Analytics 2.0™

Published by Sonia

Google has branched out from being a simple search engine into a superbrand which has everything from maps, email and search marketing tools. When it comes to Google and PPC, Google Adwords is truly a good venue for you to jumpstart your PPC campaign.

 

Getting started with PPC should be easy for someone who has a background with search marketing and has the know-how on how these tools work. But if you are a completely newbie to this industry, it might be a little tricky and confusing if you are setting up your first Adwords campaign.

 

As a guide on how to efficiently launch your PPC campaign, we are presenting a case study which highlights the different characteristics that a good Adwords campaign has versus a bad Adwords campaign. We will be presenting a total of 4 scenarios and hopefully, all the PPC hopefuls will learn something from this.

1. Quality of Keywords

Good: Having keywords that are specific.

Bad: Having keywords that are general.

One common factor of highly successful Adwords campaigns is that their keywords are specific to what they can offer to their prospective customers. Having specific keywords will not only describe what you are offering extensively, but it will also help you stand out from millions of PPC ads out there in the internet. Generic keywords can be seen in thousands of PPC ads and no person would be interested to click on a generic ad that they see everyday. Your ads should be able to arouse the viewer’s interest and force them to act by clicking on your PPC ads.

2. Identifying your target market

Good: Selecting a target market and developing your campaign for this market.

Bad: Having no idea who your target market is.

Google works hard in developing new tools that they can introduce to the market to make sure that you are having an easier time in optimizing your SEM campaigns. One of those tools is the geo targeting tool which enables you to specifically pinpoint which geographical area you would want your PPC ads to appear in. If you have a target market which is concentrated on a specific geographic area in the world, this will be further implemented by using this tool. Having a target market would save you more time and effort because you will be developing your PPC campaign to cater to their needs.

3. Website content

Good: Having website content that has keyword density, is unique and frequently updated

Bad: Having website content that is never updated

As we all know in SEO, content is king. No matter how nicely decorated your website is, it all boils down to the quality of our website content. If you have frequently updated website content which has an acceptable amount of keywords then you are on the right track. It is also important that your content it unique and informative.

4.  Maintenance and over-all management of your campaign

Good: Constant maintenance and hands-on management

Bad: Developing your campaign, launching it and leaving it

You can’t just launch a PPC campaign and leave it to fend for itself. The bulk of the work actually comes from PPC maintenance and management. You need to update the content on a regular basis, you need to check and do tests for your keywords and you need to do tracking to find out which keywords are profitable and which ones should be changed. You have to do all of this in order to ensure that you are running a good Adwords campaign.

Differentiating a good Adwords campaign from a bad one is essential because developing a good one will enable you to save more time and money.  Knowing what constitutes a good campaign will enable you to be at par with the industry’s best and help ensure your success in the PPC race.

 

Post a comment . Apr 05, 2009
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing, Characteristics of a good Adwords campaign, Knowing who your target market is, Maintenance of PPC campaign, Website content

Published by Sonia

 

Google Adwords is not only the best PPC provider out there but it is also the most popular.  But PPC and Google Adwords is a competitive marketplace and if you make mistakes in your campaign it will only mean that there are many other competitors will take your place.

To shed light on what Google Adwords mistakes that you should definitely avoid, here are 9 common mistakes that Adwords users are usually guilty of. Committing these mistakes will not only waste your time and effort, it will also leave you behind eating on your competitor’s dust.

 

1. Not creating relevance between the PPC ad and the landing page

Picture this, if you have a visitor who sees your ads and it arouses the interest in him, he will click on the ad and expect that your landing page will be the exact page that contains the same information that he is looking for. Most Adwords users just use their homepage as their landing page which does not establish the relevance. You have to be specific because the people who are looking in your ads want the right information in a short amount of time. Directing him to the exact page where your ppc ad is further discussed will do wonders for your campaign.\

2.  Putting all your keywords in just one Adgroup

Google penalizes for this action which will lead you to have low quality score. To avoid doing this mistake, you should spin off one keyword and make one adgroup, this will increase your quality score and will lead you to have more profitable adgroups rather than just having one.

3. Lack of follow-up with your existing network

Most PPC practitioners are guilty of this act; after one customer is entered into the database that customer is soon forgotten and treated just like any other name. But you can capitalize on this database by following up on your past customers. This is how you build good customer relationships. Once your customer feels that you are taking time out to talk to him, he will realize that you care for him which will make you stand out among the rest.  This will ensure you don’t waste your money on PPC to generate leads that you never use.

4.  Not doing adwords testing

It is a must to have your keywords and adgroups tested before you finalize your PPC ad. This acts as a dry run on how people will see your ads and which ones will be your cash cows and which ones should be left in the drain. Testing will also show which keywords will work and from this, you can also get other keywords related to the profitable keywords.

5.  Using your company name or product name in the ads

If you are a well-known company then this is an advantage that you can capitalize on. On the other hand, if you are a small business you must not place your company name in the title of your ads. If you are a start-up business, chances are most people won’t know what your business is all about so they won’t be interested in clicking your ads. Use keywords that can efficiently describe and highlight what your company does, this is a more interesting approach on having increased CTRs.

6.  Using boring words

This will not incite any excitement among those who are seeing your ad; to them you are just one of a million ads that they see in Google every single day. Make your ad stand out by making it something that will arouse interest. Potential clickers must see a value added that can benefit them if they see your ad. You can put the words free, best, efficient or any positive words that you can best describe what you are offering. Remember, you have to be specific but at the same time sound interesting.

7. Using generic keywords

You have to be really specific in your ads. Nobody will want to click on an ad which says the same thing as the rest of the ads. What’s the fun in that? Place yourself on the shoes of the viewers and visitors, of course you will just click on the ads which will hold your attention and be interesting. You don’t want to click on a boring ad which uses generic keywords. The fact is, you are up against millions of other PPC ads and you have to make a mark and be unique so your ads will stand out.

8.  Not using the geo targeting tool

Google also allows you to geographically target your ads to cater to specific countries. This is a nice tool to use especially if you see that a specific country has a demand for your products or services. For example, if your sales are centralized on a specific area in the US, Google can geo-target your ads for that specific area which will convert to huge profits.

9.  Not being hands-on with your PPC campaign

Being hands-on with your PPC campaign is very important. You should be able to monitor and track every little thing that is going on so that when a problem arises, you will have a quicker response rate. Constantly monitoring your PPC campaign will also enable you to pinpoint which ads are not profiting or keywords are not generating any clicks.

Entering into the PPC world is no easy task, it is hard at the beginning and you will definitely encounter a lot of setbacks and commit a lot of mistakes. But this is how your learn, once you commit a mistake the learning process that you get from it is really priceless. Nobody’s perfect, it will help if you don’t commit any mistakes in PPC, but if you don’t think that your whole campaign will collapse because of that one mistake. Find out where you went wrong and think of ways on how you can turn around a mistake into a golden opportunity.

 

Post a comment . Mar 29, 2009
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing, Geo targetting tool, Google Adwords, Landing page relevance, PPC ads

Published by Sonia

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not hard at all.

Of course, when you’re starting and trying to learn everything at once, it might be a little tricky remembering everything but once you get the hang of it, the basics are quite simple.

Ultimately, websites which achieve SEO have a simple goal and that is to get a higher ranking position in search engines.  Higher rankings generally result in higher conversion rates and increased traffic.

As promised, here are the keys to SEO in 10 Simple Steps.

 

1.      It’s all about the keywords. Your keywords are considered the backbone of your whole SEO campaign and everything else will follow from it. If you don’t know where to start in choosing your keywords, you can use keyword research tools to make suggestions on different keywords that you can use in your site.  With keyword research tools you want to look for keywords that have good search volume and low competition.

 

2.      Do keyword testing. Most SEO practitioners forget to do this. But you must remember that keyword testing is as important as the keywords itself. Early on in your campaign, you must be able to pinpoint which keywords will work well for you site and which ones should be rejected and changed. You can also take your profitable keywords and produce similar keywords from them.

 

3.      Keyword density is also something that you need to keep an eye on. Once you have decided which keywords to keep, you must incorporate them into your website content, but don’t go overboard with it. Too much keyword density might get you in trouble with Google. Plus, who wants to read the same words over and over again?

 

4.      Capitalize on quality content. Google relies so much on website content when it comes to ranking websites so you must be able to deliver this requirement properly. Make sure that you have well-written, informative and useful content which is updated regularly. This will greatly help if you want to achieve higher page rankings.

 

5.      Get good incoming links from reputable websites. For example, if you have a page ranking of 6 and you have an incoming link from a website whose page ranking is 3, it will help you climb up a higher notch in rankings. Make sure that the incoming links that you are getting are from relevant sites.

 

6.      Don’t forget your tags. There are two types of tags which are important in your SEO campaign and these are: title tags and meta tags. It is acceptable that you use your keywords in these tags. Title tags are actually being used by search engines to categorize and index websites so you must tag your website correctly. As for meta tags, you can also optimize these to help search engines in indexing your site.

 

7.      You’ll go a long way with link building. Having a good set of relevant links in your site will help you achieve higher page rankings.  Pay special attention to the anchor text within those links.  These are important signals to the search engine on which topics (i.e. keywords) that your site is an authority on.

 

8.      Make your website easy to navigate. Analyze which pages or content are slowing the website down. Make sure that all links are updated and there are no broken links. Update your content every month at least and make sure you don’t have duplicate content.

 

9.      Track your traffic and ranking. Once you launched your site, you must be able to keep track of how many people are visiting your site and page ranking. If you see that you have few visitors in a daily basis, then you have to think of a new idea to bring in the traffic.  By analyzing your traffic patterns, you can understand what type of content attracts visitors and with deeper analysis, you will understand what kinds of keywords your users search for to find you (and from there you can expand on more interesting and related topics.)

 

10. Maintenance is the key. Once you have achieved good page rankings and considerable site traffic, then you have to maintain it. Don’t be complacent and assume that the traffic and ranking will remain the same all throughout. Strive to make your website better so that your traffic and ranking will improve. If you see that your website is doing well, but the web is a very competitive space, and you have to always stay one step ahead of the competition.

 

Post a comment . Mar 19, 2009
Filed under: SEO, Keyword Density, Keyword Research, link building, SEO in 10 easy steps, website which provides easy navigation

Published by Sonia

If you don’t know anything about Twitter then this is a hot new trend that you should be aware of.  In its most basic essence, Twitter lets you share ideas with other people in 140 characters or less.

So how does Twitter help SEO? Well, for one it will not help you create inbound or outbound links nor can it increase your website’s traffic like other bookmarking sites like Stumble Upon, Technorati and Digg. If Twitter can’t do this, then what can it do for your SEO campaign? What it does is to let you use their site as a marketing platform to make your website, blogs, and new updates known to other people.  

Twitter relies heavily on social networking and social media. It will enable you to establish relationships, build and expand your network and communicate directly with other people. In the end, all of these will be helpful to your website in the long run, as it provides you with a great real-time promotion tool that builds awareness and engages your community.

It is important that you keep yourself and your website interesting. You must be able to pique people’s interest and hold it for a considerable amount of time. This is how you build viewership and increase website traffic.

Another good thing about Twitter is that you can update it using your cellphone. So wherever you might be, you can still edit your information using your mobile phone.

The main benefit of Twitter is that it has a lot of members and your Twitter page can be made available to millions of users. You should take advantage of this so that you can advertise your site for free. Once you gain popularity in Twitter and increase your Google Page Rank, you can now use it as a promotional tool for your website so that the whole Twitter network can also see and visit your website.

In conclusion, Twitter will not help your website be more SEO-ready.  It is not a tool which will go into the technical stuff to get your site optimized.  Rather, it is a marketing and promotional vehicle that you can use to make your website known to a wide network of people.

 

Post a comment . Mar 14, 2009
Filed under: Uncategorized, Bookmarking sites, Google Page Rank, Social networking and Social media, Twitter and SEO

Published by Sonia

We all know the different website parts and contents that you can optimize to help your SEO campaign. Obviously, your website content is a key part of your SEO campaign. SEM practitioners often make mistake of ignoring all the other parts of their site because they have the tendency to just concentrate on the website content.  This is a grave mistake  Studies show that the other parts that can help you achieve better rankings in search engine are: meta tags, images, website name and the title tag to name a few. For this article, we will concentrate on the title tag and how you can utilize this tool to help out in your SEO campaign.

What is a title tag?

The title tag is the html code that is displayed in the browser page when your website is being viewed. In other words, it is the perfect marketing tool that you can take advantage of if you want to increase traffic in your site.

Optimizing Title Tags For Search Engines

Normally, search engines have their own algorithm formula when it comes to ranking search engines. They usually look for three things in a site which are: text copy or the actual website content, links and the title tag.

The Impact of Title Tags on Searchers

The text in your title tag will also appear in search engine results page (SERP) once someone searches something that is related to your website. Search engines usually allow just 150 characters to be displayed, so you have to make sure that you maximize this space. As a tip, you add many important keywords in this space. Remember that you are competing against thousands, even millions of websites and the first thing searchers see is your website’s title tag so you have to make sure that it is easy to understand, straight to the point and eye-catching.

Picking the Right Title Tag

When deciding what title tag to use you should make sure you establish relevance between your web content and your title tag.  The title tag can either be a summary of your content or the general idea that your whole website is trying to send across.  Next, you need to make sure you include your target keyword into your title tag - you can use keyword suggestion tools to help you with this process.

Never Ignore the Almighty Title Tag

Title tags are usually ignored when it comes to SEO, but you must realize that this is an important part in any SEO campaign. Think of it this way, you should optimize ALL parts of your website, and that includes always optimizing your title tags.

Post a comment . Mar 09, 2009
Filed under: SEO, Search Engine Marketing, how to create title tags, Search Engine, SEO, SERP, title tags