Search Engine Guide : Small Business Search Marketing
Google Improves Control of PPC Exposure With Modified Broad Match
date: 2010 09 03by Mike Fleming
If you manage a PPC account, you know that for several years now AdWords has had three match types: exact, phrase, and broad. You also know what they mean and how your keywords are matched to search queries. Up until a couple of years ago, broad match meant that the keywords in your phrase were matched to queries that had all of your words in any order.
Then, broad match became "expanded broad match" where Google's algorithm was given free reign to decide if search queries were a close enough match in search intent to show your ad. Many of the results were not even close. Your keyword could be business cards and your ad would show on state ids and business plans.
The overwhelming advantage of broad match of course is that you get more impressions, clicks and conversions; although you most likely would have a lower conversion rate that will make you pay more for each conversion. So for some it works and for some not so much. The major disadvantage is that you have to spend time going through your search queries very often to weed out those that are not applicable to your business because you paid for clicks state ids and business plans.
But now, Google has given us another option that offers more flexibility in balancing the tension between traffic and relevance; the old broad match and expanded broad match. It's called modified broad match. This option has greater reach than phrase match, but is more controlled than broad match.
How? With this match type, if you put a plus (+) sign in front of a word in your phrase, AdWords will only match your keyword to search queries that contain that word exactly or contain a close variation of the word.
Google defines a close variation as "misspellings, singular/plural, abbreviations/acronyms, stemming (like "floor" and "flooring") and synonyms. They say related searches like "flowers" and "tulips" are not considered close variations.
So basically they are allowing advertisers to choose between the old broad match, newer broad match, or a combination of the two. You can choose to "bring in the reins" so to speak on broad match and decide which words in keyword phrases are necessary in the search query for their ad to be triggered. So, you could do this:
business +cards
This means card will not be matched with id or plan but only cards exactly or close variations of it (card, etc.). Now, this still means that you could get matched to id card; so if you want to further filter your possible matches, you could go with:
+business +cards
This functions like the old school broad match. Now business will always mean business and cards will always mean cards.
This really takes the realistic number of possible match types up to 6 or 7. Here's a really cool graph that shows the match types, their relative reach and an initial bidding strategy for each.
If you would like to test these match types out, choose a couple ad groups where you are struggling, copy them and use the new ad groups to replace your broad match keywords with modified broad match. Modify your broad match keywords and set their bids between the your broad match and phrase match keywords. Then, after enough data has collected you can analyze search queries and conversions of each ad group to see the results and adjust using your reports.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Do Keywords In Your Domain Matter?
date: 2010 09 02by Sage Lewis
This is a question I get asked all the time. Get the final answer right here.
Inspired from this article at Search Engine Roundtable
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Don't Let Good Content Die - 4 Ways to Keep It Alive
date: 2010 09 02by Stoney deGeyter
Much like life, websites have to adapt over time. When they don't, they risk becoming stagnant, outdated, stale, and boring. As times change, so should your content. Content that was once relevant becomes irrelevant or in need of an update, old products get dumped in favor of new products, and data becomes outdated and needs to be replaced.
There are any number of reasons why content needs to be changed, freshened up, or removed altogether. But rarely, if ever, do you want to throw the baby out with the bath water. Something can usually be salvaged. Previously valuable content can be made valuable again. Here are four ways you can keep good content alive, even when it's old.
Keep content up to date
Keeping your content up-to-date may sound like a simple task; but, the larger the site, the more difficult it is. Sites with hundreds or thousands of pages often have a lot of little hidden gems that can easily become stale or irrelevant. Over time, you see products and services change. A simple reference to an old pricing structure or outdated way of doing things can really throw a wrench in the works for the reader. Conflicts and contradictions breed mistrust.
Failing to find and correct these nuggets will send your readers a message that perhaps you are stale and irrelevant as well. So, spending time on a regular basis, perhaps yearly, reviewing all your editorial content and brushing it up to keep it current is an important item to put on your task list.
Redirect deleted pages
Pages on websites often get moved or deleted over time. Perhaps you are restructuring your information architecture, removing services that you no longer offer, or deleting tutorials that have become obsolete. Just because this content is considered old, doesn't mean that it can't still work for you.
Simply adding "301 redirects" or a building a custom "404" page can capture that traffic and send them to other areas of your site. This allows them to stick around long enough to see if you still have something that will meet their needs, even though you no longer have exactly what they want.
Adding redirects allows you to keep visitors on your site if they have arrived, say, from a bookmarked page or an old page in the search results. Instead of losing those visitors, this gives you the opportunity to keep them engaged with your site, with the possibility of attracting them to your other excellent content.
Repurpose old content
Blogs are a great place to re-purpose old content and provide an updated spin on it. If you're running out of ideas for what to publish on your blog, you can go back several years in your archive and find old topics and discussions for which you can provide a new take.
Blog back history can give you a wealth of topics that you can pull from to create fresh, new content for your readers.
Another way to re-purpose old content is by removing excessive content from your site and moving it over to your blog. This can be necessary after years of site content build-up. This happens when you keep adding content to your site and it becomes so bloated that your readers end up spending too much time working through your site instead of being moved through the conversion process.
A couple months back, I worked on the Information Architecture for a client, and they had this very problem. We were able to take dozens of pages of content and move it off of their main site onto their blog. The content was good, but it was excessive. This hindered the conversion process, making the site both convoluted and confusing at the same time. By moving this stuff to the blog, the main site was better able to do the job of selling and the blog became the avenue of informing readers.
Link to historical pages
Content, especially blog content, often gets buried after months and years of time passing. But that doesn't necessarily mean the content isn't valuable or even needs to be re-written.
What you can do is write new content that links to this valuable content that was written long ago. You're giving your readers something fresh, while linking to something historical, that you can use to make your point or provide more detailed information for the reader to peruse at their leisure.
Take advantage of any area of content that allows you to link to another page that provides more information. The web isn't a brochure, it's more like a choose-your-own-adventure novel. That historical content can be a goldmine of information, provided you're giving your new readers a way to access it.
Good content never has to die. If you're treating it right, it never will. New people are coming to your site every day. These people have not had the benefit of reading all your past or historical stuff. No need to let it go to waste. Instead, keep it alive... and keep it working for you.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Adapting to a Social Media Fast
date: 2010 09 02by Mike Moran
Some of you might know that I like to take Augusts off. While not completely off the grid (I still clean out my e-mail—although I don't reply much—and I still moderate comments on my blog), I don't write any blog posts (on my blog or here at Search Engine Guide), and I stay off Twitter. I also don't read any blog posts or check out what others are saying on Twitter—it's a social media fast. Each year, it's interesting to find myself picking up a newspaper again. This year, I did something a bit different, because I actually returned to work on August 25th because of a client need, but I continued to stay away from social media for the last week, just to see what it was like. It's one thing for me to avoid social media while I am on vacation, but what would it feel like during my work day?
Image via Wikipedia
Well, the verdict is in. It felt very strange. As easy as it is for me to drop out of social media while on vacation and just hang with my wife and play with the kids, once I am back at work, it felt very odd to not know what is going on.
I mean, I had been away for three weeks on vacation, so I really had no idea what was happening, but to be working in that kind of darkness was a different experience. The first thing I had to do was to fly to a distant city and make a speech on Internet marketing to hundreds of people. In doing so, I was gripped by this semi-insane fear that I couldn't make the speech without knowing what is going on. I mean, what if someone asked a question about something that just happened and I didn't know the answer?
Of course, the speech went just fine. Internet marketing apparently hasn't changed all that much in the last month (even though apparently the Web died while I was away).
But I also noticed how much I wanted to say, with no one to tell. I usually tweet about where I am traveling, so I had to resist the impulse to tell people about my trip last week. People would send me links to things to read—not only didn't I read them, but I didn't tell anyone about them. I'll probably catch up over the next week and tweet some of them.
But it was the blog ideas that just kept coming. And I wasn't writing any of them.
Usually, I post to my blog once each day (usually I am the writer of the article, but I also edit contributions from some other excellent contributors), so every day it is a struggle to get that done. I take for granted that nice people out there are actually interested in hearing what I have to say. It was strange to have a few work days where I wasn't publishing anything. (Frank Reed published several posts on my blog while I was away, but I didn't have any work to do while on vacation.)
I now have dozens of ideas for blog posts. most accumulated during the last week at work, with only a couple from my vacation. So, while my vacation definitely recharged my batteries, my social media fast during my first week back from work filled my creative coffers. Perhaps many of you post just once a week, or even less frequently, so this is not an issue for you. And while I've never felt like I am running dry for ideas, going a few days without having to write anything has been an eye-opener.
So, I still haven't completely caught up on what's been going on, but I will soon. My social media fast has proven to me both how important social media is and how important it is to take a break now and then. Some have told me that they only look at social media during defined times of the day (I know some who do this with e-mail, too). I never understood that before, but maybe I am starting to.
Anyway, I am glad to be back, and I'm honored that a few of you actually want to listen to what I have to say. Thank you.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Is 2011 The Year of the Social Media Bubble
date: 2010 08 28by Eric Brown
Perhaps a Social Media Weeding is forthcoming
2010 has been the year that many small and mid size businesses have taken the plunge, and embraced the throws of Social Media Marketing. With that, nearly every unemployed straggler has hung out their Social Media Consultant shingle.
As reported in the Harvard Business Review...
"During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt -- debt that couldn't be made good on. Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections -- linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships." Low Barrier to Entry
Whenever the barrier to entry is low, to non existent, pitfalls loom. While the real estate bubble happened due to a multitude of reasons, whenever someone can sell a condo several times before the builder finished construction, and each selling party profits, all is well and good until the market falls off. It then becomes musical chairs and the last person standing is holding the bag. When profit occurs absent anyone really doing anything or adding any value, a Weed and Trim typically follows. Problem is, we aren't very adept at history or awareness.
Panera Bread is My Office
Nothing against the Nomads or Entrepreneurs, we all started somewhere, but when your only cost of business or overhead is your laptop, lots of crazies are suddenly Internet marketers and social media marketers. And, by all means, some of this lot are pretty smart. However once the check writers (the business owners) start requiring results, many of these Cast of Social Media Characters will evaporate as quickly as they spawned.
What is the Correction
Results, or lack there of will lead the correction. Business isn't as complicated as we try to make it. If you are doing Internet marketing or social media marketing for your client, and they aren't selling more stuff, you may well get fired, as you should. Marketing is and has always been about selling more stuff to more people for more money.
Engagement, Conversation, Connections and all of the buzz words of today won't cut it if sales leads don't increase. The truth is, Social Media Marketing is so much more than a Facebook page and a Twitter account. While there are lots of businesses and agencies doing a stellar job, many are not, and it seems the honeymoon may be coming to a close for those that lack the experience of delivering a real and measurable result.
Are your clients selling more stuff from your Social Media Marketing Campaigns?
We would love to hear your feedback. You can connect with Eric on Twitter or at The Urbane Way.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
PPC Testing Made Easier with AdWords Campaign Experiments
date: 2010 08 27by Mike Fleming
If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn't you?), you're always testing. Always. It's the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels. One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.
Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from different time periods (except for ads). For example, you'd have to run ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the new bid price for a while. Then, you'd have to compare the results from different time periods. The problem? When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes. But fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.
Google's example of this involves advertising for soccer balls. "Let's say you're advertising soccer balls, and you decide to increase your bids to get more traffic. Two days later, the World Cup starts, and your clicks and impressions increase substantially. If you had simply raised the bids in your campaign without running an experiment, you wouldn't know how much of the increase in traffic is due to the World Cup, and how much is a result of you increasing bids."
Let's say you raised your bids at the beginning of June and noticed this trend when doing analysis in July....
Alright, looks great. Let's go ahead and keep that new bid. What? What's that? That might not be the best thing. Well now, why would that be?
Ouch. That's web search volume trends for that keyword phrase. Not so fast my friend.
Enter the newest "seedless watermelon" in the AdWords system called AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE). With ACE, you can run simultaneous split tests with most of the key variables in your campaigns by splitting traffic between you "control" group (original) and your experiment group...AND...you can analyze the results of your tests before you apply them to all auctions. This lowers the risk of diving into new, unproven strategies by enabling you to control the amount of traffic you send to your experimental groups; which ultimately helps you make better decisions in your optimization efforts. You can split your traffic in 10% intervals from 90/10 all the way to 10/90.
The cool thing about this is that if you want to run a low-risk experiment and send 80% of your traffic to your control group and 20% to your experiment group, you can analyze the results and find if the changes performed better. If they did, then you can run what is called a holdback experiment before you fully applied the changes to your campaigns. A holdback experiment involves running the exact same experiment again, but this time with the control at 20% and the experiment at 80%. This way, you confirm that the positive effects of your experiment are truly there as the experiment is exposed to a larger amount of traffic.
When you go to analyze an experiment, you want make sure that the statistical differences in your numbers is meaningful rather than the result of random chance. Statistical significance is calculated based both on the number of auctions your campaign participated in, and on the size of the differences in metrics. Google AdWords provides icons in your campaign when the math indicates that you can be 95%, 99%, or 99.9% confident that differences are meaningful, and not just due to chance.
The icons are arrows that show you whether a particular element you're experimenting with has achieved statistically significant results, and how confident you can be that those results will carry over to your campaign if you apply the experiment (one arrow meaning there is a 5% probability your results occurred due to chance, two arrows means there is a 1% chance, and three arrows means there is just a 0.1% chance these results are due to chance).
The introduction of this new feature saves the account manager time and makes testing in your AdWords account much more accurate, efficient and profitable.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
How to Ensure Your Website Gets Some Action
date: 2010 08 27by Stoney deGeyter
When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it's your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it's that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.
Think about it. If you're not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or "figure it out on their own". But, for anybody that's doing anything new, directions are a God send.
I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I'll be the first to admit that I'm generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn't help. Not even a little.
The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table...but they didn't make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren't making much sense.
Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn't make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn't hear!
Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn't have to be difficult. You don't have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of "here's what we want you to do next". All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.
Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we've done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.
Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.
Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.
If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won't be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won't work.
Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need... because they may not even know they need it.
Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.
That's the biggest problem with not using textual links. You're forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team's experience, then link to your "About Us" page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.
Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have "what it takes" to provide what they need.
A website that's not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to "put out". But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Best Buy, Orwell and Minority Report
date: 2010 08 26by Sage Lewis
Best Buy wants you to tell them the moment you walk into the store.
From Marketing Pilgrim: "The "shopkick" system is designed to detect and reward shoppers just for walking into a Best Buy store. In order to accomplish this feat, consumers must download an application to their smart phone. "
What do you think of this? I'm all about it!
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
How to Train Your Content to Get Your Audience's Attention
date: 2010 08 24by Stoney deGeyter
In my last post, I talked about training your text to "engage", "inform", "speak" (call to action), and "convert". The first step is to make sure the content doesn't overstay it's welcome. In this post, I'll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.
Teaching tricks the audience likes
There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like or the kind of tricks your audience likes. Obviously, training your text to do the tricks you like will make you happy... but it won't make your audience happy. You think the tricks are cool, but nobody else does. And... that's just not cool.
Most people who visit websites scan them first, then skim the text. But, they only skim read if they get intrigued by their initial scan, and they read it only if they find something compelling and interesting that warrants their full attention. There are four easy ways to train your text to be scan-able:
Paragraph headings: Your page should have a proper heading and your content should be broken up with paragraph headings throughout, depending on length. Don't get carried away by placing a heading before each paragraph. That overkill. But the longer your text is, the more it needs to be broken up into easily digest chunks that allow your readers to consume it.
Internal linking: One of the biggest missed opportunities on business websites is linking their content to other relevant areas of the site. That's what the navigation is for, right? Yes and no.
Your navigation needs to do a proper job of allowing people to find what they are looking for, but relying on it too heavily forces the visitor to know what they are interested in finding. But, adding links into your content streamlines both of those issues and also helps the visitor get to where they want to go much quicker. This is more intuitive and requires little thought or effort on their part.
Bolded Text: Bolding key words, phrases, and sentences can also allow your visitors to find key points as they quickly scan your content. Note that I said "key words", not "keywords". There is nothing wrong with using keywords in your bolded text, but that should not be the reason for using bold text. You bold text because it's important, not because you want to get a keyword in bold font.
Bullet Points: Bullet points are another way to get your visitors to read key information without having to read every word of content. Most readers will read bulleted lists while ignoring everything else on the page.
Bullets provide a very easy way to read quick bits of information that otherwise might get lost in a single paragraph. Bullet points also break up your content, which also makes the text more scan-able and skim-able. You can also use bullet points to link to other areas of your site that provide additional information without mucking up the current page content.
Or, to put it another way, bullet points:
Provide quick bits of information Break up content to be more scannable and skimmable Provide linking opportunities to related contentPeople love tricks. But, they don't like to be tricked. These tricks that you can use to train your content are not and should not be used as a means to deceive your audience. They are tricks that help you communicate with your audience in a way that is more to their liking. Giving people what they want isn't deceptive, unless you are pulling the rug out from under them later.
You can train your content to do things that other sites are not doing. By teaching it to keep your audience engaged with the site, and training it how to direct your readers to other areas of the site they are interested in, you're just helping people find what they need. If they don't find it with you, they will with someone else... likely because their content has learned these tricks.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Properly Formatting Your Press Release for Maximum Impact - Part I
date: 2010 08 23by Stone Reuning
Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm. They make your company look active and lively, drawing more interest from prospective customers.
Regularly scheduled press releases do this and more provided they're properly formatted. Simply writing some text and putting it online will not do a whole lot for you. Many distribution outlets like PRWeb and PR.com will reject your press release for syndication if it's not properly formatted.
So what's the proper way to format a press release?
Continue reading for ways you should format a press release for online distribution. Beyond the tips listed below, there are some additional ways you can format your press releases to further its impact in the search engines so check back next time for press release formatting tips from a social media and SEO perspective.
• Be sure your press release is at least 400 words (including boilerplate/company description at the end) and no more than 600 words.
• Write the press release in the 3rd person. Meaning, use words like he, she, they and them when writing about your company.
• Mention your company by name in the title and include your target keyword too. Include a sub-heading below your title with additional details to complement your title.
• In your opening paragraph, include your city and date first. Example: Atlanta, Ga. - August 23, 2010. Be sure your first paragraph covers the "5-W's and H" of your story - or who, what, when, where, why and how.
• Next, the main body of your press release should contain further information on points in your introduction along with quotes from an important person at your company.
• Close out the press release by offering the reader a link to click and/or a place to contact your company for further information.
• Include a boilerplate after the conclusion describing your company and website.
• After the boilerplate, include your name, phone, email, title. This gives your press release further credibility. Once you have this, include a "###" or "END" to signify the conclusion of the press release.
Double checking spelling, grammar or formatting is critical to having a proper press release. Check out the AP Stylebook or some other resource for ways to format certain words or how you should abbreviate a state and more.
And here's one of the biggies and where many website owners fall down
Don't make your press release read like an advertisement. They're meant to announce events of a newsworthy fashion. If your press release has a bunch of "salesy" type language, it will be immediately dismissed by any journalist or blogger that comes across it. You can talk up benefits of your new product or whatever news you're announcing in your quotations a little bit but that's about it.
Not to mention, most distribution outlets will reject it as well.
Take a few moments and carefully review each press release before posting it on your site and distributing it to newswires and social networks. Doing so will save you lots of time and maximize the value of doing a press release in the first place.
One way to write a well formatted press release is to carefully examine other press releases like this one from a rental cabin firm in the north Georgia Mountains.
In the end, press releases are about informing journalists, bloggers and potential customers of events at your company. They're not meant to sell per se but draw the reader's interest in enough for them to want to learn more.
Check back again soon for more on properly formatting press releases - specifically for the search engines and how you can squeeze even more benefits out of announcing your company's news online.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Google Places - Do You Know This Place?
date: 2010 08 23by Sage Lewis
If you aren't familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It's growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Take Your Online Business to New Heights With the Display Network - Part 5
date: 2010 08 22by Mike Fleming
This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:
1. Targeting specific websites that you've already found have performed well for your ads in an automatic placement campaign to maximize your exposure on those sites.
2. Targeting specific websites that you've found through research.
With this campaign, you do not choose keywords because you are telling Google exactly which sites you want your ad to be eligible for auction, so they don't need keywords to come up with a theme to match to websites. The way to create this campaign is to choose "relevant pages only on the placements and audiences I manage" under "Networks" in the "Network and Devices" option of your campaign settings.
The easiest way to pick some websites where you want your ad to be shown is to run and analyze a Placement Performance Report of your Automatic Placement Campaign once a significant amount of data has been collected. You can export the data in this report to Excel and find some websites that have historically met the marketing objectives you have set for your ads. Once you add them to your new Managed Placement Campaign, make sure you exclude them from your Automatic Placement Campaign by selecting the placement and hitting "Exclude Placement" above the list -
Then, you go in to the Networks tab of your new Managed Placement campaign, click on "show details" next to managed placements and then click "add placements." This is where you enter and submit the sites where you want your ads to be shown.
If you are not as patient and/or you would rather not rely on Google's imperfect algorithm to find some websites you'd like to test, once you hit "add placements" and choose an ad group, you can click on a link to take you to the Placement Tool. Here, you can look up sites by category, keyword, ad type or size, and URL and the tool will spit out all sorts of options for you to pick from to add to your ad group.
You'll want to monitor these choices over time to weed out the bad and maximize the good. Remember, just because you think something in marketing will work doesn't mean it will. It has to be proven with data. Take a look at the sites that are suggested and decide on some that are locations where your target audience frequents, select them and add them to your campaign. Once you start to find some websites that are working for you, you can start to develop themed ad groups with your managed placements and write more targeted ads for similar types of sites.
For instance, if you sold guitars and you are finding that guitar lesson sites work well for you, group all of the sites about guitar lessons together and create targeted ads for those sites. You should see click-through and conversion rates improve significantly. This makes it easier to identify sites and themes that work best for your business.
Now, you've got one campaign that is going out to hunt down sites that will work for what you're advertising (automatic placement) and one campaign that contains sites that work for you that you can optimize for the long-run (managed placement). As time passes and data is collected, continue to add keyword-themed ad groups to your Automatic Placement Campaign to replace themes that aren't working for you while pulling the sites that work to place into your Managed Placement campaign. Frequently, you should go in and apply standard optimization techniques to your ad groups and placements similar to how you would optimize search campaigns with keywords.
Hopefully, my short introduction series to the Display Network will allow you to take your online business to new heights! Down the road, we'll get into some more advanced Display Network strategies. Hope you'll hang around.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
How to Train Your Content Not to Overstay it's Welcome
date: 2010 08 18by Stoney deGeyter
We don't often realize this, but we can train our website content to do tricks. Unfortunately, most website content just lays around all day. This is why you see high bounce rates and poor conversion rates on so many websites. About the only "trick" this content knows how to do is to roll-over and play dead. But, those aren't tricks at all. The opossum that streaked across the highway after getting hit by a truck can do that!
What I'm talking about is teaching your content how to "engage", "inform", "speak" (call to action), and "convert". Teach these tricks to your content and you'll see a whole new level of performance on your website.
The first thing to train your content to do is not to overstay it's welcome. Like a neighbor you enjoy having over occasionally, there comes a time when they must leave. In the same way, you can train your content to know when to stop talking and show the visitor the door to the next page or pages of your site.
Leave them wanting more... and then give them more
We often try to do either too much or too little with our content. The "old school" rules of SEO said you had to have a minimum amount of content. Is it 100 words...200 words? There is a minimum number of words you need per page, but it has nothing to do with counting. It's the amount of content that is needed for the text to move the visitor to the next step.
There are three simple rules to training your text when it comes to the quantity of text to be used:
1) There is no magic amount. Some pages require a lot of text, but some don't require much text at all. But, bear in mind, that all pages need some text. Text is what convinces, persuades, informs, and helps your audience decide that they want to buy from you.
2) Keep your text as brief as possible. This doesn't mean your text has to be short, just that you don't go for length when length is not needed or warranted.
3) Use no more words than needed to convert. Your audience isn't just one person. It's many people looking at many items for many purposes. Once you start looking at personas and personalities trying to target everybody on a single page can be daunting. But, you don't have to hit everybody perfectly on a single page. Figure out what the next step is for each group, and provide that opportunity. It could be a link to an "About Us" page, a link to "Shipping Policies" or a "Buy Now" button.
The basic idea is to train your text to be minimalist while still providing ways for the reader to request an encore. They do that by clicking further into the site to get even more information, where, hopefully, that page is also trained to provide the audience what it wants as well.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
They Got Dibs! Make Your Audience Your A-Girl
date: 2010 08 16by Stoney deGeyter
I remember the first day back at my sophomore year of college. It was the weekend before classes began, and the new students were moving into the dorms. There were cars and trucks all parked out along the street with students unloading furniture, bedding, clothes, and everything else a growing college kid needs to survive in the almost-real world.
I remember this day vividly because a bunch of us guys were scouting out the hot chicks, generously helping the new batch of coeds unload and unpack. Later that afternoon, when it was only us guys within ear shot, a buddy of mine claimed, "I got dibs on the red head." I remember thinking, "Whatever, dude!" Nonetheless, everyone knew Jon had claimed Shannon and she was hands off until he said otherwise.
It wasn't long before Jon and Shannon started dating, and a few years later they married and are still happily married today.
You Aren't Special If You're Last In Line
Dibs are a great thing. It makes us feel special. Like calling "shotgun" to get the front passenger seat, dibs allows us to lay claim to something we otherwise may not have been entitled to: the last piece of pizza, the larger bed, the first shower before all the hot water is gone, and the hot red head that needs a nice, strong college man to help her move into her dorm.
Unfortunately, too many business owners let "dibs" on their website go to everyone else, except those that matter most: the target audience. All too often site design and content is developed for the boss, or the marketing team, or even the search engines. But the audience--the people who the site is supposedly intended for--get left out. They don't get dibs, they get whatever is left over.
Does that seem right to you?
Your audience is your "A" Girl
I knew someone once who had a philosophy on his women. You could have an A-Girl, B-Girl, and C-Girl. A-Girl could in no way know about B- or C-Girl. B-Girl could know about A-Girl, but couldn't know about C-Girl. C-Girl could know about both A- and B-Girl.
Don't laugh, this is true.
This was obviously his way of attempting to build a playground in a minefield. I'm not sure how that worked out for him, but it will work as a good analogy here.
Your audience absolutely must be your A-Girl. Your content must be for her. Your visual presentation must be for her. Your site architecture and usability must be for her. And she doesn't need to know about your B- and C-Girls... the search engines, or that guy that pays all the bills and has really strong opinions.
What you write, how you write, and the overall presentation you put together on your website shouldn't be based on the boss' opinions or what we think the search engines want. Those don't have to be totally disregarded, but your audience, your A-Girl, comes first. She's the one that matters. And if she catches a whiff that the site isn't for her, she'll be out the door and onto the next site in a matter of minutes.
Keywords are important, and as I noted a few weeks back, your content isn't good content unless it's optimized. This is very true, because optimizing for your audience is the same as optimizing for the search engines. The problem is when C-Girl becomes too prominent, A-Girl is sure to notice.
Building a perfect relationship
Your keywords should be present, but not obvious. They should be a part of your relationship with A-Girl, but not overbearing. If you suddenly start giving your girlfriend gifts, she may suspect you're covering for something else. Same is true here. If you add too many keywords to your pages, they become overpowering. A-Girl isn't dumb.
Keep your content persuasive. Just because someone knows you love them doesn't mean you don't ever have to tell them. Your content should tell your audience what you want them to do. Do you want them to purchase? Download? Learn more? Add to cart? Failure to have calls to action throughout your content will lead to a stagnant relationship. The audience won't know what you want them to do next and, sooner or later, they will wander off.
Overall, you need to maintain value in your content. If you're just adding text for the sake of B-Girl or C-Girl, A-Girl will realize that there is nothing there for her. You have to keep your audience engaged. You do this by writing content that helps them learn, grow, improve, understand, etc. A relationship that does not help each side to grow is a dying relationship. If your audience isn't getting anything new, just the same content they found on every other site, they'll soon grow bored with you.
Your A-Girl needs dibs. She needs to be the first priority on your website. Sure, you can build a site that pleases the higher-ups, and can write content that is optimized for search engine placement, but your audience must come first. She's too important for anything less.
This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx's Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert's Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for "inconceivable content" on this blog to find them all.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
Take Your Online Business to New Heights with the Display Network - Part 4
date: 2010 08 13by Mike Fleming
The most useful tool for this is the Placement Performance Report in your Google AdWords account. It segments your ad serving by domain or individual URL so you can see the performance metrics for them separately. This will allow you to find sites and categories of sites where your ads perform well and where they are struggling. The best, most important metric to analyze when looking at a site's Display Network performance? Cost Per Conversion.
Why? Google uses what they call smart pricing as their method for click charges on the Display Network. Basically, if your ad wins the auction and is placed on a site, Google determines if that page is more or less likely to end in a conversion action for you and they adjust the price of a click accordingly. This makes cost per conversion much more important than conversion rate.
Why? Smart pricing will very likely give you a scenario of metrics like the one below when comparing two sites:
If this scenario is true its because Google determined website #2 to be less likely to result in a conversion. So, they discounted the cost per click to advertise on website 2 to make up for this. But, as you can see, you are performing relatively well on this site because they've discounted your price enough to make your cost per conversion 25% lower than website 1 despite your lower conversion rate. Therefore, website 2 is working better for you despite the lower conversion rate. So, you can see how smart pricing changes the game and make cost per conversion your most important metric.
Once you run a Placement Performance Report, you will have data that you can use to make decisions about your ad's exposure. You will find sites that are both performing well and not performing well for your campaigns. If you want to block your ads from being shown on specific sites, you can use the Site and Category Exclusion Tool within your AdWords account to block these sites.
With the sites that are performing well, you may want to have more control over your bidding and targeting flexibility with them. In this case, you can take that placement and use it in a Placement Targeted Campaign, which we will talk about in my next post.
Here are some ways that you can block your ads from being shown to specific web traffic using this tool:
1. Blocking Domains - You can block top-level domains, subdomains and directories. Blocking one doesn't block the others, so you will need to enter them separately.
2. Undesirable Content - There are six types of content that you can block if you are concerned about brand protection.
3. Video Sites - You can block your ads from being shown as content ads within video.
4. Page Types:
a. Error Pages - these are displayed when a page does not exist. If someone attempts to navigate to a domain that does not exist, a page can be shown that has ads based on the mistyped URL instead of a "not found" error page.
b. Parked Domains - These domains are owned, but they have never been developed. So, all you see is ads when you navigate to these pages. This traffic comes from users mistyping a URL or using a domain name that does not exist.
c. User-generated sites - forums, image-sharing sites, social networks, video-sharing sites
In my next post, we'll take a look at targeting specific sites on the Display Network that you find through your gathered data and/or through a little research to take your online business to new heights...
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
