Internet Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘PPC’

Reaching the top of any major search engine takes a great deal of understanding, knowledge, and consistent execution of optimization related techniques. The good news about SEO is that basic principles or best practices are well documented and are relatively easy to implement.

Reaching the top of any search engine requires that you apply the methods used by today’s top ranked websites. There are a variety of techniques that are applied to top ranking sites and many that wont improve your ranking a single position. I have focused my time experimenting and determining which techniques work the best and here they are.

Researching keywords comes first. Wonder how you’re going to reach the number one position? The answer is directly correlated to what keywords you are trying to rank out on top for and how competitive they are. Said another way, if you are trying to rank well for a term that every one else is trying to rank well for, you have a long hard road ahead of you. On the other hand, if you are trying to rank well for a term with little competition, your odds of achieving search engine dominance go up significantly.

Meta Tags are extremely important. A good deal of people think that meta tags no longer hold any weight. The truth is that meta tags are just one of many factors affecting search engine rankings. That being said these tags are needed to prove to web site spiders that your content is consistent with your tags. Also, consider that meta tags drive how your search listing appears in search results. You want to provide something that is helpful and encourages users to click through to your website.

Make sure your site loads quickly. Search engines want to make sure that browsers are having a good user experience. Nothing is more annoying than to click on a top search result only to have the page load slowly. Most people browsing the web don’t have the patience to wait for pages to load and neither do the major search engines. Focus on fast load times and you will see higher rankings as a result.

It’s all about developing inbound links. Today’s leading search engine, Google, uses a complex algorithm that puts a significant amount of weight on the number and value of in-bound links. The patented formula of Google PR captures the value of more than one hundred and twenty factors associated with each and every web page on the Net. Many of these factors are dependent upon link value and significantly influence Google search results.

If you want to improve the ranking of your website, then focus on search engine optimization strategies that have been proven effective over the long-term. By applying only those search engine optimization strategies that produce results consistently, you can make the most of your optimization efforts.

You may have heard about pay per click marketing and how it is a cost-effective means to promote your business online. However, there are no such thing as a perfect advertising tool and any techniques always have at least some pitfalls that need to be avoided to reach your desired results.

Pay per click may be an ideal tool in online advertising but like any other ventures, it also has some downsides and drawbacks. With this, it is always advisable to make sure you know about the tool before using it and research on what can be pitfalls of the technique. This would also help you in coming up with a good strategy when it comes to online advertising using pay per click.

One common mistake encountered in pay per click is the wrong choice of keywords. Most often, failure looms in bidding for very broad keywords and spending higher pay per click rates on it. Be careful also of some “auto bid” settings which increases your bid automatically to retain your ranking.

One thing also is that, not all traffic that comes to your site could be valuable, so this can mean paying for something that will not give you anything. This is also a risk in pay per click advertising.

The return on investment (ROI) of this kind of advertising technique can be difficult to measure. You may be able to see how your site traffic increased upon implementing pay per click but it may be a little difficult to measure how much you profit from every cost you have spent on a click. It may require you other tools to track the conversion of your site traffic.

It is also important to keep in mind that in pay per click marketing, the cost per click may remain the same but as soon as your traffic increases, you will also have to prepare for an increased total advertising cost.

Although this approach is generally successful, it pays to be cautious and careful in its implementation to avoid these common pitfalls.

PPC search engine internet marketing isn’t brand new. Since Google and the major search engines started including advertising space on their search results pages internet and partner marketers have been taking benefit of the opportunity to get in front of their target markets when would-be customers are searching for targeted information. Owing to increasing competitiveness in the industry, however, the cost per click (CPC) for purchasing advertising space has increased dramatically since the early days. This has made PPC search engine internet marketing exorbitant for many new marketers and risky for the inexperienced person.

The basic premise behind PPC search engine internet marketing is the idea that search engine users are entering targeted search terms or keywords into the SE interface looking for information that is related to a merchant’s products or services. The focus of the search is particularly important and relates to the level of targeting that an advertiser wants to hone in on to make their campaigns successful. The more targeted a user’s search is the more chance that the marketer will make a sale if that user clicks through to their website.

The cost of pay per click advertising seems low to the inexperienced, with some clicks valued at only $0.10 in many instances. However, there are many popular search terms that can cost upwards of $10 for a click on the first page of the search results and even with the lower priced clicks the volume of clicks that can accumulate over time can mean that the cost rises quickly. For low priced products, particularly information products, the return on investment can prove to be very low in some instances.

Because of these factors there is a lot of stiff competition for the top spots and the cheaper clicks with advanced strategies and deep pockets coming into play among the top dogs in the business. In particular, it is now common for PPC marketers to use intricate software to spy on their competition and see the kind of campaigns that they are running. Some of these software programs are available to the general community. Some, like PPC Web Spy published by Bryxen Software are accessible free with the option to upgrade to a premium subscription and some are more prohibitively expensive. For example, PPC Bully 2.0 recently released for over $1000 and was sold out with over 1000 marketers quickly grabbing the privileges to use the software.

WIth increasing competition it is of the essence that new internet marketers experimenting with PPC realise that simply building Adwords on the fly is not a safe strategy. Lots of market and keyword research as well as competitor analysis is required. And it is often good to know that you have large reserves of money available to fund testing and enhancement to get the most benefit from this form of promotion.

If you want to make money online with PPC search engine internet marketing it is advisable above all to gather all the information you can and participate in extensive training before embarking on the challenge. This is not to say that you shouldn’t pursue it at all. It can be very profitable. It’s just important with PPC search engine internet marketing to make sure you do it right.

Can you capitalize on others’ mistakes and be wildly successful with your Google Adwords campaign? Yes! But it’s not your competitors’ mistakes that you should always focus on. Let me explain…

Your prospects are not necessarily the best spellers in the world. In fact, the word “misspell” (mispell) is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English language. There are many other commonly used words that are misspelled. Unfortunately, many of these words are typed into search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN every day. So why should you care? Because your competition usually doesn’t care!

Armed with this knowledge, you can dominate keywords in your market that no one else thought of bidding on. Since there is normally little competition for these keywords you can get them a lot cheaper than the correctly-spelled versions.

But let’s say you serve a clientele that is more sophisticated than most; perhaps your average customer has a college degree. Well, first I would like to ask you if you have read any college essay papers lately, but (seriously) even if you believe that those searching for you CAN spell, there are other reasons besides ignorance that many people misspell words:

-In their hurry, people leave out letters in a word. -Letters get switched because of “fast fingers”. -Ocassionally keys on keyboards get “stuck” and they add extra letters. -People know how to spell common words, but don’t remember exact names of companies – especially if your business uses a surname in its title. (”Thompson” or “Thomson”?)

So how do you know which keywords people are misspelling to get to your business. First of all, start with good keyword research and make sure that you get the correctly spelled keywords first. Next, take a list of the most commonly used words in those keyword phrases and think about how people could misspell them.

There are several “typo” tools on the internet that can help. A free tool that you can use is located at http://www.selfseo.com/domain_typo_generator.php . Let’s do a real example. I will type in the word “attorney” and see what comes up: -zttorney -sttorney -qttorney -attornet -attorndy

There were many more misspellings generated, but notice that all of these examples have nothing to do with the searcher not knowing how to spell; but in each case, the letter mistyped was a key in close proximity to the one intended.

So if you are going to dominate your competitors and take advantage of your prospects’ typos so that you can get inexpensive clicks, let’s go over some “Do’s and Dont’s.”

DO include variations of the most commonly misspelled keywords in your Adwords campaign. DO set up a SEPARATE ad group for these misspelled keywords so that you can better track their effectiveness. DO make sure that you have the misspelling of your own company name.

DON’T try to use the misspellings in your headlines or ad copy. That means you can’t use “dynamic” keyword insertion techniques for these particular keywords. Don’t even try. If it gets by Google the first time, rest assured that they will catch it, and you could end up being penalized big-time because Google definitely wants professional, correctly-spelled copy in its Adword campaigns.

Yes, it takes some extra work, but the payoff can be hugely successful. You not only have to know what you should do correctly, but more importantly, what your clients are NOT doing correctly in order to run a successful Google Adwords campaign.

When it comes to pay per click campaigns, smart PPC managers know something that most amateurs don’t: When you advertise with Google or any of the other major search engines like Yahoo or Bing, you are not necessarily competing against your competitors!

I can hear you now saying…”What do you mean? Of course, I am competing against my competitors.” My answer again is NO, you are not. Let me explain.

I just typed in the keyword “cars” into Google. On the first page alone, here is what I found advertisements for: -car auctions -car buying guide -used cars -new Chrysler cars -DVD of the Disney movie called “Cars” -information about the CARS Car Allowance Rebate system -car insurance program for high-risk drivers

Now, let’s get real. Do all of these company really compete directly with one another? The answer: Yes AND no.

No – they don’t directly compete for the same customers. Yes – they DO compete for the same ad space with other companies that happen to be bidding on the same keywords that they are bidding on.

Now, I will tell you, the company advertising the car buying guides (as well as the company selling DVDs) probably make a lot less revenue than the company selling high-risk car insurance or the one selling new Chrysler cars.

The lesson…don’t be one of these low-volume companies advertising on broad, wide-appealling keywords. The problem is with the keyword itself. “Cars” is WAY to broad of a keyword to bid on. If you don’t know what you are doing, you will lose money. Chances are that the larger volume sales companies already know this fact and are willing to take a calculated risk and waste multiple clicks by folks who are not necessarily prospects in their quest for a certain volume of clicks that may end up resulting in a high-volume-revenue sale.

Smaller-volume sellers have to be smarter. They must choose keywords that are extremely targeted. And if these targeted keywords that they choose are super-competitive keywords, then they have to have a strategy for getting these keywords at an affordable price and /or have a better conversion percentage than their competitors.

And if this fails, they must target long-tail keywords that don’t necessarily have the competition of the shorter keywords. If these long-tail keywords don’t have much traffic, then they must make it up in volume – by bidding on a large number of these super-targeted, non-competitive long-tail keywords.

Sound complicated? It is. Think you need help? You probably do. That’s why you may need to consider hiring a full-time employee, dedicated to managing your search marketing campaigns. If you cannot afford a full-timer, then perhaps it is time to consider outsourcing your pay per click campaign to a professional PPC campaign management service so that you can stop competing with companies that aren’t even your real competitors…and start making sales to prospects who want and need your wares.

A successful Google Adwords campaign begins with proper keyword research. Many businesses use Google Adwords for attracting customers, but few really become successful with their campaigns. Truth be know, most folks advertising on Google probably fail. Why? Because they tried to advertise without researching what their customers are actually searching for. They failed to do proper keyword research.

First let’s define the phrase “keyword research”. Many newbies to the internet mistakenly think the term “keyword” is actually one (1) word. Well, it could be, but normally it is not. Anytime you hear the word “keyword” think “key-phrase” instead because normally most keywords are in fact “phrases” that someone is typing into a search engine in order to find something.

So where is the best place to begin your keyword research? The answer may be right under your own nose. Chances are the best place to begin a successful Google Adwords campaign is to look on your own website. There are actually two places on your website to begin. First, look at the site itself. What keywords are you optimizing for? In other words, what words are you using on your site that makes the average user know that they have come to the right place.

Maybe you are an accident attorney that practices several states in the Southeast. In that case, wouldn’t it make sense to have the keyword phrase “accident attorney” and “southeast” in prominent positions on your site? And if that is the case, then shouldn’t you be bidding on keyword phrases that include the word “accident attorney” and also “southeast?”

Another place to begin keyword research is to look in the not-so-obvious place, and that is on your server. Most hosting companies have a software interface that has many useful programs and tools incorporated into it. For example, many hosting companies such as HostGator and SiteGround use an interface called CPanel. CPanel has a useful software tool called Awstats. Awstats collects collects much information about the visitors to your sites. In many cases not only can you see which sites that arrived on your site from, but also which keywords they used to search for your company. This information is invaluable.

I would bet that over 95% of the users of Adwords don’t access this information. If one customer found your site using a particular keyword phrase, doesn’t it make sense to bid on that particular keyword (as long as you consider it to be a keyword that is pertinent to your business)? If you don’t know how to take advantage of this tremdously valuable information already sitting on your hosting server, then ask your hosting company or a techie to help you get it. It only takes a minute or two to access, but the information could be invaluable.

There are many more tactics for the doing proper keyword research, including legally spying on your competitors. What? You don’t know how to legally spy on your competitors and swipe some of their best performing keywords for your own? In this case, what you don’t know about running a successful Google Adwords campaign can definitely hurt you.

There are many free and paid resources on the web that will educate you about doing proper keyword research. Take the time to learn them and if you don’t have the time, then pay someone with experience in adwords campaign management to manage your Google Adwords campaign for you.

It is true, and Google will love you too if you just take the time to set up your adwords campaigns the right way! You see, there is a right way and a wrong of doing it and if you are like 95% of Adwords advertisers you are probably doing it the wrong way!

When you first set up your adwords campaigns you are either setting yourself up for success or optimizing your campaigns for absolute failure. No one wants to fail, but only a very small percentage of advertisers are actually setting up their campaigns the correct way and optimizing for success. While setting up your campaigns the correct way is not the catchall for Adwords success, (it still requires daily maintenance, split testing and bid management), it definitely play a huge role in whether your campaigns will succeed or fail.

Google is very judgmental; and rightly so. After all, it is the world’s #1, most trusted Search Engine. What I’m trying to say here is that Google will not reward an Adwords campaign that is set up wrong. As a matter of fact, many times Google actually punishes campaigns that are setup incorrectly. With that in mind, hopefully you understand how important it is to set up your adwords campaigns correctly. When you set up you are either setting up for success or setting up for failure.

Setting up Your Campaigns the Wrong way – I’m not going to go into to much detail on how to set up your campaigns the wrong way. You probably already know how to do that, but let me tell you a couple things that Google absolutely hates.

Google really hates: – Irrelevancy – Keyword Cramming- (this is when you stuff all of your keywords into just one or few adgroups. Google expects your keywords to be organized into separate adgroups with your keywords being perfectly relevant to each other.)

You see, Google is all obsessed with “relevancy” and the reason being is because Google wants to provide the most relevant content possible to its users. So, if you cram all of your keywords into just one adgroup, then Google know that there is know way the text ad you have displaying for those keyword can possibly be relevant to each of those keywords. Do you really think that Google is going to display an ad that it thinks might not be relevant to what a searcher is actually searching on? The answer. Of course, it will, but you will have one heck of a click cost and pretty sorry ad placement! Do you see why keyword cramming does not work? This is why you must be very sure to set up your campaigns the right way.

Setting up Your Campaigns the Right way – Don’t you want to gain favor with the Google Gods? Well here is the way to start. Set up your campaigns right! Begin by carefully organizing all of your keywords into closely knit, relevant adgroups. Divide up your keywords so that each adgroup had a main theme where all of the keywords inside are relevant to each other. This will also force you to write a relevant ad for each of the adgroups you have created. I know, it is a lot of work, but Google will love you for it! If you really want to please Google, try making your campaign super relevant by putting each individual keyword into an adgroup of its own. That technique is a lot more work though, and is better left to us PPC Pros.

Farmers would more than likely make poor PPC Managers; hunters would make great ones. Now I have nothing against tillers of the soil. Some of my ancestors were farmers. It’s just that I think farmers would not succeed at managing pay per click campaigns for very long.

Why? Because farmers operate from a long-term mentality. An apple farmer plants a seedling and doesn’t expect any fruit for the first 3-4 years — and even then the fruit is normally not edible until the apple tree is 8-10 years old!

Now that might work for an apple farmer, but can you imagine “investing” money in a pay per click campaign with that mentality? Break even in 3-4 years — profits in 10. No way.

But hunters on the other hand would make GREAT PPC campaign managers – especially African safari hunters. Why? It’s either kill or be killed. If you miss your mark your competitor (in this case the lion) has you for lunch. Sounds a lot more like pay per click to me than the apple tree example.

In the pay per click game, you have to think like a hunter. When a hunter goes on a hunting trip, he has to target what he wants to hunt. Why? Because an African lion can’t be brought down with a squirrel gun. The hunter has to know what he is going after and have the appropriate weapons and ammunition for his prey.

By the same token, in order for PPC campaign managers to be successful, they must target their market with precision, intelligence, and speed. In pay per click you don’t have time to mess around. If the keywords that you are targeting are wrong and don’t convert, then you have to make swift decisions on whether to keep throwing money at them or to toss them aside and focus on better, more targeted and higher-converting keywords.

And unlike the farmer who normally has time on his side…PPC managers don’t have that luxury. Sometimes you have only a few weeks or several months to get things “right” so that you can afford to stay in the game.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of players don’t operate like hunters. They treat their search marketing campaign like it is an apple orchard and they have all the time in the world. They plant small seeds, and make small minute changes that are days apart, while their competitors run about with a gun in their hand and hunt big prey, knowing that if they miss, they can quickly re-load and hunt again later that day or even tomorrow. Guess who wins?

So what do horses have to do with PPC management services? Plenty! Bear with me and I’ll explain.

Back in June, 2008, there was a major horse race – the Belmont Stakes. Big Brown, who had previously won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness (and in dominant fashion), was the heavy favorite. All Big Brown had to do was win at Belmont and he would have become the first Triple Crown winner since a horse named Affirmed accomplished this feat way back in 1978.

All bets were on Big Brown. It didn’t take a lot of research for the bookies to make Big Brown the overwhelming favorite – both on the field and at the gambling booths. It was all but a foregone conclusion…the race was over before it began. Big Brown would win and win big – just like he had in his other two races.

According to conventional wisdom (and also according to Big Brown’s trainer) all the other horses did not even need to show up. This was a guarantee, a no-contest, a shoe-in (no pun intended).

Well, once again…”conventional wisdom” was wrong. Big Brown came in dead last. The winner was Da’Tara! This was the same horse who had finished 23 1/2 lengths BEHIND Big Brown in a race just three months earlier. In fact, Da’Tara was so dominant, that he beat all the horses by four lengths!

It’s a good thing horses can’t read because if they could…then Da’Tara would not have even tried. But, alas, horses CANNOT read, and Da’Tara is in the record books forever a winner of the 2008 Belmont Stakes.

No, horses can’t read, but neither can your customers. Yes, most can probably read words, but they can’t read your mind. They don’t know what you think they are supposed to know. You see…you and ever other pay per click advertiser only have 85 total characters to tell your customer about your offer in order to get the click – only about 12-16 words to tell your story – no matter who you are.

Pay per click is the “great equalizer.” It doesn’t matter how big your company is, how long you have been in business, or how many millions of dollars of sales you made last year. Customers don’t necessarily “know” that; you can’t take them for granted like Big Brown’s fans took him for granted because of his reputation. Every day, you must compete to win. You must fight. You must outsmart your competition. Heck, in many markets it’s hard enough just to get on the first page of the search results – let alone get the click – and let alone make a sale or convert a prospect into a lead!

Now, if you are a small company…you should be getting very excited about this scenario. Just like with Da’Tara…each new day brings you a shot at winning. In the pay per click game, everyone is on an even playing field. You cannot buy your way to the top. In fact, if you know what you are doing and practice smart PPC management, you may even get to the top of the page, while spending less than your competitor who is at the bottom!

Yes, some search engine may play favorites to a few previous winners, but not too much and not for too long. For you see…the customer is the one who gets the most favoritism…and that’s the way it should be.

Companies who are not on the top of their game and choose to approach PPC management like it is some sort of “set it and forget it” service will soon be going the way of Big Brown, while an upstart like Da’Tara, who sticks with it long enough to figure things out, becomes the pay per click champion of the day. If you find you can’t compete anymore, then perhaps it’s time to retire or, to consider outsourcing your PPC management services to a company who knows how to breed “champions” and has a track record for turning losing PPC campaigns into winners.

I know…pay per click advertising is not a girl and dating is definitely NOT a game, but that did not stop legendary T.V. producer Chuck Barris from creating one of the most popular television game shows of the 1970’s – The Dating Game.

This creation put one man behind a screen to ask three (3) women various questions. At the end of the game, the man picked the woman whose answers (and voice) most pleased him. All the while, the viewers and the studio audience could see all three potential dates, while these rivals took turns at cutting their competition down, hoping to be the lucky date chosen at the end.

Well…pay per click advertising works the same way…sort of. The PPC manager has to choose between three different match types for his keywords. He can choose from the following: -broad -phrase -exact

There IS a catch, however. He can also choose ANY combination of these three. (Imagine the man in the dating game getting choose two or even all three women to take out at the same time.)

So what do MOST PPC advertisers choose? Broad match, of course. The reason why most choose broad match is because that it the default in most search marketing advertising systems. But here is the problem: Most folks don’t understand the difference between the match types…and knowing this difference is CRUCIAL to success in PPC marketing.

The best way to explain the difference is by example. Let’s take the keyword “colon difficulty” for our broad match example. When using broad matches, you are telling the search engine that you want your ad to show as long as all of your keywords appear in the search query.

You ad will appear if you used the broad match type for the keyword “colon difficulty” and the searcher typed in any of the following search queries: -having colon difficulty (okay) -having difficulty with my colon (okay) -difficulty deciding whether or not to use a colon or a semi-colon (NOT okay)

As you can see in the above example. There is definitely a risk when using broad match as the match type.

Now let’s do an example using the phrase match type. When using phrase match, you are telling the search engine that you want your ad to appear when the searcher types the combination of keywords in that exact order; however, using phrase matching allows for words to appear before and after your phrase.

Your ad will appear if you used the phrase match type for the keyword “divorce attorney” and the searcher typed in any of the following search queries: -need good divorce attorney (okay) -divorce attorney in Texas (okay – if you practice law in Texas)

Your ad will not appear in the following example: -attorney divorce (It will not appear because even though the words are in the search query, they are not in the exact same order; they are reversed.)

But your ad will ALSO appear in this example: -how do I hire a hit man to knock off my wife’s divorce attorney? (DEFINITELY not okay)

So you see…there are times that you should use and phrase matching and times when the use of it could be rather unfortunate.

So what is the exact match type? Simple. That is when you select your ad to appear only when the keywords you bid on are used exactly; nothing more – nothing less.

If you used the exact match type for the keyword “state attorney bar” here would be some results: -state attorney bar (Your ad will be shown. It is an exact match!) -state attorney bar and grill (Your ad will NOT be shown; there was not an exact match, which is a good thing because the searcher definitely would not be looking for your in this case.

In conclusion, just like the suitor in the Dating Game had to carefully consider which date to choose, those managing PPC campaigns better think carefully before they choose the match type for their keywords. Of the three (broad, phrase, or exact)…broad match is definitely the most dangerous to use! Yes, there are cases where broad matching is applicable, but for most newbies, it is best to stick with phrase or exact matching for better results.

If you are now thoroughly confused, don’t feel alone. Just by reading this article you probably know more about match types than 80% of the PPC advertisers out there. If you think you are in over your head, then perhaps it’s time to play a dating game of your own…choosing the correct PPC management company that you can trust to handle your search marketing campaign so that you can concentrate on something less confusing.