Monthly Archives: July 2010

Pay Per Click Advertising and PPC Management Tips

Posted on by poonambhatt

Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very effective way to drive targeted traffic to your website, increase your leads-to-sales conversions, and announce new products and services. However, achieving success and maximizing your return on investment with Pay Per Click is not merely a matter of outbidding your competition for prime ad placement. As with any Internet marketing strategy, it’s critically important to have a clear understanding of the fundamentals and develop a PPC advertising plan before the campaign is launched. Otherwise, you run the risk of wasting your time and resources to take advantage of this increasingly effective means of reaching your targeted audience.

Here are some Pay Per Click advertising tips that will help you get started:

1. Establish a Budget – This may seem simple and obvious but creating a budget and sticking to it is the best way to keep from overspending and falling victim to bidding wars for popular search terms.

2. Develop a PPC Marketing Plan – Creating a plan in the early stages gives you a template to follow which should include thorough research of your industry, your competition, and a prioritized list of your targeted keywords and phrases.

3. Consider your Target Audience – Spend some time assessing who you want to click on your ad, the search terms they are likely to use, and how broad or narrow your intended demographic may be. Determining your audience in the early stages will help to inform your decisions in every phase of the campaign.

4. Identify Niche Opportunities – Instead of focusing on the most popular search terms where costs and competition will be steep, think about specific two- and three-word phrases that may have been overlooked by your competitors.

5. Write Compelling Ad Copy – You have a finite amount of space, so choose every word carefully to entice your audience to click on your ad. Most web users know the difference between sponsored and organic search results but if your ad copy leads them to believe that the link will help them find what they’re looking for, your click-through rates and sales will take off.

6. Craft Custom Landing Pages – This is essential. Each ad must take the viewer to a landing page where they can quickly and easily find what they need. Always remember that web users scan content and the decision to stay or look elsewhere is made in seconds.

7. Create and Analyze Performance Reports – These reports will tell you which ads are underperforming and which are exceeding expectations. Use this data to fine tune and adjust your marketing plan. Track your results at regular intervals.

PPC Tips for the Small Business Owner

Posted on by poonambhatt

The following tips provide the framework for developing a successful and cost effective pay per click campaign.

Time/Day Parting – Google allows advertisers to determine the day of week or even the time of day they want their ads to display. This can be a very useful tool for small business advertisers who know when their customers are most likely to look for their product or service. By setting your ads to display at only high performance times you increase the effectiveness of your campaign and reduce your costs.

Ad Scheduling.png

Match Types – Gone are the days of simply adding keywords that are all set to broad match and hoping for a return. Sure, casting a larger net brings in more traffic, but it also punishes your budget. The quality of that traffic might also suffer depending on the chosen keywords. Try using the available match types, especially exact match, to control costs and which searches are actually displaying your ads.

Negative Keywords – Selecting negative keywords to offset unwanted traffic is an absolute must for any campaign, large or small. For example, f a florist that sells only fresh flowers and plants might want to include the negative “artificial” to prevent traffic from artificial flower type keywords. Using negatives also allows you to pursue higher volume keywords without the exposure to unrelated searches.

Geo Targeting – According to a 2009 TMP/comScore report, 80% of consumers expect businesses in their search results to be within 15 miles of their location. This definitely doesn’t apply to all industries and regions, but it should provide a starting point with your targeting. It’s important to mention that with Google’s targeting granularity, you could potentially target your business out of traffic if it’s set so small that only a few people will see the ads.

Other Search Engines- Google has the lion share of the search market, but they also carry the highest bid prices. Bing and the like might not offer the volume that Google does; however, smaller search engines often have lower bid prices, which ultimately produce lower conversion costs. Test out a small budget on these other engines to start looking at your PPC efforts as a portfolio.

Keyword Development–The Google traffic estimator tool might show you that the keyword “new shoes” generates 1,500,000 searches each month, but that doesn’t mean it’s a quality keyword for your ad group. To maximize your budget, think locally and specifically. For example, if you’re in the printing business, expand past the generic and more expensive “printing” keywords;  pair them up with location identifiers to better define your product and audience. By using the keyword ”printing shops Denver 80202,” you pay less for a consumer that is further along in the buying cycle.

How External Deep Linking and More Content Can Boost Your Rankings

Posted on by poonambhatt

Everyone wants a better ranking. Heck, we all know that that nice boost from position 8 to 5, or 2 to 1 for your targeted search term can mean a world of difference in the pageviews and clicks you receive, and that’s probably a metric you’re aggressively tracking. But how can you surpass the competition in your targeted search rankings?

External deep linking is something a lot of websites neglect, which can cause you to be at a big disadvantage with your SEO strategy. Websites spend too much time optimizing their home page to rank for their high level keywords, and send all external links to their homepage while neglecting their deeply indexed pages.

Benefits of external deep linking include:

  1. A more diverse link portfolio because the links pointing to your other indexed pages are likely to have other keywords associated with the links, therefore your top level domain will be more powerful because of the diverse links and because the keywords in those links are likely to be semantically relevant to the top-level keywords you are trying to rank for
  2. External links to other pages within your site increase your rankings for those medium- and long-tail keywords which increase your overall traffic
  3. More traffic from your other pages increasing in ranking means better top-level rankings because aggregate traffic is an important factor in your search rankings

Internal deep linking can help if you are finding it hard to gain external backlinks to your deeply indexed pages.

Creating more unique content is important too. This is certainly something that seems to be said too much by SEOs, but it’s true because there is a direct correlation between better rankings and more indexed pages, as well as volume of links. Of course, quality comes into play too, but we won’t complicate things too much with all of that right now.

More content can be really useful for your SEO strategy in a number of ways:

  1. More indexed pages show you are a more trusted source because you will have more content relevant to your niche and the keywords you are targeting
  2. More pages means more opportunities for links to those pages, and more deep linked pages increases the diversity of the links you receive
  3. As always, more pages mean more opportunity to target long-tail keywords and ranking for those keywords won’t be hard so your overall traffic will increase, and if your traffic increases, so will your search rankings

Making sure you are investing time and effort into external deep linking and more content creation will be important if you want to increase your search rankings. Do not just link to your homepage and try optimizing that only because you will notice that there is a ripple effect when you link to other pages within your website since all your rankings will increase. These benefits work best for websites that do not have many external links pointing to their inner pages. For websites like SearchEngineJournal where many links are pointing to deeply indexed pages rather than just the homepage and where new content is published each day, doing more external deep linking and adding more content would just be redundant.