Wednesday, May 27, 2009

It's Pay-Per-Click, Not Paper Clip!

Just getting the name right can be hard, not to mention running a successful campaign for your business. Many small business advertisers, with their DIY modus operandi, believe they can drive traffic to their website with an inefficient budget of $50 bidding on one or two keywords. During my time as an Internet Consultant I've met many of these guys who complain," Why don't I ever see my ads and how come I never see any traffic from them?"

The answer is that they are not properly using the Three Core Elements of a Paid Search Campaign.
  1. Keyword Research
  2. Keyword Bidding Strategy
  3. Text Ad Creation

These elements are critical to Pay-Per-Click (PPC) success. Let's breifly review each one. If you would like to learn them in more detail, contact us at www.wsimagicweb.com to reach our expert Internet Consultants.

Step 1: Keyword Research

If you are considering managing your own campaign, take the time to extensively research the search terms that would be best for your business. Free tools such as WordTracker help you to find keywords that are popular but not competitive, A.K.A. keywords with a high KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index).

Another tool called SEMRush allows you to see what keywords your competition is bidding on and for how much! Finding keywords with high KEI is great, but you also need to be found where your competition is, so you can compete with them directly. Combining the data and advertising on all the keywords you've found from both tools will start to get you ahead of the game.

Are you starting to see why a DIY campaign of two keywords and an inefficient budget does not work?

Step 2: Keyword Bidding Strategy

Manually managed PPC campaigns have a simple but time consuming keyword bidding strategy.
  • Keyword research
  • Bid on new keywords
  • Outbid competition

In the mind of the DIY advertiser," I will do my keyword research when I have time away from running my business, then bid on my new and current keywords when I have the time and the budget to implement it." Well, that's not good enough. Keyword research results change all the time as behaviors of Searchers and their search patterns are constantly in flux. Your average, busy business owner/ manager will be constantly behind the competition.

However, they can fix this problem by hiring a salaried employee to do it, or they can go the economical route and hire a professional Internet Consultant. WSI Internet Consultants have simplified PPC marketing for you. We do not charge an hourly rate, making it less expensive than hiring a person to work in-house.

WSI PPC keyword bidding strategy is different, because we
  • Do the Keyword Research for you daily.
  • Bid on hundreds of related keywords for you daily.
  • Combine expert professionals with intelligent technology to keep your campaign optimized daily.
  • Are managing thousands of campaigns for local businesses like yours.
  • Are partners with all the major Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, AOL, etc.).

Watch a brief video of our PPC strategy on YouTube. You only need to pay a small management fee plus your ad spend, we will take care of the rest.

Step 3: Text Ad Creation

First of all there are rules. Google, Yahoo and the other major Search Engines have rules about what can and cannot be displayed in the text ads. Exclamations are right out. Offer lines are only so many characters long which count spaces and punctuation. Another is that you cannot say you are the "best" if it cannot be verified by a reputable third party. Copyrighted terms like brand names may need special permissions from the copyright holders.

Second, your ads need to be compelling. Try to stand out from your competition with an engaging offer and use strong calls-to-action. "10% off" or "call us today for a special discount" are statements that will grab traffic in the buying phase of the online purchasing cycle. Be sure your ad links directly to the page on your website with the stated offer/ coupon.

Third, you should be AB testing your text ads. That's right, you should have two or more text ads running to learn which offers are more effective for which keywords. You may have to run multiple campaigns to do this. This entails doing keyword research and bidding for each campaign for each Search Engine on which you are advertising.

Does this seem like a lot of work?

Unless you are a business owner with lots of time on your hands, this is too much work. Even your Webmaster does not have this kind of time, because he's busy building websites. Your WSI Internet Consultant will make Pay-Per-Click marketing easy and profitable for you.

We do not need to make changes to your website which means no messy code work for you. We recommend an efficient budget appropriate for your business. We manage your campaign with our expert professionals and our intelligent proprietary software (nobody else can do this). We exclusively optimize and report on your campaigns daily for free! You will always know what your campaign is doing and what your Return on Investment is, which is something the DIY advertiser cannot do themselves.

Call 1-866-690-4249 today or contact us through our Website to speak with a WSI Internet Consultant about starting a successful Pay-Per-Click Marketing campaign.

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

What Is Online Success?

Simply, just with any business venture, it is a measure of desired results against your investment. How seriously you take your investment has a direct impact on your success.

I have seen how expensive and ineffective websites done by amatures can hurt a small business. Because of our economic times and emerging technologies a new and expanding marketplace has developed on the Internet. The online marketplace is more sophisticated allowing consumers to learn more about the products and services to fullfill their needs.

What does that mean for your business? It means that the investment in your website or virtual storefront needs to be taken as seriously as your physical storefront. Whether you provide goods or services you have invested time and money in a prominent location, training a friendly and engaging staff, and (hopefully) effecient marketing.

Guess what, your website needs to perform as your brick and mortor location. It needs to be in a prominent location i.e. at the top of the search results for keywords related to your business. It needs to be engaging, professional, and informative like your best employees. Lastly, it needs effective marketing such as

  • Pay-Per-Click: Stand out from your competitors
  • Social Media Optimization: Join in the conversation with your customers and manage your brand
  • Display Advertising: Build brand awareness where customers are consuming media

The great thing about succeeding online is that it is easily measurable. You and your professional Internet Marketing supplier should be using analytic tools to measure your return on investment. With them, you can see where traffic is coming from, what they are doing on your website, how they are converting into customers, and at what rate? (more on analytics in a future post or contact me)

Businesses should keep these tips in mind as they build their Internet presence.

  1. Always work with a professional Internet Marketing company.
  2. Always keep your website updated and engaging.
  3. Never stop driving traffic to your website.

Make sure your Internet Marketing company does all of the above. WSI is a world leader in Internet Marketing with 1500 professional Internet Consultants to help your local small-medium sized business. Learn more at http://www.wsimagicweb.com/.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

New Results on Google

Search Engine Optimization is constantly in flux as Google is always changing. Normally, webmasters have to optimize with a blindfold on because Google will not tell us what elements get pages ranked higher.

Recently, Google has been showing some new results as part of their beta search experiment. There are several experiments you can be a part of, but you can only do one at a time. One such experiment is "Timeline Results". These results list pages that have dates associated with the topic of their content. Here's the timeline result on 'Thomas Jefferson' (sorry about the fuzziness):

This result was at position ten on page one. Any business can do this. All they would need to do is write a short history of their product or service and let the spiders crawl.

Searchers can also adjust their search result settings with these experiments. Check out the other experiments here http://www.google.com/experimental/. There's experiments with keyboard shortcuts, web accessability, and one for your preferred sites.

As you are looking for SEO strategies keep these experiments in mind. They could be your ticket to page one results. As they say on the Google labs page,"Google is always experimenting with new features aimed at improving the search experience." This implies that at least one of the experiments will become a permanent fixture of the search experience on Google.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Down the Rabbit-Hole of Social Media Marketing

I'm working on a Trend and Competitor analysis report for a client that is interested in starting Social Media and Search Engine Optimization. I started playing around with tools like Google Insight and SEOQuake, and I went down a rabbit-hole of information.

While juggling all the data on my client and their competitors, much like the tea cups at the Mad-Hatter's, I discovered strong evidence for the previous post's claims that SMO gets websites ranked better. Compare the website in the red column with the orange, blue and green.The red website has no SEO or SMO and rarely is found. The sites in the other columns are easily found at top positions for their search terms with some elements of SEO and SMO. Notice that standard SEO elements such as robot.txt files and XML sitemaps are absent from all the sites. The red column has more indexed pages but still does not rank as well as the others. While the green ranks the best, probably from its high count of incoming links, the orange and blue are a close second without any known incoming links.

Why? Take a look at their Social Bookmarks. Orange 3, blue 11, and green has 1. What does this say about Social Bookmarking and Social Media Marketing? Volumes. It is as if Google is weighing social media activity more than incoming links. And who could blame them? Social media is a much better experience for searchers than following links from site to site. Social media provides fresh content and engage the searcher to interact.

I've come out of the rabbit-hole more convinced than ever that Social Media Optimization works. Moreover, because those inbound links still have a lot of weight, it should be implemented with a strong SEO strategy for the best results. I'm excited to show my client the report and for them to get started on SMO and SEO right away, so I can share the results with you.

Friday, May 1, 2009

Social Media Helps Sites Rank Higher

Did you ever wonder whether your business should be doing anything with social media optimization or social media marketing You know, things like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. If you think that these sites are just for the casual use of folks who want to share what they have for lunch, think again. Google and the other search engines are paying close attention to what is going on with these sites and they tend to give them lots of credibility in the search display results. The reason for this is that the search engines love new content and the social media sites and blogs are displaying new content on a regular basis.

I just had a first had example of this. We recently launched a new web site for a local dentist. The site is http://www.jamesrussodds.com/. I have been checking daily to see if the site has been crawled by the Google crawler so the site will be included in the Google index. Of course we did all the "right things" like submitting to the DMOZ project, installing an xml site map and verifying the site via webmaster tools. Still it had been a few days and the crawler had not been there yet.

But today I typed in http://www.jamesrussodds.com/ in the search bar instead of the browser bar and the site did come in the search results for the first time. So the Google crawler has just been there. But guess which page of the site that Google choose to display - well the one blog post we have done so far. Here is the page that was displayed. http://www.jamesrussodds.com/Read_Our_Blog.php

Social media optimization does seem to be the fastest way to get on the search engines. Use social media to get your site ranked.