Pay Per Click – getting the best campaign for your business

By Chris W | Published: October 2, 2011

One of your first considerations when deciding to launch a PPC campaign is internet marketing training and education. Each search engine has their own pay per click advertising program and way of doing things. One of the advantages of web site promotion through PPC advertising is that it is generally easy to establish an account. Simply do your keyword research, outline the benefits of doing business with you, create some ads, have your credit card handy and follow the steps. There are some engines though, that will post ads immediately and satisfy your need for instant gratification.

Search Engine Advertising Program Changes

Keeping up-to-date on changes as they occur can also be challenging and another reason for logging into your PPC advertising campaigns daily. The search engines are continually improving their pay per click marketing programs, adding enhancements and making changes. Be sure you subscribe to some of the many newsletters made available by experts in the search engine marketing industry. For those using Google AdWords, they have an official blog that will give you tips and insight into tools available and changes that will help you advertise your site. Another great resource is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free service offered by Google that sends you email notifications for topics that you are interested in and is a great way to keep on top of industry changes.

Google AdWords offers some automated bid structuring which helps initially, but soon you will want to manually manage your bids. Learning how to do this will take time –looking through the forums and asking the right questions of the right people will help.

PPC bid management can be “tricky” in programs such as Google AdWords. Although, setting up a campaign is fairly easy managing it can be frustrating if you don’t know what you are doing. Some things are learned by trial and error and only over time will you become a pay per click expert.

Increase Visibility and Bring in Customers to Your Local Business

By Chris | Published: September 16, 2011

Display Your Address and Contact Information in All the Right Places

Adding your business name, mailing address and phone number on pages you would find related to a local search query increases relevance and shows validity to both search engines and your customers. You would be surprised at how many small businesses don’t put a physical location on their home, about and contact page, let alone on every page.

Another place to add contact information to is the page’s title tag.

As you find the need to add more content to your site to help drive traffic and bring in customers, start adding your contact information to specialty pages in a targeted fashion, for example speciality/name of company/location.

Extra Credit: Markup your geographic location with Microdata, a collection of HTML tags used to help all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Bing) to enhance the display of search results in the form of rich snippets.

Get Social. Seriously.

Just like any marketing initiative, the key to success in ensuring maximum return on local search engine marketing programs is consistency and visibility. The more places your business is mentioned and cited, the better. Customers can’t find you if they don’t know you exist.

Stick to mediums that can easily be measured, so ensuring you have the right mechanisms to track social media campaigns is paramount its success. Use free tools like Google Analytics.

If you’re ready to begin utilizing social media in your small business marketing efforts, start by registering your username on each and every social network frequented by your target audience.

Extra Credit: Promote deals, specials, and new product offerings by holding contests on social media. By encouraging retweets, likes, shares and +1’s through incentives, you increase awareness through social media while also positively affecting your social link profile.

How would you vote?

By Chris | Published: May 9, 2011

As more and more companies look to tap into the huge traffic monster that is facebook just how can you engage your new fans to make the most of your investment in facebook?

Without a doubt, one of the best ways is to create a quick poll that your fans can then answer. Now I’m not talking about creating another “which cartoon character are you?” poll that serves no purpose other than annoying people after they have been asked to join the app and take part for the hundredth time! Creating a poll is incredibly easy and can be done using any one of a number of “polling” apps.

However, creating a poll doesn’t just stop at creating a community feel and getting some interaction on your page, it is much more powerful than that! Imagine being able to ask all your customers to fill in a quick questionnaire, what would you ask? How could you use the results? What would it mean to your business to be able to know what your clients are thinking right now? Because that is essentially what you are finding out.

With a little careful consideration you can find out if a new product or service is something your clients not only want but need, how much they would be willing to pay for it and if there was an invaluable addition or improvement you could make to your business or current services, probably at little cost to you, that would make you the number one provider of that service.

So just how do you create a poll? Our preference is to use the in-house facebook questions app, you can find a link to the app by using facebook as your fan page, click on the home button and you should see the link to the app in your menu bar under your picture. Once you clicked on it, you can then add a question and any filters you wish. Although this app is open to the whole facebook community by making your question related to your page/products, you can then target your client base within facebook.

Once posted the question will appear in your fans’ newsfeeds and give them the opportunity to answer you.

For more information on how this app works and get started posting questions yourself please visit https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1145 for the apps faq’s.

Happy polling!

The Keyword tag

By Chris | Published: May 4, 2011

Although discounted by many SEO “gurus” I always like to include the keyword meta tag on all sites that I am working on. The reason is that the search engines are constantly changing how their algorithms work and it was not too long ago that the keyword tag was used by search engines like Google to determine what your site was about, so by including this tag I basically safeguard against any changes that may take this tag into consideration again.

Getting your keyword tag right is really simple and incredibly quick to do by following just a few golden rules but it is implemented wrongly on the vast majority of websites.

The first Golden rule is to keep your keyword list small and targeted, aim to have somewhere between 5 and 12 keywords maximum. On countless sites that use this tag the web designer/owner has crammed in anything up to 50 keywords hoping they will appear for any and all of those keywords. But using so many keywords has an adverse effect on your ranking, as rather than thinking that your site is about all the keywords you have listed, the search engines basically take the view that if you are about all of those things you cannot be about any of them in any great detail. So keep the list small and targeted around one main keyword per page.

The next most common mistake is to use a geographical area as a keyword. Whilst it can be a very good idea to market locally as you are cutting down on the amount of competition you are fighting with, by simply adding in a town name you are saying your site is about that town not the services you provide, so for a jeweller instead of having the following keywords:

Engagement rings, jewellery, watches, Leeds, Bradford… etc

You would be far better to add the town to the keyword you are targeting and again keep it targeted to rings if that what the page is about:

Engagement rings Leeds, Diamond rings Leeds, etc.

Now you are telling the search engines your site is about engagement rings in Leeds.

So, in just a few minutes by following these tips you too can safeguard your site from any changes that bring the keyword tag back into commission with the added bonus of knowing exactly what keywords your page should be targeting.

The Description tag

By Chris | Published: May 3, 2011

This can be one of the hardest of the tags to get right. You basically have around 160 characters to write a blurb about your web page explaining what it is that you do whilst convincing the search engine user why they should click on your site and take a look around.

In terms of SEO value we have found this tag to have slightly less value than the title tag but it still gives some value and as such, we need to follow the same rules as the title tag by getting our keyword in nice and early. This should also help the click through rate (CTR) as the searcher can immediately see the page is about whatever they type into the search engine. The remainder of the tag can be devoted to good copy encouraging the searcher click on your listing, but to really get the most SEO value you may want to include a derivative of your main keyword further down in the description, so for example, if I sold fencing panels my description may read:

Wooden fencing panels at the best prices in Leeds! For all your fencing needs click this listing now you won’t believe the amazing prices of all our wood panels

As you can see I have included the main keyword of “wooden fencing panels” with further variations of “fencing” and “wood panels” in the body of the description whilst giving the searcher a compelling reason to click on this listing – I’ve basically told them if they want panels, we have them at the best prices possible in Leeds.

Other variations may describe an offer on the site for anybody who buys panels direct through the site or some other reason as to why a searcher should want to visit. There really is no right or wrong just as long as you give a good reason as to why the searcher should click on your listing.

One thing that is important to try is to change the description tag every now and again and by using some website analytics software, you can test to see what description works best at obtaining you the clicks. This is relatively easy to do as you will be able to see how much traffic your site is getting from the analytics before and after the change. Please do make sure though that the description is the only thing you have changed otherwise you will not be able to tell whether the new description tag is what is having the effect on your CTR’s. Also be sure to keep any traffic not through organic search engine listings at a constant level (or at least make sure it is measurable) so you can discount it from the results.

By testing and tracking, not only will this tag give you a good SEO boost but also you can make sure your listings are as effective as possible.

Pay Per Click – getting the best campaign for your business

Search Engine Advertising Program Changes

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The Keyword tag

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The Description tag

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