Seo Blog | Search Engine Marketing News

Although there are thousands of ways you can promote your business online, two well-known methods are search engine optimisation and paid advertising. Paid advertising can be done in the form of PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns like Google Ads or paying other webmasters and bloggers to display your link on their websites and blogs with your chosen anchor text.

SEO on the other hand is based on naturally ranking higher on search engines. You are ranked for the kind of information — content — that you have on your website.

Both SEO and paid search engine marketing have their pros and cons but in this post I’ll list some reasons why you should prefer natural search engine optimisation over paid search engine marketing.

• SEO is long-lasting: Once done properly, only a big shake in the search engine ranking algorithms can move you from your place and that too only happens if you have relied upon some unreliable ranking tactics.
• Search engine users trust naturally appearing links more: This has been proved again and again that search engine users when given a choice first click on links that appear as the natural result of their search and mostly stay away from “sponsored” or PPC links.
• SEO is far cheaper: In paid search engine marketing you have to pay for every click whether it fetches you business or not. Some of the search terms are very competitive and hence you have to pay a lot for them. For some keywords PPC advertisers pay even more than $100 per click. Once you get a higher ranking naturally, your clicks are practically free.
• SEO keeps your website in good condition: Good SEO practices ensure your website is completely accessible and adheres to all web design and development recommendations and protocols.
• SEO improves your conversion rate: SEO, in real sense, means targeting right keywords and search terms, and it definitely doesn’t mean targeting every possible word under the sun but ignoring the ones that can fetch you business. Intelligent SEO practices help you attract the right crowds and this in turn does wonders to your conversion rate.

I hope these pointers help you make up your mind. To be frank I’m not totally averse to paid search engine advertising because although SEO is highly rewarding, it takes its own time and till then you cannot simply wait for your links to turn up on the search engine result pages. So put your energies into search engine optimising your website but by all means in the mean time if you can afford it, start generating some traffic, and some business, through paid search engine advertising.

Managing your Google AdWords campaign well is very critical to your online business success especially if plan to get lots of business from Google users.

Google AdWords Explained

Although it is highly unlikely, in case you don’t know what are Google AdWords, these are those link boxes that appear at the top or on the right hand side when you search for certain terms and phrases on Google. They are pay-per-click ad campaigns that means the advertisers pay Google for every click Google sends their way. This form of online advertisement is so popular that for Google AdWords is the main source of income.

How Google AdWords Works

The algorithm handling Google AdWords ads might be complex, but the logic is simple. There are two things that affect your AdWords ad placement when you run an ad campaign:

• Maximum cost per click you are ready to pay
• The performance of your advertisement

It’s the second point that makes Google AdWords so popular among the advertisers. It doesn’t matter how much money you can pump in; unless your advertisement generates enough clicks, unless it performs, that is, it’s not going to get the placement ranking you desire. So even a company like Nike may appear below you if your ad performs well. This creates a level playing field for everybody and it also makes good business sense for Google. More low-cost clicks are always better than few high-cost clicks.

So the trick is, achieve the highest possible position for the lowest possible cost. And this is something that I want you to achieve after reading this article.

If you follow a few things mentioned in this article I can safely say there is no need to hire a profession AdWords management company, although you can, and should hire them in case you don’t have enough time at your hand.

Target High-Precision Keywords

You can lose lots of money by not targeting the right keywords. Once your ad starts appearing for your selected keywords, you’ll start getting clicks, and you’ll start paying for those clicks. What if 80% of those clicks were never meant for you and they merely happened because your ad appeared for wrong, or misleading, or confusing keywords?

Let’s take “web designing” for instance. A very costly phrases in terms of PPC advertising. But if you are providing web design services and you want only those people to click your ad who are looking for a web designer or a web design company, do you really think “web designing” is a good keyword for you? I’ve personally experienced that people who are searching for online tutorials and trips and tricks mostly search for “web designing”. A good term for you would be “web designer” or “web design company”.

Better, if you want to target an audience only in London, it’ll be more profitable if you target something like “web designer in london” or “web design company london” or “london web designers” or something like that.

I understand that when you are just starting your Google AdWords campaign you are pretty much excited about getting traffic for all sorts of keywords, but keep in mind that you are paying for every click.

Use less competitive, Long Tail keywords that will get you focused traffic. If you are selling Nokia phones you should use “Nokia 6110 Navigator” to drive clicks to that model’s page instead of using simply Nokia to drive traffic to your home page. Well, this brings us to

Use Different Landing Pages For Different Keyword Sets

A Google AdWords campaign means nothing without a good landing page. Don’t just drive all the traffic to your home page because your home page means different things to different people, more so if you are offering multiple products and services. In fact your landing page is so important that Google provides you a landing page optimising tool so that you can tweak and optimise your landing page.

Since you are paying for every single click, and paying dearly sometimes, it is better to increase your conversion rate to decent level and you can only achieve this by having the perfect landing page.

If you can manage, have a dedicated landing page for every keywords, or for every keyword-group.

Google also lets you track the conversion rates of your landing pages so that you can stop using the landing pages that don’t perform well and use those landing pages more that perform better.

Use the [Exact Match] if possible

Google AdWords lets you set the following phrase-matching options when you are entering the keywords you want to bid on:

• Broad match: This is the default option, and I’d say, the most inefficient way of selecting the search options. Here, if you enter content management software it will show your ad for all possible combinations of the three words, plus, if they are used in conjunction with some other word. So whether it is management software or content software or buy content or something else, your ad will appear for all of them, attracting tons of unwanted clicks and hence, expense.
• Phrase match: In this phrase match option your ad appears for the phrase match plus for any other word appearing with the phrase. So if you use “content management software” (with double quotes) it will not only show your ad for content management software but also for free content management software, download content management software, download content management software, content management software in php, etc.
• Exact match: This is the best way of entering your keywords and it can get you the highest conversion rate (although fewer links). For exact match you enclose your keywords within [ and ]. Hence, if you enter [buy content management software] your ad will only show up for this search term and nothing else. This drastically reduces the clicks you get but since people come to your website through the exact search term the conversion rate is quite high.
• Negative match: Suppose you don’t want to appear for the word free If you use -free content management software your ad won’t appear for the search terms containing the string free. Use this option to mark for all the keywords and phrases you don’t want to appear for.

I suggest you use the exact match whenever possible because then people see your ad for exactly the thing they are looking for.

Define Your Ad Copy Clearly

Well, this goes without saying. The purpose of your Google AdWords is not just to drive traffic (in some case it can be the sole purpose but I’m talking in general sense) but to drive traffic that converts, that is, traffic that gets you business. So don’t use misleading words just to get clicks. If you don’t offer free stuff, don’t use the word “free” in your ad copy.

If possible use the search phrase in the title of your ad, that is, if you are selling a CMS, make your title as “Buy CMS” or something like that. Similarly, in your description clearly state where the link leads to.

Group Your Ad Campaigns

It’s better to organise multiple keywords under various campaign groups. This also helps you in geo-targeting. Different countries and regions use different words to find the same thing. So you can target different countries and states in different groups.

You can also set different tracking URLs for different ad groups to monitor which group of keywords are performing better.

Managing your Google AdWords campaigns is not as intimidating as it seems. Although it does make sense to hire professional AdWords managers if you have hundreds of keywords and scores of tracking pages, for entry-level Google AdWords management, follow the tips mentioned above and you can easily optimise your PPC investments.

Organic SEO or Pay-Per-Click search engine advertising, which is better? It depends on what you want at a particular moment.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO means trying to rank well naturally. In organic SEO you don’t pay for every click you get from the search engines. All the clicks from the search engines are free when you appear on the search engine result pages on the merit of the quality of your website. The only money you spend is on getting your website search engine optimised and getting quality content generated for your website.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

In pay-per-click advertising you pay for every click you get from the search engines. Both Google and Yahoo! run their own pay-per-click programs. Whereas in Yahoo! your position depends on the amount per click you are ready to pay, in Google’s AdWords your position depends on your bid amount PLUS the performance of your ad.

So which one is better?

Pay-per-click is preferable in the short-term when you want to get quality clicks immediately after launching a new website or introducing a new product. It’s not the best way of getting traffic but it is an effective way. You can start receiving quality hits as soon as you’ve activated your campaign.

Organic SEO is preferred for the long run. It doesn’t make sense to keep paying for every click especially when you talk in terms of thousands of clicks per day. For every major keyword relevant to your website you should try to appear among the top 10-15 results on the search engine result pages.

The search engine users too trust those links more that appear naturally.

I think both organic seo and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns have their respective places of importance: it depends on how much time and budget you have at your disposal and what are your immediate and long-term priorities. Let’s first quickly see what organic seo and pay-per-click mean.

Organic SEO

Organic SEO, or natural SEO fetches you higher search engine rankings without paying for the placement. Organic SEO makes the search engines like your website without you having to pay for the affection. For this you have to create and maintain a website that the search engines would love to present to their users when they search for terms related to your website. Organic SEO takes lots of effort and it often takes months to show some tangible results. You can achieve organic SEO by

• Creating lots of relevant content
• Getting quality inbound links
• Creating optimised markup

All these points have been covered in detail in various posts on this blog.

Pay-per-click

Pay-per-click programs get you visibility on the search engines according to the bid you are ready to place per click. This way you can start getting high-quality clicks from the search engines within fifteen minutes of activating your website You can see such links on Google at the top or the right on search engine results pages and on Yahoo under the “Sponsored links” section. Different search engines use different methods for displaying pay-per-click links. For instance, Yahoo places you higher for higher bids, but Google places you higher for the higher number of clicks your link generates.

So should it be organic SEO or pay-per-click

It should be a mixture of both the methods. It’s better to use your PPC campaign in the beginning so that your online presence gets relevant traffic from day one. If you don’t want to spend lots of money on your PPC campaign, you can target the least competitive expressions and start getting traffic for them. In the mean time you can continue your organic SEO efforts. When you feel you are getting good traffic due to organic SEO, you can stop bidding for your keywords.

For those who haven’t noticed or did notice but didn’t use the new features that came out last December here’s a quick overview on the Content Analysis feature. As the name suggests the new feature is very useful at analysing the content of your website. So what exactly does it analyse? The content analysis feature gives a report on metadata issues that could affect Google’s crawling and indexing your web pages as well as your website’s usability. Some of the specific metadata issues looked into by the content analysis feature include:

1. Title tag issues

• missing title tags
• duplicate title tags
• long title tags
• short title tags
• non-informative title tags

2. Meta description issues

• duplicate meta description
• long meta description
• short meta description

3. Non-indexable content issues

• flash files
• images
• other non-indexable content

Your Google PageRank tells how important your website is. The importance of your website is gauged by how many websites link back to you. And it is not as simple as it seems. Even the websites linking to you too must have a good Google PageRank. This means the websites linking to you should also be linked to by websites being linked to other, well-linked websites. So in a sense, every website being considered for your PageRank should enjoy a higher PageRank.

The inbound links to your website are counted as “votes”. So the more votes you have, the higher PageRank your earn. You can view a website’s (including yours) by installing (if it is not already installed) the Google Toolbar that resides in the upper part of your browser once the Google toolbar is installed. In the Google PageRank button there is a green bar that ranges from 0/10 to 10/10. As a said, the websites sending you inbound links should also enjoy higher PageRanks (PR). The more links you get from higher PageRank websites, the less links you have to garner in order to attain a higher PageRank.

People have written complete research papers on how Google calculates PageRanks but if you are reading this just to search engine optimize your website, then the only thing worth knowing is that you should get inbound links from trusted websites that get lots of targeted traffic — this is the only thing that matter as far as your PageRank goes.

PageRanks used to be taken seriously a long time back, but not now. They do matter, but not to a great extent. You can enjoy top rankings in the search pages even with a PageRank 1.

Blogging about SEO seems to be the “in thing” over the last 12 months. Hundreds of SEO and make money online blogs have sprung up offering tips on how to get more traffic.

The problem is that 90% of them offer very bad tips (the other 10% of them are mostly excellent). Why do people who don’t know much about SEO decide to start blogging about it?

I really can’t understand why somebody would blog about a subject they don’t know much about. Sure they might have read a few threads on a forum but does that make you an expert? You wouldn’t sit down and write and article about baking or fixing cars unless you were a good mechanic or chef so why write about SEO when you don’t know much about it?

Another issue is when people say “I don’t know much about SEO and don’t consider myself an expert but here are my tips on how to optimise your site”. Sometimes these tips are very good but most of the time they have either been said before or are misleading. If something has been said before, by an expert, then why repeat it?

As an industry SEO is full of misinformation and the hundreds of uninformed SEO bloggers who write about the subject just add to the noise.

My advice is to stop blogging about SEO and start doing it.

Exchanging links is decidedly unfashionable in SEO circles and yet it’s the first thing most new sites do when they launch so who’s right? The answer is that getting some decent incoming links from similar sites is a good thing, even if you have to exchange links to get them.

Having a list of 20 or so sites on a links page and getting reciprocal links is going to help your rankings in most industries so don’t be worried about it. The key is to make sure you don’t exchange links with sites that have hundreds of reciprocal links as they won’t be passing link juice.

Once you have done your 20 exchanges you need to stop and think about new ways to generate links from similar sites. One of my favourite methods is to exchange links within news articles or blog posts. Sometimes I write about a blog a few times and they link to me a few weeks later from another post but the process can be more specific. For example the companies could agree that they link to the other site in alternate weeks and always use some helpful anchor text.

Google sees these links as highly valuable and as long as you don’t abuse the system they will count and help your rankings.

Search engine optimisation can be helped by simple tactics such as rewriting product descriptions when selling items from another manufacturer, a commentator has suggested. E-consultancy researcher Graham Charlton said in a recent blog post that original content is helpful for both driving search engine traffic and a company’s conversion rate.

Although such recommendations may seem obvious to high-ranking websites, research conducted by Microsoft at the end of last year revealed more than 60 per cent of small and medium businesses in the UK do not invest in search marketing because they fear it is expensive and difficult. This is despite 76 per cent of such firms which do spend time on search engine campaigns being rewarded with an increase in sales.

The software company estimated that businesses are wasting as much as £3 billion investing in websites their potential consumers will never find.

Many people manage Google paid search campaigns based solely upon the information provided in AdWords (reports, campaign views etc). I’m not saying you can’t manage an account using just this - but by combining the AdWords data with additional information from Google Analytics then you can look deeper into your campaigns to help assess it’s performance before making a judgement upon the best way forward.

Here are some of the Google Analytics metrics which can enhance your PPC campaign:

1) View Bounce Rate and Average Time on Site
By reviewing user activity information such as the bounce rate and average time on site you can assess the effectiveness of your landing page and keywords.

This also provides information upon the relevancy of keywords and ad variations, with low average time on site stats and high bounce rates suggesting that users aren’t finding what they are searching for and clicking back to find another site instead. You can also compare the quality of traffic from different sources, are Yahoo! users more likely to browse your website for longer than an average visit from Google? How high is the bounce rate from the content network? Are your email marketing or banner advertising campaigns as effective as search engine traffic? And so on…

2) Find Exact Referred Search Terms
Using Google Analytics you can analyse the referring keywords in more detail, finding the actual search terms triggered by your broad and phrase match keywords. The Google AdWords search query report provides this information to a certain extent but sometimes groups similar instances of keywords together without providing full details.

This can be a great way to quickly find if your ad is being displayed for irrelevant queries, for example I found a search on blog design listed several ads about furniture design instead!

3) Heatmapping - Site Overlay
To be honest I prefer to use Crazy Egg but the Site Overlay report in Google Analytics provides a clear overview of where users are clicking on a landing page. Clearly showing if users are regularly distracted from your main call-to-action and leaded away to a page of lesser importance.

4) Country/Regional Location Data
In Google AdWords it’s good practice to separate the main countries into new campaigns, rather than bidding on the same keywords and using the same ads/landing pages in the UK, US, Canada, Australia etc. But there’s only so far you can split this down without making the account too difficult to keep track of. By viewing the Google Analytics visitors map overlay you can quickly find where the majority of users are coming from at the country level, drilling down to view regional data, and viewing the bounce rate, average time on site and conversion figures for each location. Making it very clear if users from Liverpool aren’t interested in buying the new Manchester United shirt, but in Dubai everyone wants one!

5) Goal Tracking - Finding Brand Conversions
Finally, in addition to Google AdWords conversion tracking, you can view very useful conversion data from all traffic sources. So if perhaps your Google AdWords campaign conversion rate is low, rather than classing this as a failure by looking at Google Analytics you may find it’s not doing so badly after all. It’s possible that in fact users don’t buy from your site straight away but do remember your brand or bookmark the site, this means that they may return to the site at a later date via a direct visit or brand search and complete a transaction. In Yahoo Search Marketing these are counted as conversion assists, Google doesn’t provide this information but you can make educated guesses towards this by analysing the conversion data from direct and brand search visits and considering the new visits percentage for these.

When combined with the information in your Google AdWords account such as clickthrough rates for keywords and ads, this can certainly make an impact on your campaigns performance and ROI. Just make sure your account is linked and auto-tagging is enabled!