Recently I started working on a project dealing with Guns and Firearms and noticed something that does not make any sense what so ever. You are allowed to purchase the keywords "Firearms" and "Guns" however you are not allowed to input them into your ad displaying to the searcher that this is the correct ad to click on.
This pertains to the quality ad score which determines cost per click and position. However a simple solution to this problem. Using { } brackets containing "Keyword" will display whatever keyword that was typed in automatically upon the search. For instance, if your keyword you are purchasing was "black nike shoes" your ad may say :
Black Nike Shoes
Browse Nike, Reebok, Adidas.
$25 Purchase. Free Shipping.
www.WillsNikeShoes.com
But you also may be purchasing "Blue Nike Shoes" "Red Nike Shoes" "Hightop Nike Shoes", instead of making an ad for each keyword to display properly within the ad, use {keyword} to display the keyword (when character space is available) to the searcher to "call to action" or click on your ad. This will also allow you to display those words in your ad that they would not allow you to input previously, be aware if the words are against all of their rules you may have ad turned off or worse, suspended. This tactic is a time saver and very effective to convey your message to the potential customer.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Google PPC vs. Yahoo PPC
After your website is created and published you will come to a crossroads, depending on previous activity on the site. Do you have traffic yet? Did you have traffic? Do you anticipate any return on investment from your site just sitting there?
Take a global view of your company. What is the average dollar amount for a sale? How many sales do you average on a daily basis? Are they new customers? Are they existing customers taking up sells? With this data you can determine how many visitors it would be before you would need a conversion to stay on the positive side of the profit scale. Regardless of what your business is, everyone advertises to make money, it's an investment.
Say you average $100 dollars profit per sale, and Google has a minimum cost of $2.00/click. You would need to make 1 sale out of every 50 visitors in order to stay positive. So your goal should be 2 sales out of every 50 paid visits. 1 sale for every 50 visitors would keep you even and you would know that you need to make adjustments.
Now that you have your goals set, you need to determine which search network you want to use. Google has by far the largest search network, aka the most traffic. Yahoo has been around the longest and has a very large following of Yahoo email users. Maybe not searched as much as Google but always in competition with the most unique daily visitors. This could lead to higher conversions depending on the region, and age group you are targeting. Google has the most competition for advertising spots, and people are starting to learn that you can pay to be in those spots rather than using the search algorithm to show up organically. However not every business that advertises on Google advertises on Yahoo as well, so there may be less competition for top spot, making your cost lower, traffic lower, and possibly lower conversions. Lets face it without traffic there is no opportunity for a sale, and without sales there is no reason to advertise. If you have $100/day budget you might wanna spend $75 on Google and $25 on Yahoo this way you can determine which of the search engines provide your business with the right mix of traffic and conversions.
There is no real answer to what is going to work, but the old saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" definitely stands strong here. Diversity is what is going to set you ahead of your competition, using the data you can compile from your experiments with PPC can really boost your confidence and the success of your business.
Take a global view of your company. What is the average dollar amount for a sale? How many sales do you average on a daily basis? Are they new customers? Are they existing customers taking up sells? With this data you can determine how many visitors it would be before you would need a conversion to stay on the positive side of the profit scale. Regardless of what your business is, everyone advertises to make money, it's an investment.
Say you average $100 dollars profit per sale, and Google has a minimum cost of $2.00/click. You would need to make 1 sale out of every 50 visitors in order to stay positive. So your goal should be 2 sales out of every 50 paid visits. 1 sale for every 50 visitors would keep you even and you would know that you need to make adjustments.
Now that you have your goals set, you need to determine which search network you want to use. Google has by far the largest search network, aka the most traffic. Yahoo has been around the longest and has a very large following of Yahoo email users. Maybe not searched as much as Google but always in competition with the most unique daily visitors. This could lead to higher conversions depending on the region, and age group you are targeting. Google has the most competition for advertising spots, and people are starting to learn that you can pay to be in those spots rather than using the search algorithm to show up organically. However not every business that advertises on Google advertises on Yahoo as well, so there may be less competition for top spot, making your cost lower, traffic lower, and possibly lower conversions. Lets face it without traffic there is no opportunity for a sale, and without sales there is no reason to advertise. If you have $100/day budget you might wanna spend $75 on Google and $25 on Yahoo this way you can determine which of the search engines provide your business with the right mix of traffic and conversions.
There is no real answer to what is going to work, but the old saying "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" definitely stands strong here. Diversity is what is going to set you ahead of your competition, using the data you can compile from your experiments with PPC can really boost your confidence and the success of your business.
Monday, December 29, 2008
When is it time to hire help for your SEO?
When do you think it is time to hire an SEO expert to handle all your internal optimization of your site? You are the only person that can answer that question. Anyone can perform SEO and anyone can maintain SEO, it's just a matter of having the time and the knowledge.
If your business has 5 products/services and is a fairly small operation, chances are an employee may have the time to learn and to perform the SEO that needs to be done. So instead of checking into what companies are out there to perform the SEO, use sites that already exist to learn about the process of SEO like SeoBook for example. This way an existing employee can learn the process of SEO or even hire a new employee to do the work for you at an hourly rate rather than paying someone obscene amounts of money to do it for you. However you do miss the quality of the work, this is a best case scenario for a small business. A larger business may want to take some of the money they have in their marketing budgets to hire a company to optimize and maintain optimization on the site ongoing. The choice is completely up to you, and there is no real answer it's just another judgment call you have to make as a business owner.
If your business has 5 products/services and is a fairly small operation, chances are an employee may have the time to learn and to perform the SEO that needs to be done. So instead of checking into what companies are out there to perform the SEO, use sites that already exist to learn about the process of SEO like SeoBook for example. This way an existing employee can learn the process of SEO or even hire a new employee to do the work for you at an hourly rate rather than paying someone obscene amounts of money to do it for you. However you do miss the quality of the work, this is a best case scenario for a small business. A larger business may want to take some of the money they have in their marketing budgets to hire a company to optimize and maintain optimization on the site ongoing. The choice is completely up to you, and there is no real answer it's just another judgment call you have to make as a business owner.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Email Marketing
Ever since the birth of the "Black Book" or the "Do not call list" everyone has changed their marketing strategies and their procedures with phone calls and emails. Spam became a quick phenom and I am not talking about the kind that comes in a can. Email spam was a quick way to get your message in front of a potential client from an email list someone may have purchased from a scrubbing company. A scrubbing company basically made their money from gathering email addresses using scripts to find the @ symbol in an email address and took the info, put it into a database categorized based on the content on the site and offered lists to potential companies interested in solid contact information. This idea worked really well for a long time until business owners got sick of being prospected by companies they did not know or in other words, "Cold Called".
Along came the DNC list which prohibited companies from calling or emailing companies that were apart of this national list. Fines are handed out for not abiding by the rules and regulations of the DNC registry and the telemarketing industry took a large hit. Email databases have never been as important as they are today. If you have a feature on your site that allows users to input their information, aka. thier email address, that made the DNC list null and void for that particular customer. Now you have their information and you are now capable of sending them the email letters or specials you may have. However this may not be a good practice in this day and age, your best bet is to develop a regular routine of newsletters or press releases to send to these potential customers, keeping them interested in the content of your prime site guaranteeing a loyal subscriber base. With the use of an email marketing campaign like Bella Posta you can now use that information and keep it updated as often as you would like, send out automatic emails, automatic newsletters or special offers. All your data will be at the tip of your fingers, allowing you to change the scope based on demographics or product interest or even by name.
Using an email database platform will not stop you from getting fined or listed as spam, in fact it's how you use it and how often you use it that will have a bearing on the outcome of results.
Programs like Bella Posta or third party vendors of the product can truely improve your viral networking and get your information out to people that weren't using search engines in the first place. Email marketing can be used with your SEO or SEM project improving the results of either and increase your business exponentually.
Along came the DNC list which prohibited companies from calling or emailing companies that were apart of this national list. Fines are handed out for not abiding by the rules and regulations of the DNC registry and the telemarketing industry took a large hit. Email databases have never been as important as they are today. If you have a feature on your site that allows users to input their information, aka. thier email address, that made the DNC list null and void for that particular customer. Now you have their information and you are now capable of sending them the email letters or specials you may have. However this may not be a good practice in this day and age, your best bet is to develop a regular routine of newsletters or press releases to send to these potential customers, keeping them interested in the content of your prime site guaranteeing a loyal subscriber base. With the use of an email marketing campaign like Bella Posta you can now use that information and keep it updated as often as you would like, send out automatic emails, automatic newsletters or special offers. All your data will be at the tip of your fingers, allowing you to change the scope based on demographics or product interest or even by name.
Using an email database platform will not stop you from getting fined or listed as spam, in fact it's how you use it and how often you use it that will have a bearing on the outcome of results.
Programs like Bella Posta or third party vendors of the product can truely improve your viral networking and get your information out to people that weren't using search engines in the first place. Email marketing can be used with your SEO or SEM project improving the results of either and increase your business exponentually.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
When to consider a no index.
There comes a time in your websites young life that you need to make some adjustments to the code that resides on the pages. Whether it's adding images, deleting pages, or you need to adjust the frequency the robots visit your site, or what pages they follow or index.
The no index tag can and should be applied to log-in pages or credit card info page. This way when the search engines index or try to index the page there is no way that the search engines will look for an entry point past that page. However without the no-follow tag it will still follow all text links and keeping the links associated with the content on the site. Use no-follow tags on: Log-In pages, contact us pages, internal search pages or maybe even examples of what not to do on a site, show the user what not to do, and tell the search engine you do not approve of this site in lesser words. Use the no-index for any of the pages of your site you do not want the search engines to find. Whether if it's duplicate content that you are just trying to provide the "users" the proper information, or if its a page that changes it's content frequently and the previous information is not archived. Specials pages can be a page that does not indexing due to the frequent change of content on the page, rankings will never be achieved when the content is always different.
Do not put a no-follow tag on your links page, you want the search engines to find the other sites that you are linking to, this will establish a chain of data streaming to the people that use your site.
The no index tag can and should be applied to log-in pages or credit card info page. This way when the search engines index or try to index the page there is no way that the search engines will look for an entry point past that page. However without the no-follow tag it will still follow all text links and keeping the links associated with the content on the site. Use no-follow tags on: Log-In pages, contact us pages, internal search pages or maybe even examples of what not to do on a site, show the user what not to do, and tell the search engine you do not approve of this site in lesser words. Use the no-index for any of the pages of your site you do not want the search engines to find. Whether if it's duplicate content that you are just trying to provide the "users" the proper information, or if its a page that changes it's content frequently and the previous information is not archived. Specials pages can be a page that does not indexing due to the frequent change of content on the page, rankings will never be achieved when the content is always different.
Do not put a no-follow tag on your links page, you want the search engines to find the other sites that you are linking to, this will establish a chain of data streaming to the people that use your site.
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