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Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine’

The lives of Yahoo PPC advertisers just got a little easier! Yahoo announced that they are launching a feature that lets you import campaign data from Google AdWords.

Here’s a great tutorial on what types of Google Analytics reports you can run to help better manage your PPC campaigns. There are lots of new features on Google Analytics, but it helps to get back to the basics and recognize how much valuable data you can find!

One of our favorite things to do is Test, Test, Test, and this post gives a great step-by-step process for creating and testing your ad copy to make your ads the best they can be.

Are you a newcomer to PPC? Or maybe you are trying to explain PPC to a newcomer? Search Engine Land has a helpful post on The Five Most Frequently Asked Questions About Paid Search.

Content network advertisers are apparently being blocked from advertising. Why is this? Apparently Google has high hopes for the Nexus One and is using up quite a bit of space on the content network to push the phone. Isn’t the first rule of being Google, not being evil?

The structure of your PPC campaign is imperative to your success. Make sure you have all of your ducks in a row with these tips and tricks for creating order.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Would you go for blogger, wordpress or typepad. Which is the most search engine and user friendly to you?

If you have an existing blog, chances are that you have search engine authority built to that domain or subdomain. Typically, companies simply start a new blog and abandon their old one. If your old content is lost, this could be a huge loss in momentum.

In order to keep search engine authority, here’s how to migrate to a new blogging platform:

1. Export your old blog content and Import them into your new blogging platform. Even if you do this manually, that’s better than starting with no content.
2. Write 301 redirects from the old blog post URLs to the new blog post URLs. Some platforms have redirection modules or plugins to make this easier.
3. Write a redirect from the old blog RSS feed to the new blog RSS feed. I would recommend using Feedburner so that you can update the feed without interruption in the future (Although I do wish someone would come out with an alternative to Feedburner! It’s terrible).
4. If you’re moving domains or subdomains, it’s still possible to redirect to the new blog address. UPDATED: I’ve noticed that clients lose some of their ranking when doing subdomains but they’re sometimes able to bounce back quickly. Changing domains altogether can have a drastic impact. I would try to avoid this at all costs. (Thanks to Jeremy at Slingshot SEO for pushing back on my original wording!)
5. Test many of your old blog URLs and ensure they forward properly.
6. Monitor Google Webmasters, Bing Webmasters and Yahoo! Site Explorer for pages that are not found and correct them. Don’t bother checking every day – it will take a week or two before you’ll see prob
7. Republish your Sitemap and resubmit each time you correct items.
8. If you’re changing your domain or subdomain, the biggest loss you’re going to take are on sites like Technorati, which require that you register your new blog address. They don’t have a means of updating your actual address.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Webmasters and how you can look for 404 Not Found references:

By ensuring your content is properly redirected, not only will you ensure that visitors can still make it to the content they were searching for, you’re also going to generate a lot less 404 Not Found pages. One note on this… give Webmasters a week or two to catch up! After you redirect those bad addresses, it won’t immediately fix them in Webmasters (I’m not sure why!).

On that note, I often find that external sites publish incorrect URLs – so I’ll even redirect those bad URLs properly!

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

Thanks for subscribing! From all of the bloggers at The Marketing Technology Blog, we'd like to wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Our present to you... download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO at no cost.

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Late last week Search Engine Land posted an article on how Google is planning to stop allowing companies to create local business ads, and for anyone who currently has a LBA will stop displaying mid-December. Now the post did say that Google’s LBA’s will be coming back in the future, but declined to say when exactly.

This could potentially hurt some local advertisers, especially the ones who rely on the local business ads but do not run any PPC ads. However, if you are running PPC ads there is a mini solution to this issue until Google gets their LBA’s back up and running.

They’re called Location Extensions. If you’re running a PPC ad with a location extension your PPC ad will show the local address you entered as the extension in your PPC account as well as a map allowing customers to at least get your business name, address and even directions.

The location extensions will show your PPC ad with a plus sign below the ad text. Upon clicking on that plus sign your map will come up.

To enable the location extensions in your account, simply click on any campaign, then click on the settings tab.

Under ‘locations, languages and demographics’ you should see an option to ‘show relevant addresses with your ads (advanced). Click on that link.

Once you click on the link, another link will pop up saying, ‘add an address’. Click on that.

Then, you simply add the name of your company, address, phone number if you’d like, city, state and zip and hit save. Your final version should look something like this:

These ads with address won’t replace Google’s LBA’s but they will help your customer see where you’re located. The location extensions won’t show up for searches located outside of your geographic location as well. In addition to, if I’m not mistaken, the plus box allowing the customer to see your address is only available in positions right below the search box or in the shaded sponsored ad area in Google.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

This post is coming to us from a new guest blogger. His name is Brian Connelly. He will be writing for PPC Hero on a weekly basis, so look forward to hearing more from Brian soon!

After spending the past few years working in PPC marketing, I’d like to believe I’m exceptionally competent at managing effective search campaigns. Based on the ROI and profit margins associated with many of those campaigns, that may be true.

For companies that handle all of their own search marketing internally, it’s possible, and likely, for the search manager to be an expert on not just the best practices for running a Google or Bing campaign, but also an expert on the product and target market. However, working for an agency with dozens of clients and hundreds of products presents a different problem. It has forced me to acknowledge the unpleasant truth that there are many things I know nothing about. Among those things: construction, anti-aging skincare products, scrapbooking, all-natural male enhancement pills…

Despite my relative ignorance of those subjects, I can still devise comprehensive keyword lists for products that fall into those categories. How? Research. There are countless keyword research tools available – Google’s Keyword Tool is particularly useful and convenient when setting up new ad groups – and it would be foolish not to take advantage of them whenever possible. Those tools can be extremely valuable, as can soliciting advice in the forums of industry sites like Webmaster World and Search Engine Watch. However, there’s another vast source of knowledge and useful ideas that most SEM professionals leave untapped: non-SEM professionals.

It’s easy to occasionally fall into a comfortable pattern, using similar keywords and themes that have worked in the past, and it can be difficult to think like the customers I’m trying to target. So, instead, I find it very helpful to talk to those potential customers. More specifically, I find it helpful to talk to people I know who are not involved in PPC search. The same people who I see at parties or family gatherings and attempt to explain, without success, exactly what paid search marketing is are the people who can help me the most.

For example, maybe I’ve got to manage a PPC campaign for a new scrapbook tool. I’m clearly not in the target audience for this product, but I know that my wife is. Rather than spend an hour creating a list of terms that I think are relevant, I’ll send her a link to the site with the questions, “what would you search for if you wanted to buy something like this?” A client selling an innovative new power saw? That one goes to my brother, who works in construction and offers me a few suggestions about what he might call the saw and what kind of jobs it would be good for.

Sometimes these questions don’t lead to useful results, but sometimes they can lead to extremely effective general and longtail terms that would not have occurred to me or to the Google Keyword Tool. The point is this: don’t assume you’re always an expert, and don’t ever ignore a potentially useful resource for good keywords.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

Testing your ad copy and your landing pages can significantly improve your paid search efforts. Of course, building a solid keyword base, creating an optimized account structure, and executing a well-planned bid management strategy are also crucial. However, testing allows you to understand how to optimize and improve your communication with your target audience. Conducting thorough tests on your landing pages can deepen your audience interaction and increase your conversion rate.

If you’re like a lot of companies, running tests on your landing pages used to involve numerous meetings with your IT department, development hours in order to get everything designed and launched, as well as additional time to analyze the active tests. Your life as a search engine marketer got easier when Google launched Website Optimizer. If you have access to your landing page code, and you have some basic coding skills (or someone in close proximity does), then you can quickly launch tests, analyze the results and adjust accordingly.

With Website Optimizer you can run all of your testing in one location. (And no, this isn’t a paid plug for for this tool. We just think it’s extremely helpful!) You can monitor your tests, make adjustments as needed and improve your conversion rate. As far specific technical requirements are concerned to launch tests with Website Optimizer, I’ll leave that to the help section of the official website.

However, once you have your account open and your ready to start improving your landing page performance, what exactly should you be testing? Here is a list of landing page/website elements that you can test in order to learn what appeals best to your audience.

Headline: Your headline, along with almost every other element on our landing page, needs to be relevant, timely and appropriate for your audience. First, your headline has to assure the user that they’ve landed (pun intended) in the right place. In this vein, your headline needs address the core concern of someone who arrives on your page. From the first second of a user’s arrival, you need to tell them that you have the answer to their search.

There are numerous ways to write and test great headlines. Here are just a few ideas for testing new headlines:

• Try using emotional copy that will appeal to the user’s hopes, dreams, fears, aspirations.
• Test customer-focused vs. company focused headline (example: We can make your lead prospecting easier vs. You can make your lead prospecting easier).
• Split test using questions against declarative sentences.
• Try using longer headlines that are loaded with benefits against shorter headlines that focus solely on setting up the conversion.
• If you have headline copy that works well, then you can test the different font sizes and color.

Body copy: This is where you back-up the claims made in your headline or PPC ad. If your PPC ad inspired the user to click and the headline has convinced them to read further down the page, then your copy needs to do the heavy lifting.

Your body copy also needs to be relevant to a user’s search, benefit-driven, and written in the manner in which your audience expects. By this last point I mean that you need to know how colloquial, formal or technical the language on your landing page should be.

For the purpose of improving conversion rate, here a few body copy elements to test:

• Try using short text against longer text.
• Test copy that is more emotionally driven, rather than technical or feature driven.
• Your copy should always be relevant, but you can test inserting more of your high-traffic keywords into your copy.
• See if a list of benefits helps increase your performance.

Call-to-action: By this I could mean a few different things: the phrase that you use on your landing page for the desired action, or perhaps the button that users click on to go to the next step in your conversion funnel. Either way, you need to test it.

In regards to actual text, you should test a few different phrases to see which appeals to users best. Does a shorter call-to-action such as, “Sign Up’ work better than a more detailed one such as, “Get Your Free Guide Now.”

Also, you can test the color of your call-to-action buttons. Usually when there is an article written about landing page testing, someone mentions the button color. But it works and it’s worth testing.

Contact form: In the past, I have found that the next two are the hardest to test. The difficulty lies in the fact that the contact form is usually tied to a database. And if the contact form is damaged in anyway, then the leads will not populate correctly. However, if you can adapt, then this can be a quick win for testing.

For contact form testing, you should try out:

• Different lengths of your form. Try to using a longer form, and then try a version that is short enough to get above the fold.
• Ask fewer questions. How much information does your sales team need to follow up with a lead?
• How many required fields do you have? Can you make some of them optional?
• In regards to contact information; do you display your phone number on the landing page? How many calls do you receive from your landing page? Try removing the phone number to see if this inspires people to fill out the form.

Trust/Credibility symbols: Does your industry have certain certifications that will display your level of expertise and help build trust with your audience? If you don’t have them on your landing page, you should test this out. Also, if you’re accepting any type of payment, displaying safe-purchasing symbols can help improve your conversion rate.

Try out different offers: This is a quick one: you can highlight seasonal or time-sensitive offers on your landing page. This is pretty straight forward. See which offer generates the best response and use it again at the same time the following year or even the next month.

Mini-site vs. Landing page: Once you have conducted a series of tests on your landing page and you feel that it’s as good as it’s going to get and you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns, then it might be time to go back to the drawing board. By this I mean you may need to completely re-think how you use landing pages. However, at least when you start this process, you’ll have a control landing page that you can test against.

With this tactic, you may to test out a mini-site or a multiple-step conversion process. Or if you’re using one of these longer forms, you may want to go the opposite direction and use a shorter landing page.

If you want more ideas on how to optimize landing pages for higher conversion rates, you can check out our podcast series, PPC Hero Landing Page Optimization Podcast.

For more in-depth information on landing page testing, I highly recommend Tim Ash’s book, Landing Page Optimization. And I also recommend Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar for additional information on Website Optimizer. Very helpful resources!

Keep in mind that there is a cost to landing page testing. Some of your tests are not going to be successful, but your results should improve over time. Optimizing your landing page is a continuous process that will lead to enhanced results when executed properly and with care.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.

In March 2008, I wrote that Twitter was becoming my new search engine. Thank goodness Matt Cutts and the folks at Google were reading my post!

Kidding of course… I never saw this coming but the answer was right in front of me – combine your social network with your searches to provide more relevant results based on your network. Very cool indeed! Via @jessenewhart on Twitter.

You might also find these posts interesting:

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Most online survey sites are scams. Never ever ever pay to join a survey site.
There are legitimate survey sites out there, however you will usually only be able to make around 10-30 dollars a month per site.
Below is a partial list of legitimate online survey companies with no sign up fees and that will never make you pay a dime:
Survey Savvy
Haris Poll Online
Greenfield Online
Opinion Outpost
Survey Spot
Buzzback
NPD Online
Lightspeed Panel
Your2Cents
Feel free to use a search engine to visit their websites and sign up, or you can visit my website at:http://www.earnontheside.com/?page_id=13
I am personally a member of all of these sites and many more and have received payment or rewards from all of them.
I have reviews for over 15 sites with detailed information including:
Rating (1-5 Stars)
Survey Participation Method
Payment Type
Payment Method
Minimum Payout
Average $ Per Survey
Survey Invitation Frequency
Referral Program
Minimum Age
I don’t charge you anything for this information, but I have worked very hard compiling it, so hopefully you will bookmark it and share with your friends.

Blogs like www.makemylink.com is getting link popularity soon in search engines than the normal website. Is blogging the next thing to get indexed in search engine.

In case you haven’t heard, the Hanapin Marketing Team is giving away $16,000 in SEM software, books and services in our Totally Awesome SEM Sweepstakes! Throughout the week we’re going to give you some details on the software prizes that are up for grabs in the sweepstakes. And if you haven’t done so, enter now!

Before we were ClickEquations, we were Commerce360, a full service search marketing agency. Like you, we managed enterprise clients with large brands, like Comcast. We looked at the market to try to find a tool to manage our own clients, but everything we found was sub-par. The tools were built around what was convenient for the search engines, not what real practitioners need.

Haven’t you been frustrated by how long it takes to manage campaigns and how hard it is to get the data you need? Yeah, us too.

That’s why we decided to build ClickEquations – the only tool on the market built for practitioners managing enterprise-sized paid search accounts. Our goal is to completely change the way paid search is measured and managed with one purpose: to make you more money.

We have strong beliefs about how paid search should be managed:

Great Data Is Crucial – If you have the wrong data, you’ll make the wrong decisions. Garbage in, garbage out. That’s why our automated analytics gather search queries (the words a searcher actually types) for every search engine, Impression Share, Quality Score, and minimum first page bid. We even created our own proprietary metrics, ClickShare and ClickVariance. We’re also the only tool on the market that supports all 4 types of revenue attribution (first click, last click, linear and weighted) and calculates all 4 simultaneously.

Managing Paid Search Doesn’t Need to Be Tedious – You know all of those screens you have to jump through to make a campaign change? That’s what we call “workflow”. Frankly, it’s broken today. There are too many steps between what you need to do and complete the tasks. The campaign editing features in ClickEquations cut out and automates many of those steps. We let the computers handle the busy work so you can focus on strategy and optimization.

You Need Control and Visibility – Two things are clear: paid search is becoming more competitive as budgets move online and the search engines are trying to monetize more (just as anyone who uses broad match). Outwitting the competition means you have to move faster and smarter. We built flexible bid management that gives you suggestions or automates bid changes at the keyword or ad group level, so you have precise control over how you spend your money. Our pre-built guidance templates help you quickly find areas of opportunity or loss, so you can optimize faster.

In short: ClickEquations is a complete paid search platform designed specifically to help large advertisers and agencies manage campaigns more profitably in less time. You can control all of your campaigns, accounts and clients quickly and easily with our full suite of paid search tools in one application.

ClickEquations Analyst, a unique Excel plug-in, gives you unlimited customization of sharable reports and dashboards and unprecedented analytics power. It’s included free for every ClickEquations client. You’ll never deal with “reporting Mondays” again.

We have transparent, no hassle pricing with no setup fee and free support. Learn more about ClickEquations, read our paid search blog and follow us on Twitter.

Check out The Adventures of PPC Hero: Heroic Feats of Pay Per Click Management at http://www.ppchero.com/. Copyright © 2007-2009 Hanapin Marketing, LLC.