seo optimization

Small Business Paid Search Marketing 101

example site for paid search marketing post

I have such a love/hate relationship with paid search marketing. What is so great about it is that your are able to bring traffic to your website very quickly while you work on your search engine optimization to start to work. Yet, what is so frustrating about it is that it can be such a money pit that you do not have the opportunity (budget) to really have it be a successful part of your search marketing plan. Even worse, you hire a fly by night search marketing company to manage your PPC campaigns and you pay the majority of your money to them to give you less traffic than you would have gotten yourself. If you are planning to try to do it on your own here are a few things to do:

Set Up a Trial PPC Account

I can not stress this enough. You are not going to be any good at this at first and you do not want your account (and you) to pay for it in the future. This very easy to accomplish and will help you greatly in the long run. Start off by creating a Gmail account. Then, open a AdWords account under that Gmail account and start! Kind of reminds me of the days in sales at a pharmaceutical manufacturer years ago. When new sales people hit the sales floor we would give them the back of their client book of business (the ones that hated us or have not bought from us for years) so that they can learn how to pronounce the generic chemical names and get a feel of what it is like to perform this job. Of course the sales person was not very good at this and they were able to get their “feet wet” without hurting the front part of their book of business which was the ones who did buy from us.

List Your Conversions By Priority

We all want more money and that could be actual sales through your e-commerce or leads to follow up on. What about branding, newsletter sign ups, downloads of a PDF, webniars, videos, social shares, bookmarks? These are all conversions that will help make sales and you need to take at least the top three and use them as success metrics within your paid search campaign. If not, you run a very big risk (depending product or service your offer) of not seeing the value of your PPC campaign.

Build Your Search Keywords

Start with your website and find the main keywords within it. For this post, I am going to use Billiards Plus website. Billiards Plus is a company out in central Ohio that is a billiards supply store . As you can see from the picture, a pretty cool site that offers lots of different types of billiard and dart supplies. So how do you go about developing your keyword list for your PPC campaign based on this site? This site screams local and I would start off with keywords that will include the city (Dublin) and some surrounding cities such as Colony Estates and Coventry Woods into the more generic terms like pool tables, billiard supplies, pool table service, etc.

Account Category Setup

You have signed up for your AdWords account and you have a good sense of your keywords and conversions so now it is time to set up your categories. Give our example, I would use the following:

Dart Supplies – Local
Dart Supplies – General
Pool Tables – Local
Pool Tables – General
Billiard Supplies – Local
Billiard Supplies – General

At this point you may want to keep the budget more on the local categories than the general ones at first to see how well those general terms like “pool tables” will actually work.

PPC Keyword Exact Match Type

So there are 3 major match types out there across the search networks and I am going to talk about one of them called exact match. I am a big fan of using exact match on the majority of search terms especially when you are first starting your PPC campaign. Your visitors are highly qualified and you really limit your budget while keeping “window shoppers” from clicking your ads and having to implement advanced paid search marketing tactics. You can not go wrong with using exact matching to start off with.

Ad Copy Creation & Ad Testing

I think this is where the fun begins. Ask yourself these few questions first:

What is the motivation of my users?
What is my company’s unique selling proposition?
What makes my company stand out from the rest?
From a visitor’s perspective, what is in it for them?

I think our example site would want to promote that they are family owned, been in business since 1995, and offer all the name brand pool tables at below retail prices. In terms of ad testing I would start with at least 3 different ads and have the search network deliver the ad that is driving the most click through. You want to make the ad copy as relevant as possible to the keywords you are bidding on so make sure you are including the keyword you are bidding on within that ad. A good ad example would be the following:

Ohio Billiard Supplies

Name brand pool tables below retail

Family owned & operated since 1995

I would also implement geo-targeting testing within this campaign as well so that only visitors that are within a certain radius would see these ads. Again, your millage may vary but something you should test.

Landing Pages & Search Ads

One of the biggest mistakes from new paid search DIYs is that they send visitors to the incorrect page from an ad. So many of them send visitors directly to the home page as they feel that this will give them the best opportunity to find what they want. Depending on the ad and the keyword it can be but the best advise I can give to anybody on this is to say think “no click” meaning the best experience you can give a paid search (or SEO) visitor is to have them land on a page that is exactly what they wanted to see from the ad and not to have them click to find what they are looking for. Given the example ad and site I would test sending them to the home page (and the ad and keyword are very generic in nature) or pool table page.

Top SEO Tricks & Tips Not To Do For 2011 (or anytime)

Being in the industry as long I have it is amazing to see how far the art of search engine optimization has grown and yet how it has stayed the same. There are many SEO service providers and DIY search engine optimizers that still put their careers and websites at risk by performing bad SEO optimization. What we call “Black Hat SEO” in the industry. Times are still tough and small businesses might go with a more cost effective company for their SEO needs or perform their on-page optimization after reading a few blogs. I understand completely and thus here is a list of SEO tips that will get you thrown in the sin bin faster than a jack rabbit on a hot tin stove!

Keyword Phrase Stuffing

Old faithful! This one has been around since the day Al Gore invented the Internet! Basically it is exactly what it says. Take your keyword phrase you really want to rank high for and repeat it in any area you can find such as headings, titles, images, keywords and description tags. What is amazing is this is still happens today! Check out our friends (not) at http://www.viverosdesanjuan.com.mx/

Yes, stuffing SEO keywords still happens

Multiple Title Tags

To this day the title tag is still the most important place to insert your keywords for SEO purposes. Nothing wrong with that it sets the tone to the search engines what the specific web page is all about. But hey if one title tag works how about 2,3,or4?

Small or Nearly Invisible Text

Now search engine spiders “see” it and visitors don’t! Years ago you used to be able to make text exactly the same color as your background (white text on white background). It was easy for the search engines to see. So the cat and mouse game continued and the black hatters when off and started making the text just a few shades different than the background so using the same example the text had a yellow-ish tint to it. Thus the search engines saw it and did not ding you for this and visitors really did not.

Hidden CSS Div Tag

So this one might be a little technical for the DIY person but SEO companies can still perform this. Matter of fact, I ran into a site that posted this technique in 2008 and had comments form visitors from December of last year that said they were going to use it! Basically you use CSS (cascade style sheets) to layer images and text over SEO stuffed text. Only way to know it is happening is by reviewing your code so if you are using a SEO firm you need to check what your HTML code (right click-view source) on the web page to see.

Selling Links

So you get an email that says “would you be interested in you linking off your site to mine for $100 bucks a month? Let me know!” Hell yeah, not a bad way to make a few bucks and what if I get 5-10 of these bad boys it could be a nice little side income! This is where the line to this day turns Gray. Do the search engines frown on selling links? Oh yeah! Will they totally kill (ban) your site? Oh yeah! Do people still use the tactic of buying and selling links today? Yep! Is it still an effective way to raise in the rankings? Yep! Is it worth your business web site to do it? I say no.

But let’s say you did take the chance and sold links. If you get caught you are going to get banned and will have a very had time getting back in the good graces of the search engines. I have helped a bunch of sites get re-enlisted to both Google and Yahoo and I can tell you that Yahoo is nearly impossible. Had one site that took over 18 months to get re-enlisted in Yahoo and then kicked back out a year later for no reason at all. I did manage to get it back in again but by then the business sold the web site due to the economy. Google will give you one more chance but you need to work very hard as well. It will take minimum of three months but that will be best case scenario.

Hidden Links & The Pixel Trick

If hiding text was a no-no so is hiding links. The strategy works the same as hidden text as the search engine will see them yet visitors do not unless they hover over them. As for the pixel trick, it basically runs on the same principle where you create a 1×1 transparent image that equals 1 pixel and use that as a link. Make it very difficult for a visitor to find but the search engines did see it as big as a house. They see it today for what it is.

SEO Doorway Pages

You could say that these pages are still in play today and still work. Any page that talks about a specific topic like a blog post, like this post, is intended to be ranked for a specific set of keyword phrases. A true SEO doorway page is a page with very low quality content that ended in a call to action like “click here to enter”. At one time these pages worked very well until linking became a big factor in search engine rankings.