SEM Archives | SeoCustomer

The Low Down on Pay-Per-Click

Regardless of the type of website that you own, it is imperative to drive traffic to it. After all, unless you want to be the only person who will ever see it, you will need to take steps to let people know that your site exists.

There are several marketing strategies that are utilized to increase a website’s search engine ranking and daily amount of traffic, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is definitely one of the most popular options. By creating quality PPC ads that run on websites such as Google, you can easily transform an under-performing website into a solid financial resource.

What Exactly is Pay-Per-Click Advertising?

PPC advertisements enable you to get a message about your website in front of a large group of people for a discounted rate. Instead of standard banner ads that can cost several hundred dollars for a limited time period, you will only be required to pay when someone actually clicks on your advertisement.

The advantage of this is easy to understand, especially when you consider that anyone who is interested enough to click on your ad is much more likely to actually spend more than a couple of seconds on your website.

The most popular example of PPC advertising is Google AdWords, but the format is also used by a wide variety of other websites, including Facebook. Google’s version enables owners to push their website toward the top of the search engine’s site rankings. These paid advertisements will catch the attention of most Internet users, and this will help you capture a larger percentage of your target audience.

How do I Design a Quality Pay-Per-Click Ad?

You will be given the opportunity to enter a target market and several keywords that are relevant to your website. By properly taking advantage of these options, you will ensure that your ads employ the necessary search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

After all, if people who look for information about your specific company or general industry are unable to easily find either your PPC ad or your website’s search engine listing, you will not be able to capture a large audience.

Everspark Interactive, an SEO firm in Atlanta is one of the many companies that provide SEO services in the United States. Among many other rules, Everspark Interactive teaches its clients that keeping SEO in mind at all times during the construction of your website and your PPC ads is crucial.

The most important thing, besides using the right keywords, is to make sure that you are targeting the right audience. After all, if you have a locally owned comic book store in New York City, it is not going to make sense to target people who live outside of the general area.

You should also consider your key demographic when you are setting up your parameters, and make sure to use common keywords that are associated with your industry. In the comic book store example, that would include keywords such as Spider-Man, Batman and Superman.

How do I know if My Ads are Working?

You should receive a PPC analysis along with your paid advertisement. For example, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that makes it easy to figure out if an ad is attracting a lot of traffic. However, if you are paying for hundreds of clicks a day without getting a lot of additional business, it is important to try a new approach by changing your keywords.

If you take advantage of everything that PPC has to offer, it can help you greatly increase your website traffic. As long as you offer a quality service or product to everyone who clicks on your ad, you should also see a better bottom line.

Felicia Willis is a writer and editor of more than 15 years, and lives in Atlanta. Everspark Interactive is an SEO firm in Atlanta that takes the mystery out of SEO practices, and teaches about the importance of it. Photo credit: altemark.

May 14, 2013/by Henrik Sandberg

Using AdWords for a More Effective SEO Strategy

Search Engine Marketing

Google AdWords is the alternative to search engine optimization, using advertising to bring in traffic instead of organic search results.

At first glance, the two methods have very little in common, but they can be used together to create a more informed and effective marketing strategy on both fronts.

From an SEO perspective, AdWords’ main value lies in its potential to find and test keyword phrases with quick results.

Instead of spending half a year optimizing for a promising query only to be disappointed, an AdWords campaign can collect the necessary information in as little as a month.

Performing Keyword Research
Most webmasters limit their AdWords usage to its Keyword Tool, which provides a number of statistics for any given search term.

The tool is free to use and simple to learn, though some terms are not immediately intuitive.

When a phrase is entered, the Keyword Tool returns the competition level for advertiser fees as well as an estimated number of searches per month.

More importantly, it also offers variants on the phrase, which may be more lucrative or at least spawn a few new ideas. It is not fool-proof, but the Keyword Tool is a useful starting point in any SEO strategy.

Collecting Demographic Information
Once you have some keywords in mind, you can choose to either walk away from AdWords or begin a campaign.

It costs money, but the information gathered is generally well worth the initial investment.

AdWords provides extensive reports based on performance, including a rough sketch of the people most likely to click the ad. This may divulge age, gender and location, all of which play a role in conversions.

Knowing your visitors helps shape content to better suit their needs, resulting in a better experience for everyone involved. At the same time, don’t get so focused on one group that other traffic feels alienated.

Determining Click-Through Rates
The click-through rate is the number of times an ad is clicked relative to the number of times it is shown.

A low rate indicates either a lackluster keyword or poor copy. Unless the first run is satisfactory, it may take several tries to get right. How does this help SEO?

Think of the title and description that appear on Google’s results page as an advertisement that runs without any fees.

Those few lines of text are all you have to lure in readers. Knowing what it most likely to get them clicking is a key part of business success.

Studying Conversions
Last but not least, the number of people you reach is only important within the context of conversion rates.

The conversion rate describes how many visitors actually go on to do a profitable activity, whether that is buying a product, signing up for a service or clicking someone else’s advertisement.

The right keywords and copy are essential in this. For example, someone searching for how to potty train a puppy might be interested in buying house pads, but they may just take the information and run.

An AdWords campaign is your first clue whether or not a keyword string is actually commercially viable, making it one of the most important pieces of research in SEO.

Author Bio – Paul Teitelman is a Toronto SEO expert who has been involved with the industry since its earliest days. He currently offers consulting and optimization services through his website at www.paulteitelman.com.

January 24, 2013/10 Comments/by Henrik Sandberg

How to Use Google Analytics to Find Longtail Keywords

Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Google Analytics is perhaps one of the most ideal assessment tools for startups, who wish to make it big in the online marketing realm and appear as a challenging competitor to its rivals.

The records, metrics and the array of valuable information the analytics provide can truly improve the performance of a website.

Apart from the information on the number of page views, traffic, and others, Google Analytics also provides precious information on the Keywords, which when tracked and implemented efficiently can bring about beneficial results.

So before we proceed further, let’s just see briefly about keywords, and what they mean in SEO.

A Quick Introduction to Keywords

In SEO, keywords are of two types – Longtail & Head Terms.

Head Terms

These are non-specific keywords, which the users type in to get generic results. For instance, a user looking for a laptop will reach in his search engine by directly keying in the term ‘laptop’. This is more open and throws in a number of options to the users.

Longtail

Longtail keywords are search terms that contain a tiny phrase of about 3 to 5 words.

These are specific in nature and help the users to refine their search results and get closer to what they are looking for.

In the same example as above, a user who is specific about his requirements will type ‘Laptops below $500’ in his search engine. The phrase ‘Laptops below $500’ is termed as longtail keywords.

Perks of using longtail keywords

ü They are less competitive, since they are specific
ü They constitute about 70% of the web traffic
ü They produce higher conversion rates, because the user knows what he wants

Now that we know the importance of longtail keywords for our website and content, it’s time to capitalize on them and reap the benefits. So, let’s get started.

Using Google Analytics to Find Longtail Keywords

I. Login to Google Analytics and set the timeline to about 3 months, for a detailed information

II. Reach the ‘Content’ tab , present on the left portion of the page, beneath the dashboard

III. Now select the ‘Top content’ tab. This will display the pages in descending order, or in simple words, based on the number of times they are viewed

IV. Select the page for which you wish to analyze and determine the keywords

V. Notice the option ‘Entrance Keywords’ on the bottom right corner of the page and click on it. This option will display all the keywords that were used by the searchers to reach that particular page you’ve chosen

VI. Now explore through the keyword list and gauge if you have used them already in your articles or web content. If used, ignore them and proceed to the next. In case if you haven’t select a few keywords, which you think have a potential, and set them aside

VII. Now, zero-in from the hand-picked keywords, after carefully analyzing the following factors

a) Choose only the keywords that are relative to your website and/or niche

b) Also factor in the number of page views the keyword managed to convert

c) Take into consideration, the duration spent on that particular page. This indirectly signifies the relevancy of the keyword and assists you in coming into a conclusion. The longer the duration spent on the page, the relevant the keyword and the information was and vice versa. However, there is a restriction that the amount of time spent may also be due to the length of the article. So, consider even this and zero-in on your keyword

So, that is how we determine new longtail keywords and make the most out of Google Analytics.

Implementing this will surely bring about a commendable change in the derivation of website traffic.

So, make use of Google Analytics to the optimum, try out new longtail keywords in your articles and content and witness the traffic your website soaring high, this 2013!

Andrea Walters, a freelance writer for www.globalx.net – The Nation’s Lowest All-Digital Price Provider. dish tv packages

January 20, 2013/by Henrik Sandberg

4 Ways in Which Web Development Provides an Edge to Your Business

Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

The scope of web development is gradually improving owing to the surge in newer technologies. With the increasing level of competition, creating a niche in the market has indeed become a tough task.

The internet is indeed a great solution to project the advantages that customers can get by opting for your services. It has been researched that the success and sales of a business depends on its web presence to a great extent.

This is where the services of a web development company can be so instrumental. Let us reveal some more advantages that you can reap by resorting to the help of a web development company.

User friendly service – The user friendliness of a website plays a pivotal role in boosting the sales of the business.

An experienced and reputed web development company will help in improving the user interface of your website thereby helping your customers to locate things quite easily.

Moreover they can also help you to find a good domain name so that your website gets a good recognition. However, if you have certain names in mind, an expert developer can still help you choose the best.

Effective Web Design – A developer will also help in providing the best design for your website.

They will add new images and videos to make the website look more attractive and interactive. They would also construct proper contents that would help your client to get a fair idea on the products that you deal with.

New business enterprises should focus on improving the quality of their content because customers these days go through the content of a website in details before opting for the services.

Enables accessibility via phone – Besides the computer, people nowadays access the internet with their mobile phones.

Web development professionals use HTML 5 technology that enables a site to be accessed via a cell phone.

Customers won’t spare much of their time to try and access your website, if there is a problem they would simply move on. So you need to make sure that your website is properly optimized to provide an uninterrupted service.

Enables accessibility via slow internet connections – Websites that have heavy files and graphics take a lot of time to load over slow internet connections.

However with the help of a good web developer you will be able construct website that will load easily even with a slow connection.

Moreover they will also construct the website in such way that you will be able to place all your offers and notifications in effective locations.

These are some of the ways in which your website can benefit from the services of the web developers.

However, you need to make a thorough research in order to find a good web developer. Try to find one that has a good amount of experience. In this immensely competitive market you cannot afford to commit mistakes.

That might just mar your online reputation and provide an edge top your rivals.

Author bio – Myke Thomas is an amazing writer and mainly known for his remarkable columns on numerous professional website builder relevant issues.

January 20, 2013/1 Comment/by Henrik Sandberg

3 Ways to Pro-actively Promote Your Brand

Search Engine Marketing

In the past, protecting the reputation of your business simply meant keeping the customer happy.

Unfortunately, those days are long gone. Today we live in an increasingly “virtual” world. We rely on our Smartphones and mobile devices to direct us towards reliable companies before we make a purchase.

This means that a single negative review can do serious damage to your business.

It’s important to stay a few steps ahead when it comes to protecting your image and the image of your company. Ben Franklin was once quoted as saying, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”.

When it comes to managing your online reputation, it’s far easier to prevent negative press than to undo it.

Read on for three ways to pro-actively protect the online reputation of your business – you’d be wise to put in the effort!

1. Buy your brand’s domain name and several variations

The first step to ensuring a flawless online image is to make sure you’re in control of your own brand. If you haven’t already, it’s a good idea to buy yourname.com and several modifications of the original. For example: yournamenews.com and yournamereviews.com.

This prevents anyone with sinister intentions from taking those sites and using it to drive traffic away from your business; or, even worse, to bash your product or services.

While this might sound unthinkable, you’d be surprised how nasty competitors or dissatisfied clients can be. Additionally, you can use these “sister sites” to create more content that links back to your main brand homepage.

When it comes to increasing search traffic on Google, owning the variations of the original domain name can be a valuable SEO tool.

2. Monitor Yelp and local review sites for customer feedback

It’s always a good idea to keep an eye on what customers have to say about your business on Yelp.

Not only for reputation management purposes but also because it can help you improve your offerings and appeal to your customers better down the line.

Some SEO-savvy organizations use Yelp as a way to communicate with customers and gain valuable insights into their own services.

Without formally surveying customers, you can essentially look for any commonalities among Yelp reviews, and make adjustments to your product accordingly.

3. Look out for negative reviews

No matter how hard you try, there’s always someone out there who wants to drag your name through the mud. Whether they attack you on a more personal level, or bash your brand, it’s unpleasant either way.

Keep an eye out for negative press by searching your company on Ripoff Report, scam.com, and other complaints sites. If you happen to stumble across a negative review, don’t panic. Contact the dissatisfied client and see if you can help.

This just comes back to basic customer service. If you feel like the issue has been addressed, you can ask them to take down the review.

The less time negative comments related to your brand spend on the Internet, the better it is for your online reputation as a whole.

Of course, you can’t expect to silence every naysayer, but with these three tips in mind, you can effectively monitor your brand’s online reputation and pro-actively promote business.

About the Author – Brian Patterson is a Marketing Analyst with Online Trading Academy, a day trading education firm with 33 locations spread internationally.

January 15, 2013/10 Comments/by Henrik Sandberg

Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4 is ready

Link Building, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Traffic

I am very happy to show you this Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4. And it’s still free for all members of SeoCustomer.

This guide contains all the post and articles from 3. Quarter 2012 about SEO, SEM, Social Media Traffic and Link Building – 159 pages.

After a while the older articles are no longer visible here on SeoCustomer.com but you can still get a lot of tips and tricks from the posts.

So I have collected all the articles in an eBook (PDF) – so you can get a hot cup of coffee (or tea) and sit down and read about it all.

You can get the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2012 Q4 here free after signing up for the weekly newsletter.

As a bonus you will also get the Complete SeoCustomer Guide 2011, 2012Q1, Q2 and Q3. All together 5 ebooks now.

Have a great day out there.

Carpe diem, Henrik

December 26, 2012/by Henrik Sandberg

SEO vs. PPC – How to know which one is right for your business?

Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Who says there is competition only in business field! Well in the world of internet these days it’s a battle between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC).

As per the research made around 90% of the people who uses internet use various search engines like Google, Bing, yahoo and MSN to get information on the products and services which they are looking for.

Almost everyone who searches for information type a keyword which is also known as Keyword which helps search engines bring up the required results which have natural organic listings also consisting of PPC advertisements.

But the bottom-line is not about the battle and who wins! It’s a question of which one would suit your business requirements. Keep reading the article for more details.

You need to pay to attract traffic to your website with the help of PPC advertising programs which are provided by Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing etc.

These tools would help you to display your advertisement in sponsored section whenever the result related to your website is displayed. You would need to pay a certain amount of fee every time the user clicks on your website link. The amount however depends on how strong are your keywords.

On the other hand you could also attract more traffic to your website for free by getting high rankings in the natural listing results. Natural listing results are the results which are shown next to the sponsored sections.

All you have to remember is that you follow the SEO practices in an appropriate manner so that your website results appear on the first page more often whenever the visitor keys the words related to your product or services.

There may be some circumstances when your website might take some time to reach on the top of the page but then again the free, directed traffic would most likely be worth the deal.

But the question is which tactic is much better? To answer this question I would say it entirely depends upon the budget. If you have a huge budget go for PPC but if you are looking to save money by investing a little than SEO is better.

How much is my budget?

Before choosing SEO or PPC, you must first know how much you are going to invest in advertising your business on the web. It can be a good idea to start with a minimum amount of $5 to $10 per day set as your daily spending limit.

On the other hand if you have a very little budget than SEO is the best option. If you ask me I would say even if you have a little capital to invest go for PPC as it offers various benefits like faster testing and guard from SEO algorithm updates.

What are the CPC rates for my business?

Secondly, it depends on how are the CPCs for your industry. PPC allows the users to bid on how much they are ready to pay for a single click which is known as cost per click (CPC).

For instance if you are targeting people who are looking for “Cleaning industry services” you can make use of online software called Traffic Estimator which is a free Google External Keyword Research Tool.

You would see that the average CPC for this keyword is $2.76. On the other hand average CPCs can sometimes run as high as $30 thus making it difficult for your business to gain profit from PPC which means SEO is a better choice.

To conclude SEO and PPC can both be powerful. Last but not the least! Always make sure you get regular updates about Google’s policies as they change every now and then which means if today your website is on page 1 who knows tomorrow it might land up to page 6 of the page.

Matthew Anton is a professional online marketer offering search engine optimization services through Backlinksindexer

PS – Remember to check out the article How to find your perfect PPC budget here.

December 12, 2012/7 Comments/by Henrik Sandberg

39 percent of search related traffic information from Google is now gone

Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization

Did you know that for over a year ago Google started to encrypting search by default for signed-in users?

I just found a study from Optify that shows that 39 percent of the search related traffic from Google to our websites now is gone. Google will show the search terms as withheld.

Qptify made a study with 424 websites with over 17,143,603 visits and 7.241.093 referring keywords. This way they could check out how seriously the “not provided” issue is.

What does it have to do with me?

So why should you care about all this? Well imagine you have a shop in a shopping center Normally you will approach your customers and ask them if they are looking for something special right? But then one day you are told you can’t do this anymore.

You are only allowed to approach customers if they are specifically forthcoming and request help. Now you have lost the ability to proactively help your customers right? You will also lost some valuable information and feedback about your customers.

Google has started to encrypt search queries about 1 year ago. So now you will no longer receive “referrer” data from Google when the user is sign-in.

So you don’t really know what your visitors was looking for. Was it cheap dresses? Or quality dresses? Secondhand dresses? Blue dresses? You don’t know. So you can’t tell if they found what they were looking for.

Maybe half of your customers from Google was searching for blue dresses – but you only have red dresses in your shop. Bad for you right? And now you will not know that your customer love blue dresses.

You have lost a lot of insights.

So a hot term now in search marketing is behavioral targeting. You will have to know what the customer was initially looking for.

But now you will need to rely on later user interactions. You can use log-in information, or cookie based personalized experience.

If you are in the B2B business you can still get a lot of great information from Google Analytic about who are visiting your website and which pages they are looking at. Check it out here. But its getting harder to know about the initial search term.

If you have a newsletter – which search term did they use in Google to find your website? This is a very usefull information. But now its getting harder to get.

Google’s concerns about privacy is driven by a bigger force than this search marketing industry. So we might as well get use to it.

All the best to you as always, Henrik

December 2, 2012/12 Comments/by Henrik Sandberg

AdWords Remarketing For Driving Traffic

Search Engine Marketing

However interesting your online marketing campaign may be, at the end of the day, there’s only so much it can do.

It can certainly target your niche and bring in interested customers to your site, but it can’t convert all the incoming traffic into sales.

The reason is, regardless of the attractiveness of your website, people may not tend to come back to your site even if they were interested in your products initially.

The fact that barely 2% visitors purchase products when they visit a site for the first time is proof enough that every online marketing strategy needs to be thoroughly looked into.

The remaining 98% of visitors don’t make a purchase the first time they land on your webpage.

What can a marketing manager do to bring back these potential customers to the site once again to complete the purchase? How about a gentle reminder or giving them a cue that can turn these potential clicks in to concrete sales? That’s where Google AdWords remarketing comes in.

What is AdWords Remarketing?

Remarketing is a feature in Google AdWords that can help you reach out to those people who initially visited your site but left without purchasing anything.

With remarketing, you can connect to these people even when they visit any other site on Google Display Network.

You can send certain compelling advertisements that can encourage them in coming back to your site and buying the product.

How does Remarketing work?

Here’s an example of how remarketing may help in bringing more traffic to your site. Let’s assume you deal in the sale of antiques.

You know that 10% of visitors to your site will purchase your products. But the rest 90% visitors, although they were initially interested, leave your site without purchasing any product.

Now with remarketing, you can add a remarketing tag or a remarketing code to all your site’s pages.

Thus, whenever a visitor visits your site, he will automatically be added into your remarketing list.

You can now reach out to those 90% visitors who didn’t buy any product by showing them ads and offers’ that may entice them to come back to your site to buy even while they browse other sites.

How can AdWords remarketing bring in more traffic to your website?

• Creating and managing AdWords remarketing list is very easy.
• AdWords remarketing is a targeted advertising campaign that targets only those visitors who dint get converted into sales.
• As Google has a huge partner list, your remarketing campaign has the potential to reach millions of customers.
• It can target those visitors who were on the verge of making a purchase (those who discarded the shopping cart!) before leaving the site without completing it.
• Remarketing helps you connect with every visitor. It can also target those visitors who have completed a sale by offering them other products and special offers.
• It helps you get in touch with customers within a period of time.
• It helps bring in higher and faster return on investment.
• You can create attractive and relevant advertisements and follow-up messages to target customers.
• You can also control where your advertisement appears by limiting or increasing the number of advertisements depending on that particular sites performance.

Tanya Hansen is a Freelance writer, she currently writes for www.homesecurityreviewsite.com – offers full home security to help protect your family, assets from burglary and other crimes. home security systems

November 24, 2012/by Henrik Sandberg