Search Engine Optimisation Advice

Why do online advertising agencies offer pay per click management services? What value is there for the customer and why is it important to seek professional assistance with your google adwords campaign?

Things change
As with everything, things change with time. This is extremely relevant with pay per click campaigns that are setup once and not touched again. When you create a new campaign or ad group you are using keywords that are generating traffic (based on traffic tool estimators) and linking the adverts to pages on your website that are most relevant.

Keywords
Keywords are nearly almost certainly generated through a process of brainstorming and then research to see how much traffic these terms generate. The problem you encounter with an old campaign is that these keywords are not necessarily as important as they once were. Perhaps some of the keywords you originally selected were “buzz” words that at that moment in time were very popular and now they are a distant memory. Perhaps the range of products you have been promoting are now outdated and there is a newer model on the market. Perhaps you quoted prices or figures in your advert text that is no longer valid and out of date.

Website

The majority of websites are living, breathing things that are constantly changing. It is not uncommon to find that major website pages (homepage and main category pages) can have a major overhaul at least once a year. This means that where once your ppc campaign was originally setup with your adverts linking to those highly relevant landing pages on the website it now points to pages which may not be as relevant.

In many cases page layouts and text can been changed to effect the old calls to action that might have once been there. This is a bad place to be; users will lose think that your website does not have what they are looking for and your advertising costs will be higher as a result.

All of these things could be severely impacting the performance your ppc ads, costing you money and losing you business.

Every website owner is concerned about how to get the most out of their website. Depending on the website you have a conversion can be many different things. It may be when somebody purchases a product or service directly from the website; it might be when a visitor fills in an online form or even when they interact with the website for a set amount of time. What constitutes a conversion is entirely up to you and your business model.

Look at the simple things. Believe it or not reviewing and changing some of the more simple things on your website can make a huge difference. Here are a few simple tips to help you on your way.

Phone Number

Is your company phone number visible without having to look around the page for it? Ideally your company number should be in larger font than your standard text and present on every single webpage. Placing the number in the page header is the ideal place.

Contact Form

Does your website have an actual contact form? There are a lot of websites that have just a mailto web link for users to contact the company. The problem with this is that you are reliant on the user having their own mail client installed and you cannot specify what information you want to collect. If you have a proper contact form on your contact us page you can specify what information you want to collect e.g. name, phone number, email address, website etc.

Another great tip is to introduce a mini contact form on each webpage. This means no matter where you are on the website you can send an enquiry.

Website Design

Does the design of the website give the visitor confidence that you are a reputable / professional business? If you have created your website yourself the website design might be very basic. Given that nearly all internet users searching for a product or service look at multiple websites before making a decision it is important that your website does not stand out for the wrong reasons.

Loud SEO are pleased to announce that Giftmaster have recently established themselves as one of the major 1^st page Google companies for Irish Gifts and Presents.

Giftmaster approached seo company Loud SEO looking to increase their online visibility to customers and to get ranked on the 1^st page of Google for their key products. Having been an online business since 2006 Giftmaster had already gained a great reputation for quality of products and speed of service but was not getting the traffic they knew they could get from the 1^st page of Google.

Working with Loud SEO, Giftmaster took a step back and re-analysed what their priorities were for keywords and what would drive profitable business to their online store. Through keyword research they selected a range of keywords that were highly profitable and very well targeted to their products on offer.

Next Loud SEO performed a range of website optimisation changes to the website code and content, making it fully optimised and focused. With these changes Giftmaster were able to increase their existing search engine rankings and obtain a solid 1^st page presence on Google.

Giftmaster plans for the future are to continue with the search engine optimisation campaign for a whole new range of keywords which will help them expand and grow their business.

Giftmaster have also embarked on email marketing campaigns using HTML emails. These were optimised by Loud SEO and tracked using specially designed links for tracking in Google Analytics. This has given Giftmaster a great feel for their ROI on certain product lines and campaigns.

Giftmaster have 2 more branches of their online business.

Yankee.ie and Casinoshop.ie are both very successful online stores, specialising in the sale of yankee candles and poker chips, poker tables and other poker accessories.

In order to make sure your search engine aspirations are not just a flash in the pan, you need to make sure that you put a proper search engine optimisation plan in place.

As already discussed in previous articles the first step for any seo work is keyword research, this is an integral part which will help you map out what goals you will set and how much work will be required to get to your goal.

Generally the next stage requires website seo, onsite work that will improve how search engine friendly the code and content is. In every single website I have ever reviewed, not matter how new or old there has always been work required at this stage. It is very important to go through your website code and content with a fine tooth comb to make sure that all the work you do to get search engine spiders and visitors alike to the site is not in vain.

Once you are happy that the website has the correct format, structure and content the real work begins… building your website’s online profile. This stage of the work is where the long term element comes in. Depending on the keywords you have chosen to optimise for, you will need to generate new inbound links to your website steadily over a long period of time to gain the trust of the search engines and improve those search engine rankings.

The main method of generating new links to your site is through article creation and syndication. This is where most people have difficulty, each article needs to be planned around the keywords and themes you are aiming to rank well for and ideally consist of 300 words plus. Once you have your article written you can choose to publish it first on your own website before syndicating it around the internet on other sites. I personally prefer this method where possible as the page, if written well enough, will begin to rank in its own right and bring in its own traffic.

The time needed to plan, write and syndicate articles on a regular basis each month is quite high, some businesses do not have the time or internal resources to dedicate to link building which is why they look to outsource to companies who provide article creation and link building services. Loud SEO provide such services to a number of clients, some who utilise both elements of the service and some who write their own articles and outsource just the link building process.

As part of my job I talk daily to people who are either just joining the online revolution or are already a member but commonly have something in common… the distrust or dislike of online advertising and promotion.

The main argument that comes back is “I have all the promotion I need for my business, my sales team tell people daily about our website and we have lots of print media out in the marketplace with our website address on it”.

Now this argument could almost seem like a reasonable statement at first glance, but we need to stop and think about what effect traditional advertising and promotion has when used for online purposes.

Established businesses with large sales teams and large print media advertising budgets certainly do tout their online wares quite well through the papers and magazines as well as other forms. Many times I have seen some interesting looking two door vans whizzing around the streets of Dublin with their brand name and website address splashed across the side of the vehicle. But can I honestly say I can name one website I saw off the side of that van, or even what service they provided? No not really. The main reason is that unless I am looking for a person to trim my hedges or power wash my drains at the time those vans advertising those service drove by then I am more than likely going to be a potential customer that slipped through the net.

New technology such as a website cannot be efficiently utilised with old style advertising and promotion techniques. The evolution of the internet has allowed hundreds of millions of people to search for information, products or services in real time from their homes or offices. This introduces the question, why spend money on an advert in a newspaper which may be in only 5% of people’s homes who are looking for that particular product or service when you can advertise online only to people who are actively searching for that product or service right now?

The power to tailor how and when your advert is shown makes a small budget go a long way online than it would through traditional means, usually with a much higher return on investment.

There will always be a place for traditional forms of advertising for online products and services, especially in niche markets but as long as someone can successfully target a product or service to a customer on a shoe string budget and make a profit there will always be a need for online advertising.

A business man asked me this morning “How can I find out what Google’s secret Authority websites are and how can I get links from them to my website?”.  When I asked him what he would do with such a list if he could get his hands on it, I quickly received the response I was expecting “I would contact all of them and try and get as many links as possible back to my site”.

I spent the next half an hour educating my new friend along the following lines…

It is more important to think about what would be regarded as an “Authority” site in relation to your business rather than what does Google regard as an “Authority” site.

For example Google may think that the Barney the dinosaur website is a great website and is one of it’s secret “Authority” websites. Knowing this does this mean you should get a link by any means from this website? Many people would say yes, personally unless your business is related to children’s entertainment my answer would be no.

There are 2 main reasons for this.

1) How likely is it that someone looking at the Barney website is going to be interested in your products and services if they click the link and come to your website? Link building should be about bringing in quality traffic no just increasing your rankings.

2) In my experience Google looks for patterns and themes. If your website is linked from 100 websites, all from different business sectors with no common theme how is Google meant to know what you are all about as a website? Having good anchor text can help but it would be much better to be linked from 50 websites that are related to your business in some way, giving Google a better understanding on what you are all about.

I would look to get some good links from PR 3 or 4 websites that are in your industry rather than chasing the big PR 6 and 7’s that have nothing to do with your sector.

How do you know if your website is a success in the eyes of Google and the other main search engines and do you have the tools to tell you why?

Is traffic the one and only metric that determines whether your website is performing well? The question really is what type of traffic will make your website a success.

Many part time (and some full time!) SEO’s believe the art to search engine optimisation is to get links from any source possible to build up the traffic the website receives. Links are very important for a websites traffic and page rank but generating links from all types of websites diminishes the quality and can sometimes generate penalties from Google for linking to tasteless or black listed websites or servers.

As with most things SEO quality should always come before quantity. By sourcing the right types of websites, blogs and web directories you can build you business online profile correctly, creating a focused, on topic theme for Google to take notice of.

Before delving into the world of link building you need to first work out what keywords these websites & directories should be linking to you with through the anchor text of the hyperlink – this requires keyword research.

The key to keyword research is to gain a list of keywords that have:

• A sufficient amount of traffic
• Are specific and not ambiguous
• Least amount of competition as possible

By generating a strong keyword list you can then use this as the foundation of all your search engine optimisation efforts. You can adapt your websites internal linking structure, generate new content specifically based on keyword themes, optimise link building activities by utilising keywords in the anchor text amongst many other uses.

It is to be noted that keywords with time can become more popular or lose popularity, with this in mind you should continue to monitor the traffic and competition generated by existing keywords and keep a look out for the new up and coming keywords.

Every online and offline business owner is concerned about how to increase profitability. With a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business it is usually very difficult (if not impossible) to judge key statistics beyond how many sales were taken that day. Eg; How many people walked past my shop today? Of those people how many came into my shop? Without this key information it is very hard to determine how well a business stands out in a busy market place.

This is where online business has the advantage. Online advertising such as Google’s pay per click provide key statistics to show any advertiser exactly how many people viewed their advertisement (impressions), how many people clicked to see more information (click through rate) and with conversion tracking you can actually see how many people went on to purchase your product.

With this information it is possible to make changes to your campaign to increase your AdWords conversion rate; however there is a large amount of information that Google AdWords does not provide that is critical to having a fully optimised campaign.

This is where having an analytics (statistics) package can take your business and profit to the next level. By integrating your PPC campaign with Google’s Analytics package you can view data to show you how well your PPC campaign is really performing.

You will now be able to view key information such as how well your landing pages are performing, what times of the day people are most likely to purchase and what region or country does your conversion rate shoot through the ceiling or fall through the floor.

There are many factors beyond the keywords and ad text that go into making a fully optimised pay per click campaign, getting analytics on your side is just the beginning.