Recent Google AdWords Improvements that Make Advertisers’ Lives Easier
At Work Media, what we do can be broadly classified as “Internet marketing,” and underneath the Internet marketing umbrella it breaks down into a few more specific areas such as search engine optimization (“SEO”), social media management, and paid search. Over on the SEO side, things are pretty chaotic these days. Google is whacking websites left and right, causing people in our line of work to scramble to make adjustments to how we do things to salvage our clients’ (and our own) rankings. However, while Google continues making it harder and harder to figure out how to get high organic search engine rankings, the company continues to make improvements to its paid search platform that make it easier and more efficient to manage paid search campaigns (you don’t think it could be that Google REALLY wants you to spend money with them to get your site to appear, do you?). Certain policies notwithstanding (a subject for another day), from a technological standpoint, the Google AdWords platform is more robust and powerful than ever. So let’s talk about some of the newer features that Google has implemented, or will soon be implementing, that make your life as an advertiser easier.
Improved exact and phrase match. Soon, Google will display your ad for an exact match or phrase match keyword even if there is a slight variation in the search query if it is clear that the person was searching for the same thing. These include misspellings, singular and plural forms, acronyms, stem variants and abbreviations. For example, if the keyword is “personal injury lawyer,” but the actual search query is “personel (note the misspelling) injury lawyer” or “personal injury lawyers (plural),” then it will display. Google was even considerate enough to program the system so that only exact, exact matches affect your keyword quality score.
Improved ad rotation. This is one of the things that has always bugged me about AdWords, and I am thrilled that Google has improved this. Google has always encouraged advertisers to use ad rotation that automatically displays the ads that have the highest click-through rates. But that mechanism always kicked in way too early. A like to see LOTS of data to know FOR SURE that one ad is a better performer than the other, yet Google would always start choking ads before they had been exposed to enough impressions. So now Google is about to unveil an improved ad rotation that first gives equal rotation to all ads for 30 days, and then begins making adjustments based on click-through rates. Major improvement.
Mobile app links in mobile ads. If you have a mobile app, you can link to it from ads that appear on mobile devices. This is a great opportunity to increase your prospective customers’ level of involvement with your company. If you can get them using your app, they could see your company name every day, or at least when the right occasion arises.
Smarter keyword research. The Google keyword tool will now automatically build out distinct sets of keywords to use as the foundation of ad groups based on the keywords returned from your query. While I would certainly look at the suggested ad groups with a critical eye, this is a way to quickly split out your keywords into appropriate ad groups, or just to get a campaign built out if you are short on time.
Google seems to be making changes to their AdWords platform at an increasingly rapid rate. The best way to keep up with new features is to check out the AdWords blog at http://adwords.blogspot.com/. Most of the newest changes coming out are very smart features designed to help you use the platform more effectively, so stay informed about what is possible and take advantage of any new feature that makes sense for your situation.
Fuzzoodles – A Lesson in Bad Marketing
Last night I saw a commercial on TV for a child’s toy called Fuzzoodles. It’s basically a set of little fuzzy pipes and pieces that you put together to make crazy looking characters. I’m pretty sure I have actually bought some of these in the past when I saw them at Wal-Mart. It’s a cute product, and the fact that it is on the shelves of Wal-Mart is proof they know how to sell it. However, watching this commercial last night, I was appalled at what, in my opinion, is a bad marketing mistake.
The point of the commercial was to get you to call or go online to order a special set of Fuzzoodles. The website address shown in the commercial was www.poof-slinky.com
Say what? What does “poof-slinky” have to do with Fuzzoodles?
A URL used in an ad for a product should be tightly linked with the name of the product.
It should also be easy to remember.
This URL uses two words, joined with a hyphen, that don’t seem to have any connection to the product. The only reason I made note of the URL in the commercial was because of how shocked I was at what a poor choice it was for a URL. And even then, I still had to rewind and pause the TV so that I could write it down. Otherwise, I never would have remembered it!
A URL in an ad is another opportunity to reinforce the name of the product in the consumer’s mind, and hopefully convince him to visit your website. If the URL is completely disconnected from the product name, then you’re forcing the consumer to have to remember multiple pieces of disparate information. Keep it simple!
This, in my opinion, is bad marketing for what I think is a reasonably good product.
Contact Work Media at info@workmedia.net to avoid making these types of Internet marketing mistakes with your business.
Two Little Things that Can Ruin Your Search Rankings
There are many factors that go into how Google or any other search engine will choose to rank your website. If you’ve ever read much about SEO, then you probably already know the importance of optimizing the pages of your website and creating links to your website. If not, feel free to read any of the hundreds of blog posts on this site to learn more about that stuff. What I want to talk to you about today are two little things that you probably haven’t spent much time thinking about that can greatly damage your search rankings. They are:
Bad hosting
and
Bad pages
By bad hosting, I mean hosting that goes down often. Here is the problem: if Google visits your website and it is down, that is a black mark against you. The first time it happens, it may not hurt you. But if it happens repeatedly, Google is going to greatly downgrade its opinion of your website. As a result, your rankings in Google will plummet. If you have no idea if and when your website goes down, you should use a website monitoring service that will tell you when your site goes down. One that we have used is www.freewebmonitoring.com. There are many other services that do the same thing. Some are paid, so they may be more advanced, but a free service will do you just fine.
If you find that your website goes down often, my advice is to change hosting companies. It is a pain moving your website, especially if it is connected to a database, but the short-term pain will be your long-term gain in terms of improved search engine rankings. And I hate to say it, but with hosting, sometimes you get what you pay for. That cheap $6 per month hosting plan may work just fine, but there is just as good a chance that it will be a piece of crap. Work Media uses cloud hosting. We like it because it is as reliable as having our own server, but as easy to use as shared hosting (well, almost as easy). It is more expensive than shared hosting, but you will find that your website almost never goes down. Another similar consideration is how quickly your website loads. If you find that your site loads very slowly, that is another ready to upgrade to something better.
By bad pages, I really mean missing pages. If your website has gone through various changes over the years (especially as related to changing content management systems or platforms) then the URLs to your pages may have changed, or some pages just may not exist at all any more. This is a problem because Google HATES it when pages that it has indexed disappear. What you need to do is set up 301 permanent redirects from old pages to their newer counter parts (or even just to your home page). This is a pretty simple thing to do, but exactly how to do it depends on your Web server, what technology your website uses, and things of that nature. If you’re not sure how to go about it, contact someone (like us, for example) who can help you with it.
Work Media is here to take care of all your problems. If your search engine rankings are poor and you just don’t know what the problem is, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net.
The Latest and Greatest: Getting Started with Pinterest
If you do Facebook, or keep up at all with what is going on with the world of social media, you probably know about Pinterest. Right now, it is the hottest thing going. Pinterest lets you set up virtual boards on which you pin images you collect by visiting Web pages, or by re-pinning items that other Pinterest users have already pinned. It’s a lot of fun, but our question here is: Does it have value from an Internet marketing standpoint? The answer is yes, although certain types of business may be a more natural fit for the Pinterest concept.
Pinterest is visual. It’s pictures. Therefore, any type of business that sells visually interesting products is a natural. For instance, I am somewhat of a collector of guitars and amps (much to my wife’s chagrin), so I have a board with pictures of items that are in my collection. If I had some kind of business related to guitars, such as selling vintage guitars, I could do this same thing to actually display what I had for sale. Sure, there are lots of places where you could display my inventory online, but why not go where the people are? Anything related to visual arts or crafts is also a natural fit for Pinterest.
As soon as I created my Pinterest account, I noticed that people started following me. Many were people that I knew from Facebook. Some were people that I had never heard of. I would advise that before you use Pinterest, you begin maintaining a Facebook account and build up a nice friend list. Then segue into Pinterest.
The trick to getting material into your Pinterest account is to install the Pin It button from the Pinterest interface on your bookmarks menu. Then you are on a page you would like to pin, you just click the button. Before you start pinning, you should set up your boards. Going back to our vintage guitar dealer example, maybe he has a Fender board, a Gibson board, and a Peavey board. Or maybe he just has one board for everything. Either way, he needs to have a board on which to place his pins. When he selects something to pin, he will choose a board on which to place it.
Like most of the social media sites, you should follow others as well as having people follow you. And you should pin interesting things from others’ boards onto your own. The more social you make it, the more exposure you will get.
If you are a service business, you may wonder if you have any use for Pinterest. The answer is yes. You don’t just have to pin “things.” You can pin content as well (the pin itself will still be a picture, but it will link to the content). But if you pin something like that, it should be interesting.
We’ve just skimmed the surface, but if you are the type that like to look for every advantage, you should give Pinterest a try. But my advice is to not just approach it from the standpoint of a way to promote your business, but really get into it. Have fun with it.
What Are Your Competitors Doing? Using Emulation to Improve Search Rankings
Experienced search engine marketing companies like us have a pretty well-defined formula for how to do what we do. On-page optimization, link building, local search optimization…whatever it is, we have a good idea of how to do it within the confines of how Google and other search engines like to work.
However…
Sometimes playing by the strict rules just doesn’t get it done. If you find yourself in a situation where you just can’t seem to get the kind of visibility you are after for one or more particular keywords, then it might be time to take a hard look at what the top-ranked websites for those keywords are doing. You may be surprised.
We have a client in a very specific segment of the jewelry industry who wanted to get on the first page of Google for one specific keyword. Now, depending on the keyword, that can be a very tough situation. We like to spread things out and target a bucket of keywords. In a given week, some will go up and some will go down, but we always see a general rise in rankings overall. But when you are dealing with a single keyword, it’s either up or down, and that’s all there is to it.
We had optimized our client’s site in such a way as to not disturb the existing design (which is quite attractive) and went to work creating a ton of links. Our client’s site started bouncing around Google for the keyword, which is normal, but it just wouldn’t crack the first page. After a while, we decided to take a step back and take a hard look at what our client’s top-ranked competitors were doing. What we saw surprised us…sort-of. Many of them were quite ugly sites, filled with text. No surprises there. But what we noticed was a LOT of repetition of our target keyword. Much more than we like to use.
What this told us was that in this instance we were being too conservative. We needed to increase the frequency of our keyword in the text on our client’s website home page. Even though this was going to result in a keyword density that we are not really all that comfortable with, in this instance that is what Google wants to see.
The process of examining what your top-ranked competitors are doing is a very valuable exercise. You may be shocked at some of the things they are doing. Now, I should advise some caution here. If your clients are doing things that border on ban-worthy, then do not follow them over the cliff. But if it’s something like we are talking about in this case, where you just need more instances of your keyword, then do what they are doing…and then improve it!
The Dirty Little Wiki Secret
Wiki’s are basically like online encyclopedias that are publicly edited. It’s a collective knowledge tool. You’ve probably heard of the most famous once, Wikipedia. If you can get your business listed in Wikipedia, then that is very, very helpful. But it’s also very difficult to get a listing devoted to a business unless you are a big, nationwide company.
However, Wikipedia is only one wiki-style website. There are LOTS of those things. If you research your competitions’ back links and notice that they have lots of wiki links, then chances are they are working with an internet marketing company that is setting up wiki’s as a source of links. Many of these wiki’s are open, meaning anyone can edit them. So you know what you can do? You can change those links to point to your website. In cases where a marketing company is setting up lots of those things for links, they are probably not going to bother ever working on them again. Chances of your link staying intact are quite good.
This is somewhat of a borderline tactic because we’re not dealing with real high quality link sources in most cases. But if you see that these links are helping drive up your competition’s rankings, and they are open wiki’s, you have an opportunity to literally steal links from your competition.
Don’t spend all your time trying to hunt down these types of links. I’m really talking about a very specific situation where your competitors are driving up their ranking by using low quality wiki’s as a source of links. These sites really aren’t benefiting society at large, so you’re not hurting anyone…except your competition.
20 Top Article Directories to Target for Your SEO Campaign
Following are twenty of the top article directories, roughly ranked by recent Alexa ratings. These directories all have a reasonably high PageRank, a low Alexa rating (lower is better), and allow Do Follow links. This is a good list to use for your SEO campaign.
- Ezinearticles.com. The king of article directories.
- Buzzle.com.
- Goarticles.com.
- Gather.com.
- Ezinemark.com.
- Infobarrel.com.
- Ideamarketers.com.
- Thefreelibrary.com.
- Amazines.com.
- Sooperarticles.com.
- Pubarticles.com.
- Articlerich.com.
- Triond.com.
- Articledashboard.com.
- Articlecity.com.
- Isnare.com.
- Submityourarticle.com.
- Articletrader.com.
- Articleblast.com.
- Articleclick.com.
What Makes a Good Keyword for SEO?
When Work Media is conducting keyword research for one of our SEO clients, we look for keywords that meet three primary criteria:
They are highly relevant. This seems obvious, but many business owners tend to stretch the meaning of “relevant.” If you own a used car dealership in Memphis, “cars” is not an appropriate keyword. “used cars” is slightly more relevant; “Memphis used cars” is even more relevant.
They generate adequate traffic. Regardless of how relevant a keyword, if it represents a search phrase that is NEVER used, you’re not really accomplishing anything. Don’t forget the reason for doing all of this in the first place – to generate traffic to your website, and then leads for your business. No traffic, no leads. But a warning: don’t get greedy. You have to balance the potential traffic against the amount of effort required to achieve high search rankings.
They are in a reasonable competitive situation. If I do a search for “social security lawyer,” Google returns 21 million results – astronomical, but not a true representation of competition. If we do an “allintitle:” search for the same thing, we get 395 thousand results. That is a much more realistic measure of competition. But still a very large number of websites to compete against. If I do an “allintitle” search for “Baltimore social security lawyer,” I get 322 results. Now that is a number we can deal with!
BONUS Criteria: if you have search engine rankings for any keywords that meet the traffic criteria, then those are excellent candidates for optimization. Any good keyword for which you are in the top 30 or 40 should be targeted.
To put it another way:
| Low | High | |
| Relevance | X | |
| Traffic | X | |
| Competition | X |
How to Become a Google Recognized Authority in Four Easy Steps
It is becoming increasingly more important for you to establish to Google that you are a real person creating legitimate content in order to get more leverage from the content that you create for your search engine marketing. There are a lot of little details for doing this, but what follows is a quick and dirty four step plan for becoming a Google authority.
1. First set up for yourself a high quality profile on Google +. Add a photo, and take advantage of any opportunity Google presents to give more information. And go ahead and follow some other people to start forming your circles.
2. Then create an account for yourself at www.ezinearticles.com, the top article directory. Go ahead and fill out all the information, including a photo. Add your Google + profile link to your Ezinearticles.com account by clicking the Social Media dropdown on the main menu and then selecting Google +.
3. Add your ezinearticles.com profile link to your Google + account. Click on Profile, then the Contributor to link. Add your Ezinearticles.com profile page link as a public link.
4. Begin publishing articles with your ezinearticles.com account. Place at most two keyword links to your website in the resource boxes for your articles.
This is a super simplification, but that’s it in a nutshell. You’re basically forming a chain that Google can follow to establish that you are a real person and a legitimate creator of content. If you do this over time, Google will consider you more of an authority, thus showing favoritism toward your published articles, and possibly increasing the likelihood of favoring your website in search rankings.
Getting Started with Facebook Contests
Have a contest is a great way to spread your brand on Facebook. However, it’s not as simple as just announcing that anyone who likes your business gets entered into a drawing. Facebook has a very strict set of rules about how contests should be conducted. You don’t want to risk having your account banned. So the best way to pull it off is to use a third party service already set up to do contests.
One that I have used recently is www.shortstack.com. It is easy to use and works great. But there are many of these now, so look at some different ones and find the one you like the best.
One advantage of using a third party service is that it can automatically store you contest entries into a database. Setting up a contest is a little bit complicated, but using a service like this will walk you through it, saving you a ton of time.
As far as the actual prize, it is certainly nice if it can be tied to what you actually sell. If you sell some kind of product or service that people would really like to win, and you can legally give it away, then you can make that the prize. Sometimes it’s not so obvious, however. So you may have to just pick some kind of prize that would be desirable to your market. Maybe give away a trip or an ipad. You get the idea.
If you are busy running your business (aren’t we all?), it is easy for your social accounts to get stale. Hosting a contest is one way to get people liking your account, and it gives you something to talk about. It keeps things moving.
Contact Work Media if you could use some help with your Internet marketing campaign.