Checking AdWords

If you have a significant Google AdWords account then checking it on a regular basis to ensure that it’s performing at it’s optimum can be a drain on resources; I've previously spend days at a time ensuring that all keywords, ads ad landing pages are performing well together for particular AdGroups that contain thousands of keywords.

Whilst it works as an approach, it is very time consuming, and we don't always have the time to do a thorough check (although you should try to do one at least once a month).

If you want to spend less time working on your AdWords campaigns, but you also want to spend your time constructively, my advice would be to focus on the important elements of your campaigns.

Each week download a full list of your keywords - just click on the Keywords tab from Campaigns, then click on the Download Report icon). Ensure you are just viewing data for the Last 7 days.

This will provide you with a complete list of your keywords with all the relevant data you will need to check how your keywords and ads are doing.

Once downloaded, open the report in Excel (or your favourite Spreadsheet application).

Now you have your data, perform the following tasks:

High CTR, No Conversions

Sort the data by CTR (Descending) then by Conversions.  What you are looking for here are keywords with a high click through rate but low or no conversions. Note: You’ll need to make a judgement call on what you think are high and low values for your industry/site – but it should be clear that if a keyword has received a 50%+ CTR but no conversions, then something is wrong!

First of all check your ad(s) to ensure that they are clear on the benefits that your prospect will get, tweak the ad(s) if need to be ensure that they are crystal clear. Remember you can always have more than one ad, so if you want to make a change add a new one so you can check later which one had the best results.

Next check the landing page, are the goals clear? Is the benefit that you have suggested on the ad(s) clearly visible? Is the call to action nice and clear?

Low CTR

Next check your keywords that have a low CTR.

Your ads here just aren't working for you. Look to see how they can be reworded to make them more appealing, are you clearly getting across your core benefit?

Make sure your budget isn't running out too quickly.

Low Impressions

Low impressions are usually down to either low budget, low bids.

Consider adding more relevant keywords to help trigger your ads, slightly increase your keyword bids.

These are the absolute basic checks that you need to make every week, keeping up with these will ensure that your campaigns are in good working order.

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What Content should you write for your website?

Content is the life blood of your website, which in turn is likely to be the lifeblood of your business.

Content, the right content is amazing stuff; it can drive high quality traffic to your website and also convert these visitors into customers.

But what content should you write?

Until recent Google changes you could take a look at your Google Analytics to see what search terms brought traffic to your site, but with Google now protecting the privacy of users up to 80% of your traffic will be showing up as “(not provided)”.

So how else can you capture what topics visitors are interested in?

Most websites have the ability to give you subtle clues as to what you need to write. When a visitor comes to your site, IF what they want to see isn’t clear to them then many of them will go to your search function to find the content within your site.

All you need to do is capture these search strings and you have the start of your content funnel.

A quick search on Google will show you how to unlock the onsite searches for your particular CMS (Content Management Systems), but let’s take the example of WordPress, one of the most popular for websites.

In Google Analytics. From your site profile click on Admin.

From here you’ll see a sub-tab for Profile Settings. Click on that to bring up the Edit Web Profile Information screen.

Scroll down to the bottom the Edit screen to the Site Search Settings. Ensure that you click the radio button to track Site Search.

Next you need to enter a query parameter. On a typical WordPress installation, the query parameter is simply the letter “s”.

How can I be sure that “s” is the query parameter for my WordPress site?

If you go to your WordPress site and do a search via the search widget, you’ll notice the URL of the results page will look something like http://www.yourdomain.com/?s=search-phrase.

Whatever is between the ? and the = is your query parameter!

Now Google Analytics will start to collect your entire on site queries, it can take 24 hours to start collecting these so please be patient.

Once you have these search queries you’ll start to get a better understanding of what content your visitors want to see.

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What the future of SEO?

When Google entered the search engine market back in the 90’s they changed the game.

Before Google all you needed to do was stuff your web site full of keywords and as long as you had more keywords stuffed than anyone else you appeared at the top of the rankings for that particular ‘stuffed’ term.

Since Google started spreading their magic on the search landscape things have changed, suddenly keyword stuff got you absolutely nowhere and links to site became the most important factor (as links suggested that the page was liked by someone).

Then Google started to look more at the quality of the links that link to you – if a high quality, relevant and trusted site linked to you then Google rightly took more notice of this link and trusted it more than lower quality sites that linked to you.

Things are changing again with Google Panda (rolled out in 2011) and further more with Hummingbird (rolled out in 2013) – now the quality AND meaning of your content is looking more important.

So with these algorithm changes and other developments, what does the future hold?

As SEO practitioners we are still providing good quality content that answers visitor’s questions whilst chasing those important linkbacks, but will all this activity be beneficial in the next few years!

Backlines are still important and will continue to be until something else comes along which can help Google understand the reputation and trustworthiness of a site; but as links can be easily gained AND the value of link erodes over time then a new way of working out Reputation needs to be brought into play.

Reputation networks like Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are examples of other networks trying to understand the reputation of a site, business or individual by trying to understand the context of any engagement; predominately in a social media context.

But it’s this social context that holds the key for reputation in real-time; with the erosion of link value over time then Google admit that once a link to a piece of content is provided it almost immediately starts to become out of date (hence the erosion of value over time), so real-time analysis MUST be the way forward.

The reality of the future of SEO and the question of reputation probably lies in a mixture of the types of work; i.e. the analysis that Klout, PeerIndex and PeerReach are working on and the latest Google Hummingbird platform changes.

A merger of these two sides would mean that Google would have a idea (in real-time) of how a brand, business or individual is being talked about, and from this it could be determined whether that discussion or engagement looks to provide positive or negative reputable (lots of links/mentions from could mean that it’s a valued resource for example).

Also with the Hummingbird update Google is showing that it’s starting to understand natural language and the semantics on how question and answers can be phrased.

I imagine within the next ten years Google (or AN Other) will be able to determine the basic reputation of a site or author (by links and real-time reputation analysis) and understand the real meaning of the content on a site; with these two pieces of information a search engine provider will be able to provide search engine results that provide the very best answer to a question with a higher degree of certainty.

But as we do not live in this world right now then links and great quality content are the way to go.

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The new Lead Generation Content Strategy

If you are responsible for sales or lead generation then you will no doubt be familiar with the classic sales funnel.

Traffic or Leads are basically thrown in at the top of the funnel and due your magnificent sales and marketing nurturing you pass these leads through the different levels of your particular sales funnel all the time attempting to create a customer at the end of the process.

It’s a classic image used in business today and it works well ….. up to a point!

You see what this model doesn't adequately explain is that THIS process is a process that converts traffic or leads that have shown an active interest in your product or service.

But there are many, many more individuals or businesses that are not yet interested in you, but you can still get them into this funnel, they might not buy yet, but they will be aware of you when they are ready to purchase and by changing the way you talk to your market will help you to become “front of mind” in their future purchase decisions.

To change this mind-set within your market all you need to do is talk about something closely related to what you sell; so for example if you sell computers, then create guides to help people use them or understand common problems and how to resolve them.

This would mean that you are then likely to attract people who (whilst not ready to purchase) use computers, and your great use of associated content means that there is now a chance that when they are ready to buy you will be “front of mind”.

This is a fundamental shift on how businesses look at content and their content strategy, but this simple tweak to make content available that is closely related (and helpful) to your core business offering can bring in more prospects.

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Inbound Marketing: The SECRETS

Actually, there was a small mistake in the subject of this blog, because there isn't really a secret in great inbound marketing – other than ensuring the right people see your content at the right time!

Inbound marketing is all about your prospects finding you, which means that it’s important that your precious and brilliant content is found when it’s needed to be found.

I’m sure we've all done the same thing at some point in our careers; we've created a brilliant piece of content (website content, video, article, blog or social media post etc) we have lined up several online channels to host and promote the piece and clicked send … then sat back ….. and waited ….. and waited some more …. but nothing happens!

No interest at all in our lovely, well crafted content, but it was perfect, what went wrong?

Well the chances are that simply your excellent message just didn't rise above the rubbish and the clutter – image this from a social media perspective, as soon as you click the send button your piece of content is the freshest and newest piece out there and it appears at the top of the stream, but second later it’s buried in a pool of noise.

As an experiment I simply tweeted the hashtag #Marketing and within just two minutes it was buried in my own twitter stream with by all the other stuff I follow, Even when I searched Twitter for my update after only 10 minutes my tweet has disappeared under 187 tweets – for all intents and purposes this post was now gone.

So what could I have done differently?

Very simply I just needed to make my post rise above the clutter and this is easiest done with my advocates – and virtually everyone and every business has some of these. These are your greatest fans, your enthusiastic followers.

These people serve two key functions:

1. They a can extend the life of any content by simply sharing it for you, but more importantly, 
2. They take on a valuable “word of mouth” presence.

What you might not realise is that a large percentage of new business comes from some sort of referral (whether these be Friends, Relatives, Acquaintances or Unknown online networks etc), and word of mouth has always been the most trusted form of advertising.

And whats even better is that these advocates are still working for you when you aren't around, constantly posting, sharing, and mentioning your brand.

How do you find your advocates?

They should be fairly obvious to spot if your close to your online marketing channels, these are the people that will readily retweet, like, favourite or share your content; they respond to your requests, they comment and talk about you (and often without being prompted).

The trick is to recognise these traits in your social networks and recognise the individuals - network with them, thank them, provide easier access to your best staff, provide extra content, training or even prizes. If your industry is suitable for it then try rewarding with gamification (providing points and badges etc).

Numerous big businesses understand the importance of their advocates and work with them – Google have supplied advocates with freebies in the past as a thank you; Samsung provide special events for their advocates and chances to get their hands on the latest devices (the recent Samsung Unpacked 2014 in Barcelona was a great example; Walmat creates specialised online communities of shoppers to help spread their messages. It is everywhere.

It’s the very importance of these advocates is the reason that I seem to find the constant need to explain to people that it’s not the number of Followers or Friends, Retweets or Likes that important, but who Follows and Likes you, who Retweets or Likes your posts.

One good advocate is worth more than 1,000 Followers that don’t listen to you.

Summary:

So listen to your channels, discover your advocates and build a relationship with them, then the life of your precious content will be lengthened allowing your important messages to reach more people.

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Keyword Stuffing

A huge mistake made by marketers, business owners and bloggers every day is the practice of stuffing irrelevant keywords (keyword stuffing) into web pages and articles in an attempt to dominate Google search for particular search terms.

You need to know that Google’ has grown very wise to this practice, and as soon as they consider that you have undertaken any form of keyword stuffing you will get a Google ranking penalty and in severe case be delisted from their index (i.e. no-one will be able to find you from a Google search).

Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs, and only include the major keywords that will assist your pages in being indexed properly by ALL search engines.

For an example of an overstuffed web page, take a look at this >> keyword stuffing.

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So what does Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) give you?

SEO utilises modern search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing etc) to increase the visibility of your website or individual web page which in turn ensures that your potential customers find your website rather than your competitors when they are searching for a solution you provide.

Typically a SEO professional will handle and provide on website design, content marketing and website optimisation tactics - all designed to provide the search engine visibility that you need.

Bottom line with search results is that the higher your site appears in the search results, the more people will come and see your site, the more visitors you get, the more customers you will get.

KEY BENEFITS OF MY SEO SERVICES IN YORKSHIRE

• Expert advice on how to achieve desired results
• Drives high-quality, profitable traffic to your website or individual web pages
• Gives your business long-term visibility, never short term hope.
• Introduces your brand to a much wider audience
• Increases traffic to your website
• Provides a cost-effective method of reaching your target market
• Establishes trust and credibility in the marketplace

Contact me for further details.

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Don’t forget your keywords in your Social Media

Most webmasters and (hopefully) all internet marketers know the importance of properly understanding keywords for website ranking, but that nugget of knowledge seems to be forgotten when thinking about and posting on social media channels.

But the keywords are king rule is as equally important in social media, and this is why.

At the moment Google views everything online as if it was a website – in fact in essence that’s all your social channels are.

Take your Twitter account for example – it’s just a page (albeit a long one) of content, same for your Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest accounts etc.

So if Google does see your social streams as a web page element, doesn't it make sense that these also contain your best keywords - just as your web pages do!

So when you post, think carefully about what you want to say and craft them carefully to get your valuable keywords in.

This will ensure that in search these could be more easily picked up by search engines, but also your brilliantly crafted accounts start to show your authority, which will be passed to your website and web pages when you link back to them.

AND like your web pages, please don’t add posts purely to spam your keywords, Google is wise to this trick just as it is with websites and it could lead to a social penalty!

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