We have talked a lot about conversion optimization for websites and landing pages associated with any Internet marketing strategies.  Here is another great page used for paid search campaigns.  Each PPC campaign will have different conversion goals depending on the company’s needs.  The landing page below is designed to increase room bookings for the Tropicana in Las Vegas.  PPC will be used to drive the traffic. 

Google Quality Score parameters are becoming much more strict.  Notice the amount of content on the page.  Landing pages now must have quality (and relevant) content in order to gain a good quality score and have a productive PPC campaign.  Many landers tied to new URLs with no history require even more content in order to meet Quality Score standards.  It can often now take time to build the score, so keep adding good content to your pages!

Today we are going to take a look at some of the priciest keywords online. Thanks to SpyFu.com for providing this date. Let’s look at the top 20 and analyze them. With the economy being the way it is, it is no surprise that 2 debt related terms are at the top of the list. This is a very competitive industry online. $54 a click is insane.  You have your injury attorneys coming in at #3, another very competitive industry. They can afford to pay big bucks for clicks because 1 case pays for itself. It seems that with a bad economy, people also drink more putting DUI terms at the top of the list as well. What a shame! My home town comes in at #16 for San Diego DUI related terms. Bill Abbott is a car dealer so that ranking is a surprise. This could be competitors bidding for his name.  There is no doubt that thousands of companies are bidding for these terms and making these specific terms a big portion of their internet marketing budget. I prefer to look at the less expensive longer tail keywords. I will share more fun lists in the near future.

		Rank Term CPC         1 purchase structured settlements $54.06       2 loan consolidation student loans $53.29       3 accident no win no fee $53.17       4 tax attorneys los angeles $52.79       5 get auto insurance online $52.55       6 online life assurance quotes $52.46       7 scottsdale dui lawyer $52.45       8 bakersfield car insurance $52.42       9 tampa dui lawyers $52.18       10 cheap life assurance quote $52.15       11 education student loan consolidation $52.09       12 claim solicitors $52.01       13 la quinta inn airport $51.99         14 remortgage with adverse credit $51.94         15 tax relief attorneys $51.70         16 san diego dui defense $51.53         17 mesothelioma attorneys san diego $51.50         18 accident attorney chicago $51.46         19 bill abbott $51.27         20 mesothelioma lawyers san diego $51.12

PPC can be a complicated advertising method.  With constant changes in the algorithms and Quality Score indexes, we need to stay on top of strategies that fall under the “best practices” category.  We can talk all day about landing pages and call to action but the first step in any Internet marketing strategy is to get the clicks.  Without the clicks everything else is irrelevant right?  So how do we ensure that the ad titles and descriptions are compelling enough to get the clicks?

Here are a few tips for improving Click Through Rate for yout PPC ads:

1.  Direct Keyword Association:  Use the exact keywords in your ad title and landing page copy.

Example Keyword Search:  Summer shoe sale

2.  Trademark or Regsitration Symbol:  This works well when running PPC for distinct products and brands

Example Keyword Search:  Back to school clothing sale  (notice the Dickies.com ad)

3.  Use the Price in the Ad Title:  This works well when running special offers or sales

Example Keyword Search:  Cheap San Diego hotel rooms (notice the Heritage Hotels ad)

4.  Season Association in Ad Title:  This goes back to keyword association and creating relevance between the search and the ad title

Example Keyword Search:  Summer shoe sale (notice the use of “Summer” in the simple ad title)

5.  Use a Brand or Product Name as a Subdomain URL

Example Keyword Search:  Xbox 360 sale

Notice that the ad for the Xbox uses a few of these strategies combined:

• Keyword association (direct keyword match – or at least close)
• Price offer in the ad title
• Brand name as Subdomain URL

All the studies out there point to the fact that an integrated online marketing strategy is more powerful than just using one Internet marketing channel alone.  Most strategies compliment one another very well.  Today, I want to talk a bit about the use of search engine optimization and pay per click advertising together as a combined strategy. 

About SEO:  Organic search engine optimization is the process performed on (and off) a website to improve the quality and volumes of traffic from the natural search results.  A good SEO campaign starts with a targeted keyword strategy.  Then best practices must be applied to site architecture, content, and link building.  SEO is one of the most important investments in the long term online visibility for any brand.  However, unless you already have good momentum with natural placements, it can take time to see results.

About PPC:  Pay Per Click advertising is a strategy that involves buying keywords through programs like Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, etc.  Again, it starts with defining the keyword strategy and setting budgets.  You can of course dig deeper by geo-targeting terms as well as using daily and hourly targeting so that over time you can maxmize your budget and have your ads showing only during times where you are experiencing the best conversions.  Google now uses a Quality Score index to rank campaigns.  This is important because your budget matters less and the quality of your campaign and landing pages matters more. 

Here are some interesting stats on spending:

• PPC search advertising continues to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013. (Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008)
• Companies in the US spent $10 billion last year on paid search ads, and even more this year. How about SEO?
• SEO: $1.3 billion (11%) (Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008)
• According to SEMPO’s data, it’s 11% for SEO and 87% for PPC (with another 1.4% for SEM technologies and 1% for paid Inclusion).

It seems that people still do not quite grasp the power of natural search rankings.  Let’s take a look at this heat map study to show where most users look when doing searches online.

Companies that use only paid search marketing do so usually because they either do not have good orgainc rankings or are deploying a very targeting ad campaign.  Companies that use only SEO usually do so because they have great natural traffic and don’t have much need for more targeted advertising (or think they don’t). 

As we all know, starting from scrath, SEO takes months to generate good lasting results.  The time it takes to show results is largely based on a few factors:  the competitiveness of the industry online, the age and history of the domain, the number of inbound links the site may already have, content, and the overall quality of the SEO campaign.  In the meantime, many companies use PPC to drive traffic and generate revenue.  PPC advertising managed correctly can show some big wins.  But you don’t want to have to rely on PPC alone forever.  This is not a scalable strategy nor will it always yield the best conversions as compared to great natural traffic. 

When using PPC as a means to drive traffic while working on building natural rankings, the keyword movements and traffic volumes coming through the SEO efforts should be monitored closely.  As specific keywords start to drive more traffic (most likely from moving to the first page results), you can gradually start to decrease the PPC budgets.  You don’t want to be too quick to turn certains terms off though and you will want to montior both efforts closely.

Many case studies are now showing that conversions rates increase when companies deploy BOTH methods, even for overlapping keyword strategies.  Companies using both methods, are seeing the conversions coming through SEO, but at a much higher rate than using either PPC or SEO alone.  So as keywords start generating more natural traffic, you may want to consider decreasing some budgets while still maintaining keyword visibility in both natural and paid results. 

A deeper analysis will come when you start really looking at your CPA (cost per acquisiton) and conversion goals through your paid search efforts.  Since PPC is advertising, you can lose money if it is not managed well.  SEO is really more of a true business development investment.  Once you start SEO you really can’t stop – and when you start showing higher traffic volumes coming through natural search, you won’t want to!  The visitors coming through natural search results usually stay on the site longer, view more pages, and convert better. 

The conclusion:  Every brand will need a different strategy but if you have the means, deploying both SEO and paid search can generate great results.  If you decide to manage both efforts in-house be sure to seek professional advice on how each work separately and as a combined strategy.

Social Marketing has become the latest buzz word in the internet marketing industry.  Organizations, companies, and bloggers are now using this method to convey their messages to their intended audiences effectively and quickly.  There are many tools, perhaps too many tools at their disposal to be able to create effective messages.

Some of these tools include the ever growing FaceBook, a social networking site that has grown from being exclusive to college students, to an internet marketing vehicle for companies, bloggers, and yes, even celebrities.  There are many other social networking sites besides FaceBook such as MySpace, Bebo, Xanga, and even Ning which allows you as a user to custom create your own little social network.

In addition to social networking sites there are also micro blogging sites.  These micro blogging sites such as twitter, tumblr, and Pownce (now Six Apart), have been great vehicles for launching the latest news, keeping tabs on the recent elections, and simply updating your friends and followers alike of your daily activities.  All of these tools, from social networking sites, blogging, microblogging, and doing search optimization, can become rather overwhelming for most companies, and surely so for people.  All of these tools have gotten a term coined by the marketing industry, called social marketing.  If you have a business, a blog, are a celebrity, or a large corporation, it becomes more and more important to hire professionals to do social marketing for you.

The days of getting the message out via static images in newspapers and magazines are over.  Television ads are also not as effective as before as more and more people have turned into engaged consumers, instead of passive consumers.  Consumers want to choose what to view, what to buy, and what to admire.  To become successful and get  your message out there, you need to be actively involved in all of these social marketing tools.  However, if you dedicate your time to that, you may not have the time of day to effectively run your business.  Perhaps now is the time for you to think about social media marketing by talking to people and see what they think about it, as well as do some research on your own.

Yahoo is actually the most visited website in the world because it is a content site but it currently only controls about 20% of the search market. It would make sense to combine with Microsoft and MSN which is going to be the only way they will be able to compete with Google moving forward in my opinion. Here are the most recent Comscore stats on Yahoo’s percentage of the search market:
ComScore: Yahoo! Web Search Reported Total Search Share (US)

Dec 07 22.4%
Jan 08 21.7%
Feb 08 21.2%
Mar 08 20.8%
Apr 08 19.9%
May 08 20.1%
Jun 08 19.6%
Jul 08 20.0%
Aug 08 19.7%
Sep 08 19.8%
Oct 08 20.1%
Nov 08 20.3%
Dec 08 20.5%

They really have not grown their share and with more competitors hitting the market and Google growing their monster engine, it will be tough for Yahoo moving forward. This being said, our clients at Internet Marketing Inc still get decent results and high conversions from Yahoo. In fact sometimes conversion rates are actually even higher on Yahoo than they are in Google. With the recent CEO change, I am excited to see how Yahoo grows moving forward. I actually still use them as my home page and personal search page over Google but apparently I only make up 20% of people. Check with your internet marketing company to see what search engine is right for you and your business. Odds are that it will be a combination of all the major search engines.
-Brandon

With Google moving toward a universal search model , video optimization has become a must as part of your internet marketing campaign. This is just one more way to attract your target market and keep them coming back.  Similar to the content on your website you need the videos you add to be relevant to your website and give something back to the user.
Make the video for your users! No matter if you are selling products or services you can create videos that your viewers will want to see. Video sites are growing tremendously Yahoo video has grown over 400% and Youtube is still growing at about 160% a year. This is a great time to get your videos in front of your target market.
Here are a couple of tips for your video optimization:
1.    Make sure that your video is relevant! If you want people to keep on coming back to your website you have to give them what they want … useful information.  If your company is selling software don’t teach people how to cook a casserole. Tell them about all the different uses for the software and add how to videos that teach the viewer. These are great and will keep them coming back for more.

2.    Viral Video Marketing – Expose yourself:  we have all heard of viral marketing and the great effects it has. So don’t keep your videos to yourself! This social media aspect gets people talking about them, share your video with the world. Upload your video to sites like Youtube, Google Video, Yahoo Video, AOL Video etc. A few tips when uploading your video to different websites:

• Make sure the video links back to your website.
• Tag it! Always include keywords in the title and description of the video you are pushing out to video sites.
• Let people use you! Seriously, give people the option to embed your video on blogs, forums and websites by giving them the embed code.
• Power to the people: let people rank your video. Search engines pay attention to this when ranking your videos.

3.    Attract attention to your video; make it stand out on the page! Make sure to include information about the video in the title. A great idea is to incorporate keywords into the title of the video. Make sure that the video that you are embedding is relevant to the page its on. Make sure your metadata for the page is relevant to the video.

4.    Keep it short and Concise. Don’t bore your viewers, keep your video short and sweet while still keeping it entertaining and informative. I would suggest a 5 minute max.

5.    Include a brief intro with your logo and make sure each and every video has this 2-3 second intro to build brand loyalty.

6.    Create a video sitemap: this makes it easier for search engines to find and identify your videos.  Make sure to put your keywords in the video anchor text.

Pay Per Click advertising is of course one of the fastest ways to achieve quick results in the search engines.  Natually, we all want our sites to be number one in Google organic rankings for all our most popular search terms but that just isn’t realistic.  PPC campaigns are a great way to bridge that gap while waiting for more natural rankings (assuming your are properly optimizing your site with SEO) or to launch a specific online ad campaign centered around a specific product launch, event, etc.

Part of the job of a qualified Internet marketing company is to educate the client on how their PPC campaign should be run, what keywords will be most effective, and how to acheive the best ROI.  Yes, we all want the best ROI possible but there are many subtle variations in every campaign that can save (or waste) tons of money.  Here are a few tips on how to put together a reasonable campaign with a limited budget in a highly competitive industry.  Keep in mind, these days, the more competitive the industry is out in the “real” world, the more competitive it usually is in the “virtual” world.

Don’t Be Unrealistic: This is where the education piece comes into play.  The first part of putting together an effective PPC campaign within a given daily/monthly/weekly budget is to research and analyze the industry and keywords associated.  The keywords searched the most each month will usually have the highest cost per click.  If you are in fact in a very competitive industry with terms running at $3 per click and up, you may want to consider starting with broader “long tail” keywords that focus on a specific niche within your industry.  Long tail keywords are generally searched less but are more specific and can actually result in a better conversion.  The keywords searched the most may drive tons of traffic but you have to then have the ability to maintain visibility for your listings and convert what traffic you do get to decrease the overall cost per conversion.

For example, if you only set a budget of $20 per day for a popular key term your campaign might reach its limit by 10 am and then you are done for the day!  Another aspect to consider is that if you are a little fish in a big pond, and your product does not compare well with the giants in the industry you may want to take that into consideration.  I am not saying don’t go for it, because I am extremely competitive by nature.  However, research where your competition falls short (and you excell) and consider starting there first.

So the bottom line is to be realistic in your choices of keywords at first.  Go after ones you can afford and follow some of the additional steps in order to use those less expensive key words to generate conversions (sales) and use that revenue to go after some of the more expensive terms.

Create a Budget and Stay Committed to it: If you are not the one directly handling the campaign, you may have hired a PPC management company or Internet marketing firm to do the job.  But you should know the details so you can plan accordingly.  If you are in a competitive industry with expensive keywords you need to consider what budget you allocate to the PPC effort.  Sometimes people are just way too unrealistic and commit only a small amount of money.  This is important to note because you need to consider all the aspects of a good PPC camapign:  research, website preparation (landing pages), implementation, analysis, adjustments, and more analysis.

If you are bidding $3 per click but selling a $5 item, it may not be worth it.  Ongoing analysis of the bounce rates and conversion rates will help with this process.  Additionally, continually monitoring your titles and descriptions is important for seeing which keywords are giving you the best return.  Sticking to the budget can be difficult if you are not seeing the ROI you want immediately but it takes some time to analyze the results before you can make adjustments that will improve those results.

The Six P’s: I am prior military and this might not be a common saying among civilians, but I know some of you have heard it.  Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance.  It can never be more true than when spending money on PPC.  Let’s face it, organic SEO is much more of an “investment” as it takes time to see results.  PPC may take time to assess conversions and increased revenue but the visibiltiy in the SERPs happens at the flip of a swicth.

When I refer to planning I am really referring to the development of solid landing pages that will help convert that user who clicked on your PPC ad into a sale.  A landing page is basically a page on your site that is very specific to the ad and has very ovbious calls to action.  For example, if your ad appears for the term “Wedding Invitations” then your landing page should be specific ONLY to your wedding invitation products and services with calls to action like “BUY NOW”…you get the idea.  Sending specific PPC ads to your home page (especially the long tail terms mentioned above) will not result in good conversions as it requires too much extra effort for the user to find what you want them to find.

Timing is Everything: During the research process and throughout the whole campaign you need to research the best times of day for when people are searching for your product or service.  You may notice for example during the campaign that your click through rates are higher from 11 am to 2 pm and then pick up again at 7 PM.  Whatever it turns out to be, turn off the campaigns during the dead times so your visibiltiy will be more prominent during the more active hours.

Location, Location, Location: The great thing about Internet marketing using PPC is that you can further dial down on your target audience and stretch your budget using GEO-targeting.  For example, if you are a flower shop in downtown Chicago and only targeting people who live and work in the city, you probably do not want to run a competitive national campaign for “flowers”.  You can GEO-target the campaign so that only people within a given mile radius see the ads.  That way you are not wasting clicks on people who will most likely not be your customers.

All of these tips can be useful for any campaign…but are most useful when launching a campaign in a competitive industry.  Keep in mind for the most part pay per click marketing will only get more expensive, so plan accordingly.  Happy bidding!

One can embark on the most aggressive Internet marketing campaign utilizing targeted Pay-Per-Click and organic SEO implementation. However, these efforts are futile if your website is not structured for conversions. Proper website site structure begins and ends with the customer being guided through the website to reach the final ending point, the conversion (sale, lead, etc).

Here I have listed a few key points to improve the conversion rate on your website:

Place text on the left – This sounds strange but as we read books from left to right, so we view web pages. By placing attention grabbing and informative content on the left the user will naturally follow the flow of the page and take in the information

Calls-to-Action – These are the “Buy Now”, “Sign-Up” or “Join Now” buttons that enable the user to immediately convert. However, these titles are less effective than they used to be. Users are attracted to unique or specific content. A better call-to-action would be “Add ***** to your shopping cart” or “Check Out.” These titles are newer selling catch phrases, compared to the older phrases that have come become less trusted. Theses phrases should be placed strategically throughout the site in bold coloring and font.

Internal linking – Placing links to internal pages within the content of the page allows the user to immediately access the subject that was mentioned. Instead of having to scroll back and forth through pages this saves the user time and frustration getting to where he wants. Internally linking the pages of your site provides another form of navigation and leads the user to reaching the final ending point quicker.

Add a sitemap – During Web 1.0 the site map was not important. Users did not scroll down as much and computer screens were smaller. Now, part of Web 2.0 the sitemap has becoming the favored place to find everything contained in the site. This is usually a last ditch effort for the user to find what he is looking for. Not including a sitemap can aggravate and turn away a user who gives up and leaves your site.

There are many more aspects to consider. One should consult and Internet marketing company to fully optimize the conversion rate of your website.

So you’ve got your million dollar idea – congratulations. Now what are you going to do to market it online? Well, any good internet marketing company will suggest that you start a Pay-per-click ad right away to get immediate exposure. And they’re right. However, if you’re in this for the long run, you should also be focusing on search engine optimization and building your website accordingly. In order to have a successful PPC campaign, you must take many things into consideration. “Success” is an arbitrary word in this case as it is different for every website. For this, I will define Success as getting the right users to your website and having them click on what you want them to click on. The first thing that you must do is your homework to find your niche for your website and what competition exists. If for example you have a website dedicated to a solar-powered car, you may want to look into what terms are being searched for “solar-powered car”. You may learn that only 20 people per month are searching for this term as this is a not a widely known concept. However, you may find out that the term “Hybrid car” is searched over 20,000 times each month. Although this may not be your exact target demographic – it’s in the same vicinity and you can thus test to see what is going to drive the best and most qualified traffic to your site.

Also, you should also go after low-cost keywords as well. This is highly suggested for any new company starting out that doesn’t have a huge budget. So, for example, you wouldn’t want to go after the term “car” because that is not only too broad of a search term, but also it is a highly expensive on a CPC basis.

You also want to write engaging ads for your viewers to see. The viewer will hence see these ads and want to click on them. Be careful and selective in what you write for your description and make sure you have the search term in the ad. This will give you good placement for your ad in the sponsored results page as you’ll have more clicks on it because users will find this relevant. Any good internet marketing company will be able to generate a solid campaign for you and help you with your Pay-per-click campaign.