I’m asking this as a personal question about your search habits – this isn’t a blog post on how to actually conduct an online search. Stop and think about it for a second. Step back a bit and think about how you use search on a personal basis on the weekends and at night when you’re not working. And this isn’t a rhetorical question – really think about it. You might learn something.
My search habits have evolved quite a bit during the five years I’ve been a search marketer. I used to pride myself on the number of ways I could conduct a search on the same topic and find all sorts of different results. I’d show off to my family – “Look honey. Here’s a BETTER way to search for a condo at the beach.” And then I’d launch into a tutorial of how to conduct searches and get the most relevant results. I’d explain about relevancy to the search query, ramble on about backlinks and how sites get ranked organically, and pontificate on the differences between paid and organic results. My family and friends were astounded by my abilities – or at least I think they were.
Now, however, I must admit I’ve become a lazy searcher. Read more…
Ad Extensions in Google AdWords are an immensely helpful tool that provides more useful, relevant ads to your target audience searching for information on Google.
Whereas paid sitelinks extensions allow you to display additional URLs leading to specific and related content deep within your sitemap, location extensions lets you include your business address and phone within your ads.
Of course, this feature is especially useful for advertisers with a local business presence who want to generate brand awareness to users already close enough to visit their location, as well as users who are browsing for related businesses in their area. Read more…
The article outlines specific steps for testing whether or not you should buy particular keywords. It will allow you to compare profitability for a keyword when you’re ranking #1 organically only vs. when you’re running PPC at the same time as ranking #1 organically. The test can also address any cannibalization concerns you may have.
Finally, landing pages are discussed, giving you a way to test the conversion rate of SEO landing pages (which are typically regular pages on the site) against specific PPC landing pages. Most of the time, it makes sense to use PPC for all organic keywords, and to build custom PPC landing pages…but not always, and here are instructions for how you can test this.
The first step in driving more web traffic and leads from search engines is to rank high and take up a lot of real estate on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Google has just made that easier in both the organic and paid results with its recently enhanced sitelinks. That has just gotten easier on Google thanks to its recently enhanced “sitelinks,” both on the organic and paid sides. Below, we define sitelinks and provide examples, impacts, and tips for how to make sitelinks work for your business.
Organic Sitelinks
When a site is ranked #1 organically on Google (usually for its own brand name), Google now may display up to 12 sitelinks below the main listing. These are links to other important pages in the site, with the URL listed as well as a very brief snippet of a description. Here’s how it looks for one of our longtime clients:
I was recently interviewed for the Business Leader Daily Report radio show. Host Wade Taylor and I spent an hour chatting about Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising for businesses, ranging from the basics to new developments in search marketing and social media. The interview is broken up into four segments for easy listening. To listen, go to Business Leader Daily Report and scroll down to the 8/15 date.
Over half of conversions and revenue that are credited to Paid Search happen after the customer had previously found and visited the site from an Organic listing within the previous week. In other words, prospects are searching and clicking on organic listings first (there’s your SEO), and later searching again and clicking on a paid listing (there’s your PPC) to make a purchase.
This effect is even stronger with branded keywords – 81% of those who converted on a Paid Search ad running on a branded keyword had already found and visited the site through an Organic listing.
The value of taking a Paid Search spot away from a competitor can even be measured in terms of revenue – for every increase in a PPC ad’s ranking (that generated a click), revenue increased 10%. Alternately, it decreased by about 12% when competitors ads were more prominent, showing a sharper decline in revenue when you let competitors trump you.
Let’s say you set a goal of doubling the number of leads your website generates. Sounds ambitious – how are you going to get there? There are two very different approaches:
Double the amount of traffic coming to your website, or
Double the conversion rate (so that twice as many visitors become leads).
It’s generally easier to do the latter than the former. Doubling website traffic – assuming you’re not starting from zero – can be quite daunting. As well as potentially expensive. But often, doubling your conversion rate is attainable (again, depending where you’re starting from). And…they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Read more…
We’ve partnered with our friends at Atlanta advertising agency MAX, and they’ve produced a cool, two-minute video all about Prominent Placement. Our services and benefits are summed up in an entertaining way. Want to know the typical return on investment we generate? Curious about what makes us different? Wonder no longer!
Last Wednesday, the Prominent Placement team made its way to Park Tavern for the AiMA/SEMPO event The Social Impact on Search. We learned how Google and Bing are transforming into “social search engines” and Newell Rubbermaid shared how making their site social helped their business. We have a lot of great info to share!
Panel :
Dave Williams, BLiNQ Media – Moderator and Event Sponsor
Stacy Williams, founder and president of Prominent Placement Inc, led a webinar for Online Marketing Connect’s Search Engine Marketing Focus Week in early May. This is the sixth post in a six-part series based on her webinar about the use of search engine marketing to pull B2B buyers through the sales funnel. To view the slides from Stacy’s presentation, click here.
As the previous post stated, measurability is a key benefit of online marketing. Historically, there’s been a gap between site analytics and a company’s CRM database. We could collect data on a searcher’s interaction with the site, and companies could collect data on leads and customers and maintain it in their CRM software (such as Salesforce), but there was no way to connect the two. But technology has improved, as it always does, and now there is much more continuity between these two sets of data. Read more…
