Many marketers are using or have tried Google AdWords, the auction style advertising platform that allows you to advertise on Google sponsored search and content networks, commonly known as pay per click (PPC).
This guide shares my experience of actively using Adwords as a small business owner who manages their own campaigns. I’ll run through the steps to review Adwords to improve traffic quantity and quality to give more conversions. In the second part I’ll go into more detail on the optimisation.
I have been using AdWords for a while and overtime I have gone through many phases of continuous tweaking and re-structuring to improve conversions and I am always looking at ways to make it a cost effective marketing tool. Whether you are starting new or have been using it for a while, it is important to understand some key areas within your account to improve the performance and gain return on money spent on campaigns. I will run through some of the areas related to account structure and Ad Creative in this post.
I was recently putting the digital world to rights with digital marketing consultant James Gurd (James on Linked In, James on Twitter). We were talking about the ongoing need for straightforward advice on SEO for small and medium businesses who are new to SEO. We both felt there is still too much complexity and too many myths. James finds that when talking to clients that many still want to get to grips with SEO essentials so they can can focus their investment working with their SEO agency on advanced strategy.
So I’m delighted that James has offered to share his approach to cutting through the complexity – I hope it provides useful frameworks and interesting reading for marketers grappling with the basic success factors for SEO and also for consultants and agencies grappling with explaining it.
Key SEO strategy areas
Question 1: What are the components of site optimisation?
It’s essential to understand what influences your website’s visibility in search engine results. Search engine algorithms update frequently and strive to provide the best customer experience, so the demands on website owners to match this aspiration has increased accordingly.
Best to go straight to the Horses Mouth – this is a great intro with examples, although published in 2008 and not updated since. It underemphasises the importance of backlinks – links from other sites.
If you noticed significant changes to your organic traffic from Google through May this could be the result of a major algorithmic change in Google. It’s reputed to impact longer tail queries, i.e. less popular searches typically of 3+ keywords in the search keyphrase often related to specific product queries in commercial sites. But the analysis of my site later in this post suggests it affects shorter terms too.
I also recommend viewing this update from Google – they produce many videos for Webmaster Tools these days, but this is a must-watch for anyone involved in managing site traffic:
In the video, Google head of search quality, Matt Cutts notes that the Mayday update:
it impacts longer tail queries most
is a major algorithm change used to adjust ranking and doesn’t involve manual assessment of individual sites
is independent of the “Caffeine” update (the recent crawling/indexing update that also affects delivery of results)
was fully tested before rollout and will not be reverted
Search marketing essentials is our weekly round-up of what really matters in search marketing if you’re a marketer or digital marketing specialist. Since Google is dominant in search in most markets, we focus on the changes made by Google to it’s search experience and the implications for SEO and Paid Search.
Unlike the portals specialising in SEO and PPC we will only select posts from around the web which are “must-read” for marketers managing search, but also responsible for other areas of marketing. Of course, if you are a busy search specialist, aren’t they all, we hope you find our updates useful.
Sign-up to our enewsletter if you’d like a reminder of the updates each Friday.
Our recommendations on Search Engine Marketing practice for week starting 30th August 2010
Commentary: With the Yahoo Search transition to Microsoft / Bing now complete the great webmaster data that Yahoo used to provide is now no longer available. While they have said that they will maintain the site explorer function the more advanced query parameters will now display no results.
