According to the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus, change is the only constant. As you have most likely heard by now, Google is making major adjustments to its AdWords platform that will have sweeping changes to the ways and means of how you execute your search campaigns. For B2B search, this is going to have a specific impact on your programs, and getting ready for the coming changes will require a bit of forethought into how you maximize the results of your campaigns. In a realm like B2B, there is always the dual challenge of a diffuse customer base with ever changing needs and a lim [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords: Enhanced Campaigns | How To | How To: PPC | Intermediate

A few weeks ago, at SMX West in San Jose, George Michie of RKG, was talking about the challenges of managing enterprise-level PPC campaigns, and he made the interesting observation that you can either manage to ROI or to budgets, but not both at the same time. The context of George’s remarks was setting expectations with client C-Level executives and educating them about what is and what is not possible with online marketing campaigns. [caption id="attachment_153754" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Maximizing PPC ad spend and managing to best ROI are usually conflicting goals.[/captio [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Paid Search

Recently, I was asked to run an estimate of traffic opportunity for a multinational sports franchise in which I modeled their current global traffic against brand visibility growth opportunities. However, I also identified that to make the estimate relevant, I needed to quantify the traffic more than they had suggested. So, like all good Web marketers do, I got revenue involved in the equation. Want to know how to understand the revenue opportunity available to your brand globally? Read on... Calculating The Size Of The Pie First up: what's the current global reach of my client? To und [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Multinational Search

There’s been a lot of confusion among paid search marketers upset about the lack of device targeting in Enhanced Campaigns. This article will tell you how to advertise your mobile app using AdWords while checking out the new app promotion ad format in AdWords. One of the most common hypothetical use cases for device targeting in AdWords has to do with mobile apps. For example, a mobile app developer who doesn’t want to target desktops because their app only works on say, iOS tablets – it would make no sense for these ads to show up on Windows desktop computer searches. One Search E [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To | How To: Mobile Marketing | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Paid Search

More so than any other product in the AdWords suite, managing, reporting on, and making sense out of Product Listing Ads (PLAs) extends beyond the toolsets provided in AdWords. The levers that we can push and pull exist within two unique systems -- AdWords and Merchant Center -- and, as a result, we need to do some internal legwork in order to effectively merge the inputs and outputs and come up with actionable analytics to optimize on. At my agency, we’ve been working on some different ways to more effectively work with PLAs, given the available analytics and levers for optimization. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Search & Analytics

The bane of most search marketers’ existence is search query ambiguity. Is a user searching for [one night stand] interested in an illicit affair or a piece of antique oak furniture for his bedroom? Does the query [internet security] reflect the needs of a consumer fed up with viruses or a CIO looking for a $10 million enterprise solution? John Battelle has called a search engine a “database of intentions,” but that database is often fuzzy, to say the least. In many cases, it would be much easier for marketers to know who the user doing the search was, as opposed to for what they w [...]

Related Topics: B2B Search Marketing | Channel: Social | How To | How To: SEM | How To: Social Media Marketing | Intermediate

As promised last month, I’ll be sharing more information about how to do mobile SEO specifically and less about why to do mobile SEO. This month, I’m going to go through how to do mobile keyword research. First, though, a brief explanation of why to do mobile keyword research. Mobile Keyword Research Then & Now One of the primary reasons for doing mobile keyword research is that you could be missing out on keywords that your audience uses on mobile that they don’t use on desktop (e.g., [keyword + “nearby”]). There are some categories, such as restaurants, where upwards of 30 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: Mobile Marketing | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Mobile Search | SEO: Mobile Search

In a typical organization, the social media tweets away in one department while content writers toil away in another. The social team links to fresh content, sure... and that’s about the extent of their interactions. But, at the end of the day, what you post and share on social media is content, and it’s time we start treating our social postings with the same amount of gravity as we do our content. Fact: social media posts are content. They may be abbreviated and (in some cases) more casual, but they’re content all the same. They’re written to get attention; they can be optimized f [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | How To | How To: Social Media Marketing | Intermediate | Search & Social

During the regular online training sessions which I deliver to our customers, I inevitably get asked the same question. Actually this question comes in a few guises. What should I focus on more - citations or links? Are reviews an important factor for local ranking? How many citations should I build for my client? How do I know the best categories for my client to be listed in? But, they are all asking the same basic question: What do I need to focus on to improve my client’s rankings? Unfortunately, I don’t have a silver-bullet answer because there isn’t one. Every clien [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Local Search

Whether you report on just two or twenty different regions, getting a centralised report on search engine result page performance by region can be a headache if you don't have an easy -- and scalable -- reporting system in place. There are lots of ways to tackle the problem, but by far the easiest is via Google's Webmaster Tools, now integrated into Google Analytics, which has the added advantage of being free, always a benefit to those working within tight budgets. Interestingly, looking at alternatives to see what the paid competition offers results in very little opportunity. Truly mu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Multinational Search

No matter what level your paid search program is operating at, whether small business or enterprise, inevitably some campaigns will outgrow the daily budgets that were set to sustain them. Aggressive keyword expansion or increasing CPCs due to competition could be two contributing factors. Until these budgets can be expanded, your campaigns will be limited. Optimizing a campaign that’s limited by budget is one of the toughest tasks for a search marketer. A limited budget not only eliminates opportunities to expand on keywords and campaigns, but can hinder the execution of other crucial [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Intermediate

Semantic markup is becoming more and more popular in conjunction with large scale SEO. Adding rich snippets to send rich signals to alert search engines as to the relevancy of your content − whatever vertical they may appear in − is not only a wise move, but an SEO best practice. Included below is an illustrative guide highlighting currently available Chrome extensions, which you can leverage to both test on-site markup as well as expose any information regarding your competitors. An example is illustrated below, and what follows is a guide to getting the information.   Installi [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Enterprise SEO | Google: Rich Snippets | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Schema.org | Search Features: Enhanced Listings

What if you could only spend one hour each week identifying some of your biggest opportunities and problems? What would you spend the time doing? That was a question - well, more of a “challenge” given to me by a few attendees of a recent Advanced Keyword Modeling presentation. While the many possible analysis were great, they were limited by time and wanted to know of all of them, which I personally would do first. First, the 60 minutes does not include gathering the data and building the reports. Since the challenge was to me and I would obviously use the keyword management tool I [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate | Multinational Search

Custom variables are one of the most (if not the most) powerful tools Google Analytics has to offer to better understand your audiences from search and social. Unfortunately, they’re also one of the most underrated and underused. So, if they’re so useful, why do so few sites utilize them? For the same reason that custom variables (CVs) are so powerful: they’re infinitely customizable. In other words: there is no one-size-fits-all variable. It doesn’t come equipped straight out of the gate; additional assembly is required. You’ll need to set it up yourself to match your site’s a [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Search & Social

When starting out with a new search effort or performing a keyword refresh for an existing website, the options for discovering new keywords are limited only by the SEO’s imagination. From the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, to digging through analytics, to leveraging sites like Soovle that discover ‘suggest’ keywords across multiple search engines, keyword discovery options abound. Building a pool of potential keywords to optimize for, however, is only half the battle. For those websites driving visitors to a ‘conversion event’ (e-commerce, asset download, form completion, etc [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate

Recently, I ran an audit on 56 music industry websites and received a startling result. Sixteen sites, 28.6%, forward people from their domain name to their homepage using 302 Temporary Redirects. These sites are tossing away valuable link authority! If your domain and homepage are different, determine how the domains forward visitors to the actual homepage. The correct way to forward visitors from one Web address to another is via a 301 Permanent Redirect. A permanent redirect tells search engines to take the authority from off-site links pointing at your domain and apply it to your rea [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Intermediate

Remarketing has been around for quite a while as part of the Google AdWords suite of tools. Remarketing works by creating a "list" or "audience" within Google AdWords. The pages that are pertinent to that audience are tagged with special code that allows Google to place a cookie in the browser of anyone who visits that page. It's a great way for you to get your brand out there in front of your website visitors, even when they're not thinking about shopping and buying from your site. There are tons of ways for you to segment your website to serve remarketing ads; you can even get as granular [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Search & Analytics

Do you spit out status updates on Facebook for your local business without much thought? Carefully engineering your status updates can result in more effective targeting, better engagement with your audience, and improved EdgeRank to help more of your followers actually see your status updates. These tips should be considered to be "spice", rather than the meat in cooking up your Facebook contents. Use these tips with some restraint and balance or you could create fatigue for your followers, resulting in reduction of your audience engagement rather than growth of it. Increasing engagemen [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | How To | How To: Facebook | How To: Social Media Marketing | Intermediate | Local Search | Search Marketing: Local Search Marketing

Recently, I was on an in-house SEO panel at SMX with REI's Jonathon Colman. Most of the audience's questions centered around explaining and reporting relevant metrics to upper management. Turns out, while search has come a long way, many execs still use terms like "Google Juice" and define success as launching a PPC campaign to "rank number 1 for our competitor's name". This issue is even more pronounced in larger, established companies where search makes up a smaller portion of the marketing mix. :::sigh::: Jonathon's primary recommendation centered around "data visualization" - expl [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Enterprise SEO | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate

"There aren’t enough hours in a day" is an old – but true – refrain about the nature of an SEM’s job. The list of things we could be doing in any given day to optimize accounts is a daunting one. Agreed? Fantastic. As long as we’re on the same page, and already slinging the clichés, this post will help you "work smarter, not harder" by helping you identify where your accounts lie on the head-tail spectrum – and how to use that knowledge to prioritize tasks like ad testing, keyword optimization, negative keywords, and more. First: Identify If Your Accounts Skew Towards ‘Head� [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Paid Search