Google’s display network is massive, encompassing more than 4 billion daily page views, 700 million monthly users, and reaching more than 80% of the online audience. Yet, with all this inventory, many marketers fail with display marketing. The major reasons are they either are trying to reach the incorrect goals or they don’t understand how all the targeting options work. In this article, I’m going to walk through how to get started with display advertising so you can avoid some of the most common mistakes that cause marketers to fail with the network. Display Keywords Most ma [...]

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

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

Often when I complete a keyword research project for a client, they ask me about keywords I may not have included, or they want to know what the relative competition on the keywords looks like. This happens often enough that I thought I would remind everyone that while research for SEO and PPC can go hand in hand, they’re actually very different. First, think about what your goals are with each medium. What are you trying to do, and what constitutes success in that area? Next, think about how the keywords will be used. Where, when, how often? Finally, consider what your margin for erro [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | How To: PPC | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content | Microsoft: Bing SEO | Search Marketing: Search Term Research | SEO: Writing & Body Copy | Yahoo: SEO

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

In my last column, I looked at some of the differences between small and large accounts as the best practices vary for each. In this column, we’re going to specifically focus on one of the most common small accounts: local accounts; and examine some of the best practices for this type of small account. A local account is where there is a limited geographic area being served. When you combine a limited geographic reach with a small budget, you often run into problems trying to balance spending the budget on highly relevant keywords while getting a high enough return for the budget so th [...]

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

Links are always a popular topic, and this year has proven no exception including Penguin, links vs. social media, negative SEO and disavowing links. Recently, someone asked me to distinguish between good links and bad links. First, there are really three types of links: Links that help SEO Links that hurt SEO Links search engines ignore Google and Bing have been clear, search engines do not use every link as a ranking signal; they ignore many links. While they are not going to tell webmasters which specific links matter and which ones they ignore, the search engines d [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | Google: Disavow Links Tool | How To: Links

When you are managing hundreds of ad groups, it’s easy to neglect certain details; however, the diamonds in the rough can often only be found through account deep-dives. Thus, I’m always looking for the next tip or tool that could speed up and make more efficient my management of large, complex AdWords accounts. Below I provide 3 proven tricks that make managing large, complex programs much easier: Bulk changes to local business listings AdWords labels Automated rules Examples and step-by-step implementation steps are given as well. Bulk Changes To Local Business Listings D [...]

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

As search marketers, we are constantly digging around in analytics, finding data, thinking it looks neat, then stepping back and saying, "But is this important?" I've done this a million times, and recently came across a quote that put some of what I'm always looking for into perspective. Don't make the measurable things important but make the important things measurable. The data you have is not necessarily the data you need to succeed. I think we go about this all wrong sometimes. Instead of finding data in Google Analytics or some other tracking program and trying to figure out if [...]

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

Among the scores of data points search marketers have at their disposal, perhaps no other metric is as shrouded by mythology and misconception as ad position. Despite careful studies showing, including one by RKG in 2006, and confirmation by Google in 2009 that conversion performance doesn't vary much by position, you will still hear pronouncements, even among enterprise level practitioners, that some specific position on the page generates exceptional performance. This piece is not meant to rehash that argument, per se. Instead, we'll examine how attributes of the current ad auction in [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | Google: AdWords | How To | How To: PPC | Search Marketing

"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 ‘Headâ [...]

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

While it might be the simplest way to drive more impressions, any savvy search marketer (and particularly those in the retail sector) in should be aware that leveraging broad match type is far from the only possibility to scale your PPC program. There are plenty of other options out there –I’ll try to cover just a few of them in this post. 1. Leverage All Match Types In a previous article, I analyzed AdWord’s new exact and phrase matching behavior and found that those new "plurals, misspellings and other close variants" were beneficial overall, with a 4% lift in clicks on average with [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Search & Retail

Handling established campaigns across multiple countries can quickly become a case of handling overwhelming quantities of data interspersed with never-ending menial jobs, preventing the SEO from developing their strategy to squeeze yet more value from their campaign ROI.

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

When Google published their new guidelines for mobile SEO, the item that made headlines was their declaration of responsive design as the preferred option. Last month, I covered the basics on how responsive design works and how to optimize it. But the second option Google discussed got lost in the headlines: increased support for purpose-built mobile sites located on m-dot subdomains (e.g. m.brand.com. ) This type of site had previously been flagged by Google’s Matt Cutts as being the favorite from a usability standpoint. While Google now favors responsive sites, their support for m-do [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Mobile | How To: Mobile Marketing | Microsoft: Bing Mobile | Mobile Search | Search Marketing: Mobile | SEO: Mobile Search

One of the hardest things to do in keyword research is to uncover related keywords. With that in mind, the tools I’m reviewing today all help identify related keywords that you may want to search in more detail. These tools are not a substitute for detailed keyword research like I talked about in my first series of articles. Rather, they may help to either identify those keywords that are most important to your competitors, or help find obscure opportunities where there may be little search volume, but there is also little competition. All of the tools I reviewed for this article are [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: PPC | How To: SEM | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content | SEM Tools: Keyword Research | SEM Tools: PPC

Yahoo has suffered through its fair share of turmoil over the last few years: a revolving door of CEOs, significant layoffs, investor revolts, and a declining share of the search space, both paid and organic. One recent bright spot for Yahoo was their first year over year growth in search revenues after traffic acquisition costs (ex-TAC)  since their alliance with Microsoft in the fourth quarter of 2010. In fact, before last quarter, Yahoo hadn't shown Y/Y growth in search revenue ex-TAC since they began reporting it in 2009. Not too shabby then, and Yahoo's results were generally well [...]

Related Topics: Advanced | Channel: SEM | Enterprise SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Search Marketing: Branding | Yahoo

Link building can, and should, be a domino effect. A good solid link should lead to more good, solid links, but do we always pursue links with this in mind? I confess that I don't always. Sometimes a link is just a link, and that's where it ends, but moving forward in the wake of the recent algorithm updates, I think we'll all be better off if we try to build links that build links. Along with that, since I firmly believe that building relationships builds links, we'll talk about how to do that, too. It's simple and easy but sometimes the simple and easy methods are the most overlooked. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

A couple weeks back, Google annouced new standards for mobile website design. Among the practices identified on their help pages, responsive design has been singled out as the best option from a search perspective. Let's look at how responsive design works, and how we can build sites to achieve maximum SEO performance on both the desktop and mobile environments. A Quick Recap Of Responsive Design If you're new to the mobile space, you'll find that there are three approached to mobile site design: 1) build a brand-new mobile site, 2) use your existing desktop website (which smartphone users c [...]

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

Keywords are important. I've heard from several potential clients recently who have talked to other "professionals" who told them keywords are no longer important for SEO, and that good content is all you really need. Here's the thing. Keywords are language. They'll always be important because words are how we communicate with each other. So until someone invents the microchip that can be implanted in your brain and read your thoughts without using words, you'll need to think about language in marketing. And I can only hope that those potential clients were told this by one seriously mis [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEM | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content | SEM Tools: Keyword Research