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New Keyword Targeting Feature – Google AdWords

John Carruthers — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:58:12 +0000

Many of us know the different styles of targeting that you can implement with your Google AdWords campaign. The options that you have had so far is: broad, exact, phrase and negative. Let’s recap on what these are:

Broad match: Allows your ad to show on similar phrases and relevant variations.
Example: Red Shoes

Phrase match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase.
Example: “Red Shoes”

Exact match: Allows your ad to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively.
Example: [Red Shoes]

Negative match: Ensures your ad doesn’t show for any search that includes that term.
Example: -Red Shoes

Some of these options will allow more traffic to your ad as others will bring less traffic that is more narrowed down to the specific search.

So, what’s new? It’s called ‘broad match modifyer‘.
You can think of this new match type as being inbetween broad and phrase match. Broad can bring you very general internet traffic whereas phrase is a bit more strict. This is very helpful for you if you are used to using phrase and exact match types in your AdGroups, because this can ‘loosen’ up your ad exposure with less risk of the keywords being at a broad match level.

How does it work?
Simply put a (+) in front of one or more of the keywords. Example: Red +Shoes, +Red +Shoes
Be sure that there aren’t any spaces between the + and the keyword itself.

Each word that has the + in front of it has to be in the search query, or at least a close variation of it. The ‘variations’ include: abbreviations, acronyms, plural/singular forms, and stemmings (drive and driving). What isn’t included with the variations is words like ’slow’ and ‘drag’. They simply aren’t close enough to be considered.

Above, I mentioned a use for this new match type if you are using primarily phrase and exact match in your campaigns, but what if you mainly use broad match types? If you change these keywords to the new match type, the only thing that you need to be aware of is that you will likely see a decline in your click and conversion count. If this is a concern to you, feel free to add broad match modifyer keywords to your AdGroups while keeping your broad match keywords active. Keep a close eye on your bids so that you can maintain your ROI goals while testing this out.

Google’s Social Search and Its Effect on Internet Marketing

Natalie Revell — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:22:27 +0000

Facebook. Twitter. LinkedIn. They’re all huge in the online world. Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site just reached 500 million users. Director David Fincher is set to release a movie this October about Facebook’s conception, history and founder. It even cast Justin Timberlake. But how do these social networking sites impact Internet marketing efforts?

Top social networking sites have changed the online marketing landscape, with a focus on social media optimization(SMO). In the past online search ratings were dependent upon the positioning of a business Web site in the search engine result pages (SERPs), particularly how many links were pointing to the site. This indicated popularity and how good the page rank (PR), a measurement applied to the site from Google’s algorithm, would be. But now with the steady rise of participants in this social media phenomenon, the Internet marketing landscape has changed forever.

Google defines its social search feature as a way “to help you discover relevant content from your social circle, a set of online friends and contacts. The idea is that content from your friends and social contacts is often more relevant to you than content from strangers.” In other words, savvy consumers today don’t trust the paid, hyped up product ads on the right side of Google’s page near to the degree they trust what one of their friends has to say about his experience with the product.

Social Media Marketing: The Alpha Male in the Online Jungle

We all remember the separate Google search bars we had to download for blogs, images, videos, news, etc. That was Google’s way of separating social content. Nothing from the social media sites ever showed up in the SERPs. You actually had to go through a separate search bar to get them. But now Google streams all platforms into one system called Universal Search. With this change, we see blogs, RSS feeds, images, videos, news, user profiles and comments from social media sites fully integrated right into the natural SERP listing, easily taking those coveted top spots away from traditional Web sites and anchoring in comfortably. Both Bing and Yahoo have incorporated very similar systems.

Just by taking in what we see in the SERPs today, we can easily draw a conclusion on how critical social media optimization is to an overall Internet marketing campaign. When logged into Google you will even see personalized social search results, such as those in your Gmail and FriendFeed, under “Results from people in your social circle.” Does this mean we toss search engine optimization (SEO) on our business sites to the wayside? Absolutely not. But it does mean the use of social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter can give us a larger piece of the online pie and help us to capture a greater number of organic search positions, giving us a great way to dovetail SEO efforts.

SMM & SEO Together for Optimal Search Results

The use of social networking sites, such as Facebook, can attract inbound links to your money site that have a much heavier weight than inbound links from any other source. If you manage your social sites correctly with fresh, relevant content, while also engaging and conversing directly with your audience, it will be easier to attract inbound links. As you become a trusted source to your audience, your audience will start to converse about you and eventually push your brand, your expertise and your personal touch out virally.

These methodologies are essential for pushing your Web site higher in the SERPs, increasing Web traffic and reaping the rewards of conversion and overall ROI. SMO leverages an additional, effective set of online tools to accomplish the same goal as SEO: more exposure and better positioning for your Web site on Google, Yahoo, and Bing and a much broader exposure of your brand. The challenge lies in knowing how to use those platforms effectively and without spending all of your waking hours in vain.

The bottom line is this: The days of launching a basic SEO campaign alone within such a competitive online space and joyfully watching your site rise to the top of SERPs are long gone. Not only has SEO become far more complex than it was just a few short years ago, but social media optimization has transformed SEO from a relatively straightforward strategy into an intricate discipline that to most is nothing short of frustrating and time-consuming.

While social media optimization is a must for any business seeking to boost exposure in the search engines, most companies are not up for the task at hand. Turning to someone with social media expertise and experience to successfully go head to head with the alpha male of the jungle is the key reaping rewards from your online efforts.

Traffic’s Up…So What!

Josh McCoy — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:39:53 +0000

Many SEO practitioners as well as clients of SEO firms like-mindedly dream of watching organic search referrals climb from month-to-month and from a year-over-year perspective for that matter. While any SEO firm can boast the ability to lift organic traffic to a site, the dream of this success is much like that of my fantasy of a red Ferrari…without an engine.

Why you might be scratching your head at my analogy(and they are not always the best), there is quite a lot of validity in this statement considering that organic traffic increases can be much like that shiny car, pretty on the outside and hollow on the inside. For the most part, any SEO firm at some point can perform enough basic SEO and content creation to lift a site’s traffic simply because at some point you will drive so much long tail traffic that referrals will likely increase. What so often looks like a great report should have additional questions posed.

A review of your site analytics and these factors in mind can paint a better picture of whether your SEO program is targeted appropriately.

What site sections are driving traffic?

- Site sections such as a blog can drive a lot of traffic for a blog but often are virally motivated and this traffic can result in a 80+% bounce rate. Your traffic should be landing on your homepage or key pages that are a starting point for your conversion funnel or a page along this pathway.

How do organic visitors consume your content?

- Only in a perfect world does someone stumble upon your site and immediately become so enthralled that they instantly perform the intended action you are attempting. From an organic-wide view you need to ensure that page views, pages-per-visit and time on site are gradually increasing. This is also a way to show that site content has been developed for search engines but also for human visitors as content is compelling and there are links and calls to action to help propel visitors throughout the site.

Are organic referrals branded or non-branded?

- Every time you go all out on an offline effort or social promotion you are building your brand. And while not every offline viewer picks up a telephone and not every social user follows a link these web users search for company through a branded term. It is very important to parse your SEO reporting by branded and non-branded segments. Non-branded development should most often be your focus as a common SEO goal is to gain visibility across popular brand/service related terms.

How well does organic search referral s convert?

- Yes, I know, this is obvious. However, I am still surprised at how many people do not even think about this factor but more so with the climb in traffic. A thousand visits that do not convert at all are not as important as one visit that converts (brand identity freaks excluded). Analysis of these conversion metrics will allow you to figure out the most important goal of whether visitors are doing what you want them to.

Asking these questions of your SEO firm or analyzing these areas for yourself will help you to identify if your SEO campaign is successful or if the traffic numbers are misleading. Rankings are great but if they drove hollow traffic there is no importance for having a listing in that position and driving meaninglessness traffic. Who knows, if your site is a likely candidate for the conditions above, hopefully after a little work your traffic will drop next month…and your conversions will increase.

Need help with your Search Engine Optimization efforts or just some help with understanding website analytics? Let’s talk.

Posting to Your Google Local Listing

Josh McCoy — Thu, 20 May 2010 20:58:43 +0000

For those of you who came across my column last month, Local Search Convertibility at Search Engine Watch, The overarching theme was that local presence is great but it is what you do to promote and convert at a local level which is even more important. Here is something new from Google to help you out in this arena.

I found a recent change in Google Local Business Center or Google Places as it is now called that is closely related to the message above. There is now the functionality to post short term “tweet”-like posts to your Google local listing. From your Google Places dashboard click on a specific listings View Report link. In the upper-hand section of the next page you will see a box for which you can post up to 160 characters about something relevant to your company or this specific location.

Your post will be instantly displayed on your local listing when visitors view additional information about your listing. There is a date stamp of when you posted the message and the post expires 30 days from the time you post to your profile.

This real-time capability for revising your listings can be a great opportunity. For instance, if your companies location is offering a special or promotion that is time sensitive you may not have the few weeks it often takes for a local listing revision to be approved and posted by Google.

It would no doubt be a greater value for these real-time posts to become visible in the actual SERP listing of your local listing but we should be appreciative of this local listing modification. And on the bright side, if we already didnt have enough postings to manage, i.e., Facebook, Twitter, at least we have something new!

Monitoring Your Link-Building Provider

Josh McCoy — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 22:13:49 +0000

No time to build links to your site? Hire a link-building provider and then you don’t even have to think about inbound linking. Wrong, bad link-builders will likely set you back further then where you are now in respect to link-building and your trustworthiness with the search engines.

Much like the three-month probationary period you would endure with a new employer, the same is advised for any relationship you would engage in with a link-building provider. Not paying attention to their structure of link accrual, if they are paying for links, what types of topic relevance are associated with your site and the sites that now link to you could end up really hurting your site in the end. Site owners who peddle this task out to vendors must initially take their link-building reports with a grain of salt. They need to double check many of the links accrued and assess the relationship of these linking sites, pages and associated links to understand if value is really being passed onto the site.

I can say that I have experienced this first hand as for instance I recently watched a client pay for link-building services from a link-building vendor which resulted in dozens of link-filled blog posts placed on sites of little topic relevance. However, this was not the worst of the situation. Many links were adjacent to non-topically relevant posts such as the posts with links to Russian mail order brides, Viagra and other sites that make your skin crawl.

It is imperative that you hold your link-building service to a standard when assessing link-building efforts. Start by keeping these questions below in mind.

Topical Relevance:

Domain Relevance: Is the domain linking to your site hold keyword-rich similarities to the overall keyword theme of the target page on your site? It is much less credible when the red bicycles page links to your red bicycles page from the fordtaurusfanatics.com domain.
Page Relevance: Does the page hold topic/keyword relevance to the target page on your site. We don’t need links to the red bicycles page from a directory page for Ferrari dealers in New Jersey.

Domain Uniqueness: Social media links to me do not hold true link-building credit. These are efforts in social media marketing. If for the last three months you see links from Facebook, mixx.com, and Digg.com to your site pages, so does the search engines, and maybe you got credit the first month. 20 links from one site are as good as one link from an external domain, regardless if they are to different site pages. If you can understand the relationship than so can a crawling search engine.

Anchor Text: This is common to most savvy internet marketers. The links directing to your site should be anchored on a relevant keyword phrase. It is becoming more important to diversify the text to your site so that you are not getting all your links anchored on the same text. It should be mixed up, filler words, semantic varieties, etc.

Linked Page Associations: Much like the example given above that made us giggle, assess the page linking to your site and see what other links point out from the page. If these are to porn sites, pill sites or gambling sites you should be on the phone screaming your link-vendor’s head off.

While these points are in no way the entire list of considerations for analyzing the link-building accrual methods of your link-building provider, this checklist is a quick way to understand where things may be headed in the future. Having someone send a plethora of junk links to your site can do more damage in the long run than if you would have never hired them in the first place.

Mobile Search – Time to Act

John Carruthers — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 22:40:50 +0000

At this point in time, it has been estimated that one out of three search queries from smart phone users are looking for a business local to them. The advantage for the local business is that the user is nearby and that the searcher is looking to take action pretty quick. This frontier of search is still new, as this medium of search is on the rise.

A couple tips to optimize your experience with mobile search…Ensure that your business listings can be found easily on Google.com and on Google Maps (if you are a local advertiser). Simply creating a Business Listing in the Local Business Center helps those potential customers find you with more ease.

To take further advantage of the advances with mobile search, you can display local extensions within your mobile campaign ads. This is an additional line of text that displays your local business address in your mobile ads for search inquiries’. These searches are either in your local area or are the result of the potential customer searching your area via geo-based keywords. There is also the simple option of including your ‘Click to Call’ phone number so that they can quickly and conveniently call your business without having to rely on their dial pad.

By implementing these features, you are securing your place in online mobile search ads. Wanting a more real-life example of how this can work? Lets say that you are craving some seafood. You pull into a gas station (because I’m sure you never search Google while driving!) and do a search for ’seafood restaurants’. Since you’re close to one of the seafood restaurants, the ad appears with a local extension (address) and ‘click to call’ phone number. You simply click on business address and see the map, which happens to be at a nearby intersection.

In this example, like many other examples that could’ve been used, people on mobile search are looking to take immediate action. These features should be tried out for your business so that potential customers can easily and quickly inquire about your products/ services!

Google Retargeting Feature for Content Advertising in AdWords Announced

Mark Jackson — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 20:23:08 +0000

Google just rolled out a new program out to all AdWords users today that will allow advertisers to target ads at “users, based on their past interactions with your website.” This new remarketing feature will have great results for advertisers when used properly.

So what exactly does this new retargeting feature do? According to Google:

“Let’s say you are an online retailer who sells printers and TVs. You can show TV ads to those people who visited the TV section, and you can cross-sell, up-sell, and promote other relevant products: surround sound systems or DVD players, for example.

Here’s how it works: You add a piece of code (remarketing tag) to pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, adding a tag for “TV” on all of the pages where you sell TVs will let you later show relevant TV ads to everyone who visits those pages.”

According to a recent report by Advertise.com and SEMPO, 70% of online marketers don’t have retargeting strategies as part of their online marketing efforts. Additionally, almost half (46.3%) of the marketers surveyed thought that retargeting was the most underutilized online marketing strategy. Fetchback, a retargeting platform, released data that shows their retargeting platform “produced huge Valentine’s Day campaign results for its clients; including 600% or higher return on investments, and Click Through Rates of 11%”. They also claim that retargeting can outperform more than 74% better than normal PPC campaigns.

So Google has entered a very untapped market here that will serve to help their bottom line, but will also help them provide better value to their advertisers. Expect this topic to start getting much more coverage across the web in the months to come.

404’s: A Great Way to Lose Site Traffic!

Josh McCoy — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:58:04 +0000

404 errors, dead pages, bad links, whatever you like to call them are a great way to increase your bounce rate, decrease your online revenues and make you look sloppy. This form of conversion suicide can be corrected by monitoring your site well to make sure that you are not contributing to the probability of your site rendering 404 errors or that others on the web are not properly linking to your site.

Not ensuring that all site pages are linked correctly and redirected appropriately is like waving good bye to site visitors. There are a couple reasons why your site may have 404 errors evolving from server requests. This can include a URL rewrite where folders may have changed yet certain internal pages didn’t make the rewrite file. Other reason reasons for 404 File Not Found errors include internal linking to pages that may have the link structure of the above explanation or that there may just be a typo in the internal link. Another reason for a 404 error may not be your fault at all. This can simply be someone who is link to your domain but to an incorrect page. This can also relate to the first reason above where you did not include all site pages in the URL rewrite and now inbound links arrive at pages that no longer exist.

I know, we have all been here before, we recognize our mistakes, run our heads into a wall a few times and move on. Below are a few suggestions I have found helpful for assessing the potential of 404’s on-site.

Utilize site crawling tools. I use OptiSpider and like this because it quickly crawls the site and reports on any 404 errors so I know off-the-bat what needs to be fixed. With any new clients I assess this is one of the first areas I look at. There’s no telling what your neighbor’s cousin Eddy missed when he redesigned your site last year.
Google Webmaster Tools can be very helpful for assessing dead pages, broken links etc. The Crawl Errors section will tell you what pages are listed as unreachable and what links out there on the web from other sites are breaking.
Generate an XML sitemap. This is another form of crawling your server and will let you know what page errors it finds. Google Webmaster Tools above will also tell you about error pages in sitemaps but this is just another way to assess the situation from a different vantage point.
It should go without saying that you should have custom 404 pages for your site. If not, go ahead and run your head into a wall a few more times and come back to this post. The custom 404 page allows you let visitors know that they have reached a non-existent page and that you would like to provide them with the navigational opportunity to find the page which holds the information they are looking for. This custom 404 page also houses the analytical tracking code in the footer of the page template hopefully that all of your other site pages possess. I as well as the other 99% of webmasters and search marketers use Google Analytics. Since we have made sure that we possess custom 404 pages with our tracking code it is easy to find 404 errors that are currently indexed in search engines or are coming from other referring sites. Simply go to the Content section, filter to 404 pages and do reverse path research to note where the referring source, keyword and such have brought about the 404. I like this method because you can drill down on a recent 404 from a search engine listing and hopefully repair it before you lose the listing.

Managing your 404’s is not that hard to take on once you have found a few methods such as those above. If you are working with an internal web team or third party developmental resource it will also save a lot of time if you host a quick SEO 101 crash course to address proper page redirection and internal linking practices to get everyone on the right page, no pun intended.

Need help making your site perfect?

Search Engine Optimization: Pushing Google to Display Real-Time Web for Any Keyword

Mark Jackson — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 18:11:17 +0000

Back in Dec 09, Google announced the integration of the real-time World Wide Web in their organic search results. Google told us that their goal is to strive to bring us “the freshest, most comprehensive and relevant search results over an ever expanding universe of content on the multitude of devices” we “use to access it.” They introduced real-time into the search results like this:

I would equate this move to Google Universal, where they algorithmically add news, images, blog results, music (if it’s related to music), and video into the organic search results. Somehow, algorithmically, the Google search engine adds these features into the organic search results. You have probably noticed that sometimes they show it in the search results (for certain keyword phrases) and Google show do not show the real-time web for other keyword phrases that you search for at Google.com.

As a search engine optimization expert, I have been intrigued by this part of the search engine algorithm. In other words, I have tried to figure out how to literally push Google to display the real-time web (the “Latest results for”) for a certain keyword or keyword phrase.

Well, I am happy to be able to tell you that I have “cracked the code” so to speak, and am able to now “force” Google into showing the “Latest result for” a particular keyword or keyword phrase. In other words, if the “Latest results” is not presently showing for a keyword phrase in the Google search results, I am able to drive Google into displaying the “Latest results” for a keyword or keyword phrase of my choosing.

Let us take a look at an illustration of what I am speaking about. As an sample keyword phrase, let’s use the phrase “vizionweb”, as in our Vizion Interactive Twitter ID, @vizionweb. If you look at the following search result, you will see that there are no “Latest results for vizionweb”.

But, after a particular period of time (which I won’t reveal right now), you will see that a search for “vizionweb” does, in fact, show the “Latest results for vizionweb”.

I have proved this with several other keywords and have been able to use my technique in order to push Google to show the “latest results for”, display the real-time web, for a certain keyword phrase of my choosing.

Why would you want to do this?
Candidly, I can tell you that doing this, forcing Google to show the “latest results for” a certain keyword phrase when Google currently does not show the real-time web for that search phrase, is advantageous. I have currently not tested it specifically, but most likely if the real-time web is displayed in the Google search results for a certain keyword phrase then the Click-Thru Ratio (CTR) is going to be better than normal. It just stands out more, and more individuals are going to click on it, particularly if it was not previously displaying. And if you are able to control the content that shows up in that little real-time internet box, you may be able to get more relevant traffic to your web site.

So how did I do it?
What is the secret sauce? Currently, manipulating the Google search results in this way requires a combination of particular types effective social media accounts from particular social media websites that are linked together properly. I am not going to specifically address which accounts and which social media web sites are participating, but you may be able to figure it out if you take the time to look. Furthermore, disclosing exactly what it takes is not just not in my best interest right now, particularly because clients are paying for things like this.

What I will say, though, is that Google, just like all of the other search engines out there, does have its defects and holes so to speak, and there still are things that a SEO professional like myself can do to drive more traffic to your website.

Search Engine Optimization: Should You Optimize for the LeapFish Search Engine?

Mark Jackson — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:56:55 +0000

I have written about the LeapFish search engine earlier, as you might recall. I am a fan of LeapFish, not only because LeapFish is the fastest search engine, but because I believe LeapFish is one search engine that might really have a chance of making it to the big-time. Further affirming this, LeapFish continues to grow its user base.

LeapFish anticipates that there will be more than 20 million searches in 2010 at their search engine. They have lately reported strong early adopter growth in 2009, and they have reached a 10,000 Alexa rank in one year.

So, if you are optimizing your web site for search engines, using the latest search engine optimization tips and search engine optimization best practices, should you optimize your web site for the LeapFish.com search engine? Let’s consider the facts, first:

– LeapFish reported that at its current growth rate and with its new partnerships, the search engine expects more than 20 million searches to be performed in 2010.

– In 2009, LeapFish made essential advancements and innovations to its growing search engine including; real time search, deeper search results, personal homepages, content sharing features and proprietary Twitter and Facebook applications, that have facilitated the growth of the search engine from an Alexa traffic ranking of 150,000 to 10,000 in less than one year.

So, should you pay attention to LeapFish and try to optimize your web site’s web pages for LeapFish.com? Not necessarily. Let’s take a look at the LeapFish.com search engine results pages (SERPS) for a keyword search for “search engine optimization”:

LeapFish is what you would call a “meta” search engine. This search engine currently combines search results from Google, Yahoo!, Bing.com, and other sources, such as WikiPedia and even Google News, to deliver search their results. So, if you are already showing up in the top search results for a keyword on any of those search engines, you will most likely also show up in the search results on LeapFish.com for a keyword search.

While I would not spend a whole lot of search engine optimization man power on optimizing your web site for LeapFish specifically, it is important to keep in mind that you have to be aware of one factor. What’s that factor? You need to show up in the top search results on Yahoo!, Google, or Bing.com in order to show up on LeapFish. This is yet another reason to not only make sure that you show up on the first page of Bing.com, Yahoo!, or Google, but you should try to show up in the top 3 search results there.