Conference Buddies

Google for Technophobes: How to Secure Your Number One Spot on Google
David Rodnitzky, Founder, PPC Associates

SEM vs. SEO

SEM is not magic, best practices in SEM can improve your business, but cannot cure your business. If you don’t have a competitive business, no amount of SEM will help you.

The seven habits of highly effective SEM:

1) Search engines.

The big 3 are Google (78%), Yahoo (11%), Bing (8%), the 2nd tier, AOL & Ask.

Google search:

Good: easy, reliable, and large.
Bad: competitive, direct-response, quality score

2) Content:

2 types: content & placement.

Google:

Good: easy, less competitive, latent demand, no quality score.
Bad: inconsistent, complex, requires effort

Google makes 1/3 of their revenue from their content network

Yahoo & MSN (Bing):

Advantages: no as much people are using using it, so it is less competitive. Focus on Google first, then use these (if you have time)

3) Keywords

2003: keywords are king. Long live the long tail
2005: Google introduces “quality score”. Non-relevant keyword buys will cost you a lot
2006: Google expands “broad match’ algorithms

4) Ad text:

Call to action:

• Four human emotions (fear, greed, exclusivity, vanity)
• Targeted to specific ad group
• Test, test, test – CTR x conversion rate, CTR cannot be ignored, Google looks at those
• Do not be clever, it does not work. Tell people exactly what you want them to do

Advanced Ad Text:

• Dynamic keyword insertion
• Display URLs & custom 404 pages
• Google Checkout & PayPal
• Tell the user what to do
• Geo-targeting, maps out your location on Google

5) Landing Pages:

• Never use your homepage as a landing page.
• Always create a specific page, down to the keyword level.

Landing page Success factors:

• Avoid scrolling
• Establish credibility
• Important data should be placed above the fold
• Function over form
• Test, test, test
• Quality score: contact us, privacy policies, about us, site map, load time
• Multiple methods of communication
• Highly targeted to your keyword and ad text

Basic Bidding Calculation:

Reverse engineer to actual profit for every click. If 5% conversion, 1% downloads, with revenue of $5000, margin goal is 20% on advertising. 2000 clicks get 100 downloads = $4 CPC

6) Reporting:

The more data you can get from your campaigns, the better

Search Engines

• API’s are available
• Google desktop editor

Log Files

• Time stamp
• Raw search query

Web Analytics:

• Click path
• Click overlay

7) CRM and Sales Team

• Phone calls
• Offline conversions

What metrics matter for SEM?

Search engine metrics

Targeting:

• Excludes certain areas so you can focus on your neighborhood
• Create negative keywords, (words you don’t want) i.e. people who sell night stands should exclude the word “one”
• Demographic targeting
• IP address exclusion, your own salesperson is clicking on your ad, exclude your own company

Consequences on not targeting:

Competitors will get the traffic instead of you

Bonus: SEO Best Practices

Meta Content:

Meta title, Meta description, Meta keywords

• Title= 145 characters, description = two sentences
• Search engines read from left to right
• Each page needs a separate meta-content
• Be reasonable about the word you are trying to rank for

Relevant Content:

• Write unique content relevant to your business
• Consider keyword density
• Avoid duplicate content
• 150 to 250 words minimum per page

Relevant Linking:

• Get relevant websites to link to your site
• Ask them for specific “anchor text”
• Avoid reciprocal links; trading links is not good practice
• Avoid “link farms” or “text link ads”, avoid buying links because they’re too spammy
• Create good internal linking structure

David Rodnitzky

David@ppcassociates.com
Company: www.ppcassociates.com
Conference: www.CRSconference.com
Networking Group: www.onlineleadgen.org

Questions from audience:

1) Any advice on click fraud? Google can find out and exclude them
2) How much should you spend on a campaign? Not a quick answer. Ask yourself: What is my expected conversion rate? Use a statistical significance calculator.
3) Is it true that if you have a blog, you get ranked higher? Yes, if you provide fresh, updated content that’s relevant. Use Google Webmaster Tools to see how often you are spidered
4) How does Google handle keywords on blogs vs. a regular website? You can create custom meta keywords for your blog to rank. WordPress is better for SEO than Blogger.com