Search Marketing InsiderPay Per Click, Social Media and SEO Strategies – An Internet Marketing Institute Publication

By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing at PPC Summit

Is your landing page working FOR or AGAINST you? Landing pages that don’t convert are a common complaint from PPC marketers–we hear this over and over at our PPC Summit training events. PPC advertisers spend so much time and money to get the click through, but somehow they lose the potential customer in a split second after landing on their web page. We conclude that PPC marketers spend so much time perfecting their pay per click ads that the landing page becomes an afterthought. This is a huge pay per click marketing mistake!

Now is the perfect time to fine-tune your landing pages so that you can gain more customers and put more dollars back in your pocket–especially with the busy holiday season coming up! Following are three things you can do to make your landing pages convert better.

Top 3 Tips to Convert Customers with Effective Landing Pages 
1. Use Effective Calls-to-Action: A rule of thumb in pay per click marketing is to direct potential customers to what you promised them in your ad–the landing page should mirror your ad. If the ad says ‘SAVE 50%’, then it should be on the landing page too. To help entice the visitor to buy your product now, always include a
Call-to-Action like: Order Now & Save 50%, Offer Expires in 24 hrs, Buy One, Get One Free. And make sure you give the potential customer clear direction and tell them how to act in one or two simple steps.

Most search engine marketers use the call of action they’re comfortable with, but you have to understand your customer needs and wants. What it boils down to is putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and finding out which Call-to-Action method works best.

There are a couple of ways to do determine which Call-to-Action works best with your customers: 
    a. You can run a PPC split test campaign. This will give you some concrete data to comb through.
    b. The easiest way is to just ask, ie, put a poll on your site. With free polling software, you can have a poll up and going in minutes and gain invaluable feedback directly from your customers!

2. Ask for a Little; Get a Lot: Don’t require visitors to give a lot of information in order to take advantage of any offer you may be running. In fact, you want to ask for as little info – initially – as possible. Consumers are very wary about giving out personal information. Once you gain their trust over time, you can do more progressive information gathering. This is why you’ll see so many pay per click campaign offers that only request an email address to “Get the free, downloadable report instantly”.

3. Create Customized Landing Pages: Many pay per click marketers use one landing page and let it do all of their selling/converting traffic. But, each landing page should have its own set of keyword phrases and be customized for the particular promotion at hand. Again, this goes back to putting yourself in your customer’s shoes.

While it may be more expedient to use one standard landing page, your customers don’t care about that. It’s important to take the time to create custom landing pages to connect with the buyer looking for the specific product/service in your ad. And creating more than one landing page is most effective in reaching ALL customers, those who may be early on in the buying cycle and those who are ready to buy now. 

Giving your customers what they need–when they need it–is a sure-fire way to higher conversions. This is why it’s important to test, test and test some more in pay per click marketing.

We’d love to hear your landing page success stories, email us at marketing@ppcsummit.com. We’ll try to include a few of your stories in our future newsletters.

Book Review by Mary O’Brien, Founder/Director of PPC Summits

The Truth about Search Engine Optimization by Rebecca Lieb is a great introduction to SEO. It explains the importance of search engine optimization with a simple step-by-step overview approach.

As with anything from Rebecca it is very well written and outlines everything in a very detailed easy to follow formula. Rebecca has been doing SEO for many years now, and she knows what it takes to do it properly and where to invest your time and energy wisely to get the best results.

Each chapter is short and to the point and it’s a great airplane read, as you can grasp one concept and then put it down and pick it up again easily whenever you are interrupted.

It shows how to make your business more visible to potential customers and how to determine what is working and where your website needs to improve.

The book is presented at “51 truths” basically outlining a road map to follow to get the most out of an SEO campaign. It covers all the fundamentals as well as several more advanced topics and contains some actionable tips, tricks and strategies. The “bite-size” approach to each chapter allows you to learn easily as you can review each strategy and then implement it step-by-step.

If you aren’t familiar with SEO, this is a great place to start. It’s not a technical book, it’s more aimed at managers or small business owners that need to figure out what needs to be done and who they need to hire.

The search engines want marketers to believe that SEO is the simplest of marketing science. It’s not. It’s constantly evolving as the Search Engines Change their algorithms and display differing results to the user.

 Rebecca shows that the more a company knows about search, the greater the opportunity in using it properly. Knowledge is power. For Search Engine Optimization knowledge is profit. You ignore it with high risk to your business.

I highly recommend this book as a first book on SEO. You can then delve deeper into other books, blogs and forums, for greater detail and more examples.

The book covers: The basics of SEO, site and page design, keyword development, writing for your users, analytics, page tags, links, local search, blogs and RSS, page rank, outsourcing your SEO, black hat tactics you want to avoid and SEO for mobile and global.

• Doug Mortensen, The Watch Prince
• Hung Tran, Be A Mentor Inc.
• Michael Chepiga, Marketing Solutions
• Scott Mowery, Cleveland Clinic
• Sarah Shepherd, Emergency Medical Products
  
  All copies of Landing Page Optimization include a $25 AdWords coupon – so our winners have been doubly rewarded for their readership.  Congratulations! 

By Nick Herinckx, Account Executive, Anvil Media

Just like peanut butter and jelly, Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) belong together. When done correctly, integrating your PPC and SEO campaigns lead to substantial increases in conversions, a decrease in management costs and a healthy boost in ROI. But unfortunately, they are traditionally managed separately, often with separate goals, budgets and teams. By handling each campaign in a vacuum, managers hinder profitability and literally do the same work twice over.

We’re going to review how to integrate your PPC and SEO campaigns to get the most from your Internet marketing efforts.

Using PPC Keywords to Guide SEO Keyword Choice
One of the most harmful mistakes a company can make with their Internet marketing campaign is to separate their PPC keywords and SEO keywords. Now, PPC keyword research and SEO keyword research are definitely very different. With SEO, it’s important to consider organic competition, link profiles and domain trust while with PPC, ROI and paid competition is your guide. But remember this: SEO can take months while PPC results and data are almost immediate. Because of this, doesn’t it make the most sense to test out keywords using PPC before you spend months working to rank your pages organically? Let’s be honest, with most link building campaigns it can take months or more of hard work before you start seeing traffic, and link building isn’t exactly the most exciting aspect of Internet marketing. The last thing any company needs is to work for months, start ranking for a keyword and then discover that it’s not really profitable or targeted. For this reason, it’s very cost and time effective to test keywords using PPC before attempting to rank for them organically.

So how do you test keywords using PPC? The most important part is to ensure you have conversion tracking set up correctly. Regardless of integration, you need to be tracking your PPC conversions so you can accurately calculate ROI. It doesn’t matter what your conversion point is, as long as it represents one of the main goals for your website and as long as it doesn’t change throughout testing. Once you have conversion tracking established, simply create your PPC campaigns how you normally would and let them run for a month. At the end of that month, you are going to have a solid idea of which keywords perform the best and lead the most conversions. These are the keywords you should strongly consider for your SEO campaigns, as they have proven their profitability.

Using PPC & Landing Page Copy to Guide Website Copy
Most companies choose a target market and then develop messaging that best resonates with their audience. But even still, small copy changes and headline changes can have a dramatic impact on bounce rates and conversion rates. This is most evident with PPC ads, where you are able to see which ad text works best for certain keywords (leads to a high CTR) and which landing page headlines lead to the lowest bounce rate and highest conversion rate. Many companies will test PPC copy and implement results separately from the main website, and this a big mistake. If certain messaging resonates well with your PPC traffic, and the traffic is being generated from relevant keywords, then make absolutely sure you integrate that messaging into your main website. I did this with one of my own clients and saw organic bounce rates decrease 10% immediately after implementing the copy that worked well for my PPC ads.

Content Network Performance and Your Link Building Campaigns
Do you advertise on content networks? If so, then you should be monitoring the quality of the traffic coming from these campaigns and specifically, which websites drive that traffic. What often happens is that content network ads run on tons of sites and generate millions of impressions, but only a handful of those sites will be the ones that drive the best performing traffic. I can’t stress enough how important and valuable this information is to your organic link building campaigns. The top PPC ad platforms have methods to see which content network websites drive the most targeted traffic, and you should take this information and use it to reach out to these sites individually to request a link or establish some sort of offline relationship. If these sites drive quality traffic with your content network ads, they will most certainly do the same with a more comprehensive and permanent presence.

So, have you integrated your PPC and SEO campaigns? If not, consider the above ideas and get your SEO and PPC managers working together. Doing so will save much time and effort and will certainly boost ROI. Remember: PPC and SEO belong together like peanut butter and jelly.

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Nick Herinckx is an Account Executive and professional Internet marketer at Anvil Media, a strategic Internet marketing agency. Nick works with a variety of companies including Axway, Trend Micro and Jones and Bartlett Publishers to increase their Internet visibility and generate a positive ROI from their Internet marketing efforts. With both a background in coding and general marketing, Nick specializes in SEO, PPC management, website code optimization and website promotion strategies.

Connect with Nick via his LinkedIn profile, or email him at nick@anvilmediainc.com.

Drive Best-in-Class Results by Integrating Your PPC with Other Online Marketing Channels

By Mary Huffman, Ionic Media

In the first two articles in this series, we reviewed a variety of online marketing vehicles:

• Pay-Per-Click search marketing (PPC)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Display advertising (e.g., banners)
• Email (to house list)
• Mobile
• Online PR
• Blogging
• Viral /social media
• Email (to rented list)
• Affiliate marketing

Now that we have looked at each marketing vehicle individually, we would like to explore why you should and how you can effectively integrate your PPC marketing with other online media.

First: The Big Kahuna of Integration: PPC and SEO
• People regularly ask us which type of search marketing they should use to drive site traffic and the answer is, “Both.”
• Having multiple listings on the same keyword is mutually reinforcing (people believe you must be relevant!).  So, users end up clicking more than if you had only one PPC or organic listing.  The result is that you get more than your fair share of clicks
• PPC works now, you can control it, and you can always run it profitably – even if it does require cash outflow
• Organic works over the long haul, brings in targeted traffic cheaply, but is not controllable

Second: Integrate PPC with Your Brand Building Efforts
• While it is an effective online vehicle, PPC is not a demand generator so you have to drive demand with other media
• That said, PPC is great as the “catcher” of other efforts to drive demand
• Use display advertising, PR, e-mail, and offline to drive buzz and generate demand
• Ensure PPC is in place to capture all of the opportunity you have created with the other media
• A very large company (to remain nameless) ran an expensive Super Bowl ad but failed to integrate it with a search campaign.  While search volume on target keywords spiked an astonishing amount after the ad ran, the advertiser was nowhere in the search results and clever competitors ran special ad copy to capture the opportunity.  Don’t let this happen to you.

Third: Integrate PPC with Your Direct Response Efforts
• PPC is in itself a great direct response vehicle and can deliver even more value when integrated with other direct response vehicles
• The bottom line is that having multiple channels with which you touch your prospects is smart (hint: they convert better)
• When you run an e-mail or mobile campaign, be sure to have an equivalent PPC campaign in place to capture searchers driven from other media

Get the Right Tracking in Place – It Makes a Difference
• Assists are important and can be an important part of the equation showing which media is effective
• Ad serving allows you to track across PPC and display advertising (e.g., DART for Advertisers and Atlas are two ad serving systems)
• Yahoo Analytics allows you to track PPC click assists with e-mail campaigns
• Yahoo Analytics allows you to track PPC click assists to SEO clicks but not vice versa

The benefits of marketing integration are clear and, in most cases, easy to capture.

We hope this three-part series has been helpful in laying the foundation for you to explore the variety of online media that exist to help make your business succeed…and to do it smartly.  Good luck!

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Mary Kingsley Huffman is a co-founder and Executive Vice President at Ionic Media, a firm with deep experience driving bottom-line results for clients using search and online marketing. Previously, she was Director of Marketing at Overture Services where she was responsible for the acquisition marketing and communication departments, leading all advertiser acquisition efforts and customer communications. Prior to Overture, Mary was an Engagement Manager in the London office of McKinsey & Company, specializing in marketing solutions. Mary has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA from UCLA.

The Truth About Search Engine Optimization, by SEO expert Rebecca Lieb, is a quick, complete, easy-to-use guide to help anyone optimize Web content for better search engine placement.  

FIVE COPIES will be GIVEN AWAY to PPC Insider readers. 

CLICK HERE TO WIN!

Readers will learn how to set realistic goals for search optimization, attract qualified traffic, incorporate search engine optimization into both new sites and redesigns, write for users, implement search-friendly content management, create metatags that work, and budget and manage search optimization projects.

By Heather Lutze, Founder, Findability Group

Mention the words SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) to most businesspeople and you’re sure to hear stories of frustration. Either they’ve handed their company’s web site SEO and PPC activities over to an agency and have little idea what’s going on with either, or they’ve “done it themselves” and have had lackluster results at best.

This is unfortunate, because SEO and PPC are the foundation of any good web site. Think of it like building a house. If you build the roof before you build the foundation, you really don’t have a house. Likewise, if you launch a web site or engage in fad web marketing techniques (such as Facebook, Twitter, etc.) without solid SEO and PPC in place, you’re wasting both your time and money—two things that are precious in the business world.

Complicating the whole SEO and PPC experience is that many businesspeople are so determined to please Google and appear under certain ego-focused keywords that they neglect their customers and how they search for products and services. For example, suppose you have a web site that sells high-end gas grills. As such, you’re fixated on seeing your company come up under a general search with the keyword phrase “gas grills.” But that’s an informational, ego-driven keyword phrase, not a selling keyword phrase. When people are ready to buy a gas grill, they don’t search with vague keywords. Rather, they type in something like “Viking stainless steel outdoor propane grill model 5529.” Now that’s a buying keyword phrase. And face it…at the end of the day marketing is about getting customers in the door and paying your bills. It’s not about seeing your company under a general keyword and pleasing your ego.

When you stop trying to please Google and start pleasing and connecting with your customers, you will end the frustration and will start getting the results you want from your SEO and PPC campaigns. Use the following tips to make connecting with your customers and maximizing your SEO and PPC a profitable endeavor.

1 Use PPC first to fish for keywords.
Fishing for keywords is a like throwing out a big net into the ocean. The more narrow or refined the holes are in your net, the better the quality of fish you’re going to pull back. When you’re new to PPC and SEO, you don’t know which keywords will work for your web site. At this stage you need to balance the general, obvious, and informational keywords with the longer keyword phrases that will attract customers who are ready to take action. Therefore, start slowly with long keyword phrases and then shorten your phrases over time (open up the holes in your net) to let more general traffic in. Over a testing period of at least 30 to 90 days you can see a pattern of which keywords give you business and which are a waste.

The general rule of thumb is to start with approximately 500 keywords. As you see what works, you can narrow your keyword list. Also, your number of keywords depends on your industry, your company, and the length of time you’ve been testing keywords. Some companies who have years of testing and research under their belt have a finely narrowed list of only ten keywords, while others have a keyword list in the hundreds of thousands. The bottom line is that you don’t know what your company’s findability is until you start throwing out that net and tracking your PPC results. So don’t rush into a web site redesign or other web marketing activities until you have tested in PPC.

2 Apply your top performing PPC keywords to your SEO campaigns.
Take the knowledge from your test period, which again is a minimum of 30 to 90 days, and apply what you learn about top performing keywords to your SEO campaigns. The goal is that you don’t waste time and money on SEO terms that will never help you. Therefore, as you analyze your PPC information, look at which keywords are getting clicks and which ones lead to a conversion or a purchase. A conversion could be someone downloading a white paper, filling out a contact form, taking a survey, etc. It’s some activity that gets people involved in your site. A purchase, as the term implies, is when someone buys something from you. Find out how many clicks it takes for someone to say “yes” to your offer and make a buying decision. You may find that it takes three to four clicks before someone takes action.

3 Carefully group or theme your SEO keywords by page content.
The prime objective of SEO is to prove to Google (or any other search engine) that the content on your site is worthy to be placed on the front page under a particular keyword. “Worthy” means you have the content on the page in such a fashion that Google sees repetition of the keyword, either in your text or in your code. This proves to the search engine that you belong under a certain keyword.

The challenge is that many business people have a fruit salad mentality. In other words, even though each page of their site deals with a particular topic or theme (and should therefore have page specific keywords), the keywords for every page are identical. So even though one page is dedicated to bananas, one page to apples, and one page to oranges, every page has keywords that relate to all fruits. This confuses search engines because they don’t know what you really are. As a result, your site never gets found.

Rather than think “the more keywords the better,” think in terms of compartmentalizing your keywords. So if one page covers who you are as a company, that page should only have keywords about your company. Likewise, each product page should have keywords that apply to that specific product only. Those companies that clearly define who they are by keyword on a page by page basis win.

4 Submit only once to search engines.
While Google and other search engines will find some of your pages naturally, if you want to be sure they find every page of your site then you have to manually submit it to them. However, you don’t want to submit to them every day. Once they have spidered your site, you don’t need to submit it again unless you add a lot of new pages or make significant revisions. Many online submission tools sell the idea that you should submit your site every day. Such an approach only ends up frustrating Google rather than helping your company. So let the search engines know you’re there, but don’t harass them.

5 Get great inbound links to your site.
Google looks for two types of links. The first is a non-reciprocating inbound link from a reputable source, such as an industry association, the Better Business Bureau, etc. Since a link from another site is essentially an endorsement, getting a link from a reputable source—one where you don’t link back to them—is the gold standard of links. It’s not an “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch my back” sort of arrangement, and Google likes that.

The second type of link is a reciprocated link, meaning you link back and forth with the company or person. Such links are good, although the search engines don’t place as much value on them. Realize that if you’re an authority you are going to link to others, and Google expects this. However, when you have 800 reciprocating in every category under the sun, you send a red flag that your site isn’t of value. Any link you have needs to be appropriate and industry related; therefore, only link to people and partners you know and that make sense for your site.

6. Make Your Web Site Work Smarter
Only after you take the needed steps to maximize your SEO and PPC, which typically takes a year or more to fine-tune, should you redesign or relaunch your site, or engage in trendy marketing endeavors. While SEO and PPC are in-depth and intense activities for a business to undertake, they are the foundation of any good web site that effectively reaches the company’s target market and coverts prospects into paying customers. So whether you decide to tackle the project yourself or hire an agency to help you, always be aware of and stay on top of the basic tenets of SEO and PPC so you can get the results you want.

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Heather Lutze is the author of the newly released book, “The Findability Formula: The Simple and Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing” (Wiley and Sons). As a nationally recognized speaker and author, she has spent the last 10 years as CEO of Findability Group – a Search Engine Marketing firm that works with companies to attain maximum Internet exposure. Heather is also a speaker for Pay Per Click Summit, and previously spent two years training on Yahoo! Search Marketing. For more information, visit www.FindabilityGroup.com.