Before targeting a new keyword vertical, it’s a good idea to evaluate the competitiveness of the market. This will give you a sense of how difficult it will be to rank for that term in organic search, and/or how costly it will be to bid on that term in your PPC campaigns.

This is done by analyzing keyword competition. By estimating how much time and effort it may take to achieve top rankings for particular keywords or search terms, search marketers can better gauge where to spend their time. So how do you judge keyword competition? What are the factors involved in competitive keyword analysis?

Here are five tips on evaluating keyword competition to get you started.

1. Check the age of competitive domains

One indication of how difficult it might be to rank highly for a keyword phrase is the age of the domains of sites that are already ranking at the top of the SERPs. WHOIS is a tool that allows you to look up domain registration info, so you can see how long the top 5 or 10 sites that rank for your chosen keyword have been around. Older domains tend to have a much longer tail of inbound links, and it can be difficult to compete with trusted domains that have been around for many years.

2. Use Google search operators

The search operators “allintitle” and “inanchor” can provide a good indication of how many pages are already being optimized for a particular search query. Google allintitle:”keyword” to find pages with the keyword in the title tag and inanchor:”keyword” to find incoming links that use the keyword in the anchor text. The more pages these searches return, the more competitive the keyword.

3. Check the top results for home pages

Are the results in the top 10 mostly home pages or deeper pages? For example, for a keyword like “running shoes” you might see mostly home pages on the first SERP (such as Nike’s and Reebok’s home pages), whereas for a keyword like “how to write a wedding toast” you might see deeper pages, forum threads, and blog posts. If the top results are mostly home pages, you’re probably looking at a very competitive keyword.

4. Run it through a keyword suggestion tool

Do a search on your keyword in a tool like WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool.

In general, the more keyword suggestions, variations, and related results the tool returns, the more competitive the keyword. The relative frequency, monthly search volume and competition columns in our tool provide further signals of the keyword’s competition (the latter two are only available in the paid version of the tool).

5. Gauge advertising interest

By looking at the sponsored ads for a given keyword, you can get a sense of the competition. If the advertising space is full on the first page of the SERPs and extends past the first page, and if the ads aren’t based on broad match (in other words, the ads are linked to targeted domains, not general ones like Target and Amazon), this is a strong indication of a competitive keyword.

These are some tips to give you an idea of where you stand when it comes to tackling a new keyword space. There are also plenty of tools devoted specifically to keyword research and analysis, some free and some paid. Competitive tools can make a nice complement to straight-up keyword suggestion tools. Give them a shot!

About the Author
Elisa Gabbert is the Content Development Manager at WordStream Inc., a provider of PPC management software and services as well as a new Keyword Research Suite. Elisa is a frequent contributor to the WordStream Internet Marketing Blog and you can follow he

Do you have one of *those* websites? They get traffic or links, but don’t convert. It could indicate a huge problem at the foundation of your SEO efforts — your keywords.

When Customers Don’t Know They Need You

Here’s the scenario:

Background: A client has a cloud computing service, ideal for SMBs that collaborate, travel, or work in multiple locations. This audience is busy and passionate, but lacks patience and tech skills.

The problem: The site is optimized and has an extensive marketing strategy. It generates traffic, but not profits.

The cause: The keywords they chose ([cloud computing service] and various versions of it) have good numbers, reasonable competition, and describe their services well, but their potential clients don’t use them. Instead, the target audience uses question queries and looks for general solutions to their problems, not a specific product.

The solution: Target the right people, with the right pages, using the right terms.

Know Your Main Markets

The first step? Decide:

Who visits your site?
Why are they visiting?
What words do they use?

Generally, the visitors you identify can be divided into three distinct audiences:

Group 1 — Potential Buyers — In our example, this group is tired of inefficient business systems and uses queries like [collaboration tools] to find solutions. In fact, buying comes second. Note: customers generally don’t link back.

Group 2 — Related Businesses — This crowd routinely writes and recommends your competitors, as well as similar services and tools. They rarely buy, but they do give you links and reach, so be sure to offer basic product details and optimize for keywords like [cloud computing]. Don’t forget: They normally link to your home page.

Group 3 — Buzz Builders — Those who provide services/products for your business, the media, current clients and others who use you to make money/get attention fall into this category. This group searches using basic queries (like [cloud computing]), while looking for information about the service, news, inspiration, and real-world examples.

Creating Your Site Blueprint

Next, compare your keywords to your sales funnels. Here’s what I mean:

Customer Sales Funnels (Group 1) — The shorter your sales funnel, the better your conversion rates will be. This tells us the “how it works” page, case studies, and blog are going to be the best landing pages for interested buyers.

Enhance this effect by optimizing these pages for client-based keywords ([collaboration tools] and [run software online], for example), instead of your home page. It’s one less step, and they’re far more likely to get to your money pages. (Money pages are where actual conversions take place, such as the services page, if you use buy buttons, or the contact page.)

The blog should also center on client-based keyword phrases and cover many of the problems and issues potential customers encounter. You’ll capture visitors here and push them back up to the services or contact page.

Link Building Funnels (Group 2) — Your home page gets the most links, and related businesses do the most linking, so it only makes sense to use group 2 terms ([cloud computing]) here. The same goes for your services and about pages.

Marketing and Media Funnels (Group 3) — As mentioned before, this group looks for information they can use to sell you something or to include in their own products, so they’ll need the right content. That’s where your press room, case studies, and contact page come in. Optimize them for group 3 keywords, and you’re on your way.

Creating Your Marketing Content

Use these same rules to create your marketing content. Make lists of topics, interests, needs, and issues under each group and combine them with the appropriate keywords to create your marketing strategy.

For example, if you’re looking to generate links, create content and marketing campaigns around the keywords for group 2. Go to your analytics and find out which of your keywords generated the highest conversions. The same goes for garnering media coverage or for making sales.

Targeting your content strategy and keyword research sounds difficult, but you’ll find the majority of the work is in the planning and research stage. Do it once and you can base the rest of your marketing, content, and expansions on it. The results will be more than worth the effort.

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Angie Nikoleychuk is the Senior Copywriter, Strategist, and Consultant for Angie’s Copywriting Service. She’s passionate about SEO, marketing, and behaviour. She loves a good marketing mystery, a great cup of coffee, and is an avid Twitter user.

An industry best practice for structuring a paid search campaign is the implementation of highly targeted and relevant ad groups. This is a part of the ‘before the click’ process that can easily be controlled and maintained. If this is not happening you have bigger issues than what the rest of this discussion is about. That being said, separated out into its own stop along the entire value stream, the paid search campaign is a relatively easy thing to manage and manage well. However, as we will see, the paid search campaign is in the middle of the value stream and can only sustain long lasting success if the upstream and downstream processes are completely aligned to serve the customer with the best user experience.

Upstream From the Paid Search Campaign

Before a paid search campaign can take form and become effective a search team needs to have certain basic information from the client who is further upstream in the process than the paid search team is. The following are key points about how to be most effective and what to avoid further upstream from paid search.

1. Goals and KeyPerformance Indicator’s (KPI’s) - To begin, clients should have a good idea as to why they are getting into the paid search game or how they’d like to grow their current paid search program. Clients should know the goals they want to achieve, their KPI’s, and their tolerance/risk for testing in order to learn. Paid search experts can help set expectations and guide clients in understanding what the potential may be for reaching certain goals, however, the initial goal setting should come from further upstream. Since both parties are working toward the same end results, ideally these are collaborative goals agreed upon by the expanded team before implementation or optimization happens.

2. Messaging Information- If the paid search program has already been implemented or is in the process of being developed, one of the most critical components of a paid search campaign is the text ad. And it’s just not the relevance of the text ad for Quality Score or how targeted it is, but more so in what the text ad messaging offers. Is there a generic call to action or is there some amazing discount or benefit that only your client can offer potential customers?

In some cases differentiated messaging can be found on a client website that can be worked into the ad creative copy. In many cases, on large e-commerce sites where there are hundreds of vendors and thousands of products, hunting and pecking for sales, discounts, and offers is not an efficient use of time. These offers, sales, and discounts should be made available to the paid search team in the form of a merchandising calendar so pro-active planning can occur.

3. Internal Communication- At times there are internal communication issues outside the paid search team that occur farther upstream that can have a significant negative impact on the success of paid search. Whether it’s an in-house paid search team or an agency there can be multiple layers of people and departments involved. If those parties farther upstream fail to communicate effectively, the lack of communication can trickle farther downstream and limit the effectiveness of the paid search team. This not only adds stress to the relationship between the paid search team and the departments farther upstream, but in effect, when the lack of communication and alignment reaches the paid search team and they are left to work with limited information this will have a negative impact on potential customers – the people you are trying to convert.

The impact of upstream goals, information or lack of information can vary but can mostly be managed to a certain level of success. If upstream processes are not fully aligned with everyone involved, the sustainability of long term growth may be at risk.

Downstream From the Paid Search Campaign

As part of the development, implementation, and continuous improvement of a paid search initiative, there are a couple of ‘post-click’ components that occur on the website that have an even greater significance on the success and growth of the account than those farther upstream in the process.

1. Does the Website Work/Are the Landing Pages Valid – This downstream process is the most critical in the mix because this one comes closest to customers you are trying to convert. First and foremost your website should work 100% of the time. Beyond that it should be user friendly providing the best experience possible for customers. Once customers have decided that your paid search ad matches closest with what they want to buy or it provides a solution to their questions, you are on the way to providing a high level of satisfaction for customers.

Not only should the website work and that its usability and navigation be at its prime, but the landing pages selected must be functioning and relevant. In reference to the large paid search program above, if you tag keywords and/or ad creatives with destination URLs it is critical to have open communication (from farther upstream) as to when those URLs change due to inventory levels or other website structure changes. If the landing page has been updated or the product no longer exists and there is not a redirect in place until the paid search URL can be updated, customers landing on error pages or some other random page is never a good thing. This not only impacts customers’ experiences, but also can have Quality Score implications.

2. Proper Implementation of Web Analytics Tracking & Tags – We all know paid search and all other online marketing channels are usually inaccurate within an acceptable range. That’s just the nature of this industry. For some reason website analytics tagging is the search industries bane of existence and inevitably problems occur when web analytics site tagging is not implemented correctly the first time. The other problem is when URL tagging parameters are not used correctly and used as a temporary work-around to fix a problem farther upstream instead of fixing the root cause of the problem. These types of downstream problems create additional challenges in reporting and decision making farther upstream in the process.

Regardless of upstream or downstream from paid search, the entire value stream should be considered as a total system.  When all of these processes are aligned there is a greater opportunity for success of the paid search account. The alignment of the entire value stream also builds trust between all those involved creating a more productive team for long term sustainability.

Let us know what you think — fee free to add your comments, ideas… below!

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Matt LeVeque is the Founder & President of SEM Science Consulting, LLC and Senior Member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).

Google AdWords can have numerous benefits if planned, executed, and monitored properly. There are also pitfalls to be avoided. This article will cover important things to avoid as well as effective steps for implementing an effective AdWords campaign.

Step 1: Define attainable goals

A team seeking to maximize the use of AdWords will identify and articulate realistic goals, which might include:

1)    Increasing donation volume

2)    Recruiting more volunteers

3)    Raising brand awareness

Step 2: Appeal to the relevant geographic and/or demographic targets.

An effective campaign should speak to a defined market. For tracking purposes, duplicating or moving around keywords once “up and running” should be avoided. A feature called Ad Scheduler can be set up using either Accelerated or Standard Delivery (evenly delivered ads throughout the day).

Step 3: Develop tightly-themed Ad Groups

The more relevant the ad text, the higher the CTR (click through rate), the Quality Score and the Page Rank that will be achieved. As for Ad Text Optimization, place catchy calls to action and inter- capitalize your display URL.  For instance, instead of having www.marketingbydeepak.com show http://www.marketingbydeepak.com/.  In addition, rotate various ads and you can track individual performance.

Step 4: Research keywords

This requires serious consideration; an organization can benefit from using the Google Suggest Tool to find relevant keywords.  Trying to think like the target demographic may result in coming up with keywords from the User’s perspective.  Be sure to look at all match types – broad, phrase and exact.

Step 5: Landing Page Optimization.

Most people have shared the frustrating experience of clicking on an ad only to be led to page that has nothing to do with the product/service searched for.  There are numerous resources available on Landing Page Designs online.

The bottom line is that the marketer can have great goals, campaigns, ad groups and keywords; however, if these cannot be converted to close the sale, the effort has been fruitless.

AdWords Campaign Cautions and Pitfalls
Earlier, it was mentioned that there are pitfalls to be avoided. Chief among these is: Google AdWords cannot be done alone.  AdWords is only one aspect of Social Media, which is a marketing tactic.  Any business or organization seeking to leverage the social media tools, at a minimum, will establish a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook and show up in organic search results in addition to running AdWords.

Statistics indicate that, when people do searches, 75% of the time they click on the organic content found within the search engine results page (SERP).  Only 25% click what they see on the sponsored links section.   Users tend to trust the organic content more because of the independent review.  An organization that shows up in both areas has a great deal in its favor!

Branding should not be underestimated.  An organization that is well-branded and enjoys good press is more likely to perform better than an up-and-comer.

Remember to use Keyword Research, the Google Suggestion Tool, and to brainstorm with your Team or others to generate novel ideas.  Even funny-sounding search terms can yield surprising results!

Campaigns that are up and running can benefit from the reporting features and Google Analytics to monitor and track campaign performance.  Every so often, adjust a campaign by eliminating low performers, refining keywords, and ads themselves.  Repeat this process often.

As with other aspects of your ad campaign, budget how much to spend on AdWords.  Calculate enough allowance for your industry.  Competitors may jump in and bid up the price for keywords.  Determine a realistic ROI. Team members should take the time to read your reports and work with AdWords as seriously as they would a direct mail campaign.

What are the challenges you face with your AdWords campaigns? Please add your comments below.

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Deepak Gupta is VP of Marketing for Help My Resume, a Florida-based non-profit and is the Principal of Marketing By Deepak Consulting Group. Prior to jumping into the inbound marketing world, Deepak worked in database marketing and analytics where he developed marketing initiatives for brands like the Auto Club, State Farm, UPS, Hooked On Phonics, Comcast, AT&T, World Wrestling Entertainment, ESPN, Nickelodeon and other related brands.

The countdown to Christmas is on and the holiday shopping season is now in full swing, with Cyber Monday just barely in the rear view mirror. The good news is that there is still a lot that can be done to take advantage of the increase in consumer spending this month, whether you started planning in July or are just now thinking about how to grow sales this holiday. Here are 5 tips and tricks that any Pay Per Click (PPC) advertiser should consider when maximizing AdWords for the holiday sales rush.

1.       Budget Wisely. For many online retailers, traffic and sales volume can go through the roof come holiday time. This is because more people are searching and more of those searchers have the intent to buy. Don’t let your ‘regular’ budgets limit your profits. If you are obtaining or exceeding your ROI goals, there is no reason to keep your campaign budgets capped! This is one of the easiest ways to increase your PPC profits this time of year.  Review your campaign budgets and ROI and where it makes financial sense increase those daily campaign budgets to levels that ensure your ads aren’t missing out on impressions.

 In AdWords, you can look to the metric called “Lost IS (budget)” (“IS” stands for “Impression Share”) to tell you how much traffic you might be missing out on. In the AdWords interface, edit the columns of data you are viewing and select this metric. If your “Lost IS (budget)” is 25%, then that means that you could be receiving 25% more impressions if your budgets were 25% higher.

2.       Plan Your Promotions, Have Ads at the Ready. Make the management of your holiday PPC efforts effortless – by having all of your promotions laid out for the holiday season, you can also ensure that you have PPC ads ready to support those promotions. By creating ads ahead of time and including the ads in your campaigns on “Paused” status before the promotion is live you allow time for the ads to be approved by editorial and limit the risk of any lack of visibility when your promotion goes live. I generally recommend adding new ads a week in advance just to be sure there aren’t any editorial issues. Then when it comes time to promote your sale or special offer all you have to do is switch your old ads off and flip your new ads on.

 3.       Know Your Competitor’s Deals. Holiday shoppers are a fickle bunch – always looking for the best deal. This is why it’s so critical to make sure your promotions are just as attractive as your competitors. Be sure to consider the total price of the transaction, including shipping. A comparable “30% off regular price” will not be as enticing if your standard shipping is $10 and your competitor is offering reduced or free shipping on top of the 30% off price tag. Monitor your competitor’s ads and websites and have the flexibility to adjust your promotions accordingly.

 4.       Leverage Sitelinks. Many retailers have a lot of different promotions, offers and sales taking place this time of year – and with only a very limited amount of space in the typical PPC ad, it can be difficult or impossible to make sure searchers are fully informed. The AdWords ad extension called “Sitelinks” can add up to 140 additional extra characters to your text ad space. Add up to ten Sitelinks per campaign that call out, for example, your Free Shipping offer, Clearance Sale, New Products, lowered prices on specific products in your inventory, or Gift Guides. AdWords will display up to four Sitelinks in an ad at a time. Sitelinks will not only help to make your promotions visible, but your ads themselves are often more visible and can generate high click-through-rates.

 In this example, Moonstruck Chocolates is using Sitelinks to merchandise a variety of holiday-related product offerings. A range of price-points are included in order to speak to a range of shopper’s budgets.

5.       Plan for Promotions After December 25^th. This is something that retailers often forget about – some of the biggest shopping days of the year are actually AFTER Christmas. This is driven by gifts that shoppers received such as gift cards, cash or products such as a Wii that will require the purchase of additional games and accessories. Post-Christmas shopping is also driven by deal-seekers heading out in droves to take advantage of all of the clearance sales that traditionally take place at this time. Be sure to promote your post-holiday sales in PPC; don’t just revert to your ‘regular’ ad messaging. Make your website’s Clearance or Sale section extra prominent, but be sure to keep tabs on inventory – if pickings are slim, then users can get frustrated and leave the site without making a purchase.

Even though the holiday shopping season is quickly counting down, PPC advertisers still have time to grow sales and profits. Make it a happy holiday for your PPC campaigns by implementing any or all of these five easy tips.

Let us know what is working or not for your holiday AdWords campaigns. Feel free to comment!

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Leisa Hall is an Account Director at Anvil Media, Inc. – a search engine marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. Leisa directs Search Engine Marketing strategy primarily for B2C clients ranging in size from start-up to Fortune 500.

When creating a pay per click campaign, marketers commonly focus on things like keywords, match types, cost per click bids, organizing the campaign into ad groups, target cost per acquisition, and other mechanics of PPC campaigns. But in concentrating on the setup and execution of their pay per click campaigns, too many marketers don’t spend enough time thinking about their PPC landing pages – some don’t even setup customized landing pages at all!

So here are the top landing page mistakes to avoid when creating pages for your pay per click campaigns:

1) Not having a landing page. I know I already mentioned this, but this is the single biggest mistake you can make. Many marketers who are first getting into PPC advertising think it’s adequate to drive traffic to their website. Get people to your home page, and they’ll know what to do, right?

Wrong. When people are typing a search into Google, Bing, or another search engine, they are looking for an immediate answer to a specific query. If they click on your ad, they’re expecting a question to the answer they asked – now. They’re not going to dig through your website to find what they’re looking for. Customized landing pages answer the question the searcher was asking quickly and directly.

2) Not having CUSTOMIZED landing pages. If you’re running a large pay per click campaign or multiple PPC campaigns, chances are you are covering a multitude of keywords and have numerous ads. If possible and appropriate, you should be setting up customized landing pages with different offers that are aligned with the ads and keywords used in individual ad groups and campaigns.

This can help improve your quality scores for Google AdWords, which, in turn, can help bring down your cost per click. By ensuring your landing page offer and wording are closely aligned with your ads, you should also improve your conversion rate.

3) Not having a conversion goal. Too many marketers do setup landing pages, but fail to setup a conversion goal. What is a conversion? Simply put, a conversion is when a visitor to your landing page takes the action you want them to take.

This could be downloading an ebook or white paper, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a webinar, and so on. If there isn’t an action you’re trying to get visitors to take, why are you paying to get them to your website? Tracking conversions lets you know how effective your PPC campaigns are. Make sure you define what your conversion is and setup conversion code on your landing pages to track when visitors complete your defined goal.

4) Not tracking return on investment. While establishing a dollar value for conversions can sometimes seem arbitrary, doing so can help you manage your PPC campaigns and determine whether or not they are cost effective. While the dollar value of some conversions might be easy to calculate (buying a product, registering for a paid webinar), others can be more difficult (signing up for a newsletter or downloading a free white paper).

Do your best to realistically calculate the value of your conversions and use this to compute ROI on pay per click campaigns.

5) Not testing, testing, testing. Another major mistake many online marketers make is failing to constantly test and improve the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns. There are many landing page optimization tools out there to help you do this.

If you’re not continually testing and optimizing your landing pages, you’re letting potential customers get away and leaving money on the table. Testing different offers, landing page designs, copy, and images can help you improve the conversion rate on your pay per click campaigns.

Everybody has been new to Internet marketing at some point, but that doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same mistakes as everyone else. Instead, learn from the common pay per click landing page mistakes explained here.

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Jason Mikula works as a freelance search engine marketing and social media marketing consultant.  Jason has experience working with pay per click, search engine optimization, and email and web marketing.

Think about the hot-button keywords for online businesses. Many will say “need traffic”. Others say “more leads”, “improve rankings” or “need new website.” I say conversions, i.e. the result that is recorded after the visitor performs an event and actions preceding that. This is what smart marketers work on.

Recently, I spoke to the owner of an online health-care business. He needed to ‘improve’ his website with a new look. After a brief discussion, he shifted his thinking. He didn’t need a prettier site, but rather – to focus on tracking, measuring and tuning the traffic, conversion and funnel experience that the visitor had with his website.

Your website – a performance machine.

To build a better performing website – you must build trust, authority – both in the users and search engines’ eyes. And, it helps if you create compelling, actionable pages that convert.

However, this article is not about detailed conversion strategies, per se. It’s about building website content with which users engage. And, it is about creating an experience for the visitor that compels action, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business.

I have used these strategies to more than triple traffic in a short period of time using content marketing and SEO friendly copy. The bounce rate moved from approx. 90% to about 22% in the same period, as well as doubling the lead count, and increasing time on site to an average of 9 minutes.

Quality content – how to create it.

What is the word that you hear most often at SEO conferences? Answer: Links. It makes sense, since that’s at the heart of search engine’s ranking algorithm, and in specific, Google. It is the power of “votes” for your website (pages, actually) from others across the Internet. You get the benefit (depending on the link attribution) of ‘link juice’, overall visibility and, if done right – more web traffic.

To develop quality content, several criterions exist. One important aspect is about matching your content to your audience.

You can do this by collecting information for topics from:

• Keyword research (Google Keyword Tool, Wordtracker.com, Keyworddiscovery.com)
• Competitive research (Search engines, spyfu.com, semrush.com)
• Links research (OpensiteExplorer.org)
• Popularity research (Google trends, digg.com, amazon.com, shopping.com, search.twitter.com)

Once you have data from this research, you’ll be able to build the articles and a content calendar for your website. You’ll have a never ending stream of ideas from which to build. You can even outsource this research if you don’t have time. Check http://www.elance.com/ to start. (Footnote: I recommend using a blog – WordPress – to facilitate the organization and output of this new, steady content. Soon, I’m launching a new search-engine friendly WordPress system with built in content marketing solutions. Feel free to check http://www.simplewebsitepress.com/ for more information).

Visitors and links attraction.

Now that you have your content factory constructed, users should find you as you deploy and get a few links. However, you must expand your strategy to capture a broader net. These next steps will help your content get wings, and will provide much needed links for the authority building.

While some would say, start with a PPC campaign, find out what works first – and then apply wider strategies later, I say you can expand using social media with very little effort and cost too. Reaching out to other bloggers in your space will be important, don’t forget that. Here’s what to do:

Step 1: Convert your text into video format. Upload to Youtube. Use Tubemogul for wider syndication. Use keywords in Titles, URLs early in descriptions, add full text there also.

Step 2: Build an audio version. Audacity.com is free to record if you do it yourself. Or, use transcription services (also elance.com). I hear good things about castingwords.com. Distribute to podcasting / voice directories. Try itunes.com.

Step 3: Create a list of places to “tweet” and distribute the (links) multiple formats of content into the social media sphere – start with Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin. (Footnote: don’t spam, join the social communities, and become a listener first). Include rich media into press releases. Try a social media release with prweb.com.

These tactics work, and Google loves multi-media and video. It’s easier to get listed in organic (universal search) results with video.

Develop a process for yourself, and keep doing it consistently. I spend most of my time in research and RSS feeds, and content is built in 10-20 minutes on average.

Provide something of immediate value, offer downloads and give products (when you can) away for free. Don’t forget to build out a great relationship via your follow-up email marketing (did you get their name & email?). Learn their behaviors from that list over time. Send information they care about, and drive them back to your money site.

Let us know how you are creating an experience to compel visitor actions, referrals and admiration (fans) for your business. Feel free to comment!

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Jon Rognerud is the SEO columnist, blogger at Entrepreneur Magazine, author of the “Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Optimization” (Entrepreneur Press/McGraw-Hill) and writes on his own blog at http://www.jonrognerud.com. Visit now to get more cool information on internet marketing, SEO, PPC, Social Media, content, traffic, lead strategies – and learning more about the human challenges of being an Entrepreneur. You are not alone.

Finding new customers is a critical objective for any business. No matter what kind of marketing a business uses to meet that objective, from business cards to web sites, success requires understanding a couple of marketing fundamentals for building an effective Search Marketing strategy.

Where are your customers?

Where do your customers look for information to help them make a purchase? If it’s a simple purchase, one with no big perceived risk, a phone book might be the only place a customer looks. If those are your customers, then your business needs a phone and a listed number. If you focus your marketing attention on giving your customers the best possible service by phone, you are on your way to successfully meeting their needs and winning their business.

For a more complex sale, there can be many touch points along the way from early consideration to final sale. Not only that, but each individual marketing medium can offer several different touch points during the course of a sale, with messaging tailored for different stages of the buying process, as well as the different people within the buying audience.

Do your customers read newspapers? Do they watch TV? Do they spend time on social networking sites, and which ones? In other words, where do they congregate and how can you be there with them?

The important thing to remember as a marketer is that you need to get the right message in front of the right person at the right time. To do that, you have to understand who your customers are, where they go for information, and what they do next.

How do they decide to buy?

Buyers commonly do research online to learn more about solutions, products and vendors, as well as find information on pricing, reviews from customers, instructional videos and more. Business-to-business purchases also routinely involve several people. You might think of them as categorized into three main types: doers, buyers, and bosses.

The “doers” are the people on the frontline, and they are often where the need for a purchase is first recognized. They are the people who will likely be working with your product or service on a regular basis, and as such their influence can be keenly felt at the beginning of a purchase cycle.

The “buyers” typically enter the purchase cycle a little later on. They have different needs than the “doers” who will be using the product. The buyer wants to know about pricing, guarantees, support, and the vendor’s credibility. In other words, their job is to mitigate the risk associated with a purchase and protect the company from making a costly error.

The third type of person that can be involved in a complex sale is the “boss”. The Boss can enter the picture at any stage, and they will look at a transaction from a different perspective again.  Their considerations might include stockholders, company directors, and longer term information that other company members don’t have access to. Combine all three types of people into a purchase decision and it’s easy to see how complex a complex sale can really be.

Search is a common denominator

With all the different variable behaviors that your customers may engage in, one thing that’s clear is that online search has become a mainstream source of information for everyone. Need a part number for a piece of machinery? Google it. Want to see what people are saying about a product? Look at Twitter. Do you want to see a product demonstration? Look it up on YouTube. Need to see pictures of a product in use? Search images on Bing. The list goes on and on.

The key point for marketing is that when customers are searching online, they’ve got to be able to find you there. Depending on the nature of your business and clientele, here are three basic steps to consider in building your online search strategy:

1. Optimize your company web site to be search engine friendly.
2. Start (and maintain) a company blog. Search engines will reward your site, and new and existing customers can find a good blog a valuable source of information that will help establish your company’s reputation as a leader.
3. If your company web site is not showing up in the search engines for important search terms that are relevant to your business, consider a paid search campaign to increase your online visibility.

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Karl Hourigan is a Digital Marketing Strategist with Mediative. Mediative is one of North America’s largest integrated digital marketing companies. Their results-oriented marketing network is supported by industry thought leaders and a data-driven platform.

Google makes it really easy to start running PPC campaigns on AdWords. Running a well-optimized campaign, however, is another story altogether. Without knowledge of the nuances of AdWords, a novice can end up losing a ton of money very quickly on their SEM campaigns.

Here are five things you can do immediately to your AdWords account to save you a lot of money in just a few minutes.

1. Don’t Heed Google’s “recommended settings”. Google wants to run your ads as broadly as possible. They want you to run on Google, Google’s search partners, Google Display Network, and on mobile phones. When you launch a campaign, you are opted-in to all these areas. While there is value to running on all of these different areas of the Google AdWords system, you don’t want to run them all from the same campaign – doing that usually results in getting you lots of over-priced clicks from lower-quality parts of the network (usually content and mobile) and not enough right-priced clicks on AdWords. My advice is to start by targeting Google only, or at most, Google and Search Partners. Google has comprehensive help resources that explain how to properly set your campaign settings.
2. Move away from broad match as quickly as possible. Google has four match-types – broad, broad modified, phrase, and exact. Broad match means that Google can (and often will) match your keyword to other words that are semantically similar – or that Google’s algorithm just thinks are related. For example, I have a client that bought the keyword “electronic signature” and got match on “sign language” and “e coli.” Go figure. The easiest way to avoid this sort of bad broad matching is to place all of your keywords on one of the other match types. Again, if you search Google’s help guide you’ll find detailed explanations of the various match types.
3. Add lots of negative keywords. Negative keywords are the opposite of a normal keyword. For example, if you added the negative keyword “complaint” if someone typed in “Nikon camera” and you purchased this word on broad match, your ad would show up, but if they typed in “Nikon camera complaint” you would not. The point here is to exclude words or phrases that indicate that a user does not have “purchase intent” for whatever you are selling. You can discover negative keywords by looking at your “search query” report in Google, or by just brainstorming words that are unlikely to result in conversions.
4. Set up tracking. You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Google offers very easy and useful conversion tracking – anyone with basic knowledge of HTML should be able to install this on your site. Tracking will help you determine which keywords, ad text, and landing pages work for you, and which you should either bid down or exclude. Don’t bid on keywords because intuition tells you they ‘should’ work or because the boss wants to show up #1 so he can brag to his friends. Bidding should be done scientifically – gather the data from the conversion tracking and adjust bids based on actual performance.
5. Check your geographic targeting. Do you sell your product or service across the entire world, or perhaps just the U.S., or perhaps just within a five mile radius of your office? Google will default you to the U.S. and Canada (if you are based in the U.S. at any rate) when your campaign begins. If you are a local business such as a law firm or a dentist, you are unlikely to be able to fulfill requests from clients across the continent. Similarly, if you primarily sell overseas, you don’t want your ads showing up in the U.S. Adjust your geographic settings to attract the right customers. Read the help guide to learn about all the different targeting options you have in AdWords.

I admit that I wrote the headline of this article as an attempt at “link bait” – i.e., to pique peoples’ interest and hopefully get some good links/tweets from the blogosphere – but the truth is that simple optimizations like those I described above can really save you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars based on the size of your AdWords account! The difference between success and failure on Google is often one of little tweaks here and there, so start tweaking today!

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David Rodnitzky is Founder of PPC Associates, a leading SEM agency in San Francisco. To learn more about full service AdWords management from PPC Associates, contact David at david@ppcassociates.com.

Google AdWords recently fully launched a reporting feature called Search Funnels. For advertisers that utilize AdWords Conversion Tracking, Search Funnels reports are now available to provide critical insights in to the search ‘funnel’ that searchers travel down before ultimately performing a conversion action. This is a huge win for marketers, who will now have more insight in to the attribution of their paid search campaigns.

The Issue of Attribution

Attribution is the measurement of the marketing touch-points which have influenced or resulted in an end action. Marketers can use this measure to then attribute value from that end action across touch points. To illustrate, a consumer might see a TV commercial for a product, be reminded of that product by an online banner ad, and then finally perform a search on Google clicking on an AdWords ad before buying the product that is being marketed. So should the last touch – the click on the AdWords ad – get all of the credit? No, in a perfect world some of that credit is also due to the TV commercial and banner ad. Unfortunately for marketers, attribution is famously difficult to accurately track.

Paid Search measurement comes with its own host of attribution dilemmas – users typically perform multiple searches in the process of researching and narrowing down to an end purchase. For example, Betty knows she wants a new washing machine – she searches “washing machine”. After researching based on those results, she narrows her search down to “front-loading washing machine”. Then after researching even further narrows it down to a “red Kenmore Elite front-loading washing machine” – Betty searches, finds the best price, and buys online (home delivery? Yes please.). Betty’s last click was on “red Kenmore Elite front-loading washing machine”. As in the first example, just because the last click immediately preceded the sale, it doesn’t mean that there’s no value in the previous searches Betty performed.

This is an important concept for AdWords advertisers because in many industries, the very general terms related to our industries (“washing machine”) are relatively expensive and we don’t see them convert well enough to justify the cost of bidding on them. But we’re not seeing the whole picture – if we’re generating awareness for our brand and products via those general terms, this can result in a sale via a longer-tail or branded query. With Search Funnels, we can now see this via the keyword funnel that the searcher traveled down before ultimately converting. And, AdWords factors both impressions and clicks in to Search Funnel reporting! Meaning, if Betty searched on “washing machine” and your ad showed, but Betty didn’t click on it, it would still appear in the Search Funnel report if she later clicked on your ad for “red Kenmore Elite front-loading washing machine” and made a purchase. Such information can help us to lend more value to terms that would have otherwise gone un-credited, allowing us to justify spending on that visibility because we know it is driving sales.

The Basics of Search Funnel Reporting

Search Funnels can be found in your AdWords account if you are currently using AdWords Conversion Tracking. In the Reporting & Tools tab, navigate to Conversions and then Search Funnels.

The new Search Funnels reporting interface consists of seven reports including Assisted Conversions, First and Last Click Analysis, Time Lag, and Path Length. The Assisted Conversions report is one report which shows the keyword funnel, but also allows segmentation by campaign or ad group

For companies with stronger brands, note the potential impact for your branded keyword campaigns versus non-branded in the Assisted Conversion report– frequently the last search is on a branded term, which is why ROI on branded typically looks so phenomenal. This, as you’ll see, can often mean that a user knows about your brand because they found out it via a more general non-branded search first.

Path Length and Time Lag provide insights in to how many searches and how long it takes from first search to ultimately drive a conversion. One way to leverage the Time Lag information would be to understand the cycle of budgets, spend and sales. For example, if you double your spend in October to drive more sales, and know that there is typically a 30 day lag in conversion, you would know not to start judging the merits of that increased spend on day 2 of the campaign, but instead waiting until the time lag has closed.

For any AdWords advertiser, Search Funnels can become a new integral element in your campaign performance reporting. Start sifting through the data now to become comfortable with the meaning it has for your business. Then use it all you can! By applying learnings from Search Funnels, we can begin to close the gap on the challenge that is attribution and even increase the success of our AdWords campaigns along the way.

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Leisa Hall is an Account Director at Anvil Media, Inc., a search engine marketing agency located in sunny Portland, Oregon. Leisa directs paid media strategy for the agency and works with primarily B2C/ecommerce clients ranging in size from start-up to Fortune 500.