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

By Dennis Yu, The Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal

You may have read these HitWise numbers  on how Facebook has overtaken Google as the most popular site in the United States– now at 7.07% of all visits versus Google at 7.03%.  At 400 million users and 25% of all traffic (not visits), it’s not just teenagers anymore. Did you know that Facebook serves 150 million search queries a day? Industry estimates place Google at 250 to 400 million queries per day.

Thus, “search” is not a website– it’s a function that occurs across any site or application. Think of websites as vertical bars, while applications such as search, commenting, and user participation as horizontal slices that go across these sites.  Even the concept of a “website” is being blown away– note that most users of twitter are interacting not at twitter.com, but via a 3rd party tool or within another blog. Whether it’s @anywhere or even the APIs being released by CitySearch and Foursquare, it’s clear that there’s a increasingly shared data layer underneath these websites. Think of the sewer and electrical grid that is below Manhattan.

I had a chance to sit down with Alex Schultz, who runs online marketing for Facebook– he is also in charge of Facebook’s SEO.  He mentioned the concept of “interestingness squared, boringness squared”. Let’s say you have 500 friends and each friend, on average, has 20 things they do each day that could be shown in the feed.  Thus, with no filter, you would see 10,000 items in your feed on your Facebook homepage. Impossible to sort the noise on what’s important or most relevant to you.

Facebook must choose what to show, based on the influence of each user, their track record (are they spamming others or is their stuff being actively shared and commented on), and general “karma” FriendRank-like factors.  Thus, the things that are interesting get promoted in the social graph– to quickly become viral.  And things that are boring get buried, never to be shown in activity stream.

This morning, Facebook released some insights into how their search works.  It’s worth a read if you some time, but let’s just say that they’re serving personalized search results based on proximity (of the many “Jose Gonzales” in the world, show the one that has the most mutual friends in common), popularity, and context. I’m in Boulder today, so my search for cosmetic surgery here should ideally yield a different result than someone searching from Chicago.  Google’s Caffeine and the introduction of personalized results from your friends only starts to approach what happens on Facebook.

5,000 new businesses join Facebook each day.  Google has about 570,000 advertisers on AdWords. Do the math.  Who has the deeper relationships and has 50% of visits from users that log in at least once a day? Facebook is on track to hit a billion dollars in annualized revenue, if they haven’t already.

Are you using Facebook’s self-serve ad platform yet?  For the 2.5 years, we’ve treated Facebook PPC as another paid search channel, just behind Google, while ahead of Yahoo! and Bing.  And the results for Facebook lead gen and consumer product have been phenomenal.  They will continue to be so long as the territory is still new to advertisers and agencies– and clients understand that social media, properly targeted, and integrated with other channels, is quite effective.

Google has discussed that they’re incorporating social signals into ranking factors.  An article that a couple years ago might have generated 50 links might today generate 10 links and 300 mentions on twitter and Facebook.  Facebook now opening up pages to be indexed, along with many other previously private default options, means that you should be sending stronger signals in social media to influence search results not just on Facebook, but in traditional search engines, too.

So what does this mean for your business?

1. Create and pimp out your fan page immediately. When you get to 100 users, grab your vanity url at facebook.com/username. Get customers and friends to comment and participate regularly, knowing this can generate a viral effect, plus generate links to your fan page (links between pages are votes for Google, while fanning on fan pages are votes for Google).

2. Start testing Facebook’s PPC.  Run traffic to both your fan page and site, to build up a fan base and generate a viral effect. Use proper analytics and attribution, determine the effect of the “assist” on organic search traffic and direct traffic, much like a view-through conversion.

3. Run demographically targeted ads on the Google Content Network– this is a good proxy for what will work on Facebook and MySpace self-serve, given your display creatives and demographic targets are in alignment.

4. Focus more on offers and “interestingness”. Remember what Alex Schultz said about “interestingness squared” earlier? With the rise of local, social, and mobile games– or platforms like Gowalla that effectively are video games, make sure what you are saying doesn’t sound like a shameless ad.  Make it cool, interesting, or perhaps even offer a coupon.  Is it funny or shareable in some other aspect?

5. Begin reaping the rewards for being a first-mover. The spammers were first, but your legitimate brand is still early in the game. 

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Dennis Yu is an entrepreneur and internationally recognized lecturer in search engine marketing. Areas of expertise include search marketing technical analysis and pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign development and optimization. He is co-founder and chief executive officer of BlitzLocal, a Denver area firm that provides local search solutions for enterprises of all sizes. Dennis is also a regular speaker at leading industry events like AdWords Advantage Online Summit and the upcoming PPC Summit Presents…Search & Social Media Success.

By Mary O’Brien, PPC Summit Founder

Part One. This is a two part article. Part Two will appear in our next Pay Per Click Insiders newsletter.Small businesses face a unique set of challenges when it comes to Search Engine Marketing. They don’t have a lot of time to constantly monitor campaigns while juggling their other business responsibilities and they typically can’t afford to hire a full time marketing person to run them. They also don’t have the dollars to invest to test huge campaigns and every dollar they spend needs to return an immediate and significant investment, otherwise they tend to just throw up their hands and bail on the process assuming it just doesn’t work for their type of business .

In some cases that may be true, but more frequently they simply haven’t set up the campaign correctly to start with, or have set it up and forgotten about it until at some point they review their credit card statement and realize it’s providing diminishing ROI. With a little education you can avoid most of the common things that kill small business AdWords campaigns and make them perform more effectively for you.

Here are the top ten mistakes many small businesses make that cause their AdWords Campaigns to fail:

1. Not turning off the content network.
When first setting up a campaign in AdWords turn off the content network. Google sets this option as “on” by default, but it typically only works for certain products/industries and those advertisers with a lot of experience and the ability to perform frequent testing. The content network doesn’t deliver relevant enough results to make it worthwhile on a small budget. It’s difficult to manage where your ad shows up and what queries it will show for unless you know what you are doing.  Ads on the content network can show up on hundreds of Web sites and generate thousands of clicks. While this can be a good thing if you are looking for cheap traffic and know what you are doing, you can also run through dollars very quickly. These aren’t focused searchers, specifically looking for your product or service; they are typically impulse buyers at a very early phase of the buying cycle. Nurtured properly these leads can turn into sales, but if you are just starting out or have limited dollars to spend that’s not where you want to get hung up.

2. Using too many or too few keywords.
Some small businesses assume they can get all the sales they need with twenty keywords, others go to the other extreme and add thousands before they really know how to properly set up a campaign. The folks with the twenty keyword campaigns bail out fast as they typically blow through their budgets in less than a month, wondering why they used the main keywords their competitors are on, but didn’t get many sales. That’s why. They spent too much on obvious keywords that everyone else has been bidding on for ages. Some of their larger competitors have already tested their ads, landing pages and bids to see what works, tweaked them and moved on. This strategy does not create a level playing field for a smaller business or give them any type of advantage, as you are playing a high risk game with high dollar keywords and there are always going to be competitors who have more money to spend than you do.

The folks who start off with thousands of keywords basically forget one simple thing. There is no point in having that many keywords unless you have the ability to test them and see which ones perform for you. With this strategy you’re just throwing mud against the wall and hoping something sticks.

Start off with 200 – 300 targeted keywords and that will allow you to test appropriately. You can use free tools like those from WordStream to determine which keywords to begin with. Then, when you have a list together, work on organizing your Ad Groups, and creating relevant ads.

3. Not structuring Campaigns correctly
In a perfect world your campaigns would be set up like this:

Campaign One:
Keyword One = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test
Keyword Two = One Ad Group = Three unique Titles & Descriptions to test

But seriously, very few small businesses have time to become a full time copywriter and marketing analyst, so wait to try this approach on your top performing keywords after you get some results. At the start, you need to set up your campaigns in a user friendly fashion that allows you to test easily and frequently and see at a glance what’s working and more importantly what’s not.

Creating ad groups with sets of tightly matched keywords is critical but most small businesses don’t do it. Add a few (maximum 10) relevant keywords to each ad group and add more groups as necessary to accommodate new “themed” keywords. Google maxes out at 100 ad groups per campaign, so you have plenty of room to move things around until you see what makes the most sense.

4. Using broad match unilaterally.
When you initially set up a Google AdWords campaign and input your keywords, the default type is broad match. While broad match can work effectively, it’s better to start off using phrase and exact match types, track the performance and adjust from there. Examples of match types and their functions are:

• Broad: tennis shoes (any order, any word, not as targeted, more clicks)
• Phrase: “tennis shoes” (exact order, words before and/or after, more targeted, less clicks)
• Exact: [tennis shoes] (exact order, no other words, highly targeted, least clicks)
• Negative: – white (this would not show ads for “white tennis shoes”)

By setting all your keywords to broad match initially you allow Google to control which keywords it deems “relevant” for your campaigns rather than deciding for yourself. Broad Match can provide great targeted traffic, but ONLY when you have a large list of negative keywords attached to the campaign and ad groups. Don’t even think about trying broad match without determining which negative keywords you want to use first. Otherwise you run the risk of Google’s algorithm running your campaign for you without a true understanding of your product or service offering. Really? You’d allow a robot to run your business? I would never suggest using broad match on a small budget campaign. You will just blow through money before you can test and determine the appropriate keywords for your business.

5. Not tracking ads and keywords.
Many businesses both large and small set up their ad campaigns assuming that they will just be able to measure results by the amount of sales or leads that come rolling in. They forget this simple fact: If your campaigns aren’t performing, you’re wasting money from the very start. There is no excuse for this given the fact that the Google Analytics tool is available for free to help you track exactly which keywords aren’t performing. Set it up and use from the very start to adjust your results.

All of this may sound a little intimidating at first and as a small business owner you’re probably wondering where on earth you can find the time to work on all of this. Setting up the campaigns properly is a good first step. The next is to learn as much as you can about AdWords. That’s what will give you a true competitive advantage in the long term, and with a little bit of knowledge you can tweak your campaigns to truly perform better.

For additional information we’d like to invite you to attend our upcoming AdWords Advantage Online Summit where a team of 13 experts will go into much greater depth on strategies that you can use right now to make your AdWords Campaigns produce more dollars.

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Mary O’Brien is the Founder and Chairman of Pay Per Click (PPC) Summit and AdWords Advantage Online Summit, premier Search Engine Marketing training events held in person and online to offer laser-focused education to help internet marketers make more money with Pay Per Click advertising. These training events bring together an expert pool of Search Marketing’s most respected leaders during hands-on workshops, how-to sessions, power labs, personal consulting and much more.

by Heather Schwartz, Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.

It’s never too early to start getting ready for the holidays whether it’s shopping if you’re a customer or prepping your strategy if you’re a marketer.  Here are some things to start thinking about the upcoming 2009 holiday season for your online marketing efforts, specifically for Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.  First let’s look into last year’s holiday season and expectations for this year to get a good understanding of the 2009 holiday landscape.

Holiday Season 2008
According to comScore, e-shopping sales in 2008 were over $130 million, a 6% increase in sales from the 2007 holiday season, and among the top 500 internet retailer’s sales in 2008 increased 12%.  From this we can conclude that more people were shopping online in 2008 compared to 2007 and that larger retailer sales are growing at a faster rate.  In a study done by Coremetrics, department stores and gifting sites saw an increase in conversion rate over the 2008 holiday season, while luxury goods retailers saw a decrease in conversion rate.  Why you ask?  Because the department stores and gifting sites adapted to the economy, they offered early discounting, they changed their merchandising to feature value items at lower prices and they added buying incentives for customers, like free shipping.   The retailers who continue to change and adapt to their customers needs and wants (within reason) are the ones that will prosper.

2009 Holiday Forecast
In order to properly prepare for this year’s holiday season, some research needs to be done first.  Below are Coremetrics’ forecasts for the 2009 holiday season:
• Shoppers will be shopping earlier this year and buying value orientated, incentive driven items.
• Potential for increase in cost/order, because customers will be shopping in more sessions therefore clicking on more marketing programs.
• Targeted email and display ads will play a bigger role this holiday season.

So, here is your friendly reminder – get ready for the 2009 holiday season, consider offering more promotions, like free shipping and feature products that aren’t necessarily the most expensive on your site.  (Keep in mind you don’t want these promotions to negatively affect your bottom line, be smart about your offerings.)  Also if you’re already running PPC on the Search Network, consider running on the Content Network on sites that directly target your customers.  So, how should you get started for the holiday season?

PPC Ad Text for Holiday 2009
1. Look at your campaign history.  If you included holiday messaging in your campaigns last year, what types of ads had the highest CTR and conversion rates? For those top performing ads can you translate the messaging for this year?
2. Continually test ad text.  There are several options when it comes to A/B testing ad copy.  For the holidays, test what type of promotion increases CTR or conversion rate.  Test the headline on your ad, for example, one that includes pricing v. one that doesn’t.  Once you have collected enough data, pause the non-performing ad, copy the ad that performed better and slightly tweak the messaging to continue testing.
3. Competitive research.  Don’t forget to do some holiday recon, look at what your direct competitors are saying in their ad text.  What type of offers/promotions are your competitors offering?
4. Create a schedule for the launch of your new ads, paying close attention to the following dates:
      a. Black Friday, November 27th – only 28 shopping days until Christmas this year.  Last year’s holiday season was the start of the shorter time period between Black Friday and Christmas Day.  In 2007, this period was 32 days, which is over a 12% decrease in the number of shopping days from 2007 to 2009.  This decrease in the shopping period is influencing customer’s buying behaviors to start shopping earlier.
     b. Cyber Monday, November 30th – this day continues to be a bigger day each year, with more people shopping online.
     c. Christmas Day, December 25th – continues to be a big shopping day for people doing returns or exchanges, customers buying complementary goods, using their gift cards, buying additional gifts online and buying products that were forgotten.

PPC Keywords for Holiday 2009
1. What keywords performed well last holiday season?  Instead of setting bidding strategies based on last month’s performance, take some time to review last year’s performance and make decisions based on last year’s holiday season.  Was there a specific keyword category that did particularly well in terms of sales, will this be the same for this year?  Look to popular trends to help determine “top sellers” and manage budget accordingly. 

2.  Revisit your negative keyword list.  Are there any particular holiday related negative keywords you could consider adding to your campaigns?

3.  If you are bidding on holiday related keywords, keep an extra close eye on the CPA and ROI at the keyword level, often times these keywords are expensive and don’t show goal return.

PPC Landing Pages for Holiday 2009
1.  If your ad text has holiday messaging be sure this gets translated to your landing page.  Same goes for promotions.
2.  Imagery.  Update any relevant images on your landing page with holiday related imagery.
3.  Revisit the conversion funnel on your site; make sure the appropriate merchandising is holiday related for cross selling and recommendation opportunities.  Do you have any gifting options on your site?  Also, make sure your internal search engine delivers gifting related results to relevant inquiries.

In summary, today is not too early to start planning your PPC campaigns for the holiday season.  Before it’s too late, determine your key benchmarks and goals for the holidays.  Start testing different verbiage or promotions now so you have a leg up on the competition before the holidays hit, and if something is working in one medium try to translate that across all your marketing efforts if applicable.

I hope the above takeaways regarding ad text, keywords and landing pages get you excited for the 2009 Holiday Season and jumpstart your PPC strategy.

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Heather Schwartz is an Account Executive at Anvil Media, Inc.  Heather  graduated from the University of Oregon with a BS in Marketing and a minor in Communication studies.  Heather has been working with Anvil Media in Portland since 2008 specializing in B2C ecommerce clients such as lucy activewear, Tea Collection and Ellington Leather, developing SEO, Social Media and PPC campaigns to increase clients online visibility and ROI.

By Kelly Larsen, Director of Marketing PPC Summit

Advertisers continue to shine a bright light on Paid Search marketing. In fact, the Internet Advertising industry was recently named the only advertising medium that is expected to grow this year, according to Zenith Optimedia.

As more and more companies leverage the search engines and Paid Search to grow their business, it’s no surprise that Internet ad spend is expected to grow 10.1% globally this year, and Paid Search boasts an even stronger 20.0% growth projection*. Paid Search has literally stomped on the other advertising mediums, and has become the fastest growing advertising channel because it delivers more targeted traffic, greater budget control, more accountability and can generate immediate revenue–of course, when done right.

If you take a look at the Search Marketing industry advertising spend in the last 12 months, you’ll see advertisers are getting more creative with their Paid Search spending. The Marketing Sherpa chart below shows recent results for a search marketing ad spend study where nearly 70% of respondents use Google search ads, 32.6% use Google contextual ads, 27.6% use Yahoo search ads and Facebook advertising is now becoming a valid option with over 3% of advertisers now using it. The industry is now being fueled with advertising through new publishers and social sites that offer display ads on a CPM basis or Pay Per Click.

Zenith Optimedia reports the search advertising increases are attributed to Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, “…a welcome competition to Google and should spur further innovation in search.” Bing is worth watching and is surprisingly competitive with Google. The report also adds that new search technologies are reducing entry costs, providing a lot of new competition for established advertisers. The competition to attract search engine users–and your potential customers, will only get more intense. Savvy Marketers will spend their ad dollars on Search to ensure higher ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend).

Staying current on industry trends and innovations is a must in order to compete in the over maximized online advertising space. Even though there are many online resources that Internet Marketers can access (BtoB Online , MarketingProfs , Search Engine Watch , iMedia Connection , eMarketer , Marketing Experiments and Search Engine Land), many of us simply don’t have the time or resources it takes to do the necessary research.

If you don’t have enough time in the day, training may be a better option. And it can also be worth its weight in gold when you learn those little nuggets that turn under performing campaigns into profits. Whether it’s online or in-person training, justifying training costs becomes easier when it means the difference between successful or failing campaigns.

We’re getting ready for upcoming Pay Per Click Summit’s in Los Angeles and Chicago where Search Marketing’s brightest and most experienced will teach cutting-edge Search Advertising techniques that focus on how to do more with less.

We hope to see you there!

Kelly Larsen
Director of Marketing, PPC Summit

*Source: Zenith Optimedia, July  2009 Ad Spend Projections.

…but you may still want to try it.

At this point is there anyone in America who isn’t on Facebook? The site boasts over 200 million active users, and more than 100 million log on to Facebook at least once a day. This is obviously a very engaged audience, just what you’re looking for as a marketer.

While I was at SMX in Seattle a few weeks ago, I sat down with some of the Facebook folks who were there (a bunch of very nice, very evangelical Facebook fans) and they took me on a great tour of the Facebook interface.

It’s really easy to quickly create ads in Facebook, and very user friendly, especially for small businesses as you don’t need a lot of money to get started. You can target different audiences, different locations, set a budget, and monitor progress using the reports. You can purchase ads using a CPM or CPC model, which makes it very easy to test the same messaging as you would use in your pay-per-click campaigns.

So does it work? During last year’s Pay Per Click Summit in Los Angeles (Sept 2008), I surveyed a bunch of attendees and asked whether they had tried Facebook as an advertising vehicle. Only about 10% had, and out of that 10% maybe 3 or 4 had experienced good results. But now it’s 2009 and Facebook has re-vamped their advertising platform, and also put the ads in the upper right hand “call-to-action” portion of their pages so after SMX I asked my Twitter and Facebook followers, and discovered advertisers give it very mixed reviews.

This time maybe 20% of folks surveyed had tried Facebook Advertising and approximatley 50% were getting good results, but that’s hardly competitive with the kind of response you would get from advertisers using AdWords, where conversion rates of 20% and more are possible.

So who are the folks getting the results? Basically the same folks who get good results using Contextual Advertising. So it’s really not fair to compare Facebook to Google. In fact, they are just another large publisher (like the Wall Street Journal or ESPN.com) and you need to create, target and determine the CPA for your ads accordingly.

Contextual Ads can work extremely well for products that are impulse buys, or for branding, and the more targeted they are to the content on the page the better. Advertisers selling mortgages, insurance, entertainment, weight loss products, etc. are all doing very well with Facebook advertising, as are affiliate marketers generating leads for these types of businesses and for other products.

So can it work for your business? Just like any form of advertising you need to test it. If you are currently doing contextual advertising with something like Google Adsense or ContextWeb then it’s easy. Just set up similar campaigns targeting the same placement and demographics on Facebook and test against each other to see what works.

If you are not currently using content ads then it is very easy to set up a campaign in Facebook.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1) Most rules of pay-per-click also apply to Facebook marketing. Make sure your offer matches the landing page, and the keywords/images in your ad are consistent with the landing page also.
2) Include a call to action in your ad. Just like writing an AdWords ad, but punchier.
3) Less is more when it comes to text/copy and graphics. In fact writing like the “National Enquirer” might be totally appropriate as you only have a few minutes to catch people’s attention. Big headlines can work. This is not AdWords where folks are already looking for what you are selling. With Facebook you’re trying to get people’s interest when they are focused on something else entirely, so make your headlines snappy.
4) Consider testing a contest. I’ve heard of advertisers getting good results with them, and they may appeal more to social media users who aren’t really in buying mode.
5) Geo-target your campaigns well. If you don’t ship to Canada or the UK – don’t advertise there.
6) Try segmenting your campaigns by gender to make them more targeted
7) Use people in your graphic ads if possible. Just like on landing pages people respond to pictures of other people.

Just remember, as with Contextual Advertising, you shouldn’t try this form of advertising (or actually, any advertising at all) if you don’t have good tracking on your site. Content ads can take more tweaking to get them to perform, and you may need to test and track many variations before you find that sweet spot.

Have you tried Facebook Advertising? If you have, we’d love to hear your results. Tweet me at @ppcsummit or post a comment at www.ppcsummit.com/newsletter in response to this article. We’re also considering adding a session on Social Media Advertising at our upcoming PPC Summit in Los Angeles in September. Please let me know if you are interested in that also, and we’ll add it to the agenda.

To Your Continued Success Online,

Mary O’Brien
Chairman and Founder PPC Summit

In the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) content has always been considered king.  But is it in Pay Per Click (PPC)? 

Content is in fact very important in PPC, but other things are equally important.  Identifying these can be the key to running a successful campaign, or running a really successful PPC campaign.

What I want to do here is to give you a few tips and tricks we commonly use to find the gaps in most PPC campaigns.

All of the search engines look at conversions to determine the quality of ads and landing pages. They also use a version of their organic ranking algorithm to ‘grade’ the various elements of your campaign – which directly influences your placement and price. So things like the age of a page and the back links to that page are just as important in natural search results as they are in paid search results.

In many markets the big guys dominate and run up the cost of this valuable traffic to a level that most everyone else cannot monetize. So how can you get to the top spots? After all, being in the top three paid results on Google carries certain privileges like syndication across other networks. AOL, for instance, converts twice as much as every other network that uses Google’s top PPC ads in their search results. These are merged into their organic results just like they are on Google.

Now assuming that you are familiar with techniques like day parting, site placement and keyword weighting, what I’d like to show you is how to implement more off-campaign techniques to improve your conversions.

First off, most of the larger bidders (corporate types) employ PPC companies or professionals. Coming from this scenario first-hand and managing millions in PPC budgets I can say that the majority of these people test and create landing pages. Whilst this is a great idea, the fact that they create new pages is a problem. As I mentioned above, the PPC algorithm is a chunk of the organic algorithm, so you should use existing pages and change the content to include CTA’s or call to action elements. Match back link anchor text to the keywords that your PPC uses.

The next tip is to target ‘break out’ terms. These are terms that have drawn new attention. We use three techniques for this:  Google Alerts, Google Insights and DomainTools.com.

Google Alerts allow you to tell Google that any time it finds a particular term on a website, news article or other source that you want an email sent or an RSS feed updated. This monitors anything to do with your targeted term and can provide many longtail terms that you can target.  Be one of the few that are actually targeting these terms and your bids are cheap and your click through is high. By the time everyone else comes around, you already have the best history and you stay at the top of the results for less than anyone else pays.

The next tip is to get an upgraded account through DomainTools.com. The cost is only a few dollars per month depending on your settings. For example, if we are primarily targeting the gaming market, we monitor new domains for new operators springing up in this arena. DomainTools will let you know newly registered, domain transfers or just about any change that happens.

Upon receipt of this daily report we decide whether to add the domain, the keywords or both. We may even create a completely new adgroup. How many new start-up’s have you seen in the last six months for bingo websites spending mass amounts of money on off-line advertising? (Since trademark infringement has become so loosely regulated or even allowed, this is useful information.)

The third tool that we use for exploiting breakout terms is Google Insights. You may be familiar with Google Trends? Well this is a new and improved version that gives great information. Google Insights allows you to nail-down recent trends much better than Google Trends.

Besides giving regional search levels, top searches, and a host of other features and filters, it gives you Rising Searches – which we call Breakout terms. You may add this to your iGoogle dashboard and see every day if anything has changed or a newcomer is breaking out in your market. The key to this technique is to find the hot keywords and target them quickly. The various paid engines have loosened their grip on trademark infringement so look into it carefully and find out what you can and can’t get away with.

In closing I’ll say that the PPC market is a competitive market, but with a little ‘outside-the-box’ thinking, you can do very well.

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Gary R. Beal has been in the Search Engine Optimization field for 12 years. He attended Ohio State University in the US and holds a Masters Degree in Biometrics and Mathematical Statistics. Gary is currently the MD of Vanguard SEO based in Leeds. He has been instrumental in the development of many SEO and PPC tools as an analyst and consultant. Gary specializes in Search, Pay Per Click, Affiliate Management and Email Marketing and he has worked for many years in lead aggregation for highly competitive industries such as Online Gaming, Banking and Finance, Insurance, Travel and Investments, and primarily specializes in SEO for the gaming industry. You can contact Gary at Gary@VanguardSEO.com .