PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

Get Elastic
Excluding irrelevant or low-performing keywords (i.e., negative keywords) from your campaigns can greatly increase relevance (and efficacy), particularly when using broad and phrase matching. Linda Bustos offers some tips for negative keyword research using a trio of Google tools–the Keyword Tool, Google Suggest and Google Product Search. With Product Search, for example, you can find shopping-related terms, particularly brand names of products that you don’t carry, that should be excluded from your campaigns. “When a search query involves a brand name, it’s a strong signal that someone is looking to research or purchase a specific item, not check out other brands,” Bustos says. “So your general ad will have lower click through, which lowers the click through rate of your entire AdGroup, hurting all your keywords’ ad positions and possibly raising your cost-per-click.”

Practical eCommerce
“For the majority of small and mid-size, locally-focused businesses, your target market is more defined than everyone living everywhere,” says Lisa Wehr. “With local search strategies for both pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and natural search engine optimization, you can refine your search marketing program, cut costs and grow your business.”

For paid search, go local with regionally defined and geotargeted keywords. Geotargeting helps to restrict your ads to a smaller audience and delivers more qualified leads, while regionally-defined terms can give you wider exposure, yet still allow you to hone in on your target market.

Meanwhile, for SEO, make sure your site has accurate listings on the slew of IYPs and local search sites, from Superpages.com, to Citysearch, to Google Maps. Each one resonates with a different local audience, and their listings also show up within the core search engine results, maximizing your Web site’s exposure.

Self SEO
If content is king, then upgrading your copywriting skills (or calling in a copywriter) is vital to ensuring your Web site’s success. And according to Lisa Packer, the most effective content is the kind that can spark emotions. “You absolutely must trigger an emotional reaction with your copy if you intend to get response–whether you’re looking for a lead or a sale,” Packer says, and serves up a host of tips for crafting such content.

Try telling a story–one that can convey your sales pitch or lesson without triggering resistance. “A good story captures attention, and draws the reader in. Right away, his emotions are stirred, and he cares about the outcome,” Packer says.

Also, try stimulating all five senses with your copy. If possible, describe how the product or service feels, sounds and possibly even tastes. And Packer recommends using a conversational tone of voice. “Read your copy aloud and see if it passes the ‘barstool test,”‘ she says. “If it sounds like you’re talking to the person on the barstool beside you, it’s good. If any line or sentence makes you stumble, rewrite it.”

Search Engine Land
Some paid search marketing platforms may allow you to bid on a competitor’s branded keywords, but you should steer clear of their trademarks when it comes to organic optimization. As per an 11th circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling, injecting another company’s trademarked terms into your site’s meta tags (be it title, description or any other tag) can cause consumer confusion and thus constitute trademark infringement.

The ruling upheld a district court’s decision that Axiom Worldwide infringed on American Medical Corp.’s trademark when it used the terms “Accu-Spina” and “IDD Therapy” in its meta tags–particularly in its description tag. A Google search that showed the terms highlighted prominently in the company’s description field was offered as evidence.

Axiom doesn’t deny that they used the terms, but as copyright and IP legal expert Eric Goldman notes, the ruling doesn’t take into account the fact that Google (or the other engines) sometimes automatically assembles search result descriptions from third-party resources like DMOZ. The issue also raises the question of whether meta data counts for much more in terms of rankings than the engines have been admitting to. Still, the best way to avoid any kind of confusion (or legal ramifications) is to not use trademarked terms in your meta tags.

DM News
A paid search campaign is only as good as the actionable metrics it can provide–and Olivier Silvestre, director of optimization consulting at Omniture’s Visual Sciences, discusses the three areas that marketers should focus on for optimal campaign metrics.

For landing pages, Silvestre says it’s about the “single access visit” ratio, or the percentage of visitors that land on the page and then leave the site without browsing any other pages. “If the ad copy is relevant to what a company offers, and the landing page is consistent with the ad copy message, then the SAV should stay low, as long as the landing page is not a final destination in itself, which is not recommended,” he says.

When it comes to ad copy, the key metrics are CTR and return-on-ad-investment or spend (ROAI or ROAS)–not just sales. “Assessing your SEM campaigns based on sales alone could lead a company to make unsuccessful online campaign decisions as sales transaction is not the sole criterion,” Silvestre says.

And with keywords, Silvestre says that you should start a new campaign by buying broad keywords or phrases on the cheap and using broad match–as the resulting analytics reports provide some of the best, actionable proof of which pricier terms your target audience is actually searching for.

High Rankings Advisor
Consistency is key to increasing paid click conversions. Say that three times fast. It’s the mantra that Karon Thackston uses when crafting PPC ads for clients of her copywriting firm, Marketing Words. “Including the same keyphrases you target in the PPC copywriting throughout the rest of the steps in the conversion process can make or break your end results,” Thackston says. It doesn’t seem like rocket science, but you wouldn’t believe how many marketers using search don’t keep consistency in mind.

Offline marketers have had a few decades worth of trial and error to learn that the messages in TV ads need to match the ones in print, on billboards and even in-store. With paid search, that translates to using the same keywords in an ad’s title, in the body copy, on the landing page and even to the shopping cart and support pages.

But take it easy when it comes to the actual ad itself. “Don’t try to close the sale with your PPC ads. That’s not their purpose,” Thackston says. “The sole purpose of PPC ads is to drive visitors to your site, where they can collect enough information to take action–whether that means buying, subscribing, joining or whatnot.”

I’m Not A Doctor
“The Doc” (a search consultant based in San Diego) was working on a site that had consistently ranked within the top three organic results for a keyword, when one day he noticed it had slipped down to the tenth spot. At first, he thought that there might be duplicate content issues, a possible need to tweak the URL structure for canonicalization or maybe just build up more inbound links.

But after fiddling with those factors and waiting about a month, there was still no change. Frustrated, the Doc found that sometimes snagging rankings means going back to three basic questions: Does the keyword appear on the page? Does the site have a keyword rich h1 tag? And are the title tags and Meta data optimized? “By asking these three basic, but extremely important questions I found the problem,” the Doc says. “The homepage did not contain a keyword rich h1 and the target keyword only appeared in the text once.”

He added the target keyword to the h1 tags, sprinkling it into the homepage text as well, and saw the site return to the top three rankings within two weeks. “So, if you are having a hard time in your SEO campaign, take a step back,” the Doc says. “Take a deep breath. Go back to the basics.”

Silicon Alley Insider
Six search firms — SearchIgnite, Clickable, iCrossing, Covario, Range Online Media and IPG’s Initiative — held a conference call with Citibank analyst Mark Mahaney last week, to talk about advertiser spending and search trends in Q1. The goal was to help gauge what impact, if any, the economic downturn was having on the search industry. Henry Blodget says that it’s a glass half- empty/half-full forecast.

The firms generally agreed that search advertising trends remain strong. “Search volumes remain robust, and advertising clients continue to shift greater share of ad budgets to search,” Blodget said. Still, the group “appeared to acknowledge some search-spending weakness.”

CNET News
After years of standing on opposite sides of the click fraud fence, Yahoo and Click Forensics have partnered to help tackle the issue for Yahoo Search Marketing advertisers. As Elinor Mills notes, “There have been calls for an independent third party to oversee the business, but advertisers don’t want to give up their server data to search engines and vice versa. The Yahoo-Click Forensics relationship seems like a step in that direction.”

While neither company has detailed exactly what click info they’ll be sharing, both Tom Cuthbert, CEO of Click Forensics, and Reggie Davis, Yahoo’s click quality czar, said that the goal is to come up with a “better consensus click fraud rate than the widely disparate figures now being reported, and to make advertisers more confident in the system,” Mills says.

PPC Hero
According to Amber Benedict, there are two main reasons why you should run AdWords Search Query Reports–to gain insights on new keywords and negative keywords.

“The search query report will give you a list of actual search queries that customers are typing in the search bar to trigger your ad,” Benedict says. “It’s good to know this information especially if you find some keywords that aren’t currently in your account.” These rogue queries were most likely triggered by your broad match keywords–and you can rank higher on, and more precisely target, these keywords if you incorporate them directly into a campaign.

The same goes for negative keywords, as the reports help you discover random terms that your ads are showing up for–terms that may not be relevant to your product or service set, and are possibly generating costly, non-converting clicks. For example, “If you don’t offer natural or organic dog food, then you should add ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ to your negative keyword list. This is a great way to qualify your traffic, decrease spend and increase conversions,” Benedict says.