Marketing on the Web
I recently went through a pre-launch design study with a client. The client is launching a new division of an existing company and after hearing me speak at a local business group, wanted to be sure he was starting with the right stuff. First let me say this is a great approach. Its much easier to fix problems on the front end than to try and undo mistakes that have your site identified for the wrong things. However, when you work on an existing design you do have some history of what is work...
MoreHuntsville Internet Marketing Services
When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with larger firms as part of a team, with in-house web and marketing resources, applying my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation for others to carry out. While it does work that way with larger accounts, I am frequently called to apply technical changes for small companies that have little or no marketing and/or the technical expertise. (It is unlikely they employ anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to con...
MoreChasing the Long Tail
It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific "long-tail" phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood. If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren't needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns. More on this topic here in Yahoo's Sear...
MoreMeasuring Conversions
I am always surprised when I find businesses measuring Ad effectiveness based on click-thru rate. CTR is a simple measurement of clicks given as a percentage of impressions. That is, for a given volume of ad impressions, some number of readers have clicked-thru to your site. Unfortunately CTR can be very misleading. If you create a gee-wiz ad (such as click here to WIN), you can make your CTR soar, but if 100% of those clicks bounce, or otherwise don't go past your landing page, you have wasted ...
MoreInternet Marketing Overview
This past week I was asked to speak to a group of CEOs at the Huntsville business incubator, BizTech . In preparation for the meeting, I created a slide presentation that discusses organic versus paid search results and some of the elements that come into play when improving Search Engine Rank. Here is a link to that presentation. Internet Marketing Overview. I recently updated this presentation for the North Alabama Web Developers group. The update is here.
MoreSEO Beyond the Page
Let No Good Phrase Go Un-clicked If you have read much on SEO, you know that page name, title, and content play a big roll in the optimizing you pages. However, there is a second phase of optimization that shouldn't be neglected. When you develop your content, you optimize you page for certain keywords or phrases. However, after launch it is important to follow up to see what phrases are driving people to your site. It's important to verify that your key phases are working and certain your...
MoreBroad match in SEM campaigns
I have said that you shouldn't use broad match in AdSense campaigns. While I still lean in that direction, it would be more correct to encourage you to test both phrase and broad match and then base your decision on hard conversions data. An excellent article on this topic: Google AdWords Marketing: Exact Match Bidding How these differ: Broad Match: Broad Match actually matches the words from the phrase any order. What is a little harder to follow is broad also matches synonyms for ...
MoreBudgeting for Adwords Leads
I have blogged about this breaking Adwords campaigns up before, but recent events merit revisiting this approach to PPC management. While employed as a in-house marketing manager, I was faced running campaigns that included some very high-cost phrases (in excess of $10). This select group of phrases appeared to be the only words that were converting. We measured demos, and trips to the contact page as conversions. We received conversions only once out of eight or nine clicks (at $10/click a conv...
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