How to use Pay-per-click advertising Part 2

Written by on October 13, 2011 in Blog, SEO - 2 Comments
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Before you start your ad campaign, its important to know what your current cost per lead is. You need to know how much each online sale costs you. You will need three pieces of information: the number of visitors your site gets per month, the number of sales you make per month and your monthly marketing expenses. Once you know what those are, you can work out your cost per customer. Here’s a little tool to help you work it out:

Your Data:



Results:




The next step is to decide how much you want to spend per keyword. Knowing the conversion rate is very helpful here, use it to decide how much you are able to spend to achieve a sale. If your site receives 1000 visits per month and generates 100 sales, your conversion rate will be 10%. If your website has a lot of repeat customers, the calculation won’t be as simple! Repeat customers are far more likely to generate a sale, with or without the advertising. Generally speaking, you should not pay more than your profit margin. If you make £100 for every 1000 visitors, you should be paying less than 10p per click in order to make a profit.

Find your keywords

You will also want a list of keywords. These are the words you will target for advertising, depending on search volume. Ther online tools like the Google Keyword tool can help you here. If a keyword (or combination of words) is popular, you can expect to pay more for your ad listings. You want to base your campaign around a group of keywords, some will be more popular than others. A balanced approach between popular and specific keywords generally works out better.

Make an account

Once you know which keywords you want to target, and how much you are willing to pay for them, its time to get a PPC account! Google adwords and the Yahoo/Bing marketing solution are the biggest providers on the market, pick one to start with. WHen you sign up, you will be asked to set your maximum budget. If your budget is £100 per month, the search engine will display your adverts untill £100 worth of clicks have registered and your account is empty.

Your ads will be made up of a title, a description and a link. The title and the description text are very important, this is how a search engine determines whether your advert is relevant. Its in your interest to keep these short, you also want to include your keywords in both the title and the main text. The title should be 25 characters or less, and the main text 35 characters or less.

The ranking of your advert depend on how much you bid for the keywords in question, how relevant the keyword is to someone’s search and the relevancy of your website. It helps if your website is optimised for the keywords you want to advertise on, that will make your campaign much more efficient.

How to use Pay-per-click advertising Part 1

Written by on October 4, 2011 in Blog, SEO - No Comments
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What is Pay-per-click advertising?

Pay-per-click (or PPC) advertising is an easy way to promote your business on search engines. Its perhaps the most widespread method of marketing on the internet. The largest PPC networks are also the most popular, Google and Yahoo/Bing being the biggest (together they have 98% of the market).

So, how does it work? You pay a preset amount, and your advert appears next to search results. The amount you pay is usually capped at whatever value you choose. If you set your limit to fifty pounds per month, that’s the maximum that you’ll pay. Every time someone clicks on your advert, a fixed amount is deducted from your account. When your account is empty, your advert will stop being circulated. Here is an example of what it looks like:

I searched for “christmas cards” and around the normal, organic search results I’m shown a list of paid links. These ads are placed by the advertiser; they get to control the placement of the ads as well as their content. Pay-per-click ads consist solely of text, so no images or videos, just a heading, a brief description and a link.

Its a pretty simple concept, and well targeted ads will increase the traffic to your site. Will you generate enough profit as a result of a campaign to make it worthwhile? Stay tuned for Part 2 where we discuss how to get the most out of a PPC campaign and maximise your conversion rate.

How to Use the Google Adwords Tool

Written by on September 29, 2011 in Blog, SEO - 3 Comments
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The Adwords tool is mainly used to analyse pay per click (PPC) advertising, but it is also a very useful tool for SEO. With Adwords, you can measure the number of queries Google registers for particular word combinations. How do we get useful information out of it?

Let’s do a search for “Bristol hotels”. Type in your search criteria and be sure to tick the box underneath the search field called Only show ideas closely related to my search terms. If you dont tick this, you may end up with a large list of unrelated keywords that wont be very useful.

Next, select your location and language next to the advanced options. It should automatically select your location as the default, but you may want to change it depending on your search. The next step is to press the search button and see what comes up!

Depending on your search criteria, you may end up with a very large number of results. The default setting for this search is broad match typing; it tries to give you all the possible related results for your keywords. Some of them may not be relevant, so filtering for exact matches will probably give you a better picture.

Looking to the left pane, a new box labelled Match Types should apper. Try unticking “Broad” and select “Exact” instead. That will give you a more reliable estimate of how many people search for that specific phrase, either locally or worldwide.

There is another filtering option called “Phrase”. That will give you results for longer search terms that contain your keywords, like “cheap Bristol hotels” and “Bristol hotels with parking”.

The columns labelled ‘local/global monthly searches’ show the number of queries per month averaged over the last year.

That’s about all there is to the keyword tool! You can use it to help find the terms to focus on in your marketing campaign, or to discover new popular keywords.

Negative factors in your SEO

Written by on September 23, 2011 in Blog, SEO - No Comments
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Not everything you put on your web pages will help your ranking. Some techniques are considered bad practice, and as such are actively penalised by modern search algorithms. What are the biggest offenders?

Duplicate content

Search engines try to ensure that the top results for any given search are not identical. The most common way of doing this is reducing the ranking of a website that copies content. The site that posted the material first should remain at the top. It’s good to have lots of content, just don’t copy and paste it and expect good results!

Hidden content

There are many ways of hiding text on a page, from positioning links off-screen to making text the same colour as the background. These underhand techniques are best avoided, since the websites that implement them will experience hefty penalties in their ranking.

Linking to disreputable sites

These can include but are not limited to: link farms, spam pages, malware pages… Google will consider all outbound links on your website, and if any link to shady websites your ranking will suffer. Check your links!

Canonical Hints

Showing identical (or very similar) content on more than one URL can cause  you to slip in the rankings. An example of this would be an E-commerce site that shows the same product list on multiple pages. You can use the canonical tag to mitigate its impact, but it’s better to avoid the situation in the first place.

How does Google+ affect your rankings?

Written by on September 21, 2011 in Blog, SEO - 2 Comments
seo cheltenham

When Google+ first appeared, it was largely unclear how it would influence rankings. You could add a +1 button to your pages, much like the facebook “like” button, but would it make a difference to the search algorithms? Recently, Wired.com published google’s email to them about the subject:

“Google will study the clicks on +1 buttons as a signal that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results. The purpose of any ranking signal is to improve overall search quality. For +1’s and other social ranking signals, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.”

While Google is figuring out how to use these +1 click signals, you can start preparing for it in advance. Put the +1 link buttons on your pages where appropriate, the important thing is to get as many recommendations as you can! It will affect your search results in the future, so why not get started early?

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