There is one thing that you’ll learn real quick as you get into building pay-per-click campaigns and that is observe and study the competition. While you’re there trying to figure out what words work best, how to write a compelling ad, what words to build on, your competition has been doing that for longer than you have! Remember, they have gone through the same process you are going through now and trying to figure out, what keywords to use for the best return on investment, what ads will get the best click-through-rate, which ads may have the best conversions, etc.

SEMRush is a tool that lets you do just that, study the competition and get an edge. My strategy is and was never to COPY the competition but build around keywords they use, get ideas, etc.

Some key features that will really help you optimize your campaign using SEMRush are:

* Identify Competitors – By searching for your keyword phrase on SEM Rush, you can pinpoint competing websites that are already ranking highly in Google for your intended keywords, and as a side benefit, you can identify other potentially profitable keywords of each of your potential competitors.

* Ad / Traffic Buyer Suggestions – When you research a website, SEM Rush will display related websites that are advertising via Google Adwords, which, this can give you an inroad to potential advertisers, who are proven buyers, for your website.

* Adwords Ad Overview – If a particular website that you are researching, namely, a competitor, is advertising via Google Adwords, SEM Rush will show you your competitors’ ads, and their landing pages within their simple-to-use interface.

* Side-By-Side Competitor Comparison – You can analyze your domain vs. your competitors’ domain name, alongside your common keywords, your rank in Google, their rank in Google, estimated monthly search volume for the keyword, number of competing pages for the keyword, and the estimated cost per click in Google Adwords.

* Data Exports – Like most keyword tools, SEM Rush offers a few choices when it comes to exporting your research data. However, because this service is so unique in the type of information it provides, we wanted to mention this as it is a major asset for you, regardless of whether you’re a paid or free user.

The way I used it best was always to look at my top competitors in the PPC space. From this, I can go one by one and look at keywords they are bidding, keywords they are ranking for organically, and looking at their ads. A GREAT strategy that I don’t have much search marketers talk about but is great for me is really digging into the websites organic rankings and building of that.

Google ranks many website for specific products and these are great, long-tail keywords, that may have a real chip bidding price and although may deliver very low volume traffic, can deliver a high conversion rate!

You can start a free SEMRush account by clicking on the following URL: http://www.semrush.com/users/register.html

**This review was written for an exchange of a trial period and for the education of a good search marketing product for all PalatnikFactor.com readers.

Here are some ways to increase traffic to your blog:

1- Sign up to forums in your niche. Link out to your post if the thread is relevant and engage users. YOUR READERS are the people in the forums looking for information you may have already written about that they can use.

2- You can use Pay-Per-Click as a channel to drive more traffic. Choose the most affordable keywords and create large ad groups bidding very low for relevant keywords. This will surely increase your traffic. You may pay at first but long-term results can be well worth it.

3- Offer something for FREE. Offering something such as a free EBOOK can increase traffic because either readers will share it with others or other bloggers will link to the page driving traffic. Make sure to include your blogs URL anywhere you offer something free.

4- Write guest post in blogs similar to your niche. THIS DOES WORK. Reach out to the bigger blogs in your niche and ask to write a guest post. They will be happy to add more good relevant content so why not? Also a good network resource.

5- You can always find something worth while about your blog everyone should know. There are plenty of free PRESS RELEASE websites out there that allow you to place a link to your blog.

6- Article marketing is still a good way to drive traffic. It may not be the best SEO resource, but if you write quality content and place a link back to your blog, it will surely make a difference. Submit your articles to websites such as eZine.

7- Twitter has been a great channel as a traffic driver. Place a link to good post from your blogs and try to get as many followers as possible. Remember to add twitter buttons to ALL your post.

8- Social bookmarking websites is still a MAJOR source of traffic and can not only help you with link building but driving traffic. Submit your post to pages such as DIGG.com, PROPELLER.com, and others. You can find good list online for these.

9- Create and Submit RSS Feeds. Feeds can always be a good source of traffic. Submit your blogs RSS feeds to all the blog rss feed directories you can. If you find some with good PR, even better.

10- Comment on other related blog post and IF POSSIBLE AND REALTED, place a link to a related story you wrote.

“Many ads are aimed at interrupting a consumer to get them to pay attention to the ad, but this approach has proven less effective on the Web, as consumers often come online to pursue an interest or perform a task, such as finding a local restaurant or booking an airline ticket. To address this, many advertisers are moving away from interruption toward helping consumers accomplish their tasks by offering commercial messages that are useful, helpful and relevant.

Hear more on this strategy from Jim Lecinski, Managing Director, U.S. Sales, and think about incorporating this idea into your 2010 planning:

The reason I am writing this post today is because I truly realized today how important your own blog can be for you if you put information YOU think is important to your niche. IF you think the content you are writing about is important and a good resource for YOU, then chances are it will be good for A LOT of people out there.

I was searching the web for some resources regarding link building. Funny enough, I came across a forum with a thread that contained one of my links and I thought, wait a minute…I had the information i wanted in front of my face the whole time. I have complied a bunch of what I believe is good information for myself in my blog instead of just bookmarking it or writing it down somewhere and put it on my blog to help me.

It obviously helped more than just me if someone in an SEO forum had posted a link to my post to help many others. Your blog should always be a good resource for YOU to come back to since you should be writing things to help you and your audience. News, Tips, etc…that will connect with your audience.

As Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa states, “”We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true,” says Moskwa. “We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

As described by Wikipedia, “PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page,[1] used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is also called the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E).”

There is a great video on WebProNews with EricWard from EricWard.com regarding if PageRank never existed.

“As Eric notes, Google has never actually said don’t buy links. They just say don’t buy our PageRank. Don’t buy the PageRank measure that they’ve assigned to a site. Buying a link would make sense just like buying a banner would’ve made sense ten years ago. If your motivation is click traffic that’s fine, says Ward. If your motivation is that you want to buy a link from a high PageRank site so that you can rank high, then you’re in the area that Google doesn’t like.”

So, with that said, will you change your link building strategies? If pagerank is really irrelevant, do you still think its best to get a link from a site with a PR 2 or a site with a PR 5?

Other Articles Regarding PageRank For Your Interest:

Say Pagerank Update and Everybody Jumps

PageRank Update: To Follow or Not To Follow?

Paid Links Don’t Hurt Your PageRank Right? Matt Cutts?

On the Adcenter Community blog, there is a great post about easy steps to targeting your demographic when creating a pay-per-click campaign. So, how can you determine the target demographic for your keywords? One tool that many people don’t know exist and can be very useful to build your campaign is the Microsoft Forecast Tool which gives you demographic data based on your keyword.

Now, for setting this criteria in the search engine while building your campaign (steps and instructions taken from blog post)

Applying demographic targeting is a simple process that can be done right in Microsoft adCenter. Demographic targets can be set at the Campaign or the Ad Group level.

1) Select the Campaigns tab

2) If you would like to set demographic targets to the Campaign level, select Edit

3) If you would like to set demographic targets to the Ad Group level, select the Ad group on which you would like to implement this functionality

4) To the right of the Campaign or Ad Group name, select Change settings

5) Under Campaign targeting and to the right of Target your customers by location, select Edit





6) Under Targeting setting, select Demographic on the left





7) Ensure the Apply campaign settings check box is unchecked if applying age or gender to specific ad groups

– If this box is cleared, no campaign-level age or gender targeting will be applied

– If this box is missing, there is no campaign-level age or gender targeting

To specify an incremental by for an age or gender group, select a value in the corresponding base bid + drop-down lists

9) Select Apply and then Save

The article in the WSJ points out relevant and important quotes from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and they are listed here as you can also see it by clicking on the link above to the original article (recorded from a call to Google share holders):

4:35: “While there’s obviously a lot of uncertainty about the pace of the economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us,” Schmidt says.

5:28: Schmidt wraps up the call, saying, “I hope it’s clear that we’re very happy with the quarter. We believe we now have the confidence in our underlying business and the business trends to begin to get back to do the kinds of things that we really see as our mission, which is to make the world an information-rich place, to build some of these new businesses and really serve our customers very well.”

Google Geo-Target on Google Adwords

As you know, the way the search engines do targeted local search is by user IP addresses. What about all the people that are local but don’t use a local service provider but use an internet provider such as a wireless card such as AT&T, which to my understanding, can have out of town IP addresses? This means you can be missing out on local users using this type of service.

When making a local campaign, not only should you be using broad keywords where only local users will find you but also create a new ad group or campaign with geo keywords such as ‘city name + keyword’. For example, let’s say you have a hair salon. In one ad group you would have your broad such as:

Hair Salon
Womens Hair Salon

in the geo keyword ad group, you would have:

Manhattan Hair Salon
Manhattan Womens Hair Salon

While there are many tools out there for keyword research, I still maintain this is one of the better tools out there, if not the best, to give you great ideas on what keywords to use to build a ppc campaign and also can serve as a great tool for SEO purposes to give you ideas what keywords maybe be good to optimize for an an approximate value per click.

You can try the Google Keyword Tool now.

You will be surprised how good this tool can be for ideas and putting a PPC campaign together. On the left hand side, you will see a box that will ask you this questions: How would you like to generate keyword ideas?

It gives you an option to allow you to search by keywords or by website content which you can put the URL and will give you the keywords on that site and then will also go ahead and split them up into ad groups for you with some great keyword ideas. I strongly recommending this tool if this is your first time or a rookie in the PPC game.

Many companies do seek a translation company to translate their website and build a whole new page with their page in secondary languages. Google has just released a widget that can make this way easier to the customer. In the click of a buttom, this widget will turn the website to the language of your choice.

Google tells all about this widget in their new blog post, as they state, “Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.”

All this takes a simple piece of code to put into your website. You can find it now in the Google Website Translator.

As a tip for those of you who deal with international customers and have experienced issues in your customer service department with customers (potential and current) sending emails in other languages other than English and your customer service reps dont speak that language, try to Google Translate tool.

I personally love the tool that allows you to see the amount of bid that will get you a certain number of clicks and/or impressions which of course those are all estimates as it has a lot to do with your ads, etc. You will see this like this when you click on the little arrow next to your bids:

The New Google Adwords Bid Simulator

From the newest post on the Adwords blog, Hal Varian explains, “In general, when you increase your maximum CPC bid for keywords on search you are able to generate more clicks to your site. This may be because your new bid qualifies you to appear higher up in the Sponsored Links on the search results page, or because your higher bid qualifies your ad to appear in new, more expensive, auctions. The goal for you as an advertiser is to decide whether or not these additional clicks come at a cost that is still profitable for you.

To make this decision, you need to compare your expected value per click to your incremental cost per click. Your value per click is how much a click for a particular keyword is worth to you, on average. Your incremental cost per click is how much extra you are paying, on average, for the extra clicks you are getting from your higher bid. When your value per click is higher than your incremental cost per click it makes sense to increase your bid. On the other hand, if your value per click is lower than your incremental cost per click, you probably want to decrease your bid.”

“As an advertiser, you’ve probably wondered from time to time what people thought about your marketing efforts. How are they responding to your ads? Do they like them? What do they think about your brand? With many advertisers running display campaigns across the Google Content Network, we’re starting to test some interactive ways for brand advertisers to get feedback on their marketing efforts. In the coming months, we’ll be experimenting with some new approaches that help measure the impact of AdWords campaigns beyond traditional click-through and conversion metrics.

The first is a way to gather feedback on display ads. We start by taking a display ad and removing all traces of the advertiser’s brand. We then show this de-branded ad on the Content Network, and present a few basic questions: 1) Have you seen this ad?, 2) Did you like it?, and 3) What was the product or brand being advertised? This simple and approachable ad encourages users to provide feedback, and it also gives advertisers more information on whether people liked the ad and whether they remember the ad and were able to link it to the brand.”

Here is what users will see:

Full Image

Are you currently doing any display advertising? Are you having success? Feedback is always welcomed!

Sunnyvale-based Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) sites ranked second worldwide with 8.9 billion searches (7.8 percent share), followed closely by Chinese search engine Baidu with 8 billion searches (7.0 percent share).

Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp. sites (NASDAQ: MSFT) had 3.3 billion searches.

Most of the top search properties worldwide experienced significant growth in search query volume versus last year, with Russian search engine Yandex growing at the fastest rate (94 percent) among the top 10.”

Some very important things to notice in this report:

1- July 2009 saw some 113 billion online searches, a 41 percent increase over a year ago

2- Russian search engine Yandex growing at the fastest rate (94 percent) among the top 10.

This will be a short, sweet post. I’m sure of most of us involved in online marketing, we search different than how the average Joe searches. We look at specific things when performing a search, whose ranking for what, etc. I think in order to be successful at search marketing, you have to look at everything in search, even when not working on a project.

I’ll give you a quick example and then you can make out what you want of it. I was performing a search for something last Thursday, I really do not remember what it was. It was something that was very UN-related to a current PPC campaign I’m working on. Anyways, during this search, an ad I saw struck me. It’s an ad that is a bit more nontraditional that what I’ve seen, I just thought it was unique. I said, “OK, let me try this method, a similar ad for my current PPC campaign for one ad group.” Sure enough, I went right ahead and implemented that ad to my campaign.

Within the next 3-4 hours, I had a Click through rate of about 2%+ and a conversion rate of about 5%. The ad has dropped of in CTR and conversion rate a bit since then though. Nevertheless, worked very well and still maintains a conversion rate of about 1.82%.

Point is, ideas for a PPC campaign or even some SEO are always in front of you with the search engines, just have to look.