• 234 million people in the United States have mobile phones – 50% of those use their phones for searching in some capacity.
• Over 70 million people in the United States have smartphones – almost all of those use their phones for searching (this doesn’t even include the 10 million iPad and Tablet users).
• 50% of phones being purchased in the United States are smartphones.

Here’s your takeaway: a huge amount of people use their mobile devices for conducting internet searches and that number is only going up.

Since mobile searching is the newest dominant advertising outlet for businesses. It is in a perfect spot – old enough to have a proven track record, but new enough to not have a ton of competition. Right now, mobile advertising costs 30% less per lead generated than advertising on desktop devices. If you are working on a somewhat limited budget like most small businesses are, this is definitely an outlet worth exploring. If you make the effort there, you won’t be sorry.

The trick is to think like Google so you can be proactive rather than reactive.

Look at it from Google’s point of view: their goal is to provide the best search results possible for individual searchers. While the market share does not reflect this, Google is currently way behind Bing in providing relevant results to search queries. Google needs to close that gap as they are seeing their market share slowly (very, very slowly) slipping away.

And while it may not seem this way after the “Panda” update, Google isn’t trying to ruin small businesses, they are simply not thinking of them at all. Their entire focus is on creating a better user experience through their search results. Too often businesses try to trick algorithm updates, as each update brings its own loop-holes (sounds kind of like politics, huh?) and its own opportunity to take advantage of those loop-holes. But like all major loop-holes, one day they close. And when they close the business who was exploiting those holes feels like a pig who just had his house blown down.

If you think like Google, and adhere to what they say are legitimate ways to increase your SEO value, you will never have to panic when they update their algorithms. If you listen to what Google says, you can stay on top of the SEO game, and prepare yourself for these types of changes. You don’t have to be reactive because you know what you’ve built is not going to be attacked. You have used the foundation Google set and built a house made of brick. We all know how the story goes…the big bad wolf can blow down the houses made of straw and wood, but he can’t blow down the house of bricks. Don’t try to exploit loop-holes. Try to build a solid online presence using methods you know will be accepted for a long time to come.

Think like Google and I promise, your house will not get blown over.

Google Offers went live yesterday with support for 4 US cities – NYC, San Francisco, Portland and Oakland. From the Google Offers support page, “Google Offers BETA will get you great deals in your city on things you like and things you need. Whether it’s half off a title at the corner bookstore or a meal at a local restaurant, the offers will be delivered right to your inbox.”

Google offered to buy the leading deals website, Groupon, in December for $6 Billion, and was politely declined.

Google Offers looks to have several distinct advantages over it’s competitors – most attributable to Google’s size and positioning in the search world. Assuming they share data between their products, Google has access to most web queries regarding the already popular Groupon – things like “why groupon sucks” (19million hits) or “why groupon doesn’t work” (3million hits) have undoubtedly been scoured over by Google employees.

With so many daily deals websites, it may be time to take a more serious look at aggregators like Yipit and DealSurf.

For those of you who are new to PPC, I don’t want you to become jaded. I want you to love PPC as much as I do! Here are a few simple tips to help set you and keep you on the right track.

1. Think about your Quality Score

It used to be that quality score didn’t matter. You could get away with having hundreds of keywords in one ad group. But this led to almost completely irrelevant ad text in relation to the keyword searched. Rather than having one ad group and hundreds of keywords in that group, launch the account with very specialized ad groups, each consisting of no more than 15-20 keywords. Then write ads relevant to these specific groups.

Here’s an example: Say you own a landscaping business where you offer lawn mowing, weed mediation, tree trimming, and tree removal. If you have one group with all of these products being offered, it is impossible to consistently serve relevant ads to the searcher. You might have an ad offering general landscaping services, but if someone searches for Tree Removal, Kansas City and they see your general landscaping ad, they will not be very likely to click on your ad. But if your ad offered “Tree Removal Services,” the searcher would be much more inclined to interact with your ad.

2. Use Relevant Landing Pages

This ties in very strongly to having relevant ad text and specialized ad groups. Using the example above, if the searcher clicks on your “Tree Removal” ad and is sent to your website’s home page, or a page discussing lawn mowing, you can be sure that they will bounce right off your website. They won’t stick around for more than a couple seconds. However if your Tree Removal ad sends them to a page discussing your various tree removal techniques and safety information, they will be much more likely to convert into a customer. Your ad’s landing page must be relevant to the keyword the searcher enters. Period.

3. Bid on Your Brand Name

It is common to assume that you don’t need to use your PPC budget bidding on your brand name because you probably already rank first for your brand naturally. Throw this misconception out the window.

Even if you do rank number one on your brand name, not all searches click on organic listings. In fact, many people, don’t even know that search engine ads are ads at all! They click on the first listing on the search engine results page…and guess what; the first listing is an ad. Furthermore, due to new trademark policies, your competitors are able to bid on your brand. You need to keep a step ahead of them and not let them steal a customer who is actively looking for you!

4. Test Your Ads

This is probably the most overlooked piece of PPC advertising – even by larger agencies. Adwords and AdCenter make it easy to test ad copy and find out what text works best with your customers. Take advantage of this ability. Continually rotate new ads into your ad groups and run the ones that have the best click rates and conversion rates. You want to drive qualified traffic to your website, don’t hinder yourself by sticking to one ad forever.

5. Track your campaigns

The only way to know what is working and what is not is to track your campaigns. Both Adwords and AdCenter offer free conversion tracking. Google offers analytics for free as well. These tools are absolutely invaluable when analyzing your PPC efforts. If you don’t know specifically what worked and what didn’t, you will make many incorrect decisions simply based on assumptions. You need to know what keywords work better than others. You need to know what ad groups perform better. And you need to know what time of the day your ads perform best. Use this information to constantly optimize your campaigns. Without tracking your campaigns using analytics and conversion tracking, how can you know what you need to change? The short answer is, you can’t.

By following these 5 steps, I sincerely hope you will fall in love with PPC advertising and will appreciate its value. This is one of the most efficient advertising outlets that exist today, and these steps will put you on the right path to generating positive results.

1. Use CSS for Consistency

You don’t have to like CSS, or really even understand all that it can do. Adding Cascading Style Sheets to a website that doesn’t have them can cut down overall code weight by several KB per page and ensures a consistent look across your website. Every paragraph should be the same font size, and every headline should match your theme. Consistency helps build trust and credibility.

2. Reduce Image Sizes

Start by downloading a backup of your website. Next, find all of your images and upload them to Yahoo’s free service Smush.it™. This will reduce file size on all standard file types without losing any quality. Smaller images load faster and faster websites make visitors happy.

3. Make Sure Your Links Work

This one is often overlooked. Broken links are a great way to lose trust. Test every link on your website and correct any that don’t go where they’re supposed to.

4. Sign Up For Webmaster Tools

This one is easy. Google offers a free tool that gives you insight into what they find when they visit your website. Once configured, Webmaster Tools will offer information on Search queries, errors on your website, suggestions to improve your website, and even a list off all websites that link to your own.

Like our tips?

Let us know through the comments or our contact page. Good feedback will lead to more helpful articles.

1. Enhance your website. As I talked about in Online Marketing: Step 1, the key to all online marketing success lies within your website. If you don’t have a good website, don’t bother trying to fix your search engine marketing campaigns – nothing you can do to them will fix the problem.

2. Understand your core keywords. Search engine marketing is based around keyword searches on the major search engines. In order to be successful you will need to choose keywords that are highly relevant to your business but also very focused. Say you offer landscaping service. The term “landscaping service,” while very relevant to your business is so broad that it will cost you a lot of money and not send as qualified traffic to your website. Instead, use the term “retaining wall landscaping service Kansas city KS.” Using the longer terms (called “long-tail keywords”) will deliver higher quality and less expensive traffic to your website.

3. Write concise and relevant ads. Your ad text should be short and sweet. It should get right to the point as quickly as possible. You should include a call to action like “buy” or “register.” You should also include keywords in your ad text to make the ad as relevant to the searcher as possible.

4. Landing Page Customization. Many advertisers drop their ads to the home page of their website. DO NOT DO THIS! If you have an ad about building a retaining wall, link that ad to a page on your website about building retaining walls. If you have an ad about planting trees, link that ad to a page on your website about planting trees. It is a simple concept but is overlooked far too often. If you keep your keywords, ads, and landing page relevant to what the searcher typed into the search engine, you have a much better chance of turning the searcher into a client.

5. Maintain your campaigns. Search engine marketing campaigns will fail if they are not maintained. Keep rotating out ad text – as ad text gets stale after a while (the time varies based on your industry). Also, you want to keep adding and deleting keywords. For example, you may have one keyword that generates a lot website traffic, while another generates fewer visits and more purchases. The second keyword is likely better for you to use. Maintaining and testing these types of changes is key to the current and ongoing success of your search engine marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of slowly and naturally getting your website to appear higher up on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is a hugely important process to engage in as over 90% of search engine users click on results which appear on the first page (http://www.marketinghub.info/serp-click-distribution/). If you can optimize your website to appear on the first page, not only will you see an enormous boost in traffic, you will see an enormous boost in high quality leads coming from search engines. While this process typically takes several months to take effect and is an ongoing effort beyond that, it is one of the most important marketing practices you can engage in to drive high quality traffic to your website. One of the largest pieces of SEO is Local Search Visibility, which I will be addressing in a later post.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is essentially paying the search engines to give your website premium placement on the SERPs. Instead of your website appearing in the natural results, it appears in a featured section dedicated to search engine ads. There are several advantages to engaging in SEM. One of the most appealing advantages to the budget-conscious business owner is that these search engine ads are free until they are effective. The ads are paid on a per-click basis, which means you only pay the search engines for your ad when a user clicks your ad and is sent to your website. Imagine if you only had to pay the newspapers for you ads when you generated a lead; that would be game-changing! What is a dream in traditional media is a reality online.

Another advantage SEM offers is extremely specific target. You can choose who sees your ad based on geographic and demographic data. You can also target the ad based on what people are searching for. This targeting allows you to only show your ad to potential customers who are ready to buy your product! Again, imagine if you could guarantee that the correct audience was seeing your newspaper ad. If this were the case, newspapers wouldn’t be going out of business.

To wrap up, two of the biggest pieces in driving high quality traffic to your website are Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. You have a great website, help your customers find it.

The new “Do-Not-Track” option is implemented by a unique tag at the end of each request your browser makes to a web server with a simple 0 or 1 (1 meaning do not track). Websites that support the tag will be able to opt users out of tracking cookies without a prompt. Many hope this will open the door to new privacy legislation and requirements for website owners to comply with people not wishing to be tracked.

The first large scale adoption has come from the Associated Press. It is said that they were able to implement the code on 800+ websites with only a few hours put in by 1 developer. This means that over 175 million visitors per month now have the option to opt-out of all personally identifiable tracking. This is a big step forward and goes to show just how simple it will be to adopt the new tag.

Unfortunately, as is often the case with web standards, Google and Microsoft have already been working on their own twist to Mozilla’s DNT feature. This will mean additional development time to support all of the major browsers. There is speculation that there may be a W3C specification in the works, but we all know, complying with the specifications is not a requirement (I’m looking at you IE).

If you are in the large group of business owners that do not have a website or are not happy with your current website, listen up! Far too often business owners think of websites as a secondary priority – an unnecessary expense. But as more and more people start using the Web to help make decisions, it has become absolutely imperative that you, as a business owner, represent your company online.

Use your website to reach your sales goals. Communicate your strengths to your clients, and do so in a clean and professional manner. You have just a few seconds to grab the attention of an internet user. Make those seconds count.

Most people know what they want before they visit a website. Make sure you know what your customers are after and make it easy for them to find what they are looking for. If you sell baby clothes, don’t make your customers click through 5 pages of text before they can see baby clothes. Give them what they want, and give it to them right away.

A great website is the easiest and most cost effective way to build trust with your customers. If you have any marketing budget at all, make sure a website is part of that budget. Only start thinking about other online marketing initiatives after you have a solid website.

It’s time to drop IE6.

Before the applause, it’s important to note: Internet Explorer 6, now more than 10 years old, and unsupported for 2 major operating system updates (Windows Vista & 7), still commands 12% of the market. For a local school, that’s 150 visitors per month; for a small e-commerce business: 1450. That’s a lot of people.

Microsoft has launched a new website to help educate users and track the campaign. They’re also using the new website to promote the Release Candidate for IE9, the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

So, what exactly is wrong with IE6? What’s the rush to upgrade?

Internet Explorer 6 was never built to handle web standards, meaning web developers are forced to spend additional time coding around its various quirks. Depending on the complexity of the website, this could mean days of extra coding. For web developers, it’s merely a nuisance – but for business owners, supporting IE6 means added cost.

Options for upgrading have never been better. The browser market now has at least 5 main contenders: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari, and Opera. The newcomer Chrome has quickly climbed the ranks, showing the 3rd most popular browser in February this year.