With AdWords campaigns, perhaps you follow all of the best practices for:

• campaign structure
• keyword targeting
• negatives and compelling ads

But, if you fail to create a customer experience within your site that gets a click – that becomes a conversion – then all of your hard work may not pay off.

Elements of an effective landing page

The first step is to determine whether or not you are landing your customers on the best page within your site. Here are simple recommendations for your pay per click campaign, so that you don’t frustrate your customers:

• your brand terms should go to the home page
• specific brands or types of products you sell should each have unique pages so that you can land your traffic on those pages
• if you are product marketing (bidding on a specific product/formulation),you should take them to the relevant product page

The second step is to meet expectations that are promised in your ad copy.

If you are offering something for free or at a discount, then that info must be on the landing page. If it’s a “price match guarantee” type of offer that requires more explanation, make sure there is a page on your site to explain the program.

Don’t communicate that you have something that you really don’t, in the hopes that they will still convert.

The third step is to make it easy for the primary online conversion to be completed.

If it’s a hard conversion such as a purchase or sign up, make the process happen in as few clicks as possible. Making your customers feel like your site was easy to use will make them more likely to come back.

If your primary online conversion is a softer conversion, such as a phone call or completing a contact form, make sure it’s visible on the landing page and give clear direction what you want them to do and why.

A few bonus tips for your pay per click campaign

• See how your site runs and how fast it runs on each browser. If your site is slow, it may be a barrier to online conversion.
• If your customers are bouncing, use Analytics to determine the step that is causing them to bounce. For instance, if it’s at the shopping cart, try to diagnose the problem. It could be that your shipping charges are too high or that you require information that customers aren’t willing to provide.

Need help creating an effective landing page? Contact The Search Guru today!

Let’s face it. Search engine marketing firms make more work for information technology companies. We know it, and we admit it. There is time-consuming work involved in making a site SEO friendly and we need the support and cooperation of IT to make that happen.

Consider, though, that SEO folks and IT people should be striving for the same goal, and that is to contribute to the financial success of a company. So, when you’re hiring an SEO firm, know that getting the buy in of your IT team (either in-house or third party vendor) is a crucial component to that success.

What role does the information technology company play?

In an ideal world, SEO should be considered BEFORE a site design or website redesign, and before major decisions and changes are made to an existing site. Open communication between the teams is essential during the planning stages and education of SEO best practices may be necessary to ensure that the IT team understands the importance of the changes they’ve been asked to make. For instance, some changes will likely need to be made to the CMS.

Considerations for a best practices content management system

A content management system (CMS) is often not out-of-the-box SEO friendly. This is where the IT folks are needed to assist. An SEO friendly CMS allows users control over items such as:

• Title and meta description tags
• Header tags
• Page content
• Navigation
• URL formation

Without the ability to control these elements, organic success can be limited. Read more information about a best practices content management system. And, if your company is embarking on a website redesign, consult our handy SEO checklist. Then, share these articles with your information technology company!

What is Buzz Marketing?

Buzz marketing is about the remarkable. No matter how clever the message in your online marketing strategies or how wide the audience, the content underlying the status update, tweet, post, article, poll, survey, contest, quiz or link must be extraordinary.

There are two things to keep in mind when contemplating the importance of buzz in marketing your offers:

1. How good is the offer?
Offers must provide substantial value to consumers.

2. How sharable is the offer?
Offers must be appealing, unique and make the customer want to promote the offer on your behalf.

When asking the question what is buzz marketing, keep in mind that the goal of buzz marketing is to get your customers to do your marketing for you. So in turn, you must provide them with something of substantial value.

The 5 Buzz Marketing Building Blocks

Before you put any buzz-related online marketing strategies into place, lay a successful foundation through these 5 building blocks.

1. Start Small

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is that they try to hit a home run during their first at bat. Go for a ground ball and get to first base. Here’s how.

Monitor your competitors over time. Make note of what home page offers they run with and which strike out (those that are removed from their site quickly).

Home page offers that endure on your competitor’s site are probably converting well. Look for ways to add value to one of their existing offers to use on your own home page.

For example, if one of your competitors is running a contest, create a similar contest but with a higher offer value and with an extra bonus for sharing the contest with friends.

2. Get Timely

Create a calendar of tent-pole events and dates. Tent-pole events are those that people prepare for, experience in groups and talk about afterwards. The best example of a tent-pole event would be Christmas Day.

Other examples of tent-pole events:

• Holidays that people share in joy, such as April Fool’s Day and July 4^th
• Unofficial holidays such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Superbowl Sunday
• Industry-related conferences
• Movie / DVD releases with subject matter that either relates to your business or relates to your audience

For promotions in between tent-pole events or without a good tent-pole match, consider creating a time-limited offer. Marketers have been using limited time offer promotions for decades to create a sense of urgency in the mind of the consumer.

3. Piggyback

Always look for opportunities to multiply the appeal of your offer by tying it to the appeal of a larger event.

For example, if you sell widgets and there is a big widget convention coming up, create a contest on your website that sends one of your customers and a guest to the convention with VIP passes to all events, sessions and at least one really good party!

4. Create Post-buzz

After a big event, people are always willing to talk about the great time they had. Leverage this willingness to communicate by asking promotion participants to share their experiences with your audience.

For example, you could ask the VIP widget convention contest winners to send in their photos and to write a guest post on your blog about their experiences.

The idea here is to get your customers, fans and followers excited about your next promotion by having others sing the praises of your last promotion.

5. Measure Engagement and Re-test

The importance of buzz in marketing is best measured by keeping a spreadsheet of the amount of contest entries, the amount of coupon code redemptions, the amount of offer tile clicks or similar. Don’t judge the success of a promotion by what you think the result should have been. Measure the success of each promotion by comparing it to the success of others.

For example, if a contest administered on Facebook resulted in 50 new Likes but 5000 were expected, that does not make the contest a failure. You must create a new contest and measure the amount of Likes generated by the new contest to determine two things:

• The relative success of one promotion to another
• What resonates with your audience

Hitting a Buzz Marketing Home Run

Once you determine what your audience likes, give them more of it. Take what you’ve learned from each (comparatively) successful promotion and apply it to the next. This method of determining the importance of buzz in marketing never stops. It continues in perpetuity and helps to ensure the success of every new promotion.

Still asking yourself – What is buzz marketing? Got an idea for a promotion but not sure if it’s buzzworthy or how it can be made buzzworthy? Post your questions or comments about your buzz-related online marketing strategies below!

To start with an extreme example, it’s unlikely that you’d use the word “supererogate” on your web page (although, if the Internet was around long ago, your ancestors might!). This word has fallen so far out of favor that it appears in the Time article titled, “Researchers Detect ‘Disappearing’ Words That Are Falling Out of Usage.”

As a test, I put “supererogate” into a Google search box. Nine of the top ten results defined the word and the other result wasn’t even in English. The main purpose of the word, it now seems, is to flesh out dictionaries and encyclopedias. (By the way, the word means to “do or perform more than is required.”)

I got similar results in Google when I searched on “succedaneum,” which means “something that is used as a substitute” — and I suspect the same would occur for other disappearing words from the Time magazine article.

More relevant examples include the ever-changing technological terms of today, business jargon and everyday slang.

Do you remember when a “car phone” was the latest and greatest gadget to own? One of the best practices keyword research tools indicates that there are now only about 13 daily searches on that term.

The idea of a mobile phone didn’t go away, though. It kept improving, technologically, and people started referring to it as a “cellular phone.” And, apparently approximately 39 people a day still search for that product. But, the technology and the language didn’t stop evolving and now we have:

• Mobile phone (94 daily searches)
• Smart phone (106 daily searches)
• Cell phone (289 daily searches)
• iPhone (2,187 daily searches)

Depending upon the tool that you use for your keyword research analysis, you may get different metrics — but the reality is that the language is rapidly changing in certain areas. And, if your business sells products in a space that is evolving, you need to keep on top of how language around those products is changing.

Here are two tips:

• Conduct targeted keyword research regularly; this may mean twice a year for you — or it may mean every quarter. You’ll need to find out what schedule fits your industry.
• If you’re a B-to-C company, it’s important to know the latest consumer language around your products, but avoid business jargon. You aren’t talking to a colleague on your web site; you’re talking to customers — or you should be.

Do you need help with your targeted keyword research analysis?

Contact The Search Guru, the supererogating company that goes above and beyond to deliver superior results for you!

Once your pay per click advertising keywords have been active for a few days, you will have some very critical data that you can use to make decisions. And, as long as you have implemented tracking for your online conversions correctly, you can use that data to begin to optimize your keywords.

Here are issues to consider.

Date ranges you choose are important to make sure you look at enough data to make statistically significant decisions about online conversions.

So, always consider your date range when evaluating the performance of keywords and ads.

You’ll also want to put your AdWords keywords into a few buckets – the efficient, the inefficient and the spoilage:

• The efficient keywords are the ones that convert at low cost. If these keywords are performing well, you can consider expanding the keywords related to these terms, broadening your match types, increasing your bids, or all three.
• Your inefficient keywords are the ones that convert but at a very high rate to the point where you are losing money on them. Some of these keywords may be loss leaders that you need to keep active just because they are high volume. With optimization such as adding the right negatives, and choosing the right landing page and the right copy, you may be able to slowly get these keywords to work.
• The spoilage are the keywords that have run over a period of time and continue to spend without converting. Before you pause them, analyze their individual performance:
  • Why aren’t they converting?
  • Are they too broad?
  • Are they synonymous with another word that’s unrelated to your product?
  • Do other advertisers have more compelling offers?
  • Are you bidding too much?

Every pay per click advertising keyword should be given a chance, but if you have tried multiple times to get keywords to work and they don’t, its best to move on and focus on the ones that do work.

Optimizing AdWords keywords is an art and a science.

There is a formula to get keywords to work that is a combination of average position, ad copy, negatives, competitors and landing pages. It is sometimes easier said than done, so contact The Search Guru today if you need help optimizing your pay per click advertising keywords.

Facebook is updating the way their fan / brand pages look and operate. This change in appearance and behavior is being called the Timeline for Facebook and offers brands new and unique opportunities to connect with their fans.

Why does the new Timeline for Facebook matter to business?

The new Timeline on Facebook will become mandatory for all brands starting on March 30, 2012. New features such as the cover image, pinned content and private messaging between brands and fans are enhancing communications. Continue reading for tips on how to maximize your brand’s messaging and engagement using the new features on Facebook’s Timeline.

The Facebook cover photo

You may already be familiar with the new Facebook cover photo. The cover photo has been available to Facebook’s personal profile pages since the new Timeline was offered to everyone (except brands) in December 2011. The maximum Facebook cover photo size is 851px x 315px.

Many brands were excited by the prospect of promoting their offers in what seemed to be a huge banner advertisement. Facebook, however, has a different idea.

The image above shows the Facebook cover photo policy – no promotions, no coupons, no advertisements. It’s entirely possible to achieve the goals of each organization (your company and Facebook) while appeasing the desires of both. Here are some cover photo ideas:

• A product photo in use by a customer or showcased by a model
• A photo of a satisfied customer with a short testimonial
• A before and after photo of how your product or service solves a problem for your customers

Another great cover photo idea is to promote a recent achievement by your company, brand or employees.

The photo above shows Ferrari driver Fernando Alonso victorious at the 2012 Malaysian GP. Brands are experimenting with ways to incorporate their brand identity (logo) into their cover photo.

The image above shows how Captain Morgan changed its profile photo to integrate seamlessly with its cover photo. Nice work, matey!

Pinned content on Timeline for Facebook

A drawback to the previous Facebook format was that evergreen or top posts useful to fans could be quickly pushed down by newer posts. The new Timeline on Facebook allows brands to pin a post to the top of the page, so their fans see it first.

This feature can be useful for the promotion of a limited time sales offer, an instructional video, a poll, a survey or a how-to guide that quickly and easily solves the most commonly held problem shared by your fans.

Highlighted content on Timeline for Facebook

Brands can now highlight content that may be important or useful for fans but doesn’t take precedence over pinned content.

The highlight feature size is 843px x 404px, so be sure to upload an image that is at least that size. Highlighted content creates a milestone. Milestones can be used to record important events in your company such as the opening of a new store, the collection of 10,000 Facebook fans or the launch of a new product.

Timeline for Facebook Admin Panel

The new Facebook Timeline simplifies page administration by combining common tasks under a single Admin Panel button.

The image above shows the location of the Admin Panel button in the Facebook Timeline. Brands may now directly communicate with messages sent privately by fans as well as access page analytics via Facebook Insights in a single location.

Are fan gates still allowed on Timeline for Facebook?

Fan gates, or Facebook apps, that ask a user to Like a page in exchange for contest entries, news subscriptions or similar items are still allowed. However, the fan gate is no longer the first thing your fans-to-be will see.

By default, all users will see your cover image and pinned content at the top of your page. Your fan gate app will still exist, but you’ll have to be creative in how you get people to use it.

For example, you could change the Facebook link on your website’s homepage to point to the URL of your fan gate app. Or you can move your fan gate app to the top of your app list and point towards the Like button.

The image above shows one method of how a fan gate may be used with the new Facebook Timeline.

What does your Timeline on Facebook look like?

With so many clever new features, we predict a host of re-imagined Facebook strategies may emerge. Post a link to your new Facebook Timeline below. We’d really like to see your creative use of cover images, pinned posts and milestones!

This post covered how to use the new features on Timeline. Be sure to catch our next post where we’ll present our thoughts on this new Facebook format.

Social signals are generated every time you engage with a friend, business or group via social media. Whenever a friend, fan or follower posts something you like, retweet, share or forward, a signal is generated.

Why signals from social online networking matter

Search engines like Bing and Google have admitted that they are actively measuring social signals and finding new ways to integrate them into their algorithms for online rankings. If SEO and online rankings are important to you, then so are social signals.

The 4 types of signals from social online networking

Popularity – search engines can count Google +1s, Facebook likes and Twitter tweets when social sharing code is embedded in a page. In areas with high degrees of keyphrase competition, separating what is relevant from what is not via popularity may be more important than traditional factors for online rankings, like link metrics, in the near future.

Shares – search engines can count retweets on Twitter, since information shared on Twitter is open to anyone that hasn’t chosen to protect their tweets. Search engines can also count (public) Facebook and Google+ shares.

Authority – search engines can count how many followers you have on Twitter vs. how many follow you and then make decisions based on the ratio. They can see how many times users have sent tweets to your @username and from how many accounts. The same is true for public shares on other social networks like Pinterest. The number of people repinning and liking your pictures is public, by default.

Comments – search engines can count the number of comments made on blog posts, articles and videos as well as the number of up-votes and thumbs-up on content networks like Reddit, Digg and YouTube. The next step in content valuation is sentiment analysis. Soon, search engines will be able to understand the meaning behind what is being said instead of analyzing which words are being used in conjunction with one another.

Generating social signals through effective online communication

Most marketing messages are decidedly one-way. The best way to generate social signals is to create two-way communications between you and your target audience.

Traditional marketing messages are one-to-many. Social marketing messages may begin life as one-to-many (via a question asked to all followers) but end as one-to-one (via an @reply to a single follower).

A good strategy for generating social signals is to make your messages conversational and commit to participating in the conversation. Reward participants with positive affirmation. Pay forward any shares by sharing the content of those that shared yours. Acknowledge the work of others and thank them for their contributions.

Building value through effective online communication

How successful your search marketing campaign is depends largely on your ability to generate socials signals. The best way to ensure social signals are generated beyond the one-to-many then one-to-one approach is to add value to the conversation at each turn.

Value can be added in more ways than one. Humor, eyewitness news, event attendance, and local happenings with national or worldwide audiences all have value. If 50,000 people are in the audience of an event, it stands to reason that at least 50,000 more wish that they were. Sharing your experiences as an event attendant with your fans and followers has value.

Whether you are a business owner or business employee, your particular experiences are unique to you. Look for ways to incorporate things you’ve learned, plus case studies and work you’ve performed into conversations in such a way that you are helping your friends and followers solve a problem or achieve a goal. By adding value to the conversation and helping those that have chosen to fan or follow you, you increase the likelihood that your content will be liked, your @username will be mentioned and your brand will be shared.

Question for our readers

Given that both positive and negative experiences generate social signals, have you ever asked your audience what they didn’t like about a product or service? Feel free to answer in the comments below.

Recently, we had a client ask about the value of blogging. They wondered about the blog’s return on investment (ROI) and whether the time spent blogging – which they felt was excessive – might be better spent on other SEO initiatives. Today, we’re sharing our business blogging tips with you, our blog readers!

Blogging for business tip #1: Determine blog value

One way to assign value to blog posts is to look at the number of times people enter your site from your blog. For example, we found that, over the last 2.5 years, our client’s blog had received 338,173 search engine visits.

It’s important to place a value on each of these visits, even if it’s an estimate only – and the best way to do that is to use data from Google AdWords. On Google AdWords, our client’s average cost per click (CPC) over the last 2.5 years was $0.54. Paid traffic and organic traffic are similar in that PPC ads entice a click via ad copy and organic listings entice a click via a title and meta description. If we consider the value of blog entrances as if they were PPC ads, 338,173 visits times $0.54 = a blog value of $182,613.42.

The value of blogging is that it increases the freshness and value of your entire site to keep Google crawling your site frequently and helps to boost your rankings.

Blogging for business tip #2: Include valuable content

We noted that many of our client’s blog posts were highly promotional. As a general rule of thumb, no more than 20% of posts should be promoting your products or services. When you do write a promotional post, also include valuable commentary and insights. This will increase the likelihood of social sharing of your posts (Likes, Tweets, +1s, etc.). Remember to include social buttons on all posts.

Blogging for business tip #3: Conduct a time study

We recommended that our client conduct a time study to determine how many hours per week are spent on blogging. How much time, for example, is spent on keyphrase research? How much on researching the blog topic? Writing? Finding images? Living the post? Knowing in which areas the time is being spent can help determine where time savers are needed. For example, including images in posts is important; however, one or two images per post is sufficient.

Blogging for business tip #4: Boost effectiveness of posts

Some blog posts are more effective than others in drawing traffic to your site. We suggested that our client take notice of past blog posts on their site and their competitors’ sites that have high degrees of social sharing. Create a spreadsheet of past blog titles/content and make columns for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Note the amount of shares for each article. Articles with more sharing activity denote topics that are more relevant to your readers. Create regular content on those topics. Always build on the content that came before and link to that content in each post. You’ll want to make it easy for both readers and search engines to determine which articles go together. We suspect that, once you do this analysis, you’ll discover low value in purely promotional blog posts.

Blogging for business tip #5: Create buzz

Choose topics that have “buzz” built into them. One way to do that is to create contests that tie in with current events. Piggybacking your contest buzz on the buzz of a larger event is a great way to increase social sharing. Announce on your blog: contest details, deadlines and requirements; exemplary contest entries as they come in (like photos in a photo contest); and contest winners.

First, to be clear, the most important metrics include:

• Targeted traffic
• Conversions
• Sales
• Profit
• Return on investment

But, it’s true that, the more highly that you rank for a relevant keyphrase, the more likely it is that your targeted traffic will increase – and targeted traffic is the baseline component of improved conversions, and higher sales, profit and ROI.

So, the question is: what search engine ranking tool is the best choice?

The Search Guru uses Rank Checker. This free search engine ranking tool can only work with Firefox, version 2 or higher. So, if you don’t yet have Firefox, download it first. The tool may not work in beta versions of the browser. Instructions are included on the Rank Checker page – and the tool is quick and easy to use when you want to find out your current rankings for certain keyphrases.

Website ranking analysis: now you know your current rankings. What’s next?

This particular search engine ranking tool will let you know your rankings in Google, Yahoo! and Bing, as long as it’s within the top 200. The Search Guru focuses on Google rankings. Then, we recommend the following website ranking analysis guidelines:

• If you rank for a term in positions 1 through 10 (first page of the search engine results pages) – and if it’s important to you – use it in all relevant places to hold onto your lucrative positions. Surely there are competitors who want to steal them from you!
• If you rank for a term in positions 11 through 50 (second through the fifth pages of the search engine results pages) – and if it’s important to you – use it in all relevant places to boost your rankings. As you move up the rankings, you will begin to see an increase in targeted traffic.
• If you rank for a term in positions 51 through 200 (sixth through the twentieth pages of the search engine results pages) – and if it’s important to you – add this keyphrase to your long-term strategy. It’s unlikely that you’ll see fast results on these terms (unless it is not a very competitive term), but it is necessary to build a stronger foundation for a keyphrase for it to rank.

Notice that Rank Checker lists a corresponding URL whenever your current rankings for a term are in the top 200.

This search engine ranking tool only shows one page from your site that is ranking well for a term. In reality, multiple pages on your site might rank well for the term in question.

The home page is the strongest page on your site, and it will often rank higher than other pages on your site – and so the tool will often list the home page in its results.

If you want an inside page to rank for a keyphrase and the tool is telling you that the home page already is, then check to see if the inside page needs to be optimized more strongly for that keyphrase; if so, then do it. If it already looks strongly optimized, then it’s likely that the tool simply pulled in the strongest page in its results.

Need help with your website ranking analysis?

Contact The Search Guru today!

Today marks the one year anniversary of what is arguably Google’s most significant algorithm change in recent years – Panda or, as it was nicknamed when it launched, the Farmer Update. Read what we wrote about Google Panda last year: the impact of the update and ways to help your site recover.

What is Google Panda?

Google’s Panda algorithm has sought to identify and devalue sites with low-quality content. The update has also hit sites that contain duplicate and thin content, and those that suffer from poor usability. It is in Google’s best interest to return only sites that contain useful and valuable information – as opposed to “content farms” or sites that are full of ads – to help it hold onto its large share of the search engine market which, as of this writing, is still over 65% according to Hitwise data.

More answers to “What is Google Panda?” can be found in this great Google Panda update infographic and timeline. Here is another terrific infographic on the same topic.

How do I improve my Google Panda quality ranking?

Google has made it clear that it is emphasizing quality, originality and value – and, in the Panda era, Google is rewarding sites that work harder. Follow these tips to help “Panda-proof” your site:

• Keep your site fresh by continually adding unique content
• Keep your site user-friendly and easy to navigate, with fewer ads and more content “above-the-fold” (visible in the first screen length)
• Keep your site sticky with relevant links so users will visit more pages on the site and stay longer
• Keep your site buzz-worthy: offer something of value to get people talking, as social signals have become important quality indicators

What’s next for Google Panda?

Panda appears to have run its course – but we know that Google is never going to stop working to provide better and better search results. In 2011 Google was said to have rolled out more than 500 search improvements. Your site needs to stand out as a quality, valuable resource in order to compete with the millions of sites out there. So, be unique, be original, be valuable, and be different!