 Taking Your Search Marketing to the Next Level
By Shari Worthington
President
We love Google for the way they let us seamlessly breeze through millions of web sites. But we’re getting a little nervous that they’re trying to take over our desktops. Last guy that did that left us holding the bag with an array of mediocre products. Eh, Bill?
But you can’t argue with the data. Google is the place to be if you’re looking to make the most of your search marketing program. In June 2007, they captured nearly 53% of the 6+ billion web searches performed.
If you’re looking to move beyond the basics of search engine optimization and pay per click advertising, you should have been at the 2nd Annual ISA Marketing & Sales Summit last month. If you missed it, here are a few highlights from my talk.
Search Engine Optimization: Google Rules
There isn’t enough bandwidth or electricity in the entire world to spider and index all of the web. So Google has to make choices as it decides who should turn up at the top of its listings. Their advice to you is to create a community of like-minded individuals that builds its popularity over time. Make your site search engine friendly which means streamlining the HMTL code so pages load faster and use less bandwidth. And make them more readable and compatible with a wide range of browsers and mobile devices.
In SEO, formatting matters. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and header tags. Move JavaScript and CSS definitions to external files. And please, please clean up your tag soup: malformed HTML tags, improperly nested HTML elements, and use of proprietary and discontinued elements. These are all major no-no’s.
For Google, Page Rank matters. I’m not talking about the toolbar toy called PageRank, but about Google’s internal page ranking system. It’s a complex algorithm with over 140 variables, including the volume and importance of links to your site, internal linking within your site, relevant content, clean coding, etc.
Put SEO to work in your branding efforts and experiment with branding at the front of some of your <title> tags, e.g. company name + keywords vs keywords + company name.
Online reputation management is coming of age. It’s time you took an active role in encouraging positive commentary, especially in these days when social media can make or break a brand in a matter of days.
Pay Per Click: Structure Matters
We recently took over an existing PPC advertising account to help improve it’s numbers. Unfortunately, we took one look at it and had to take an aspirin. I’ve never seen anything so disorganized and cluttered. There were thousands of keywords in each ad group making it impossible to target the advertising message to the phrase being searched. What’s the point of using the great target marketing offered by search engines if you defocus the keywords from the message?
So when you set up your PPC account, create multiple campaigns, dozens, hundreds if need be. Just make sure you’re keeping the keywords and ad copy relevant to each other. Without that, you’re throwing away your marketing dollars.
Make sure you’re testing your ads for different stages of the buying cycle, e.g. demo vs download paper vs purchase. And always run a test ad against your main ad to fine-tune results. Most importantly, don’t just track click-throughs, track conversions (follow through actions like filling out a form or placing an order) as well.
You can download a copy of my presentation at the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit.
If need help working your way through the complexities of the world of search marketing, find out more about Telesian’s Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click Advertising services.
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