iMod » Search Engine Marketing

Creating a Google Plus page

Chris M — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:46:52 +0000

The other day I was reading a blog and went on to read the comments where someone wrote, “What is Google Plus?”. I had a good chuckle and I must admit, I haven’t too active on Google Plus and I’ve hardly explored the platform, well, that was until last week when I started to realise just how important Google Plus was. See, MySpace arrived and everyone had an account, LinkedIn arrived and everyone had an account, Facebook arrived and everyone had an account, Twitter arrived and everyone had an account, About.me arrived and everyone had an account.. so the list goes on, so the management gets more and more involved, so the free time vanishes. Then Google rolled out Google Plus, people jumped on because Google has Klout, but there wasn’t anything really exciting enough to keep people plugged in – I do believe that I don’t speak alone on this.

Well, things are changing and Google Plus might not be for everyone, but if you’ve got a website or sell a service online or anything to that nature the tables are about to turn. Remember when Google started showing Twitter and Facebook stuff in the search results? You might not, but they certainly did, I can’t help but think that this was purely a trial to see what social search was capable of, and this further fueled Google to put together Google Plus, remove Twitter and Facebook (to an extent) and start including Google Plus discussions in the search results – doesn’t take rocket science to really see the plan here.

So, Google’s the search giant and people want current information these days, so what better than for Google to include Google Plus conversations in the results? I mean, Google then starts to dominate the search market even more and takes a big chunk of real-time search with them – brilliant.

But what does that mean for topics like SEO? I’m not going to attempt to answer this in detail purely because it’s been answered here by Rand Fishkin, Joost de Valk, Marcus Taylor, Aaron Wall and Jorg Ruis, who are all industry leaders with excellent insight. Instead, I’m going to tell you that now is a really good time to get yourself a Google Plus Page for your business, just think, if you create that page and get some great content onto it, you’ll have an edge over your competitors for a good while – of course, there’s a strategy for creating good content and you might have to hire an SEO to assist you with aligning your Google goodies – organic SEO stuff, Google Places, Google Plus Page, etc as they can all work so beautifully together and I’d recommend doing that, but you can at least make a start and I’m going to assist you in doing so:

To start creating a Google Plus page you need to navigate to http://plus.google.com/pages/create in your browser.
Select a category which best describes your business: local business or place, product or brand, company, institution or organization, arts entertainment or sports and finally other.
Fill in the information that appears in the form on the right as accurately as possible (remember, Google loves the truth, don’t try cheat the system).
Click the CREATE button
Your page will be created, you can now add a tagline and profile photograph (or logo).
Share your page with your circles if you wish
Click FINISH

7 easy steps and you’ll have a Google Plus Page, fresh and ready for new content that will start being indexed by Google any day now and this is how you’re going to get ahead of your competitors.

This is really the direction in which things are moving at the moment in my opinion, I’d jump on and get going right away :)

iMod

Still no Email Scheduling or PDF Exporting in new Google Analytics

Chris M — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:35:39 +0000

If there are two functions that were incredibly important and useful in the old Google Analytics, it was email scheduling and PDF exporting, both of which aren’t available in the new Analytics even after Google announced that they would be, and should be by now.

On November 1, 2011 Google said, and I quote, “We are happy to announce that both email scheduling and PDF export functionality will be the new interface in a few weeks. We’re now 5 weeks since this statement and still don’t have access to the functions, I’m surprised they don’t put some icons on the interface and upon clicking have a popup that says “Not Provided” (sorry, lame SEO joke).

Sure, real-time analytics, multi-channel funnels and flow visualizations are awesome and incredible additions to the system, but those are new things that we still need to play with and get used to, email scheduling and PDF exporting are things that we’ve used over years and grown to depend on somewhat.

Come on Google, give us these functions back please!

iMod

Is Social Commerce growing? [infographic]

Chris M — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 21:17:51 +0000

Social Commerce isn’t really a buzz word per say, but it’s definitely a new phrase that’s come into affect with the “joining” of E-commerce and Social buzz. Social Commerce involves social interaction and user contribution to assist in the online buying and selling process.

An example of this is a website that has a Facebook Like button next to a product, so when you Like the product, your Facebook friends see it. The same applies for Twitter and all the other social networks. It’s become hugely popular and any company that sells online who isn’t doing this is crazy. Why? Well, just take a look at this infographic.

Here you go:

iMod

Target your adwords campaigns or get blocked

Chris M — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:16:25 +0000

I normally focus on Search Engine Optimization specifically, but from time to time I come into contact with someone that requires an AdWords campaign to be run and because it’s a skill set I have, I oblige. Now, there’s a misconception that AdWords is quite easy and that it’s not nearly as difficult as SEO in the sense that SERP results algorithms change almost daily, but not much happens with AdWords apart from bidding bounces. Well, that’s not quite the case and I’ve got a great example to show you.

When running an AdWords campaign, you’ve got options to use keywords and key phrases in an exact match or broad match (there are three types), in the case of an exact match, if you’re bidding on “green shoes”, your advert will only show when someone searches for “green shoes”, but in a broad match if someone searches for “cheap green shoes”, your advert will stay. Now, I’m a fan of both types of matches and I don’t want to get into why because it’s off topic, but let me just focus on exact matches. When dealing with exact matches, you want to display highly targeted adverts, for example, if someone searches for “green shoes” and your exact matching that phrase and leading a person through to a site with all sorts of shoes, if you aren’t putting a pair of green shoes in front of that person, there’s a chance the person will click back and you’ll have paid for nothing. This isn’t the only problem and here’s a little, hmmm, case study I was looking into:

If I was coming on holiday from the UK and my criteria for accommodation involved wanting a place in clifton that wasn’t too big and that it needs to have a jacuzzi, I would more than likely search for something such as “clifton apartment jacuzzi”. In doing so, I would be presented with an assortment of AdWords adverts as well as organic results, something like this:

The thing to note here is the top AdWords block; this person is broad matching on the term “clifton”, hence their advert showing. Now, there are two things I want to show you here:

When you click through to the advert, you arrive at the cliftononsea.co.za website in the Clifton section, but there’s absolutely nothing about jacuzzi’s, but instead a list of villas in clifton. So, I’ve found villas in Clifton and will now have to perform a search on the website (which didn’t help, I tried) or click around until I find a place.. what a hassle! So, I click the back button to look at the other results from my initial Google search..
The first time you perform the search, the AdWords advert does not have the “Block all cliftononsea.co.za/Clifton_ads” in the advert, this appears if you click an AdWords advert, don’t find what you’re looking for and click the back button. So, Google can tell that you’re unhappy with what you saw and let’s you block the website.

So my point here, and to go back to the title of this post, target your AdWords campaigns and avoid getting blocked. The person doing the search marketing for cliftononsea.co.za should rather look at an exact match type or refine the way the broad match is working, and ensure that when a person clicks the advert that they’re presented with what they’re looking for!

I don’t want to go into this too much more, but you know Google+? The Google system that let’s you PLUS a website so that all your connections online can see that you like it? Ah yes, that rings bells doesn’t it? Well, imagine if you blocked an AdWords campaign, surely there’s room for Google to store your dislike? In fact, of course it does, otherwise how will it know not to show you again? So, what does that mean? Well, that means that Google’s got all this information, if would take a tiny bit of code from one of their developers to now block that advert from all your friends too – this isn’t what happens, I tested it, but there’s certainly room for this and the way that Google’s handling PLUS certainly points in this direction. Just some food for thought, perhaps a discussion for another day.

Please feel free to pop me a comment if you’re interested in discussing this further :)

iMod

An eMarketing Textbook worth giving a read

Chris M — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:29:58 +0000

About a month ago I was invited to the launch party of Quirk’s 4th Edition eMarketing textbook. Now, I’ve been to parties at Quirk before and I’ve read a previous edition of the textbook, both of which were really great, so combine the two and what more could you expect? The party was awesome, despite arriving a little late, it was awesome meet Dianne, Lyndi, Jason and Abby, who are the geniuses behind the education department. I also managed to catch up with Rob Stokes who is the mastermind behind Quirk itself as well as the textbook.

The party was awesome, I had a really good time and was stoked to be given a free copy of Quirk’s eMarketing Textbook, which sees it’s 4th Edition now. Wow, the textbook’s doubled in size, jam-packed with online marketing information, tips, tricks and all sorts of other goodies. I haven’t had a chance to get through the whole book yet, but to give you an idea, it’s broken down into sections: Think, Create, Engage and Optimize.

To give you some understanding, I’ve been practicing SEO for almost a decade and I would consider myself an advanced technical SEO, yet reading through some sections of the book present me with things I’ve never even heard about, which means there’s something for me to learn. On top of this though, there are sections which are incredibly straight forward and aimed very much at a person who doesn’t even know what Search Engine Optimization or Online Marketing means/entails. So, if you run a business that has a website or perhaps you have a hobby website and you want to learn how to optimize your website, increase your website’s visibility in search engines or attract more traffic to your website, then this book would be a great starting point.

Of course, reading the book won’t turn you into an SEO or someone who knows everything about it, but it’s a great start to being educated and then being able to hire someone to do your SEO for you, but doing so with a good understanding of what the SEO is talking about – you might even be able to catch him/her out if he/she starts talking nonsense about projected value ;)

All in all, awesome textbook, it’s taken a place next to my bible and the previous edition and will be read start to finish, probably more than one. If you want to learn more about it or purchase a copy, you can do so by clicking here.

Oh, and if you’re not into reading a text book, Quirk offers an assortment of online courses, which have received rave reviews, even more heavyweights overseas such as Dave Naylor, take a read of his review of Quirk here.

iMod

Introducing Google Analytics Premium

Chris M — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 21:03:32 +0000

Google Analytics, for those who don’t know, is a free service provided by Google that allows website owners to view all sorts of information about the people who arrive at their website. From simple things such as what country the visitors come from to advanced formula’s for calculating social media traffic and conversions.

Today, Google has announced that they’ve launched a Google AdWords Premium account, which gives advanced users even more tools, support and access to more data (if that’s even possible!).

The main additions are:

1. Extra processing power
2. Advanced analysis
3. Service and Support
4. Gaurentees

The bad news is that the Premium accounts are only available to those in the United States, Canada and the UK, so us South Africans are going to have to wait a while still.

Here’s a video to bring you up to speed:

iMod

Google AdSense adverts with +1 buttons

Chris M — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 21:49:46 +0000

Google’s going to be rolling out a new feature with Google AdSense, whereby they display the Plus One button allowing users to “vote” up AdSense blocks and thus determine even more relevance from AdSense blocks.

It’s an interesting move and I’m not too sure how many people will use it, I’m more inclined to say that they should introduce Minus One buttons on the adverts as people would be more inclined to vote negatively. Just my opinion though.

The cool thing is that in your AdSense control center you’ll be able to turn this feature on and off, so we’re not going to be forced to use it.

What do you think? Good idea or Bad idea?

iMod

4 websites to help you find the best keywords

Chris M — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:34:54 +0000

The other day James sent a tweet out to all the SEOs asking about being able to predict the potential traffic a keyword has. This is a tricky topic because it’s not so much about predicting keyword traffic, it’s about first selecting excellent keywords relevant to the niche in question and then possibly using tools to predict keywords. At least that’s how I’ve always recommended people do it. It’s a similar approach I tell bloggers about concentrating on great content and enjoying their blog before looking at ways to make money. First things first approach.

Never the less, I felt I would blog about 4 websites which can assist you in finding great keywords for your niche:

Google AdWords Tool (link)
WordStream (link)
Wordtracker (link)
SEMRush (link)

These four web applications are incredibly useful when it comes to tracking down excellent keywords. Google AdWords tool is free, the data searched belongs to Google and all in all it’s a quick and simple application to get decent results. WordStream is quite a bit more involved and although the results are good, it’s quite pricy ($299 a month). WordStream does offer a free trial, so you can at least try before you buy. Wordtracker’s a popular application which has a good number of active monthly users. Wordtracker is far cheaper than WordStream in that it costs $69 per month, or if you buy an annual subscription it’s only $379. SEMRush is the last application on the list – I’ve used SEMRush quite a bit in the past and have seen great results from what their tool offers; for $70 a month, it’s actually really good.

My opinion on keyword tools and research is that the very best thing you can do is spend time reading and researching keyword analysis. Buy application accounts, get familiar with the results they provide and with time you’ll gain that experience that will allow you to do your research without the help of a premium application.

Know of another great application? Share it with us!

iMod

Where is paid search heading?

Chris M — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:34:32 +0000

I’m a really big fan of running paid search campaigns when websites launch, whilst building up authority with SEO. The idea is to generate immediate leads and once the SEO kicks in, to reduce the spend on paid search – this, for me, has proven incredibly effective in most cases where I put the strategy into play.

Anyway, it’s interesting to watch trends and see where things are going, so this infographic, The Future of Paid Search, interested me and I’m sure it will interest a number of you.

Simply click the thumbnail to see the large version:

iMod

Most expensive AdWords categories

Chris M — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 19:29:25 +0000

If you’ve ever worked with Google AdWords, you’ll know that some keywords are incredibly expensive. I’ve found it fascinating discovering that some areas such as credit, insurance and property can have cost per clicks of tens of dollars, if not hundreds. I remember the first time I was involved in a debt related search engine marketing campaign, a good few years ago and each click was up at $50 per click – just imagine how much money you go through!

Anyway, each time a click is performed, Google makes money of it – that’s right, they make MONEY off it – millions and millions of dollars. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know which AdWords categories cost the most and make Google as wealthy as it is?

Well, here you go:

Click to enlarge

The list of most expensive AdWords categories are:

Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
Lawyer
Donate
Degree
Hosting
Claim
Conference Call
Trading
Software
Recovery
Transfer
Gas/Electricity
Classes
Rehab
Treatment
Cord Blood

Big up to Techcrunch for this infographic.

iMod