What is Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)?

Pay-per-click advertising is an amazing way to advertise. For a very resonable amount of money you can get a world-wide audience to know more about your business. This post is going to talk about what is PPC advertising and why it's important.

 

Many websites offer pay-per click (PPC) advertising on them, but not all of them are necessarily a good investment. It's hard to know where is the best place to advertise on the web, but starting with Google is never a bad thing. The next thing I'd do is look at what other websites appear near the top in searches for your targeted key phrases and then see if they offer advertising on them.

How Does PPC Work?

When you search on Google, for example, the PPC advertisements are the listings that show at the very top and also on the right side of the page. Research shows that the top left, followed by the top right is where most people's eyes start out on a search result page, so placement is critical.Of those ads, when you set up an advertisement to trigger when a person searches for a particular phrase, you are competing in an auction against anyone else who also set up an ad to trigger for that same phrase. So the logical conclusion is the more broad the phrase, the more people competing for it and the more it will cost per click. This is why it's critical to be as specific as possible when coming up with your key phrases. Ideally, your ads should link to a specific page on your website that talks about the same thing that the person searched for, so pointing to your home page is not always best.For example, if you own a shoe store and one of your key phrases is "Nike 330K Running Shoe" then you ought to link to your product page for that specific shoe. That improves your quality score in Google and keeps the user from having to search for the specific thing they want all over once they get to your site. 

So what is "Quality Score" in Google? Google wants advertisements to be as relevant to the search term as possible. This results in a better experience for the user. If someone searches for "Roses in Raleigh, NC" and lands on an auto parts store, that would tell the person that Google advertisements don't deliver. And Google doesn't want that, since that is how they make their billions of dollars. So they rate all key phrases with what they call a "Quality Score" in order to encourage more relevant advertisements. You make an advertisement relevant my making sure  that your key phrases match wording in the ads for those phrases and point to a page on your site which also contain those same key phrases. In order to do this, you may need to break your key phrases in Adwords into several groups and get specific with the ad for that group and the landing page that the ad points to.

One of the best parts of PPC advertising is you don't have to concentrate so much on search engine optimization and link building and you get much faster results. And sometimes no matter how hard you try, you just can't get a page to rank well for some phrases, but because you know it's a killer phrase, you'd be willing to pay to show up for it.

Another advantage to PPC advertising is you can get TONS of analytical data on how many clicks you get, how many times your ad appears to people, how long does someone stay on your website when they search for a particular phrase, what country they are coming from, etc. Unlike traditional advertising, you have a lot of numbers to work with. Unfortunately, with all those numbers comes the complexity of analyzing those numbers to interpret trends that work in your favor. That is where an expert in search marketing comes in handy.

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.

Tweet Your News or Blog

Twitter is a great tool. But it doesn't replace blogging - although it can suppliment it. There is a great service out there called TwitterFeed that will take any RSS feed and send new posts to your Twitter account automatically. That is great because people who are interested in your Tweets are probably also interested in your blog and this way you can promote your blog with no extra effort. And don't forget you can use RSS feeds to automatically send new posts from your news or blog to other blogs, Facebook, etc.

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.

Don't Let People Rip Off Your Website Content

It is not uncommon for people and automated bots to snap snippets of text from your website and then use it for their own diabolical purposes. Here's a script that will let you know when that happens and it also automatically adds a link to your site in the snippet anyone copies, so you can get an incoming link which helps improve your ranking with search engines. Cool, eh? The best part is it's free and very easy to set up. Check it out!

Tracer:
http://tcr52.tynt.com/

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.

How Do I Get My Website to Rank Well in Google? (Part 3)

Okay, so we've been discussing keyword generation, search engine optimization, link building and today we tackle the basics of paid online advertising...

Online Advertising

There are a lot of places you can spend your money advertising on the web. Some places yield better results than others. Find sites that rank well in searches, and don't forget you can advertise directly on search engines using Google Adwords or Yahoo Online Marketing. Often it's easier to pay for an ad for a key phrase than to rank for it organically. This is especially true for highly competitive phrases. The best part is you get almost instant results with paid advertising, unlike link building, which takes months to see the full benefits of your labor. Also think about sites where your target demographic are. Facebook Advertising, for example, has a great advertising program that let's you target specific demographics.

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.

How Do I Get My Website to Rank Well in Google? (Part 2)

Last post I discussed the importance of developing good key phrases and optimizing your website for search engines. This post is going to cover the basics of link building.

Link Building

Now we need to get a lot of high quality links pointing to your site. Start of by searching the web for your key words and see what comes up. Take note of which sites seem to come up again and again. Those are sites you want to get linking to you. Also look for local business directories or directories that specialize in your industry as well as forums where you can post as an authority on a topic. Put a link to your website in your profile and signature. Write up several articles about your industry, include your key phrases, and post them on the web at online article syndication websites. Make sure to include links back to yourself. Post online press releases. Sign up for social media sites and find a few you really dig and set up camp. Build a network of friends and colleagues and link back to your site. Find other companies that are synergistic to what you do and contact them to see if they will link to you.

Rinse and repeat.

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.

How Do I Get My Website to Rank Well in Google? (Part 1)

One of the things we get asked a lot by business owners is "How do I get my website to rank well in Google searches."

I typically respond with "It's kinda complicated, but here's the basics..."

So, here's that "basics" shpeel for those out there still wondering.

This is a large conversation that all falls under the umbrella of "Online marketing." Online marketing is composed of three main subsets in my mind: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) , Link Building, and Paid Advertising. Over the next couple of days, I'm going to focus on each of these three areas.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO can be broken down into two things:

1. Making sure your website contains the key phrases that people will be searching for on a search engine
2. Making sure those key phrases are in the right places

Come up with a list of key phrases that should land a potential client or customer to your site. Go ahead...I'll wait. You may come up with 10-20, if you're good. Now we need to multiply that by ten :-) Think like a layperson. You may need to include terms that aren't really accurate but they are what the general population might think to search on. Now think like an expert...a person in a desperate situation that may need your product or service right this second (Think emergency 24-hour plumber). Now look at your competitor's websites. Notice any key phrases being mentioned that you didn't think of? Try viewing the source of their site and look for key words in META tags, the title, or as ALT names for images. Now pull out a thesaurus and come up with alternate synonyms for your words or concepts. Now plug in some adjectives that describe your terms like "free" or "best" or "cheap" or "friendly." Now think of geographical names for areas you marks to. Now mix and match all of the above. Your list ought to be rolling now. Note, there are tons of tools on the web that help with combining phrases or identifying new ones.

Getting keywords in the right places may mean checking with your web designer, but basically, it means putting them in body copy, headers (H1, H2, H3, etc.), in the page title, as ALT tags on images, in TITLE tags for links, lists, in bold and italic. Also, put absolute links on your pages to other pages on your site and make sure each page of your site uses different keywords in the title and META tags. Many people use the same info for all pages and that is not ideal.

So now you should have a bunch of key phrases and your website should be optimized for those phrases. Stay tuned for the next post, where I'll discuss link building!

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.

What is Twitter and Why Should I Care?

When I first heard of Twitter a couple years ago I thought "Nobody will ever use that!" Apparently I was wrong, as Twitter has become the "Next big thing" in the social media arena and is poised to outpace Facebook in the next year. I get asked a lot from our clients what Twitter is, so here's a brief explanation to the non-tweeters out there.

Twitter is basically a micro blog. So instead of writing a long, thought out post, you can keep it short and sweet. In fact, you have to as each "tweet" is only allowed 180 characters. You can tweet text, links and even photos and you can do it from your computer and even from your cell phone.

So why tweet? Good question. It's a great way to let friends and family know what you're up to and share the little things that happen in your day. Often people use it for sharing a random funny thought or a great website link or a photo of their kids. Professionally it's a great way to find other people with similar interests and learn from them and share things you've found to be helpful too. Often people use Twitter for posting questions to friends and colleagues as well.

Recently Twitter added the ability to search tweets. This is huge. Now you can see trends of what people are talking about right this second, unlike searching on Google and finding pages that were indexed days or even weeks ago. It's like a giant, world-wide chat room. For example, your wife may be a huge American Idol Fan (This is all hypothetical, of course).  You could search on the term "Idol" and find what a bazillion other people are talking about right that second regarding American Idol. And it's usually pretty amusing.Will Twitter replace Google....I doubt it, but it does have it's place for searching for things that are very time sensitive, like news.

So anyway, it's a very interesting piece of technology and definitely worth checking out. if you'd like to follow Page Progressive on Twitter, click here, or to follow Daniel Trimpey, Click here.

 

---

Page Progressive, LLC: Web. Print. Smart.