Pleasanton Web Design

Here is part two in the series recapping a recent Web Guild panel discussion:

Advanced Search Marketing
Silicon Valley Web Guild
12/13/06

Speakers

1. Barbara Coll, Founder & Search Specialist, WebMama
2. Jessie Stricchiola, Founder, Alchemist Media
3. Moderator: Massimo Burgio, Search Specialist, Global Search Interactive

I’ve just outlined comments or information that stood out as being useful for someone involved in or trying to understand search engine marketing.

Pay Per Click (PPC) and Web Analytics

Massimo: Analytic tools are important in obtaining necessary metrics to determine ROI for a marketing campaign.

Barbara: Business to business marketers selling products priced between $5000 and $25,000 aren’t worried about PPC costs. What is the most important question to answer? What are you willing to pay to get a customer? What is a customer’s lifetime value to you?

Jessie: Send PPC traffic to the proper landing page. Properly track clicks with a query string in the link, i.e. url?page=2.

Redesign your page layout for the best conversion. You can better track the effect of changes by testing with a PPC campaign. Use split AB testing for this purpose. Feed the data obtained by this testing back into your SEO program.

Keyword Analysis

Massimo: Talk to your sales force. They are most likely using different terminology than you PR department and customers.

Tools:

Trellian.com – Keyword discovery.
Wordtracker.com – Wordtracker keywords. Has a steeper learning curve. You can buy a daily license.
Bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm

Firefox tools for SEO
Extensions:
seobook.com – search “SEO for Firefox”
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Jessie: The average number of words in search queries is increasing all the time. The following are measurements and predictions by John Smart -
2002 – 1.3 words
2006- 2.6 words
Projected:
2010 – 5.2 words
2013 – 10.4 words

The average number of words in a human to human questions is 11.

Question and Answers

Q: What is the most critical piece of information in designing your internet marketing campaign?
A: Barbara: Which action converts.

Points to Take Away from the Q&A:

1. There is better conversion on the long tail.
2. Local.google.com gets most of it’s traffic from Google.com because Google includes links to local results in it’s SERPs when appropriate.
3. Buy a feed on local.google.com. You can also include local results in your adword campaign.

Does Google Adsense Make Sense?

I’ve been “messing around” with Google Adsense for a few months now. I’ve also been on the other end – running Adwords campaigns that included the “Content Network” or, in other words, Adsense ads.

I’m sure there are people getting more clicks and making more money from the program than I am. Somebody blogging on electronics, cell phones or other consumer products are obviously more likely to get those high ticket clicks. Probably the most successful at raking in the Adsense cash are those who’s sole purpose is to capture the searches and direct the visitors to the ads.

The most obvious way to increase clicks is to increase the number of visitors to the page. Another way is to embed the ad in the content, so that the user may accidentally click on it, thinking it is part of the article. Yet another way is to optimize the page for the long tail keywords, and provide no useful content, so that the visitor’s best bet to get at the information they seek is to click on the ads. I would consider this last technique spam, and would never use it. I would also see it as having the best chance at high click-through.

From the Adwords advertiser’s perspective, would you want a lot of clicks coming from spam? Do you want to pay for visitor’s who have accidentally clicked on your ad because it has been embedded in the content? I think there are two sets of answers to those questions, depending who you are:

1. If you are a small business with a limited budget, the first thing I would do would be to unclick the “Content Network” box in you ad campaign. Stop advertising through Adsense for a period, and see if your conversion doesn’t increase. In addition, I’ve found that not only the clicks per page view increase when excluding the Adsense network, but when you do get a click it is more likely to convert to a sale.

2. If you are a larger company with a diverse marketing strategy, internet marketing is probably giving you your highest ROI of all channels, so you probably don’t mind the lower conversion per dollar, if it means higher overall volume.

So, to answer my own question: does Google Adsense make sense? – I’d say, if you are internet marketer who’s raison d’etre is to get those clicks, then yes, or course. For a site like mine, however, that has the ads up incidentally, “because I can,” then no, it doesn’t really make sense. It’s a waste of effort. But it’s still kind of fun.