• Why Use PPC When You've Already Got Top Organic Rankings?
    When you've attained prime organic placement for a client across the major search engines, the question of why/whether they need to continue to (or start to) invest in PPC for their branded terms may arise. And the MoreVisibility team has got some insights to help you formulate a good answer. "In reality, having strong positions in the natural listings in addition to strong presence in the paid listings gives your website (and business) the best chance for success in online marketing," the team says. That's because you can't bank on searcher behavior. Some users may just click on the …
  • PR And SEO: Broader Strategies
    Lee Odden goes beyond the basic SEO-focused PR tactics and digs a bit deeper into strategies. The post covers everything from blogger relations, to social media monitoring and crisis management. First up is knowing how to seed briefings and interviews with target keywords. "We've always counseled our clients on the use of targeted keywords during interviews and in communications with the media as well as with content published to the web," Odden says. "In a push and pull PR strategy, keywords are used to optimize content and digital assets to enable the media to pull themselves to a client's …
  • Should Search Firms Offer Refunds?
    How do you handle refund requests? Have you received any lately? What happens if a current client underwent a management shakeup and now the new powers that be are asking for a refund for previously unmet goals? That's the situation one High Rankings Forum member is facing, and is seeking advice for how to handle it. While the particular SEO's issue may be unique, it raises the larger question of how refunds are handled in the space. SEO services fall into a gray area when it comes to results--as unless both parties are extremely clear on what the tangible …
  • Search Marketers Are So-So At Integration
    New research from iCrossing finds that only about half of all search marketers integrate their client's search campaigns with offline channels. When they do, about a third of them cross-promote with direct mail or print (magazines and newspapers), and only about 12% tap broadcast mediums like TV or radio. The biggest factor hindering multi-channel campaigns is a lack of budget, as 20% of the survey respondents said that was the cause. Other factors include a lack of human resources (15%) and personnel silos--11% of respondents said that they their organization had separate people managing search and offline channels. …
  • First Shots Of New AdWords Quality Scores In The Wild
  • Fluff, Filler And Other Extras Your Site Doesn't Need
    "The worst mistake in internet marketing? Making things too complicated. It pumps up costs, slows site launches and keeps you offline when you could be online, selling stuff," says Ian Lurie. And he serves up a list of more than a dozen features your site doesn't need. First up is a complex content management system (CMS). "A full-featured, enterprise CMS is a great tool when you need it," he says. "But do you need it? If you have a staff of two, you don't. Use Wordpress or Movable Type, instead." The same goes for an inventory management …
  • The Benefits Of Combining Paid Search And Paid Inclusion
    Roger Park posts a quick case study on the benefits of combining PPC and paid inclusion, starring the Lending Tree. "Yahoo! and LendingTree wanted to quantify how using sponsored search ads and paid inclusion listings together increases traffic," he says. So Lending Tree used paid search and Yahoo's Search Submit Pro--which gives site owners more control over the page title and description that shows up in the organic search results-- and tapped comScore to measure traffic, consumer engagement and conversions. The tests ran over the course of three months, with the paid inclusion ads turned off at metered …
  • Tips For Successful PPC Day-parting
    "Taking advantage of intraday fluctuations in traffic value can be important to maximizing the efficiency of your pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend," says George Michie. "We see statistically significant variances in traffic value on the order of 5% to 25% for many retailers, and much more than that for some." So Michie offers insight into developing a thoughtful day-parting strategy, starting with analyzing the right traffic. This means focusing on the parts of the day with the most high quality traffic (not just the highest volume) as well as the non-brand PPC traffic. "Direct load and brand traffic …
  • Are Site Indexing Times The New Benchmark For Page (And Link-Building) Authority?
    Wil Reynolds piggybacks on a recent post by SEO Book's Aaron Wall, delving into the idea that a page or site's average indexing time might be a better benchmark for determining its authority than PageRank. After all, if Google is indexing new content from a PR 2 site within hours, and taking a day or more to index content from a PR 6 site, then the former site is seemingly the more authoritative one--and likely the one you should be targeting for link-building. "By running a test on how quickly a page gets in the index from hundreds …
  • A Duel Of Google's Site Targeting Tools: Ad Planner Vs. AdWords Placement
    Joe Kerschbaum compares Google's Ad Planner and the AdWords Placement Tool to see how they stack up when it comes to choosing which sites to target for PPC. The client used for the experiment sells personalized wedding gifts, favors and accessories, making the target audience of females on the hunt for wedding favors (for themselves or friends) pretty clear. With Ad Planner, you enter demographic criteria like gender, age brackets and household income, and the tool spits out sites in new horizontal and vertical markets where your core audience also shops/browses. In this case, Kerschbaum's first set of …
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