Begin with Keyword Research: Selecting Relevant Keywords
As we begin any project we start with keyword research: Selecting keywords should be a first step with any good SEO. There are several tools such as WorkTracker and Keyword Discover which can help locate keywords; We just need a tools which will show relative volume of different keywords compared to each other.
Let’s take a recent project we worked on for Sonus-USA, who offers wholesale car detailing supplies.
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IYPs Get in the Pay-Per-Click GameRemember the good old days where there were only 3 places to buy traffic? Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have dominated the market. Especially in local search marketing, several IYP, Internet Yellow Pages, have moved from yearly directory listing fees to a pay-per-click structure.
In some highly competitive keywords especially, this has been a great opportunity for more keyword inventory and to really control a cost for conversion for a client. However, with so many opportunities and each site offering a slightly different package and type of customer a search engine marketer’s job is growing increasingly more difficult.
Over the next several weeks, we are going to open up our Advertising Portfolio and share real traffic patterns and conversion rates for the different IYP to show which sites drove quality traffic and leads and the sites whose advertising structure actually hurt our search engine efforts. You will want to stay tuned, as we rank each traffic source… you are not going to believe how the traffic from the different IYP behaved or how drastic different results were from the same sources to different industries.
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Google Adwords Advertising Professional
We have been managing PPC campaigns for a couple years now and with big changes in the works, I finally decided it was time to take the Adwords Professional test. I feel pretty good about passing the test on the first try- which is not bad whose main bread and butter is hyper-local search marketing.
The test is not particularly difficult if you have been using Adwords, but there were several questions which you just have to save time to look up, like, “If you are a pre-pay account can you pay your account with western-union or cashiers check.” Since this doesn’t apply to me I had to look it up. So anyone looking to take the test, keep your Google help open.
I noticed for my test, that there was a large section on new ways a site marketer can integrate with the Google Local Business center within their adwords account. Since I had attended Google’s launch of these features in 08/09 in San Jose I had already been testing conversion when adding this association. But this was really one of the few times I had noticed a strong push for Google to start monitoring Google Local business and maps. More on the Adwords / Local Business integration at a different time.
PPC Tip #1: Block Low Quality TrafficIt is a really fine line between low quality traffic and click fraud. No matter how you divide it, itis clear traffic from some partners is much better then others, so by taking steps to block low quality traffic this will improve the quality of PPC traffic to your site and decrease wasted spending.. This is especially true on Yahoo, where you cannot opt out of search partners like you can with Google Adwords.
The first step we take when looking at a Yahoo! Marketing Campaign is to Block Domains.
Blocked Domains lets you specify sites on which you don’t want your ads to appear, whether they’re competitors of yours, or have products or content that you don’t want associated with your brand. Blocked Domains lets you block up to 500 domains. These can be an entire domain, a subdomain, or up to two subdirectories per domain. For more information on when and how to use Blocked Domains click here.
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