Is Your Website Leaving You as Frustrated as this Experience?

Putting on the Ritz

Imagine you’ve met the perfect person, all you ever dreamed of and wanted in an ideal partner. So special that your heart skipped a beat whenever you even thought of them.

Then imagine they’d agreed to a date, with you!

The Perfect Date?

So you set out to impress, yes, you’re going to impress definitely…

You look a million dollars, you feel great, you smell divine, how could they resist?

You’ve laid on the cocktails, taken them to the most exclusive restaurant, ordered the most exquisite dinner imaginable, chosen the most expensive wine and, at the culmination of the evening, as you wait breathlessly on their words, they utter that classic, knee trembling line ‘I’ll call you later’.

How would if it feel if that happened to you? Imagine how you’d feel if it happened every Saturday night?

What if it happened every night?

Then imagine how you would feel if it kept on happening to you, repeatedly, all day and every day.

You’d be really stupid wouldn’t you?

Can you really believe anyone would be daft enough to let that happen to them, over and over again and do nothing about it?

And yet amazingly this sort of thing goes on all the time on the internet.

I daren’t count the amount of times I’ve been told ‘we need more traffic!’. Yet getting more traffic is like asking for more water when you have a hole in your bucket, or asking ever more people out on expensive dates when something you do or say every time makes your perfect partner never want to see you, ever again.

Traffic isn’t the issue, it’s what you do with it, just like it’s not your chat up line that’s not working, it’s your conversion process.

Peter Van Zelst is the founder of Specialist Online Marketing, which runs an integrated online marketing service for small to medium sized UK organisations,using PPC, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Social Media and a number of other activities and utilising Analytics to ensure every click counts.

The 10 Best Uses of PPC Search Marketing

How to use PPC/Paid Search Advertising Most Effectively

There’s lots of debate in online marketing and search engine circles (even in general discussions down the pub, for that matter) about the best way of online marketing. SEO’s will always tell you that Natural Search is best; PPC Search Professionals will advocate that Pay Per Click is far more effective; Affiliate Marketing experts will advise that the Affiliate channel is the only way; the email marketing guys will shout that nothing works like email and so on.

The truth is that they all work really well but what YOU should use depends on what YOU want to achieve.

Depending on your objectives; products/services/industries/markets or segments; product lifecycle stage; different customer/target customer groups or such criteria, one or more of these online marketing activities is going to be best for you. The secret is selecting which!

Pay Per Click Search Advertising and how to use it most effectively

Because PPC is immediate, flexible, controllable, targeted, measurable and, in some cases, extremely cheap, it is ideally suited for certain situations. In these appropriate situations, PPC will give you a significantly higher return on your investment than literally ANY form of marketing and advertising, and I can more or less guarantee that.

We recommend that the 10 best uses of PPC are as follows:-

1.Starting out with a new website

When you first launch your website it is extremely difficult to get initial traffic. Google and the other search engines take time to index your pages, you have yet to start building any links, other webmasters can’t see your page rank, no word of mouth or recommendations have started to kick in, referral traffic doesn’t exist, you’re faced with spectre of the mythical Google Sandbox, and the list goes on.

If you launch your website at 10 o’clock, you can have traffic coming to your site at 10:00:01 with PPC. What’s more, with a correctly built, optimised and managed campaign you can be at the top of the search engines from day 1, minute 1. Even better with a good campaign, every single visitor that hits your site is looking for exactly what you do and is ready to buy.

2. Competition, around your name or in general

Just like when you’re starting out, if you have a common, generic or widely used name, e.g. ‘john smith’ or ‘flowers’ or ‘sarah palin’, it will be very difficult for you to achieve high search engine prominence. Which means if you’re marketing your business offline, people won’t be able to find you. Using PPC for this is an extremely important and very effective way of protecting your brand name and making sure your customers find you.

Similarly, sometimes it’s just not possible to get a top Google ranking for a particular term or would be prohibitively difficult. In these cases, if you need presence for that keyword phrase, then PPC is your option.

3. Testing

In search engine marketing you need to know the keywords that will be used by your customers, and the words that will attract them to your site and not those of your competitors. You also need to know which keywords deliver conversions, be that sales, leads, enquiries, downloads, etc., and which don’t. You also need to know if that keyword will bring lots of traffic or hardly any.

There’s no point in optimising for a particular keyword that no-one searches for or having descriptive text and titles that don’t drive people to your site.

Because PPC is so flexible, immediate and measurable you can test out any conceivable number of variations of keywords and phrases, titles, advertising messages, landing pages and so on.

You can then be sure that when you do start to optimise those important keywords, they will drive viable volumes of quality traffic that bring in business.

4. Low volume/high conversion search terms

Just as in the above, because Pay Per Click is flexible, instant and highly measurable, if you identify that a particular keyword phrase brings in a high level of conversions but has very low search volumes, you can assess whether it is more profitable just to run with PPC for that particular phrase.

5. Sales Push or Demand/Workload Control

Most businesses are limited by capacity but also have a minimum level of business they need to cover overheads. With a well run PPC campaign the moment you feel like you’re going to need some new business you can either turn on or turn up your PPC advertising volume and, lo and behold, in comes the business or at least targeted leads.

Once you’re reaching capacity and are worrying about how you can fulfil all your orders or work, simply turn off or reduce the PPC advertising volume.

Few advertising media can compare with the speed, immediacy, controllability and flexibility of PPC and I would say it is a superb tool for controlling your businesses work load.

6. Perishable Products/Services

If you grow Strawberries, offer coach tours, run seminars or sell Valentine’s Day gifts you have a very time specific offering and a limited window to sell your product or service. There’s no point in offering your Strawberries two weeks before they are ready and there’s little point in advertising valentine’s gifts on the 15^th February or your seminar they day after you ran it.

Just like the above point, you can regulate your advertising according to demand so if you still have empty spaces on your seminar the week before you can promote heavily or you can cut back your advertising once your coach is nearly full.

7. Promotions/Special Offers

If you have a twice yearly sale, a one week promotion or a 10% off day, then PPC is highly effective. You can advertise whenever you need and pull the moment you stop the promotion. You can take your potential customer to the exact landing page that advertises your promotion or even multiple promotions. Your advertising is fresh, exciting and you’re not promoting something that finished 3 months ago.

8. Time Specific Advertising

If you offer next day delivery up to, say, 2 o’clock in the afternoon, then you don’t want to be promoting next day delivery at 2:30pm. With Pay Per Click Search Advertising you can time your adverts so that they appear from say 1am to 1:55pm each day so you never disappoint or mislead a customer or potential customer.

9. Geographic targeting

If you only sell to a local market you don’t want to be promoting your offer in India or to the Highlands of Scotland when you only service London. With the Geographic targeting options available on the main search engines you only need to advertise to the geographic area you cover, so your ads aren’t shown to people outside this area.

10. Short Term Campaigns

If your site is built around an event that is going to take place in 3 months time and then be over, PPC is really the only way you can effectively drive viable levels of traffic to your site. You can launch your campaign whenever you’re ready and then go like mad until you’re satisfied. As soon as the event’s over you can switch off your PPC campaign.

Conclusion

An intelligently used, highly targeted, optimised Pay Per Click Campaign is one of the best forms of internet marketing and when used appropriately is an invaluable weapon in your marketing armoury.

Peter Van Zelst is founder of Specialist Online Marketing, which runs an integrated online marketing service for small to medium sized UK organisations,using PPC, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Social Media and a number of other activities.

Is This The Most Important Mindset In The Web 2.0 World?

The fuss/buzz around Google’s 10th anniversary last week has caused many people, not just the usual ‘Search Geek’ suspects, to review and discuss Google and what it’s all about. If you take the time to read through the Google corporate information and mission statement there’s one keyword that you should index and cache in your head, without the need for one of Google’s server or complicated algorithms:- ‘Relevancy’, in fact you’ll find the word ‘relevant’ 10,100 times on Google.com.

Despite this, it’s staggering how many people haven’t grasped the impact of this word ‘relevancy’ on their business or ambitions.

Traditionally marketing people liked to think of cross selling possibilities, up-selling and impulse purchases opportunities. If you went to someone looking for a hammer, you might also buy some nails and a screwdriver (That’s why Supermarkets are laid out the way they are).

Don’t get me wrong, the same can happen in today’s online world, but when someone is searching for a hammer on a search engine, the statistical probability that they will abandon this search and buy some nails instead is, at best, remote.

A simple search for hammer on Google throws up the possibilities of Horror films, Data Storage, a legendary 1980’s US Rapper, a heavy metal rock band, Communism, Computer Parts and many other variances, aside from our intended target, the eponymous impact tool.

Refining the Hammer Tool search then throws up: – hand operated hammers, machine hammers, framing hammers, demolition hammers, air hammers, metal hammers, wooden hammers, claw hammers, dead blow hammers, sledge hammers, lump hammers, cross-peen hammers, hammer drills, and so on.

Refining our search to hand operated hammers throws up another raft of options and the search process continues.

Users refine their search to become more and more relevant to what they are precisely looking for at the time. Anything else is lost in the periphery.

Relevance is fundamental in natural search but it’s crucial in Paid Search

You can see this effect in Pay Per Click Search Advertising so clearly. If you don’t target your keywords and advertising message with precision, laser-like accuracy, your Click Through Rates will be poor, your quality score will be poor, your minimum bid costs rise and/or your Ads won’t be shown.

The other side to this, is that if you inaccurately target your keywords but your ad copy leads people to believe that your site offers what they want, you will get visitors to your site (and have to pay for the privilege in PPC) but they will leave almost immediately once they realise your site isn’t relevant to their requirements. The resulting high ‘bounce rate’ will adversely affect your quality score, your minimum bid costs will rise, your Ads won’t be shown and your partner will probably leave you and take with them all your possessions.

As an online marketing company, we see this all the time (Though not the last bit too much, thankfully). Sensible, experienced, successful business people who obviously understand their markets and customers, but don’t fully understand the keywords that drive their users and customers to visit their website. ‘Yes’, they say, ‘I know that’s really not exactly what we do, but if someone was looking for that they might be interested in this’. NO! Sorry it just doesn’t work like that.

So you’re talking about relevancy in search, surely web 2.0 is different?

The huge amount of information that is now out there in this web 2.0 world makes relevancy (and search) even more important. Many sites are so huge you almost have no option but to use Google to help you find what you want.

If you think back to the early days of Google, its results weren’t anywhere near as relevant, but then again there weren’t so many web pages out there as there is today. The sheer volume of information now on the web; the way Google has positioned itself as an organiser of information based on the criteria of relevance and the growth of both are inextricably linked.

Which leads us to the information overload question. With so much stuff coming at you, what do you do? Errm, focus on what you want at that particular time, back to Relevance, again.

So what does this mean to me?

It means you have to understand relevance. Which means you need to fully understand your business, your customers and your target customers. Try to articulate exactly what it is you do and what your customers/users value. The start to develop an understanding of the sort of words that your target users/customers will use when looking for you and what you do, and which words will attract them to visit your website not one of your competitors. And then test, analyse and ruthlessly refine your target keywords. And DON’T go thinking that if lots of people are looking for info on Theo Walcott there’s a good chance they may be interested in your site that sells mobile phone cards!

Peter Van Zelst is the founder of Specialist Online Marketing, which runs integrated online marketing campaigns for small to medium sized UK organisations, using PPC, SEO, Email, Affiliate, Social Media and a number of other activities.