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By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Coverage of the PPC for the SME session by Steven Power, CEO of ReachLocal at SMX Sydney 2009.

Understanding the Purchasing Funnel

Steven showed the purchasing funnel graph and how it applies to Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). He says 79% of searchers use the internet to research the purchase of products and services, while 42% of searchers are actually seeking a local business to buy something offline. Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME’s) should be using this information when planning PPC campaigns.


Get your business ready for paid search advertising:

- Are you ready and able to handle increased deamnd from prospective customers?

- Can your processes and infrastructure scale?

- How will you handle overflow?

- When do people shop online?

- Prepare before you start Pay Per Click

Steven then discussed a case study for Auto Lift Garage Doors where they tried PPC for the first time and couldn’t cope with the influx of inquiries that resulted.


Work out what success looks like:

- What are you trying to achieve?

- Are you trying to generate qualified enquiries?

- Are you trying to focus on a particular product or service

- What is a good return on your marketing investment?

What does success look like for you? Are you prepared to spend more? Steven then showed a graph of what success looks like for different SMEs:

1) 24 new customers $72,000

2) 2 new patients $16,000

3) Sales from campaign $50,ooo

4) 10 new customers $200,000

PPC is particularly effective on a Cost Per Customer basis, but it’s also effective on a Cost Per Lead basis.


Define your target audience:

- How far are your customers willing to drive? E.g. would you drive 30 mins for a dentist? (probably not) What about a brain surgeon? (probably)

- How wide is your service area?

- Where is your target audeicnce?

- How may locations do you have and where are they?

- What types of advertising do you use now?

- What is your average transaction value?

- How much business can you support?


Review your web presence

- Do you have an existing website? Offer page? Coupon page?

- What sort of property do you need to do PPC?

- Does your site reflect your business today?

- Is it an info site or a sales site?

Case Study for BMW Precision Automotive where a Flash landing page worked well.


Product or Service:

- What are you tryiing to sell?

- Do you want to focus on a high margin line?

- Will separate landing pages be more effective?


Geographic Coverage:

- What is the geographic service area that you want to cover?

- Do you have local market credibility?


Contact and Key Information:

- Is it clear and easy to contact your biz? Is contact info on every page?

- Does your copy have a call to action?


Key Images:

- Is your web site visually appealing?

- Does it encourage potential buyers?


Easy Navigation:

- Is it easy to find key information and use the features on your web site?


PPC Budget:

- Make sure your budget adds up

- What can you afford to spend per lead?

- What are you currently paying per lead?

- How do you calculate ROI?

- What about lifetime customer value?

- Use the available online budgeting tools

- Think like a searcher

- It’s an iterative process

- Monitor performance and manage your list

- Understand the value of each keyword in your bid management strategy

Test measure learn and improve, says Steven. Ask the question: “can someone help me manage my PPC campaign”? Steven says that many SMEs spend too many hours managing their PPC campaigns and they should be outsourcing that. But make sure that you use companies endorsed or certified by the search engines.

* Photo courtesy of Andrew Ballard of ReBusiness


By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Coverage of the Day 2 Keynote by Bill Tancer GM Global Research from Hitwise at SMX Sydney 2009.

Bill is the author of the book Click which is about people’s behavior patterns online. Bill starts by asking the audience a range of questions about the search market. The audience guesses correctly that in Australia, Google has the majority market share. Hitwise data is drawn from 25 million internet users worldwide. Search market stats for 2009 show:

  • In the US, 70% of all searches are being executed on Google, then Yahoo 16%
  • In Australia, 90% of searches are being executed on Google, then MSNLive
  • In New Zealand, 92% of all searches are being executied on Google, then Yahoo

In March 2008, Google’s market share in the US was 67%. In March 2009, it was 73%. In March 2008, Google’s market share in Australia was 88%. In March 2009, it was 90%. In March 2008, Google’s market share in New Zealand was 90%. In March 2009, it was 92%.  So much for Bill’s prediction last year of Google reaching their market saturation point!

In the US in 2009, 14.9% of people used 4 words per search query, while 8.7% used 5 words per search query. This is a marked increase in long tail search query usage over 2008.

Search term length in Australia is different. Of the top 10,000 queries, the search term length is actually lowering. Bill thinks this is because people are searching for short terms like Facebook, YouTube and other brand related terms. When comparing search query success rate and query length, it shows that there is some dissatisfaction amongst Australian searchers with their SERPS.

Top Search Terms by Market

Australia

1) Facebook

2) eBay

3) YouTube

4) MySpace

5) BOM

New Zealand

1) Bebo

2) Trademe

3) Facebook

4) YouTube

5) Trade me

United States

1) Craigslist

2) MySpace

3) Facebook

4) eBay

5) YouTube

There is so much search data available to us and it’s very powerful information to help your business.

Adult Entertainment and Cognitive Dissonance

PPC = Porn, P and Casinos

Australia is more porn free than the US based on share of visits, says Bill. Adult vs. social sites trends are different in the US and Australia [I find this quite surprising!]

Power of Observed Behavior

- Marketers often rely on gut instinct or research influenced by cognitive dissonance.

- Observed behaviour often provides a more realistic view of what we do

- Search term data is a valuable proxy for timing consumer interest

Just for fun, Bill takes us through the top “Fear Of” queries.


What Are You Afraid Of?

  • Traditional survey research around phobias differ from online observed behavior
  • Social fears show prominently in online behaviour
  • Long-tail fear searches reveal some bizarre fears unlikely to surface via traditional research methods

Top fear in Australia based on the stats is a fear of crowds.  Not so in the US. Other common fears included things like:

- fear of flying

- fear of heights

- fear of long words [huh?]

- fear of clowns [understandable]

- fear of the dark

- fear of spiders

- fear of sex [what?]

- fear of commitment

- fear of success

AND… (wait for it)

- fear of being followed by a duck. True!


Predictions for Next 12 Months

Bill thinks that over the next year:

- Words/queries will continue to increase

- Search success rate will continue to degrade

- Long-tail searches will continue to grow as the amount of content on Internet grows exponentially

- Current search algorithms will become less effective in helping us find content online

By SEO Sapien in Featured

twitterWhen it comes to increasing your blog reader base and driving more traffic to your posts, there are few platforms more effective than Twitter. Twitter is an excellent tool for connecting with your readers and building a rapport. All businesses should use Twitter as a part of their marketing and branding strategy. For bloggers, knowing how to use Twitter effectively can lead to unbeatable exposure. Here are 5 steps any blogger can take to get his posts to go viral on Twitter.

By Matt Helphrey in Featured

For those of us who are running an online business certainly know that it’s not easy to gain traffic to our websites. It requires plenty of tedious work, consistent action, and a desire to make our online business succeed.

There are many ways to get traffic to your website. Some people suggest using a plethora of traffic generating methods. I suggest to find just one way, become very good at mastering this one method and use it over and over again. Learning all the different ways is fine, but keep in mind that the learning process itself will take time in which you could be implementing a traffic generating method that you already know.

In this case it only makes sense to find one method that you think you can master and just stick with it. That way you will optimize the amount of time you have to spend on your online business towards gaining that much needed traffic. Trust me, you will not make any money if you can’t get traffic to your website.

If you want your online business to succeed long term and would like traffic to come as cheap as possible, you’ll want to utilize the power of back links. Back links are simply links on others websites that point back to your website. The more back links you have, the higher your website and websites pages will rank in the search engines.

This is a very important concept to know for any internet marketer. Your goal should be to use a method where you are constantly picking up back links on a daily basis. When you combine those back links with keyword research and search engine optimization, over time you will begin to see your traffic drastically improve. Here’s an example of how I get traffic two ways using one method…article marketing.

The first thing I do is my keyword research. Ill write down a list of about 10 or so keywords that get a decent amount of traffic and very little to moderate competition. Once I have compiled the list, Ill write an article using one of the keywords and post it on my blog. Then I will write another article and submit it Ezine Articles using the same keywords as a hyper link in the authors resource box.

Over time I’ll see that page slowly move up the rankings for those keywords. The more back links I have pointing at that page, the higher and faster it will move up the rankings. I will rinse and repeat this process for all of the selected keywords until I have reached page one for each. It may take a month or more to do. Then I will select another 10 keywords and repeat the process all over again.

You can see how powerful this method is over time. After a year of this process you can be ranked on page one for over a hundred keywords all of which will bring targeted traffic to your website.

Matt Helphrey – Are you looking for guidance, direction, and free training on how to Make Money From Home? Sign up for Matt’s free mini course at http://www.livelifetothefullest.biz

By Mary McNeil in Featured

Most websites conform to the traditional ‘brochure’ style where you present your services and yourself to potential new clients, as well as asking them to sign up and give you their contact details.

* Information capture as a sole purpose

If you’re serious about growing your mailing list, though, there’s a route you can take which involves turning your home page into what is known as an opt-in or squeeze page. The one and only purpose of an opt-in page is to get visitors to sign up. Its job is to squeeze contact details out of your website visitors!

Websites with an opt-in page as the home page appear to the visitor as a one-page site. There are no links to other pages, nothing to browse, and nothing for the visitor to do but sign up. Of course, you have to offer a reasonably generous reward for them to do so, and present it with a degree of compelling urgency. As a technique for growing your mailing list, though, it really works and it sure gets you focused!

* The opt-in page strategy

The question of whether an opt-in page is suitable for your particular website depends on how far you’re prepared to go down the route of growing your mailing list, of staying in regular contact with your subscribers and of using your list as the source of pretty much every single one of your future clients. It’s a widely-used strategy that’s been proven to work over and over again, so definitely worth considering.

Oddly enough, given the website-based material that I usually write, this opt-in page strategy is in many ways more reliant on email. It only requires that you have one page on your website… an opt-in page with the sole function of creating and growing a mailing list for your business. Once you have the contact details of your potential new clients, you can correspond with them via email – they don’t necessarily ever need to go back to your website again!

Of course, you can have a traditional-style website which you direct people to only after they have signed up on your opt-in page. In reality, this is more often how website owners use the strategy.

* So what makes a good opt-in page?

Actually the elements that make up a good opt-in page are much the same as the ones that should be present on any effective home page…

  1. Write the content to and about your reader, not about yourself. When your target market visitor lands on your opt-in page, make sure they know this is THE website for them. How? Empathise with their problems and grab their attention with a blockbusting headline.
  2. Let them know you have the solutions to their problems. Tease their interest. Offer them a form of these solutions for free. Your free offer needs to be relevant and enticing enough for them to want to get hold of it straight away. Don’t be afraid to give away some good information… when they see what you’re giving away for free, it increases their interest in what the paid-for information or service might include.
  3. Sign-up box and call to action. Make these big, bold and utterly unambiguous.

* Keep testing and measuring your conversion rate

You may have come across some much lengthier opt-in pages that include many more elements than I’ve listed here. While these longer versions may work for others, I’ve always found that the clean, clear and concise versions produce the best results for me.

It’s very easy to measure the effectiveness of an opt-in page – the number of sign-ups as a percentage of the number of visitors to the page is your conversion rate. So why not experiment with your very own opt-in page and see what works best for you?

Mary McNeil’s FREE bulletin: “How to Set Up Your Coaching Website AND Get Clients From It” is available right now. Click here to grab your copy

By admin in Featured

Your website is designed, the CMS works, content has been added and the client is happy. It’s time to take the website live. Or is it? When launching a website, you can often forget a number of things in your eagerness to make it live, so it’s useful to have a checklist to look through as you make your final touches and before you announce your website to the world.

This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch – little details are often forgotten or ignored, but – if done in time – may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release.

Favicon

A favicon brands the tab or window in which your website is open in the user’s browser. It is also saved with the bookmark so that users can easily identify pages from your website. Some browsers pick up the favicon if you save it in your root directory as favicon.ico, but to be sure it’s picked up all the time, include the following in your head.

  • <link rel=”icon” type=”image/x-icon” href=”/favicon.ico” />

And if you have an iPhone favicon:

  • <link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”/favicon.png” />

Titles And Meta Data

Your page title is the most important element for SEO and is also important so that users know what’s on the page. Make sure it changes on every page and relates to that page’s content.

<title>10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS | How-To | Smashing Magazine</title>

Meta description and keyword tags aren’t as important for SEO (at least for the major search engines anyway), but it’s still a good idea to include them. Change the description on each page to make it relate to that page’s content, because this is often what Google displays in its search result description.

  • <meta name=”description” content=”By Paul Boag Choosing a content management system can be tricky. Without a clearly defined set of requirements, you will be seduced by fancy functionality that you will never use. What then should you look” />

Cross-Browser Checks

Just when you think your design looks great, pixel perfect, you check it in IE and see that everything is broken. It’s important that your website works across browsers. It doesn’t have to be pixel perfect, but everything should work, and the user shouldn’t see any problems. The most popular browsers to check are Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Chrome, Opera and the iPhone.

Proofread

Read everything. Even if you’ve already read it, read it again. Get someone else to read it. There’s always something you’ll pick up on and have to change. See if you can reduce the amount of text by keeping it specific. Break up large text blocks into shorter paragraphs. Add clear headings throughout, and use lists so that users can scan easily. Don’t forget about dynamic text too, such as alert boxes.

Links

Don’t just assume all your links work. Click on them. You may often forget to add “http://” to links to external websites. Make sure your logo links to the home page, a common convention.

Also, think about how your links work. Is it obvious to new users that they are links? They should stand out from the other text on the page. Don’t underline text that isn’t a link because it will confuse users. And what happens to visited links?

W3C Link Checker

Functionality Check

Test everything thoroughly. If you have a contact form, test it and copy yourself so that you can see what comes through. Get others to test your website, and not just family and friends but the website’s target market. Sit back and watch how a user uses the website. It’s amazing what you’ll pick up on when others use your website differently than how you assume they’d use it. Common things to check for are contact forms, search functions, shopping baskets and log-in areas.

Graceful Degradation

Your website should work with JavaScript turned off. Users often have JavaScript turned off for security, so you should be prepared for this. You can easily turn off JavaScript in Firefox. Test your forms to make sure they still perform server-side validation checks, and test any cool AJAX stuff you have going on.

Validation

You should aim for a 100% valid website. That said, it isn’t the end of the world if your website doesn’t validate, but it’s important to know the reasons why it doesn’t so that you can fix any nasty errors. Common gotchas include no “alt” tags, no closing tags and using “&” instead of “&amp;” for ampersands.

RSS Link

If your website has a blog or newsreel, you should have an RSS feed that users can subscribe to. Users should be able to easily find your RSS feed: the common convention is to put a small RSS icon in the browser’s address bar.

Put this code between your <head> tags.

  • <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Site or RSS title” href=”link-to-feed” />

Analytics

Installing some sort of analytics tool is important for measuring statistics to see how your website performs and how successful your conversion rates are. Track daily unique hits, monthly page views and browser statistics, all useful data to start tracking from day 1. Google Analytics is a free favorite among website owners. Others to consider are Clicky, Kissmetrics (still in closed beta yet), Mint and StatCounter.

Sitemap

Adding a sitemap.xml file to your root directory allows the major search engines to easily index your website. The file points crawlers to all the pages on your website. XML-Sitemaps automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for you. After creating the file, upload it to your root directory so that its location is www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml.

If you use WordPress, install the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in, which automatically updates the sitemap when you write new posts. Also, add your website and sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. This tells Google that you have a sitemap, and the service provides useful statistics on how and when your website was last indexed.

Defensive Design

The most commonly overlooked defensive design element is the 404 page. If a user requests a page that doesn’t exist, your 404 page is displayed. This may happen for a variety of reasons, including another website linking to a page that doesn’t exist. Get your users back on track by providing a useful 404 page that directs them to the home page or suggests other pages they may be interested in.

Another defensive design technique is checking your forms for validation. Try submitting unusual information in your form fields (e.g. lots of characters, letters in number fields, etc.) and make sure that if there is an error, the user is provided with enough feedback to be able to fix it..

Optimize

You’ll want to configure your website for optimal performance. You should do this on an ongoing basis after launch, but you can take a few simple steps before launch, too. Reducing HTTP requests, using CSS sprites wherever possible, optimizing images for the Web, compressing JavaScript and CSS files and so on can all help load your pages more quickly and use less server resources.

Besides, depending on the publishing engine that you are using, you may need to consider taking more specific measures – for instance, if you are using WordPress, you may need to consider useful caching techniques to speed up the performance.

Back Up

If your website runs off a database, you need a back-up strategy. Or else, the day will come when you regret not having one. If you use WordPress, install WordPress Database Backup, which you can set up to automatically email you backups.

Print Style Sheet

If a user wants to print a page from your website, chances are she or he wants only the main content and not the navigation or extra design elements. That’s why it is a good idea to create a print-specific style sheet. Also, certain CSS elements, such as floats, don’t come out well when printed.

To point to a special CSS style sheet that computers automatically use when users print a page, simply include the following code between your <head> tags.

<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”print.css” media=”print” />

Download the Ultimate Website Launch Checklist!

Just recently Dan Zambonini has published a very detailed checklist that covers both the pre-launch and the post-launch phase of the web site life cycle. Among other things his Ultimate Website Launch Checklist contains checks related to content and style, standards and validation, search engine visibility, functional testing, security/risk, performance and marketing.

Lee Monroe – Freelance web designer from Belfast Northern Ireland – http://www.leemunroe.com Web design portfolio and blog

By Rostin Reagor Smith in Featured

SEM SEO Experts are finding ways of establishing higher ranking in search engine results by serving quality content to users. Over the past 10 years, SEO techniques have evolved with the demand of the search engines to serve quality search results to users requesting information. It all comes down to user experience and what online marketing professionals are doing to contribute to optimal search engine results. This evolution in demand for higher quality search results has forced SEO Consultants to develop new strategies for higher ranking. These online marketing professionals have learned from history and are achieving higher rankings for their clients by avoiding black hat marketing techniques. Whether you enjoyed history class or slept through it, you cannot afford to miss this lesson. Sleep too long and you may miss some important pointers from our marketing predecessors.

Ten years ago, the online marketing industry was comprised of traditional marketing professionals with a desire to bring their products to the online market. Most companies interested in marketing products online were marketing to consumers in ecommerce environments. A major consideration in any marketing plan included online traffic generated from search engines. In order to increase search engine traffic, black hat marketing techniques were used frequently to market products online. Keyword stuffing was a frequently used technique by SEO Consultants to achieve higher search engine ranking. Attempting to gain high rankings for a specifically targeted keyword or phrase, SEO Consultants would employ a keyword density of up to 50% to secure first page, first position listings in search engines. Needless to say, the results found by search engine users were less than optimal and the search engines were not serving the quality search engine results they were seeking for users on Yahoo, MSN, or Google.

Another tactic used by online marketers of the past was the establishment of link farms. That practice continues today. Over the past 10 years, SEO Consultants have used link farms to establish higher search engine rankings for their clients. Considered by most experts as black hat marketing techniques, link farms are a bank of links on a page which is established without a relevant theme or associated content to the link farm page. Since search engine optimization professionals realized a large factor in ranking depended upon the number of backlinks to their site, SEO Consulting firms of yesterday were allowing clients to establish links to any page online, regardless of the theme of the website. Today, search marketing experts are finding ways to establish backlinks from relevant theme associated content. By establishing relevant links within a theme or category, a website will be perceived at a higher value to the search engines for that particular category. SEO Consultants of today are finding that a higher perceived value within a category by Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, gives a website the ability to rank higher in search engine results.

Pop-up advertising and Spam are black hat marketing techniques once used by experts in online marketing to achieve higher search engine ranking. Today, search engines still use traffic as a factor in search engine ranking. However submission of identical content within comments on websites, creating identical pages linked to website content, or employing advertising companies to spam online users with pop up or pop under ads just to increase website traffic, will no longer assist websites in higher ranking. Quite the contrary, search engines are penalizing websites which employ black hat marketing. The penalty for using spam techniques can be as minor as a lower value to the search engines and associated search results ranking. The penalty of using black hat marketing techniques can be as severe as delisting with search engines for 6 months or longer.

Studying history gives us the opportunity to learn from our predecessors. The growth of the online marketing industry has established an incentivized environment for increased knowledge in the field of search engine optimization. These new consultants are including optimization of social media content, web 2.0 content and applications, article marketing, RSS feeds, podcasts, and video marketing to communicate directly with consumers at a level expected by the online market. The days of serving irrelevant content to online users and expecting to benefit from the dissemination of that content no longer exist. SEM SEO Experts of today have modified the practices of yesterday to offer techniques to their clients which are ranking higher with the search engines. These new techniques are more effective because they offer users the quality content for which they are requesting information. We are not only learning from the mistakes of our industry’s past, but the evolution of these new practices of online marketing professionals is providing a higher quality online experience.

With 20 years in marketing, advertising and 10 years in internet marketing, Rostin Reagor Smith has refined the SEM SEO Expert Formula. Hundreds of case studies have combined to build the formula that drives search engine ranking through social marketing and web 2.0 communities and resources.

By Bill Platt in Featured

twitterFor years, it has been well known that Google’s search algorithm is driven by the number and quality of links pointing to a particular URL. And as a result, it was all the rage for some time to buy links on web pages that had a high Google PageRank (PR).

But in March of 2007, Google’s mouthpiece Matt Cutts declared that Google was going to fight back against Paid Links. Google put a shot across the bow of many online marketers, letting them know that the days of easily buying links from high PageRank pages in order to influence a website’s ranking in Google were over.

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Coverage of International SEO session by Cindy Krum from Rank Mobile at SMX Sydney 2009.

Cindy starts by listing some things to consider when structuring your site for international markets:

- Design and development costs
- Maintenance costs
- Server configuration and location
- CMS system
- Order fulfillment
- Email and direct marketing
- PPC
- SEO

Three Site Architecture Options for International SEO:

1) One Site (Server Side Translation or Sub-domains / Sub-directories)
2) Multiple Sites
3) Blended

1) One Site

The single site solution involves using location detection software to determine where a user is coming from then serving the user data in the appropriate language. Another idea is to put the most likely language on the home page and keep other languages in optimized sub-domains or sub-directories. This approach uses:

- Server side language translation (and/or)
- Sub-domains and Sub-directories

Pros of the One Site Server Side Translation Approach:

- Home page ranks in multiple languages (possibly)
- Robust translation software = lower overhead and more scalable
- Can work with CMS, Back End, XML feeds and DHTML
- Best user experience
- [added by me] Link popularity is channeled to a single site and not diluted over several sites

Cons of the One Site Server Side Translation Approach:

- Harder to set up
- Risk of inaccurate location detection
- Risk of mistranslation
- Risk of duplicate content
- Natural inbound links could be in the wrong language

Tips for One Site Server Side Translation Strategy:

  • Always check the work of the translation software.
  • Redirect country-specific domains to the appropriate language translation of the home page.
  • Allow users to change or specify their location.
  • Set a cookie to remember the user’s language of choice.
  • Include links to different languages in the footer.
  • Buy the country specific domains, set a cookie and redirect them to the appropriate language translation on your single site.
  • On the fly translation takes longer so use software to generate static pages instead.
  • Consider www.worldlingo.com for translation options.

Pros of the One Site Sub-Domains / Sub-Directories Approach:

- Easy to set up
- Same content in different languages is never duplicate
- Put top keywords in your domain or URL
- Target by country or language
- Country specific hosting option

Cons of the One Site Sub-Domains / Sub-Directories Approach:

- Bad for targeting multiple countries that speak the same language (duplicate content potential)
- Home page only ranks in one language
- Extra click for users / confusing

Tips for One Site Sub-Domains / Sub-Directories Strategy:

  • Spell the name of the subdomain or the subdirectory in the appropriate language. For example, www.espanol.website.com NOT www.Spanish.com
  • Consider using your top keyword for each language as the name of the sub-domain or directory e.g. www.autovermietung.site.com
  • Use location detection software to redirect to correct subdomain or subdirectory.
  • Optimize all META data and on-page tags in the appropriate language.
  • Avoid things like “choose a language” on home pages
  • Use the Regional tool in Google Webmaster Tools to inform Google what regional markets each of your sub-domains and sub-directories are targeting.

2) Multiple Sites

The multiple sites solution involves purchasing regional domains and using a different site for every country, e.g. .com.au, .co.uk etc.

Pros of the Multiple Site Approach:

- Incrementally low start up costs
- Rank better in country specific search engines faster???
- More chances to rank better in SE’s
- Potential link benefits
- Country specific hosting options

Cons of the Multiple Site Approach:

- High maintenance costs
- Harder to rank in .com search engines
- Forced to target countries instead of languages
- Must compete with .coms
- Potential link and duplicate content risks

Tips for Multiple Site Strategy:

  • Specify the specific country for each site in Webmster tools
  • Interlink different sites carefully & logically
  • Use *IP sniff and suggest* to link users to other contry sites

3) Blended

The blended solution involves a combination of one site and multiple sites. Generally you put your international site on the dot com and you have some languages and country specific content on the main site, with the rest on country-specific domains. This can be a transitional situation or strategic.

Pros of the Blended Approach:

- Most realistic for worldwide presence
- Allows testing
- Creates flexibility
- Allows you to strategically segment by region or root language

Cons of the Blended Approach:

- It’s inconsistent and confusing
- Could be perceived as unprofessional

Tips for the Blended Strategy:

  • If multiple country specific domains are unavailable, make them part of the .com rather than compromise branding
  • Use country specific domains for highest traffic countries and group other countries on single sites by language
  • Evaluate countries /languages by traffic and conversions
  • Put countries / languages with similar aesthetics on the same site

Cindy’s final advice: *Do Not Distub* signs should be written in the language of the hotel maid!

* Photo courtesy of Andrew Ballard of ReBusiness

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Live blogging of Writing Killer Ad Copy session by Tim McDonald from The Found Agency at SMX Sydney 2009.

Tim says PPC advertisers need to structure their ad campaign effectively. How much time do you have to manage your campaign? Plan effectively BEFORE launch. There are limitations to an AdWords campaign but generally you can use a single campaign to manage hundreds of keywords.

Within your campaign you can use the targeting and then within the Ad Group is where you get specific.


Targeting options

Campaign targeting =

- search / display /
- geo / time / demographics
- start / end dates
- daily budgets

Ad Group targeting

- keywords and sites
- CPM / CPC bids
- Ad creative – text, display

25 campaigns per account
100 ad groups per campaign
2000 kw’s per ad group
50 ad creatives per ad group
spend $$$ and limits can be increased manually

Keep in mind when planning that relevance is key. It leads to high click through rates.

Why be concerned with Click Through Rate (CTR)?

- direct impact on your CPC
- it’s a metric of ad/keyword effectiveness
- impact on your quality score
- if little or no relevancy, ads may not show
- high CTR = more visitors/better ROI

Showed an example search query for “richmond real estate” where PPC ads lead to specifically targeted landing pages for the query.


Best AdWords Account Structure

- no single structure is best
- make it granular + manageable
- clustered keyword themes
- test and adapt

Tim also recommends using few keywords per Ad Group, which I always agree with, but when he suggested using 30 separate AdGroups for 30 different keywords, he kinda lost me at that point. From a management perspective, I’ve found that grouping together keywords via specific themes is much more logical than creating a new AdGroup for each and every keyword.

Tim says to consider separating:

- brand & high performers
- content / display
- Head vs long tail
- keyword match type
- keyword topics / themes

Tim recommends breaking out high performers from Ad Groups and putting them in their own Ad Groups so they have their own budget rules. Break out search and content ads into different ad groups to allow easier management and ad type display. Also consider breaking out separate keyword match types (exact / broad / phrase etc)

- Isolate exact match keywords

- Use phrase / broad match for keyword discovery

- Use negative keywords

- Don’t rely on AdWords to show you the “best match”. Do your own keyword research

- Use search query reports in your analytics to dig deeper


Content Network Recommendations

- Separate Content Network-only campaigns

- Fewer keywords per Ad Group

- Use Broad Match

- Separate bids for content audience

- Consider top-performing placements

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