Impact Media's SEO Blog

Google offer far more than just a search engine. They have become a driving force in online innovation, developing some exceptional tools and programmes along the way. Here, we take a look at some of the most significant of these.

Google AdWords
This is Google’s Pay per Click platform. It provides site owners the opportunity to advertise their site within specific search terms on Google’s SERPs. Within AdWords you will also find the Keyword Tool, which will highlight potential phrases and the competition levels you face. Perfect for websites looking to get additional exposure.

Google Alerts
Get the latest updates in any field delivered straight to your inbox. Alerts scrapes Google News for stories that contain your requested keywords and phrases, then sends the information and links to your email account.

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As Pay per Click (PPC) advertising becomes increasingly important, we look at why it is important that you choose a PPC management company who are qualified to manage your online marketing budget.

Online advertising is now one of the most popular ways to gain exposure for your site, company and the promotions you offer. It is unlike any other form of marketing, relying solely on a Pay per Click basis, which means that your adverts need impact and they need to be shown for the most appropriate keywords. More…

This is the second post in the Quality Score series and covers probably the most important issue, in my opinion.

Once you are aware of the benefits of having keywords with high Quality Scores, you should have no problem with making the changes required to improve your scores.

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Quality Score was introduced for Google AdWords to help Google decide which position an advertisers ad should be displayed and subsequently how much should be charged for each click on the ad.

Google assigns each keyword within an AdWords campaign with a score between 1 – 10 (1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest).

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In April, a new conversion column started appearing in AdWords reports and eventually the main AdWords homepage; it was called “Conversions (many-per-click)” and the old Conversion column was changed to “Conversions (1-per-click)”. This was done with no real fanfare at the time, especially considering the importance of the column. But what is “many per click” and is it better than plain old conversions?

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What is PPC Advertising?

PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. It is the most prevalent and popular form of advertising on the Internet and works by charging a pre-determined amount each time an advert is followed by a visitor.

Sponsored adverts appear with the vast majority of search engine results pages (SERPs). They can often be seen in a coloured box at the head of the main search results as well in a column running adjacently to the right.

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The ‘ad scheduling’ feature within Google AdWords has always been a fantastic way to extend the budget of your Pay Per Click campaigns. Rather than running an advertisement all day, every day, ad scheduling would allow you to define certain time parameters and ensure you targeted visitors at peak times.

Previously this was all done on a standard hourly rate. Meaning that your adverts could run it from 9am to 6pm on every weekday ,and 10am to 4pm on weekends without any problems. This was always a hugely efficient way to streamline campaigns; that was until Google updated the system, making it even more versatile.
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One small move for Google, one giant leap for online marketing… well maybe.

It may only be a centimetre or two but Google’s decision to move their sponsored ads much closer to the organic listings could improve ROI.

The new Google layout definitely puts the sponsored links in eye range, which could only mean one thing – advertisers get a higher Click through Rate, a better quality score and more traffic.

It will be interesting to see just how much of an increase in traffic advertisers experience and more importantly how this affects the quality of the traffic they receive.

Only time will tell but this could be a win win situation for Google and Pay Per Click management.

Watch this space!

Every landing page can be improved upon and no landing page converts 100% of its visitors. This blog post contains some ideas that may help you to improve your landing page conversion rate.

Landing page testing is becoming more and more popular with advertisers all over the world and it is not uncommon to see improvements in conversions of over 30%.

Google Website Optimizer is a free and simple tool that works hand in hand with Google AdWords and Google Analytics to give you the power to increase the number of conversions your website generates.

Listed here are eight simple ideas that have been known to deliver a huge increase in the number of conversions a web page generates. More…

A new service has come to light further linking Google AdWords with Google Analytics and meaning that you can now import your Analytics Goals into your AdWords Account.

Goals are the primary measurement of a desired action on a website including:
•    Page views
•    Contact requests
•    Email registrations
•    Making a purchase
•    Adding product to shopping cart

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Google have just announced that their AdWords Search Query Report has been improved and will no longer contain the dreaded “Other Unique Queries“.

We’ve long advocated using the search query report to improve AdWords campaign performance and this will now make it an absolute must use for any advertiser interested in saving money and improving their ROI.

With these enhancements, expect to see longer keyword lists but remember, the devil is in the detail. Use with Excel and apply filters to spot negative keywords as well as fresh opportunities to expand your campaign.

You have a well designed website with great content and you’ve decided to use paid search to increase the flow of quality traffic to it. You’ve created an AdWords advertising campaign in an attempt to get the most out of your website, but there’s an important factor when using AdWords that you need to consider.

Google AdWords try to present ads by relevance and quality. To ensure this, one of the things they do is to make an assessment of the ad and your website and give an AdWords quality score.

Google Adwords Quality Score

What kind of things affects the AdWords quality score?

• The Click through Rate (CTR) of the keywords in your ad
• The past performance of the CTR to the URL in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords in your ad
• The relevance of the keywords to the ad and the search query
• The quality and performance of your landing page

The quality and performance of your landing page is a vital factor in Google AdWords determining your quality score. The benefits of having a good quality score are:

• AdWords decreases your CPC rate
• AdWords improves your ranking position

This means that your ads will cost less and your chances of being clicked on will improve. Without a good quality score, it will cost you more to get people to visit your site and there’s less chance of them finding you if your ad has a low ranking position.

So what can you do to improve the performance of your website and attain a better Google AdWords quality score?

• Ensure your site contains relevant and quality, original content
• Improve site speed
• Improve server speed

Your website’s content always needs to be fresh, original and well written. This shouldn’t be new to you; content is king and always had been. Google assesses the quality, originality and relevance of your content against the ads you place. One final thing on content-relationship to ads, if you want a good quality score, it helps if the keywords in your ads appear on your website. That might seem obvious, but many people forget to do this.

Your site speed is also essential, slow loading pages will kill your quality score and put off human visitors alike. If your pages are full of heavy graphics files, slow loading Java Script or CSS feeds, you will damage your quality score. Strip back everything non-essential from your website landing page; keep it simple and to the point, your search engine and human visitors will appreciate it.

Likewise, if you’ve hosted your website on cheap, slow servers with a budget web hosting company, your quality score may also be badly affected. If your hosting service is providing you with poor server speeds, it’s time that you moved your site to a new host.

Remember, by making web pages that load quicker, you will save money on you AdWords campaign, and more people will stay longer on your website, increasing the chances of converting them from visitors to buyers.

Further Reading:

Improve Your Landing Page Quality Score, Save Money!

You turn your back for a moment and Google slip in another change to AdWords!

If you go to your campaign settings in AdWords, you’ll now see an option under ‘Networks and bidding’ to select “iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers”.

AdWords Campaign Settings for Mobile Devices

Not to be confused with mobile ads, this is simply stating that you do want your standard text and image adverts to be shown on mobile devices where a user conducts a Google web search or appear on the content (AdSense) network.

Given that the number of mobile devices with full browser capability is relatively small at the moment, the effect of this option is likely to be negligible but certainly worth experimenting with if your spend with AdWords is significant.

If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser, you’ve no doubt been affected in some way by Google’s Quality Score. This is the system within AdWords that rates a keyword “great”, “OK” or “poor”.

It is calculated using your keyword’s Click through Rate, the relevance of your ad copy and your landing page, i.e. the page that a searcher is taken to when clicking on one of your adverts.

What you may not appreciate is that having a poor quality score can cost you more than just pride. Those AdWords advertisers who create highly targeted campaigns benefit not only by higher conversion rates but they will also typically pay less for the click in the first place.

If you’re running your own AdWords campaign and it is littered with keywords flagged as “poor” it really is in your best interest to try and remedy the situation. This could mean deleting the keyword if you conclude that it is not appropriate or redesigning your landing page (or creating a new one) to improve the relevancy.

Google’s quality scoring system isn’t perfect and can sometimes leave even experienced AdWords users scratching their heads but to ignore it and do knowing is sure to end up costing you.

For more on this, watch Google’s introductory video on Quality Scores:

Google AdWords Quality Score Video

Google AdWords is Google’s paid search advertising system where you pay only when someone clicks on one of your ads.

AdWords ads are displayed to the right hand side and sometimes above the top of the natural results.