SEO Blog

The re-launch of MSN Live to Bing has generated a lot of hype across the Internet. Many advertisers who wouldn’t have considered using the Microsoft adCenter before are certainly giving it some thought now.

There  are many tools available for new advertisers and also those that have been running paid search campaigns for years.

(more…)

According to a recent report from Bloomberg, the numbers of customers using Facebook advertising within the past year have trebled,. The proliferation of targeted advertisements, which is in stark contrast to Twitter’s stand against paid ads, has clearly caught the attention of businesses and marketers everywhere, as well as the consumers.

By utilising the data that Facebook have on record, including location, age, interests and relationship status, advertisers can hone in on their key demographic and really achieve some eye-catching results. Due to the vast nature of the social networking site’s reach, you can connect with thousands, if not millions of potential customers through a single advertisement. Similarly you can localise your adverts, benefiting smaller businesses looking to trade within a certain region.

(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

(more…)

Pay Per Click or PPC is a fast growing method of producing dramatic results for your business by advertising your products or services online. These are just some of the benefits:

• Precision: In a results oriented culture, being able to precisely target interested customers and clients is vital. The efficacy of PPC has been particularly demonstrated through the precision that the ads offer the advertiser. PPC allows greater control over who arrives at your website and through which keywords. This level of control is important to ensure that the correct customers are targeted.
• Budget Control: PPC allows complete control over what you spend on advertising. Campaigns can be arranged with a daily budget and this can be increased or reduced depending upon changes in your business.
• Ease of Measurement: Measuring the success of your advertising campaigns is very easy with PPC. Pay Per Click systems come with the type of tools that allow the advertiser to analyse the success of their online ads. By creating specific landing pages for each different ad, you can see how effective the ads are at driving traffic towards your site. The analytical systems will also allow you to directly measure the conversion rate of specific ads from ad to sale.
• Geo-Targeting: The ability for the advertiser to geo-target specific locations is one of the greatest benefits of PPC. By choosing precisely where in the world you want ads to appear, you can increase your global marketing or decrease your costs. Unfortunately there are still companies across the world advertising their services in countries where customers cannot buy them. Whilst this might expand the presence of the global brand, it is also a waste of valuable finances during this difficult economic period.
• Speed of Execution: Each aspect of PPC is quick to set up and execute. You should always write the ads in advance, but the actual mechanical creation time is very short. Once created, the ads can be up and earning you money within minutes. What’s more, in terms of speed, the time taken from click to sale has been drastically reduced to potentially a matter of minutes. Traditional advertising on television or in the newspaper simply cannot compete on any level with the efficacy of PPC.
• Capture Visitors: One of the strengths of PPC is its power to capture visitors. Someone searching for your keywords will be attracted to a well-written PPC ad. Once you’ve got that person to click your ad, you can use your website to help them make whatever decision you require.
• Boosting Brand Awareness: PPC is a successful way of increasing brand awareness. The complete control the advertiser has over the entire process allows them to easily promote their brand. Not only is each ad a potential sale, but even those users that do not click the ad are aware of the brand without the advertiser spending any money.

Pay per click is an exceptionally successful way to increase qualified traffic to your website but is only one part of a fully integrated marketing mix.

In times of an economic slowdown we all have to find ways to economise. In business, advertising and marketing budgets are often one of the first things to be reduced; but is this a false economy?

In order to continue generating business we all need to constantly reach out to our target audience. Therefore, simply streamlining your advertising funds can ultimately restrict who uses, or is at least aware of, the products or services your company offers. For small businesses, finding a balance between advertising costs and potential customer income can be particularly difficult. Do you stick with convention and target an expensive magazine, newspaper, radio or even television campaign without visible results? Or are there alternatives that can get the same potential exposure, but without the upfront costs?

Visible Online Marketing Results

The Internet has revolutionised many areas of modern communication; however, rarely is this more evident than in marketing. With a strong online presence, any company, in any part of the world can achieve fantastic results, drawing on a diverse global audience. The traditional face of advertising has been changed forever, thanks primarily to search engine driven pay per click (PPC) platforms such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Without having to risk any capital initially, your website can target keywords and phrases in adverts that you’ll only pay for when someone clicks on them. Therefore your site will suddenly gain universal exposure at a minimal cost, helping to drive in extra traffic and hopefully keep business flowing. With PPC advertising you set the parameters too. So you can create a strict daily budget and ensure that advertising costs never exceed your limitations.

Pay per click services can play an important role for small businesses on many levels. Not only are they a cost-effective way to advertise, but they’re also easy to monitor too. Google AdWords, as well as its MSN and Yahoo alternatives, offer tracking devices that clearly indicate how successful your PPC campaigns are performing. For example, if swathes of people are clicking on one advert but are not being converted into direct sales, then you can adjust the keywords or landing page to better suit customer requirements, or simply cancel that advert altogether.

Small Business Pay Per Click Services

It’s a very fluid process and can be adjusted as and when required without a long-term tie-in. The ability to change budgets, replace and edit key campaigns whilst also being able to chart successes, makes this one of the most versatile options available to businesses of all sizes; hence why PPC marketing is rapidly becoming a leading force in modern advertising strategies.

As with most aspects of business, proper management of PPC accounts is integral to their ultimate success. Researching your keywords and ensuring that you are targeting the best possible searches can ultimately determine whether a campaign is a glorious triumph or dismal failure. This can be time-consuming and confusing, particularly if you’re not altogether savvy with online marketing techniques.

At Impact Media we offer affordable pay per click management services to suit budgets and businesses of all sizes. So if you’re on the lookout for someone to handle your PPC campaign, get a no-strings quote from us and start turning hits into sales.

If you’re a Finance Director, you probably don’t think you have much to do with the online marketing of your company. However, online marketing is the answer to many Finance Director’s prayers during this time of economic trouble. Online marketing is a straightforward and effective way to immediately begin reducing costs and dramatically increasing profits.

Advertising
How much does it cost to put a 30 second advert on commercial television? In the UK, the average cost is £140,000. That’s for one advert that airs once. For that cost, you get blanket coverage of a particular broadcast region. But how many of those people seeing the ad would actually want to buy your product? And what if the people who would respond positively to that ad were at work or making a cup of tea during your commercial? With Online marketing, you can target your market directly.

Pay per Click
Using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, you pay only for those potential customers that actually click on your adverts. It’s competitive, so you bid to compete with other companies for the keywords in your ad. But with £140,000 and a professionally managed PPC campaign you could receive many more leads or sales due to the highly effective targeting of PPC. What’s more, the ads appear any time of the day or night and for whatever period you set. And there’s a certain commitment involved in clicking an ad that isn’t achieved through simply viewing a television commercial.

In the next two years, Internet advertising will take over from all other forms of traditional marketing. Why pay more and receive less?

SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is another way to ensure that people looking for your product find it and spend their money with you and not the competition. The Internet is a competitive marketplace and with billions of pounds of consumer’s money at stake each year, getting a high placement on Google really matters. SEO is a specialist craft and requires an expert but again the cost is very little compared to other forms of traditional marketing.

People go to the Internet to find the things they want to buy. When your website comes up top on Google, you get most of the attention and most of the business. This is a very cheap alternative to traditional advertising and could save you tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds.

Website
Your website is the new place to do business. The website is now your marketing pitch, your point of sale and your customer service centre. It’s your public face and it comes at the fraction of the cost of maintaining buildings, paying the wages and travel costs of a sales force, investing in tradeshows, printing expensive glossy brochures, engaging in costly direct marketing or cold calling campaigns. Your website is the greatest tool in reducing your costs and increasing your business.

Britain’s recession is causing many Finance Directors to force more and more cut backs. Businesses need to tighten their belts, even those that are currently in a growth period. As the Head of Finance, you have two choices, continue with these devastating cut backs, redundancies and wage freezes or make real savings by transforming your costly offline marketing into a cheaper, streamlined and dynamic revenue source.

Search Marketing Careers offer great opportunities during a terrible economic period. Whilst many sectors of business are making people redundant, the growth of the search marketing field offers a range of opportunities now and in the future. Universities and other training institutions are beginning to offer more specialised search marketing education to produce graduates that can make the most of this rapidly growing area.

The Internet marketing field has developed quickly and strongly, responding to the need for high quality, targeted marketing with lower costs than traditional marketing and advertising agencies could offer.

So what kinds of career opportunities exist within the Search Marketing field?

SEO – Search Engine Optimisation Specialist
Optimising websites, performing research and selecting keywords for clients. The role requires someone who stays ahead of the game and is completely up to date with changes in Search Engine policies and procedures. SEO specialists know how to fix website traffic problems and make positive suggestions to clients.

Web Article Writer
Writing content for websites to be used for increasing traffic and backlinks. Good knowledge of SEO and Keywords helps to create articles with great search potential.

PPC – Pay Per Click Specialist
Devises PPC strategies for clients, picks keywords, creates PPC adverts and analyses traffic and conversions.

Online PR Consultant
Public Relations has now strongly moved into the sphere of the Internet. A company’s reputation and credibility are built on what people think of them. This job is about using the Internet and Social Media to promote the company positively online.

Web Analytics Specialist
An important player in an Internet marketing team, this expert uses their analysis skills and those opportunities provided by software systems to improve their client’s web traffic and conversion rates. As well as having strong analysis abilities, they also need excellent communication skills to inform the client how and what changes are needed to develop their site’s potential.

Social Media Maven
This is one of the newest areas for exploiting the Internet for marketing purposes. Social Media includes the well-known social networking sites such as BEBO, MySpace and Facebook, but also includes YouTube and Blogging. Social Media experts know how to exploit the benefits of Social Media to benefit their client’s business.

Link Builders
To obtain a good relationship with Google, a website should have lots of quality incoming links. The quality is more important than the quantity, so merely signing up for thousands of link directories is not enough. Link Builders negotiate with individuals and companies to ensure that they source links that benefit their clients.

Bloggers
Bloggers are writing experts that can develop short pieces of writing aimed at building reputation, backlinks and SEO possibilities. A good blog can massively benefit a website and bring potential customers and clients from all over the world to your site.

As the Internet continues to dominate business sales and marketing, more and more recession-proof jobs will come into existence. Internet commerce is growing stronger and stronger each month and without people with these skills, businesses will not prosper in this new business environment.

Impact Media are always interested in hearing from talented individuals with a passion for search. If that’s you, get in touch if you’re interested in developing your search marketing career with a leading UK SEO agency.

Yahoo has recently updated the terms and conditions of its pay per click (PPC) advertising program to allow it to optimise your account.

I’m not going to repeat what has already been written on this topic but if you’re a Yahoo Search Marketing PPC client, it would be in your interest to read this summary from Econsultancy:

Is Yahoo’s proactive account ‘optimization’ legal?

As it’s the season of good will, we thought we would spread some Christmas cheer by offering you our very own Search Engine Marketing 12 Days Of Christmas.

We won’t be singing but we will be posting 12 Days worth of SEO and PPC tips, tricks, advise and expertise.

From link building tips, free online tools, analytics advice to SEO do’s and don’t, our Christmas gifts will be more welcome than the inevitability unwanted gift from Gran this year.

Our 12 days starts tomorrow so be sure to come by and pick up your first gift. Better still, subscribe using RSS to make sure you don’t miss out.

Pay per click is a business model where by you pay for advertising when a searcher clicks on your advert and is delivered to your website not just when your advert is displayed.

Whilst not quite as predictable as Sarah Palin not being the next American Vice President, it is still worth noting Google’s announcement on their blog that they’ve ended the agreement to serve it’s ads on the Yahoo! search engine.

This has been put down to the legal hassles with government regulators and concerns of some (!) advertisers.

I don’t know what impact this will have on the Yahoo share price but I’m sure that someone wishes they’d accepted the $31 per share offer from Microsoft.

As a footnote to this, Yahoo have already emailed their PPC advertisers to convey their disappointment and express their wish about how they want to reach out and work with their advertisers. I wonder if this is in the same way they were going to force PPC costs up by jumping into bed with Google?

Click Forensics have just released a press release highlighting the fact that pay per click fraud for Q3 2008 was 16%, a slight reduction on the previous quarter and the same period in 2007.

Pay Per Click Fraud Rate by Quarter

This data is taken from their Click Fraud Index.

Unfortunately, the UK is listed as one of the PPC fraud hot spots accounting for 3.5% of all fraudulent activity.

If you’re a pay per click advertiser, clearly you need to be vigilant with your traffic. There are professional solutions available for anyone wishing to monitor their paid traffic closely or, as reported last month, there is a simple solution if you do suspect click fraud and want to monitor your traffic.

In the Search Engine Marketing Buyer’s Guide (2008) recently published by E-consultancy (September 2008), they reported that the market for spend on search engine marketing was estimated to be worth £2.75 billion this year in the UK alone.

As a UK business owner, you may not be interested in that fact but where the numbers start to tell a story is how they’re split between paid search (£2.42 billion) and search engine optimisation (£330 million).

This split is mirrored by data released by SEMPO which has the US advertisers investing just 11% of their Internet marketing spend on search engine optimisation ($1.3 billion).

As a company that helps businesses with both of these core aspects of search engine marketing, we can appreciate why there is such an investment in PPC advertising. However, we find it intriguing that search engine optimisation (SEO) is so far behind in the spend stakes being treated with the same disregard as an Icelandic bank savings account. Perhaps it suffers from the feeling some site owners have that SEO is free? The notion of free listings is valid but for any business to not be making provision for SEO in their online marketing budget is short-sighted, particularly when you review the following:

Google Eye Tracking Heat Map

This eye tracking heat map from Enquiro clearly highlights the fact that most searchers still go top-left when conducting a search.  It demonstrates that the sites occupying the top 3 slots of the natural search results will attract 100% visibility and only dropping to 50% at position 6. Compare this to the PPC adverts where the ad at position #1 only achieves 50% visibility. This falls dramatically to 10% by the time you get to the ad in position 5.

Hopefully, you’ll appreciate the value in SEO and understand why free isn’t always best.

We offer a range of search engine optimisation services and would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate how we could help your business improve its online visibility.

Further Reading:

Eyetools Eyetracking Research

The Internet presents limitless opportunities for mid-sized businesses that want to compete in the larger market.  Thanks to affordable online marketing options, it’s possible for a medium-sized business to carve a place in their sector and contend with the bigger companies.  The problem is finding or choosing the most suitable way to market your product or service online.

There are a number of options for businesses to choose from when considering cost-effective or affordable Internet marketing solutions, although the combined method or blended mix of marketing might better serve as the best approach.  This blended approach is made up of the five most effective and affordable ways to market your business website online.

SEO

Although SEO, or search engine optimisation, appears to be a rather simple way to increase your share of online traffic, the Natural Search results that it yields are powerfully impressive. SEO is the process of engineering your website so that it most effectively responds to the way that potential customers search for your business online.

Many people believe that SEO is something that can be done by just about anyone, but it takes a professional SEO expert to glean dynamic results without causing some of the very damaging errors that amateurs easily make.

Always choose to work with a professional SEO in order to get the best out of your website’s SEO potential.  The cost of an SEO expert is nothing compared to the potential increase in revenue from having your website optimised.

Articles

The Internet is a word-based medium and very much search driven.  Including articles on your website has a multiplicity of benefits, not least of all providing your customers with up to date expert advice.  Other benefits include:

• Increased credibility
• Improved SEO results from keywords in the articles
• Expanded web presence

You don’t need to be an expert author, there are lots of highly competent and affordable writers that can provide any number of quality articles for your website on any topic.

PPC

PPC, or pay per click, is one of the best methods of bringing traffic to your website and converting it to sales.

Imagine advertising that is read directly by people who are already interested in your product or service.  That’s exactly what PPC offers!  When a potential customer is interested in your ad, they click to find out more.  You only pay for the number of clicks that your ad receives and you can set your budget accordingly.

PPC represents a highly customisable and a truly affordable method of advertising.  Unfortunately, this has been one of the reasons why so many people have attempted DIY PPC, resulting in some quite catastrophic wasted opportunities.

Online PR

Your reputation online matters because it’s easily raised and easily damaged in the same measure.  Online PR can be used to fire fight problems but can also be used to announce important product news, service changes, sales, launches and make the best use of all profile raising opportunities.

Video Marketing

Still relatively in its infancy but drawing increased interest and attention, online video marketing can offer a stunningly effective alternative to television advertising. Many people have found that they can obtain dramatic results from very simple videos.  In the increasingly competitive online market, this is one approach that cannot be ignored.

By using these five methods together, you will create a powerful yet affordable website marketing campaign for your business.

If you feel you need help with any of these areas and would like to work with a professional UK based search marketing agency, please refer to our search engine marketing services page.

With the emergence of services like Google AdWords, Pay per Click advertising has grown to be the marketing medium of choice for online businesses. No other form of advertising has been known to create such a stir in the industry for all online marketers.

So what exactly is Pay per Click and what can it do for your business?

Pay per Click (PPC) advertising is exactly how it sounds! You pay every time that a searcher clicks on your ad. While this may seem like a simple illustration, it demonstrates the beauty of the idea. Let’s compare this method with a traditional form of advertising. Let’s say that your business put up a billboard on the side of the road. You pay a monthly fee for this. This means that regardless of whether anyone actually looks at the advert or not, you’re paying! People who don’t want anything to do with your product will look at it and you are still paying for it.

Now, let’s look at the advantages of PPC advertising. Your ad appears prominently within the search engines and related websites. When your ad appears it means that one of the keywords relating to your business triggered the ad. This means that someone who is looking for something related to what you have to offer just performed a search. Therefore, your ad is only being shown to people who are looking for what you have to offer. Then, you only have to pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and goes to your website. That means that you only pay when someone actually comes to your place and checks out your product. You are not charged for someone who merely looks at your ad. This is obviously a superior form of advertisement. You are getting highly-targeted traffic to your website.

One of the major benefits that Pay per Click has for your business is the ability to generate massive amounts of traffic in a short space of time. You just start an account, write an ad and start running it. Within a few hours you can have people visiting your site.

While this is definitely a benefit, it can be a detriment if you are not careful. If you don’t set a careful daily budget for your advertising, you can rack up a huge bill with the search engine. You can make your daily budget as small or as large as you want. It is truly customisable. The traffic won’t stop coming unless you make it stop. Therefore, you have to watch your budget carefully.

Pay per Click offers access to quality traffic online. It is a steady stream of targeted customers that you are paying to bring to your website. If you have a good product, you will increase sales with a carefully crafted PPC campaign.

At Impact Media, we understand Pay per Click and if you want to focus on developing your business, you should consider our Pay per Click management services.

We recently had reason to suspect that one of our client’s PPC campaigns was being targeted by one of their competitors. We suspected that they were clicking the ads to try and use up the daily budget early in the day. The trouble was how to identify who was clicking the Ads.

There are many expensive Click Fraud solutions available but we found a simple and free way of checking who was clicking the ads by using Statcounter.

By putting the Statcounter code on the website pages we were able to easily see the IP addresses of the clickers. This clearly showed that two Competitors were in fact clicking the ads. We then forwarded our findings to Google and hope this will result in a refund for our AdWords client.

Google are currently rolling out the new AdWords Local PlusBox which will now enable the top featured sponsored result in the Google search engine to display even more information.

This information will consist of a map, contact details, address and will even allow people to get directions. The best part is there is no extra charge for this and you will only billed by Google as normal, when someone clicks on your add and arrives at your landing page.

For local businesses looking specifically to target their particular geographical location this could prove very helpful in maximising the online visibility received.

More information can be found here at the Inside AdWords Blog

Why is Search Engine Optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising so important?

• The search engines are the web surfers first point of contact when it comes to finding what they want online and statistics show that over 90% go on to make a purchase / conversion. It would be a grave mistake to miss out on this amount of highly converting targeted traffic.

• If your website isn’t optimised for your specific keywords then you are practically invisible to your online target audience.

• Google, MSN Search, Yahoo! Search and Ask Jeeves between them powered 81% of all search traffic in the UK during September 2006.

• Having an effective and useful website will provide you with a 24 hour online sales representative that will be consistently available to prospective clients. If you produce relevant quality content that effectively sells your products then part of your sales pitch is already done for you and hasn’t taken up any of your time!

• Appearing in the search engine’s natural listings is completely free of charge making search engine optimisation extremely cost effective producing a fantastic ROI.

• An effectively managed Pay Per Click campaign can provide large quantities of pre-qualified leads within hours. The ad can be easily set up within minutes gaining you top placements in the major search engines and instantly bringing in highly converting traffic.

• You are in complete control of the budget and campaign meaning that you can determine your own daily, weekly or monthly budget, keywords and keywords phrases you want to appear for and how long you want to run the ad for.

If you have a business and are serious about getting the maximum exposure possible then you cannot overlook the power of the search engines.

Of course, there’s no absolute answer to this question as many search marketing agencies will charge for their PPC services at different rates.

With Impact Media, we work with our clients typically by charging an initial fee to set up their Google AdWords PPC campaign or to optimise an existing campaign. This varies based upon complexity and/or number of products or services but is flexible enough to accommodate most budgets.

We then work on a monthly retainer basis, the purpose of which is to allow us sufficient time to further optimise the account, develop additional Ad Groups and provide comprehensive reporting. Given that we see what we do as a partnership with our clients, no one is tied into any long term contracts and we only want our clients to stay with us if they feel we are adding value.

Some agencies will also charge a monthly service fee as a percentage of the spend they are managing through the pay per click search engine(s) and you should check the details if that is the case as this could develop into a hefty additional charge.

When shopping around for a company to use for PPC management, make sure you have a good chat with them to understand their approach and also ask for testimonials or case studies. If you find a good one, stick with them! Once you do this, the question will change to “How Much is PPC Management Gaining Me?”

———-

Impact Media provide AdWords management tailored to fit your needs.

We are pleased to announce we have been appointed as Simply Mirror TV’s professional search marketing partner.

Simply Mirror TV specialise in Mirror TV’s and that’s it, they also offer customised Mirror TV’s in unusual shapes with bespoke frames.

We will be running Simply Mirror TV’s Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign via Google AdWords to ensure it is both cost effective and efficient from the outset, providing the best possible return on investment.

We are very much looking forward to working with Simply Mirror TV on their PPC project.

According to a recent survey commissioned by Internet Advertising Bureau UK, the amount of money invested in online advertising has risen to £1.33 billion for the first six months of this year compared to £917.2 million for the same period in 2006.

The survey goes on to suggest that this figure could reach £2.75 billion by the end of 2007.

Such has been the growth in UK Internet advertising that it now accounts for almost 15% of all UK advertising.

57.1% of the total spent to date has been invested in paid search, or Pay per Click (PPC). With £762.3 million spent, this is a 44% increase compared to 2006.