Search Engine Optimisation Blog

If you’ve been trying to get your web pages ranked in the top of the search engines by yourself but are struggling, you may just decide to use the services of a professional search engine optimisation (SEO) company.

The big question is how do you go about picking a company to become your search marketing partner? How do you find a good SEO company that can do this effectively?

Here’s our top tips to choosing a good SEO company:

• Seek a referral from a trusted contact. Sounds obvious but who do you know (supplier, partner, business contact) who may already have gone through this selection process?
• Do a search! What phrase do you think a good search engine optimisation company should be ranked for? Obviously, the phrase you search for is an individual choice but go with what you feel and look through the top 10.
• Do some research about the SEO company. Look at the search engines and see if anyone has written anything positive (or even negative!) about them.
• Review the company’s testimonials but also see if you can talk one or two of their clients directly.
• Don’t believe anyone who promises you the No 1 spot at Google. Google updates regularly and, that aside, no one can guarantee top spot. The search engines just doesn’t work that way! Yes, you can rank highly, but you can’t always be No 1 at Google. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
• Read their case studies. If they have none, ask why or just move on to a company that does.
• Cheap isn’t always a bargain. If someone promises to rank you in the top 5 at Google for a really low fee, you know that they are lying.
• Review multiple companies before you decide. Do your due diligence and find the best company for your needs. Compare like for like.
• Find out about contract terms up front. What length of time are you committed for? Yes, SEO can take time to have an effect but that doesn’t mean you should be locked-in to some lengthy contract period.
• Review the appropriate company registration site for your country to ensure you are dealing with a legitimate SEO company.

At Impact Media, we’re proud of the results we’ve achieved for our clients and would encourage you to review our search engine optimisation case studies.

You’ve finally taken the plunge and set-up your very first Pay per Click campaign with Google.

You marvel at how easy it was to create your first Ad Group and appreciated the way Google suggested some keywords you might like to add. You worked through your reservations over some of the keywords as you figured that those clever people at Google knew far more about your business than you. Finally, you couldn’t quite believe how easy Google made it to add your credit card details and realised that the phrase ‘don’t do evil’ was more than just marketing hype…

Roll forward two months and whilst you appreciate that the level of web site enquiries have increased, you just wish that some of them were connected to your business. You start to question your own ability to sell online and figure that Pay per Click is just too complicated and best left to others.

If you are ‘going solo’ with the build of your AdWords campaign, these tips should at least help you avoid some of the pain:

1. Carry Out Your Own Keyword Research

• Don’t just take Google’s suggestions and blindly add to your account. Prepare your list in advance and keep it relevant to what you’re selling.

2. Set Your Budget

• Start small and test. You can always increase once you’ve become an ‘AdWords Ninja’!

3. Migrate from the ‘Starter’ to ‘Standard’ campaign

• Take control of your account and gain access to the complete management tools and reports.

4. Turn off the Content Network

• Edit in your campaign settings. There’s nothing wrong in using the Content Network but do not mix with the search campaign.

5. Use Match Types

• You need to know the difference between Broad, Phrase and Exact match. If you don’t know and don’t use as appropriate, it’s bound to end in tears!

6. Split Test

• No, I’m not talking about anything overly complicated at this stage but start with two adverts for each of your Ad Groups and see which performs best in terms of CTR.

7. Understand CTR

• Click through Rate, or CTR, is the percentage of clicks your advert appears against the number of searches (impressions) for a term. Better ad copy = better CTR.

8. Relevancy Wins

• Don’t just send all of your traffic to your home page. Take the searcher to the most relevant section of your site for that search term and get rewarded for relevancy.

9. Rotate Your Ads

• Edit in your campaign settings. At least until you know which of your adverts is performing best.

10. Get Negative

• Use negative keywords to prevent unnecessary displays of your advert. They will dramatically improve your account performance and save you lots of cash!

11. Run Reports

• There are many reports that Google make available but the Search Query report should be one that you get very familiar with. You’ll be surprised at some of the terms you see, particularly if using Broad. Use this report to spot rogue searches and add further negatives.

You may just decide that this is a lot of work and that you’d rather spend time focusing on your business. If that’s the case, take a look at our Pay per Click services to see if we can help you.

If you use Google’s Pay per Click service, it can seem at first that you’re on your own when it comes to getting help with managing your AdWords campaign.

Google make it really easy to set-up your account and, although they provide a comprehensive AdWords help section, it can sometimes seem quite daunting when you first get started with this form of online marketing.

So, what else should you do? Well, if you plan on using Pay per Click (PPC) consistently, you should invest in at least one good book. Just do a search of Amazon and check out the reviews. Perry Marshall and Andrew Goodman are two well respected authors on the topic.

You could also join the AdWords Help Group ‘though this may appear overwhelming at first.

We’ve published a handy checklist of Google AdWords Tips that you should find useful.

Finally, you may decide that you want to spend your time managing your business rather than becoming an AdWords expert. If that’s the case and you plan on investing significantly in PPC then the answer may be to out-source your AdWords management to a qualified specialist. Clearly this will carry a cost but if you pick the right service provider, they should add significantly more value to your bottom line.

The main thing though if you plan on diverting some of your marketing budget online is to seek out appropriate help and not assume that just handing your credit card details to Google is all it takes to make a successful campaign!

Google are well known for their technical innovations and when it comes to pay per click (PPC), their AdWords advertising system is the clear market leader.

However, they’re not perfect and recently seemed to have dropped the ball when it comes to using Broad Match. This is the most common type of matching used when you create an AdWords campaign with the others being Phrase Match and Exact Match.

In very simple terms, Broad Match previously meant that if you entered a keyphrase, e.g. England Football Team, those three words could appear in any order and still display your advert. For example, someone entering the search term, “What is the best football team in England?” could have displayed your ad.

In short, Broad Match has always given most exposures but not always relevant. To combat this, we add a large dose of Negative Keywords.

Now though, Google are developing their algorithms to enable synonym replacement on words. Carrying this example on, it may be that the system thinks ‘English‘ is a good swap for ‘England‘ and ‘teams‘ for ‘team‘ so someone searching for “English football teams” could display your ad. Not too bad? What about “England Rugby Team“?

Although this is a very frivolous example, last week we saw in our own campaign that we had paid for the click “John Lewis Website“. This had come from the broad term Website Marketing Company. Go figure!

The point here is that we’re seeing a lot of totally unrelated searches coming through and if you’re running your own AdWords campaign and have it full of broad terms, you may want to start running regular Search Query reports and scanning a critical eye over the search queries column. Go on, run one today… you may be in for a bit of a surprise!

More AdWords Tips…