An effective landing page is essential for a successful pay per click campaign.

With AdWords campaigns, perhaps you follow all of the best practices for:

• campaign structure
• keyword targeting
• negatives and compelling ads

But, if you fail to create a customer experience within your site that gets a click – that becomes a conversion – then all of your hard work may not pay off.

Elements of an effective landing page

The first step is to determine whether or not you are landing your customers on the best page within your site. Here are simple recommendations for your pay per click campaign, so that you don’t frustrate your customers:

Read the rest of this entry »

Cooperation of search engine marketing firms and information technology companies is necessary to achieve business success. Here’s what your IT team needs to know about SEO.

Let’s face it. Search engine marketing firms make more work for information technology companies. We know it, and we admit it. There is time-consuming work involved in making a site SEO friendly and we need the support and cooperation of IT to make that happen.

Consider, though, that SEO folks and IT people should be striving for the same goal, and that is to contribute to the financial success of a company. So, when you’re hiring an SEO firm, know that getting the buy in of your IT team (either in-house or third party vendor) is a crucial component to that success.

Read the rest of this entry »

What is Buzz Marketing?

Buzz marketing is about the remarkable. No matter how clever the message in your online marketing strategies or how wide the audience, the content underlying the status update, tweet, post, article, poll, survey, contest, quiz or link must be extraordinary.

There are two things to keep in mind when contemplating the importance of buzz in marketing your offers:

1. How good is the offer?
Offers must provide substantial value to consumers.

2. How sharable is the offer?
Offers must be appealing, unique and make the customer want to promote the offer on your behalf.

When asking the question what is buzz marketing, keep in mind that the goal of buzz marketing is to get your customers to do your marketing for you. So in turn, you must provide them with something of substantial value.

Read the rest of this entry »

Conducting targeted keyword research analysis once isn’t enough. Language always evolves — and you need to keep up with how your prospects talk.

To start with an extreme example, it’s unlikely that you’d use the word “supererogate” on your web page (although, if the Internet was around long ago, your ancestors might!). This word has fallen so far out of favor that it appears in the Time article titled, “Researchers Detect ‘Disappearing’ Words That Are Falling Out of Usage.”

As a test, I put “supererogate” into a Google search box. Nine of the top ten results defined the word and the other result wasn’t even in English. The main purpose of the word, it now seems, is to flesh out dictionaries and encyclopedias. (By the way, the word means to “do or perform more than is required.”)

I got similar results in Google when I searched on “succedaneum,” which means “something that is used as a substitute” — and I suspect the same would occur for other disappearing words from the Time magazine article.

Read the rest of this entry »

Once your online conversions are clearly established and being tracked, what’s next? Activate your campaign and monitor your AdWords keywords.

Once your pay per click advertising keywords have been active for a few days, you will have some very critical data that you can use to make decisions. And, as long as you have implemented tracking for your online conversions correctly, you can use that data to begin to optimize your keywords.

Here are issues to consider.

Date ranges you choose are important to make sure you look at enough data to make statistically significant decisions about online conversions.

So, always consider your date range when evaluating the performance of keywords and ads.

Read the rest of this entry »