Tips Guides

Most beginning online advertisers are very confused about the difference between SERP (”search engine results page”) ads and content network ads. The major search engines blend the two together so well that they seem to be the same thing, unless you really pay attention.

Search engine results pages are what most people think of when talking about pay per click marketing. Ads are displayed based on the search terms used by searchers. When users search for terms that are the same or very similar to keywords you have specified in your account, they appear on the page. Content network sites are non-search engine web sites that display ads either based on the content of the pages or by advertisers that have specifically requesting advertising on the sites.

Web sites join content networks in order to monetize their traffic. They receive a portion of the revenue generated by users clicking on the ads. The amount that can be earned for each click is dependent on advertiser bids, so content network clicks can be just as expensive as SERP clicks for some industries. Clicks in more competitive industries will cost much more to the advertiser, so those clicks will be worth much more to the web site hosting the ad. There is good money to be made in online advertising if you can drive enough traffic to your web site.

It has been my experience that ads on content sites generate far fewer clicks and conversions than ads on search engine results pages. No matter how relevant a web site is to the advertiser, viewers of the site will not be nearly as targeted as a SERP showing search results related to a specific keyword. However, there are some very good reasons for choosing to advertise on a content network:

1. Branding is an important consideration, so you need to get your name as much exposure as possible.

2. You are in a very expensive industry.

3. There is not much search activity for your industry. If noon is searching for what you have, then you need to place your message in front of people who might be interested based on their visitation of a particular web site.

There are usually two ways to get your ads placed on sites in a content network: based on the content of all of the sites in the network, or by specifying particular sites. If you have time to research particular sites, then that might be the best route. However, you can also get good results letting the advertising platform place your ads for you based on site content.

Content network ads may work well for your business, or they may not. The only way to know if content network advertising is a good option for your business is to give it a try. Go conservative at first and carefully monitor your conversions. Content network is generally cheaper than search advertising, so you should be able to stretch your budget out. As with all things, calculate your return on ad spend or cost per conversion for both search and content and go with the one that provides the best performance.

Jerry Work is president of Work Media, LLC, http://workmedia.net, a search engine marketing firm based in Nashville, and author of Scientific Search Engine Marketing: Maximizing Your Pay per Click Return on Investment.

It’s easy. Just type your subject in quotes in Google’s search box. This is one of the quickest and easiest ways to test your search marketing efforts. Each week you can track which of your search marketing efforts is paying off and which isn’t doing so well. The results may surprise you.

For instance, you might be surprised to see your Craigslist ad showing up surprisingly high in your Googleprint. Placing an ad on Craigslist not only gets your name out but also gets you site picked up by the search engines.

You can also find out what doesn’t work; for instance, all those URLs you stuck on Twitter are fun but probably don’t count for much. Using search Googleprints is also a good way to see what your competitors are doing. If they are buying Google search words that will turn up too.

And don’t forget to click past the first page and examine other pages. Every now and then look at the first five pages to get a sense of what is happening on the lesser hits, especially if your search is a big generic one.

So how can one tell just what is going on? Much has been said about figuring out the Google algorithms or the way Google comes up with its search results. Forget it.

Even an engineer would have trouble figuring out exactly what Google is up to and Google certainly doesn’t want to let the cat out of the bag. Those algorithms are Google’s greatest intellectual property.

The truth is the Google algorithms change on a regular basis and if you are monitoring your Googleprint you can see how search results change when algorithms change. Sometimes these changes can be somewhat dramatic significantly changing your Google footprint. But you won’t know unless you are tracking your Googleprint.

It’s obviously important to remember that yours is not to reason why. Your chore is to see the application and results of the Google algorithms. If you begin to see the results, you can begin to understand the bigger picture and how that affects your search marketing efforts.

Don’t expect any great revelations, but if you keep a steady finger on the pulse of the algorithms they will begin to make sense.

The basics don’t change very much and they are most important; change your homepage with fresh, original content daily, focus on keywords and keyword strings and publish, link and backlink as much as possible. Avoid scams and spam.

Regular Googleprints also help you check for spammers and scammers that affect your Googleprint; in fact, you may have recourse.

For instance, a short while back when checking my Googleprint I was dismayed to see that the number one hit was a scam. This scam had lifted my name and business name and had posted it on a website that was selling porn.

I flagged and reported the site, as well as probably hundreds others also did. Within 24 hours it was gone; barred by the Google God. Or Goddess. Or their Googlenesses. The lesson here is take action and don’t panic. Panic gets you nowhere when dealing in the search world.

If you are just starting out with your search marketing efforts, make a weekly copy of your Googleprint and save it for reference. Over a period of time you can review your Googleprint snapshots and see which of your search marketing efforts is more effective.

You can also check your Yahooprint and MSNprint as well. But clearly Google, as the biggest and most important search engine, is critical to search marketing and your search marketing campaigns.

Think search.

Jack Deal owns Deal Business Consulting and JD Deal Local Search Marketing, Monterey and Santa Cruz, California 95060 831-457-8806. Related articles, ideas, strategies, tactics and tips can be found at and .

A frequently used but just as frequently misunderstood term, ecommerce is the abbreviated term for Electronic Commerce - the transaction or exchange of goods or services through a digital network.

Billions upon billions of dollars have been generated through ecommerce in the past decade. While the revenue generated is impressive for a relatively novel phenomenon, even more impressive is the manner in which ecommerce has transformed the national landscape of business; both from the viewpoint of the business owner and the consumer.

Ecommerce, as is demonstrated by quarterly figures released through The United States Census Bureau, Department of Commerce, has become an important, powerful, and significant part of our corporate lives. These staggering statistics indicate the powerful role ecommerce plays in our changing economy.

Issued for public consumption in November 2007, the Q3 2007 ecommerce report showed sales rates of 34.7 billion dollars. Do these figures indicate people are buying more, or conversely buying less through traditional means? A study done by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future suggests people now spend fewer of their dollars in brick and mortar establishments than at any point before in corporate history.

In fact, reports indicate that people spend 65 percent less in traditional stores since the ecommerce boom commenced. While shopping habits have not changed completely, the gap is shrinking at a swift pace. The future of retail business will depend a great deal on the traditional retail front partnering with online ventures. As the saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them.

For you, the ever-important consumer, this information may be more relevant and important than you think. Ecommerce is growing at a rate of 25 percent per year. Growth in any area of business generates greater choice and availability of both goods and services.

Essentially, this level of growth incites some healthy competition among the businesses involved, thus keeping prices low. It permits merchants to offer a broader range of transaction options and incentives. Most importantly, it allows the consumer more freedom on how to spend his/her hard-earned funds.

In the past, a consumer could find reading material at a local book dealer. Most booksellers were very willing to special order a book that was not available on store shelves. Through ecommerce, the consumer can order a book from any location in the world and have it delivered to his/her doorstep within days. The entire practice of ecommerce has served to indulge our yen for instant gratification and, in the process, made our lives easier.

Who would have thought in a matter of minutes one could pay his/her mortgage, download a CD, book a vacation, order groceries for home delivery and purchase a gift all with only a few clicks of the mouse?

Beyond aiding the consumer, ecommerce has changed the face of business full circle. Millions of entrepreneurs are using this process to make their concepts and wares available to the world, and for relatively small start-up fees.

New industries have been born from this trend, some out of necessity and some from sheer genius. The Aberdeen Research Group predicts that the technology of BI (Business Intelligence) will be one of the most sought-after technological solutions for 2008. BI technology, in essence, gives the retailer real time information that allows a swift response to consumer demand on the Internet to create customer retention and loyalty.

Without ecommerce specialty, niche industries never would have existed. The domino effect filters down to the manufacturers, sales people and marketers.

No longer a novelty, ecommerce is here to stay. The natural progression of this new corporate art form has been exciting to watch and participate in. To us it may spell convenience; in the eyes of the world, the possibilities are endless.

Garey Simmons writes about SEO Services from experience using SEO Services from his Search Engine Optimization Specialist. Much of his online success can be credited to using the SEO Services of http://SEOCoach.Net

I ran across a respected website where they were talking about “Destination Marketing” where by implementing a model where the website that a person lands on when clicking through a search result becomes the end of their search - in other words, a resource that fits all of their needs and is essentially the first and last website they will need to surf to in order to get their questions answered and their problems solved.

In the past it has been all about attaining the top 10 positions on generalized keywords and keyword phrases in a particular niche. While the content was there, it wasn’t the total package because webmasters and companies were more interested in getting on the first page of the major search engines rather than wondering what would happen once that desired flood of traffic arrived.

One thing I realized was that our firm had always built Destination pages and used the idea of destination marketing to not only get our clients great results in the search engines, but also have the pages where visitors arrived ready to be a one-stop solution package that the company could offer as both a resource and a platform for selling products and services.

Getting high rankings we have long known is only half of the equation. In order to attain and maintain high rankings as well as the tops in customer satisfaction required that we develop marketing strategies that took into account both search engine optimization for landing pages always delivered with a focus on providing exactly what the arriving and prospective customer needs.

In a way, the definition of Destination Search Engine Marketing is a desired destination point. In order to attain this status every marketing campaign needs to achieve top rankings and go that much further to meet the needs and desires of a specific target audience. When a site becomes a resource that people tell others about and point and return to, it has become a destination website. In a way, it is like having a resource booklet with links, sources, materials, products and services that are aligned with the search engine message and always in total sync with why a customer clicked on the SERPs results.

When one looks at SEO, rankings are at the top. Getting good ranking is what it’s all about. Knowing that is the start and not the end all to search engine marketing, many companies are now going beyond the traditional search engine optimization techniques offering clients the ability to create exceptional webpages that are tightly focussed and designed to satisfy arriving web traffic.

By taking the focus off of just getting high rankings in the search engines and looking and dealing with the total presentation, this new term Destination Marketing is in many instances like our firm already at the forefront and on the cutting edge of this marketplace.

Having a name for this methodology is great and the article went further to back up what we’ve said all along. Destination SEM is developing a website that is a cut above the mediocre SEO only sites. It attains high search engine rankings because it is not only optimized but highly deserving of those search engine results. When visitors arrive at websites they will always feel that they have arrived at a site with the complete answer to their problems.

Clients, as a result, can offer products and services, rapidly build and maintain credibility and increase ROI at faster rates. Going at it from the idea that by building an incredibly good and useful site and as a result gaining high rankings is a concept that is building in popularity and one that we’ve used successfully for our clients for quite a while.

The big picture of utilizing a destination marketing approach comes in the form of additional exposure and positive company branding that a client will receive when they shift paradigms from getting high search engine rankings alone. Not only will traffic arriving be more satisfied, it is a known fact that people drive the Internet.

One satisfied customer will tell another one who will tell another. The flipside to that which many firms have suffered is that if they are only optimized to get a visitor to their site, their credibility will suffer and trust will decrease based upon what the site offers to an arriving web surfer. What that means is that conversion rates and sales profits will decrease according to the level of professionalism, friendliness and amount of useful information provided when visitors arrive.

Destination marketing is about asking yourself a question every time you start out to build a page or pages for your site: Do you simply want an average/mediocre site that only half delivers? Or, do you want a site that goes viral, where the amount of good, useful information transforms it into a resource that everyone is looking for, will bookmark and return to again and again.

Answering that question is what makes the difference between having a good site and a great site. Destination marketing is all about making fantastic, useful resource sites that are authorities in specific niches.

Randy Zlobec, Search Engine Marketing Expert who also offers Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing Services.

Throughout the depressing news on oil, foreclosures, credit, jobs and stocks; there has been little attention paid to search technology, which is quietly changing our sense of community and the way we do business.

Several trends suggest local search is not just a fad but a tsunami. Each day more and more local searches conducted. Yahoo estimates their local searches have grown by 76% in just 12 months.

This spike in use is partly due to users becoming more skilled at using local search to find exactly what they want. Search logs reveal users are adding more modifiers or attributes to describe more specifically what they want. And they are finding it.

All of this is resulting in a huge fragmentation of the Internet from global to local to niche and hyper-niche. These local niche sites or “tail sites” are popping up to meet consumer demands for more information and direct access to local markets.

Additionally more searches are being done per individual. Yahoo reports their user logs show average user local queries up from eight to twelve per month. These statistics are showing that users are finding what they are locally searching for.

The good news for local businesses is that they can now market in areas outside of their immediate location. The bad news is outside competitors can do the same thing.

Businesses can now create promotional campaigns that can compliment an online experience with an in-store experience; or combine a virtual experience with a real experience. This double barrel approach using both real and virtual appears to be the current hot ticket.

It’s called ROBO: Research Online, Buy Offline and it is the true tsunami. The trends are also showing online research often leads directly to an onsite office or store visit.

On high consideration items like cars, fully 89% of all buyers research online before making their new car purchase.

While only 10% of actual purchases are made online; 90% are still made offline. Still, that 10% represents $500 Billion dollars in sales.

Small retail merchants are also complaining about a reverse threat to their businesses: ROBO Reversed. Customers will come into their stores to see and feel a product and then go home to their computers and buy it cheaper online.

Another growing trend is the coming together of local markets and social networks, like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube.

With a burgeoning presence of smaller and smaller businesses on the web, local business marketing is seeing a rapid shift away from radio, TV and newspaper to local search marketing.

It’s simply a matter of Return on Investment or ROI. Advertising is an investment and increasingly the better returns are coming from search marketing and not traditional media advertising.

This better ROI is because search marketing is an entirely different way of marketing. Advertisers can target a narrower niche market with very appealing promotional campaigns at a fraction of the cost of traditional media.

A major advantage of local search marketing is shortened marketing cycles; the results are known quickly and changes can be made “on the fly.” With traditional marketing, results may not be known for weeks or months.

In the age of the Internet, as the saying goes, “he who hesitates is lost.”

With this new capability to market geocentrically, local search marketing is changing the way we buy and sell. Cars, home and garden, professional services, financial services and insurance, real estate and entertainment are increasingly being found and purchased through search technology.

We all are watching as TV and radio viewing drops, newspapers shrink and telephone directories become obsolete. This same local search technology is now beginning to drive local as well as global marketing.

In the past we chose our friends and business dealings with those we physically knew. Today, with local search technology, we can choose our friends and business dealings with anyone connected to cyberspace.

Jack Deal owns JD Deal Local Search Marketing, Watsonville and Santa Cruz, California 95076 831-457-8806. Related articles, ideas, strategies, tactics and tips can be found at and .

When you are designing your AdWords campaigns, you need to give some thought to the difference between profits and ROI (Return On Investment). I’m sure we can agree that the ultimate goal of your AdWords campaigns is to make money. For that you need profits. So the answer to the question of which you should pursue seems simple. But the situation is not as simple as it appears.

In general, when you are starting a new ad campaign, your first goal should be a high ROI, rather than maximum profits. You’re in a testing phase at the beginning, unsure how well your ads and your keywords will perform. What you really need to do right now is identify the ads and keywords that perform the best, while not losing money.

You’ll be spending some time split-testing ads and eliminating keywords that don’t perform. If you try for maximum profits during this time, you’ll be spending a lot of money, much of it on ads and keywords that aren’t profitable. By trying to make big profits, you’ll likely end up losing money.

Once you have a refined campaign, with the most effective ads and only the keywords that actually generate sales, you’ll be ready to shoot for maximum profits. And strange as it may sound, when you go for maximum profits, your ROI will almost surely decrease, even as the amount of money in your pocket increases.

The explanation for this surprising result comes from the way you maximize ROI in an AdWords campaign. All other things being equal, the lower an ad’s position in the search results, the higher its ROI. That’s because the cost of a click in the topmost ad positions for an AdWords search typically costs far more than a click for a lower position.

In addition, most of the time, someone who clicks on a lower-ranked ad is a more motivated buyer than someone who just clicks the first ad on the page. People click ads for a variety of reasons, some of which have nothing to do with an actual desire to buy the product. Few of these “curiosity clickers” bother to click the ads further down the list. They almost always click one of the top 2 or 3 ads. So when a person clicks a lower-ranked ad, they’re more likely to buy. The two factors combine to create a higher ROI.

There’s only one problem with all this. Far fewer people click on the lower-positioned ads than the higher-positioned ones. So, while the ROI for lower-ranked ads tends to be high, the total number of dollars they generate tends to be low. In AdWords, ROI and Profits tend to move in opposite directions.

High ranked ads generate a lot more clicks, amplifying both the positive aspects of your campaign and the negative ones. If you shoot for top positions (and potentially maximum profits) with a campaign that isn’t ready yet, you can lose a boatload of money fast. However, if you stick to the lower positions and concentrate on maximizing the ROI of your campaign, when you do start bidding higher in an effort to increase profits, you’ll be well on your way to making lots of money instead of losing it.

So there’s the long-winded answer to the question: Pursue ROI until your campaign is refined and performing at its best, then shoot for maximum profits.

Knowing when to pursue profits and when to pursue ROI is only one of the ways you can improve your AdWords success. For more on a aggressive new guide rich in proven AdWords techniques, read my Google Massacre Review.