Archive for the ‘Pay-Per-Click’ Category

Is SEO a better deal than PPC?

Friday, November 20th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Optimizing your website’s content for search engines costs about half as much as relying solely on a paid-search campaign for getting customers to your site. So says a recent study by Frommer’s Unlimited I read about in the Travolution article, “WTM: Rich content ‘more cost-effective than PPC’.”

SEO, PPC Scrabble game

Of course, the main flaw I saw in this study is that it analyzes SEO and PPC results separately when many ecommerce companies use a combination of the two. SEO and PPC have different strengths and weaknesses. SEO is slower but more cost-efficient while PPC is fast, but each click costs money.

It’s essential for a website’s long-term future for it to have strong content that is designed to attract search engines’ attention and increase its ranking in their search results. But that doesn’t mean PPC is irrelevant or too expensive for companies to take advantage of in their Internet-marketing campaigns.

According to Frommer’s study, it costs about 17 cents per visitor to optimize a site’s content. On the other hand, it costs about 33 cents per visitor through PPC ads.

You can find the rest of this blog entry in the Submit Solution Paid Search Blog on November 24, 2009. It will be entitled, “PPC clicks cost more than SEO.” The photo of the SEO, PPC Scrabble game is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of therichbrooks.

Top SEO tactics for small businesses

Monday, November 16th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

I read an article on Entrepreneur.com a while back, entitled, “Rev up the Search Engines.” It gives a helpful rundown of solid SEO principles for small businesses, which don’t have a whole lot of money to spare but need to start generating results from ecommerce.

Bicyclist soaring through the airThis article gives six tips for a small business to get the most bang for its buck, when it comes to search engine optimization. They are attributed to Steve Wiideman, a fairly renowned SEO expert. I already talked about most of these in my SEO series right here in the eHarbor Blog, back in February and March of 2009. But I think a refresher is healthy.

Here is one highlight I took from these tips:

- Search engines are getting smarter. Don’t expect Google, Bing or Yahoo to fall for the same old SEO tricks. Bloggers and other content generators used to focus on their keyword-to-content ratio, but now search engines recognize when you use the same keyword too many times in the same post. Use relevant keywords prudently. If you use keyword-stuffing tactics, don’t expect much success.

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the Submit Solution SEO Blog on November 23, 2009. It will be called, “Getting your business on top with SEO.” The photo of the flying biker is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Tom Grundy Photo.

Submit Solution offers PPC solutions

Friday, November 6th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

An excellent blog post on Practical Ecommerce got me thinking about how paid-search campaigns are handled. The blog post is entitled, “Pay-per-click Advertising: Seven Pointers for Smaller Campaigns.”

Bad magazine advertisement

I was amazed when I read all of the pointers on how people can improve their PPC efforts because basically all of them are easily handled by Submit Solution. I think it’s a great idea to be educated on the best practices of online promotion, so you should definitely read that blog post and take its advice to heart.

After you come up with a plan and thoroughly research your keywords, you can present your ideas to a Submit Solution PPC expert, and he or she will be able to improve upon your ideas and fully implement them. Submit Solution offers a number of pay-per-click solutions, including one-on-one support, easily updatable keywords, up-to-date reports and more.

You can find the rest of this blog entry in the Submit Solution Paid Search Blog on November 10, 2009. It will be entitled, “What you should know about PPC.” The photo of the bad advertisement is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Unlisted Sightings.

Google flexes its creative muscles

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Search-engine giant Google is trying to buck the overall downward trend in Internet advertising sales by grabbing a bigger slice of the pie.

Cat in a Coke box

In my blog entry, “Google tries to expand into new PPC forum,” I talked about Google’s attempt to make its new DoubleClick Ad Exchange successful. At the end I touched on Google’s attempts to grow beyond its core competency of search ads into the world of display ads. I’ll pick up where I left off.

According to the Wall Street Journal article, “Google Decides to Find Its Creative Side,” Google is trying to translate its ownership of YouTube and DoubleClick into a more dynamic advertising approach. Google is so well-known as the king of search ads that it might be difficult for it to break into Yahoo’s territory of creative display ads.

They’ve already created YouTube ad campaigns for J.C. Penney and Quaker Oats, but they saved their most innovative campaigns for Hewlett-Packard and Volvo. For those two companies, Google helped create YouTube ads and display ads featuring the latest updates (tweets) from Twitter.

Search engines are notoriously slow in catching up to social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can read my insights into this topic in my blog entry, “Google can’t keep up with Twitter.” It’s a promising sign that Google is making this effort to use Twitter in its online-advertising services.

You can find the rest of this blog entry in the Submit Solution Paid Search Blog on October 27, 2009. The photo of the cat in the Coca-Cola box is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of Greencolander.

By the way, I thought of giving this blog entry the title, “Google develops rock-hard ads,” but I wisely decided against it.

Google tries to expand into new PPC forum

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

In September, Google introduced a new way for its customers to buy and sell online display ads. It’s called the DoubleClick Ad Exchange and it allows Internet marketers to find a variety of Web pages to advertise on and quickly make a bid. This speeds up the process for both advertisers and publishers looking for ad revenue.

Chef cooking on fiery wok

I heard about this development in a Wall Street Journal article, entitled “Google Unveils Market for Display Ads.”

Google has literally thousands of partner websites scattered across the Web that display its online ads. However, Google has never been very good at display advertising. It bought DoubleClick back in 2007 for $3.1 billion and has been trying to come up with a good way to jump into this part of the paid-search market. This appears to be its big move.

This isn’t the first online-advertising exchange service. Actually, other major search engines, like Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have had them for some time, though none of them has been able to make them particularly big or useful, yet. Maybe Google will find a way to make this exchange service popular and profitable.

You can find the rest of this blog entry in the Submit Solution Paid Search Blog on October 20, 2009. The photo of the fiery wok is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of liber.

Done right, SEO and PPC deliver tasty results

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

The unattainable goal for many search campaigns is the ever-elusive melding of PPC and SEO tactics for bigger and better top-line results. Theoretically, the two should go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwichThat’s how Herndon Hasty starts his superb Search Engine Watch article, “Of PPC and PBJ: Combining PPC and SEO Effectively, Part 1.” His comparisons of search engine optimization to peanut butter and pay-per-click advertising to jelly are apt, and they work well through the article.

We’re starting a new blog on the newly redesigned Submit Solution website, which will soon be launched. We’ll be shifting attention from the eHarbor Blog to that one. You can find the rest of this blog entry there when it comes out. Stay tuned!

The photo of the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of jacky_oh_yeah.

What the Microsoft-Yahoo merger means for ecommerce

Friday, July 31st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

It looks like two Davids are joining forces to take on Goliath. After years of public wrangling over the details, Microsoft and Yahoo finally announced a proposed 10-year partnership between their search-engine and online-advertising departments on Wednesday, July 29, 2009.

Microsoft-Yahoo combination“In simple terms, Microsoft will now power Yahoo search while Yahoo will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers,” the official Microsoft news release said.

We’re starting a new blog on the newly redesigned Submit Solution website, which will soon be launched. We’ll be shifting attention from the eHarbor Blog to that one. You can find the rest of this blog entry there when it comes out. Stay tuned!

The Microsoft-Yahoo logo is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of JVManna.

Paid search about to get complicated

Monday, June 1st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Here’s an interesting trend online marketers should pay close attention to: the increasing length of search queries. That’s right, online users are Googling more search terms at a time to find specific topics and products. And they are clicking on paid listings less often than before.

Complicated wiring in India

This is big news because it represents a shift from business as usual.

The number of words per search grew from 2.8 in January 2007 to above 3.0 in March 2009, according to comScore, a top source of online research. This change might seem insignificant, but it is actually quite large, statistically speaking.

I read about this shift in search queries in a WebProNews article, entitled “Longer Search Queries Hurting PPC Clicks? The author of that article suggested online marketers who use paid search in their marketing campaigns will have to adapt and be much more creative in their selection of search terms.

When people used fewer keywords in their searches, it was easier for marketers to choose good ones with low competition to get their paid-search listings on. Now, however, people are using so many keywords that a growing number of search-results pages do not include any paid-search listings because they have gone unnoticed.

The world of pay-per-click might become extremely complex in the near-future as marketers awaken to these facts. A seemingly endless number of keyword combinations could make the task of reaching the right customers more difficult but also more effective at the same time.

People who use more search terms are usually more intent on finding and buying a product than those who type in one or two keywords. It will be interesting to see where this trend leads.

If you would like help with creating an effective paid-search campaign, I recommend contacting Submit Solution or Real Estate Promoter. These eHarbor, Inc. affiliates are industry veterans and they will able to help you.

The photo of the complicated wiring is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of challiyan.

adCenter Keyword Forecast Tool

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

A few months ago, Microsoft’s adCenter Labs released a keyword forecast tool which displays a search term’s impression count forecast and demographic predictions in any format (flash, picture, or text). The tool allows you to evaluate traffic for previous months as well as forecasting of impressions for future months.

It gives a very useful snapshot of detailed historical impression data, something that Yahoo! doesn’t offer and Google only offers visually with no numerical data. Here are a few screen shot examples of the search term impression data:

search term “real estate websites”

real estate websites screenshot

multiple search terms “real estate websites; realtor websites”

multiple keywords screenshot

The side by side impression comparisons of search terms are very useful in identifying effective keywords. The demographic data is also very interesting, but I still question how reliable this data is. Overall, it’s an impressive tool, coming from adCenter, and hopefully they can continue to innovate and offer useful resources to online advertisers.

YSM Launches New Ad Ranking

Monday, February 5th, 2007

Yahoo! Search Marketing launches it’s update ad ranking system today. The new ranking model changes the way that advertisers ranking for various keywords and replaces the bid-to-position model. The new model is based on both bid and the quality index score - YSM’s measurement of CTR relative to other competing advertisers.

The new ranking model closely follows that of Google AdWords. YSM gives the following explanation for the change:

“When users engage with highly relevant ads, advertisers receive interested, valuable potential customers. This new ad ranking model should, in the long run, help bring up the value of our network for everyone: advertisers, partners, publishers and consumers alike.”

Overall, I think the change is a good one. It will essentially allow advertisers with the best ads win, which gives us an advantage over our less experienced competitors