Lately small businesses have been bombarded with strategies and tricks to improve SEO efforts.

As an employee hired solely for SEO reasons, I understand the importance of organic search rankings and the excitement that comes from seeing your company pop up after a Google search.However, companies need to remember that pay per click (PPC) advertising is still an important part of the marketing process.

Even if your businesses in ranking well in organic search, PPC marketing should still be on the top of the priority list. Unfortunately, many companies toss PPC marketing to this side once SEO efforts yield positive results.

For those who are unfamiliar, PPC marketing allows a company to place little ads either on the top or on the side of search engine results pages (SERP), and each time that ad is clicked the company has to pay a certain amount of money. This is a quick way for a business to get their ads at the top of major search engines, and is therefore primarily used by startup companies and companies who haven’t see their website rank well in organic search.

Consider a few of the benefits of PPC advertising:
• Keyword and Phrase Tracking—PPC advertising allows a company to learn quickly which keywords and/or phrases and ads yield the most profitable results. This takes much longer to track if you’re using SEO alone. Knowing this information will then, in turn, also help your future SEO efforts.

• Reliable—SEO rankings can fluctuate at any time, but a company can count on PPC marketing. If you pay for an ad to be at the top of a Google search page, it will be there. It also serves as a nice back-up in case your organic search ranking does fall short of your expectations.

• Competition—It can be very difficult to compete with dominant brands. However, PPC helps to keep things fair. If you can pay for that top spot on Google, you’ve got it. This will put your company’s ad right in the middle of all those dominant brands, which helps to even out the competition.

• Budget—Many companies think that PPC will force them to take out a small business loan, but companies can actually set their own budget. You can be as aggressive or as passive as you’d like to be, which puts you, the company owner, in total control.
PPC can offer these benefits to both small and large companies. Regardless of where your company falls on the SEO scale, PPC will always be important. Whether your company has taken a break from this type of advertising or has never given it a thought, it’s time to put it on the radar. Below lists 5 steps to getting started with PPC:

4 Simple Steps to Get Your Company Going with PPC
1. Search Engine—Just about every major search engine (and many local search engines) allows PPC advertising. The first step is deciding where you want to place your ads. Different search engines have different benefits, so don’t go running to Google without doing a little bit of research! Consider your budget and your company goals.

2. Keywords—It is important to consider which keywords you want to target. PPC ads are connected to specific keywords, so in other words, the ad will only be seen by consumers when the keyword/keywords are typed into the search box. Once you decide keywords that work for you, be sure to add them into the text and title.

3. Bidding—This is where PPC advertising gets a bit confusing. Your company has to pay the search engine every time someone clicks on an ad you placed on their search engine. The highest bidder then gets the best spot on that particular search page (usually at the top as opposed to on the side). This is the easy part. It is deciding how much money you should bid that gets a bit tricky. Consider this example:

- Let’s say you get one sale for every 100 clicks (a conversion rate of 1:100) and your product costs $10. This then means that you should not pay more than 10 cents per click if you want to break even. If the highest bid costs 30 cents, then it is not worth the money for your company.

4. Landing Page—You want to make sure that when someone clicks on your ad they are sent to a page that will allow them to buy the product. Make sure the page is organized and easy to use so that you don’t pay for a bunch of clicks that don’t give you a sale.

Amanda DiSilvestro is an expert writer on toll free numbers based in San Diego, California. She writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as workers compensation insurance. You can find more of her articles as well as vendors comparisons for your small business needs at Business.com.

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

… tonight at midnight the price to get instant access to Unlimited Web Traffic – ten calls, ten transcripts and the exclusive Guide to Unlimited Web Traffic – goes up.

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©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Today you have a choice.

Last week I interviewed eleven of the world’s top web traffic experts to show you exactly how to flood your site with qualified prospects so you can make more money this year.

In case you missed one or more of the calls, you can still get access to the ten mp3s of the calls, transcripts and the exclusive Unlimited Web Traffic Guide and save yourself $100…

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The price goes up by $100 in the next 48 hours, so if you have any interest in getting more web traffic …

… use the link above, scroll to the bottom of the page and get these amazingly powerful web traffic and profit generating secrets.

Let’s face it.

At some point you’re going to want to get access to the traffic generating secrets of these top web traffic experts and you can either claim your copy now, or you can wait and pay more later this week.

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How to Use Google AdWords To Generate Massive Targeted Traffic 24/7/365 – Even If You Don’t Know The First Thing About Search Engine Optimization

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The Amazing-Simple Blueprint To Getting Top Rankings In Google That Drive Traffic and Profits To Your Site Every Day While You Sleep

Web Traffic Expert #3 – Stoney deGeyter
How To Flood Your Site With Free Traffic Even If You Never Get Near Page One Of The Search Engines

Web Traffic Expert #4 – Eric Ward
The Link Factor: How You Can Get Others To Provide You With All The Free Traffic You Want Without Having To Touch Your Website

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Traffic Secrets Most SEO Firms Don’t Want You To Know

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Web Traffic Expert #6 – M.J. Taylor
Incredibly Simple Tweaks You Can Do To Your Website That Bring In All The Traffic You Can Handle

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Real-Time Search: The Foolproof,  Five Minute System For Getting Instant Traffic and Buyers To Your Site For Free

Web Traffic Expert #8 – Mary Bowling & Mike Belasco
How To Save Up To $9,200 On Yellow Page Ads And Get A Constant Stream Of Customers With Google Local

Web Traffic Expert #9 – Shelley Ellis
The Most Powerful Ways To Slash Your Advertising Costs and Boost Your ROI With Google’s Content Network

Web Traffic Expert #10 – Dave Davies
Magic Words You Can Use Immediately To Dominate The Search Engines and Gather All The Traffic You Ever Want

And as an extra bonus I’m including my 120-page-plus, step-by-step exclusive Guide to Unlimited Web Traffic.

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©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Are you a small business owner who runs PPC campaigns? Have you spent hundreds, maybe even thousands of dollars, and not known if any of your ads have brought in a single sale?

The challenge is maximizing your PPC spend and understanding if your PPC campaigns are truly profitable.  I started this thought process about five years ago when I started asking businesses if their PPC advertising was profitable.  The most common answer that I was received was that their PPC campaigns (typically Google Adwords) were generating targeted leads and sales but they were not sure if the ads were actually showing a profit. 

This is because most sales are done offline and Google and other search engines has no way to know if a sale was made and cannot report if the campaign was profitable or achieving a positive return on your investment.

Let’s say that you have a business that sells Outdoor Furniture and you have three PPC ads running on Google; Google reporting tools will tell you how often a specific ad is seen (impressions), clicked (click thru rate) and converted (customer takes an action such as submits a contact form).  If someone searches for a Gazebo and your PPC ad appears; the searcher first sees the ad, then clicks on the ad, then takes an action to request a price on a Gazebo.

Google reports all that information but they do not know if the Gazebo was sold.  That is incredibly important information to be missing when making advertising decisions.  Without knowing the sale was made and how much was generated it is very hard to know for sure if your Adwords spend is profitable and would be almost impossible to know what the ROI on that spend was.  In addition you do not know which ads are generating a positive return and which ads are not.

It is very beneficial to know the ROI of every advertising campaign that you do in order to make smart marketing decisions.

Hopefully we now agree that calculating the ROI of each PPC campaign is extremely important.  Big business are already tracking this data, my goal is to illustrate how smaller businesses and entrepreneurs can accomplish the same.

Step 1 – The URL
Every URL has the ability to store what is referred to as variables.  In a URL, variables are set after a question mark (?).  Here is an example; www.company.com?variablename=variablevalue.  What you need to do is set up the variables that your Website will read from the URL when a searcher clicks your PPC ad.

My suggestion is to have a different variable value for each different PPC ad that you have. To keep this a illustration more easily understood,  we will just use one variable name and one variable value in this example.  By having just one variable value, we will be tracking your entire campaign, not separated by different ads.  Here is an example of what your URL should look like: www.YourWebsite.com?google=1.

The variable Google can be any descriptive word that you choose. You can name this variable Adwords, Yahoo, Bing or whatever works best for you.  I personally prefer using Google as the variable name when I am measuring an Adwords campaign.

Step 2 – Extracting the Variables
When a searcher clicks on your new ad the URL that will be live at your website will be www.YourCompany.com?google=1.  You need to read that URL and extract the variables from it. I use the Cold Fusion programming language to accomplish this, but you can also use PHP, .NET, ASP or any other dynamic language.

Step 3 – Creating a Session
There are different ways you can create a session for that user.  The easiest way is to set a Cookie which will create a session for that specific user.  This Cookie will follow that user throughout the Website as he/she surfs from page to page. Basically what the Cookie is storing is that this specific user came from a Google ad (variable name) and from the first ad your tracking (variable value).

Step 4 – Recording the Data
Almost every Website that is using PPC advertising should have a call to action.  Some type of action you want the user to take, such as filling out a contact form, requesting a price, downloading a white paper, purchasing a product or service, etc.  Every action should include the user filling in some type of information, with their name and email address being the minimum.

That information being filled out in the form needs to be inserted into a database. Along with the personal information submitted you need to also submit the Cookie data into the database in the same row as the personal information.

Do not forget to include the date in which the form was submitted, this is extremely important. At this point the application will know that a specific person took the call to action on a specific date and that person came from a Google Adword with the number one indicating which Adword this user clicked. This can be referred to as a lead from that Adword campaign within a specific time frame.

Step 5 – Recording the Sale
As an example;  Person A come to your Website from Google Adword campaign 1. Person A then requests a price on a “Shed” that they were interested on your Website by filling out and submitting a “request for price” call to action. Person A should then be recorded in your database. In this case, Google will be recorded and campaign 1 along with their name, email address and date submitted.

Now Person A purchases a shed for $2,000 offline.  You need to record in the database that person A spent $2,000.  If person A later purchases another item such as an Outdoor Table for $500, then this has to be added to the original $2,000 spend. Person A is worth $2,500 and came from Google Adword campaign 1 during the month of April 2010.

Step 6 – Recording your PPC Expenditures
In a separate database table you need to record the Google Adwords expenditure for each month that you want to run a report on. I run my PPC campaigns monthly with a specific monthly budget.  Let’s use April 2010 and an expenditure of $10,000 as an example.  You need to record in the database that you invested 5,000 between 4/1/2010 and 4/30/2010 for campaign one.

Step 7 -   Generating your ROI Report
Your database has two tables; one that contains your PPC expenditure within a monthly time frame and another table that holds the sales data.  To report on the ROI for the month of April 2010 you need to run a query that pulls the spend from Google Adword campaign 1 during April  2010 (table 1) and a query that adds how much revenue was generated from Google Adword campaign 1 from leads during the month of April 2010 (table 2).  It is important to note that it doesn’t matter when the sale was made; instead we focus on the date in which the lead was generated.

Step 8 – Make Smart PPC Advertising Decisions
You are now armed with critical data to help you decide where to spend your advertising dollar. Let’s use the following report as an example; April 2010 spend was $10,000 and the website generated $50,000 in revenue from that April 2010 spend.  Your return on that investment was $40,000 or 400%.  I personally like to focus on the dollar amount and not the percentage in this measurement. Obviously the $40,000 was not all profit, you need to estimate how much of revenue is actual profit.

For example 50% of a sale can be profit and 50% goes to expenses. So in this case out of the $50,000 revenue generated only $25,000 was profit, then you subtract the PPC investment of $10,000 to come up with a total profit of $15,000.

With a positive return you know that the ad performed well and that you may want to increase your budget to maximize your return. Let’s say in June you increase your Adwords spend to $20,000 and you generate $60,000 in revenue off that spend.  Now you take the $60,000 in revenues and cut it in half to get $30,000 in profit, and then subtract the $20,000 PPC spend to get a ROI of $10,000.

This data tells you that you were more profitable investing $10,000 than investing $20,000 towards your PPC campaign.  You should not entirely make your PPC advertising decisions off this data, but this data would be an important part of that decision making process.

A better ad or a better offer could have generated more revenue. With a better ad, possibly the $20,000 spend could have generated $80,000 in revenue which would have given you a total profit of $20,000 (80K revenue – 40K in expenses – 20K in PPC expenditure = 20K in profit).

- Jason

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Google Adwords with her seemingly targeted traffic, easygoing daily budgets, and conservative broad matching makes you think you have found the perfect solution to your marketing needs.

Then as you get to know each other and start to build what you think is a trust-based relationship, she slowly goes completely crazy. Like bad movie psycho girlfriend crazy. Make a wrong move and she’ll set your wallet on fire with bad content network traffic, ridiculously liberal extended broad matching, and possibly throw all your clothes out the window onto the lawn because she caught you messing around with Yahoo Search Marketing or Bing. If you catch her talking about how she wants to optimize or automate your relationship grab your wallet and run for your life!

Okay so the opening is a bit dramatic, but this is a boring topic and starting with a little humor and wit makes it easier to learn. There is no proof that Google actually has a gender but it certainly has a personality and most of its bad behavior is linked to how you trained it. There is no doubt that Adwords gets more complicated as your relationship with it grows and so today let’s talk about how it learns and grows with you.

The normal course of evolution of an Adwords Account starts something like this. Someone throws a bunch of keywords into an ad group, writes a quick generic ad, adds a few dollars to the budget, and pulls the trigger. This is followed quickly by a couple of searches to confirm your genius and mastery of the Adwords System because just like magic your ads appeared as you knew they would. So you walk away thinking to yourself “That was easy” but that was only the first pitch of the game. This is a huge mistake because from the second the account starts Adwords is learning about you and if you disrespect Adwords it will get offended and it can get real rude with your wallet.

If you want to play Adwords professionally you have to understand Google, and Google wants to create the best possible SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This is incredibly important to Google and unlike a regular business the quality of the SERP is more important to Google than your money.  Adwords is 50% of the most important web page on the planet so it is no surprise that if you do not help them help you, they will hurt you. Adwords is only slightly less complicated than space travel, programming all the features of your phone, or nuclear cold fusion and there are thousands of rules, guidelines, policies, and advisory comments. Since even partial coverage of this topic would fill a book I just picked a few common ones to make the point.

Rule 1: First Impressions Count

You never get a chance to make a second first impression and Google never forgets its history. If you start your relationship by just throwing keywords around without any thought then you are disrespecting the system and you teach it to treat you that way.  The right way is start your relationship with Adwords is slowly and carefully building your traffic one layer at a time. Go after only the best quality words and buy only the ones that really apply to your business. You can get more liberal and go after broader traffic as the relationship develops but initially try being on your best behavior and help Google create a better SERP with an ad group that is absolutely on-target.

Rule #2: Impressions are NOT FREE!

The term PPC (Pay per click) makes some people think that impressions are free and they could not be more wrong. Just because you pay by the click does not mean that impressions are free and this can be hard for some folks to understand. As they say the truth is in the math and here is how the math works. Your CTR (Click through rate) is clicks divided by the impressions so you can change the CTR by changing the clicks or the impressions. Since CTR is a major factor in your quality score extra impressions drive down the CTR and with it your quality score. Seeing as your bid consists of your money times your quality score impressions do cost you real money. The general rule is that you want all the impressions you need but no more than that.

Rule #3: Words are special

One of the most complex issues with Adwords has to do with the multiple definitions of a word and more times than not it is the context of the word. Somehow English readers can tell the difference between how to read a document and how they read the document. Same word but different context and this happens much more than you think.

My all time favorite word for this is pearl because depending on context the word can be so many things. There pearls of wisdom, pearl jam, pearl harbor, pearl jewelry, pearl paint, pearl flip, aunt pearl, and many more. So this word can be a concept, rock band, tropical island harbor, jewelry, color, cell phone, or a person.  The use of an apostrophes and plurals makes this even more fun!

A great tool for understanding how this impacts your keywords is Google Insights for Search

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

What I like to do with this tool is look at how the use of the word breaks down for the use I have in mind. I did this recently for a client and we came to realize that while we wanted a specific word only 2% of the traffic actually applied to their business. This helped to explain why we were having such a problem with the CTR and quality score. If you start with 98% of the searches not related to your use of the word, you’re going to have a problem!

Rule #4: Adwords is simple, except for the details

Adwords lives where people, language, and technology collide and it is not always pretty. Conceptually Adwords is easy but when you get down to the details there are thousands of trade-offs that you have to make. Fundamentally they boil down to a balance between quality and quantity. Generally speaking as quality goes up quantity goes down and the trick is to find the right balance because there is no right or wrong answer. I frequently have this discussion with clients about the balance between the multiple choices they have in keyword selection, ad copy, and landing pages.

- Bob

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

For your small business marketing you need to understand the tools and pick the right one for the right job at the right time.  You cannot effectively compete without at least considering all the marketing channels and that certainly includes both SEO and PPC.

The issue is not “Either Or.” It is about the balance, frequency, and audience.

If you have a web site you need to consider playing on both sides of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). As people debate the issue of SEO and PPC I hear some very interesting statements and my absolute favorite is “I never click on the ads.” The reason it is my favorite is it is so blatantly absurd. 

If people did not click on the ads why did Google post $21.128 billion in PPC revenue in 2008? Clearly people click on the ads, and they also click on the organic. We have studied the mix of PPC and SEO several times and the bottom line is every link on a SERP has the potential to get a click. In both Paid and organic, showing up is half the battle.

Just to put my prejudices on the table I am an Adwords Expert but I also earned a living for a decade doing SEO so I have played on both sides of this playground. People are sometimes confused by our business and they call me and just want to optimize their site because they think that SEO is fast, cheap, and easy. The problem is that SEO is none of these things.

We have studied this many times and while PPC and SEO have different cost dynamics neither of them is even close to free. A good SEO strategy requires a steady stream of unique content and that costs plenty to generate.

In all the dozens of cases we have documented, SEO and PPC tend to be about the same cost. What people always forget is the cost to generate, manage, and promote this stream of content. If your business has a source of free professionally skilled labor to write this content then SEO is free, otherwise you just need better cost accounting.

One weakness of SEO is that most web sites will only rank highly for a very small list of keywords.  You may think that your business is the center of the universe; however it is unlikely that Google will share that opinion. You might want to rank highly for 50 keywords but the reality is that in most cases that is not going to happen.

Since most sites get 1-3 core words with good ranking make sure you know what you want. If your list is 50 long make sure you put it into priority order because it is unlikely Google is going to give you everything you want.

When working on optimizing content the advice I give all the time is to write a great article about a unique topic because Google has a whole team of people and thousands of machines trying to find that and serve it up to deserving searchers. Write great copy, do not hide it from them, and Google will be your friend.

PPC has its strengths and weaknesses and everyone knows the big weakness – it costs money! Once you get past the cost, PPC normally out performs organic. The bottom line with PPC is that you can get traffic that you have no prayer of ranking for organically. PPC can also help improve your organic traffic. While there is no direct connection, PPC will tell you things about the volume of traffic that you will never know in a SEO only approach.

A web traffic strategy without a PPC and SEO component is likely to have the same problem as the football team with no defensive team – make sure you’ve got defense.

- Bob

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

I’ve been clicking through the google adwords for a recent project and every 10th ad or so I run into the same problem. I see an ad I like. I click on it to view the service providers’ website and get a not found page.

How dumb is that? People paying for clicks on their google ads and then losing their prospects by taking them to a site not found or page not found page.

Don’t make this mistake.

1. Check your Google Adwords account regularly to monitor your conversion rates. That means, the number of people who click from your ad to your webpage and then contact you in one form or another.

2. If your conversion rates are lower than 10% you’ve got a problem with the page you are sending people to. Your landing page isn’t doing its job and you should fire it, replacing it with one that will prompt your prospects to contact you, or to add their names to your list.

Interested in increasing your conversion rates and generating more profitable leads with your website? Start here >>

- Charlie

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

Do Google Adwords work?

The answer is yes and no. Google’s elegant Adwords system makes it easy to set up and test ads but most web site owners never make a profit from their ads. For most people Google Adwords are the number one website marketing money waster.

Why?

Once a prospect clicks on your Google Adwords ad, they’re linked to your site. Then what happens? In most cases a whole lot of nothing. They visit your site or your landing page and then they leave. They leave without buying anything or even leaving you their contact information.

The result of your Google Adwords campaign? For most people, it’s another advertising black hole. A whole lot of money goes into it and it doesn’t generate much in the way of business. That’s not to say it can’t work.

I have one web site marketing client that relies primarily on Google Adwords to generate leads and sales. And their business is booming. But it costs them plenty, more than most people realize to generate a lead. When I first started working with them their per lead cost was over $75 dollars.

That’s right they were paying for more than $75 worth of Google Ads just to get one person to fill in their opt-in form on their site. Now, they’re absolutely delighted that I’ve helped them reduce it to less than $25 per lead. Why does this work for them? Google Adwords works for them because they close enough of their leads to make a huge profit.

Will Google Adwords work for you? To make them work you need to determine your per lead costs, conversion rates and the value of a new client. If it’s less then you’re paying for your Google Ads, then you need to either stop or discover how to increase your conversion rates so a higher percent of visitors to your site or landing page become buyers.

Don’t be hoodwinked by this website marketing hoax. Don’t assume Google Ads will automatically start bringing in business. They won’t – unless you know how to convert site visitors into highly profitable clients.

- Charlie Cook
Web Site Marketing That Gets Results

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

How can you improve your small business marketing with your Google Ad campaign?

Before you rush into spending money on your Google ads, it pays to understand how they work and their purpose in your small business marketing. With the right verbiage you could create an ad that generated hundreds and thousands of click-throughs to your small business. Would that help your small business marketing?

Maybe – maybe not.

It depends on how many of the people who clicked on your Google ad actually turned into small business clients as a result of your marketing.

You could have the world’s greatest Google ad with a click-through rate of 3-5%, but if the people who click on your ad aren’t buyers then you are just wasting your money and lots of it.

To make sure your ads are not only working to attract prospects, but are also working to generate sales do the following once a month.

On a piece of paper list each of your Google ad campaigns. In the next column to the right, list the amount $ you spent on that campaign. Then in the third column over, list the dollar volume of sales directly attributed to that Google ad campaign.

Here’s what you may find out about marketing your small business. Ads that get the most clicks and bring the most people to your web site aren’t necessarily those that generate the most sales. Other ads that have a lower click-through rate may bring in more bonafide clients. Based on your monthly data analysis you’ll discover which ad campaigns to cut and which to spend more on, resulting in more sales.

Create a monthly advertising ROI spread sheet and you can use the data to improve your small business marketing and see your sales soar. Find out how with this link >>

- Charlie Cook

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..

“I have a client who is generating lots of business from the top placement of his listings under his keywords in the search engines. Is this a risky strategy or should he be looking at pay-per-click advertising?” – M. Anderson, KPMG

Given the vagaries of the search engine algorithms and the volatile nature of the search engine marketplace I’d advise your client to develop multiple ways to generate leads over the internet. He could be doing very well with his Google search engine placement this year, but if Microsoft has their way, they’ll be putting Google out of business and his search engine placements could be irrelevant.

Even if his current listings continue to do well, why not invest in pay-per-click advertising and generate 30% more leads and business? – Charlie Cook

©2012All Rights Reserved by Charlie Cook or Blog Post Author..