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What Is Search Engine Marketing?

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Put simply, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is using search engines like Google, Yahoo,  and others to get the word out about your business to potential customers.

There are usually two main methods for doing this:

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Pay Per Click (PPC)

1. SEO – is making sure that your website gets found by Google, basically.

More accurately, SEO means making sure your website is set up in such a way that it gets found by the search engines and appears high up on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

An important part of this includes making sure your website features content (text, video, audio, etc.) that is relevant to certain search engine queries. For example if you sell Environmental Consulting then you’d want to make sure your website has lots of articles about that subject on it. (Yes, more is usually more in this case.)

These SERP listing are essentially free, although many businesses need to hire somebody to either create website content or to “optimize” their website properly (or both).

If you don’t do proper SEO it is VERY easy for your website to disappear into the millions of web pages that exist, which will make it useless to your business.

However, SEO takes longer and despite the promise of “free traffic” tends to be more expensive in the short term.

What I’m saying is that if you need more targeted traffic now, then SEO isn’t the magic bullet you’re looking for – PPC is the magic bullet…

2. PPC – is advertising inexpensively to only those people who want what your business does or sells.

You may have noticed that on Google results pages there are ads down the right hand side of the pages.

These are called Pay Per Clicks ads and are highly effective both for internet users searching for specific goods and services, and for the business who purchase this advertising space.

Yahoo and other search engines also have PPC ads.

The reason these ads are so successful is because they are “contextual”.

This means that ads are set up only to appear when certain search keywords are entered into the search form.

For example if you were to type in “pet supplies” into Google, you would get a bunch of ads from sellers of pet supplies.

It works well for searchers (consumers) because they only see ads relevant to what they are looking for, and it works well for advertisers because businesses only pay when their ads are clicked on, so it can be a lot cheaper than traditional advertising (magazines, newspapers, TV etc) and a lot more effective too.

But having said that, the way Google have set up their PPC system, Adwords (by far the most successful and useful PPC system), is, while very effective, complicated to manage.

If you don’t know what you are doing (which many self-taught PPC advertisers do not) you can wind up paying way too much money – lots more than you need to be.

Consequently clever business managers hire PPC managers to make sure they do not spend too much to get poor results from their PPC advertising.

Who Else Wants Cheap Advertising That Actually Works?

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It’s official – traditional advertising in magazines, Yellow Pages and newspapers is too expensive and ineffective.

Why spend all that precious cash on these tired, old “scatter-gun” methods when you could spend less money to show your ads only to those people who are looking for EXACTLY what you do or sell IN YOUR AREA.

A New, Better Way to Advertise Your Business

My Dad runs a small business making stained-glass windows. When the last Yellow Pages came out he got all excited because he noticed that his biggest competitor had obviously forgotten to run their Yellow Pages ad. Being on good terms with the other business owner, Dad called them up to gloat BUT it turns out that his (more successful) competitor had deliberately dropped his Yellow Pages advert because he’s getting such fantastic results out of Pay Per Click advertising. This had my non-computer savvy Dad stumped – so he called me to ask what Pay Per Click is.

“Dad,” I said “I told you about this – Pay Per Click advertising is advertising on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. You should be doing this as part of an Optimized Search Engine Campaign.”

“Err … Can you put that in plain English for me?” Dad said.

“It’s the most effective way to advertise and it’s also the cheapest!” I said.

“I like the sound of that!” Dad said, “Now send me a plain English explanation.”

What IS Search Engine Marketing? And Why Should You Care? (In Plain English)

WHY:

I’ll tell you what it is in a second but first here’s why you should care:

Because if you’re not running an inexpensive, well-managed Optimized Search Engine Marketing campaign today, then there’s a strong chance you’re missing out on much needed new business opportunities – i.e. SALES (i.e. MONEY).

WHAT:

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that works by increasing your visibility in search engine result pages (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc.) using contextual Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

PPC is the best way to advertise because it is contextual – you are only targeting people who you know are looking for what you sell (so you don’t waste money advertising to people who couldn’t care less about your business).

Oh and by the way, you only pay for the advertising when people click on your ads.

What is “Optimized” SEM?

Optimized SEM means that instead of throwing up one advertisement that leads to one webpage (your homepage for example), we split-test many different pay per click advertisements and many webpages to see which get you the best results.

After running these tests repeatedly, we end up with an “optimized” marketing campaign for your business, i.e. advertising that is proven to work really, really well for the cheapest price (way cheaper than advertising in magazines or newspapers).

How to Spend Less And Get More Customers

Here’s what we do to help your business grow using PPC advertising.

• We look at what service you provide or products you sell

• We determine where your customers are and “geo-target” your campaigns to only service those areas (saves you money)

• We research “keywords” that your potential customers might be typing into search engines to search for your product/service (i.e. “plumber in St Kilda”)

• We set up professional-standard PPC campaigns up for you, ensuring you only pay the lowest prices possible.

• We write different ads that are relevant to the keywords targeted (because this works best)

• We write and design different “landing pages” within your website, relevant to the keywords you are targeting (again because this works best to save you money and get the best results)

• The above ads and web pages are split-tested against other versions of ads and landing pages so we can see which work the best.

• We determine what you want your clients to do (i.e. buy a product, call you on the phone, fill in a contact form) and how we will measure this

• We install analytics so that we can track and measure what your website visitor’s do while they are looking at your website

• We analyze the results of all of your ads and of your web pages, to see what is working and what isn’t

• We drop what isn’t working and tweak what is, to see if we can get these successful ads and webpages to work even better

• And we introduce new ads and web pages as well – to see if they do even better than the existing versions

• repeat until we get you great results – more website traffic and more sales!

Get Rid of Your Advertising Problems Once and for All

Here at SquareEyes (it’s just the two of us) we are passionate about your marketing results.

We don’t take on too much work, preferring to concentrate on doing a great job for a small client base. With our help you can be spending less on advertising (than in traditional media OR on poorly managed PPC campaigns) and getting more sales or enquiries.

All you’ll need to do is quickly educate us as to what your business is about, then we will go to work running your PPC campaigns for you, always making sure not to spend more than you have authorized.

At the end of each month you will get a report from us, explaining what we have done, how much you have spent (no nasty surprises there) and what results you have been getting. There are no lock-in contracts and you are free to contact us anytime to ask questions or just check up on progress.

Don’t delay – our mission is to bring you more traffic and more sales – call us now!

Are these 4 Adwords Mistakes Costing You Money?

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You probably know already that using Google Adwords to advertise online is one of the best marketing techniques around. It can certainly be a much cheaper method of advertising than traditonal media like magazines and radio.

BUT running Adwords campaigns successfully can be a VERY complicated and time consuming process and making mistakes can cost you real money.

Here are 4 common Adwords mistakes that could be costing you money:

1. Only one AdGroup in your campaign:

This lack of differentiation means Google can’t understand the context – i.e. what your Adwords ads are about. This means that all search queries are being shown the same ads. A better approach would be to have highly relevant ads targeted to specific search queries.

2. Keywords Not Optimized:

Keywords that are known to produce conversions have not been expanded and optimised to increase sales. To get the best results out of your Google Adwords you need to be monitoring results and then “optimizing” your ads. Optimizing means improving the range of ads that you are running so that they are more targeted and providing higher conversion rates (i.e. getting you the results you need, like sales or phone calls).

3. Google Analytics Not Set Up or Set Up Poorly

In order to get the best results out of your Adwords campaigns and your website, you really should be using Google’s Analytics tool. It is free and probably the best way to manage your online marketing as it provides a detailed and clear picture of what your website visitors are actually doing while visiting your website.

There are many things you can do with Analytics to improve results, but generally speaking what Analytics does is it allows you to see the factors that directly result in enquiries and sales. This means you know what works so you can replicate, and what doesn’t work so you can eliminate it.

4. Website Not Optimized

There is no point running an efficient Adwords campaign if you are not backing this up with an excellent website that gets those sales or gets the phone ringing off the hook.

Just having a normal website that you thought was pretty good when you had it made is not enough. For starters, just because you think that your website copy (the words) is up to scratch doesn’t mean that it is necessarily resulting in the best results.

Further to this you really should be running keyword specific Adwords campaigns into landing pages (pages within your website) that are highly relevant to the keywords used in the ad (and the terms your prospect typed into Google to end up seeing your ad in the first place).

The best way to do this efficiently is to “split test” several landing pages for each different Adwords ad, which as you can probably guess, can mean running many different landing pages at any one time. Thankfully, Google’s Website Optimizer tool makes this automatic once you’ve done the initial set up.

Split testing is a continual process of experimentation and elimination to see which factors (Landing Page design, copy, headlines, etc) give you the best results. Assuming that any given factor will work is not as effective as split-testing several different strategies to discover what works in reality.

If you are running Adwords campaigns for your business right now then you should check to see if you are making any of these 4 mistakes. There are plenty of other factors to consider, but these four are certainly very important.

Of course, doing all of this can be very time consuming and complicated, so if you are busy running your business and would like some help with your Adwords ads, landing page optimization or advertising copywriting (the words you use in your ads or web pages) then please do contact us using the contact details below.

We offer a FREE no-obligation Adwords account review which will show you how you could be getting a higher return on your Adwords advertising investment.

Contact us now to find out more:

1300 975 224

info@squareEyes.com.au

How You Can Increase Sales By 67% Just By Using The Most Powerful Word In The World

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If you want to write words that inspire your potential customers to take action (buy, call, join your mailing list) then you should be doing in-depth studies into the best copywriting techniques – right?

But learning copywriting takes a lot of time and effort and if you are running a business, you’re probably feeling a little short of extra hours and energy!

Well, don’t fret – it’s ok – because if you’re new at copywriting then in fact you stand at the edge of a lush valley resplendent with low-lying marketing fruit just waiting for you to pick and bite into!

What the…?

What I mean is this: When you start learning and practicing a new skill, there is an initial period where you can quickly learn some fundamental skills that will massively increase your results for minimal effort – and this applies to copywriting.

So here’s one simple skill that will increase your sales by 67% – use the World’s Most Powerful Word – and use it A LOT!

What Every Customer Wants

Do you know what every single potential customer in the world wants? They want to know what’s in it for them. It’s called the WII FM Theory and it’s true.

Your potential customer doesn’t really care about what your business does. They aren’t very interested in the amazing product that you manufacture, or the incredible service that your company prides itself on.

Your potential customer doesn’t give a hoot what your latest widget is called, or what your qualifications are, and they sure as hell aren’t interested in the details of your experience and know-how.

All they care about is what’s in it for them. They come across your website, advertisement or brochure and for about 3 seconds (if that) they give you their attention while they unconsciously ask themselves “What’s in it for me?” – and if your words don’t answer this question quick-smart then you’ve lost them – usually for good.

Now there are many techniques and theories about how you can get your message across that:

A) This is what’s in it for you and…
B) it’s what you want

… but like we established earlier, you don’t have a lot time, you’re a busy person, so here’s the hot tip that will increase your sales by 67% every time without fail.

(Drum roll please…)

The Most Powerful Word In The Whole World Is…

YOU

and derivatives like “your” and “you’ll” etc.

You need to pepper your every sentence with that little sucker. Put it in your headline, Put it in your first couple of sentences, put it in as many times as you can. Why? Because it just works. It is the word that broadcasts the clearest and loudest over the WII FM airwaves. It tells the customer that your words are about them and their needs and wants, which is all they care about (sad but true).

The flip-side is rambling on about yourself and your business using the two worst words in the world: “I” and “we”.

Don’t do it – you’ll just lose potential customers that way.

By all means, say what you’ve got to say, but word it so that it’s about your potential customer, not about your business, and do that by using the word ‘you’ repeatedly and then some more (even make your “about us” page about the customer).

So there you go, you now know a proven method to increase your sales by 67% every time without fail.

Contact us anytime on the details below if you’d like some help growing your business using powerful copywriting techniques.

1300 975 224

info@SquareEyes.com.au

Working With AdWords Placement Campaigns

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I have been focusing a lot over the last few weeks on the creation and optimisation of Google AdWords placement campaigns on the content network. Before I go into the tactics and a few fresh ideas that I am currently playing with, those of you new to the blog may be asking the question…

What is a placement campaign?

A Google AdWords placement campaign allows you find pick which websites that participate in the AdSense program you want your advertisements to show on. Instead of relying on Googles contextual matching of keywords that you specify to the content of sites, the placement campaign bypasses this, and allows you to use your intelligence to find sites that you believe will provide visitors to click on your ad, and more importantly convert into sales or actions.

TEXT PLACEMENT AD

STANDARD CONTENT NETWORK AD

One of the main advantages of placement campaign ads is that they take over the whole ad block. Instead of showing your ad with four other competitors inside the ad block, the placement ads take over the WHOLE ad block. It doesn’t matter if you are using text ads or image ads, the whole bit of valuable site real estate is yours. BUT, it does come at a price (doesn’t everything).

Using Placement Campaigns

To take out the placement ad block, you must bid higher than the top content bidder for that ad block on the site. But this can be more than compensated for by thinking laterally, and placing your ads on sites that have a similar demographic to your target market. These sites are running ads from a different but demographically related niche, so you can bid against cheaper keywords, and get a lot of content traffic without going head to head with your competition.

For example, you may know from market research that the people that buy your widgets also listen to heavy metal. Sure you can run content network ads, and then pick the winners by running an AdWords Placement performance report. This is a good initial strategy to find out if these heavy metal music keywords ads are being shown, and what the average cost per click is. Once you determine where the ads are being shown, and the type of sites that are converting then you can transfer these winning domains into a placement campaign, and optimise the advertising spend on each of these sites individually. Placement campaigns allow you to change individual bids on each url, instead of bidding on keywords. This allows you to fine tune each and every site that you know converts well, making sure that you pay the maximum needed to get your ads shown on that domain.

Placement campaigns are also excellent for targeting large blocks of related content within large news and social media sites. I will give a few examples here of some ninja style tactics for finding placements. There are many more …..

1. Set up a Google alert to search for all news stories that feature your niches or product areas. Most news sites, at least here in Australia show content network ads on story pages, and these make excellent placements. Remember, that these articles can get massive surges of traffic, but they are timely, so some form of alert system is needed to make sure you maximise the effectiveness of a campaign.

2. Buy up blocks of related niche content within social media. Say for instance that there was a popular social video site that showed Adsense content ads. You could do an internal search on that site for all of your keywords, record the url’s of the results and then run placement ads on all of those URL’s within the site. These pages get thousands of visitors per day.

PLACEMENT TIPS

Here are a few other tips that are fresh on my mind:

  • Use AdWords Editor for setting up placements. Make your job so much easier, and can easily template whole setups and copy them to new campaigns.
  • Specify the placement url without the http:// Google doesn’t like it.
  • No placements over three directories deep. Not sure why Google doesn’t allow this, as it makes targeting on social media sites a lot harder to accomplish. You can put ads on www.last.fm/group/tool but not on search.url.com/lyrics/q/james+blunt+high+lyrics because the target url has more than 2 slashes in it

Call us now to discuss your Adwords campaigns

1300 975 224

info@squareeyes.com.au

Google Adword Campaign Strategy Is Important

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New users to AdWords often find the system very challenging, or the return on investment simply does not add up because they make a number of common mistakes.

The problem that most new starters get into when setting up their AdWords campaign is that they don’t approach the subject with an analytical mind. Once people get a basic understanding how PPC advertising works, and sign up for an AdWords account, they hastily throw together a campaign with ill defined goals and no actual strategy behind it.

A lot of people have been burnt by PPC advertising because they have failed to take the time to set up an easy to manage and optimise campaign. Failure to manage a campaign through a number of critical stages, and poor initial campaign design leads to a drop in quality score for your campaigns over time. When this happens, the cost per click for all of your keywords goes through the roof, and it leads to a lot people becoming disgruntled with AdWords in general, and feeling like Google is greedy and grabbing at cash.

This is the furhest thing from the truth in my opinion. A well thought out AdWords campaign is one of the best ways to draw traffic to your product or service.

If you currently are running AdWords, a simple way you can get some control over the direction of your PPC marketing is to review the way your campaigns are organised.

Don’t think about campaigns and AdGroups as just simply a place to put keywords that have similar themes. The structure of campaign and AdGroups should be thought of as individual experiment. This is the place where combinations of keywords and advertising copy are being tested against each other.  It is very easy to make comparisons of results between individual AdGroups, or advertisements and keywords within AdGroups. You can find clear trends and winners by testing like keywords and ads with only small variations. This makes it easy to see which factor is in play and has increased CTR, conversions or Quality Score.

This separation of data is important to think about when setting up AdGroups. Try as hard as possible to keep your data ‘clean’, and not muddy the results by having unrelated areas and types of keywords in the same AdGroup, or even the same campaign. For instance, i always have brand related keywords in a separate campaign, as these then to have a higher CTR and skew the results of the other campaigns.

This should be taken into consideration for the life of the campaign. If a keyword is dominating a campaign or AdGroup, you should consider isolating it and creating an expanded AdGroup for it.
This makes it easier to test variations on this proven winner and further increase its performance.  There is a fine line to walk here, as Google likes to see a high CTR for campaigns, and if you drastically reduce the CTR by removing all of the high performing keywords, the quality score will lower and the average CPC for the campaign will increase.

As for everything, testing and measuring is the key to success.

Contact us to discuss your Adwords campaigns

1300 975 224

info@squareeyes.com.au