SEO Training

Pay per click advertising, (the ads that appear at the side of your search results) has really taken off in Ireland.  The internet is still a relatively fresh market place in Ireland.  Indeed some businesses still do not have a website today.  With all new technologies it can be difficult to ascertain what is reasonable budgeting.  What will give a ROI and what will drain the budget resources?

PPC advertising was gaining momentum in Ireland.  However, with the onset of the recession, we saw spends decreasing.  How do we know that spends were decreasing radically?  The bid prices fell dramatically.  So too did adsense revenues.

What is the difference between Google Adwords and Google Adsense?  If you are an advertiser then you are using Adwords.  If you display google ads on your site (like the ones on this site) then you are using adsense.  Every time one of you clicks on an ad on this site I get a few cents.  Pre recession, the revenue from these adsense ads was much higher.

All of this points to a lowered pay per click (ppc) spend.  Interestingly though some companies actually chose to increase their adwords budget.  With reduced competition and lowered costs it made / makes sense.

How much should you budget for with Adwords advertising?

The easiest way to find out is to set a budget that you are comfortable with and then see how far that gets you.  It really depends on how much competition there is for the keywords you are targeting.  The higher the competition, the higher your bid will have to be.  This can sometimes be ludicrously high.  If you are paying $5 – $8 per click then you are wasting a lot of money in my opinion.  I don’t like to ever spend more than $2 per click.  In fact, I am more comfortable around the 50 cents mark.  There are other factors to figure out too, before you spend a fortune on adwords.

How many click throughs are converting to sales?

Your Website really needs to be set up to make money out of visitors you are actually paying for.  If you are getting clicks from your adwords campaign, but are not seeing a boost in revenue then you are doing something wrong.  The landing page needs a call to action.  If it is a single product, give them a big buy button. If it is a shopping site of some kind then get them to register.  If you can get an email address you can give occasional reminders about your site.  Most people visit a site up to 5 times before making a purchase.  Your websites greatest focus should be on converting visitors to sales.  This is true of services too.  If you do not interact with your visitors they will go elsewhere.

Some of you will be thinking that there is no call to action on this site, so what am I talking about?  There is the RSS feed, which is gaining more subscribers every day.  There are also links to my main site sprinkled throughout the blog.  I link from relevant topics to relevant pages on the main site.  In this instance, because the post is about Search Engine Marketing or SEM which is the umbrella term for PPC and related advertising, you will see links like the previous one on PPC.  This helps my SEO and leads to more relevant information.

So, in short, if your conversion rates are low, then you are spending unnecessarily.

Why pay for a professional to do my Adwords advertising for me?

The short answer is that professionals have more experience with Adwords and can actually save you money on your advertising campaign.  Of course you can learn it yourself, but that is taking focus away from the core of your business and it will take you time and money to learn.

You will always retain control over our own Pay Per Click budget in either case.  Online marketing budgets need not only take PPC ads into consideration.  I’ll be discussing Online Marketing budgets further in the next post.

I've heard of a fire engine, but what is a search engine?

The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Strictly speaking SEO means targeting just search engines.  It is concerned with getting your site as far up the Google, yahoo and Bing rankings for chosen keywords as possible.  Achieving that is done in many ways.

SEM on the other hand has several meanings in regular use.  Some think of it purely as PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns.  These are the ads you see on the right of the search results in search engines, and occasionally occupying the top slots.  I like to think of it as much more than that though.

When I think of SEM the word marketing takes priority.  I like to think of Search Engine Marketing as encompassing SEO but taking into account the user experience.

Let me expand on that.  A site may be extremely well optimised from an SEO perspective, ranking well in the major search engines, but that does not mean that the site is a good user experience.

It is a mistake to put SEO ahead of user experience.  I’ll give you an example. The following is SEO optimised text

Car washing by the car washing experts.  At Car Washing Ireland we wash cars all day every day.  When it comes to car washing we are the number one car washing company in Ireland.  If your car needs car washing then you have found the right site.  Contact us and one of our mobile car washing units will be dispatched to you and one of our car washing experts will have your car gleaming.  You will be so impressed with our car washing that you will return to car washing ireland again and again.

Actually, that is terrible SEO.  I have exaggerated it hugely.  The point is that SEO optimised text is not necessarily particularly readable text.  If the quality of English is high, then you use different words or phrases to describe the same thing.  This is at odds with SEO, where you want to repeat your key phrases.

The object is to achieve good legible text that a user will read, while retaining a keyword density that is reasonably high (though not much above 5% of total text).  It would be entirely better for both SEO and the user experience to write the above text with far fewer instances of “Car Washing”.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is all about S......elling!

SEM is more holistic.  It encompasses good SEO techniques for on page content (but not at the expense of the user experience).  It also covers Social Media as well as PPC advertising and even banner or button advertising.  Search Engine Marketing is about selling your site online.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of using the meta description purely to put in keywords.  Same goes for the page title.

In the case of the meta description it is fairly likely that google does not include that text in any meaningful way in its ranking algorithms.  I am not saying that you should not put keywords into the meta description or page title, but use them to better effect.

Better effect means using them to sell.  To stick with our car washing example, The title can be “Car washing Ireland”, the meta description could read “Get your car washed at home or at work.  We come to you.  Discount for online booking”.  No key words.  Just good descriptive text that helps sell the service.

The whole reason for this post was because I am writing about Social Media and somebody asked me “what has social media got to do with SEO training?”.

Well these days you can’t market your website online without at least paying lip service to social media.  And if you know your stuff (or get Social Media Training) then you can really make it work for you in a big way.  Look at what happened with the Susan Boyle clip on You Tube.  She became an overnight, international sensation, from a clip of an audition!  Wow.  That just does not happen with traditional media.

Why do companies invest thousands of euros in SEO training?  It’s all part of their marketing mix.  SEO is marketing.  Therefore, SEO is SEM and SEM includes SEO.  By the way.  I’ve just broken a rule there.  I’ve overused the phrases again (my site may pay for all this bad SEO!).  I was only playing with words, but be careful.  Remember we are dealing with dumb machines (no matter how good the algorithms are).  They do not see a bit of word play, but rather an attempt at keyword stuffing, which can hurt your ranking.

So, SEM is all about selling.  SEO is just about trying to get better ranking on Google et al.

One of these days I’ll learn to write short concise posts, but I hope that I’ve cleared up the difference between SEO and SEM somewhat.