Search Engine Marketing Tutorial

Today I am going to be talking about search engine marketing and how to go about optimizing your campaign, both in the areas of pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimisation (SEO).So moving along to the tips and I am going to start with PPC. And with PPC it is important with all of your campaign that you use a tracking code. If you don't take the moment to add your tracking code to your landing page or wherever your desired action is, then you are flying blind and more likely end up wasting a great deal of money. Take the time to get this done before you spend anything. When it comes to your PPC campaign, the next thing that you want to do is go monitor and adjust daily. You have got your tracking code in place and your campaign is live, don't just let it run. You need to monitor it every single day, looking at every single keyword and determine what is working and what is not. Essentially you need to get rid of that stuff that does not work and keep what does. Every day that you are not monitoring your campaign, you are not optimising it which basically means that you are losing money. The goal is to get to a point where you are only spending money in words or websites that make you money. 

So the number one area of PPC is Adwords. This is the Google PPC system and these are advertisements that show above organic search. Now they are broken down into textual and image ads. For textual ads you want to focus on two main areas. Your Google search and your Google network of sites. And you want to break these down into separate campaign, because if you don't it can get confusing very quickly.Beginning with Google search: whenever you are choosing your keywords, you want to make sure that you are putting brackets around the keywords. If you don't put brackets then Google will automatically get any word that is close to that word and puts your ad out there. Again this makes it very difficult to determine what is actually working. For instance, you may one phrase like 'credit report', bit if it does not contain brackets around it then it could appear for words or phrases related to these but not necessarily your business.You need to focus on buyer words. When I say buyer words it could be as simple as 'buy product X' or 'buy service X'. So someone just searching for 'product X' by itself may not actually be ready to make that purchase. They are more than likely still in the research process. Finally for Google search you want to make sure that you target your region. Whether you are national or local, it really does not matter. A national company with its headquarters in London is more than likely to have a greater chance of converting its customers in London first. You can have a national and regional campaign and keep them separate, so you can manage both of them. If you are a company with eight regional offices, then you can have separate campaigns for each office. So when you are creating such ads, you can make sure that they specific to a certain geographical location. With Adwords the second aspect of textual ads would be the network. Network sites are essentially any site that has signed up to a campaign called Adsense which allows them to display PPC ads on their own sites. Whenever an ad is click, the revenue is shared between the site owner and Google. One of the downsides to this that anyone can sign up to this program, so this is something that you really need to stay on top of. Another aspect of Google Adwords which show a great deal of promise is that of image ads. Image ads within the Google network work well because most companies do not take the time to make the images. So it is very easy for any company to go into Google Adwords and type up copy for a textual ad. But it becomes difficult to create six or seven targeted image ads. So what you will find when going in this direction is that you will have lower PPC costs but higher conversion. So I do recommend for anyone to create their own images. The other area of PPC OS that of Bing and Yahoo, because Adwords is king this is where you want to start first. Once your Adwords campaign is starting to show a return on investment then and only then should you try Bing and Yahoo. At the end of the day the textual ads just do not cover the ground that Adwords does and it is widely noted that they do not convert ad well. That’s PPC so let's move along to SEO.With SEO UK it starts with keywords research. Now what will happen is, is that you can use the keyword research that had been compiled in your PPC campaign. So if you have been running your Adwords campaign for a couple of months, then you ought to be able to identify phrases that are able to convert and consistently. These words are going to become your primary keywords that you are going to focus your SEO campaign on. At the end of the day you don't want to drive search engine optimisation traffic that simply does not convert. You want to make sure that you are focused on converting traffic which is why it is good to use your Adwords data which you compiled with your campaign. You also want to be doing competitor analysis. Your competition have probably been doing this for much longer than yourself and their information is readily available through a program called SEMRush.com and for their services they have a free and paid version. This service allows you to see where your competitors are ranking, where they are getting their traffic from in terms of SEO and PPC.When it comedy to keywords you want to break them into your primary and secondary keywords. Primary keywords are those that are converting the most and the secondary keywords are everything else. These are your longer tail keywords consisting of three or more words per phrase. The next aspect to focus on is that of Analytics. I strongly recommend that you use Google analytics because it is free, easy to understand and it is very widely used, and ad mentioned before it is free. With your analytics you want to be looking at your low hanging fruits. You want to run your analytics first because you may have pages that are showing up in the search results for certain terms that you are already getting traffic for. By going into your analytics and looking at the organic search results you might be able to identify areas that you can optimise better and move up the search results. Another area is that of On-Page optimisation. This is old school but it still plays a big factor. The two primary elements that you want to focus on initially are your title and description tags. This is because these are what people are going to see when they do their Google search and they will help to determine whether they will click thorough to your website one thing that you need to is to make air that your title and description tags match with what us actually on your website in order to keep people on it. Then there is link building and this is another old school area that had been affected by the most recent Google updates. But where it stands right now, you want to focus on white hat techniques, which mean anything that is good. White hat is the hard way but in the long term it will reward you. Remember to focus on anchor text diversification so the same words are not pointing back to your website repeatedly. So if you are trying to rank for the phrase 'search engine marketing' then you font want the same words to appear in every link. 

Finally let's look at social signals. This is the fastest growing element of the SEO algorithm especially with regards to Google and Bing. The areas to focus on are Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and Pinterest. For Google, clearly Google Plus will play the largest role and you just want to make sure that you are doing everything organically. Also with social signals, the location of buttons is important. Whatever pages you are driving traffic to you want to make it very clear where those buttons are so people are able to share your content.