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Do you need to improve your AdWords Quality Score? Do you want to understand what Google wants from you as an advertiser in exchange for a decent Quality Score and lower click prices? Today I will teach you the ins and outs of the algorithm and show you how you can tweak your account and site to influence each Quality Score factor.

I am constantly surprised at how little advertisers really understand Quality Scores. If you put in a little effort, you can reap some very tangible benefits and come out leaps and bounds ahead of your competition.

SECTION 1: QUALITY SCORE BASICS

While Quality Score is relatively simple to grasp as a concept, it’s a little more complicated in practice. Stasia, an AdWords Seminar leader, gives you a nice introduction to the basic concept of Quality Score in the video below:

Get the Flash Player to see this video about quality score.

The Opportunity.

Back in the good old days, AdWords was based on a pure auction-based model. If you bid more than another advertiser on a keyword, your ad would appear higher and ultimately get more clicks (and hopefully sales). Back in 2005 when Google introduced the Quality Score, it changed everything.
No longer could search results be flooded with irrelevant ads of those with massive budgets. Many advertisers were very upset, but a unique opportunity arose for those with smaller budgets and the inclination to put in a little hard work — perhaps people like you. With the refinement of the Quality Score algorithm and the great scam / affiliate flush of late 2009, there has never been a better opportunity for those advertisers with a quality product or service and a little time to try to understand Quality Score to really reap the rewards. Are you ready to learn more about Quality Score? Let’s get started.

Why Quality Score Is Important.

Quality Score is extremely important because it can make or break your campaign (and in some cases, your business). Quality Score determines how much you pay for your advertising on Google and how much exposure you get. You wouldn’t place a TV or magazine ad without knowing how much you have to pay or how much exposure you would get, would you? Brian Carter, a  humorous motivational speaker and the Director of Search  for Online Marketing Agency Fuel Interactive shares some interesting client information over on Search Engine Journal on the inverse relationship between Quality Score and cost per click (CPC). I have reformatted the data below:

As you can see, the higher your Quality Score, the lower the price you pay per click. Also, as you will see below, the higher your Quality Score the more exposure you will get as AdWords uses Quality Score to determine what Ads are placed in the coveted 1-3 search results above the organic and local search results.

SECTION 2: QUALITY SCORE FACTORS

Types of Quality Score And What They Impact.

According to Google, there are two “types” of Quality Scores. The AdWords help documentation goes into a little more detail, but the guys over on PPC Hero pretty much nailed it in their Quality Score Handbook (Essential reading by the way) when they said:

Search Network Quality Score is different from Content Network Quality Score. Also there are different Quality Scores for setting minimum bids and ranking ads for the Content Network, Quality Score and the maximum cost-per-click determine the ad rank on content pages. For search, Quality Score, along with maximum CPC, determines ad rank and determines promotion to top of page.

The Google & Search Network Variations/Exceptions.

There are slight variations to the Quality Score formula when it affects ad position and first page bids:

• For calculating a keyword-targeted ad’s position, your landing page quality is not a factor. Also, when calculating ad position on a Search Network placement, Quality Score considers the click through rate (CTR) on that particular placement in addition to the CTR on Google.
• For calculating first page bid, Quality Score doesn’t consider the matched ad or search query, since this estimate appears as a metric in your account and doesn’t vary per search query.

The Content Network Variations/Exceptions.

The Quality Score for calculating an ad’s eligibility to appear on a particular content site, as well as the ad’s position on that site, consists of the following factors:

• The quality of your landing page
• The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites

The Quality Score for determining if a placement-targeted ad will appear on a particular site depends on your campaign’s bidding option.

If your campaign uses cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding, Quality Score is based on:

• The quality of your landing page

If your campaign uses CPC bidding, Quality Score is based on:

• The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites
• The quality of your landing page

Brad Geddes of bgTheory has a handy Quality Score chart with all of this information (reformatted for this post) :

SECTION 3: IMPROVING YOUR QUALITY SCORE

Now that you know as much as Google is prepared to share about Quality Score, how it is calculated, and roughly how much weight is given to each factor, what factors can you as an advertiser realistically influence? As it happens, quite a lot! Let’s go into each of the major factors and look at what we can improve.

Improving Your Quality Score for the Search Network

The CTR and historical CTR of the keyword and the matched ad on Google

The CTR of your ad / keyword pair is by far the largest factor in determining Quality Score. The important thing to remember is that the CTR is normalized to your position so your CTR is judged good or bad for Quality Score reasons based on the performance of other ads currently and historically in this position.
Bidding more to move up to the number one position will more than likely improve your CTR, but it will rarely do you any good if your ad doesn’t get a better Quality Score than other ads have received in that position in the past. The goal here is to make your ad so relevant and enticing that the searcher just has on click on it. You can explore the topic of Improving CTR in more depth in some of my previous posts.

It is also important to aggressively research and add negative keywords. This will increase your CTR and reduce your exposure to those searching for something you do not provide. Consider running an AdWords Search Query Performance report daily or weekly, mining your server log files, or checking your Analytics account for negatives and add them to your campaign negative list.

A final historical CTR improvement tip: always bid (and bid high) on your company or brand name. You will get a massive boost in historical CTR because 70%+ of the time, your ad is what searchers are looking for. You will pay pennies per click and decrease the normalized Quality Score and historical account CTR of any competitors bidding on your brand or company name!

Your account history, which is measured by the CTR of all the ads and keywords in your account

Account history is a tough one and is subject to a lot of speculation. Unfortunately, I believe a lot of it to be true. Advertisers with older accounts which have performed well in the past have a huge advantage over advertisers with new accounts. It can take anywhere from 1 week to 4 months to “shake off” a “bad history.”
This is also what some people refer to as the account level Quality Score. It is not so much a type of Quality Score as it is a factor. Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done here with a new account apart from making sure that you have a solid understanding of the factors to get your account off to a flying start (ie: a high CTR off the bat).
If you have an old account with a poor historical Quality Score, you might feel tempted to create a new account to counteract this. This is against AdWords’ policy. If you want to be on the cutting edge and have an appetite for risk, you can beta test new AdWords search ad formats. New formats generally show huge CTR improvements before they settle into the consciousness of Google users.

The historical CTR of the display URLs in the ad group

A relatively new addition to the QS family, historical CTR of the display URL in the ad group is an easy one to get right. Make sure you initially split test the hell out of your ads/display URL and make sure you stick with the one that drives the highest CTR. Adding keywords to the subdomain and subdirectory of display URL can give massive improvements. Especially if the keywords are trademarks. Frank Pipolo has some good tips on using test domains for this.

The quality of your landing page

This is another subjective topic. However (and this is very important), Google has hired thousands of what are called “Ads Quality Raters.” These are actual humans outsourced by Google who sit at home and rate your ads and the quality of the pages those ads go to. To improve on this factor, it is important to pay very close attention to the Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines here. I wrote a quality score post years ago on this exact factor, and a lot of the tips are still relevant.
Google also has thousands of Search Quality Raters, not to be confused with Ads Quality Raters, who look at and rate pages for classification in the organic search results. While I don’t have the Ads Quality Rater operations manual, the Quality Rater document is out in the wild for all to see. I’ve heard there is an awful lot of crossover.

Remember, you should ensure your landing page is capable of passing a human check. Make sure it follows the rules and never forget that once it is reviewed, it will be reviewed again.

The relevance of the keyword to the ads in its ad group

You’ve heard it many times before. Make sure your base keyword is in the ad title, ad text and display URL. Easy peasy, even for the tiny fraction of weight it carries.

The relevance of the keyword and the matched ad to the search query

This one is a little trickier. Again, attack your negative keyword research aggressively — consider it an essential daily task. This is a more advanced area where going through some detailed buying cycle analysis and segmenting search phrase intent can really pay off. The effort-to-reward ratio will vary here. Getelastic has an amazing post on something very similar here.

Your account’s performance in the geographical region where the ad will be shown

This factor is a relatively new addition to the Quality Score algorithm. I wrote a post about using geo-targeting to improve CTR previously, but the important takeaway is not that blanket geo-targeting is the right way to go, but that you should pay attention to the geographic areas that are performing poorly and consider creating a dedicated campaign or adgroup for this area or remove it completely. Run an AdWords Geographic Performance report to see where you could improve. Consider using local colloquialisms in your ad text for those specific areas to help improve performance.

Other relevance factors

While there is no way to know for sure what all potential factors are, some common sense can be applied here. The first thing to work on is your bounce rate, or more specifically “back-bounce-rate.” Yes, you read that right. Google has mentioned throughout the years that if a visitor clicks your ad and immediately hits the back button, this is an indication that the page was not relevant. In fact, Google explicitly prohibits the disabling of the back button functionality in their policies.

We also have anecdotal evidence that adding your root or base keyword to your landing page title tag and the other keywords in the adgroup around your copy improves Quality Score marginally. If you have the time, it would be ideal to create a landing page for each individual keyword. When this is not possible, a landing page dedicated to each adgroup usually does the trick.

Page Load Time/Other Factors
You may have noticed “page load time” or “site speed” left out of the factors above. To be honest, I’ve never seen a poor Quality Score due to slow page load time. From my experience, as long as your page loads in a reasonable length of time, you don’t even have to worry about this for now. If increasing your page load by a half second has any impact on Quality Score, it is minimal. There are also many other marginal factors I won’t go into, but Bradd Libby does.

Improving Quality Score For Content Network

There is a lot of crossover in the areas where you can improve your Quality Score on the search and content networks. Let’s look at the factors we can influence to improve Quality Score on the content network. In most cases these are a little harder to influence and take a lot more time and resources, but they are worth the effort if you want to succeed on the content network.

The ad’s past performance on this and similar sites

You can do a little or a lot with this one — from site and site section targeting all the way up to joining the community (if it is a forum for example) to get to know the users of the site and what makes them tick. As a member of the site, what ads or ad text would you find most relevant? I have seen some people even targeting the site users themselves (ie: an ad headline that says something like “Attention Redfly Blog Readers! Want to know more about increasing your keyword Quality Score? Click here!”

Another tip is to try image ads and compare their performance against your text ads for each site (if the site accepts image ads). Many advertisers still don’t use image ads, so there is a huge opportunity to jump straight to the top of the pile.

The relevance of the ads and keywords in the adgroup to the site

Consider using Google AdPlanner to get the demographics of the site, and target your ad copy to those demographics. Also have a look at what other AdSense ads are showing on the site and make note of ads that are consistently displayed over time. In general, those ads are what Google finds most relevant to that site (at the time). If you can’t beat them, join them.

The historical CTR of the ad on this and similar sites

Again, use Google AdPlanner to see the “Other sites Visited” section of the site you are targeting. Run a site targeted campaign on some of the lower trafficked related sites. This will improve your “related performance” on similar sites. It might be a lot of effort but not only will you improve overall content network performance, but you will gain significant long tail content network leads or sales.

SECTION 4: Troubleshooting Quality Score

There are numerous things that can cause a sudden drop in Quality Score or a slower, more gradual decrease. Here are some of the most common Quality Score problems and what you can (or cannot) do about them.

Sudden 1/10 Quality Score on all (or most) Keywords & Huge First Page Bid Estimates

This is an extremely common problem and is characterized by an advertiser noticing a very sudden drop in traffic from AdWords. In a lot of cases, your search network traffic stops first and is followed shortly by your content network traffic. This unfortunately is known as a “Google Slap” and occurs when a review has taken place on your account and you are no longer deemed to be complying with the outlandishly opaque landing page and site quality guidelines.

Cause: You are linking or deemed to be linking to a bridge page, a get rich quick scheme, an affiliate page that’s only purpose is to redirect traffic to another domain, an affiliate site that provides no added value, a data collection site (a site that collects users’ email addresses or other info in exchange for a free product / whitepaper, etc.), a “poor quality” comparison shopping site, an arbitrage site, or a scam site.

Solution: Despite what you think about your own site, Google, the Ads Quality Raters, and the QS Algorithm/Bot feel differently. They more than likely feel your site falls into one of these categories. In this case, there is very little that you can do. If your site falls into the “scam site” category, expect to be banned permanently or investigated by authorities.

If you feel that your site absolutely does not fall into any of the categories, request a quick look over of your site on the AdWords Help Forum and then request a manual review by contacting Google here.Note that it should be a 100% false positive if you are to get this reversed so be completely sure that your site doesn’t even fall remotely into one of those categories. Remember, AdWords does not run on auto pilot. Real people will look at and inspect your account.

One High Volume Keyword has a Quality Score Of 2-4

This problem happens when a specific high volume keyword, usually a single word or two-word phrase, slowly drops its Quality Score and starts costing more. Because these keywords are usually high volume, they can generate a lot of traffic, and a low Quality Score on these keywords can cause a significant drop-off in exposure and sales.

Cause: High volume and low CTR.

Solution: Add negative keywords to the campaign, use exact match, remove the keyword (be careful as this can impact an adgroup “theme” on the content network) or place the keyword in it’s own ad group and optimize the ad copy and display URL aggressively.

Very High (Even 10/10) Quality Score but a Huge First Page Bid Estimate

Unfortunately, this is not a problem with your Quality Score. When it comes to certain keywords, there are quite literally hundreds of advertisers. Assume all advertisers also have a 10/10 Quality Score. What determines which ads show? That’s right, good old fashioned bid price.

Cause: High volume of advertisers.

Solution: Bid higher and use the backend to improve ROI and increase lifetime customer value (LTV) so you can afford to bid higher.

In Conclusion

AdWords Quality Score is still a closely guarded secret, as is Google’s organic search algorithm. While it may not be possible to figure out every factor, just like the organic search ranking factors, it is possible to extract enough meaning to understand them and make them work for you. The great scam / affiliate purge of 2009 may have made things easier for existing advertisers, but at the current growth rate of PPC and online ad spending, it’s only a matter of time before the paid search results become as competitive as they used to be. Those of you who understand Quality Score will be in a far better position to get more from your AdWords advertising spend than those who do not.

I hope you got some value from this post. If you did, please share it with others who might get something from it too.

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On Saturday, the 23rd of January, I attended an online PR workshop run by Damien Mulley from Online PR Company, Mulley Communications. I’m a little late to the party, but that’s only because I had to rush out and buy seasons 1-6 of The West Wing and watch them all back-to-back. Thanks Damien!

The Workshop

The course / workshop was broken down into the following areas:

• Basics of Online Communications
• Developing a Communications Bible
• Developing a Communications Philosophy
• Working with Blogs, Forums, Twitter, etc.
• Finding Tools – Who is Talking about you Online?
• Crisis Communications

The Day

The Day started off early and I got in a little face time with Dena, Darragh and Leo. I also had the privilege of meeting Martina Skelly of activate.ie (who I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to speak with as I had not had my morning triple espresso). Next time Martina!

The event was held in the Radisson Blu, a venue where I’ve managed to meet numerous online marketing folks for some reason. It seems to be the new Dublin venue of choice.

The day started off on a very casual note — just the way I like it. Everyone in the room introduced themselves (except those who were late) and everyone felt immediately at ease. There were no awkward “Am I going to be asked to get up and give an elevator pitch?” moments. Again, it was just the way I like it.

Damien, who is amazingly comfortable speaking in front of people, kicked the morning off on the topic of grassroots media campaigns using examples from Techcrunch and Hotelicopter, and then dove straight in on the subject of “influencers.”  I have a feeling a lot of the presentation was ad-hoc, but it felt very prepared. Damien didn’t need to bother with fluff. Yet again, just the way I like it.

I was expecting there to be a lot of focus on Twitter but was very grateful that here was no focus on any one medium in particular. This was my biggest fear about the day — listening to someone rattle on about Twitter. It was nothing like this.

Damien went on and covered a lot about negative reputation management, which was quite interesting and a subject I feel will be very important in coming years.

There was then some audience participation and I got the most value from the day at this stage when the idea of “photowalks” and facilitation came up. There were some good nuggets of information here.

The next part of the workshop focused on SEO and reputation management. I believe there could have been a lot more said on this subject but I’m a little biased in this area. Leo and I provided the names of some tools for this part. As they are paid tools, I’ve included screenshots showing how they can be used in relation to Damien’s presentation. The tools are OpenSiteExplorer and MajesticSEO. Below I have included some sample images of reports I ran for Mulley.ie on OSE.

In the next example I used Majestic to run a basic link report on the same site. You can use both tools to complement each other and analyze the link graph of any site you choose. If anyone from the workshop would like me to run a report for them, let me know. We have lots of credits with each and it’s sometimes better to try before you buy. I can highly recommend each of these tools.

The next part of the day was extremely interesting, valuable, timely, topical, and relevant. Darragh Doyle, the Community Manager for Boards.ie, gave a talk on the very high profile security breach on the boards.ie website. Darragh went into some great detail on the steps that the Boards and Daft team took to resolve the situation and it turned out to be the perfect example of how to do crisis management right. It was almost as if the security breach was intended from the start to serve as the perfect case study for this workshop.

Next up was the topic of “owning the search results for your own name.” There was some good stuff here.

On a whim, Noel Rock gave a fantastic spur-of-the-moment talk on Soccer Stars for Haiti. He did a great job considering he was put on the spot like that. Noel’s talk transitioned smoothly into the final official area of the workshop. Christian Hughes (who despite having lots to say, can talk the talk) gave a quote I still remember that’s worth mentioning:

A”Anything ‘viral’ is doomed to fail as the idea of ‘viral’ is inherently flawed. There’s no such thing as ‘a viral;’ things ‘go viral.’”

The day closed with a nice informal open session. I’m not so sure this would be suitable for “newbies” as there were a lot of high caliber PR and marketing folks who knew what they were talking about throwing around some interesting ideas. These were smart people. I doubt it could be recreated though.

The day finished earlier than I expected. I was very thankful — not because the content was bad (quite the opposite) but because I hate sitting down for a whole day. The length of the workshop was absolutely perfect.

The Feedback.

• I would have liked to see more actual case studies.
• I think the length the day was perfect. I wouldn’t try to make it longer.
• I would have liked if we all went to lunch together.
• I really liked the open session at the end. I think this should be an official part of the workshop.
• I liked the “no pitch” policy. I think it’s important even if some people did ignore it.
• I would have liked more info and examples on dealing with the mainstream press and their process.

In Conclusion.

The day was great. The day was valuable.

Would I recommend this workshop? Yes.

Would I pay for this workshop? Absolutely.

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Want to meet with us in 2010? The Redfly team will be traveling the globe to attend a wide verity of Internet marketing and blogging events in 2010. Why not get in touch if you’re at any of the same events or even nearby and we can go for coffee or just shoot the breeze?

Below is a chronologically listed schedule for the remainder of this year. Do say hello!

January 23rd: Mulley Communications Online PR Workshop Dublin

The Online PR workshop run by Damien Mulley of Mulley Communications is putting on it’s inaugural workshop dedicated to online public relations, reputation management, online communications and crisis communication. The event will be held at the Radisson Blu hotel in Dublin and is set to be a sure fire hit.

February 4th: Dublin Web Summit

The Dublin Web Summit run by Paddy Cosgrave will take place in Trinity College Dublin. It will feature influential keynote speakers such as Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, and Matt Mullenweg, founder of Wordpress as well as delegates from a massive array of Irish companies (and a guest appearance from bohemian economist David McWilliams) .

February 15th – 18: OMS & Search Engine Strategies (SES) London

The first search related conference of the year kicks off with a double whammy. The online Marketing Summit and Search Engine strategies have teamed up to offer search geeks and search engine marketers everywhere a bumper 4 day search conference featuring the legendary author of Web Analytics An Hour A Day, Avinash Kaushik. The conference will feature well known guest speakers such as Richard Baxter, Lisa Myers, Ciaran Norris, The lovely folk from Ayima SEO and legend in his own right, John Myers of Mediavest. I’ve also heard there is due to be quite a large knees up at the LondonSEO party. To get a 20% discount on the cost of this event, use the promo code 20SPG when registering.

March 6th-7th: Wordcamp Ireland

Another inaugural event, WordCamp Ireland will be held in Kilkenny, Ireland (which for some reason I’ve never been to). Wordcamp promises to be two days of everything Wordpress related. The event is being run by Pixel Pusher Sabrina Dent and will feature well known bloggers and techies such as Donncha O Caoimh, Joost de Valk, Niall Harbison. Redfly are also one of the sponsors of this event for which we have been promised that there will be a “Redfly Cocktail” made available to all attendees.

March 27th: Irish Blog Awards (Galway)

The fourth annual Irish Blog Awards (which takes place in a different county every year) will take place in Ireland’s “Culture Capital”, Galway. The blog awards, run by Damien Mulley (Is there anything he isn’t involved in?) is set to be a night of fun, frolics, recognition and … well, cool awards. Redfly is also sponsoring the best group blog category. Good luck to everyone who makes the shortlist!

April 22nd-23rd: Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Sydney

The Search Marketing Conference & Expo in Sydney is “Australia’s #1 Search Marketing Event and is the “must-attend” Search Engine Marketing and Social Media event of the year in Australia”. SMX Sydney will feature speakers like Greg Boser, Todd Freisen and the always lovely Gillian Muessig or SEOmoz.

May 17th-18th: Search Marketing Expo (SMX) Advanced London

SMX Advanced in London is the only search marketing conference designed exclusively for experienced internet marketers. We’ve heard some great things about SMX Advanced sessions and have never been in the US for the Seattle event. No speakers have been announced at the time of this post but we’re positive that this is going to be great. Dedicated to a conference without a schedule or speaker list? It must be good. To get a 15% discount on the cost of the event, enter the promo code REDFLY010

May 20th: IIA Congress Dublin & Net Visionary Awards

The IIA Annual Congress 2010 will be held on Thursday 20 May in the Crowne Plaza Dublin Northwood followed by the Net Visionary Awards 2010 that same evening. The IIA Congress usually operates on an annual “theme” of which most of the sessions are (at least loosely) based on. We’ve been a member of the Irish Internet Association for nearly two years now and this will be our first congress.

Spetember 17th-19th: Think Tank San Diego

For the past two years, something urgent has always come up to prevent us from attending this. Hopefully this year will be different. Think Tank is a conference with a difference run by one of the nicest blokes in the industry, Dave Klein of PurposeINC (Yes, the same Dave Klein who runs the Pubcon Charity poker tournament and fixes back problems). This is an invite only event and caters for experienced online marketers with a friendly no-pitch setting.

October 4th-6th – Search Marketing Expo (SMX) New York

The third Redfly SMX of the year because we’ve never been to an SMX before and believe they deserve a chance considering the good things we’ve seen and heard. SMX Seattle promises Sessions that are fast-paced, Q&A-packed, frequently controversial, always informative…and don’t stop to cover the basics. For those fluent in search engine marketing, SMX Advanced is full of others who speak your native language.

October 11th-13th: A4U Expo London

A4U Expo in London is one of the funnest events with the widest verity of attendees of any other conference. A4U focuses not only on the affiliate marketing industry, but the search industry that surrounds it. While we keep our involvement in the affiliate space fairly clear of the Redfly blog, the quirky and incredibly intelligent people you can meet at this conference makes it a must-attend.

November/December: Pubcon Las Vegas (Exact date TBC).

If A4U is one of the funnest conferences, Pubcon Las Vegas is without a doubt the funnest. Let’s face it, it’s in Vegas, it can hardly be anything but fun. Pubcon is the de-facto search marketing conference. It’s one of the oldest and most respected conferences of the year. Those who have been to one (or a few) know that it needs no introduction, those who have not should come along with us this year for the educational and online marketing event of the year.

Get In Touch.

If you would like to arrange a sit down, some lunch or just a chat at the bar at any of these events, get in touch. We’ll be more than happy to get the first round in.

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Improving your CTR is now the single biggest thing you as an advertiser can do to improve your AdWords quality score and reduce your CPC. When it comes to CTR, every little helps. Today, I’m going to show you two very simply things you can do to increase your CTR and as a result, your quality score. The following can be implemented easily and immediately but as with all changes to your PPC account, make sure you test the results. If it doesn’t work for you, revert.

Google has recently announced that you can now tag  your adwords ads with your company address. These are called location extensions. However, many advertisers do NOT want their company address under their ad.  We’ll cover that in another blog post. They are also not available in many countries.

Instead, we’re going to use regional targeting to add the County, City or State of the SEARCHER to the bottom of your ad. When the person that’s performing the search sees their OWN City, State or County below their ad they not only see a word they can relate to but an ad that’s a little different to most (if not all) of the other ads on the page. This has an immediate and sometimes astonishing impact on click through rates.

To achieve this we simply need to get a little more granular with our regional targeting in AdWords. It’s really quite simple. Instead of targeting a whole country like the US or Ireland, select “target specific locations within a single country or territories” and select EVERY STATE . You could even select every metropolitan area or even every city to have THOSE show up below the ad.

Likewise, Instead of targeting the whole country of The Republic Of Ireland, select “target specific locations within a single country or territories” and select all 26 Counties in The Republic instead. If you are based in Dublin for example, using this method, a searcher from Cork would see the word “Cork” below your ad.

That’s it! Simply update/upload your campaign, wait a few minute and when someone performs a search from any location that you are now targeting, their city, metro area, State or County will show up below the ad. We have found that in 100% of cases for both us and our clients, combined with gradual CTR increases this has improved our CTR significantly. CTR being the single biggest factor that you as an advertiser can influence towards your quality score, improving CTR is a no-brainer.

While it’s not possible to auto rotate these ads in the same campaign, we had to try and replicate that for this test. We spread it out over a month (yea, low volume) alternating the days that each campaign was enabled. So each ad got the same share of days of the week, times of the day etc. The big drawback here is actual demand for the “product” on any specific day may have skewed the results slightly but I think we got a pretty accurate result that is in line with what we have seen with all our other campaigns.You will notice that the CTR is almost 100% greater and the cost is 100% less.

An increase in relevant CTR (No bounce/back rate) is an effective increase in that keywords quality score.

On the subject, to remove the location from below your ad (I have no idea why you would want to), you can target a specific geographic area using customized targeting.  Many thanks to Richard at Apogee for teaching me something new and keeping me on my toes over on the official AdWords help forum.

So there you have it. A simple, yet effective way to improve your quality score without much effort. What other ways have you found to increase the quality score of your keywords?

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I am rarely one for conspiracy theories or donning tinfoil hats but a word of warning, a lot of this post is conjecture. With that disclaimer out of the way, I would like to discuss a trend that I have noticed with the paid side of Google AdWords. I wrote recently about Google flushing out affiliates that use AdWords. A lot of people didn’t agree with me yet Google published an update just days afterward to it’s “website types to avoid” document about the exact topic. A lot of commenters made the very valid point that Google owns and operates it’s very own affiliate network.

The biggest revelation that was drawn from this and the subsequent thread over on WebmasterWorld was that Google was flushing out even the “highest quality” affiliates. They were even flushing out direct linking affiliates that were advertising with the parent merchants consent. I wont go into the rights and wrongs of all this, it’s been done to death on the WMW thread already and I do not want to discuss the whole Google Vs Affiliates topic again either. What I do want to point out is what happened next.

On Wednesday, November 11th, the Inside AdWords blog announced Product Listing Ads. Product listing ads are image ads that appear along with the “normal” sponsored listings on a Google search result page except they have images, merchant name and prices associated with the ad.

Pay only for results: Product Listing Ads are charged on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that you only pay when a user clicks on your ad and completes a purchase on your site. Because Product Listing Ads is charged on a CPA basis, it offers a risk-free way for you to reach a larger audience on Google.com.

While this is still in very limited beta it’s quite interesting. I was wondering how Google would go about charging merchants the CPA. I’m not sure how long this has been a feature in Google Merchant Center, but you can now link your AdWords account to your merchant center account.

You can now specify your AdWords account information in your Google Merchant Center account. By doing this, you can surface your product information in your AdWords ads. AdWords campaigns that are linked to Google Merchant Center accounts will receive the benefit of richer, more specific product information in their creatives; including images and prices.

You can add multiple AdWords accounts to a single Google Merchant Center account. To do this, simply enter your AdWords Customer ID under Add an AdWords Customer ID: and click Add. Once you’ve entered your AdWords Customer ID in your Google Merchant Center account, you’ll need to create a Product Extension within the Campaign Settings section of your AdWords account and link it to your Google Merchant Center account.

So now Google is allowing merchants to link their product feeds to AdWords and set a price they want to pay for each sale? Isn’t that what a PPC affiliate does/Used to do? Only this time, Google being the owner of the search engine can offer what no other affiliate can, images and branding directly in the search results.

Could it be that Google flushed out all the affiliates to make room for the merchants that it is promoting on a CPA basis? What if Google were to allow it’s affiliate network merchants opt in to product listing ads? All their feeds, data, images and prices are already uploaded to the network. Couldn’t/Shouldn’t Google start displaying product listing ads in the search results for it’s own merchants and getting a nice juicy CPA for it? Doesn’t this make sense? Google has all the data it needs to display the most profitable product ads too. Affiliate marketing is a multi billion dollar industry. Why wouldn’t they get on board? Especially if it compliments their existing search results. It appears that others have come to the same conclusion. Google have since announced more AdWords bans and in typical Google fashion, refuse to communicate clearly.

Google has just announced a whole slew of new ad formats, is slowly making organic results less visible and now with product listing ads is monetizing the remaining space above the fold. It’s also worth noting that this month, Google also released DFA analytics. It’s all mounting up.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is great for merchants and I am a firm believer that Google can and should do what they want with their own search engine. I am also not sounding the death knell of affiliate PPC marketing. I do however believe that PPC affiliates are going to be up against a pretty powerful 800 Lb Gorilla in the very near future.

I’d like to end with a quote over on WMW by the very wise Netmeg (You should follow her on twitter too):

But nothing pisses me off more than seeing all the talk about how Google has destroyed your business. Google has NOT destroyed your business. If your business cannot survive without Google, then YOU have destroyed your business..

…Google is not responsible for the success or failure of your business. YOU are.

I was wondering why Google was flushing affiliates out of the AdWords system and not so much the organic results. This is, in my opinion, a possible reason why. Google is making room for itself. Time to focus a little more on paid search? What do you think?

Go to Source

There are literally thousands of SEO tools out there. Some paid, some free, some good and some not so good. There is one tool that is often overlooked when it comes to SEO, yes, search engine optimisation, and that’s AdWords. While most people see AdWords as simply a paid traffic generation tool, many fail to realize the organic SEO benefits a tool like AdWords can provide. I’ve touched on this subject briefly before but below, I have outlined a few more detailed ways that AdWords can (and should) be used for SEO. Please note that screenshots have been slightly modified to protect some sensitive data.

1) For Keywords

Before you start to do any SEO on your site, you need to know what keywords to target (You can’t target them all). You could use one of the plethora of keyword tools out there but they are rarely accurate. AdWords allows you to test any amount of keywords you think are relevant to your site and get 100% accurate data on which ones you should be targeting. There’s no worse feeling spending months targeting a keyword for SEO and finding out that it doesn’t convert or it doesn’t drive any traffic. You can even filter out keywords that use a question mark so you can find questions to problems that your product or service can solve. You can then craft a blog post around this question.

2) For SERP CTR Improvements.

Any seasoned SEO knows that Google uses some sort of user data and probably uses organic SERP CTR data (and a recent patent looks like things are going that way) to judge how relevant an organic listing is to a keyword . Marcus touches on it here and Bill goes into patent detail here. With the CTR data and gains you obtain from a PPC campaign, you KNOW what page title and meta description to use to increase your organic SERP CTR. Just think, if you’re in position 3 and get twice the click through rate as the number 1 position over time, doesn’t it make sense that Google would factor this in? Simply pick the best headline from your best performing AdWords campaign and use that as your headline on your page. Pick the description of the best ad and add that to the meta description. This can be improved upon and changed over time too with zero risk. Use the AdWords Ad Performance Report for this (Make sure you filter the ads so that there is enough impression and click data to get a statistically significant ad, using AdWords Editor works great for this too). This also has the benefit of getting the perfect anchor text when someone links to you because many people will use the page title when linking out to you.

3) For Landing Page Optimization.

With Google’s website optimizer, you can quickly test and optimize your landing pages so that you don’t have to wait months for the traffic you would ordinarily need for optimizing with organic traffic. You can create a landing page that’s super optimized for your conversion type so that when the organic visitors do come, you’ll convert them at ultra high rates. This gives you a huge head start over your competitors. It also allows you to create personas that you can map to keywords or sets of keywords to each persona so you can create specific “SEO Campaigns” and more effectively structure a larger SEO effort.

4) For Geographic Targeting.

AdWords allows some pretty granular geographic targeting. Knowing which countries, cities or states convert best (by using a Geographic Performance Report in AdWords), can help you optimize your pages specifically for those locations. It can also help deciding which cities to target when running local business listing campaigns. This data can also help you decide if you should create location specific landing pages or not. Tailoring landing pages to a users landing page has proven extremely effective How many really attractive people have you seen available for a date in *your area* lately?

5) For Link Ideas

The Google content network reaches 80% of all online users in the world! Running a campaign on the content network can generate a LOT of traffic but using Placement Performance Reports in AdWords, you can see where exactly you’re CONVERTING ads are running. You can use this info to strike a direct sponsorship deal with a particular site that’s sending you great quality traffic, or maybe you can write content for those particular sites and get a link back. Some people I’ve heard of have even bought links from those sites. An ultra relevant link that sends conversions. You wont get that from any directory links!

6) For Content Ideas

Further to (5), you can see a list of URLs that sent you converting traffic. You can look at the content of that URL and create some content (even a blog post) that has even better information than that page and solves the problem the visitor came to your site to solve to begin with. If that particular page of content was found organically, if you can make it better with your content and SOLUTION, you’ll have fantastic web content that attracts links naturally, more so than the original piece. You can even merge a lot of the ideas from different sources into one “super source” of content which will be seen as the ultimate resource and linked to as such.

7) For Large Scale Media Buys

While this is not strictly SEO related it’s very valuable. If your product or service has mass appeal, you can use the Google content network to test out creatives (flash ads, image ads, video ads etc.) to find out which ones drive the highest CTR and Conversion rate out in the wild. Now you don’t have to drop 25k on a run of network test just to find the best creatives. Anyone who has ever advertised on the Yahoo display network in the past can tell you, this is not for the faint of heart, although this has changed somewhat recently with the improvements of a FANTASTIC service called AdReady (More about this in another post). You can go into your media buy with what you KNOW are strong creatives.

Demographic Targeting Facebook

Again, not SEO related but a goodie. You can use an AdWords Demographic Performance Report and ad version reports to find out (generally) what age, sex and country demographics are converting on your site and the creatives that were associated. You can use this info to get a whopper of a start in facebook. Simply target the age, country and sex fields in facebook that matched your AdWords reports and use similar images/creatives for your ads. (You can pick up a free $100 facebook voucher code here). You can also use this demographic data for (7) above to give you that extra edge. Facebook uses CTR data and historical CTR data as a major factor on how much coverage you get so the higher your initial CTR for a new campaign the better. Start as you mean to go on.

9) For Link Exposere & Diversity

New website owners have always faced the chicken and egg problem. How do you get links to a new site if nobody knows about you to link to you? With AdWords, you can get immediate exposure to your content, product or service. With this immediate exposure comes the potential to be linked to which will ultimately improve organic search engine rankings (Be careful to redirect your users to the correct URL when using this method, you don’t want links to an analytics tagged URL or a URL with any sort of campaign tracking arguments in it). This is technically a “clean way” to buy a link. You can also buy AdWords traffic to your linkbait content. This is a slight variation on one of Gab’s tips in his fantastic piece on link buying here. *Image courtesy of SEO Book*

10) For Improving Your Conversion Rate

Yes, that’s right… improving your conversion rate. Microsoft/Atlas release an insightful piece of research (PDF) showing that and increase of up to 22% in conversion rate can be achieved by effectively synergizing search and display advertising. We have found this to be true not only with display and PPC search, but also with display and organic search. This information comes with a few caveats however:

Another point of interest is the impact of display ad frequency in driving conversion results for users exposed to both display and search. Again, the results varied by advertiser, but generally those users who viewed three or more impressions in combination with at least one search click had better results than those who viewed only one or two impressions. Both conversion rates and search click-to-conversion rates climbed significantly for these users, further suggesting the benefit of display advertising when paired with search. However, there is a point of diminishing returns when display ad frequency gets too high.

So there you have it. Ten ways in which AdWords (or any other PPC network) can help improve your search engine optimization. Do you use AdWords in any other creative ways to help improve your natural search engine rankings? If so, why not share them in the comments below and I will add more to the post (with a link) as they come in.

Note* I am fully aware that in a lot of cases, users who click on sponsored listings behave differently than those who don’t. Please use the above tips as guidelines and make sure to test everything for yourself.

Go to Source

There are literally thousands of SEO tools out there. Some paid, some free, some good and some not so good. There is one tool that is often overlooked when it comes to SEO, yes, search engine optimisation, and that’s AdWords. While most people see AdWords as simply a paid traffic generation tool, many fail to realize the organic SEO benefits a tool like AdWords can provide. I’ve touched on this subject briefly before but below, I have outlined a few more detailed ways that AdWords can (and should) be used for SEO. Please note that screenshots have been slightly modified to protect some sensitive data.

1) For Keywords

Before you start to do any SEO on your site, you need to know what keywords to target (You can’t target them all). You could use one of the plethora of keyword tools out there but they are rarely accurate. AdWords allows you to test any amount of keywords you think are relevant to your site and get 100% accurate data on which ones you should be targeting. There’s no worse feeling spending months targeting a keyword for SEO and finding out that it doesn’t convert or it doesn’t drive any traffic. You can even filter out keywords that use a question mark so you can find questions to problems that your product or service can solve. You can then craft a blog post around this question.

2) For SERP CTR Improvements.

Any seasoned SEO knows that Google uses some sort of user data and probably uses organic SERP CTR data (and a recent patent looks like things are going that way) to judge how relevant an organic listing is to a keyword . Marcus touches on it here and Bill goes into patent detail here. With the CTR data and gains you obtain from a PPC campaign, you KNOW what page title and meta description to use to increase your organic SERP CTR. Just think, if you’re in position 3 and get twice the click through rate as the number 1 position over time, doesn’t it make sense that Google would factor this in? Simply pick the best headline from your best performing AdWords campaign and use that as your headline on your page. Pick the description of the best ad and add that to the meta description. This can be improved upon and changed over time too with zero risk. Use the AdWords Ad Performance Report for this (Make sure you filter the ads so that there is enough impression and click data to get a statistically significant ad, using AdWords Editor works great for this too). This also has the benefit of getting the perfect anchor text when someone links to you because many people will use the page title when linking out to you.

3) For Landing Page Optimization.

With Google’s website optimizer, you can quickly test and optimize your landing pages so that you don’t have to wait months for the traffic you would ordinarily need for optimizing with organic traffic. You can create a landing page that’s super optimized for your conversion type so that when the organic visitors do come, you’ll convert them at ultra high rates. This gives you a huge head start over your competitors. It also allows you to create personas that you can map to keywords or sets of keywords to each persona so you can create specific “SEO Campaigns” and more effectively structure a larger SEO effort.

4) For Geographic Targeting.

AdWords allows some pretty granular geographic targeting. Knowing which countries, cities or states convert best (by using a Geographic Performance Report in AdWords), can help you optimize your pages specifically for those locations. It can also help deciding which cities to target when running local business listing campaigns. This data can also help you decide if you should create location specific landing pages or not. Tailoring landing pages to a users landing page has proven extremely effective How many really attractive people have you seen available for a date in *your area* lately?

5) For Link Ideas

The Google content network reaches 80% of all online users in the world! Running a campaign on the content network can generate a LOT of traffic but using Placement Performance Reports in AdWords, you can see where exactly you’re CONVERTING ads are running. You can use this info to strike a direct sponsorship deal with a particular site that’s sending you great quality traffic, or maybe you can write content for those particular sites and get a link back. Some people I’ve heard of have even bought links from those sites. An ultra relevant link that sends conversions. You wont get that from any directory links!

6) For Content Ideas

Further to (5), you can see a list of URLs that sent you converting traffic. You can look at the content of that URL and create some content (even a blog post) that has even better information than that page and solves the problem the visitor came to your site to solve to begin with. If that particular page of content was found organically, if you can make it better with your content and SOLUTION, you’ll have fantastic web content that attracts links naturally, more so than the original piece. You can even merge a lot of the ideas from different sources into one “super source” of content which will be seen as the ultimate resource and linked to as such.

7) For Large Scale Media Buys

While this is not strictly SEO related it’s very valuable. If your product or service has mass appeal, you can use the Google content network to test out creatives (flash ads, image ads, video ads etc.) to find out which ones drive the highest CTR and Conversion rate out in the wild. Now you don’t have to drop 25k on a run of network test just to find the best creatives. Anyone who has ever advertised on the Yahoo display network in the past can tell you, this is not for the faint of heart, although this has changed somewhat recently with the improvements of a FANTASTIC service called AdReady (More about this in another post). You can go into your media buy with what you KNOW are strong creatives.

Demographic Targeting Facebook

Again, not SEO related but a goodie. You can use an AdWords Demographic Performance Report and ad version reports to find out (generally) what age, sex and country demographics are converting on your site and the creatives that were associated. You can use this info to get a whopper of a start in facebook. Simply target the age, country and sex fields in facebook that matched your AdWords reports and use similar images/creatives for your ads. (You can pick up a free $100 facebook voucher code here). You can also use this demographic data for (7) above to give you that extra edge. Facebook uses CTR data and historical CTR data as a major factor on how much coverage you get so the higher your initial CTR for a new campaign the better. Start as you mean to go on.

9) For Link Exposere & Diversity

New website owners have always faced the chicken and egg problem. How do you get links to a new site if nobody knows about you to link to you? With AdWords, you can get immediate exposure to your content, product or service. With this immediate exposure comes the potential to be linked to which will ultimately improve organic search engine rankings (Be careful to redirect your users to the correct URL when using this method, you don’t want links to an analytics tagged URL or a URL with any sort of campaign tracking arguments in it). This is technically a “clean way” to buy a link. You can also buy AdWords traffic to your linkbait content. This is a slight variation on one of Gab’s tips in his fantastic piece on link buying here. *Image courtesy of SEO Book*

10) For Improving Your Conversion Rate

Yes, that’s right… improving your conversion rate. Microsoft/Atlas release an insightful piece of research (PDF) showing that and increase of up to 22% in conversion rate can be achieved by effectively synergizing search and display advertising. We have found this to be true not only with display and PPC search, but also with display and organic search. This information comes with a few caveats however:

Another point of interest is the impact of display ad frequency in driving conversion results for users exposed to both display and search. Again, the results varied by advertiser, but generally those users who viewed three or more impressions in combination with at least one search click had better results than those who viewed only one or two impressions. Both conversion rates and search click-to-conversion rates climbed significantly for these users, further suggesting the benefit of display advertising when paired with search. However, there is a point of diminishing returns when display ad frequency gets too high.

So there you have it. Ten ways in which AdWords (or any other PPC network) can help improve your search engine optimization. Do you use AdWords in any other creative ways to help improve your natural search engine rankings? If so, why not share them in the comments below and I will add more to the post (with a link) as they come in.

Note* I am fully aware that in a lot of cases, users who click on sponsored listings behave differently than those who don’t. Please use the above tips as guidelines and make sure to test everything for yourself.

Go to Source

Over the past year we have had a massive increase in leads for our range of online marketing services, especially from Ireland. The recession has really done a number on the SME and most are starting to think smart, because they have to. This has led them to look more and more to the online face of their business and many are shocked that their competition who put int he effort earlier on are way ahead of them in the online space.

In a lot of cases, it is no longer good enough to have a lot of inbound links OR a good looking website. You need both. There is also no point in having a website number one in the search results for a keyword if the traffic it brings just will not convert on your dated website. While constant hacking away at an already poor website may bring temporary relief, it’s just a band aid and will eventually be untenable.

Trent over at Blizzard Internet makes a very good point about how all the SEO tactics in the world can’t help a poor website. He goes into some detail on the stats but this jumps right out and should be highlighted.

… Sometimes they want to discuss SEO and are not open to discussing the overall problems with their website. Forget SEO for a moment, and consider that doubling the visitors to your website still won’t be profitable if your website doesn’t convert. It is the definition of throwing good money after bad… This hotel doesn’t need more SEO! They need to lower their 43% bounce rate AND improve their 0% conversion rate. They need a better booking engine.

Some web designers can even do a lot of damage to their clients online business if they don’t have at least a basic understanding of what I call “Core” seo. Adam has a great post on dangerous web design here where he states:

So what is there to learn from all this? At a minimum, this situation illustrates that knowledge of SEO is critical for anyone running a web design/development firm. But I would argue that this isn’t even SEO — it’s basic web 101. To think that companies are operating without this knowledge, and doing their clients real harm, is a little scary.

The emphasis above is mine because I think that is exactly what Eoghan and Ken were trying to get across in the SEO is Bullshit post here. While I do nott agree that SEO is bullshit (Bill pretty much put that to bed in his excellent “10 SEO Questions” post), I DO see their point. “Core” SEO is basic webmastering and web design 101. You’ll find it very difficult to make a website made completely with images or flash against a competitor with a well designed, standards compliant, accessible and structurally comprehensive website with logical internal linking and basic best practices kept in mind.

To all you small business owners considering getting a website built, please remember to ask your web design company or web designer what they are doing to make sure your website is search engine friendly. To all you small business owners considering getting SEO “done” to an existing site, consider what I said above. All the SEO, inbound links or fantastic content in the world wont help you if you have a terribly inaccessible site.

This post may seem a little self serving but more and more we are not only having to redesign clients websites , but insisting on it. (We have now merged our web design service with our other offerings to be more in line with this idea). So before you even consider having an SEO company work on your site, make sure it’s ready to be worked on or it might end up costing you a lot more in the long run.

Finally, in relation to inbound links, a really good website design that pays attention to both style and standards can obtain a massive influx of high quality links and traffic by being included in the plethora of web design and CSS showcase galleries. These can be a huge boost to site authority and give a much need initial boost to any SEO efforts.

* This will be the final semi-self serving post of the year What do you think of the new design?

Go to Source

One of the huge hurdles of starting any SEO campaign is knowing what keywords you are going to target. Keyword tools are a dime a dozen and we’ve all used them. But the biggest problem that they all have is that they can’t show conversion data (obviously).  I am a big fan of using PPC to get accurate and converting keyword data and optimizing to help rank for those keywords that you KNOW convert (or at least have a very good chance of converting again). This can also be done in reverse.

In a lot of cases, pay per click campaigns can give you some really valuable insights into the words that people use to find your site and ultimately become customers. In many cases, these words are quite long and were never phrases you were specifically targeting. Adwords for example can give you data on hundreds of CONVERTING long tail search terms. Once you know know what they are, you can simply craft a page specifically for those terms, focus on the on page elements, then sometimes all it takes is a new blog post linking to that page either internally or externally to get it into the number 1 position on the search engines. I wrote a post on the correlation between PPC and SEO a while back and I feel it’s still true today.

I do realize that optimizing for a search term that converts once every month may seem like a waste of resources in the short term but those rankings are easier to get and can add up quickly. To compete in a saturated market from the grass-roots level it’s essential. I also believe this method of growth and promotion is in line perfectly with what Matt Cutts (The head of search quality and webspam at Google) mentioned in the below webmaster help video in June. The video is only 87 seconds long but his point is clear.

Matt also reinforces this point again at his wordcamp presentation, (skip to ~29:30). He mentions specifically:

“Build up, build up, don’t over reach… you have to get there gradually”

“Start with a smaller niche then embiggen that niche”

“You’re writing about more and more important things and bigger niches and eventually, over time, people get to know you … they’re sending you links and LIFE IS GOOD.”

This method of building up very specific content should attract links naturally and over time build up the reputation and authority that your site needs these days to even have a chance in more competitive markets.

So we know that rankings matter. They matter a lot. There will never be a way to know 100% for sure where you rank for a given phrase but I think it’s pretty important to have as good an idea as possible so you can monitor the “success of your embiggening” (you can’t measure what you can’t track). I know a lot of people/SEOs are not fans of rank checkers but I think that if you monitor your rankings over local search engines over a long enough period of time, you get a good idea of how your doing and weather or not you need to focus more on the long tail or specific regions.

I wont go into too much detail about the variety of rank checkers available, Ann Smarty does a great job of that here but I will mention the one that we use here at Redfly. We use Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Web Ranking is website ranking software that allows you to track as many keywords as you see fit across every search engine imaginable, including every regional version of the major ones. The search engine database is updated almost daily and they even have the latest versions of Google caffeine and all it’s regional indexes included.

What’s even better is the fact that it uses the search engines API keys (You all still have your Google SOAP API keys right?) so you’re not violating any of the search engines rules about automated queries. The reporting is fantastic and you can easily see at a glance you’re overall organic visibility. The one problem I have with this application is that it only allows a single API key, I’d love to be able to enter multiple APIs, especially for each site. It’s expensive and not for everyone but for those serious about tracking rankings over multiple sites, I highly recommend it.

*** Edit: As noted in the comments below, the AWR search engine ranking software does indeed take the Google AJAX API keys.

Imagine if you had data on 1000 longtail keywords that only converted once or twice each year from your PPC campaigns. Each conversion is valued at say, €100. If you rank on page one for these results in the organic SERPs, chances are you’ll eventually get clicks and conversions. If you only get ONE conversion for each of these keywords again, that’s still €100,000. I’d be willing to bet you could generate relatively decent content for each of those terms for less than €100, especially if you are bootstrapping and especially if that content you are creating helps build your authority (see above). It’s a win-win-win situation. You’re creating content that you KNOW converts, that you KNOW will help build your authority (because you KNOW your customers convert on these topics) and that you KNOW is a worthwhile investment of time. It’s essential to monitor how you’re doing for these terms.

I know a lot of people will not agree with me in the value of tracking individual keyword rankings, they are indeed in a state of “everflux” (although longer tail term rankings tend to be a LOT more stable). But surely having a reasonable idea of how you’re performing holds value? Especially if you are entering a competitive market “through the back door” using the long tail method outlined above and in the videos by Matt.

What rank checkers do you use? Do you find they are a waste of time?

Go to Source

One of the huge hurdles of starting any SEO campaign is knowing what keywords you are going to target. Keyword tools are a dime a dozen and we’ve all used them. But the biggest problem that they all have is that they can’t show conversion data (obviously).  I am a big fan of using PPC to get accurate and converting keyword data and optimizing to help rank for those keywords that you KNOW convert (or at least have a very good chance of converting again). This can also be done in reverse.

In a lot of cases, pay per click campaigns can give you some really valuable insights into the words that people use to find your site and ultimately become customers. In many cases, these words are quite long and were never phrases you were specifically targeting. Adwords for example can give you data on hundreds of CONVERTING long tail search terms. Once you know know what they are, you can simply craft a page specifically for those terms, focus on the on page elements, then sometimes all it takes is a new blog post linking to that page either internally or externally to get it into the number 1 position on the search engines. I wrote a post on the correlation between PPC and SEO a while back and I feel it’s still true today.

I do realize that optimizing for a search term that converts once every month may seem like a waste of resources in the short term but those rankings are easier to get and can add up quickly. To compete in a saturated market from the grass-roots level it’s essential. I also believe this method of growth and promotion is in line perfectly with what Matt Cutts (The head of search quality and webspam at Google) mentioned in the below webmaster help video in June. The video is only 87 seconds long but his point is clear.

Matt also reinforces this point again at his wordcamp presentation, (skip to ~29:30). He mentions specifically:

“Build up, build up, don’t over reach… you have to get there gradually”

“Start with a smaller niche then embiggen that niche”

“You’re writing about more and more important things and bigger niches and eventually, over time, people get to know you … they’re sending you links and LIFE IS GOOD.”

This method of building up very specific content should attract links naturally and over time build up the reputation and authority that your site needs these days to even have a chance in more competitive markets.

So we know that rankings matter. They matter a lot. There will never be a way to know 100% for sure where you rank for a given phrase but I think it’s pretty important to have as good an idea as possible so you can monitor the “success of your embiggening” (you can’t measure what you can’t track). I know a lot of people/SEOs are not fans of rank checkers but I think that if you monitor your rankings over local search engines over a long enough period of time, you get a good idea of how your doing and weather or not you need to focus more on the long tail or specific regions.

I wont go into too much detail about the variety of rank checkers available, Ann Smarty does a great job of that here but I will mention the one that we use here at Redfly. We use Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Web Ranking is website ranking software that allows you to track as many keywords as you see fit across every search engine imaginable, including every regional version of the major ones. The search engine database is updated almost daily and they even have the latest versions of Google caffeine and all it’s regional indexes included.

What’s even better is the fact that it uses the search engines API keys (You all still have your Google SOAP API keys right?) so you’re not violating any of the search engines rules about automated queries. The reporting is fantastic and you can easily see at a glance you’re overall organic visibility. The one problem I have with this application is that it only allows a single API key, I’d love to be able to enter multiple APIs, especially for each site. It’s expensive and not for everyone but for those serious about tracking rankings over multiple sites, I highly recommend it.

*** Edit: As noted in the comments below, the AWR search engine ranking software does indeed take the Google AJAX API keys.

Imagine if you had data on 1000 longtail keywords that only converted once or twice each year from your PPC campaigns. Each conversion is valued at say, €100. If you rank on page one for these results in the organic SERPs, chances are you’ll eventually get clicks and conversions. If you only get ONE conversion for each of these keywords again, that’s still €100,000. I’d be willing to bet you could generate relatively decent content for each of those terms for less than €100, especially if you are bootstrapping and especially if that content you are creating helps build your authority (see above). It’s a win-win-win situation. You’re creating content that you KNOW converts, that you KNOW will help build your authority (because you KNOW your customers convert on these topics) and that you KNOW is a worthwhile investment of time. It’s essential to monitor how you’re doing for these terms.

I know a lot of people will not agree with me in the value of tracking individual keyword rankings, they are indeed in a state of “everflux” (although longer tail term rankings tend to be a LOT more stable). But surely having a reasonable idea of how you’re performing holds value? Especially if you are entering a competitive market “through the back door” using the long tail method outlined above and in the videos by Matt.

What rank checkers do you use? Do you find they are a waste of time?

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