Posts About Search Marketing

On Tuesday, I posted instructions on measuring organic keywords that send traffic to a given web page. At the end of the post, I gave the caveat that the traffic reported to you isn’t necessarily for just that page.

So what do you do if you want to know a more precise number of visitors referred to a given page by organic search? Fortunately, there is a way to get to that number in Google Analytics. But again, it’s not very easy to get there. I will show you the way.

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Let’s say that you optimized a page for [blue widgets], are now ranking for the term, and you want to see if it’s driving any traffic.

Google AdWords lets you measure your PPC keyword traffic easily, but it’s not so obvious how to do the same for organic keywords in Google Analytics. Let me show you what I think is the best path to setting up a report.

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Want to see how horrible it is when you overdo your keyword optimization? Tell me how long you can honestly pay attention to this article about what to look for in an SEO consultant. I laughed out loud as I read it.
My favorite sentence:
Many SEO consultants offer more SEO services than just content so if [...]

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Everyone wants to rank better in Google and has that dream search where they want to be #1. The scarcity there creates the problem. There’s only one #1 spot, and everyone wants to be there.

Read on for my altruistic view on SEO.

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One of the biggest mess-ups for web designers is the design and maintenance of URLs. Poor planning and design of your site’s URLs can lead to some missed opportunities for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) over the long-haul.

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Your landing page is a crucial part of getting customers to take action after clicking on one of your AdWords ads. There’s a good chance that they didn’t read too much of your ad, so a lot of your persuasion needs to take place on your landing page. And you didn’t really have much space to get your message across in a ridiculously short text ad, did you?

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Another crucial element of your Google AdWords campaign is the ad itself. You only have so many characters available to express yourself, set the searcher’s expectations on your offerings, and get the searcher enticed to click.

I will discuss the best strategy, writing the ads, standing out from the competition, and testing.

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Bill Tancer from Hitwise released some interesting analysis of the most popular search terms on Google. And you may be surprised with what the most popular terms look like on a graph.

Let’s take a look at what this means for you.

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Have a local business? WebProNews released stats today, showing that people now prefer using search engines to find businesses over the Yellow Pages. It’s currently by a small margin, but the trend is showing that the margin will get larger.

Just over a month ago, I advocated that local businesses optimize their web presence for local search results on Google, Yahoo!, and other search engines. This data just backs that up.

Seriously, give it a read if you haven’t already.

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From MarketingSherpa: Four Strategies to Bend Rules on Landing Pages and Double Conversion Rates

I wish they would have cited me in the places where it was me talking, but I’ll take it. Our team is very proud of this.

The lesson: There are times to follow best practices, and there are times to bend the rules a little. And when you have conclusive data to back it all up, you get industry coverage.

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