Paid Search & Search Engine Marketing Primer

This post is intended to be an introduction to search engine marketing (SEM) and paid search for marketing managers. In short, SEM is the practice of managing your online assets to improve findability. If you’re interested in learning about search engine optimization (SEO), which is part of SEM, check out my previous post Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics For Marketing Managers. In this post, I’ll focus on the practice of buying paid search listings from search engines such as Google.

The Big Take Away

Before reading any further, you should know that SEM is something with which most companies gradually gain experience. It’s rare that I would recommend that any company jump into an aggressive paid search program because it takes time to understand the market for the terms that are relevant to your brand, to identify what those terms are, and to determine their value. This is partly because services like Google’s AdWords are based on an auction model, which I’ll discuss below. For now, think of paid search as something that you want to get into gradually so that you can measure ROI and iterate on your program as you go.

SEM Speak

  • Keyword – This is just another way of saying “search term”. Consumers enter keywords into Google to find things. For example, if you’re trying to find a local auto-mechanic your keywords might include “mechanic”, “subaru” and “San Francisco” or “94110”.
  • Pay Per Click (PPC) – This is a pricing model for paid search where advertisers pay only when someone clicks on their advertisement and is taken to their website.
  • Cost Per Click (CPC) – This is the cost associated with each clicked-on advertisement within the pay-per-click pricing model.
  • Cost Per Action/Acquisition (CPA) – Another online advertising pricing model where the advertiser pays when a specified action takes place after a click-through to their website (for example, a purchase, a form submission, etc). Sometimes, the action might be entering contact information, in this case the cost is measured as the Cost Per Lead (CPL).
  • Cost Per Impression (CPI) or (CPM) – The cost per impression is  measured by the thousand, or cost per thousand (CPM), and refers to the cost associated with exposing a customer to an advertisement. In this pricing model, the advertiser is charged by the number of impressions (i.e. number of times the advertisement appears) regardless of whether or not it gets clicked on.
  • Click Through Rate (CTR) – This is calculated by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions).
  • Conversion Rate (CR) – This is the ratio of people who take a specified action on a website divided by the number of people who were offered the opportunity to take the action. For example, you might have a page on your site where people land, after clicking on your ad, that includes some kind of offer. If 100 people land on that page and 25 of them take the offer than your conversion rate would be 25%.
  • Click Fraud – Click fraud happens when people click on advertisements online not out of interest in the related products or services, but so that the advertiser will be charged for the click. Such fraudulent clicks can be automated so as to financially damage a company or competitor. Search engines have developed technologies to prevent click-fraud, but they are not completely motivated to resolve this issue because they are a beneficiary of the fraud.
  • Flat Rate vs. Bid Rate – With flat rate placements the advertiser pays a fixed amount for each ad placement. With bid rate placements advertisers are bidding on the price of each placement. Google’s AdWords is a bidding rate model based on the ongoing auction of chosen keywords.

Google’s AdWords & AdSense

Chances are that if you’re interested in paid search you’ll want to start with Google’s AdWords because Google is the current market leader. That said, other paid search options are available including, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft ad Center. (now combined under the Bing search engine).

AdWords
As I mentioned above, Google AdWords is based on an auction model that serves contextually relevant advertisements in search engine results pages and on ad network websites. This means, that the paid advertisements that show up along side a search should be relevant to the search terms, or keywords. Where a paid advertisements show up on the page (how high up) depends on an advertisement’s rank number. The rank number is calculated by the cost per click bid multiplied by a quality score. The advertisement quality score is determined by the keywords it contains, the keywords on the page the advertisement is directed to, and other factors such as it’s historical click through rate. The quality score essentially insures that relevant advertisements have an advantage with respect to page rank and cost per click. If you want to get a sense of how your advertisement will rank and how much it will cost to get to the top of the paid search results, you can use the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool. For more detailed information about how pricing works, check out the Paying for AdWords tutorial at the Google Education Center.

AdSense
Google AdSense is worth mentioning because paid advertisements can be served not only to search engine results pages, but also to websites in the AdSense ad network. For example, if you’re a blogger you might set up an account with AdSense that would allow Google advertisements to show up on your blog. Google tries to serve contextually relevant ads based on the content of the site on which they appear rather than on search terms. If someone clicks on an advertisement that Google places on your blog then you’ll get a cut of the cost per click. If you’re an advertiser, you can specify where Google can serve your ads. In essence, you’re trying to  help Google make sure that your advertisements are being placed in the most relevant places whether that is ad network sites, search engine results pages, or other specific sites.

Placement
Placement choices can be specified across a variety of dimensions (i.e. time of day, regions of the world, ad networks, etc). But, keep in mind that AdSense customers can block specific advertisements from showing up on their sites, such as advertisements from competitors who might seem to be a good contextual fit!

Search Targeting vs. Contextual Targeting
Google serves advertisements in two situations, either on a website in the AdSense network (they call this the content network) or on a search engine results page. We’ve already discussed the latter, which offers search targeting using a cost per click pricing model to serve text based advertisements based on keyword relevancy on search engine results pages.

With contextual targeting Google doesn’t have search terms to determine which advertisements to place. Thus Google looks at the information on the page where the advertisement will be placed and compares it to your advertisement’s keywords to determine which ads will be most relevant.

Another thing to know about contextual advertisements is that they are not limited to the four-line format that you find on the search engine results page. With contextual advertisements Google offers additional formats including: image ads, flash ads, video ads, and gadget ads. Finally, the pricing model can be either cost per click or cost per impression. Which brings me to the anatomy of the AdWords advertisement.

The Anatomy of A Google AdWords Advertisement

A Google AdWords text advertisement has four lines including.

  • Headline – you’re looking for a succinct message which immediately identifies your advertisements relevance.
  • Description Line 1 – this is usually used for a key benefit of your product or service
  • Description Line 2 – this is usually an action request or demand.
  • Destination URL – the link where the user can make the purchase or learn more, but may not be the actual landing page URL where you send them when they click on the advertisement.

Here’s a sample of what an advertisement might look like for my consulting practice:

AdWords Sample

As you write advertisements, you’ll want to have several variations running so that you can determine which ones perform best and migrate towards those. For more on Writing Targeted Ad Text check out the Google Education Center. You may also want to explore Ad Groups, which allow you to set up different keyword combinations for your advertisements so you can learn about which keywords produce the best results for your business. Which brings us to keywords.

A Word About Keywords

Choosing the right keywords is important because they can allow you to get more relevant placements at lower cost. As I mentioned above, you’ll want to experiment with keywords to see which groups work best for your business. I’ll introduce the four types of keyword matching options that Google offers, but if you’d like to learn more visit the Keyword Matching Options tutorial on the Google Education Center.

The four types of keyword matching options include:

  1. Broad Match – Allows your advertisement to show on similar phrases and relevant variations
  2. Phrase Match – Allows your advertisement to show for searches that match the exact phrase
  3. Exact Match – Allows your advertisement to show for searches that match the exact phrase exclusively
  4. Negative Match – Ensures your advertisement doesn’t show for any search that includes that term

By combining these matching options, it’s possible to target your advertisements and improve your click through rate. This in turn will allow you to improve your quality score and reduce the cost of getting top placements. If you need help finding appropriate keywords to experiment with try Google’s Keyword Tool.

The Campaign Management Process

Campaign management is an ongoing process. Assuming that you’ve created some advertisements that are running, you’ll want to establish a review cycle that captures enough data to support statistical significance. In other words, you’ve got to let the advertisements run long enough to get a realistic sense of how they are performing over time.

The next step it to review the performance metrics such as click through rates, cost per click, etc. You should see that some advertisements are performing better than others … which is where you’ll want to look to identify what’s working and what’s not. Next you’ll want to set some performance goals to work against and start iterating on your advertisements to improve your overall performance.

If you’re setting up an AdWords program at your organization plan on dedicating ongoing resources for campaign management. This will require more time until you get a set of advertisements that are optimized and performing well. To learn more visit the Google Education Center’s Campaign Management Overview tutorial.

Learn By Doing

Many small businesses can’t afford to work with a professional to set up an AdWords account and campaign management program, so they start experimenting on their own. Google’s learning center is wonderful and if you have time to go through the entire center you should have everything you need to get started. That said, the single best thing you can do to start getting results from AdWords is to simply get an account and start experimenting.

As you do this, I highly recommend spending a good amount of time running every search that you can think of that someone might enter to find you or your competitors. Take a good look at the advertisements that come up and ask yourself how relevant they are. Are your competitors there? What does their copy look like? Is there a set of keywords where they don’t come up? Take a look at your competitors landing pages, and in general get a feel for the market and where you might fit in.

As a final note, buying AdWords is not a good fit for every business. And, if I had to choose between spending on AdWords or improving my SEO, I’d go with the latter to improve where I come up in organic search results first. That said, the nice thing about AdWords is that you can start slow and with any sized budget. Thanks for reading and let me know if there’s any other high level stuff I should add to this post!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics For Marketing Managers

This week I had a chance to talk with Scott Zeitz who is a SEO consultant based in the L.A. about the latest trends in the business. This post is a summary of that conversation and is intended to be a primer on SEO for marketers managing projects that have an optimization component.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of improving the ranking of a particular website within a web search results page. Basically, getting as close  as possible to the top of the first page of results from Google. Search engine optimizers (SEOs) accomplished this by making changes to the site in question (internal), as well as by doing things outside your site such as providing information about your site directly to search engines (external).

How is it different than Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
You’ll hear SEO and SEM used together in sentences all the time, but they are not the same. SEO is one part of SEM along with other methods including, link development campaigns,  pay-per-click advertising (PPC), and pay-per-impression advertising (PPI). The latter two involve bidding with other businesses for ad placement typically in the “sponsored pesults” area of the search results page. I’ll talk more about this later. I’ll also do another post on SEM someitme soon.

The Big Take Away

Before reading any further, you should know that SEO is not rocket science and you can get 80% of the way towards excellent SEO simply by following Google’s SEO guidelines closely. I HIGHLY recommend reading these guidelines as they offer a more in depth discussion of much of what I cover here. If you’re trying to decide if you need a SEO, or if you can do SEO internally, I suggest reading this post in it’s entirety because it’s a high level overview. I’ll talk more about selecting an SEO at the end.

Before launching into SEO 1o1, let’s define some key SEO jargon. If you already know this stuff, just jump down to the next section.

SEO Speak

  • URL – An acronym that basically means “web address”, It stands for uniform resource locator. URL format/structure is important to SEO.
  • ORGANIC SEARCH – “Organic” is used to describe the search listings that come up in the main area of the search engine results page (SERP) when you run a search. They are considered “organic” or “algorithmic” because they are based on an algorithm that matches your keywords (search terms) to indexed content from the web. In contrast, paid search describes the listings on the periphery of the page such as Google Adwords, or sponsored links. See an image of Google’s page layout with organic and paid content highlighted.
  • PAGERANK – This is a number that is calculated based on several variable including how many people are linking to a specific page and how relevant they are. For example, if hundreds of well established sites link to a specific page on your site, it is likely to have a very high pagerank. Google owns this term and uses a 0-10 range with 10 being the most relevant. Pageranking is a complex calculation that uses many variables to establish relevance. Google’s pageranking alogrithm is proprietary, one effect of which is that it prevents people from easily gaming it.
  • KEYWORD DENSITY– This is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on that page. Search engines use this to determine the relevance of the keyword. This prevents people from placing a keyword on a single page 100 times to improve it’s relevance with respect to a search for that keyword (aka, keyword stuffing).
  • CRAWLERS – Also known as web spiders or web robots, these are programs that search the web and index what they find as input to such things as the pagerank algorithms.
  • BLACK/WHITE HAT – Black hat uses techniques to game pagerank in ways that conflict with a search engine’s terms of service. Alternatively, white hat uses techniques are consistent with the terms of service. Black Hat techniques include such things as linkfarms, spamdexing, doorways, cloaking, hidden text, and keyword stuffing (note, this is the second time I placed this link/keywork in this post!).
  • ROBOT.TXR / NOFOLLOW – This is a file or tag that you put on your website that prevents robots from indexing specific content so that it won’t show up in search results. This is commonly used for pages on your site that don’t have much relevance to outsiders, or for blog comments that you don’t want to effect your relevance or the relevance of others. “Nofollow” is a meta tag that the robots understand to mean “do not index”.
  • INBOUND & OUTBOUND LINKS – As the name suggests, inbound links are links, which other websites place on their pages, that link to you. Outbound links are links on your site that point outward. In general, the more incoming links you have from reputable websites the higher your pagerank will be.
  • SITEMAP – This is a list of pages within your web site that are accessible to crawlers or users. Providing a sitemap to search engines can help them index your site more accurately.

URL Structure

One of the first places that SEOs look to improve your site’s performance is in the URL structure, so let’s start there. There are two kinds of urls, static and dynamic. Static urls are basically pages on your website where the url never changes. Dynamic urls are different because they are generated on the fly to present information that’s been requested from a database. Every site has static urls and many have dynamic urls.

Here’s why they are important. As web crawlers index the internet they don’t just look at the content on your pages but also look at the urls, meta tags in the code, and other information. Part of what they are looking for is a structure, or format, that they can understand. For example, here are two possible urls for your bio on your site:

  1. www.mysite.com/?catid=2294&pID=2254
  2. www.mysite.com/about/people/bios/you

As you can see, the second url uses words that a web crawler can recognize and consider for keyword relevance along with a structure that shows where the information is located within a hierarchy. As you come up with the right structure for your site, make sure to pay special attention to your information architecture as this will improve both SEO and user experience. The structure of the second link above shows a clear architecture and is sometimes referred to as a “breadcrumbs” style url because it shows you the path back to where you came from. Many sites also place breadcrumbs within the content area of the page.

Cleaning up your urls is possible for both static and dynamic pages and improves the user experience as well as the SEO. In addition, you can put a system in place to manage truncated urls. Truncated urls are created when users are trying to get back to a page higher in the hierarchy by chopping off some of the url address. Using the address above, a user might truncate a url down to: “www.mysite.com/about/people”, hoping to get to a page where they’ll see info on your entire team.

Finally, you’ll want to avoid duplicate urls and forwards on your site, as well as pages that have very similar content with a similar url. This will reduce the relevance of your site overall.

Registering You Site

The  second thing an SEO will probably do to improve your site’s performance is to make sure that it’s registered with the search engines. When registering your site, they’ll also want to provide a sitemap that tells the web crawler where to look for information. At the very least, you’ll want to register with the top three search engines, at the moment this is Google, Yahoo & Bing. If you’re a bigger company and really want to get every ounce of optimization then you can go after some of the less dominant engines as well. At the end of this post, I’ll put in some link resources for help with sitemaps and registering.

Its About Your Content

Titles

Now that you’re registered and you’re urls are cleaned up, the next big win can come from adjusting the content on your site. And remember, web crawlers are reading more than what jumps off the page because they’re reading the code underneath it. Therefore, it’s important to create brief, accurate, and unique page titles.

Descriptions
From there, you’ll also want to make use of the “description” meta tag. This tells the search engine what a particular page is about. Again a brief, accurate, and unique description provides the best results. Google actually offers tips for content analysis in their suite of webmaster tools.

Anchor Text
Another thing that can help is to make sure that your link anchor text is descriptive of what it links to. For example, the link anchor I used in the last paragraph reads “tips for content analysis”. This is descriptive of what it links to. It would be wrong to have written: “Google actually offers tips for content analysis in their suite of webmaster tools here.”

Headings
As you structure the content on your pages, you’ll also want to use headings correctly. Headings use the following tag “<h1>sample copy</h1>” and stand out visually as bold or larger text depending on what style you assign them. Headings are a visual que to how information is structured, but they also have meaning for web crawlers. The same principle behind anchor text applies here, make your headings relevant with appropriate keywords.

Images
The images on your pages also require optimization, which means sensible and descriptive file names, alternative text if the image doesn’t load, and store them all in their own directory. Finally, make sure that you’re using supported formats (i.e. jpg, .gif, .png, etc)

Should I Hire A SEO?

As I mentioned above you can get at least 80% of the benefit from SEO without being a rocket scientist, but you will need someone to take responsibility for making sure your site complies with SEO best practices. In other words, it’s about compliance not innovation. WIth that in mind, the real question is whether or not you have someone internally who can handle the project for you and who can learn the basics on their own. There are some great guidelines out there, which are published by the search engines, so it’s really just a matter of implementation.

Here are some reasons to hire an SEO:

  • You don’t have an internal developer, or one someone who can own SEO on an ongoing basis.
  • Your site is massive and old and needs a ton of SEO work done to bring it up to par.
  • You want to bring a SEO in to train your team and reduce the slope of the learning curve.
  • You’re planning a website redesign and want to make sure that you plan for SEO properly.

IF your site happens to be using one of the more popular open source content management systems, such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, then you’re in luck because they offer some built in optimization functionality. Sitemaps and robot.txt files can be generated automatically as you update the site using free tools from the community. They also offer structured url creation systems and easy access to meta tags, titles, and descriptions. If you’re using one of these frameworks, you’re starting point will be much further along.

Useful SEO Links

Here are some links to sites where you can learn more, test your current performance, and plan for optimization: