Search marketers often advise clients- particularly large ecommerce companies- on strategies to maximise long-tail traffic to their websites as a way to boost sales. For SEO campaigns this means focusing not just on the top 10 or 20 “head” terms but optimising site structure and content for category and product pages to help visitors find your products, as well as building links to these pages, to attract “long tail” search traffic. The conventional online marketing wisdom states that somebody searching for “womens shoes” – although higher in search volume- may be in the research phase, collecting information and comparing prices whereas somebody searching “blue size 6 high heels” for example has a pretty good idea of what they want to buy and therefore has a higher chance of converting. I thought it would be interesting to test these theories looking at the data from the last month for one of our ecommerce clients.
PPC – Google Adwords
5 Reasons Why Organic SEO Is Better Than Google Adwords
To add balance to Eleni’s argument that Google Adwords is better than SEO, I thought it pertinent to publish a retort from an SEO’s perspective. Read this and the opposing article and make up your own mind as to which argument you think is most valid.
Reason 1 – In Most Cases PPC Burns Money
There’s no denying that most PPC Adwords campaigns created by business owners are left to run wild without the daily management needed to make them cost effective. This costs businesses an obscene amount of money as these un-managed campaigns burn cash at off-peak times on keywords that don’t convert or worse to landing pages that don’t exist.
SEO on the other hand cannot be left running on auto-pilot. As a result more care and attention is paid to optimisation and link building activities which in the long run is more cost effective.
Reason 2 – PPC Costs Can Only Go Up
As the market becomes ever more competitive and as Google seek to integrate a paid advertising model into an increasing number of new channels, the costs attributed to PPC are set to increase exponentially as more competitors drive up the cost per click.
SEO services don’t work on the same business model. SEO is a great playing field leveller with small online retailers able to compete with bigger brands by being more agile and having a smarter SEO strategy.
Use AdWords Top Estimated Impressions to Attract Higher Volume of Sales
The Estimated Top Impressions = More Impressions – More Clicks – More Sales!
If you are looking to increase impression share on top converting keywords on the Google search network for your AdWords ads, use the Adwords Estimated Top Impression metric.
Estimated Top Impression data helps advertisers monitor the volume of ad impressions which they are bidding for and more importantly it allows advertisers to maintain high impression volume on those premium AdWords ‘bonus sections’.
Maximise GDN Exposure. AdWords Above The Fold Advertising
If you are running display ads on the GDN network and want to increase customer awareness and display visibility – you will want your ads to be as prominent as possible. If a user can see your ad completely without scrolling down the page, it will be more valuable than an impression appearing further down the page.
Top 10 new AdWords features from 2010 that you really should be using!
Even though Google AdWords has just celebrated its tenth birthday- a long time in internet years- the pace of innovation over the last year shows no signs of slowing down. We have been using the following brand new features extensively this year and have seen some great results. The ability firstly to get more conversions- sales, leads and customer enquiries for our clients and secondly the ability to measure return on investment more accurately are the most important features of AdWords for us and our clients, and in both of these areas we have seen some significant improvements.
