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17 01, 2017

SEO vs PPC

By |2019-01-30T21:20:49+00:00January 17th, 2017|SEO, Google, Keyword Research, Keywords, PPC|0 Comments

SEO vs PPC

“I want to grow my business in the online world, what do I focus on and the question of SEO vs PPC is maybe not a clear cut as we think.”

This is a question that digital firms hear all too often. Both can have a massive impact, but the answer depends on your business. Are you large and established? Do you sell a product or service? What are your budgetary needs and concerns? Are you a local business?

The Benefits of SEO

What’s it all about and what is it useful for?

Now, it is important to know that SEO is not simply about optimising your content with keywords (although the use of ‘Semantic keywords’ is very helpful in organic search). Consider the plethora of information search engines use to measure a company’s online potential. Amongst many other factors, search engines monitor your services in the offline world, your social media interactions and the ‘relevancy’ of the content you produce to help prospective clients at crucial touch-points. This information has much larger ramifications on your overall marketing strategies outside of the digital world, as well as in. In fact, one of SEO’s primary functions is about discovering and finessing these touch-points.  

In practice, SEO is a long process of measurement and research. It is heavily content driven and time consuming because of Google’s semantic search technology. Your primary goal should be to understand the keyword landscape of your market, honing in on the variety of search terms the consumer is using and gaining a better understanding of their intent. Investigating the why, as opposed to the what, is a much larger benefit to your future marketing efforts. So, SEO is very useful for businesses that have some time. Getting your pages to be indexed for ideal keyword search terms is a gradual process and fluctuations are to be expected in highly competitive markets. The margin for error is much larger and strategies are as exploratory as they are results driven. From a UX point of view, one serious benefit of SEO is that your efforts will have made your site a lot cleaner. On a bridal website, for example, instead of having headings like ‘Wedding Dress Accessories for Vintage Weddings’, you can go with ‘Wedding Dress Accessories’ or the more specific but still high volume ‘Vintage Wedding Dress Accessories’.

Don’t be discouraged by the indefinite nature of SEO. It will bring you the most qualified leads over time and will directly influence your PPC results. Since SEO has no fee per keyword, you shouldn’t shy away from high competition words, especially as it will help you to qualify for longer tail keywords (something particularly useful for local businesses). Primarily, SEO is an integral framework for your digital marketing efforts. In the short term, it is a form of good ‘house keeping’ that can be used as a solid jumping off point.  Everything counts towards understanding your market’s behaviours and this is why a good SEO strategy can often be useful for small and local businesses, if they have the time. SEO vs PPC is the question that we have been asked more times than any other. Its generally good practice to engage with your knowledge and we think that writing at least one article of 300 – 600 words.

The Benefits of PPC

How does it differ to SEO and how can it benefit my business?

PPC is a great way of kick-starting your business’s digital efforts. It is a very concentrated way of driving potential leads to your site. However, it is a vastly different process to SEO. PPC consists of bidding on and competing for specific search terms that appear in display networks. As a result, you need to be absolutely precise with your keywords and copy, always keeping one eye on the cost per click and one eye on the quality score. You must make absolutely sure that your ad copy is tightly correlated with the corresponding landing pages and that your campaigns are tightly categorised. This approach makes it much easier to cut away ads that are not working. Due to the fastidiousness of PPC, the margins for error are much smaller, simply because it costs you money every time a mistake is made. Although Google does not always put the ‘highest bidder’ at the top of its sponsored results, affording PPC long term can be tricky.

In practice there should not be a choice between SEO vs PPC, PPC is very useful to a business that does not have the time to wait for the long-term benefits of SEO. Lets say you have a brand new product that has to be launched in the next 3 months. You could use a campaign to gauge the demand for the product, by bringing attention to it quickly and taking an early look at its reception. This data will not only inform your longer-term SEO efforts, but also your overall marketing strategies. Another huge benefit of PPC is something called the ‘panic scenario’. With many small businesses that are still trying to establish a steadfast form of revenue, PPC offers the possibility of gaining traffic quickly. And, because of its highly targeted nature, this can be relatively inexpensive in the short term.

However, if budget is not a large problem, PPC does have some very serious long-term benefits as well. Often, SEO consultants cite the classic ‘most people have trained themselves to actively ignore the ad spaces on search engines’. Whilst this might be true sometimes, they are forgetting the deeper value of a high-ranking ad in the search results. In an article from Search Engine Land, a study found that 82% of ad clicks are incremental when the associated organic result is ranked between 2 and 4, and 96% of clicks are incremental when the brand’s organic result was 5 or below. Google says that those visits would not have occurred without the ad campaigns. What is important to consider here is that as a result of having a strong ‘ownership’ of Google’s ad space, the appearance of that business in the organic search section seemed more ‘clickable’. Thus, the biggest long-term benefit of a PPC campaign is reputation, and how that reputation directly affects clickthrough rate and conversions.

Conclusion of SEO vs PPC?

Whether it’s a much-needed source of traffic, or necessary architectural changes that will stand up in the long run, both PPC and SEO have their separate uses. In fact, the only way to ensure success in the digital landscape is to use both in tandem at different times. A good digital firm knows this. So don’t be swayed by a consultant that offers you one service to fix all as this really isn’t good practice. The question of SEO vs PPC will not disappear for a while and will be enhanced even further with Google and Bings increasing emphasis on Semantic keywords becoming more important. So SEO vs PPC will never a choice between the two, but the two being used in a smarter way together. 

Please see other articles that you might find interesting.

Digital Fundamentals Training

Digital Glossary

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5 08, 2016

PPC Marketing £2 Made For Every £1 Spent Really?

By |2019-01-30T21:20:49+00:00August 5th, 2016|PPC, AdWords, Blog, Keyword Research, Keywords, SEO|0 Comments

PPC Marketing – Where Do You Make Your Money?

PPC Marketing – Jupiter Research a Forrester Research company said that 81% of users find their desired destination through a search engine. Broadly speaking, you need to be in the top of the SERP (search engine results page).

PPC marketing is still a relatively new concept and from the outside looking in it can look a bit daunting. What with it looking like a war zone with multiple companies trying to outbid each other on keywords to get their ads to the top. There are many more business not doing PPC Marketing than there are, so therefor Google and Microsoft stand to get even larger in size.

But its important to be aware of whether or not it is right for your business. There have been multiple success stories when it comes to PPC, but it has also seen its fair share of companies who haven’t seen success with the advertising platform.

I want to share with you some amazing statistics before I get into the good & bad of PPC Marketing.

When it comes to AdWords, businesses make an average of £2 in revenue for every £1 they spend PPC Marketing on the platform.

Organic results are 8.5x more likely to be clicked on than paid search results! However, PPC holds a slight edge in conversion rates, as paid search results are 1.5x more likely to convert into sales or email sign-ups for example than organic search. After all the average click-through rate for a Google ad is 3.16%

While those may be huge positives, let me share with you what I found to be the bad points of PPC……

The Bad

It can get very expensive

PPC Marketing costs money, after all its in the title Pay Per Click, you pay up every time someone clicks on your ads. Depending on your experience with the advertising medium it can appear like you are burning cash with no return on investment. So it is essential and good practise that you have defined objectives before you start. Keep your PPC objectives and strategy at the forefront of your mind. What is your CPC (Cost Per Click) target. Even then with the fact that you are bidding with hundreds of other companies for keywords – costs can still skyrocket if you want to see your ads in the top 3 of the first page in Google or Bing.

As an example, “Insurance” is the most expensive keyword at £55 per click! Now can you imagine if 100 people clicked on your ad. That would end up costing you £5500!

Of course this is all relative depending on the size of the business and how much a conversion is worth compared to the PPC spend. Another essential element of effective PPC management is knowing how much you are making in profit margin terms. The product or service you are advertising will have a profit and this should be included as a goal to measure against your PPC efforts.

Did you know, a YouTube homepage ad can cost on average £4,000!

Constant management

One thing a lot of companies don’t realise is the constant management required to run effective PPC Marketing campaigns. A lot of companies start out not knowing this fact and believe it is a set and forget job, burning cash and not achieving results in the process.

For small companies this can be a problem as they usually do not have the resources or time to allocate to manage PPC on an ongoing basis. Many get disillusioned and will say ‘it doesn’t work after trying it briefly’.

Keeping up to date

This almost ties into the previous point in some respect, as being on the ball with PPC Marketing will make sure you are aware of the latest updates and changes. Looking at AdWords for example and Google being Google, they are constantly updating the algorithms and if you are not aware of the changes until its too late, then your campaigns suffer. A good example is Google expanding the character limit for text ads. If you weren’t made aware of this, then you’ll be losing out as your competitors will be one step ahead of you, all because they are constantly aware of what Google have planned and act upon it.

The Good

Instant results over SEO

It’s a fact that SEO takes times before any improvements or changes take effect within the search engines. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, its not great if you are looking for results in a short space of time.

This is where PPC Marketing comes in! you can put together a campaign with ad groups, keywords and ads – set it live and the next morning see results from the get go. These may mainly be impressions and only a few clicks but results nonetheless. Getting these results instantly also enables you to make changes whereas you would have to wait for SEO to take effect before seeing if you need to make any improvements.

That’s not to say you should neglect SEO entirely, as they both go hand in hand in improving your visibility.

Data, data and more data!

Using AdWords as an example again, there is so much data you can pull from campaigns that help you make smarter decisions and optimise effectively. Data like quality score, average CPC, average position, impression share, % impressions lost and the rules around these.

As an example of how data heavy PPC Marketing can get, the Google Display Network serves about 180 billion impressions (views of an ad) each month, which is about 6 billion a day!

You can also pull data from Google Analytics to find out the effect the campaigns are having on traffic, bounce rate and new sessions.

Some may also see this as a negative because of the overwhelming amount of data, but I like to look at it in a positive way. The more data means the more opportunities you have to make smart decisions that improve your campaign and therefore improve click-through and conversion performance.

Specific Customer Targeting

This is great for businesses of any size, location and target market.

For example you can specify locations down to individual counties which is great for local businesses, this means you won’t waste money from clicks by individuals who are not in your location.

Another great feature is the ability to schedule when your ads are shown. Like the previous point, it helps to reduce click wastage by making sure your ads are shown when your target audience is at its most active.

Conclusion

I have aimed to provide a completely even view of the benefits & negatives of PPC Marketing, to summarise it works for some companies and others not so much. It requires diligence, understanding and real commitment to see true results that become conversions for your business.

If you find that the process puts you off, then we would love to help manage your PPC and show you just how successful it can be for your business. We have years of experience and proven results! If that interests you Click Here!

Some further reading we would recommend includes :

  1. Microsoft Adwords
  2. Google PPC Adwords
  3. Digital Glossary

We are currently making an offer that will enable the

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8 06, 2016

Keeping It Simple, How To Write Stunning Blog Posts – A 5 Minute Read

By |2019-01-30T21:20:50+00:00June 8th, 2016|Blog, Keywords|0 Comments

How To Write A Stunning Blog Post

Blog posts should be more than 300 words? Correct we all know this, but what about the really long 1,000 word plus blog posts you often see and give up on three paragraphs in? Well they are equally as important and providing they are well written will gain you significant SEO advantages.

Your blogs should be no fewer than 300 words that’s for certain. However writing a 1,000 word blog post is not easy and requires planning and a serious amount of research. The general rule is 1,000 word blog post to every three 300 plus word blog posts.

In this article we go through how you can really drive high quality traffic through to your website with really well written content that has a high key word density of greater than 2.5%, with great relevant back links that will really help drive your organic rankings.

 Before we start advising on the structure and types of great content writing for your blog, we explore why a lengthy blog post really makes a difference with Google and Bing search engines.

At Digital Web World we have a few articles that are over 3,000 words in length, they really help drive some great organic traffic to our website. But why?

Google, Bing and the other major search engines all look at your key word density, your article structure, how easy to read your article is, your back links and interlinks within your post and rank your site accordingly. When you write a blog post of over 1,000 words compared to blog posts of only 300 words Google and Bing have more content to analyse and decide exactly what your article is about.

As part of your longer blog post you will have considerably more pictures, more headings, more links in which your chosen keyword are listed.

Your lengthy long tail key words you have within your article will also have a greater chance to be picked up by the search engines. The more associated topics, always related to your key word of course, the greater the possibility of your article being picked up and then bringing you valuable FREE organic traffic to your site.

Large blog posts require you to really hold your readers attention. 1000 well written words is not easy to achieve and a blog post that cannot hold your readers attention will work against you. If you don’t get the clicks on your article, it may be well optimised for Google and Bing but it won’t be of any use to your reader.

So what? We now show you how you can really get to grips with your blog posting and deliver some great, well researched content that your readers will love. Feel free to download our calendar at the end of this article which will give a free calendar with key events on a month by month basis all the way through to the end of 2017. Thats 18 months of FREE calendars that you can plug in your the key dates, marketing initiatives and other inspirational days for you to associate and blog content around.

How Much Time Should I Spend On My Blog?

We estimate it takes approximately 4 hours to create a well written 1000 word piece that has been optimised for your key words, links and pictures. 90 mins to produce an article of about 300 words that has been optimised with pictures and some relevant links. However if you are a first timer then this could well extend to over a week in time. BUT the preparation time is key here as this is what will save you the time in the long run.

So Where Do We Start?

Before you press a single key on your keyboard you need to answer these simple questions.

Why not try this now it will only take you a couple of minutes. You probably have an idea in your head, why not try and answer these questions before you start.

What do you want to achieve? There must be a higher purpose. What do you want the reader to do following the reading of your blog? What Call to Action are you trying to get the reader to follow ?

Here are some ideas: download a white paper, follow link to purchase, sign-up to an email resource?

  1. What is the question you want to answer for your reader?
  2. What audience are you writing for? This is fundamental and surprisingly often forgotten.
  3. What information or research do you need to undertake to write your blog post? Don’t forget imagery here as this is also very important for SEO and engagement.
  4. How do you want to structure your article? Tell your audience about the article at the beginning. Inform them and provide information in the article. Summarise the article by telling your audience what you have just told them.

Now Onto Writing Your Blog Post

We know that poorly written articles will simply not be read. So how do we make them read well?

Follow these easy steps for a great blog read…

Short Sentences

Keep sentences short and punctuated correctly. See what we did there.

Why not try this now it will only take you a couple of minutes. You probably have an idea in your head, why not try and answer these questions before you start.

Active Voice And Enthusiasm

Write in an ‘active’ and future tense NOT an ‘inactive’ or ‘past’ tense. Why? Well most readers prefer a positive and ‘active’ upbeat voice as opposed to a more perceptively negative ‘voice’.I do empathise with you if you are writing for a card-board manufacturing company and this doesn’t really float your boat. However writing with enthusiasm and a positive active voice will make a considerable difference and I suggest that anything can be made interesting with some research and an upbeat positive ‘active’ voice.

Good Structure

Structure your blog posts with short paragraphs. If writing a 1000 word plus article make sure that you use plenty of sub-headings. Possibly think about indexing the blog post at the start to ensure that the reader can go direct to a subject that interests them. This produces a better user experience and its all about the user experience right.

The Flesch–Kincaid

This readability score measures just how easy to read your blog post or article is. It looks at the sentence structure, paragraph length, ideas presented and words used.

Measured from 0 to 100 anything between 60.0 and 70.0 is generally seen as acceptable, with anything over this score your ideal target. Google considers readability very important and it is no coincidence that most blogs that rank well in search engines are ones with a Flesch–Kincaid score of 70 plus.

Use Formatting

It helps to slow down the reader.Highlighting specific text within your blog by underlining, highlighting in BOLD or italic will significantly improve readability.

Get Rid Of Filler Words

Filler words lengthen your blog but they are also irrelevant and will not improve your Flesch-Kincaid score. So here are a few examples that should be avoided:

NO: Why not use some of these great SEO blog techniques. 

YES: Use some of these great SEO blog techniques.

NO: Make use of italics, underlining and highlighting.

YES: Use underlining, italics and highlighting.

Planning Your Content

Start of very simply to get a view on your Blog Requirements, target segment, and ;timescales for resource planning. We have provided a very simple but effective Blog Calendar in which you can download and simply plan your blogs.

If you don’t plan the old adage will stand true.

Simply brainstorm your content. Here is a great way to brainstorm your ideas for your Website for free.

After brainstorming your content then add the ideas to a list. Select the list and the target url’s that could be best associated with that topic you have captured that is most relevant. If you don’t have an appropriate topic or page it might be worth adding one to the list.

Your Keywords And Phrases

Then comes the keyword research bit. This is the bit where you capture the keywords that are most relevant to your business topic that you will be blogging about. The keyword research for volumes are important here, but most important is the fact that you will be keeping the keywords relevant. RELEVANCE RELEVANCE RELEVANCE!

Great keyword research tools are:

SEMrush

Google AdWords Keyword Planner

Your Keywords And Phrases

These should be positioned in a number of places throughout the blog.

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17 05, 2016

How To Do Keyword Research In 2016

By |2017-01-24T11:35:17+00:00May 17th, 2016|Keyword Research, AdWords, Keywords, PPC, SEO|0 Comments

Updated Practices For Keyword Research In 2016

One thing that won’t change for Inbound Marketing is keywords, but what has changed is how you effectively research and come up with a strategy for the right keywords that will drive traffic.

Keyword research in it’s simplest form is looking at when users input words and phrases into a search engine and taking that data, then forming it into a strategy of keywords that your website could rank for.

Let’s have a look today at how to effectively keyword research in 2016!

Understanding your business and the relevant topics associated with it

How much do you know about your business? If you struggle to answer this question then maybe you need to take a step back and understand your business a bit better before delving into keyword research.

What are the most important topics for your business that you want most users to find you by? Create a list of these 10 keys areas, as these will form the basis for coming up with more specific keywords at a later point.

Understanding your audience (and/or any customers you may have had) is key to knowing what keywords should be targeted. For example if you are a company that sells shoes and a customer who has made a purchase started the journey to that purchase by inputting red trainers into the search engine. That is a keyword you should use.

Of course finding that information is not easy. You need an analytics tool that will trawl through all the search data. The best tool I can recommend to you is Google Analytics, it’s free, comprehensive and will give you all the information you need to find and fine-tune the keywords your audience is using.

Starting to flesh out the keywords

Now that you have got your list of the 10 key areas of your business, it is time to identify and narrow down keywords for each of those areas. For example if one of the key areas of your business is SEO, one keyword you might use is backlinks as it is relevant to the topic of SEO. Another example (long-tail) may be search engine optimisation services.

Come up with 3 keywords for each key area you listed. Doing this will give you a good start at 30 keywords, enabling you to increase as your SEO efforts expand in the future.

A good practice is to put yourself in the customers shoes, use the search engine as if you were looking to buy a product/service you sell. Look at the results that appear and see if there are any keywords you can put to use.

Looking at the competition

Similar to understanding the business you are in. It is paramount that you know who your competition is. Get a list together of your main competitors and research each of them individually, using the search engines to discover any keywords that may be ranking well for them and improving upon it yourself.

Another good idea is to look at keywords that the competition may not be fully behind. These represent a great chance to rank well for keywords that are not being utilised by your competitors.

Make use of related search

A good way to find inspiration is using google’s related search feature at the bottom of the SERP (search engine results page). This is a great way to find keywords you may not have found or realised could be put to use.

I would recommend this strategy only if you are really struggling to meet that 30 keyword target as the related searches are sometimes not that consistent nor contain useful phrases.

Finalise that strategy

Using these updated practices for keyword research in 2016 I have mentioned above, you should be close to having a strategy in place that can be carried out onto your website.

Of course that doesn’t mean keyword research is over once the website has been optimised, it is a constantly evolving process that requires you to be on the ball the whole time. Continue looking at the competition and expanding the keyword goal every couple of months to rank well for even more keywords and boosting your website in the search engine rankings.

For more information on keyword research, visit our dedicated page on PPC

 

Image courtesy of patpitchaya/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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25 04, 2016

5 Killer SEO Methods For 2016

By |2019-01-30T21:20:51+00:00April 25th, 2016|SEO, Keywords|0 Comments

SEO is big business! Every company is doing it, but not everyone is doing it right. Over the years there have been many different tools, programs and platforms that make the process a whole lot easier to rank well based on many factors. SEO has changed so much from where it began, and still is today and will in the future as well.

What if I told you that programs alone won’t solve your SEO woes, but that different methods that even some experts don’t use achieve great optimisation.

Today I have got for you 5 killer SEO methods that work in 2016. These are sure to boost your rankings in the search engines for pages and posts…

Header Tags (H1, H2, H3 Etc.)

These should be used for all content on a website (pages and blog posts). Even the header above is an H2 tag. They should be used to break up text and highlight parts of content on the page, making it look more compelling whilst also having a big SEO benefit. If you use WordPress then you don’t need to worry about including a H1 title tag in the body of content, as it is created when you give the page or post a title.

Try to have a natural structure with header tags, using H2 tags for main titles, H3 tags for sub titles and so on. Be careful not to repeat loads of H2, H3 or H4 tags as that is a negative ranking practise that should be avoided and could damage the future SEO reputation of the website.

Density Of Keywords In Content

There is no right or wrong answer, but best practise is usually 2.5% or under (Yoast SEO) of the word count of the content. The bulk use of the keyword should be in the main content. It should also be used once in the first and last paragraphs of the copy. Not only does this make the topic clear to the reader straight away, it is also good for the search engine rankings.

It is also good practise to highlight key terms (bold, italic, underline) for improving readability and making it easy for the reader to understand what they are reading.

Meta Description

The meta description should be unique and relevant for each page/post and include the focus keyword in there. It should be a summary of that page or post, compelling users to click through if they have already been convinced by the meta title and need more information before deciding to click.

160 characters is the limit, go over and the description will be truncated which doesn’t look the best if your a potential user.

Interlinking (And External Linking)

If some pages don’t get enough traffic to them, it is a good idea to link to them from other, relevant content on the site. It can be a good way of sending traffic and page rank to content that readers don’t know is there. It may even lead them to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter because of interlinking with other pages that compels them to take the desired action.

Linking to external sites is also beneficial if it is a relevant and trusted site to the content on the page. Make sure you don’t take the user away from your website completely, do it so the link opens in a new tab so your website stays open.

Content Is King

Google’s current top ranking factor is unique content… and lots of it! It goes without saying, if you don’t have compelling enough content, bounce-rates are going to be really high. To combat this, create engaging content that is based on target keywords. It’s really a good idea to pose questions to the readers and share opinions, so you can start a debate and create interest in your brand.

Pictures, info-graphics and videos in content also help to keep engagement up and benefit the website in the search engine rankings.

Take the time to build up strong, compelling content. Your readers will appreciate it and Google will love it as well.

Summary

On-page SEO can take quite a while to do effectively, but done well can provide enormous SEO benefits for your website. These killer methods are what Google currently loves and ranks well for. I have made sure you stay one step ahead of the game with the most current and powerful SEO methods that you can put to action today.

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