Slow site = More expensive Adwords!
Just over a week ago, Google introduced a new aspect into its Quality Score for Adwords. Google’s Quality Score for your Adwords affects your rank and your minimum bid amount - a high quality Ad will generally rank better and cost less. As always, Google rewards relevance. And a relevant (high Quality Score Ad) will be rewarded.
Take a look at Ten things Google has found to be true to find out more about Google’s founding principles. One of these principles is “Fast is better than slow”. And now, this philosophy has been extended to Adwords. If you’re landing page is slow, your Quality Score will suffer. It’s worth checking out how Google scores load times, as if your site is slow you’ll be hit on the Quality Score, and you’ll be hit by customers leaving before the page has finished loading.
Testing times: split-testing rules
Wouldn’t it be great if you could buy a full page ad in the Daily Telegraph, but the print morphed evenly throughout the day, so you could see which ad was the most effective?
One of Adwords most powerful features allows you to do just that. For the same set of keywords you can display as many Ads as you like. By default, the Adwords manager is set to optimize which means Google will establish which is your best Ad, and favour that Ad.
If you’re checking into Adwords once a day (I live there), you should set to rotate. This allows you to choose the winner from your split-testing. You need 20 clicks before you can declare a winner, anything less is just not enough data. There’s a great tool at www.splittester.com that helps you check your analysis.
In split-testing we tend to focus on getting a high clickthrough-rate (CTR). CTRs are definitely important, as Google always rewards relevance, but a high CTR and poor conversion rate is a fool’s game. Don’t lose sight of the end game, which is winning customers.
What’s wrong with this adword?
My apologies to Ink Cycle in advance, but here’s what’s wrong with this Ad:
This Ad was served as a response to a search for ‘HP 57 printer cartridge’. With the exception of the word ‘cartridge’ the adword makes no effort whatsoever to use the language of the customer.
The title and body copy carries no specific price information. This Adword will gain clicks but from browsers who don’t know what they want to buy. That’s wasting clicks.
The destination URL is to a general landing page. Now the customer is faced with a bewildering array of choices. More often than not the first choice will be to leave. Taking customers to a general landing page will often yield a deservedly high bounce rate.
‘Absurdly low prices’ is marketing speak. What’s absurd about them? If they’re so absurdly low, let’s see them!
Finally, the display URL is not utilised to enforce any messaging. If you’re really stuck with absurdly low prices, you might try: www.inkcycle.co.uk/aburd_prices.
Writing for the web
Jakob Neilsen’s definitive article, How to Read for the Web, happily gives us guidelines for writing content that is optimised for search engines. It’s summarised below, and you can see immediately why it is Google friendly.
As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using
- highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
- meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
- bulleted lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half the word count (or less) than conventional writing
Meta tags: what’s it all about?
Meta tags are read by browsers and search engines, you won’t see them on a web page unless you click view source. There are three main kinds of meta tags that people normally obsess over.
- <title>Meta tags: what’s it all about</title> - this is the tag that generates the page title that appears in your browser bar. I’d say the page title is about the most important semantic location for your entire page. If you’re targeting a keyword like ‘arthritis pain relief‘, you’d want ‘arthritis pain relief‘ in the title, but don’t forget to make the rest of the page about ‘arthritis pain relief’. Google’s looking for good content, and the page title should correlate with all other content on the page. [notice that Word Press with Permalinks switched on is generating a url with the page title included in the URL - these friendly URLs are also an important aid]
- <meta name=”description” content=”Baldy’s Blog is the definitive and accessible guide to the latest SEO and Adword techniques”> I don’t think (and I’m happy to be corrected) that meta description makes any difference to your weighting in Google, but the meta description is normally used as the description in Google’s search results. So, if you’ve written a good meta description, you’re likely to get a better click-through rate (CTR). A better CTR = more traffic = a higher ranking.
Note, your meta description must match the content of the page, and must only use the vocabulary found on the page. Anything else, will signal spam.
- <meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, SEM, Google, Adwords, Baldy” />. In the old days you could slam your meta keywords full of anything, and it would deliver traffic. Meta keywords very vital in the days when searchbots couldn’t digest the content of pages. But they can now, and in my view you can forget meta keywords. If you do feel tempted to use them, make sure the keywords absolutely reflect the page’s content.
Is it ok to buy links?
First off, why buy links? Links are the primary indicator of a site’s popularity. One-way links from high-traffic context-related sites are particularly valuable. The more links you have, the nearer you get to the top of the engine.
Google encourages users to report paid links, as some kinds of paid links violate Google’s quality guidelines. However, Google doesn’t ban paid link activity entirely, and seems to accept that is “a normal part of the economy of the web”, when done properly. And ‘properly’ means making sure Google knows this is a commercial relationship:
- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file
If you’re retaining an agency to buy links for your site, you must make sure that these guidelines are adhered to, or your site will be regarded as part of a spam network. Once Google has identified a spam site, it’s relatively easy to identify all the back-linked sites, and to penalise them accordingly.
So, it’s ok to buy links, as long as you do it properly, but if you attempt to pass PageRank - i.e., not identifying that inbound links to your site are part of a commercial relationship, you may be Google-slapped.
Google Trends for Websites
The latest incarnation of Google Trends doesn’t just give you trend data on keyword searches, it also gives you great analysis of where else your target customers are going. Take a look at this analysis for MyMemory.
Not only will this analysis show where else your customers are going, but it also shows the keywords they’re also searching for. This kind of data usually costs lots of money (HitWise), and now you can have it for free. Enjoy!
How to pimp your blog
Very impressed with Yoast’s blog, and his definitive piece on Wordpress, The must read article about Wordpress SEO. There is a section in there on conversion optimization, and encouraging readers to subscribe. That’s why each Baldy post now carries an invitation to sign-up for email subscriptions. Guess what? Subscriptions up 50% in one day. Thanks Yoast.
Adwords are not advertising
Imagine that you’ve got a high-street store - you stand at the door of your shop and you grab the next passerby and say: “Please don’t come in and browse. Only come in if you’re going to buy. Only come in if I’ve got what you’re looking for. In fact, look here I’ve got a printer cartridge for a Hewlett Packard 57 printer. Do you have an HP 57 printer? You do? Do you need a cartridge for it now? Ok, you can come in.”
This is what Adwords is like, and the beauty of it is that there are millions of people passing by, and you don’t pay when they see your Ad, you only pay when they clickthrough. Out of those millions of passerbys, your job is to find the few that want your product at your price. If they like your competitor’s Adword better, that’s fine, let someone else pay for the clickthrough. You don’t want them, you only want customers who want you. Refreshing isn’t it?
This is the ultimate in request marketing. We’re only interested in consumers who want our product. There’s no persuasion. There’s no tempting a customer to buy something he or she doesn’t want. Adwords aren’t really advertising. They’re precise units of information delivered to consumers who’ve requested them.
There are mega-brands out there using Adwords to build brand, build reputation etc etc. I’m glad I’m not burning those dollars. The best Adwords are highly specific, leading to dedicated landing pages that deliver exactly on the promise of the Adword. Think of it as the haiku of advertising. 3 lines, 95 characters, no over-capitalisation. Short and to the point.
Adwords are not interruption marketing. Browsers are in front of their computers, on-line, searching to buy your product. When they click on a specific, targeted Adword, they’ve just given you the biggest buy signal you’re going to get. Don’t be alarmed then when you see CPCs running into several pounds. If CPCs are expensive, they’re working in your market, and you need to work out how they can work for you.
Short and to the point
Over the last three months I’ve been doing a really vicious email cull. It started by using out-of-office replies to indicate that I wasn’t wedded to my Crackberry, and that I wouldn’t be responding to emails until 4pm every day. This slowed down the onslaught, as writers started to re-consider whether they should email at all.
Then I started ignoring all emails where I was CC’d. You should try this one, it really works. If you’re CC’d it’s not important, and someone’s either covering their proverbial, or giving you information that you *might* need. Ideally, I should script Outlook to delete CC emails as they arrive.
So, emails should be short, to the point, and you should use them when they’re relevant. So, when you’re emailing your customers you are burning up a valuable right to communicate - it should be short, pithy, hard-hitting, and worth reading (and sharing).
Today I received an email from a supplier by mistake. Not only was I CC’d, but so were 200 other businesses in Jersey (BCC is a technology that doesn’t exist for some yet). 20 minutes later we all received another email, apologising for the previous mistake, but with all the emails still present. That’s one way to get your customers talking about you.