It's a big search world out there, and if you are in a business with broad market appeal, you may find it hard to stand out from the crowd on Google and other major search engines. You're not alone. Getting on the first page of Google SERPs is exceedingly difficult, and if paid search is your strategy, bring your checkbook - bidding on popular, general search terms can get very expensive.
On the other hand, if you have a niche in the market you can capitalize on it to raise your search profile and make paid search affordable.
Suppose your company provides personal financial services. You will have a hard time standing out in organic or paid search on a term like, "financial services" (107 million returns on Google). "financial services chicago" is better, but still returns more than 25,000 matches.
But by narrowing your focus to a part of the market you especially cater to, you'll see a dramatic difference.
"financial planners chicago" - 4,700 matches
"financial planners divorce" - 428 matches
"financial planners retirement" -5,100 matches
"financial planners generation x" - 2 matches
A careful keyword analysis (which Whoast can provide) may alert you to wonderful marketing opportunities that are there for the taking. Whatever your total search marketing budget is, you may find it more productive to split it up across a few niches, rather than spend it all on one broad campaign.
In an upcoming post I'll offer a few ideas on niches you may find attractive and/or have not fully considered.
There may be no one-size-fits-all answer to this question, but I think there are a few elements of content that belong on just about any Web site's home page. Yet - how often do you not see them? Here they are.
A concise value statement that answers the question, "What's in it for me?"
A concise description of the products and services the company offers
Images that speak to the pain or gain a visitor will experience after doing business with the company
Too often, companies get wrapped up in the details of the products and services they offer. We solve problems. We innovate. We create. We deliver. We do this. We do that. Visitors come to Web sites to find out what how companies can help them. Try approaching content this way ...
You're feeling pain. Here's what it feels like. Here's how we make it go away.
Images are crucially important. They carry more impact than words alone, and stick in the mind longer.
Say you have a bowling alley Web site. A picture of a bowling ball or a sterile interior shot is a waste of space. But how about a group of young adults (or whatever the target audience is) laughing it up, having a great time on the lanes? It follows the formula ...
The pain. You're working your tail off trying to make ends meet. How it feels. You need some relief or you don't think you'll be able to go back to work tomorrow. How we fix it. Coming to our bowling alley with a group of friends will recharge your batteries. We're not happy unless you are! We're all about fun, friends, and family - and an evening here won't break the bank, either.
You can talk about your alley's sophisticated score keeping technology, your well maintained, state of the art lanes, etc., to your heart's content. Just not on the home page. Once readers are engaged, they'll explore your site to the extent they crave details. But if the home page doesn't engage them, all the information in the world won't persuade them to do much of anything.
Did you know the color scheme you select for your Web site or online ad is just as important as the content and design? Humans have a strong emotional response to color, so it's imperative to select colors that stimulate the response you're looking for.
This brief article, Welcome to the World of Colors, summarizes how various colors affect our state of mind. Red, for instance, stimulates anger and increases tension, and so is not a good choice for a luxury resort Web site.
For an in-depth analysis, here is an excellent article from Canright Design, Emotional Impact of Color. Read through the color descriptions and discover which color supports and enhances the message you're trying to send.
If you're looking for even more information, try Color: Messages & Meanings, a book designed to help you select the right Pantone color (and there are a lot of them) for print or online materials.
Are you color challenged, one of those people who has trouble picking a shirt that matches your pants? Several Web design tools are available to help you select a color scheme for your Web site or landing page. This Color Scheme Generator is easy to use - give it a try.
Readability is a crucial issue for Web design, and color plays a decisive role. Joe Dolson discusses in detail why light text on a dark background is a poor choice. Important information for those of us who tend to go overboard with color. This excellent article from Hooker & Perron with an historical theme is packed with examples of various text/color combinations. This blog post from 2006, Light text on dark background vs. readability, includes an extensive and instructive conversation on the topic. If nothing else, we see that color selection cannot be reduced to an exact science - too many variables.
A couple weeks ago I sat down to read the Sunday Chicago Tribune. It looked weird. Why? Because the front page was half covered by an advertising page wrapped around the first section. I couldn't start reading until I took the ad page off.
Then I go to the sports section - same thing! Scores and recaps covered by ads.
What are the newspapers thinking? Readership continues to decline, advertisers continue to drift away, and what do the papers do? They go out of their way to annoy the few remaining readers they have with the worst kind of interruption marketing. I don't get it.
In terms of online advertising, one thing everybody knows, whether they surf the Web or not, is that pop-up ads are universally hated. So what does the Tribune do? They come up with a print version of a pop-up ad. Well, I didn't bother to read it, but if I had, I wouldn't be much inclined to buy anything from any of the advertisers.
I wonder if newspapers ever ask readers what they'd like see in their publications. My view may be typical. I'd love to read a newspaper that was free of advertisements. If a paper listed its advertisers on a single page (page one for all I care), I would go out of my way to patronize each and every one of them. If that's not feasible, how about putting all ads in a single section dedicated to advertising?
Well, maybe the Tribune is listening after all. The wrap around ad pages have disappeared. But papers need to new more than maintain the status quo if they expect to hold on to their subscribers, let alone attract new ones. Fresh ideas are needed.
Building an attractive, appealing, and engaging Web site is an exercise in continuous improvement - new content, new designs, and new features. Some companies, though, put a site up and leave it alone. Leave it alone long enough, and you may be better off without a site at all. Here's are 15 features of a Web site in dire need of a makeover.
The color scheme looks straight out of the '90's
The last link in the Company News section is from 2003
No Company News section
The About Us section has biographies of executives who no longer work there
No About Us section
The site has a splash page
Text is too small to read
Text is clownishly oversized
Pages take forever to load because of too many graphic images
With all the hoopla surrounding social media marketing, paid search engine marketing is in danger of falling into the dread class of "traditional" marketing activities. However, if paid search has become an integral component of today's marketing budget, it's because paid search gets results -- and we have no shortage of statistics to prove it. Here are a few reasons why companies continue to invest heavily in paid search campaigns.
Paid search gets immediate results. Search engine optimization, or SEO, takes time, often quite a bit of time, to have a noticeable effect on search engine rankings. Conversely, paid search provides immediate search engine exposure and with it, Web site traffic. Paid search drives targeted traffic. No doubt SEO is worthwhile, but how often does your Google search query display sites having nothing to do with your intended search? It's a common problem, and explains why a lot of R &D is going into contextual search engine technology. But a well written and strategically placed pay per click ad will attract site visitors with a qualified interest in your offering.
Paid search requires less labor. While the hard costs of paid search may exceed those of social media marketing (and even there, arguments can be made either way), the internal time commitment to support paid search should be less than what is required to execute a full blown social media program. Writing, brand monitoring, and networking takes time and, except for very large companies, is far more difficult to outsource than a paid search campaign.
Paid search is measurable. What's the ROI on your sales brochures? How about the ROI on your blog? Hard to measure, isn't it? Now, that hardly means those types of marketing activities should be abandoned, but it does mean to have a balanced marketing program you need measurable activities in the mix. Nothing this side of direct mail is more measurable than paid search marketing, which leads to its most important benefit ... Paid search produces continually improving results. Since paid search is measurable, campaigns can be compared to each other using simple A-B split testing. Sometimes, a single word change can result in high percentage increases in traffic. Careful testing and monitoring allows companies to launch more effective ads with every new campaign. If you think paid search marketing is smoke and mirrors, you may need to investigate further or work with a different search marketing firm.
As I've said many times, RSS is the most under appreciated Web tool around, for marketers and consumers alike.
For marketers, RSS is the way to make sure the market receives information you put out on the Web. How many people go to a Web site or blog to see if someone has posted new information? Not very often. So much of today's quality content goes unheard, but RSS can change that.
For consumers, RSS makes information gathering easy, like having 10 or 20 newspapers delivered to your door every day. By aggregating RSS feeds, consumers control the information they want to track and read it whenever and wherever they want.
Why RSS hasn't caught on is baffling. The technology is free, so any publisher or reader can use it without dipping into the pocketbook. Plus, subscriptions are easy to process and feed readers are amazingly simple and customizable. My favorite feed readers are Google Reader and Bloglines.
Celebrate RSS Awareness Day by subscribing to your first feed (The Whoa Factor, for instance). Once you get used to it, you'll never go back to surfing.
By Brad Shorr on April 21, 2008 6:30 AM
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After reporting better than expected earnings for Q1 2008, Google stock surged more than 20% last Friday, or almost $90/share. Revenues for Q1 were $5.19 billion, up 42% from Q1 2007. International revenues grew to 51% of Google's total revenue. Significantly, revenue from paid clicks grew 20% over Q1 2007, and continued strong both in the U.S. and internationally. With the acquisition of DoubleClick, the phenomenal popularity of YouTube, and the largely untapped growth potential of emerging markets, Google's future looks as bright as its first quarter numbers.
This is all exceedingly good news for Google stockholders, the stock market, and the search engine marketing industry. Google''s results signal online enterprise has remained strong in the face of a slumping U.S. economy. The growth in paid clicks is particularly encouraging. Normally, when business slows, marketing expenses are among the first to be cut. But the U.S. spend on online marketing continues to grow, as reported by Google and as we also saw in SEMPO's recently released State of the Market Survey.
Being enormous, Google is a popular target for criticism. Some deplore Google's perceived abuse of privacy rights; others, its heavy handed tactics; and a few simply don't like the company because of its size and dominance. But clearly, a strong Google is good for search engine marketing sellers and buyers alike. During the tech bubble, every tech related firm made money hand over fist. But during our current slump, it takes true leadership and a rock solid business model to achieve growth and profitability. Google is providing the leadership and a business model that delivers a satisfying user experience. Google products are fun, easy to use, reasonably priced or free, and get the job done. They innovate, test, and roll out user-friendly versions of new products and services with amazing rapidity. And oh, yes - they make money, and lots of it. Many of Google's competitors can lay claim to one or more of those characteristics, but how many can claim them all?
In a Google free world, I doubt advertisers would pour money into search engine marketing to the extent they do today. Why? Because the overall value of SEM would decline. By setting a high standard and providing leadership, Google makes its competitors stronger and encourages new players to get in the game, giving advertisers more choice and quality options.
If you've invested time and money to attract site traffic, you want visitors to read your message. That's why it's crucial to make your message readable, inviting. Otherwise, visitors will pull back and click off.
1. Avoid using ALL CAPS. They are hard to read, especially in headlines. They also distract from surrounding text, which may cause readers to miss your message.
2. Avoid multiple text colors. Again, distracting. It's OK to use a highlight color for headlines and subheads, but otherwise be judicious.
3. Avoid multiple fonts.
4. Use multiple font sizes only when you have a good reason.
5. Avoid italics, which are harder to read on a screen than in print.
6. Break up long chunks of text with bullet points.
7. Break up long chunks of text with subheads, especially ones that incorporate keyword phrases.
8. Replace colons and semicolons with a dash. Much easier to read dashes on a screen. Sometimes you have to break grammatical rules to accomplish the switch; in such cases you must choose between readability - and formality.
9. Never use reverse print (dark text on a light background) unless your site has minimal content. Reverse print looks cool, but is extremely hard to read. Black text on an off white background is the easiest to read.
10. Match your font size to your audience. If your product appeals to senior citizens, go big, because they won't be able to read small fonts. For more on this topic, click here.
11. Keep sentences short. Doing so makes your ideas easier to follow and eliminates the need for those pesky colons and semicolons.
12. The color for anchor text should be bold enough to stand out, but not so bold as to overwhelm the rest of the content.
The economy may be slowing, but spending on search engine marketing continues to rev up. The recently released 2007 SEMPO State of the Market Survey includes these remarkable findings.
The North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007.
North American SEM spending is now projected to grow to $25.2 billion in 2011, up significantly from the $18.6 billion forecast a year ago.
Marketers are finding more search dollars by poaching budget from print magazine spending, website development, direct mail and other marketing programs.
Paid placement captures 87.4% of 2007 spending; organic SEO, 10.5%; paid inclusion, .07%, and technology investment, 1.4%
It seems as though nothing can stop the tidal wave transfer of advertising spend from traditional to online media. In fact, as I'm writing this post, a breaking news story reports that CBS Channel 2 in Chicago has laid off 17 people, including news anchor Diann Burns and sports anchor Mark Malone. The story explains -
What happened at Channel 2 is endemic to nearly all broadcast and print outlets of late. With audiences and advertisers investing more time and money in digital platforms such as the Internet, old-style media have announced cutbacks to offset the slipping revenue.
It's important to note that nearly 90% of SEM spending goes to paid placement. For all the media focus on SEO and conversational marketing, paid advertising still works. In fact, it works better all the time because ads can be targeted with greater accuracy than in the old days of indiscriminately placed pop-ups. Geographic filtering allows PPC ads on search engines to reach more relevant searchers. Ad placement on blogs, RSS feeds, and social networking sites can be geared to the tastes of very specific subscribers. Many Internet-based business models hinge upon building a healthy revenue stream from advertisements on their Web sites.
The ability to focus advertising spend on the Web makes the (relatively) scattergun approach of traditional media advertising look less appealing than ever, now that business conditions are weak. With that in mind, 2008, despite a recession, may see more growth than ever in paid search engine marketing.
