All posts in Search Engine Marketing

4 websites to help you find the best keywords

by Chris M on September 11, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 3 Comments

The other day James sent a tweet out to all the SEOs asking about being able to predict the potential traffic a keyword has. This is a tricky topic because it’s not so much about predicting keyword traffic, it’s about first selecting excellent keywords relevant to the niche in question and then possibly using tools to predict keywords. At least that’s how I’ve always recommended people do it. It’s a similar approach I tell bloggers about concentrating on great content and enjoying their blog before looking at ways to make money. First things first approach.

Never the less, I felt I would blog about 4 websites which can assist you in finding great keywords for your niche:

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Where is paid search heading?

by Chris M on August 31, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing with 1 Comment

I’m a really big fan of running paid search campaigns when websites launch, whilst building up authority with SEO. The idea is to generate immediate leads and once the SEO kicks in, to reduce the spend on paid search – this, for me, has proven incredibly effective in most cases where I put the strategy into play.

Anyway, it’s interesting to watch trends and see where things are going, so this infographic, The Future of Paid Search, interested me and I’m sure it will interest a number of you.

Simply click the thumbnail to see the large version:

Most expensive AdWords categories

by Chris M on July 18, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing with 3 Comments

If you’ve ever worked with Google AdWords, you’ll know that some keywords are incredibly expensive. I’ve found it fascinating discovering that some areas such as credit, insurance and property can have cost per clicks of tens of dollars, if not hundreds. I remember the first time I was involved in a debt related search engine marketing campaign, a good few years ago and each click was up at $50 per click – just imagine how much money you go through!

Anyway, each time a click is performed, Google makes money of it – that’s right, they make MONEY off it – millions and millions of dollars. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know which AdWords categories cost the most and make Google as wealthy as it is?

Well, here you go:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

The list of most expensive AdWords categories are:

  1. Insurance (example keyword: “auto insurance price quotes”)
  2. Loans (example keyword: “consolidate graduate student loans”)
  3. Mortgage (example keyword: “refinanced second mortgages”)
  4. Attorney (example keyword: “personal injury attorney”)
  5. Credit (example keyword: “home equity line of credit”)
  6. Lawyer
  7. Donate
  8. Degree
  9. Hosting
  10. Claim
  11. Conference Call
  12. Trading
  13. Software
  14. Recovery
  15. Transfer
  16. Gas/Electricity
  17. Classes
  18. Rehab
  19. Treatment
  20. Cord Blood
Big up to Techcrunch for this infographic.

Google Social Search hitting South Africa

by Chris M on May 26, 2011 in Internet, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 2 Comments

So it’s official, Google Social Search is starting to work for us South Africans. I don’t know how many of you have noticed yet, but I certainly have and I’m still trying to decide if I’m happy with the results.

Here’s a breakdown on what this is all about:

“Social Search can help you find pages your friends have created, and it can also help you find links your contacts have shared on Twitter and other sites. If someone you’re connected to has publicly shared a link, we may show that link in your results with a clear annotation. So, if you’re looking for information about modern cooking and your colleague Adam shared a link about Modernist Cuisine, you’ll see an annotation and picture of Adam under the result. That way when you see Adam in the office, you’ll know he might be a good person to ask about his favorite modern cooking techniques.” (Chris M: rofl)

“So how does this all work? Social Search results are only visible to you and only appear when you choose to log in to your google Account. If you’re signed in, Google makes the best guess about whose public content you may want to see in your results, including people from your Google Chat buddy list, your Google Contacts, the people you’re following in Google Reader and Buzz, and the networks you’ve linked from your google profile or Google Account. For public networks like Twitter, Google finds your friends and sees who they’re publicly connected to as well. You can see a complete list of the people included in your Social Search results in your personal google Dashboard (this display is private).”

Google Social Search results look like this:

What I don’t like about this is that it would appear that Google’s gone an aggregated all the people I’ve ever been in contact with and therefore search results are appearing with items shared by people who I might have contacted before, but might not really want to know what they’re interested in – know what I mean? So, I’m investigating ways to unconnect from people, but it seems to be a little more complicated that I would have thought.

My first guess was Google Profile, so I looked there, found the list of users I follow and who follows me, so I unfollowed a number of people, but this didn’t help at all. I then read further and discovered that it pulls in GMail contacts as well, I looked into removing and adding people, this didn’t seem to end in the desired result either.

So right now I’m still investigating and still deciding if I actually want this to be part of my profile at all!

Have you seen Social Search yet? Have you figured a way you to remove certain people from your results?

UPATE: Terrance from countingbeans.co.za pointed out this link and it’s a winner: https://profiles.google.com/connectedaccounts

Social Media ROI vs SEO ROI

by Chris M on May 24, 2011 in Networking, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Video with No comments

This is a pretty cool, unstaged video which compares return on investment for social media vs that of search engine optimization. I like the video because it’s interesting naturally, but it’s also a conversation which leads to much discussion:

SEO is still growing in the consumers eyes

by Chris M on May 23, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 2 Comments

I’m passionate about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and when I read articles and blog posts about SEO being dead or about to die, I immediately sigh at the pure ignorance that some people suffer. If someone said that traditional search was dying and that social search was taking over, I’d be more inclined to listen as I tend to feel that it’s not a complete inaccurate statement at all, but SEO, well that’s not dying at all, it’s growing, the bubble hasn’t even burst yet in my opinion and being on the cusp is hugely exciting!

Google Trends is a great platform for determining the world’s interest in certain terms and so I decided to run a trends search on “SEO” to see what the outcome would be, purely out of interest and this is what I saw:

Remember, it’s not what industry thinks per say, it’s what the consumer’s interested in, and the consumers clearly interested in SEO.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is following a similar growth pattern, although it appears to be even more active:

I find Google Trends fascinating and I’m always in and out of it testing various things. Anyway, point of this post was to show that SEO and SEM are most definitely not dying and I wouldn’t be surprised is the graph continued to go upwards for many months to come!

Facebook Insights for your website now available!

by Chris M on May 17, 2011 in Blogging, Networking, Search Engine Marketing with 2 Comments

Get Facebook Insights for your website

Facebook Insights is a great way to look at your website from a statistical point of view. Sure, Google Analytics does this, but with Insights you can link your website to your Facebook Page by adding a single line of meta data for your websites source code.

Five new features are to be noted:

  1. If you’ve got Like buttons on your website, Insights will report on statistics around the performance of the button on your website. What I like most is that this feature will show you the referral traffic, in real-time.
  2. Facebook rolled out a new comments plugin earlier this month and Insights will report on this information too.
  3. Aggregated demographic data is now accessible.
  4. A useful statistics is a list of the top 100 most popular pages on your website, this allows you to update the pages to contain more useful information and/or more social buttons and the likes.
  5. A great new feature is reporting on social sharing, which essentially tells you how many people are forwarding your content.

To get started, click here, click on the green button top right and copy and paste the meta tag provided on the screen that pops up. Once you’ve done this, link to a page using the drop down, enter in your domain name and click the “Get Insights” button.

Here’s an example from the iMod account:

Facebook Insights for Website

Click to enlarge

 

Demographics are going to be hugely useful:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Official reference on Facebook: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/476

Google testing new SERP layouts?

by Chris M on May 10, 2011 in Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with No comments

Some images have been floating around today which give us reason to believe that Google might be looking into changing its search engine results page (SERP) layout. The design, which has slowly but surely changed over the years, has never really changed like this, well, not that I’ve noticed at least.

Take a peak:

I’m not sure whether this is real or speculation, but I can definitely see Google looking into something like this.

Is it time for a change?

The CPA and Google Adwords

by Chris M on March 29, 2011 in Industry News, Search Engine Marketing with 4 Comments

Today I was reading up on the new Consumer Protection Act which will come into effect come April 1st 2011. Instead of reading it as a consumer, I was reading it as a business owner, so as to understand things from the other side. I’m not a lawyer and there is a great deal of legal jargon in it, so I think I’ve understood it correctly, so please be weary of my comments below.

One of the things I picked up from the new Act is that if you’re running your business ethically and above board, you should not have any problems with the change. As I started to realise this, I began to think about how it might affect various aspects of online marketing and that’s when I realised that many Google Adwords adverts may breach the new Act.

I know a lot of people don’t look at the adverts on Google search pages (or at Facebook Ads for that matter), but perhaps take some time to look at them. Because so few people notice adverts and so many advert blockers have been created, it pushes campaign managers to turn to sneaky tricks to attract clicks. When I say sneaky tricks, I’m merely referring to various ways in which things can be phrased. I’ve often seen adverts which bend the truth and upon clicking through to the website, something else is presented to you – this would be a breach of the Act if I’ve understood correctly.

If you run campaigns at your company or for a company, be careful, make sure that you’re not misrepresenting anything. “Groupon is being accused of running “false and misleading business and advertising acts” and running “bait and switch” ads on Google.com, according to a lawsuit filed by a bus tour company in San Francisco (read more).” – this is not something you want to ever get caught up in.

Have you thought about how this new Act might influence your marketing strategies?

SEO/Social marketing spend [chart]

by Chris M on February 1, 2011 in Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization with 2 Comments

Knowing what industry trends are is always useful when planning how you’re going to spend your budget for the year. Below is a graph outlining which areas of online marketing are going to get more money poured into them as well as which forms of marketing are going to lose budget:

Social Media Spend Chart

What is your company spending its budget on?

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