Displaying items by tag: Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Per-per-click marketing is always evolving—sometimes in obvious and dramatic ways, sometimes in small and incremental ones. For the most part, 2017 fell into that second category. Though there’s not one, massive upheaval you can point to, there were plenty of little ways in which the PPC landscape shifted—and some of them may be things that you missed.

When it comes to marketing, it’s generally a good idea not to put all your eggs in one basket. This is certainly true for retailers, who face a number of questions about how online consumers seek and find new products—via Amazon, or through Google, Bing, and Yahoo. The answer, of course, is a little bit of both, but really understanding it requires a nuanced perception of the consumer journey.

As you are no doubt aware, the world of search has changed dramatically over the last few years—and one of the most seismic shifts has been with the medium itself. Where search engine queries were once largely confined to desktop computers, the increased prevalence of mobile devices means that more and more searches are conducted on the go. In fact, mobile searches are more common than desktop ones, something that has key implications for marketers. One such implication is that mobile users—increasingly reluctant to type out a full search query with their thumbs—are using voice search more than ever before.

You are no doubt familiar with PPC advertising, even if you’ve never leveraged it on your brand’s behalf. You see PPC ads every time you conduct a Google search; these ads are located on the top and bottom of the page, beyond the standard organic search results. For those who are only passingly familiar, PPC stands for pay-per-click marketing; basically, a system wherein you pay for each time your ad gets clicked by a search engine user. PPC exists in many forms, though the best known is probably Google AdWords. More to the point of our discussion today, PPC ads represent one of the most effective ways to build your brand online.

But what makes PPC so valuable to marketers? That’s what we’re going to address in this post.

There is an ongoing misconception that search engine optimization (SEO) is primarily a concern for digitally-based businesses—that brick and mortar stores don’t have the same need to establish search engine visibility. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Even if your company doesn’t conduct transactions online, consumers use search engines to find local companies—and if your business isn’t present in local searches, you’ll miss out on significant foot traffic.

When it comes to optimizing your website, it is important to take full advantage of every square inch of online real estate that you can. One opportunity that often goes underutilized is the meta description. Though it’s fairly easy to craft a compelling meta description for your website—and though the benefits of doing so are potentially quite significant—it somehow slips through the cracks or is simply deemed unimportant. In this post, we’ll explain what the meta description is and why it matters, then provide some general tips on writing a good one.

One of the many perks of AdWords is that it allows you to claim more of the search engine results page (SERP) than you could ever claim through organic reach alone; paid ads buy you access to corners of online real estate that SEO simply cannot penetrate. It stands to reason, then, that anything you can do to make your paid ads bigger—that is, to expand them to further corners of the SERP—is ultimately going to be worthwhile. And as it happens, there are some effective ways to do exactly that, specifically by including AdWords extensions.

You may have heard it said that “Citation services are a secret SEO marketing tool.” In 2016 it’s true. Citation services are incredibly effective, incredibly important and incredibly overlooked. Because so few businesses even know where to begin with citation services, we recently conducted a short webinar where we let the cat out of the bag and shed some light on what citation services are—and why they are important.

This has always been a basic concept of retail: You’re not going to sell any products if nobody knows that your store exists. This was true in the brick and mortar era, and it’s still true today. Online stores can have perfect business models, outstanding products, incredible prices, and amazing customer service—but if the store itself is not well marketed and made highly visible, it’s simply not going to do well. It is imperative that ecommerce merchants do anything they can to make sure people are aware of their store.

We’re big believers in the power of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to boost brand visibility and to connect with consumers. We’re hardly the only digital marketing agency to think so. With that said, we understand that Google AdWords can be difficult for the PPC novice to understand, let alone optimize. That can be frustrating: we talk to many small business owners who believe AdWords can work for them, but they’re just not sure how.