Month: June 2014

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Are You Really Working Negative Keywords in AdWords to Your Benefit?

Educate yourself on the value of negative keywords in Google AdWords.
Educate yourself on the value of negative keywords in Google AdWords.

Keywords are the backbone of a successful AdWords campaign, but negative keywords are the “secret sauce” that make a program truly successful.

Negative keywords in an AdWords account will limit the search queries where an ad will show on Google search, but not quite as effectively in the Display network. That being said, the inclusion of negative keywords into every AdWords program is something that should be done and routinely reviewed.

Here are some of my tips on developing your own negative keyword list for your AdWords account.

1. Create a standard list you can use for every program but review it first before using as some keywords may not be appropriate for every campaign. Some I routinely use are: free, discount, info, information, forum, reviews, stories, school, job, hire, career.

2. Decide if you want to add all your keywords to the negative keyword field as broad match or if you would like to use phrase match instead or in addition to the broad match keywords you’ve added. This requires a little bit of thought; think how searches for your product would be done. I will typically add a combination of both.

3. Do a reality check and monitor your account for actual search queries. If you are seeing keywords that are not targeted to what you are really selling, take some time to review if you need to expand the negative keywords you are using. You may find that there are new versions you may want to add. An easy way to do additional negative keyword discovery is to use the “add keywords” button just above the keyword table. Look at the keywords that Google is suggesting that you add. Look over the list, you’ll find all kinds of additional keywords that may really not be about your product or service and these keywords will give you great ideas on new negative keywords to add.

4. If you add your negative keywords as broad match, you will not need to create such an extensive list as Google will also use synonyms and close variations in your negative list as a nice benefit of using broad match.

5. Watch your AdWords alert button for negative keyword conflicts that Google will tell you about over time. Sometimes you will want to leave the keyword in place and sometimes you may want to remove it.

If you need help with your AdWords program, I invite you to find out more about our AdWords set up and management services.

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Google is Serious About Smartphone Compatibility

Google Blog Screen Shot
Google Blog Screen Shot

Google is serious about forcing you to address smartphone compatibility on your website. In fact if you do not design now to accommodate smartphones Google is now actually lowering your Google AdWords Quality Score for your landing page. Now there is an even bigger penalty in Google Mobile Search.

On the Google blog this past week, Google showcased this image showing how it will now be tagging results in the mobile search results showing when a site is using a tool like DudaMobile or other service that simply redirects a user to the home page of a website and not the page mentioned in the actual search results.

That’s a huge black eye and sure to now kill any mobile traffic for sites that are not properly serving up mobile optimized content. With Google predicting that smartphone searches will eclipse desktop and tablet searches this year, Google is getting serious about search quality for smartphones.

You can read the full article from the Google blog and see a large photo of the return in the results red flagging sites that are not mobile responsive and redirect mobile users to the site home page not the real content.

Make sure that you read the details of what Google is now revealing on their best practices for websites and how to serve and design websites that are responsive as surely Google will be penalizing sites in the future that do not adhere to their best practices.

If you need a responsive website, I invite you to check our service offerings.

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What’s the Best Length for a Tweet?

Shorter may be better and get more attention - sometimes
Shorter may be better and get more attention – sometimes.

What’s the perfect sized tweet? Is 140 characters too much? Who says that a longer tweets are better, are they really? In an article found online at Buffer, I’ve found what one author says is the perfect length for everything. But are those tips and suggestions right?

Here’s my personal recommendations on what works best for Twitter based on what I have seen and customer response.

Twitter – what’s the perfect tweet length?
Although Twitter only let’s you enter in 140 characters including spaces do you ever wish you had more room? Sure, but less room? Kevan Lee says the perfect tweet is 100 characters and that these short tweets get 17% more engagement. I have to say that from my experience tweets that are this short typically are teasers for videos, spam, or sharable quotes.

Does that mean that you should start shortening your tweets? I say no, but make your tweets work harder by linking or pointing to something meaningful to your audience. If you have a great link to share and can be concise with a great teaser in 100 characters, go for it, but if you need more room insert your link early in the tweet to see just how much space you’ll have to sell it.

Sometimes shorter IS better.

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Building Links With Dead Strategies

We create customer-winning content.
We create customer-winning content.

Creating articles that were informational in nature with links back to your website in a bio and placing these on news sites, article directories, and ezine sites for use by other webmasters on their blogs and in their websites in a way to build incoming links is just another previously good tactic that Google has disavowed.

Unfortunately, there are many business owners who are still using this tactic and are encouraged to embrace this tactic by SEO firms. It is very important to know that using this type of tactic today may actually work against you.

Make sure to watch this video on this topic from Matt Cutts the lead web spam engineer from Google and the voice to my industry. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo75Og4M34Q

Now using this tactic to build inbound links may actually drop your organic placement. Guest blogging is also another high profile tactic that has also fallen under Google’s eyes and has also been disavowed as a usable tactic to improve organic search placement.

With Google focusing on high quality unique content, that is not overly keyword dense, and has high user relevancy as tested through click through rate, time on page, and personal search history it is nearly impossible to scam your way to the top of the organic results.

A much better approach for placement today is to focus on improving the user experience on your website, refining the message, and promoting your site to generate traffic on social media and Google AdWords. There will always be sites that are placed in the top ten slots on Google but getting there now is no longer an art form but rather creating the very best user experience that is the most relevant to a unique search query.

For help in creating user-centric content and blog posts please make sure to review our service offerings.