Google – Page 32 – McCord Web Services The Web Authority

May 27, 2014May 25, 2014

Five Tips on Creating Negative Keyword Lists for AdWords

Giving you a hand on negative keyword lists.

Keywords, they are the pivot point for the success of all AdWords programs. Have keywords that are too broad in your account and you’ll be looking at poor quality scores and higher costs. Have keywords that are too narrow and you’ll be looking at very low impressions and very low conversion numbers.

So, how do you achieve the balance you need to make an AdWords program truly successful? By combining broad match, phrase match and negative keywords you can drive traffic while staying targeted.

Here are my five tips on creating top performing negative keyword lists for AdWords.

1. Think like a customer. By putting on your thinking hat as you create your initial keyword list you will actually identify keywords that will not bring you the traffic you need. Got something that is top quality? Good negative keywords will be cheap, free, and discount.

2. Review your search query report. Look for keywords that are popping up in the report that have actually triggered your ad. For example you are selling enterprise document generating software, are you seeing terms like letter generator, tattoo letters; if so your ads may be showing to people who are looking for a letter (symbol) generator not a correspondence generating platform. Good keywords to use to filter out this traffic would be generator (focus on generating instead in your keyword list) and online.

3. Consider using match types for your keyword list. Remember however if you use phrase match negative keywords, you will need to enter in plurals. To enter in phrase match keywords, use the same syntax by quoting the phrase.

4. Look for the smallest number of keywords that still make your negative phrase workable. Instead of a negative keyword phrase like “luxury Hawaiian vacations”, maybe luxury all alone is a better match or the broad match variation of “luxury vacation” and “luxury vacations”.

5. Use the shared library. By adding your negative keywords to the shared library, all your campaigns and ad groups in your AdWords account will share the negative list. This action makes it easy to update your global keyword list. Just make sure if you add a new campaign to the account that you link that campaign to the shared list.

If you need help with your AdWords program, I invite you to find out more about the services my firm provides for AdWords set up and account management.

May 20, 2014May 18, 2014

New Title Tag Length for Google Search

Illustration of new title tag length on Google.

If you are a Google watcher like me, you’ve seen changes come and go on Google. Here is a new one that I am seeing now in the search results and it has to do with the length of the title tag.

“I am seeing title tags of 49 to 58 characters but typically with a pixel width on the Google page of search results ranging from 486 to 506 pixels wide. It is time to shorten your title tag from 80 characters down to 50 to 55.” – Nancy McCord, President of McCord Web Services

After reading this article at SiteProNews, I started really checking out the title tags. Previously we had been recommending a 80 character title tag but had typically exceeded that as Google would truncate the title tag to there needs, but in some cases would show the full title. Bing would show more than the 80 characters as well. Now however, Google seems to prefer about the 50 character length at this point in time and is justifying the title in formatting to fill the smaller space. The font of the title is larger but with fewer characters.

Bing is showing a variety of title tags and without the justification that Google appears to be using in formatting. Bing is also showing the title tag with a bigger font.

My recommendation at this time is that if you have not reviewed your title tags in over a year, I would recommend a review and possible revision. I will be revising mine to a 50 character length with a clear description of the page written in marketing-type language (meaning to entice a click in to my site).

April 24, 2014April 20, 2014

AdWords the New Keyword Discovery Tool

In the name of privacy Google has been stripping away one by one the tools website owners and SEOs have used to identify important keywords that drive organic traffic.

First, it was Google’s announcement that they were moving only to https:// and that they would no longer supply keyword data for organic search activity in your Google Analytics account. This was sold to the public as a way to keep you the user secure from prying eyes. The dreaded “not provided” for keyword data started to appear in all Google Analytics accounts for more than 60% of the recorded traffic.

Now Google is stating that they will not even flow AdWords search terms into Google Analytics. Although I do not believe that this change can be passed off as a user security enhancement, it clearly is a move on Google’s part to enhance their own ROI. Due to this soon to be enacted change, the only way a website owner can now know AdWords search terms is to login to their own Google AdWords account. Some data is available in the Google Webmaster Tools site but only the top 2,000 queries and only for a 30 day period. This data will no longer appear in Google Analytics.

“This change means that Google AdWords is not becoming the world’s most lucrative keyword search tool.” Nancy McCord, President of McCord Web Services

Remember when you used to pay for a subscription to WordTracker so you could optimize your own or client website’s with words with a high KEI index? Is this the direction that AdWords is moving in? Do we need to have a running AdWords account while we are optimizing a website so we can see keyword traffic?

To me it seems like Google has decided to start closing access to their own services and are moving to a pay to play model.

April 22, 2014April 20, 2014

What’s the Perfect Length for Social and Blog Content?

What’s the perfect sized blog post? How about a tweet, is 140 characters too much? Who says that a longer Facebook status update is better, is it 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?

Below are personal recommendations on what works best for each platform based on what our own customers and readers seem to like best.

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.

Facebook – what’s the perfect length for a status update?
Customers do think that more is better when it comes to paid writing on Facebook, but does more necessarily translate into more engagement? Buffer says the perfect Facebook status update is 40 characters long. Wow, that seems pretty short and hard to really even express what a link in your updates is all about. From my personal experience about 150 to 160 characters seems about best for Facebook. Facebook updates with an image or linking to a page with an image (so Facebook will show a thumbnail) seem to get the most response.

Blogging – what’s the perfect length for a blog post?
Buffer says the ideal blog post is 1,600 words. 1,600 words translates into more than three pages of a Word document. When was the last time you read this much content on one website? Unless the article was enriched with data, statistics and unique research from a highly authoritative writer and on a topic that was really important to me or about something I wanted to learn about, I have to say that the chance of having a real audience be engaged from introduction to conclusion would be pretty slim.

Recent studies have been done on how Internet and screen reading have cut the general publics attention span. Internet articles are not read like books or print articles but rather scanned. Have too much content, not enough white space, blocks of content that are more than two sentence long and you risk losing your reading audience.

My customers vote with their pocket books and our top selling blog writing levels are those at 200 to 250 words per blog post followed by 140 to 300 words per post long. I personally like blog posts that are 300 to 350 words long as this is just long enough to flesh out a topic and really have something interesting to say.

So what’s your perfect length? Just as a point of reference this post is a little over 500 words long. If it was the supposed “perfect blog post” it would be three times this long!