Spend on Search – The Budget Alternative
With macroeconomic conditions in Australia meaning that many businesses are tightening their belts, the most common area that spending is being cut from is marketing.
This is evident by the fact that marketing positions are down by 26% across Australia (BRW Magazine) as many businesses look to cut the fat from their advertising dollars.
But there is a cheap alternative to traditional advertising mediums… search.
There are two kinds of ways businesses can spend money on search. One is through search engine optimisation (SEO) where professional optimisers improve your website’s position in search engine rankings. The other is search engine marketing (SEM) which are the paid ads you will see above and to the right of natural search results.
There are a number of reasons why search engine spending is a wise alternative. Let’s do a quick comparison:
A full page ad in many print media publications costs between $6000-10,000 for just one run. And this is occuring at a time when many businesses are noting a distinct drop in conversion to sales from print media.
One of the clients I manage has a Google AdWords budget of $90 per day. One of the great things about investing in SEM is the ease with which detailed statistics can be obtained and sales conversions tracked. Here are the basic facts from four weeks of the AdWords campaign:
- Around $2500 was pumped through AdWords in that time. This compares quite well to the $6000 that would have been splurged on a print media ad.
- The Ads generated about 180,000 impressions. That means 180,000 people actually had the ad appear on their screens. Even if the readership of the print publication was 200,000, this does not mean that 200,000 people saw the ad, especially if the ad is buried on page 37.
- As a result of these impressions, over 1200 visitors were sent directly to the site.
- This translated into 350 conversions at an average cost per conversion of around $6.50. With the print media ads, it is often very difficult, if not impossible, to tell exactly how many sales have been generated.
So when we sit back now and look at the final figures, this particular client spent half as much money and generated around the same number, if not more, views of the ad. But the thing is, they know exactly how much they spent, how many views they had, and most importantly, how much it cost them per sale to undertake the advertising.
It is this combination of factors that makes search such an attractive alternative to traditional marketing.
But SEM is just half of the picture, as that $6000-10000 can also buy your company a whole lot of SEO. By putting that money into professional SEO you’ll get around 12 months of continual optimisation for Google and the other major search engines.
This means 12 months, not one print run, of potential customers seeing your site up the top of search engine results, and that translates into sales.
So despite many business’ financials being quite tight around Australia at the moment, SEO and SEM remain highly lucrative options as their relatively cheap nature and ease of tracking make them a smart solution for all businesses.
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Read MoreShattering your Site’s SEO – The Google -60 Penalty
There’s been a rather interesting development in Google’s algorithm in the last few months and it has come about as a result of Google Sitelinks appearing at position 61. This has lead many SEO specialists to claim Google has introduced a negative 60 penalty.
Google Sitelinks are the links you see from time to time below the first result in Google. Google claims that the algorithm for Sitelinks is independent of its other algorithms and that navigation is the key to getting Sitelinks to appear below your website’s listing.
However, the only thing that is known for sure when it comes to Sitelinks is that they only appear for sites that have a stable number one ranking for a particular keyword. So the fact that Sitelinks were appearing at number 61 meant that the Google Sitelinks Algorithm (independent of the ranking equation) thought the site did have a number one ranking, not 61.
It is this result that has lead those in the SEO game to reason that Google has introduced a -60 penalty to the ranking equation. What this means is that a site that would normally appear in position one is now appearing in position 61, and because the Sitelinks algorithm still thought it was number one, we can assume that it was just one factor that was added to the ranking equation, but wasn’t added to the Sitelinks algorithm. Google have seemingly fixed the problem with Sitelinks appearing at number 61, but the sites themselves that dropped by 60 places are still in that position.
So the question then becomes; what is it that these websites are doing that is so bad it is costing them 60 places in Google?
When the issue first came to the fore in February, numerous discussions broke out about why Sitelinks were appearing so low. Whilst no-one from Google officially confirmed a -60 penalty exists, some Google employees, including Matt Cutts (Google’s Head of Webspam), did comment on these discussion boards that Google was penalising sites for paid links.
So without directly saying so, it appears that Google is now penalising sites 60 ranking places if it deems the site is taking part in extensive paid referral activities (called site-wide-links).
So the message here for the moment is to stay well clear of paid referrals, or any linking techniques that appear as if they are for paid referrals. The penalty is too great to risk it.
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Read MoreBuilding an Online Store
When it comes to setting up a new physical retail space, most business owners will take the time to research demographics in the new area, write up a new business and marketing plan and not be afraid to spend time and money to make sure it works.
So why is it then, that as soon as that new store becomes an online one, planning and deliberation take a back seat. Many businesses will simply spend up big on a new website and sit back, waiting for sales to come rolling in.
The downfall of many online stores is that they do not go through the same planning steps that a ‘bricks and mortar’ store would, and this is major downfall because for many businesses, online stores make the same if not more, than their physical stores put together.
For a physical store, businesses spend extensive time and money on choosing the right store location and signage to make sure that potential customers can find their store. Online stores are no different. It is even more important to make sure consumers can find your online store because unlike a physical store in a shopping centre, there’s basically zero chance of a customer accidentally finding your store on the web. For this reason, it becomes essential that you have invested wisely in search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM).
Without adequate investment in both these facets of e-commerce, customers won’t be able to find your store and any investment in an expensive, flashy website will be wasted.
The key then becomes utilising the right resources to make SEO and SEM work for your business. Whether this be a do-it-yourself attempt or outsourcing to a professional with industry knowledge (www.reloadconsulting.com), it is essential that you take the first steps towards a successful online business.
For more on why you need SEO: http://searchstrategy.com.au/?p=4
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Read MoreGoogle AdWords – How to Make the Most of Your Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Whilst organic search engine optimisation will get you so far, it does have its limits. This is mainly due to the fact that when it comes to organic SEO, it is not possible to optimise for every keyword you want to generate results for. Attempting to optimise for ridiculous numbers of keywords is more than likely going to get you blacklisted from Google, and once this happens you really are in a whole world of pain.
So the best option for increasing your reach through search engines is to plunge into the world of search engine marketing through pay-per-click programs such as Google AdWords. Pay-per-click programs allow you to design the four-lined ads you see above and to the right of search results.
But designing your ads is not as simple as it seems. It’s not just a matter of slapping together a promotional piece and waiting for the sales to come rolling in. Google have strict editorial guidelines that govern the use of punctuation, superlatives and displayed URLs. Plus there’s also the trick of using the right kinds of messages that are going to work in a search engine environment. The word chains that you use for your search engine advertisements are vastly different to the messages you would use in more traditional marketing mediums. This is where it becomes important to ensure that your ads are:
- In line with Google’s editorial policy;
- Utilising the kinds of messages that search engine users are looking for;
- Pulling the right kinds of users to your site; and most importantly
- Generating you sales.
But designing the ads is just the first step. Once your ad designs have been created, you need to specify how much per click you are willing to pay as well as listing the keywords you wish to target.
You might be thinking that this is a straightforward budgeting exercise, but unfortunately, AdWords is not as simple as just listing a whole heap of keywords and setting a per-click budget. This is because Google does not simply see who has the highest bid for a given keyword and display their ads first. If this was the case, one cashed-up company could theoretically dominate every keyword search in Google.
Google consider what they call their Quality Score, which takes into account a whole range of factors to determine how relevant your ad is to a given search query. This often means that a small-targeted business can out-perform a large broad corporation despite the larger company outbidding the smaller one quite considerably.
Like most of their algorithms, Google do release part of what goes into into their Quality Score calculation, but how it all comes together is kept secret. An experienced SEM company, such as Reload Consulting, learns from experience how to improve a campaign’s quality score, and this is why investing in an AdWords campaign manager is a wise move.
The quality score is calculated by taking into account a number of factors including landing page load time, landing page relevancy, ad content relevancy; and a combination of how all these factors relate to the keywords. The trick then becomes knowing how to use each of these variables to maximise one’s quality score, and hence, placement in paid search results.
So to achieve the best results from your search strategy, use a combination of both organic SEO and paid SEM. And be prepared to spend a lot of time tinkering if you intend to go it alone.
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