[car insurance]          “car insurance quote”          [car insurance quotes]

At the moment only these search queries will show ads for the terms stated above.

Car insurance                        need car insurance quote                car insurance quotes

The changes will allow close variants of the search terms to appear as well like the following:

Car inseurnce                        need car insurance quotes              car insurance quote

From mid May phrase and exact match keywords will match close variants, misspellings, singular and plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.

Based on Google’s research and testing they believe these new features will greatly benefit users and advertisers.

At least 7% of search queries online contain misspellings and the longer the query the higher the rate.

Even with perfect spelling variations occur between users that are searching for exactly the same product such as “climb Kilimanjaro” and “climbing Kilimanjaro” or “mens hiking shoes” and “men’s hiking shoes”.

Google’s organic search systems detect and compensate for misspellings and close variants.

Google has been testing these new changes with advertisers and the participants have seen positive results.

I believe this will help all advertisers as we spend a lot of time making sure that misspelling of keywords and other close variants are included in our keyword lists.  You will still have an option in advanced settings to use the original setting or make use of the new matching behavior.

Try it out and tell us what your findings are.

The enhanced ad offers the user more choices, for instance if you are advertising a small business such as the local supermarket, your ad could offer the user alternatives such as vegetables, fruits, canned good etc, making it more targeted and more relevant for the user.

Adding sitelinks to your ads has proven time and time again to lower CTR and thus improve quality score.

An Ad with sitelinks also takes up more of the Google real estate, making it more visible than your competitors’ ads, thus enticing users to click on your ad instead.

Here is an example of what an ad with sitelinks looks like on the Google SERP’s

Previously adding sitelinks meant that users would see a set of four links beneath the main ad, but recently Google unveiled their enhanced sitelinks, that has certainly gotten PPC advertisers excited.

Now instead of merely displaying links beneath your ad, you can now feature all your alternate ads, provided that they are located within the account and are closely related. Another criterion is that the ad is ranked number one on the Google SERP’s.

The enhanced Google sitelinks will look like this:

You can be certain that an ad like this will definitely grab the attention of the user and also allow PPC managers an opportunity to optimize their accounts further.

Google has announced that in testing they found that people reported that the ads containing the enhanced sitelinks performed better than those with the traditional sitelinks.

So if you aren’t already using Google sitelinks, you should get started.

Happy Marketing!

The festive period means shops are selling Christmas trees, stockings, advent calendars and singing Christmas collectibles; all of which signals that the countdown to Christmas has begun.

So what should you be doing now in preparation for a lucrative Christmas?

Here are a few things you can do during this festive season:

The first step is to look at your account’s history:

Analyse your accounts past metrics such as cost per click, impressions and conversion rate in order to plan your strategy effectively. One metric that is pretty useful is the average position of the text ads and the related performance, so you will know more or less how to position your “special ads” to achieve the best results.

Choose relevant keywords and match types:

Ensure that you add festive keywords to your keyword list such as “Christmas gifts, Christmas hampers, Wine for Christmas” etc. Be sure to also include variations and misspellings as well, in this case it would be prudent to include search terms such as “Xmas gifts, Holiday activities, Xmas table decor” etc. You could even further improve relevancy, if for example you sold Christmas trees online, you could include keywords that include a clear call to action, such as “Buy Christmas Trees”. This type of keyword is great for your ROI. Another key point is to be aware of match types, if you are operating on a large advertising spend, a campaign incorporating all match types would be feasible, however if you have a smaller budget, you can try limiting the campaigns to exact and phrase match keywords.

Inject some glitter to your ad text:

This is the time of year where the competition is quite stiff, so in order to grab the user’s attention, you need to have ad text that really jumps off the page. Include call to actions, free offers and special discount prices in the ad text and more importantly include the “Christmas” terms as well.

Landing pages and website:

It’s important to keep the Christmas feel and theme on your landing pages and website, Christmas is a significant time for many people and these little touches can make a big difference in persuading users who have clicked through to convert by making a purchase.

Happy Marketing This Christmas Season!

One advantage of PPC is that it is a lot more flexible than SEO, you can cover a lot more keywords than with a SEO campaign, so while you optimize your SEO campaign to rank high for your beter performing keywords you can also target a whole range of other keywords to drive people to your site.

I want to show a comparative report on how these can work together and especially how you can  even double your visits if you do SEO together with your PPC campaign.

For one of our clients we started doing SEO more than 2 years ago, you can really see a difference in the traffic they get. The graph below shows visits from the first of January 2009 to the 30^th of September 2010. The orange line  represents Paid traffic and one thing you can clearly see from it is that they haven’t increased their Adwords budget, it stayed the  same. If you look at the green line which represents organic traffic you will see that it gradually got more, up to a point 7 months ago where it started outperforming the PPC traffic.

The quality of the visits don’t differ a lot however, the bounce rate, average time spent and page views are a bit beter on SEO traffic than the PPC. The blue line indicates the total visits to the website, so you can imagine what the difference would have been if the client only focused on PPC or SEO. By doing both PPC and SEO you can maximize your reach to clients looking for your services.

By looking at these statistics you can clearly see how SEO traffic grows over time and how it can work together with PPC to give you a great Search Marketing campaign. So if you are just doing just PPC or SEO at the moment, you have now seen what your traffic can look like when you combine it.

The thing with brand new domains is that it takes some time for Google to know it’s there. You will eventually feature organically for your brand name or domain name, but not immediately. One thing that you can do to ensure immediate results is to run a branded PPC campaign where you only show an ad on the search engine result pages when someone type in your company name or misspellings thereof.

This will ensure that you will be seen when someone is looking for your company. The clicks for these branded terms will also be fairly cheap as there will be little or no competition. Google Adwords has got a setting called site links that is only enabled when you have a campaign that has a very good quality score and feature mostly in the first position. Now with a branded PPC campaign it is very easy to achieve this. The site links will display up to 4 of your products or services with direct links to their pages on your website, this will give the user a greater experience as they can see what your main products or services  are from your ad and  go directly to that page.

I have found that a lot of people have the Google page as their browser homepage and whenever they open it up they type whatever website address they want to go to directly in the search box. The problem with this is that they might be potential customers and if they don’t find you in that search result, they will think that your website doesn’t exist or that it is broken (believe me I had people phoning me tell me that their website is not working because they can’t find it on Google).

So if you just launched a new website get a branded PPC campaign going to make people aware of your brand. Even if your website has been indexed and appears in the first position keep your PPC campaign active and up there and make use of site links to direct people to your most popular products or services.

This week we will have a look at why you need to get professional help for your website, from the management of the website to all types of online marketing that can be utilised. The online marketing industry is an ever changing environment and if you are running your own company and still need to keep track of all the best practices needed to stay ahead something will get left behind.

Online marketing professionals work with websites and the marketing thereof everyday and trusting a company to handle your website might be worth a lot more than just the extra money that you will spend for their services.

People that I’ve met that ran their own PPC campaigns for example, realized that it was getting too involved for them to manage it properly. After handing it over to us they could focus more on their business and performance of the PPC campaigns also improved. Trying to do SEO yourself might be a bit more tricky because SEO is a lot more technical. You need someone that understands the technical side of how websites and search engines work to do that properly. Managing your social media marketing by yourself might work for a while but you will soon realize that as it grows that it will become time consuming, and you will never get to everything that you have to and do proper management of your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Do check back here the rest of the week for more reasons why you should use an online marketing expert.

That is why effective online marketing is vitally important. It is essential to have a strong online presence and not be just another needle in the proverbial haystack.

The two main ways to create an online presence is through Pay Per Click advertising and through Search Engine Optimisation. Both of these methods work very well but each one has it’s advantages and disadvantages.

SEO

SEO is where the website is optimized to perform beter for certain keywords on the Search Engine Result Pages. It involves fixing the code of the website and optimising the content for the desired keywords. With SEO your goals are more long term, as it takes time for your pages and changes to your pages to be indexed by the search engines as well as getting a good rank for your keywords.

PPC

Pay Per Click is a type of advertising that is used on websites and search engines. You set up an ad that will display when certain criteria is met and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. It works on a bidding system, you compete against other advertisers for the top spot. The placement of your ad all depends on what you are willing to spend per click as well as the relevance of your ad and content to the specific keyword you are bidding on. PPC is a lot more flexible than SEO because you can start and modify campaigns in a couple of minutes. You can see results instantly, so it is good to get a PPC campaign going while you are busy optimizing your site to perform beter organically.

The rest of the week these services will be discussed in more detail, so do come back to find out more.

Today I am going to educate you on the many advantages of Pay per click advertising and what sets it apart from search engine optimisation. So for those of you out there who feel ambivalent about PPC advertising, I offer you the following points to consider:

• PPC advertising is quick and easy to implement, you simply select your keywords and phrases and how much you would like to bid on them and you are on your way. There is no hassle or fuss as Google Adwords (The Google PPC advertising tool) makes the process of uploading your keywords a simplistic one. This is especially advantageous when you have a promotion/sale or there is an event you would like to capitalise on such as the world cup as you can write many ads for one keyword and pause them just as easily when the event is over. While developing a sites search engine optimisation on the other hand could require months in many cases
• You should be pleased to know that with PPC you only pay when someone clicks on your ads and not for each impression (each time your ad is viewed is one impression)
• Google assigns a Quality Score to each keyword, depending on how good your quality score is you will pay far less per click than what you are actually bidding for on that specific keyword. So PPC is not as expensive as some believe it to be after all
• You have complete control of your budget, you decide what to spend and when, for example if you feel a keyword is out of control you have the power to reign it in by decreasing your bid cap or simply pause it or if a keyword is doing really well and is highly profitable you may want to increase the budget to broaden its reach. It is completely in your hands
• You can write highly relevant ads suited to your product and relevant to your list of keywords thus ensuring that you receive highly qualified traffic that are most likely interested in your product or service. Organic listings (SEO) does not have ads that briefly describe your product so the traffic to an organic listing is not as qualified as it would be with PPC
• With PPC advertising even if a user does not click on your ad they will still see it on the Google landscape (impression) when they search for a keyword your are bidding on, so you achieve brand awareness and remember an impression costs you noting at all
• The Pay per click method of advertising generates immediate results whereas SEO is time consuming and is more suited to achieving longer term results.
• With PPC you can choose the language you want your ad to display in and also can target many geographical locations whilst you cannot do this with SEO
• The biggest advantage of PPC for me and what really sets it apart from SEO is that PPC is completely measurable. Google Adwords allows you to generate accurate reports on pretty much any statistic you require from your number of clicks, impressions, cost, conversions, conversion rate and click through rate. You can also get reports on your budget and return on investment.

So with all these advantages I think it’s pretty clear that Pay per click advertising can achieve phenomenal results for you or your business if executed well. Well, now I have armed you with some cold hard facts so that you can go in confidence to your boss and motivate him to try PPC advertising remembering that with more and more businesses are choosing to market their products online, one of them may be your competitor, so why not get a head start.

Well if you are at all like me then you are probably not as well on your way as you would have liked to be by now. I have been struggling to reach all the goals that I have set for myself in the past. Now this could be attributed to me setting up quite an extended list of goals or the more likely reason is because I don’t set up a plan of how to reach them.

Defining your goals consists of much more than just writing down what you want to achieve. You need to set out what exactly you would like to achieve and the steps needed to accomplish those goals. I recently started implementing project management techniques such as divide and conquer to break down my goals into smaller more manageable tasks. By doing this it has allowed me to clearly define the steps I need to take to reach my goals.

This principle shouldn’t only apply to yourself but also to your business. You need to define goals that you wish to reach with your online marketing this year. These could include online brand awareness, stimulating the conversations with your customers, increasing website traffic and direct sales.

If one of your online marketing goals were to improve brand awareness then how would you achieve this? Well social media is definitely the hot topic in 2010 for businesses, so you might want to look at how you could leverage this to increase brand awareness. Investigate what you would like to achieve this year and set out a plan to reach these.

Planning your goals is only the start, as you will need to measure the results by monitoring. In the blog posts to follow we will discuss using Google Analytics and other technologies to monitor your efforts. So please visit our site this week to keep up to date or follow our twitter account.