I attended an Advanced AdWords seminar last week and am revisiting the topic of Building National Ads for Local Needs .

This seminar was sponsored by Google and lead by Brad Geddes of BG theory . While most of the Advanced Class was more a refresher than anything new, it has prompted me to make a change in my national campaign strategy for local business. In addition to the negative terms I use (listed in the original article), I now also use exclude cities, regions and metro areas in the campaigns Location settings. If your business is in Madison Alabama area, I would create local and national campaigns. In the national campaigns, I would exclude the areas covered in the local campaign and then add exclusions for all cities named Madison in the country (Google lists 24 all together).

SEM adwords, alabama, Huntsville AL, Local Marketing, ppc, SEM

When I started my consulting business, I imagined that I would be working with some larger firms with in-house web and marketing resources. I imagined that much like it had been for me as an in-house marketer, I would apply my SEO/SEM skills to a given situation and others would carry out the recommendations.

While it does work that way some of the time, I frequently work with small companies that have little or no marketing and/or technical expertise. It is unlikely they know or have anyone who knows what an <H1> tag is, or how to create an .htacess file.

I had one customer whose shared-hosting provider experienced frequent outages, sometimes several hours a week and another whose canned shopping cart was broken by a system-wide upgrade and was unable to process orders for months.

The long and short of this is that while my focus is SEO and SEM services, I frequently provide additional marketing services through relationships with local designers, programmers, and copywriters. Some of these folks I know from my days as an in-house marketer, others I have come to know and respect through clients projects.

I enjoy the challenges brought by different types of businesses and the opportunity to make a difference.

How about you, any stories you can share?

SEO Huntsville AL, Internet Marketing Websites, SEM, SEO

This past week I was asked to speak to a group of CEOs at the Huntsville business incubator, BizTech . In preparation for the meeting, I created a slide presentation that discusses organic versus paid search results and some of the elements that come into play when improving Search Engine Rank.
Here is a link to that presentation. Internet Marketing Overview.

I recently updated this presentation for the North Alabama Web Developers group. The update is here.

SEM, SEO Biztech, Huntsville AL, Organic Search, Paid Search, SEM, SEO

Let No Good Phrase Go Un-clicked

If you have read much on SEO, you know that page name, title, and content play a big roll in the optimizing you pages. However, there is a second phase of optimization that shouldn’t be neglected.

When you develop your content, you optimize you page for certain keywords or phrases. However, after launch it is important to follow up to see what phrases are driving people to your site. It’s important to verify that your key phases are working and certain your pages aren’t being recognized for the wrong phrases.

You can monitor and identify phrases that convert in your analytics package or by working your SEM campaigns. But how do you identify phrases that are showing in search results, but that are not getting click-throughs? Google’s Webmaster tool is a good resource, specifically have a look at >Statistics > Top search queries. What you get is a month by month report of words that being displayed in Google’s search results. The list on the left is all results, and the list on the right are the phrases that were clicked on.

You can follow this month-by-month to see what is moving up or down in Google’s Search Results page. Any of target phrases that only show up in the list on the left side should be tested and associated page descriptions evaluated to understand why these good phrases are going un-clicked.

SEO Huntsville AL, page optimization, SEO, webmaster tools

Ever wonder what Google is ‘thinking?’

It is important to know how Google views your site, because if Google has the wrong impression, you will get traffic with high bounce rates. High bounce rates equate to low search engine relevance. You need to know that relevant terms are being found so you can locate any ‘offending phrases’ and eliminate them from your pages.

You can start with Google’s Webmaster tools. If you haven’t signed up for this, you should. It’s free and can be very helpful. Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ to sign up. The tool requires that you verify ownership either by placing a meta tag (that they provide) in your home page or creating a blank web page with a specific page name. Once you are verified, look at >Statistics >Top search queries to confirm what search phrases your site is being displayed for and which of those phrases are generating clicks. Also check >Statistics >What Googlebot Sees. What you should see is a list of “linked text” found in external links to your site. Google weighs linked text and surrounding phrases heavily when evaluating relevant phrases for your site. (Note that you may get the error “Data is not available at this time,” in which case you will see two lists: one titled “In your site’s content” the other “in external links to your site.” I believe this occurs when you don’t have enough incoming links to generate a report, but the information is still instructive.)

I believe you can also get some good ideas by using its keyword tool for website content. Just for grins, go to Google’s keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, select >Website Content and type in your URL. Then, based on what Google finds when it hits your pages is a list of “keyword groups.” If your site is optimized well, these phrases should all be relevant terms. If any of the “keyword groups” are not relevant, you have some work to do. Navigation, page names, and site structure all play a part.

– It’s also a good idea to try the keyword tool on a competitor’s website.

Added  11/2008:

Google has released a new keyword tool named the Search-Based Keyword Tool. This tool tells you what keywords you are currently missing out on based on search data directly from your website’s content. Viewing this in reverse, that is looking at recommended phrases that shouldn’t be there, is another good what to know what phrases Google is associating with your site.

SEO Huntsville AL, site optimization, webmaster tools