I have been on a mission with several of my clients to establish good landing pages. Good landing pages can improve Quality Score and your rank for key phrases. A good Quality Score means Google considers your page to be relevant to the phrases used in your ad campaigns and directly impacts what you pay Google for your ads. 

This test demonstrates the real dollar impact (savings), when it’s done right.
see: Landing Pages to Improve Quality Score

Google suggests:

• Edit your keyword and ad text so they clearly relate to each other and accurately describe your landing page.
• Choose keywords that target your audience. What terms would your customers use to describe your products or services? Use the Keyword Tool for help.
• Optimize your ad text to include your keyword and a call-to-action (such as purchase or sign up).

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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).

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I handle pay per click campaigns for most of my customers. The front-end, setting up and tuning the campaign is the most time consuming part of the effort. Finding the right words and then determining which words best convert. After the initial set-up maintenance requires far fewer hours, with much of the time spent adjusting spend for postion. However diligence and attention are important as results should be fed back into the website to improve landing pages and improve organic results for top performing phrases.

It is interesting to see how people charge for this service (most of my clients are hourly). There is an excellent article about PPC management options here

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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 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 client projects.

How about you, any stories you can share?

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It appears that attitudes on mining the lesser used, but more specific “long-tail” phrases is changing. Quality Score is making it too expensive to go after these phrases. What this means is to improve the performance and lower the cost of your campaigns you need to clear out the deadwood.

If you must stubbornly clinging to your long-tail phrases, move them their own group so they aren’t needlessly impacting the Quality Score of your other campaigns.

More on this topic here in Yahoo’s Search Marketing Blog titled:
Chasing our Long Tails.

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