Choosing KPIs is always a challenge – you want metrics that reflect the business, show the success of your marketing, and are manageable. As humans, we also love metrics that make us look good. However, metrics that make us look and feel good can frequently […]
Choosing what to measure the most important aspect of building great campaigns that drive nonlinear business results. If you’ve found someone who has cost per click as their be-all, end-all measurement, don’t walk… run! Your measurement plans should be somewhat unique to you as a […]
Improving your SEO can be a lot like saving for retirement. You keep investing for ages before you start to see the impact of your compound interest. Investing for the future is a good way to think about SEO – good SEO takes time, effort, and rarely has an immediate impact.
That being said, it’s worth taking the time every day to invest in making your site SEO more effective with these five checks.
If you were to look just at the heading tags on your page, would you know what the page is about? If the answer is no, spend a few minutes adjusting your heading tags to make it read like an outline. The page should be structured so that a user or search engine crawler can understand the important parts of your page without ever reading the paragraph text.
Find out more about how to use heading tags effectively.
For internal or external links, replace any bad anchor text with richer descriptions. The anchor text is the words that are underlined and compose how the actual link itself reads to the user. Search engines use this text to understand what the page you’re linking to is about. This means phrases like “Click here” and “Contact us” are essentially useless.
Consider making those richer. “Click here to learn more about SEO” or “Contact us for help with your digital marketing” can provide better search engine optimization.
After you’ve checked your heading tags and improved the anchor text, spend some time tightening up your copy. Make sure that it’s easily readable and understandable, both for humans and machines. This can help encourage users to engage more with the page, which is an indicator for search engine rankings.
When you’re tightening your copy, it’s worth pulling out some old high school tricks. Reading it out loud makes it easier to spot areas where it needs to be refined.
The world has gotten more visual, and having images is essential to creating engaging content. Go through the images on your page and/or site and make sure that they have alt text. And even for images that have alt text, find areas you can improve it and make it richer with relevant keywords and phrases.
Using SEM Rush, Moz, or Google Webmaster Tools, create a baseline of how your page was ranking before you made the changes. This will help you understand which changes have the most impact, and which don’t have any impact so you can refine your approach moving forward. Google Webmaster Tools now has a year’s history of data, so it can be as easy as keeping a record of which changes you made on which dates and then looking at it pre and post change.
Heading tags are an incredible opportunity to fine-tune your pages for Google, and using them well will improve your SEO. What are heading tags? Heading tags are the pieces of code that use where X is a number from 1 – 6. These you can […]
Waste. Advertisers hate it, but it’s an inevitable part of any online display advertising spend. It’s a bit like the old Wanamaker quote “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” Luckily, we are in an […]
AdWords is awesome – it’s easy to use, and it’s great for getting traffic to your site. When was the last time you gave your account a second look to make sure it’s as efficient as possible?
Here are five 5-minutes checks you can do to get on top of spotting errors, addressing inefficiencies, or making things more efficient.
No matter how much you try to refine this list from the start, it’s one that needs to be consistently managed. Especially if you use a lot of broad match keywords, you’ll want to go through and see what matches have shown up that are not a fit for you brand.
If your key goal in running Google AdWords is generating new visitors and potential new customers, then double check the landing pages the search traffic is landing on.
If paid search is the only media you’re paying to run online, you can use the pre-defined “Paid Traffic” segment in Google Analytics.
Otherwise, make a custom segment in Google Analytics for your paid traffic.
Once you have your segment ready, go to Content > Landing Pages and you can see New Users on each of your landing pages, as well as the percent of traffic those new users represent. If your paid campaigns are showing a significant number of returning users, considering using RLSA to remove return visitors from your AdWords targeting.
While you’ve got your analytics segmented, go ahead and go up to Audience > Geo > Location and take a quick look at the areas your paid search traffic is coming in from. Is it coming in from where you’d expect? Are you not getting any traffic from places you would expect to get some? If you see anomalies like this, check your geo-targeting in AdWords and make sure it’s tight.
If your campaigns have always been based on a broad match keyword set, you might consider testing taking some of your top terms and implementing them in AdWords as exact match types. You’ll want to still have broad match groups to capture all of the long-tail terms.
In Google’s algorithm for AdWords bidding, Quality Score is an important factor in what you ultimately pay. Frequently, switching to exact match on your top terms will improve the relevance and improve the quality score. Ultimately, this will be decreasing what you need to bid!
Numerous studies have shown that having both an organic result and a paid result on the same SERP increases the click-through-rate far more than the sum of having either on their individually. I’ve actually seen this happen for clients!
So go into Webmaster Tools/Search Console, and check which terms you’re ranking the highest for. If you’re not already, consider adding the terms you’re on the first page for to your paid campaigns.
Hopefully, these hints and tips will make your paid search campaigns more effective! There have been times where doing any one of these checks will find 10% or more budget being wasted. Save that money for other investments, and make your paid search more efficient.
The care and keeping of an analytics implementation takes time and effort. Luckily, tag managers like Google Tag Manager have made this easy over the years – but while keeping the tags updated is one need, so too is making sure your Google Analytics (GA) […]
Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work is one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. It emphasizes thinking about how you go about making good decisions and how you can systematically build processes in your life to correct […]
