Internal competition, or duplicate content, is not just an SEO problem. Over the last 2 years I have probably inherited as many PPC campaigns as I have actually created from scratch. This has its pros and cons, but one of the biggest repeated mistakes I come across is accounts having duplicate keywords across campaigns targeting the same geography. Read More
In case you haven’t heard Microsoft recently launched their new search engine called “Bing” earlier this week. This is their 3rd attempt at stealing some search market share from Google and honestly I think it’s going to fail…again.
I’m not saying that the new Bing search engine is a poor attempt by any means. I think it’s a well designed search engine with some great new features. The user interface is clean and the added features like the hidden flyout on the right side of each listing with site info are a nice addition. Read More
Earlier this week Google updated their Local Business Center. Now included is some analytics data including how many impressions (how often your listing was shown), actions (driving directions to your business, clicks to your website, etc.) and which search queries triggered your local business listing.
If you don’t already have a local business listing, you can add one here - www.google.com/local/add.
While doing some general research for the home I noticed a couple of headlines that were longer than the stated 25 character limit.
Since you still can’t create ads like this in the Adwords UI or in AW Editor, my bet is that this is happening because the ad copy was created using dynamic insertion - which can change a section of ad text to the keyword the searcher used to trigger the ad. In this same way advertisers have also been able to sneak in superlatives like “best” into their Adwords ad copy. In general, ads with the keywords a searcher actually used will have a higher click through rate. I’m guessing Google is allowing these longer ads for the sake of a higher relevancy for their users. Read More
If you’ve clicked on the “conversion tracking” button in your AdWords account you may have been greeted these 2 different conversion metrics. What do they mean? Read More
I’ve been asked this question several times over the last few years and so I’d like to do a run down on the initial aspects of PPC that any new account holder will have to go through. Of course there are particulars that apply to specific industries or goals which I do not touch on. So - in some semblance of order here you are:
1. Goals - Set your goals. Read More
Google recently announced that they will be making some changes to their referral string format which will be rolling out this week.
The old url referral string looked something like this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=flowers&btnG=Google+Search
The new one will look something like this:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=flowers&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw
Read More
Today Google announced that they are rolling out longer meta description snippets for some keyword searches. The new feature will appear in search results for queries that are 3 words or longer and have a very specific intent. So for example, if you are searching for something like “Google Rolls Out Extended Snippets” you’ll see some results that have longer meta description snippets (3 or 4 lines instead of only 2) like this: Read More
Every once in a while even the biggest of websites have server issues or temporary bandwidth problems. While we always push custom error pages for 404 pages and other applicable error codes for SEO and usability sake, it is interesting to see how the big boys handle such issues.
Here is the top part of the page I just saw when causing a 500 internal server error: Read More
The day has arrived - Yahoo! has finally given more control to their advertisers with day parting. This has been a long available technology in Google, and a long desired option in YSM. Day parting essentially allows an advertiser to block their ads for showing during certain times of the day or from entire days. This is great if you only want a campaign running during business hours, or when you notice a trend that your cost per conversion skyrockets on only Saturdays. Of course, this could always have been done manually, but just setting it up in the interface itself does give advertisers and PPC managers more peace of mind that this is consistently being done.
Check out some instruction and Yahoo! day parting screenshots.
One of the most important things a local business can do is to create a locally visible presence. 20 years ago a billboard may have seemed like the best option. Perhaps a 30 second spot on local television, or maybe a newspaper ad. Not having a Yellow Pages was small business suicide as it was the only place that people would actively look for what your small business had to offer. Today more and more people are jumping online to actively find local businesses.
It’s said that as much as 40% of all online searches have a local intent, with a said whopping 80% of commercial searches having local intent. This makes sense. If I search for “pet store”, I almost assuredly am looking for one in Chicago, where I live, and not in Florida. It’s not the most refined search, but these generic searches certainly occur with regularity. Read More
A friend of mine sent me a cool new link today - the new Google Agency Toolkit can be found here. Nothing on here is new, but the convenience of having every major AdWords tool I use found at a central hub is a great improvement. Now I can consolidate 6 of my bookmarks into just one.
Some features include trend tools, placement tools, keyword tools and more.
Big news in the SEO world folks….Google, Yahoo and MSN have recently announced that they will be respecting and following what’s known as the “Canonical URL Tag”. This new tag (if it works) allows you to avoid duplicate content issues by letting the search engines know which pages are duplicate and which are the preferred versions. This is actually a very big deal for SEO’s since it sort of makes our lives a lot easier…we hope. Until now, we’ve had to play the role of duplicate content evangelists. Part of our job was to create complex webs of 301 redirects and noindex pages to handle duplicate URL’s. We have been plagued by pagination, “sort by” features like sort by price, test landing pages, and other similar devices that have been helpful for site visitors but create multiple URL’s for the same or similar content. Now all we have to do is use this tag to avoid a giant duplicate content mess all over the place.
Here’s the technical explanation of how it works quoted directly from Google’s blog: Read More
In Google AdWords there are many options and settings which you can tweak for different effects and for different purposes. One such feature is found in Edit Campaign Settings under Scheduling and Serving: Ad Serving. This allows the user to choose from 1 of 2 options - Optimize (which Google recommends), and Rotate. Read More
I know I am late to the Twitter game, but I’ve started to play and I will say this - Twitter can be great!
First - we here at Digital Third Coast started using Twitter about a month ago as an experimental way to communicate easily between all of our employees. As George and I started exploring the options we started following some users… but wait…. Read More