Video is everywhere. It’s on the TV, it’s on your computer, it’s on your phone… With companies now complimenting their SEO by actively promoting their products on video sites such as YouTube, it’s important to analyse which of your videos are performing the best, which are the most popular, where your visitors are coming from – exactly as you do for your website.

We’re occasionally asked how you can monitor video usage on YouTube. As you’d expect from a Google owned company, YouTube has analytics. Here’s where you can find them.

1. Go to YouTube and log in;
2. In the top right corner of your screen, click your account name and then select “Account”;

   
   

3. Click the link marked Insight
   

   
   

   
   

4. Hey presto! You can drill down to view stats on specific videos, demographics and more using the links at the bottom left corner of the screen. You can also download reports towards the bottom of the page.

   

Does this give you all the information you need about your videos? Let us know your thoughts!

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I’ve recently dealt with several WordPress installations. I am by no means an expert in this one so, you know – this is an amateur’s guide to the essentials. But sometimes an amateur’s guide is best. Yes? or No. I don’t mind – you can leave your opinions in the comments.

So – you’ve got your basic WordPress installation. Someone has promised to skin it for you to make it pretty, someone else has promised to link it in to the site so visitors and search engines can find it, another person is actually going to write the magic content. That’s everything covered isn’t it?

Nope. Really very much nope. Here are my 5 SEO essentials for WordPress:

1.) Top, number 1, really very big, super important thing to remember. Think Pete wrote about it a couple of weeks ago. Check you haven’t accidently blocked the entire website. You can do this by going to your WordPress dashboard and going to Settings > Privacy Settings and checking the Site Visibility and check that it says “I would like my site to be visible to everyone”.

2.)Google XML Sitemaps – this one generates a special XML sitemap which will help search engines. The one to watch out for here is to ensure that the root of the blog has a writeable sitemap file – so if you have told the plugin that you want the sitemap to be at mysite.co.uk/blog/sitemap.xml, then ensure that you have placed a file there with that name and ensured that it is writeable

3.)All In One SEO – after installation of the plugin, go to the “options configuration panel” and ensure plugin status is “enabled” and that you’ve filled in some good keyword rich stuff for “Home Title” and “Home Description”.

4.)Permalinks – a really good one that isn’t default. This is part of WordPress – no plugin required. Go to Settings > Privacy. The default option has question marks and parameters and numbers. This is not particularly useful – a far better option is “month and name” which includes the name of your blog post – hopefully getting some keywords into the URL structure. In order for this to work, you must ensure that the root of the website contains the .htaccess file and that the file is writeable.

5.)Google Analytics For WordPress – a straightforward one this, to ensure that all your posts of your analytics tracking script on.

Drat. I always think of a 6th essential point but 5 is snappier – let’s just say – another thing to consider then…

Another Thing to Consider.) Promoting your blog on Social Media – there are lots of auto tweet plug ins. I tried a few. I didn’t enjoy the experience on any of them very much. I’ve decided to stick, for now, with my trusty friend twitterfeed.com

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Which statement do you believe?

 - Marketing is a function of Sales

- Marketing operates besides Sales

- Marketing operates with Sales as a function of Marketing

I found this table that Marketing Sherpa released. It shows the ownership of responsibilities and activities in relation to sales leads.

Amongst other things such as what is marketings role in lead generation, engagement and conversion? This tables throws up an extremely valid question – who owns leads in the B2B marketing world?

According to this breakdown a number of things are a little startling:

1. Only half of B2B marketers use a CRM system to manage the leads process. 

Not everyone has to use a CRM system, thats fine, so long as you are genuinely monitoring the leads process. A CRM system is the accepted way of working though. Why? Because it is essential that every lead has a montiored and recorded lifecycle in the marketing and sales process. From acquisition to becoming a client (and I would argue that through the customer lifecycle) each contact should be recorded, segmented and monitored in order to move through the lifecycle correctly.

2. 55% Do not collaborate on what makes a lead.

Well here the issues really start. Marketing could argue that anyone who shows an interest in anything to do with your business is a lead. Sales could go to the other extreme and argue that only leads that are qualified against rigid criteria and essentially all the pre-sales is done should be considered leads. Now in my humble opinion neither of these lend to a pleasant working relationship and certainly neither are an effective model to move forward. Being able to work together on defining what works for both sales and marketing is important, but what is really key is having the openess of relationship to review the lead qualification criteria regularly.

3. 66% of B2B Marketers do not measure lead generations contribution to revenue.

Then how do you measure the effectiveness of marketing activities designed to attract, capture and convert new business? What is really astounding here is that I really do know B2B marketing managers who are actively recruiting new business opportunities (leads) but have no clarity on what their efforts mean to the bottom line.

Now, Im about to open a can of worms… but what is wrong with marketing having clear targets for lead generation based on the attainment of new business revenue? I firmly believe that a marketing led business should inform its marketing strategy with the breakdown of targets by product line/sales team/segement however works best for you. This way you know where you are heading and can ensure that everyone is pulling in the same direction.

4. Rating and nurturing leads.

The function of lead generation marketing is to Attract, Engage and Convert. Without an effective method for doing this you can’t move leads through the marketing lifecycle. It means you cant target your marketing to different stages of the groups, so new contacts get downloads, warm ones get invited to a webinar and hot get a one to one meeting offer complete with sign up discount.

5. Passing leads back to marketing.

This is essential to determine the success of lead generation in terms of quality, but can also be used to identify the gaps in the sales/marketing process. Dont forget, leads = money! 

There are leads that sales people themselves will want to own and evolve. There will however be leads that have qualified out on budget, a delay in the project, the decision maker has suddenly gone off long term sick. These leads should not be lost. You have invested time, effort and money into moving them into a hot prospect, so ideally they will stay with the sales person to follow up in a 6months but also get assigned back to marketing to ensure maintained warmth through newsletters, whitepapers and special offers that will start them moving back up the sales funnel again.

What’s the fight really about?
Realistically the battle between Sales and Marketing shouldnt exist. Both are essential to the business and both have a crucial role to play in the growth of revenues over time. However, marketing, unlike sales, should be about the identifcation of opportunities; opportunities to attract new business, opportunities to improve engagement, conversion and ultimately client retention rates. Marketing should also be concerned with plugging the gaps in the process, and it isnt possible to do that until you are successfully tracking, monitoring and evaluating every single opportunity and how it moves through the marketing and sales pipeline in your business.

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I’m always on the lookout for new Search Engine Optimisation tools, tips, inside information and other great snippets of knowledge to help increase the quality of service we provide our clients. No matter how big or small, there is always something new to learn or experience.

While on another jolly jaunt across the net in search of SEO wisdom, I came across a tool created by Vladimir Prelovac; renowned for his WordPress work, he is giving away an SEO tool called SEO Doctor for Firefox. So I read through the synopsis and thought I’d give it a bash. Here’s my review…

Like most plugins for Firefox, the tool installed fine and immediately swung into action placing itself in the bottom status bar. However, my first point of notice was that there was no availability for the tool in Chrome, only Firefox. I know that may be picky as I prefer using the Chrome browser, but it was the first thing I picked up on.

What originally caught my eye when I was reading about this tool was the fact that it included a new metric for measuring the overall effectiveness of a web page. It’s been called ‘SEO Score’ (well yes, obvious I know) that takes all the other factors the tool measures into account and provides an overall mark out of 100. The closer to 100 you get, the better your optimisation.

The user interface is simply and well arranged and clicking on the display provides an easy to use pop-up panel displaying all the other factors the tool calculates.

Another interesting metric the tool measures is that of ‘flow’. This compares the amount of on-page links going to your domain, compared with those pointing to sources beyond your own website. It suggests anything above 50% is a good thing.

Clicking on the down arrow to the right of a metric allows you to access the complete information about that particular factor. The tool provides a ‘more info’ link straight to Vladimir’s website where he provides more information about that particular measurement. Very useful, as there is no need to go hunting for a separate explanation as to what it represents. Additionally, there is an ‘export to CSV’ link in the top right enabling you to download and analyse the information separately, again extending the usability of the tool.

However, the tool itself is very basic in terms of what it provides. Other than the interesting use of ‘flow’ and ‘SEO Score’ (which other tools do similarly) the information available is quite simple. Plus, everything the tool measures is orientated around on-page optimisation without any information concerning the off-page side of SEO. Information that is available elsewhere in other tools.

I decided to put SEO Doctor to the test to find out how the results of the tool weighed up. Having visited several websites, some of which on-page issues were already known, the only thing I picked up on was that of its page loading measurement.

One site I visited SEO Doctor told me it took 5 seconds to load the page giving me a lovely, big satisfying green tick next to the factor. Now, I would say that 5 seconds is actually on the slow side of things, a time I would expect this particular web page to take using a dial-up connection – but I’m using cable! So I ran the site through another tool I use for measuring site load speed. That told me the site takes 0.75 seconds to load – somewhat of a difference! (I then ran a second test to make sure, SEO Doctor said 2.5 seconds, my reliable tool said 0.7 seconds)

So, my conclusion.

Although the site speed’s accuracy is a little debateable, overall the tool is a useful, well organised piece of software that provides good feedback with some great usability features. However, it does only contain the very basic information. So if you are interested in SEO, a beginner or an enthusiast, go get it. But I would personally recommend for the hardcore SEO’ers like us at Vertical Leap, there are far more reliable and more in-depth tools at our disposal.

Either way, there’s no harm in trying it out for yourself!

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As a website develops and grows sometimes issues will arise or become apparent which create duplicate content on your website.

Such issues might not be duplicate content specifically created by a person working on the website but a result of an issue with the internal linking structure, CMS or ecommerce platform being used on the site.

Some examples of this include where the pages on a website are available both with and without a trailing slash, for example www.yourdomain.co.uk/products/ and www.yourdomain.co.uk/products and if you create internal links to these pages from around your site as part of your search engine optimisation strategy you need to be careful that all the links are to the correct page (for example www.yourdomain.co.uk/products/) and not the duplicate page.  You also need to make sure that the pages you don’t want seeing (those without the trailing slash) redirect to the correct page (with the trailing slash).  When an issue like this has been spotted on your website it is also a good idea to use the canonical tag to ensure that the search engines know what the correct URL for the page should be.There is also sometimes an issue with the naming of pages on your website, for example www.yourdomain.co.uk/products/ could also be visible as www.yourdomain.co.uk/products.html so again you need to make sure that all internal links go through to the correct page, that there are 301s in place to stop the pages being seen and that you use the canonical tag on all pages where you know this might be an issue.

Keeping an eye on the pages indexed in Google using the site command can help you to see if there are any issues such as this on your website.  You could also ensure that you are regularly creating and checking a sitemap.xml file as this also shows you pages the search engines might find and index which could be duplicates of other pages on your site.

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As a writer at Vertical Leap, I’m intimately familiar with one stone cold fact about content marketing. If you’re going to create content, you need a subject to write about – and really, it should be something new.

This isn’t exactly a profound realisation. Look at every blog ever written; sure, there’s a central topic (be it search engine optimisation, a travel diary or just a public transcript of your entire life) but that central topic has to be explored in a new way each time.

If there’s nothing new to add then really, you could just throw up something you wrote a year ago. But will anyone want to read it?

There’s a fairly easy solution to this though: news.

There’s one thing that’s true of all subjects and which plays perfectly into a content generation strategy: nothing stays the same. Everything changes. And if you’re going to actually reach an audience at any step in your content marketing activity, you need to reflect these developments rather than rehash familiar subjects in the same old way.

Using news to drive topical content is a pretty good way of sourcing new content – it gives rise to new topics relevant to your audience, as well as new ways of looking at the existing state of affairs. At the very least, it will ensure that your content is updated on a regular basis and that your site reflects the current state of affairs, rather than being forever frozen in its first appearance.

It’s also possible that through news content, you can actively engage with topical issues, potentially building your reputation among readers as one of the more authoritative online news providers for your specific subject. Even if all you do is demonstrate that you’re aware of how things are progressing in the wider world, you’ll be subtly reassuring your readers and prospective customers that you can be trusted to at least keep up to date with the latest developments.

Still, using news as the basis of your content generation requires a little forethought and planning. You’ll need to develop an editorial strategy for your coverage – if you’re too inclusive, then your content will be drowned out by sheer volume and a lack of focus.

If you’re too exclusive, you could leave yourself with nothing to write about in a slow month. And slow months will inevitably happen; whilst nothing stays the same, change is by its nature unpredictable – and news is all about change.

So what’s the answer? Planning. Research. Identify what kind of wider contexts affect your business and where you can tie developments there back into your central subject; identify what potential readers would be looking for if they visit your site – and identify what you can do when news coverage slows to a crawl.

After all, the mainstream news publications cover almost every type of story under the sun and they still have to pad out their reporting with commentary, editorial, opinion and entertainment pieces to fill pages. With a bit of flexibility and a bit of forethought, news can be an indefinitely sustainable source of content for your site.

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Many people, SEO, webmasters or otherwise have heard and engage with PageRank on a daily basis. But perhaps few know its true meaning. This blog will help you get a grip on the meaning of PageRank, who it was invented by, its purpose, how it affects rankings and how it is measured.

Who invented PageRank?

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were the student minds behind Google, which they invented in the late 1990’s. They believed they could make an Internet Search Engine that not only returned relevant results (from on-page factors like a majority of Search Engines at the time) but also from their ‘importance’ (off-page factors) too. They created an algorithm (which is publically available and publically mind bending) which uses the naturally democratic nature of the web by viewing a link from one page to another as a vote of confidence. PageRank was thus invented by Larry Page and it was even named after him too.

The purpose of PageRank

PageRank is a value calculated using an algorithm and its purpose is to calculate the most important pages on the web. It does this by using the algorithm to assign a number or score to each page it crawls and indexes based on factors external to the page. For example, a page with links from other pages with high PageRank therefore has more importance in the eyes of Google. Therefore, the page receives a stronger amount of PageRank.

How does PageRank affect rankings?

It is common belief in the SEO world that 70% of the factors Google weighs when indexing a website as part of its algorithm are to do with its external hierarchy on the web; also known as importance, which is a factor that PageRank measures. Google themselves also state PageRank as being core to their search methods. So, it’s logical to assume that PageRank is important to rankings, however, it is only one factor of over 200 that Google employs when ranking sites, so it’s not something to get hung up on.

Toolbar PageRank and ‘real’ PageRank

There are two types of PageRank. Firstly, the PageRank we are all familiar with that provides a score between 0 and 10 featuring in Google’s toolbar. The other is the true score that Google assigns a web page known as real PageRank. Real PageRank can be anything up into the millions.

Although the topic is highly debateable, toolbar PageRank is pretty useless for any SEO other than perhaps gauging the general importance of a page and assessing the potential of other pages in terms of link building. The reason for this is in its measurement. Additionally, because we don’t know the ‘real’ PageRank of any given page, PageRank overall is, well, pretty meaningless to us. But the knowledge of understanding how it works, is not.

How is real PageRank measured?

Many assumptions have to be made regarding PageRank purely because there is not enough hard evidence, hence why PageRank is a very debateable subject. However, it is generally accepted that ‘real PageRank’ is measured using a logarithmic scale, the base value of which only Google knows.

How does this affect us SEO’s?

Understanding PageRank as best as possible with the evidence, knowledge and information we do have allows us to not only take advantage of it for the benefit of users and our website but it also provides us with that additional intelligence and ammunition to provide thorough advice and guidance getting the results we’re looking for.

Additionally, understanding that real PageRank is a logarithmic scale imposed onto the toolbar PageRank we can make several useful assumptions:

1)      If two webpages have the same toolbar PageRank, they could either have very similar real PageRank’s or completely different ones. Hence why pages with the same toolbar PageRank could rank very differently to one another. Conversely, two pages with similar toolbar PageRank’s (e.g. 2/10 and 3/10) could have very similar real PageRank’s.

2)      We can speculate with strong certainty that real PageRank is used in Google’s mystical algorithm due to its importance in rankings and calculating off-page hierarchy.

3)      Each toolbar rank is exponentially (assuming the real PageRank is logarithmic) greater than the last. This means that getting from PageRank 1/10 to PageRank 2/10 could take fairly minimal effort. However, getting from PageRank 6/10 to PageRank 7/10 could be hugely challenging due to the wide range of values that each toolbar PageRank could represent.

So, although you shouldn’t become obsessed with PageRank, get it tattooed on your forehead or write it in permanent marker on every wall in your home, this information is worth considering when you’re performing your off-page optimisation.

More intelligence means more advantage.

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Who can believe its nearly September?! I’ve already heard talk of Christmas shopping (Chris Evans on Radio 2 is to blame)! But as soon as that popped into my head, I started planning our PPC changes for the months ahead.

Like many marketing types, Im definately seasonally driven, well my marketing is, so as I too begin the tasks to revise our own PPC for autumn and winter, I thought I could extend the hand of helpfulness to you, dear reader.

Right now you are poised, ready to attract the world’s traffic with your PPC. Then you plan to sit back and watch the sign ups, free trials and sales roll on in right?… No.

Pay Per Click (Adwords) is all about conversions and conversions is all about landing pages. And with over nine years in the Search world, Vertical Leap’s PPC team knows a great deal about helping customers drive better conversions.

They have kindly helped me (and you) by putting together a list of essential tips and advice that will have your landing page primed and perfect to gain as many conversions as possible.

Vertical Leap’s: PPC Guide to Landing Pages 

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It’s a common assumption in business that no news is good news. Let’s just clarify that phrase: it doesn’t mean “there’s never any good news”, it means if you don’t hear from your customers you assume that all is well and they are perfectly happy.  It’s also usual to assume that those customers who shout the loudest get the most attention.

And it’s easy to fall into the oh-so-common cycle of reactivity.

A company doesn’t contact their clients because they label them as a ‘good customer’ – loyal, complaint-free and therefore happy to be left alone and put to the bottom of the pile of people to call.  Then when there is a problem with the ‘good client’, it’s necessary ‘red alert’ and all available time and resource are invested in sorting out the problem. Finally, other clients who have been ‘put on hold’ (because time and resource has been diverted to the customer with the problem) get fed up and say “if you don’t deliver I’m off to your competitors”.  The attention shifts again and the cycle goes on.

Every business strives to work against that trend and not fall into that trap of reactivity.  We all want to be proactive, calling our clients just to say ‘hey, how’s it all going?’. But it’s fair truth to say that if a business does fall into the trap of reactivity, it takes a while to get out of it.  So my advice to you is…..

Be a ‘bad customer’!!

By that I don’t mean start tutting loudly if you have to queue for more than a couple of minutes to pay for a coffee (chances are, the coffee will be nicer to drink after a minute or two anyway cos you won’t burn your mouth, but maybe that’s just me).

When I say be a ‘bad customer’ I mean buck the trend.

If we define a ‘good customer’ as being loyal, complaint-free and happy with little or no contact at all, being a ‘bad customer’ means you can feel totally justified in calling your suppliers for a chat, making them aware that you have done your research and that you know there are other companies out there who can do what they do.

If you don’t feel you have a total understanding of the product or service, have it explained to you – even if it takes 10 times for you to get to grips with it.

If you want to get a weekly or monthly update from your supplier, say so, and don’t wait for them to call you – pick up the phone and give them a bell.

If your supplier has a direct impact on the success of your latest marketing campaign, make sure they are involved at all points.

You’ll find that most suppliers, whether it be an SEO agency or the people that stock the stationary, are more than capable of justifying why they should continue to be involved in the future successes of your business – after all, they managed well enough at the sales pitch!

So here’s what you can do today:

- Contact your account manager and ask them to call you once a week/month/twice a month or whatever suits you best

- If you need to get a more complete understanding of the product or service, request a training session

- Don’t be afraid to say “I don’t completely understand what you do for me.  Can you go over it again?”

- If there’s a question over the on-going role of that supplier, bring them in and ask them to talk about what they have done so far and what they will do moving forward

- If your suppliers have done a good job, saying ‘thank you’ goes a long way to maintaining a successful two-way relationship!

Ultimately the secret to a successful relationship of any kind is locked firmly in the art of communication.  If your supplier knows what you want and how you want it, they can deliver in a way that’s the most efficient and (hopefully) profitable for you.  If you can help to establish a successful symbiotic relationship with them, you’ll find that it’s easier to get what you want.

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If you’ve ever had the pleasure of coming down to Vertical Leap Towers to say hello to our SEO team, you’ll know that we have a very varied background. We have a few who used to be freelancers, someone who worked in email marketing, and even a couple of SEO lifers. This variety gives us a lot of strength in depth, meaning that most likely someone has come across a given problem before. As for myself, I’ve got a background working for internet start ups, with a couple years of web marketing and SEO mixed in.

All this being the case, here are five things I’ve learned about starting a business on the internet.

1. You’re not that original.

There are a lot of people in the world, so it’s more than likely that someone or other will have had the same brilliant idea as you. There’s a reason that great scientific leaps forward occur to a few people at the same time (see, for example, the contested genesis of Calculus) – the circumstances are right, the external stimuli are there, and fundamentally, on a macroscopic scale, people are basically the same. The upshot of this is that time to market really matters. There are generally three successful positions in any given market – the first, the cheapest and the best. Which one are you? Will achieving perfection mean you are passed on the way by a more nimble rival who is prepared to launch now and take some lumps?

2. You can’t build a business on a feature.

Until a few years ago, this was absolutely true. A successful offering needs to be more than just a couple of nice tweaks to something that exists somewhere else – how many variations on twitter have you seen? And how many of them will actually have a long term impact. As I alluded to, a caveat to this is that, as more websites open up their code to outside developers, you can, potentially, build a business on a stable of add-ons like Facebook applications. Good luck with that, though.

3. The paradigm works until it doesn’t any more.

How did sites like Amazon or MySpace or Google become the accepted way of doing things? They found a new way to work, or had great marketing, or a great business plan, and in the first couple of cases, succeeded almost in spite of themselves. The bottom line is this – the standard way of, say, setting up an e-commerce site, has become the norm for a reason – it pretty much works. The safer option is always, always, always to follow the crowd – users will be familiar, they’ll understand how to use their site, and there’ll be lots of hints and tips around to help you on your way. It certainly lowers your risk. What about voice that’s nagging away at the back of your head telling you to do something different, and that your idea is special enough to succeed? It’s probably lying, but hey. You might just be brilliant or lucky enough to pull things off. Only one way to find out…

4. A clear and transparent production cycle is vital.

Developers don’t come cheap. Talent in general doesn’t come cheap. The most successful companies that I’ve worked for have had a detailed production plan, which is shared around the company. Often, this process is lead by a production manager, whose job it is to have ownership of products – from identification of business need, consultation with stake holders, setting out the development parameters to testing, documentation and release. By taking input from all of your employees, you’ll end up with a more balanced, usable offering, as well as increasing the amount of buy in you get from everyone.

Also, hire smart, dedicated people.

5. Have an exit strategy.

A well played game of chess is nothing without an end game. Similarly, don’t enter into any sort of project without an idea of how you’re going to finish things off. It’s important, within this, to understand your own skill set – you might be brilliant at bringing a business from inception, to alpha to market and to general recognition, but are you able to handle the day to day running of a company when things settle down into a rhythm, and there’s less of the initial thrill of creation? It’s important to set targets for what you regard as success, be it in terms of visitors, purchases, turnover or something else.

In the final reckoning, there are, essentially three things that will happen to your nascent company. It will run out of money (this is by far the most likely, so be prepared mentally), you’ll end up selling to a larger entity, or it will become a stable, profitable institution under your or someone else’s leadership.

Think ahead, and plan accordingly for each.

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Content is an important part of the SEO of your website. Adding new content to your website helps to reinforce your keyword messaging to the search engines as well as providing useful content for your visitors.

As I mentioned in my blog last week about internal links as part of your content generation plan (particularly if working with an external company) the anchor text you use on these links is very important to helping the search engines see this relevancy.

However, there is another important thing to note when discussing internal linking from content on your website, which is the number of times you need to link to a specific page, or from a specific keyword within each piece of content on your site. If you are creating a new page of content that mentions once of your keywords twice or even three times (natraully in the content) the it might be tempting to use all of the mentions of the keyword to link through to your target page on the site. However, the search engines will only follow the first link to any given page.

If you sell the Nintendo DS Lite and have a page dedicated to this product on your website which you use as the target for the keyword “Nintendo DS Lite”, it might be tempting to link this page three times from a new content page which mentions the keyword “Nintendo DS Lite” three times in the content. But Google will only follow the first link to your product page, so there is little point in doing this.

Additionally, you might consider targeting more than one page for the keyword “Nintendo DS Lite” as you have used the keyword three times in your content. However, this could also work against you as this could create more than one page competing for positions in the search engines for the keyword “Nintendo DS Lite” which could slow down the process of gaining a good ranking for this highly competitive keyword.

So, if you link to pages using keywords in your content, be careful how you do it, as if you don’t manage this internal link building process well you could be wasting effort creating new links or could confuse the work you’ve been doing to get the search engines to pay attention to a specific page for a specific keyword.

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Last week I introduced Internet marketing strategy as a concept and I explained the categories digital marketing channels fall into.

This week we’ll take a look at the framework overall, before going into more depth of each section over the coming weeks.

Internet marketing framework

The diagram below is a visual representation of the framework we are looking at. As you can see, the structure is a process, beginning at the top and working down highlighting key activities involved in the formulation of an Internet marketing strategy.

The framework is divided into 3 primary sections, each with their own set of sub-activities. At the core of the process there are 4 key steps:

1)       Setting marketing objectives

2)       Defining the strategy to get what you want

3)       Implementing your strategy

4)       Measuring, analysing and improving the campaign

Looking at the diagram, you will notice that the process is not strictly sequential in its flow. One element can affect another in the framework. For example, your business objectives inform what your Internet marketing objectives are; conversely, your Internet marketing objectives can also affect your business objectives depending on your industry and market.

These 4 core steps are predominantly common sense and they are familiar to a lot of business orientated action processes that require the creation, implementation and revision of campaigns, strategies or concepts. However, reinforcing these steps will help you keep in mind these important points when performing the more detailed aspects of the strategy. This in turn, can help you more easily and proactively manage other opportunities and risks that you identify along the way.

At the very top of our strategy is the most important part; the business objectives of the company overall. It’s important to maintain a clear understanding and vision of your business goals and objectives throughout the process. If your online objectives do not compliment your offline targets, you’ll be trying to steer your company ship in two separate directions!

How can this help us Search Marketers?

This framework isn’t solely for broad, business wide or corporate strategy building. It can be applied to a myriad of specific situations. E.g. On page SEO, PPC, keyword research to name just a few. You just have to apply the framework and think of it in that particular scenario. Whatever situation you apply the framework to, use it as a guide and point of reference, always keeping the four core activities relevant and present in your workings and consistently keep in mind your business objectives.

Next week, we’ll take a look into the framework sections, beginning with the definition of your online opportunity.

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Your business is growing through online customer acquisition; however your marketplace is increasingly competitive online… At what point do you choose to invest in a Search Marketing company?

When it comes to promoting business online people are keen to see results, but often their decision hinges on whether to attempt SEO, PPC and content production in-house or invest in a Search Marketing Agency like ourselves. There are lots of reasons you might be looking to invest in Search Marketing, not least of which, you want to promote your website to build your business.

The question we are frequently asked is ‘How do I decide what value Search Marketing has for my business?’.

What this question is really about is risk.

Search Engine Optimisation, Pay Per Click advertising, News Content Marketing, Social Media activities have one thing in common… results are not guaranteed. As a consquence the perceived risk is high and the question then evolves from the ‘value’ of search to its ‘worth’. (And as a marketer myself, let me just say how soul crushing it is to always bring what you know has value back to a question of cost, sigh…)

How to decide… In-house vs Search Marketing Company

- Cost. Will you hire in an expert or will the task of search maintenance fall into another existing role? Paying a full time salary of someone qualified and accredited to deliver Search Marketing is significantly more than the typical investment with an agency.

- Time. How much time will be dedicated to the task of SEO, PPC or Content Marketing? In house the pressures on staff to perform other roles is great so concetrated efforts on Search Marketing may start with the right intention, but lapse over time. An agency will guarentee the efforts they invest in your campaign. A good agency will ensure that campaigns are managed daily to ensure rankings, adwords and content articles are performing at their best for optimum achievement.

- Control. This is a significant issue for many companies we speak with. Because of the 3rd party nature of search marketing i.e. no one controls the search engines, no guarentees and promises are really valid. Businesses can feel compelled to retain control in house in order to keep a closer eye on results. A good agency will enable clients to have full transparency of their account at every stage of the campaign. A good agency will operate with their clients to deliver a strategic plan that achieves real results.

- Resources. Agencies are set up for the daily task of search marketing. For fully managed services, there are processes, technologies and best practice that simply can not be replicated in-house with serious investment of years, people and money.

- Team. A sole employee can do a good job to increase your conversions, your traffic or your content within the confines of their role. But a dedicated campaign manager, working as part of a team that performs the task everyday can increase those results immeasurably.

If you are building a business case or want to simply read more download our help guide – ‘Im Not Sure About Search…’

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One of the most frequently asked questions that I get from clients is about the long term, ongoing Search Engine Optimisation part of the campaign that we are working on together. It’s a reasonable question, too; one of the reasons that I was keen to work here at Vertical Leap was the emphasis put on long term client relationships, rather than a one and done fly by night sort of attitude. As a freelancer, you have to be able to deal with both, but I believe that agencies can, and indeed, should, form lasting relationships.

But the question still stands. It’s easy to see what happens in the first three to six months of a campaign; market analysis, site analysis, recommendations for on page changes. But where is the value once all of the structural changes have been made? To my mind, this is exactly the part of the campaign where we really earn our money.

First of all, let’s take a set back and ask why a company would contract an outside agency to do its website optimisation, its branding, its marketing. It all comes down to one thing – opportunity cost. Given enough time and a baseline level of ability, it’s more than possible for anyone to become capable of performing their own SEO campaign. At what cost, though? At the cost of taking away this person from doing what they are best at – running their own business, building value for their websites, selling their product.

Taking this back into the context of a long term SEO relationship, then. What advantage do you gain by continuing to have a managed campaign? To use a seafaring analogy, if the first part of a campaign is making a ship that is seaworthy, then from then on, it’s about manning the radar, anticipating stormy weather, keeping the engines running and most of all, trying to avoid icebergs. Essentially, it’s the fact that we spend our time doing the research, making the small tweaks, maintaining link building efforts that keep a campaign humming along. Long term success isn’t about boom and bust – it’s about stability.

A managed campaign provides the reassurance that a website will be in the best place to survive any external hazards, to react to changes in search engine algorithms, markets, search patterns (both seasonal and long term). If there are new products, or even a whole website to be launched, who is better placed to see things through than a long term partner?

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For the entire time that I have worked in search engine marketing, Google have limited the number of results that could be seen on a results page without a special operator (like a site: search that you would use to review all of the indexed pages on a domain), to just 2 per page.

One way to increase your brands domination of a SERP in this respect was to add some sub-domains to the website, and you would frequently be able to get multiple listings for your site (depending on how many sub-domains you used and the authority they accrued individually).

Early last week, Malcolm Coles spotted that Google was treating brand names quite similarly to site: searches. Here, Malcolm spotted that a number of examples such as “Guardian Football”, “Sky Sports” & “Amazon TV” were all displaying additional listings beyond the normal 2 per site that we have come to know (and maybe love).

Google have now officially announced that this is a deliberate change, with a post about how they are showing more results from a domain.

There are mixed feelings amongst the SEO community for this change based on the feedback I have read on Malcolm Coles’ blog and on Twitter.

Personally, I can see some ways where this is an improvement – for example, with regards to affiliates that rank highly for a brand term, and only send traffic and business to a site on that basis – if Google perceive that brand as a suitable authority, then they should now have multiple returned results from their own domain – certainly this has been an issue for a couple of my clients, and this could well prove beneficial (if only this change was being applied to them too).

However, other elements of this are not so useful for the ultimate end user – one of Malcolms example terms “Sky Sports”, is an instance of this – Sky Sports may well have a prominent brand, with a website providing useful news to those looking for it (though it is not my football news destination of choice), but as a product, in the UK, it is not exclusively found on the Sky TV network – it is also sold by Virgin and BT Vision, and by allowing Sky Sports to dominate this search engine results page (SERP) it possibly is damaging to the sales of the product on those 2 platforms.

This could also be good for reputation management issues – it’s not uncommon for us to be asked about what we can do to push a 3rd listing on a SERP down the page so that it isnt quite so visible, when that page in question contains information that a company would rather potential customers would not see – but crucially, is this good for the user?

I know when I am searching, I will look for both sides of an argument to use a service (i.e. the company selling spiel) as well as the reviews – both on the site in question, but particularly if I haven’t used a website before, also their reviews from other sources.

I suspect that users who really want to find this information will still do so – perhaps by modifying their search, or by trawling through deeper pages, but I suspect that a large percentage of users will not. If you want some more examples of where this is displaying, try searching for “BBC” – whilst interestingly a term like “Daily Mail” is not generating the same.

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How can I tell if my development site is indexed?

Do a quick site search by typing “site:MyDevelopmentSite.com” in Google – if you get no results then wahey – Happy days. If however Google returns a load of pages from the development site, then not quite so marvellous.

Why is this a problem?

Well it’s a problem because Google may see the development site as duplicate content to the main domain and may penalise the site you want to rank because of this. The development site may even rank higher than your main domain for your keywords. It’s also a problem for the end user, because the information on the development site might be out of date – prices or addresses may have changed. It seems a waste to ensure fantastic search engine optimisation of your new site, but then partially waste it by letting Google see a duplicate copy.

How did it happen?

Simply by putting a link to the development site somewhere so the search engines can find the link – e.g. putting the link in a forum, on Twitter or a blog may all result in the website being found. I have also experienced an instance when the main site homepage has a miniscule link at the bottom of the page with the anchor text of “test” which links to the test site – resulting in the whole test site being indexed.

How can I fix it?

Easy peasy. First go to your robots.txt file on the development site and add the line:

disallow: /

This tells all search engines that you don’t want them to crawl or index your site. This is a good start but it doesn’t work instantly and we really want Google to remove your development site ASAP. The next stage is to get  Google Webmaster tools access for the development site. Once you’ve verified yourself as the webmaster using the available options (e.g. uploading an html file to the development site root or by adding a meta tag to the development site homepage), you can then go to “Site Configuration > Crawler Access” and click on the “Remove URL” tab. Click the button for a “New Removal Request” and then type in your URL e.g.  “MyDevelopmentSite.com” and hit “continue”. You need to tick the check box to say you have added the “disallow” line in the robots.txt file. Google then tells you “This will remove all instances of http://MyDevelopmentSite.com/ from Google search results” – Good news- hit “Submit” once more, The request then goes into a status of “pending” – check back later in the day to see once the status has changed to “Removed” and your development site should be gone!

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Every offline activity that involves marketing, involves a marketing strategy to set and meet business orientated goals and objectives, to reach new markets, generate sales and increase brand awareness. The web is no different.

To succeed in the future, forward thinking organisations will require marketers and practitioners with cutting edge knowledge of the skills in the application of digital media. This includes the web, mobile and social networking to name just a few that are rapidly growing.

If you want your business to stay competitive in your market you have to stay in line with the demands of your customer. With so many consumers adopting the Internet not only for direct purchases but as an integral part of their research in the buying process, the question is not whether you should implement Internet marketing, but how you should implement it. If you’re not using the Internet to its full potential, you could be losing out on potential business.

During a 6 week series I will outline a framework that can be used to create your Internet marketing strategy. You can then change, chop and amend the process to suit your specific commercial requirements. So let’s start at the beginning …

What is Internet marketing?

Internet marketing has been defined as:

“Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies”

Importantly, the definition above helps remind us that it is the results delivered by technology that determines your investment in Internet marketing – not the technology itself!

This is very important, for example, just because everyone you know is ‘doing social marketing’ it doesn’t mean that you should be investing in it to. Speak to someone who knows what they’re talking about. We can help you move your web presence forward with search marketing.

Internet marketing channels

Generally, Internet marketing channels can be divided into 6 categories:

1. Search marketing (Pay per click and Search Engine Optimisation)
2. Online PR (Brand management, social marketing)
3. Partnerships (Affiliate marketing, link building, sponsorship)
4. Interactivity (Ad networks, interactive advertisements)
5. Email marketing (List purchases, 3^rd party adverts, opt-in email)
6. Viral marketing (Pass along emails, online word of mouth, media mentions)

All of the above channels are available to anyone, none of them are exclusive and all have their advantages and disadvantages, depending on how you intend to apply them and the market you are deploying them into.

Next week we’ll begin outlining the framework of an Internet marketing strategy. The following weeks we’ll go into more depth about each part of that framework.

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Google are set to update their Trademark policy next month across UK, Ireland and Canada to keep in line with the current policy in the USA which was implemented back in June 2009.

The updates are set to come into play on 14th September 2010 and will allow certain advertisers to use trademarks within adtexts.

An advertiser must abide to one of the following criteria to be eligible to use a trademark;

-     Ads which use the trademark term in a descriptive or generic way and not in reference to the trademark owner.

-     The advertiser’s site must sell the goods or services of the trademark and the landing page must clearly reflect this.

-     The advertiser’s site must sell the components, replacement parts or compatible products relating to the trademark and the landing page must clearly reflect this.

-     Informational Sites – The advertisers site must provide non-competitive and informative details about the goods and services of the trademark. The advertiser may not sell or facilitate the sale of the goods or services of a competitor of the trademark.

It is great to see that advertisers in the UK, Ireland and Canada can now use trademarks in adtexts to make their ads more relevant to users search queries. I have clients’ accounts that are suffering with quality score and CTR issues competing against advertisers who have been trademark approved for the branded products my client also sells.

If you have ads that will become eligible to use trademarked terms than you will need to re-submit them after the 14th September. Trademark owners can still submit a complaint against unauthorised advertisers who they do not believe comply with the updated trademark policy.

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Hannah mentioned in her blog recently about the importance of not using click here as a link anchor text for internal links on your website, which is something that causes people who work in search engine optimisation some real headaches and caused Hannah to recommend “Don’t do this. Please”.  Hopefully you will be looking at the way that you link to internal pages on your website and reducing the number of “click here”, “find out more” or “read more” links you are using.  This will mean that your website is more likely to be found for relevant keywords for the products and services you are offering and not telling the search engines that your website is about “click here”!

However, if you have a Content Generation plan and are using a news provider to create unique news content for your website then you need to look at the internal links being created in this content too.

When you receive news content from another company they will provide you with internal links from these articles to pages on your website.  However, if these links are not using useful keywords as anchor texts the benefits of regularly updated content for your site will be reduced as you won’t be benefitting from an increase in visibility for your target pages and keywords.  Using a keyword to link to the page you are using as the focus of your SEO activity will help to show the search engines that, not only is your website relevant to these keywords but that your specific page on the keyword is the most important page to rank for the keyword.

If you sell treadmills on your website and you have created a landing page for treadmills, you will have optimised this page to your treadmill related keywords to help your rankings.  As part of this you should have reviewed your internal linking to ensure that you are using Treadmill related keywords to link to the page and not “click here”.  However, if you have treadmill related news items coming through to your site you also need to make sure that the links to the treadmill page from these news items are also from your treadmill related keywords and not things you aren’t focussing on.

Another thing we’ve seen on news items is the use of really generic non specific keywords which aren’t relevant or related to the content on a website.  Again, using my Treadmills/Sports equipment related website as an example using link anchor texts relating to the sports equipment is a good use of internal links but using links such as a location such as “Portsmouth” or a more generic term such as “Running” which can be interpreted in many ways won’t help the site become an authority on or create rankings for treadmills and other sports equipment.

Make sure that the company you use to provide you with news content for your website is aware of the keywords you are focussing on as part of your SEO strategy and is using these keywords as links.

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Do you remember when you were in primary school and you were told to write a story? The teacher always said to plan your story first and to make sure it had a beginning, middle and an end.

Your story had to have a main character that went somewhere or did something. The beginning was a little introduction, the main plot was described in the middle and the results or consequences of the actions were explained at the end.

Believe it or not writing a news story is pretty similar, but your article has to be more condensed.  I personally believe a journalist’s role is to tell the reader the story in the least amount of words, my job is to read all of the less interesting bits and then to write an article in a way that saves you from having to do the same.

Writing a news story doesn’t have to be difficult and the top five tips I am about to share with you, can be applied to a story with any subject.

Tip One- The five Ws. In your opening paragraph you should answer the basic five W’s: who, what, where, why and when.  Your introductory sentence should ideally answer all of these questions in a short, snappy, direct way.

Through the rest of the story you should expand on each of these details, telling the story’s background and setting the scene. There are times when the five W’s have more than one answer each, but it’s up to you to decide which are the most important and which can be left out.

Tip Two- Use the Inverted Pyramid. The Inverted pyramid is nowhere near as complicated as it sounds. It’s a metaphor used by journalists that simply means you put the most important and interesting information at the beginning of the article, with the less relevant information left until the end.

With this in mind, the best thing to ask yourself is if your article was cut short because of space limitations, would it make sense and would a reader have a good understanding of the story?  If the answer is no, the article needs to be re-arranged.

Tip Three- Write objectively. It’s pretty self explanatory. A journalist has to write objectively, it doesn’t matter how much you agree or disagree with the content of your story, your article must be impartial.

If there is more than one side to a story, ensure you cover them all. Contrary to some beliefs a journalist’s job is to report the facts, so do not include your thoughts or judgements in the article, let your reader make up their own mind.

Tip Four- Quote people. Using quotes is a great way of keeping the reader’s interest whilst advancing the article, quotes from people involved in the story gives your article credibility. When choosing a quote find the most colourful, descriptive one available.

It is worth remembering that direct quotes are more effective than paraphrasing and can really help bring the story alive. “When my finger tips began to ache I was terrified I would lose my grip and fall on to the rocks below” is much more interesting than “Kate said she was afraid she would lose her grip and fall on to the rocks, when her fingers started aching.”

Tip Five-Choose a good angle. It’s up to the journalist to spice up a story by writing from an interesting angle. Writing an article from a different angle will help create unique web content that will offer your readers a perspective they wouldn’t have read anywhere else.  Decide on the angle before you start writing as the angle you choose will be your article’s selling tool.

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It’s fairly widely recognised now that the traffic figures quoted by Google in their Adwords tool are pretty much bunk. This is a bit of an issue for exponents of SEM and SEO both, as we all need to have some idea of traffic levels in order to guide the direction of a campaign, choose the best keywords, and so forth.

Fortunately, this isn’t the only information that Google releases. Their Google Insights and Trends tools both information about relative search trends that you can download into your spreadsheet programme of choice (ahem Excel ahem) and manipulate as you wish. Here comes the caveat emptor – be careful with this raw data. The numbers quoted are normalised to fit a scale, and as such, very depend on exactly what readout you’ve specified, what keywords you’ve entered, the timescale and so forth.

Even when you’ve narrowed a range that you want, you’re left with a choice of ‘fixed’ and ‘relative’ scaling for your data dump. The basic difference between this is that ‘relative’ scaling normalises the data to an average based on the timescale, whereas ‘fixed’ scaling measures everything against the average of a fixed period of time, normally 2004, assuming that data exists for that time, the moon is in the right part of the sky, and so on and so forth. Of course, as you might imagine, not all ‘fixed scalings’ are created equal; the normalisation factor will shift, depending on which particular keywords you have used as your input. The upshot of this is that you can get different values for the same search term.

All this being the case, it’s clearly quite a complex set of numbers to handle. But are not difficulties just opportunities in sheep’s clothing? I may be getting that confused with something else. Anyway, here are some pointers to guide you through this mathematical minefield and help you to produce some results that are in some way meaningful.

1. Relativism is everything. In a world with moving goalposts, you need to try to establish a fixed point. Chose one keyword that you know has pretty good traffic (I normally chose the one with the most volume I can find.

2. Use fixed scaling. Always do this. Always.

3. Include the chosen search term in all of the searches you perform. I generally use this phrase and four others in all of the searches I do.

4. Chose a point in time, and stick with it. Except when you need to compare seasons. Then don’t.

5. Create a normalisation factor by scaling all your data to your fixed point. Remember that it has to be the original fixed point, so you might have a few factors to include in your equation.

This should help you along the way. It’s worth bearing in mind that even this is a pretty simplistic look at things – it doesn’t take into account the different ways that Google displays search returns, for example.

Anyone have any thoughts on improving search volume estimates?

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I’ve talked about Content Marketing til Im blue… at least now someone else agrees!

You may have seen last week we published the results of some research we conducted in July. The outcome was hugely interesting as it validated our belief in two very important things:

1. fresh, unique web content is the most powerful incentive to revisit a website
2. social media is not a significant draw for the web user

I know what you’re thinking… so what, content is just content, I already get traffic to my website alright without the addition of more content.

I know myself, content production requires resources that just aren’t readily available and the returns can be difficult to measure. It takes brain power which can often be put to more immediate gain in other endeavours. And most keenly, it takes time, something which many of us really don’t have.

But just because it’s more of a challenge, it’s dangerous to dismiss the value of content marketing.

As our survey says, it is the most popular reason web visitors return to their favourite websites. Want more proof?

• 72.5% said fresh NEWS content was vital or highly important on a website
• 47% said fresh product/service information was vital or highly important on a website
• 50% said rated being a ‘Thought Leader’ as vital or highly important for a website

Still need more proof you should be thinking about creating unique web content?

Putting aside the fact that Google has already plunged its quality content inscribed stake in the rankings charts earlier this year when its algorithms changed to reward content driven websites first and foremost. Let’s also put aside the fact that the internet has evolved to the point nearly everyone has a website, everyone is trying to capture more business online and consumers are so web-savvy they respond best to real online engagement.

Ignoring all that, if you need convincing about content then let me tell you about the call I’ve just had which prompted this blog.

A well known publishing house called me, not to tout the merits of its display advertising, but instead to talk about high value, unique content. Unlike some newspapers who are essentially selling links in their content, this call started with some impressive sales banter on the competitive business markets in which we now live – he even mentioned a double dip recession – and how the only essential marketing decision I should be making is about content…

It seems advertising is only there to promote the high quality content in their online resource library, (or so this guy says).

But it got me thinking, if the traditionally slow to change publishing industry is being forced to adapt and is finding new footing selling more online content than print page advertising it’s because they are responding to a genuine demand to what sells and what audiences really want.

Surely we should all be listening a little more seriously then to the demands of the consumer and finding a way to make content marketing a real priority…

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Sitemaps are something we discuss with regard to the search engine optimisation of your website so I thought I’d continue my SEO speak series by discussing sitemaps in more detail.

Sitemaps can be both XML documents and HTML type pages where the content is visible in a user friendly way.

XML sitemaps are useful to help pages on your website get indexed, although as Pete said earlier this year, they don’t create rankings . When adding large blocks of new content on the site we recommend adding a new sitemap.xml file to the site. Another good way of doing this is to have automatic generation of the sitemap.xml file on your site so that this is not something that you manually have to remember. If you have a WordPress blog you can automatically generate an XML sitemap using one of the free plugins available on the Plugin Directory  and there are also tools which can be used for non WordPress sites including Google’s Sitemap Generator. XML sitemaps are great as they allow you to list all of your products in a way that Google can find them, which is esopecually important if you have a shop on your site and are selling 6,000 products.

An XML sitemap should begin with the urlset tag and end with the close tag. This tag should contain a protocol standard such as xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″.

Each URL entry should contain a URL tag and a loc tag as well. XML sitemaps can also include a last modified date using the lastmod tag and a change frequency date using the changefreq tag. Dates for the last modified tag should be in YYYY-MM-DD format. The Change Frequency can be set to the following options:

• Always
• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Never

Personally if you are going to use yearly or never I’d not bother with this tag.

XML sitemaps are also used when you become a Google News Provider. This type of XML sitemap is in a slightly different format than a normal XML sitemap and is aimed specifically at the Google News Bot. A Google News sitemap should contain the following tags:

• Publication
• Access (if access is limited via a signup or paid subscription, if not this can be left out)
• Genres (this can be things like “pressrelease” or “usergenerated” if these are appropriate, if not this can be left out too )
• Publication Date (required and again should be in YYYY-MM-DD format)
• Title (the title of the news peice)

There are some other guidelines for Google News Sitemaps which can be read at Google’s News Sitemap help page

HTML sitemaps are more for users of the site but also help to provide additional text based links to pages on your site. Hannah provided some useful best practice guidelines for creating HTML sitemaps earlier this year including not having too many links on each page and using keywords and phrases as the link anchor text. Remembering to update your HTML sitemap is important as well as the XML version of the sitemap. However we’d not recommend listing all of your 6,000 products in the HTML version of your HTML sitemap as this then becomes to cumbersome for users to look through and easily find what they are looking for.

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4. Google Sitemaps – Don’t Need to be Verified
5. SEO Speak: What is a Robots file?

The ‘search query report’ found in the adwords reports centre is one of my most used reports on a weekly/daily basis.

Here are my 5 top reasons why;

1.    Identify New Keyword Opportunities

Search query reports help expand your keyword lists by detailing the actual search queries that are currently triggering your ads. Additional keywords can then be added to your account to gain greater target traffic and also help increase the frequency of ads being served for these keywords.

2.    Identify Campaign Negative Keywords

These reports also help identify any keywords that aren’t relevant to your account/site. These keywords can be excluded at campaign level to ensure your ads are only served for the most relevant search queries.

3.    Identify Adgroup Negative Keywords

Keywords from several adgroups all can be served for a single search query. For example, the following account keywords;

mens football boots

“football boots”

Can all be served for the search query ‘mens football boots’. In this situation the ad with the highest ad rank will be served for the search query.

Search query reports identify which ads are being served for each search query, allowing you to add the necessary negative keywords at adgroup level, ensuring the most relevant ad is served for each search query.

4.    Identify Ads Being Triggered Without Accruing Click Costs

Up until recently, the search query reports would only detail the search queries that resulted in a click on one of your ads. However they are now detailing search queries that triggered an impression for one of your ads.

This now gives advertisers the ability to exclude any un-necessary search queries before they have paid for the click!

5.    Update Keyword Match Types

By detailing the exact search queries that are triggering your ads you can make the decision to expand your keyword search engine visibility by adding a broad keyword match type or restrict the visibility of a keyword by adding an exact match keyword match type.

Search Query report are easily accessible in main adwords interface as well as reports centre. Please see the following link for more information creating search query reports.

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1. PPC Quick Tip – Identifying The Long Tail!
2. The No 1 UK Local Search Query is?
3. Negative Keyword Research – Don’t Go Throwing Money Into A PPC Black Hole!
4. PPC Search Results – Expand Exact Search Queries
5. 4 More Reasons for Adding Content to Your Website