Lazarus » Phil Baddock

Double your sales overnight with Google Adwords…

Phil Baddock — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 22:24:05 +0000

I wrote this article a few years back after picking up a key insight into optimising Google Adwords campaigns. It still applies today. Here it is, for all customers who run their own Adwords:

I recently had a client who we were running a large Google Adwords campaign for where the client had an abundance of different categories and words which we were targetting their ads at. We had done broad keyword research, setup around 17 categories with ads all worded and targetted at these categories. The client was spending around $100 per day on adwords and we were easily filling this my mid morning as the breadth of their keyword list and categories was huge, and some of the terms being targetted were quite broad also (this customer was targetting the home improvement market – with a consumer audience).

Ok, on to the point: The client pressed me to experiment with a drastically lower CPC than we were using. We were targetting positions 2 – 4 on average and paying around $0.50 – $0.60 per click for website visitors, and it was converting nicely at around 28% (their conversion actions were fairly easy for users to take hence the high conversion ratios). I was convinced based on various prior experiences that lowering the CPC, would of course lower the ad position, and that with less people seeing the ads, and seeing them buried down a long list of advertisements, the conversion ratios would surely plummet and the overall cost / conversion would go up – making their campaign less effective.

Boy was I wrong!

OK – so there was a drop in conversions, but it didn’t go from 28% –> 5% or even 28% –> 15%….their conversion ratios only dropped a little to around 25%. Their cost per click however COLLAPSED!! They went from paying around $0.55c on average per visitor to paying around 0.25c per visitor, and with conversions holding their ground, their cost / conversion also COLLAPSED!

The results:
a) Visitor traffic doubled.
b) Cost per conversion almost halved.
c) Volume of conversions per day doubled!

The moral of the story:

While the client was spending a lot of money on adwords, I should make it clear from the start, that this approach really works best where you have a limited daily budget to spend on Adwords each day / month and which is being easily filled each day by clicks. If you have a very small but lucrative market you are trying to reach, and a big budget, you may be in a situation where you are bidding big prices in order to win the clicks of a small group of people, so lowering your cost per click (and ad positionining) in this scenario may not make sense.

IF however you have a very broad keyword inventory, and you’re easily filling your daily click budget – I would strongly encourage you to do the following:

1. Download the adwords editor from Google which can be found here
2. Copy and paste the campaign or campaigns you are running and create a LowCPC variant of these which you can run side by side with the higher CPC campaign.
3. Lower your bid prices – halve them, go even further…..drop them to the minimum bids.
4. Sit back and watch carefully.

If you have your conversion tracking setup properly, then you should be able to clearly observe the variation in conversion %. From my experience now in trialling this approach for over 6 clients in the last few months, I predict that you will see a lowering in conversion, but in most cases not as far as you think and you will likely also see a drastic increase in the visitors, and conversions you are achieving within your limited budget. If you suddenly find you are underspending you daily click budget, then perhaps tune up the Max CPC / bid a little until you comfortably fill your budget, and observe the change in cost per conversions.

if you are in the situation described above, where you have a small budget you are spending Google Adwords each month, and a broad market you are targetting, this is highly likely to drammatically improve your return on ad spend, and potentially transform Google adwords as a channel to market for your business.

Clicks achieved in lower ad positions don’t necessarily convert at a lower rate!! As with everything in online advertising….don’t hold on to past prejudices about what you think works – just try it out and see what happens!

This article, was written by Phil Baddock, Salsa Internet’s Search Marketing Director. If any of this didn’t make sense, or if you need help doubling your sales with Google Adwords, Phil can be contacted on phil@salsainternet.com.au.

Reciprocal Links – Do they help your SEO or hurt it?

Phil Baddock — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 22:23:00 +0000

I wrote this article a few years ago, but it still applies. Anything other than sensible link exchange where you are thinking of the user experience, and NOT your site’s optimisation – doesn’t make sense. Anyway, here it is again to explain why:

Introduction – the link phenomenon

One of the important factors in ranking well on search engines such as Google is ensuring that you have a number of links pointing from other websites to your website. Website links can be a confusing thing, there are many terms used to describe them including one way links, reciprocal links, backlinks, inbound links but to explain what I’m talking about here – lets say you own ACME Shoe Sales, and you are on another website say www.great-aussie-footwear.com and you see a link that says “Visit ACME Shoe Sales” and you click on it – and it takes you to the ACME Shoe Sales, then this helps the ranking of ACME Shoe Sales.

This type of link is called an “inbound link” to ACME, or confusingly, is sometimes referred to as a Backlink for the ACME website. These backlinks or inbound links tell Google that someone else thinks that your website is worth linking to. If lots of people think your website is important enough to create a link to, then this tells the search engines that your website must be important. Fundamentally this is because when someone writes an article about your website or product, they often link to it. Google know about this phenominon (links which attribute you credit, or give you recognition for something), and so recognise it as a thing of value.

So how do you get these links to your website?

Well, there are many ways to do this including posting messages to forums with links to your website, listing your business in online directory websites, getting business partners to link to you, paying people for links (a risky practice these days), general off-line PR activities, and “Reciprocal Links” where you agree to link to someone if they link to you. This Reciprocal linking is also called “Link Exchange”. Many people still exchange links with others hoping that they will rocket to the top of the search results because “their cousin who’s an IT guy told them that was how to get ranked on Google”.

Reciprocal links – will they help?

The answer is yes and no. A few years ago, reciprocal linking alone would get you ranked well on the search engines. The problem was that everyone figured this out and so many professional SEO companies abused the practice and setup massive reciprocal linking programmes – have you ever got one of those spammy emails from people asking you to link to them if they link to you? The practice is still alive and well. Given the disproportionate number of links that various websites ended up obtaining by the practice, the search engine companies caught on that most of this was an artificial practice, and they started to discount the value of links pointing to websites where that website linked back to the linking partner.

So they wont help?

The answer is yes, and no. There are two benefits you get from a link from someone else’s website that points to your website.

a) Referral benefit
b) Ranking benefit

Referral Benefit

By this we’re talking about the fact that if someone is on the other website, and they come across your link and they click on it – well they arrive at your website. If the place they found your link was on a site that is somehow related to your business (if you sell shoes, they may have been on an othopaedics website, or an price comparison website showing differnt footwear available for purchase in your country) then they may well be interested in shoes and so this could be a valuable website visitor. If they found your link on an online gambling website and clicked on it by mistake – well clearly there is limited benefit you receive from their visit.So typically speaking, referral benefit is strong when the link comes from a related website that is not competetive in your field (if you sell pillows, think bedding websites, if you sell tyres, think car websites etc)

Ranking Benefit

Ranking benefit is what we discussed earlier where the search engines will recognise this link as a vote of your websites importance and give you weighting / ranking for this.

So back to Reciprocal Links – will they help?

The answer is yes and no….but this time, we’ll try to really answer the question I promise! If a website owner approaches you who has a website that is related to your industry but not competetive to your business, and you think that people on their website may be the right sort of target audience who you’d like to have come to your website, then by all means exchange links with them.

Forget about the search engine ranking issues – if this business attracts people who are the sort of people who would buy or deal with your organisation (ie same area, same interests, same product category) then having a link from their site to yours has enough inherent value to exchange links. Same applies to whether a link should go on your website. Are your visitors going to find it interesting? Will it add value to their experience of your website? If so – go for it.

If a website from an overseas website approaches you but you don’t sell to overseas customers, or if a website from an unrelated industry approaches you, then don’t exchange links in the hope they will deliver strong rankings. On the issue of ranking, there is still much debate in the SEO industry about whether any rank is achieved from exchanging links. My personal view based on our SEO experience is that a small number of link exchanges with high quality “authorititive” websites in your industry will help to some extent. Be careful though, as linking out to a range of useless link partners who have sites filled with thousands of spammy links could actually hurt your rankings. If the person asking you to exchange links fits this category don’t do it.

This article, was written by Phil Baddock, Salsa Internet’s Search Marketing Director. If any of this didn’t make sense, or if you need help with building high quality links to your website, Phil can be contacted on phil@salsainternet.com.au , or read the Free Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) eBook.

Social Media: You’re the voice, try & understand it

Phil Baddock — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 01:05:22 +0000

Social Media is another communications channel; a way to engage with your audience, a way to have a dialogue with customers and get meaningful feedback about your views, your products and your business. In the past, it has been difficult to achieve this sort of direct customer engagement effectively, as reaching each customer in a space where they are ready and willing to give you feedback (focus groups, one on one etc) has been costly to achieve, or time consuming to arrange. Social Media now gives you a channel to engage with people directly, frequently, and at very low cost.

There is, however, a lot of hype around now about business requiring new techniques to “do social media marketing”.

With things like SEO and Google Adwords, there is a whole (somewhat archane) process of keyword selection, structuring of marketing messages in abbreviated forms (meta tags and such) and understanding Google algorithms and how Google’s software analyses your website in order to make these activities effective.

Social Media, on the other hand, is just about communicating with people, very directly. Many business managers and business owners, having perhaps dabbled in Facebook or Twitter, still feel anxious that they don’t understand what all the hype is about. There are jargon-filled PowerPoint packs being thrown up at them and just as many consultants willing to relieve managers of their cash to help with Facebook or Twitter.

Social Media is to marketing communications, what the telephone is to speaking. You don’t hire a technical consultant who knows all about the workings of your phone to call your customers and sell to them or engage with them – the message comes from your team – the people / the company / the sales staff – so why would you hire a social media expert to “do” social media marketing?

Businesses should focus less on the delivery mechanism and more on what it is they have to say – what they want to talk to customers about, how they want to engage their customers in a dialogue – regardless of medium.

Think about the following questions:

Why do you want to engage directly with clients one on one online?
What opportunities does this present for you, and, most importantly, for them (why should they care about engaging with you)?
What outcomes are you seeking commercially?

Once you’ve figured out your answers, have a go at throwing some social media into the marketing mix (it’s exciting knowing you’ve created a bit of a buzz within your industry!!). BUT! Remember that Social Media is very transparent, and a poorly conceived attempt to sell to your customers may evoke direct and candid feedback, so make sure you’ve thought about why you’re doing this type of marketing and what you want out of it first. The medium, and your unfamiliarity with it, shouldn’t mean you can bow out and hand it off to a consultant.

You wouldn’t outsource a meeting with an important client to a consultant; you or your business development staff would be engaging with your clients. Likewise, you shouldn’t assume you can hire a pimply teenager or an expensive consultant in a dark skivvy to tweet a few times about how cool you or your products are – and then just forget about it.

This approach is likely to be an ineffective as it sounds, and the nature of Social Media means that it may backfire. Get involved, think about what you want to say and why your audience will care – and get busy with this exciting new media.

There are huge opportunities to get people excited about you, your products and services, but make sure you are adding value and not just shoving an old sales pitch into a new medium.

How to tell if your SEO programme is working?

Phil Baddock — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:00:00 +0000

Many people look at Google on a daily basis to check where they are ranking for a particular keyword or a few keywords, and obsess over competitor rankings for that word, but with online marketing, measuring success doesn’t have to be based on limited comparisons of only a few popular or obvious keywords. It’s not uncommon after we start working with a client, to get a phone call a few weeks later asking why they are still at a particular spot in the google results for one or two keywords – with the client deeply concerned that their SEO investment isn’t being effective.

SEO takes a little time to take effect – usually a few months after you commence work (some limited results are immediate, but strong success is a process that needs a few months to gain momentum), and also Google traffic comes from users who type a huge myriad of keyword combinations into Google. Ranking highly for 1 or 2 obvious keywords is not necessarily the be all, and end all of your SEO success. Often ranking strongly across 100′s of more specific keyword searches can work just as well, or even better !

The real measure of success of your SEO investment is whether your traffic, and your sales/inquiries are increasing! Sounds obvious right? You’d think so, but it’s amazing how often people obsess over a few ranks for a small number of specific keywords, or how their competitors ranks for these words, without looking at how their overall visitor traffic, or sales / leads are travelling.

Ask your SEO company to run a Google Analytics graph over the last 6 months showing Google Organic traffic only (that’s the visitors who come to your website after clicking on your listing on the left hand side of Google, not the sponsored links……these are the listings that are affected by SEO and Google optimisation). This will show how your overall traffic levels are trending, and give you a view of your visitors arriving based on ALL the keywords typed into Google, and not just a few. If your SEO provider is doing their job, then you should be seeing traffic trends heading upwards.

It’s vital that this isolates only Organic / Natural search traffic, as looking at all of your website visitors can hide upward or downward trends in individual sources of traffic (3rd party referring websites, paid advertisements or directories etc) leading you to think all is ok, when in fact your organic traffic may have collapsed while other traffic sources have leapt up to compensate.

Ask them to run a report of “conversions” over the past 6 months (conversions are the actions that you want a user to take on your site, such as contacting you, or buying something, or signing up for a newsletter), and review the results in detail to ensure your conversion numbers are being maintained, or growing. Typically, the % of users who go on to perform your “conversion” action, once they are at your website is purely a function of page layout, and clarity of message and navigation, and prompts or “call’s to action” to get users to take this action.

So if your website has a prevailing conversion % of 3% for example (3 in every 100 who arrives, go on to convert) then naturally, once you know this – usually after that point, it becomes a numbers game. You need to get as many people coming to your site (who’ve typed something relevant into google) as you can….if you double your visitors, you’ll double your conversions……so SEO success is achieved by seeing increasing numbers of visitors. If you suddenly rocket to #1 position for your favourite keyword, but don’t see overall increases in traffic – then this wont help you in the way that you are hoping for. And yes, if you move to position #1 for 1 specific keyword, this definately isn’t a guarantee that your overall site traffic is on the increase…..it could be a reflection of a narrow, one dimensional SEO campaign that ignores the breadth of your product offerings.

To see the trends in these reports, you can use Analytics to switch to “week” view or “month” view to show you the numbers aggregated across these time periods. This makes it easier to spot the trends as you compare results week to week, or month to month.

These are some basic, but crucial metrics in ensuring your SEO programme is doing its job. If you aren’t getting that sort of information from your SEO provider, you should contact them and arrange to review this, to ensure you’re getting value for your SEO investment!

Google Sitelinks…. gimme gimme

Phil Baddock — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:11:44 +0000

We have had a few clients recently, eyeing off the big panel of links that appear under some Google search result listings, and asking how they can set these up for their business. In this article, I’m going to briefly outline what sitelinks are, and what the factors are that help you get some!

Google site links appear in two main forms. A full/large panel of sitelinks, which looks like this:

And a smaller mini panel of sitelinks:

If you are keen to achieve sitelinks for your business, there’s some things you’re going to want to understand about them:

1. The links are displayed, or not – at Google’s sole discretion.
2. They are not linked to your business listing in Google (i.e. they are not displayed consistently to all users), but instead are shown depending on the keyword the user searches on, and how “authoritative” your website is considered to be.

For example, if you type in “Salsa Internet” into Google.com.au, you will see our Salsa Internet listing show up with the full spread of sitelinks shown, as our business is considered to be an authority in Google’s eyes in relation to that keyword phrase. If however you type in “Google Adwords Melbourne” then you’ll see us ranking at position #1 also, but with no sitelinks, as Google recognise we offer this service, but don’t attribute enough “authority” to us in relation to that keyword.

So this begs the obvious question – what, in Google’s eyes – determines “authority” ?

Your site’s authority in relation to a keyword is typically determined by:
a) How many times that keyword, or words related to / on the same topic of that keyword, appear on your homepage, and throughout your website
b) The number, quality and type of inbound links to your website (ie an inbound link is where another website contains a link to your website from their website), which contain words in the link that are match the keyword, or are related to that keyword

If you want to achieve these types of sitelinks, you need to engage in link building targeting for the keyword in question or words related to that word, in the link text. You’re going to want to have a lot of strong / high ranking inbound links for that keyword in order to achieve sitelinks. Sounds like hard work ay? Well achieving sitelinks for your business name, is often readily achievable, but achieving sitelinks for popular common keyword phrases on Google – takes a lot of effort.