Email LinkedIn Twitter

SEO: What’s working? What’s relevant? A Newport Interactive Marketers Q&A session

1 Comment

By Julie Woodside

At another successful Newport Interactive Marketers event, attendees got comfortable in a second floor meeting room at Christie’s as Eric Covino, of SeoBook.com and CreativeSignals.com, fielded questions from an audience of eager SEO info-seekers.

What did Newport Interactive Marketers learn about SEO?

SEO general tips

  • Titles: Be concise; don’t pack with modifiers
  • Content: Be focused, relevant, concise, engaging
  • Content booster:
    • Blog approximately 3 times per week
  • Put your links in the main body for your content, rather than in the side bar.
  • Keywords
  • Use SEO for Firefox to sort results by page rank
  • Invest in a quality design

On-Page optimization

  • Avoid salesy copy
  • Use tags to articulate what your site is about.
  • Great site for info on on-page optimization

Off-Page optimization

  • It’s what drives search, links, anchor text
  • Relevance is important- Google needs to understand relationship
    • Don’t be a link farm
    • Google’s ‘people’ know when you aren’t relevant
  • Link building is the most difficult aspect of SEO

Does video boost rankings?

SEO success recipe: Time + Money

  • Find your niche and look at similar sites
    • Are they brands?
    • What is their domain page rank strength?
  • Invest in design

Reputation management

Eric Covino stresses the importance of link building for SEO purposes: Great content is good, but without link building, you will not see the ranking results you want for your website.  Strong content, simple design, your character, and relevant link-building are the formula for successful SEO strategy.

Be sure to attend the next Newport Interactive Marketers event for great networking opportunities and valuable marketing information.

A/B testing your PPC: Is too much detrimental?

1 Comment

“Could too much A/B testing be detrimental to PPC?” asks Matt Van Wagner of Find Me Faster at a recent SEMNE event.  Follow Matt Van Wagner’s SEMNE slideshow to see how to obtain advertising success on the internet.

A/B testing:  Which message resonates best with your target audience?

  • Run ads to create performance profile
  • Find out which ad is the best

Reasons why AdWords fail

  • Keywords don’t match queries
  • Ad impressions doesn’t equal number of searchers
  • Ad rotation isn’t even/balanced
  • A/B testing will give you the best ad, not designed to give you your highest performing ad group
  • As many of 50% of searches are repeats, and they happen in hotspots, search up to 20 times
  • 5-20 impressions could be just one person
  • Quality score impacts ad rotation, so rotation might not be even

Winning ads perpetuate themselves

  • A few well-performing ads will be more effective, we forget that individuals with personal preferences are doing the searches
    • Humans can out-smart the algorithms
    • “Save 20%” message vs “eco” message: these are two different demographics you’re speaking with
    • Keeping multiple ads gives a fighting chance to engage with divergent populations. Why would you only write ads for men and cut out women?
    • 5 well-performing ads will outpace one top-seller

Google is trying to make money, so if you didn’t click on the first ad, it’ll show you another version

  • After 1 search you’ll see different results, by the time visitors search 4 times there’s a 93.75% chance that visitors are seeing both ads

Bottom line: Don’t be so quick to kill off ads that are performing until you have a top 5 and keep testing

  • Don’t try to reduce to 1 ad
  • Test more combinations
  • Ad sets can mask the performance of poorly performing ad groups
  • Set ad rotation to even

Broad Match Modifier

  • Create keywords that give you more control than broad, more flexibility than phrase match
  • Use + sign in front of broad-match keyword
  • Now available in the US, think how can use broad match to direct traffic to targeted places.
« Previous Page
Next Page »