Landing Page – An active webpage where customers will ‘land’ when they click your ad. The web address for this page is often called a ‘destination URL’ or ‘clickthrough URL.’

Below is a list of 7 deadly sins for landing page designs. The list was taken from a webinar from Tim Ash, a consultant from Google.

Have you committed one of the “7 deadly sins of landing page design?”

1. Unclear Call to Action
   Ensure that traffic is sent to a page where the desired action is clearly defined. If you wish for them to book a room night, have a large visible button that allows the customer to book a room night.
2. Too Many Visual Distractions
   A page filled with too many visual distractions, whether its photos of products or flashing banners or AdSense ads, will likely not convert as well. Keep the page simple, clean, and to the point.
3. Too Much Text
   A landing page should not be text heavy. Keep sentences short and simple, and convey your message using bullet points.
4. Not Keeping Promises
   Your AdCopy says: Buy 2 get 1 free, but if this same offer cannot be found on the landing page, you are not keeping that promise. If you have an attractive offer in your AdCopy, make sure that it is easily found on the landing page.
5. Long Forms
   Keep forms as short and concise as possible. Only include fields where it’s absolutely essential for the existing transaction.
6. Invisible Risk Reducers
   If your business is accredited by the BBB, or if your website is hacker safe and tested on a daily basis, be sure to include these logos above the fold.
7. Trust Indicators
   If your business is highly rated or raved about by another company of trust, place that logo above the fold as well. For example, if Conde Nast named your hotel as one of the “Top 500 Hotels in the World”, adding this trust indicator will surely help increase trust, and hopefully conversion.

We are Google Adword Professionals and we can help you implement a successful search engine marketing campaign. Contact us through the blog or on our website, SalesOverNight.com. If you’re company is in the medical industry check out of dedicated medical marketing website, LEVELTWO | Medical.

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As you type into the Google search box, Google Suggest guesses what you are typing and offers suggestions. In the example above, I typed “dallas den” and Google suggested “dallas dentists.”

It works by those amazing Google algorithms that use a wide range of information to predict what you are typing into the search bar. It’s a mashup between the overall popularity of various searches and the frequency of the search. The trending topics make a big difference in how these suggestions are ranked. For example, as of this morning the hot trends in the US are “home run derby 2009 winner,” “the bechelorette finale spoilers,” and “wbcn.”

You can dig down into trending topics to see the search volume index over the past 24 hours. For example, let’s look at the last 24 hours of “home run derby 2009 winner.”

You can see that there was a spike at 8pm (PDT) that trailed off late into the night, but shot way up this morning. Understanding trends like these is important for building your search engine marketing campaign.

Since Google Suggest relies on Google Trends, the current events will guide how people search for answers. If you are an advertiser that sells home run derby memorabilia, you might receive a tremendous amount of clicks over a short period of time, but the majority of those clicks would not return sales because they are visitors looking for news coverage, they are not interested in buying a coffee mug.

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Understanding the value of keywords in online marketing and taking the relevant actions is the key to making significant profits in the industry. Understanding the power of keywords means picking the right keywords, leveraging them effectively and continuously reviewing their conversion rates.

Google is not an automatic money making machine on its own. The power of Google is in the keywords, not on Google itself. The reason that keywords are so important is simple. Keywords represent a custom built service for the Internet searcher. They ask the search engine for information on specific words and the information is returned to them. Hence the reason why the premium is attached to keywords.

The success of the online marketer is therefore linked to how well she leverages her keywords. She needs to plan them very carefully and do a lot of research. Picking effective keywords takes skill and patience. Acquiring the skill helps the online marketer remain calm under pressure.

To pick the right keywords, the online marketer must constantly watch for traffic and searches for the relevant words. If she is pursuing a cost per click advertising strategy, she must also ensure she is not paying over the odds to the point where the keywords are not delivering sufficient value to her business. To gain an indication of the value of the keywords, seek competitor information on what they are spending on the keywords.

It is also very important to note that loyalty to keywords based on an online marketer’s hunch is suicidal to her business. Over 90% of keywords lose money in cost per click advertising; therefore it is very important that the online marketer has management information on conversion rates for her keywords. She should quickly identify the ones that her making her money and ditch the rest as quickly as possible. This should be an ongoing review process as keywords do run their course. The online marketer should aim to spend the bulk of her advertising budget on around the best 5% of her keywords. This is how she can consistently make money.

Keywords and not Google is the key to making money in an online marketing business. Understanding the power of keyword leverage, being consistent and unsentimental in the use of keywords and picking the right ones are the keys to success in the industry.

Continue Reading »

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This is an interesting way to give a non-bias opinion on the best search engine. Use Blind Search to search for a phrase and then choose which column provides the best search results for that query. The choices are Bing, Yahoo, or Google. The columns are randomized with every query.

Due to some hacker tampering with the results page we can’t see what most people are choosing as their preferred search result.

TIP: Don’t test it using a search phrase that you are familiar with. Instead, try something you’ve never looked up, like “who was the 23rd president?” or “weather in Helena, Montana”.

Try Blind Search

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Tim O’Reilly, Founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, argues that microblogging service Twitter is changing real-time information search in a way that will revolutionize the web. O’Reilly goes on to discuss the impact web search engines like Google have had on shaping human/computer interactivity.

“I think there is a revolution coming in business. You can see it by thinking about what Google does when they get new information.”

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While Google gets all the attention, it’s easy to forget that the search industry is much more than just Google. There’s are many tools that provide search results on a wide range of topics. While Google might provide a global search on a broad range of keywords, many search engines hold very strong niches in many different industries.

For example here is a short list of a few non-google search engines that are based in very specific niches.

Westlaw – Online legal research services for lawyers and legal professionals

PubGene – Visualize and navigate current understanding of genes

Bioinformatic Harvester – Crawls and crosslinks bioinformatic sites

Daylife – News search engine, organizing and distributing the world’s news

Topix – News aggregator which categorizes news stories by topic and geography

Yahoo! News – Top news headlines on current events from around the world

HotPads – Real estate, house, and apartment search engine

Zillow – Search engine for real estate and homes

GlobalSpec – Search engine of engineering and industrial products

Indeed – Job search engine

Picsearch – Image search search engine

PriceGrabber – Online shopping search engine

mySimon – Price comparison shopping search engine

Bing Shopping – Microsoft’s shopping search engine

The best approach to search engine marketing is to diversify your search marketing portfolio. The little dirty secret about search engine optimization is that you ultimately have no control on how search engines display your website. Each search tool uses a different algorithm to determine their best results and it is a constant battle to stay at the top of the search result page.

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Everyone wants the success of Google and as of this morning Microsoft has launched its latest attempt at stealing some of Google’s search dominance with their release of Bing.com.

Live.com, Microsoft’s major search engine, now redirects to Bing.com. I did a quick test search comparison using our company name, LEVELTWO, and I found very different results from Google’s results for the same search. Bing returned many more social network results than Google. Our Twitter account was ranked third on Bing, which Google ranks it 8th on their search engine. I think this is a good thing since social networks will often provide more current and up-to-date information than a static website.

Videos
Another interesting (maybe annoying) feature is the autoplaying video previews. By simply holding your mouse over the video search results the video will automatically start playing with sound. While this was a cool feature, I was quickly overwhelmed with multiple videos blasting sound through my speakers. However there is a mute/unmute button on each video which makes browsing video previews much less assaulting to your ears.

Search Categories
Over on the left side of the screen you’ll find a search categories list that are dynamically generated according to your search phrase. I tried several different types of broad searches and they all returned a different list of categories to accompany my search.

Overall, I think Bing is an improvement over Live search. I don’t foresee people leaving Google to use Bing as their primary search engine, but this friendlier platform certainly makes Bing a great secondary search engine.

Bing.com

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Finding a search marketing company is easy. Just do a quick search and you’ll find tons of companies demanding that they are the best. So you’ve find ‘em, the hard part is choosing which marketing agency to use for your search marketing campaign.

We’ve put together 10 questions to ask your search marketing company before you sign that contract. You’ve let the salesmen do the talking, now it’s time for you to ask some questions of your own.

1. Does the contract include ongoing maintenance? The search marketing world is always changing and if you stand still you’ll get left behind.
2. Are they certified search engine marketing professionals for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN)?
3. Each campaign should be custom tailored for each client. Ask them if they use any template campaigns.
4. Ask if they use any blackhat tricks. Blackhat are methods that are not honest and could result in getting your website banned.
5. An honest search marketing agency will never guarantee conversions, only a specific range of traffic increase can be guaranteed. A well planned campaign will yield a return on investment, but there’s no way to predict the level of activity.
6. Ask to see example campaign landing pages or websites. What’s your first impression? Would you buy it?
7. Do they offer on-demand campaign reporting or do they email you a spreadsheet once a month?
8. Do they make use of multiple search engines? A strong SEM campaign will be diverse.
9. Be wary if they say “yes” to everything. A successful search campaign requires a minimum level of investment. If they say that $200 a month will get your website ranked first in Google you might want to get a second opinion.
10. Do they track everything about your campaign? This includes the number of people who see your ads, the number of clicks, what they do once they reach your landing page, and how many of those visitors fill out a form or call your phone number. Call tracking is key to search engine marketing.

Honesty is the best policy. We know there are a lot of other marketing agencies out there, but no matter who you choice it’s important that you are informed about what you’re getting.

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Google’s Inside AdWords blog has a interesting post about using filters with the new interface.

Filters allow you to look at just the data you want within your account. You can use filters throughout your account and save them for later use.

They give examples of how filters can be used to find high performing keywords by filtering based on CTR and conversion rate.

Another tip is a way to monitor all pending or disapproved ads. There’s lots of ways to use filters and their short explanation can help new users better understand the usefulness.

Inside AdWords: All about filters

We’ll be putting a blog post together to help give more details about AdWords filter tips. Stay tuned.

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What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is an advanced feature that can help make your ad more relevant to people performing a search. Here’s how it works:

- You (the advertiser) put a small code in your ad text.
- When the searcher sees your ad, the keyword(s) they used in that search replaces that DKI code in your ad text.
- These inserted keywords are typically bolded, which will help pull the searchers eye to your ad.

Here’s an example of how it would work (for Google Adwords).

You create an ad for your “Awesome New Shoes” company and put Dynamic Keyword Insertion in two spots. One in the headline that looks like this: “Buy {KeyWord:New Shoes}” and one in the second ad text line that looks like this: “Order {KeyWord:Shoes} Today!”

So now when the person searches for “Purple Running Shoes” they would see an ad that looks like this:

This is an oversimplification of how DKI works and there are many more aspects to consider. For example, Dynamic Keyword Insertion is avalible to everyone, so before you start adding this popular feature, do a little research. Perform a search on the search engine and see if everyone else is using the DKI feature. If every ad says “Buy Purple Running Shoes” as the headline, the DKI feature loses it’s strength and the advertisers that are not using DKI will actually stand out from the crowd.

If all of this is confusing or if you are not having success maintaining your own search engine marketing account give us a call (469-619-0573) or contact us using our form.

Check out other blog posts that can help answer your basic internet marketing questions:

What is Search Engine Marketing?
What is Social Media Marketing?
What Results to Expect from a Social Media Campaign
What is Clickthrough Rate & Cost Per Click?
Social Media Terms, Defining the Buzz Words Part One
Social Media Terms, Defining the Buzz Words Part Two

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