Search Engine Marketing Basics

Search Engine Marketing Basics – SEO Basics

Search engine marketing to most people is conceived as some sort of trickery or manipulative process that involves getting your website to the top of Google. The truth is that search engine marketing is very complex and extremely important to all kinds of businesses that need to have an online presence. Attracting customers through the internet or more specifically search engines, has become one of the most lucrative forms of advertising in history. Google alone was able to rake in over 40 billion dollars in revenue last year from Adwords advertising alone. Search engine marketing is not cheap by any means and mistakes can be very costly, if you are a business owner you should take the time to learn the basics so that you can gauge your in-house or out sourced team accordingly. The basics will be explained in this post, things that I feel everyone should know if they plan to ever be involved with a professional search engine marketing campaign.

Its all about User Experience – Think like a search engine

Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture here, the search engine. What is its job? What does Google have to do in order to be the best search engine out there? Well, if you ask me what I would like the perfect search engine to do I would say, I want it to provide me with the most accurate results when I type in a search query, makes sense right? In a nutshell that is what every search engine user is expecting, relevant results that provide a good user experience. User experience is the most fundamental part of search engine marketing and optimization.

User experience or UX, plays an influential role in your search engine marketing practices and it is important to understand how you can apply certain changes to your website that would increase it’s performance. Below is a short video by industry leader Mike Rand going over some common topics related to SEO and UX.

The more you know about user experience and how it plays a role with search engine users, the more you will understand how search engine marketing works. Anything that you do to your website that provides a good user experience will be rewarded by Google, such as having a relevant landing page for your PPC ads or creating really informative blog posts that give value to the viewers etc.. Not only will UX enahance the performance of your marketing campaigns, it will also increase your conversion rates for other marketing efforts that you are utilizing such as direct mail campaigns that lead people directly to your website.

Pay Per Click Marketing

PPC marketing is grossly misunderstood, many people feel that they know how to do it and it is too expensive. The truth is that most people do not understand the capabilities of Adwords and the ways to increase ROI through analyzing data with scientific methods. Having an experience Adwords manager managing your account can be expensive but it can also be well worth it. Professional Adwords managers can track your returns down to an exact dollar and increase your conversion rates as well as increase your ROI.

PPC Management Service – Adwords Managers Increasing ROI

The secret to pay per click advertising or PPC management is to understand how to measure your success and increase your conversion rates. There are many ways to measure your success such as conversion rates, click through rates, visitor duration thresholds etc… We as the campaign managers need to know how to make the best use of the data gathered from a PPC campaign in order to optimize the campaign performance. Improving a campaign performance can ultimately lead to an increase in clicks and or impressions as well as a decrease in average cost per click. Paying less money for a larger amount of clicks ultimately translates into dollar signs for a business owner. As a ppc manager it is our job to ensure that the campaign is improving in performance in ways like the one mentioned and many more.

If you have never setup an Adwords campaign and you want to learn how to you should watch these few videos first or visit the Adwords Beginners Guide Center.

Optimizing your PPC campaigns

One of the most common ways to enhance a campaigns performance is done by improving quality scores to pay less per click while obtaining top positions. The higher your average quality score is the less you pay per click. This is because Google rewards websites or web pages, that provide a good user experience. Think like a search engine, if you were Google your job would be to provide searchers with the most relevant and reliable result. Naturally, a landing page that provides a good user experience will have content that is relevant to the keyword being searched for. So, if you know all of this, then you could logically assume that if you have content that is relevant to your keyword ads on your landing pages then you are helping Google provide their users with a good search engine experience. Think about it, if Google allowed ad positioning to be based on cost per click solely, then irrelevant ads could potentially appear and it wouldn’t be long before people started to use Bing or Yahoo instead. Imagine if you were to do a search for something that is extremely important and you get a bunch or irrelevant ads, that wouldn’t be such a good experience, you’d probably start using a different search engine…

Where can I hire a ppc manager? If you are asking yourself this question then you have found the right place, The Miami SEO Company specializes in all forms of search engine marketing and we are local the Miami area known as one of the Best SEO companies in Florida. One of our services include Pay Per Click Adwords campaign management. With professional Miami and Fort Lauderdale Web designers standing by, we can take your PPC campaign to the next level by setting up ROI tracking, conversion tracking, split testing and many more types of data gathering techniques that will aid in making educated decisions on improving your campaign performance. PPC and SEO are very similar in many ways, which is why we believe that you should always use the two marketing vehicles harmoniously. Having our team of certified campaign managers take charge of your campaign will lead to a bigger monthly return on your investment and a boost in user friendliness for your website.

Search Engine Optimization – 2016 Basics

If you always think like a search engine, you will bee successful with search engine marketing. A search engine does not give preference to a company’s net worth or revenue, it does’t care if you are a industry titan or a start up lead generation web site. Search engines care about their users. Their users want answers and results when they search, results and answers that are accurate and reliable. Getting your website listed on ABCfreebacklinkdirectory.com won’t ever help you, having a million back links different kinds of link farms won’t help you either. Having an intelligent navigation and user friendly content will help you, getting engagement from your audience on your blog and social channels will help you. Things like this will ultimately lead to your success.

There are many things that you can do to a website to earn page one positioning for your money keywords, in fact there are over 200 different things that a search engine will evaluate in terms of SEO. To go through the entire list would be overwhelming so I will discuss the top 10 factors that need to be focused on heavily, keep in mind that there are many other things that will need to be implemented in order to rank for very competitive keywords.

1. Content – Content is the driving force behind your campaign, the fuel to your fire. Software generated content that is pushed out to dozens of article sites wont help you anymore. You need to be creating content that is engaging your audience. On top of that you need to have many inbound contextual links from trusted sources like business directories, guest blogs, Web 2.0 properties etc.

2. Meta Tags – Meta tags will help the search engines understand what your pages are about and they will use this information to create ads on the SERP’s for you. Make sure to create a clear and accurate representation about your page or business with your title and description. Meta keywords do not matter so much anymore, if you are going to use them, less is more.

3. Intelligent navigation and structure – Remember to think like a search engine, if you are providing your visitors with a good user experience you will be rewarded. Keep your user intent in mind and customize the layout and navigation accordingly. It won’t be long before metrics like average time on site and pages per visit make a difference in the search algorithm. Plan ahead!

4. Trust and Authority – Building your websites credibility can be done in a number of different ways from reputation management to press releases and Blogging. The key is to diversify your methods, put your name out there as much as possible. Get involved with social media, recruit an audience, create news worthy articles and get them in the RIGHT places. Fight as hard as you can to get featured in the Moz blog or local news, these are just the kind of modern techniques that will help you prevail.

5. Internal Links – Make sure you are making good use of your internal linking structure, remember not to over do it and more importantly ensure that your linking structure is providing a good user experience.

6. Social Media – Social proof is weighted and can make a difference in competitive arenas, make sure that you are taking the time to build you Facebook fan page and other social media pages that are authoritative.

7. URL structure – Having a coherent naming convention for your URL’s can be extremely helpful as it will allow you to squeeze in keywords in a non-spammy manner.

8. Back links – They are not dead yet, but they are evaluated differently. Meaning you need to be careful with how you obtain your back links, don’t get any back links from sites that you would even consider to be questionable. If it looks like a link farm, chances are that it is a link farm. If it has the word “free” and “backlink” in the URL, it’s definitely not a good link to have.

9. Blogging – Create many great blogs like this one 🙂

10. Audience Engagement – Audience engagement is very important and is a great way to build yourself up to be a figure of authority in the industry. By utilizing Google authorship you can also leverage your organic rankings and increase your click through rate!

As daunting as all of this may sound, it’s just barely scratching the surface. The best advice you will ever get if you are trying to learn more about is SEO is to follow the industry leaders and keep up to date with all of the Google Products and News updates. Staying one step ahead of the curve is what will help you stay ahead of the competition. When an algorithm update hits, you should be eager to see the spike in traffic from the black hats going down in rank!

Thanks for reading and we hope to hear from you soon!

About The Author

Jason Hawkins / http://www.themiamiseocompany.com

Jason Hawkins is the CEO & Co-Founder of The Miami SEO Company. He has over ten years of experience in search engine optimization, conversion rate optimization and lead generation. His core responsibilities include identifying ways to increase value of services rendered, training staff on advanced SEO topics, and A/B testing internal processes to consistently improve client return on investment.