Social Media
So this week we covered more social media and SEO in my business class. I had to write a one page essay covering my long term and short term goals. Now I won't repost that essay here but I will go through some of the things I've thought about in terms of my social media strategy.
Short term I recognize I need to have more content. The more interesting and unique content I can post on my website I can also include on my social media accounts. From my research it looks like facebook will be the very best avenue for me to do my social network accounts due to its ability to micro-target to my audience as well as how people thinking about relationships are actually interacting on facebook. I also will leverage youtube as I have videos I can reference there. The nice thing about facebook is that I can also embed some of my quizzes and assessments there and get it going viral.
Long term I need to be aggressive in responding and communicating to the wider community as they talk about me and my products. Twitter is a good way of leveraging this, but in general I need to spend a portion of my day each day responding to social media. There's a lot of information here, but I hope to be able to incorporate this more over the long term as I move forward. The first steps are setting up the facebook account and actively publishing content on it.
Here are the links and there are indeed a lot of them.
4 Steps to Social Media SEO Success
16 Rules for Social Media Optimization Revisited
7 Steps for a Successful Social Media Strategy
How to Measure Social Media Traffic with Google Analytics
Developing a Social Media Plan
How to Use Social Media To Effectively Improve SEO
How to Use Facebook for Business
Is Your Website SEO and Social Media Friendly?
Social Media SEO & Analytics Tools Worth Checking Out
Free Tools for Social Media Optimization
Social Media Marketing
Wikipedia’s summary on Social media marketing
Must Watch: 12 Awesome Social Media Tutorials
How Does Social Media Affect Search Marketing?
Omniture / Adobe webcast on Facebook and Twitter marketing
How to Use LinkedIn: Using social networking to further your career
Saturday, March 26, 2016
Landing Pages and SEO
Landing Pages
I've decided to change up the format of this and subsequent blog posts. As I intend this to be a resource for myself to help me review I'm going to start posting the links I find from my class (and my own investigation) on the topics we are studying. I'll also continue to talk about my reflections.
So we talked about landing pages. First a few links:
Understanding Landing Page Experience
Basic Strategies for Optimizing Websites and Landing Pages
Create Better Websites: Introducing Content Experiments
Content Experiments the Benefits
So the first key take away for landing pages is to AVOID POPUPS. No seriously stop using them! I was happy to find that piece of advice from google that they specifically prohibit landing pages with popups for the advertising policy as I hate them yet I had read (and even blogged) about how people see increases in sales with them. I'm glad google is starting to penalize people for using them.
The reality is the old way of doing landing pages was to try and keyword spam the page to make it so it was more relevant to google's SEO and advertising algorithms. Now a days they want you to have content that just flows naturally (so talking about related concepts, synonyms, etc). If you keyword spam google will penalize and possibly eject you from adwords and their SEO rankings.
I also really liked on the basic strategies link for the tips I had there. The biggest tip for me on my landing pages was to drive a single call to action. I thought I was leaving money on the table if I didn't try to throw every possible email signup, product purchase, video watch, etc at people to give them every possible option. However, focusing on a single thing I want people to do actually increased my conversion rate as well as the time people spend on my pages. Which was fascinating.
The other element, which I have tried but I am going to when I get a bit more time is the content experiments. I already do a bit of A/B testing by sending people for the same ad to different landing pages, but with content experiments I can have the SAME landing page and present different tests to see which ones perform better. I'm really interested in this and I just need to devote more time to it.
Next up SEO.
So here are some links to help remind me about topics of SEO:
What is Search Engine Optimization/SEO
Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization
Backlinks Checker Tool — Backlink Watch - Check to see how many backlinks (external links) to your site you have.
I've decided to change up the format of this and subsequent blog posts. As I intend this to be a resource for myself to help me review I'm going to start posting the links I find from my class (and my own investigation) on the topics we are studying. I'll also continue to talk about my reflections.
So we talked about landing pages. First a few links:
Understanding Landing Page Experience
Basic Strategies for Optimizing Websites and Landing Pages
Create Better Websites: Introducing Content Experiments
Content Experiments the Benefits
So the first key take away for landing pages is to AVOID POPUPS. No seriously stop using them! I was happy to find that piece of advice from google that they specifically prohibit landing pages with popups for the advertising policy as I hate them yet I had read (and even blogged) about how people see increases in sales with them. I'm glad google is starting to penalize people for using them.
The reality is the old way of doing landing pages was to try and keyword spam the page to make it so it was more relevant to google's SEO and advertising algorithms. Now a days they want you to have content that just flows naturally (so talking about related concepts, synonyms, etc). If you keyword spam google will penalize and possibly eject you from adwords and their SEO rankings.
I also really liked on the basic strategies link for the tips I had there. The biggest tip for me on my landing pages was to drive a single call to action. I thought I was leaving money on the table if I didn't try to throw every possible email signup, product purchase, video watch, etc at people to give them every possible option. However, focusing on a single thing I want people to do actually increased my conversion rate as well as the time people spend on my pages. Which was fascinating.
The other element, which I have tried but I am going to when I get a bit more time is the content experiments. I already do a bit of A/B testing by sending people for the same ad to different landing pages, but with content experiments I can have the SAME landing page and present different tests to see which ones perform better. I'm really interested in this and I just need to devote more time to it.
Next up SEO.
So here are some links to help remind me about topics of SEO:
What is Search Engine Optimization/SEO
Perfecting Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization
Backlinks Checker Tool — Backlink Watch - Check to see how many backlinks (external links) to your site you have.
So I actually worked for an SEO company when I first got back from my LDS mission and it was awful because we went through creating these spam landing pages to generate links back to our website. Our content writers would create tons of articles and post them out on the internet in all kinds of random obscure places in order to drive up search traffic for our clients. The days of that working are no longer. Now Google specifically looks at how you are targeting your keywords and the reputation of the links coming back to you. Highly reputable sites linking to you? Higher ranking. Continuously fresh content? Higher Ranking. Spamming articles and websites that all link to each other with no external links? Likely to be banned from google search.
Overall I recognized I need on my business to have better schema organization of my site, target a few specific keywords I've identified from my best performing adwords campaigns and write a lot more content, frequently.
Monday, March 14, 2016
Google Adwords - Translating clicks and impressions into sales.
This week I've been monitoring my adwords campaign and I would have to say that I'm pretty good at getting clicks and impressions on my ads and not so good at getting sales.
My initial campaign had 5 different running ads with over 60 keywords I was targeting and a daily budget of $9.67 a day. It had 4000 impressions and 40 clicks on Wednesday when I re-evaluated my campaign. Astonishingly I found out from Google's search term reports (a report that shows the keywords people are actually searching) that I was receiving a lot of clicks from the wrong audience. People were clicking on my ads looking for relationship advice, tips, teenage dating, etc and it was costing me a lot of money - over $20.00 in clicks for people that I was not even targeting.
I also noticed that a few people were clicking on my ads that were searching for quizzes or tests which is one of my products but no the one I was trying to push people to. I started an adgroup for tests and targeted some of the keywords people were searching for and I had over 30 clicks in 1 day (compared with 5 days of running and 50 clicks total) also my costs for those keywords were much much lower. However, my keywords are still not translating into sales. So I either have the wrong audience still or my landing pages are not functioning as well as I want them to. I know there's a lot of data and I just have to sift through it to try and identify where things are a problem. I'm also considering giving a free offering of a portion of my products that people can try out for free and then purchase. I wonder if people are not wanting to spend the money I'm asking for without actually trying out the product. However, this will take some time to build so I'm not sure I'll be able to get it done in the context of my class but I can look at it as a future plan for my business.
Overall I am very happy with what I have learned about google adwords. I've found that by narrowing my focus I have a much higher click through rate. For example a keyword I was targeting that only has 70 searches a month, has a click through rate of 20%, others with volume under 500 all have much higher click through rate as well. These people stay on my site longer (as I can see through google analytics) and look at more pages. Somehow I just have to figure out how to get them to convert (hence my free offering idea).
Again I know now know how to get traffic to my site, I just need to find the right audience / right product fit. I may find out eventually that my products just aren't wanted / desired but I think based on my click behaviors that there is a market I just to have to refine the message and the product to meet people's true needs. I'm excited about the journey ahead!
My initial campaign had 5 different running ads with over 60 keywords I was targeting and a daily budget of $9.67 a day. It had 4000 impressions and 40 clicks on Wednesday when I re-evaluated my campaign. Astonishingly I found out from Google's search term reports (a report that shows the keywords people are actually searching) that I was receiving a lot of clicks from the wrong audience. People were clicking on my ads looking for relationship advice, tips, teenage dating, etc and it was costing me a lot of money - over $20.00 in clicks for people that I was not even targeting.
I also noticed that a few people were clicking on my ads that were searching for quizzes or tests which is one of my products but no the one I was trying to push people to. I started an adgroup for tests and targeted some of the keywords people were searching for and I had over 30 clicks in 1 day (compared with 5 days of running and 50 clicks total) also my costs for those keywords were much much lower. However, my keywords are still not translating into sales. So I either have the wrong audience still or my landing pages are not functioning as well as I want them to. I know there's a lot of data and I just have to sift through it to try and identify where things are a problem. I'm also considering giving a free offering of a portion of my products that people can try out for free and then purchase. I wonder if people are not wanting to spend the money I'm asking for without actually trying out the product. However, this will take some time to build so I'm not sure I'll be able to get it done in the context of my class but I can look at it as a future plan for my business.
Overall I am very happy with what I have learned about google adwords. I've found that by narrowing my focus I have a much higher click through rate. For example a keyword I was targeting that only has 70 searches a month, has a click through rate of 20%, others with volume under 500 all have much higher click through rate as well. These people stay on my site longer (as I can see through google analytics) and look at more pages. Somehow I just have to figure out how to get them to convert (hence my free offering idea).
Again I know now know how to get traffic to my site, I just need to find the right audience / right product fit. I may find out eventually that my products just aren't wanted / desired but I think based on my click behaviors that there is a market I just to have to refine the message and the product to meet people's true needs. I'm excited about the journey ahead!
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Google Adwords Relevance and Quality Score
So I think the business highlight of this week has been learning about google adwords quality scores and improving my advertisements because of it. When you advertise with google adwords they will tell you the quality of your advertising efforts for specific keywords in your campaign. They look at the keyword, your advertisement text and your advertisement landing page and give it a score. If your keyword is average or below average it can lower your position on the search pages as well as increase your costs. It also gives you clues into whether users will actually click on your ads when they see them. All of my keywords ended up with scores around 6 out of 10 which is considered average.
What I learned from my class and ended up implementing was creating specific landing pages to target each of the groups of keywords for my advertisements. I created unique and specially crafted keywords to target areas such as relationship problems, another one for how to save your marriage, another for no intimacy in your relationship. Each one a different experience. I then customized my ads and had specific text for each ad group. Originally I had the same ad verbiage and same landing page and that gave me average scores across the board. I haven't seen the scores update yet so I'm assuming it will take some time but I have a lot more confidence that my relevancy and quality will be much higher. In turn this should increase the number of sales we have.
I also installed google analytics on the site and experimented with the e-commerce integration. I've used analytics a lot for technical and functional analysis of the performance of the website but never really for advertising and conversion tracking. I really enjoyed learning more about goals and setting monetization values for my campaign. I'm interested in exploring that further although sadly we won't cover it much in the class. The week has been busy so I'll cut it short at that but I'm feeling really excited to start seeing how adwords will translate to sales!
What I learned from my class and ended up implementing was creating specific landing pages to target each of the groups of keywords for my advertisements. I created unique and specially crafted keywords to target areas such as relationship problems, another one for how to save your marriage, another for no intimacy in your relationship. Each one a different experience. I then customized my ads and had specific text for each ad group. Originally I had the same ad verbiage and same landing page and that gave me average scores across the board. I haven't seen the scores update yet so I'm assuming it will take some time but I have a lot more confidence that my relevancy and quality will be much higher. In turn this should increase the number of sales we have.
I also installed google analytics on the site and experimented with the e-commerce integration. I've used analytics a lot for technical and functional analysis of the performance of the website but never really for advertising and conversion tracking. I really enjoyed learning more about goals and setting monetization values for my campaign. I'm interested in exploring that further although sadly we won't cover it much in the class. The week has been busy so I'll cut it short at that but I'm feeling really excited to start seeing how adwords will translate to sales!
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