SEO and high organic rankings are a mid to long term goal.
They take consistent effort, time and lots of supporting research and content creation. As any battle weary SEO will tell you – it’s good to know it’s worth the effort before you start! That’s why solid Keyword Research is so important to any successful SEO campaign.

However, once you know which keywords you want to target, it’s still a good idea to give them a ‘wee test’. Google Ads is a great way to do just that. Buying the top position for your target keywords for a week can help you ensure that your website is setup fpr your market. A week spent within the top ad position for your target keyword will tell you whether or not your site offer attracts clickthroughs and, if it does, whether or not your site is setup to entice those visitors into becoming customers. Great information to know before you embark on the battle for page 1 organic rankings!

Here’s a quick video that will show you how to work out how much a week spent in the no 1 sponsored link position might cost you, and how many clickthroughs you should expect from that position.

Once setup, you’ll be able to view what happens to your Ad via the Adwords dashboard. As started briefly in the video, if you attract lots of clickthroughs to your site from the ad, but none of these convert, then you should look at your website copy. Be sure that your ad is sending people to THE most directly relevant page of your website and not just the homepage.  In the video example of a London caterers website, this might be a menu page or even a special offer ‘buy today’ page.

If on the other hand, your ad has many impressions but very few clickthroughs (you should base this off the no of clickthroughs Google Traffic Estimator predicts your keyword should generate across the week), then you look at your ad copy first. Is this selling your offer well? Does your ad copy differ from other advertisers on page 1? If so, how?  If you feel your ad copy is great and competitive, then you perhaps need to look at your offer itself. Is it really of interest to the people searching for your chosen keyword? Are there better keywords your offer would be more appropriate for?

Finally, if your ad generates good clickthroughs and you convert some sales too then…..you’re set to go with SEO! Well done!

A quick bonus post inbetween our series on Website concept to completion.

It’s that time of year when the mornings are getting lighter, the birds are singing for incoming Spring and we’re all finding Yell.com sales people camping on our doorsteps! I can just remember the days when a Yellow Pages advert was a must for any new business. Thesedays Yell have moved almost all of their attention towards their online directory yell.com. A client and I were discussing the new yell.com offer last week and this post outlines a clever wee trick we uncovered to price check their latest yell.com package, using keyword research.

One of the major selling points of the new Yell.com package is a guaranteed page 1 Google ranking of the page your Yell listing is placed upon. This guarantee is offered around a choice of locally tagged keywords, eg ‘accountants in leeds’, ‘florist in keighley’ or in this case ‘monumental masons york‘.   The current rate for the package on offer to my client was £120 per month. We first checked Google rankings for the keyword ‘monumental masons york’, sure enough their was the Yell.com listing page ranking no 4.

The Yell.com sales pitch had promised 300 hits per month currently being sent to this webpage, a rate of around 40p per impression. So, we first checked this figure of 300 hits per month in Google Keyword Tool – if you read the last post you’ll know how to do this. Even on ‘broad match’, this keyword showed ‘not enough data’ to give us a figure for searches across January 2010. Did no-one need a ‘monumental mason’ in York in January 2010? Or were Yell.com claiming to get more traffic than the mighty Google itself (no chance)?

The answer probably comes wrapped up in the ancient language of ‘sales spin’. Within the world of online advertising, most sales pitches are delivered quoting seemingly wonderful ‘hits’ per month figures. What really matters is the figure a potential advert will deliver in ‘visits’.

The Difference Between Hits and Visits
If I browse to your website ‘Homepage’, then I go to your ‘About’ page and finally your ‘Contact’ page, I have generated one visit and three hits. When you next check your webstats, look out for the difference between your website hits and visits, you’ll be quite amazed at how many hits comparatively few visitors can generate.

From the evidence provided by Google’s Keyword Tool, I ‘strongly’ suggest that Yell.com were quoting hits to my client and not visits. So, given that when Google tells us there is not enough data’ to offer a keyword search figure, this generally means that there were less than 5 unique searches last month for that keyword. But let’s be generous and assume there were 10 searches last month for ‘monumental masons york’. The £120 per month now works out at a massive £12 per search!

So, what can be done about this? Is this simply the cost of advertising in the online world? Do we really have to give up our Xmas bonus for another year? Certainly not! With the flick of the wrist and the click of a mouse, we’ll be smiling all the way to Harvey Nicks!

First, type into Google’s Keyword Tool the exact keyword being offered to you by Yell.com. Click on the drop down menu labelled ‘Choose columns to be displayed’ in the Keyword Tool and select ‘Show Estimated Average CPC’ and ‘Show Estimated Ad Position’ (see below – click to enlarge).

For this example, I’ve kept with the post topic keyword of ‘monumental masons york’. What you can now see is that a Google Adword bought for this very keyword will cost you only 4p per click, and this is for an estimated Ad position between 1 and 3. Those 10 unique searches we ‘assumed’ above could now cost 40p as a Google Ad instead of £120 as a Yell.com Ad! And that’s only if they all ‘click through’ to your website.

If you were to bid a little higher, say to 20p per click in this case, then you should find your Google Ad appearing at position 1. This is exactly what my client has done, now he sits on the first page of Google, four places above yell.com and at a cost up to 90% cheaper than his Yell.com listing would have cost him.

If you’re not up to scratch on utilising Pay Per Click and Google Adwords, I will be writing a few posts on this subject in the near future. In the meantime, do feel free to get in touch, I’m always happy to talk web. Next post, back to our new website and going about discovering more keyword targets…