The process of managing client expectations inadvertently leads to a lot of learning for both the client and the Adwords Campaign Manager. Let me give some relevant examples which will help Adwords professionals and those who chose to advertise on Google.

1. Client Query – ” I am receiving irrelevant or out of geography enquiries? Please block them ”

Imagine this enquiry forwarded to you by your client with screenshot & big red circle over it. You have installed captcha & have configured spam bot plug-in too, but still it’s not possible to block this always. So how can we handle this?

Remember standard copy-cat servicing replies don’t work here, your personal & professional pitch addressing the problem and follow-ups to understand if the situation has improved is of utmost importance. In the above case we probed the problem, looked at various solutions, interacted with Google teams and arrived at some solutions. We shared these with the client with a clear explanation on what we felt would be the impact on the campaign. And then we revised all campaign ads, changed the methods of geo targeting and added a few landing pages with fresh copy and geo focus and viola! The leads relevancy improved and over time is almost negligible. We also learnt how IP’s can be a major problem with targeting for campaigns and how to resolve this issue successfully.

2) Client Query – “My sales have increased over last month, but my adwords budget/spend has increased too?”

Ok, this tricky & difficult because you will have to explain to the client the workings of adwords campaigns and optimisation properly. Rule no.1 share knowledge so the client can take informed decisions.

Today though branding is a need for almost all growing companies, a typical Client will say, we can increase the budget if there is increase in sales and that is really a client who wants to grow and someone who needs to be explained the medium, its efficacies and boundaries properly. When a clients sales from adwords campaigns went up by 64% & budget went up by 24% he asked us the same question. Now, firstly does the increase in leads and budget really disqualify performance or qualifies as a essential improvement in cost per lead and also share of impressions? Each adwords advertiser would weigh this in his own way and rightfully so, it is an agencys job as custodian of the clients monies to ensure that he understands the right way to look at data, analysis and implementation plans. Data and analysis are at the heart of campaign success – we need to look at search query reports, ad performance reports, adding negative keywords daily, search impression share reports etc.

Ok, so how did we tackle this ? Yes, data crunching, explaining to the client why, along with reasons why we should continue with the existing strategy. Make sure the client & you are on the same page at the end of the discussion, which would be only possible if you have successfully explained them to granularly look at the data rather than just numbers.

The best piece of advice I ever received during my learning days years ago was “whatever you can track, you can optimize“, that fits exactly these situations.

Hope you enjoyed this piece, do stay tuned for more.

Earlier this week in a formal announcement Google said, “In the next few weeks, we will no longer allow phone numbers to be used in the ad text of new ads. Advertisers who would still like to promote phone numbers in their AdWords advertising can use the call extensions feature. We’re posting this alert now to provide adequate lead time to make ad changes.

In April 2013, we will begin to disapprove ads that were using phone numbers in their ad text before the March 2013 policy change. We are making this change to foster a safer, more consistent user experience across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.”

The latter is one of the key goals of Google and given the increase in mobile usage and the future prospects of mobile, Google wants to monetize the click to call feature and what better time than now.

The “Call” button is only displayed on smartphones and can be seen on Google’s search, Voice search, Google Mobile App or Google Maps for Mobile. On desktops, laptops and tablets, ads appear with a phone number that is not clickable. With this change when a user searches on Google using their smart phone or GPS enabled handheld device they would be directly able to make a phone call, using the call extension, the advertiser would be charged the same as for a standard click on the ad.

Here’s small example of this new extension would work in different devices

Desktop and/or Laptop :-

Before :-

After :-

Image 2 – The 1st PPC ad is only using the Call Extension & hence the phone number is in-line with the headline.

While – The 2nd ad in image 2, is using location extension – One thing to note is if you have location extensions and call extensions both enabled for the same ad, users near your business will see the address of your business as listed in the location extension, which is the only implication it seems where only one extension will show.

The good thing about this feature is that it will give the advertiser more room to use the character space and describe more about the service/product rather than wasting it mentioning the call no.

Mobile & GPS enabled hand phone:

The flipside for advertiser is that they will now be charged for clicked links & calls made from PPC ads, whereas previously they would slip telephone numbers into the text of their advert description and benefit from potential customers accessing their contact details without having to click on the URL.

Advertisers, particularly small businesses, will need to consider call extensions when setting their PPC budgets. In addition, in order for call extensions to show “your ad group will have to receive a minimum number of clicks … and a minimum number of calls to show a Google forwarding number”.

Google added, “Call extensions are best for you if you have a national service center, or if your business isn’t tied to a specific physical location.” We’re awaiting clarification on what these statements mean for local businesses. In the meantime, prepare to remove phone numbers from your text ads by April Fools Day.

What am going to do with all the relationships if it does not translate into business?

How do I translate these relationships into business and whats going to be my ROI?

How am I supposed to calculate Social Media ROI?

Now you know social media is working for many brands and maybe you also saw your competitor implementing social media marketing campaigns – you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity. As one of the early adopter of social media you might just have an edge over competition, right!

So you give a thumbs-up yes to a trial campaign using Facebook but the question remained How do you figure out that 25,000 you will spend on Facebook was worth the effort and the money? There is no absolute technology which allow you to do that just like you cannot know how many people saw your prime location hoarding and purchased your product / service because they saw it.

Having said that, let me try to highlight a few simple ways to track ROI from social media campaigns which you can employ anytime.

Campaign specific promo Coupons and Offer codes

Offer a coupon only on one medium. You can thus know with 100% accuracy that every coupon that customers used came from Facebook or from someone who got it from his / her friend but nonetheless from facebook. Facebook has introduced a its own version of coupons in called ‘Offers’.  The process is rather simple and it better be if Facebook wants marketers to use the platform J.  As per a facebook product manager the offer mechanism allows online stores to quickly understand where the source of traffic.

Using unique phone / mobile numbers

Getting a mobile number is not difficult these days. You can book unique mobile numbers for specific campaigns / offers. These can be assigned to each campaign or offer by the medium you intened to use for e.g. Facebook, Twitter etc The calls will enable you to track which medium works best for a specific offer.

Facebook’s Conversion Measurement tool

This is a relatively new tool introduced by facebook for measuring ROI. The tools lets advertisers track the behavior of people who click an ad on facebook. If a user clicks on an FB ad and then goes to your website and initiates action like Sale, registration, enquiry, download etc then you will be able to track it.  Activating conversion measurement calls for pasting a few lines of code on your webpages and is not difficult.

Google Analytics

Understanding traffic sources is very critical to campaign management success in online marketing. Analytics may not be able to what people are buying if they have come from a social media page but you will know for sure if traffic is coming from social platforms like Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest.

Isolate Campaigns

This though simplest is a difficult one to implement especially when your marketing is in full flow. You can stop all marketing activities and run a social media campaign for a few weeks on each of the social platforms and see for yourself if there is any change in sales of your products. Do remember you are going to a targeted audience and your offering, creatives etc have to meet expectations for them to work.

I hope the above methods will give you a snapshot of how well your social media marketing is working thought in a limited way.  Social media ROI may not be visible immediately in may cases but do remember that your brand is being seen, engaged with and shared. That’s high value for money given the very lost cost of engaging prospects using social media campaigns.

1. Focus on your usability and better websites

Now Google has started looking at the website as an important part of the overall user experience. A good website has the opportunity of getting shared socially and that’s an opportunity on Google+ as well which you must not miss.

Ensuring better user experience will mean better engagement and more frequent visitors. When people like something they would want their friends and associate’s to check it out too. Hence you need to have faster loading, well designed websites which will find social acceptance.

2. Keywords, keywords, keywords! Yes this is very important 

As Google goes more local search engine users are also understanding the benefits of specific search terms. Majority of searches contain three or more words in the search query. Most search queries are completely new and businesses understand analytics better they will get better understanding of how consumers across geographies are seeking solutions using new keywords. It’s the long tail keywords that are steadily gaining prominence especially when it comes to finding services nearby.  This is a fantastic growth areas and SEO strategies should be focused here.

Focusing on Short keywords and ignoring the long tail lead to an imbalance and returns drop over time.

3. It’s not just rankings but traffic that should count

Gone are days when you only approached SEO with a single objective – Ranking on Google! Its time to take a traffic-view of seo. Time to take stock of keywords that can get you relevant traffic and build a strategy around them rather than chasing ranking.

4. Write relevant solutions oriented Content

Content strategies is where most SEO’s are found to be lacking. Creating content visitors will love is not rocket science. Focus on how your product / service can solve a customer’s problem. The customer came searching for a solution, found you and depends on you for a solution. Just address that and you will have some of the best content which people and Google will love. And if it’s the very writing that’s giving you nightmares, reach our expert content writing team.

5. Publish Content on trusted sites

Last year’s the penguin update started negating the value of content published on untrusted sites.  So this year make sure you have your content publishing sources right. We already started on this long ago. Just consider the websites you publish content on as your sources of reference. Good sites draw people and that’s where your opportunity lies. Its no longer thousands of links but good links from quality sources. You need good references afterall to be trusted J.

6. Use Social Media

A great referral tool is what Social media can become if used right. Social platforms are an excellent tool for sharing and promoting content on your websites. No doubt over time you will be able to reach millions of people but the great plus is that content sharing on the social platforms will ensure brownie points for search results – do not forget Google +.

Before I say good bye I would like to say there is much more to SEO than just the website today. Happy Optimising!

Getting them right.

It is important that you get your keywords right or else you will find your efforts resulting in failure. More than the financial loss, the loss of opportunity will hurt the most. Competition will have surged ahead and you will need to invest more time and money all over again. The right SEO and SEM marketing campaign needs to target the right audience and the right market.

To get started, learn about the market and adopt your customer’s mindset. As a customer what would you be looking for? Keep the consumer behavior points in mind – search, research, buy. For effective search engine optimisation keywords selection have to be supported by a strong content plan.

The idea is to build good quality content around keywords related to the product / service you are aiming to sell. You may seen the services of a content writer or a content writing agency Good keywords are those which just do not have high search volumes but have high relevancy and can impact conversion objectives. A keyword with 5000 search volume need not be as good as a keyword with 1000 search volume. You can check search volumes on Google keyword tool.

For example Google adwords agency is not as relevant as Google adwords agency Mumbai if one is looking for business from Mumbai only. ‘Google Adwords Agency Delhi’ is an excellent keyword for us if we are targeting clients in Delhi markets who want to employ services of a Google certified Adwords agency for PPC campaign management services. A generic keyword like PPC agency or Adwords agency will throw up different search results.

Similarly if you we want to rank high for SEO Agency Mumbai as a keyword we would do better if we focused on the same and not just on SEO agency or SEO agency India. I hope you have been able to understand thus far.

Competency and differentiation

What is your core competency? What is it that sets you apart from your competition? What can give you the edge? These are the questions which need to be answered when embarking on an optimisation plan.

This helps in selecting keywords unique to your business / product offering. Thereafter add prospective Markets to further focus your keywords.

Targeting single keywords is not a great idea as there is too much irrelevancy and needless competition. If you are a MBA college in Pune targeting student admissions for MBA courses – the keyword “MBA” may sound exciting to rank on but is not as relevant as part time ‘Best MBA courses’ or ‘full time MBA courses’ and the more relevant keywords are ‘MBA colleges in Pune’ or ‘best MBA College in Pune’ and so on. Using relevant keyword phrases to build your search rankings makes it easier to rank on shorter keywords over a period of time.

The right approach is to build a small databank of keywords and phrases which are relevant before starting Search Engine Optimisation for webpages. Objectively you want your SEO or SEM campaigns to bring the right customers to your website through their search queries, focused keywords will get you relevant traffic.

Happy Ranking!

Many a times to make the page attractive and focused images are used. They add to the look and feel of the web page and make it more enjoyable for the visitor. Did you know that these images can help improve search rankings? Yes, Images can be optimized for SEO and should be. Standalone they can generate traffic from image-based search engines too. For e.g. Google Images search.

Let’s understand what needs to be done to optimize images for SEO.

Tips for Image Optimization for SEO rankings

SEO Tips For Image Optimisation

A: Alt Text (short for Alternate Text)

When you see an image of a person eating an ice cream you are immediately able to understand the activity. Similarly when you see people shaking hands or see the image of a well known monument you recognize what’s in the picture, isn’t it!.

Now the problem with search engines is that they cannot understand or recognize what images mean. The solution to the problem is to tell the search engine bots what the image is all about and this is where the “Alt Text” tag comes in. It basically helps the search engine understand the images on a web page.

How to add alt text?

In the image tag on the web page all you have to do is add the Alt Tag as alt=”alt text here”. For example:

<img src=”ice-cream-vendor.png” alt=”Ice Cream Vendor at Juhu beach” />

That’s it, by doing so you have told the search engine what the image is all about.

B: Size of the Image files

Web page load time has become an important parameter for SEO. This means codes and images on your pages have to be highly optimized to ensure faster page load times.

One of the things that increase page load times are the images. If images are a must, then some steps must be taken to ensure SEO compatibility. Ensure that file size of images is as small as possible. No doubt you must ensure that reducing file size does not result in poor image quality.

One common mistake I have seen that people let the browser resize images. The best route : edit images to the desired size, and upload that. No code issues

C: File Name Nomenclature

Whats in a name? is a famous saying. But the for SEO lets understand that there is much to a file name. You must have a descriptive filename for the image files. The ideal method is to add a keyword in the file name itself because it will help search engines relate the image to the page content in a better way.

D: Writing Captions for Images

Image captions make sure that the readers or web page visitors quickly get a grip on what the contents of the page might be. In the absence of such the visitor is left to guess and / or read a few lines and in such cases usually visitors bounce from the web page.

I would say captions on images have helped me many a times decide whether I was the right page for the information I was looking for. I must add that this has been a long argued feature as no relationship has been established between captions and seo rankings but I believe it has its own benefits.

E. Page content surrounding the Image

Content relevancy and originality is something we already know about. This applies to images too. The text surrounding the image has to be relevant to the image and vice-versa. Not only is this important from the image SEO perspective but works also from a user perspective.

Hope you enjoyed. If you are looking for more information on seo you can check out our blog on 6 things you must know about seo and our performance seo page will help you too.

While much has been written and spoken about the various aspects of Internet Marketing and the roles that internet marketing agencies have to play there is still so much that has unfortunately not been understood clearly. What I want to say is that while almost everyone who is in the business of providing SEO, SEM, SMO and other Internet Marketing services is attempting to do the very best, the aspect which gets ignored is educating the client. Come to think of it and I see that we have had a number of clients the recent past who have had unhappy relationships with their respective internet marketing agencies. No, I am not here writing to say who is right and wrong but I surely could understand that most of these unhappy relationships were a result of the client not understanding the internet marketing realities and thus having very high unrealistic expectations which could not be met.

Having said that I plan to write a series of blogs in an attempt to simplify things for all those who want to get started or are already investing in internet marketing. In this blog piece I am writing about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) .

When it comes to search engine optimisation here are some basic questions that come to mind. For all those who are going to attempt understanding SEO for the first time this link to our SEO Services page will help.

Now the Questions:

1. What is important in SEO?
2. What makes a website site rank higher than others?
3. How to improve Google search rankings?
4. Is there some kind of secret method to rank?

1. Website Content

Just like a good sandwich requires good quality ingredients between the breads a website needs good quality content. That “Content is king” is something all good SEO’s know. Good quality unduplicated content is the secret to success. It ensures that the visitors stay longer and increases time spent on the website. Needless to say good content plays an important role in generating traffic. After all, we all love to share good stuff we find. Content in a way initiates word of mouth and social marketing. So hone your content writing skills or start looking for a good content writing services agency.

2. Keywords

When you think content you need to think keywords. Keywords are words which you expect a user to search for when he is looking for the product / service / information you are providing. They are  important because they guide the search bots to understand your site content better thus making your site specific to the search engine. Identifying Good keywords ensures right targeting and thus brings relevant visitors to your website thereby increasing chances of conversions and also search rankings.

The right mix of keywords and keyword phrases will ensure better authority for the pages.

3. Pictures / Images

We all know that a good image can speak so much about the content. Images also add to the look at feel of the website and the content layout. A few images in the content make it attractive and thus prod the visitor to read. Images are often missed when it comes to SEO but the fact is that they can play a role too. Images can be coded with alt text that comes in handy when people are looking for Images on search. Alt tags can be keyword rich thus adding to the page value.

4.  Website Page URL’s

Your domain name is important. It has a role to play in search rankings.

If your domain name is in sync with your website’s content it improves the possibility of ranking early. If its not, then you need  not worry you won’t loose ranking or be penalised by Google, its just going to take more efforts to rank. If possible its better you get a domain name that has a keyword relevant to your business / product / service for which you wish to gain a search ranking.

5. Meta Tags

This is one of the most spoken about aspect of SEO. To be specific Meta Tags are an important element of on-page SEO. Meta tags (Meta Title, Meta keywords, Meta Description etc) are tags which are a part of your webpages header codes. It is read by Google search bots and helps in establishing the relevancy of the web page to the search engine.

Meta tags increase the weightage of your keywords and also help the search engines determine what your website is  about. The meta description tag is used by google as an excerpt in search results. The crisper and relevant the description the more the possibility of the search user clicking on the search result and visiting your web page.

more information on meta tags

6. Backlinks / Inbound links

This is the critical element. Backlinks or inbound links essentially tell the search engine about the number of sites / pages on the web pointing to your web site pages. This is definitely the biggest booster for search rankings. With the google panda update quality of backlinks has also become critical. Relevant backlinks will ensure you earn google brownie points and thus boost search ranking.

Another important element which often is known but sidelined if the very nature of your website right from design to navigation to usability. Essentially how friendly is your website. It has to simple and easy to negotiate, engaging and understood by the audience it is meant for.

All SEO begins with understand the prospective customers and ends when you have done that it will keep bringing them back to you. And remember the buzz word is “Relevancy”.

Currently the results that Google displays for your search query is generated by established algorithmic approaches in which the relevance is determined by taking into account every text in the document and by how the links are structured. The page rank algorithm is a very big reason why Google is the best search engine around. And recently Google has tried to enter the social networking market with Google Plus. The success of Google Plus as a social medium is being questioned by many and this might be one reason as to why Google may not succeed much with Social Search.

The basis of Social search is the social graph of a person but with Google Plus being a newbie as compared to the well established Facebook, Google entering the social search market might not make a huge difference. As of now when entering a search query on Google, the result that one gets is the most relevant out of a huge chunk of indexed websites data in the order of the website having the most adequate, extensive data which is search engine optimized. This was to change with the +1 social feature that Google introduced but has no bearing as of now given that the +1 usage itself had not achieved any great numbers.

On the contrary Microsoft Bing which is Google’s main competitor has probably taken its first step to challenging Google by partnering with Facebook for social search. Bing is taking the right approach into social search by linking you to people who can help you with your search query. By introducing a sidebar, Bing lets you share, discover and converse with friends, real time. The combo is working together so that as you search you can get help from Facebook friends by tagging them. Bing also suggests friends who might know about your query based on FB likes, profile and photos. Quite interesting isn’t it!

Bing identifies  for you the experts  and enthusiasts of your search query from other leading networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus (how ironic) etc. Activity feed lets you know about real time posts, queries and answers in both Bing and FB. Also the sidebar is non intrusive and you can decide whether you want to social search. Thus Facebook with over 900 million users and their personal database and Bing being a reasonably good search engine the Bing-Facebook combination can prove to be more successful in the social search frontier.

Our post on what are Meta tags was written to help you understand the basics. Now let’s try to go a step ahead or maybe a few steps ahead and know more about meta tags. They are tags written within the code of the webpages and thus are not visible to the web page visitors. A simple view source on the browser can show you the meta tags of a page. Do you ever wonder what search engines do with your meta tags?

There are three things that a search engine crawler / robot does with meta tags:

1. Indexing: This is the basic function of meta tags – to aid indexing. When a search engine bot crawls your page, it create a copy of the HTML code on a web page and stores it in its database. This act crawling and storing of a web page is called indexing. All meta keywords are indexed by Google.

2. Retrieving : How a search engine reacts to the people surfing the web and looking for something and serves results is termed as retrieving. What does it retrieve? Well, the search engine retrieves what it has indexed about your website from your web pages and compares it with the search query of the user. While doing so it tries to find the right match among the documents it has indexed looking for those pages which are most relevant to the search query the user has entered in the search engine. While doing so it may not necessarily go through the indexed document completely – meaning that it will not necessarily go through the meta keywords, title and description for retrieval and matching with the search query.

3. Aiding Ranking: This is what every website owner craves for. Ranking is about finding and putting the best, most accurate and relevant web pages on top of a search results page. This is based on a complex algorithm. The meta tags have a role to play here claim many and others feel they have no relevance.

4. Presentation : Yes, the metas are used by search engines when it comes to showing the details of a page on the search results pages. The title and description are picked up by search engines and shown on the search results. This is important that the Meta tags be written by an SEO professional who knows the impact of the writing the meta tags correctly.

But then there are sites that may have been negatively affected by the Google Panda update and would want to acquire some information on how Google searches for high-quality sites. In a recent panda update post Google has attempted to share guidelines for building better quality websites. Our article on SEO for websites and why content is important for SEO success is a suggested read before you begin reading this post further.

Google says “search is a complicated art and science, so rather than focusing on specific algorithmic tweaks, we encourage you to focus on delivering the best possible experience for users”. Yes, friends the user experience is critical for all businesses be it online or offline. User experience is a critical parameter in evaluating the quality of a website and Google is taking this seriously to ensure quality search results.

What counts as a high-quality website?

Google says “Our site quality algorithms are aimed at helping people find “high-quality” sites by reducing the rankings of low-quality content. The recent “Panda” change tackles the difficult task of algorithmically assessing website quality.”

In an attempt to explain some of the ideas and research that drive the development of our algorithms, Google has shared information which will help clients, webmasters, SEO’s and digital marketers to assess the quality of a website, web page or an article.

These are the type of questions Google says its team would consider when writing algorithms, that attempt to assess site quality. Essentially it’s what Google thinks the search users want.

A large chunk of questions are about content. We have written about this quite a while back in our post about content writing tips that Google will love .

But now there are more SEO tips here, so consider the following questions when you think website SEO.

Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this website?

Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

Does the article describe both sides of a story?

Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?

For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?

Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?

Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?

Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?

Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
(Google Adsense users, this is a parameter google is considering for SEO ranking)

Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?

Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?

Would users complain when they see pages from this site?

According to Google “we hope the questions above give some insight into how we try to write algorithms that distinguish higher-quality websites from lower-quality ones.”

What can help achieve better search results ranking on Google?

Keep questions like the ones above and those in our earlier posts and also ensure hygiene parameters are not ignored, like our post on Search engine optimization for small websites or how to avoid SEO penalties for over-optimization. Most important would be to focus on developing high-quality content rather than trying to optimize for any particular algorithm.

Remember that low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings. Following the right steps will ensure that your website will be more likely to rank well for the long-term.