Aqua Blue Studios is all about results! When setting up a Search Engine Marketing Campaign it is always good to understand Goals and Objectives as well as who is going to be held accountable. Watch this video from Adobe to learn more about how we are taking top level strategies to the local level.
Aqua Blue Studios was pleased to sponsor the NARI 2011 Golf Tournament at the St. Ives Golf Club outside of Atlanta. Check out NARI to learn more about them. We had a great time and met some great people!
It is simple. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is organic traffic and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is paid. So simple…or is it?
Many businesses often engage in both activities when promoting their business online. For many online enthusiasts it is a most. The might have an SEO guy working on their website and a completely different company working on the SEM. Most business owners or companies hired these online marketing companys based on their expertise. For example: I hired company A to do my SEO because that is what they specialize in and I hired company B in SEM because that is what they specialized in. But sometimes this can be a deterrent to your overall marketing. Why? Because the two hands need to work together.
Take your retirement portfolio. Actually take all of your family finances as a whole. If you have one financial advisor managing your wife’s 401K, you are managing your IRA the you rolled over from your previous company, your kid’s 529 portfolios are being managed by a fund company, you have a couple bank CD’s managed by a customer service representative at your bank, and you also have a personal friend who is a financial advisor managing a ROTH IRA you have. WOW! That was confusing just writing it! Just imagine how all these accounts are operating by themselves as opposed to in conjunction with each other. Dave Ramsey would give you an F on your score card.
When running a business or making the overall marketing decision this example applies to your overall marketing as well. For this article we are going to purely focus on how this affects your SEM and SEO only. It is important for each hand to know what the other is doing.
A lot of the beginning analysis of a well formed SEO campaign can be around geo-graphic structure, long-tail keyword analysis, and high conversion keywords needed to land leads. Interesting, that sounds a lot like what is needed for a well structured SEM campaign.
Where we see Keyword Selection and Analysis parallel with SEM is in the fact that they can work off of each other. If you are focusing on a group of SEO keywords and an group of SEM keywords how are they relating to each other? Are you strategically focusing on a certain group of cities for this keyword and focusing on a group of other cities for your SEM keywords? Are you targeting your own company name? If you are what are the cost? Have you run a cost analysis study to understand if you were to eliminate this from your SEM campaign would it lower or increase conversions? If you do what is the cost/benefit of doing so?
So when making all SEM and SEO decisions it is important to understand if I am doing this in SEO, then why? If not, then why? Same goes with SEM. It is important that not matter what you are doing you have a plan behind it and make sure the two are interacting and working together as opposed to complete opposites.
These are important questions to ask yourself as well as the companies you are working with so that you know when the right hand moves the left hand knows where to go.
Avoid High Cost:
Lets pretend we are a furniture store and let’s say we are investing in SEM. These are all examples and I have formulated numbers for easy math based on the examples below.
Say for every 10 customers who click your ad and got to your website 3 are buying. Great! Business is good things are great but lets get competitive.
This keyword is costing you $10 a click. So every 10 customers who click that keyword is costing you $100. For every 10 customers you get 3 are buying. These 3 equate to $500 in gross revenues.
So you spent $100 and made $500.
Out of the $500 in gross sales you actually make $300. So the $300 minus the $100 invested you have a profit of $200. Your SEM Guru has led you to believe this is great. It might be, but let’s explore this further.
What if I did some SEO and focused on that keyword. Say we were able to move our website to the top 5 position for that keyword organically and we received 20 clicks a month and it equated for $1000 in gross revenue. We took the $100 we were spending on that keyword in SEM and applied it to another keyword and received 20 clicks and made $350 gross of that investment. So now we are making $1350 gross off the same effect.
Now we are talking!
Before we get started in this example just know that their are many influences in a Quality Score and how it is determine.
In simple terms: AD RANK = MAX CPC x Quality Score
The quality score of a keyword is part of what is used in the equation to determine your Cost Per Click. There are many factors used to measure the quality of the destination page, but many of the factors can be influenced by SEO. In fact, by improving the quality of a web site’s SEO as perceived by a search engine can help your quality score. Let’s take this for example:
An Atlanta web design company has their homepage the landing page of their SEM campaign. They are in fact located in Atlanta and focus on the keyword “Atlanta Web Design.” They have a high quality score because they are located in Atlanta and all their information on that landing page is regarding Atlanta so Google rates their quality score as a 10. Say one of their employees says we should really focus on “Alpharetta Web Design.” So they add it to their SEM campaign. They keep the same landing page though. So when Google rates this keyword against the landing page it is a 6. So they will pay more than someone who is rated 7,8,9,or 10 for keyword (*This depends also on their bid amount). So if they made a landing page that talked about Alpharetta Web Design and had keyword associated with it they might be able to win Google over and increase their quality score thus decreasing the cost for that keyword because their quality score is higher.
The morale of the story is that SEO and SEM definitely work together and we have showed this in many ways. Simply by adding a blog or some extra program by a large company does not grant you SEO or SEM. Just because your site was added to 1,500 blogs or 1,400 news feeds, or 99,000 local sites you can see it is much more complexed then that. Make sure you hire a viable SEO/SEM firm that understands this and can distinguish and make actions to make sure they work together.
Shane Snow is co-founder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands-turned-publishers and freelance journalists.
Old school SEO pros cover your ears, or be prepared to adapt your craft: Search engines are changing, and social media is a huge part of that change.
Bing, Google, and an increasing swath of nimble little search engines like Blekko and DuckDuckGo are incorporating social data into their results. This is potentially great news for new businesses trying to achieve visibility in search. It’s less great news for sites that rely heavily on link buying (illegal, but hard to catch), producing huge volumes of borderline-useless content (long-tail, content farm approach), or just really old domains (previously an SEO trump card).
Both Bing and Google admitted in interviews that their search results are positively affected by social signals, such as tweets, Facebook Likes, and +1s.
SEE ALSO: How User-Generated Content Is Changing SEO
“As ideas, thoughts, questions and answers are shared more freely and easily than ever, the increased amount of information from social sources provides great benefits to users,” says a Microsoft spokesperson for Bing (who asked to remain anonymous).
“The links that you build through social media, the references, the authority — all can have an impact in various ways on how you are ranked and listed even in ‘regular’ search results,” says Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land, in an email interview. “Social media allows for people to provide more trusted signals.”
Search Engines Adapt to Survive
Since the early Internet days of Excite and Webcrawler, the principal goal of search engines has been to help people find what they’re looking for. Google rose to dominate the industry by tracking better indicators of content quality than anyone else. It developed a complex algorithm that measured which websites were “voting” for others by linking to them.
Essentially, it was social media, but for websites rather than people. If your site had lots of links from relevant sites, your Google rank climbed. Plenty of other factors, like putting keywords into headlines and titles, remained in play (and continually evolved), but the game changer of the last decade was links.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry emerged to help webmasters play the “me rank higher” game with Google. On the one hand, website owners attempt to adhere to Google’s standards and prove they are high quality (creating relevant, high quality content and formatting it to Google’s taste). On the other hand, shadier sites try to trick Google’s secret formula, “pretending” to be good content without having to bother with creating useful stuff.
The spammers have done well for themselves. Over the last few years, searchers have increasingly complained about the number of irrelevant or spammy results returned in searches.
The battle to the top of search keeps search engines on their toes. Every so often Google, makes an abrupt change in its algorithm, like the “Panda Update” of early 2011 that wiped out a significant number of content farm results. Periodically, new search engines launch to try to outdo Google. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has climbed to 30% market share since its launch in 2009. Blekko, an “anti-spam” search engine, has climbed to a million searches a day since its launch in 2007.
And now, social media is factoring in to make results even better.
Social Media Changes The Game
Social networks produce an immense amount of data about what real people like enough to share with their friends.
Today, people share 30 billion pieces of content on Facebook and over 5 billion tweets — about a quarter of which contain links to content — per month.
In an industry where knowing what humans like is crucial to success, search engines have figured out — and taken to heart — a delightfully simple mantra: If people share your content, it’s probably pretty good.
In a white paper called New Signals To Search Engines, Search Engine Strategies Advisory Board chair Mike Grehan says, “End users who previously couldn’t vote for content via links from web pages are now able to vote for content with their clicks, bookmarks, tags and ratings. These are very strong signals to search engines, and best of all, they don’t rely on the elitism of one website owner linking to another or the often mediocre crawl of a dumb bot.”
We’re already seeing proof of search engines taking social data into account when serving results.
Social Data Is Personalizing Results
Last year, Bing started incorporating Facebook like data into its search results. Results for pages that a searcher’s own friends had liked show up more prominently.
And more recently, Bing announced better results through Facebook data and “collective IQ,” meaning that things popular throughout Facebook (not just among your friends) rank more prominently.
SEE ALSO: Why Web Personalization May Be Damaging Our World View
“Search is better when it’s not just based in math and algorithms, but also infused with the opinions of people,” writes the Bing team in a blog post.
Google answered back to the Bing-Facebook deal with its own +1 button, and subsequently Google+. When searching as a logged-in Google user, you now see this social data personalizing your results.
Sullivan recounts how automaker Ford rose in his Google results after he added Ford to his Google+ account. “Ford gets into the top results for cars not because of links, not because of the content on its page, but because I was ‘friends’ with it,” Sullivan says.
Shared Content Now Ranks Higher in Organic Search
Both Google and Bing have added real-time results to their searches, meaning Twitter (and now Google+) results show up prominently above other content.
In addition, several experiments have shown that sharing stories on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ can dramatically affect regular search results as well.
In July this year, Rand Fishkin of search engine authority SEOmoz.org performed a series of experiments to see if 1) social shares affected Google search results, and 2) how quickly those results appeared. (Find the full details on the experiment here.)
Spoiler Alert: In every test Fishkin performed, tweets and Google+ shares dramatically affected the rank of new, previously unindexed content. The results in most cases were nearly instant.
“We’re experimenting with clicks on +1 buttons as just one of the hundreds of signals that influences the ranking and appearance of websites in search results,” says a Google spokesperson (who wished to remain anonymous), via email. “As with any new ranking signal, for +1’s and other social ranking signals, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals are related to quality.”
A Microsoft spokesperson (who also requested anonymity), says via email that tweets and Facebook Likes do indeed positively affect a URL’s ranking in search results on Bing. “To be candid,” she says, “we are experimenting with placements in order to strike a balance between this new social signal and the other signals we have honed to determine relevance.”
“Social signals that say quality are pretty straight forward,” says the Microsoft spokesperson. “Look to things such as likes, re-tweets, shares, etc. Beyond that, watch for the sentiment surrounding the action. Are people sharing your content via Twitter yet flagging it with #fail? If so, it’s a clue they’re displeased.”
When we go to a search engine, we want to find what we’re looking for, immediately and hassle-free. It’s clear that social media is helping search engines deliver more immediacy and more relevant results. In the long run, this will help SEO-directed businesses focus on what they should be doing: creating content people love.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hillaryfox, ilbusca
With a little over six weeks having passed since its launch, the fuss about Google+ has died down. Google today shook things up again with the introduction of games.
When Google+ launched on June 28, early adopters praised the minimalist, clutter-free feel of the UI. Several people in my circles mentioned the lack of games specifically. Well, today Google filled that void. The company has added games to its brand new social network.
Yesterday afternoon, Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, announced that the search giant would be gradually roll out games in Google+. Gundotra explained that Games will not be in your face, bothering you when you’re not interesting in playing.
“When you’re ready to play, the Games page is waiting—click the games button at the top of your stream,” he wrote on the Google blog. “You can see the latest game updates from your circles, browse the invites you’ve received and check out games that people you know have played recently,” he continued, adding that if you don’t want to play games at all, you can just ignore it completely: “If you’re not interested in games, it’s easy to ignore them. Your stream will remain focused on conversations with the people you care about.”
Some of the games you’ll be able to play via Google+ are Angry Birds, Bejeweled Blitz and Dragon Age Legends. If the Games tab is available to you, you should see it along with the ‘home,’ ‘profile,’ ‘photos,’ and ‘circles’ tabs at the top of the G+ homepage. Let us know what you think!
Placement on Google Video search results. We’re expanding Promoted Video ads to show up on the Google.com Video search results page in the US only. This change gives you more opportunity to connect with potential viewers when they’re actively seeking out video content. If you also have search ads set up in your account, we’ll serve either your Promoted Video ad or your Google AdWords search ad, not both, based on a range of factors including your bid and Quality Score. To make sure you can take advantage of this increase in your potential audience, please opt into “Search partners” in your campaign.
When users enter your search terms (A) on video.google.com (B), they could see your Promoted Video ad above or to the right (C) of the organic search results (D).
Introduction on YouTube Mobile. Soon, your Promoted Video ads will be able to show up on our mobile destination,m.youtube.com, which can be easily viewed on web browsers across any mobile and tablet devices. New Google AdWords campaigns are opted into “All devices” by default, but you can opt your ads out of showing on mobile devices by navigating to “Settings” on the Campaigns tab. For existing campaigns, you may wish to verify that your device settings include or exclude mobile.
The mobile Promoted Video ad on m.youtube.com will include your ad thumbnail, title, and channel name, similar to organic video results.
Inclusion in TrueView video ads. We recently moved Promoted Videos from a cost-per-click to cost-per-view pricing model, focusing on the value of video views. In the coming months, Promoted Videos will join our TrueView family of ad formats, which provide viewers with choice and advertisers with engaged, opted-in views. Stay tuned for more updates!
Posted by Jonathan Goldman, YouTube Software Engineer
Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.
In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.
We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project:
+Circles: share what matters, with the people who matter most
Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today’s online services turn friendship into fast food—wrapping everyone in “friend” paper—and sharing really suffers:
In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, “What do people actually do?” And we didn’t have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time—with their circles.
From close family to foodies, we found that people already use real-life circles to express themselves, and to share with precisely the right folks. So we did the only thing that made sense: we brought Circles to software. Just make a circle, add your people, and share what’s new—just like any other day:
+Sparks: strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything
Healthy obsessions inspire sharing, and we’ve all got one (or two, or three…). Maybe it’s muscle cars, or comic books, or fashion, but the attraction is always the same: it comes up in conversation, we immediately jump in, and we share back and forth with other fans. Often for hours. The trick is getting things started, and getting over that initial hump. Fortunately, the web is the ultimate icebreaker.
The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about—not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks.
Thanks to Google’s web expertise, Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share—with just the right circle of friends:
+Hangouts: stop by and say hello, face-to-face-to-face
Whether it’s inside a pub or on a front porch, human beings have always enjoyed hanging out. And why not? It’s how we unwind, recharge, and spend unscheduled time with old and new friends alike. Hanging out is deceptively simple though, and the nuance gets lost online.
Just think: when you walk into the pub or step onto your front porch, you’re in fact signaling to everyone around, “Hey, I’ve got some time, so feel free to stop by.” Further, it’s this unspoken understanding that puts people at ease, and encourages conversation. But today’s online communication tools (like instant messaging and video-calling) don’t understand this subtlety:
With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you’re free, and spend time with your Circles. Face-to-face-to-face:
+Mobile: share what’s around, right now, without any hassle
These days a phone is the perfect sharing accessory: it’s always with you, it’s always online, and it’s how we stay close with our closest friends. We didn’t want “just” a mobile experience, however, so with Google+ we focused on things (like GPS, cameras, and messaging) to make your pocket computer even more personal.
+Location, location, location
In life, the places we visit shape conversations in lots of meaningful ways. If we call John from the airport, he’ll likely ask about our trip. Or if Jane texts from a nearby restaurant, we might join her for dessert. With Google+ you can add your location to every post. (Or not. It’s always up to you.)
+Instant Upload
Getting photos off your phone is a huge pain, so most of us don’t even bother. Of course pictures are meant to be shared, not stranded, so we created Instant Upload to help you never leave a photo behind. While you’re snapping pictures, and with your permission, Google+ adds your photos to a private album in the cloud. This way they’re always available across your devices—ready to share as you see fit.
+Huddle
Coordinating with friends and family in real-time is really hard in real life. After all, everyone’s on different schedules, in different places, and plans can change at any moment. Phone calls and text messages can work in a pinch, but they’re not quite right for getting the gang together. So Google+ includes Huddle, a group messaging experience that lets everyone inside the circle know what’s going on, right this second.
Starting today Google+ is available on Android Market and the mobile web, and it’s coming soon to the App Store.
+You: putting you first, all across Google
That’s the Google+ project so far: Circles, Sparks, Hangouts and mobile. We’re beginning in Field Trial, so you may find some rough edges, and the project is by invitation only. But online sharing needs a serious re-think, so it’s time we got started. There’s just one more thing—really the only thing: You.
You and over a billion others trust Google, and we don’t take this lightly. In fact we’ve focused on the user for over a decade: liberating data, working for an open Internet, and respecting people’s freedom to be who they want to be. We realize, however, that Google+ is a different kind of project, requiring a different kind of focus—on you. That’s why we’re giving you more ways to stay private or go public; more meaningful choices around your friends and your data; and more ways to let us know how we’re doing. All across Google.
When your invite arrives we hope you’ll join the project. But it’s entirely up to +You.
Posted by Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President, Engineering
In-Stream Ads on YouTube are also available in the YouTube Android app, enabling Animal Planet to extend this engagement opportunity to mobile users. Including Interactive Video Ads on the AdMob network further expanded the mobile campaign, giving users the opportunity to watch a preview of the River Monsters show, share the video through social media, learn more on the show’s mobile website, and watch additional videos – all from within the mobile ad.
To stir up even more excitement on the day of the premiere, a Rich Media Masthead on the YouTube homepage revealed clips from the upcoming episode and reminded users to tune in.
The River Monsters campaign was hugely successful:
The combination of compelling rich media and video advertising on both desktop and mobile created an engaging experience that increased social buzz around the show and led to a premiere that exceeded expectations.
Posted by Vicky Homan, Product Marketing Manager, Mobile Ads
Call Metrics works by assigning and placing a toll-free forwarding number next to your ad text on Google search pages. When a user sees your ad and calls the number, AdWords registers the call and forwards it to your business. So far, we’ve connected over 5 million calls for thousands of businesses. And calls generated from ads using Call Metrics last six minutes, on average.
1. More detailed reporting. In March we enhanced Call Metrics reporting to show the time, duration, and caller area code for each call. Based on advertiser feedback, we’re now making reporting available at the ad group and campaign level for manually-dialed calls (subject to minimum volume). And you’ll still be able to segment reports to compare how many calls were received from mobile clicks-to-call and how many were manually dialed after the ad was shown on a desktop, notebook, or tablet computer.
2. New pricing for certain calls. A $1 USD (or equivalent in CAD) charge applies to manually dialed calls completed to your Google forwarding numbers. These calls occur when a potential customer on a desktop, notebook or tablet computer sees your ad and dials the number shown.
Pricing for mobile clicks-to-call remains unchanged, whether you use Call Metrics or not. They continue to be charged as regular mobile search ad clicks.
3. Call Extensions replace Phone Extensions. To reduce possible ambiguity, we’ve renamed Phone Extensions to Call Extensions.
In a future release, we plan to incorporate calls into Ad Rank calculations, which determine an ad’s position and cost per click. At that time, you’ll be able to influence your ad position by specifying a bid per call greater than $1.00 USD. This will parallel the way that clickthrough rate (CTR) and max CPC bids can influence Ad Rank today.
To get started with Call Metrics, sign into AdWords and click on the Ad Extensions tab. Select Call Extensions in the shaded View drop down box. Select your country, then enter the business phone number where you’d like to receive calls for this campaign. Finally, select the check box for Call metrics.
| Before | After |
| “Relevant pages across the entire network” | “Show ads on pages that match the broadest targeting method” |
| “Relevant pages only on placements, audiences, and topics I manage” | “Show ads only on pages that match all selected targeting methods” |
