Optimization Strategies For Product Pages - Increase Conversion

Many business owners rely on content to push the customer through the sales process. There is no doubt that the content of the site is strategically important to convincing the customer to buy. But beyond the content, there is the site itself. While the content may be getting the message across, does the site help or prohibit customers from moving forward through the buying process?

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Shoppers come to a website not only with an intention to buy something (clearly the most desired end action from the site owner perspective), but to also learn, research and compare what you offer against what your competitors offer.

When landing on a product page – either via internal site navigation or external site search – shoppers need to have their informational needs met before they’ll even consider pulling the trigger on a purchase.

This is where your product pages come in. Not only can your product pages provide this information, they can also serve to help buyers find relevant pricing information, delivery costs, warranty and/or return policies, and a whole lot more.

Effective product pages are able to satisfy the various needs of each of your visitors. Raw product information isn’t enough! Your product pages must be designed with usability and conversions in mind. Effective product pages convert visitors on an intellectual and emotional level (content) as well as on a sub-conscious level (usability).

Here are 11 product page conversion optimization tips that can help you turn your product pages into your best sales staff.

Keep Your Product Page Layout Consistent

Try to maintain as much visual continuity from one product page to the next. Your content management system should use a single (or very similar) template(s).

Images, product descriptions, specifications and pricing should all be in the same place for the shopper who jumps from product page to product page. This consistency eliminates the need to re-orient themselves with each product page and provides the ability to compare information much more easily.

Provide A Printer-Friendly Page

Not every shopper is ready to buy. Some will want to print out the product information, either for review later or for someone else’s review. Ensuring your product pages are printer friendly allow for your product information to be printed, saved and passed on in a format that is easy to read, compare and perhaps even make notes on.

Below is an example of non printer-friendly page. I’ve circled in red all the things that are not needed on the printed page.

This, and all printer-friendly pages, should be stripped of unnecessary navigation elements, including linked breadcrumbs and links to other content. In case you weren’t sure, nobody can click navigation links on a printed page. I’ve tried.

You also want to ensure all the relevant information prints legibly. Consider font style, font size and information placement on the printed page. Once you strip out all the unnecessary stuff, there is room to ensure the remaining content is plenty legible.

Have Your Contact Information Available

Ideally, we want our product pages to close the sale, but that can’t always be the case. Sometimes, a shopper has a question that hasn’t been answered on the website, and providing a way for them to get that question answered is critical to their completing the purchase.

Understandably, displaying contact information will increase the number of emails and calls for questions that have been answered on the site, but the risk is losing the customer altogether. They are contacting you because they either were unable to find the information or needed additional clarification. Without the ability to get in touch with someone who can help them, the odds of getting the sale diminishes.

Write Robust Product Descriptions

Each product should contain a unique product summary, overview or description. This information is the crux of what the product is, does and will accomplish for the buyer. It’s the “meat” of the product page and is what will (or won’t) convince the shopper that this is the product they want or need. Use this space to address the emotional needs as well as the “what’s in it for me” question.

Include Detailed Product Information

In addition to your product information, you also want to include detailed information on the product’s features, specifications and benefits. If some of these features require more information, provide links to pages that have more details on each feature. Include as much information here as possible, so as not to force the visitor to leave the page unless absolutely warranted.

Use High-Resolution Images

Images are extremely important for helping shoppers get a greater understanding and appreciation of what they are (or may be) purchasing. And with monitor quality improving rapidly, you should use only high-res images for each of your products.

There isn’t a lot of lost with the low quality image on the right above; however, it’s enough to make the eye have to work harder. When low-quality images are used, the visitor is left with a low-quality impression of your products. Better images improve the perceived value of what you offer.

Add Enhanced Image Views

Sometimes, one image isn’t enough for the shopper to get the full appreciation for the product. Adding additional images and image enhancements allow the shopper to see your product in a more interactive format. Consider adding images of the product from various angles, in use, in storage, zoomed in, in a video or or even just a larger view option.

These enhanced image views gives the shopper a greater appreciation for the product that they cannot yet hold in their hand, and this can often be a defining factor in being able to make a decision to buy.

Incorporate Product Comparisons

Whenever possible, incorporate the ability to compare your products side by side, showing varying features and benefits of each. This comparison helps reassure shoppers that it’s the right product for them, which in turn reduces the likelihood of a product return. Side-by-side product comparisons emulate an in-store benefit that shoppers don’t often get online.

Prominently Display Pricing Information

All product pricing information must be displayed in an obvious place on the product pages. For most shoppers, the quality and value of a product has no meaning until they can affix a price to it.

Don’t hide your pricing information or tell people to “call for more information” unless it’s absolutely impossible to put a finished price on your products. Even still, a “starting at” pricing can often help provide a baseline of expectations, eliminating calls and questions from shoppers who will never be your customers.

Provide International Pricing Options

If you sell products outside your home country, it’s a good idea to including pricing in different currencies. This can be as easy as allowing the shopper to select their own currency and having the calculations made on the fly. If you’re unable to provide different currency prices on the site, link to a currency conversion site, allowing your shoppers to make the conversions easily on their own.

Calls To Action

Finally – and most importantly – every product page absolutely must have at least one (or more) calls to action. The single most important action a user can take is to “buy now,” but other actions can be used as needed. These can be (but are not limited to): “purchase now,” “add to cart,” “save for later,” “add to wish list,” “compare” and “print.”

Each of these calls to action has a specific purpose and can keep the visitor engaged in the site without forcing them to purchase or leave. Don’t overload your shoppers with options, but only include those that you feel will be most valuable to them.

The two primary roles of your product pages are to inform and to sell. Generally, you won’t get the sale unless the page provides adequate information. The more complete the information, the more likely that the page will become a “top seller.”

Shoppers that are well informed are more likely to not only complete their purchase, but also to make the best purchase possible and then return later to do it all over again.

Quick sales can turn into sale headaches that convert a profit to a loss. But giving visitors the information they need steers them to the right product and helps them make an informed purchase – creating profits now and hopefully for years to come.

By Stoney deGeyter
Source : http://searchengineland.com/

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Steps to Set Up a Remarketing List in Google AdWords

It’s a handy reference for anyone who is interested in setting up a remarketing campaign in AdWords. Below is the 12-step process to setting up a new remarketing list, and you can click here to download the cheatsheet as a PDF. Thanks to our SEM Manager Rich Griffin for creating this resource!

1. Define your remarketing strategy.
   • Will you target all visitors to your site?
   • Are you only interested in targeting visitors to a specific page?
2. Create the remarketing code.
   • AdWords > Shared Library > Audiences > + New Audience > Remarketing List

3. Fill in all of the required parameters including membership duration, list name, and a brief description of the tag. Then click “save.”
4. Navigate to the new remarketing code and click the “tag” link.
5. Copy this new remarketing code to the appropriate pages.
6. Next, navigate back to “all online campaigns.”
7. Create a new campaign and include “Remarketing” in the campaign name.
8. Create a new ad group within the “Remarketing” campaign and define the ad group default Max CPC.
9. Add both text and image ads to this new ad group. Here are the image ad size requirements:

10. Next, stay within the newly created ad group and click on the “Display Network” tab then the “Interests & Remarketing” button.

11. Click “+ Change display targeting” > “Remarketing Lists” > and select the remarketing list you created in step 2 > then click save.

12. You are now all set. Your remarketing ads will not begin to show until this new remarketing code tags at least 100 unique visitors within 30 days.
    • You can see the size of your lists in the audiences section of Google AdWords.

By Elisa Gabbert
Source : WordStream

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Important PPC Tips & Tricks For 2013

More Advanced PPC Tips For 2013

• Tag all of your Bing destination URLs with Google Analytics tracking code to ensure data is importing properly. 
• Create a campaign that targets select managed placements on Google's display network based off what you know about your target market. Create some really great banner ads using the display ad builder.
• If you are e-commerce, make sure you have revenue tracking set up in Google Analytics.
• If you a service based company, integrate AdWords with your CRM to better understand the value of each click. 
• Duplicate campaigns based off customer-value from specific geographic regions. Spend more money where the average customer is worth more.
• If you don't know, spend some time this year understanding what the lifetime value of a new acquisition is. Always look at click price with this in mind.
• Set up remarketing through Google Analytics. Create separate ad groups to target different people. 
• Avoid searching for your own ad online. It is not a clear indication of performance and can easily distract you.Look at the data within AdWords, Analytics and other tools to make decisions.
• Utilize Google Places and +1. Make sure you have linked AdWords with Places if you rely on local business. 
• For e-commerce, enable Google Shopping by setting up a Merchant Center account. Also check out Bing Shopping, as they are making regular improvements to it.
• Read the Google Analytics Blog every day.
• Always keep your Google Analytics Tab and your AdWords/WordStream tab open at the same time to make better bidding decisions.

Source : WordStream
By Nathan Peters

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A Local SEO Checklist : Semantic Markup Tips For 2013

One of the least-tapped areas of local business website optimization continues to be semantic markup. Semantic markup can increase chances that information from your website will be highlighted in search engine results pages via rich snippets, attracting greater attention and clickthroughs. So, read on and use this checklist to see if you’re exploiting all elements possible for your local business website.

While special markup likely may not directly improve your rankings in search, it does apparently increase clickthrough rate or “CTR,” as consumers are more drawn to your site’s listings. The increase is reportedly 15% on average, and potentially higher!

Just this increase in CTR alone could benefit your rankings over time, as clickthroughs can influence rankings; so, there are a few reasons why semantic markup is worthwhile. Semantic markup optimizes for Google, Bing, and Facebook search, too.

If you think most Microformats/RDFa/Micro Data/Schemas don’t apply to your local business website — think again! While only a few of these may impact your listing in the local 7-pack or in Google Maps, your site can also attract customers via the regular, keyword search results pages; and, regular listings can and do appear on the same results pages as the 7-pack!

So, check to see if you’ve added the following semantic markups to your local website (if applicable). Improving your traffic, even on search results which are not directly related to something you sell, can help benefit all the rest of your website as your overall popularity becomes augmented.

13 Semantic Markup Strategies For Local Business Websites

1.  Authorship Markup

The number-one, best semantic markup is likely authorship — it allows your personal photo to appear with pages you author, and your website, when they are listed in search engine results.

For instance, check out listings of articles from Search Engine Land, and you’ll frequently see icon pics and names of authors paired up with their article listings.

For local search, this may be even more compelling in Google, making your listing appear far more interesting and professional in the 7-pack. In the search below for personal injury attorneys in Seattle, the first two listings sport pics of the attorneys:

To enable this to happen, you must have a Google+ profile for the business proprietor, link to it from your website including a querystring with rel=author:

<a href=”[profile_url]?rel=author”>Google</a>

Then, link back to your site from your Google+ profile in the “Contributor To” section. It’s also a good idea to have a good author photo for Google+.

2.  Local Business Schema and Geotag

Schema.org provides a few different types of semantic markup that I’ll be listing in this article, and the prime one is for describing local businesses. Essentially, you can use this to markup your address and contact information on your site, although there are additional fields you can include such as hours of operation, payment types accepted, and more.

Example markup:

You can also geotag your location (or “Place” in Schema.org lingo) by including your geocoordinates with your LocalBusiness code. As I’ve noted before, if you’ve been using hCard Microformat for this purpose, you can continue to do so, although Schema markup has become more preferred.

If desired, you can use both simultaneously, such as what I’ve done with my business address on my homepage at Argent Media. For LocalBusiness Schema instructions, go here.

3.  Testimonial

Testimonials on a business website can often aid in persuading visitors to become customers.

Because of this, Google allows local businesses to disclose that they have a testimonial by using semantic markup for reviews, and Google sometimes will display that information in conjunction with the business’s listings in SERPs. I believe tagging your testimonials can increase their chances of being displayed in the snippet text beneath your listing, and in the sample text callouts shown variously in the cached image of your webpage.

For instance, check out the EagleLift foundation repair company in Los Angeles which has a testimonial page marked-up with the Schema for testimonials — and that testimonial text now shows up in both the description snippet and the cached page callout:

4.  Breadcrumbs

Many sites I run across neglect to use breadcrumb navigation, despite it being highly useful, according to usability experts. Even on relatively small sites, breadcrumbs can help a user orient themselves in the site’s hierarchy, and provide them with related pages that they might wish to visit. For this reason, Google began bubbling-up this data to display in rich snippets as additional links beneath the hyperlinked page name.

Simply from a statistical perspective, having additional links to your site on search results pages increases the odds of you having users click through over time — so, breadcrumb links are highly desirable! Google does a fair job of automatically detecting these, but there are times when a page’s breadcrumb code isn’t interpreted successfully by them in order to be displayed in the snippet. To increase your chances, use the breadcrumb markup on your site pages.

For local sites targeting a few local city names or with multiple offices around a metro area, breadcrumbs are very worthwhile. For example, here’s a breadcrumb from my company site:

Once you’ve coded your page, check the code in Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool, which should reflect the breadcrumb links properly. The tool shows a search listing preview for my page at Argent Media, in addition to the extracted structured data.

5.  Events

If your company participates in some events or provides special services at different times/dates during the year, you might consider incorporating the Events Schema markup. If you are too intimidated to do structured data on your site, or you don’t feel confident at doing the coding necessary, Google does give you another option for Events at this time.

In your Webmaster Tools account, Google has provided a beta service called the Data Highlighter for Events. Using this interface, you can highlight elements of events and tell Google which data item is which event element — Name, Date, Venue, Address, URL, etc.

*If Google deems the Data Highlighter to be successful, they’ll likely expand it to include other types of rich snippets as well. I hope they do — this would be a great boon for small business websites!

6.  Coupons/Offers

If you have coupons or special offers, use the Offer Schema. It’s not clear to me that Google or Bing does any special snippet treatment for coupons or offers at this time, but they included it in Schema.org, and it would make sense for them to consider incorporating it more visibly at a future date, since they’re obviously interested in it, and it would be the sort of thing that end users would like a lot.

7.  Videos

Google recommends that you use the VideoObject Schema to help them to better interpret and represent your video content in search results. If you’re not using videos on your site, you should — video listings in search results take up more room in search results and are more attention-grabbing.

Consumers apparently like seeing videos of products or of businesses providing services, so this can help with conversions as well. Here’s an example video page listing in search results from the Wasp Barcode Technologies company in Plano, Texas:

8.  Recipes

Recipes get tons of searches on the net, and for that reason search engines highlight the presentation of their listings in search results.

Most local businesses don’t feel that they really lend themselves to food themes, so it might not occur to them to show a recipe or two on their site and mark it up for search engines. True, recipes may make more sense for a restaurant, hotel, caterer, or even a coffee shop, but there’s no reason why a business couldn’t publish some favorite recipe and get some extra traffic and ranking power by doing so.

For instance, a lawyer recently made headlines by filing a Freedom of Information Request with the government in order to obtain President Obama’s beer recipe (“White House Honey Ale”). The lawyer was likely satisfied that the recipe is now published on the White House’s website, but he’s missed out on the opportunity of publishing the recipe on his own website and marking it up for search.

The White House’s recipe is actually very non-optimal, because it was published in a couple of images instead of in text, and it won’t look as pretty in search results as recipes at the Food Network or AllRecipes.com.

Your reason for publishing a recipe doesn’t have to be dramatic, though — just do it to interact with the Web community more and your business may benefit.

9.  Individuals

I’ve written before on how highlighting your employees can help with local search rankings. In addition to displaying author information, you can also mark up information about executives and employees on your site as well by using the Schema for a Person.

10.  Tables & Bulleted Lists

This doesn’t really require any special semantic markup — but, if you have tabular data or content that lends itself to presentation in a list, providing this on your website can again make your listing in search results get more attention, and it affords you the opportunity to display more info about your products and services before potential customers have even reached your website.

Example — rental cabins in Gatlinburg, TN:The Cabins of the Smokey Mountains webpage presents their rental properties and features in a table, and Google has featured that below their listing. To enable this to happen, consider whether you have any information that might lend itself to a table or bullet list format, and create a page for it.

For example, this could work great for many restaurants, if they put their menu in an HTML table — preferable, compared with the Flash/PDF/image formats that many eateries use instead.

11.  Products

If your business sells products, seriously consider incorporating data about them on your site and marking it up with the Product Schema. The product markup can enable your listings to show price, ratings, and availability in the search results:Note that the Product markup can be particularly effective in combination with breadcrumbs! (Shout out to Zachary Palmer for reminding me of this one.)

12.  Meta Descriptions

While it doesn’t involve Schema, Meta Descriptions have been one of the earliest and longest surviving semantic markup elements. They’re possibly the most-influential as well, since they often appear as the entire snippet text in search results.

Despite all this, the Description Meta Tag is still frequently neglected on many small business websites. The Meta Description should briefly describe what a particular page is all about, incorporating good keywords. You should not use the same description for all pages, or even more than one page on your site!

Don’t just parse the first sentence of a blog post into the description field, either — make them custom, describing the page. Twenty-five words ought to do it. Check in your Webmaster Tools and see if any changes are recommended, too — warnings about being too short or duplicated tags should alert you to adjust.

13.  Facebook Open Graph

Instead of cooperating with the search engines to make life easier for millions of webmasters and developers, Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol. To help ensure your site’s pages are presented well in Facebook search and various interfaces, incorporate Open Graph for local businesses as I suggested previously. Use it simultaneously with Schema.org protocol — the two do not conflict with one another.

Each time you insert semantic markup, be sure to check it using Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool (previously called the “Rich Snippet Testing Tool”). I’ve seen many instances where designers and programmers think they’ve incorporated semantic markup, but instead it’s incorrectly configured and erroneous.

So, go through this checklist and add any of the semantic markup options you can, and it may help you achieve a very rosy year for your website and business in 2013!

Written by: Chris Silver Smith
Source : http://searchengineland.com

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How To Determine The Starting Bids For PPC Campaigns

While ad testing, proper account setup and conversion tracking are necessary for a successful account, you can’t get any data without a competitive bid. If your bid is too low, then your ad never shows. If your bids are too high, then you can quickly lose a lot of money; and if you are new to PPC, then you might decide that PPC doesn’t work and abandon the medium.

With mature accounts with lots of data, bidding isn’t too difficult. It can be as simple as last click attribution, or as complex as using multi-touch attribution models. However, the reason you have options is because you have the data. A new account doesn’t have any data. How can you effectively set bids based upon what you rely on the most – the data – if you don’t have any?

In this column, you’ll look at a few bid methods that can help get you started setting your initial bids.

Setting Bids Based Upon Estimated Conversion Rates

This model attempts to simulate traditional bid models by guessing first at your conversion rates and then using your typical bid formulas to set bids based upon your goals, such as CPA or ROAS. Estimating conversion rates can be very difficult. If you offer a free whitepaper, your conversion rates can vary from 1%-20% based upon your form design. Many companies like to use 2% for e-commerce.

However, it’s common to see e-commerce rates for less expensive items hit 5-10% and for more expensive items be around 0.1%-0.5%. If you have historical analytics data, you that to help you make some good guesses as to your PPC conversions. If you have worked in a vertical before, that can help as you’ll have some background to start with. However, all you are trying to do is reach a reasonable assumption of a conversion rate so you can use your regular formulas to set the initial bids.

So, do some educated guesses and research to come to an estimated conversion rate, and then use that rate to set the bids based upon your CPA or ROAS targets. The method is fairly straightforward. The advantage of this method is that you usually don’t lose too much money (and hopefully make some) when the account first launches.

The disadvantage is that sometimes you launch an account and the traffic is so low that you immediately have to redo all the bids. That brings us to the second bid method, ensuring that you get clicks for the brand new account.

Accumulate Lots Of Clicks To See What Works

In this model, you’re  looking for the most clicks possible so you can determine what is going to work and what will not work. By having some data, you can focus your future energy working in the correct places.

So, your goal is lots of data, clicks, and traffic regardless of how it converts so you can make decisions moving forward. This does not mean you still should not spend time creating you’ll organized ad groups – you must give the system good inputs to get good outputs and useful information. The end goal is data first and profit a distant second for the initial bids; later on those goals can change.

In this model, you can use the estimates from the AdWords Keyword Tool or from the Bing Ads Intelligence plugin to get some starting bid information and use that in the accounts as the starting bids.

What will happen as soon as you put those bids live on AdWords is that some of the keywords will automatically be ‘below first page bids’; even though that was the bid suggestion in the tool. You can then use bulk edit function to raise all the keyword bids to the first page bid.

A note of caution, whenever using a bulk edit tool to raise all keywords to first page bids – always put in a bid cap (upper limit or CPC bid limit in Google’s interface depending on the screen you are working with) so you don’t have a few keywords at $100+ bids. If you really just want lots of clicks; you can even go a step further and use the budget optimizer for the campaign bid.

I find that budget optimizer (AdWords will set my bids to help maximize my clicks…) setting is great for publishers or for just collecting lots of clicks regardless of the quality of the click.

However, as its goal is to get the most clicks possible, if you have a few broad keywords (especially if they are broad matched), those few words could get all your clicks so that your data is not evenly spread throughout the new campaigns.

In the end, with this bid method – you’re taking suggested bids from existing data sources and using them as your starting bids; so there is no guess work involved. The advantage of this method is that you will get lots of data. The disadvantage is that you might not make any money at all; so be prepared to lose some money while you determine what the bids should be based upon your target goals.

The Hybrid Approach: Traffic & Conversions

In this method, you want to estimate conversion rates so that you are hoping to make some money from the initial launch; but you also want to use the existing data from AdWords & Bing (using their cost estimations) to ensure that you will get some traffic.

Start by estimating conversion rates and determining your starting bids. Next, you’ll need to see if those bids are close to page one bids. If they are, then you can go ahead and set the bids live. If they aren’t, then you need to reassess your goals.

For instance, if you do the math and guess that you can start the bids at $1 based upon your estimated conversion rates; but the AdWords tool says almost all the clicks in the industry start at $5-$10; then you might have a problem to overcome. There are some simple questions you need to ask yourself:

• Can you realistically raise the conversion rate?
• Can you raise the target CPA?
• Can you raise the average order value?
• Do you have a business model problem?

Personally, I always go through this bid exercise even if I’m not going to use this bid method as it will point out business model issues. I’ve seen times where the target CPA isn’t possible in an industry and you need to reevaluate how you are making money, the value of a lead, your upsell opportunities, and lifetime customer values in order to be able to be competitive. It’s best to evaluate the business model and how the advertising needs to be executed before spending money.

The advantage of this method is that it will give you a realistic expectation of traffic levels and conversions. The downside is that it might scare you away from keywords that could work you’ll and it can be limiting if you don’t take a few chances with some keywords (which could be at a later date) to see if high bids and competitive keywords do work for the business.

The other downside is that this can be a lot more work prelaunch; but I’ve never thought this exercise was a waste of time. It’s good to have an overall idea of conversions and CPAs before you start.

Just Bid High, Build History, & See What Happens

Another starting bid method is to bid into high positions, ensure you build up a great history for Quality Scores and for the account, and then make adjustments after you get some really good data. This bid method is generally used by three types of people:

• Novices who are new to AdWords and heard bad advice
• People who engage in ‘ego bidding’; and tend to lose a lot of money doing this
• Skilled experts who are bidding this way for a very specific reason and have set aside a budget of money they will lose in order to establish the brand and ads in the search results

The only group that should be using this method is number 3, the skilled experts. The other two should change their starting bid method. This method is not for small budgets nor the faint of heart. There have been accounts we purposefully set aside $25,000-$100,000 as ”play the game money” just to establish a strong history and presence. The money can often be recouped down the road through the sheer volume of clicks that occur at the top of the page.

If you have a small budget, don’t try it. If you are new to AdWords or PPC in general – don’t try it. The reason it can be useful gets into some interesting quality score theory.

There are some of us that believe that Google does not normalize CTR for quality score purposes very well when examining the top versus the side of the page. This group does believe that Google normalizes CTR for quality score by position; but that there are some issues. For instance, among the ads in the top of the page it is normalized well among other ads in the top of the page. Among the ads on the side of the page, the CTR is normalized well for all the ads that are on the side of the page.

However, when comparing top versus side ads, the normalization often gives preference to top of page ads as it underestimates CTRs that occur on the top of the page, and thus giving some of these keywords higher quality scores than they deserve. It’s through top of page exposure that you end up with entire accounts that have 8-12% CTRs through ad testing and keeping most of the keywords (assuming they are profitable) at the top of the page.

Of course, this is only a theory; and one that cannot be proven or disproven without understanding Google’s actual formulas. However, it seems to be true from an outsider’s perspective. The advantage of this bid method is that you can build up a great history so that over time, it will cost you less to maintain these top positions that can bring in a significant amount of traffic. Before you ever try this, you must have very well segmented account and great ads – an exceptional account build is necessary to try this bid technique.

The disadvantage of this bid method is pretty obvious, it can cost a lot of money to bid this way and it will not always work. It is a gamble.

However, for those skilled in the game of PPC and have the budgets to work with – it is a good way to establish a presence. For many companies, playing a long tail or geographic strategy is a better idea than a high initial bid strategy. I add the information here in hopes that more people will realize it is not always necessary to overbid and to caution anyone before attempting to try this on their own.

The majority accounts do not need to start this way; but I commonly hear the advice so I wanted to address it and put it in perspective of other initial bid types. If you have comments on this bid method, or perhaps there will be another columnist who wants to write an article disproving this bid method – I welcome the input and debate (I don’t claim to be right – I just claim it’s a theorythat has worked for me for many accounts).

Know Where You Want To Go

One of the tricks to bidding and creating the accounts is knowing how you want your PPC account to mature. If one of your goals is to get to a point where you can try CPA bidding, then you’ll first focus on getting as many conversions as possible, establishing a conversion history, and then letting Google do the work.

This means that you will start with a highly targeted narrow keyword set and try to get traffic and conversions immediately after account launch. If you are launching a new product, and your initial focus is to drive product awareness, then often you want lots of clicks and impressions across a wide variety of keywords, and then in a few months you’ll switch to a more ROAS focused approach. This account would use a lot more modified broad match and broader keywords to attain those goals than the account focused on conversions.

In the famous words of Lewis Carroll: “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” You need to know where you’re going, and setting initial bids is just the beginning of the journey. However, set the initial bids based upon the road that you do want to travel.

Conclusion

There are many ways to set initial bids; including ones I didn’t even mention such as the $1/$5/$10 method in which every ad group starts with a semi-competitive number just to see what happens or the ‘instinct method’ where you’ve been doing PPC for so long, you’re just good at guessing some initial bids and don’t even bother to look up any numbers before setting the first bid.

Personally, I feel the hybrid approach is the best method for most companies. It will help to ensure you can get some traffic and to see if you can hit your target CPAs with your keywords, bids, ads, and landing pages. When you first start accounts, you usually make few adjustments in the first week to month (depending on account size) as you are accumulating data to determine bids, negative keywords, tests, etc that you need to set bids that have a chance of giving you the data necessary to work with so that later on in the account’s history you can make data-driven decisions.

Picking one of these solutions should help you find a way to set initial bids so you can take your PPC account from the beginning of the journey to a place where you are making informed, data-driven decisions.

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The Author: Brad Geddes 

Source : http://searchengineland.com

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Tips For SEO Job Interview in 2013

As the industry of inbound marketing evolves, SEOs have to get even more prepared for tricky complicated job interviews. I’ve recently asked some of my friends in SEO about the most difficult questions they had to answer. The hardest thing for them was to discuss SEO with people who were not really proficient in the sphere! In some cases, they were even asked to reveal exact formulas for getting top rankings, Google algorithms, etc. (if that happens to you, please do show some sense of humor)!

If you are lucky enough to get interviewed by someone who IS experienced in SEO, let’s analyze what you should know and how you should talk about it in 2013.

First things first

Just as in any other sphere, you should pay very good attention to the criterion mentioned in the job description. Read the description carefully and identify what the employer is looking for. Rankings and traffic? Pay-per-click management and lead generation? Viral content creation? Everything combined?

When you fully understand the needs of an employer, you should adapt your resume and covering letter. Additionally

• Be friendly and professional when addressing an HR specialist or directly an employer
• Double-check your spelling
• Make sure your online profile looks professional too – get a closer look at your tweets, Facebook shares, Flickr pictures – everything that can be found online for your name.

Talking about your SEO experience

Your experience with promoting websites is probably the most important thing for your potential employer. Make sure that your description makes your portfolio look diverse and persuasive:

• Describe the smallest and the biggest projects you’ve ever had, what kind of workflow you followed in each case
• Have you worked with international projects? Did you take another approach when working on smaller local websites?
• Describe your success and failure (or biggest difficulty), try to explain how you acted in a difficult situation (losing rankings, traffic, de-indexing, duplicate content, site getting to a “sandbox,” etc.) and what solutions you found to manage the problem.

Why not take a laptop or a tablet and showcase some of your projects – for instance you can show the screenshots or reports from Google analytics or what kind of changes you suggested for this or that website (don’t forget to blur your customers’ domain names!).

This interaction will create a more memorable impression than just giving an oral description or a link.

Talking about link building

Here’s a tricky question once discussed at Search Engine Roundtable – what are the ways to build natural links? I’d agree with some commentators – you cannot BUILD natural links, links come out naturally on 3d party blogs and websites when you produce truly useful or viral content. Okay, so what kind of links do we build? Those that look natural.

If you need to refresh your knowledge of the ways to build links, take a look at these fantastic posts:

• 101 list compiled by Aaron Wall and Andy Hagans
• 101 list compiled by Sujan Patel here at SEJ!

If I held an SEO interview, the chances are high I would ask you about the Penguin update, the link disavow tool and your experience with it. I’d suggest looking through your current SEO data and noting down the figures in advance, so that you won’t have to answer “Well, I noticed just some minor changes…”

Talking about SEO tools and services

SEOs tend to use a lot of tools to get more data in less time, so get prepared to talk about the tools and services you prefer. I would probably mention:

1. The tools provided by search engines: Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools,Google Adwords Keywords Tool, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc.
2. Tools for tracking SERPs: Rank Tracker
3. Link ideas and competition research: SpyGlass
4. User experience analysis: ClickTale
5. Guest blogging: MyBlogGuest, HARO
6. PPC analytics: SEMrush

Don’t ignore the details

I bet you easily recognize the difference between CPA, CPM, CPL, and CPC? You shouldn’t have any problems with CMS, CSS, and XML either J But your potential employer can also ask about KEI (Keyword Effectiveness Index), LPO (landing page optimization) and RTB (Real Time Bidding).

If you feel you need to refresh your industry knowledge – go ahead. (The acronyms I mentioned above can be found in this list: http://www.submitshop.com/seo-acronyms-and-abbreviations.

Prepare your own tricky questions

At the end of a job interview, job seekers usually feel relieved and exhausted and forget about a very important part – asking your own questions. Here’s a list of some question you may ask:

• What kind of work will I be doing in general?
• Is this a new position that has opened up because of more work?
• What kind of tools or software are available in the workplace?
• How large is the team?
• What would I be working on first?
• Is there a budget for conferences or training?

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The way you talk during the interview can make or break whether you land your dream job or not. But you can make the most of preparation, so that your skills and experience will not go unnoticed! Good luck!

By Inessa Bokhan
Source : Search Engine Journal

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