Free Google AdWords Voucher Worth $100 for New Clients
Since I am a Qualified Google Advertising Professional, I am given free AdWords vouchers worth $100 for new clients interested in trying out Google AdWords. I have been managing Pay-Per-Click campaigns for numerous businesses and organizations over the past five years and have had achieved much success for them. Feel free to check out some of the search engine marketing results we have achieved for our clients over the years. If you are interested in trying out Google AdWords for the first time and would like to use a free $100 AdWords credit to get started, please contact us today!
One Simple Way to Increase Your Conversion Rate by 36.3%
If you have a website and you are not constantly testing it, you are missing out on potential business. You are losing money. It’s as simple as that. With the advent of the easy-to-use and perhaps more importantly FREE testing tool Google Website Optimizer, there really is no excuse for not setting up split A/B or multivariate tests on your webpages in order to constantly improve conversion rates and ultimately increase your bottom line.
With GWO, you have the ability to test anything you could possibly think of (and I strongly encourage that you do). Even if you “just know” that the stock photograph of the attractive saleswoman will generate more leads than the overweight middle-aged man, you might be surprised that the data suggests otherwise. If the design and marketing departments are at each other’s throats about which color background to use, put it to the test and let the data speak for itself.
One recent A/B split test we set up for one of our lead generation clients produced some pretty eye-opening results. Since the original page was already converting at a solid 7.49%, we were only expecting a minor improvement, if at all. Especially since the only difference between the two pages was the text used on the submit button of the contact form. The original page had the generic text of “Submit” and the test page had “Get Quote Now.” That’s it.
After running the test for a month and a half, the original version had 854 visitors with 64 conversions for a conversion rate of 7.49% and the test version had 842 visitors with 86 conversions for a conversion rate of 10.2%, an increase of 36.3%! This is pretty significant. If each lead generates an average of $100 per lead, this comes out to $6,400 from the original version and $8,600 from the new version. If we had just decided to be satisfied with the 7.49% conversion rate, we would have been missing out on an extra $2,200. So the moral of the story, is to test, test, test!
AdWords Conversion Rate Optimization Tip - Add Keyword to Landing Page with Dynamic Keyword Insertion
One of the most effective ways to boost conversion rates for Google AdWords campaigns is to make sure to include the exact keyword that the user searched for to get to your site on the landing page. Not a slight variation of the keyword they searched, but the exact keyword they searched! The easiest way to do so is by utilizing Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI).
Let’s say we want to set up an AdWords campaign to advertise musical instruments for sale. Here’s how I would set it up from the beginning.
1. Create a new AdWords campaign called “Musical Instruments”. Configure the campaign settings so that the ads only show up on Google search results.
2. Create an Ad Group called “Guitars”.
3. Bid only on Exact Match keywords, such as [guitar for sale], [buy guitar], [buy American Standard Telecaster guitar], etc. It is critical that the keywords are Exact Match! Otherwise, there runs the possibility that the keyword the user searched for and the keyword you bid on are different, and thus the keyword inserted on the landing page with DKI will not match what the user searched, which may end up confusing and discouraging the user.
4. Create a new text ad. Add the DKI keyword to the end of the Destination URL. For example, if my landing page is www.mymusicstore.com/guitars.php then I would make the Destination URL www.mymusicstore.com/guitars.php?kw={keyword}.
The AdWords campaign is ready, now we just have to add some code to the landing page itself.
5. If you’re using a PHP-enabled page, place the following code at the top of the page to grab the keyword parameter from the URL.
6. Now that you have grabbed the keyword from the URL and stored it as a PHP variable, you need to add it to the content of the page. Here is an example that I have used on several sites with much success:
The code above checks to make sure that a keyword parameter is actually in the URL. If there is, it echos a DIV container which outputs the exact keyword that the user searched for:
This is just a simple yet very effective way to maximize the relevancy of your AdWords landing pages and as a result, boost the conversion rates and ROI of your campaigns.
Hacked Website Spam Running Rampant in Google Search Results
Over the past couple weeks, I have been seeing more and more hacked websites rank very well for topical keywords in the Google search results. It appears that all of the sites in question are in fact legitimate websites but somehow share a common vulnerability which enables them to be exploited by the hackers to easily rank for specific keywords and distribute malicious spyware.
For example, I just tried a search for more information on “Anthony Sowell” who is the serial killer in Cleveland that the evening news keeps covering. The screenshot below shows that the four websites ranked from the 6th to 9th positions are all compromised and share the same parameter “?kkk=anthony-sowell.”
If you click on any of those 4 results, you will be redirected to another domain that attempts to install the malware on your computer.
Want more screenshots? You got it.
I picked some more examples of trending keywords on Google Trends, such as the company “Coins for Anything” that was recently highlighted in the news. Five of the Top 10 results are spam.
And yet another one for some guy named “Robert Lozier.” In this case, 3 of the Top 4 results are spam.
I have seen other variations such as “?q” and “?loop” and “?mowp” so it’s not just the “?kkk” parameter.
Historically, I think Google has done a pretty good job of combating spam and malware sites in their search results, especially when compared to any of the other search engines, but it seems recently that the amount of spam has increased significantly. Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
Yahoo! Shuts Down GeoCities & Blows SEO Opportunities Worth Millions
Yahoo! purchased the popular free web hosting service GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 Billion dollars in stock. And on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! shut down GeoCities for good. Any website on GeoCities that was not transferred to a new web host by Monday is gone forever. Granted, most sites built on GeoCities were festering eyesores and for the most part nobody will lose sleep over its demise, but Yahoo! really screwed the pooch on handling the closing when it comes to SEO.
Let me explain.
As of October 28, 2009, there are 7.45 Million GeoCities URLs still indexed in Google. Go ahead, click that link and try to visit one of the sites listed. For example, Dr. Doo Wopp’s site “all about me and my love of the doo wopp sound” at http://www.geocities.com/doowopp21/ is no longer available and redirects to a Yahoo! 404 page. Multiply that one site times 7.45 Million and we’re dealing with a huge number of sites that will simply vanish.
I just did a search on SEMRush to find out the popular keywords for which GeoCities URLs rank in the Top 20 in Google for, and it came back an astounding 686,270 different keywords that generate an estimated 11,947,000 visitors from Google each month. It’s hard to fathom a website that got nearly 12 million visitors a month from Google alone will disappear.
For example, one of the keywords reported by SEMRush is the keyword “sayings.” According to the Google AdWords Keyword tool, this keyword gets over 1.2 Million searches a month.
Currently, the GeoCities website at www.geocities.com/heartland/lane/2470/lslists.htm ranks 4th in Google for a keyword that gets 1.2 million searches a month. Once Google re-indexes that site and is served a 404 error page, that site will be removed from the index.
At the very least, you would think Yahoo! would put forward some effort to preserve their search engine rankings and most of that traffic, right? Apparently that isn’t the case. Since Yahoo! is simply forwarding the GeoCities URLs to 404 or 410 permanent error pages instead of redirecting the sites with SEO friendly 301 redirects, the search engines will eventually drop all of the missing URLs from their indexes and Yahoo! will lose out on all of the invaluable search engine rankings and traffic that has amassed over the years. It baffles me that a company as big as Yahoo!, not to mention a major search engine, would make these decisions without keeping SEO in mind.
UPDATE - LocalSEOGuide.com made a similar post called Yahoo Flushes GeoCities, PageRank & Million$ Down The Drain. Check it out!
Streamline Metrics Attains Recognition as a Qualified Google Advertising Professional
I am proud to say that I have been officially recognized as a Qualified Google Advertising Professional. In order to be recognized as a QGAP, the following requirements must be met:
To become Qualified, this individual has:
- Accepted the terms of our program.
- Managed at least one AdWords account in a master account for 90 days.
- Built and maintained our 90-day spend requirement.
- Passed the Google Advertising Professional Exam.
You can view the official Qualified Google Advertising Professional profile page for Streamline Metrics at https://adwords.google.com/professionals/profile/org?id=015187405271492007149&hl=en. To find out how we can help your business with your online marketing efforts, please contact us for more information.
Google Caught Manually Changing Search Results for The White House
I caught this tweet from RustyBrick this morning: “Amazing, Google changes search results for White House http://bit.ly/1BuL80.” The link points to an article on SERoundtable.com which explains how Google has appeared to have “made a change” to push a certain page on www.whitehouse.gov show up at the top of the search results for a specific query. What is even more striking is that the original poster mentioned that Bing already served the “correct” page, and Google apparently rushed to fix it.
This is significant because Google has had a longstanding philosophy of “no manual intervention.” Below is an excerpt straight from the Official Google Blog at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/introduction-to-google-ranking.html.
No discussion of Google’s ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided!
- question: “Does Google manually edit its results?” Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well … subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.
I am curious to see Google’s response to this. I am sure they will say something along the lines of “we didn’t directly change the SERPs manually, but we tweaked our algorithm to get the desired result.” Either way, incidents like these can definitely shake the trust of Google’s loyal userbase.
How to Redirect PDF Files with PHP, ASP or .htaccess for SEO
This is the follow up to my previous post “SEO for PDFs - Optimizing PDF Files for Search Engines” in which I recommended NOT using PDF files whenever possible. In this post, I will explain how to go go about redirecting PDF files with .htaccess, PHP and ASP.
301 Redirects
When it comes to SEO, the best redirect to use is a 301 permanent redirect. This is because search engines still have trouble handling 302 temporary redirects. And don’t even think about using a Meta Tag Refresh redirect or a redirect generated by a client-side language such as JavaScript if you care about search engine optimization.
.htaccess 301 Redirect
This is the easiest and most straightforward option to use, but it’s only available on a Linux server. Simply add the line below to your .htaccess file.
Redirect 301 /oldfile.pdf http://www.example.com/newpage.html
PHP 301 Redirect
This is also normally a pretty easy way to redirect pages by adding a couple lines of PHP on each page you want to redirect. But since PHP code cannot actually be inserted into the PDF file, we have to treat it a bit differently. Follow the steps below:
1. Rename oldfile.pdf file to filename2.pdf.
2. Create a new directory named “oldfile.pdf” in the same directory that the PDF is in.
3. Add an index.php file in the new oldfile.pdf directory.
4. Add the following PHP code to the top of the index.php file:
<?
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com/new-page-to-redirect-to.php" );
?>
Now when the search engines access http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf they will actually be served the http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf/index.php file which contains the 301 redirect to the new page.
ASP 301 Redirect
This is very similar to the steps for the PHP 301 redirect above, but this is websites that are hosted on Windows servers and use ASP.
1. Rename oldfile.pdf file to filename2.pdf.
2. Create a new directory named “oldfile.pdf” in the same directory that the PDF is in.
3. Add an index.asp file in the new oldfile.pdf directory.
4. Add the following ASP code to the top of the index.asp file:
<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status="301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location","http://www.example.com/new-page-to-redirect-to.asp"
%>
Now when the search engines access http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf they will actually be served the http://www.example.com/oldfile.pdf/index.asp file which contains the 301 redirect to the new page.
I just realized I haven’t explained how to identify PDFs which are already ranking in the search engine results and thus are prime candidates for redirecting, so I’ll do that in another follow up post shortly!
SEO for PDFs - Optimizing PDF Files for Search Engines
There has long been a myth that “search engines can’t read PDFs” so it is better to put all content on an indexable HTML page. This may have been true a few years ago, but nowadays most of the major search engines have no trouble crawling and indexing PDF files. There are several fantastic guides out there about how to optimize a PDF for the search engines, such as this one from 2007 on Search Engine Land.
However, even though I just clearly stated that search engines can crawl and index PDF files, I still recommend putting text-rich content on an HTML page over a PDF file (whenever possible) for a few reasons:
1. No website navigation in PDFs. More often than not, the PDF does not maintain the same look and feel of the website, let alone provide any navigational elements. While it is true that PDFs can include clickable links, the vast majority of them do not have the site’s global navigation, and thus users will be left with nowhere to go but back to the search results.
2. Not able to track user behavior on PDFs. Sure, we can analyze server log files to see how many times a PDF file has been accessed, but we are not able to track visitors with JavaScript based tools such as Google Analytics. Accurate tracking is absolutely essential to the success of any online marketing campaign.
3. Users may not be expecting PDFs. This may be just me, but I personally hate clicking through a search result and not immediately viewing a web page, but rather waiting for my browser to unfreeze while Adobe Acrobat takes its sweet time launching to load a PDF file. By the time the PDF is finally loaded, oftentimes I am already regretting that I clicked to view it while directing my cursor to the Back button.
There are some cases in which PDFs should remain as PDFs, such as brochures and other print material, but articles and technical papers certainly can be converted to HTML pages. I will follow up shortly with another post on how to go about doing so.
Welcome to the New Streamline Metrics Website & Blog
After being in business for over a year and a half now, we are happy to finally announce the launch of the official Streamline Metrics website. One might think that an online marketing company would make sure the company website was up and ready before actually conducting business, but the truth is that we’ve been lucky enough to stay busy with new business through word-of-mouth referrals on top of working with our existing clients that we just kept putting the site on the backburner. However, we certainly realize the importance of establishing an online presence to convey to people that we actually are a “real business” and acknowledge the fact that the site needs to be put up sooner rather than later. The site is not 100% complete but now that it is finally up, we will be more likely to finish the pages which need to be fleshed out as well as add new pages, sections, tools and update the blog on a regular basis.
Stay tuned!
