Sep 28

Keyword Landing Pages Increase Conversions

By Aaron Google, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Travel Marketing, Yahoo 3 Comments »

If you’re pushing all of your search traffic (PPC or natural) into your home page, you may be missing out on conversions.

When a user gets to a page that they’ve found on a search engine, always remember that they got there (usually) by a specific keyword phrase.  You can greatly increase your chances of converting that visitor into a buyer by showing them a landing page with those same keywords.

One thing that I’m continually telling my clients is that you can truly only optimize a page well for 1-2 keyword phrases.  It is also important to note here that an optimized page doesn’t ONLY rank well, but it must convert well too.  If not, is it really optimized?  Maybe our industry should change its name to Search Engine Conversion Optimization…  SECO has a good ring to it too…

So, if a page can really only be SECOed for 1-2 keyword phrases and you’re buying 15,000 keywords that you’re pushing into your home page, it stands to reason that you may be experiencing more fall-out than necessary.  If I go into a store looking for sandals but all I see when I walk in the front door is hiking boots, I may, and a certain percentage of all people may, turn around before we find the sandals by the back door.  The great thing about the interweb is that we can have as many doors as we want.  And if someone wants sandals, or cruises or all inclusive or whatever, we can lead them through that door.

I’ve seen a couple of general studies that have shown around a 40% increase in conversions after implementing keyword targeted landing pages.  In my experience, travel sites can see conversions increase in that same ballpark.  I’ve personally seen it increase conversions by 30-35%.

Landing pages should have your targeted keyword at the top of the page and have a consistent theme throughout the page.  If the keyword is “New York Hotels,” don’t show a picture of a couple relaxing on a tropical beach – instead show the Manhattan skyline so that visitors know immediately that they’ve found the right place.  If you have a booking form on that page (which you should if you can), have the form pre-populated with the city name or itinerary, or package or whatever (you’ll be surprised how many more form submissions this simple little change will garner).

The other advantages of keyword landing pages are that if you create them for your PPC campaign, they usually rank well in the natural results too!  Make sure to include them in your site map and in your Google Sitemaps XML file.  Having well optimized keyword landing pages may help bring the minimum CPCs down in your Google AdWords account as well.

Now go make 15,000 new pages!

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Aug 16

Search Volume Update -Does it Really Matter?

By Aaron Ask, Google, MSN, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Yahoo No Comments »

Hitwise has released search engine volume data that shows Google with just over 60% of total online searches in the U.S. Here is the breakdown, according to Hitwise:

U.S. Volume of Searched Top Search Engines Four Week Period Ending July 29, 2006:

  • Google: 60.2%
  • Yahoo: 22.5%
  • MSN: 11.8%
  • Other: 5.5%

They indicate that it is a slight increase for Google and Yahoo and a slight decrease for MSN.

I wonder how Ask.com fares in all of this. I still think they have a great search engine and I find myself more disappointed with Google and Yahoo results all the time. With Yahoo’s recent update, results seem to be even closer to Google. Is search becoming just another commodity? In “organic” search results, what does, can or will differentiate the brands? Does it even matter any more?

Here’s a fun tool to see the overlap of Yahoo and Google results:
yahoo! vs. google

Here is the Hitwise piece:

Bill Tancer – Hitwise US: Google Breaks 60% – U.S. July Search Volume Numbers

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Jul 21

Search Engine Brand Management

By Aaron Marketing, Online Marketing, SEM, Search Engines, Travel Marketing No Comments »

In yesterday’s post about the struggle for customers between agents, online agencies and suppliers, I noted that branded sites (airlines, hotel chains, cruise lines, etc.) are fighting hard to cut out the middleman and have their customers book direct. Some do it through incentives like free miles or points, some do it with low rate guarantees or a combination of both.

United Airlines, for example, has a low rate guarantee and gives you 1000 miles when you book direct. Therefore, I use Orbitz to search for a flight, then usually book directly with the airline and save a few bucks. Which makes the point that the airline sites really need better shopping tools…

Airlines have done a pretty “good” job at online price control. The cruise industry is finally getting there too (after some changes that caused a lot of heartburn for cruise resellers, including my former employer). Hotels, though, have an uphill battle controlling brand and pricing through online channels.

Hitwise has released a white paper on search engine brand management that focuses on “brand theft” with some examples from the travel industry.

I have a bit of a problem with over zealous brand protection in the travel industry when it comes to PPC advertising. There is definitely a line that can be crossed, but many chains are abandoning a philosophy that helped make them a successful brand in the first place: other people selling your rooms. Instead of making enemies out of resellers, they should recognize that maybe others can sell their products better than they can. Some of us were selling online back when the hotels still thought it was just a fad that didn’t deserve any real resources (oh, and that was just a few years ago).

Give us a reason to want to book direct (incentives, exclusive inventory, price, content, something!). Don’t just make sure nobody else is buying your brand name in the search engines. Seems like those resources would be better spent on actually listening to the online travel consumer.

Hitwise’s study is definitely worth a read, especially if you can’t afford to buy keywords for your own brand name anymore. (-;

Download it here:

Hitwise White Paper

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Jul 17

Google Adwords Makes Waves

By Aaron Affiliate Marketing, Google, Marketing, Online Marketing, SEM, Search Engines 1 Comment »

If you use Google Adwords to buy PPC advertising, you’ve no doubt noticed some changes to your accounts over the weekend. It seems that Google has launched their update that takes into heavy consideration landing pages when determining your minimum CPC, ranking and whether or not your ads even show up.

Just to review, Google has always used a combination of click-through-rate (CTR) and your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) when determining your rank in the paid listings section of their results page. If your CTR wasn’t high enough, your CPC was too low or some combination of those factors, your ads will be inactivated by Google until you raise the CPC to a new “minimum.” The logic here is that only ads with high CTRs make it to the top of the results. Makes sense.

Now, Google is also inspecting the landing page that the ads point to to make sure it’s relevant to the ad with the goal of providing a more positive experience for the Google user, oh AND helping Google’s bottom line, I’m sure. From Google:

“Although it is counter-intuitive to some who hear it, we’d rather show one less ad than to show an ad which leads to a poor user experience — since long-term user trust in AdWords is of overarching importance.”

In true Google fashion, however, the change has been dramatic, without adequate warning to advertisers or its own employees, and is causing lots of heartburn among many advertisers. Minimum CPCs have gone through the roof making them unrealistic for most advertisers. Again, from Google:

“We realize that some minimum bids may be too high to be cost-effective — indeed, these high minimum bids are our way of motivating advertisers to either improve their landing pages or to simply stop using AdWords for those pages, while still giving some control over which keywords to advertise on.”

Even though Google states that, “that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change,” there is a lot of talk on the blogs and forums since the changes took place at the end of last week (nearly 30 pages of posts on Webmaster World) making me doubt that it’s that isolated among larger advertisers. One person I spoke to who manages several Adwords accounts said that for one account nearly 90% of their terms have been deactivated. That’s enough for anyone to lose lots of sleep over.

Here are some posts, discussions and insights on the matter:

It seems that Google Adwords is setting itself up to be usable only by advertising agencies or companies large enough to employ dedicated PPC staff, which is unfortunate. One of the great things about advertising on PPC networks has been that a company doing business out of the garage could always compete head-to-head with major corporations and suppliers…

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Jun 30

Free Search Marketing Guides and Info

By Aaron Blogging, Google, MSN, Online Marketing, Optimization Tips, SEM, SEO, SEO Tools, Search Engines, WebMasterWorld, Yahoo No Comments »

I’m often asked, “how do you keep up with search engine marketing?” “Isn’t it always changing, how do you know what to do?”

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple – choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing – DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy – SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!

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Jun 02

Is Natural Search Dying an Unnatural Death?

By Aaron Google, Online Marketing, SEM, SEO, Search Engines, Yahoo 1 Comment »

We’ve known it for a while… Search is destined to change. It has to. There is so much info out there, and so much crap, that the existing model of typing in 2-3 words and clicking through Google’s or Yahoo’s top results isn’t going to cut it for much longer.

There’s local search, intent-drive search, personalized search, Web 2.0, yadda, yadda, yadda. Personally I’m big on intent-driven search. This gives users results based on their search intention; commerce or research or something in between. Although not a perfect model, Yahoo has a nice beta example here: Yahoo! Mindset – where you can manipulate a slider from “shopping” to “researching” and see the results change in real time.

The most buzz right now is coming from Web 2.0. Digg.com, del.icio.us, Yahoo My Web 2.0, blog search, Google Co-op, etc. These are emerging technologies and I’m just not quite sure how they’re going to fit into search in the real world. My instinct is to say that I trust an algorithm, with some user controls, more than a “community” of anonymous users. But, I’m also in the middle of reading The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and I understand the concept that getting advice from a crowd may actually be better and could provide a closer match to what I’m searching for.

It’s interesting to think about where search is heading and exciting to be involved with an industry that has so much opportunity to evolve. In several years I’m not sure that there will be a place for “search engine optimizers” as we know them today. But that will be okay, I’ll be ready for a change by then anyhow.

The author of this article, Paul Kedrosky, seems to imply that it’s all going the way of paid search, that natural results are meaningless:

“Today a certifiably better search algorithm is a meaningless and abstruse academic notion.”

Business 2.0:The Untapped Search Business

People have been saying that for a while; I think there will always be a place for natural search in some form, though. Because we all know that if it can be bought, anyone can and will buy it. We’re too cynical to trust advertising and advertising only.

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May 26

Weekend Round Up

By Aaron Google, Online Marketing, SEM, Search Engines, Travel Marketing 2 Comments »

Since we’re going into a long weekend, I thought I would post on a couple of things that I’ve been following and thinking about since I won’t get a chance to post much over the next few days.

Kayak.com gets $11.5M in financing for marketing, expansion – I heard someone say at a conference last year, meta travel search engines are an answer to a question no one asked. And based on the JupiterReaserch data that I posted about earlier today, only 4% of travelers are using them. I guess you could look at this two different ways: 1) HUGE growth opportunity; 2) No real value to the costumer using one of these engines. I’m going with number 2. In Kayak’s case, though, there’s $30 million saying I’m wrong. Accel Partners, General Catalyst Partners, Sequoia Capital and American Online have all invested in Kayak, which is using the new funds to expand into the U.K., Germany and France.

Google AdsBot Now Coming To Assess Your Landing Pages – Google just keeps getting smarter. In case you don’t already know, when you buy pay-per-click (PPC) ads on Google, your position is not only based on how much you’re willing to pay, but also what the click through rate (CTR) is on your ads. So you can bid $100 for a click, but if after a short amount of time (measured in impressions) your ad doesn’t receive any clicks, you’ll see your ad drop in the rankings. This ensures maximum revenues for Google and, in my opinion, seems to be fair to everyone. Now, they’re taking it a step further and are going to inspect the landing pages you’re pointing your ad to to help establish your ranking. It makes a case for targeted landing pages; which is something we already know helps conversions. This should be beneficial for everyone from Google down to the consumer.
Google AdsBot Now Coming To Assess Your Landing Pages, Will Impact Your AdRank

What do you think of this:
Is Google Dropping Conservative Sites They Disagree With?

Have a Great Weekend!

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May 10

Schmidt: Google faces competition – but…

By Aaron Google, Online Marketing, SEM, Search Engines No Comments »

“There is a surprising, if not bizarre (fact that) more competition in auction can actually produce more revenue, rather than less” – Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

This is what is truly great and utterly frustrating about the auction model for PPC (e.g. Google Adwords, Yahoo Sponsored Search).  Schmidt’s statement is true for Google in the corporate sense just as it is for us advertisers; as we’re all competing for the same keyword we drive the price up.  And Google takes it to the bank…  It’s genius.

But wouldn’t that mean that the more advertisers there are the less valuable the advertising is?  Higher CPCs = lower ROI…  Right?  Now that Yahoo is updating their system to be more like Google’s, I’m also assuming that their CPCs will naturally raise closer to the level of Google’s.  Meaning advertisers won’t be able to water down their CPCs with Yahoo as some have been known to do.

This will also have a profound effect on advertisers selling products with thin margins.  At some point the prices get too high to return a positive ROI no matter how effective you are at selling your product.  I think this has already started to happen to some extent in the travel industry where average CPCs have actually come down for some terms in the last year or so.  When you can’t make money anymore you leave, the CPCs come down for anyone left, you come back in, CPCs go up and it starts all over again.  Super Genius… Does Google see this as a limitation though?  It doesn’t appear so based on this article.

It does leave room for some alternative models, I believe…

Google faces mounting competition: CEO – Yahoo! News

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May 08

Yahoo’s Project Panama

By Aaron Online Marketing, SEM, Search Engines, Yahoo 1 Comment »

Yahoo is unleashing its new PPC system; look for more info on May 17. It seems that for the time being it’s going to be an awful lot like Google. This isn’t bad, because for the advertiser Google is light-years ahead of the current Yahoo Search Marketing offering.

Hopefully their tool at predicting traffic will be more accurate than Google’s. For those who aren’t aware, your position in Google is based on not only how much you pay, but the click through rate (CTR) that your ad receives… In a roughly 50/50 equation. This makes it tough for Google to predict how many impressions and clicks your ad will receive without historic data. Very seldom do I experience much accuracy with its estimates.  Yahoo seems to claim that they understand this and are aiming to have an accurate system (complete with graphs!):

“But as advertisers enter each bid, they will see an estimate of how many clicks they will receive each day. More important, a graph will show how many more clicks they can expect for each increased bid.

“One of the primary complaints we get is users can’t explain to their bosses what they could get for spending the next $1,000,” said Steve Mitgang, the Yahoo senior vice president who oversaw the development of Project Panama. “Now they can take this to their bosses to justify spending more.”

They also state that demographic targeting (à la MSN) may be in the future.  However, they don’t think it’s important…  Huh?!  It would be great for some of the companies I work with that have a very keen sense of who their customer is…

Read the whole New York Times piece here:

Yahoo Is Unleashing a New Way to Turn Ad Clicks Into Ka-Ching – New York Times

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Apr 11

New Search Stats from iProspect

By Aaron Marketing, SEM, Search Engines No Comments »

iProspect and Jupiter Research have released the findings from a January study of search behavior. The study finds that searchers are growing more impatient than ever when conducting a search. They’re more likely to click on a first page result, quicker to change their query or even the engine that they are using. Some of the findings include:

  • 62 percent of search users click on a link within the first results’ page. This is up from 60 percent in 2004 and 48 percent four years ago.
  • 36% of search engine users believe that the companies whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field.
  • 90 percent click on a link within the first three pages, up from 87 percent two years ago and 81 percent in 2002.

Read the entire release here:Search Engine Marketing Firm iProspect Study Reveals Increase in the Importance of Attaining Top Natural Search Results

Here are some other references to the study:

MediaPost Publications – Study: Two-Thirds Of Searchers Click On First Results Page

62% Of Searchers Click On Links On First Page Of Search Results

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