While digging deep into PPC campaigns, search marketing professionals understand that it’s imperative to look at quality scores. A quality score is how Google rewards relevant and well-performing keywords in an ad group, specifically using factors such as click-through rate, landing page relevancy and other criteria. Keywords that have a quality score above 7 receive more impressions, higher positions and CPC discounts. Yes, discounts! Up to 30%!

But what about those keywords that score 6 or lower? Because they are not as relevant, these keywords are penalized with fewer impressions and lower positions. But the harsh and eye-opening news is about the CPC penalties: you could be paying up to 600% more for each click.

There is even more bad news. Low quality scores do not stop at the keyword level. These low quality scores bleed into the campaign, affecting the entire account.

PPC is not a set-it-and-forget-it marketing effort. It involves serious management. Without it, you will lose money – resources that could be used to make your Internet marketing work harder for you. Even if a keyword has a passable quality score of 7, why settle for a 12.5% discount? Use those savings to test more options, which could lead to doubling or even close to tripling your discounts. Given that approach, the long-term impact of optimizing one single keyword across a campaign can be quite worthwhile.

Not bad for one little word.

A month in and I’m still here. That’s a good sign, right? Because if these guys couldn’t cope with my feisty bossiness passion for search, I think I’d be out on the street.

My job here is to bring clients’ search marketing efforts to a whole new level. Not a small feat since the MicroArts team has been doing it for years. But we’re ready to put it into overdrive.

How? Well a number of ways…

1) First and foremost, we take clients’ business goals into account. If our efforts are not meeting your business goals, we need to start over.

2) Our ability to work directly with clients is paramount.

3) We deliver on ROI. We need to justify and surpass monthly investments.

4) We can demonstrate main facets of search marketing: SEO (on-site and off-site factors), link building and PPC.

5) Understanding that SEO and social media are no longer mutually exclusive: tweets, comments, status updates, photos, videos are all content that strongly impact search results.

6) SEO needs to be a partner in site redesigns and site migrations. A single new page of content is an optimization opportunity.

7) As a result of numbers 5 and 6, SEO and content development go hand-in-hand. Your content strategy is the foundation of your site: there is no doubt that an excellent content strategy will deliver search and social results. As Kristina Halverson mentioned on her blog BrainTraffic, “Numbers don’t lie.”

Here’s a look at Google search results for “social media” over the past few years:

2005: 9,150,000
2006: 41,600,000
2007: 165,000,000
2008: 359,000,000
2009: 1,230,000,000

Here’s a look at Google search results for “content strategy”:

2006: 5,930,000
2007: 8,340,000
2008: 137,000,000
2009: 337,000,000

Content strategy is pretty much on the same path as social media was three years ago. And what do search engines look at? Your content.

Search marketing is ongoing and not a one-time engagement. We can set it up and implement, but the real work starts once the program is up and running. Reviewing and analyzing results, modifying search campaigns on performance and crushing the competitive landscape is not a one shot deal. It takes time. But it’s awesome when it comes together.

9) We love what we do, and it shows. We have been blogging, speaking and sharing our expertise for years. Personally, I firmly believe the more you share, the more you get back. Luckily, Peter feels the same way. So our clients are not just getting our expertise; they’re tapping into our network, too.

If you have a question about Internet marketing, fire away. Challenge us. It’s how we get better.

Is it true, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

Although the Pet Industry is going “healthy”, the Pet Industry as a whole is asleep when it comes to Internet Marketing and Social Media Strategy. As I walked the floor of this weekend’s pet show in Chicago I visited with 25 people from 25 companies who appeared to be in the ‘know’ surrounding their brand marketing communications. I asked the same initial question and then proceeded my inquires from there:
“Do you have a documented or formal Internet Marketing Strategy for 2010?”

Here is what I learned:

• Two out of 25 companies have a documented Internet Marketing Strategy for 2010. In both companies, they did not have a “documented” Internet Marketing Strategy in 2009, beyond pay-per-click (PPC) search engine marketing. Both companies ballparked that in 2010, >25% of their total marketing budget was allocated to Internet marketing and social media. Although neither company would divulge the size of their marketing budget, based on my understanding of marketing budgets for brands of this size, I would confidently estimate their Internet Marketing and social media marketing budgets are >$1 million for 2010. Both companies have an agency like MicroArts to lead them in their Internet Marketing Strategy. Both brands engage their customers (the actual pet owner) in online conversation, on a daily basis. A primary objective for both companies is to double their customer contact (pet owners) databases from >100K to >200K. Because I appreciate their candid conversations with me and understand their strategy is a major competitive differentiator for them, I will keep their identities to myself. I will say, however, that one was a long time brand leader in the Pet Industry and the other is a young, fast growing company.
• Fifteen of the 23 companies that did not have a documented Internet Marketing Strategy for 2010 did not even understand the question. I went on to define the benefits of Internet Marketing but it most cases, it didn’t help.
• In fact, on five occasions, the response was, “the pet owner is not our customer, we sell through distributors.” I’m sure the look on my face was priceless. In all five cases, these companies owned multiple brands. And the only customer contact (pet owners) database in all cases was a rewards program that seemed to give them all a headache to talk about. Four out of five of these companies have brands selling in Target®. Honestly, I left these booths perplexed. Normally, in these situations, I’d leave the booth thinking, “hey, this could be a great client for the MicroArts Internet Marketing Team! But, these five companies clearly attributed “little value” to Internet Marketing and also felt it was the responsibility of their distribution partners.
• Three of the 23 companies became interested with Internet Marketing and didn’t want our conversation to end. One company had ear marked 20% of its marketing budget towards Internet Marketing because they knew it was important, but hadn’t taken any initial steps.
• Five of these 23 companies believed, in fact, that they did have an Internet Marketing plan because they had a Facebook page and a Twitter account.

In sum, the Pet Industry is a sleeping dog and appears to be settled into a long nap. Which I’m happy about, selfishly, I say, “let sleeping dogs lie.” Kudos to brands that will profit from Internet Marketing and Social Media Marketing efforts, your brand deserves every penny of it.

If you found this blog because you did a search on “Internet Marketing in the Pet Industry” or “Social Media Marketing in the Pet Industry” … Good Morning!

To engage MicroArts in a discussion about your brand strategy, brand design, Internet marketing and social media marketing in the Pet Industry, ping me, Peter Getman.

Search Advertising is one of the most efficient and surefire ways to get your brand appearing favorably within major search engines. Using search advertising, advertisers, marketers and organizations can target the key search terms and phrases their most-valued prospects, customers and stakeholders look for every day.

Sounds pretty simple, right? The basic principle of search advertising or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is a simple one—drive brand awareness and traffic to your site and ultimately improve your marketing ROI through new business. Sometimes, however, the process seems so simple, many of the most important things that impact overall performance and ROI are overlooked. Those who use search advertising must remember that effective search advertising involves two primary focuses:

2. Getting your ad to appear, be noticed and get clicked for the keywords you desire. With a website set as the default location, you should be able to direct visitors to your homepage or subpage. But DON’T STOP THERE.
3. Once searchers click your ad, they need to enter an engaging, relevant and actionable environment that directly pays off what the keyword or concept they searched. Getting the visitor to take the desired next step/action or “conversion” doesn’t happen automatically. You need to build optimized and targeted landing pages for each ad and each unique set of keywords. This is critical to ensure a positive return for every dollar you invest in search advertising.

So, with that in mind, here are five simple rules for building effective landing pages.

1. Create the ultimate call to action (CTA). On your page(s), clearly provide one simple way visitor can take a next step. This is different for every company and every brand; it may be a free download or something more complicated, such as sharing demographic information in exchange for a coupon. By having one call to action, you won’t overwhelm every visitor with additional ways for them to interact with you. Also, make sure you amplify the button for your CTA and make the signup process as simple as possible with as little fields as possible.
2. Write an integrated, compelling and relevant page headline. To make your headline integrated, simply include a keyword (or two) directly from the ad headline appearing in your ad. To make you add compelling, make sure to include an actionable benefit or reward, such as “learn,” “save” or “download.” To make your headline relevant, keep in mind who your audience is and speak directly to them.
3. Visually engage the user. Tell a story with the ad copy, page headline and the supporting visual.
4. Convey reputation, trust and security. Back up your work with examples where possible. Make your landing page look professional and secure. Remember that people need to trust you before clicking an advertisement.
5. Less is more. The least amount of information, design and development it takes you to produce a compelling and trusted environment the better. Try not to overwhelm visitors with any over-the-top Flash displays or fancy navigation formats. Keep it simple.

With properly crafted landing pages, you will increase the potential value of every new visitor who was intrigued by your search advertising efforts. It’s a big opportunity so take the time to create the appropriate environment for each ad group.

MicroArts specializes in landing page design and the implementation and management of search advertising campaigns. Need help? Give us a call!

1. Will they get to know you and your brand?

First things first. Will the agency or service you are looking at truly get to know you and your brand? Both are very important. Let’s begin with the importance of getting to know you. You like to have fun, right? Work is work but why not have a little fun in the process right? Before working with a provider, truly ask yourself and your team if you think you can have fun with them? When fun, productivity and results get mixed together it can make all the difference in the world.

Secondly, make sure that they get to know your brand. There are a lot of services and agencies out there with turn-key solutions. It is great to get things going quickly but not at the risk of jeopardizing the integrity of your brand. Think about the power you are about to hand over to this new company. They are going to have the keys to creating massive amounts of brand awareness using search words, phrases and advertisements as based on your brand. What if they trigger a keyword that gets you in a tangle or promise something in an ad you can’t deliver? Make sure they know your brand or it can come back to hurt you!

Before making a decision make sure you feel like the agency or professional service you’re about to hire will work as an extension of your team. Typically, this involves at least one strategy session with their core group of experts or project managers. Also, make sure that they get to know your competition. Without having a clear picture of the competitive search environment it will be hard to break the clutter and selectively qualify the searchers in direct benefit of your value proposition.

2. Can they only offer PPC Related Services? Do they offer more than just PPC Related Services?

Does the provider specialize only in PPC services? If so, they may not have the ability to integrate a variety of tactics to support PPC efforts. Why is this important? There are more ways to drive targeted traffic to your website than just engaging in PPC. The problem arises when there are other viable opportunities to drive targeted leads to your website and a company can only provide one of them. If you want to have a healthy and well-rounded lead generation system in place, your dollars should be allocated properly and include search engine optimization (SEO) landing page design and other forms of internet advertising including banner advertising. Or as they say, you shouldn’t collect all your leads using one basket … forget about the chicken and the eggs.

3. What are their success metrics?

Impressions, click-through-rate, conversions, leads, opportunities, sales closed, downloads, time on page… and the list goes on. Every agency and service is armed with a unique set of success metrics. Before you get presented with the laundry list of metrics it is important to figure out what is truly important to you. Obviously, almost every business is looking for new leads. What about the actions that may lead a new visitor to recommend your site to a friend or sharing a piece of content? Or what about the new visitors that find your site but then don’t convert? What is that information truly worth to you?

In reality, success metrics should be unique and not universal. Try to come up with four desirable actions a new visitor could take on your website that you would consider a win. When working with the PPC service or agency, discuss these. See what they can offer. If they seem to be on top of it than work on figuring out a dollar value you can assign to each metric. This will make your investment easy to track. Make sure you help and are comfortable with their campaign dashboard.

4. Allocation of your budget. Is there any brand design included?

Make sure you find out where they intend to allocate your dollars. If you get one bulk price ask how much of that budget gets paid directly to the actual PPC service. If you don’t feel comfortable with your website and see zero dollars allocated to creating targeted landing page environments or upgrading your site, maybe you should reconsider. Remember sometimes your dollar is only as good as the environment you send a new visitor to. Make sure your site and landing pages are up to speed before opening the flood gates.

5. Past Experience

Make sure to go ahead and look at or ask for any past client examples and how they delivered success on their behalf. These services are measurable. Are there any situations or cases that align with or are similar to your needs? Can they show a positive ROI as based on the example? What was involved in the project and how many new visitors/leads have the services generated to date? Make sure to check out a few examples to ensure that the actual delivery of their services matches your expectations.

Now you’re ready

So now that you are armed with exactly what to look for when considering a search advertising or PPC service we wish you all the best of luck. We invite anyone and everyone to put our search advertising expertise to the test by asking us any of the questions or concerns shared above. You can also learn more by reviewing our Search Advertising (PPC) services. We would love to talk to you about how we can take your lead generation efforts to the next level, give us a call today.

What Google, and other search engines, want you to do is to approach the situation as if search engines didn’t exist. For example, if you have a partner who has a website who wants to link to you, then you should first ask yourself a few questions. Think about your answers from a strategic perspective and remember a true link should add value to the user experience on both sides of the click.

• Does your partner’s site complement your site?

• What reasons do people have to visit my partner’s site?

• Would those people, as part of their experience on that site, be likely to follow a link back to my own site?

• Does the link relate to your site? This can be categorically, horizontally or vertically as long as an intuitive connection exists.

• Can you identify a piece of content or place on the site that your link could exist as part of it and make sense/add value to the user experience?

• Is the site professional and would you like to be associated with it?
• Is the site credible and doesn’t practice any black-hat or malicious SEO strategies and tactics?

If you have a hard time answering any of these questions, you may want to re-consider and possibly avoid getting linked with the site in question.

If, on the other hand, the answers lead in a positive direction, make sure your partner uses a descriptive hyperlink–something more than “click here”–and make sure the link is to a relevant portion of the site. (It might make sense for to link directly to a product page, for example.) If you do get linked, and think you should link back, you should perform the same exercise. Don’t link back to someone just because they linked to you! Only link if it adds value.

Our approach

MicroArts has had proven success following these guidelines with our own network of partners. As a company specializing in aligning brand design, positioning and development and seeding it online as part of our clients’ websites, it is not uncommon for site visitors to ask themselves, “Who made this?” So oftentimes, our clients will include a single hyperlink to our website with a label along the lines of “Website Design by MicroArts Creative Agency” or “Brand Design by MicroArts.” This example of a descriptive hyperlink sends curious and interested visitors in an intuitive and linear manner to our website. This has three primary benefits:

• We get a relevant traffic flow of potential prospects, who have already seen our work and are interested to learn more.

• Search engines naturally recognize these links and assign us higher ranking on results pages

• We can ask our partners to change terms and tweak terms within each descriptive link as we evolve, our work evolves and search engines evolve. This flexibility provides a great way to test certain relevant link descriptions within different spaces to see what works best.

To find out how we can develop and deliver value adding SEO strategies and tactics to boost your online presence and drive traffic to your site, please call 603.430.1110 to learn more.

Since SEO is only a part of good communications techniques we never apply it solely for the sake of ranking higher in the search engines’ organic listings. This is especially true if it’s at the expense of good writing and communication. Why not? Well, let’s say for argument sake that “your widgets are the best widgets anyone in the widget market could hope for in a widget.” And let’s say that sheer repetition gets you the recognition you want from people searching for “widgets.” The fact remains that your message is weak and you’re not going to compel anyone to buy widgets from you. Besides, trying to game the system like that just doesn’t work.

Google and other search engines dedicate large portions of their budget to make their engines behave and classify information more and more like a person would every day. Therefore, trying to trick the system would require Google-eqsue budgets and constant vigilance as the algorithms change. So it’s a risky and expensive move at best to try to play that game.

Further, Google’s own guidelines for SEO say to do what you would if search engines did not exist. They say that if you are effectively communicating with your users then you are effectively communicating with search engines and this is the best way to increase your search engine results page rankings.

What are effective communications on the web?

To truly communicate effectively online, you need to reach all users-regardless of their technical savvy, practices, and equipment. That means you have to accommodate all types of browsers and all types of user abilities. It means graphics and flash have appropriate text-based representations backing them up. And it means you always connect with the lowest denominator of technology while reaching for the highest. Some examples of how to do so include:

• Make sure everything is labeled
  
• Complete all labels in a way that is most relevant to the user-telling them where they are and where they can go.
  
• Act like a newspaper; put the most important things at the top of the page and make the most important information on the page stand out with larger text.

If you do all that, and create great content to boot, then you are on the path to great success. The next step is to tell the world about your website, which we’ll cover in a future blog post.

In conclusion, concentrate on your story rather than search engine spiders. Reach out to your audience and engage your users. Make sure you are clearly communicating with all types and all technologies. At MicroArts Creative Agency, we know how to develop websites that effectively tell your brand story and enhance your brand experience. And as it turns out, that’s the way to draw users in and achieve a higher ranking.

Give us a call. And let’s get started!

Google results are the dominating manners in which your potential customers feast on your facts, other’s opinions and the media’s hubbub about your brand. Clearly, it’s a powerful brand awareness advantage if your search results placement yields 100% or 1000% more readership than your competition about your brand’s promise of superior value. Not to mention, revenues.

Soon…conversations in highly specialized social communities, the Technorati-like blog-o-spheres, will be leveraging more sophisticated Digg-like taxonomies to deliver the most relevant facts, opinions, videos and media noise around your brand and the search terms surrounding your brand. You’ll come to call it “participatory media and content.” It’s happening. Count on it. (Yeah, that sentence hurts my head too.)

We know the Internet is constantly changing and evolving. For the better. All searches queried by your potential customers will be yielding more personally-relevant results to them. How great is that?

A key to being a dominating brand in generating free online traffic, boiled down to almost nothing:

Offer free, personally-relevant content to your brand’s potential customers on the web.

Content that must somehow directly exude or indirectly illustrate your brand’s ability to deliver its differentiating value proposition in a manner that is tangible and believable.

That’s it. Go do it.

This basic content creation discipline on behalf of your brand must be ongoing. In other words, your brand’s supporting content must evolve at the same break neck speed as your business itself. Do this, and no matter how the Internet search result’s taxonomy technology improves, your brand will be positioned for traffic generation dominance.

To me, this really requires nothing more than Internet Public Relations, or what we lazily call iPR.

iPR is simply the combination of your Old School Public Relations [OSPR] content creation, your Search Engine Optimization [SEO] and Social Media Optimization [SMO] strategies into one dovetailed effort. It’s sensible, since at their core they are both based upon – you guessed it,

‘Offering free, personally-relevant content to your brand’s potential customers and followers to consume both online and offline.’

It’s not necessarily sensible that you have 3 different agencies working on developing this content.The job of managing message consistency makes my head hurt.

Success in OSPR, SEO & SMO nets the same success for your brand’s website, your business. Whereby, the start of your sales process is initiated:

More brand awareness of your superior difference
> More web traffic
> More qualified traffic
> More customers
> More revenues
> More brand knowledge
> Bigger EBITDA multiple
> Get one step closer to brand ubiquity

Sure, OSPR content creates is clear, concise, bulletproofed and validated announcements for editors to consume. And of course, SEO strategies are employed to digitally influence algorithmic machines so to speak [Google, etc.] for higher-ranking results. Lastly, SMO strategies are employed to digitally influence web people in communities et-al.

Yet, the end result for both is the same. More web traffic…

To make your brand’s differentiating value proposition more tangible, more believable, “package” its personally-relevant content in as many forms the web empowers us to do so:
> Brand success case studies in download print
> Brand success case studies in video
> Blogs, forums, white papers, silver papers {what’s this?}
> Viral videos
> Emailed “spoon fed” pitches to analysts and media
> Optimized PR pitch stories
> Optimized PR releases
> Internet PR [iPR]
> Digital sales collateral
> Webinars
> E-Newsletters
> A creative social media program

There is more, but I don’t want to bore you. The point is, go craft a ton of meat and potato content and then give it your iPR and creative team to package it into outreach programs for your brand.

It works. [Google: Brand Launch Agency or Creative Agency, what comes up? ]

If you don’t have the time or expertise, team up with a disciplined, progressive rand creative agency to dive into your head and deliver.