A farewell to ‘broad match modified’ search ads
Here at BMON, we’re not very impressed with yet another move by Google to take away the control we have on our search advertising.
Search Engine Land
Backlink checking without the financial outlay
Justifying the cost of ‘backlink checkers’ can be hard for smaller companies, but there are free tools which can do at least part of the job.
A new opportunity for smart speakers?
While the public have come to love these devices, the marketing opportunities they’ve provided have been next to zero.
Consider what people see when they don’t click in Google
Figures from the USA (and I’ve no reason to think things are different here) suggest just under half of all searches don’t result in a click.
The call to action which gets people to your site
There’s a lot that can be deduced about the prospect’s intent from the search itself
Why Google My Business is really important
If you don’t get involved, Google may well just create a panel anyway
Tools to help you reduce the size of your images
Almost every site could do better in this respect.
Sites to fill up the search results for your company name
It’s a good idea to build up more quality sites mentioning you
Put announcements on the search results page with Google Posts
They’re a good way of dropping important news or offers in front of people
Conservatively does it with your page titles
Promotional messaging performs far better in paid ads than it does in organic results
How understanding SEO means understanding the machines
What makes ‘quality content’ which will make a page rank increasingly higher in the search results?
Helping search engines on multi-national websites
Search is not like AdWords, where you can simply tell Google to show this ad in this country
The Google results aren’t a popularity contest any more
Continue to work hard on writing page titles which draw people in
Twitter just became a lot more important in B2B
This news immediately propels Twitter from a “useful marketing tool if you have the time” into the “virtually essential” category
Another Google update: should we do anything?
There are still over 200 factors which determine where your website ranks in Google. However, the most important three remain well worth an investment of your time and money.
Do your products have to be so dull?
There’s nothing stopping you from being creative, however unglamorous your products might be. The designers who produced your rather uninspiring website? You might be surprised what they can do, given the opportunity.
And who’s going to be your +1?
This is another experiment from Google which we all need to know about. It might not change the marketing world (a number of previous Google experiments have quietly shrivelled up and died) …but it could be important.
Google: still quite important then
There’s plenty of chatter about the amalgamated opposition (Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing) putting up increasing resistance, but although this may be the case in the United States, we’re not seeing it in Europe.
Keep reading the copywriting tips until they sink in
There are many good sources of advice on writing for the web, but when you’re knocking out copy for your site, it’s not practical to keep referring to checklists. You need the right way of doing things to be second nature. Sadly, the only way this is going to happen will be if you regularly read articles on online copywriting, so I shall regularly point out good ones here, in the hope that you’ll have time to read them and the suggestions will begin to sink in. Ten Copywriting Tips… Read More »Keep reading the copywriting tips until they sink in
Can you recommend a company to do our AdWords?
Following on from my discussion about Google AdWords advertising, the inevitable follow up from one or two readers was “Can you recommend a company which can do our AdWords advertising then?” The answer is (in the UK at least), no. If you’d like a recommendation for a search engine optimisation consultancy, or someone to write online content, I know some great people. I know a great web design company. But someone to manage AdWords (sometimes known as Search Engine Marketing agencies)? I work on recommendations, and nobody’s ever told me… Read More »Can you recommend a company to do our AdWords?
Control your own Google
If you hadn’t heard, Google introduced a highly significant enhancement to its service a week or so back, called SearchWiki. This enables users to edit their search results – that is, reorder, remove, or add web pages to the results for any query. You can add notes to listings too. There’s a good summary of the implications of this in Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide on Search Engine Land which you might like to read. If that looks daunting, I’ll highlight the bits you need to know, before any… Read More »Control your own Google
Happy with your site? Think again.
This is quite an advanced article today, but it’s the sort of thing you’ll be taking in your stride after you’ve been on our Insider Programme for a while (and please think about joining, it’s a genuinely great investment). In Six Mistakes B2B Marketers Continue To Make With Organic Search, Search Engine Land takes you past elementary “optimisation” of a website for search engines, and looks at the things many people continue to get wrong even after they think they’ve got their site all sorted. Likely errors include not having… Read More »Happy with your site? Think again.
Understand what you subcontract
A good article on Search Engine Land, called Why You Need To Know SEO Basics, Even If You Outsource, is something you should read if you’re planning to improve your company’s web site performance but know you’ll be subcontracting the task. SEO is the specific science of “search engine optimisation”, but the principles in the article apply to other aspects of web site and online marketing development. You can only give a task to someone else if you actually understand what the task involves – we all know that – so education should be your priority at the moment.Read More »Understand what you subcontract