Pay per click is an online advertising method used to boost traffic to your website. A Pay Per Click campaign can be setup by purchasing keywords from one of the pay-per-click search engines or directories. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their website. The campaign can also be placed on other relevant websites where the webmasters charge a fixed rate per clicks rather than letting the advertisers bid for their keywords.

PPC ad campaigns have been used for many years and they prove to be extremely useful. If you monitor the campaign regularly, you’ll be able to improve the performance of your PPC ads.

Choose keywords and phrases appropriate to your product or service

A keyword is a word or phrase that consumers would use to locate information about the products or services when they search on the internet .You should select more descriptive phrases for your products or services so that your ads will appear to those who are important to you – prospective customers searching for what you have to offer.

Keyword Variations Will Get You More Prospects

Not every person will enter the same keyword spelling to search for your type of product or service. You can boost your chances of getting more prospects by including spelling variations and plural forms in your keyword while creating your PPC ads. By specifying keyword matching options that will trigger your ads, you can widen or narrow your focus on prospective customers.

Broad match

With broad match keyword options, search engine will automatically run your ads on relevant variations that include synonyms, singular/plural forms of your keywords, even if these terms aren’t in your keyword lists.

Phrase match

You should not forget to include a complete phrase match for your keyword phrase so that any user who types in the phrase will get to view your ads through search engine sponsored results.

Exact match

Exact match of your keyword phrase is what you will mainly target to grab users who know exactly what kind of product or service they want.

Negative Keywords

Negative keywords also called as excluded keywords can be included in your ad campaign to avoid unqualified traffic that increases your overhead costs. An effective PPC campaign drives qualified traffic to your website for the purpose of increased visibility and increased sales.

Increase the impression rate by showing Ads more often

Your daily budget decides how frequently your ad is shown to the internet users for your keywords. To increase the number of times your ad is shown on a day, set your daily budget high enough so that the ads won’t turn off during the day.

PPC Ad Content

Your PPC ad content will first be showed to the visitors who will then decide whether or not to click on the ad. So, you should focus on creating PPC ad content that is compelling enough for the users.

• Your ad title should be your targeted keyword.

• Follow a clear style.

• Test multiple ads per ad group.

• Identify the unique aspects of your product or service and convert it into a unique selling point for your website.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are displayed when internet users click on your PPC ads. You have to link to appropriate and informative web pages because users click on your ad when they are interested in what you offer. Make it easy for them to find out more by sending them to a relevant landing page.

After establishing a successful PPC campaign, you should review your campaign from time to time and make necessary changes. Monitoring tools help you to track how your ad campaigns are performing. Conversion rate which specifies the number of ad clicks that are required to convert into purchase determines the success of your ad campaigns. By monitoring page views and leads, you can optimize your PPC campaign and get the most out of it.

By trying to incorporate your knowledge and experience while creating PPC campaigns, you can achieve the results you want to see.

Companies that cared about managing reputation while dealing only with the customers is considered extremely old fashioned these days. Changing interactive market place trend has made online reputation a primary factor to care to acquire new customers and maintain existing customer base.

Free consumer forums, discussion groups, blogs and social media sites are helping consumers not only to know better about the products but also about the bad practices of businesses. Most of the internet users know only this side of the reality. For businesses, the dark side shows its cruelty as businesses lose their customer base and brand image due to spoiled reputation. Ex-employees, business competitors, upset customers and suspicious SEO companies are targeting various businesses to damage their reputation in the competitive global market.

Worldwide economic recession has already made businesses to go through a rough weather. Damaging online reputation adds fuel to the fire. To create an aggressive positive impact to regain reputation, many businesses make a lot of changes such as changing their names, discontinuing product lines and engaging lead bloggers as business partners to move forward.

Complaints.com and PissedConsumer.com are some of the websites that publish unverified information. Growing popularity encourages a lot of new such websites that criticize local businesses, industry specific and country specific businesses. Some websites are even allowing the use of local languages to attract local users. These websites earn money through various means that include space selling, getting business from affected companies for ORM, directory subscription fees etc.

Such publishers/website owners never care about attorney notices and they easily escape from lawsuits using loop holes in the international cyber laws. As far as I know, no business has succeeded in the legal battle. Instead, such a practice made the situation worse than before by agitating the individuals who posted messages against the business entity.

Reversing the damaged reputation is not an easy job and it is similar to a war waged against invisible enemies. Only with professional help, the consequences of damaged reputation can be reversed.

Important question that arises now is, how to control the damage? We have helped several customers in ORM and our proven practice recommends

• Not responding to negative comments
• Having a set of micro sites attached to main site.
• Hosting such sites in the local servers to see better result in the SERP
• On-page optimization of own assets to stabilize positions in the first page for the desired keywords
• Aggressive social media optimization

Several initiatives like posting comments/articles from hundreds of different IPs and link building from own network of hundreds of websites and directories will also help in building reputation but it is not mandatory.

Various unprofessional advices include taking care of negative postings, pushing the negative postings aside, sending legal notices, getting on to the negotiation table etc. Using any one of these advices will only make matters worse. The only way to win the reputation war is to counter attack the enemy using various means including those to deviate their attention. So, in-depth analysis is required to decide the course of action and it should not compromise the on-page initiative of own assets. Various public websites and social media have their own rules based on which the position of a particular page will fluctuate. So, you need to strengthen the website attributes and make it immune to negative postings.

Search engines including Google give more importance to blogs and forums considering the freshness of the content due to visitor participation. The blogs and forums will always be alive as long as search engines continue to give priority. In general, search engines treat business giants in a special category and so, such negative reputation postings will not affect large business entities and search engines anyway. Maintaining business reputation is a part of business tasks of SMB and the support from the government to capture anonymous detractors is very minimal. The only available solution is to safeguard your business reputation proactively.

So roll up your shirts and prepare an action plan to take part in the ORM war if you are responsible for your web assets.

-Krish Govindaraj
SEO/SEM Manager – Egrove Systems Corporation

Krish Govindaraj is an experienced SEO/SEM Consultant. If you have any questions, you may reach him at gmk1567@gmail.com.

SEO- Is it a Rocket Science?

Business owners are breaking their heads to decide on the role of SEO in their marketing initiatives to cope up with growing global competitions. Some of the questions are:

• Why do I need to add additional item in the marketing budget?

• Do I need to strengthen existing marketing team which is already trying to dominate?

• How important is Google search or Yahoo search?

Simple answer: Customer base that relies on the internet is growing day by day. A decade ago, people laughed while hearing the idea of selling cars online. Now, before spending on a car, a major portion of auto buyers are doing research on makes and models of the car and they want to know whether the car dealers are reliable. So it has become unavoidable to study on the impact of online presence of auto manufacturers as well as their dealers.

Branding, improving reliability, reputation management, generating leads for current and future business, converting the leads to sales and getting customer feedback for improvements are the key areas where SEO can help.

No business is ready to take any chance to miss any sales in the roller coaster economy.

What is SEO and Who Can Do The Job?

In simple terms, SEO is a set of guidelines that designers and content writers need to follow while uploading any content on the web site. If similar businesses are operating in the same location, every business will try to differentiate itself by offering specials to encourage customers to visit their business. In the same way, effective SEO is required to attract customers to visit the website. If brand value is already established over a period of time, there is no need to worry about loyal customers who love the brand. To improve business and to bring new customers, SEO is required.

Customer behavior will be different when they find the business in the first few places of Google or Yahoo or Bing search and the business that they find in the 2nd or 3rd page.

Then next question that automatically arises is: How to get the first place in Google Search?

In order to stay ahead in the competition and to display the website in the first page of search engine results, we need to understand the algorithm used by popular search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO must be applied starting from domain name selection, location of hosting, content, technology, maintenance and promotion of the website.

Growing popularity of Social media plays a vital role in current SEO operations. Old saying of “No news is good news” will not work anymore. We need to step in the viral world to spread positive messages about the company and product and this social marketing must be started as soon as possible. Age of news, domain, posting etc., all influence the SERP results.

Before getting into the floor of car dealership, a major percentage of potential buyers are researching the cars on the internet which motivated the car companies to concentrate more on achieving internet popularity. For such businesses that care more on the internet visibility, websites are not their private property anymore. Before doing any update, technology migration, content changes etc. search engine rules must be given importance right from their design stage. The website SEO techniques must reflect the changes in the algorithm of major search engines.

In a nutshell, SEO is a set of guidelines in practice that must be followed to get the website indexed and approved by different search engines.

-Krish Govindaraj

SEO/SEM Manager – EGrove Systems Corp

Krish Govindaraj is an experienced SEO/SEM Consultant. If you have any questions, you may reach him at gmk1567@gmail.com.