Internet Marketing Blog

We recently made some changes to a client’s AdWords account that reduced clicks, traffic, and spending. Several days later we reversed those changes. Over the next several days, AdWords spending exceeding our daily budget by 20%. This came as a surprise to us as we are used to seeing some slight overage some days, but [...]

AdWords just announced that they will soon factor in landing page load times into the quality score that helps determine your ad’s position. The reasons for this are, in effect, to reward site owners who provide responsive sites and punish those that make users wait. We have no idea yet how much of an impact [...]

In a previous post on keyword competitiveness, we described a long list of factors that help determine how difficult it would be to achieve top search engine ranking on a keyword based upon competing websites. The process of thoroughly examining the situation is usually unrealistically involved, and the effort would not substantially change the tactics [...]

Should you advertise on keywords for which you already have top rankings? This question came up recently with a client seeking to improve advertising ROI and redeploy budget to other, less successful keywords. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume you have plenty of budget so that the core question is whether such advertising [...]

Given enough time, personnel, and money it is theoretically possible to improve rankings on just about any keyword. However, few us have the luxury of unlimited resources. Under ordinary circumstances, we have to choose what keywords are likely to provide the most benefit for the least effort. This is where assessing competitiveness is so critical: [...]

If you’re running a national SEM campaign, it may be desirable to exclude all local queries so that you can optimize the ad language for non-geographic queries and users. To target specific locales, you could setup additional campaigns that are better optimized for those sets of keywords. The best way to exclude location-based queries is [...]

Sorry, but it’s just terrible. With all the press and hoopla — almost all of it free — we’d expect better than the following example search results (which may change / be manipulated by the time you try them): #1 result for “Seattle” is a site that is supposed to list events, bars, restaurants, etc. [...]