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Currently Browsing Keywords

Interpreting AdWords statistics

I’ve blogged before about how to interpret CTR and what conditions are necessary for a valid comparison of two ads. In one recent case we created two identical ads that went to different landing pages so that we could test the effectiveness of each landing page. The assumption is that each ad — being identical — […]

Yahoo search trends

Yahoo! Clues is a new tool that offers insight into search trends. Think of it as a version of Google Trends that only provides a month’s worth of data. It does try to provide additional demographic information such as gender and income breakdown, but this data almost certainly only applies to the very small portion […]

SEO vs. SMO – hold your horses

A friend recently pointed me toward an article that says “SEO is Dead” because of the rise of Social Media Optimization, or SMO. The article is wrong, and here’s why: First, search traffic is still growing. People still use search to find products and services, background information, reviews, and competitive pricing. People may get ideas […]

How Google Instant affects advertisers

Google announced today the rollout of Google Instant. Now search results are shown as you type instead of waiting for you to submit a full query. This forces us to rethink the concept of an impression and suggests some new directions in ad targeting. Google Instant changes both natural results and ads as what you […]

Google makes local SEO more important than ever

Now that Google is allowing searchers to specify the location of search results, it is more important than ever to ensure search engines know where your click-and-mortar business is located. We recently wrote about local SEO (part 1, part 2), and now would be a good time to take basic steps to improve the likelihood […]

Customers are right, you’re wrong

You know your products and services inside and out. This knowledge can be a critical challenge when communicating with customers. They may not be experts, or they have a perspective and terminology that’s different from yours. The good folks over at SPOS recently wrote about this and gave an excellent example: Customer language is often […]

Google synonyms and natural language processing

Google just blogged about synonyms as they related to searcher intent. They provide several examples of how a concept as simple as a synonym complicate natural language processing. This also brings up some important recommendations for site owners with respect to SEO. Prospective customers type in all kinds of variations on your most obvious keywords […]

First look at AdWords Ad Sitelinks

We have been granted access to the Ad Sitelinks beta in Google AdWords for one of our clients. This new feature, which was announced on the Inside AdWords blog two days ago, provides advertisers in the top spot with the ability to show additional keyword links in their ads as shown in the example below. […]

See what users search on in AdWords

AdWords has added the ability to see what keywords are triggering ad impressions without running a Search Query Report. Simply open up an ad group to view the keywords, and a button will appear above the keyword list that says “See search terms….” Clicking on it will present you with two options where you can […]

Keywords as markets for SEO and PPC

This post was prompted by many discussions with clients in which we attempt to summarize SEO and PPC performance in practical, easily digestible forms. There is frequently a tendency for clients to oversimplify evaluations to “it works” or “it doesn’t” based upon summary data. For SEO, we try to summarize performance in terms of increases […]