Beware AdWords budget overshooting

March 26th, 2008 by Josh

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 landing page load time precautions

March 6th, 2008 by Josh

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 this [...]

Assessing keyword competitiveness: Part II

February 29th, 2008 by Josh

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 [...]

Advertising on your top ranked keywords

February 1st, 2008 by Josh

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 brings [...]

Assessing keyword competitiveness

January 29th, 2008 by Josh

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: [...]

Geographic negative keywords

January 18th, 2008 by Josh

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 [...]

Wikia’s Poor Performance

January 8th, 2008 by Josh

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. but [...]

Google Zeitgeist 2007

December 18th, 2007 by Josh

Google recently released their 2007 edition of Zeitgeist, an assessment of popular search terms and trends for the year. While this has little actual utility for most organizations, it is entertaining.
Among our observations of their observations:

Searches spiked for several notable events, including Anne Nicole Smith’s death, the Virginia Tech shooting, nude photos of Vaness Hudgens [...]

Overcoming SEO skepticism

December 7th, 2007 by Karen

I spoke yesterday with Phil, the owner of an established web design and hosting firm. He told me bluntly “I don’t pay much attention to this SEO stuff.” Chuckling dismissively, he went on to recount stories of two clients he works with — mid-size firms — who have forked over thousands of dollars to SEO [...]

Maintaining ranking through web site changes

November 16th, 2007 by Josh

A friend of mine recently told me about his experience with renaming pages on a site, how the traffic fell off from a drop in rankings, and how he recovered the traffic quickly using an XML sitemap.
Scott has been running AdSense ads on his site for some time. He decided to restructure the navigation to [...]