Brent Carnduff has pulled together a well-documented post covering the various historical communications that Google, Matt Cutts and the SEO community at large has shared amongst one another to get to the bottom of whether or not social signals impact ranking.

Part of the value of the article, though maybe not its primary intent, is to provide clarification on how social media helps SEO.

Social drives discovery of content, which often generates in bound links. Social most likely helps drive indexing, meaning Google is locating links on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and connecting those links to the appropriate content.

Do not discount the value social media marketing can provide to SEO.  Acquiring links, establishing authorship and authority and helping content to be located are all very important things from an SEO perspective but they are ancillary benefits. At the end of the day however social does not drive rankings.

So what should this mean for channel marketing?

A lot of organizations merge social media marketing and SEO into the same bucket because there is a large cross over in the tools necessary to succeed in each discipline.  Content is the major factor in both channels and often content can be repurposed cross functionally making it appear as if one channel’s goal is to affect the other when in reality each channel should be using shared content in a much different ways.

What this means for organizations engaged in online marketing is that SEO should have its own marketing plan and goals and those goals should be separate from an organizations social media marketing plan and goals.  Any ancillary benefits a channel can provide to another should be considered just that, ancillary. While there may be levels of efficiency each channel can gain from sharing resources, such as content, each channel should be treated as independent entities.

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Michael Martinez, from SEO Theory, has written a thoughtful and informative article called “Why You Run with Spammers” and it helps remind me why less experienced marketers and their clients make poor decisions.  Michael’s article focuses on Google’s policy as it relates both to decision making and linking.  The crux of the article is that as experienced marketers we have failed the younger generation.

The implication is that back in the day, think the 90s, links were used to guide people to content before search engines became the primary solution for web content discovery.  At some point web users recommended search engines to one another enough that search engines established themselves as the de facto way to locate content on the web.  These days Google is “the” search engine and most search marketers think in terms of Google when making any decision, yours truly included.

When it comes time to attempt to understand Google, understanding linking is critical.  Google uses the way websites link to one another to help learn about that website and classify it amongst its peers.  When search marketers realized the perceived value of links, they began formulating strategies to acquire links because the impact of those links was substantial.  This was what Michael believes was our point of failure.

“Web marketers have dipped into their extensive pool of linking behaviors and devised some interesting ways to use those linking behaviors to influence search results. But if you look at those transformations objectively you’ll see that the majority of marketers ignored the small minority of “old-timers” who kept saying, “This isn’t what you’re supposed to be doing with these kinds of links!”

In other words, the pool of elders whose wisdom should have guided the Web marketing community’s link building efforts was too small to be effective at restraining the majority of younger, more naive Web marketers. Of course many of the elders simply jumped ship and started grabbing whatever links they could, having an advantage in knowledge and experience over newer, more naive marketers. Those turncoat marketers simply taught new generations of marketer’s bad habits, and gradually the reach of the turncoats surpassed the reach of the traditionalists.

This is how ecosystems evolve. It’s also why so many of you suddenly found yourselves running with the spammers even though you had been convinced what you were doing was acceptable to the search engines all along. You looked around and saw that your neighbors were not dead and they were still eating. Everything looked fine because groups cannot look into the future.”

Sadly enough, I have to agree with Michael.  Many online marketers and the agencies they were associated with did exactly what Michael describes and have created a generation of online marketers that are willing to do what works, even if it contains an unacceptable amount of risk, because they don’t seem to know any better or just don’t care.

Link building, content development and on page optimization are never going to go away, however there is a right way and a wrong way to go about taking on each of these challenges. Clients need to educate themselves and evaluate the risks v. reward of their decisions, regardless of what their consultant or agency says, and if they make risky choices then they need not be surprised if they get burned.

The post Why Are We Committed to Bad Behavior? appeared first on Silverback.

When it comes to creating a new pay per click campaign, keyword research is one of the most important, valuable and high return activities in the whole process. Through the detective work of determining which keywords are most relevant and have the most demand, you learn not only which terms and phrases to target, but also more about your target audience as a whole.

Effective keyword research not only ensures that you are driving the most relevant web traffic to your website, but also, enables you to quickly respond to changing market conditions and predict shifts in demand. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually every niche.

Every search phrase that’s typed into a search engine is recorded in one way or another. Today’s cutting edge keyword research tools allow you to retrieve this information efficiently and easily.

However, those tools cannot show you (directly) how valuable or important any given keyword might be to a website. To understand the value of a keyword, you need to research further, make some hypotheses, test, and iterate – the classic web marketing formula.

Think strategically when creating keyword lists

Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into the thinking of your potential customers. When users go to search engines and type out their search queries, they often use language that is entirely different from what you might expect.

Even if your product or service provides a solution they can use, they may start with a description of their problem instead. For example, someone looking for a new dress might simply type dress in the seach box first, and the next search might be for evening dress or black cocktail dress.

Searchers often go through a progression, with users trying certain searches, checking out different sites, refining their searches, and repeating this process until they finally find what they want. Taking the time to understand the typical search sequences will impact your keyword strategy and ultimately determine if you are capturing the best traffic.

Take the time to go beyond the surface and use keyword research to learn how your customers think, get your thinking in alignment with your target audience, and then build your PPC strategy around that.

Tips for building effective keyword lists

-       Identify your target audience so you can determine what they are searching for. Think like a customer and try to use keywords that would match the search queries they would use.

-       Group similar keywords into themes. This will help to show more relevant ads to potential customers by giving you better control of who sees specific ads. For example, if you add all your keywords and ads to one ad group, a customer searching for women’s evening shoes may see your ad about men’s tennis shoe

-       Start with the right number or keywords. Start a handful of well-targeted keywords, 5 to 25 will do in most cases.

-       Always include negative keywords. This will help block traffic from unwanted searches and make your campaign more targeted.

Get the help of a PPC professional

Pay-per-click advertising has become an important part of online marketing and it can be a highly effective way to drive traffic to your site. However, it takes a considerable amount of time and expertise to master. If you are new to the world of pay per click, consider hiring a PPC expert to help you avoid the many pitfalls that come with pay per click advertising. Silverback Marketing PPC experts can help to create profitable campaigns that generate high quality traffic and garner the best ROI.

Please contact us to learn how to maximize your PPC strategy today!

The post Keyword research strategies for PPC success appeared first on Silverback.

What is Pay-per-click advertising?

Pay-per-click marketing or paid search marketing is an online advertising channel that is designed to drive traffic to websites for a fee. Businesses can place online advertisements on websites by bidding on keywords and phrases relevant to the products or services they provide. PPC advertising prominently displays ads at the top of the search engine results page, bypassing organic search rankings. Once someone clicks on an ad they are directed to the advertiser’s website and the advertiser is charged a fee.

PPC advertising has quickly become an integral part of online marketing by offering an affordable and flexible way to grow your business online. We have outlined a few benefits of PPC advertising and why you should consider incorporating pay per click into your online marketing strategy:

Benefits of PPC advertising

Relevance – Reach people as they search for words of phrases that are relevant to your business. Your ads are displayed to people who are actively searching for the products or services you provide. So those people who land on your site are more likely to take action.

Flexible budget – There is no minimum spending commitment. You can decide much or how little you want to invest in your PPC advertising.

Easy & precise tracking – Google AdWords and Bing ads provide powerful and comprehensive tools that help advertisers keep track of key performance metrics like costs per click, click through rates, conversion data and much more. This data gives advertisers invaluable information on the behavior of their target audience, as well as the ability to control costs and increase ROI.

Speed to market – Platforms like Google AdWords and Bing Ads make it easy to create PPC campaigns quickly and driving traffic to a website within a matter of minutes. But be warned, just because you have created a PPC campaign doesn’t mean you will receive high-quality traffic.

Paid search is nimble – It can take weeks or months for the natural results on search engines to change because of how infrequently the search engines crawl sites. Conversely, PPC campaigns allow users to make adjustments in real time providing an unparalleled ability to adapt to changing market conditions.

Testing capabilities – PPC platforms offer many options to allow advertisers to test everything from ad content to individual bids for keywords. This ability to test key aspects of the campaign gives experienced PPC marketers an opportunity to continuously refine and improve the campaigns.

Target difficult keywords – PPC allows you to target keywords you might have difficulty ranking organically and appear on the first page of the search results for those terms quickly.

PPC advertising compliments SEO – PPC can be a great compliment to organic SEO and can be a useful tool to help drive some traffic to your site right away. It is always a good idea to diversify marketing strategies to reduce dependency on a single marketing channel. This reduces the risk that comes with unexpected changes like the major algorithm updates that we’ve seen in the last 2 years. Any business that solely relies on one source of traffic is potentially on very rocky ground.

Get the help of a PPC professional

Pay-per-click advertising has become an important part of online marketing and it can be a highly effective way to drive traffic to your site. However, it takes a considerable amount of time and expertise to master. If you are new to the world of pay per click, consider hiring a PPC expert to help you avoid the many pitfalls that come with pay per click advertising. A PPC professional can help create profitable campaigns that generate high quality traffic and garner the best ROI.

Please contact us to learn how to maximize your PPC strategy today!

The post Benefits of Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising appeared first on Silverback.