Boston Web Consulting
Search Engine Optimization and Adwords Reporting

Sometimes your main site may be languishing within Google, Yahoo and MSN for your main keywords. What can you do? If it is your company’s name, you would want to keep the site for branding purposes. But how to get that magic traffic for the keywords that you covet?

Smaller satellite sites.

These satellite sites would target traffic back to your main core site or star in keeping with the astronomy analogy. So you can create these sites and work on them specifically to target certain keywords. Sometimes starting fresh with a new site can be the right way to get that traffic that you have been missing. But make sure that it is only part of your internet marketing plan.

Recently, the adwords team changed the URL policy of what can been used as the destination (Read more details here). In summary, you need to make sure that your ad’s display URL match its destination URL. Make sense right? Well there were cases where the display url make did not match the destination url. Why would one do that? Increase click-throughs of course.

One always looks for advantages but I would recommend to keep things back to the core of the copy of the ad and keep the display urls simple and where possible relevant to the copy of the ad. Have a great benefit statement and where possible give them a reason to click - such as a free report, etc.

In the future, we will be posting more tips on how to improve your ad copy.

Broad Matching can be very useful to fine tune a AdWords campaign.  How?  Use it for a week to capture what are the terms to use for Exact Matching.  Now that you can use the reporting with AdWords for “Search Query Performance” to see which terms are converting for your campaign. 

Read more about Search Query Performance here: Inside AdWords: How to use the new Search Query Performance report.

The key to success within AdWords is constant testing - expanding, contracting, pruning.  Think of your campaigns like Bonsai trees - constant attention to gain true beauty but in the case of AdWords - more profits.

It is interesting to see to my customers striving for a higher CTR or click-through-rate on their AdWords accounts.  Sometimes they are drawn to looking at their daily statistics a bit too much.  And yes a higher CTR may reduce your overall bids but don’t get blinded by that statistic.

What is more important?  Conversions is much more important than CTR in the long run.  If you can convert your traffic from AdWords, it is far more important.  Whether you are selling goods, service or just trying their email address, the goal should be conversions especially for small businesses given that most of you have limited budgets.

So start tracking how much it is costing to convert that visitor and not so much on the cost per click.

One of the hardest aspect of web marketing for small business owners to figure out is what is their goals for their website.  Many put a website up just to be online, or some are sold an package to build a template website.  None of these are bad reasons but they will most likely be wasting your hard earn money and in business terms is a ”lost opportunity cost”.  Why?  Those few visitors that come to you site are lost to you in terms of generating you potential revenue. 

I would recommend that your site be aimed to capture the contact information of the visitor.  Why?  Studies show it takes over 6 contacts points for a online visitor to be converted to a buyer.  You need to capture their contact information so you can have a continued conversation with the visitor whether through email, your blog, forum or newsletter.

Unless your site is an e-commerce site selling goods directly (and even then), I would suggest always trying to capture the visitor someway - somehow.