TopRank Blog

As a business owner, you take pride in the quality of the goods and services you provide to your customers. Why should your marketing and advertising efforts reflect anything less? This is particularly true for pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns, or the listings in the search engine for which you pay each time a user clicks on your ad.

Unfortunately, many PPC advertisers adopt a “set it and forget it” attitude towards paid search: selecting keywords at will, haphazardly drafting ad copy, directing those who click on their ads to a homepage, and expecting the leads to pour in. A truly effective, quality PPC campaign requires a little more effort than that.

Just as you would take the time to nurture your goods into the high quality products your customers expect, so should you take the time to nurture your PPC program into a high quality, optimally performing campaign. Follow the below five steps for PPC campaign creation and practice a little quality control in your online marketing efforts.

1. Materials: Think of keywords as the basic materials of your pay per click campaign. You ensure the materials you put into your goods and services answer a specific need to create your ideal product. Take the same approach to keyword selection. Look at the specific terms that truly describe what you are offering to searchers, and not just which terms are most popular.
2. Assembly: The way in which you organize your keywords into specific ad groups is similar to how you would structure the assembly of your product to ensure maximum efficiency. In product assembly, you group like tasks together. In ad group creation, you group like keywords together. Place your keywords into extremely granular, closely-related groups that can speak directly to your ad copy to ensure a high quality, cohesive ad group.
3. Packaging: Ad copy is the packaging of your PPC campaign. You design your packaging to attract attention and entice customers, and your PPC ad copy should function in the same way. Your first goal is to let searchers know exactly what you are offering – so draft your copy to speak directly to the keywords in its ad group. As PPC ads are very brief, don’t be cryptic. State exactly why searchers should click on your ad rather than all the other rankings, both organic and paid, for a given term.
4. Product: Your landing page is the product of your PPC campaign. It’s what you are trying to get searchers to ‘buy,’ by either filling out an inquiry form, downloading a piece of fulfillment, or even directly purchasing your goods. Your clients want a functional, appealing product that fulfills their need. Your landing page should be user-friendly, informative, and a direct response to the user’s search query.
5. Quality Assurance: You continually monitor and adjust your product for improvement. A PPC campaign is no different. Take your ‘customer feedback,’ or your click through and conversion rates, into consideration and adjust your keyword lists, ad copy and landing page continually in order to develop the optimal PPC campaign.

Creating a quality PPC program can take some time and effort; however the end result of a high-impact campaign is increased brand awareness and leads that translate into greater revenue. Approach PPC like you approach your product, and you can create a quality PPC program that generates a high ROI.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a necessary component of any successful business website. The internet has become the primary resource for information on everything, including the goods and services your company provides. Yet with all of the search engine hoops to jump through, an effective SEO campaign is surprisingly similar to a political campaign. You need to beat out your competitors and win over your public, in this case the search engines, to convince them you are most deserving of the top spot.

So how do you get the search engines’ votes? Will you need to hire a campaign staff, i.e. enlist outside assistance, to make it to the top? Take TopRank’s five SEO campaign essentials into account and ensure your website is elected to the highest search engine position.

1. Plot Your Campaign Trail: Know what you ultimately want to achieve with your SEO campaign. Are you looking to increase your site traffic? Up your brand visibility among your target audience? Generate more leads? Solidifying your goals is a necessary step in deciding which SEO campaign tactics to deploy and how to measure your results.
2. Staff Your Campaign Headquarters: Do you have the resources to implement your ideal SEO program? Or will you need the help of a seasoned campaign manager to reach your goals? Once you have established what you hope to attain with your SEO program, take a look at your capital, SEO knowledge, and bandwidth to decide what you can accomplish and what you will need help with.
3. Count Your Votes Unlike a political campaign, you don’t have “yay or nay” votes to indicate your win: and even these are not always so clear-cut. Do you determine success by your website’s rankings for key terms in the search engines? Or by a change in organic website traffic over a given period of time? Reference the objectives you established in order to solidify precise metrics that will clearly indicate the success of your SEO campaign.
4. Take Your Message to the People: Just like a candidate, you need to get your campaign message in front of an audience in order to sway those votes. Find your target audience online, rather than waiting for them to find you. Knowing where your prospective customers are interacting with one another online, and promoting your website as a resource within that space, can increase the reach of your SEO program and improve your ROI.
5. Deliver on Your Campaign Promises: You need to make good on the initial ‘promises’ you made to the search engines in terms of the quality and relevancy of you website in order to maintain the top spot. As search engines are constantly upgrading the way in which they determine website rank, a good SEO program should adapt to survive and thrive in the changing online environment. A consistent, ongoing SEO program is your best bet to ensure you win your bid for reelection and continue to rank highly in the search engines.

Campaigning for the top slot in the search engines can be difficult. Your needs are unique, and you need to keep your goals clearly in mind in order to establish a campaign that will get you the ‘votes’ you need to exceed the competition. Good SEO consultants or in-house SEO specialists should use their expertise to establish individualized campaigns for each and every project.

Digital Asset Optimization

Keyword optimizing standard text content and images found in web pages isn’t nearly enough to win in competitive categories. As a result, in-house search marketers and search engine optimization consulting companies are adopting holistic social media and digital asset content SEO. Digital Asset Optimization is a SEO Point of View that TopRank started developing in early 2007.

Managing a textbook SEO program for a complex website can be challenging. Managing a digital asset optimization program which involves a matrix of media types (text, image, audio, video and interactive applications) and formats (web pages, MS Office docs, shared media, news, blogs, etc) with promotion channels in a big company carries even more of a challenge.

With every challenge there is an opportunity to create a competitive advantage, especially when it comes to managing Digital Asset Optimization efforts.

The first step to managing a digital asset optimization program is to take inventory of the media assets and content types that are currently being created. It is important not to discount content because it is not published online. Many types of interactive, video and image assets that are used with CD, DVD, kiosks and various electronic advertising platforms can be repurposed for online optimization and promotion.

The second step for a successful DAO program is to create a matrix of inventoried digital assets and the corresponding promotional channels. This is helpful when a strategic promotion plan is put in place because it’s easier to see what parts of a program can be promoted individually.

The third step is to keyword optimize the media and content types being promoted. Ideally, a process and training is put in place with the various content creation sources to enable new content to be optimized and promoted on an ongoing basis.

The fourth step in the digital asset optimization campaign management process is to create a content promotion plan. It’s important to consider both the strategic DAO promotion opportunities as well as the promotion of individual media types.

For example, an entire viral campaign can be deployed leveraging not only the buzz building and word of mouth benefits, but also the ability for individual components of the program to drive traffic and attract links on their own.

Like all marketing efforts, campaign activity and conversion tracking and content interactions should be analyzed with analytics software. Monitor what’s working and what’s not ensuring to continuously test and refine.

Other resources on DAO:

• SEO evolved: Digital asset optimization - DMNews
• Digital Asset Optimization for News Content

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxhsBVLmqGU

Search Engine Optimization has been ranked the highest ROI and top conversion tactic for internet marketing. Add social media to the SEO mix and the impact on community building with optimized content brings an online marketing effort to the next level.

This video interview with  TopRank’s CEO, Lee Odden, shares insights into the type of SEO and Social Media training offered by TopRank Online Marketing to help companies improve their search marketing and social media results.