I’m amazed at the marketing world pushing pay per click campaigns as much as they do, and equally amazed at clients that swear how brilliant it is.
Yes being listed on the top of a search string is important but I ask why you would pay for this when with a little time and effort you can probably be organically on the top anyway!
For those that don’t know me very well, I’ve been working with clients since 1999 helping them optimise their sites for Google. Some of these have made millions, seriously millions from matching what people have searched and selling them a solution! One golf site I worked on helped golfers fix a slice with a step by step ebook guide, interesting reading but let’s be real if they weren’t number 1 in the world for six or seven major golfing search phrases would they have done so well? Now these guys paid for terms in googles ppc system and yes they made sales but selling a $29.95 ebook and a click cost $9.00 the margin was obviously reduced
So heres the rules broken down for you so you too can achieve great rankings
1. Research what people are searching for in Google. I highly recommend the Google key external keyword tool. Type that into Google and you will find it. Use this tool to work out phrases people type.
2. With these words make sure you have them within your content on your site/blog. This is essential as google first of all checks your header tag for phrases then the copy. Make sure these phrases are in both
3. Once google indexes your site (visit’s it) it will pick these terms up, remember google really is only trying to match what people are typing and what sites have within their pages. Is not that complex!
4. Now search engines know your chosen phrases you want to go for, now everyone is ranked on two criteria. Yes only two and here they are – traffic and how many links are inbound
5. So get as many inbound links as possible
There are other considerations and i will talk about these later, such as the duplicate content rule, adhering to the www.w3.org validation rules and others
But for now, i wanted to point out these basics. Why? Well for two reasons, firstly if you are a small business remember you have choices either pay google each time someone clicks on your ad or do basics so over time you will organically rank
The second reason was I believe there’s a mass conspiracy with advertising agencies, pushing businesses into PPC’s. Now I’m not a big scare monger type guy but i have seen time and time again agencies ripping off clients. Charging management fees or artificially hyping up PPC pricing. To understand this you need to understand the changes in the past year.
The average American now on a daily basis gets over 1800 ads, this has created a situation where people have switched off and they are no longer as affective. Hence the rise in google ads, facebook ads and the list goes on. What people don’t realise is that advertising agencies get a 20-30% kickback for all TV ads they place. So given that ads on TV are dropping at a alarming rate agencies have started to look for other revenue opportunities. At a later date i will talk more about this but at this stage be warned, some agencies are putting ridicules mark-ups on internet advertising. Why? Because they have huge staff numbers historical high overheads and are desperate to find revenue
So the purpose of this blog is to one point out the basics so you the consumer or business owner is educated enough to make a informed decision and secondly is a warning to watch out and be aware that due to TV and traditional advertising dropping the agencies and media buyers are out there trying desperately to generate new revenue sources
