Over the years we have noticed that clients either swear by or swear at their SEO Expert and there is no middle of the road on this one. With over a decade working on the SEO side of web sites I understand and deeply appreciate the value of SEO and I am a strong advocate of competing on both sides of the search engine.

SEO and PPC advocates often do not play well with each other because they have very different fundamental beliefs. These conflicting inputs from the business manager’s advisers cause great confusion in the manager’s strategic decision process. This is because the conversation is framed as one being better than the other. SEO and PPC are not better or worse, they are simply different. The secret to success is to use the right tool for the right job at the right time. Sometimes that is SEO and sometimes it’s not.

Google’s top priority is the best possible SERP

SEO is what Google thinks, and to understand how Google thinks you have to consider Google’s personality and the source of their success. Google’s number one unquestioned top priority is to produce the best Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for the query posed by the searcher. Google knows that if they produce the best SERP the searcher will have a positive experience and they will return to use Google again and again. It is their dedication to the searcher’s experience and the Quality of the SERP that is the essence of their success. Here is a flash of the short term thinkers in the world – Google values the quality of the search above money!

Lie #1: We can get your site to the top of Google Guaranteed.

One thing that makes me crazy about the SEO industry is that there are a fair number of people representing themselves as SEOs that have little or no understanding of what is really going on. Like the amateur magician they have learned a few simple tricks and they go from client to client selling the fast, simple, and “guaranteed” way to the top of Google. This is not to say that there are no good SEOs, there certainly are, but for every good one that we run into there seems to be ten that are less than honorable.  They falsely represent what SEO is and they propose that they have some magical skill which will instantly get you free traffic to your web site.  The rule here is that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is, and anyone who guarantees anything specific in search is lying.

Lie #2: We will optimize your page to get to the top of Google

One sure clue that the SEO is lying is when they say that they will optimize your web site or page. This statement can be a partial truth but it is never fully truthful. The majority of the organic page score is not in the page source so you cannot optimize it by changing the page. Nobody outside of a small circle inside Google knows the exact formula and in reality no one person knows the whole thing. Our guess is that 80% of the organic score comes from items not on the page.  A top position in Google is earned by being an expert resource on the search query. An expert is defined not by what they say about themselves, but by what others say about them and this is the fundamental concept of the Google Search Model. This does not mean doing the basics on your page isn’t important, a good foundation is vital to the search-ability of your site. However on page search factors won’t get it done by themselves.

Lie #3: We will get you to the top of Google easily, simply, and quickly

Another clue that your SEO is lying is the statement that they will get you to the top of Google easily, simply, and quickly. There are a thousand ways to get to the top of Google and all of them are hard work conducted over a long period of time by very smart people. One trick is to create a page and show the client that it is in fact first on Google. Unfortunately this is not difficult to do but the page will not stay there. The trick works because Google values fresh content so when it finds fresh content it moves it up in the ranking to test it. However this freshness factor wears out quickly and if people do not click on your listing and get engaged by your content you will very quickly find yourself in position 5,000. The challenge here is that the highly optimized page is often horrible copy that nobody would read.

Lie #4: You just need more back links no matter where they are from.

We recently had a client that engaged an SEO to work on their site. The SEO set out to generate lots of inbound links, which normally would be a good thing except they were not concerned with the quality just the quantity.  The final termination to the relationship happened when they told the client that the quality of what was on the page was not important. The client intuitively knew that poor content pointed at his site would end up hurting his professional reputation and he was absolutely correct.  Like most things in life more is not better, better is better. Poor quality content will never get picked up by highly reputable sites and one link from a highly authoritative site is worth much more to your reputation online than links from poor quality sites. The risk here is that this approach might actually backfire on you.  Google has a whole department headed by Matt Cutts dedicated to finding these tricks and fixing them. Often the way that Google “Fixes” these tricks is by removing the pages from the index. The advice we give to clients all the time is that you should only try to trick Google if believe that your SEO is smarter than Google.  Google hires the best engineers on the planet who fanatically dedicated to the mission of creating the best possible SERP. So you have to ask yourself, do you really want to take that on?

Lie #5: People search for this keyword

Often times we find SEOs that have optimized for keywords that nobody searches for. They target what they call long tail traffic and they get great position because nobody cares.  One of the great tricks is to optimize for these words so the client sees the results and the SEO walks away the hero. This is until someone comes along and adds analytics to your site and shows you how many visitors you have for that keyword and how engaged they become with your web site.  Analytics is the way to measure your investment in SEO and make sure that the words you optimize for are also ones that you would be willing to purchase.

The Truth

We have many clients that are wildly successful with their organic keywords and they share a common trait. They are all people who are passionate about their business and they share that passion and expertise freely with the world. They write articles, white papers, books, speak to groups, answer questions in social media sites, and many other things. They are Evangelists for their business and the second they open their mouth or touch a keyboard you know it. These people are the resources that Google is looking for because they will provide the searcher with the most positive web experience and that is how you get to the top of Google in the long term.

The secret to a great organic position in Google is:

To consistently create meaningful content that is valuable to your visitor and contributes to building the best SERP. Help Google create a great SERP and they will be your best friend.

Google Adwords continues to grow in complexity and it is unlikely that will ever change. In the olden days you could write an ad, pick a few keywords, and your campaign was up and running. Well, the world has changed. It is not that you cannot still do this, you can, but Google has continued to release information and smart advertisers are using this to get better performance from their marketing investment. The problem is that your competitors are really smart people and they are not going to let you get away with being sloppy or cheap. Competitors are going to push the system for maximum performance and you have to do the same thing.

We can start by talking about the broad areas that have changed and what this means to your business. In the early days we had clicks, impressions, and CTR and not much else. Today we have a whole array of information and understanding what it means is not simple. Within Adwords we have quality score, impression shares, exact match, filtering, expanded search query reports, and many other newer items. Then you have Analytics and that gets into a whole new level of complexity.

Of the newer items quality score is probably the most important since it contributes to your knowledge of both paid and organic traffic. Quality Score is simple to understand but very difficult to manage. It is in fact what Google thinks of the relationship between that keyword, your ad, and your web site. It is the first quantified feedback in this area that Google has ever given us. Quality Score is what Google thinks. Google filed a patent on the Quality Score and we read it from start to finish. Our count of the attributes in this filing is about 140 so there are 140 items they are telling us about that affect the quality score. What they have not given us is the weight of each item. Given Google’s love of partial information my guess is this is about half of what is really going on inside the quality score. What is very clear is that organic score and quality score are cousins and very close cousins at that. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that an improvement in quality score will also improve your organic score. Every professionally run web site needs to be tracking and managing this number for both paid and organic purposes.

Impression share is another area that deserves some attention. This data includes the total impression share and a break down by budget and rank. The budget side of this is fairly straight forward in that if you want to improve these numbers simply give it more money. The Rank side however is about as clear as the components of the quality score. When an auction takes place Google ranks each of the ads with what they say is the sum of quality score and bid, however this is not entirely true. There is a touch of magic involved here and magic is another word for something they are not telling us. If the calculation were as simple as quality score and bid the positions would not move very much and they move all the time. We accounts that do not run out of money yet they loses large volumes of traffic to Rank. Our belief is that Google is moving ads in and out of the list that is being ranked based on factors they are not ever going to tell us. What we have learned about Rank is that it seems to improve based on the overall reputation of the account. Those accounts that have been around for a long time with a good CTR and run a clean account have the highest impression shares based on Rank. The problem with Rank is that Google does not report this information to a level where you can develop a specific strategy for improving this. The data stops at the campaign level and the problem has to be fixed at the keyword level. So you look at the warning signs at the campaign level and you try to guess what keywords are losing based on rank. Maybe Google will fix this, but for right now there is a huge leap between the level of the data and where the change has to be made at.

Filtering is new to the beta interface being rolled out in 2009. In the olden days you would run your reports into Excel and then use that to filter your data to find what is important to you. That has changed in a big way since you can now create the filter and not only see your data but change it as well. This is a massive improvement and we think this is probably the most important improvement in the Beta Interface. We have not been a huge fan of the beta interface but it is continuing to improve and data filters are one of the really bright spots in this change. Developing filters that isolate, view, and edit the data in a way that supports your overall strategy is now possible.

Search queries are one of the basic building blocks of any account and yet it is common to run into an account that has never run one of these reports. The newer reports have gotten rid of the Other Unique query problem. This is where Google would hide much of the detail that you needed to really understand what people were actually searching for. That is no long the case and we think this is a wonderful change. Beyond that they have expanded out the search queries letting us know about session matches, which we always suspected were going on but could never document before. A session match is where Google uses parts of queries within the same session to figure out what the person is really searching for. For example if you search for Grover Beach, which is the city we are located in, then followed that with a search for Real Estate. Google gives you results for Grover Beach Real Estate. This is a simple example of putting location with topic but they get much more creative than that.

Google Analytics is another component of this conversion because it brings all the other traffic to the conversion. It is now possible to see how the multiple types of traffic interact with each other and the mixing of Adwords data with this makes some incredible things possible. In many cases you can now calculate your organic click through rate which is really exciting since organic traffic is a mystery wrapped in an enigma with little or no real information available for it. Yet as an advertiser you suddenly have information to help you tune your organic optimization. You can use Analytics to measure your branding strength based on real reactions from real people. All you have to do is accept the assumption that an increase in searches on your brand is reflective of the strength of that brand. The number of things you can learn from Analytics could fill a dozen books and I am not going to do justice to it here in a couple of paragraphs so let’s just say that it makes many things much clearer than they were in the past.

These are just a few of the really big changes so you have to add to this all the little things and you can see that the system is evolving and the pace of change is just getting faster and faster each cycle. Added to all the above the changes in the interface that include extensive graphing ability and now you have a real powerful system for advertisers to focus their investments with. The question is what are you going to do with this better information interface, and will you do it before your competitors or in reaction to them?

Dear Google,

Every year kids from around the world write to Santa with their wish list and in keeping with that fine tradition this is my open Christmas letter for things we wish for in the Adwords system. We are not expecting all of this to roll out on Christmas Day although that would be nice. Better tools inside Adwords will create a better SERP (Search Engine Result Page) because the searcher gets ads that are more relevant to their search query. Adwords Professionals armed with the best tools will create better SERPs because it is in our best interest and it serves our clients.

Reports & the User Interface (UI)

This is, in my opinion, the most serious defect in Adwords. Some data is available only in the UI and some is only in reports. There are dozens of examples of this like average position is in the campaign report but not available on the campaign summary UI. The quality score is available on the UI but not on the keyword reports and negative keywords exist in the UI but not in the reports. Maybe the development team should stop and fix some of these before they move on to the next new feature.

User Defined Data

Almost every serious application on the planet provides UDD (user defined data) and Adwords is in serious need of this at every level. We should be able to create several different types of data to be associated with each level in the system. Data types should including numbers, text codes, and memo fields for notes. UDD should exist at the campaign, adgroup, ad, and keyword levels. UDD should be one of the options when you customize your screen. So simple examples of what this could be used for would be to put goals or targets in the display.

Move & Copy

This is probably the hardest to understand why it is not already part of the UI, especially considering that we used to have this. So to Google I say give me back my toy! The simple function of being able to move or copy information is one of the most basic functions of modern systems (iPhones excluded). We should be able to move ad groups from campaign to campaign with all the data intact. This should include all the history, search queries, ad performance, and everything else. On the copy function we should be able to copy full campaigns with all the supporting data. On a copy it is ok that it does not take the history forward since that would cause the account to be out of balance. The need for this function comes up constantly. We have clients that want to control the hours of the campaign and, of course, that does not work if you only have one campaign because a US campaign has 4 time zones to consider.

Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a great tool but the hook up to Adwords, oh please! This interface is horrible to work with except when everything goes right the first time. This could be as simple as submitting the GA account number to be linked, then have it approved by someone with administrative authority in the account. This is exactly how the client center works so replicating this should be simple. The hook up needs to be by account number so everyone knows exactly what account is attached to what account. This relationship between Adwords and Analytics needs to be a many to many relationship. An Adwords Account should be able to have multiple Analytics as it does now and the same needs to be true of Analytics. An Analytic account should be able to belong to multiple Adwords accounts.

Client Center

Allow more than one manager in an Adwords Account! This limitation is crazy and for our large clients it makes their life and ours difficult. Many large advertisers have several Adwords accounts and they have to sign in and out of each instead of running a client center because there is a limit of one manager in the account. Client centers should have a “Look-Only” access. Advertisers often times want to have professionals look at their data but not have the ability to change it. This is common in the early stages of our relationships with clients. I am sure they would be more comfortable giving us a first access of look only.

Client Center Internal Security

We need a client center with the ability to manage multiple users. Within a single client center the need to control the access of multiple people is critical. We need the ability to attach authorized users to the client center and then grant account access as change or look only. The current client centers forces the sharing of passwords and the reuse of a single profile. A manager overseeing 100 accounts might have 4 people on staff taking care of different sets of accounts and today this situation requires sharing of passwords. Client center users with full client center authority should be able to transfer an account to another client center within the same business. In this way we can have managers overseeing accounts with the ability to transfer the account within the company.

Quit pushing off-line tools

We know that off-line tools have advantages but they also have disadvantages. Offline tools create islands of information with data security and synchronization challenges. Each Account Manager should be allowed to make this decision and the online user interface and the offline application should be kept in sync with each other. You should not have features offline that are not offered online.

Ranges of Data

Common to most applications but lacking in many areas of Google is the ability to select and work with a range of data. Sure I can select keywords with a checkbox but what a pain it is to select lots of words. Do you select them all and then manually deselect those you do not want or do you just pick the ones you want to work on. This change would be simple select the starting item and the ending item and it would select everything between.

Changing Bids

Once we select the 25 keywords we need to work why not let me just say add .25 to every selected bid or add 10%. Why do you force us to retype every bid?

Negative Keyword Search Query

Negative keywords improve the quality of the SERP and that should be a goal of advertisers and Google. A system without feedback will fail to evolve and it will stagnate and die. When you run a search query report it should show you the traffic you got and also what you eliminated. A Search Query Report with the negative transactions might be more valuable than just the positive. Adwords is a much better delivery because of negative keywords and how they function needs to be clearly understood. Only specific feedback of what keyword removed the ad from the SERP will help improve the SERP.

Search Query

Tell us what keyword triggered the ad because it is not always obvious especially when it comes to broad matches.

Other Unique Queries

This is actually one of my personal pet peeves and it’s frustrating to have to work with partial information because it makes one wonder what you are hiding. At one point I thought this might be caused by the other search engines in the search network but clearly that is not the case because we have clients that only advertise in Google Search and they still get “Other Unique Queries”. So tell me Google, what are you not telling me?

Rethink Ad copy Maintenance

I was trained in relational database design and the Adwords system follows many of the best practices until you get to Ads. To properly focus traffic you need to break your keywords down into smaller and smaller groups, a process we call granularization. For each ad group you end up writing the same ads over and over and for no good reason. Why not just let the ads stand by themselves and attach the ads you want to the ad group. This gets even more frustrating when it comes to image ads that we have to upload the same graphic file dozens of times and your staff has to approve dozens of times.

There is no Ad maintenance

Ads are never maintained and everyone one knows it. When you maintain an advertisement it actually deletes the old and writes a new one. There are good and bad things that happen as a result of this but in reality you should let the Adwords Manager decide when to delete and copy and when to change the data directly. In some cases we are running a split test and we discover a spelling error. We are faced with either not fixing the problem, resetting the test, or add the two results during the analysis. The default of resetting all the stats on the ad is not always the right answer.

Opt Out Advertisers

Click fraud is out of control and it endangers our entire industry. One way to control part of this is to have a cookie put on every machine that accesses the Adwords system and not count anything that machine does related to ads other than their own. If an advertiser is caught clicking on competitive ads then Google should take some sort of corrective action. One idea might be to reduce their quality score or disable their account for 72 hours. There are people that could figure out how to stop this by deleting the cookie but they would have to remember to do it every time they access the Adwords System. Advertisers should be allowed to voluntarily go to a page to create a test cookie that would put them into test mode. This mode would allow them to click on ads with no impressions or clicks being counted for their account or any other account.

Give the same result every time

Every client we have tests their ads from time to time and honestly there is no prayer of getting them to stop. Some do it once in a while and some do it several times a day. We know there is a test tool inside Adwords but honestly NOBODY BELIEVES it. They want to see it for themselves! Everyone in this industry knows that there are thousands of variables involved in rendering a SERP. The most troublesome of these are the local variables like prior searches, ad click history, other data related to the session. Advertisers should be able to go to a page and install a cookie that causes search engine to act like it is on a clean local machine. All it needs to do is turn off the local variables so the search results remain the same.

Get a better Position

It is no secret that average position is not the position of the ad. We all know that the top positions or T1, T2, T3 do not always exist but what I think we can agree on is they are different than the positions on the right side. There are many ways to solve this problem but the simplest is probably to just split the impression and click data down by the top and right positions.

Quit hiding data from me

It makes me crazy that certain things that we know exist are simply not made available to us. One example of this is the conversions by hour. Every computer system on the planet time stamps everything it touches so why can we not see the conversion time. We understand that conversions are not posted for hours after the event and fixing that problem may be more complex than we can appreciate but we do know what time the event happened when it finally gets to the data. When we are trying to control our budgets we have some control over the clock but no data to help us understand our audiences buying pattern. Another area that is hidden is who exactly is providing traffic from then search network. We know the big names because they are part of the marketing of Adwords but there is no detail of where this comes from. Just like Google did in the Content network they need to open the curtains on this data and let us control where this goes.

In closing

We know this list is long and we know that we are not going to get all of this, and hey maybe Google has a surprise gift that we did not think of. That would be cool. Like the kid writing to Santa we promise to be good and use these new tools only for the betterment of Adwords and the service to our clients.

Sincerely,

The Adwords Monster

A lot of potential advertisers are intimidated by the possible reach of Adwords. They’re trying to grow their business at a local or regional level and don’t want to spend money for traffic coming from thousands of miles away. Luckily with a few extra steps in the campaign process you can use Adwords Geographical Targeting features to make sure you’re paying for clicks in Portland, Oregon not Portland, Maine.

When Geo-Targeting you have 3 main choices: Countries & Territories, Regions & Cities, and Customized. Countries & Territories is the setting of choice for those running national and international campaigns, but for the rest who have a specific area to target the last two are the choices to explore.

Regions & Cities

Say your sales territory is the West Coast, how do you only serve ads to web surfers in your territory? With the Regions & Cities tool you can specify whole states, major cities, groups of cities, or counties. The level of detail in this area is limited by the options allowed to you by Google and it is determined mainly by population. For example my town, San Luis Obispo, is grouped with Santa Maria and Santa Barbara. Each City is demographically and geographically distinct, but we’re a little low on people so we got smooshed together.

Customized Targeting

Customized Targeting allows for a much more specific targeting of prospects. You can set a radius around an address or a point on a map, you can also draw a polygon that includes the areas you want to target.

The radius settings are pretty straight forward, pick a place and decide how far away you or your customers are willing to do business from that point.

Below I’ve included screen caps of both versions, notice how impressively similar they are.

The Polygon setting is the most interesting setting to me personally. It allows you to capture cities that fall outside of a reasonable radius, or draw around ones that are on little to no value to you. Keep in mind that with the polygon tool you should use it with city level areas, going smaller probably won’t get you the desired results. You may have a server on the side of town you didn’t want and that’s where all of your potential clients connect to the internet.

Other Benefits…

So besides saving time and money by only advertising to the areas you want to do business with, you also get a little addition to your Adwords ad that lets people know it’s locally targeted. The string of ads I posted on the right includes a mix of national, local and statewide ads. Notice the difference? Web surfers do. In our experience we’ve noticed that ads that are noticeably local get better Click Through Rates and overall response.

So What’s the Bad News?

For the most part Geo Targeting is pretty cool, but it’s not perfect. Location is determined by the location of the server not necessarily the location of the person surfing the web. Most of the time the server and the surfer are fairly close to each other, but sometimes they are really far apart which means they could be in your targeted area but not receive your ads… and sometimes Google just plain screws up. In one campaign localized to San Francisco I had one rogue click from Greece… which happens to be slightly out of my 100 mile circle. That’s the exception not the rule however.

It may be worth it, especially if you deal with tourists in your business, to consider running a national campaign that uses your keywords mixed with local city and region names to capture relevant out of town traffic and those with geographically distant servers.

Give it a Try!

So as you can see Google gives you a fair amount of control over where your ads show, and mixed with a well controlled budget you can safely test the waters and start advertising online!

Google Adwords require patience, persistence, and perspiration. Its hard work and it needs to be part of a long-term marketing strategy. Reacting too quickly results in judgment errors and a continual thrashing of your decisions.

A great example of this is an advertising split test. I have seen rookies that set up a test and declare a victor with 100 clicks and start making decisions based on the facts they just absolutely proved with a “one click” difference. With full belief in their results they tell a client that one ad was twice as effective as the other and, of course, they predicted that outcome just two days ago. They got one conversion with one ad and two with the other.

An immutable rule of marketing states that “You cannot predict the action of an individual but you can predict the action of a group”. What does this rule actually say to us? It says that your data sample has to be big enough for it to represent a group not an individual decision. You need patience because you need a sample large enough to get to your number with some degree of confidence.

The next logical question is “How do we figure out how many need to be in the sample?” Good question although we are not ready to answer that quite yet. First we have to get some idea of the margin of error. The simplest way to do this is to set up a split test in several Adwords groups. You need to make everything absolutely the same.

• Same keywords
• Same traffic split (set campaign to serve evenly and turn off the content network)
• Same ad copy
• Same landing page
• Same conversion objective
• Same Start & End Date/Time

Logic would tell us that the results of this should be the exactly the same but they almost never are. The longer you run this the more the numbers move toward each other and at some point in this time line the differences settle in. Track this data weekly so you can see the patterns until your numbers slow down in their movement. I recommend doing this over several ad groups to get an understanding of how these factors interact. There are actually more accurate ways to measure this but that typically requires engaging professional market researchers.

With a sample size and margin of error you can now set up split tests where you change the ad copy, while keeping all the rest of the path the same. When you reach your sample size on all the ads examine your actual results with the margin of error. The graph below assumes our test had a 1% margin of error.

These results are “Too Close To Call”. The two data sets overlap from 3.25 to 4.75 so within that range either of these could be the winner. While we are talking about this lets consider that the margin of error also has a margin of error. This math might be scary to some and I do not do this math all the time because I have a life and I like to live it. I have a simple rule of thumb and that is if the winner is winning by more than the margin of error then I tend to believe the result, otherwise I keep testing.

On sample size, my rule of thumb is that I do not believe a result until it has at least 1,000 events. If I am testing ad groups then I want to see an average of 1,000 clicks on each ad before I start making decisions. In some accounts this can take several weeks or even a few months but if you truly want to make a good decision you have to wait for the experiment to finish. On top of this consider that the market is a complex place and your results can be tainted by external events. Events like holidays, items in the news, and a thousand other things can change your results.

In closing continually question and test your marketing and strive to become one with the campaign.