Google has a problem. A big, big problem. It turns out that search engines aren’t actually  inherently worth any money. Since Google lists any page on its search results for free, and since Google’s search engine is available to use for free, the largest search engine company on the planet (and its shareholders) are slowly discovering an unalienable fact: it’s hard to make money off a search engine. So what do you do if you run a company whose net worth of billions is largely based on the success of its largely-worthless search engine?

The answer is easy: relentlessly monetize anything and everything possible about the search engine experience, and constantly change your policies to force people to utilize those monetized services.

We’ve seen Google do this repeatedly, most recently with this new Hummingbird update, and a few months ago with their Penguin update, which was ostensibly aimed at making life difficult on black hat SEO types but really ended up penalizing small businesses who engage in any SEO to compete with the big boys. This seemed deliberate, as the main choice these businesses then faced was either paying Google for PPC ads or suffering from lower rankings and being relegated to back pages in search results. (See this past blog post in which we cover this issue in more detail.)

Unfortunately, it didn’t end there. Google has now updated their policies regarding the availability of search terms. Google is now encrypting and will no longer provide the specific search terms used to generate organic clicks, and so webmasters can now only access the specific terms generated by Google PPC ad clicks.

It’s not hard to see how this happened to Google. Many people have invested in the company without fully understanding their business model and the way monetizing search engine traffic works. These investors are now understandably demanding a return on their money, and this has put Google in the position it is in now. It’s hard to blame Google for making these changes from a business standpoint, even when the end result may not necessarily be the best thing for your bottom line. Google is a business, and businesses need to make money or die. This is the easiest and perhaps best way Google has to monetize it’s primary product, and it took the opportunity. In the end, this model will likely become the standard practice in the industry.

You may be asking yourself right now, “Why should I capitulate? There are other large search engines! I’ll just use the information they provide, and not worry about Google!” While this may seem like a good idea, and while focusing solely on Google is not a good idea (we explain why here), the truth is that Google is the 400-pound gorilla in the room of search engines. Bing and other smaller (but still large) search engines like Ask only collectively account for around two-thirds of all searches, and the vast majority of the searches on those engines are for the term “Google.” There are also demographic differences between Google users and users of other engines, sometimes very large differences, and these may change the relevance of their search term information enough to really make a difference for your business. The fact is that when it comes to search engines, it’s Google’s world, and everyone else just lives in it. This means that for better or worse Google, and its policies, ct of online marketing life that must be reckoned with.

So what does all this mean for your business? If your business is not a large player with a big share of the online market in its field (which it probably is not), then the answer is simple: if you want to be able to see the exact terms people are using to find your business, you are going to have to start a PPC campaign. If you don’t understand why knowing the exact terms is important, we covered that in this earlier blog post.

There is both a downside and an upside, however, to being forced into a PPC campaign. The down side is that PPC costs money. In the current economic climate, many savvy and/or frugal business owners are loathe to spend more money than they absolutely necessary, and expanding a marketing budget that may already be a large part of overhead is not an idea that is particularly relished. The upside, however, is that PPC campaigns are often much less expensive than other traditional marketing modes, and a well-managed PPC campaign rarely actually costs more than it generates in additional revenue. We explained why in a past blog post on how to manage PPC campaigns, but it really boils down to the way the PPC model works. You are literally only paying for ads when they actually send customers to your site, and as long as the campaign is effectively managed, this will never fail to be a net revenue generator. The truth is that in a business world that is growing increasingly orientated towards the internet, any business that wishes to be successful would do well to run a PPC campaign, and if this is the kick in the pants you need to bring your business into the 21^st century, you may very well bless the day this happened.

Managing a PPC campaign can be time-consuming and difficult for the novice, however, and that’s why we here at The Click Experts offer PPC campaign managing by experienced professionals. We work tirelessly on behalf of our clients to ensure that the money they spend on PPC ads is well spent. With The Click Experts managing your PPC campaign, you can rest easy knowing that every dollar is generating the maximum revenue for your business without the need for you to spend hours managing the details and sweating the minutiae. It’s time to get your business the online presence and sales it needs and deserves in this brave new digital world. For a free quote and see all the benefits working with The C,lick Experts has for your business, be sure to contact us today. You’ll be happy you did.

If you would like to learn more about the Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird updates and how they may effect your business, watch this informative video:

“Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.”

Every business owner has probably heard this. Most, especially those who really care about their businesses, have done their best to live this motto. It held true for many years, but unfortunately the times, they are a-changin’. The modern truth is, that those with the better mousetrap don’t have the world beating a path to their door. The ones with the world beating a path to their doors are the ones who have convinced the world they have built a better mousetrap, whether or not their mousetrap is in fact better or not. In these modern times, how you market your product is as important as the product you are offering. This is sad, but true, and those that fail to adapt are going to quickly find themselves falling behind the wayside. A better mousetrap matters, but if no one knows it won’t mean anything. There are many ways to market your business, but the most cost-effective for many small business owners is using the internet.

There are many ways to utilize the internet to market your small business, but the primary one being used is called SEM, or Search Engine Marketing. It is a sort of catch-all term for those efforts and processes that a business can use to improve its rankings and visibility within search engine results. SEM includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click Marketing). According to Wikipedia, in 2012, North American advertisers spent US$19.51 billion on search engine marketing. That is a vast ocean of money, and a small business’ marketing budget can seem to the proprietor of the business a drop in the ocean, While that may be true, even a small budget can have an enormous impact when effectively utilized.

That’s where we at The Click Experts come in. With our knowledge and experience, we have the ability to formulate a SEM strategy that will get you and your business the most bang for your buck. It is far too easy these days for an inexperienced business owner to use their limited marketing budgets in a haphazard and ineffective way. See our recent articles regarding the pitfalls of not managing your PPC account and the recent changes to Google’s algorithms that are changing the effectiveness of traditional SEO tactics. Don’t make a major mistake. Get your business’ marketing on track and start letting the world know about your mousetrap. Contact us today for free and see what we can do for you.

Watch this quick video explaining SEM more thoroughly:

Google is changing it’s search algorithms again, and this time, it’s webmasters who may be forced to pay the price. This is not the first time Google has changed it’s algorithm, but the new update, referred to internally as “Penguin 2.0”, is one of the most drastic and sweeping changes yet. While Google claims that the changes are intended to give users more diverse and accurate search results, some are claiming another purpose. It appears that the new algorithms may have the intentional or unintentional effect of putting traditional SEO efforts on the back burner, forcing many companies to consider a PPC campaign in order to get the hits that they need and are now going to be denied. Both the reasons for this and the motivations behind it are fairly straightforward.

Google’s algorithms that rank where a website will appear in its search rankings are complex and involved, but they can be easily summed up. Basically, a website ranks better based on a few key factors. These include the number of hits the website gets, the number of links other reputable and well ranking websites have to the site in question, and the amount of organic content the site has that relates to the search in question. Because larger, more established sites and businesses will naturally have more of these, what follows is a scenario where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. In the past, there used to be a number of slick SEO tricks that a webmaster could employ to boost the rankings of a site. These tricks allowed the Google algorithm to be spoofed. These tricks have always been frowned upon by Google, but they could be applied with a lot of care and a little luck. However, with the new Penguin updates, Google has more aggressively gone after these tricks and is now much more able to identify and thus neutralize them. It is becoming harder and harder for small and mid-sized businesses in fields with many competitors, particularly large ones, to compete in the current paradigm of the Google algorithm architecture. No relief is in sight for these smaller sites, either, since Google has absolutely no motivation to change that and every motivation to keep restricting access to the top rankings.

The reason is simple: money. Sites do not pay Google to be listed in Google rankings, and running the search engine and generating those results cost Google an enormous amount of money. Google only makes money when sites pay to advertise, mostly through PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, wherein advertisers pay Google for each visitor, or click, Google sends to their site. Since this is Google’s chief way of making money, why on Earth would they want to make top rankings easier to achieve? If small businesses can’t get those free rankings, they are forced to engage in advertising in order to drive traffic to their site, and Google gets paid. This is the crux of Google’s business strategy, and in Penguin 2.0 and other websites, Google can continue this process while hiding behind the excuse of “improving user results.”

In this situation, spending money on traditional SEO is becoming less and less cost-effective. While “white hat” techniques like blogging to create organic and useful content and legitimate link building should not be neglected, business may be well served to consider diverting some of their SEO budgets into PPC campaigns instead. But remember, not all PPC is created equal, and businesses and individuals without good PPC experience can find themselves wasting money by paying for clicks they don’t really want or need. For this reason, hiring a firm like The Click Experts to manage a PPC campaign can be a wise choice. See this past blog post for the reasons why.
At The Click Experts, our goal is to make your business successful in the online arena in a cost-effective manner, and we are always keeping an eye on developments in the online world to make sure we are up-to-date and can perform our functions well. Contact us today for a free quote to see what we can do for your business.

This short video explains the Penguin 2.0 in more detail:

In SEO as well as in PPC, the main idea is to focus on certain “keywords”. I’ve discussed this before, but a brief refresher may be in order. Keywords are certain words or phrases that a potential customer or visitor to your website inputs into a search engine. Some keywords are more popular than others, and thus from a SEO perspective they are more difficult to achieve high rankings for since they are more targeted, and from a PPC perspective, again, they are targeted more, and thus become more expensive per click. This issue highlights two important strategies when engaging in either a SEO or PPC campaign. First, keyword selection is of paramount importance. Second, it’s advantageous to not ignore the so-called “long tail.” More on that later.

First, let’s discuss choosing the right keywords to focus on. Choosing the right primary keywords to focus a SEO or PPC campaign can make all the difference. When choosing keywords, you need to be specific, but not too specific. You also need to try to avoid very heavily targeted keywords, as that competition can derail a SEO campaign or cause a PPC campaign to quickly become prohibitively expensive. Instead, try to focus on keywords that a potential customer might use to find your business when searching, with enough specificity to avoid drawing in users who aren’t interested in your business but with a broad enough net to get all or most of those potential customers who are. This is especially important with a PPC campaign, as you, the business owner, are paying for every click, whether or not a customer is qualified. With a SEO campaign, you aren’t paying for the click, but going after heavily competed for keywords can waste valuable time and effort without producing much result.

What will this keyword selection strategy look like in action? For instance, a pizza joint in San Diego should avoid focusing on general keywords like “pizza” or “pizza delivery”. These keywords are heavily competed for and largely dominated by the large national chains that have resources with which a small business owner will find hard to compete. Instead, focusing on a keyword (key phrase) like “pizza delivery in San Diego” will be more cost effective and will separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. This phrase is specific, and will draw in customers looking for exactly what the owner is offering, while not being so specific as to lose potential customers. However, there is a way where those more specific and less competed for terms can be useful.

Let’s now move to discussing the so-called “long tail.” So far we have discussed where and how to focus a keyword campaign, but we haven’t discussed those keywords of less desirable status. In the hypothetical example above, these keywords might be things like “meatball subs delivered in San Diego” or “pizza delivery in downtown San Diego” or the like. They are generally keywords less focused on because they are either considered less likely to be used in a search or so specific as to be inappropriate to focus on, which is very true. However, when looking at all keywords from a statistical standpoint, when graphed with number of user searches on the x axis and level of specificity being on the x axis, keyword price (for PPC) or level of focus (for SEO) generally takes the form of a inverse square proportional curve, with the most desirable keywords being at the top and less desirable ones forming a trailing “tail”. However, simple math can tell us this tail accounts for around fully 70% of all possible keywords and searches. This means that while it isn’t really a good strategy to focus a campaign around these keywords, it does behoove a business owner to not ignore these words entirely, as that would potentially be ignoring many possible searches that could potentially yield many qualified customers. These tail keywords also have the advantage of being very specific, so they are more likely to convert into sales, as customers tend to know exactly what they are looking for. Additionally, these terms have the advantage, particularly from a PPC perspective, of being cheap, or in SEO terms, of being easier to achieve rankings for. SEOMOZ has some great data backing these assertions up here.

What have we learned? In short, keyword selection is everything. Choosing the right keywords to focus on can make or break a business, while not ignoring the “long tail” can be extremely cost-effective and profitable for a business. Confused by all of this? You aren’t alone. That’s where The Click Experts comes in. We are a company that specializes in focused and targeted SEO campaigns. We have the experience and expertise to put these principles to work for your business, large or small. We can help design a PPC or SEO campaign, or both, that will increase your business’ online presence in a way that will bring in more qualified customers and greater conversions, and we can do it in a cost-effective manner. Contact us today for a free quote to see what we can do for you!

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