Those of us in marketing would all love to believe that every lead we send is qualified – but the reality is they are not.  Sure, there are keywords with more “commercial intent” than others, but this is a tough road with SEO.  Google is giving more and more preference to educational and self-help content in organic results, and pushing commercial content further down.  Why?  They want you to buy Adwords for that.  That’s why almost every Internet marketing campaign requires a mix of SEO to help generate educational, thought leadership content that can generate visitors we can “nurture”, and compliment that with a PPC campaign for those who are ready to “buy now”.

So while our prediction tool incudes things like traffic increases and potential lead flow, we also have to account for things like:

- Qualified lead % – what percentage of the total leads generated are really good leads?  We assume 5-10%.

- Internal close rate – Is your sales team on the ball, or letting leads fall through the cracks?  Your customer acquisition cost depends on this.

- What is the customer willing to pay for a lead, or even a new customer?  This requires knowledge about what the lifetime value of the customer is, and what makes sense from a lead cost standpoint.

- What is the current conversion rate of the website?  Well, that’s sometimes a loaded question.  Most clients are not really tracking that, or are not tracking enough channels to get an accurate number.  We might assume somewhere in the 2-4% which would include calls and form submissions – maybe higher if you have other avenues such as newsletters, free trials or free downloads.

How Internet Marketing Prediction Modeling Works

We took actual analytics data from nearly 50 customers and tracked their KPI’s over a two-year period.  We normalized the data and came up with a linear regression model of how just about any client would react to any of our plans given a) current traffic; b) conversion rates; and c) market competition.

Then, with our add-on products like call tracking, retargeting and a/b testing, we’re able to create a conservative assumption of how the conversion rate would be affected by these, which slowly improves the lead flow in the model over time.

Finally, we built the model to work backwards from a client’s total budget.  Once we choose the recommended services, what’s left over will go towards the click expenditures, resulting in something that looks like this:

From here we can easily do a sensitivity analysis and see how the lead flow and cost/lead are affected by changing the marketing mix.  Want less SEO and more PPC spend?  No problem, lets see how that changes things.

We can also play with the model to get the client into the right cost per acquisition “zone”, and so we can indicate how much we are over or under their acquisition cost expectation.

Testing Against the Model

This model has been in play for only about 2 months now, and what we’re doing is using it to compare current customers who are maybe in their 5th or 6th month to see  how close we are to the prediction (we’re able to plot results out for traffic and leads for 12 months in advance), and so far we’re between 75 and 85% accurate.  As we add more data to the core analytics, I think we’ll be able to improve our accuracy, and even perhaps get enough data to model against certain industries, such as medical, law, technology, etc.

Want to learn more, or get a demo?  Call us at (888) 427-2178 and let us help!

The post Internet Marketing Prediction Modeling appeared first on .

You’ve decided you are not going to renew your FindLaw contract, and you want to work with another Internet marketing provider.  The problem is that what comes next is the dizzying array of steps and costs that your law firm could incur by making this switch.  FindLaw uses a proprietary content management system – or CMS – to manage your website.  They may also have purchased some domains for you as well.  According to their contract, FindLaw is happy to charge you to continue using their “EUI”, or End User Interface at a rate of 25% of the value of your contract per year.  Or, you can un-handcuff yourself from them by following these precise set of instructions, and own your content and domains and be provider-agnostic – of course, when your contract is up and you’ve decided to switch. First, let’s cover some basic definitions because we are going to use these terms a lot in our instructions:

Domain or Domain Name:  A domain name is your website address, like yourawesomelawfirm.com.  We’ll show you how to find out who controls this.

Registrar:  This is the company that manages your domain names for you, like GoDaddy or Network Solutions.  We think FindLaw predominantly uses a company called DomainPeople.com, and so if they have purchased your domains for you, this is probably where you will find all of the records.

Hosting or Host Provider:  This is the company that provides a server to put your website on so it is accessible on the Internet.  FindLaw has likely been hosting your website on a cluster of servers with thousands of other customers.

DNS:  This is an acronym for Domain Name Server or Domain Name System.  It’s like a phonebook for the Internet that associates your domain name to an IP address for the server it is hosted on.  It stores information called “DNS records” that control your email (MX records), subdomains (name server records) and more.  FindLaw has been controlling your DNS, and we’ll show you how to move it to another provider.

Design Files:  Design files are typically referred to as Photoshop files, or Indesign files – something a graphic designer would give you.  However, FindLaw confuses its customers by telling them at the end of the contract, they will send you the “design files” on a CD.  What you get on the CD is not design files, but rather a full “scrape” of your website in HTML.  We’ll explain why this won’t help you in a minute.

HTML Scrape:  Your web guy or developer should be able to “scrape”, or copy, the source code and HTML/CSS from any public website.  It’s a rather easy process, and you could create a “carbon copy”of your website in just a few minutes.  However, none of it is easily editable.   You’ll need to choose a new CMS, like WordPress, and get all of your content, photos, video and more transferred over by hand.  There is no programatic way to do this.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

OK, now that we have some basic definitions down, lets get into the steps.  Give yourself a minimum of 4-6 weeks to complete all steps.

Step 1 – Get Your IT Guy In The Room.

Identify an IT person either in-house or outsourced who helps manage things like your computers, email, websites, etc.  We’re going to need this person very soon.

Step 2 – Find a Graphic Designer.

Since FindLaw will not give you the original design files of the website you paid for (they consider this to be proprietary), you will need to find a graphic designer who can either emulate or redesign your existing website.  You could take the HTML scrape and try to build a WordPress theme out of it, but based on our tests, it takes the same amount of time to just redesign it and get the PSD, rather than try to cobble together a theme out of perhaps poorly written HTML or CSS.

Step 3 – Find a WordPress Developer.

Typically, a designer will not be the same person who can program or code a website.  There are some, so if you happen to find a guy (or gal) who can design AND get that into a WordPress theme for you, then great – move on to the next step.

Step 4 – See Who Controls The Domain Name.

If you purchased your own domain, then you may have a GoDaddy account or similar.  Find the login and password to this account.  If FindLaw purchased the domain for you, we can see if they put it in your name, or theirs.  Simply Google “who is” and click on the top result (probably Network Solutions).  Click on the link and add your domain name in the box.  What you will get is something like this:

Put in a request to your FindLaw rep that you would like the Registrant Contact, Administrative Contact and Technical Contact changed to the name and contact info of YOUR IT person.  If you are using an outsourced IT firm, make them the Technical Contact, and make the law firm the Registrant and Administrative Contact.  Remember, domain names are like pieces of property and legally, these need to be in your name in case anything comes up so you will have the right to make decisions.  This would be like putting FindLaw as the trustee on your estate or will – not what you want.

Important Note:  Take a look at the expiration date on this record, and make sure it will not expire anytime soon, and register it for at least two years out.  All domain transfers come with a 1-year renewal.

Step 5 –  Take Inventory of Your Website.

Here we want to take a close look at all of the features and functions that FindLaw is providing on your website, because all of these services will need to be replaced.  If you have video, FindLaw may be using Brightcove as the video player on your website.  You will want to get the raw video files in .mp4 format and get them into YouTube so they can be easily embedded on the new website later.  YouTube is more SEO friendly, and free compared to Brightcove.

If you were using live chat, once you move off of FindLaw, you will not be able to use their live chat service anymore.  We would recommend a service such as Olark or SnapEngage as a lightweight, inexpensive alternative.

For contact forms, if you move to WordPress, we would use a plugin called Gravity Forms and from there you can link it into just about any CRM of your choice.

For trackable phone numbers, there are a variety of choices out there, but we like CallRail for its simple, but full-featured SaaS app.

Are you paying for mobile access with FindLaw?  Consider building a responsive theme so your site is rendered properly on any mobile device.  There will not be a need to pay any other 3rd party service for a “mobile-friendly version” of your website.

Step 6a – Get Your Designer Going.

Your graphic designer can now start the process of recreating the design of your website.  Instruct the designer that you would like he or she to design several “themes” to the website – these would include a home page, an attorney bio page, an area of practice page, a blog or article page, and maybe 1 or 2 generic pages for things like about, contact, terms, etc.  Provide your designer with a vector file of your logo (a file that ends in .ai or .eps) or at least a high resolution .png or jpeg, along with as many images or photography as you may have.  They can also use what’s on the existing website.  The final outcome that you want from the designer is a layered PSD file – even if they are going to put it into WordPress for you – get this file.  If your relationship ends with your designer in the future, you won’t be able to easily make design modifications to your site without this file.

Step 6b – Start Setting Up a Host Environment.

Remember, once your FindLaw contract ends, they will not host your site anymore.  While your designer is working on getting you an actual “design file”, have your new host provider start setting up a place to host your new website.  They will know the typical set up for a WordPress site.  Your web developer (or designer) who is translating the design into WordPress is going to need either “SSH access” or “FTP access” as well as the database credentials to set everything up.  Hosting people just make sure the site is up and running – they generally don’t setup complex WordPress websites for you.  In the end, you may get a separate monthly hosting bill.  If you need an excellent and cost-effective WordPress hosting company, we recommend ZippyKid.  Once you have this server setup, go ahead and scrape the current site and set it up on this server – just in case your contract ends with FindLaw before the transfer is complete.

Step 7 – (optional) Begin Transferring the Registrar.

While FindLaw does set up the domains at DomainPeople.com with an account for each domain that you have access to, you may have other domains somewhere else and you want them to be managed all in one place.  This is completely up to you.  DomainPeople could host your DNS records, while your hosting provider hosts the actual website itself.  If this is the case, when the WordPress site is ready, simply log into DomainPeople (or whoever the registrar is) and change the DNS per the hosting company’s instructions.  Referencing the image above, you will change the nameservers from ns1.westgroup.net and ns2.westgroup.net to something else.

However, to change the registrar over to perhaps your outsourced IT company (who may have purchased dozens of other domains for you), there is a 3-part step to do this:

1) Log into your current registrar (DomainPeople) and first, unlock the domain.  This allows you to move it.

2) Once you have unlocked the domain, there should be an Authorization Code that appears.  Copy this and send it to your new registrar.

3) Your new registrar will initiate whats called a Domain Transfer Request.  Within minutes, whoever is listed as the technical contact on the domain, will receive an email with instructions that include a Transaction ID and Security Code.  Send this information to your new registrar.

4) The new registrar will complete the process, and within 7 days, your domain will be under their full control.

Step 8 – Design Completed – Begin Slicing and Building WordPress Custom Theme & Post Types.

Now that your design is completed, the WordPress developer will need to start piecing out the Photoshop file and building a custom HTML and CSS theme for each layout.  This process should only take 2-3 days max.  Once there is a working theme in place, they wil begin to customize the CMS so that you will easily be able to update each page, or particular sections of the website.  These are generally called “custom post types”.  This process could take another 5-10 days, depending on how many features your site has.

Step 9 – Begin Porting Over Your Content.

Remember that there is no automated way to copy all of your content from the original site, and place it into the proper database format for WordPress.  This will need to be done manually.  While you port over the content, you mind as well optimize it for SEO at the same time, and use the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress.  This will allow you to optimize each page based on a specific keyword, such as “car accident attorney”, etc.

Step 10 – Change the DNS.

If the website is ready and it has been tested, you are ready to switch your DNS to the new host provider.  Login to your registrar and change the name servers per the instructions of the host provider.  It might take 30 minutes or so to propagate through the Internet, so while some people may see it live in Texas, they may not see it live yet in Virginia.

Sound like a lot?  It is.  But Pear Analytics can help you through the process step-by-step.  Please call (888) 427-2178 and let us evaluate your situation at no charge.

 Update 4/25

Step 11 – 301 Redirects For Old Site Pages.  I almost forgot.  You will need to 301 redirect all of the old URL’s from the FindLaw site to the new URL’s on your WordPress site.  FindLaw’s URL structure has pages that typically end in “.shtml”.  Go to Google and type this in the search bar: “site:www.yourwebsite.com” where yourwebsite is your firm’s website address.  You will then get a list of all pages Google has in their index for the OLD FindLaw website.  You can easily 301 redirect all of these over by using the Redirection plugin in WordPress.  Use Google Webmaster Tools to keep an eye out for any 404 errors, which will likely be cause by lingering pages from the old site.

Good luck!

The post Leaving FindLaw: 10 Steps to Convert a FindLaw Website into WordPress appeared first on .

Over the past few months, we’ve had an opportunity to look at three different franchises that came to us for help and dig into the various strategies that deal with franchise SEO.  First, let’s define what a “franchise” is.  A franchise is the right or license granted by a company (the “franchisor”) to an individual or group (the “franchisee”) to market its products or services in a specific territory.  Many franchises like to control the marketing in terms of offers, promos, graphics, web design and other things, but allow the franchisee to customize certain things like pricing in their specific territory.  Some franchises even require each franchisee to contribute between 1 and 3 percent of sales to a national marketing fund, which helps support and buy things like web maintenance and SEO.

The problem, however, has several components to it:

1) Branding vs. Locally-Targeted.  Franchisors, for the most part, are brand marketers and are more interested in growing brand recognition (to sell more locations) than they are with super-targeted, locally-relevant content.  This presents a challenge for SEO because optimizing around the main head terms don’t do much for local searches.

2) Co-op Marketing Dollars.  The franchisees are not excited to put more of their gross sales into a “national marketing fund” – it feels more like they’re being nickel-and-dimed and maybe not receiving the full benefit of the fund.

3) Lack of Online Spend Locally.  At the same time, the franchisees are not all willing to put forth a significant budget towards online marketing in their area, especially if there are other franchisees in the same market.  The fear is that they don’t want to be paying to drive leads to their so-called competition down the road.  Along these lines, the franchisees more or less expect natural lead flow (or foot traffic) into the business since they’ve bought into a brand name and a retail location.

4) Alternate Domains.  For the more Internet-savvy franchisees who put up other vanity URLs, it turns out that the franchisor does not like the individual franchisee going “rogue” and creating these separate websites and URLs, since these could compete with the main website and the investment that has been poured into that as the main lead generation engine.  However, some franchisors are okay with the franchisee setting up separate landing pages for PPC purposes that are outside the realm of the primary domain.

5) Limited Tracking & Analytics.  If the franchisor forces the franchisee to use the main website and their location-specific page for marketing, there seems to be very limited analytics and tracking of leads because the franchisor might not have implemented a system where each location can get monthly detailed analytics, such as visits to the page, calls made, chats initiated or forms submitted.

Our analysis shows that the most ideal way to handle franchise SEO is to treat each location as a micro-site, instead of just a simple landing page within a subset of city and state location pages.  We’re recommending to take it just a little further than the write up Matt Cutts did in 2010 about Pinkberry.

There are a number of benefits to this kind of set-up:

1) Each store can have their own content–not just pricing, but even article content, which avoids big time duplicate content issues down the road.

2) Each store can and should have their own social identities, particularly in markets with multiple locations.  This not only creates an identity for the franchisee, but could also trigger multiple listings on a SERP – which is definitely good for the franchisor in terms of pushing out the competition.  Also, use the location-specific URL in your profiles, not just the root domain.  Users get frustrated when you dump them to the main page and force them to hunt all over the site for the right location.

3) This avoids the need for the franchisees to create “rogue” domains that dilute the SEO benefit of the root domain, and franchisors don’t need to (and shouldn’t) create duplicate websites and host them on different domains, just changing out a few elements of the content.  An example would be SanAntonioAutoGlass.com, AustinAutoGlass.com, HoustonAutoGlass.com – all with the same exact design, page structure, content, etc. with just the address and phone number changing.  SEO’s are generally against this kind of set-up for fear of duplicate content.

Potential Solutions

Solution #1 (most recommended):  Franchise-Friendly CMS.  Use a tool like www.empowerkit.com, which helps franchisors give the franchisee locations the ability to create pages, relevant content and SEO at a local level.

Solution #2 (somewhat recommended):  Allow franchisees more control over their local pages on the main website.  If you’re already heavily vested in your current web setup, perhaps giving the franchisee the option to create more keyword-targeted SEO pages or even PPC landing pages with the option to noindex/nofollow is a viable solution.

Solution #3 (least recommended):  Allow franchisees to create their own domains in their own market.  This is tough to control even if you have strict design guidelines, but could be a viable option depending on where the franchisor is in their life cycle.  Most SEO’s will always recommend building the trust and authority on the root domain first, and then branch out to other niche segments with exact match domains.  So this is an alternative, but we would probably push you on #1 or #2.

What franchise SEO challenges do you face?  How have you planned around some of these challenges?

The post Franchise SEO: What’s The Best Strategy For Optimizing a Franchise Website appeared first on .

So I gave them a call, and they graciously took care of me same-day, and in fact, I was done within ten minutes after walking through the door.  The bill?  A whopping $5.00.  She could have charged me $20.00 for the rush, and I would have been OK with it.  But I got to thinking, “gee, a $5 sale barely paid for the click on Adwords, let alone any management fees” – which would inflate the cost per click, if in fact they has someone running their campaigns for them.

But this is the kind of flawed thinking that, in my opinion, can distort the true Google Adwords ROI, or any online advertising for that matter.

What I mean by that is, sure, if you compare the direct impact of the sale associated with the cost of the click, then the ROI in this case doesn’t look all that great.  After all, I probably wasn’t their “ideal customer.”  But there are other things that could generate revenue off that first click, that are not only likely to be untrackable, but that we’re not even aware of; such as:

- Future Sales/Visits – you have to consider the true lifetime value of a customer to look at ROI correctly.  I may have spent $5 today, but next week I may bring in my whole wardrobe and spend $200.

- Social Sharing/Referrals – what if after my positive experience today at SewChic, I call a couple of friends and refer them?  Or I post it to Facebook, and one of my friends stops in next week?  This goes back to the issue of first click/last click attribution – which should get the credit?  I wrote about PPC attribution a while back.

- Direct Hits/SEO – many times when we search, we click on the paid ad, then go back out looking for the main website in the natural listings and then click on that looking for more information.  If a sale or lead is generated, then Adwords is given the “assist” in the conversion funnel if you look at Multi-Channel Funnel metrics in Google Analytics, also part of my prior post on attribution.

The moral of the story is to consider how Adwords or other advertising may have “assisted” in other leads or sales for your business, rather than just focusing on direct impact.  You may find a pleasant surprise.

The post 3 Things That Affect your Google Adwords ROI You Weren’t Thinking About appeared first on .

Disclaimer:  This is not a scientific experiment.  The setups in each platform were slightly different, but the results were still dramatically different.  If either platform wishes to do a more scientific experiment, we would be happy to set one up.

What is Ad Retargeting?

Ad Retargeting allows marketers to “re-market” to visitors who come to their website and fail to complete a specific action – in this case, a purchase.  So, if you do not make a purchase, a cookie will be added to your browser, and you will begin to see banner advertisements across various websites, luring you to come back.  If you were to click on this advertisement (assuming there is a promo) and complete a purchase on the website, there is typically a “burn pixel,” which then removes the cookie from your browser, and you would stop seeing those ads.  Let me be the first to say that this does not always work!  Even after purchase, you may continue to see the same banner ads.  Annoying?  Sure.  Is it effective?  HELL YES. I’ll show you in a minute.

Perfect Audience and AdRoll allow you to put up various sizes of banner display ads, including the ability to remarket to visitors on Facebook using Facebook Exchange.  In this case, you’re not using the typical ad setup in Facebook by selecting demographics, locations, etc.  None of that matters — only the folks who’ve been to your website AND are on Facebook will see your ad.  You can even get pretty fancy and retarget visitors who landed on specific pages.  So if your visitor was on the leather briefcase page, you can set it up so they’ll see an ad with a leather briefcase in it.

Google also has a remarketing option as part of Google Adwords, and you can track its effectiveness by adding some additional code to your Google Analytics snippet.

Note:  It is advisable that you have at least 5,000-10,000 visits per month to your website in order to maximize the effectiveness of your retargeting campaign.  Retargeting works by building a “list” of prior visitors that they can pixel and retarget, so the bigger the list, the better the retargeting will be at driving more clicks to your website.

Setup Comparison

Both tools are relatively easy to set up.  You start by creating a campaign, uploading your ads and setting a budget — pretty straightforward.  However, there are two things I like better about Perfect Audience in this area:

1) Perfect Audience has a UTM tag builder built right in — AdRoll does not.  A UTM tag consists of various parameters that are included in the URL that talk to Analytics.  It’s the same parameters you use when you “auto-tag” your Adwords campaigns.  This way, I can see what banner, or even what offer on the banner was more effective in driving conversions.

2) Perfect Audience also has better campaign/site management for agencies.  As you can see below, I can easily add another web property or customer to our parent retargeting account.  The developers may want to continue to add more agency features, like sub-account access and login, as well as invoices that correlate to each site, versus the account.

Billing Comparison

Both of these retargeting platforms bill in a similar manner; you set up a weekly budget that will be used to fund whatever CPM or CPC you set.  However, I feel like AdRoll bills the weekly budget amount whether you’ve used it or not, leading to a pretty large reserve in the account.  Perfect Audience doesn’t seem to be doing this.

The Results

It’s worth noting that the AdRoll campaign has been running considerably longer than the Perfect Audience campaign, and that the AdRoll campaign is not retargeting to Facebook, whereas Perfect Audience is.  First I’m going to post the dashboards for each tool for the last 30 days, and then for the lifetime of each.

As you can see from this graph, the AdRoll campaign hasn’t generated any conversions in the last 30 days.  I also pulled in from Google Analytics some other comparison metrics looking at time on site, pageviews and bounce rates.  Looks like Perfect Audience is getting us slightly more engaged users.

Here are the full campaign metrics for comparison:

Notice the difference between the Facebook results and the web retargeting.  Facebook brought in a lot more clicks, but a much higher CPA.  In conclusion, both of these tools provide a valuable platform for marketers.   I am leaning towards Perfect Audience and plan on getting all of our customers on this platform in the next couple of months, but I would encourage you to try multiple providers and do your own testing.

The post Perfect Audience Outperforms AdRoll in Ad Retargeting Test appeared first on .

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So we changed our model.

Now, the website focus is on our results for our customers.  I personally spent my Christmas vacation last year pouring over about 50 different Internet marketing websites.  You know what I found?  None of them talked about actual customer results, and very few listed their pricing.

So what did we do?  The opposite of everyone else.

We posted actual customer results, and testimonials and lay out what really differentiates us from the pack.  We continued to publish pricing, but with a new “twist”. You can now order a full Internet marketing plan with several “pieces” and checkout once.  This is a big improvement over the previous way of signing up customers, which required them to signup for every product individually.  And when the majority of your customers are buying more than one thing, it becomes cumbersome to get started with us.  So we removed that hurdle.

We also added some free eBooks, and you can order a free Internet marketing assessment as well.  You’ll still be able to run the free analyzer too.  (We haven’t re-branded that, but we’ll be refreshing that in the coming weeks.)  Finally, we added a referral program, which you can see if you go to pearanalytics.com/treat.

Shout out to Vid @thezippykid and @omaruddin from UVision Consulting to make this happen!  Let me show you how easy it is to modify absolutely everything from our WordPress panel:

Using lots of custom post types in WordPress, I can easily change any slider, testimonial, staff picture or bio or even plan within minutes.  I can even change the text rotation in the first hero banner in about 2 seconds.

But the cool part was the Chargify integration.  Previously, if you wanted an SEO plan, a PPC plan, some retargeting and some call tracking, you would need to sign up 4 times on 4 different hosted pages at Chargify.  Using the Chargify API and Chargify Direct code base, we were able to integrate our plans and pricing, and even coupon codes into the WordPress install.  Just add to your plan what you want, and check out once.  In the theme options, I just have to indicate the Site ID and the Chargify API key, and we can start taking credit card payments in minutes.

What’s Next

We’ve had several agencies and resellers who want to seamlessly resell our products and services, and we can now turn this entire ordering system (including the assessment reports and website analyzer) into a WordPress plugin.  What that means is we can easily integrate our entire ordering system into any WordPress site using a plugin, or any site really with some other javascript code.  We can even allow you to change the colors and fonts of the theme to match your website, and any reseller can begin taking orders the same day.

Thanks again to Zippykid and UVision Consulting for getting this up and running today!

The post The New and Improved Pear Analytics! appeared first on .

This doesn’t seem to be the case in mid-2012. After the “Panda” and “Penguin” updates–code names for major changes to Google’s algorithm–everything seems to be awry. We’re seeing customers’ rankings slip–even though they had held those spots for months at a time with only minor fluctuations. We were once rewarded for things like adding new and interesting content, optimizing (but not over-optimizing) pages, and getting some reasonable, related links pointing to the site.

Prior to 2012, this was considered “good SEO.” It was an effort that could take 1 or 2 years, but you would be handsomely rewarded by the search engines for sticking with it and doing it right.

However, in July of 2012, it seems as though Google is stretching for anything to help grow their cash cow–Adwords–even if it means altering the results page to gently force those enjoying free clicks to consider paying for ads.

It’s really not that hard to imagine. Consider the fact that this past quarter, Google reported an 11% increase in revenue as investors cheered for the better-than-expected earnings report. A study from Wordstream reports that for the first time ever, paid ads are getting more clicks than organic listings for keywords with high commercial intent. They also produced an interesting infographic about this issue, and we thought we should share it.

Also consider the fact of some other changes Google has “quietly” been making:

1) With the ongoing battle for “privacy,” Google is forcing users to a secure search page, which reduces the keyword query data available for marketers. Now, Adwords is the only place you can get this data reliably in full.

2) Google is reducing the domain diversity in organic search results now. Previously, you could get 8-10 different domains in a result, but now it’s being reduced to 4 or 5. The reason? Google thought it would be better to show 3 or 4 listings from the same website (Read the study that was done on this here).

In the past 12 months, we’ve found ourselves offering customers a hybrid solution that combines both SEO and PPC to get maximum results. The bottom line is that you want to use PPC for short-term lead generation by capturing the visitors who have high intent to purchase, and use SEO to attract buyers in the “early stages” by targeting easier, long-tail searches. In either case, you want to be sure that your website has a way to capture and nurture leads. We’ll write more on that in a future post.

The post Google’s War on Free Clicks appeared first on .

Sometimes a designer or web developer will put the just the logo at the top right inside an h1. Some will put the logo and the headline of some text in h1 tags, giving you multiple on the same page. According to Matt Cutts, Google will not penalize you for multiple h1′s on a page, but he does caution that we should use it sparingly.

What is an h1 tag?
By definition, the “h” tag is used to define HTML headings on a page. The h1 tag is used to define the most important heading on the page (like a title of a blog post, for example) – which is why search engines use this as a signal to determine what the page is about, and can help your SEO quite a bit. According to the most recent study by SEOmoz Search Engine Ranking Factors report from 2011, the h1 has a high correlation between keyword usage in the h1, and rankings – only behind keyword usage in the URL and title tag.

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Last week, a post on the DoubleClick Advertisers blog revealed that Google is working to create new measurement metrics for AdWords beyond simple impressions and click-throughs.  The idea is formulated around brands who want to be able to measure the impact of their brand online, similar to the way they do it offline with Gross Ratings Points (GRP’s), which has been used since the 1950′s for measuring broadcast reach and frequency.  In Google’s case, they will refer to it as “Active GRP” because the advertiser will be able to react in real-time.

It seems like this is a move to appeal to the large brand advertisers, like Nike or Procter & Gamble, who are contributing billions to Google’s cash cow.  The marketers behind these brands are trying to correlate their broadcast big spending to their online spend, but it’s like comparing apples and oranges.  In broadcast, you can demographically segment where you want your ads to appear, and so you know if your creative resonated well with the 25-35 year-old females who earn $100K per year.  Online, we can’t do that very well.

Also, if you look at a large brand’s marketing budget, you’ll likely see that the lion share is allocated to broadcast, with expensive productions and air time costs, compared to a dwarfed online budget.  Even though the online is more “measurable”, they really don’t have any insights to things like brand recall, and if the ad copy or banner creative resonated with a particular audience.  So, in order for Google to convince these brands to allocate more dollars to online spend, they’re going to have to give them similar metrics for measurement.

What does this mean for small business?

I’m afraid not much.  This is obviously a ploy by Google to grab more advertising dollars from the large brands, and so introducing a new measurement metric to the SMB’s will be counter-intuitive.  Most of the SMB’s I talk to are still trying to grasp the concept of click-throughs and conversions.

Besides, I’m not so sure that 1950′s measurement technologies are the most useful anyway – after all, have you ever met a single person who had one of those Nielsen “black boxes” on their TV?  I didn’t think so.

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