It’s that time of year. The time where you start looking at your website and tilt your head wondering if it’s starting to sound a little stale to readers. If it’s been a few years since you’ve updated your content, your site could probably use a good scrub. A lot changes in a year – trends, tools, keywords, methodologies – and you want to make sure your Web site is giving users (and the search engines) the most up-to-date information about your company. The best way to do that is to give your website a quick content audit to determine what exactly it’s saying about you.

Below are five ways to tune up your content for 2011. You want to start the New Year off on the right foot, don’t you?

1. Highlight your strengths.

You’ve probably heard it a lot over the past year – marketing is storytelling. Each sentence on your site should be part of a larger effort to tell your brand’s story and lure readers in. To capture people’s attention, your content has to be telling a story that displays your product/company’s strength and tying it back into how it will solve a problem they’ve expressed. Does the content on your site do a good job highlighting your strengths or is it simply a list of features? Do you show customers how your product will help them achieve a larger goal or are you waiting for them to put it together themselves? If it’s the latter, you need to go in and tweak your message. What’s different about your product or service? What goes above and beyond in a way your competitors don’t? Revamp your copy to include these selling points and clearly outline the benefits you offer to customers.

2. Know your competition’s weaknesses.

Part of knowing where your product succeeds means also knowing where your competitor’s product fails. Maybe you deliver superior customer service, maybe it’s a price point issue, or maybe they’re nowhere to be found on social media whereas you’re dominating and ever-so-accessible. Whatever their specific weakness is, make sure you account for it when highlighting your strengths. Don’t do this in a way that speaks badly about your competition, but in a way that highlights something that you do really well. It’s about you, not them. You have to remember that potential customers are landing on your website to research their options in service providers. Make sure you’re showing them why you’re the best choice and what you offer that your competition can’t match.

3. Tighten your calls to action.

One of the most important things you can do for your website is to use your analytics to find your high-traffic/low-conversion pages. You know that a large number of potential customers are landing on these pages, but for some reason, they’re abandoning before they can convert. Why? Often it’s due to too many distractions on the page, or maybe your calls to action aren’t as compelling as they should be. If it’s a case of the latter, experiment with your calls to action to try and find ones that do better with your audience. Sometimes simply changing the call to action on a page can change the whole tone and make things sound fresher.

4. Reassess keywords.

Two years ago you used keyword research to help you determine how users were searching for your products and which terms you needed to rank for. You then developed content based on those terms. But have you checked back in to see if you’re still on the right path? Are you regularly looking for new opportunities, checking for any terms that may be falling off, or calculating the ROI for going after a specific term? If you haven’t, now is a good time to go through your site and reassess your keyword needs. Just because your customers typically referred to something one way doesn’t mean they’re still searching for it that same way. By tidying up your keywords you ensure you’re attracting the right people and optimizing your search traffic.

5. Freshen up your stats.

Another way to revitalize your content is to go through it and update the statistics you’re referencing to make them more relevant. It’s hard for customers to establish trust in your brand when you’re still talking about how effective your company was five years ago or about the latest in mobile trends from 2002. Make sure you’re constantly reading up on different sources to update your stats as your industry and market matures. If your site is talking about what happened decades ago it’s an unintentional sign that you haven’t done anything since.

The end of one year gives us a chance to tidy things up in preparation for the next. One of the best investments you can make for your website right now is to clean up your content to make sure it’s attracting the right people and properly differentiating your business from your competitors. Give yourself a content audit before the calendar hits 2011 to start things off on the right note.

About the Author

Lisa Barone is Co-Founder and Chief Branding Officer at Outspoken Media, Inc., an Internet marketing company that specializes in providing clients with online reputation management, social media services, and other Internet services. She blogs daily over at the Outspoken Media blog.

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Article source: http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/12/5-ways-tune-up-content-2011.html

Here we are. I hope your time here at PPC Academy was productive and you learned a lot because it’s now time for your final exam. Were you paying attention? Have you bloomed into a search marketing pro with the knowledge and skills to kick major PPC butt, or do you still have things to learn?

Below are 35 questions that test the most important concepts you should have learned from this one-year PPC course. If you missed any posts, here’s the course guide. Answers follow the questions. How good are you?

• 0-5 correct answers: Novice. Go back and read all of these posts again.
• 6-11 correct answers: Beginner. Glad to see you retained the basics, but you still have more to learn before you should even touch a PPC account other than your own.
• 12-20 correct answers: Advanced. You know what you’re doing and probably have already run a PPC account.
• 21-30 correct answers: PPC Expert. Congrats! You really know this stuff.
• 31-34 correct answers: certified SEM Pro. Right on! I bet you could teach me a thing or two.
• If you answered all 35 correct, then you, my friend, are a true search god.

PPC Academy Final Exam

Intro to Search and Research Phase

1. What is a SERP?
2. Name two reasons why paid search has historically performed so well.
3. Roughly, what were Google’s revenues from worldwide paid search in 2009? $5 billion, $10 billion, or $22 billion?
4. Which five search engines currently handle over 97% of all searches in the U.S.?
5. Around what percentage of all U.S. online advertising revenue does paid search represent? 10%, 25%, 50%, or 75%?
6. What three letter abbreviation best describes this definition: An advertiser-defined group of top-level metrics that are core signs of the health of the account.
7. How do you calculate ROAS (return on ad spend)?
8. According to this column, on Day 1, what is the most important question to ask when starting on a new PPC account?
9. What does a keyword monitoring tool do?
10. Your advertiser calls you and is very upset that they’re not seeing their ads when they type in their keywords into the search engines. Why might this be happening?
11. What tool/platform helps you track user activity on your website?
12. What are a group of users called who allow their online actions to be tracked by competitive intelligence platforms?

Build Phase

13. How many keywords should you have in your account?
14. Although these limits can be extended, what are the default number of keywords in an ad group, ad groups in a campaign, and campaigns in an account for AdWords?
15. Can you bid on competitor trademark terms in Google? Can you use them in your ads?
16. What is it called when you get charged for clicks that you shouldn’t have had to pay for?
17. What are the four phases of the buying cycle/funnel? (some people use different names but the concepts are the same)
18. What term did Chris Anderson of Wired popularize to describe the niche strategy of certain business such as Amazon.com or Netflix? It is now used by search engine marketers to help visualize their high-volume, general terms versus their low-volume, niche terms.
19. What are the words called that you can combine with your core terms to generate thousands (or more) of keywords variations?
20. Which Google keyword tool provides keyword ideas based on actual Google search queries and matched to specific pages of your website with your ad and search share?
21. What are the three most common paid search match types?
22. Which other match type allows you to remove keywords to ensure your ads will not be triggered by users?
23. What feature in AdWords will incent advertisers to have the most relevant keywords and ads and penalizes those who do not?
24. What feature in PPC copywriting allows you to automatically include the user’s query into the ad text?
25. In both AdWords or AdCenter, what is the character limit for the headline of a search text ad?
26. What campaign type targets ads across the web on pages that are topically relevant to your keywords?

Launch/Reporting Analysis Phases

27. What is Google’s desktop software that allows you to upload and manipulate AdWords accounts?
28. Name five settings that can be chosen at the campaign level in AdWords.
29. Name four levels of geotargeting you can specify in AdWords.
30. What are tracked user actions such as leads, sales, downloads, etc. called when they are important to the advertiser?
31. What are five common metrics used to monitor PPC effectiveness? (various answers)
32. Which report allows you to view performance data for search queries that triggered your ad and received clicks in AdWords?
33. According to this column, what are three of the ground rules for properly performing tests in PPC?
34. What are three ways you can lower the overall cost per click on your entire account?
35. What “newish” AdWords tool allows you to test different campaign configurations to find the best mix of keywords, bids, ads, etc.

How did you do? Was this hard or super easy? If you found parts of this hard, I urge you to go back through the course guide and read up the topics you could brush up on.

Thanks again for a great year! You can still catch me in the SearchEngineLand column, In the Trenches, each month along with some other great search marketing professionals as we dive deeper into the inner workings of PPC.

PPC Academy Final Exam Answers

1. Search engine results page.
2. Many different reasons so really no right answer here. Some answers could be: relevancy to users’ query, only pay when someone clicks, bottom of the funnel advertising, highly measurable, etc.
3. $22 Billion.
4. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Aol, Ask.
5. 50%.
6. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
7. ROAS is the ratio of sales/spend, so a $1000 PPC budget that generated $2000 in sales has a 2:1 ROAS.
8. What are the goals of the account? The answers to this question will drive most of your direction moving forward.
9. Keeps a historical track of your competitors’ keywords and ads on various search engines. Also called keyword scrapers.
10. Many different reasons, but some include: the account has been paused, the budget has run out, the daily budget cap has been reached, the advertiser is out of the geotargeted area for the campaigns, the budget is small so the ads won’t be shown 100% of the time, etc.
11. Web analytics.
12. Panelists.
13. Trick question! There is no set number. Whatever works best at furthering the goals of your advertisers is the best answer.
14. 2,000/2,000/25.
15. Yes, as of now, you can bid on them, but no, you cannot use them in your ads.
16. Click fraud.
17. Awareness, interest, research, buying. Once again, various terms are used by different people but the concepts are the same. Some funnels/cycles are three, four, five or more steps, so if you were even close, give yourself credit on this one. Just understanding that your potential customers are at different levels of engagement with you is the important thing to keep in mind.
18. The long tail.
19. Keyword modifiers.
20. Google’s search-based keyword tool, also called the Sktool (soon to be discontinued and folded into the general Google keyword tool)
21. Broad, phrase, exact.
22. Negative match.
23. Quality score.
24. Dynamic keyword insertion
25. Twenty-five. (did you get the hint?)
26. Content (a.k.a. contextual) targeting. These are called automatic placements in AdWords.
27. Google AdWords Editor.
28. There are many, but the major ones are: budget, geotargeting, dayparting, networks, flight dates, language targeting, bidding options, etc.
29. Some include city, state, metro/DMA, country, zip code, custom shape, lat/long coordinates.
30. Conversions.
31. Some of these metrics include clicks, impressions, cost, average position, cost-per-click, clickthrough rate, conversions, conversion rate, cost per conversion and others.
32. Search query report (now rolled into the general user interface).
33. There are six: don’t disrupt normal account practices, don’t test too many variables at once, give your tests enough time to get real results, use the scientific method, understand the context, and leverage the technology.
34. This is very subjective so consider yourself correct if you came up with at least three ways that you truly think could work. However, some to consider would be: lower bids, improve quality scores, pause high cost words, or split terms by geotargeted areas to avoid paying too much in some areas.
35. AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE).

PPC Academy is a comprehensive, one-year search advertising course from beginning to end. Starting with the basics, PPC Academy progressively explores all of the varied facets of paid search, and the tactics needed to succeed and become an advanced paid search marketer.

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/ppc-academy-final-exam-test-your-paid-search-knowledge-59339

Isn’t this the time of year we always get a little introspective? What worked this year and what didn’t? I suppose New Year’s is really the time for that, but go with me here. Let’s get introspective about one of the things that drives us crazy all year: reporting.

Today, reporting is largely considered a way of conveying the facts and statistics of our web site, search efforts or other endeavors, but the truth is that none of it really means anything, and at its worst, doesn’t represent “facts” at all. Here are the types of things we talk about in reporting:

• How many people came to our web site
• How many visits those people had
• How many pageviews those people had, if they didn’t bounce
• What percentage of the time that traffic returned some revenue or other valuable event
• etc.

And it’s not absolutes that matter, right? We rarely talk about the total number of pageviews, because getting 12 million pageviews isn’t all that informative. We want to know how many pageviews each visitor had on average or how many they had in the average visit, so we can see whether the site really drove a lot of interest or not. Same thing with conversions. We want to know the relative measure of performance for our traffic: does search drive “productive” traffic? Are these things trending upward or downward? You know what? It doesn’t freaking matter. Because averages are lies.

There is no such thing as an average. No average clickthrough rate. No average conversion rate, no average bounce rate, page views per visit, percent new visits, any of that. Why? Because there is no such thing as an average visit or visitor. Nobody is capable of looking at 5.82 pages in their session. Nobody in the world is 12% interested in digital cameras and 6.9% interested in washing machines in the same visit. Nobody converts 2.9% of the time. They either do these things or they don’t.

And nobody knows this better than you lovely, attractive, and highly intelligent search people, because you understand with certainty that there is no such thing as an average visit, otherwise there would only be one keyword driving traffic to your site (I’ll let you use your imagination about what that keyword might be!) But we know that thousands if not hundreds of thousands of keywords drive traffic, and these different keywords represent myriad needs, interests, or intents. And a lot of these keywords don’t have a prayer in the universe of creating a real conversion, but they will absolutely provide value to your company and your visitor (with the possible hopes of a conversion down the road) if your marketing and your site are doing their job.

What I’d urge us towards in 2011 is a new way of reporting (and acting on that reporting) that revolves around the key concepts of information architecture. There are two ways you can break down and understand every single visit and visitor on your site that allow you to determine the success of your efforts in search and on the site. Let’s use those.

A Quick Primer On Information Architecture

The most basic and fundamental components of IA are users, context and content. Here are some descriptions that will come in handy for the purposes of this article, but there is a lot more to learn about IA if you’re interested, and I’d imagine that some IAs may debate some of the finer points of these definitions. But since I have the keyboard at this particular moment, here we go.

Users are just people. People with histories, preferences, issues with their in-laws, and mean-ass pets that they swear are well-behaved. I don’t mean uniques or visitors; I literally mean real, actual people, like the ones you see in the grocery store.

Context, then, is what their current situation, need or pursuit is all about. “I need a new dishwasher,” is a context. “My pet won’t stop pooping in the kitchen,” is a context. “My digital camera’s pictures suck compared to Fred’s” is a context. Context is the reason users choose the keywords they choose, attempt to navigate where they navigate, and view what they view. But don’t confuse context for users, or people, because different people with the same context will behave differently. A self-proclaimed smarty-pants will shop for a digital camera very differently than a friendly novice; they will use different types of information to narrow their choices, learn more, compare prices and ultimately convert. So let’s just say context describes the current need. And a “visit” or “session” is literally the intersection of a user and a context.

Content is what you deliver. Your site is content. It’s the good that your site provides to those users with their contexts, and depending on the type of content you have (and the organization of that content), you will have visits that sit on the spectrum between satisfying or not satisfying the visit. SEOs ride companies pretty hard about creating better content around various topics, and they should. Because for the vast array of information-gathering searches/visits/intents, most sites are just trying to drive a conversion rather than really trying to help this particular context.

And The Point Is?

But wait, isn’t all of this just a fancy way of saying, “Use segments?” Well, yes. But no, too. Because we are not just making segments willy-nilly. We are picking specific types of segments related to the two factors in IA that help us understand how productive our visits are. We want to understand our users (your org may have defined personas) and the contexts (which often relate directly to funnel position, or how close to conversion they are), and report on those breakdowns. And what we are reporting on is whether our content is working for these segments.

As an example, let’s say that you do sell digital cameras on your site. How can you determine a sophisticated user with a high funnel position? How about people using Linux, or people running Chrome on a Mac… that sounds like a techie to me. And how about if they search for “digital camera reviews”? There’s your techie high-funnel visit. How did your site do? What about your nontechnical (AOL connection using IE 7) visits with the same search?

Obviously we are talking about some pretty small groups of people here, and no, I don’t advocate making a 4,000 page report every week. But start with some users and contexts that are “no duh” segments and work your way backwards to a realistic subset of personas and funnel positions, and ask yourself if you have the content to satisfy their visit. You’ll also see that measuring everything against conversion rate is totally stupid. Obviously, many of your segments have no prayer of converting. But what you will begin to see is the current: the force that moves people down through the funnel in successive visits. But you’re finally measuring and reporting on something that isn’t the “average” person; you’re talking about something that really tells you if what you are doing is working for real people with real needs that your business can satisfy. You goal shouldn’t be to outline every segment but to drive the point home that breaking things down into pieces means a whole lot more than keeping it “high level.”

There is no getting around the fact that this is going to take a ton of time, especially when you first get started. But in my experience, this reporting paints a clear picture of where the site is strong and where it is weak (and also where your paid and natural search efforts are weak/strong), which changes the focus of the conversation from radical guesses about how to improve pageviews per session for the “average” visitor toward conversations about how to more appropriately work with specific types of people and their specific needs.

If you want even more to think about for 2011, take a look at my predictions (and hopes) for web analytics in 2011, and weigh in on those, too. We’re in for some really exciting changes in 2011.

How close to this do you think you can get next year?

Article source: http://searchengineland.com/for-2011-resolve-to-stop-being-average-get-real-59663