Testing Out Search Engine Marketing Tools

This past week of class has been full of amazing speakers and visits. This past Monday, our class welcomed Chris Vella, a search analyst from LunaMetrics, to speak about Google AdWords. He mainly focused his lecture on keywords and characteristics of successful Google ads. First, the title tag should include your main keywords and have a strong indication of what your business is. This can be organized with a "pipe," or a vertical line that separates text. Below the title tag, the meta description should involve keywords, share what the webpage is about, and include either a call-to-action and/or a unique value proposition (UVP). A UVP is best suited for heavy hitter pages, but a call-to-action should be used as frequently as possible. Lastly, when the consumer has clicked on your URL, it should lead them directly to the landing page most closely related to their original keyword. Information on this page should not be overwhelming or contain too many uses of the keyword or else the page will lose credibility. Vella covered this in more depth, but I felt as though these facts were most useful and connected to our client.

On Wednesday, our class took a tour of Google and attended a lecture by Tim James, a partner technology manager. The tour was very entertaining and seemed like an amazing place to work. James' talk centered what the Pittsburgh branch of Google focused on most - shopping. He explained that typically consumers shop online for the least expensive version of a product regardless of company loyalty. This has posed a threat to both brick-and-mortar stores and their store websites. James noted that brand advertising has been extremely successful in combatting this, as it promotes the store rather than a specific product. Advertising on Google includes AdWords, AdWords Express, Youtube Ads, and Shopping Ads (Product Listing Ads and Local Inventory Ads). Although the Pittsburgh branch focuses on the Shopping Ads, James spoke mainly about AdWords. My main takeaways from his talk were to make sure each ad group within a campaign successfully matches a specific product or service and to consistently use Google Analytics to track your ad groups' success.

Although I asked many questions for both speakers, I have some further questions about Adwords and search engine optimization. If my client has various products and services, should I create ad groups for each one even if it routes the potential customer to the same page? Or should I ask my client to divide the products and services up and devote a singular page to each? I am also interested to see how Google Analytics will work with our client's site, as she has very little traffic.

In preparation for the beginning of the Google Online Marketing Challenge, I have attempted to use both Google AdWords Keyword Planner and Screaming Frog. Here is what I thought of each:

Google AdWords Keyword Planner:

This program is known as Google's official keyword aid, in that when an advertiser seeks to find semantically related keywords, he or she searches through Keyword Planner. Planner can successfully help you find other keywords because they have the mind of a computer, rather than a human, and has tracked information related to frequently searched words. When I tried Keywords for the first time, it prompted me to input my budget, my network target audience, my bids, and my text ads to base the suggestions off of. It was a very fluid and easy process, and I look forward to using it for my client.

Screaming Frog:

Screaming Frog is a small desktop program that pulls onsite elements for SEO and presents them on your computer, allowing you to filter for common SEO issues. The data it collects is endless and involves every aspect of search engine optimization. The best part of this is that it crawls in the computer side of digital marketing, including the server-side programming languages, which I am not familiar with. I have downloaded this product to my desktop and am excited to utilize it when I work on my client's advertising.

Google Market Research Tools

Following my previous post, I have gained a great deal of insight concerning online tools that benefit one's website. I would consider PageRank to be the one of the most important concepts I have learned, as it identifies how webpages are ranked. A website is ranked based on its popularity and relevance to its search terms. As Dr. Chung explained in class, a website's popularity can be boosted by its connection to other highly ranked websites through links. Relevance is also important as it must clearly and closely relate to the search terms. The quality of webpages was discussed in Chapter 3 of the Internet Marketing Essentials Textbook. Webpages can be more highly ranked if they have short load times, fresh content, good grammar and spelling, low bounce rate from landing pages, and original content. These attributes are invaluable to know, as my group will be working with our client to improve their webpage for the highest ranking search possibilities. A PageRank can be checked online through sites like this.

In addition to this, I learned the differences between white hat and black hat SEO practices. SEO practices are those involving search engine optimization, which is the practice of designing the content and structure of a website so that it will rank well. White hat practices are those that ethical and allowed by search engines, while black hat are designed to unethically manipulate rankings for its personal improvement. Because our client's website is newly introduced, it is important for our team to understand these differences and act under the white hat practices. Not only will black hat techniques mar the reputation of our client's website, but search engines can temporarily penalize websites that don't act accordingly, which may hurt our client's online business.

Although I feel my conceptual understanding of these topics is thorough, my next goal is to be able to actively and correctly apply these concepts to the work my group and I will accomplish with our client.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a site that allows a viewer to analyze a percentage of Google web searches to determine how many searches have been done for the terms one has entered in comparison to the total number of Google searches done during that time. This, however, only concerns popular searches. The main benefit for Google Trends, for our purposes, is that it closely relates to an AdWords account. This means that an owner of an AdWords account is able to track how successful their chosen search terms are in comparison to all of the searched terms on Google during a selected time.

As our group will be in charge of a Google AdWords account, this will aid us in choosing terms that are very popular versus those that may not yield a desired amount search. Using this tool will also allow us to track the success of our chosen search terms throughout the competition.

Think With Google

Think with Google is a dynamic website that allows professionals to have forward-looking perspectives on specific sectors of business. This site divides the global span of business into different sectors of industry. In the case of our client, I would most closely identify it as a business-to-business company. On their business-to-business page, they post articles, infographics, case studies, and data collections. The combined information will add to our groups success greatly as it will allow us to gain insight in this sector of business. Understanding the current business-to-business landscape will only give more knowledge into the intricacies of our client's company.

Google Market Finder

This is an online application that helps a professional find new markets for one's products and services. It combines Google Search, Google Translate, and AdWords to compare the cost of acquiring a new customers with one's product margins and help determine whether reaching customers in a new market is good for business.

I feel this tool, unlike the others, will not add to our client's business because it is a very localized and customizable service. Because this client is fully involved in developing and implementing each service, it would not benefit them to expand their business to the global market financially.

Takeaway Post: Discover GOMC and Pre-Preparation Course

The Google Online Marketing Challenge, GOMC, is characterized as competition in which students from around the world create online marketing campaigns using Google Adwords. With a budget of $250.00, students develop an Adwords campaign with the goal of attracting the most amount of traffic flow for the company they are advertising. In order to be eligible and prepared for the GOMC, Google has outline criteria on their "Discover GOMC" and "Pre-Course Preparation" pages.

In order to fully prepared for the GOMC, the competitors must have a Google account and the company must have an online presence. Google emphasizes an online presence for each company because it is a method to effective communicate with customers, to give potential customers information on the company, and to conduct business transactions through e-commerce. The competitors must be in groups of three to six members, and those in undergraduate or graduate programs pursuing any majors may compete. Each group must be registered with a faculty member to oversee the actions and progress taken by the teams.

The "Discover GOMC" outlines nine steps in order to be a standing member in the competition process. Students must first register for the challenge as a team and access a Student Dashboard. Then they must work with a business to properly identify words that reflect their company. This is extremely important because AdWords depends solely on words, and if the words chosen do not accurately represent the client's company, their products, or their image, consumers will be unable to find them. Once this is complete, the team then turns in a Pre-Campaign Report and requests crediting in order to receive recognition for the campaign. The campaign then commences and teams spend 21 calendar days and $250 to run their AdWords. Following the competition teams submit their Post-Campaign reports which outline the success of the team's campaign. Once submitted, Google judges chose winners and awards.

The process of GOMC is very direct and simple, which may allow for increased creativity and diversification between teams. I am very interested to first work with the companies to focus on their image and needs, and then represent them through AdWords.