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.