Under the radar, Google has quietly raised AdWords account limits. Accounts can now get boosted to include up to 500 campaigns and 3 million keywords. Previously accounts were limited to 100 campaigns and 1 million keywords.

If you wanted to expand beyond that, you had to open new accounts. This was a headache because you’d need to work out tracking, billing, and access requirements for the new accounts. That required putting new scripts on your website; handling credit cards or invoicing agreements; and getting together new Google users, possibly implementing a sub-MCC.

In the past it also meant that your additional accounts wouldn’t be linked to a Google Analytics account. Though, nowadays, you can also link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account.

Making Account Management Easier

While for very large marketing efforts, separation at the account level may make sense, in all likelihood, going through the effort of starting new accounts to accommodate AdWords limits is going to make maintenance, error-checking, and reporting more difficult.

If you’re implementing over 100 campaigns, some of them are probably close copies of one another with different targeting settings. For example, sites for local businesses might be targeting mobile separate from other devices. Or if your business targets multiple locations that perform differently and have different ad requirements, these would also be separated into different campaigns that are similar to each other.

Bulk changes using the AdWords Editor becomes a multi-step operation with multiple campaigns. Even with accounts consolidated under a single MCC, running reports across multiple accounts, implementing changes, or understanding how the targeting might overlap between different campaigns in different accounts becomes a more robust task.

A quick lookup or troubleshooting becomes not so quick anymore. So it’s good that AdWords is making efforts to accommodate larger accounts. (Although with so much duplication within larger accounts, it also is surprising that a better management option hasn’t surfaced that eliminates the need to increase account limits.)

Getting the Maximum Limits

To get the maximum limits for an account that has the default settings, you still have to consult with a Google AdWords Representative, requesting a boost. If you have an account that should be using limits that are this high, you most likely are already in contact Google Reps about other things.

You know that you need a boost if you get account limit errors from AdWords Editor when you try to post new additions. But what this doesn’t tell you is if you’re wasting your time filling your account with clutter or if you’re sincerely in need of more, more, more.

Which accounts should be using the new limits? Whenever you notice performance differences by network or device, it’s always a good idea to separate campaigns out to single out targeting. It’s also a good idea to keep a healthy keyword list, to be sure that all of the relevant queries trigger your ads.

In well-organized ad groups it’s fairly easy to maintain a large number of keywords. But unless you have a million products, or hundreds of business locations, you’re not going to need anywhere near the account limit of keywords and campaigns.

At Pure Visibility, one of our core competencies is Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). While some may think that navigating the interfaces at Google is where paid search management begins and ends, we know it is only the tip of the iceberg. One of our core values, “Driven to Improve,” plays out constantly in our interactions with our paid search clients.

In the paid search arena, landing page testing is one area where Pure Visibility gains extra leads and conversions for clients. It’s exciting, and we can see the results of quality landing page design, immediately.

I have been managing a very exciting project at PV since I joined the company. One of the sub-projects in that engagement, which I have really enjoyed, is a true team effort. Some of the stakeholders and team members include client representatives and their third-party website designers.

It has been an exciting project from a team building point-of-view, as the client manages both agencies. We all work closely to make sure the results meet our expectations and the client wins.

Good landing page design takes into account what the potential customer is looking for, website usability, and a compelling sell or call-to-action. Before the PPC part of the business can do its magic, the landing page has to be designed.

We design the blueprints (or wireframes) for the web design firm to create. After the page is designed, copy is written, and everything is perfect and approved, the new landing page is moved to a production environment where Pure Visibility’s PPC Pirates (a.k.a. Analysts) can use and test it.

Google has tools that make A/B testing very simple to understand. Using Google Website Optimizer, Pure Visibility’s PPC analysts can set up a test which sends users to the existing, control version of a landing page (A), 50% of the time, and then to a test version (B), the other 50% of the time. If there is a statistically significant improvement in conversion rate between A and B, the interface will let us know and the test will be over.

At that point, we can roll out that winning landing page to a production environment and use it 100% of the time. Since the client has several brands, this landing page design can be scaled and we see gains across all brands. Excellent!

In our last landing page test, the new version of the page was so compelling that it showed a 37% improvement over the older page with a 99.9% level of confidence.

The next time you search the web for something and you soon find yourself on a company’s landing page, stop and think, “How can they do better?” I always do.

I bet you thought that once you graduated school that you were done with having to worry about people evaluating and grading your writing. Well, think again! Google evaluates and classifies the reading level for each of your pages into one of the following three buckets:

• Basic
• Intermediate
• Advanced

The classifications are intended to describe the level of reading comprehension needed to understand the content on the page. For example, scientific research papers would be more likely to end up classified as Advanced, while you would expect a website targeted at kids to be classified as Basic.

Google does this for many reasons, but the main purpose, like most of the things Google does, is to better serve its users. By being able to evaluate reading level, Google can better identify poor quality content and filter out spammy low quality content from their search results.

In addition, they can allow user to search for things based on reading level. For example, lets say you just bought a new iPad and you were looking for a tutorial. You could search for “ipad tutorial” and filter sites that contain basic reading levels to ensure that the tutorials you review are easy to read and understand. Not sure how to do this? Don’t worry, just keep reading.

Filter Your Search Results By Reading Level

Here is a step-by-step guide to filtering your search results by reading level – it is actually quite easy!

Step 1

Enter your search query in the Google search box as usual. Then click the “Show search tools” link in the bottom of the lefthand sidebar. In this example, we will search for iPad tutorials.

Step 2

After clicking “Show search tools” the menu expands. Under the “All Results” menu, click “reading level.”

Step 3

After clicking the “reading level” the search results should refresh and you see a chart that lists the percentage of sites that fall into each reading level. In addition, the reading level is displayed for each individual search result.

Step 4

The last and final step is to click the reading level that you want to filter the results so that only sites that match that reading level are shown. That’s it, you did it!

In the example below I clicked on the Basic reading level. To revert back to normal search settings simply click on the “x” in the upper right hand corner of the reading level box.

Reading Level and SEO

Although the reading level can be very helpful for users, it can also be a valuable resource for optimizing content and improving your SEO. Generally speaking, you want to write content that is consistent with the reading level used on the majority of sites that discuss the particular subject matter in question.

For example, 71% of the sites that write about iPad tutorials have content that is at the Intermediate reading level, while only 8% have content that is at an Advanced reading level. This means that in the eyes of Google, an Intermediate reading level is more “normal” and appropriate for this subject matter.

And as a result, Google may favor this type of content in the results because it believes that it better suits the audience and provides a better user experience for the user – or so the theory goes?

If you think about this logically, it actually makes sense. iPad tutorials shouldn’t be at an advanced reading level. You don’t want tutorials to be like research papers; using long sentence structures, a large vocabulary, and requiring advanced reading levels to comprehend the subject matter.

You want tutorials to be written so that your readers can easily understand the material; short sentence structures and simple vocabulary (basic reading level). However, the iPad itself is a technical device and by nature some of the jargon and vocabulary used to understand it is probably above the basic reading level, which is why the majority of sites are classified as Intermediate.

By doing this research ahead of time you’d know the reading level you want to achieve (Intermediate in this case) and the reading level you most likely wnat to avoid (Advanced in this example). In addition, after you’ve written and published the article you can see how Google classifies it and then make the necessary modifications to get the desired result.

Reviewing reading level for keyword targets is not a game changer, but it can help you write better content and it can be an effective and useful tool in an SEO analyst’s bag of tricks.

With Google’s bid-per-call feature in AdWords, you can now set separate max bids for clicks and calls. Many businesses benefit from customers calling their office or shop, for example if you own a local pizza joint or flower shop. Some people prefer to book a cruise over the phone, getting advice from the company’s operator.

Some businesses may even be willing to pay more for a phone call than a click. This post will give you an explanation of Google’s call extensions and their features, how to measure your phone calls, and how to bid on calls.

Displaying a phone number within your ads is recommended for most businesses that can effectively turn calls into sales. Here are just a few advantages to adding call extensions to your ads.

• Distinguishes your ad. Anything you can do to help your ad stick out is a positive.
• Makes it easier to contact you. If someone is searching for your phone number they can find it easier if it’s listed within your ad.
• Advanced call metrics. More data! Call metrics within AdWords gives you insight into your calls, including area code and call duration.

What Are Call Extensions and the Related Various Features?

You can add different features to your AdWords ads, which Google calls “ad extensions.” These include adding things like a Google Places listing or sitelinks to your ad.

Again, remember that adding any feature to your ad can help set it apart from others. To access these features, click the “Ad extensions” tab within the AdWords online interface. From there you can add call extensions.

There are several things to take note of when using call extensions. The following list of terms can become confusing if you don’t know what each means:

• Call extensions – Adds any phone number you choose to your ad.
• Google forwarding number – Select “Show a Google forwarding phone number on all eligible ads and devices” when setting up call extensions, to place a dynamic 800 number within your ad that Google uses to report data on your phone calls. If you do not select this option a phone number will only appear on “high end” mobile phones.
• Call metrics – The data which Google reports to you on your calls. Includes duration of call, area code, and other information.
• Click-to-call - This mobile-only feature allows users to call your phone number directly by clicking on your ad.

How to Measure the Effectiveness of Call Extensions

From within the Dimensions tab, pull down the View menu and select “Call details”. This report shows the data collected on each of your calls. The duration of the call and area code can give you great insight. Try downloading this report by clicking on the downward pointing arrow. Open the spreadsheet to analyze the data further.

You can also add phone details from the Column menu in the Campaigns tab. Data like number of phone calls and the average price-per-call can be viewed, down to the adgroup level.

Bid-per-calls

When call extensions were first introduced, all phone calls were charged $1. Google now allows you to bid separately on phone calls and clicks. Say Susie at your office has a very warm personality and does a great job of making sales over the phone.

A phone call may be worth more to you than a visit to your e-commerce site. Simply increase the bid on your phone calls. This can improve the position of your ad while still keeping the price-per-click the same.

As with any new feature within AdWords, it is important to test. So give call extensions a try but pay attention to the results. If sales increase, make sure to take Susie out for a nice cup of coffee!

The knee-jerk answer to this is, “Yes, people are looking for everything online.” To an extent this is a pretty fair answer; active consumers are connected to the internet with phones, tablets, computers… and have internet access just about all the time – from their phone, at McDonalds, with portable devices, etc.

Marketing has changed, and is continuing to do so, as more devices gain access to the Internet and more locations become practical places from which to connect. These days, people have a vast amount of information at their fingertips, a number of convenient ways to access it, and search engines act as gateways for finding what they need.

This move has caused a shift in advertising as companies scramble to get to where the people are – the yellow pages has moved online (and to a large extent is integrated into search engines); television shows, music, social activity has moved online.

All of this alters the format of display advertising and creates a struggle for companies to monetize from advertising because traditional methods are not suitable; magazines and newspapers have moved online (to the consternation of publishers because of the general “free-ness” of content on the internet).

Google continues to benefit from all of this, as it fuels the transition and answers people’s queries. If you check Google’s stock, you’ll probably see that a lot of the transition has already happened, as almost all of their revenue comes from advertisements that people click on (online).

But Are People Really Searching for My Business Online?

The easiest way to check whether people are searching for your particular business services or products is to use the Google Keyword Tool. From this tool you can see “Local Monthly Searches” which is how many times people search for a business like yours from the location you have selected (probably the United States if you left the default setting).

If you are logged into a Google account you can even change the columns to see the average cost per click advertisers pay when they bid on the term. Unless your product is very new, or if your product is not particularly well-defined in the market, you will probably see search volume for terms that are specifically for your product.

Search advertising is good at answering existing demand. Even if you have a particular niche that can be covered by a group of salespeople, you might supplement those efforts with search advertising. Answering inquiries for your products when they occur is probably going to work better than an unsolicited contact. Search advertising might also reveal unexpected or peripheral markets where you wouldn’t have a sales team assigned.

Probably a better question than “Are people searching for my business” would be “is it cost effective and practical for me to target search engine users?”

Is It Cost Effective and Practical for Me to Target Search Engine Users?

If you are just now asking whether people are searching for your business online, you might already be late to the game. But asking whether it makes sense to get involved with paid search/search advertising/AdWords/SEO/social media, is different than asking if people actually search online for your products.

I think I established that they most likely do, and it takes about five minutes to find out. But whether it is cost effective and practical to make an online marketing effort is a completely different topic. Obviously the answer varies by the type of business you have.

Are you a local business that wouldn’t typically advertise? Are you a franchise? Are you thinking of starting an e-commerce site? Is your business international? Is your business a branded household name? Is your business so large that it is more concerned with reputation management than acquiring customers through marketing?

For any business, here are a couple of easier questions to start with:

• Are your competitors advertising on search engines?
• Based on search query data, what kind of market share are you losing by not actively marketing with search engines?

Hopefully you’ve gained a little insight here on how to start thinking about your online marketing efforts.

Five Steps to Optimizing Local Search Marketing to Secure and Promote Your Brand

Yesterday we covered the first two steps of what a single location business can do to make their business stand out against a franchise operation with multiple outlets.

3. On Site Optimization

So now you have claimed all your local search listings, and optimized them to take full advantage of how their fields influence the local search results pages in search engines. Great! It’s time to do some high-level optimization to your own web page to appear clear and concise in the organic search results.

Write the homepage <title> and <meta> description so they both appear as complete thoughts instead of being cut off in mid-sentence. If the user is searching with the intent of going to your website, they will skip the local listings completely. In the search results page, your website needs to clear, concise, and grab the attention of the user. Most search engines allow a maximum of 60 characters for the title, and 160 characters for the description.

4. Paid Search and Competitor Terms

Other companies are allowed to bid on your brand name, however, they are not allowed to falsely represent themselves as your company.

Advertisers often use DKI (dynamic keyword insertion) in the titles of their ads as a way to increase the perceived relevance of an ad to the search query. This gets tricky when the search query is a branded term that fits in the ad title parameters.

In the ProFlowers.com AdWords account, a search for “University Flower Shop” would trigger a broad match hit of the keyphrase “Flower Shower”. Using DKI though, University Flower shop would appear as the ad title (because it fits in the 25 character parameter), meaning that people could click the ad wrongly thinking it would direct them to University Flower Shop.

DKI Ad Example: {KeyWord: Flower Shop}

When it comes to branded terms, competitors are not allowed to use your brand name in their ad title. Because of this, using DKI on competitor terms often gets advertisers into trouble. If you own a business and someone is using your business name in the title of their ad, you can contact the advertiser directly or send a trademark grievance to Google.

But there is more! If your brand name is too vague (as the business name “University Flower Shop” is above), it is okay for a competitor to use your brand name in an ad title. Because there are dozens of stores across the US named University Flower Shop, ProFlowers is not overstepping their bounds.

5. Bonus! Free Listing of Local “Offers” and “Deals” to Stand Out

Especially if your business is in a very competitive market, and everyone has optimized their local pages, it can be difficult to stand out. A new feature in both Google Places and Yelp is the ability to promote offers for (i.e. “Three free balloons with purchase of bouquet!”).

These are free to post, and give your listing more precious real estate on the search results page. And in Google Places & Google Maps, it puts a green star next to your listing which immediately attracts the searcher’s attention and makes you stand out from the others. An example of what the green star looks like next to Paid and Places ads can be seen in the image below.

This makes you more noticeable, attracts attention, and increases your chance of a click (since people love saving money). A definite Win-Win situation.

Five Steps to Optimizing Local Search Marketing to Secure and Promote Your Brand

Running a small business is tough stuff, and complicated even more when large national brands begin throwing their weight around and engage in questionable practices. Small business owners are left wondering what is and is not legal when it comes to aspects of online marketing. If you’re a small business owner, here’s what you can do to protect and promote your brand, and to help you recognize when another business has overstepped their bounds online.

Here’s the kind of thing that could happen. Last week I spoke with University Flower Shop of Ann Arbor, who were vexed that a national competitor of theirs, ProFlowers.com, had done some very questionable and shady marketing tactics to attain new business, at their expense.

ProFlowers.com claimed the Google Places page of UFSAA, and changed the phone number to their own. Because of this, anyone who tried to call UFSAA ended up talking to the customer service department at ProFlowers. This was shady indeed.

ProFlowers was also showing up in the AdWords listings for University Flower Shop terms. Again, UFSAA worried that they were losing business because of unfair advertising methods.

So as a small business, what can you do to protect and promote your brand, and what is unauthorized when it comes to aggressively competing on the search results page?

1. Secure Your Local Listings (Before Others Do)

The easiest way to prevent others from wrongly claiming your local listings is to beat them to it. Google Places makes it difficult to claim a listing that is not yours, however there are loopholes that shady-savvy marketers have discovered, as UFSAA found out.

Below I’ve segmented the local search sites into three levels of decreasing importance. When claiming your local listings, I suggest fully optimizing each tier (see Tip 2, below) before moving on to the next level, as they will have the greatest impact in creating better visibility for your brand on the search results page.

Tier 1: Google Places & Yelp.

Tier 2: Facebook, Yahoo Local, Bing Local

Tier 3: Yellow Pages, Localeze, Superpages, CitySearch, Yellowbook, and MapQuest.

2. Optimize Your Local Listings to Bolster Local SEO

Each interface has different fields to populate. As an example, I am focusing here on the options Google Places provides, and the significance of each.

Very simply, the more complete your Places page is, the more prominently it appears on the search results page, and the more likely the user is to find the information they were seeking. Including all this additional information and claiming your local listings bolsters your local SEO strategy, allowing you to dominate the organic search listings for highly relevant traffic.

Company, Address, Phone: These fields are the essence of local; alerting the search algorithm that you are indeed relevant and within the local radius of the search.
Note: Phone number is especially important in this instance, because local searches are much more likely to be done from a mobile device, and these users have a high propensity to call you.

Email & Website: Not essential, but including these fields allows the user to learn more information about your brand, and gives them an alternate means of contacting you.

Description: 200 characters are given to sum up your business. Depending on how well known your brand is, you may wish to write your slogan, give important details of your company (locally owned since 1985!), or attract users with short marketing copy (Lowest prices on flowers, guaranteed).

Categories: Five categories are given, and I recommend using them all. This helps both the search algorithm and the user understand your expertise better.

Photos & Videos: Boom! One of the biggest things you can do to increase your real estate on the search results page, and attract a users attention is to add photos (up to 10) and videos (up to 5) to the local listings page. Often times businesses do not include any good multimedia with their listings, making those that do stand out amongst the pack.

Hours of Operations: One of the main reasons people use local search is to find out if/when businesses are open. This is an optional field, but a very important one.

Payment Options: Letting the user know ahead of time what is accepted as payment is a good business practice. You’re a restaurant that doesn’t accept American Express? Please let me know so I’m not out of luck after ordering dinner.

Additional Details: This section is reserved for other details customers should know about your business. Do you validate parking? Include that. You have student discounts every Thursday? Include that. Accept competitors’ coupons or interesting trades? Include it!

Stay tuned for the other three tips… coming tomorrow!

At the end of the day, the goal of SEO is to establish your website as an authoritative “subject matter expert” on the topics and keyphrases you want to target; at least in the eyes of the search engines.  To this end, I wanted to share an excellent analogy I heard to help crystalize this notion.

In the early days of the Internet, webpages were conceived of much like academic publications (such as dissertations or journal articles), with descriptive titles and abstracts, deeply informative body content, and references to other authoritative work on the subject.  Translated to a webpage, these correspond quite nicely to the <title>, meta description, <body>, and links to related content.  At a very fundamental level, sites and pages continue to be thought of in this fashion by search engines.

Using this analogy is helpful to understand how a website might be viewed by a search engine as an “expert” on the topic(s) it covers (and thus be rewarded with higher rankings).  Expressed in academic terms, subject matter “expertness” is derived from two basic elements: the size of the body of work on the topic (i.e. the number of pages your website contains dedicated to that topic), and the degree to which that body of work is cited by other relevant, authoritative sources (i.e. links from other high-quality webpages on the subject – both internal and external).

Pretty cool, huh?  Now get out there and act like an expert!  Start fueling your SEO campaign with some high-quality, link-worthy content!

A few weeks back Scott and I had the pleasure of attending SMX East 2011. And now that the dust has settled we figured we’d share with you the most interesting things we learned. Drum roll…

Top 3 Take-Aways from SMX East 2011

3. Panda is here to stay

Not only were there several sessions dedicated entirely to Panda, but it felt like it was discussed in just about all of them. Panda was everywhere! With Panda affecting so many sites and shaking the foundation of so many online businesses, it’s no wonder it was such a hot topic (here is a good Panda Update Video that discusses how it changed SEO forever). There was a lot of interesting discussion and predictions focused around Panda, but what it came down to was that Panda is here to stay. In fact, almost everyone (to a certain degree) agreed that similar adjustments to the algorithm would continue to occur as Google tries to identify ways of filtering out “poor quality” websites. To help protect yourself from being affected by the next big quality update the experts recommended doing the following:

• Write content for your users, not the search engines
• Make sure your site is user friendly – include graphs, charts and images, while excluding excessive amounts of ads
• Remove error pages from your site

2. Schema.org – Don’t get left behind!

Schema.org was launched in June of 2011 and is an effort supported by all three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) to establish a uniform set of schema, such as html title tags. The idea is to establish one “standard” set of schema for webmasters to use in order to markup their webpages. Although at this point in time, the search engines do not rely heavily on the schema, the experts on the panel all agreed that it is the “way of the future” and several indicated that you will be left behind if you don’t begin to think about using the markup on your pages. This doesn’t mean you should do it now, especially if there isn’t an obvious ROI for your business. It may not make sense to redesign your entire site or CMS to include schema, but when you do overhaul your site or think about updating your CMS, you should definitely consider building in the ability to markup your pages with the new schema.

1. Don’t Ignore Social – It’s part of SEO!

As would be expected, there was also a lot of talk around social and its impact on SEO. One of our favorite sessions was called “Facebook, Twitter, and SEO.” A huge amount of tips and fun facts came out of this session – below are some of our favorites:

• Social media visibility = # of social media events (likes, shares, etc.) linking to a web page, accumulated over a defined time period
• Most popular social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc.) depend heavily upon audience and the type of site. Searchengineland.com’s most popular channels are as follows (in order) -  tweets, stumbleupon, shares, and +1′s
• Add Social Buttons to Your Site!
  • Twitter drove 7x more “engagement” and is on only 42.5% of sites
  • Facebook drove 3x more “engagement” and is only on 50.3% of sites
• Social media CAN be a huge time suck. Use technology/tools such as HooteSuite to help you be efficient and get the most out of your social media in as little of time as possible.

Across the board the experts agreed that while specific social signals, such as Facebook likes/shares, may or may not have a direct impact on the algorithm right now, it will be used to some degree in the near future. In addition, social media has a lot of other great benefits, such has helping build brand awareness.

Recap

In total we attended over 20 sessions and had a blast in New York. We hope to see you all there next year!

On August 16, 2011 Google announced the newest version of sitelinks. Sitelinks are links to pages on a website that are displayed below the link description on the search results page. Google explains that often times a broad search term is used even though a specific action is intended. If you search for a local pizza shop, your intention may be to order online. You enter “Ann Arbor pizza” as your query. The local pizza parlor shows up with a sitelink reading “Order Online.” You click the sitelink and go directly to their online ordering system. Now that cheesy goodness can get to your house in fewer clicks!

How do sitelinks work? Google first must determine that there is a strong likelihood that you are searching for a specific site. Say you enter “the met” as your search query. Google assumes you are trying to get information about The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will then display several sitelinks referring to The Met. The more confident Google is that you are searching for that specific site, the more sitelinks they will display. Currently sitelinks are automatically populated by Google. You can influence which pages on your site show up as sitelinks but Google will have the final say.

So what does this mean for your site? Say there is space for ten organic results in Google’s search results page. If someone searches for the name of your company, Google may show links from your site in the top eight results. With the new sitelinks, Google could now take several of those results and include them within their two column sitelinks. Now you have the top result, six sitelinks, and then one more organic link below the sitelinks (equaling the original eight). This now creates more space for other results such as news articles or other mentions of your company on the first page of results.

It is now even more important to monitor what results are showing up for your company’s branded terms. Results that had a lower ranking may now be displayed on the first page of results. Monitoring blogs and news results is one way to keep an eye on what pages may be displayed. Make sure your company is actively sharing and promoting good press and reviews. This can help ensure your company has a positive presence on page one.