The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

A simple way to optimize your Adwords PPC campaign, is to run regularly scheduled search query reports.

What is a “search query report,” you ask?  A search query report is available through the Adwords interface, and it shows the actual search queries people typed in before clicking on one of your ads. While the reports leave something to be desired in terms of their level of detail, they can still be very useful. The problem is that some of the keywords get lumped together under the heading, “x other unique queries.” That being said, the queries that are actually shown can be surprising and informative at times.

New Adwords users often think that their ads will only show up when someone searches for the keywords exactly as they enter them into Adwords, but that’s not usually the case. Whenever you “broad match,” or “phrase match,” a keyword, you leave the door open for many different variations on the search phrase to trigger your ad to display.

Broad matching in particular, gives Google a lot of room to show your ad for a wide range of different queries. I’ve seen where Google completely drops one of the keywords in a broad matched phrase. An example would be:

Keyword: bright blue widgets
Search phrase that displays ad: blue widgets

Google can also change your broad matched keywords based upon algorithmic ways that it defines concepts. This can get scary at times. To prevent your ads from showing up for keywords you don’t want, run search query reports regularly; and either use “negative keywords” to get rid of terms you don’t want, or take out the broad matched keywords replacing them with more accurate phrase matched keywords.

Don’t rule out the “broad match” altogether though, because broad matching can sometimes bring in cheaper conversion costs by showing your ad for search queries you hadn’t thought of targeting.

To run a search query report while in the Adwords interface, click on the “Reports” tab, “Create a new report,” then choose the “search query performance” radio button, and define the rest of the options.

When evaluating site content, it’s vital to, have a look at the title tags when doing SEO. If the title tags don’t contain keywords relevant to the content of the web page, then it has a significantly lower chance of showing up in the search results. Unfortunately, many web designers these days don’t know anything about search engine optimization. A common misconception is that your site will show up for its keywords when you add them in it’s “Meta tags.” The truth is, that meta tags are one of the least effective things you can do to improve your site’s search results.

Below are a few guidelines for writing effective title tags, when we do SEO at Reciprocal Consulting, we evaluate many factor of “on-page” optimization, and help to make your site as search engine friendly as possible.

• Don’t exceed 10-12 words in the title tag.
• Make sure that the keywords you’re targeting are actually represented in content on the page.
• For more competitive keywords, keep it short and sweet.
• For less competitive keywords, or when you’re not targeting anything specific, shoot for the “long tail” by having longer title tags.
• Think about clickthrough rates and visitor perception - the title tag is the first thing they will see in the search results, so it helps if it has meaning, rather than just a bunch of keywords mashed together. You want visitors to click on the search result, not ignore it as spam.

Did you know that you can change your domain name and still keep your search engine rankings?

Changing your domain name is not something we recommend to do if it is avoidable, Google doesn’t recommend it either, but we recently pulled it off when we had to change our main website’s domain name from foremanpike.com to reciprocalconsulting.com.

The problem was that we had top rankings in Google for “internet marketing firms” and many other keyword phrases we were targeting. We knew that it was important to do 301 redirects, but what other factors were involved. Here are a few we had to consider:

• Domain “trust”
• Content changes
• Duplicate content
• Apache and hosting issues
• Sitemap issues

Taking those factors into consideration, we were able to move our site to the new domain name with only about a 30 day interruption in our rankings. In fact, we are now ranking better than ever with the brand new domain name! If changing domain names and keeping your search engine rankings is something you need help with, feel free to contact us about it.

A lot of Business owners I know are getting fed up with the “Yellowpages mafia” that overcharge for their advertising. They think there are no alternative means of reaching their local market. They know people look up their products or services on the internet, but who wants to spend money advertising a local business on the World Wide Web? Wouldn’t you be paying for ads that show up in China?

No. The truth is, Yahoo! and Google have some great tools for targeting local communities with search engine marketing. Say that you’re an attorney, and you want to target your “Personal Injury” ads to your local city or state - in Google Adwords, this is a task that’s easily accomplished. Sometimes we find that it takes a little fine tuning to balance the size of the area you want to cover with the amount of traffic you want to get. The bottom line is return of investment, and Google’s local targeting options definitely increase ROI when you’re trying to reach that small audience.

Here are some examples of how local targeting works:

1. If we don’t use Google’s local targeting tools on a campaign, we need to specify keywords with the names of the localities in them, for example: “Philadelphia personal injury lawyers” or “personal injury lawyer in PA” - as you can see there are infinite possible combinations of these keyword phrases that grow exponentially as you include more city and state names. These ads could potentially show anywhere in the US, but we exclude non-relevant searches by requiring the local term in the search itself. These campaigns can get very big, and we still use them alongside locally targeted campaigns, because they can catch some traffic that local targeting misses.
2. With Google’s built-in local targeting tool, we can specify a radius, or even city names or areas, where we want the ads to show up. In other words, if we only want the ads to show for Google searchers in Philadelphia, we can specify that. Then we can target more broad keyword phrases, like “personal injury lawyers” (without the locality name).

Keep in mind that Google’s tools aren’t perfect. Experienced search engine marketing professionals know which settings work best for which types of campaigns. Once we go through the exhaustive process of setting up these types of campaigns, we start tacking conversions and modifying bids on all of the keyword combinations over time to increase your ROI.

Welcome to our blog. We feel that it’s important to keep up with current events, and to keep our clients and friends up to date as well. That’s the driving force behind establishing the blog. Blogging is a great format for generating content and interacting with the public.

Here we can let you know what interesting things we’re working on, and interact with the social media networks on the web that we like to participate in, like Sphinn, MyBlogLog, and Technorati. Social media is such a big part of what we do these days that not having a blog is a crime! Here are some of the topics we plan on discussing:

Reciprocal News
Internet Marketing
Reputation Management
Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Competitive Intelligence
Viral Marketing
And More!

So whether you’re here looking for information on internet marketing, our services, or reputable professionals to network with, you’ve found a good place. Welcome!