Friday, July 26, 2013

Pay Per Click Advertising



Pay Per Click Overview

Pay Per Click or PPC mar­ket­ing is still one of the most pop­u­lar meth­ods when it comes to dig­i­tal ad­ver­tis­ing. PPC mar­ket­ing has been proven to bring in lots of traf­fic to a web­site with lit­tle in­vest­ment and risk. The risk is min­i­mal be­cause not only do you con­trol your bud­get but you’re go­ing to be us­ing key­words and/or key­word phrases that you cre­ate in your PPC mar­ket­ing cam­paign.
When it comes to us­ing a PPC mar­ket­ing cam­paign you can ex­pect to not only save money on this type of ad­ver­tis­ing, but you can also ex­pect to see a higher re­turn on your in­vest­ment (ROI). As time goes by there are changes that are go­ing to need to be made to your PPC cam­paign so that it stays both true and cur­rent. Con­tact us now for more in­for­ma­tion.
Plat­forms Ser­viced: Google Ad­words, Face­book, Bing, Ya­hoo 

Adwords Campaign Attributes

  • Multivariant Testing (A/B Testing)
  • Keyword Development and Generation
  • Landing Page Creation and Optimization
  • Return on Investment Tracking
  • Quality Score Optimization > 5
  • Advanced Automated Reporting
  • Multiple conversion tracking
  • Automated Bid Management
  • Cost and Conversion Forecasting
  • Conversion Metrics
  • Automatic Budget Management
  • Unique Seasonality Decisioning
  • Long Tail Term bidding
  • Automated algorithm bidding
  • Cost per click (CPC)

Pay Per Click Ideology

Experience, Innovation, and Presentation are the three pillars of success for your pay-per-click marketing campaigns and Lechlak has a strong foundation in all three. Contact us today to see how our PPC managers can grow your business.

Our PPC Management Methodology

Hir­ing Lech­lak puts your com­pany in a unique po­si­tion to achieve re­sults to­day while hav­ing cam­paigns de­vel­oped for fu­ture goals. Suc­cess­ful PPC man­age­ment ser­vices re­quire that the agency has a full un­der­stand­ing of the client’s busi­ness model and fu­ture im­ple­men­ta­tions so that the brand of your com­pany grows ex­po­nen­tially.
Be­fore we even con­sider be­gin­ning the analy­sis stage of any cam­paign we talk with our clients to gain an un­der­stand­ing of their busi­ness and iden­tify spe­cific goals us­ing data de­rived from past cam­paigns, prod­uct mar­gins, sea­son­al­ity, and com­pet­i­tive en­vi­ron­men­tal fac­tors. We dis­cuss your time­line and es­tab­lish ex­pec­ta­tions based upon that time­line, bud­get, and com­pe­ti­tion for goals. Once Ad­word goals and ex­pec­ta­tions are set we move on to the fol­low­ing:
lechlak-ppc-campaign-management

Pay Per Click Process

1

Analysis & Discovery/ Planning & Strategy

We re­search all el­e­ments of your busi­ness and ag­gres­sively en­gage with your team to learn every­thing about your com­pany: his­tor­i­cal ad­ver­tise­ments, cur­rent and fu­ture goals, cur­rent po­si­tion in the mar­ket­place both on­line and of­fline, sea­sonal trends, and me­dia pres­ence. Sec­ondly, we do com­peti­tor re­search ex­am­in­ing your com­pe­ti­tions’ key­words, ads, and land­ing pages to help us dif­fer­en­ti­ate your place within the paid search realm. We want you rank­ing bet­ter with­out pay­ing an ex­u­ber­ant amount. There are sweet spots that we can tar­get rather than the de­cep­tive num­ber 1 spot which nor­mally costs a con­sid­er­able amount more be­cause every­one wants to be num­ber 1.

Keyword & Competitive Research

Lech­lak’s Ad­word and PPC Strat­egy per­forms a com­pre­hen­sive key­word analy­sis across all of the ma­jor search en­gines ( Google, Ya­hoo, Bing, Ask ) us­ing ex­pert key­word re­search tools avail­able. We dis­cover the key­words which are more likely to con­vert to sales or leads and op­ti­mize ac­cord­ing them ac­cord­ing to your PPC cam­paign goals while main­tain­ing a tight bud­get. We also look for key­words that are a phrase or short sen­tence also known as a long-tail key­words have high po­ten­tial to bring tar­geted cus­tomers to your web site. Long-tail key­words are of­ten ben­e­fi­cial to tar­get be­cause of re­duced cost and ef­fort that it takes to gain a bet­ter rank­ing.
2
3

Development

Based on our re­search and your di­rect in­put, we de­velop a holis­tic strat­egy which in­cludes key­word de­vel­op­ment, ad­ver­tise­ment cre­ation, con­tent cre­ation, in­for­ma­tion ar­chi­tec­ture, op­ti­mized cam­paign struc­ture, and land­ing page cre­ation and op­ti­miza­tion. Each of these el­e­ments is strate­gi­cally de­vel­oped so that dur­ing the course of your cam­paigns we can make in­formed busi­ness de­ci­sions to bet­ter al­lo­cate funds dri­ving a higher ROI and im­proved leads. This is where we de­velop our AB mul­ti­vari­ate test­ing so we can ef­fec­tively make changes based upon sta­tis­tics found in Google An­a­lyt­ics.

Set Up & Deploy

Lever­ag­ing in­tel­li­gence gath­ered dur­ing analy­sis, we move on to re­fin­ing key­word lists, cre­at­ing ad­ver­tise­ments, gen­er­at­ing a cus­tom strat­egy for Ad­words, Bing, or Face­book cam­paign struc­ture, key­word bids, in­for­ma­tion ar­chi­tec­ture, and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels in­clud­ing search queries, search net­works, and dis­play net­works. Af­ter an ex­ten­sive QA process where we ad­just cam­paign set­tings and test the cam­paign track­ing mech­a­nisms we have put in place: Google An­a­lyt­ics, Hub­spot an­a­lyt­ics, con­ver­sion track­ing, goal track­ing, and event track­ing,  we push your cam­paigns live.
4
5

Optimize & Refinement

The core of any paid search cam­paign will be its flex­i­bil­ity to test, re­fine, and op­ti­mize re­sults within a time­line that is more rapid than any other medium. Your changes can be re­flected within min­utes to hours de­pend­ing on the mod­i­fi­ca­tions per­formed. With on­go­ing re­fine­ment, your cam­paign will re­ceive daily nim­ble changes to more com­pre­hen­sive ac­count trans­for­ma­tions dur­ing the life­time of your cam­paign. Us­ing the cam­paign goals, per­for­mance data, and test­ing re­sults we are able to ap­proach each ad­just­ment as an in­formed busi­ness de­ci­sion to reach your fu­ture goals. These de­ci­sions can im­pact every­thing from key­words, key­word bids, land­ing page de­signs, or ad group bud­gets. The com­pre­hen­sive op­ti­miza­tion process is an on­go­ing pur­suit through­out the life of the Ad­words, Ya­hoo, Bing, or Face­book cam­paign. Dur­ing this time we will be con­cur­rently mon­i­tor­ing, test­ing and re­fin­ing all el­e­ments of the cam­paign.

Why Buy Traffic with PPC?

The abil­ity to pur­chase traf­fic and trans­late that into leads with lit­tle start-up costs makes PPC search en­gines the per­fect means to use on short run cam­paigns for we­bi­nars, niche mar­kets, sea­sonal traf­fic, and tight dead­lines. You also can use pay per click ad­ver­tise­ment s for:
  • the ability to turn the traffic off once a particular campaign is finished,
  • calculating return-on-investment through defined reporting mechanisms
  • generating traffic without substantial web site modification, if any
pay-per-click-chart1

Monday, July 22, 2013

SEO Doesn't Need to Be So Complicated

If you spend much time reading blogs, you're probably aware that there are some truly brilliant minds within the SEO field. While it's fascinating to read what the guys and gals at the cutting edge of this field are up to, it can also be intimidating. But if you’re a business owner or just dabbling in internet marketing, they you feel like SEO is something that's beyond your grasp.

While it may be true that whatever specific strategy you’re reading about is going to be too difficult for you to implement right now, that doesn't mean you have to completely give up on SEO. On the contrary, for the majority of business owners with a website, there are all kinds of simple things you can do to increase search engine traffic.

To show you just how many fairly simple but effective SEO opportunities are available, let's go over three right now:

Expand at Least One Page on Your Site

Whether your site has ten pages or several thousand, some of those pages are going to be focused on a specific product or service. Although you've probably already got some great information on them, on virtually every business website, there's always room on these pages for improvement.

If you're wondering why you should add more information to at least one page on your site, the answer is actually simpler than you may expect. Not only will it make it more compelling to readers, but also because you'll have more content, that specific page is likely to attract more visitors.

Register With Google Webmaster Tools

Although it's completely free, plenty of business owners haven't taken the few minutes needed to sign up for Google's suite of analytics tools. If you were previously on the fence about whether or not there's anything to gain from these tools, you'll definitely benefit from seeing how Google accesses and views your content, as well as getting much more data about your site.

Offer to Write a Guest Post

A great way to spread awareness about your site is to write a post for another blog. Not only will this help with your SEO efforts, but it will also bring direct readers. For example, if you specialize in septic inspections, reach out to a real estate blog and ask if they'd like you to write a post about what first time homebuyers need to know in terms of the septic system of the house they're considering.

Although the time may come when it makes sense for you to get involved in some very advanced SEO efforts, as you can see from the above examples, you can actually accomplish a lot just by getting started with some basic but proven tactics.

Adrienne Erin is a social media and internet marketer who loves to share the tips she’s picked up over years spent growing with the industry. She writes regularly for Search Engine People and SiteProNews.


Friday, July 19, 2013

3 Native SEO-Friendly Features in WordPress You Should Definitely Care About



With over 16% of the web powered by WordPress, the popular open-source blogging platform turned CMS is now viewed as a viable alternative to more traditional content management systems and holds more than 50% market-share in the CMS market, including the very blog you are reading right now. Other than it’s apparent widespread use, what is so compelling about WordPress?

When considering a CMS, WordPress' ease of use is often the first selling point to come to mind, and understandably too. Most people want a website that just works so they can focus on their core business, whether that be blogging, a small business, or a hobby. Another desirable element of WordPress, however, is the
SEO-friendly nature of it's architecture

Permalinks and Pretty URLs

The first feature to come to mind is WordPress' use of permalinks, and more specifically, it's built-in clean URL structure also known as "pretty URLs." Pretty URLs generally use the category and title of your post or page to form the URL, rather than a random character string. To adjust or customize the permalink structure in the WordPress Dashboard, go to Settings > Permalinks. On older versions of WordPress, the default structure included query strings (i.e.
http://example.com/?p=197?). The newest versions of WordPress, however, use the ‘pretty’ URL structure by default, albeit a long one: http://example.com/blog/year/dd/mm/post-title/ for posts and http://example.com/about-us/ for pages.

If you don’t have too many blog posts, it may be advisable to shorten this structure (using the ‘Custom Structure’ option in your Permalinks Settings) to something like:
http://example.com/blog/post-title/, because that will make it easier on the search engines to correlate your topic (rather than going through multiple levels of directories of dates or categories).

The reason the default structure uses the date and/or category in the URL is to make it faster for the server to search the MySQL database to find the correct post to serve back to the end user, resulting in faster load times. This is usually only a difference of milliseconds, however, unless you have thousands of blog posts, in which case the category/date structure would definitely be advisable.

Spam Control



Always require comments to be moderated before approval, and sign up for a spam filter such as
Akismet. If you allow comments to post without approval, you open yourself up to comment spam, whose mostly irrelevant and even downright disreputable backlinks can make your site appear disreputable, and not just in the eyes of search engines, but your readers as well. It’s not a good first impression to allow someone (or automated software!) to comment about viagra on a post about how to prepare your favorite brownie recipe.

As you moderate comments, make sure you pay close attention to comments coming through. Akismet will need to ‘learn’ your site at first, so you may have some spam get through or some legitimate comments be held for moderation.

Titles

Last but not least, pay attention to your titles! Under Settings > General, you’ll be able to change the default title for your entire site. For the titles of your pages and posts, WordPress will take the title of that page or post followed by the default title of your site. This is why it is recommended to always using your company name and a single keyword for your default site title, otherwise you may accidentally “keyword stuff” your page and post titles, upon which Google may not smile so kindly.

Of course there are many plugins which further customize your control over every aspect and can
improve the websiteSEO. As you become more aware of your site SEO and want to explore more, you can find many good, reputable SEO plugins on the WordPress.org plugin repository.

What other SEO features in WordPress do you like? Which plugins are your favorites? Share in the comments so everyone can benefit.

Monday, July 15, 2013

3 Ways to Improve Your Blog Posts

Whether you've been blogging for a few weeks or several years, you're probably always looking for ways to improve your writing and the overall quality of the posts you publish. Although blogging is definitely harder than many people realize, the good news is improving your writing doesn't have to be a painful process.

Instead, you can get a lot of mileage out of some fairly simple tweaks. If you're wondering exactly what you should be focused on in order to improve, the following three tips will help:

Use Analytics

One of the main goals of blogging is to maximize engagement with your audience. As a result, you want to get as much data about their habits as possible. Fortunately, free tools like Google Analytics make it very easy to do just that. And once you start collecting this information, you'll be able to see the types of posts that attract the highest levels of engagement, as well as which ones people don't pay much attention to.

While you're obviously not going to copy yourself over and over, having this information in front of you will make it possible for you to find patterns and optimize your future blogging efforts based on what's most likely to deliver the best results.

Stick to Plain Language

One of the most common mistakes that new bloggers make is thinking that they need to write with very formal and academic language. In reality, what most readers want is useful information that's easy to digest. Since overly complicated language means they're going to have to slow down to absorb what they're reading, you can prevent your readers from getting frustrated by sticking to a conversational tone.

Using simple language makes your content easier to find, too. If someone is having substance abuse trouble and seeking a rehab center, they aren’t going to take the time to search for “substance abuse detoxification and rehabilitation programs in Florida” – they’ll just search “alcohol rehab centers in Florida.” Write like your readers do, and you’ll be easier to find.

Break Up Paragraphs

Not only do people prefer language that's easy to absorb, they also want to read it in a format that doesn't get in the way of enjoyment. By taking advantage of whitespace and breaking your content up into plenty of paragraphs, you won't scare readers off when they see a huge block of text.

The great thing about the ongoing nature of blogging is there's always an opportunity for you to write something that's even better than what you've done before. While publishing great content is always going to require hard work, as long as you have a good attitude and remember to put the above tips into action, you'll find that your blogging efforts continue to move in the right direction.


Adrienne Erin is a social media and internet marketer who loves to share the tips she’s picked up over years spent growing with the industry. She writes regularly for Search Engine People and SiteProNews.

Friday, July 12, 2013

How to be Smart with Your SEO

When the concept of SEO first emerged, it seemed as though it caught fire overnight. Suddenly, everyone knew the “great secret” of Internet success.

Unethical or misinformed Internet marketers began to take advantage of keywords and key phrases, stuffing as many as possible into a nonsensical page of content designed only to get the search engines to rank the page more highly.

As a result, SEO became a nasty word for many people who valued doing business honestly. It wasn’t long before the search engines revised their algorithms to weed out these spammers. Today, SEO has reclaimed its rightful place as a powerful online marketing tool. The trouble is, few people seem to understand how to do it the smart way.  

A Shift Away from the Search Engines
Yes, the entire point of SEO is to get attention from the search engines, but savvy SEO people know that isn’t the end game. After the change in algorithm, many people began to understand what successful online personas knew all along: it’s not the search engines who buy products.

Today’s SEO — truly smart SEO — is written for the consumer. Webmasters and site owners are increasingly relying on clean, clever website coding, viral content, and social media to increase their ranking with Google. They are steering away from the keyword stuffing that makes a website painful to read. They are focusing on the people who will actually be making a decision to take an action.

Getting it Done
Now, all this isn’t to say that keywords are now worthless. They aren’t. If you’re selling a GPS paving control system, then you better mention it somewhere on your website. The difference is, you don’t need to try to mention it in every other sentence — or even more than two or three times on an entire page.

So here’s how you do it: Think about what your consumer base would find interesting or helpful, and then come up with an angle that ties it back to your products or services. Then just write as if you were speaking to a friend. Use casual, approachable language, but do keep it professional.

If your topic really is relevant to your product, then your keyword will naturally work its way into your content throughout the conversation. You don’t have to force it, make it obvious, or otherwise shove it down your readers’ throat.

The best part is if you create content that people actually want to read and enjoy reading, you’re bound to find they're willing to share it. A really stellar post could go viral, and you’ll be getting the best kind of search engine attention there is: organic backlinks that tell the search engine your site is hot and relevant.

Adrienne Erin is a social media and internet marketer who loves to share the tips she’s picked up over years spent growing with the industry. She writes regularly for Search Engine People and SiteProNews.

Friday, July 5, 2013

Top 5 Tips for optimising your chances of a prime Google Places spot


From a list it and wait approach not so long ago, to the fiercely competitive space it is today, Google Places is gives your local business what Small Business SEO cannot, a featured spot (even more "featured" with recent changes) on page one.
Google Places SEO is now more important than ever with more than 500 000 new smart phone activations daily in the US alone, with 73% of all online purchase activity based in local searches and 82% of traffic through your door or on the phone via searches, there is nowhere better to be than in a Google Place!
Top 5 Tips for Google Place Success
1.      Go the whole hog and optimise your Google places page to the fullest!  Some research indicates that the more detail you add, the better your "local business search" score. 
·         All required fields – and remember that the phone number is vital
·         Focus on 1 "best fit" category
·         Authentic email address
·         Linked Website
·         Brief, meaty, natural description including keywords, product/brand names and geographical locations.  Be specific about your business, don't have the same wording as any other business in your category.
·         Include hours of operation
·         Include at least one method of payment
·         Fill all photo slots
·         Add at least one video
·         Fill in unique "additional details"

2.      Verify it with other reputable directories
Hotfrog, TrueLocal, Bing, Foursquare, Yellow or White Pages – any reputable high authority directory will help to verify your business listing, not to mention provide valuable followed links. 
3.      Use identical address and phone data
If you're on Smith Street on Places, don't be on Smith St on Google + and Corner of Smith and West streets on your website.

4.      Where possible, use Google Business Photos
Rolling out at the moment is Google Business Photos, Google Street view for inside your business – literally.  The street view team comes to your workplace or retail outlet and does a 360 degree video to upload to your page.  Very new, very chic and rolling out to a Google Place near you!

5.      Review, review, review – the three key reviews to conduct
Review type 1: Review your listing, update it, keep it fresh and add valuable content whenever possible.
Review type 2: Review your listing's performance and experiment with tweaks and content optimisation options
Review type 3:  Customer reviews. This is the most important review.  Show Google that your Place is relevant and popular by encouraging all customers to review your place.  Include the link in your emails, on your website and ask in person as your customers leave your place of business.

Google Places gives you the kind of search results you may never be able to achieve with plain local business SEO or content marketing.  Spend some time on your listing and be sure to get it just right.


Author Note:

Dana Flannery is an online marketing consultant with Talk About Creative.  Talk About Creative specialises in online marketing for small business including SEO without monthly fees.  Talk About Creative does Social MediaMarketing, Branding, SEO Content and Copywriting in Brisbane, Australia.