Author Archives: rholmes

AdWords vs. SEO…a Surprising Winner?

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We hear it all the time from prospective clients, “I’m willing to use AdWords for a while until the SEO takes hold; I’ll turn off AdWords as soon as we rank organically for our important keywords.” This has been a tried and true strategy for many years—pay for traffic until the free traffic starts rolling in. And, it’s how many Internet marketers actually sell their bosses/clients on getting started with AdWords. Everyone has the dream of not having to pay Google...just having your homepage at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), kicking back, and watching the money pile up.

However, AdWords shouldn't be considered simply a bridge to the promised land of SEO. It’s a real contender and should be just one of the tools used to drive traffic to your site. Here’s why:

AdWords Often Clicked More Than Organic Results
AdWords is taking more and more screen real estate in Google’s SERPs. They are giving more and more tools to AdWords users to make their ads bigger and bigger: between location extensions, phone extensions, sitemap extensions, Google+ extensions, and image extensions, more and more ads are larger than just a headline, two lines of text and a URL.

Ever Expanding Screen Real Estate
More and more often, searchers on Google are seeing results that look like the screen shot

AdWords vs Organic Screen Real Estate 300x244 AdWords vs. SEO...a Surprising Winner?

Screen shot on my 13” laptop for the keyword
“basement water cleanup.

to the right; the organic results are pushed lower and lower by the ever-expanding ad sizes.

WordSteam, a PPC consulting company, noticed this trend and decided to do some research. Their results were quite surprising. They found that for highly commercial keywords (example: “basement water cleanup”), “Clicks on paid search listings beat out organic clicks by nearly a 2:1 margin for keywords with high commercial intent in the US.” Check out their very nice info graphic on their results.

Highly Relevant Results
How can this be? If the screen shot above isn’t enough to convince you ads can get more clicks that organic, consider this: more and more people are becoming good at playing the “AdWords game.” As the competition heats up, the players’ skill level tends to rise. More and more of those using AdWords are starting to use best practices: small ad groups of highly related keywords paired with well crafted ads that point to highly relevant landing pages. All of this means that the ads are ever more appealing (“hmmm...that looks exactly like what I’m looking for...”) and more often provide the information the searcher is looking for. And reviewing my Psych 101 textbook, that positive reinforcement means that people begin to repeat the clicking-on-ads behavior more often.

WordStream points out many other reasons AdWords is winning the click war. However, they make the important point: on the whole there are more clicks on organic results than on paid results. However, they immediately point out that not all keywords are equal and that informational queries like “who was the 18th president of the US?” tend to not have many ads and organic gets the clicks. However, for people looking to find the closest place to buy self-leveling concrete may find the organic search results buried under a large number of Home Depot and Menards ads.

Positive ROI Required
But just because ads get a lot of clicks doesn’t make AdWords a good business decision; you have to keep the bottom line in mind. And the goal of a positive ROI is getting more and more difficult due to the increased and highly skilled competition.
However, if you know what you’re doing with AdWords, do excellent keyword research, organize your campaigns well, write compelling ads that point to compelling, highly related landing pages that do a great job of selling, you will make money. And make no mistake, there are a lot of companies that make a great deal of money with enormous ROI even in today’s competitive market.

So, if your AdWords account is making a positive ROI, why would you turn it off, even if your SEO is bearing fruit and you’re getting more organic traffic? We have never seen a client ever follow through on the “shut down AdWords after my SEO kicks in.”

headshot 150x150 AdWords vs. SEO...a Surprising Winner?Rod Holmes is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm. You can read more of his thoughts at ChicagoStyleSEO.com/blog/ or on Twitter: @chicagostyleseo

What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Counts

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By the number of flyers stuck to my front door, sticking out of my mailbox, and tucked under the wiper blade of my car... I think I’m safe in saying that my local restaurants, cleaning ladies, roofers, grocery stores, dry cleaners, window washers, painters, etc, etc, Sandwich Board 300x199 What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Countsetc are desperate for ways to stay in front of potential customers.

There is a way to stay in front of potential customers online that likely costs less than paying people spam houses and cars in the neighborhood. Two well known companies give you the tools to put your ads in front of targeted audiences at very low prices: Facebook and Google.

Facebook - Targeted Advertising on the Cheap

Facebook allows you to choose the people you want to target very carefully. You can select gender, age, location, and even get into what they like and don’t like. If you know your target market’s demographics, using Facebook’s simple system, you simply focus in on those people, create a very simple ad that even has an image in it, and your ads begin appearing in the right-hand column of the targeted people’s Facebook pages.

Yes, you do have to pay for these ads, but like most online ads these days, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. And, part of the reason Facebook’s stock has slid nearly 20% in two days is because people know that the only 5 in 10,000 people click on those ads. That’s potentially 9,995 people seeing your ad without you paying a dime!

Bonus Info: People burn out on Facebook ads very quickly—they literally stop noticing them because they see the same ad dozens of times a day. To prevent ad burn out, rotate your ads. Facebook ads are easy to make, so make several and rotate them regularly.

Google’s Remarketing – Visibility for Pennies

Google has a great AdWords product that allows you to put a cookie on the browser of anyone who visits your site. This is referred to as putting these visitors into your remarketing audience. When these visitors go to another site that has advertising delivered by Google—there are over 1 million websites and hundreds of millions of pages that have ads delivered by the online advertising giant—Google can see they’re in your audience and will display your ads to them.

What could be better than staying in front of people who have been to your site—they are in some way interested in your products and services. The vast majority of people do not become a customer on their first visit—stay in front of them and encourage them to come back.

Like Facebook, Google gives you some great tools to make very powerful ads. And like Facebook, they only charge you if/when someone clicks on the ad. Maybe one of the reasons Google’s stock is doing better than Facebook’s is because on average ads on Google’s display advertising system are clicked on 40 out of every 10,000 views.

Bonus Info: Your ads only begin showing up after 500 people are in your audience, so get the code on your website ASAP to begin building that audience. Don’t let creating the perfect ad hold you back. Make a really simple ad to begin with—you can build the real ads later.

Visibility Still Matters

Lemonade Stand 300x199 What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility Counts

Any kid who moves her lemonade stand to the corner of two busy streets can tell the GM geniuses, you need to be visible to sell.

The high-paid marketers at GM don’t seem to understand that staying in front of potential customers is important. Last week they very publicly announced that they were going to stop advertising on Facebook because it wasn’t selling cars.

Internet marketers tend to focus on the aspects of online marketing that are quantifiable.  It’s what they love about Internet marketing—everything can be measured. This measurability tends to blind Internet marketers to the fact that visibility and branding still have an important role to play, even it can’t be measured to tenths of percents.

Thanks to Todd Bates for sharing the sandwich board photo and Geoff Sowery for sharing the lemonade stand photo via the Creative Commons license.

headshot 150x150 What General Motors Doesn’t Understand—Visibility CountsBIO

Rod Holmes is a partner at Chicago Style SEO, a full service Internet marketing firm. You can read more of his thoughts at ChicagoStyleSEO.com/blog/ or on Twitter: @chicagostyleseo