Categories
PPC

Cutting your costs on Adwords

Google Adwords is a great way to advertise your business or specific products and services. It allows you to create adverts that are triggered by someone doing a search for the keywords you have bid on.

Although Adwords can be very effective, it can also be very expensive, especially if you are bidding on competitive keywords and phrases and targeting generic locations. You need to be able to set the Adwords campaigns correctly to cut down on wasted clicks. If you are targeting too many generic phrases you may find that you are having clicks through to your site (that costs you money) that are never going to convert as you do not offer what the customer is looking for.

There are many ways to reduce your spend on Adwords whilst still receiving a good number of clicks, you just need to qualify the traffic to your site.

Checking bounce rates etc will help you establish which of your keywords are working and which are not.

Categories
Web Design

Creating an easy to use website

When developing a website you need to consider many points. 1) Does it look and feel how you want it to? 2) Is it user friendly and easy to use? 3) Is it SEO friendly and will rank on the search engines and? 4) Have you got all the functionality that you need?

It is worth making a note of these questions so you can note what you want under each heading. It may be that your website is ecommerce based, meaning you want people to buy online, then your focus will be different to that of a site trying to gain enquiries.

It can be easy to get carried away with adding in functionality to a site that may not be needed. The more functionality the more to go wrong, so my advice is to keep it simple to start with and then build on it once you know what your customers need and want.

Categories
Web Design

Choosing a web designer

When it comes to choosing a web designer, you need to establish what is important to you. It may be that price is the main factor and you want something for as cheap as possible, or it may be that money is not really the main concern and quality and speed are most important.

Once you have a rough idea of what you want to accomplish with your website you can start to obtain quotes from web designers. Some designers will design and program a website others will only design it in which case you would need to find a programmer too. Ideally you want to use a company or individual that can offer both otherwise you may have issues with communication between the two.

Be wary of always going with the cheapest quote you have as you may find that quality suffers because of it. Always ask to see working examples of work they have created and possibly even to speak to some of their past or current clients to get a review.

Categories
PPC

Are you spending enough on Google Adwords?

Google Adwords is a form of online marketing where you can create adverts that link through to your website or show a contact number for your business. With the usual set up of Adwords you will set a daily budget for each campaign such as £10. Within each campaign you will create ad groups which will contain keywords. These keywords can then be set either a group maximum cost per click or individual.

Some competitive keywords can cost well over £10 for each click, meaning if you have a low budget and chose to target these phrases your ads may turn off completely after only one visit to your site.

If you can only afford a small daily budget then you are better off targeting more niche keywords that may not have as much search traffic but will cost a lot less to target. If you really want to target the costly keywords then you will need to either give these words a budget of their own or increase you daily budget across the whole campaign.

Categories
Web Marketing

Fresh content for your website

Fresh, relevant content is vital to improving your website marketing. When Google or the other search engines crawl your website, they look to see if there is any new content on there. Then they check to see if that content is relevant. It will then start to list the page or pages in the search engine result listings ranking it based on a number of factors.

The search engine giants such as Google and Bing, like to see websites that are constantly adding new content as it gives them the impression that this business is offering up to date information on a regular basis. This can help greatly in terms of your online marketing

A blog is a great way to add new content to your website without cluttering up the main navigation. It allows multiple pages to be added as often as you wish whilst not interfering with the main website layout.

Categories
PPC

Monitoring a Google Adwords campaign

Google offer a service called Adwords which allows businesses to create an ad that is triggered by a keyword that is being searched for. When this ad is clicked the user will be taken to a page within the company’s website and the business owner will be charged a specific amount for this click. There are a number of options within Google Adwords that allow you to opt how you pay for clicks and where your ad will be shown.

With any Google Adwords campaign it is vital that it is monitored regularly. This is to ensure that you have not made any mistakes such as time scheduling or locations that may mean your ad is not showing when it should or to improve the advert content, add or remove keywords or show you where you need to improve content on your site. By improving your Adwords campaigns, you will often see your cost per click decrease.