Happy Monday! Over the last couple of days, we’ve covered the debate over SEO vs. PPC, why companies should think like customers when they set up their campaigns, and we’ve learned the most common mistakes that companies make when setting up their own campaigns.

In this final installment, pay per click expert Matt DeYoung will share landing page tips and pay per click tools, then discuss the rising cost of pay per click marketing and alternatives to Google Adwords.

From my experience, companies focus too much on their keywords, ads and bids, but don’t focus at all on landing pages. Can you tell us why landing pages are important and give some tips to optimize them?

Yeah, I hate to say this but most business owners have their PPC process upside down. Most owners I’ve worked with pick keywords to match their business or website. Bids and ad copy are important to generate affordable qualified traffic. Quality landing pages have become the smarter way to work. You don’t have to worry about forcing your ad position by bidding higher.

With landing page optimization all you’re trying to do is match closer and closer to what’s on your customer’s mind. Dr. Flint McLaughlin from Marketing Experiments said it best, ‚ÄúYou’re not trying to just change landing pages, you’re trying to change people’s minds.‚Äù Keywords tell you what’s on your customer’s mind. Your landing pages should match.

Each optimization effort will eek out a few more conversions. Even 5% compounded monthly equals massive increases in sales over 12 months. It can be the difference between a profitable or loosing campaign.

What I suggest is to start with a landing page that best matches what you think the intent of a keyword. Then start testing minor elements of the page one at a time. Start with a simple 2 column vertical layout page. Test writing a new main headline, the 1st and 2nd sentences. Test each paragraph subheading. After that, work on testing your offer, or “call-to-action”–your method of response. Hint: put your call-to-action on both the top and bottom of the page.

Optimization is just a matter of improving on the early educated guess you made about your customer–one step at a time. It’s worth doing. Landing page optimization is truly the secret of internet marketing. It shouldn’t be a secret, but it is.

Are there any tools on the web that you recommend to small businesses that want to set up and run their own campaigns?

There are a lot of tools out there. Adwords Editor is a crucial. Download it if you don’t have it already. Using Google Adwords conversion tracking in your campaign is a must. Also learn Google Analytics inside and out will take you far. It’s free, but does more than most small biz packages.

Keyword research and campaign set up can be tedious. Adwords Accelerator and SpeedPPC are two great tools. They’re expensive, but they pay for themselves quickly. Of course, there are lots of tools out there to peak at your competitors’ PPC: KeywordSpy, SpyFu, Compete.com, PPCBully to name a few.

More businesses are advertising online and keyword bid prices are rising. What is your take on this, and how can small businesses be budget-conscious?

PPC has definitely gotten more expensive. I even saw a swift increase last half of 2008. But, the fact is I’ve still been able to lower my costs. Small businesses can maintain their budgets in two ways:

• Focusing on optimization, whether ad copy, landing pages, product offers etc. Doing more planning and testing pays off. Increasing conversion from 1% to 2% means you just cut your marketing expense in half.
• Don’t diffuse your efforts, and your budget, but try to siphon irrelevant traffic away from your website. My suggestion is to focus all your resource–time and money–on better serving the keyword that make sense for your business. Even if that means you’ll only have 5-10 keywords, you can still generate a ton of sales.

It seems like everyone is focusing on Google Adwords. Is it your favorite pay per click engine? Are there other more niche engines or properties that small businesses should evaluate?

That’s a great question. I’m thankful for Adwords. It changed SEM. I start all my efforts with Adwords. There’s so much traffic on Google, and they get ads up so fast and you can test things quickly.

Adwords isn’t always the best place to spend all your PPC money. It really depends on your customer. I have one client who has an older demographic. I have the same ad on Google as I do on Yahoo. The Yahoo ad brings in 2 or 3 times more sales. I start with Google but expand to other networks. I track my ad channels/networks individually. Each one performs differently, and I adjust my budget accordingly.

MSN and Miva (Findology, ABCSearch, 7Search, SearchFeed, FindWhat) can be other places to look for traffic too. Just track the results so you can reallocate your budget to the best performing channels. Only reward the networks that are bringing you the best sales.

Any closing advice for small businesses?

Yes. Stop changing directions. Start working with what you’ve got. Too many clients I speak with keep trying new SEM tactics before they really learned why the last effort didn’t succeed. The difference between success and failure is to just see through what you’ve started, with the tools you’ve got before you. Free tools and Microsoft Excel will go along way if you know what you’re doing. With Internet marketing it’s especially easy to keep trying new things. Sad part is you’ll probably stop one step short of all the benefits.

Yesterday, I introduced you to Matt DeYoung, and he weighed in on the SEO vs. PPC debate. Matt also talked about how small businesses need to closely examine why prospective customers would buy their product/service before setting up their pay per click campaign.

In today’s installment, I ask Matt what common mistakes are being made by small businesses that set up their own pay per click campaigns.

When you’ve audited campaigns that small businesses set up themselves, what are the most common mistakes that they make?

I see 6 common mistakes when I review pay-per-click campaigns:

1. Trying to manage too many keywords. Once upon a time you could get cheap, converting traffic by bidding on lots of keywords. That simply doesn’t work anymore. You have to be more focused now because Google values quality over quantity more than ever. Bidding on too many keywords usually leads to a huge, bank-breaking invoice from Google. You’re better off picking keywords that match your product or service exactly. If you pick keywords that help meet your customers where they’re at in the sales process‚ learning, researching, deciding, etc.‚ and mapping that to the right entry point of your website (i.e. landing page). Google will even give you a discount on your cost-per-click for this effort.
2. Poor organization of campaigns and ad groups. I still see business owners lumping 15 or more keywords into a single Ad Group. This is a horrible technique most of the time for one reason: It makes financial and performance controls almost impossible. You‚’ll get a few high traffic keywords, or poor performers that muddy up the works. There are instances where an Ad Group has a few great performing keywords. But then the 10 other words are just holding them back from their full sales-generation potential.
3. Picking the wrong keywords. Usually business owners conduct keyword research by trying to find keywords that basically describe their business, but that’s a well-intentioned waste of time. It’s too broad an effort. You have to be more specific. If you use keywords that don’t match your website page, you’ll end up paying the “idiot tax.” Google’s happy to take your money‚ and charge you a premium‚ when you bid on PPC the wrong keywords.Keywords can be defined as “wrong”  for 2 reasons. Either they keywords are too general to predict anything about what the customer is looking for, or they simply don’t align with the service offer.
4. Picking the wrong landing pages. I think the value of landing pages is grossly overlooked. Even I overlooked their value for a long time. I’ll admit that was the single most costly Internet marketing mistake I ever made.One of the best ways to waste money is sending PPC traffic to the wrong landing page. Even if your landing pages are bad, but keyword-specific, you’ll still see more sales than if you use the wrong landing page.
5. Not knowing what to improve. The number one reason business owners come to me for advice is not really knowing what to do after setting up a PPC campaign. PPC optimization is a “black box” for most small business owners I think. The question is “Where do I start?” What usually happens is there are too many clicks that don’t convert. Or hundreds of keywords get a few clicks but no sales. It starts to get as overwhelming as doing your own taxes. You start to think “what does any of this even mean?” The issue for most businesses is understanding each metric individually, but not understanding how all the PPC results lead to the next optimization step.
6. Not deleting the unproductive keywords. Why hang on to a PPC keyword that’s not profitable? You wouldn’t hang on to an employee who under-performs or helps you loose money — fire them. Do the same with keywords. Fire the keywords that aren’t performing. If a keyword is converting, but the cost-per-conversion is to high, optimize. Look at your biggest costs per campaign per month. Get rid of the ones that aren’t working fast. You’ll have more cash to promote the ones that are doing well.

On Monday, I’ll share the final part of my interview with pay per click expert Matt DeYoung. We’ll talk about landing pages, pay per click tools, the rising cost of pay per click marketing and alternatives to Google Adwords.

A few weeks ago, I found pay-per-click specialist Matt DeYoung on Twitter. He offered to answer any pay-per-click question that anyone could throw his way. I took him up on it, and we ended up on the phone talking about an upcoming campaign that I was planning for a client. During the call, he had a lot of tips to offer, so I invited him to share them here on my blog. Here’s what he had to say.

Matt, tell us a little about yourself and your business.

In late 2006 I decided to start consulting for businesses on web development and search marketing. Now, in 2009, I primarily coach business owners on how to run their own PPC.

My passion is more teaching and coaching. I’d rather teach small business owners how to apply a methodology for developing and maintaining their SEM. I’ve always liked being a mentor. It”s more energizing than anything else I do. Maybe it’s because I was the oldest of four kids growing up.

SEO, PPC or both?

PPC is the perfect starting point. I strongly recommend a tandem deployment. PPC comes first so you can test. SEO comes second because you have data from PPC to prove the SEO investment is worthwhile.

With SEO your benefits are latent. In some ways, that makes it riskier. It’s lots of hard work up front with benefits on the back end. With PPC the benefits are immediate. You can test and fix right away.

It’s tempting to think of SEO as free. It’s not. I see this mistake all the time. There’s an upfront cost of both time and money‚ even for an in-house effort. Just as with PPC, SEO has a cost to produce more traffic.

Of course the important contrast between SEO and PPC is that SEO is a kind of one-time effort and expense. With PPC you’re always going to have to pay today’s rate to keep it going. Both are important for any business owner. But I strongly discourage comparing them equally. They should be used strategically, relative to the business’ goals.

I say why not hedge your bets and use a PPC campaign as a test bed for your SEO efforts?

When we spoke, it struck me when you said that companies should ask the question, “so what?”about their product or service, meaning that companies need to ask why customers would buy their products/services. I’m assuming that you do a fair amount of product and customer research before you research keywords or write ads. What’s your thought process when planning a campaign?

The secret to PPC marketing is simple: Get inside your customer’s head. You need to know why they search they keyword they do. Your customer has an inner conversation that started long before they entered a search query. What they search, why they search, and your “so what” answers should influence every aspect of your SEM and web design. “So what” summarizes the process of looking at your product’s features, pretending your the end-customer and asking, “Well, so why do I care about product? Why should I even take one more second to understand your service?”

Answering “so what” isn’t hard really. Technology makes it easy. I use Google’s Keyword Tool and website forums. That usually is enough to get the answer. Sometimes I create my own online surveys to dig deeper.

There are about 5 or 6 steps I do before writing any ads, or even creating websites. I have a strict methodology to uncover what will drive PPC conversions to a website. Five or 6 steps sounds like a lot. It’s easy to be anxious about getting started. It might take me longer to get started because of the research steps. But, once I nail down how a product meets my customer’s problem, and even down to which keyword they use, sales conversions follow.

Read part two of our interview with Matt DeYoung, where we focus on the most common mistakes that small businesses make when setting up their own pay per click campaigns.

I’m digesting this blog post today from Bazaarblog about how Office Depot increased clickthrough, conversion and sales from their Google ads simply by putting information based on customer reviews in their ads. What a great idea! Office Depot recently started a creative test to see how searchers would respond to messaging from product reviews on their site. The result was a 78% increase in clickthrough rate, 23% increase in conversion and almost 200% increase in revenue from their Google ads.

Here’s a sample of one of their ads (from the Bazaarvoice case study):

Office Depot Google ad

This would be an interesting test for online retailers that test copy in Google ads. You can bet we’ll be testing it!

When determining which phrases your site should be optimized for, or when searching for the right phrases to bid on in your paid search campaign, wouldn’t it be great to have an idea of what people are thinking when searching for that phrase?

Microsoft adCenter Labs released an interesting tool focused around determining the level of commercial intent for search phrases. Here’s how it works. Type in a word or phrase, and the tool will give you a measure of the likelihood that the phrase will lead to a commercial transaction.

For example, the tool says that “dvd player” has a commercial intent of 0.63816, while “sony progressive scan dvd player” has a commercial intent of 0.86043. The higher the number, the more likely that the search phrase will yield a transaction.

You can use this data to determine what phrases are more likely to yield transactions for your company (or web site). I used this free tool in a trial paid search campaign for a client. We targeted one exact phrase which had a commercial intent of 0.47, and a variation of the original term that had a commercial intent of 0.81. The ad copy and the landing pages were identical except for the use of the search phrases in the headlines on the ads and landing pages. The results? The term with higher commercial intent received nearly double the conversion rate of the term with lower commercial intent according to the adCenter tool.

Personally, I would use paid search to test terms rather than just relying solely on the commercial intent tool, but the tool has been fairly accurate in my experience. Try it out now.

The newest keyword research tool available is Google Insights for Search.

This new tool lets you type in a search phrase and graphs out interest over time. While the graph will tell you how many searches have been done for a particular term over time, the numbers aren’t absolute search volume numbers, just a gauge of popularity.

You can also see regional interest for a particular term, either targeting a country, or if you choose the United States, you can see search popularity for that term by state. You can even get a breakdown by city.

So how is this helpful? Here’s one way to use the tool. If a client wants a paid search campaign, and the campaign lends itself to geotargeting, we can run the advertisements in popular areas to get the biggest impact.

If you advertise locally via paid search, you might also find the search phrases that give you the largest number of impressions in your market.

Of course, the trend graphing feature is impressive. You can learn how many searches occurred for a particular phrase over time, and you can learn about related top searches and searches that are on the rise.

Companies have been throwing money down the drain using Google Adwords for years, partly because they use broad match for their ad campaigns. Even if you’ve discovered exact match and phrase match options in Google Adwords, wouldn’t it be great to see the visitor’s actual search query in Google Analytics? Here’s a tip — albeit an advanced one — to get real keyword detail from your Google Adwords campaign using Google Analytics.

First, though, I’ll start with why this is important. These are in no particular order.

1. Keyword detail helps you discover negative match options. If you’re bidding on “dog food” and someone searches for “how to make your own dog food,” your ad is going to appear. You may be selling dog food, and a visitor like this is not going to find information on your site on how to make dog food. You don’t want that click. After seeing this keyword detail in Google Analytics would perhaps want to add “make” as a negative match option for that ad group. This helps you hone in on buying traffic that’s going to convert, making your campaign more profitable.
2. You’ll get revenue and conversion rate data on every search, which helps you make decisions about the keywords that you are bidding on.
3. It may help you generate ideas for new products, services, blog posts or other search phrases that pertain to your site but you haven’t thought of yet.

For a step-by-step explanation of how to set this up, browse over to the Get Elastic ecommerce blog and read the instructions.

The big news of the week in internet marketing, in case you missed it, is that the Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool is now showing actual search volume data. Specifically, the tool is showing the number of times keyphrases were searched the previous month and also the average search volume.

Many keyword research services, like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker, collect search volume data from many search engines, but you must pay for these services.

So what does this mean for internet marketers and search engine advertisers? The Google Adwords Keyword Suggestion Tool was a great tool even before it provided actual search keyphrase data, but now why pay fees for a subscription service when you can get real numbers from Google?

Is your company planning to increase their search marketing spend in 2008? If you said yes, you’re in good company. MarketingSherpa’s latest Search Marketing Benchmark Survey reveals that search marketing will see double-digit growth next year, but not to increase reach. Rather, marketers are raising their budgets to account for rising keyword prices.

According to the survey of over 3,000 marketers and agencies, Google Adwords will be the most popular pay-per-click (PPC) spend.

Companies are also focusing on improving their landing pages to optimize the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns and site conversion rates.

Other interesting facts from the survey:

• Just over 1/3 of companies will increase their search engine optimization (SEO) budgets for 2008.
• Despite reporting relatively high value from SEO, some companies are still having difficulty measuring effectiveness.
• E-mail marketing remains the most effective marketing tactic, while online banner ads and print marketing have the lowest value.

Newspapers, who have recently struggled to retain advertising revenue, are getting a boost from an unlikely source: Google.

Over the last few months, Google has been piloting a program that offered newspaper ad space to Google Adwords advertisers. That pilot program is likely to lead to an announcement today that Google Adwords advertisers can now buy newspaper ads via their Google Adwords account, reports the New York Times.

More than 225 newspapers are said to be participating in the program, with coverage in 91% of the top 35 media markets.

While newspapers will ask for “rate card” ad rates, advertisers can make a lower offer on the ad space, which will help newspapers fill spaces normally filed by “house ads” which don’t generate ad revenue for the newspapers.

This expanded program will offer online advertisers the opportunity to venture into the print world. I see this as good news for advertisers that want to advertise in print, but it’s either too daunting or expensive when working directly through the newspapers. There’s also the possibility of getting less-than-rate-card rates, which is attractive for small businesses trying to get more advertising coverage in their local markets.

The June 24 New York Post article called “Search & Destroy: Audit Could Siphon Ad $$ from Google,” reports on a soon-to-be-published audit by UK-based firm Internet Search Metrics. The audit claims that spending money on Google Adwords, Google’s text-based advertising system, could be the worst-spent marketing dollars on the Internet. Instead, the Post article hints that search engine optimization activities would be a better investment.

In the context of small business, there are a couple of points that I wholeheartedly disagree with.

First, the article states that “most executives, with little regard to how well their companies fare in the more important natural search results – the top sites that come up after an Internet search – overspend on paid search because it is the one area of the search market they understand.”

In my experience, most executives don’t have a clue about paid search or natural search. That’s why they hire consultants to run these campaigns for them. This, too, can be problematic. While there are certainly some firms out there that do great work, I’ve known some Google Certified Consultants who couldn’t run an effective campaign if they tried, and I’ve encountered some SEO gurus who charge their clients thousands per month while their clients’ sites actually drop in the search results.

The article (and the study) says that money is better spent on SEO. For small businesses, I disagree. Good SEO costs thousands of dollars per month, while good results can be obtained from a pay per click campaign for hundreds per month. Many small businesses can’t justify spending thousands every month on an SEO campaign, which is never guaranteed to work. Pay per click marketing, on the other hand, only costs companies marketing dollars when a customer is delivered to their web site.

I’m not saying that SEO is “snake oil” and that it never works, but for many small businesses, it’s just too expensive.

While the argument between paid search and SEO may not be solved any time soon, I’m focusing on what I feel is potentially a much more powerful promotional tool.

I’m currently experimenting with PR and strategic communications as a more effective way of promoting companies. My approach is traditional PR with a twist — utilizing traditional media releases with blogs, email marketing, print marketing and more. This PR 2.0 approach — this combination of online and offline media exposure — can naturally improve online search engine rankings while driving web site traffic and improving mindshare across mediums. Good PR efforts for small business can be much cheaper than search engine optimization campaigns as well, all while reaching more potential customers. This approach also eliminates “tunnel vision,” projecting a consistent message across media.

Need a Google Adwords tip? Here’s one — small tweaks to your ad copy can significantly improve results. A recent blog post by MindValley Labs proves that even a small change can dramatically raise your clickthrough rates.

The tip is to place an ellipsis (“…”) at the end of the final line of ad copy. The idea behind this concept is that customers see the ellipsis and infer that more information can be found by clicking the ad. For instance, “Get More Information…” should generate more interest than just “Get More Information” without the ellipsis.

I’ve tested this concept over the last week, and did see a dramatic improvement in clickthrough rate. The ad without the ellipsis had a 1.92% clickthrough rate, while the ad that included the ellipsis garnered a 5.26% clickthrough rate. All other wording and capitalization between the two ads were the same, so the ellipsis was the variable that made the difference.

You can read more about the ellipsis test at the MindValley Labs blog post.

If your company is new to Google Adwords advertising and you’re trying to go it alone, chances are you’re looking for ways to maximize your ad spend. Rather than broadcasting your ad to the largest possible audience, I’ve prepared three suggestions to control your advertising spend beyond just setting a daily budget. These three tools are in the Google Adwords pro’s arsenal, but aren’t commonly-known by the Google Adwords newcomer.

1. Turn off the content network.
In your Google Adwords campaign settings for each campaign, you can disable the content network, which is enabled by default. The reason you want to do this is because if you’re bidding $2 for a phrase on the search network, you’re bidding $2 for the same phrase on the content network by default. Since your ad will be seen on the content network much more than on the search network, there’s more of a chance that you’ll deplete your budget on clicks that generally aren’t as relevant.

2. Bid on more specific words and phrases.
When you bid on phrases and exact matches, you’re limiting the word combinations that would trigger your ad. This not only helps you control costs, it also can make your campaign more relevant to the searcher because the phrases that trigger your ad are more specific.

In addition, bid on phrases containing two or more words.

Let’s say I am bidding on the term “widgets” (without the quotes) with a broad match. Make this phrase more specific by adding qualifiers, and add quotes/brackets around the term. For example, rather than bidding on “widgets,” I might bid on the following:

• “red widgets”
• [red widgets]
• “buy new widgets”
• [buy new widgets]

3. Use negative keyword matching.
Often times, the phrases that you want to match are similar to unrelated or irrelevant topics. For example, if you are bidding on “Peanuts,” (the cartoon), you probably don’t want your ad to show up when someone searches for “Planters peanuts.” In this case, you could add “Planters” as a negative keyword to your keyword list, and your ad would not be shown when a person searches for “Planters peanuts.” To include a negative keyword, simply put a hyphen before the word you want to designate as a negative keyword.

So how do you find potential negative keywords? Go to Google and search for a very broad term that relates to the products you sell. In the above example, search Google for “peanuts.” You’ll see that some sites are food-related while others are related to the Peanuts cartoon.

Hopefully, these tips will help the Google Adwords novice control ad spending while making the campaign more effective.

Internet Retailer reports that retailers are spending more on pay-per-click marketing and natural search engine optimization. 57.4% of marketers claim that search engine marketing performs better than other forms of marketing, including affiliate marketing, e-mail marketing and direct mail. Among the respondents to the Internet Retailer study, natural search engine optimization seems to yield higher conversion rates than paid search.

The pendulum seems to be shifting toward natural search engine optimization. I’ve found that both tactics can be successful, but both require ongoing expenses. A mix of both tactics seems to be the right approach for many companies. Optimizing for natural results is the prudent approach for core keywords, while paid search can supplement these results for keywords and phrases that are related to the core keywords. Regardless of the approach, customers clearly do not ignore paid search ads (“sponsored listings”), and as we learned in 2006, ranking in the top three natural results is critical as these links are most often clicked.

A blog post over at Search Engine Roundtable struck a chord with me today, as this topic has come up when talking to various clients over the past few months.

The question was recently posed if the days of “set it and forget it” are gone. The “set it and forget it” method of pay per click management is when you would set up a campaign, monitor it for a few weeks, then let the campaign run itself.

The search landscape is always changing, and there are a number of reasons that companies should not “set it and forget it.” Here’s why companies should manage their PPC campaigns on a continual basis.

• Competitors enter your space. As pay-per-click search engine marketing becomes an even more popular advertising channel, competitors enter. While some may not know how to run an effective campaign, some will, and as more savvy competitors enter your company’s advertising space, your company will be shuffled down the list if your company’s campaign is not properly managed.
• Increased competition drives up bids. As more advertisers enter your market, bid prices are likely to increase. If companies don’t manage their bid prices over time, they may lose their position. Being the first paid listing isn’t always the best approach, but if your company’s ad isn’t on the page at all, you won’t get results.
• Search trends change/seasonality in retail. As time passes, so does the way people search for things. In the entertainment industry, electronics and others, what’s hot now isn’t what’s hot a few months from now. What people search for changes, and companies need to adjust phrases they bid on to capture the most traffic possible. Additionally, being visible during peak selling times during the year is especially important for retailers, and while upping ad spends at peak seasons may make sense, it may not make sense to be as aggressive during slower seasons.
• The way search engines (especially Google) determine where your ads show up changes over time. As the search engines change their PPC algorithms, companies need to adjust their campaigns accordingly. For example, Google Adwords recently added quality score and now allows advertisers to see their quality scores for individual keywords, allowing advertisers to adjust their campaigns and get better results.
• Testing ad copy keeps companies ahead of competitors. If advertisers don’t test their ad copy, their click rates will never significantly improve. It’s standard fare to run multiple ads at once, measuring the results and removing ads that don’t perform. It’s not uncommon for me to test 25-50 different versions of ad copy per client per year.

For my money — and my clients’ — continual PPC management is the way to go. Continual monitoring and improvement of campaigns will keep your company ahead of your competition while generating the most traffic possible to your company’s web site.

As a follow-up to my last post, “When Google rankings affect your small business’ bottom line,” I wanted to provide some real data for my claim that a web site can get a significant increase in traffic by paying for search engine advertising even though they have a #1 search engine ranking for their niche search term.

My client is currently #1 in Google for their niche phrase, which is a moderately-competitive two-word search phrase. The client’s web site has always been in the top 5 results for this phrase, and just recently re-gained the #1 ranking.

The client also pays for a Google Adwords ad for the exact two-word phrase that they are currently ranked #1 for.

In the last week, the client has gotten 59 visits from the #1 Google ranking, and the client has gotten 54 visits from the paid Google ad. You can see that the client nearly doubled their web site traffic from this niche search term by paying for advertising. What’s more is that the paid ad had a 6.78% conversion rate, proving that people not only clicked — they bought.

There’s an interesting thread on SEO Roundtable today regarding the way Google’s rankings can affect small businesses. The fact of the matter is that when Google shuffles its rankings or when competitors start to get aggressive, small business can suffer when they are shuffled down in the search engine rankings.

It’s a timely post as I have a new client that was shuffled off of the first page in the Google rankings for their particular niche search terms, and their revenue has dropped significantly. I wish there was a rosier picture to paint, but this business has a slow road to recovery ahead of it.

Luckily for other businesses that still have good rankings, I see two ways to prevent business decline, and I employ these with many of my clients that hire me to perform search engine consulting services.

1. When times are good (and rankings are high), try harder to keep your ranking.

Work with your search engine consultant to continue SEO efforts when your site is ranked well. If your site is ranked on the first page or even in the #1 spot, you should be continuing to build links to your site, optimize your site and build your business. If your site is #1 for your niche search term, the target is on your back, and other companies are determined to take that spot from you. Using proven, ethical techniques to improve your rankings, even when your site is at the top of the list, is necessary.

2. Buy search engine pay-per-click ads or improve your existing campaign.

If you’re relying solely on search engine optimization to attract customers, you’re putting all of your eggs in one basket. A paid search campaign can increase traffic to your site dramatically, even if your site is ranked #1 for your niche search term (I have data to prove it).

A #1 or first page ranking can also cause business owners to lose focus on their pay-per-click marketing efforts. I advocate the Rimm-Kaufman Group’s recommendation to evaluate your search engine marketing campaign at least once per year. If you have a smaller campaign with a monthly spend under $10,000, you should even evaluate your program every quarter.

With both paid and natural search engine programs running at an optimal level, you’ll lower your risk of a big drop-off in business.

I’m seeing a trend lately with new Google Adwords accounts and wanted to share my findings and get your feedback.

Back on January 11, I set up a Google Adwords account for a new client. We went all out, writing multiple ads for testing purposes, splitting the keywords into similar groups and targeting the ads geographically.

The results, at first, were poor. The campaign got one or two clicks the first couple of days, then went for days without a click. We decided to raise the bids significantly and write landing pages for each ad group that were designed to be highly relevant to the Google Adwords ads to drive conversion.

After we employed a more aggressive bidding strategy and directed ads to landing pages, the clicks started coming in, and just this week we’re seeing much better results. I’m unsure of what factor (the landing pages or the higher bids) had the biggest impact.

I recently read that advertisers should expect to bid higher at first to get desired results. This is good advice for all of you starting new Adwords campaigns. The folks over at MindValley Labs blogged earlier in the month that new advertisers “get crushed” when employing the same bidding strategies as an established advertiser, and they backed it up with test results.

My advice for those starting a new Google advertising campaign is to a) write and design your landing pages before you activate your campaign and b) start keyword bids higher than normal while also setting daily budgets high. Monitor your campaign closely, and if you’re getting a high clickthrough rate, test the effect on clickthrough rate of backing off of your bids gradually.

I thought I’d share a real story about how important your web site design (specifically, your landing pages) is to your search engine marketing program’s success. Here’s the story.

A company recently approached me about a running a Google Adwords campaign for them with the goal of getting more people to their web site. After some initial keyword research, I confirmed my hunches that their target keywords bring a hefty price tag.

I told myself that I could still make it work, but after looking at their web site, I’m squarely sitting on the fence. The web site isn’t structured well at all — in fact, there are no good destination pages with relevant content on the site, and the homepage is one image (no text at all). Surely the quality score that Google will assign to the client’s destination pages will be very low. Unless we build some custom landing pages, we’ll have to live with the higher price-per-click and a low conversion rate.

When companies hire consultants to revamp their search engine marketing campaigns, they should understand that an effective search engine marketing campaign often requires more than just the campaign setup and monitoring. We consultants want to make our clients’ campaigns as effective as they possibly can be, so allowing a consultant the budget to create some targeted landing pages to place on the client’s web site is something that should be included in every campaign.

Here’s why — Persuasion/the selling process doesn’t end with the ad.

Selling and generating leads online requires that you capture the user’s attention in the ad, get them to click, and then push them to your web site where you can convince them to do business with your company. After they are sold, they will call or buy online.

If your landing page simply provides a phone number or contact form, you’ve missed the opportunity to convince that visitor to do business with your company. Worse, you’ve wasted your money on the click.

A quality landing page on your web site is critical to the success of the search engine marketing campaign. Your web site is where most of the selling should happen, and your web site should engage your potential customer with relevance and credibility. It should also make the process of becoming a customer intuitive.

Understanding this concept will make your company’s search engine marketing campaign much more effective.

Google’s Inside Adwords blog recently provided some insight into Google’s quality score that’s used to rank your Google Adwords ad. This information is a good read for those of you that manage your own Google Adwords campaigns.

According to Google’s Ad and Quality Performance section in their Adwords Help Center, Google Adwords quality score is defined as:

Quality Score = (keyword’s CTR, ad text relevance, keyword relevance, landing page relevance)

Editor’s note: “CTR” above is “clickthrough rate,” or the ratio of the number of times the ad is seen to the number of times the ad is clicked.

It turns out that quality score isn’t a number (at least not outside of the Google compound), but you can still find out where you stand by doing the following:

The best way to calculate your Quality Score is by looking at each keyword’s minimum bid. The lower the minimum bid, the higher your keyword’s Quality Score.

What’s encouraging about quality score is that Google Adwords consultants like me can improve ad copy, relevance and landing pages and pay less for traffic:

You can also try to reduce your keyword’s minimum bid by increasing its Quality Score.

In my experience, landing pages are often the most neglected part of the ad campaign. Google Adwords can send lots of traffic to your site, but how effective is your landing page at directing traffic and building customer confidence? Most companies either send all of their Google Adwords traffic to their homepage or don’t properly optimize their landing pages. Here’s what Google has to say about what makes a quality landing page:

• The money you spend on AdWords ads will be more likely to turn into paying customers.
• Users develop a trust in the positive experience provided after clicking on AdWords ads (and this turns in to additional targeted leads for you).

Your landing pages will do these things when they:

• Provide relevant and substantial content.
• Treat a user’s personal information responsibly
• Develop an easily navigable site.

So there you go, an overview of Google Adwords quality score. My take on quality score is that the more effort advertisers put into crafting a quality campaign, the better their results will be. Additionally, a quality campaign costs less per click.

WebProNews is a site I discovered a few months ago, and their video coverage of the latest Search Engine Strategies conference is very good. Their newest video is an interview with two smart marketers with two first names, Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and Bath and Brian Mark of ToolBarn.com. Both of these sites started as small online businesses and now are among the top 500 internet retailers, so if you own a small ecommerce site or want to start one, you should take 15 minutes to listen to the interview.

Dick and Mark discuss many search-related ecommerce marketing strategies they use in their day-to-day ecommerce businesses, and they make some great points about the following:

• Using Google Adwords as a research tool to find top converting phrases as input to an SEO campaign
• How both companies handle local search and retailing to local markets
• Retailers’ perspective on social media and working with niche bloggers
• Advice for a budding online retailer — “Be open to trying everything”

I don’t want to give it all away, so check out the video.

Who would have thought that a business could advertise for a few cents per click and get a free landing page to boot? Google is removing another barrier for small businesses to advertise on its Adwords search engine advertising service. Google will help small businesses create their landing page and host it on Google servers.

Landing pages will not be full-featured web sites, but instead can include phone numbers, addresses and simple images. Clearly, this type of landing page is meant to serve the local search client — small businesses that rely on foot traffic or phone calls but still want to advertise on the web.

My friends at the Rimm-Kaufman Group posted a festive blog post yesterday called Avoiding Search Hobgoblins that is a good primer for reviewing results of your established search engine marketing program.

The audit should begin with gathering keyword data/results and then analyzing those results, breaking out branded keywords from non-branded keywords. Bids, ad copy and destination URLs should also be analyzed.

It’s a good read if you have an established search engine marketing program or if you have an underperforming campaign and want to know where to start to improve it. I certainly advocate analyzing your program’s performance at least once per year. During your yearly audit, you can not only identify big issues that need to be fixed‚Äîyou can uncover new opportunities for program growth and profitability.

I had the opportunity to listen to a Clicktracks webinar yesterday that discussed using Clicktracks to quantify your search engine optimization efforts. It was a rather enlightening presentation.

The presenter argued that “average time on site” is a good measurement of your search engine optimization efforts. It goes to figure that if your web page shows up in a search for a particular topic and the searcher spends a good amount of time on your site after clicking your result, your SEO efforts for that term have been successful.

You can improve your web site’s optimization and usability by writing content that is focused, helpful and on-topic. If you’re paying for search engine ads, write well-targeted ads, click the user to a relevant landing page and they’ll engage with your site.

So what’s a good “average time on site” benchmark? The presenter said that it’s impossible to come up with one benchmark, and that it’s difficult to compare sites. The best practice is to compare “average time on site” for all of the keywords that generate traffic to your site. The longer the average time on site for a keyword, the better the keyword is at captivating the web user. For those keywords with a low average time on site relative to other keywords, opportunities exist to further optimize pages for those terms.

The seminar presenter also confirmed that businesses should pay for advertising on terms they also optimize for. I’ve always agreed that this is a best practice, and you can read why in my post called “The search engine marketing mix: paid search versus SEO.”

During the presentation, one astute attendee asked the presenter why they would use Clicktracks when Google Analytics was free. The presenter explained that Google Analytics uses Javascript to capture information while Clicktracks Pro Server Edition uses the server’s raw logfiles, and this type of data can only be retrieved through logfiles. I later confirmed this through a Google Analytics message board.

Full disclosure: I used Clicktracks Hosted for approximately 6 months until Google Analytics was released. I endorse Clicktracks as the best paid web analytics service but I personally use Google Analytics for my business purposes.

With landing pages becoming more popular with internet marketers due to a landing page’s ability to effectively convert browsers to buyers, it’s only natural for businesses to compare their results with others. So what is the industry average conversion rate for a landing page?

That’s the question I got recently from a client. The answer is that you’re not likely to find an answer, and here’s why — the term “landing page” has different definitions to different marketers.

Here are some of the different ways a marketer describes a landing page:

• A page a user gets to when clicking on my search engine advertisement
• A page a user gets when clicking on my ad banner
• A page a user gets when they click on a link in my email marketing campaign
• A page a user gets when they click an ad on my homepage
• A hidden page that people get when they click a specific link on my site.
• A hidden page that people get when they click on my link from a web directory or other web site

These are just a few definitions. Additionally, because there is no standard format for a landing page, landing pages can look significantly different. Compound that with the fact that a landing page might be doing something as complex as selling a $3,000 television or as simple as collecting an email address.

If you’re trying to improve your landing page conversion rate, make sure you test different versions of the page so see which has the highest conversion rate. Here are some more landing page conversion tips:

• Keep the page simple and uncluttered.
• Write compelling copy.
• Use color to highlight the most important area (the desired action).
• For lead generation, make the form as short as possible and make it the focal point.
• If selling a product, include a large product photo and clearly state the offer.
• Assign tracking codes to each individual version and track sales/leads from each.
• Make sure the landing page has only one subject/focus/product.
• Consider not including your site navigation on the landing page and reduce the number of links off of the page.