Author Archives for Igor Belogolovsky

We’ve taken a look at some effective AdWords strategies in the past — how to write effective ad copy, what types of lead forms convert well, and the like.

Now I want to show you 4 AdWords “strategies” that I continue to see in clients’ and prospects’ SEM accounts, and debunk them. These are 4 things that AdWords veterans simply don’t do, and now you won’t either.

1) Advertising on peripheral terms. Your best shot at AdWords ROI is to identify keywords that signify searcher intent to find your site or product, and to tailor your ads to those search terms as closely as you can. It’s tempting to think, “Maybe if I bid on terms related to tax season, like ‘1099’ or ‘find a tax accountant,’ I’ll hook potential customers for my tax software — but don’t go down that road. You’ll find you spent time to set up a campaign only to suffer low quality scores, low clickthrough rates and poor-converting traffic.

2) Let AdWords set your bids. If you’re racking up enough conversion data to use Conversion Optimizer bidding, you’re golden. Manual bidding is cool too. But there’s another option: “AdWords will set my bids to help maximize clicks within my target budget.” This auto-CPC strategy is self-admittedly ineffective unless all you’re trying to do is get unqualified traffic and money (and ROI) is no object.

3) Brand name in your ad copy. With all these impressions, you might get the harebrained idea that search marketing is an opportunity to build some brand awareness. Let me set you straight: in display, that might be true, but in the search network, nobody cares about your company name unless your brand carries some major weight. If you’re using your brand name in AdWords ad headlines, 9 times out of 10 you’re wasting real estate.

4) Copy & paste from AdWords keyword tool. The AdWords keyword tool is a great resource, but if you don’t parse carefully, your adgroups will earn terrible quality scores and even worse ROI. Be sure to use the option to “show search terms closely related to the ones I entered,” and filter down from there. Your objective is to create tightly themed adgroups focused on a specific search intention — not to pull in every possible keyword under the sun.

Now go make sweet AdWords love, you crazy marketers.

Last time I rapped at you about creating effective lead forms, we covered the basics. Here, I want to spend some time on slightly more advanced tactics.

1. Sometimes, minimalism is a poor qualifier. Yes, I told you to ask only for the information that’s absolutely essential. But let’s say you’re capturing leads and everything’s fine and dandy, except that the leads aren’t taking your calls. They won’t call back, they barely remember submitting the form or they simply aren’t qualified to have a sales conversation.

Add a field or two that better qualify your prospect. What you ask for depends on your unique sales cycle.

One idea is to force your lead to specify a “best time to call” or “requested phone appointment.” Generally, the more specifically your leads answers this question, the better the lead. Some companies require the lead to name a project budget. You can also ask for specifics around the challenge that drove them to write in for help. In every case, entering more detail requires more commitment of your lead and better qualifies them.

2. Plug your forms into a marketing automation platform. The advantages of doing this are:

• Get richer data about each lead (geography, business IP, etc)
• See the keyword(s) the lead searched to get to your site
• See form conversion data over time in pretty charts & tables
• Automatically add your leads to specific mailing lists if you wish
• Automatically push lead data to the platform and to your CRM
• See exactly which pages the lead visited before & after converting

There are plenty of options, but I’d steer most small businesses away from the heavyweight, feature-rich marketing automation platforms like Eloqua and Marketo unless:

• You’re ready to make an investment of at least $50k to $100k annually
• You know what you’re doing when it comes to marketing automation
• You have at least one dedicated person whose full-time job is making your marketing automation engine sing

On the other hand, if you just want to get your feet wet, some lower-end yet powerful marketing automation tools include Pardot and Loopfuse. The latter will even give you a free trial with functionality for up to 1,000 prospects.

3. Explain why you’re asking for the info. Assuage your visitors’ concerns by adding tooltips that explain why you’re requesting their phone number, email address or mom’s maiden name. Build trust with your prospect by over-communicating early. If you can’t put into customer-friendly words why you need the info, reconsider your decision to collect it.

4. No checkboxes. For heaven’s sake, don’t make them check any boxes. Unless you’re a giant corporation with a legal staff, don’t require a checkbox about your terms & conditions. Just insist that submitting the form signifies acceptance of your terms, and link to them. If you must add a checkbox — be sure to make the entire text and area around the box clickable.

5. Sell softly. Your visitors get it: you want their contact info so you can sell them stuff. But if you don’t couch your lead form in enough information — if you don’t give them enough to go on — they’ll just leave.

Every time a prospect encounters your lead form, they engage in a (sometimes subconscious) decision process: is this company worthy of my contact info?

Be informative, be brief and earn their trust by spelling out the benefits of what you do, featuring prominent logos of your partners and clients, making other options beyond your lead capture form available to them and being open about your company. Check out how helpful Gmail’s sign up page is. Aim for that level of hand-holding and transparency.

What companies are sporting the most effective, most powerful lead forms out there?

I was recently surprised to find Google’s keyword tool reporting more than 44,000 monthly searches for “cheap SEO.” Many of the results, as you’d guess, are offshore companies using less-than-wholesome SEO tactics — but I bet you they get business.

For reference, the first 5 organic Google results ranking for “cheap SEO” look like this:

“Cheap SEO” companies get business because SEO is tremendously confusing.

Consider the difference between hiring an SEO contractor and hiring a salesperson for your small business:

Salesperson

• Most business owners know what to look for in a great sales candidate
• Most business owners have done the job of the sales warrior at some stage; they got to where they are by selling their own ideas
• Measuring success is easy and relatively fast in most sales cycles

SEO contractor

• Many business owners have a light understanding of SEO principles, at best
• Most business owners have never done hands-on SEO; they have to rely on what they’re told and what they’re “sold”
• Measuring success is tricky as SEO takes many months to propagate
• SEO is a high-maintenance channel

It’s no surprise that executives and business owners are daunted, and because the understanding of SEO is weak, the promise of “cheap SEO” is very enticing. You can “test it out” with a small budget, and if it “doesn’t work” you can move on without taking a big hit.

The problem with this approach is that optimizing your site for organic search isn’t a one-shot makeover, and the time of people who are great at it is worth a lot more than the $10/hour you can get on Odesk.

This approach is analogous to hiring a junior salesperson at $40,000/year to sell a complex, long-cycle B2B software tool. You might be able to shoehorn something, but if it doesn’t work out — while you haven’t taken a big hit, you also haven’t really tested or learned anything. If you fire your junior sales guy (or gal), you haven’t determined the tool can’t be sold; you’ve simply determined it can’t be sold by cheap help.

Why writing 6-figure checks for SEO expertise is hard to swallow

• You can’t measure success quickly enough
• Cheap SEO services seem to be available all over the web — how can I distinguish between them?
• It’s not immediately clear what you’re getting

Good point. Why is it that you see what should be a relative commodity — the “SEO audit” — priced at $1,000 in some neighborhoods, at $5,000 in others and sometimes at $35,000?

Well, there’s a few reasons. First, SEO for a simple site is very different from SEO for a complex site. Second, there are a bunch of crappy companies out there that offer cheap SEO. What makes them crappy is this: a strong SEO action plan requires profound research.

Choosing which keywords you target is a very critical decision. You can spend an hour on the research, 9 hours on HTML recommendations and troubleshooting, and sell a $1,000 audit. Conversely, it can take many hours to consult weapons-grade SEO tools like SEOmoz, Raventools and the like, and ensure you’re choosing terms that are sufficiently high in volume, not overly competitive and, importantly, terms that you can actually rank for, given the content of your site.

It’s the same story when developing a content strategy, troubleshooting your site for potential indexing problems, building a backlink footprint and the rest.

Why it doesn’t matter that you can’t “see” the results of SEO right away

Think about how you get traffic to your site. Chances are you’re paying for traffic in some way. It could be any of these channels:

• Paid search
• Display ads
• Other PPC advertising
• Affiliates
• TV / radio ads
• Blogging
• Email marketing

No matter what you’re doing to get customers to your site, you’re spending time on it, and in many cases you’re paying by the click, too.

If your average cost per click across all channels is $1.25, you should think of every organic visit your site gets as a $1.25 credit against your account. If you grow your organic traffic to as little as 1,000 visits per month, that’s a $1,250 return on your investment — plus what each conversion is worth.

The bottom line: Cheap SEO is a mirage, good SEO is the real Giving Tree

The point I’m trying to make, and perhaps belaboring, is this: cheap SEO is bullshit, and good SEO appears expensive because it’s uncertain and difficult to measure. There are no guarantees in search engine rankings (company who give them are, well… disingenuous at best). But, actually, done successfully, a site well-optimized for organic search can be among the greatest assets of a business and can generate tremendous revenue from free traffic. SEO is the Giving Tree of online marketing.