How to Do a Quick SEM Audit Before the Holidays by Sana Ansari #349

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebResults. I am Charles Lewis, your client results advocate. And sitting right here on my head is Clucky Turkey Results. The turkey. Because it's Thanksgiving. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. Welcome to our podcast. This is podcast number 349. And I am not kidding. I am actually wearing a turkey on my head. And the turkey sounds like this. You probably missed that, too. All right. As always, we have a tip from our previous podcast. And that tip is have a consistent marketing message across all owned media. Owned media, like your website, your social profiles, your email newsletter. All of the actual platforms that you own or that you manage. Then make sure your branding is consistent across all of those challenges. So that way, when people visit them, they get the same experience. Boom. Boom. Hey, if this is the first time, I'm going to change it up a little bit. If this is the first time you've listened to the podcast, howdy. Welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you. If you've listened to the podcast before, you know what we're going to skip. Yeah. But before we skip it, we've got to take a step back and say, hey, this is filmed live in Houston, Texas. Chuck and I and Clucky here. Clucky. We are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers. And our mantra is. Do not be a douche. Don't be a douche. I thought you were going to go. There you go. That's how you say don't be a douche in Turkey speak. We've got a great article for you today. This is what? Like 10 seconds? 10 minutes? Yeah. A 10-minute account audit to prevent SEM fires during the holidays. This was posted by a lady named Sana over at Search Engine Watch. Talk to PPC management and some quick tips you can do before the holidays start. So do you think it's worth spending 10 minutes? It's worth spending

an hour, but at the very least 10 minutes. Without a doubt. All right. So because we got a review, and this is how this works. If we get a review and we get at least 10 shikos. Those are shares, likes, and follows. If we get those, then we don't tell you how exactly you could leave us a review. We did get a review. We did get more than 10 shikos. I think we got like 20, 21 on Twitter again. Yeah, the best SEO podcast Twitter handle is blowing up. Ironically, I think it's sometimes being limited because I'm only limited to following three people. Each time? Each time. Yeah. So, yeah, it's right at the cusp of the 5,000, and you get 10% more than the 5,000 or whatever. Anyway, they need to cut us some slack or something. We will tell you, though, how you can shiko us. Yeah. Right, so there's lots of platforms. Our profile on those platforms, we've made it really easy for you to find. They're like facebook.com slash eWebResults, twitter.com slash eWebResults, youtube.com slash eWebResults, instagram.com slash eWebResults, and linkedin.com slash company slash eWebResults. All of those will take you to our profile on those platforms, and we ask you to psycho us, share, like, and follow on all of those. If you are a PHP genius or a WordPress guru, please reach out to us. We're probably looking for it. Give us a call. Submit an audio resume, 713-510-7846. If you're interested in a free, comprehensive website profit analysis, just go to our website, eWebResults.com, and you cannot miss the green button, and we will get that profit analysis started for you. It's a little more in-depth than just, hey, it's just SEO, or hey, it's just conversion analysis. It's kind of all of that put together. Do we have any AlgoCats? No AlgoCats. We do not have any AlgoCats, so. We're almost an AlgoCat today, but not quite. So, we got some news. We got some news. All right. The little pieces of news that I have. Google

is going to offer a Black Friday tracking where they're going to be able to tell you, hey, this store is a little busy right now, or this store is slammed right now. People are currently getting squished to death at this particular store. That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, that'd be kind of cool. You could avoid those stores. No one's accurate. Yeah, that's the. They've got to be updated. You know what I'm saying? How are they going to update them? I don't know. Well, probably similar. Check-ins or something? Yeah. That means they're monitoring us, which doesn't really surprise me. Yeah. Deliveroo. Yeah, I got news on that same time. Deliveroo. All right. Let me skip it. Twitter. No, I'm talking about in regards to us being monitored. Go ahead. Oh, okay. Deliveroo customers were billed for unordered food. That's weak. It's just one of those delivery services. Like, yeah, I got some hamburger charges on my account, and they were delivered somewhere. else in England, and he's like, they got all their money back. It's fun to report when apps go awry. The Twitter CEO got banned from his own website. Let's do blanks there right now, dude. Yeah. Yeah, we'll come back to that, because that's some what news. Yeah. And then they're estimating Snapchat's IPO is probably going to be at about $250 billion, no, $25 billion. Yeah. Yeah, that's a lot of chatter. I think it's going to go down some, only because Instagram Stories is picking up, getting a lot of usage, and I see Snapchat numbers kind of going down. I just see Snapchat is a really good one-to-one. I have a hard time, and I know you can, and I know we've been together, great long-time listener, Dean Calhoun, who's like, you've got to get on the Snapchat bandwagon, and it's the stories is the only value. The interaction is almost painful from a company perspective. Yeah, because a lot of time invested in the one relationship. Yeah. Well, the key is to come up with messaging that's suitable for

multiple people, and so even though you're interacting with one-on-ones, it's the same messaging. Copy-paste, copy-paste, yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so I thought that was cool, $25 billion is the estimate for that. You got some news? I got a little news, little news, one piece. So we were talking about being followed, right? Right. So Google is adding some new data to AdWords. Right. It's actually kind of cool. They're adding store visit data to AdWords under the label Distance. Okay. So dig this. They got a location report ahead of Black Friday, the Distance Report is what it's called, and it's located in the Dimensions tab, and this report will show you store visits based on how far someone away from that store was when they searched and they clicked. Okay. Great news here, right? So if you're a retail establishment, right, and maybe you're even a franchise. We talked to a franchise today. Right, right. Got multiple locations. How awesome would it be to know how many people went to Google and searched for a kickboxing gym? Right. And how close they were to one of your locations when they searched it. That way, anytime there's searches within that specific area, you have the option now to increase your bid maybe, add a location site link extension, and do all sorts of other stuff that can get you that conversion a lot faster. Understanding how far people are from the location they're searching for, when they search, that's some great data to have. That's what's up, AdWords. Appreciate it. Wow. Good stuff. So yeah, follow us. I got one patiff. This patiff goes to Direction Marketing. Hit us. That's a punch in the face to you. That's a good thing, Direction Marketing. Think you're a new follower. She hit us up, says, at Direction LLC. Think they were probably a competitor. They said, looking for an awesome SEO podcast? I've tried many. This is the one which actually impresses me. At eWebResults, at BestLSEOPodcast, hashtag SEOPodcast. I think it's the turkey on my head. It's the turkey? Yeah,

it's the turkey that impresses them. Punch in the face to you, Direction Marketing, LLC. Hit us up. Let us know what you're working on. Very cool. All right, so we do have one review, as we mentioned. This is from Steph R. It was on Stitcher, I believe. And it is, of course, Fastos! It says, the title is Excellent Way to Learn About SEO. I found this podcast because I needed to learn about SEO and fast. Chris and Charles are knowledgeable and fun to listen to. I even hit them up for a free website analysis, and they really delivered. I'll definitely keep listening to this podcast so I can stay on top of the ever-changing world of SEO. Punch in the face to you, Steph. F-L, right? No, Steph R. Steph R. Punch in the face to you. Yeah, we had a great conversation about some direction. She's helping out a friend of hers, and so hopefully the conversation with me and that report sent her in the right direction. Hopefully. So that is the potatoes of the podcast. Time to get into the meat. Yeah, so I want to give a good punch in the face to Sarah. Sarah and the good folks over at Search Engine Watch. She posted this article, A 10-Minute Audit to Prevent SM Fires During the Holidays, and I do not have that title for you, that person. And so, but I started reading the article, and one of the reasons I wanted to pull it was because I felt it was timely, right? When people leaving, we're going to want to leave the office after the podcast. Isn't that one of our recommendations about content? It should be timely. Relevant and timely, exactly. So just considering that a lot of people are about to be out of the office, about to be, you know, spending time with families and not really working, but you have campaigns running, these are some great tips to do if you're running some paid campaigns while you step away from your computer. So, let's

start with, bam. So she starts off with the first one. Number one. One. It says, Pull a search query report over the last 60 to 90 days and optimize against it. It's like, oh, sorry. What do you mean by that? Pull a search query report over the last 60 to 90 days and then optimize against it. And I was like, a search query report? I look at search query reports all the time and I've optimized against them. I know exactly what she was talking about. She says, Terms that have spent a significant amount of budget and racked up no or few conversions that have high CPAs, right? So when you pull this search query report from a paid perspective, first thing you're looking for is which search queries, which terms, not the keywords you've actually put in, but the actual queries that come because of that. So if you put in your keywords and for example, your match type is broad or even phrase match, then when you check your search queries, they're going to be different from the keywords you put in, right? And so she's saying, check those queries and figure out which terms actually converted or better yet, in this case here, have no conversions. And if they don't have any conversions, then she say optimize against it. That means add those terms to negatives. That means delete those terms that maybe rework those terms, find some terms that probably have a higher likelihood of converting. She also says terms that are converting and have great CPAs. What would you do with those? Expand on them, create more ads with them, create more relevant content to support those key phrases, but come up with other variations of those secondary key phrases that also will convert well because they're based off a set of phrases that already convert well and then increase your budget and put more focus on those. But the key is pulling that search query report so you'll understand which directions to go in. Terms that aren't performing well, high

costs, no conversions, add them to negatives, stop wasting money on them. Terms, queries that are converting, that have decent engagement and nice conversion rates, then come up with more variations of them, increase the budget. I can totally get it. Pull the search query report over the last 60 to 90 days and optimize against it. By optimize against it, she really means just take the information it's given you and then make some smart decisions. Good work, yeah. Exactly. Two, number two, check your ad group setup and limit the number of keywords. This is a great tip and this is probably addressing a lot of newbies. You kind of get in, you create your campaign, you create your ad group and then you want to dump in 100 keywords. Not the best practice to do. You really want to limit it to about, matter of fact, she says ad groups should be limited to one to 10 key phrases with close-knit themes. This allows you to tailor your ad copy as much as possible and keep the ad relevant to what the user is searching for. This is exactly right. If you got 100 phrases in there, I guarantee you there's probably four or five different niches within those phrases and therefore, the ad copy that you're writing, the ad description you're writing, the title you're writing is probably not going to be relevant to a lot of those terms. And so if you reduce the amount of keywords you have in each ad group, then you get the opportunity to write a more focused ad. You give the user a better landing experience because they're searching for something. They're seeing an ad for what they search for. They land and see that. But when you have them all in one big group, yeah, your ads are going to show for searches that aren't that relevant. Your click cost is going to go high. Your engagement is going to go down. It's just not going to be a good experience. So yeah, so check your ad group

setup and limit. Limit the number of keywords you put into that ad group. Now, you can have more than 10, right? If you got 20 or 30 key phrases but they're all relevant to the same thing, go for it, right? But if they're not and you're just trying to be lazy, I'm going to recommend that you just do one vertical at a time and then at least one is done correctly and when you have time you can come back and do the others. You may bunch them up or if you've already got them bunched up, just start the slow process of breaking them down. Exactly. Three. Number three. She says, run a placement report over the last 60 to 90 days and ad negatives, right? So a placement report and again, we're talking about paid ads. We're talking about SEM, search engine marketing and so a placement report would be for anybody using GDN, that's Google Display Network and so if you're using a Display Network then you're probably taking advantage of placements or if you're running ads then they're automatically getting placed on certain sites. That's how Display Network works and you can log into AdWords, you can click placements and you can see the sites and the other locations where your ads have been shown. What she's saying to do is, matter of fact, she says, look for poor performing placements that have a high number of clicks and plenty of costs but no conversions. Well, why would you look for those? So you can stop them and so if you don't look for those then you don't know that they're underperforming and that they're costing you too much money. So log into AdWords, go to that campaign, check your placements and figure out where those are at and key point here, if you have analytics set up and you got your conversion tracking and everything in place then you also know which placements actually converting to best and then at that point you make some decisions. You either A, add them as

a negative so we don't want to show here no more maybe it's not relevant the site's just a bad site you don't want your ads over there or whatever logic you have behind it or B, this placement is really converting well and so we should do more of it. Either way, understand what your placements are and then make adjustments and here's what I add at this before we move to number four, add new placements. How about that? Instead of just understanding what automatic placements Google is automatically showing your site on based off of the kind of display network settings add your own placements. Oh Chuck, what kind of placements would you add? Here's the start and here's a pro tip for you. Add the local news stations in your city. You provide a local service like in Houston for example we have Fox, we got ABC, we got NBC, we got CBS, right? All of these major networks have local stations Channel 11, Channel 26, Channel 13 and so on and all these local stations guess what? Have local websites and guess what's on these local websites? Google Ads. Google Ads. Exactly. And who visits these local stations? Local people. The people who watch them, right? And so because every news station you watch tells, they're constantly telling people go visit us here, go visit us here. And so if you're a local business and you're running ads on your website and you're doing Google AdWords during the holiday season, run some display network placements on your local news. That's our pro tip for the day. Hey, I'm going to add, so one of the options okay was turn it off and maybe make a negative. Maybe you look at why it's not performing. Could be to change the ad. The ad, right? So maybe the offer in the ad needs to be tweaked. Exactly. Definitely. If this ad is getting a lot of clicks, it's costing you a lot of budget, people are coming to the site but then not converting. Switch up the

ad. Switch the ad up. Switch the ad. Exactly. Maybe it's both. But if you don't look at the numbers and analyze the numbers then you just won't know. And that's the kind of important part. She starts off by saying run the placement report. That's to understand the numbers. Yeah. Number four. Four. She says do device analysis for search and display. A device analysis. As a matter of fact, she says pull a device analysis on all campaigns to understand how mobile, tablet, and desktop perform. Look, she earned a whole bunch of cool points with me with point number four because the device report is one of my favorites. All of my clients, all of our clients get this report every month. And discuss it. And discuss it because it's important to know how your desktop visitors are performing compared to your mobile visitors. You had a client who was pushing back on something. Yesterday. Yeah. Yesterday, talked to a client and the client says, well, we know for sure based off of what we see in our lobby that bulk of our clients aren't visiting us on mobile devices. They're just not. Because nobody in their lobby is on a mobile device. And then I had to remind them that, well, you're in the healthcare industry and so if they're in the lobby then they're not searching. They're probably gaming or passing time waiting to be called. Texting. More importantly, pull the... Or watching our podcast is probably what they're doing. I pulled the device report for the last 60 days and what we learned really quickly was that over 46% of their traffic was on mobile devices. Not only was 46% of the traffic on mobile devices, mobile traffic actually had a higher conversion rate than the desktop traffic. Outperformed. Outperformed the desktop traffic even though there was more desktop visits. Yeah. Device report. Having understanding, analyzing what these devices are and how they're performing is key to any marketing strategy whether it's SEO or it's pay-per-click or whatever it is. And so when she

says do a device analysis for search and display, yeah, you need to understand how your ads are performing on different devices. How are these working? Are your desktop ads generating more walkthroughs and your mobile ads maybe generating more downloads? Right? What's going on with these ads and the devices that they're being presented on and how is it affecting your business? You must understand that in order to move forward. Yeah. Number five. And this is the last one. She says check for basic campaign level best practices. Right? And so this is really just kind of making sure okay, I've done everything. I've got my ad scheduling on. I've got my language type set. I have my geographic target set. All of these campaign level basics that you need to do. She said make sure you did that. She actually listed some. She says search and the GDN should be separate campaigns. Right? So if you've got a search campaign and you've got a display network campaign, please do not put them in the same campaign. And what she's saying, they should be separate campaigns. Why should they be separate campaigns? Maybe because one's not performing and the other one is. And if they're separate, then you can easily pause one. If they're combined, then all your data is together. All your numbers are skewed. And you can't even go in and pause one or the other. You kind of got to pause the whole thing. Yeah. It's so easy to get tons of impressions on a display network. And then when you're talking about admin work, it's, yeah, overwhelm. Overwhelm. So separate them. Matter of fact, she says, don't, here's another check for basic campaign level best practices. She says, don't settle for standard delivery for your best campaigns. So standard delivery is that little checkbox they'll give you in your campaign settings where it asks you how do you want your ads displayed. Standard delivery, which is kind of, you know, recommended is what it's going to say in parentheses and that's where they just

do it over time. Then it's kind of accelerated, right? Which show your ads as fast as possible irregardless of what your budget is. And that's the one she's recommending and I recommend for ads that you've already confirmed have a great conversion rate, right? If this campaign is performing well, it's converting well, it's getting decent traffic, it's not costing you a lot of money and you're seeing the result from it, accelerate those ads. Get that ad showed as much as possible. Frankly, pause all the others. Because if the situation requires that, but the key is to not let your ads that are performing extremely well just kind of be shown sporadically. No, make them shown all the time. Yeah. From a PPC perspective, we say you should either be increasing your budget, potentially decreasing your budget, or just changing ad copy, landing page, et cetera. You need to be making one of those three decisions a month over month. Frequently. If not every other week. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So, punch in the face to Santa. She said, a 10 minute account audit to prevent SEM fires during the holidays. This was posted on Search Engine Watch. Great article. Great article. All right, so now we have our what news. What news. You changed it out. I like that. I like that. That was smooth. It was smooth right there. That was the Thanksgiving edition of the what news. Yes. You're supposed to hit me with a There you go. By the way, you do need to see that on camera. The only way I can do this is by shaking my head vigorously. It's probably pretty entertaining. It is. That's why I keep asking them to do it. Plus, the turkey on the head exacerbates the whole effect of it. So, this blank stare goes to Twitter. Right? Because Twitter, they were suspending some accounts. Right. Now, the key is why they were suspending them. This is why they're getting the blank news. So, I don't know if you saw the guy, white nationalist guy, you

know, he's... Yeah, we talked about it last time. He got chopped off. He got chopped off. So, him and his whole slew of followers and everyone else who was on Twitter being aggressive. All complaining and... So, Twitter decided to just suspend all of them. Okay, right. And the owner got caught up in that. Yeah. So, Mr. Dorsey, how did that feel to know that your own company perceived you as a white nationalist? Wow. That's... I would kind of like to know what algorithm caused that to happen, right? Is it like... Yeah, who are you following, man? Who's following it? Who are you cycling with? Wow. Yeah, but they fixed it a few hours later, you know, and he did tweet... And then I like the tweet of him coming back on. Yeah, saying it was a mistake and I'm react... What did he say? I'm reactivating my... He used the exact same tweet that he did the very first tweet he ever did. Yeah. And I thought that's kind of cool. A little throwback. Yeah. You should have been more creative with that first tweet. Let's go Twitter. Y'all got to do better. We got a flyer for Webby Awards and the winners of Webby... I think it's Webby Awards or maybe it's something else where you get a five-word acceptance speech and there's some pretty cool ones. Anyway, I'll share that with you. Okay. I'll have to dig it out of the trash. It's really important to me. Hey, if you guys enjoyed this podcast or any of our previous podcasts or are going to enjoy any of our future podcasts, first, thank you. And then second, do us a small favor, share our podcast with three people. Maybe that's part of the reason that our best SEO podcast, Twitter, is blowing up. You guys are doing your job. Do share with three people. If you're watching live on Facebook, then just hit the share icon, tag your three business owners and share it with them. Maybe you're watching live on our website, then

great, copy that link, tweet it out through your favorite people. Yeah, and maybe even add our website, ewebresults.com. We'd really appreciate that. Appreciate it. Normally wait for you to do that, but you've already done that, so thank you in advance. If you are looking to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet, call ewebresults for increased revenue in your business. Our phone number is 713-592-6724. If you have a referral, somebody who's interested in internet marketing, you send them to us and they pay their bill. We will actually pay you. That's how that works. We have that referral program in place. Please remember, we are still going to get the Guinness World Record for the most TV interviews in a 24-hour period. This guy right next to me is actually releasing a video during the Guinness. This is why I need the little horn for the new mixtapes that come on. A new hashtag SEO rapper song. It's called Internet Marketing Only. The only way you're going to be able to catch the live debut of this song is if you tune in to our Guinness World Record Breaking Ceremony. What's that? December 16th? December 16th. December 16th? It's from noon December 16th to noon December 17th. We have a coffee sponsor. I'm relieved that we have a coffee sponsor. So I'll be awake for the whole 24 hours. Make sure you're following me at Chuck. Follow us at eWearResults. Follow up social live. And so that way sometime during that 24-hour period when we get ready to release this new SEO rapper song called Internet Marketing Early Only. Only. You can be the early adopter and get to see it first. I like it. Yeah, so that's pretty exciting. We've got other things going on. There's going to be like a jujitsu demonstration apparently this actually at UpSocial Network this last Tuesday so yesterday it's only Wednesday there was a little girl she's like I can break three boards and like I wasn't worried about her kicking my ass

earlier. Now she can break three boards she's probably if I get suckered into this she's going to break something and it's going to hurt. The good thing is I'm going to make sure you get suckered into it. I'm about to nominate Chris. And even my wife will be like yeah, choose Chris this will be fun. The good thing is it's actually located we're doing the event from the Bay Area Regional Medical Center and that's just south of Houston and so if I get injured I'll be right there at a hospital so that'll be really convenient. So yeah make sure you go to UpSocialNetwork.com fill in the little Guinness thing. We are probably Skyping in people so make sure that you connect with us and if you're in the Houston area make sure you get to follow us on UpSocialNetwork.com and then Facebook.com slash UpSocialLive great stuff going on there. Please remember we were filmed live here at 5999 West 34th Street Suite 106 Houston, Texas 77092 a transcript and video and audio of this podcast are available on our website and that is eWebResults.com you guys have made us the most popular internet marketing podcast you all of you guys look you do need to tune in and check out the turkey and his wonderful noises until the next podcast my name is Chris Charles Lewis bye bye for now for Thanksgiving check balance check 349 it's the old podcast 349 Thanksgiving Eve tomorrow's turkey time so please tune in tell me can you handle it today we talking about PPC management let's go it's the old podcast 349 boom oh wait that's a chicken the only way I can do a turkey is I gotta go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go