HTML5, Yahoo Directory and SEO - #seopodcast 139

Hi, and welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Got it right there, Tom. Got it right there, Tom. We have a mantra here. That mantra is... Don't be a douche. Don't be a douche. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. I'm Charles Lewis, so internet marketing... And right, pulling up, because I had the wrong page. As we have our previous podcast, and our tip from Podcast 138, because this is Podcast 139, almost 140, woo-hoo, is identify your audience and keep them in mind as to generate content. The content on your web is not only your friend, but actually addresses the audience and concerns they may have when they visit your site. So if any of that sounds a little foreign to you, go back and listen to our previous podcast. You know, in fact, just go back and listen to all our podcasts. Then we don't have to... We've got a few people who are trying to do that, too, so punch in the face to y'all. Boom. Um, remember, we are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers, where our mantra, as we just mentioned, is... Don't be a douche. I thought you was a little early with that. I thought you'd change it up every now and then, right? Um, remember, if you're at some sort of electronic device that enables you to be social in any form or fashion, we're asking you, imploring you, at this moment, be social. Be social. Very easy. Get on Twitter, get on Facebook, and, uh, you know, tell people, let people know that you're actually listening to podcast number 139 right now. On Twitter, how do they do it? On Twitter, hashtag, SEOpodcast139. Make sure you tag... We can be online. Thank you. Uh, we've been... That's actually been working really well. We've been getting lots of feedback. While we're talking about social, you can stalk us at facebook.com slash... E-webstyle. Twitter.com slash... E-webstyle. YouTube.com slash... E-webstyle. By the way, we're actually getting all sorts of labeling descriptions and title tags in

our YouTube pages now. E-webstyle. Um, so the, I just heard some talking, I was like, was that me? A slow echo check. Um, and then you can also email us at podcast at... Oh, the other you. Podcast at E-webstyle.com. All right. So, a little bit of news. Um, I thought there was some cool stuff going on. We know HTML5's coming out. Mm-hmm. We know HTML5 actually has the ability to do video in it, right? Mm-hmm. And, uh, one of the challenges that they're having with it are what are called DRMs. Know what DRM stands for? Uh, Dr. M. Dr. M. Dr. Media. He's the dude who's writing the code for HTML5 so that it can show media. He's highly educated. It stands for digital rights management. So, this is, you know, how can you, right? So, how you can lock, how you can lock out people to make sure, you know, people can't record videos, all this stuff. Google has a guy on staff who is actually instrumental in basically saving, uh, that HTML. His name is Ian Hickson. And, uh, he basically says, like, all DRM is unethical. Um, you know, the government has already decided we have specific things that we can do with media after we purchase it. Mm-hmm. For instance, you go out and buy Toy Story. You have the right to cut out a snippet and blog about it. You have the right to actually make a copy of it for yourself. Um, you know, in my case, I need to do that because I have small kids and they like to go over to the DVD and grab the DVD out and rub it all over stuff. So, it will no longer work. A copy is really nice. So, um, I actually appreciate that, that perspective. The other thing he's saying is the whole reason of having video in HTML5 was to get away from the plugins. The Flash plugin. The other plugin. Necessary to watch video. So, uh, so by putting in a DRM system, you actually end

up with a plugin still. So, what's the, what's the point of that? So, I just thought that was pretty interesting. Also, there's, um. That's almost blank still worthy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, let's, let's create a new standard so we can get away from plugins. First thing we need is a plugin. Um, do not track. It's a, there's a, there's a consortium of, uh, like Google and online Facebook, all sorts of, uh, online people who are coming together and they're creating this standard, which is do not track. Like, what it really means, and actually it's the Digital Advertising Alliance is that group. And what it really means is do not target. So, they want to have built into browsers the ability to not target. When, and how many people are, like, we all feel a little big brother-ish the first time we realized that an ad is being displayed to us because we went to a website. Yeah. Does it really upset? I'm sure it upsets some people, right? How many people does it really upset? Like, I, I want this to stop. Yeah, I don't, you know, personally, only reason it upsets me is because, um, we do PPC. And so, I, every time I'm remarketing to it, it's usually a client of ours. Oh, yeah. I don't, I've never been interested in that. It's an ad I've created. Yeah. And it's constantly being shown to me. I did that. Ooh. It gets you an opportunity to tweak the ad. Ooh, that didn't look good that time. Um, yeah, so they're trying to come up with some sort of, they're calling it Do Not Track and, and kind of the, the gist of the article, uh, was that really it's Do Not Target and so the name Do Not Track is kind of trying to circumvent Congress from, you know, trying to protect our privacy. They make an interesting point. If you don't want to be tracked, but you want to have all these social tools, and you also want your Yahoo page to actually, you

know, show up and have all of your, you know, customized content on it, it has to know who you are. It has to track you. So, crazy. Um, we are currently on our Facebook page running a contest. It's actually a really fun contest. You know how at the beginning of, uh, every Simpson episode? Yeah, Bart writes a different sentence. Bart writes a different sentence. So, there's a link to a place where you can go write a separate sentence, uh, and where the contest is, whoever comes up with the, uh, the most entertaining one, uh, will win a gift card. And, uh, I've just printed out two of them here. One of them is, I will not wear my black hat when giving SEO pitches. Sounds like maybe that was a lesson learned. Lesson learned. No, exactly. That was in one of my videos, uh, against Aaron Goldman. I chose to wear the white hat. Right, right. And you point, I remember that. Awesome video. Go out and check out the SEO wrapper because there's some great videos and, and I think that was some of your kind of most inspired stuff was, was, uh, back and forth with Aaron, with Aaron Goldman. Uh, and the other one I have is, uh, and the other one I have is, write keyword rich content. Click here for more information. That's just hilarious. That's obviously somebody who watches. Actually, that's Darren, Darren Bowie wrote that one. Thank you. I'm watching now. What's up, Darren? Punch in the face. Um, we've got two questions. Um, we've got two questions before we get to questions. We've got some reviews. Yeah. I noticed there wasn't no, no, no, no tear. No tear, yeah. I didn't have to stop by my friendly local neighborhood tattoo artist. Uh, this one is Great Actionable SEO Podcast. Uh, this is from William Parleman. Okay. We'll address him later. Yeah. I, and he's got one of our questions too. Yeah. I love these guys. They do a great job of sharing the most recent SEO topics

and share their real world experiences with you. It's like Christmas morning every time they release a new episode. That's awesome. That's phenomenal. If you're an SEO or responsible, and maybe he had a bad Christmas. Horrible. I don't know. If you're an SEO or responsible for your company's search campaigns, this is a must listen. A nice mix of SEO one-on-one and advanced SEO tactics. Again, Bill Parleman, Radical Marketing Solutions. Punch in the face. Yeah, he's got a good question. Um, the other one is, great resource and entertainment. That's the title. And then the first line is, five stars. Five stars. Punch in the throat to you guys. Oh, so no. Punch in the throat? Yeah. You have to determine what that is. That might not be good. I can't even say thank you. I'm learning about SEO while having a great time. Thanks for helping me put some basic thoughts in my website while in development. When it's ready to show, I'll ask for an analysis. Thanks again, Adam. And his handle was Engineer Bell. Punch in the throat. Punch in the throat. Man, Adam. All right. I'm going to say it, I think. I think. If I could speak. I do. I'm still trying to catch my breath. We got more from our international sites. We'll get on those next time. All right. So we have a question from our Facebook page. Tim Colling, who has become a kind of pretty interactive listener. Thank you. Punch in the face, Tim, for that. Here's a new question for experts. Is it still worthwhile to pay to be added to the Yahoo directory? And does the Yahoo directory still exist? Cool thing about that question is I responded to Tim on Facebook. And my immediate answer was yes, right? Some paid directories work, and frankly, Yahoo paid directory is one of those that works. It does have a cost associated with it, $300, but it generates a high PR link. Google sees it at value, and at the end of the day, it helps your ranking. What

was cool about that was two days later, which would have been yesterday, Matt Cutts posted a video by Matt Cutts addressing paid directories. And in Matt Cutts' video, he went on to say that just be careful which paid directories you use. Some fly-by-night ones have a low PR. They don't really trust them. The categories and the criteria for them to publish or link in business information in the directory is subpar, so they actually devalue it. Then there are others that have a high quality rate, have great categories, do a lot of research, almost require a verification process, and those get a higher PR. And then he went on to mention that they value Yahoo. So definitely, Tim, paid directories work, and Yahoo is one you should invest in if the budget permits it. And this next one is, again, from William Parleman. I like this. You guys mentioned you do both SEO and PPC for clients. I just took on about 20 new SEO clients. I would love to hear an episode where you guys talk about how you manage your time when it comes to working with SEO and PPC clients. SEO is time-consuming and a lot of roll-up-your-sleeves type work. I would love to hear an SEO time management secrets. We'll actually cover that in another podcast because we have something special for you guys today. It's really kind of for you guys and for us. We're about to take the video from this particular podcast, and it's going to kind of transition, and it will become a video on our pay-per-click page. So, Bill, if you're listening, you'll be able to hear what we do for pay-per-click clients. You'll hear a case study, and so that can send you down the right path. I know your question is towards SEO, so we're just going to table that question. We'll table that. I'll respond to you, though. Yeah, because, frankly, as you know, it's a lot of roll-up-your-sleeves work. There are a couple tools that we use that certainly help us. I would

imagine you're aware of them. We don't keep them secret or anything. We don't have anything. Time management. Let me give Bill these two tidbits, two real things that will save you a ton of time. Now, sync up your AdWords account with Analytics, so that way when you run a report, you can access Analytics and pull PPC reports. Do that, and then get friendly with AdWords Editor. Yep. There you go. Take that, run with it, and I'll send you some more information across email. So, like we mentioned, we're actually about to start a section of this podcast that we're going to cut out and use on our webpage. So, enjoy. Hi, and welcome to our pay-per-click page. You're about to learn everything you need to know about pay-per-click. We're going to get started with Charles Lewis. He's our Internet Marketing Specialist. And I'm Chris Burris, the owner of eWebStyle. So, here we go with pay-per-click. Yeah, so pay-per-click is, we'll start with calling it paid search. Paid search is really, in a nutshell, paying to drive search traffic to your website. There are several different ways you can do it. Pay-per-click, PPC for short, is one way you can actually pay Google, Yahoo, and Bing for clicks. You can do that in a couple ways. Actually, buying keywords or bidding on keywords. You can bid on display ads, which are actually images that can show in Google's content network across different sites. There's also a form of remarketing, which is kind of getting very popular right now. Remarketing is, in a nutshell, a spinoff of display advertising, how you can kind of display ads to people who have already visited your site. And so, today I want to talk about how we do paid search. And, to be honest, what we try to do up front is be very transparent with all of our clients. And this should go across the board with most firms. Unfortunately, it doesn't for some. So, one of the things we try to do in regards to paid search, you have

to monitor billing. Right? So, let's address the facts first. We're very transparent. We do our billing on our client's card. Google requires that you, and Bing as well, requires that you apply some sort of billing payment method, you know, a credit card. Right. We'll use our client's card. And not only that, but we create login credentials for that client. So, they can log in. They can see the billing. They can see the ads. The client can log in and see traffic. They can see CTR. They can see a lot of the things that, to be honest, most agencies and most firms try to hide. That, especially if it's not performing well. We want the client to see that for two reasons. One, so they'll know. Two, since I know they'll know, I have to definitely put our best foot forward. I think, you know, transparency is key. The other thing is by the client having login, you know, when we call to follow up with details about how the campaign is performing, the client's actually able to log in and look at the exact same reports at the exact same time. So, it's incredibly valuable. So, it's very valuable. And at the end of the day, it kind of eases their mind. Unfortunately, a lot of, you know, small business owners out there who have been burned by different agencies, and there are plenty of popular agencies, I'm going to give names now, that use a separate sort of platform set up. And so, you can't really see the information that you want to see as a business owner. And so, we decided to just not do that, give you the information you want to see. Cool story about how our PPC works is that I'll be blunt and say I'm pretty confident that we can probably do it better than you if you're the business owner. We have one client, a windshield replacement guy, Delta Autoglass. And what they did was they were spending a ton of money on pay-per-click, like 5K or such.

And they came to us, they were spending it with an agency. They weren't quite sure how it was working. They weren't getting reports. They didn't have the transparency that we were just talking about. Couldn't see the keywords, couldn't see CTR, couldn't control which keywords were working, and all of this. And I looked at it, and I was like, I know I can probably decrease your spend even while adding our 15% management fee. Yeah, we do have a 15% management fee on the budget that's spent either with Google or Bing. Just on your pay search budget in general. And we could probably lower your spend while adding our 15% and still get you better results. He took us up to the challenge, immediately dropped it to 3K, plus our 15%. And within two weeks, he saw a significant increase in business. Before the end of the first month was over, he called to move it back up to 5%. And that was because he had saw business coming in, and he wanted more of it. To this day, that budget has doubled, and their business has almost tripled. They've expanded to offer new services, servicing new locations, hired new employees, bought new vehicles, and looking to get a new Northside location. And raised their prices. And raised their prices. So, put it to the face to you guys. An important aspect of that campaign was the fact that we're an internet marketing company that's responsible both for the web design and development and also driving the traffic. So, you know, if we saw that we were sending lots of traffic to his website and it wasn't actually converting into business, we would pull back and actually rework the website and figure out why it's not working. We have lots of experience doing that. And in his case, we just revamped the entire website, which had some positive impact even before they switched over to us managing the campaign. And then once we started managing the campaign, it's just been through the roof for them. Well, to

add on to that, one of the benefits of doing that is that, like you said, we rebuilt the website first. And knowing that we would eventually take over the page search campaign, that allowed us to, during that development phase, to go ahead and create the necessary landing pages that we knew we would need to make the pay-per-click campaign successful. And so, dealing with an agency that can not only manage your paid search but also maintain your website has great value. Absolutely. Part of our process in doing paid searches is a couple things. One, we always determine what the goal is, right? What does your business do online? Are you selling a product? Are you providing a service? In Delta's case, they provide a service, which kind of includes a product. We have other clients who are strictly e-commerce, and so they sell products. Once we determine that, then we need to go in and figure out what sort of paid search campaign should we apply. If you're providing a service, then Display Network may not be the best for you because it's a longer sale. Right. Right. If you're selling a product online, then Display Network just might work. Frankly, remarketing will probably even work better because people are shopping online, and so you need to have your products in front of them as often as you can. One of the things we do is also establish where those ads should be published, right? Should they be published on Google? On money.com? Yeah. Should they be included in Google's content network? Should they be on mobile devices? We need to determine all of that before we even begin creating the ads so that we will know what sort of ads we need to create. And that comes from a good understanding first of what your client base is. Definitely. And how do we target that specific client base? After we do that, then we kind of go in and figure out what sort of paid search is needed. Again, like if they need remarketing, if

they need regular pay-per-click, or it may be kind of a social company. They may need Facebook ads and things like that. Then that helps us determine what the overall budget should be and how we can tweak that budget to make sure it works. So, after we can determine all of that, then we go back into the basics, keyword research. Always start there. Figure out which keywords you need. Develop as many as possible. Tag them with the locations. I got to stop here. They say in real estate, it's location, location, location. We always say in internet marketing, it's keywords, keywords, keywords. Definitely. You have to do that. One of the things, and I'll give you this tidbit. One of the things people tend to leave out when they do keyword research is they don't take that time to do negative keyword research. And so, some people, when we take over a pay-per-click campaign for someone, I'll notice they may not have any negatives, or they'll only have two or three. And so, I can quickly go in and just look at Google Analytics, see what kind of traffic is coming to them, and realize that some of this traffic is the wrong words, and go and add those words to the negative list. Right, so I would suggest that you do your negative keyword research while you're doing your regular keyword research, because you will get all of those same words at the same time. Do them as thoroughly, because they really both require a lot of attention. They require a lot of attention, which is why at eWeftStyle, what we do is I'll go in, you know, at least daily, and check spend. Make sure it's spending right. Make sure nothing's going haywire with your budget. And then, at least twice a week, go in and add negatives, or tweak ad groups, or remove keywords that aren't performing, or increase the budget on words that are performing very well, and make adjustments. That way, we kind of earn that 15%, and at the end of

the day, the client can see some results. So, after the keyword research, then we get into what I call ad creation, and ad creation really happens once we determine where these ads are going to go. Like I said earlier, if we determine that you're doing display ads and remarketing, then our graphic designer, I'll give him the CTAs, I'll give him a copy of the ad text, and he'll whip up, you know, horizontal ads, square ads, banner ads, that all, first, have the same look and feel as the website. Number two, will also be used on that landing page, so that way, when they click the display ad, they land on a page that has a same graphic, or if not the same, very, very similar, but definitely includes the same offer. So, that way, you won't lose the client, and they won't think that they landed on the wrong page. Ad creation also, of course, includes the text ads, you know, typical Google ads, 25 characters in your title, 35 in your first line, 35 in your second line. Take advantage of that. Speaking of those ads, this is a great time to do some advanced stuff. We kind of determine if we should use what Google calls DKI, for example. That's dynamic keyword insertion. Make sure that the word you searched will show up in the title. It'll be bolded throughout. You know, you can put this in the title, you can put it in the description, or wherever you really want it to show at. So, these are just some sort of, I won't call them advanced techniques, because most people who do PPC should know this stuff, but that's a stage that we tend to implement that at. So, once we create the ads, we go into budgeting, right? One thing we try to do here is we'll max out on Bing first, and until the tables turn and Bing becomes more expensive than Google, we'll continue to max out on Bing first, because at the end of the day, click is

a click. If somebody goes to Bing or somebody goes to Google and they type a keyword that you would like to be found for, you don't care that they were on Bing or Google. You do care, though, that Bing is cheaper. Yeah, definitely. That click is five bucks in Google. It's probably 180 in Bing or less. And so, we'll definitely max out on Bing as much as we can, and then the remaining budget, which usually has been averaging 70%, 30%. So, that 30% will usually max out the amount of traffic and the clicks we can get from Bing, and we'll take the remaining 70% and manage it effectively in Google. And then it also depends on how we manage that budget, right? Depending on the industry, we may pour it all in and gradually decrease it. After we see what kind of clicks come in, after we see how it's performing, or vice versa. We may start off low and gradually increase it once we see that it's spinning too fast or it's not spinning fast enough. And we take all of that data and, first off, note-take it and report it so we can refer it back to the client, but also to make sure that we're managing your budget to the best of our ability. Fourthly, we'll complete the basics. We're talking about budgeting. Google has what they call quality score. The better your quality score, the lower your ads, the higher your placement, the better your CTR, right? And so, there are several ways we can do this. And I won't go into too much information about that, but we do cover the basics. Make sure that the landing page is consistent with the ad group. Make sure that the content on that landing page is consistent with the ad text. And that way, Google will say, okay, this ad group is landing on the right page and the content on that page is definitely related to the ad. First off, from a client perspective, that will likely get you a conversion,

which would increase your CTR. Confidentity. Definitely. And from Google's perspective, they like conversion. And they'll increase your quality score. And so, that same click that was costing five bucks over time may cost you $4.75 or $4.50 or $4.25 because you're providing a great experience to the Google user. Lastly, I'll say review it. Constantly review it. The last thing you want to do with a paid search campaign is set it and forget it because at the end of the day, it'll spend and it'll keep spending. And your client probably won't notice it, but you're not really making the best of the budget. You have to go in constantly and check the budget, add negative phrases, tweak terms, test new ad groups. We tend to do two or three ads, frankly, per ad group. That way, we can let them rotate and compare them with each other. If three ads get shown a hundred times a piece and one has a significantly higher CTR, then click-through rate, then that's the one we go with. And then I'll make that one the primary, get rid of the other two, and maybe even come up with some spinoffs of the primary. And then test those. And that way, we can constantly improve on the CTR and the ranking. There's three things that we're constantly focusing on. And one of them is the ads, which is either the text ads or the graphic ads. I'm sorry. First, it's the keywords. Then it's the ads, text ads, or graphic ads. And then it's the landing page to make sure that you've got continuity through all of those. Whatever the client searches, they see in the ad text. And whatever they see in the ad text, they see on the page that they land on. We've all clicked pay-per-click ads where I thought I was looking for an air conditioning unit, and it showed me refrigeration page or something. And so that results in a bounce. That's just wasted dollars for that particular client. Or people who you may send an ad

to a home page. And while you do do AC repair, your home page says AC repair, refrigerator repair, washing and dryer repair. And you're creating additional clicks and really wasted time for the user. They search AC repair. Let's land them on AC repair. To take it a step deeper, if they searched AC repair with a free service call, let me land them on a page that says free service call with your AC repair. Right. Continuity. And fill out this form so you want to have a good, strong call to action. CTA, fill out this form or give us a call immediately, and we'll get you set up. Yeah, so in a nutshell, that's E-Web style. That's how we start off managing a paid search campaign. And those are just the basics. Because we really dig deep. We could have talked about match types and things like that. But, you know, we'll talk about that another time. Thank you guys for visiting our pay-per-click page. That was our little segment that we're actually going to throw on our website. Thank you guys out there for listening to our podcast. Do we have anything else? Is there any blank stare? No, no blank stare today. No blank stare today. I was going to talk about how Android shares went up, their users went up. Oh. And Apple's actually went down. Oh, wow. But that was almost expected. With how many devices are holding the Android operating system on it. Definitely. So you have been listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. This was podcast number 139. Remember, do us a very small favor. Go on to iTunes. Create an account. Submit a review. And then send us an email so that we can actually give you a punch in the face. We've got lots of reviews coming in. We really appreciate it. Our fans are just awesome. We're getting more and more engagement. You guys are out there tweeting. Remember, if you can tweet right now, hashtag podcast. Hashtag SEO podcast 139. That's why I

don't die. Yeah, I gave him the buzzer sound. Let me do this real quick. For our fans and people who follow us and really kind of stay in tune with what E. WebStyle is doing, do me the big favor of either DM an email address through Twitter or send us a message through Facebook or frankly email us at podcast at E-WebStyle.com with your email address because we're about to go through a whole website redesigned for E-WebStyle. Actually, yeah, the video we did where we did what no other internet marketing company would probably ever do. We released a podcast where we did an analysis and pretty cutthroat. It's probably one of the most cutthroat analyses of our own website. Yeah, so check that out. We'll be posting that on Facebook here shortly. Then we'll be coming out with some designs. We'd like to get you guys to get some feedback. Yeah, that's why I want those email addresses. Once the new design mock-ups are done, I'll send it to you, kind of get your guys' opinion on it, and we'll take it from there. All right. Thank you guys for tuning in to the Most Popular SEO Podcast on iTunes. Until the next podcast, my name's Chris Burris. Troll Fools. Bye-bye for now.