While ROI (Return On Investment) is the most important factor of your pay-per-click campaign, Google and other popular PPC programs make it easy to track this through conversions.

Here is the definition of a conversion tracking from Google:

What is conversion tracking?

In online advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on your ad leads directly to user behavior you deem valuable, such as a purchase, signup, page view, or lead. Google has developed a tool to measure these conversions, and ultimately, help you identify how effective your AdWords ads and keywords are for you.

It works by placing a cookie on a user’s computer or mobile phone when he or she clicks on one of your AdWords ads. Then, if the user reaches one of your conversion pages, the cookie is connected to your web page. When a match is made, Google records a successful conversion for you. Please note that the cookie Google adds to a user’s computer or mobile device when he or she clicks on an ad expires in approximately 30 days. This measure, and the fact that Google uses separate servers for conversion tracking and search results, protects the user’s privacy.

In general terms we track from the point to where the user searches for your term, clicks on your ad, and then purchases a product, fill out a request form, or any other form of lead.
If we see a keyword set is not converting than we generally investigate and adjust budgets towards keywords that do convert. The first month or two generally consist of us making these tweaks daily to optimize your campaign and get it converts at the highest potential. From that point on, we do small tweaks and market research that help to improve sails and ROI.

Here is a screenshot from a client of ours that is highly optimized and doing very well in their niche market.

For every $16.35 spent, the is a conversion.

Is your campaign optimized well? Is it worth you hiring a professional to do so? You may be losing hard earned dollars by not doing so.

We recently wrote an article on why top ranked sites benefit from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising such as Google Adwords.  In a recent case study we designed and developed a fishing guide website that was launched in under a week.  The entire industry for the area is extremely sluggish, but we were confident that a highly optimized and research PPC campaign would enhance business consistently.  For this reason, we would rather do PPC marketing, than go after the natural rankings in the initial life of the website.

We first start out with a consultation of the client who in turn knows the particular industry the best.  We find out the area, types of services, etc. and then begin to do our own keyword research.  We use tools such as the Google Adwords keyword tool to investigate the market among many in-house tools developed by our programming staff.

Once we have a high level of education for this particular client’s business and marketing, than we put it together in an Adwords campaign.  We charge a one time setup fee to setup the campaign and then a small maintenance fee to tweak and optimize the campaign over time.

In this case study, we decide to only target keywords that we know (from previous experience) that will convert for a fishing guide.  This will keep ROI up and along with conversions.  Based on the slow industry reports, we don’t have time or money to experiment on keywords that may or may not produce, so for this study we kept to high converting potential only.

In the following screenshot you can see that we are converting each click 15% of the time at a cost of only $11.33 per conversion!  So for every $11.00 or so, this guide is potentially booking a fishing charter.  While the conversion rate varies in each industry and the state of the economy, you can only benefit from having a professional company like ours in your corner, constantly tweaking your marketing dollar.

Not all websites will convert this well due to design issues.  Your website has to look professional and able to easily navigate to your conversions.  We have taken on clients with poorly designed websites in the past, only to see those waste marketing dollars.  Revamps are generally easier than a website from scratch, so please inquire.

We have worked with many of our clients to achieve top search engine rankings for many competitive keywords.  In many niche markets this often is enough to dominate the market, however your competitors may pump away at great ROI’s (return on investment) by paying to be on top of you via pay-per-click advertising.

When doing a simple search in a major search engine, you may find one to three ads that are sponsored that appear above the number 1 ranked site.   These websites are paying to be in these spots in the various PPC (pay-per-click) advertising programs.  While the cost may be great, the return may be even greater.  You will also see the PPC advertisers on the right side of the page, all of which are bidding to be ranked on top of each other.

While your competitors would love to have your natural rankings, they definitely are not out of the game.   In establishing a search engine optimization plan and goal, your competitors have the ability to appear on the page they want for any keywords while going after natural rankings.  While the exposure is highly related to the amount of budget, PPC advertising can be extremely effective when in the right control.

Well, why do we recommend that our clients with good natural rankings use PPC in combination?  It is simple, to cover your bases and maximize online exposure.  You may be surprised to know that many users are trained to look to the PPC ads on the right side of the page for more relevant website pertaining to their search.   Where does this leave the hard working natural ranked sites?   We’ll just say that we are working with many of our clients to keep quality sites, hence strong natural rankings.  And once we added PPC to the marketing formula, a whole new sea of visitors and business flooded in.

It many cases, some sites just can’t get good rankings for all the keywords that they are targeting.  There may even be keywords that produce business for you that your site is no where to be found on.  This is where a good keyword tool and research comes in for your PPC campaign.

When we put up brand new sites for clients, they are all built around the major search engines and main targeted keywords.   However, nothing is going to happen overnight and instead of hiring an SEO company to go after the natural rankings, we would prefer to see you have a PPC professional working a highly optimized campaign for you.

You see we are in the business to help you gain business, and a professionally PPC marketing plan can give you results faster than any SEO plan.  We can generally get you started in a few days and have the potential customer on your site just as fast.  This will allow you to truly put your new website to the test, while going after natural rankings at the same time.

YES.  While Meta tags have lost much of their weight in the determination of rankings, the Title tag <title> still remains very important in page indexing and search engine optimization.  While the Title tag isn’t really a Meta tag, it is still worth discussing here.

It takes widespread market research and keyword analysis to come up with the appropriate content for your title tag.  We use tools such as the “Adwords Keyword Tool” to determine the macro-market on the site and then we zone in on the terms that produce the best ROI.   If your web page is about multiple topics, you can separate them with commas, pikes, or hyphens within your title tag.

The description Meta is used by search engines widely and should be a concise summary of the page.  You generally want to stay in the 200 characters range and stay away from keyword stuffing.  This summary or description should be user friendly and not made for the search engines, however you definitely want to keep the keywords at hand in mind when writing this.   If you choose not too use a description Meta tag, most major search engines will scan your page for the appropriate text.

If you are serious about natural rankings for your website, than don’t totally count out Meta tags.  We generally only focus on the Title, Description, and Keywords tag, however some web companies will use the others available such as Ratings, Robots, etc.  Do your research and come up with unique tags for all your pages.

While quality content and offsite marketing is dominate, you want to make sure your web page is search engine friendly by covering all the bases.

Adapting modern search engine optimization techniques to your website may lead to a dramatic increase in traffic and profits. A clearly presented navigation menu can make or break your website in today’s competitive online market.Many web development companies are still missing the point on developing the navigation menu in text links and css (cascading style sheets). By effectively coding a text link menu, you allow search engines to read the link and page you are sending them to. The page loads will also be faster, as the site does not load images for the menu.

If you see a web design company that primarily uses images as navigation, I wouldn’t count them out right away, but ask them to show you sites they have done with a text link system and request it to be done in your upcoming project.

There are only so many web fonts to work with and you may find that a grungy website or graphically appealing site may be better suited with a cool font in the navigation (through image navigation). If you do this, it is highly advised that you put another navigation menu in the footer of the site using text links, effectively drawing a site map.

CSS is extremely powerful and you can control rollover colors, underlines, etc. all within one single file. This eliminates the need for javascript or flash to handle these components. This may also result in faster page loads.

If you are serious about good rankings in the top search engines, than have your site designed and coded accordingly. Here at SFC Design Group, we do several projects each month which involved revamping a poorly coded website to have several technical features such as this one. Most of our sites will always see a text link navigation system as we want our clients to have the edge and take advantage of high search engine rankings to increase revenues.