maine web development, web design, internet marketing

BING = But It’s Not Google

I have to admit, I snickered when I first read this clever little acronym for Bing!, given my penchant for all things Google. And does anyone else find the Bing TV commercials annoying? (“Moms who wear jeans to match their teen’s jeans”- ugh). However, now that the Yahoo-Microsoft search agreement is moving forward, you’re going to need to start showing Bing some extra love in your website’s internet marketing campaign.

But I Don’t Wanna!

You don’t have to throw a temper tantrum just yet, because you’ve got some time on your hands. The deal first needs to be approved by government regulators, which is expected in early 2010. From there, it will likely take about 3-6 months for the the Bing-powered organic search results to start showing up on Yahoo. You’ve got at least a year to learn more about how the Bing algorithm works and how to optimize better for it, which will be helpful if your site performs better in Yahoo than in Bing. So quit your whining.

Your PPC Life Might Get a Little Easier (Maybe.  Eventually.)

Although you may be like most companies and exclusively use Google AdWords for your PPC campaign, if you use all three paid search platforms, you’ll now only have to use two. So this consolidation might mean a little less work for you (keep in mind this won’t happen until around 2012). And if you only use Google, you may want to start using Micrsoft’s AdCenter to be able to participate in the top two platforms. Oops, I may have just made more work for you instead of less. Sorry ’bout that.

Get to the Point, How Can I Get Better Rankings in Bing?

Well, like any good SEO would, you’ve got to do your research. Take your targeted keywords and type them into Bing. Where do you rank? Who ranks for the more coveted spots? Look at the better ranked websites and see how they’re optimized. Obviously, using SEO best practices that are appealing to search engines in general and creating quality content that is appealing to people is the winning combination. Still, there are some ideas that Bing favors a keyword rich domain, a longer-is-better domain age, linking out (yes, OUT), and pages with at 300 words of text. Play around a bit, try some new things and see if there’s some Bing movement. Isn’t that what we do best, anyway?

Whatever, I Just Want to Care About Google

I prefer Google, too, but now that those “other” two search engines have essentially combined, they’ve got about 30% of the market share.  I think it would be foolish to not pay attention to how your website keywords rank in bing.  My advice?  If you’re currently not performing well in bing, I would make some minor adjustments and see if you can increase your ranking.  Do you really want to ignore 30% of the the search population, who are also potential customers?  I know I definitely don’t.

It never fails to surprise me how often I’ll click on a pay per click ad only to end up on a page that’s resemblance to my search query is worse than a Canal St knock-off. I experience this both as a consumer and a professional as I compulsively click on ads in an effort to understand the state of pay per click marketing and the often neglected connection to the customer.

Let’s take the search term “solar panels,” a nice, simple, fairly straightforward term, right? After all, what else could someone who types in solar panels be looking for other than, well, information on solar panels?

Well, the answer to that question varies –quite a lot — depending on whether you look at the organic search results or the paid listings.

In the organic column you see a mix of commercial sites with varying degrees of information, the token Wikipedia entry and a nice integration of Google Universal listings including some eCommerce retailers, a YouTube video, and blog entries. While getting dumped onto some of these eCommerce sites may be a little thin on the practical details you might be looking for, what would you expect when typing in such a generic search? (Try something like “learn about solar panels” if what you really want is information…)

What’s really fascinating, though, is how poorly the pay per click ads match the actual query. The answer to the question on most of the pay per click advertisers, instead, seems to be… what do we want people who like solar panels to think about?

This me-centric thinking leads to a variety of oddball ads — one promoting an energy audit (no info on solar there), another promoting the Democratic National Convention (powered by a lot of things, the sun not being one of them), one info-packed if ugly site for a solar panel retailer, and a half-dozen knock off sites by the same advertiser promoting a single product (which, by the way, isn’t a solar panel).

And we wonder why users are sometimes hesitant to click on paid ads?

On the flip side, paid search ads that are properly targeted are incredibly effective. After all, isn’t it pretty cool that I can throw “war and peace book” into Google and then see an ad to Amazon.com that shows me… the actual book? And hey, there’s the “Buy it Now” button…

Relevancy and specificity are critical to an effective pay per click campaign, as we’ll be discussing in our webinar this Tuesday afternoon — Pay Per What? (2:00PM EDT).

When you’re managing 30+ Yahoo Sponsored Search accounts, you tend to get a lot of administrative and marketing mail from them. Though I do my best to keep apprised of the latest changes in their service, there’s just too much information to care about all of the time. For example, they’ve been running a webinar series for making the most out of your campaigns, which, as PPC Hero cares to point out in good detail, can be a mixed bag of advice.

So why did my eyebrow raise to see that Yahoo will now offer me $20 as a thank-you gift for attending the webinar and then filling out the survey? A gift which I can get up to three times?

The reason I’m not attending these webinars is not because I need $20, but because my perception of time/value is just not there… and $20 sure isn’t changing anything. I even think their webinars are GREAT… for the right market.

For example, look at the titles of these:

How to Create Successful Campaigns
How to Create Successful Keywords and Ads
How to Improve your Ad Quality

All nice topics, covering some pretty hearty stuff like geo-targeting, automatic keyword insertion, landing page quality, and other factors that effect the success of a campaign. The problem is, I already know all this, which means that as many pieces as Yahoo sends my way, I’m still not going to be interested.

Missing the Boat

My frustration with Yahoo’s service, especially compared with Google’s, is their failure to provide powerful tools for account managers like myself. The topic of these webinars and the frequency of their appearing in my inbox is just more evidence of that.

Where’s my offline editor for managing multiple ad campaigns across several accounts?
Where’s my master account so I can easily review the status of multiple clients?
When can I pull reports for multiple accounts automatically, based on specified parameters?

While I appreciate Yahoo’s effort to keep customers apprised of how to make their campaign work for them, my feeling is that they’re doing so as the expense of professionals who need more than what you’ll get out of an hour-long slideshow.

A few of our customers have received an email claiming to be from Google Adwords that looks like this:

Dear Google AdWords Customer,

Your ads have stopped running because we were unable to process your billing information. We will reactivate you account after you update your billing information. In order to reactivate your account, please sign it to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login and update your billing information.

This is a scam! Do not visit the site and do not enter your information.

You’ll see that the link ACTUALLY goes to: http://adwrods.google.select.swviyp.cn/select/index.html, NOT Google’s website.

In general, if you get any emails that sound fishy — asking for credit card or other personal information to avoid a bad outcome — it’s good to err on the side of caution. We’re happy to review any such emails to let you know if they are legitimate or not.