A Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads

A Beginner’s Guide to Google Ads

Nov 15, 2019

When it comes to building a solid digital marketing strategy for a client, PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns are a tactic that is always on our “considered” list. Google Ads is perhaps the best known PPC platform, so we’re taking a look at how you can take advantage of this agile tool. From choosing what kind of Google Ad campaign to run to assessing your efforts after it’s underway, we’ll give you an overview of the process from start to finish.  

Why Google Ads?

For starters, it’s helpful to outline what falls under the umbrella of “Google Ads.” The most commonly understood iteration is the Search ads feature, where brands can bid on specific keywords on Google Search to capture that traffic in real-time. Here, you’re harnessing the power of Google’s search engine—which processes nearly 40,000 searches a second—to attract targeted traffic or activity.

Google Display ads are the visual component to Search’s text-only format. With a Display campaign, your brand can share key visuals on websites across the internet, with targeting that includes both keyword-based (what users had previously searched for) or contextual (what kinds of sites they’re searching on).

There are other variations within Google Ads, but Search and Display are the best starting points for anyone looking to begin using the platform. And much like Facebook ad campaigns, Google Ads are generally very user-friendly. Setting up a campaign requires attention to detail and some patience, but it doesn’t require a ton of technical know-how to execute.

Finally, a major advantage to Google Ads is that there is no minimum required spend for any campaign. Whether you want to run a $100 campaign for a week or a $2,000 campaign for a month, you have equal access to all of Google Ad’s tools. The overall strength and spend of your campaign will depend on a few factors (to be discussed later), but there is virtually no barrier to entry—making it a great place to explore adding more digital elements to your marketing mix.

Choosing a Campaign

When you begin to create a new Google Ads campaign, you’re presented with a few different choices. Here, it’s important to make your decision based on what stage of the Buyer’s Journey you’re trying to target. Whether you’re going for Awareness-, Consideration- or Decision-level users, you’ve got a campaign type that will help you meet your goals.

Various Google Ads campaign types

Now, it might be tempting to start with enticing options like campaigns for “Sales” or “Leads.” But depending on the size or nature of your brand or the audience you’re targeting, it might be best to start at the top of the funnel and work your way down. ​“Brand Awareness and Reach” campaigns will deliver the most amount of impressions and viewers, whereas a “Website Traffic” campaign will help you generate more website visits—which you can later retarget in a Sales or Leads campaign.

So regardless of what kind of campaign you choose, just make sure it lines up with your overall goals. You can’t expect to start by generating valuable sales leads if you’re a new player in the digital space, and you might be wasting ad dollars by simply generating impressions if you’re an established presence.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

We’ve written about the importance of defining what campaign “success” looks like before you launch—Google Ads is no different. Again, your KPIs should always match up with the kind of campaign you’re running. Starting with impressions and ending with conversions, there is a wide range of data your Google Ads will generate to help you measure your KPIs. The reporting dashboard within Google Ads is easily customizable to show the key metrics that are important to you, but it may take some poking and prodding to get the configuration that’s best for you.

Building the Campaign Framework

There are a few items you’ll want to have in place before you begin building out your individual ads. Without them, you’ll likely find yourself scrambling once the campaign gets underway:

  • Research and Build Your Keyword List: Using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner (located inside Google Ads) will allow you to find out where your opportunities lie. This is where you’ll want to distinguish between your short- and long-tail keywords—e.g. bidding on “B2B marketing” versus “B2B marketing automation manufacturing.” Google Ads provides a lot of detailed information about search trends and activity, giving you some idea of how obtainable or expensive specific keywords may be.
  • Plan Out Your Budget: As previously mentioned, you can spend as little or as much as you want on Google Ads. Once you’ve got a keyword list and objective in mind, you can zero-in on a budget. You’ll also want to consider geography in your budgeting, as the broader your geographic targeting, the more expensive your campaign will be. We always recommend starting in a small, targeted location and expanding as your influence or presence grows.
  • Set Up Back-End Tracking: Though you might not yet be ready to track conversions or sales quite yet, it’s always a good idea to get your website back-end tracking in place. Using the Google Ads “pixel,” you can begin collecting audience info that will later allow you to retarget previous website visitors. This can be accomplished directly through your website or another Google tool called Tag Manager.
  • Build a Landing Page: Though not explicitly required, a landing page tailored to your Google Ads objective can make a huge difference in campaign performance. In the Awareness stage, more generic landing pages may suffice for simply generating impressions and clicks. However, once you’ve moved into the Consideration and Decision stages, you’ll need to have a best practices-informed landing page unique to that campaign in place.

Building Your Ads

For ads running on the Google Search network, you’ll need to do a little bit of copywriting. Much like you would for a Facebook ad, you’ll want a few catchy, relevant headlines and a bit of descriptive copy. Also like Facebook, you’ll want to run a few different ad variations, and Google Ads will automatically show the best performing version the most often.

Google Display ads and Search ad (middle right)

It’s important to remember that whatever copy you end up using should relate back to your landing page copy—otherwise you’ll get dinged for a bad user experience, which will affect your Google Ads performance. Here, you can also create mobile-only “call ads” designed to generate calls when seen on a mobile device, or a new tool called “Responsive Search Ads.” With these, you can enter 10 or more headlines and Google will automatically serve the most relevant headline according to each search.

For Display ads, this is where your visual branding can come into play. Google has a wide array of sizes and display types for this kind of campaign, so again you’ll want to provide a multitude of options and let Google automatically rotate through the best performing placements. Much like a billboard, Display ads will often only be seen for a brief time, so you to need to communicate your message clearly and succinctly. Make sure you’ve got a clear CTA (call to action) and don’t try to cram too much text into any ad.

Assessing Your Campaign

When it comes to any new Google Ads campaign, there is one simple mantra we love to preach: “Patience.” While, yes, Google Ads does often produce more immediate and short-term results than a long-term strategy like SEO, it’s important to give your campaign enough time to generate actionable data.

To that end, we often recommend allowing a campaign to run for two to four weeks (closer to four if you can stand it!) before you make any big changes or draw any conclusions. Google Ads often builds on itself, “learning” as the campaign progresses, so not allowing the algorithm’s black magic to do its thing can really inhibit campaign optimization.

(This is not to say don’t check the campaign in that period: simply resist the urge to tweak and adjust).

When you have hit that four-week mark, you’ll want to do a deep dive on the analytics Google Ads provides. That includes:

  • Checking your campaign KPIs and comparing to your own internal and external benchmarks
  • Analyzing the “Search Terms” that are triggering ads to show (and removing irrelevant queries as “negative keywords” or adding relevant ones as new keywords)
  • See which ads are performing the best
  • Reassess your bidding strategy: would you benefit from an automated strategy or do you have target cost-per-clicks or cost-per-acquisitions you’re looking to hit?

And with that, you’re ready to start poking around the wide world that is Google Ads. Take your time, pay close attention and don’t get frustrated too quickly. We’re just scratching the surface of this powerful tool here, but this post should give you enough to know if Google Ads is right for your digital marketing strategy.

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Defining Your Campaign Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Defining Your Campaign Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Sep 25, 2019

At the start of any campaign, it’s critical to outline what kinds of metrics are most important to establish your definition of “success.” That definition will vary quite a bit, depending on the size, scope and goals of your campaign. But by making a clear distinction as to what your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, you will have a better ability to judge your campaign’s progress as it is underway and once it’s completed. KPIs tend to differ based on what phase of the “buyer’s journey” your campaign is targeting, so let’s take a look at a few key examples for each of those three phases.

Phase One: Awareness

IMPRESSIONS & CPM
The base unit for any campaign, Impressions measure how many times your campaign creative was seen. Whether that is a Facebook ad or a banner ad, Impressions give you a sense of the overall exposure of your campaign. Higher Impressions are particularly important in an Awareness-phase campaign, where your primary goal is generating interest and knowledge of your brand. The Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) metric gives you a sense of how expensive or inexpensive those eyeballs were. 

REACH
Related to Impressions is the measurement of Reach, which counts the unique total number of people who saw your creative. Reach will always be a lower number than Impressions, as campaigns often serve your ads to the same people between 2-4 times. An important way of looking at Reach is thinking of how many people were potentially in your audience, and what percentage of them did you actually reach?

VIDEO VIEWS
If your campaign creative features video of any kind, total Video Views is another important metric for the Awareness phase. Much like Impressions, they are a measure of how many times your videos were seen. In addition to Video Views, statistics like Average Percentage Watched or Total 100% Completions (the names for these metrics might vary from platform-to-platform) are good ones to consider, too.

ENGAGEMENT
If you’re running any kind of campaign with a social media component, Engagement is a great KPI to measure. That can be broken out any number of ways, including post Likes, Shares and Comments, as well as the overall sentiment of the interactions (positive, negative, indifferent). These will give you a sense of what the overall interest-level of your campaign was, with higher engagement metrics usually indicating relevant, enticing ad content and messaging. 

Phase Two: Consideration

CLICKS & CLICK-THROUGH-RATE
Here, you’re looking at how many people actually clicked your ad once it appeared in their social media timeline or wherever your ads are being served. This gives you an idea of how compelling your creative messaging and visuals are, and which versions of your creative perhaps resonated best with your audience. (Side note: It’s always a good idea to run a few variations of creative in any digital campaign to test your messaging).

The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) is a ratio of total Impressions to total Clicks. This is good to keep an eye on when comparing creatives across different campaigns, as a campaign that has lower Impressions, but a better Click-Through-Rate might actually have more valuable messaging and visuals than a campaign with more impressions and more clicks but a lower CTR. There are also often many benchmarks for various industries with which you can measure your CTR to see how you stack up against other advertisers in your space.

LANDING PAGE VIEWS
One step beyond Clicks is Landing Page Views, which is somewhat of a Facebook-specific metric, but it can usually be calculated from other platforms, too. This looks at people who clicked your ads and then waited until the full landing page loaded after the fact. It’s a better measure than Clicks if you can get it, because it addresses more the strength of your landing page, as well as removing those accidental clicks that may have occurred during the campaign (especially if your campaign features a lot of mobile placements).

BOUNCE RATE
This measures the percentage of people who visited a specific landing page and left without interacting with the page. Essentially, it means they came, they saw, they left. Much like Landing Page Views, it can indicate how well-designed your Landing Page is. Average bounce rate benchmarks are between 40%-60%, so if you’re seeing results higher than that, it may be worth evaluating your Landing Page for potential drop-off points like load-time, irrelevant content, etc.

Phase Three: Decision

CONVERSIONS
This is where some of the most relevant, impactful KPIs come into play. Whether you’re looking at website purchases, webinar sign-ups, mailing list subscribers or any other “conversion” event, those should be the focus of your Decision-phase campaign. Now, many times you might track Conversions within an Awareness or Consideration campaign, but those should not necessarily be your primary focus if you are targeting an audience that is not yet in the decision-making phase of their buyer’s journey.

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Case Study: The New Madison at Adams Farm SEO & PPC Campaign

Case Study: The New Madison at Adams Farm SEO & PPC Campaign

Jun 28, 2019

The New Madison at Adams Farm is an apartment community just 15 minutes from our HQ in Greensboro, North Carolina. After our major creative overhaul of their brand (learn more about that here), our next step was to begin a concerted effort at driving more targeted traffic to their website. And, ultimately, we were looking to drive more leads for their sales team. Below we’ll break down the two key components of those efforts—SEO and PPC—and what kinds of results they’ve yielded. 

SEO

Search engine optimization is a critical part of any website redesign project we tackle. Without the right infrastructure behind it, a website’s beauty only goes skin-deep. Because of the crowded market of apartment complexes in Greensboro, we knew that SEO would play a part in The New Madison at Adams Farm’s long-term game when it comes to redirecting attention away from their local competitors.

By creating a targeted list of a dozen or so mid- to long-tail keywords the complex would like to rank for, we were able to begin the work of slowly but surely increasing the amount of organic traffic to the new website over time. Using the website’s internal CMS system, we deployed the target keywords in a tactical way throughout the site. Those keywords, coupled with a few key internal SEO tweaks (site speed, security, etc.), allowed us to set the new website up with the framework that would eventually start drawing more visitors over time.

Since the SEO project was completed in mid-September 2018, we have seen a marked increase in organic search traffic to the website. In that month, the site saw 505 visitors as a result of organic search results. Contrast that with May 2019, where the site had more than 3,700 organic search visits. That’s an increase of more than 600%. During that same period, we’ve also seen organic search visits account for 51% of all completed site conversions (phone calls & contact form responses), highlighting the importance of SEO to this project’s overall goals.

Organic Search Traffic, September 2018-May 2019

PPC

On the paid side, we knew that Google Ads would be a significant driver of traffic to the site while the organic SEO efforts began to take hold. Our Google Ads campaign implemented a three-part system to guide through the natural buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration to decision:

  • Search Network campaign using keyword targeting
  • Display Network campaign retargeting using website traffic
  • Call-Only campaign driving mobile users to call the sales office

With these three elements, we were able to reach our target audience at multiple touch-points. And the use of the Display Network campaign allowed us to take advantage of all the great photography and videography assets created during our first campaign. This Display campaign would primarily be an awareness-driver, helping increase our total ad impressions, while the Search Network and Call-Only campaigns did the conversion-focused heavy lifting.

Without getting too far into the weeds (or revealing our “special sauce”), we can see that the Google Ads campaign has been a very successful traffic and conversion driver for this property. Here are some of the key metrics from the campaign thus far:

agsdi-eye

2,622,423 total ad impressions

agsdi-cursor

24,677 total ad clicks

agsdi-refresh

Search Network CTR: 3.58%

agsdi-ribbon

390 total Conversions

agsdi-refresh

Search Network Conversion Rate: 6.6%

agsdi-mobile

846 total phone calls

3 Easy SEO Tactics You Can Implement Today

3 Easy SEO Tactics You Can Implement Today

Aug 28, 2018

There is a lot about SEO that will always remain a mystery. Even for the most advanced SEO experts, a portion of what makes search engines tick will always be an educated guess. That’s because search engines like Google will never reveal the exact minutiae of how their algorithms work. But have no fear: there is still a lot you can do to improve your site’s overall SEO game. In fact, there are three easy SEO tactics you could implement right now.

1. Always Use Alt Text

If you know one thing about SEO, it’s probably that keywords within your website help search engine “spiders” find and index your pages for others to discover. And while this is true, your site’s copy isn’t the only way to sprinkle those choice keywords throughout.

For every image on your website, there is a piece of code known as the “alt text.” This code helps a browser or email client describe what image is being shown should it fail to load. For example, the alt text for the image below might be “responsive mobile web design layout.”

responsive mobile web design layout

But the alt text is also quite useful if you’re working to attract hunters of specific keywords to your website. Say, for example, you’re a full-service marketing agency always on the lookout for its next great client. If your site features images with those keywords as alt text, it could help a potential client locate your site. It can be a lengthy process if you’ve got a particularly deep website. But if not, you could more than likely knock out all your alt text in an afternoon.

2. Don’t Forget Your Metadata

When building out new pages or posts on your website, it’s crucial that you provide search engines with the right information to display your content properly. Without that “metadata,” your site pages may end up looking incorrect or unprofessional in search results. Without getting too far into the weeds, you typically need coding ability to set those parameters, depending on your website’s CMS. If you’re using a site built on WordPress, for example, there are a number of plugins that help you set metadata quite easily.

We recommend looking into Yoast, which is one of the most highly-rated SEO plugins. It allows you to customize your post titles, meta descriptions and featured images. It also allows you to plug in the keyword(s) you’re basing your posts on and will actually “score” you on how well you’re optimizing for those terms.

QUICK TIP: Yoast’s “Premium” features help you customize how your posts look when they’re shared on Facebook and Twitter. These platforms provide a useful way of building site traffic (and, thus, credibility) for your website—so it’s important your content looks its best.

3. Secure Your Site

Have you ever wondered about the difference between a website starting with “https” versus “http”? That “s” stands for secure, which means the website has what’s referred to as an SSL Certificate. In addition to that little extra character on a web address, you can also tell whether a website is secure or not through a small lock icon in the top left of your browser bar.

ssl connection secure website

For a long time, websites tended to only purchase an SSL certificate when they offered e-commerce or other transactions involving sensitive material like passwords or payment information. But in recent years, Google has begun prioritizing websites that offer secure browsing experiences over those that do not. Consequently, if your site does not have an SSL certificate, you could be getting penalized on the search results page.

Many common web hosts (like GoDaddy, for example) offer a managed SSL Certificate service, meaning you don’t have to get into the nitty gritty of all that goes into implementing that change. If you want to manage that transition on your own, more power to you — but whatever options you’ve got through your hosting company might be worth any added costs.

Note that you might not need to prioritize this step if your other marketing efforts already have you placing favorably in organic search results. We know just how important it is to prioritize your time and tactics, so keep that in mind when thinking about undergoing this change.

So there you have it: 3 easy SEO tactics you could implement today. Once completed, these three mini projects will help strengthen your structural SEO and begin to improve your organic search results. But remember: SEO is a long game, so you won’t notice an immediate bump. But as you continue to refine your site and add more keyword-targeted content, you’ll no doubt notice a long-term overall trend towards higher results on search results pages.

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Search Marketing & Social Media Glossary

Search Marketing & Social Media Glossary

Aug 22, 2017

The worlds of search engine marketing (SEM) and social media are full of jargon and abbreviations that can make even savvy marketers scratch their heads. Whether you’re a business owner trying to understand your latest campaign or a digital marketing newbie looking to dive into this fast-paced environment, you’ll need a baseline understanding of a few basic terms. To help get you started, we put together a quick glossary of some of the most common terms we come across in our own marketing efforts.  

Alt Text

Short for “alternative text,” this text describes an image in the event that a site or browser cannot load the image, or if a visitor is using accessibility software to browse your site.

Backlink

An external link from another website that points back to a page on your website.

Buyer Persona

A fictional representation of customer or audience types for your product or service.

CPA

Stands for “cost per acquisition” (or conversion).

CPM

Stands for “cost per thousand.” A type of bidding strategy for PPC campaigns in which you’re charged for every one thousand impressions that your ad generates.

CTA

Stands for “call to action.” A direct solicitation for a visitor or customer to complete an action, such as “Download Now” or “Visit Our Website.”

Conversion

An event in which a user takes a specific pre-determined action, such as downloading an eBook, purchasing an item or signing up for a mailing list.

Engagement

A metric that measures any time a user interacts with an ad or social media post, often by commenting, sharing or “Liking” the content.

Header

A piece of text that helps title a new section of copy in a blog post or website section.

Impression

Any time an ad, video or social media post is seen by a user.

Landing Page

The destination for a digital ad, designed to offer visitors some sort of benefit (a piece of educational content, a trial demo, etc.) or complete a sale.

Longtail Keyword

A keyword that consists of more descriptive language than a normal keyword, used to refine an SEO or PPC campaign (e.g. men’s flame resistant workwear instead of men’s workwear)

Off-Page SEO

SEO efforts aimed at creating more backlinks to your website through partnerships, guest posts and sponsored content.

On-Page SEO

Modifications done to your site both internally and externally to improve your position on SERPs.

Organic

Any marketing efforts or strategies that do not involve spending ad money.

PPC

Stands for “pay-per-click.” A type of digital ad campaign that allows you to advertise around a specific set of keywords in which you pay every time a user clicks your ad.

Reach

The number of individual (or “unique”) users that see your ads or posts.

SEO

Stands for “search engine optimization.” The process of improving the position your content appears in SERPs.

SERP

Stands for “search engine results page,” such as on Google or Bing.

Sitemap

The internal framework or outline of your website that allows search engine spiders to navigate your site and determine what kind of content exists within. 

Slug

The section of a URL that comes after your primary domain (e.g. BouvierKelly.com/about-us)

Spider

An automated bot that “crawls” through your website to determine what kind of content you’re offering to determine how, when and where to surface your site on SERPs.

Unique Impression

An impression generated by an individual user, as often a user will see the same ad multiple times
in a campaign.

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization: How to Conquer Search Engines with SEO

An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization: How to Conquer Search Engines with SEO

Jul 12, 2017

Take a quick look at most marketing blogs and you’ll find yourself floating in a sea of acronyms. From CPC to SEO to KPI, it would appear that the marketing world’s favorite lunch is alphabet soup. We’ve picked out two of those acronyms — SEO and PPC — from our soup bowl for a closer look at the two key elements of what is called Search Marketing. In part one, we explore Search Engine Optimization. Click here for part two to learn more about PPC (pay per click) advertising.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

SEO is likely the acronym you’re most familiar with but have the hardest time explaining. Trust us—we get it. SEO is one of those dark arts that involves a little of this, a little of that and then POOF: you’re the first organic search result on Google.

In reality, search engine optimization is a tangible series of checks and balances designed to make sure your content is surfacing during the right searches. The ultimate goal of SEO is to get you to the top of a search results page “organically”—that is, without paying for ads (more on that here). It can be a slow, methodical process, but it is a necessary one. It requires patience and diligence, especially as the parameters that define and dictate search engine results are always changing.

For starters, let’s break SEO into its two main components: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. In the most basic terms, on-page tactics are measures that you can take on your own site to improve search results. Conversely, off-page SEO involves relationship building with other websites to position you as a source of information and educational content, thus building the amount of links back to your website (aka “backlinks”). Both types of SEO play off of one another, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus more heavily on the improvements you can make on your own site.

Keywords

Any good SEO project begins by identifying your target audience and the keywords they would use to search for your service or product. Constructing “buyer personas” can be very helpful during this process if you’re unfamiliar with how your audience behaves online. It’s a good idea to map out all of the keywords that would be relevant to your audience and business first, and then narrow the focus by figuring out how to tailor specific pieces of content (either existing content or future content) to those keywords.

Make sure to identify both basic keywords (such as “SEO”) and what are known as “longtail” keywords (like “search engine optimization dog daycare”). You will typically have a harder time ranking for basic keywords unless you’re a major brand, but the basics will help give you a starting point to funnel into your more specific longtail keywords.

search engine optimization search bar

Do you know how customers are searching for the answers you provide?

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to rank for, you can begin inserting them into your existing content and building out new content around those keywords. A key point to remember is that adding your keywords to content has to be done tastefully and naturally. Simply peppering your text with as many keywords as possible will not achieve any lasting effect, and might even hurt you in the long run.

Formatting & URL Construction

Once you’ve got your keywords identified and plugged into your site copy in an organic way, you’ll want to work on formatting your headers and images. Search engine “spiders” (the bots that crawl through web pages and index them for search engines to find) don’t just scan your body text—post headings and image “alt text” is fair game, too!

The way you title your post and construct its URL will also play into your SEO efforts. For example, you’ll want to make sure the keywords you’re trying to rank for appear in the URL “slug” (e.g. the part of the URL that comes after your primary domain — bouvierkelly.com/quick-look-public-relations). The H1 headings in your post (in this post our H1 heading is “SEO: Search Engine Optimization”) should also use keywords whenever possible, still making sure that you’re not simply stuffing your post full of those keywords haphazardly.

Site Speed & Hierarchy

Two internal mechanisms of your website play a crucial role in where you surface on Google: how fast your site loads on various devices and how easily Google can “read” the overall structure of your website. As mobile web browsing becomes the standard across the internet, even differences of milliseconds in load-time can affect how Google favors your website. This is, of course, assuming that you have a mobile-responsive version of your site: In 2015, Google announced that it would no longer index websites that did not include a mobile version.

search engine optimization spiders

Without a proper sitemap, search engine spiders can’t find or index your site.

The hierarchy and organization of your website — referred to as the “sitemap” — is a guidepost for Google’s spiders to see just how easy it is to navigate through a website. Does the organization of your pages make sense? Is it easy to get “stuck” on a particular page without being able to easily navigate away? Without a coherent sitemap, Google could be penalizing your page for a feature your visitors can’t even see.

Creating Reputable Backlinks

The most crucial aspect of off-site SEO is the practice of generating quality backlinks. That is, external links from other websites and blogs that point back to your page. Not only do these backlinks create more external traffic for your site, but backlinks from a reputable website can also significantly boost your search engine rankings.

This can be done by establishing relationships with other websites and blogs (often through social media and public relations efforts), but it’s not always a free tactic. Sponsored content and partner programs can help establish these quality backlinks, but you must account for these strategies in your overall marketing budget.

Search engine optimization backlinks

The more websites you have pointing back towards yours, the stronger your search ranking will become.

Do-It-Yourself SEO Tools

Feeling adventurous? There is a slew of great DIY tools out there today (primarily for WordPress-based websites) that allow you to tackle some of the nitty gritty SEO parameters yourself. Here are some of our favorites:

  • Yoast SEO: Allows you to set keywords for any post or page and gives you an SEO score, letting you know where you can improve and what you’re doing right. Yoast also allows you to edit the Meta Descriptions of your pages (e.g. what appears when the post is Googled or shared on social media).
  • Google XML Sitemaps: Gives you the ability to create a proper XML sitemap without any major coding or back-end knowledge.
  • BJ Lazy Load: Hides images and other elements of your page that can slow down site speed while they’re not being displayed on-screen.
  • Website Grader: Plug in your website’s URL and let Hubspot’s tool tell you just how good (or bad) your SEO is, and where you can make improvements.
  • SEM Rush: This site allows you to explore what backlinks your site and others have, what site traffic is like, what organic searches are creating traffic — a whole host of valuable SEO data. The free version offers great data, and the paid upgrades make this tool even more robust.

So now that you’ve got a handle on at least one of these particularly complicated acronyms, let’s start exploring how you can bolster your organic SEO efforts with a paid PPC strategy. From driving more web traffic to generating targeted conversions, PPC campaigns can be a powerful part of any marketing campaign.  

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