Category Archives: SEO

Google AdWords Certified Professional

Today  I passed the second compulsory Google AdWords certification exam. The first exam is the Advertising Fundamentals, which covers AdWords account and campaign management, amongst other things. The other exam I passed was the Advanced Search which covers advanced best practices for campaign management and promotion.

As its name implies, the Advanced Search exam is a much more difficult proposition. It covers bidding strategies, maximising campaign profitability, AdWord tools, conversion rate optimisation, ROI calculation, amongst other aspects of AdWords campaign management.

It will probably take a couple of days before my Google Partner status is updated with my certification details. in the meantime, I’ll be implementing some of the strategies  I learned about to the benefit of my PPC customers.

Leicestershire Point of Sale website launched

home page imageLast week Carter Design Group’s new website was ‘soft’ launched. Carter Design Group, based in the small Leicestershire village of Foxton, are point of sale display designers, manufactures and installers.

The website was designed by Wavy at The Mitchesons, while we worked on the site’s architecture and turning the design into a responsive WordPress template.

UPDATE

Less than a month since going live, the search engine results are very pleasing. For terms such as “point of sale designer” and “point of sale design” they rank 3rd and 5th in Google respectively. For “grocery merchandising” they are #2.

While this represents a great start to our SEO efforts, there is still much to do!

 

SEO vs AdWords – one story

I run what I consider to be a successful  search engine optimistion (seo) campaign for a local client, with lots of page one result in Google for his local keywords, and improving conversion rates to boot. However, I was recently asked by the client to compare my service with the equivalent cost of just running an AdWords PPC campaign (I think a Yell salesman had been bending his ear).

Well, the first thing I did was try to calculate the cost of getting 1,000 unique visitors a month via AdWords. What soon became clear was the following:

  1. Just using local search terms would not generate the same levels of traffic to this site
  2. Using more general or “national” terms would lead to an alarming rise in costs and poorer quality traffic.
  3. This traffic was less likely to convert since it was not “local” or “targeted” traffic and would therefore be less interested in my client’s locally based services.

So, the result of moving over entirely to AdWords would in all likelihood have been my client paying a lot more for a lot less. I calculated that the client would be spending about 4 times more on AdWords to generate the same amount of, but poorer quality, traffic.

There’s another angle to this story too. Inexperienced people think of AdWords as being simple and easy. However, running a successful, efficient AdWords campaign is a complex and time consuming process if you’re going to do it properly. This is because bids constantly change, adverts need frequent tweaks and equally frequent A/B testing – its almost a full time job.

So, while AdWords may seem like better value for money, it may prove to be the opposite.