June 18, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of 1000 Ways to Market Your Business, Samantha Scott, APR, is joined by Paige Johnson, Digital Operations Coordinator at Pushing the Envelope.
They delve into the world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), discussing the fundamental differences between organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and paid, best practices for optimizing your website, conducting keyword research, and integrating organic and paid strategies for maximum impact.
Have a question or feedback to share? Visit www.getpushing.com or one of our many social media channels. We look forward to hearing from you.
#marketing #business #communication #strategy
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:05):
Hi, everybody.
Welcome back to another episodeof 1000 Ways to Market Your
Business, a podcast brought toyou by Pushing the Envelope.
I am Samantha Scott, APR, andtoday I am joined by Paige
Johnson, our Meta CertifiedSpecialist.
Today we are talking about SEM,that is search engine marketing,
for those of you who don't knowthe lingo.
We're going to try to make thisa jargon free podcast.
(00:26):
But we want to go over allthings related to search engine
marketing and how you can usethat to grow your business.
So, Paige, why don't you kind ofgive a high level, 30,000 foot
view of what does that mean forthose that might not be
familiar.
Sure.
So in search engine marketing,we're ultimately talking about
what our audience members or anyindividual browsing the web is
(00:46):
typing into their search box andwhat is coming up both
organically and paid.
Which includes PPC and Googleads and Microsoft ads, Pinterest
ads, as well as just SEOfundamentals of optimizing your
website and your content todrive organically.
And for those of you who don'tknow, SEO, compared to SEM, is
search engine optimization,which is a core part of search
(01:09):
engine marketing.
So search engine optimizationcould be how you set up the back
end of your site, so your H1tags, the back information, alt
tags, information on images, aswell as other text on your
website, to help you rank betterin search.
So if somebody is searching onGoogle for your business, your
service, a product that youoffer, you want to rank highly.
(01:30):
So think of when you'researching for something, you
probably look at the first oneor two things on a page, you're
not scrolling, you know, Googlepages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you want to
be right there at the top.
So, let's talk about some bestpractices for search engine
marketing.
Where do you want to start?
Let's start with SEO fororganic.
I think this is a reallyfundamental thing that a lot of
marketers or companies miss themark on, because it is something
(01:54):
you don't really see when youopen a site in front of your
face, it's a lot of from theback end.
That being said, it is rooted alot in content and your content
strategy and putting highquality content and data and
information on your websitethat's rich in primary keywords
and secondary keywords, so thatyou have a better chance of
showing up in the search engineresults page.
(02:15):
So there's a couple ways to findthe best keywords and a lot of
great tools that you can use tofind those, whether you're
searching a page on your websiteand highlighting the ones that
have a lower competition and ahigher search volume, higher
conversion rates, and you wantto make sure that those are
spread out organicallythroughout your website so that
you're ranking when people arelooking for something specific
(02:36):
to the topic at hand.
So I'll jump in there.
For those of you who aren'tsuper familiar with this, this
is really technical.
It can be kind of confusing ifyou're just stepping in.
So, keywords are things thatsomebody might be searching for,
and I always, always counselclients, and I know Paige does
too, that it may not necessarilybe the terms that you use to
search for a product or service.
We all use different terms,phrases, approaches to searching
(02:57):
for things.
So it's really important to dothat keyword research, and I
think Paige is going to give youa couple of those resources and
tools that you can use to findout what keywords or terms are
ranking the highest or have themost eyeballs on it, because
that's ultimately what you want.
And to your point about thisbeing on the back end, the
majority of this is built intothe content you put on your
(03:18):
site.
And often we may not be thinkingabout that when we're writing
content.
It's, okay, I'm Pushing theEnvelope and this is what we do
and my services, versus thinkingabout the keywords somebody
might be using to find mybusiness.
But it's also in the back end,the structure of your site.
If you are not responsible forthat, that's okay, but you
should be posing the question toyour webmaster or your team
about what are they doing tohelp with SEO, are they
(03:40):
completing the H1 tags, the alttags, and all that back end
information to make sure thatyou have a really strong SEO
plan.
And you can always have pluginsand things on your site too to
help give you kind of a pulse onthat if your site is set up
really well for SEO or not.
Right.
And to that point, with it beingdeeply rooted in the quality and
quantity of content you have,another best practice is to not
(04:02):
have duplicate content.
The way I like to think of it isthat Google is searching through
your website trying to figureout what you're talking about
and who they can put it in frontof.
So when there's multiple piecesof content that say the same
thing, it confuses the programand it doesn't know which to put
out and then therefore you'llrank lower.
So that's just a good practice,because when we say content,
(04:23):
it's not over do all that youcan.
Right.
It's quality, relevant, timely.
Yeah, don't go to Chat and askit to publish a hundred blogs
for you that you can publisheach week.
That would not be good.
But that also reminds me ofsomething else that I see is, a
lot of times, we work withprospects or clients who are
coming from a very specificindustry.
Maybe it's legal or healthcareor something like that.
And there are a number ofcompanies out there that are
(04:45):
doing copy and paste websites.
And that can also hinder youbecause if it's copy and paste,
not just duplicate content onyour individual website, but
it's duplicated content from adifferent website, well, that
gets a thumbs down in the eyesof Google.
It's not going to help you.
So, making sure you've gotsomebody creating the content on
your site that's custom, unique,but also keyword rich.
Yeah.
(05:05):
And how you're going to makethat content and the density of
the keywords should be plannedaround the search intent of your
audience.
So it's important to know youraudience and what they're
looking for, knowing their painpoints when they're trying to
find a specific product orservice on your site.
Again, this is different perindustry.
And being specific and usingthose words in places on the
(05:26):
back end and up front; is it inthe title, is it in the meta
description?
And again, to my point aboutGoogle trying to understand what
your landing page or blog orcase study is about, it can't
read when it sees a photo ofsomething.
It doesn't really know what thatis.
So it goes back to alt text andmore of that background
information that you're givingto Google to show that you're an
(05:47):
authentic and reliable brand.
It also helps with readabilityfor those who might be reading
impaired, those types of things,if you have the alt text.
So if a page doesn't loadcorrectly or if they have visual
problems, they're able to seewhat it is.
So you could say this is apicture of Paige and Samantha,
you know, so on and so forth.
But yeah, it's really importantthinking about that and the
(06:07):
keywords and the content thatyou're putting on your site
because it does matter whensomebody is looking for a
solution.
And that's really, to me, thenot technical side, but more of
the marketing positioning sideof what is the problem you're
trying to solve?
What's the benefit you can giveto the end user?
And communicating that, that'smore important than the product
or service.
People don't really care howthey get to the solution, they
(06:29):
just want the solution.
Right.
Within the SEO elements and thekeyword structure, the different
places we want to look at it,there's a technical side and the
strategy side.
Ensuring that you know youraudience and you're researching
their pain point search intent,as well as knowing the
technicalities behind alt text,the meta tags, headlines,
descriptions, and the URLstructure.
(06:51):
And as I said before, there's alot of great tools where you can
copy and paste the URL that youhave, and there's checkers for
effectiveness and the likelihoodto convert or to have somebody
land on that based on all thosedifferent elements in the
research that you do before youpublish something.
What are some of those websites?
I know Google Ads has some ofthose resources.
Yeah.
Google Ads is a great one forchecking for keywords on a
(07:14):
website and the search volumecompetition level.
SEMrush is great.
And there's a bunch of adskeywords planners, WordStream is
a free one.
So there's a whole bunch oftools and they'll give you the
same output.
There's some premium or plusprograms that you can get, but
there's free ones that workreally well.
Awesome.
So SEO is definitely a big partof search engine marketing, SEM.
(07:37):
So what is another component?
And this goes into kind of thepaid world, I think.
Yeah.
This is also a process thatinvolves a lot of keyword
research and making sure thatyou're using the words that are
going to have the best responseand you're meeting your audience
where they are at for whatthey're looking for.
Within that, there's sometechnicalities with targeting
(07:57):
and how you're going to matchyour keywords.
I would say it's a little bitmore technical because it has
less of the creative element.
It's just your ad copy andheadline, whereas on your
website you got images andvideos and all these other
different engaging elements thatyou want to optimize
organically.
So within PPC, it's equally asimportant to do your keyword
(08:18):
research and understand whatyour audience is searching for.
You don't want to be paying forclicks for search terms that
aren't going to convert or bevaluable for you.
Just wasting money at thatpoint.
Exactly, so you might see a tonof impressions on a certain
keyword, but is it reallyvaluable traffic that you're
driving with that ad.
Yeah, are you getting theconversion?
(08:38):
So impressions meaning exposurein terms of how many people were
exposed to that particular adand then conversions being how
many of them actually took thedesired action.
So did they make the purchase?
Did they make the reservation?
Did they click to learn more,make an appointment, fill in the
blank?
And Paige referenced the termPPC, that's pay per click.
So you're paying essentially perclick.
I can expose Paige to the ad onGoogle, but if she doesn't
(09:00):
actually click on it, I don'thave to pay anything.
I pay when she actually clickson it.
And to your point, it istechnical.
You don't have the images orthings to attract attention, but
I think this just goes back tothe core fundamental best
practice of marketing, which is,you have the right audience and
the right offer, it's gonnawork.
So, if you've targeted really,really well and you have the
right keywords to reach thosefolks and you have the right
(09:21):
offer or the right solution totheir problem, it's going to
perform.
Right, and it is best practice,if you have the budget and
capability and resources, topair the organic with the paid,
when your organic is workingreally well, your paid is going
to reflect that because the PPCad groups are built around
directing a user to a landingpage.
(09:43):
The landing page needs to befull of call to actions.
I'm sure someone watching hasgone to a landing page, and it's
like, this is not what I waslooking for, right back out
after two seconds.
You should be directing youraudience members to a page where
they open it, and it's clickhere to call, for directions,
make a reservation, it should berich with CTAs, so that there's
conversions happening from thatpaid click.
(10:04):
And specific to the ad.
Because you might be arestaurant that serves lunch and
dinner and your ad is lunchspecific.
Don't take them to your homepagewhere they have to then hunt and
peck to find that.
Take them to the page that talksabout lunch service.
Or if you are a retailestablishment and your ad is
about women's wear versus men'swear or fill in the blank, make
sure it's specific and you getpeople to the point where they
(10:26):
can make the purchase or thedesired action quickly and
efficiently.
Don't make them hunt and peckaround.
Please, please do not sendpeople to your homepage.
Like, just don't.
You're wasting your time.
If anything, you can make, like,additional landing pages.
That's a good option for if youhave multiple locations.
And make ad groups and campaignsspecific to that landing page.
You can have one campaign thattakes the audience member to
(10:48):
multiple different locations ineach ad group.
But it's really a good idea tomake sure that you are
addressing the exact thing thatthey are searching at that time.
Yes.
That being said, there are timeswhen your landing page might pop
up when someone searches forsomething that's a little bit
unrelated to what you want themto do.
And so it's also a really goodpractice to continuously check
(11:10):
at the search queries for yourad and add the terms that don't
apply to your negative keywordslist.
So that next time somebodysearches that, you will not pop
up there again and you're notgoing to pay for that conversion
or click.
Right.
That's the worst thing is likeif something happens to come up
and it's not what you want, butthen you still have to pay for
it.
So yeah, maintaining a reallyquality negative keywords list
(11:32):
is really, really important justto help you save money and make
it strategic.
The other point I would add isthis kind of lends itself to, I
would say, the best practice,running multiple campaigns
simultaneously.
And I understand if somebody'srelatively new to this, that
might sound really, reallydaunting and confusing, but it
doesn't have to be.
It's just meant to be really,really hyper targeted, and it
gives you the ability to havereally great control over who's
(11:54):
seeing your content, makingthose campaigns really specific,
which always perform better, andthen manipulate your budget.
So, the way that we run pay perclick and any of our digital
things is not a set it andforget it.
We're monitoring in real timethroughout the week, throughout
the month, because if onecampaign is just crushing it and
the other one is not, we'regonna bail on that one and put
all the money into the otherone.
Or if one needs a little morehelp.
(12:16):
But it's monitoring those thingsand being able to make
adjustments.
So having multiple campaignsrunning simultaneously is really
beneficial for your business.
Especially if you have multipleproduct lines, services and or
target audiences.
Really important.
Yeah, and thankfully withinGoogle Analytics for your
organic analytics and in GoogleAds, there's really great
(12:37):
reporting information and datathat'll tell you a lot about
your audience and how thosespecific keywords are working so
you can continue to refine itand add new ones at any time.
And just make sure you'refinding your people when they
are looking for you.
I mean, it's definitely betterto hone in on a more focused,
more likely convertible audiencethan to do all the keywords,
(13:00):
everything related, and get abunch of people seeing your ad
that aren't looking for yourproduct or service that aren't
going to serve your business.
A great example, we worked witha remodeling company a number of
years ago, and they serveSouthwest Florida.
When we came on, they had beenworking with a different company
that had a fairly robust digitalcampaign running for them, and
(13:21):
we got the data, and they weresaying, oh, look, you know, our
rep tells us that we got so manyhundred thousands of
impressions, et cetera, and it'sreally, really good.
Okay, great.
Well, how many of those peopleactually hired you to do the
job?
Well, they couldn't really trackthat, which should have been set
up from the beginning.
But secondarily, when you duginto the impressions, there were
people in Idaho, Indiana, allover the place.
These are not people that canactually hire this company to do
(13:44):
the job.
And therefore, that company waswasting money on these
impressions.
So yeah, absolutely.
You've heard me.
If you've listened to thispodcast before, you've heard me
say I am anti spray and pray.
Yeah.
But that is so often whatcompanies do because they don't
really know.
They're like, well,"anybody,"right, if I'm a restaurant,
"anybody" could be my targetaudience.
Okay, sure, anybody could go toyour restaurant and buy food
from you, but it's not reallywho you're trying to reach.
(14:06):
So, try to be as specific as youcan.
Yes, I agree, and I think,understanding where your
audience is going and what otherPPC campaigns are performing,
there's a lot of easy ways tojust look at what competitors
are doing.
Google your search term and lookat the sponsored links, and what
is in the headlines?
What's in the descriptions?
(14:26):
What keywords are they using?
And also on top of that, Googlehas a really cool feature that
says, you know, people also ask,or you might also want to see,
you can get some insight on whatother things people are looking
for.
So are they asking questionsabout how you do something or
where you find something or theeasiest way to do something,
whether it relates to yourproduct or service, it gives you
(14:46):
a lot of insight on searchintent and activity in real
time.
So, look at what yourcompetitors are doing.
They have ads that are workingand it's readily accessible.
And they're looking at whatyou're doing.
Yeah.
It's all out there.
Trust me.
So yeah, I think we've touched abit on data and tracking.
Is there anything else that youwant to add as it relates to SEO
performance tracking, pay perclick performance tracking, and
(15:08):
any how to tips for people whomight be interested in doing
that for themselves?
Yeah, I think for SEO, whenyou're trying to improve your
rankings organically, youmentioned earlier there's some
plugins and stuff which aregreat tools from your back end
of your site, and I hadmentioned some tools earlier
that are both free and paid.
Searching, just looking what'sout there, look at industry best
practices, industry benchmarks.
(15:30):
How much are other advertiserspaying for a click for PPC ads?
What does your performance looklike on the web page that you
are optimizing year over year,month over month?
And just, it's really, reallyimportant, I can't stress
enough, the paid and organic,the audience members need to
know what to do.
We inherently have a shortattention span, and so there
(15:51):
needs to be plenty of directionof where to go, where to find
us.
And on that note, actually, thatjust reminded me, in your meta
titles and descriptions, don'tput your phone number on there,
because then people can callyou, or your email, or your
contact, then they can call youwithout even visiting your site,
and that's a conversion that'suntrackable as it relates to
data.
So strong CTAs, call to action,call to action, sorry, monitor
(16:16):
and adjust as needed.
It's great within Google Adsspecifically because you can add
and adjust keywords at any time.
You're not set once you start acampaign with, okay, here we go.
You can adjust your targetbudget per day.
And I think the best advice Ican give is use both together
and complement them and producereally high quality content that
speaks to your audience.
(16:37):
And continue to do it, right?
So make the effort to plan itout and do it that initial time
and monitor, but then continueto do that.
Continue to create content andto watch and monitor.
And if you need additional help,we have blogs and eBooks on this
topic, but you could also tryout Google's max performance
campaigns as well.
But I would tell you, don't doit as a set it and forget it
kind of Band Aid, you know, makesure that you're learning and
(16:59):
educating yourself, or if yourealize like, hey, look, this is
out of my depth and you need apartner, feel free to search out
somebody that can help you withthat.
But we would love to answer anyquestions that you may have.
Feel free to comment, share,tune in to our next episode of
1000 Ways to Market YourBusiness.
I'm Samantha Scott.
Thanks for joining.
Hi, everybody.
Welcome back to another episodeof 1000 Ways to Market Your
Business, a podcast brought toyou by Pushing the Envelope.
I am Samantha Scott, APR, andtoday I am joined by Paige
Johnson, our Meta CertifiedSpecialist.
Today we are talking about SEM,that is search engine marketing,
for those of you who don't knowthe lingo.
We're going to try to make thisa jargon free podcast.
(00:26):
But we want to go over allthings related to search engine
marketing and how you can usethat to grow your business.
So, Paige, why don't you kind ofgive a high level, 30,000 foot
view of what does that mean forthose that might not be
familiar.
Sure.
So in search engine marketing,we're ultimately talking about
what our audience members or anyindividual browsing the web is
(00:46):
typing into their search box andwhat is coming up both
organically and paid.
Which includes PPC and Googleads and Microsoft ads, Pinterest
ads, as well as just SEOfundamentals of optimizing your
website and your content todrive organically.
And for those of you who don'tknow, SEO, compared to SEM, is
search engine optimization,which is a core part of search
(01:09):
engine marketing.
So search engine optimizationcould be how you set up the back
end of your site, so your H1tags, the back information, alt
tags, information on images, aswell as other text on your
website, to help you rank betterin search.
So if somebody is searching onGoogle for your business, your
service, a product that youoffer, you want to rank highly.
(01:30):
So think of when you'researching for something, you
probably look at the first oneor two things on a page, you're
not scrolling, you know, Googlepages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you want to
be right there at the top.
So, let's talk about some bestpractices for search engine
marketing.
Where do you want to start?
Let's start with SEO fororganic.
I think this is a reallyfundamental thing that a lot of
marketers or companies miss themark on, because it is something
(01:54):
you don't really see when youopen a site in front of your
face, it's a lot of from theback end.
That being said, it is rooted alot in content and your content
strategy and putting highquality content and data and
information on your websitethat's rich in primary keywords
and secondary keywords, so thatyou have a better chance of
showing up in the search engineresults page.
(02:15):
So there's a couple ways to findthe best keywords and a lot of
great tools that you can use tofind those, whether you're
searching a page on your websiteand highlighting the ones that
have a lower competition and ahigher search volume, higher
conversion rates, and you wantto make sure that those are
spread out organicallythroughout your website so that
you're ranking when people arelooking for something specific
(02:36):
to the topic at hand.
So I'll jump in there.
For those of you who aren'tsuper familiar with this, this
is really technical.
It can be kind of confusing ifyou're just stepping in.
So, keywords are things thatsomebody might be searching for,
and I always, always counselclients, and I know Paige does
too, that it may not necessarilybe the terms that you use to
search for a product or service.
We all use different terms,phrases, approaches to searching
(02:57):
for things.
So it's really important to dothat keyword research, and I
think Paige is going to give youa couple of those resources and
tools that you can use to findout what keywords or terms are
ranking the highest or have themost eyeballs on it, because
that's ultimately what you want.
And to your point about thisbeing on the back end, the
majority of this is built intothe content you put on your
(03:18):
site.
And often we may not be thinkingabout that when we're writing
content.
It's, okay, I'm Pushing theEnvelope and this is what we do
and my services, versus thinkingabout the keywords somebody
might be using to find mybusiness.
But it's also in the back end,the structure of your site.
If you are not responsible forthat, that's okay, but you
should be posing the question toyour webmaster or your team
about what are they doing tohelp with SEO, are they
(03:40):
completing the H1 tags, the alttags, and all that back end
information to make sure thatyou have a really strong SEO
plan.
And you can always have pluginsand things on your site too to
help give you kind of a pulse onthat if your site is set up
really well for SEO or not.
Right.
And to that point, with it beingdeeply rooted in the quality and
quantity of content you have,another best practice is to not
(04:02):
have duplicate content.
The way I like to think of it isthat Google is searching through
your website trying to figureout what you're talking about
and who they can put it in frontof.
So when there's multiple piecesof content that say the same
thing, it confuses the programand it doesn't know which to put
out and then therefore you'llrank lower.
So that's just a good practice,because when we say content,
(04:23):
it's not over do all that youcan.
Right.
It's quality, relevant, timely.
Yeah, don't go to Chat and askit to publish a hundred blogs
for you that you can publisheach week.
That would not be good.
But that also reminds me ofsomething else that I see is, a
lot of times, we work withprospects or clients who are
coming from a very specificindustry.
Maybe it's legal or healthcareor something like that.
And there are a number ofcompanies out there that are
(04:45):
doing copy and paste websites.
And that can also hinder youbecause if it's copy and paste,
not just duplicate content onyour individual website, but
it's duplicated content from adifferent website, well, that
gets a thumbs down in the eyesof Google.
It's not going to help you.
So, making sure you've gotsomebody creating the content on
your site that's custom, unique,but also keyword rich.
Yeah.
(05:05):
And how you're going to makethat content and the density of
the keywords should be plannedaround the search intent of your
audience.
So it's important to know youraudience and what they're
looking for, knowing their painpoints when they're trying to
find a specific product orservice on your site.
Again, this is different perindustry.
And being specific and usingthose words in places on the
(05:26):
back end and up front; is it inthe title, is it in the meta
description?
And again, to my point aboutGoogle trying to understand what
your landing page or blog orcase study is about, it can't
read when it sees a photo ofsomething.
It doesn't really know what thatis.
So it goes back to alt text andmore of that background
information that you're givingto Google to show that you're an
(05:47):
authentic and reliable brand.
It also helps with readabilityfor those who might be reading
impaired, those types of things,if you have the alt text.
So if a page doesn't loadcorrectly or if they have visual
problems, they're able to seewhat it is.
So you could say this is apicture of Paige and Samantha,
you know, so on and so forth.
But yeah, it's really importantthinking about that and the
(06:07):
keywords and the content thatyou're putting on your site
because it does matter whensomebody is looking for a
solution.
And that's really, to me, thenot technical side, but more of
the marketing positioning sideof what is the problem you're
trying to solve?
What's the benefit you can giveto the end user?
And communicating that, that'smore important than the product
or service.
People don't really care howthey get to the solution, they
(06:29):
just want the solution.
Right.
Within the SEO elements and thekeyword structure, the different
places we want to look at it,there's a technical side and the
strategy side.
Ensuring that you know youraudience and you're researching
their pain point search intent,as well as knowing the
technicalities behind alt text,the meta tags, headlines,
descriptions, and the URLstructure.
(06:51):
And as I said before, there's alot of great tools where you can
copy and paste the URL that youhave, and there's checkers for
effectiveness and the likelihoodto convert or to have somebody
land on that based on all thosedifferent elements in the
research that you do before youpublish something.
What are some of those websites?
I know Google Ads has some ofthose resources.
Yeah.
Google Ads is a great one forchecking for keywords on a
(07:14):
website and the search volumecompetition level.
SEMrush is great.
And there's a bunch of adskeywords planners, WordStream is
a free one.
So there's a whole bunch oftools and they'll give you the
same output.
There's some premium or plusprograms that you can get, but
there's free ones that workreally well.
Awesome.
So SEO is definitely a big partof search engine marketing, SEM.
(07:37):
So what is another component?
And this goes into kind of thepaid world, I think.
Yeah.
This is also a process thatinvolves a lot of keyword
research and making sure thatyou're using the words that are
going to have the best responseand you're meeting your audience
where they are at for whatthey're looking for.
Within that, there's sometechnicalities with targeting
(07:57):
and how you're going to matchyour keywords.
I would say it's a little bitmore technical because it has
less of the creative element.
It's just your ad copy andheadline, whereas on your
website you got images andvideos and all these other
different engaging elements thatyou want to optimize
organically.
So within PPC, it's equally asimportant to do your keyword
(08:18):
research and understand whatyour audience is searching for.
You don't want to be paying forclicks for search terms that
aren't going to convert or bevaluable for you.
Just wasting money at thatpoint.
Exactly, so you might see a tonof impressions on a certain
keyword, but is it reallyvaluable traffic that you're
driving with that ad.
Yeah, are you getting theconversion?
(08:38):
So impressions meaning exposurein terms of how many people were
exposed to that particular adand then conversions being how
many of them actually took thedesired action.
So did they make the purchase?
Did they make the reservation?
Did they click to learn more,make an appointment, fill in the
blank?
And Paige referenced the termPPC, that's pay per click.
So you're paying essentially perclick.
I can expose Paige to the ad onGoogle, but if she doesn't
(09:00):
actually click on it, I don'thave to pay anything.
I pay when she actually clickson it.
And to your point, it istechnical.
You don't have the images orthings to attract attention, but
I think this just goes back tothe core fundamental best
practice of marketing, which is,you have the right audience and
the right offer, it's gonnawork.
So, if you've targeted really,really well and you have the
right keywords to reach thosefolks and you have the right
(09:21):
offer or the right solution totheir problem, it's going to
perform.
Right, and it is best practice,if you have the budget and
capability and resources, topair the organic with the paid,
when your organic is workingreally well, your paid is going
to reflect that because the PPCad groups are built around
directing a user to a landingpage.
(09:43):
The landing page needs to befull of call to actions.
I'm sure someone watching hasgone to a landing page, and it's
like, this is not what I waslooking for, right back out
after two seconds.
You should be directing youraudience members to a page where
they open it, and it's clickhere to call, for directions,
make a reservation, it should berich with CTAs, so that there's
conversions happening from thatpaid click.
(10:04):
And specific to the ad.
Because you might be arestaurant that serves lunch and
dinner and your ad is lunchspecific.
Don't take them to your homepagewhere they have to then hunt and
peck to find that.
Take them to the page that talksabout lunch service.
Or if you are a retailestablishment and your ad is
about women's wear versus men'swear or fill in the blank, make
sure it's specific and you getpeople to the point where they
(10:26):
can make the purchase or thedesired action quickly and
efficiently.
Don't make them hunt and peckaround.
Please, please do not sendpeople to your homepage.
Like, just don't.
You're wasting your time.
If anything, you can make, like,additional landing pages.
That's a good option for if youhave multiple locations.
And make ad groups and campaignsspecific to that landing page.
You can have one campaign thattakes the audience member to
(10:48):
multiple different locations ineach ad group.
But it's really a good idea tomake sure that you are
addressing the exact thing thatthey are searching at that time.
Yes.
That being said, there are timeswhen your landing page might pop
up when someone searches forsomething that's a little bit
unrelated to what you want themto do.
And so it's also a really goodpractice to continuously check
(11:10):
at the search queries for yourad and add the terms that don't
apply to your negative keywordslist.
So that next time somebodysearches that, you will not pop
up there again and you're notgoing to pay for that conversion
or click.
Right.
That's the worst thing is likeif something happens to come up
and it's not what you want, butthen you still have to pay for
it.
So yeah, maintaining a reallyquality negative keywords list
(11:32):
is really, really important justto help you save money and make
it strategic.
The other point I would add isthis kind of lends itself to, I
would say, the best practice,running multiple campaigns
simultaneously.
And I understand if somebody'srelatively new to this, that
might sound really, reallydaunting and confusing, but it
doesn't have to be.
It's just meant to be really,really hyper targeted, and it
gives you the ability to havereally great control over who's
(11:54):
seeing your content, makingthose campaigns really specific,
which always perform better, andthen manipulate your budget.
So, the way that we run pay perclick and any of our digital
things is not a set it andforget it.
We're monitoring in real timethroughout the week, throughout
the month, because if onecampaign is just crushing it and
the other one is not, we'regonna bail on that one and put
all the money into the otherone.
Or if one needs a little morehelp.
(12:16):
But it's monitoring those thingsand being able to make
adjustments.
So having multiple campaignsrunning simultaneously is really
beneficial for your business.
Especially if you have multipleproduct lines, services and or
target audiences.
Really important.
Yeah, and thankfully withinGoogle Analytics for your
organic analytics and in GoogleAds, there's really great
(12:37):
reporting information and datathat'll tell you a lot about
your audience and how thosespecific keywords are working so
you can continue to refine itand add new ones at any time.
And just make sure you'refinding your people when they
are looking for you.
I mean, it's definitely betterto hone in on a more focused,
more likely convertible audiencethan to do all the keywords,
(13:00):
everything related, and get abunch of people seeing your ad
that aren't looking for yourproduct or service that aren't
going to serve your business.
A great example, we worked witha remodeling company a number of
years ago, and they serveSouthwest Florida.
When we came on, they had beenworking with a different company
that had a fairly robust digitalcampaign running for them, and
(13:21):
we got the data, and they weresaying, oh, look, you know, our
rep tells us that we got so manyhundred thousands of
impressions, et cetera, and it'sreally, really good.
Okay, great.
Well, how many of those peopleactually hired you to do the
job?
Well, they couldn't really trackthat, which should have been set
up from the beginning.
But secondarily, when you duginto the impressions, there were
people in Idaho, Indiana, allover the place.
These are not people that canactually hire this company to do
(13:44):
the job.
And therefore, that company waswasting money on these
impressions.
So yeah, absolutely.
You've heard me.
If you've listened to thispodcast before, you've heard me
say I am anti spray and pray.
Yeah.
But that is so often whatcompanies do because they don't
really know.
They're like, well,"anybody,"right, if I'm a restaurant,
"anybody" could be my targetaudience.
Okay, sure, anybody could go toyour restaurant and buy food
from you, but it's not reallywho you're trying to reach.
(14:06):
So, try to be as specific as youcan.
Yes, I agree, and I think,understanding where your
audience is going and what otherPPC campaigns are performing,
there's a lot of easy ways tojust look at what competitors
are doing.
Google your search term and lookat the sponsored links, and what
is in the headlines?
What's in the descriptions?
(14:26):
What keywords are they using?
And also on top of that, Googlehas a really cool feature that
says, you know, people also ask,or you might also want to see,
you can get some insight on whatother things people are looking
for.
So are they asking questionsabout how you do something or
where you find something or theeasiest way to do something,
whether it relates to yourproduct or service, it gives you
(14:46):
a lot of insight on searchintent and activity in real
time.
So, look at what yourcompetitors are doing.
They have ads that are workingand it's readily accessible.
And they're looking at whatyou're doing.
Yeah.
It's all out there.
Trust me.
So yeah, I think we've touched abit on data and tracking.
Is there anything else that youwant to add as it relates to SEO
performance tracking, pay perclick performance tracking, and
(15:08):
any how to tips for people whomight be interested in doing
that for themselves?
Yeah, I think for SEO, whenyou're trying to improve your
rankings organically, youmentioned earlier there's some
plugins and stuff which aregreat tools from your back end
of your site, and I hadmentioned some tools earlier
that are both free and paid.
Searching, just looking what'sout there, look at industry best
practices, industry benchmarks.
(15:30):
How much are other advertiserspaying for a click for PPC ads?
What does your performance looklike on the web page that you
are optimizing year over year,month over month?
And just, it's really, reallyimportant, I can't stress
enough, the paid and organic,the audience members need to
know what to do.
We inherently have a shortattention span, and so there
(15:51):
needs to be plenty of directionof where to go, where to find
us.
And on that note, actually, thatjust reminded me, in your meta
titles and descriptions, don'tput your phone number on there,
because then people can callyou, or your email, or your
contact, then they can call youwithout even visiting your site,
and that's a conversion that'suntrackable as it relates to
data.
So strong CTAs, call to action,call to action, sorry, monitor
(16:16):
and adjust as needed.
It's great within Google Adsspecifically because you can add
and adjust keywords at any time.
You're not set once you start acampaign with, okay, here we go.
You can adjust your targetbudget per day.
And I think the best advice Ican give is use both together
and complement them and producereally high quality content that
speaks to your audience.
(16:37):
And continue to do it, right?
So make the effort to plan itout and do it that initial time
and monitor, but then continueto do that.
Continue to create content andto watch and monitor.
And if you need additional help,we have blogs and eBooks on this
topic, but you could also tryout Google's max performance
campaigns as well.
But I would tell you, don't doit as a set it and forget it
kind of Band Aid, you know, makesure that you're learning and
(16:59):
educating yourself, or if yourealize like, hey, look, this is
out of my depth and you need apartner, feel free to search out
somebody that can help you withthat.
But we would love to answer anyquestions that you may have.
Feel free to comment, share,tune in to our next episode of
1000 Ways to Market YourBusiness.
I'm Samantha Scott.
Thanks for joining.
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