the dangling carrot
cultivating your business vision
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
How Do I know if I am Getting my Money’s Worth with My Ad Words?
May 12th
At Creative Carrot Studios, we do not provide services for Advertising words (adwords) with Google or Yahoo, or any of the Paid Inclusion Groups. We don’t have anything against these services, this is just not our forte – however, I can provide some guidance to those of you who are participating:
- If you are paying for PPC, or ad works, etc, – please make sure that you have the proper analytics installed in your site to be able to measure what is happening with your website. Has there been an increase in traffic since you began utilizing ad words? Are the ad words the words driving traffic to you? How long have the “people” stayed on your website when they have been driven there, by the keyword. If it is a short time, the people may not have been your prospects and your Ad words may need to be adjusted.
- Do you have the time or staff to manage the ad words if you have the analytics? Watching the traffic numbers, and determining what is working and what is not working takes time and discipline. So – if you are spending $20,000 on ad words per year, but are not effectively interpreting the traffic, conversion rates, site rankings, etc, we recommend that you spend $12,000-15,000 on the paid inclusion and $5,000-$8,000 on marketing support to manage the project.
- Don’t skip the Organic Search words traffic. Lots of people skip the “paid” site rankings without even know that the sites are “Pay per Click” – they just skip it because they know it is some type of advertising. So – it does not make sense to not increase your rankings with Keywords in your source code.
Clean Programming – a Path to SEO
Feb 1st
We have a client whose website was designed by another company. The site is attractive and the copy is good. But – there is always a but – there are no keywords (the words that people type into Google or Yahoo or Bing, etc to find what they are looking for on the internet). This makes it very difficult to be found unless you are using pay per click. So – our services were retained to provide the keywords.
There are many factors that determine your rankings in the search engines. One of the factors is when the description that shows up when you are found in the search engines, your keywords, and the content (the words) on your pages are consistent. If the same words are in all three places, the search engines are happy. Also the words in your copy need be easy to find (not a lot of junk in the programming). Just like a person browsing your pages – the less work search engines have to do to find what they need – the happier they are.
When we looked at our client’s website programming (how the site was built), the coding was a mess. We could add the keywords to the site – but the search engines would not be able to find the content on the page. The search engines would not be happy & thus the site not found. Now, we have been retained to clean up the code too. So – the lesson is, to ask your web design companies if they follow the W3C programming standards – as you do not want to have to pay someone else to clean up the coding.
Search Engine Optimization
Nov 9th
Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is the use of “keywords” in the description and content as well as the number of users driven to the website. These factors as well as sitemaps, registration with the search engines, links to the website, etc., are parts of organic SEO, and they allow users to find your website without having to know and enter the exact name of your website into the address bar. Users can enter for example, “realtor, south Florida, and mortgage calculator” and the websites with those keywords would be found (so websites without the mortgage calculator will be lower in the ranking that those with the mortgage calculator).
It is not that Creative Carrot Studios has anything against “paid search”, it’s just that paid search is not our forte and we don’t provide services in any area in which we do not consider ourselves subject matter experts. Also, internet users are becoming more and more savvy, and are increasingly skipping past paid sites to get to the organically searched websites.
Users normally go to sites found on pages 1-3, so having rankings on those pages is critical. We strongly recommend that companies use organic SEO even if they are using PPC. Companies will only benefit from having a high rise organic ranking as you want your customers to be able to find your company easily. The harder a user has to work to find you, the less likely they will be to do business with you.