What I’m angling towards here is for you to consider what sets you apart from your competitors, what is it that your company offers that endears customers, what’s that little unique thing that keeps them coming back for more? Follow-up, potentially most important question: are you telling potential clientele your unique selling points? We constantly meet business owners who have either buried their USPs deep into their site or assume visitors will put together how amazing they are as they browse around. Sadly, that isn’t how the internet works; there is no patience online, because that greener grass is only a mouse click away. Regardless of what it may be, how minor you may think it is, you need to be promoting whatever sets you apart.

Here are some examples of “offerings” from a few of our clients that show the sort of things I’m talking about:

• A moving service advertising the professional appearance of their crews. It seems minor until you really think about it. Do you want clean-cut “moving specialists” touching all your personal items or the local chain gang?
  
  

  The boys and I were just curious to which room the Hummel collection will be going.

• A water and mold remediator who makes it clear they’re available 24/7 for emergency water damage services. When your basement has become a pond in the middle of the night, you’re going to be quick to pull the trigger on a website that plainly assures you they are in fact open no matter what page you land on.
• A fishing resort in the Ozarks has a daily fishing report, giving the weather, along with news about what’s biting. You don’t even have to be staying there to find this useful.


Biting today: your nightmares



• A Chinese tea importer that maintains a FAQ, health benefits page, along with a well-updated blog that provides not only a wealth of information regarding their product, but a resource to engage current and potential clients. This makes for educated customers while showing they’re an authority in their industry.

You don’t have to have some crazy, mind-blowing offer, in fact, providing information can work just as well as giving away something tangible – just make sure people know about it, because that little bit extra could be what turns a new customer into a repeat customer.

Over a year ago I was invited to visit with a gentleman who had opened a business where you paid to break things in an effort to relieve some stress. It was a fun idea and he had done an awesome job of not just cobbling together the obvious social media accounts, but also garnering the attention of the local papers and TV stations. He’d done a lot of work stirring up this buzz, but harnessing and maintaining it turned the sprint into a marathon he wasn’t prepared for. Anyway, more to the point, shortly after we started talking he mentioned the new custom graphics he’d just had done for the huge front window. It was pretty cool and definitely eye-catching, but nowhere did it have his site’s url! It wasn’t on the promotional flyers either, and later I noticed the business’ Facebook and YouTube channel didn’t even link back to the actual website, but that’s beside the point I suppose.

Now, juxtapose that with this:

Yeah, Maxxis just goes full-bore and prints their url on the product, making it difficult to forget where to look for your next tire when you’ve ran your current one slick. Oh yeah, that’s a mountain bike tire by the way.

OK, I kinda’ just wanted to put a picture of our developer Todd eating the last doughnut today in here, but guess what, even big dog companies like yummy in your tummy Krispy Kreme could do a bit better showing off their address.

Guess where it is on the box. The bottom. They printed it on the bottom of the box. I can’t even follow the logic there.

Now, here’s Shang Tea who sells internationally, though, lucky for me and my building tea addiction, has a local storefront. Shang Tea has their website on all product labels, but something else that can work for many of you out there are their quality, reusable bags, which are, of course, all printed up real nice including (buh-buh-buUum!) their url!

Think of everything you have printed, stitched and die-cut – is your website on any of it? It should most definitely be on the obvious things like business cards, store bags and any promotional material, but consider too how often you notice when someone puts their site address in the window of their car; when you’re on hold, listening to some sweet hold music and a voice cuts in saying, “feel free to contact us online at www.ourcooladdress.com and avoid this ludicrously long wait,” or, duh, when speaking to someone about their business and they make sure to mention their website. And that’s really the root of all this – simply do not forget, do not neglect to promote your most tireless sales partner: your website.

Company materials:
• business cards
• letterhead
• envelopes
• invoices
• voicemail
• customer questionairres

Promotional materials:
• press releases
• brochures
• pens
• magnets
• stickers
• stress balls
• if you give away a car it had better have your url somewhere on it

Clearly, I could go on for a while here – what did I miss, what does your company do to market your website offline?

Hey, that’s terrific. How do your conversions look?

Nearly a year ago, a client of ours was in a huge hurry for us to build an expansive pay per click campaign alongside the new website we were also creating for them, and they wanted that PPC fired up immediately! Since building a PPC campaign is much faster than creating an entirely new website, we were just going to do the best we could with what we had on their soon-to-be old site. I had no custom landing pages, nor could I track simple conversions (don’t ask), sooo yeah, it was not going to be the best conditions for a finely-tuned PPC machine. I recall our owner telling them, “Listen, without the tracking we’re just going to be spraying people at your site. Who knows what happens after that.”

It all ultimately comes down to your conversion – what is the goal of your campaign? Are you trying to increase inbound phone calls? Form submissions? eCommerce sales? You can pour tons of traffic onto your site, but unless you’re tracking conversion rates you’ll never be able to truly know what’s happening with your budget. Imagine your PPC ad is the beginning of one of those awesome automated sidewalks like they have at the airport – is there a section of your sidewalk that’s broken? If there is, who’s going to walk on that? They’d look like a dork. Maybe some dorks will walk on it, then you’ll just be paying to have a bunch of dorks coming to your site. Is that what you want? OK, you’re getting me off track now…

Hyperspeed is also a very real danger on these things.

There are ambiguous keywords out there that might be looking good in the CTR column but break down once they hit your landing page. Maybe its the keyword attracting people with the wrong intent, maybe your ad is setting the wrong expectations, or, well, there are all sorts of things that can cause trouble on a landing page; the point is, CTR is not the be-all end-all of your keywords. If you don’t currently have the conversion columns running on your dashboard, THEN SET IT UP! I don’t want to go all local news scare tactic on you, but who knows how much money you could be wasting on a couple bad apple keywords that pull in browsers instead of buyers… how’s it affecting your ROI, what’s in your food, is it good for the children?!

Let’s begin with the basic best practices for your meta descriptions: The idea is that you want an enticing lure to pull visitors in from their search results. If you can get your top keyword for the page worked in it gives you a nice couple bolded words, (you know, if the searcher actually uses them) but the primary focus is to write something that sets you apart from the riff-raff while also assuring the searcher that they’re one click away from precisely what they’re looking for. It’s a pretty straightforward concept, but the thing that makes this tricky is that you only have 160 characters in which to accomplish this. This is Google’s limit for what they’ll show in organic results, and since they’re the big dog it’s kind of silly to go over. You’ll only get chopped off by ellipses, meaning everything thereafter is just you getting some typing practice in.

What is apparently news to some is that there are actually instances when it’s best to completely leave the meta description blank. Sorry, I hope you were sitting down.

Here's my logo... still need a good name

Let’s pretend I own a business, an amazingly awesome business that sells mountain bikes, cigars, beef jerky, both kinds of beer (root & regular), and kung fu movies. The fact that I would literally consume most of my profits is irrelevant, we’re focusing on my super-cool website here. Now, writing meta descriptions for each page that dealt with individual products would be pretty simple – right? What happens though as we slowly make our way back up the site tree to the home page? I’m not saying that you couldn’t squeeze everything I sell into the meta description, but would you want to? Or, would you instead prefer the search results catered to your potential visitor’s keywords?

You see, when you do not write a meta description the search engines take the user’s keyword phrase and match it by pulling the most relevant content off your page. If your business offers a variety of products and/or services, that means you also have a variety of keyword match opportunities on your home, and even product/service overview pages. The advantage is plain to see: if a consumer was looking for “fine cigars” and they’re served my home page, I’d want them to see the cigar content specifically, as they may be skeptical of the place that also fixes bicycles in the back room. If I wrote a generalized meta description I likely couldn’t fit in references to my walk-in humidor and top-quality selection of fine cigars while also touting the specific and unique selling points of everything else I offer.

And that’s it, that’s the brilliant stratagem to take away from this; sometimes it really is best to let the engines help you by helping the consumer. Consider that the consumer is really the search engine’s client, the engine’s want to cater to that person as best as it can, so as long as the copy on your page is solid, leaving the meta description wide open can benefit your click through rate beyond any overly-generalized tag you may have cobbled together. Do some searches with competitors in your industry to see what they’re doing. If you see an ellipses at the end of their descriptions don’t immediately advertise your ignorance on your blog by calling them all out publicly. ALL of them may not be lazy and/or derelicts (it also doesn’t mean they aren’t), they might actually be doing something rational.

Looks are, of course, subjective, but I reckon there are few people who couldn’t find a Lamborghini or Ferrari body style to fall in love with. Beyond the sexy curves and aggressive angles lie ferocious power, governable only by the most sophisticated performance engineering, from deforming spoilers all the way down to the microscopic grip of the rubber patches tearing at the ground. Saying all that, I quickly found how surprisingly easy it is to make these ground-based missiles, well, boring. Though the specifications on these cars are staggering, dryly listing them doesn’t make for the most engaging reading. Now, I understand these cars don’t need a lot of help selling themselves, by the time a new model is announced there’s already a multi-year backlog of orders, but if we focus on that it won’t help my point.

So, what is this point I’m taking forever to get to? Even though you may have an amazing product, or a fabulous service people truly need, don’t leave the end user out of the equation. Dryly listing the stats and specs of your product certainly shows what it’s capable of, and its unique selling points might be glaring therein, but how does the consumer relate to it? You may be selling an exclusive, super fast, super cool automobile, but you then have to tell me that this makes me exclusive, super fast and super cool in turn. We humans, whether some want to admit it or not, crave some pretty basic things. We want to belong to a pack, while also impressing others in the pack. We want cool stuff, we want money, we want to save time, money and energy, and we want to improve whatever insecurity we have within ourselves… a Lamborghini Murcielago and its 631 horsepower can work wonders on the latter.

Somewhere in there is a better me...

Point is, do not forget to speak to your client and their wants and needs, otherwise you’re essentially giving off a “take it or leave it” attitude, and unless you’re selling a product that automatically comes with a two-year waiting list of customers built-in, then the extra effort is well worth it. I know it sounds insanely basic, and it really and truly is, but I’m constantly running across websites that fail to tell me directly why my life will be better with their product. After all, when it’s all said and done, it’s really not about the product, it’s about ME.

Unfortunately, the house is probably fine, but some third thing I hadn’t thought of came up: it was all an elaborate (kind of) scam. Luckily, I’m real smart and sniffed it out within the first sentence, somewhere in the red area:

“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa…”

I was sad, even though I knew it was too good to be true, I felt like you do when you fool yourself into believing your Powerball ticket is, “really going to hit this time,” and then, you know.

Anyway, of course the email ended up asking for a bunch of my information, and even better, the sender’s name is apparently, “Am Nice,” so clearly, this is someone with a psychology degree… but I was about to find that beyond that, this evil genius was also well-versed in the dark arts of email marketing. *cue: buh-buh-BUH!*

I did a quick search of the phone number, which, yes, goes somewhere in Pankshin, Africa (that was as far as I felt like researching), where I assume I was to pay my first month’s rent. Google showed me a blog covering this Craigslist scam with a copy of the email they had received, and lo and behold, there were slight variations – this person is A/B testing their emails, I thought… and then I told everyone in the office, then I thought, what a good blog idea… and then, erm, now.

First variant:
My email: The sender’s name is the aforementioned Am Nice. I laughed at first wondering if they really thought that would work, but then I was like, oh, maybe this person had hippie parents, I mean, I went to school with a guy whose last name was Nice. For a moment, I felt bad for Am Nice, the barely literate home renter.

Email B: The signee’s name is Howard Bradshaw. I feel like, already, this one surely has the edge out of the gate.

Second Variant:
My email:
“Hello ,
Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church in West Africa.I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Email B:
“Hello , Thanks for you response,I am the owner of the property you interested on,a missionary with the General Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church International, I am presently serving as Camp Director with the United Methodist Church in West Africa, Nigeria.”

Interesting. Perhaps the “International” would have allayed my fears for a split second longer? I mean, you can’t flat-out say that you’re part of an African church off the top – the “missionary” bit hardly covers it, does it? At this point already I wish I could see this guy’s (or girl’s) analytics.

Third Variant:
My email:
“Note:  We Intend selling the property before my wife reason to it that we should not sell it any longer,that the best way is to rent for future purpose,so if in case you drive by and see a sign board with a number on it,please disregard it,be cos we have ask them to get the sign of our property that we are not selling any longer,that it’s for rent now by us…”

Email B: Wisely, this version left out the whole, “Hey, it might look like the place is for sale, but that’s jokes,” note.

Summary:
I’m willing to bet that this criminal mastermind’s B email is beating the crap out of A, but I’ll likely never know. Maybe after I post this I’ll email good ol’ Am Nice back and see if they’ll let me know how it’s going. Hmmm, I’ll have to look close at Mail Chimp’s Monkey Awards program, I may have a partnership in my future…

*ahem* Also, the moral of this story is that’s it’s smart to A/B test your email marketing campaigns, heck, maybe add a C in there if your list is large enough. Just imagine how sad our buddy would have been had he only used his clearly inferior A up there. Only the largest derelicts looking for rental property would have even attempted to follow through – imagine the headaches in trying to walk someone like that through the process of wiring money to you.

Here, let’s pare this down to its elements: What are you selling? Who are you selling to?

If you were explaining your product to a potential client, what would you say? This shouldn’t be too difficult a question, I imagine you’ve done it more than a few times already – so why not write as you would speak? Just because you’re transferring thoughts to the written word, there’s no reason to think you need to transform yourself into Shakespeare. As you may have learned from Sesame Street, just be yourself – don’t try to be too clever, don’t oversell, just be honest and friendly. Sure, Thesaurus.com might come in handy here and there, but be sure to speak to your customer and don’t bust out the fancy words unless they really and truly fit.

So, what’s your demographic? If you’re selling slopestyle and freeride bikes you’re likely angling for crazy, Red Bull-chugging youngsters; the Rolls Royce Motor Car demo are affluent, slightly older individuals concerned with style and luxury; and both of those are likely a tad to the side of the people actively searching for those “Truck Nutz” things for, you know, their truck. The point is to speak to your customer in text as you would normally with your gob – use your real voice and you may be surprised how well you engage your clientele and how that ultimately transfers towards your sales.

And hey, if it still ends up all being a bit overwhelming, I *ahem* know a guy…

OK, yes, I obviously realize the extreme limitations of your average PPC ad, I don’t expect to be whisked away on some adventure or, what is it movie reviewers say – something, something, roller-coaster thrill-ride? But how difficult is it to at least make your ad slightly different from the competition? Writing PPC ads doesn’t require an English Doctorate, a do-it-yourselfer can get noticed by following a few very simple rules that even some of the pro’s seemingly forget as they cobble together yet another ad about tennis shoes, car tires or Red Vines, the most delicious licorice ever (Tom here in the office has fueled an entirely new addiction for me – THANKS, TOM).

Let’s get this thing rolling then, here’s part one in my, um, some number, series of how to stop being so darned lazy with your PPC ads. Sooo, no particular order, and no, it’s not because I’m lazy… geez:

Check the Competition
I understand you might have a metric crap-ton of keywords attached to a certain ad group, but you should know which are your big-bangers off the top. Simply sling the heavy-hitters into the search engine you’re writing for, hit “search”, and see what ad copy gets served up. What do these ads look like? Which are drawing your eye, if any? Are all the ads essentially the same? Remember, you aren’t trying to camouflage your ad, you want to draw the eye, be unique! Consider what will set yours apart, either with your message, with the inclusion of numbers, or heck, even the shape of your ad.

A week ago I was looking at bikes online with my son and did a search for “giant anthem”, because sometimes I like to pretend I’m rich and can just buy a new bike whenever I want. I just double-checked as I’m writing this and it’s still the same: every PPC ad has the exact same headline… and if you look closely the text doesn’t read properly, leading me to believe these are all dynamic text ads. Making a dynamic text ad is a pain in the rear – I’m sure the people who built these would be thrilled to see this.

What I’m looking at here is a perfect opportunity for a Giant dealer in Kansas City (where I am), even if it’s just some hole-in-the-wall shop, to get some attention and move some of his or her Anthems. Hell, add a word or two to the title and write some copy that actually makes sense and BAM!, you’ll far and away have the best ad of the lot – and you wouldn’t even have to bid anywhere near the top to stick out from the crowd!

Let’s consider you actually have some legit competition that isn’t poorly using dynamic text ads to all look the same, the question remains: from a purely cosmetic standpoint, what will set you apart? Think about it, a searcher isn’t automatically reading every ad at once, something irregular is pulling their attention. In my experience numbers have been strong, whether it’s a price, a percentage, or the easiest (though it does eat up some characters): adding a phone number. Everyone in the SEO game will tell you that putting your keyword in the title and body of the ad is best, and listen, I’m certainly not advising against it, but do a search for “used cars” and see how much of a difference you think those bolded keywords make. If everyone is using the same trick, it’s no longer a trick, is it?

I realize I may have thrown a few people when I mentioned the shape of your ad, and admittedly this one is fairly gimmicky, but hey, you have to draw the eye before you can draw a click, amirite? You can do the ol’ upside-down pyramid, making your title the longest bit and slowly shrinking the next couple lines, or, if you’d like a proper challenge: going the other way with a crazy-short title – just don’t forget that your PPC ad copy has to say something sensible once your potential customer shows up to read it.

And I’ll try to remind you at the end of each of these articles: don’t forget to test your ads! Make multiple ads to see what works. Are your silly pyramids working? How about the numbers? Does it matter where the numbers are in the copy? Keep what’s working and experiment with the losers, and don’t forget, keep an eye on your competitors – your best ad could accidentally get pirated by more than one company and before you know it you’ll be blended back into the sidebar.

OK, stay tuned next week for the, erm, next part of this series I decide should come next – ’til then, happy PPC-ing!

Though keyword density seems to be losing more and more strength in the SEO game, maintaining a solid focus with a specific, core keyword on a page still carries weight, can streamline your keyword hunt, and can make the puzzle-solving process of fitting multiple keywords into copy that much simpler. Since I’m still relatively unable to hit the bike trails here in Kansas City, thanks to our nasty weather, allow me to entertain myself by pretending we’re a bike seller pushing the very winter-friendly Surly Pugsley… a bike I wish I had in the garage at the moment.

As usual, I recommend hitting our free friend: Google’s Keyword Tool. We’ll toss in “surly pugsley” and see what we’re workin’ with.

No big surprise, “surly pugsley” is the winner… well, along with “pugsley surly”. Crap!

What do we do in case of a tie then? How about breaking this stalemate with the help of another free friend: the Wordstream Keyword Tool.

I'm having difficulty believing Kansas City is drawing more searches than the rest of the globe. Ah well...

Wordstream seems to have given us a pretty clear cut answer, so we’ll stick with our Surly Pugsley keyword and go from there.

Well, that solves that.

Now, here’s where we need to pay close attention, you don’t want to begin and end every sentence with your keyword. Your copy needs to read fluidly; if the keyword sticks out to the reader as though an excited child wrote the product summary for his or her favorite toy, then you’ve gone too far. Also, back to the original point of this article: you don’t want to have keywords spread all over the place, and by that I mean do not sacrifice a focus on your main product by watering it down with handlebars, wheelsets, tires, saddles… you get the idea. I’m obviously not advising you to ignore your peripherals, just focus those on their own pages. This focus (if anyone searches the term “focus” I may rank) on your individual product pages will strengthen their punch and make the search engines take notice… like Ali Mills on Daniel LaRusso!

OK, that was the last one, I swear.

Chapter One: Landing Page of Doom

Tires are kind of a big deal on a mountain bike, and though the Kansas City area is short on mountains, there are still gnarly trails aplenty that are fully capable of, and happy to, throw you headlong into the dirt, jagged limestone outcroppings, trees, poison ivy, stuff like that there – point is, it’s nice having a tire set you’re familiar with, and all I wanted was a replacement for my rear hoop. These are never in stock at my favorite local shop, and to order one in you will pay a premium, so I took to the interwebz to find a new Schwalbe Rocket Ron… and so it began.

Since I deal with PPC campaigns every day I’m inclined to look through the paid search before natural, I suppose more out of a professional curiosity than anything else, and here is where the number one result, though not giving the tire’s model name, matched the make. I took it as a good sign as Schwalbe, a German manufacturer, isn’t as popular here in the States as they are in Europe, so I clicked through. I was dropped on a landing page that was jam-packed with Schwalbe tires, 16 pages worth in fact, with 28 models per page. So, yeah, I wasn’t taken to the tire I wanted, but hey, I was close now – right? This is where it crosses into site design territory, as there was no search bar to guide me directly to what I wanted, and even when I adjusted one of the few variables: the tire size, mine still hadn’t shown by page two. A non-SEO person would maybe be less of a baby about it, but I couldn’t be bothered and decided to look elsewhere.

The lesson here is to aim your PPC ads at a landing page that fits your customer’s search, or at the very least drops them somewhere close! People don’t want to solving the navigation puzzle of your site, and especially when you offer something that is not unique to you, try to keep that sales funnel as short as possible for them.

Chapter Two: The Land of Not Crazy Low Prices

Here’s a quickie: Don’t say you have crazy low prices unless you actually have crazy low prices – it will anger the person who discovers it… you know, the person who was possibly going to give you their money.

Chapter Three: Bounce

Two clicks in and I’m treated to a picture of my tire with a red-lettered, “This item is currently out of stock.”

Back ‘er up – *click* *click*

In this specific case it’s kind of understandable, you’d have to be on the ball to pause your ad after you run out of a freakin’ tire, one item out of the hundreds you stock, but this is still a hit to your ROI. Sure, you could argue that at least you drew a customer into your site, but how realistic is the scenario that they’ll adventure around looking for something else in this case? I was not a customer looking for “mountain bike tires” that’s much different than someone looking for a specific brand and model, and it’s absolutely important to keep this in mind when building your campaigns. If you’re going to go as far as building an ad group around specific items then it only makes sense to stay on top of inventory and hit the pause button if there’s going to be a delay in restocking.

Chapter Four: The Grail

The fourth ad was the first ad that actually had the model name in the ad, and hey, a sale! I was a bit skeptical when the body announced free shipping on orders over $240.00, because, well, that would be a bulk order of tires, and I worried that this was likely a poorly put together dynamic text ad that was about to add some disappointment to my shopping adventure.

Dynamic text can be a great eye-catcher as it matches exactly what the customer is looking for, but boy, if you don’t put the time in when building it, you can really do more harm than good. Before my finger had time to twitch I’d already considered how unrelated the landing page would be, this “sale” having ran through the stock already, if it even existed at all, and why I didn’t just quit screwing around and go buy from the site I usually do. Then, just like that, there it was…

I was taken directly to the item I wanted! There really was a sale! It really was in stock! Yes, I really was this excited to find the thing I’d set out to purchase. And consider this excitement stemmed from all that crap I’d just sifted through; this site was my hero, not because they did anything amazing, but because they did what they were supposed to do! These other businesses spent money to frustrate and run off a potential customer. Comparatively speaking, they’d have come out ahead by doing no PPC at all!

If you’re managing your business’ PPC campaign ask yourself if you’re making it easy for your customers to give you their money. Are you frustrating them? Are you making them write angry blogs? What’s the ROI on that sort of business model anyway?