Adwords & Adwords Express

If you’re ready to venture into the world of Google AdWords advertising, you’ll have a decision to make: AdWords or AdWords Express? If you’re not sure, we’re here to help you understand the difference between the two.

Both versions allow you to reach potential customers on Google, market on mobile devices and the ability to target geographically. But they differ significantly when it comes to user control.

AdWords Express

Most AdWords Express features are designed for small, local companies with or without a website, and this platform is ideal for business owners who don’t have a lot of time to manage online advertising. It offers easy setup and is a convenient way to quickly setup online ads, which you’re only charged for if someone clicks them (Pay-Per-Click or PPC).

The user sets a budget and based on the type of business you have, Google will identify a list of keywords that can trigger your ad. Google also maintains and updates the search phrases, so minimal management by the business owner is necessary.

Ads can be targeted for a specific area around your business, or targeted to cities, states or countries depending on your advertising needs.

The ease of AdWords Express comes at the cost of some user control, including the ability to only promote one service or product at a time due to the allowance of one set of keywords and ads. It’s also limited in the keyword data provided, making it difficult to analyze the effectiveness and make improvements.

AdWords

The full version of AdWords is ideal for business owners who desire more control over their advertising campaigns and who want more features. Large businesses, e-commerce companies and those with websites and multiple landing pages are best using the full version. But all of its additional features make it more complex and time-consuming.

The user chooses daily budgets, keywords, bids, and creates the ads – essentially has full control over the account. If the user wants to take advantage of other marketing campaigns, this platform also includes display advertising and videos, and can be set to include Google’s Display Network partner sites like YouTube, AOL and others.

AdWords also offers in-depth analysis of keywords, along with detailed reporting of what’s working – and what isn’t – so that the user can make adjustments as needed. It also allows for specific geographical targeting, from state and city, to zip code and neighborhoods.

So which is best? It all depends on your needs. If you’re a small business looking for quick and easy online ads without a lot of additional detail, AdWords Express may be the right choice. If you’re a larger company or online only business that seeks deeper analysis and control, then the full version of AdWords may be the best advertising path to take.

Posting Fresh Content On Your Website

Search engines love websites that are updated frequently. This shows them that the websites are fresh and relevant, rather than outdated. Search engines don’t want to list irrelevant, outdated webpages for their users. They want to post the most up-to-date and new content possible to ensure that it’s as useful as possible.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many chances for you to update the other areas of your website. Your company’s history and about us page will never change. Your price page and product pages will only rarely change, if ever. You might update your home page content a couple times a year, at the most.

Starting a blog gives you the opportunity to continuously publish new posts on your site. You can post multiple times a day if you want to. The more fresh content you post, the more pages you’ll have for search engines to index, which means more opportunities to take the #1 spot on search engine result pages.

Why Blogging Is Important

One of the most important reasons why blogging is important, however, is because it can boost your SEO results. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves a series of activities that optimizes your content in order to improve your organic, or “free,” traffic. The better you optimize your blog posts for SEO, the higher your webpages will be listed on search engine result pages, so more people can find your website and get to know your business. In fact, companies that blog typically gain at least twice as much web traffic as those that don’t blog.

Using Keywords Strategically

Every blog entry you post gives you a new opportunity to use SEO keywords in your content. By performing keyword research, finding the keywords and phrases that searchers looking for a company like yours would most likely use, and then using those keywords strategically in your blog posts, you can really improve your search engine optimization results.

To improve your outcomes, use long-tail keywords that your target audience will likely use during their research as part of the buyer’s journey. But remember to avoid keyword stuffing.

Backlinking

It pays to build relationships with other organizations and websites. Blogging offers you the chance to include links to other relevant websites. As a return, these organizations may link back to your site, which will help you generate even more web traffic that you couldn’t otherwise generate on your own.

It’s important to build relationships with reputable and high-quality websites that fit your niche when backlinking, however. Otherwise, you could be penalized by search engines.

Increasing Your Popularity Rank

Sometimes, SEO is a popularity contest. Search engines will move up your rank on their result pages if they notice that your blog entries are shared frequently and clicked on often. The best way to win this popularity contest is to commit to only publishing high-quality content that your audience will actually want to read. Sharing your blog however you can and suggesting that others do the same can also help.

Alexa Rank – What Is It And Is It Important

How are Alexa Ranks measured?

According to the official Alexa website’s Our Data page, the rank is calculated using a ‘combination’ of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months – with the site with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews being ranked as #1. The data is collected from a subset of internet users using one of 25,000 browser extensions for either Google Chrome, Firefox, and/or Internet Explorer. An algorithm then ‘corrects’ for various potential biases and attempts to compensate for visitors who might not be in Alexa’s measurement panel (a factor it historically hasn’t always tried to accommodate for) and normalizes the data based on the geographical location of visitors.

How can I view a website’s Alexa Rank?

At least this part is straightforward: simply go to the official Alexa website, type in your full domain name and hit return! What’s more, scrolling down the results page reveals no end of other interesting metrics, such as Bounce Rate, Daily Pageviews per Visitor, Daily Time on Site and the Percentage of visits from Search, as well as various Demographics, a list of sites that link and even page speed/load times! All of which should probably be taken with a pinch of salt…

What does the Alexa Rank mean?

The general consensus seems to be a reluctant admittance by most (certainly not all) that there does indeed appear to be a very general – rough – correlation (seemingly with a LOT of outlying data points) between a site’s Alexa Rank and traffic for well-established websites that receive over and above a certain level of traffic: i.e. for relatively popular sites with Alexa Ranks of less than somewhere in the region of about 50,000 to 100,000 – to their credit, Alexa does actually state on their website that ‘traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as [very?] rough estimates‘ and that conversely ‘the closer a site gets to #1, the more accurate traffic rankings become‘. Anything higher than this 100,000 waypoint and everyone I’ve ever spoken to on the subject (I hangout in somewhat geeky circles) seems to pretty much laugh it off as a metric that can, nine times out of ten, be almost completely ignored.

Why don’t people tend to trust it?

It seems that a lot of people/webmasters with access to reliable web analytics data (the most popular being provided by Google Analytics of course) for more than one website often report seeing web-traffic trends and statistics that appear to be completely out of line with the corresponding Alexa Rank for each site. Unfortunately, you’ve only got to Google something like ‘Is Alexa Rank Accurate?’ to find such reports – not good! Although, in all fairness, quite a few of these reports are for websites with quite high Alexa Ranks – i.e. often way in excess of the 100,000 mark.

The real kicker though, seems to be two-fold: 1) Alexa aren’t able to gather their data from everybody (they obviously simply don’t have access to everybody’s browsing habits) – they can only gather data from a subset of a few million users via certain browser extensions (as previously mentioned) – something common sense suggests will almost certainly skew the data right from the get-go (since the average user presumably arguably isn’t likely to have installed any such browser extensions) and 2) rather than address such concerns head on and be completely open about exactly how this particular problem is accounted for, i.e. by being more open about exactly how the underlying data is collected and used to calculate the rank, Alexa seem to (as far as my admittedly somewhat limited research goes) be less than 100% transparent on the matter, simply stating that Alexa Rank ‘is calculated using a combination of the estimated average daily unique visitors to the site and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months’. Hmmmm….

Are Alexa Ranks important?

For most site owners, ‘how a website is doing’ is of course very important, however, when assessing your own website my advice would be to simply stick with Google Analytics data rather than to go attributing any significant meaning to your site’s Alexa Rank. When looking at competitor’s sites however, by all means take a quick peek at their Alexa Rank for a very rough idea of how popular their website is relative to yours (assuming the same kinds of people visit both sites – thereby hopefully minimizing some of the biases brought about by the significantly-less-than-perfect way in which Alexa gather their data); however I definitely wouldn’t go thinking a particular website gets more traffic than another merely on the basis that its Alexa Rank happens to be only a few thousand lower – and if the website you’re interested in happens to have a rank of anything even near the aforementioned 100,000 mark, it’s probably best not to go attributing any significant meaning to comparing Alexa Ranks at all!

Conclusion

I personally hope that Alexa continues to work towards really getting this particular metric up to scratch… because it sure would be nice to stick a number on each and every website that would allow us to compare and contrast them all with a decent level of accuracy! Unfortunately, it would appear that they’ve still got quite a long way to go in order to regain the industry’s faith in the matter!

SEO Vs AdWords

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and is a method of digital marketing that focuses on making your website content relevant to search engines. SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps you to rank higher in the organic, or natural, search results. Properly implemented SEO optimizes your site in terms of keywords, content, links, and other technical aspects.

By optimizing these areas, search engines see your site as the most relevant result, and, as such, put your site in a primary spot on the search engine results page (SERP). SEO is the process of getting more traffic to your website by getting the site listed and ranked highly for queries relating to your product, market, or business in the natural or organic search results.

What is Google AdWords?

Adwords is an advertising platform created by Google that makes it possible for you to position your advertisement on the top or right-hand side of the search results pages on Google and other affiliate websites.

AdWords allows you to target internet user’s search queries and display your offers every time they look for a similar product. The visitor then clicks on your advertisement and it takes them to your site or landing page.

With Adwords, your business listing can be displayed alongside the natural search results when people search for specific keyword phrases in Google. Search results displayed by Google Adwords are also called Pay Per Click (PPC) results because you shell out money for every click on one of your ads. We’ve illustrated the difference between the natural or organic search results and the paid Adwords search results below.

SEO Versus AdWords

The best practice is to use a mixture of both SEO and Adwords to keep your brand top of mind for internet searchers. Even though you rank in top positions in the organic search results, you should still consider using AdWords to target users who might not be as familiar with your brand.

Here are a few other factors to consider when debating how much of your resources to spend on SEO and AdWords.

SEO requires more time for results than AdWords, but can result in a high rank in Google for an amount of key search terms. There’s no charge per click linked with the organic search results, but on the other hand, ongoing work is necessary to sustain your search engine rankings with SEO.

Adwords can be switched on and off instantaneously, while SEO can take a lot longer to make an effect on search results

Adwords pretty much guarantees your business will be displayed in the search results. There is no assurance you’ll rank in the organic search results through SEO.

SEO targets high traffic keywords mentioned in your website. (Just don’t keyword stuff)

Adwords also permits you to respond quickly to a shifting marketplace by targeting new terms visitors may be looking for. This can be very useful for e-commerce businesses.

Adwords ads are displayed on top of the organic listings. On some screens (particularly on mobile) this area is all the user can see without scrolling.

Adwords targets abundant variations that you have around particular keywords and allows you to use negative keywords, so you can avoid ranking for terms that aren’t a good match for your brand.

AdWords runs on a variety of websites that register for Google Ads, so your site may gain more exposure.

Adwords is a rapid method for generating quality leads and sales.

If SEO is stopped, the ranking of a website decreases over a period of time due to constant algorithm updates by Google.

SEO also optimizes the quality and quantity of incoming links to your website.

AdWords pulls instant traffic from the start of the campaign. This is useful for new websites or services and products that are seasonal.

In Conclusion

You don’t have to choose between SEO and AdWords. These are two very different tools you can use to reach the same goal: an increase in sales and traffic.

It is also very important to keep the user in mind. Above all, provide high-quality content that is actually useful to your readers. Do not “over optimize” it to get better placements. You need to keep relevant content that actually transforms your clicks into business!

Posting Fresh Content On Your Website

Search engines love websites that are updated frequently. This shows them that the websites are fresh and relevant, rather than outdated. Search engines don’t want to list irrelevant, outdated webpages for their users. They want to post the most up-to-date and new content possible to ensure that it’s as useful as possible.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many chances for you to update the other areas of your website. Your company’s history and about us page will never change. Your price page and product pages will only rarely change, if ever. You might update your home page content a couple times a year, at the most.

Starting a blog gives you the opportunity to continuously publish new posts on your site. You can post multiple times a day if you want to. The more fresh content you post, the more pages you’ll have for search engines to index, which means more opportunities to take the #1 spot on search engine result pages.

Why Blogging Is Important

One of the most important reasons why blogging is important, however, is because it can boost your SEO results. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves a series of activities that optimizes your content in order to improve your organic, or “free,” traffic. The better you optimize your blog posts for SEO, the higher your webpages will be listed on search engine result pages, so more people can find your website and get to know your business. In fact, companies that blog typically gain at least twice as much web traffic as those that don’t blog.

Using Keywords Strategically

Every blog entry you post gives you a new opportunity to use SEO keywords in your content. By performing keyword research, finding the keywords and phrases that searchers looking for a company like yours would most likely use, and then using those keywords strategically in your blog posts, you can really improve your search engine optimization results.

To improve your outcomes, use long-tail keywords that your target audience will likely use during their research as part of the buyer’s journey. But remember to avoid keyword stuffing.

Backlinking

It pays to build relationships with other organizations and websites. Blogging offers you the chance to include links to other relevant websites. As a return, these organizations may link back to your site, which will help you generate even more web traffic that you couldn’t otherwise generate on your own.

It’s important to build relationships with reputable and high-quality websites that fit your niche when backlinking, however. Otherwise, you could be penalized by search engines.

Increasing Your Popularity Rank

Sometimes, SEO is a popularity contest. Search engines will move up your rank on their result pages if they notice that your blog entries are shared frequently and clicked on often. The best way to win this popularity contest is to commit to only publishing high-quality content that your audience will actually want to read. Sharing your blog however you can and suggesting that others do the same can also help.

Using Keywords Strategically

Every blog entry you post gives you a new opportunity to use SEO keywords in your content. By performing keyword research, finding the keywords and phrases that searchers looking for a company like yours would most likely use, and then using those keywords strategically in your blog posts, you can really improve your search engine optimization results.

To improve your outcomes, use long-tail keywords that your target audience will likely use during their research as part of the buyer’s journey. But remember to avoid keyword stuffing.

Backlinking

It pays to build relationships with other organizations and websites. Blogging offers you the chance to include links to other relevant websites. As a return, these organizations may link back to your site, which will help you generate even more web traffic that you couldn’t otherwise generate on your own.

It’s important to build relationships with reputable and high-quality websites that fit your niche when backlinking, however. Otherwise, you could be penalized by search engines.

Increasing Your Popularity Rank

Sometimes, SEO is a popularity contest. Search engines will move up your rank on their result pages if they notice that your blog entries are shared frequently and clicked on often. The best way to win this popularity contest is to commit to only publishing high-quality content that your audience will actually want to read. Sharing your blog however you can and suggesting that others do the same can also help.

Why Blogging Is Important

One of the most important reasons why blogging is important, however, is because it can boost your SEO results. Search engine optimization (SEO) involves a series of activities that optimizes your content in order to improve your organic, or “free,” traffic. The better you optimize your blog posts for SEO, the higher your webpages will be listed on search engine result pages, so more people can find your website and get to know your business. In fact, companies that blog typically gain at least twice as much web traffic as those that don’t blog.

Posting Fresh Content on Your Website

Search engines love websites that are updated frequently. This shows them that the websites are fresh and relevant, rather than outdated. Search engines don’t want to list irrelevant, outdated webpages for their users. They want to post the most up-to-date and new content possible to ensure that it’s as useful as possible.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many chances for you to update the other areas of your website. Your company’s history and about us page will never change. Your price page and product pages will only rarely change, if ever. You might update your home page content a couple times a year, at the most.

Starting a blog gives you the opportunity to continuously publish new posts on your site. You can post multiple times a day if you want to. The more fresh content you post, the more pages you’ll have for search engines to index, which means more opportunities to take the #1 spot on search engine result pages.