The Art of Search

7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.
Mistake #4 – Not Targeting Your Geographic Region.
In the last post we talked about using Negative Keywords and how to best utilise these to cut out on unwanted and un-targeted AdWords traffic. Pretty neat huh?
But there’s another fatal mistake that I’ve see [...]

7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.
Mistake #3 – Sending all Clicks to Your Home Page.
Let’s start this post with a question. What is one of the single most powerful features of search engine marketing? The key to why PPC and SEO work so well?
Quite simply, the user [...]

7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.
Mistake #2 – Not using negative keywords.
Google AdWords (Yahoo and Bing) allow advertisers to select words or phrases that you do not want your PPC ads to appear against. They call this adding ‘negative keywords’.
The idea is pretty simple, but often overlooked.
Let’s [...]

Series: 7 Common AdWords mistakes that will kill your Quality Score and increase your costs.
Mistake #1 – Too many keywords per ad group.
I see this mistake all the time and, as a new AdWords advertiser, it’s not exactly 100% your fault. I’ll explain why.
Google (and Yahoo and MSN) pretty much lead you down a path [...]

I thought it would be a good idea to briefly describe the various elements that make up a Google Search Engine Results Page or SERP as it will help later on if you clearly understand what each piece of real estate is all about.
I also decided that there’s no better way to show this than [...]

While it may seem obvious to some of you what pay-per-click advertising actually is, you are not alone in this world if you are still a bit confused.
I believe it is always good to take a step back and look at the big picture, so I wanted to define PPC and briefly explain where and [...]

This next topic in the MYOPPC Series deals with Defining Marketing Goals and Setting Realistic Targets.
Note that we’ve not even looked at AdWords, Yahoo, Campaign Structure, Set-up etc.  this will come, but as I mentioned it’s important to get the foundations right and have a clear picture of what you want to achieve.
I’m also assuming [...]

Defining your business goals and understanding how search marketing may help achieve these.
As a business owner or marketing manager this post may be nothing new to you however I wanted to start this series with the fundamentals and work up from there as a strong foundation is the key to future success.
With a strong foundation [...]

If you are  a ‘Do it yourself’ kind of person then this new series is definitely for you. Each week I will be posting new articles on how to manage your PPC campaigns yourself.  It doesn’t matter if you are a small local business, large corporate, or online e-tailer, there is sure to be something [...]