Technology
Basis Platform
Advertising Operating System
Communication Portal
Intelligent Collaboration
All Channel Activation
Activate Media on Every Channel
Consulting
Resources
Digital marketing is affected by seasonal trends; there are many advantages – and a few disadvantages – to following seasonal advertising trends. It’s important to understand why seasonality matters and how to manage your digital marketing accordingly in order to make seasonal marketing work for you.
Seasonal marketing can be a lot of fun. It provides an opportunity to get creative with your digital advertising and messaging. Don’t be afraid to depart from the norm and do something different to stand out! Whether you're advertising based on the seasons themselves, or specific (well-known or more esoteric) holidays, following seasonal trends can produce great results. Yet is it really the most effective way to market your agency, brand, or product? We explore further below.
Depending on performance, some seasonal ads may be recycled year-over-year. Make small tweaks to the messaging to A/B test year-over-year if needed; see what resonates with your audience and ditch the rest. Recirculating or repurposing winning ads is a cost-effective way to remain competitive.
There are a number of ways to make seasonal advertising trends work for you:
Plan ahead. Marketing efforts should start a few weeks before the season or holiday actually hits. Materials and media need to be ready to launch just as consumers begin to make their own plans and preparations.
Managing multiple media assets can be challenging — especially when you're making an effort to keep up with seasonal advertising trends. Basis' technology platform centralizes, organizes, and automates digital media across programmatic, direct, search, and social channels. We empower agencies to control their digital business, optimize advertising intelligence, and drive team performance by advocating for the thoughtful integration of digital buying. Contact us today to learn more.
These days, Americans spend more than half of their waking hours consuming media across a variety of connected screens. That’s a lot of screen-time—and it’s created a multitude of challenges behind the scenes. Many marketers are struggling to effectively reach consumers who are connected to an average of 4 or more devices a day. How can marketers acknowledge the significance of understanding their consumers’ journey across multiple screens, and seek to craft media and marketing plans that reflect those behaviors?
This webinar spotlights the notable rise of cross-screen behaviors and how cross-device technologies can help advertisers take important steps to better connect with their audiences.
At its core, the idea behind automated bidding is a simple one: it's a process designed to take all of the heavy lifting and guesswork out of the equation within the context of your online advertising campaigns, allowing you to use real data and actionable insight to achieve specific goals for your brand in easier ways than ever before. In essence, it's an opportunity for you to work "smarter, not harder" — crafting the right strategy to meet your needs that lets you focus less on bidding and more on actually making a connection with the people you were trying to reach in the first place.
For years, online marketers have been using it as an opportunity to generate higher levels of return on investment with far less work required than ever before. But it also represents something far more powerful and important. It's confirmation of the fact that, in this day and age, with the technology we now have available to us, there is absolutely no reason to manage your advertising bidding manually any longer. Any benefits you think you're gaining in terms of control are at the sacrifice of insight and expertise, not to manage a process that creates more time for you to focus on all of the qualities of your campaign that matter most of all in the eyes of your consumers.
All told, the rise of automated bidding is a fascinating story, indeed — and taking a moment to appreciate how far we've come can easily help shed light on where we might be going, together.
The story of automated bidding, in general, begins in the early 2000s, back during the dawn of what would eventually become known as pay-per-click (PPC advertising). As advertisers moved into the digital world and onto the Internet in droves, many ad platforms (like Google Ads) needed advertisers to actually set a maximum cost-per-click (CPC) that they were comfortable with. This quickly proved to be a lot easier said than done.
For starters, maximum CPC isn't necessarily the top priority of a digital marketer -- they're (correctly) focused on things like visibility, conversions, sales, leads, etc. These are all tangible goals that weren't as directly related to CPC as they needed to be, and were more appropriate to gauge against something like cost-per-acquisition (CPA) or even return on advertising spend (ROAS).
CPC was important, yes — but it was only one small part of a much larger story. Yet at the same time, advertisers needed to essentially find a way to convert all of their short and long-term business goals through this one particular lens — essentially bringing together what they were trying to accomplish with the information they needed to find a kind of "Happy Medium" or middle ground.
Even advertisers who liked manual bidding usually agree that while they were able to make this system work, it was hardly the best possible use of their time.
Beyond this was the fact that, over time, services like Google Ads themselves grew more complicated. Things got particularly tricky during the mobile revolution, when advertisers suddenly had access to huge volumes of new data that were unavailable a few short years ago. Which types of device, geographic locations, and demographics impacted nearly every level of their campaign, yet they still had to funnel everything through one particular (and limited) lens.
This is where automated bidding quickly proved its value, not only in terms of how it could help the average marketer save a great deal of time, but also with regards to how it could help people with more advanced and important goals in far easier ways as well.
But at the same time, it's important to acknowledge that automated bidding itself is not necessarily a silver bullet. It's not a magic wave of the hand that will instantly allow you to achieve all of your goals and send your return on investment into the stratosphere. It's ultimately a tool, the same as anything else. It is possible to misuse a tool or fail to tap into its potential if you're still not quite sure what you're doing.
There are different types of automated bidding strategies, for example, that are designed to be used in entirely different ways. All of them require you to consider a few core factors.
As stated, an automated bid strategy is one that automatically sets bid values for ads on the advertiser’s behalf, based on the overall likelihood that the ad in question will result in either a click or conversion. Different types of strategies can be created based on exactly what it is you're trying to accomplish, such as increasing your visibility in search results on engines like Google, increasing clicks, increasing conversions, increasing the value of those conversions, and much more.
In a conversion-based automated bid strategy, for example, unique bids will be set for each auction based on all analytical data present at the time. So different bids may be made depending on where the specific ad is being shown, what type of device a user will be seeing it on, what type of browser they're using, or even the time of day. All of this directly impacts that ad's ability to achieve your goal, which in turn affects the bid, which then ties directly back into the amount you're expected to pay in the first place.
As opposed to the alternative of manual CPC bidding, you don't actually need to manually update your bids to take into consideration specific ad groups or even unique keywords. Absolutely everything happens on your behalf, based on the strategy in place and the specifics that you've decided at the outset of the campaign.
Not only does this often involve a campaign that is far more cost-effective and easier to run, but one that also performs better than you would be able to achieve on your own as well.
There are a number of other automated bidding strategies that you can choose to use depending on your current campaign goals. These include but are certainly not limited to the following:
These are the seven strategies that are currently available in Google's own advertising platform. They've gone by a number of different names in the past, but the core objectives at the heart of them all have remained the same. You can always come up with your own strategies to get more specific and customized with your efforts, of course -- but for a lot of people, especially those who are just getting into automated bidding for the first time, picking one of these existing strategies is the perfect foundation to build from moving forward.
However, Google Ads automated bidding capabilities are only the tip of the iceberg. There are a number of amazing platforms now that can put automated bidding on steroids and can fundamentally transform your SEM and PPC campaigns into revenue-generating machines.
With predictive advertising platforms, you can not only automatically generate 8.2 million combinations of bid adjustments for each keyword, but also set the platform to maximize profit or revenue capacity.
As you begin to research this topic in greater detail, you'll be immediately greeted by two terms: standard bid strategies and portfolio bid strategies.
A standard bid strategy is one that was only ever designed to be applied to a single campaign. Even if you're running multiple campaigns using the same standard target strategy, they're still all going to be treated as individuals. Decisions will be made within the context of those silos and one campaign won't affect another in any appreciable way.
Generally speaking, standard bid strategies are ideal for situations where that lack-of-crossover isn't a disadvantage, but an asset. If you're running a branded and non-branded campaign, for example, you don't necessarily want those two to mix. You've likely got very different goals and you're trying to hit very different targets. When you use a standard strategy, the difference between what you actually paid and what you were willing to pay won't be re-allocated from the branded campaign to the non-branded campaign and vice versa.
A portfolio strategy, by and large, is the opposite of that. With this type of strategy, multiple campaigns that are all sharing the same goal are treated less as individuals and more as a larger unit - or in other words, as a portfolio. The major advantage of this is that if you've got three campaigns that are performing well and one that is performing poorly, those successful campaigns can help subsidize a bit of the loss you're taking on the less successful one. Oftentimes this can be a great way to drive more conversions and it's a benefit that you don't really have when using a standard strategy.
You would definitely want to use a portfolio strategy if you were using multiple campaigns to sell different but similar items within the context of the same end goal. If you were setting up individual campaigns for PRODUCT A and PRODUCT B, but both A and B were made from basically the same materials, performed similar functions and you were targeting very similar groups of people, it's likely a good idea to let them share data and work together instead of separately.
If PRODUCT A was a sophisticated new type of flashlight and PRODUCT B was a new mobile phone, on the other hand, these two products couldn't be more different and a standard strategy would ultimately be the way to go.
Having said that, there are still a number of important considerations you need to make to help guarantee that your automated bidding efforts get off on the right foot.
One of the most important things to understand is that you should really avoid making any frequent changes to automated bid campaigns if you can help it. Remember that the bidding algorithm is actually responding to a huge volume of information and every change you make to the campaign means that the algorithm needs to "learn" everything all over again. This takes time and can absolutely affect your performance in the short-term.
If you're going to be making any type of optimizations at all, proceed with caution and only do what is absolutely necessary. Most people agree that it will take about a week for your campaign to stabilize after that, so make sure that every move counts.
Likewise, you should always be sure to take advantage of the reporting tools that platforms like Google put at your fingertips. Not only can you rest easy knowing that your bidding is taken care of, but you can also view reams of historical data to help make more thoughtful and informed decisions moving forward.
Google's reporting tools involve bid strategy statuses, for example, that let you see exactly what is going on with your campaigns at any given moment. You can set up alerts and notifications that will instantly clue you in on issues with conversion tracking that you may be experiencing and provide actionable steps on how to fix them.
You can even use Google's own bid simulators to try to gain insight into the number of conversions an ad MIGHT have gotten had you set different targets at the outset. Along the same lines are campaign drafts and experiments, which are intended to let you test how automated bidding will fare against whatever manual bidding method you're currently using. You can even use this to help you pick out a strategy and make more informed decisions in the future.
These tools are available to you right from your user account. It would be an absolute shame not to take full advantage of them whenever possible.
Over the last two decades, digital advertising as a concept and as a platform has gone through one incredible transformation after another. There was a day where ads on the Internet were actually something of a novelty, if you can remember back that far. Flash forward to today and not only did digital ad spend come in at $83 billion in 2017 according to one study, but it's also predicted to reach a massive $129 billion by as soon as 2021.
Despite all that, one thing remains unchanged: Google still holds the largest share of total digital ad spend in the United States, coming in at an incredible 38.6%. This is with good reason, too — for every $1 a brand spends on Google Ads (formerly AdWords), they can typically expect to make an average of $2 in revenue as a result. To that end, digital advertising has long proven itself to be more than just another marketing opportunity. It's become one of the dominant forms of communication on the planet, connecting businesses with their customers in new and innovative ways with each passing day.
Unless, of course, you're still setting your bids manually.
When it comes to the idea of manually bidding on each and every term, manual bidding is very much one of those things where the old saying "just because you CAN do it doesn't mean you SHOULD" applies. Technology itself has evolved over the years to make our lives faster, more efficient and more convenient than ever in a practically limitless number of ways. This can and absolutely should extend to the world of online advertising — provided you're willing to allow it, that is.
Make absolutely no mistake about it: if you're still working with manual bidding in the modern era, you're not only doing things the hard way — you're also doing them the wrong way.
In an era where competition is more fierce than ever and margins are getting thinner and thinner all the time, this is absolutely one mistake that you, your brand and your customers cannot afford to make.
Website redesigns often require reconstructing at least part of a site from scratch, which can send search engine marketers back to square one. If the redesign project is not completed correctly and critical steps are missed, a website redesign has the potential to send a website into a tailspin. Even when a website redesign is done well, most redesigned sites see a minimum of a seven-to-10% drop in traffic. When done wrong, “redesigned” sites can see traffic plummet. What’s more, it can take weeks or months for the site to regain its lost traffic.
Given this, if you’re a search engine marketer in charge of a site that’s going to be redesigned, you need a plan for surviving the website redesign. The following steps will help minimize any negative impact that the project might have on your SEM efforts, and ensure your hard-earned SEM accomplishments aren’t lost during or after the redesign.
Your first step in preparing for the website redesign should be to gather a team of people who can assist with the work required. Unless you run a one-person microsite, there’s too much work for one person to manage. Even if your sole responsibility is SEM, you’ll quickly be overwhelmed with all that there is to do and coordinate.
The people on your team should fill a number of roles. There should be a:
You may also want to bring on IT staff, social media marketer or peripheral people.
Of course, the size of your team will depend on how large your site and its support staff is. Large sites may have a different person assume each of these roles, while small sites might have individuals simultaneously assuming several roles.
Recruiting team members isn’t difficult, as everyone you need will already be working in these roles. Gathering a team is about being intentional and setting up a meeting with all the people who are involved so that everyone can understand each other’s needs and be on the same page. If you don’t get people together, SEM can easily be overlooked in the midst of everything else and your concerns may be unacknowledged, ignored or neglected.
Once everyone is together, you’ll want to create a plan that has three distinct phases: pre-launch, launch and post-launch.
While there’s a lot of technical work to do before launching the newly rebuilt website, search engine marketing concerns are fairly simple. The focus is primarily on making sure the site’s organic search rankings are affected as little as possible during the initial launch of the new site. To this end, there’s some on-site SEO work to do and a few PPC campaigns to set up.
Start by getting a new sitemap of the current site so you know exactly what will need to be done for on-site SEO. Rather than using an older sitemap, fetch a new one using a crawling tool like ScreamingFrog or DeepCrawl. Both tools (and others) will generate a sitemap and show you some items that are relevant to on-site SEO.
With a freshly generated sitemap in hand, carefully review it with your webmaster and SEO specialist. Discuss how the site’s architecture will be changing and what alterations must be made to the sitemap in light of the new architecture.
Make sure someone is given the specific responsibility of updating the sitemap before launching the new site. Having an accurate sitemap in place for the new site will be essential for SEO, since search engines can only rank pages if they’re able to crawl sites accurately.
Assuming the site architecture is changing, some on-page elements will need to be changed in order to maximize on-page relevance. The content creator will likely do most of the actual work, but the SEO specialist ought to be consulted.
Exactly what needs to be changed will depend on how much the architecture of your site is changing. You may need to adjust pages’:
As you work through each page, team members may notice changes that can be made to improve the user experience or increase conversion rates. Work with the project lead to determine what changes should be made before launch and which ones can wait until after launch. The leader might not want to delay launching for changes that’ll only have a small impact or that take too long to implement.
The most important part of this step is to make sure all page elements are updated before launching the new site. You’ll want search engines to be able to easily determine what pages are about from the first day that the new site launches.
One of the most important aspects of pre-launch preparation is addressing dead links. This is a matter of both SEO and user experience. Links pass link equity and help search engines determine pages’ topics, and no users like landing on dead pages.
Use the same crawling tool you previously ran a sitemap with to find 404 pages that may have dead links pointing to them. Then, confirm that these are 404s in Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools.
There are a few ways to address any dead pages you find. You can:
It’s often worth spending a little time manually fixing the major links that point to a dead page, but the less important links offer a much lower return on the time invested. Therefore, you might want to focus on a few major links and create a redirect that’ll be sufficient for any lesser ones.
Link changes and redirects certainly should be taken care of before launch so that referral traffic coming from external links can find the new site and on-site visitors aren’t frustrated with a bunch of dead pages. Dead links don’t look good on new sites.
Even with your team’s best efforts, there’ll likely be at least a temporary drop in the site’s organic rankings. Search engines will need a little time to crawl all the pages and discover all the links, and redirects don’t pass on all of their link equity.
Per Moz’s reporting back in the days of PageRank, Google eventually determined that redirects from HTTP to HTTPS would pass on all of their link equity. Redirects that aren’t to adopt the HTTPS protocol, however, lose about 15% of their link equity. Although PageRank is no longer a ranking factor, there’s no sign that Google stopped treating redirects’ link equity in this way.
Running additional PPC campaigns while the new site becomes established is an easy way to compensate for potential drops in organic rankings. Find out what organic search terms generate are most important to your site’s organic traffic, and then ask the PPC marketer to create campaigns around those terms. The paid advertisements will ensure your site’s still visible in searches until the organic rankings recover.
These campaigns shouldn’t be started until the new site launches, but they should be created and ready to go. Don’t worry about split-testing and refining them too much, since they’ll hopefully only be used for a short time.
At the time of launch, most of the immediate responsibilities will fall to the team members who actually did the website redesign. There’s not a lot of immediate SEM work to do, but you may be needed for some crisis management.
The best way team members who aren’t directly involved with the technical aspects of the new site can help with the site’s launch is by simply keeping their schedules free and minds open.
Anything can go awry on the day of launching, and even well-planned launches sometimes experience difficulties. Should a problem arise, developers may need all hands on deck to help address the issue. People can only help if they’re free of other obligations.
Helping with launch issues may involve any type of work, which is why being flexible is essential at this point in time. There’s a chance that you and other team members will be asked to do something not related to SEM or the other roles listed above. That might involve searching for dead links, checking specific snippets of code or just getting developers lunch while they work continuously on a problem.
Whatever is asked, now is the time to help and not protest that something’s beyond your responsibilities. Pitch in however you can, and your efforts will be appreciated and remembered. Assisting so issues are promptly resolved will also let you return to SEM work sooner.
The one SEM item that should be taken care of at this time is launching those PPC campaigns that were previously set up. This should require little more than re-checking bidding parameters and actually starting the campaigns.
When setting bids for these campaigns, bid high to make sure your ads will appear alongside search results. This is one of the few times in PPC marketing when return on investment isn’t the primary objective. Instead, keeping your site visible should be pursued as the main goal—even if that means over-spending on ads temporarily. If you need a lot of extra funds to sustain these campaigns, talk to your project lead about boosting your PPC budget this one time.
You can ask the PPC marketer to keep an eye on these campaigns during launch, but they shouldn’t require close monitoring. As long as you’ve set bids appropriately, the campaigns should be fine on their own for a little while. There’s no sense in micromanaging them since they’ll soon be ended, and not micromanaging lets the PPC marketer be free to help with other issues should they arise.
You might want to ask the social media manager to increase posting activity shortly after launch. Extra posts can help compensate for a temporary loss in search traffic, and social activity can help SEO.
Increasing social activity should be done cautiously and only after the initial launch, though. The tactic can backfire if there are any issues with the new site, as increasing traffic will only increase the number of aggravated users.
After the immediate activity of the launch is over, the post-launch phase becomes one of checks and steady SEM growth.
Soon after the new site is live, check to make sure all redirects are functioning properly and there aren't any dead pages that were missed. The easiest way to do this is by using your chosen crawling tool to create a sitemap of the new site.
Any 404 errors that are found should be redirected. If there’s no new content for them, the redirects should be made permanent. If there is content intended for them, use redirects until the content is uploaded so that the user experience isn’t impacted as much.
In the days, weeks and months following the site’s launch, carefully monitor all forms of search traffic. Watch organic traffic and paid traffic, as well as what search traffic is going to any secondary platforms like a Facebook page or external blog. If the new site has subdomains, watch for variations in the number of visitors each one sees.
Watching your site’s search traffic will help gauge how SEO and PPC campaigns are going, and it’ll alert you to any SEM emergencies that may arise. If there’s a sudden drop in traffic, it’s probably not due to a search engine update. In the period after a new site launch, drops are more likely to be caused by issues with the site or its SEM campaigns.
As you see SEO efforts grow organic traffic back to pre-launch levels, slowly decrease the temporary PPC campaigns that were set up. There’s no reason to run these short-term campaigns once the new site’s pages are ranking for the targeted terms.
How quickly you can reduce these campaigns depends on how well SEO goes and whether you’ve created a bidding war with your elevated budget. If competitors have increased their bids to match yours during this time, don’t cancel the campaigns all at once. Instead, lower your bids or reduce the number of ads you bid on slowly as the new site’s pages climb up the organic rankings.
If you do want to continue running campaigns for any of the terms, work with the PPC marketer to design campaigns that are better researched and have gone through more extensive testing. When transitioning from a temrporary to a sustained campaign, it makes sense to invest more resources in maximizing the ROI.
Going forward, continue to watch what organic traffic is being generated. Look not only at the amount of traffic, but also check what terms are bringing in visitors.
With a new site, there’s a good chance that you’ll see new search terms bringing in visitors. Some of these terms might be worth creating PPC campaigns for. An analysis of the costs-per-click for these terms will show whether you should also run paid ads for any of them.
Since these are long-term campaigns, you will want to carefully optimize the ads for maximum ROI.
As soon as you get word that your website will be redesigned, be proactive. Take action by gathering a team and developing a plan for keeping SEM in tact during the website redesign.
Get everyone to:
If you do all of this, your site’s search engine marketing should emerge from the redesign with strength. You won’t lose all of the hard work that you’ve already put into organic and paid campaigns. Nor will you lose the traffic those campaigns generate.
September is not only the start of the new school year at colleges and universities, but it’s also the start of the new fiscal year, which means marketers in higher education need to start rolling out new marketing strategies. But which strategies and tactics should they use? For universities looking to succeed in an increasingly competitive environment, more and more the answer to that question is search engine marketing (SEM). In fact, according to a recent survey, 97% of students will initiate contact with a university and it is absolutely critical not only to build and maintain a relevant digital presence, but also a “robust search functionality.” In general, an overwhelming number of students have reported using online search to discover colleges and universities.
So while it’s easy to grasp why for-profit businesses need to invest in search engine marketing (SEM) to get more reach and drive sales online, until recently it was unclear if SEM really is a necessary investment for higher education institutions. In this blog post, we not only suggest that search engine marketing should be a go-to tactic for every marketer in higher education, we also provide 10 tips for super-charging SEM campaigns for higher education.
SEM is actually a blanket term used to describetwo different marketing approaches, organic search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) search advertising. Both are very valuable ways to promote your school to search engine users.
PPC requires a direct financial investment — you bid on placement to get your ads at the top of search results. On the other hand, it’s technically free to optimize your website pages for SEO, but doing it effectively requires a lot of time and investment.
Simply put, search engines remain the most popular way people search for and find information on the internet. Researching potential educational institutions is no exception. Investing in SEM can help you get more visibility for your school, build prestige, attract new web traffic in the process, and help you on the path to increasing enrollment.
SEM is a multifaceted marketing strategy that can’t be learned overnight. But if you start out by following important best practices, you’ll be well on your way to deriving ROI from your investment.
SEO is a long-game strategy that can build you a strong, long-standing presence in search engine results. Do it the right way, and SEO can bring you a steady stream of new traffic long after you optimize your pages. Here are the best practices you should follow:
Your educational institution’s website already has an organic presence in search engines, whether you’re optimizing for it or not. So the first step is to take a look at your current performance.
You’ll want to invest in a tool like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, or SEMRush to get a deep look at your website performance for various SEO ranking factors.
These tools will also help you find issues with your website that you should fix, such as 404 errors and broken internal links.
Most importantly, you’ll get a look at what keywords your pages are already ranking for in search results. You can actually do this for free when you try out SEMRush. Just go to their home page and type in your domain name:
On the next page, under “Domain Analytics” from the sidebar, go to Organic Research>Positions:
SEMRush will prompt you to sign up (it’s free) to get 10 free queries. Do that, then you can see the report showing your rank position for various keywords.
SEO is a long-term strategy — it takes time for your new content to rank well for keywords. So it’s best to start by identifying what keywords you already rank for, then make efforts to optimize these pages even more.
It’s a common misconception that SEO is all about putting keywords in your content. There are also a few technical aspects you need to get out of the way that relate to your site’s user experience. At a minimum, you should:
Page speed is a very important rank factor for search engines. It can also have a big impact on your bounce rate, as site visitors have low tolerance for slow loading pages.
Google has a free page speed tool you can use to test your site speed. It also offers suggestions for improving your pages’ load speed that you can follow:
Google prioritizes pages in search results that are mobile-optimized. Providing a mobile-friendly site experience is also good for the many users who will visit your site from their mobile phones.
If you have a responsive site design, it should adapt automatically to the size of the device people are using. Just go through and ensure there aren’t any legacy pages on your site that haven’t been updated to the responsive design.
Google doesn’t like duplicate content, so much so that they will manually penalize sites that have too many similar pages.
That tends to be a big problem for higher education sites. It’s easy to end up with a lot of duplicate content if your various departments have their own blogs or news sections. Student blogs, professors’ blogs, and/or university publications can all end up under your domain, publishing the same press releases and announcements.
You can avoid the duplicate content penalty by (1) eliminating unnecessary pages, and (2) telling Google which pages to prioritize. Again, using a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs will help you identify your duplicate pages so you can delete the superfluous ones. Some duplicate content is necessary, however. In this case, you should use canonical tags to indicate to Google bots which pages to prioritize in search results.
Once your site is all cleaned up and optimized, you should create and submit a sitemap to Google Search Console. This provides a guide for Google bots, making it easier for them to crawl and index your site pages. It’s easy to do — just follow Google’s instructions for building and submitting a site map.
When developing your keyword strategy, targeting your competitors is a good idea. If you already use Ahrefs or SEMRush, they can help you discover what keywords other educational institutions are optimizing for. Use that as a starting point.
But most importantly, you should take your value proposition(s) into consideration when brainstorming keywords to target. Here are some examples of value propositions that users might search for:
There are also a variety of free and paid tools out there that can help you brainstorm new keyword ideas. Keywordtool.io and LongTail Pro are examples of tools that can help you find long-tail keywords to optimize for. Just type in a root keyword and they will return suggestions for other long-tail keywords:
Targeting long-tail keywords is worthwhile because they have less competition than base keywords, but can help you reach a very targeted audience.
Once you’ve developed a list of keywords to target, you’re ready to start creating and optimizing your site content. You’ll want to start with your major site pages first, like department or program pages.
But if you want to really make the most out of long-tail keywords for SEO, you need to develop more related content for departmental blogs and/or resources. You can use these pages to answer common questions people have about the subject/program. Use a tool like Answer the Public to get even more keyword and blog topic ideas. It will help you come up with questions related to a root keyword you ender:
Make sure with each site page you also follow on-page SEO best practices. Here are the main places your target keyword should appear on-page:
Try to distribute your keyword naturally throughout the content wherever it fits and makes sense to use it. Never sacrifice the quality of your written message to fit in more keywords. That’s called keyword stuffing, and is actually bad for your SEO.
Link building is just as important as keyword optimization for SEO success. Your first initiative should be internal linking. Build a healthy web of links connecting your various site pages to each other. The anchor texts for these links should be descriptive, helping Google bots understand what your content is about.
The next step is to start building external links from other high quality websites. Getting your institution and its educational programs listed in high quality directories is a great place to start. You should also seek out as many links as possible from other prestigious educational institutions with a .edu web address.
Building links from .com domains is good as well, as long as they have high domain authority. Quality online magazines and news sites are great options. If your school is a research institution, it should be easy to get new studies mentioned on high authority sites. Try to get those links pointing back to your faculty and/or department pages, instead of the journal publications themselves.
Google Ads PPC is a great complement to organic SEO as part of your SEM strategy. It not only helps you get instant visibility in search results while developing your organic SEO, you can also target conversion-related keywords to reach people at the most important points in their school decision process.
Here are a few best practices to remember when launching your Google Ads PPC campaign:
One of the first things they teach you about PPC keyword targeting is to bid on your branded terms (e.g. your institution name). That strategy makes sense for ecommerce businesses that are trying to attract traffic from potential shoppers. But it can actually be a huge waste of money for higher education institutions.
While some of the people that google your school name might be prospective students looking for information, the vast majority will be your current students, faculty and staff using Google as a quick way to navigate to your homepage. They click on your ads because they appear at the top, then you have to pay for the conversion.
In the same vein, you should avoid targeting your competitors’ branded keywords as well. That strategy makes sense for a business that offers competitive products or services, but not for a university. You’ll end up attracting a lot of traffic from your ads that didn’t mean to navigate to your website at all.
So what kind of keywords are valuable to target for PPC? You want your ads to appear for users who are interested in joining an educational program, like an undergraduate environmental science degree or executive MBA program. So you’ll want to target keywords that reflect the right points in their journey to conversion.
The more specific and relevant the keywords you target, the more likely you’ll be able to reach users who are almost ready to choose a school to attend. Think about the undergraduate environmental science degree example. You could target “environmental science,” but then your ads might appear for a 9th grader working on a science essay. Targeting more specific long-tail keywords like “environmental science degree” or “environmental science bachelors” will help ensure your ads appear for the right target audience.
To start brainstorming keyword ideas, Google Ads has a Keyword Planner tool that can help. All you have to do is type in a base keyword related to the program you want to advertise (e.g. “environmental science degree”).
Keyword Planner will come back with a list of related keywords, including important information like their average monthly searches, PPC competition, and bid range:
Deciding what keywords to target is a balance between relevance, search volume, and competition. You want to target the most relevant keywords possible. But if they don’t get a lot of search volume, you’ll be limiting your ad visibility. At the same time, relevant keywords with high search volume tend to be more competitive and expensive.
Use Keyword Planner to get an idea of what kind of keywords you could reasonably target with your budget.
Getting traffic to your website pages is one thing. But if you want your PPC ads to actually lead prospective students to apply for your programs, you need to consider the path they take after they click on your ad.
Say you’re targeting the keyword “accelerated nursing program.” Don’t allow that ad to link back to a generic landing page or the homepage of your nursing program. The whole point of paying for clicks is so your website content can convince prospective students to sign up.
So take the time to create a unique landing page that caters to the interests and needs of the person who clicked on the ad. A landing page for the “accelerated nursing program,” for example, could highlight details about the fast-track course option.
Offer a clear overview of all the program details, then include a prominent call-to-action asking visitors to inquire about the program. Do everything you can to encourage visitors to convert after clicking on your ad to ensure your PPC strategy works effectively towards your overall marketing goals.
You’d be surprised how even the most simple changes in your ad copy can have a huge impact on click through rate. Take a look at these top ads that appear for “masters public health”:
Phrases like “No application fee required” and “GRE not required” are examples of unique selling propositions that higher education institutions can use in their ad copy to stand out and drive clicks.
Chamberlain University’s ad also makes use of ad extensions to display their phone number, address, related links, and more. These are powerful ways to stand out as well.
Whatever information you do decide to include in your ads, just make sure you test it with your audience. Google Ads makes it easy to create ad variations where you change the headline or call-to-action, add or remove ad extensions, etc. Google Ads will automatically rotate these ad variations for you so you can identify the most relevant ad copy for driving clicks.
When running your first Google Ads PPC campaign is that it’s easy to set it up and forget about it. But letting your campaigns run themselves isn’t going to be worth your financial investment in the long run.
If you pay attention over time as your ads run, you’ll start to realize there are certain keywords, ad types/copy and bid strategies that do a better job of helping your get inquiries into your educational programs.
For example, say you have ad groups targeting your MBA program vs other masters degrees you offer. MBA-related keywords tend to be highly competitive and very expensive to bid for as a result. After distributing your ad spend equally, you might discover that bidding more on keywords related to your other masters programs does more to drive your marketing goals. You can then reduce your investment in expensive MBA-related keywords and reallocate that spend.
Optimizing your bid strategy is another important factor that can help you minimize your financial investment in PPC ads without affecting ad performance. Wasted ad spend is granular and often difficult to track as ad competition comes and goes. But there are technologies you can use to automate the process. Centro, for example, offers a machine learning technology via Basis that uses data science to predict keyword performance and optimize your bid strategy for you.
No matter if you’re targeting the “back to school” crowd or the next generation of students, SEM is simply the best way to reach them with your marketing message. Everyone today uses their mobile phones to research and discover educational programs like those you offer.
Use the best practices explained in this post as a starting point to launch successful search engine marketing campaigns. As you start to illustrate results from your efforts, garner more buy-in so you can invest in tools to optimize and automate the process even more.
Keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends in the ad tech world can be tough and time-consuming. We took it upon ourselves to declutter the space, and compiled a list of articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy the latest list for September 2018 below!
In-house Agencies on Rise as Advertisers Seek Services Closer to Home [3-minute read]
According to a new study from Forrester, benefits ranging from knowledge of the brand and business to speed and cost-effectiveness—the number of advertisers with in-house agencies has increased to 64% from 42% a decade ago. The majority of the respondents claimed that an uptick in internal agencies does not pose a threat to external agencies.
Google Tracks location data even when users turn service off [2-minute read]
The Associated Press found that Google’s smartphone services store user location even when privacy settings designate the feature off. Although Google halts tracking services when sharing location with apps, it doesn’t prevent collection with Google-specific products like Google Maps where it instantaneously grabs user location when the app is opened. This conflicts with Google’s official messages on how user location history is supposed to be entirely opt-in and changeable at any time; the fallout from the findings will continue to develop (and include a class-action complaint).
Mobile apps are Stalling on the Way to GDPR Compliance [5-minute read]
The GDPR deadline was this past May, but many mobile apps have struggled to become compliant. Read more detail on what that looks like, and how some are managing the data they’ve collected, as well as 3rd party data via SDK partnerships to meet GDPR compliance standards.
Under GDPR, Publishers Are Adopting CMPs For Fear Of Losing Out On Ad Revenue [3-minute read]
More publishers are feeling a need to adopt CMPs – consent management platforms to be compliant with GDPR. While many publishers have built their own CMP, some worry that implementing them could cause a drop in personalized advertising.
Are Targeted Ads Stalking You? [6-minute read]
NYTimes highlights the prevalence of stalkers ads while sharing some tips and tricks on how digital consumers can avoid them. The article highlights the well-established retargeting ad for digital media professionals and the generally observant web user alike. Advertisers need to be judicious in the use of retargeted ads by limiting the number of exposures to any user (frequency capping) and the number of days that a user should be exposed to minimize concerns of feeling stalked. Not doing so will not only upset users and knock down performance, but can also lead to increased adoption of ad blockers, which eMarketer estimates to be utilized by 1/4 of all US internet users.
Bundle Up!: Traditional TV Providers Offer OTT Packages to Head Off Subscriber Freeze [5-minute read]
Traditional TV providers have little choice but to quickly find desirable alternatives as the rise of cord cutters outpaces earlier projections –a 32.8% increase, with 33 million individuals no longer paying for traditional cable or satellite. This report highlights a number of critical stats on TV and OTT consumption trends including a sharp decline in paid TV viewership, which is expected to decrease by nearly 4% down to 186.7 million in 2018. In response to an accelerating population of cord cutters, traditional TV providers are seeking to retain their customers by partnering with OTT video services like Netflix, though it is too soon to tell if Pay TV-OTT partnerships will be effective in reducing the current pace of subscriber churn.
Audience for Connected TV Grows, but Ad Spending Has Lagged [2-minute read]
While TV households now are increasingly using Connected TVs, ad spend has not quite caught up—yet. In a new forecast package, eMarketer estimates 71.6% of households have a connected TV, but CTV only accounts for 12% of overall TV ad spend.
Here’s What’s Needed To Scale Behavioral Targeting In OTT [3-minute read]
Behavioral targeting is still in the early stages when it comes to OTT due to a few challenges. The solution to this problem includes further development of cross-device maps that tie the devices used to research products and services, such as desktops, tablets and mobile phones, to OTT and CTV devices.
Amazon To Merge Its Ad Businesses Into One Platform [3-minute read]
Amazon is streamlining its ad business so advertisers will be able to buy campaigns from the same place. This will include the consolidation of Amazon Media Group, Amazon Marketing Services, and Amazon Advertising Platform—big things for the big(gest) man on campus.
Augmented-Reality Ads Are Headed to Your Social Media Feed [4-minute read]
In an effort to take advantage of new consumer tech available on smartphones and brands’ desire to encourage more consumer engagement, Facebook is testing AR ads similar to what Snapchat has been offering for some time. Virtually trying on a new pair of Michael Kors sunglasses or testing various eyeshadow shades from Sephora are early examples that have shown increased brand interaction. Meanwhile, other companies like Ikea and Pottery Barn are looking to expand what they’ve offered via their app and website, by stepping directly into consumers’ feeds to allow for virtual experiences that don’t require shoppers to walk into their brick and mortar stores. Basically, they took out all of the leg work. (See what we did there?)
The old production adage has held true for many generations. Faster, better or cheaper: you can only choose two. However, Google's introduction of their new Ad Strength tool is helping marketers and advertisers around the world achieve all three by reducing poor-performing advertisements on Google. In an age when consumers are demanding a more personalized experience in less time than ever before, Google’s new Ad Strength tool provides you with the means to deliver quality advertising with less risk using Google's algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) assets. Here's a quick look at this new tool and how you can put it to use to improve your campaign performance.
With an estimated 91% of consumers purchasing something they saw on a mobile device in an advertisement they felt was relevant, producing an advertisement that really speaks to your target audience is important to succeeding in your digital advertising efforts. But with the number of differences between people, the expectation that an ad be relevant is a huge challenge. A large number of different ads must be produced, then tested for effectiveness. If done in a traditional fashion, this can be an extremely expensive proposition. Enter Ad Strength.
Ad Strength is a tool developed by Google Ads that leverages the power of AI to evaluate potential ads. The tool's AI evaluates each ad and determines which one will be the best fit for your target audience, providing you with real-time feedback on your ad design while allowing you to more quickly add the advertisement to your online portfolio of options. Experienced marketers who have studied the tool expect a boost in the number of clicks by up to 15%, a significant uptick in activity and profitability potential for most businesses.
One of the typical ways to handle testing different ad types is through A/B testing, which provides a viewer with one of two different ad types. You can then study the results of the testing to decide which ad is more effective, allowing you to focus your investment where it will do the most good. The problem is, that process can take time - time that your company may not have in today's fast-paced, competitive world.
Ad Strength automates that process by using machine learning and AI to study multiple forms of the advertisement, then recommend which one is the strongest. It will even deliver additional feedback on how to improve upon the best ad design that was provided. This can include adding more headlines to evaluate or making the headlines or descriptions more unique to better reach your specific demographic.
Ad Strength uses a number of different factors to determine a numerical value metric to rate a Ranked from 1-100, with 100 being the best, it looks at three primary factors at this time.
If you're looking at setting up a display ad, there are some other areas to consider as well due to the graphic nature of the advertisement.
The Google Ads update also includes a few other tools that may be helpful for marketers. It provides the option to preview the completed ad as you work on it, allowing you to make quick tweaks to the design as you go. Take the time to learn how to reach and use the reports that are generated by the entire process, allowing you to more carefully hone the next set of ads before you get into the process.
The tool also requires options to be able to process which combination works best. Though there is a minimum, the more that you can provide will help you to determine the best possible combination for your business' situation, your demographic and your position in the industry and market. For that reason, you'll want to stick to the minimums above to ensure that you get fabulous results.
The tool will be available to advertisers and marketers in column format in early September, but in the meantime, what does Google itself have to say about its new tool and how to get the most out of it? It recommends coming up with at least three, possibly five, and as many as ten different headline combinations so that it can choose the best possible one out of the lot for a responsive search ad. If you're looking at display ads, it requests 15 images, and five each of your logos, headlines, and descriptions for each ad you want to create. It will then use the onboard AI to study each aspect and determine the best possible combination of features to create the best overall ad.
When Apartments.com stuck to these recommendations in a test, it saw a 10% uptick in the number of clicks their ads received. ForRent.com used a similar array of techniques and saw a 16% upswing in the number of clicks it received. Both sites inserted their ads at particular points in the search process to maximize their results, and both saw excellent improvements in their returns due to the changes that they decided to make. This change makes sense given that a recent Adobe study found that 42% of viewers became annoyed when ads weren't personalized or relevant.
By using Google's AI resources to improve your campaign ads, you can increase performance and boost your company's bottom line, without having to invest in these sometimes expensive assets yourself.
Keyword research is the foundation of pay-per-click advertising. It’s impossible to run a PPC campaign if you have no terms to target. Thus, growing a keyword list is the first step to launching new campaigns or expanding existing ones. If you’re looking for new keywords to target, the following ideas will help you find a variety of potential terms.
The initial place to look for keywords isn’t in some keyword-generating tool but rather right on your own site. Any terms you discover while reviewing your site’s current traffic will be the most promising of all terms, for they’re already generating a little traffic and you can mine the data for more detailed information. There are several ways to glean keywords from your site’s current traffic.
Using Current PPC Campaigns and a Thesaurus
To get new keyword ideas from your current PPC campaigns, simply look over the campaigns with a thesaurus in hand. What terms are used in the ads, and what are you bidding on? Write down the successful terms you come across and then, open the thesaurus. You might come across some related terms you haven’t previously thought of.
Using a thesaurus may seem like an antiquated way to do keyword research in today’s era of online tools, but it’s the uniqueness of this tactic that makes it useful. With a thesaurus in front of you rather than a keyword tool, you’re forced to focus on the terms rather than the metrics. You’re freer to brainstorm, and you can always later check the viability of terms that you find.
Checking Google Analytics for Occasional Ideas
Ever since Google made SSL Search its default mode back in 2011, Google Analytics has not been the goldmine of keywords that it once was. Nevertheless, it’s still possible to find a few keywords through analytics.
To garner what ideas Google Analytics can provide, check the Organic Search section of Channels. You’ll see how many visitors are finding your site organically, and below the chart, there’s a list of the keywords that visitors are searching for when they click on your site’s listing in the search engine results. The vast majority (likely more than 95 percent) of terms will be “(not provided).” You may see a few terms that are visible, though.
Any terms you see are potentially viable keywords, for at least one person found your site through organic search by using the terms. If they work for search engine optimization, there’s a decent chance they’ll also work for PPC marketing.
Looking Up Search Terms in Google Webmaster Tools
Google’s Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) is a much richer source of potential keywords. The data is aggregated from multiple users, so privacy is less of a concern and Google displays lots of terms on the platform’s reports.
In the Search Analytics section, you can view what terms are generating impressions for your site. There are also reports for positions, clicks, and click-through rates, and you can filter by search type, device, and/or country.
This information is widely used by SEO specialists. The Queries reports that show the aforementioned details, however, are also useful in PPC planning. Any terms that are generating high impressions or clicks might be worth building PPC campaigns around.
Asking Your Customer Service Representatives
If you run a site that receives lots of customer inquiries, the people who respond to these inquiries may be valuable sources of keyword ideas. They’ll know what customers are asking about and what terms they’re using in their questions. If you ask, customer service representatives will be happy to share this information.
Most of the questions that customer service reps field won’t be directly related to sales, so you’ll hear lots of responses that aren’t appropriate for PPC. Any questions or terms that are related to your marketing funnel might be good for PPC ads, though.
Should you come across a pre-purchase inquiry that people are asking a lot, you might even be able to use some of the customer service department’s budget to create a resource and campaign around the question. If people are able to easily find the answer on your website through a PPC ad and associated landing page, the company may save labor by reducing the number of questions that customers ask.
After going through your own website, the next place to turn is your competitors’ sites. There are a few quick ways to see what keywords they’re targeting. Any term that a competitor is targeting is probably one you should be targeting too.
Seeing Competitors’ PPC Ads
Anytime you come across a competitor's PPC ad, that’s an obvious time to check for keywords that they’re running a campaign around. How you find the targeted term depends on why the ad is appearing:
You don’t want to go searching for these ads, as there’s no efficient way to discover all competitor PPC campaigns by just using the internet. Whenever an ad appears, though, take note.
Finding Out Competitors’ Tags
Some basic sleuthing on competitors’ websites will reveal what keywords each individual page is designed for.
You can open the HTML source code of any page on a competitor’s website, generally by right-clicking and selecting “page source.” Among the HTML elements revealed, you’ll find the headers (including H1, H2, and others), page title, meta description, keywords tag, image title tags, and image alt tags.
Not every site uses all of this schema, but any terms you discover might be worth running a PPC campaign. Terms can be especially promising if the competitor isn’t currently running a paid campaign for them.
Researching Competitors’ Keyword Ideas
After you’ve completed some initial research on your competitors, take their URLs over to Keyword Planner. Input the URLs into the “Find New Keywords” function, and you’ll soon have a list of possible terms, including the traffic they generate and how competitive they are.
You’ll likely already have campaigns running for many of the terms shown, and manually filtering through duplicates is time-consuming. To efficiently discover new ideas, download the report generated as a spreadsheet. Then, copy-paste the terms you’re currently targeting into the spreadsheet and remove duplicates. You’ll soon have a list of potential keyword ideas that you aren’t currently targeting.
Utilizing Third-Party Tools
There are also a number of third-party tools you can use to discover what keywords your competitors are targeting. Some are paid and others are free. One popular tool is SEMrush, which shows paid and organic details along with other information.
Once you’ve reviewed what’s working for your own site and those of your competitors, it’s finally time to begin using other tools and platforms that can give you brand-new ideas.
Perusing Keyword Planner
Already mentioned, Keyword Planner is a powerful tool that can do much more than merely show you ideas based on competitors’ websites. You’ve likely already used the tool if you’re currently running PPC campaigns through Google. If it’s been a while since you looked for ideas in Keyword Planner and you've been using another advertising platform thus far, spending some time perusing the tool might be helpful. Put a few ideas in and see what terms are generated.
Getting Terms from UberSuggest
UberSuggest is a go-to tool for long-tail keywords. Enter a keyword or phrase, and the tool will soon suggest a plethora of related multi-word terms. Each term comes with volume and seasonal trend information, along with a Keyword Difficulty that’s helpful with SEO and a Competitive Intelligence that’ll help you determine how expensive PPC campaigns will be. The Competitive Intelligence section even shows you the ad copy competitors are using for selected terms.
Shopping on Amazon
To glean potential keywords from a different perspective, head over to Amazon. Amazon has grown from the company’s initial days as an online retailer into the largest search engine for product-related searches.
Amazon doesn’t have the same keyword-finding tools as Google does, although the company's tools are growing as Amazon Ads develops. The real usefulness of Amazon, however, lies in its abundance of creative phrases and ideas for terms.
To find creative keywords, search for products related to your website’s focus. See what terms people are using both in their listings and discussions of products. What are the book (and Kindle) titles and subtitles? What’s being used in the product descriptions and reviews? Any of these terms might help you incorporate more creative phrases into your current PPC keyword profile.
A similar tactic can be used on eBay, although Amazon is now the larger of the two companies.
Searching with Soovle
Soovle is unique among keyword research tools because it's not limited to any one platform. Instead, Soovle aggregates data from Google, Yahoo, Answers.com, Bing, Amazon, eBay, Overstock.com, Buy.com, YouTube, and Wikipedia. Don't expect the same level of detail as you get from Keyword Planner or UberSuggest, or by personally reviewing a site like Amazon. If you want a selection of results from a number of sources, however, this is an excellent tool.
Because Soovle combines several sources and provides basic information, you might want to use it early on in your research. Conducting a cursory search via Soovle might yield a few terms that you can look further into via the other tools. Also, don't be afraid to take words found on one platform (e.g. Wikipedia) and see if a PPC campaign on a search engine will work.
Reading on Quora and Yahoo Answers
Content strategists sometimes go to question-and-answer sites like Quora and Yahoo Answers when they need ideas for pieces. These sites are occasionally also useful for conducting keyword research.
Don’t expect to find specific terms on Q&A sites, as they aren’t easy to search for keyword ideas and normally don’t have optimized text. Instead, look around to see if there are any completely new ideas you can create PPC campaigns around. A long line of comments around a product or service your website offers might be the spark for an entirely new PPC campaign that has several ads. Once you get a few ideas, you can return to the other tools to refine the exact terms that should be targeted.
Monitoring Hashtags on Social Media
Hashtags are largely confined to social media, but there are some instances where hashtags that first grow on social platforms may be useful to SEM managers planning PPC campaigns. Any hashtag that becomes popular on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or another platform might be incorporated as a new keyword in a PPC ad.
To see how you might capitalize on a trendy hashtag, assume #exampletoo was trending on social media. You could:
This tactic can’t be your only keyword research strategy, since you never know when a hashtag related to your website will start trending. Should this good fortune strike, though, being able to quickly execute a PPC campaign could provide a good return on investment. Hashtags aren’t regularly targeted, so PPC costs for these terms are often lower -- especially when the hashtag is kept as a single phrase without spaces. The site that can put out a quick ad might see a nice and low-cost boost in traffic.
Finally, just staying up-to-date with developments in your site’s industry is a great and natural way to discover new terms without actually doing keyword research. There’s no better way to learn technical jargon than by reading industry publications and talking with professionals in the field, after all.
Staying Current on Industry News
Keep up with industry news so that you know what’s going on and learn new terms as soon as people start using them. Any news that’s at least indirectly related to your industry may provide low-cost PPC terms that generate traffic. If a topic is fresh, people will be searching for it and many search engine marketers won’t yet have discovered it.
If you do include news-related terms in your PPC campaigns, carefully monitor them on an ongoing basis. News has a lifecycle, and the return on these terms will change as the news progresses. Once more marketers start running campaigns, costs-per-click will go up. Once the news is passed over, campaigns will generate less traffic.
Reading Trade Publications
Reading trade publications will show you how people are using your industry’s technical jargon, and you’ll see new terms as soon as it’s coined. Any new term or slang that you read is definitely worth investigating further as a potential keyword, and just the act of reading will help you use terms more naturally in ad copy.
Items published in trade journals sometimes have a lifecycle, but their lifecycles tend to be longer than what the general news reports. You'll, thus, want to monitor any campaigns centered on terms that come from journals or other trade publications. You don't necessarily need to watch them as closely, though.
Just remember that there are lots of resources available to help you with keyword research. When you need new terms, look to:
Use a variety of these resources, and you’ll have a rich and varied collection of new keywords that can form the foundation of growing PPC campaigns.
~
To learn more about how you can build better, higher-performing keyword lists, connect with our digital media experts today.
A search engine marketer doesn't have to be the best marketer on the internet in order to be successful. You simply need your SEM strategies to be more effective than your competitors.
I know what you’re thinking right about now. Something like, “Well, if I could read minds and know exactly what moves my competitors are making next, it would be simple to be more effective than my competitors. Duh!”
What if I told you that there is a relatively easy way to get into the minds of your SEM competitors? What if I told you that learning exactly what your competitors are up to and what tricks they have up their sleeves in search engine marketing can be accomplished painlessly by executing a few bullet-proof tactics? What if, in other words, someone handed you the SEM playbook for crushing your competition?
Do I have your attention now?
Yeah, you read that correctly. This post is jam-packed with practical tips and tactics to discover the SEM strategies your competitors are using. You can duplicate their SEM strategies and employ other, more effective ones to outperform your competition.
Read on to get the most comprehensive SEM playbook for crushing your competitors.
The initial step in any meaningful competitor analysis is choosing the best sites to analyze. No amount of research yields helpful insights if you’re looking at sites that are irrelevant or have ineffective SEM strategies.
You likely already know what competitors you’d like to analyze;it takes just a few minutes to confirm your suspicions with data that shows which competitors are most worthy of study. Checking ensures you use resources efficiently; the data helps address any questions that others raise about why you chose the sites you did.
First, perform a quick search to see what sites are showing up in search engine results. Pay attention to sites that rank in the top positions and just above your site. Also, pay attention to any site that’s using pay-per-click campaigns for your chosen terms. Any of these might warrant investigating.
Second, use a service like RankWatch to discover additional competitors and see how competitors are trending. After logging into RankWatch, click on the “Competitors” section and select the ones you’d like to compare. You’ll see a few details on how each competitor appears in search engine results. More importantly, the display will show how each of the chosen competitor’s rankings is trending. Focus on those competitors that are trending upward as opposed to those that are falling.
At this point, you should have a shortlist of the best competitors to analyze. Try to keep this list to a handful or less so that you can perform a deep analysis on each. You may even want to look at just the one best competitor.
Before looking at search results themselves any further, first spend some time on each competitor’s site. Explore them as a typical visitor would, paying attention to both on-site optimization strategies, user experience, and conversion strategies. Only the on-site strategies are directly related to SEM, but the ultimate goal of SEM is conversion so the other two areas should be kept in mind at least.
Regarding on-site strategies, simply look at the items that you keep in mind when setting up new pages.
For example:
For example, a cursory review of seminariesandbiblecolleges.com shows that the site uses the key phrase "seminaries in [state]" for its state-oriented pages. Likely thanks in part to this tactic, the site ranks well above the Association for Theological Schools' geographical search. The Association for Theological Schools is the official accrediting body of seminaries. However, its geographic search page has a URL of "...geographical-search" rather than one with a key phrase. (Rankings were accurate at the time of writing.)
Most of these items are fairly basic. However, sometimes reviewing a competitor’s website reveals strategies that your site currently doesn’t use. Even if you don’t discover new SEM strategies, you may come across more user-friendly ways to include certain ones (e.g. more natural ways to include key phrases in copy).
After perusing their sites, you probably have a good idea of what primary key phrases competitors are targeting. The phrases should appear in headers, copy, and other places. You might not know all of the key phrases that are generating traffic for each competitor, though.
In order to get a more comprehensive view of the key phrases that competitors are targeting, turn to a tool like SEMrush. After logging in, entering a competitor’s URL, and selecting a country, you’ll have access to an array of information:
The backlink profiles and display advertising information is interesting. But the most helpful data are the lists of organic and paid keywords that a competitor is targeting.
SEMrush is a third-party service that has access to lots of data, but even its data is limited at points. Thus, the display advertising details and backlink profiles are only nominally helpful without supplemental sources. These reports can be pulled and filed for use at a later stage.
What’s needed now is the list of key phrases. Combine the lists that SEMrush provides with key phrases you’ve already discovered, and prioritize them.
Use the prioritized list of key phrases to see what methods your competitors are using to show up in search results.
Enter a few of the highest priority phrases into the major search engines, and note what types of listings show up for each competitor. Is the main organic listing being supplemented with other organic listings from social media, external blogs or review sites? Are display ads being used in addition to the organic listing?
All of these additional listings help build a site’s authority and reduce how much space is available for other sites to be listed. Even if they don’t improve organic rankings, they increase the likelihood of searchers clicking through to the competitor’s site.
You don’t need to do this for a full list of key phrases, as the same strategies are likely being used for all major phrases. You should, however, check several search engines. Competitors may be using slightly different strategies or getting different results in Google, Bing, and the other search engines.
Naturally, this is a point where you can take action as a search engine marketer. Any SEM strategy that you see a competitor using is one that you can employ for your site. If a competitor's Facebook page is ranking, invest time in cultivating your site’s corresponding social media pages. If a competitor is using PPC ads to appear multiple times in the same results, you can start PPC campaigns for the same key phrases.
Regardless of whether you see a competitor’s social media profiles in search results, you ought to quickly see how each competitor is using social media. Check what platforms competitors are on, whether they have multiple accounts on a single platform and how they use the accounts.
A case study of Home Depot and Lowes on Facebook shows how similar small alterations in activity can have significant impacts on social metrics.
Lowes posts to their Facebook page almost daily, usually between 6:00 and 7:00 a.m. EST. Home Depot tends to post every two or three days, and the company varies the time its posts between morning and afternoon. Both companies respond directly to comments on their pages.
The two companies have similar followings on Facebook: Home Depot has 4.6 million likes and Lowe's has 4.5 million. The difference between the two companies' engagement rates is stark, though. Home Depot saw 4.1 million visits at the time of writing, and Lowe's had only 2.7 million visits.
Exactly what is the reason for the vast difference in the number of visits and how that difference impacts SEM is difficult to say. The posting patterns would certainly be an area to explore if these were your competitors, however, and the payoff could extend far beyond social media marketing. Search engines consider social activity and a 1.4 million difference in visitors is bound to have some impact on search engines' rankings.
Your social media efforts should at least match, and ideally exceed, those of your competitors. Social platforms themselves can be valuable sources of traffic, and social activity has been positively correlated with higher rankings in SERPs.
For a detailed picture of competitor’s off-site search engine optimization efforts, perform a thorough backlink profile analysis using Ahrefs, Moz’s Link Explorer, and the SEMrush's backlink report.
None of these third-party reports are complete on their own. Together, however, they create a fairly comprehensive picture of a competitor’s linking domains and pages. You can see linking domains, linking pages, how many backlinks a site is gaining and losing, whether a linking site is spammy, and much more. Creating a master spreadsheet with referring domains makes it easy to remove duplicates and sort domains by chosen criterion.
In theory, your competitors' backlink metrics are the ones you need to beat. If you have more links from higher quality sites and everything else is equal, then your site should outrank competitors’ sites.
Of course, this isn’t always the case because there are many other factors that search engines consider. Backlink profiles are one of the major factors considered, though, and your site will be in a good position to rank well if it has a better profile than the competition.
During your research, make note of any referring domains that might be willing to link to your website. Any webmaster who’s already linked to your competitors is likely willing to give you a backlink if you offer the same benefit. Figure out how your competitors got the backlink, and make a similar proposition to the webmaster. Along with helping SEO, some of these domains might also provide referral traffic.
The final step to fully understanding your competitor’s SEM strategies is analyzing their PPC campaigns. To do this, you’ll need the cursory information offered by SEMrush and more specific details from Google Ads and Microsoft Ads.
Step 7a: Google Ads
First, run any new key phrases that you’ve discovered through Google Keyword Planner. While this provides only a broad overview, the traffic volume estimate, average cost-per-click, and overall competition level are helpful when deciding whether to pursue new key phrases.
Eliminate any key phrases that don’t appear to be profitable, for your competitors don’t necessarily always pick the best phrases to target. Continue researching any phrases that do appear profitable.
Second, take your shortened list of keywords over to Google’s Auction Insights report. Auction insights will show you:
This information has obvious benefits when you’re trying to discover which key phrases offer the best ROI and set budgets. You’ll learn how much you should be bidding to have an ad visible, and from there can calculate the required investment and resulting return.
To refine campaigns even further, Auction Insights also offers options to drill down by device type and/or time. This type of segmentation lets you adjust your PPC campaigns for the maximum ROI by targeting devices and times based on cost-per-click or overall activity.
Step 7b: Microsoft Ads
Finally, take everything you’ve learned thus far and put the same key phrases into Microsoft Ads’ Campaign Planner. Similar to Google Ads’ reports, Campaign Planner will give you:
Sometimes this information is almost identical to that found through Google Ads. Other times, there are great discrepancies between the two platforms’ information. When there are differences, they usually arise not from inaccurate data but from competitors’ PPC strategies.
Competitors frequently favor one platform (usually Google Ads) over the other. This is because there’s more activity on that platform or because they aren’t as familiar with the other. Any such imbalance, such as higher and lower costs-per-click, can be exploited to get a higher ROI on PPC.
For instance, assume you run a website that specializes in mobile phone repair services. You would expect to target most PPC campaigns toward mobile device users who might need a screen repaired or another issue fixed. This research might show, however, that competitors aren't targeting desktop users. While the conversion rate for desktop users is probably lower, the cost-per-click might be so affordable that it makes sense to run a small desktop-focused campaign.
Alternatively, think about running an e-commerce business that sells expensive jewelry. Your data might show that people who own Apple computers are more likely to purchase items from your store than those who have PCs. Based on this data, you may choose to show ads to Apple users and not PC owners if the cost-per-click is identical when segmenting by device. Back in 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that Orbitz was using just such a strategy. The site showed Apple users more expensive getaways by default.
For an example that involves time, consider a synagogue that holds services on Saturdays and uses PPC advertising to reach potential attendees. Most people looking for a synagogue to worship in are likely going to search on Friday or Saturday; you want to make sure your ads have good coverage during this time. By researching what competitors are paying and how much coverage they're receiving, you can determine what your synagogue must bid to have ads show on these days. You can then set you maximum bid to the appropriate amount for Friday and Saturday, and bid much lower (or not at all) on the other days of the week when people aren't looking for a place to worship.
Once you’ve completed a full analysis of your competitors' SEM strategies, incorporate your insights into an actionable plan. Meet with your team to draw up a budget and define next steps to outperform the competition. Then, execute the plan and monitor your site’s performance.
Conducting a comprehensive analysis of competitors' SEM strategies is resource-intensive; it takes time to identify competitors, and check their sites, social activity, search rankings, backlink profiles and PPC campaigns. However, at the end of the process, you know exactly what SEM strategies you must use to succeed in search engine marketing. If you invest the time and other resources, the ROI can last for a long time.
So what are you waiting for? It's time for you to go out and crush your competitors.
