Learning about Google’s Best Practices for SEM and SEO
What we learned from the latest Google Partners webcast
Last week the Marketing team here at Infront sat down to watch Google’s webcast which was offered live to all its partners. This webcast featured topics such as how to interpret big data, what content to use in social media, and best SEO practices. The topics covered internally at the office before watching the webcast included “Wow, Google is giving us a $150 Starbucks gift card, high-quality pens and hard-cover notepads, and a giant banner to promote that we’re Google Partners?” It’s quite impressive that Google did this for all their partners.
Anyway, the event was hosted by a few different speakers including Fred Vallaeys, who’s one of the original 500 employees at Google, and one of the builders of AdWords. These speakers answered questions that Google partners around the world had submitted earlier. Here, I highlight some of the answers they gave during that webcast.
Question: What should my advertising budget be?
While none of the speakers were willing to give a formula for achieving an overall advertising budget for any particular business Fred gave the formula to calculate your daily AdWords budget: Take your highest CPC (cost per click) that you have for any keyword in your AdWords campaign, and multiply it by 10. That is what your daily budget should be in that Google AdWords campaign. So naturally, you multiply that daily budget by 30 to get your recommended average monthly budget.
Question: What should I say on my social media websites?
The advice given by the Google gurus was to find your voice, don’t be obsessed with ‘likes’, and focus on engaging with people. However, they touched on the importance of responding to negative reviews on your social sites. How you respond to a negative review is often more important than the fact that you got a negative review. So rather than ignoring a negative comment or review, respond with a comment that offers to fix the problems if they come back to your business. That shows you care and goes further than not responding at all.
Question: What are the most important factors that Google uses in its algorithm?
As we all know, most of Google’s algorithm is secret, however, here are a few tips and tricks you may not have thought of before that was given by the speakers: do not duplicate your Google reviews on your website (meaning don’t copy a positive review about your business from your Google+ page, and paste it on your website) because that is going to cause your website to take a hit for duplicate content. Also, make sure you update your website regularly. Having copyright content from 2008 is not what they want to show in 2014. Lastly, if you have an online store be sure to take advantage of Google Merchant Center because Google Shopping is really growing fast.
One of the things I found most valuable during this webcast is a tip on how best to use Remarketing (display ads). Rather than just displaying an ad that offers the user to visit your (or your client’s) website again, offer a coupon that the user could have possibly missed their first time around. This way, you’ll not only be staying in the user’s mind but also be giving him/her an incentive to place an order on the website. Make sure you update your website regularly. Having copyright content from 2008 is not what they want to show in 2014 because obviously technology and information get updated almost on a daily basis. Lastly, if you have an online store be sure to take advantage of Google Merchant Center because Google Shopping is becoming one of the fastest-growing features of Google search.
There were also suggestions for real estate marketers, such as buying a domain for the house address. Many people in the market for a house will simply type in the address of the home they’re interested in on a search engine. The idea here is, why not buy a domain for that house’s address? That way you can give it its own website with videos, pictures, and information on buying the house and the loan process.
If you missed the webcast this was an abbreviated version of some of the best parts, sans the Starbucks coffee and bagels. Contact us to find out how our Marketing team can implement these and other Google best practices for your business to put it in front of your competitors.
Allan Todd is CEO of Pagecafe Digital Marketing. In 2022, Allan teamed up with Infront Webworks to provide digital marketing, website design, content marketing, SEO and strategy and solutions to local businesses. Allan lives in Colorado Springs.