Every year my marketing team has an offsite planning meeting where we lay out major goals and initiatives for the coming year. Last winter, site speed made it to the top of that list. The main push for making site speed a priority came from our SEO team. They felt strongly that improving our website’s page load times would improve our organic rankings.

Besides the potential SEO benefit, it just makes sense to give your visitors the best possible experience.We are halfway through the year, and we’ve made some measurable improvements in site speed. Our IT department has revamped code, optimized images, etc. to give our webpages a diet, and we’ve seen real improvements in site speed. During this process, something interesting happened that we hadn’t really planned for or expected (alt... > Read more

Everyone wants more leads, right? This is probably your number 1 request from clients or upper management if you’re running pay-per-click campaigns (followed closely by “without increasing spend”). But the reality is you’re likely managing to a target cost per acquisition, so grabbing more volume isn’t as easy as jacking up bids and lifting your budgets.

The obvious answer to increasing conversions is focusing on conversion rate optimization, but we’ll walk through five slightly less obvious ideas worth testing that can help you grab more volume without ignoring your margins. Idea 1: Keyword Expansion The first idea is to try different keyword verticals and expand your keyword list. How do you do that? In all likelihood you’ve already brainstormed ... > Read more

Your landing pages – the pages that searchers land on after clicking on your ads – should usually be substantially different in content and style from a regular web page. This is because they are built around different goals. Web pages may  be built to rank organically, to inform, to entertain, and sometimes to sell.

Landing pages are almost always intended to sell. Here are three points to keep in mind when creating landing pages as opposed to other types of pages. 1. Landing pages should be closely aligned with your keyword and ad. It's especially important when creating a PPC landing page to form a clear line between the keyword, the text ad, and the page. Using the keyword prominently in both the ad and the landing page demonstrates clear relevance to both the user and to Goog... > Read more

This is a guest post by Jenny Anderson, a search marketing consultant at Hanapin Marketing. She works with a variety of clients and writes for Hanapin’s blogs, PPC Hero and SEO Boy. Over at SEO Boy, I recently wrote a post on how a promotional calendar can help boost SEO efforts. The main point was that if you set up a promotional calendar and pair it with site changes and new content based on the promotions, you’ll have a plan in place for adding relevant and useful information to your site.

Search engines will love the fresh content and your customers will love the sales and promos. The same concept can be applied to PPC management with just a couple of twists. Let’s say we’re managing pay-per-click ads for a resort. Below, I outline how the three main compon... > Read more