Search engine optimization is not for every website. Although search engine optimization can really improve the organic search results for some websites, there are a couple of considerations when search engine optimization should not be considered and maybe a full site redesign may be a better investment of money and time.
When not to do search engine optimization:
If your site is created in a template and the site layout becomes broken when new content is added.
Your site looks funny in browsers other than Chrome and Firefox.
You have a site designed using Flash or tables for your layout.
Your website looks dated or non-professional.
As search engine optimization is not inexpensive, in some cases the money that would have been spent on search engine optimization would be better spent on a new search engine friendly design with built-in optimization features.
Here are a few web video tips you may find helpful as you consider if you are ready to expand your video postings on your website.
Google loves it when a site uses YouTube for videos, but customers hate putting web videos on YouTube due to the ad overlays.
I recently ran into an issue where we were putting a video on the home page of a website in a key position that is the very first thing any visitor will see. Once loaded to YouTube and embedded in the website my first reaction was URGH look at those ads mid-stream and at the end of the video that stay up obscuring my clients work.
There are two things that you can do to prevent ads on your videos. 1.) Turn off monetization in your YouTube account so ads do not appear on your videos. 2.) Use a free service like the Basic Vimeo account.
You can watch these videos for nice instructions on how to turn off ads in YouTube. It is a 2 step process. First turn off ads and then go into the info/settings of each video travel to the monetize section and turn off for each video. This video shows you how to turn off the pre-video ad in your channel settings. This is a nice video that explains the second process. What is important to know is that you are in control of the monetization of your own videos. But by default, it looks like if you don’t manually turn monetization off, Google will slap ads all over the start, middle and end of your video.
Alternatively you can use Vimeo. I like the interface and like that you can customize the player. The downside is that Google loves it’s owner properties. I see YouTube videos in the search results all the time, but would be hard pressed to say that I regularly see Vimeo videos in the search results.
The choice is yours which service you’ll use, but for now, I am actually using both.
If your business is pulling back where can you realistically chop in your marketing plan and not get hurt?
Chop Away
Social Media – if you are paying to update Facebook, Twitter and Google+ you could easily take a break to save money.
Blogging – try not to kill all your writing as the SEO juice you get from well-written blog posts helps you in the long run, but maybe consider moving from three days a week to two or from two days a week to one. Try to still keep the momentum up but maybe lower the word count or frequency.
Chop Not!
Google AdWords – don’t touch it unless you absolutely have to. AdWords is hands down the best way to generate new leads and start cash pumping back into your business.
e-newsletters – they build loyalty and repeat business. Newsletters are especially important to businesses that have annual renewals for service plans like pest control firms and HVAC firms. If you chop this, your name is not kept in front of your customers and come time to renew, they may not see the value of renewing; which will hurt your sales even further.
Need some practical sense to make the most of the budget you do have or to get AdWords to work harder for you? We’re the firm to call and chat with first especially if you are looking for honest advice you can trust with no sales pressure.
As a professional Google Ads account manager, I see all kinds of accounts – healthy ones, sick ones, and those that simply need to be started all over. One thing that I have seen consistently is an issue with conversions and what clients decide to track has a big impact on performance. Especially when automated bidding driven by AI is turned on.
In the image above, you can see that this client has no conversion tracking working. This new client is using conversion maximizing automated bidding, but is not tracking any conversions as the codes are all broken.
Here’s what I like to track when it comes to conversions:
Sales
Email form completions
Phone calls from the website after 40 seconds
Click to call from ads – sometimes
Whitepaper downloads
Newsletter subscriptions
Free Demos or Trials
Here’s what I do not like to see as tracked:
Visits to a page
Time on a page
Number of website pages in a visit
Set up for a disaster are:
No conversion tracking at all
Broken codes for conversion tracking
Clicks on a button – in most cases
McCord Web Services is a Google Partner and a Certified Google Ads Professional
I have also found that changing from 1-conversion to many-conversion can be good, but moving from many-conversion to 1-conversion can be very problematic, for reporting history as well as communicating a strong success story in Google Ads.
From my point of view not tracking the “right” conversions in an account makes it very hard to utilize the Google Ads bidding algorithms to maximize performance and to drop the cost per conversion effectively.
If you do use any automated bidding tools with a conversion boosting focus and your conversion tracking codes are broken or not working, you set yourself up for incredibly high bids as Google has no historical data to base bidding upon.
If you are looking to optimize your Google Ads account join our clients and get quality review by our experienced team. We take a no-nonsense approach to getting you more business.
