Welcome back Rankers. Want to get right into this week. Question is coming in from myko54 who says ‘Does Google have plans to transcribe audio component of video to make it searchable?’ God, I hope not. The reason I say that is because obviously that would make a lot of sense, right? It’s sort of the next logical step for Google to go but they’re already doing closed captions on video and they’re trying to transcribe these things on the fly. If you just have a look at mine they’re absolutely terrible, they turn out as gobbledeegook, I don’t know whether that’s because I’m not articulating properly or it’s the Australian accent or it’s a bit of both. Makes sense for them to do it but they are going to have to become Apple like in their ability to understand different dialects and accents and all those sorts of things.
I want to talk a little bit to you today about Adwords. Many of you know that we do Adwords campaigns for clients but we only do them when they’re doing SEO so the idea is that we use the Adwords and the SEO together to have a more rounded campaign for a client. There’s a few things that you need to understand with Adwords, I’m not going to get into the mechanics of it today but just how it works in conjunction with an SEO campaign. It’s great because you can use Adwords to target specific phrases right now and switch it on and see what happens or just this weekend or a specific timeframe or a specific geographical region. So it allows you to target a lot better. One of the things that you are going to find when you get into keyword analysis is that Google tools will all tell you something different about what’s popular and what’s not.
I want to take you back a couple of weeks to our Gasp Clothing Gasp Melbourne experiment or blog posts and the shows we did back then and the sort of traffic we were getting from those phrases. Some of you may remember it was a major social media faux pas by an Australian fashion retailer. Everyone said, ‘Oh it’s terrible that’s the end of that company, they’ve committed social media suicide’. Anyway, it hasn’t hurt them and the hoohah from that social media episode has gone away but they got lots of great publicity out of the whole experience. We have a couple of posts on our site so we rank for some of those gasp keywords. We were looking at the stats a couple of weeks ago and looked at Google Insights which was telling us at the time that Gasp Clothing was more popular that Gasp fail or Gasp Melbourne. Now, you can see here that there is a spike around that time that I’m talking about specifically for Gasp Clothing. Gasp Fail in relationship to Gasp Clothing doesn’t even rate on the board anywhere, it’s insignificant in comparison. Gasp Melbourne shows as 38% of what the Gasp Clothing searches are. This is a world wide search for the last 90 days, if we go the last 30 it’s pretty similar except we don’t have any Gasp Melbourne data. Then if we have a look at Webmaster Tools and this is the search queries, your site on the web search queries that I’m looking at and because we were ranking for these phrases I can get data on them within Google Webmaster Tools and that will tell me the search impressions. What we’re seeing here is Gasp Clothing is 1000 impressions and Gasp Melbourne is 700 and this is only the last 30 days so it’s saying something completely different from Google Insights for Search. That’s why I would recommend that if you are going to do Adwords make sure you’re using Webmaster Tools and make sure you’ve got it set up properly. If you are already ranking for some phrases, you don’t have be ranking high, you don’t have to be ranking on the front page to get this sort of data. You can be ranking say 53 it says here for Gasp and it’s telling us there’s been 500 impressions. What you can do with Adwords is quickly test those numbers to see whether they’re accurate or not. Interestingly, we’re seeing here Gasp Melbourne 700 and Gasp Clothing 1000 in the last 30 days. If we go to the Google Keywords Adwords Tool and we put those same three phrases in there we see we get very very different numbers.
We’re getting told nearly 10,000 people a month search for Gasp Clothing, you gotta get into that, which of course is not true. Remember that the Adwords team, the Webmaster Tools team, they’re different teams within Google. Of course, they talk to one another but they’re totally different departments so they’re going to have different data. These numbers here are made up of an average of what Google Adwords thinks the total global 12 months search would be. So, it’s a monthly average. So, it’s obviously wrong. What I would do is use this Tool in conjunction with Google webmaster Tools if you’re already ranking for some phrases and you can start to see some impressions. The one thing here that is really outrageously inconsistent is the relationship between Gasp Clothing and Gasp Melbourne according to Google Webmaster Tools. Not necessarily so when you look at Google Insight for search but one thing that is consistent is that Gasp Clothing is definitely the most popular phrase out of those three so we’re seeing that across the board. So that’s what you take with you and you can then go and test.
The mistake that a lot of businesses make that we see when we take over their Adwords campaign is essentially they’re paying too much for a phrase. Here’s an easy example. On the weekend my wife was googling for a Dremel which is basically a small hand held drill that’s got lots of different attachments, no, it wasn’t for me, it was for her. We googled Dremel and we can see that Bunnings is finally doing Adwords which is great to see, Bunnings are probably Australia’s largest hardware retailer and if we click on their ad, hopefully it’s not costing them terribly much, we don’t actually have the word Dremel in that ad. The same sorts of things that Google applies to Organic they want to see similar things in Adwords and it’s about relevance. They will reward relevance in your Adwords. If your ad is really relevant to the search it is going to give you a higher quality score and possibly cost you less and also increase your click through rate. When someone does a search they want to see what they’ve searched for. I happened to click on that ad because it was Bunnings and maybe the brand, it’s got a good click through rate because of the brand. But I would say they are probably paying more that necessary because there’s a couple of things that’s happening here. When you click on that ad the word Dremel didn’t appear in the ad itself. When we look at the source of the landing page that we were taken to and it’s great that we’ve got a landing page, you see so many ads where they just drop you at the front page of the site or the home page. That’s really really bad because it’s totally irrelevant, some one’s going to click on that ad, they’re going to hit your page which is your home page which probably won’t have a lot to do with their search and then they are just going to hit the back button. Basically it’s a waste of money for you and Google’s going to charge you more if you do that sort of thing. So, you’ve got to set up pages that are very specific to the search. You can see here the page title is not specific to the search ity doesn’t have dremel actually in the page title. But when we do a search for that word actually in the copy on the page it’s right down here in “Narrow by Brand” so this page really isn’t relevant for my search. It might be relevant for that Ad but that Ad is not relevant for my search. When I search for dremel on the Bunnings Warehouse site there’s a whole range of dremel tools that are just not seen. Not that you can buy off this site anyway, it’s basically a catalogue site but I would assume that in some point in the future they are going to turn it into an ecommerce site. So that’s an example of an ad campaign which could be getting much better results than it probably currently is.
One of the other problems that Bunnings has with this particular ad campaign and of course the other morning while we were sitting in bed googling for a dremel I didn’t have my desktop with me because that would indicate I’d be at the desk not in bed, so of course I was using an Ipad, an IOS device, portable device, mobile device whatever you want to call it. I did the search for dremel got the same page that we see in Google desktop, then unfortunately for Bunnings if we click on their ad we’re taken to a page which is obviously set up when you look at the URL, it’s re-directing me to a mobile friendly page so I can search my store. But it’s got no relevance to what I was looking for so of course, I didn’t look at Bunnings the other morning, I just looked at that page and went “wow what a waste” and looked somewhere else. I actually looked whilst I was mobile at the Google shopping results, which of course Bunnings are not in because they are not transacting. It’s those sorts of things that can really hurt your quality score in an Adwords campaign and there could just be 5 or 6 of them and your going to be spending too much money and your not going to be getting the best bang for your buck that you possibly could. When we take over an Adwords campaign they’re typically the things that we have to fix and make things more targeted and those sorts of things.
How you use that in conjunction with SEO is that you make sure that if a phrase is costing you a bundle, you better make sure you’re ranking organically for that phrase as well. Whilst a lot more people are clicking on ads now than what they used to people still trust the organic results more than they do the ads. Just ask some of your customers Do you click on ads? Or do you click on organic results? See what they come back with.
They’re some of the basics of how you should be using Adwords and Organic search together. Hopefully that’s helpful and we’ll see you next week. Thanks very much. Bye.
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