Archive of Search Engine Advertising Posts

With search engine optimization being one of the most effective tactics for the B2B marketer, budgeting for SEO will certainly remain available in 2012. That said, with almost no barrier to entry and a limited industry standards, choosing an SEO vendor can be a precarious proposition.

While it does not surprise us to find a lack of quality information about SEO when meeting new prospects, this certainly becomes troubling when that organization has been burned by a bad SEO relationship in the past. Misconceptions and SEO fraud hurt the industry in general, evidenced recently in a few mainstream examples.

If your organization is looking for the right SEO partner, or you know of one that is, here is a list of questions to consider when interviewing the prospective vendor. Hopefully this will help your organization avoid SEO fraud and build a foundation for an effective SEO partnership moving forward.  ... Read the full post

We receive a lot of questions about our “search engine marketing process”. For KoMarketing Associates, our search engine marketing process, revolves around a comprehensive search engine marketing plan. That plan includes three core components: pay per click advertising, social media marketing, and search engine optimization.

Even though these solutions can be handled separately, there is tremendous value in the integration of all three, and in coordination with the organizations’ marketing program in general.  ... Read the full post

As AdWords has hundreds of individual pages with tips, help files, and tutorials I thought it would be helpful to put together a list of some of the questions I get over and over by seasoned advertisers and newbies alike.

Please browse the following list for some of the most commonly referenced AdWords questions and its corresponding page in the AdWords Help Center.  ... Read the full post

The new year is upon us and is looking to take off like a rocket ship. As B2B marketers begin to lay the groundwork for their 2011 initiatives, keep these 10 important statistics and metrics, specific to search engine marketing, in mind for the new year.

 ... Read the full post

1. The Value of Google Result Positioning

2010 is already drawing to a close? Unbelievable. It really seems like this year has flown by so much faster than others.

Despite this feeling, there has not been a shortage of quality B2B blog posts. In addition to our favorites, I decided to ask some of our colleagues what their favorites were as well.  ... Read the full post

Earlier this week a prospect called KoMarketing Associates. They were frustrated that they could not find a search engine marketing firm interested in their small business. They could not understand why so many companies had no interest helping a new company get their SEM strategy started.

When I explained to the caller that KoMarketing Associates works primarily with B2B companies and organizations, I was met with the following reply:  ... Read the full post

I’ve found that once people have determined what their ideal campaign settings are for a particular client they usually go into set it and forget it mode.  I’m going to go into detail about how we can use one specific section to get a little bit more out of our campaign settings.

Giving National Campaigns a Local Flavor

Normally when choosing to serve ads to the United States you’d simply pick the United States bundle under the Locations and Languages tab in the campaign settings.  Instead, try manually choosing each state from the list one by one.  ... Read the full post

It’s important to differentiate between a time-saving shortcut and one that has some serious drawbacks to the quality of your work or your relationship with your advertiser.

Here are a few “shortcuts” that I’ve found are important to avoid:

Failing to Use a Unique Login (Or Your Master Client Center) To Access the Account

The first thing you should do when you build an account for an advertiser or take over as the primary manager of an existing account is to associate a unique user name to all of your interactions.  This is important for several reason:  ... Read the full post

A common question about keyword research and the Google keyword tool is whether to ignore keyword opportunities that list “not enough data” for global and local search volume estimates.

The answer is NO; the misconception is that “not enough data” means “no one is searching for this keyword”, which in many cases will be far from the truth.  ... Read the full post

The fact that you can apply geographic constraints to more accurately target searchers in a specific region makes PPC an obvious partner for a local search strategy. Here the term ‘local’ is defined purely as the area in which an advertiser operates business.  For a scrap metal recycling firm in Springfield, Massachusetts local may be defined as Hampden county, a the entire state of Massachusetts, or a certain area radius where the operation, transportation, and labor costs are low enough for the transaction to be profitable.  ... Read the full post