Hi Darin,

What you said does make sense. With the information you provided to me, I think I can figure out how to get approved sitelinks.

1. If I have an ad linking to URL A, then do not have the sitelink go to URL A as well.

2. If I have a sitelink going to URL A in AdGroup 1, then do not have a sitelink going to URL A in AdGroup 2.

Hello,
I cannot find a justifiable reason as to why Google AdWords has disapproved my sitelinks.

1. My link text is descriptive of each page. For instance, I use the link text "Merchant Accounts" for the URL http://www.instabill.com/services/merchant-accounts/

2. I have four extensions within one campaign. Each have 5 sitelinks with all the same link text and destination URLs. However, only two of the "Merchant Accounts" sitelinks were disapproved from two out of the four extensions. Two "High Risk Accounts" linking to our High Risk Merchant Accounts page were disapproved out of my four extensions, one "Industries We Serve" to our eCommerce Industries page was disapproved, and one "Offshore Accounts to our Offshore Merchant Accounts page was disapproved. Why are some disapproved and not all?

3. I use Daddy Analytics to generate my destination URLs for tracking purposes, but I do not see this as being an issue since the URL still begins with the URL in bullet point 1.

After reading a few threads within the AdWords community and reading the AdWords Sitelinks Guidelines, I feel as if I have followed the guidelines.

Any helpful advice would be appreciated.

Vadim,

We already have an offshore page and it ranks quite well for the term in Google. We typically hold two SERPs for the term offshore merchant accounts--one for our home page and one for our offshore page.

Thanks for your suggestion!

Regards,
Meghan

Thanks, Moosa! Your advice does help very much!

Regards,
Meghan

Hi Chris,
Your advice makes perfect sense. I appreciate your help and input!

Regards,
Meghan

Hello,

We recently launched a new home page design on our company website, but we still have the same focus keyword in the title, H1, and in parts of the page copy. However, this focus keyword no longer represents our entire brand. We want to change the focus keyword and have done some research on the keyword difficulty and local searches in Google, but are still uncertain on the potential effects.

Let me explain our situation more in depth.

Instabill provides business owners with merchant accounts and other services. Our current focus keyword is offshore merchant accounts. However, over the past three months, we have been helping businesses establish US merchant accounts (retail, mobile, and online--but retail and mobile to US only while online to merchants everywhere) and intend to continue to increase our US merchant base. We are also still able to provide offshore merchant accounts.

Our fear is that when a US merchant comes to our website (http://www.instabill.com), they will see Offshore Merchant Accounts in big H1 letters and leave our site since they want a local US merchant account. However, we still want to make sure our international merchants know we can still work with them.

Thus said, we would like to change our focus keyword to something more broad, but still descriptive of our brand: merchant services. To elaborate, we want our H1 heading to read Merchant Services for Retail and Online Businesses. Merchant services is more descriptive since we provide more than just merchant accounts. We also provide the payment gateway, free shopping cart modules, help registering businesses, help obtaining an SSL certificate, and a discounted PCI Certification Service through McAfee.

We have more than one page on our website that ranks for the term online merchant accounts, but none that rank for merchant services. However, we are willing to put in the work to ensure we optimize our website properly and put in the effort to make the change successful. Merchant services is also a keyword we would like to optimize on our website, so making the change on the home page will only help the steps in the process.

Statistics:
Offshore Merchant Accounts has a 35% difficulty level and we consistently rank for SERPs #1 and #2. This term, according to the Google Keyword Tool, only receives 70 monthly searches in the US, 50 in the UK, 10 in Canada, and 10 in Australia. These are the four countries of most importance to our website.

Merchant Services has a 57% difficulty level and we do not rank for it in Google at all since we have never tried to optimize for this term in the past. Also according to the Google Keyword Tool, this term receives 14,800 monthly searches in the US, 1,600 in the UK, 590 in Canada, and 260 in Australia.

Clearly, merchant services could potentially get us much more traffic than offshore merchant accounts if transitioned correctly.

I suppose my bottom line question is this: Would it be a bad idea to change my primary focus keyword on my home page? What type of results should I expect to see if searching Google for my company name?

Thank you for all of your help.

Meghan
Senior Copywriter of Instabill

Branden and John,
You both provided very helpful information. However, I think I will start with Branden's simple advice on creating separate campaigns to target countries using the same ads and keywords.

I will take some time to explore the bid-setting by location and see if I can make sense of it. I am primarily a content writer, so the marketing and technical aspect of AdWords is fairly new to me.

Thank you both so very much for your help!

Regards,
Meghan

So, here is the situation:

Our company works with merchants worldwide (with the exception of those who live in excluded high-risk countries--mostly in Africa), but most of our Google AdWords leads come from Indian merchants.

My CEO wants our campaigns to convert leads from other countries (i.e., the UK, Germany, US, Canada, Australia, etc.), but I have no idea how to do that without excluding India. However, my CEO does not want to exclude India from our AdWords campaigns as the leads are profitable. We simply want more diversity with out leads in terms of geographic location.

I am sure there are resources on the Web about how to do this, but I am not an Adwords expert and am unsure of what phrases to search to find the answers.

Direct advice or helpful links are much appreciated.

Regards,
Meghan

Thanks, David! This is excellent help as well!

Ooh thank you so much! I knew there was a way, but I could not remember how to find this section of GA. You are awesome!

Hi folks,

My company has Google Analytics setup for all of our websites, but I am a bit stumped on something. Now, this may not be possible, but am I able to see what time of day visitors most frequently view my blog? I would like to optimize blog post publishing for when I know we have in influx of visitors, yet I cannot find this information on GA.

Any input would be much appreciated.

Regards,
Meghan