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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.
I am in the middle of re-vamping my PPC marketing campaigns. Once I have more data on the results of my changes, I may take you up on that offer for a free review. Thank you for all of your help!
Regards,
Meghan
We have been attempting to get our blogsite to rank for our business name(Instabill). We are now considering changing the url from blog.instabill.com to something like instabillblog.com. I have following concerns about the change;
Will changing the domain really be that helpful (i.e. will the change get our blog on page one for the term instabill)
We have over 350 pages of content on our blog. Will changing the domain have possible negative effects ( I was thinking of using url updater in webmaster tools and creating a permanent 301 redirect from the older url to the new)
Having never changed a url for a site with this much content and seo value for my company I would like to know the following from someone who has made mistakes here before;
what not to do
what steps you would take to make the transition easier
Any help here will be greatly appreciated.
cheers,
Thanks, Branden!
I did know know that I could sort through my keywords in this way. It does seem like a lot of work, but I am willing to do it if it provides me with better results. That is the goal, after all.
I am unfamiliar with broad modified keywords. Could you explain this a little more?
Regards,
Meghan
Trenton,
The keyword airaisia payment online by debit does not sell. That is a keyword consumers used to find our ads--but I do not work with consumers. I work with business owners, which means any clicks or conversions are a waste of money from this term. However, I do understand what you are saying.
Also, I must add how much I love Excel's concatenate function. It saves massive amounts of time!
Thanks again for your help!
Thank you, Kerri.
I have been analyzing the Search Terms in Dimensions to see what phrases people are searching to find our site. I have been building a list of negative keywords since my last post. Some of the negative keywords include:
I am hoping this helps solve my problem!
I feel like I should not use exact match negative keywords in this situation. Consumers are not searching for exact match phrases. For instance, one of the search phrases a consumer used to sign up on our website through an ad was: airasia payment online by debit.
If I list -[online payment] as an exact negative keyword, this consumer would still see my ad. Even adding the phrase -"online payment" as a negative keyword would allow this consumer to see my ads since the exact phrase within the entire keyword is payment online and not online payment.
Other keywords consumers search and see my ads are:
The list goes on and on . . .
I just do not know what to do. I feel like I need to either choose between blocking legitimate clients or allowing bad conversions.
I am working on compiling a list of both broad and phrase-matched negative keywords for my AdWords campaigns, but I feel like I am encountering a problem.
We offer payment gateway services and business owners often search terms including online payment gateway, Internet payment gateway, credit card payment gateway, etc to see our ads. However, we have been getting bad leads from consumers searching for terms such as online payment, online payments, online bill pay, and various other phrases regarding consumers paying their bills online. We work specifically with business owners who want to accept payments and NOT consumers who want to make payments.
Here is my dilemma: If I have "online payment gateway" or [online payment gateway] as keywords as well as "online payment" or "online payments" as negative keywords, then I will be blocking business owners from seeing my ads when they search the term online payment gateway. Correct?
Is there any way to get around this? Am I wrong?
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
We are now considering changing the url from blog.instabill.com to something like instabillblog.com. I have following concerns about the change;
Any help here will be greatly appreciated.
cheers,
Thank you, Branden, for your advice. Telling me specifically what I need to do is exactly what I wanted to hear.
My company used to work with a PPC agency, but they were horrible in every way possible. That is when I decided to manage the Adwords in house.
I am the senior copywriter for my company (I studied professional writing in school), but the AdWords work sort of fell into my lap. With a new copywriting assistant, I have more time to focus on Adwords. I just never knew where to begin after the basic framework of launching a simple campaign.
I have metrics that show me what ads work well for my specific industry, but I do not yet know how to use keywords differently, such as negative keywords and exact phrases.
Your information will most definitely be coming in handy over the coming weeks and months. I am truly grateful to the both of you who responded.
Regards,
Meghan
I am looking at our average position now. They range from
I can definitely do some work to increase our average position.
I can also do some keyword research to see if, for instance, merchants in the United States search for more specific terms such as US merchant account as opposed to simply merchant account or online merchant account.
How do you feel about country-specific campaigns? I have seven campaigns that all target the four countries in question. I feel like it might by wise to eliminate multiple campaigns and create new campaigns that target just one country each. For instance, my US Campaign could include the same type of keywords among each of the current campaigns, but could be much more specific to US merchants only.
Also, how do you feel about the Display Network? I feel like since my industry has such specific jargon, using the Search only would generate more qualified conversions--merchants searching for the term US payment gateway and seeing my ad as opposed to a random consumer seeing my ad in the Display Network, clicking on my ad, and then I have to pay for the click when the consumer was not even part my target audience to start.
It is a very big task to get the results I want, but I am willing to do the work if it will pay off in the end.
Hi Adam,
Thank you for your in-depth response.
1. CPC and Positioning: I do not doubt that the CPC in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia are more expensive than in other countries my campaigns were successful in--India, Pakistan, and the Philippines were the highest converting countries. I am not familiar with QualityScore, but I will look into this term and try and see the average CPC for the terms I use in the four countries listed above.
2. Linguistic Differences: I do not think this is the issue. I use a large variety of keywords related to our services. For instance: Internet merchant account, online merchant account, ecommerce merchant account, e-commerce merchant account, online payment processing, online credit card processing, website credit card processing, payment gateway, Internet payment gateway, etc. I use a spectrum of terms to hit the different variations e-commerce merchants use. They are pretty niche terms, but also universally used worldwide within this industry. Although I am relatively new to Google AdWords, I am well versed in my industry's jargon.
3. Service Discovery: Merchants in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia may very well use other sources to search for merchant account services. We have many listings on website directories and have been trying to implement PPC banner ads (completing this task is a timing issue since we have other projects to complete first). I can definitely look into this matter.
4. Conversion Opportunity: I agree with you 100% that merchants in these four countries have a higher standard when it comes to apply for services. Our office is located in New Hampshire and as a consumer, I feel the same way. I have been with my company for 2+ years and we are constantly working on improving our website for conversions. We are currently working on completely re-vamping our Home Page. The A/B test results will encourage us to try another layout or to redesign our other highly-converting pages.
Honestly, I am not seeing the same traffic at all. By this point today, my campaigns have only received 3,712 impressions with 8 clicks. We typically have at least 250,000 impressions by mid-day and between 500 and 750 clicks by the same time. Now, my company's website was receiving clicks with no conversions, then I think it would definitely be the website, which it could still very well be.
What I think this boils down to is that I need more time to analyze the data from Google Adwords. I made these changes to target the four countries around 4 p.m. yesterday so I know I will not see the conversions right away. It was just very alarming to not see the same amount of impressions and clicks.
I launched two new campaigns yesterday and one received one clicks today that cost $2.46. Our previous average CPC was around $0.16. This information tells me that the keywords in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia are most likely more competitive and cost more for visibility.
Hello,
So here is the gist: Our company provides credit card processing services primarily to e-commerce businesses. I began managing Google AdWords in-house this past April. I started out by not excluding any countries, but received leads from merchants living in countries we could not serve due to risk of fraud. Then, I excluded countries our company could not work with to eliminate unwanted costs. I then took it one step further and targeted only countries our company can serve. My campaigns performed very well. This month, I have been averaging nearly 14 conversions per day.
[I should also add that four campaigns are Search and Display, one is remarketing so it is Display only, and two are Search only. Prior to what you will read in the paragraph below, the majority of our conversions came from the Display network, but we had a significantly higher conversion rate with our Search conversions.]
However, throughout all of this, we received very few conversion from English-speaking countries--primarily the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Yesterday afternoon, July 15, I targeted only those four countries. When I came into work this morning, I saw that we received very few impressions and only 7 clicks (as opposed to more than 500,000+ impressions in one day and 1,500-2,400 clicks in one day).
I am no Google AdWords expert, but I do understand that searching these terms in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia may be more competitive, which will require a higher CPC. I set it so Google manages my CPC, so I would assume this would adjust while staying within my daily budget.
I do not know what to do, but am in dire need of guidance. I do not know where to look online for help and Google AdWords Live Chat is not working.
Thank you in advance,
Meghan
While continuing my research after publishing this question, I saw several articles that stated Delhi is a hub for e-commerce. I saw that article before publishing my question as well, which is why I asked if people knew of any others since Delhi was the only location I could find as a result from searching the Internet.
What I ended up doing was searching a list of the largest cities in the world and targeted those cities that were within my target countries.
From my experience, there are many things to look for when determining the quality of your SEO. There is a technical side of SEO as well as a content side. I handle the content side of SEO for my company and know that backlinking is very important.
What sites backlink to your site? What is the PR of the sites linking to your site? Does Google consider the site a good or bad one? (We had an SEO company provide us with several backlinks to one of our company sites. After the Panda update, Google deemed most of those backlinks as bad, which significantly hurt our SERPs.)
What keywords are your optimizing on your website? Are you stuffing keywords to a high percentage rate? Are you using your focus keyword properly throughout the text?
Are you using meta descriptions that include your focus keyword and are less than 156 characters (including space)?
What is your site loading time? (That is a more technical answer)
Is your sitemap working properly? (We also had a problem with an improper sitemap that was setup by a former employee.)
There are so many questions you should ask when having your site professionally reviewed by an SEO firm. I know I have missed several you can ask!
However, I hope this has helped in getting you started. I also hope this answers part of your question as I was a little uncertain of what exactly you were asking.
Best of luck!
Meghan
I suggest updating the content all together, but doing so wisely. Use analytics tool to determine what keywords your visitors searched to find your page. Then, compare those keywords to the keywords for which you want that page to rank.
For instance, if you are selling Cracker Jacks and your page ranks for ballpark snacks, then optimize your page properly for both keywords. I have several pages on my website that rank for more than one term. However, be sure to select one focus keyword, whichever you feel is most important to your success, and then include your secondary keyword throughout the text.
One last thing: Let's say you have 1,000 dedicated visitors. If your content remains the same over the years, that number will dwindle or your dedicated visitors will visit your page less often. However, if they see you are updating content, that will entice your visitors to check back on your site often to see what additional changes you have made. Google also loves to see fresh content and helps improve your search engine results.
I hope this helped!
Regards,
Meghan
I am trying to target e-commerce merchants to see my Google AdWords ads and would like to know what cities are most popular for e-commerce businesses. I know Delhi is a huge hub in India. I would also assume U.S. cities include Boston, New York, and Seattle. I would also assume London and probably Paris as well.
What other cities do you recommend for geo-targeting e-commerce merchants?
Thank you!
Meghan
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
We still cannot get our blog to rank on page 1 for the term Instabill. Thank you all for your previous input, but I am marking this question as answered.
Chiaryn,
Mike's suggestion worked. Thanks for your help!
Thanks, Mike! This worked! When I re-opened Firefox, I was automatically logged into the MozBar--I think because I was already logged into SEOmoz. Again, thank you!
Thank you Oleg, but I already tried that and it did not work.
I just downloaded and installed the MozBar for Firefox, but it will not let me login to my account. The Log In button is gray and none of the buttons do anything when I click on them. Please help!
Thank you,
Meghan
Again, I appreciate your feedback, but it is a technique we have tried in the past.
Originally, we were not optimizing the Instabill Blog for the keyword Instabill and it was ranking poorly. We found resources that encouraged us to use our company name more, so we added static content, an about page, and blog posts with Instabill in the title and heading tags.
For a short amount of time, our blog fluctuated between pages one and two for our brand name. Now, although our technique has not changed (and we even update our static content regularly), our blog does not rank at all for our brand name.
We will keep what you have said in mind, but it has failed us in the past. Oh, and thank you for your helpfulness within your snide remark.
Cheers!
Meghan
Thanks for your comment. I dont feel your feedback has any scientific value. We are still waiting for an answer.
That was one of our theories, but we wanted to research additional possibilities before deciding the real reason for the poor ranking. Thanks!
For six months or so, my team and I have been trying to get our blog to rank on page one in Google for the term "Instabill." The URL, http://blog.instabill.com, is a sub-domain of our company website and they both use the same IP address. Three pages on our www.Instabill.com site rank in the top three spots when searching our brand name in Google. However, our blog ranks 100+.
For our blog, we are currently using b2evolution and nginx.
We have tried adding static content on the home page, static content in the sidebar, static content on an About Instabill page, and optimizing blog posts for the keyword Instabill, but nothing seems to work.
We appreciate any advice you can provide to us.
Thank you!
Meghan