Epiphany Search Marketing Blog

Social Media Optimisation SMO is something you can expect to hear a lot more about over the coming year as social networks increasingly come to dominate the web landscape. As part of an over arching Search Marketing Campaign for many it is no longer going to be good enough just to be on the front page of Google and have a professional adwords campaign. There is a new player in town and whilst you can ignore SMO today if you wish, tomorrow it may be crucial to your online success.

It’s important to remember that the web is still relatively young as an industry. Whilst I think we’re beyond the automobiles industry benchmark of the the Ford Model T, we’re nowhere near the deterioration of Detroit! The longevity of Search Engine Optimisation is less clear, but you can be guaranteed that as the web moves out of pubescence / young adulthood its evolution will have an effect on the way Search Marketing operates. Social Media Optimisation could be only the first of many examples.
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Tonight Google have launched their new CPA model that we have been hearing about so much.

The new ‘conversion optimizer’ tool as they are calling it will ask you for a maximum bid and attempt to optimise your adwords campaign to hit this target. It will only work on campaigns that are seeing at leasts 300 conversions per month but it sounds interesting.

The only downside we can see is that we can all hit low cpa’s by dropping our bids and only bidding on very specific keywords, how it takles volume conversions is another thing!

Let us know your thoughts….

Google announcement here: CPA Targetting

The fact that Yahoo have ceased to update their Overture keyword suggestion tool has been known for several months. Overture US was last updated in January 07 and the UK data was last refreshed in May 07 and Yahoo have officially commented on their termination of support for the tool.

This morning however, it seems that the tool has become completely defunct as no terms return any search results. Does this mean the tool is officially dead ? Either way this throws a serious issue for the little guys who relied on the fact the Overture tool was free.

So what now ?

With Wordtracker now using UK data there is now a solid alternative at a cost. £15 per week / £29 per month / £149 per year. Having now used this tool with the UK data (I wouldn’t have recommended it to the UK market prior) I can say it is a sound investment and the billing structure makes it accessible to both big and small whether you want to cram all your keyword research into a single week or have the tool on hand all the time.

That being said, I for one would like to see the Overture tool reborn as it provided another angle to compare with Wordtracker and the more thorough you can be with your research, the better the results.

Many of you here may have been reading Steves blog posts about Google Adwords and how to get the most out of it. His posts have been very informative and extremely popular so we decided to give him even more work to do and ask him to put an interactive guide together about everything he knows of the Adwords world!

And here it is Adwords Expert Guide

Please pop over and have a look, ask as many questions as you like, we really want to keep him busy!

Seems like a bold statement to make doesn’t it? Well I don’t think it is and in this article I hope to explain why, to both business owners and website developers alike.

Let me explain. Roughly 80% of all UK search traffic originates from Google. In the majority of cases, your long term website traffic (& conversions) will originate from a search engine (insert your own social media caveat here). Before this online behemoth and others can begin sending you those potential customers it has to visit, ‘read’ and ‘understand’ your website, not just once, but hopefully time and time again. How else can Google decide on which pages to recommend to its users? ‘The machine’ (or rather several thousand servers) that does this is know as the Google Bot.

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