Google frequently makes changes to its PPC platform and you want to stay on top of them so you can make the right choices for your campaigns.

Google recently announced “new matching behavior for phrase and exact match keywords.” Starting in mid-May, exact and phrase match keywords will “match close variants, including misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviations.”

Google has also made a change to the ad rotation settings. After 30 days, Google will run only your ad with the highest clicks. The ad with the most clicks may not necessarily be the ad that brings the highest quality traffic to your site. An ad that Google takes out of rotation may be your most profitable ad. Google will make more money from the higher clicks, but you may not.

If you’re running an Adwords campaign, be aware of these changes and take the extra steps to be in control of your campaign. Better yet, leave PPC to the professionals—US! Our PPC analysts are Google Adwords Certified and it’s their job to keep on top of the latest changes and configure the settings to make the most of your budget.

Google frequently tweaks its algorithm to target sites with low-quality content, particularly those that scrape content.

Google calls these updates “Panda.” The first one came out in February 2011 and the latest kicked into gear on April 19, 2012. Google says, “We’re continuing to iterate on our Panda algorithm as part of our commitment to returning high-quality sites to Google users. This most recent update is one of the over 500 changes we make to our ranking algorithms each year.”

According to data from Experian Marketing Services, Facebook had 7 billion visits (not unique visitors) in March; Twitter, 182 million; and LinkedIn, 86 million. Newcomer, Pinterest, kicked LinkedIn out of its third place spot in March with 104 million visits.

You simply cannot ignore those numbers. Participating in social media is a must for every business if only because your customers and prospects are spending a lot of time there! In addition to massive numbers of visits, social media sites are taking steps to give businesses more opportunities to engage with their customers and prospects.

All Facebook brand pages have transitioned to the new timeline format. Facebook is also improving its self-service ad feature to make setting up ad campaigns easier and more tailored to achieving specific marketing objectives. Twitter has launched self-service ads for small businesses, but release is currently limited to cardmembers and merchants using American Express. LinkedIn has announced a new program that lets brands embed a “follow company” button from the social network on their homepages; followers will receive automatic updates from the brand in their LinkedIn feeds.

It’s no longer so simple to set up and manage a social media campaign. More advertising and marketing opportunities mean more time strategizing, implementing, updating and communicating. Once you have a social media page, you must monitor and respond to messages to be effective at community building. We’ll take care of all of those details–call us and we’ll get your social media campaign rolling. We can help you figure out where you should concentrate your efforts to best suit your budget.

Thousands of Yahoo employees are out of a job due to layoffs earlier this month.

Since August 2010, Bing has powered Yahoo’s search results and in October 2010, Microsoft adCenter began powering paid search for both Bing and Yahoo. Rumor has it that Yahoo is discussing a renegotiation of its search and advertising deals with Microsoft, and Yahoo is “in active discussions” with Google about Google taking over Yahoo’s search business.

Google powered Yahoo’s search results from 2000 until Yahoo went independent in 2004. Yahoo partnered with Google on advertising in 2008, which attracted the attention of the Department of Justice–Google pulled out of the deal later that year over broader antitrust concerns and fear of being labeled a “monopolist”. Seems unlikely that Google will go down that road again. Google is under antitrust scrutiny from the FTC because competitors charge that Google is using its search dominance to promote its own services at the expense of competitors and consumers.

Recently, Google identified a number of blogger network sites that existed purely to build links to websites. Google targeted one of the larger blogger networks called “Build My Rank.”

The Build My Rank site was de-indexed, along with an overwhelming majority of its posts. Businesses that were over-reliant on the links from Build My Rank (and other blog networks that may be facing de-indexing) saw a significant drop in rankings. Businesses that used Build My Rank but also acquired links from a variety of other sources fared much better. The more you diversify, the less impact a Google update will have on your rankings.

We have always stressed that SEO and marketing overall needs diversification. Links should come from as many different sources as possible and be relevant. Diversity coupled with relevant and useful content is what builds value. Our diversified approach to link-building in combination with your relevant and useful website content (we cannot overemphasize the importance of relevant and useful website content!), puts you on the path to improved search rankings. If you’d like to diversify even more, consider adding pay-per-click advertising, email marketing and/or social media to the mix. Let us know if you’re interested.

On February 1st, Facebook filed for an IPO and expects to begin selling shares by the end of April.

In 2011 Facebook reached profits of $1 billion on sales of $3.7 billion. 85% of that income came from advertising and the rest from games and other fees. The Social Media Giant plans to raise at least 5 billion and hopes to raise over 10 billion when it begins selling stock in April or May. This is probably going to be the biggest Internet or technology IPO ever.

For online marketers, the message is: social media must be embraced! Its impact is growing and growing every day. Facebook and other social media websites will continue to be aggressive in looking for ways to compete with search engines. Besides having a presence on social media networks, many marketers are including Facebook PPC to their advertising strategies. From 2010 to 2011, the number of pay-per-click ads displayed on Facebook grew 42% and the average price per ad grew 18%. Consider that it’s easy to make expensive  mistakes when you first venture
into social media marketing. Contact us if you want help with social media.

Google and its user experience is constantly evolving. For a company that controls over 60% of the search market, it’s normal to hear the question, “How many visitors can we expect, if we rank in the position [x]?”

The latest study on the benefits of ranking high on Google.

There have been many changes to the Google user experience since previous studies/surveys were published years ago. There’s a new algorithm, a new user interface, increased mobile search, and social signals. On top of that, the blended SERP is riddled with videos, news, places, images, and even shopping results.

These calculations revealed an 18.2% Clich Through Rate  (people that actually click on the search results and enter the website they’ve found) for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for No. 2. CTR for each position below the fold (everything after position #5) is below 4%. An interesting implication of this CTR curve is that for any given SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the percentage of users who click on an organic result in the top 10 is 52.32%. This makes sense and seems to be typical user behavior, as many Google users will window shop the SERP results and search again before clicking on a domain.

THIS MEANS THAT IF YOU ARE ON THE POSITION #1 YOU WILL GET 18.2 %  OF ALL THE VISITORS THAT ARE SEARCHING FOR THAT KEYWORD.

How does this applies to your business? Think of it as If there were 1000 possible clients per day walking by your door, being number one will make 192 of those possible clients enter.

Source: The Slingshot SEO Google CTR Study Whitepaper: Mission ImposSERPble

Without a doubt, search engines are trying to figure out a way to include social signals (activity on social networking sites) into their search results. How big of an impact this currently has on search results is up for debate. For now, we don’t see a very significant impact. We recommend that you participate actively in social media sites so you’re prepared for the day when these sites becomes an important factor in search results. Evidently, that day is coming soon!

Social media sites certainly have a place in online marketing. Facebook has more than 800 million users (compare that to 62 million in Google+’s ) and more than half of Facebook users log on every single day. There’s more than 100 million users in Twitter that posts more than 250 million tweets per day. Facebook and other social media websites are great for reaching out to customers and creating a community around your business. We’ll be glad to talk to you about adding social media to your online marketing plan, for more information visit: http://ibisstudio.com/services.htm

Blogging frequently  is a great way to keep having fresh content on your website but more importantly, blogs can be a search engine traffic magnet! Your long-tail keyword-rich blog has the potential to rank highly for many  long-tail keyword phrases that are relevant to your industry.

Many marketers are inclined to target head terms, which are high volume keywords consisting of a few words (1 or 2). Example ‘attorney’ or ‘tax attorney.’ But head terms are too competitive and there’s small chance they’ll improve your position on search engines. The best strategy is to use long-tail keywords. Example, ‘tax attorney specializing in small business.’ Yes, there are far fewer searches on longer keywords BUT, a recent study demonstrated that using these long keywords can help a website move up in the search rankings more rapidly than head (short) terms. And, long-tail terms converted (visitors clicked on them) two and a half times more than head terms. Long-tail keywords might bring smaller traffic  to your site but chances are, it will be the most profitable kind of traffic!

Need even more proof that targeting long keywords can be good for your search results? Last December, Google announced that it would be doing more comprehensive indexing, making long-tail documents available in its search results. That means that your blog that contains long keywords is now more likely to rank for relevant queries!

There’s a lot of  people that throw a blog post up every day without worrying too much about keywords or quality. IBIS Studio advice: concentrate on using long-tail keywords in your blog and make sure the content you write is useful to your readers.

The Google Panda update (also known as Farmer Update)  was designed to remove content farms out of the highest ranks in the search results.

Apparently, these updates are working. A study by New Science Magazine shows  evidence that Google has gained the upper hand against those unruly sites that steal content from legitimate sites. The study was conducted by computer scientist Richard McCreadie at the University of Glasgow. He ran 50 search queries before  the Panda updates and found that content farms were present in highest search results. After the Panda updates, content farms were no longer in the top positions. High-quality content websites are now far more likely to be found at the highest ranks of the search results.

This is good news for all of us who work hard to create high quality content. The update removed many of the sites that don’t deserve a high position so now there’s more room for the rest of us at the top of the search engines. Most sites that reach top rankings use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies. If you have questions about SEO services in Coral Gables give us a call or visit: http://ibisstudio.com/services_seo.htm