Search London – Search In House or Agency

Thank you all for coming to the last meetup “Search London – SEO & PPC In House or Agency” that took place on Wednesday, October 26th.

Thanks to IG Index who sponsored the event, giving us a few drinks at the bar. Martin MacDonlad’s presentation of search agency side has been uploaded to slideshare.

http://www.slideshare.net/seojoblogs/search-london-seo-ppc-in-house

Check out the photos from the latest event.

http://www.meetup.com/search-london/photos/4208332/

I have also uploaded them to this site.

Search London – SEO & PPC In House Or Agency

Search London – SEO & PPC In House Or Agency – Sharon Harris

Sharon Harris, Head of Search at IG Group will be discussing the benefits of taking SEO & PPC In House. IG Group is a FTSE 250 leader servicing over 130,000 clients across 130 countries. The sheer size and scale of IG Group proved a challenging yet rewarding online platform for search integration.

IG Group encompasses IG Markets, IG Index and Nadex. IG Markets CFDs offer traders the ability to take a directional position on market movement. IG Index acts as a gateway into spread betting across a range of markets including the fast paced world of forex spreads. Nadex is a fully regulated US Exchange.

These markets offer complex derivative products yet understanding remains at the heart of IG Group. Integrating search enabled IG Group to tap into the users desire to learn at the point of inception, targeting both the newbie and professional trader. Increased online exposure across multiple keywords significantly enhanced visibility and conversion rates on a global scale.

Financial markets are fast and dynamic – Sharon Harris has fine tuned global SEO & PPC to react accordingly.

The event “SEO & PPC In House Or Agency” will take place:

When: Wednesday, October 26th, 7:00pm

Where: Theodore Bullfrog, 26 John Adam Street, London WC2N 6HL

RSVP to Search London to guarantee your place

New London Meetup – SEO, SMO and PPC

I have just taken over as organizer for SEO, SMO and PPC meetup and will look to organise an event in the New Year.

New organizer for the meetup

It is important to integrate, seo, social media and paid search and therefore I was pleased when the organizer position became available to demonstrate how these three areas can be integrated. I think it is hard to think of each separately in this digital age. There is so much cross over between the three.

Blogger outreach – social media seem to have taken control of this. However, when bloggers are contacted and write content about a product/service, the seo team should become involved. They should work with the social media team to put together optimised content the bloggers can post on their blog. Optimised content, simply means links on keywords back to the site that is building up rank and traffic.

Keywords – paid search data showing the impressions and number of clicks can feed into seo work. When a new page is built, the seo team carries out keyword research to see which words have the highest search volume. Google keyword is sometimes used to view the search volume for the terms but it is often inaccurate. This is when the paid search data can be used to see the words that have the highest click throughs. If paid search are using certain terms that are performing well, then these terms can also be used on the landing page for that campaign. This also helps to improve the quality score of the paid search advert.

Buzz - the social media team monitor the amount of buzz generated for a certain client. However, it is the seo team that monitors the traffic and sales to the site that this buzz has generated. The seo team also record the rankings for its key terms and should see rankings improve. It is important to be able to assign a ROI to the buzz, otherwise it is very easy to keep spending money on social media with out seeing a return on the investment.

Integration is not just a new word, it is here and now and going to stay. The more people pay attention to it instead of treating PPC, SMO and SEO separately, then the more we will be able to reap the awards.

Sign up to SEO, SMO and PPC meetup on meetup.com to network and meet like minded digital people.

Integrated search – a new buzz word

So you are looking for a new agency to help you with your digital strategy and all the people you have met are talking about delivering an “integrated search” strategy.

This is the new buzz word in search and it is here to stay. Affiliates, paid search, seo and social media working independently will not get you to the top of the search results. Paid search and seo go hand in hand. They are a match made in digital heaven and should not be treated as separately.

How do they compliment one another?
Studies have shown that if users see both a paid search ad and the natural search results, they will click on the natural search listings which is free. You are not paying for that click and if that therefore generates sales, you are lowering your cost per acquisition.

How can you integrate the two?
Communication is the key. Have regular meetings with the paid and natural search team. In this way both teams are aware of the campaigns and seo work on optimising the key landing pages the site wants to rank for making it appear higher in the search results.

Report back as one
When you are analysing the results, make sure you record how seo and ppc have complimented one another on a campaign by campaign level and then how this has led to a decrease in paid search costs overall. This way you can show to senior management and those in control of the purse strings the positive effect of integration while drilling down to the detail of the campaigns and can tweak these even further for next time.

Do you have any case studies where you have delivered an integrated search strategy that has worked well? Or perhaps you are still in the middle of working on it. Let me know, all comments welcome.

Photo is from Flickr

PPC and SEO

SEM – otherwise called Search engine marketing, covers both SEO – search engine optimisation which is “organic” or “free” growth and paid search, also called ppc “pay per click”

It is important to understand the difference between the two which can be broken down into

Traffic

Display

Cost

Implementation

1. Traffic

With PPC you can increase the amount of traffic to your site much faster than with organic search.  You can set up campaigns easily through google analytics or msn or yahoo.

However, if you have built your site to be seo friendly, then you will see people click on your organic search listing in google.  Studies have shown people are more likely to click on the organic listings than the paid listings.

This brings us on the point 2.

2. Display

The paid ads are located in the top ad sections on a search result and in the right hand column where it says sponsored links.

The organic listings are below the sponsored link section. Most people only view the first page, so it is very important for your ad to appear on page 1.  Anything lower down may not be seen,

3.Cost

PPC stands for pay per click, everytime someone clicks on your ad, it costs you. The cost per click is dependent on the compeittion for the keywords you have bid for. The trick is to bid for the keywords that have the highest search volume but the lowest competition.  Easier said than done, I know.  With PPC you need to monitor your keywords closely, as competition for the words can change, one day it could be 25p a click and the next it could be 75p.

SEO costs in terms of time.  You need to build your site to be seo friendly from day one, which means including the meta data, increasing links to your site.  If you do not have this, then yes it may cost you a lot to implement it.  But if you start off from day one with SEO in mind then you will not have to encur expensive seo consultant fees.

This leads us on to the fourth and final difference.

4.Implementation

With PPC you can get to a high ranking quite quickly.  Simply open up an account with a search engine such as google adwords and bid for the keywords you want to use in your ad.  You may need to pay a lot for your ad especially if there is a lot of competition, but then you will get a lot more traffic to your site.

SEO on the other hand, takes a lot longer.  As I mentioned, you should build the site with SEO in mind from day one. Using all the meta data, submitting site map to google, updating the site with rich and dynamic content, maybe even having a blog. This way you will be able to create traffic to your site from day 1 and if you want to increase traffic for specific periods like Christmas or summer sales you could also use PPC.