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yehdawg
Oct 2, 2013

Danger Extraordinaire
I'm about to run my second test site and I was wondering if I could get some advice on the ad campaign so that this time around it doesn't fall flat- my first test ate a fat dick

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Snatch Duster
Feb 20, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

yehdawg posted:

I'm about to run my second test site and I was wondering if I could get some advice on the ad campaign so that this time around it doesn't fall flat- my first test ate a fat dick

If you want, I can take a look at your campaign for you and give you some feedback.

yehdawg
Oct 2, 2013

Danger Extraordinaire

Snatch Duster posted:

If you want, I can take a look at your campaign for you and give you some feedback.

Thanks! I'll shoot you a message in a day or two with my finished test site and the plan for my ad campaign.

Snatch Duster
Feb 20, 2007

by FactsAreUseless

yehdawg posted:

Thanks! I'll shoot you a message in a day or two with my finished test site and the plan for my ad campaign.

Sure thing.


FYI Google increased character limits on their search ads earlier this week. Here is a little article from Word Stream regarding the changes.

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/05/25/google-expanded-text-ads

warheadr
Jul 6, 2005
I was excited to find this thread and have been catching up on all the great information being shared. I don't want to step on anyone's toes, as the OP is doing an awesome job sharing insights and providing help.

I manage digital campaigns for a variety of clients at a mid-size agency. My specialty is paid search, so I'm happy to talk shop or supplement the great information of others with my own thoughts if desired. I have free time, so I've been thinking about putting my skills to use a bit with a niche site of my own for some side income, and as a way to teach myself a little on the web development side that I really haven't gotten much of yet.

For anyone running AdWords of any size: have you implemented the new pricing extensions on ads yet? I'm curious to hear how those play out, as I've been thinking they could have a big impact on sites pushing niche products. The fact that the extensions are mobile-only and for an ad only in the top spot will be interesting. I don't have any good sample size to report back on yet, but my thought is that it could create some seriously increased competition for that coveted top mobile spot among bigger advertisers in ecomm product areas.

yehdawg
Oct 2, 2013

Danger Extraordinaire
Is anybody using Shopify for making their site and know how to redirect buyers to the "out of stock page" instead of charging them? Right now their cards get charged and I have to refund their transaction.

Absorbs Smaller Goons
Mar 16, 2006
I've been making website for a few years now, just for fun, and recently started to try to monetize them on the side. Unfortunately I haven't made anything good that can be monetized, so I've decided to start from scratch and follow this model, which I had discovered a few years back but didn't pursue at the time. I'm located in France, and I thought it a good opportunity to try and corner a relatively emerging market (France is always a bit behind everybody in tech) for some niche marketing, preferably dropship.

Am I right in thinking that since I am targeting only French citizens would give me very poor SEOT results and I should expect lower returns, or is it because I need to get better at finding niches? I'm using daily SEOT in market samurai, not sure if that's the correct setting but it seemed to be implied in the OP.

Absorbs Smaller Goons fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Aug 23, 2016

Snatch Duster
Feb 20, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
I would recommend not sticking to just France, but include all of Europe if you could. If you do just France, you'll be advertising to the same population amount of Canada and California combined.

You could test just France out but man, it'll be hard to carve out a niche with only 66 million people.

Absorbs Smaller Goons
Mar 16, 2006
Yeah, I found a few niches (more generic than niche, but still targeted products) that get a SEOT of 20-50k/month. Competition is low and not that good, so there's that point in my favor. Most of the stuff I am finding is only being disregarded because of poor SEOT results, not competitors, as the results are mostly dominated by big box outlets. Most of them have no SEO optimization that I can see, only amazon does.

Problem with going Europe wide is language and poor usability of research programs. It's kinda hard to target a region comprised of a lot of countries so my research basically limits itself to the 6-8 big. Also market samurai is really not evident for that, basically have to do one research per country.

I also found out after reading 30 pages of the old thread that the old google update of 2013(?) that made PBR useless also meant that SEOT is now mostly exact match and most representative of who will want to go to your site. Feel free to correct if I misinterpreted that. Further research outside of these forums pointed to people basically saying that anything over 100 daily is golden as far as SEOT goes (not sure about the targeted population size though). I'm not really buying into that, but for a lower population I guess those are ok numbers for low maintenance affiliates sites. Dropshipping is pretty much a hit and miss, I'd have to get on top of a new product fast, but the demand is likely to hit the country way later than elsewhere. I've also hit a wall as far as dropshipping goes, which is where the OP came into full play, there is not a lot of reliable dropshippers that I can easily find in Europe! I did find a French fulfillment center, so that aspect is covered if need be. As far as direct dropshipping goes, the only big reliable one I found is bigbuy.eu, I haven't actually targeted specific manufacturers yet but that'll go after the test parts if they succeed.

Pantothenate
Nov 26, 2005

This is an art gallery, my friend--and this is art.
Okay, I've got a question--hope this is the right place to ask it.

I've been writing freelance web content for a while, and frequently do work for a large local SEO company. Most of what I've done for them have been blog posts and social media calendars, but they recently started bringing me on for web content.

When they assign me a post, they throw in key phrases, many of which aren't how normal people speak--for example, let's say the client is an RMT, the keyword they give me might be "Massage Therapy Toronto". In a blog post for a massage therapist, this is fine--instead of saying "massage therapist" you say "Toronto massage therapy office", and you have at least the words in there, as organically as possible.

Now, the question I have comes from the web content. This is static content, not a blog that exists primarily for organic search value. And the website for a financial services company, so there's an extra emphasis on content sounding formal and proper... and still I get keyphrases for products that are written like people type in search bars, but sound absolutely nothing like how people talk, such as "consumer proposals Texas".

This is example is a few pages deep on the website. Texas has no place anywhere on the page--visitors will know from the context of the rest of the site where they're located, and by all of a sudden saying Texas all over, it would even start to seem like a "Texas consumer proposal" is a special type of proposal, like "California rolls" are a special type of hand roll. Other search phrases I was given are questions that appear in headers, and they're asking me to include it in the opening paragraph as well.

So the question itself:

Is exact search keywords worth loving up your content? Is there any documentation arguing one way or the other? Of course I personally sway towards quality content over SEO value, and Google is notoriously guarded about their search algorithm, but there seem to be quite a few digital marketers around here who know their stuff who I'd like to hear weigh in on this.

The plan is currently just to do what the SEO rep says, and then just reverse the changes when their client comes to them with the same argument I'm making. (Which they will--I'm pretty familiar with how this client thinks.)

Emmideer
Oct 20, 2011

Lovely night, no?
Grimey Drawer
What's the status of SEO now hat google has locked adwords keyword tools giving accurate results behind a paywall? I woke up one day to see that and, as someone who primarily uses it for market research, now I feel plum outta luck.

Chas McGill
Oct 29, 2010

loves Fat Philippe
Is SEO as boring as it seems? I have a good chance at getting a job as a technical account exec and I might go for it because I'm not having much luck finding UX related jobs at the moment.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
First question: ungrammatical uses of keywords don't work, and if they do, they won't survive a long time. Google is the largest company online, search is their main revenue source, so any shortcut you take will eventually be outed. (This one stopped working in 2014 if I recall correctly.)

Is SEO boring? It depends on what you're doing. If you like restructuring webpages, SEO is a factor. The pages you'll be fixing probably also have Bad load times and unoptimized assets.

I would love if you worked on text to speech, as I'm dictating this post and I've had to go back quite a few times.

Welcome to GBS
Feb 26, 2011

Is Shopify the best platform to start selling products on? I have a few websites, mostly built on squarespace, that I'm looking to monetize by selling physical products. Any alternatives? Does anyone just use the built in Squarespace shop?

Chas McGill
Oct 29, 2010

loves Fat Philippe

Golden Bee posted:

Is SEO boring? It depends on what you're doing. If you like restructuring webpages, SEO is a factor. The pages you'll be fixing probably also have Bad load times and unoptimized assets.

I would love if you worked on text to speech, as I'm dictating this post and I've had to go back quite a few times.

Sorry, my post was pretty dismissive, which was unwarranted. I've read more about the role and how page speed and usability factor into successful SEO and I'm a lot more interested in it. I have an interview next week so I'm trying to do a crash course in what's going on in the field, best practices etc. I think I would find optimising sites quite satisfying. My background is in interaction design and UX, so I'll try and approach it with that in mind: better speed = better usability. Google likes accessibility as well, it seems.

If anyone has experience being interviewed or interviewing candidates for technical SEO roles I'd appreciate any advice.

Snatch Duster
Feb 20, 2007

by FactsAreUseless
Sorry folks, i was probated for a month because my trolling in PYF cosplay thread. Some big changes occurred during my vacation. However, the biggest change was to Google's search algorithm with the launching of Penguin 4.0. Below is a link to an article from Cognitive SEO how impactful backlinks are for rankings now.

http://cognitiveseo.com/blog/12071/google-penguin-4-0-recoveries/?mail

In short, your site is immediately punished or rewarded by the quality of backlinks. So if you've been creating engaging content and earning placements on high domain authorities sites (50 DA score or higher) you should see a huge uptick in traffic and rankings. If you been buying lovely links from a blog or link network, you can expect to see the opposite. Before any changes to SEO, on-site and off, would slowly trend in a direction. Most SEO changes still are that way but with back links that is no longer the case.

Golden Bee
Dec 24, 2009

I came here to chew bubblegum and quote 'They Live', and I'm... at an impasse.
What does everyone use to keep current on FB ads? I could use a sounding board for one of my staff as we develop skillsets.

oliveoil
Apr 22, 2016
How do people feel about affiliate marketing? That's the one where companies give you free products and coupon codes that you use to entice customers on their behalf, right? I thought that sounded like a neat way to make money online, but it seems like if your clients aren't giving you good freebies and discounts, you're not going to send them any customers, so you're not going to make any money. Do you just keep looking through companies until you find some that give freebies and work predominantly with them?

Scaramouche
Mar 26, 2001

SPACE FACE! SPACE FACE!

oliveoil posted:

How do people feel about affiliate marketing? That's the one where companies give you free products and coupon codes that you use to entice customers on their behalf, right? I thought that sounded like a neat way to make money online, but it seems like if your clients aren't giving you good freebies and discounts, you're not going to send them any customers, so you're not going to make any money. Do you just keep looking through companies until you find some that give freebies and work predominantly with them?

The bottom recently fell out on this on the Amazon side, as they purged tons of reviews that weren't verified purchases. I believe their policy going forward is that pay-for-play reviews (e.g. get a free thing and review it on the Amazon store) can get a seller account banned.

As far as doing it as a content provider (e.g. you have a blog and want people to give you free stuff to review on it) it's all pretty niche, and I believe the only really successful people doing it have enormous specific audiences relating to that category of audience. This was common in the "mom" category a few years ago where if you ran any kind of quasi-popular blog related to baby crap you'd have free stuff coming out of your ears.

A correction though, affiliate marketing is any case where you provide traffic/leads to an eventual seller. So for example, just having an Amazon link to a product page with your affiliate id is affiliate marketing. Another would be where you have a link to GoDaddy and someone registers a domain using your affiliate link, etc etc. There doesn't have to be any coupons or free product involved.

oliveoil
Apr 22, 2016
Oh. It's kind of sad to hear that I'm too late but thank you for explaining!

Baronash
Feb 29, 2012

So what do you want to be called?
Is it still possible to use Google's keyword planner for this? I'm putting some keywords in, but it's only giving me search ranges (10k-100k, super useful) and I'm not sure how that compares to SEOT numbers.

Also, is protective equipment (or really anything that could cause injury in the event of failure) a bad idea for this? I'm wondering if I'd be opening myself up to litigation if anything ever happens.

Baronash fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Feb 26, 2017

Baronash
Feb 29, 2012

So what do you want to be called?
Sorry for the double post, but I have some revised questions if anyone still reads this thread.

I went back and re-read the old thread. According to that, SEOT is about 42% of total search volume. Since Google doesn't directly show volume anymore, I'm wondering if my workaround is valid:

I put an absurdly high maximum CPC in, and found that the number of projected impressions levels off at around 16000 per month. This means that there are about 16000 total searches for that term per month, right? Or is there something I'm not accounting for?

Pretty much every niche keyword I have researched brings up Google Shopping results. In some cases, the shopping results are in a banner at the top and text ads are only shown at the bottom of the page. What is causing text ads to not show above the fold? Also, should I be focusing on Google Shopping placement instead of text ads, regardless of whether text ads appear before search results?

Biggest question: From what I can gather between this thread and the SEO stuff I've been surrounding myself with the past few days, getting ranked highly requires high quality backlinks and a broad site with a fair amount of content. I'm trying to figure out how this could work outside of hobbyist niches. For example, if my niche was "shoe organizers," how am I supposed to build a site filled with quality content around that? Should I just avoid niches that don't cater to content generation?

clear eyes full farts
Jul 3, 2007

the uk is just awful
It's a fake democracy
with free education and healthcare as long as you are a dosser and I am trapped here :(

imo once you have reached the limit of what you can create content for widen it out to related things eg. shoe organizers widens out to closet management/storage hacks

beergod
Nov 1, 2004
NOBODY WANTS TO SEE PICTURES OF YOUR UGLY FUCKING KIDS YOU DIPSHIT
Can anyone provide recommended resources for driving traffic to a services business (in this case, a lawfirm)? Thought I would ask here; if this is the wrong thread, please ignore me.

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bug chaser chaser
Dec 11, 2006

beergod posted:

Can anyone provide recommended resources for driving traffic to a services business (in this case, a lawfirm)? Thought I would ask here; if this is the wrong thread, please ignore me.

AdWords would be where I'd start - targeting niche legal keywords. I've had to find an attorney in the past year and the best advice I can give is to have reviews on yelp / google reviews.

This is a good guide to get you started:
http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2015/06/29/law-firm-marketing

You'd want to think about setting up https://www.perfectaudience.com to retarget whoever clicks as well.

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