As an online business, you need to work hard at getting your position cemented within the SERPs, hopefully with the end goal hopefully that you’re a recognizable brand both online and offline. It is a long road to work at gaining a high position within your relevant ranks, but it’s also not impossible to completely own the results pages for your brand, and with a lot of hard work and a little luck, you can easily dominate branded search.

Your first stop, as it should always be with branding, is with a strong AdWords campaign. There are a number of reasons you need to take the step to owning your own brand with AdWords, one of the main points being, it’s your brand. Any ads that are on that page should all be sent back to your website and no one elses. You’ll want to focus your campaign with exact match keywords and phrases so you can keep the costs down, and while their may be some competition initially you’ll push out the interlopers purely by being more relevant to the exact match settings of your branding campaign. Over time your costs to maintain a branded AdWords campaign will drop, and it will cost you a fraction of what it took to initially build up your position. What you’ll earn by owning your brand in AdWords is a higher than expected conversion rate from your PPC campaign, especially if you make sure to have your landing pages ready to make that conversion possible once the visitor arrives.

The bigger trick, and a more difficult one to earn, is owning the organic listings for your brand. Again though, just like with AdWords just because it’s difficult does not mean that it’s impossible. But just like with building your relevancy and authority with any organic search, focusing on a branded term will eventually pay off. Having the AdWords positioned and fully owned by your brand will help with your organic positions, as you’ve already had to develop the content and relevance to list in paid search. Expanding on your overall site will help your case with organic, and if you keep your quality of content as high as you needed initially over time you’ll soon have an entire branded results page, dedicated wholly to you and your business.

Whether you’re going for a pay per click campaign to get your branding started, or you want to invest the time into building a strong organic position you need to identify what your goal is from the beginning. One of the most common mistakes you can make when you have your business online is to not have a clear, defined goal or purpose. This leads the search engines to try and figure out what it is you do and who you are, and all the while you should be doing it yourself.

There are a handful of advertising options when you’ve gotten your business up and rolling, and each one has their own pros and cons. Television, radio and print advertising is generally seen as being an older, dated method of advertising that still sees a fair amount of use, especially among some of the larger companies out there. Because at a certain point, you need to use it, because your competitors are.

And then 20 years or so ago, all of that got flipped onto it’s head with the rapid growth and use of the internet. It took a few years for an indexing service to come along, but Google worked out a way to wrangle the mess of the web, and give it some order, and allowed users to search the web for what they want. Fast forward to today, and it is again starting to become a tangled mess of advertising avenues. Having a website has become, for the most part, a no brainer, if you have a business, you need a website. Because just how old media advertising was perceived 60 years ago, if you’re not doing it and capitalizing on the advertising, your competitor will be. One of the biggest differences between the old advertising methods and their counterparts of today however, is that the online variants can be tracked and deliver you a definitive return on your investment. Search engine marketing, also known as pay per click advertising is great for immediate branding efforts and recognition, and helps you build your brand quicker than by just word of mouth. Think of PPC/SEM advertising as impulse adverts, like the gum and magazines you see in the check out isle at the grocery store.

The true benefits of online marketing really only become clear when you have the time and the budget to incorporate search engine optimization into your advertising portfolio. It is not to be taken lightly or done in a haphazard way. SEO is the chocolate chips in a chocolate chip cookie, you need to do it right, and it needs to be done in a proper balance otherwise you’ll end up with a poor product, and be met with the wrong side of the ranking algorithm on the search engines. There isn’t much to expand upon regarding search engine optimization, and in the spirit of following our own rule set of keeping it simple, if you don’t know how to properly perform SEO, don’t.

There are a number of ways to market your business online, the two more prevalent methods are search engine optimization, and using social media to help you garner attention and traffic. Although it’s a little a lesser known method to use to help bolster your online visibility, AdWords, or search engine marketing is a very powerful tool which when used properly can definitely attract highly qualified customers to your website.

Typically the paid results show to the side, or sometimes above the results page after performing a search. The links are often on a different color background and their formatting is different. And if all of those were not strong enough indicators that they’re different than the organic results you’ve received, in the corner of that different colored box you’ll find a small snippet of text that says ‘Sponsored Links’. Think of it as paid advertisement that is trying to capture those impulse buyers out there, the people who buy a package of gum or a magazine in the check out line at the grocery store. If your ad copy is well written, your bid is high enough and you’re trying to build a brand for yourself, AdWords is a medium you definitely need to explore.

The point of the short explanation of adwords and their use, has to do with a court case that was recently settled in the US. It was between two rival companies, and one took the other to court because of their questionable use of adwords marketing. Referring to them as Company A and Company B, it went something like this: Company A wanted to try and garner traffic from searches completed using Company B’s name, so Company A used the AdWords platform so they would also appear on the results page. The judge in the case cleared Company A of any wrong doing, even though Company B argued that it was a breach of privacy, when in fact it was clever, albeit shady, marketing. If Company B had done their job marketing themselves correctly, and had used AdWords as well to ensure they capitalized on searches using their name, then there wouldn’t have been a case to begin with. From now on I’m sure they’ll be more likely to consult with those who know what they’re doing, in order to protect their online brand.

Online marketing and branding is can be an intensely competitive market, made even more difficult with there being billions and billions of web pages out there about everything you can imagine. And while they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it can tend to be a death note where the search engines are concerned.

With the web being so massive, it’s can be often difficult to say where content originated. Images get copied, text gets scraped and snippets of code gets replicated across the web on untold amounts of websites. Where organic optimization is concerned, it’s a time intensive process to prove original authorship in some cases, and even then it may not make a ton of difference. There is a difference however, where paid advertisements are concerned, such as with Adwords campaigns.

Adwords is a much different platform from organic search, the biggest being you’re paying for your positioning in the results pages. You bid for your chosen keywords, and if your ad copy and your bid are better than your competitors then your ad will appear, frequently before theirs. It’s a lucrative search market namely because it’s where people make their snap buying decisions. Sometimes, there are companies out there which play a little dirtier than others, sometimes copying ads copy directly, or even copying ad titles and format. It is a dirty business practice, and you can compare it to Pepsi mimiking a Coca Cola commercial or tune.

As dirty as it is to copy your competitors titles, copy or entire text, due to the nature of the business they may be allowed to run the ad, that is of course unless you dispute their usage. A prevalent argument that is often found in these cases falls under the Adwords informational site policy, a long winded document that exists to cover the usage of trademarked terms use in Adwords. It basically limits the use of a trademarked term to the original mark holder, or a reseller of the product. The loop hole exists however, when you get to the portion of informational sites, which can carry the trademarked text if the landing page of the ad is informative in nature to the written ad text. Now just because the loop hole exists, it doesn’t mean you’re out of luck if your competitor runs an identical ad using your text, your primary step should be to file a dispute in your Adwords account against the ad. You’re also covered in the same trademark policy text where it basically says you can’t use a trademarked term if the goal is to take sales away from the trademark holder.

Make sure to be diligent with your Adwords copy, and if you see someone using your very own text to try and snag away sales then you should be reporting them as soon as possible. If you let it slide, there’s nothing stopping you from losing your next big sale.

So finally the election is finished, and the winner has been decided. If for some reason you’ve been living in a cave the last couple of days, Obama took the crown and is set to begin his second term as the President of the United States. And regardless of who you were rooting for, there were some interesting search discoveries over the last couple of months of the battle, which have their roots in search.

A few days back, there was a story run in the Wall Street Journal about how Google was serving up results pages in what some were thinking was a strange coincidence. It seemed that even with being signed out of a Google account, and being on a cookie free browser, the results when searching for Obama almost bcame personalized. The article that was published even went on to say that the search engine was biased when searching for obama and related news, with one story coming right out and saying that the candidates were being treated unfairly. While it would make for a great conspiracy story, the unexciting truth is that it’s just how the Google algo works. Google simply displayed results based on how people searched for terms, the example being

more people searched for “Obama” followed by searches for “Iran” than the number of people who searched for “Romney” followed by “Iran.”

That was the first interesting point, the second follows in a similar vein.

It’s not really news anymore that between the candidates there were hundreds of millions of dollars spent on campaigning, but it was interesting to find that Obama out bid Romney on search ads online at nearly three to one. Both were bidding on the big hitters like ”2012 election” and “2012 presidential polls” to lead people to their campaign websites, but it was the former President who owned the paid advertisements of the results pages. Sticking in the trend of online visibility, Obama had Romney beat across the board with more Facebook fans, website visitors and Youtube video views.

The largest demographic in the voting populace is shifting to a much younger, information hungry crowd, so being able to be found online should be an integral cog in any parties agenda. When you shake all the numbers out from organic results to paid search, it looks like in the end Obama simply out optimized his opponent, and as helped secure himself with a second term.

In the online digital world that we’re moving towards, there are a lot of intangible elements that can leave you wanting for more. Are my documents really safe to be stored only in a cloud service? How can I discerne how my visitors interact with my website? Is it possible for me to work out a precise return on investment for my SEO and PPC (pay per click) campaigns?

With there being so many extra variables, it’s difficult to acurately answer those types of questions, as each case is unique. Some cloud services are much more reliable than others for example, while even the biggest and best companies don’t sell themselves as having 100% uptime. Because where the web is concerned, it’s still has more than enough unknown variables affecting performance. There has been software, which reports assumptions of how visitors interact with your website for example, basing it’s calculations on mouse point duration and location. It takes the clicks that users perform on your website and use the aforementioned mouse position to determine your highest activity zones on your website. It’s still a best guess scenario at any rate, as it can only assume that each visitor to your site is actively engaged, and not tabbed out of the screen leaving you with a false positive.

Return on investment, is also one of those intangible variables that can be difficult to distinguish where search engine optimization is concerned. Pay per click is different in that you are actively bidding on your traffic and visitors, banking on their impulses to make conversions. Google Adwords for example can give you a calculated percentage of what each click through visitor was worth for you, so you can determine if your Adwords cost is justified, so you can make a solid decision on that investment. SEO is a tougher variable to work with, as your site content has to be that much better. Once you’ve worked on your campaign well enough to rank organically, you need to then work on your content to determine if it will elicit the response you want, whether it’s a newsletter sign up, email address or a direct purchase. There are a handful of sites which are built to help you work out the return on your SEO investment, some of which run with a hefty price tag. Organic optimization is the business of bringing your website relevant traffic, if your content is well done, you’ll convert to the type of result you’re looking for. Sometimes the information you’re seeking, is only a few clicks away, and you will learn how you’re being found.

With Google making their gaff and releasing their earnings numbers in the middle of the day as opposed to the end of day, it caused a bit of excitement. So much do in fact, that trading on their stock had to be halted, due to their earnings being lower than expected.

The market had already been aggressive with the stock, estimating positive growth in the company. With the final numbers coming in lower than what was expected, it caused the knee jerk reaction that the stock experienced. But just how is it, that one of the most powerful online properties failed to increase earnings when they picked up notable acquisitions like Motorola? Perhaps the answer isn’t as complex as it seems on the surface.

When it comes to search there is a handful of (viable) options for being found online, Google, Bing etc. But one of the avenues that mostly levels the search playing field is paid search, or PPC. Pay per click is almost the gear equalizer, as it’s limited to daily budget and doesn’t have any real bearing on age of domain or rely on heavy back linking strategies, you just need to write a better ad than the other guy. The issue we’ve been seeing in the last 8 months or so is the cost per click on client campaigns, previous costs ran in the 35 to 40 cent range where now we’re seeing increases to the 3 dollar plus range.

It makes it vastly difficult for anyone who doesn’t have a budget of several hundred dollars, equating to budgets of several thousand dollars per month. Short term gains are much more difficult for the mid to small business owner and who knows, maybe a direct correlation was their bottom line.

In Search Engine Optimization, your keyword margin for error is very large. If you use a keyword in a way that just doesn’t seem to be working, you can adjust it and try again. You may even find yourself starting to rank for keywords you didn’t think about. Those are a bonus, and you can chalk them up to extra traffic and possible conversions. You’ll also want to reassess your keywords every now and then to make sure there aren’t new trends, technologies, products or ideas that weren’t popular when you first did your research.

Since organic optimization doesn’t attach a fee per keyword, you shouldn’t shy away from the high competition terms that you may not get. It doesn’t hurt to compete for those, and, it makes it easier to match up for long tail keywords. And when it comes to the users, it makes your site much cleaner, because instead of having headings like “Winnipeg Blue Bombers Hatsfor your baby”, you can stick with “Blue Bomber Hats” or the more specific but still high volume “Winnipeg Blue Bomber”. It’s important to adjust the depth of the keyword to the depth of the site, with your landing pages using broader keyword matching and leaving it to your categories to be more specific.

On the other side of the spectrum, the margin for error in PPC is small. Every time you make a mistake, it costs you money. Every time that you bid on a new keyword, it puts you in direct competition with other sites. You need to go over your keywords with a fine tooth comb, cutting out those that aren’t working, adding negatives, researching new trends, and always the cost per click in mind and the other on the Quality Score. You need to make sure you’re using themes to categorize your keywords, that your copy is performing as well as it possibly can, and that your tight ad group/keyword strategy extends to your landing page and the way keywords are used on it.

When you’re working on your online branding campaign, a portion of your time is well spent on working on your pay per click offering. It’s like writing ad copy for a commercial, as adwords are the results which you see often on the top of the organic results, or to the left of the page. Typically marked as ‘Sponsored Links’ so as not to confuse those who are looking for the organic, or natural listings in the center of the page.

The pay per click model of search listing and advertising has been gaining a growing number of clicks, especially with searchers actively seeking to purchase an item. While working hard to improve on page and off page otpimization to rank organically is great for the long term gains, you can experience short term growth with adwords (PPC) advertising.

Once you’re setup with your adwords account, you’ll begin to get emails from Google offering to assist you with your account. Sometimes they offer simple suggestions as to keyword optimization or increasing your daily budget, and sometimes straight up offer a helping hand at improving traffic. On the surface at the moment, it seems that the helping hand that can be offered is worth it, with increased traffic and lower over all cost. And if that were all that were important with the PPC model that would be great, but the number one metric of measurement still hasn’t been determined – conversion rate.

It’s a great point of pride to say that your website receives 1000 visitors per hour (example only), and that your adwords cost to drive those visitors is only a few cents. But if you’re only able to effectively complete your goal – sign up for a newsletter or email, purchase a product etc, a few times out of those thousand then you’re really not doing as well as it looks initially. Your conversion rate is the key metric that matters the most in a pay per click campaign, and while it seems that letting the Adwords associates do the heavy lifting for you is great on the surface, they really only serve the same purpose as a search engine optimization expert. Driving traffic is key to visibility online, but it’s up to you and your website to convert the visitor.

It’s simply another method which you can use to become a more trusted business online, but Googles AdWords advertisements are sometimes met with ire. With complaints of search privacy and too many advertisements, Google is about to roll out a feature which should help clean up your browsing in the near future.

The newest feature to begin rolling out, is one which directly, and indirectly affects your browsing. Ads which are displayed on Youtube have had a small [x] in the top corner which allows you to close the ad so you can continue watching your chosen video uninterrupted. This muting feature, is currently now on its way to all ads served on the AdWords display network. Display ads are visually driven ads, often pictures or a short gif, as opposed to the purely text ads you often find attached to search results on the Google results page. By allowing users to be able to mute ads, it’s allowing a few things. You’re telling the search engines that you’re not interested in seeing ads from that ad group any longer, and a link to an Ad Preferences page where you can tell Google the types of ads you don’t want to see. By using the ads preferences page you can tell Google exactly which types of ads you don’t mind seeing occasionaly on your browsing adventures, and which types you explicitly don’t want to see.

With the idea of being able to mute display ads, you’re also saving advertisers money, as they don’t have to pay for ads which are served to individuals who aren’t interested in them, and you don’t have to continually filter out advertisements in an ad group you don’t want to see. All in all it’s a solid step forward for both parties online, the advertisers and the consumers.