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Original poster

Help please - Google/Yahoo search engine advertising

39 replies

ilove · 21/03/2011 19:36

Please can anyone help?

We have a website and we currently advertise with google and yahoo, paying ppclick etc but it is costing a fortune every month.

Is there a cheaper way to get us up the google and yahoo search listings other than paying them for the search words etc and paying them per click on our website if someone comes to us through them?

This is an area I know VERY little about!

OP posts:
Tee2072 · 21/03/2011 19:42

Have you done Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your website? Does each page have keywords embedded in it for the search engines to find?

If not, there are a ton of websites and books out there to help you do that or you can hire someone to do it for you.

Original poster
ilove · 21/03/2011 20:01

Is it expensive to hire someone?

OP posts:
Original poster
ilove · 21/03/2011 20:01

Ahhh right - some of the words are embedded in the pages yes, you are the first person to tell me what SEO actually means in real-time terms!

We get reports from google and yahoo every month telling us what traffic we have had and the percentage of SEO words that have been clicked on, so I can go in and tweak those now.

Any other help or any books for dummies that might give us more of a clue please? I need to increase traffic to the site and decrease the advertising costs - don't we all!

Thankyou :D

OP posts:
Tee2072 · 21/03/2011 20:19

Really any basic SEO book should work. I would just put SEO into Amazon's search engine and buy the one with the highest rating!

Original poster
ilove · 21/03/2011 20:26

Is that all we need to do to increase it? You hear about these companies that promise to get you to the top if you pay them £££ but as I've no idea really what needs to be done, I don't know how difficult it is!

OP posts:
TalkinPeace2 · 21/03/2011 21:11

Adwords
pay the minimum to stay on page 1 : 4th or 5th place is fine.
Look at time of day of clicks.
Mine are off at night to stop spurious clicks from overseas
make use of mis spelling
be specific
DO NOT let the adword companies bounce you into more ads, more words and more per click
context clicks - in sites - I hate so have set at 1p maximum
use your web stats to see where people go once they have come to visit

when I started adwords I checked it nearly every day
now its stable and I go once a month if that (service remains unchanged, website updated)

Original poster
ilove · 21/03/2011 21:25

Clearly we are not doing nearly enough ourselves, we have set it up, set an amount per click and done nothing else Blush

OK I have looked on Amazon and the Pay-per-click for dummies looks good to me - well rated and covers google and yahoo. I think we are paying FAR too much to Google and Yahoo every month at the moment and it is ridiculous, along with paying for the site to be hosted as well.

OP posts:
TalkinPeace2 · 21/03/2011 21:30

Adwords is FUN.
Its a game in itself.
I used to spend hours tweaking it - default click is 6p - remember that DH's site is not a retail sales one - some things are 1p, others 15p and I NEVER bump up to what they suggest
daily budget is £5 - but normally nearer 95p !

don't get a book - just play with it. You can always undo changes.....

hambo · 21/03/2011 22:05

I have a question to you all - how do you know what words to buy? I sell nursery art but I am not sure what people would type in to find it...do you just change the words every so often to see how business increases/decreases? Watching this thread as I have not started paying yet as I am scared of the amount of money it will cost....

Original poster
ilove · 21/03/2011 22:36

From what I can gather up there ^ it is words you already have within your website that you need to be using. Am I right?

OP posts:
TalkinPeace2 · 22/03/2011 12:57

there are two parts to SEO

'organic searches' in the main search list, which are based on the keywords in your web page headers and the number of people linked to it and who refer to it

this can be 'enhanced' by making sure your website metatags are spot on
AND use twitter, linkedin, facebook, blogs, ebay, etc etc

'paid searches' - down the right hand side or 'featured links' - these are adwords and are adverts that provide a link to your website and NEED NOT use the same words.

There is also google maps - people pay for those little pins and popups

we used do discuss this as infinitum as nauseam on the ebay business board - hours of fun!

Tee2072 · 22/03/2011 17:26

TalkinPeace beat me to it!

It's not just words on your page, but words in the code of the headers of your page.

Original poster
ilove · 23/03/2011 14:44

OK, so how do we check that they are in there? We didn't build the website we had it done by a company.

OP posts:
Original poster
ilove · 23/03/2011 14:45

What are metatags? I am feeling more clueless by the minute!

OP posts:
TalkinPeace2 · 23/03/2011 16:37

Hover over a web page - any web page, this one will do.
Right click.
click on "View Page Source"
You can now see the HTML that underlies every web page
For this page, its lots of white and courier text and this bit

quite near the top.....
the meta tags are the description for google.
Try the same with your own site....
or your competitors
you'll soon start seeing what is in there

hambo · 23/03/2011 18:59

Oh ho Talkin Peace...v v v interesting! I never knew how to find that out bfore...off to scout the competition!!!

TalkinPeace2 · 23/03/2011 20:09

HTH
As a beancounter I'm a bit of a secret geek - DH's website that I wrote, paid for my lifestyle for ten years!
I got Simon of UKSiteBuilder to rewrite it last year and now maintain it again.
I find understanding how it works makes a real difference.
Things like CSS (Cascading Style sheets) - if you understand what / how they work you are likely to have a better, more robust site and less likely to be ripped off.
I donate £30 every couple of years to Stuart who runs this site www.cssplay.co.uk/ for the free use of his (excellent) ideas.
Even reading his site will help.

A couple of sites to look at written by people I've chatted to over the years (on this name and my own) - again, look at the code/tags to understand more
www.laughingbeartoys.co.uk/ - a home educator dad
www.thesoapycauldron.co.uk/ - when I first 'met' her a 29 year old single mum of 4
www.fusion4clothes.co.uk/ - Terry is mad as a hatter but DH loves his shirts

taking control of how people see your business is very important

Helenagrace · 26/03/2011 21:25

Can I just say thanks for posting this and thanks to everyone else for their ideas. We're just revising our web presence and we've been quoted some truly astonishing sums for SEO by some truly uninspiring people so it's been really helpful to read what others do.

One good piece of advice I received from the entrepreneurship programme I'm part of was to change ONE thing at a time with emarketing and evaluate it before changing anything else. Then you'll know what made a difference and you can concentrate on doing more of that.

off to Amazon now...

nannynick · 26/03/2011 22:27

If you are in the business of selling something... then remember it's not the number of visitors you get that is important but the conversion rate from visitors to buyers. The window shoppers are not important, what you want are buyers. So track on your site how people find it, paths they take, what they buy.

You can use free services like Google Analytics or paid for services like GetClicky.

TalkinPeace2 · 27/03/2011 15:55

but also bear in mind that a site like DH's - which has no direct sales
falls down on every click through ratio algorithm.
His site suggests to people what he offers.
they email him
they cogitate
they might book
the profit on each and every booking is more than the annual adwords budget....
YOU have to understand YOUR business.
Geeks are lovely but they are geeks, do not trust them with the business that YOU understand.
And don't get me started on "management consultants"

Helenagrace · 27/03/2011 17:59

Yikes talkinpeace some of what I do could be described as management consultancy...don't start on me!!

TalkinPeace2 · 27/03/2011 21:03

LOL
So is what I do when the beans become too esoteric to count!

dreamofwhitehorses · 14/04/2011 23:12

Talkinpeace, just to let you know I have found your advice on this thread really useful. In fact I registered partly to say that!

Now I know about clicking on page source to view the html, I have been copying and pasting the keywords and metatags from sites similar to me that seem to do well in search results (obviously adjusting them to reflect my business) Is this a good way to start with SEO?

bluetortoise · 18/04/2011 09:42

dying to know the answer to that question Dream, I am also not a very technical person and most of the information in this thread has been very helpful but a little bit of a 'foreign' language to me. Now I am starting to 'process/understand' some of the information, would like to know if practical things like what Dream has suggested would be a good starting point...

TalkinPeace2 · 18/04/2011 18:46

dream - HTH
That is a good starting point.

It may also be worth setting some of those words up as 1p adwords to see how many people actually search on them
web traffic stats are very useful for that too - see where people come in to your site from and what they do when they are there

its almost as addictive as discussion boards!