Steady Bid Rates

One of the toughest parts of being an early AdWords advertiser was that new – and largely uneducated – competitors were continually jumping into the game. These competitors would bid high in an attempt to reach the number one spot and force everyone to increase their cost-per-click (CPC) to remain competitive. Bids often increased month-over-month and our clients had to raise their budgets to maintain a steady click rate or simply accept fewer clicks within a given budget.

Today, we’re noticing that bid rates are very stable. We rarely need to increase our clients’ maximum CPCs by more than ten cents from one year to the next. Moreover, our typical client regularly appears within the top three ad positions with maximum bids of $2 to $4 – a far cry from the $40-$50 bids insurance, loan, and mortgage companies are willing to pay to achieve a top spot.

Improved Analytics

Ten years ago, you could report on the number of times your ad was clicked and how much it cost, but little else. Today, conversion tracking and the integration between Google AdWords and Google Analytics makes it easy to understand how AdWords visitors navigate through your site. Are AdWords visitors actually spending time on your site and hitting your contact page, or are they abandoning your landing page in a matter of seconds? Today, it’s easy to tell.

In fact, Analytics is now able to track an entire e-commerce workflow from click through to sale – and can report on the actual cost-per-sale.

Take a Second Look

If your company gave up on AdWords years ago, it now makes sense to take a second look. If you’d like some help, our Pay-Per-Click Advertising service has helped a number of B2B and B2C clients launch – or improve – long-lasting campaigns with positive results.

The post It’s Time to Reconsider Google AdWords appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

- by Andre Danis

In a recent meeting with a trusted client, the owner stated categorically that he did not “believe” in social media. He said that it was just another piece of useless drivel and that he would be damned if he started wasting time, effort and money supporting it. My reply to him was: “Steve*, the web doesn’t care what you think”.

*Names have been changed to protect the guilty!

The Web Likes Social Media

There has been a huge increase in the number of social media sites and corresponding users  in the last five years.  Along the way, most social sites have transformed into “search and deliver” engines for their users. As a result, web search engines have begun to score and integrate social media “signals” into their  efforts to serve up top-drawer content to users. In short, when all other factors are equal, content that is shared via social media is more likely to be well-ranked than content that is not.

Does this mean that quality of page content, metadata, and search engine optimization –all staples of strong search performance –are becoming irrelevant? Absolutely not. But it does imply that the number of likes, shares, posts and comments can and will impact your overall web popularity and your search engine rankings. Although developing a social media strategy may seem daunting, the good news is that most engines provide tools that allow managers to apply some science to optimizing performance in the social media realm.

Extend Your Reach

Social media also has huge benefits in terms of reaching large and/or specialty audiences. Car manufacturers are adept at using social media to generate buzz. A high resolution photo of an upcoming car model is released onto social media streams and within minutes the post has hundreds of thousands of “likes” and comments. You simply can’t do this in other media realms without big budgets.

A successful online strategy requires a complex mix of tactics and your web site is just one of them. How well your site interacts with other web-based elements is what will ultimately define your incoming search traffic volume and quality, and social media has become an inherent component in the big picture.

You may or may not like social media, but the web does – and it’s the web’s opinion that matters.

Would you like to know more about social media and how to take advantage of it? Talk to us.

Further Reading

12 Most Feeble Excuses Leaders Give to Shun Social Media Read it >>

The post Hate Social Media? The Web Doesn’t Care. appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

Check Your Image Search Rank

Google Images presents desktop and mobile visitors with an attractive and easily scrollable list of relevant imagery. If your images are not optimized with important keywords, it is unlikely that they will appear among the top image search results. Images can be a valuable referring source of traffic to your website so it’s wise to appear as high as possible in a Google Images result.

Moreover, Google often includes a row of images as part of its regular text search results. Even if your customer base isn’t likely to perform an image search for your product, it is still worth optimizing your images to try to grab a piece of this valuable first-page real estate.

It’s Not Difficult, But…

Many of the rules that apply to website content optimization carry over to image optimization, but there are some unique best practices you’ll need to consider. Your ALT text, filenames, file size, captions and surrounding text can make or break your chance at cracking the first page of image results.

As part of our search engine optimization services, Kaszas can provide specific image optimization recommendations for a new or existing website. If you’re unhappy with your existing image search placement or think that you might be missing out on image-based traffic, talk to us!

The post Don’t Forget to Optimize Your Images! appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

But to simplify the question, I thought I’d offer a few certain warning signs that you’re spending too much time on social media:

1. You catch yourself using the words “like” and “dislike” in conversations. As complete sentences.
2. You keep looking for the Comment button — in emails, cards, and face-to-face conversations.
3. You won’t click/read online content if it isn’t accompanied by an image.
4. You use #hashtags in your love letters.

Happy Easter!

-maria

The post Signs That You Use Social Media Too Much appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

The Curse of the Button-Pusher

Lately, we’ve come across a number of PPC campaigns that have been set up quickly, are being monitored passively (if at all), and are performing poorly as a result. In each of these campaigns, we noticed the following tell-tale signs of  ”button-pusher” management:

1) Campaigns use default settings. A pay-per-click campaign should be as unique as the company offering it. While there are best practices that apply to all PPC campaigns, each company will have unique goals, audiences, products, and services that necessitate a custom strategy and approach. When Kaszas takes on a PPC project, the bulk of our time is spent  developing a custom strategy that will target the right audience with the best set of keywords (including broad, phrase, and exact matches), ad text, landing pages, ad settings, and budget possible. Flipping the switch and “turning on” a PPC campaign is easy – its the work that comes before the launch that is important.

2) Reporting is weak. Almost every new account we audit or improve  lacks conversion tracking and/or is not connected to a Google Analytics account. This means that only “clicks”, “cost-per-click”, and “click-through-rate” are used to analyze the success of a campaign. Clicks alone, however, don’t tell the whole story. Anyone can setup a campaign that receives clicks. What matters is what those visitors do after they click. What action do they take? Do they navigate from the landing page to important pages on your website? How much time do they actually spend on the site?

3) Only one campaign is used. Quite often, we come across an account that uses only one campaign and AdGroup. In these cases, all keywords and ad variations are lumped into one massive campaign. It’s almost impossible to write ad text that accommodates each keyword variation in a long list. Furthermore, this approach ensures that many keywords will never trigger an ad as the available budget will be “eaten up” by the handful of most frequently searched terms from the long list.

4) Ads do not point to targeted landing pages. There is almost never a case in which pointing a PPC ad at your homepage is desirable, yet this is one of the most common errors we see. In addition to frustrating users that expect to land on a page dedicated to their particular search query, this practice raises your cost-per-click (CPC) rates. Search engines want to ensure that ads are relevant and will punish advertisers (by lowering their ad position and specifying a high minimum CPC) that don’t link to a relevant landing page.

5) Ads follow a “set and forget” mentality. A well-built PPC campaign will perform in a stable manner once it’s been properly implemented but your audiences, your competitors, and the search engines you advertise on will continue to evolve. In our experience, campaigns that are actively monitored and tweaked consistently outperform those that are ignored or for which a report is automatically generated each month.

Hire the Professionals

At Kaszas Marketing, we’ve been managing pay-per-click accounts for clients for more than seven years. In that time, we’ve learned how to craft, implement, and monitor winning PPC strategies for both B2B and B2C clients. If you suspect that your existing PPC campaign is being neglected or are looking to launch a campaign for the first time, contact us!

The post Is a “Button-Pusher” Managing Your AdWords Campaign? appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

I’ve used Google Reader for years, in particular to track topics on the web of importance to our clients. Today, Google shut down this (free) and very popular application, meeting with widespread public outcries against the move. I also use Facebook, and there is always a great outcry when Facebook makes changes to the site’s usability, privacy policies, layouts, and more. LinkedIN has also been experimenting, and not (in my opinion) for the better.

One can argue that, because these are FREE services, users have no right to complain when these services’ owners make changes, rescind privileges, or anything else. It’s a fun ride while it lasts, be glad that you get to enjoy it at all. Right?

I don’t think so. By capturing us and enabling us to use (and to WANT to use) their applications and services, Google, Facebook, LinkedIN and other social mediums build their most valuable currency: our attention and eyeballs. Without this currency, there would be no business model, as there would be no one for advertisers to speak to.

Nikhil Pradan provides an excellent analysis of Google’s decision:

Google’s focus has always been serving ads based on user profile and a user’s profile doesn’t get clearer than on a social network. With Google+ not really setting the world on fire (after all, in spite of all the numbers that Google puts out there with regard to the growing Google+ user base, how many people do you know around you that actually use Google+ on a regular basis?), and Facebook proving that content sharing within social networks is a viable revenue opportunity, it would seem like a wise business decision for Google to force its users to start sharing content exclusively on Google+ rather than through an additional service that doesn’t possess a social network’s inherent ability to draw out more information about the user from the user.

Although the business reasons for the decision may be rational, when operators shut down popular apps and services–or make wholesale changes–without real consultation with users, they are sending users a message. The message is this: we value your usage, not YOU.

Consumers’ use of a service is in itself a currency. When the currency flows in favour of the operator then we’ll be able to continue to enjoy the service. We may even be asked for our opinions about how to improve it. But if our use of the service doesn’t align with the operator’s corporate goals, we consumers have less value. The colour of our “money” is wrong.

Very few small businesses could afford to operate this way, because whole customer relationships are so critical. The trouble that the Googles of the world have is that they are Big Companies with shareholders to satisfy, but their brands create extremely personal relationships with users.

Use of Google Reader may have been declining, but my use of Google overall has more than tripled in the past year, since I brought my company into the cloud with Google Apps. Despite my increased loyalty, Google has taken away something that was valuable to me and to my business.

Google and its counterparts are big companies, but small thinkers.

The post Google: Big Company, Small Thinker appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

Search engine optimization must be the most tedious job I can think of. The process of keyword research in particular is boring, repetitive, tedious, and leads a person down multiple branching pathways that are often unanticipated and un-budgeted. Sometimes, it feels like a monkey could do the job.

But a monkey can’t do the job, and it’s why we refuse to outsource this task, despite the many companies from India, China, etc. that contact us on a weekly basis offering to provide the service for us. Yes, it would save us time. Yes, we’d make better margins on our SEO service by outsourcing the “grunt work” overseas. But we wouldn’t be able to provide the true value that has proven itself again and again in our clients’ search engine rankings.

IQ, not AI

The fact is that search engine optimization is an art and a science. While the data-gathering process may be very tedious, it is crucial to the INSIGHTS that it holds. Insights that only an educated, experienced, and knowledgeable marketer can detect, understand, and apply to a given business. Time and again during the SEO research process, we uncover insights into how a business should best structure much more than its website content or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. In fact, the data usually gives us insight into how a client can best structure its offer model, its website data model, promotions, thought leadership, social media efforts, and more.

Just as important is the critical analysis that must be applied to the data to understand it, organize it, and make it work FOR the client. Automated tools and many quick-and-dirty solutions simply cannot provide this value. There is simply no substitute for experienced, educated human intelligence.

What are You Really Paying For?

We know there are tons of companies out there offering SEO and PPC services for $500 a month. They do it by reselling Google’s automated services–not by applying deep intelligence to the task. They prey on their clients’ desire to rank well in search (regardless of whether the search rankings match what your actual customers are doing) and their lack of knowledge about the process.

$500 a month adds up quickly whether or not it delivers great business value and measurable results. Our approach begins with a deep dive into data that produces insights that impact a business’s overall strategy, and an SEO and/or PPC strategy that will yield the best possible, longest lasting results.

You can read more of what we have to say and demonstrate regarding search engine optimization >>

I invite you to contact us to learn how we can build the best possible foundation for YOUR website’s long-term search engine, marketing, and lead-generation performance.

The post SEO: the Most Tedious Job in the World appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

In the Beginning

I founded Kaszas Communications Inc. in 2002 based on the work and the industry that I had specialized in over the previous four years:

“Kaszas Communications is a strategic marketing communications, positioning and writing firm specialized in helping technology-based organizations effectively communicate the value of their products and services to customers, partners, employees, investors and media.”

This messaging was effective in attracting my first tech clients, but I wished to diversify the
business into other markets and to leverage my experience with other types of businesses, such as professional services firms and the design/build industry. Over time, the messaging needed to adjust to accommodate that goal, along with some shifts that occurred as my business grew:

• I had become more attuned to the reasons that motivated my clients to seek out my help.
• I had developed specific processes and standards of work that I wanted to convey.
• I was doing more “packaging” of services and needed to make it easy to understand how a company could engage with Kaszas.

Evolving Confidence

By 2005, the main message had evolved to incorporate the language of the customer:

“At some point most businesses struggle with getting their target customers to take notice. Previously effective marketing approaches can begin to yield fewer results. Competition can start multiplying like rabbits, making your efforts to stand out more difficult. You may find that people in your networking group still don’t know much about your business.

“Kaszas Communications is expert in helping private businesses shape their offerings and craft their messages to be relevant and compelling for the target audiences. Our positioning and messaging strategies lead to the development of effective marketing and sales tools that do more than look good. They get your messages heard.”

While the focus of the business was still on helping companies to effectively communicate, the messages had evolved to speak more relevantly to the target market.

Accommodating Growth

A year later, I hired my first employee and his first major project was to perform the Kaszas Communications process on Kaszas itself, while he was still nearer to being an objective outsider than a Kool-Aid drinking insider. This included an audit, competitive survey, interviews with customers, and other data points.

Based on the findings, we undertook a major overhaul of the Kaszas look-and-feel, messaging, website and marketing materials. The messages had to evolve to suit two distinct audiences or types of clients that the process identified, and needed to fill particular gaps that the research had uncovered.

The new messages developed in late 2006 continued to reflect our core values and purpose, but with even greater clarity of vision and crisper delivery—results of the confidence that the process always delivers:

“Kaszas Communications Inc. is a marketing communications boutique that knows a good story and how to tell it. We’re experts in effectively communicating the difference and value that a business offers to its target audiences.

“We’ll synthesize your vision, expertise, products and services into concise marketing communications strategies and tactics that do more than tell your story. They get it heard.

“Whether you’re looking for branding, positioning, communications strategy, marketing writing, or website optimization services, our integrated marketing communications approach ensures that any new project works in concert with your other activities to maximize the power of your message.”

This message remained largely intact for the next six years, maintained through other updates such as to website design, headlines and home page banners, the addition and reorganization of services and pages for search engine optimization purposes, and the overhaul of the site’s content management system.

Re-branding

This year, Kaszas welcomed its third employee, brought on to enable us to provide a complete range of integrated marketing services. This required the most significant adjustment to our messages yet, because the company now covers a broader range of marketing services. It was also an opportunity to dig deeper than ever before into our company’s key value proposition and differentiation—to solidify and communicate these elements very clearly.

We determined that the brand needed to be updated to properly reflect the company’s expanded
focus. By changing “Kaszas Communications” to “Kaszas Marketing” we were able to maintain the personal aspect of the company name (Kaszas is my maternal grandmother’s maiden name) while still reflecting the company’s full range of capabilities in marketing rather than just communications.

While our key message has an expanded scope, you’ll note that the concept of “being heard” has remained relevant over the past 11 years:

“Be Seen. Be Heard. Be Remembered. We believe that an investment in marketing should yield long-term results. Kaszas Marketing is a consulting firm that delivers lasting outcomes. The marketing strategies, brands, messages, and programs that we develop for our clients are pitch-perfect platforms that support businesses through growth and transition.”

Read the full message set here >>

This latest evolution of our messaging is the most significant to date, yet it is still an evolution rather than an overhaul. It has been possible to maintain this continuity by utilizing these best practices:

1. Focus. Focusing the brand on a core capability has ensured continuity in the business as well as the marketing and the messaging.
2. Process. Because we are marketers, people often think that we are able to do our own messaging and marketing in a magical way. In reality, we have always followed our own process—the same one that we use with every client. This ensures that our own messaging is objectively constructed: relevant to our target audiences, and based on research and data.
3. Attention. I have never allowed the company to succumb to the “Cobbler’s Children” syndrome. In fact, we rarely recommend anything to a client—such as a process, a tool, or a strategy—that we have not first experimented with and used ourselves. We pay constant attention to our messages and marketing materials to ensure that they remain aligned with our goals, intentions, our industry, and our clients.

Is it Time for an Update?

Because business exists in an environment of constant change, your company’s messages, marketing materials, and design should be reviewed yearly. Brands and websites should be reviewed every three years. If the brand and messaging foundation is a strong one, the house built on top of it can be enhanced, remodelled and even enlarged without having to undertake frequent new construction.

In fact, if you find that you are constantly rewriting and overhauling your key messages or marketing content—or can’t seem to achieve agreement among stakeholders on the these critical elements of a company’s identity—then it’s definitely time to talk to Kaszas Marketing about inspecting the foundation and ensuring it’s properly designed to support your business over the long haul.

The post How a Messaging Platform Evolves in the Real World appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

When Kaszas first offered search engine optimization (SEO) services, it was mainly about the content. We researched optimal keywords on behalf of customers and included them in the body text, headings and metadata of all web content we wrote.

While these “on-site” factors still play an important role in optimizing a website, off-site components are now just as critical. We’ve taken three recent projects to illustrate this point..

Off-site Factors Are Key

The most recent SEO projects we’ve undertaken for clients confirm that off-site signals are just as important – if not more important – than the on-site steps taken to optimize a site. These off-site components include:

1. Social Media: As part of a recent SEO & Social Media Audit for a client, we examined the SEO performance of a number of the company’s competitors. We found that while a number of competitors were not following standard on-page best practices (such as optimized headings, page titles, and internal links) they were outperforming the client in search due to their powerful presence in social media.

In late 2010, both Google and Bing confirmed that links shared in social media channels can positively impact a site’s search engine rankings. Having content on your website shared in social media both increases the number of incoming links to your site and can improve your page rank if enough links are shared by “authoritative” social media accounts. Our recent audits confirm that search engines absolutely take social media sharing into account when calculating a website’s search ranking.

 2. Blogs: A corporate blog is an excellent way to generate new website content and provide timely material that can be shared in social media. One of our SEO/Social Media Audits revealed that the client’s blog was their fourth-most popular source of referral traffic. Most importantly, visitors reaching the site via the blog had the highest “page-per-visit” views of any traffic source. In addition to positioning the client as an industry thought leader, the blog is driving qualified traffic to the site and provides the company with a source of new content to share in social media.

3. Directories & Third-Party Links: Referring sites have always been important to SEO and there are now more opportunities than ever before to obtain traffic from relevant, authoritative third-party websites. In addition to seeing SEO value from social media referrals, our audits confirmed the value of listings in industry directories. For example, a a key industry social media property on which we maintain a weekly presence for one of our clients delivers both relevant traffic to the website and provides our client with a number of additional authoritative links back to its site. Finding and maintaining a presence on industry directories is not easy, but it is an important element of a professional SEO campaign.

A truly optimized website in 2013 needs to incorporate as many of the above factors as possible in addition to following the traditional on-page best practices.

Content is Important – But it’s Just the First Step

Search engine optimization isn’t a set-and-forget activity. It’s not enough to build a website, populate it with optimized content, and wait for the search rankings to increase. Even if you develop the off-site properties listed above, you still need to ensure that your on-site content is optimized and refreshed on a continual basis.

Search engines still love content – especially new content. New content offers the search engines additional keywords to index and it indicates that a site is actively being updated. Google and Bing want to deliver the best results to searchers and they will consider a site that is continually being updated to be more “fresh” and relevant to users than one that has remained static for months or years.

Moreover, the algorithms search engines use to determine rankings are frequently updated. Content that was well-ranked three years ago can lose its ranking if it doesn’t follow the latest search engine best practices.

Companies also need to start thinking about optimizing images as well as text. One of our clients sells a very visual product and found that its images were not ranking well in Google Image searches. It’s becoming more popular for users to conduct image-only searches, and it’s important for some companies to be found via these image-based searches. Images need to be optimized separately from the web content and need to meet a specific set of criteria to be well-ranked

In many ways, an SEO campaign is like a gardening project. Planting the flowers and shrubs is just the beginning – your plants need to be watered, fed, and pruned on a regular basis if they are to survive and look appealing. In the same way, maintaining and improving your search engine ranking is an on-going process that requires frequent care and attention.

Writing for Humans and Search Engines is Trickier Than Ever

Finally, we’ve noticed another trend that can affect the search engine optimization of a website. Many of our clients are now asking for shorter web copy on both consumer and B2B websites. This is often done to give sites a more appealing visual look – especially on smartphones and tablets – but also to accommodate visitors that are busy or have short attention spans.  While short copy may be visually appealing and cater to a perceived audience need, it may lack the needed on-page factors required for a good search engine ranking. The challenge for today’s web writers is to develop concise, straight-to-the point content that is still lengthy enough to include the keywords and features sought by search engines.

The New Reality

To ensure that your website is search-engine friendly in 2013, you need to consider more than just your existing web content. Your off-page activities, imagery, and the frequency with which you update your content all contribute to your current ranking.

At Kaszas Marketing, we have an understanding of both web writing and search engine optimization. This allows us to design SEO programs for clients that address the off-site factors needed for success, and deliver web content that appeals to its human and robotic visitors. If you’re looking to upgrade your website to take advantage of the latest SEO best practices, contact us!

The post SEO Ain’t What it Used to Be! appeared first on Kaszas Marketing.

What is Stewardship?

Wikipedia does a good job of defining stewardship:

“Stewardship is the ethic or an entity that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources. The concepts of stewardship can be applied to the environment, economics, health, property, information, religion etc. Stewardship is often linked to the principles of sustainability.”

Stewardship comes in many forms and can be focused in a number of areas. Popular examples include:

• The environment
• Charities
• Community programs
• Transparency and oversight
• Health

We’ve built stewardship programs for a range of companies and find that the most successful path to creating a successful and lasting stewardship program is to:

1. Pick a charter
2. Start small
3. Be realistic
4. Stick with it

You cannot create wealth overnight. A stewardship program is a long-term “buy-and-hold” investment that pays back as it evolves over time. You should never look at stewardship as an expense, but as an investment. And you should be always looking for ways to top up that investment. By following a long-term approach, your stewardship program can yield enormous wins over time.

“I got to ride an elephant in a parade”

These memorable words were spoken to me by a trusted and very successful business mentor who has spent the better part of his life applying himself to community stewardship. It came up one day as I was complementing him on the many initiatives he had undertaken to help the city he called home. His point was that his investments had been kind in granting him new business and memorable life opportunities–including riding an elephant. His company was respected, he was respected for his initiatives, and many new opportunities for business came his way as a result.

In a design-build company that I ran several years ago, we adopted environmental stewardship as a cornerstone of our business. Simply stated, we concluded that we would only design and build homes that offered the ultimate energy efficiency and air quality, and that would surpass the standards set forth by the leading environmental specifications of the time – namely R2000 and Energy STAR.

This brand of environmental stewardship became a key component in how we presented ourselves, communicated our offer, and designed and built homes. It became embedded in the company’s way of life, and it helped set expectations with clients. Over time, the company became recognized as a highly respected builder that did not compromise its products and services under any circumstances. Did the company lose some business in doing so? Yes, but only those clients that did not fit the profile of what it had to offer. In sum, the company attracted many more clients than it turned away, and ultimately received several awards and industry accolades for what it was accomplishing, which further boosted its value.

The company’s stewardship achievements reinforced the sales pitch and made closing the sale much easier. They also helped to move the conversation away from price. Lastly, the experience helped the business  create novel tools that  made its offer more compelling by demonstrating lower net carrying costs than those associated with building a home conventionally.

Perpetual Benefits

Stewardship programs are an important component of any progressive company’s marketing and communications strategies. In addition to the benefits I’ve listed above, the existence of a good (and well communicated) stewardship program make your clients feel great about choosing your company. Unlike short-term or disjointed advertising and promotional gimmicks, stewardship is one investment that will not find its way to a marketing landfill.

Want to know more about stewardship? Talk to us!

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