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What’s New for October 17, 2013 – PPC Analysis, Good News & Bad News for Yahoo!

PPC Can Make You Smarter

PPC (Pay Per Click) campaigns are a great way to gather data on your web marketing campaigns and consumer use of keyword streams while also testing different website conversion strategies.

1. PPC Analysis can be a great way to test sales strategies. You could gain insight on things like:

  • Deciding to focus on one product or service over another based on sales cycle, margin, and customer satisfaction.
  • Testing pricing strategies to determine the online “sweet spot” for pricing your services.
  • Testing different specials and coupons to determine which convert more often and bring you repeat customers.

2. PPC will give you quick and accurate answers to the marketing questions that you have. Your ideas will get quick exposure to an audience already looking for the goods and services that you provide.
3. A PPC campaign will allow you to analyze not only CTR (Click Through Rate), Quality Scores, impression shares, ad position, cost per conversion, conversion rate, and more, but will also give you meaningful statistics that can be utilized to evaluate your marketing campaigns.

Pay Per Click Spend

Where is your dollar best spent for PPC?

Photo Credit: photosteve101 via Compfight cc

Good News: Yahoo CEO Announces Yahoo Traffic Increases

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer revealed that Yahoo properties hit a two-year high in September, saying that Yahoo’s “product sprint and increased engagement effectively erased two years of traffic declines.” Mayer also announced that Yahoo now has 800 million global monthly unique users and that Yahoo has more than 390 million monthly mobile users, up 15 percent from the second quarter of 2013.

Yahoo Global Daily Page Views
Yahoo US Daily Page Views

Bad News: Mayer Announces that Yahoo Search Volume is Down

Mayer also announced that the US share of the search market was just 11.3% in September, according to comScore, an all-time low equal to the numbers posted this past July. Mayer stated that:

“It is true that, over the past several years, our search share has declined. In terms of the search alliance, we’re trading share with Microsoft.”

Mayer also stated that the future for Yahoo is bright, in part because of the following initiatives:

Mayer said the company will try to reverse its continuing declines in search by creating more relevant results for users.

Bottom Line: Yahoo is living the good news/bad news scenario, but stockholders think that Marisa Mayer can help to revive this sleeping giant. Online marketers have always known that PPC advertising is a consistent, measurable proving ground for good marketing ideas. With the new “not provided” from Google, Google Adwords becomes a strong proving ground for keyword stream testing as well as offering an online sales analysis.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, a Santa Rosa, California based SEO, Online Marketing and Website Development Firm.

Yahoo Unveils New Search Results Format

Yahoo has officially announced that the redesign of their search results display that has been in testing mode for the past two weeks has gone live.

The new design boasts a faster load time, search results higher up on the page, a new navigation bar at the top, and a more consistent look with the Yahoo homepage. Yahoo also promises to roll out the top bar you see on the home page and on the search results page throughout more and more Yahoo properties going forward.

Yahoo Search Engine Results

Penguin 2.0 Update Happened around May 15th.

Google Penguin 2.0 occurred around May 15th, and seemed to affect more sites than previous Google Penguin Updates. Feedback from Webmaster Forums supports that more sites have been hit with penalties, although the feedback is that Google is sending notices to webmasters through webmaster tools notifying them of potential penalties.  This is not good news in general, as the consensus of surveys of webmasters show that only about 10% of sites have fully recovered from the first Google Penguin updates, one year later.

Google “Softens” Panda Algorithm

According to Matt Cutts, Google is changing the Google Panda Algorithm to look at some other website factors to determine if a site is a quality and relevant resource.   The exact quote from Cutts is below:

“We are looking at Panda and seeing if we can find some additional signals, and we think we’ve got some to help refine things for sites that are kind of in the border zone, the gray area a little bit, And so if we can soften the affect a little bit, for those sites, that we believe have got some additional signals of quality, that will help sites that were previously affected – to some degree”

This falls well short of a repeal for those whose rankings have been affected by Google Panda.  Content remains King.

Bottom Line:  If it is possible, Local SEO Services is about to become even more complicated.  Link Strategies will be different, and content relevance remains important. Hint: Social Media is a great medium to provide useful information, disseminate valuable information, and ultimately, drive traffic to your site. Social media will not be all about the ROI of Facebook Ads, but more about creating relevance for your website through original and compelling content that will be shared by website users.

Keeping Up With the Joneses Yahoos

Eye on Web Trends

Are you keeping up with the latest web trends of 2013? You might want to consider it. The saying “first impressions matter” is true in more than just job interviews. When people find your website due to your amazing SEO marketing or email campaigns, they’re going to give it a few seconds’ glance before deciding whether you’re worth their time. A website that looks like it was plucked out of 1997 is going to leave them looking for a time machine, not your products and services.

Why’s it so important to keep up with the times? Because an easy-to-navigate, visually appealing site that falls in line with what users are already used to is going to increase your conversion rates. People who spend a lot of time online (which is most people these days) are going to be accustomed to a certain aesthetic. If they’re not getting it, they’re going elsewhere to find it.

So how can you get up to speed with today’s biggest trends?

Pay Attention to Your Visuals

The most innovative sites on the web are adapting hugely visual designs using high-quality photography or illustration. The designs are literally huge – think big, bold, HD images. As more people are moving to mobile devices to browse the web (more on that in a minute), Retina Display-ready graphics are becoming a very big deal. Gone are the days when you can throw up a blurry 600px image of you with your arm around your dog and hope it’s good enough.

Visuals need to tell a story and give a sleek look to your design. There’s a theory that attention spans are becoming so short that we need to rely on images to hold attention now. No idea if there’s truth to that, but it doesn’t hurt to make things look nice. Clean lines, simple fonts, and bold imagery is the way to go. Even if you don’t have the professional photography, a good web designer can still create a spectacular design with fonts and layout.

Content Still Matters

Although many of the most innovative designs are moving in a visual direction, that doesn’t mean you should skimp on content. You just have to be a little more creative. Tell a story. Learn the art of brevity (or find someone who does). Make sure your copy is professionally edited. Aim for a genuine human connection rather than catchy buzz words. If you can tell a story in 100 perfectly edited words that punches someone right in the heart-guts, you’ve got it made.

It’s an art, and if you’re not sure you can pull it off, you have options available to you.

Eye-Catching Details

Have you heard of parallax scrolling? If not, you should look it up. This isn’t a technique for everyone (or everyone’s budget), but it’s exactly the kind of eye-catching design that’s turning heads right now. These sorts of details will give your site, and your product by proxy, the sort of sophistication and style that consumers expect from their most trusted brands (think of Apple). You don’t have to go this bold. Sliders, design flourishes, creative use of color, or other elements can give you a stylistic edge over your competition.

Watch the Big Guys

If you really want to stay ahead of the curve, you should watch what the big sites are doing, particularly when it comes to social sharing sites. These are the places where millions of the Internet’s denizens gather, which means the user interfaces and designs are very intentionally done to keep users on the site. It also means that these are the layouts users are accustomed to using. Follow the innovators’ lead and you’ll find that users have a much easier time figuring out where to go on your website.

Plus, there’s the added bonus of reflecting a site that users spend hours of their time on already, which will make it feel very familiar. That means they’ll be less likely to leave immediately. We’re not recommending that you mimic Google+ on your homepage, just that you take a few leaves out of its book.

How Mobile Are You?

And then there’s mobile. The number of people browsing the Internet via smartphone or tablet is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s only upward from here. That means you desperately need to pay attention to the “mobility” of your website, not to mention the responsiveness of your layout. Do you have a mobile version? Is it easy to navigate? Is the pertinent information easily accessible?

At bare minimum, users should be able to easily access your phone number so they can call directly from their phone. It’s also recommended that they be able to use a map to locate you, and that you have conveniently sized product or service menus for them to browse.

These are just a few of the biggest web trends to keep an eye on in 2013. You don’t have to go to big brand level heights to have a functional design your customers will love. If you need some professional guidance for your new web design, our web team is here to consult with you.

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