Hello and welcome to this week’s SEO video blog. Today, James and I thought we’d talk about how organic SEO and Pay Per Click advertising can work together in the best way, for the best results.

We all know that running a PPC campaign before your organic campaign begins performing can be useful, but how about running the campaign while your organic SEO is working?

Yes we see too many webmasters and SEO consultants who believe that SEO and PPC are two services which shouldn’t be used at the same time. This simply isn’t the case, so we thought we’d run through a few tips for making the most of both aspects of online marketing.

1. Testing Keywords

This is probably the most useful feature of using both PPC and SEO at the same time. Basically, you can use PPC click to overcome the biggest problem with Organic SEO – the time it takes to start, configure and be successful in a campaign. PPC keywords and campaigns can be changed instantly, allowing you to experiment with different keywords at the touch of a button.

Once you find a keyword which has a good Click through rate for PPC, you can roll this out to your organic campaign and you don’t have to wait 6 months to know whether the phrase will convert or not, as you already have this information.
2. Testing landing pages

There are other things you can test with PPC too, such as landing page optimisation. Why not run two campaigns using the same keyword but different landing pages.

Using the data gathered, you’ll be able to see which landing page converted better and then you can choose this one for your cheaper and longer term organic campaign.

3. Testing locations

The final test you can do uses PPC ads to test which location works best for any given keywords. The ad manager allows you to only display your ads to searchers from a specified area or radius. By changing this radius and recording the CTR, you’ll be able to gauge regional interest in your product or keyword and then adjust your regional SEO campaign accordingly.

4. Umbrella vs longtail

Using SEO and PPC together can enable you to dominate the SERPs for your industry’s phrases. For example, why not target large umbrella phrases with your organic campaign whilst focussing on longer tail variations with your PPC ads.

5. Google Merchant Integration

The final point on the list integrates your Google merchant data with your adwords campaign. Basically, using product listing ads and product extensions, you can feed product data from your online shop directly into your PPC ads so that product details and price begin to appear in your adwords campaign.

This can lead to better click through rates and if it doesn’t then it’s a good indication that perhaps your prices aren’t competitive within your market place and changes are needed across your campaign and business model.

So that’s it for this week, thanks for watching and please add any of your own tips and tricks in the comments below.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, Recently Google integrated it’s privacy policy for all of its products including mail, search, social and youtube.

The reasoning behind the change is to improve the usability and user experience of their core products and will effect PPC, Organic, Social and Video results.

So with ‘James and I’ living and working in the SEO world how will this effect us?

Some key points are:

• Targeted Advertising
• Personalized organic results
• Suggested Videos & Interests
• Suggested Social Media Profiles

The data that is now passed between the Google products identifies your past search history, demographic and Google + profile details to decide which results suit you most.

One important thing to consider moving forward is your keyword choice and target demographic, think objectively to ensure your website suits your audience and the type of serp you want to appear in.

This sounds obvious, but consider the following keyword ‘SEO’, a marketing manager or business owner may understand the term but is looking for company like ‘Creare’ to take on their website.

hypothetically if we consider this is the first time this imaginary user has searched SEO this is what they will see. Essentially a list of businesses selling SEO.

<screen shot>

Where as if we ‘log in’ to My Google account we see a huge difference in the type of results, gone are the companies and instead we have social recommendations with Google +, Videos, Images, Blogs and Research Sites. The only company left in the SERP is Creare as Google knows through Google + I am a contributor to the blog.

<screen shot 2>

So if i wanted to target people specifically in the SEO industry to our site, we would have to set up our strategy in a different way.

We could look at guest authors from the SEO industry that have authoritative Google + accounts, be set up to deliver resources, industry information or guidelines. All to help encourage other industry experts to +1 your site to improve social signals and to link to you from sites within the industry.

We would recommend that ideally you would integrate all these methods in your SEO campaign anyway, but we believe you would have to increase this investment to target industry users and not joes bloggs the small business owner, especially in the world of SEO.

We are well aware that its a tough topic this week, if you feel that Google’s new privacy policy will be deterimental or beneficial to your campaign, please add any comments to the supporting blog post.

Thank for watching.

Welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, today we’re discussing more on schema micro formatting and looking at the postal address code.

Previously we mentioned that having micro formatting helps the search engine bots understand the content displayed on your webpage and how potentially it ‘could’ help a site local SEO campaign if you address supports your target area.

Lets take a look at the code and talk through the different elements:

<div id=”address” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/Organization”>

Let Google know what ‘type’ of mark-up tags you are using. Put this in your <ul>, <div>, <p> tags

<ul itemprop=”address” itemscope=”" itemtype=”http://schema.org/PostalAddress”>

Link to Schema’s address mark-up tags, again put this in your <ul>, <div>, <p> tags

<li itemprop=”name”>Creare Communications</li>

References your company name, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”streetAddress”>Boughton Leigh House</li>

References your Street/First line of your address, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”addressLocality”>Rugby</li>

References your Locality/City, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”addressRegion”>Warwickshire </li>

References your Region/County, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”postalCode”>CV21 1HL</li>

References your postcode, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

<li itemprop=”telephone”><strong>0800 01 999 06</strong></li>

References your phone number, put this in your <li>, <p>, <span> tags

</ul>
</div>

So that is it, a simple method of unsuring that Google and other mahor search engines can read you business address.

Make sure once you have added the formatting you double check it using the Google rich snippet tool.

We have added the all the code to supporting blog post, if you have any question or comments please leave them on the blog also.

Thanks for watching.

schema – download test page

Hi and welcome to this weeks SEO video blog, last week we introduced Schema mirco formatting and how it allows more information being filtered through into the SERP results. We have linked last weeks video on Google, Schema and SEO from the supporting blog post.

This week we are going to look in more detail how to add the star ratings to your search listings, there are several ways of displaying the same information. You can do it with a percentages or a ‘out of’ score and different variation of the schema standards.

All the code for any type of micro formatting code can be found from schema.org, but we have used the following code on www.seo-creare.co.uk for this weeks example. As you can see a few of our competitors have also installed the code on their sites:

<span itemtype="http://schema.org/Product" itemscope="" class="normal">
<span itemprop="name" class="normal"><strong>SEO</strong></span> Services
<span itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating" itemscope="" itemprop="aggregateRating" class="normal">
rated <span itemprop="ratingValue" class="normal">4.9</span> / 5
based on <span itemprop="reviewCount" class="normal">7</span> customer reviews</span></span>

The key pieces of information needed for the search engines to understand this code are the itemprop elements which are referenced from the item type at http: // schema.org/product and http://schema.org/AggregateRating

The four itemprops tell the search engines the ‘name’ of the service. the ‘aggregaterating’ for the site or webpage, the ‘ratingvalue’ i.e. whats displayed in the SERP and the count of reviews that have been made using ‘reviewcount’ also displayed in the SERP.

You can then integrate these itemprops into normal HTML code, in this case span classes. It is important that you display them on your site so Google can find them when it crawls your site.

You can visit the rich snippets tool to check if you code has been correctly installed, also linked form the video blog. As a side note Google do not guarantee that all micro formatting will be displayed. http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Thanks for watching, if you have any problems installing the code or a variation of the code, please leave a comment on  the supporting blog post and we’ll try and help you out.

byeeeee.

Welcome to this weeks SEO Video blog, Last week we looked at the rise of aggressive PPC adverts in the Google results pages. We did however mention schema micro-formatting, this could help balance the listings and improve click through rates for organic rankings.

Schema for those who don’t know is a selection of markup language supported by Google, it provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers http://schema.org/

The advantages of using micro-formatting is to aid the search engines to understand what elements are being discussed on a web page via HTML. These ‘tags’ can describe ratings, addresses, movies, places, people, videos and much much more.

So… I hear you ask how can this help my organic rankings, well directly we wouldn’t want to suggest that it will improve actual SERPs. But we can say there is opportunity to improve CTR by adding extra value to the listings displayed. For example:

Ratings – these can be referenced from credible sources for your industry.

<Screen Shot 1>

Recipe Cooking Times -Does what is says on the tin, by illustrating how long the dish takes to cook before having to click the ranking.

<Screen Shot 2>

Movies – Shows director, cast and ratings.

<Screen Shot 3>

You can also add micro formatting to your address in the footer or contact page, this will help Google identify your location and could ‘could’ help your regional SEO performance.

Our friends over at SEOmoz have done a comprehensive blog post previously which is worth taking at look at and linked from the supporting blog post. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29

Thanks for watching, any questions or queries add them to the comments.