Epicenter Network Blog

In search marketing, getting your message saturated into the market is the best way to gain control and ensure that as many people as possible are viewing your page or product. This gives you more creditability and increases the likeliness that the user will click on your link.

When a user enters a search query, Google will present them with 10 organic and about 11 paid listings, presenting you – the marketer – with about 22 chances to win them over. The goal is to gain as many of those spots as possible and to achieve a stronger presence for your targeted keywords than your competitor.

There are many ways to go about saturating your message and becoming successful with organic and paid search takes time and a lot of testing. Here are a few ways to gain more control of the search market through “free” and paid techniques.

If you are striving to dominate in a competitive market organically, you’ve got to get creative and use your competitors to your advantage. Start by running a query on the keyword or phrase you want to rank for and see who your competitors are and what they are doing. Then brainstorm ideas that can make you stand apart from them and offer a more specific, targeted solution. You can then incorporate your messaging into your page titles and meta descriptions and write them like ad copy.

Gaining saturation in a competitive marketing through paid search is not an easy task and will require a lot of time, money and monitoring. To get the most out of paying for top listings, you may want to consider day-parting, placement testing, geo-targeting and determining your most lucrative timeframes.

When working in a less competitive market, using long tail phrases for organic results saturation may help you jump up the page quicker. Focus on getting more than one page within your domain to rank for a query. This way, Google will combine your listings and you can move up a spot or two on your results pages. For example, if you were displayed at spot 4 and 6 before, Google would combine your listings and move you to spots 4 and 5.

For paid search saturation, gain rank through buying directory listings and paying for sponsored ads to be placed on competitors sites. You may also consider building multiple web sites and buying PPC ads for these sites for the same keywords and phrases. The only downside to this strategy is that it can be expensive and you need to make sure that you aren’t bidding against yourself. Additionally, this may grab you a large share of the market, but also gives your competitors a chance to drive up the bids on your long tail phrases.

Overall, the best way to gain saturation of the market is to stay one step ahead of your competitors. Keep an eye on what they are doing and strategies they are using and then try to optimize on them.

Using ppc marketing is the best way to reach a targeted audience and drive more potential buyers to your sales page. If you are using Google AdWords to manage your campaigns, one of your biggest focuses should be on relevancy and creating the most targeted ads possible.

Here are 5 tips to help you succeed in AdWords and create the most relevant ads for the search engine and your customers.

#1 – Don’t group all keywords into one campaign and one ad group. Instead, split up your campaigns according to base keywords and split up your ad groups to have variations on your base keyword. The more your separate and micro-organize, the easier you can view the performance of different terms and help you to create more targeted, specific ads.

#2 – Make your ads as targeted as possible. Not only does this make your ad more relevant to a search term, but it also makes it more relevant to the user and will encourage more people to click on your ad.

#3 – Incorporate your keyword into your ad. This plays into tip #2 and helps get Google’s attention and the user’s attention. When you include a specific keyword in your ad and that keyword matches the search term of the user, it appears bolded on the search results page. You can see this if you type in “shoes” or “backpacks” into Google.

#4 – Create multiple ads and run tests. Create three or four good ads for each ad group and let them rotate through. Keep an eye on the stats for each one and you will probably start to notice that one or more of them will outshine the rest. This will help you to further optimize your ads and make them even more targeted.

#5 – Keep up with Google. It seems like Google is always evolving, adding new features, changing up algorithms or creating new policies. Use this to your advantage by staying up-to-date on their newest tools and announcements and periodically check out their Help Center and Learning Center.

As an affiliate marketer it is important to keep a constant eye on your traffic and to be on the lookout for ways to improve and optimize it. If you are running search campaigns, the same attention and up-keep is required in order to improve your profits and return on investments.

To help your sites and search campaigns be the best they can be, there are several online tools to help improve SEO so you can rank higher organically and others to help with finding new keywords and to gain better link love.

If you’re a seasoned search marketing affiliate, these tools and applications may be nothing new. However, if you are new to the game, be sure to give them a try and see what they can do for your page rankings and affiliate profits.

Link Voodoo – This is a free tool that includes a suite of SEO tools including a TrustRank Score Calculator (See video for details) and a Backlink Analyzer (reports a sites backlinks with Alexa Ranking and PageRank).

Lipperhey – This one is good if you are building out sites for affiliate offers. It analyzes your website on overall quality and searchability and provides you with an improvement report to help increase your traffic and, ultimately, your sales.

SERPrush – This is a free SERP checker that shows what your search engine position in Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

SEOrush – This is a free SEO tool that provides information not only on your On Page and Off Page SEO, but also on your social presence, meta information, validation, indexed pages, ranks and domain info. You can also check your competitor’s URLs.

InstantRankmeter – Find out for free how your website is ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo!. You can get stats on your website and compare it to your competitors. It is a little slow, but a helpful tool.

SEO Drop – Another SEO tool to help improve your organic search and ranking. It allows you to check your standing on social networks and also has a tool to help you monitor your longtail traffic.

Keywordle – A free keyword suggestion tool. Not the best out there, but it can be helpful.

The success of any marketing campaign is greatly influenced by the quality of traffic to your web site or affiliate offer. In search marketing, the goal is to drive highly targeted traffic through keywords that you will receive the highest return on investment from. However, you need to focus on more than just keywords to optimize your campaigns.

Here are 5 tips for improving your AdWords campaigns.

1. Gather as many low-cost, highly targeted keywords and keyword phrases as you can. Research and testing can help you avoid overly saturated markets and tapping into your organic searches can provide you with new keyword phrase ideas. Check out these tools for more help:

Google AdWords Keyword Suggestions tool
Misspelled Keywords
7Search.com’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
WordTracker (you can use the trial version for free).

2. Create many different versions of headlines and adcopy and do some split-testing. When you start writing these it’s a good idea to check out your competition and see what they have done. Who is showing up at the top of search results and how are they phrasing their ads? Make sure that you are using the best words possible and use catchy headlines to grab the user’s attention.

3. Become familiar with how AdWords works. This gets back to the basics. When you know how something works – in this case how AdWords ranks ads – you can work with the system and create your campaigns with the ranking system in mind. Examples of this include using the keyword matching or phrase matching options.

4. Control and monitor who is seeing your ads and when they see them. This is especially important if you are running on a tight budget. Analyzing your data and visitor trends is important and can save you a lot of money.

5. Monitor your campaigns and keep looking for ways to improve them. The market is always changing and the online consumer is fickle. Don’t let your ads run past their prime – modify them as time goes on to get more bang for your buck.

Are you new to search marketing or looking for some funding to improve your skills? If you said yes, then you should consider applying for the SEM Scholarship from Marketing Pilgrim.

Here is a brief description of the scholarship contest:

We want to help find the brightest minds in search and social media, so each year, we ask you to submit your very best “how to” article on the topic of SEO, PPC, or social media. Over a 4 week period we tally the traffic count and send the top 5 most visited entries to our panel of expert judges. They pick their favorite, and the winner helps themselves to a prize package worth over $10,000!

If you win the contest, not only are you given $10,000 but you also receive a prize package full of SEM and SEO event passes, memberships and subscriptions. A few of these include a premium membership to SEOmoz.org, a subscription to SoloSEO.com and passes to SMX East and Pubcon.

Want to enter? The deadline is June 22nd at 6pm Eastern time. Click here for full entry details.

Microsoft’s newest search engine, Bing will go live June 3rd. They are calling it a “decision engine” and claim that it provides more intelligent search tools to simply tasks and help people make more informed decisions. Developers wanted Bing to focus on enabling people to actually use the information they find, rather than just providing them with search results.

Bing is starting out by focusing on four main verticals:

     • Making a purchase decision
     • Planning a trip
     • Finding a local business
     • Researching a health condition

Microsoft says that Bing will replace their Live Search’s core search with advancements such as query intent recognition, entity extraction and expansion and document summarization technology. Virtual Earth will be rebranded as Bing Maps for Enterprise and the cashback program will be renamed Bing cashback.

So what does this really mean when it comes to search? Possibly an increase in impressions. The project was given a bigger marketing budget than Xbox, so many predict it will start off with a bang. Many feel that conversion rates and ROI are almost always better on Microsoft compared to other engines, so the new advances in Bing could make your stats even better.

If you want to find out more before it launches, go to DiscoverBing.com.

So do I think I will start “binging-it” more than googling-it? Hard to say. I can say that it will be hard to compete and overcome such a giant in search.

Whenever I need to do some research, find an image or perform any kind of web browsing, Google is my search engine of choice. I’ve gotten pretty good at finding what I need and modifying search terms to produce more exact results. This is probably why Google captures over 60% of U.S. online searches.

However, it’s important to remember that Google is not the only search engine out there. You also have the other two big players – Yahoo! and MSN – and a handful of up-and-comers looking to offer their own unique approaches to online search engines.

Here are a few to check out.

• Kosmix
This engine is in the “beta-ish” stage and incorporates more real-time search results. Information is sorted by source – ie. If it came from Twitter, Hulu, YouTube, blogs or government – and has about 12 different search categories, or featured searches.

• Twine
This is more of a community search engine where you create an account and receive tailored search results. You customize your interest feeds and are provided with results based on your Web use.

• Searchme
Call themselves the first multimedia search engine. It’s interface is similar to that of iTunes and allows for easier sorting and shuffling through videos, images and music.

• Hakia
Hakia’s search results come from sites that are recommended by librarians – which I guess would make this helpful for school reports. There is a link on the homepage that says “Compare to Google” where you are given the Hakia challenge and you get to see side-by-side search results for the two search engines.

• Wolfram Alpha
This is a computational knowledge engine, so it’s more of a calculator than a search. Even if an answer to your question doesn’t exist online, Alpha will use algorithms to gather data and produce the answer for you.

• Cuil
This start-up has already deemed themselves as the world’s biggest search engine – stating they search three times more pages than Google and 10 times more than Microsoft.

• Scoopler
This is another real-time search engine. It takes updates and feeds from a variety of social networks – like Twitter and FriendFeed – and sorts through them to display results.

Starting June 4th Google plans to open up trademarked keywords to AdWords advertisers. This is going to make for some heated battles in the search engine results pages over company names, branded products and services.

Google released a list of 200 countries that are allowed to purchase rival trademarks as keywords to trigger display ads. Check out the complete list here.

However, this is new is not entirely new. Google has allowed for bidding on trademarked keywords in the past, but would slap you on the hand if they received any complaints. The difference now is that trademarked companies’ complaints won’t be accepted. You also still can’t use a competitor’s trademark in your ad.

For affiliate marketers, this opens up the potential for more money. However, there are still many advertisers that enforce their own rules for keyword restrictions, and those will still have to be followed.

This decision comes at an interesting time, as a prior court ruling in 2006 was overturned recently in the Rescuecom v. Google case. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed the lower court ruling and said that recommending and “selling” a trademark to an advertiser to trigger a sponsored link could violate trademark law.

They went on to say that even product placements could be subject to trademark law if the trademark holder could prove that the consumers were confused.

Good luck proving that one.

Here is an exciting announcement for small businesses and non–profits: free webinars focused around technology tips and techniques to help increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your organizations. The webinars will be held on the second Wednesday of every month starting tomorrow and ending in July, starting at noon EST.

These webinars are part of the Talking Tech series sponsored by FormSpring and will feature special speakers from a handful of different companies. Each session is composed of three 15 minute webinars and a Q&A session.

The first speaker for tomorrow’s webinar is Pat East, president and CEO from Hanapin Marketing. He will be talking about how to make SEO and PPC strategies work for businesses and organizations with different needs and objectives.

Also in tomorrow’s session, you will hear presenters from Cantaloupe talking about basic video marketing techniques and FormSpring will discuss online data collection methods.

Click here to register.

Hey all you PPC campaigners, have you tried Tracking 202 yet? If you have, then you know how helpful it is to monitor and optimize your campaigns. If you haven’t tried it yet, why not start with Tracking 202 Pro?

Here is a brief introduction to the world of Tracking 202 Pro.

Tracking 202 was designed for pay-per-click affiliate marketers as a tool for optimizing campaigns, receiving real-time analytics and increasing profits. It provides an overall picture of how your campaigns are doing across multiple networks, gives individual visitor details and individual keyword performance.

The Pro version offers all of this plus the following upgraded features:

• Integration of all major PPC networks – automatically syncs all your PPC data

• Integration with affiliate networks – automatically pulls affiliate network data and updates profits, percent change, etc.

• Keyword analysis – See which keywords converted, even which long tails converted

• Mobile phone App – check your campaign statuses on the go

Another difference between the two versions is that Pro is not free. However, if you are an Epicenter affiliate, or would like to become an affiliate, we are offering a 20% discount on T202 Pro.

Check out the details at WikedFire.

Want to get started right now? Sign up here!