While some marketing and SEO strategies can be executed separately, the occasions in which the two concepts overlap are becoming more and more common. And the good news is, when it comes to your e-commerce site, it’s fairly easy to hit two birds with one stone. Below are a few tweaks that you can apply to your product pages to make your merchandise more attractive to customers, while drawing natural inbound links at the same time.

1. Be thorough with your product images – Did the manufacturer provide photos of the products that you’re selling? That’s great, but one problem with using these images is that other sites that are selling the same products are probably using the same old pictures as well. Whenever possible, do your own photography and shoot your merchandise from different angles. Allow users to see how a product looks like from the front, back, and up close.  Doing this will make your customers’ experience more pleasant, and they will remember you for it. As an SEO bonus, using interesting product images can attract other websites to link to your page. You never who’s talking or writing about the products that you’re selling, and publishing images that stand out can be an unexpected but pleasant way to land some inbound links.

2. Use creative descriptions – Avoid using only generic and unoriginal terms to describe your merchandise. Unless you’re selling a completely unique and one-of-a-kind item, chances are, other websites out there that are selling a product similar to yours are using the same bland words in their product descriptions. Furthermore, if you’re just copying the manufacturer’s description that all the other online stores are using, then you’re only creating duplicate content, which, as we all know, is a big no-no in terms of SEO. Be more innovative when describing your merchandise. No, this doesn’t mean that you should use flowery words or write dramatic content. Be original by means of getting into your customer’s head, and thinking of additional terms that people may use when they’re searching for your product. Is it a specific time of the year? Add season-specific points to your content to further entice your customers to make a purchase.

3. Utilize inventory data – Don’t let inventory facts and figures just sit in a database somewhere; use them to keep your customers in the know. Some people may want to find out more about your bestsellers, and some may even be wondering when a product is most or least in demand. Doing this not only educates your customers, it makes them stay in your website longer. And again, you never know who’s writing about trends in your industry. Useful and interesting data can draw people into your site, and you might even get some backlinks out of it.

4. Ratings and reviews – Publishing ratings and reviews from users makes a webpage more interesting. For one thing, numerous buyers consult with other individuals before making a purchase, and for another, there are lot of opinionated consumers who love an outlet where they can rant or rave about their experiences.  By doing this, you’re adding value to your page, and in turn, drawing more natural inbound links from other websites.

We’ll continue to share tips about how to maximize your AdWords campaign and help you reduce your advertising costs.

In addition to the tips we shared yesterday, be sure to prioritize setting your gross ROI. Google enables you to choose your target location, time frame, keywords, and placement of your keywords. You can also select which program you would like to use: pay per click and pay per impression. In choosing pay per impression, know that there is a payment difference between displaying your ads through Google Network and Google Instant.

A writer on eHow confidently claims that he knows how to reduce your advertising expense by up to 80%. His suggestion is utilizing free traffic using backlinking on blogs, forums, and other related means. To do so effectively, you should compose a brief & direct ads in your title and once in the body. Then, target a broad market by bidding on many different keywords. We’ve heard some SEO companies bid on more than 1,000 keywords or more at once.

Again, after a period of testing and gathering different data points on which keywords performed best (meaning they brought you the most meaningful traffic that led to email inquiries, phone calls and SALES!), you should quickly delete those keywords that are not effective so you do not end up paying for those clicks because you know they do not bring you the kind of traffic that will get you the results you want — and this is key to reducing your advertising expenses.

Testimony

Matthew Keegan, an Ezine professional and veteran writer, shared his testimony regarding his use and experience with Google AdWords. He compared the impact on his business between using AdSense and AdWords. He first started a trial campaign and he noticed that his site received better indexing by way of Google Ads. This resulted in increased traffic and sales. With all the benefits to his online business, he considers the cost of pay per click very low. We can only wonder at the connection between his use of Google AdWords and his amazing accomplishments in article marketing with 140 niches, 1,065 articles, and more than 2.5 million article views.

Conclusion

Our posts (part 1 and 2) are not written to make you the AdWords expert you need to be immediately to run your own campaigns. We believe that by sharing our own experience in running campaigns and some tricks we learned along the way promoting our site will help you as you try to figure out how to maximize your own AdWords campaigns. Remember, AdWords is not the only effective tool – check out incentiBox to grow your customer outreach) on how we can effectively help you generate word-of-mouth among your customers’ social connections to help you grow sales and customers outreach.

Last note: if you do not know what you are doing comes to Google AdWords, it is better to quit using AdWords until you familiarize yourself with all the features and costs that come with using AdWords – because AdWords are EXPENSIVE (we’ve experienced that first hand)!

Image Credit: Google

We found a consensus among online marketers that Google AdWords does work when used properly. There are a few tricks you need to know in order to maximize Google AdWords campaigns before you see that large charge on your credit card from the “Do no evil Google”. In this post, you’ll learn about the common reasons for inefficiencies for AdWords campaigns to better manage your own campaigns. We provide a few tips for lowering your advertising costs and also add one relevant testimony showing that Google AdWords really works.

Two Common Obstacles

The first obstacle for an ineffective Google AdWords campaign is not setting a goal for Google AdWords ROI. This occurs primarily due to lack of monitoring or unfamiliarity with Google AdWords ROI statistics. Your primary task before beginning your advertising campaign will be to familiarize yourself with this feature. If you decide to do it yourself, studying the Google AdWords Learning Center and the Google AdWords Guide provides you with a great start.

We also recommend using Google Analytics – a free tool provided by Google to help you monitor your store website traffic.

The second obstacle is improper optimization; choosing highly competitive keywords without a basic understanding of how the system works is a certain recipe for frustration. You have first undergo a brief period (we suggest 3-4 weeks so you can gain enough of data points to make more calculated decisions on what keywords work for your business and what don’t) of trial advertising to measure keywords effectiveness. Then you can drop those unproductive keywords and recreate your ads.

Knowing the Basics and Tips for Reducing Your Advertising Costs

Google AdWords is expensive! (We’ve spent $350 on keywords search over 2 weeks and got no traction in the past) This is understandable … Google pretty much has monopoly over online search engine. It is true that the price is higher in comparison with the pay per click program of Yahoo Search Marketing or Bing by Microsoft but that is also because more people use Google.

However, the high costs can be mitigated if you carefully set you budget and maximum for the keywords you are willing to pay. Ongoing monitoring is also crucial – we’ve spoken to many of our customers who never visited their campaigns once they are set up and then got a large bill from Google at the end of the month.

Note: when we engaged AdWords, we set a budget of ~$50 a day on our campaign (the keywords we were bidding on, were very popular, and therefore, expensive, ranging from $4 to $8 per click). Google assigned an account manager to help us manage our campaign for one month at no additional costs. We spent 2 phone calls with two different account managers until they understood exactly the services we provide and helped us create our ads.

We found Google’s account managers to be useful in understanding the different metrics and coming up with short and succinct ads because they had way more experience writing them and knowing what kind of phrases will catch people’s attention and get them to click on your ads. So if you are a first time users, be sure to take advantage of this service Google provides!

In addition to monitoring spending and keywords effectiveness, we will talk about setting ROI and testimonials from experts on Google AdWords tomorrow!

Image Credit: Google