Below are a few of the questions that I have recently answered for people online that had questions about their PPC Advertising and SEO. I’ve decided to share some of these in the hope that others might benefit.
SEO Auditing a Large Site
Q: I just started managing a large site with about 2000 indexed pages. When I ran an audit on the site SEMRush and checked Google Search Console, I found a number of errors and warnings. How important is fixing these errors to maintaining and improving our SEO?
A: I would prioritize any errors on Search Console, as those can affect how search engines see your site and can even prevent pages from appearing at all in tbe search results. Don’t worry as much about semrush, while it will find some important issues that Search Console may not find, a lot of stuff in the SEMrush audit are minor technical SEO improvements that don’t have a big impact on most rankings. They are still good things to do, but they aren’t essential.
One Ad Account per Domain
Q: I want to run more ads for my online store, but I can’t make another google ads account that is linked to the domain for my online store. Can I create a new ad account that links to another domain that redirects ad traffic to my main store?
A: I would not recommend trying to do that. Having multiple ad accounts for the same domain is against Google’s Ad policies. They reason that they have this rule is so that people don’t try to game the system by using multiple ad accounts to buy all the ad slots on the search results page and have them link to the same site.
Trademarked Keywords
Q: My product is currently known to most people by the trademark of one of our competitors. For example, if I were selling sticky tape, but everyone searching for it uses the term “Scotch tape” to describe it. .
What should I do in this situation when it comes to SEO? We are currently targeting the generic name of the product as the keyword (in other words: “sticky tape”), but realistically, most people will be searching using the trademark term as the keyword. How can I target a competitor’s trademark? Should I at all?
A: It’s highly unlikely that you are going to be able to outrank a competitor on their own trademark name. If you really need to have your results come up for that keyword because that is where most of the traffic is, the easiest solution would be to run paid search ads for the trademark keyword. Some companies try to prevent this by running search ads for their trademark name and raising the price, but not always. It’s not an ideal solution, but at least you might get in the running.
Same Campaign, Different Results
Q: I ran the same campaign twice 2 months apart and got significantly different results. Is this just a case of not having enough data to draw clear conclusions, or is there something else going on?
Campaign A:
Spent: $186
Link Clicks: 105
Conversions: 14
Campaign B:
Spent: $121
Link Clicks: 72
Conversions: 3
A: That isn’t a huge sample size, so it’s probably not a conclusive result. Depending on your product, it could also be change in demand due to Covid or the time of year you were running your campaigns. You may also want to look at the delivery method, if these are display ads your ad might have been shown on different mix of sites, some of which may have been a good match for your target audience.
