 I need to go, because my thing's on. I didn't do no mute anyone there. Cool, so, hi everyone, if you haven't come on these sessions before, my name's Oli, I am from Created Bloom, and I'll be running this session. For the majority of it, I will keep your microphones muted just because there is so much for us to get through in search marketing, we're gonna be covering a load of stuff. So if everyone could have a look for the chat function, so there's a chat function in Zoom and everyone just write hi in there for me because there'll be one or two moments where I ask you to write in that box for some exercises and just so that you know where to ask some questions because Stu will be managing the chat for me, so if there's some questions he can quickly answer, he'll be able to file them in there. But if we have time at the end, fingers crossed, there'll be some questions, some time for questions at the end. So, right, let's crack on. This is webinar three from series two, search engine marketing. There's obviously four series in this whole program. If you haven't signed up for them, already series three is now available in Eventbrite, so make sure you jump on there. It's gonna be all about systems and productivity and we still have some more webinars from this series coming up. I think we have eight in total with a big QA session at the end, so make sure you jump on those if you get a chance. And just to mention, if you are not already aware, we have some free consultancy from digital champions from the Coast Capital Growth Hub. It's free digital support to drive small business success. So you are able to take advantage of, I think there's eight people in total and they're offering eight hours of free specialist support fully funded by Coast Capital Growth Hub and each individual digital champion offers a different type of skill. They have kind of a different blender skills, so it'll be a fantastic thing. There's literally no reason not to take advantage of it and I know there are some people in this session who are the digital champions, so if you wanna give the camera a wave, feel free to or say hi in the chat. So there's, obviously you're gonna get all these slides and you'll be able to see them all in here, but we've got Andrew who deals with websites and CRMs, Malcolm for e-commerce, Lisa for digital tech and improving productivity and processes, Rachel RSEO expert for support with marketing plans and tactical activity advice. And we've got Rob who deals with digital transformation, Susan who works digitally focusing products and services and Roya if you want to utilize digital to accelerate the growth of your business. So there is a form at the end of these slides, so if you do wanna get in touch with them, I'll show you how to do it at the end of, just to remind you at the end of this presentation. So this is Search Engine Marketing and what we'll be covering is, you'll see a lot of cats, cause I love cats and they kinda help lighten up what is like a lot of information to take in, so hopefully we're all a fan of some nice little cat illustrations. But Search Engine Marketing is basically comprising of two main areas, so that's SEO, which is Search Engine Optimization and PPC, which is essentially paid advertising. And in and around there, we've got loads of things that we're gonna be focusing on. So this is a rough itinerary of what we're gonna be covering, how Google works, the factors that affect SEO. We'll touch on keywords, the things you need to have on your website, on pages and how you need to optimize those pages for SEO and what you can do. Some notable mentions that I always like to throw in so that everyone can go away and do some action straight away just to check how their website's doing. And then we'll jump on to AdWords, we're focusing on search and display advertising, that's what I'll be talking about today. There is shopping and other things, but we're gonna focus on those today. I'll give you a very top level understanding of how it all works, a bit of rank keyword research. I'll mention remarketing and reporting as well. So when we're talking about search marketing, we're talking about the landscape that is on a search engine. And we're talking about people getting yourself found on and we're gonna obviously focus on Google, other search engine platforms are available. We're gonna be talking about Google and we're gonna be kind of differentiating between SEO and paid advertising. And we're obviously probably all familiar with what a Google search results page looks like, a little bit like this. We typically have ads at the top and then organic underneath. But one thing that's really important is this very often changes, depending on what you're searching for, the whole environment will look different. So we're gonna be doing a lot of kind of analysing what's going on for each sector and different kind of search engines. So the first thing I'd like you to do is I'd like everyone to find the chat and imagine it's Google and I'd like you to type into that chat what you would search for in Google if you wanted an occasion cake made for you. That's all the information I'm gonna give you. And I'd like everyone to just use Judy's cake. But yeah, type into the chat what it is that you would search for if you were going onto Google to search for an occasion cake made for you. And I'll just give you just a couple of seconds. Perfect. Okay, brilliant. Thank you very much. So this is the next size I really love doing because it's something everyone should really be doing for their sector and their service. Whatever you do, people very typically will go into Google and they'll type in a keyword that they think is the right one to find what they're looking for, right? Now, I've just asked kind of however many of you are in here, the same question. I've asked you to type in what you type in if you wanted an occasion cake made for you. And pretty much everyone has typed in something different. And this is a really important thing to remember when we're talking about SEO because we know so much about our businesses. We know what we do. We know right, we do digital marketing. So that's surely what someone's gonna type in. But this exercise, and you can do it like I say for your own business and your own sector this is a perfect example of how people don't necessarily type in what they think what you think they do. And the keyword that you think you should be targeting might not be the correct one. And doing this exercise reminds us that people use all sorts of different varieties of keywords. Some people use locations in there if we're searching for something in a specific local area. Some people replace the word cake with patisserie. Some people use suddenly birthday cakes. And all of these different topics and queries are things that you should think around your content. Do I have content around that on my website? Because if you don't, if you don't have the words occasion cakes or cakes for occasions, that kind of thing you're probably not gonna appear for those search terms. So doing this exercise, asking some people to type in what they would search for for your business will help kind of pull out something. It's a really great way of just doing a bit of research with either people you know or people that don't know your business. So when we talk about search engine optimization and after doing that little exercise we're gonna say that it's all about optimizing signals both on and off a website to get it to show up when people search, okay? And what is the important after doing that exercise what's the important word in that sentence? Optimizing signals both on and off a website to get it to show up your website when people search. Any ideas what the key word is in there after just doing that exercise that we just did? Any takers anyone wanna jump in there and write in the chat, give me five seconds. The key word in that sentence is people. And it's because we've just learned that people all think differently. They're all at different stages of the funnel. They're all typing something different. So we can optimize all these things but the one thing that we need to really focus on and be flexible around is people. How are they searching? What are they thinking? Why are they searching? You know, how are they exploring of the website and all these things and all of the elements that we're gonna cover are gonna kind of help with SEO but it's all gonna be kind of focused around, you know, why people are doing it. There's a big red arrow there if you haven't seen it already. Okay, very simply, how do search engines work? So firstly, search engines looking for authority very top level. So this is making sure that you're an authority in your sector, you know websites that have had more traffic through them. They've got a lot more data around how people are browsing. They have more backlinks. We'll talk about back into a bit later. Authorities are really important measurement in terms of how well you'll rank for SEO and it's a scale that's ranked from zero to 100. All new websites will start at zero and most websites tend to sit on average around 20 or 30. And when we're talking about big websites like Amazon eBay we're talking like up in the hundreds, sorry, up at 100. So Amazon eBay, all those massive websites. It's not something you should aim towards but it's indicative and it tells you how well you're doing it in general. So authority is number one thing. Number two, relevancy. You have to be relevant. And that means you really need to be honest and have a look at what's going on in the keywords and all the content that's out there and think right is my website really relevant. Have I included all the information I should? Have I kind of bothered to write extra content on the website or have I just done essentially the bare minimum? So it's really important. Google only wants to show results that are very, very relevant to the users because ultimately all Google cares about is giving everyone a good experience who's using the platform. So relevancy is two. And lastly, user experience. So the actual experience someone has on your website. So if you have lots of people coming onto the site and then suddenly leaving, okay, that's going to assume that is a poor website. So it's really important to make sure you're working on mobile optimization, making sure that in line with your competitors, that you don't stand out for the wrong reasons. What is the website made 10 years ago and hasn't been updated, that kind of thing. So really paying attention to those three things. Yeah, Alison, as you said, I'll talk about how we can influence authority a little bit later. So and very simply, how Google calls the web. There is something called a Google spider. I always say that this might be a better depiction of what it maybe looks like, but we'll leave that for now. There is a Google spider who uses the Google algorithm to crawl the web. And it's basically just trying to take in all the websites out there, all the content categorize it and get a good understanding for what's going on. And then from that, it's going to make a decision around who should rank where for what terms. Okay, so if you don't know already, the question, what will SEO help with? So what will SEO help with? It will help you get found organically, nationally or locally. So it gets you found when we say organic, that means without paying for it. So that means appearing in the Google search results because you've got good relevancy, authority and that kind of thing. So ranking well. Help improving your SEO can also reduce the cost of ad campaign. So when we're talking about PPC later on, that is all about optimization and relevancy as well. So the more optimized your account is, sorry, the more optimized and relevant your website is, the less you'll have to pay per click for your advertising. So it's going to help reduce the cost of that. Of course, it's going to increase conversions because you're going to get more people through the website. You're going to get more qualified users who are typing in exactly what you want to rank for. So having the right content helps you increase conversions. And of course, the all important stat is defeating your competitors because that's really what we all want to do. And like I say, we focus on Google, but there are a lot of other search engines available. And it's always interesting as well to do some searches on these other search engines, particularly being Ecosia is one that's coming up a little bit more and see how you're ranking on there compared to Google. Is there anything that, is there any kind of extra feature of those search engines that we can jump on? Okay, so let's do a quick search on Google. Stu, can you see my screen? Okay. I think so. Yep, not. Okay, perfect. Thank you. So let's, someone give me something to type into Google, into the chat, something to search for. So feel free to just throw it into, so dogs. Okay, let's do, okay, I'll take dogs and we'll say dog sitters. How about that? I'm going to do dog sitters. All right, perfect. So dogs sitters. So what's the first thing we see here? So the first thing we actually see is before we even look at the page, okay? And this is really important. We're very familiar with this environment, but let's really dive into each individual section, right? Even in these search results up here, right? What's Google doing? So Google is suggesting keywords to me, but why is it suggesting these keywords? Any ideas? Feel free to just throw it into the chat. Well, what's, why would Google be suggesting dogs sitters brighten, dogs sitters near me? We've got related searches, most used, similar, exactly. So yeah, so Google is essentially telling us, it's saying, okay, so you want dogs sitters. Well, I'm just going to tell you that most people are in your area because it's taking location in and previous searches, like you say, my search history. It's taking into consideration the fact that we're in Brighton. So it's going to include keywords around that. But also, loads of people typically type in, dogs sitters in my area, dogs sitters near me, et cetera, et cetera, you know, if I go back, dogs sitters, yeah, so it's given me loads of locations. But what this is, is this is Google giving us some free keywords. It's saying, look, you need some content on this on your website, if it's relevant to your service, you should be including these elements and for your sector, you can do the same thing. Start tapping something in, see what Google presents you with and you'll start to already add some more keywords to your list. Okay, so we've got some free keywords already. And then first, when we actually look down on the page, we've got ads we're all familiar with. We'll be talking about ads a little bit later. Google is also generating some C results about pet sitting and dog daycare. So it's linking these two and these widgets we'll talk about as well. They pop up a lot and more and more, Google is introducing new widgets for new sectors and it's important to look at those and think, right, can I get on those? Is there an opportunity? Sometimes it's gonna be pulling in review websites. If you're a restaurant, it might be pulling in a trip advisor and that kind of thing. Can you get your website on there? It might be pulling in blogs and directories. Can we kind of, is there a way we can get into that? Because if you can get yourself into these spots, you're immediately gonna be, here you go, here's an example here. So you've got Bach and we've got hotels. You could get a directory listing on one of these and immediately you're way above the organic results without having to get your website ranking well. So when we're talking about search marketing, it's getting on here and getting as much visibility as you can. So focusing on these new widgets that Google's introducing. This section here is for local SEO. So you won't see this when we're talking about national ranking nationally. This is focusing on local businesses and local areas and you will only appear on this if you have a Google My Business page and I'll be talking about that in a second. So if you have a Google My Business page or if it's relevant to you, if you're a business in a local area, does everyone have a Google My Business page in here? Because it's all about owning your space and appearing locally if you offer a service in location. It's a really important thing to focus on if you haven't got one already. We've got people also ask section. So you can see here that it's pulling in question and answers. Again, something that you can look at. Can you include some of this content on your website? And then finally, after all of that, we're finally on to the organic results. And another really valuable way to use a Google search results page in terms of looking at how can we improve our SEO by doing this research is who is ranking well and why are they ranking well? What are the consistencies between all of these page titles that are ranking well? Well, I can see that they all are including the word dog sitting. So this specific page, this page title is dog sitting in Brighton. And then the result number two is dog sitters in Brighton. And the next one is the best dog sitters in Hove, which is just like two minutes away from Brighton. So there is a trend here. So if I had a page that did dog sitting, I would wanna make sure that my page title is somewhat in line and including the right types of keywords within my page title. And of course, we can see that some of them are pulling in reviews. I have an absurdly long results page, but if you scroll right to the bottom as well, we also have some more free keywords, private dog sitters. I hadn't thought of that keyword. That's something I'm gonna include in my content now. Dog boarding, maybe a different type of word that people are using. So immediately just from looking at this for five minutes, from my competitors and from Google's help, we've got loads more keywords that we can use that we can implement into our kind of content strategies. Look at our services. Have we, can we kind of expand things out a little bit and break down our services using some of these? Yeah, immediately looking in your sector at your own results page and actually having a look at what's going on and who's ranking, where and why is a really, really important thing to keep an eye on. So very quickly, owning your space. So we talked about Google My Business page. This is really for local businesses that serve a service and location, have a service and location business model. However, it's also relevant to think that even in your sector, even if that isn't you, a lot of people who might buy your products or your service, they might be comparing you versus your competitor, right? A lot of the time someone's typing in, they'll find you or name somewhere. If you're doing Google ads, they'll find you and they'll type in your brand name and they'll look for reviews and they'll look for what you're about and how long you've been established for. And by owning your space and having a Google My Business page, it means you can immediately qualify, give them that positive trust signal. You can show them that you have almost five, you've got five star reviews, that you've had a lot of reviews, that they can see real people talking about your product and how great you are. You can show them pictures and all these types of things. And they also exist on Bing and Apple Maps as well. So making sure you own your space is really important in terms of customer attention, taking customers from your competitors, making sure that you haven't just left this if you do have one. Let's say you don't have any reviews on it, you don't want it just to be bare because that also could have a negative impact on how someone perceives your brand. So really paying attention to owning your space and claiming your Google My Business page. Just use the link in the chat if you need it. Prioritising reviews. So when we're talking about search marketing with a lot of the time, especially on local map packs and when someone's doing a service and location search, we see reviews come up. They're a big, big signal that makes someone subconsciously like one business over another. Even if there's no real rhyme or reason for it, we all click on something that has five stars over three stars. So having a review strategy is really important and making sure that whenever you've worked with someone in any capacity that you've followed it up with a review strategy. Send them a review link and make sure you have Google reviews and also reviews on places where maybe your competitors do. Is it Yelp? Is it Facebook, TripAdvisor? Do you need reviews on TrustPilot? That kind of thing. If it pulls into the search results, it's really important to encourage reviews. And we always try and recommend having at least 4.5 because again, subconsciously, as soon as someone drops below that, there's this feeling of, okay, why do they have a lower score and now they're gonna investigate a little bit further. So if you have dropped a little bit low, try and kind of get a few more reviews to kind of bump that up. But the big question and in the chat, does anyone have an idea how many reviews you need? Very, very broad question. How many, what is the magic number of reviews? Or is it a trick question? The truth is you need more reviews than your competitors, of course. So if someone sees you in the map pack, if we look at these results here, someone types in search marketing in Brighton or local SEO, whatever it is, and these four results pop up, most people in general are gonna find the woman more reviews and also the higher review score. So very simply, try and get more than your competitors. And we always say prioritize Google first. Google now ask you to respond. So make sure you respond to your reviews. It actually prompts us to and it sends you an email. And we always say, Google suggests that you should do something. You should always try and do it. So, and that kind of exists primarily within the kind of Google and Bing space. If we're talking about trust pilot and those kind of things, it maybe matters a little bit less, but with Google, make sure you respond. And just two seconds on negative reviews. And I think this is a really important thing to cover. We've worked with some businesses who have experienced a negative review and someone's left them a review on Google. It wasn't very nice. So what did they do? They jumped straight into reply to them, telling them how horrible that review is and how dare they write such a horrible thing about their product and their products are the best and all this kind of thing. But what you need to remember is any response that you give is not for that person. It is for everyone else. It's for every other customer so that they can see how you deal with this process. Give them a contact information. Make sure you reach out. It's all about kind of, when we're talking about the search environment, it's about making sure wherever someone sees you, you are, your brand is on point. Everything on there is cohesive and has the same branding. The language is the same. You deal with customers really well. You deal with complaints really well. So really, really, really important to not be a cyber bully and don't get into a war. Take it offline as most must aware of. And if you don't know where to get that URL from for your review strategy and Google my business page, there's a little kind of instruction there in terms of where to do it. And you can send some of the nice short link asking them to review. Okay, that's about earning your space. Now we're gonna talk about websites. So your website is a signpost. So Google is gonna come into your website and what we want is we want our content and everything laid out in a way that it's easy to understand, okay? This particular website here, if it looked like this, it would be kind of confusing. It doesn't wanna kind of come down. It doesn't wanna, you know, if we talk about a 404 page, this is a broken page, for example. Now that's gonna impact your SEO if you have a lot of pages that are broken because it's like a dead end to Google. It's like Google coming into your website, going down a road and there being nothing there and then it being like, right, where do I go from here? So making sure that you look, you know, go through your website, understand your site structure and why you've set things up how you have. Now is it easy for a user to navigate? If it is, it's probably easy for Google to navigate but keeping an eye on what's going on and making sure that kind of all the different kind of roads and routes through your website are kind of slick and there aren't loads of basically technical issues. And why does Google rank one website over the other? Is it because someone is just shouting, I am amazing and just talking about themselves? No, it's not. Is it because someone's shouting loud about how amazing they are and how great they are? It's also not that either. There's a lot of things that we need to consider and we need to think about the customer and the content and all that stuff in order to rank. And really we wanna focus on these three areas which is expertise, authority and trust. So we talked about authority before but when we're looking at our content and obviously review signals as well, Google wants us to see that we're an expert in our sector. Okay, there was an update that Google made about a year ago called the EAT update. And it's all about expertise, authority and trust. And what that means is when you're talking about expertise, it's not any more about how long a website's been around or necessarily just about how many backlinks. It's a whole combination of different things that gives newer websites and smaller websites a bigger opportunity to rank. If you've written your content really well, that's why we're seeing all these resource guides, they're so long now and they're packed full of information because it's all about giving people as much value as possible. So making sure that when we're looking at our website content, we're gonna be focusing on being an expert in our sector. So in the content, making sure we're giving people loads of information and stuff. We're gonna, you know, authority. So over time, you know, building up our trust signals in terms of getting links to our website from other websites, I mean, improving our reviews when people come through our website, have a good experience and all those things they're all gonna be super important and it's really important to be honest with yourself. So look at your own website and think, right, does my website deserve to rank? Let's be honest. Let's look through the competitors and let's see if there's anyone out there. You know, who am I competing with and what kind of experience do you have on their website? You know, when I come to mine or when you come to your website, does someone have a better experience? The same, is it worse? Is the content a little bit less? Have I gone into as much detail? And that kind of thing, really important to try and be honest with yourself and just step back. And when you're looking at your content, think, what do I need in my sector? What are my pages? What types of content from this do I need? Do I need blogs? Do I need, you know, photos, videos? And the answer is every single sector's different. So the websites that are ranking well for particular keywords, depending on the sector they'll have a different kind of combination of these things. If we're talking about the healthcare sector it's gonna be mainly text, it's gonna be mainly content. Maybe there would be some infographics on there but there's not gonna be necessarily loads of imagery, pictures. It's not gonna be blogs necessarily. It's gonna be more kind of resource guides, PDF downloads. Whereas if we're talking about a wedding flower company that's gonna be full of photos and imagery and maybe articles and stuff but it's important to understand in your sector what you need. And this is always changing as well. So, you know, video might suddenly increase and it might be a good idea to start trying to do some video content but paying attention to your sector and what's actually going on. That's a really good idea. And when we talk about content in general unique content is king. It's all about unique content. You know, the web was built of people writing things and, you know, new websites popping up. So making sure that you're, you know when you're writing something, writing it uniquely. You know, if you're trying to take elements from somewhere else or even if you're trying to kind of cite paragraphs just really try and take that into consideration that you need to write it uniquely and try and provide value, like more value than someone else's. And when we're looking at our website when we're talking about content we need to ask the question what should you write about? Like what should we write about? And again, if we're looking up from our business from an inside out perspective we think we know what the services that we do are and we think we know what the customer needs but it's as that exercise showed us earlier, you know, we might think that someone's searching one way but essentially there could be loads of other things that they might need us to write about. There could be loads of other content out there that would actually bring in customers that we otherwise wouldn't know. So this is where we do our research and there's loads of research that we can do. So we can do our search research like what we just did call it search research it's got nice, has a ring to it. But like what we just did, looking at the environment what's going on, you know, is it just organic results? Do I need to write loads of blogs? What's popping up here? You know, change the keyword a little bit and type it in but have a look for your sector, what's going on and what opportunities are there for me to rank highly. So, you know, look at your competitors look at the keywords that are coming up. What keywords does Google suggest? What little widgets are popping up? You know, you can now book flights through Google you can book hotel rooms, you can do so much and that will keep changing and the search environment is going to continue to be focused around Google and Google essentially would rather someone just stayed on their platform and didn't even click on your website. So pay attention to this as much as you can as it changes is really important. So Man says, when you say content should it be relevant keywords? Do we always write content in a form of blogs or is there something else that makes a difference too, apart from page headings? Yeah, so I'm going to go through content now so we're going to talk about where the keywords should go and hopefully that'll answer the question some more. So when we're talking about research we've got search research so that is just doing some searching on Google or other search engines then we've got keyword research and this is actually picking out the exact keywords and getting some volumes and getting some data around what are people searching for? Without keyword research we're essentially just stumbling around in the dark thinking, okay, this is what someone's searching for this is what my customers tapping in but it may change over time, you know the whole environment and I'll give you an example about where it's changed for us very recently with a client of ours but the three that I've highlighted here are all free Google keyword planner, Bing keyword planner and Google trends. So these two here I'll show you a screenshot of what it looks like but essentially you can plug in a keyword and it will send you out loads and loads of keywords related to that keyword that people type in and it'll give you an idea of search volumes and how competitive they are. So immediately you've gotten a huge bank of stuff that people are searching for they maybe didn't realize. These are really designed for paid advertising and they will ask you for a credit card if you haven't gotten an account yet but they won't charge you they'll just send you some pretty hundred pound free vouchers which I'm telling off a little bit later so they won't charge you anything but just be worried that they will ask for some card details and then Google trends is another free one where it's a really good tool to compare keywords so if you find two and you don't know if one's trending up one's trending down it will help you there there are some paid tools as well available and when we're thinking about keyword research as you might have as you will have experienced in some of the other webinars that have already run depending on the buying stage whether someone's at a different stage of the buying process or they're just trying to discover what it is they're looking for or they know what they want to buy they're gonna be typing in something different so for example if someone's at the awareness stage and they wanna improve their garden they're looking outside of their garden they're thinking you know what I'd like to improve my garden they might type in something like that if they've already decided they wanna kind of improve their garden and they're trying to work out right what should I do to improve it that suddenly the keyword changes to how much does a gardener cost and then if they're suddenly at the stage where they know how much it costs and now they're looking for one they might type in something like best gardener and Brian so but for your service the keywords intent will change depending on the stage at which someone is along that process so trying to do a little bit of work on that you know how do the keywords change and how does my content fit around that you know and yes you can just write a blog on these things you know for example best gardener in Brighton I could write a blog now if I had a like horticultural website talking about the best five gardeners in Brighton for 2021 and I just kind of give as much information and value as I can and then you know you might find in you know a couple months that starts ranking well for those keywords so yeah different stages really important this is a little snapshot of Google keyword planner so this is an example of what you might see you would type in a keyword up here so I've typed in Glasgow bagpipes as you do and when you press search up here you can specify the you know location you want to search in it will generate for you loads of keywords related to your search term up here it will give you the average monthly searches and it will tell you how competitive they are so how many other websites are trying to rank for this keyword and if you want to do paid advertising roughly how much it would cost you per click but you can download this all into a big Excel spreadsheet and essentially we have loads of keywords immediately and you can keep typing in up you can type in up to 10 keywords in here at one time and it will just generate loads and loads of stuff for you so it's a really great tool there's a link down there if you if you want to have a look this is Google Trends so when we talked about how things change this this was pretty much just in the last couple weeks that we that we found this so we work with a company who does email marketing and we actually run paid advertising for them and we and they were you know dropping in inquiries and we couldn't really you know there was no real rhyme or reason why but what we discovered was actually over time the searches for the specific terms that they were kind of really focused on the kind of generic umbrella terms they were going down at the beginning of the year they're all the way up here and now pretty much they've almost been slashed like about two-thirds and what it turned out was that the market's dropping a little bit but also we've now figured out that we can actually look for keywords for people much earlier in the chain you know looking for customer attention keywords so although we were targeting email marketing before we're now going to target ways to retain customers for small businesses and therefore start to introduce those people who aren't aware of email marketing much yet through you know through that way so we're now going to kind of start writing content around that in a different way so using something like Google Trends is really valuable if you're looking kind of for different ones Matt says how often should you update websites with new or trending keywords so Matt what we'd say is you need to give it a little bit of time for it all to settle in and normally it can take three months it can take three to six months but you can start to get an idea if you're looking at Google Analytics which pages are ranking well if you're starting to appear on Google search results after around three to six months so the important thing is to review it every month have a look is anything improving if after three to six you're not really seeing anything improving then that's when you might want to jump in and kind of play around with a different keyword we've got long tail keyword research which is great for informing blog content you know why is someone doing you know it's like typing in something like you know yeah how much does a gardener cost or what's the best what's the difference between electric vehicle charging speeds that kind of thing Answer the public is a really great tool for this they have a limited number of free kind of entries that you can do I think every 24 hours or week or whatever it is but you type in a keyword into here a simple one and it generates a lovely wheel like this that's kind of hard to read sometimes but a wheel of long tail what we call long tail which just means long form questions and queries that people are typing in and it's really great for just helping break down your content a little bit more you know we might be talking about you know a you know let's say the lemonade stand example earlier online you know if we you know we might be talking about lemonade quite a lot but what we don't realise is we could actually start tapping into content around you know alternatives to caffeine drinks or sugar free new sugar free drinks or you know new businesses who do you know 100% recycled cans or whatever approach you want to take but we don't always need to focus directly on the one keyword that we have been targeting for the rest of our website we might want to break down the content a little bit and try and kind of dive into a few different things the link's there or Stu has put it in the chat for you and ideally in the end the best keyword once we've looked at all our research and we've looked at you know all those volumes in Google Keyword Planner and stuff the best keyword is going to be one that is has a low competition so not many people searching for it has a lot sorry not many people trying to rank for it has lots of people searching for it and of course is relevant for your content but that's easier said than done because everyone is trying to find that the kind of golden egg of keywords but that of course in that lovely Venn diagram is the ideal keyword so now that we have our keywords where do they go someone so someone asked about this in the chat so I'm going to run through this quite quickly but we do have some a blog on it which will help you kind of understand it if you wanted to check out on the website there'll be a link in here so firstly your page title you need to put your keywords in your page title and what that means is on your home page your page title you don't want it to be called home you want it to be relevant to your product you know you want it to be for us you know digital marketing agency and Brighton something with those keywords in mind you know we saw there was no coincidence that when we typed in dog sitters earlier all the page titles there said dog sitters in Brighton or dog sitters in Hove that is where the page title is so page title I'll show you where it is meta description which is the little descriptive bit underneath the page title the actual headings on your page it's a really important place you know don't just put you know online shop you know if you have an online e-commerce store you might want to think about ways that you can include a keyword in there to help you know add another keyword onto that page your content of course which is obvious images so giving images a keyword it's called image alt text or alternative text and backlink anchors as well I'm not going to talk about that very much because it's a whole nother kettle of fish but essentially when someone is hyperlinking to your website so if you have the Guardian linking to your website the words that they're using to link are very relevant you know if they talk about if if the words they're linking are digital marketing agency Brighton and they're linking to our website with that that tells Google that the Guardian is willing to confirm that we are a digital marketing agency in Brighton whereas if it said find out more there aren't any keywords there so the actual words that someone uses to link to your website are relevant too so when we talk about keywords in page titles if you don't know where your page titles are you know open some tabs in Google and you can hover over these tabs and that will tell you that specific page that is the page title on that page so you can go through your website open some some some of the pages up and have a look at there and it would and it will tell you exactly what it says and where you change your page title if you don't if you're not aware is in WordPress and there's a tool called Yoast most developers put it in already but if you're on Squarespace or Wix you'll see something like this it's called an SEO section but you would just type your title in where it says SEO title and you type your meta description in where it says description and what that does is that shows you what it will look like on Google so you can see here let's say if it was you know creative bloom you know and our homepage we might have something like digital marketing agency in Brighton creative bloom that might be our home that might be our homepage page title and that's we're going to put it in there here's an example of one that isn't very good so fresh time what do they do at first glance absolutely no idea maybe they sell fresh time but they don't that they are well they might but it's a grocery store online that I came across hopefully no one owns it I'm not slating it maybe some free consultancy that I'm giving right now but yeah fresh time right of course there are ways you know how could we improve this you know if we know that it's an online grocery store and they've got a little bit of a meta description feel free to write in the chat if you want as I go through this what would be a better way of writing a page title for this and it is their home page so fresh time but yeah it's branding but no one's really going to click on it purely from the fact that I have no idea what it is and also remember that if Google knows that a user won't know what it is then Google will be unlikely to actually you know rank you put you among the rankings immediately so Stuart said online grocery store someone said grocery store in Hove offering exactly even that is going to be better so we've got I put some in here grocery store in Brighton so me and Samantha are right on the same page and yes you can use bars like that to separate the text you can use that or you can use hyphens that's absolutely fine it's just a preference in terms of whichever you prefer looks the best the one thing I'd say is if you're using bars or hyphens try and make sure you do it on every page on your website so choose one and then run with it because then it looks nice and tidy if there's ever a kind of multiple page tasks popping up and your page title should be no longer than 60 characters so 60 characters long if you go over it Google is going to truncate it and chop it chop it at the end so all your effort not all your effort but some of your effort is wasted so 60 characters all right any a little bit any more kind of specific questions I'll I'll make sure I see if I have some time at the end and a quick way for you to visually see all the pages in your website in Google so at the moment you see kind of all sorts of websites if you tap the word site S-I-T-E for the nice colon and then put your website address afterwards so creativeloomrocks.com you will just have results for your website in Google so at a glance you can really quickly have a look at your page titles and what you might also find in there is you might find some pages that you think wait that shouldn't be on Google I shouldn't have like a you know maybe a maybe it says test page or something like that that someone published ages ago by accident or maybe on purpose and forgot to remove it but you can look at your page titles you can look at your meta description see how they look see how your brand is being perceived make sure everything's nice and cohesive yeah but also any pages that maybe shouldn't be on there you can be able to find as well and if you want to do anything a bit more technical you can use a tool called Screaming Frog which is up here and they do have a free version we use it it's a really fantastic tool but much more data and technical so that's not your bad and yeah use that site tip and then obviously we've got the description you're editing it in the same place that little example I gave you before but it's really important we can see that Google does highlight words you know if you type something into Google a keyword and you look at the meta description it's often highlighting words in there so it obviously considers it to be an important factor so you've got here's a better example of how that could be written you know considering all the words that Google might want to see or people are actually typing in that could be a better kind of format if you don't type it it will just take a chunk from that page so it's not the worst thing in the world and obviously if you have a thousand pages we wouldn't expect you to write every single one just focus on your most important pages your home page your main services pages and that kind of thing you have up to 160 characters to do it in and your shop goes from looking like this this was fresh time before I had no idea what it was and now all of a sudden it's very clear what they do so you know very simply especially if you're sat among your competitors and you've you know and when we're looking at ads it's even more important obviously your page title in the description that you've got that kind of spot on so that's page titles meta description we've talked about now quickly on headers including it in the headers is only going to benefit you this is there's always a bit of a compromise here between you know branding what you feel comfortable having on your page and also the kind of keywords that are going to help you I can guarantee you that if you went onto our website and kind of looked at a page like this you wouldn't even clock that it says SEO agency in Brighton you know whereas if I said to you oh that's the keyword you need to have on your page you know other you know or maybe something specific you know if it was that wedding flower luxury wedding flowers in Sussex you know someone might say I don't want that but not many people see it you kind of it just kind of like blends in there it's only because we know our business is very well that it kind of becomes an issue but in terms of keywords it's another signal the next thing that Google is going to focus on is going to be your header so when we say headers when you're when you're editing your pages it's h1s h2s those are all headers and there is a hierarchy and there should only be one h1 on every page that's what we say it's essentially the umbrella term that that page is about so you're not going to have your main keyword in there so for us this page is about SEO so it's going to be SEO agency and Brighton because that's what we want to get found for and then what we're also doing is we've done a bit of research and we know that people type in what is SEO so we've also included on that page some information because we want to try and be an authority in our sector especially in Brighton actually helping people understand what it is if you don't already know so headers is number three and then my most annoying slide of the day try not to stay on it for too long come at the frog talking about content when you're looking at your keywords of course naturally if we're writing some content keywords will come out there'll be keywords in there so write it naturally first and then from our keyword research we might have found that oh a keyword that we that users use to search for SEO is local SEO agency Brighton and that might be it could be on the same page or it could be a separate page of content but you might find that there are specific terms that you can put into your content that maybe weren't in there before so write it naturally and then just double check with your keywords if there's any other keywords or a different variety or another semantic word the keyword that's kind of related to that keyword that you could use afterwards so just make sure you write it naturally and it's not robotic like we sell flowers in Brighton the best flower shop in Brighton come and buy our flowers they are amazing flowers are great because no one it sounds like a robot and Google's not going to enjoy them and a notable mention here is there's you know architects is a good example of anyone who's an architect not anyone who's an architect let me take that back a lot of the time we come across architects who have nice simplistic they look fantastic their websites their imagery is massive however just because you want a minimal design you still need to rank do you still need content to rank for SEO it's a little bit like having a book shop without any books in it so if you if your website as a whole is very simplistic or minimal it's important to that can be the front end of the website it can look like that if that's how you want it to be but it's really important to break down your content somewhere behind the scenes so that there is some stuff in there a really important thing making sure yeah as Stu said you really want at least around 200 to 300 words on your pages even your kind of like our main services page pages you need some content on there otherwise it is essentially like an empty shop and Google size I think last but not least image images I said image alt text so very quickly this is just some examples this is WordPress here this is Squarespace this is Wix obviously there are other website builders that some people might have their websites built in but I just wanted to give some examples so these are all the places to put keywords in your images it's a good way of appearing on Google images you know if you showed wedding flowers and you want to appear for kind of you know rose wedding bouquet or something like that you might want to put it in there and you can lose longer tails so be more descriptive you know if it's an e-commerce website making sure you're this is really important for e-commerce as well you know any ways to free you know get your images popping up all over the place it's called alt text on WordPress it's called the caption on Squarespace and it's called what's in this image on Wix because all these websites builders love to confuse us by giving us lots of different terminology okay and the last section for SEO is some notable mentions now I'm going to fly through this so I have enough time to cover the ppc so bear with me but like I say you will get these slides and you'll get a recording of this so you'll be able to review it if you need to so backlinks that's what we talked about very briefly one website is pointing to your website it's a great signal for authority and it's going to improve your authority if you have some the more the more high value backlinks you have I want to say high value I mean from established trustworthy websites like The Guardian for example and what they do is they're essentially a way of some of a website essentially saying to Google hi Google I an established website approve this website over here and the more of those websites you have doing that obviously the more Google says wow this is a really great website we're going to rank you higher so that's what a backlink is I'm not going to cover it anymore because it's very very it's a whole another session but if that's something that's interesting if you've done everything else it's something that you should look at or look at potentially thinking about how you can improve the amount of links you have to your website because it improves your authority your speed so website speed and it's going to come become more and more important particularly on mobile you can use any of these tools down here so you can type in GT metric speed test you can type in Pingdom speed test or think with Google speed test and you'll be able to put your URL in and see how fast your website is it is quite cutthroat on these so don't worry if it says F or you have a horrible score it's just something to be aware of and if you struggle with your you know if you have a slow website there are ways you can improve it very typically it's images so images that aren't compressed they're typically massive and they take a long time to load and as we add content to our website over time the number of images on the website increase over time and then it slows down the website so but paying attention to this and paying attention to you know mobile speed particularly is really important you know when we're talking about mobile speeds you want to really be below three seconds below two seconds for a page to load this is the type of thing it might pop up and say you need to do these things the developer can help you if you're not aware but like I say very typically it's about images so compressing images and as Stu threw into the chat there is a URL called tinypng which is somewhere you can just compress the images it doesn't change the quality of them you just drag them in there it makes them a bit smaller and then you can put them on your website and there are also a way there is also plugins that developers can put on that automatically reduce the size of the images on your site but I think it might cost a little bit Lisa not so much that's something that you might have to have to talk about after in terms of media library so I don't think it's in your CMS so I don't think it's going to be I don't think it's loading the media library every time it's browsing the website so I would say no it doesn't affect the speed it's only the ones that are physically on the website and good image sizes I now say below 300 kilobytes so it used to be a hundred but images cameras are getting better and you know and I think that it would be reasonable to say if you can get images below 300 kilobytes so if you don't compress them they're going to be like 1.2 megabytes they're going to be massive and if you drag it into tiny PNG it will drop down and the other thing is if you can convert it from a PNG to a JPEG it will almost half or reduce it by about three times just automatically because PNGs are larger so if you compress the images they shouldn't blur some and if you drag it into tiny PNG if you try that you should see download it and compare the two one will be smaller than the other and they should look the same it's different compressing versus resizing so not resizing the images we're compressing it so see what it does so we talked about mobile so mobile speed but also mobile optimization okay google is now looking at mobile first so everyone should be grabbing their phones and having a look at their website on a mobile making sure it doesn't look like this really it's tiny and just like a normal website on a desktop but actually is optimized for it wix does it automatically Squarespace does it automatically wix is still drag and drop and WordPress obviously depends on the template you're using or the developer but make sure you have a look and that means really go through the whole journey you know at every step does anything look kind of out of whack keep an eye on that it's really important don't keyword stuff be natural we already talked about that so don't just write loads and loads of keywords and chuck it in a paragraph write something natural so people can read it avoid duplicate content so no copy and pasting I don't really ideally want you to copy you know one website said all of this and you kind of copy 500 words from their website and copy and paste it onto yours avoid duplicate content we said unique content is king so whenever you can as much as you can make sure you are writing your own content because google doesn't like to be confused and there is a link here if you ever want to check that google is going to think that your content is plagiarized so it's a really good thing and for blogs as well if you're using resources and that kind of thing taking snippets put it through a plagiarism checker and just to make sure that you're not kind of putting it on there and 404 like we said we don't want to be sending google down a dead end you know a 404 just means a broken page so very typically it's when maybe you've turned a page a page is once live on your website and then you've put it into the drafts again but you haven't redirected that URL that's what we call it so that URL can still be found but there's nothing on the page so you arrive at something like this and it's okay if you crawl your website and you find some you just need to make sure you redirect them we'll just make sure there aren't any 404s in there and you can use screaming for broke like we said like the tool we used it for before to do that and lastly just to remind you once more it's very important to not just go from an outside to have an inside out perspective you want to have an outside in so be very honest step back be critical and look at your websites criticize them but then also be willing to kind of criticize some things on your own website be very honest and it's not all about saying I am great and one thing that stew and I always say as well is SEO is not just a quick 100 meter sprint it is a marathon you're not going to do all these things and think ah there you are finished there will still be things that keep changing we said earlier that everything is continuously moving and changing when it comes to search marketing so making sure that you are always doing some keyword research you're learning you're looking at the Google environment how it's changing check it after three to six months have a look at what's going on if you're not seeing any positive results you might need to add some more content or maybe you're talking the wrong keywords or that kind of thing and there is a blog on our website on how to on page SEO if you need to go through that process again and that's just going through page titles choosing the keyword headers content that kind of thing and where to put your keywords okay so I am running four minutes over time so that's pretty good because that's a lot to get through and I appreciate that with SEO there are so many you know we could normally probably run a session on each section individually so but immediately that should give you some actionable things that you can go away straight away and check go onto your website run speed tests do some keyword research look at the Google environment so you can do that immediately so hopefully that was valuable now we're going to talk through AdWords PPC and we're going to focus first on these lovely offers that they give you and I would love to say be wary because there are we you know we've worked with businesses who've taken advantage of this free ad credit but remember what I said your credit card is on file so as soon as that budget is used your the money from your credit card starts getting spent if you don't know what you're doing so all I would say is you know be very just just be cautious if Google is offering you let's say you've just signed up to your keyword research and they've asked you to be your card in you know they will send you this kind of thing and just be wary to jump in and use it straight away because we have been in a situation where people have been spending their own money before without even realizing it it's a bit cheeky on Google's behalf so just make sure you know what you're doing or someone at least is checking out keeping an eye on it if you are taking advantage of some of this free ad credit which does exist if it is something you're interested in I'd also say that when you start a Google ads account it will typically start it up in something called Google AdWords Express and that is essentially a very very simplistic form of using Google AdWords and in my opinion it's where Google being a bit more vague about where they're showing your ads and it's really important that we know where our ads are being shown we get as much information as possible we can change as many factors of targeting factors as we can so making sure you're on the real Google AdWords platform and not on Google AdWords Express and you'll typically see it in your navigation URL but if you do have a Google Express account there is a link down here in terms of how to switch it from Google Express to Google AdWords if you are in that situation so why do we want Google ads? so there are around 70 to 80,000 Google searches every second right so if we can and we know from doing Google searches and just from seeing it every day the ads appear right at the top right we see them right at the top of the Google searches and this is a little just snapshot about how ads have changed over the years you know from 2000 we can see visually how different and how almost disguised they are now compared to you know where they used to be they used to be tiny but also you know bright blue you know writing in bold with highlight text behind it and everything's a sponsored link but now it's pretty much blended in to an organic result which means more people are now clicking on ads because not as many people as we think can you know notice an ad from an organic result you know there's now four ads that can appear in the top of the results it used to be three and they're now much larger so we can see that on our desktop screens on our laptop screens our whole page can be taken up of ads before we even see any results they really do blend in to organic results and these are some reasons you might be interested in Google ads so you can be at the top of Google until organic improves so you might have a new website and you might identify that you want to rank highly for something but your organic results aren't quite there yet so if you want to rank on the top Google ads is a way you can get there you can target specific keywords and locations so you can only you can choose to only target people in the specific geographic area if you want and you can be quite accurate if you know what you're doing you can steal your competitors to traffic which is fantastic you can actually build on your competitor keywords and you can appear when someone taps on your competitor's brand name Google is trying to kind of crack down on that a little bit and we're talking about relevancy because of relevancy it's harder to do this because obviously most brand names we don't have on our own websites so but that is a way you can do it and you can use display ads so even when people aren't on Google you can put banners up around websites online you can choose to only pay when someone clicks on your ad so a lot of people forget that most of the results that we see those ads they're only getting charged when someone clicks on it you can set it up to work differently but the majority of ads are called CPC which is cost per click or PPC pay per click ads you can use them for awareness attracting new customers you can remark it to people who've already been on your website we'll talk about that in a few slides and you can obviously offer seasonal holiday offers and that kind of thing as well so you can do product offerings but dude be careful because like I said before this is paid advertising our cards are listed if we don't necessarily know what we're doing we could be spending money unnecessarily we could be being way too broad with our searches and these are all some things you need to be aware of so it can be really expensive if you don't do your keyword research you know I know that some of those email marketing terms that we were targeting they were 54 pounds a click so 54 quid is what people like Melchimp are willing to pay just to get people onto their website which is absolutely ludicrous when you think about it now when we're talking about keywords and ads really with Google we're normally going to be looking between one pound, two pound that kind of thing but for those hyper competitive agencies they're willing to spend you know that much money every month so being aware of bidding on expensive keywords without doing your research you don't want to rinse your budget you know if you're not kind of if no one's paying attention to how much you're spending every week you could just be spending your money and then suddenly jump in three weeks later and realize you spent 500 pounds and have nothing to show for it so important not to rinse your budget you don't want to appear for non-relevant keywords or broad keywords you have to have conversion tracking there is no point paying for advertising if we haven't worked out if they're leading to conversions we will talk about conversions we need to write good ads we need to understand our budgeting and we need our landing pages and that is the page that we send someone to on our website they need to be as good as possible there's no point sending you know it's paying for someone to come to our website if it's not ready you know or the page isn't good or if it's a bit you know it's slow or the mobile optimizations aren't good and I always like to remind people that it is not always the answer even if someone comes to me and says you know I want to I want to run pvc ads it doesn't or it's not relevant for every business and it's not always going to be the what the golden goose for you don't just push the button across your fingers you know it could be already incredibly competitive or you could be targeting the wrong customers or they're just not the customers clicking that you want to so we always say if you want to do it run a trial first have a very have a much smaller budget see what happens see what's out there get some data you know work on you know we'll be able to find out what keywords people are typing in and what is causing them to click through and then make a decision after that so we talk about Google ads so these are the options that we have search display shopping video and apps we're going to focus on search and display today mainly on search because we're talking about search marketing but obviously we do see Google shopping popping up on search as well so you will see commerce products popping up but again that's kind of another kettle of fish so we're going to focus on search and display today and we all know what they look like so if you had a donkey sanctuary we can see that people are bidding on donkey sanctuary ads if you had a Marmite shop I'm not sure what it is I just typed it in and it ends people are bidding on on the words Marmite shop and it's also important to note that in that local map pack where we saw the Google My Business pages appearing like this you can connect that to your Google ads so that when someone's looking locally you can actually have your ads this is an example of one here I should really have a screenshot of the whole thing but you can actually connect it so your ads are appearing in there in the local map pack so that's a kind of good way to use ads I think if you're a local business or selling a service in a specific location but essentially with search ads your ads appear when a user searches for a specific keyword that you are targeting in your account and when we talk about display ads these are the ones that appear on other websites around the place display ads are the kind of things that we'd be more likely to use for remarketing so when someone's visited our website and left we might want to send them some discounts on some other websites with that kind of thing but you're going to treat it like an online billboard so it's a little bit like when we walk down the street and you look you know to your left and the right and there's some billboards it's essentially the same thing so ad words, auction and relevancy so what's happening in the background I'm just going to quickly tell you what's happening in the background so obviously these have been decided in terms of what order they're in you know we've got digital marketing institute number one jellyfish number two et cetera et cetera but there is a reason that they're in this order and I'm just going to give you a very kind of top line explanation of why and typically display ads are much cheaper than search ads Lisa because you are essentially showing it to people when they're not searching for it but yeah with search ads it's because it's an in market customer so someone who's searching for something specifically at that time it's much more competitive so you will yeah it will be much cheaper to use display so I mean to give you a rough figure it's only like 20 pence or something per click 20 to 40 pence so the reason so one of the main factors that Google's looking at is something called quality score and that is relevancy so it just simply it's relevancy made up of a combination of different things so it's how relevant is the content in your website to the keyword that you're trying to target how relevant is the ad to the key that you've written to the keywords you're trying to target you know how many you know while you've had your ads running how many people have clicked it and how many people who click those ads kind of stay on your website or leave straight away and all of that Google is using its algorithms to give you what we call a quality score out of 10 and it will give you that for all the keywords you're targeting each individual one so you might have 10 out of 10 if it's a really if it's like your umbrella keyword like if it's creative a brand name for example creative bloom you probably have 10 out of 10 because it's it's going to be hyper relevant but if you're going for something a little bit more vague then you might have a lower quality score and so how does it decide what quality score to give you and how does it decide where it's going to rank people so essentially it's looking at your bid it's then going to look at your ad relevancy and then it's going to look at your landing page relevancy so everyone is able to bid on a keyword but you can bid a maximum what you call cost per click so I'm only willing to bid about two pounds per click for people to come through and then I've written my ad really relevant and I've got my landing page really relevant and I've got a quality score of x so let's see some examples so let's say we have we'll call him middle bidder and he's willing to bid five pounds right but he only has a quality score of six out of 10 because it's at 10 so he's kind of in the mid-range of being relevant and then we have a low bidder who's only willing to bid three pounds but they have a really relevant website of nine out of 10 and then we have a high bidder who is very is not relevant at all but is willing to bid a lot more the point of this very simplistic kind of example of the algorithm is that just because you're able to bid more does not mean that you're going to be able to rank higher because Google cares about relevancy so this is where we talked about SEO really helping your cost per click and the amount that ads are going to cost you the more relevant your site is we can see here this person's only having to only having to bid three pounds essentially but they're in second place over someone who's maybe willing to bid eight but because they haven't worked on their relevancy so it's important to and make sure we're optimizing our pages and this is why you know you don't just jump into ad straight away and start marketing them you need to work on your relevancy jump on site do your work on keyword research and make sure you're sending someone to a page that is very relevant for the keyword you're trying to target I've shown you a little snapshot of the data table that you'll typically see in Google ads and I've also given you a handy jargon busting slide in a few slides time that kind of explain what all these topics are up here all these individual headings but this is how we we typically see what we call keywords you know we've got a cost per click per keyword so this is how much we're willing to bid on that keyword and then we can see our quality score here so you can see at 10 and we can see something a little bit lower and then we can see why as well because you know these are much more targeted to our business whereas we've gone a little bit broader with best yoga retreats UK and so our quality score is a little bit less but what we can see here is actually with quality score if you have a low quality score there are ways that you can improve it so how do you do it you can improve ad keywords from your ad group into your ads and make sure you actually have the keywords in the ads that you've written make sure your keywords are actually on your landing pages I know it sounds obvious but make sure that the keywords are trying to target if they if you can include them on your page semantic keywords so keywords that are linked to the keywords you're targeting should be on your page so Google likes to know that the content in general is including all the stuff it expects to find and in regards to kind of keywords making sure your experience is better on your landing page like mobile optimization and speed and that kind of thing and then you'll get nice thumbs up and improved quality score so when we're targeting keywords so we're focusing on this section here Google will ask you right which keywords do you want to target when you're setting up your account and you'll see there's different ways that these have been put in place so there's some with speech marks around them some with square bars and some with little pluses and they all mean different things it's essentially telling Google how you want to target these keywords and it's you can see them here this is the type of interface that you might put it into and when you're looking at speech marks and square bars and that kind of thing it's all different ways of saying right this how broad you want to be with your targeting so I've given you a nice table here so you can see so when we look at these square bars that's called exact match an exact match keyword is essentially saying this is pretty much all I'm willing someone to type in to target for this keyword so in this instance someone's typing in women's hats I only want to appear if they type in exactly that term so women's hats if we use speech marks it would be phrase match for the word women's hats so it means we could appear for something like by women's hats or second hand women's hats because it's in the phrase so you've got exact match that's exactly that term phrase match within the phrase and then you've got things called broad match broad match modifier and these are going to be extinct next year in June 2022 and you'll only be able to focus on these two but for now you don't need to worry about the top one because you don't no one's ever going to be using this anymore broad match modify you put a little plus between each word and it helps give you kind of like it helps you appear for synonyms other misspellings and kind of close variations to what you're looking for so women's hats hats for women it would probably appear for hats for ladies hats for girls that kind of thing because Google knows and can understand that women is related to those terms so those are the different types and you can see them this is how where you didn't put them but that's essentially all those mean and to start with you know if you know your if you don't really know what to be targeting or whatever of course we can use broad match to find let Google throw a bigger net out there and see what people type in but that's when we risk appearing for broader less relevant keywords so we just need to be wary with those things right so I've got kind of six minutes so I'm going to try and whistle through these digital shop window very quickly so we can see an ad here the eon has used and you can use something called negative keywords which is when you choose which keywords you don't want to appear for and it's very important because obviously they're appearing for this brand eon clothing so they would need to add a negative keyword as eon clothing as an exact match because they don't want their ad to appear for that because it's irrelevant you don't want someone click on there if they if they're a knock knock the right customer and it's also important these are both some bad examples of ads you should not be including in an advert what you don't do so they've added not serving prom or school dancing in this ad that I I managed to find so don't use an ad to say what you don't do use an ad to say what you do do really well it's quite a funny one and then a funny one so this is quite clever so Samsung have actually bid on the word iPhone 6 obviously iPhone's an Apple product but they've said oh that's all good you obviously meant you wanted an S6 from Samsung so they're trying to nick some of their competitors traffic's that's quite a clever one but the one thing I'd say with ads is you know for the in this example I've tapped in bakery course online you know have a look at what makes you click on an ad you know what is it what's the wording how does the wording make you feel you know in terms of psychology you know look this one actually they've just introduced images into ads now so you can add them in that actually does make a difference it draws my eye to that ad so being you know taking the time to kind of focus on actually what draws your eye and what actually makes you want to click on an ad is really important very quickly on budgets Google is going to ask you how much do you want to spend each day and the way that you work that out is you work out your monthly spend first so how much do you want to spend over a month so let's say you want it to be 500 pounds you will then be able to work out from that your daily spend so it's important we've done our research we know how much are rough cost per clicks going to be let's say one pound so we know if we have 500 pounds a month and our clicks going to be roughly one pound on average then we hopefully get around 500 clicks and so to work out that daily budget that we just saw we've got a monthly spend 500 pounds and we divide it by the days in the month on average so 500 divided by 30.2 which is the average across the year would be 1650 so that is your daily budget essentially so you work out your monthly divide it by 30.2 and that's only if you're running it on every day if you're running on every day of the month obviously it will change if you turn it off for weekends and there is your daily budget I have about two more minutes so let me just see how long I've got couple more slides yeah I think we'll be right perfect so um I'll just go that way remarketing quickly someone mentioned this the other day when Stu was running his session on Tuesday about remarketing so what remarketing is is essentially when someone comes to your website and then leaves you can then serve them adverts and it's great for people who leave carts who put something in checkout and they don't complete you could then send someone a free delivery ad and they could click on it or it could show them a code and that kind of thing but it's a good way to kind of retain customers whom you may may be lost or they may be kind of still in the kind of decision phase it's a good way to kind of remind them and there's a little kind of visual infographic of the example you have a customer they go to your website they're trapped with a cookie then they leave and then you can kind of advertise the one other advertise them on other websites and what that does is it creates audiences so you can actually choose specific pages for this to be applied to so you can say right just for anyone who visits my website I want to create an audience and once it gets to a certain size you'll be able to advertise to them so you can see here it says too small to serve because it needs to be over a thousand to um serve it on search ads and this is a little bit like what it looks like so you know so you might have just gone onto this website gazelle and now you've gone to onto youtube and you're suddenly seeing these big ads that is what remarketing is so you're seeing that kind of in action and lastly don't forget about conversions if you're running any advertising or seo it's really important to set up conversions and that just means assigning um a conversion trigger or just saying choosing what conversions around your website that could be a form fill someone signing up to your email letter someone clicking on a button visiting a page that or you know buying a product of course of a t-commerce having those conversions in place is so important to understand ROI you know your return on ad investment but also understand you know which of your pages landing pages are being conversions which of your seo efforts are working you know this is now you might have a thank you page like this so once someone bought something or you know filled out a form you could very simply put um a conversion on anyone who visits this page and then you know that wherever they came from led to a conversion as I said all of these phrasings up here all these different words I've given you a handy jargon busting slide to tell you what they all mean if you don't know and if you're banging your head against the table like the kitty down there and the final thing to remember is reporting so you should all have analytics Google analytics is free it's a free tool on your website that tracks everything that's going on which pages are working how people are enjoying it if you've got major issues and which of your kind of marketing if it's our you know bearing fruit so using that is really important there are paid tools that you can use as well if you want to go a bit more advanced but regardless everyone should have have Google analytics analytics in school stored on their website so that is the end of the search marketing session I appreciate there was loads in there but there's a couple more sessions obviously coming up so next week we have social media and content and data security and GDPR on the 21st so put your place it's all on the Eventbrite pages so feel free to go check those up and just to remind you about the digital champion so I said there was a form at the end of this if you haven't seen this already you'll get these slides but there is a contact form here to request your preferred digital support and they'll kind of direct you to the right digital champion so give them some details or you can give them a call and leave a message and they'll get in touch with you but it's eight hours of free consultancy that you don't have to pay for from some really really great experts in loads of different areas of digital so definitely take advantage of that after a couple helpful resources in here and yeah thank you there's one last cat because you stay till the end you get to see if the queue is one of all so yeah I appreciate that we are are we on time yeah bang on 130 that's that's just keep fair in mind Charlie put on no problem so does anyone have obviously if anyone needs to go feel free but I think we've got five minutes just to cover any burning questions and there's obviously some digital champions in here as well that would be able to give some available insights if anyone has any questions I didn't have a chance to read the chat as I went but I saw I saw stew feverishly button bashing to answer everyone so I didn't need to interfere so if you did ask ask a question I didn't answer it I apologize while I was doing it but feel free to ask now if there's anything anything that I haven't covered or anything you need clarification on yes definitely no first off thanks it's been really yeah it's really useful I've written down loads of notes to go through so yeah sorry about that I as I say I make rose lemonade and I've noticed I've done a couple of the searches you've been talking about and I know there's a lot of volume for pink lemonade for example I don't I ideally want to change the name of the lemonade I don't mind calling it pink rose lemonade I know when it's been on television a lot of people are for Google and Sam's pink lemonade for example I will if someone was to search pink rose lemonade and escape complicated or rose pink lemonade would there be too much variation or is that a really serious difference and I'd like to make a serious decision on I mean so so in terms of the order of keywords so so you can typically type that into Google and you'll see the difference so you'll see you can you can do that research yourself just by typing it in it will it will differ but I would say marginally with such a specific product pink rose lemonade you know I think most people will go with either rose lemonade or pink lemonade there's not normally using both keywords what I would say is when we talked about I like some content to your site that isn't always necessarily that exact keyword you know you could start writing a little having a little content hub all around pink lemonade and you could talk about all the different types and how you know how fresh lemonade pink lemonade is different to sparkling and then you know start to link to your products you know hyperlinking pink lemonade so you're trying to essentially start it's not kind of the forefront of your business so when someone lands it doesn't say just pink lemonade but you are starting to create some content around it because it's what we need to do sometimes we need to kind of like dabble in areas that maybe wouldn't have been the ways that we would have done it but so that we can say to Google we actually do have content on pink lemonade and if someone types it in it's going to be relevant for our searches the only thing is pink lemonade is a different product to what I imagine is an American pink lemonade is a different product to the product that you're selling so it's working out of those people who are typing that in are they actually looking for the fresh still no pink lemonade or are they open to the product that you're selling because we don't want you you don't want you to spend hours and days working on that if the customer isn't right so that's why I would say cool I've got a question I've got a question for Malcolm I'm Malcolm's our e-commerce expert Malcolm what would you say you know from your exposure I'm generalising what would you say is the most important search search elements to pay attention to for an e-commerce business I know it depends on the sector and the things that that's quite an open question and that is that's why I asked it I mean first of all I'd say the today's session has been brilliant there's some really good you know practical knowledge and information the on-site SEO is super important for e-commerce I think the tip about alt tags for images often gets overlooked so on page SEO and really making sure that you know pages are ranking as well as they can is probably my go-to bit of advice paid is a different channel all together so paid search for me is a very I think for any business you've got SEO that works over here giving us organic results that's great we can do what we can to get all of that free traffic through paid has some very specific targets associated to it not just in terms of revenue but in terms of activities and actions that you're looking for a user to take once they visit your website so for me they're they're very different disciplines and often you can be looking for different things as a result from both you know from both paid and organic search I don't know whether that helps answer your question in any way did yeah that was good thanks I'd like to say guys that we actually worked with Malcolm not long ago and we did a lot of work with Malcolm on my SEO and one of the things that you mentioned just then Malcolm was about our descriptions of our products and actually a few months down the line now we're coming up organically as well as the manufacturers of those products and sometimes people buy a first instead of buy off the actual manufacturers thinking that we are the manufacturer so yeah we've done really well on that great stuff Jeff that's really good to hear that's a good success sorry good work Malcolm oh get a SEO okay cool any other questions before we stop the oh we need to do the poll actually don't we I'm so glad I remembered that did I do the poll in the beginning no we didn't we missed the poll all right well we'll do the poll anyway I was so caught up in the excitement I missed it new buckets now so right Stu and I would just go on at the beginning and do another poll and they'll just we'll make sure you're right not at all at the beginning okay let's relaunch the poll there we go so feel free so type in there for me just click you can click on the actual text itself not at all could be better or confident how confident are you in understanding search marketing now whatever you feel after that session if you do need some more help like we say there are digital champions in here there's eight hours of free session a free kind of consultancy with them that you can use so make sure you take advantage of that I have a quick question yeah go for it so I've noticed on a lot of brand websites particularly fashion they're putting lots of writing at the top and then putting the rest of it under a what's the team then with someone like google someone like apple or other luxury brands they're not doing that and still getting at the top of google I know you're saying earlier about how you don't you don't want lots of images but I find that people do spend a lot of time looking at images I didn't say I didn't say there shouldn't be images it depends on the sector very very much so I mean it could be like I was saying an example of wedding flowers that sector is going to be all about images everyone wants to see what the wedding bouquet looks like so it it's going to vary in you and it's about looking at your sector and looking at your competitors who's ranking well and what is that makeup of content you know how much of its text and imagery but we do have to also bear in mind that apple they don't need to do a thing because they are such a huge website essentially it would probably be one of the worst websites to keep an eye on in terms of SEO best practice just purely because only from the fact that they are such a huge website and they have they have a domain rate rating of probably a hundred that it'll be better to look in your sector who's ranking well why are they ranking well and then try and replicate their best practices that they're doing that would be my best bet so that's my next point really but really everyone's new in the sector no one's ever really sold online before a lot as I say wasn't really practical before lockdown so it's everything's very new some of the websites you would expect from big companies are only at best sometimes yeah and so it's quite hard to to gauge it I've been looking at other industries to kind of you know figure it out but I'm finding quite I'm finding that particularly frustrating mm-hmm they're all about how they're gauging everyone else what I've got that was a gauge against yeah I would say I mean I would say in that case try and find a similar similar product that's maybe a different type of keyword you know whether it's something that's like ginger beer for example or something that's going to be a similar type of style of product see how that sector's all laid out see what people are looking at there and you can maybe be the first one in your you know you know hold the you know carry the button and start kind of like going in your sector and be the first one to set the you know the foundations and what it should be so yeah it's a bit of an unknown but only through kind of trial and error doing some things check it off to three six months and then if it's working then great if it's not then revisit it I'd say so folks yeah California you have usually done everything so you can usually find a website of what you do in California so just type in in California and you usually find something they're usually a bit ahead of us you know we have to go a little bit of a website website inspiration hunting and in California and thanks for I've got this afternoon sorted already yeah sorry about that we pushed something we pushed your call out the way didn't we gave you a big gave you a bigger importance now the jump one cool yeah Matt just said do bullet points work as well as normal text as my sector bullet points are becoming very popular Malcolm did say sound looking to S.I.P.S.U.P. and Vokington's and bullet points are are still are still going to be super valuable I mean they're when we talk about something like a featured snippet a lot of the times they're actually populated as as as bullet points so again it depends what exactly is you're talking about but very it's very common that bullet points are often complemented by longer form text so having a bit of both is normally a good idea and not just kind of having just bullet points on the page you want to probably see a little bit of both even if it's product descriptions I wonder if Malcolm would agree but normally you'd want bullet points as well as probably some longer form content as well don't bullet points kill kittens Olly unfortunately they do that was shouldn't be saying that in my presentation okay champs I think we will have to wrap up the session yeah thanks very much everyone don't forget to sign on to the next courses next week they're going to be some really great ones around social media and gpr so if you haven't already jump onto that and see you then thank you very much thanks guys really great session it's a thank you very much yeah well done guys see you later see you later that was good