BING ADS VS GOOGLE ADS: CASE STUDY: WHICH OFFERS THE BETTER VALUE?

While talking to group of PPC mediums, the topic of Bing Ads vs Google Adwords surfaced. Google Adwords turned out to be the winner because of greater loyal base and results to prove worth. But what was noticeable thing in the debate was the fact Bing Ads advantages are not known to many. This article is not about promotion of Bing Ads, but rather a neutral view of which campaign platform works betters.

Target Audience

While working through different campaigns we realized that Bing Ads works for much mature audience of middle age to early forties. So if you are into business like home services, advertising through Bing Ads can be pretty fruitful. The Google Adwords on the other hand, has huge chunk of young people. So products and services focused on teens and young adults have better results on Google Adwords.

Size of Competition

It should also be kept in mind that Google Adwords has a much bigger pool for high volume traffic generation. The number of people who uses Bing Ads is undeniably low, but the quality of relevant clicks has higher probability. When we analyzed through a sample test run campaign, the results show that overall conversion ratio of Bing Ads are higher with lower cost per click (CPC), minimal cost per lead (CPL) and better positioning. There is much less competition that gives you a wider ground to show your advertising skills with creativity to showcase in a unique attention-grabbing way.

Better Option

No one can suggest you to import all your campaigns from Google Adwords and run it on Bing Ads exclusively. As the Google Adwords is an expert player that your team has probably greater experience working on and generating sure shot results. But Bing Ads is more like an untapped platform that might support you more than you expect. It needs to be explored by continuous trial with margin of error kept in mind. One should know the limit of budget that needs to be invested and should stick to it. The advantage of Bing is that it provides import from Google campaign option, that reduces the work requirement to start from scratch, yet there are few technicalities that you need to manage on the way. The most prominent limitation is that keywords cannot be edited when you import from Google, rather you need to set new campaign for the purpose.

At last we can say depending upon the nature/ size of your business, you should identify the platform that works for you. But you can give both of them a fair chance to check the worth of your money at the very minute, giving you long-term benefits.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ON PAGE VS OFF PAGE SEO

 Well, SEO has two major parts that includes on-page SEO and off-page SEO. We’ll discuss about their differences and what we need to care about for the most part. Thing is, it’s kind of easy to see the difference because on-page SEO is basically what you do on your own site to improve rankings whereas off-page SEO is what you do on other sites to improve your search engine rankings.

Let’s take a closer look at each of them:

On-Page SEO:

Like I said before, on-page SEO is what you do on your own site to improve your search engine rankings. Now you’ll learn what exactly that means. On-page SEO falls into two main categories:

Basic on-page SEO and in-depth on-page SEO. Basic on-page SEO implies that you use your keywords in:

In case you’re using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, you’ll be able to use it for keeping track of your keyword usage. You can just scroll down once in your post editor and you’ll see all the requirements that you need to keep in mind for proper on-page SEO for every single WordPress post you create.

In-depth on-page SEO deals with things like


You can install the Broken Link Checker plugin to take care of broken links and images within your site. You may want to use other software or services to get to know about your in-depth on-page SEO issues. I personally use ScreamingFrog and Moz.com for that sort of info. Now, let me get you up to speed about off-page SEO.

Off-Page SEO:

Off-page SEO is all about building links that point back to your site (aka backlinks). As a matter of fact, there are a lot of off-page SEO methods. They are generally called link building because you kind of build backlinks for your site. Some of these methods are


So, the main question that arises from this is that what is the priority: on-page or off-page SEO? Though you need to know both to make sure that your site is good both in terms of on-page and off-page SEO, a Google rule of thumb would be to focus on off-page SEO. More specifically on the quality and quantity of backlinks. At least that’s how it’s working at the time of recording. You can find a whole lot of mediocre sites on Google who rank pretty high because they have a slew of backlinks. Now you would know the difference between on-page and off-page SEO.

Did you happen to make sure that your WordPress site is ok in terms of on-page and technical SEO? Thing is, if you did not properly take care of your WordPress SEO, your site will not rank as high as it could. There are various WordPress SEO issues such as installing and configuring SEO plugins, robots.txt, XML sitemaps, image optimization, video SEO, permalinks and the list goes on and on.

GOOGLE ADS: SEARCH VS DISPLAY CAMPAIGNS

If you’re brand new to Google Adwords and you’re trying to decide should I use the search Network ads or the Display Network ads and what the differences are, we’re going to discuss this in a bit detail. 

In Google ad words we have two different options we can do search ads and we can do display network ads. With search ads people are going to Google google.com or google.ca fair in Canada or whatever country you are in and they’re specifically doing a search and you as the advertiser you’re bidding on that search term and your ad shows alongside the search results with there so it’s very specific, it’s kind of simple some of these searches you target that keyword and your ad displays with them. With display network it’s a little bit different. People aren’t explicitly searching for what you have to offer, they’re surfing the internet and you’re trying to get your ad in front of them based on different criteria that you set so there are very different types of targeting. With search network it’s keyword-based targeting so you’re targeting the search queries that people are typing into Google.com so when somebody does that search your ad shows up hopefully they click on it go to your website or landing page and then contact you and you get a conversation out of it.


There’s only one type of ad format and that’s a text ad so if you go to Google and do a search you’ll see an example of what those text ads look like and you can’t input videos or banner ads or anything like that it’s only text ads on there and your ads are only shown on Google’s search network which is a search network. They also give you the option of using their search partner network which are additional Google properties like YouTube and also third-party websites that use Google as their default search engine. So the best practice is usually to start with just using Google because if your costs per click are higher and you’re just starting out and then if you want to get more adventurous and expand a little bit more then maybe include their partner network searches. So, the advantage with search is you can do much targeted ads so somebody does a specific search you can actually serve them back very specific ad in response to that search that they did with. With that being said it costs more because typically these are people who are closer to making a buying decision so there are more towards the bottom of the funnel, more competent people are competing and these costs per clicks tend to be more because of that.

 Now when it comes to Google display network, people are searching online but they’re not searching for what you have they’re kind of surfing the net and you’re trying to get your ad in front of them. As far as targeting goes you can target by demographic, you can target by interest, you can target by keywords and you can target by placements. So you can target by age, gender, location, things like that. What type of interest they have so if you’re a landscaper maybe choose people interested in home and garden or finance if you’re a financial planner. You can choose keywords not the same as search because people aren’t explicitly searching for things here but you can choose keywords for pages where you want your ads to display. So if you’re in a hot tub company you can choose hot tub type terms to try to get your ad shown on pages that have hot tub type content and hopefully those people that are reading it have an interest in hot tub and drive traffic to your website or your ad. You can also do placements where you can specifically pick what websites you want your ads to show on. The nice thing with Google display network is they have partnerships with millions of websites. Although, it’s not as targeted as ‘Search’ because these people aren’t really searching for what you have to offer.

WHY LOCAL BUSINESSES FAIL WITH GOOGLE ADS. AND HOW TO FIX IT

The local market is filled up with entrepreneurs and people who have vision. In order for you to stand out you must portray a level of enthusiasm to show that you’re in the game. Today is all about the four key reasons local businesses fail when using Google AdWords. You’ve likely heard other business owners trashing Google AdWords as being expensive, complicated and ineffective. That’s actually a good thing because it means there’ll be less competition. AdWords get a bad reputation in many circles and while clicks are expensive for more people and the interface is complex most of the time when advertisers get bad results they only have themselves or those they hire to manage their campaigns to blame. There are 4 main reasons local businesses fail with Google AdWords.

No Landing Page or a Really Bad Landing Page:

The first page of visited to your site lands on after clicking on your Google ad is called the landing page. 

A landing page is an essential part of your AdWords campaign and a good one can instantly double your leads from AdWords without sending a cent more on clicks not having a dedicated high converting landing page is a massive mistake based on experience I estimate the typical local business website converts somewhere at around 5% on the other hand a better design landing page can easily convert at 10 to 20% even if we assume it just converts on the low end you’d double the amount of leads you get for the same money spent so that means for every thousand dollars you spend instead of getting ten leads you’re now getting twenty. That difference could easily make or break your month or even your year.

Horrible Ads with low Click-Through Rates:

Most Google ads say basically the same thing and to be honest they’re not all that compelling in the way that they say it as with landing pages are high converting Google ad with a high click-through rate or CTR can also instantly double your leads and the best part is that Google rewards you for having high CTR so not only will doubling your CTR get you twice as many potential leads but you also end up paying a lot less per click that’s because Google has an algorithm known as quality score and quality score determines how much you pay for clicks in AdWords just because you bid the most free keywords doesn’t guarantee your ad will show up in the top position. 

Google rewards relevancy and if you can show Google your ad is more relevant than your competitors and CTR is the number one factor used to determine relevancy you can end up ranking higher than your competitors, get paid less per click than they do.

No Conversion or Call Tracking:


We’ve seen that 60-70% of the leads for local businesses come in the form of a phone call furthermore phone call leads tend to be high quality leads because someone who is really a hot lead is most likely going to pick up the phone and call rather than just submit the information through a form on your website. If you’re not tracking call conversions then you’re missing out not only on the sixty to seventy percent of your leads but also your hottest leads not tracking call conversions also means you’re not going to be able to optimize your AdWords campaign well. You can throw a ton of money away on bad clicks if you’re not tracking calls and have the data that shows you which keywords and ads are making the phone ring and which ones are not.

Poor Campaign Structure:


With all the AdWords, books, articles and training courses available it’s somewhat surprisingly even have to mention this; however, I still see AdWords campaigns every week that are set up poorly many times by agencies that should know better and don’t even adhere to basic best practices. One example of poor campaign structure is a single campaign that runs on both search and display networks. Search and display are two utterly different beasts and they should never be lumped together in a single campaign. In fact, I urge you to avoid using the display network to advertise your local business until you develop strong Edward skills and seek additional training. Other examples include only having one ad group having too many keywords and going to broad with the keywords in your campaign. AdWords may not work all the time for every local business. There are some situations where due to high click costs, budget internal sales problem or other issues that even a well-structured AdWords campaign won’t generate a high enough return on investment however in my experience that’s the exception much more often than the rule.

FREE SEO TOOLS – YOUR BASIC GUIDE TO FREE SEO TOOLS

SEO is gaining momentum in the field of digital marketing and anyone who has his/her own blog or website is doing SEO or probably knows about it. But there is also a minority that doesn’t know about SEO at all and thinks of it as some mysterious technique of page ranking which costs around a fortune. This is not true. Because you can do your own little SEO for your blog/website for free too! Yes, there are a lot of free SEO tools on the web just to help and we are going to discuss the best of them today.

Google Analytics

The most valuable thing in the field of digital marketing is analytics and data. Google Analytics provide you with tailored analytics of your website/blog. No other analytic tools can do better than Google Analytics because Google has the its web crawlers all over the web and is the biggest search engine ever built.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another power tool that helps you judge your page rank in a better way. It helps you visualize how your site appears in the search. It also helps you with crawling error, suggestions for html improvement and much more.

Moz

Moz is a powerful tool for inbound marketing services and is probably one of the best SEO suites out there. It helps you backlink analysis, OSE Metrics, individual search results, citations and much more! If you are planning to do some powerful SEO then Moz is the perfect suite for you.

Google Keyword Planner

SEO specialists, love this tool. This is the most loved tool in the field of SEO because it provides you with the most basic SEO thing yes, keywords! Simply give it a seed word and you’ll see keyword suggestions pouring in with estimates of monthly searches.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool

SEO Spider Tool is a great web crawler that easily gets you critical data on every URL. All you have to do is, download it and start spinning.

Builtwith

Builtwith is the Sherlock of SEO because it tells you what technology was used to create the website whether it was on a CMS or is custom built. It even tells you what analytics have been implemented on the website as well!

Web Developer Toolbar

Web developer toolbar is a powerful toolbar that enables the users to find or disable information from CSS, Javascript, cookies images etc.

GTMetrix

The page load speed of your blog matters in the SEO game, a lot. It also affect the UX of your website. GTMetrix allows you to find out the page load speed of your website/blog which is pretty helpful. Other than that, GTMetrix is popular being of its friendly UI and thoroughness.

Conclusion

If you are on your way to build a powerful SEO strategy for your blog/website then these tools will be there to help you for sure. However, what else matters more than these tools is your approach towards building a good SEO.

SEM AND SEO: DIFFERENCE AND NEED OF THE TIME

In this big mighty world, we have a few fine lines between a few things that are at constant war-like UI & UX, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, and SEM & SEO. Majority of people, even professionals confuse them both for being the same thing. But there is a huge difference between Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. It’s like comparing two different music genres like Rock and hip-hop with each other. So, if you are a new blogger or you have created your website and looking to market your blog/website. Stop confusing these two terms. Both have their own pros and cons and both are champions in their grounds. Firstly, if you don’t know much about Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing is as deep as the programming industry. SEO, SEM, SMM etc. all these are popular Digital Marketing methods that generate a set of audience relating to your blog/website. So if you are planning to market your blog then this blog is for you!

SEO

Well, SEO is so common these days that even our parents know about it. Putting it simply, SEO is the method of getting free traffic from the search engines. How? Umm… Search Engines have these things named web-crawlers, web-crawler are little million pieces of software spread everywhere on the internet fetching data in exchange of keywords and to make the search results more relevant to the keywords and sentimentally on-point, page ranking kicks in which is basically a method of content filtration. “Doing SEO”  consists of making a strategy to optimize your website/blog according to the search engines by adding meta tags, descriptions, backlinks, image captions etc.

SEM

SEM or Search Engine Marketing covers SEO and paid marketing. SEM includes PPC (Pay per click) and CPC (cost per click) which drives a huge amount of traffic to your website. SEM works like a needed extra topping on the ice-cream that is your website. The more you pay search engines to rank your website on top gets you the more of traffic present on the web. However, this ranking implies far by the means of advertisement which accentuates that your website won’t get ranked number one. It will just put you on top with the help of keywords related to your campaign or website. SEM is the subset of the overall strategy of internet marketing. Your website will get visible on the search engines with the help of paid marketing. SEM covers the areas of marketing that SEO doesn’t.

What to do

The reason behind this blog is not to prioritize one method over the other but to accentuate that SEM and SEO work together as a well. A strong marketing strategy requires both SEO and SEM onboard. You cannot just rely on one method to advertise your website. Your internet marketing strategy should incorporate both of them so you’ll be able to cover the lion’s share of your market. SEM goes in the most specific area and it is paid while on the other hand, SEO is free and covers the general audience through tips and tricks.

IMPORTANCE AND FUNCTIONALITY OF SEO

 The world of SEO is even deeper than the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean. The more you indulge in it the more you’ll get to know about its complexed functionalities. SEO has been around us ever since the birth of search engines and their frequent use among the masses. This tell us that it has been constantly evolving. The more you dive deep in SEO the more you’ll explore it.

What you have to understand

Whenever you hear the term “SEO” things start to revolve in your mind. Colored hats, links, SMM, SEM, keywords, optimization and whatnot. Bing has different algorithms than Google and every search engine has its own pattern of crawling the web. SEO is the all-under-one-roof solution for this problem. Ranking your website on search engines is a tough job. However, experts say that if you understand how search engines rank websites, it’ll get much easier for you. All the famous websites/blogs have their SEO nicely done because keywords are power and if you are using them right then you are on way to success. SEO is the best ever digital marketing tool and it even beats sponsored advertising at times in the matter of reach. If you need to do SEO for your website then it’s mandatory for you to know its functionality. Furthermore, to know how SEO works, you should first have a good knowledge of search engine functionality.

Functionality of SEO

When the internet was created and it started to gain momentum, it was hard to keep track of websites and pages. Search engines found a way to tackle this by creating indexes. Website indexing is a method by which you can search your desired website or keyword in the list on a particular search engine and you will get your required link. So basically, you don’t search the web, you are searching inside the indexes made by search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc.

However, when the indexes were made, there was a problem of content and keywords. For example, you want to search “Coffee” and you simply write “Coffee” in the Google search but the “Coffee” is in a story as well. To avoid this keyword confusion, page ranking was created and it filtered the content real good. If a blog has a good amount of backlinks, nicely done meta tags, descriptions and everything, it is ready for the web crawlers called “Spiders” to rank it. These Spiders create a web of information and keywords and interconnects both in the saved web pages on that search engine’s databases. This helps in ranking pages because if you have written coffee then you want to read about coffee not a story.

Conclusion

So this is how a website/blog is ranked on the Google Indexes. Bing and Yahoo have their own algorithms but the core technology is same for every search engine. SEO requires its expert to be smart and a good planner. If you are bad at planning things then you cannot become an SEO expert. Find yourself another career.

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