How to Grow Your Business Through Online Search

Huge thanks to Wegner CPAs for hosting us at their Wake Up With Wegner event at the Sheraton on John Nolan Drive. We spoke on “How to Measurably Grow Your Business Through Online Search,” touching on pro tips, strategy and tactics for SEO, Google AdWords campaigns and Google Analytics set up and tracking.

Here’s a video re-recording in case you missed or would like to brush up.

Top Google AdWords tips for Pay Per Click (PPC) Campaigns

This is from our Optimizing Search Ads slide:

• Use full AdWords instead of AdWords Express
• Measure your conversions with analytics
• Review search term report & add negative keywords
• Use more specific keyword modifiers (Like “ ” + [ ]. See this video for more information)
• Create custom landing pages
• Have clear calls to action
• Match specific ads to keywords

Top SEO tips (especially for local businesses)

From our How to Optimize for Search Engines slide:

• Research Keywords
• Onsite Optimization
• Offsite: Business Directory listings
• Google My Business (GMB) page
• Blogging
• Links from other websites

Questions

Some great questions came up from the audience and we said we’d answer them in this post.

How should we handle directory listings when the business has multiple locations?

Great question and this comes up all the time in local SEO. Our recommendations are to do the following:

• share the same overall domain name (website) so you can consolidate your SEO content creation and link-building efforts. Otherwise you might be multiplying the necessary work by the number of different websites you have.
• Create location specific pages. For example:
  • madisonflowers.com/middleton
  • madisonflowers.com/madison
  • madisonflowers.com/east-washington
  • etc.
• Create and manage separate Google My Business locations under one account. (This video shows the screen to do that)
• When listing the different location addresses in your footer or elsewhere, strongly consider using structured data like Schema markup to tell search engines that each address is for a separate business location under the same brand.

Is it possible to use a Facebook page as the destination URL for a Google Ad?

The answer we found was maybe, but learning toward no. The only way to know for certain would be to test.

We’re not totally sure when you’d want to do this, but perhaps it’s coming up for businesses without websites. In those cases, you should be able to use AdWords with Google My Business, which could probably give you better analytics anyway.

Two major problems arise on the forums:

• Because the word “Facebook” is trademarked, Google sometimes disapproves Ads with the word Facebook in them
• Even if Google approves your ad, there’s no good way to add tracking code to see how your ad performs.
  • We’re not sure how you’d get the ad approved because you’d have to include “facebook.com” in the target URL, but from the forum posts above it sounds like including it in the ad copy was the main issue.

We couldn’t find evidence of people who succeeded at doing this, we’ve never once seen an example on a results page, and we’re not sure it’d be a good idea even if it’s possible. (Drop us a line if you know we’re wrong on this one.