But the audit focused on pure AdWords practices. The baseline. There’s also other stuff you need to be analysing and optimising. Sure your PPC account may be ideal but what if the website you send your traffic to resembles a digital steaming turd?

Exactly.

So, audit outside AdWords. Let’s consider Google Analytics. What would you look at?

These statistics aren’t so much down to your PPC manager as my previous Audit post. It depends on your client’s website. If they send all traffic related to jumpers to the homepage then blame can be placed on them for poor landing page selection. If your website doesn’t have static urls or a dedicated page to jumpers, there’s not much they can do.

Analytics Audit. Look over a decent date range. Compare it to previous ranges. Look at test result data which correlates with AdWords test times.

Have a look at the below.

Landing Pages – Look at bounce rates, time on site, pages viewed from that landing page, top landing page. Is this page doing what you want it to? If not test another, send recommendations over to the relevant person.

Exit Pages – Is exit bad on this page or does it promote a phone number or takes people off site? Is this a natural exit or is it a rubbish page for this traffic?

Entrance – If 50% of your natural traffic comes through iPads has your account manager (if budget allows) tested iPad specific campaigns? Are they using this information? Are they testing the top entry pages? If it’s mobile are they nagging you to build a mobile friendly version of the website?

Bounce Rate – Is it really high on specific pages? Source the URL back to AdWords. Maybe the blue jumper adgroup directs people to a shoe page. For the Blue shoe campaign, this page should have a high bounce rate.

Returning Visits – Is your PPC bringing in new traffic or just helping people return via brand?

Entry Sources – Any keyword areas that could be built on? Think of the organic keyword list as a PPC search query list, just not as extensive. Same as if any top referrers. Can you add GDN adverts to this page as a managed placement?

Country and Language – If your site can be translated is there a need for it? It’s proactive for your account manager to be feeding this back to you.

Site Search – Engage it and see what isn’t easy to find on your website. See what new areas you could potentially add to the search campaigns or suggest to your client to add.

Day Parting and Entry Times – If one time, say 11pm, you get great conversions test increased bidding during this time in AdWords.

PPC, as I have often said isn’t turn it on and leave it. A decent audit in Analytics can really reveal new areas or areas you may be lacking. GO through the data and feedback to your client or staff. Be proactive.

It’s well worth going through the pain in order to secure this great content, so I’ve tried to list out the pitfalls and how you can deal with them along the way.

Finding out the details

So to start with you need to get information on how they’re using your product/service in the first place. The more the merrier here but also the more details you need – the harder they are to get.

In an ideal world you want to cover:

1.    How they’re using your product/service

2.    What problem it’s solving for them

3.    Why they chose you over another company/brand

4.    What they’ve achieved since choosing you (numbers are key here, people love a good improvement stat)

Start with what you know yourself, and then go to anyone else in your business that may hold this information. Remember it’s not going to be their top priority so make it worth their while and shower them with lots of public praise if they follow through for you. Get the customer’s contact details and give them a call yourself – working through a middle man just takes longer and you’ll find most info you can get over the phone.

Numerous hours spent chasing details, changes & approvals

Because you need to have a customer sign off this case study or quote, they’re going to need to see it and they will highly likely have changes they want to make to whatever you have written. Don’t send them over something you consider is draft, get it written up properly and you will spend less time going backwards and forwards.

Make sure you avoid a middle man again and go direct to the customer yourself, in your email give them a deadline they can work to and then follow up with a call to make sure they received and understood.

Don’t chase by email and don’t leave messages on answerphones – this is your priority not theirs so speak to them directly.

Securing approval

Some customers may not like being talked about in the first place or don’t want to spend their time on this so give a nudge with an incentive if you can. It could be the idea of having their name on your site, it could be a discount on their next order or some vouchers as a thank you for their time.

Of course if they’ve not had a good experience with you in the first place you’re not going to get approval so don’t insult them by asking, do your homework!

Click to view full-size infographic.

How do you think consumers feel about buying online?

Our research found that 80% of respondents had bought something online within the past month. Apply that to the UK population and how can your business not afford to be selling online?

Take a look at this infographic for top tips from our experts on setting up a business to sell online and key insights from the public on what they like and dislike when making online purchases.

If you’d like to share the infographic with friends or colleagues, we have social share buttons on the left hand side which will allow you to do so easily!

For more advice about getting your business online get in touch with the Yell team.

If you’d like to feature Your Website is Your Cash Register on your website, feel free to use the below embed code.

<a href="http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/e-commerce-infographic/"><img src="http://marketing.yell.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/e-commerce-infographic-e1336994045424.png" alt="Your Website is Your Cash Register – Infographic" border="0"></a> <div>Infographic by <a href="http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/" target="_blank">Yell Marketing – Web Design</a></div>

Click to view full-size infographic.

Online video offers up a fantastic opportunity for you to get your brand and website in front of a huge number of people. Don’t believe us? More than a quarter of all Londoners we surveyed share video online each and every day. That’s a lot of people.

This infographic explores online video; our experts have identified the key benefits of investing in it and offered up tips on how to make yours as effective as possible. You may not have realised, but video can have a real impact on SEO and so we’ve explained how to best benefit from this too.

If you’d like to share the infographic with friends or colleagues, we have social share buttons on the left hand side which will allow you to do so easily!

For more advice about getting your business online get in touch with the Yell team.

If you’d like to feature Lights, Camera, Customers! on your website, feel free to use the below embed code.

<a href="http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/video-marketing-infographic/"><img src="http://marketing.yell.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/video-marketing-infographic-e1336994323585.png" alt="Lights, Camera, Customers! – Infographic" border="0"></a> <div>Infographic by <a href="http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/" target="_blank">Yell Marketing – Web Design</a></div>

To start with it was very much a case of ‘just do social media’, with not a huge amount of planning, strategy or measurement going on. As is always the case with the latest marketing technique, it can be a dangerous road to go down if you’ve not prepared yourself properly.

There have been some very high profile cases of big brands getting it very wrong on social media…

A Ryanair employee engaged in some awful  comments on a blog that someone had written about how to book a flight with them and not pay for it. Instead of professionally pointing out the error in his ways, the Ryanair representative branded him an idiot and a liar. What made it worse was that when a more senior Ryanair representative confirmed what had happened he released a statement that referred to lunatic bloggers. Not the best PR the brand had ever received.

Dominos Pizza had problems when one of their employees put videos on Youtube showing the mischief he got up to when making pizzas. One video showed him putting food up his nose and then onto a pizza. Yes employees really do things like that on social sites. Thankfully Dominoes responded much better and the CEO released an apologetic video saying it was an isolated incident and the brand have been using Twitter to thank those who write positive comments about them.

It’s a tough line when a company needs to issued guidelines to their staff about the correct way to behave on social sites but if done properly it can save some egg in the face of both.

1.    Make sure that it’s clear the guidelines are to protect the employee aswell as the company

2.    Rules should apply to those who are in any way linked to the brand, whether that’s through profile or what they disclose in social conversations

3.    If you want to keep it simple then ask that employees don’t post negative or unsavoury comments against the company, their prospects, competitors or clients

4.    Show examples of where it’s gone horribly wrong for a bad posting employee

5.    Show examples of good posting and who does it well

6.    Remind employees that there is no way to delete bad posting from their account, once it’s out there, the world will see it

Of course you can always turn a negative social experience on its head – people are looking to the brand and their response in these situations. Don’t stick your head in the sand, don’t say anything inflammatory regardless of what you think and don’t just try to delete it and hope it goes away. Someone somewhere saw it and can spread it again like wildfire.

Click to view full-size infographic.

Google isn’t just the biggest search engine in the UK – it also offers some additional services to help businesses market themselves online. One such service is Google Places; the local business listings that appear to be pinned to a map when your search results are shown.

Even if you don’t have a website, Google Places is worth using; we found that 80% of people surveyed trust a business more if it has some sort of online presence. Take a look at this infographic for plenty more reasons why you should give the service a go!

If you’d like to share the infographic with friends or colleagues, we have social share buttons on the left hand side which will allow you to do so easily!

For more advice about getting your business online get in touch with the Yell team.

If you’d like to feature Putting Yourself On The Map, Literally! on your website, feel free to use the below embed code.

<a href="http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/google-places-infographic/"><img src="http://marketing.yell.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/google-places-infographic-e1336991355945.png" alt="Putting Yourself On The Map, Literally! – Infographic" border="0"></a> <div>Infographic by <a href="http://marketing.yell.com/web-design/" target="_blank">Yell Marketing – Web Design</a></div>

Google rankings are highly competitive

Appearing high in search engine results pages is a key goal for every business website. It may be the only way that potential customers are able to find you.

Although Google’s formula for finding and ranking websites in its search pages – its ‘algorithm’ – is a very closely-guarded secret, a few tried-and-tested tricks when building your website can help boost its chances.

Website structure

Structuring your website well is essential for search engine optimisation. SEO experts suggest you shouldn’t create more than three levels in your site structure – home page, sections and subsections.

This is because site ‘spiders’ (the technology used by search engines to read and index websites) often won’t explore any more deeply than this – meaning they won’t find and rank your pages.

Your home page should link to each section of your site, which in turn should link to each other. This makes it easier for the spiders to find their way around the site.

Metadata and page titles

Strong, well-researched keywords are crucial for getting good search engine rankings.

When building your site, include keywords at strategic points in section and page titles and in your metatags, as well as throughout the content – making sure it reads naturally..

Images and SEO

Search engine spiders are unable to ‘read’ images – so any text embedded in image files will not be indexed. If relevant content is overlooked, this can have an effect on how your site is understood and ranked.

For any images you do use, give them descriptive alt tags using strong keywords to help spiders index them correctly.

Techniques to avoid

It’s important to remember that there’s no easy way to improve your Google rankings quickly. Building a well-planned and well-researched site with relevant, useful content is the only thing that works in the long term – so be patient.

Try to avoid ‘keyword stuffing’ (including keywords on your site which aren’t strictly relevant, or in a dishonest way such as in white-on-white text) and any other techniques which claim to drive extra traffic ‘overnight’.

Search engines such as Google frown on techniques like this and, if you’re discovered, your page will lose its ranking or even be de-indexed entirely.

Your site should be easy to understand

Usability describes how easy it is for an untrained person to understand and use what’s called a ‘human-computer interface’ – such as a piece of software or a website.

What is web usability?

When we talk about the usability of a website, what we usually mean is:

• how intuitive the site is to use
• how quickly a visitor can find the information they’re looking for, or carry out the task they want to carry out
• how well the content is organised
• how clear and logical the customer journey is, from entry point to where the user wants to be
• how easy it is to recover from mistakes – for example, to navigate back after clicking on a wrong link
• how efficiently the site loads and displays
• how accessible the site is on different devices, or to users with disabilities

Web usability is sometimes confused with website user experience. Although the two terms are very similar, user experience is a broader and more subjective term that describes how pleasant the site is to use, how useful the user finds the content and functionality, and how generally satisfied they feel with the overall experience of using the site.

Making it easy for the user

The key goal of website usability is to make things as easy as possible for visitors.

This has obvious business benefits – a visitor who finds your website very easy to use is much more likely to find the information they want, to convert to a customer in an e-commerce store, and to keep coming back.

Key considerations for usability

Make sure your web pages are uncluttered and key information is prominently displayed – preferably ‘above the fold’ (visible when the page loads, without having to scroll down). Content should be written in a concise and digestible way, with helpful titles and subheadings.

Navigation needs to be intuitive and clear. If you can, have a search function as well as a navigation menu, and consider including a sitemap as well, so that users can see at a glance where to go.

If users need to take action – for example to download a document or make a purchase, make sure your instructions are utterly clear and unambiguous.

Finally, your site should be well built to accessibility standards, so that it displays properly for all users. Avoid using too many background features such as plugins which could make the site load slowly.

Plan your content ahead

Your website might serve many basic purposes – telling people about your business, giving product and price details and letting them know how to find you.

Depending on your type of business, you might think there’s no value in putting too much ‘extra’ content on your site, or adding to it over time. But you could be missing some big opportunities – to build customer relationships, boost SEO and keep your site’s value high.

Here are some good reasons to keep your web content fresh.

Engage by providing added value

If you’re trying to attract prospects and keep existing customers, you need to give them a reason to engage with your brand.

Ideally, you want a ‘sticky’ website that people come back to again and again – building the relationship and your reputation. The best way to achieve this is with a flow of fresh, entertaining and reliably expert content.

If your site appears inactive, people won’t come back – making them prime targets to be poached by competitors.

The Google ‘freshness factor’

Content is what brings search engines to your site, and what helps them rank pages. In 2001 Google announced it was introducing a ‘freshness factor’ to its algorithm for some topics – treating newly-uploaded content as more ‘relevant’ and so ranking it higher in results.

Regularly-updated content – eg on current industry news and events – could help you take advantage of this, boosting SEO.

Refine keywords over time

If you want to get the best SEO results for your site, it’s important that you keep looking at what’s working and what isn’t, and improving your approach.

Keyword research is something you should be refining continually, as you discover what’s important to your customers and what works best for driving traffic from search engines.

Adding fresh content regularly gives you a change to weave in these popular keywords as you discover them.

Keep your ad space value high

If you sell advertising space or sponsorship on your website, a steady stream of traffic is all-important to keep the value of that space high.

A stagnant site won’t attract a turnover of potential customers, and so won’t be desirable to advertisers – a big problem if that’s how you’re funding the site.

Setting up a single listing for one branch is straightforward enough but how do you go about submitting multiple branches with individual details i.e address, telephone numbers, opening hours?

Well, Google have just this week launched a simple tool for managing multiple business listings with the new Google Places management tool.  For businesses with 10 or more physical locations this is great news.

Bulk Management Tool

How does the new bulk management tool work?

Here are 2 short videos from Google which will show you how the tool works.

Google Places Bulk Management Tool – New User

Google Places Bulk Management Tool – Verified User

Once you have created your account you can simply download a spreadsheet template which contains the different fields which are available when creating a single entry.  They have also made it easier to manage your live entries by giving you the ability to search for a branch using keywords and being able to adjust using the new tool using a simple interface.

This is very welcome for those businesses who have multiple locations which need updating on a regular basis.  The objective here is to make Places more relevant for users, whether they are using a desktop/laptop and more importantly in my view the Places app.

Google is really starting to refine its interface across the board going with a clean and simple interface. Let’s see what’s next on their list to get this treatment!

Any questions, please feel free to post below.