Blue Poppy

Your Google AdWords Account is Suspended!

by Blue Poppy on May 3, 2009

Many Google AdWords DIYers find their accounts get suspended. Why? All that they recieve is an email from the Google AdWords Team stating that their account has been suspended and no advertisements will run on Google. The reason being non-compliance with Google AdWord’s Terms of Service and Advertising policies.

Have you received one such email from the Google Team?

Many customers who are new to AdWords are unaware of Google’s policies that they need to adhere to while setting up their accounts. Google’s Help Center provides all the necessary info but let’s face it – you were anxious to dive in and get started right away.

You created your AdWords account created the new campaigns, ad groups, and stuffed a huge list of keywords in each ad group. The next thing that happens is you spend a ton of money, wonder if it’s working and then one fine day your shocked with an email that the account is suspended.

On the flip side, many small business owners acknowledge that they are too busy managing their business to familiarize themselves with everything they need to know about online marketing, SEO and geo-targeting local search shoppers. Additionally, such companies usually don’t have an IT department or an in-house web staff so they choose to outsource it to a third party provider. They contact faceless providers through any of the many project bidding websites. You post your requirements and set a budget. Someone bids as low as $50 for your project, which is really worth $500 and a full day of planning. End result, dissatisfaction!

So what’s the solution? The solution lies in searching for a good provider who has the necessary credentials for optimizing an AdWords account and partnering with you to build an online web presence for your local business. How do you ensure that you’re getting a quality search marketer?

  1. Ask your provider if they are GAP certified? GAP stands for Google AdWords Professional. This certification is only awarded when a person completes an online exam and is well versed with the Google AdWords system and their Policies and Terms and Conditions?
  2. Find out if your provider has any hands on experience in optimizing Google AdWords accounts? In SEO?
  3. For how long has your provider been optimizing Google AdWords accounts? Has your provider hired an experienced staff?
  4. How will they go about optimizing your PPC and online presence?

We all like to make the best use of our hard-earned money. In most cases, low priced services do not offer the best quality. They are low priced because the quality is compromised. Where does this leave the small business owner? Caught between a rock and a hard place. Until now. Blue Poppy SEM’s small business solution offers local businesses the only cost-effective and strategic solution to compete with big-budget competitors.

The choice is now in your hands!

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3 Lies You Didn’t Know About Search

by Blue Poppy on April 13, 2009

I know it’s been a while, but I’m going to again reach for the “I’m busy” excuse.

I am always eager to take a chance to show people how convoluted and complicated the search marketing world is. Search engine marketing and the search engines have done a great job at showing what they do and making it simple. That is great for marketing, but leads to unrealistic expectations from clients who believe this is “simple”.

I was about to write a new blog, but it turns out this will be another in my series of “stolen blogs because someone else said it better“. This time, we once again visit another brilliant blog from Search Engine Land. As usual, I have edited and rewrote it some to make things simpler and applicable to what we do here at Blue Poppy, but I take no credit for the content…. just passing on information.

Here are three lies the search engines will tell you.

Lie #1: Write great content and the links/traffic/rankings will follow

What you have on your page counts, but not as much as you think. They write a great page and want to know why they’re not number one when everything they have read states that relevant content is the most important factor. They forgot one thing – the competition. Let’s just try an example. Say I’m going to open a store that sells ‘Orc Miniatures’. That’s a pretty narrow niche. So the competition shouldn’t be too bad, or is it? As you see below, there are nearly 2.8 million pages listed:

lieblog1

Basically, content alone is not going to boost you into the top 10 for any even remotely relevant phrase. Go ahead and pick out the most obscure niche in your own industry, and check out the competition. here’s a few suggestions:

  • If you’re a speaking coach, try ’speaking upside down’ (2.5 million results).
  • If you repair cars in Seattle, try ‘Edsel repair Seattle’ (186,000 results – still a lot).
  • If you run a diner in Terre Haute, try ‘Terre Haute Ostrich Burgers’. Somehow, Google still finds 12,000 results.

Good content is a must, but not the be all end all. Even Shakespeare wouldn’t rank for ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ (56,000 results) without a little help. Trust your professionals when they are doing the other things that may move you up. Don’t focus on the glamorous parts.

Lie #2: Search engines are not competing with you

Back in the old days, when search engines were just search engines, they weren’t competing with your website. Nowadays search engines are becoming aggregators (publications, even), and as they do so, they’re keeping more eyeballs on their pages and away from other pages. That means fewer coming to yours.

Check out this search result on Bing:

lieblog2

Between the paid ads, the related searches and the map, you have to look carefully just to find the organic search results. Then, by merely running your pointer over the listing, you can get a preview of the site content without even leaving the page.

Search engines are competing with all of us. They make money by generating page views and clicks (on pay per click ads). To get more page views, they need to keep people on their site. To get more clicks on those pay per click ads, they have to get visitors to click those ads, instead of the organic listings. They also deliver the ads that get more clicks. Sounds a little competitive to me.

Lie #3: We are good

Actually, this is a lie that we tell ourselves – the search engines just let us believe it. Google, Bing and Yahoo! aren’t good and they aren’t evil. They’re profit-seeking enterprises.They are in business to make money, period.

Delivering relevant results is a core part of search engines’ search for more profit. Relevant results make their users happy. Happy users bring other users. And happy users search more often. That generates pageviews and pay-per-click traffic (see Lie #2, above).

That’s the lesson, really. I’m not suggesting that search engine representatives deliberately lie to us. Not a chance. There are many things they cannot tell us without exposing their algorithms to all sorts of spammy practices to manipulate the results. That would screw up their quest for the most relevant results. If they can’t control the results, how would they stay in business?

Luckily, their need for money involves helping folks find other businesses when their business is relevant.

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