Pittsburgh Internet Consulting SEO Blog

From being a political junkie, I know that you release things you don’t want people to cover right before a long weekend. Just this last weekend, John McCain did this with his medical records. In the search engine world, Google Ad Words announced it’s “Automatic Matching” which will begin on June 3rd with an e-mail Friday afternoon before Memorial Day weekend.

The first line of the explanation reads “Automatic matching shows your ads on relevant search queries not already captured by your keywords. ” In other words, we at Google will now decide when to spend your money instead of you. The spin that Google puts on the e-mail notification they sent out is that the goal of the program is to keep your cost per click and click through rate on these queries in line with the keywords you have signed up for. BUT THE REAL GOAL is to help Google’s bottom line.

Many Ad Words advertisers are not that savvy when it comes to running their accounts. This policy will effectively increase Google’s revenue immediately beginning June 3rd as a result of being able to show ads for keywords nobody has signed up for. Expect their 3rd quarter advertising revenues to go up significantly. By automatically opting all client into this campaign, many advertisers will be unaware that they are now spending on keywords THEY DID NOT SIGN UP FOR.

If this policy was to improve accounts and not to improve revenue, then it would be something you could opt IN to, not opt OUT of. If the major benefits were for the customer, then the e-mail notification would have announced the great new feature and tried to get people to sign up for the beta. By doing it the other way, Google shows themselves to be no better than the competition they hate so much. So much for point number six in their company philosophy page, “You can make money without doing evil.”

Today we are opting out of this program for 100% of our client base. If they had allowed us to choose to opt-in, we would have tried it on a couple clients. To read more about this from Google, here is the FAQ on their Automatic Matching Option. Go here if you want to opt out of Google’s automatic matching.

If is isn’t, could it be with the right SEO effort? That depends. First, lets look at what an authority listing is…

An authority listing is when you do a search on Google.com and your listing includes not just the page that ranks best for that page, but also a series of four deep links into internal pages of your site. Here is an example of a google authority listing we achieved for our Penn State Merchandise client. So if you search for “penn state merchandise” this is what you see as of 7/27/07:

Now, could your site be a Google Authority? In the case of most niche markets, the answer is yes. Just like any SEO effort, the difficulty depends upon the amount of competition for your key phrase. This client above took about three years to achieve this listing. It wasn’t a deliberate effort to get an authority listing, but through years of slow link building, the client doing a great job with word-of-mouth and consistent and ongoing SEO changes, we have made it to the pinnacle of Google success, the authority listing.

Here are a few other Google Authority Listings:

• Weather - Weather.com
• Cars - Cars.com
• Hockey - NHL.com

So to achieve a Google Authority Listing, I recommend the following;

1) Don’t focus on just achieving this goal, stay focused on increasing traffic and sales. This is a bonus

2) Start by insuring that your entire site has been optimized and all your content is indexed. This means unique title and meta tags, optimized page headings, and optimized page content.

3) Remember that link building is a never ending effort. Use online article submissions, press releases, build sticky content for other webmasters to link to, contact organizations that might link to you and barter for a direct link (we sent free t-shirts), buy targeted web advertisements that include direct links, etc. etc.

4) Do a good job serving your customers and clients. Links are often a factor of branding and customer satisfaction. Customers or clients that have blogs or sites will link to you if they get great service. If your business is stong, your links will occur naturally and these are the best kind.

5) Hire a good company like Pittsburgh Internet Consulting to do your SEO work

Other Resources:

• Webmaster World Google Authority Thread
  

Welcome to the launch of the new Pittsburgh Internet Consulting Blog. As SEO consultants, we often recommend blogs to our clients. So in taking our own advice, our consultants will begin posting about these topics here on a regular basis:

1. Search engine optimization
2. Pay per click management
3. Link Building
4. Website Design/Usability
5. Corporate News

Thanks for stopping by. Our SEO blog will be a bit different in that our clients are mostly small-medium sized businesses rather than larger SEO issues. So the focus will be regional SEO, industrial SEO, and SEO on small budgets.

For information about our SEO services in Pittsburgh, please visit our site.