David White concludes his presentation at the CIMA event in Cobham, January 2008, you can hear the questions that the audience was interested to know
 and the answers...

Hi, I’m David White from Weboptimiser. I would like to thank the CIMA Organization, and Harvey and Jenny for arranging everything so far, and here we all are. So thanks very much for coming along.

So, here’s a clue. If you go to Yahoo.com and you type in search box Link:www. and then your’ competitor’s URL, it will then list up all the links that exists for your competitor and you can see where your competitors are getting their links from. And guess what: you can go and look at those sites and say - send them an e-mail or register on their site. And basically, ask the sites owner to give you a link.
This is the last of my top tips for today from a total of 24.

Pay per click.

Yet again: use analytics! This is absolutely the key.

Ensure relevant landing pages. I’ve touched on this. Make sure that what they search on, what they click on and what they deliver to is consistent. And that way, your pages, your site will be more sticky, you’ll get a higher position and you’ll get a higher quality score and whole thing would just work better.

Employ a call to action. Could be a simple phone number. But theses are the things you can measure and you can put in to place that people will respond to.

You can use a system called Dynamic titles and what you can do is you can target certain phrases and with a Dynamic title….what it does is…..it can take a phrase people have typed in and puts it in your pay per click result, makes it bold and then makes your advert stand out above the others.

Because so many people are now searching from their phone and they’ll deliver an ad quite often, Google Advertising appears on mobiles. We don’t want you to have clicks from Japan if you’re not selling in Japan. And if your business is based around Coburn, you know, with Google and other search engines we can limit your region and get your business very, very targeted. And that’s what helps make it very effective.

This is a big issue. The trademark. Many, many companies have trademarks and what they don’t realize is often that our competitors will go and target your trademark. But if it is your trademark and you’ve paid for it and it is registered, you can just send the trademark number through an e-mail to Google (and we’ll do it for you, if you like) and they would just stop other people from biding on your trademark. So that would mean that your cost for bidding on your own trademark would be low because have no been competition and you’ll be much more likely to get number one position because have been no one else there. So lowest cost per click, highest position and is your trademark that gives you that.

A lot of companies, amazingly, don’t seem to realize that the trademark protection applies online. But it does.

And the last tip here is capitalizing URLs. “Accountants in Coburn” is your business to your website name and someone types that in, then that would be very reasonable thing to do. And again, quite a lot of people seem to forget to do these basic things but they can make a lot of difference on the clicks that you get.

So why, why should we do all these things? I’ve extracted some research from the IAB, the Internet Advertising Bureau. There is interesting information about the volumes. 28m people use search, 90% visits through search of which 83% clicked through.
Interestingly, is a massive growth in paid for search. So, folks, pay for search is actually gone get more expensive.
Huge volumes of people are now online. There’s now a large volume of women online which changed about 18 months ago. Prior to that, had been predominantly men; and prior to that it had been predominantly young men. There are a couple of habits which have disappeared or been absorbed. One of the things that someone from Hitwise told me about 18 months ago was that at the beginning of last year the number of porn searches had reduced. So they are now no longer the most highly search for term. I think that’s a good thing.

And the bottom line here is that the online audience is now far more representative of the population as a whole.

Online behavior, I don’t know if you realize, but with the advent of the wireless technology, sometimes we have 5 or 6 devices on us when we go home. We might be sitting in front of the television, we’ve got a mobile phone in our pocket, we’ve got a laptop on our lap or on a desk; we’ve got a remote control for the video, another one for the DVD and that goes on. But that’s just you. And then, there’s your other half and then there’s your child or children. So, you know, if there are two of you, as a couple and a child, between you, you could have 15 or 20 objects that are all internet enabled and radio control. And you just sitting and watching your TV and multitasking and having a cup of tea and all those things are going on. And people are….their habits are very connected….. where just a few years ago, it just wasn’t.

Effectiveness…..online is now more effective than the radio, more effective than billboard advertising, it is more effective than cinema advertising. Is about as effective if perhaps TV still leads the way. But is the last one in a long chain of all those advertising mediums. So, internet advertising is a fantastic reach across all demographics. And is totally suitable for promoting “niche” markets and reaching those markets. You can reach people in the middle of the day and we can start to use terminologies. Day-part marketing, I think is one of TV terms and we can now apply that to the internet. And because we have this control and is so accountable, we can turn it on and we can turn it off. So we can do that for our advertising, so, if we specifically want to hit a certain type of demographic, with a advanced search marketing techniques that target demographics, target time of the day and can target region as well as “niche” markets.

Search engine marketing can be very valuable.

There’s another statistic as well which public comes up on the next live. But here we have 26% of internet users have listen to live or a previously recorded broadcast. The other things that’s happening a lot, especially since the advent of YouTube, is that people are now downloading television programs and preferring to watch them on a laptop over a broadband rather than turning on a television.
Some converging….

Bringing us right up to date. Is just what happened over the last few weeks. Nearly £1bn a week. Phenomenal.

IMRG predicted that this Christmas would be 30bn and they’re beat their own focus by .2bn. That’s good. Its massive rise compared to last year.
Across the board, everything is being sold online.

I would say pay per click is not necessarily the cheapest way, but it is the fastest way. Because you can open a pay per click account today and you can optimize that account. But, in some ways, the answer is part of my presentation. So the answer is: employ analytics, start watching what happens to your clicks, especially if you are paying for them, because you want to try and work out how to get ride of the unwanted ones. When you’re paying for them, you want your clicks to go through and ultimately go to the application for them, so you can track and see if that happens. It is fundamentally by paying close attention to the way the ad system works and then monitoring how the clicks occur and where they work for you.
If your website meets the search term or the advert meets what they’re typing in and the page follows through and you have that consistency, you’re gone get more people satisfied and all the things are going to work. So, yes, it does become a judgment thing.

Audience: Could you explain how sort of money talks in pay per click?

Basically, you can target a wider range of key terms and by spending more money you can get more clicks because you can target more search terms. Through your analytics you will then determine whether those terms are, what we call, converting, are they giving you order forms, are they giving you inquiries? And then you can subdivide them into groups and start narrowing down your focus. And just watching what its really happens from a business contact and then turn off the ones that don’t work, yeah…..and turn on the ones that do work. There’s another expression that we use, called “the long tow” ….an example of the long tow…..might be for the car industry. Typing the word “car” in google.com. You can get cars from all over the world. Well, this is not very good. So “Coburn”…type “car Coburn” and they you get the local Mercedes dealer perhaps, but you don’t want the Mercedes, you want Nissan or something else. So you type “car Coburn Nissan” and what happens? Your search terms, the tail, if you like, expend.

And, when using pay per click, you want to follow, kind of imagine or create that longer, longer search terms and the longer the search term, the more targeted is the search term and the cheaper it becomes because is the less people in Coburn selling Nissan.

But you might add other things: “people carrier”, “diesel”…the length of the search term can just go on and on and on. But actually, your cost per click can reduce, the targeting is improved. So, you get more….you might get less, but you’ll get even more valuable visitors coming to your site.