Best Practices For Campaigns
(Websites, Brand/Company SEO, Youtube, Amazon, Local, Niche, etc)
Each one is unique, and best practices should be followed!
Brand / Large Corporate SEO
We will use Yahoo.com as an Example. As if you owned Yahoo.com
Step 1: Create Your Campaign for your main website and enable SmartRank.
Information About SmartRank Technology below
We will use Yahoo.com as an Example
Enter main homepage, generic keyword you wish to rank for, select Exact, and choose your target search engine.
Exact: means the searchers will only click on this webpage / keyword combination, and not the first, best ranking webpage for a specific keyword. If you wanted to rank for “billards and pool” and did not care what webpage ranked for it first, leave unchecked. 99% of campaigns will want to be exact unless a power user.
Read more about SmartRank technology below about if a campaign is not ranking and search volume practices.
If a website, and NOT a Youtube video, you will want Internal Browsing, Random Browsing, Retweets, Favorites, Searches, Dwell time (time spent on page).
Internal Browsing: Internal Browsing is instructing the searcher to initially search and find your main webpage with the desired keyword, then browse other pages of your website in order to eliminate bounce rates. It’s highly recommended
Random Browsing: If you don’t care what webpages the visitor goes to within your website, select this option. A searcher will simply find another webpage within your website.
Manual Browsing: Only if you turn OFF Random Browsing can you select the specific inner pages you wish the searcher to visit.
Retweets: Searchers will tweet out the campaign, and subsequent searchers will Retweet it. A social signal Google tracks. Recommend 1-5 based on budget and competition.
Favorites: Searchers will favorite the tweet originally created. Recommend 1, or 2 per day if more competitive.
SmartRank: Internal algorithm to determine how many searches and time spent on page a campaign should receive. Further detailed explanation further down page.
Search Boosts Per Day: The number of searches per day the Crowd Search Me army will perform for this specific set of url and keyword combination. Described in further detail along with SmartRank below
Minutes Spent on Visit: How long the searcher is instructed to stay on your website before exiting his/her browser. Quality websites tend to have longer dwell times, signaling a good user experience to Google.
Daily Credit Costs: Searches, Time Spent on Page, Retweets/favorites, and future features use credits. It’s recommend to run campaigns for 2 weeks minimum to determine effacy. In two weeks, you can increase the numbers slightly and re-evaulate. Note, it can take up to 60 days for campaigns to show movement, but can sometimes happen in days. Based on many factors described below.
View activity: allows you to see what the searcher has done. Shows what they searched, what they found, how long they stayed, and other webpages they visited before exiting their browser.
Social Sharing Report: confirms the webpage + keyword was tweeted, retweeted or favorited by a searcher.
Twitter Search can sometimes find, but is very inefficient. There is no easy way to check twitter, which is why many users rely on the API (which can still be off) in addition to see if their counts increasing:
http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/count.json?url=http://yahoo.com
Replace yahoo.com with your website. Ensure you enter the exact url you inputted into your campaign.
Status: ON, means campaign is currently active. Off means it is not active. Campaigns do not use credits when off. For best practices we recommend letting the campaign run after 2 week tests before abandoning it for other, better performing campaigns.
Edit: You may edit a campaign at anytime. Note, you can not change the url/keywords. If you wish to do this, either pause or delete the campaign and create a new one. Editing allows you to change other user metrics such as Internal browsing, random browsing, time spent on page, searches per day, and social sharing. It’s recommend to edit a campaign if you want to get slightly more aggressive once you start seeing movement, i.e. if 3 searches at 2 minutes of dwell time is driving some results in first two weeks, test 5 searches at 3 minutes the following 2 weeks.
Want To Become a Brand and Drive Keyword Relevancy?
Many members see the benefit of assocating their website with a keyword. This is often seen with Google’s Auto Suggest feature, which “guesses” what you are going to type as you are typing it. These guesses are not by accident, but large sets of data. While the focus isn’t on auto suggest, driving traffic through Brand + Keyword is a very safe, effective, long term strategy.
Example: url:http://yahoo.com keyword:http://yahoo.com Yahoo
or
Example: url:http://yahoo.com keyword:Yahoo.com
Youtube Best Practices
Members are dominating with Youtube. Things to keep in mind for Youtube campaigns
1) Turn Internal Browsing OFF. We do not want our searchers jumping to another video while they are viewing yours.
2) Increase Dwell Time: Length of time someone watches your video is a critical metric. You do not need to max this out, but should start out at least 2-3 minutes (longer if you have a larger budget, and high quality video)
*Note* longer videos tend to rank much easier in Youtube. It’s very difficult to rank videos that are under 3 minutes in length.
3) Social. Same as websites, base it on competition and your budget
Local SEO – Brick and Mortar Businesses
Local SEO is all about service + city searches. This example is a lawyer in the North East.
Notice this member is only using “1” search per day! He’s run this campaign for nearly 60 days. Slow and steady wins the race for local.
Tip: Be sure you get a Verified Google My Business page for yourself or clients.
Amazon, Facebook, etc
Also known as Parasite SEO by experts such as Terry Kyle, some advanced users are ranking 3rd party websites for their kindle books, ecommerce products, fanpages, etc.
Same as a website, but can be more aggressive. Suggest inputting keywords which you are already ranking in top 120 for (you do not want/need to build brand awareness with these type of campaigns); explained below in SmartRank
Crowd Search Me SmartRank Technology
Crowd Search Me SmartRank technology is an internal algorithm that automates campaign setup. It’s only available currently if keyword volume is over 1000 per month, and your current ranking is tracking under 120.
Volume:
It’s based on average volume of keyword searches; i.e. lawyers would have high search volume, compared to lawyers that specialize in tort law. Higher volume = more searches per day.
Current Rank:
It’s also based on your current website rankings. It’s not normal for a website in 54th position to receive more traffic than the #1 result. The SmartRank internal algorithm determines volume of keyword AND your current keyword / webpage positioning to decide on searches per day.
SmartRank N/A / not working:
SmartRank will not work or be effective in situations where your keyword is a) n/a ranking or b) low search volume. In situation a) you are not ranking, or our system needs a few hours to correctly assign it. In situation b) you have to manually set your searches:
Manually Setting Campaigns:
Less is more. If you have a keyword with low search volume, choose one to a few searches per day at max, with high dwell time. In conjunction with link building/social, drip fed searches will give you fantastic results.
Crowd Search Brand Feature:
When you aren’t ranking in the top 120 for your respective keyword / webpage, your website + keyword will be searched in order to give relevancy to your website for that specific keyword. If you wanted to rank example.com/red-widgets for “red widgets” but were not in the top 120, the system would put in requests for the following search:
example.com/red-widgets red widgets
This helps build brand power, and search relevancy for your website.
Not Indexed in Google:
If for some reason your website/webpage is not indexed in Google Crowd Search Me users will not be able to find it in Google (because Google has not found it yet). We recommend building quality backlinks / social network signals to ensure your webpages get indexed. Quality links / social works best in conjunction with Crowd Search Me, as another major tool in your SEO arsenal.
Onpage SEO / Offpage SEO (backlinks / social signals)
Onpage SEO: You must properly have your webpages setup to rank in Google. Guide here
Offpage SEO: Authority websites do much much better, faster in Crowd Search Me. Read about building backlinks and social to your website here.
Best Results for Niche Sites (Generic traffic)
Setup is very similar to the very first example. In this case we only want generic traffic (if you don’t want to be seen as a brand). Things like “cars”, “auto mobiles” “vehicles that run on ethanol”, etc. As you know, the best ROI tends to come from easier to rank phrases.
Because we do NOT care about any brand relevancy + keyword, you should choose only keywords that are currently ranking in the top 120 spots in Google for your website. Please keep in mind no searches are “wasted” because assocating a keyword with your url is still powerful, just a more long-term approach.
FAQ / Concerns
Current Rank: Crowd Search Me currently uses Authority Labs API to determine your keyword position. You might see yourself ranking at 15, but Google has thousands of datacenters, all with slightly different variations. The main thing is consistency in reporting, and the searchers able to find your keyword + webpage combination (can view activity)
N/A: Two scenarios. 1) you are ranking in the top 120 and Crowd Search Me has not updated in time. It can take up to 24 hours max to correctly identify your rank. You can perform a “force refresh” from your dashboard. If you absolutely do not want branded searches, please pause your campaign and wait for rankings to be found. If nothing after 24 hours, contact our helpdesk.
Keyword Volume: Incorrect. We are integrated with SEMrush to determine keyword volume. Sometimes we are not able to accurately display keyword volumes. If showing under 1000 you will have to use manual setup vs using SmartRank. This will only take a few minutes to micro-manage once every two weeks. Once you are ranking you can simply lower everything to go into a maintenance type mode.
Competition Bounce Back: Our searches will randomly go to competitor websites, quickly bounce (leave) their website, and find yours, staying on it for minutes before closing the browser. A strong signal you are better than your competitors and should rank higher organically.
Traffic Analytics: Google and other software can often incorrectly report traffic as direct or referral traffic, versus organic. Please read this article on search engine land for clarification
Timeframe: SEO takes time. Even new techniques such as Crowd Search Me can not work miracles; even though some campaigns jump in a matter of days, others can take up to 60. Follow the guidelines for best practices, and tweaking campaigns. The better your Onpage SEO, the lower the competition phrase, the better your Offpage SEO, the quicker you will see results.
Failed Search/Didn’t find my website: If a searcher is not able to find your website, you will never be charged credits for this. Even if it shows “completed, and no click through has taken place. If a social action is taken, credits will still be used, but failed actions never result in credits used or wasted.
Time Spent Finding your Website: Searchers are instructed to search for your keyword and spend a random amount of time on the page, before going to the next page. This can take more time if you are on page 10 vs page 1. Time spent finding your website does NOT cost you credits. Only actual time spent on your website uses credits.
When will you support Google “my country”: We are diligently making updates but are focusing on the current search engines we support at the moment. We do not have a timeframe on this.
What keywords should I target? We suggest using Google Keyword Planner Tool or premium tools such as Jonathan Leger’s Keyword Canine. Do not focus on the big keywords unless you are an advanced user. Recommended to go after smaller volume terms.
Google Adwords / Adsense safe? Yes, we have many checks and balances in place to ensure no fraudulent clicks occur to yours or competitor adword accounts.
# of keywords per Campaign. ONE keyword per campaign. You can create multiple campaigns to one url if you wish to target multiple keywords for that specific webpage.
Real searchers? From where? Yes, Crowd Search Me is powered by real users across the world, searching for your keywords and finding your websites. Primarily from the highest valued, English speaking countries such as USA, Canada, UK, Australia. Campaigns can not be geo-targeted; data suggests quality websites get traffic from multiple locations, regardless of local intent.
More Information? Interviews:
Carl Radley Interview
Mike from Maine Show Interview
IMPORTANT: Every campaign is different and you should know the following:
1. The campaigns that do the best in this system already rank within the top 120 results
A. If you are ranked higher than page 5 you want to really focus on your branded search terms.
B. Focus on Long Tail Keywords with appropriate # of Daily Searches. This works VERY WELL!
2. Your rankings may bounce around for the first few weeks. This is because Google is testing your website to see if it should really be ranked higher. Do not be alarmed! (stay the course)
3. We have seen that the campaigns which don’t bounce around as much and have very consistent results are ones which already have quality backlinks and social signals. Can check using ahrefs.com where you stand
4. Google wants to see branded searches for your site with high CTR so make sure you follow that rule of thumb for long term websites.
PowerTraffick is a full service digital marketing company. We are a top PPC Agency that offers Google Ads (AdWords) help from certified Pay-Per Click (PPC) expert consultants and campaign account managers.