startup hustle

A common adjustment businesses make in a recession, (I’m not saying we are in a recession, although many indications point in that direction), is to cut their advertising budget.

That is often found to be the wrong reaction, as cutting your advertising budget wont lead to more sales. Since cutting the ad budget is still practiced by many, your competitors might join that crowd. Or, you can go crazy and expand your marketing spend during a down turn.

I have noticed a reduction in the number of AdWords advertisers. This decreases spend per click and reduces the options searchers have, which could lead to more sales for you. Even if the general populace is buying less, they still research products which could lead to sales down the road.

Read the rest of this article »

Google has begun the PageRank update. I have seen updates on multiple site that I work on.

Some of the potential changes per the Search Engine Roundtable blog:

1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the PageRank vote equally.
2. Depending on the location of the link, PR may be weighted differently.
3. Multiple links to the same url from the same page may not each get the same piece of the PR vote.
4. “Run-of-site” external links, like Blogrolls, may now have diminished PR.
5. Links between domains that Google sees as “related” may have their PR significantly damped down. Possibly the same goes for sites that link to subdomains.

Although many deem PageRank unimportant I still contend that it is one way to tell how relevant Google deems your site.

Recently I have received many questions about the Adwords Quality Score. I have wanted to write an article that explains the most important aspects of the quality score and which segments you have the most control over so I can use it as a resource with startups I work with.

First, lets discuss the segments that you control when building an Adwords campaign.

1. Keywords – Like keyword research in SEO, paid search keywords are vital to reaching the correct audience. Competition can also be tough for highly searched words, so a long-tail strategy can also be useful to keep cost down. Regardless if they are high volume keywords or long-tail, they need to be relevant to your offering.
2. Ads – One of the most important tasks in paid search is ad copy. These ads are displayed in the search engine results pages (SERPS) and are the only source of information that searchers have when deciding where to click. As you will read below, Google uses click through rate has a major gauge in the quality of your ads.
3. Landing Page – This is the page that searchers will land on when they click your ad. You (should) build and control this page. Google will look at this page to determine if it is relevant to your keyword and ad.

Read the rest of this article »

Google has updated PageRank over the last few days. I have seen increases on all the sites I work, including Startup Hustle which went from PR2 to PR3.

Remember that Toolbar PageRank is a dated version and Google does not disclose your current PageRank. The green bar you see is a few months behind. PageRank is not very important anymore when it comes to rankings but is fun to see the shifts.

Rand wrote a good post over at SEOmoz about startups lack of using (or understanding) SEO. I saw a list of blog post that provided startup marketing advice and I was hoping to see a post from Startup Hustle (because I wanted a link from Rand), but I do talk about SEO so I did not meet the requirement. Rands overall point was that SEO is basically free and a little keyword research goes a long way.

Let me just be clear on this point – not one of those posts has the word “SEO” in it, nor makes any clear reference to getting traffic from search engines. I’m forced to ask myself – are these people idiots? Are they being coy? Or have they really never experienced the built-in marketing channel that comes from ranking at the top of the engines for a relevant keyword phrase?

Read the rest of this article »

I started to read about a pagerank update on some of the marketing/SEO forums but saw no movement on any of the sites I watch. About a week later I noticed two sites change PR (one went up, the other went down). When I first started internet marketing pagerank updates were consistent, about once per quarter. In the past 6 months PR updates are becoming more common outside the usual standard updates. There is always debate about when these smaller updates occur because not everyone is being effected. I just wanted to verify that I have seen multiple pagerank changes this week.

If you haven’t noticed already, Google has begin the first quarter PageRank update. Startup Hustle has seen some movement in individual post but not on the homepage. A few of the sites I work with have seen increases.

Although many deem PageRank unimportant I still contend that it is one way to tell how relevant Google deems your site.

Are you tracking how Google indexes your site? If you rely on Google as much as most web companies, it is important to see how you are being indexed. You always hear about the dreaded “Supplemental Index” (whether it exist or not) which is a fear for any startup. The supplemental index (SI) is a segment of Google’s index where the pages are in a search engine purgatory. The problem is, there is no way to tell if you have web pages in the SI and worse yet, there is not 100% proof that it exist.

There is hope however. With the proper tracking you can get a good idea of when Google views your site as a positive additional to its index. If you submitted an XML site map in Google’s Webmaster Tools (how-to), you will have an idea of how many URL’s have been submitted to Google. This is not needed for the tracking but will give you an idea of the percentage of URL’s Google is giving you credit for.

Read the rest of this article »

I’m currently working on an international pay per click campaign for a startup. I turn to Google Trends to get an idea of the search volume in different countries. I don’t take these numbers as 100% correct, but I assume they are in the ballpark. Well, its not in the ballpark, its not even on the same planet. Here is the regional breakdown of search volume for “Keyword” per Google Trends. India has about 85% of the search volume of the US and Canada has roughly 50% the volume.

To test the potential conversion of these international campaigns, I ran a short 3 week test. The international campaigns were replicas of the campaign I run that targets the US market. Each of these campaigns are geotargeted to the specific country (and we all know how well geotargeting works).

Read the rest of this article »