Articles about search marketing

,

How to Gauge Reach with the Cat Line and Google Trends

laser cat

You may have read the title of this article and thought, “Cats on the internet, huh? I see what you did there.” And you’re right. There’s a love affair between the internet and cats. As much as I’d love to go on a long tangent about this, I’ll save it for a future post and try to stay focused on The Cat Line.

What is Google Trends?

Google Trends is a tool that lets you track how many times people used Google to search a specific term. You can analyze and compare up to five keywords and refine the results with multiple filters. If you want to find out how many people in Brazil are searching for Rick & Morty pics in Google Image Search, then Google Trends is the tool to use.

Google Trends Brazil - Rick and Morty Pics

Get Schwifty!

Cool info. Looking up search volume on random TV shows or celebrities might be fun or interesting, but it probably won’t help you accomplish your goals. This tool, though, does have its place in your internet marketing toolkit, but you need to know how to use Google Trends.

Read more

/by
, ,

“I Voted” Stickers as a Native Ad Campaign: Is It Worth It?

Texas "I Voted Sticker"

Since Michael and I took some time off last Thursday to vote, the “I Voted” stickers have been on my mind. What’s their value? Could that money be used better elsewhere? Is it actually a strong enough voting incentive for it to be worth diverting that slice of state budget? Should we view these as a form of native ad?

Monetary Value of “I Voted” Stickers

I did a little bit of research, and I found an article stating that in 2016, the state of Oklahoma spent approximately $0.003 on each sticker. That’s a very reasonable per-unit price, but how much does it become in aggregate? For Oklahoma, at 2,030,277 registered voters, the answer is $6,090.83. That’s like the cost of a home air conditioning unit, so, no, the sticker budget wouldn’t go very far toward anything.

But what about a more populous state? According to the Texas Tribune, there are 15,015,700 registered voters. Assuming the same price Oklahoma pays for stickers, that’s $45,047.10. So, no, that’s still not really enough to do anything at a state level. It’s maybe one lower-level employee salary, so unless we desperately need more papers pushed around, I don’t think it’s going to go very far.

Read more

/by
,

How to Speed Up Your Website in 10 Minutes or Less

PageSpeed Score

Why Page Speed Matters

As much as I’d like to jump straight into the code snippets that can help speed up your website, it’s important to define why load times matter. In 2010, Google revealed site speed was a ranking factor the company considered when choosing which sites to show in search results. Quoting that article:

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.

It’s hard to argue with happy users, better rankings, and reduced operating costs, especially when it may just take a few minutes to accomplish. Now, enough with definitions, let’s jump straight to why you’re still reading. Read more

/by