Blue Fountain Media’s Director of Marketing, Alhan Keser, was just featured in the Wall Street Journal and Smart Money’s SMSmallBiz.com in a story covering Pay-Per-Click advertisements. In an extended interview, Keser helped explain why paid advertisements resulted in higher conversion rates–the ratio of users who actually make a purchase–when compared to the organic, unpaid search results.

Here’s a quick excerpt:

The reason for the differential: Conversion rates tend to improve as shoppers progress through the buying cycle, says Alhan Keser, an SEM specialist at Blue Fountain Media, a boutique web site development and online marketing firm in New York. Although search engine users typically troll organic results to conduct online research, they start favoring sponsored links when they’re ready to buy, he says. “Most people who click on ads are ready to be sold to; they are at the buying stage,” Keser says.

Keser is a certified SEO and SEM expert, meaning he is well versed in all aspects of marketing through search engines–both improving organic results and paid results. Keser has previosuly been featured on Entrepreneur.com, in the Google section of About.com and is a guest expert for Ultra Light Startups–a forum for technology entrepreneurs.

A while back I went over the basics of search advertising, or pay-per-click. These are still the best place to start, and can be broken down into four areas:

• Keywords: do keyword research, and use keyword groups to segment your audiences. Also use different match types to make sure you’re targeting the right users at the right times in their buying cycle, but not overpaying for lower-performance phrases.
• Ad copy: Use keywords in your ad copy, and prioritize the relevance of what you’re advertising (in relation to the search terms) over branding or your company name.
• Landing page: Make sure your landing page is relevant to your keywords, and ads.
• Performance Tracking: Know what metrics are important to your business; monitor and improve your campaigns over time through controlled testing.

But what if you’re already doing all that? Here are the next 8 steps:
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Three members from the Blue Fountain Media marketing team, Alhan Keser, Zack Sinkler, and Byrne Hobart attended the first day of the annual Search Engine Marketing Expo at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Monday.
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I attended the session entitled “7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page of Design” presented by Tim Ash, President & CEO, SiteTuners.com (Twitter @tim_ash). Here the seven deadly sins of landing page design, outlined by Ash in a very humorous fashion:

1. Unclear call to action.

Focus your visitors on one thing. What it is that you want people to do on each of your pages? 1-800 Flowers is one of the big companies that was messing this up (on their product detail page).

Use Attention Wizard heatmap to find where people are looking on your page.

2. Too many options – steps.

Reduce the friction between the user and the product they are seeking. Show main categories that are most popular on your page – not every subcategory and product on each page.
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We’ve talked before both about making your paid search ads stand out from the crowd, and about using microformats to help organize content on your website. It appears that Google’s new “rich snippets” announcement has implications for paid search as well, giving advertisers the opportunity to leverage the new policy to differentiate their ads.

In this example, Google includes a plus-box below a Newegg.com ad, with product images and information pulled from microformatted tables on their product pages:

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Last week we attended Search Engine Strategies New York, the online marketing conference and expo, and one theme that kept coming up in various contexts was the concept of real value. Different industries talk about it different way: in economics it’s “utility”, in customer relations it’s “satisfaction”, but the idea is the same: businesses and consumers alike are paying more attention to each dollar that they spend and how it benefits them.

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Hi everyone,

Alhan and I just got back to the office after three days at the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference and Expo. We’ll be writing more about the takeaways from that experience a little later. But first I wanted to point out something I noticed this morning:

One technique to avoid unwanted clicks and the charges associated with them is to write ad copy which will “filter” unqualified users by discouraging them from clicking. Above, on our own AdWords creative, we use the filter “$5K+”, which gives users a clue about the level of our services.

Another New York firm, Avatar, has been doing the same thing (“$20,000 and up”), but now they’ve added a second filter on the same ad: “Currently NOT Hiring”.

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This is a quick post to exemplify why most methods of marketing, especially online, simply do not match the effectiveness and longevity of search engine optimization (SEO). The important factor to remember is that it is measurable, like pay-per-click advertising and banner ads, but unlike these, the effects of SEO last far beyond the length of the campaign and cost-per-conversion plummets with SEO as time goes by.
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Blue Fountain Media's Web 2.0 Marketing Seminar at the Center for Architecture.

BFM Creative Director, Gabriel Shaoolian, gave a presentation in front of 30+ attendees to the Luxury Brand Web 2.0 Marketing Seminar, which attracted former clients and other parties interested in learning more about the following:

> How to effectively drive traffic to a website through various means of online marketing, the most cost-effective being search engine optimization.

> How to convert visitors into customers through landing page optimization and continual testing and analysis.

> How to build brand loyalty online and insure repeat traffic.

Want to attend our next seminar? Contact us and we will send you an invitation.

Here is the presentation, which can easily be shared:

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It’s amazing how many poorly researched, poorly written, and poorly targeted paid search campaigns I’ve come across on the major search engines without even really looking for them. It’s obvious why Google runs those $25 free AdWords credit promotions for new users; if you don’t know what you’re doing, that money goes pretty quickly.

Whether they’re using Google AdWords, Yahoo! SEM, or Microsoft adCenter, here are some of the dangerous thoughts that seem to go through the minds of PPC users:

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