Google Ads – Keywords Match Types

   |   By  |  0 Comments

Google Ads Matching

When creating ads in the Google search network, the system requires adding keywords, i.e. phrases, after entering which the recipient will display creative content. The keyword can be one or several words – for example the word “dress” as the whole phrase “retro cocktail dress”. The more general the keyword, the more searches it will get online, but this does not necessarily mean it will be more effective than a more specific keyword. What should you know when choosing keywords? How to apply Google Ads keyword matches? You can read about it in the article below.

What Is Google Ads Keyword Matching?

When using Google Ads, sooner or later you will always come across the term “keyword matching”. Each keyword in Google Ads can be added in three types of matching: exact, broad, and phrase matching. Which option you choose depends on how broadly the system will search for recipients to whom you should display your ad. Google Ads matching determines, in short, how exactly the phrase typed by the user in the search engine should correspond to the one we added as a keyword. Depending on the selected matching, the system may display the ad only to those recipients who have typed in the same phrase, or also to recipients who have made their keyword more specific with additional terms or have typed a phrase only loosely related to the keyword. What areas of meaning are covered by the individual matches?

Verseo Ads Banner
Verseo Ads Banner

Types of Matching

  • Exact match – is the most precise of all Google Ads matches. It reaches the narrowest group of recipients, but at the same time allows you to maintain the greatest control over who will be shown your ad. Using this type of matching, we reach only those users who typed in exactly the same keyword or phrase of the same meaning (or otherwise – related to the same search intent). When typing a keyword in exact match, we put it in square brackets, e.g. [men’s pajamas]. Then the ad will display similar keywords, such as pajamas for men, men’s pajamas, etc.
  • Phrase matching takes into account all of the same searches as exact match, and also allows you to display your ad for keywords you have specified. Still the ads will only show for searches that include our product or service, but it doesn’t have to be an exact repetition of the keyword. So this is a slightly more relaxed type of matching, but it still allows you to maintain a relatively high degree of control over how your budget is spent. We denote phrase matching by putting the keyword in quotation marks. If you type in the word “women’s boots,” for example, your ad will also show up in more specific queries, such as black women’s boots, comfortable women’s heeled boots, etc.
  • Broad matching allows the ad to be displayed also for queries which are very loosely related to the selected keyword. This allows, on the one hand, to reach a very wide group of recipients and, on the other, to have little control over the contexts in which the system shows our ads. Broad matching does not have any special characters, so when you enter a keyword into the system, without any additional characters – it has this type of matching by default. For example, if you enter a low sugar diet as a keyword, your ad may also show up in results such as low carbohydrate recipes or low sugar diet books.

Using Broad Matching Wisely

Does this mean that by using broad matching we’re wasting resources on users who aren’t going to buy our product anyway? Not necessarily. Showing ads to audiences that aren’t yet ready to buy is part of guiding them through the purchase funnel. So if an ad is shown to users who aren’t yet looking for our product but are interested in a particular topic, it can contribute to conversions later on.

However, to make sure your budget is being used optimally, it’s a good idea to use intelligent rate setting in every type of Google Ads match – and in broad matching in particular. Thanks to this solution, the system will decide what chance for conversion a particular recipient gives, and thus how high the rate should be in a given case. Taking into account how much knowledge the system has about the users, you can be sure that its predictions about the effectiveness of actions will most often be highly accurate. What does Google Ads take into account when searching for recipients? Among other things, it may be guided by the user’s last searches, the content of the page to which the ad leads, or other keywords from a given ad group.

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

In addition, in each type of matching we can narrow down the search context by introducing the so-called exclusion keywords. By excluding certain words the ad will not be displayed if the user includes these words in the search term. This feature allows us to gain a little more control over the ad and prevent it from being displayed in contexts that we deem unprofitable.

Which Type of Broad Matching In Google Ads Is Best?

There is no clear answer to this question. Exact matching allows you to maintain a great deal of control over your spend, but on the other hand, it narrows your field and can deprive you of valuable audiences. Phrase matching gives you more freedom and broadens your audience, but your ads are still displayed only for keywords strongly related to your product or service. Broad matching, on the other hand, carries a potentially high risk of reaching uninterested recipients. On the other hand, we can reach completely new groups of recipients and learn about new keywords that are highly effective for our brand. So it’s worth simply using keywords that are tailored to the specific goal we want to achieve with a given campaign.

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

Free SEO Tools

   |   By  |  0 Comments

If you want your website to generate more traffic, you need to engage in SEO efforts. This will help you rank higher in the search results and bring potential customers to your site faster. SEO takes a lot of time. It’s important to constantly monitor, scan and improve your site. Fortunately, the market for SEO optimization tools has grown significantly over the past few years. There are now many marketing tools available online to help with SEO. We’re going to introduce you to free SEO tools that will make your website more visible in search results. We have listed the selected free SEO tools in alphabetical order.

Ahrefs is one of the most comprehensive tools on the market that allows you to verify keywords, link building and content. However, its main advantage is the link building part, as it has the largest link database on the internet, and thus the information we can get through it is invaluable. Moreover, this link database is updated from time to time so you know when you are losing links or when you are gaining due to bots that, like Google, roam the internet but index links instead of pages.

Answer The Public

AnswerThePublic is a tool that helps you find out what users are searching for on forums, blogs, and social media. It’s a free app for keyword research and content ideas. When you type in a keyword, you get dynamic charts containing the queries that Internet users have typed into the Google search engine. Thus, we get a list of keywords with the so-called long tail. The operation of the tool is simple and intuitive.

Check My Links is a Chrome browser extension that allows you to identify broken links on any website with one click. Damaged links negatively impact user experience and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, so cleaning them up quickly is in our best interest. When you run Check My Links, it begins the process of scanning your site. The results will be displayed in the form of an easy-to-read graph. You can also choose to have your pages scanned automatically. Indexed links will be highlighted in the color corresponding to their status. Broken links are displayed in red.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that is used to track website performance and collect visitor information. It can help businesses identify the main sources of user traffic, evaluate marketing efforts and campaigns, discover trends in user engagement that can be used to improve marketing campaigns, increase site traffic, and retain visitors longer. As we can see above, Google Analytics provides statistics that are useful in the context of optimizing your site for search engine optimization (SEO) and for marketing purposes. Google Analytics as a free SEO tool is very useful!

Verseo Ads Banner
Verseo Ads Banner

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a data reporting tool. It is used to create interactive and responsive dashboards that allow you to build custom dashboards using templates with a wide variety of charts, maps and tables. Access to advanced data allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, as you can see traffic and how search engine bots index your sites, among other things. Google Data Studio collects metrics and indicators that support decision making and strategy direction, so businesses take less risk and increase the chances of achieving their goals.

Google Search Console

A free tool available to any site. Google Search Console, contains a wealth of data about our site related to free search results, as well as various error reports. Search Console is constantly evolving as Google adds new features and changes its approach to what is important to users, for example the emphasis on site speed means that some of the key error reports on the platform are related to speed. You may also see errors related to indexing a site or page that Google tried to add to its index but was unable to due to poor coding.

Google Trends is a free tool provided by Google that will allow us to compare the search popularity of different words or phrases. This way we know what the search rate of a particular keyword is in a given time frame. This comparison is presented by a graph that shows the search phrases from 2004 to the present, which allows us to see the changes over time and depending on the geographical area. Other data that is made available to us is a global heat map that graphically shows an index of the number of searches in different regions of each country, or a list of words related to each search phrase that show more growth. Google Trends also gives us the ability to compare up to 5 terms at a time, and thus see how their popularity has changed over time.

HubSpot Website Grader

Website Grader is a tool that all websites can use, not just those affiliated with Hubspot. It’s a great tool when you want to see where you stand in terms of your website and SEO efforts. To use, enter a URL and email address and Hubspot will index the site in question and provide a summary of the results. Our site will be rated in four general categories: performance, SEO, mobile and security. With HubSpot Website Grader, we will discover areas for improvement and learn what to do to make our site more SEO optimized.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a program that captures website links, images, CSS, scripts and applications. It also retrieves key page elements for SEO, presents them in tabs by type, and allows you to filter for common SEO issues. You can browse, analyze, and filter information as it accumulates. Screaming Frog SEO is especially helpful when analyzing medium to large sites, where manually checking each page would be extremely labor intensive.

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

SEMrush Site Audit

The SEMrush tool works well for small to medium sized websites. The site audit option will analyze a given page (up to 100 pages in the free version) and will check about 140 different SEO-related parameters. These include duplicate content, broken links, HTTPS implementation, and page indexing. In the results of the site audit, there appears a score expressed as a percentage and any errors that need to be corrected. Each item includes information about why it matters and how to fix it.

SEOquake

SEOquake is an SEO tool that is easy to use. All you need to do is install it on your browser. The main advantage of SEOquake is that you can view all the data and metrics in the same place, making it easier to interpret and make SEO decisions. You can also get more complete information about page or keyword optimization through the audit option. Another advantage is the insight into the metrics of sites that rank in the results for a search keyword.

Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is a free SEO tool used to help SEO by optimizing content and selecting keywords accordingly. Surfer SEO analyzes the current top 50 results on Google for potential ranking factors for the search term. It also includes a built-in keyword research and SERP review tool that provides an average word count or preferred content length and keyword frequency and page speed estimates.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that will improve our site’s search engine ranking by helping to optimize page content and keywords. Once installed on your WordPress site, the Yoast SEO plugin will appear on each page and post you create and will analyze the page content and make suggestions on how to improve it. If we don’t have extensive SEO knowledge, regularly using Yoast SEO when publishing new pages or reviewing existing ones is a great workout. Using the plugin will start publishing content with optimization in mind, more instinctively.

Summary

If you want your site to attract more traffic and provide a better experience for your visitors, you should analyze it for SEO, and there are hundreds of tools available online to help you do that.  Verseo has gathered these free SEO tools we think are valuable and that are easily accessible. You can enjoy valuable feedback on your SEO within minutes. Free seo tools – and actually knowing how to use them, will also increase your value in the job market!

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

The Benefits of Local Positioning (Local SEO)

   |   By  |  0 Comments

Local SEO

There’s no doubt that Google is the most popular search engine among Internet users. It’s estimated that over 90% of its users use Google. Not surprisingly, a high ranking position is usually a competitive advantage for various businesses and enterprises.

We use it to find all sorts of information: from the seemingly trivial, such as a list of recommended restaurants nearby, to the quite serious, such as health advice (it’s not without reason that the term “doctor Google” is very popular). For this reason, SEO has become one of the most effective ways to promote your brand on the Internet. However, businesses that are focused on regional advertising should be interested in the concept of local SEO.

What Is Local SEO?

Local SEO is a series of onsite and offsite activities, whose aim is to increase visibility for a selected set of keywords, but only within a specific area such as a city or a district. The essence of this solution is based on displaying information to potential customers about the place where they are currently located.

For example: imagine that at the moment you are in a foreign city, but you need to use the services of a hairdresser. In the past, you would ask the locals and based on the first or most common answer, you would choose the best service provider. Nowadays, you can find a specialist in a particular industry in your vicinity and read reviews about them in a much shorter time with the help of a search engine. So, as you can easily guess, an effectively conducted regional SEO process combined with a good quality product or service can bring a number of benefits to a regional business.

What Are the Benefits of Local SEO?

A well-planned and executed local SEO strategy brings unquestionable benefits to a business. First of all, competing on a national or global market is difficult and also requires lots of time. Regional positioning, on the other hand, isn’t such a complicated process, and at the same time it brings the intended results much faster (both in terms of higher position in the rankings, as well as financial gains associated with it – potential consumers are located in the area and are usually ready to use the offer on the same day).

Additionally, a less complex SEO process usually requires less money, especially in areas with low competition. This is also supported by the fact that optimization activities within local sites or directories are much cheaper. Regional positioning may also bring much better results if you simultaneously decide to implement Google Ads advertising campaign or promotion in selected social media.

Who Should Take Advantage of Local Positioning?

As you can easily guess, local positioning of a website works well in case of businesses, which operate in a certain area, e.g. in a given city or province. Catering establishments (restaurants, cafes etc.) and health and fitness centers (private doctors, gyms etc.) often use this solution. Local positioning is also used by companies that provide their services in the homes of customers (eg. emergency plumbing, repair crews, locksmiths, etc.), as well as by premises to which customers must get to themselves (eg. hairdresser, law firm, car service, etc.).

Verseo Ads Banner
Verseo Ads Banner

Of course, this method can be used by businesses in a variety of industries, so it need not be limited to the examples listed. Those who opt for this solution, however, should realize that most local searches are done via smartphones. Thus, their sites need to be responsive, and therefore, tailored to mobile device users.

Geolocation and its Impact on SEO

Geolocation allows you to determine the geographical location of a particular website user,and t;is a very important factor that affects search results. In the past, the results displayed were also dependent on the national domain of the search engine. This means that when you typed in a particular phrase via google.co.uk, you received exactly the same page ranking, regardless of where you checked. Nowadays, results are tailored to a specific location to make it easier to find information from a user’s perspective. Of course, the user does not have to rely on the search engine and can specify for which area he wants to receive information. It’s enough that for this purpose he uses the so-called geolocalized query, e.g. “pizzeria Portland”. 

Regardless of whether the user is currently in Warsaw or another city, Google should present a ranking of this type of restaurant from Portland. However, it’s worth adding that the geolocation made by the search engine is so accurate that in large agglomerations, it can show the sites of companies that are located in a particular district. The fact that many Internet users still enter the phrase + area in place of the bar may result from their habit or previous planning of staying in another city. Nevertheless, this kind of personalization of results is a very important SEO factor, over which the person responsible for the regional positioning of a given site has little control.

As a site owner you should set up a business card in Google My Business, and thus ensure your visibility in Google Maps. Additionally, apart from XML sitemaps, you also have to equip yourself with a KML file (the so-called geositemap), which is used, among others, by the Google Earth application to guarantee that your company or premises will be properly located in search results. In addition, you must take care of regional positioning through other actions: internal (proper optimization of the site and content) and external actions (acquiring links and encouraging customers to add opinions).

How to Create a Business Card in Google My Business?

As it was emphasized above: creating a business card in Google My Business service is an absolute must if you care about local positioning of your business. This not only ensures that your business will appear in standard search results and maps, but it also increases the credibility of your business from Google’s point of view.

Setting up a business card isn’t a complicated process though it requires verification with a special PIN (in most cases sent by mail to verify the actual address). Once this step has been successfully completed, you will have your own ID on Google, where users will be able to check your address, phone number, opening hours, as well as see available photos and past customer reviews.

When providing contact information (which is all the information that your customers can use to contact a company representative), you must also remember to be consistent. It’s a good idea to have the same address, phone number or email name on the “contact us” subpage, in the attachment with regulations and in all external sources. Then the algorithms will easily associate the contact information with your business, which ultimately benefits the local search results.

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

Customer Reviews

A very important factor that affects the ranking of local search results is your business reviews. This should come as no surprise since Google always puts the well-being of the search engine user first. In turn, the opinions of previous consumers about a given service provider provide a lot of valuable information about its offer and customer service, and thus often help an undecided Internet user in making a decision. Positive reviews about your business are therefore read favorably by both Google’s bots and potential consumers.

For this reason, you need to make sure that your customers share their reviews (especially on Google My Business card, but also in other places), because their number and average are valuable clues for the robots when determining the local ranking. Additionally, there are times when Google displays selected ratings and reviews as part of the presentation of your business in search results, so unflattering comments can cause your listing to be quickly excluded by users.

Correct Optimization of Your Site for Local SEO

Of course, if you’re committed to achieving high local rankings, don’t forget to properly optimize your site. It includes a number of the same actions as in the case of SEO for general phrases, i.e. correct page structure and internal navigation or unique content. However, optimization of the website for local positioning provides for a few additional, obligatory actions:

  • placing a Google map in the “contact” tab (indicating the seat of the company),
  • company name, address and phone number in the “contact” tab and footer,
  • describing contact information using structured data,
  • naturally placing the name of the area in the content on the page, in headers and in meta descriptions.

You also can’t forget about external links to the site, which play a very important role, both for general and local positioning. In the latter case, it’s worth taking care of links from local sites e.g. regional advertisement portals or county newspapers.

Regional positioning may bring a lot of benefits for the business in a short time, though it requires the website owner to fulfill several conditions, such as correct optimization of the website, effective link building or encouraging customers to leave ratings and opinions. There’s no doubt this will result in reaching a wide range of customers from the local area, and thus monetization.

Sounds good? Write us for a quote!

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

Google Discovery Ads: the Essentials

   |   By  |  0 Comments

Google Discovery Ads is an advertising format that allows you to reach a wide audience in various places on the Internet. We don’t use ready-made graphic ads to run this type of campaign. Instead, we give Google Ads resources which the system mixes to create visuals tailored to use needs. Discovery Ads are ads based largely on self-learning algorithms which analyze the behavior of recipients and display the creative content to those who are most likely to be interested in a given service or product at a given moment. Where exactly can you see Discovery Ads and how to create them?

Google Discovery Ads – Locations

Discovery Ads reach 3 billion Internet users. At the same time, this format allows for a very precise selection of the target group – we can direct the ads to groups of recipients with specific behaviors, demographic features and interests, but also to lists of recipients created by us. Users can see our ads during their daily online activities, thanks to which information about a product or service reaches them at each stage of the customer purchase path. Google Discovery Ads are displayed in places such as:

  • Discover tabs – these are tabs in the browser where Google displays personalized news to the user, tailored to their interests, based on previous online activity,
  • in Gmail – Discovery Ads have replaced traditional ads in Gmail. Currently, they are the only way to show promoted content to recipients in “Offers” and “Communities” tabs,
  • on YouTube – on the platform’s homepage or in the “Worth watching” section.

In Google Discovery Ads, the system selects the best display spots itself for a particular ad. It also adjusts rates for it and adjusts its size to the place of emission and size of the device on which it’s displayed.

Verseo Ads Banner
Verseo Ads Banner

What’s Included in Google Discovery Ads?

As we’ve already mentioned, Discovery Ads is a type of creative content in which the system itself assembles the ad from available elements. Therefore, before we launch this type of campaign, it’s necessary to provide the system with the appropriate resources. These are:

  • headlines – a maximum of 5 titles, each for no more than 40 characters,
  • descriptions – a short presentation of the product or service and the benefits of buying it. You can add 5 descriptions, each for up to 90 characters,
  • business name,
  • business logo,
  • images in horizontal rectangle and square format. There can be a maximum of 15 of them,
  • Final URL – subpage address to which the user will be redirected after clicking the ad,
  • CTA – call to action. They should be selected from the list offered by the system.

It’s not necessary to use all the available images, headlines or ad texts, but it’s worth remembering that the more resources you make available, the greater the chance that the system will find effective connections for given recipients.

Images in this type of ads can be displayed in different ways, so it’s best not to include logos or subtitles. These elements will be pulled from other resources that will be uploaded to the campaign creator. It’s also worth making sure that all headlines, descriptions and images match each other. We do not know in which configurations they will be displayed, so it’s important to make sure that in each possible configuration they create a coherent message.  

New call-to-action
New call-to-action

Automated Discovery Campaigns – What Do They Give and Take Away?

Google Discovery Ads, as a campaign type optimized almost exclusively by self-learning algorithms, doesn’t allow some of the features known from other Google Ads formats. We can’t, among other things, set targeting to destinations or devices, limit the number of impressions for a given recipient or exclude inappropriate contexts. But do these limitations make us waste our budget? On the contrary, the system is already so efficient that it doesn’t display ads in inappropriate contexts threatening the brand or bombard the recipient with the same ad dozens of times a day. What’s more, it has so much information about viewers’ behavior and preferences that it can almost always choose display parameters much better than a human.

Additionally, Discovery Ads offers the option of automatic ad targeting – after enabling this option, the system itself expands the group of recipients with new ones who are most likely to benefit from the offer. It’s not mandatory to enable this type of targeting, but it often provides significant benefits, especially when the ad has been online long enough to exhaust the potential of remarketing lists.

Discovery Ads – Why’s It Worth it?

  • wide reach – Discovery campaigns can potentially reach billions of people all over the world, in various places on the web,
  • precise targeting – this format offers many possibilities of selecting target groups, including targeting at non-standard lists of recipients and automatic targeting so you can reach new, promising recipients,
  • modern multimedia format – Discovery Ads are ads adjusted to the needs of today’s users. They do not have a rigidly specified content, they adjust to the size of the device and place of display and display the product or service exactly when the user is looking for it,
  • using the budget to the maximum – thanks to the intelligent determination of rates the system can precisely manage the budget. This, combined with a well-chosen group of recipients, prevents over-budgeting,
  • saving time – the system automatically optimizes the campaign so we don’t have to waste time manually changing the settings. Of course, this doesn’t relieve us from watching the campaign and monitoring its results.

Google Discovery Ads is a type of advertising that is definitely worth getting to know. It’s a great complement to other formats such as responsive search ads, Google Display Network ads or YouTube Ads. If you want to use this type of campaign to promote your brand, check out our offer subpage!

New call-to-action
New call-to-action