Driving sales with Google Adwords

My Google Adwords campaign has been running for a few days now and is driving traffic to my AOL landing page on my UK broadband comparison website www.ukbroadbandfinder.com.

I can't use AOL trademarks, but I have written loads of ads which are quite specific about AOL broadband and dial up package details - speed, downloads, free wireless router, free month, broadband with no minimum contract if you switch to AOL, etc.

Now the campaign is up and running I am tweaking it all the time - clearer Google ads, more popular keywords, keyword mis-spellings - and I'm also continually optimising the landing page (while I also work on the general SEO on the whole broadband site).

It is hard work but the person I really feel sorry for is Jason Henry at affiliate network TradeDoubler, who has been the recipient of far too many emails from me about Adwords functionality, keywords, and optimising. Sadly for Jason, there's more to come.

I'll be working with AOL and TradeDoubler later this week to fine-tune my campaign, and also to find out which areas of my broadband availability website need search engine optimisation (SEO) changes.

By Sarah, UK Broadband Finder

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

In my last post I mentioned the new broadband articles I had written. These were keyword-rich but I know search engine optimisation (SEO) is about more than liberally dotting the word broadband about the site (which, as it is a broadband website, it has enough of already).

I've worked on SEO before, particularly when I used to work for other companies and I got to spend their money on it - and I have also tried to follow the principles on UK Broadband Finder (adding keywords, not using Flash or images to convey content). But I knew I had got lazy with my H1 and H2 headings and that I wasn't making it easy for Google to spider down through my website.

SEO was one of the areas I spoke to AOL and TradeDoubler about - and Sanjeev Mirchandani, the Publisher Manager at TradeDoubler, has helped me out with an SEO checklist covering the basic SEO principles. He also had a good browse around www.ukbroadbandfinder.com and came back with feedback on what I'm doing right, and where I'm missing a trick. (Good - lots of content. Bad - little internet linking from within the body text, poor use of H headers).

So I've started work on some of the main articles, making SEO changes in the following areas:

1. including SEO keywords in H1, H2 and H3 headers
2. using SEO keyword phrases in the body text, particularly near the top of the page
3. adding internal and external text links (again, using keyword phrases in the link) to make it easier for Google to visit other pages on the website (rather than just relying on the surrounding page navigation)
4. adding new content
5. diving into Joomla and giving my main content pages search engine friendly URLs (eg http://www.ukbroadbandfinder.com/dial_up.html)
   

There's loads more to do - and now I'm worried I've added too many links and keyword phrases - but it's a start. Next step is to give each of my broadband packages a friendly URL (over 100 of them) which will take time but should be worth it.

By Sarah, UK Broadband Finder