The search engines’ proprietary systems crawl billions of web pages to determines which pages will rank for each keyword within the top 10 organic search listings. These listings are the results on the search page that are not advertisements and to which approximately 40% to 60% of the clicks from the search results go.

With Americans conducting more than 12.6 Billion searches in October according to Comscore, search engines are on track to give away almost 100 Billion clicks for free per year. As you would expect, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become the must-do activity for online marketing success as businesses compete to get as many free clicks as possible from Google and other search engines.

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Client: Uplifting Athletes, Inc. is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that operates as a national charter and serves as a uniting force to help change the perception of rare diseases. They have created a network of university chapters within major NCAA Division 1A football programs to enhance the current football student-athletes’ academic and playing experience with real-world job skills. Each chapter partners with a charity that supports one of these rare disease and engages in a grassroots effort to connect millions of passionate and loyal college football fans with people affected by these diseases.

Challenge: Thrivepoint was hired by Uplifting Athletes in June-2008 to help generate donations for an upcoming event at Penn State and to help launch the Ohio State chapter. Uplifiting Athletes had created a Google Adwords campaign with a Google Grant that was inactive due to poor Quality Scores. With the key events coming in July, Uplifting Athletes was under a looming deadline to generate awareness of the pledge drive and donations before and during the events. The situation was especially urgent given that the events only take place once per year ahead of football season.

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Statistics consistently show that searching the internet is the 2nd most common activity online (1st is email) with more than 50% of online users conducting at least one search per day. Search engines scour the web for websites and other content to index and provide strong search results to their users. When your website appears in the search results, you are receiving free exposure to your target audience. In addition, if the user clicks on your listing, you do not need to pay for that click.

The key challenge is that unless you pay for an advertisement or sponsored link, you can not control where or when your listings appear. The search engine maintains sole authority and editorial judgement of what sites to list. In an earlier post, we discussed six ways to achieve free traffic from Google and other search engines, but one of the most important additional aspects to achieving website rankings in Google and other search engines is your meta-title.
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Google offers a unique program for non-profit organizations to advertise for free on Google.com’s keyword advertisements – Google Grants. From Google:

“Designed for 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, Google Grants is a unique in-kind advertising program. It harnesses the power of our flagship advertising product, Google AdWords, to non-profits seeking to inform and engage their constituents online. Google Grants has awarded AdWords advertising to hundreds of non-profit groups whose missions range from animal welfare to literacy, from supporting homeless children to promoting HIV education. Google Grant recipients use their award of free AdWords advertising on Google.com to raise awareness and increase traffic. “

Google was recently shown to have more than 70% search engine market share and is routinely touted as marketer’s #1 performing advertising placement. The upside is the program is free, the downside is that there are some limitations and hurdles to getting it to work properly. Whether you have a Google Grant or want a Google Grant, here are three things to look out for with your Google Grant program:
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The age-old marketing question “How much should I spend on Marketing?” has recently turned into, “How much should I spend on Google?” Over the years, many different methodologies for determining budgets have been promoted, discussed and employed as different businesses try to perfect their marketing. Some of the most popular techniques are to allocate a percent of sales or an overall percent of total budget. Others go with gut instinct or a shoot-the-moon approach to maxing their credit card out. In search marketing, people often promote building a big keyword list, setting it live and ‘optimizing it to results’.

Whatever approach you have heard in the past, its worth considering a completely unique approach to Google budgeting – demand-based budgeting.
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Quality Score is the measure used by Google to determine the placement and cost per click of your search ads. Quality Score is calculated using a number of factors related to your keywords, creative and landing page in each ad group. One of the most frustrating parts of launching and managing a search campaign is when keywords are disabled and require a higher bid in order to be active. It is especially frustrating when seemingly obvious terms that should rank brand or product names are disabled due to low Quality Score. Why does Google do this? And how can you avoid it?

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Dear Thrivepoint,

We have received several proposals from search engine optimization providers who gurantee our listing will be ranked in the top 10 or our money back. This type of offer is very appealing because we have tight marketing budgets that need to be squeezed for maximum results. But, can SEO results be guaranteed?

-W.B.

Thrivepoint: SEO rankings are not something that can be guaranteed very easily. Beside the fact that the SEO does not own or control the search engines, there are a number of important reasons why you should dig deeper into the SEOs guarantee before buying. Here is how to get started with evaluating the guarantee.
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Optmizing your website to attract traffic from search engines – or search engine optimization (SEO) – can be one of the most cost-effective ways to generate traffic to your website. On the other hand, it can take a lot of time and energy to get to the point where the traffic is paying off for your effort. Whether you manage your site yourself or outsource it to someone else, here are six ways you can increase search engine traffic to your site without breaking the bank and without a time intensive overhaul.

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[disclosure] Thrivepoint is receiving a free t-shirt for posting the following

Today, we received an email from Powerset, the much anticipated semantic search engine, asking us if we wanted a free t-shirt. Who doesn’t? All we needed to do was use the Factz feature on www.powerset.com and post our thoughts in our blog. What a great marketing idea. Reach influencers. Make it fun. Get the word out virally. Nice SEO bump. All for the cost of a t-shirt ($10) and postage ($1). Brilliant.

We typed in the query, “powerset” at www.powerset.com and received the following Factz:

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What is the difference between good creative and bad creative on Adwords? The strength of your testing regimen.

Great campaign results are the goal but if you do not understand why results are good or bad, then it will be impossible to scale your marketing for profitable growth. Testing provides you a framework for understanding why your campaign behaves in certain ways so that you can continually improve and scale your campaign profitably.

There is not a simple formula that you can apply to magically create great search advertising results, but here are five standard practices that you should incorporate into your Google Adwords practice to test and improve results:

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