Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords – Perry Marshall
Advanced Google Adwords – Brad Geddes
PPC Hero
Google Ads Blog

SEMrush Ranking Factors 2.0
https://www.semrush.com/ranking-factors
Search Metrics: Google Ranking Factors
https://www.searchmetrics..com/knowledge-base/ranking-factors
Moz Ranking Factors Survey
https://www.moz.com/search-ranking-factors
Google Updates by Search Engine Round Table
https://www.seroundtable.com/category/google-updates
Search Engine Land
https://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-algorithm-updates
Moz Blog
https://moz.com/blog

The strongest factors in the top 10 search results:

1. Direct website visits.
2. Click-through-rate.
3. Time on-site.
4. Bounce rate(low bounce rate is good)
5. Number and quality of backlinks.
6. HTTPS security certificate installed on site.
7. Overall content relevance and keyword usage.
8. Font size in main content area(people find larger fonts more readable and leads to higher engagement)
9. Number of images.
10. Total social media activity.

Keyword research. The most important step of SEO.

Different kinds of keywords:

• Head-term keywords
  keywords with one to two words, i.e. classic movies.
• Long-tail keywords
  keywords with three or more phrases, i.e. classic Akira Kurosawa movies.
• Navigational keywords
  keywords used to locate a particular brand or website. Examples would be Facebook, YouTube or Gmail.
• Informational keywords
  keywords used to discover on a particular topic. This includes keywords beginning with “how to…” or “what are the best…”
• Transactional keywords
  keywords entered into Google by customers wanting to complete a commercial action, i.e. buy jackets online

In most cases, targeting head-term or navigational keywords for other brands is competitive and not worth the time or effort. Despite their high traffic numbers, they will generally not lead to any sales.

On the other hand, long-tail, informational and transactional keywords are good keywords for most SEO projects. They will lead to more customers.

How to generate a massive list of keywords

Relevance is vital.

Keeping relevance in mind, you must develop a list of potential keyword combinations to use as a resource, so you can then go and uncover the best keywords with a decent amount of traffic each month in Google.

Some powerful strategies to help generate the list:

• Steal keywords from competitors.
  Use a Keyword Density Check. If you enter a page into this tool within seconds it will scrape a list of the keywords your competitor has optimized into their page. https://www.seoreviewtools.com/keyword-density-checker
• Brainstorm your own master list.
  Sketch out a grid of words your target customer might use. Split the words into different prefixes and suffixes. Combine them into one giant list using the free Mergewords tool. https://mergewords.com
  Prefix: buy | where do I buy
  Middle word: main keywords
  Suffixes: online

How to find keywords that will send traffic to your site

Estimating keyword traffic data with Google’s Keyword Planner
Google Ads Keyword Planner(https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner)
To access all the juicy traffic data provided by the Google Ads Keyword Planner tool, you need an active Google Ads campaign running, and must be spending at least a modest amount of money regularly.
Estimating keyword traffic data with a paid tool like KWFinder
KWFinder https://kwfinder.com
It’s liked for its ease of use, relevant keyword suggestion, and competitive data.

How to find keywords for easy rankings

Have a large keyword list for your research.

You need to wash this list and separate the ridiculously competitive keywords from the easy keywords no one is aggressively targeting.

On-page SEO

= the process of ensuring that your site is readable to search engines.

Some considerations, make sure that:

1. The site content is visible to search engines.
2. Your site is not blocking search engines.
3. Search engines pick up the keywords you want.
4. Site visitors are having a positive user experience.

How to structure your site for easy and automatic SEO

Search engine friendly URLs
Clean URLs are more logical, user friendly and search engine friendly.
Internal navigation
As a general rule, making it easier for users makes it easier for Google.
Above all else, your web site navigation must be made of real text links-not images.
For an additional SEO boost, include links to pages you want visible to search engines and visitors on the home page.

LSI – latent semantic indexing – related phrases – synonyms
https://lsigraph.com

💡Areas you can weave keywords into the page:

• meta description and meta title tags
• navigation anchor text
• headings(h1,h2,h3)
• content text
• bolded and italicized text
• internal links in content
• image filename, image alt tag and image title tag
• video filename, video title

Meta tags
If you don’t fill out your meta tags, Google will automatically use text from your site to create your search listing. This is exactly what you don’t want Google to do, otherwise it can end up looking like gibberish.
Fill out these tags correctly, and you can increase the number of people clicking to your site from the search engine results.

Site load speed
How fast or slow your site loads is a strong factor Google considers when deciding how it should rank your pages in the search results.

For each second shaved off a site, there is an average increase of 7% to the site conversion rate.

sitemaps.xml robots.txt
The XML Sitemaps Generator will automatically create a sitemaps.xml file for you.
XML Sitemaps Generator

https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Next ask your web developer or web designer to upload it into the main directory of your site or do it yourself if you have FTP access. Once uploaded, the file should be publicly accessible with an address like the below example:
http://www.yoursite.com/sitemaps.xml
Once you have done this, you should submit your sitemap to the Google Search Console account for your site.
If you do not have a Google Search Console account, the below article by Google gives simple instructions for web developers or web designers to set this up.
Add a website property – Search Console Help

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/34592

Login to your account and click on your site. Under “site configuration” click “sitemaps” and submit your sitemap.

robots.txt
“This should sit in the same place as your sitemaps.xml file. The address to this file should look the same as the example below:
http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt
The robots.txt file is a simple file that exists so you can tell the areas of your site you don’t
want Google to list in the search engine results.
There is no real boost from having a robots.txt file on your site. It is essential you check to ensure you don’t have a robots.txt file blocking areas of your site you want search engines to find.
The robots.txt file is just a plain text document, its contents should look something like below:

robots.txt good example
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
User-agent: *
Disallow: /logs
If you want your site to tell search engines to not crawl your site, it should look like the next example. If you do not
want your entire site blocked, you must make sure it does not
look like the example below. It is always a good idea to double check it is not set up this way, just to be safe.

“# robots.txt – blocking the entire site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
The forward slash in this example tells search engines their software should not visit the home directory.
To create your robots.txt file, simply create a plain text document with Notepad if you are on Windows, or Textedit if you are on Mac OS. Make sure the file is saved as a plain text document, and use the “robots.txt good example” as an indication on how it should look. Take care to list any directories you do not want search engines to visit, such as internal folders for staff, admin areas, CMS back-end areas, and so on.
If there aren’t any areas you would like to block, you can skip your robots.txt file altogether, but just double check you don’t have one blocking important areas of the site like the above example.

duplicate content-canonical tags
Unfortunately, many site content management systems will sometimes automatically create multiple versions of one page.

Canonical tag indicates the original version of a web page to search engines.

“Choose the URL that is the most straightforward for users, this should usually be the URL that reads like plain English.
Using the earlier socket wrenches example, by using the tag below, Google would be more likely to display the best version of the page in the search engine results
.

As a general rule, include this tag on every page on your site, shortly before the tag in the code.”

Mobile freindly test – https://search.google.colm/test/mobile-friendly

Mobile Support
It’s important to implement mobile support, not just for better search engine results, but for better engine results, but for better sales and conversions-quite simply, the majority of your traffic is coming from mobile users.

Mobile Friendly Test Tool
https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Test Your Mobile Speed and Performance – Think With Google

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

Mobile Usability – Google Search Console

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-usability”

If you have a responsive site that delivers the same content to mobile and desktop users, automatically resizes content to the screen, is fast and is user-friendly, all you have to do is follow the SEO recommendations in this book, and your mobile results will be top notch from an SEO perspective.

Mobile friendly sites – https://developers.google.com/search/mobile-sites

Google’s Search Quality Guide
EEAT – EXPERIENCE | EXPERTISE | AUTHORITY | TRUST

This includes things like the content quality and how aggressive ads are on your site.
The reputation of the site and its authors, publicly-listed information about the site ownerhsiop, contact details, and several other factors.

Search quality evaluator guidelines:

1. real name, comppany name, and contact information listed on an about page.
2. Excessive and unnatural internal structural links across sidebars and footers.
3. Over monetization of content.
4. List editors & contributors.
5. Provide sources
6. Financial transaction pages must link to policy pages for refunds, retuns, devliery information, and the terms and conditions of your site.
7. Pages offering financial information must be of the highest quality.

Readability
Making your content readable for the widest possible auidence, with simple language and sentence strucutre is true readability.

The searchmetrics rankings report discover sites appearing the top 10 showed an average Flesch reading score of 76-content that is farily easy to read for 13~15 year old students and up.

Readability Score https://readable.com

How to accelerate traffic and rankings with content marketing

One of the most powerful on-page SEO strategies is adding more unique, fresh content to your site.

If you consistently add new pages to your site, you are going to receive more traffic.
In fact, not only can you increase your traffic, you can receive an exponential traffic increase as you publish more content.

This is why blogs, publishing and news-type sites consistently get good results in search engines. More content means more rankings, more visitors, and more sales.

1. Post new content on a regular schedule.
2. Leverage your social media accounts.
3. Link up your site to blog aggregators.

User Behavior Optimization

Get higher-click-through-rates with these 7 techniques.

1. Fill out meta title and meta description tags on your target pages. Unfilled meta tags lead to automatically generated snippets by Google, which generally receive low CTRs. For every page on your site with unfilled meta tags, an SEO technician silently weeps.
2. Make meta tags compelling. Think actionable, descriptive and specific. Sell your page and make it clear why the user should click on your result instead of competing pages.
3. Use numbers and special characters to stand out. Specific numbers naturally attract higher click through rates. And special characters such as pipes, em-dashes and brackets make your rankings more eye catching, gaining more clicks.
4. Use keywords in URLs. URLs with keywords indicate your page is relevant at a quick glance, getting automatic clicks.
5. Use short URLs. Both users and Google like short URLs, and so do I. Case closed.
6. Target featured snippets and rich snippets. Rich results can gain up to 30% more clicks. The rich snippets chapter later in this book details targeting these types of rankings.
7. Improve low performing pages. Look through your Google Search Console keyword report for keywords with low CTRs. Improve the meta tags and URLs on those pages and make them more click worthy.

5 simple techniques for getting users hooked to your content.

1. Increase internal links in your content. Creating relevant internal links within your content encourages users to open up more tabs and browse more pages on your site, 2 to 3 internal links per blog post is enough without becoming annoying.
2. Make your content readable. Use large font sizes, preferably 16px-18px so people don’t need to fetch the magnifying glass to read your content. Use short and simple words. And break your content down into subheadings, numbered lists, short paragraphs and sentences.
3. Use longer word counts. It stands to reason it takes longer for users to read long articles. And according to study by Ahrefs, content with longer word counts naturally attract more links. Nice.
4. Use videos. Video will be 80% of all Internet traffic by 2021 according to a study by Cisco. Simply put, Internet users love video. Every user that watches a video on your page boosts your time-on-site metric in heavenly ways.
5. Use interactive media. Interactive media such as slideshows and online tools are time-tested techniques to boost your time-on-site and user engagement.

If you have a small business, the technical factors mentioned earlier in this chapter are what will make the difference—such as ensuring your site has the right keywords and is accessible for all users.
If you are doing SEO for a large company and need a large amount of traffic, regularly publishing new content and ensuring structural areas of your site are setup correctly are what will make the difference—such as regularly posting new blog posts, ensuring you have sitemaps working correctly, and no duplicate content or 404 errors.
What’s most important is you act. On-page SEO is often the easiest part of SEO. The power is in your hands to fix these areas in your site. Remember small changes can lead to big results.

Anchor text
You can learn a lot by looking at the search engine results ranking in Google, enter high-ranking sites into Link Explorer, and looking at their anchor text. You’ll notice every top-ranking page has natural anchor text.

Social Media & SEO

Not only can you use social media to build social activity to increase your overall SEO strength, you can use social media to regularly create backlinks that are free and easy to build.

As a rule, social media should be a part of every SEO project, or even every marketing project.

You should consider using Facebook for every SEO project.

Facebook advertising stands out as a great way to build up an audience, social activity and referral sales for projects with a budget.

If you have limited resources, focus on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram are secondary options.

Troubleshooting common SEO problems
You can always check your website by Google searching: “site:yoursiteaddress.com”

Use Link Explorer to spy on competitors, find out how many backlinks they have, how much social media activity they have, and set these amounts as your target to build your rankings back up.

Local SEO

Some local customer statistics:

• 97% of search engine users searched online to find a local business.
• 76% of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day.
• 78% of local mobile searches lead to an in-store purchase.

Most important ranking factors for local listings:

1. Google My Business Signals (Proximity to searcher, correct categories, keyword in business title, etc.)
2. Link Signals (Inbound anchor text, linking domain authority, linking domain quantity, etc.)
3. Review Signals (Review quantity, review velocity, review diversity, etc.)
4. On-Page Signals (Presence of NAP, keywords in titles, domain authority, etc.)
5. Citation Signals (NAP consistency, citation volume, etc.)
6. Behavioral Signals (Click-through rate, mobile clicks to call, check-ins, etc.)
7. Personalization.
8. Social Signals (Google engagement, Facebook engagement, Twitter engagement, etc.)

How to target featured snippet rankings

1. Rank on the first page, first. Almost all featured snippets are fetched from rankings on the first page. Follow techniques from the On-Page SEO and Link building chapter and work your way up the results first.
2. Create “snippet bait” targeting 40-50 words. SEMrush did a giant study on rich results and featured snippets, finding almost all text-based rich snippets range between 40 to 50 words.
3. Structure your content to target featured snippets. Hint: putting target keywords as H2 or H3 headings, followed with clear and concise paragraphs around 40-50 words, is a solid approach.
4. Use images. Featured snippets often contain images, I like to call them “snimmages”—for some reason, this terminology never really caught on like I hoped… Using images increases chances for both text and images appearing in the featured snippet. According to Google’s official guidelines, images should be at least 1200 pixels wide. And using multiple high-resolution images with aspect ratios 16×9, 4×3, and 1×1 can help with appearing on different devices

How to target “People also asked” on Google:

1. Your desired ranking must be a question type keyword. Searches not phrased as a question won’t always trigger a “People always ask” snippet, best focus on question type keywords.
2. Your answer should be clear and concise. Well-written and clear answers have a much greater chance of being featured then poorly written answers. Remember the 40-50 words technique from earlier in this chapter.
3. Include a Q&A or how-to section on your site. Increase content in a question and answer format and increase your odds of being featured for question-type searches.
4. Provide more valuable information than a simple and direct answer. If your answer has numbered lists, rich media such as images and videos, and is generally more helpful than an obvious answer to the question, then you have a greater chance of being featured.
5. Add Google’s recommended question-type JSON-LD code to relevant pages… While this won’t guarantee results, it’ll encourage Google to look at your pages and consider them for use in the rich results. Recommended JSON-LD code is listed at each of the following pages.

FAQ – Structured Data, Google Search
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/faqpage
How-to – Structured Data, Google Search
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/how-to
Q&A – Structured Data, Google Search
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/qapag

Research Tools

• KWfinder
• Google Ads Keyword Planner
• Google Trends
• Moz
• SEOQuake
• Ubersuggest
• LSIGraph

Optimization Tools

• Google Page Speed Insights
• Google Snippet Optimization Tool
• Google Search Console
• HTTP Status Code Checker
• Lighthouse
• Robots.txt Analyzer
• Robots.txt Generator
• Schema Creator
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• Test my Site
• Xenu’s Link Sleuth
• XML Sitemaps

Link Building Tools

• Link Clump
• Ahrefs Backlink Checker
• Buzzstream
• Hunter
• Mailshake
• Buzzstream
• Ninja Outreach
• Pitchbox
• Moz – Link Explorer

Web Analytics Tools

• Google Analytics
• Call Rail
• Call Tracking Metrics
• Crazy Egg
• Google Data Studio

Google’s game-changing Mobil-First Index

Mobile-first indexing means Google will predominately use the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking.

Google is now using the mobile version of websites as the first touchpoint in calculating the search index and search results, for both desktop and mobile results.

The mobile version site will be the FIRST touchpoint for calculating BOTH results

• When mobile load times increase from 1s to 10s the probability of users leaving your sites increases by 123%.
• When the number of page elements increases from 400 to 7000-titles, text, images, and so on-conversion probability drops by 95%.

Make sure your page shows high quality content, including related keywords, LSI keywords and natural language on your pages. And perhaps targeting more long-tail keywords.

Some future Google updates to keep in mind:

1. Voice search continues to rise.
2. Video becomes essential for every marketer and business owner.
3. Rich snippets and structured data becomes required knowledge for every SEO professional.
4. The rise of the machine learning algorithms.

PPC with Google Ads

Pay-per-click advertising benefits over SEO:

• Send customers to your site within hours, not the months it sometimes takes for solid SEO results.
• Track results down to the penny, and get very clear insights into the financial performance of your advertising. Simply set up conversion tracking with the instructions provided by Google, or whichever pay-per-click provider you choose.
• Achieve a much larger overall number of customers to your site by running pay-per-click in tandem with your other marketing efforts.
• In most cases, achieve a positive financial return on your marketing spend and keep on selling to these customers in the future.

If you’re selling a common local trade, service, or product online, it’s likely you can receive a profitable return on your advertising spend.

If you're looking to jump into PPC advertising, get started with Google Ads. Move on to the other PPC networks after you have some experience under your belt.

Why Google Ads is the best first choice for a first venture in PPC:

• With Google’s search engine market share at 88.61%, and Bing at 2.72%, you can reach out to the largest potential amount of customers with Google.
• Fast and instant results. Send new customers to your site within a couple of hours.
• Advanced targeting technology. Target users based on where they are located, or what browser or device they are using. Google’s ad targeting technology is among the best in the world.
• Due to the popularity of Google Ads, there’s a wealth of knowledge on running Google Ads campaigns successfully.

Some important questions to ask yourself before you get started:

• What is the objective of the campaign? Sales, web inquiries, sign-ups, or branding?
• What is the maximum monthly budget you can afford?
• What is the maximum cost-per-inquiry, or cost-per-sale you can afford? For example, if you are selling snow jackets at $100,andyourprofitmarginis20$20 on each customer you acquire. Write this figure down and review it later. You may need to first run a small test campaign to determine if pay-per-click is profitable, and the right tool for marketing your business.
• What are the most common characteristics of your customers? For example, if you’re selling late-night pizza delivery in New York, you don’t want to be paying for the lovely folk in Idaho searching for late-night pizza delivery. Write down your customers’ common characteristics, and later in the settings recommendations, if there’s an option to target these customers, I’ll tell you how to target them.

Main keyword match types:

• phrase match keywords
• exact match keywrods
• broad match modified keywords
• negative keywords

Text ads are made up of the following components:

1. Headline. Your headline has a maximum of 25 characters. With your headline, you should include the keyword the user is searching for or capture the user’s curiosity.
2. Description lines. You have two description lines at a maximum of 35 characters each. Your description lines should make it crystal clear what you are selling, the benefits of clicking through to your site and a call-to-action.
3. Display URL. You have 35 characters for a custom URL that will be displayed to users in the search results. Display URLs are great as you can actually display a different URL to the users than the URL of the page they will arrive on. You can take advantage of this to encourage more users to arrive on your site.

Examples of some successful winning ads:
Logo Design ® SALE $49www.logodesignguarantee.com/Logo-USA100100InjuredinanAccident?www.1800needhelp.com/YouMayBeEntitledto$10,000 +
Free Case Evaluation. 24/7 Call Us
Flowers Online – $19.99
www.fromyouflowers.com/
Delivered Today Beautiful & Fresh!
“Best Value Flowers” – CBS News
In each of the above, we can see some similarities. Each ad has:

• An interesting headline. Each ad captures the curiosity of the user, through use of special characters, asking a question or posting a competitive offer right in the headline.
• Clear benefits. Each ad has a compelling offer in addition to the core product or service being sold, making the ad stand out from the search results, such as a no-risk, money-back guarantee, same-day delivery, or a free evaluation.
• A clear call-to-action. The first two ads make it clear what the next step should be. In the third ad, the call-to-action is not explicit, but it is obvious. By having “Online – $19.99” in the headline, and “Delivered Today”, it is clear the user can order flowers online to be delivered the same-day.

Google awards an advantage to advertisers showing ads with high quality and high relevancy. This is Google’s Quality Score technology. Ads with a higher number of clicks and relevancy are awarded with a higher Quality Score, and subsequently receive increased ad positions and cheaper prices!
Keep this in mind when writing ads and choosing your keywords. Your ads should be relevant to achieve the highest Quality Score possible, so you can receive the cheapest cost-per-click.

The single most important factor to ensure your campaign is successful is to fill out all of the settings when you set up your campaign.