SEO Belfast

Exact Match Domains

Do Exact Match domains still carry any ranking value in 2015?

I think it’s too simple to say keywords in domains no longer hold value.

I certainly still think they do, they certainly do in folder names and file path, absolutely no doubt about that.

I also still see plenty of keyword rich domains that rank highly, and the keywords are a contributing factor.

Having said that, the relevancy of a keyword domain has to go hand in hand with other authority and trust signals. By itself a keyword domain will struggle, unless it’s in a very weak market.

PPC Strategy

There’s plenty of discussion on how to run a keyword strategy. Should you just run broad match modifier, exact match or lump in broad match keywords with broad match modifiers & exact matches all in the one adgroup.

One strategy that I like, is to start with a broad match adgroup, and an exact match and broad match modifier adgroup for similar terms and then keep on checking the search term report of the broad match adgroup and picking the keywords that convert and adding them to the EM & BMM keywords.

This helps having different bidding strategies, getting more granular with your keywords and gives you more control over what you’d expect to be your best converters. If you’ve got alot of adgroups then this might be too time consuming & difficult too implement, but it would be worth trying for your top adgroups.

Bing Autotagging

Someone asked me recently how to track conversions in Bing Ads. Here’s how – if you’re running Bing Ads make sure to turn on autotagging. It’s not set by default.

The auto tagging feature within Bing will automatically tag the following parameters:

source
medium
campaign

And it’ll make tracking Goal conversions in Analytics alot easier.

Conversion Tips

Sometimes when building a website you can over complicate a system. One site I was involved in building had a fairly simple sign up form and login, removing this feature smashed the conversion rate. At the time the sign up form seemed like a good idea, in hindsight it wasn’t, lesson learnt.

Another thing that helped decrease bounce rates dramatically and almost double conversion rates was creating a video explainer and adding this to the homepage. This can be done relatively inexpensively, though the video should be thought out meticulously. This was split tested with Google Experiments before it was implemented.

All in One SEO Plugin or WordPress SEO?

Which Plugin is better? I started off using the All in One SEO plugin, though since I tested Yoast’s WordPress SEO I now use that. The All in One SEO plugin is a great plugin, and does all the basics such as page titles, meta descriptions, though with the WordPress SEO there’s a bit more functionality. I can set a 301 redirect on a page that has been deleted which I’ve had to do quite alot. As far as I’m aware the All In One doesn’t support this. You can read more about the differences here.

Google Support

Used to be a time that Google Support was non-existent. Support has improved greatly over the years, not just with tools such as Google Webmaster Tools that provides manual action notification and more visibility, but also phone support for Google Adwords and Google Analytics. It’s worth listening to the support teams rather than dismissing them as solely interested in getting you to spend more.