After working in pay per click advertising for the last 6 years I have taken it for granted that clients don’t ask for my qualifications. I can only assume that this has been due to their lack of knowledge. The more savvy clients now want to see all your degrees, trophies and medals!

Now I have met a lot of professionals from the industry over the past few years and I would say almost every single person I have come across has a degree.

I don’t.

I have worked with a small set of clients for the last 6 years. I have helped grow their small businesses into a multi million pound national companies spending huge amounts on their pay per click. Until recently joining LinkedIn I had never been asked about my qualifications for what I do?

I began to question if I was missing a huge marketing channel or revenue stream for my clients due to my lack of knowledge or gaps in my knowledge.

In order to ensure that clients can not only rely on my word that I can do the work for them, I have took a vow at the start of August to get all the pieces of paper needed to appease perspective clients.

Since August I have passed the Google AdWords Fundamentals and Advanced Search exams. I have started the Google Advanced Display exam and the Bing certified professional programs and plan to pass these two before the end of September. If I am honest, I started both the training programs for the AdWords exams, got bored and just took the exams, 90% on the first an 84% on the second one.

I should also mention that I start the all new super duper Squared Online course tomorrow!

I am little apprehensive about starting the Squared course, I appear to be 20 years older than most of the other students on the course (and some tutors) and no doubt they all have degrees!

I already made a massive mistake by answering questions before watching the video, not a great start

I will be posting regularly about my time becoming a Square and hopefully put an old geezer’s perspective on a new learning qualification.

My Education and experience so far!

I have to be honest now, I have no fancy degree, I left school as fast as I could before taking my exams. I was set to take 9 ‘O’ levels and a CSE in Social Science, I just couldn’t wait to get out there, get a job and earn some money.

My working life has seen me doing all kinds of work. I did steelwork fabrication & erection for a few years working for my uncle. I then worked as a telephone engineer for a year and then ended up working for a national retailer, Magnet & Southerns (Magnet now). After a few years of working my way up the management ladder I was head hunted out by Howdens Joinery to help them start their new business. I helped grow the business before leaving to pursue my realised passion.

I had always excelled with computers, at school writing a burglar alarm program on the schools BBC computer, the sensors for the alarm being my technology project. Fixing, learning, anything to do with computers I have been told I have a natural talent when it comes to IT.

I started work at CAPITA and less than a year later started working as an IT contractor for a London Borough. I began work there full time as assistant IT manager, again after a year I made it to IT manager. Responsible for teh support and delivery of IT to 2,500 students and staff across several sites.

I learn anything IT related very quickly and seem to have a second sense when it comes to problem solving. My expertise and insight into emerging technologies helped to create a state of the art learning environment with provision for interactive whiteboards before they were readily accepted as a teaching aid.

We also changed the face of the learning environment with a revolutionary interactive desktop design, this helped to bring schools and students closer to a Virtual Learning Environment when there were none available on the market.

I finally left after 9 years when PFI contracts came as part of the BSF (Building Schools for the Future) program.

Digital Marketing

Since leaving local government I have worked on pay per click advertising. My IT skills are also called upon when trying to find technological solutions to the clients everyday problems. As the clients companies have grown I have worked in a much wider capacity. Some of the roles I carry out for them include:

• Brochure design working with developers, pagination, layout, reporting
• Paper advertising design, pagination, layout, reporting
• Email marketing design working with developers, pagination, layout, reporting
• eBay, store design working with developers, business strategy and continued growth
• Social network presence and marketing
• Brand awareness
• CRM system design and implementation
• Analytics and strategy
• IT strategy
• Project management
• eCommerce design and implementation working with developers

The above list is far from exhaustive, for every campaign we send I spend hours looking at internal and external data from Google analytics, client phone system call logs, client CRM system reports and any other source of information relevant to the product, market and client to help the next campaign even better. My work with clients is commission based so my pay reflects their earnings and company growth.

I am passionate about tech, emerging tech and anything electricity flows through. Sad as I am I get a kick out of getting more sales for less money, higher click throughs, more likes, retweets, I love proving that we can and must improve our marketing to keep ahead of the competition.

I am hoping to learn a lot and hopefully reinforce all I have taught myself the past 6 years on the Squared Online course.

The post What is Qualified? appeared first on Fish 4 Sales.

Optimised landing pages are a core part of a Pay Per Click campaign. With Google paying even closer attention not only to the quality of your landing page but also the speed at which it loads a lot is riding on the quality of your landing pages. The quality of your landing page is one of the factors Google uses to decide how much you are going to pay for a click on your ad.

If your page load time is too slow you pay more for your AdWords clicks, poor layout and use of elements like H tags, alt image tags and of course the copy used on your landing pages will also affect the cost you pay. Google needs to ensure the landing page your ad leads to gives its users search query the most relevant information possible, the less relevant the landing page the more you pay.

Of course there are many others factors in play when an Internet user types a search query which matches one of the keywords in your ad groups. The quality score of your ad and keywords are but a few others to mention. The end result is how much you pay for your clicks, the lower the cost the further your budget will stretch.

OK, so onto Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. Working with clients it seems many business owners consider SEO as a waste of money, a dark art where they pay someone for something they aren’t too sure about and can’t see a direct benefit to their business. I have worked with clients who started down the route of combined PPC and SEO campaign only to drop the SEO after a 6 months as they saw no value of the work being done.

Whats the difference between PPC and SEO?

So we are clear, PPC or Pay Per Click like it says in the title, you pay for each click your ad receives.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is getting your website listed high on Google’s organic search results, also know as Search Engine Results Page (SERP). I would describe the Organic search results as free but if you are paying to have SEO work done to your website it isn’t really.

SEO is a careful balance of linking other authoritative and most importantly relevant website content to your web page. The link building is known as ‘off page optimisation’, ‘on page optimsation’ is covered in part by the list below. A careful balance of keywords, placement and how they are used within the page content.

The landing page on your website needs to contain your most important keywords in the following parts of the page:

• URL
• Title
• H tags
• Good copy
• alt image tags
• META description

The above list is not exhaustive, there are lots of other important elements which affect your page rank in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) placement.

So, you are asking yourself what is the connection between PPC and SEO then?

In my opinion they both interact with each other, this interaction is however only a one way street. The SEO efforts to a landing page on your website will have a positive effect on your PPC campaigns. Having a great AdWords account with wonderfully written ad copy and a mix if strong short and long tail keywords isn’t going to help your website rise through the organic search results page and get you on page 1.

On the plus side, your SEO efforts if done properly should see your CPC (Cost Per Click) costs reduced for your campaigns using landing pages that have had SEO work done to them.

Going back to clients that dropped the SEO and kept going with their PPC campaigns. We gradually started to see CPC costs rise. Why you ask? Relevance.

The relevancy of your landing page is what Google is interested in. The more relevant the page content is, the more likely the same Internet users will return next time they are looking for something online.

Another factor affecting SEO is the age of the content, Google is also looking for fresh content that is being updated regularly. The thinking behind this is that if a page has been updated it is likely that the content is more relevant thant an older page with similar content.

After all, Google’s business is search.

If you have applied the SEO correctly you should see an improvement in your organic results. SEO is a slow business and the results can take 6 months for your site to be seen on page 1 of search results for your keyword. Amongst other things the results of the SEO work depends on the number of other pages optimised for the same keywords your webpage on the Internet.

The quality score of your landing page for AdWords should also improve. If you have optimised your landing page for the same words you have in your AdWords campaigns your landing page is now more relevant to the search query in your ad group activating your ad. The result of the better quality landing page, a dozen tightly themed keywords with a couple of nice ads should result in a lower CPC.

Google rewards you for a tightly themed campaign, with relevant ad groups containing both long and short tail keywords and some engaging ad copy with call to action. When Google calculates how much it will cost and whose ad gets the top spot in the results for a users search query your landing page should tip the scales and get you a cheaper CPC bid.

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