One of my top frequented sites as a digital marketing specialist is Success Works. The site is full of great articles and great resources. Success Works has been live for 13 years now and focuses on SEO content and development. Since SEO is critical for all industries there is a vast array of websites and blogs out there, but I’ve always been drawn back to Success Works.

Our CEO, Susan O’Neil was recently asked to be a guest blogger for them on SEO copywriting and disruptive innovation. Take a look…

If you’re a PPC Manager you’re well aware of the Google AdWords Policy, and when you see the dreaded “disapproved ad” you think you’ll easily diagnose the issue.

But, sometimes you can still learn something new.  For example, did you know your ad could be disapproved if you have images on your destination URL that are not hosted on your server? This happened to one of my client’s accounts recently and it took a bit of trying to figure out why the ads were disapproved. It turns out that some of images on the destination URL were hosted elsewhere. While this may not seem to make a lot of sense, it’s what Google wants so be aware of it.

If you run into this issue you’ll have to work with your web developer to get all your images on your own server.

Our CEO, Susan O’Neil, was honored recently in the Success Works blog of Heather Lloyd Martin, noted Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultant and writer, as one of ten women who pioneered SEO and still lead the industry forward.  According to the post: “These smart females were in the trenches back at the beginning and deserve to be celebrated. They have unselfishly led discussion lists, built resources, and helped set best practices.”

And now that SEO is making a resurgence as an indisputably critical marketing resource, it’s an appropriate time to note the innovative work that has helped bring us all into this
industry.

Thanks to Heather and Laura Crest of Success Works for this recognition of the work of my colleague, Susan.

Google continues its period of constant activity with yet another update related to the first one named “Panda” that we witnessed in February, 2011. During that update, and many that followed, Google has targeted sites considered to have thin content and to be overall poor quality sites. With 14 updates since the first including the latest released March 23^rd, Google continues to shake up its results in an effort to improve the quality of the sites it serves up in response to searchers’ requests. While this time around only 1.6% of queries will reportedly be affected, based on the non-stop nature of these changes it will be a short time before yet another update rolls out.  This makes it even more critical that your SEO efforts address the entirety of your website’s content and user experience if you are to continue placing well on Google.

Bing recently announced two changes to its system’s handling of negative keywords.

The first is good news: advertisers can now use exact match keywords to better control their ad service. This can help ensure you limit ads from serving to specific irrelevant phrases, and it also can be used to tightly control which ad serves when more than one ad is eligible.  We welcome this advance in campaign refinement capabilities from Bing.

The second will affect far fewer advertisers: the end of keyword level negatives. While keyword-level negatives are not often used by advertisers, it offers a moment to refresh our understanding of how Bing uses negatives at different account levels.  Negatives can be assigned at the Campaign and Ad Group level. If you assign the negative “free” to a campaign, and then the negative “custom” to an ad group, Bing will only utilize the ad group assigned negative term “custom”. Bing replaces the campaign level negative with the ad group level. Confusing, and if not understood it is possible to essentially disable all your negatives by assigning one at a lower level. If you have 25 negatives assigned to a campaign and then add one negative to an ad group, Bing will disregard all 25 and replace it with just the one for the ad group.