I find something utterly enjoyable about scary movies. I’m not sure if it’s the ominous score or the scenes that make you jump. But BCI Media Services knows the last thing anyone needs is a digital marketing campaign with a dark side. Spooky stories may be great around the campfire, but when scary things happen with your digital marketing it can lead to a tale of horror too chilling to imagine. In honor of the season, our team wanted to share some nightmare scenarios, and teach you how to avoid them.
When PPC and Google Ads go Eerily Wrong
PPC stands for pay-per-click, a form of digital marketing where businesses pay a fee each time their ad is clicked. One of the most common forms of PPC is search engine advertising. Advertisers bid for ad placement via search engines sponsored links when someone searches specific keywords related to a business’ offerings. PPC advertising can be highly effective at driving traffic, but it can also go horribly wrong. If Google Ads, the most popular ad platform, was improperly set up, or is being managed by someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, disaster can happen.
- Once upon a time, there was a business that sold very fine and lovely high-end art. One day they decided, as many companies do, that PPC advertising was right for them. They set up the campaign with all the right keywords and targeted the audience wisely. Then the art company set a budget and waited expectantly for the customers to line up. But when they set up their Google AdWords account they didn’t know that apps were not excluded from the campaign. That meant the carefully crafted ads were being shown on apps such as Fruit Ninja and WeatherBug. Fruit Ninja is a fun game, but alas, its target audience isn’t usually in the market for high-end art. Players of video games were clicking on the company’s ads and bouncing right back out of them. Worse, that high-end art company paid for every single one of those clicks and their budget was wasted on useless traffic. It was a frightening situation that was detrimental to profit. Don’t let this tale of woe afflict your business. Be sure your PPC campaigns are served to the right audience by hiring the professionals at BCI Media Services to handle your next PPC campaign.
The Horrors of SEO
SEO can be terrifying and overwhelming in and of itself. To improve website ranking in search results, there are many practices that must be observed. To make things more complicated, Google periodically updates “the rules” making it hard to know what best practices to follow. A lot of simple steps can be taken to improve your website SEO like using keywords in the content. However, there are some pieces of technical SEO that take more than a little expertise to implement.
- Long ago a little company built a great big website. It had pages for everything and each page had quality content. The images were alt tagged, metadata keywords loaded and the URLs were properly formatted. They checked off every box in the SEO checklist and felt certain their site would reign supreme. But, something was wrong, no traffic came. They had built a beautiful site, what could have gone wrong? It’s vital to ensure that search engines can crawl website pages so they must be indexable. If your pages can’t be indexed, your site won’t be found. The scariest part? It only takes one word: “disallow: /” That simple word is among the most terrifying SEO errors. When the Google’s bots read “disallow: /” they ‘disallow’ the whole website. As long as this small string of text is visible in your robots.txt file, nobody will find your website in search results. It’s easy to make a mistake on your website that can cause long term SEO damage. It’s also easy to hire professionals like the team at BCI Media Services to repair these mistakes, or better yet, prevent them. We’re here to help you avoid nightmare SEO situations.
Avoid these Digital Marketing Halloween Horrors
Now that you know about these tales of terror, make sure that your business never falls victim to them. When in doubt, it’s always worth talking with an expert who can help you avoid terrifying mishaps. BCI Media Services specializes in SEO, PPC, digital marketing, content creation, web development and video production. When you work with us you’ll find treats not tricks! From the team at BCI Media Services, we wish you a safe and happy Halloween. After the decorations come down and the candy is gone, keep these stories in mind to avoid becoming next year’s marketing horror story.