LionShark Digital Marketing Blog

9 Things You’ve Never Thought to Include in Your PPC Ads

8/22/2018

PPC ads and keywords are the essence of a paid search account. Without persuasive ads and comprehensive keywords, PPC efforts are doomed to fail. But as paid search has become more competitive, it’s gotten harder to create ads that stand out. The old tricks of including keywords and dynamic keyword insertion in ad text have begun to feel passé, and simply sprinkling in juicy offers and promotional coupon codes won’t cut it anymore either.

These out-of-the-box suggestions will get your ads noticed, attracting better targeted traffic and increasing conversion rates:

7 Ways to Make Your Content Longer Without Sacrificing Quality

8/8/2018

Anyone responsible for creating content has come across a situation where they’ve been asked to make content longer. Typically, this is in response to perceived audience demand for longer form content like whitepapers, case studies, and professional articles. Novice content marketers and copywriters will just “un-edit” their content – going through it to look for opportunities to elaborate on existing information or needlessly sprinkle in more text. However, simply increasing the word count doesn’t do anything to enrich content and may even backfire by discouraging readers.

So, how do you increase content length without sacrificing quality?

How to Write Above Your Pay Grade

7/25/2018

As a professional ghostwriter, I am often recruited to write well above my pay grade. Writing on behalf of executives for their peers can be a daunting task. C-suite executives are respected professionals and before they will put their name on anything, they need to feel confident that it is going to be professionally written and well-received. Ghostwriting for executives demands an understanding of the subject matter and the target audience to create the kind of content that adds value to the conversation.

How to Identify Your Top Keywords (and Make More Money Off Them)

7/10/2018

As with any other marketing effort, PPC success requires homing in on your most successful tactics and exploiting them to increase revenue. The key to your PPC is efforts is the right keyword selection. Using keywords that are too generic will drive up advertising costs while using keywords that are too long-tail will result in minimal exposure. The sweet spot is finding the right balance between the two. But even within that sweet spot you’ll still have keywords that are unprofitable.

Using these three steps will help you identify the best keywords to maximize revenue:

Fueling Your SEO Efforts with PPC Data

6/21/2018

It’s a well-known fact that doing SEO and PPC simultaneously can bolster both efforts.

While SEO works to increase relevancy in the eyes of search engines, boosting your organic ranking over time, PPC provides immediate visibility to increase traffic. These complementary strategies provide short-term and long-term benefits as well as increased competitiveness throughout the lifecycle of the business. In fact, studies have shown that focused SEO efforts continue to increase traffic long after they’ve been implemented, which is why SEO is such a lucrative investment.

But if you’re just counting on merely running PPC to diversify your overall online marketing strategy, you’re squandering a valuable opportunity. You can (and should) use your PPC data to improve your SEO efforts. The result will be a more informed organic search approach that’s poised to succeed.

Your SEO efforts need this cross-over PPC data:

Preparing Your PPC Account for Summer Vacation

6/5/2018

As a small business owner, the idea of taking a vacation is an alluring, albeit scary, proposition. You want to get away occasionally to reward yourself for your hard work, but you worry about everything that could go wrong while you’re away. The smaller your company is, the more anxiety you probably have because there just aren’t enough employees to cover everything you do in a typical day.

If you’re trying to take some time away from the office, these tips will help you to prepare your PPC account so that you can leave it unattended:

The Ultimate PPC Spring Cleaning Checklist

5/2/2018

Spring is here, which means the season of cleaning is underway. While most people are cleaning out their homes, desks, and cars, shrewd marketers know that this post-holiday lull is the perfect time to clean out their PPC accounts as well.

PPC accounts that are utilizing old keywords and ads are not only less likely to engage searchers and convert, they can also generate significant budget waste. Furthermore, accounts that haven’t been updated in some time can portray your business negatively, doing substantial brand damage. Avoid these perils by cleaning out your account using this actionable checklist:

Knowing What to Measure – Selecting the Right KPIs for PPC

4/17/2018

Most of the business owners and marketers we work with have a general sense of how their PPC efforts are doing, but few truly have an accurate understanding of how they’re performing. Whether you’re new to running PPC or have been investing in PPC for a while, understanding which key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor can be tricky. While KPIs can certainly vary by industry and even by company, some KPIs will always be important.

Why Quality Content Will Always Be Golden

3/6/2018

In its 20+ year history, SEO has taken on a variety of forms – both good and bad. While black hat SEO has utilized unscrupulous tactics to try to trick the search engines into acquiring search relevance, white hat SEO has been used to honestly gain exposure for high-quality content. And somewhere in the middle is the average marketer who has noble intentions but may also be prone to chasing the latest rumors and fads to get a leg up on the competition, sometimes helping and sometimes hurting their cause.

But amidst it all, the importance of quality content has always reigned supreme!

High-quality content will always be golden because it appeals to real people and factors heavily into search engine algorithms.

Conducting Competitive Research Like the Pros

2/22/2018

Every business should do competitive research regularly.

Peeking into your competitors’ tactics and operations provides the direction that businesses need to ensure that they’re not only keeping up with the industry, but also setting themselves apart. Analyzing what your competitors are doing provides ideas for how to improve your own offerings and processes. It also helps identify market positioning and uncover industry trends as they’re emerging.

That doesn’t mean being nefarious or inappropriate. It just means paying attention to the public information available about how your competitors are attracting traffic, nurturing leads, and maintaining customers.

Companies of all sizes invest time and money into competitive research, but big businesses typically have the capacity to do it more frequently and more thoroughly than small businesses. Take a lesson from their playbooks and use these 8 tips to research your competitors:

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