In honor of college football’s return, here are the position-by-position starters if Internet marketing strategies made up a football team:

Head Coach – Analytics and A/B Testing

The head coach analyzes everything and makes changes to improve. Analytics and testing gives you the stats, tells you what is working, where people are coming from, how long they’ve been on the site, what is bringing traffic and what converts best. Through analytics and testing, you can tweak strategies to be more successful.

Assistant Coach – Competitive Analysis

The assistant coach often scouts out the competition to know how to beat the bad guys. A detailed competitive analysis will reveal the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors so you can know how and where to strike.

Offensive Starters – Building the Brand, Getting Exposure and Outbound Marketing

Quarterback – SEO

Arguably, the quarterback position is the most important position on the field. Top quarterbacks win games despite weaknesses in other areas of the team. If you get top rankings for the right keywords, you will get more website traffic and sales. All-Pro SEO services will almost instantly make you a major player in your industry. Quarterbacks are also the face of a team. Similarly, organic natural results act as the face of your company

Running Back – Conversion Optimization

There are crucial times in any football game where a team needs 1 yard for a first down or a few inches to score a touchdown. A dependable running back will get that extra yardage almost every time. Conversion optimization plays that role for your website. Once you get that extra website traffic, you need dependable website conversion principles to take that visitor into the end zone.

Fullback – Web Design

Fullbacks are often the lead blocker that clears the way for the running back to get that extra yard. Good SEO Web design clears the way for everything else to work right.

Wide Receiver — Social Media Marketing

Fast wide receivers can change the game with one quick-striking score. Good social media marketing using viral video, infographics, blog posts, etc., can quickly send a lot of traffic and create a ton of exposure in a short period of time. Social media can be a game changer just like a flashy wide receiver that blows past the defense.

Tight End – Online Public Relations

Tight ends are instrumental in blocking for the quarterback and running backs. But they also consistently score touchdowns and get first downs in tight situations. Tight ends are critical in clutch moments whether it’s a run or pass play. Online public relations have the same dependability. Online PR doesn’t always results in a home run, but it does consistently bring good traffic quality links. And sometimes online PR scores a touchdown by getting the attention of big blogs and publications. Online PR is the go-to weapon in tight situations when you need good links, and more traffic and exposure.

Offensive Line – Keyword Research

The offensive line is the foundation of every football team. They give the quarterback time to throw and open holes for the running backs. Games are won and lost in the trenches, and they are similar won and lost with the right or wrong keyword research. Every search strategy revolves around picking the right keywords to target. Targeting the right keywords will make you a lot of money. The wrong keywords will keep you guessing and will lose you money.

Defensive Starters, Protecting Your Online Brand

Defensive Line – Reputation Management

The defensive line is the literally first line of defense. Any offense will roll over a team with a pansy D-line. For online marketing, this is similar to reputation management. It’s the foundation to defending your brand online.

Line Backer – Link Building

I chose this mostly because linebackers and link building have the same abbreviation: LB. So, you can come up with your own analogy on this one.

Corner Back – Social Media Profiles

Corner backs protect the pass and are sometimes the secret weapon on a corner blitz to reach the quarterback. I compare this to social media profiles. An active profile that provides valuable information and brings in fans, is a big part of protecting your brand and company. Social profiles are usually found high in the search engines for a company’s name. Plus, social media is all the buzz right now. In the sports world, corner backs are usually the guys with all the hype.

Safety – PPC

The Safety position is self-explanatory. The Safety has a lot of roles, but is there to basically defend wherever things break down. That’s what PPC is for. A good mix of PPC with your SEO will make sure you get the right exposure and traffic while you work on getting your SEO rankings where you want them.

Kicker/Punter – Local Search and Maps Optimization

A good kicker can nail a field goal in clutch situations or pin a team near the end zone on a good punt. Local Internet marketing places your website in the right spot for local shoppers to find your business and buy your products.

A fool and his money are soon parted. This old time Idiom has never been truer especially when it comes to poor PPC management.

1) Website not clearly defined

All the traffic in the world can’t overcome a poorly defined website. Sites that are confusing with poor navigation will lead to poor website conversion rates. Remember, that finding the winning PPC recipe takes time and effort. If possible, test different versions of your site. Sometimes a landing page will work better than a 50-page website. Regardless, be sure to synchronize your keywords, ads, and site. PPC is a science of relevancy. Matching keywords, ads, and pages improves user experience. On the other hand, failure to do this will have a negative impact on conversion rates and quality scores.

2) Failure to implement AdWords tracking and Google Analytics.

With PPC virtually every metric is measurable. Without tracking, how do you know which page, keyword, or ad is working and what’s not working? Don’t do anything with PPC unless you can track it.

3) Sending traffic to broken pages

Sending traffic to broken pages only results in wasted money. Be sure when pages are deleted the corresponding PPC elements are also taken offline. PPC accounts should always mirror the website.

4) Not evaluating the competition

Frequent competitive reviews will help keep your pulse on the competition. Using your core keywords, you can easily study your competitors messaging and website in just a few clicks. From this info you can counter and find a hook that will differentiate your company from the competition.

Keep in mind you won’t really know what is working until you test it yourself. Be sure to also study your competitor’s ad text. At any time you might be competing with 9 other advertisers on the search network. Make sure you are always testing more than 1 ad at a time with a strong call to action. You should also rotate your ads evenly. You can then determine the best messaging based upon CTR and conversion rate.

5) Allowing campaigns to run on auto pilot

You might remember that old infomercial with the catchy tag line “Set it and forget it”? PPC is not a set it and forget it. If you have this mentality you might as well throw your money into the Fire Place. I recommend evaluating your PPC campaigns every day. This will help keep your finger on the pulse of your PPC campaigns. Many PPC managers don’t review data often enough. Failure to check in on a regular basis can result in lost revenue.

The bottom line is, don’t take shortcuts when setting up your PPC account. Setting up PPC accounts the right way takes a lot of research and time. However, the amount of money you will save in the long run will make the time you spent worth it. Stop donating wasted dollars to the Search Engine Slush Fund.

Related Posts:

• ‘I Want My $2!’ — The Power of SEO with Conversion
• 7 Ways to Use Keyword Analytics to Your Advantage
• 3 Ways to Increase Sales in Google Adwords
• When Can I Stop My SEO Campaign?
• Keyword Research Gems From PubCon

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For those who don’t know, ad extensions are features that can be added to your AdWords ads. Some of these include Ad Sitelinks, Product Extensions, Video Extensions, Location Extensions, and Click to Call Phone Extensions.

Upon logging in to AdWords, you will probably not see this tab unless you have enabled ad extensions in at least one of your active campaigns. When clicking on the tab, you will be able to see the stats for any of your campaign ad extensions. You can also decide which data you want to see. You can see everything or filter out deleted ad extensions, or just filter the results by extension type.

Here is a screenshot right from the AdWords blog:

Being in a relationship can be tough. If you use Google Adwords it might feel like you’re dating Adwords, and not in a good way.

Imagine dating a person who remembers all your faults, who places a lot of weight on the first impression and then equally as much weight to every subsequent experience. That can create an uphill battle before you.

Sounds bad right? Too bad there’s more. Communication is generally poor and infrequent. If you have a problem, you can’t really talk to this person directly. To find out where you stand in the relationship you have to turn to, what would be, no better than their MySpace friends who may or may not be in contact with the party in question or even be “in the know.”

One little thing can cause this fragile relationship to fly off the handle, considering the near-ridiculous standards to which you are being held. Oh, and you can’t make plans without running them by your significant other … and it’s safe to say you’ll get shut down a lot if your suggestions are “questionable.”

There will come a lot of days where you feel like you’ve had enough and you can do better. You don’t deserve this type of relationship right? If you decide to pull the plug then beware! Your nights, weekends, and even the days become very empty because there are only 2 other dating possibilities…and they’re both worse. In short, you can’t do any better even if you think you deserve it.

This is the relationship that every Adwords user has with Google. It’s a fickle one-sided relationship where the user is always in the dark about their account. The only ways to get answers about the status of your campaigns are with Google Adwords representatives who can be difficult to contact. If you are able to reach one, getting more than just a canned response from them is a near-impossible feat.

Unless you are a major retailer, or have a world-renowned brand name, your only other options for paid search marketing are the offerings from Yahoo and Bing. While both can be utilized profitably by some businesses, there are a lot of pitfalls for even experienced users. Additionally, there are generally fewer opportunities for relevant traffic.

So, we’re left with Google. It can be a very profitable arm of your marketing campaigns if executed correctly. There are volumes written about how to do it right and thousands of instances how to do it wrong. Flying solo might be the easiest way to get yourself into a bad situation since managing a PPC campaign can be a time-consuming practice. Hiring a professional PPC Company is an efficient way to manage your time and maintain a successful Adwords campaign.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is arguably the most important element of your Adwords account in relation to costs and Quality Score (as outlined here, here, and here). If you can achieve a high CTR, your Quality Score improves, your Costs per Click (CPC) decrease and your overall Return on Investment improves.  Sounds awesome right? The trick there is improving your Quality Score, which all ties back to having a high CTR. It’s quite the conundrum.

There is a lot that can be done to improve CTR. One of the most important aspects is to make sure that your keywords and ads are nearly mirror images of one another. This means that if you’re bidding on keywords like “Bay Area landscaping” your ad headline should say something like “Bay Area Landscaping.”

What about a phrase like “Bay Area lawn mowing?” Is that close enough to be in the same ad group as the landscaping keywords? Don’t even think about it. They’re related but not nearly close enough to group together. It should go in its own ad group.

Make your goal for each ad group to have less than 20 keywords to start. If an ad group appears to be growing to more keywords than 20, look for ways to separate the keywords into individual ad groups. If you write ads to be representative of the keywords in each ad group (NOT a generic ad for the entire account/campaign) I would be shocked if you didn’t have a good Click-Through Rate.

If you’re going to do PPC then do it right. This begins with research about your costs per click for whatever you’re advertising. While the resources are limited and can be somewhat inaccurate for determining costs per click (See Google Keyword Tool) it can give you estimates.

When you’re ready to set your campaigns live, don’t be afraid to overbid. If you set your bids high it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have to pay that much per click. However, it sets the stage for your account because by those bids you make your first impression with Google … and Google doesn’t forget any of your errors or screw-ups. They are forever etched in your account’s history, which you cannot see or change.

It’s important to start out your campaigns with a high CTR. That is the first thing recorded in the history of your account. Relevant keywords and ads show Google that you’ve done your research and you are truly trying to provide a valuable product/service to those searching for it.

Conversely, if you start off without keyword research and underbid you’ll ultimately see a low CTR in your account.  As a result, you battle uphill to get your account to where it could have been had it started on the right foot.

After your account has been live, be mindful of adding very broad keywords to your campaign because they typically see a low CTR and can drag the account down. For example, if you sell baseball training videos, adding the keyword “baseball” to an ad group will cost you … literally and figuratively.

Someone searching for “baseball” could be looking for a hundred different things: rules, player bios, stats, team schedules, etc. More importantly, they are probably not in a position to buy anything. If they come to your site, they will almost certainly browse and leave. You pay for it though, not just the click cost, but also from your account’s declining Quality Score. It’s not worth it.

This brand new mobile interface is only available on Android, iPhone, and Palm Pre devices. For Blackberry users, I guess we will just have to wait. For some reason Google didn’t get the memo that 40% of smartphone users are running a Blackberry OS.

Now, when users log into their AdWords account from one these devices, they will automatically be directed to the AdWords for mobile interface. Unfortunately, this is only available for accounts that are being managed in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Australian English.

For more information, you can watch the video released by Google below: