TJ44 – Search and Social Fusion: How WordStream Generate 650,000 Visits Per Month Using Paid and Earned Media ~ Larry Kim

Hi welcome back listener! This is Traffic Jam episode #44, I am your host James Reynolds and you of course are tuned in to the podcast show that teaches you how to build and grow a profitable audience online.

A quick shout out at the top of the show to Viveka Von Rosen who was our guest here on episode #38 of Traffic Jam talking all about LinkedIn Marketing. Viveka made some really nice comments during the week about how much she has been enjoying the show as a subscriber so I want to thank you for that Viveka. But also mention her because her content which she spoke about at episode #38 is a very nice precursor to some of the content that we talk about with today’s guest.

So let me introduce him, he’s Larry Kim, and he’s the founder of Word Stream, a technology and services company that helps you get the most from your paid search marketing. Larry really is one of the pre-eminent authorities on paid search. He blogs on pretty much all of the big search engine blogs Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Journal and Moz among others. He’s also been named the leading expert in paid search both in 2013 and 2014 by PPC Heroes so he really knows his stuff on paid search and it would therefore be stupid of us not to really dig dip on that topic in today’s show. But we don’t stop there, we also go deep on content marketing, SEO and social media so we cover a whole bunch of topics on today’s episode. Before we get to that, I want to tell you about some special bonuses I have put together for today’s episode which you can get by going to TrafficJamCast.com/44 where I put together the MP3 as a downloadable file for you, a full transcript of today’s show, plus my very own notes from this episode put together in mind map format so head to the URL TrafficJamCast.com/44, grab yourself the download and then sit back and enjoy today’s episode.

James: So welcome back listener this is episode#44 of Traffic Jam and joining me today is Larry Kim from Word Stream. Larry, how are you?

Larry: Doing great! How are you James? Thanks for having me.

James: Absolutely awesome to have you on the call. Now, right as we speak I am actually browsing around WordStream.com and I read that your company’s purpose, really exactly as stated, is to bring the power of search marketing to businesses of all sizes. So first question, should all businesses engage in paid search? And if so, how?

Larry: I think so. I am not saying that you have to allocate 50% of your budget to paid search but at the very minimum I think that any company doing web marketing must have at least a component of their marketing budget being allocated to paid search aimed to discovering the keywords that are exactly relevant to the business that you are operating.

James: So what are some of the aspects of doing paid search effectively? Because this is really your thing, right? Your background yourself, you’re very much the paid search guy. Your business produces software that helps people with the process of doing paid and you manage, to my knowledge, over a million dollars’ worth of your own spend on paid search. You’ve got to have a few lessons up your sleeves I am sure. What are some of the key points to doing this thing effectively?

Larry: So the first point would be kind of along the lines of what I was just talking about of being really kind of picky. On Google, there’s like three billion searches every day and the point is, maybe a lot of small businesses get tripped up, the point is not to buy all the searches but rather be very, very picky. If you are a web development consulting firm in Boston, you should not be bidding on the words web development because that could mean anything – that could mean that they are looking to learn web development, it could be that they are looking for a job, right? Who knows what the intent is behind that search. The key is to be super, super picky, like Web Development consulting firm Boston or something like very, very specific search terms that are highly relevant to exactly what you are doing because you have to pay for these clicks, you want to be reasonably sure that when you do pay for it that it is somebody that is able and willing to buy the product and services. So just being very, very picky and not trying to go after a lot of keywords but rather a narrow set of keywords that are precisely relevant to your business is I would say kind of #1 most important thing. A second thing has to do with ad copy, most of the ads that you do search for anything, like big data solutions, what you’ll find is the vast majority of these advertisers on AdWords for whatever reason. 98% of them have no creativity, they just write about the same ad, more or less for 4 different companies or for 10 different companies. So the idea is to come up with something really compelling and creative angles just like how in content marketing how you have these really ridiculous titles that really compel people to click on articles. Those emotions like awe, and anxiety and fear, and curiosity – you should be employing those same kinds of tactics that you do to your content in your ads so that you’re getting the clicks and you’re standing out in the audience. Just a last tip that I also want to throw out there is just to be active, where a lot of businesses fall down is kind of set it and forget. They do this one time account set up and they just leave it on autopilot and that is really not a great formula for success. You really need to be in the account once a week, looking at what worked, what did not work, and make necessary adjustments. So really one of the main take a ways is to be relevant to your business and that is through keyword matching. But then also extremely relevant to your relevance, understanding as you said, paying for points and what keeps them up at night and what big these fears and anxieties, how do you uncover that though, I mean I guess there is a skill set and a talent in writing good copy for your ads but what processes might we go through to kind of really understand what the paying points are for our potential customers.

Larry: Sure I would suggest to bring in outside people. A lot of times, when you are working within your own company seven days a week for the last five years, whatever it is, it is hard to really see the paying points from the point of view of someone who is not familiar with your services, so the external point of view always helps. One process that seems to work really well is to just map out these personas like who your target customer is and what are their fears, what are their best friends and what are the emotional triggers associated with those different actors and then just try to draw a bridge from those paying points to your solution, you know in a 120 characters or less. It’s really an art form like paid search analysts and people who do paid search, they tend to be more data oriented. What is that – left side brain kind of people like spreadsheets and stuff like these? You really need to team up with one of these copywriters for like a newspaper like the New York Post or whatever, like the crazy headlines that they come up with.- you should be thinking more along those lines.

James: Yeah, I am sure that character limit, that constraint of having only a few characters to work with actually forces kind a bit of creativity in your ad copy, right? Because you can’t be very long-winded and descriptive. You have to get to the point very, very quickly, right?

Larry: Right! But you know what, the bar is very, very low like most ads, they are very unimaginative so if you were to write a Haiku or a poem in a three-line format of an ad that would really stand out and people would be very, very curious so let’s see what that was and that would allow you to gain more clicks and having less position in the page.

James: Yeah, well you mentioned that to be inside the accounts, almost daily, monitoring the activity, what are some of the key numbers or metrics or things within an AdWords account that we should keep our eyes most closely on?

Larry: Sure. Maybe a daily is a little bit over-active, I would suggest maybe once a week would do it for the small typical business, even that, if you can do once a week is to be pretty ahead of your game in terms of your achievement and effort level but one of the key metrics that I like to look at is something called quality score and it is a lot more complicated – Google makes it a lot more complicated than it actually is, it has to do with just how good the click through rate of your ads, relative the expected click through rate for a given ad position so obviously if you’re on the first spot, you’re going to get a higher click through rate if you’re on average or if you’re on the fifth spot. The quality where it just says how high is your click through rate relative to the rate for your ads and the reason why is because Google has this very neutral pricing policy where like the ads that get clicked on are ridiculously cheap and they get this 50% discount of your minimum click bid. Conversely, if you have these really bad ads that nobody is clicking on, they get taxed for like 400% increases in monetary engineering for relative cost per click so this kind of rolls up this notion of the click through rates of your ads as a measure of quality and basically it impacts every single thing in your account.

James: Yeah, and what are some of the measures that we can take then to improve quality score? I am sure again it’s becoming more relevant with our ads and our targeting but again I guess it would also be down to just writing an effective ad copy, would it?

Larry: Yeah, those are two staples, the main ways that has to do with the keyword targeting, eliminating keywords that have nothing to do with content, and meaning that it’s not that web development is not important to that possum it’s a web firm and they’re less likely to click on ads on searches that have either navigational or informational intent so meaning like if people are just looking to navigate to some brand asking some question about the technology, they are less likely to buy the product and less likely to click on your ad than if you have a very high commercial intent query where it’s like best web development firm Boston. Now you’re looking through a comparison orientation so they’re really close to buying someone’s website development. A lot of it has to do with the nature of the keywords and beyond that there’s all sorts of crazy technology that you can leverage. One of the ones that you can kind of guarantee the double the clicks of your ads is this notion of RLSA (Remarketing list for search ads) It’s a relatively new technology and what it allows you to do is you can tag people who visited your website in the last X number of days and then you can show ads just to people who just visited your site recently. And just because they have both the query intentions that they are searching for a keyword added to the fact that they were in the market for your services recently, because previous browsing history is a strong indicator for future purchasing intent, when you add those two signals together, that tends to produce ridiculously high – double click through rates, for those types of ads, which then generates the higher quality score which gives you all the neat great benefits of better ad positioning or cost per click higher impression share, lower cost conversion, etc.

James: Yeah, listeners to Traffic Jam will know that I am a huge fan of doing remarketing. We’ve had various sessions on the show talking about how it can be used across the display network and using some other platforms as well, I’d be interested to gain your insights Larry, as to what the strategy might be with paid search and potentially what sort of messaging that we might serve up to someone who has visited our site already compared to what we’d show a first time searcher within Google.

Larry: You know, we found that even running the same ads, just running it to a more selective audience – to people who recently viewed your site that alone is good enough to significantly increase the click through rates of your ads. If you want it to be really, really cute, you could say things like finish your purchase and save 10% off the items on your cart because you can take people who presumably take things in their cart but did not check out or whatever, you can be very precise about the audience definitions but really James, one of the most effective strategies for remarketing for search as is for display, is going after broader keywords. Remember how in the beginning I was saying be very, very picky and go after very, very specific keywords, the exception to that rule is if you are using remarketing search and you happen to know that here is a person who was recently on the site searching for products and solutions that you offer and they look for a competitor name which could be very broad and unspecific. The fact that they are looking for that competitor term plus the fact that they were on your site would lead me to believe that they’re doing some kind of comparison shopping, so that would be the exception to the rule. Now this is the exception where you can go after broader terms and still get decent conversion metrics.

James: Love it! Love it! That is some fantastic insight. Well, we’ve looked at some of the positive and some of the effective measures we can take, what are about the flip side? I am sure from your experience from pulling data from your own software, you’ve seen plenty of people throw away a ton of money with PPC, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see others make?

Larry: Well, a lot of it has to do kind of the opposites of what we are talking about before; failure to be very specific with the keywords, we find sometimes we’ll do these audits and then companies will be spending tens of thousands a month on keywords that have nothing to do with the business, it’s like oops, that was a mistake. Google makes it really easy to spend a lot of money, there are no safeguards in place. It’s like going to a casino and you really need to know the rules, otherwise you’ll just get taken. Other than that, it’s just this notion of people not optimizing their accounts on a weekly basis because that is kind of giving away a lot of the benefits of this challenge where paid search is different from advertising on the yellow pages or on the billboards that you get all this nice feedback on how these different keywords on this different ads are resonating with your audience and then you’re throwing a lot of the value away if you are not going to take that data and kind of double down what is working and what’s not working.

James: Yeah, good. Well, let us move the conversation on a little bit from there, maybe perhaps ironically, of the 650,000 visitors or so that you get to your site per month, about 400,000 of them to my knowledge come from organic search, what in your opinion does it take to succeed right now with SEO?

Larry: Well, we’re very fortunate. I started blogging six or seven years ago, so that was definitely a strong demand that was very old and trusted and has gained links over time. Some of the things that we do to get this tremendous amount of tremendous traffic. The blogging that we do tends to generate tons of links on its own so meaning like we tend to blog about studies about how Google makes their money, just interesting things about what are the most interesting keywords in AdWords and these stories then get picked up by companies like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times it just generates tens of thousands – actually, the link profile of the site has something like one and half million links from something like a hundred thousand domains. So it is not manual link building where you’re just link begging. It has something to do with coming up with these compelling stories, like if any reporting is doing their job in that space, they should be covering your stuff. You know what I mean? And then leveraging that power, like all the trust that has been flown in to this domain just by publishing these evergreen information or content that ranks very highly for content like if you would do a search right now for what is Google AdWords? You’ll find like a nice content from Word Stream that will explain what that is, and in fact we kind of did it so that in anything at all, if anything from Word Stream should show up on the first page, like quality score or negative keywords or pay per click or PPC or your keyword tool. You should find a Word Stream content somewhere.

James: Yeah, and it’s not that you’re just blogging to WordStream.com right? You’ve also got columns for INC and you do stuff for Search Engine Journal, Forbes, Search Engine Land and a bunch of others I see. How on earth do you produce so much content? If I scroll down on your own About Page on your own website, there is almost 4 or 5 content pieces per day that in some way you had a contribution towards. How on earth do you maintain such a high frequency of content?

Larry: Well, first of all, it is doable. I mean there are journalists and professional writers and their job is to produce 6-8 pieces of content per day and it is pretty typical for those types of reporters. So for myself, I kind of get annoyed with myself if I don’t do maybe 2-3 articles a day in terms of either contributing them myself or working with my thousands of industry contacts on helping them with their pieces because you don’t have to originate everything. You can just be the expert side in one of those other articles and that works out just as well from a PR perspective. It sounds even better if you are not the one originating everything. You know what I mean?

James: Yes, absolutely! I guess if we can just dig a tiny way in to this it would be great listening. How on earth do you keep the stream of relevant content ideas kind of at your fingertips ready to share with the world because 2 or 3 content pieces is a fair amount of content even for the most seasoned writers to produce, right?

Larry: Well, there is a lot of benefits here like I have such a nice perch here working on paid search company, I have like 2000 customers that we help with paid search and I am kind of like the go to guy for difficult problems so if an unusual situation bubbles up from one of our clients as managers and they need a second opinion, it kind of bubbles up to me so I get a lot of exposure to a lot of interesting case study data because you are either originating new stuff or you’re rehashing generic tips or whatever so just having a lot of customers and then having the most interesting case bubble up to me is kind of a tactical advantage and then we’ve got so many thousands of customers that you can do case studies like what’s the average quality score across all these different accounts? You can do some nice research and it is kind of like an endless pool of interesting ideas to draw from. I understand not everyone would have that but ideally, you should create your business in such a way that you have a wealth of topics that can bubble up from beneath.

James: Yeah, and I guess the result that people would expect as you create more content you run out of content ideas, but I guess the reverse happens because when you are putting more stuff out there you are getting more interaction with your audience which then surfaces other questions and other topic matters that you can learn from and understand that they’d be more interested to learn more about that, right?

Larry: Yeah, another interesting thing is that a lot of the stuff that I am writing about is just first person experience because I am still actively involved with the marketing of our content on our site and I’ll discover new tricks and new hacks and a lot of people would keep it to themselves but I am happy to just write it up and share them with the audience.

James: Yeah, absolutely! Well I believe you’re reported to have created the most shared PPC article of all time. What was that about that article specifically that created so much buzz?

Larry: If you are a paid search practitioner, the one tool that all of us has used is the keyword tool. Last year, I discovered that the keyword tool was being retired and being replaced by the new keyword tool called the keyword planner and I discovered that maybe two months before anyone else did and so I blogged about it and provided a detailed review of what it was and how it was different and that ended up generating several hundred thousand reviews on Search Engine Land where the typical article may be just three or four thousand views and that was the most shared article ever. It was also the most read article in Search Engine Land of 2013 because it was quite a scoop. And it is so funny James that the way that I found out about it wasn’t because of special connections with Google, it was just that we have so many account managers like I have got like 30 account managers working in Google AdWords every day and then one of them found this weird tool and it was the keyword planner. We just stumbled upon it and what we had done, they had this beta where they had enabled it for 1% of the accounts so one of us stumbled upon it and it kind of bubbled its way up to the top and I was like, holy crap! This is something totally different and that was how we were able to write the scoop like two months before anyone else.

James: It’s like newspapers, right? It’s finding that one story that is relevant for the market that everyone is interested in and just getting it ahead of time over everyone else, right? I can just see how that blew up. Amazing, right?

Larry: I have to confess, I have a quite an unfair advantage here just sitting on a billion dollars of paid search data, two thousand customers, 30 people working those accounts and it just becomes more and more unfair as more customers sign up.

James: So anyone looking to get in to the market of blogging about pay per click and paid search, I would retire early. I don’t think you’re going to gain an advantage by Larry and his team by the sounds of it.

Larry: Or just we can be friends where can just promote each other’s stuff, so many paid search companies that we work with there are many types of paid search right? We specialize in small-medium companies and there are many other types of businesses working with different companies like Kissmetrics or perhaps PPC Hero where they like to produce content and then we give them something like that because it gives them a lot of exposure.

James: Yeah, well let’s talk a little bit about that because you do create a lot of content for other people’s audiences and not just your own, how do you go about identifying the right partnerships and the right guest blogging opportunities because I am sure you have plenty of available to you?

Larry: I am mostly looking for, just like you said, other people’s audiences so I am looking at the size of their following in their social channels and check if the content that they share are actually being shared or not, or is it just counting just five tweets, you know what I mean? You kind of do a subjective analysis of that and try to see like will this substantially move the needle? Writing is a little bit like giving blood and there is only so much you can do before you pass out. You want to make sure that the venues that you are choosing, they are going to produce a return on investment that is greater than just you blogging on your own blog. So that is kind of the thought process, any thoughts on that?

James: I think those are valid points. I know Neil Patel, we mentioned Kissmetrics just now so I guess it is relevant, we were just talking I think on a post I read the other week about really identifying audiences also based very much on relevancy. He’s done a lot of stuff for Huffington Post for instance but got far less return on that than some of his stuff for Search Engine Land or one of those more trafficked and orientated websites so reach is I think extremely important but I guess getting that target market just right for your own business is also important, don’t you think?

Larry: Yeah, absolutely! And we do this stuff about two or three times a year.

James: Yeah, good stuff. Well I want to wrap things up by observing some of the stuff that you are doing with LinkedIn is quite innovative. The first thing that I observed myself is that you seem to be repurposing your own blog content and posting that to LinkedIn, how is that working out for you?

Larry: It’s amazing leverage for your content. LinkedIn is a really funny social media network, it is kind of like – it is not quite Facebook and it is not quite Twitter. In Facebook you’ve got all your friends and families and Twitter it’s just pretty much open networking. You can just connect with Britney Spears or whoever you want to follow. LinkedIn is kind of in between where you are supposed to connect with people you know through work but not necessarily friends. My take here is that with LinkedIn blogging, it changes everything. So what it does is to me it suggests that you should be doing LinkedIn blogging and that you should be doing LinkedIn much more like Twitter. You know what I mean, like accepting much more openly of people who you don’t know, and also sending out actions to people who you’d like to know as opposed to just the people that you know. The benefit for this has to something to do for the blogging. When I repurpose the content, some of the articles have over 50 or a hundred thousand views in just a few days and the way that that works, it is kind of there is an edge rank and algorithm for LinkedIn blogs where my blog content will show up on people’s timelines and that is based on the engagement and topical relevancy of the post so if a lot of people are liking and commenting and favoriting it on LinkedIn and re-sharing it on LinkedIn then it kind of snowballs and it is kind of the square of the engagement and so there is a decisive advantage then of having a large number of connections because then you are more likely to generate the likes and the shares and the comments that you need to get this content to snowball and it is just remarkable, I mean I posted and re-posted 50 or so articles in the last 60 days and geez, like some of these articles they get featured on Wired Magazine or the Wall Street Journal just because they generate so much, like the ones that do well, they just do well so much. It’s a way to amplify the reach of the content that you’ve already produced.

James: So if we’ve got a listener out there who’s sitting on a large volume of blog posts they perhaps produced over the last year of two, I quite can imagine going back to that content and finding the stuff that’s worked best perhaps on their site and then right away re-purposing that on LinkedIn, perhaps freshening it up a little bit and posting it again to get even more traction.

Larry: Yes, but like what I was saying earlier, you just post that to LinkedIn and you only have like 300 connections or whatever, and it’s really just those 300 connections that get the notifications, so even if you get like 5% or 10% of that people to engage in that content, it’s still a very small amount of likes and shares and so you might end up with 50 or 200 page views which might be a lot but it is not very interesting from my vantage point so the trick is you first ball up your connection counts by opening networking, importing your Gmail contacts and stuff like these, and then having like once you have a few thousand connections, like ideally, 5, 10 or 15,000 connections. You can then start doing some blogging and then you’ll see that you’ll rely that you’ll get 15 thousand page views per blog post because you have so many connections.

James: Yup, absolutely! I love that. That is an awesome thing there to wrap the show up Larry. Let’s give some advice to our listener, let’s tell them where they can go to connect with you, I am sure WordStream.com is one place, where else should our listeners connect with you out there in the internet?

Larry: The one that I am checking like every 20 minutes or 10 minutes is Twitter. That is the quickest way to do it. You can also shoot me an email at LKim@WordStream.com.

James: There you go, I guess that is where the first time we also connected, at Twitter. We’ll make sure that Larry’s Twitter handle is included in the show notes of episode#44 which you’ll get to by going to TrafficJamCast.com/44. So Larry, thank you for your time and expertise. I thoroughly enjoyed this today got a ton out of it, I am sure my listeners also have as well. Thank you once again, Larry.

Larry: Thanks again for the opportunity James.

Hey welcome back listener, so that was Larry Kim from WordStream.com. Totally loved Larry’s innovative approach to LinkedIn that we ended the show with and there is really no doubt that if you are a business to business company that LinkedIn should absolutely be in your marketing mix and if you are ready to step up to the plate and put yourself and your business to the forefront then publishing to LinkedIn offers one of the best marketing opportunities for sure.

So thank you for listening in to this episode #44, we’d be back with another show in about seven days from now. Remember, subscribe via iTunes and Stitcher radio which you can do by going to TrafficJamCast.com/iTunes and TraffficJamCast.com/Stitcher. For a direct link to all of the bonuses that we’ve got coming with today’s episode, including a downloadable MP3, full transcript of today’s show, plus a very special bonus which I put together just for this episode which is my very own notes in today’s show put in to mind map format. You can get all of that by going to TrafficJamCast.com/44 where you’ll instantly download those bonuses plus of course you can join the discussion on today’s episode. Also head on over to the main website, veravo.com for more traffic tips and to learn how I can help you get more traffic, leads and sales from the search engines.

We end this week’s show with a track of course chosen by Larry Kim. He’s chosen a track titled Safe and Sound and it is by the band Capital City so enjoy the Traffic Jam to play out the show and I’ll see you back here in about seven days from now. See you then!