Myths and legends of online advertising - "Top Yandex"

Despite the fact that a huge number of companies appeared in the market of Internet marketing, this market cannot be called developed. Only some large players are ready to play fair and to teach clients new, unfamiliar to them concepts and rules of the game. The rest not only do not struggle with the myths that exist among newcomers of Internet sales, but sometimes strengthen them with the client, because they find them to be beneficial.
Many of these myths are associated with the criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of a campaign. Agencies sell the simplest metrics that are easiest to “pump up” and present to the client. Unfortunately, many of these metrics are of little help, while others are good, but insufficient. They can all mislead the customer.

The most blatantly illiterate term I've come across from this area is “Yandex’s top”. Its appearance is connected, apparently, with the fact that search results are similar to the rating - 10 numbered positions on the page, and the site that turned out to be higher becomes more popular among users.



The sound of the term “Top Yandex” leads to the fact that many are beginning to consider their positions in this list as a guide for success, forgetting that the real top is already a result of success, and positions in a search engine are only a means of achieving it.

The following circumstances can prevent a beautiful chain “Buy positions in the top - enjoy success”:

• The search results, oddly enough, depend on the user's request. The more often users enter a request, the more often they see its results and go to sites from the corresponding “top”. To many experienced internet marketers, this seems wild, but novice customers sometimes do not distinguish between requests that are asked 300 and 30,000 times a month. Good SEO businessmen use this and make a list of requests from rare phrases - it is cheaper to promote the customer, because no one else wants to get hold of places in the unseen "top".
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  In order to determine the frequency of a particular request, there are special services from search engines - for example, Yandex allows you to do this on the page wordstat.yandex.ru . At the same time you can pick up similar requests. True, Yandex counts not exact phrases, but all queries containing the words entered. That is, if 100 users entered “work as an accountant in Moscow” and another 100 “work as an accountant in Kiev,” the combination “work as an accountant” will receive an extra 200 impressions.
  

  For example, the owner of a tanning studio decides to engage in search engine optimization and refers to an office that promises to “bring it to the top of Yandex.” He gets a tasty, at first glance, offer: for a few thousand rubles a month his site will be "in the top" for five requests - "ultraviolet tanning beds", "express tanning beds", "Prague tanning studio", "cheap tanning", " studio tanning ". Very soon, his site is in these "tops", but there are no users: no wonder, because these requests are not at all popular.

  
  
• To see a link on a page does not mean to click on it, and to click does not mean to buy. The goal of a typical selling site is to bring a new customer to the company, and in the event of an error, one link in the chain to attract and convert it can negate previous efforts. For the user who entered the request, it is important not only the location of the link to your site, but also what is written on it (the so-called snippet is a text fragment with keywords taken from the page of the site), adjacent links (all of a sudden your link is only does the page contain a suggestion of interest to the user?), as well as what the user sees after clicking on the link - the page of your site.
  
  That is why any advertising campaign should be built on the user's way to the purchase: any ill-considered step can destroy the entire result.
  

  For example, look at these search results for the Acer Notebooks query:
  
  
  
  Both sites offer the right product, but in the title of the first one, the offer corresponds to the user's request, and the second one “roars” with three repetitions of the word “laptop”. The first link is to a page dedicated to a specific manufacturer, and the second is to the main page of the site, which still has to be searched directly by Acer laptops. For unknown reasons, uti-note.ru did not identify for this popular (more than 60,000 requests per month!) Request for a separate page of the site.

Recommendations

In order to get satisfactory results from search promotion, the customer needs to either work with a company that is engaged in a comprehensive analysis of the user's path, or work through everything related to it.

• Before starting the search engine optimization, you can place ads in the Yandex.Direct advertising system or Google AdWords for the selected keywords. By estimating the CTR (the percentage of those who click on this ad), you can understand whether many of those who asked this question will benefit from your offer, and select successful queries.
  
• For each category of goods, and ideally - for each product, you need to select a separate page. This will simplify the promotion, provide an opportunity to register an exact snippet (page title) and add convenience to the user.
  
• All the text on the site should be for people, not for search engines, as it were not assured "black" SEO-shniki. This does not negate the presence of keywords in it.
  
• Check the contract with the contractor. Usually, there is a guarantee for promotion in the form of “we will pay compensation for a request for which you were not in the top ten, at the rate of 1 / N requests for the amount of the contract for each request”. If you are moving up with words with different popularity, such an agreement will lead to the fact that one “top-rated” popular word, on which promotion failed, will slightly reduce the amount of the contract, but it will hit site traffic a lot. Try to tie the compensation to the “weight” of the word.
  
• Use advanced analytics and testing of selling pages. I will tell about it a bit later!