I wanted to take a moment to share a brilliant PPC marketing strategy by Converse. Watch the video below to learn more:

Unfortunately, this strategy would not work well for many small to medium sized businesses due to resource and budget constraints. However, it is nice to see large brands focusing on more creative tactics such as this, instead of throwing money into their ads without much thought. The video also serves well to get your creative juices flowing.

Instead of using this tactic in PPC, you can use it to help boost traffic to your business blog. I often suggest that owners of business blogs use these types of long tail queries and questions when brainstorming ideas for their posts. If you can come up with an interesting, relevant post that addresses this query, you have just attracted a potential customer to your site.

For example, if you are a small business selling beauty products you may see searches like “How to get rid of under eye circles” suggested as a search term. Your post can not only help the reader, by explaining ways they can achieve this at home (gaining their trust) while also pointing them to products you have available that can help with this. By solving that searchers question – you have developed a relationship with the reader while getting your products and services noticed.

I also suggest developing a list of these types of queries and creating a “Common Questions” section within your website or blog. Don’t just sell products, sell products by delivering solutions to common issues. You can place these questions right in the side of your blog, or even as a drop down menu where customers are already searching.

Don’t forget to combine this with the power of social media. If you see a problem common to one you have answered on your website, send them a tweet with a link. Going back to our example of dark circles under your eyes, you can use Twitter to search for phrases similar to this and create a feed that you can follow.

What ideas have you used, or would you like to share?

Today Google rolled out their new Instant Search feature, providing users with a quicker way to search for results online.  Throughout the day, blogs and twitter users have been buzzing about the new feature and what the implications this may have for the future of SEO and Adwords.  I have heard claims ranging from SEO is dead (again) to talk about how this may improve optimization – as well as a lot of theories about how this will impact Adwords advertisers.

Nobody can say for certain at this time what the change will bring, like any Google change this will be a wait and see game, and I am sure SEOs and SEMs will be watching their metrics and analytics data like a hawk over coming weeks.  However, while we can’t say for certain what the future holds, there are a few logical conclusions one can make – here are my two cents.

This feature will now include star ratings under your ad:

Google has stated that they only plan to show ratings that have four or more stars, and at least 30 reviews.   This should definitely help in acquiring consumers trust of your brand or product when advertising.

These features will be automatically rolled out to qualifying Adwords accounts.  If you would like to opt out, you may do so using Google’s Opt Out form.

You also have to be using Google Product Search to acquire the necessary reviews for qualification.

More information can be found on Google’s Adwords Blog.