What’s easier than making money the hard way? Stealing it.

That seems to be the motivation behind a Google AdWords phishing attempt a client received this morning. Luckily he had the keen eye to avoid the trap and forward the email to me for further review.

Step 1: The Phishing Lure

Here’s the email he received. Is says his account is no longer running and that his ads need to be reviewed before being re-activated.

Looks legit, right? Even the reply-to address is the normal AdWords notification email account. Who wouldn’t log in to re-activate their ads?

AdWords Phishing Email - Click to Enlarge

Step 2: Set the Hook

After clicking the link, an unsuspecting advertiser could be tricked into filling in their AdWords username and password on this screen.

AdWords Phishing Login Page - Click to Enlarge

Again, it looks legitimate. More experienced AdWords users will immediately recognize this as a old version of the login page. The new version is below as a reference.

The Real AdWords Login Screen - Click to Enlarge

Step 3: Be The One That Got Away

There are numerous clues that the site may not be legitimate and should be avoided:

1. The click-through URL on the email goes to “google-ist.com” instead of “google.com“. This should be a dead-giveaway.
2. The landing page is not hosted on a secure site. All official Google login pages are secured on https pages.
3. The email seems overly dire and not worded in the typical “Googley” fashion: “Please note: If you do not verify the status of your Adwords account and notify us if your ads do not appear online we can not help you and your ads will stay offline for the next few days.”
4. The landing page is a copy of an old version and does not resemble the current AdWords login page.
5. The whois information for this domain is not registered to Google. It’s probably fake info anyway, but it’s definitely not Google.
6. Clicking the link in a modern browser pops up a phishing warning. Not all browsers do this, but it is extremely helpful and usually accurate.

Phishing Warning - Click to Enlarge

Prevention > Cure

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I always love getting over to the VCU BrandCenter to talk to the students about search engine marketing. The students are active, engaged, and endlessly curious.

They got more detail than they bargained for when they started asking deep questions about Quality Score and Google’s impending “big brother” reputation, but it makes for a fun couple of hours.

My goals were to educate the future creative and brand strategists about Pay Per Click advertising basics, how to incorporate PPC strategies into larger marketing plans, and how to effectively manage a PPC program. Much of the detail was voiced over, so if you can’t make sense of it, it’s probably because I prefer pictures to words on the actual slides.

Even if they never log in to Google AdWords themselves, they are a little more prepared to work with the folks like me that do it every day.

Most people in Richmond don’t realize the amazing advertising talent in this town, much less the post-graduate educational opportunities available at the BrandCenter. Thanks to Chris Busse of Fahrenheit Emerging Media for the invitation to speak to his class!

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A Basic Lead Generation Page

Anybody involved in Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing will tell you that landing pages matter as much, if not more than keywords and ads.

What’s the point of bidding on different keywords if you don’t give your site visitors easy access to the information, products, or services that they searched for?

Google announced this week that landing pages can now positively influence a keyword’s Quality Score. Previously, landing pages would only count against you.

From SearchEngineLand:

Landing page quality has long been a factor in Google AdWords, but more as a negative signal. If an advertiser’s landing page was particularly terrible or misleading, advertisers could have their ads rejected or their accounts suspended or revoked — depending on how bad the policy violation was. The new change will assign landing page quality a positive value, incentivizing advertisers to make sure the landing page’s keywords and content are closely aligned with the keywords for which they’re bidding.

Hooray for Landing Pages

This is great news, especially as the intractable problem of PPC squeezes out smaller advertisers with rising click costs. The only way to compete effectively is to test, measure, and refine your landing page strategy to improve conversion rates and convert more visitors to customers.

I’ve been in favor of this all along, and I’m extremely glad to see Google is finally doing the right thing for its users and advertisers.

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Having one website is good for SEO, so having 50 must be 50X better, right?

Not necessarily.

A client recently asked if it made sense to do the following for SEO and/or PPC reasons:

• Buy 50 domains to use as landing pages
• Write unique landing page copy for each site
• Use the pages to capture email addresses for an email newsletter
• Link each of the 50 landing pages to the primary e-commerce domain

My answer is a bit oversimplified but I would argue that the time and money are better spent improving the primary domain. You might get different and equally valid answers from others, but be sure to weigh the pros and cons, costs and benefits before heading down this path.

SEO Benefits or Brand Builder?

While this tactic used to work well for ranking high with exact match domain names, there is almost no benefit in moderate-to-highly competitive markets.

Unless those 50 sites had links pointing to them from other sites (not reciprocal links within the same link wheel), they won’t pass much, if any, link equity to the primary domain and won’t rank well for anything but very long tail keywords.

Exact match domain names are no longer as powerful as they used to be.

My advice would be to spend the resources (money and time) that you would have spent on building unique content for 50 unique landing pages and add 50 pages of useful, relevant content to your primary domain.

PPC Benefits for Landing Pages?

Any PPC benefit that can be derived from unique landing pages (and there definitely is some) would be just as effective as subdomains or subdirectories of the primary domain without the added expense and management overhead.

Want to test and manage multiple landing pages easily? Try a landing page testing tool like Unbounce.com or Google Website Optimizer.

Bottom Line

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Not quite sure what’s going on here. I’m certainly not THAT important, am I?

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I had a great time presenting to the AMA Richmond chapter this morning. Huge thanks to Studio Center for hosting and Mike Rose for organizing.

P.S. If you are looking to hire an experienced senior marketing exec, Mike is your man.

P.P.S. The picture on slide 3 is my son…you had to be there.

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To the uninitiated, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) can feel like staring into an abyss.

How deep does it go? Where does it start and end? How do I avoid getting swallowed alive? What happens if I get in over my head?

There are countless consultants, companies, and software tools that can help you navigate these waters, but it helps to have a reliable map and a good compass to avoid being lead astray. The following tools are provided by the search engines themselves and are a great head start towards improving your company’s visibility in a wide variety of search results.

Even (especially) if you are planning on hiring somebody else to manage your search engine marketing, you need to familiarize yourself with the tools of the trade.

Search Engine Optimization

Once you verify ownership of your site, search engines will share a lot more inside information about how they view your site and content. The following are must-have tools for any website owner that wants to know how their site is perceived by search engines, any obstacles that their crawlers encounter, and who’s linking to you.

1. Google Webmaster Tools – Shows obstacles uncovered by their crawlers, search queries that your site ranks for, and allows for some control over your site’s appearance in search results.
2. Bing Webmaster – Similar to Google’s tools, but don’t always assume the results will be the same. Each search engines views sites differently, so it’s best to get a “second opinion” from Bing. Also, since Bing now powers Yahoo search results, you can diagnose problems on both engines in one place.
3. Yahoo Site Explorer – Since the Bing/Yahoo alliance began last year, the Yahoo Site Explorer tools have been largely replaced by Bing Webmaster data. However, Yahoo Site Explorer still shares extremely useful inbound link data.

Website Analytics and Testing

Websites are nothing more than digital brochures unless you measure how well they are performing and make changes to improve the results. These tools provide insights into your visitors’ behavior so you can make more informed business decisions.

4. Google Analytics – By far the best web analytics tool on the market for small- medium businesses. It allows you to analyze the “who, what, where, why, when and how” of your website’s visitors. It helps you understand how they got to your site and what they did once they got there. Plus, it’s completely free!
5. Yahoo Web Analytics – While it’s only available to Yahoo advertisers or hosted e-commerce sites, it goes a step beyond Google Analytics to provide demographic and psychographic data about your visitors in real-time.
6. Google Website Optimizer – A free, relatively simple tool to A/B test different elements on a web page (images, text, buttons, forms, etc.) to mathematically determine which combination leads to the highest conversion rates. The numbers don’t lie, and it minimizes the risk of “going with your gut” or assuming that the web designer (or design by committee) nailed it the first time.

E-Commerce Product Listings

You mean people actually buy stuff online? Sure they do! And they frequently start their search on a major search engine. Conveniently, it’s easy (and free) to list your products in their shopping engines.

7. Google Merchant Center – Do you sell products online or in a retail store? Did you know you can list them on Google’s product search engine for free? These results frequently appear in Google’s web search results so you could receive additional free exposure and traffic.
8. Bing Shopping – Upload your products through Microsoft adCenter and your products can appear in Bing and Yahoo search results.

Multimedia Search

Sure, people waste a lot of time online “researching” the latest viral videos. However, if your company has digital content such as photos or videos, a little legwork can make sure potential customers can check out your assets.

9. Flickr – A free photo-sharing website owned by Yahoo that allows members to upload and share their images. If your business or products are highly visual, this can be a great way to build awareness and connect with people searching Flickr or the general web since images frequently show up in web and images search results.
10. YouTube – The world’s largest video-sharing website. Your video content is discoverable by people searching YouTube or presented in Google search results when people search for related keywords. Video can be a powerful sales tool when done right, and picking a distribution channel is an important part of getting it right.
11. Google Images – Insure that photos on your website incorporate SEO best practices to increase the likelihood of them ranking well in Google’s image search engine. This can increase traffic and awareness from highly competitive keywords.
12. Yahoo Image Search – Similar to Google Images, but with better grouping of thematically related images. For example, a search for “Richmond, Virginia” also displays options to view nearby landmarks, neighborhoods and events.
13. Bing Image Search – A more visually appealing layout of image search results that focuses on creating a rich experience for searchers.
14. Yahoo Video – A good source for commercially produced video content with less of a focus on user-generated content than YouTube.

Local Search

Claiming your business’ listings in each of the major search engines insures that your details are accurate and up-to-date. This is especially important as their databases are often pulling from outdated sources. Plus, you can upload photos and videos to make your listings stand out.

15. Google Maps / Google Places
16. Yahoo Local
17. Bing Maps
18. Yelp – A different type of search engine, Yelp is a leader in the customer reviews space. Businesses can claim or create their listings to better manage their listings and promote offers.
19. Reviews Sites & Directories – This is where it gets hairy. There are literally thousands of reviews sites, local directories, and internet yellow pages sites. It is impossible to find and keep track of all of them, but start with the obvious and try to check and update a few each week. Most offer ways to claim or edit your business listing so be sure to fix anything that is wrong. One word of warning, every one will try to up-sell premium listings. You could go bankrupt paying for all of them, so use your judgment (and web analytics reports) to figure out which ones send the highest quality traffic and start there.

News Search Engines

Each of the major search engines crawl news sites and curate their own news search sites. If you are a publisher or media site, you need to insure your content, site maps and data feeds are structured properly to maximize your exposure in news search results, which are also frequently positioned prominently in web search results for timely or newsworthy searches.

20. Google News
21. Yahoo News
22. Bing News

Paid Search Advertising

These technically are not free services, but I cannot overstate their importance. The list of benefits reads like a marketer’s wish list: immediate exposure to people that are searching for your products or services, real-time performance data, accountability, immediate on/off controls, geographic targeting, and relatively simple ROI calculations. I could go on, but the important thing to remember is that paid search is highly effective for those willing to invest the time or money in managing it properly and optimizing for better results.

23. Google AdWords
24. Microsoft adCenter

Bonus Level! Keyword Research

25. Google AdWords Keyword Tool – This is the first stop for most search marketers that need to know how many people search for specific keywords in an average month. By comparing keyword variations (plurals, synonyms, geographic modifiers, etc.), marketers can determine where to allocate their SEO and SEM resources. It’s free, but the data provided are invaluable.

Utilizing these (mostly) free search engine tools, any company can improve its standings in search results and attract more qualified visitors to its website.

The biggest mistake I see people making when embarking on a search marketing journey is putting all their eggs in one basket. Don’t fall victim to the temptation to focus only on Google, or ignore the traffic-driving potential of your other digital assets.

How many of these tools have you used? What would you add to this list?

(CC Photo Credit: Landfeldt on Flickr)

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