Their arguments tend to go along the lines of,

“Matt Cutts says Google doesn’t pay attention to meta keywords, so that means meta keywords are worthless.”

They may even post a link to the video where Cutts says, “We don’t use it” (it being the meta keywords tag):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RBTBEfd7z_Y

My response to that is, “What does Matt Cutts know?”

He knows about Google’s organic search algorithm. But what else does he know?

Shock News! Online Marketing Doesn’t Begin And End With SEO!

The, “The guy who knows all about Google SEO says meta keywords aren’t used, so they’re not used”, argument is daft for three reasons…

#1: It assumes Cutts must know about all other forms of online marketing. It’s known that Google likes to keep its organic algorithm team and its adwords team separate, so why would Cutts be a PPC expert?

#2: It doesn’t pay attention to Cutts’ language. He says “we”. Is that Google? Or is that the team responsible for the organic ranking algorithm?

#3: It forgets there’s more to internet marketing than SEO.

My view on the video is that Cutts is talking about organic rankings… and only organic rankings.

And here’s why …

Google Adwords Uses The Meta Keywords Tag

There. I’ve said it.

I’ve run tests where we’ve taken an Adwords landing page with either no meta keywords – or poorly targeted keywords – and tested it against an otherwise identical page with on-topic meta keywords… and found the latter ads show higher on the page.

That’s a sign of higher quality scores.

Which – because I’ve done this a few times – tells me that google is using meta keywords as a factor in the Adwords landing page relevancy algorithm.

Why Does Adwords Use Meta Keywords?

The reason why Google organic ignores meta keywords is simple: they’re not related to what the visitor sees, so they can be spammed.

So why does Adwords approach things differently?

With the organic listings, if Google can’t figure out what a page is about, it can simply not rank that page.

There’s never a shortage of other pages to put in the top 10. So ignore the poorly themed page and the problem is solved.

But when you’re dealing with paid advertisers, you don’t have that luxury. You can’t just ignore their ads, so you have to make more of an effort to understand the theme of the landing page.

Meta keywords tend to be a reliable indicator of the advertiser’s idea of the topic of the page. So it makes sense to include them as part of the page analysis.

The Limits Of What Can Be Done With Meta Keywords

While I haven’t tested this exhaustively, I suspect that, if you have a page that’s clearly themed around the search terms you’re bidding on, the meta keywords won’t have much of an impact.

I think their biggest impact is as a remedy for pages that are poorly themed.

However, as I said, I’ve never tested this, so the best practice is to have on-theme meta keywords that reflect the topic of your landing page. (Which should, of course, be closely related to the keywords you’re bidding on.)

A Final Piece Of Advice

There’s a reason why the word “myopia” features in the headline of this blog post.

There’s a tendency amongst SEOs to assume that SEO is everything, and to make pronouncements about “internet marketing” that are really only true for SEO.

SEOs know about SEO. Don’t be fooled into thinking that means they know much about PPC.

Visitor Value Is The Key

#1: Click prices aren’t “too expensive”, they’re merely a reflection of how much money your competitors make per website visitor. 

#2: If you make less money per visitor than your competitors, you’ll have an uphill struggle.

#3: Selling cheap only makes sense if the increase in conversion rate (percentage of visitors that buy) more than makes up for the decrease in profit per sale.

#4: One overlooked way to increase visitor value is through up-selling: offering either a more expensive version or additional products at the point of sale. That can increase the average profit per sale by up to 30%.

Understanding The Adwords Auction

#5: Because Google factor clickthrough rate into your ad costs, Adwords is closer to “pay per impression” than “pay per click”. 

#6: Therefore, the company that does the best job of turning ad impressions into money tends to dominate the market. 

Managing Campaigns

#7: Your goal is to buy conversions at a profit. This means you need conversion tracking. That’ll tell you which ads and keywords are profitable.

#8: To know what’s profitable, you also need to know the value of a conversion. Few businesses know this important number.

#9: Adwords broad match can be matched to almost anything. This means you’ll get some low quality traffic. Identify these unwanted clicks by running regular search query reports and block them with negative keywords.

#10: Low Quality Scores don’t just increase your cost per click, they also reduce your impressions as your ads are shown less often. 

Split-Testing Ads

#11: Set your ads to show evenly. Otherwise the results from your ad split-tests won’t be valid.

#12: When comparing ads, pick the one that’s more profitable (the one that makes you the most money), not the one with the higher clickthrough rate (which is the one that makes Google the most money).

Landing Pages

#13: The three things that are most often missing from landing pages are: (1) a strong reason to buy from you, (2) proof to back up your claims and (3) a clear (and highly visible) call to action. 

#14: Small changes to landing pages can make 20-30% difference to your sales. See (torpedoed) for an example of this.

Content Network

#15: The content network is much better than it’s reputation. However, it needs different ad group structure compared to the search network. Also good content ads tend to be different to good search ads. Therefore you should put search and content in different campaigns.

Is This All I Know?

These findings are only the tip of the iceberg. There are dozens of other insights and principles I use to make campaigns more profitable. However, this information is applied to clients’ campaigns, not shared publicly.

To find out what they could do for you, just drop me an email.

Best wishes

Steve Gibson

There’s a scene where Samuel Jackson, with disappointment, asks Robert De Niro, “What happened to you, man? You used to be beautiful.”

Sometimes that’s how I feel about Adwords. It used to be beautiful. Darwinian direct marketing. Business the way it should be.

The rule was simple: if you could turn ad impressions into money better than anyone else, you could rule the market.

But, not now.

Now you have to care about non-buyers. Will they bounce away from your site? Will Google reviewers – who don’t have a clue about your market – like your site?

A load of nonsense.

Steve