Archive for the 'Domain names' Category

Google Goggles Review

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on August 19, 2008
in Domain names, Google Goggles, Keyword research, Product reviews, Products and Services, Recommended Products and Tools
. 0 Comments

Here’s a quick rundown on Google Goggles:

Bottom line:
It is a good tool. It’s not yet the be-all end-all for defeating the Google Slap.
But it does have great value. Especially to get past whatever is slapping your keywords.

You do have to manually enter the information. But that’s worth it for important adgroups. I could imagine a “power” version that ties in with your account, pulls in the information, and gives you the breakdown. Maybe that will come later, for people that want to go through a lot of adgroups.

I don’t feel they have THE formula for how the pieces (keyword, ad, landing page, etc.) together go into the quality score. But it seems like a decent approximation.

Which is better than a lot of the overly-simplistic stuff out there, that would have you believe there’s only one main factor.
(I’ve seen tools that are just about having keywords match the landing page, like that’s ALL that’s needed to defeat the Google Slap.)

But back to Google Goggles:
Even going through the process made me think through some or factors. And a couple new things to try. The big value is that it breaks things down (as the formula sees it) into the different pieces.

For example, if it thinks your domain name is bad, it will show as a short brown bar. You click that and they give some tips. Though the tips are going to be the same each time, they’re still useful.

The user interface is a bit more cute than I need. But then it makes it more fun. So I guess I can’t hold that against it!

Anyway, I do recommend Google Goggles as a good tool to have in your toolbox. Even if not getting heavily “slapped”, it’s still a good way to increase quality, and get lower bids.

And after get it, they throw in some great bonuses.

Get full details

Here’s a sample screen shot:

Google Goggles Example

Google Goggles Example

Don’t get too hung up on a particular domain name

Published
by
Darrell Merrick
on July 30, 2008
in Display URL and Domain names
. 1 Comment

Don’t get too hung up on your domain name. You may think you have the “perfect” domain name. Not realizing you might get better CTR from a more appealing domain (and hard to know, short of testing, which is more appealing). And not realizing you might get better quality scores due to a domain better matching your main keywords.

For example, you may think your domain “JimsGreatBigOnlineStore.com” is perfect for selling model rockets (to give a random example). But people searching will respond more to something like “ModelRocketOnlineStore.com”, that corresponds to what you’re selling. And Google will give you higher quality for keywords with the words “model” and/or “rocket” (which are the most important keywords in that domain).

Oh, and you get more free traffic too, especially from Google!

For example, I threw together a blog under “ScottsdaleOnlineMarketing.com” (for the Scottsdale Arizona area).
I’m currently getting the top listing in Google for “Scottsdale online” and different variations.
Not big traffic. But it is outrageous to me that I could “own” that keyword for organic listings, by virtue of having the domain name and a little content.

Now I understand that you may have a domain name that is established, it give good branding, and/or you may already have affiliates under it.
That’s cool. I’m not saying you throw it away. But you can still have a different one that you use in AdWords, if you find a better one for AdWords purposes.