Myths and legends of online advertising - Yandex Top

    Despite the fact that a huge number of companies have appeared on the Internet marketing market, this market cannot be called developed. Only some major players are ready to play honestly and educate customers about new concepts and rules of the game unfamiliar to them. The rest not only do not struggle with the myths that exist among newcomers to online sales, but also sometimes strengthen them at the client, because they find them beneficial for themselves.
    Many of these myths relate to criteria for evaluating campaign performance. Agencies sell the simplest metrics, which are easiest to “pump over” and present to the client. Unfortunately, many of these metrics are of little use, while others, although good, are not enough. All of them can mislead the client.

    The most blatantly illiterate term that I have come across from this area is the “Yandex top”. Its appearance is apparently due to the fact that search results are similar to the ranking - 10 numbered positions on the page, and the site that is higher becomes more popular among users.
     The


    soundness of the term “Yandex Top” leads to the fact that many people begin to consider their positions in this list to be a reference point for success, forgetting that a real top is already a result of success, and positions in a search engine are just a means of achieving it.

    The following circumstances can interfere with the beautiful chain “Buy positions in the top - enjoy success”:
    • Oddly enough, the search results depend on the user's query. The more often users enter a query, 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 queries asked 300 and 30,000 times a month. Cunning SEO businessmen take advantage of this and compile a list of queries from rare phrases - it’s cheaper to promote a customer, because no one else seeks to take hold of places in an unseen “top”.

      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 queries there. True, Yandex does not count exact phrases, but all requests containing the entered words. 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 do search engine optimization and turns to the office, which promises to "bring Yandex to the top." He receives a tasty, at first glance, proposal: for several thousand rubles a month his site will be “on the top” for five requests - “ultraviolet tanning”, “express tanning”, “Prague tanning studio”, “artificial tanning is cheap”, “ tanning studio ”. Very soon his site is in these "tops", but there are no users: it is not surprising, 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 case of an error, one link in the chain to attract and convert it can nullify 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 excerpt with keywords taken from the page of the site), adjacent links (suddenly your only link does the page contain a proposal that interests 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 along the user's path to purchase: any ill-conceived step can ruin the whole result.
      For example, look at these search results for “Acer Laptops”:



      Both sites offer the desired product, but in the header of the first one the offer corresponds to the user's request, and the second “makes noise” in three repetitions of the word “laptop”. The first link is to a page dedicated to a particular manufacturer, and the second is to the main page of the site, where you still have to look directly for Acer laptops. For unknown reasons, uti-note.ru did not provide for this popular (more than 60,000 requests per month!) Request for a separate page on the site.

    Recommendations


    In order to get satisfactory results from search promotion, the customer must 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 search engine optimization, you can place ads in the Yandex.Direct or Google AdWords advertising system for the selected keywords. By evaluating the CTR (percentage of those who click on this ad), you can understand whether many of those who asked this question will really find your proposal useful and select successful requests.
    • For each category of goods, and ideally for each product, you need to select a separate page. This will simplify the promotion, make it possible to register an exact snippet (page title) and add convenience to the user.
    • All text on the site should be for people, and not for search engines, no matter how “black” SEO-readers could assure. 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, based on 1 / N of the request amount for each request." If you advance in words with different popularity, such an agreement will lead to the fact that one “top” popular word for which promotion was unsuccessful will slightly reduce the amount of the contract, but will hit the site traffic heavily. Try to tie compensation to the "weight" of the word.
    • Use advanced analytics and testing of selling pages. I will talk about this a bit later!

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