When you start a pay per click advertising campaign, what you are really doing is beginning an engagement with customers that you hope lasts for a long time. You aren’t just trying to get them to click on your advertisement on time; you want to convert their click into a purchase or action. But it can go even deeper. A well planned PPC campaign can lead to building long-term relationships with customers.

A pay per click advertising campaign should ideally have a limitless life cycle. Within this life cycle, there are four key stages that will mark the relationship you have with a customer who is initially engaged by the campaign. And within each state, there are several metrics that you can use to determine the effectiveness of the campaign:

Attract: This is about getting initial eyeballs for your advertising and is measured by total impressions. This tells you how effective you were at picking the right PPC outlets. You’ll want to pay special attention in this stage to targeting the right keywords and identifying your target audience.

Capture: This is the “engagement” process when someone takes the action of clicking on your link. You’ll track this by measuring the total number of clicks along with the click-through rate – the clicks divided by the total impressions. This will give you an idea of how effective your ad is at getting people to click on it.

Convert: At this stage, you want to take the potential customer who has clicked on your ad and take them to the next step. If you are an eCommerce site, this would mean closing a sale. If you offer a service or a product that you don’t sell online, this can mean setting up an appointment or getting information for further follow-up.

When you reach this stage of your pay per click advertising campaign, you’ll want to install Conversion Tracking and Analytics software tools on your site. This will allow you to perform a wide range of analysis including conversions, costs, costs and revenue per conversion, return on investment and average Cost Per Click and position.

Retain: Once you have converted a click, you want to turn them into a recurring customer or, if they didn’t convert, find out why. You can track both the number of returning visitors and the revenue they generate to get a sense of how well you are retaining potential customers. You can also analyze the clicks they took on your site to see if there were any stumbling blocks that kept them from converting.

As you move from one PPC campaign to the next, you’ll want to remember the lessons you learned through previous campaigns. The more data you are able to gather and analyze will help you target and build effective advertising campaigns.

Local search sites such as Google+ are a key element of modern small business Internet marketing. But you need to make sure you are taking the right steps in order to maximize your local search visibility. Here are some of the basic things you need to make sure you are doing with your local search page:

LOCATION

Physical Address: You need to let people know where your business is located but this can get tricky if your business is located just outside of a major metropolitan area that you would like to target (such as being in a suburb of a larger city). Your best bet is to create local pages on your site for that city to boost search results. Google can also see where a user is located and often will cater results to their location.

You can also add a city and state to the title tag on your main landing page and other site pages to give sites like Google a clue to your business’ true location.

Listing Citations: Citations are mentions of your business’s Name, Address and Phone Number (NAP). You want to make sure that these are always consistent from listing site to listing site. Using slightly different business names, addresses or phone numbers will hurt your rankings. This is especially true for the NAP you have listed on your local search page versus the NAP listed on your website.

You also want to make sure that you are only listed on high quality sites. Use a tool like GetListed.org to find the leading local search directories. You can also do a web search for your business category in your area to find top results or go to Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder. Locally-relevant citations like Chamber of Commerce listings are positive, as are citations from sites relevant specifically to your industry.

Phone Numbers: Always use your local area code instead of a toll-free number in a local listing.

ORGANIZATION

Domain Authority and Links: Your site will rank higher in local search results if it has a high “Domain Authority.” This metric is based on a website’s age and quality. Doing solid SEO work with local SEO services like eVisible also help. Having high quality links to your site provide a strong signal to search engines about your site. Also, make sure the link you publish on a local search site is your home page or another page with high Page Authority.

Site Verification: When you create a local listing on a site, they will typically ask you to verify it before it goes live. This could be through a link or a verification code sent via a postcard or email.

CONTENT

Business Categories: It’s critical that you take the steps to make sure your business is categorized correctly. If you are setting up a Google+ Local listing, you’ll have to give your general business type and then be able to drill down to specific subcategories.

Reviews: Having a lot of positive reviews for your business is a great thing. However, Google will be concerned if they see a high volume of reviews come in too quickly — this is a sign that the reviews are fake. Encourage customers to give positive reviews but don’t try to “buy” reviews. Having positive third-party reviews (such as from newspapers and blogs) can also improve rankings.

Business Name: If you are starting a new business, you might rank higher more quickly if you include the service you provide in your name. But don’t rename your business or use a different name online – this will only hurt your rankings.

Whether you are launching a new website or redesigning an existing site, the temptation is to pack as much content and information onto the site — particularly the front page — as possible. This can include lots of pictures, videos, product descriptions and content information. Unfortunately, this is a mistake that can cripple a site before it launches. When it comes to creating an SEO friendly design, simpler is better.

More specifically, you need to design your website to reflect the visual expectations that customers have for sites like yours. This doesn’t mean that you should exactly copy the look and layout of one of your competitors. What it does mean is that you need to do some research to understand what the major design elements are that similar sites to yours have in common and why they are so frequently used.

If you think about certain types of sites such as online clothing stores, real estate offices or news sites, you’ll find that many of them naturally have similar elements laid out in similar ways. A big reason for this is because of a concept called “cognitive fluency,” which essentially means that people feel more comfortable looking at a site if the information they need is where they expect to find it. This means having graphics, headlines and logos in places that are comfortable and familiar if they have also looked at other sites in your space.

In addition, customers don’t want to be confused with an array of visual elements when they go to a site. Studies have shown that complex sites essentially make the eye and the brain work too hard to process information, causing people to find the sites ugly and leave them quickly. Instead, people prefer sites that are not as complex. This includes simple images, only a few colors and liberal use of white space.

The bottom line is that every element on your website – especially your front page – should communicate something important. Research has shown that an adult is only able to store about five to nine pieces of information in their short term memory. You need to identify the big points that you want people to take from your site and make sure they are front and center in your design. Doing professional website development with this in mind will lead to a cleaner, more user-friendly site that results in conversions.

While many things have changed in the SEO world in recent years, one thing that hasn’t is the predominant position of Google in the search engine world. It’s maintained its hold on roughly two-thirds of the search engine market share, while Bing continues to make incremental progress but lags far behind.  Because of this, it’s natural that Google is the primary focus of almost all SEO activities.

But will this always be the case? It’s easy to forget that it was fairly recently that Google was the upstart in the search engine field, going up against established rivals such as AOL and Lycos. With Google recently choosing to keep its keyword data private to the public but share it with advertisers, some experts are wondering if Google is primed to lose some of its market share to Bing.

One thing is clear: Google and Bing approach search in different ways. Google is clearly focused on attempting to decipher what users really want to find and predicting this before a search is made. Bing takes the opposite approach and uses data from its deep ties with social media sites to determine what is most important to web users.

Mobile searches continue to gain in popularity as more people are using their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices as primary means of surfing the Internet. Microsoft has already invested heavily in mobile; in addition, their connections with social sites such as Facebook mesh with the habits of users to use their mobile devices to check their social media profiles.

Google has been taking big chances recently by beginning to completely rethink how it handles search results. This includes implementing its Knowledge Graph in 2012. While Google hopes that this will eventually revolutionize the way that people search for information online, it also might provide competitors like Bing with a chance to capitalize and gain additional market share. Google is going to be the main search engine for the foreseeable future, but other search engines like Bing are likely to continue to gain market share in the months and years to come.

The rules of search engine optimization have changed dramatically in the last few years. Google responded to the glut of low-quality content with Panda and Penguin, algorithm updates that placed an emphasis on quality content and organic search engine optimization rather than keyword-stuffed articles and manipulating site code.

The most important thing to think about when creating an SEO strategy for your website is the visitor experience. This wasn’t always the case; until recently, Google wasn’t concerned about the user experience when determining site rankings. This has changed, as Google is smarter about reviewing sites in a way that mimics how users interact with the site. In short, the best way to improve your link popularity is to have a website that provides useful content and information to visitors.

Adapting to the new SEO landscape means rethinking old tactics that were considered to be the industry standard just a few years ago. Here are four examples of how SEO strategies have shifted recently:

Build Blog Relationships Instead of Buying Links

While Google still places a high value on having your site linked on other sites, the concept of “buying” a high volume of  low quality links via a link network is no longer considered to be a good SEO strategy. In fact, if done incorrectly, you might get punished by Google for this. Instead, you should focus on doing outreach to blogs that are a natural fit for your site. Reach out to them and try to enter into a mutual relationship where you provide their readers with interesting content in exchange for links.

Focus on the On-Screen Design of Your Website

It’s still important to have a website that has a common sense architecture and that has a solid internal structure. But it’s now just as important to have a site that looks great and has content that flows naturally. Google’s spiders can read sites to analyze where and how content is displayed and you need to have a website design that takes advantage of this.

Expand Beyond a Limited Set of Keywords

Until recently, the prevailing method that search engine optimization consulting services used to increase a site’s page ranking was to focus on a limited amount of keywords and use them in the page content, title tags and header tags. Google is now smarter about how it evaluates keywords for rankings. It’s better to come up with keyword groups of related words and use them organically in your on-site content.

Concentrate on Branding

Google frowns on paying for anchor links on unrelated sites. Instead, it wants to see your company’s brand have strength. If this occurs, the power of your brand will give an extra boost to your related page rankings.