Tag: SEM

I’m sure you’re a lot like me and find it hard to get excited about anything in Google Merchant Center. The UI is bland, the features are lacking, and some things are downright confusing to use. For all of the work Google has put into its other platforms (AdWords, Analytics,…

Editor's Note: Effective June 30, 2022, Expanded Text Ads are going to be phased out of Google Ads as an ad type. Instead of reviewing these ad headline types, we suggest you take some time to fully understand Responsive Search Ads so you can take full advantage of an ad…

Ahhh April, what’s better than the weather warming… birds singing… and the flowers blooming?   Along with April comes spring, a feeling of freshness and a new start. April also has one of the most historically dreaded days of the year… Tax Day! Those who wait until the last minute…

First thing's first.  Despite what some people in the industry say search engine marketing, or SEM, refers to all forms of marketing, optimizing, and advertising through / to / with search engines.  Primarily that means paid search and search engine optimization plus all related disciplines and offshoots like local search,…

Clients come in many a shade. While we’d all love to be given free reign and an open checkbook to play around with a site to see what works, that very rarely, if ever, happens. It’s also fairly rare to find a client who has a budget, but gives you…

I knew there was a reason I'd stopped feasting on the evening offering of the various television networks. That reason has never been clearer than Celebrity Family Feud. Heavens to Betsy. Al Roker, the former(?) NBC blimp of a weatherman who hasn't so much lost weight as deflated like a…

As the half-dozens of regular readers of the Direct Online Marketing™ Blog know, Derrick "McKinley's Bodyguard" McKee recently came on board to our search team. Before deciding on him I was able to speak with several talented folk. One was a young woman in school down in Georgia who had…

When all you deal with every day is online marketing, it can sometimes be easy to completely strip yourself of your experience to fully explain the medium to people outside the industry. I think I normally do a good job of explaining to people how search engines work at the…

I was reviewing my blog posts recently and saw how often I mention something about my kids. I laughed thinking about how different this digital marketing blog would look were Justin at age 25 - he who dressed in a poor man’s gerbil outfit and rolled around OU’s block party…