Summary: Donovan Kovar is the CEO and chief strategist of the 24-7-Sales.com agency. Donovan has a strong background in Adwords, Search Engine Optimization, Lead Generation, Sales Funnels & Multivariate testing, just to name a few. Donovan’s impressive list of clients include but are not limited to Perry Marshall, Ryan Deiss, Perry Belcher, and most recently myself Greg Cassar. Lot’s of business owners talk about ‘they just want free traffic’ with SEO but there is also a valid argument about the benefits of paid before free. What’s your take on this horse before the cart argument? Many businesses speak to us about "I want help with SEO" and what that conversation leads down the path to is “You think you just want SEO, but what you really want is better conversions. You want traffic that's really targeted. You want a workable, predictable model." I turn the conversation to looking at paid traffic first, because we know we can control paid traffic, and the days of firing a bunch of backlinks at a site and ranking number one for your main keywords are gone. Google has changed their algorithms, and they've cracked down on link spam, and the things that we used to do that were considered legitimate article submissions and blog posts - we have to be much more careful about that now. So, I've turned the focus to Adwords as it is scalable, consistent, and can be used to consistently build a business on it. Once Adwords is optimized and we know what are the 20% of the keywords are that bring 80% of our buyers, then we can then focus on the SEO part, and we can tune the website. We can start to make sure the website is optimized for those keywords and that they're being used properly. In some of the backlinks, but not many of them, we would use that keyword. I position SEO now as icing on the cake. Any traffic that you get organically is icing on the cake, but it could be gone tomorrow, so don't build your business based just on it. Greg: Another point here is people think about Google Adwords on its own. I could have a guy as skillful as you do my Google Adwords account, but if my site is ordinary, then it doesn't matter how skillful the Adwords guy/girl is. So a focus on the page and call to action that we are sending the traffic to is also crucial to see that it’s optimized for them to take the primary desired course of action. You work with organisations of all sizes on their Adwords optimization. What are some of the main ways that you see businesses wasting money with their Google Adwords? Donovan: That's an interesting question, and it varies across the board. But mostly I would say not utilizing negative keywords properly; not split testing ads and spreading ad groups out too thinly. Effective Adwords advertising is a constant pruning process. What I do is similar to a gardener or somebody who's running a vineyard - You're constantly massaging and training your vines. Making sure they're getting what they need, and they're being trained to move in the direction you need them to go. When I go into campaigns, the first thing I look for is whether or not conversion pixels are properly placed. You really need to make sure that you're properly measuring what's going on, and that's where conversion tracking is crucial. Also with Negative Keywords I like to think "Is that part of the buying vernacular? Would a buyer actually use that word?" And if not, then in a shared library I build a master negative list, and we just keep adding those keywords - I like to keep them broad matched, one keyword, if possible. Negative Keywords when applied correctly really does eliminate a ton of waste. With Adwords, it's really about being vigilant about eliminating waste, eliminating negatives, split-testing your ads. There is a distinction I call ‘Ad Control’ - Ad Control is being in control of your ads. And if you're not in control of your ads, guess who is? Google, and they want your money.
