I’ve never had much use for case studies because they mean so little and they’re so easily ‘cooked.’ Until recently we didn’t have any on our website or in our sales pitches because I figured that everyone viewed them the way I did. Our sales team has taught me that they have great value in the sales process and are therefore important. People want to see concrete evidence of results, and even if they get the questionable value of case studies as a class, they may need something to get the bosses to sign off.

4 reasons I’ve never put stock in case studies:

1. Large improvements can be made by either doing great work to raise the bar, or by doing mediocre work on a badly broken program. The lower the bar the better the case study, but does that really tell us anything?
2. Often times the impressive results may be attributable to factors not mentioned in the study. Advertisers may dramatically change their product or service offerings, their marketing objectives and ROI needs, their methodology for measuring success, or other changes in the marketplace any of which can create a totally different result set having nothing to do with the “before/after” comparison presented.
3. The study methodology can be grievously flawed making the results meaningless. Sadly, this nevertheless proves interesting information to folks who don’t look at or think critically about study methodologies.
4. Interested parties often bury the bad results. Few companies are willing to publish the results of studies that run counter to the story they’d like to tell.

This is a riff on this last point.

Physics students are taught that experiments that aren’t repeatable are more or less worthless. This discipline is a key piece of the scientific method. But physics is comparatively simple. A number of folks may flip out at that statement, but hear me out: physics is a tough subject for students precisely because it’s relatively straight-forward and we know a great deal. That means that there are wrong answers and that no amount of hand waving can make them right.

Psychology is infinitely more complex. We can figure out with keen precision what will happen when two pool balls collide, but predicting how two people will interact when thrown together is impossible. This complexity creates a great deal of wiggle room for folks to wave their hands.

Medicine is also impossibly complex. Some patients won’t get better even taking a good drug; some patients will get better regardless of treatment. In drug trials, it is understood that what works for some won’t work for all and that studies must use control groups to see what lift in positive outcomes can be associated with the drug being tested as distinct from any placebo effect. If scientists ignore some of the bad outcomes in the test group they are cooking the study in a way that creates misleading results.

Not only do the results become meaningless, the scientists have lost the opportunity to learn something. Why doesn’t this drug work for some patients? Is there something in common among the failures? Why does it work in mice but not in humans? Exploring these questions can be the catalyst to important breakthroughs.

In online marketing you will never see a case study that shows “this new technology didn’t help this client at all.” We have on occasion participated in studies that didn’t produce the results the study partner wanted to see and, to no one’s surprise, those study results weren’t published.

We try to be different at RKG. We’ve done lots of tests that didn’t go the way we expected, and didn’t produce the results that would help us increase our revenue. We ‘publish’ the results anyway when we think there is something to learn from the study. Trying to learn why something works and under what conditions, for what types of advertisers, etc., helps us figure out what to recommend to which clients. We’re gaining market share in our industry because we take the long view of client relationships.

Google would benefit from taking the long view here, as well. Google is hot to get advertisers to share data sufficient to show the connection between online advertising and offline revenue. That’s fantastic!!! It is great to have the kind of resources Google can bring to the table as these studies are challenging to do well.

Google would be wise to publish the results of not just the success stories but the failures as well. Showing that “for this type of company we haven’t seen much success, whereas for these other types we have” would make for a much more compelling sales pitch to an advertiser than would “burying the bodies” and only talking about successes. Folding in offline marketing efforts to help advertisers understand what offline media does to drive online results would be an even bigger, bolder and more transparent step in the right direction.

In the absence of scientific integrity, the Google sales pitch that “your Google ads drive tons of business offline” will sound no more compelling than every other sales pitch CMOs hear.

If we truly believe that advertisers, acting with perfect knowledge of what’s driving their business, will spend more money online than they are now, then the truth will set us free. Hiding the bodies only serves to convince CMOs that the engines are just another in a long line of sales people trying to get them to cough up more money.

Was Target hit by Penguin?

Is it possible Target.com was smacked flapped by Google’s Penguin update? It’s certainly possible (although unlikely), and while only conjecture, one piece of evidence indicates Target has experienced a dramatic loss in traffic tightly timed with the Penguin update.

Why We Think This

When the first versions of Panda hit, Mark Ballard analyzed PPC partner traffic and found obvious trends in the types of sites suffering traffic loss (e.g. content mills). His analysis also lined up with the public discussion of specific sites hit by the update.

As it turns out, Target.com is a very large Google search partner, and dramatic drops in search network clicks are meaningful here, especially when the timing coincides so tightly with Penguin.

Note the sharp drop in clicks for Target.com on 4/25. Penguin was announced and released on 4/24. Target was the only top 50 search partner to see PPC clicks fall through the floor.

Again, while this is an indirect way to determine who may have been hit by Penguin, doing the same with Panda did seem to fit with the intent of that update and what others were saying at the time.

Why Could This Happen?

When looking at Target’s website, there isn’t anything obvious that Penguin (or Panda) would penalize. Sure, the global navigation is a bit excessive, and there are rich anchor text links well below the fold that appear solely for SEO. But there isn’t any reason why these things would cause an issue, by themselves, and they aren’t out of the norm of what you might see on a large, competitive ecommerce site. Internal footer links like this aren’t usually a reason for concern:

There is an inordinate amount of nofollow being used internally. If we were advising them on SEO, we would certainly want to evaluate why this has been implemented and help recommend some other strategies.

Nofollow is highlighted in pink.

Off-page metrics show just what you’d expect of Target: a massive link profile with a predominance of branded anchor text. It’s a very natural looking profile, save a few odd entries. Digging deeply into the historical index with Majestic SEO, we discovered some oddities around at least three anchor text matches: electronics, baby, and toys. Looking at the link distribution for these exact match anchors showed a pattern.

Like other large brands and sites, there are many domains redirecting to Target.com. However, Majestic shows us that at some point in time (possibly several months or several years ago) Target had rich anchor text from these domains pointing at the landing pages for electronics, baby and toys (and possibly others). Looking at those URLs and anchors today show straight 301s to the home page. There are probably less than 100 of these redirects in place, at most, so it’s nothing alarming.

It may be that Target had many, many duplicate sites for non-SEO reasons – for example brand ownership of misspellings. Are these now hurting their SEO? I would be surprised, but this kind of thing is not unheard of in SEO.

Another possibility is that these sites, as duplicates, linked to target.com for SEO purposes and were then mass redirected. However, that seems much less likely.

Finally, an edge scenario we found were a few duplicate domains hanging out there with Target’s content but links pointing to the canonical target.com homepage. It seems obvious enough that these are either spam sites or anomalies. One domain worth mentioning, however, is targetmobilestore.com which links to the target.com URLs in breadcrumbs, potentially creating confusing signals.

Conclusions

Other than the concerning search network click trends, there isn’t an obvious reason to believe Target has been hit by Penguin. Admittedly this was only a 30 minute exercise and much more investigative work would need to be conducted.  However, with PPC clicks as an indicator, one that has validated Panda penalties in the past, we can see no other clear explanation for Target’s dramatic loss in traffic.

MB Postscript: We have noticed a sharp increase in search network traffic from Google’s googleadservices.com domain, but the timing and scale of that increase does not fit neatly with the traffic patterns we’ve seen from Target.com.  The two may still be related though.

Technorati Tags: target

Under the umbrella of close variants, Google includes: misspellings, singular/plural forms, stemmings, accents and abbreviation.  Nothing too crazy there, but the response to this change among sophisticated search marketers has largely been negative.  At RKG, we have already taken action to opt our clients’ campaigns out of this behavior when the change is made.  Thankfully, Google has given us that option:

Why such a response to a seemingly minor change?  George touched on some of the issues we have with near matches last month, but I want to focus on one in particular:

How Closely a Keyword Matches the Query Matters a Great Deal

This isn’t news to anyone following our blog over the years.   Five years ago we highlighted the performance differences between broad and exact match traffic and recommended that advertisers segment and bid the two accordingly.  That’s advice we had given before and have given innumerable times since.

But Google is just talking about very close variants, those can’t matter all that much, right?  Let’s take a look:

While RKG has been a part of the close variant testing ahead of its launch, it is a small sample for us.  The results above are from a larger group of RKG clients and it offers a view into the precise keyword to query matches being made by Google in April 2012 and not necessarily the match type setting of the keywords themselves (a keyword set to broad match may be matched to a query exactly, etc.)

The segments above are mutually exclusive, as I’ve defined them, and exclude branded keywords.  Let’s take a look at each:

Exact Match

The gold standard.  When a keyword matches the search query exactly, it generates a significantly higher sales-per-click than average.  For this sample, exactly matched keywords had a 27% higher SPC than the overall average.

When keyword and query are perfectly aligned, we have a much better grasp of the user’s intent — we added the keyword, after all — and we have tailored our copy and chosen our landing pages specifically for that search phrase.  Exact matches account for around 25-30% of all traffic and serve here as the barometer for the performance of the other segments.

Plural Keyword to Singular Query and Vice Versa

Whether the keyword and search query share the same plurality sounds trivial, but the cases where they don’t match have the greatest disparity from exact match performance of any of the segments above.  Plurality mismatches have a 40-50% lower sales per click than exact matches.  This is not a group we want Google to treat as equivalent to an exact match.

Why do these mismatches perform so poorly?  Generating both the singular and plural form of each keyword we want to run is one of the easiest and most obvious steps in building out a term list.  If we do not have one form or the other in the account — leading to a non-exact match — chances are there is a good reason.  Either we added it and it performed poorly, or our experience suggested adding it was a bad idea to begin with.  This happens when one form — usually the singular — clearly has a far lower commercial intent.

If this is the case, shouldn’t we be blocking any unwanted forms entirely with negatives?  Generally, yes, and the traffic levels we see here are miniscule as a result: less than 0.3% of click traffic on average.

Near Misspellings

It is beyond my abilities to reverse engineer the algorithm Google is using to determine which misspellings are close variants of the exact or phrase match terms we’re running, but I adopted a proxy that I believe is reasonable.  The Soundex algorithm, which is, conveniently, a built-in SQL function, determines if two strings are equal after retaining the first letter, removing all subsequent vowels and deduping repeated consonants, among a few other steps.

The result is that my definition of a near misspelling is probably a little broader than Google’s, but both groups are dominated by an incorrect vowel here or there and small punctuation mismatches.

Near misspellings have a SPC that is about 10% lower than exact matched keywords — much better than the plurality mismatch group.  That’s likely because it is far more difficult to generate, and unwieldy to maintain, keywords for all remotely likely misspelling possibilities.  In other words, if we do not have these keywords in our account, it’s probably not for cause like with plurals/singulars.  Near misspellings account for about 3% of traffic.

Other Phrase and Broad

What remains of our data set falls into the phrase (the keyword is found in the search query in its entirety) and broad (everything else) categories.  Not surprisingly, phrase matches, which are closer than broad matches, have a higher average sales per click than broad.  Phrase SPC is about 20% lower than exact, while broad SPC is 30% lower.  Phrase match accounts for about 10% of traffic in this sample, while broad accounts for about 60%.

A Matter of Principal and Practicality

Google claims that testers adopting the new matching behavior increased search clicks by 3%.  Our own testing experience suggests that figure is probably high, but not unreasonable for some.  It’s a small number to get worked up about either way, but advertisers with well-built programs should still opt out of the change as their default tactic.

Segmenting traffic more and more finely, while still accurately predicting its value is the name of the game for paid search bidding.  Why would we take a step in the opposite direction?  Even the best performing close variant segments will dilute the performance of our existing exact match keywords and we’d also be paying between 10-50% more for those close variant queries than they’re worth.

Advertisers will be better served by continuing to use broad match, normal phrase match, and broad match modifiers — which already trigger for close variants — to capture this query segment at a lower price.  We also need to remain vigilant about scouring our query logs to discover new keywords to add, as well as new negatives.  And while segmentation is a core element of paid search, so is testing.  We shouldn’t completely slam the door to this change, just as we shouldn’t blithely accept it.

Technorati Tags: misspellings, near exact match, plurality, soundex

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User Experience is Poor

These Other Ideas often look very similar to Google Sitelinks, however, when the user clicks on one of the links it takes them back to a new Bing SERP, similar to how Related Searches work.  As a user looking for something specific, you don’t want to go through another step to find the product for which you’re looking and Google’s Ad Sitelinks have created the expectation that your click will be taking you to a deeper page on the site listed above the link, not a new SERP.

The Other Ideas are too Broad

In the example below for the search query “mens nike basketball shoes”, the Other Ideas link that is listed is “nike” – a much broader form of the initial search query.  Compare this to the Related Searches on the left of the page, which relate much better to the original search query.  It is confusing to us why the Other Ideas link is so broad.

This got us thinking…why would Bing want to show a broader form of the initial search query under the ad, when it already has specific queries on the page in the form of Related Searches?  How would showing the term “nike” enhance the user experience when the user specified they want “mens basketball shoes” in addition to “nike”?

Higher CPCs for Other Ideas

Not only are these Other Ideas broader than the original search query in most cases, they are also likely to carry higher CPCs.  When comparing “mens nike basketball shoes” to “nike”, there’s a very good chance that the phrase “nike” has more competition and thus higher CPCs across the board than “mens nike basketball shoes”.  While CPCs have no direct concern to the user, it does have an impact on the advertiser.

Bad for the Advertiser

In addition to advertisers likely having to pay more for clicks driven by Other Ideas suggestions that lead to broader, higher competition phrases, we have also found Other Ideas in which Bing is showing the initial search query, plus the phrase “coupons” or “discounts”.  These phrases undoubtedly have higher CPCs as you are now bringing in competition from both competitors and affiliates whose sole purpose is to drive users based on coupons.  This not only forces the advertiser to pay more, but also makes their ad stand out less on the page.

Conclusion

With all of this said, Bing’s main goal is to make money…the more clicks they can generate, and in particular clicks with high CPCs, the more revenue they can bring in – I get it.  But at whose expense are they willing to do this?  The user, who is being driven to less relevant results by the Other Ideas?  The advertiser, who may see unnecessarily inflated CPCs?

It was reported by RKG in the RKG Digital Marketing Report: Q1 2012, that CPCs for Google were down 9% in Q1, 2012, while Bing saw an increase in their CPCs YOY.  Could Bing’s main focus in launching the Other Ideas be to drive users to higher competition terms – artificially raising CPCs?  Is this a contributing factor in Bing’s YOY CPC increase?  If so, this is an interesting development, something that would seem to be motivated by the bottom line – putting their own interests before the users.  Alternatively, maybe this is just a clumsy implementation of an idea that holds merit.  We’ll see how it develops.

Google reports that the Penguin update is performing well, while many sites complain loudly that they’ve been unjustifiably penalized. It’s hard to find answers, yet, in all this noise.

One thing is clear: the recent changes at Google have yet again raised the bar for SEO.

SEO’s Flight to Quality

David Brooks of the New York Times recently opined that online courses are poised to shake up higher education, largely due to the keen interest elite schools are taking in the medium. David correctly perceives that,

“The early Web radically democratized culture, but now in the media and elsewhere you’re seeing a flight to quality. The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.”

As Google continually raises the standards and expectations of websites, we will surely see a flight to quality in SEO, too. In fact, we already are due in large part to quality changes forced by Panda.

SEO should be invisible is a mantra I’ve repeated many times, and with good reason. How transparent, how obvious, is a webmaster’s naïve manipulation of links in an anchor text distribution like this one? How glaring an attempt at SEO?

Anchor text distributions this spammy resemble PPC ad groups, not natural links.

No wonder there’s so much blood in the water. Unfortunately, that blood is primarily from small- and mid-sized companies that were desperate to compete without the tailwind of a meaningful brand, value proposition, or budget. Their lack of strategic breadth and depth, their lack of investing in sustainable SEO techniques, and their greater exposure to risk put them on the chopping block.

The combination of Panda, Penguin, losing query data to “not provided,” and the greatly increased cost to entry for SEO has indeed pressured sites into a flight for quality. And that, in my opinion, is a very good thing.

Penguin’s Unforeseen Consequences

It was a year ago I wrote about The Coming Tide of SEO Tattletales and, at the time, my concern about webmaster’s using a type of competitive sabotage to “out” others in order to take their marketshare in organic search. That has now come to pass, but in a more sinister fashion. Negative SEO indeed is a very real threat to certain types of websites, specifically sites without significant authority, trust validation, and online presence. This translates to websites with less quantity and quality of links, with less of a footprint. Unfortunately, these types of sites are exactly the same small- to mid-sized companies already suffering from Google’s Penguin update.

It’s a double-whammy for small sites in competitive niches:

1. First, in order to compete, some took the shortcut and easy path and bought links with manipulative anchor text. Those are now stripped, causing a significant loss in ROI for the sites that secured them. In fact, it’s a negative ROI: the sites are not only stripped of receiving benefit from those links, the links are even contributing to their penalties.
2. Second, sites in competitive niches have fierce competitors, some of which are vile and will do anything to win, including engage in negative SEO. Here’s an example.

What Google’s Penguin update has done, is to invert the implicit and expected value of manipulative links and anchors. Rather than simply strip value from these links and filter them accordingly, Penguin proactively penalizes them. This creates an imbalance towards low-quality linking signals and gives them a new kind of power. Competing sites can use this new power imbalance to take each other out. While we have yet to see negative SEO impact any large, reputable site, I have seen several examples of small sites clobbered in this manner, and many more examples are public. For sites that aren’t yet victimized but feel vulnerable, they would be wise to begin protecting themselves, if it’s at all possible.

What Does This Mean?

Google will need to take action against the impending tide of negative SEO. How this is accomplished is very complex, because simply filtering manipulative links seems to contradict the results Penguin is after: the aggressive handicapping of sites engaged in the practice.

I will tell you one thing, however self-serving it may appear. Practicing sustainable, long-term SEO for our clients has insulated them from the teeth of every recent algorithmic change, including Penguin. I guess quality really is the only sustainable SEO strategy after all.

Google organic share post-Penguin for RKG clients.

Panda vs. Penguin

The Panda update puts a premium on original, high-quality content and clean, canonical sites. Duplicate content can be a bigger problem now than it was before the update hit. The rule of the day post-Panda is a ‘less is more’ strategy and a focus on user engagement. Now Penguin puts a premium on natural links and anchor text. In early 2011 we preached that SEOs should quit obsessing on anchor text. For those who followed my advice back then, congratulations. You’re well positioned to take marketshare from those who may have taken shortcuts in the meantime.

No, it’s not that simple. In fact, it’s quite complex. But when complexity and confusion rear their heads, it’s helpful to distill the problem to its simplest possible essence. In this case, it is just this: focus on quality and focus on your users. Focus on marketing beyond search engines. Build your audience. Make Google need you for their relevance more than you need them for your traffic. And let the algorithm updates come and go.

Technorati Tags: algorithms, google panda, google penguin, negative seo

We have noticed the changes have taken effect in new Facebook advertising accounts (or “grey accounts”) and have not yet rolled into accounts that were already active when these new changes went live. The new tool includes a step-by-step guide that customizes the input fields by what information you have already entered.

The first step is the Destination. Facebook prompts you to choose from an External URL, your Facebook Page, and your Domain (if your domain is linked to Facebook).

Create an ad with an External URL as the destination:

If you choose to enter an External URL, Facebook will automatically suggest a headline and text. It is important to make sure that the headline and body copy text you decide to use is within Facebook’s character limit and meet Facebook’s advertising standards.

Once you have made the appropriate changes to your headline, body text, and chosen an image, you are then able to refine your target audience. The only real change made to the targeting options is that you are now able to use Precise Interests with Broad Category targeting. In the past, the two were mutually exclusive.

After narrowing your target audience, you are now prompted to enter an “objective”. Facebook defines the objective as “the goals that you have for your ad or sponsored story.” They also explain that the Facebook system will “optimize your ad or sponsored story’s delivery by showing it to the people who are most likely to take the action you select as your objective”. The available objectives change depending on the featured destination.

In addition to Facebook’s definition, it is also important to note that what objective you choose will change your pricing structure. If you choose “like my Page”, you will be billed on a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions). If you choose “click on my ad or sponsored story”, you will be billed on a CPC (cost per click) model.

Create an ad with a Facebook Page as the destination:

So, let’s take a step back to the destination. If instead of choosing an external URL we choose a Facebook Page, we are presented with a new box asking what we want to promote. We are given the option to promote the Facebook Page or a specific post on the Facebook Page.

If we choose to promote a specific post, we are immediately asked to choose our ad creative, the target audience, our objective, and billing procedures. If we choose to promote the Facebook Page, we are then presented with more options.

At this point, we can either create an ad where we choose the creative or we can set up a Page Like Sponsored Story. If we choose a new ad about the page, we are immediately asked to choose our ad creative (with a Facebook generated headline), the target audience, the objective, and the billing procedures. If we choose stories about their friends liking the page, we don’t choose creative but instead choose a target audience, objective, and billing procedures.

Create an ad with my Domain as the destination:

If you have your domain linked to Facebook, you are given the option to use your domain as a destination. Once that option is chosen, you are immediately prompted to enter an optional URL tag to better track traffic coming to your domain from Facebook, the target audience, your objective, and your billing procedures.

Conclusion:

While there aren’t many fundamental changes to the Ad Creation tool, the updates seem to be an attempt to make the ad creation process easier for advertisers moving forward. It is unclear if these changes will be applied retroactively to accounts that are already active. For those of you who have used the Facebook Ad Creation Tool in the past, do you find the new creation flow easier to understand?

Technorati Tags: Ad Creation, facebook, Social Media

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Segmentation is the key to success in most marketing activities. Simply recognizing that how traffic gets to the site tells us a great deal about its value should prompt analysts to dive into data. Doing so often reveals big opportunities in device segmentation.

Golden Tablets

I’m not talking about Joseph Smith’s discovery, I’m talking about Apple’s. The traffic from iPads is more valuable than traffic from desktops for many in the eCommerce sector. Our data suggests the traffic from tablets as a class to be worth ~15% more than traffic from desktops. Traffic from the Kindle Fire seems to be less valuable, but that makes up a pretty small fraction of the total, therefore doesn’t degrade the overall value of the traffic significantly.

Different Demographic

Quite likely, the differences above are in part demographic. Folks with iPads are early adopters of technology with significantly higher than average household incomes. The disparity with Kindle Fire may represent how ads are displayed on a generally smaller screen, but also, perhaps a function of the price point attracting a less affluent user.

Different Usage Pattern

People use tablets differently than desktop computers. I have heard from folks in the know that something like 80% of tablet traffic takes place between 6PM and 9PM in the tablet’s time zone. More than 95% of tablet traffic happens over a wireless signal rather than a cell tower connection. Tablets are not, by and large, mobile devices. The tablet should be seen as a couch companion. People mostly use their online functionality while watching TV.

More Valuable and Less Expensive

Not only is the traffic on tablets more valuable than average, it is also less expensive by volume than desktop search. That is to say: the same bids on tablets put you “higher” on the page than they do on desktop. This is a function of the fact that few search managers are separating campaigns by device at all, and many of the ones who do have left tablets bucketed with smartphones. In either case, the blended average traffic value is leaving opportunity on the table, and splitting tablets into a single “mobile” bucket with phones may be worse than doing nothing at all. Grouping tablet traffic with desktops may be an acceptable compromise for busy SEMs.

These facts should send online marketing directors for major brands scrambling to figure out whether and how tablets are being split out from traffic from other channels. Also, those brand advertisers who spend significant money on television ads might consider whether the look and feel of the normal ad landing pages is consistent with the messaging in the commercials. Might there be an opportunity for a separate set of landing pages tied to the themes of the commercials running at the moment?

The Smartphone Conundrum

Your mileage may vary a great deal, but for many advertisers, particularly those with a wide range of products and services to offer, the online conversion rate for smartphones is a small fraction of that of desktop devices.

We have heard that this will all change with better, easier online payment types, and that NFC will make our phones the offline shopping credit card of choice. Perhaps. It’s also quite likely that it’s really hard to sort through lots and lots of different items on a tiny screen. That problem won’t be resolved until human eyesight improves and fingers get pointier.

We know that something like one third of all smartphone searches carry local intent, that is: the user is trying to find a physical location. For businesses that are online only these users are the wrong group on which to spend advertising dollars.

To advertisers with a wide brick and mortar footprint the online conversion metrics may not tell the whole story. Perhaps these folks are converting offline instead and the value of the traffic is materially understated? It is worth testing with POS coupons to get a sense of this, but in the meantime, you might at the least restrict the degree to which that online to offline assumption is being spent within a reasonable geographic proximity to your bricks. Spending beyond online ROI metrics on smartphone traffic 100 miles from the nearest physical location is likely unwise.

Context is coming

If marketing hasn’t become sufficiently complex yet, might we think differently about our bids and even ad creative to smartphone users whose device is motionless vs moving 2 mph vs moving 30 mph vs moving 60 mph?

We must crawl before we walk and run before we fly, but enterprise SEM isn’t getting any easier any time soon.

None of these refinements will make much difference unless and until the mobile experience we offer our users improves. The average quality of mobile user experiences is low, and it is likely that there are heavy penalties coming soon for brands with poorly optimized mobile user experiences. There are rumors floating around that the penalty for high bounce-rates for organic listings in mobile and mobile QS in ads is about to be increased.

Conclusion

The big picture of all this is simply that we must not expect all users to be equally valuable to our business regardless of the device they’re using and the context in which they’re using it. We need to market to them smarter, now, and build better experiences for all users in the near future. The growth rate of searches from devices other than desktops and laptops suggests that the penalties for ignoring these differences will only get bigger as the year progresses.

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In the past, we have found that affiliates playing this game were only doing so in the wee hours of the night when their activities were less likely to draw attention.  Similarly, some affiliates have geo-targeted their brand campaigns to exclude not only our clients’ headquarters, but RKG’s own offices.  One of the more nefariously clever tactics we’ve seen was an affiliate spoofing RKG’s redirect in their ad destination URL, so at a quick glance it appeared to be our ad, but the affiliate had really inserted their own affiliate code into the link to take the credit and a nice commission.

The latest incarnation of this scam, for lack of a kinder interpretation, is for the affiliate to only run the brand paid search ads on specific devices like the iPad.  Again, the idea is that the advertiser, agency or monitoring service is less likely to come across the deception if it is being carried out in a niche segment.

So, how can you catch them?  Your first stop should be the good old AdWords Ad Preview Tool where you can specify the type of device you want to mimic and for which geographic location.  If the ad showing is not yours, but looks just like yours — the best practitioners of  this tactic use the exact same ad copy as you are running — it’s likely an affiliate.  In fact, affiliate versions of your ad can even show with seller ratings because they live at the domain level, rather than the account level.

Another option is to install a browser add-on that allows you to operate your desktop browser as though it were a different device.  We’re partial to the User Agent Switcher extension for Firefox.  Once you’ve installed the add-on and turned on iPad user agent spoofing, do a Google search for your trademark, right click the ad, and copy the link location.  Paste this into a text editor and see what you’ve got.  You can also do the same sort of research on an iPad itself.

In one example we uncovered, the affiliate was using a bit.ly URL that was redirecting to their affiliate site and then to the client’s site.  How handy!  Add a ‘+’ to the end of a tinyurl or bit.ly URL and you can see how much traffic the URL has received — and for how long — to get a precise view of how severe the infraction has been.

More automated means of trademark monitoring would employ similar methods of spoofing user agents and geographic locations to make sure that the rogue affiliate has difficulty hiding their activities.

Fortunately, the vast majority of affiliates operate above board.  Even if the value some of them contribute is debatable, they adhere to the rules and work within the system as it is.  But, there will always be a contingent looking to beat that system by going outside its boundaries and, with each innovation in the ad marketplace, we need to keep an eye out for a new spin on the same old tricks.

Edit 4/27/12: Added clarification to first paragraph specifying that we are referring to cases where the affiliate usurps the display URL of the company.

You become too single minded – SEO is a marketing tactic that helps support higher business objectives such as increased revenue.  Holding SEO to measurable goals that closely reflect whether or not it’s accomplishing what it should be is the only logical way to determine its success.  If too much focus is placed on achieving goals that don’t matter (cough, number of links built, cough), then results are limited or never achieved at all.

Use SEO as a tool to accomplish specific business objectives and let SEOs use their tools as they need to.  Links don’t really tell the story of whether SEO has been successful or not.

You miss out on opportunities and create resource waste by handcuffing your link builders/agency partners – There are a few important aspects to this point, but a basic understanding of links needs to be laid first.  Unfortunately, what helps a webpage rank (from a link perspective) isn’t just how many links are pointing into it.  A variety of factors are important, including quality, number of linking root domains, domain authority, anchor text, context of the link, etc.  As a result, all links are not created equal.  In fact, there might be a situation where one link is worth more than hundreds, or even thousands of other links.

If all links are not equal, then we need to be able to go after the links that will help!

As is often the case with the best things in life, they take work to achieve.  Sometimes, they take lots of work, and the payoff is delayed.  The same is true for link development.  The best links USUALLY come from building long-term relationships and finding ways to make your business worth talking about.  These are the types of links you’ll have a very hard time getting if you tell a link builder, SEO, or agency you are expecting 20, 50, 100, 200, or whatever other number of links a month, week, day, etc.  This requirement instantly shifts the focus from finding and creating linking opportunities that will be the most beneficial, to finding ways to meet a quota.  The result is middle of the road (or downright poor) results and missed opportunity.

Missed opportunity due to time spent on low value activities = waste.

When quotas are introduced, the strategies and tactics that link builders can use shrink.

Scenario 1: Site A has three links from Blog B to deep products and category pages.  Blog B is relatively new, and thus, has few links into it and little equity, but has great writing, is already gaining an audience, and the links pointing to site A are in context and highly relevant.

As many link builders know, getting links to product pages is not always an easy thing to do.  Having already earned these links from blog B, link builders for site A might choose to increase the SEO value of these links by building links into blog B’s post because it’s easier to link manually, talk about, reference, or share this post than it is an individual product, which can be spammy/pushy.

From an SEO perspective, this isn’t a bad idea.  From a link quota perspective, this is a terrible idea.  No credit will be given for any links you build into that page.

If you’re visual:

Scenario 2: Site A has thousands of excellent links pointing to its home page, and it has a very strong domain compared to many of it’s competitors, but it’s deeper pages don’t rank as well as they should.  In this scenario, internal linking might be a great efficient option for improving rankings, driving traffic, and hopefully increasing revenue (a higher goal).  Success is efficiently obtained, allowing SEO’s to spend more time working on developing content that attracts new visitors and generates more money.  Best of all, this content leverages the domain strength site A already has and doesn’t burn time building unnecessary links.

People spending time on activities that don’t impact true goals = waste.

Don’t limit what SEOs, link strategists and link builders can do by handcuffing them with quotas.

You don’t invest in the long term - SEO is not a short-term play.  In fact, good SEO likely won’t be hitting its full stride for a year or two after you start.  There will likely be results (and good enough results to validate the investment) before then, but SEO starts as a small fire that continues to grow the longer it burns – as long as it’s maintained correctly.

Part of that maintenance comes from focusing on the right things and having a long-term vision for what is to be accomplished.  Links happen to be a crucial piece of fuel, which, if not handled correctly, can result in weak SEO efforts that don’t hold up.  Setting link quotas can be like dumping gasoline on a fire.  They may produce some early results, but eventually not investing properly in relationships, content, and other keys to generating great links (the fuel that can really keep the fire burning) will leave you with a mediocre website and a lot of continued investment in manual link efforts that will continue to produce mediocre results for the effort.

You risk irritating your SEO agency partner and/or your internal staff - I don’t know a lot of people that 1) enjoy having someone tell them how to do their job, or, 2) provide them with busy work that gets in the way of them producing results.  Link quotas represent the worst of both worlds. Not only is the SEO being instructed on what’s important and how to do their job, they’re also being told (in many cases) to do something or focus on something that won’t necessarily improve the situation.  That’s a tough spot to be in and can make for some cranky people :).

Solutions

There are ways to avoid link quotas and their pitfalls.  We recommend the following:

• Focus on what really matters – What business objective is SEO supposed to be accomplishing? Is it doing that?
• Identify more reasonable steps in the SEO process to build measurable goals around –  (IE increases in organic traffic, etc. – tie them to your higher-arching goals).
• Learn more about SEO and online marketing – A little education goes a long way to understanding what is important to measure for SEO and what is essentially gimcrack (best word ever).

• Link Building Beyond SEO – What it Really Means for your Business Learn how link building is impacting more of your online presence than you think and how to better understand its...
• Content Is How You Scale Link Building: RKG’s Philosophy & Approach Today I have the privilege of sharing with you how RKG approaches link development, how we see it in the...

This is obviously something that needs to be continually re-evaluated. It can be challenging to keep pace with the search industry, especially Google. (We love ya’ Bing!)

What is your perspective on the state of SEO?

Today, SEO is more about users than it is about machines. It’s more about visitors than robots (pro tip: it always has been). One of the errors companies and websites have made over the last several years is to put SEO above their users, their differentiators, and their real value and contributions online. At RKG, our approach to SEO can be summed up with these principles:

1. First, make the best user experience possible. Contribute real value. Be compelling. Engage users.
2. Then, maximize with SEO.

SEO makes a poor business model. But with the right business model, SEO can be a rocket ship and is truly one of the most efficient and cost-effective channels that exist in marketing today.

What are your SEO strategies and tactics?

Our SEO process follows crawl, index, rank

Our strategies and tactics depend greatly upon the site and industry, but generally focus on four primary concepts:

1. The crawl experience: technical SEO
2. Indexation: maximizing, controlling and optimizing what URLs are included in the indexes
3. SERP visibility: how highly URLs rank, especially in comparison to competitors and for important keyword categories
4. Off-page signals: quality is generally more important than quantity when it comes to link building, but specific strategies and tactics vary. Social media and AuthorRank are increasingly becoming strong off-page validation signals as well.

Within these conceptual areas, SEO teams must develop content strategies, work with public relations teams, social media teams, development teams, user experience teams… you get the idea. Mobile, microformats, pagination, faceted navigation, internal linking, the list of specific tactics is long. There is much more to SEO than these four bullet points; they are meant to be concepts.

The paradox of SEO is such that, while SEO is more about users than it is about machines, technical SEO remains a deeply important area of the work.

SEO is complex. RKG's example set of technical SEO factors.

What do you believe are the biggest threats to organic traffic growth?

The biggest threat to lack of SEO growth is lack of SEO implementation. Time and again, when we see companies fall short in their SEO programs it’s because the SEO programs have not been given sufficient resources. It comes down to this: get things done. Recommendations are worthless without action.

How do you envision your SEO services/tactics evolving over the next 2-3 years?

Our SEO strategies are constantly evolving. The industry and search engines change almost daily, so evolution and adaptation is the rule, not the exception. There is nothing stable in SEO. That said, the concepts that have been tried and proven since Google came into existence still matter most: content is king, users are king, quality SEO is the only sustainable strategy, and buying links and using trickery and shortcuts introduce excessive risk and have short-term, unsustainable value. We do not take shortcuts. We invest in long-term strategies that keep our clients sheltered from unnecessary risk.

Let me go ahead and jump off this soapbox now…

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