1. Newsletter Archives: Even if you don’t have any, there’s still value at the end of this for you.

Check the PR & backlinks coming into old newsletters. Newsletters could be several years old and are waiting for internal linking. Find some decent anchor text in them and links into the pages you’re targeting now. The four readers a 2004 newsletter attracts each year will not mind. Are there links you can strip out of them to lower the amount of links on the page? Check that too.

Oh you don’t have a newsletter archive? While it may take some time, why not see if there is some adspace available on old newsletters. I’m sure there’s plenty of companies out there that would gladly pimp out their old newsletters for a few extra bucks.

2. Webmaster Tools:

The Not Found section, pictured below, shows all of the pages that Google can no longer find. It also shows the number of links pointing to each page. Are there any pages that can be redirected to an updated page that’s currently being targeted? Are there any pages that could be 301 redirected to the homepage? Webmaster tools is one of the few places where Google truly tells you what’s up.

3. Press Release Services

There are dozens of press release services available for when you want to spread you big news. While these aren’t internal links as the post says, these are entirely under your control….unless you’re unaware.

Answer the following questions before using an unfamiliar or new service:

- Does the release level you’re selecting allow for links?

- Does it allow for custom anchor text or only absolute links?

- Is there a certain text threshold required before the release qualifies for links?

- Are there different character limit levels that could allow more links in the release? (eg: under 500 allows 1 link, 501 - 1000 allows 2 links)

- Are links not allowed in the opening paragraph? This is important when other sites pick up the release and only list the first 250 characters or so.

- Are any weird redirects placed on links?

When you’re paying for a release, you want to make the most of your linking opportunity within it. Don’t be misled by the stipulations some release sites have listed above.

4. Unused Websites:

Whether they were purchased for a contest that is now over, purchased for the common site misspelling or whatever reason, there are often stagnant links that aren’t being used to their fullest potential. As Laura mentioned in a previous post about Starbucks, they STILL have not linked over an old contest page that has hundreds of external links. While Starbucks probably doesn’t need the links from this contest to rank, 99% of other companies do. So…

- Find old websites

- 301 redirect any misspelling or duplicate content sites not being used to your original site.

- 301 redirect old contest sites to a related page or back to your homepage.

- Benefit from corking your link juice.

5. Old Press Releases:

We covered new press releases, but what if you have an internal press release section that’s dated back for years?

- Find releases with value (backlinks, PR, still cached somewhat frequently)

- Search for anchor text you can use & link it up to currently targeted pages

- Strip out old unnecessary links

- Reward yourself by reading about awkward office conversations.

6. Duplicate pages splitting link value:

Again, this is something that can be solved by digging into WMTools. Google lists out in the HTML Suggestions tab under Diagnostics where your site has duplicate title tags. If the engines don’t like duplicate content and they are reporting on the pages that have duplicate title tags, checking out the pages could lead you to find duplicates caused by capitalization in the urls (eg: examplesite.com/Bananarama vs examplesite.com/bananarama)

Link value could be split, especially if your url structure isn’t consistent across the site.

7. Secure pages & Non WWW vs WWW:

The last one is less involved than all the others, but seven is such a nice number. Make sure https pages aren’t showing up and that the non-www version is being 301 redirect to the www version or vice versa.

There are dozens of ways to get the most out of your existing links. Drop some favorites as comments if so moved.

There are three primary ways in which programming can be used to improve a business:

• Business Process Automation
• Business Process Improvement
• Business Process Re-Engineering

While a developer without domain knowledge can improve a business in some of these ways, only a developer with solid domain knowledge can effectively use all three methods.

Business Process Automation

Business Process Automation (BPA) takes an existing business process with a human component and either eliminates or reduces the amount of human involvement necessary. The benefit to a company comes from the reduced amount of labor necessary to complete the task. This is the method that requires the least amount of domain knowledge to be an effective developer. While this method is incredibly useful and can save a business large amounts of time it is only one way in which programming can improve a company.

Recently SEER has been working with the Google Analytics API to further automate its reporting process. This automation has allowed SEER employees to focus on higher level strategies, instead of performing this recurring task every month.

Business Process Improvement

Business Process Improvement (BPI) takes an existing process, which may or may not have a human component, and improves upon it. The benefit to the company can vary significantly depending on the process that is being improved. Some examples include, gathering additional information for employees to make decisions on, or creating reminders instead of having to remember to check something on a regular basis. A programmer without domain knowledge should be able to implement these improvements. However a programmer with domain knowledge should not only be able to implement these improvements, but has the ability to design improvements of their own, making them significantly more useful.

SEER has recently revised its keyword tracking systems. Not only has the process been automated, but it has been significantly improved in two ways. First, the new system is pulling several additional metrics giving SEER employees much more information to make decisions about keywords. Second, due to the automation of the system the process can be run four times more often. This allows SEER employees to track keywords much more often, and therefore detect movement and trends much sooner.

Business Process Re-Engineering

Business Process Re-Engineering (BPrE) is the creation of a completely new process. As with BPI the benefit to the company varies with the process that is created. BPrE can have a massive impact on a company as it often creates entirely new opportunities. A developer with no domain knowledge will most likely be unable to apply this method. On the other hand, a developer with domain knowledge will has the opportunity to create these processes which may have otherwise not been discovered by the company.

SEER has been working with the Google Analytics API and the Adwords API to enhance our SEO / PPC integration. By combining information from both of these APIs both our SEO and PPC teams have new tools for research and analysis. Without having a developer with domain knowledge, it would have been very difficult to understand how these APIs could be combined to generate useful information.

Why Developers Are Key to BPrE

The reason developers are seldom included in the design and evolution of a business process is they are often viewed simply as developers of an already existing business. Developers are not normally hired to re-design the business, but to perform BPA and BPI services. There are two fundamental reasons why a developer is essential to re-designing a process:

• The Developer knows what programming/they can do!
• Developers have a different way of thinking than most!

As simple as these two statements are they are more often than not overlooked. If designer of the project or of the business does not have a development background, it is difficult for them to fully understand how a system is going to work. Things which may be very simple to develop may appear to be impossible to a non-developer, or vice-versa. This can lead to unpractical expectations or missed opportunities which may have been very simple to include in the process. It is important to understand that simply having a programmer on hand to sign off on requirements and time-lines is not including them in the BPrE process. SEER interactive however, includes the development point of view from the ground up when designing new processes and tools, making for a far more accurate time-line and expectations.

Developers are used to thinking in terms of if statements, loops, arrays, functions, classes, object orientation, databases, recursion, and any number of problem solving techniques. Anyone without a development background most likely does not think in this manner. In fact, I’ve yet to meet a non-developer who understands recursion, never-mind has the ability to apply it as a potential business process solution. This gives developers a different viewpoint and a very different problem solving tool set.

By applying these problem solving methods to business practices developers can be very good completely redesigning a system or a business. By viewing developers as problem solvers, and not just programmers, a company can significantly increase the chance of developing a new system which may be able to revolutionize the company. However in order to take advantage of BPrE, the developer must have domain knowledge!

Just how much do landing pages matter for PPC success? Here are some examples of the impact the SEER PPC team has seen on clients PPC metrics as a result of landing page testing:

Client #1: Geographic Information System Software

We recommended that this client feature a click-to-play video tutorial highlighting the main features of their software rather than the static image featured on the page at the time. The primary concern was that the landing page wasn’t communicating all of the advanced features and usability of the product since it was a free standing page, with all key points appearing above the fold. Here are the results:

• 35% increase in conversions
• 47% increase in conversion rate
• 43% decrease in CPA

Client #2: Cable Provider

This client was looking for a way to increase the conversion rate of lead form fill-outs, so they worked with a landing page testing company to launch a multivariate test using Google’s Website optimizer using 4 variations:

1. Control page
2. Variation of control page with a cleaner design and longer page. The CTA being tested was “Free Quote”
3. Mirror image of the variation above, with the CTA “Order Now”
4. Different design than all other pages (colors, page length, etc.) with the CTA “Free Quote”

Variation #4 ended up winning with 99.4% confidence. Here is a summary of the cumulative impact of the test:

• 52% decrease in CPA
• 140% increase in conversion rate
• 100% increase in conversions

Often times, clients ask us for feedback on their websites and PPC landing pages. We’re not designers or usability experts, but we’re happy to recommend designers and usability experts we’ve worked with and trust. We’re also happy to share what we do know on these topics with our clients. There are oodles of great blogs and articles out there on Landing Page and design best practices that we often pass along to our clients so I decided to dig into some of our team’s Delicious accounts and share some of my personal favorites.

10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines

Informative Product Pages Help You Stand Out
“Provide detailed information about your products, but don’t fall into the trap of bombarding users with too much text. Make the information easy to digest. Make the page scannable by breaking up the text into smaller segments and using plenty of sub-headings. Add plenty of images for your products, and use the right language: don’t use jargon that your visitors might not understand.”

Apple does a great job explaining the advanced functionality of the new Magic Mouse. The three product features Apple wants the visitor to be aware of are in bold, making them scannable. They text is broken up with clean, sharp images making the page visually informative as well.

Quality of design is an indicator of credibility
“One interesting finding of these studies is that users really do judge a book by its cover… or rather, a website by its design. Elements such as layout, consistency, typography, color and style all affect how users perceive your website and what kind of image you project. Your website should project not only a good image but also the right one for your audience.”

Most users do not scroll
“Jakob Nielsen’s study on how much users scroll (in Prioritizing Web Usability) revealed that only 23% of visitors scroll on their first visit to a website. This means that 77% of visitors won’t scroll; they’ll just view the content above the fold.”

31 Ways to Improve Your Landing Pages

Compare your landing pages to your competitors
“Go out there, sign up for their email lists, click on their ads, revel in the glory that your click just cost them $3. See what online marketing strategy they have in place — and determine how you can do it better.”

Have a clear value proposition
“To win conversions in online marketing, landing pages need to focus on a distinct and compelling value proposition—preferably the same one that prompted the click—and communicate it in the simplest language possible: ‘Lowest price.’ ‘Biggest selection.’ ‘Best technology.’ You get the idea.”

Have a clear, defined Call to Action
“An effectual CTA will be the cohesive next step for the respondent to take. Don’t confuse your respondent with too many actions they can take. Keep it simple! A strong CTA tells the respondent what to do, why they should and when to do it.”

CommercialIQ is a great example of a well executed CTA. When the visitor arrives at the page, they are encouraged to “Find Commercial Property”. The “Search Now” button directly below the CTA makes the path to conversion seamless.

7 Form Tactics that Drive Users Crazy

Insisting that passwords have certain characteristics
“While your goal - keeping your users safe - is noble, going about it in this way serves only to annoy and frustrate them as they try to join your website.”

Requiring information that has no business being required
“Given the choice, most users wont fill in information they don’t want to give out”

The screencap of Tumblr’s homepage above is a great example of a well executed form. It is above the fold, featured prominently, and requires a minimum amount of information from the visitor.

Having to re-enter all your data just because you messed one thing up
“It’s bad enough to complete an entire form and have to go back because you left something out. “

7 Tips To Increase Landing Page Conversions

Digestible Content
“Good content on your landing pages are a must, but make this content easily scannable.”

Minimize Choice
“If you can’t summarize the purpose of your landing page in 5 words, then your visitors will never be able to figure it out. Give users one option, the conversion option.”

Evoke Trust
“Use logos that convey credibility like awards your company has won, professional association memberships and accreditations. There are a lot of choices on the internet and you want to assure your users that they are making the right one.”

Basecamp uses both client lists and a shout-out from BusinessWeek.com on their Pricing & Signup page. Featuring brands like Addidas, The World Bank and BusinessWeek help Basecamp to establish credibility on this page.

5 Copywriting Keys to Landing Page Credibility

Scent
“They’re called landing pages because they’re where you plan for visitors to “land” after clicking through on PPC and targeted search terms. So before you do anything else, convince those visitors they’ve come to the right place by prominently featuring their “trigger” or search terms on the page.”

ArtRiver’s ad above is a simple, but great reminder of the importance of scent. The ad above was triggered by the query “Francesco Clemente prints” and directs to a page with only Clemente prints. It seems like a no-brainer, but there are plenty of product specific PPC ads that direct to home pages rather than product pages. Imagine if the ArtRiver ad had directed to the homepage (below) instead of the Clemente page. Would the visitor bother looking through the left navigation? Maybe, maybe not. But why take the chance?

Transparency
“People are rightfully cynical. They want to know all the angles. Provide that to them through a transparent explanation. Once they believe your explanation, they’ll have gained a world of confidence in your offer.”

Readability
“Use short paragraphs not to exceed 5 stacked lines. Use headlines, sub-heads, bullets, and bolding. Make sure your page is skimmable and scanable and that your key or trigger words are featured within your headlines, bolded text, and hyperlinks.”

Have a favorite article on landing page best practices? Post it here!

The second tool to be examined in this process is MajesticSEO.

MajesticSEO - The Good

• Crawled 127 Billion pages
• Over a Trillion URLs
• Anchor Text Indexed
• Link Tags Indexed (Redirect / Alt Text / NoFollow etc.)
• Data Export via CSV and API

Majestic SEO has crawled over 127 billion pages and over a trillion unique URLs. This makes MajesticSEO only the second company in the world to publicly announce that they have discovered this many URLs. The big question though, is how does all of this data help SEO campaigns? Well before we can discuss how the data impacts an SEO campaign we must discuss all of the data and features Majestic provides us with. Once you register a domain with Majestic, you gain access to several reports. I will discuss what I think are the most useful below.

The Anchors report shows you the most popular anchor texts to your domain, along with how many external links and referring domains use that anchor text. Additionally the report shows an ACRank spread, which is Majestic’s way of ranking the importance of a website. This report is useful to get a sense of what people on the web are using as anchor text to link to your site. What makes this report even more useful is the ability to drill down into a specific anchor text.

Once you drill down into a specific anchor text from the Anchors report, you are shown information about all of the links that point to your domain. This information includes, the source, its ACRank, the date the link was found, the target URL, the target URL’s ACRank, along with several source flags. The tags indicate what kind of link is pointing to your site including; redirect, frame, nofollow, images, deleted, mention, and alt text. This is where the real power of Majestic comes into play.

Imagine if you were able to find every link to your domain on the web along with these tags. Optimizing your links is now a simple matter of filtering the criteria you want, and emailing a webmaster and requesting they make a small change to an already existing link. Trying to target a specific keyword? Email webmasters requesting your anchor text to be changed to that keyword. Having access to all of these tags allows you to address these existing links in whatever way best fits your linking strategy.

Perhaps one of the most useful tags is the mentions tag. The mentions tag indicates that your domain has been referenced in plain text, however no link is provided. Creating a list of all the pages that mention the name of your site but do not link to it is an easy way to generate links.

Other reports allow you to break down this information in different ways. Some of these reports include referring domains, specific URLs within your domain, IP Addresses, Subnets, and even countries. How you use these reports will depend on the SEO strategy you are using, but these reports give you several more ways to analyze your data. I also should mention one of my favorite reports, the daily update report. I will get into why the daily report is one of my favorites later in this post.

Another major plus of MajesticSEO is the ability to export the data via a CSV or via an API.

MajesticSEO - The Bad

• No Keywords
• ACRank = Bad Metric

One of the unfortunate drawbacks of MajesticSEO, as they themselves are quick to point out, there is no ability to sort by keywords. The reason for this makes perfect sense when you consider the 127 billion pages that they have crawled. Storing all of the links from these pages alone requires a huge amount of processing power and data storage. In order to allow for keyword searching, MajesticSEO would have to index the entirety of all 127 billion pages, and then provide a search feature to sort through all of the data. Needless to say that is a tall order, especially considering MajesticSEO is primarily focused on finding links, not the keywords on the pages.

Another small drawback, which again MajesticSEO points out themselves, is that currently the ACRank of a site is only based on how many pages link to the website the link is on. Here is MajesticSEO’s summary of the issue:

“It should be said that in it’s current design it suffers from a serious drawback: actual ACRank weight of backlink is not taken into account, so a page with one backlink of ACRank 1 will have the same ACRank value of 1 just like the other page that has got backlink with ACRank of 10 (or 15), clearly the latter page should have gotten higher ACRank as being linked to from the more important pages intuitively makes the page they linked too also more important.” Full Definitions: MajesticSEO Glossary

While MajesticSEO plans to correct this problem, in the meantime they have implemented the ACRank spread. The ACRank spread shows the ACRank backlinks broken down by their ACRank. However after doing some spot checking on some of the websites that have high ACRanks I am very weary using ACRank as a metric for evaluating a page until this problem is fixed. Here is an example:

One Webpage http://cfsxiba.1freewebspace.com (I’m not linking because I don’t want to give this page anymore links!) has an ACRank of 10, which according to MajesticSEO should have at least 1,024 links pointing to it. I assumed it would be a somewhat reputable site, fair assumption right? Wrong. When the site loads it takes you to a black screen with the words “Loading…” displayed in white. After a few seconds I scrolled down and saw a list of URLs and what appeared to be some porn spam. I don’t know about you, but I DO NOT want a link to my site from there. Now the page was indexed on April 30th 2009, so it may have been changed or hacked, but not a risk I’d like to take.

Since the size of the database rivals that of Google, another thing to consider is what if Google, or any other search engine, hasn’t indexed a page yet? Getting a link from that page won’t be very helpful, and it’s probably not a very valuable site! Furthermore if no one else has found it, it becomes very difficult to determine if it is a quality page without manually analyzing it.

MajesticSEO - The Ugly

• OLD DATA

Old data and the problems that result from it is the major problem with MajesticSEO.

While the vast amount of linking information is by far the draw of MajesticSEO, as with most large databases, it also causes some issues. Due to the fact that pages are constantly changing it is difficult to trust information that was gathered over a year ago. Depending on the type of domain you are optimizing for a large number of the pages MajesticSEO finds may not exist anymore, or may have been altered. While Majestic will tag links as deleted when it can no longer find them, this requires MajesticSEO to check the page again, which normally won’t happen for a significant period of time.

As with most large databases focusing on the internet, this inaccuracy of data is to be expected. When crawling billions of pages it becomes very difficult to make sure the entire database is kept up to date. This means however that before the information can be used in an SEO campaign it must be cleaned up and verified to ensure the accuracy of the information. This inaccuracy of information is why I believe that the Daily Updates report is incredibly useful. Since the links were found within the past day, the information provided by the Daily Update is far more accurate than the data collected years ago.

Takeaways

• Tracks a HUGE amount of links
• Links may be old, pages may not exist, or the link may have been taken down
• ACRank is not a good metric to determine priority
• Some sort of script to evaluate sites is necessary
• If you can implement a system to evaluate links found my MajesticSEO, it can be VERY powerful

MajesticSEO allows you access to more linking information than any other tool I’ve seen. However as with other tools of this size the accuracy of old data becomes a problem. Combine this problem with the fact that the ranking metric MajesticSEO uses (ACRank) is a poor judge of the quality of a site sorting through existing links becomes a huge problem. So what is the best way to make use of the data we do have?

Start with what we know for sure: At some point every link in MajesticSEO’s database pointed towards your site with the given tags. What makes this awesome is this is all you need to know!

Here at SEER we have built a tool that checks several data points to determine what we believe to be the quality of a website. Now all we need to do is sort these links by the quality of the website and bingo, we have a list of sites linking to us in order of importance!

This is a great first step but it leaves us with a few problems, does this site still exist / link to us / are the anchors the same? Well it should be pretty clear from whatever site ranking tool you use if the site still exists. As for if the site still links to us and if the anchors are the same? The last thing you’d want to have to do is manually check this for each link. Good thing is this is easy to find out! Building a web crawler to explore a web page for this information is a relatively simple task.

The power of Majestic SEO comes from the fact that it is able to find so many links. However at the current time Majestic doesn’t seem to do a fantastic job of ranking the links or keeping the information up date. If you have a system in place that can automate this part of the process MajesticSEO has the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Follow me on twitter for more tool reviews!

PPC Hero wrote a nice overview of the new interface back in April. Their post describes all the new changes of the interface.

One new feature I want to discuss in more detail is the “See Search Terms” button under the keyword tab, which is an incredibly powerful tool to enable search marketers to take Keyword optimization beyond just tweaking and editing bids.

Below is a step by step guide on how I use the new “See Search Term” button to hit my CPA goal without sacrificing volume (for the example below lets assume my CPA goal is $30)

Step 1: Click on the Keyword Tab and Sort Keywords by Spend

Step 2: Look for Keyword above your CPA target:

In the example above if we were targeting a $30 CPA, the top spender is far over metric at $72. Before the new interface, I would have lowered the bid on this term to cut the bleeding. I may have also pulled a Search Query report at the ad group level to add negatives, but I would have not been able to easily see what terms the phrase was being matched to without having special filters set up in Google Analytics.

The downside of just cutting the bid on this term is that, although above metric, it has had 18 conversions in the last 30 days. Immediately lowering the bid on this term, which is already only in 6th position, would undoubtedly sacrifice conversions.

In the new interface, I instead go straight to the “see search terms” as seen in the example below.

This will bring up all the queries being matched to this phrase matched term

Step 4: Sort the Search Query List by conversions or cost and look for terms you want to add to your campaign that are hitting your CPA goals

In the example, let’s assume the term, “buy shoes online”, received 5 conversions at a CPA of $20. If I would have just lower the bid on the phrase match of “buy shoes”, I would have hurt visibility on “buy shoes online”, which is a great term!

Instead of just blindly lowering the bid, I can add “buy shoes online” as a keyword so that I can maintain position on this term, even if I eventually lower the bid on the phrase match “buy shoes”

Step 5: Check off the terms you want to add as Keywords and click on the “Add as Keyword” button

You can edit this Keyword to be the phrase matched or the exact match version. Click Save and the term will be added to the same ad group that it was originally being matched to.

Step 6: Next check off the terms you want to add as negatives and click on the “Add as Negative Keyword” as seen below.

In this example the shoe store does not sell clown shoes, but Google is matching to the term “Buy Shoes Clown”.

Google will default to the exact match negative. You can edit this to add any phrase you want. In this example I would change this to the term “clown” in general so any phrase that includes clown would be excluded.

By eliminating these irrelevant queries you may be able to bring the CPA down for “buy shoes” without lowering the bid. This will help you maintain visibility and maximize your conversions, while hitting your CPA goals.

One thing to be VERY careful about when using this technique…
Make sure you are adding keywords when you want to add keywords and negatives when you want to add negatives. The last thing you would want to do, is to start bidding on the broad completely unrelated term “clown” This would be BAD!!!!

What I love about Google is that they never stop improving. They continue to create ways for more transparency and functionality to help advertisers to cost effectively find consumers ready to take an action.

The first tool to be examined in this process is SemRush.

SemRush - The Good

The best part about SemRush is the amount of data that is stored in the database. SemRush is “Currently indexing top 20 results on 30 million keywords across more than 13 million domains.” That is a TON of data. SemRush also boasts several tools including:

• Google Keywords - Shows keywords that rank for the current domain.
• Adwords Keywords - Shows any Adwords ads that land on the current domain.
• Competitors in Google - Shows the domains that share keywords with the current domain.
• Competitors in Adwords - Shows the domains that have Adwords ads running for the same keywords on the current domain.
• Adwords Ads Texts - Shows a summary of all Adwords ads found landing on the current domain.
• Potential Ad Buyers - Shows you can sites that buy AdWords on your keywords.
• Potential Ad Sellers - Shows you sites with visitors that are the same with visitors from your AdWords campaign.

Full descriptions of these tools can be found at: SemRush

So what makes all of these tools and this data useful for SEO and SEM campaigns? I will highlight some of the better uses of the first four of these tools.

The Google Keywords reports allow you to find a significant portion of the keywords that you rank in the top 20 for (this portion will vary depending on how mainstream the site is) along with several metrics describing the keyword. Perhaps the simplest use of this tool is to look at the combination of position and search volume. If there is a keyword with a high search volume ranked just off of the first page, in position 11 or 12 perhaps, if you specifically target that keyword you may be able to push it to the first page with minimal effort. Competitors in Google is best used for keyword discovery and to keep an eye on how much traffic your competitors are getting on shared keywords.

The Adwords Keywords report is most useful when examining a competitor. If you are managing Adwords for a domain, you will have access to that accounts Adwords information. Therefore the best use of this tool is to enter a competitor’s domain to examine their Adwords strategy. By entering a competitor’s domain you will be able to see a majority of keywords they are bidding on along with several metrics, including estimating volume and cpc. Using this information it should be possible to find quality keywords to add to your campaign.

Competitors in Adwords is best used to find sites that share a significant number of keywords with your domains and give you a brief overview of how they are doing compared to your campaigns. If you discover competitors using this tool, and then use the Adwords Keywords report you have a very powerful combination.

The most powerful aspect of this tool is the ability to export data, specifically via the API. Considering the amount of data stored in SemRush’s database, examining the data manually is far too time consuming. By allowing data to be exported, you may apply rules or filters to the data, and only examine the results that meet the criteria you are looking for.

SemRush - The Bad

The best part about SemRush is the amount of data that can be searched; however the size of the database is also its Achilles heel. Data displayed in reports can be incorrect or outdated. This may include Ads being displayed in results that don’t exist, or incorrect rankings in keyword reports etc. Let’s take a minute to look at why the size of SemRush’s database is the cause of this problem.

SemRush tracks over 30 million keywords, and several statistics associated with them. For each keyword at least several queries must be made.

• The Google Search Engine
• The Adwords Traffic Estimator
• The Google Keyword Tool

This results in millions upon millions of queries that must be made to Google. All of the while SemRush must make these queries in such a way to not incur any penalties or be throttled. As a result gathering this data takes a significant amount of time. The three most recent US database updates have been on June 9th, August 3rd, and September 29th, which means the database is
currently being updated roughly every eight weeks.

While SEO campaigns often require several months to generate results SEM campaigns do not. Many SEM campaigns are seasonal; react quickly to changes in the marketplace; or are otherwise changing frequently. While it is beneficial to have access to competitor’s ads, you cannot run an Adwords campaign using just a snapshot of the marketplace every eight weeks.

Another major concern about SemRush is that it only tracks the first 20 results per keyword. There could be many instances where it would be useful to know keywords beyond simply the first 20 results. Also, SemRush only tracks the ranking for one search engine, Google. While Google is the most dominant search engine with approximately 65% of the market share all other major search engines are ignored. If there were ever a large shift in market shares, SemRush may not be a good indication of how terms are ranking.

SemRush - The Ugly

The dangerous part of SemRush however, is all of that information does not magically appear in the database upon the update! It has to be gathered over the eight weeks prior. The problem is you do not have any way of knowing at what time during the process the keyword you are examining was added to the database. Here is an example (this is an extreme example to illustrate what COULD happen not what is most likely):

On September 29th after the database was updated you checked a keyword, and it says you are ranked #1 for that keyword. You do a search for the keyword and to your surprise; you aren’t even on the first page! How did this happen? Unknown to you, the keyword you are checking was the very first of the 30 million keywords to be updated, and that query was run on August 4th. Since then your ranking tanked and you were no longer on the first page.

If you do not check your keywords and this happened it would take until the next update of the database for you to be alerted to this problem.

While this is an extreme example to illustrate the danger, it’s important to understand that when the database is updated, to some extent all of the data is old. It could be only a day old, or it could be significantly older than that, though no older than the last database update.

Takeaways

SemRush has a massive collection of data, and a number of very useful tools to go along with it. It is great when used to get an idea of the marketplace, find out information about competitors, and to find new keywords. However due to the size of the database, and therefore the infrequent updates and potentially inaccurate information displayed, it is not the best tool for tracking any of your domains. Additionally in order to make best use of the data, some methodology must be created to avoid manually sorting through the huge amounts of information.

***After contacting SemRush’s support team they indicated they try to update their database each month. According to their news feed I haven’t seen any updates in less than eight weeks, but if they do start to update the database once a month the impact of the negative issues discussed will be reduced.

***If you have any other favorite uses of SemRush, or disagree with any aspects of the post, please feel free to comment!

Some keywords unfortunately tank well on pages that you do not wish they pulled rankings for (like a homepage), this is expecially big in e-commerce or large publisher sites.

At SEER we are marrying bounce rate and ranking data to help us find keywords that are ranking well but are bouncing highly. This is why its got to be able more than rankings.

Later in the video, I even mention a GREAT use of a scraper that can tell you when you are NOT price competitive, watch the end of the video to get an idea on why not being price competitive in large scale e-commerce can lead to great rankings but poor conversions.

Who would think that you can get better SEO revenues without even moving the ranking one bit?

A few weeks ago Laura wrote about bounce rates versus exit rates, even if you think you know what bounce rates are, read this just to make sure, because I had it wrong.

E-commerce SEO’s read this post on the long tail, the next part (which I am late on) will be heavily focused on e-commerce SEO.

Extensions can be set up at the Campaign or Ad level. At the Campaign level, the address will populate dynamically based on the user’s location or search query. Read more about setting up Local Extensions at the Campaign level here.

If you want more control over the address that appears with your ad, you’ll want to set up Local Extensions at the Ad level. For example, let’s say that you want test a new product in a smaller market before launching it nationwide. In this case, you’ll want to set the address at the Ad level so that only users in that market will be directed to the landing page featuring the new product, and will be shown only the address where that product is available. Read more about setting up Local Extensions at the Ad level here.

Here is an example of Local Extensions in action:

Google has made some additions to reporting metrics so you can see how users are interacting with your local business ad. Here is a peek at some of the information you can pull from the AdWords Reports tab:

You’ll only pay for clicks through to your website; clicks on the PlusBox, map, or directions are free!

Before getting started with Local Extensions, you’ll want to link your AdWords and Local Business Center accounts. Lots of exciting things have been happening in the local business center, so it’s a great time to sign up. Here’s how:

Google Local Business Center

Google Maps pulls business information from a slew of sources (like Yellow Pages, for example) so in order to ensure that your listing has the most accurate and comprehensive information possible, you’ll want to register your business with Google’s Local Business Center. The process is simple and Google has a great video that will walk you through the steps. If your business already appears on Google Maps, you’ll just need to claim the listing before getting started. If you have more than 10 listings, Google makes it easy to import a bulk feed in a CSV file. The process is a bit different and you can find everything you’ll need to know here.

Next, add some more information about your business:

* Hours of operation
* Payment Options
* Photos & Video
* Additional Details
* Categories

Select up to 5 categories that relate to your business. This will allow potential new customers to find you when they search for businesses in the categories you have specified in your listing. Let’s say I’m planning to do some shoe shopping in Paris. I’ll go to Google and search for “shoes paris” and here are the suggestions generated based on my query:

The Local Business Center Dashboard gives you access to a couple of great features relating to your listing:

* Statistics: ‘View Report’ to see information including impressions, actions, top search queries triggering your listing, and zip codes where driving directions came from.
* Coupons: Click the ‘Coupons’ tab and select ‘Add New Coupon’. The format is pretty simple and you can upload an image to make your coupon pop. Here is an example:

* Reviews: Reviews come from third parties as well as reviews written by Google Maps users. If you feel that a review’s authenticity is dubious, you can flag it as inappropriate and it will be reviewed and possibly removed.

Just last week, Google introduced Place Pages. According to the Official Google Blog, a Place Page is “a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.” Just click on the “more info” link in a local listing and you’ll be taken to the place page, where you can find photos, videos, street views, nearby transit, reviews, related websites & more. Here’s a closer look at Boutique Repetto’s Place Page:

With all of the fancy new features the Google Local Business Center has rolled out, now is a great time to get started!

Let’s start at Step One: Why do we run Ad Copy tests?
The answer is easy – To find the optimal performing ads that drive the most conversions.

While all PPC marketers (I hope) realize that this is the end goal in Ad Copy testing, many PPC marketers get overwhelmed with the amount of ads in their accounts and get caught up with where to start and how to achieve the goal. It really does not need to be such a stressful task.

Though it would be great to be able to run ad copy tests across all campaigns/ad groups, the fact is there is just not enough time in the day to tackle it all.

Simply (Step Two) start by identifying your under-performing campaigns/ad groups (I recommend using a 60-90 day time frame, though depending on the volume of your account, a 30 or even 120 day time frame may be more appropriate) that if you optimized ad copy, could have a positive impact in performance. “Under-performing” can be various indicators, for example; over CPA/CPL /ROAS/ROI goals, low CTR, low conversions, etc.

Let’s look at an example of how to choose your under-performing campaigns for your Ad Copy testing. Below I’ve indicated the three campaigns that within this data set, I would chose to focus on when looking to run an ad copy test. One has the lowest CTR, one has the highest CPA and the last has the lowest conversions.

Now that I know where I want to focus my time and energy to improve performance through testing Ad Copy, Step Three is pulling an Ad Report for those campaigns (use the same time frame as you did when selecting under-performing campaigns).

Sort & filter the report by Campaign/Ad group. From there, create a new column with the formula CTR * Conversion Rate. By using this formula, you are not just analyzing ads based on CTR, which is not an indicator of conversions, or Conversion Rate, which is not an indicator of traffic. You are able to find the optimal pairing of CTR (the traffic indicator) and Conversion Rate (the conversion indicator). The one important thing to keep in mind with this formula is that it won’t work for evaluating all of your ads, namely those that have low/no conversions. In that instance, you would simply base your decisions off of CTR.

Once you have the new formula calculated for all ads, Step Four is ensuring there is statistical significance between ads. Here at SEER, we have an amazing developer, who has built us a proprietary internal tool to automatically determine statistical significance between the formula, CTR * Conversion Rate (screen shot below).

If you aren’t as lucky as we are, there are various Stat Checker tools out there you can use for the same thing. A few of our favorites are: Split Tester, SEO Book Split Tester and Super Split Tester . While you may not be able to check the statistical significance of the formula by itself, you can still use it to check Clicks/CTR or Conversions/Conversion rate to ensure the outcome of the formula is based on statistical significance.

95% is the ideal confidence level you want to reach to make a decision on the “winning ad.” However, if you find the ads consistently run at an 85-90% confidence level, it may indicate that the ads are very similar and thus will continue to perform in that manner, which indicates a new ad test is still ideal.

Now that you have your statistically significant winner in each ad group, you can confidentially pause the under-performing ad, and replace it with a new ad to test against the winner (Step Five). However, in order to ensure you are running a well structured ad test, it is critical to remember to isolate the ad test to one variable. For instance, when writing your new ad, keep all copy consistent with the winning ad, with the exception of 1 variable, perhaps the headline, value proposition, call to action, or even display variable. Here is an example of two ads that would adhere to ideal ad testing practices:

Notice the only variable I changed was the value proposition in Line 2 -> Free Shipping vs. Price Point. Testing just one variable at a time allows you to easily determine and understand why the ads are performing differently.

One of the best things about optimizing your ads and testing them using this strategy is you are able to get into a rotation. When your first test (let’s say the one in Step Two) is implemented and aggregating data, you can start the process all over again with a new round of campaigns to optimize and test new ads. If your first test was to optimize and test ads for under-performing campaigns, perhaps in round two of testing you should tackle your top converting campaigns, as you can always improve performance by tweaking aspects of your campaigns!

So, any time you want to optimize and test your ads follow the five simple steps for a stress-free testing strategy!
Step One: Why do we run Ad Copy tests?
Step Two: Identify your under-performing campaigns/ad groups (or other set of factors to test a specific set of ads)
Step Three: Pull an Ad Report for those campaigns and add the CTR*Conversion Rate formula (where/when applicable)
Step Four: Ensure there is statistical significance between ads
Step Five: Pause the under-performing ad and replace it with a new ad to test against the winner (remembering to isolate just one variable for accurate testing)

So let’s start with a quick review. What is a bounced visit? In Google Analytics, a bounced visit is someone who views only one page on your site and leaves. In other words, whatever page he enters on is the only one he sees. Bounce rate is the number of bounced visits as a percentage of all visits. (It is important to note that some people/tools define a bounced visit differently – often in terms of a short amount of time spent on a page.) Additionally, in Google Analytics, when you’re looking at a Content Report, you’ll also see a metric called “% Exit.” What is % Exit? It represents the percent of visits that left your site from a particular page. How is Bounce Rate different than % Exit? To be considered in Bounce Rate, a person must view only one page and then leave but a person can view any number of pages (1 or 10 or 100) to be counted in % Exit.

Ok, here’s a scenario. Suppose you are looking at the Top Content pages for your website (the report that shows you the most viewed pages for your site in Google Analytics) and you see a line that looks like this:

Perhaps that line in your report is a step in your checkout process. Look at the bounce rate for this page – 100%!

This is where the important distinction between Bounce Rate and % Exit comes into play. What does this bounce rate of 100% mean? Literally it means of all the people who LANDED on this page left this site immediately. Because we’re looking at a Top Content Report, it does NOT mean 100% of the people who saw this page left. So how many people viewed this page & left without looking at anything else? Actually only 1 person. (You’d find this data by drilling into Entrance Sources or Keywords for this particular page.) If you want to know how many people come to your site, start the checkout process, get to this page and then decide to leave, you’d want to look at the % Exit (in this case 53.91%). While you might be worried that 54% of people who view this page decide not to complete the checkout process, at least you’re not thinking 100% of people who view this page leave.

If Bounce Rate is not always an appropriate metric to look at when viewing a Top Content Report, when would you be concerned about high bounce rates? Here are some good reports for Bounce Rate:

- Traffic Sources: For example, if you’re running a PPC campaign on Google and see that your Bounce Rate is much higher than your site average, you might be concerned that your landing pages are not resonating with your searchers.

- Keywords: Perhaps you find a keyword that you’ve been working to improve in organic rank but the Bounce Rate is high. Check for the landing pages for that term. Maybe your content is not quite relevant. Maybe you are lacking strong calls to action. Or maybe you should abandon trying to improve rankings for that term.

- Top Landing Pages: It may seem obvious but instead of looking at the Bounce Rate for a Top Content Report, I’d look at a Top Landing Pages report. The important distinction – with Top Landing Pages, by definition, you know a visit started on that page. Thus, if I saw a landing page with 100 entrances and a bounce rate of 100%, I would be concerned.

I hope this helps clarify the difference between Bounce Rate and % Exit. I’m a strong believer that your web analytics data is only as good as it is accurate. But more than that, your data is only as good as you can correctly understand and interpret it. Once you understand the data you’re seeing, it can be very powerful. At SEER, we believe in working to drive more traffic for our clients, but it’s important to know that this traffic is taking the actions you want on the site. Bounce Rate and % Exit are two of the metrics that can be extremely valuable in improving conversion rates.