The Internet Marketing Driver

SEO and AJAX: Taking a Closer Look at Google’s Proposal to Crawl AJAX

2009-10-13T07:27:00.005-05:00

Last week at SMX, Google announced a proposal to crawl AJAX. Although it was great to hear the official announcement, you had to know it was coming. Too many web applications are using AJAX for Google to ignore it! After the news was released, I received a lot of questions about what the proposal actually means, how it works, and what the impact could be. There seemed to be a lot of confusion, and even with people in the Search industry. And I can understand why. If you don’t have a technical background, then Google’s blog post detailing the proposal to crawl AJAX can be a bit confusing. The mention of URL fragments, stateful pages, and headless browsers can end up being confusing for a lot of people, to say the least. And if you’ve never heard of a headless browser, fear not! Since it’s close to Halloween and I grew up near Sleepy Hollow, I’ll spend some time in this post talking about what a headless browser is.

So based on my observations over the past week or so, I decided to write this post to take a closer look at what Google is proposing. My hope is to clear up some of the confusion so you can be prepared to have your AJAX crawled. And to reference AJAX’s original slogan, let’s find out if this proposal is truly Stronger Than Dirt. :)

Some Background Information About SEO and AJAX:
So why all the fuss about AJAX and SEO? AJAX stands for asynchronous JavaScript and xml, and when used properly, it can create extremely engaging web applications. In a nutshell, a webpage using AJAX can load additional data from the server on-demand without the page needing to refresh. For example, if you were viewing product information for a line of new computers, you could dynamically load the information for each computer when someone wants to learn more. That might sound unimpressive, but instead of triggering a new page and having to wait as the page loads all of the necessary images, files, etc., the page uses AJAX to dynamically (and quickly) supply the information. As a user, you could quickly see everything you need and without an additional page refresh. Ten or more pages of content can now be viewed on one… This is great for functionality, but not so great for SEO. More on that below.

Needless to say, this type of functionality has become very popular with developers wanting to streamline the user experience for visitors. Unfortunately, the search engines haven’t been so nice to AJAX-based sites. Until this proposal, most AJAX-based content was not crawlable. The original content that loaded on the page was crawlable, but you had to use a technique like HIJAX to make sure the bots could find all of your dynamically loaded content. Or, you had to create alternative pages that didn’t use AJAX (which added a lot of rework.) Either way, it took careful planning and extra work by your team. On that note, I’ve yet to be part of project where AJAX developers jump up and down with joy about having to do this extra work. Based on what I explained above, Google’s proposal is an important step forward. But there just had to be a better solution.

What is Google’s Proposal to Crawl AJAX?
When hearing about the proposal, I think experienced SEO’s and developers knew there would be challenges ahead. It probably wasn’t going to be a simple solution. And for the most part, we were right. The proposal is definitely a step forward, but webmasters need to cooperate (and share the burden of making sure their AJAX can be crawled). In a nutshell, Google wants webmasters to process AJAX content on the server and provide the search engines with a snapshot of what the page would look like with the AJAX content loaded. Then Google can crawl and index that snapshot and provide it in the search results as a stateful URL (a URL that visitors can access directly to see the page with the AJAX-loaded content).

If the last line threw you off, don’t worry. We are going to take a closer look at the process that’s being proposed below.

Getting Your AJAX Crawled: Taking a closer look at the steps involved:

1. Adding a token to your URL:
Let’s say you are using AJAX on your site to provide additional information about a new line of products. A URL might look like:

example.com?productid.aspx#productname

Google is proposing that you use a token (in this case an exclamation point !) to make sure Google knows that it’s an AJAX page that should be crawled. So, your new URL would look like:

example.com?productid.aspx#!productname

When Google comes across this URL using the token, it would recognize that it’s an AJAX page and take further action.

2. The Headless Browser (Scary name, but important functionality.)
Now that Google recognizes you are using AJAX, we need to make sure it can access the AJAX page (and the dynamically loaded content). That’s where the headless browser comes in. Now if you just said, “What the heck is a headless browser?”, you’re not alone. That’s probably the top question I’ve received after Google announced their proposal. A headless browser is a GUI-less browser (a browser with no graphical user interface) that will run on your server. The headless browser will process the request for the dynamic version of the webpage in question. In the blog post announcing this proposal, Google referenced a headless browser called HTMLUnit and you can read more about it on the website.

Why would Google require this? Well, Google knows that it would take enormous amounts of power and resources to execute and crawl all of the JavaScript being used today on the web. So, if webmasters help out and process the AJAX for Google, then it will cut down on the amount of resources needed and provide a quick way to make sure the page gets properly crawled.

To continue our example from above, let’s say you already provided a token in your URL so Google will recognize that it’s an AJAX page. Google would then request the AJAX page from the headless browser on your server by escaping the state. Basically, URL fragments (an anchor with additional information at the end of a URL), are not sent with requests to the server. Therefore, Google needs to change that URL to request the AJAX page from the headless browser (see below).

Google would end up requesting the page like this:
example.com/productid.aspx?_escaped_fragment=productname
Note: It would make this request only after it finds a URL using the token explained above (the exclamation point !)

This would tell the server to use the headless browser to process the page and return html code to Google (or any search engine that chooses to participate). That’s why the token is important. If you don’t use the token, the page will be processed normally (AJAX-style). If that’s the case, then the headless browser will not be triggered and Google will not request additional information from the server.

3. Stateful AJAX Pages Displayed in the Search Results
Now that you provided Google a way to crawl your AJAX content (using the process above), Google could now provide that URL in the search results. The page that Google displays in the SERPs will enable visitors to see the same content as if they were traversing your AJAX content on your site. i.e. They will access the AJAX version of the page versus the default content (which is what would normally be crawled). And since there is now a stateful URL that contains the AJAX content, Google can check to ensure that the indexable content matches what is returned to users.

Using our example from above, here is what the process would look like:
Your original URL:
example.com/productid.aspx#productname

You would change the URL to include a token:
example.com/productid.aspx#!productname

Google would recognize this as an AJAX page and request the following:
example.com/productid.aspx?_escaped_fragment=productname

The headless browser (on your server) would process this request and return a snapshot of the AJAX page. The engines would then provide the content at the stateful URL in the search results:
example.com/productid.aspx#!productname

Barriers to Acceptance
This all sounds great, right? It is, but there are some potential obstacles. I’m glad Google has offered this proposal, but I’m worried about how widespread of an acceptance it’s going to gain. Putting some of the workload on webmasters presents some serious challenges. When you ask webmasters to install something like a headless browser to their setup, you never know how many will actually agree to participate.

As an example, I’ve helped a lot of clients with Flash SEO, which typically involves using SWFObject 2.x to provide alternative and crawlable content for your flash movies. This is a relatively straightforward process and doesn’t require any server-based changes. It’s all client side. However, it does require some additional work from developers and designers. Even though it’s relatively painless to implement, I still see a lot of unoptimized flash content out there… And again, it doesn’t require setting up a headless browser on the server! There are some web architects I’ve worked with over the years that would have my head for requesting to add anything to their setup, no pun intended. :) To be honest, the fact that I even had to write this post is a bad sign… So again, I’m sure there are challenges ahead.

But, there is an upside for those webmasters that take the necessary steps to make sure their AJAX is crawlable. It’s called a competitive advantage! Take the time to provide Google what it wants, and you just might reap the benefits. That leads to my final point about what you should do now.

Wrapping Up: So What Should You Do?
Prepare. I would spend some time getting ready to test this out. Speak with your technical team, bring this up during meetings, and start thinking about ways to test it out without spending enormous amounts of time and energy. As an example, one of my clients agreed to wear a name tag that says, “Is Your AJAX Crawlable?” to gain attention as he walks the halls of his company. It sounds funny, but he said it has sparked a few conversations about the topic. My recommendation is to not blindside people at your company when you need this done. Lay the groundwork now, and it will be easier to implement when you need to.

Regarding actual implementation, I’m not sure when this will start happening. However, if you use AJAX on your website (or plan to), then this is an important advancement for you to consider. If nothing else, you now have a great idea for a Halloween costume, The Headless Browser. {And don’t blame me if nobody understands what you are supposed to be… Just make sure there are plenty of SEO’s at the Halloween party.} :)

GG

Related Posts:
The Critical Last Mile for SEO: Your Copywriters, Designers and Developers
Using SWFObject 2.0 to Embed Flash While Providing SEO Friendly Alternative Content
6 Questions You Should Ask During a Website Redesign That Can Save Your Search Engine Rankings
SEO, Forms, and Hidden Content - The Danger of Coding Yourself Into Search Obscurity

SEO Technical Audits - A Logical First Step for Improving SEO Results

2009-09-28T08:58:00.019-05:00

When I begin assisting new SEO clients, I typically start each engagement by completing a thorough SEO technical audit. Actually, I believe technical audits are so important that it's rare for me not to complete one. The reason is simple. An extensive audit identifies the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities that a client has in natural search. It’s essentially a full analysis of a website and it takes into account several key factors that impact organic search. Needless to say, it's an important part of my seo services.

When speaking with new clients about natural search, I often refer to the four pillars of seo, including structure (a clean and crawlable structure), content (ensuring you have the right content and that it’s optimized), links (inbound links are the lifeblood of seo), and analytics (ensuring you track and analyze your natural search efforts). Then I typically jump back to pillar one and explain that without a clean and crawlable structure, you’re dead in the water. You can essentially forget about the other three pillars if your content can’t be crawled and indexed... For example, I was helping a site that already had over 1.3 million inbound links, yet the site ranked for almost no target keywords. The site had a massive structural problem, which was wreaking havoc on a number of important factors for SEO. The site could have built another 1.3 million links and nothing would have changed. The structure and architecture needed to be addressed before any impact would be seen. That’s a good example of when a technical audit was desperately needed (and you better believe I started one quickly to identify all of the barriers present on the site.)

The Core Benefits of an SEO Technical Audit
SEO technical audits yield several key benefits for clients looking to improve their results in natural search. The first benefit is that the audit yields an actionable remediation plan, which is a deliverable that documents each of the findings from the audit (along with how to address each issue.) To me, it’s one of the most important deliverables in SEO (especially in the beginning phases of an SEO engagement.) The remediation plan enables clients to fully understand where their website (or network of websites) stands SEO-wise. They get a lay of the land, understand the core problems impacting their website, and identify key opportunities in natural search (some of which can be tackled immediately). For example, I once helped a website jump from 250K pages indexed to 1.1 million in less than a month based on relatively painless changes to the site’s structure. That opened up a massive amount of content that was essentially hidden from the search engines. Without the audit, they probably would have stayed at 250K pages indexed and missed a huge opportunity…

Another benefit is that the audit helps build an SEO roadmap, which is a critical plan for how a client is going to achieve its goals in natural search. You know where the site stands, what needs to be addressed, what the key opportunities are, and how long each step will take. Working directly with a client’s team (executives, marketers, programmers, designers, copywriters, etc.) you can map out the necessary steps to remediate the site and expand your efforts. Everyone should have a solid feel for what needs to completed, and every person on the team is involved. In case you haven’t read my previous posts, I typically refer to a company’s team of developers, designers, and copywriters as The Critical Last Mile for SEO. Without their input and cooperation, you’re going to have a heck of time getting things done and seeing success.

What Can You Learn From an SEO Technical Audit?
Extensive audits produce a wealth of knowledge about the website in question. Although there are some people that might want to charge the (SEO) hill without conducting a thorough audit, I think that's a dangerous proposition. Thorough research and analysis are critically important when trying to determine obstacles in natural search. Without fully understanding what you are facing, you risk wasting time, a massive amount of effort (from everyone involved), burning through budget, and all while producing little results. Don’t charge the hill without a solid plan in place.

So, what can you find when performing a technical audit? To answer that question, let’s take a look at a hypothetical situation. Imagine you’re a VP or Director of Marketing that has a serious SEO problem. How important would finding the following things be for you?

Your SEO website audit revealed:

* Your company was using seven domains, and splitting your content across all of them. All seven have built up their own amount of SEO power (and none of them are very powerful).
* A website redesign was just completed, but without a proper migration strategy in place. This left thousands of pages, and possibly hundreds of thousands of inbound links, in limbo.
* Your website just added a killer web application, but that same application is hiding 90% of your content.
* Your website houses 750 videos across 30 categories, but none of them are indexed and ranking.
* Your navigation is half as robust as it needs to be, and uses several 302 redirects to link to each page.
* Every campaign landing page you launch disappears after the campaign ends (wasting thousands of powerful links.)
* Your new product pages are beautiful, but they contain a heavy amount of flash content and almost no text. And to add insult to injury, your flash content isn’t even optimized.
* 600 pages on your website are optimized the same exact way.
* Your site contains 200 pages, but over 2000 are indexed. Huh? What does that even mean?
* Your 404 page look great, but it issues 200 codes (telling the engines the pages in question loaded successfully).
* At any given time, thousands of URL’s can change, wasting all of the SEO power they have built up over time.

I can keep going here... and you can probably start to see why I think SEO technical audits are so important. :) You never know what you’ll find, and many times these little gremlins are severely impacting your natural search efforts. Without conducting an extensive audit, you might only identify a small percentage of the problems impacting the website. That could leave the most important, and deepest structural problems hidden and unaddressed. And those deeper structural problems might be causing 90% of your SEO issues. By tackling only 10% of your problems, you might not make a dent in your efforts and performance in natural search.

SEO Audit Details: Deliverables, Cost, and Length of Time
In case you are wondering what a technical audit looks like, the deliverable is typically a PowerPoint presentation. Using PowerPoint enables you to provide visuals, screenshots, callouts, etc. It also works well when you need to present to larger groups of people. There are times a Word document will suffice, but unless you're audience is extremely familiar with the technical aspects you will be referring to in the remediation plan, I recommend going with PowerPoint. The length of time for completing an audit (and subsequent cost) completely depends on the size and complexity of the website. For example, larger, more complex sites might yield a 70 or 80 slide deck where smaller websites might yield 25-30 slides. I’ve seen audits completed in less than a week and others that take 6-8 weeks to complete. It makes sense if you think about it. You might have one website that has fewer than 50 pages and another site that has millions of webpages… The two presentations might look very different.

A Critical Component: The Analyst Completing Your Audit
It’s important that you find a consultant or agency that matches well with your business, industry, and the type of content you provide. You definitely don’t want to spend time and money on an audit that produces little results. So it's important that you choose a consultant or agency that can produce a remediation plan that's technically sound, thorough, and actionable. Find out how many audits the agency or analyst has completed. Find out which verticals they have focused on, and then ask for results based on their audits. For example, if you're a small business, find out if the SEO focuses on SMB's and local search. If you have expanded internationally, then ask if the SEO understands international SEO. If you focus on video, make sure the SEO has in depth experience with Video SEO. If you have 10 million webpages, then find out the largest website the consultant has worked on. You get the picture.

A quick example: All technical audits are not created equally:
I was asked to analyze a website last year and give the site a score for SEO (0-100, where 100 was be the best possible SEO situation). Before presenting my findings, I was told that the site was previously audited and was given a score of 75%. I was pretty shocked to hear that score. I had given the website a score of 35%. From my perspective, the site needed serious help… There's a big difference between the two scores, right? But, there’s also a reason the company had chosen to have a second audit performed. They weren’t seeing results after the first was completed. A score of 35% was accurate and we quickly were able to identify projects to tackle and develop a roadmap.

Unfortunately, technical audits that provide a shallow or incomplete view of your website can be dangerous. That type of audit could yield what I call “the snake oil effect”. That’s when internal employees become desensitized to SEO, don’t believe it can actually work, and focus their attention on less powerful initiatives. Think about it, if you’re an executive that allocated significant budget for several SEO efforts but never saw results, then your view of SEO will probably be skewed. Don’t let that happen! Natural search is too important.

The Most SEO Bang for Your Buck
If you are unhappy with your natural search results and you are determining where to begin, don’t overlook the power of an SEO technical audit. As I mentioned above, an audit can yield a detailed remediation plan in a relatively short amount of time. The remediation plan can yield a roadmap for your efforts, which can include projects that improve your overall SEO performance (including crawlability, indexation, content optimization, rankings, and targeted traffic.) That’s why I consider technical SEO audits a logical first step for most companies. It can provide serious SEO bang for your buck.

GG

Related Posts:
6 Questions You Should Ask During a Website Redesign That Can Save Your Search Engine Rankings
The Critical Last Mile for SEO, Your Designers, Developers, and Copywriters
SEO, Forms, and Hidden Content - The Danger of Coding Yourself Into Search Obscurity

SEO, Forms, and Hidden Content - The Danger of Coding Yourself Into Search Obscurity

2009-09-08T06:51:00.013-05:00

When I perform a competitive analysis for a client, I often uncover important pieces of information about the range of websites they are competing with online. Sometimes that information is about traffic, campaigns, keywords, content, inbound links, etc. There are also times I uncover specific practices that are either beneficial or problematic for the competitor. For example, they might be doing something functionality-wise that could be inhibiting the overall performance of the site. If I do uncover something like that, I usually dig much deeper to learn more about that problem to ensure my clients don’t make the same mistakes. So, I was analyzing a website last week and I uncovered an interesting situation. On the surface, the functionality the site was providing was robust and was a definite advantage for the company, but that same functionality was a big problem SEO-wise. Needless to say, I decided to dig deeper to learn more.

Slick Web Application Yielding Hidden Content
As part of the competitive analysis I was completing, I came across a powerful web application for finding a variety of services based on a number of criteria. The application heavily used forms to receive information from users. The application included pretty elaborate pathing and prompted me to clarify answers in order to provide the best recommendations possible. After gathering enough information, I was provided with dozens of targeted service listings with links to more information (to more webpages on the site). So you might be thinking, “That sounds like a good thing Glenn, what’s the problem?” The problem is that the web application, including the robust form functionality, essentially hid all of the content from the search engines. In this case, we are talking about more than 2000 pages of high quality, high demand content. I say “high demand”, because I completed extensive keyword research for this category and know what people are searching for. Unfortunately for this company, the application yielded results that are simply not crawlable, which means the site has no chance to rank for competitive keywords related to the hidden pages. And by all means, the site should rank for those competitive keywords. For those of you asking, “but isn’t Google crawling forms?” I’ll explain more about that below. For this application, none of the resulting content was indexed.

Losing Visitors From Natural Search and Missing Opportunities For Gaining Inbound Links
Let’s take a closer look at the problem from an SEO standpoint. Forms often provide a robust way to receive user input and then provide tailored information based on the data collected. However, forms can also hide that content from the search engine bots. Although Google has made some strides in executing forms to find more links and content, it’s still not a perfect situation. Google isn’t guaranteeing that your forms will be crawled, it limits what it will crawl to GET forms (versus POST), and some the form input is generated by common keywords on the page (for text boxes). That’s not exactly a perfect formula.

Using forms, you might provide an incredible user experience, but you might also be limiting the exposure and subsequent traffic levels to your web application from natural search. I come across this often when conducting both SEO technical audits and competitive analyses for clients. In this case, over 2000 pages of content remain unindexed. And if the content is not indexed, then there is no way for the engines to rank it highly (or at all).

The Opportunity Cost
Based on the keyword research I performed, a traffic analysis of competing websites, and then comparing that data to the 2000 pages or so of hidden content, I estimate that the site in question is missing out on approximately 10-15K highly targeted visitors per day. That additional traffic could very easily yield 300-400 conversions per day, if not higher, based on the type of content the site provides.

In addition to losing targeted traffic, the site is missing a huge opportunity to gain powerful inbound links, which can boost its search power. The content provided (yet hidden) is so strong and in demand, that I can’t help but think the 2000 pages would gain many valuable inbound links. This would obviously strengthen both the domain’s SEO power, as well as the power of the specific pages (since the more powerful and relevant inbound links your site receives, the more powerful it is going to become SEO-wise.)

Some Usability Also Hindered
Let’s say you found this form and took the time to answer all the questions. After you completed the final steps of the form, you are provided with a list of quality results based on your input. You find the best result, click through to more information, and then you want to bookmark it so you can return later. But unfortunately you can’t… This is due to the web application, which doesn’t provide permanent URL’s for each result. Yes, the form is slick and its algorithm is great, but you don’t have a static page that you can bookmark, email to someone else, etc. How annoying is that? So if you want to return to the listing in question, you are forced to go back through the form again! It’s another example of how SEO and usability are sometimes closely related.

SEO and Forms, A Developer's Perspective
I started my career as a developer, so I fully understand why you would want to create a dynamic and powerful form-based application. This specific form was developed using asp.net, which utilizes postback (where the form actually posts back information to the same page). The URL doesn’t change, and the information submitted is posted back to the same page where the programmer can access all of the variables. Coding-wise, this is great. SEO-wise, this produces one URL that handles thousands of different pieces of content. Although you might have read that Google started crawling html forms in 2008, it’s a work in progress and you can’t guarantee that all of your forms will be crawled (to say the least…) On that note, you should really perform a thorough analysis of your own forms to see what Google is crawling and indexing. You might be surprised what you find (good or bad). So, the application I analyzed (including the forms) isn’t being crawled, the URL never changes, the page optimization never changes, and the content behind the form is never found. This is not good, to say the least.

If I were advising the company using this application, I would absolutely recommend providing another way to get the bots to all of this high quality content. They should definitely keep their robust web application, but they should also provide an alternative path for the bots. Then they should optimize all of those resulting webpages so they can rank for targeted queries. I would also disallow the application in robots.txt, blocking the bots from crawling any URL’s that would be generated via the form (just in case). With the right programmer, this wouldn’t take very long and could produce serious results from natural search…

The Most Basic SEO Requirement: Your Content Needs to be Found In Order to Rank
It sounds obvious, but I run into this problem often as I perform SEO technical audits. Your killer content will not rank just because it’s killer content. The content needs to be crawled and indexed in order to rank highly for target keywords. In this case, the site should definitely keep providing its outstanding functionality, but they should seriously think about the search implications (and provide an easy way for the bots to find optimized content.)

The bad news for my client's competitor is that I believe they aren’t aware of the severity of the problem and how badly it’s impacting their natural search traffic. However, the good news for my client is that they know about the problem now, and won’t make the same mistake as their competitor. That’s the power of a competitive analysis. :)

GG

Related Posts:
6 Questions You Should Ask During a Website Redesign To Save Your Search Engine Rankings
The Critical Last Mile for SEO, Your Copywriters, Designers, and Developers

The 4 Pillars of e-Commerce Excellence, Why Amazon.com Has Earned the “First In Mind” Advantage

2009-08-24T14:19:00.020-05:00

When I work on e-Commerce optimization projects, I often take clients through several examples of what I consider to be e-Commerce excellence. While I go through this process, it usually doesn’t take long before I mention Amazon.com. Amazon consistently exceeds my expectations with selection, ease of use, access, security, and customer service. I've written previously about how strong Amazon is, including a post last year about mobile e-Commerce. I explained how Amazon blurred the line between making a purchase via your browser and your mobile device. It's just another example of how Amazon goes above and beyond to ensure customers can access, browse and purchase across devices. So, after placing yet another order with Amazon late last week, I started to think about the reasons I visit Amazon over other e-Commerce websites. I also started to think about how those reasons apply to other websites (and possibly yours).

Here’s a quick, yet important question you should ask yourself (and yes, I understand that every website can’t be like Amazon):

In your industry, are you the knee-jerk reaction for buying online?

It's such a basic question, but can mean the difference between thousands or millions of dollars in revenue… Do customers think of your business first when they need to buy something? For me, Amazon is often the first website that comes to mind, and there are several reasons for this. As I was writing down the core reasons that I buy at Amazon so much versus other websites, I noticed that I was inadvertently listing the pillars of e-Commerce excellence. More on this shortly.

An Impromptu Friday Afternoon e-Commerce Purchase
Last Friday I needed to buy something quickly. I was in between meetings and only had a few minutes. Literally the first business that came to mind was Amazon.com. I could have purchased the item at a number of websites, but Amazon was my knee-jerk reaction. I also could have stopped on my way home, but Friday evening and New Jersey traffic don’t mix well, to say the least. So I opened up a new tab in Firefox, accessed the website, searched for the product, visited the product detail page and added it to my cart. I then quickly checked out and completed the purchase in less than 90 seconds. From an e-Commerce perspective, that's simply outstanding. I closed the tab, received a confirmation email and was back on another conference call. Then, less than two hours later, I received a shipment notification.
{Update: I just received my order on Monday afternoon using standard shipping. Simply outstanding.}

OK, remember the pillars I mentioned above? Let’s take a look at each pillar of e-Commerce excellence and how Amazon has successfully achieved a first-in-mind advantage.

The Pillars of e-Commerce Excellence:

1. Accessibility and Simplicity
Amazon.com makes it easy to access their website across devices. Amazon also makes it simple to find products, read reviews, view product information, check technical specs, find out what other people have purchased, etc. On Amazon, I'm able to visit the site, search for what I need quickly, and view all of the necessary information in order to make a purchase decision. There are no hoops to jump through, and I don’t necessarily need to be in front of my computer to buy something.

2. Speed and Organization
Amazon.com loads fast, provides an easy to navigate organization of categories, which is almost unnecessary based on how good their on-site search is. Amazon’s search functionality enables you to easily search within their main categories. It’s fast and provides outstanding search results. Product detail pages on Amazon provide a thorough breakdown of valuable information. Note, I said thorough and not elegant and I’ll explain more about that soon. As I explained earlier in the post, I can make a purchase in less than 90 seconds. I can always quickly find what I need, add it to my cart and then check out in a flash. My order is always quick to arrive, but that’s included in another pillar below. A quick recap of pillar #2: Fast, fast, fast, and fast. :)

3. Trust and Security
Security is a big concern in e-Commerce, and it will only become a bigger concern as time goes on and technology progresses. For e-Commerce managers, a lack of security and trust can become a horrible barrier to conversion. However, if you can have prospective customers feel confident that their security is first and foremost, then you can reap great rewards revenue-wise. I always feel 100% confident when I’m buying at Amazon. If you put yourself in the mind of a consumer (and not a marketer), you can quickly understand how people browse through sites and what might be a problem conversion-wise. Some questions pop up like “who owns this site?”, “how long have they been around?”, “where are they located?”, “what happens if I need to return something?”, “how secure is this website?” …so on and so forth. The more you build trust, the easier it is for a person to click “Buy now” or “Proceed to Checkout”. Personally, I don’t even think about security when I’m on Amazon. That’s how much trust they have built up with me. I’ll cover my points system later in the post.

4. Communication and Customer Service
I’m not sure there is anything more frustrating than buying something and then having to jump through hoops to track the order, view order information, contact customer service, or return merchandise. It’s definitely a problem with buying online, and rightfully so based on some e-Commerce operations. Amazon makes it easy for customers to find any information they need, from invoices to tracking information to returns. Simply clicking on Your Account brings you to self service screen that enables you to handle a wide range of customer service tasks. Amazon knew this was important, and knew it could also save them money (a lot of money). Amazon empowers customers to handle various account related tasks by themselves. By far, it’s the fastest and most cost-effective way to handle this. Again, they make it easy for me to want to buy from them...

The Self Service Account Screen on Amazon.com:

The Glenn Gabe Virtual Points System
You may not think about it this way, but you probably have a points system too. Every time I deal with a company and have a good experience, they earn virtual points in my mind. During an average experience, no points are awarded. During a negative experience, several points are deducted, and it depends on how serious the problem was to know how many points should be deducted. Over the years, Amazon has earned a mountain of virtual points. In fact, it has earned so many G-Squared points, that it has earned rollover points. That’s right, it means Amazon could actually screw up a few times, and I would probably still go back. And unlike my friends at AT&T, my G-Squared rollover points don’t expire. ;-)

A Quick Tangent About Website Design and Conversion:
For those of you that obsess about ultra-slick web design, head over to Amazon.com now. Amazon is pretty well known for their continual e-Commerce optimization. From a design standpoint, their pages are relatively plain, they are text-heavy, and it seems like images are thrown around the page. But let me tell you, they convert! They provide all of the necessary information in order to convert browsers into buyers. The pages load fast and have valuable segments of information that push you closer and closer to buying. It proves you don't need crazy functionality or a beautiful design to be a leader in e-Commerce. My advice is to optimize for conversion, and not for awards. :)

Strive for e-Commerce Excellence
So yes, Amazon is the proverbial knee-jerk reaction when I need to buy something online. And I’m sure it won’t surprise you to know that Amazon is probably the knee-jerk reaction for thousands of other people too. But they deserve it and have quite a few G-Squared rollover points to play with.

Here are some quick takeaways:

1. In your industry, is your business the knee-jerk reaction for buying online? If not, which company is? What can you do to get closer?

2. How does your business fare when it comes to the four pillars of e-Commerce excellence I listed above? Can you improve any of the areas quickly while developing a plan to tackle the others?

3. Are your customers writing blog posts about your business like the one I just wrote about Amazon.com? How can you get them to become company evangelists?

Now that you know how I feel about Amazon, I’d like to hear about your favorite companies or e-Commerce websites? Why are they your knee-jerk reaction for buying online?

GG

Related Posts:
Mobile e-Commerce, How Amazon.com blurs the line between web and mobile purchase

Your Google Local Business Center Dashboard, Analyzing and Refining Your Google Maps Listing Based on Analytics

2009-08-12T07:32:00.015-05:00

More and more small businesses are realizing the importance of advertising online, including how to maximize their presence in Search. As local businesses get more involved in online marketing, they begin to understand how prospective customers research products and services. Needless to say, many are searching for information online. And, if you offer a product or service they are looking for, it’s obviously important for you to show up for targeted searches. If you don’t rank highly for target keywords, other businesses are...and they are the ones receiving calls (or visits in person).

In addition, there are searches that Google and the other engines deem as “local” in nature. For example, bakery in Princeton, NJ and florist in Miami, FL. Google may provide a 10 pack of local results for searches like this, and it’s important to make sure you show up. Even further, Google recently changed the way it processes requests that it deems local. For example, you often don’t need to put a location to trigger the 10 pack. Google knows your location and provides tailored local results for you. How nice. :)

To learn more about local listings in Google, you can read a previous post of mine about how to set up a Google maps listing in Google Local Business Center. In the post I walk you through what it is and how to set one up. By the way, once you take a hard look at Google’s 10 pack of local listings, it should be no surprise that it attracts a lot of attention. The 10 pack, which sometimes shows less than 10 listings, contains a map with markers showing the location of each business. It’s pretty hard to ignore this on the results page… The 10 pack also pushes down the organic results, which can potentially move your organic listing down the page.

Why Continual Analysis Can Provide Serious Benefits
I've found that many local businesses either don't have a listing or they set one up and check it off their list, never to return to analyze and refine the listing. But hold on a second… businesses should really be asking themselves, “How is that local listing working for me?” I recently had a client make some relatively minor changes based on reporting. These changes ended up having a significant impact on their local rankings and subsequent visits and calls from prospective customers. That’s pretty powerful considering the reporting they analyzed cost them nothing. Yes, $0. I helped my client use data provided to them in their Google Local Business Center Dashboard. You might have heard about this recently, as Google launched it in June of this year. That said, I’m sure some of you reading this post have no idea what it is. That’s ok, since this post is here to provide a thorough overview of your local dashboard, while also giving you some ideas for how to best use the data to attract prospective customers.

The Google Local Business Center Dashboard, Free Analytics for Local Businesses
OK, let’s assume you read my post about setting up your Google maps listing and you are showing up for some targeted searches. That’s great, but do you really know how well that listing is working for your business? Until recently (June 2009), you really didn’t have a lot of insight into the performance of your local listing. Sure, you probably had Google Analytics or another analytics package set up, but that doesn’t specifically give you data about your local listing. Thankfully, Google understood this and did something about it. They rolled out a Local Business Center Dashboard that is basically a scaled down Google Analytics report for your local listing. It provides some important data about how your listing is being triggered, viewed, and accessed. Let’s explore the features below.

The Features of Your Local Dashboard
First, log into Google Local Business Center. You will see your business information, status, and a label for “Statistics”. Under the heading for statistics, you will see a quick view of impressions and actions. Impressions include the number of times your local listing was triggered and viewed as a result of a search on Google or Google Maps. Actions include when someone viewing your listing actually interacted with it. More on this shortly. Click the “View Report” link to access your dashboard.

Google Analytics-like Graphs for Impressions and Actions
The first thing you will see is a timeline at the top of the page showing activity for your listing. The chart breaks down impressions and actions visually by day, over the time period you selected. The default timeframe is the past 30 days, but you can easily change that by using date range selector in the upper right corner and then clicking apply. Right below the timeline, you will see the number of impressions, which again is the number of times your listing is viewed as a result of a search on Google or on Google Maps. Underneath impressions, you will see a breakdown of actions, which is the number of times a user took “action” with your listing. Possible actions include clicks for more information on Google Maps, clicks for driving directions, and clicks to your website. Actions are aggregated in the graph, but actually broken down underneath the graph. Providing this reporting enables you to get a quick snapshot of the performance of your local listing.

What to look for:
You might notice spikes in impressions and actions based on advertising campaigns you have launched. You can identify the most active days of the week or periods of time based on activity. For example, are many people searching for your services on weekends or during the week, right before holidays, or heavily during a specific season? You can also test the effectiveness of the details of your listing. Google provides the ability to edit the details of your local listing, so my recommendation is to test various ways to communicate your business and then view the impact on impressions and actions. For example you can refine your description, specialties, and categories served to determine the optimal combination of elements. Don’t just throw up a local listing without revisiting its performance on a regular basis.

Top Search Queries
Below the breakdown of actions, you will find top search queries that triggered your local listing, along with the number of impressions. Although this isn't a robust list of keywords like you would see in Google Analytics or another analytics package, it still provides important data for you to review. You probably have an idea about the types of keywords that trigger your listing, however, I’ll bet some of the keywords in the list surprise you. It’s just like when I talk about performing keyword research, you should find what people are actually searching for versus what you think they are searching for. Trust data, and not necessarily opinion.

Click the image below to view a larger version:

Are there keywords you never thought about targeting that people are actually searching for? Analyzing even this simple keyword report can help you target the right people locally, based on what they are really looking for. For example, let's say you are a florist focused on wedding arrangements and none of the keywords triggering your listing seem targeted for that niche. You find that most people are searching for gifts or flowers versus a specific type of arrangement. Or, you might find the opposite is true and that people are searching for very specific types of arrangements. Again, you never know until you look. Then you can determine the best path to take with regard to your local listing.

Based on what you find, you should start to think about why your listing is showing up for those searches. Is that because of the type of search being conducted or the information contained in your actual listing? It’s a good question and it is definitely worth analyzing... For example, did you let Google know that you provide organic food at your restaurant? Take the time to analyze the data and make changes to your listing. Don’t miss out on customers. In addition, the data can help you craft new marketing messages, and even possibly how you explain your business in person or via other forms of advertising. Using the example above, are you using the word organic in your advertising, whether that’s on TV, in mailers, at shows or festivals, and when you speak with people in your community. If they are searching for it, you might want to start including it. :)

Know Where Your Customers Are Coming From (Literally)
Underneath top search queries, you will find a list of zip codes, based on where driving direction requests are coming from. To clarify, this is when someone clicks “Directions” or “Get Directions” from your local listing. This data would mean more to a business with a physical location serving local customers and can provide some interesting data. For example, you can see the impact of offline marketing, you can see which areas provide high demand for your products or services, and can help you craft future advertising campaigns. For example, I know some local businesses like to attend town festivals, which enable you to set up a booth. Let’s say you planned to attend four festivals in the fall (at $750 per booth). Your knee jerk reaction might be to set up at festivals that are in close proximity to your business, maybe the four closest towns to your business. However, you might change that strategy based on data you view in your dashboard. Maybe more requests are coming from locations 10-15 minutes away versus 5 minutes away. You actually might pass on the festivals right around your town and target ones that are two or three towns over. Again, you don’t know until you review the data. If you don’t, you could miss opportunities to get in front of more targeted groups of people. This is why I always recommend continual analysis and refinement based on data. It has become a motto here at G-Squared Interactive.

Click the image below to view a larger version:

Go Check Your Local Dashboard Now
So there you have it, an overview of your Local Business Center Dashboard, or what I like to call a scaled down Google Analytics report for your local listing. I would love to see the ability to access more data, but this is still better than flying blind (which is what many businesses were doing beforehand).

Here are some key points to think about after reading this post:
* First, do you have a local listing and are you effectively managing that listing?
* Second, are you reviewing reporting for your listing and making changes based on the data?

Remember, you don’t want to miss an opportunity that’s right around the corner…literally. :)

GG

Related Posts:
How to Set Up Your Google Maps Listing
How to Perform Keyword Research for SEO
The Difference Between Sales and Marketing

Creative Headlines Versus Descriptive Titles - Why Optimized Titles Tags are Still Important for SEO, My Latest Post on Search Engine Journal

2009-07-30T05:46:00.007-05:00

Headlines can be powerful. Chances are you've come across a headline that was so enticing, you just had to learn more. It may have been funny, shocking, intriguing, etc. I think most marketers would agree that strong headlines can help drive a surge in short term traffic, while also being extremely memorable. However, I’m also sure that most SEO’s (including myself) would agree that those very headlines could risk poor search engine rankings, which means a potential loss of long term, quality traffic from organic search. And when Search can be a majority of a website’s traffic, it’s hard to ignore the power of high rankings.

SEO and Shoe-Throwing Incidents
There are times that I work with a client’s editorial staff to explain SEO, including keyword research, content optimization, the power of inbound links, etc. I find that many writers are interested in SEO, since they obviously want their articles and posts found via search engines. However, it's not uncommon to have a shoe fly by my head when I explain that clever and creative headlines are not optimal for SEO! As I explained in my guest post on Search Engine Journal, if I’m lucky, the shoe is thrown by someone with poor accuracy or small feet. :) Once the bombardment stops, I often start to conduct searches to show the impact of optimized headlines and titles (based on a client’s industry and focus). If you’ve read my previous blog posts, then you know I’m a big fan of backing your recommendations based on data and not opinion. I find that data is hard to ignore.

My SEO Headline Test
Based on my work with copywriters and editors, I decided to run even more tests and write a post detailing my findings. So, I conducted searches on a number of topics and checked Google, Yahoo, and Bing to determine how many of the top listings included titles that would be considered creative or clever. Then I reversed it, and checked posts and articles that I knew used clever or creative headlines to see where they ranked in natural search.

To view the results of my test, you’ll have to read my post on Search Engine Journal titled Great Headline, Poor Rankings – Why Clever Headlines Don’t Beat Optimized Title Tags for SEO

Feel free to post a comment on Search Engine Journal or here on my blog if you have any questions or thoughts about the topic.

GG

New Features in Keyword Discovery - Also Searched, Successful Search, Core Search Engine Information, and Competitors Search

2009-07-21T09:17:00.010-05:00

If you’ve read some of my previous posts about SEO, then you know how important I think keyword research is. When you break it down, it’s risky to base decisions on what you think people are searching for versus analyzing the actual data. Once you perform keyword research, it can be used to optimize your current content, or more importantly, to help generate ideas for new content.

Needless to say, I’m neck deep in keyword research on a regular basis. Although I’ve used several tools to perform keyword research for my clients, I believe Keyword Discovery by Trellian is the industry leader. As new features are added to the product, I plan to cover them here on my blog in detail. In case you are interested, I’ve written several posts in the past about the importance of keyword research and some overlooked features in Keyword Discovery. After reading this post, you might want to also check them out.

New Features, Better Analysis
I’m going to cover four new features in this post that have been greatly helpful as I work on SEO projects. I’m a firm believer that you need to conduct a thorough analysis of your keywords versus just checking query volume. Trellian obviously understands this too, as they keep adding valuable features that make it a powerful analysis tool for search marketers. These new features help provide important pieces of information so you can make educated decisions about which keywords to target.

The four new features I will cover are:
* Also Searched Queries
* Successful Searches
* Analyze Information from Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and Ask
* Competitors Search

Without further ado, let’s jump in.

1. Also Searched Queries
I love this feature. Have you ever wanted to know which other keywords people are searching for based on an initial keyword? This feature displays “also searched queries” as you search for keywords in the application (along with search volume.) So, if you enter “mens shoes” as the keyword, Keyword Discovery will show you other keywords that were searched for by the same users that searched for mens shoes. You actually know that the same users were searching for these additional keywords… In addition, the order of the results is based on user frequency (and not by pure number of searches in the database). This lets you see which keywords were most often searched by the same users versus just seeing volume numbers.

Click the image below to see a larger version:

So, you can see that people searching for mens shoes are also searching for footwear, mens jeans, mens shirts, etc. You can also see specific retailers they are searching for. All of this data can help you make informed decisions about which keywords to target, as well as which additional keywords you might want to optimize for.

2. Successful Search Score
This is an important metric when analyzing keywords. Successful Search Score essentially tells you the percentage of people that clicked through a search result after searching for a keyword. It gives you a good feel for the keywords that actually generate a click through.

Below you will see a list of 13 keywords based on a search for mens shoes. You can clearly see how certain keywords generate a much higher click through. This metric should be part of your own decision making process for which keywords to target. It’s obviously not the only metric to consider, but when combined with other metrics that KD offers, it can help you determine which keywords to focus on.

3. Now You Can Analyze Data From Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and Ask
After adding keywords to one of your projects, Keyword Discovery enables you to analyze those keywords to view a number of key metrics. For example, you can see the number of searches in the database, successful searches (mentioned above), the number of results in each engine for that keyword, and the KEI (or Keyword Effectiveness Index). Keyword Discovery recently broke down this information by core search engine, including Google, Yahoo, MSN/Bing, and Ask. Having all of this information at your fingertips enables you to analyze keywords across the core engines, in order to make smart decisions about which keywords to target. This data helps you understand how competitive each keyword is so you can target the right keywords for the task at hand.

Click the image below to see a larger version:

4. Competitors Feature
Checking this box when conducting a search in Keyword Discovery will display the top websites receiving search engine traffic for that keyword. There are some great competitive analysis tools on the market, and I use several of them on a regular basis, but it’s great to have some base level data at your fingertips while performing keyword research. For example, I entered mens shoes in KD and it displayed the top 100 sites receiving search engine traffic for that keyword (based on Trellian’s Competitive Analysis User Path Data). Your list might start with some obvious players, but as you scan down the results you might find some interesting competitors. And, you can use the results to start performing a deeper competitive analysis.

Click the image below to see a larger version:

This won’t be my last post about keyword research or Keyword Discovery…
So there you have it. Four new features in Keyword Discovery that can help you select the right keywords for the project at hand. I plan to write more about KD in the future as Trellian adds more features. Actually, there are some features that warrant an entire blog post, so look for more posts in the near future!

I’ll end this post with a Glenn Gabe public service announcement:

Please don’t base your SEO efforts on opinion. Perform extensive keyword research and have that research fuel your projects. A keyword is a terrible thing to waste. :)

GG

Social Networking Trends: Are People 55 and Older on Facebook?

2009-06-30T08:47:00.000-05:00

Social networking is booming and Facebook is getting a lot of the press. Everyone seems to be friending, tagging, poking, and grabbing their vanity URL’s, including your grandparents. Wait, did I say grandparents? Some recent Facebook research revealed that the fastest growing demographic on the social networking site is women that are 55 and older (with men 55 and older not far behind.) Initially that sounded great, and I was excited to see the data, but then more information was revealed. The new data showed that although people 55 and older were signing up for Facebook, they weren’t returning to the site. Unfortunately, this made more sense to me and intrigued me...

So I decided to find out for myself. I crafted a quick Facebook survey and sent it out to my network of friends and family. I wanted to see if people 55 and older were on Facebook, if they liked it, how they used it, and if they planned to join additional social networks. To see the responses to my survey, along with my analysis, you’ll have to read my post on Search Engine Journal (listed below).

After reading my post, feel free to post a comment on SEJ or back here on my blog. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Facebook or Just Face-Look? Are People 55 And Older Really Using Social Networking Websites?

GG

How To Create A Google News Sitemap and Submit It Via Google Webmaster Tools

2009-06-11T07:09:00.011-05:00

As Twitter and Facebook boom, the need for real-time search grows more important. When people want information about breaking news, they Google it. It’s their initial reaction... And if you're not there, you might as well not exist (even if you have the greatest article on the web about the subject at hand.) So, when I’m analyzing websites that contain articles and posts that could be considered news, I'm obviously interested in seeing the amount of traffic coming from sites like Google News. After checking referring traffic levels, top content, and trending, I check to see if a Google News sitemap exists. I’ve always been a believer that if Google provides a way to send it structured data with additional information about your posts and articles, you should use it (period!) Unfortunately, many site owners don’t take the time to set up a Google News sitemap. I think it sounds harder to do than it really is, so they just brush it off. As you probably can guess, I think that’s a bad idea. :)

Google News Being More Than Google News…
When searching for a hot topic, some people head straight to Google News, however, many simply search on Google’s homepage or via their Google Toolbar. The way your listing shows up will vary depending on where the user searches. For example, thanks to Universal Search, news content is being mixed into the organic listings for targeted queries. For example, you might see a thumbnail and headline in a Google News one box at the top of the search results. See the screenshots below for a few examples.

I’ve found that news content ranking in the organic listings can be a powerful driver of highly targeted search traffic (for obvious reasons). By the way, having your listing show up in the SERPs (with associated thumbnail) substantially increases your chances of click-through. Check the latest Google heatmap study to see the effect of Universal Search on user behavior if you don’t believe me. :) It also provides a great opportunity to gain valuable readers and subscribers, since you might be viewed as an authority site by visitors (since you rank highly in Google News.) Don't underestimate how powerful top rankings can be credibility-wise.

So, how do you make sure Google has the necessary information about your latest articles, posts, and content so you can have a chance of ranking in Google News (and as part of Universal Search)? One way is to provide a Google News sitemap. Let’s dig deeper.

What is a Google News Sitemap?
In a nutshell, a Google News sitemap is an xml feed that enables you to tell Google about your latest content, including information like publication date and news tags or keywords. In addition, as part of the keywords you provide, you can include Google News categories. You might already be familiar with xml sitemaps, or the xml feeds you provide Google and the other search engines that contain all the URL's on your site. Google News sitemaps are similar, just tailored for news-related content. Note, Google requires that the information contained in the sitemap is less than three days old, so you wouldn't want to provide a running list of URL's in the feed. Instead, you would want to make sure your latest posts and stories are included. For example, if you provide the latest in electronics or search engine marketing or celebrity news, then a Google News sitemap containing your latest articles would be a smart feed to employ.

What Information Should You Provide In A Google News Sitemap?
You should create a Google News sitemap using the sitemap protocol (which is what you are probably using to create your standard xml sitemap). The core elements of a news sitemap include the namespace/URLset tag, your list of URL’s, publication date of each URL in W3C format, and optional news tags (which can include Google News categories). There's no limit to the number of keywords you can provide, but Google recommends you keep them fewer than 12. Click here to see a full listing of all categories used by Google News.

A Quick Example of a Google News Sitemap:
Let’s say I ran a website covering the latest in baseball. To keep this example simple, here is what my Google News sitemap would look like if it contained two new articles: (Can you tell I'm optimistic about the Yankees this year?)

Click the image below to view a larger version:

Submitting Your Google News Sitemap
Once you create your Google News sitemap, you should submit it via Google Webmaster Tools. Note, webmaster tools was just updated (June 10, 2009), and now you can find the sitemaps tab by clicking the plus sign next to Site Configuration (the first listing in the left navigation). First, upload your sitemap to your website (in the root directory of your website). Then submit your sitemap via webmaster tools by entering its location in the text box once you click the sitemaps tab.

Including a Reference to Your Sitemap or Sitemap Index File in Robots.Txt
You would also want to include a reference to your sitemap in your robots.txt file. If you have more than one sitemap, then use a sitemap index file, which can contain references to up to 1000 sitemaps (although you will probably never come close to that number). In addition, each news sitemap should not contain more than 1000 URL's. If your sitemap contains URL's older than 3 days, they will be rejected. If you have more than 1000 URL’s for your news sitemap, break them into separate sitemap files.

Here is what you would enter in your robots.txt file on a new line. Note, you would either enter the location to the sitemap file itself or the sitemap index file, which would reference several sitemap files.

Sitemap: {sitemap_location}

Google Webmaster Tools and Error Messages
Be sure to monitor your news sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools to view any errors being encountered by Google. Google will notify you and provide the exact error message, which can be extremely helpful. There are a number of errors that can occur, such as date not found, date too old, empty article, etc. You can find a full list of Google News sitemap errors here.

Moving Forward With Your Google News Sitemap
Based on what I’ve explained above, my hope is that you are ready to create your own Google News sitemap. It’s relatively straight forward to create and submit and can help you notify Google of all the news-related content hitting your website(s). In addition, if you automate the creation of your Google News sitemap, then it can work for you without having to dedicate any additional resources to it… It’s one of the projects I often recommend knocking out before other, more time-consuming SEO projects. Good luck and stop back and let me know how it worked out for you. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

GG

Twitter Account Ownership, A Legal Overview of Who Owns Your Twitter Account

2009-05-29T07:21:00.006-05:00

Twitter is all the rage now. You can’t go anywhere without hearing about the microblogging service that’s growing like a weed. You hear about on the news, at work, your kids are talking about, and even Oprah has taken the plunge and started an account, which now has over 1.2 million followers by the way (although don’t get me started on how she’s using it).

I ended up reading an article on BusinessWeek.com last week that presented the results of a survey of c-level executives regarding employees and social networks. According to the survey from Deloitte, 60% of c-level executives interviewed believe they have a right to know how their employees represent themselves and their companies on social networking sites. However, 53% of employees surveyed believe their activities on social networking sites should be of no concern to employers. This is a new frontier for both executives and employees and you can tell this subject hits a nerve for both groups. So, as I’ve been helping companies develop social media strategies that involve Twitter, there’s one question that keeps coming up. “Who own the Twitter account?” That question typically comes from the executives I’m helping… as employees focus on other topics like how to set up a Twitter account, how to build followers, what to tweet, and Twitter etiquette. Executives know all too well that Twitter account ownership could be a messy situation (legally).

Now, I have my opinions about who owns your Twitter account, but I also wanted to understand the legal implications of various Twitter scenarios. That’s when I called Mike Pisauro, from Frascella and Pisauro. Mike heavily focuses on business law in Princeton, NJ. I mapped out five scenarios and asked Mike to analyze each one from a legal perspective. Walking through this exercise ended up yielding my latest blog post on Search Engine Journal, titled Lawyers, Guns, and Twitter – Who Owns Your Twitter Account. Mike provided some great insight, but to be honest, I wasn't thrilled with some of his responses! :)

In order to read my analysis of each scenario and then Mike’s legal analysis, you’ll have to visit my post on SEJ! Be sure to read the comments, and feel free to add your own. This is such a new subject, that there’s no clear answer at this point. We’re all just trying to make sense of it.

GG

Killer Content, A Loyal Community, The Twitter Effect, and Its Impact on SEO

2009-05-14T08:20:00.006-05:00

How's that for a title? I witnessed a pretty amazing thing last week from an online marketing perspective. I love finding dynamic examples of how the social web works, especially when it unfolds right in front of your eyes over just a few hours. What I experienced last week was an outstanding example of how great content, a loyal following, respect in the industry, and SEO all tie together. It's kind of like the perfect storm, but in a good way.

Organic Linkbuilding
First, I'm a believer that your best linkbuilding comes naturally. If you create killer content that provides value to your readers and visitors, you often will end up generating high quality links. In my experience, I've seen a direct relationship between the time and care you take to create content and the impact that content has from a linkbuilding standpoint. For example, I've developed content that took a relatively long time to create (days to write and sometimes weeks to research), but based on the popularity of that content, the buzz it generated, the targeted traffic, and subsequent inbound links, it was well worth the time. Compare that to content developed or written quickly, with little or no thought put in, provides little value, and subsequently has no impact. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Are you going to link to a quick post that provides no value and no original content? Probably not, right? But you might link to a post that greatly helps your efforts (for whatever you are trying to achieve).

How it Unfolded
So let's get back to what happened last week? Here's the deal. I watched an editor break a story on a website (providing killer content), I saw that content go viral on Twitter (due to a loyal following), then it got picked up by a popular industry website (due to respect in the industry), and then I saw that content go on to generate over 22,000 inbound links in a matter of days. I saw how the content ranked in just hours in Google (due to Query Deserves Freshness QDF), and then how it ended up ranking for dozens of competitive keywords in a short period of time. That's darn powerful.

Let's break down what happened and its impact:

1. Content
The content was great (a scoop), and probably wasn't easy to come by. But providing valuable content (in this case breaking news), is only part of the equation. That news could have easily led to little traffic, no links, and no rankings, right? Everyone has heard about sites getting their scoops ripped off. That's a good segue...

2. Loyal Community
Enter the next important part of the equation. If you're publishing to a black hole, who cares about what you write. But, if you've built up a serious following, earned respect, and engage your community, then amazing things can happen. In this case, community members starting tweeting, then retweeting, and more retweeting. You get the picture. I scrolled through pages and pages of tweets linking to the story. For people that think Twitter provides no value, please read this section again. :)

3. Respect in the Industry
Ah, the point at which things can take a different path. What happens if people try to steal your scoop? For example, they find out the breaking news from you and then post their own version of it, essentially watering down your impact. I don't care who you are, that's a horrible feeling and happens more than you think. But, if you've gained the respect of your peers (even beyond your community), you might see an interesting effect, like what I saw last week. A major industry website wrote an article about the breaking news and linked to the scoop I mentioned earlier. A “hat tip”, so to speak. That hat tip ended up being the top referring source for a few days. Again, powerful (and a great link for SEO too.)

4. SEO Power
The culmination of what I listed above was 22,588 inbound links, including links from some powerful websites in the industry. Inbound links are the lifeblood of SEO, so gaining thousands of them from relevant and powerful sites is a good thing. :) This article generated quality links, and a lot of them. This resulted in top rankings for competitive keywords around the subject matter. Right now, the site ranks for dozens of keywords related to the subject of the article. And, that was after just a few days.

Also, I mentioned Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) earlier. That's a part of Google's algorithm that determines when a query requests information about breaking news and which listings to provide that reference the breaking news. Google determines this by monitoring the activity around a given subject. The content Google provides in the SERPs may be new blog posts or stories from trusted sites that don't have any inbound links yet (or are in the process of increasing inbound links). The site I was monitoring is definitely a trusted site in the industry, and benefited from QDF. In case you want to learn more, Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz provides a video explaining the ins and outs of QDF. As usual, Rand does a great job explaining how it works.

Let's summarize what happened:
So, after just a few days the article ended up being one of the most popular pages traffic-wise, it generated quality visitors, and incredible rankings in organic search. It's a great example of how the social web works and its connection to SEO. A quick side note, the page wasn't perfectly optimized for SEO, but it still ranks like mad. I think it shows which SEO factors are most important, right? (cough, quality inbound links) I can only imagine what the page would rank for if it was well optimized! :)

So, have you witnessed something like this? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

GG

The Domino’s YouTube Video and the Ripple Effect on Fast Food Restaurants

2009-04-30T05:28:00.006-05:00

My guess is that you’ve heard about the appalling Domino's YouTube video by now. It’s the one featuring two employees performing some disgusting acts to ingredients as they prepare orders for customers. For example, one employee sticks pieces of cheese up his nose while making a sandwich with that very cheese. And if you watch the video, it only goes downhill from there. The employees then decided to upload the video to YouTube for the entire world to see. You know, because nobody visits YouTube, so they probably wouldn't get in trouble, right? :) The videos (which I won’t link to from this post) went viral, which ignited a PR firestorm for Domino’s on a massive scale. Patrick Doyle, the President of Domino’s, released his own YouTube video explaining more about the situation, but the damage had been done. The two employees have been charged with felonies for food tampering, and I believe Domino’s is considering filing a civil suit against them (although what could you really get other than a moral victory.)

I've been asked at least one hundred times over the past few weeks what I think the impact will be on the Domino's brand? Will the incident impact sales? How long before people forget about it? Is it already over? These are all great questions, but I unfortunately don't have a crystal ball. That said, you don't have a to be a Harvard MBA to know this will impact sales, it has tarnished the brand, and it will ultimately lead to poor business results (at least in the short term). And yes, this was all done by two people (jerks) who are now learning a hard lesson...but unfortunately at the expense of Domino's.

Becoming Part of the Domino’s Case Study
Let’s see how an incident like this really impacts a brand and a business. It's one thing to project how this will impact sales, the brand, etc. and it's another thing to become part of the case study. Last Thursday I ended up taking a later train home from New York and knew I wouldn’t have much time to make dinner. As I was ready to get off my train, I decided that I would quickly pick something up on my way home. I got off the train and knew there were a few fast food restaurants right by the train station. This is where it got interesting.

As recently as a few weeks ago, I would have no problem making a quick stop at one of the fast food restaurants to pick up some dinner. But this time was different. The first thought that hit me was of the two Domino’s employees messing with the food they were preparing. I feel horrible saying that, but that image was simply the first thing that came to mind. I could not for the life of me get that image out of my head. As I walked to my car, I couldn’t get over it. That's when I pulled out my Blackberry and ended up ordering a much more expensive dinner from a restaurant in my area (even though I knew that I would have to wait 20-30 minutes to pick it up.) Yes, I decided to spend four times the amount of money and wait an extra 20-30 minutes in order to avoid fast food restaurants. As I waited for my food at the restaurant, I started to think about how many other people this might have happened to. How many people were about to order from Domino’s, stop off at Taco Bell, visit a Burger King, and then thought of the infamous Domino’s YouTube video? How much revenue has Domino’s lost? And beyond Domino’s, how much revenue is being lost by the fast food category based on what happened? I believe there is a ripple effect from the Domino’s incident.

Could It Happen Anywhere?
Listen, I'm not naive enough to think that more expensive restaurants are free from food tampering. But, I did work in restaurants growing up and I know what an Executive Chef is like... Most are fanatical about their kitchen and their reputation. They run a tight ship and would probably physically harm anyone on their staff that pulled the sort of stunt that the two Domino’s employees pulled. So, when I thought about where to buy my dinner, I went with the higher end restaurant with the Executive Chef who would saute any person who thinks it’s funny to stick cheese up his nose and use it while preparing a dinner (or worse). I’m sorry Domino’s, I really am, but I'm not sure I can get over this so quickly...

How Many Glenn's Are Out There And How Much Money Is Being Lost?
Let’s say there were 50,000 people in the United States like me who decided to bypass fast food restaurants for lunch or dinner. Next, let’s estimate that they would have spent ~$25 per month. That’s probably a few meals at a fast food restaurant.

50,000 people x $25 per month x 12 months would be $15 million in lost revenue per year.

That’s a lot of dough, no pun intended. So the two ex-Domino’s employees could be responsible for approximately $15 million dollars in lost revenue annually. And that doesn’t take into account the damage to the brand… Amazing, isn’t it?

In closing, I feel horrible for Domino’s. They don’t deserve this. In addition, I’m not sure their competitors are benefiting either… If there are others like me, and I’m sure there are, they are running for the hills when thinking about fast food. Personally, I’d rather dish out more money and wait on longer lines to ensure I have an Executive Chef overseeing the preparation of my dinner. How about you?

Post a quick comment below and let me know.

GG

What To Do When You've Been Labeled An Attack Site By Google, My Guest Post About Malware on Search Engine Journal

2009-04-23T07:09:00.004-05:00

Imagine you wake up one morning and notice a significant drop in traffic to your website. You dig deeper in your analytics package and notice that search traffic from Google is down (as part of the larger overall drop). You start checking rankings for keywords that drive a lot of traffic to your site and notice that you still are ranking…but there’s a slight addition to your listing in the SERPs:

“This site may harm your computer.”

Yes, Google has labeled you as an attack site! It gets worse, though. When you are identified as an attack site that contains malware, Firefox 3.x users will be redirected to an interstitial page warning them about your site. Not good, right? Between the new line in your search listing, an interstitial page presented by Google, and another presented by Firefox, you can experience a serious negative impact on your traffic levels (and revenue levels.)

Needless to say, you would want to tackle the problem quickly and efficiently. But where do you start? Well, that’s the focus of my guest post on Search Engine Journal, which went live yesterday. To learn more about the attack site situation, including steps to resolve the problem, you’ll have to visit my post on SEJ! :)

My guest post:
Yes, You’re An Attack Site That Contains Malware, Now Here’s What To Do About It

If you have dealt with attack site or malware situations, please post a comment either here or on my post on Search Engine Journal. I’d love to hear how you handled the problem and how you cleared your website’s name!

GG

YouTube Ranking Factors: Additional Factors That Can Increase Your Rankings, My Guest Post on ReelSEO

2009-04-14T19:41:00.008-05:00

As some of you know, I covered Search Engine Strategies New York (SES NY) a few weeks ago via twitter and blogging. Each year, one of my favorite sessions at SES is Video SEO. Since I have a lot of experience with video seo projects, I enjoy hearing from the panelists and comparing their advice to my own findings. This year, Greg Markel from Infuse Creative focused on YouTube ranking factors. Greg knows his stuff and his past presentations were top notch. This year was no different. In addition, Matthew Liu from YouTube was part of the session, so it was interesting to watch Matthew's reaction as Greg made his case. :)

Going beyond views, titles, and tags...
Whenever you discuss optimizing YouTube videos, most people think about titles, descriptions and tags. But as Greg pointed out, that's only part of the equation. There are many other factors that can impact your rankings on YouTube, including several community factors. This actually makes complete sense when you break it down. For example, views, ratings, comments, channel views, subscribers, age of video, inbound links, etc. Needless to say, this intrigued me...

So based on Greg's presentation and my obsession with testing everything in online marketing, I decided to take a closer look at the factors that contribute to YouTube rankings. That's when I decided to visit YouTube and conduct some research. To learn what I found, you'll have to hop over to ReelSEO and read my guest post! :) The only thing I'll say here is that I believe Greg is on to something...

GG

PS I'd love to hear your feedback. How are your YouTube videos ranking? Have you analyzed your competition on YouTube? Definitely feel free to post a comment on ReelSEO or just post it here. Now check out my guest post! :)

Hacked Gmail Accounts: What To Do If Your Gmail Account Is Compromised By Hackers

2009-04-01T00:32:00.003-05:00

The morning of March 2nd started out fairly normally. I moved quickly to get ready and jumped on my computer to check email, twitter, my feeds, etc. So I launched Outlook and happened to see an email from one of my good friends Matt Leonard (or @mjleonard if you are on Twitter). He's a great guy and a smart marketer so we're in touch often. The email was sent from Matt's gmail account and the subject line communicated the urgency of his message.

Apparently, Matt flew to Nigeria the night before to attend the Tinapa Opening Ceremony. {???} He ended up staying at a hotel, which was attacked by armed robbers. {OK...} They took all of his money and his wallet. {???} His email explained that he needed money badly, to the tune of $1500 so he could settle his hotel bill. {LOL} He seemed very scared and he emphasized that he needed the money sent as soon as possible. As you can imagine, I was genuinely concerned for Matt... {sarcasm}

Yes, Matt's gmail account had been hacked and I'm sure many people received the same email I did. Here was the original email:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: *****URGENT REPLY NEEDED *********

Hello I am in a hurry writing this message, I had a trip to West Africa *NIGERIA* on visiting the TINAPA OPENING CEREMONY, Unfortunately for me all my money got stolen at the hotel where i lodged from the attack of some armed robbers.Right now,I'm without money and I'm even owing the hotel here, the hotel telephone service is disconnected,i have only access to emails,my mobile phone can't work here so i didn't bring it along, please can you lend me $1500 so i can return back and settle the hotel bills i would return it back to you as soon as i get home, I am so confused right now.You can have it sent through western union money transfer. My passport is with the Embassy here so i cant use my name to collect it now, But you can have it sent directly to a western union Manager here and i would get it through him as he helps the people here in the hotel to receive the money, I have already spoken to him, please let me hear from you so i can collect his full name and address where you can send the money tomorrow please,or if possible today. I am waiting for your reply.

Thank you. I look forward to your positive response.

Regards.

-----------------

OK, this was absolutely ridiculous, but being the good friend I am, I still wanted to reach out to Matt as soon as possible to let him know what was going on. I was pretty confident he didn't know yet. Now, I didn’t know if his actual account was taken over. I simply thought that someone was blasting out emails using his address as the sender. There’s a difference between the two. So, I created a new email (which was sent to his gmail account) informing him that his email address had been compromised. Unfortunately, that was the only email address I had for Matt...

It was a brief email that looked like this:

--------------------------

Hi Matt.

I just received a spam email from your gmail acct. Not sure if it's
widespread or not, but wanted to let you know.

It was one of those Nigerian schemes.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Glenn

-----------------------

It was only a few minutes when I received an email back from Matt. My guess was that he wanted to quickly thank me for notifying him of the scam. I opened the email and was shocked to see that the original email from Matt wasn't a joke! Matt was in fact in Nigeria at a hotel and needed money. {sarcasm yet again}

You see, “Matt” actually responded to my email!

Holy smokes, the scammers who hacked Matt's gmail were answering emails right from his account! I'll admit it, that creeped me out. Read their response to my email below:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: Re: Email Spam
To: Glenn Gabe

Hello,

Its not a scam mail, i am really there now. i need you to help me with $1500, i shall pay you as soon as a i return. i hope to read from you asap. below is the info where the money will be sent to....

------------------

So, I direct messaged Matt via Twitter notifying him of the hack, this time using only 140 characters or less. :) Before long, I received a DM back from Matt that he was handling the situation. He thanked me, and got back to fixing the problem. So, after Matt recovered his gmail account (and after he got pummeled by jokes on Twitter), I asked him about the steps he took to recover his gmail account.

After this happened to Matt, I asked myself if I would know what to do... I really didn't. I'm sure I would eventually figure it out, but I didn't know the exact steps. So with Matt's assistance, I decided to write this post to document the steps you should take to recover your gmail account after it has been compromised.

So in Matt’s own words, here’s how to handle the situation:

The process was pretty simple.

First, from the Gmail login page, select "I can not access my account".

Second, select the radio button "My account has been compromised". This will show a new prompt below "Please fill out our account recovery form to help us process your request as quickly as possible". Follow that link.

From the Account Recovery page, select "I believe someone has taken over my account" and fill out as much information as possible.

In my case, Google had contacted me pretty quickly via my alternate email with instructions to reset my password. {Glenn: Make sure your alternate email is active. You can check this from your Google account settings. You can also add additional email addresses just in case.}

Some other useful notes from Matt:
I'm not sure how someone hacked my gmail account. I did make a mistake by using the same password on way too many things. My main passwords are now individually unique. Passwords I set up for vendor accounts are no longer the same as I would use for other more sensitive services, like online banking.

Matt’s Tips to Protect to Your Logins:
1. Avoid unsecured networks
2. Don't use the same password everywhere.
3. Don't duplicate your email password with any login elsewhere (if you do, someone can use your email to login to your other accounts).
4. Change passwords periodically.
5. Don't share your passwords with anyone. Even if they're not going to abuse it, they may not store it properly.
6. Know where you enter passwords. 3rd party Twitter apps that require passwords are a perfect example of sites that people will enter their password without much familiarity aside from a tweet referral.

--------------------

So there you have it. If you wake up one morning and everyone is asking how and why you checked into a Nigerian Hotel, forgot your wallet, ran up a $1500 bill, and now need money, you'll know how to handle it. :) And definitely feel free to connect with Matt on Twitter. It's ok to joke around with him about the situation. He's a nice guy and has handled the jokes with grace. But don't go too far, he can bench press 375 pounds and used to be a minor league hockey player. ;-)

GG

Recapping Day One at SES NY, Key Points (Tweets) From Each Session

2009-03-25T05:27:00.011-05:00

Day one at SES NY was fast and furious. I attended some some great sessions and I also made my first pass through the expo. One thing was definitely clear, there's a lot of talk about social with search and search with social. :) This isn't news for many people in the industry, but when the keynote for a search conference is all about Twitter, you know search and social are seriously overlapping!

I've been tweeting as much as possible from each session, and it seems to be valuable for many of the people following my updates. So, I decided to take some of the key points from day one and include them as bullets below. To keep up with day two and three, definitely follow me on twitter! Without further ado, here are some key points from each session I attended on day one.

Keynote from Guy Kawasaki: (Twitter as a Tool for Social Media)

* Nobodies are the new somebodies. It doesn't matter who you are, you can be noticed and build up a following on Twitter.
* Guy highly recommends the auto-dm, or automatically following someone back when they follow you. Glenn: I disagree, but he's got 91K followers! :)
* He wants people to reply (@) or direct message (DM) him, which reinforces his point for auto-dm's (In order to direct message someone, they need to be following you.)
* The retweet (RT) is his key metric. That's when someone passes along your tweet to their followers and gives you credit. He battles mashable every day. :)
* Guy uses some interesting methods for getting tweets out to a targeted audience. Some might even consider it spam... :)
* Use advanced commands in twitter search to find tweets at a granular level.
* Use Tweetdeck or Twhirl to manage your twitter accounts. Twhirl enables him to manage two accounts simultaneously. Tweetdeck doesn't, but tweetdeck has some outstanding features for filtering updates. Sounds like the two need to merge. :)
* You need to squeeze the trigger on twitter and "go". If you don't, you are missing a huge opportunity.
* You need to be able to take the heat on twitter. He created a new acronym UFM. If you don't like what I say? Unfollow me! Glenn: I like his philosophy.

Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers

* You need to track rankings, traffic, conversions, sales, and repeat visitors. Many companies will need to customize their web analytics setup. Great point by @seocatfish
* Don't forget about Universal Search, opportunities for images, video, shopping, local, etc. Don't just focus on text listings as success (more on this later).
* Understand the difference between brand terms, non brand terms, head terms, long tail terms, etc.
* Track microconversions to better understand which keywords and categories work for your business.
* Ensure your analytics package is set up correctly. Don't take the data at face value. Ensure it's accurate or you can base future changes on bad data. Glenn: that last line is from me. :)
* Seth Besmertnik from Conductor says SEO spend is too low at companies. Glenn: I like him already.
* Fortune 500 companies are doing a terrible job at seo, based on their recently released study.
* Lack of predicting and forecasting is hurting seo...marketers are confused by it.
* What's your SEO opportunity? Try this: overall target keyword volume x ctr x conversion rate x avg sale.
* Sales attribution is a big problem. Last click is not good enough.
* Metrics bridge the gap between seo and your company.

Key Points to Launching a Global Website: (Note, I interviewed Motoko Hunt a few weeks ago about international SEO.)

* Don't disregard traffic to websites outside of the US.
* Run ranking reports in local markets (versus just focusing on US-based data).
* Although your website might rank well here in the US, it may not rank at all in country-specific search engines.
* Several factors contribute to how you rank in local search engines, including hosting, ccTLDs, inbound links, etc. Just throwing a copy of your website up might not work...
* You need strong local market teams (which can be a challenge if you aren't familiar with consultants and agencies in the region.)
* Understand seasonal trends FOR THE COUNTRY YOU ARE TARGETING. If you focus on US seasonal trends, you can lose opportunities.
* Keyword research is critical and make sure your local teams are heavily involved and driving that research (including translation).
* Yes, localizing content takes money and resources.
* You can use Google Webmaster Tools to geo-target directories on your website. This is an alternative to using ccTLD's.

Universal and Blended Search:

* With Universal Search, you need to think beyond just text. Think images, video, shopping, news, blog posts, etc.
* Pay attention to what currently ranks in vertical search for your target keywords. That content may very well end up in the blended results. It also gives you ideas for targeting universal search for your company or clients.
* Some good examples include searching for Oscars or March Madness (Glenn: those were the Live Search examples). Also, search for Rihanna in Yahoo.
* Yahoo: Take advantage of Search Monkey to have greater control of what's displayed in the SERPs. Yahoo has streamlined the process for developers so it's easier to use and implement. (Glenn: this is definitely worth checking out and trying.)
* Ask.com is blending the Q&A channel into the search results (good idea if you have content that answers direct questions. (i.e. FAQ content on your website).
* Vic Drabicky from Range: Now, search people are not just the text dorks sitting in a corner. Search now includes YouTube, Flickr, blogging, Facebook, etc.
* There's a lot you can learn from Kate Moss, who hired an online reputation management company. Vic recommends that you start doing some searches to check out what ranks for Kate...
* Consensus: There needs to be better tracking of universal search results so marketers understand how visitors interacted with the results and how that impacted conversion.

Video SEO:

* 72% of searches on YouTube are music related. (Glenn: if you watch how teenagers interact with YouTube, you can see why so many use it... it's their knee-jerk reaction for listening to music.)
* YouTube optimization: the basics include optimizing your text based on keyword research. That includes the title, description, and tags.
* Use the full space you have in YouTube for your description. Too many people overlook this and write a one liner...
* TubeMogul can help you distribute your video to many video sharing websites.
* No matter who you are, you can produce your own YouTube videos. (Glenn: I agree, but it's not ultra-easy to produce quality video content. Test it out and seek assistance, if needed.)
* You can add your videos to the local listings via Google Local Business Center. Glenn: This is commonly overlooked by small businesses.
* YouTube ranking factors include keywords, tags, ratings, view counts, channel views, playlists, flagging, embeds, comments, age, etc.
* Use YouTube's search suggestion feature for keyword research. (Glenn: I also recommend this, and have used this for my own projects.)
* Community factors are important for ranking in YouTube. Analyze your competition in YouTube and meet or beat their statistics.
* Attention span for video is increasing (~4 minutes up from ~2 minutes). Professional video could be playing a factor in the increase.
* Matthew Liu from Google: YouTube has hundreds of millions of users per month. It's the fourth largest web property and every minute over 15 hours of video is uploaded.
* Don't keyword stuff in YouTube. You will be penalized. Glenn: Hey readers, that's right from Google. :)
* Share videos with other members, experiment with annotations, and avoid spamming people.
* Utilize YouTube Insight to optimize your video content based on analytics. Weezer used Insight to analyze their music video Pork and Beans. They noticed their demographic was older, male, and heavily viewed videos via embed. They now tailor campaigns, based on that data.

Again, the sessions on day one provided some great information. I'm eager to hit day two, including a closer look at the expo. If you want to follow my SES stream for day two and three, then definitely follow me on Twitter. My tweets will start at 9AM. :)

GG

SES NY Series: Social Media Marketing for Brand Building, An Interview with Hollis Thomases from WebAdvangtage.net

2009-03-18T05:35:00.011-05:00

Social Media Marketing is obviously a hot topic right now. It would be hard to attend a marketing meeting at any company and not hear about Blogging, Social Media, Facebook, Twitter, etc. But in my experience, many marketers are confused about how to proceed and have many unanswered questions. For example, how do you start? Who should be driving your social media initiatives? Should you just outsource it? How do you measure the results? What metrics should be analyzed? Like I said, there’s a lot of confusion about how to do this, especially from traditional marketers. That’s why many marketing budgets have a very small line item at the very end, so small you can barely make it out. It reads “Social Media”, and typically has less dollars associated with it than your bill for lunch! :) That will change, though.

I’ve been a part of many conversations with clients about social media marketing. I’ve heard a lot of concerns, confusion, and to be quite honest, fear… Since it’s so new and there are limitless creative opportunities, many marketers view Social as the Wild West. You know, gun-slinging social media mavens that are breaking bottles at the bar that somehow end up playing poker with your marketing budget. ;) Now, most of us know that’s not the case (for the most part), but marketers that haven’t participated in social media yet sometimes view it this way.

Based on what I explained above, you can imagine that I'm very interested in the session at SES NY about Social Media Marketing for Brand Building. I’m sure many brand marketers will be attending the session looking for answers. As I reviewed the session panelists, I noticed that Hollis Thomases was on the list, who I actually met on Twitter by the way! (Ahh, the power of social media, right?) I decided to interview Hollis to find out more about what she’ll be covering during the session, which is on Wednesday, March 25h at 9:00. She was nice enough to take some time and answer my questions about social media marketing.

I’ve provided my interview with Hollis below. After reading the interview, don’t hesitate to post your comments or questions.

Glenn: What are the top things people will learn by attending your session?

Hollis: People that attend our session will learn how smart companies are using social marketing tools to promote brands and reach out to customers (and how it’s possible to do so without investing a fortune.) They will also learn the kinds of metrics being used to measure the success of social media initiatives.

Glenn: What are you hearing from clients and prospective clients about social media marketing? Are they deathly afraid of it, are they transparent enough for social, do they think it’s just for a younger demographic, etc?

Hollis: There’s a great deal of interest in social media, though most of our clients are simply trying to get educated so they can understand if it might be an area worth dipping a toe into. To some, it’s a pox to be avoided (and rightly so for regulation reasons); for others, they’re eager to get in on the action; a few are actually already successfully engaged. It’s really a question of understanding, “Is social media right for US?”

Glenn: Are you going to introduce popular social media sites and platforms, with a quick rundown of each?

Hollis: In my session, one panelist will focus on Twitter (me) and another on Facebook (Harry Gold of Overdrive), while a third speaker (Dave Evans) will discuss the mechanics and metrics of social media marketing.

Glenn: Do companies understand that social media is about connecting and engaging with communities or do they view social as a media spend?? I know many traditional marketers are trying to tie Social Media to older metrics that don’t make sense for the medium…

Hollis: IMO, the answer at the moment is NEITHER. It’s still too nascent of a field and clients are still too under-educated to really understand much about social media. Still, once I do a little education, yes, I constantly get the question about measuring ROI. I usually then use the public relations analogy, e.g. “Are you doing any PR? How are do you directly measure the ROI of that kind of tactic?” Of course, I can also help get them thinking about engagement and interaction metrics, but I caution that direct ROI is certainly harder to do and isn’t really the place for social media.

Glenn: What are some top-level recommendations for marketers with regard to participating in social media?

Hollis:
#1 - Get educated. Diving ignorant into social media is a recipe for disaster.

#2 - Plan to dedicate resources in the form of staff time. At least one human being is going to need to be behind this social media effort.

#3 - Get a thick skin. Social media is a place where your consumers are going to reveal the good, the bad and the ugly. If you can’t hack that and maintain a consumer and customer-friendly focus, don’t play here….but know that your consumers will still be in this space talking about you in all kinds of ways regardless.

#4 - Be authentic. Don’t lie, try to cover up some kind of bungle or make stuff up because you will be called out by the community quicker than a burning match. If your company has a mishap, acknowledge it, apologize for it, explain how you will rectify it, and move on.

#5 – Have a clear objective as to why you’re entering the social media space to begin with because it’s not for every company, and every social network is not right for every company. Social media, like any other tactic you might be investing time, resources and dollars to, should have clear objectives (or at least a roadmap to guide the process initially).

#6 – If nothing else, know that social media is a great laboratory to understand what your audience may/may not respond to. As you build relationships with your audience, you can also utilize them to help you “market research” in an informal way. Test out ideas, design creative, product trials, etc. with your crowd - many will leap on the chance to contribute to the development of something bigger than themselves.

Glenn: Are you going to explain the difference between quantity and quality of followers, friends, etc?

Hollis: For Twitter, I’m going to frame this from an opinion, but also from what’s going on out there and what restriction Twitter places on ratios (great read on this subject in case you didn’t catch it: http://www.twitip.com/the-twitter-numbers-game).

Glenn: Are you going to provide any case studies or statistics as part of your session?

Hollis: I think each panelist will probably cover 1 or 2 case studies/success stories, and we’ll cover as much as possible based on the time we have to present.

----------------------
As you can see, there’s a lot to think about when you start delving into Social Media Marketing. Like anything else in online marketing, there are some great examples of companies doing it right, and then some examples of companies that haven’t done such a good job (and I’m being nice here…) I think that’s why a session like this at SES NY is so important. One thing is for sure, Social Media Marketing is not easy. There are no shortcuts to connecting with people, providing value to a community, building relationships, etc. Unfortunately, I think many marketers have a hard time with that concept… My hope is that changes.

Again, Hollis’ session on Social Media Marketing for Brand Building is on Wednesday, March 25th at 9:00. I’ll be attending the session and tweeting the core points that each panelist covers. I’ll also be recapping my days at SES here on my blog.

Are you interested in Social Media Marketing, but confused with how to proceed? Post a comment below and I’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.

GG

SES NY Series: Advanced Keyword Research for SEO and SEM, An Interview with Frederick Vallaeys from Google

2009-03-08T19:44:00.018-05:00

Keyword research is a critical component to any search marketing initiative (for both SEO and SEM). Although most search marketers understand the importance of keyword research, many people outside of Search are not extremely familiar with the concept or the various tools at your disposal. I’m a firm believer that if you don’t perform extensive keyword research, you run the risk of missing key opportunities. Actually, you could end up basing your campaigns on guesswork and intuition versus actual data. Needless to say, that’s not a good thing.

I've written previous posts about the importance of keyword research, the power of the long tail, and how to get the most out of Keyword Discovery, and I always like to speak with other search marketers to share ideas. There's always something new you can learn (and then use immediately in your campaigns).

Why is keyword research so important?
In both paid and organic search, if you don’t target what people are actually searching for, you’re going to have a hard time succeeding. For example, if you target infant bedding, but people are searching for baby bedding, will they find you? If you target notebooks, but people are searching for laptops, will they end up finding your computers? Imagine you just launched a major SEO initiative and you spent a lot of time and resources optimizing your website…but for the wrong keywords. Will that yield adequate results? Will it yield ANY results? And beyond just finding the right keywords, you need to analyze how competitive those keywords are, how much they cost, and if you actually have supporting content. i.e. Are you providing answers to questions about your category, products, services, etc?

So if you can’t tell yet, I think keyword research if pretty darn important. :)

SES NY Session: Advanced Keyword Research
Based on what I wrote above, it should be no surprise that I’m very interested in the session at SES NY that covers Advanced Keyword Research. In order to find out more about the session, I decided to ask Frederick Vallaeys from Google about what he will be covering during the session. Frederick is Google’s AdWords Evangelist and he helps advertisers better understand which Google products can help them achieve their marketing goals. After interviewing Frederick, it was easy to tell that he is passionate about helping people maximize their AdWords campaigns! If you will be attending SES NY, the session will be held on Thursday, March 26th from 10:30 to 11:45. You can read more about the session on the SES NY website.

So without further ado, here is my interview with Frederick:

Glenn: What are some of the key points that people will learn at your session?

Frederick: The session should be fast-paced with myself and 5 other panelists. I will try to share as many ideas as possible for finding new keywords with Google tools like Insights for Search and the Search-based keyword tool and I'll also share some thoughts about how our different keyword matching options can be put to work for advertisers.

Glenn: I come across many marketers that aren’t familiar with keyword research, let alone how to organize the data, use it when building their content, landing pages, ads, etc. Will you be providing an overview of why keyword research is important and how it should be used in both organic search and paid search? Also, will you cover the core differences between using keyword research for paid search versus organic search?

Frederick: I won't go into keyword research for organic listings but you're right that there are different tools and methodologies for researching keywords for paid search. Users simply have different expectations for paid and organic listings. Google and Compete did a study in September 2008 with retail advertisers that showed that paid listings were up to 50% more likely to convert than organic listings. Selecting highly targeted keywords is a big component of driving conversions and because you're paying per click, you want to ensure your keywords attract the right type of users.

Glenn: With Quality Score becoming more and more important in Paid Search, will you explain how to use the keywords that you are targeting to achieve a stronger QS?

Frederick: I'll touch on a few best practices about Quality Score but I'm also doing an entire session on this topic at 2:15pm so I recommend you attend that one if you can. The gist of it is that ads should be useful information and if you choose highly targeted and relevant keywords, users will like your ad and this will help establish good Quality Score which in turn will improve your rank and decrease your cost.

Glenn: Will you be explaining advanced matching options? I know there is a lot of confusion with what they are, how to best use them, etc. (especially negative keywords…)

Frederick: Our keyword matching options are one of the most powerful ways of ensuring your ad reaches the right audience so I'll definitely touch on this. With negative keywords, you can tell Google which queries not to show your ad for and when you combine this with broad matched keywords, it's a great way to maximize your clicks while ensuring a high conversion rate.

Glenn: The long tail is incredibly important and powerful. Will you explain how to target long tail keywords, which can ultimately yield more targeted visitors from organic search and a lower CPC and a higher ROI from Paid Search? I think too many companies initially target just a few head terms, and completely miss the power of the long tail.

Frederick: Long tail keywords are extremely important when you consider that 1 in 5 queries on Google has not been seen in the past 90 days, if ever. Users search for keywords that are so diverse that any marketer would have a tough time predicting all the variations. Fortunately, Google's broad match keywords automatically capture any tail terms that are relevant to your ad. When you add them all up, queries that were captured with broad matches deliver roughly a third of all conversions for our advertisers.

Glenn: I’m sure you will be covering the Google Keyword Tool. :) Will you be explaining some advanced features and ways to maximize its use? If so, can you list some of the features you will cover?

Frederick: We have a brand new search-based keyword tool that generates a list of relevant historical Google.com search queries for which a particular site has no ad presence. For each keyword, it also suggests a landing page, bid, and ad group. It's a really great way to find missed opportunities in your existing campaigns. You can try the tool at http://www.google.com/sktool

Glenn: Analytics is obviously extremely important for tracking both organic search and paid search at a granular level. Will you be explaining how to glean insights from your reporting in order to target the right keywords?

Frederick: Analytics has a tremendous amount of data you can apply to your paid search campaigns. For example, you could use the "Keywords" report or the "Site Search" report to learn which keywords drive traffic to your site and what people search for once they're on your site. Combine that with data about conversions and you've got a powerful new source of potential keywords for your account.

Glenn: For Paid Search, will you be explaining how to estimate the cost for keywords and campaigns, once you have completed keyword research? I know the Traffic Estimator tool can be helpful in this situation… I’ve found that many marketers don’t know how much to spend on paid search, how much their initial budget should be, how to calculate that, and then what to do once their campaigns are running.

Frederick: Unfortunately I probably won't have time to cover this in my session but I'm happy to share some of my thoughts here. Because paid search is so measurable, we really hope that advertisers will analyze their results and tweak their targeting and other settings to ensure they are meeting their ROI goals. If you can show a positive ROI from placing paid ads on search, there should be no reason not to spend as much money on this as possible. Instead of thinking about paid ads as money that goes into a black hole, think about it as a cost of sales and use it to drive as many profitable conversions as you can possibly handle.

We have some tools and reports that provide guidance about how much potential traffic you could get and you can estimate your potential conversions from this. And once you've maxed out on search advertising, look for the next big opportunity such as ads on the content network or ads on new formats like mobile or video.

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To quickly summarize, there are many important aspects to consider while researching keywords to use in your campaigns. That includes using various tools and software to perform keyword research, estimating traffic, understanding the potential cost, increasing your quality score, conversion, and ultimately your ROI. To learn more about the Advanced Keyword Research session at SES, definitely check out the session details on the SES NY website. I’ll be attending the session and tweeting key points as they come up! I’ll also be recapping each day at SES NY here on my blog.

Are you new to keyword research and confused with where to start? Post your comments below. I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

GG

SES NY Series: Key Points in Launching a Global Website and International SEO, My Interview with Motoko Hunt from AJPR

2009-03-04T09:36:00.010-05:00

As companies start to develop global digital strategies, they begin to face new challenges and obstacles. This is often uncharted territory for many people. Sure, US-based online marketers feel comfortable when targeting US consumers, but what if they had to suddenly target consumers in Japan, England, France, or China? Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to assist several large companies and brands with building global website strategies, including international SEO. I have found that there is a lot of confusion with how to target multiple countries, as well as how to rank across country-specific search engines. Actually, I’ve spoken with several companies that were going down the wrong path...

Globalizing your website might sound easy at first, but unfortunately, it’s not as simple as setting up additional domains, pushing your content to local markets, and then ranking across country-specific search engines. And if you’re thinking about keeping just one website that will target multiple countries, you have another set of problems to deal with. There are several key items you need to work through before you can have a successful global presence.

Global Obstacles and International SEO
From an SEO perspective, you need to address several factors, such as performing keyword research across various languages, addressing cultural issues, understanding top search engines in other countries (yes, Google is not the top engine in every country), and how to adapt to unique market trends. You need to understand the optimal technical setup for your global website, including hosting, ccTLD’s, geotargeting, localized inbound links, etc. Actually, to understand more of the challenges that search marketers face, you should visit some country-specific search engines and start entering your queries. Chances are you will see some interesting results, to say the least. :)

SES NY Session: Key Points in Launching a Global Website
So, when I was reviewing the agenda for SES NY and saw a session about Key Points in Launching a Global Website, I was all over it! Since I know there are a lot of questions about global website strategy and international SEO, I decided to interview one of the panelists to find out more about the session. I tracked down Motoko Hunt, Founder and Search Marketing Strategist of AJPR. Motoko is a seasoned search marketer focused on helping clients enter the Japanese market. She has a thorough understanding of Asia and has helped some of the world’s top brands with their search marketing initiatives. By the way, the session is on Tuesday, March 24th at 11:45 in case you’ll be at SES NY.

Motoko was nice enough to answer some of my questions and I have included my interview with her below. Definitely feel free to post your comments after reading the interview. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Glenn: What are the top 4 or 5 things people will learn at your session?

Motoko: People will learn some important points that will help them better prepare for launching a global website. Often times, people experience these issues during or after the global website has been completed, and wish they'd known that at the beginning. Research indicates more companies will launch or relaunch global websites in 2009. I believe this session will have something for everyone, from agencies to in-house marketers, from small to large-sized corporations.

Some of the key issues I'll cover are:
- Language and cultural issues
- Geographical issues
- Cross-border management issues
- Leveraging standardized templates to develop global websites

Glenn: What trends are you seeing with regard to how clients and companies are approaching international SEO? For example, when clients begin speaking with you, what are you hearing, are they going down the wrong path, is there confusion, etc?

Motoko: Since most of my clients are in the US and Europe, the decisions often times come down from the HQ in Western market to receiving ends in Asia. I see that one of the biggest challenges is how to carry out the project that was planned by the HQ and dictated to each local market. The size of in-house teams in local markets are usually much smaller than what they have at the HQ. Also, they usually have less understanding of SEO, or have different challenges in doing SEO like different target search engines and different search user behavior.

I hear loud and clear that local teams are struggling to keep up with the globalization projects sent down from HQ, while trying to create and maintain the site that "works" for local markets. The companies who give some room for local teams to adopt the local trends seem to have greater success with their globalized website.

Glenn: What are a few core things you want people to know about launching a global website (or multiple websites targeting specific countries)?

Motoko: During my presentation, I'll try and identify the top issues. Some address the technical issues such as keyword research and content localization, CMS, hosting and geo issues. Some countries may have unique regulations about the products you can sell online, or keywords you can bid on. Some are the organizational issues such as manpower, budget, project management and education.

When companies consider "globalizing" their website, some of the benefits they expect to see include cost and time savings. However, by not taking these issues into consideration before they kick-off the globalization project, it ends up taking more time and costing more money.

Glenn: Are you going to touch upon some of the technical items that marketers should address for global SEO, like ccTLD’s, Google Webmaster Tools (geo targeting), inbound links, hosting, duplicate content, etc?

Motoko: These technical issues are often overlooked or unnoticed until it causes some problems after the website launches. I'd like to cover as much as I can within the given time limit. ;-)

Glenn: Should companies just focus on Google or understand more of the global search landscape? (OK, that was a leading question!) I know many marketers in the US understand that Google is dominant here, but there are a lot of people that don’t know the leading search engines in other countries. i.e. Yahoo Japan, Naver in Korea, Yandex in Russia, etc.

Motoko: You know, they shouldn't just focus on Google. Unless of course their "globalization" target markets are limited to those where Google is the dominant engine. When globalizing a website, you need to know each market you'd like to target to determine what types of adjustments are required. If you have an in-house team in a local market, talk to them, use their knowledge, and let them add what is needed to succeed in that market. If you are going to hire an agency, make sure that the agency really knows the market. Having native staff is a huge plus. You want to work with someone with globalization experience, and someone that understands the culture, including how consumers behave and how business is conducted there.

Glenn: I think keyword research is a big issue, including translation. Several tools only focus on certain languages and countries. What are you going to cover that will help people go down the right path? Also, once they find the right keywords and content, what’s the best way to have that content translated?

Motoko: Keywords are the starting point for both SEO and PPC campaigns. If you use the wrong keywords, the entire SEO program and PPC campaigns would fail. Simply translating keywords for other markets never works well. I'll talk about the process of keyword research that has worked really well for my clients. The content should not be simply translated, but localized for each market. I'm sure you understand that the translation tools are not perfect. In fact, they are far from perfect when it comes to Asian languages. You should invest in editing the content by an in-house team or local professionals. You'd want to avoid giving the impression that you are just pushing US-centric services to other markets, which will be viewed as you don't value the market enough to take it seriously.

Glenn: Are there any case studies you are going to provide (along with statistics) for companies that have successfully launched global websites or that are having success with international SEO?

Motoko: I've just finished a case study with Autodesk's Japan team. Maura Ginty will share the results of the case study in her presentation. Also, I will share some of the feedback I received from a client's in-house team in an Asian market about their globalization projects.

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As you can see from Motoko’s answers, launching a global website is no easy feat. :) To learn more about Motoko’s session at SES NY, check out the session details on the SES NY website. The session is being held on Tuesday, March 24th at 11:45 and is part of the Search and the Future Track. As you would guess, I’ll be attending the session and tweeting from the conference. I’ll also be recapping each day at SES NY here on my blog.

Are you launching a global website or focusing on international SEO? Definitely post your comments below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!

GG

The Connection Between High Search Engine Rankings, The Latest Google Heatmap Study, and The Long Tail of SEO: My Guest Post on Search Engine Journal

2009-02-24T06:48:00.005-05:00

I’ve been a big fan of Search Engine Journal for a number of years now. They provide excellent search-related posts and information, as well as outstanding coverage of the Search industry. So, as you can imagine, I was extremely excited after speaking with them about becoming a contributor. My first guest post went live yesterday and it details an experiment that I recently ran across a number of websites I manage.

A Custom Google Analytics Filter for SEO
Based on a great blog post by Andre Scholten, I set up a custom filter in Google Analytics to track where each keyword ranked in Google when people clicked through to the websites I tracked for the experiment. This enabled me to view all of the keywords (head, torso, and long tail keywords) leading to the websites I tracked, but also let me quickly see where those keywords ranked in Google when people clicked through. Yes, I could use a number of search tools to run a position analysis on target keywords, but that’s not realistic when you include all of your long tail keywords, since you might be analyzing thousands of keywords at a time.

The Results Were Pretty Darn Compelling…
So I set up a custom filter on a number of websites I manage and waited for the data to stream in. It only took a few hours before keywords started showing up in my reports (along with their rankings). And, I picked up an interesting trend pretty darn quickly... I started to see a strong connection between page one rankings and the long tail of SEO. I’ve written about the powerful long tail of SEO before on my blog, and I believe it’s often overlooked by many people outside of the Search industry. You can start to connect the dots if you add the latest Google heat map study, which found that people are quickly scanning the first few organic results in Google, and if they don’t find what they need, they are refining their searches. My experiment definitely started to connect the dots...

Eager to see the results? Well, you’ll have to check out my guest post on Search Engine Journal to find out more about my experiment and to view the results! It’s a thorough post, and if you have enjoyed the rest of my posts on the Internet Marketing Driver, I think you’ll really dig this one. :)

My guest post: The Long Tail of Page 1 Rankings

Also, definitely feel free to post your comments after reading my guest post. I’d love to hear your own experiences with the long tail of SEO.

GG

Flash Tutorial, How to Track Flash in Google Analytics Using the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component (GAforFlash) Part 2 of 2

2009-02-08T19:48:00.022-05:00

In part 1 of this series I introduced the concept of tracking flash applications, why flash has been hard to track for many marketers, and I introduced the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component. To quickly review, the GA for flash component enables you to easily make calls directly from your ActionScript code in order to track pageviews, events, conversions, etc. in flash. It’s an important step for understanding how your flash elements contribute to the success of your website, and not just because you think it’s a killer flash app. ;-) In part 2 of my series, I will walk you through how to actually set up flash tracking using the gaforflash component (step by step in the flash authoring environment.) By the end of this tutorial, you should have a solid understanding of using the flash component and making calls to Google Analytics from within your ActionScript code. I will reference the flash movie that I created during my own testing and show the resulting Google Analytics reporting to tie it all together. So without further ado, let’s start coding. :)

Quick Disclaimer, Code Ahead:
As I mentioned in my first post, if you have some knowledge of developing flash movies and writing ActionScript code, then you should be able to follow along. If you aren’t familiar with developing in flash, grab your flash developer and possibly your web analyst and set up a working lunch. By the end of the tutorial, I’m confident you will see the power of using this technique to track your flash elements.

Visit the Google Code Project and Download the Components
First, visit the Google Code Project for Google Analytics for Flash (gaforflash). http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/ Click the downloads tab at the top of the page and download the zipfile listed. The current version as of this blog post was v1.0.1. Once you download the zipfile, unzip the contents to a directory on your hard drive. Open the readme textfile and follow the instructions for copying the components to the proper directory in your Adobe flash folder. This will differ depending on if you are running a pc or a mac and you will be creating a new folder within the components directory where you will copy the files (the instructions tell you to create a Google folder and drop the components there). Once you copy the components into the new directory, then go ahead and launch flash. Again, make sure you follow the readme before launching flash.

The Google Code Project for GaforFlash:

Determine What You Are going To Track:
To me, this is the most important step (and I bet the web analysts reading this post agree!) Mapping out what you want to track is essential to having clean reporting and a structured hierarchy. You can really have some messy reporting without working through this step… We’ll keep this example very simple to keep the amount of coding down, so here’s the scenario.

You will be adding a new flash element to a category page on your website and want to track how visitors engage the flash movie and how that flash element contributes to the success of the website. In our sample flash movie, there will be a start button, which launches the rest of the flash movie. The start button is there for a reason and you’ll learn why in a second. Once someone clicks the start button, they will be presented with two product thumbnails. The goal of our sample flash movie is to get visitors to learn more about each product and then click an email button at the bottom of the flash movie to get in touch with sales. Again, this is completely made up and simple, but we need to map this out in order to know what to track. Also, we'll track when users hover over each thumbnail and then when they click each one to reveal more information. In addition, they obviously want to track the email link at the bottom of the flash movie, since clicking the button will be a conversion in GA.

To summarize the key pageviews, events and conversions we will track:
1. A start button will trigger a pageview so you know how many people engaged the flash movie. This is so you know that the flash movie was triggered (and not just sitting on the page).
2. The two product thumbnails will trigger events when someone hovers over the thumbnail and when someone clicks them.
3. The email link at the bottom of the flash movie will trigger a pageview for when someone clicks the button. That pageview will also trigger a conversion.
4. Note: you will need to set up a conversion goal in Google Analytics for the email pageview that we trigger when visitors click the email button. This is easy to do and then will start showing up within your Goals tab in GA. You can read more about tracking goals in the GA help center. http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55515

Open Up Flash and Create the Necessary Assets
In order to work though this tutorial, you will need to create some simple flash assets (buttons). Don’t worry about how they look. The core point of this tutorial is that you learn how to use the flash component to make calls to Google Analytics and not to win design awards. ;) You will need to create a start button, a product thumbnail button, and an email button (which can be simply text if you want). Once you have quickly created each button, proceed with the rest of the tutorial.

Import the Tracking Libraries
First, make sure your current flash movie is targeting ActionScript 3. Open up the publish settings dialog box (control shift F12), click the flash tab, and use the dropdown to select an ActionScript version to target. Choose ActionScript 3. Next, you need to drag an instance of the AnalyticsLibrary Component to the stage in order to import the code libraries. Create a new layer in flash and open the components panel (control F7). You should see a category named Google (which you created earlier in this tutorial). If you don’t see the Google category, then go back to the beginning of this tutorial and follow the directions again in the readme text file that was part of the download. Click the plus sign (+) next to Google and drag the AnalyticsLibrary component to the stage. Don’t worry where you place it on the stage. It should now be present in your project library (you should also see it listed in your library. Click Control L to see your project library.) Keep in mind I’m referring to your project library, which holds all of the assets you create in your flash movie (buttons, movie clips, images, components, etc.) I’m not referring to code libraries, which we will discuss shortly.

Finding the AnalyticsLibrary Component in Flash:

Next, create an Actions layer and select frame 1 of the timeline in that layer. Click F9 to open the Actions window (which is where you write ActionScript code). Since we are using the Analytics Library Component to make calls directly from our ActionScript 3 code, you will need to import the libraries that you will use to instantiate a tracking object and make calls to Google Analytics. If you don’t import the libraries, you will not be able to make calls to GA.

Here is what you should add to frame 1 of the actions layer:
import com.google.analytics.AnalyticsTracker;
import com.google.analytics.GATracker;
var tracker:AnalyticsTracker = new GATracker( this, "UA-111-222", "AS3", true );

A Quick Explanation of the Code:
Note, you would obviously want to add your own GA account number so the data is sent to the correct profile. i.e. Don’t keep 111-222 as the web property ID. The first two lines import the necessary code libraries and the third line of code initializes the tracking object. Keep “this” as the first parameter, which references the current display object. Enter your own GA account number for the second parameter, you can keep AS3 as the third parameter for this tutorial, and keep “true” as the fourth parameter. That sets the debug mode. When true, you will see a trace of all tracking events occurring. When false, this will not be visible. Also, you can read the gaforflash documentation to learn more about each parameter.

Making Calls From ActionScript to GA:
Now, if you create a start button that visitors have to click in order to see anything in your flash movie, then we can logically target that click as a pageview. Then we can view in GA how many people started the flash movie. That would answer one of the first questions from your CMO, right? :) So create a new layer in your flash movie called Start Button and add your button to frame 1 of this layer. To stop the flash movie from playing before someone clicks the start button, simply add a stop action on frame 5 in your Actions layer. Create new keyframe on frame 5 and enter this.stop(); as the code. Again, the intent of this tutorial is not to teach you how to use flash, but I’ll add some tips as we move along. Select the start button on the stage by clicking it once and give it an instance name of start_btn in the properties panel. You can click Control F3 to bring up the properties panel if it’s not on screen. We need to give the button an instance name in order to target it in ActionScript. If you don’t give it an instance name, your code will not work.

Creating an Instance Name in the Properties Panel:

Now go back to frame 1 of your actions layer and open the actions window again (click F9). Below the code we first added (importing the libraries and initializing a tracking object), add the following lines of code. I will explain them in a second… You can give yourself some space by clicking enter a few times. Your code does not need to be lumped together!

//functionality for start button
start_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, startExample );

function startExample( event:Event):void {
//we know that the user engaged the flash movie (they clicked start)
tracker.trackPageview("/GAFlash/Start");
play();
}

The Code Explained:
The first line is a comment, which is good programming practice. You can simply describe the code that follows. This will not be visible to anyone but you as a programmer. The second line is an event handler for the start button. It targets the instance name start_btn, which we set up earlier. This is why we needed to create an instance name. Now our code will look for a mouse event (CLICK) for the start button and then trigger the function called startExample, which I will cover in a second. Event handlers enable you to react to events in your flash movies. They are critical to creating advanced functionality in your flash applications.

The function startExample() will be called when someone clicks the start button. This function uses our tracker object to trigger the trackPageview method and then plays the main timeline in your flash movie, using the play(); action. Remember, we want the visitor to see the rest of our flash movie after clicking the start button. The trackPageview method tells Google Analytics to track a specific pageview when something happens. The page will show up in GA reporting as /GAFlash/Start in your content tab, as if someone actually visited a page on the website. Pretty cool, right? So, you’ll be able to go into GA and click the content tab and see how many times this “page” was triggered. Nice. That wasn’t so bad, was it? That was all done in less than 15 lines of code.

Tracking the Product Thumbnails:
You will use the same methodology for tracking the two product thumbnails in your flash movie. Remember, we want to know when someone clicks each thumbnail, but we’ll be adding one more event…when someone hovers over the thumbnails. You might find that people were interested enough to hover over a product, but not trigger it. If you see enough of this behavior, you might want to dig deeper to find out what’s causing it. That’s just a simple example and you should work with your web analyst to determine what to track for your specific website and flash content.

A Screenshot of the 2 Product Thumbnails for this Example:

We used the trackPageview method for the start button, but we will use trackEvent for the thumbnails. Examples of events might be clicking a button, hovering over that button, visiting a specific area of a flash movie, etc. GA now provides an Event Tracking tab within your Content tab. Within the Event Tracking tab, you can view categories of events, the specific actions users took, the labels associated with those events, trending, etc. So, we’ll track two events with each product thumbnail in our flash movie. I will only cover the first thumbnail here and you can copy this process to apply event tracking to the second thumbnail.

After someone clicks the start button, you used the play(); action to play the main timeline. At frame 20 on your main timeline, create a new stop action in your actions layer. Add a new keyframe at frame 20 and open the Actions windows. Enter this.stop(); as the code. Then create a new layer for your product thumbnails and add the buttons that you created earlier in this tutorial. Note, for this example, add them to frame 1 so your code can target the button instances. You can place them off the stage (off-screen) in frame 1 so they aren't visible and then move them on-stage later in the flash movie when visitors need to see them. If they aren't on the stage in frame 1, the event handlers you create targeting these buttons won't work. Give each instance on the stage a unique instance name, like product1_btn and product2_btn. You do this by selecting each button and then entering an instance name in the properties panel. Again, we need to give them instance names in order to target them in our ActionScript code. Once you do this, go back to frame 1 of your Actions layer, click F9 to open the Actions window again and add the following code:

//functionality for product btn 1
product1_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, clickProduct1 );
product1_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER, hoverProduct1 );

function hoverProduct1( event:Event):void {
tracker.trackEvent("Products", "HoverProduct1");
}

function clickProduct1( event:Event):void {
tracker.trackEvent("Products", "ClickProduct1");
gotoAndStop("product1");
}

So we have two event handlers for the product1_btn. The first event handler will handle the CLICK mouse event and the second will handle the MOUSE_OVER mouse event. MOUSE_OVER is when someone hovers over the button (as you probably guessed). Checking the clickProduct1 function, you see that we are using trackEvent to send an event tracking call to Google Analytics. The two parameters are Category and Action respectively. I lumped both product buttons under the same category called “Products” and then gave specific events to each click and hover (HoverProduct1 and ClickProduct1). You will be able to drill into event categories in your GA reporting and then see specific actions, along with trending.

Important: When you set up the code for the second product button, make sure your event handlers target product2_btn versus product1_btn and that you trigger specific functions, such as clickProduct2 and hoverProduct2 versus clickProduct1 and hoverProduct1. You definitely don’t want to call the wrong functions, as this will ultimately skew your reporting or throw errors in your flash movie. i.e. Someone might click the profile 2 button, but you triggered the profile 1 tracking.

The Email Link, Our Conversion in Flash
Last, but not least, we want to track when people click the email button. We have decided that clicking this button will be a conversion for our flash movie. Create a new layer in your flash movie and add your email button to frame 1 of this layer. Select the email button on the stage by clicking it and give it an instance name of emailMe_btn. Then go back to frame 1 of your Actions layer and open the actions window (hit F9). Below the code we added earlier, add the following lines of code:

//functionality for email button, this is also our conversion
emailMe_btn.addEventListener( MouseEvent.CLICK, onButtonClick );
function onButtonClick ( event:Event ):void
{
tracker.trackPageview("/GAFlash/EmailMe");
}

OK, so when visitors click the email button, we will trigger the trackPageview method to track that click as a pageview in Google Analytics. The page will show up as /GAFlash/EmailMe in your Content tab. In addition, since this is a conversion, you can set up a conversion goal in Google Analytics targeting that page. Then conversions will show up in your Goals tab within Google Analytics. Now you can tell your CMO how many visitors are converting within your flash movie. That’s not as generic as “Sorry, we don’t know”, right? ;-)

Quickly Test and Track Your Flash Movie
In the first piece of code we added in this tutorial, we included this line:
var tracker:AnalyticsTracker = new GATracker( this, "UA-111-222", "AS3", true );

As mentioned earlier, the “true” parameter tells flash whether you want to run debug mode. If you set this to true, then you can see a trace of your calls to Google Analytics. I recommend turning this on during your testing and then when you are ready to go live, you can turn if off by setting the parameter to “false”. Go ahead and test your movie and click the start button. You should see a message when the call is made to GA, and if it was successful. Then as you interact with your product thumbnails, you will also see the calls being made. Last, as you click the email button, you should also see the call being made. If all looks good, then you can add your published flash movie to an html page and then upload the files to your website. Remember to set debug to false as mentioned earlier or else everyone viewing with your flash movie will see the trace of your calls. Then click away and thoroughly test out your flash movie, try different browsers, platforms, etc. Make sure you trigger each of the elements enough and wait for GA to show you the results in your reporting.

Enabling Debug Mode to View a Trace of Your Calls:

My Working Example of Using GAforFlash
I uploaded my example of using the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component in case you wanted to see how it looked and worked. I know it's hard sometimes to follow along without seeing the final product.

Checking Your Google Analytics Reporting
I’m going to show you what the reporting looked like for my own example. The first thing I did was click the Content Tab in Google Analytics and then Event Tracking within that tab. I immediately could see the total number of events that took place, visits with an event, etc. {See screenshots below.} Clicking the Categories tab displayed the event categories we set up earlier, such as Products (Note, I used UserProfiles in my example versus Products so that's what you will see in the screenshots below). This category includes the actions of hovering and clicking the product thumbnails. This is why mapping out what you want to track is important. You want a clear hierarchy in your reporting. Drilling into each category, I could see the actions that took place like HoverProfile1, ClickProfile2, etc. Note, I used the word "profile" in my testing versus products. If you click the Actions tab (below categories), you will see all of your actions listed, regardless of category. We didn’t add the optional parameter for Labels so you won’t see anything there (in case you were wondering).

The Event Tracking Overview Report in Google Analytics:

The Events Category Page in Google Analytics:

The Event Actions Report in Google Analytics:

Pageviews and Conversions
Remember we wanted to know how many people started our flash movie (after clicking the start button)? Well if you go into the Content Tab and check top content, you will see the /GAFlash/Start page listed. The number of pageviews shows how many times visitors started the flash movie. In addition, you can view /GAFlash/EmailMe, which shows the number of times the email button was clicked. And since we set this up as a conversion, you can click the Goals tab and see your TrackFlash conversion listed. Drilling into that conversion goal will also reveal conversion rate. And since it’s a conversion goal, you can see conversion by traffic source, campaign, keyword, etc. That’s the benefit of setting up conversion goals… So, you might find that organic search traffic converted 10x as much as paid search, or that visitors arriving via your email marketing didn’t even trigger your flash movie, so on and so forth.

Viewing Flash Pageviews in the Top Content Report in Google Analytics:

Viewing a Flash Conversion in Google Analytics:

Summary
OK, we've definitely covered a lot in Part 2. Either your head is reeling or you're excited to use the gaforflash component in your own projects (or both!) Take your time and test our different scenarios. Work with your flash development team and your web analysts to map out how to best track your flash apps. You never know, it very well could lead to more flash application work… like if you told your CMO that 25% of the people interacting with your flash movie converted! :) Imagine if you could glean insights from your flash content versus it just being slick and pretty. And I’ll take data over pretty any day of the week. ;-)

GG

Read Part 1 of this Series on Tracking Flash in Google Analytics

How To Track Flash In Google Analytics (GA) Using The Google Analytics For Adobe Flash Component (GAforFlash), Part 1 of 2

2009-02-08T19:35:00.008-05:00

I wanted to start this post with some quick points about flash:
* flash content can be extremely engaging.
* flash apps are a great way to create something viral.
* flash is currently used extensively on the web for everything from video to games to product demos.
* Creative Directors love flash.
* Brand Managers also love flash.
* But unfortunately, flash has been hard and confusing to track...

I apologize if you were feeling pretty good about flash until the last bullet! ;-) That is the reality, though.

Why Has Flash Been Confusing And Hard To Track?
Let’s take a quick look at why flash tracking has been an issue. First and most basic, there are many people that don’t know you can even track flash applications. That’s a tough obstacle to overcome, right? Second, the Analytics team is sometimes not involved during the planning of flash-based projects or campaigns. I’m sure some web analysts reading this post probably believe that’s an understatement! Third, you need to coordinate mechanisms for tracking flash with both flash developers and analysts. Fourth, there has been confusion about how to actually track flash even if you already have your flash developers and analysts in the same room. Last (at least for this initial list), some people will focus on the end result (conversions only) and not track the specific elements on the website that lead to the conversion. i.e. As long as people buy something or sign up, I don’t care what they do on the site. As you can probably guess, I’m not a big fan of the latter… I think the more information you can gather about how visitors interact with your website, the more you can optimize the website to increase conversion (whatever conversion is for your specific business).

Yes, You Can Track Flash
I’m here to tell you that you can track flash and you can see how visitors are interacting with your flash applications. The approach I am going to show you is a more elegant method for tracking flash than what's been used in the past. My hope is that this two part series can save you from a potentially embarrassing moment. You know, when your CMO asks how the 6 month flash development project that cost $75K, that looks incredible, is highly engaging, and wins awards is contributing to the success of the website. Unfortunately, many people run for the hills at that moment, or act like they didn’t hear the question (Chevy Chase-style). I’d hate for you to say, “We’re not actually sure Mr. CMO…” ,and I’d rather hear you say, “Absolutely, here’s detailed reporting of how visitors are engaging our flash content, as well as the tangible effects on conversion.” Yes, I want you to be the flash analytics rock star. :)

Introduction to the Google Analytics for Adobe Flash Component (GAforFlash)
The GA for flash tracking component enables you to track specific events and functionality in your flash movies and seamlessly communicate with Google Analytics for tracking. It gracefully handles any DOM issues that could cause problems in other types of flash tracking using GA. It’s an open source initiative between Google and Adobe Systems and you can find more information on the Google Code Project website. http://code.google.com/p/gaforflash/

OK, But What Is It Exactly?
There are two components you can use in flash that enable you to track events, pageviews, conversions, etc. One is a simple flash component that you can customize in the component inspector in flash and the other component involves importing the tracking libraries into your project and then making calls to GA from within your ActionScript code (AS3). I’m going to cover the second approach, since it gives you the most flexibility. And don’t get scared with the way it was explained above. It’s actually straight forward if you are comfortable working in flash.

A Quick Tip For The Code-Averse:
I’m going to walk you through my example step by step in Part 2 of my series on tracking flash in google analytics. If you have worked in flash and written some ActionScript code, I’m confident you will be able to follow along. If not, grab your flash developer and your web analyst and then schedule a working lunch. You can all walk through my example together as a team. After going through my second post, I have a feeling you will collectively brainstorm several ways to use the GA for flash component to track your flash elements, websites, and applications.

So Are You Excited To Start?
Good, then you’re ready to read my second post, which covers how to track flash in Google Analytics using the GA for flash Tracking Component.

GG

From Positive to Negative Word of Mouth (WOM) in 10 Minutes on a Saturday Morning, Windsor Cleaners vs. Jiffy Lube

2009-01-25T21:58:00.015-05:00

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM) is undeniably powerful. I’ve written about the power of WOM in the past (Boar's Head, Pabst Blue Ribbon, etc.) and I still believe that organic word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business. And that's especially true for small businesses. Well, a few weeks ago I was able to see an example of how one business could foster positive WOM and then how another company could generate negative WOM, and all in 10 minutes on a Saturday morning. Yes, I keep a keen eye out for things like this, but it was amazing to see how I could feel so good about one company and then so bad about another in such as short period of time! After I got home that Saturday morning, I started to think about my two experiences and wanted to share them here. I’ll break down both experiences and then give you some questions to think about regarding your own company or business.

Experience 1: Fostering Positive WOM
I’ve been going to Windsor Cleaners in Princeton, NJ for a number of years now. I'll start with some some basic reasons why I go there. First, they provide an outstanding service. I know, a novel idea, right? Providing a great product or service is obviously the foundation for generating positive WOM. Next, they provide excellent customer service. Third, they go the proverbial extra mile for their customers (which is more than just providing excellent customer service and you'll read more about this below). So for me, Windsor Cleaners is starting with a solid foundation. In all the years I’ve been taking my clothes there, I have never left unhappy. In addition, they know me as soon as I walk in the door, entering my account number in their system without me having to say a single digit. I like that. I also typically bring my kids with me when dropping off my clothes, and the employees at Windsor Cleaners are always great with them. And you can tell it’s genuine, and not the BS, “oh how cute” that you hear from some people. So in a nutshell, they provide a great dry cleaning service and provide excellent customer service. Now for my Saturday morning story.

A few weeks ago, I walked in holding my 2 year old son in one arm, a pile of clothes in another arm, and I was in a hurry. I also brought in one of my winter jackets during this drop off, and I quickly checked my pockets to make sure I wasn’t forgetting anything. I received my ticket, said goodbye and was on my way. I ended up taking my son to another store in the same shopping center as Windsor Cleaners. So I’m on line in the store and someone taps my shoulder. It’s one of the women from Windsor Cleaners holding my $225 pair of sunglasses. I must have left them in my coat. The woman from Windsor Cleaners tracked me down (without knowing where I was going) to make sure I had my sunglasses. That’s awesome. How easy would it be for her to just put them aside and wait for me to come in next week? Or worse, how easy would it be for someone to just take them, right? The people at Windsor Cleaners never would, but I can’t say that for everyone in this world… This was a great example of a small business going the extra mile and fostering positive word of mouth.

The Positive Impact on Windsor Cleaners
In my opinion, Windsor Cleaners is doing everything right as a small business. They provide an excellent dry cleaning service, they are nice to their customers, their employees seem happy, and they go the extra mile for their customers. Why wouldn’t you like them?? By the way, they aren’t the least expensive dry cleaning business in my area. But I don’t care. It would take a lot to get me to stop going to Windsor Cleaners… And as I’ve said in previous posts, I’m a WOM machine. If I like something, you can’t shut me up about it. I blog about it, tell people at work, tell my friends and family, etc. So, you bet I tell people about Windsor Cleaners. It’s easy… I want them to succeed.

--Next Stop, Jiffy Lube For An Oil Change (Just 5 minutes down the road.)--

Experience 2: Creating Negative Word of Mouth
I pulled into Jiffy Lube to simply get a fast oil change and be on my way. I got out of my car and entered the building, and then waited for someone to check my car. It wasn’t long before I heard, “Mr. Gabe, please follow me.” and that’s when my stomach turned… I’ll stop for a second and ask you if you already know what I’m referring to? I bet some of you do… Actually, I know some of you do (more on that soon).

Are you ready for a Jiffy sales pitch?
And the game begins… I’m holding my 2 year old son and I follow the person from Jiffy Lube out to my car. Now I’m in front of a monitor in the middle of Jiffy Lube’s garage. How nice. :) In a matter of seconds, you are being pitched all sorts of products and services for your car, from the infamous air filter, maybe a cabin filter, something about your fuel injectors, and then some type of engine flush. Really?? First of all, if I was to have something like that done, it probably wouldn’t be at Jiffy Lube. They rush you through the process, hoping for the uncomfortable, “ok, I guess so”. They pull out your air filter to show you how “dirty” it is, and push you just hard enough that you feel like you’re being swindled. I hate that feeling, and I hate their process. They point to the monitor and show you some data about how your car hasn’t gotten this in six months or how you haven’t done that in one year. And of course they don’t tell you pricing while taking you through all that’s wrong with your vehicle. You actually have to ask for pricing (if you’re even lucky enough to retain half of what they threw your way.) I hear this pitch every time I get my oil changed, and to be honest, I'm tired of it.

Forcing Customers Through This Process Is Not Good For Jiffy Lube…
The process I just explained above is where Jiffy Lube goes wrong. I don’t feel confident that I need most of what they are pitching. Do I need some of it? Probably so, but it doesn’t matter. I don’t trust them. I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed a process that makes me feel so negative, so quickly. Then you’re forced into the awkward situation of declining what they just rattled off, and it’s even a little embarrassing. I can’t imagine that anyone at Jiffy Lube would want it to go down this way. Do you?

Breaking This Down Marketing-Wise
Does Jiffy Lube provide a good oil change service? I think so. I’ve never really had a problem. Their pricing is ok and their employees are generally nice. But, I don’t get a good feeling about going to Jiffy Lube. I think it all comes down to the cheesy sales pitch you get every time you bring your car in… Does anyone in marketing at Jiffy Lube understand how this impacts their brand? I don’t feel loyal to Jiffy Lube. Actually, I could go somewhere else for an oil change 3000 miles from now and not even give it a second thought. By the way, if you’re thinking that an additional air filter can’t generate a lot of revenue, you’re wrong. Start doing the math based on how many locations they have any how many estimated customers get oil changes each day. It sure adds up, but at what long term cost to the company? Jiffy Lube might have generated an extra $20 this time, but what if they lose my business forever? That would be thousands of dollars that Jiffy Lube would stand to lose (and just from one customer).

So Jiffy Lube, please stop the madness. Go visit your locations and see what goes on. I’ll guarantee that you’ll want to change how the process works. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t make sure people have the right information and get the right products or services, but there has to be a better way to do it without making people feel like they are being ripped off. Actually, go to Windsor Cleaners and see how they treat their customers. :)

The Power of the Web Tells Me That…
I’m not the only one that feels this way. I found out that many others feel the same exact way. I tweeted about my last experience on Twitter and received some quick replies and direct messages from others that don’t like the process either. It’s funny, I didn’t mention what was pitched and their messages all revolved around the air filter sales pitch! I found that interesting…so I started doing some Google searches. That’s when I found this, this, and this. Oh yeah, and this, this, and this. Uh, an entire site dedicated to Jiffy Lube problems and it ranks #1 for jiffy lube air filter? (see screenshot below) And there were dozens of more listings too. By the way, enter Jiffy Lube Air Filter in Google Blog Search. You’ll find some interesting stories.

Let me tell you, if I worked at Jiffy Lube, this would be one of the first things I fixed. They seriously need a Customer Service Czar, and now. Someone who comes in with guns blazing and fixes this problem. The power of WOM is undeniable, but the fact that Jiffy Lube has a reputation management problem is also undeniable. It actually makes me wonder what’s getting in the way of fixing the problem… So, the next time you hear a pitch for an air filter at Jiffy Lube, think twice. Maybe you need it, but maybe you don’t.

Think About Your Business…
Is there any part of your business that actually annoys your customers? Do you help generate negative word of mouth? Take a hard look at all your customer touch points, ask your customers for real feedback, and change anything that can be generating negative word of mouth NOW.
So I think it's clear that Jiffy Lube can learn a lot from Windsor Cleaners about customer service. But more importantly, how much can you learn from them?

GG

Check Your Search Engine Rankings, Why Your Competitors in Organic Search Might Not Always Be Who You Think They Are

2009-01-12T05:45:00.011-05:00

When beginning a new SEO project, there are some questions that always come up during initial meetings. How does organic search work? Which keywords should we target? Do we need to redesign our entire website? And…how do we compare to our competition in natural search? I’m going to focus on the last question in this post, because there’s an important point I’d like to make. Whenever I ask someone who their competition is in natural search, I typically hear the names of their core competitors (business-wise). Although that’s true in a pure business sense, that’s not necessarily the case in natural search. So, I often run a competitive position analysis to determine where a site ranks in the search engines as compared to its competition. It helps you (and your client) understand who their actual competition is and then sets the stage for deeper competitive analysis.

Don’t drop names with Google…
Outside of search, you might be able to throw a big brand name around and get somewhere. Unfortunately, the search engines don’t necessarily care. That’s one of the reasons you’ll see all types of websites ranking for highly competitive keywords. Actually, I’d argue that some smaller online businesses can easily outmaneuver larger websites and companies in SEO. When it comes down to it, the engines care about quality content, a good user experience, relevancy, and popularity. In other words, create outstanding content that can be easily crawled and indexed, optimize that content based on keyword research, make it easy for your visitors to find and use your content, and if those visitors find that content valuable, you might gain important inbound links (AKA votes). If that happens, subsequent rankings can follow… BTW, you’ll notice I didn’t mention that you need to be a big brand or a multi-billion dollar company to do this. That’s part of the reason blogs have become so powerful. They give the small guy a voice…and that small guy can often outrank large companies in the SERPs. Empowering, yes? Scary to large businesses and big brands, you bet.

Seriously? That’s My Competition in Natural Search??
Yes, I hear this often (with a few other words that I cannot put on my blog!) Once you run a position analysis using competitive keywords (based on keyword research), you and your client can clearly see who owns the SERPs for those keywords. Sure, the rankings can change over time, but you have a snapshot of which sites are ranking at that point in time. Then, you can take the next step and perform a competitive analysis to help you determine what type of content ranks, how the websites structure their content, and which sites link to them. Remember, quality and relevant inbound links are the lifeblood of SEO.

Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Note, since search engine rankings change often, you might not see the same exact results that I did during my test.

Flatscreen TVs
HD TV’s are obviously hot, so let’s check out a competitive keyword like flatscreen tvs:

This is a great example. There are only 2 manufacturers in the top 10 (Samsung at #7 and Westinghouse Digital at #10, which isn't visible in the screenshot above). More on Samsung in a minute. The rest of the sites include reviews, news stories, a buying guide, an e-commerce website, etc. I’ll bet if you walked into LG, Panasonic or Samsung and asked who they compete with in natural search for a keyword like flatscreen tv's, you would hear the other big brands and not the sites in this list. Note, Samsung was pretty smart with creating the page that ranks on their website. Someone at Samsung (cough, cough, SEO guy), understood what people are searching for and provided that content on Samsung.com (Pagerank 8...) There are other good things about this page that I'd like to cover, but that’s for another post. :)

Cabernet Sauvignon
Any wine drinkers out there? Imagine you owned a winery and had an award winning cab? You would probably want to rank highly, right? Let’s see which sites rank for the keyword cabernet sauvignon:

Wow, I’m not exactly a wine connoisseur, but I don’t see any popular wine brands here (other than in the shopping results, which I'll tackle in a minute). You have Wikipedia (big surprise), about.com, an article about Obama, and then a spattering of other wine-related educational pages. Needless to say, this list of websites is probably not what a leading winery would expect to find ranking for cabernet sauvignon.

Enter Universal Search: Also, in the middle of the page you will see shopping results listed. This is Universal Search in action, where Google is mixing additional types of results within the organic rankings. More on this below, but you should start to think about all the different ways you can rank in organic search beyond traditional webpage content. For example, video, images, news, shopping, local, etc.

HD Video Camera
HD Video is all the rage, let’s take a look at the keyword HD Video Camera:

Very interesting. There’s only one big brand in the list (Canon at #4). The rest of the list includes reviews at cnet, an announcement from camcorderinfo.com, two YouTube videos (more on this in a minute), some news results, and then amazon.com. Again, if you walked into Sony, Panasonic, or Canon, do you think they would guess that they are competing against YouTube videos? Probably not. On that note, you can see Universal Search in action here again, with two video thumbnails in the organic results (at least at the time of my test). One is from Tiger Direct and the other is from Chris Pirillo! Great job Chris, you outrank major manufacturers of HD video cameras. :)

So, if you haven’t started thinking about Universal Search and the impact that it can have, just take a closer look at the screenshot above. I think you’ll change your mind. There's also a news result right under the video thumbnails. Both the video results and news results are powerful, especially since they have thumbnails associated with them. If you are interested in learning more about optimizing your video content, then check out my post about Video SEO.

Fuel Efficient Cars
Based on the spike in gasoline prices during 2008, let’s check out a search for fuel efficient cars:

Holy smokes, there’s not 1 car manufacturer in the list. Not 1. I highly doubt that Ford, Honda, Toyota, Chrysler, and GM would take me seriously if I walked in and said that they compete with a government agency, a green publication, and a newspaper in natural search! That said, you need content on your site in order to rank... I was shocked to see several car manufacturer websites without a single occurrence of the keyword fuel efficient cars. I had to check a few times to believe it...

You will also see another example of Universal Search in the screenshot above. Google is providing news results mixed in the organic rankings (in the middle of the page). This is just another reason to start thinking about all of the ways to rank in organic search (and the different types of content you can optimize). All of your digital assets come into play with universal search.

So, are you ready to conduct a position analysis?
OK, I think you get the point. Performing a position analysis is an important step in understanding your actual competition in natural search. I would begin the process by identifying your competitive keywords via extensive keyword research and then determine where you rank against your competition for those keywords. Then, once you know the competition, you should complete a thorough competitive analysis to see how you can strengthen your organic search power and increase your search engine rankings.

Good luck and be ready for some interesting looks as you tell people who they really compete with in natural search. :)

GG

The Top Blog Posts of 2008 From The Internet Marketing Driver

2008-12-29T06:39:00.007-05:00

I always love reviewing my web analytics reporting for an entire year. It’s amazing to see which posts were the most popular. I can tell you that there’s definitely a trend with my most popular posts from 2008. My visitors really like "how-to" posts! That’s pretty clear and it doesn’t shock me at all. I’ve mentioned before the power of instructional articles and blog posts. Expect more in 2009! That said, there were also some non-instructional posts that made the top ten. It seems my visitors also like beer brands, mobile marketing, and DVR’s. That’s right, I said beer... Have I piqued your curiosity?

Let’s jump in. I’ve provided links below to my top ten posts, including a short description about each. I’m also eager to start writing my 2009 posts soon so definitely check back often!

1. Using SWFObject 2.0 to Embed Flash While Providing SEO Friendly Alternative Content
Natural Search is too powerful to keep producing flash content that can’t be crawled. My post about using SWFObject 2.0 to provide alternative html content ranks as my most popular post in 2008. In addition, I recently wrote a 2 part series on ReelSEO that covers using SWFObject 2.1 for providing alt content for flash video. Be sure to check out all three posts.

More About My 2-Part Series on ReelSEO About Using SWFObject for Flash Video:

2. 6 Questions You Should Ask During a Website Redesign That Can Save Your Search Engine Rankings
Be sure to ask these six questions during your next website redesign and you can very well save your search engine rankings. The alternative might be a serious drop in natural search traffic, which may end up forcing you to ask these questions anyway. ;-)

3. How to Make a YouTube Video, A Beginner’s Checklist for Marketers
With online video booming, it didn’t surprise me that my post about how to create a YouTube video came in at number 3. This post takes you through each step in the process of creating a YouTube video from storyboarding to choosing a camera to editing your final video. If online video is part of your marketing mix this year, then you might find this post extremely helpful.

4. Pabst Blue Ribbon and Negative Brand Perception, How Word of Mouth (WOM) and Brand Evangelists Can Impact Your Business
If you’ve ever had a negative reaction when hearing a brand name, only to find out that you actually like the product, then you might enjoy this post. I couldn’t believe how much I liked PBR, and after writing this post, how many other people like it as well!

5. QuickTime Pro, A Powerful and Versatile Video Tool for Web Marketers
QT Pro is my favorite utility for online video. Seriously, it’s the Swiss Army Knife for video. Check out this post if you plan to work with video this year. It can save you hours…

6. The Long Tail of SEO, How Long Tail Keywords Impact Natural Search Traffic, Bounce Rate and Conversion
I refer to the long tail of SEO often, especially when starting a natural search project. This post defines the long tail and explains why you don’t want to rank for just a handful of competitive keywords... You want to rank for the hundreds or thousands of long tail keywords associated with those keywords. Don’t overlook the long tail!

7. The DVR and Its Effect on TV Advertising Recall, Do Your Commercials Stand Out?
This post was in response to a study conducted to see what people retained while watching TV commercials at 6x normal speed (what is looks like when being fast forwarded at top speed on a DVR). Needless to say, I couldn’t hold back with my thoughts on this one… I decided to run my own experiment.

8. Setting Up Your Google Maps Listing, Make Sure Your Business Shows Up In Google Local Search
This post introduces Google’s local one box results and how to set up a local business center listing (step by step). If you own a local business, or you are helping a local business owner, then definitely check out this post. It can help you gain more exposure in Natural Search for local searches.

9. Mobile eCommerce, Amazon.com Blurs the Line Between Web and Mobile Purchase
If you’ve tried to purchase something on your mobile device, then you know it’s not the smoothest process yet. That said, my mobile e-commerce experience on amazon.com blew me away. It was fast, seamless, and I was so impressed that I wrote an entire post about it! If you are interested in mobile e-commerce, check out this post.

10. YouTube Insight, How to Optimize and Enhance Your Online Videos Using Analytics
Did you know that YouTube provides a video analytics tool for free? It’s called YouTube Insight and it provides some outstanding functionality. You can learn a lot from the reporting that YouTube Insight provides. Read this post and start optimizing your online videos today.

There you have it, the 10 most popular posts for 2008 from the Internet Marketing Driver. I hope you have a chance to check some of them out and that you find them helpful! If you have any comments or questions, definitely use the form below to post a comment. In addition, if you would like me to write more about a specific topic, definitely let me know.

Happy New Year!

GG