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Meaningful SEO Metrics – SES London Presentation

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 14:50:08 +0000

Here are my slides from today’s presentation at SES London on the Meaningful SEO Metrics panel:

SEO Metrics – SES London 2012

View more presentations from Kevin Gibbons

53 Best Tips from SES London 2012 Day One

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 13:51:31 +0000

This week I’m at SES London and I’m going to try and keep my notes of the event up-to-date on here and Twitter across the three days. Wish me luck!

Image credit: Andrew Girdwood

So far, here’s what I’ve picked out as the best tips – favourites highlighted in bold. I’ve tried to credit the speakers where possible and thanks to the useful tweets from @gfiorelli1, @wordtracker and many more:

Analytics (@avinash)

Calculate the economic value of the micro conversions and you will have the real picture of the efficiency of your site
1st click attribution is like giving your 1st girlfriend credit for marrying your wife!
John Lewis online success isn’t just sales – measure micro-goals; credit card apps, brochure requests, email captures
Measure both macro & micro conversions – don’t just focus budget on 2% that converts. Improve the 98% that doesn’t!
Measure social metrics that matter; interaction, amplification rate, applause rate (quality), economic value
Use GA multi-channel visualiser to find channels drive conversions w/ multiple touchpoints
Multi Channel Portfolio Optimization > Incrementability > To calculate the incremental value of your mrkt actions
Media Mix Modeling > don’t figure out the order of the channels, but the optimal mrkt channel mix
Don’t let your ad write cheques your site can’t cash!
Insane focus on: Price, Cost, Share, Size = making huge amounts of money!
HITS = How Idiots Track Success

SEO Sales (@lisadmyers)

Estimating traffic worth; 1) what is conversion worth? 2) current rankings/traffic/rev 3) estimated volumes
SEO sales; ban words like XML sitemaps, robots.txt from a pitch – talk to them about the money, not detail
Sometimes you have to say “no” to clients when their available budget can’t get them the desired results

SEO Site Migration (@leeodden & @russosullivan)

Use http://www.snippetoptimizer.net to show clients how the site will look in google
Failure to plan is a plan to fail – SEO migration considerations; technical, process, people
Technical migration considerations; CMS, redirects, links, maintain SEO, sitemaps, custom 404, analytics, webm tools
Process migration considerations; design, content, linking, benchmarks, monitoring
Businesses consolidate = combined company website. Design w/ SEO migration in mind (KWs, CMS, links etc)
Crawl each site for assets and links. Map old pages on CC site. ID top converting pages. ID most powerful links..
Ensure New CMS SEO Features: Title Tags, meta descr. separate title tag and on page titles, Image alt txt editing, URL editing
Mapping of old to new content most important factor during site migration – preserve URLs wherever possible
Audit & benchmark, preserve URLs, update backlinks/301, submit new sitemap & work with SEO agency from day 1

Search (@andrewgirdwood)

1.75 in-store connections are driven by Search for every one online in Vodafone’s case study

Link Building (@lisadmyers, @patrickaltoft)

Different types of links; Giveaways, linkbait, paid links, guest content, syndication, reciprocal, social links
Google+ may not be a ranking factor at the moment but it is a visibilty factor so don’t ignore it
The biggest way social signals effect rankings is the way they syndicate out to other sites as links
Every paid link should look like a natural link. More about what it looks like than if it’s paid!
Link outreach; email people you know, blog editors in sector, give products away (carefully)
Confused.com linkbait generates large volume of social shares – yet not generating links. Make sure you target bloggers
Bad links do hurt sites & only way to recover is remove links & submit reinclusion request
Large scale link prospecting tool by Justin Briggs recommended

Social Media(@avinash, @jakelangwith)

Most of what’s measured in social media is garbage – so actions are not innovative, e.g. Facebook just used for comps
National Express (Facebook) & Marks & Spencer (Twitter) highlighted as great examples of social strategy – Disney UK (Twitter) bad example
LinkedIn is the best platform for sourcing SEO staff
LinkedIn tips: use advanced search, current job, multiple job titles, location radius, filter by keywords

PPC/remarketing (@guylevine, @duncanparry, @daxhamman)

Why invest in PPC? It works – your competitors are already doing it.
Make sure you set time spans on remarketing….few weeks can be ok a few months will annoy customers
A ranking in position 3 or 4 with review stars can generate as much traffic as number 1 position
Think about your brand when you’re writing a PPC ad – it may look spammy and may not be good for it.
Search retargeting company Chango are now active in the UK
Retargeting is broader than site retargeting. Infographic reveals 7 types effective retargeting
Adding order ids to remarketing ads to do attribution modelling super quick

To be continued…

5 Powerful Facebook Guerilla Marketing Tips to Outsmart Competitors

Shaad Hamid — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:16:33 +0000

Continuing from my previous post, 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign, I thought I’d share with you some simple yet powerful tactics to outsmart your competitors and reach out to your target audience. Facebook offers some incredible targeting options, so here are my five top tips to get the most out of these features.

#1 Targeting your competitors’ fans

There has never been a more fertile hunting ground for systematically picking off competitors’ customers and fans than Facebook ads. At the time of writing, there are no legal limitations in targeting users who express positive or negative interests in other companies’ protected brands. I doubt that this frontier mentality will last legally; but meanwhile, you can certainly get it while it’s hot!

Why do you want to target your competitors customers and fans? You need to keep in mind that brand interests carry important customer qualifiers. For instance, consider luxury brands, especially if the marketing task involves high-quality goods. Those interested in luxury items tend to prefer the finer things and are willing to spend. Brands such as Rolex, Mercedes-Benz, Burberry, Issey Miyake, Chanel and Swarovski are great examples and well represented on Facebook. Users displaying interests in these brands may qualify to view your ads.

Also, people interested in a competitor’s product or service may be interested in yours too. Conferences are a great example; Distilled could target users who already like the Search Marketing Expo Facebook page. That’s because these conferences attract attendees surrounding the same topical content: SEO, PPC and Social Media.

#2 Targeting users who hate your competitors

Users who display colourful expressions of negativity toward your competitors’ brands provide powerful fodder for marketers for a couple of reasons. First, they were once interested in the actual products and their bad experiences have pushed them away from the brands. Second, it is reasonable to assume that these unhappy customers might actually be in the market for an alternative, which we are only too happy to offer up. For example, Spotify could target users who like the fan page “iTunes sucks”.

Please note that marketing to competitors’ disenfranchised customers is nothing new, and Facebook offers lush ground to mine negative sentiment. As in life, community members are more than willing to explicitly share what bothers them about brands, including general hatred.

Wouldn't Ford love to pounce on the opportunity to belittle Toyota when they recalled large number of cars due to faulty brakes?

#3 Targeting general things people dislike

If your client or organisation is a college or university and you offer online distance learning, you could target young adults who are fans of the pages “I don’t hate school, I hate waking up at six in the morning” and “I hate waking up in the morning” and write ultra targeted ad copy to entice these users to call you or sign up for more details. Facebook users hate many things; sell privacy fences to those who hate their neighbours, sell anti-romantic or lonely-person products to those who hate Valentines Day. The list is practically endless.

#4 Occupation and employment

Next ask yourself “what are the occupations and places of employment that indicate a user might be interested in my product or service?” Targeting occupations can be an extremely potent strategy, because after family, profession is one of the most powerful components of an individual’s identity. I am aware that LinkedIn gets all the publicity as a ‘business’ platform, while Facebook has been known as the ‘personal’ platform. The reality could not be further from the truth. We work with many B2B clients. One thing nearly all of them have in common is that they openly question the value of Facebook ads for marketing to professionals.

If you look at Facebook’s PPC targeting girth, they boast of over 800 million users worldwide (and counting)! That number amounts to almost one in seven people on earth. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that business people use Facebook at sometime in their daily cycle. If you sell specialised goods to large manufacturing companies, then you could target users with the following job titles, “procurement manager” or “purchasing manager”. If you sell DNA testing services in order to distinguish who a child’s father is, you could target specific lawyers who deal with these types of cases.

If you’re a local restaurant or a coffee shop located next to well known businesses, then you could target your ads to these professionals as they are your target customers. Also, certain job roles require certain types of productivity software, tools, machines, clothing gear etc.

#5 Final list of ideas

In addition to the list above, here’s a list to inspire you to come up with even more creative niche segments:

Political orientation – people who support the Green Party have different values to those who support the Conservative party.
Leaders – there are users who idolise certain people e.g. Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, the Dalai Lama etc.
Sports teams – users who are fanatical supporters of Manchester United or Barcelona FCs.
Family roles – Facebook’s new broad category targeting allows you direct access to family status.

Books and authors – the saying ‘you can judge a person by the books they read’ has never been truer. Think about your target audience and think about what books, authors, magazines and newspapers they would read. The type of material they read would give you an insight into their internal psychological values.
Applications – this is specifically important if you are trying to promote an app or a game yourself. Facebook tells me that there are 2,367,780 users who are 18 and over in the UK who like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars”. We know they have downloaded these applications, so we have every reason to believe that this target segment would be interested in another application.

As you can see, there’s a universe of creative ad targeting ideas for marketers. More important than the examples above is that I hope this post has inspired you to look deeply at contextual targeting in a whole new light. As always, I would love to hear your views, ideas and tips on advanced Facebook targeting, so feel free to add to the discussion below.

Image credit: HikingArtist.com

Link Building – a Helpful Guide to Prospecting and Analysis

Pak Hou Cheung — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 13:54:14 +0000

Creative Link Building, Link Prospecting or even Link Scouting – call it what you will, the premise is the same: you are looking for opportunities to build links.

Over the years there have been many different ways that people have been doing this; one of my personal favourites is using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. However useful this is, I still find it time consuming and painful, until thankfully along came Linkdex which came and helped ease the pain.

However helpful these tools have been in aiding my link building efforts, it is important as part of any SEO link strategy to think outside the box and establish links where your competitors are not present.

Like many others I am sure, I find quality link prospecting to be a slow process, and knowing where to begin is the hardest and most frustrating. Hopefully, though, after reading this you’ll be able to analyse quicker and build better quality links.

What You Will Need Beforehand…

Before finding these links, you will need the following extensions installed to your Google Chrome Browser:

SEOmoz
Scraper

Step 1 | Change Your Google Search Settings

The first step is to change your Google Search settings, you will want to show 100 results per page rather than the standard results of 10. This can be changed in the search settings as shown below:

Step 2 | Knowing Your Operator Queries

I discussed in a previous blog post of mine last month how to understand Google operator queries, and how they can help you better in the art of SEO. The truth is that knowing these queries will help to aid you quicker in filtering and analysing useful link prospects.

Let’s take an example. With it being the start of London Fashion Week today, let’s say I was on the lookout for guest blogging opportunities to share the world of how great Holly Fulton’s and Dion Lees’ Show Spaces were. I would be thinking about different search query strings that would accept guest blogging opportunities, such as:

“write for us” OR “guest post” “fashion”
inurl:blog “write for me” OR “Guest Writer” “fashion”

Step 3 | Start Looking for Links

Once you have the extensions, configured your Google search settings and have narrowed down your search results with better defined operator queries, you can start link prospecting.

After displaying your search results, highlight the title tag from the listing and scrape the results using Scraper as shown below:

Once you have scraped the results, you should export them into a Google Docs file for analysis and research. What you have now is a highly relevant set of sites to look at when building links.

Step 4 | Analysis and Research

The next step is for you to analyse and take note of the root domains using SEOmoz toolbar. Once you have, I would recommend filtering them to make the largest at the top and start prospecting.

Step 5 | Engagement and Action

Finally, after having filtered the prospective links, it’s all up to you to go about and building the links! Good luck!

Excel Hints for PPC

Tamsin Mehew — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 13:05:05 +0000

Excel is one of the best tools for PPC. Downloading your data into Excel gives much more scope for analysis and complex change than using a browser interface or AdWords Editor.

You may have already read Distilled’s Excel for SEO or some of PPCHero’s Excel tips, but here are my own hints.

Concatenation

If there’s one thing you can put into practice from this post, it is this: you can use ampersands instead of CONCATENATE().

A1&A2 is the same as CONCATENATE(A1,A2), except for being far fewer characters and not adding to the oft inevitable nightmare of nested brackets.

Wildcards

Excel has three wildcard characters:

A question mark (?) can match a single character, but it can be any character. So ‘ca?’ will match ‘cat’ and ‘cab’ but not ‘ca’ or ‘cattle’.
Tilde is the escape character – if you actually want to search for asterisks, question marks or tildes you have to add a tilde (~) before them. So ‘Where am I?’ will match ‘Where am Id’, while ‘Where am I~?’ will match ‘Where am I?’ and nothing else.
An asterisk, *, can represent zero or any number of any characters. ‘*’ will match anything. ‘*where’ will match ‘where’, ‘somewhere’ and ‘thwsohfkjsgnsmnglsnwhere’ but not ‘where am I’.

Main takeaway: ‘*where*’ will match anything with ‘where’ in it. You can use this to check text for a single word.

Wildcards do not work in all functions (you can’t use them in SUBSTITUTE(), for example) but will work in SEARCH(), SUMIF(), SUMIFS(), COUNTIF(), COUNTIFS() and VLOOKUP(). You can use also wildcards in Find and Replace.

Checking Ads

Pretty basic tip: You can check that all the bits of your ads are the right length using LEN(), and then having conditional formatting to highlight where text is too long.

More advanced: what if you use dynamic keyword insertion? Then your ad text’s actual length can be over 25, as AdWords won’t count the ‘{KeyWord:}’ when counting the characters. You can get around this by using:

=LEN(A2)-10*COUNTIF(A2,”*{KeyWord:*}*”)

You usually would use COUNTIF() on a range of cells, but you can also use it to check just one cell – if A2 uses DKI, then COUNTIF() will return 1, and if it doesn’t COUNTIF() will return 0. There are 10 characters in ‘{KeyWord:}’, so if COUNTIF() is 1 the formula gives then length of A2 minus 10.

COUNTIF() is case insensitive, so it won’t matter if your ads use ‘{keyword:’, ‘{Keyword:’ or ‘{KeyWord:’.

Checking Search Query Reports

Search query reports are great providers of negative and positive keywords. But it can be difficult to spot trends if people phrase their queries slightly differently. You can use SUMIF() and wildcards to see the performance of all search queries that have an individual word in them.

First, download your search query report into Excel – here’s an entirely made-up example:

Then add a second worksheet, and set up these headings:

The ‘Word’ column is for the word or phrase you’re searching the search terms for. Add some words that recur in the search terms.

In cell B2, we want to add up all the clicks of search terms containing whatever’s in A2. So use the formula

=SUMIF(‘Search term report’!A:A,”*”&A2&”*”,’Search term report’!E:E)

There are three parameters inside SUMIF():

the first is the range of cells to test
the second is the criteria to test those cells
the third gives the range of cells to add up if the tested cell fulfils the criteria (This argument is optional – leave it blank if you’re adding up the cells you’re testing)

So the SUMIF() will look at ‘Search term report’!A:A (which is the column of search terms) and see if any match “*”&A2&”*”. So if A2 is ‘cheap’ then the function will look for search terms that match “*cheap*” – which means any search term that uses the word ’cheap’. It then sums the numbers in ‘Search term report’!E:E (the Clicks column).

The formula for Impressions is

=SUMIF(‘Search term report’!A:A,”*”&A2&”*”,’Search term report’!F:F)

which is the same except that the third parameter is now the Impressions column.

In the Cost column the third parameter should be ‘Search term report’!I:I, and in the Conv column the third parameter should be Search term report’!K:K.

The CTR, CPC, Cost/conv and Conv rate columns can’t be filled in using SUMIF(), as they aren’t sums – calculate these from the other columns.

Then copy the formulae in Row 2 and paste them downwards.

In this example, searches with the word ‘cheap’ get good CTR and bad cost/conv, suggesting that ‘cheap’ should either be added as a negative keyword or effort needs to be spend improving their performance. It also shows there’s a lot of traffic for ‘blue’ which converts well, so separating ‘blue widgets’ into their own ad group might web a good idea.

What words should you check? Look at your search queries and see what keeps coming up. You might want to check for words suggesting an informational search (like ‘why’, ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ or ‘which’). Or you can check for people searching for websites with words like ‘www’ or ‘com’.

Note that the CTR calculated is likely to be higher than the actual CTR of all searches containing your word – some queries are collated under ‘Other Search Queries’, and if a search query had a click it’s less likely to be one of those. So it may be better to focus on the cost and conversion metrics.

Download the Sumif Example sheet here

Any More?

I hope you’ve found these tips useful – there’s so much depth to Excel that it’s easy to miss the things you can do with it. Please share your own tips in the comments!

3 Free Tools to Establish Competitors Online

Chelsea Blacker — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:34:26 +0000

Often, people running websites have a unique interpretation of who their online competitors are. Depending where you do your SEO, you will have seen this manifested in a variety of ways:

In house – Director asking “Why don’t we rank number one for BMW instead of BMW.com? We sell models of BMW cars”
Agency – Chances are you’ve held back giggles as a new business prospect suggests they are competing with a major site like Amazon/YouTube/eBay. I find brick and mortar clients struggle the most to detach themselves from the material world to look exclusively at online competitors.
Independent – Joe Snow sells his own e-book “How to Build a Shed” and considers B&Q a competitor.

Here are three free tools to help get a better sense of accurate competitors in the digital space. Assessing online competitors requires a detailed look at a number of SEO factors like backlinks and targeted keywords, so consider these tools as a great way to get the gist of competitor websites instead of a thorough analysis. By working out competitors, instead of biting far more off than can be chewed, a more realistic SEO campaign can be managed from the outset.

SEM Rush

In SEMRush break down your competitors by organic search or pay per click advertising. SEMRush will even show you how many keywords you target which are shared with each competitor, along with how much traffic, and the number of keywords driving that traffic.

Spyfu

Spyfu will provide a list of nine competitors in both organic search and pay per click competitors. Even better, Spyfu allows quick access to competitor’s competitors by simply clicking the a link in each list.

Alexa.com

Remember back in 2005 when people used Alexa rankings? It actually provides some great insight into competitors even today.
To establish competitors in Alexa search for your chosen site. Then check out the “Related Links” tab which appears just below the site summary. The table defaults onto “Search Analysis”, so be sure to click “Related Links” tab.

Non-Personalised Search

It’s not a tool, but I’d be a fool not to throw it in there. Be sure to Google some of your target keywords and see what websites are appearing; that said, be sure you’re not signed into a Google account when doing this in Google; that way your results wont be personalised to your tastes and they will more accurately reflect search results.

What do you think of the competitors suggested by SEMRush, SpyFu and Alexa? What other free competitor analysis tools can you suggest? I’d love to hear your thoughts to improve this brief list!

Valentine’s Day Marketing Strategy – Did Your Brand Get it Right?

Gillian Cook — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:00:06 +0000

St. Valentine’s Day has become one of the biggest events in the retail calendar. Second only to Christmas, it is a huge money maker for brands, with 32% of gifts being bought online. In America, it is expected that a whopping $3.5billion will be spent on jewellery alone. Men are the biggest spenders, buying all sorts of gifts for their loved ones, from flowers, to chocolates, to dinners out and weekends away – and they are more likely than women to buy elaborate gifts. With such huge revenue opportunities, ask yourself… how well did your brand perform and what can be done to improve performance for next year?

1. Planning

People start searching for Valentine’s Day gifts around mid-January, with momentum picking up pace at the beginning of February. The biggest sales days are the 5^th and 6^th of February, with the week running up to the 14^th February characterised by frenzied and frantic last-minute gift buying. This means brands have to get their thinking cap on and start planning well in advance. Think about what worked well the previous year and act on it. The earlier you start, the wider the audience you will reach.

2. Segmentation

Not everyone on Valentine’s Day will be expecting to receive a gift. Not every woman is going to appreciate a ‘Perfect Earrings for the Lovely Lady in Your Life’ branded email. Segment your market by the gifts they may buy. A Facebook ad campaign is a particularly good way to go about this, as they have the ability to target your audience by their age, location, gender, relationship status, etc. Also, look at who bought from you last year and be sure to target them with a special message.

3. Sending Out The Right Message

Once you’ve segmented your audience, it’s time to create a customised message for their wants and needs. People are price sensitive and they’re looking for a good deal and great service. An Email Marketing Campaign can be a great place to start. Make sure you have a punchy subject line, that you feature suitable products for the segment you’re targeting and include other special deals you might have on. Use a range of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to promote your offering and utilise your blog if you have one. Solve the problem for those who don’t have a clue about gift buying for their lover and encourage them to strike while the iron’s hot.

4. Your Website

Now that you’ve made sure you’re getting the message out to your contacts and social media followers, it’s time to target anyone visiting your site. Make sure your homepage clearly promotes your Valentine’s Day offering. Give the landing page a makeover with red, pink and beautiful hearts and be sure to include on every page of your website information about delivery and shopping cut-off dates.

5. Get Creative

You don’t need to be in the chocolate or flower industry to benefit from this holiday and reap the financial rewards. You will, however, have to be creative if you are not in the traditional industries associated with this romantic holiday. Create a video. Use Valentine’s Day inspired discount codes. Partner with a company that offers complimentary products to yours. Create a special Valentine’s Day product. Run a Valentine’s competition on your social media platforms. Use this holiday to drive traffic to your site and increase engagement.

How to create a successful business blog

Rachel McCombie — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:22:41 +0000

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and similarly (if on a somewhat smaller scale!), building up a successful blog doesn’t happen overnight. As with anything, it takes hard work, determination and commitment to get a blog on its feet, and even more to build up a readership through earning the trust and respect of your audience. Here are some top tips on how to build up a successful blog for your business.

In brief – why a blogging is good for business
The purpose of this post isn’t to extol the virtues of blogging, but to show you how to do it successfully. Nevertheless, I’d like to start with a brief summary of what the main advantages are, for the benefit of those who are new to the subject and to remind ourselves why it’s worth putting the effort in.

SEO – a blog creates fresh new content for your site and allows you to target long-tail keywords with ease
Brand – a blog gives your brand a voice with which to speak out on relevant issues and news
Authority – a blog positions you as an industry authority
Traffic – a blog brings relevant traffic to your site, and even if a visitor isn’t looking to buy immediately, they’re more likely to remember your site if they become a regular reader

Figure out what you want your blog to achieve and who its readers will be
Let’s start at the very beginning. If you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to achieve from blogging, your blog is not likely to achieve success. That’s because it’s important to understand who you’re writing for and what your goals are: is your blog purely for SEO, to target long-tail keywords? If so, you’re probably missing a trick. Think about who you want your readers to be – whether they’re potential new clients or customers, other people in your industry, consumers, and so on. Your audience will dictate the whole tone, style and content of your blog, so set down your aims carefully before you do anything else.

Create your blog on your own domain
Not only does it look better and more consistent from a brand point of view, but keeping your blog on your own domain (as opposed to sticking it on an external site such as Blogger or WordPress.com) will bring maximum benefit to the rest of your site from an SEO perspective. Hosting your blog on your own site will ensure that your whole site will benefit from the extra visitors and incoming links generated from your blogging efforts, and you end up with a stronger site that will rank better for a broad range of keywords. Just a note – make sure your blog looks like the rest of your site – otherwise you risk confusing your readers.

Blog regularly
What you write about – and how you write about it – will depend heavily on your industry, your brand tone and many other factors. But it’s important to blog regularly. I don’t mean that you should compromise quality over quantity, but a blog that hasn’t been updated for weeks or months doesn’t give a very good impression to visitors – it just looks a bit half-hearted and therefore a bit unprofessional. (Of course, it is very possible to go too far the other way and blog so often that you become annoying, or your readers can’t keep up with the sheer volume of posts you’re churning out. It’s about striking a balance.)

Don’t worry if you’re not sure what to write about – you can often repeat the same formulas (e.g. ‘Tip of the week’), and with a few one-offs thrown in, you’ve already got yourself a healthy number of posts.

Here are some ideas for blog post angles which we’ve found work well for business blogs

Interviews with people who are involved in your industry
Round-ups of and commentary on relevant news stories from the past week or month
Write-ups of points and tips arising from industry conferences
‘Ultimate guide’ to a topic relevant to your business
Advice for people wanting to build up a career in your industry

The importance of proofreading
I know I’m always banging on about this, but proper use of English matters. Poor grammar gives a poor impression of your site and it’s extremely unprofessional. Proofread all your posts and make sure that there are no silly errors, and furthermore, ensure that there’s no inappropriate language or anything overtly political or religious that could alienate some of your readers. Make sure that your spelling is appropriate to your audience – e.g. don’t use American spellings if you’re writing for a UK audience. Go easy on the slang, but remember that a blog is a more informal setting, so a friendly and approachable tone is appropriate.

Blog without agenda
Linking to other pages of your site is fine (and it’s good for SEO), but don’t do so in a salesy way. Of course you want your blog to tie in with what your business does, but cramming your blog with sales blurb completely defeats the object. You’ll build up a readership and earn trust much more easily if you blog for the benefit of your readers, not your own sales targets.

Get everyone involved
Try and encourage employees from different parts of your business to get involved in blogging, perhaps by offering an incentive or running a competition to see who can get the most number of views or comments on their post. Though some will be more interested in this idea than others, the fact remains that having a number of different employees contributing posts gives a good impression of your business, as it shows that the people who work for your business are interested and informed enough to want to speak out on topical issues and share advice.

Capitalise on trending topics
Keep an eye on Google Insights and Twitter trending topics to find hot topics relevant to your industry. The interest is already there, and in a wider group of people than your regular audience, so be on the ball and get ready to blog when you see a topic relevant to you that seems to be generating a lot of attention. Google loves fresh results, so you’re more likely to rank highly for up-to-the-minute blogging about a trending topic.

Knowing what time to blog
The time of day and week you blog can affect how many visitors it receives. Fridays, for example, tend to be quieter, and a post released around lunchtime will likely do better than one released at 5pm when everyone’s going home. Take a look at the Analytics for your site and figure out when your busiest periods are. You can also extend this analysis to your social media; if you’re tweeting about your blog posts and you know that some of your target audience is located in a different time zone, consider sending out a different tweet (to avoid repetition) at the peak time for that audience.

Encourage and reply to comments
Invite your readers to comment on your posts and get some discussion going. Reply personally to people who comment on your blog and ensure that you are quick to approve comments.

Promote your blog
Finally, there’s no point sticking a small link to your blog on your homepage and leaving it at that – you have to tell people about it! Direct customers and clients to your blog by mentioning it in your mailouts, encouraging visits from your social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) and even mentioning it in your offline marketing material. You can also submit your blog to blog aggregator sites such as Alltop to bring in extra visitors at the same time as building links to the blog.

Do you have any tips to share for business blogging success? Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter – @RachelsWritings.

Image credit – Mexicanwave on Flickr.

Tracking Your QR Codes to Bring Offline Marketing Online

Daniel Bianchini — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 12:10:43 +0000

Over the past few years, QR Codes have become more mainstream and can be seen in most day-to-day activities. There are examples of some very good uses of QR Codes as well as some badly thought out QR Codes.

QR Codes are great for getting offline marketing messages online quickly. Adding QR Codes to typical offline marketing material such as posters, flyers, business cards or event badges allows the user to see the message instantly.

With all these offline marketing activities being used, how can the business track what is working and what isn’t? Well, with Google Analytics and I am sure most other analytics packages, you can put tracking codes directly into the QR Code and track when users scan the code.

Below is a step by step guide to tracking QR Codes in Google Analytics.

1. Choose the URL that you would like the QR code that you are generating to return once scanned.

Example: www.oxondigital.co.uk/register/

2. Now create your campaign tracking code that you will use to identify the traffic that you receive from the different marketing activity you are running. You can do that by either using the Google URL Builder tool or my GDocs campaign tracking spreadsheet.

Example:

Campaign Source: University-Flyer
Campaign Medium: QR
*Campaign Content:
Campaign Name: OxonDigital4

This will provide you with the following URL to use:

http://www.oxondigital.co.uk/register/?utm_source=university-flyer&utm_medium=qr&utm_campaign=oxondigital4

*Using the campaign content tag you can differentiate between the ads. In the example above I could have used the Campaign Content to differentiate between the different campuses (Wheatley, Headington, Botley).

3. Now that you have your URL with the correct tracking code, you need to find a QR Code generator or use one of the following:

- http://createqrcode.appspot.com/
- http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
- http://goqr.me/

The example below shows the outcome of what we have just created. Give it a try by scanning the QR Code on your smart phone.

4. Now place the QR code on the relevant marketing material that you are going to distribute.

5. To see the results of the tracking code, you need to go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns

6. Now that you have your campaign data you are more than likely wanting to delve further into your analytics to see metrics such as types of devices and locations.

To do this you will need to create an advanced segment or two. This can be done in a number of ways, two of which I have shown below.

Segment 1

Include > Metric = Medium > Exactly Matches > Campaign Medium (QR)

This segment will bring back results that were generated using the campaign medium name of QR.

Segment 2

If you are using lots of different QR Codes you might want to split them by campaign name and campaign medium to delve into the specific marketing channel at the time.

Include > Metric = Medium > Exactly Matches > Campaign Medium (QR)

AND

Include > Metric = Campaign > Exactly Matches > Campaign Name (OxonDigital4)

Once you have created your segments, you will be able to delve further into the data you have received.

The above shows you how you can track your QR code. So whether you put them on a poster, event ticket, t-shirt or coffee cup, you will be able to see what traffic they have generated to your targeted page and/or website.

How do you use QR Codes? Are you making sure that you are tracking your offline marketing channels with techniques such as QR Codes? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below or on Twitter @danielbianchini

Thanks to Dan Barker for help on some aspects of this post

The Challenge of Selling SEO & Forgetting the ‘Human Ranking Factor’

Shaad Hamid — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 12:31:23 +0000

As with selling any service, selling SEO services is an extremely challenging task. Here are my observations of two opposite ends of the spectrum of what SEO consultants often experience with selling SEO services.

Give me a two day optimisation strategy

We’ll often get contacted with the following, “We want a two day web optimisation strategy implemented.” Many neophyte consultants lick their lips and pounce on the ‘opportunity’ with alacrity. They start shooting off proposals, buffing up their hallowed methodology, and more.

A more sane, measured and customer-serving response to the request for a two day optimisation precess is, “Why?”

That always stops people in their tracks. “Why do you want a two day strategy implementation for your website and how do you know that’s the right thing for you?”

In the act of asking that question, you start actually consulting. And if you engage in a real dialogue on the basis of those questions you will gain bracing insight into the real issues, challenges and aspirations of the potential client. You may also get a bracing introduction to the assumptions they’re making — many of which are potentially untested.

It may well be that a two day implementation process is like a relatively empty vessel, into which (after suitable diagnostics and appropriate design) you can pour content that will actually serve their needs and best interests. But it may also be that a half day audit would suffice, and the real action needs to take place at their organisational levels, or with a different group of people, or may require preliminary contact with customers or other stakeholders. It could be that a six month process is needed.

My recommendation to companies who put out a request like the one above, and get a proposal back in response, is to disqualify the person or agency from further consideration, as the request has no meaning without further exploration.

And if you are an agency or a freelance consultant and receive a request like the above, differentiate yourself meaningfully by helping to get to the core of what’s driving the request, rather than getting infatuated by the format proposed.

Avoiding the panacea of empty process

Here’s another common challenge. An organisation decides they need to create a SEO strategy or a digital marketing strategy and manage its roll-out. They get an agency with a strategy implementation process, anchored in the balanced scorecard or some other framework. As they proceed, courtesy of this framework, they are deluged with meetings, with process charts, with communiques, and eventually they arrive at what they perceive to be ‘The Holy Grail’. Namely, they have a clear map. All inconsistencies are removed (at least on the charts anyway), and the path forward glitters like a mythical ‘Yellow Brick Road’.

The problem in the map is not the territory, and it never has been. The problem is that underlying the process clarity are dysfunctional relationships, misguided leadership behaviours, poorly aligned teams, social networks that don’t operate well, departmental practices that may be out of kilter with strategic aspirations, information hoarded rather than shared, a culture that is ossified with past practices rather than vitalised by future aspirations. And eventually the ‘knowing/doing gap’ will become that much more profound.

My humble advice is that once you have process clarity, you have to convert that into a more human map: of behaviours-in-action, team composition and alignment, presence of vibrant or nullifying relationships, communication and network effectiveness, leadership role-modeling and relevant efforts at culture-shifting in order to make the processes actually manifest. Until these adaptive elements are infused into the process steps, to humanise and actualise the processes, we run the risk of trying to run the world from an operating manual.

It doesn’t work. In fact, most of us don’t even run our computers from a manual. We get some hands-on experience while drawing on some guidance, then tinkering and adapting based on results. Alas, in an organisation there are many more moving parts, and my ‘tinkering’ can have expensive consequences if not synergised with the learnings and efforts of others.

Process clarity and human engagement must march together. You can see an organisation as a collection of processes and plans. Fair enough. But you can even more meaningfully see it pulsating with human performance. In other words, the subtotal of all the actions, interactions, behaviours, collaboration and communication between all the people who make a difference to the success or failure of the organisation. You can see the organisation as a patchwork quilt of teams, conversations and acted upon commitments. These are human dimensions, or as I’d like to call it, the ‘human ranking factor’ and if not addressed, all the gewgaws and trinkets of process clarity will be fallow and leave your strategic marketing vision unfulfilled.

Image credit: mootown

11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign

Shaad Hamid — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:31:29 +0000

As I have found out the hard way, Facebook ad production is extremely labour-intensive. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate an effective ad production workflow to best utilise your time. Here are eleven tips I’ve been able to come up with over the past few months.

Understanding the account structure

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.

Step 1 – get your target demographic right

Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.

E.g. targeting list:

Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.

Step 2: create your ads

Facebook has no process to save ads without submitting them for editorial approval. This is one of the greatest weaknesses to the user interface and the ad creation process and is a serious pain the rear. Therefore, it’s most efficient to submit one version of an ad for each social segment for approval at the time of research. It would be a complete waste of time if all your ad variants didn’t pass editorial scrutiny. Once the draft ads are approved, you’ll be able to tweak, duplicate and build ad variations and resubmit.

Step 3: designate the landing page

If the landing page has not already been determined, designate or create a page that is relevant to the draft copy. It’s extremely important to make sure the landing page is relevant for two reasons:

1) Facebook editorial might reject ads that take users to pages that aren’t relevant.

2) You would see a very high bounce rate, which means your time, effort, and money will be wasted.

Therefore, I cannot stress enough the importance of a great landing page. It’s often best to create specific landing pages solely for PPC campaigns. Trust me, the investment in development time will yield higher return on investment and provide a more effective PPC campaign.

Step 4: create your ad copy

The ad title, image, and body need to be reasonably related to pass editorial review. Again, choosing relevant images and writing compelling ad copy are critical to receiving higher click through rates.

Step 5: define your customer

This is the fun part. Use all the targeting attributes to fully target your social demographic segment.

Step 6: select your campaign

If you’re creating your ads on the web interface, click on “create a new campaign” and make sure you either change your budget to “lifetime budget” or change your daily budget to £1.00. This will ensure you don’t overspend your budget mistakenly. I’ve had to keep stressing myself to make these changes as I have had to endure some painful lessons in the past.

Step 7: set your bid and place your order

Once the demographic targeting is done, set your bid to £0.01. You set the bid so low because there’s no way to pause ads until after you’ve placed your order. Placing your bid at £0.01 will almost guarantee your ads won’t display and spend your valuable budget.

Step 8: repeat above steps

Once you’ve completed the above steps, find the little green button at the top right hand corner of the page that reads “create an ad” and click it. Go through the above steps until you have a paused campaign with an ad for each segment in it. Hopefully none of your ads will be rejected. If they do, all you need to do is make the recommended changes and resubmit them.

Getting the account structure right

Now that you’ve got a basic structure in place, let’s discuss best practice campaign lay-out. Most clients want to test more than one ad’s creative to the same target audience. While it’s tempting to dump a lot of ads targeting various segments in one campaign bucket, the result can be a big mess. Unfortunately Facebook does not currently allow you to sort results by demographic group. So you can’t isolate performance of ads by gender, education, interest or other criteria with a few clicks. This needs to be done manually, so setting things up with a bit of foresight goes a long way.

Example 1: messy structure

Baseball campaign:

baseball bat ad
baseball ad
baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2
baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign:

basketball ad
basketball ad 2
basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign:

football boots ad
football boots ad 2
football ad

The problem with the above structure is that Facebook’s algorithm decides which ads in your campaign are served. I suspect the algorithm is more optimised for Facebook to maximise its profits than for you to get coverage across all your ads equally. Because Facebook automatically rotates through each active ad in a campaign, it’s really important that the algorithm is comparing apples to apples.

Example 2 : better structure

Baseball bat campaign -

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball campaign -

baseball ad
baseball ad 2

Baseball glove campaign -

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign -

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign -

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign -

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign -

football ad
football ad 2

Football boots campaign -

football boots ad
football boots ad

You could go even more granular:

Baseball bat campaign (age 18-24)

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball bat campaign (age 25-35)

baseball bat ad
baseball bat ad 2

Baseball campaign (age 18-24)

baseball ad
baseball ad 2

Baseball campaign (age 25-35)

- baseball ad
- baseball ad 2

Baseball glove campaign (age 18-24)

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball glove campaign (age 25-35)

baseball glove ad
baseball glove ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign (age 18-24)

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Baseball shirt campaign (age 25-35)

baseball shirt ad
baseball shirt ad 2

Basketball campaign (age 18-24)

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball campaign (age 25-35)

basketball ad
basketball ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign (age 18-24)

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Basketball trainers campaign (age 25-35)

basketball trainers ad
basketball trainers ad 2

Football campaign (age 18-24)

football ad
football ad 2

Football campaign (age 25-35)

football ad
football ad 2

Football boots campaign (age 18-24)

football boots ad
football boots ad 2

Football boots campaign (age 25-35)

football boots ad
football boots ad 2

The above structure will be very handy when you need to monitor performance and also to make sure your end of month reporting is fairly straightforward.

A/B Testing

I love what one of my previous bosses told me during an internship programme I was completing some time ago. He said in my role I am not allowed to hold an opinion. If I need to push something forward, I’d need to substantiate it with tangible facts. I find A/B testing a great way to substantiate my proposals and recommendations, such as which campaigns to allocate more budget to, what type of images do I want, what type of message tone works with users, which type of call-to-actions work best, what colours are users more receptive to etc. By using A/B testing, you can obtain actual numbers, which can help you in your decision-making process.

Therefore, it is extremely important that you test different headlines, switching body copy, testing different images etc. It’s important to test at least a couple of ads per campaign. But don’t overdo it with loads of ads at the same time. As mentioned above, Facebook’s not going to give each ad a true chance to perform at its best even in rotation but will skew toward an ad the algorithm perceives as successful.

What’s in a name?

The last tip is to make sure you name your campaigns logically. The last time I checked, Facebook’s web interface allows a user to sort campaigns by most columns, while power editor does not support sorting. The ‘all campaigns’ page defaults to an alphabetical sort by campaign name every single time the user returns back to ‘all campaigns’, even after another sorting column was chosen previously. This can be extremely frustrating, so planning your naming standard early on will save your heart from increased blood pressure.

There is no hard and fast rule when it comes to naming conventions, but make sure they make sense to you when sorted alphabetically and that it also makes sense to someone who will work on the account in your absence. I generally use the following format as a guide -

[promotion name]-[product name]-[duration]-[special targeting metric]

e.g. Christmas deals – Trainers – 01 Dec/05 Dec 12 – males

Conclusion

The most essential take-away from this post is to plan ahead and be organised. Unless you use an in-house account management tool or you use a third party account management tool, managing Facebook campaigns can be fairly exhaustive. Hopefully the above tips will keep you in good stead. I’m sure you have some nuggets of wisdom to share too, so please feel free to leave your comments below.

Postscript

I received some constructive feedback after having published the above post and was notified by Leyla Arsan (@leyla_a) via twitter that I didn’t address a very important part of the whole campaign set-up process, namely URL tagging for conversion tracking. I also didn’t mention targeting ads to your existing Facebook fans and their friends, which I thought I should include too. So here are my #12 and #13 tips for a better Facebook campaign:

Tip #12: Conversion tracking
As with any PPC campaign, it is imperative that you set up conversion tracking in order to better gauge the success or failure of the campaigns you run. Like many PPC advertisers, I use Google Analytics in order to gain greater insight about the traffic I send via Facebook ads. The only problem is that Google Analytics can’t differentiate between referral and paid traffic sent via Facebook unless you tag your URLs with tracking codes. Google have very generously provided a URL builder that help you generate the tracking code to your landing page URLs. The only limitation with this tool is that it would be extremely time consuming if you have a large number of ads and landing page URLs. For this reason, I use our very own Daniel Bianchini’s Google docs spread sheet which lets you scale what the Google’s URL builder offer. This spread sheet has saved me loads of precious time, so I do urge you to use it. Here’s where you could find the spread sheet: http://goo.gl/jI1Wd
If you want more guidance on using the spread sheet click here to get to the original post.

Tip#13: Don’t forget your existing fans
With Facebook’s ‘premium ads and featured stories’ you can feature page posts on your brand pages as ads. This means that you can promote and advertise your content you post on your brand pages. This is quite a powerful channel to reach out and engage with your fans and their friends. The significance of this method of advertising is that you would be able to provide your target audience with an ad that is more engaging and less sale-sy. Also, you get to use not only text, but rich media such as images and videos. However, the key points to remember when setting campaigns that target your fans are:

1. The objective of the ‘premium ads’ campaign is to create brand awareness and increase the number of fans – or your fan rate. So you should avoid a sales approach in your core messaging.
2. If you are posting an image, make sure your page posts are up to 90 characters or less so they could be featured in its entirety on your ad. If it’s a page post with no rich media, then you can post up to 150 characters.
3. Since your target audience are fans and their friends, you might limit your reach (especially if you target sub-groups). However, it is still important to have a targeted audience with a decent enough number as Facebook wouldn’t display your ads if the target audience is too small.
4. Use your ‘page insights’ data to find what best geo locations to target your ads, and also to find which demographic segment are most receptive to your posts. This data should guide you when writing content for page posts.
5. Anecdotal evidence has shown that questions do tend to gain a fair amount of engagement: this also tends to work well when targeting those who are not already your fans.

Image credit: marcopako

Will HTML5 Boost My Rankings?

Matthew Taylor — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:56:01 +0000

It would be fair to say that pretty much every major change to the online environment is greeted with the same two questions by the vast majority of the SEO community –

What is it?
How can I use it to boost my SEO campaigns?

So with adoption of the next major evolution of HTML becoming more common, and having a growing feeling that it was about to come up in more client meetings, I decided it would be a good time to check how I can potentially make the most of HTML5.

I won’t go into a whole explanation of what HTML5 is now – I will leave that for the web design blogs – but the highlights as I understand them are:

A more descriptive set of markup tags; for example, nav, article, aside and footer
The introduction of Canvas element could be used for rendering graphs or images dynamically without the need for browser plugins
A Video element which will allow videos to be embedded without the need for third-party plugins; for example, Adobe Flash
Sites will be able to geolocate users without having to use IP address detection

It is apparent from this list that there are some pretty big changes between HTML4 and HTML5. For example, I’m guessing that every SEO will spot the third bullet point – video without the need for Flash – and realise the obvious content indexing benefit this will offer as a result.

But will you get any direct benefit from being first to the party (so to speak)? Will changing your site to HTML5 be a quick route to top spot in the rankings? Well, the simple answer is no! And you don’t have to just take my word for it either; Googler John Mu left the following responses to related questions on the Google Webmaster Central Help Forum:

In general, we work hard to understand as much of the web as possible, but I have a feeling that HTML5 markup is not yet as widely in use (and in use correctly) that it would make sense for us to use it as a means of understanding content better. As HTML5 gains in popularity and as we recognize specific markup elements that provide value to our indexing system, this is likely to change, but at the moment I would not assume that you would have an advantage by using HTML5 instead of older variants.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=2d4592cbb613e42c&hl=en

and

In general, our crawlers are used to not being able to parse all HTML markup – be it from broken HTML, embedded XML content or from the new HTML5 tags. Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that. If we find that more and more content uses HTML5 markup, that this markup can give us additional information, and that it doesn’t cause problems if webmasters incorrectly use it (which is always a problem in the beginning), then over time we’ll attempt to work that into our algorithms. With that in mind, I definitely wouldn’t want to stand in the way of your implementing parts of your site with HTML5, but I also wouldn’t expect to see special treatment of your content due to the HTML5 markup at the moment. HTML5 is still very much a work in progress, so it’s great to see bleeding-edge sites making use of the new possibilities.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=1d3850aec4e3dd96&hl=en

Although both of these comments date from late 2010, there doesn’t seem to have been any further opinion put forward to suggest that this is not Google’s current view, or not that I have found anyway.

So does this mean that you should ignore it all together? Well, no. This may sound odd having seen the opinions offered by Google, but there do seem to be some credible theories of the indirect benefits of implementing HTML5.

First, due to the fact that HTML5 is still a relatively “new” technology, a number of people will link to other sites that are using it. This means that an HTML5 site or piece of content (an infographic for example), if implemented well or uniquely, will accumulate links and social signals naturally. Check out this music video from Arcade Fire, which makes use of HTML5 and Google Maps to personalise the video to you. I’m not a fan of their music but I shared the link. Obviously this will only be a benefit until HTML5 becomes commonplace.

As well as this, it is believed that HTML5 will reduce the volume of code required to render a page, so it therefore has two indirect benefits. The first is that it will improve page load speed, which is a minor ranking factor, as well as having an effect on conversion. Secondly, it should increase the likelihood that information would be found by the search engine bots, as a result of them being able to process more site pages (if you believe that the search engines expend a limited amount of resources on a site).

Finally, you will be ‘future proofing’ your site. Even though Google’s current position is that it will not aid rankings, the Webmaster Tools responses imply that it may do in the future once it is more widely adopted.

When HTML5 becomes a web standard, I believe that at some point it will be worked into the algorithm as a result of its wide use. Being an early adopter means there should be an immediate boost if and when it is added to algorithm. It is also safe to assume that this change wouldn’t be publicly announced, so you will get a short competitive advantage until everyone else catches on.

Anyone who has read some of the other posts around on HTML5 and SEO are probably thinking I have missed out one of the most obvious benefits – the new markup. From what I have seen, a lot of people believe that it will indicate to the search engines what type of content is on a page and how important it is, meaning you are really able to draw attention to content.

While this may be the intention, I personally believe the ease with which this may be manipulated to promote low quality sites is such that it is likely only ever going to be a low value ranking factor, if it is one at all. It is very similar to the keywords metatag, which was so easily abused that Google finally discounted it as a ranking factor. If all you have to do is to put content within a certain tag to boost its rankings, everyone will do it.

So overall, while I personally wouldn’t recommend that a site change to HTML5 as some kind of SEO silver bullet, there are enough incidental SEO benefits to make it worthwhile to work into new builds or redesigns, or to use for content generation (such as infographics).

Android Fails to Render URLs with Dashes Via Bit.ly

Chelsea Blacker — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:41:44 +0000

Android platform is not able to render URLs shortened by bit.ly, which include dashes in blog post titles. To guarantee all users can read your posts via mobiles, be sure not to utilise dashes in blog post titles.

Last week, a client flagged up to us that their site wasn’t getting Android traffic on certain posts. True, Android traffic is never high, but when it slips to 0 visits, there must be something wrong. When the client looked into the posts, it was evident the titles of these blog posts each had a dash (-) in them. The majority of traffic to these posts comes from Twitter via Bit.ly links.

With the help of my local Orange Shop (HTC Hero Graphite anyone?), and some rigorous testing by @spamhendricks, it can be concluded that Android is not rendering bit.ly links which have dashes in certain instances. Specifically, when a blog post title utilises a dash, a bit.ly link won’t render on the Android platform.

Example

For example, here is an SEOptimise blog post with a dash in the title.

The URL for this blog post is:

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-just-roll-out-panda-3-2-2012-edition.html

As you can see, dashes are utilised in the URL for two reasons. First, the dash between “roll-out” appears in the URL. Second, all spaces in the title are also accounted for as dashes.

This link is then bit.ly-fied to appear as:

http://bit.ly/xgR9xq

If you have an Android phone, this bit.ly link will not render.

Significance

This issue is most likely to affect blog promotion across the social media sphere. But it can also affect press release promotion, news stories, and essentially anything where a dash is included in the H1, and then promoted via the popular link shortening service of Bit.ly.

Inconsistencies

What I’m struggling to understand is why this Android rendering issue is only valid if the title of the blog post has a dash; the issue is not reflected in the URL.

This URL from the earlier example for the blog post “Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 edition)” includes one dash in the title of the blog post.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-just-roll-out-panda-3-2-2012-edition.html

This second URL is for the blog post without any dashes “Foursquare 2012 | Experience, Thoughts and 6 Immense Tips for Your Business”.

http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2012/01/foursquare-2012-experience-thoughts-and-6-immense-tips-for-your-business.html

In this second example, the URL still utilises dashes to make up for the spaces in the post title. And yet, in this second example the bit.ly link renders on Android platforms just fine. Why?

What do you think? Why does the title of the blog post equate to Android users being able to view the post or not view the post? Is this enough reason to stop utilising bit.ly?

15% Discount Code for SMX Advanced London 2012

Kevin Gibbons — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 01:00:50 +0000

Once again, we are proud to be a blog partner for the SMX Advanced London 2012 conference. The event takes place on 15-16th May 2012 at Chelsea Football Club – Stamford Bridge.

In order to receive a 15% discount, just enter the code SEOPTIMISE012 when signing up online. There are different packages available and the prices go up after 30th March so it’s best to book early!

For coverage of previous events, please check out the presentations we have delivered and posts we have written:

Foursquare 2012 | Experience, Thoughts and 6 Immense Tips for Your Business

Pak Hou Cheung — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:32:39 +0000

My Foursquare Experience so far…

Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below. I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging.

To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those “Foursquare specials” and “Sharing with your friends”. Well the last two I did not experience; working in Paddington I would presume that businesses would be flocking with specials, but sadly not, and in terms of sharing with friends I have none (on Foursquare). With myself not experiencing two of the most important factors of Foursquare, this has sadly hindered now a relationship with the platform (for now). In what I have found is a similar occurrence to Google+, the number of “real people” on there (and active users within the UK) is, I would imagine, not staggering.

Despite my negativity and social neglect of Foursquare as of this month, I do believe it will be a bigger issue this year amongst companies (especially SMEs and franchises) to start rolling out and using this social media platform. Using Foursquare has really helped me in understanding why businesses should start using this social media platform and how to use it most effectively.

Does your Business Foursquare?

If you were to ask most businesses about what social media platforms they use to market their company, I suppose you could name a few, popular ones being Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and if you are really savvy (but not really), Google+.

But how many of us have thought about using Foursquare as a marketing platform for their business? I am going to go out on a limb and say probably less than 5% use Foursquare and to its full potential; an infographic that I saw last year outlined the number of small businesses using social media, with Foursquare not even being mentioned in the Top 7. Even today, the fact remains that Foursquare is still not being recognised, which was exemplified when I took part in a business social media survey last night, shown below:

Shown from the screenshot, not only has Foursquare not been recognised, but what is interesting is that Google+ and Pinterest have not been included. Also, their list showed that wikis were a more of a popular option.

Should my business start using Foursquare?

As I envisage Foursquare to get bigger and better, businesses will find it particularly useful for:

Maximising their social media efforts.
Looking to improve their multi-channel marketing efforts.
Digital-only brands to build upon their online reputation.
Great way of testing new products to market.
Source of market research to help understand their consumers better.

6 Immense Tips for Your Business to Capitalise on Foursquare

There are many ways for your business to make the best use of Foursquare and making the“Foursquare Special” better. Here are my Top 6 Tips.

1) Make your check-ins more useful

As exciting as check-ins are, after a while users are bound to get bored of them, so capitalise on using them better; for example, it was reported by Tnooz that the Radisson Edwardian chain of hotels were offering guests the chance to keep their rooms for longer, if they checked in via Foursquare. The hotel chain gave guests an extra two hours in their room.

2) Review and monitor your tips section

Be sure to monitor your tips section and understand what people are saying about your brand via Foursquare. Not only is this a great way for “free market research”, it is like having the service of a mystery shopper without the costs.

3) Create location-based experiences

If your business has one or more location, don’t just have a standard special across all the branches. Include specific ones, for example if your business is near a seaside resort or within the city. Have a special offer that is unique to that place to ensure they that your branch capitalises on that specific location’s resources.

4) Capitalising on low-cost impulse items

This idea works particularly well for businesses that sell cheap items, that people buy on impulse. Reach out to people in the surrounding area to let them know of a “free cup of coffee with a cake” or “buy one doughnut, get one free.”

5) Marketing new/seasonal products

Broadcasting new/seasonal items is a great way of using the “Foursquare Special” to letting your consumers know of any new products or services available, and that they should try them out as soon as possible!

6) Understand and review your specials

When you set up “Foursquare Special”, don’t just have one special set up and done; alternate them and see what works best for you. For example, if you own a restaurant, don’t just have “free glass of wine for the mayor”, but alternate them – “5% off Winter menu for check-ins”, “20% off food bill for the mayor” or even “15% off total food bill on the 10^th visit.” Play around with them to give new incentives and better engagement for the users.

2012 The Year of Foursquare (and the dragon)

With huge savings and partnerships already established in 2011 within the U.S, for example H&M, Sports Authority and Dunkin’ Donuts on board, I envisage that Foursquare will only get bigger and better for us in 2012, and be adopted as another popular social media platform to help businesses improve their sales.

What Could Google’s New Privacy Policy Mean for PPC?

Tamsin Mehew — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 16:33:59 +0000

Earlier in the week Google announced changes to its privacy policies. The main changes are that:

Now nearly all Google products are covered by one privacy policy.
Information you give Google’s various different services can be combined.

Google still promises not to sell personal data, but to only share aggregated, non-personally identifiable information. It hasn’t announced that it’s collecting information it wasn’t before, just that it’s combining what it has differently. You can preview the new policy here.

According to Forbes, combining information between Google services has been allowed by the privacy policies since 2005. But this didn’t stop the FTC complaining of privacy policy violations when Google used data from Gmail accounts when launching Google Buzz in 2010 – Google’s policy at the time also said “If we use this [personal] information in a manner different than the purpose for which it was collected, then we will ask for your consent prior to such use.” The new policy instead says “We will ask for your consent before using information for a purpose other than those that are set out in this Privacy Policy.” Still, the FTC complaint may be a factor in why Google is trying to be very clear to its users about what it’s doing with their data, as it starts to treat all of its products as parts of a single unified service.

And now, some speculation on what this may or may not mean for PPC and SEO:

Interest-based targeting may improve. Currently Google uses DoubleClick cookies to place users into interest categories based on the sites they visit – you can see what Google thinks you like here. The changes mean Google could infer interests from searches or Google+ activity as well, which should improve accuracy.
Demographics targeting might be available more widely. Currently targeting by age-group and gender is only an option on sites where users supply that information. But Google’s demographic information (from YouTube or Google+ accounts) could be used for targeting on other sites as well.
New ways of targeting Display Network advertising may appear. For example it could be possible to target people based on what Google Products they use – advertise Analytics training to Analytics users, say, or push Google+ users to circle your Google+ page.
New ways of targeting Google Search advertising may appear. AdCenter already allows targeting based on age-group and gender when advertising on Search: Google could do the same.
There will be even more changes to the SERPs – Google’s announcement says the change will let them “better understand which version of Pink or Jaguar you’re searching for”. But perhaps it will also add more than help with disambiguation, adding to the personalisation of the SERPs we’re already seeing with Search Plus Your World.

Have you any idea what Google is (or could be) planning? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What Brands Need To Know About Google+ Pages

Gillian Cook — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:25:03 +0000

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

As we have seen, Google are placing more emphasis on people. People are going to share your content; they are your audience, so make sure they are interested in your market offering and develop trust with them. What can be done to grow circles? First and most importantly, the Google+1 button must be displayed on your site. This not only helps build contacts, it helps verify your site to your page. Ask employees and partners of the organisation to share the page within their circles. In the same way a brand would develop Twitter and Facebook campaigns, the same should be done on Google+. This could include giveaways, deals, offers – anything that is exclusive to Google+ will help you gain more followers. People’s pages at the moment have a higher weighting than brand pages. People need to add a page before the page can add them, so if a celebrity like Lady Gaga was to pick up your page, it could essentially drive a lot of people to your page. There is also a What’s Hot feature on Google+, so featuring on this would also increase the visibility of your page.

2. Segment Their Audience

Like in Google+ for personal pages, you can divide up your contacts into ‘friends’, ‘family’, ‘colleagues’ etc, the same can be done with your Google+ Page contacts. At the moment, a Google+ page’s circles are defined as ‘following’, ‘customers’, ‘VIPs’, and ‘team members’. This is a good place to start, and more circles can be added to further segment your audience. This provides brands with a wonderful marketing opportunity where they can target each segment with unique and specific messages. This is important, as it allows brands to develop trust with their audience… a key factor which will encourage users to share their content.

3.Develop A Content Strategy

Content creation will become more important for brands than ever before. A content strategy should take into consideration the latest Google algorithm updates, including Panda, which favours unique content that is relevant and fresh. A regular flow of high quality content will raise your brand awareness and potentially drive traffic to your site through your Google+ page. However, the value of that content will drop if it is not ‘shareable’. Making content easy to share and to +1 will widen its reach across the internet, essentially helping that content appear in more personalised results. Having said that, creating shareable content is not always an easy task and brands will need to analyse their content and adapt it. ‘Ripples’ is a feature that will allow them to do so. It provides visual information on how content has rippled through the web. This insight could be invaluable to brands, as they are able to see who is sharing their content.

Now that Google+ allows multiple managers to log into a brand’s Google+ page, there is even more incentive for a brand to use this platform. Excluding the owner, a page can have up to 50 managers who can act on behalf of the organisation. While taking on another social platform may seem a lot of work, I believe that brands that implement and integrate their Google+ page well could really reap big rewards, not just in terms of brand awareness but also SEO. However, until the platform further develops, it will be hard to say exactly how SEO and Google+ pages will be intertwined. Google+ is about ‘connections, interactions and activity’ …people, essentially. Surely Google will reward in some way, brands that can prove they have quality, shareable content that has been publically approved (+1ed) by numerous people in their circles?

Did Google Just Roll-Out Panda 3.2 (2012 Edition)?

Kevin Gibbons — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 10:26:43 +0000

Yesterday Google announced a new page layout algorithm update – this is a landing page quality update, which looks at “the layout of a webpage and the amount of content you see on the page once you click on a result”. As opposed to having the need for scrolling beneath ads to get to this. Doesn’t this sound very similar to Panda though?

At Pubcon in November last year, Matt Cutts mentioned that:

“If you have ads obscuring your content, you might want to think about it,” asking publishers to consider, “Do they see content or something else that’s distracting or annoying?”

With Danny Sullivan following up to say:

“Many already assume that Google’s Panda algorithm is already penalizing ad heavy pages. This suggests that this either is not part of the Panda algorithm or that it might be made a separate and more specific algorithm in the works.”

So reading into this, I would suggest that if this wasn’t rolled out last year - it just has been!

Google has stated that this isn’t a change which will affect every site that has ads above the fold, just those that have an excessive number of ads which obstruct users from getting to the content that they were searching for:

“This algorithmic change noticeably affects less than 1% of searches globally. That means that in less than one in 100 searches, a typical user might notice a reordering of results on the search page. If you believe that your website has been affected by the page layout algorithm change, consider how your web pages use the area above-the-fold and whether the content on the page is obscured or otherwise hard for users to discern quickly. You can use our Browser Size tool, among many others, to see how your website would look under different screen resolutions.”

So that means that if you’ve been penalised, it should be easy enough to get out of. It’s an algorithmic penalty, not a manual one – so if you fix the layout of your page, Google’s filters will pick this up the next time it’s re-crawled and whatever penalty you had previously will be lifted. We’ve seen this many times with other algorithm penalties – and once you figured out what’s caused the drop in rankings, it’s not too difficult to get out of. It’s the manual penalties you want to avoid, Google take note!

And overall it’s not likely to affect a huge number of sites (1% predicted by Google), but it looks like affiliates and ad monetised sites are those most open to suffering. So is this the latest, unofficial panda update? Maybe Google has just got bored of keeping track of the numbers now that it’s 2012 – what do you think?

Image credit: David Allen

Time Management for SEO

Daniel Bianchini — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:23:41 +0000

Over the last few months I have been trying to work on improving my time management skills, not only at work but in my personal life as well. I am forever being told that I am late or don’t do anything on time, and that is just from the wife.

So I took to improving my time management skills, and thought that I would share with you a few techniques that I am using now in my working life.

Time Planning

Whether you have your time scheduled out for you by management or you prefer to manage your time yourself, ensure that you plan your work in advance.

I use a spreadsheet within Google Docs to create a monthly calendar that I populate with the hours that I need to complete, for the forthcoming month.

By planning your month in advance, you know exactly what is in store for you on a daily basis. It provides you with the flexibility to move your schedule around to suit the needs of your clients and any unexpected changes that may happen.

Email

Communicating via email is a great way to get information to and from your clients and contacts quickly, but it can be a massive distraction.

I, like most others, get distracted by emails and tend to reply immediately to any queries that come through, taking your attention away from what you are currently doing.

If this happens several times throughout the day you are potentially taking an hour or more of productivity out of your day.

Recommedation: Check your emails at certain times during the day, and closing it during the other times.
e.g
9:00 – 10:00am Open
10:00am 12:30pm – Closed
1:30pm – 2:00pm – Open
2:00pm – 5:00pm – Closed
5:00pm – 5:30pm – Open

Email Categories/Labels

Prioritising emails can help save you a large amount of time. Most people, myself included, set up rules that move emails straight into allocated folders. I find this a very useful trick to keep my inbox organised, allowing me to find specific emails quickly.

As well as using rules, I would recommend using the categories (outlook) or labels (gmail) to separate emails that need to be actioned.

Recommendation:
Create two categories called “To Action” and “Completed”. When you recieve an email that requires you to do an action, then assign it to the “To Action” category. This will provide a constant reminder that you have emails to action, and work that needs to be done. Once you have actioned the emails you can change the category to “Completed”, this will allow you to see all the emails that you actioned. This will help you to keep track of the emails that you need to action and the ones that you have completed, ensuring that your inbox is efficient.

To-Do Lists

To me, knowing what I am doing on a daily/weekly basis is an essential part of managing my time correctly.

Personally I think the best way of organising your work is by having a to-do list. I am such a big believer of this that I actually have three to-do list methods. I know it’s a bit over the top but hey, it seems to work for me. :)

1. Remember the Milk:
I use Remember the Milk, an online to-do list mainly for personal use, including picking up the milk or feeding the cat.

I do however, use it for work when I am on the move and need to add something to my to-do list. Using the iPhone application I record anything that I think of whilst I am not at the office or don’t have my notepad with me.

If I have made any notes whilst I am out, I transfer any tasks that have been created to the most relevant to-do list.

2. Project Management Tools – Monthly To-do Lists:
There are many project management tools available, but I am a big fan of Basecamp. It gives you a lot of functionality including the ability to keep track of all communication, files, calendar meetings and to-do lists.

In Basecamp I plan out the next three months worth of work for all my clients, split into monthly to-do lists. Doing this allows me to tick off the tasks on completion.

An example monthly to-do list might include the following:
- Monthly Report
- Monthly Client Meeting
- “keyword1″ link building
- “keyword2″ link building
- Keyword Research Review

Although the list tends to be a lot bigger, you get the general gist of what I mean about the monthly to-do lists.

Using project management tools such as Basecamp allows you to share the work that needs to be done with the rest of your team, whilst also providing visibility to the client on what work has and will be carried out.

3. Written To-do List – Weekly:
As mentioned above I create monthly to-do lists that plan out the next three to six months work. Because I am planning for the future these tend to be high level lists.

At the end of each week I take time to look at the monthly to-do lists and write a weekly task list on my notepad for the following week. This would generally include more detailed information.

Example:
Client A
Keyword Research Review
- Long tail keywords
- Analyse keywords generating conversion
- Analyse potential ROI
“keyword1″ link building
- Blogger Outreach
- Guest blogging x3
- www.example.com
- www.example1.com
- www.example2.com

Time Sheeting

Keeping track of what you do for your clients on an hourly/daily/weekly basis is important, not just for you but for your agency.

There are many ways that you can keep track of the time you have spent on a particular project, either manually using spreadsheets or using a database driven tool.

My personal preference is using a tool called Harvest to track time. Harvest allows you to do much more than just time tracking. It includes invoicing, expenses, reports, etc, which are all very valuable. To me the time tracking aspect of the product is great – you create projects and tasks that you record time against as and when you work on a specific client.

As you begin to track your time against the projects you are working on you can see how much time has been spent, how much is left and where the time has been spent. From a project management perspective the account manager can see what the team has been working on and who has done what very quickly by running a quick query.

These are just five techniques that I believe can help improve your time management when working on your projects. Now I just need to solve my personal time management skills to make the wife happy :).

What techniques do you have for managing your time? Do you agree with my suggestions? I look forward to hearing your thoughts and opinions in the comments below.

Image credit – Roby Ferrari on Flickr.

Why SEOs should be conducting user testing research

Rachel McCombie — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 15:07:35 +0000

‘Build websites for users, not search engines’ is the advice continually propounded by insiders at Google. As SEOs, we’re used to looking at websites and analysing how they would be viewed by a search engine. In actual fact, though, there’s a fairly big overlap between what’s helpful for a user and what’s helpful for a search engine, and the user and search engine experiences can often mirror each other. That means that it’s often worth carrying out user testing research in the initial stages of your SEO project to gain valuable insights into how real visitors view and use your site.

User testing isn’t just about usability for humans or identifying bugs; parts of your website that are difficult to use can hide potential SEO problems that you may not have spotted. User testing can help shed light on the user behaviour behind the dry metrics you see in Google Analytics, and its benefits in conversion rate optimisation are obvious. It’s also worth noting that if your client is taking some convincing that they should make a change to their website for SEO reasons, having concrete evidence from the word of users’ mouths might prove more persuasive.

User testing research takes people from your website’s demographic and gives you the benefit of several fresh pairs of eyes to enable you to see your website (or your client’s) as your target audience sees it. Sure, it can only ever be a small sample size, but the insights you can gain from user testing can nevertheless be valuable. Here are just a few of the issues and insights we’ve uncovered with user testing for some of our clients…

High bounce rate
The reason for a high bounce rate isn’t always immediately obvious – particularly if you’ve viewed that site many times and have become, as it were, ‘immune’ to it. I conducted user testing research for one of my clients and it transpired that, upon viewing the homepage for the first time, users weren’t immediately sure what that my client’s site was actually about. This was mainly because the imagery on the homepage was misleading, and the headings on the page weren’t obvious either. If users are having problems figuring out what a site is about, the chances are that Google spiders are too. We’d spotted the lack of optimised headings, but the wider issue of the imagery was only identified by getting real users’ first impressions. Whether bounce rate has any meaningful impact on rankings is beyond the scope of this post, but I’m sure you catch my drift.

High time on site
Similarly, if people are spending a lot of time on your site, you can only really speculate as to why. Is it because they’re are engaging more with your content? Or is it actually because they can’t find what they’re looking for? User testing may be able to help you find out.

Keywords are friendly to users, not just search engines…
…Otherwise why would people type them in? Keywords are revealing about user behaviour, and search volumes for differently worded search terms are revealing about how people think. We’re obviously used to optimising header tags to target keywords, but this can often have benefits to users, too – because keywords can give them a clearer idea of what each section of a site will be about (e.g. “our products” versus “shoes for sale”). Within reason, using keywords to help your users find their way around your site makes sense, and helps avoid confusion over the purpose of the site (which was something user testing highlighted for one of our clients).

Hiding content behind registration
A lengthy registration process for one client highlighted the issues surrounding hiding content behind a log-in. During user testing, users were frustrated by the number of details they had to provide to get at the full-length content, and one even said that if he hadn’t been paid to look at the site, he’d have given up long before he got to the end of the process. So the issue of content being hidden went beyond an SEO issue and it became a possible conversion rate problem. In an ideal world, we’d have liked to have seen all that content immediately in the public domain, for both users and search engines; this not being possible for legal reasons, we recommended a simplified sign-up process and optimisation of the visible content instead.

So how does one conduct user testing research? We’ve used http://www.usertesting.com/, which costs $39 per user and allows you to set your target demographic and specific instructions/tasks that you want users to accomplish (e.g. find a particular product or page). You get a video of the user’s screen as they navigate your site, and a soundtrack of their voice commenting on what they see. This sort of insight obviously delves deeper than dry metrics, user journeys and even heatmaps, because you get explanations rather than straightforward identification of patterns.

Have you conducted user testing research? Did you find it helpful, and did it uncover anything you’d not spotted?

Image credit – mastrobiggo on Flickr.