Day 1 – Paid Search Track

Amazing Paid Search Tactics & Tools

Ann Stanley, Co-Founder and MD of Anicca Digital (@annstanley)

Ecommerce advertising has changed quite a bit recently: Google Shopping transitioned from free to paid last month in the UK, and Google have just announced that they’re getting rid of product extensions. That means having product listing ads is more important for ecommerce.

Having a PLA ad group set for ‘all products’ with a really low bid has got them good results – it can be a good way to turn up in searches no one else is appearing on.

There doesn’t seem to be a true quality score for PLAs, but CTR is a factor to whether they get seen or not. Improve CTR with negative keywords. Also check your feed – you may be using low quality information.

If eBay and Amazon are competing then CPC for a product listing ads can be higher than for a regular ad. You may have to take a hit on costs to appear at first, but you may be able to claw back CPC as you build performance history.

PLAs don’t always improve your CTR – you’ve got to test them. It’s rare that they don’t add advantage, but the cost could be prohibitive.

If you have multiple prices, for example from multipacks or excluding VAT, AdWords may pick the wrong price to show. You may have to manually manipulate the price in your feed.

Use tracking URLs to track PLA performance in Analytics.

Enhanced campaigns mean we can’t have separate tablet bids or keyword level mobile bids – but people might use conversion optimiser (CPA bidding) to get around this.

Magnus Nilsson, Managing Director of RED Performance (@nilsson_magnus)

You can automate structures, bid management, optimisation and reporting using AdWords Scripts.

AdWords Scripts are JavaScript based, so it’s easy to get started. You can learn JavaScript from Codeacademy.

There is Google Docs integration. That means you can push data into spreadsheets to make automated reports or charts. You can also pull in information from a Google Doc – and Google Docs can pull in information themselves that you can then use.

He used Scripts to put a countdown in ads, which updated hourly. The increase in CTR and QS meant he doubled the number of clicks he got for his budget.

He also used a script for a dating site, so that different ad text showed according to the weather – the day’s weather forecast was pulled into Google Docs from Wunderground.

Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster (@mvanwagner)

The Display Network is sort of like a newsstand. You can find anything, but you want to be in the right area, section & page.

Once you’ve found the perfect placement, own the page with both text and image ads. Make image ads to complement the placement’s colour scheme, and use appropriate language.

Use keyword targeting as a ‘seed campaign’ to find good placements and to get on one-off pages.

When targeting with keywords, have tightly themed ad groups. Be specific with 2 or 3 word terms, as you only have broad match available.

Once you’ve found the perfect page, you can throw the Google Keyword Tool at that page and target those keywords too.

Don’t use more than 50 negative keywords, or Google won’t pay attention to all of them.

‘Fine tune the hell’ out of managed placements. Specify a site and then use keywords to turn up on certain subjects.

Don’t use topics as a standalone targeting technique. They are useful as negatives and for picking out sections of large placements.

Keep graphical ads in separate ad groups to text ads

Use AdGooroo for competitor research on the Display Network

Use MixRank to find competitor image ads and placements

Play ‘king of the hill’ – create a campaign targeting competitor placements, with high bids to push their ads out, for 3 days. Then you will have performance data so you can tell which placements work for you, and they probably won’t be able to tell what happened because of the short timeframe.

Conversion Science

George Popstefanov, Founder and Chief Idea Officer of Performance Media Group (@GeorgePMG)

Don’t remove content from your mobile site, but don’t keep masses of text or huge pictures that won’t work well on mobile devices. Tailor your content to mobile.

Page speed matters: he’s seen a 22% improvement in conversion rate by moving to better servers and getting faster load speeds.

Look at what content your mobile visitors use, compared to desktop users. “I promise it is different”

There are attributes like creative, offer, placement and time of day which could be the driving force of an ad’s success: see which is correlated with revenue.

Use remarketing list for search ads for people from non-paid traffic. Group people by traffic source, so for example you can use a landing page with Pinterest style images for someone who previously came to your site from Pinterest

Manny Rivas, Online Marketing Account Manager from aimClear (@mannyrivas)

Not all targeting is created equal, and not all sources are going to convert equally well.

You want to draw qualified customers into a sales funnel, and if they leave then bring them back in at the right stage.

Create content to position yourself as thought leader, to create a good first impression.

Use psychographic targeting: figure out your customers’ personas and target them, then see how they perform against different pages.

To find psychographic information use display advertising with age targeting, and see how the different age groups use your site.

Don’t forget the fundamental tenets of sales – create rapport, be likeable, be an expert, actively listen, understand their motivation.

“The best conversion optimisation is a product that doesn’t suck”

Q&A

There was some debate about enhanced campaigns. George says you should upgrade a few campaigns to get used to the new features and interface – don’t try to tackle it all at once.

Conversely Matt says that Google is still “making it up” – since the initial announcement they’ve added ad group level mobile bids and moved the deadline. He says you should put off enhancing for as long as possible in case it changes again.

Ann Stanley agreed, saying that as Google made a U-turn on ad rotation settings they may still allow separate mobile campaigns. If they do, any time spent now merging mobile and desktop campaigns would be wasted.

Manny is worried about rolling tablet and desktop together as he’s seen widely different conversion rates – they may be trending together but they’re not the same at the moment.

Creating, Testing and Optimising Ads

Sean Malseed, Director of Strategic Development at SEMrush (@seanmalseed)

Where should you start? A lot of people say you should just jump in. But you can avoid trial and error if you find what your competitors are doing, avoid their mistakes and build from their successes.

Use SimilarSites – it’s actually a recommendation engine but you can use it to find your real competitors.

If several competitors bid on a keyword, then they’re probably on to something.

If there’s an obvious keyword for you think it looks good, but none of your competitors are bidding on it, then there’s a reason.

Do all of your research with exact match – close but different searches convert differently, and Google Keyword Tool is a salesman. You need to accurately compare keywords without overlap.

Use Merge Words to merge your list of keywords with your locations for local terms.

Use Keyword Eye to find the easiest keywords to grab from your competitors

Use Keyword Tool Dominator for more long tail keyword research.

Rebecca Hansson, Senior Search Strategist and CEO at SESNordic (@sesnordic)

When creating ads you should understand your audience and know your benefits.

Meet your visitors’ expectations – the landing page must match the ad.

Never stop testing until you have a CTR of 100%, a conversion rate of 100% and an infinite ROI.

Things to try testing:

• subfolders or subdomains in the display URL
• copyright or trademark symbols
• short testimonials in the ad
• social proof
• time sensitive phrases
• pricing
• ask a question
• call to action
• seasonal copy
• scary tone

Use the ‘rotate indefinitely’ setting, not ‘optimise for clicks’.

Don’t test many things at once, or you won’t know which part of the ad worked.

Don’t just look at CTR. Look at Analytics and your conversion data to choose the best converting ad.

Rebecca Momberg from Marin Software

Instead of thinking of ad as headlines, description lines and display URLs, think of the emotional and functional components. For example ‘summer’ conjures images in head which influences the searcher – it’s an emotional component. Information like offers and pricing are functional.

Look at tokens rather than keywords. For example ‘mens hiking backpacks’ is 3 tokens. See which tokens are the most popular in your SQRs and use them in creative testing.

Don’t just test ads with dynamic keyword insertion against ads without – also test changes to the static part of the DKI.

Q&A

Use a t-test tool to check your test is statistically significant.

Testing ads can temporarily affect quality score as the ad lacks history – don’t stop your tests too quickly, give it some time for the QS to go back to the normal level. The minimum time for testing is a week, but this is not recommended.

Forget What You Know About AdWords & Paid Search

George Popstefanov, Founder and Chief Idea Officer of Performance Media Group (@GeorgePMG)

Have a Google+ page with over 100 followers and regular posts, so you can get on the Knowledge graph and dominate searchers for your brand.

Enhanced campaigns require a mind shift – how do we keep track of bid multipliers?

The new sitelinks can be scheduled, which is good for promotions.

Not everything is changing when campaigns are enhanced. The overall structure of an account will not change; keyword match types remain the same; Google Search, Search and Search Partners and GDN will still be separable.

In legacy campaigns opted into multiple devices, Google currently discounts mobile bids. This will not be the case for enhanced campaigns. When everyone is on enhanced, it’s likely many less experienced advertisers will neglect to add mobile bid adjustments and just use their full desktop bid – this means mobile CPC will probably rise.

Ad group level sitelinks are worth the hassle of setting up, but we think AdWords Editor should be able to cope with them at the end of July which will make them easier.

Day 2 – SMX Advanced Track

Prioritising Your Search Marketing Efforts

Mikkel deMib Svendsen, Creative Director of deMib.com (@demib)

3 easy steps to prioritise your SEO:

1. List all the things you may have to deal with – look at the SEO periodic table for inspiration.

2. Analyse your site and market, rate each issue as green (not a problem), red (serious problems), yellow (things that could be improved).

Red and green issues are easy – you can ignore the green and must fix the red. The complicated thing is the yellow

3. Rate all the yellow on a 5 point scale by impact on results, time to complete, impact on resources.

You know you need to do the red issues first and can ignore the green – you just need to sort out the yellow ‘nice to haves’. If you rate by each factor then can order the tasks by what matters: for example if you don’t have much resource order tasks by how much resource they need.

Julia Logan, CMO of ContentMango (@irishwonder)

In May 2012 (after the Penguin update) Google stopped saying “there’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your rankings” and started saying “Google works hard to prevent other webmasters from being able to harm your ranking” – so they are admitting negative SEO is possible.

SEO security audits should cover more than links: site architecture can cause problems too by making negative SEO against your site easier.

If you have indexable search results you could be indexed for any sketchy term with a page like yoursite.com/search/buy+Viagra.

To stop this on WordPress sites, add to robots.txt
Disallow: /search/
Disallow: /*?

Insecure plugins mean people could add links to your site

Being infected by malware can disrupt traffic, as people trying to visit your site will see malware warnings – here are instructions of how to fix this.

Site architecture can cause duplicate content, for example by having archived pages.

Check WhoRush to see who is hosted on the same IP as you – you don’t want to be in a bad neighbourhood.

Do link audits before you get any emails from Google. A weak link profile makes negative SEO easier. Use LinkRisk.

Watch your links to see if they suddenly disappear – as so many link removal requests are flying around, someone could request your links to be removed without you knowing.

Be suspicious if you suddenly get more links, spammier links or unusual anchor text. You can check what terms you get traffic for as well as crawling for links.

Dave Davies, CEO of Beanstalk Search Engine Optimization, Inc. (@beanstalkseo)

Strategise: don’t just think of what you want now but also what you want in the future. Think about where you want to be in 3 months.

Before you get started you will need keyword research, find major influencers and competitors in your field.

Outline your milestones, like launches and press release worthy things, so you can plan around them in advance.

Test keywords with paid search before putting resources into ranking for them organically – then you will know if those keywords’ traffic actually converts. Have your SEO focus on onsite improvements while this testing happens.

Andy Atkins-Kruger, Group CEO of WebCertain (@andyatkinskruge)

Log investment by activity, then link this to Google Analytics data to see if it’s successful. But allow for production time and Google crawl delays.

Rate whether tasks will have high or low impact on your goals, and how much effort they will take. Prioritise tasks that are high impact and low effort, then those that are high impact and high effort.

Remember some tasks need to be done in the correct sequence: for example you may need a new CMS before you can rewrite page titles.

Use the ‘brussel sprout’ method – pick the task you want to do least, and do it first to get it out of the way.

Q&A

Julia warned that if you think a plugins fixes all the issues, it probably doesn’t.

Beware of malicious plugins pretending to be popular plugins – check the number of downloads.

Mikkel said people will make plugins that start out clean, so they can get in the directory and get downloads, but then they add dodgy stuff like backlink functions as an update. Crawl your site for links you didn’t put there.

Close your dev server from indexing, but make sure your site is indexable when it’s put live.

Paid Search Advertising in a Multi-Device World

Manny Rivas, Account Manager at aimClear (@mannyrivas)

Make a timeline for upgrading – give campaigns difficulty levels based on thier budget, volume and settings.

Don’t start a new campaign structure at the same time as upgrading to enhanced campaigns – you won’t be able to tell which caused changes in performance.

Use a script to keep track of account level quality score.

“I’ve never seen the upgrade of an account go completely right” so keep an eye on things after upgrading.

Remember that bid modifiers stack – you could get 8 times your original bid if you have 3 adjustments of 100%.

Alistair Dent, Head of PPC at Periscopix (@periscopix)

People don’t care what device they use. Their context, not their device, is key – who are they, what are they doing, where are they. Is the person ‘in’ or ‘out’? To let us get to this context Google have given us bid multipliers.

While Google continue to give examples for pizzerias, you can still apply the idea to B2B. If you want to target office workers then the keyword is starting point, the time of day suggests whether they are at work or home, and being on a mobile suggests that they might be commuting. But be aware some people may work late, or be at work while on their mobile.

Alistair predicts that more features will become multipliers. For example remarketing lists for search could become a multiplier, so you can bid down or up if someone has previously visited your site.

Jason Spievak, CEO of RingRevenue, Inc (@spievak)

5% of the US works in a call centre – that’s twice the number of people who work in food production.

Search is driving tens of billions of calls, and it’s growing.

Calls have a 30-50% conversion rate, compared to a 1-3% conversion rate from clicks. They also have a larger average order value. This means companies are willing to pay for high-quality inbound calls.

Use call tracking to find out what keyword drove a call, to keep track of lead quality and to get true ROI.

Bill Dinan, President of Telmetrics (@Telmetrics)

PC search is not the same as mobile search: mobile is an ‘act’ platform. Use action metrics rather than just traffic.

Be upfront with your contact info in your mobile ads – smartphones are used to find & contact businesses.

Advanced Keyword Research & Competitive Analysis Tactics

Kayden Kelly, CEO, Founder, Blast Analytics & Marketing (@kaydenkelly)

Understand what people need and want so you can identify what content to create.

Map keywords and content to the customer lifecycle. Don’t just focus on the last stage where the customer makes their decision: know what success looks like across all stages.

Split keywords into tiered silos (the top tier being head terms and the lower tiers being more long tail). Then look at the top keywords for each silo, see how your site is doing for them and if you have pages that cover them.

When looking at keywords’ performance in Analytics, use landing page as a secondary dimension – poor performance may be because of a problem with the page rather than because the keyword is bad.

Use Tableau to visualise data for easier analysis.

When looking at the Adwords Keyword Tool, don’t exclude keywords because of high CPC or high competition. These are likely to be keywords near the end of the customer lifecycle.

Check the local search trends – some terms may have a low average search volume but have high volumes in a few months.

Pete Wailes, Operations Director of SEOgadget (@petewailes)

Categorisation keywords by

• intent (why are you searching?)
• demography (who are you?)
• content (what terms are used?)

Just one keyword on its own isn’t useful. Use indices to group them.

• search volume (market interest plus audience share)
• conversion volume (this indicates funnel stage)
• rankings (but don’t trust them, as personalisation messes them up – look at Webmaster Tools data too)

Collect all the data you can – from Analytics, rankings, anything you can think of – then put it in an Excel spreadsheet, label the keywords with their categories and use pivot tables to look at those categories.

Report for your clients, not for yourself.

Make sure you know about your client’s media buys and other advertising in advance, so you can rank for their slogans.

Laura Thieme, CEO of Bizwatch (@bizwatchlaura)

If you see ‘*’ in your keywords on Analytics, it’s from product listing ads. You can see the SQR for PLAs in AdWords but not Analytics.

You want to know the extreme successes or extreme failures – filter to show keywords with more than 5 visits and more than 5% conversion rate (or whatever a good conversion rate is for you).

Look at your data over time – see seasonal trends.

Keywords get around 10% of the traffic that Wordtracker predicts.

Don’t just look at bounce rate, look at it along with time on site and pages viewed.

Ready, Aim, Fire… Then Retarget!

Anna Lewis, Digital Marketing Executive at Koozai (@Koozai_Anna)

Why remarket? You’ve got a targeted audience: you know they’re already interested and they’re closer to converting. They are 70% more likely to concert according to Criteo.

According to Periscopix, the average CPC for remarketing is £0.40, and the average CTR is 0.18%.

To use Analytics remarketing you will need to change your Analytics code. But this modified code will be blocked by ad blocking software. Andre Scholten has instructions to avoid this. (Around 2% of users have ad blocking, although there are no firm numbers and the percentage will vary by industry – you have to judge for yourself whether implementing a workaround is worth it.)

Ideas for how to split up remarketing audiences:

• spend level – advertise high end products to those who spent over £50, or advertise cheaper products to those who spent under £10.
• season – if someone brought flowers for Valentine’s Day, will they buy more for Mother’s Day?
• location – if someone is close to you maybe delivery is cheaper and you can give better offers?
• abandonment – give offers to people who fell out of your funnel
• cross sell – if they’ve bought shoes do they want matching handbag?
• email readers or social fans – you can make audiences based on their traffic source
• researchers – people who come to your site quite a bit without buying

Tailor your ads to the remarketing audience. Use branding, as your audience already know your brand. Give an incentive to come back to your site.

Always make sure you use frequency settings! Don’t spam people too much or it will work against you. Check your reach and frequency report to see where conversions drop off, so you know how to set your frequency cap.

Ideally you want at least 500 users in you remarketing list, but you can use 100 as a compromise.

Michael Benedek, CEO of Datonics

Behavioural targeting means delivering ads based on observed online behaviour.

Retargeting is the most popular version – advertising to people who have already visited your site.

Search retargeting allows you to advertise to users who didn’t necessarily visit your site, based on their search behaviour on third party sites. Data exchanges collect data from sites and make it available for people to target elsewhere.

Anders Hjorth, owner of BDBL Media (@soanders)

Anders gave a case study of French automotive accessory seller Oreca-store.com. They used IgnitionOne to remarket across lots of display networks, with banners personalised based on which parts of the site they spent time in.

While Google dominates in search, there are other networks for display advertising like Bing, Yahoo and Facebook.

Since end of last year, you can remarket on Facebook.

You need to deduplicate conversions, otherwise you could attribute the same conversion twice to different sources. They have a mixed attribution model that’s mostly last click but prioritises PPC and social media.

Ask The Search Marketing Experts

This was a questions and answers session with Ann Stanley, Christine Churchill (president of KeyRelevance, @keyrelevance), Andy Atkins-Kruger and Mikkel deMib Svendsen.

On enhanced campaigns: Ann is still hoping Google will allow mobile-only campaigns. Andy thinks they won’t as they need more money from mobile to please stockholders.

On graph search: Andy likes that Facebook are approaching search a different way to Google. Christine says the problem is that Facebook has rubbish search.

Mikkel: “I don’t like my dentist. I don’t like my bank.” Facebook doesn’t have the data to properly recommend services based on his usage.

On Bing: Microsoft have the advantage that Office is now SAAS – that should provide them with a wealth of data.

Christine and Ann agree that Bing Ads has cheap CPCs, so they do advertise there, but it is limited by having a small market share in the UK.

Andy says Bing seems to be focussing on the US market. Yandex have said they won’t go to the US as there’s no point. Would Bing be better off concentrating on other countries?

On schema: Andy says you should mark up the things that make a difference. Don’t mark up everything.

Mikkel remembers when metadata was used as a ranking factor – it stopped being a ranking factor as most sites didn’t have it or did it wrong. Now we’re bringing in schema, which is far more complicated – even fewer sites will be able to do it right. He says “it’s doomed.”

On (not provided): Christine says you can get the search terms from Webmaster Tools, and then you can roughly fit them to the (not provided) searches in Analytics based on landing pages.

There is debate on the accuracy of Webmaster Tools data – Mikkel is sceptical. Andy says you can get good data if you “work the filters to death”. Ann says you’ve got to regard WMT data as a sample, and look at trends.

© SEOptimise SMX London 2013 – Top Takeaways from the Paid Search and SMX Advanced Tracks

Day 1 – From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters

The first session on the SEO track saw Chelsea Blacker, Grant Simmons, Jim Boykin and Google’s Maile Ohye talk about Authorship and how to enhance your authority in an industry. The main draw to the session was as you would expect Maile Ohye, with the hope she would give away some inside information. Unfortunately this didn’t happen, but she did confirm that a lot of what the speakers had discussed was correct. I managed to take a lot away from this session, but here are a few of the key points.

• Communicate using your profiles.
• Your digital footprint will go on long after you pass away.
• Facebook has memorial pages that people continue to interact with and tag images in.
• Tools to update profiles

• Check scial profile availability with Namechk / name checkr
• Acquire profiles with knowem

• Be consistent with your details throughout your profiles.
• Use appropriate avatars across your profiles.
• Be careful of what images you put online – they will be there forever.
• Author rank = getting lots of references from other authors.
• Google Webmaster Tools provides your author stats, go check it out.
• Brands should be getting on rel=publisher – this should be utilised more than it is.
• Egobait people with the aim of getting other authors to reference you.
• If you are not going to write great content then don’t write at all.
• Google+ should be about identity rather than authorship.
• Traditional page ranking is about links and quantity/quality, now it’s about a web of links and people.
• Lots of personal details on the web are behind a login page, so Google created it’s own that is open.
• Having a Google+ profile provides credibility to your website.
• There are multiple ways of claiming identity and authorship.
• Email verification, or
• the “Handshake technique” – Rel=author, rel=me
• Authorship and identity is a cluster of all your nodes (content) that you have created.
• If you have email verification, Google will be able to find old articles. If you use handshake you need to go back through and add rel=.
• Google is paying more attention to Structured data than ever with the Knowledge graph.
• Content is king, but Authority is more important.
• Create quality content over quantity of the content.
• Trust used to be links (still count but not as important)

• *Trust an authority.

• Authority is a known, credible topic expert.

• Claim & connect all your properties. (G+, etc)

• known entities (content) to know identities (people)

• Credibility comes from authority

• Links, engagement (dwell time)

• Expertise

• Single Focus
• Consistent focus and topic
• Signals

• Links,
• Citations, co- citations.

• Building authority

• Claim & connect
• Build Credibility

• Create great content

• Expand your footprint

• Onsite, social, PR, guest

• Follow the rules set by the search engines.
• Engage with your community via Social Media and other channels.

Killer Content Remains King, Queen and Ace

This session was all about how to create great content, which has been a hot topic over the past 12 months. Chris Bennett, Vincent Wehren , Dixon Jones and Jonathan Stewart talked us through techniques and tactics of content creation and production. Below are some of the key points.

• Don’t be one dimensional and think it is just links and shares.
• Do not disguise your marketing as research to create infographics.
• No one is in a boring industry, you just need to find the stats that make it interesting.
• When content works, beat a dead horse. Re-purpose or re-create the same idea in a different area.
• Make your content interactive – not just interactive infographics, but other media including video.
• Visual content tells a very long story very quickly. A picture paints a 1000 words.
• Adapt your content to your audience.
• Function is better than words, when it comes to content.
• It is better to have unique content than big content.
• Content Principles

• You need a core.

• you cannot be your own advocate.
• Build marketing towers in advance – be prepared.
• Create a message plan.

• Find the connectors to write for you.

• Write a great press release and give it to your influencers in advance
• Use embargo dates to ensure that content is safeguarded.
• Provide something visual, whether it is an infographic or video.
• Create ambassadors, and provide them with information/perks.

• Beta access, free conference attendance, etc.

• Create a newsletter to be launched, but it is launched 24hrs after the connectors have mentioned it.

• Ideally your audience would have seen it via other channels before they get the newsletter.

• Involve technical partners.

• Shared in confidence months before, and get feedback.
• Give partners early access to your product/service.

• After launch date, go on the promotion trail.

• Webinars.
• YouTube video.
• Conferences.
• Written content, internally and externally.

• Create a message calendar, so that the launch is planned and agreed. Ensures that all content is ready to go when required.

• SEO used to be nerds in a room, but now is more grown-up marketing and more difficult.
• 3-tiered content approach <– Creating content that clicks

• Off-site content with influencers.
• Regular content of on-site.
• Hero content (big ticket).

• Look at what is already out there and make them better.
• Monitor site in GWT to ensure there are no duplicate content issues.
• Be wary of the amount of content that you publish at any one time.
• Content is the single biggest ranking factor that you can influence.
• Search Engine Ranking Signals

• Content signals – title, descriptions, H*, document body, URL.
• Anchor signal – text, quantity, quality, diversity.
• Click signals – perfect match, close-match keyword clicks.
• Social – quantity, diversity, trends.
• User signals – location, preference, history, interests, social graphs.

• Even in Bing you need to focus your content on people first.
• Search engines use machine learning to inform the algorithm.
• Whats popular at that moment?

• Link equity
• Social mentions

• If the back button is used quickly, then that could be detrimental to your rankings.
• If a user metric is useful (bounce back), then a search engine is probably using it in their alogirthm
• If content is king, let it lead design. Design responsively. HTML5 & CSS give you the tools.
• In all the search experiences, content remains king

Hardcore SEO Power Tools

SEO Tools is a common panel at most search conferences and this was no different. Stacey Cavanagh, Dixon Jones, Pete Wailes and Steve Lock took us through a large range of SEO tools that they recommend. There was a lot of tools that have been mentioned over and over again, so I have removed a number of those and left the tools that were either new or had been recommended by others.

• Infographics

• ease.ly
• Piktochart
• http://www-958.ibm.com/software/analytics/labs/manyeyes/” rel=”nofollow”>Many Eyes by IBM

• Find data – survey client data.

• One Poll
• Quick Surveys.com
• What do you they know.com

• Content inspiration

• Content hot searches
• Trends Map
• SEOgadget content ideas generator
• Portents Content Idea Generator

• Finding influencers

• Journalisted
• Group High
• Followerwonk

• Not getting response from Outreach

• Phone them! :)

• No body looking at your content after you have published it.

• Zemanta
• Outbrain
• StumbleUpon Paid
• PPC

• Image SEO

• Google Image Search
• Image Raider

• KWR

• Soovle
• Keyword Eye

• Reporting

• Cyfe
• Venngage

• Mobile

• SEO rankings app for iPhone and Android
• Found SEO Tool

• Tools to help automate reports include AnalyticsSEO, SearchMetrics, Trackpal and Linkdex
• For integrated project management use Google Docs, Trello & Harvest.
• Browser Set-up

• Use multiple Chrome profiles for general, auditing and link building
• Use extensions such as Grab Y’All Links, Xmark, Quick Markup, MajesticSEO, SEOmoz, Scraper, Check My Links, WebRank SEO, Pocket & Trello Scrum
• Use Bookmarklets as well as extensions

• Use RSSowl, and input Twitter Feeds, Google Alerts, Topsy and Social Mention
• HTTP Track

Is Link Building Still Crucial, or a Waste of Time & Money?

With Penguin 2.0 on the horizon this was a hot topic of the day, and Tim Grice, Dave Naylor, Marcus Tober and Prashant Puri all gave different advice. What was evident was that all agreed that getting rid of bad links, no matter how many, was the first step to improving your link building efforts. Below are the key points that I had from the session.

• Ensure you have a diverse link strategy.
• When removing links, start to build new links to dilute and replace the old ones.
• Keep an eye on your links over time. This will help spot any negative issues.
• You are unable to get out of a link penalty just by building new links.
• Google is getting better at analysing and penalising sites with bad link profiles.
• Branded3 have managed to get 40 websites out of a Penguin inflicted penalty. It can be done.
• Do social signals really count? It’s a bit chicken and egg!
• I think like an SEO everyday of the week – I just can’t help it, I’m an SEO.
• The mix between quality and quantity has swapped. Focus on quality rather than quantity.
• Keep an eye on the site-wide links that have been created – these are a huge issue.

Day 2

Tuning Up Your Twitter Tactic

The first session of the day brought up some thought-provoking ideas, and some that caused a lot of debate on Twitter. Mike Essex, Brent Gleeson (ex Navy Seal :|) and JimYu gave some great insight into what customers find useful, what you need to be doing to improve content distribution, and how to find influencers online. My key takeaways are below.

• Personal social media can come to haunt your professional career, so be careful what you upload.
• Monitor Conversations using BrandsEye, BrandWatch, Trackur, SproutSocial, TweetDeck, Google Alerts, HootSuite & Social Mention.
• Reclaim old employee accounts and be ready for fake accounts.
• Don’t forget about corporate line, and be fun.
• 61% feels better about company a if they deliver unique content.
• 81% of businesses use Twitter to distribute content.
• Tips to improve distribution.

• Less is more, so keep tweets brief.
• Replace words with symbols.
• Use hashtags in content instead of at the end.
• Include call to action.
• Shorten and track click-throughs.

• PR outreach

• MediaonTwitter.com
• Seek or shout
• Cision

• Understanding Twitter & search correlations is vital for 2013.
• How do you align your SEO and social media terms?

• Create an SEO and Social Supergroup – open clear dialogue
• Think of keywords that work across both SEO and social media
• Identify keywords trending on Twitter
• Prioritise keywords for driving Twitter activity.

• Bring together, twitter data, analytics data, and rankings to create a publishing calendar.
• Plan works well across all different sectors

Facebook’s New Graph Search & Its Marketing Implications

This next session took us into the world of Facebook, with Kelvin Newman, Mark Purtell and Justin Sanger. I have to say this was one of the best sessions that I was in, mainly due to how intensely Justin Sanger delivered his presentation. The delivery and content provided were great. Here are my takeaways from that session.

• If anyone can build a Google killer, it will be Facebook.
• GraphSearch is not really a search engine. It’s a filtering system for Facebook’s HUGE data set.
• “2.7 billion likes on Facebook everyday, and some of them are real.”
• 3 Factors in the EdgeRank algorithm – 1. Affinity. 2. Weight 3. Decay
• If you have a big announcement, post a status about a big announcement coming. Generate affinity.
• Mark up using the Open Graph Protocol – this needs to be part of every SEO audit going forward.
• You need to do ‘Good’ Facebook marketing to be successful, but you should be trying to generate affinity.
• Google Graph search can be great for local business – aggregated reviews are key to rank/click.
• Facebook gets reviews/rating data for places from Foursquare, Yelp and Tripadvisor.
• 9/10 people prefer a personal recommendation from someone they know.
• 82% of businesses point to word of mouth as their leading source of new customer acquisition.
• It is imperative to ask customers for their feedback, and then use it to improve your service
• 70% of Facebook users have only liked one local business.
• Google+ is Google itself. Extended across all products, to get as much information about you as possible
• 15 years into search, and on average people have only given two reviews. – Incentivise for people to generate reviews.
• 30% of reviews will be fake by 2014, whilst 98% of reviews are coming from 2% of Yelpers.

Social Media Automation: The Good & Bad

Having covered the main two players in the social media space, the attention turned to automation and whether it is actually worth the risk. Samuel Bueno de Mezquita, Bas Van Den Beld and Aaron Wester discussed how they each used automation of their websites and what their recommended strategies were. Here are my key takeaways.

• ITTT an underused tool for social media distribution.
• Social media automation needs close monitoring to ensure it works smoothly.
• Manual posts generated lots of interaction.
• Funny pictures get shared a lot. Bas now posts a funny picture everyday just for the interaction.
• If you’re feeding the same content to all social platforms it will annoy your followers.
• Use the Tweet All Posts to remind people of great content that is archived.
• Be careful when you do this though – make sure that you check all the settings to ensure that you do not confuse your readers.

SEO & Google+

The final session of the day turned to SEO and Google+. Wayne Sleight, Marcus Tober, Jim Yu and Kevin Gibbons provided some interesting data, that included not only statistics to prove that Google+ is growing, but how brands are starting to implement and engage with it. My key take aways are below.

• 3/4 brands now have an active Google+ profile.
• H&M lead the way by constantly engaging with followers.
• Google+ added 94x followers since December 2011. Google+ IS now mainstream.
• 20% of brands have their Google+ page show up in the SERPs.
• Expect more brands’ Google+ pages to be indexed in the SERPs in 2013.
• 5 actionable tips for getting the most from Google+ 1: Think. 2. Utilise 3. Engage 4. Optimise 5. Set up Authorship.
• Split testing the image that you use in the SERPs increases CTRs. @CyrusShepard increased his by 54%
• Your Google+ profile is similar to a website – it has PR also.
• If you’re in a boring industry, try and find a community on G+. If you can’t find one create one, and build it.
• Utilise data for boring industries, and then create something awesome.
• 36% of Fortune 100 Companies have G+ Profiles – only 3% use Authorship markup, whilst techblogs have 45%
• Google is getting better at connecting the dots. Email verification and the “Handshake” technique
• AgentRank: *Who* links to you is likely to be more important than *where* it’s from.
• How topical, and how relevant you are to the industry is hugely important. As an author you MUST be focused!
• Use tools to find authors/influencers, including Google Ripples, Unofficial G+ Recommended Users, ProBlogger, AuthorCrawler
• Authorship is to support SEO, not to replace it. Don’t give up on those backlinks yet.
• The publish button is a marketer’s dream, you just need to be an authority first. Work hard, and get the benefits.
• When you Join G+ communities, make sure your ratio of your content vs. natural participation is healthy.

Well, it was a busy few days, with lots of takeaways that will keep us busy for few months. What did you think of the conference, and have I missed anything that you thought was key? I look forward to hearing from you in the comments below or on Twitter @danielbianchini.

© SEOptimise 217 Takeaways from the SEO, Search and Social Track – SMX London 2013

The giant content audit spreadsheet – and why I don’t use it

A question that often comes up when a client wants a content audit is what form it should take. Many consider a content audit to be a giant spreadsheet with every single URL listed, along with marks out of 10 for various quality metrics. Because of the sheer scale, this method often relies to an extent on automation, but that only gets you so far; a true assessment of content quality requires a human eye, and for bigger sites it’s not practical to look through every single page. While the process of content auditing in this way certainly has its merits, the way I like to do it has more of a qualitative focus that I believe gives the client considerably more value.

Look at a representative sample

Most websites follow templates that ensure a uniform design throughout the site – or at least they should! This means that content can be split into content types – for example, homepage, service page, product description page, blog post, and so on. Each content type is there to fulfill its own purpose, and requires its own assessment as to how well it achieves its aims. So why waste time looking at every single URL on the site when the comments you’re going to be making about one page in a particular category are likely to apply to the others in that content group?

I believe that the key to a good and actionable content audit is to look at a representative sample of a site’s content, providing concrete observations and recommendations and exploring in depth the actual experience of people using the site. They are, after all, by far the most important consideration.

The big content audit checklist

I’ll start with a disclaimer: every site is different. I’m not a believer in sticking rigidly to templates, and I typically use the headings below just as a starting point. I will often add or remove sections according to what’s appropriate for the site I’m looking at.

So, here’s what I would look at…

Analytics

This section looks at who uses the site, how they use it and what bits they visit more and less. Aspects I’d look at are:

• Languages and countries – gaining an appreciation of the demographics of your visitors can help you understand how well your current site caters for your target audience. Who is your current target audience, and are your visitors who you expected? For example, if you’re wanting to target customers in a particular country and that country isn’t high on the list, it would be worth looking at how well your content meets the needs of people from that country; do you need to add extra content tailored specifically to that country, or perhaps add a translated version?
• Mobile – what percentage of your audience accesses your site from a mobile or tablet? How well does your content perform on a mobile and is it worth introducing new content aimed specifically at mobile users – for example an app?
• Engagement – looking at engagement metrics gives a rough understanding of how users interact with the site, though metrics such as bounce rate and time on site are notoriously tricky to draw conclusions from. This is why I would use them to look at relative popularity of pages rather than looking at the absolute figures.
• Popular pages – for obvious reasons, identify the pages that get visited the most and least. If there are pages I know to be a key concern to the client that don’t appear high on the list of most popular content, I’d want to identify why.
• Search terms – looking at the paid search terms driving the most traffic can identify keywords worth optimising the site for, while organic search terms driving traffic give more of an indication of the current level of optimisation of the site. It’s common to see mostly branded search terms in the top ten for an unoptimised site.

Trust factors and brand identity

It goes without saying that people will probably not give your website the time of day if it doesn’t seem trustworthy. A strong brand identity is key to achieving a high level of professionalism and trustworthiness, and that means things like consistent use of design, styling, logos and fonts throughout the site.

But what other factors can improve the trustworthiness of your site? In addition to having a clean and professional design, here are some of the features I’d want to see included on a site to convey a trustworthy impression:

• Credentials – does the site prominently display important industry accreditation and membership? Is it obvious what these mean?
• Contact details – it should be easy for people to get in touch with your site, and it shows that there are real people behind the anonymity of the internet. Many people still prefer to speak to a real human rather than emailing or using a Help page.
• Membership numbers – if you display on your site that you have millions of members or users, this shows potential customers that your site is popular, and therefore trusted by others.
• Testimonials – these are another way of showing potential customers that others have successfully used and enjoyed your product/service. If photographs are used, make sure they’re of real people – stock images just make the testimonial look fake.
• Social media accounts – while social media arguably isn’t for every business, people have come to expect businesses to be on Facebook and/or Twitter. Having prominent links to your social media accounts won’t just encourage follows and likes; a regularly updated social media account with plenty of (two-way) interactions helps show your business to be up-to-date, embracing new forms of communication, and easy to contact.
• Good English – the standard of English on a website is something that users won’t notice if it is high quality – it should be one of many flawless aspects of the website that subconsciously give users an overall impression of quality and trustworthiness – but that they will notice immediately if it is poor. Typos and lapses in grammar are likely to be picked up on and will come across as unprofessional. Furthermore, if the copy itself feels laboured – for instance, using ten words where one would suffice – I’d be recommending a refresh.

Amount of content

This can be a tricky one, because it’s about balancing the needs of your users with that of search engines. You don’t want to overwhelm your users by presenting them with a wall of copy or too many pages, but conversely if a page has very few words on it, Google will find it harder to understand what it’s about and may assume that there’s nothing there of value to users – so you’ll find it harder to get that page ranking well. Typically, a balance can be struck by presenting the user with a reasonable amount of content formatted in a web-friendly way – i.e. using bullet points and subheadings to break the text up and make it easier to read.

The homepage is a prime candidate for thinner content. Of course you don’t want too much copy getting in the way of a snazzy homepage design, but it’s usually possible to add in some copy towards the bottom of the page that won’t impact too much on the design. From an SEO perspective a minimum of 300 words is worth aiming for, but ultimately if more or less content than that is all that’s needed to give your users the best experience, that’s what matters most.

Content layout

What content does the user see immediately upon entering a page? Look at a selection of page types (homepage, service page, blog post, etc) and assess whether the most important aspects of each are visible immediately. Does the site have adverts, and if so, do they dominate the page? Google is known to penalise pages that have too much advertising above the fold, so this is to be avoided. Are key bits of information and calls to action immediately visible?

Navigation

Though it could be argued that this is more of a technical issue and therefore not a necessary thing to include in a content audit, navigation crosses into content territory in several ways. Firstly, it’s important that users can find their way around your content as quickly and easily as possible. A content audit perhaps isn’t the place for an in-depth site architecture appraisal, but it’s good to highlight any issues users may be having with finding important content.

Secondly, the copy on the page can be used to highlight and complement the navigation by guiding users to the pages you most want them to visit. Is your site navigation aided by calls to action in the copy, or clearly labelled buttons?

Content quality, including web writing best practice

To a certain degree the observations falling under this section could be subjective – your view on whether content is good quality may differ from that of the client, for instance! So I would use this section to highlight any issues with the tone and substance of the copy, whether it does a good job of explaining products and services, and how well the design and copy guide users to take actions such as finding out more and buying.

Web writing best practice is another concept to mention here. People read websites differently to how they read books, and will often simply skim a page to get the gist of it rather than reading it in detail. This is particularly true on mobiles, when people may be reading on the move. This means that content needs to be easily ‘scannable’, with the text broken up with subheadings and bullet points to make it easier to read. Walls of text not conforming to best practice should be pointed out in the content audit.

Using a proper header tag structure is also important, with a single H1 for the title of the page and H2s, H3s and so on for progressively less important subheadings.

Multimedia content

A variety of media types – images, videos, audio etc – helps your site rank in universal search (where image and video results are pulled into the main search results) as well as enhancing user experience. Content such as videos or graphics is also more likely to get shared, which not only increases brand awareness, but also brings more traffic and links to your site. More on sharing later…

Meta data

An old but nevertheless still important SEO staple, meta data should be included in the content audit because it does form part of the content of the site – in fact, given that so many people find and access websites via search, your title tag and meta description may be the first thing they see. So make sure you give them a great first impression and stand out from the sea of other search results!

Title tags should of course be optimised for search engines, but should also make sense to users and give them a bite-size summary of what your site is about. The meta descriptions should be well-worded and enticing, summarising key selling points and including calls to action to encourage users onto your site. Meta descriptions aren’t a ranking factor, but search terms do get highlighted in bold when they match a user’s search query, so including keywords where it reads naturally will help your site seem more relevant to what the user is looking for.

Images and image optimisation

Good images inject life and interest into a site and can be used to form part of a uniform visual identity if used consistently throughout. Does the site make good use of images, and do they feel unique to the site? I’ve seen sites that just use cheesy stock photos throughout, which doesn’t inspire confidence in users; it makes a site look as though it has something to hide, and any old spammer can populate a web template with a load of stock images.

Images should also be optimised to help them rank well in image search – that means having descriptive alt tags and filenames to help Google understand what an image is of. For instance, naming a photo of a beach with lots of meaningless letters and numbers won’t help Google at all, but naming it ‘couples’ holidays in Barbados’ will give it a much better chance of ranking for this search term in image search. And because image results are often pulled into the main SERPs, that may mean that your image appears above competitor search results even if your website doesn’t.

Linking practices

Strong internal linking is as helpful to users as it is to search engines, so look at whether or not the pages on the site link contextually to other internal pages. For example, a travel site offering travel guides to different destinations could cross-reference specific holidays or flight information elsewhere on the site, and could have a section at the end linking to other destinations the reader might be interested in.

External linking should be considered as well, as it’s thought to help Google establish your ‘link neighbourhood’ – are you linking to (ergo associated with) reputable sites or dodgy ones? Linking out to strong, authoritative sites is also likely to come across positively to users of your website by associating you with other organisations they may have heard of.

Shareable content

It’s also important to think beyond the site itself and look at how ‘shareable’ the content on the site is. For many sites this could come in the form of a blog, which has the added benefit of giving your site fresh new content on a regular basis (Google loves fresh content by the way).

People have grown accustomed to sharing interesting or amusing things online via social media sites, and sharing can do wonders for brand recognition. So think about what data you have access to, and what resources you could provide, that might get people sharing. If you’re a travel site, for example, video guides or handy checklists for different destinations would be useful, shareable content you could add. Infographics and white papers are other examples of shareable content that could work well depending on the niche your site operates in, but this is a great opportunity to flex your creative muscles and come up with some exciting content ideas tailored to your own audience.

Oh, and don’t forget to make sharing easy by including social sharing buttons where appropriate – you can even ask or encourage users to share by offering them something in return (e.g. access to exclusive content, or entry into a competition).

And finally…

As I said at the start, all sites are different, and will have their own peculiarities, strengths and weaknesses. Don’t get too tied down by a template: feel free to go beyond it, add new sections, and get creative with the content suggestions!

What do YOU look at when you audit content? Do you think there’s anything I’ve missed? Share your thoughts below or tweet me @RachelsWritings.

© SEOptimise The ultimate content audit checklist

Your options are campaigns that target desktop and tablets, or campaigns that target desktop, tablet and mobile (with adjusted bids). This means that if you had different versions of campaigns for different devices, when you upgrade you can only keep one active. But if you’ve had separate campaigns they are likely to have grown apart, even if they started as simple duplicates.

So, let’s say you’ve decided to keep the desktop campaign but you have tablet and mobile campaigns you want to merge into it. You need to check for differences, then judge whether anything that was only in the mobile or tablet campaigns should be copied into the desktop campaign. But how?

From the title you may have guessed: I suggest using Excel.

Firstly, download your account into AdWords Editor. Then go to the File menu, ‘Export spreadsheet (CSV)’, and ‘Export selected campaigns and ad groups’ – select the campaigns you’re interested in and click ‘OK’.

Open the CSV you’ve just made in Excel. There will be many columns – what columns you get will depend on what AdWords features your account uses.

Before we do anything, we’re going to need to add some more columns. Copy the Campaign column (column A) and paste it into the first empty column (in my case it’s column AS but it may be different for you). Rename the first cell ‘Campaign Root’.

The idea is that all campaigns that are going to be merged should have the same Campaign Root. If you have a naming convention that gives you names such as “Things – Desktop”, “Things – Tablet”, “Things – Mobile”, “Widgets – Desktop“, “Widgets – Mobile”, etc, then use find and replace to get rid of “ – Desktop”, “ – Tablet” and “ – Mobile” to leave Campaign Root column saying “Things” or “Widgets”. If you haven’t got a consistent naming scheme you may have to manually change the campaign names.

Then add the column name “Is Primary”. This will say if the campaign is the primary campaign – the one you’ll keep when you’ve upgraded. Fill the column with ‘Yes’ for rows from the primary campaign, and leave them blank for the other campaigns (i.e. the mobile and tablet duplicates).

Then add to the top row the following column titles:

• “Is Ad”
• “Ad Check”
• “Is Keyword”
• “KW Check”
• “Is Sitelink”
• “Sitelink Check”
• “Is Campaign Setting”
• “Setting Check”
• “Ad Group Bid”
• “Keyword Bid”
• “Primary Bid”
• “Bid Adjustment”

Then select the entire worksheet (press Ctrl and A), go to the Insert menu, and click ‘Table’.

There will be a dialogue box – click OK.

Your data should now be a table – the column headers have drop down buttons next to them, and everything has probably changed colour (in my case to blue).

Why are we turning this into a Table? Mostly so the columns are named sensibly. The file you create will have different columns depending on what features are in your account – having display campaigns, location extensions, or dynamic search ads will add extra columns. It’s easier to keep track of what’s happening if you know you’re looking at the column of display URLs rather than knowing you’re looking at column X (which contains display URLs some of the time). It also makes writing this blog post easier!

Note that [@Column Name] or [@[Column Name]] means the cell of the named column in the current row, while [Column Name] refers to the whole column.

Scroll sideways back to the column ‘Is Ad’. In the first cell underneath type in
=AND(NOT(ISBLANK([@Headline])),NOT([@[AdGroup Status]]="Paused"),NOT([@Status]="Paused"))
It should be automatically copied into the entire column.

This formula is true if Headline isn’t blank, the ad group isn’t paused, and the ad isn’t paused – which is to say, it’s true if and only if the row is an active ad.

Then go to the first cell under ‘Ad Check’ write this code:
=IF([@Is Ad],COUNTIFS([Campaign Root],[@Campaign Root],[Ad Group],[@Ad Group],[Headline],[@Headline],[Description Line 1],[@Description Line 1],[Description Line 2],[@Description Line 2],[Display URL],[@Display URL],[Destination URL],[@Destination URL],[Is Ad],[@Is Ad]),"")
The IF means that if the row isn’t an ad, then this column is blank.

Then the COUNTIFS checks how many rows have the same campaign root, ad group, ad text, and destination URL as the current row. If the answer is one then the ad isn’t in all the campaigns. If the answer is three then the ad is in all three campaigns. If the answer is two then the ad is in two campaigns but not one.

Under “Is Keyword” type
=AND(NOT(ISBLANK([@Keyword])),NOT([@AdGroup Status]="paused"),NOT([@Status]="paused"))
This is true if the row is a keyword that’s not paused or in a paused ad group. Note that this covers negative keywords as well as positive ones.

Under “KW Check” type
=IF([@Is Keyword],COUNTIFS([Campaign Root],[@Campaign Root],[Ad Group],""&[@Ad Group],[Keyword],[@Keyword],[Criterion Type],[@Criterion Type],[Is Keyword],[@Is Keyword]),"")

If the row isn’t a keyword, it’s blank: if it is, then it’s the count of how many duplicate campaigns the keyword is in.

Why do we need “”&[@Ad Group] rather than just [@Ad Group]? It’s a bit complicated. The ad group could be blank, if the keyword is a campaign level negative. But there is an oddity of the COUNTIFS function – an empty criteria will be treated as 0 (a number), while the empty cells in the criteria range are treated as “” (a string). Using “”&[@Ad Group] as the criteria means that if there is no ad group the function will see [@Ad Group] as “” and count the number of rows where [Ad Group] is blank (rather than treating the [@Ad Group] as 0 and looking for 0s in the [Ad Group] column).

Under “Is Sitelink” type
=NOT(ISBLANK([@Link Text]))
This just checks that there’s link text (unenhanced sitelinks can’t be paused so there’s no need to check the status).

Under “SL Check” type
=IF([@Is Sitelink],COUNTIFS([Campaign Root],[@Campaign Root],[Link Text],[@Link Text],[Destination URL],[@Destination URL]),"")
This counts the number of duplicate campaigns the sitelink is in.

Under “Is Campaign Setting” type
=OR(NOT(ISBLANK([@Campaign Daily Budget])),NOT(ISBLANK([@ID])))
Some rows contain the campaign’s budget, language, ad schedule, and networks. Others contain the locations targeted.

And under “Setting Check” type
=IF([@Is Campaign Setting],COUNTIFS([Campaign Root],""&[@Campaign Root],[Languages],""&[@Languages],[Ad Schedule],""&[@Ad Schedule],[Networks],""&[@Networks],[ID],""&[@ID],[Location],""&[@Location]),"")
This counts the number of duplicate campaigns with the same language, location, ad schedule, and networks settings.

Note: COUNTIFS only works if strings are under 255 characters, and if you have a complicated ad schedule it may be over this limit. In that case the formula may return 0 and you’ll have to check manually whether the settings in duplicate campaigns are the same or not.

That’s all the formulae! Now you can use these new columns to filter – if a Check column shows a number less than the number of duplicate campaigns, then the row is an item that is not the same in all of the duplicate campaigns.

For example, if you have three versions of each campaign (desktop, mobile and tablet) then any Check column saying two or less shows something that is different between the campaigns: if you went to the KW Check column and filter for 1s and 2s, you’ll get a list of keywords that aren’t the same in all versions of the campaign. You can order by keyword to make it clearer which campaigns a keyword is in and which it isn’t in.

You’ll have to decide for yourself what to do with these. Why is the keyword not running on all devices? If it’s because it performed badly on something you’ll have to weigh up that against losing the keyword on the device it does work on. Similarly, compare sitelinks and ads – you can keep separate mobile ads and sitelinks, but you can’t have tablet-only versions – and campaign settings.

If you want a look at my example spreadsheet, download it here.

Have you been using any Excel tricks or other tools to help you upgrade to enhanced campaigns? Let us know in the comments!

© SEOptimise Using Excel to Help Move to Enhanced Campaigns

And it did not disappoint; we thoroughly enjoyed our in time in Leeds, and came away with plenty of takeaways. With so many talks (over 40 different talks/panels), we sadly couldn’t see everything there, but we’ve put together some of the key takeaways from our favourite sessions of the conference.

Andrew Dumont – Exploring the differences between Web and Marketing Analytics

Andrew Dumont of SEOmoz kicked IonSearch off with a look at marketing analytics, and what you need to look at differently from your everyday web analytics.

• If web analytics is how your site is performing, marketing analytics is how your campaigns are performing – and the sweet spot to site success is in the middle of these two sets of data
• We need to dig deeper, and ask performance questions of the entire data pie, and there’s some great places in addition to Google Analytics to get this:
  • Topsy – superb tool for measuring content success by seeing how often it is mentioned
  • Fresh Web Explorer – the new toy from SEOmoz can help you quickly see mentions of new content, or your brand in the wake of a new campaign
  • Buffer – excellent tool for social media sharing and tracking
  • Open Site Explorer, for link generation (note: although OSE releases are getting quicker, MajesticSEO and Ahrefs can also give you further backlink data, and potentially more quickly if it is a while before next OSE index update)
  • Kapost – content marketing software platform that helps manage the entire process (for a price)
  • Use all this tasty data to help analyse your marketing performance, alongside its impact on the site performance
• This data is great, but a common pitfall is you set it all up, but then forget to collect it, or don’t spend the time to analyse it thoroughly
• Another common issue can be that even if you do the work, you don’t communicate it with the rest of the team – you must tell your team what you are doing, and how your content is performing – content must be part of everyone’s job

Key takeaway: Think broader about what data you can get to make smarter marketing and content decisions

Panel – Sha Menz, Tim Grice, Martin Woods & Christoph Cemper – Link removal

Link removal has become an increasing part of the SEO landscape, and many agencies have picked up new clients who are desperately looking for help having been penalised by previous link building work. This panel looked at some of the lessons learned about link removal and re-inclusion requests:

• Have you been caught by Penguin? Check your analytics data to see the exact date of a decline in traffic. If the timing does not correspond precisely with a Penguin update, then it is not Penguin causing your trouble
• If you get a warning in Google Webmaster Tools, you need to at least be aware of what your link profile looks like, even if your warning was of the ‘Google has taken action in this case’ variety
• To analyse your backlink profile, you need to grab all the link data you can from every available source, including finding records of links you built years ago through different sources like Fiverr, or guest posting, that the link database tools don’t find – you want to have the picture possible
• Use the historic data set from MajesticSEO
• Although Google Webmaster Tools only gives you a sample (10-20%) of your links, Bing Webmaster Tools is a great source of link data
• Disavow at a domain level – don’t worry about if you think it is a good site or not, if you are worried about the link, disavow the domain and let Google decide what it thinks are good and bad sites
• Disavow reported links even on 404 pages and no-followed links – Google might not recrawl the site for weeks, and do you want to wait for them to catch up?
• Pre-empt Penguin by tidying links now – if you get caught by Penguin you will have to wait a long time (months) for your changes to take place, as Panda updates are infrequent (there have only been three iterations so far, far less common than Panda updates)

Key takeaway: Make backlink profile modifying part of your SEO routine – look at your links on a regular basis

Ross Hudgens – Rapid-fire content marketing

Ross gave some great examples of methods he uses to make the very most of the content marketing work he does. With so much competition emerging in content marketing, you need every promotional advantage possible. This rapid-fire list of methods to improve the way you market your content were given thick and fast!

• Content marketing is painful. It requires repetition and constant iterative action if it is to be evergreen in nature
• How to get links:
  • Advanced Search – allinurl:/tag/brand/ – search where your brand has been mentioned recently
  • Check by time in Google
  • Create personal pages for every employee, the journalists and other sites have direct place to link to rather than social accounts
  • People link to twitter pages, do link reclamation by asking them to link to website as well – do the same with Google +
  • Reverse image search to find links to images
  • Search for links to domain name misspellings
  • Monitor stolen images with imageraider.com
  • Look at links to your YouTube videos and contact links. – Check YT analytics for embed locations
  • Broken link building, using tools such as http://www.brokenlinkbuilding.com/
• Getting social shares:
  • Be deliberate with tweets – Use followerwonk to understand when your followers are using twitter, then schedule your tweets to the appropriate time
  • Every time that content is on the web, there should be some kind of social action
  • Slideshare Gold – Allows you to add URLs and Twitter accounts
  • Build relationships with Twitter Favourites/+1s
• Find influencers on YouTube, Hackernews, Twitter, Followerwonk, Pintrest, and act upon what these people are saying
• Ego Appeals – Indirect mention of influencers likely to see content
  • Chose the influencer for the content, not write the content for the influencer
• How to get more CTR & safe links from infographics: siegemedia.com/infographic-embed-codes
• Use content platforms (such as Slideshare) to rank for search terms by using their authority – get the traffic
• Pre-check buttons as people generally won’t uncheck, especially on newsletter sign-ups
• Use co-citation to your advantage – be very deliberate around adding additional information, for example Brand (link), a content marketing company
• Not much will change with Link Building going forward – Ross explained he builds links that competitors can’t take / defensible links
• Don’t worry about controlling anchor text – under 20% commercial anchor text
• Where target demographics are not socially active, create more educational pieces

Key takeaway: Link building might not change that much moving forward, but being smarter in how we promote content is key to success

Marcus Tandler – What’s next in search?

One of the talks of IonSearch 2013, Marcus Tandler gave us his very entertaining thoughts on where the search engines, and the search industry as a result, might move in the near future. Boasting 477 slides in less than 45 minutes (!), Marcus delivered a captivating talk on what Google might use next as rankings signals:

• Marcus showed some examples of spikes in traffic thanks to strong content marketing, but traffic often died down after – with content marketing it is important to rinse and repeat constantly for best effect, and for a steady rise
• It is vital to see what type of content has worked before – examine what the audience/bloggers/news sites in your niche have actively liked before
• SearchMetrics has an excellent ‘social visibility’ tool that works very well for measuring the impact your content marketing is having
• Searchers want to see the experts or authorities in a field talking on news and events, and the search engines will respond in kind by presenting this information, so Google+ Authorship (rel=author) may become more important as time goes by – to connect with your audience you need to have people on your site positioned as experts
• Author-Rank is a great tool to help see where authors are writing, and their areas of expertise
• Traffic will become a ranking factor in the future. Google are searching for patterns in how people are searching, and they have a lot of data on how we are using the internet
• Google want to highly rank sites that satisfy the user – and traffic patterns that indicate a site is solving people’s problems help them do this
• By building links for users (where you will get traffic from), not search engines, you help start building these patterns

Key takeaway: Building for traffic encourages better SEO, and better content, and this will reap rewards as Google evolves

Nichola Stott – Link earning: Marketing strategies for earning your links, and how to survive the grey borderlands

Nichola spoke on how we can gain meaningful content from real stories from each client we work with. She examined what makes an engaging story, and how we can get such angles into our content work.

• There are myths around content-led link building that need to be busted:
  • Build it and people will not just come
  • Videos aren’t ‘viral’ as a trait – this is something that happened to them, you can’t build it in
  • Data doesn’t make an infographic – a story does
• The stages of content creation: Ideation -> Creation -> Distribution (then repeat)
• Why you need an earned link strategy:
  • 82% average visibility drop for the top 100 affected by Penguin
  • 3.1% of all queries dropped in Penguin.
  • 73 places dropped by Chrome for ‘browser’ keyword for link buying
  • Using genuine news stories delivers diversity of link sources, audience targeting, plus reinforces brand story
  • Compare the brand perceptions of Innocent smoothies (story telling) with DFS (constant sales pitches)
• So, what is newsworthy?
  • Quantifiable – humans are obsessed with wanting to measure items, so use this in your content (such as ‘world’s smallest’ or ‘industry first’)
  • Celebrity content – our obsession seems to know no bounds
  • Emotive content (either feel-good or controversial)
  • Recommended book – Contagious (Jonah Berger)
• Where do you start?
  • Your product and USP (marketing 101)
  • Qualitative angles such as face-to-face interviews; these need senior buy in, or try stakeholder groups
  • Surveys – Google Consumer Survey (used on the display network) work very well – set your demographics, screening questions and prudent questions on pressing topic. Data can give you excellent qualitative angle (‘64% of consumer think x’), backed by survey data
  • For ubiquitous products, look for USPs or a point of difference; for boring products you need to find a human application, can be service or policy related – bring your product to the human conclusion that suddenly makes it less boring
  • Data-led content has to be a story – infographics and slides are the mechanisms to deliver that story – the story is the 3rd dimension of the data you have got
  • Don’t discount infographics because others are starting to, just find the better angle
  • Find stories by defining what normal looks like, then create some filter alarms to let you know when something newsworthy is happening
• Tools:
  • HARO – subscription service that sends two emails a day of reporters seeking a source for a story
  • Media Agility – a media contact database
  • Some agencies are teaming with PR firms, changing names of link builders to ‘promotion executives’

Key takeway: Great content needs a reason – find that, in any niche, and you’ve got something to build links to with meaningful content from real stories

Sam went into fascinating detail with his tips on succeeding with SEO for enterprise-level sites.

• When pitching, do your research. Get to meet the client first hand
  • Understand the business objective of the client, and speak their language; ROI, TVR, Cost of Sale, etc. rather than just DA and so on
  • Know your audience – who is in the pitch meeting with you that you need to connect with?
  • Create a scoring mechanism – score outreach similar to PR, what it would of cost in ad spend? Look at brand related terms
  • Don’t call it SEO, call it ‘fixing the website’ for example for technical jobs
• Advantages of working with big brands are when there is a big brand with poor website or agency which you can immediately improve upon. You can get people to do your job, such as the PR team
• Budgets can be big, but it needs to be unlocked- you have to be prepared to play the long game.
• You have to play nice, working with other agencies/partners, but integration is overrated – it can work but is sitting down in meeting for 8 hours the most productive use of your time?
• You need to always strive to get on their radar, and try to present to senior leadership – do not wait to be called, be proactive
• And remember, SEO is just a single cog in the wheel
• Traditional brands are generally weak at getting things implemented, so understanding the structure & process in updating the site is key – define how the business works through regular meetings, training of in-house staff, working in deliverable ‘chunks’, transparency of costs, and streamline the approval process wherever possible
• Compliance/brand guidelines slow you down, but big brands often do some really good branding plays that you can use for SEO, RedBull being a notable example
• Working with a global business it can be difficult to meet all people involved, get in the diary to talk quickly and earn local control
• Pick your battles, you will lose some!
• Enterprise SEO generally competes with itself.
• Choose portfolio, different brands can target different price set.
• As site grows, information architect goes wrong, and duplicate content issues are hugely common – see slideshare.net/SamuelCrocker/duplicate-content-ses-london for some examples
• Outsource where you can is a great win, but you need to ensure that all is signed off, and that quality is checked thoroughly
• Big sites generally rely on more on-site work as outreach to sites with millions of pages are impossible ethically
• Technical audits can be like going down a rabbit hole – look at top level and identify symptoms
• Good results are common for moving site structure from sub-domain to sub-folder
• Tools:
  • Brightedge (highly recommended)
  • Woorank
  • ScreamingFrog (not always good for large sites) / DeepCrawl
  • Automate reports whenever possible

Key takeaway: Give full visibility and teach

Martin MacDonald – Why I’ve quit SEO

Martin gave a passionate, and well-argued, talk on how the SEO industry’s preoccupation with short-cuts (which he cheerfully admits he was a large part of) has made it hard to gain traction as other online channels have.

• SEO’s don’t need spam techniques any more, but much of the public (at least, any that work with a site in any capacity) often thinks that’s what we do
• The public perception of SEO hasn’t evolved as the actual job has over the past several years
• SEO is now incredibly complicated, and focus is on scale – not in amount of data, but the amount of data points to be measured
• We used to manufacture links, now we make incredible content, and we make websites ‘work’ properly
• Industry needs to keep moving from the ‘next trick’ mind-set, and concentrate on being remarkable
• SEOs are online marketing heroes, understanding important concepts and methods no-one else does
• There are remarkable people in this industry, and they need to be aiming toward becoming the next generation of CMOs
• But SEO is just one part of the modern online buying cycle, there’s PPC, social, Adsense, email and more
• If you just do SEO you miss out on 50% of the potential conversions, but if you don’t include SEO you miss out on up to 80% of the traffic – you need to do it all
• Wherever the eyeballs are, that’s where you should be, and investing in SEO-type activity, answering searcher’s questions
• Use PPC for transactional keywords – people using such terms are informed searchers who have done their research, and you now need to be in front of them with your selling page

Key takeaway: SEO has a reputation-management issue, perhaps fatally so as a name, and co-joined thinking needs to be more prevalent in the online-marketing industry

Panel – Aleyda Solis, Daniel Bianchini & Andrew Girdwood – Local SEO

Our very own Daniel Bianchini joined the discussion on local SEO before a packed room for the first session on day 2.

• Quality is more important than quantity with reviews for local listings
• Use rich snippet markup for reviews, events and addresses to help your local listing stand out
• Create individual pages for each location in your chain for local SEO, this allows you to add individual information for each listing, and allows relevant markup without spamming
• The way local works might well change drastically soon, with full Google Plus local around the corner – Google Plus is going to be key hub for local listings, and a great way to potentially interact with other businesses and customers
• Diversifying your channels, Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest, email, Foursquare etc., otherwise you could be missing on the channel that appeals to your niche
• Reviews are still very significant – so you need to encourage them. Follow up sales with emails asking for reviews, preferably with links that require no sign-up
• Small businesses can be agile, and can engage more directly with the local community more often, so use this to your advantage via social media, and getting involved in events (even sponsoring of possible)
• 70% of local queries come from mobile search, indeed there is a close relationship between local and mobile overall. Making sure your local listings look good in mobile versions, especially your Google Plus and Maps presentation, as well as your contact information on mobile site key

This talk focussed on productivity, and how using your brain, and time, more effectively to encourage creative thinking makes it the best SEO tool available. Drawing on his own experiences, Mike Essex presented a whole raft of potential work-hacks to get your mind on the job at hand.

• As SEOs we love tools, but knowing how to make the most of these required being a better you – your brain has 86 billion neurons, that’s a lot of potential – how many do you engage to do your work?
• Using a tool always needs a human element, a sense check if you will. Mike told the example of how a tool suggested over 200 places to have a site mentioned, and then gave you a tick once you had outreached; the tool was happy, but none of the submissions went through, so the site was no better off!
• Tools are static, and can’t always adapt to the changing landscape, so be aware of the limitations
• Why fill your head with tools, when we need to learn to constantly adapt to be great online marketers
• Trying to make everything scale and work automatically leads to a robotic process, which anyone can do
• Creativity is the best way to become better than any tool
• Time management is vital, however works best for you – Mike recommended checking out the Pomodoro technique which breaks work into 25 minute sprints
• Inbox Zero can lead to much greater time to concentrate, and greater efficiency and creativity through focus
• Step away from your PC, get a clear head, and find new inspiration
• Being bored is a great way to be creative – look at how children are creative when there is no obvious stimulus
• Walking the dog, the daily commute, exercising – all great times to become creative as you are bored
• Find a mentor to help give feedback or guidance
• If all else fails, copy President Obama – each day he has three moments, his workout, dinner with his daughters, and at night after everyone else is asleep, away from his work – this he credits with enabling him to work better at other time as it gives him time to step back and process. If the most powerful man on earth makes time to be creative, so should you

Key takeaway: Get creative by:

1. Controlling your time
2. Freeing your mind
3. Finding inspiration

• Koozai’s blog
• Zazzle’s blog

We hugely enjoyed IonSearch, and will be back in 2014. If you made it, what were your favourite talks and panels, and what tips, tricks and thoughts did you come away with? Let us know in the comments!

Many thanks to CST Photography for letting us use their excellent images.

© SEOptimise IonSearch 2013 recap – our favourite tips & thoughts

A link from a high-authority news website can do wonders for SEO. But do you know how to appeal to journos?

The boundaries between SEO and PR are becoming increasingly blurred. In fact, for many small businesses, any PR work is carried out by their SEO team or agency.

Links from top news websites and popular bloggers are incredibly valuable online. But do you know how to get positive press mentions?

We’ve been speaking to a journalist who regularly writes for high-authority news websites, including Yahoo! UK and the MailOnline. What are her tips for getting mentions – and even links – in the press?

Attracting press attention

Pitch actual news stories

No journalist wants to give you free publicity – advertorial doesn’t sell papers or mean website clicks. So you need to pitch actual stories, such as research you’ve conducted or analysis of interesting sales figures, not just ‘news’ of your ‘great new product’.

“I get between 10 and 20 press releases in my inbox every day,” our insider explains. “About half of those are simply non-stories. They contain ‘news’ that shouldn’t go beyond the company newsletter and certainly won’t be interesting to journalists.”

Her advice is to look for an interesting angle to the story you want to publicise. For example, if you make chocolate and sales have increased, that’s not a particularly interesting story. But if you can show that sales rose following a bad news story, then that’s far more interesting – ‘Brits turn to chocolate to beat economy blues’.

Offer proof

Your press releases or pitches can’t just be ‘we think x’. Journalists need some supporting figures, even if they’re just to prove to their editors that the story has legs.

“It’s not as if we need a massive report,” says our journalist, “just something to support the story. Sometimes that can be sales figures, like a surge in sales for a particular product, but it also might be a case study. For example, a popular website that sells second-hand music gave me a case study about a man who’d made £4,000 for Christmas selling off his old vinyl. They had a hugely positive mention and I had a great festive finance story.”

Don’t underestimate the value of your corporate data and market trends – these can support interesting stories and gain you valuable press attention.

Build press relationships

Don’t bombard journalists with press releases if they’ve never heard of you. Look for writers who have an interest in your field and woo them online. Follow them on Twitter, retweet their stories, and engage with them whenever you can.

If the company budget allows it, take a few high-value journalists out for a drink or a meal. They’ll be far more likely to listen to your pitches if they know you.

Our insider adds: “I often get emailed press releases where the company hasn’t even bothered to spell my name correctly. It makes me much less likely to read their release.”

Pick the right time to approach them

Unless your news is time sensitive, think carefully about the best time to contact a journalist. Last thing on a Friday afternoon isn’t a great idea, for example.

Look at when the journalist most commonly publishes so you can avoid ringing them too close to a deadline.

Our insider says: “I remember working in a busy newsroom during a really important speech from the PM. Everyone in the country was watching it but some pain of a PR was phoning around every journalist in the room in turn. None of us ran his story.”

Call the right writer

Is your story best suited to a tech journalist? A lifestyle writer? A fashion specialist? Don’t waste your time or theirs by contacting someone who can’t carry your story. Look up previous articles and coverage if you’re not sure who’s best.

Receiving press attention

It’s impossible to predict when the press might be interested in you. You might be a small company importing plant food when suddenly Radio 4 wants to talk to someone about teens accessing dangerous chemicals from abroad.

Having a popular Twitter and blogging presence will really increase the likelihood that they choose you; if you already look like an industry authority then you add authority to a news report.

If a journalist contacts you, here are some points to remember.

Respond fast

We asked our journalist insider what the single most important thing to remember is when dealing with the press. Her answer? “Act fast!”

She explains: “Most journalists, and even bloggers, are working to incredibly tight deadlines. They are probably ringing around a number of businesses like yours, meaning the first one to reply gets the mention.

“So often I have companies call back or tweet me a week or more after I contacted them. By that point the article has been published and I’m working on something else. If I remember the company at all, it will be to make sure I don’t waste time on them again.”

Don’t be too suspicious

Whenever a survey of the least-trusted professions is carried out, journalists rank about as well as politicians. As a nation, we don’t trust them. But you need them for SEO-friendly PR!

Our journalist insider says: “I was recently writing a good news story about businesses that were thriving despite the recession. Yet a number of the companies I phoned were really suspicious of my motives – one had a receptionist who was downright hostile. Because of that one member of staff, they missed out on some really positive publicity.”

Be cautious, yes. Consider your words carefully and ask if you can reply by email if you want more time to think your comments through. Make sure you understand exactly what story they are after before you agree to help.

But don’t assume that all journalists want to make you look bad. Most often they just need expert comment or a case study.

Don’t ask for too much

Of course you want a link or a product mention, but the journalist only cares about the story. Ask for too much and they might just go elsewhere.

“I understand that you want a link and that it’s probably the only reason you’re talking to me,” agrees our insider. “But sometimes my editor won’t allow it – but the brand mention is still good publicity and worth having.

“In the past, I’ve ditched case studies because the company has demanded the right to edit my article before it’s published, or insisted that I include a positive mention of a specific product. I’m not some sort of freebie copywriter and only my editor gets to amend my articles.”

Of course, if you have a really valuable or unique story then it’s worth offering it first to the publication that will give you the most. Just be realistic about what your story is worth.

Respect bloggers

Most smaller websites are unlikely to get a huge amount of press attention from major news sites. Quite often, journalists will simply run an internet search for the kind of spokesperson or case study they need, meaning those that rank highest for the most competitive keywords are likely to get the mention.

However, bloggers may have more time and a wider industry network, meaning you’re more likely to be approached by them, or to succeed in pitching a story.

Because they are more specialist a link from a blogger’s website can often be extraordinarily useful in terms of SEO. So it’s essential to respect bloggers and be as polite, timely, and helpful as you would to a journalist.

Have you dealt with the press? Did you get a link? Is all publicity good publicity? Share your thoughts with us and other readers using the comments below.

© SEOptimise How to approach journalists for your SEO

As the easy self-publishing or submission tactics fall by the wayside, link building has become a far more creative, and time-consuming, process.

But at SEOptimise, as well as building links through content, we also regularly boost clients’ link profiles without typing a word. There’s no asking for links, nor risking the wrath of Google’s anti-spam team.

This is link reclamation – fixing existing links that point to broken or inefficiently redirected pages on your site.

As Ian Lurie pointed out in one of his excellent webinars last year, before worrying about various creative methods of generating links, “get the #@@!#@$ easy links” first. And link reclamation is just that – it might take a couple of hours to complete, but can be a boost for any campaign.

Tools

What you’ll need for your link reclamation project:

• Access to Google Webmaster Tools
• Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, or the backlink data tool of your choice
• Screaming Frog SEO Spider, or a crawler/server response code checker of your choice
• Excel/Google Spreadsheet (example version for you to keep here)

Finding your broken links

Now, the quick-win version of this process is simply to put together a list of all the broken URLs on your site that have external links pointing to them, ready to put 301 redirects in place. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, and it will certainly give you the boost of reclaiming your lost authority, but sometimes we need to know where all the broken links are.

This is so we can see which broken links we should redirect, and which we want to attempt to have fixed on the source URL. Plus, as an agency, it can be advantageous to be able to report all the links we have reclaimed.

So, let’s put together as comprehensive a list of broken links pointing to our target site as possible.

Backlink data

Our first port of call is backlink data. Go to the tool of your choice and look up your site. We’re using Open Site Explorer in the examples here, but Majestic and Ahrefs both also provide perfect data for this. Within the inbound links tab select links from “only external” pages and either “pages on this sub-domain” or “pages on this root domain”, depending on the scope of your project.

Grabbing the backlink data from Open Site Explorer

There’s a whole range of metrics we could use to investigate, but to keep things moving, delete all the columns except for URL, anchor text, page authority, domain authority, followable and target URL.

Doing this allows us to analyse our broken links by PA or DA, and see which are no-followed, helping us decide which links to 301, and which to reach out to have fixed to the correct URL. If you are not using OSE, then Majestic SEO and Ahrefs have their own importance metrics.

Now to find our broken links. Copy the entries in the target URL column, and paste them into a new spreadsheet. Use the remove duplicates feature within the data tab, and save as a .csv or .txt file.

Removing duplicate URLs in Excel

Fire up Screaming Frog, and select ‘List’ from the mode menu. Choose your file of URLs, and start crawling. Once the crawl is complete, select the Response Codes tab and filter to ‘Client Error (4XX)’. You now have a complete list of URLs that external sites are linking to which don’t exist on your server.

No URLs on the list? Congratulations! You have no broken links to fix, and can crack on with working on ways to generate fresh links. If, like most sites we’ve worked with, you have URLs here, export the list.

Exporting all pages resulting i a 404 error from Screaming Frog

Finding 302 redirects

Still in screaming Frog, filter to ‘Redirection (3xx)’, and order the results by the ‘Status Code’ column. Are there any 302 redirects in there? If so, export this list, open in Excel and make the data a table (ctrl+T is the shortcut). Filter by Status Code to find the 302s, and copy the data. Open your exported list of URLs resulting in 404 errors, and paste your 302 data into the spreadsheet. You now have a complete list of linked-to pages we want to fix.

Getting clever

It’s time to prune data again. Delete or hide every column until you are left with just the Address and Status Code columns. Once ready, select all the 404/302 data and copy. Go back to your spreadsheet with OSE data. You need to paste in the two columns, either to the right of the OSE data, or in a new sheet (however you prefer to work).

Now for the (relatively) clever bit. Add a column to the right of your OSE data, and call it ‘status code’, then turn all the OSE data into a table. Now we are going use a VLOOKUP function in the new ‘status code’ column to have Excel tell us which of our OSE links match the 404 errors we found in Screaming Frog.

The code we used is =IFERROR(VLOOKUP(F:F,I:J,2,FALSE),”"), with F:F specifying the Target URL column in the OSE data, and I:J the Address and Status Code columns respectively in the Screaming Frog data. (A big hat-tip to Joe and Tamsin for patiently helping me with Excel formulas!)

Alternatively use the Insert Function wizard in the Formulas tab to work through the process, though you will have to add the IFERROR part afterwards.

Our ‘status code’ column should now contain the code from the Screaming Frog data each time one of our external links points to a URL that returns a 404 or 302 code. Simply filter the source code column by 404 and 400 to give you a complete list of broken URLs. You can then reorder this list by PA, DA or by which are followed.

You may also wish to add a ‘date fixed’ column, so you can record when the redirect or edit is in place, and the link starts passing its sweet, sweet authority to your target site.

You can also filter by 302, and instantly have a list of redirects to be changed to 301s, and all the links that suddenly pass all their potential link authority to show your client or boss. Not bad for a few minutes’ work!

Two sources are better than one

So are we done? Not quite; many SEOs work on the premise that using more than one data source is prudent.

Once you have done this process, it’s very quick to do the same again from an alternative source; in our example I might now use Ahrefs. Once we have all my 404s/302s from Ahrefs in a new tab in our spreadsheet, we can create a third tab to combine with the 404s from OSE, using the remove duplicates tool once again.

Of course, the sources cannot share quality metrics – just URL, anchor text and target URL. However, the advantage of using multiple sources to find a greater number of broken links to fix is worthwhile, and we can still filter on individual sheets.
Google Webmaster Tools crawl errors.

To use every available source of external links leading to 404 errors, we need to use Google Webmaster Tools’ ‘Crawl Errors’ report (found under Diagnostics in the menu).

Alas, this is where things become a little more frustrating. As no doubt many of you know, it is impossible to cleanly download a list of each 404 URL address and the links pointing to it, despite the information being available on screen. Plus GWT is not always as up-to-date as we would like. So, we have to use a workaround.

What you can download from GWT is all the broken URLs Google has found on your site. So, our first step is to download this list as a .csv file by selecting Health, then Crawl Errors in the left-hand navigation.

Finding external links resulting in 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools

Select the ‘Not found’ links, and hit the download button. This file can then be imported using Screaming Frog’s list mode, and all the reported broken URLs checked. Any URLs that are now returning 200 or 301 status codes should be removed from your list, and marked as ‘fixed’ within GWT.

We now have a smaller and accurate list of the broken URLs on our site. Create a new tab in the spreadsheet with the broken links we found in our backlink tool, and create headings for URL, target URL and status code. Unfortunately, there’s now some manual work involved; how much depends on how many 404 errors GWT is reporting.

• Select each error in turn within GWT
• Choose the ‘Linked from’ tab
• Copy all the external URLs pointing to that URL
• Paste these URLs in the URL column in your spreadsheet
• Add the target URL you have just been checking to the target URL column

As you can see, if you have a lot of reported external links, this can quickly become quite a pain. One helpful shortcut I have found is the Link Clump extension for Chrome. This allows you to create keyboard and mouse action shortcuts for opening or copying multiple links. I set one for copying all URLs selected to the clipboard. This makes it relatively quick to grab all the URLs for each reported error and paste them into my spreadsheet.

There’s plenty of other great extensions/add-ons that can help with this, such as Scraper for Chrome and Multi Links for Firefox. Please suggest any favourites you have in the comments below!

After a bit of leg-work, you will now have a list of all the source links, and their target URL. The final stage is to ensure that these external URLs still exist, and still link to our site. Doing this is a two stage process, both using the same VLOOKUP method we used earlier.

Copy all the source URLs and paste into a new spreadsheet, then save as a .csv file. Now go back to Screaming Frog and upload the list and crawl all the URLs. Firstly go to Response Codes and filter for any redirects. If you have some you need to export the list.

Open this list and copy the redirect destination URLs, then add these to your master list of URLs from GWT. Next use the same VLOOKUP methodology to remove any URLs that result in a 301 or 302 – we don’t want them in our external link list as they no longer exist, but do want the redirect targets, in case our links are there!

Now go back to Screaming Frog and filter for any client errors (400/404s). If there are any, again export then use the VLOOKUP method to remove them from our list of external links from GWT.

The second step is to check they are still linking to you. Copy the edited column of URLs reported by GWT, and save to (yep, yet another) .csv file. Upload in Screaming Frog and go to the Configuration menu and select Custom to add a bespoke filter. Enter your domain, with or without subdomain depending on your project, and set to ‘does not contain’.

Creating a custom filter in Screaming Frog

Crawl your URL list, then head to the Custom tab and filter to your bespoke filter. This then shows you all the URLs that no longer point to you. Export, copy into your main spreadsheet and VLOOKUP one last time and delete these links. You’ll need to add some form of marker text in a second column so you can see which ones to delete, or use the Status column.

Side note: You may wish to keep a record of these to try and get your site back on them if still relevant – it may be they simply removed the link to you because it was a broken page. Being able to write to the site saying, “You used to link to us and we’d love to be featured once again”, is a great reason to have to contact these sites.

Your final list

So, after a lot of editing, you have a list of broken external links reported by Google Webmaster Tools, plus the page they are linking to. Add these to your master list (the URLs from OSE and Ahrefs), de-duplicate and you have your final list of links to reclaim.

Using the individual sheets for each source you can check each link for importance, deciding which ones to try and have corrected, and which you will simply put a 301 redirect in place for. Of course, as we have recently learned, 301 redirects possibly pass all their authority, but many still prefer to have clean links wherever possible (as previous studies have shown some authority is lost).

So that’s it. It might seem a little complex or time-consuming at first, but the process only takes a couple of hours, or less if Webmaster Tools hasn’t reported too many errors. The rewards vary of course, but if you have an older domain, or one that went through a site migration without SEO assistance, there can be many broken links. We’ve found several hundred links for clients before doing this – worth getting for any site.

To make things a little easier (as this is a long post to follow!), we’ve put together a basic version you can access and copy for your own projects.

There’s plenty more that can be done of course. Another good use of time is finding the sites that linked to you at one point, but no longer do so, as excellently laid out here by Ethan Lloyd at Seer Interactive, and we’ll be bringing you more as well. Happy reclaiming!

© SEOptimise Plugging the link leaks, part 1 – reclaim links you are throwing away

There comes a time in the life of an in-house marketer when they need agency support in order to implement and manage offline and online campaigns. However, building a solid working relationship between the two parties can, at times, be quite challenging, especially for those with little experience. I spoke to two senior in-house marketers: Dr. Gill Whiteman, head of online content and strategy at GTI Media and content manager of targetjobs.co.uk and Shalini Seneviratne, Global Brand Manager – Lifebuoy at Unilever, about sharing their experiences and advice on working with agencies and what to look for from an in-house marketing perspective. The following is the list of questions I posed to them along with their responses:

•  What are the key criteria an external agency should meet in order to work with you?

Gill: I look for the right expertise, for the specific work that needs to be done and, thereafter, I look for clarity in the agreement. I want to know what we are going to do together, what the expected outcome will be, what both sides will be bringing to the table, and when, realistically, we can expect to see the results of any action. This is important in setting up the relationship, and it helps an in-house SEO like me to communicate the value of any activity to stakeholders within my business and also manage expectations. Our business is very committed to our SEO activity, which is great. However, that means that stakeholders are also eager to see results as soon as possible when, as we know, there can be a bit of a waiting game.

For me personally, I also want to be able to work with people I feel are credible and can make their expertise accessible. As well as achieving a specific and positive outcome for the site, I want us as a business to learn from our experiences of working with agencies and build on our internal practice so that we are always progressing.

Shalini: Firstly, I think expertise is the main thing. The whole reason for outsourcing things to an external agency is because we don’t have that expertise in house. The agency must really have a ‘wow portfolio’ which demonstrates that they have the expertise. Secondly, discipline is very important. One of the biggest complaints that people have, is how the agency doesn’t stick to time, their overall commitment levels etc. Whilst some may think that a creative process is hard to keep to deadlines, this is really important to me. Thirdly, the agency must have a sense of business. More often than not, ideas presented by agencies are very outlandish and are not practical to be implemented. They must understand the business realities and be creative within them. Finally commitment – if I look back and think about the best agency people I’ve worked with, they are the ones that really make things happen. They will go out of their way, find back-up plans, make suggestions, and pull out some pleasant surprises!

•  What are the key ingredients for a successful client-agency relationship?

Gill: The key ingredients for success are good communication and clarity. It begins with good preparation before any work begins, and actually before I pick up the phone to call an agency.

From the client side, I think it is important to provide your agency with as full and clear a brief as possible. This is a good place to begin discussions and see what is possible with the time, resources, and funds available.  It also sets the scene for the work that will take place. It can be difficult for both the agency and the in-house team if the internal team (content, design, development) isn’t given sufficient time to prepare for and take on the extra work that can come out of a full site audit or campaign.

I’m also a sucker for a detailed and well-presented report. I know that some people leave these to collect dust on their shelves. I don’t. We have worked with a number of agencies over the years and I do go back to review the reports. Sometimes what wasn’t possible at the time becomes possible at a later date, or I might re-evaluate something we have done previously to move it on to the next level, or reassess it against changes in practice. I get maximum value out of you guys even when you’ve moved on!

Shalini: Trust – both client and agency must really believe in and trust each other. If you brief an agency knowing their output is not going to be up to the mark (and this happens a lot) whatever they present won’t make you happy. Same with the agency – if they present to the client knowing that their ideas will be shot down, guess what?! More often than not, their ideas will be shot down. Trust will only come when both parties know that they are experts in what they do, and they really have done their background work so they can justify their ideas or feedback. With trust also comes respect. I hate having arguments with an agency about absurd ideas that can’t be implemented. And they just don’t let go and keep arguing about things that don’t make sense. This really makes me lose respect. Finally, both parties must know when to let go.

•  What advice would you give other in-house marketers on sourcing and getting the best out of an agency?

Gill: I think you should aim to talk openly about expectations and not expect your agency contacts to be complete mind readers. It’s that brief again! As a site owner you know your product and your market, therefore it is in your interests to give the agency the inside view and then they can focus their expertise and consultancy better. Maybe those who are newer to managing their site’s SEO need more handholding, but even providing good basics (competitors, main keywords, gut feel of where issues may lie, etc.) and some context of your business can really help you and your agency get quickly to the root of any issues.

Shalini : Firstly it’s all about selection. Good agencies are really hard to find and good people within an agency even harder. So you shouldn’t back down and go for a substandard option; fight to get the best people in the agency working on your project. Secondly inspiration – it’s not rocket science that a creative process needs some kind of inspiration – be it where you brief, when you brief, what your brief looks like, even the language that goes into the brief. Make the agency feel like they’re part of the team. If you really think about it, they are! Get them involved from the beginning of the process, go with them to meet consumers, have them at your meetings, and get their input into other aspects of your projects as well. You need to build a strong relationship with them which is almost personal. So whether you do it by taking them out for drinks, or sending them a cake for their birthdays, it’s really up to you. But ultimately the best work comes out of inspired people and not systems and processes. I know agency people who really go out of their way for clients they like

• Finally, in your opinion, what separates the good agencies from the great?

Gill: It’s about empathy for the client’s set up. Clients want to work with consultants who can go beyond the textbook solution and work with them to find the next best approximation that can be applied to their site in particular; content management systems and business-as-usual running of a website don’t always allow for the perfect solution. I always prefer honesty and a good dose of rational thinking, and I would rather know and discuss upfront priorities and possible showstoppers, so that we can use our time together effectively.

Shalini: Consistency. Good agencies will have great ideas sometimes, but great agencies will consistently deliver great ideas. And that’s not because of some magic or coincidence. It’s because there is a scientific process that goes behind all the creativity which is required. It’s because the agency people have a deeper understanding of the consumers’ needs and each idea they present strives to find a genuine solution to these needs. Consistency also comes when you are not afraid to do something different. It’s not really about thinking outside the box (too clichéd) but it’s about thinking inside the box – the boundaries are important, you have to be creative within them.

Are you an in-house marketer? Have you had experiences of working alongside some great agency folk? If so please feel free to share your thoughts, advice and experiences with us in the comments below.

Image credit:  Victor1558

© SEOptimise Tips for in-house marketers on engaging with an agency: senior marketers share their advice

Each year, webmasters and marketing managers are faced with new developments and technologies, and it can be hard to know which to adopt and which to ignore. But Google Authorship is not one something to casually disregard.

Google’s AuthorRank can strengthen the SEO value of pages published by a particular individual and now is the time to climb on board – before your competitors do.

This simple HTML tag – built around the rel=”author” or rel=”publisher” command – specifies that a certain individual wrote the page, and this is proved by adding a reciprocal link back to that page or site from their Google+ profile.

It’s a fairly elegant way of making the Authorship of online pages provable, but you might be wondering if it is worth the effort of adding it to your own pages. Here are some of the most compelling reasons to consider doing so early in 2013.

AuthorRank makes authority matter

Adopt Authorship now and you can begin to build your reputation in Google’s eyes, something that could be difficult to catch up later on.

Remember, the ‘authority’ given to any one author is based on their entire publishing history of articles that include the rel=”author” tag, and which are reciprocally linked from the individual’s Google+ profile.

If you wait until AuthorRank is clearly here to stay before you begin using it, you risk giving your competitors a head start from which you might never recover.

Luckily, because AuthorRank is so easy to implement, it shouldn’t place a huge administrative burden on you – making it a relatively low-risk move to begin using it immediately, especially compared with the long-term risks associated with delaying its uptake.

AuthorRank gives priority to primary sources

If you’re a primary-source publisher, writing anything from opinion-based blogs to technical documents and press releases, Authorship allows you to claim ownership of that content ahead of any third-party sites that then report it.

This might not totally prevent other sites from republishing your content without permission – and therefore triggering Google’s ‘very similar content’ filter – but it at least gives you some ability to claim Authorship of your pages.

You can also use the rel=”canonical” tag if the same page must be published in more than one place (the common example is if a document is published online in both HTML and PDF format), so that Google knows this was deliberate, was not an example of plagiarism, and which of the pages to treat as the ‘primary’ source.

Authorship is instant

Add your author tag to a page (and reciprocate that link on your Google+ profile) and it instantly receives the benefit of your authority (at least theoretically) – unlike similar previous systems such as PageRank, which take time to develop as external sites link in to your page. Having said that, I do need to point out that Google’s John Mueller recently stated during a Google Plus Hangout, that author rank isn’t used at present to rank webpages based on an author’s reputation score. However, The Wall Street Journal published seven predictions made by Eric Schmidt – former CEO of Google, and their current executive chairman – in his up-coming book “The New Digital Age”, states:

Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.

Many SEOs believe that Schmidt is referring to Google’s use of author rank in the future. However, by building on your reputation score now, you can reap its benefits once it’s actually implemented.

Granted, it will take some time for a new author to build substantial AuthorRank, but when that author’s name is placed on a new page from that point onwards, the page will benefit immediately.

Unlike any other form of SEO (at least, to the extent that this is the case with AuthorRank), this is a method that places the direct online value of a page in close alignment with the human value of its author, as measured in terms of their past writing career. That means the page in the future, can receive an instant boost in value, as soon as it is crawled by Google.

Authorship transcends media formats

If your post contains little plain text, but is rich in media that has traditionally been difficult to crawl, an author tag helps Google consider it as significant as your plain-text posts.

This is important because there are still relatively few ways to directly impact the SEO of non-text content, particularly if you don’t count methods that are not entirely within your control, such as inbound linking.

A rel=”author” tag is also much simpler to add to your page’s HTML than a detailed microformat description of your multimedia content, which is the other ‘best’ method of optimising for non-text elements at present.

AuthorRank defeats spam

As more authoritative sources rise to the top of Google’s search results, spammy publishers will be easier to remove. Potentially, they could stop appearing in the early results pages altogether.

This is clearly a fairly utopian ambition, but it’s a uniquely compelling reason to adopt Authorship too; if all legitimate publishers start using the tag, spammy publishers can be isolated completely.

Even if you’re not altruistic enough to change your website template purely in a global effort to combat spam, the same argument applies equally compellingly the other way around; woe betide the web publisher who finds himself perceived by Google as being spam.

Only by adopting the use of the tag can you be sure that you won’t fall foul of this risk – which should be a compelling reason for any publisher to get behind it.

AuthorRank helps third-party publishers

If you’re a third-party publisher without a history of authoritative posts behind you, AuthorRank can still help you. If you can ask an authoritative writer to contribute to your posts, this could boost the overall authority associated with your site.

Remember, Authorship is about the perceived importance of the individual, not of the site on which they are writing – in effect, the site receives an assessment of importance based on the AuthorRank of its contributors, rather than based on any of its content.

This equally means there are new opportunities being created for writers with strong AuthorRank, who should soon be able to market themselves to new websites as being able to provide content with unassailable built-in SEO value.

Authorship is being built in

The rel=”author” tag is increasingly important in Google’s search results, and should be fairly easy to build into your CMS or site template, allowing you to reduce the admin associated with stating the author of a page.

In order to add Authorship to a new site, you should only have to add the appropriate author tag to your page’s header template, and it should then appear on each new page you publish automatically.

A single reciprocal link from your Google+ profile to the new site should then be enough to demonstrate that the Authorship tags are legitimate, and start including them in your virtual canon as you publish each new article.

Google+ is becoming mandatory

Google owns plenty of web properties besides Google Search, and it’s placing Google+ at the heart of these sites. The social network won’t just curate your authored pages, you could need an account simply to sign up for other Google resources.

This is apparent if you take a look at the discrepancy between Google’s official statistics of how many ‘active users’ are logging into Google+ each month, and the general mood in which those figures are discussed on other social networks.

Even experienced online marketers and social networking experts are doubtful of the official statistics, but if anything this demonstrates the importance of Authorship. If Google is powerful enough to bring all of its web properties together in such a way, then you should be seriously considering adopting any innovation of theirs that has a clear and stated effect on your search ranking.

Are you using Google Authorship to improve your SEO? How have you found it? Share your experiences with me and other readers using the comments below.

© SEOptimise 8 Reasons Why Google Authorship Might be The Most Important Thing You Adopt This Year

Google has announced a major update to its AdWords advertising platform, with the introduction of ‘enhanced campaigns’. According to the AdWords blog, it is meant to help advertisers manage ad campaigns more simply and smartly in today’s multi-device world.

What are enhanced campaigns?

Enhanced campaigns let you manage bids across devices, location and time, allowing you to bid higher or lower based on the user’s proximity to you, or the device that they’re using.

You can also show the right ad, sitelink, app or extension based on user context and device capabilities. An example cited by Google is that “a national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign”.

In addition to the above, advertisers will have access to detailed call reporting, with free Google forwarding numbers and conversion metrics for digital download campaigns.

The core changes that have been made in enhanced campaigns are as follows:

• Enhanced campaigns give you control over the mobile bid by allowing you to set bids for mobile ads to a percentage of your default bids. They can range from -100% (your ads won’t be shown to mobile users) to +300% of your default bids.
• Advertisers do not have the option of splitting campaigns targeting desktop devices and tablet devices separately. Under enhanced campaigns, tablets and desktop devices are grouped as one device type with the following exceptions:
  • Ads for app promotion will only appear on devices that the app operates on. For example, ads that promote your latest Android tablet app will only show on Android tablets.
  • For “Display Network only” campaigns, advertisers will be able to target the device models where an ad can run.
  • For display ads, certain formats (for example, 3rd party ad serving/HTML5) will have a “Touch Device” filter for ads.

Upgraded extensions

In addition to the above changes, enhanced campaigns let you use new features on four types of ad extensions:  call extensions, app extensions, sitelink extensions and offer extensions. These new features let you:

• Create an extension for your campaign or ad group, which means you’ll have more control over which ads your extensions are shown with.
• Schedule start and end dates for your extension to run on specific days of week and times of day.
• Specify sitelink extensions you want to give preference to on mobile.
• Each extension will go through an ad approval process separately. This means that if you create four sitelinks, for example, and three are approved and one is disapproved, then the three approved sitelinks are still eligible to appear with your ads.
• Edit each extension without resetting its performance statistics. In comparison, when you edit an extension in a non-enhanced campaign, AdWords creates a new extension and delete the edited one.
• You’ll receive performance data for each extension. For example, you’ll be able to see how many clicks or impressions an individual sitelink received. This means you’ll be able to better evaluate the performance of each extension.

Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option beginning in February 2013 and all campaigns will be upgraded by mid-2013. If you need assistance, contact the Google ads team.

If you’re ready to upgrade, and you want a detailed guide on upgrading your account to Enhanced Campaigns, we recommend reading this step by step guide here.

Resources and further reading:

Read Google’s announcement on their blog – click here.

Check out the ‘AdWords enhanced campaigns’ section on their site – click here.

Google AdWords Help Centre – click here.

Google AdWords on Google Plus – click here.

If you have any further queries, it would probably be useful to drop your questions here, at the AdWords Community forum.

Other media reports

Search Engine Land - The Big AdWords Update: Enhanced Campaigns Puts The Focus On Mobile.

Search Engine Watch - Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: The Good, Bad & Uncool and Google AdWords New Enhanced Campaigns Connect Ads With Multi-Device Consumers.

Wordstream - AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: Google Announces Big Changes to Mobile Ad Campaign Management.

TechCrunch - Google Launches ‘Enhanced Campaigns’ To Manage Cross-Device Campaigns In AdWords.

Econsultancy - Google AdWords changes the game with enhanced campaigns.

Blogs

PPC Associates - The scoop on Enhanced Campaigns (good and bad).

SEER Interactive - First Reaction to AdWords Enhanced Campaigns.

Interestingly, there’s even a petition demanding more options from Google. If you’re unhappy with these changes, it might be worth signing this petition at Change.org. Also, Richard Fergie shares his thoughts on the update on this Google plus post here.

What are your thoughts on the new changes? Will they actually help the advertiser and the end user? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

© SEOptimise AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: What You Need to Know

New year, new you – but is it time for a facelift of your website’s content as well? To stay ahead of the competition and to win moments that matter to your customers, recognising the growing value of good online content is the first step; whether it’s launching a new blog, writing some guides, or revamping your landing pages and paid search text.

If you still need some persuading from the higher-ups, here’s our list of reasons for you to make content your king in the new year and beyond:

23. Keyword competition is never-ending, and even the most effective on-page SEO campaign can be scuppered by a new competitor targeting the same long-tail phrases as you. On-going innovation and investment in new optimised content helps to include a greater variety of key phrases on your site. This reduces the risk of losing your ranking if a couple of those phrases are targeted by your rivals.

22. Paid search remains similarly competitive. You don’t want to get into a bidding war for your primary target keyword bids if there are equally relevant phrases you could bag at a much lower price. Keywords are content of a sort, and content is king. So spend some extra time analysing and testing alternatives.

21. Landing pages provide a highly relevant place for paid search visitors to arrive on your site – so any tweaks to keywords used in your campaign should be reflected with tweaked or rewritten landing pages.

20. Microformats continue to make non-text content more search-visible in the same way that meta tags used to determine how your page was displayed by search engines. If your content strategy involves audio, video, and so on, make sure you’re making it as search-visible as possible.

19. Social networks increasingly drive the web audience to take action en masse – just look at the December 2012 Instagram exodus for proof. If you haven’t done so in the past, now is definitely the time to think about social and sharing factors when preparing future pages of content.

18. Televisions are set to make a comeback as the ‘first screen’ of most households, ahead of computers/laptops (the ‘second screen’) and smartphones/tablets (the ‘third screen’). Gartner predicts 85% of TVs manufactured in 2016 will have internet capability. This means it will be even harder to know what device your readers are using to visit your site. It’s essential to ensure your website is ready for visitors no matter what platform they’re using.

17. Apps further complicate the picture for anyone entering the mobile market in this way; your content strategy should include not only your website but also any in-app text and the descriptions of your app in the relevant marketplace or online store. ICM Research estimates that 28% of people downloaded a Christmas-themed app during the festive season of 2012, showing the scale of this potential market.

16. Local search is a different proposition from mobile, but the two are clearly linked. As more people search from GPS-enabled devices, producing content that caters for your local audience, rather than for the ‘global village’ of the web as a whole, can help you to establish your brand better in the real world.

15. Bing continues to compete with Google in core markets like Image Search and Shopping. Microsoft took things to a new level with the Scroogle campaign in December 2012, accusing Google’s Shopping results of being little more than paid-for listings. It’s worth keeping an eye out for the tide turning against Google, and making sure you’re ahead of any changes in search behaviour this year.

14. AdWords has a column showing which specific keyword within a search query triggered a PPC ad to be displayed to the user – adding an extra layer of transparency to accounts. Like any other interface change, it makes it a good time to review your ad copy and keyword bids, and make sure they’re optimised.

13. London 2012 may be over, but its legacy remains. With the event itself now consigned to history, look for opportunities to market your own goods or services based on the nostalgia and renewed interest in sport many Britons continue to feel into the new year.

12. ‘Not provided’ results now dominate Analytics keyword reports, since Google stopped providing that data from users logged in via an https connection. Review your content strategy in light of this, and make sure gaps in your data aren’t causing you to miss out on opportunities.

11. 4G mobile connections offer faster web access from anywhere that has network coverage, and won’t be limited to EE customers forever. As the full rollout of the higher-speed mobile data format begins, you’ll be able to serve larger amounts of content to mobile site visitors, without the worry of attrition due to slow page load times.

10. New social media sites might well emerge in the months to come – just like Google+ did in the summer of 2011. Notice them, consider them, and, if they suit your purposes, incorporate them into your content strategy. Early adopters can achieve big wins with popular new platforms. Just be ready to jump ship if they fail to establish much of a user base.

9. Navigation should work with touchscreen devices. With more tablets and smartphones being used to view desktop versions of sites, remember that dropdown navigation based on the cursor ‘hovering’ over part of the screen might simply not work and using it risks cutting off a portion of your visitor base from whole sections of your site.

8. Social spread is making it even easier to include less formal content on websites – particularly in your blog pages – and not purely on your social networking profiles. Consider your tone of voice, and whether you might find better levels of brand loyalty if you were to sound less formal and friendlier.

7. Inbound links should never, ever be paid for, or you’re at risk of vanishing from Google’s search results completely. If your site was affected by the Google Penguin update, 2012 has probably been a period of damage limitation for you. Let 2013 be the time when you begin to build afresh, through post-Penguin-friendly practices.

6. Uptake of new technologies shows no signs of stopping. comScore reports penetration of the EU smartphone market is now at 55%, and 62% in the UK alone. Serving content to this new mobile audience is a must, regardless of their choice of operating system, handset, or connection speed.

5. Inadvertent discrimination could cost you money. It’s a difficult area to discuss but some research suggests different ethnic groups are more likely to engage with different types of content. For example, Nielsen Wire reports that white people are much less likely to engage with social ads than other ethnic groups, while Asian people are much more likely to engage. Make sure no-one is missing out on your marketing messages.

4. Economic turbulence is on-going, but there are moments of brightness in various different markets. Whether your business thrives on recession (e.g. debt management) or on fresh growth in previously troubled industries, the coming months will be a key time to make the most of new opportunities.

3. Tech-savvy shoppers are changing the face of retail, whether you like it or not. Edison Research notes that shoppers embrace the benefits of technology, particularly when it helps them through a stressful situation such as intensive Christmas shopping sessions. Content that offers product details, clear pricing and sizing guides, or special offers and coupons, could all help to tap into this.

2. Responsive web design is becoming a widely used term as smartphones and tablets grow in popularity. Make your website properly responsive and you can future-proof it to make sure it remains functional for the foreseeable future, regardless of any changes within your customer base.

1. Google‘s on-going algorithm updates continue to make good-quality, informative, and relevant content the best way to rank for any given search term.

Any one of the reasons above should make it worth taking a fresh look at your content. Even if your website is performing well, make 2013 the year you review your content and see if you could do even better.

Image credit: 10ch

© SEOptimise 23 reasons to improve your content in 2013

A few years ago, this blog brought you ‘Online marketing tips for Santa‘. Well, this year (to guarantee our place on the right side of the ‘naughty or nice’ list), we’ve looked again at how he could improve his online presence.

Frankly, it’s not looking good. Father Christmas needs to rank for some incredibly competitive keywords, like ‘Christmas’, ‘present’ and ‘Santa’. So does the jolly fat man need to ditch his old routine and find a dynamic new online identity that’ll be easier to drive up the SERPs? For a bit of fun and for a bit of a laugh, this article takes a tongue-in-cheek look…

Should he rebrand?

On some occasions, it’s worth considering dumping a name that’s simply impossible to rank for. Too many other organisations use his branding; he’s everywhere this time of year. That makes it very difficult for the genuine item to rank highly for his own brand, because there’s such a lot of competition. He could consider a new name – Doc Frost, or the Gift Geezer perhaps – but there’s plenty of positive sentiment and goodwill surrounding his existing name, and he may not want to ditch it.

Of course, once the online community recognises that he’s the real deal, he’s likely to get a tonne of inbound links and will soon be considered a high authority site, pushing him to the top of the SERPs.

But how to find that initial audience… Here are some ways he could increase his brand awareness levels, without changing his name or selling his soul to Coca Cola.

Local Search

Services like Google Places are a useful way to make your location known to customers who need to visit you, so Santa should make sure he has Place pages for each of his offices in Lapland and the North Pole.

Once these are established, long-tail geographic key phrases, such as “Christmas presents in Lapland” or “Christmas presents in London”, should help him to rank for location-specific searches without harming his rankings for shorter terms. Those shorter terms, where used, should adopt a scatter-gun approach to cover all likely variations and synonyms – it’s no good ranking for ‘Christmas presents’ if your customers are searching for ‘Christmas gifts’.

And of course, anybody searching for those longer phrases should find his location-specific landing pages highly relevant, helping to get them engaged with his content more quickly.

Mobile 

It’s a mobile world these days, but responsive web design can make sure web pages look right on any kind of device, without limiting access to content. Google recommends using responsive web design, and it makes sense from a visitor’s perspective as it lets you show all of your content to visitors on PCs, laptops, tablets, and phone handsets, with full control over how it appears.

If Santa doesn’t have the technology or know-how, there are plenty of agencies that would be happy to give him a good deal. After all, a recommendation from Father Christmas probably goes a long way…

Penguin

Penguins may be more Antarctic than North Pole but they’re still something for Santa to consider. A well-stuffed turkey is a Christmas tradition, but a keyword-stuffed website is definitely out, along with way too many keyword-stuffed anchor text backlinks from low quality and irrelevant websites.

Fortunately, there are a lot of variations on Santa’s name (Father Christmas, Saint Nick etc.) so he can fill his website with his brand without spoiling the site for humans. Google’s Penguin update began to penalise websites for containing too many keywords within a website’s text fields. Varying the key phrases and setting up targeted outreach activities and link-bait campaigns that attract natural and high quality backlinks is a good antidote to this.

This actually turns Santa’s diluted brand name into a strength, as there’s no reason why he can’t perform well for all of the names people commonly use for him, bringing that fairly disparate audience together in one place – his new, branding-heavy website – to deliver a clear and cohesive message to the world as one.

Coming to Town – Fighting Duplicates

With a Santa impersonator in every high-street store, Saint Nick needs to reclaim his true place as the face of Christmas. A few well-timed flash mobs, guest appearances on the news, and holding press conferences for the print and television media could quickly make the headlines, winning him some high-quality mentions.

If he’s persuasive with his gifts, he could potentially get links back to his website from high-authority news sites – not bribes, obviously, but perhaps a couple of well-chosen items for column editors to review.

In a fast-moving world, genuine brand heritage is still something that many consumers appreciate, not to mention good customer service. Santa not only has centuries of brand-building behind him, he also has a reputation as never failing to deliver, even against the world’s tightest deadline.

Nobody can do it as well as he does, and that’s always a powerful brand message.

Going Social

Santa’s a busy man, but he has a full-time team of elves to manage his Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. He can use foursquare to keep his followers updated on his every move. He can also share photos on his social media profiles and also use his video channel on YouTube to build a global community.

All of this will help him create true engagement, allowing this long-time absent figure to return to the 21st century Christmas gifts market with a bang and stake his claim as the true brand identity for the festive period.

For good little girls and boys all over the world, sending a tweet or a Facebook message is also a slightly more reliable method of reaching Santa directly than simply throwing a letter on the fire and hoping the smoke reaches him at the North Pole.

Social Marketing

As Santa is looked up to by children the world over, he can align his brand with good causes, such as support for vulnerable children all over the world. Aligning his brand with social causes will not only help him increase brand equity, but help create a sustainable solution to global issues all year round – transforming Santa into a brand that’s for life, not just for Christmas.

This type of socially responsible marketing, often referred to as ’cause marketing’, is a win-win situation for brands that want to give something back, their customers who want to shop ethically, and for the good causes they help.

Who knows, Santa – whose ‘naughty or nice’ policy has set his brand ethics in stone from the very start – might make social marketing so successful it could come to be known not as ’cause marketing’, but as ‘Claus marketing’ in the years to come.

What advice would you give Santa? Share your opinions in the comments below. You never know, Father Christmas might take your advice, which has got to be worth a place on the ‘nice’ list.

Image credit: PepOmint

© SEOptimise Does Santa need an online marketing strategy?

If you’ve been on Google + recently, you might have noticed Google’s latest feature called Google+ communities. It’s probably too early to judge its success just yet, but based on my personal Google plus news feed (so not scientific at all) I am certainly seeing quite a lot of engagement on the platform.

The concept and the objective behind launching Google+ communities is to create a platform within Google+ where individuals, organisations, and business can meet and engage, based on shared interests and passions.

This is meant to enhance a user’s ability to find others with similar affinities or interests, and be able to connect and learn from experts. Organisations, businesses, and brands can leverage topics, interests, and causes that they’re passionate about and share them with their audience.  Thus, communities provide a place for all of these groups to converge.

As a business, here are some of the benefits of setting up Google+ communities:

• Find and connect with people whose interests relate to your business
• Start engaging in discussions with prospects and individuals that share a passion related to your business
• Host Hangouts and Events to engage face-to-face

By creating a community that’s relevant to your brand, you can quickly begin to build a community based on topics of interest to your customers and act as a guide or moderator for discussions within your community.

You can also engage with other communities that are related to your business.  In addition, your Google plus page can engage with community members, whether they follow you or not, using Hangouts and Events.

Engaging in communities related to your business is another great way for businesses to listen to and learn from their customers and target audience.  Communities can be a rich source of market research.  Try joining a community related to your business or industry and stay connected with your customers, even when they’re not directly engaging with you.  For example, a major e-commerce electronics retailer could observe what people are talking about within a gadget and tech-focused community, and use this information to make decisions on stock, products, user needs etc. and respond to them.

Setting up Google+ Communities

The set up process is pretty simple; you can choose one of four community types:

1. Public communities – this is a community where anyone can join.
2. Public but moderator approval needed to join – this is a community type where anyone can join upon a moderator’s approval.
3. Private but people can find you through search and request to join – similar to the above community type where anyone can request to join, but unlike the previous community type, only members of the community can see existing members and their posts.
4. And finally, private communities hidden from search – people can become members of a community only via invitation, members and their posts are viewable only to existing members, and the community is hidden from search.

The key to remember is that once you have selected one of the four types of communities you cannot later change it. So be sure to think long and hard about which community type suits your audience best.

Setting up your community:

Name – pick a unique name that clearly conveys the purpose of your community.

Photo – pick a photo that’ll make a good impression

Tagline – make sure to include a descriptive tagline to attract the right audience.

About – this is the section where new members will learn about your community, so use this space to describe the purpose of the community, what types of posts you’d encourage users to share, and add any relevant information.

Discussion categories

You can create discussion categories to help your community members find topics that they’re most interested in. So if you have set up an ‘online marketing’ community, you can have categories such as SEO, Paid Search, Social Media, CRO, Email Marketing etc. Categories can be added, renamed, reordered, and deleted fairly easily.

Posts and moderators

Unlike Google plus pages where you mainly broadcast information about yourself, communities are meant to encourage discussion and sharing of ideas by community members. If you find yourself doing all the posting, it might be a good idea to identify some of the most active members within the community and make them moderators so as to get them involved in managing and posting content.

Moderators can:

• Remove posts made by members
• Remove members from the community
• Ban members from the community

Lastly, here’s a check-list with setting up and managing a Google plus community:

Setting up your community

• Pick a unique name that communicates your community’s purpose clearly
• Include a 200-pixel-wide by 250-pixel-tall photo that makes a good impression
• Add a clear and descriptive tagline to attract the right members
• In the ‘About’ section, add additional information relevant to your community and set expectations for members
• Add discussion categories to help guide conversations
• Write a first post to welcome members

Promoting your community

• Share your community publicly from your profile or page
• Share your community on other social networks
• Send out emails announcing your community
• Promote the community on your blog and include a link
• Link to your community from your website

Engage with your community

• Participate by posting, leaving comments, +1’ing posts, and creating hangouts and events
• Install the Google+ mobile app to keep up with your community on-the-go
• Check in on your community daily to make sure that the right kinds of conversations are happening
• Update and add discussion categories if necessary. Invite moderators to help you post content and manage your community

I hope you‘ve found this post useful. Have you set up a community on Google plus yet? If so, please feel free to share your thoughts and experience within the comments below.

Image credit: steven w

© SEOptimise Setting up Google plus communities – what you need to know

Every year for the past 4 years the SEOptimise blog has predicted trends within the online marketing industry.  In keeping with this tradition, I’ve listed 25 trends that I think we’ll see becoming more and more mainstream in 2013. Considering the rate of change within the online marketing space, most of these listed may not even be new. So, without further ado, here’s my list of online marketing trends for 2013:

1. The notion that ‘content is king’ will slowly diminish, being replaced with “context is king”. I know this sounds blasphemous right now, but let me elaborate.  Your website could have the most outstanding piece of content written about pizzas; but someone who’s looking to order pizza at 1 am in the morning wouldn’t be interested in your awesome content. Therefore, brands and publishers will need to focus their efforts on gaining a greater understanding of ‘context’ to guide them with their content creation.
2. In order to provide context to content, semantic mark-up will become increasingly important. In the example above, search engines can look up all the Pizzerias around that particular user and display which ones are open at 1am in the morning based on their ‘opening times’ and figure out distance based on their address. Imagine if Google knew your dietary requirements and only displayed search results that met them. Semantic mark-up makes it easier for Google to make these judgements. Although most SEOs wouldn’t have paid much attention to structured mark-up in the past, in 2013 we will see more and more SEOs learning and executing semantic markup as part of the optimisation process.
3. Quality of content suffers as channel tacticians succumb to pressures of audience content demands and editorial calendars. The ones who will succeed are those that follow the following (or similar) customer focused content creation model:

Source: The digital Evolution in B2B marketing (2012), The Corporate Executive Board Company. Find the pdf here.

The above model outlines a framework for content creation focused on the customers’ information needs. The question essentially is, what information needs will you satisfy your diverse customers at varying stages of the buying cycle?

4. Perception of visual content (video, image, custom illustrations, illustrative animation, and infographics) will change among marketers from “it’s a ‘nice-to-have’ marketing collateral”, to a key strategy in acquiring and increasing customer engagement and influence within target audiences.
5. Creative teams will expand the core skill set by including web developers, digital experts, and freelance specialists based on project needs.
6. Conversely, more and more SEO agencies will begin to forge strategic partnerships with PR and creative agencies in order to increase impact on client service delivery.
7. Mobile specific marketing strategies will be a core customer acquisition channel, especially for local and small businesses.
8. With the increase in devices that content is consumed, websites designed in 2013 will largely incorporate ‘responsive web design’.
9. Google’s intentions of becoming an ‘answer engine’ will become even more obvious in 2013. Google’s ability to answer complex questions gets better.
10. More and more businesses will begin taking their Google plus strategies much more seriously. This will help unify all their Google specific campaigns.
11. Continuing from the last point, Google plus will be looked at as an important digital fingerprint for not only businesses but for regular users.
12. With smartphones increasingly becoming our trusted companion at all times, faith in email marketing as an acquisition channel will increase.
13. With the increasing complexity and maturity of the SEO industry, and due to Google’s algorithm updates such as Panda, top-heavy, and Penguin, the cost of SEO will continue to increase.
14. Users will continue to have contradicting needs. On the one hand, they want personalised and customised service and product offerings, but on the other, will be increasingly uncomfortable over the amount of personal data being mined.
15. Google will continue to mine more and more data about people and their relationships via Google plus and Gmail.
16. Marketers will create assets from a multi-screen perspective. Based on how consumers engage with different devices; content creators will need to start focusing on channel-specific marketing strategies and content.
17. More and more companies begin to dedicate a greater proportion of their marketing budgets towards going beyond online contact-level web analytics to incorporating important off-site social behaviours. Marketers will begin to make a greater effort to place estimates of digital impact in proper proportion and context of broader marketing strategy and the market environment.
18. Marketing teams, typically in slower moving industries, will graduate from digital experimentation (via pilot tests) into actually defining their digital marketing strategy.
19. Marketing teams that have gone further than that will look to approach the more sophisticated tasks of aligning and integrating activities across organizational siloes to deliver a more cumulative impact on their audience.
20. Brands will continue to build communities on social media and blog platforms. We will begin to hear the role ‘community manager’ or ‘community relationship manager’ in the UK more and more.
21. We all know that increased digital marketing efforts demand continuous and collective management, something few companies are designed to support at this point in time. The value destroyed by this misfit approach—although hard to quantify—is potentially very large. Several companies will be looking to take steps to restructure internal teams as a result.
22. Companies looking to make structural changes will begin to look for individuals who can take ownership in executing processes and bringing the following disparate functions together: paid search, online community, corporate website, advertising, social media and blogging, and SEO.
23. Television advertising is far from dead. On the contrary, television ads will begin to incorporate more and more social integration. Television advertising will also incorporate “second screen experiences”, where a TV programme’s tablet app, mobile app, and even discussions will be promoted and encouraged on social media platforms. Content creators will need to create assets that can live across multiple screens seamlessly.
24. There will be an increased push for social marketing among businesses. Companies will look to align their brands with social causes.
25. And finally, Facebook will finally figure out their eco-system. Businesses will have to use Facebook advertising to build a relevant audience and use Facebook advertising to reach their audience. 

Have I missed anything? What do you think will be among next year’s online marketing trends? I look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments below.

Image credit: futureshape

© SEOptimise 25 Online Marketing Trends for 2013

As this is my first post on the SEOptimise blog, I wanted to write on a subject that reflects a situation that I find myself in an awful lot. No doubt this is a situation that anyone reading this post will have found themselves in at one time or another.

Whenever we receive an enquiry, whether it’s a phone call or an enquiry form from our website, this person has taken the first steps in contacting us, meaning that they are interested in SEO services. Yes, I am a genius for figuring this part out! The people who enquire will tend to fit into one of two categories; people who know what they want and people who don’t.

The people who know what they want are used to agency interaction and understand how a digital agency will operate. They will have their processes set around this knowledge. I refer to the Request for Information (RFI) > Request for Proposal (RFP) > Pitch > Contract Dance that we have all learned to enjoy. In my opinion, this category of people (though usually requiring much more work at the later stages of the process) are much easier to deal with.

The latter category can sometimes prove a bit more challenging and in this scenario, it is the agency’s responsibility to educate the potential client and identify their needs. Whilst thinking about this category of people, I thought I would write something that agencies could use to help clients identify their own needs, but I also hope that this post will reach some clients before they pick up the phone and make that first enquiry.

Things that an SEO agency needs to know from the client:
An oldy but a goody, the campaign goals:

“…and what are you looking to achieve with an SEO campaign?” This is still without a doubt, the most important question of any engagement process. One campaign goal I hear quite frequently is, “I want to be on the front page of Google”, which is fine, but not if your keyword list is 10,000 words strong and you’re looking for a number one position for all of them in a ‘three month trial’. For an agency to make a strong proposal, they will need to know what they’re aiming towards. If a client is unsure, encourage them to think about what they want to achieve. The first part we need to understand is:

“What is the site there to achieve?” or “What is the main revenue stream?”

For example it could be advertising, so the client will probably need to focus on traffic numbers and should probably be targeting high volume search terms. The traffic will probably need to consist of a certain number of unique visitors.

Is the site media and information based? Do they need to attract subscribers? This example could be much more about brand building with the success measures based around building community. In this instance the metrics for the project could be about referring traffic.

It could be a retail site, in which case the site is there to make sales. This client should be looking at slightly different metrics such as converting traffic, good quality traffic, or an increase in conversion rate amongst others. This can be broken down even further, to the targeting of specific products. Maybe seasonality is a factor. Maybe products with the highest margins or highest revenue earners could also be a particular focus.

Really thinking about the business goals and revenue targets are important and will help the agency to make suggestions on the type of tactics it may employ in order to achieve the campaign objectives.
Our very own Matthew Taylor once said something that has stayed with me. “SEO is a marketing practice and it’s there to make you money. It should pay for itself and then some.”

An agency needs to understand how it can benefit a client before it is engaged. Once goals and targets are established it is much easier to look at potential campaign ROI. Creating projects which are focused on the client’s return, means that when presenting its proposed campaign strategy, the agency can provide a good business case, but much more importantly, it provides real value to the client.

Internal team setup and processes:

SEO agencies work on websites. As such, the agency will need to know who, on the client’s side of the operation, will also be working on the website. This means development teams, content teams, and PR teams to name a few. If an agency is to make a proposal, they need to know their place in a business’ day-to-day working practices, and whether any changes or site additions will need to be signed-off by a particular team. It can be devastating to a campaign’s progression if there are cross-overs in individual tasks. Let’s get those communication channels open. Good points to establish at this point are:

• Who is responsible for site changes, the agency or the client?
• What is the sign-off process and timescale for any recommended changes?

These points have a great impact on how the project will be structured so are extremely important, especially when both parties need to know how much time will be allocated to the project. This inevitably affects the campaign budget.

To summarise these points (and at the risk of being accused of writing a blog post that should have only contained 14 words), the agency and client need to know two things:

• What is the campaign there to achieve?
• How are we going to work together?

These bullet-points can be opened out into a landslide of other questions, some of which have been covered above, but these two should hopefully open the doors to building a successful campaign.
When a project is ready to kick off, everything should have be done to make sure it is as well planned as possible, ready to meet its objectives, expectations have been set realistically, and both parties know their roles. This applies to both sides of the relationship! As more information is uncovered, a decent campaign will naturally change over the days, weeks, and months that follow, but if both parties have been as open and honest as they can be, without withholding crucial pieces of information, then your campaign should be up for awards in no time at all.

What are your experiences? Are you client side or agency side? I love to hear your comments!

Image credit: Highways Agency

© SEOptimise Tips for SEOs on initial agency-client engagement

1. Figure out target audience volume

The best thing about Facebook is that it provides you with audience volumes. Therefore, before you calculate estimated budgets, you’ll need to obtain information on the different target audiences such as locations, age, gender, and other interests. Ideally the target audience profiles should be something like this:

Married women who live in the UK and are 40 years or older, who like, ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘Homes Under the Hammer’, ‘Location, Location, Location’, ‘Grand Designs’, ‘John Lewis’, and ‘Ocado’.

Once you’ve got information on all your different personas, include them in Facebook’s ad creation tool. You should see suggested volumes like so:

2. Now divide this number by 4

I think Facebook’s targeted audience volumes are the number of FB profiles that match an advertiser’s geographic/demographic and interest targeting (duh!). But these probably don’t account for fake FB accounts, or that among those who do have FB accounts some have duplicate accounts (e.g. corporate account/personal account), some don’t log-in as frequently as others, etc. So from the numbers I am seeing, Facebook doesn’t actually “reach” the total “targeted audience”.

I have noticed that on average, out of the total number of people targeted, Facebook “reaches” only a quarter of that number (this is across all accounts I work on, so may change based on different campaigns or targeting).  So to make things a little bit more realistic, I’d suggest dividing the targeted audience by four.
324,100 / 4 = 81,025

3. Make an assumption for the ad frequency (the number of times a user would see an ad).

I usually go by a frequency of 4 or 5 per person. But this number will change depending on the volume of the audience. If the audience volume is fairly high (say over a 100,000), I would go with a frequency of 1.5 or 2 per user. If the audience is small (say less than 10,000) then I’d probably assume a frequency of 15-20 per user.

In the example above I would assume a frequency of 1.5 per user, so I could assume the total number of impressions for a given day (assuming every user within my ‘estimated reach’ saw my ad) is 81,025 x 1.5 = 121,537 impressions.

Also I’d just like to quickly point out that I would usually target at a much more granular level than this; therefore, smaller target volumes would show a higher frequency than when you target at a broader audience like in the example cited here.

4. Make an assumption for your CTR

CTR is dependent on factors such as how well your ad creative is written and your bid amount. CTRs also vary depending on which vertical you operate in. I’ve noticed travel ads garner higher CTRs than the health sector, for example. Also, direct response ads will have higher CTRs than brand awareness ads. So you’ll need to make a judgement on what you think is a realistic CTR. With travel related ads I use a benchmark CTR of 0.04%; if it’s a competition or a giveaway, I’d assume a CTR of 0.10%; but for a less ‘social’ product or service I would assume a CTR of 0.015% (personally for me, this is the lowest acceptable CTR for Facebook ads). Based on this assumed CTR, you could obtain the estimated number of clicks per day. So for the above target audience, the estimated number of clicks (based on a CTR of 0.015%) is:

121,537 x 0.015%  = 18 clicks

5. Multiply by 30 or 31

This is your estimated number of clicks per day. In order to estimate the number of clicks for the month, I would multiply this number by 30 (or 31).

Estimated clicks per month

6. Multiply by suggested bids

Now you could multiply the estimated monthly clicks by Facebook’s suggested bid numbers. So in the above instance, the estimated budget would be:
Estimated monthly budget

So there you go, here’s an estimated budget for a particular target audience for you. You could potentially include different ranges of spend based on the suggested budget. In the above example I took the higher end of Facebook’s bid suggestion. You could provide your client with maybe three different budgets based on the lower, middle and higher end of suggested bids.

Obviously the above methodology isn’t the only way to estimate Facebook budgets. I generally use this method for sales proposals and sometimes to make a case for budget increases. I would love to hear your thoughts and methodologies for estimating Facebook budgets, please feel free to add to the discussion within the comments below.

Image credit : birgerking

© SEOptimise How to estimate Facebook advertising budget

Whether you’re decking the halls, or trying to pretend it won’t happen this year, Christmas is fast approaching. For marketers of all kinds, it’s a topic that’s impossible to avoid if you want your content to appear timely and relevant to your readers.

But if you want to cash in on the Christmas rush, you can’t wait until the turkey’s in the oven to start publishing festive content on your website. Not only that, but you need to be equally ready to move quickly once it’s all over, in order to get your website ready for the new year.

A website that’s still Christmassy by January is sadder than an empty tin of Quality Street.

Content strategy is a matter of careful planning at the best of times, even if you factor in the ability to respond quickly to developing trends in your traffic and customer base. Christmas is probably the fastest-moving time of year, particularly for retailers carrying festive products or gifts.

Within the world of ecommerce, there are unavoidable delays due to your distance from your customer. While you can do plenty to overcome this with next-day or same-day delivery (particularly of virtual services, rather than physical goods), it’s still worth thinking about whether your customers might be leaving 28 days for delivery when they place their orders. That shows just how early your Christmas content needs to be live.

There’s no more important time of year than Christmas to take this into account, as even last-minute shoppers will be keen to avoid disappointment, and many people will think of the Royal Mail ‘last date’ for sending cards and parcels as being the cut-off point for online orders too.

Effective content strategy can overcome this – either by explaining that private delivery firms are used for guaranteed receipt in time for Christmas, or simply by making sure orders are placed well ahead of the cut-off dates.

Know Your Trends

First, know when people buy. A Christmas 2012 poll by ICM Research for Retail Week found the following:

• 5% of people had finished their Christmas shopping by the end of September;
• 12% more expected to have finished by the end of October;
• 36% expected to complete their shopping in November;
• 28% planned to finish in the first half of December;
• 9% would leave it until the last minute, and shop in the final weeks before Christmas.

That leaves 8% of people with no clear idea of their shopping schedule, and 3% who were not intending to do any specific Christmas shopping at all – proving that, even at Christmas, you can’t please everyone.

A good content strategy, then, might reasonably target these groups separately, with early-bird offers for those September-October shoppers, a mass-market approach to the November rush, and last-minute gift ideas for December laggards.

Know Your Keywords

It’s important in any search-focused content strategy to know which terms are likely to perform best for your site and generally. For instance, Google Trends data consistently shows that more people in the UK search for ‘Christmas gifts’ than ‘Christmas presents’.

Long-tail keyword knowledge can help you to reach even more relevant customers too – for instance, Google Trends shows that while ‘gifts for men’ is a fairly popular query, its female equivalent is not ‘gifts for women’, but the less direct ‘gifts for her’.

Analyse and test keywords throughout the festive period to ensure your content and your paid search content are delivering the most customers they can.

The Perfect Year

Learn to view the New Year period not as the end of one year, or as the beginning of the next, but as a joined-up stage in your content strategy.

In particular, make sure you recognise all of the different possibilities for winning customers out of your festive search audience.

These could include:

• shoppers with Christmas gift money (or gift vouchers, where relevant) to spend
• shoppers keen to make the most of January sales
• shoppers already planning ahead for next Christmas (a small but legitimate niche audience)
• revellers keen to keep the party spirit alive into the new year
• committed New Year’s Resolution-makers (especially in traditional markets like gym membership)

Depending on your niche, you might have further specific opportunities that are worth targeting. Analyse last year’s click and sales information carefully to see what will work well for you.

Reaching Your Audience

Finally, while your Christmas content strategy is likely to be dominated by product descriptions, special offers and posts about the best Christmas gift ideas, you’ll probably want to change things slightly as you move into the New Year.

If you’re targeting New Year’s Resolution-makers, make your updates motivational, or write how-to articles to take the stress and planning out of maintaining a resolution for as long as possible.

One of the most important watchwords to keep in mind is simply ‘mood’. For most people the festive season is a time of celebration. If your content strategy is able to tap into that, and keep the feeling alive for as long as possible after New Year’s Eve, there’s a lot of positivity around that you can benefit from quite cheaply.

Image credit: DeaPeaJay

© SEOptimise Content strategy for Christmas and the New Year

As you might have read in a previous post by Rachel we use Buzzstream – among other tools – to perform blogger outreach. Placing content is time consuming and the process sometimes can be complex, especially when you’re tempted to use every tool you hear about or read about on blog posts. But tools alone aren’t enough; from what I have experienced, the key really is to have a well-organised process.

What you will need

Before you start you need to get the right tools. We use the following:

The SEOMoz toolbar – we use this tool to determine a webpage’s/websites’ quality based on page authority, domain authority and trust rank (post penguin, trust rank to me is a very important metric).

Good ol’ Google search – To find relevant websites manually using search operators (use SoloSEO to pull all possible operators with links to the search results. Here’s an example list for the keyword “nappies”)

You can also use Google Blog which just searches for blogs.

There are, as I already said, various tools, such as Buzzstream, to find and manage websites and conversations. If you don’t have the budget you can use the ‘Link Building Toolbar’, or even a simple Excel spread sheet, to manage your conversations.

If you have a lot of content, Trello might be a good tool for you to use and manage your content. MyBlogGuest and Blogger Linkup can be used to offer content to others. Of course, there are a lot of other tools you can use; you have to find out which is the best one for you and your needs.

Be organised – from the beginning

To manage your content you need a tool to jot down notes, see the current status of your content etc. this is especially important when you have lots of content to publish, as you might want to avoid publishing the same kind of article twice or using the same website within one project.

This is where Trello or the linkbuilding toolbar can be really helpful. In Trello, you can create your own project and jot down lists, leave notes, assign tasks to team members and best of all, move these tasks around so you can see the current state of the content on the first sight. Here you can see a screenshot of a Trello project below.

Alternatively, you can just use an Excel spread sheet. Whatever you choose, make sure you keep it up to date as it’s an essential part of the process.

Find suitable websites

Finding websites and blogs to publish content on is the next step. As mentioned before, you can search in Google or more directly in Google Blogs. You can also use tools like Buzzstream to perform a search by giving them a few ideas about what you are looking for. You can also try to find out what sources competitors have used for their websites. Majestic SEO, Open Site Explorer are great tools for this, as is Linkdex. You can also go through blogs that are recommended by other blogs (blog rolls).

Another way of finding blogs and websites, and simultaneously starting a relationship, is using Followerwonk or Wefollow. Check this awesome post by Ruth Burr on using Followerwonk for building relationships.

When you’ve found websites you have to make sure that they’re up to scratch. Their quality and their relevance are the most important. First of all, check the domain authority (DA). Also be particularly careful of how the URL looks e.g. trelloblog.blogspot.com or trellonews.wordpress.com, as the DA relates to the blogspot or wordpress part and is therefore not exactly relevant. In this case you could check the page authority (PA). If the DA/PA and Trust Rank are ok, you can also check the overall quality of the website, by asking yourself the following questions: “Is there a lot of advertising?”, “Do they post regularly?”, “Is the overall design good?” and “Is the website relevant to my content?”

Next you can search for a “guest post”, “contribute”, or similar and read through their guidelines. If there is nothing about guest posts on the site, don’t give up! You should still try to contact them.

Contacting people

When you’re ready to contact people you have a range of options. You can use a simple email account, or if you want to use a tool, you can try sending out emails with Buzzstream as it stores the email conversation. The email will be sent out via Buzzstream but it will be connected to your chosen email account, so you can check the responses and keep in contact with them there.

The challenging thing is sending out good emails that impress the recipient. It can either be a formal email or a funny one; this depends entirely on the recipient, the industry, and the business they’re working in. Make sure you know enough about the website and the content they might be interested in, read their articles and try to find the blog on twitter and other social networks. To decide what to write think of what you would like to read and keep it short – we’re all busy people!

Sending out an email isn’t the end. You need to follow up. Wait a few days and try to contact the person again. Maybe they didn’t receive your email or maybe they forgot about it. You can get a lot of positive responses from follow-up emails. It can make the person realise that you’re really interested and it can remind those who were genuinely interested but forgot about it. The amount of follow-ups is up to you. I prefer one or two follow ups but you can send out more – you’ve nothing to lose (but be careful not to spam the recipient with too many; just use common sense really)!

Sending out emails doesn’t suit everyone but it is a great way to build relationships. If there is no email address on the website and no contact form, or you just don’t like sending out emails, you can also contact them via twitter etc. But be natural; follow them, re-tweet posts etc. before you ask them for a favour, don’t just blurt something out. It takes longer this way, but it tends to work better.

If you know the recipient’s first and last names, you could also use linksy.me to guess the email address of the person. A word of caution before using it though, makes sure you use this tool only if you know the person you are contacting personally.

Other ways to publish content:

You can use websites such as MyBlogGuest or Blogger Linkup to offer content. Here it is essential that you have a good layout with paragraphs and/or subheadings, a good description of the post, and a relevant image. This is what the people see so it needs to look great to get requests from good websites. There are a lot of other websites like this or even blogs where you can create an account and upload articles directly. The most efficient way would probably be using several tools. Whatever you decide to do, do not forget to make notes on what happens with each article to avoid having anything published twice.

Measure your success

You can use an e-marketing tool to see who actually opened the email and to measure the responses. If you use Buzzstream you can do this by creating different email templates and it will show how often each one has been used and how many responses it had. The disadvantage is that Buzzstream does not know whether the response was negative, positive, or a system generated response. But it still helps to see what kind of email works best and you can then try to find out why.

Building a relationship

Building a relationship is not always easy. You need to keep in contact with people who are interested in your content and who have published your articles. Posting articles for them in return or promoting them on social networks is a good way of doing this. Re-tweet posts you like, comment on their posts, and email them asking if they are interested in particular content in the future so you can write something they are especially interested in. Conversely, if you’re working on behalf of a well-known brand, offer to publish their content on your client’s site. This will really help cement your relationship with other expert bloggers.

Maintaining a relationship is the most important part of blogger outreach as it saves you a lot of time in the long-run. Managing your existing relationships can be done with Buzzstream (or the Link Building Toolbar) as you can change the relationship stage to “link accepted” if someone publishes your article and you can contact them again.

The relationships you have created can help you further as they might know other people who are interested in the same or similar content. Try to use existing contacts and twitter to build relationships through your current relationships.

Remember all the steps and improve

A process can be defined as “series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end”. In order to achieve the particular end faster or with a better result you have to make sure your process is clear and that you follow all the necessary steps within it. Writing a guide or process plan and sharing it with your team is essential. Talk about the process on a regular basis, share your thoughts and experiences, and see the process as a guide – not set in stone. It’s a living document that needs to be improved all the time. Work on it, improve it, learn from the tools, and try out new things.

There might not be many positive responses at first, but make sure you know why people aren’t interested. Respond to the negative emails. If it is unclear why they are not interested ask why or what they would be interested in. This helps you and shows them that you are willing improve. Keep in contact as the person might be interested in the future or in other kind of content. Learn from email responses and have it as part of your process.

Remember blogger outreach and link building is an art that requires continuous refinement and a lot of dedication. Never be satisfied with your process, challenge existing processes and methods, and always look for new ways to make the process more efficient.

I have tried to make this post as useful to you as possible. I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with us, so please feel free to share and add to the discussion below.

© SEOptimise Blogger Outreach Process – Organisation is key

AdWords has changed a bit over the years. The interface changes, functions come and go, new settings appear…

The problem is that not everything changes at the same time, meaning AdWords Help might not immediately reflect shiny new features. The AdWords exams – and the Exam Study Learning Center – are always behind on something.

It’s possible that some things are left out for simplicity. For example, it’s possible they left out some of the many and varied targeting methods for the Display network in the Fundamentals sections to avoid over-complicating things. But some things are just plain wrong.

If you use AdWords quite a lot but are just studying for the AdWords exams, it’s useful to know what the exam thinks is the case and what actually is the case. Or if you’re using the Learning Center to teach yourself about AdWords, you may be wondering why what you’re reading doesn’t match the real thing. Here’s a rough guide to where the Learning Center and exams are behind.

The Networks Tab

This has, more or less, been replaced by the Display Network Tab. The Networks tab used to give an overview of traffic on the different networks, as well as a list of automatic and managed placements. The Display Network tab doesn’t have that overview, and covers all targeting options (keywords, topics, interests, and now age and gender).

Devices

Section 4, Device Platform Targeting mentions “desktop and laptop computers” and “iPhones and similar mobile devices”, but neglects to mention tablets (which have been an option since July 2011).

Also, it claims statistics are available only in aggregate: “If you’d like to see performance statistics broken out by device platform type, we suggest creating two separate, identical campaigns and targeting them to different device platforms.” This is wrong; to see performance broken out by device, use the Device segment.

Close Variants

This might be left out to keep things simple; it’s easiest to explain exact match as the ad appearing “only on a query that precisely matches the keyword”. But, seeing as the “include plurals, misspellings and other close variants” campaign setting is turned on by default, this actually isn’t how exact match works on most campaigns. You’d think they’d mention this somewhere.

On the subject of match types, there isn’t any mention of broad match modifier either, even though it’s been around for about two years. Not sure why embedded match would make the cut but BMM wouldn’t…

Demographic Performance

Section 11.2, AdWords Reporting will tell you there is a ‘Demographic’ view in the Dimensions tab “packed with information about the gender and age groups of your users”. There isn’t. There hasn’t been since March.

Before March, if you were on the Display Network, there were campaign settings to exclude age groups or specify a percentage by which to alter bids for particular age groups. Now you can’t alter bidding, although you can exclude ages and genders at ad group level (in the ‘Gender’ and ‘Age’ parts of the Display Network tab). You just can’t see your performance data split by demographics any more.

The section also says the Geographic Performance report in the Dimensions tab shows the ‘geographic origin’ of searches. This isn’t quite accurate; the ‘User locations’ report shows where searchers actually are, the Geographic report shows either their location or the location they’re searching for.

Wonder Wheel

Not actually part of AdWords, the Wonder Wheel was an option in the sidebar of Google Search. It would show your search term, with spokes sticking out showing closely related concepts. You could click on a concept and it would expand, gaining spokes and related concepts of its own.

This one went away in July 2011.

(If you miss the Wonder Wheel, or want to find categories Google thinks are related to your keyword, try the Contextual Targeting Tool – it uses the same engine.)

The Video Targeting Tool

There used to be a standalone tool for finding suitable placements on YouTube. Now there’s just the Placement Tool. There are Placement Types in the sidebar, and you can uncheck them all except Video to get YouTube placement ideas.

Report Center

The Reporting lessons sometimes mention the Report Center. It was retired two years ago. It used to be where you could download a variety of reports, which nowadays you get from the Campaigns tab or Dimensions tab. Some things – like the Conversions page – have moved to the Tools and Analysis menu.

Anything Else?

I’m sure there are many more things that I’ve missed – if you can think of any (or just fancy a rant on how inaccurate the exams are), feel free to comment!

Image credit: Alexandre Dulaunoy.

© SEOptimise How Out of Date is the Learning Center and AdWords Exam?

Web marketing is a constantly developing challenge and it can be useful to have staff who specialise in particular areas. That’s certainly true with online copywriting – there’s such a lot to consider that having a dedicated copywriter can make a real difference to your overall online performance.

But whether you’re a writer trying to perfect your online capabilities, or an SEO exec needing to brush up, there’s a wide range of issues to consider. Online copywriting poses its own challenges, from knowing the basics of HTML to understanding the ever-changing world of SEO.

So what help is available?

W3Schools

If you’re new to HTML, or you just need to double-check the correct bit of code for a particular HTML element, W3Schools is the go-to website for easy reference.

Its HTML Tutorials section covers all the basics and the more complicated stuff too, allowing you to pick up the most common bits of formatting you might need – such as the correct way to format headings, bold text and so on – and lets you try out the more advanced types of formatting and see how they look right there on the page.

Google Blogs

Google’s own blogs can help you to keep on top of developments in SEO, and Google keeps an up-to-date directory of all of its blogs. Here you can find everything from algorithm updates on Google’s search engine itself, to dedicated blogs for online marketing, advice on using Google Analytics, and other topics relevant to Google products.

Bing and Yahoo! also have blogs to help you to keep up to date with any major changes in their algorithms or the design of their search result pages, so you can be confident that the content you produce should perform well across all of the major search engines.

Scheduling

As your workload grows, you need to make sure you can keep on top of it all, and scheduling is an important part of keeping your business in order. Online calendars offer one way of doing this if you don’t always work from the same PC or laptop – Google Calendar and Windows Live Calendar are good options, especially if you have a smartphone that can sync with them.

Just be sure to get into the habit of checking your schedule at the start of each day or week – it’s no good putting things on to your to-do list if you never actually go back and check what you’ve got left to do. This might seem basic, but a blog that’s never updated is worse than useless. It’s like dead flowers in a vase; whatever the motivation behind it, a sparse blog will actively put people off.

Inspiration

Choosing what to write about on your blog or website pages is a huge topic – so much so that we’ve dedicated an entire post to the subject – but there are a couple of simple approaches that will never go out of style.

The first is to simply write about whatever’s making headlines in your industry, or your client’s industry if you’re ghost-writing for a corporate blog. Look out for mentions of the relevant industry in the news, or for new campaigns launched by unions and professional associations, and write a response or opinion piece.

Secondly, get involved in discussions on Twitter and other social networks, and blog about the issues other people are talking about. That’s a good way of making sure people out there will be searching for the subjects you write about. Just remember to keep your content original and interesting – it’s OK to court controversy in the opinions you express, as long as you don’t go too far.

Staying On Course

Building an effective blog isn’t just about one post, of course – if you’re going to attract regular readers, you’ll need to produce articles again and again that your readers will keep coming back for. There are plenty of ways to do this, drawing on the kinds of inspiration mentioned above, and some of them can help to cut down the individual effort you need to put in.

For instance, post a series of articles all touching on different aspects of the same general topic and you can easily build a sequence of posts with good SEO benefits, all based on a single set of background information that cuts down on the research time needed. The good thing about this is the consistency and repetition of key themes that you get within your set of posts. However, this could be a downside if you’re keen to provide plenty of variety on your blog if, for example, you’re a news website.

If you don’t think a series of posts would suit your blog, then don’t go for this approach – there are plenty of other things to try.

Guest Posts

Invite guest posts and you could publish content from authority figures within your industry area without having to write anything at all. The pros here include the very small amount of effort you’ll need to put into the writing, assuming your guest contributor is good at what they do.

However, the potential cons include rewriting any poorer efforts from contributors whose English isn’t quite up to scratch, as well as the time you might need to spend on finding people to write for you. Don’t be tempted to fill your blog with second-rate ramblings just to get a return link; you’ll devalue your online presence.

Style Guides

If you’re concerned about the variation in style that might come with publishing guest posts or blogs from several different employees, consider putting together a tone of voice or style guide for your contributors. This will not only let your guest contributors know what they can and can’t say on your blog, it can also give you a rule of thumb for your own future posts. This can help to keep your blog cohesive as time goes on.

Copify

When you take on more work than you can handle, something’s got to give – but it needn’t be your client relationships that take the strain. Instead, consider hiring a copywriter to work for you, and they can take some of the strain during your busier times.

Copify is just one place where you can hire freelance writers quickly and easily. Alternatively, you might want to do the same thing on a less formal basis, by sharing any excess work around copywriters you already know. You could even ask for recommendations via Twitter.

Either way, don’t compromise on your usual standards – give the completed copy the once-over when you get it back, and make sure it’s up to scratch before sending it out to your client or publishing it on your corporate blog.

Promoting Your Content

Once your content is written, optimised, formatted, and published, you need to make sure it reaches the largest possible audience. SEO can help to increase the number of people who find your new post through their search results, but social networks are also a good way to spread the word.

Take a look at FeedBurner for ways to have your new blog posts automatically tweeted out to your followers. FeedBurner also gives you more control over your blog’s RSS feed: a way for your regular readers to be alerted when a new post is published, and a great way of sustaining an audience for the long term.

The Virtuous Circle

Finally, a piece of advice that is often given to writers, but which is still as good as ever: read. Simply by reading fellow bloggers’ efforts you can stay aware of developing trends within your industry, and position your article topics so that they fill any gaps that your colleagues and competitors may have left unfilled.

As you read well-written articles you can also maintain an awareness of the prevailing style of blog posts or formal news articles online and adapt your own tone of voice accordingly. By including this positive feedback loop in your everyday activities, you’re designing-in self-improvement, a kind of continuing professional development for freelancers and independently minded copywriters everywhere.

Image credit:  JoelMontes

© SEOptimise 10 Tips, Tools and Resources for Online Copywriters