SEOmoz User Generated SEO Blog

How to Measure ROI for Lead-Gen Websites

spanishgringo — 2013-05-20T09:04:00+01:00

Ecommerce sites have it very easy when trying to tie sales information back to online marketing activities whether it be organic, social, email, or paid campaigns. Since the purchase happens online, web analytics packages capture the transaction details and can generate detailed analyses on sales, visitor profitability, visits and days to transactions, etc.

Lead gen websites, on the other hand, generate copious amounts of data about web traffic and visitor behavior but web analytics tools have zero direct access to sales information that happens after the website visit either offline or outside the scope of the website. At best, stand alone web analytics tools can report on unqualified leads. In our company, we sell business phone systems and 100% of all purchases happen offline but the majority of the leads we generate come from online channels.

Although organic search is often the leading source of high quality leads and converting customers, most marketers have little or no visibility into what keywords and content are actually generating those sales, let alone qualified leads. If I only look at what the web analytics tools tell me without understanding qualification and close rates, we may be promoting the wrong keywords that waste a lot of time and effort for our sales team because they generate a large amount of low-quality, non-converting leads.

That is absurd and no way to run a successful demand gen organization.

For most marketers who do have any end-to-end tracking capability today, they will have maybe one or two details like “Lead Source” and “Lead Source Detail” in their MAP/CRM reports. When asked, they perhaps could say that a new customer came from “Organic Search” and maybe even know that they came from “Google”. That’s the only source information in their CRM they have to make business decisions.

Imagine having to decide on what to pack for a vacation and the only weather information you are given is the direction of the wind. No temperature. No rain forecast. That’s crazy, right?

Luckily, you can marry up your website visitor data with your CRM. When done right, it is like putting your Lead Source on Steroids. I want to show you how to do it.

There are different possible ways to do so depending on what your business needs are, but I’d like to walk you through my preferred method that will work for the widest range of marketers because it uses the two most common tools for analytics and CRM, Google Analytics and Salesforce.com (Although this example discussed here is for Google Analytics and salesforce.com, the technique could be applied to any web analytics tool and CRM combination).

Marketing ROI bliss is as simple as 1,2,3

Step 1: Capture All Possible Campaign Data with the Lead

Every time you visit a webpage, Google Analytics (“GA”) sets a cookie on your browser with many different pieces of information ranging from:

the first time you visited the site
how you arrived at the site
how many times you’ve visited since that first visit
what type of browser you use
how big your browser window is
etc…

So, GA has a wealth of knowledge already and our goal is to match that information with the lead details captured by our Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) or CRM. The best way to pair this information with the lead is to read the GA cookie and pass the important visit information as hidden fields in your lead capture form. By leveraging the data this way from Google Analytics you can not only measure the effectiveness of your search marketing with more granularity, but really you’ll get great visibility on any type of campaign that uses your website to capture leads including social, display, re-targeting and email activities.

Many CRM and MAP packages offer a way to include some of this visit information already in their forms, but there are a few reasons why I still prefer to leverage GA for this information:

GA is our web analytics tool of record. I want the data in my MAP and CRM reports to match up as closely as possible with GA so I can get a complete apples-to-apples view of the data from initial visit to final contract close.
Google has more engineers dedicated to understanding web traffic than anyone else. It is more efficient to piggyback on their expertise than reinvent the wheel.
Most CRM and MAP vendors don’t handle every type of traffic well and may only track CPC or social visits because they require you to tag every URL for tracking. That is not a scalable solution because you don’t control every URL that points to your website.

Before I go into any more detail, let me make a recommendation. Get a technical resource to help you setup this project. Find your buddy who manages your website or some other web developer to help you with the actual code. Most marketers still may not have mastered jQuery and that’s OK. Just find someone who can lend you a hand. Your developer is your friend (and if not, you need to make friends with one) and the payoff is well worth it in the end.

utmwv=5.4.1&utms=1&utmn=441931773&utmhn=www.shoretelsky.com&utme=8(LandingPage)9(%2Fproducts%2Fcloud-phone-system%2F)11(2)&utmcs=UTF-8&utmsr=1440x900&utmvp=1423x404&utmsc=32-bit&utmul=en-us&utmje=1&utmfl=11.6%20r602&utmdt=Cloud%20Phone%20System%20%7C%20Cloud-Based%20VoIP%20for%20Business%20%7C%20ShoreTel%20Sky&utmhid=1040593808&utmr=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Furl%3Fsa%3Dt%26rct%3Dj%26q%3Dcloud-based%2520phone%2520system%26source%3Dweb%26cd%3D5%26ved%3D0CG0QFjAE%26url%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.shoretelsky.com%252Fproducts%252Fcloud-phone-system%252F%26ei%3D6uVqUY3LIePMiQKtp4CgDw%26usg%3DAFQjCNFzkkM5-y83xss7cTfrooT2EkRVYg%26bvm%3Dbv.45175338%2Cd.cGE&utmp=%2Fproducts%2Fcloud-phone-system%2F&utmht=1365960188895&utmac=UA-425619-12&utmcc=__utma%3D182004837.537251314.1365960189.1365960189.1365960189.1%3B%2B__utmz%3D182004837.1365960189.1.1.utmcsr%3Dgoogle%7Cutmccn%3D(organic)%7Cutmcmd%3Dorganic%7Cutmctr%3Dcloud-based%2520phone%2520system%3B&utmu=qR~

As you can see it is a treasure trove of information. It may look like ancient Greek, but there are multiple examples you can find online to learn how to read the GA cookie and add it to hidden form fields. For this to work you need to make sure that your lead-gen forms include the necessary hidden fields to place the GA values that you want to track. Make this a standard practice for all of your lead-gen forms. As in my case, you may want to roll your own code to make sure you get everything you want the way you need it.

The only piece of data we need, not captured by the GA cookie, is the session landing page. For me, this is critical information. As the growth of the “(not provided)” keyword continues, it is more important than ever to look at the landing page as a proxy for the keyword to see which pages (and keywords) are driving actual sales, not just unqualified leads. For us, we want to know what the page/keyword that immediately led to a website conversion. As long as you have the data you can decide which attribution model works best for your business. To capture the session landing page, I store the landing page with a session-based cookie and include that value in our lead-gen forms along with the other GA data.

So, we know how to read the GA cookie and we’ve added the hidden fields to our lead-gen forms. The last piece of this step is to insert those values in the hidden fields in your lead-gen form. You’ll need to add code to read the GA Cookie and insert that code into your form fields when the form loads. It should look something like this:

//put this code in a handler for when form loads or gets focus jQuery( “input[name=’tracking-source’]” ).val( gaValues.source ); jQuery( “input[name=’tracking-keyword’]” ).val( gaValues.keyword ); jQuery( “input[name=’tracking-campaign’]” ).val( gaValues.campaign ); //etc...

Step 2: Pass the Data From the Lead/Contact to the Opportunity in Your CRM

Regardless of whether you use a MAP such as HubSpot or not, when a form is submitted by an unknown prospect a new lead and/or contact is usually created in your CRM. As I mentioned before, you will need to ensure that your lead and contact records in your MAP and CRM include the fields for capturing the GA data being submitted with the lead-gen forms. If they are not offered as default fields, then create custom fields in those records to house the data. If you use a MAP, include those new fields in your MAP-CRM sync programs / workflows / integrations.

Now that your CRM has the complete GA source information in the Lead and/or Contact records, you need to pass that information over to the Opportunity record because that is where your CRM will let you report on sales qualified opportunities (SQO) as well as revenue. This is where the ROI magic really happens.

Bonus Tip: Make sure these tracking values are visible in your Lead / Contact / Opportunity records in your CRM: Showing this info is great for your lead qualifiers and sales teams because it lets them know in rich detail how the prospect came to your website. They’ll thank you for it.

How often this information is passed or overwritten in the opportunity will depend on the attribution model that you select. For example, if you want to use a time-decay method, you’ll need to pass over this information for every conversion event in the funnel. On the other hand, if you use the first interaction method, this information should only be passed once and never overwritten.

Step 3: Build the Reports on Qualified Leads and New Revenue

Now that the source data is paired with the sales cycle information I depend on a handful of different reports to understand what is driving value vs. what is causing us to waste time and resources.

Because keyword data is so fragmented and depending on the length of your sales cycle, it may take at least a few months of data collection before you have enough data to draw conclusions and take actions based on a solid analysis of the data.

Inbound Marketing is a combination of art and science. It is important that as you review the results, try to keep in mind your context of the data, where it is coming from and what actions you are doing as a Marketing team. When done correctly, you’ll find that there are plenty of gold nuggets that you’ll discover.

Report 1: Conversion ratio of Leads to Sales Qualified Opportunities

Certain keywords and landing pages may be driving a large number of leads that rarely convert to qualified opportunities. We want to minimize those as much as possible because they take up the valuable and limited time of our lead qualifying team.

Keyword	Landing Page	GA Source	GA Medium	GA Campaign	Leads Created	Sales Qualified Leads	Lead to SQO Ratio
voip phone	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	organic	(organic)	50	1	2%
cloud phone system	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	organic	(organic)	20	8	40%
cloud phone system	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	cpc	VoIP	6	4	66%
cloud voip	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	organic	(organic)	10	2	20%
cloud computing	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	cpc	VoIP	10	0	0%

All of the keywords in the above example drive traffic to the page about our cloud-based phone system. As you can see above, “voip phone” is generating a lot of leads from the page and may even have a much higher traffic volume and conversion rates when looking at the data in Google Analytics. However, my CRM now tells me that “voip phone” is really a distraction for our sales team and we should take one or more of the possible actions:

Reevaluate the content of the page to see if we can optimize better for “cloud phone system” and “cloud voip” instead of “voip phone”
Give a low lead-score to leads that come from “voip phone” and only contact those leads when we’ve gone through the rest of the higher priority leads
Put leads that come from “voip phone” into a nurture program and only contact those leads that continue to interact with our site and contact us again
Stop buying AdWords for “cloud computing”
Increase my AdWords spend on “cloud voip” because the conversion rate from lead to SQO is so high and the volume seems a bit low

Depending on your volume and the diversity of keywords, you may want to look at patterns of keywords instead of specific keywords. In my case, I might compare how keywords with “hosted” in the phrase compare against those that have “virtual” or “cloud” or look at the difference between the performance of those that mention “small business” vs. “enterprise”.

For a more generic example, group all keywords that include “free” or “cheap” in your analysis to see how those perform vs. other classes of keywords such as those that include “best” “alternative” “highest”, etc…

Report 2: Conversion ratio of Sales Qualified Opportunities to Closed New Business

Beyond looking at the Qualified Opportunities, I also want to know how those opportunities actually convert to new business. When reviewing this data I include many more fields such as avg. deal size, avg opportunity age, which I will not show in this example

Keyword	Landing Page	GA Source	GA Medium	GA Campaign	SQOs	New Customers	SQO Win Rate
voip phone	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	organic	(organic)	1	0	0%
cloud phone system	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	organic	(organic)	8	4	50%
cloud phone system	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	cpc	VoIP	4	1	25%
cloud voip	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	organic	(organic)	2	1	50%
cloud computing	/products/cloud-phone-system/	google	cpc	VoIP	0	0	0%

Again, the story here is to look at the relationship between the keyword, landing page, channel and the number of real paying customers you are acquiring. Salespeople are expensive and you want them to focus on the opportunities most likely to convert and that have the best profitability.

Report 3: Campaign ROI

For the last report, this occurs outside of the CRM, but I pull all of the data I need from GA and our CRM to crunch the numbers and add in the costs to calculate a true ROI for each of your marketing campaigns.

Campaign	# of Visits	Leads	SQOs	New Customers	Revenue	Cost	ROI
New Content for Core Website	7,000	210	58	10	$$$	$$$	%
Blog	6,000	100	16	3	$$$	$$$	%
AdWords – Display	5,000	50	1	0	$$$	$$$	%
AdWords – Remarketing 1	1,200	60	9	2	$$$	$$$	%

It is unlikely that you have actual costs for your organic keywords but you do know the cost of developing the content and resources needed to build links in your organization. If you don’t know the actual cost per page of content that you develop, then estimate the proportional cost of the staff and resources that work on content and divide it by the number of new pages created over the time period that you are analyzing. It may not be completely accurate, but it will give you a rough idea of your cost per page of new content.

The ROI beauty of Inbound Marketing

The great thing about inbound marketing, is that over time your ROI improves because as you continue to generate new content, you’ll find that certain blog posts, web pages, and other premium content assets continue to deliver leads and customers well after you’ve invested your time to develop them. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Inbound marketers need to be able to understand the business impact of their actions. If you are not able to reliably see which content and SEO actions are contributing to revenue growth then you need to start making a change today.

How do you track the business impact of your search campaigns today? What type of attribution model works best for you?

Image credit: Mike Overall (Flickr)

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Watch Out: Google Will Dominate the Web for Decades to Come

Johann Beishline — 2013-05-17T08:06:00+01:00

Posted by Johann Beishline

Think back to the last time you were outside just before a rainstorm. Remember the feeling of the wind bustling around you, kicking up a slight dust; remember seeing the sky darken into an eerie gray. Well, the Internet marketing landscape is beginning to look nearly as ominous.

If you sit back and examine the current state of the Internet, you find yourself looking at a dominant force that has hung over people for more than ten years. It’s a force so powerful that it has birthed and destroyed millions of small businesses over the years. That force is the seemingly unstoppable nature of Google.

It’s really over the past five years that the Internet has begun to take shape. In this time, seven new Internet mediums have matured; seven mediums that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in the next decade; seven new mediums that Internet marketers will need to adapt to if they plan on being successful in the long run.

Combined with search, these seven mediums will essentially form the backbone of the consumer Internet for years to come.

And guess what? If you plan on being an Internet marketer for long, you had better plan on being nice to your big brother, Google. Because like a true older sibling, he’ll try to overshadow you across each and every one of these mediums.

1. Media

The average American spends 34 hours a week in front of a television. It’s no wonder that the entertainment industry is able to rake in tens of billions of dollars a year when Americans are making a second career out of their viewing habits.

Despite record-high profits in the industry, recent lawsuits indicate that the entertainment industry is worried though. They are worried about the long-term threats presented by sites like Hulu, Netflix, and especially YouTube. Viacom’s recent attempt to force YouTube to remove much of its content vividly demonstrates the seriousness of these fears.

YouTube is massive. Like a cake rapidly expanding in an oven, YouTube has fast commanded a large presence in the average American's life - a presence that is only expected to grow year-after-year for the foreseeable future.

YouTube was founded in 2005. By 2007, 134 million Americans watched a YouTube video in a given month. Five short years later, that number grew by over 37.3 percent to about 184 million Americans watching a video in any month of 2012. That’s staggering, almost incomprehensible growth.

If you took the total number of views on YouTube in 2011 and divided it by the population of the entire world, you would find that the average person on the planet watched close to 140 YouTube videos that year.

The average video length on YouTube has also increased over time. In 2007, the typical video was 2.7 minutes long. By 2012 videos swelled in length to an average of 6.7 minutes long. That’s a change of more than 148 percent.

The increase in views and content length on YouTube presents a compelling opportunity for advertising to big brands and local companies alike.

Guess what?

If you can target viewers with highly-specific video ads by factors such as their location, age, income, sex, and interests, you are in a much better position to see massive returns to your budget. Unlike with traditional TV advertising, 100% of your budget will reach the exact type of person you want. And boy are companies beginning to notice. YouTube brought in more than $3.6 billion dollars last year.

You may have heard that newspaper revenues are down, but do you know how quickly they’re dropping? Six panic-inducing percent a year. It’s like compound interest but in reverse.

Why has demand shifted from newspaper advertising? Partly because the audience is shrinking, but mostly because of the compelling, well-targeted opportunities that digital advertising affords. Google AdWords (combined with Craigslist) broke the newspaper industry’s dam much the same way that YouTube will break the television industry’s iron curtain.

Not only is YouTube making huge chunks of money but its costs are much lower than anyone else’s in the industry.

Do you know how much risk YouTube had to take to produce the content for those $3.6 billion dollars in revenue?

Very, very, little. Since YouTube pays its content creators based on performance, it only loses server space if things don’t work out. And storage prices cut in half every 18 months.

YouTube hasn't stopped innovating either. Right now Google is exploring a subscription model for YouTube. If successful, the model will challenge distribution models like iTunes, Hulu Plus, and Netflix.

Every major TV interface, such as Apple TV, Sony PlayStation, Xbox, and Google TV, also incorporate YouTube as a core function -- ensuring that no matter what happens in the television space, Google is sure to be a part of it at a fundamental level.

Every person from Bill Gates, to you and I, have the same number of hours in a day. Twenty-four hours that we can distribute any way we choose. From the looks of it, that zero-sum figure is redistributing itself rapidly towards online video.

Unless you have been living under a giant rock (possibly like the man in this Geico commercial), you have probably noticed that YouTube is owned by Google.

If we create a list of the eight areas that will be define Internet usage in the next five years, we can begin to check off which parts Google is likely to own. So far, Google’s future is stacking up quite well.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Media

2. Local

People use Yelp for essentially one reason; to find the best local restaurants, places, and events by using crowd-sourced, user generated review content. Yelp has monetized people’s interest in everything local to the tune of $137 million last year.

Yelp is far from being that lone tree on the prairie. HomeAdvisor, Angie’s list, and the Better Business Bureau made $205 million, $88 million, and $184 million in annual revenues last year, respectively.

If you throw Groupon into the local category, you are looking at an additional $1.61 billion in market value. Smart approaches to local, such as FourSquare (also a social networking application), Ticketmaster, and Uber are creating new possibilities on the local frontier as well.

The most innovative company in local recently, however, is Google. While it is true that people use apps on their smartphones more than they use search-–it could be because Google hasn’t historically done a good enough job at understanding what people are looking for at a local level.

But that has changed. A lot.

Google first introduced its ten pack local maps results in 2008. And here is what they looked like:

Ouch. What an eyesore.

Looks aside, Google was really innovative in the approach it took. It essentially looked at the success that directories were having and decided to bring their core functionality right into the search results.

It makes sense if you think about it. Google has always looked to reduce complexity across its entire product line. In Google’s mind, directories not only reduced the amount of time people spent on the search engine but they also increased the amount of clicks users had to go through to find something.

Integrating maps into search queries with local intent also presented Google with the opportunity to cut into the revenue and traffic directories had. Not only did Google’s ease of use eat into the profits of directories but it also reduced the need for the Yellow Pages. Obviously directories have since done okay – but I doubt they’re doing as well as they would have had Google not stomped into their territory.

For a while, Google scraped reviews directly from its new competitors like Yelp and Insider Pages because it lacked user-generated content of its own. Google was later forced to quit after a government investigation into this practice several years later. In response, Google purchased Zagat in 2011 to incorporate its reviews into local search results.

Google’s aggressive actions in local search indicate just how seriously it’s taking it. And their assertive tactics appear to be working. According to Google’s Ed Parson, about 1 in 3 searches now have local intent.

Recently, Google came out with a large weather chart in search results for much the same reason it came out with local maps results: it wanted to remove unnecessary steps.

Once again, Google is aggregating data from multiple sources, depriving each of potential ad impressions.

Beyond adding weather and maps information into search results, Google began integrating advanced flight data into queries since acquiring ITA for $700 million dollars in 2010.

The results are nothing short of amazing. Rather than fighting with various airline search mechanisms, Google provides users with an instantaneous source of fast changing flight information from even the most basic of keywords.

But what some people may not know is that much like with Google Shopping and Google Credit Cards–flights has largely become a paid game.

100 percent of the viewable window for most searches looking to book flights are now ads. The big players in the travel game, such as Expedia, TripAdvisor, and Kayak have lost tons of money as a result. And it doesn’t look like Google plans on sharing again anytime soon.

Oh, and just so you are aware–-I think Google has every right to increase the efficiency and user experience behind its search results. I just think it is important to point out that Google isn’t the innocent white angel that many people perceive it to be. Companies need to fully consider the business risks associated with traffic from Google.

Today, Google might be your best friend. But tomorrow it might decide to further monetize your high-value niche under the guise of user experience--destroying your profitability in the process. I say “guise” because if Google’s goal was to purely increase the user experience of its search results, it would not charge companies to advertise in many of these widgets. They would work much like the rest of Google’s ranking algorithms.

While local places, weather, and flight information may be pretty cool-– they’re not part of a cohesive, location-based experience. All of these localized search functions still rely on the user to pull information from Google.

But all of that changes with Google’s latest local release, which recently won Popular Science’s Innovation of the Year award. That innovation is Google Now.

Google Now will essentially be the public’s first brush with augmented reality. Combined with Google Glasses, Google Now will make sure that Google comes out on top of almost everything local. Everything.

What makes it so powerful is that it automatically pushes top-notch information about your surroundings to your phone.

If there is a traffic jam on your planned route to work--Google Now will tell you and offer a faster alternative. If you’re waiting for a train in a New York subway terminal, Google Now will let you know the exact time it will arrive. It leverages all of the features Google has been building over the past ten years from Google Maps to Google Plus, from Google Flights to Google Calendar, all into one synchronous end-to-end user experience.

Google Now will likely secure Google the vast, vast majority of the local technology base–-on both the hardware (see Google’s acquisition of Motorola) AND software fronts.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Media
Local

3. Mobile

Most people classify the iPhone as the world’s first smartphone. When Steve Jobs introduced it in 2007, the world hadn’t seen anything like it.

Smartphones are now so commonplace that nearly 130 million Americans own one.

Most people in the technology industry are familiar with Steve Jobs epic quote on going thermonuclear on Google because they were entering the smartphone marketplace and borrowing heavily from Apple’s innovations in iOS. But what few know is that Eric Schmidt had actually been on Apple’s board for several years prior to building Android.

When Google sees an opportunity to develop a promising product line, it drops everything (from existing relationships, to mountains of cash) to make sure that it successfully dominates the vertical. The reason Google is the massive multi-billion dollar company it is today is precisely because of its willingness to explore indirectly-related verticals with a take-no-prisoners, aggressive approach

Since Google’s entry into the smartphone market in 2008, Apple’s first-mover advantage has dropped from owning nearly 100 percent of the market in 2007 to owning just 43.5 percent of the U.S. smartphone market today.

Apple’s problem is that it’s a company that has always insisted on creating a closed-software environment for users. The sole reason Microsoft became the powerhouse of 80’s and 90’s tech is because Bill Gates recognized that hardware cross-compatibility would be the most important piece of the personal computer marketplace. Google has essentially taken Microsoft’s approach with its Android platform and its open-source software environment now controls more than half of the U.S. market.

Google is well poised to dominate the mobile environment much like Microsoft began dominating the operating systems market decades ago. This market alone will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars to the company.

On the side Google has been clandestinely building Chrome OS. According to Eric Schmidt, the end game is for the Android to merge with Chrome OS-- which will make the company a direct competitor to Windows. Google's superior cloud-networking abilities will make it a formidable opponent in the sector.

Oh, and by the way, the mobile market also includes tablets--at least with respect to operating systems. Declining PC sales in favor of tablets, and Google’s early success with its thin client-focused Chromebooks casts a promising future for the company’s mobile success.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Online Video
Local
Mobile

4. E-commerce

Google has taken a keen interest in e-commerce recently. In fact, three months ago it bought Consumer Intelligence for $125 million dollars in an effort to overhaul its efforts in the area.

Online retail is a booming industry. According to Forrester Research, it will grow by 14% this year alone. Companies like Amazon and eBay survived the dot-com collapse and have grown to massive sizes -- indicating the permanence of the market.

Nowadays niche sites are gaining prominence as well. Their focus on creating a social and UX based shopping experience have made them hundred million dollar companies in just two or three years. Two examples that immediately come to mind are Fab.com (the world’s fastest growing e-commerce site) and Brian Lee’s ShoeDazzle.com.

Underestimating Google’s role in e-commerce is a mistake. Google’s ability to send targeted traffic for e-commerce related queries is nothing short of spectacular -- something they’re well aware of.

Google has begun a massive e-commerce monetization attempt with paid Shopping results. Such monetization attempts include infesting queries for credit cards, flights, smart phones, UK insurance, and more with ads. In response to Google’s assertiveness in the area, Microsoft started a big public relations campaign:

Beyond increasing the number of ads in its queries, the company has taken even bolder steps in e-commerce.

In 2010 they decided to directly compete with LivingSocial and Groupon after a $6 billion dollar failed buyout attempt. In 2011 they created Google Wallet to compete with PayPal and Square -- in both online and offline purchasing (NFC technology makes it likely that Google will take this market too). In 2012 they launched the Google Trusted Store program to gain data from large web retailers.

As a result of its various investments in e-commerce, the company is well positioned to become a major voice in the entire ecosystem.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Online Video
Local
Mobile
E-commerce

5. Productivity

Microsoft made $21.592 billion dollars in revenue from Office last year, accounting for 65% of its operating income. Office is the company’s most profitable arm -- but one that is facing serious competition in the form of web based apps.

While it’s true that Microsoft Office currently dominates word processing with 95% of the market, expect major changes to occur in the area in the next 5 to 10 years.

Google has been responsible for the majority of the changes in the area so far. The success the company has seen with Google Docs has forced Microsoft to take web based office solutions seriously. Office 365, SkyDrive, Yammer, and Skype are all reactions to Google’s solutions -- which are gaining broad acceptance.

While businesses have been slow to drop Microsoft entirely in favor of Google Drive, the shift is beginning to happen. The main driver right now is cost. Microsoft Office can cost up to 8x more for companies -- even though the software lacks decent collaborative features.

Google already has more than 5 million companies using Google Apps for Business, bringing in more than a billion dollars of revenue a year. The company also beat Microsoft hand over fist in federal government contracts last year. Of the 42 contracts available for companies to bid on, Google won 23 of the deals to Microsoft’s 10.

Microsoft is so concerned about Google Drive that they've started a large PR campaign to bash it.

When it comes to office solutions, Microsoft has the most to lose. For the better part of two decades the company has been unchallenged in the area. While new competitors such as Google may not eat all that much into the company’s market share (maybe 5-10% in the next 10 years), they will still cause devastation to the company’s bottom line.

Much like the existence of Pepsi causes Coke prices to remain extremely low -- the availability of Google Drive has forced Microsoft to radically reduce its prices, even as their costs (for more feature intense software) is much higher than their competitors’.

About two months ago, Google announced Google Keep. The app makes Google an even larger competitor to Evernote and will help it solidify its place in the productivity arena.

When it comes to productivity tools, Google has also created tools such as Google Calendar, Google Voice, Google Translate, and Google Hangout. These tools are extremely popular and give Google a significant portion of the overall productivity market.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Online Video
Local
Mobile
E-commerce
Productivity

6. Gaming

In 2012, U.S. gaming companies made upwards of $14.8 billion dollars -- a figure which is growing by 33% a year.

Much of this revenue comes from mobile app sales. In fact, 75% of Google Play’s revenue in the United States comes from games. In South Korea, the figure is closer to 95%.

While gaming is one of Google’s weakest areas, it has taken a YouTube style approach of simply distributing other people’s creations across its network.

But gaming is increasingly developing core online features. Perhaps the earliest browser based game with mainstream success was RuneScape, which came out in 2001. It amassed more than 200 million users in a short time -- and demonstrated the possibilities that server side games had.

Following RuneScape came World of Warcraft, which peaked at 10 million paying subscribers and several billion dollars of revenue overall.

Most recently, SimCity 5 came out, which had more than 1.1 million sales in the first two weeks.

Google is responding to the increasing online nature of games in two ways. Firstly, It is working on an Android game center (much like Apple’s) for leaderboards, multiplayer functionality, and more. Secondly, it launched the Chrome Web Store to distribute HTML5 games to its users.

Currently the Chrome Web Store is just an assortment of links and bookmarks to games -- but if Google puts more energy into developing gaming -- it could become a larger player in the space.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Online Video
Local
Mobile
E-commerce
Productivity
Gaming

7. Social

Everything thus far brings us to Google’s latest and greatest battle. This is the battle that no one is quite sure Google can win. But Google sure will give it every last damn drop of sacrificial blood it's got.

Facebook has fast developed a user base of more than 1.2 billion people.

Humans are inherently social creatures. Massive parts of our brain developed for speech, facial recognition, and body language, which in turn allowed for the creation of sophisticated cultures worldwide. It’s natural for us to want to stay connected with those around us… too natural for Google’s liking. In 2011, Facebook already had more than twice as many page views as Google.

Google is tackling social heavily for three primary reasons:

Reason #1: Facebook is a non-public database of some of the largest pools of semantic information in the world. It has information that people connect with on a deep emotionally driven level. If Google does not incorporate social into search, its algorithms will lack personalization--a feature the future of search is bound to have.
Reason #2: Ranking websites based on the number of links they have is outdated. Doing so only provides an exclusive group of webmasters--“the linkerati”--the ability to decide where websites rank. Social media has the potential to democratize search engine rankings, as anyone with a quality social media page could vote. Social data also plays a big role in Google’s plan to incorporate AuthorRank into its algorithms.
Reason #3: Facebook could potentially be used to serve crazy well-targeted ads across the Internet. Banner ads are one of Google’s top income generators. But Google AdSense has a huge weakness. It relies on generic interest categories and website visit history to target ads to people.

Imagine a world, however, where Las Vegas casinos could target advertising to males in the United States who have visited Las Vegas at least once in the last year, and are between the ages of 45-67 years old. Or imagine a local plastic surgeon advertising his services across the web to women between the ages of 34-56 living in Seattle, Washington who like fitness and health. Such highly targeted advertising has the potential to wipe out Google’s monopoly on banner ads.

Will Google win at social? It is unlikely that Google will gain a majority of the market share any time soon. Facebook has done too good a job of making people aggregate their life stories on the site. Facebook is like a living, flexible, step-by-step scrapbook of a person’s life.

Imagine reflecting on the adventures you had in life twenty years from now. If Facebook is successful you will have your whole life documented on the site--from that college trip to Mexico City to the loss of your best friend, Facebook will likely have it all in one, easy place.

Google Plus faces an uphill battle in trying to convince people to switch social networks. Possibly the only way users would make such a drastic switch is if people are able to import an exact copy of their Facebook data into the social network. New laws on Internet data ownership could actually make this a reality.

Truth be told Google has already met many of its goals with Google Plus. It has a vibrant community producing active social signals across the web. It has the bare bones it needs to incorporate social into its algorithm.

Google Plus actually has more than 500 million members of which 235 million are active. Google has a good shot of maintaining its position as second behind Facebook for years to come, which just might be all that the company truly needs for continued success.

Google’s Scorecard:

Search
Media
Local
Mobile
E-commerce
Productivity
Gaming
Social

World Domination Looks Inevitable. PANIC!

In the eight areas that Internet technology is likely to develop in the next decade, Google appears well-positioned to play a permanent and dominant role.

Google’s revenues have been growing by an average of 28% a year over the past three years. Last year they made $50 billion dollars. For comparisons sake, the whole newspaper industry combined made $38.6 billion dollars of revenue in that same time.

So what does all of this mean for you?

It means that it’s pretty much impossible to be a digital marketer without working with Google for the foreseeable future. If you don’t like Google’s policies in search, video, applications, and pay-per-click advertising you are going to hear one message consistently: ‘It sucks to be you. Go work somewhere else.’

And to be honest-- what online marketing options exist beyond Google? Search is the most powerful marketing medium ever developed. It has opened up a world of analytics oriented business; business where you can trace your ROI with exact precision; business where you can optimize your marketing message to its most optimal form with conversion rate optimization. The words we use to describe search engine marketing alone are indicative of its tantalizing power.

What about Yahoo and Bing? They’ll remain small players unless they can come up with a compelling enough reason for people to switch. No matter what Microsoft might think-- adding photos to random queries (as their ridiculous ads show) hardly creates a better user experience.

Microsoft’s algorithms are at least three years behind Google. Their social media integration is at the wild mercy of third parties like Quora, Twitter, and Facebook. Their results for local queries are abominable-- a mix of irrelevant social sidebars, news updates, alternative search suggestions, and cluttered maps results. Finally, they lack video content, authorship data, and haven’t even begun touching augmented reality.

Instead of focusing on value adding innovation, the company has largely turned to creating imperfect replicas of Google’s core search features.

What Steve Jobs said about Microsoft almost twenty years ago may still hold true:

Bing’s growth over the years has largely come at the expense of its partner, Yahoo. Google is still growing despite Bing’s best efforts. And it will likely stay that way because Google offers so much value through its cross-channel of products like Chrome, Android, Gmail, and YouTube.

So where else can businesses be marketed online?

Some might be argue that social is a viable option.

There’s a fundamental deficiency with social media though. Social media is essentially a branding platform for the individuals and companies that use it. So while it’s great for crafting an image for people who already know, like, and trust you-- it’s hard to reach well-defined groups of people as they move through different parts of the buying cycle.

So what does the future with Google look like?

As lawsuit after lawsuit has already shown--you as an individual are powerless against an overly aggressive Google. The company has always been able to argue that their algorithms provide the public with mere opinions on which products, services, and websites to use.

Pretty much the only thing that has been able to exert some degree of influence over the company’s policies is the possibility of antitrust litigation. And if Google truly begins dominating the Internet--antitrust cases will resurface much like those against Microsoft in the 1990’s. The irony is that Microsoft will likely be the one pushing for it.

But until then, Google will do whatever it can to deflect such action. When the Panda update hit in 2011, the Online Publishing Association (consisting of top online publications such as the New York Times) stood to lose $1 billion in potential earnings. According to Aaron Wall’s research, Google re-ranked OPA websites in a backroom deal likely because the organization was big enough to pose a genuine litigation threat to the company.

So what can you do with this information?

There are three primary things you can do with the information above:

You can analyze the areas that Google is going into and consider creating B2C startups in them. The more categories you intersect, the better off your idea might be. For instance, FourSquare is a combination of the Local, Social, and Mobile categories.
You can be more aware of the potential for Google to compete with you or your clients in various verticals. Google has shown an uncanny desire to enter large, profitable industries.
You can sign up for a monthly newsletter mapping Google's next moves at TrackGoogle.com. The newsletter will document Google's latest acquisitions and how it's developing various product lines in the categories mentioned.

Conclusion

I guess the main point I am trying to make here is that Google is not your friend. The company doesn’t give two-hoots about anyone’s business except its own. If your business gets in the way of its two goals, increasing user experience and making more money, then trouble is coming your way.

That leaves people working in the industry in a tough spot. The best we can do is work together as an open, information sharing community. No one benefits from the infighting between white hats and black hats. We’re all in this together.

It's going to become our responsibility over the coming years to not let Google push us around. It's going to be our job to work together to understand Google's ever smarter algorithms. The days of the lone-wolf SEO are over.

The truth is that even if Google controls a large part of the Internet in the next few decades, it will still remain the vibrant and creative community that it is today. In fact, in the next seven years, 2.6 billion people who have never been heard from before will join us online-- bringing new stories, perspectives, and opportunities with them.

Although Google has swayed from its idealistic motto of "Don't be evil" hundreds of times, they are still an organization guided by their view of a better world. I am optimistic that a bright future still lays ahead for online marketers worldwide-- but it's one we might have to fight for to keep.

10 Lessons from a 100k Pageview Post

SteKenwright — 2013-05-16T00:04:00+01:00

Posted by SteKenwright

This kind of thing might happen to Rand all the time, but it’s not often that a digital marketing company based in Leeds gets 100,000+ people reading anything it does (at least on its own site). That’s what unexpectedly happened to us on www.branded3.com a few weeks ago – what essentially started as a rant from some guy having a bad day blew up and now has 1,184 votes on Hacker News (and incoming links from some of the biggest sites in the world).

I think it’s likely I’ll never replicate this, and I didn’t intend this either – so I’ll not preach: “this is how you get 100,000 page views.” Everyone else is just as qualified as I am to write a post that’s read all around the world, and that’s exactly what I want to happen. I’d like to tell you what I’m taking away from this, and how I’ll use it when I’m creating content for my clients in the future.

Commonly known as sharking. Google it.

1. [citation needed]...but not always.

Google only wants you to list the links that are most relevant to and most important to your content – Eric Enge likened this to a research paper around a month ago on Search Engine Watch. The difference between your content and a research paper, though, is that your content doesn’t get discredited if there is nobody to link to that backs up the point you’re trying to make.

In a Webmaster Help Video earlier in the year, Google Engineer Matt Cutts said don’t link out to low quality sites – this is pretty much the equivalent of quoting from Wikipedia in an essay. You don’t have to get peer approved before people will read your post, though, so if there’s nobody to link to that’s talking about whatever you are then that could actually be a good thing. If someone else is covering the same subject as you there’s no real reason why you should get all the links, so you should definitely write about things that no one else is covering if you can.

NB: Not having anyone to back up your point doesn’t excuse you from not having a point in the first place.

2. Content needs to solve people’s problems…or highlight them.

I had a problem with Path and as of the time I started writing the post, nobody had solved it, though a few people had tweeted about experiencing similar problems. I tweeted @path at roughly 7am and the first person to reply was someone else who was (very) actively looking for an answer to the same problem. I embedded Design33’s tweet in the post and linked to him; let my cohort know; and instantly a problem shared is a problem…erm, doubled.

Whether your content is solving someone’s problem, or you’re just empathising with them; if you know where to find them…let them know it’s there and get your influencers on board.

3. Find out what people are looking for.

The principles behind content marketing are gaining real traction in the SEO community, and more and more companies are getting on board with long-term content strategies. There’s plenty to say about planning your content out for months in advance, but as Simon points out in this fantastic YouMoz post from last year, it’s not all about Google Keyword Tool anymore. There are some great tools out there to find hot topics (Bottlenose is particularly useful), but the best way to find what your audience is looking for is by using the same tools as they are.

Wil Reynolds is a great advocate of using Google Complete to find content topics (check out Wil’s LinkLove 2013 presentation, around slide 90) – start typing questions, don’t press enter; just note down what people are actually searching for. Search Twitter and find out not only what problems need solving, but who it is that actually has that problem (see point two)! Google Keyword Tool shouldn’t be your first stop when you’re looking for fires to put out, and if it’s monthly search volume you’re looking at, chances are someone faster has created content solving the same issue weeks ago.

4. Find your forum.

…by which I don’t literally mean a forum, since as an industry we’ve pretty much ruined that for everyone – all I’m saying is that you just need to find the right soapbox to spread your message.

In the comment string on our site this guy called me out for posting this on a company blog. At the time I hadn’t really questioned where else I could actually write this up, so Luca made me think. If I had put this on my own blog nobody would have read it…I would have just been complaining without any real platform to build on (might as well have just put it on Facebook or Twitter).

One of our clients is a cloud storage company who obviously have a vested interest in online security, and do write about issues such as this from time to time. They’d never approve something like this for their blog (more in point six) so I would have had to dry it right out…or put it on another site on their behalf.

Hammering this article to fit brand guidelines would have dulled its impact so much, and for a company to write about real life issues like this they really would have had to find a real life case…otherwise they’re just tipping off the media. It would never have worked.

If you’re going to be controversial, find a site that’s fine with that to host your content – that goes for the content you’re putting out on behalf of your clients too. We’ve had plenty of content turned down by webmasters for being too much for their blogs, and you’ve got to respect that. Guest blogging is like the name implies, and you’ve got to make sure you don’t leave a mess in someone else’s house.

5. Write for your audience…

Something everyone is taught in English class from a relatively early age is how to write for an audience. Even if you came into SEO from something else – a computer science degree, MA in marketing; whatever – you still have those classes to fall back on, and they’ll give you a pretty solid foundation in content marketing. In this industry everything comes from experience – if you covered search engine optimisation in your degree I’m sure you found half the things you knew were obsolete by the time you’d graduated…and post-Penguin the other half will get you penalised too.

I found when I moved from in-house to agency side search engine marketing, most of the things I’d been doing for the last year were considered pretty spammy. If you’re writing to put content on websites that nobody reads, like article marketing websites, then you’re not writing for an audience…and that shows in the work you put out.

You don’t have to be a journalist to create great content. If you’re solving problems imagine you’ve got that problem yourself and then just write for you…

6. …don’t write for your client.

If you think you’ve found a hot topic and your client isn’t happy with being associated with it, there’s probably a case for not pushing that. Controversial content gets links, but there’s a certain amount of press that comes with those links.

I don’t have a PR agency, so TechCrunch pointing out that it was probably my fault isn’t a disaster from my point of view. If your client makes a mistake then it might be. In the case of my blog post it wasn’t long before the media-at-large didn’t care anymore (TechCrunch may have even been the start of that) and the chances are pretty good that nobody will remember a guy getting mad at his phone in a few weeks – if a tech company posted a rant about Path it would probably be called a smear campaign.

…and I won’t lie – when the VP of Marketing called me I was more than a little worried.

7. Your content has to be worthy of links to get any…

This is my very first YouMoz post, and there’s a good reason for that – up until now I’ve not really had anything to say that I think might help the community, so I’ve stuck to my blog, Twitter and getting all up in other people’s business when I get the chance.

If you’ve got an opportunity to write for a great site – or to work with a well-known journalist, or whatever – giving them a few hundred words of nothing content will a) not generate much in the way in traffic, b) not generate any leads, and c) make that great site think twice about having you back.

8. …and so does your site.

Which leads me on to number eight: the whole point of placing links as part of a content marketing strategy (or at least it probably should be the main point) is for people to click through to your site. Make sure your users are arriving on a page they want to see.

@stekenwright @phillipsnick @newsyc20 @path I think that branded3.com needs to install a WordPress caching plugin. :D
— David Lynch (@kemayo) April 30, 2013

When St. Louis-based developer David Lynch submitted the post to Hacker News our entire site went down almost immediately (at 17:25, which our Development team were definitely not happy about). It’s a pretty extreme example, but if your site doesn’t present people with the screen they were expecting to see they’re probably going to leave straight away.

This applies not only in a technical SEO sense (see Aleyda Solis’ wonderful resources on mobile SEO and which versions of a page you should be serving to which people for a start), but also in something as intrinsic as the services you’re providing.

Going back to point four (Find your forum): the company I work for not only has a burgeoning social team, but an entire blog dedicated to social media – the perfect place to host an article about a social network, in my opinion.

Make sure your link is pointing to the kind of page your audience wants to find.

9. Be funny, or insightful. Probably not both.

The links generated by my post contain so much more useful information and insight than my content does. Like I said, I’m not pretending to be a journalist uncovering a story. I just presented a real life experience in a humorous way…because it was pretty funny. How do you explain what you do to your partner’s grandparents? I go with “I work with computers”. Imagine trying to explain a social network to two different pairs of 80 year-olds before 6:30 in the morning? You’ve got to laugh, as the expression goes.

Your multi-national debt management firm probably can’t be funny in its content (very happy for people to prove me wrong here). Companies like this have guidelines to uphold and the chances are they’re much more interested in their brand guidelines than the links you’re working so hard to get for them. Make sure you take tone of voice into account and if your content doesn’t work in their speak, see point six. You’re writing the wrong thing.

Your post definitely needs a Wonka meme.

10. Don’t do it for the links.

Writing my blog post, I had absolutely no intention of getting a single link. In all honestly I didn’t fully expect the guys at Path to see it – I just wanted to vent and if possible, make my colleagues laugh. In a very helpful post on Quick Sprout last October KISSmetrics’ Neil Patel wrote that he never manually built a link – he just kept writing. We’re not KISSmetrics, but our blog has been covering as many of the happenings in the digital marketing world as we can possibly manage for more than half a decade – and mostly we just do it because we want to.

Posting a piece of content on your blog every few weeks or months and expecting it to get picked up isn’t going to happen; and it’s definitely not content marketing – it’s just content. No matter how good your stuff is, don’t be disheartened if you don’t get any traction with a blog post…or a hundred blog posts.

What I do think is important is that you look at every piece of content you write and think about how to make it better this time. You don’t need to over-analyse every post before it goes live – I would guess you’ve got targets and deadlines to make after all – just think about how to improve on what you’ve got so your next article will make outreach easier, or will help more people out; and if your last piece performed well, how are you going to beat it? Even if you know you won’t.

Google Alerts VS Mention VS Talkwalker

ildar — 2013-05-15T07:03:00+01:00

Posted by ildar

This is a detailed comparison of Google Alerts vs. Talkwalker vs. Mention. The analyses was performed on three key points:

Amount of Alerts Delivered
Quality of the Alerts
Speed of Delivery

This is probably the most detailed comparison of Google Alerts vs. Mention written to date. Read the conclusion at the end of article to see which service I picked as the winner and why.

Total amount of delivered alerts:

Talkwalker pulled in the biggest amount of alerts: 391.

Second place goes to Mention.net which delivered 249 alerts, but if I would have included Twitter and Facebook results that amount would be close to 600.

Least and last was Google Alerts which pulled a total of 126 alerts. The only instance when Google was able to beat both Talkwalker and Mention.net is when it came to keyword number 6. This keyword was somewhat related to the recent "Boston marathon incident". It's as if Google Alerts was better suited to deliver alerts that come from News Sources.

Quality of the alerts:

Google Alerts:

Quality sites: 82 out of 89 were high quality
Source of alerts: Almost all of the alerts came exclusively from news sites
Conclusion: 92% of alerts came from quality sites, but almost all of them were news site, which means that important places like blogs, forums and personal pages were ignored.

I would occasionally come across a few blogs, but it didn't alert me of any forums (except for hybrids like "topix") and it completely ignored places like Yahoo answers, Twitter and Facebook, which is surprising, but for some reason there were no notifications of Google+ articles either. In this regard I would say the quality of the alerts was pretty high, but only because Google Alerts delivered results from a News sites. At times Google Alerts would notify me of the same exact URL 3 times in a span of 2 days, but this wasn't the norm so it's not a big issue.

Mention.net:

Quality sites: 133 out of 158 sites were high quality
Source of alerts: About 40% sites/blogs, 40% news sites and 20% forums
Conclusion: 87% of alerts came from quality sites

On several occasions I saw mention deliver results which did not contain the keywords entered into the alerts. It seems as if the keyword was dynamically generated and must have been present when mention initially crawled the site. The result is pages that have nothing to do with your alert.

Also mention returned pages which had my alert keyword inside their navigation. The keyword would be in either "tag cloud", "recent post" etc. but not within the body of the article which means that the actual page on which I landed was unrelated to my alert. I'm sure with some minor tweaking the Mention team could fix this. On the other hand mention.net did not notify me of web sites that had my keywords in the comment section, which would indicate that they have a feature in place that eliminates these alerts (unlike talkwalker).

Talkwalker:

Quality sites: 44 out of 121 were high quality
Source of alerts: Mostly blogs and strange wikis, with about 20% news sites
Conclusion: 36% of alerts came from quality sites. Extremely low quality results for three out of five keywords. In addition it failed to find high quality web sites that other services were able to find. All in all, only one out of three alerts came from quality sites.

Talkwalker's quality is hard to categorize because keyword number 5 and 6 produced spotless results. Almost all results were delivered on time and quality was good (almost all were news sites).

Unfortunately for keywords, 1,2,3 and 4 the results were as follows:

After reviewing the initial five results returned by Talkwalker I started getting worried about the safety of my computer. Many of the results were spam pages and at one point my browser (Opera) crashed because of some unknown Java script. A large chunk of the results were returned because people left spam comments containing my keywords, ironically it was spam comments on spam affiliate "blogs". From the looks of it they were blog networks. On the other hand it did manage to capture a few good results which other resources were not able to catch. But those results are definitely not worth the sheer amount of low quality pages that Talkwalker sends your way.

For this experiment I was using their free version, so I'm not sure if there is a way to filter sites in the paid interface.

Speed of the alerts delivery:

IMPORTANT: I wasn't using any quality filters when performing the test. All keywords are raw and each service was supposed to deliver the same quality keywords ("anything goes" in this case).

Mention.net:

Alerted on the same day: 130 out of 158
Delivered alerts on the next day: 21 out of 158
Delivered alerts late (over 1 day): 7 out of 158
Conclusion: Roughly 82% of alerts were delivered on the same day the text appeared on the net.

Talkwalker:

Alerted on the same day: 94 out of 121
Delivered alerts on the next day: 14 out of 121
Delivered alerts late (over 1 day): 13 out of 121
Conclusion: Where Talkwalker lacks in quality it makes up in speed of delivery. With 77% of alerts being delivered on the same day your keyword was published.

Google Alerts:

Alerted on the same day: 51 out of 89
Delivered alerts on the next day: 25 out of 89
Delivered alerts late (over 1 day): 13 out of 89
Conclusion: Google alerts is the slowest of the 3 services. Only 57% of the alerts are delivered the same day your keyword appears on the internet.

For some keywords Google Alerts would be remarkably fast, delivering the results on the same day as the keyword is mentioned. While in other instances there would be a week and a half delay.

How the experiment was performed

The experiment spanned across three days: 15th, 16th and 17th of April 2013. I used a total of six keywords to perform this experiment. I did NOT include any filters, so in Google Alerts I would select "Everything" and in Mention I would not apply any filters. The only type of filtration used was to take out two websites that continuously pump out articles which trigger alerts, so as to avoid clutter I have blocked them out. All three services offer an option where you can exclude certain web sites. All keywords were in quotes when I put them in Google Alerts and Talkwalker, I wasn't able to do that in Mention since it throws an error when it sees quotes.

How I did it: On the 18th of April I analyzed a maximum of 180 alerts per service. I would analyze 30 sites, per keyword per given date. For example for keyword A in Mention.net I would look at the 30 results delivered during the 15th, 16th and 17th. That means I looked at 30 results per day. Since there is six keywords that makes a maximum of 180 alerts per service (in this case Mention, Talkwalker and Google alerts). Most of the time it would be less because Google Alerts would deliver below 30 results per given keyword.

I looked at the type of results each service returned. Were they duplicate results? Where they coming from quality sources or doorway pages, MFA (Made for Adsense sites) and RSS aggregators? How quickly did the service deliver the results. For example if I opened the alerts delivered on the 15th and found out that a news article it had sent me to was published on the 12th, I would mark it as having arrived three days late.

I wish I could reveal the actual keywords used, but a signed NDA is... well a signed NDA. I sent my keywords to the SEOmoz editors and also offered to login to my Google Alerts, Mention and Talkwalker accounts to verify the data. The keywords are related to telemarketers and unsolicited phone calls in general.

Conclusion:

None of the services had a flawless performance, but in my view Mention.net came out on top.

It delivered less results than Talkwalker, but majority of Talkwalker results were from low quality properties.

In terms of quality Mention.net had a lower percentage of high quality sites than Google Alerts, but almost all of the Google Alerts come from News sites, which means that it often ignored forums, personal pages and blogs.

As for the speed of delivery Mention.net was the fastest. Mention.net also has a nice feature where it give you a preview of the results on the right part of the screen. The only drawback is that if the web-site contains malicious code it will also come through Mention.net interface, I wish they would have just taken screenshots of the web-site, this way I can see if I want to visit it or not, oftentimes spam pages are easily to identify just by looking at them. To make things worse Mention doesn't show you the full URL (which can oftentimes also tell you if a web-site is spammy or not), you are literally forced to click on a result to find out what it is. Talkwalker on the other hand will show you the URL of the page that contains your result.

I think it's best to use a combination of Google Alerts and Mention, I would also include Boardreader into the mix which is an excellent tool for monitoring forums. You can subscribe to a keyword alert inside boardreader via a RSS feed and then plug-it into your RSS reader along with Google Alerts RSS feeds to have an even more complete list of results.

Building a Freelance Link Building Team

adamwagner44 — 2013-05-14T09:05:00+01:00

Posted by adamwagner44

Need help link building, but can’t afford to hire an agency or a full-time employee? There are some great resources out there that can connect you with qualified freelancers to help you meet your goals. The trick is knowing what to look for in freelance SEO help. Unfortunately, there are a large number of "SEOs" that deliver low-quality and/or out-of-date strategies that will not help your site, and at the worst could actively hurt your site’s rankings. In this post, I am going to describe some best practices for finding quality freelance help for link building through oDesk.

oDesk is a service that connects companies or individuals with contractors in a variety of marketing mediums, one of which is SEO. Through oDesk you are able to post a job description, hire help, manage the time they work and pay your freelancers. I am not a representative of oDesk or affiliated with them in any way; I have simply used it successfully over the last two years to help me build my start-up marketing agency.

Set Your Budget and Goals

The first step is to set your budget and goals for the project. If you are a small agency hopefully you would have planned this out during the pitch for a new client and if you are an in-house team you will need to get buy-off from internal stake holders. Either way, having a budget of $200 per month vs. $1000 per month will dramatically affect how you divide the hours spent on various projects and how much you are willing to pay each freelancer.

During this process you will also want to determine what type of link building you will need for the project. The reason this is important is because different link building techniques require different levels of competency and capability. So, some link building techniques will cost more than others based on the skill level of the freelancers that will be hired for the work.

For this post, here is the list of link building techniques that we will be finding help for:

Guest Blogging
- Writer, Researcher and Project Manager
Local and Business Directory Submissions
Blog commenting

Map Out the Desired Freelancer Qualities

This is where you are able to build in a lot of budgetary efficiencies. I would highly recommend hiring several freelancers in order to complete all of the necessary work.

For example, I would hire 2-4 people to cover-off on my Guest Blogging line item. I would look for 1-3 writers and then I would find someone else that will act as a project manager (oversee writers, find the posting opportunities, reach out to the potential blogs, etc.). These skill sets require different types of people. A decent writer with experience in the niche you need content for can generally be found for $20-$50/hour. A good researcher and project manager can often be found for $15-$25/hour. However, when hiring the project manager you really want to do your homework on them (A Skype interview is recommended) to make sure you find someone capable.

Then for directory submissions and blog commenting you can look for freelancers that charge lower hourly rates. This is fairly simple work; it is just time consuming. I would look for a freelancer at a rate of $5-$15/hour. Sometimes you can find a contractor from India or the Philippines that can perform this work successfully or you can find an entry level North American SEO at an affordable rate. I would always recommend native English speakers first if you can afford it.

Post a Job

Once you have your budget set and list of link building needs, then you are ready to go! After you create a profile on oDesk.com you can navigate to the “Post a Job” section. Be as detailed as possible in this section and make a case to the potential freelancers for why they would want to work on your project.

Suggestion

I have noticed that it is very helpful to ask for some type of action from the applicant. There is potential to get a large volume of low-quality applicants, but if you ask them to do something when applying it is easy to sift through the applicants to see who took the time to tailor their application to your job posting.

You will begin to receive applications pretty quickly, so once you have had a chance to look through them it is time to follow-up with the applicants. Before hiring someone it is good to message them with a secondary question or task to gauge their capabilities and response time. You want to find a freelancer that will respond to your emails and work requests the same day you send them, so the application process is the best way to see who is quick and who is not.

*Note: You are able to counter-offer the hourly rate the applicant has provided. I have noticed that most are willing to come down a little bit from their initial offer. And, if they aren’t it was at least worth a shot.

*This is the screenshot from an old job posting for a copywriter, so you can see the large volume of applicants. Please disregard the date since they applied. I filled this position within a week of posting the job!

Set Strict Goals

Now that you have hired your team of freelancers you are ready to go! It is crucial to the success of the project that you provide straightforward and attainable goals for your freelancers. Tell them exactly what you want. When dealing with freelancers you want to spell out your requirements as plainly as possible so that all parties involved know what to expect.

Managing Workflow

oDesk offers a simple to use interface that tracks all hired freelancers and the number of hours they have worked on a given project. oDesk also takes periodic screen grabs of your freelancers computer screen, so you can see exactly what they were doing. It is a very transparent process.

If oDesk and Excel are not detailed enough for the link building work you require, then you can easily have your freelancers work in project management systems such as Buzzstream or TeamBox.

Regular Reporting

As a part of your goal setting, make sure to establish guidelines for the frequency and type of reports that you would like to receive. For link building I prefer monthly reports showcasing the links that have been prospected. However, for large volume projects you may need more frequent reports or you can ask freelancers to track progress in Google Docs, so the progress is shown in real-time. This reporting can also be leveraged for the reporting that you provide to your client or boss.

Build Those Links!

And now you can rinse and repeat. This process is easy to scale up or down depending upon your link building needs at any given moment. You are able to find freelancers that will work a few hours a month all the way up to nearly full-time employees. Utilizing oDesk for finding talented freelancers has allowed me to offer large agency quality work out of our boutique agency. Good luck with your next link building project!

Get Email Alerts for New Backlinks with Open Site Explorer

Martijn Oud — 2013-05-13T00:05:00+01:00

Posted by Martijn Oud

Recently SEOmoz added a new function to their Open Site Explorer called Just-Discovered Links. Instead of having to wait for new index updates and comparing your CSVs, you can simply monitor the new links tab. Unfortunately SEOmoz doesn’t have RSS support for Just-Discovered links. And checking for page updates every day is probably not the best use of your time.

In this YouMoz I'll demonstrate a quick and easy way to monitor new backlinks to websites. I've set this up for my own site, but also my competitors. It shouldn't take you more than 30-45 minutes to set up, and it will save you a lot of time.

What we will be doing is creating an RSS feed for that page and then sending an email for every new feed item. Don't worry, we will use free tools to accomplice this. No programming knowledge needed.

Step 1) Get the URL

Personally, I would like to be know every external new link to a website (root domain). For that, use the URL below. Replace www.example.com with the domain of your choosing.

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/just-discovered?page=1&site=www.example.com&sort=crawled&filter=&source=external&target=domain&group=1

Of course you can change this to fit your needs.

Step 2) Creating an RSS feed

To get around not having an RSS feed, I use a service called Page2RSS. You simply enter a page URL and this website does all the magic for you. It’s free and doesn’t require an account. It’s not perfect; there are no instant updates and sometimes feed entries are blank. Still, it works just fine for this particular job. With this feed I use another free service to email every new feed item.

Now, the most important part is being notified of new links. For this, we will use IFTTT.

Step 3) Setting up email alerts

IFTT (if this then that) is a online service that lets you create triggers. For example, you can ask to be sent an email if it’s going to rain tomorrow. Or tweet ‘Happy New Year’ at New Year's (more ideas). You can also ask it to send you an email each time a RSS feed is updated. This is what we are going to use.

Here is the recipe that I use.

For feed URL enter the RSS feed you created in step two. Instead of an email you can also use other channels as well, like Twitter. You can then adjust the email to your needs. Make sure to enter the name of the website you are monitoring in the subject. This makes for easy filtering in your email service later.

This is a quick workaround until SEOmoz adds RSS support. Hopefully, they’ll even add email alerts!

Using Trello For SEO Success

jasarrow — 2013-05-09T00:09:00+01:00

Posted by jasarrow

Firstly, let me start by introducing myself – I’ve been working as an agency SEO for just over three years now, during which time I’ve read the SEOmoz blog pretty much every day. Although I enjoy and learn from many of the posts published, the ones that get bookmarked and read over and over again usually contain something that can be used straight away to improve the service we offer. Hopefully this article does that for at least some of you.

Since joining the company I work for (Clicky Media), I’ve witnessed the SEO department develop from being a small part of the company, to becoming an integral part of its success. As part of this growth, we’ve had to implement certain processes to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible. We’ve tried a fair few project management tools, but they all seemed to take more time to update and manage than they were worth (especially for the more specific processes). Then we found Trello.

I’m not going to run through how the platform works as it would need a whole separate article. Also, this topic has already been well covered by Eric Siu and Tom Critchlow, so if you’ve never heard of or used Trello before, then I’d advise you to check out their posts. What I will say though, is that it is one of the easiest and quickest to use project management tools I’ve seen, and they consistently roll out new features to further improve the product. Best of all, it’s completely FREE!

Now, on to the actionable part. We use Trello for various processes in the department, three of the main ones being reporting, guest posting and lead management. Below, I’ve provided screenshots of how we have set up boards to manage each of these.

Reporting

Reports are one of the best ways to demonstrate your worth to clients. However, it can become increasingly difficult to keep on top of these as your client list grows, especially when multiple people across multiple departments are involved in compiling the report. We have the following board setup to ensure that everybody knows what is due and when.

The image is a little zoomed out, so in case you can’t read it, the six lists we include on this board are:

Needs to be started
Needs SEO section
Needs PPC section
Report complete
Report printed
Report sent to client

Lists two and three are only used if the report needs to include data from both an SEO and PPC campaign (and they are managed by different people). You may also want to include a list for social or any other service that you provide.

Notice that you can assign board members and set due dates on specific cards. The relevant member can then choose to receive a reminder (via email and the Trello platform) when any of their tasks are due.

Link to board - https://trello.com/board/reports/512383539db0463e7200ca2a

Guest Posting

One of the best things you get out of guest posting is the ability to build strong relationships with sites and blogs in your niche. The last thing you want to do is spark a bad relationship with one of these sites by missing an agreed deadline, or worse, forgetting about them completely. The following board has allowed us to steer clear of these scenarios while ensuring multiple parties can be kept in the loop:

Again, apologies for the zoomed out image (click the link below to see the board in full). The lists we have in place here are:

Potential opportunity
Contact made
Article subject agreed
Article/information requested from client
Post submitted to site
Post live

You can have a single board to manage all opportunities but we quickly found that this became too messy, so created a similar one to the above for each client. We try to keep a contact name and site URL on each card so that we don’t forget who we’ve spoken to. We also like to note some of the key metrics for the site, whether that be domain authority, social signals, estimated traffic, or anything else (this can be seen in the above screenshot). Again, it’s a good idea to set deadlines for people on these cards so that nothing is missed.

Link to board - https://trello.com/board/guest-posts/5123ace8ef6310a2570009ea

Lead Management

As well as helping us keep on top of work for current clients, we’ve also found that Trello helps us convert more leads by keeping on top of the proposal and sign-off process.

As with the guest posting board, notes on each card come in handy here as they allow you to keep track of anything that has been discussed (e.g. specific requirements, budget, etc.). This information allows us to create a proposal that is more tailored to each prospective client (as we don’t forget things that were discussed at the outset), which always increases the chance of winning their business.

Lists on this board include:

Prospective (for initial enquiries)
Phone call arranged (following which you should add any notes from the conversation)
Proposal requested
Proposal sent
Meeting/follow up call arranged
Lost (for contracts we didn’t win – good for reference in case they get in touch in the future).
Won

Again, this can be tailored to match your sales process. Additionally, you can invite the sales team to the board so that everybody knows what stage the pitch is at.

Link to board - https://trello.com/board/lead-management/51237964514ddf2447004d45

Copying the Boards

If you don’t have time to make your own boards (not that it takes too long at all) and would like to copy any of the above and adapt them to your needs, then please feel free to do so. All you need to do is click the relevant link above to go through to the public board that I’ve created, then select ‘copy board’, change it to ‘private’ and deselect ‘keep cards’:

Bonus Tip – Creating a ‘to do’ Calendar Feed

As all of us here work on Mac’s, we use iCal to organise ourselves day to day. I wanted to find a way to integrate my assigned items and due dates from Trello into my calendar, which is checked daily. It doesn’t look as though Trello supports this yet but recently came across a web app that can create a Trello ‘to do’ feed, which can then be imported into iCal (and I’d imagine other Calendar applications).

The web app created by (Michael Sverdlin) can be found at http://fun.sveder.com/trello. All you have to do is enter your email, select ‘authorise’ and allow the app access to your Trello boards. There are then a few simple settings to select (or not), which determine whether you see only your own ‘to-dos’ or everybody’s, and how much time you want the item to take up in your calendar:

Then simply follow the relevant instructions link, dependant on which calendar you use.

I’m sure there are plenty of other uses for Trello, and we’re always looking for new ways we can incorporate it into our processes – so please feel free to discuss additional ideas in the comments.

Increasing Organic SEO Traffic by 400,000 Unique Visitors a Month!

James Norquay - Australian SEO — 2013-05-08T06:04:00+01:00

Posted by James Norquay - Australian SEO

I would like to talk about a case study for a large start up I worked on for over eight months in the Australian and US market. This client originally came to the company with the typical link building and SEO problems. They had been using a SEO company that had an extensive link network and was using less than impressive SEO tactics and methodologies over the last 12 months. The company was also losing considerable revenue as a direct result of this low quality SEO work. So, I had to scramble and develop a revival strategy for this client.

First, I will show you a quick snapshot of the traffic uplift, which yielded an additional 400,000 unique visitors from organic search traffic on a monthly basis. Then I will explain to you the steps in which we took to get the client to this level. I have also tried to keep this quite general so everyone can adapt their own situation to this case study.

The graph shows January 2012 v.s. January 2013 and the uplift in organic traffic only; this is an example of the type of uplift you can have from removing low quality SEO work and implementing a high quality SEO strategy with high quality linking building and content creation.

Now I will show you the steps I used to increase the clients traffic, I have kept this to ten key steps from the overall process.

Step One: Link Identification and Analysis

So, you realise you have a problem. Google Webmaster Tools has provided a warning or you have had manual action taken by the web spam team and you realise your prior agency has been using some less than impressive link building methods. How do you identify your links?

The tools I usually use can be the following:

Majestic SEO (Paid Tool) http://majesticseo.com
Ahrefs (Paid Tool) http://ahrefs.com
Open Site Explorer (Paid Tool) http://www.opensiteexplorer.com
Google Webmaster Tools Link download (Free) http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

For our client: We used a mix of Majestic SEO & webmaster tools data in a .csv format to provide analysis from this file.

Step Two: Detecting Which Links are Bad and Good?

So, you have downloaded your links profiles on a CSV and you now have an extensive list of all your linked domains. If you have been doing SEO for 8+ years like me you can probably just know from analysis which links are bad from a TLD and URL point of view. If you do not know too much you can use tools such as Link Detox: http://www.linkdetox.com/ to complete analysis of your link profile. I would always consult the advice of an expert SEO in this instance because it is easy for these tools to mistake good and bad links.

Another tip you can use is just reach out to the prior agency and say something like the following: “We realise you were using link networks for our website which has resulted in a Google penalty and loss in business. Can you please remove my website from any link network you have built?”. If the prior agency is decent, they will remove the links from the network.

For our client: As I have been looking over link profiles for years, I was able to use my experience and knowledge determine the low quality links. We also contacted the prior agency and were successful with removing over 2000+ root domain network links, which was a huge success for the company.

Step Three: Removing Further Links

We reach the next step, where possibly the prior agency has been naughty and does not want to remove links or they have removed only a section of links. So, what do you do? You can do the following:

Reach out to the website owners and ask them to remove the links. In today’s market most website owners want payment to do this, which is annoying. You can do this by using Whois data website or onsite website contact forms.

My advice is to try everything to get links removed before moving onto the Google disavow tool:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/disavow-links-main?pli=1

For our client: We were lucky enough to remove most from the prior agency outreach, we also went directly to many webmasters in which we wanted to remove links. We did not use the Disavow tool as it was not around when we completed this link cleanup, but we all know it has been said that if you are going to use the Disavow Tool to use it with caution.

Step Four: Writing a Reconsideration Request to Google

Google is currently been inundated with reconsideration requests from webmasters all over the world. On public holidays the Search Quality teams do not look at reconsideration requests. See below analysis. From my experience it can take anywhere from 15-30+ days for Google to respond to reconsideration requests; during peak periods it can even take longer.

Image Credit: Brian White (Google Web Spam Team - SMX Sydney 2013)

Now in your reconsideration request make sure you are honest and tell Google everything that the prior agency was up too. Be sure to include all Excel information of removed links and say you are going to make an ongoing effort to remove everything negative. It is common knowledge that Google may not accept your first reconsideration request, so it may take a few times.

For our client: We sent a comprehensive reconsideration request, the first time it was knocked back, yet we were successful on the second attempt. Make sure that you emphasise the fact that you plan to remove all non-natural links if possible.

Step Five: Implement a High Quality Content Creation Strategy

So, Google has accepted the reconsideration request, you can now move forward with creating high-quality link building and a content creation strategy. I see every one creating threads about great content marketing examples, but the problem is that most of the time these are big business examples. SME’s and start-ups do not have big dollars to do such things, so the next best thing is to is to create a content market calendar for your clients.
Work out all the events coming up in the year and work out how you can align these with the business. As an example, here are seven content ideas to get you started:

Valentine’s Day Content
Easter Content
Mother's Day Content
Christmas in July Content
Talk like a Pirate day Content
Christmas Time Content.
Any significant birthday your company has, i.e 20 years in business.

Work out which content strategies your selected client can use and plot it all in Excel (example below):

My advice is to also get everyone involved in this process, even the receptionist. Great content ideas can come from anywhere in the business. Creative agencies will charge you $1000’s for a “brain storming” session, but you can do it for free with your immediate team.

For our client: We rolled out numerous new pieces of content onto their blog and news section; we aimed to make the content creative and funny. As the client was in the careers space we made use of “funny interview questions” and “technical interview questions” style articles. It was amazing that one of the articles even made it to the first page of Reddit. We also pushed out content which was related to various holidays in that year and also specific to the client’s industry and also current trends in the market.

Step Six: Implement a High-Quality Link Building Strategy

Tie in your link building strategy with your content marketing strategy. Work out how you will be building high-quality links via outreach and also by integration with your content strategy.

Link building in the last two years has changed dramatically. Gone are the days of building forum links and social bookmarking links. In today’s market if you want to stay ahead you have to be creative with your link building. Here are some ideas for link building in today’s market:

Make sure you always include related links in PR that you push out.
Make sure you always look for suppliers or affiliates of your business that you can reach out to for links.
Track your competitors using tools such as Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, listed above in this post. Work out how your competitors are getting links and create content assets that are the same as your competitors.
Go to local events or Meetup events and connect with bloggers in your industry. An example of an event I run to connect with bloggers and people in the online marketing word is: http://www.meetup.com/Online-Marketing-Sydney/. Make friends first and then try to gain guest posts later. I am not really a fan of websites which are flooded with guest posts one after another; it is the type of thing which Google is just waiting to target.
Look for high-quality directories which you can obtain decent links and traffic from. I would go for directories which ask for verification processes such as phone verification and not ones who allow you to add your site in seconds. The harder the site is to get a link on the higher quality the link will generally be.

Further ideas of higher quality link building can be viewed here: http://backlinks.com.au/10-surefire-link-building-tips-for-2013/

For our client: We only used a smaller quantity of very high-quality link building each month. So, for example we only built 40 of the best links each month to supplement the work we were doing on the content marketing front. We also invested heavily into tracking competitor backlink profiles, using Majestic SEO and Open Site Explorer. We worked out how the competitor's acquired specific backlinks, then by using outreach and content creation we obtained these links.

Step Seven: Implement Schema Markup and Rel=Author

This is a crucial area. If you do not have schema markup and rel="author", you are costing your business money. It is as simple as that. As an example, say I want to make spaghetti (pasta) for dinner I search for “Spaghetti Recipe” and instantly I see some great markup in play, but one competitor has no markup and no rel="author" they are losing business in my eyes. Wouldn't you agree?.

Google has been pushing rel="author" at events and I would endorse it 100%. You can set up rel="author"; the basic set up can be found by visiting the following link:
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986

Google is also pushing Schema along wiht Bing. For Schema markup information all the data can be found using the following website:
http://www.schema.org

For our client: We rolled out a successful implementation of rel="author" for the three in-house content writers the company had. The client had over 300+ articles made by these content writers over the years and it was possible to implement rel="author" for all the aged articles. I advise anyone who has a large section of content to do so as it will only benefit the website. We were also in the process of rolling out further schema markup to the site's course content as it only has a benefit for CTR.

Step Eight: Look for Big On-site Technical Wins

Many legacy websites usually have some big on-site technical wins. Some examples of huge technical problems I have seen in the past and fixed are:

Someone had completed a site move in the last year and they did not 301 redirect the correct URLS; they have missed plenty of key URLS which are now 404 errors.
Someone has built a whole section of linked categories in JavaScript and search engines cannot access the content effectively.
Someone has blocked specific sections of the site in robots.txt for no specific reason.
Someone has used the same rel=canonical to only one page across all the website pages.
Someone has built internal indexed pages as PPC landing pages and copied all the content.

Fixing things such as the above can have a really great impact on the website. I have come across these and many more over the years.

For our client: It was a case of reducing the 404 errors on the website, reducing the number of 302 redirects which were not passing correct link value and also monitoring other areas of the website to improve the speed of the sites content pages.

Step Nine: Use Advanced Keywords Research and use your Paid Search Data to Implement a Effective Long Tail Strategy

Using your paid search data to its full extent is an area of SEO where many do not delve into. My advice is if you are not using your paid search data to assist your SEO campaigns you need to start now.

Some fantastic articles on how to use for paid search data for Keyword Research and analysis can be found here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/advanced-seo-keyword-research-tips-and-ideas-14216.

By using paid search data and advanced keyword research you are able to pin point areas where you have a competitive edge and where you can drive revenue to the business. It makes business sense that if you are not implementing these key areas then you are missing out!

For our client: We took the top PPC terms based on conversion and worked these keywords into existing pages on the website. We also created new high-quality content-based pages from these conversion terms. This type of strategy can work very well in assisting overall conversions on the website and driving more revenue. We also conducted a large-scale keyword research project for the client which yielded in uncovering many areas of opportunity for content development and targeting.

Step Ten: Monitor Everything and Continue Doing High-Quality Work!

Monitoring what is happening with your domains is crucial and you can do this using the following tools:

SEOmoz Campaign manager: http://www.seomoz.org/tools
Webmaster Tools Analysis: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/?hl=en

I would advise you to complete analysis on a daily basis if the site is large and if the site is smaller than check the metrics several days a week.

I would also advise to monitor your competition sign-up to their RSS feeds and stalk their social profiles; see what they are up to and see if you can generate further ideas from your competitors for work moving forward.

I would also advise to continue doing what works. If something you have rolled out generates great traffic and links bring out a new version of the content, for example the 2012 version worked effectively bring out the 2013 version of the content. Another effective strategy is to make the piece of content into an evergreen article which you add to over time so it is always up to date.

For our client: We monitored everything on a daily basis. If something came up, which needed to be fixed, we were quick to implement it with the development team at the business. We also rolled out numerous campaigns multiple times as they worked effectively the first time around in generating significant traffic so it was second nature to do the same thing twice.

Overall, these were ten of the key elements which assisted our client in reaching this growth in organic SEO traffic. I hope this guide/case study can assist webmaster's who have been targeted by recent updates over the last 12 months. If you want to learn more about these tactics or have any questions feel free to contact me via Twitter @ https://twitter.com/connections8 or leave a comment below!

Four Tried-and-True Techniques to Improve Conversion Rate on your e-Commerce Store

wooncherk — 2013-05-03T11:03:00+01:00

Posted by wooncherk

Introduction

E-commerce has become a big part in today’s Internet. Because the start-up cost is relatively lower, more and more people are leaving their daily jobs to run online stores in search of higher incomes than their 9-to-5 jobs. While starting an online shop is easy, earning money from it doesn’t seem so. It turns out that a lot of work is needed in order to turn an online store into a money-making machine. In this article, I’ll share four tried-and-true techniques of e-commerce store optimization that my web design company has applied on the online store of one of our clients – Chi Chi Principle Malaysia Online Boutique. These techniques are very simple to implement, they are either built-in in any matured shopping cart software, or can be implemented as a plugin without too much effort!

Technique 1: Upselling & Cross-selling – Give One More Reason for Your Customers to Buy

Many first-time e-commerce store owners don’t know the power of upselling and cross-selling, and let their customers check out without recommending more products to the customers. This can mean the store is losing a lot of potential opportunities of getting more sales, just by asking one or two simple questions. In short, upselling means you try to upgrade or upsize the same product your customer is going to buy; while cross-selling means you sell them any complementary products related to the original products they are buying.

In fact, upselling and cross-selling have been put into practice by almost all brick-and-mortar retailers. Imagine yourself buying a can of soft drink from a convenient store and the cashier asks if you want to also buy, let say, some snacks to go with your drink. Familiar? And guess what? Many customers will actually just grab a packet or two of those snacks. Even if they don’t, it doesn’t affect their initial decision of buying what they originally want to buy. And this is the beauty of upselling and cross-selling: you get more sales if you ask, but you never get less if customers don’t accept the offer! So why not start asking away?

One trick I have implemented for my online boutique client is that I recommend them to choose a reasonable price that will entitle the customers to free shipping (my client eventually chose 50 bucks as the bottom line for getting free shipping). Then I created a plugin for them, and that plugin will trigger a recommendation page to ask the customer to buy more to save on shipping (see Figure 1).

Notice how the plugin will automatically choose items that’ll make the cart equal to or more than 50 bucks, and adding any of the items will make the customer enjoy free shipping. I’ve also played with words so that they feel sorry if they don’t make it to 50 bucks (look at the button that read “I don’t want to save RM8).

Having said that, if your store is currently providing free shipping on any amount, don’t be shy to implement this technique. Remember, if they are interested, they’ll buy more; otherwise, you don’t actually lose anything!

INSIGHT: With the free shipping recommendation in place, the client found that about 95% of their orders are now more than RM50, a very encouraging number that the tweak is well worth the effort!

Technique 2: Landing Page – Ask for Customer Actions

Most likely you’ve used Pay per Click (PPC) or other types of online advertisement to drive paid traffic to your store; and I bet most of you just let the traffic land on the home page. The main problem of having your customer land on the home page is that the home page is usually cluttered with different types of banner, products and other texts that’ll blur your prospect’s focus.

Enter Landing Page. A landing page is a page specially designed to do just two things – to welcome your customers and to let them know immediately what you have to offer them. A landing page is usually designed to be a very focused page detailing points that you want your customers to pay attention to, usually with a strong ‘Call to Action’. Sometimes, landing page also includes a sign up form that allows the visitors to quickly sign up for any promotion. Below is the top portion of one of the variations the landing page we are using during a Chinese New Year Promotion campaign. Unbounce has a list of nicely optimized landing pages for your inspiration.

There are also cases where you are running campaigns not on generic promotions, but on a series of targeted PPC keywords, for example “Nikon dslr camera” or “red night gown”, make sure you land your customer on the category page of the type of product you are advertising. In the case of ‘Nikon dslr camera’, don’t land the customer on your home page, and let them navigate through your site to actually find a Nikon camera. Instead, land them directly on the Nikon DSLR category page. You can read this article for more information the best practice of landing your customer when doing PPC campaigns.

INSIGHT: After implementing landing pages, the sign up rate has increased by about 10% as pointed out by the client. Sign up rate is an important KPI for the client, because this allows them to send e-mail newsletter to members, which in turn is a key way for them to engage with customers and convert them into buyers.

Technique 3: Optimized Checkout – Provide Seamless Buying Experience

More often than not, e-commerce stores requires the customers to check out using a confusing multi-step checkout form to buy items. I am a fan of online shopping, and the checkout part is always the part that I hated most. The case is even worse for some slow-loading checkout forms full of errors, where customers spent 10 minutes waiting for the checkout steps to transit from one to another, only to find that the last step of the form is malfunctioned.

When asked by my client to optimize their cart, I’ve spend a lot of time going through the checkout process. As expected, I wasn’t impressed with the whole buying experience: the checkout steps are complicated, I am sure first time online shoppers will lose their way during checkout. While I could have implemented a better multi-step checkout, I go further by implementing a more integrated checkout solution: a one-step checkout form. As shown in Figure 3, users enter the information until completion, all in a single page.

INSIGHT: By implementing the express checkout solution, the whole buying experience is improved and the whole process becomes faster and simpler. Interestingly, my client also gets much less e-mails asking how to buy from the store! While there is no number confirming the impact of the express checkout solution, the client believes the overall experience is now much better, and their customers are now less confused about the checkout process.

Technique 4: Abandoned Carts Recovery – Remind Customers of Their Cart

If your online shop is running on any capable shopping cart software, you should be able to view the current items in any customer’s cart. Try analyzing on this perspective, you’ll be surprised how many of them have actually added items to their carts, but eventually leave your store without checking out. Just try to do some math to see how much more you’ll earn if 10% of them actually end up buying from your store. You’ll be surprised by the number.

So what should you do? Remind them! That’s when e-mail marketing comes in! I actually come across this idea when GoDaddy regularly e-mails me to remind me about the current items I am holding in my cart. Most of the time, GoDaddy even gives discount to encourage me buying from them!

Drawing from this inspiration, I quickly implemented a plugin for my client that loops through all registered customers who has added items in their shopping cart during the past week, and send each of the customers e-mail reminder. Some customers are randomly chosen to be given a small amount of discount if they check out (some kind of A/B testing here). Regardless of whether they get discount or not, the reminder actually works, and it works nicely!

INSIGHT: Of all the selected customers who are provided discount, about 15% of them actually check out, which is proven to be a pretty encouraging number!

Conclusion

I hope you find these 4 little techniques useful in optimizing your (or your clients’) online store. All of these are very easy to implement, but they brings very good results! Remember, e-commerce optimization requires constant analysis, regular testing and sometimes some inspiration! Now, stop reading and start implementing these techniques on your store! (Ok, you can take a few minutes to write some comments below, appreciated!)

Bonus

If you are using Magento as your shopping cart system, check out these plugins for similar optimizations:

One Step Checkout - An equivalent of the Express Checkout mentioned above
Abandoned Carts Alerts Pro - Abandoned carts reminder