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January 18 2012
December 19 2011
The Coupon Effect: How Does it Impact the B2B World?
December 16 2011
The “Good Neighbor” has new clothes
October 18 2011
Say hello to lots of page views (and potential customers).
September 22 2011
Keys to a Successful Acquisition Email Campaign (Part 1)
March 29 2011
CONEXPO-CON/AGG: How the Construction Industry Does Business
February 28 2011
Google’s SEO Crackdown Is Nothing to Fear
February 07 2011
Super Bowl: Super Game, but Commercials Belong in the “Bowl”
February 01 2011
Down. Set. Hut. Hut….MESSAGE!
January 15 2011
B-to-B Digital Marketing Trends for 2011
January 12 2011
Siren’s song? Ubiquity
January 10 2011
5 tips for SEO Housekeeping and Housecleaning in 2011
Happy New Year everyone! It’s been a while since I last posted, but I wanted to post some housekeeping and housecleaning ideas for 2011 to get those SEO juices flowing.
Take another look at Webmaster tools
This is probably something many of you do on a regular basis. I think most of us take a look at the keyword report, the crawling stats and inbound links, but there’s many other reports in there that don’t always get our full attention. Have you setup your domain to display as “www” vs “non-www”? Should your domain target users in a specific country? Do you know if you have malware on your site?
I recently had an issue with our site CMS where it was throwing a “soft 404″ error instead of a legitimate “404 error”. Don’t know what a soft 404 error is? Well, it’s when a page isn’t found and the user is directed to what looks like an error page but the server doesn’t throw a 404 error code. Here’s some more info on “soft 404” errors. This doesn’t necessarily effect our SEO rankings to a large extent, however, in terms of serving up the freshest content to our site users, as well as search engines, it can be an issue. So even if you review these numbers on a regular basis, take a look at some of those other facts and figures you may not always analyze.
Domain Aggregation and Consolidation
If you’re a company that has numerous URL’s floating around on the web as a result of past marketing efforts, PR landing pages, microsites, affiliates, or whatever the case may be, now may be the time to get those domains in order. Maybe you registered www.company2008.com, www.company2009.com, and www.company2010.com. Should you have them all point to www.company2011.com? Or to your home corporate site? It’s better to 301 redirect them to your most current site or just to a root domain site for the time being than to just leave them floating out in the ether until a user or search engine stumbles across them. And the same could be said for root folder redirects (www.domain.com/2010contest) or subdomain redirects (2008pr.domain.com). I know that it’s easy to set and forget with some domains, but now is a good time to revisit these old domains and dust off the IT cobwebs.
What are your competitors doing?
Now you may have been savvy to what your competitors were doing in 2010, but 2011 is a new year and that means new marketing budgets. It may be time to take a look at what they’re doing on their corporate site, on any other domains you’ve been able to identify as theirs, or what they are doing externally (i.e. with affiliates or through link building). Have you identified any risks in your strategy or theirs that either of you can capitalize on? How will you know if they figure out your weaknesses or how will you exploit theirs? It’s always good to have a plan B or some kind of alert ready in case you see some serious moves from them.
New Year, New Content
As it’s the new year, that means you should take a fresh look at the content on your site. Are there old sections you can remove or consolidate to improve the user experience? Before you remove anything though, check to see if it’s driving traffic to the site and how you can make the best use of it.
Or should you promote that old content again as it’s now timely? Your site metrics may be able to tell you based on seasonal trends.
Is there new content waiting to be posted? When was the last time you spoke with your content experts? Is there anything they can share that you can use to drive additional traffic to the site? Why not shoot them an email today and find out.
The bottom line is that Google loves all content, as long as it’s unique to your site, accurate to the best of your abilities, and timely to your market segment.
Vendor Communication
And lastly, let’s talk about vendor communication. I mentioned earlier that my CMS was throwing “soft 404″ errors. Well my vendor has recently made an upgrade to the platform to eliminate those, but it was at my request. They’ve also made some other enhancements for added functionality and reporting. It was only because we speak on a regular basis and I keep an eye on our metrics to tie to the two together. As part of the new year, give your vendors a call to see what enhancements they can make to your applications or new products and services they can offer you. You’ll be glad you did. (That is assuming you’ve paid all outstanding invoices, in which case, maybe hold off on that)
Have any other SEO ideas for the New Year? Let me know if the comments.
Image courtesy of sporkist
October 27 2010
What should we do?
September 28 2010
Meaningful SEO Metrics: An Interview with BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu
It’s that time of year again when SES Chicago rolls into town. Typically, it doesn’t arrive until the dead of winter, but this year it’s been moved up a few months to October 18th-22nd. As I did last year, I’ve been given the opportunity to interview some of best minds in the search space. This time it’s Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge. Jim will be on a panel at SES Chicago entitled “Meaningful SEO Metrics: Going Beyond the Numbers”. Below are a few questions Jim was able to answer over email about going more in depth into SEO metrics and how marketers are changing the way they think about SEO as a marketing channel.
1. For many SEO marketers, the focus previously has been on ranking reports and page rank increases. What do you see as “the new metric” that many marketers are now focusing on?
We have definitively seen SEO marketers start measuring the effectiveness of their SEO campaigns with business metrics such as revenue, sign-ups, time on site, etc. We saw this trend in our enterprise customers start about one year ago, driven by the fact that SEO is becoming a top-tier online channel with C-level executive visibility. Recently, we release BrightEdge Connect which brings SEO into the CMO’s dashboard and have seen incredible adoption in the marketplace.
2. How does that metric vary by industry? Or does it?
The metric indeed vary by industry. E-commerce sites will be focused on purchases, finance and insurance on sign ups, internet and media on page views and time on site. There is usually one main key performance indicator that drives the entire business and that is the one to focus on for SEO.
3. Should B2B marketers evaluate SEO differently than B2C? Are the tactics any different?
We have found that the biggest differences are not B2B vs B2C but come from the current status of your SEO and what you have to achieve to become competitive. For example, here are different tactics for two companies both in B2C: you might be a financial services company going after a small set of head terms or you might be an e-commerce site with a large product catalog targeting the long tail. In all cases, the tactics are similar: start with a visibility baseline, develop a roadmap that moves the needle quickly using existing assets as well new ones, and then start growing your SEO footprint. The details vary company by company.
4. As an SEO marketer myself, I find one of the hardest things to predict or forecast is traffic modeling & forecasting, especially within an existing campaign. Do you have any recommendations for how folks can evaluate opportunity cost within SEO (i.e. if I move from position 12 to position 10, how much traffic can I expect?)
We work with our customers to build this capability over time. We found that forecasting improvements and click-throughs is highly dependent on the specific situation. It depends on the industry, the type of keyword – purchase vs research, competitive landscape, and even the number of paid ads. Our recommendation is to get a baseline, understand why and how fast your metrics change when you optimize for organic search, and then apply to a forecasting model.
5. Do you have any platforms you can recommend to folks that provide a holistic approach to SEO, incorporating ranking reports, traffic analytics, sales/leads/revenue all into one package or does one exist?
This is exactly what we offer at BrightEdge! We have developed the first SEO platform that combines all these metrics but also provide the dashboards, keyword research, recommendations, and workflow all in one place to execute on SEO. In a nutshell, we were the first to make SEO as easy to manage as PPC.
6. How do you think Google Instant will effect SEO or what do you think the future of SEO looks like?
There has been a lot of speculation on the effects of Google Instant on SEO. We expect changes in keyword volumes with some searches for longer multi-token keywords moving to the shorter keywords suggested by Google Instant. With only two weeks of data and the fact that many searches are not impacted by Google Instant, the effects have been marginal. We are monitoring the situation with our enterprise customers but right now the news is that there are no news.
At BrightEdge, we believe the future of SEO is brighter than ever. We are seeing an acceleration in demand for our SEO platform from companies across the board. You might have seen our recent announcements with MySpace, Symantec, VMware to name a few. Using SEO for driving relevance and authority is not going away any time soon, regardless of the changes at the point of search.
Many thanks for Jim Yu and Albert Gouyet for contributing to this article.
Disclosure: I’ve been given a press pass to attend and cover SES Chicago.
September 10 2010
Google Instant: A User and Marketer’s Perspective
A few days ago saw the big launch of Google Instant, and if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s a totally different search experience compared to the Google of old. Initial reaction was mixed from SEO is dead to SEO lives on to my initial reaction that in fact, it’s just plain annoying. Now that all the initial reactions are out of the way, let’s take a step back and analyze how this really effects paid and organic search from a user experience standpoint, as well as a marketer’s standpoint.
Paid Search (User)
From a user standpoint, the sponsored listing haven’t changed. The only difference now is that users may see many more variations of them as they type their query. Now, these will probably pass them by without them noticing much, but they still rapidly change. I’m sure Google did extensive user testing on this, but we’ll see how this plays out over time. I think you’ll hear from some that they don’t like the new interface or that it’s too distracting, but it’s still new, so we’ll see over time.
Paid Search (Marketer)
From a marketing perspective, what the heck do you do now? Stay the course? Change your whole strategy? Well, my early thought is that head terms will start to play a much bigger influence on user behavior. As you type, Google “guesses” what your going to type next. So if I type “auto” it guesses that I mean “autozone”, “auto trader”, “auto parts” and a few others. It’s these guesses, much as a I said about Google Suggest, will start to sculpt user awareness around what Google recommends. As a result, my early impression is that long tail is going to take a bit of a hit. Users are inherently lazy and with Google’s redesigned interface, it’s as if they are funneling people towards top brands or sites and it’s because of that, I think some users are going to bail out earlier than they might have without the suggestions and predictions. There have been some analysts that have said Google Instant may be a play to game the volume based measurement system and make Google appear larger than it is already. I don’t think that’s it entirely. I think this play is about increasing profits faster than they would have otherwise. Here’s my theory – cost per click bids have only been increasing as more competition goes into the marketplace. This is good for Google and bad for marketers, however, as head terms become more and more expensive, good marketers have been focusing more on the tail where more qualified customers often lie. This is bad for Google, but good for marketers. With this platform change, Google has said “Ok marketers, we’re going to push your customers back up the keyword funnel to shorter head terms and if you want to follow, you have to pay the price.” Am I wrong? Possibly, but tell me it doesn’t make sense on some level.
Organic Search (User)
Same interface as before for the user, only now the results flash by rapidly as the user types. The other difference I noticed is that when a user moves from page to page, it looks like the entire page fades out and fades in with new results, as opposed to a complete page refresh. I assume this is related to some AJAX magic Google is using to serve up these results in the first place on the fly.
Organic Search (Marketer)
From a marketing perspective, I think the suggestions are also going to effect the head terms more positively than tail terms. For authoritative, high ranking sites who rank well for head terms, I don’t think you need to worry about much. Continue to do what you’ve been doing, however, if you are a long tail site that subsists primarily on long tail terms, I’d be wary of these changes. Based on my experience, I’m going to assume that some users who are unfocused are going to start typing their query, up comes some results which are close to what they were looking for, and they click away never fully realizing the long tail search they may have entered if the suggestions and predictions not appeared. Again, this is early and we’ll have to see what the industry nets out, but that’s my initial reaction.
And if you’re looking for additional opinions and resources, check out this complete breakdown of industry analysts and form your own opinion or look at Google’s take on it on the AdWords Blog or the AdWords FAQ. Have you seen any changes initially to your campaign results? What do you think is the future of this “feature”?
Image courtesy of svenstorm
August 27 2010
August 26 2010
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