Several members of the PPI team attended the SEMPO Atlanta event, “The Future of Web Analytics”. Three speakers provided great insights on analytics to the packed house at the Google office in Atlanta. SEMPO members join us via webcast from Chicago, New York, and Santa Monica. Provided all the opportunities for a huge technology fail, the evening went remarkably well. Also, it was great to meet SEMPO Global president, Chris Boggs. I’ve always been impressed by the amount of support our local chapter receives. Read more…
Ask any SEO expert and they’ll tell you that link-building is the least fun and most tedious part of the job that we all otherwise love. There are a myriad of ways to generate inbound links for a website, including creating good “linkbait” content, optimized press releases, social media, directories, article marketing, partner links, authoritative links, and more. Any link-building campaign worth its salt must also include analyzing who’s linking to other relevant sites (industry sites, competitors and such) and attempting to get links from their link sources too.
To say this is a chore is an understatement. It involves using a search engine or software tool to download the links pointing to another site – there may be hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of links. Then someone has to go through those links by hand to take a look at the sites they’re on and determine if the site’s good quality and likely to link to their site. And then they need to dig around to find the site owner’s contact information and email or call them to ask for a link. All this has to be tracked, as a great deal of follow-up is usually required. It’s an incredibly important thing to do; unfortunately it’s also very time-consuming.
Read more…
I’m asking this as a personal question about your search habits – this isn’t a blog post on how to actually conduct an online search. Stop and think about it for a second. Step back a bit and think about how you use search on a personal basis on the weekends and at night when you’re not working. And this isn’t a rhetorical question – really think about it. You might learn something.
My search habits have evolved quite a bit during the five years I’ve been a search marketer. I used to pride myself on the number of ways I could conduct a search on the same topic and find all sorts of different results. I’d show off to my family – “Look honey. Here’s a BETTER way to search for a condo at the beach.” And then I’d launch into a tutorial of how to conduct searches and get the most relevant results. I’d explain about relevancy to the search query, ramble on about backlinks and how sites get ranked organically, and pontificate on the differences between paid and organic results. My family and friends were astounded by my abilities – or at least I think they were.
Now, however, I must admit I’ve become a lazy searcher. Read more…
Google has recently reclassified link data in Webmaster Tools. The latest update is designed to closely align your backlinks with how you define internal and external links. Due to this major change, many sites can expect to see a decrease in external links and an increase in internal links, depending on how your site is arranged.
Previously, links that were categorized as internal had to start with your site’s exact URL. If they started with something other than your site’s exact URL then they were considered external links. For example, if you entered your site as www.prominentplacement.com/bestSEMfirm/Google , links from www.prominentplacement.com/bestSEMfirm/Google/Professionals would be considered internal, but links from prominentplacement.com/bestSEMfirm would be considered external. As such, links from www.prominentplacement.com and prominentplacement.com would be considered external.
Here is a quick lesson on how Webmaster Tools views different types of domains Read more…
We’ve written before about why advertisers should typically run pay-per-click ads on keywords that are already ranking high organically. Still not convinced? Want to test your own results? Our friend and colleague Brad Geddes has published an excellent article entitled Paid vs. ‘Free’ Clicks: When to Buy a Keyword that Organically Ranks #1.
The article outlines specific steps for testing whether or not you should buy particular keywords. It will allow you to compare profitability for a keyword when you’re ranking #1 organically only vs. when you’re running PPC at the same time as ranking #1 organically. The test can also address any cannibalization concerns you may have.
Finally, landing pages are discussed, giving you a way to test the conversion rate of SEO landing pages (which are typically regular pages on the site) against specific PPC landing pages. Most of the time, it makes sense to use PPC for all organic keywords, and to build custom PPC landing pages…but not always, and here are instructions for how you can test this.
I was recently interviewed for the Business Leader Daily Report radio show. Host Wade Taylor and I spent an hour chatting about Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising for businesses, ranging from the basics to new developments in search marketing and social media. The interview is broken up into four segments for easy listening. To listen, go to Business Leader Daily Report and scroll down to the 8/15 date.
We’ve always said that smart marketers should undertake both Search Engine Optimization AND Pay-Per-Click campaigns together. (In fact, one of our newsletters last summer was on this very topic – check out “Why Should I Run PPC Ads On That Keyword? I Already Rank High On It Organically!”)
Our friend Lindsay Blankenship at Razorfish, along with her colleague Sonali Sureka, backs us up with an excellent article based on primary research: Paid and Organic Search: Why the Marriage of Both is Important. Key findings include:
- Over half of conversions and revenue that are credited to Paid Search happen after the customer had previously found and visited the site from an Organic listing within the previous week. In other words, prospects are searching and clicking on organic listings first (there’s your SEO), and later searching again and clicking on a paid listing (there’s your PPC) to make a purchase.
- This effect is even stronger with branded keywords – 81% of those who converted on a Paid Search ad running on a branded keyword had already found and visited the site through an Organic listing.
- The value of taking a Paid Search spot away from a competitor can even be measured in terms of revenue – for every increase in a PPC ad’s ranking (that generated a click), revenue increased 10%. Alternately, it decreased by about 12% when competitors ads were more prominent, showing a sharper decline in revenue when you let competitors trump you.
Don’t miss additional details in Paid and Organic Search: Why the Marriage of Both is Important.
Let’s say you set a goal of doubling the number of leads your website generates. Sounds ambitious – how are you going to get there? There are two very different approaches:
Double the amount of traffic coming to your website, or
Double the conversion rate (so that twice as many visitors become leads).
It’s generally easier to do the latter than the former. Doubling website traffic – assuming you’re not starting from zero – can be quite daunting. As well as potentially expensive. But often, doubling your conversion rate is attainable (again, depending where you’re starting from). And…they don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Let’s look at a couple of examples. Read more…
If your website serves a lead generation purpose, you should have a rough idea of what an average lead is worth to you. This information can help you and your marketing agencies ensure they’re not overspending to generate online leads. There are two pieces of information you need to know in order to figure out the average value of a lead. They are:
The average percentage of leads that close and become paying customers, and
The average value of a customer. Note that this latter figure can be looked at two ways: Read more…
Google+ (“Google plus”), a new social network, launched about two weeks ago. Although there was much cynicism surrounding the launch (given Google’s late entry into social media and their failed efforts with Google Wave and Google Buzz), early reviews are quite positive and millions have joined Google+ already, despite the fact that it’s still “invitation only.” We wrote last time about Google’s “+1” button and how it affects search engine marketing – the odd naming of “+1” makes more sense now that we know it’s part of Google+.
So what does Google+ mean for search marketers and how can we leverage it to drive more website traffic, leads and revenue?
On the Search Engine Optimization side…
Social media activity around a piece of content is always positive – it generates posts, links, shares, tweets, likes, +1s, etc. So having this kind of activity happening directly on a Google property will presumably help popular content rank high organically on Google. This is the opposite of Facebook, whose content is mostly in a “walled garden” – behind a password and unavailable to search engines. Read more…
