Kevin Hill

M Posted 13 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

My name is Kevin Hill, and I run the SEM and E-Commerce for a company in a niche marketplace for safety products.  Prior to that, I ran the SEM programs for Harbor Freight Tools, and was responsible for over 47MM in revenue tied to my programs.  In both of these positions, I was tapped to help guide social media marketing both formally and informally.  I am going to share with you the guidelines to success with Social Media marketing that have helped me in my quest for successful digital marketing and buyer's journey. 

Rule 1: You Can Participate - Not Control

Social media is a place where people go to talk about the things that matter to THEM, not you.  What this means is that ,often times, the discussion might be about how a customer is using a chainsaw as a nose hair trimmer - and your legal department is having fits about you  even responding to this kind of post.  Most likely, they are begging and pleading with you to get this post off of Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media sites because of liability issues. What is important to realize is that you don't control the content or content of the conversations about your products or services.  Let me repeat that.  It's important. YOU DON'T CONTROL THE MESSAGE. What you do control is how you participate in the message.  Can you add value to the discussion?  Can you answer people's questions? Can you be helpful and responsive?  Can you do it in a professional, yet human way?

Rule 2: Develop A Ruleset

Now that you know you can't control the message or subject - what can you do? Develop a ruleset around what subjects you will post about, what you will respond to, and how you will deal with angry or negative posts.  I suggest something like the following: Tone

1. Will use proper grammer
2. Will use language your customers use
3. Will be neutral in tone

Content

1. Will be informative and relate to the discussion at hand
2. Posts about our products or services will generally be human interest stories of how our products were used, or professionals in our industry have succeeded/won or done something newsworthy
3. Posts like the above could start with "Like this if:..."
4. Use stories that are of interest, or that ask questions

Subject matter that will not be posted

1. Involving improper use of products
2. Political in nature
3. Sexual in nature (unless that's your business)
4. Abusive, angry or attacking
5. Foul language

Dealing with Angry Posts

1. Posts that attack others, contain foul language will be deleted, and we will post a comment acknowledging the deletion and reason for the deletion
2. Posts that reference politics, sexual issues will not be responded to
3. Responses will ask the person in question to contact customer service at xxx-xxx-xxxx so that we can help the customer directly.

Rule 3: You control what you post

The 3rd rule is pretty obvious.  You control what, how and when you post.  For Twitter, you probably need to assign someone who uses Twitter regularly, and is willing to respond to a Tweet within seconds of it going live.  That means they monitor it during all their waking hours.  It also means you need to assign this task to someone who understands your policy of how you post, when you post, and what you post (See Rule 2). When responding to customer posts, it's critical that you participate in the discussion at hand, and don't try to "sell" something right away.  Help the conversation along by simply participating and being human.  Social media is about developing a place where people can talk about your products, and sharing with people how your products matter to them in their personal lives. It's also simply about sharing what's of interest at the moment.  Think about posting things that are interesting, may generate questions and responses.  Find someone who knows how to be the center of a conversation, and how to enliven a conversation. This person will know how to turn up the volume, and get activity to increase with interesting stories, tidbits, and posts.

Rule 4: Don't sell things in social media

Unless you are asked to, don't sell.  When someone is having a discussion about how a ladder might be used, it is totally appropriate to post with some details about the differences between fiberglass and aluminum ladders, and include a link to your website where you sell ladders.  It's not appropriate to interrupt a discussion about puppy house training, with the said ladder post, or an offer for 20% off dog collars.  When a post comes around asking about "where can I find a coupon for...", by all means, post a coupon offer.  But don't post that coupon offer just because there is a conversation about the best way to use a DeWalt power drill motor for driving skateboards. Unless you are involved in the conversation and proved that your not just a vulture trying to hawk products, avoid such posts.

Rule 5: Post often. Post Frequently.

You have the ability to post content to your social media page and accounts.  Make interesting posts about your company, your staff, and your products and how people are using them.  Make the posts often, and make them frequent.  Look at what posts your customers respond to, and post relevant content.  Be genuine in your posts. People have very good marketing detectors today.  They'll spot a sales pitch miles away and filter it out.

Rule 6: Monitor your Social media

Watch your social media regularly. Visit it.  See what your customers are saying. Learn from that, and use it to find and spot trends.  Do you see quite a few posts about how customer service is abusive? Perhaps it's time to start monitoring phone calls and seeing if there is any truth to that rumor.  Do you see a Tweet complaining that you are always out of stock on flux capacitors?  Perhaps a call to Purchasing might shed some light about the situation, and you can Tweet back with some information about the issue?  Get involved.  Respond to your fans, and they will respond to you.

Rule 7: It's not hard, it's just constant

Social media is not hard.  It's constant.  That means you need to start living and breathing your social media.  Fans will instantly detect fake interest, attempts to control the medium, or blatent attempts to monetize all social interactions.  Be real, Be human, and start talking to your customers.

Rule 8: Never censor (unless you have to)

And then, if you do have to censor, be transparent about it.  If someone posts a comment about a subject that is clearly illegal, wrong or calling names, feel free to delete the post or edit it.  But be 100% clear about what you did and why you did it.  For example - let's say someone posts an attack against another poster that is laced with expletives.  You'd probably be justified in removing or editing the post.  And along with that, post a comment saying "This post was deleted and/or edited because it did not follow guidelines found here.  Specifically this post used inappropriate language and attacked another poster.  We hate to do this, but when this happens, we will always let you know."

Rule 9: Have Fun!

Most of all, remember, social media is more like a conversation than a sales pitch.  You are extremely high up in the sales funnel, and your goal is to bring customers to think of your brand, product and entity in a ZMOT way.  You won't get sales immediately, but I promise you, if you actively post to your social accounts on a regular basis, and your stories that you share are of interest to your audience - you will grow - and more people will be reachable by your media. Feel free to test your knowledge with BrightEdge Digital Marketing Quiz or SEO Quiz.

Nag

M Posted 13 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

This week Andy Betts had an opportunity to catch up with the multi-talented Mike Grehan, publisher of Search Engine Watch and ClickZ and producer of the SES international conference series. Mike shared his thoughts on the successful SES Chicago conference, the CMO agenda, the role of reputed digital marketing evangelist Avinash Kaushik at SES, the importance of social, authorship and integrated marketing, and, of course, DJing!  

SES Chicago – The Hidden Diamond

Andy: First of all, Mike thanks for taking the time to talk today. How was SES Chicago?

Mike: Absolutely fantastic. The great thing about SES Chicago is that it’s a hidden diamond. In the US, everybody seems to know what they call the larger shows, which are New York and San Francisco as it is now, San Jose previously. I think people have had this tendency to think of Chicago as being the smaller show with anywhere between 1,500 & 3,500 people. It’s sometimes easier to network and work with people at a show this size than it is at New York or San Francisco, where you might even be talking about 6,000 people. Certainly the networking, the content and feedback has been fabulous.

Andy: Any common theme that you managed to pick out there?

Mike: We’ve been working with Avinash Kaushik, a major industry blogger, a bestselling author and, more notably, Google’s digital marketing evangelist. He’s the keynote speaker for the first time ever doing the whole series globally, and he changes the presentation often. He’s spoken about mobile, local and, in Chicago, he had a heavy focus on Facebook. This was interesting because we also had a session on the new Facebook Exchange as well. So, there was great content around, ‘How do we do better marketing with Facebook’?

From Search To Social

Andy: Social’s definitely a hot topic. You’ve got a new book coming out soon called “From Search To Social: Marketing To The Connected Consumer”. Is that where you see the market heading? Away from search and into social or is it more a convergence of search and social?

Mike: It is more about the convergence. I’m not really saying that you either do search or you do social. I don’t believe that anybody actually wakes up in the morning and says, “I think I’ll go and do some searching.” Everybody’s task oriented. Sure, we’ve gone to places like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or Bing to look for answers, and it’s been a little bit of a solitary thing. But it’s becoming much more of a group event more than anything else, and there’s a lot more research that goes on. People tend to tap into their own networks first of all, and these are the kind of networks where people feel confident because they are friends and the information is much more verifiable. It’s probably easier for them to ask a bunch of people that they know about the best pizza place In New York than it is to look at ten blue links in a search engine and try to figure out themselves. So, I think search is always going to be in there. It’s just going to be a different kind of search. I think it’s more about social search. The title as I say, it’s not meant to be misleading, but it’s how we’ve moved and progressed or evolved from using a search engine into what you would call social search now.  

Optimize For Humans, Not Machines

Andy: Another question that I’ve got which is more about the big picture. We talk about SEO, social and full on digital market integration, which is very internal-focused. What about the notion of connected marketing, looking at the consumer before marketing techniques? Do you think, in 2013, we will look at not what online discipline that we use and, instead, focus on optimizing for the consumer, not a search engine?

Mike: I believe that we’ve moved a long way from working in silos. I’ve been known as an online marketer but, frankly, I don’t know whether I am online marketer, digital marketer, web marketer. Maybe we’ll come up with a terminology one day.

Andy: We are what the client wants us to be!

Mike: Exactly. I’ve been online for 18 years. When I started my online marketing consultancy, email was the killer app. So, we were all email marketers and then search, which had been geeky, became the big deal. For that ten-year period, the reason that everybody went to Google to do marketing, and SEO and paid search became so big is that’s where the audience was. Because the audience would wake up and they’d say, I want to find stuff online and Google was the answer. Now you can go to Facebook, you can go to Twitter, you can go to LinkedIn. You can do some search over at Google or at Bing. The opportunities are much greater in terms of the way we kind of interact. Just going back to what we said before, the whole notion of social media didn’t exist before. When you think about it we spend a lot of time optimizing web pages. I always thought that SEO was a very strange term, Search Engine Optimization. I’ve never met anybody who’s optimized a search engine! So, we optimize web pages and we’ve been doing that to get beyond some technical barriers that search engines had with crawlers back in the early day. And I think that was like the coolest thing to do to be the SEO. Now, search engines have become a lot smarter. Content management systems are a lot easier to work with than they used to before. I think we start thinking now about how do we optimize for human beings, and not for search engines. How do we develop something that’s beyond even just talking about content? How do you create an experience for the user? We should be thinking about how can we create a great experience for the end user as opposed to how do we just throw some content at them.  

Online Is Not Different – Just Bigger, Faster, Better!

Mike: We talk about online marketing as if it was something so remote and something entirely different from offline and yet it’s not - it’s the same human beings that we’re getting to. So, everything that we did offline before whether it was personal selling, public relations, advertising, trade show, outdoor advertising or PR- they all exist online. We’re doing basically the same thing. We may be able to do it bigger, better and faster, but it’s basically the same thing. I think what we were talking about just a few seconds ago about SEO and doing search and being an expert in that field, you do have to broaden it out and become much more of a marketing expert. Before I came online, I was working for advertising agencies and mainly buying press, radio, and television. If I’d sat down with one of our clients and said, “Right, we’re going to do PR and that’s it,” they would have been saying, “Well, what about advertising and what about sales promotions and those kind of things.” That’s why I think we’re moving away from people just being an expert at one thing. We have to become kind of multi-talented.  

The CMO Cares About Search

Andy: Shifting gears - as we see the growth of search and as it becomes more visible in the CMO’s office, what are CMOs saying to you about search and the future of search? Is it on their agenda now?

Mike: It is strange that we have this discussion now - I was just talking about how 70-75% of the people that come into SES are actually new to search. That doesn’t mean they’re new marketers, but they’re actually new to digital or online. We see a lot more brands coming in now, big brands and a lot of the titles that we see have moved from being the SEO Consultant to the Marketing Manager or the Marketing Director. And those titles are very interesting because when we talk to them as they come into the conference, they’re only now beginning to take all of this very seriously. So, I think the mindset is changing from, “Yeah, we have our press. We have our radio. We have our TV over here so we’re doing our marketing and then over here we’ve also got the internet.”  

Panda, Penguin & Too Many Eggs In A Basket

Andy: One of the things, in the light of Panda and Penguin, I hear a lot is the move to content marketing now, something that should go beyond the SEO side into all traditional, digital, or offline channels as described in the article 'SEO – Content | Confusion | Clarity'. Content and authorship are two very important things for next year. Have you got any thoughts on that? Is that the new SEO?

Mike: Let’s tackle the SEO side of it first of all. I believe with whatever Matt Cutts talks about Panda or a Penguin should worry only those who are trying game Google. We also hear a lot of people saying well I got hit by Panda or I got hit by Penguin and I’m just an innocent guy. Nine times out of ten if you talk to that innocent guy, they’ve tried something that was beyond the guidelines. If marketers think way beyond that and go back to what we were saying before - think about creating a great end user experience and just do good marketing, the likelihood they’re not going to get penalized for that is high. Post-Penguin, I hear a lot of ‘how do we get rid of links?’ Previously it was about paying for links. If you stop thinking about links so much and instead think about doing great marketing, that’s probably more productive. Do you know what you’ll get from great marketing? As a byproduct you will get good quality links and you’ll get great business. The other thing is, and this is really, really important, that if you spend so much time worrying about Google and Panda, the likelihood is that your business is not geared correctly. And what I mean by that is that somebody else owns more of your business than you do. We talked to some of the people who are hit by Panda and Penguin and they say they’ve lost up to 80% of their traffic. I would never as a marketer allow anybody to own that much of my business. People should have a good balance. You need to think about traffic from Google, Facebook, Twitter, offline efforts and other channels.  

Authorship, not having 20K followers, matters

Mike: Getting back to authorship - I don’t think it’s actually to do with the guy who writes the piece and who has the most Twitter followers. I don’t think it’s about who is the number one writer in the industry or the number one blogger. I actually think it’s more about the source, which is the author. I read a paper years and years ago about information retrieval and citation analysis. After digging in deeper, it was apparent that the source of where a publication appeared is what really matters. I think that Search Engine Watch is the author, not the guy who wrote the piece. From an information retrieval point of view, Google or any of the search engine look at a source as being the author. We write some great stuff over at Search Engine Watch. You write some great stuff over at Search Engine Watch, and the audience approves in terms of page views, usually the number of people that read that. All of those signals are a big thing for Google to go to. Search Engine Watch is a resource location. That’s more about the authorship I think than like, “Well that guy should get number one because he’s got 20,000 Twitter followers.  

SES, ClickZ, Search Engine Watch

Andy: You’ve given us great insight here Mike. I’d like to talk now about the SES series, Click Z and Search Engine Watch. I always looked at Click Z as broader and more strategic. It looks at digital. It looks at news. Search Engine Watch is more focused on search and social and tactics. Are you seeing an overlap in these audiences now and is there going to be a convergence of some of that content down the line?

Mike: I think there’s a very strong overlap with the audience and to be quite frank, the name and domain Search Engine Watch is a blessing and a curse at the same time. It’s a problem area because we don’t write only about search as Search Engine Watch used to and we cover search, social and broader digital marketing now. The name indicates otherwise. I guess the best way to sum it up is - Click Z has always been much more geared towards the bigger picture. It’s always been more about strategy than anything else, and Search Engine Watch has always been quite tactical. So, if you look at Click Z, you will probably see that our relationships and our content is definitely more towards people who are building and working with brands and also with agencies who are working and managing those brands. That’s more the buy side. If Click Z was saying this is what you should be doing, Search Engine Watch talks about how you should do it. In all likelihood, SES will look a lot more like Click Z Live, in terms of content, with the broadening of the audience profile.  

Big Brands vs Small Brands

Andy: You mentioned brands a few times today. I am curious to know your take on the whole debate about Google favoring big brands.

Mike: I’ll take an example, which just flashed, through my mind. Some time ago, there was this big furore in the industry with SEOs because Eric Schmidt said that If you want to do well at Google, then stop and build a brand, that it was more about brands. Maybe he was talking about the trust there than anything else, but a lot of people in the SEO industry started to say ‘wow, they’re only for the big brands’. And that’s not specifically what he was saying, but they seem to be so anti-brand while most SEOs spend a lot of their time on social media networking sites trying to build their personal brands!

Andy: Yeah, they’re trying to build their brand. In a sense, over the years gone by, they’ve worked with these brands and taught these brands how to build their companies. And the brands are slowly taking over which is why we see a change in the shift in the way that people manage and approach SEO from a consultancy or an agency perspective. I saw a lot of that at BrightEdge Share12 - brands talking about their approach to search and social, and how it fits in with their big brand and all their other departments. It will be interesting to see in 2013 how that develops.

Mike: I think companies like BrightEdge are enabling large corporations, enabling companies who are not essentially necessarily doing anything from a technical point of view that hasn’t been done before but educating them on how to do it to make online marketing work, to make it effective and to make it accountable. I think there’s a lot of stuff about search that people are beginning to realize now. This is how you do it on an enterprise level and instead of the CMO looking at search as being something much further down the line, he or see sees it as being the middle of the marketing mix.

Andy: Exactly and I think that’s why the format at Share12 worked well. Jonathan Allen from Search Engine Watch moderated the keynote and was excellent, it was a great discussion about Google and the Black Box. What made it more insightful was the fusion of the brand and expert perspectives.  

Musings On Being An Author & DJ

Andy: Writing a book must be a pretty daunting task with so much content and information out there. Have you got any tips? So, how did you get started?

Mike: I thought about where am I going to put all this information in my head. A book is the obvious thing. It has a lot to do with my background way before I got into marketing, I was in broadcasting in the UK and I worked in radio and television for a long time. I was actually a radio DJ and a club DJ before that and it’s a similar kind of thing. Why did I become a DJ? I use to have all of this great music and I knew so much about these artists and this entire music trivia that I carried around inside my head. I used to think, ‘where am I going to put this?’ So, I become a DJ to put it out there. Likewise with books! I’ve been threatening to write another book since ‘Search Engine Marketing and the Essential Desk Practice Guide’, and I’ve talked to a lot of publishers, who all want me to write another search book. I keep saying, “No I’ve done that”. ‘From Search To Social: Marketing To The Connected Consumer‘ is different. It looks at network theory, the way we come together as human beings. It’s about how the end user is changing, how we have a trans-media phenomenon. We consume media in an entirely different way than the way that we use to. So, marketing is changing not so much because of the technology or the devices that people are connected with. It’s changing because the consumer is changing and we have to adapt to that greater need from the consumer.

Andy: If it weren’t search, would you carry on as a DJ? Mike: I never thought of it that way. I remember after working for ten years in radio and television, and I was sitting in a studio and there was a commercial break. I was thinking to myself, ‘Just as this commercial break finishes, I shall push the fade on this mixing disc, some music will start, and I will say something totally banal’. At that point I thought, ‘Grehan, get yourself a proper job!’ So, I came out of it and now you have no idea how much I miss just being able to sit in that studio, play that music and say something banal again.

Andy: You never know in the future. It could be Mike Graham radio show.

Mike: Follow the golden oldies, exactly. Look at my eighties hairdo back again.

Andy: You can watch the development of search over the last ten year with a soundtrack of your times. You could soundtrack to it.

Mike: The Google soundtrack. Very good.

Andy: Then, a sort of mashup of all these different channels. So, you will have to do a bit of mixing and stuff like that towards the end.

Mike: We’re doing a bit of that now with your talk radio show here.

Andy: Yes. Well thanks a lot Mike. That was a great chat!  

About Mike Grehan

Mike Grehan is publisher of Search Engine Watch and ClickZ and producer of the SES international conference series. He is the current president of global trade association SEMPO, having been elected to the board of directors in 2010. Formerly, Mike worked as a search marketing consultant with a number of international agencies, handling such global clients as SAP and Motorola. Recognized as a leading search marketing expert, Mike came online in 1995 and is author of numerous books and white papers on the subject. He is currently in the process of writing his new book “From Search To Social: Marketing To The Connected Consumer” to be published by Wiley in 2013.  

About Andy Betts

Andy Betts has 12 years marketing, digital media and search marketing based experience working with many of the industry’s leading agencies and brands working across key strategic and marketing growth functions. Andy has been part of some the industries largest acquisitions such as Latitude (5years) £50m – DoubleClick Performics (2 years) $3.1bn – Google – Publicis/Vivaki Andy has worked at VP/Director level with brands such as – Google, MSN, Apple, HP, HSBC, United Airlines, Lexis Nexis, Saxo Bank, Motorola, American Express, Fidelity and Fidelity International. Andy also consults for start-ups on marketing and digital strategy whilst writing for many of the industries leading publications. You can reach Andy on Twitter as@andybetts1 and on LinkedIn.      

Nag

M Posted 13 years 4 months ago

t 9 min read

Last week, marketing thought leader Andy Betts chatted with Danny Sullivan, founder of Search Engine Land, Third Door Media and the SMX conference events. Danny recently received a lifetime achievement award at the Bend WebCAM conference--a well-deserved award to one of the true pioneers in technology, digital and search journalism. What ensued was quite an insightful discussion. Enjoy!  

Andy: First of all, I want to thank you, Danny, for giving me the opportunity to hear your thoughts on search, social and content, and how what happened in 2012 will impact what we do in 2013.  

2012 Redux – Panda & Penguin Are Not Designed To Hurt

Andy: I’ll start with the obligatory question. Obviously, 2012 has been the year of Panda and Penguin - do you think these changes have had a negative impact, as some people suggest, and does it favor big brands?  

Danny: I think that it’s favored some people to the degree that it’s hurt other people. For every time you have somebody who drops in rank, there’s somebody else who benefits, and the people who benefit never say anything to the people who run around and say, “The world is falling. No one gets to make it any longer.”  That’s not true. In particular, you have people who want to say that small businesses are being completely slammed by this and wiped out, but I think they don’t really understand what a small business is. For some of them a small business means, “I found a way to create a website to make money by being entirely on the internet and getting traffic from Google,” versus “I actually have a business that sells products and services, that I don’t just resell for other people, and I have a business that would survive or thrive if Google didn’t exist.”  And those small businesses are the bulk of the small businesses that are out there. If they are really being harmed by these Google changes, you would see outcry coming from politicians about this. Their constituents would be hearing about Google wiping these sorts of players off the board. So, I don’t really buy into this claim that the small businesses are being wiped out. In fact, it’s the same kind of thing you used to hear back in 2003 when we had Florida. - “Google is wiping out the small businesses. The level playing field is gone. You’re never going to be able to make it.” How did it manage that we got through Florida to the degree that we could have all those small businesses be around in order so that they could be wiped out over a decade later?  

Andy: That’s a great point.. There was a big outcry after Florida, which people tend to forget as they move to the next ‘challenge’, and I would almost say that a general reaction to Panda and Penguin has happened. The reality is that it has affected different people and different businesses in different ways. What is your take on this?  

Danny: To say that Panda and Penguin doesn’t affect big brands is not true. Demand Media took a huge slam off of Panda. About.com ended up getting sold, probably sold at a discount, because of the amount of traffic they lost off of Panda - About.com was owned by the New York Times, which is a big brand and a big trusted brand.  It’s not as simple as people want to make it out to be. I will say that Google and Bing, and search engines, in general, want to reward good brands. They want to reward good brands that are large and small, and they want to reward things that are going to give people a good experience. If people leave their search results and end up with a bad experience, they blame the search engine, not the destination site that they ended up on.  

2013 – More Of The Same & Different

Andy: That leads us to my next question. In Google’s pursuit of better quality, better content and better relevancy, what do you think they’re going to do in 2013, or what should they do next? Are we going to be looking out for a new update? What would it be called or what would it be focused on?  

Danny: I expect that 2013 will be more of the same - more updates designed to patch up all the problems that they have with the existing system that relies largely on analyzing links. What I think they need to do is fully make use of the social data and consider that as being the heart of what they’re going to use going forward. They have issues. They don’t feel like the social data is doing what they would like from it. They say it’s too early. You could have made the same two arguments about links, but you kept trying to use the links, and I think that the social data may give them more information than links do. What I do know is that the link data has become increasingly creaky.  

Andy: The relationship between social and search, and how you produce quality content, seems to have changed the role of SEO marketers and it’s essential that marketers dig deeper into search and social data to understand its relationship. I almost think that many people have seen Google updates and looked at the negative impacts, but really there’s this whole new opportunity when you start to look at the data points and the convergence of search content and social media. It’s no coincidence that we have seen a division of terms of how people at big brands do enterprise SEO compared to how they look at SEO for small and medium size companies. Any thoughts on this?  

Danny: I don’t know if that’s a new change. You’ve always had these kinds of divisions and, in fact, one of the dangers is that people who do SEO for a certain kind of business assume that everything they do makes sense for any kind of business. If you’re used to doing SEO for a small company, you may have to learn different tactics and understand different needs that a big company has. If you go in from one single website to a company that may run multiple websites in multiple languages, you need a different skill set that’s involved there as well as an ability to push out and make all sorts of changes.  The big SEO isn’t necessarily less nimble or as smart as the small SEO, and vice versa. They’re just dealing with a different environment. If you’re dealing with a big brand, you have real reasons to strongly consider whether or not you wan’t get into risky behavior, because that’s going to have a PR blowback on you if someone at the New York Times decides that “Hey, there’s this interesting search story that I should be writing about as it happens”. If you are selling actual products that get shipped and get moved out, you’re in a different range of needs and things that you have to do, and then it’s just about driving traffic to your website.  

Andy: Great point Danny. One of the things which isn’t necessarily new is obviously the growth of in-house SEO, whether that’s a big brand or a small brand. When you’re looking at the growth of in-house versus using a contractor or an independent agency, how do you think the career dynamics change there? Do you think SEOers need to look at how they work with agencies and with direct brands, or do you think that they need to rebrand as content marketers, as some people are doing?

Danny: I think that really depends on the individual. I think that there’s a lot to do just with SEO. Depending on what you’re doing, you can have a full time job just dealing with tactical on page technical SEO alone. Certainly though, SEO is enhanced when you are working with a content creation team and you’re working with a social marketing team. If you’re doing some of that, and working it all in together as well, I think it will make for a better success with your SEO. One person is probably going to find it a struggle to turn themselves into being a content marketer because they’re doing the SEO, they’re running the blog post, they’re doing the social media promotion and they find they’re doing five different jobs. I think it really is going to depend on the job that you have at hand, and the amount of time that you have involved, to decide whether or not you can actually do all those things. If you can’t, the bigger questions are whether you are aware that these other things need to be part of the SEO process, and how do you work with others to make that happen?  

More Search & Social 

Andy: One of the things that people ask me in my role is about this relationship between search and social, and a lot of people talk on a very tactical level about Likes, Tweets and close ones. Do you think this is going to be more of a broader agenda going into 2013 and are people going to start to look at it as more a strategic consideration rather than “Let’s just react and see how we can link search and social together”?  When Google launched Google Plus many (at Google) said it was going to be the be all and end all, and the future was all about social signals. If you recall, we had a chat about this in the summer. What do you think is going to happen in 2013?  

Danny: In terms of people saying we should do more search and social stuff?  

Andy: Yes – and how do you think Google is going to look at Google Plus in 2013? When we talk about influence and social, do you think the new ranking factor is going to be focused around looking at social signals?  

Danny: I think the social signal is going to continue to grow. I don’t know that we’re going to a tipping point in 2013. I think Google and Bing have been very cagey and hesitant to use those social signals, although they’re tapping into them more and more. I think then, that anybody who cares about ranking well on Google absolutely needs to be using Google Plus. It’s so integrated with everything that they’re doing, and we can see that it can have some direct relations now as well. It’s stunning to me that people still don’t do that, and I think the people who are doing it now are going to be well ahead of others.

Andy: Yeah – I do see some people adopting and looking at the influence of social signals and they can come back with some pretty compelling evidence that is a big influence. That seems to me to be a big part of SEO programs now-- looking at the influence of social signals and developing content plans. It’s not just technical and it’s not just link building. How do you think the social graph compares to the way the link graph grew over the last ten years? Is it growing as rapidly? Is it something that you think needs more attention?  

Danny: I think we probably have more extensive social graph at this point than we have of link graph. It does need more attention and the search engines don’t seem to be tapping into it anywhere near to the degree that they could.  

Introducing SMX Social; SMX Content too?

Andy: One other thing I wanted to speak to you about was the launch of SMX Social in Las Vegas on the 6th of December. Bearing in mind we have just been talking about social and the social graph, could you tell us a little bit more about the show? Was it built to reflect the need of the audience, and do you feel that’s the way the market is heading?

Danny: We’ve done SMX Search shows for a very long time, and we’ve actually started doing a social media show as well, because we wanted to be able to explore social media without having to be tied completely into search. The regular SMX shows are really very search-centric. Everything needs to be about search because there’s a lot to explore, but people do want to know about some of these developments that are going on in social as well. The idea behind doing the social media marketing show is that people can stretch out, and explore, and understand more about how to do better on the social media promotion front without necessarily having to link all that back into search, and there’s plenty to explore there.  

Andy: Is that something that you’re going to launch into other countries as well and launch over in Europe?

Danny: Potentially we could. We tend to work with partners in other countries. Right now, where we have SMX shows, social is always a big part of the discussion.

Andy: And do you actually think at some stage we’ll see an ‘SMX Content’ in the near future conference?  

Danny: Possibly. We look at the different areas. The Marketing Land site covers all sorts of things like content marketing, and so it’s possible to do that kind of show as well if it makes sense for us to do it—if there’s an audience that’s interested in it.  

Andy: I suppose the challenge is addressing the different audience profiles and producing content around the overlap between specific search knowledge, social integration and then content integration.  

Danny: We attract different audiences. The people who come up to the SMX East Show and the SMX West Show are largely geographically different.  It’s not the same person who says, “Well, which show should I go to?” We do two shows in two different places because there are groups of people who want to go to one place or the other. With social media marketing, we have maybe some overlap of people who go to a regular SMX Show, but then you have a whole new audience that’s saying, “Oh, I want to learn about social media marketing,” and might not have been to one of the search shows because they need to be more social media marketers than search marketers.  

Do This, Not That In 2013

Andy: Just before we wrap up, Danny, one of the things that I think people would really like to hear is - out of all the changes we’ve seen in 2012, what do you think has been the biggest change that people need to focus on and adapt to in 2013?

Danny: If you’re a search marketer, I would be sure that you are staying very aligned with social media marketing efforts. I think that’s very, very important. I couldn’t say enough about that. I think you should also be paying attention to the semantic developments that are going on in authorship, the rich snippet stuff that’s available.

Andy: I totally agree. I also think that as SEO marketers focus on quality content, we may also see more on page content optimization as well. I think it’s going to be an interesting year in 2013, in terms of how people adapt to integrate their SEO efforts. Is there anything we’re missing? We talked about updates under Penguin, and Panda, influence, authorship, local, social, and mobile. Is there anything that you think, maybe off the radar, any curve balls out there that we need to keep an eye on for 2013?  

Danny: I think that's the gist of it really.  

Danny: The only other thing that I would add is that people really need to pay attention to what’s going on in mobile. People are continuing to use their mobile devices to find content and I think the key is not about ‘what’s the right mobile SEO I need to do’. Instead, it’s about what’s happening when they get to your site and is your site going to be friendly to them in a mobile situation.  

Andy: For sure - everyone talks about the year of mobile. I’m excited to see how local and mobile develop next year. I think there’s so much that’s going to be driven by mobile over the next two or three years.  

Danny Sullivan – Reader, Write, Journalist, Wannabe-teacher

Andy: I really appreciate you taking the time to do this. Now, let’s get personal as I know readers would love some general insight from you. Obviously you write a lot, which probably means you read a lot. So, I’m wondering if there’s anything that you could share about what you’ve learned from other industries outside of this industry-whether it’s authors or even a fiction novel. Could you recommend a book to read that has influenced you in the market, but not a book about our industry?  

Danny: I don’t do a lot of nonfiction reading. When I’m done for the day, I want to just relax. I read a lot of science fiction. I don’t have a good book to recommend to people. I would suggest that anybody who wants to understand more about Google, read the trilogy of The Search by John Battelle. Read Googled by Ken Auletta and then also read Steven Levy’s In the Plex. I think those are all essential readings for people who want to understand Google more and search.

Andy: So - you write, you research, you report, you organize events, you speak—that’s a lot to do. How do you manage all this time? Is there any advice you can give to people that are bandwidth strapped? How can they mirror some of the things that you do in the success that you’ve had?  

Danny: I’m fortunate that I have a great team of people I work with. So, find good people and trust in them to do their jobs--that’s one good thing. And part of that also means learning to let go. There are stories I want to write that I realize that I can’t write. I’d like to have time to write it, and other people will do just as well. I don’t try to let email dominate my life. I try to deal with each email message I get when I read it rather than letting it build up. If you can answer it, you answer and if you can’t, you delete and move on. I’m very organized, I guess, and try to prioritize things. It also helps that I write fast.  

Andy: You do write fast. Finally. if you weren’t in search and journalism, where do you think you would be? Would you be a NASCAR racer or would you be an astronaut?  

Danny: I might be a teacher. Yeah, possibly a teacher. I’d like to say I want to be an author, but I don’t know if I have the creativity.  

Andy: I’m sure you would. That’s it, Danny – thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it!  

About Danny Sullivan

About Andy Betts

Andy Betts has 12 years marketing, digital media and search marketing based experience working with many of the industry’s leading agencies and brands working across key strategic and marketing growth functions. Andy has been part of some the industries largest acquisitions such as Latitude (5years) £50m - DoubleClick Performics (2 years) $3.1bn - Google - Publicis/Vivaki Andy has worked at VP/Director level with brands such as - Google, MSN, Apple, HP, HSBC, United Airlines, Lexis Nexis, Saxo Bank, Motorola, American Express, Fidelity and Fidelity International. Andy also consults for start-ups on marketing and digital strategy whilst writing for many of the industries leading publications. You can reach Andy on Twitter as @andybetts1 and on LinkedIn.

Nag

M Posted 13 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

The hospitality sector is a huge focus vertical for BrightEdge. Several of the largest and most prestigious global hotel brands use BrightEdge S3 for SEO. This post is part of a 2-part series discussing why SEO is such a critical element of hospitality marketing and how global hospitality leaders like Marriott succeed in SEO. SEO is one of the most productive channels for hotels trying to boost online reservations. Our friends at the reputed digital marketing agency HeBS Digital did a neat study that sheds further light on this. The study titled 'The Smart Hotelier‟s Guide to 2012 Digital Marketing Budget Planning' tells us that:

1. The online channel matters most - As part of its study, HeBS Digital looked at data across 46 of the top global hotel brands and studied conversion rates across 3 channels - Internet Booking, Travel Agent Bookings & Voice Bookings. Not surprisingly, the online channel is the most productive channel accounting for 54% of the bookings - more than the total from Travel Agent and Voice Channels.

2. Online is the fastest growing channel - The share of online channel bookings has grown 25% since 2007 while those of travel agents and voice bookings has collectively decreased. Clearly, this growth has been at the expense of bookings from the other channels, including Voice Bookings whose share plummeted from 75% in 2007 to 24.1% in 2011. The next section illustrates how the growth of the online channel is a mixed bag.  

3. Direct website bookings are more profitable for hotels - Online travel agencies account for 31.8% of these bookings. Reservations originating on the websites of these online agencies impose lead to distribution costs for hotels. In 2010, these costs amounted to $2.5 Billion. Clearly, online travel agencies help reach more customers globally but this reach comes at a cost. 4.Hotels need to drive conversions on their website - As the Hotelier's Guide suggests, the digital marketing budget 'needs to focus on the Direct Online Channel to allow hoteliers to “Own the customer”, stay competitive and reverse the troubling trend of the OTA's growing market share'. The study then assesses the online marketing methods that can help hotels 'own the customer'. With 65.8% ROI, SEO is one of the most rewarding. Also, social media matter with a 43% ROI. This is where we come in.

Helping Hospitality Leaders Like Marriott Achieve Global SEO Solutions

Our goal is help companies drive more conversions from web sites, search engines and social networks. Clearly, there is a huge need in the hospitality industry and we responded with broad and deep functionality addressing the specific needs of the hospitality sector. The best way to understand why so many leading global hotel brands rely on BrightEdge for global SEO solutions is to hear what these brands have to say. I am excited to share this video by Luisa Escobar, Senior Manager of Global SEO at Marriott, talking about how they rely on BrightEdge for global SEO solutions spanning 3,500 properties.

Nag

M Posted 13 years 5 months ago

t 9 min read

Which iconic brand is named after a creek, which ran behind a founder's home in Los Altos, California? Which company is the ranked second among the list of Fortune World’s Most Admired Software Companies for 2012?

Which company created the file format that is now the gold standard for accessing documents independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems? Well, the last question is a give-away - the file format is PDF and the company in question is Adobe. We are proud of our association with Adobe, one of the most reputed and most innovative global brands - Adobe is a BrightEdge customer and partner.  

Adobe Uses BrightEdge For Global Enterprise SEO Success

Adobe's online marketing is among the most sophisticated across industries. Here are some stats about online marketing at Adobe:

1. 70% of total Adobe marketing spend is on online marketing
2. Adobe online marketing spans 30+ domains, subdomains, & microsites, 1.8M pages, 10M keywords, 14K ad copy rotations and 1000+ landing pages.
3. Adobe is a truly global company with more than half of its revenue earned outside the United States.

Adobe leans on BrightEdge for global SEO success and we are so excited to be an integral part of Adobe's advanced marketing machine. We provide Adobe with the ultimate insight into SEO, managing PPC and SEO together, and driving greater impact of Facebook and Twitter on SEO. Don't just take it from us - hear Dave Lloyd, Global SEO Manager of Adobe talk about it on the sidelines of BrightEdge Share12:  

Adobe & BrightEdge Partnership Helps Companies Manage PPC & SEO Together

BrightEdge is an Adobe-certified integration partner. We integrate with the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite including Adobe SiteCatalyst and Adobe SearchCenter+ via Adobe's latest integration API, Genesis 3.0. Joint customers of Adobe & BrightEdge are able to drive greater total ROI from PPC and SEO through side-by-side insights into BrightEdge SEO performance metrics, Adobe web analytics, and both organic and paid search results across both companies.

 This integration is a powerful tool for companies seeking to optimize their SEO and PPC channels together. For example, the digital marketing leader for agency HeBS Digital used Adobe-BrightEdge integration to drive a 63% increase in revenue from online reservations for Loews Hotels.   

Adobe-BrightEdge Relationship - A Win For Our Customers

Our close relationship with Adobe is a huge win for our customer community. Addressing the needs of one of the most advanced marketing teams will lead to even greater BrightEdge SEO Innovations. Our integration partnership will ensure that our customers will continue to drive cross-channel ROI as user preferences change and the digital marketing landscape evolves. The real winner in everything we do, as always, is the BrightEdge customer! Take our digital marketing quiz to test your knowledge and your understanding of becoming a digital marketing leader yourself.

Nag

M Posted 13 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

We were at SES San Francisco recently and had the opportunity to talk to Simon Heseltine, SEO thought-leader and head of organic search and training across all AOL and Huffington Post Media Group properties, including Engadget, Huffington Post, and Daily Finance. Heseltine is a frequent speaker at conferences and teaches SEO at Georgetown University as part of the university's digital media management program.  We were quite pleased to chat with him on the sidelines of the event about his thoughts on SES, the future of digital marketing and making the case for SEO. Here is a quick transcript.  

SES San Francisco A-Ha Moments

Nag: How has SES been so far?

Simon: I don’t always give generic responses but one big reason to come to SES is the whole networking aspect.  Depending on your level, you’re not always going to get a lot of stuff from the full sessions but what you will get are those nuggets of information, which you’re just not going to find elsewhere.

Nag: What was the highlight of Matt Cutts’ session?

Simon: The keynote?  For one, it was the first time it had all those guys (Matt Cutts, Incisive Media Global VP Mike Grehan, Danny Sullivan from SMX and Search Engine Land, and Brett Tabke, from the PubCon) up on stage together, talking. There were some interesting statements that were made and it’s all over the Twitter feed. I was particularly interested in that last question which was about duplicate content across different TLD’s. What Matt said isn’t necessarily what I always see but, in some respects, it’s good to understand what they believe is how things are working. That gives us a chance to let them know that that is not what we see, which gives them the opportunity to make some further tweaks. We can go back to Google and say “Okay, that’s not what we see happening with these particular properties and here are a few examples” and that way we’re helping each other.

Nag: So, this is a case of the algorithm not functioning as intended by Google?

Simon: In my experience, with the duplicate content across international TLDs, I’m not necessarily seeing the home domain, the one with the TLD for that country, ranking for that particular item. I’m seeing the US site ranking for some search terms, which is an issue when I want the individual country sites or places to rank. We want our .co.uk to be shown to the UK users. Obviously, people have the ability to go and look at content on the other versions of the site but we really want to try and get them to the right version right away. That’s Google’s intent from what Matt was saying today. But we are not always seeing that so a session like today’s that gives us the opportunity to give some feedback to Google and say you might want to look at this and get it fixed, make it work how you intend it to work.

Nag: What were other highlights of the session?

Simon: Other than the discussion on duplicate content, I found the statistics that Matt shared to be quite interesting. Matt threw out some numbers on the number of searches, number of pages crawled and total number of URLS – I find these interesting not just from the perspective of an SEO professional but also from that of a teacher. I teach at George Town University so it’s always good to get some good data and pass that along to the students. You won’t necessarily get some of this data elsewhere.

Nag: What questions would you like to have asked?

Simon: One of the concerns that a few people have had is about the latest Google algorithm update that lends weight to the number of DMCA takedown requests.  Naturally, a lot of marketers are concerned that this may potentially lead to an increase in people just filing DMCA’s requests inaccurately, hoping to potentially hit your rankings. It would have been interesting to hear Matt’s perspective on that, although I would assume that there’ll be some quality factor associated with the DMCA requests, which makes it imperative that you’re monitoring the requests as they show up in Google Webmaster Tools.    

Making The Most Of Industry Events

Nag: As an SEO marketing expert who is a regular at these conferences, how do you filter the diverse opinions and tons of data that you come across? For someone relatively new to the scene, it can be quite overwhelming. What approach should they take going into these conferences?

Simon: There is a quote that CNN’s SEO Manager, Topher Kohan, says which is that if you ask 10 SEO’s a question you will get 20 different responses and 15 of them will be right. Different people have different ways of doing things. Different people see different things and they‘re not necessarily always wrong because the search engines are evolving. They’re always changing their algorithms. One marketers experience on what worked last month or last year may not be what works now but it’s just what may have worked for them in the past. Listen to what different people have to say, listen to their perspectives, try it yourself. Always be testing, always keep trying new things, keep trying and pushing and see what happens. If you move your company’s name to the end of your title tags, if you move it to the front of the title tags, what difference does that make, does that give you a difference in the ranking or does it give you difference in click through rates. There are all these little things that you can test even down to the color of the buttons, the placements of calls to action on your page, etc.    

Looking Into The Crystal Ball

Nag: I know the changing nature of digital marketing is a huge topic for discussion at events like these. I’ve heard different perspectives on what is changing and where it’s going to go. I’m curious to hear your perspective.

Simon: Look at SEO over the last 5 and bit years. The search results page was 10 blue links. Then, in July of 2007, universal search came out and that changed things. As Matt was saying in the keynote this morning, people expect that level of constant evolution from the engines. They expect to see new things, they expect to be able to find what they want to find. When someone innovates in a very short time, that innovation becomes standard. People are used to seeing that so you want to keep seeing things moving. Things change and there are lots of different things that they are doing. As to where things are going in the future, social is obviously something that’s been played with and integrated into the search results now. I think it’s just going to continue. Social is going to continue to grow. Social is going to make more of an impact and things are going to continue that way.    

The Practice Of SEO

Nag: I want to switch gears from industry talk to day to day SEO. What ‘hands on’ SEO or marketing work, experiments and testing are you involved in?

Simon: In the US, we are a team of two, we have a team of 1 in the UK and that’s across all the AOL properties including Huffington Post, Endgadet, TechCrunch, AOL Auto, AOL Finance, Patch, MovieFone to mention but a few. The engagements that we have differ with what the needs are and what’s important for the business. In some of the businesses, we’re more deeply embedded, within others it’s more of an ad hoc engagement based on needs.  As you may expect, we have a lot going on, with some exciting projects that’ll see the light of day throughout the rest of this year.

Nag: Are you also an SEO practitioner? Do you like getting into the bits and bytes?

Simon: I try to! My background is that of a programmer – I started off as a Smalltalk developer, moved over to Java development and then got into SEO. I do tend to look closely at the architectural side of things and we also do a lot of in depth testing. We’ll move some things around and try different description tags, little tweaks that we can make just to see what makes any kind of movement and in the right direction. A lot of our sites are content sites so don’t have a specific conversion event, maybe you sign up for a newsletter but we’re not trying to sell anything, we’re just trying to go eyeballs on the sites.

Nag: A common concern among SEOs is how to implement all these recommendations from their technology platforms, agencies or thought leaders like you. They know that content is core but they do struggle with keeping track of all the keywords, pages, site architecture issues and many more areas that touch SEO. How should they (prioritize) all this as there is a lot more to be done than the bandwidth available?

Simon: That is always a challenge. I’m speaking on the in house panel tomorrow on structuring your team, trying to get some success from the team. There are absolutely challenges in prioritizing the work and getting the work done. I’ve been within organizations before AOL where I have the director of development say “I don’t really get this whole SEO thing so we’re not going to prioritize any of that work”. Then they don’t understand why they don’t get the traffic. SEO is not just marketing the content to the outside world. It’s also marketing your team’s talent, making sure people understand what it is that you can do and how you can move the needle. Sometimes you’ll find a team that is absolutely willing to work with you, they’re hungry, they want to do it, they want to get things going and you can then use them as a (internal case study) to show what you can do. And get other teams to actually buy in from that internal case study.    

Championing SEO Internally

Nag: What has worked for you within the different companies you work for in raising the profile of the SEO team?

Simon: For a content site, it’s really about showing those daily visits and trends – it helps to have executives support from somebody who can actually give you that leverage to get the teams to do the work, to get that prioritization in place. I’m not saying that SEO should be the highest priority, there are obviously other business considerations that need to be accounted for but it needs to be slotted in there appropriately. You’ve got to work with those teams, you’ve got to build that profile up whether it’s doing training across the organization or one on one meetings or anything that communicates the value of SEO.    

Collaboration - SEO, Paid & Social

Nag: In that context how do you make sure that, for example, your paid teams and SEO teams work together and also look at each other as rolling up into a single goal of higher conversions of higher traffic?

Simon: Within AOL, they’re actually in separate organizations within our company. We do some interactions across the teams but not a great deal. In other organizations where I’ve actually run both paid search and organic search, we have used that. Paid search is able to tell you where you can find those conversions and more immediate type of traffic. When you see something is working through your paid keywords, you know these are the ones we want to focus on for the organic side too. For content news based site, you’re obviously not going to be really doing a great deal of interactions (between paid and organic). The paid search team, if they have the budget, may go out there and buy the paid terms for news information. But if you’re doing your job right and you’re ranking on Google News and you’re getting your pages up there in natural content for the right keywords, then I don’t think it’s necessary.

Nag: What about interaction with the social team? How do you approach this given the interaction between search and social signals?

Simon: We actually do interact more with the social team than we interact with the paid search team. Huffington Post has a very good social team, a very mature organization with a really good process around social media activity and streamlined training. They are a great team and they show fantastic results in the form of extremely high Facebook referrals. We do work closely with the team, meet with them frequently and I’m up in New York talking to them and try to figure out what we can do, how we can make the best of things to drive social engagement and thus potentially help our organic efforts.  

Nag: How do you use social for search at AOL?

Simon: When you’re actually looking at social as an influencer on search results, it seems to be in a constant state of flux. Bing has changed how they’re doing social search results over the last few months, and Google… they’re always making changes, they initially had Twitter in their real-time search module now and then they had Google+ results showing up and , in the keynote this morning, we had Matt suggesting that SEOs should not worry too much about Google+. So, that’s going to be interesting!

Nag: What are your favorite marketing success stories?

Simon: I’m going to give you an internal one – how we showed tremendous growth for Fanhouse, AOL’s sports site. This is an example of a team, which was hungry, wanted to learn, had executive support and had the development resources. When I came into the company, I sat down with the developers and editorial staff and we all worked together to make sure that SEO was part of everything within their organization. The team did such a fantastic job – growing organic traffic by 250% in 18 months. They truly helped me make the case for other properties within the company to really focus on SEO.

Kevin Hill

M Posted 13 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

As I have managed SEM – one of the foundations that I always have gone back to is the functioning of the actual website that I am working on. I don’t want to spend hours, days, weeks or months of hard work growing traffic only to find out that the website does not work at its best! And with that experience comes some insights on how to use Google Analytics (a free tool) to measure some KPI’s that I like to monitor on a regular basis so that I can understand the health of my websites, and react to issues before they become critical issues, or lots of lost revenue. My name is Kevin Hill, and I have managed the SEM and beyond for websites from 5MM to 100MM. I'd like to share with you a particularly interesting story of my career - and how analytics and a sharp eye helped me find 9 million dollars by paying attention to the basics of website health including website speed, browser traffic and metrics, and content. I will also show you how to segment data on website health into actionable reports and items. I want to make sure you are not overwhelmed by a single statistic that blurs the details, but have small discreet values that actually represent groups of traffic or visitors that you can affect in clear and concise ways. Now, let's move on to finding those 9 million dollars!

Site Speed – Are you a Ferrari or a Moped?

Your site speed is important. Google tells us this, but also says don’t obsess about it. At SMX Advanced this year – Matt Cutts yet again spoke about it, and stated that 95% of websites are fine – and that you should not obsess about site speed. But that you should be aware of it. But that's really vague. How do I know if I am the safe 95%, or the 5% that are getting penalized? I like to look for data that can help me make decisions based upon observable patterns. And you and I are going to look at some data that will help us decide when to act, and when to dedicate valuable resources to an issue like site speed.

What I am looking for with a speed report, is a way to look over many days, and see patterns and changes to bounce rates and conversion rates. If I see a spike in one hour where conversion rate drops off dramatically, and page load time has spiked, I may have a problem with the back end of my website.

Normal activity might look like this:

Or, you might see something like this – which means you probably have some work to do with your IT staff in looking at why you are seeing a spike in time to load a page, which is causing problems with conversion rates. Let's take a detailed look at the 2nd graph. In it you will notice that I have taken data from my report, exported all 24 hours to excel, and graphed the page speed column, and the conversion rate column. You can see between 1pm and 3pm something is going on with my site that drives site speed up to 8 and 10 seconds, and correspondingly, there is a large drop off in conversion rate during these times? If I saw something like this, I'd present it to my IT group, and ask them to carefully investigate. If, I had an IT group that was pulled in many directions, I might even run a model showing what website revenue might have been if the conversion rate stayed in the 3.5% to 4% range - and what this is currently costing us in lost revenue.I am going to give you a crystal ball to KNOW if sitespeed is important. It can tell you many things about how your site is performing day to day. You will notice that the standard reporting will tell you things like what your site does hourly, daily, weekly or monthly, but it won’t really give you information that you need to determine if it matters. How do we do that? Well, we generate a custom report with Google analytics that helps us to understand how site speed affects conversion rate, bounce rate and time on site. These few metrics will help us to start understanding what matters, and when.

What pages on your site need help?

Let's look at another important area. Pages on your site that are getting the most traffic. Do you have a page that is getting lots of traffic, but are not converting well, or below the site average? Here you can see that there are a few pages with lower conversion rates and decent traffic that I may wish to start diving into in more detail? Is there expired or old content on the page? Does the page have a call to action? What changes might I experiment with that could help me to increase the conversion rate on my site?

In looking at the above report, I immediately notice that row 5 looks really low compared to the rest of the pages. It's also one of the top 5 pages on my site (excluding the home page), so it is probably a page that I am going to want to pay attention to. I might furthermore run analytics on that particular page to find out page speed, number of unique visits, filter out all traffic that is local to my office and more so that I can better understand what my customers might be doing, or might not be doing on the page.  

Watching Browser Activity – Is everyone seeing what you expect them to?

Browsers are what your customers use to look at your site. And if your site has problems that only appear on certain browsers, you are loosing revenue that you could be earning from those visitors. It’s important to monitor all browser versions and make sure that they are working effectively. Most websites will test certain versions of browsers, but we need a better way to do this. Particularly when new versions get released, and we may or may not know about it. How can we do this? It's really difficult to look at the Google Analytics standard browser report and page back and forth between browser types, versions and see the overall picture of what is happening, without either a great memory, or lots of excel slicing and dicing. Let's setup a custom report so that it's all in front of us in one page. Below is a screen shot of what this looks like:  

With this report we can now easily monitor the versions of browsers that are hitting your site, and what activity is happening with those browsers. Again, Bounce rates, pages per visit, avg time on page, and conversion rates. Some things that I take into consideration are whether a browser is mobile or desktop, and how that version compares to traffic of other sorts. For my purposes, I see mobile traffic as behaving much different than non-mobile traffic, so it’s important to separate this out so that I can clearly see behavior patterns, and potential problems. I updated my health report into two reports. One for mobile, and another for non-mobile. Using a custom report, we can look at individual browsers and versions, and compare across the board to other versions, and get a picture of areas that we may need to look at or at least test. And as you monitor this on a regular basis, you can decide at what amount of traffic a browser becomes important or non-important. Thus conserving valuable time and money resources  

Where did I find 9MM dollars of revenue?

When I monitored the information above, I found an anomaly with a new browser that was being launched. Now initially, the traffic for this browser was not very prolific. In fact, it was not even within our top 90% of traffic. It was concerning that when I ran this report; I noticed that other versions of this browser converted at almost 5x over this new browser version. More importantly, this browser version was a major version, I knew activity with it would grow, and grow fast once it caught on. My first attempts to notify the IT department were ignored, and not seen as important. I have to admit I was a bit frustrated with their lack of understanding and help. What I realized was that they have many, many demands on their time, and projects related to ROI. So I chose to come back to them in a different way.  

Speaking with Data - So very Powerful

So, I pulled more data around previous browser launches, modeled the growth pattern that could be expected, and modeled in the conversion rates that I was seeing. This showed a Multi-Million dollar miss if we did not fix this, and it was only going to get worse as time went on. Quite literally, the conversion rates for the new browser were sub 0.1% or lower, when it should have been much higher. My next step was to find out what the problem was, and actually document it fully. That was relatively easy since my report above told me exactly what version I needed to install to discover the problem.

Once I had the documentation prepared, I went to our IT team with data and examples of where and what the problem was. Now, the response was quite different. Instead of an undefined problem, that would require a lot of work to solve, they now had a very defined task to accomplish, and how much potential revenue could be tied to it. The IT team could now look like hero's for solving a Million dollar problem, and I could feel proud that I gave them the information they needed to accomplish what I needed from them. Six months later, I was able to pull actual data showing that the revenue recovered by fixing the problems with this browser version had generated over 9 Million dollars in sales that surely would have been lost without monitoring various health metrics for our website.

Action Items

So what are the action items that you should now work on putting in place at your place of business?

• Download the custom report.
• Copy the custom report, name change "mobile" to "non-mobile" and change the filter for mobile to "No"
• Examine each tab - and start diving for data and places to put corrective action in place.
• If no-one "gets" it, start modelling what it means to not fix the problem vs what it might look like to fix the problem and put a revenue number on it.

Good luck, and I look forward to hearing back from you regarding how you are using my information here to improve your bottom line. So, if you do use this, and it helps, drop me a line and tell me about it! I would love to hear about it.

Nag

M Posted 13 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

You probably read the news of our second BrightEdge SEO patent called "Collecting and Scoring Online References," which grants to BrightEdge the exclusive rights to the use of its proprietary "Reverse Index" of the web and novel ways to analyze organic search, social signals, and other data to optimize SEO strategies. Yes, that’s a mouthful and I’ll use the Amazing Race to explain, in plain English, yet another example of market-leading BrightEdge SEO innovation.

One of the World’s Most Grueling Races

In the show, The Amazing Race, two-person teams race around the world, each team trying to beat out the other teams in an effort to win the big prize—a million dollars. The race is separated into different legs and teams must use strategy, skill, and speed to reach each pit stop before the other teams in order to avoid being eliminated. The team that reaches the pit stop first is awarded for their efforts with a prize such as a trip to an exotic destination. However, while winning a single leg is a great boost to a team’s morale, the ultimate goal is to be the first to reach the final destination and win the money. This is not unlike the race your company undertakes when it comes to using SEO to win high ranking on search engines.

Know Your Competition

If you have ever watched The Amazing Race, you know that the race for a huge prize takes more than skill. A good team analyzes their competition - discovering what their weaknesses and their strengths are. Maybe one team is not physically strong or perhaps there is discontent occurring between the team members. Perhaps their age is a weakness or their lack of organization. Knowing this allows the teams to tailor their strategies to beat competition. A good team also analyzes their own skills so they know what’s working for them and what needs improvement.

Like the Amazing Race, winning the SEO race requires that you understand your competitors and yourself to the last detail - our patented SEO X-Ray does just that. SEO X-ray presents you with the tools to build your SEO advantage so that you can beat your fellow competitors. You will have the power to track your competitors and use that information to devise a plan that will push you ahead of the pack. Understanding your strengths and having the power to analyze what your competitors are doing gives you a clear advantage in this intense competition.

SEO X-Ray Shines A Spotlight On Your Competition

Imagine having the ability to see everything that you want to know about your competitors when it comes to SEO marketing. Knowledge is power and with this kind of information you can redefine your company’s course on the SEO race. SEO X-ray is designed with the intent of showing you what you have never seen before—the strategies of your competitors. You can discover hidden gems of data and use these gems to take your competitors by surprise, turning the tables to emerge victoriously at the top where it really counts. Specifically, SEO X-Ray allows you to answer questions like: What are your competition’s top-ranked pages? What are the target keywords? Do you track these keywords? If not, does it make sense to optimize your pages for these keywords? What are your competitors’ backlink strategies?

Knowing your competition at this depth helps you make really informed decisions on how you can win the SEO race.

SEO X-Ray Helps You Reflect Upon Yourself, Deeply!

Not only will you see your competitors in a whole new way, but you will also be able to look at your own company with a pair of fresh eyes. SEO X-ray reveals things about your SEO performance that you were not aware of before, bringing your company’s strengths to focus.

What keywords are you ranking on that you are not aware of? What pages are ranking for these keywords? Answering these questions uncovers your strengths and helps you capitalize on what is working well for you.

Take Action

All of the information that SEO X-ray gives you will not be of any worth to you without action . This means that you need to implement a marketing plan with this information, using it to formulate your next steps. Use our powerful workflow engine to help:

1. Receive recommendations regarding optimization of keywords
2. Create tasks to implement recommendations
3. Add due dates
4. Assign owners
5. Make your competitive strategies pay off fast!

Our Unique Patent

SEO X-ray is basically a technology that gathers keyword information from the world’s major search engines, providing you with an organic search footprint of your company and your competitors’. Similar to a search engine, it searches through terabytes of data to find keywords that rank high for you and your competition, and corresponding pages. With SEO X-ray you can redefine your amazing race and win the big prize of high search engine rank.

Kevin Hill

M Posted 13 years 8 months ago

t 9 min read

Welcome to my 2^nd column here, and I want to share with you just how accessible SEO is today to business owners, beginners, and anyone! I read so many articles online about advanced SEO techniques, or articles that assume that the reader knows anything about SEO. I’d like to start off from the beginning with some good old fashioned SEO basics, and share with you some things I have been doing.  

You may or may not know, but Google has been making some pretty large waves recently in the SEO community with the Panda and Penguin updates. These updates are Google’s attempts to remove low quality content, bad links, and in general, manipulation of the Google formulas for how websites rank on the web. But we don’t need to worry about that now. What we are going to do is some good old fashioned SEO, that you should be able to measure results on within in 3-4 weeks, if not sooner.

Setup for the experiment

The 1^st thing we need to do is to locate some keywords to work around. Open up your Google analytics account, and go to the Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries section. Set your date range for 2 months and you will see something like this:

Going beyond Google Analytics Standard Reporting for keyword ideas

Now we need to get some data, that while we can gather it via several reports in Google analytics. The best way to do that is to write a Google custom report. Don’t worry, I’ll give you a link so that you can quickly and easily import this into your own Google profile. That link is right here. Click the link, and accept the report, and you will now have a slick little Google Analytics report that will show you keywords and their landing pages. A great way to determine WHERE you want to do SEO work when you are working on a keyword group.

You now have a bunch of keywords ranked by the amount of traffic, and by the revenue generated – this should help you choose 3-5 keywords that you want to operate around. Go ahead and choose 5 of them, they should be somewhat similar, and in your mind, think about how you would talk about these 5 keywords or subjects in the same conversation. In other words, the 3 to 5 keywords that you chose should have a related product or theme to them. Look at the keywords and pick the one with the most visits which we will call the “primary keyword”. Now, you have chosen a good group of keywords for your 1^st attempt at SEO!

Take note of the landing pages, in your report, eventually you will be writing content for each of the 3-5 pages that you may find for each of the keywords.  

Measuring SEO progress is key!

Before you start your work, it’s important to know where you currently are. The only value the work we’re about to perform is going to bring is in increased traffic, rank, and conversions. In my case, sales dollars. So it’s vitally critical that you understand if what you are doing actually is having an effect. Any kind of effect. As a user of BrightEdge, I can say that BrightEdge can make that task much easier.  

Using BrightEdge to measure the impact

Log in to your BrightEdge account, go to your settings, and create a Keyword Group via Setup > Keywords > View and Edit my Keyword Groups.  

Once there, create a group called “SEO Work – <KEYWORD NAME>”. Change keyword name to your primary keyword in your group of 3-5 keywords. Once that is done, enter into your group the 3-5 keywords that you just found, and don’t worry about entering a landing page. BrightEdge is so smart; it will find that for you in a few days! Amazing really, and just that simple!

Using other tools to measure results

You don't have to be a BrightEdge customer to do this data collection, it's just going to be much more time intensive, and involve regular tasks every day or week.  I don't know about you but I am often so busy with many projects that I simply don't have the time or forget to collect my data!  Anyway, what you will need to do if you are using Google Analytics (isn't everyone?), is login to your GA account, and export all data around your search engine optimization -> queries tab, and download it to an excel spreadsheet.  Then you'll need to do that at least once a week, for the next 4-5 weeks. (preferably, every week going forward from now on).  Once you have done that, you will then need to pull the data into a chart, and graph the positioning of all the keywords you are interested in individually.  And, keep in mind, this data is for average position, and is not actual positions over time.  Once that is done, you will then need to manually pull traffic information for each keyword over time, and map that as well.  The impressions that GA reports is the number of impressions you were exposed to, not the potential max impressions you could experience. (subtle but important difference!).  See, you can still do it, but in my world, with hundreds or thousands of keywords, the task quickly becomes impossible to do, which forces me to focus in on just a few keywords.

Capturing other keyword ideas

Now, we’re not done, you are going to need to find a tool called “Google Keyword Tool”, and type in your 3-5 keywords that you have just choosing, and click go:

Scroll around, and look at all the keywords, some of them are going to jump out at you as not even related to the group you are working on, and others might be potential relations to what you are working on. Go ahead and add those to your keyword group tracking. It’s always good to know what keywords you might draw in to your web of SEO going forward.  

Finally, you will want to navigate to the Content > Site Content > Landing pages page in Google Analytics, and filter on your primary keywords landing page, and add as a secondary dimension “Keyword” – you now have your final set of keywords to look at. Examine these, skip the insulting (not provided) keyword, and add the more relevant ones to your monitoring group. You will need to wait a few days to collect data - as GA is generally 2 days behind on rank tracking.  

Let’s write some great content!

Google is always saying it’s about the content. And Google’s Panda Update and Penguin update just reinforced this message in a very strong way. If you cut to the chase, both of these updates simply enforced for the 1^st time in a really, serious meaningful way that stance from Google. Panda hit spammy links and content, and Penguin definitely hit the spammy content.  So, if you write great content that your users would want to spend time reading (time on page), you’ll be accomplishing one of the goals of Google, which should, help you get more traffic.  

What we want to do is write 3-5 articles of content around the keywords that we’re supporting. Each page is going to have 1 major keyword, and we’re going to put that keyword into the title, Meta description and in the text on the page itself. In every page, we’re going to use the other keywords we're focused on to link out to the other landing pages that we’ve found above to generate a cross linking “web” or “SEO Web” as I refer to it. And, if I have other areas on my website, that happen to be related to the keywords that I am working on, I may also “salt” those pages, with a link to my main page, supporting or voting for that page.  

Some link patterns I might use:

• <A href=”landing page”>{keyword}</A>
• Find more about {keyword} <A href=”landing page”>here</A>
• It’s amazing what a <A href=”landing page”>full complement of {keyword}</A> can do for your day to day activities!
• <b>{keyword}</b> is a basic item in any shooters bag.

  As you can see, it’s not always about a link with the keyword as anchor text, but it is about having that keyword somewhere around the link, and in such a way that any human (and Google bot) would easily infer that the following link is 100% about that keyword.

In building those links, you’ll end up with a link pattern that looks something like this:  

Using tools like BrightEdge can help!

Once BrightEdge pulls all of your keywords into its system, you can start looking at the recommendations tab, and look for the pages you have been working on. By looking at these recommendations, you can take action on what BrightEdge is recommending, to help improve positioning on each of those landing pages. If you do tie your keyword to a specific landing page, those recommendations for that page, will directly tie to your keyword, and will help you to easily improve your pages. And, BrightEdge has a great “assign task” system that will help you even more, by simply clicking and choosing who needs to act on the requested task.

It doesn’t get much simpler than that!  

My Results : 4x traffic increase with basic SEO tactics

So what happened to my website, when I started this activity? We’ll, let’s take a look at the metrics, and see what we find for my keyword of “Peltor Headsets” – which lands on my websites page of Peltor Headsets. (Yep – I just did a link build there too!)

Here is what Google Analytics says about my keyword now:

I have moved from position 9, to position 5 in about 5 weeks. (I started my concentrated work in April/May). As you can see, I saw a big drop in June, which I could have got discouraged about, but I didn’t and I kept building by SEO Web around that keyword. As I continued my work of developing content, my keyword positioning rose to new highs, which is what we would expect with all that hard work.  

But there is more that we need to check. We improved ranking, but did we improve traffic? Google analytics can tell us that.

In a little less than 5-6 weeks, we’ve taken our traffic and roughly increased it 4x. Add this up across many keywords, and you’ll get significant results in your SEO program, all through a little bit of hard work developing content, and through content that you can control directly!    

How to become an even more efficient SEO Machine!

So, you pulled the traffic and ranking information from Google Analytics or your favorite analytics package, right?  Two reports, easy peasy!  Well, have I got news for you. BrightEdge really makes it even easier through its integration with Google Analytics.