Saturday, January 31, 2015
Heat and Solar Energy
Launch Your Social Media Campaign Like This
In today's digital era, it takes much more than online presence alone to reap the benefits of social marketing. Given that , it's crucial to have an effective online marketing strategy. Follow the framework outlined in this article to get your social strategy right the first time and earn maximum ROI in the process. What [...]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
Launch Your Social Media Campaign Like This
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Written by Chris Marentis, Surefire Social
The post Launch Your Social Media Campaign Like This appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
How to Connect With Email-Fatigued Prospects in Three Simple Steps
Daily Search Forum Recap: January 30, 2015
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...
5 Practical CRO Predictions for 2015
It’s that time of year again. Out with the old, in with the new, onward and upward. Nowhere is that more true than in the business of conversion rate optimization. As someone who eats, lives and breathes this line of work, I felt that now was the perfect time, not just to look ahead at [...]
The post 5 Practical CRO Predictions for 2015 appeared first on The Daily Egg.
Friday, January 30, 2015
The Weekly Measure: Basecamp for PPC, Social Sharing & Link Building Strategies
How Welcome Emails Increase Engagement [VIDEO]
Learn how welcome emails can increase engagement with your newest email subscribers, plus discover the best time to send one
The post How Welcome Emails Increase Engagement [VIDEO] appeared first on VerticalResponse Blog.
Launch Your New Social Media Campaign Like This
In today's digital era, it takes much more than online presence alone to reap the benefits of social marketing. Given that , it's crucial to have an effective online marketing strategy. Follow the framework outlined in this article to get your social strategy right the first time and earn maximum ROI in the process. What [...]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
Launch Your New Social Media Campaign Like This
--
Written by Chris Marentis, Surefire Social
The post Launch Your New Social Media Campaign Like This appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
A Universal SEO Strategy Audit in 5 Steps - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
When it comes to building an SEO strategy, many marketers (especially those who don't spend a significant amount of time with SEO) start off by asking a few key questions. That's a good start, but only if you're asking the right questions. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand puts the usual suspects on the chopping block, showing us the five things we should really be looking into when formulating our SEO strategy.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about building an SEO strategy and having a universal set of five questions that can get you there.
So number one: What keywords do you want to rank for?
Number two: How do we get links?
Number three: Site speed. Mobile? Doesn't even seem like a question.
Number four: What about Penguin and Panda?
Number five: When do I get money?
This is bologna. That's not a strategy. Some of those go to tactics you might invest in an SEO, but this is not an SEO strategy. Unfortunately, this is how a lot of conversations about SEO start at teams, with CMOs, with managers, with CEOs, with clients or potential clients, and it's very frustrating because you can't truly do a great job with SEO just in the tactical level. If you don't start with a compelling strategy, doing all of these things is only going to produce a small amount of potential return compared to if you ask the right questions and you get your strategy set before you begin an SEO process and nailing your tactics.
So that's what I want to go through. I spend a lot of time thinking through these things and analyzing a lot of posts that other people have put up and questions that folks have put in our Q&A system and others, on Quora and other places. I think actually every great SEO strategy that I have ever seen can be the distilled down to answers that come from these five questions.
So number one: What does our organization create that helps solve searchers' questions or problems? That could be, "Or what will we create in the future?" It might be that you haven't yet created the thing or things that's going to help solve searchers' questions or problems. But that thing that you make, that product or service or content that you are making, that expertise that you hold, something about your organization is creating value that if only searchers could access it, they would be immensely thankful.
It is possible, and I have seen plenty of examples of companies that are so new or so much on the cutting edge that they're producing things that aren't solving questions people are asking yet. The problem that you're solving then is not a question. It's not something that's being searched for directly. It usually is very indirect. If you're creating a machine that, let's say, turns children's laughter into energy, as they do in the film "Monsters, Inc.", that is something very new. No one is searching for machine to turn kids laughing into energy. However, many people are searching for alternative energy. They're searching for broader types of things and concepts. By the way, if you do invent that machine, I think you'll probably nail a lot of that interest level stuff.
If you have a great answer to this, you can then move on to, "What is the unique value we provide that no one else does?" We talked about unique value previously on Whiteboard Friday. There's a whole episode you can watch about that. Basically, if everyone else out there is producing X and X+1 and X+2, you've either got to be producing X times 10, or you've got to be producing Y, something that is highly unique or is unique because it is of such better quality, such greater quality. It does the job so much better than anything else out there. It's not, "Hey, we're better than the top ten search results." It's, "Why are you ten times better than anything on this list?"
The third question is, "Who's going to help amplify our message, and why will they do it?" This is essential because SEO has turned from an exercise, where we essentially take content that already exists or create some content that will solve a searcher problem and then try and acquire links to it, or point links to it, or point ranking signals at it, and instead it's ones where we have to go out and earn those ranking signals. Because we've shifted from link building or ranking signal building to ranking signal earning, we better have people who will help amplify our message, the content that we create, the value that we provide, the service or the product, the message about our brand.
If we don't have those people who, for some reason, care enough about what we're doing to help share it with others, we're going to be shouting into a void. We're going to get no return on the investment of broadcasting our message or reaching out one to one, or sharing on social media, or distributing. It's not going to work. We need that amplification. There must be some of it, and because we need amplification in order to earn these ranking signals, we need an answer to who.
That who is going to depend highly on your target audience, your target customers, and who influences your target customers, which may be a very different group than other customers just like them. There are plenty of businesses in industries where your customers will be your worst amplifiers because they love you and they don't want to share you with anyone else. They love whatever product or service you're providing, and they want to keep you all to themselves. By the way, they're not on social media, and they don't do sharing. So you need another level above them. You need press or bloggers or social media sharers, somebody who influences your target audience.
Number four: What is our process for turning visitors from search into customers? If you have no answer to this, you can't expect to earn search visits and have a positive return on your investment. You've got to be building out that funnel that says, "Aha, people have come to us through channel X, search, social media, e-mail, directly visited, referred from some other website, through business development, through conference or trade show, whatever it is. Then they come back to our website. Then they sign up for an e-mail. Then they make a conversion. How does that work? What does our web-marketing funnel look like? How do we take people that visited our site for the first time from search, from a problem or a question that they had that we answered, and now how do they become a customer?" If you don't have that process yet, you must build it. That's part of a great SEO strategy. Then optimization of this is often called conversion rate optimization.
The last question, number five: How do we expose what we do that provides value here in a way that engines can easily crawl, index, understand, and show off? This is getting to much more classic SEO stuff. For many companies they have something wonderful that they've built, but it's just a mobile app or a web app that has no physical URL structure that anyone can crawl and be exposed to, or it's a service based business.
Let's say it's legal services firm. How are we going to turn the expertise of our legal team into something that engines can perceive? Maybe we have the answers to these questions, but we need to find some way to show it off, and that's where content creation comes into play. So we don't just need content that is good quality content that can be crawled and indexed. It also must be understood, and this ties a little bit to things we've talked about in the past around Hummingbird, where it's clear that the content is on the topic and that it really answers the searchers' underlying question, not just uses the keywords the searcher is using. Although, using the keywords is still important from a classic SEO perspective.
Then show off that content is, "How do we do a great job of applying rich snippets, of applying schema, of having a very compelling title and description and URL, of getting that ranked highly, of learning what our competitors are doing that we can uniquely differentiate from them in the search results themselves so that we can improve our click-through rates," all of those kinds of things.
If you answer these five questions, or if your customer, your client, your team, your boss already has great answers to these five questions, then you can start getting pretty tactical and be very successful. If you don't have answers to these yet, go get them. Make them explicit, not just implicit. Don't just assume you know what they are. Have them list them. Make sure everyone on the team, everyone in the SEO process has bought into, "Yes, these are the answers to those five questions that we have. Now, let's go do our tactics." I think you'll find you're far more successful with any type of SEO project or investment.
All right gang, thanks so much for joining us on Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
5 Ways To Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies
Many companies are torn between a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) strategy for their business. SEO Since early 2012, there have been many questions surrounding the SEO world with Google algorithm updates, such as Penguin, threatening websites and instilling the fear of consequence for utilizing "risky" SEO tactics. Looking at ranking in the [...]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
5 Ways To Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies
--
Written by Kristen Godel,
The post 5 Ways To Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
8 Dos and Don’ts of Networking Follow Up
There are networking opportunities everywhere! Here are eight dos and don'ts of following up
The post 8 Dos and Don’ts of Networking Follow Up appeared first on VerticalResponse Blog.
Thursday, January 29, 2015
Daily Search Forum Recap: January 29, 2015
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
How To Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies
Many companies are torn between a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) strategy for their business. SEO Since early 2012, there have been many questions surrounding the SEO world with Google algorithm updates, such as Penguin, threatening websites and instilling the fear of consequence for utilizing "risky" SEO tactics. Looking at ranking in the [...]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
How To Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies
--
Written by Kristen Godel,
The post How To Combine Your PPC & SEO Strategies appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
7 Interactive Content Trends for 2015
Multivariate Test increases CTA Button Clickthroughs by 9.1%
The Company Established in 1976 primarily as a residential condominium management organization, Provident Hotels & Resorts quickly evolved into a pioneer of the Condominium Hotel Industry. By 1980, they had established one of the first “condo-hotel” properties on the Gulf Coast of Florida. You can reserve rooms in hotels, resorts and condos in Florida on their website providentresorts.com The Test To find out the most promising combination of form title and CTA button text, Sabre Hospitality Solutions Digital Marketing team — the agency hired by providentresorts.com to optimize their website — performed a multivariate test with VWO. Since the reservation console is visible on all their pages, the test was run sitewide by using *websitename.com* pattern to match all URLs. This is how it looks: And after clicking on the dates, the CTA appears which looks like this: The original title on the form, “Make a Reservation” was tested against...
The post Multivariate Test increases CTA Button Clickthroughs by 9.1% appeared first on VWO Blog.
Focus On Customers Who Will Come Back
Laying down the law
I recently finished reading Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” and wanted to share how to apply some of the concepts he discusses directly to customer experience for your business.
First, you need to be familiar with the “law of diffusion of innovation” which states “if you want to achieve mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration and then the system tips.” Watch Sinek’s TED talk to learn more.…
The post Focus On Customers Who Will Come Back appeared first on Seer Interactive.
Become Intelligent: Use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to your Advantage
Posted by Martijn_Scheijbeler
Everybody remembers being in college, writing down activities in a logbook, hoping the hours they worked on a project were enough for a sufficient grade. After two years as an online marketer/SEO, I realized what makes writing down activities so important.
The intent of this post is to save you from making the same mistakes I made. If you're working for a brand, you probably want to make sure you're on top of all your KPIs, but few of us are able to carefully track our valued metrics 24 hours a day.
So in addition to providing you with some useful insights into why it’s so important to write down everything you do, I’ll also give you some useful tips on how to get this started with the tools you likely already use. Most importantly, I'll show you how to keep track of drastic changes in web traffic and user engagement.
How Meta Robots & XML Issues Impacted My Perception of Web Analytics
To give you an example of why it’s useful to keep track of what you and your team are working on, let me take you back to an incident I experienced roughly two years ago. My team tested an upgrade for functionally, but forgot to check the involved technical SEO elements. After a massive drop in keyword positions for all of our top (landing) pages, we did our best to retrace our steps. In the process, we discovered we had implemented the META robots noindex tag on all pages. I’d love to say I’m joking, but our drop in search traffic says otherwise.
I think you get the point—and that it’s probably best if I don't tell you about the time that we returned XML to Google instead of proper HTML—record everything. To this end, I’m going to share my insights into what I like to track on a daily and weekly basis via Google Intelligence Events, and share occurred events with our team, using the annotations of Google Analytics for our sites. I’m also hoping to hear your ideas on anything I'm missing so that we can learn from each other.
Rebecca Lehman made a great start back in 2011 with this, but in the past years a lot of new metrics and dimensions have been added to Google Analytics, making it easier to keep track of even more changes.
What are Google Intelligence Alerts?
Analytics monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations, and then automatically generates alerts, or Intelligence Events, when those variations occur. - Google Analytics Help Guides
Google Analytics provides you with predefined alerts that guide you through certain changes in engagement, traffic or visitor data, but they are hard to notice if you're not looking at your web analytics on an hourly basis. However, you are able to add custom intelligence alerts that update you of any changes that are important to you (e.g., when your traffic increases by 10% day over a single day). The tool makes it possible for you to respond faster to changing data, and you can also use it to keep your colleagues up to date.
Google Intelligence Alerts enable you to monitor your web analytics in many different ways, but they’re not without their disadvantages. Let’s look at both sides of the argument:
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| You'll be notified within 24 hours. | You're not able to share intelligence alerts with your colleagues. |
| If you live in the US, you can get texts message alerts of important changes. | If you don't live in the US, you can't receive text messages. |
| You can keep track of almost every metric and dimension in Google Analytics. | Setting up a large number of alerts is a time-consuming process. |
| You can use your intelligence alerts in multiple properties as they belong to your personal Google Analytics account and data. |
|
Note: The email reports from Intelligence Alerts have a certain delay. Hopfully Google Analytics will improve this delay in the future, but for now it's the best we have to work with.
Why is This Useful for You?
I've provided you with just one example of how Intelligence Alerts can be useful. Now let me give you more insight into why it's easier for you to keep track of changes with Google Alerts. The average e-commerce store has thousands of products, each of which is likely to be impacted by seasonal preferences such as who's buying umbrellas in mid-summer. But what if it suddenly starts raining and your warehouse is running out of umbrellas? What if you could set up alerts to see if sudden product categories change in performance based on your data in Google Analytics?
Overview
Image: personal screenshots
On the left side of your Google Analytics Reporting dashboard you have the ability to view the daily, weekly and monthly automatic alerts that Google has already triggered for you. This overview provides the most important metrics and dimensions for your site. For example, the screenshot below shows you the change in views throughout April 2014 for one of my accounts. Naturally, by clicking on details you are provided with more details on the period.
Image: personal screenshots
As you can see, the detailed view shows you the metrics again so that you can determine how importance each change is to you business. In this case, the graph tells you what the per-session goal value is, so you can see the weekly progress this metric made and why it triggered an automatic alert.
Daily, Weekly & Monthly Events
Image: personal screenshots
Image: personal screenshots
Overview: In the Admin of your Google Analytics View you're able to see an overview of current intelligence alerts. Click the New Alert button at the top.
Image: personal screenshots
Now you have the opportunity to add a name to the alert and select the profiles you would like this intelligence event to apply to. By selecting the time period, you will be able to compare the current day, week or month to its previous variant. By setting the alert conditions, you have the opportunity to select the metrics and dimensions that must change in order to trigger a notification.
To save you some time, I've created a couple dozen intelligence alerts. The only things you need to do are log into your Google Analytics account and make sure you're ready to get overwhelmed with weekly or daily alerts. Seriously, though, don't feel compelled to add all of the alerts. Select only those that have the most value for you and your business.
Error/Panic
A couple of alerts could help you monitor the status of your site and the Google Analytics integration into the site itself. You'll likely want to know when certain tracking codes are removed and pages trigger errors:
- No traffic
- No goal completions
- No e-commerce conversions
- 404 Tracking (based on this great blog post)
- Revenue drop of XX% or no revenue
- Referrals from your own domain (this alert tells you that a tracking code is missing on certain pages)
Engagement
These alerts are ideal for publishers with lots of traffic:
Traffic Sources
If you suddenly have more traffic, but don't know where the traffic is coming from, the alerts for traffic sources could come in very handy:
- Increase / Decrease in direct traffic
- Increase / Decrease in organic traffic
- Increase / Decrease in paid traffic
- Increase / Decrease in referral traffic from a specific source
E-commerce
Monitoring the conversion rate for different browsers will make you aware of any problems your site has playing nice with certain browsers:
Google Adwords
If you're running Google Adwords, you undoubtedly have alerts set up. But it would be handy to know the performance onsite and to see the corresponding spend associated with it.if your spend goes up or down.
My favorite annotations are reports of bugs, new website features, and UX/ CRO improvements to popular pages.
Image: personal screenshots
P.S. Dear Google Analytics product managers, if one of you is reading this, please make adding annotations available via the Google Analytics Management API. It would make it so much cooler if, for example, we could add a new annotation to our data for every new post in WordPress.
TLDR; Intelligence Alerts automatically keep you up to date on pre-configured changes in your data. With a daily email updates, you'll never miss important changes associated with your website's data, traffic or engagement.
Please let me know in the comments what your favorite intelligence alerts are and how you use them to your advantage. If you have any other tools that you use to keep yourself informed, don't hesitate to share them.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!