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Archive for the ‘SE Guide’ Category

by Eric Brown

Several camps are starting to chant that 2011 may well be the year of The Social Media Bubble. I would not proclaim to be able to predict the future be any means, but it sure seems more probable than not. While having little experience predicting the future, we have had an up close and personal relationship with the real estate bubble. Developing real estate used to be a pretty fun endeavor, however the past couple of years of operating our boutique apartment rental business in SE Michigan has had more challenges than we ever imagined. But as with all struggles, there has been a bright side, a bubble burst quickly trims out the weeds and the low hanging fruit. 

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by Mike Fleming

If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn’t you?), you’re always testing. 
Always.  It’s the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain
insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels. 
One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.

Yes, you could test them, but only by comparing metrics from
different time periods (except for ads).  For example, you’d have to run
ads at a certain bid price for a while, change it, and run them at the
new bid price for a while.  Then, you’d have to compare the results from
different time periods.  The problem?
When you would compare the results, you would be likely to assume the
differences in those key metrics to be the result of the changes.  But
fluctuations in demand, shifts in competitor tactics, and uncontrollable
circumstances (special events, etc.) can complicate things.

Google’s example of this involves advertising for soccer balls. 
“Let’s say you’re advertising soccer balls, and you decide to increase
your bids to get more traffic. Two days later, the World Cup starts, and
your clicks and impressions increase substantially. If you had simply
raised the bids in your campaign without running an experiment, you
wouldn’t know how much of the increase in traffic is due to the World
Cup, and how much is a result of you increasing bids.”

Let’s say you raised your bids at the beginning of June and noticed this trend when doing analysis in July….

Alright,
looks great.  Let’s go ahead and keep that new bid.  What?  What’s
that?  That might not be the best thing.  Well now, why would that be?

Ouch.  That’s web search volume trends for that keyword phrase.  Not so fast my friend.

Enter the newest “seedless watermelon” in the AdWords system called AdWords Campaign Experiments
(ACE).  With ACE, you can run simultaneous split tests with most of the
key variables in your campaigns by splitting traffic between you
“control” group (original) and your experiment group…AND…you can
analyze the results of your tests before you apply them to all auctions. 
This lowers the risk of diving into new, unproven strategies by
enabling you to control the amount of traffic you send to your
experimental groups; which ultimately helps you make better decisions in
your optimization efforts.  You can split your traffic in 10% intervals
from 90/10 all the way to 10/90.

The cool thing about this is that if you want to run a low-risk
experiment  and send 80% of your traffic to your control group and 20%
to your experiment group, you can analyze the results and find if the
changes performed better.  If they did, then you can run what is called a
holdback experiment
before you fully applied the changes to your campaigns.  A holdback
experiment involves running the exact same experiment again, but this
time with the control at 20% and the experiment at 80%.  This way, you
confirm that the positive effects of your experiment are truly there as
the experiment is exposed to a larger amount of traffic.

When you go to analyze an experiment, you want make sure that the
statistical differences in your numbers is meaningful rather than the
result of random chance.  Statistical significance is calculated based
both on the number of auctions your campaign participated in, and on the
size of the differences in metrics. Google AdWords provides icons
in your campaign when the math indicates that you can be 95%, 99%, or
99.9% confident that differences are meaningful, and not just due to
chance.

The icons are arrows that show you whether a particular element
you’re experimenting with has achieved statistically significant
results, and how confident you can be that those results will carry over
to your campaign if you apply the experiment (one arrow meaning there
is a 5% probability your results occurred due to chance, two arrows
means there is a 1% chance, and three arrows means there is just a 0.1%
chance these results are due to chance).

The introduction of this new feature saves the account manager time
and makes testing in your AdWords account much more accurate, efficient
and profitable.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Stoney deGeyter

When it comes to getting your visitors to take action, whether that be a sale, download, request, or call, it’s your content that is going to either make it happen or leave people blowing in the wind like a sagebrush through a ghost town. If there is anything that all the years of marketing research has proven it’s that people need to be told what to do if you expect them to do anything at all.

Think about it. If you’re not telling your visitors what to do next, how can you expect them to do it? Sure, they can guess, make assumptions or “figure it out on their own”. But, for anybody that’s doing anything new, directions are a God send.

I recently spent 2 hours putting together a desk that should have taken me 20 minutes. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m generally more destructive than constructive when it comes to these kinds of things, but with a little help (a.k.a. reading directions), I can usually get the job done. But, on this particular desk, the directions actually didn’t help. Not even a little.

The desk had two pieces: the main desk and a small side table. Both look nearly identical, only the size is different. The directions started you out building the small table…but they didn’t make that clear. I spent at least 30 minutes putting together the larger desk with the small table instructions, wondering why things just weren’t making much sense.

Once I figured that out and moved on to building the desk with proper directions, I found several pieces that all looked similar, but with subtle differences. The directions didn’t make those distinctions, neither verbally nor visually. Luckily, I was able to stay calm and keep the cursing to a low mumble that my kids couldn’t hear!

Your content should work like directions. It needs to inform and make clear what the next step is. Giving your visitors clear directions doesn’t have to be difficult. You don’t have to re-write all of your content, adding in long prose of “here’s what we want you to do next”. All you have to do is some simple re-working of key areas.

Action Words: We often tend to write passively. We talk in terms of how things are, not in terms of what we are doing, what we’ve done, or what we want to do. This makes our content stagnant.

Instead, use words that convey action. Tell visitors how you achieved your knowledge or skills. Tell them how they will benefit from your product or services. Give them examples of the results they will see. And, most importantly, give them some calls to action.

Calls to Action: Using action words is never more important than ensuring your work calls action into your content. These are the directives that you provide to your visitors that lead them down the path to the conversion.

If you are not providing these directives, or are providing the wrong directives, you won’t be getting the response you want from your visitors. Keep in mind that there are multiple paths to the goal. Customers need to see your products before they can buy them. They also need to know product details. Trying to move your customers to the conversion too quickly simply won’t work.

Use your calls to action to lead visitors down the path of information they need to take the desired action. Some may need to see product reviews, others need to read more about your company, and still others might want to read more about what you offer. Provide calls to action to whatever your visitors might need… because they may not even know they need it.

Textual Links: Adding calls to action directly into your text is simply the best way to get visitors to heed them. Your navigation is important, but sites often put too much faith in the navigation getting the visitors to the information they want. If the visitors know where they want to go, and if they are willing to take the time to click through the navigation, then that approach would work. But, why force the visitor to disengage from your content to hunt through the navigation for what they want? Not a good idea.

That’s the biggest problem with not using textual links. You’re forcing your visitors to figure things out instead of providing them the directions they need right there where they are. If they are reading about your team’s experience, then link to your “About Us” page. If you mention a related product, link to it. If you discuss a significant achievement, place a link to the page that provides more complete information about it.

Visitors are curious. Providing links helps them satisfy their curiosity, which in, turns gives them more satisfaction that you have “what it takes” to provide what they need.

A website that’s not getting any action is a dead site. Conversion rates will be low, and bounce rates will be high. Using action words, calls to action, and textual links gets your visitors to “put out”. But, unless your content is willing to provide the goods, you may not even get to second base.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Sage Lewis

Best Buy wants you to tell them the moment you walk into the store.

From Marketing Pilgrim: “The “shopkick” system is designed to detect and reward shoppers just for walking into a Best Buy store. In order to accomplish this feat, consumers must download an application to their smart phone. ”

What do you think of this? I’m all about it!

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Stoney deGeyter

In my last post, I talked about training your text to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. The first step is to make sure the content doesn’t overstay it’s welcome. In this post, I’ll provide some of the tricks you can teach your content; training it how to do all of these things by making it skim-able, scan-able and provide exits to where the visitor needs to go next.

Teaching tricks the audience likes

There are two kinds of tricks you can train your text to do: the kind of tricks you like or the kind of tricks your audience likes. Obviously, training your text to do the tricks you like will make you happy… but it won’t make your audience happy. You think the tricks are cool, but nobody else does. And… that’s just not cool.

Most people who visit websites scan them first, then skim the text. But, they only skim read if they get intrigued by their initial scan, and they read it only if they find something compelling and interesting that warrants their full attention. There are four easy ways to train your text to be scan-able:

Paragraph headings: Your page should have a proper heading and your content should be broken up with paragraph headings throughout, depending on length. Don’t get carried away by placing a heading before each paragraph. That overkill. But the longer your text is, the more it needs to be broken up into easily digest chunks that allow your readers to consume it.

Internal linking: One of the biggest missed opportunities on business websites is linking their content to other relevant areas of the site. That’s what the navigation is for, right? Yes and no.

Your navigation needs to do a proper job of allowing people to find what they are looking for, but relying on it too heavily forces the visitor to know what they are interested in finding. But, adding links into your content streamlines both of those issues and also helps the visitor get to where they want to go much quicker. This is more intuitive and requires little thought or effort on their part.

Bolded Text: Bolding key words, phrases, and sentences can also allow your visitors to find key points as they quickly scan your content. Note that I said “key words”, not “keywords”. There is nothing wrong with using keywords in your bolded text, but that should not be the reason for using bold text. You bold text because it’s important, not because you want to get a keyword in bold font.

Bullet Points: Bullet points are another way to get your visitors to read key information without having to read every word of content. Most readers will read bulleted lists while ignoring everything else on the page.

Bullets provide a very easy way to read quick bits of information that otherwise might get lost in a single paragraph. Bullet points also break up your content, which also makes the text more scan-able and skim-able. You can also use bullet points to link to other areas of your site that provide additional information without mucking up the current page content.

Or, to put it another way, bullet points:

• Provide quick bits of information
• Break up content to be more scannable and skimmable
• Provide linking opportunities to related content

People love tricks. But, they don’t like to be tricked. These tricks that you can use to train your content are not and should not be used as a means to deceive your audience. They are tricks that help you communicate with your audience in a way that is more to their liking. Giving people what they want isn’t deceptive, unless you are pulling the rug out from under them later.

You can train your content to do things that other sites are not doing. By teaching it to keep your audience engaged with the site, and training it how to direct your readers to other areas of the site they are interested in, you’re just helping people find what they need. If they don’t find it with you, they will with someone else… likely because their content has learned these tricks.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Stone Reuning

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One of the best ways to add content to your website and boost your search engine rankings is through an optimized press release. You can write about any newsworthy item going on at your company: a new product, an industry award, new hires are just a few examples.

Announcing these events has several benefits beyond search engine rankings too. Journalists and bloggers for instance will come across it and perhaps do a story about your firm. They make your company look active and lively, drawing more interest from prospective customers.

Regularly scheduled press releases do this and more provided they’re properly formatted. Simply writing some text and putting it online will not do a whole lot for you. Many distribution outlets like PRWeb and PR.com will reject your press release for syndication if it’s not properly formatted.

So what’s the proper way to format a press release?

Continue reading for ways you should format a press release for online distribution. Beyond the tips listed below, there are some additional ways you can format your press releases to further its impact in the search engines so check back next time for press release formatting tips from a social media and SEO perspective.

•    Be sure your press release is at least 400 words (including boilerplate/company description at the end) and no more than 600 words.
•    Write the press release in the 3rd person. Meaning, use words like he, she, they and them when writing about your company.
•    Mention your company by name in the title and include your target keyword too. Include a sub-heading below your title with additional details to complement your title.
•    In your opening paragraph, include your city and date first. Example:  Atlanta, Ga. – August 23, 2010. Be sure your first paragraph covers the “5-W’s and H” of your story – or who, what, when, where, why and how.
•    Next, the main body of your press release should contain further information on points in your introduction along with quotes from an important person at your company.  
•    Close out the press release by offering the reader a link to click and/or a place to contact your company for further information.
•    Include a boilerplate after the conclusion describing your company and website.
•    After the boilerplate, include your name, phone, email, title. This gives your press release further credibility. Once you have this, include a “###” or “END” to signify the conclusion of the press release.

Double checking spelling, grammar or formatting is critical to having a proper press release. Check out the AP Stylebook or some other resource for ways to format certain words or how you should abbreviate a state and more.

And here’s one of the biggies and where many website owners fall down

Don’t make your press release read like an advertisement. They’re meant to announce events of a newsworthy fashion. If your press release has a bunch of “salesy” type language, it will be immediately dismissed by any journalist or blogger that comes across it. You can talk up benefits of your new product or whatever news you’re announcing in your quotations a little bit but that’s about it.

Not to mention, most distribution outlets will reject it as well.

Take a few moments and carefully review each press release before posting it on your site and distributing it to newswires and social networks. Doing so will save you lots of time and maximize the value of doing a press release in the first place.

One way to write a well formatted press release is to carefully examine other press releases like this one from a rental cabin firm in the north Georgia Mountains.

In the end, press releases are about informing journalists, bloggers and potential customers of events at your company. They’re not meant to sell per se but draw the reader’s interest in enough for them to want to learn more.  

Check back again soon for more on properly formatting press releases – specifically for the search engines and how you can squeeze even more benefits out of announcing your company’s news online.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Sage Lewis

If you aren’t familiar with Google Places please watch this video. It’s growing and could be significantly affecting your business without your knowing.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Mike Fleming

Google’s Display Network has two types of targeting options. The first, automatic placements, we’ve talked about already. This is where you create keyword-themed ad groups and Google makes your ads eligible to appear on web pages whose content theme matches the theme of the keywords in your ad group. Now, we’ll talk about the second – managed placements.

This type of campaign is useful for two purposes:

1. Targeting specific websites that you’ve already found have performed well for your ads in an automatic placement campaign to maximize your exposure on those sites.

2. Targeting specific websites that you’ve found through research.

With this campaign, you do not choose keywords because you are telling Google exactly which sites you want your ad to be eligible for auction, so they don’t need keywords to come up with a theme to match to websites. The way to create this campaign is to choose “relevant pages only on the placements and audiences I manage” under “Networks” in the “Network and Devices” option of your campaign settings.

The easiest way to pick some websites where you want your ad to be shown is to run and analyze a Placement Performance Report of your Automatic Placement Campaign once a significant amount of data has been collected. You can export the data in this report to Excel and find some websites that have historically met the marketing objectives you have set for your ads. Once you add them to your new Managed Placement Campaign, make sure you exclude them from your Automatic Placement Campaign by selecting the placement and hitting “Exclude Placement” above the list -

Then, you go in to the Networks tab of your new Managed Placement campaign, click on “show details” next to managed placements and then click “add placements.” This is where you enter and submit the sites where you want your ads to be shown.

If you are not as patient and/or you would rather not rely on Google’s imperfect algorithm to find some websites you’d like to test, once you hit “add placements” and choose an ad group, you can click on a link to take you to the Placement Tool. Here, you can look up sites by category, keyword, ad type or size, and URL and the tool will spit out all sorts of options for you to pick from to add to your ad group.

You’ll want to monitor these choices over time to weed out the bad and maximize the good. Remember, just because you think something in marketing will work doesn’t mean it will. It has to be proven with data.

Take a look at the sites that are suggested and decide on some that are locations where your target audience frequents, select them and add them to your campaign.

Once you start to find some websites that are working for you, you can start to develop themed ad groups with your managed placements and write more targeted ads for similar types of sites.

For instance, if you sold guitars and you are finding that guitar lesson sites work well for you, group all of the sites about guitar lessons together and create targeted ads for those sites. You should see click-through and conversion rates improve significantly. This makes it easier to identify sites and themes that work best for your business.

Now, you’ve got one campaign that is going out to hunt down sites that will work for what you’re advertising (automatic placement) and one campaign that contains sites that work for you that you can optimize for the long-run (managed placement). As time passes and data is collected, continue to add keyword-themed ad groups to your Automatic Placement Campaign to replace themes that aren’t working for you while pulling the sites that work to place into your Managed Placement campaign. Frequently, you should go in and apply standard optimization techniques to your ad groups and placements similar to how you would optimize search campaigns with keywords.

Hopefully, my short introduction series to the Display Network will allow you to take your online business to new heights! Down the road, we’ll get into some more advanced Display Network strategies. Hope you’ll hang around.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Stoney deGeyter

We don’t often realize this, but we can train our website content to do tricks. Unfortunately, most website content just lays around all day. This is why you see high bounce rates and poor conversion rates on so many websites. About the only “trick” this content knows how to do is to roll-over and play dead. But, those aren’t tricks at all. The opossum that streaked across the highway after getting hit by a truck can do that!

What I’m talking about is teaching your content how to “engage”, “inform”, “speak” (call to action), and “convert”. Teach these tricks to your content and you’ll see a whole new level of performance on your website.

The first thing to train your content to do is not to overstay it’s welcome. Like a neighbor you enjoy having over occasionally, there comes a time when they must leave. In the same way, you can train your content to know when to stop talking and show the visitor the door to the next page or pages of your site.

Leave them wanting more… and then give them more

We often try to do either too much or too little with our content. The “old school” rules of SEO said you had to have a minimum amount of content. Is it 100 words…200 words? There is a minimum number of words you need per page, but it has nothing to do with counting. It’s the amount of content that is needed for the text to move the visitor to the next step.

There are three simple rules to training your text when it comes to the quantity of text to be used:

1) There is no magic amount. Some pages require a lot of text, but some don’t require much text at all. But, bear in mind, that all pages need some text. Text is what convinces, persuades, informs, and helps your audience decide that they want to buy from you.

2) Keep your text as brief as possible. This doesn’t mean your text has to be short, just that you don’t go for length when length is not needed or warranted.

3) Use no more words than needed to convert. Your audience isn’t just one person. It’s many people looking at many items for many purposes. Once you start looking at personas and personalities trying to target everybody on a single page can be daunting. But, you don’t have to hit everybody perfectly on a single page. Figure out what the next step is for each group, and provide that opportunity. It could be a link to an “About Us” page, a link to “Shipping Policies” or a “Buy Now” button.

The basic idea is to train your text to be minimalist while still providing ways for the reader to request an encore. They do that by clicking further into the site to get even more information, where, hopefully, that page is also trained to provide the audience what it wants as well.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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by Stoney deGeyter

I remember the first day back at my sophomore year of college. It was the weekend before classes began, and the new students were moving into the dorms. There were cars and trucks all parked out along the street with students unloading furniture, bedding, clothes, and everything else a growing college kid needs to survive in the almost-real world.

I remember this day vividly because a bunch of us guys were scouting out the hot chicks, generously helping the new batch of coeds unload and unpack. Later that afternoon, when it was only us guys within ear shot, a buddy of mine claimed, “I got dibs on the red head.” I remember thinking, “Whatever, dude!” Nonetheless, everyone knew Jon had claimed Shannon and she was hands off until he said otherwise.

It wasn’t long before Jon and Shannon started dating, and a few years later they married and are still happily married today.

You Aren’t Special If You’re Last In Line

Dibs are a great thing. It makes us feel special. Like calling “shotgun” to get the front passenger seat, dibs allows us to lay claim to something we otherwise may not have been entitled to: the last piece of pizza, the larger bed, the first shower before all the hot water is gone, and the hot red head that needs a nice, strong college man to help her move into her dorm.

Unfortunately, too many business owners let “dibs” on their website go to everyone else, except those that matter most: the target audience. All too often site design and content is developed for the boss, or the marketing team, or even the search engines. But the audience–the people who the site is supposedly intended for–get left out. They don’t get dibs, they get whatever is left over.

Does that seem right to you?

Your audience is your “A” Girl

I knew someone once who had a philosophy on his women. You could have an A-Girl, B-Girl, and C-Girl. A-Girl could in no way know about B- or C-Girl. B-Girl could know about A-Girl, but couldn’t know about C-Girl. C-Girl could know about both A- and B-Girl.

Don’t laugh, this is true.

This was obviously his way of attempting to build a playground in a minefield. I’m not sure how that worked out for him, but it will work as a good analogy here.

Your audience absolutely must be your A-Girl. Your content must be for her. Your visual presentation must be for her. Your site architecture and usability must be for her. And she doesn’t need to know about your B- and C-Girls… the search engines, or that guy that pays all the bills and has really strong opinions.

What you write, how you write, and the overall presentation you put together on your website shouldn’t be based on the boss’ opinions or what we think the search engines want. Those don’t have to be totally disregarded, but your audience, your A-Girl, comes first. She’s the one that matters. And if she catches a whiff that the site isn’t for her, she’ll be out the door and onto the next site in a matter of minutes.

Keywords are important, and as I noted a few weeks back, your content isn’t good content unless it’s optimized. This is very true, because optimizing for your audience is the same as optimizing for the search engines. The problem is when C-Girl becomes too prominent, A-Girl is sure to notice.

Building a perfect relationship

Your keywords should be present, but not obvious. They should be a part of your relationship with A-Girl, but not overbearing. If you suddenly start giving your girlfriend gifts, she may suspect you’re covering for something else. Same is true here. If you add too many keywords to your pages, they become overpowering. A-Girl isn’t dumb.

Keep your content persuasive. Just because someone knows you love them doesn’t mean you don’t ever have to tell them. Your content should tell your audience what you want them to do. Do you want them to purchase? Download? Learn more? Add to cart? Failure to have calls to action throughout your content will lead to a stagnant relationship. The audience won’t know what you want them to do next and, sooner or later, they will wander off.

Overall, you need to maintain value in your content. If you’re just adding text for the sake of B-Girl or C-Girl, A-Girl will realize that there is nothing there for her. You have to keep your audience engaged. You do this by writing content that helps them learn, grow, improve, understand, etc. A relationship that does not help each side to grow is a dying relationship. If your audience isn’t getting anything new, just the same content they found on every other site, they’ll soon grow bored with you.

Your A-Girl needs dibs. She needs to be the first priority on your website. Sure, you can build a site that pleases the higher-ups, and can write content that is optimized for search engine placement, but your audience must come first. She’s too important for anything less.

This post was inspired from The Princess Bride themed presentation I gave in early 2010 at SEMpdx’s Searchfest titled Inconceivable Content: The Dread Pirate Robert’s Guide to Creating Swashbuckling Content, Pillaging the Search Engines, and Commandeering a Treasure Trove of Conversions. If you enjoyed this post you also might enjoy other posts inspired from the same. Search for “inconceivable content” on this blog to find them all.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

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