SEO ROI

Tweet Answering prospects’ questions is key to selling them, and sometimes it’s frustrating to try and guess people’s questions/objections from scratch. I noticed the following great examples of marketers answering questions at exactly the right time – the point of action – and thought others would benefit from learning these objections and answers. This post… Continue reading

Tweet Andy Hagans used to run TropicalSEO.com, and I’ve reposted his popular quiz as to whether your site was defensible and updated it for 2012. My updates and comments are in square brackets [ ]. “In my experience the natural motivation to preserve wealth and income is even more powerful than that to increase it…. Continue reading

Tweet SEOs building email lists (and email retargeting subscribers) just got huge help in the form of data mashup artists Rapleaf and Rapportive, two tools for gaining data on your email contacts. The impact will mutate weak little campaigns into car-throwing raging hulks. Image by Abi Skipp Rapleaf mashes up data from the census and… Continue reading

Tweet Via illuminea, I’ve been handling the PPC for some clients, and recently came across two interesting problems I thought I’d document because they’re likely common to others: a) the error, “Placement URLs need to be provided in valid URL format” and b) what the heck anonymous.google.com is. 1) Google AdWords provides a misleading error… Continue reading

Tweet Steve Hanov recently suggested a thought-provoking idea: applying multi-armed bandit algorithms to A/B testing, and Visual Website Optimizer (VWO) did an interesting and accessible-to-non-statisticians statistical analysis and explanation of Steve’s method, to evaluate the accuracy of his claims. While I loved their analysis, VWO’s conclusion is a howler! I’m jumping ahead of myself though,… Continue reading

Tweet Yesterday I suggested that perhaps SEOs should automate their personalized link outreach. It turns out you already can thanks to Liam Delahunty’s Online Sales tool suite. He doesn’t discuss it visibly there, I think to avoid copycats killing the technique. Very, very interesting. Love to hear from anyone using that specifically how it’s gone… Continue reading

Tweet How do you avoid wasting time contacting webmaters whose email addresses are dead? If you’re contacting dozens or hundreds of webmasters, depending on your team’s size, this could mean hours of wasted time. How about registering a throwaway email address and sending an innocuous ‘heya’ to all your prospects (in BCC). Then filter out… Continue reading

Tweet Gab: Aleyda Solis is one of the savviest SEO experts in Spain and even in international SEO, which fact is obvious from her role managing an SEO team in the highly competitive field of Forex, or Foreign Exchange trading. We recently chatted over email about her In addition, she runs a SEO consultancy called… Continue reading

Tweet You know you’ve got a good product when it grows so massively in just 3 years. My friend Ann Smarty has done a massive job developing the site, and big congrats to her on the success, explained in the following infographic: And to think Ann didn’t know if she’d be able to blog when… Continue reading

Tweet I recently sat down with Chris Dyson over email and we got to chat about a topic many SEOs regularly ask about: how do you run an SEO consulting business?? Of course, our interview ranged wider and addressed topics such as Inbound.org, but even those essentially are tangents of our main discussion. If you… Continue reading

Tweet @ Jason Acidre is the Co-Founder and CEO of Xight Interactive, a Philippine-based Inbound Marketing Consulting Agency. He’s also the author of Kaiserthesage, an SEO blog, and has been the marketing strategist for Affilorama affiliate training for the past 2 years. [I gave him nicer anchor text; he didn’t ask for it, for you… Continue reading

Tweet In my Friday Pics posts, I share examples of online marketing done well or poorly. This post is dedicated to pre-empting questions with your benefits copy. Answer questions before they’re asked: Tesco pre-empts objections with its’ benefits bullet points. Can you guarantee I’ll have good uptime? Can I keep my number? Will the phone… Continue reading

Tweet As I shared recently in my post disspelling the myth of 3 query types, Mahalo recently pivoted to sell its content in the form of iPhone/iPad apps. They’ve gone from SEO spammers to App Store quality producers. Why does this matter? It matters because it shows a TECTONIC shift in the search engine landscape…. Continue reading

Tweet Passive or intrusive B2B Live Chat is sub-optimal – B2B Live Chat needs to actively and politely engage the prospect to understand their needs. In B2B, your sales cycle is commonly longer and more education is required than with B2C products. For low-ticket B2C, the passive implementation of live chat described below is probably… Continue reading

Tweet When Traffix Systems launched their new site, their AdWords ads got disapproved en masse, and so traffic tanked. Why should that happen, considering we (the team at illuminea and I) set up redirects properly? A: Because redirected URLs don’t redirect properly when they’ve got parameters appended. Why not? They don’t redirect because appending parameters… Continue reading

Tweet Did a little interview you might find interesting with Jon Rognerud. We talk about advanced SEO, trends and so forth. If you want a condensed class in advanced SEO, go listen in. (The transscription is so-so.)   Tweet

Tweet I spend an inordinate amount of time deleting spam emails from my Gmail inbox. Update: Someone said I shouldn’t try to get these guys penalized. Here’s my response: They’re wasting my time daily and I should stand back quietly? It’s called protecting what’s yours. You don’t think house alarms are bad, even though they… Continue reading

Tweet BookCrossing.com is a unique book giving community where people label their books, give them to other members to read and then those members pass them on further to others. In 11 years it’s grown to over 1M members, with 9M books in circulation.   How BookCrossing Works: Label your books, share them with others,… Continue reading

Tweet Since I started in SEO 6+ years ago, one forum always ranked for SEO – SEO Chat, a part of the Developer Shed network. Jim Boykin, he of the Internet Marketing Ninjas, just acquired the forum and the rest of the network. I’m pleased by the news because to me, SEO Chat has long… Continue reading

Tweet I want to put down the long-standing myth that there are three types of queries, namely navigational, informational, and commercial queries.  Anyone who’s done a class on research methods or quantitative methods knows that in drafting a multiple choice survey, the answers need to be mutually exclusive for valid data. The above three intents… Continue reading

Tweet I recently had a great chat with Phillip Klien, a conversion expert using software to first segment (or “bucket”) traffic and then personalize visitors’ experience. In fact, he co-founded BTBuckets.com, a behavioral targeting (BT) tool that enables exactly this kind of personalization, and SiteApps.com, a marketplace for related CRO and BT tools. 1) How… Continue reading

Tweet I got an email today from a client freaking out because their traffic was down about 40% yesterday and Google simultaneously sent them warnings in GWt / their email. How do you chill such a client out? Fortunately, I’d seen that this client’s traffic sunk over Christmas, and that it was generally down on… Continue reading

Tweet Here’s a look at 4 new platforms and why you should consider getting social on these networks. Triberr For companies that blog regularly, Triberr is a great solution to get quality visitors to read your blog posts. Triberr does away with the bad and retains all that is good with automation. You basically join… Continue reading

Tweet Arnie Kuenn is President of Vertical Measures, who offer services in link building, content creation and notably their content marketing guide. We met at Pubcon, and he’ll be speaking at Conversion Conference on video. He was kind enough to give us this sweeeeet interview . (I previously interviewed another Conversion Con speaker, Keith Hagen… Continue reading

Tweet Jon Cooper writes about an interesting negative SEO tactic: fake link removal requests. I have particular interest since I think I got one of these, recently. As I emailed Jon: “I recently got an email from someone supposedly asking for me to take down links to their company site. The weird thing is that… Continue reading