Arnie Kuenn, Conversion Conference Speaker

Click here for a $100 discount on Conversion Conference. You’ll see the discount code listed in the upper right after the click.

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

Can you give me a little background about you?

You bet. Well first I am the founder and president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company. Our focus is helping our clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business from their websites. I am an entrepreneur who had had two previous businesses in the world of new technologies and marketing. I am also a frequent speaker and author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing (available on Amazon).

What knowledge level are you addressing in your preso at ConvConf?

This particular session is on video marketing and using video to increase conversions. Therefore I would say the people attending this session will be a little more marketing oriented as opposed to technically oriented.

You’re talking about video for conversion. What video content can your average ecommerce merchant create to lift sales?

It is a bit difficult to define the “average merchant” due to all the product possibilities, however, in general, videos that help demonstrate the product or video reviews of the product tend to be most successful in providing an increased conversion rate.

We’ve seen this at some of the major ecommerce sites like Amazon and Zappos, but even the little guy is finding success with video. [Emphasis added.]

For example there is a guy selling a home fitness product who saw a 46% increase in conversions when he used video. In addition to product demos and reviews, how-to videos can be pretty powerful too. In fact, I will be discussing a case study where one business grew exponentially over the past several years all based on how-to videos.

Can you share some links with companies going DIY with their video, please?
Sure. One would actually be Vertical Measures. We have actually turned one of our offices into a small studio and are doing more and more video in there: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/content/how-do-you-use-yahoo-answers-for-internet-marketing-video/

Here is a Golf School creating their own videos:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CollegeofGolf/videos?sort=p&view=0

And here is a link to one of the examples I will use in my presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/user/FixYourDLPcom/videos?sort=p&view=0

What attracted you to Conversion Conference vs another show?

I have known Tim Ash for quite a while now. Tim and I have spoken at many of the same events.

About two years ago I wrote a book about content marketing and Vertical Measures added content marketing services to our mix. Tim and I were talking one day and he asked if the kinds of things we were doing were helping clients with conversions. Of course the answer was “yes” so he invited me to speak at his San Francisco event.

I guess I didn’t mess that up too bad, so he invited me back to talk about video.

I will say, Tim runs one of the best conferences I have spoken at. He has a real eye for detail and takes the attendee and speaker feedback to heart.

Can you specify what feedback you’ve seen Tim take to heart and implement to improve the show?

I can think of two examples but I can’t say that I have seen it implemented yet, as I have only done the one event so far. But in San Francisco, Tim joined our lunch table for a few minutes, one of the attendees at the table made a suggestion and Tim quickly pulled out a piece of paper and started jotting down notes. He then asked the entire table for feedback. It’s not very often you see the person in charge of the event doing something like that.

The second example, was someone complaining about the sightline in one of the presentation rooms being obstructed by a pillar. You could tell Tim was already aware of the issue as he just bristled. I am pretty darn sure, there won’t be any pillars in the way in the future.

You’ve been to the show before. Who makes up the audience, in terms of job position?

Yes, as I mention above I was at the San Francisco event. I can only speak for the group that attended my particular session, but I saw quite a cross-section of people there.

There were developers, marketers and business owners there.

But all of them were focused on how to get more out of their website. I spoke on how to generate content ideas, so I think my group was a little more slanted towards the marketers, as opposed to designers.

Who are you looking to network with most, and why? (Can mean some specific person/people or types – eg other speakers to learn, inhouse ux people for lead gen etc).

Since I am not a UX guy or a developer, I tend to gravitate to the business owners and marketers.

I love to hear what others are experiencing, the challenges they are facing, and some of the solutions they have come up with to grow their businesses.

Everything in our world is moving at such a fast pace that it’s great to have a chance to get out and talk to people who can totally relate to each other.

What tips would you offer for people to get the most out of their networking, besides the standard ‘don’t start with self-promotion’?

Pretty short answer: ask questions. Like you said, don’t talk about yourself, ask question about others and their business. It’s the best way to learn and engage.

What’s a growing trend that you see in video for conversion (besides increased usage)? What are people getting right that they used to get wrong?

I think the biggest trend is the DIY aspect.

Rather than hiring a production firm, some businesses are talking the bull by the horns and creating their own videos. This might mean they hire a videographer on staff or it might mean they just use webcams and simple equipment to produce decent video all on their own. To me, just trying is doing it right.

My only real caveat is that most viewers are pretty tolerant of less than professional grade videos, but you must get the sound and lighting right. People will just click away if they cannot hear or see the video due to low quality production.

Now with respect to conversions, little things do matter. Something as simple as pointing (in the video) to the form you want them to complete can see a drastic improvement in conversion rates.

Your company specializes in link building. How can link building consultants satisfy customers in the short term, when relationship building is a long-term effort?

Vertical Measures is definitely known for our link building, but more and more of our link building efforts are centered around creating link attraction through great content.

And Penguin/Panda have only accelerated that area of our business. Most clients are now convinced that patience is a virtue when it comes to obtaining the proper back link profile.

The Google updates in March & April went a long way in helping us explain this to our clients, but we also have many case studies demonstrating where creating solid content, then promoting it, drove backlinks to their website.

In many cases the cost per link was substantially lower than the standard “ordering 10 links for $2500” approach. The only difference being it took a couple months longer with the content approach.

This would have been a different answer just a few months ago, but anyone paying attention to SEO these days seems to totally get it.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I recently saw a video on FBEvolution.com about using a squeeze page (aka email lead generation landing page) on your Facebook fan page, which I’ll be adapting for the Advanced SEO book fanpage.

In it, Ryan Deiss shares a case study on his landing page getting the name and email of 50% of the people who clicked like.

He incentivized the like with part 1 of his free report, and incentivized the email optin by upselling folks to get part 1 AND part 2.

I’m planning to test that, as well, with the following adaptation of Ryan’s landing page: 

Key elements in the lander and my adaptation on Ryan’s take:

- I’ve made the optin area 1.5 times as wide as the opposite area.
- Moved the word Or to the height of the end of the left-hand section’s heading.
- Widened the optin fields.
- Used my brand colours.
- Adapted the call to action to reflect a successful button I use in my standard book optin squeeze page.
- Ryan cleverly made the “part 1 only” section of the lander black and white only to be less enticing. That could backfire, as whitespace is known to draw the eye. For now I’m rolling with his hypothesis.

What do you predict the results will be? Ryan told me that the case study was a bit old and the numbers aren’t what they used to be. I’m still optimistic and think this can both increase my conversion rate as well as cut my cost per click, so it should be two simultaneous wins! Plus there’s the potential to get likes, which are like their own list, and which can be used for friends-of-connection ad targeting as well as sponsored stories. I’m salivating .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

You can segment your email list by what page(s) they visited.

That means you can use your email marketing for “retargeting” aka “remarketing.”

Retargeting is an increasingly popular marketing tactic that targets prospects based on their having already visited your site (or a specific page, depending what pages include your retargeting-cookie-dropping code).

You know from the person’s previous visit that they’re interested in your product, so you use retargeting  to get a second chance at converting them.

Typically, retargeting is done via display ads. And this still is worthwhile for people who visited your site but aren’t on your email list.

The point of this blog post is to say that you don’t need to use display ads. You can just segment your email list by people who visited your site before. That way you don’t need to pay per click, and get more out of your existing email marketing dollars.

If you’re an Aweber email marketing customer (you can try it for $1 / 30 days) , this is super easy.

To set up a retargeting segment:

1. Browse to your Subscibers > Search area, then select Web Page viewed and enter the URL.

2. Click search.

3. Then enter a name for the segment and save it!

Some particular cases where email retargeting can be handy:

1. Need to liquidate your inventory?

Segment the list by people who visited the relevant pages on your site, and use your newfound remarketing savvy to let them know it’s now up to 50% off!

2. Over-deliver to customers who saw the thankyou page.

Did someone just donate to your charity? Buy your product? Don’t just say thanks – send them an email offering a free hat or sweater if they’ll give you their offline address. (Then you can use this for direct mail.)

3. Combine with local segmentation to set up meetings next time you’re in town.

Ex.: Did someone on your list see your enterprise B2B product but not convert? Let them know when your sales staff are in town next and offer to take ‘em out for lunch!

4. Download the segment and follow up personally via phone or social media.

Use this to understand the prospects’ objections and refine your persuasion process!

If you liked this post, you might also like my post Why Ecommerce SEO Is A NON-Profit Activity, which discusses using SEO for customer acquisition with minimal profit, and email for generating profit. Or try Aweber email service for $1.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

While looking around for AdWords alerts, I discovered a very handy time-saving feature in AdWords called Rules. You can use AdWords Rules to automatically pause low-CTR ads, high-CPA keywords and likewise auto-manage other aspects of your account that don’t require human judgment.

1. Pause or start ads, ad groups or keywords
2. Increase or decrease bids by a specified amount or percentage (this amounts to bid management built into the AdWords platform)
3. Save AdWords management time on the weekend, special event, or other seasonal happening
4. Control costs and budget

Do all these things based on parameters you set for performance data:

1. CTR,
2. impressions,
3. cost,
4. conversions (with over a dozen submetrics like viewthru conversions etc),
5. average (avg). cpc,
6. avg cpm,
7. avg position,
8. clicks,
9. ad text, (typically for
10. display URL,
11. destination URL,
12. approval status,
13. ad group,
14. ad group name and
15. ad type.

A useful point made in the AdWords Rules FAQ is that you want to be careful in when (i.e. how frequently) you set the rule to operate and how long a sample period it’s checking.

For example, imagine the rule: ” ‘If an ad’s average position over the last 14 days is worse than 3, raise bids by x% daily.’ This would raise your bids more frequently (daily) than the rule is evaluating the ad’s average position (on a 14 day window). It is generally better to use frequency and measurement windows that are consistent with one another (e.g., if you select a weekly frequency, then use data from the last 7 days).”

That makes a lot of sense and that tip helped me set up my rules properly. Initially I set up rules to pause low performing with too short a time window. So I had ads that I could see had a CTR below 2% (my minimal acceptable CTR for a new ad in this campaign) based on the interface, but the rule preview wasn’t showing them as being paused according to the rule I set up. Why not? Because I was viewing data from the last 30 days while the rule was set up to use 7 days data including today’s.

On that same note: the terms used for when the rule will run / what data it checks aren’t entirely clear, notably due to overlap.

Here are some clarifications:

Same day – same day the rule is run

Last day – the day before the rule is run

Same month – all days of that same month, which is not a great option because this could be anything from 1 day to 31 days! A better alternative, unless you’re just running the rule one-time to make mass changes (in which case you can run it at the end of the month for the same month and often have enough data):

Last 30 days – i.e. prior to the rule executing. Except for low volume keywords, this typically suffices.

P.s. Pro tip: Don’t have AdWords email you every time the rule runs because you will be inundated. Alternately, create a secondary email address that gets the emails, so you can track what changed and when, but without being overwhelmed.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Keith Hagen of ConversionIQ is set to speak at the next Conversion Conference in Chicago. He graciously agreed to an interview ahead of the show.

1) What’s the topic of your presentation? How did you come up with that?

The topic is “Testing What Matters” and it arose from a conversion I had with another CRO and were talking about how all these massive corporations (like the ones we had both come out of) have the best testing tools and are testing, but not getting results, and how it was due that fact they just don’t know what to test.

2) What attracted you to Conversion Conference vs another show?

I was scheduled to speak last year on the behalf of the company I worked for (Webroot) where my team had increased the conversion rate greatly, but left to start ConversionIQ just before the conference. I went to the 1st Conversion Conference a couple of years ago and was happy to finally “find my community” as I felt “alone” as a CRO before then. This is the only show I will be speaking at this year, as it is the one I feel I can best contribute to.

3) Have you been before? Who are you looking to network with most, and why? (Can mean some specific person/people or types – eg other speakers to learn, inhouse ux people for lead gen etc).

Yes, I went to the 1st one in San Jose. I am looking to network with our vendors the most. We work really closely with them and want to build a more personal relationship for the long-term. I also want to meet Amy Africa who I met in 2004 and was the 1st person I’d ever met that was doing the same thing I was (I also want to thank her for the advice she gave me years later that lead to my co-founding ConversionIQ).

[Gab:] What did she tell you?
Keith: “Amy told me that consulting was a lot of work! She said it was rewarding, but it was not for faint of heart” .

4) What tips would you offer for people to get the most out of their networking, besides the standard ‘don’t start with self-promotion’?

You are asking the wrong guy. I’m just like people and enjoy learning from others across all fields. I’m lucky if I remember business cards and really hit the events for good conversation, not strategic biz stuff. Sorry.

5) What’s a growing trend that you see in best practice web design [for conversion]? What are people getting right that they used to get wrong?

The trend I see is towards CRO, and away from the routine and costly redesign that adds more risk than the benefit is worth.

6) You published a newsletter with CRO secrets – how often do you mail people? Do you segment your list?

We email weekly tips, but no newsletter. We don’t segment it yet, as we try to keep it broad enough to be of value to everyone, although we do dig into B2B and eCommerce a bit.

7) How effective is your lead-gen to sales conversion funnel? What do CRO consultants say that’s persuasive to close leads?

We are awesome at conversion. We find it helps to be honest, and let the potential benefits (the #’s) speak for themselves.

You mention “CRO consultants”, which is interesting since we don’t have our CRO experts selling, we have sales people doing that. If any CRO consultants would like to focus on CRO, they should let us know as our business system is geared to letting people focus on their core skills.

I can’t say exactly what gets the vast majority of prospects that talk to sales to convert other than the prospects understand the numbers and believe us due to our case studies. I think part of it is we are not “salesy” and probably come off as real. It could be they are mostly referrals or people we have met face to face.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Google is cutting the ROI on ecommerce SEO and has been for 8+ years. If ecommerce merchants don’t understand the changes below, they’re going to lose market share to savvier competitors.

Read on for what you need to do to survive and thrive.

Google has reduced the traffic and ROI available to SEO-ed sites by:

• - Publishing sites’ content directly in search results as stock quotes, movie times, flight times, sports scores etc.
• - Creating “universal” search results that make sites compete with Youtube, Google News, Product search etc
• - Taking away keyword data for up to 30% of sites’ SEO traffic

And that’s just the more obvious things. But don’t take my word for it, Google proudly say so in this video:

Smart SEOs are already transitioning out of relying on SEO traffic for profit. They’re using it to acquire customers, period.

Everyone knows that repeat customers are easier to sell to and buy more. So make an initial low-profit sale to search visitors, so that you can add them to your email list and make more sales and profit later.

In fact, in my previous email to people who got a free advanced SEO book chapter, I went so far as to advocate selling at cost -i.e. at 0% profit – to maximize your conversion rate on SEO traffic.

Then wouldn’t you price everything – since you want search traffic on all your products – at 0% profit?

How will you ever be profitable then?

There are two parts to making long-term profit off of search visitors.

Part 1 – Dividing products between customer-generation and profit-generation
Part 2 – Segmenting traffic on the fly to personalize the products you show

Part 1 – Divide products between customer-generation and profit-generation

The reason for cutting into margins is that SEO traffic is decreasing, and price-comparisons are a click away.

The thing is … what if there wasn’t search traffic in the first place?

Challenge the assumption that all your products want/depend on search traffic!

Surprisingly, that’s the case for many products. For example, any new product doesn’t have existing search demand. (See sidebar.)

1) Acquisition products. These low-margin products are meant to draw visitors into the store, to be either immediately converted and/or upsold on products with higher margins.

In offline retail this is known as a “loss-leader” – a product that is sold at little, no- or even negative-margin.

It leads visitors into the sale that is then made profitable with crosssels and upsells.

2) Profit products. These are higher margin products that allow the business to grow and thrive.

Popular examples:

• - Candy-and-magazine display at the checkout counter
• - Accessories for your electronics, such as cases, memory cards, insurance
• - “House” brands – if you manufacture the product, customers can’t get it from competitors, eliminating price-competition

So how do you make sure that your existing customers will see profit-generating products when they return to your site?

Part 2 – Segment the traffic and personalize

Have you visited Youtube while logged in to your Google account? Notice that it recommends videos specifically for you?

Or notice how Amazon welcomes you by name and shows you recently-browsed products? (Retargeting of a sort.)

You can use a free tool like BTBuckets (hattip Daniel Waisberg at SMX Israel) to show these visitors custom content. It’s called behavioral targeting (BT).

Why not just send existing customers to targeted landing pages? Why resort to fancy technology?

It’s not an either-or choice. You can do both.

Most products aren’t sold on the immediate first visit, though. So it’s useful to have this segmentation in place for when users return, potentially on a different URL than your targeted landing page.

They might visit your homepage instead – but fortunately you’ve got them cookied and IP-logged so you know to show them the profitable merchandise, not the acquisition merchandise.

To conclude:

Show SEO traffic your cheapest products – but don’t keep showing them flat-margin products once they’re customers.

Create your own products.

Differentiate them.

Bundle products.

Scrape Amazon’s “customers who bought X also bought Y” recommendations.

Show products that require a higher-degree of trust. Ask for Facebook-connect logins to gain demographic data so you can buy Facebook ads to keep increasing your email list.

Increase that average order value and those profits!

If you liked this post, you might also like:

How to Find Competitors’ Keywords
Brand Building Online – It’s Not Just Colors
Remote usability testing beginner’s guide
How Inhouse Ecommerce SEOs can add value
4 Advanced Ecommerce SEO Tactics

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

In writing a report for an illuminea client, Traffix Diameter Systems , I wrote the following about the new Modified Phrase Match and Exact Match:

“The low-volume keywords (ex.: misspellings and 4-word phrases) have been paused to allow them to be targeted by other keywords set on phrase match targeting.”*

*Phrase match did not previously target misspellings (or accents or abbreviations), so it was necessary to add misspellings as separate keywords, which resulted in low quality scores since the landing pages did not also misspell the keywords.

Alternately you could target these keywords using modified broad match and broad match targeting, but this meant lower CTRs since the same ads would have to target a wide, diverse audience.

Google has, starting May 1, changed the default nature of phrase and exact match keywords to include these variants: misspellings, singular/plural, stemmings (swiming will also match swim), accents and abbreviations.

So you can achieve high keyword quality scores on phrase-matched keywords without worrying about writing ads that both appeal to your regular audience and your misspellings demographic with modified-broad-match ad writing.

Cesar Barba has a useful post that explains how to see if the change is profitable, and Steve has a nicely illustrated, colorful explanation of the change.

P.s. Anyone who doesn’t want this can opt-out via the Campaign settings selections page.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Should you focus on weekend or weekday traffic in your PPC ad campaigns? If you’re already getting organic search traffic, you have data that can answer that question in 30 seconds.

See the pattern? 5 days a week, traffic goes up and bounce rate goes down. Guess what? That’s the weekday traffic – people browsing from work, who actively are interested in the site’s products.

They’re goal oriented, so they’re more patient and make more effort to find what they want on the site.

The weekend traffic is casual, so they’re more prone to bounce.

Liked this post? Get my latest posts by email or RSS.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

If you’re using both an autoresponder series of emails as well as “broadcast” messages that go out with no regard to sequence, you run the risk of annoying people with too-frequent emails.

For example, if you have an autoresponder series that sends emails every 3 days, then broadcast on top of that, someone could literally have just gotten an autoresponder when they get your broadcast. I just found that out the hard way with someone who got my free chapter telling me that they unsubscribed because the email prior to my broadcast today was sent 90 minutes earlier!

The solution is to segment your email list. In Aweber, you go to Subscribers > Search Subscribers. Then look for subscribers with whom the last followup date was 2+ days ago.

Aweber allows you powerful segmentation including by the date you last sent a follow-up email.

The problem with this kind of segmenting is that it always needs updating, because Aweber makes you pick a specific date. You can’t set the “Last Followup” field to “2+ days ago,” you need to set it to “On or Before” “April 20, 2012,” for example (I’m writing this April 23, 2012).

The result is that in the future, subscribers who have been recently added will be excluded by this segment – EVEN IF they have gotten the whole series of autoresponders over a month ago! Imagine we’re in June, and someone got all the autoresponder emails by May 15th. I can email them again without being annoying, but my above-saved segment would exclude them.

So the conclusion is that you need to save the segment with a name that tells you exactly how it’s set: “Last followup on or before {insert precise date}.” That way, next time you need to broadcast, you’ll be reminded to update the segment before sending to it.

Kudos to Joel Chudleigh from DeepFootprints.co.uk for forcing me to improve , and to Aweber for generally making great software despite my occasional quibbles.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

[Edit: I try to post original stuff but I realize here that I'm adapting "second page poaching." It only occurred to me after writing my post, but when you're done reading this, check out Virante's posts on second page poaching, relevant data collection and an API. ]

While working on a huge site with 1000s of pages and keywords, I realized that I needed to prioritize what keywords to build links for.

The situation was different from a brand new site, because for a new site, all keywords are equally hard to rank for (except perhaps those in the domain), in that you’re not in the top 100 for anything. In such a case, you typically prioritize keywords by absolute search volume, then keyword difficulty.

Unlike a brand new site, this site already has pages in the top 100 – and especially the top 20 – for dozens of terms. I sawthis when setting up the rank tracking (for reporting purposes) in Raven Tools. (Normally I prefer Authority Labs for rank tracking for their great historical graphs. These let you see what links boosted you, assuming the links are published on sites crawled regularly.)

 Check page 2 rankings with equivalent keyword search volume for their relative keyword difficulty, using SEOmoz‘s keyword difficulty tool.

Accessible to SEOmoz Pro members only as of this writing.  

Anyways, Stephan Spencer and the boys at Virante shared a tip that you should look for pages ranking in positions 11-20, e.g. on the second page, since they’re easiest to rank.

The site already has loads of authority links from across the web, having been around since the 90s. So what’s needed at this point is deep links with a mix of anchor text. You’re only a few links away from page 1 and traffic in that case.

And as the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. A site doing 1 million visits/month didn’t get there from trying to rank for “insurance” straight away, but from getting 50 visits a month here and 230 visits a month there. It adds up and snowballs, because as more people get to know you and find you in search results, more people link to you.

(Mike Grehan described this phenomenon years ago as the [SEO] Rich Get Richer, in a piece called Filthy Linking Rich.)

What do you do when you have a few dozen pages on page 2? With similar keyword search volumes? Look at the keyword difficulty. 

So unless there’s a tool that gives me keyword difficulty scores in bulk, I’m going to go through the terms 5 at a time with SEOmoz’s keyword difficulty tool and see what ranks in positions 2-20 and is worth building links for to top up traffic.

Like this post? Get my latest posts by email or RSS!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

I launched some Facebook ad campaigns in the past few days and saw traffic skyrocket in Google Analytics.

Problem is, the traffic was garbage – not the traffic I was paying for, which converted decently. It was Facebook’s ad reviewers, tasked with checking the 1000+ ads I uploaded, visiting my site once/ad. 

You’d think they could just do CTRL+F, see the destination URLs are all the same and visit once?

I used Google Analytics’ campaign URL builder, which helped me find the problem, because it was quite obvious what URLs were generating this spike in traffic relative to this site’s otherwise low traffic, not to mention you can view goals by UTM URL variables etc specifically.

Also, checking where most of the traffic was, Google Analytics showed North Carolina.

Guess what? I wasn’t targeting ads to the US. I think we’ve found Facebook’s East Coast ad review center, lol .

Conclusion: Use filters to look at your Google Analytics data minus North Carolina if you’re uploading ads and are in a time zone ahead of North America.

I just published a guest post from Lior Levin on Advanced Segments in Google Analytics with explanations on doing that, if you need help.

I’m on time zone GMT +2 in Israel. That’s presumably why I got an East Coast review instead of waiting extra hours for the West Coast team. Speaking of which – big kudos to Facebook for setting that up so I could get my ads live some hours sooner! Thanks folks!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Suppose you’re using Google’s URL building format to mass tag URLs with UTM_campaign, UTM_Keyword, UTM_content and other UTM settings – where do you see the data afterwards?

Google Analytics used to provide UTM-tagged URL performance data under the Advertising tab/navigation item. Now, it’s moved.

You can find the info in

Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns .

Once that’s open, scroll to the top and click Goal Set 1 (or 2, 3 etc according to what you want to see).

This provides extremely actionable info if you’ve properly tagged your campaigns.

Here’s some sample info from a client, for example.

We used

- one UTM variable for age and

- one UTM variable to insert country targeting data:

When the data presents this clear, it makes taking action so easy a trained monkey could do it.

If you liked this post, get my latest posts by RSS or get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is the process I’m following to create ad campaigns on Facebook promoting my advanced SEO book.

If you like this, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO! Or get my latest posts by email or RSS!

Toolset:

Images – Royalty free stock ex SXC, plus my own headshots – faces draw eyes so it’s worth starting with those to get a high CTR and low CPC.
Social Ads Manager (SAM) by Brighter Option – bulk ad creation, upload, powerful tracking built in, save targeted interests for reuse, great support by skype and email, cost is % of spend
Pixlr & MS Paint – Cropping, adjusting image brightness and contrast to shout louder, adding text and certain effects. Free! YAAY.
FBAdsToolbox – To add standard effects like image borders in different colors and certain neat image effects like scroll buttons, video play buttons etc. Very affordable at $58/year (save $60+) or $12/mo.
Confessions of an Advertising Man – ad copy guidelines by David Ogilvy. I also want to get Ogilvy on Advertising and my friend Marty Weintraub’s Killer Facebook Ads
Google Website Optimizer (on html, not WordPress) – conversion rate optimization

PreRequesites:
Landing pages set up and ready to be split test in GWO.
I use html/css pages instead of WP for ease of editing and GWO installation, plus max flexibility. If your pages are based on WP, not to worry, you can save the files and then edit the html to add GWO’s javascript code snippets, on which the whole system is based. See the workaround details here.

Step 1: Collect Pics

Browse for useful pics and download new ones to my pc. Useful = Faces, and anything that jumps out at the eyes. I’m looking for contrast, bright colors, faces, action shots, and niche stuff. Ex. of niche: With SEO, I got pics of guys in black hats. (The copy with those ads should say “Outscale Blackhat SEO.”)

Step 2: Make Pics Eye Catching

Go to MS Paint, Pixlr and FBAdsToolbox to tweak the pics so that they pop more, model’s eyes look towards my ad text (right) or towards the center of the screen. (That’s a test I’m running against best practices (which say have eyes look at your Call to Action), based on a hypothesis that if my model can catch their gaze by looking where I expect the user’s eyes to be, that I can boost CTR.

Step 3: Write Campaign & Upload Pics

Upload pics en masse to SAM then choose those I’ll use – aim for max variety so testing has higher impact. Ex.: White woman and black woman, border vs video play button etc. As more experienced campaigners have noted, images matter more than copy on FB, so that’s the bulk of my effort.

(Note: This skips some of the initial setup work you need to do in SAM, such as creating a product, setting revenue levels, creating interest targets and saving them as clusters for reuse etc, because much of that is one-time work.)

SAM takes the different versions of copy, URLs, and images and multiplies them all by each other, as well as by your demographic targets. So if you’ve got 2 titles, 2 body copies, 5 pics, 2 URLs, and 5 demographics, you’ve got 200 ads created. Much easier than trying to do that manually .

Important optimization tip: I recommend duplicating campaigns to target each country separately, because this way you avoid overpaying by bidding high for the US/UK and paying the same price for countries where traffic costs less. It’s worth separating out, depending on your time constraints, from 2000+ people in your target audience, imho. You may want to try this for age and gender as well.

Step 4: Measure and adjust

Monitor results. Reuse copy, images, countries, landing pages, ages and interests that got best CTR and conversion rates. Cut the rest or bid lower on them.

Step 5: Stay patient

Just because you can post an ad in 5 minutes, doesn’t mean that winning at the ads game is fast. It takes time to create everything, set up tracking, split tests etc and then measure and repeat. The more you do it though, the faster and better you get at it because you realize how to move faster, what your better targets are, etc.

If you liked this, get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO! Or get my latest posts by email or RSS!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Use Advanced Segments in GA to Discover SEO, Social Media and Ecommerce Insights

Google Analytics (GA) is a tool that, while very useful to basic users who just want a quick look at their site’s statistics, is meant for power users that can take advantage of all of GA’s hidden features. Advanced Segments is an example of that hidden power.

Advanced segments are a tool that few GA users take advantage of but one that can help you understand any change or troubleshoot any issue, including SEO problems.

But before we delve into using Advanced Segments, we first have to understand what they are and how they can help you better understand your SEO ups and downs.

What Are Advanced Segments?

Advanced Segments are simply filters for the content you’re looking at in Google Analytics. It’s a way to look at only a segment of your traffic that you define.

There are several segments pre-defined in GA including search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic, etc. You can find these, as well as others, by simply clicking the “Advanced Segments” drop down in the upper right hand part of your Analytics report (upper left if you’re using the new version).

You can compare segments side-by-side by putting multiple segments in the same graph, and you can also see how well they are converting, what their bounce rate is and generally how well they are performing. So a simple way to use advanced segments is to produce easy-to-understand charts that show clients or others the best performing traffic.

Q: So how do you use advanced segments to hone in on your SEO issues?

A: Start with creating a new segment.

Setting Up an Advanced Segment for SEO traffic

Creating a new segment is very simple. Just click on the “Advanced Segments” drop down and then click the “Add New Advanced Segment” button to get started.

What you will find is a criteria “tree” with the different criteria connected by and/or statements.

Each criteria has a dimension (a variable tracked by Google Analytics), a condition and a value. To create a criteria, simply drag a dimension from the left-hand side of the screen to the slot, select your condition and then enter or select your value.

If you want to understand your SEO traffic better, drag the “Source” dimension to your first criteria, set the condition to “containing” and the value to “google.” That will show you all of the traffic that came to your site from Google.

You can include all of the search engines by using the regular expression, “google|yahoo|bing .” The “pipe’ character works as an “or” between the words. However, if you use the pipe character, you need to set the condition to “Matches Regular Expression” so Google Analytics can interpret it.

To test this, simply give the segment a name and then click “Test Segment.” You should see a number of visits beside the criteria’s line.

You can then hone your segment even further by eliminating non-organic results.

This can be done by clicking on the “Add ‘AND’ Statement” link, dragging “Mention” to the dimension slot, setting the condition to be “Matches Exactly” and then selecting “organic” from the value drop down. If you test the results again, you should find that you’ve reduced the number of results in the second criteria (unless you have no non-organic search visitors).

You can further refine the search by excluding keywords, such as keywords related to your brand, or include only certain keywords, to see how a particular keyword is performing. Simply drag “Keyword” to the dimension, choose your condition and choose the correct value for whatever you want to do. For example, if you wanted to look only at traffic that came from the keyword “windmill” you would set the condition to be “contains” (or “Matches Exactly”) and the value to be “windmill.”

This lets you include and exclude keywords as you see fit. Just remember, if you use pipes to include or exclude multiple keywords, be sure to set the condition to “Matches Regular Expression.”

Further Testing to Find SEO Problems

The learning curve with Advanced Segments can be a bit steep. However, once you do it a few times, it becomes second nature and the power that it offers you as a Google Analytics user is incredible.

However, the real power of Advanced Segments is in how it lets you play around. For example, using the above segment, you can try different keywords to see how traffic has changed, you can exclude any branded keywords you have to look at only non-branded queries and you can remove your best keywords to see if your performance with long-tail keywords is improving or declining.

Other Examples of Actionable Advanced Segments

However, SEO isn’t the only use for Advanced Segments, here are a few other ways that you can use these tools to improve your site’s peformance.

Social Network Monitoring –

If you use the “Source” dimension to track only inbound traffic from the social networking sites you’re actively involved with, you can see see easily how much traffic is coming from them and which ones are providing the best results. You can then focus your energy on the networks that your readers are actually using and cut out ones that are just wasting your time.

Twitter Traffic –

It can be difficult to track traffic from Twitter since much of it comes from 3rd party apps. However, the “Source” dimension isn’t just for domains, you can also put in keywords such as “tweetdeck” “hootsuite” and the popular URL shorteners. This way, you can look at all of the traffic coming into your site from Twitter and decide how much of an investment Twitter is worth to you moving forward.

Follow Your Buyers and Window Shoppers –

If you operate an ecommerce site and configure Google Analytics to track how much visitors spend, you can segment out the people who spend a lot of money from those who leave without buying anything at all. This lets you see which sources of traffic are delivering the highest returns and invest your time and money in building the inbound links that matter.

Find the Questions on Your Visitors’ Minds –

Finally, if you are curious as to what questions your visitors are asking to get to your site, you can set up an advanced segment to look only at the questions that people are asking. By using the “Keyword” dimension and looking at question words such as “Who,” “Can,” “Why,” etc. you can look at only in the inbound visitors who are asking questions of Google and, from there, you can answer them directly in future blog posts.

Conclusion

With Advanced Segments, you can build almost any test you want when it comes to analyzing SEO traffic. That makes it easy, through a bit of trial and error, to diagnose virtually any SEO problem.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing adviser for a shipping company that offers inspection pre-shipment services in China, and who also works for a custom neon signs store.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Recently a client came to me with a question about where to prioritize their content-writing efforts for the site redesign, and I offered her an answer based on Google Analytics‘ keyword data.

The problem is that if you just export your top keywords, you’re going to see brand search terms near the top.

What can you do with branded keywords? They’re not actionable, because you rank for your brand terms and will continue to rank in the future.

You want to find out what are your top keywords to prioritize where you spend your time writing copy.

So how do you exclude brand search keywords from your Google Analytics traffic sources report?

1. Click the “advanced” link that is near the search-filter box.

You’ll see a screen like the following one:

2. Click on the Include drop-down and switch it to exclude. Then type in your core brand term. So if your company is called John’s Crazy Shoes, type “John” or “Crazy”. Finally, click apply, and voila – you’re done!

What about if your brand name has lots of alternative spellings and misspellings? Or what if one site has multiple brands, due to a rebranding or multiple child companies sharing a single site with the parent company?

In such a case, you can use regular expressions, or regex, to exclude all of the brands .

All you need to do is switch the matching parameter to be “Matching RegExp” and type each of the various spellings into the text field.

If you liked this post, get my latest posts sent to you by RSS or email!

(Related post: How To Build Your Company’s Brand Online)

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a company that provides a to do list application and, who also consults for a company that offers psd to html 5 service.

Google Analytics is great at collecting lots of data for your clients, but once you create a graph or a spreadsheet showing traffic and keyword trends, many customers will ask, “What’s next?” There is no shortage of website data available, but the hard part is figuring out how to create a useful SEO report that will help clients improve their return on investment and keep them happy.

Reports are an easy element of SEO marketing to overlook. While creating a report by itself does not magically lead to more hits on a client’s website, creating an actionable report is an essential tool that will make you more effective and help you retain clients.

How to Present an SEO Report

SEO reports force you to sit down with your clients and discuss the goals of their SEO strategy, measure their progress, and plan for future growth and effectiveness. As you look at the various reporting tools available, you’ll need to think of various ways to present data to different clients and different groups within larger organizations.

SEO expert Max Thomas suggests that a report to a marketing team should include more data and metrics as well as analysis that makes it easier for them to report to their superiors, while a report to a boss or board will need to be stripped of search jargon and focus on analysis that summarizes your findings in a way that shows your SEO work is contributing to brand awareness and the bottom line.

Sam Crocker of OMD UK, writes on the SEOMoz blog, “there is no question that you will prepare a report differently for the Board than you will do for the developers or an in-house SEO. Make sure you know who will be reading the report and create different reports where necessary.” Different actions will be required by each segment of a company, and therefore be sure your reports target the specializations of each department—such as return on investment for the boss or keyword competition analysis for the marketing team.

Workbooks CRM

One of the most attractive tools for generating an SEO report is Workbooks CRM because of its price tag (free) and its powerful ability to track the conversions generated from keyword traffic.

Daniel Bianchini of SEOptimise writes in Search Engine Journal, “Workbooks is able to track from first touch all the way through to conversion from the site, and then on to completion of the buying cycle. With all this information you are then able to produce incredibly insightful reports and calculate ROI down to keyword level, allowing better analysis of SEO and PPC campaign effectiveness and improved efficiency in the allocation of budgets.”

Besides SEO effectiveness, you need to be able to present why the current ROI justifies maintaining the current strategy, adjusting it, or giving it a complete overhaul. In other words, the profitability of your marketing business and your clients rests on presenting a clear, easy-to-follow report tied to the ways your strategy is paying off.

Analytics Canvas

For a larger company’s SEO campaign, Analytics Canvas provides clear and simple SEO reports along with the added functionality of integrating data from the Google Analytics accounts for multiple websites. If you’ve ever been frustrated with managing multiple reports from a company’s various sites, this powerful tool will streamline your data into one report that allows you to capitalize on all of the data from your clients’ sites in order to create a complete picture of their market share and SEO success.

Analystics Canvas does not provide any unique data on its own. You’ll only be working with the data Google provides for queries, landing pages, and geography. It’s up to you to figure out how your brand is performing, but Analytics Canvas will allow you to integrate large data groups into charts that are easy to create so that you can present extremely broad trends and new opportunities to marketing teams and executives.

Recognized by Google as one of its top API developers, Analytics Canvas is not a free tool like Workbooks CRM. However, it should pay for itself with all of the time that it saves. If Analytics Canvas is a little too pricey for your budget, check out ShufflePoint.

Google Analytics Reports

As of October 2011, Google Analytics integrated Webmaster Tools data into reports, which SEO strategists had been clamoring for, but the data remains incomplete in the eyes of some reviewers.

SEO consultant Cyrus Shepherd writes, “The Landing Pages report shows how many times your top landing pages were shown in search results, again along with average position and CTR. Average position isn’t as useful in this report, as you don’t know the exact search query.”

In addition, the query report on the top 1000 terms presents the average position based on a metric that averages a page’s rank rather than simply presenting its highest position. While Google Analytics is easy to use and accessible, some of its tools will need refining before it receives a firm endorsement from many SEOs. Workbooks CRM provides a far more valuable insight into keyword tracking since it can tell you the exact return on investment for your keyword strategies rather than mere rankings. While Google Analytics provides helpful data for a marketing team, it still falls short of what you’d need for a report to a CEO or board.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Did you know I used to rank #3 for SEO on Google.ca – without being logged in or anything – behind only two Wikipedia results? So de facto, I was the #1 top ranking SEO in the country .

I had taken screenshots at the time which I never got around to posting on the blog, and while visiting my parents (who have the computer I was using then), I found the proof pics and sent them to myself. Here ya go:

Incidentally, I also once dominated all of the top 3 results for link building on Google.ca . I couldn’t find that screenshot, but here’s one of me at #1.

Before somebody asks, no I didn’t edit these photos in Photoshop or the like. If I had, I wouldn’t write this post about it because some Photoshop pros could analyze things and show what a photoshop amateur (and general idiot) I am.

What do I attribute the rankings to? You mean, besides my good lucks, charm and humility?

Mostly efforts at building relationships and sharing attention with others, which they were courteous enough to reflect back on me . My Internal Link Building plugin (currently over 25,000 downloads) was a pretty sweet piece of linkbait, too.

Want to be #1 for your terms? Get my latest posts sent to you free by email or RSS and learn your way to the top.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

The following is a guest post from James Agate, the SEO director at Skyrocket SEO, a leader in eCommerce SEO & Conversion Optimisation for small and medium sized online retailers.

eCommerce SEO is a unique beast. There are technical issues to consider, scalability challenges to think about and countless other opportunities and drawbacks that need to be taken into account. We work a great deal in the eCommerce space; here are some of the ways I know will take your or your client’s business to the next level.

Put an End to Ranking Cannibalism

The problem

eCommerce websites are notorious for having multiple versions of very similar pages which can cause serious SEO headaches. This is because there might be multiple URLs as a result of sort/search parameters or category labels.

In an ideal world, you will have one page that ‘champions’ each keyword so you can concentrate resources and measure progress.

I’m not talking heavy anchor text linkbuilding here e.g. all links pointing at your page for ‘picnic blankets’ need to be for ‘picnic blankets’. I mean a general awareness across your organisation that you are trying to get ‘yoursite.com/picnic-blankets’ to rank for ‘picnic blankets’.

There’s nothing wrong with getting multiple listings for a term –if you can. But if a client isn’t visible for a term because they have split links and social signals between 2 or even more pages, get a first listing ranking, then you can worry about a second listing.

The solution: How to eliminate page overlap in ecommerce SEO

1. Generate a crawl report using SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool (or comparable software).

2. Run a Google Analytics Top Content report.

3. Go through the sitemap (and the site itself) to identify content that overlaps and go through the crawl report to identify pages with duplicate content.

4. You should now have a list of pages that need some attention from you.

5. Using the data from both the crawl report and the top content report, you can now run through each page and analyse the best resolution – this might be redirecting or canonicalising one page to another, building out the content on a page to make it sufficiently different or useful, or perhaps consolidating content from multiple pages into one hub and redirecting all link juice into one place.

If you are unfamiliar with the term canonicalising, then I am simply referring to the use of the rel=canonical tag. This indicates to Google and other search engines which version of a page you want to rank.

The rel=canonical tag is easily implemented by adding the following tag to the of a page that is not your keyword champion, but has similar content.

< link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/example/product12345.html" >

Manual implementation of rel=canonical across a site could take a great deal of time but there are numerous plugins for a variety of platforms which can make the process a lot less painful. Also, many of the leading eCommerce software platforms have started to incorporate automatic rel=canonical tags into their system to make the process very straightforward indeed. Check with your eCommerce provider or web developer to see what the situation is for you.

Caveat: Social shares don’t appear to redirect in the same way link juice does so take this into account when deciding what to do with a page.

If you are an SEO practitioner then I think you will be amazed at the impact you can have on a client site just by doing this kind of housekeeping. As Warren Buffett would say “I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.”

Optimise Detail Pages’ Content with Structured Markup

There’s more to on-page optimization in today’s richer web than titles and keyword use, and with stronger competition, the need to go that extra step is increasingly important to gain an edge.

On-page optimisation for eCommerce websites is an extremely diverse subject but one area I would concentrate on initially would be on-page markup since it is apparent that Google will be focusing more and more on this in future. In particular, I would be looking at adopting the Schema.org principles.

Schema.org is a set of html tags for structured data that is supported by all the leading search engines. It allows you to add rich context to your website’s pages, by telling search engines what parts of the content refer to commonly sought information such as price, average review score, number of reviews, colour etc.

In turn, the search engines use this to make your search listing that extra bit jazzy. They create rich snippets in the search results displaying things like price, rating, availability, brand, condition, model number and much more besides.

The main benefit is an increased clickthrough rate. Over time, it could also actually improve your rankings because Google is working user feedback metrics like clickthrough rate into its algorithm.

Schema-Creator.org is a fantastic free tool which allows you to easily add the required markup to your pages. You can enter all the details about a product for example and it generates the markup code which you can then copy and paste into the page on your site.

Afterwards, you can use Google’s Rich Snippet Testing Tool to make sure you have implemented everything properly.

Scale is currently an issue when it comes to implementing Schema.org but as this area advances, readily available tools to automate and scale this will almost certainly follow. There is already a WordPress plugin (I haven’t tested this yet though).

I would also suggest that many of the leading eCommerce software companies out there will create of add-ons or plugin because the future of SEO is all about a richer web.

If you have an able web developer then chances are they will be able to advise you as to the best way to implement structured markup in your particular situation. Planning a redesign or a restructure – now is the time to look at ways Schema.org can be incorporated into your code.

Finally, also in the context of richer markup, you might also consider implementing rel=author for any content, blog posts or guides you have on your site. Rel=author is an html attribute for the link tag (like the alt attribute for images) indicating who has created the content, and allows authors to carry their authority around the web with them, regardless of what site they write on.

This will ensure you or your client, any authors on the site and the website itself will all start to build a reputation within your chosen industry. At some point in the future when Google really starts to take into account the Google Authorship Markup (rel-author) you will be ahead of the curve and likely gain an edge over the competition.

Don’t Set and Forget Keywords

Very few organisations review their keywords’ performance regularly, if at all. That’s a big mistake.

To many, keyword research, is a set and forget exercise, believing it is possible to make your keyword selections and then just plug away building links and content for months or even years, regardless of whether that particular keyword is still performing well in a business context.

The first step we take with clients is to understand and analyse their keyword portfolio, in particular the performance of individual keywords and categories of keywords.

How you decide to structure your audit depends on the goals of your client, but we mainly analyse looking at metrics like current ranking, current traffic, current conversion rate, revenue contribution, future potential and time to conversion.

Time to conversion is a particularly interesting metric because it helps you to identify what stage in the consumer decision making process a keyword might fit into. This helps you tailor content that targets this keyword to be as relevant as possible to the user.

For example, a keyword might have an average time to conversion of 35 days, a relatively long period of time.

Such a keyword is likely at the problem recognition or information seeking stages of the consumer decision process. You would do well to encourage users who arrive via this keyword to download a product brochure perhaps, get a product tour or even a demo.

In contrast, if you identify a keyword with a short average time to conversion – say a few minutes to a few days – this would suggest the consumer is much further along in the decision making process. So you should be encouraging ‘add to basket’ type actions as visitors are clearly on the verge of handing over their money – offering up a product guide or a product tour is inappropriate this late in the process.

Point #6 in my recent SEOmoz post talked more about performing keyword audits.

Auditing keywords is no easy task. There is quite a bit of data to trawl through but it will be worth it because it can help you to shape an overall SEO strategy that delivers a far higher return on investment, over a strategy that relies upon throwing links at the wall to see what sticks.

• Look specifically for keywords that contribute a high-level of revenue or have a particularly high conversion rate – identify ways you could increase traffic on these keywords. Are you ranking as high as you could be?

• Look for keywords that have strong traffic but a poor conversion rate – this could be an indicator that something is going wrong and is a good place to start when it comes to fixing and optimising the performance of a site.

• Look for ways to branch out around high-conversion keywords. Identify common themes amongst your top performing keywords and see if there are associated terms that you could be targeting.

Essentially a keyword performance audit is about identifying opportunities and looking at ways to capitalise on them.

Build a Community

SEO and social are now inextricably linked – we are hurtling towards life after link trust so your website and your business need to be ready.

Building a community serves multiple purposes both now and later down the line:

• Build a loyal base of customers – brand loyalty, less churn, increased profitability.

• Helps with SEO – user generated content can help scale your SEO.

• Future-proofs your website – if Google switches to more of a social trust algorithm, you’re not going to end up out in the cold.

First and foremost, your community should be respected – don’t be ‘that company’ that fakes a community or sells them out to turn a fast buck. Building a community can be a long term strategy that is beneficial for both business and individual alike.

You can leverage the power of your community in the following ways:

• For content – encourage community members to add comments, submit reviews and generally contribute to your website. All of this is long-tail content that enriches your pages and helps improve visibility AND you haven’t had to write it yourself or pay someone else to.

• For linkbuilding – As Patrick Altoft from Branded3 points out: “Commercial sites struggle to attract natural links.” This is because the person you are requesting the link from knows that in some way you are going to (over time) benefit financially from the link, in the form of direct traffic and increased search engine visibility. Leveraging a community for links can mean running competitions and prize giveaways to generate social shares and actual links. Rewarding users for linking back to you, or even giving them an identity (and a widget/badge) to show their commitment to your community.

• Grow your revenue – encourage advocates/ambassadors by offering rewards and incentives for helping you as a business achieve your goals. Referral bonuses or community points that can be exchanged for goods or cold hard cash are great ways to kickstart a community growth explosion.

Use Punchtab – a great engagement app that helps you easily reward your community when they perform a particular action e.g. like you on Facebook, makes a comment, submits a review and so on.

For further reading, you should try Motivating a Community and Gamify your Community; both provide valuable insights and tactics for encouraging and building a community even in a commercial context.

More posts on ecommerce and ecommerce SEO:

Don’t Leave Shipping Rates To The Cart
5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence
Ecommerce Widgets and more – video
How Inhouse SEOs can Add Value Beyond Search
Google’s Conspiracy To Monopolize Shopping

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Want to a/b test your WordPress (WP) website without the cranky, unreliable Google Website Optimizer (GWO) plugins?

The problem with using Google Website Optimizer with WordPress:

1. Google Website Optimizer was designed with static html pages in mind, as opposed to pages created by a content management system like WordPress.

Each post on a WordPress-powered website relies on multiple different files, such as header.php, sidebar.php, post.php etc. Google Website Optimizer requires you to place code on the page you’re going to test, which is made more difficult because of the dynamic inclusion of the header, sidebar, body of the post etc.

2. Various WP plugins supposedly resolve the difficulty. In fact, they don’t solve it for two reasons:

• These plugins limit what you can test to the content of the post, and not the title, layout, navigation and other very important aspects of the page.
• They don’t work with custom themes – which is likely your case if you’re putting money into A/B testing or multivariate (MVT) testing. I’ve failed to make GWO work on this WordPress site despite numerous efforts and following instructions to the letter.

In short, what you need is for your WordPress pages to be static html …

So here’s how to a/b test any page/post on your WordPress site, and any aspect of it!
All for free using Google Website Optimizer…

1) Navigate to the WordPress page you want to test, in your browser.

2) Click File -> Save File As and download the page. With Firefox, this downloads two things: i) a folder including all the graphics, CSS and backend voodoo that makes the page pretty and ii) the final html that is sent to the browser to display on your screen.

3) Upload the folder and html file from step 2 to your server. This is your control version of the page.

4) Create one or more copies of the folder and html file, and edit as needed for your test. This is your experimental version of the page.

5) Upload the copy/ies to your server. Important: Don’t upload to a folder in which WordPress is installed, because doing so will cause the newly uploaded page will take forever to load (in my case, 30 seconds+). This means that if WordPress powers your whole site (e.g. it’s installed in the root folder), you’ll need to test on a subdomain or another domain. I suspect this may also be true of trying to upload the file to a page where other CMSes are installed

6) Edit both the control and experimental pages to include the Google Website Optimizer code.

7) Optional: Use a 302 Temporary Redirect on the existing page to send the traffic to your control page and let GWO split the traffic between the “A” (control) version and “B” (experimental) version of the test page. You want to use a temporary redirect because you’re only doing this until you find a better version of the page.

Alternately, you can use a 301 permanent redirect if you don’t want to be bothered keeping the WP version of the page later.

Optional: If you tested layout or something graphical besides content, have a dev create a special “page template” that you can select when creating a new WP page. That way you’ll be able to keep the new version within the control of WordPress, while getting the higher conversion rate of your new version.

A summary of this approach’s benefits:

- It’s easier than breaking your head trying to install GWO on a custom theme and never succeeding at having it validate.
- It provides more flexibility in what you can test than the existing plugins out there.
- You’re still using GWO, so it’s free.

Liked this workaround to a/b testing using GWO and WordPress? Add my rss feed to your reader for more tips on conversion and usability and advanced SEO.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

This is a guest post by Phil Golobish, Senior SEO Consultant at Slingshot SEO. When he’s not writing posts for Gab, Phil helps Slingshot achieve digital relevance for deserving brands. You can follow Phil at @saintphilip or +Philip Golobish.

In 2006, AOL accidently released a ton of Google click through rate data. Clever marketers then used this data to estimate traffic a site could receive in any ranking position, and to forecast SEO ROI.

Since then, Google has made countless algorithm changes, incorporated personalization options, and blended results with images, videos, news, etc.

Given these changes, are the AOL CTR numbers still relevant? More specifically, what impact has blended search results had on CTR? The study Slingshot performed after the jump!

To answer the questions above, Slingshot SEO’s Research and Development department decided to do its own Google click through rate study using 2010 – 2011 non-branded keyword analytics and ranking data from its portfolio of clients. Enquiro and Optify have done similar studies and their much-appreciated results are overlaid in the graph below.

The graph above is incredibly useful for making current CTR estimates for ranking positions. However, analysis of Slingshot’s client data suggests that in some cases CTRs on traditional organic listings can vary wildly specifically when a non-branded query triggers a blended SERP that contains images, videos, news, etc. See the graph below for details. Note: Only the Optify study was included to simplify the comparison.

Aside from position one, the most significant change in CTR in a blended SERP is between positions two (2) and three (3). This difference between the two proposes an interesting SEO strategy question:

Should SEOs target keyword phrases that trigger blended results over like-volume keywords that do not, in order to win more traffic?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer and sample data is still being collected. We should have more conclusive data come August. However, savvy SEOs should be mindful of the different spreads of CTRs and should consider blended results during keyword selection for every search engine optimization campaign.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

• Content Marketing Cannon WordPress plugin - Consolidates content for more links, PageRank and traffic. Details: New SEO plugin: Content Marketing Cannon
• Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so you rank like Wikipedia. Details: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
• Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
• Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data
  
• ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.