SEO ROI » Ideas

Speaking At Pubcon On Usability, Conversion & SEO !

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 12:15:05 +0000

Brett Tabke n the gang at Pubcon just added me to a panel entitled, Post Click Marketing: Landing Page Optimization. Here’s what I plan to speak on, per my application:

SEO experts regularly say that pages need more content to rank. While this is often true, it sometimes leads to silly design decisions, such as having a paragraph of text above rows of merchandise on an ecommerce site.

Surprisingly, problems like that one or common. In the tunnel vision of driving traffic, the light at the end of the tunnel (or funnel?) gets forgotten. Will a local and toll-free number mess up Google local listings? Will content available via AJAX or Flash (for better user experience) be hard for search engines to index?

I’m hoping to discuss that and share a case study on the work I’ve been doing for my dad’s dental continuing education site, as well as my own. For my own site, you may have noticed I added some plain internal links to the “active window” area … while the data isn’t conclusive yet, I believe I’ve already identified one new customer, based in NY, whom that helped.

Anyways, you definitely should get a free chapter from my upcoming book if you’re the type who’d attend Pubcon, and especially this panel. Why? Because the usability-SEO intersect is a key theme in my book. Oh, and you might want to get my latest posts, too.

Lastly, will you be going to Pubcon? I definitely encourage it (I wouldn’t have pitched if the show sucked), and would love to see you there!

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
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Speaking At Pubcon On Usability, Conversion & SEO !

Finding [Mass] Niches With Content-Spinning

Gabriel Goldenberg — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:15:30 +0000

Hey there boys and girls – want to get into multiple niches really fast? Are those niches just slightly different from one another, being a “base keyword” + modifier combination? Know that if you just duplicate the copy from one “base keyword” + modifier A page to a page targeting “base keyword” + modifer B, the newer page will probably get filtered as a duplicate or low value page?

This is true both in sales-driven businesses and in lead-driven businesses.

content-spinning-or-article-rewriting-or-madlibbing”>If you think laterally, there’s a simple workaround. Blackhat SEOs call it content spinning or article rewriting or madlibbing.

Content spinning or article rewriting works as follows. The spinning software takes your original article. You select words and phrases and type synonymous words and phrases. The article randomly selects amongst the synonyms to create a coherent – yet quite different – article.

You sell blue widgets and have 500 words of copy on blue widgets? Are they the same as your red widgets except for the paint job?

Take the blue widget copy, run it through an article rewriter program and voila – fresh new copy for the red widget page. Just do a find and replace afterwards to switch all instances of the word blue for red.

~~No need~~ Less need to worry that the red widget copy will get the red widget page filtered by the engines.

I’m not sure if this qualifies as whitehat SEO or greyhat SEO. It’s different from what some blackhats use it for (at least, that I know), because:

1. Some blackhats aim to create massive amounts of rewritten articles for link building purposes. This is an onsite technique.
2. Blackhats who use this as an on-site technique just need it to bulk up crummy sites that will feed link juice upwards to moderately cleaner sites in a spam pyramid. Alternately, they’re used on made-for-adsense sites that only exist for search engines.

I doubt it’s entirely whitehat, however, because the main point of this is to avoid being filtered by search engine algorithms. But assuming you at least provide these various widgets, you’re at least saving visitors a click (e.g. the Adsense click).

If you liked this little bit on greyhat SEO, you should either add my RSS feed to your reader, or check out my SEO book for experienced search marketers.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
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Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Finding [Mass] Niches With Content-Spinning

When Does Reputation Management Grow The Bottom Line?

Gabriel Goldenberg — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:59:50 +0000

A: When you rank for coupon terms plus your brand. A guest post by yours truly at my friend Dean Chew’s site, Chewie.co.uk .

Some other recent guest posts of mine:

-Wordstream: ppc-workflow – My PPC workflow and mistakes I’ve made

-Wolf Howl: youre-all-wrong-paid-links-from-offtopic-sites-do-count/ So long as the page is relevant, you’re good!

If these posts are interesting to you, add my RSS feed to your reader already! Enough with the refresh button . Also, have a look at my advanced SEO book, featuring neat principles and tactics.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

When Does Reputation Management Grow The Bottom Line?

Google Acquisition To Refine Brand Algos?

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:25:46 +0000

Just saw this piece via the ever-industrious Bill Slawski: Google’s Acquisition of MetaWeb & its Named Entities technology.

Myself and others have noted how exact match domain names were getting impressive boosts just for being exact matches.

I asked Aaron Wall about it, and apparently their SEO Book private forum’s got some good discussions on it. One idea Aaron favoured from those discussions was the idea that Google has trouble distinguishing between legit brands and entities with generic names. Hence boosting exact matches, to help small brands out.

From what I understood of Bill Slawski’s overview, a Named Entity is basically a proper noun.

Remember Grade 2 English class? Yep, the interweb’s g33k3d out proper nouns with full-on algos to better index data about them and so forth. Check out Bill’s post for more, and share your thoughts there or here on what this acquisition means for future ranking fluctuations.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
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Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Google Acquisition To Refine Brand Algos?

The Sadly Short Story Of The Isolated Product Developer

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:28:15 +0000

Jake was a quick-witted entrepreneur oozing with creativity.

He made decent money working for others at the agency that employed him. Somewhere along the way, Jake decided that he should come up with his own product.

So he did. Jake spent all his free time for the better part of a summer in quiet isolation. While he kept up his day job, as soon as the clock struck 5:00 everyday, the fire in Jake’s seat at his desk burned him right out the door to his hatchback.

He sped home (always following the posted speed limits, naturally; his disposable income was for PPC testing, not speeding tickets) and cracked open the laptop.

‘Tippity-tap, tippity-tap’ he tippity-tapped at his keyboard. Slowly, slowly, a remarkable product emerged.

By the end of the summer, Jake’s product was done. He’d had a professional proofreader weed out the grammar mistakes, a humorist eliminated the worst jokes, and a friend informed he needed to shower. (Typing away like that one might get carried away…)

The big day finally came. Crossing his fingers, and tying his dog’s legs crooked for good measure (it was a stuffed puppy; Jake was no sadist… just a taxidermist) Jake launched his product!

“BOOOOOOM!” he announced as he lit his rocket, aiming for the stratosphere. The PPC ads were roaring, his copy was soaring and the Twitterverse was all… well, atwitter.

“fizzle-whimper,” answered the market, in energetic boredom.

“What’s the matter here?” asked Jake. “I’ve worked hard, see! You should be more compliant with what I’m trying to do, geez!”

“Did you ask me what I wanted?” quipped the market. “Why should I care about your product, when you don’t care what I need?”

“Cuz I’m motherf****** Jake with a motherf***** iFrame!” stomped Jake! (He thought he was the next motherf****** Jobs.)

Said the market, “Whatever, perv…”

Moral of the story: Ask what people want. Then develop. It’s funny how this is true in both SEO (keyword research first… building links backwards), product development, and the ways markets develop in general.

Here are some links to illustrate, and below that is a link to download a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced SEO. I’m asking my subscribers now for suggestions on what they’d like to see in it…

http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/interview-jakob-nielsen

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/build-links-backwards/21179/

http://wiep.net/talk/link-building/the-4-different-types-of-authority-links-and-11-ways-to-get-them/

http://www.thelaunchcoach.com/survey-tips

http://seoroi.com/keyword-research/buy-comes-before-sell/

If you liked this post on marketing and creativity, you might want to download a chapter from my upcoming book on advanced SEO.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.

ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.

Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

The Sadly Short Story Of The Isolated Product Developer

30 Second Tip For Phone Number Integrity In Local SEO Listings

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 13:02:26 +0000

Reading the curiosity-arousing article on SEL, “The Phone, Calling,” I noticed that the use and presence of call tracking numbers, toll-free numbers and other non-main-line phone numbers could cause trouble for search engines.

“First, these numbers throw a monkey wrench in business identification. Second, they could expire, inadvertently creating a dead-end for a consumer. Publishers today struggle with how to accurately identify an actual business when many phone numbers are involved.”

The easiest solution, imho, is to show humans one thing (the non-main-line phone number) and search engines another thing (porn, viagra, and all the good content [read: auto-generated] search engines love).

“But that’s evil blackhat, Gab!” Actually, all I mean is to recommend mediocre usability and coding in this exceptional case.

How?

In a image-editing/creation program, you type the phone number that you don’t want search engines and local listings publishers using. And then you post it – without alt text – on your site.

If you’re really paranoid about search engines using fancy optical character recognition (OCR) technology to extract the phone number from the image, you can go further.

Step 1: Create an html frame.
Step 2: Block search engines from accessing it with Robots.txt and any fun cloak-and-redirect set up you want.
Step 3: Place the image of the phone number in the frame.
Step 4: Embed the frame wherever your phone number needs to appear.

If you liked this local SEO / greyhat seo tip, you’ll probably enjoy my upcoming advanced SEO book, which teaches the principles of such creative/critical thinking and offers 30 advanced tactics. Download a free chapter here. (There’s also a link to the download page in upper left, if you browse away from this page.)

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

30 Second Tip For Phone Number Integrity In Local SEO Listings

Protest Experiment: 1 Month Without Google Search

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 13:30:32 +0000

In response to Google’s efforts to block access to Latma’s We Con The World parody, which is another proof of Google’s political bias and unreliability, I am going to go a month without Google search. I look forward to seeing how this works, and will report back. If you want to make a widget to this effect, or do the same, please feel free, and do let me know.

Again, this censuring of Latma shows the problem we have with Google’s dominance in search. If you rely on the information highway for access to information, and people put roadblocks up on certain branches of the highway, the highway’s very essence is undermined.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
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Protest Experiment: 1 Month Without Google Search

Where To Source Premium Content

Gabriel Goldenberg — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:20:58 +0000

There are a number of services of questionable ethics around, offering students to research and write full term papers for them. This is at the university level. For anyone familiar with the kind of work that goes into this, I would suggest that these sources can also be valuable sources for premium quality content. The type to linkbait professors, and other serious academics and quality sites with… Note that these things cost something like $20-$40 a page for a reason.

Speaking of content, I`ve been blogging little lately because I`m in exams and papers. That`s how I came to the above idea…

Separately, I`ve had some time to finally (I bought it over a year ago) read part of Partnering Profits by Brian Clark and someone else. I should have a review up next week.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Where To Source Premium Content

Charity & Edu Link Opp

Gabriel Goldenberg — Fri, 21 May 2010 11:08:52 +0000

To my friends, acquaintances and readers: I’ve got a sweet link opportunity for you that combines charity with trusted educational links.

Together with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s student union (the “Aguda”) and the Office of Student Activities of the Rothberg International School, we’re organizing an anti-smoking programme. The idea is to give away -free – nicotine gum to students who want to quit, to help them kick the habit.

We’ll be setting up stalls where students can come ask for a pack of the gum, and invite them to give us their names/emails for follow up to see how they’re doing a little later. Permission marketing rather than interruption marketing, to avoid giving away gum to students not really determined to quit.

If you want to contribute to buying these gums for students, send me an email at gab@seor.. for details. I’m taking payments for this through Paypal, as well as contributing $1000 myself. We’ve also got people matching donations dollar for dollar, so that if you give $10, you’re helping us get $20 total.

For the links, any donation over $100 gets you a link on the aguda’s old, trusted site and another one on the program’s site. We may get a third link n Rothberg’s site, but it’s unclear for now.

I’m not sure whether we can give optimum anchor text, but I’ll do my best to arrange it. For the record, Matt Cutts approves of charity-donation links.

Again, to send money and get links, email gab at this domain (seor..).

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Charity & Edu Link Opp

How Do I Make The Logo The “Second Link”?

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 13 May 2010 11:24:08 +0000

Reading the post Common SEO Mistakes: CSS Image Replacement, I found myself criticized for making the logo here an H1 tag, as well as for making it the first link.

First, I recognize my mistake on the H1 point.

That was done years ago when I didn’t appreciate fully the distinction between sites and pages, and wanted to rank for SEO on the homepage. The H1 is acceptable for that purpose, but it’s a sitewide element – other pages are also getting “SEO ROI” as an H1.

Oops! Thanks Boston SEO !

Second, the first link question needs some context for newer SEOs. Various studies have been done (eg by my friend Branko, the SEO Scientist) on whether all links on a page pass value or just the first.

Some say only the first does, others say all do, and maybe there’s a possibility the first passes mroe value. So best to make the logo the second link, after a more anchor-text optimized link.

Well, I don’t recall the studies in depth, but I think the context was external – not internal – links. Also, the testing by Branko says all links pass value. Third, I can spend time on more productive things.

If I couldn’t spend my time better and did believe that internal links, specifically the first one, pass more value, then the solution is simple: Use CSS to position the logo in its place, but have the code for the logo appear below the first properly anchor-optimized link on the page.

If you liked this tactical discussion on SEO ideas, add my RSS feed to your reader for more! And check out my upcoming advanced SEO book - you can download some free chapters!

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
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Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

How Do I Make The Logo The “Second Link”?

Advanced SEO Book Extract: Considering People’s Motivation

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:13:54 +0000

I’m currently working on an Advanced SEO Book. It will open with a number of principles that distinguish the thinking of advanced SEOs, and continue with a large variety of advanced tactics and ideas that illustrate this understanding. The following extract addresses the key question of people’s motivations. This applies equally to each side in a debate.

“What does the person comparison-reviewing these products want? To help, or to leverage their site into higher affiliate commissions?”

These questions illustrate the normal human instinct to use the argument that we think will be most appealing to the other side, or the argument that will make us look the most noble. We might tell a roommate that we did their laundry because we had some extra space [e.g. implying we’re nice guys] and not mention the fact that we’re hoping to have them OK a friend sleeping over on the couch next week.

Ask yourself why a person is arguing the way they are and not in some other way. Some useful questions in this regard are:

- Would it be respectable if they had some other motivation than what they’re presenting?
- Is this argument aimed at appealing to a wider variety of people than some other claims that advance a narrower interest?
- Who benefits from this? What are the consequences of accepting their argument, and how can people benefit from it?

Google’s Example

For example, Google may claim that one of their goals is providing a better user experience.

It’s well-known that humans rely on brands as a short-cut to decision-making. What’s less well-known is that one measure Google uses for the effectiveness of their search results are the speed with which people click through. So by placing brands in the organic results, Google encourages brand-based decision shortcuts.

[Ed: I wrote this before Google made the brand shortcuts idea explicit, so it's funny re-reading this now in light of how things have developed.]

What effect does that have when brands are showing up in ad slots? It’s plausible that the net effect is a greater CTR for brand advertisers, who end up depending more on AdWords traffic and a lot bigger budgets to PPC as a result.

Of course, this is just theorizing about Google’s motivations. I’m not saying I have some inside memo as proof for this. Rather, I’m just demonstrating the application of these questions and the kinds of insights you might derive from such critical thinking.

The Paid Links Example

Perhaps a more obvious and well known example in the realm of search marketing is the battle between Google and paid links. Google has repeatedly put out statements to the effect that they catch paid links and penalize one or both of the parties to the transaction.

To which many SEOs retorted that Google was just trying to fight a competing business model to their own, which is also selling links. For a long time I didn’t find that a convincing argument, because the phrasing was awkward.

Then one day Jordan Glogau explained it to me in these terms. Google sells traffic from the sponsored listings, and text link sellers really sell traffic from the organic listings. That clarified Google’s motives in the war on paid links where I’m concerned.

[...]

If you liked this excerpt, get another free chapter by email.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Advanced SEO Book Extract: Considering People’s Motivation

Sneaky Link Tactics: Removing Credit Where It’s Not Due

Gabriel Goldenberg — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 08:30:50 +0000

The situation: Your competitors have inbound links that are broken because of typos, changes in URL structures etc.

The common link building commentary: Most SEOs who’ve been around the link building block will tell you that it’s an opportunity to ‘build links’ for free – to pick low hanging fruit. Just drop the site owner a little email and voila – good as new. More juice for you!

The link-arms-race commentary given by sneaky [and helpful!] SEOs:

“Dear [webmaster],

My name is John Doe and I’m writing because I ran into a few bugs while browsing your site. Namely, there are broken links.

It’s a shame that your otherwise use[less/full] list of sites in your niche should be hampered by broken links and that they’d slow your visitors [Googlebot, and myself my broken link checker] down. So I thought I’d point out those broken links I found for your [annihilation/removal/hexic cleansing].

[Insert list of broken links, first or second amongst which are the competition's.]”

For bonus points:

Use Virante’s clever PageRank Recovery tool – based off the SEOmoz API – to find all the pages/links on your competitors’ site that are problematic like this. Hat tip to Rand’s post on 30 SEO problems and tools to solve ‘em post.

This reminds me of similar tactics I came up with over 2 years ago in response to the common question, ”Should I buy links if my competitors buy links?”

If you liked this post on link building and such competitive sneakery, add my rss feed to your reader for more!

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Sneaky Link Tactics: Removing Credit Where It’s Not Due

Affiliate Links With Hashtags Need 301 Redirects

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:15:04 +0000

I’ve just been reading some of SEOmoz’s Pro member tips and seeing their suggestions to use affiliate URLs that use hashtags, also referred to as the pound sign, number sign or hash mark.* For example, site.com/#aff123 .

One of the justifications given was that search engines ignore everything after the hash tag. As exemplified by Wikipedia and certain other sites, this is no longer the case. Google’s search results provide sitelinks on some Wikipedia articles. This has implications for affiliate links, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Sitelinks are those 4-8 deep links that go directly to a particular page on the site, or in Wikipedia’s case, subheadings within a long article.

The subheadings on Wikipedia are linked to using the corresponding hashtags. Ex.: wikipedia.org/article/#subissue1 . Therefore, it’s clear that search engines are considering hashtags.

Anyone using an affiliate program that relies on hashtags to track the source of the visitor should consider using 301 [permanent]redirects, rel=canonical or other equivalents to make sure they avoid duplicate content problems. Each of these solutions – permanent redirects, rel=canonical etc. – are designed to tell search engines what is the ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ page. I’m not saying this is absolutely necessary and that search engines won’t figure it out otherwise, but I prefer a proactive approach where possible.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Affiliate Links With Hashtags Need 301 Redirects

View-Thru Attribution Management – My Experiment Design

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:38:55 +0000

An increasingly popular question in attribution management and in advertising measurement is what effect ads – that were viewed but not clicked on – have. These ads are known in the lingo as ‘View-Thrus’ or ‘View-Throughs.’ The related question people usually have is what percentage of credit to give view-thrus for conversions that came via multiple touchpoints (e.g. the customer saw and/or clicked several ads, before buying).

I’ve come up with an idea for an experiment to measure the effect of such “view-thru” ads on conversion, as well as on acquisition costs. (An acquisition cost is the cost-per-action of acquiring the lead/customer.)

1. First, get a control group and an experimental group.

2. Second, instruct the groups to read and browse a few websites you control, and provide you with feedback on some [non-ad-related] issues with the sites.

The control group will view ads unrelated to what they’re about to search for. The experimental group will view ads by companies also advertising on the terms they’re about to look up.

Why are they browsing around and giving feedback?

The point of asking the groups to read and browse a few websites is twofold. One purpose – for the experimental group alone – is for them to ‘see’ the ads – defined here as causing an impression to be registered by loading the ad along with the rest of the page.

The second purpose – the request for feedback – is to mislead all the users about what the purpose of the experiment is. You don’t want to accidentally induce either group to to look more/less closely at the ads or otherwise behave strangely, but just browse around normally. Scientists have a name for this effect, but I forget what it’s called

At this point, the only difference between the groups should be the display ads they’ve viewed. So any differences between the groups subsequently should be attributable to the ads they’ve seen (even and especially if they haven’t clicked them).

Next, have the groups search for a few specific items and click whatever suits their fancy. The former searches are again to mislead the test subjects about the purpose of the experiment. The latter searches will be about products carried by companies whose display ads they just viewed.

Results and Interpretation

Q1: Is there a difference in conversion between the groups? That difference is attributable to the view-thrus. For attribution-management purposes, you can credit the display ads with the difference in percentage.

So if you convert the control group at 10% and the experimental group at 15%, then display gets 1/3 or 33% credit for the experimental group’s conversions.

(Not ½ or 50% because the denominator is 15, not 10. It’s 33% of 15%, or 1/3 of 15%. You already had 10% conversion rate (CR), so saying display deserves 50% credit would mean that display drove 7.5% conversion rate and the other marketing drove 7.5%. This is false since we know the other marketing, without display, converted at 10% on the control group.)

Note: This higher conversion rate again lowers your cost-per-action, reducing your costs for PPC.

Q2: Is there a difference in CTR between the groups? Supposing view-thrus raise CTR, the higher CTR should lift QS and lower CPC, effectively earning a lower cost-per-action.

So as a fun side-effect of such an experiment, you might find yourself with cost savings in your search budget from both the higher conversion rate and the lower CPC. (You might also find the opposite, such that display ads lowered your CTR and CR, in which case you need to ask whether the branding is worth it for the lower immediate cash flow.) But they came at the cost of a display ad campaign.

Next Steps After Attributing Credit

What should you do, then?

You need to see if the PPC savings with the experimental group were either equal to or greater than the display spend. If you saved on PPC more than you spent on display, you should obviously continue with display. If you saved an equal amount, you probably should still continue with display anyways because you also get a branding benefit.

If you saved less than you spent on display, it’s a question of degree. Are you willing to incur the additional expense for branding benefits? Is the branding a shield for shady SEO tactics? How much higher of a conversion rate did you get?

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

View-Thru Attribution Management – My Experiment Design

How Facebook Built A Competitive Advantage While Blocking Google

Gabriel Goldenberg — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:04:24 +0000

Yesterday, I described what I saw as a trend towards content communities becoming commodified. We ended on the question – how do you build a competitive advantage in such a case?

One idea that comes to mind courtesy of both Inc magazine’s article on Yelp, and from Kyle Lacy is to organize offline meetups.

Make your community more than virtual – get your users to meet offline.
The closer the bond offline, the more they'll frequent the site online.

As it is, the thing that brings people back to forums, Twitter, Facebook etc is the interaction with other members.

Domainers anxiously wait to hear whether their private message about selling a particular domain name got a favourable answer.

Hip-hop "textcees" (instead of being 'emcees', textcees write rap battles in text; yours truly was one in high school) can't wait to see how judges voted on their battle against other textcees.

Facebook is a particularly potent community in this respect.

Facebook members can’t wait to get comments on their pics – and it offers users plenty of ways to interact, like pic, wall, and other comments. The interaction itself is a mini-high.

This also plays on another universal trait – humans love attention, and what better way to get it than posting interesting pictures, videos, status updates, notes etc? Indeed – one thing that you see Yelp has done, as described in Inc, is to have certain members of the community go around giving encouragement to other members for their contributions to Yelp, giving positive attention to their reviews, pics etc.

Facebook does still more to draw people into its community.

…It taps pre-existing offline communities. This started by having people only join from American colleges, who then were their ‘network.’

Facebook developed the concept by allowing people to show their attachment to communities of various religious, political, social, work and other affiliations, and has recently reinforced that with the introduction of ‘fanning’ .

And as with forums, Facebook enables direct messaging such that you can’t wait to hear back from that cute girl you messaged after meeting her at your friend’s party.

Another thing that largely explained Facebook’s meteoric rise was that it adapted a dating site’s people search function. You could look for people – in your network (college / and later city) – by marital status, sxual orientation, age (I think) religion, relationship interest (serious dating, casual dating, flings, friendship and the pathetic-sounding “whatever I can get”).

Wanted a Roman Catholic from Ohio State University in Cincinnati who wanted a fling? Well, you’d obviously fail since Catholics never have sx before marriage, but you might find one interested in casual dating.

(I’m not picking on Roman Catholics – I could just as easily say the same about Muslims, orthodox Jews etc.)

Takeaways:

- Offer multiple ways to interact and communicate.

- Enable and encourage behaviour that draws attention. Give attention yourself.

- Facilitate and help offline meetings.

- Allow people to identify with large (city / college) groups they belong to and narrower groups too (fans of Rick’s driving school, a real self-organized group that Rick didn’t start but just reflects his numerous satisfied students’ affection).

- Toss sx into the mix.

This post was guest-written by Mark for Red Fly Marketing, an Dublin internet marketing company providing search engine optimisation services in Dublin and web design, too.

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Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.

ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.

Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.

Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

How Facebook Built A Competitive Advantage While Blocking Google

Is The Trend Towards Content-Communities Commodifying Them?

Gabriel Goldenberg — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:33:07 +0000

Ads are increasingly being bought to promote content, rather than to create brand awareness or sell directly. What’s interesting to me about this is that it’s a trend growing in parallel with a trend amongst large, SEO-driven sites towards building blog-focused communities.

These content community sites typically follow this outline, with some variants:

Generic brand name geared towards the industry as a whole, which leaves room for subsequent growth. Eg Health World instead of Weightlifting World

(hattip stuntdubl)

Editorial content of varying depths but frequently at a high standard
User Generated Content (UGC) via blogs users can sign up for
Hawk their own products or sell loads of ads
Supplement with forums, reviews, blog comments (though frequently there are none, or they’re not taken seriously) etc.
Don’t link out, or else only to sites not germane to the industry (eg mainstream news)

The first site that did this in an industry is probably rolling in dough.

Ditto the second.

And the third.

The fourth a bit less.

The fifth still less.

Does the sixth elicit a yawn from health readers who’ve seen it before and wonder why they should sign up here when they’re already part of sites 1, 3 and 4?

Does the seventh get ignored entirely?

This leads me to ask…

If quality content becomes a generic commodity, how do you achieve competitive differentiation? If community becomes a commodity, how do you achieve competitive differentiation?

The trends also seems to imply a tax for late-comers who want to develop content communities of their own.

Aaron Wall loves to point out that newbies are always the most populous group in an industry.

What that implies is that the first handful of sites to establish themselves as content communities can continue to grow by virtue of attracting newbies to their midst. They can rank for newbie topics/terms.

Newcomers to the space can’t target newbies as easily because they don’t have the domain authority to rank for short-tail terms. Even with equivalent-quality content, the sites won’t rank.

So to attract users and establish their own base of authority, new sites need to:

Play public relations to get authority and attract users
Buy ads to build up a user base
Spend money on making incredibly remarkable content (in which I include tools and the like)

Bottom line:

There’s a tax on late-comers.

These late comer sites will have to expend significant sums on marketing to catch up. And chances are, that further commoditizes content and lowers margins.

How do you overcome that?

Come by tomorrow for part 2: What Notoriously Closed Facebook Can Teach SEOs About Competitive Advantage

This post was guest-written by Mark from Red Fly Marketing, with 3 divisions: a full service Dublin search engine optimisation firm, a general Ireland online marketing firm and web design services.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Is The Trend Towards Content-Communities Commodifying Them?

5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence

Gabriel Goldenberg — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:32:57 +0000

Competitive intelligence provides entertainment, an inside-track on industry trend-spotting, and the potential to develop tangential business opportunities before others, or at least catch up quickly. I gluttonously consume information, and thought I’d share some parts of my diet with other competitive intelligence collectors with hearty appetites.

1) Affiliate networks.

Ever wonder what a competitor’s margins are like?

What countries they focus on? What KPIs they use?

What verticals they’re in?

Get the answers to all these questions and many others by joining multiple networks.

2) Email newsletters. I recently got a newsletter disclosing [indirectly] the profitability of certain market segments. For newbies struggling to find their affiliate niche, this is valuable info!

Consumer-facing email newsletter are also valuable, although I admit that I’m slack in monitoring these. Some things you can pick up:

- Benefits emphasized – to model your copy on

- Profitable or high volume products or otherwise desirable goals

- Tone of voice for branding purposes

3) Corporate HQ websites.

I subscribe to the RSS feed of a particular company that I highly respect, where they openly share corporate strategy. It’s pretty impressive seeing the massive, fast-turning gears turning in these people’s heads, but it’s also inspirational here and there.

If you’re a fast-food restaurant owner, you can probably pay attention to McDonald’s, Harvey’s, Wendy’s, KFC and other press releases to see where they’re going in a broad sense. The same is broadly true of many industries.

4) Alerts and keyword trackers.

Think these tools just serve to measure how much brand discussion is happening in social media? Guess again.

If new, as-yet-unknown competitors are linkbaiting, you can’t subscribe to their RSS feed.

You can set up trackers to look for particular keywords linkbait might target, or roll your own solution to monitor Digg, StumbleUpon etc.

Similarly, if the approach is more traditional, why not monitor press-release sites for your industry keywords?

Find ‘em while they’re fresh to the industry and buy those sites out…securely.

5) Mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines.

This week’s edition of Maclean’s (a popular Canadian newsmagazine) has an excellent piece on the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch and paywalls.

There are some fantastic nuggets to pick up in there, which I haven’t seen on places like Search Engine Land (despite Danny Sullivan’s thorough coverage of the issue!).

During SMX Advanced, I picked up the local Seattle paper and saw a piece about Google taking on Amazon for ebooks. Now, Slightly Shady SEO imagined that almost 2 years ago! And I had similar feelings and predictions on Google’s move into ecommerce and the implications about 7 months before SMX Advanced.

Since I love saying I told you so, here’s a little gem from my now 1+ year old post.

“The organic search results for obviously commercial searches will be dominated by Google Base products.” If you haven’t seen Google base practically become the default spot 3 on commercial searches, you’re sleeping:

Oh, and have any of you read Aaron Wall’s interview with eBay’s head of SEO?

Here’s an excerpt:

“[Millions of listings] end up cradle to grave quickly. What are some of the keys to helping search engines understand the structure and importance of content in such a fast changing environment?

[...]

“We have invested a good amount of resources in our data-feed technology & analytics. The Sitemaps protocol plays an important role here. As eBay has so many new listings every day, over the course of the day, you can almost update the sitemaps on a continuous basis.

“However, the effort to source the items from the database, generate the sitemap files, submission and pick up, takes decent amount of time. We have made good headway tuning our feeds in way to get more efficiency out of the items we send. We started optimizing based on probability of conversion. We can make these assumptions based on predictive modeling and data. Predictive modeling on large datasets will become even more important when it comes to scaling the projects. As a company, we are putting lots of efforts in building out a competitive advantage based on analytics, predictive modeling and scaling the technology to handling even larger datasets.”

If that isn’t the integration of merchandising and SEO, what is?

Well, here’s one of 5 calls I’d made about Google shifting more and more into ecommerce:

<“Merchandising will need to integrate more closely with SEO in order to feature more cheap products and expensive products where G’bot can access it.

“As a result, the middle ground of average products at average prices will see its market share gradually lost to either end of the spectrum. Just like Seth Godin suggested would happen, in his book Meatball Sundae.

And if you go to eBay, you’ll see that cruises abundantly listed there, for example, are of the cheap and generic variety. Where something is advertised in abundance, you know the ads work…
[I know about the cruises in particular because my dad combines dental CE seminars with upscale cruises and travel. Our eBay test yielded folks looking for bargains...]

Bottom line? Read, read and read some more! Add my rss feed to your reader, then check out these 30 other advanced search blogs.

Oh, and you might also like some recent guest posts of mine at Search Engine Land, Wolf Howl and Search Engine Journal. (Links go to my author profiles.)

p.p.s. I’m booked on a flight to Israel for tomorrow night. If I’ve been blogging slowly lately (or in the next little bit), that’s why!

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

5 Surprising Sources of Competitive Intelligence

How In-House SEOs Can Add Value Beyond Search

Everett Sizemore — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 13:48:54 +0000

Let’s face it – you’re only worth as much as it costs to replace you. Most businesses are going through budget cuts and lay-offs, or have at some point in the last two years, which makes it more important than ever to prove your value to your company or client.

They could hire another SEO for your salary… but they can’t hire another SEO; and a merchandising analyst; and a marketplace analyst; and a PR firm; and a blogger; and a customer service rep for your salary. Yet, a good SEO will be ALL of these things!

Be Needed Everywhere

For most businesses, Search Engine Optimization has a role to play in every stage of the buying cycle. Yet many SEOs think of themselves as only playing a significant role while someone is searching for a product or service to buy.

You can help customers become aware of their needs through various channels, including article distribution, guest posts, targeting specific industry keywords with helpful content… All of this can be done through search:

Awareness of Needs Search – “supplies for starting a widget business”
Assessment of Alternatives – “widgets” or “blue widgets VS red widgets”
Alleviation of Risks search – “blue widget reviews”
Decision Making search – “Acme blue widgets”
Achievement of Results – “Acme Blue Widget store, Denver”

Provide Value to the PR Team

While the PR team focuses on getting news out and handling major controversies (in some cases), you are focused on leveraging PR to build links.

But when you do online reputation management (ORM) or backlink laundering to improve the rankings of an external site – you are doing PR.

When you leave a helpful comment on a blog post or answer a question on Yahoo Answers – you are doing PR.

When you network with others in the industry to build a community of like-minded SEOs who can help you build links and sway results on a day’s notice – you are doing PR.

You can further help the PR team by being their eyes and ears on the ground. Help them fight fires before fires develop. Subscribe to search engine alerts for blog posts mentioning your brand. Use them to build links, but also to monitor discussion. If a blog post or comment thread starts to go sour on your brand, notify the PR team so they can respond appropriately.

Provide Value to the Dev Team

Aside from your usual SEO duties to work with development on crawlability issues and such – provide added value by helping them spot vulnarabilities or alerting them of spam issues, cross site scripting attacks, etc… Again, Google alerts comes in handy here. For instance, use it to find out if your site has been hacked for spammy linkdropping purposes.

Provide Value to the Customer Service Team

As an SEO, you are out there every day interacting with blogs and social media profiles, and probably comments on your company or clients’ websites. When working on a give-a-way project with an industry blogger, pay attention to the comments. People often have questions about the product or service being given away: “Does that come in a different color?” “why does it cost so much?” These make great customer service opportunities. The same goes for Twitter, Facebook, forums, or your own blog. If you can help your customer service department show the public that your company cares about and pays attention to what they have to say – that’s value above and beyond your rank on Google.

Provide Value to Business Development and Merchandising

An SEO is in a unique position to answer questions like:

“What is selling well for our competitors?”
“What else are our customers trying to buy?”
“What is the next hot thing?”

This can be of great benefit to those responsible for sourcing new products or services.

During your competitive analysis and link building efforts, you’ve probably also developed an in-depth knowledge of the players in your industry, both as competitors and potential strategic partners. Provide ideas and links to the business development team regarding who they might want to contact.

Sure, you may not get the credit when a big deal goes down – but that business management VP will have your back when the budget cuts come around.

Those are just a few of the general ways to provide added value as an SEO in a large company.
Here are some specifics just to put things in perspective:

Give the buyers / merchandisers a quarterly report showing which keywords were searched for internally but returned zero results. These are things your customers want you to offer.
Give the buyers / merchandisers a quarterly report showing which non-brand, product-related keywords your competitors are bidding for and/or ranking on, highlighting those that you do not carry. If a competitor bids highly or spends time optimizing for a certain product or service, chances are they’re doing it for a reason.
Give the business development and/or executive team an annual report called “The State of the Industry in Search” highlighting your biggest competitors in search, those who are gaining ground, those who are losing ground, and those who are not directly competitive but similar enough to perhaps be a potential strategic partner. Your biggest competitors on search engines aren’t always your biggest competitors in the industry. Search is a more level playing field than catalog or TV. The “little guys” can come up fast to catch your VPs by surprise.
Keep an ongoing list of the top ten questions and/or top ten complaints and/or top ten compliments from blog entries, blog comments, Twitter and Facebook posts, forums… and provide it to the customer service team so they can compare it with their own lists and perhaps find some new issues to resolve.
Provide your copywriters with a list of questions people have asked in blog comments, forums, etc… like “how heavy is this thing?” so they can make sure such questions are answered in the product or service description. This provides a better user experience, more keyword-rich web content, and lifts the load on the customer service team by answering questions before customers have to call.

I’m sure you can think of plenty of other examples yourself. I’d love to hear about them in the comments field below so I can add them to my list!

Everett Sizemore is the Manager of SEO Strategy for Gaiam, Inc. and blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

How In-House SEOs Can Add Value Beyond Search

Competitors Checking Your Backlinks? Give Their Tools The 180 Fake Out!

Gabriel Goldenberg — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:30:56 +0000

Are competitors mining your backlinks with tools like Yahoo! Site Explorer, Linkscape and Majestic SEO? Just because they can check your backlinks out, doesn’t mean you should make life easy by giving good data to their link building tools.

So here’s how to dirty the data that competitors see when using backlink checking tools or hub finders.

(Hub finder are tools that find so-called ‘hub websites’ that link to multiple sites in a niche)

The answer is counter-intuitive: build useless backlinks. Why?

Because useless backlinks can be copied until doomsday without their marginal effects won’t add up to overtaking you in the rankings.

Is it nofollow? Great! (Though note that David Leonhardt has found some value in nofollow links, likewise Mike Belasco has good arguments for nofollow links.)

Is it just a link in a comment? Perfect.

Is it a useless directory? Ok, now I need to nuance my tip.

When I started out in SEO, I got links from a boatload of free directories. It was what I knew and what I could afford to do, as a newb. Know what that did?

Got me a PageRank 5 in 3 months. That’s what.

But the killer part is that I couldn’t rank even for ridiculously non-competitive terms I wanted to rank for. Why?

Simple: I had unwittingly tied myself up in the sandbox. That’s where little sites that aren’t trusted by the biG kid go to play, isolated from all the others. You get a bunch of poor quality links like a load of freebie directories, and the net result is that you sit in the sandbox.

So then what do you do? You get a lot of trusted links first… then you make it dirty. You need to balance things out to avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

By now you’re probably wondering, “What the heck is a trusted link, then?”

One that is listed along with other resources, on a page dedicated to helping people find quality resources on a topic. The algorithm is known as Hilltop.

If you thought this post was interesting, add my rss feed to your reader (that page also allows you to subscribe by email; both options are free). If you want some help doing link building, email me or call me.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Competitors Checking Your Backlinks? Give Their Tools The 180 Fake Out!

Find Competitors’ Conversion Rates

Gabriel Goldenberg — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:52:53 +0000

If you could find out what competitors’ conversion rates are and you can estimate the traffic value to your competition? Surely the PPC pros could use that conversion data…

Well, it turns out you can get a pretty good idea about competitors’ conversion rates.

At SMX Advanced, Addie Connor shared the tip that you could bid for traffic to your competitors’ pages. Why do that? To find out their quality scores.

The catch is that such a technique won’t tell you what they’re converting at. You still can’t access their analytics.

Let’s think about this critically.

(I’m writing a little book on advanced search marketing (mostly SEO but some PPC too), and one of the main themes is that you can get really creative if you think logically and break things down into manageable pieces of logic.)

The argument we have is as follows.

We don’t control competitors’ pages. Therefore we don’t control what analytics code is on those pages. And if you don’t place your own analytics, on the page, you can’t read the reports!

Suppose we did control the pages. We could then place our code on them, right? And we could read the reports, right?

Now I’m going to share a little secret.

Don’t go sharing it with everyone, because this is really just an inner-circle thing among elite programmers.

…

The secret’s called “View Source.”

Right click, and select “view source,” to view your competitors’ html. Then duplicate your competitors’ page and host it yourself, with your own analytics embedded.

Caveats with finding competitors’ conversion rates in this way

1) For Trademark law reasons, you can’t duplicate competitors’ branding. This obviously affects conversion rate.

2) Similarly, you can’t use their domain name in the display URL (legally), or in the destination. This affects CTR and consequently conversion rate (since the mix of traffic is different).

3) This would be a hell of a lot of work for any sizeable ecommerce competitor. It’s easier to do this with simple landing pages or paths.

If you liked this post on competitive intelligence, add my RSS feed to your reader, or subscribe to get my posts delivered by email. I’ve got 2 more posts on competitive intelligence for later this week, covering how to find competitors best performing keywords AND ad copy, as well as how to muddy your backlink tracks so competitors have a harder time duplicating your efforts.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

Updated Feb 8, 2010: Internal Link Building, a WordPress plugin. It optimizes your internal navigation so that you can rank like Wikipedia. General info: Check the Internal Link Building update page.
ROI on SEO Calculator spreadsheet.
Get a free chapter from my upcoming book on advanced seo.
Backlink Analysis With Majestic SEO's Data

Find Competitors’ Conversion Rates