SEO ROI

SEO Services For Serious ROI. Blog Posts For Serious SEOs.

Two Highly Valuable WP Plugins For Testing Landers

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, December 30, 2009

Get the scoop at Janet’s Search Marketing Sage: “Two Must Have Plugins for Landing Page Testing.” The second one you probably never heard of, but Janet makes a great case for :D !

Affiliate PPC Tip For Mixing Facebook, Shareasale & Prosper 202 Tracking

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, November 26, 2009

I just spent a few hours creating and editing an affiliate PPC campaign with Facebook Ad Manager, a Firefox extension that lets you mass-create, upload and split test ads (including split-testing images) on Facebook.

Now, while Facebook Ad Manager saved me a bunch of time, I screwed up with my Prosper 202 tracking setup and so the whole campaign needs to be rebuilt from the start.

Here’s what happened, and how to avoid it happening to you. (more…)

Is PPC Necessary? Why? If So, When Do I Need To Do PPC?

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, August 18, 2009

Is PPC necessary? Why is PPC necessary or not? If so, when do I need to do it? (more…)

People I Want To See At Affiliate Summit East

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, August 3, 2009

In no particular order, here are the folks I’m looking forward to seeing at Affiliate Summit East, where I’m on the agenda to speak. (more…)

My Year In Review, Scratchpad Style

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, January 10, 2009

Here’s what I’ve experienced and learned in the past year. Feel free to skim, but as with my scratchpad first discussing submarine crawling, what you read here today may be industry-changing search news in 6 months… (more…)

How Link Buying Should Evolve In 2009

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, January 6, 2009

Link buying advice often sounds something like, “Get links from relevant sites and pages for the greatest boost to your rankings.” Link buying advice is often wrong.

According to everyone’s favourite content network guru, keyword selection on the content network needs to be based on demographics. That’s why I saw the following weight loss ads on a page that had nothing to do with weight loss, and nor did the site hosting the page. (more…)

When Pirates Share Their Booty, SEOs Rejoice

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, January 5, 2009

The Pirate Bay – the world’s largest peer-to-peer site, which focuses on torrent technology – lets you view what people are searching for (Not Safe For Work (NSFW)) as well as its tag cloud (NSFW), which I presume is what people are sharing, in the most literal sense.

At the risk of stating what may be obvious to most SEOs, when pirates share their booty, keyword research is a lot easier. (more…)

A Simple Formula To Easily Create Successful Banner Ads: AIDA

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, December 23, 2008

The classic formula for copywriters, AIDA – attention, interest, desire, action – can be applied easily with banner ads. I’m thinking of 125×125 ads and larger here, so microbanner advertisers may find this more challenging – but then, why are you using microbanners to begin with?

Attention: Frame 1: Ask a question that relates to the prospect’s need. “Want more sales, more easily?” (more…)

“Buy” Comes Before “Sell”

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, December 21, 2008

Nothing new here for the marketing pros in the audience, but you intermediate guys and newbies will like today’s post on why you need to rank for purchasing oriented terms rather than selling ones, imho… I want to expand on Seth Godin’s bit on making a new market vs taking a share of an existing market. (more…)

NDP Out-PPC the CPC

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, November 9, 2008

… while the Bloc Quebecois are seen on AdSense blocks on Cyberpresse, (more…)

Want to Beta Test Wordpress Membership + PPC Plugins?

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, August 28, 2008

If you do, let me know in the comments or by email and you’ll be given access to test things out as well as a free copy of both plugins when they’re publicly released. One of them helps make minisites in wordpress for PPC landers, and the other lets you figure out when jerks steal your content and which of your members said jerks are, so you can kick em out.

On a related note, I’m preparing several feature-quality posts, as well as guest posting and contributing to other posts, and they take time. So please be patient – I assure you it’ll be worth it. And if you haven’t seen them yet, check out my best posts and ideas.

In the meantime, here’s a preview of the posts I’m working on to get you salivating:

Internal Link Building – PageView & Time On Site Booster
Sitepoint SEO Forum: A Study on Moderator Behaviour And Its Effects On Membership
PPC Panel Uber-Coverage (Multiple Conference, multiple panel notes)
Growing Online Business Trend: Commoditization of Data
Sue The Bastards! How Porn Sites Could Be The Next Frontier In Class Action Lawsuits

So… get my rss feed. You’re going to come back anyways when they all make the frontpage of Sphinn (maybe not the ppc panel, depends how comprehensive it is and thus worthy of being promoted or not).

The End of The World is Nigh?

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, July 18, 2008

(I promise to be back with premium material next week. For now, here’s for your own entertainment…) My friend Nick recently got an apology from Facebook Ads for disapproving his campaign(s) erroneously. A commenter wrote: “Get the same comment from the Adwords team and surely the end of the world is neigh [sic].’ Well, it appears the end is nigh, as I got this in my email: (more…)

The Economics of Success (Or How To Launch A New Site Per Aaron and Giovanna Wall)

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, July 14, 2008

In the world of business, lots of figures are thrown around. There’s a whole school of thought in the world of investing that only looks at a company’s financial statements and decides whether or not to buy their stock based on those numbers. The most important factor of all, (more…)

Google Keyword Tool: Now Shares Specific Data

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, July 10, 2008

You heard it here first folks: Google has recently updated its keyword tool to share precise volume numbers. Whereas the tool only returned relative numbers before, it now shows the precise amount of monthly search that occurred last month, as well as an average amount of monthly searches. (more…)

Analytics & Attribution: Which Source Gets Credit For the Conversion?

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, June 16, 2008

The answer came to me while reading up on advertising. Studies show it takes a certain frequency – most people place it around 7 times – for an ad and its message to be remembered. It would obviously be silly to just credit the last impression for finally getting the target consumer to get the advertiser’s point when the other 6 clearly were part of the process. Yet that’s a question many pro marketers have! (more…)

How To Do Search-Based Retargeting Cheaply and Build Branded Search Demand

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, June 8, 2008

At SMX West, one of the most interesting things I learned was that an advertiser who spent $30,000 on banners saw a 20% lift in branded search. When you consider how well branded search converts, that’s good news, especially if that demand lasts (for the caveats on measuring true branded search ROI see “What Every SEO Needs to Know About Branded Search“). This post is going to explain how you can use the link graph to get similar lifts in your branded search, (more…)

What’s the ROI on SEO? Hint: SEO Experts Are Underpaid, Opportunity Abounds!

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, May 18, 2008

Update: Check out this “How to forecast SEO ROI” article if calculating the ROI on SEO is the info you want.

What follows is an editorial / research article showing that SEO is valuable – but not explaining how to calculate it.

I was asked what the ROI on SEO is a few times at a recent business event, and decided that it was about time someone spoke up for us organic search marketing experts. The sad truth is that we SEO Experts are grossly underpaid! Let’s look at some stats (or damned lies, if you prefer). (more…)

30+ Weird, Educational and Stupid Search Screenshots

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, May 14, 2008

One of my favourite things to do when browsing the web is take screenshots of interesting things I notice, particularly in the SERPs, but also on other sites. It’s an easier way of taking notes and learning from others. Featured below are some sites you know, like DoshDosh, Treatment Search, Sphinn and others.

There’s also the genuinely stupid Stupid.com, some much more intelligent Sphinn spammers who’ve carefully observed what tips us off to spam, and more. In the interest of load times, I’ve linked to some pictures rather than post them here. Enjoy! (more…)

How to Find Competitors’ Keywords For Your SEO & PPC

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, May 2, 2008

Want to find out competitors’ keywords? Here’s how to find what keywords competitors use on their sites – and protect your own!

(more…)

30 Lovely Resources and Helpful Links

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, April 29, 2008

You’re likely to see some of these in future posts here and aroud the various lovely places that take my stories. So check out as many of them as you have time for, cuz there are some real sweet ones in here.

Diorex doesn’t blog anymore, so Smaxor republished some of his classics. (more…)

Scratchpad: Questions, Reputation Management, Domains and PPC

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, March 17, 2008

Scratchpad, for those of you who don’t know, is my informal column. Take the ideas for what they’re worth and ignore the style.

Questions

Q1: What is the best measure of attention equity? Links? Daily visitors? Repeat visitors? Subscribers? Trends in the prior statistics? Something else?

Q2: Is scannable content contributing to (more…)

Final Data from Facebook Flyers Campaigns

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, December 11, 2007

Here is the final campaign data of my two Facebook flyer campaigns, both of which were terminated December 3rd. All things told, spending under $2 for about 30,000 impressions seems like a sweet deal to me! Plus, I got some clicks and awareness, and it helped me make a good industry connection that has since translated into a few links. So while Aaron paid $500 for links through AdWords, (more…)

Does Aggressive Ad Publishing Decrease PageRank?

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg,

I know that aggressive ad positioning, especially when your site is new, are a flag for spam with Google’s algorithms. I created a blog on fishing once that had ads in the topleft and in much of the sidebar, which led to me having to make it through a Captcha for each post. What’s interesting to me now is the question, does aggressive ad publishing decrease PageRank? (more…)

Weblo Sells Facebook Profile Page Ads; Here’s What Facebook Should Do

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, December 9, 2007

From the NYT (yes, that link is a nofollow and no, it’s not by accident) comes news that Montreal company (I love our city!) Weblo is helping users sell advertising on their Facebook profile pages. That’s not all though. Weblo is also empowering users to sell ads on their Youtube, Blogger, Myspace, Orkut and other web profiles. (more…)

Facebook Flyers to Die December 3 2007; My Campaign Data

Author: Gabriel Goldenberg, November 26, 2007

Since Facebook announced their new ad platform, they were allowing advertisers with existing Flyers campaigns to continue running the campaigns until said campaigns were paused or deleted. Now, those campaigns will be automatically shut off by Facebook on December 3rd. (Edit: This is gaining traction at Sphinn. Please Sphinn it to help it go hot!) (more…)