Answer: “We have a big win coming up!” hehe 
.
I don’t normally do PPC but have been for my work with illuminea and a client, Traffix Systems, who came to them for web design who also was running AdWords ads… very badly.
Got any big win stories of your own in online marketing? I’m always looking for case studies to publish here! Contact me for details, or start by reading the guest post guidelines page.
Content Marketing Cannon is a new WordPress SEO plugin.
Other benefits include easier browsing of archives (due to less pagination), time savings, and innumerable supermodels chasing after you.
To download this plugin, you can (i) “pay” with a tweet or Fb-share or (ii) get my latest posts in your RSS reader or email, free. (You need to wait for the weekly email to if you choose the email option.)
FYI: You can edit the tweet/Fb share or cancel before it appears in Twitter/Fb.
Blogs can only include so many posts on a category page before you need to paginate. And if you paginate, posts on page 2 etc won’t get as much link juice. Sure, you can set posts to appear that to 100 posts, but then the category page will take a while to load which isn’t ideal either.
I offered a few solutions to this problem in my advanced SEO book, one of which was:
Consolidate posts on a specific topic into a single authority article.
1) You get an in-depth authority article that is more likely to attract links than smaller bits of info.
2) The link juice from those articles consolidates onto 1 page, making it more competitive (e.g. use 301 permanent redirects).
3) There are more possible longtail combinations to hit.
4) You reduce the number of posts and thus have more PageRank flowing from the categories into posts . Also, you reduce the need for pagination.
An example scenario: Roof repair blog
In one post you talk about wooden roof frames rotting and in another about wooden roof frames warping shape and a few others on wooden frame issues.
You consolidate your wooden roof posts into the authoritative article on wooden roof damage. You 301 the subarticles (e.g. the ordinary posts now part of the authority post), and remove the 301 posts from the homepage, category pages, tag pages, search pages and sitemaps.
Thus your authority article has more PageRank than any of the subarticle ones did – and it stands a better chance to rank. Meanwhile, all the site’s remaining articles have a greater share of your PageRank, too.
Plus you now get longtail traffic you couldn’t get before because the two articles were on separate pages, like “wood roof rotting because frame warped.”
You can see a case study of the plugin at work from SEO consultant Kieran Flanagan’s SearchBrat blog. He beta tested the plugin. Here’s a screencap of what the results look like:
The problem is this demands a fair bit of manual work…
Unless you automate it.
Oh wait! That’s what Content Marketing Cannon does:
- Include any post in another with a simple shortcode that refers to the subarticle’s post ID: writing [ spid=123 ] in the article will include the post with ID #123. 123′s title will become an h2 in the authority article. (Don’t use spaces between the “[" and "]” .)
- Adds a column to the “edit all posts” page, which column displays posts’ IDs.
- Add a table of contents for the post Wikipedia style with another shortcode [ toc align=left ] or [ toc align=right ] (Don’t use spaces between the “[" and "]” .)
- Adds a box to the post editor page, below the main post area, which allows you to redirect the post to any article on your site. Delete the text and save again to undo. The plugin doesn’t assume you’ll redirect because sometimes, as on Wikipedia, content is included in more than one post. So you might want to use it differently.
- Removes redirected articles from the homepage, category archives and sitemaps.
- Adds a subarticles page to the WP Dashboard so you can find all redirected articles in one convenient spot.
- Adds a settings page for CMC where you can request tech support, new features etc. There will be more settings added to it with planned features.
So how do you get the plugin?
Either pay with a tweet, Fb-share, or get my latest posts sent to your email or RSS reader.
FYI: You can edit the tweet/Fb share or cancel before it appears in Twitter/Fb.
Sponsors we’d encourage you to patronize:
Sponsors of the plugin helped develop the current set of features. They’re also helping us add an auto-redirect feature for the next version, which will automate the process even more!
Get professional SEO services from SlingshotSEO.com.
Get VPS Hosting from Prohoster.gr.
Get search engine optimization from Stepforth.com .
Get local SEO from PoweredBySearch.com .
Get link building from CanadianSEO.com.
Use a analytics URL builder from WebStrategy360.com.
Use link tools and other goodies from SEOTools.net .
Get online PR and social media marketing services based in Ireland from Simply Zesty.
Get WordPress themes built for direct marketing performance from Progo.com.
Image of Gisele Bundchen via BobBekian.com, creative commons license.
The kind folks at internet marketing company IM Ninjas (formerly We Build Pages) sent me some nice clothes including a tshirt, polo and sweater (can’t show pics since they went to my address in Canada and I’m living in Israel) and to Dixon Jones of Majestic SEO link tools and Receptional SEO for treating myself and a number of other SEOs to dinner during last week’s SMX Israel show.
I love Twit Cleaner!
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Charities have a unique SEO problem: there’s not a lot of people searching to give to them, which makes keyword discovery difficult. I saw that with Mada Center, a soup kitchen in Montreal that I tried to do PPC for but we failed for lack of keywords, and recently have come across a similar challenge for Achiya, an Israeli charity for learning disabled kids whom I work with via illuminea, a web agency in Jerusalem. (more…)
UserTesting has a panel of mobile device users who have high-resolution webcams on stands. So you can watch them use their mobile device–iPhone, Android, or iPad–as they visit your mobile website or use your mobile app.
The good folks at UT, amongst them Dave Garr love SEO ROI (who doesn’t? , and are donating 100 free mobile tests to SEO ROI’s readers. To get your free test: (more…)
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. (more…)
WordPress 3.3 created a bug with my SEO plugin, Internal Link Building, such that the credits line normally found at the end of a page would appear in the middle of the post editor. Plugin developer Aaron of AahaCreative.com has coded an update that squashes the bug. The newest version is called 2.1 (I know, I had called a previous version v3, but I made a mistake then).
The ability to block automated internal linking from happening on either pages or posts is also now included, following popular demand. It’s useful to prevent traffic leaking from your sales oriented pages (e.g. a “Services” page on your SEO site) and thus increase conversions. To use this feature, simply go to the Settings page (labelled “Keywords”) and scroll past your list of keywords until you see this: (more…)
For all the people saying that you just need the social media to be a marketing success – 4/10 people are 100% inaccessible to you.
Measuring Use of Social Networking Sites.
Typically, these are older people, like those who still want to print the materials on your site and ask to be mailed brochures.
Like this? Get my latest posts by email or RSS to keep up with the latest news and tactics.
Ever needed to send a link request but lacked anything better than “webmaster@site.com” as a contact address? I’ve been back to basics with a client recently, and of course this classic situation has come up. Here are a few tools/tricks I’m using to get more information to personalize the email/phone call and increase the success rate:
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2011 was a beautiful year for guest posts on SEO ROI as more and more of the web’s top SEOs shared advanced ideas and original material, right here on this blog. I don’t publish rehash, and it shows in the unique tactics, case studies and tools reviewed.
Guest Article Case Studies & Research (more…)
Clients or leads with bad websites often acknowledge the problem but say that they’re redesigning anyways, so why implement conversion rate optimization work now when it will only last until the redesign? (more…)
There’s an eternal debate amongst copywriters whether long copy or short copy is better, and the truth is that there’s no absolutely correct answer – the length of your copy depends on how much persuading your prospects need. Here’s the simple guide as to what factors influence how much copy you need.
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This is a guest post by Everett Sizemore, who blogs about e-commerce SEO on his website www.esizemore.com. You can follow him on Twitter and connect on Linked-In.
Today is Free Shipping Day and thousands of online stores are participating in what is going to be one of the largest online shopping holiday of the year. (more…)
Search marketing fundamentally is a direct response mechanism, and ad agencies don’t get direct response. And that’s why books like Google’s ridonculous new-ish book about “ZMOT” – aka Zero Moment Of Truth – aka this brand new thing called… wait for it… the purchase decision – are going nowhere. The book basically aims to make brand advertisers into direct response afficionados.
Psst… Here’s a tip. The ad agencies don’t care. Here’s how ad agencies win awards that prove their value to clients.
This guest post is by Andrew Breen of Outshine Online Marketing who offers SEO, PPC management, and CRO services. We met at SMX West a few years ago and he recently got back in touch to see about guest posting… I suspect this technique is how he found out about me taking guest posts !
ScrapeBox kicks butt for link building. It has dramatically sped up my link building process more than any other tool I’ve used. This post will show you exactly how I use ScrapeBox to find dozens of high quality guest blogging opportunities – in minutes instead of hours.
What the heck is ScrapeBox?
Want to learn usability testing? I promise that any complete beginner who applies the lessons in this guide thoroughly will see a higher conversion rate in 30 days, guaranteed!
The value in understanding why users behave a certain way is that you get actionable insight, which raw data on what users are doing doesn’t tell you. You can see what’s tripping up users and fix it!
Note: Usability testing is also used offline for testing products, but for our purposes we’ll stick to website usability testing.
Remote usability testing is a method of usability testing where the users testing the website are in a different location than the person giving the test. The test giver, known as the moderator, sets up the test and provides instructions on what to do.
For now, let’s see how usability testing works. Later we’ll address specific issues like remote vs in-person usability testing, moderated vs unmoderated testing, and what tools to use for specific tasks.
Photo credit sxc
1. First, you decides on tasks you want people to do on your website, such as search for a product and add to cart.
2. You recruit users, ideally ones representative of the site’s audience for the test. Typically, 3-5 testers are used in each round of testing, after which changes are made and another round of testing begins.
(If you can’t recruit users, there are companies who do that and usability testing tools with panels of users you can recruit.)
3. Users attempt to do the tasks set by the site owner.
In the most popular and effective form of usability testing, test-takers record their screen and voice, while sharing their thoughts out loud as they use the site. In other types of usability testing, feedback may only be written afterwards.
A short questionnaire typically follows screen-and-audio-recording type tests. Questions focus on problems encountered using the site, possible solutions, and how the tester would have behaved had it not been a test.
4. You review the user feedback to understand what the users were trying to do and why. Make note of the most common difficulties.
5. The site owner makes changes to the website to solve the problems discovered from the recordings.
Note: For ease of reference, I’m going to use “the moderator,” “site owner” and “you” interchangeably, but the roles can be shared between team members as you see fit.
Let’s see each step of the testing process in more depth.
The first step is figuring out and writing what you want your users to try to do. You need to describe outcomes for users to achieve, and avoid (to the extent possible) being too explicit in how to do a task, avoid mentioning the names of particular links to click (e.g. the task reads “learn pricing,” when the site has a “Pricing” link).
A good task description is, “Get in touch with us,” not “Click ‘contact’ and fill out the form.”
Photo credit sxc
Start by asking, what is the purpose of the site? Then work backwards and ask yourself what steps are needed to get a visitor to accomplish those steps.
The following example illustrates how this works at a coarse level, but you can go more granular and test sub-elements within each step.
Ecommerce example: Let’s imagine we’re usability testing a running shoe retailer.
6 – Purpose of the site: The site’s purpose is to sell running shoes.
5- Previous step: To sell merchandise, users need to checkout.
4 – Previous step: To checkout, they need to have added something to cart.
3 – Previous step: To have added something to cart, they need to have found a product that adequately meets their needs.
2 – Previous step: To find that product, the users must sort through the site’s products easily.
1 – First step: Before sorting, visitors need to be convinced not to bounce with a credible appearance that’s relevant to their intent in visiting.
For step 1, since users are coming to your site to do the test, they won’t bounce on their own. To find out if your site is credible and relevant, use a five second test task description:
Ask people to look at the page for five seconds, look away, then share what they remember. Does “what people remember” match the landing page’s traffic sources, such as search keywords and ad copy? Is the design credible or does it make people flee?
For steps 2-6, a regular usability test with screen and voice recording would work fine.
Task description
Good: “Find a pair of Reebok running shoes and buy them. Find answers to any questions that come to mind.” This leaves discretion to users to browse for Reebok running shoes the way they naturally would. This allows them the choice to browse with search or clicks, refine their options as usual… in sum, to be themselves, which is what we want to see.
Bad: “Click the Reebok running shoes button in the lower left sidebar, click on a pair of shoes, add them to cart, and fill out the checkout forms.”
(image credit Vintage Military Ads)
This is where most web pros aspiring to run usability tests give up. Frankly, recruiting testers is hard.
First, it’s not always obvious who your audience is. Who are these “representative users” anyways?
To answer that, build personas (easier), and seek keyword-level demographics (harder). If you’ve never worked in the field, you can always email the owners of existing sites and ask them; if they’re competitors, look at
people offering the service in a different city or language.
Second, how do you go about soliciting people to test the site? Why would they care or bother? Where do you find them? How do you approach them?
Commonly, usability testing will pay testers for their time. With remote usability testing, paypal payments or online gift certificates (ex.: Amazon.com) are common. Others are interested in helping just to be helpful or because they’re friends.
Once you know who your representative users are, you need to find them. To do that, first try the free way and solicit amongst family, friends and contacts by email and phone.
After exhausting this pool or if your contacts just are too different from representative users (you’re starting a hispanic dating site without knowing anyone hispanic), you can run demographically or professionally targeted ads. Places to advertise include Facebook, PlentyOfFish, LinkedIn, MyAds (demographics powered by MySpace) and supposedly the Google Display Network (formerly the Content Network).
Another option that recruits directly from your users is Bolt|Peters‘ Ethnio recruiting service.
Originally, Ethnio was offered at a rate of a few hundred dollars per person because it was an offline, labour-intensive recruiting process. Today Ethnio is a software tool with a free trial that just requires you to copy-paste some code to get started. It intercepts visitors as they come to the site, asking them to participate in your test. The downside is that the test needs to consist of a survey or Usabilla click test, which helps but isn’t as useful as getting them to record their screen and voice.
Another easy way out of recruiting is buy a remote usability testing service with a panel of users.
Tools in this category that will have users record their screen and spoken thoughts include TryMyUI , UserFeel -whose panel includes testers in the UK and Greece- and UserTesting.com. (UI means User Interface, such as the part of the website customers interact with by clicking and typing.)
On a lower-tech level there is Feedback Army, which surveys visitors after they try using your site. While it doesn’t record audio or video, it’s also only $15 for 10 users to provide their feedback.
Note that these panels are only appropriate for sites geared towards a general audience. Sites requiring knowledge of particular jargon (e.g. SEO) won’t find representative users here, since user selection criteria are limited to demographics and tech-savvy (“technographics”), and don’t break down by vertical.
A word on “representative users”
Finally, while it’s ideal to get representative users, it’s also fine to get users who are less representative and grade on a curve, proportionately to how closely they match your audience. (Hattip Steve Krug)
Once recruited, it’s up to users to follow instructions and do the test. This either happens at agreed-upon times (moderated testing), or at the user’s discretion (unmoderated usability testing).
Test Preparation
With moderated testing, the moderator either sets up a computer with screen and audio recording software before the test, or instructs users to use browser-based software to record their screens and voices.
With unmoderated testing, the user is responsible for ensuring the audio and video recording software is on and recording, at the right level.
Note: Both of these comments assume a regular usability test, as opposed to a limited or partial test aimed at discovering how users interact with particular aspects of the site. This includes mouse-movement tracking and click measurement tests, for example, as well as visual analysis tools like FiveSecondTest or predictive gazeplot-and-eye-tracking tool Feng-Gui.
A gazeplot generated on Amazon’s mobile homepage by Feng-Gui.
Tip: It’s important to make sure that both video and audio are recording at the start, and that the sound levels are high enough, to avoid wasting time and money.
What Your Instructions Need To Cover
Once the audio and video are on and at the right level, there are three things your instructions must cover:
a. Asking the user to say what hes doing and why out loud, constantly. To quote TryMyUI:
“Clearly say exactly what you are thinking as you are thinking it. We are interested in your impressions, expectations, and the motivations for your actions. Don’t edit your thoughts as you navigate the website! Simply say exactly what you are thinking at each step.”
Steve Krug’s excellent book on usability testing, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, emphasizes that you should make clear it’s the website being tested, not the user. They can’t make mistakes here!
This serves the highly important purpose of preventing self-censorship, as alluded to in TryMyUI’s instructions.
b. Providing a starting URL for the user. With in-person testing, you’ll have this pre-loaded.
c. Provide a written list of tasks. Don’t just provide it orally, because you want to ensure the same phrasing each time.
If users get distracted and go off to do their own thing, the moderator gently encourages them back to the task at hand.
Once the tests have been run, what’s left is data – not actionable insight. To turn that information into actionable recommendations, the moderator needs to review the collected feedback.
His purpose is to look for patterns in what gave users difficulty.
By focusing on problems common to more than one user, you ensure that you get the most bang for your buck in making changes and fixing the site. This is also why running a test with one user is insufficient.
Conversely, to save time and money, you shouldn’t test with more than 5 users per round of testing. By the fourth or fifth user you’ll already know the main issues the site has and having the same problems highlighted another half dozen times isn’t productive.
The problems the moderator will discover can usually be categorized by WiderFunnel’s classic LIFT model of conversion optimization:
To return to our earlier example of the online running shoe retailer, here are some things you would look for in your analysis.
First, as mentioned earlier, is the landing page’s credibility and relevance to traffic sources. Is the site secure? Is the graphic design professional? For relevance, you can show the traffic source (ad, link or search listing) briefly before taking users to the landing page. Within the five second test, you can ask if the landing page matches the expectations the traffic source created. – Relevance, Anxiety, Clarity -
Visitors need to drill down and find a product that suits their needs. Can they browse and search their way through your categories to find an adequate fit? How effective are your refinement options? When clicking through to a subcategory or product detail page, does the content there match expectations? – Relevance, Clarity -
Third, visitors need to get sufficient information from the product detail page. Does the information answer visitors’ questions? Does it convey benefits? How scannable is the information – bullet points or paragraphs? Where’s the refunds policy? Are the shoes in stock? How much is shipping? – Value Proposition, Urgency, Anxiety-
Users also need to be able to add to cart easily, and then modify the contents of the cart. Is the add to cart button noticeable and clearly a button? Are the cart buttons clearly labelled and laid out in a hierarchy reflecting their importance? Does the site need all this information the checkout requests? – Clarity, Distraction, Urgency, Anxiety -
Again, follow Steve Krug’s excellent advice: Change the least possible to solve the problems.
For example, instead of redesigning a page’s graphics to reduce distraction, comment out some of the graphics. Test again and see if that solves things. To save time on such visual makeovers, you can just use a visual testing tool like Feng-Gui or Five Second Test, mentioned earlier.
And don’t wait for the “upcoming redesign”… 99% of the time it’ll go live months after promised. In the meantime, you’ve wasted loads of traffic.
How do I test…
… information architecture (aka the organization of content on a site into logical groups)? Use card sorting. Do users look for content where you expected? Do they click the right links to drill down to the content you want them to find? (Image credit Revium.)
… where people would click next? Look at click based tools like CrazyEgg or Usabilla.
… how people make their way through a model of the site? Try wireframe creation software that (i) lets you interact with the wireframe by clicking the navigation and going to the wireframes for the relevant pages and (ii) allows you to share your wireframes online, so testers can access them. Some wireframe tools are designed to only be used in a desktop environment, so read carefully to avoid that.
See
Remote testing is
- Cheaper: Don’t need to pay for travel, premises, computer equipment, food
- Less work to organize
- Easier to recruit for because there’s no geographic restriction
- Commonly paid for via Paypal or gift certificates
In-Person testing is
- More personal, you can get body language
- A more compelling opportunity for the whole team to witness the testing simultaneously and debrief, which can get things moving faster
- Commonly paid for in cash
- Instantaneous feedback; you view the data as it comes in, instead of waiting until later
Moderated testing:
- Is significantly less likely to encounter errors requiring retakes, such as setup issues with hardware or software, or testers veering off topic
- Yields richer, more useful data
- Tends to have representative users
Unmoderated testing:
- Sometimes yields obnoxious or useless responses, like FiveSecondTest and Feedback Army testers more interested in accumulating credits or micropayments than being helpful.
- Costs less on an individual test basis, because there is no moderator, or because it typically involves testing narrow interaction aspects such as click tests or visual feedback
- Is commonly associated with narrow aspects of interaction
- Tests of particular aspects may or may not have representative users
- Can save time when run through a service with a panel of testers, such that recruitment effort is negligible. This advantage makes it an easy entry-point/stepping stone for beginners to enter the world of usability testing.
There are many tools available for usability testing specific aspects of a website, or the whole shebang.
Kyle Soucy of Usable Interface put together a helpful, comprehensive overview of these varied tools.
Conference Handout – Listing of Unmoderated Remote Usability Testing Tools
- Talk about the idea with friends and family and see what are the most common questions/objections raised, so you can answer them.
- Create user interface mockups in Photoshop and do the 5 second test (with or without the site): namely, ask people to look for a few seconds, then look away and ask what they recall.
- Put early design mockups through Feng-GUI as a sanity check – are there too many visually ‘loud’ areas?
- Imperfect testing is better than none. As the French say, “the best is the enemy of the good [enough].”
Sensible – Steve Krug’s site
Usability Post
RemoteUsability.com/tools
http://okcancel.com/archives/article/2006/07/guide-to-remote-usability-testing.html
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/remote_online_usability_testing_why_how_and_when_to_use_it
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 
. (more…)
This guest post is by Ben Jackson, founder of SEO Discovery, an SEO blog with free tutorials, link building strategies, and more.
This is a case study of my broken link building campaign. These are the steps I took, the successes I had, and the mistakes I made.
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When it comes to the often-overlooked art of internal website optimization, too many people stick with the standard methods such as being mindful of keyword use within content and relevant tags. (more…)
This guest post is by Andy Havard, a Marketing Executive at Skeleton Productions, a UK based Internet video production company that also does corporate vids.
You’ve no doubt seen the slick, professional video blogs Google and its representatives have churned out lately. Videos shot with pristine white backgrounds, inviting speakers and a whole lot of views. They’re impressive video blogs right? Well the following article explores how you can make the same professional looking corporate video blogs from the comfort of your own home. (more…)
I’m looking for feature sponsors to help cover the programming costs of a new WP plugin I’ve been working on. It’s not a competitor to All In One SEO Pack or Yoast’s WP SEO, but provides new functionality that so far hasn’t existed. It will be given away free to the web community once completed.
Read on for details on the plugin.
To sponsor, contact me. Cost is $150 per sponsorship (one-time, obviously; it’s for programming costs) and we’ve already got 6/15 sponsorships taken. You’ll get a credit on the plugin page including your logo and a link to wherever you choose, as well as advanced access to current and future betas. (Yes, the link is dofollow, no, you’re not buying a link. You’re covering programming costs. )
The SEO problem this tackles: Blogs can only include so many posts on a category page before you need to paginate. And if you paginate, posts on page 2 etc won’t get as much link juice. Sure, you can set posts to appear that to 100 posts, but then the category page will take a while to load which isn’t ideal either.
I offered a few solutions to this problem in my advanced SEO book, one of which was:
Consolidate posts on a specific topic into a single authority article.
1) You get an in-depth authority article that is more likely to attract links than smaller bits of info.
2) The link juice from those articles consolidates onto 1 page, making it more competitive.
3) There are more possible longtail combinations to hit, effectively outWikipediaing Wikipedia…
4) You reduce the number of posts and thus have more PageRank flowing from the categories into posts . Also, you reduce the need for pagination.
Problem is this demands a fair bit of manual work…
Unless you automated it.
Oh wait! That’s what the plugin does. Help you create authority articles from your smaller pieces and consolidate the content like Wikipedia, creating authority articles instead of stubs.
Some key features:
- Include any post in another with a simple shortcode.
- 301 redirect a post
- Add a right or left aligned table of contents, Wikipedia style
- Removes redirected articles from the homepage, category archives and sitemaps: PageRank concentrates across fewer links
Via Eric Ward’s newsletter, I found out that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt recently testified (PDF) before Congress about claims that Google is anti-competitive. Amongst his remarks are some truly amusing statements for anyone that knows Google and/or the current state of the web. Other things were less amusing and more amazing in what they revealed.
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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.
(more…)
Short tip for today, scratchpad style:
Retargeting ads are very successful … because they target an audience that already visited your site, and because they tend to offer deals to people who almost bought, but for whatever reason left before purchasing. These deals help push people across the threshold and get them to buy.
What if you did that offline? Someone comes into your car dealership and walks away with no keys… Call them back the next day with another offer based on what you think would close the deal. Don’t start chasing the next prospect [yet].
Have you guys ever done this? Or taken other online tactics offline?
An infographic that provoked my curiosity, by longtime expert in the linkbait field, Muhammad Saleem: (more…)
Mobile websites’ homepages beat the pants off regular websites’ homepage designs at achieving a homepage’s goal: driving the visitor deeper into the site.
Full disclosure: I’m getting a free review copy for this review.
Eric Ward, aka Link Moses, has been at link building since the bad old days when Yahoo Directory actually was a place to start your search (imagine!). More importantly, the man is great at unearthing very high quality link opportunities, often hubs, that would go for $500 – $1000 / pop if you were paying true value for time.
Eric’s subscription newsletter is available very affordably – $8/month!
What’s nice is that the newsletter isn’t rehashing directories everyone knows. For example, were you aware that you can get into Encyclopedia Britannica? Or that there are specialized search engines for boating and biology?
One thing in particular that I’d never considered was how PageRank is partly dependent on how specific a page’s topic is. The wider your appeal, the more links you can gain and thus obtain more PageRank. But the more narrowly and specifically you cover a topic, the fewer the people that might link to you. Conversely, narrower treatments will often answer a searcher’s intent better than general pages. I won’t share Eric’s examples, but he demonstrated his case well with some particular SERPs.
(For people wondering how my book compares to Eric’s newsletter, the purposes and learning are different. While I have a section on link building tactics, my book is on all of advanced SEO, including converting SEO traffic, keyword research and other miscellaneous tasks. Further, I also teach you the creative thinking to invent your own link acquisition tactics. Hence the book being in the $100 price range.)
Finally, Eric discusses free tools like Firefox extensions few people know about… sure to be appreciated by people spending most of their time on the link hunt.
Liked this post? Get a free chapter from my book, on how to massively scale link building without social media!
My site was hacked for a few months now, in what was mostly a benign, but nevertheless annoying way. The hacker injected spam pages onto SEOROI.com about debt and financial products, which you can still see in Google’s cache. Only Vaultpress was able to remove the hack…
(To be 100% clear: there was no malware. Google detected none, McAffee detected none, CodeGuard detected none and so you weren’t at risk by visiting my site.)
The backstory… (more…)
Two reasons:
1) Some of the most popular contact form plugins, including Contact Form 7, don’t provide a thankyou page. That means that you can’t easily set up a simple ab-test in Google Website Optimizer (GWO) to increase conversions, because GWO requires a thankyou page. Doh! (I realize I’m running that plugin, but I’m not actively seeking new consulting clients, so it’s not a priority to fix that.)
2) Typically, the contact button says submit by default. It’s well known that you want to match the button to your headline, and people didn’t come to your contact page with servitude in mind and/or kinky S&M messaging. They came to contact you. So the default button should read “Contact Us” or “Send Contact Message” … Submit isn’t clear and cuts conversions.
Like this post on conversion rate optimization (CRO) and usability? Get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book, which offers tactics covering the overlap between CRO and SEO.
1) I got engaged.
2) Preparing the book ordering site. I’ve done two rounds of usability tests and set up a split test on the book chapter download to see if I can increase performance there.
2.1 ) Shipping pre-orders.
3) Creating a new free WP plugin based on one of the book’s tactics. It’ll help with content marketing. You can comment if you want to beta test, but I expect feedback. Expect this to seriously rock. If you’re not already subscribing by RSS, add my RSS feed to your reader now to get your free copy first once released! You can also get my latest posts by email.
4) Planning lots of guest posts and promotional content.
5) Planning a big piece of content: a remote usability testing guide based on my experience improving the book’s site.
6) Enjoying the beautiful city and life that is Jerusalem, where I live.
7) Applying to speak at WordCamp Jerusalem.
Like I said, get my latest posts by email or rss! Or get a free chapter from my advanced SEO book and see what all the fuss is about…
Jon Villiard, one of the pre-order customers, with his copy:
If you need web hosting, you can get a variety of other things, free! Hosting is a very competitive field, because companies can make $100+ / year from each user, and the reality is that most people don’t change hosts. As a result, hosting affiliate programs pay out commissions around $100 – even for new affiliates! (more…)
I’ve been digging into online marketing tools and to my chagrin, most want an annual fee (or one time payment usually roughly equivalent). It’s the rise of SAAS…
Email: (more…)
From LiveCity: “LiveCity provides a website building service, which is both easy to use by novice website builders, and robust enough to allow skilled customers to express themselves by accessing the background code. The LiveCity system was developed by us, and with more than 200,000 websites already opened with our website builder, we are glad to be a leading service provider in the field of CMS systems for websites.”
I spoke with CEO Nir Alloush about his company’s product and how they’re helping SMBs. Of most note is his eye for how customers will use the product and providing room to grow with his company’s tool, as well as their thorough QA/usability testing process… For the advanced folks reading, you can skip over the marketing tips as you’ll know them.
1) What is wrong with other website builders that you saw the need to create another tool? What does your tool solve?
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Try the Internet Archive’s 2M+ ebooks and texts.
Of course, there’s also the Gutenberg project which everyone knows, but it’s only got 36K docs, and anyways I don’t think the IA’s database is as well known.
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M.-J. Taylor is a moderator on V7N’s forums and has been working in SEO since 1997. She’s recently launched a SEO & social blog and offers services via her site Cyber-Key , focused on the web design and SEO in the Florida Keys.
How did you get involved with V7N?
I was a moderator on WebProWorld and kept hearing about V7N from other members. I checked it out. It wasn’t the most learned forum I’d ever visited, but it was the friendliest. I was made to feel welcome and a “part of.” And I felt I was needed, as well as wanted. (more…)
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:
In short, what you need is for your WordPress pages to be static html …
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.
This is a guest post from Everett Sizemore, who is an eCommerce SEO consultant operating off his 38 acre farm in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia. He enjoys gardening, collecting eggs and tackling tough SEO problems.
Want to fight the scrapers outranking you with your own content post-Panda?
Google is losing the war against content scrapers and we’re the ones paying the price. It has gotten even worse since Panda, despite efforts to fix the problem. I know of several dozen websites that are being outranked by scrapers.
While Google might hope we’re going to do their job for them with tags like rel canonical, and rel author, this problem isn’g going away any time soon. You know things are bad when powerhouses like TIME.com are outranked by sites like this.
Fortunately, there are many ways to keep sites from scraping your content, (more…)
Here’s the gameplan to sell my advanced SEO book:
1) The main target is to get people to download a free chapter from the book. To drive traffic to that page, I’m going to focus on guest posting on SEO and search blogs, especially if they allow me to include my author bio or links at the start, instead of at the end. (more…)
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! (more…)
Have you been paying $29 and now $39 a head for usertesting.com?
Mashable has a list of free and commercial screencasting tools, including web-based/online ones.
The Screencasting Handbook has another list with certain other ones listed and describing relevant feature differences.
Finally, some generous soul gave Wikipedia a really comprehensive list of such tools, but without much detail on features.
You can use this plus the methodology in Rocket Science Made Easy (Steve Krug’s guide to usability testing) for really cheap tests, or even free ones.
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In a thought-provoking article, Russ Virante of Virante SEO asks whether, instead of manually checking through competitors’ backlink profiles, it’s perhaps possible to automate the analysis, at least to dig for paid links. He suggests that by using SEOmoz’s link index, and comparing the numbers on some backlink profile metrics against those of Wikipedia [which has never manipulated its backlink profile], it’s possible to get an idea o how natural a site’s backlink profile is. (more…)
Paul May co-founded BuzzStream, a CRM for link building and PR/social media that allows online marketers to manage relationships and be more effective in getting results, be they links or press. He gave me the following two-part interview about the software creation and startup process.
I’d already interviewed Ann Smarty before about her creation of MyBlogGuest and her insights on iteration, usability and the startup process.
Have you used usability testing along the way? If so, what role has it played (share examples)?
I talk to at least two customers every day, so I’m always getting feedback…we conduct formal usability testing any time we launch a major feature. Our testing approach is based on Steve Krug’s usability testing methodology – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc.
Here’s how we did it when we launched the new prospecting tool:
In our first phase we have the testers walk through a series of linked balsamiq mockups. The thing I love about using balsamiq mockups is that it’s great for identifying features you can cut before you get into code…when you see all the things that people stumble over and when they tell you which things they really care about, it makes it much easier to figure out the minimum viable feature-set.
The downside to balsamiq mockups is that they force the user through a specific workflow, so your visibility into the true user experience is limited. Given this, we use mockups with three or four testers and then move to working code.
As they go through each step, we have them say everything that they’re thinking. This helps us identify spots where our language is confusing, our workflow is cumbersome, etc.
Two of the big takeaways from the usability testing for the prospecting tool:
1. Using language like “keywords” confused people and led to poor selection of prospecting phrases (people thought they should just enter the same keywords they’re trying to rank on).
Just changing the language to “prospecting searches” significantly changed the way people used the product.
2. For the first release, people didn’t want or need a tool that automatically creates the prospecting phrases for them…
They just wanted to enter prospecting queries on their own and then let BuzzStream de-duplicate results and collect the data. This cut out a ton of development that we thought we needed in order to deliver a v1 product.
What lead you guys to integrate Twitter so tightly?
Initially because it scratched an itch that we had…we were engaging with people on twitter and people were talking about us there, but we had no way to leverage this. All these great things were happening there and if we had a history of it at our fingertips, we could build better outreach lists and engage more effectively…but it was as though the second after you tweeted someone or they tweeted about your company, the information would just scatter to the wind.
Do you have plans to integrate other social websites in the future? Digg? StumbleUpon? Facebook?
We’ve built a prototype for automatic discovery of blog comments, but we haven’t integrated it into the product yet….the truism with software is that you have to support anything you deliver and it’s much easier to add a feature than kill it, so we’re being careful here.
The next few months will be heavily weighted towards usability and UI features, and we’ll use that time to conduct some market research on social discovery features like this. I would love to hear thoughts from you and your readers about this. [Ed: I think this is valuable for the same reason as the Twitter integration, but also because it allows you to know who to work with when you need to promote something on those sites.]
Do you have grandfathered pricing?
Yes. We haven’t raised our prices, but we did change our pricing model.
In the past, each plan included a large number of users and a relatively small number of contacts and links. The overwhelming feedback we’ve gotten is that people needed more contacts and links. To meet the need we raised the number of contacts and links in each plan, but we also reduced the number of users in each plan.
For the vast majority of our current customers, this meant they got more links for the same price, but there were some customers that would have had to move to a more expensive plan to keep the same number of users. For them, we’ve grandfathered them into their current plan, but if they want to move to the new model, they’re able to do this at a significant discount.
Liked it? Check out Buzzstream today!
Flipping websites is a common and popular practice, but you can make more money in the long term by renting websites out, instead of getting a one-time payment for them.
This technique only works in a few niches; one in particular is the local business niche. Many local businesses are still in the dinosaur age and this means one thing: It’s time to cash up on local businesses that have no Internet presence whatsoever or a very weak one if that.
One reason local Internet business marketing can be so lucrative is that while the keywords have low search volume, they are still worth an enormous amount of money to the right people, and they also tend to have weak competition. City-service keywords are some of the most unique type of keyword phrases in terms of SEO and ROI on the planet and cashing up on them all starts with owning the exact match domain name.
How to GamePlan Your Strategy
Getting into the local business market fast is all about owning the right domain names to begin with. The “May Day” Google algorithm update of about a year ago – hit people banking on exact match domain names pretty hard. But exact match domain names are still very effective in the local business niche because competition for the keywords is very low, and thus the exact match still holds a lot of weight in the Google algorithm.
Rural Regions vs Large Metropolitan Areas.
Keyword research is absolutely crucial for choosing your domain names.
You don’t want to choose a keyword that has no search volume – and that is the exact problem with areas low in population. The search volume is so low that it not measurable, thus it is a good idea to use this strategy is highly populated metropolitan areas only.
The problem with large metropolitan areas, on the other hand, is that in the last two years, a large percentage of exact match domains have been registered – so you can’t get a hold of one unless you pay a premium on the aftermarket. However, if you find the right niche (HINT: Dumpster Rental is one good one still available widely across America) you will be able to cash up.
Side Note: There is a workaround for keyword research in low populated areas: use Google AdWords.
Create A Funnel of Web Sites
A funnel is when you create multiple websites aimed at targeting multiple different keyword phrases that all funnel people to dialing up the same number and reaching the same company.
You want to take this strategy to the large metropolitan areas. The reason is that in many large metropolitan areas there are suburbs whose keyword data is measurable. Your goal should be to make 3-15 different websites that have exact match city/service domain names. Example: “Miami Bankprutcy Trustee” and its suburb “Grapeland Heights Bankruptcy Trustee.”
Finding Clients and How to Charge
Finding a client(s) will be the toughest part of the whole procedure. The best place to start is with friends, family, or friends of the family. If no one you know owns any sort of local business then it’s time to start cold calling or further networking within the area. The good part about not having a client right away however is that it will give you time to work on the SEO for your websites so that you can establish rankings and have something to show them when you pitch.
Another good idea is to get a phone number up and running on the website. Phone.com is a pretty cheap way to get an (800) number up very quickly of which you can forward to any number you like (they provide numbers for around $5 a month).
It will automatically keep track of all your calls and how much time each conversation lasted and from who it was from. This is valuable information, especially when you are trying to make a sale. Any local business will tell you that there main goal is to get somebody one the phone – and if you can do that for them then you will have done your job in the marketing department. Some local businesses even have it down to how much money it is worth every single time the phone rings.
What you go about charging will depend on a lot of different things. You’ll need to price each niche differently mainly because a potential client is worth different amounts of money depending on what business you’re in. The higher amount of money a potential client is worth – the more likely that you will be able to charge that company on a monthly or annual rate.
The less a potential client is worth – the more likely you will have to charge your clients per lead. Although this is more frequently the case, each situation is different and you might be [doing the opposite:] charging a dentist per lead while you charge a dumpster rental company on a monthly or annual type deal.
When you design them you want to make sure that you use the triangle theory as part of your design. What do I mean by that?
The triangle theory was a study that Google did back in 2005 that shows that the first thing that a person looks at when entering a website is the top left corner, and that their eyes scope it in the shape of a triangle. You want to make sure that you get a logo, phone number, and any free estimate form you have in that triangle.
Side Note: Once you find a client that wants to run with you, this is when you will be plugging the logo and phone number in. A good way to do this is to order a number from Phone.com and redirect it to the company. That way you can see just how many leads you are generating them – which is essential if you are going to charge by lead.
While your off-site SEO like link building and social networking won’t be as important (exact domain name helps that a lot in this niche) your on-site SEO must be flawless. You really want to stress proper placement of keywords. Your link building will consist of 10-50 links obtained through quality paid link directories or some sort of contextual links.
You should begin to see these sites ranking within 3 months given that you chose some quality keyword phrases. After that it’s on you to go out there and get clients!
This article was written by Anthony Benedict. Anthony helps to run and maintain inetzeal.com. This website is an entity of an Internet marketing company which provides many services, which includes a white label link building service as well as many other services that you may get a SEO Quote on at any time.
The purpose of advertising is defeated by “engaged” audiences. I came across an old advertising saw in Vanessa Fox’s recent article about the Food Network vs AllRecipes traffic battle, namely that advertisers want an engaged audience. That’s idiotic.
Why?
Engaged audiences don't click.
Ask any AdSense publisher who clicks his ads most, and you'll hear that search engine traffic is great. Heck, Chiticka has an ad product exclusively dedicated to monetizing publishers' traffic earned from SEO.
Within blackhat SEO, it's also known that providing a poor user experience - where the item sought for in the search isn't present on the landing page - generates high AdSense clickthrough rates. The AdSense block is the most relevant thing on the page - it best matches the keywords searched for, and is the best next step for the visitor. So they click.
Compare that to direct traffic. People coming to read content are the MOST banner blind visitors within a website's audience. Engaged audiences don't give a damn about the ads. They ignore them the most - they're used to the ad slots, have seen them several times already...
Brand advertisers supposedly want these audiences because they're there for the content, therefore are the most likely to be interested in the topic. OK, fair enough - lots of search traffic is off topic to a site's core topic, in contrast to the direct traffic. But that doesn't help much if those people are ignoring the ads.
The best solution in such cases is social media - you're not ignored, because you're not broadcasting at your target [direct, engaged] audience, but speaking to them personally. Offering recipes, chatting with them on Twitter etc.
A friendly business acquaintance of mine, Jean-Julien of Sid Lee, asked this question recently on Quora. I thought I’d answer here for the benefit of my readers.
The question is kind of futile, in my view. It’s the same way many marketing award shows are only aimed at promoting themselves (they charge thousands per submission…). Just as those award shows don’t really pinpoint the best in the country, it would be impossible to answer this question accurately without doing a comprehensive rating… and none of these answers (award shows, surveys, etc) are ever really comprehensive. (more…)
Do CSS galleries actually show the right way forward for web design?
Via a fascinating post on whitespace and visual hierarchy at Usability Post, I also discovered the UX part of Stack Exchange, one of the web’s biggest Q&A sites. It’s got loads of intermediate-advanced questions and is well worth a visit for people responsible for designing user interfaces. Warning: You might get hooked!
In yet another fascinating case study, Mr Green’s blog shares a mobile marketing campaign aimed at recruiting panel members for a demographic research service. (more…)
Excellent criticism of daily deals on TechCrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/03/why-daily-deals-raw-deal/
The question is – how do local companies go about (more…)
