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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To set up a retargeting segment:

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

2. Click search.

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

Some particular cases where email retargeting can be handy:

1. Need to liquidate your inventory?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some clarifications:

Same day – same day the rule is run

Last day – the day before the rule is run

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Here’s how to increase your adwords CTR and drop CPCs in 30 seconds, by finding more negative keywords. Sort by impressions.

The reason this boosts CTR is because your CTR is determined by clicks across ALL keyword phrases people use – not just those you intended.

Use negative match to block your ads from showing up for irrelevant keywords, even those that are close misses. If you sell Ford F-150s but not their tires, phrase-matching “Ford F-150″ will get you tire-buyers viewing your dealership’s ads.

So you want to pay attention not just to know budget wasters like broad match, but even phrase match keywords.

Unfortunately, it’s sometimes a hassle to sort through the “actual search phrases” report in AdWords. That’s because the default sort is by spend, and that’s not optimal for showing underperforming keywords.

Step 1: View your campaign or adgroup’s actual search phrases.
Step 2: Sort the report by impressions.
Step 3: Look for the close-misses and irrelevant traffic that are causing your ads to appear most frequently but have low CTRs.

Voila – that’s how to find the bulk of your negative keyword list.

Liked this tip? Add my rss feed to your reader.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How will you ever be profitable then?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Popular examples:

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

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

Part 2 – Segment the traffic and personalize

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To conclude:

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

Create your own products.

Differentiate them.

Bundle products.

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

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

Increase that average order value and those profits!

If you liked this post, you might also like:

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Manish Pandey, an SEO expert I’m familiar with, recently published a large article listing and describing all the phases of Google Panda. Check it out!.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Steve recently got a warning from Google that a number of pages were returning soft 404s, and the next week, his traffic dropped 10%.

The following week, another 30% was gone. What are these dramatically harsh “soft” 404 errors? How do you fix them?

What is a soft 404? It’s when your content is no longer what was there but you return an http status code other than 404 or 410 (i.e. you don’t return an error code). For instance, you might return a 200 code. As Google says in describing such errors, you can label a giraffe a dog, but it’s still a giraffe.

If Google detects such errors, you can expect them to index less of your pages and to eliminate the rankings those pages might once have had. In Steve’s case, this was probably partly to blame, but an additional server crash certainly did not help. So don’t worry about as drastic drops as Steve experienced, but be aware that you can see traffic drops due to soft 404s.

The difficulty this client experienced is that contrary to the more common soft 404 situation where 200 status codes are being served, we had established 301 redirects.

Here’s my analysis of the problem affecting this client’s site, all of which essentially stemmed from a recent redesign.

With the redesign, the client also implemented search-engine-friendly URLs. Great!
The trick of course is how do you maintain the rankings? Standard SEO best practice is to 301 redirect the old URLs to new URLs. Great!

What about when some of the pages on the old site won’t exist on the new site? This client has a dynamic classifieds site, so products are constantly being sold and delisted by the merchant who advertised it.

During the transition from old to new site, a number of product detail pages became useless because that merchant sold out his/her inventory.

We couldn’t leave the pages in place and just label them as sold, with links to other merchants’ identical-product listings. While good for users and Googlebot, it would burden the server heavily given the size and volume of this site.

Instead, we had to redirect these expiring classified listings. The priority list for 301 permanent redirects was as follows:

1. Exact-Product overview page that links to listings from several merchants. So an expired Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s Shoe product listing would send visitors to the Nike Air Jordan 1991 Red Men’s product overview page.

2. If such a page didn’t exist, a redirect to the deepest subcategory (i.e. from breadcrumb navigation) would be shown.

3. In the absence of a subcategory, a category page would be the redirect’s target.

4. In the absence of a relevant category, the general “Pick A Category” page would be shown.

Google showed us three URLs that it said were soft 404s, and indeed they were right with regards to two.

Those two redirected to the Pick A Category page. While that used to be acceptable and even widely advised SEO practice for the sake of maintaining traffic, Google’s realized it’s not an ideal user experience.

So Google tells you that such redirects (in their example, to one’s home page) are no good.

Fair enough, we’ll change that to 410 errors and hopefully make up the lost traffic on any specific rankings with increased indexing and longtail traffic to other product detail pages.

But the third page was perplexing – it redirected from a product detail page to a page that listed classified ads for exactly the same product. It wasn’t clear why Google thought this was a soft 404? A false positive from Google, clearly.

This lead me to write the following analysis for the client:

Hi Steve,

I looked around, checked out SEOmoz Pro and Google help and used my noggin. Here’s my analysis:

1) Generally, soft 404 is when there’s a 200 response even though the content isn’t there.
2) Google’s help pages also talk about redirecting to the home page as being a soft 404 – so we know that it’s not just 200 responses but also 301 that can cause soft 404s.
3) How does Google detect that there’s a soft 404? It checks if the content of the page says that the file is not found or otherwise says that an error took place.

ALSO – It seems it can look for content that is too different – as in 2). So probably it’s looking at title tags, headers, images, and content similarity.

If you look at the first soft 404 page (— edited to protect the innocent—), it’s more surprising because that category/search result shows exactly the products someone is searching for.

However, if you look at the html code, neither the title nor the headers (h1 h2 etc) reflect the product searched for. So for a robot, it’s not clear that the page it gets redirected to is about the same topic as the page it tried to fetch.

Therefore, the solution I propose to fix the soft 404 errors is:

—–Part 1—–

For products that are gone and redirect to perfectly accurate subcategories or model pages, to edit pages of that type (is it search results? something else? product-overview page?) and include the keywords in the important areas for SEO: title, h1 and let the on page content take care of the rest.

On a related note to the above, I suggest changing the css/coding around so that on category pages, not just product pages, the product name is in a large-font size h1. Currently they’re not in h1s at all. And other things that are not really important (e.g. non-category-specific sidebar headings) should not be h2.

Ex.: “Brand” “Color” etc should not be in h2, because that tells Google the wrong message about the page’s topic. They can still be in a larger font via css, but preferably not
h2.

Another benefit of making the category keyword a prominent h1 heading visible on the page is that this should hopefully help reduce bounce
rate.

—-Part 2—–

For product pages that are currently redirecting to the pick a category page, or a regular category page, let’s eliminate the 301 and just do a 410 gone .

In any case, Google is not treating them like 301s, so we may as well try and do what Google’s asking and show 410. On the 410 page, we can still show links to the relevant category page as well as the pick a category page.

For product pages that are currently redirecting to product-overview pages, let’s make sure the model pages have h1s set up right.

For product pages that are redirecting to subcategories, can we prioritize the same exact same product to show up first?

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accessible to SEOmoz Pro members only as of this writing.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

David McBee, one of the web’s savvier link builders, shared with me this parody, tongue-in-cheek infographic about infographics, via ComicalConcept.com:

I like it .

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

You can find the info in

Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns .

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

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

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

We used

- one UTM variable for age and

- one UTM variable to insert country targeting data:

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

Toolset:

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

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

Step 1: Collect Pics

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

Step 2: Make Pics Eye Catching

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

Step 3: Write Campaign & Upload Pics

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

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

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

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

Step 4: Measure and adjust

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

Step 5: Stay patient

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

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

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

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

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

What Are Advanced Segments?

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

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

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

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

A: Start with creating a new segment.

Setting Up an Advanced Segment for SEO traffic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Testing to Find SEO Problems

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

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

Other Examples of Actionable Advanced Segments

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

Social Network Monitoring –

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

Twitter Traffic –

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

Follow Your Buyers and Window Shoppers –

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

Find the Questions on Your Visitors’ Minds –

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

Conclusion

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

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

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

My friend Andrew Breem of Outshine Online Marketing asked:

“As far as I can tell, you’ve built your business as a sole consultant as opposed to say building out a big team. Was this a conscious decision or did it just evolve? I’m at a cross roads now where I’m trying to decide exactly what route to take and I’m considering both approaches. I’d love to hear your opinion on why you made the choice you did, if you don’t mind sharing. ”

A: It’s not been my conscious decision, it’s just been a product of circumstances, really. I started consulting when I was turning 19 (started SEO 6 months before ) and I couldn’t build an agency while being in university. So that was 2006-2010.

I moved to Israel December 30 2010 and then was back in school studying Hebrew for 5 hours/day for the next 5 months. Then I got engaged and was busy planning the wedding with my then-fiance (now wife). Around the same time I also finally launched my book and obviously that took a fair amount of effort.

The closest I came to running an agency was doing a decent volume of guest posting where I subcontracted with up to 12 bloggers at a time. Problem was that with monthly-renewal contracts you don’t have the stability to hire people full time so you’re limited in what you can build.

That’s for circumstances.

For my personal intentions, I did want to build a shiny big agency when I was new and starting out. SEOmoz‘s high rates and cool work really motivated me to imitate them … until, like them, I realized that SEO services have limited scale.

I’m pretty ambitious in terms of the size of the business I want to build. When I see brilliant SEOs like my friends at NVI, Distilled, SEER Interactive, Portent and elsewhere “only” growing organically as opposed to the growth of a Facebook or a Twitter, it just makes it painfully obvious to me that the way to go for mega-success is to be the market owner – the Walmart, eBay, Odesk – instead of the guy owning a stall in the market. I have some ideas on that and hopefully I’ll get around to building a startup eventually.

For the time being, circumstances are such that am going to continue offering consulting services for the foreseeable future. I’m still having fun with SEO, with my book, and I’ve also got a stint in the Israeli army coming up – I just got my first summons as a draft-eligible 24 year old. Consulting and book sales give me the flexibility I need in my work.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

I’ve been going back to basics and doing lots – dozens of hours worth – of manual link outreach. It ain’t pretty, but it works. Here’s how I build my link request list, without tools.

(Come back next week for a tutorial on the rest of my process!)

As most of you know, there are queries you can search for that will return potential link prospects. Everything from queries that return comment forms, forums and guest books (the spammier low end) to general (aka SEO-friendly aka BURN-ME-PLEASE-GOOGLE) directories.

Most people overlook that you can also use link queries to find hubs, the most powerful links around.

1. The first thing is to find out who creates hub pages and why.

2. Once you know that, you can query for more hubs of the same type. I described that process and gave examples already years ago. (Kudos to Eric Ward and his link opportunity alert newsletter for some excellent answers to “who” and “why”).

“The Results Suck Though, Gab!”

It’s true! The annoying thing with searching Google/Bing for hubs is that a large percentage of the results – at times even the wide majority – are useless. Some reasons:

1. Site updates are impossible: broken forms, email addresses, absentee webmasters…
2. No one optimizes for these queries so many of the results are irrelevant

Are tools the solution? Various link research tool vendors like Citation Labs, Ontolo, etc offer to run the queries and scrape the results for you.

The problem is that if you’re auto-scraping together junk, you just end up with a bigger pile of junk, faster. And exponentially more work sorting, if a few queries were bad, because then you need to eliminate all those results from your link prospect export.

So the question is – how do you auto-filter the junk? Or, phrased differently, how do you maximize your percentage of high-quality opportunities?

Browse, don’t search. Go parallel.

I’ve used this technique for years and it’s always proven highly valuable. In essence, once you’ve found a good prospective hub, click on their links and aim to solicit those people.

Why does it work?

It works because someone else has already done the filtering for you. That is, problem #2 – irrelevant search results – has been taken care of by human curation. It’s ironic, but human curation is an important way to provide quality in the long tail.

(Demand Media, if they wrote decent articles, is another face to this coin).

Of course, this doesn’t solve problem #1 for you.

You still have to either click around the site looking for contact info (and/or use the WhoIs database), check copyright type info to see when the last update happened etc.

The contact info rummaging, fortunately, can be handled by a tool like BuzzStream, to save you some time.

Some things to prioritize when clicking links on a hub page:

- If the site description says that it links to other sites. (Yay, another hub!)
- If the linked site has a blog.
- Look at the blogroll because you can easily see whether the blogs linked are current thanks to blogs’ default reverse-chronological sequencing. This is a time-saver, plus most blogs also have some contact information accessible.

If you liked this post, why not link to it? Or get my latest posts sent to you…

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Directory.Google.com is dead. All the links going to it and its associated URLs are broken.

Follow the process of broken link building and you could find yourself with some massively juicy links.

Step 1: Find links to relevant pages on directory.google.com in your favourite link research tool.
Step 2: Publish a directory page with links to relevant sites/pages, in replacement of Google’s equivalent page. Try archive.org to see if what was on Google’s directory is still around.
Step 3: Solicit the webmasters linking to the dead pages.

The catch? Most of the pages with links have under 10 links … so you could do a fair amount of work for little reward. This is especially true when you consider the low response rates for manual outreach.

Of course, experienced link builders know that link building tactics don’t die, they just get recycled with new twists/modifications. This is a whitehat variant on cloning dead sites, a grayhat tactic I spun off of a blackhat tactic, and shared a few years ago.

(I realize I’m a bit late finding out about the death of Google’s directory, but hey – when was the last time you visited a directory for purposes besides SEO?…)

How badly do you want quality links?

p.s. Google directory was a scrape of DMOZ… so you can also look at DMOZ”s links, and tell them how out-of-date, broken down etc the directory is and why not link to you instead?…

If you liked this post – I`d love a link to it ;D.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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

Does your competitor have some sweet old links you wish they didn’t have?

Well, here are two sneaky ways – one’s even sly and nasty – to get your competition’s links dropped.

1) Run their site through your favourite backlink research tools.
2) Use something like Xenu Link Sleuth or your favourite link checker to look for 404 pages on your competitor’s site that have links.
3) Contact the webmasters linking to said 404s and use broken link building to get the link for yourself instead.

If the link is on a hub page that links to many pages in the field, you don’t even need the competitor’s page to 404.
1) Run the hub page through a broken link checker.
2) Write an email to the hub page’s webmaster with a large list of the broken links – but don’t send yet.
3) Add your competitor’s link into the list near the end.

Q: Why would the webmaster remove your competitor’s link if it’s not broken?
A: Laziness and trust – if the first dozen links were all broken, the next dozen are probably broken, too. Why keep checking all of them?

While I think it’s fine for you to do the first to competitors, the second approach isn’t ethical. It’s an approach to be aware of though, so if you have a link management software like Buzzstream , follow up with the appropriate webmaster if a link dissappears. And of course, monitor your 404 errors in Webmaster Tools and server logs.

Downloads For RSS Subscribers:

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