SEO ROI

While I’m usually not the one to swear on a professional blog, there are exceptional occasions where it’s appropriate, and this is one of them. I’m waaaaaay overdue for a links post, and there are so many quality ones here, that I had to use my affiliate friend‘s expression.

Affiliate

First of all, one of the most brilliant minds in affiliate and search marketing, Diorex, has started his blog up again. Here’s a little jewel of a commentary that I’ll bet 99% of the search community missed on the introduction of the Google Affiliate Network and why you need to kill off your use of Google Analytics. First to sphinn it gets a hot story!

Diorex also pointed me to this bit by PunditX on making serious bank from Google Pack referrals. Impressive, and it shows how much work is required to succeed for real with this stuf..

I need to give a hat tip to Smaxor for sharing that Diorex was back up (Smaxor used to have his old posts hosted on his blog when Diorex’s blog turned the lights off). He’s also shared a little goody about Namecheap offering free SSL certificates with new domain registrations; it’s good for a limited time so get yours now! I’ve already got about a half dozen :D.

To give you an idea of how valuable that is, Godaddy sells their Turbo SSL for 24.99/year or 26.99 a year. It’s an acquisition strategy, and you better believe it’s working. I’m shifting my purchasing activity to Namecheap from Godaddy.

While nowhere near being on the level of the above mentioned elite marketers, I did come up with an original idea in a guest post for Jordan Kasteler on how to discover and nail your loose-lipped Affiliate Managers. It might get a few AMs fired if you use the technique and blog about it, but then, why were they AMs to begin with?

http://roguedomainer.com/ is a wonderful blog on search, affiliate marketing, and internet marketing generally (not in the wannabe “I’m gonna rank for this term despite only offering seo” sense, but the real deal). Know about being prepared?

AffSpy is now in public beta. Go sign up – it’s free :D!

Social

Perhaps you don’t know about being prepared, but did you know that affiliate marketing and social marketing can coincide? Have a look at the rogue’s guide to Yahoo Answers. Be prepared for some social engineering!

Personally, however, I think this is where people can genuinely claim that blackhats are unethical – they’re tricking folks into buying their products. I’ve said several times in the past that SE guidelines aren’t a moral code, but this has nothing to do with SE guidelines.

As far as being a thought leader and appealing to people’s higher senses, Leo Babauta does it the best. See this post uncopyrighting his stuff and letting others reproduce it anywhere free. Plus he’s aware of the potential SEO ramifications. Imho, he knows that others will give him credit and the good will will get him lots more links than if he just blogged regularly. Sheer genius.

While we’re on the topic of being a thought leader, I love when others lead the way down the wrong path so that you can learn from their mistakes and not screw up like that. It’s a sad story, but you must read this post-mortem on a failed vertical search / information retrieval company. Hat tip to my friend Ben Yoskovitz’s Twitter.

Did you know that email marketing is used for “customer relations management”? You probably did if you’re in enterprise marketing, but I didn’t. Sounds a lot like social to me, and in fact Sitepoint’s email marketing kit – a great investment I’ve recently made – explains some tips for that. In that spirit, I share with you 10 tips for better sign-up forms.

Why care about email? To build your distribution network for better content-based link building, right?

Socialize your lead gen, say Ion Interactive. An interesting twist on improving your whitepaper-based efforts!

Link Building

My friend Ann has either been analyzing the blackhat side of search or just getting really bright n creative on her own, but this post on managing social profiles, and the useful chart she includes, is a must read.

She’s been on a roll with some awesome posts lately, and another one is this wonderful, well-researched and presented ultimate seo tools guide. I’ve bookmarked it and so should you!

(On a related note, am I the only one who didn’t know that the Xs in the hub finder tool link to the particular pages a link is from, and that those show up in exports to CSV? I felt like such a moron when I found out, having wasted countless hours trying to discover the context of some links…)

SEO CO did a study on how the MSM links out / does not link out.

Why your linking tests suck – You don’t have to agree with it, and you can take the drama with a grain of salt, but reading this will definitely make you a brighter SEO.

Lyndon Antcliff shares some linkbait ideas. (Aside: I shared some linkbait ideas earlier, link here if you missed them.)
On the whole, I found them interesting, but wasn’t crazy about some of it:

Re: Payday loans linkbait – “If you can get pro and anti groups discussing on the same page you have hit payday gold.” Lyndon recognizes that these loans abuse people … and then [tacitly] suggests it’s a niche worth pursuing. Fake linkbait doesn’t hurt anyone, and I was actually cool with the kid-gets-hookers-plays-videogames story and honestly entertained. But working in a niche like that is something I find distasteful, to keep it in polite terms.

Roger “Martini Buster” Montti explains how India can work for you as far as link building goes.

~~Seth Godin~~ This category needs to have its own post.

Miscellaneous

Google-knol-is-behaviorally-targeting-ranking-well

12 Shopping Cart Abandonment Mistakes via Palmer Web Marketing

SEO vs Social Media: Take the traffic quality test. Courtesy of James Duthie of Online Marketing Banter, some original research! Nicely done James. Though it could have been better had the social media traffic considered been niche-related vs general. My Sphinn traffic bounces much less than SU traffic, for instance.

Joost deValk gives us an absolutely wonderful, end-to-end resource on getting that pesky WordPress search working properly. I can’t wait to implement and report back!

For my Russian readers, Proother translated the Internal Link Building plugin – cool stuff guys! Anyone who wants to create another foreign-language version is more than welcome to it! I’m happy to acknowledge your work here and let my readers know. You’ll be responsible for updating as I update though, fyi.

How to turn lurkers into posters is a wonderful bit on creating and managing online communities. Also from Sitepoint, this time from the “iFroggy” network, comes this piece on managing violations of your community’s guidelines and documenting them.

If that’s your bag, you’ll probably like this forum for Community Admins, and this WSJ article addressing why many online communities fail and iFroggy network owner Pat O’Keefe’s comment on it.

Getting more into the techie side of stuff? Learn how to set up your own cron jobs (scripts run automatically on a schedule, with no need to turn them on/off) easily.

Are you getting your arse handed to you by your channel “partners”? John Andrews spills the beans on why small + local businesses need to think twice before partnering with Marchex, and why you need to be careful not to pay for others to develop footholds in your revenue streams.

This phone screening question for job candidates is golden.

Some of you know that amongst the seo services I offer are website valuing and buying. Well ebizvaluations have created a tool I long wanted to create myself: a closed-deal scraper / aggregator / valuator.

The idea is to collect the data in the market that similar sites have sold for and then appraise your site accordingly. I’ve seen that technique work extremely accurately at NamePros, and if this tool can be effective, I’ll be quite impressed.

On a related note, one of the first pieces of linkbait I designed was a suite of site appraisal tools at Website Auction Hub. Unfortunately the site’s owner broke off communication with me at one point and I had to stop working with them before we got to promoting the tools. It’s been over 2 years now, and I’d love to hear feedback from any of you who might use the tools. I honestly don’t think they’ll be as good as ebizvaluations though, at least based on the principles of their tool.

An interesting evolution in spam vs anti-spam, where the bad guys win, unfortunately. Old but worth reading.

A real spammer selling SEO scams.

http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/07/15/rss-is-about-content-not-presentation/
A mini case study by the good folks at RKG.

Ideas on search and beyond – because building your brain is as important as building the bank account.

Google: the mother of antitrust battles?

The Five Big Mistakes That Changed My Life and How I Moved Past Them – SmartNow.com

Malwebolence – The World of Web Trolling

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License by detritus My friend Gyutae Park recently blogged about making money by tasting domain names based on Google Hot Trends. It’s a neat idea, but there are some caveats you should know.

Tasting domain names is the practice of buying them with the intent to return them during the 5 day grace period, while profiting off the typein traffic the domains get during those 5 days. It’s the web equivalent of buying a prom dress for prom then returning it. Google Hot Trends, for those who don’t know, shows you the 100 keywords with the greatest change in search volume in the past 24 hours.

Anyways, trendy domaining is something I’ve done in the past. From personal experience, I can confirm that there is money there to be made … but very little, if you’re not automating things. That’s because:

First, because mainstream domainers are already doing this, automatically. So most of the hot keywords’ domain name equivalents get taken as soon as Google Hot Trends refreshes.
Second, you need to look for keywords where there’s an intent that you can monetize without much thought, using adsense for domains. Otherwise, you won’t earn much, if anything. I’ve had 2 cent clicks before, on domain name parking, I kid you not.
Third, this raises a problem particular to Hot Trends keywords, which is that they’re often news-related. The intent isn’t commercial, then – the intent is to get information. So you’d have to either (i) figure out a filter to eliminate these domain names from consideration or (ii) figure out how to monetize news traffic. In case you didn’t know, mainstream news media are getting less than 1 cent per pageview on much of their CPM deals. So you could try working out a CPM deal where you show your banner ads above framed news sites, but you’d better have MASSIVE volume, if you want to make money.
Fourth, you need to consider what you’ll make per hour. Suppose it just takes you 10 minutes to find a hot phrase whose .com isn’t yet registered. You buy it. That takes another 2-3 minutes. So let’s say you can find and buy 4 – 5 domain names in an hour. Even some of the hottest terms on Google Trends don’t get that much type-in traffic to the domains, so you can only expect a handful of clicks, from my experience. Remember: Those aren’t terms with a lot of volume, necessarily, they’re terms with lots of CHANGE in volume. E.g. 1000% more than normal or whatever. But 50 -> 500 searches still isn’t many type-ins you’re gonna get.

Note: You can also only do this for an hour a day with Google Trends, because after that there’s no more words to mine. So doing this manually doesn’t scale really well anyways.

for the love of money
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License by monkeyc.net So when I did it, I got $2 worth of clicks. I was trying out domain tasting at the same time, and got a refund (minus I think a 50 cent charge bc Godaddy is weird, if memory serves?) on the domain so I was $1.50 ahead. Supposing you made $10-$15 a day on this… that’s still a lot of work for little ROI.

Plus it’s not just the hour spent finding and buying the names – you still have to return them afterwards! So you’re probably coming out with, at best, $15 for an hour and a half of work, which amounts to $10/hour. At worst, it’s $10 for 1.5 hours, meaning you’re making $6.66/hour. Here in Montreal, that’s actually less than minimum wage. Can you not make more money online than working a minimum wage job?

(That’s a rhetorical question – people with web skills can make great money. Start out reading everything in the Problogger.net archives, then learn SEO from yours truly ;).)

Therefore, automation is key to making money off tasting Hot-Trends-keyword domain names. That way you can

get enough domains,
pick the right domains, namely those whose typein traffic has value to advertisers
before other domainers snap them up,
measure traffic levels and earnings
create rules on when to either drop them within the 5 day refund period, or keep them for the rest of the year on the assumption you can make more than regfee off the remaining typeins you’ll get in the next few days.

And if you automate all that, it’s enough to make, maybe, $50/day – there’s still the other domainers to compete with. Fair money, but still a lot of work for an incertain ROI. Most intermediate+ internet marketers can create projects that are more profitable in the medium-long term… especially those with the programming skills to automate the above and refine it.

Sometime soon I’ll either post my spreadsheet I use to forecast new projects’ SEO ROI here, or make it available only to subscribers… So add my rss feed to your reader already ;)!

p.s. Gyutae is the first blogger I know of who has written on domain name buying based on Google Hot Trends, and has been producing other awesome content generally, so you should subscribe to his feed, imho.

p.p.s. Speaking of Hot Trends, I got several hundred visitors today, April 1st, from ranking this post for April Fool’s Email and variations on that. I checked the domain name aprilfoolsemail.com last night and it was available, for those of you want to try this.

10. Why yes, those viahra footer links will rank our kids’ toys site higher.

9. We’re experts in the three types of link: the reciprocal link, the paid link and the chainlink.

8. Of course it’s normal for link counts to change day-to-day by +/- 50,000.

7. This will cost you your time, money and sanity.

6. We follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines. ;D

5. Some killer link sources we access include the Cafepress used panties store.

4. Our SEO team leader is a pro who speaks at numerous conferences. His name is Jason Calacanis.

3. Your report? What report? (Via Acquisio bid management‘s Marc Poirier.)

2. We source content from professionals, like Paris Hilton and Ron Jeremy.

1. We tripled your traffic! We’re now ranking for “Infant Porn”!

If you liked this post, add my feed to your rss reader! Kudos also to Tamar Weinberg, Matt Inman, Rebecca Kelley, and Brian Hancock for their help and feedback!

… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.

Note: If you like this post, please link to this page from your blog or share it on StumbleUpon by clicking this button:

Here’s how to project the ROI you can expect on SEO. This way, when your boss asks you to predict next quarter’s SEO numbers to help him with his forecast to analysts, you predictive task will be easy. Better yet, the ROI forecast you make will be defendable.

The detailed explanation on making your forecasts follows after the flow chart.

Flowchart on how to project and/or forecast the ROI on SEO.

1) Pick some short-tail or mid-tail keywords. There’s no point picking long tail keywords, because the ROI on them individually is small in absolute terms.

2) Check the keyword for commercial intent.

– Microsoft offers a keyword commercial intent estimator tool. Caveat emptor: The tool’s estimates can vary significantly by day, so just take it as another data point, another road sign along the way.

– Correlate that by asking people to do word associations with the given keyword. You can use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for that. The associations will show the intent behind a given search.

– Compare the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) estimates Google provides you with for each keyword (set on exact match). The higher the CPC, the likelier there is to be commercial value.

Note: For CPCs under $1, this isn’t very meaningful.

3) Find search volume for your target keywords.

Use Google’s KW tool on exact match to find the exact volumes on target keywords.

It’s crucial to use exact match, and not broad match data, because rankings will result in getting you traffic for your exact match keywords and maybe a few variants. It’s best to be conservative.

3.5) Don’t just accept those search volume projections at face value. Double check.

– Run a PPC campaign.

– If you’re not going to run a PPC campaign (eg if the CPCs are too high), you MUST at least correlate the data to other people’s numbers:

Use Wikirank, if you see Wikipedia in the top 10.

Compare with Aaron’s tool.

Ask friends who’ve been in the same vertical about the search volume. Apparently the accuracy of Google’s numbers varies by vertical, so friends who’ve been there can provide valuable insights. (It’s not too difficult to find such friends once you’ve been in this business for a few years.)

Also, check against competitors’ keywords. Are you on the right track or really, really clueless?

4) Find out whether you can rank. Scope out the competition:

Look for backlink numbers and quality,

Consider backlink growth rates,

Calculate backlinks/referring domains to find out if there are big brands you need to be aware of,

Look at their anchor text,

Consider their own domain name – an indicator of anchor text past, present and future, as well as financial backing for marketing.

5) Estimate your costs including domain, hosting, site design + development, links, man hours.

Note: As pointed out by professional search marketer Simon Serrano in the comments below, certain costs are fixed regardless of whether you do SEO or not. So if you’re doing this with an existing site, then you can exclude those costs. But you’ll probably compensate with the man hours etc.

My perspective in suggesting that the domain and hosting costs be included was that of someone starting a new site from scratch, with the mentality, “I’ll rank and sell to search traffic.” For them, the exact match domain might be a big cost that wouldn’t be incurred otherwise, for example.

6) Estimate the traffic attainable from various positions. See Aaron’s big resource page on the topic and scroll down about 1/3 of the way for the breakdown of Click-Through-Rate (CTR) percentage by position.

Hat tip to my friend Henry Shih of online jeweler Ice.com for coming up with the idea to “make a range of projections, from conservative to optimistic” last summer. Todd Friesen has also suggested this.

Update: Given Universal search results with maps, news, videos, images etc., you may want to review these results downwards to be conservative. As Simon points out in the comments, the CTR data has changed significantly since the time AOL leaked its numbers.

7) Calculate your potential revenue.

If you’re an affiliate: i) Multiply those attainable traffic numbers by your CTR. ii) Multiply again by the merchant’s conversion rate. iii) Finally, multiply by your average commission. Take multiple values for both your own CTR and the merchant’s conversion rate, so you have a range of estimates from conservative to optimistic.

To simplify, if you know what your earnings per click will be (eg recently work in the niche), you can multiply traffic by EPC.

7b) If you’re an adcents publisher: Multiply that by your CTR and EPC if you’re selling CPC ads.

7c) If you’re a retailer / lead buyer: Multiply that by your conversion rate and then by your average if you’re the merchant.

8) Finally, divide your potential revenue by costs. This gives you your SEO ROI – the return on investment for each dollar you put into SEO.

I do this in a spreadsheet for convenience. If you add my rss feed to your reader, you can download a copy of the spreadsheet for your own use.

This has literally saved me thousands of dollars and countless hours by helping me avoid niches that offered a lower ROI for the same time and money investment…

p.s. If you want to know how to prove SEO ROI on past activities, that’s easy. Open your web analytics, and see how many organic visitors on non-brand keywords turned into leads or sales. Alternately, show your rankings increase if you’re not yet in the top 10, and thus not driving traffic just yet.

Found this post useful? Add my feed to your reader for more advanced SEO tips for inhouse SEOs, consultantts and independent webmasters and affiliates! If you want a price estimate for SEO services, you can get one quickly here.

That’s a pretty inflammatory statement, isn’t it? But why is it any less inflammatory than “Those who can, do. Those who cannot, teach.” You hear that all the time in internet marketing circles (especially affiliate ones) and it’s pretty silly.

I was preparing a syllabus for a course I called “How To Learn Internet Law For Fun And Profit”. The above thought occurred to me as I was reading for the basic section on ethics I needed to design.

Some Greek philosophers’ argue that the “happy man being a self-realized person and one who thus necessarily does what is good.” That jives really well with how I see some of the awesome profs I’ve had, like Rod Macdonald, Jill Guedon, Morteza Danechrad, Michael Duckett and Yossef Attoun. All of them are the epitome of what I think of as self-realization.

I don’t think a single one of them knows the others, yet I’d say they’re all kindred spirits in that they

Are ethical
Give back to their communities (implicit in 1, but felt it should be mentioned anyways)
Are brilliant
Teach with rare skill – it’s truly their calling
Have a toughness/resilience that is remarkable (I know each of them personally, and can tell you that they’ve not led the easiest lives).

What particularly gets my goat is those macho affiliates who act tough and think they’re the greatest thing since sliced bread just because they generate profits online. When they say that “those who can’t, teach,” they’re dismissing people of the highest quality, in every sense of the word.

The simple truth is that those who cannot, write inflammatory pieces on blogs nobody reads ;). Seriously though, I think both my version of that line and the better known version express two extremes that are rarely seen in reality – most people fall in the middle of this [bell] curve. What say you, you who can think?

First, the information that’s valuable to all my readers: Check out my most recent usability guest column for Search Engine Land, How Much Detail Do Product Detail Pages Need?

Second, in response to my 4Q visitor surveys, Tara Cervantes wrote me the following in response to the question, “What do you value most about the [company] website?”

“[I]nsight, shared knowledge, great food for thought. I’m an Internet Marketing Master’s student who just can’t get enough (now I’m thinking of old Depeche Mode)…Anyway, great site, I signed up for the blog. Your site made it as a reference for my usability class. The specific assignment was about Personas, just so you know, since the post we read talked about how you read user comments. taracervantes@(sitename removed to prevent spam)”

How can you not feel good when you see feedback like that ? I’d noticed Full Sail-referred-traffic in my server logs (the information your server records about each visitor), but to get a verbal explanation for it (since the page is restricted to Full Sail Internet Marketing Master’s students) is even better.

SEO ROI logs showing traffic from Full Sail's website as an assignment

If this site is good enough for Full Sail’s Master’s students, perhaps you’d like to add my rss feed to your reader?

Internal Link Building has been updated – everyone should get the new version, as it has fixed the main bugs troubling many installations, plus added some awesome new functionality. Download internal link building by clicking here!

Internal Link Building‘s New Functionalities and Why They’ll Rock Your Socks:

1) CSV upload. Can you say mass keyword editing? Hello time savings!

2) Link multiple keywords to a single URL. This is effective for getting all the keywords you want a page to target done in one go. Just put a space ‘ ‘ pipe ‘|’ and space between the multiple keywords/phrases you want linked. E.g. affiliate | affiliate marketing. More efficiency! More time savings!

3) Nofollow functionality. Often linking to an affiliate URL? Nofollow that sucker automatically :D. OMG! More time savings! Geez … set this plugin up and you may as well go on a month long cruise in the tropics!

Plugin Bug Fixes

1) Apostrophes within keywords can now be used. So if your friend O’harra is always getting links from you, just set up O’harra and don’t worry about it.

2) URLs that are just being shown, e.g. http://seoroi.com/seo-consulting-services/ are no longer having keywords within them linking out. E.g. services won’t link to a page you’ve set.

3) Posts and pages that are set as link-love destinations won’t link to themselves. Yay! Better aesthetics :).

4) Blockquotes and lists can now feature links within them. So go ahead and cite Nickycakes:

Ongoing ClickBooth vs Wickedfire Drama

Doesn’t seem to be much going on here. The lawsuit is apparently still in the works. One thing was obvious, though, at Affiliate Summit East: Clickbooth got a big ass double booth, but compared to pretty much all the other networks, you could practically hear crickets chirping when you walked past.

Bingo, Shady still gets the link within the Cakester’s comment for his [Shady’s] Clickbooth material.

5) Chris Cemper‘s issue has been resolved. Not quite sure how to articulate it, so here it is in his own words. “If we specify 6 links and place 3 per post, we certainly want 3 unique links, not 3 times the same ones… that would look spammy/unnatural.”

6) Simple Tags can now work with ILB, with a little ‘child’s play’ hacking on your part, per my awesome developer Aaron.

Bonus Advantage

This is something I’ve noticed since installing the plugin: My average pageviews seen per visitor has gone up from 1.4-1.5 to 1.9-2.0. Woohoo! Go extra frequency/repetition and brand recall!

7) Image tags with keywords in them (e.g. in the alt or title) are no longer breaking.

Update: Welcome Sphinn, StumbleUpon users :). How can you rank for competitive keywords like “Mortgage Calculator”? I don’t know about SEOBook, since he’s always talking about it, but here’s how Google would rank for a bigshot mortgage term like that.

1. Buy a ‘make your free website’ WYSIWIG-and-template based website, a la Geocities. Augment with a whackload of cheap hosting across different C blocks and IP ranges. For domains you can use subdomains or include them free (compare that to the cost of buying a link…).

2. Have a bunch of graphic templates made focused on the real estate sector. Pictures of houses, happy families and dogs, simple layouts, obvious email address/phone number etc.

3. Hire students to cold-call real estate agents and offer them free websites, and some resources on where to promote them (i.e. a basic how to do linkbuilding guide and quality directory list). If they ask what the catch is, be honest and tell them that there are links to your mortgage calculator webpage from their own sites.

Presto, you have:

Themortgage.com
TDCanadaTrust.com
RBCRoyalBank.com

[My SERPs look like this:]

Web	Results 1 – 10 of about 18,200,000 for mortgage calculator. (0.08 seconds)

			Sponsored Links

			Free Mortgage Calculators Easy to Use Mortgage Calculators. Check Payments and Mortgage Rates. InternetMortgageCalculators.com

Mortgage Calculator — How Much Can You Afford? | CMHC

This easy-to-use mortgage calculator will help you estimate the maximum house price and mortgage you can afford, as well as your monthly mortgage payments.
www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/buho_005.cfm – 27k – Cached–Similar pages

RBC Royal Bank – Mortgage Payment Calculator

Calculate your mortgage payments and see how you can save thousands of dollars in interest costs – while paying down your mortgage sooner! …
https://www.rbcroyalbank.com/cgi-bin/mortgage/mortcalc.pl – 26k – Cached–Similar pages

TD Canada Trust – Products and Services – Mortgages

The calculator is for demonstration purposes only and is not part of the application process Mortgage rates are subject to change at any time without …
www.tdcanadatrust.com/mortgages/afford.html – 11k – Cached–Similar pages

Mortgage Calculators

Online Mortgage Explorer gives you the quickest, most effective way to shop for a mortgage and be instantly approved by one of our leading lenders.
www.themortgage.com/calc.htm – 4k – Cached–Similar pages

In fairness, the last two also carry a pretty big brand imprint which gets lots of free, juicy editorial links. But who the hell has ever head of ‘themortgage.com’ (unless you’re in the market, obviously).

What’s especially sweet about this is that it’s endorsed by Google. Ever seen those ‘Powered by Blogger” badges? On blogspot subdomains… Templated … And links to a mortgage calculator site from a real estate broker – that’s standard in the industry anyways, so it’s not like offtopic links from something else.

If you liked this post on link building, get my rss feed.

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.

How would you measure this? Average revenue made per campaign? For themselves? The client? How/why would people even share that data?

Most entertaining agency? That’s typically what the ad/mktg awards are about, but of course this says nothing of actual ROI. (Yes, social media generates an ROI measured in dollars (PDF). See also this aside from Michelle Blanc on social ROI.)

It’s like how CSS galleries do nothing to promote good user experience and are instead just about pretty visuals.

If you’re looking for a social media agency, interview them with questions and don’t allow yourself to be satisfied with buzzwords. Engagement is great, OK. What does that mean? How do you measure it?

If you’re looking for a social media agency, look for multiple case studies where the client’s metrics for success are the same as your own. [I take for granted that marketing companies obviously only publish case studies of successes.] That way you know they’re experience with achieving your goals.

Liked this post on critical thinking? Get a free chapter from my book on advanced SEO for more.

Just as Google loves data, so should SEOs. I love country code domain names and domaining (NamePros is a great community to learn, if you’re interested). As I was conducting some keyword research to buy new .ca domains, it occurred to me that I could use Google Trends (notice the nofollow on that link

) data to help me with my selection. There are also other uses for Trends data in SEO that are equally interesting.

Google Trends shows you data on which countries’ people are the biggest searchers for any particular keyword. They’ll also show you what cities are the volume users. There’s a few uses for this data. The title promises only one tip, but I’m going to share some more to see if underpromising and overdelivering really works, or if it’s just a popular idea with no juice to back it.

First, you can usually pick up a keyword domain with the ccTLD of the country that does the most searches. For example, if you’re targeting “calgary hotels,” the calgaryhotels.ca domain is likely to still be available once the .com is gone (and if you’re a typo domainer, you look for sites exclusively hosted on ccTLD domains and get the .com ).

The reason you want to get the ccTLD is because you’ll get the edge in Google.ccTLD results, which are often defaulted to in foreign countries. I’ll frequently type a search into my browser (like calgary hotels) and find that I’ve ended up at a Google.ca results page.

As an aside, this post originally recommended that you host locally; I personally don’t think that’s necessary nor a particular advantage. Just because you do business with a local company, doesn’t make you local. By that reasoning, everyone who’s hosted with Dreamhost should have a boost wherever Dreamhost is situated. But, though I’d like to be neighbours with Aaron Wall (that way I could bug him for tips in person ;D), we’re not. Yet we both use Dreamhost.

Then again, most people do business with people in their neighbourhood. This is especially true with regards to smaller hosting companies. In that respect, it makes more sense if this is used as perhaps a counterweight to when big directory type sites try and rank for lots of local terms against smaller folks.

Second, continuing on the theme of SEO uses for trends data, you can figure out what [keyword] direction to expand your site in. If you’re succeeding with selling a product to a particular country or city, then look at related products and see how much demand there is for them in the market you’ve already conquered. This can make upselling (aka add-on sales) a lot easier to current clients. The tip comes courtesy of Julinho (with a bit more detail and practical application added by yours truly).

A few people pointed out that Google Trends is also useful for seasonal data. It doesn’t take a genius to see Christmas is a great keyword in December. But are there any keywords that could get your sales volume on March 23rd up to the same level? I’d bet that gag gifts keywords go hot as April approaches (April fools) and that certain brand modifiers become more important at different times of year. Think TV channels promoting at sweeps time.

And sometimes, Google Trends is just good for a laugh at MSN. I know, I know, I’m in MSN’s corner and want them to boost their share of search, so I’d be better off keeping this one to myself. But returning Google blogsearch’s robots.txt file in the SERPs? Come on! Then again, maybe I should be laughing because Google blogsearch is so full of spam (another great source of data, as per Smaxor). I can’t do screenshots with my HP laptop (or not as easily as I used to with the desktop anyways) so here’s a copy-paste of the SERPs (the Google mail one had me thinking privacy issuesÂ – like David, whose Gmail was hacked and caused him to lose his domain! (which he’s since gotten back) – but it’s just some innocuous Google Trends data page):

40+ Metric F***Tons Of Awesome Resources

Can You Make Money Off Google Hot Trends Domaining?

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… And Based On That Projected ROI, Get Management Buy-In, Set Priorities and Spend Time Wisely.

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how-google-would-rank-for-mortgage-calculator/

Update: Welcome Sphinn, StumbleUpon users :). How can you rank for competitive keywords like “Mortgage Calculator”? I don’t know about SEOBook, since he’s always talking about it, but here’s how Google would rank for a bigshot mortgage term like that.

Sponsored Links

Mortgage Calculator — How Much Can You Afford? | CMHC

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TD Canada Trust – Products and Services – Mortgages

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