Latest SEM techniques, Web analytics, PPC and SEO
Jun 25th, 2009 by admin
Internet is swarming with all kinds of web directories that promise to provide website owners with useful paid links. Matt Cutts from Google explains the guidelines of the world leading search engine towards defining which paid links can do a good job for you and which are just poison.
Jan 13th, 2009 by admin
A couple of months ago Google announced its new AdWords feature called Automatic Matching. It is still in beta format but many advertisers and SEO consultants already received the message from our dominant search engine company about this “exicting feature”. In fact, Google claims that Automatic Matching is purely optional and it “helps your ads reach targeted traffic missed by your keyword”. It will show ads for keywords that are not already in an advertiser’s keyword list by using its algorithm. For example, if your daily budget is 300 and your keywords brought you $200 traffic, Automatic Matching may bring you another $100 of traffic draining your daily budget.
I am amazed at the audacity of this step. First of all, Automatic Matching will only use broad match. This means that the keywords Google adds may not be as relevant as it claims them to be. As a result, multiple imprecisely matched keywords can cause your campaign a lot of harm. Including low click thru rates and more expensive cost per click.Second, it means that your daily budget will be reached more often than you even want to, thus increasing your ad spendings.
Currently, Automatic Matching feature is already active for certain accounts with billing addresses in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, Italy, Germany and Spain. There is a possibility to opt out from this feature by going to the Campaign Settings and manually unchecking the box.
Overall, I think any business that has a PPC administrator or in-house SEO consultants on board and/or other personnel which is actively involved in PPC campaign management should opt out immediately. However, I am open to possibility that this feature may be advantegous to small businesses with limited number of keywords, ads and campaigns.
Dec 6th, 2008 by admin
Part of our marketing efforts in our web analytics company is concentrated on generating interest about our clients websites on social media networks. Viral marketing through social media can be extremely time-consuming and draining, especially if client offers products and services that are not really ideal for generating the buzz. However, the masses of SMN online visitors help increase web traffic and search engine rankings which are crucial for our customers.
As you may well know, social media represent a wide variety of not marketing but personal communication tools. All these online networks appeared for the needs of social communications not for advancing the agenda of the marketing companies. However, some of our clients try to get from us some kind of traditional “measurements” that will allow them to calculate retun on investments in this case.
Naturally, it is completely natural to understand the result from campaigns conducted through natural marketing channels. It is relatively easy to put numeric quantities, report the results, count conversions e.t.c. Unfortunately, it is not possible to create viable metrics on conversations and other human interactions, which is what the social media is about.
Social media was not invented for marketers, millions of Internet visitors use it to communicate and interact, exchange opinions. Internet marketing companies hope to stream some of those visitors to the clients websites, in other words to take advantage of the existing online SMN subscribers.
I would say that the better criteria for measurements from viral marketing will be the number of positive interactions of clients websites with the masses, web traffic increase, and, possibly, the number of positive exchanges between the websites in question and Internet visitors coming from SMN.
Nov 9th, 2008 by admin
Before the advent of Quality Score, the situation with Google advertising was as bad as it could be. Rich corporations and businessmen with big pockets slowly but surely were taking over the sponsored results. They set up huge Internet advertising budgets and were pushing small business with limited resources out of the game. In the early 2007 this situation had changed when Google announced the policy of Quality Score. This meant that most relevant Pay per click campaigns would rank highest in listings sponsored by Google.
Quality Score policy did tremendously improve the relevance of the sponsored ads. If any company wanted to build a successful PPC campaign it had to hire an experienced SEO contractor who would be capable of tuning up landing pages and working on keyword performance. He would also have to provide solid PPC campaign management, according to the new Internet trends.
Surprisingly, even now, when the year 2009 is swiftly approaching, many businesses still don’t follow Google guidelines and Quality Score policy. They think that by not hiring an SEO professional they save money. But quite the opposite happens. They keep bidding on keywords that are nowhere to be found on landing pages. In turn, Google, in absence of other words, fines them by raising sky high the minimum of CPC. The minimum can keep on on going up to the extent, that makes any profitability impossible.
Personally, I like Google approach with Quality Score. It moved organic results and ppc sponsored results closer to each other. If you are a web analyst or an SEO consultant, you know that there will be no organic results if you try to sell shoes on the web page that has content about oranges.
Oct 30th, 2008 by admin
In the early days of WWW any give web page did not contain a lot of objects. Today we have gigantic objects overhead in web pages that leads to the delays that are happening on many web sites. Many websites owners don’t realize the cause of the delay. Our web analytics company has to do a lot of explaining because many don’t want to sacrifice their favorite objects even if it means that this step will have a drastically positive effect and faster response time of the landing pages.
In its turn, faster response time of landing page increases profits, as recent SEO researches show. One of our web analysts told me about another research. It turns out that when the home page of a Google Maps was downsized to 70-80 KB, its traffic went up 10% in the first week and an additional 25% in the following three weeks. Another research completed for a giant online store revealed that every 100 ms increase in load time of a landing page decreased sales by 1%, which is a lot if the company in questions makes billions of dollars from its website.
If the landing page is optimized properly and is attractive enough for the visitors, its speed becomes the decisive factor. There are multiple solutions that will allow to increase response time. The obvious ones are; image and multimedia optimization. Other measures may include conversion of JavaScript behavior to CSS and the HTML table layout to CSS layout.
If a small business owner wants to get the viable results from his landing pages, he needs to do the utmost to minimize the initial display time and HTTP requests. Honestly as a web analyst and SEO professional I am still surprised when a lot of website owners show lack of interest towards conversion rate optimization (CRO) and landing page optimization, even if this costs them a lot of money.
Oct 11th, 2008 by admin
Conversion rates optimization is an art. I can name right out lots of SEO contractors and companies, recall many professional web analysts and PPC administrators. Yet, I can count on my fingers the number of true CRO experts. Many companies will approach website owners with a promise to improve the conversion rates of their landing pages, but can they really deliver?
There are all kinds of secondary solutions that may help to improve conversion rates optimization. By combining advanced SEO and proactive PPC campaigns, it is possible to make the website more visible and direct more quality traffic to landing pages. Unfortunately, this is not good enough. The wave of visitors that an SEO or web analytics company deliver to the landing pages very often crashes and dissipates leaving just a trickle of those who has taken the desired type of action.
There are not really many truly successful landing pages, where the results beat all expectations. Unless, the website is a leader of some niche market, or offer a product that everybody wants, one needs to do a lot of song and dance to persuade website visitors act the way you want on your landing pages.
There are several approaches to conversion optimization and various schools of thought that preach that certain steps need to be taken before even the construction of a landing page. In this short entry I am not going to go deep into analysis of each CRO strategy. After all, a pile of books has been created on this subject. I just want to add after all that’s said and done, the best CRO experts are also guided by their gut feelings. One can conduct the best keyword research, make landing pages look as credible as they can be, write a brilliant copy, waste a lot of money on pay per click campaigns and the like, and still get pretty pathetic conversion results.
CRO experts don’t stop with all these, they “read” the visitors, understand their behavioral tendencies and psychological motivational factors. They are like Internet psychics, in the good meaning of this expression. I observed the results when CRO guys would achieve multiple goals at once. They would raise the conversion optimization to unbelievable heights while at the same time tremendously lowering down costs of the bids and getting magnificent points in Google Quality Scores as well.
I believe that conversion analytics companies are gonna, eventually, gain more significant role in the Internet growth. Sooner or later CRO experts are destined to achieve some kind of celebrity status and will be hunted by paparazzi the same way as Hollywood or baseball stars. Right now, they keep pretty quiet and operate mostly behind the curtains.
Sep 17th, 2008 by admin
A couple of days ago I caught up online a heated discussion among young and not so young SEO experts. The main idea of this online conversation was that search engine rankings don’t matter anymore and there is no use to check the success of the keywords and their movement on our three leading search engines. I guess, this discussion started because Google started blocking some of ranking verification tools of these freelance SEO people. As for me, I am not going to stop verifying search engine rankings for keywords anytime soon. And my web analytics company will support me in this decision. No matter what Google does, I find these guys statements bizarre for many reasons.
First of all, personally I can vouch that main general keywords are important. Any simple web analysis will confirm this. Each of the main keywords that achieved #1 position in leading search engines brings several thousands of very useful clicks and increases web traffic. In my previous blog entries I also stated that if you have#1 organic position for a main keyword and #1 position in sponsored links, this creates an unbeatable combination comparable to the powerful double punch during in the boxing ring.
Another reason why importance of achieving high search engine rankings can not be underestimated is our clients. They pay us to see the results that will increase commercial value of their websites. I do understand that PageRank significance is slowly declining, but our clients value them nevertheless. I also do understand that not all keywords were created equal, but the major ones have an impact on a status and position of the client in his industry.
My conclusion is that SEO contractors should not be selfish and patronizing. They should not present one side of the story to the client while snubbing him and giggling behind his back. In fact, that kind of attitude already pushed away a lot of valuable clients who felt confused and stupefied by people who claim to be on top of SEO mountain, but in reality are just re-sellers of links. This is why our web analysts are trying to stay away from such a “mainstream”.
Sep 1st, 2008 by admin
When you start a new SEO job, it is always great to keep in mind the main factors that would bring an SEO consultant high search engine rankings in Google. It is a top search engine and any web analyst will tell you that if Google recognizes your work, the other two leading search engines will follow. Any attempts to improve search engine rankings in Google should adhere to unwritten Internet marketing strategy that it follows.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to calculate all the reasons why Google improves keywords rankings. Many search engine optimization specialists and web analysts tried to figure that out but failed. Overall, an SEO professional needs to know `a couple of hundred hints that may help understand what really impacts your PageRank.
I am not going to bore you down with all these SEO tips - I will just name a dozen of those that you must know. Besides, a couple of weeks ago I already brought up to your attention “no-no’s” that not only won’t increase search engine traffic to your site but may ruin it completely.
I would start first with web usability of the site that brings satisfied visitors. Nothing is really more important than true popularity of your website. Next factor is the age of the site: the older it is - the better chance it stands to get a great PageRank. If your domain name contains the main keyword you are fighting for, then kudos for you because you already are well ahead of the competitors. If you don’t have it in the domain name, then don’t forget to put your main keyword in the title tag.
Anchor text of the hyperlinks to your website is important as long as they are relevant to the content of the landing pages. Internal link structure of your website is vital as well, so if you feel that there are too many links on the page, don’t forget to add “norel” attribute to some of them that threaten to dilute the importance of significant internal links.
Link popularity of your site as well as the closest matching of links to the keywords on the landing pages counts too. All those keywords in headlines, sub headlines play a big role, as long as you don’ stuff too many of them on the page.
You are going to be on the road to success if you start following just these guidelines in your SEO services for website owners. I observed a lot of sites being practically reborn after my web analytics company implemented these measures without even getting to the next state - advanced SEO, viral marketing and expanded web site marketing strategy.
So before switching to big guns, measure thoroughly the level of your strategy implementation through website analytics and get oriented by the results.
Aug 26th, 2008 by admin
It is always a very positive and exciting event when an SEO expert or a Web analyst gets hired by a website owner. Yet, very often an SEO specialist finds to his surprise that the major difficulty he is facing is not about ways to increase web traffic or improve search engine rankings for a client but to overcome resistance of IT people.
It is surprising and sometimes simply hilarious to observe that some IT people just go overboard trying to look as watchdogs of the source code and use any opportunity to say “no” to the requests of a search engine professional. Others conveniently “forget” or simply ignore begging of a search engine marketing company to update the code or content.
I often hear that the reason for this irrational behavior takes place because IT people are already overwhelmed by their work and view any additional requests as unnecessary burden. However, Web analysts and search engine optimization specialists in our web analytics company are always under an immense pressure to deliver SEO results within strict deadlines. Besides, most of us came from IT industry as well and worked for many years as systems analysts, old-school webmasters, sysadmins, programmers and developers. But I never noticed such behavior in any of our teams. And it would not be tolerated by us anyway.
Recently I read several books related to the problems that I described above. Each of the authors is an SEO guru, who dedicates a couple of chapters to his own understanding of the delicate approach to IT people. I would like to return back to this topic later and explain in details each approach. It would be interesting to have some feedback as an aftermath of this subject.
Aug 20th, 2008 by admin
I was talking to a website owner who just switched to our web analytics company from some SEO specialists in Boca Raton. I would not say that the guy was completely unhappy with their work, although he did not achieve planned SEO goals with these SEO contractors. I had to ask him why and in response he showed me a printed report peppered with keywords. “Those guys got me to Top 10 in Google and Yahoo with all these keywords” he said.
I had to study this report created by those Floridian SEO professionals. And I can tell you one thing: 95% of those Top 10 keywords were good for nothing long tail keywords and had practically no competition because, obviously, nobody was going after them. Website owner could not possibly foresee this outcome: he does not conduct SEO keyword research and he obviously bought it because he thought that some keywords looked, … well, “important”.
This event shows me that we still have to deal with a lot of issues and unanswered questions. Who defines the significance of keywords? How to explain properly what are the right choices for the web pages and website optimization in the whole?
The answers to these questions are important for the beginning SEO professionals who are just starting in this business. They usually don’t have money for professional SEO tools, that can be very expensive.
One of my SEO tips for this case is the following. If you can’t trust free SEO tools, you should at least visit Google Traffic Estimator and try to paste the keywords in the text area. If you see that the usage of the keywords brings a lot of clicks and the keyword itself does not cost cheap, check the SEO competition in Google and Yahoo.
If you are oriented on Google, check first how many pages contain the keyword. Next, use allinanchor command to verify how many pages compete for the keyword. Sometimes, you could be astonished by the difference.
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Web Analytics - Terra Incognita
Latest SEM techniques, Web analytics, PPC and SEO
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