Archive for December, 2008
Why You Don’t Work For Digg…
There is a reason why the author at PeelOpen.com doesn’t work for Digg - he has no idea what he is talking about. After seeing his submission on “5 ways to fix Digg” go front page, I was hoping to see an insightful set of solutions to the issue of “Power User” effectiveness on Digg. [...]
Yes, Keyword Ranking Reports are Still Valuable
In Mike Grehan’s New Signals to Search Engines he highlights how personalization, social media, and universal search may help move search beyond text and links.
Mike also contended that ranking reports are dead. While clients should see the end effect of optimization in their analytics and sales data, ranking reports still have good value to professional SEOs. Below are a couple examples of why and how ranking reports are still important, even as Google crowds the organic search results with universal search stuff.
New Sites
Track Your Growth
When you build a new site from scratch you get to see how effective your link building strategies are as the site’s rankings improve. You have to get in the game before you compete…ranking improvements give you an idea of how your site’s trust is growing even before you rank well enough to receive much stable traffic.
This early feedback data can be used to guide further investment in link building efforts, and prioritize which websites get the most effort and investment.
Show Clients Baseline Rankings & Growth
If you sell services to clients and they have a brand new site with limited traction then a ranking report shows baseline rankings and proof of growth, even before top rankings yield lots of traffic. This helps customers have confidence in their SEO provider, even if their SEO investment loses money before making it back.
Page 2/3 Rankings
If you rank on page 2 or 3 for some high value keywords you might not see much traffic from them. But if your keyword rankings let you know that you are close to the top you can consider working on link building and altering your site structure to improve the rankings of those pages.
Services like SEMRush also help give insights into such ranking improvement opportunities.
Algorithm Changes & Penalties
How Are Search Algorithms Shifting?
Is Google putting more weight on authority sites? How much does the domain name count (if at all)? Is anchor text becoming more important or less important? How aggressive should you be with anchor text?
When major algorithm updates happen, tracking a wide array of sites and keywords can help you hypothesize what might be gaining importance and what might be losing importance.
What Happened to My Google Traffic?
Sometimes sites get filtered out of the search results due to manual penalties, automated penalties, automated filters, algorithm changes, or getting hacked. Sometimes the issues are related to particular pages, particular folders, whole sites, or keywords closely related to (or containing) another word.
Seeing a traffic drop gives you some clues that something may be wrong, but one of the easiest ways to isolate the issue and further investigate is to look at ranking reports to see what keywords and what pages were affected…then you can start thinking about if it was a glitch, something you can fix, or something you can’t.
10 Irrational Human Behaviors and How to Leverage Them to Improve Web Marketing
Posted by randfish
I couldn’t help but love Chris Yeh’s Outline of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. It’s a fascinating look into the surprisingly predictable psychology that powers human actions and reactions, and I think there are some definitive lessons we can take away from the piece and apply to web marketing. Let’s run through the list:
I: The Truth About Relativity
When Williams-Sonoma introduced bread machines, sales were slow. When they added a "deluxe" version that was 50% more expensive, they started flying off the shelves; the first bread machine now appeared to be a bargain
When contemplating the purchase of a $25 pen, the majority of subjects would drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7. When contemplating the purchase of a $455 suit, the majority of subjects would not drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7. The amount saved and time involved are the same, but people make very different choices. Watch out for relative thinking; it comes naturally to all of us.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
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Offer a premium version of your product/service and make it easy to compare
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Charging more has the added benefit of reducing the "bargain shopper" mentality
II: The Fallacy of Supply & Demand
Savador Assael, the Pearl King, single-handedly created the market for black pearls, which were unknown in the industry before 1973. His first attempt to market the pearls was an utter failure; he didn’t sell a single pearl. So he went to his friend, Harry Winston, and had Winston put them in the window of his 5th Avenue store with an outrageous price tag attached. Then he ran full page ads in glossy magazines with black pearls next to diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Soon, black pearls were considered precious.
Simonsohn and Loewenstein found that people who move to a new city remain anchored to the prices they paid in their previous city. People who move from Lubbock to Pittsburgh squeeze their families into smaller houses to pay the same amount. People who move from LA to Pittsburgh don’t save money, they just move into mansions.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
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Want to be a premium product and charge a premium price? Set yourself against "premium" competitors in premium markets. Positioning is critical to the perception of value.
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Anchoring happens - plan for it in your sales models and be prepared that old customers will be resistant to new pricing, even when the circumstances are very different.
III: The Cost of Zero Cost
In the real world, this effect was demonstrated by Amazon’s free shipping. After Super Saver shipping was introduced, Amazon saw sales increases everywhere except for France. It turned out that the French division offered 1 franc ($0.20) pricing instead of free pricing. When this was changed to free, France saw the same sales increases as elsewhere. Another real-world example: People will wait in line for absurdly long times to get something for free. Free is one of the most powerful ways to trigger behavior.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
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Offer free stuff, but make sure you get ROI from it (traffic/ad views/email addresses/etc)
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Be prepared for the fact that people will ENJOY free stuff more than normal, simply because it is free. Use this to your advantage and give away to those whose love & affection you need (reporters, bloggers, pundits, haters, etc.)
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Making people work to get something for free is a great way to trigger behaviors that might otherwise cost a fortune (think web surveys, information classification, data entry, etc.)
IV: The Cost of Social Norms
Vohs, Mead, and Goode: Participants were asked to unscramble sentences that were either neutral ("It’s cold outside") or related to money ("High-paying salary"). Then they were asked to solve a puzzle. The experimenter left the room, and the subjects were allowed to go to him for help.
- "Salary" participants waited 5.5 minutes to ask for help; "neutral" participants waited only 3 minutes
- Thinking about money made people more self-reliant and less willing to ask for help.
- On the other hand, they were less willing to help others.
- The conclusion is that thinking about money puts one in a market frame of mind. Subjects were:
- More selfish and self-reliant
- Wanted to spend more time alone
- Were more likely to select individual tasks rather than those that required teamwork
- Chose to sit farther away from others
A real-life example: The AARP asked lawyers to participate in a program where they would offer their services to needy employees for a discounted price of $30/hour. No dice. When the program manager instead asked if they’d offer their services for free, the lawyers overwhelmingly said they would participate.
Conclusion: Market norms drive out social norms.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
- Those who freely contribute to your site/business with recommendations, referrals, content (think blog comments or UGC articles), etc. might not be willing to do so if paid. Think twice before paying for what you might be able to get for free.
- The mindset of volunteers vs. employees is very different - consider which behavior set you want before deciding on the type of labor to attract.
V: The Influence of Arousal
Ariely and Loewenstein conducted an experiment on Berkeley undergrads (Ariely tried to do this at MIT, but couldn’t get the necessary permissions). They asked them a series of questions. Then they had the undergraduates stimulate themselves to a state of sexual arousal, and asked them to answer the same set of questions. The results show that people simply don’t realize how different their decision-making is during a state of arousal.
Implications - Someone may promise to just say no, but that promise is less likely to hold up during a state of arousal.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing
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There’s a reason why AdultFriendFinder made an IPO last week, despite terrible economic conditions
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Arouse your audience and their behavior changes drastically (note: this is probably not universally applicable)
VI: The Problem of Procrastination and Self Control
Ariely conducted an experiment on his class. Students were required to write three papers. Ariely asked the first group to commit to dates by which they would turn in each paper. Late papers would be penalized 1% per day. There was no penalty for turning papers in early. The logical response is to commit to turning all three papers in on the last day of class. The second group was given no deadlines; all three papers were due in the last day of class. The third group was directed to turn their papers in on the 4th, 8th, and 12th weeks.
The results? Group 3 (imposed deadlines) got the best grades. Group 2 (no deadlines) got the worst grades, and Group 1 (self-selected deadlines) finished in the middle. Allowing students to pre-commit to deadlines improved performance. Students who spaced out their commitments did well; students who did the logical thing and gave no commitments did badly.
"These results suggest that although almost everyone has problems with procrastination, those who recognize and admit their weakness are in a better position to utilize available tools for precommitment and by doing so, help themselves overcome it."
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
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Procrastination is an extremely common human behavior - plan for it in your business and take advantage of it where it can help (trial offers that turn into paid services, for example).
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By setting up early controls and making people recognize this weakness, we can reduce its negative impact. You can apply this to contractors, employees, vendors, etc.
VII: The High Price of Ownership
The "endowment effect" means that when we own something, we begin to value it more than other people do.
Ariely and Carmon conducted an experiment on Duke students, who sleep out for weeks to get basketball tickets; even those who sleep out are still subjected to a lottery at the end. Some students get tickets, some don’t. The students who didn’t get tickets told Ariely that they’d be willing to pay up to $170 for tickets. The students who did get the tickets told Ariely that they wouldn’t accept less than $2,400 for their tickets.
There are three fundamental quirks of human nature. We fall in love with what we already have. We focus on what we might lose, rather than what we might gain. We assume that other people will see the transaction from the same perspective as we do.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
- In contrast to the recommendations for offering something for free, be aware that users who get your product/service for "free" will place less value on it than those who’ve worked for it or bought it themselves.
- It’s easier to get more money from your existing customers than it is to attract new ones (this marketing wisdom has been around forever, but applies particularly well given this psychology).
VIII: Keeping Doors Open
In 210 BC, Xiang Yu led an army against the Ch’in Dynasty. While his troops slept, he burned his ships and smashed all the cooking pots. He explained to his troops that they had to either fight their way to victory or die. His troops won 9 consecutive battles. Eliminating options improved the focus of his troops.
We feel compelled to preserve options, even at great expense, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
- Narrow your customers’ choices and they’ll be more likely to commit.
- Narrow navigation options to the most important/desired behaviors - it may seem counter-intuitive, but if you want users to click, reducing pathways may actually increase interaction (page views, sales, etc).
IX: The Effect of Expectations
Ariely, Lee, and Frederick conducted yet another experiment on MIT students. They let students taste two different beers, and then choose to get a free pint of one of the brews. Brew A was Budweiser. Brew B was Budweiser, plus 2 drops of balsamic vinegar per ounce.
When students were not told about the nature of the beers, they overwhelmingly chose the balsamic beer. When students were told about the true nature of the beers, they overwhelmingly chose the Budweiser. If you tell people up front that something might be distasteful, the odds are good they’ll end up agreeing with you–because of their expectations.
Not only do we react differently based on stereotypes of others, we react differently based on stereotypes about ourselves. Shin, Pittinsky, and Ambady conducted an experiment on Asian-American women. A first group was asked questions related to their gender, then given a math test. A second group was asked questions related to their race, then given a math test.
The second group did better on the math test than the first. "Blind" presentation of the facts (presenting the facts, but not revealing which party took which actions) might help people better recognize the truth.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
- Take advantage of expectations - if you’re selling a product or service and can enhance the perception of value/enjoyment, your market is likely to follow along and actually get more value/enjoyment.
- Branding is a powerfully ally in value creation - position your brand so that users expect great things, and they’ll get them.
X: The Power of Price
Ariely, Waber, Shiv, and Carmon made up a fake painkiller, Veladone-Rx. An attractive woman in a business suit (with a faint Russian accent) told subjects that 92% of patients receiving VR reported significant pain relief in 10 minutes, with relief lasting up to 8 hours.
When told that the drug cost $2.50 per dose, nearly all of the subjects reported pain relief. When told that the drug cost $0.10 per dose, only half of the subjects reported pain relief. The more pain a person experienced, the more pronounced the effect. A similar study at U Iowa showed that students who paid list price for cold medications reported better medical outcomes than those who bought discount (but clinically identical) drugs.
Lessons to Apply to Web Marketing:
- Higher pricing means higher expectations, but also more fulfillment, even if the product isn’t actually more fulfilling! Raise your consulting prices, people.
- The Placebo effect is strong - don’t abuse it, but leverage this knowledge to be smart about your own purchases and investments and as a potentially valuable tool to use in comparisons with competitive products/services/companies.
Your turn - go read the full piece and see if there are any terrific snippets of advice/knowledge that you’d apply to marketing online. I’ve only covered the surface level, so I suspect there’s a great deal more value to be gleaned.
p.s. Posting will remain light through January 5th, but YOUmoz is more active - and at its highest readership levels yet!
Download Alexa Top 1,000,000 Websites for Free
Quantcast was the first web traffic analytics company that allowed users to download their top 1,000,000 websites. Recently Alexa followed suit, giving away a daily updated index of their top 1,000,000 websites.
Such lists should be taken with a grain of salt, but at free one can’t complain about the price. As time passes free and good enough is going to force those selling tools and information to offer something that has a sustainable advantage over free.
At the same time…
- the sea of information will become increasingly hard to navigate, increasing the value of filters (particularly those built around a shared perspective or bias)
- hyped up salesmen will be able to build many business models out of selling such recycled information to the uninitiated, forcing others who sell information to add even more differentiators between themselves and the competition
Thanks to Jamey for the Alexa tip. 
Why We Are Lucky to be SEOs
The US (and global) economies are in sharp decline after a period of growth that was largely fueled by speculative (and fraudulent) loans that increased money supply way too quickly. While carnage is wide reaching offline, it is simply a phenomena that has not really touched our publishing business.
The Illusion of Safety
There is an illusion that if something is physical that it has a sense of permanence to it, but this year the US government has had to bail out banks, automakers, insurance companies, and credit cards. Residential real estate has dropped hard and commercial real estate is also in the hurt locker (if retail is off 10% in some areas then many businesses operating on a 5% margin will go bankrupt - leading to vacancies and lower prices).
Much of the residential real estate decline is simply due to excessive capacity and various flavors of mortgage fraud (appraisal fraud, loan application fraud, principal-agent problems, malfeasant regulation, etc.), but the commercial real estate slowdown is due to the residential slowdown, global economic slowdown, and the existence of better and cheaper alternatives - namely online retail.
Investing in Growth
The Tribune Company recently filed for bankruptcy and the New York Times is reporting dropping ad revenues. Amongst the carnage Amazon.com reported record numbers. In a lot of ways some of the offline decay is just a shift toward more efficient online business models.
Fred Wilson highlighted how many publishing, finance, and retail business models are all being destroyed by the web
I had breakfast last week with a person who has been in retailing for more than 30 years and has been operating at the highest levels of the industry. He said that he expects every category to be winnowed down to one dominant retailer with all the others going by the wayside. This too has the internet as an underlying cause. comScore says that online holiday shopping this year has been flat with the year before and I’ve seen reports that offline retail is down 6-10pcnt. The fact is that consumers have finally come to the realization that shopping online is easier, cheaper, and often a better experience. Physical retail will survive, but it will be a smaller industry in the next decade and those that do survive will need to give consumers a very strong rationale to get in the car and come to their store.
The information age is killing many traditional arbitrage based business models (or thicker business models that are heavily reliant on local monopolies as a big part of their business). Companies that thrived when there was no competition are simply folding like Origami.
Search is the Primary Growth Engine of the Web
Most future economic growth will occur online or have online touch points. The market for something to believe in is infinite.
Not only is the web growing during the downturn, but much of the online growth is driven by marketing and search. SEO exist as the intersection of those two points, and SEOs that approach the topic from a holistic marketing standpoint have a significant advantage at building distribution and growing capital. Give me an average passionate player, add SEO, and I can help them rank #1 in most markets.
When you back out inflation and opportunity cost, professional investors are lucky to gain 5% a year. With smart market research and effective SEO implementation many businesses can outpace that by a factor of over 400! Being in SEO today would be like being in coal, oil, or railroads in years past…you help connect supply and demand.
Trimming Profit Margins
Outperforming the market by hundreds or thousands of percent presents an opportunity that will draw lots of competition - and one that will not last long if not evolved. Scraping raw data is getting easier. Why should people chose to work with you (and vote for you)?
If you get a #1 ranking which provides amazing profit margins it is best to look for ways to thicken out the site even if those strategies lower short-term profit margins. Search algorithms will change, and the thicker and more interactive your site is the more sustainable your rankings will be.
Thickening up may require giving away tools and software, public relations strategies, becoming the media, providing a platform for others to use, compiling data in a useful format and/or creating the community water cooler.
Additional expenses can be offset by refining conversion process to increase visitor value and lifetime customer value, and lower forward marketing costs as you leverage the additional earned exposure.
Another thing to consider is the use of advertising to build other quality signals. Awareness leads to conversion. And if you can get advertising to pay for itself and gain other signals of quality as a side effect of user interaction with your site then you will end out ahead in the long run. I love recycling dollars because it costs nothing, builds free credit card points, and builds up a website’s online footprint in a Google friendly way.
Making Online Businesses More Sustainable than Offline Businesses
If you are an online marketer and publisher then you become a market researcher, learn how to track trends, test what works, and change with the market.
If much of your online revenues revolve around a thin SEO centric approach then it helps to create at least 1 or 2 aggressively branded sites that hedge against the risks algorithm shifts present. The net effect of building a brand is that you are not overly-reliant on any search engine or any physical market. If people talk about you and recommend you then you win. This site has members from dozens of countries all over the world, so even if the US Dollar collapsed we would still have a diverse income stream.
Helping Others
Once you are doing really well you can give back in a variety of ways - donate money to charities, donate services to charities, and/or give income-producing websites to family members. You can give away featured content and tools that help others knowing that in the end it will also come back to help build your business. You can also pour thousands of dollars into building non-profit sites that may also be able to pay you back in exposure, credibility, and link equity.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year From 97th Floor
Chris and I just want to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. We look forward to an amazing year in 2009, and hope we can keep bringing you up to date and informative articles, case studies and ideas in the SEO industry. Again - here’s hoping [...]
The Expired Domain Auctions Arbitrage Loophole
Godaddy and Dynadot (there may be others) run a very peculiar expired domain auctions service, which must not, in any case, be weigh against professional drop catchers like Pool or Snap.
Despite the “expired” label, they auction the domains before they actually expire. Domains get listed, domainers bid up their offers, best bid wins, receives a [...]
The Return of Garbitrage (Click Arbitrage SEM)
Recently one of our AdSense sites had a lot of poor ads on it that we filtered out, but it is hard to keep up with all the new ones. Some of them are so bad that you know they are junk just by looking at the URL.
Danny recently highlighted how Ask.com is becoming a big arbitrage play, but I am seeing lots of arbitrage ads from smaller advertisers as well…ones that would have been filtered out of Google a year or two ago (unbranded sites, cheesy universal subdomains, subdomains of subdomains, .info thin content sites, sites which act as a portal that link to domain lander pages that use a 0 for the o in the domain name, Overture feed sites, adsense sites with robotic content, etc etc etc) are now showing up for many Google searches. Google has begun running their own arbitrage ads for things like credit cards and car insurance. Some people have even noticed graphical ads selling people and sites distributing spyware.
To appreciate how bad this is here are a couple examples…
- On one major keyword I saw all but one ad being from an unbranded thin arbitrage site.
- On one search I clicked from Google into an arbitrage site that lists links to niche domains with domain holder pages. On those domains there were Overture advertiser links. I clicked one of those and ended up on a site that was a thin crappy AdSense arbitrage site. That AdSense ad I clicked on landed me on another domain lander page powered by Overture. That domain lander page had ads on it for the domain name I just came from…and then I fully appreciated the absurdity of it all!
I could make a video showing examples, but did not want to out people. I just find it lame that Google polices organic results so aggressively and then let their ad network devolve this far this fast. They were pretty strong 6 months ago.
I suspect that Google is trying to goose revenues for this quarter (or is trying to use the downturn to be aggressive with experimentation). I can’t think of any other reasons why they would have done such a major retracement on their quality score algorithm and click arbitrage front. Essentially they are paying people to generate garbage AND eat up a lot of their revenue while providing zero value in the transactions.
Have you been seeing a sharp rise in garbitrage?
Recent Links
While at Pubcon I did an interview with Ralph Wilson about link building. I have got wayyyyy too chubby, but I think the video turned out ok outside of that. And there is even a guest appearance of Abraham Lincoln in the video!!!
Invesp referenced me on a top marketers list. Classic ego-bait that worked great. I got so many Twitter followers this past week that I thought someone released a Twitter spam software program or something…and then I remembered the top 100 marketers list and knew it went well. 
It was popular enough that even follow-up post about it got lots of exposure. If you don’t understand egobait, then this is a great resource to study and emulate. People love awards and anything that strokes their ego or gives them a sense of purpose or sense of community and belonging.
Simplicity as a marketing strategy…it works! I am trying to create a few new features on this site (and off it) that should support simplicity and make SEO more accessible to the average webmaster.
Debra Mastaler offers a funny post about link building with elephants and link building tips for 2009.
The RIAA is now trying to go after ISP level filtering rather than suing their customers.
According to comScore, Youtube represents 25% of Google’s US search volume. They may be losing money, but renegotiation with partners on payouts and improved ad technologies will eventually turn Youtube into a huge revenue stream. Youtube holds a lot of contests and could easily turn revenues up if they can figure out a way to make Youtube ads more social and interactive. Google has always been great at public relations…if they advance their ad network to offer such services they could make their unprofitable media highly profitable.
Digg is burning through cash, but may be working to create a social ad unit:
One experiment Digg is working on, says one source close to the company, is a self service advertising product that will be somewhat similar to Google Adwords, but with a twist. The product would insert advertisements into the Digg news stream (presumably clearly marked). Where those ads end up, and how much an advertiser pays per click, would be based on user feedback.
So users would have the ability to vote on advertisements in the same way they vote on stories. The better ads, as determined by Digg users, will get more prominent placement and a lower cost-per-click.
That takes public relations and social media to the next level…allowing Digg to make revenue from their attention stream, and allowing advertisers to promote content that is well aligned with user interest…rather than having advertisers set up fake accounts to do guerilla marketing.
The WSJ shared social media marketing tips and Michael Gray shared examples of how social media links turn into rankings.
While the web might have some issues here and there, online commerce is still growing like a weed, with coupon sites and Amazon.com seeing sharp year on year rises in traffic.
Alan Rimm-Kaufman explains click volume vs profitability “to generate more total profit dollars by moving higher on the page, clicks have to rise faster than per-click profit falls.” He also shared this 2004 Atlas image on Google click potential by rank:
Frank Watson highlights a start up gone bankrupt due to a botched deal with Google, and presumes that the Google/Yahoo! search deal was simply to stop Microsoft’s advances in the search space. Most market makers actively manipulate the markets they manage…doing so is too profitable to ignore.
Are You Advertising on Your Most Profitable Search Results Yet?
What is Visible?
One of the biggest problems with this site from a business model perspective is how much free content (including tools) that we give away…as the site was started out of passion with intent to help people, rather than to maximize short term revenues. That lead to me helping people for free way more than I should have, and not earning as much as I could have from paying customers (because I spent too much time helping people who had no intent of becoming customers). Shifting the business model to charging a recurring fee fixed part of that problem…using economics to add a layer to filter out real customers from freeloaders.
Another large problem is that I have asked forum members not to mention specific forum threads without getting permission from other members who contributed this to the thread. People love the forums and leave unsolicited testimonials virtually every day, but rarely do people write publicly about the forums due that restriction.
Khalid Saleh recently highlighted the forums publicly when he referenced me as a top online marketer:
Many top SEO professionals no longer spend time on forums. That is not the case with the SEO book community forum. The caliber and quantity of top seo experts who are ready to answer any question sets the forum apart. Let alone the personal effort Aaron invests ensuring that no question goes unanswered.
But such public mentions are rare due to the above restriction.
The combination of limited public discussion of the paid content with so much discussion of the freebies creates a website that is easy to mention to attract pageviews, but does not convert anywhere near as well as it should because the conversion process is nowhere near as refined as it could be.
This site gets a ton of traffic…but we have enough to where it makes sense to put more effort into sales.
Building the Perception of Value
It is hard for people to accurately value information they do not have access to…which is why many hyped up marketers have systems built around duping newbies with fake testimonials, affiliate schemes, and “launches” promoted through email list spamming. (Everyone is talking about it, so it MUST be good!)
I hate asking people for money, but if I simply do not then this site will only perform at a fraction of its full potential. My wife is a much more aggressive sales person than I am (she did high tech marketing in the past and was responsible for landing a huge deal that ended up getting her company acquired by their biggest competitor for big money). She is always pushing me to be more aggressive. I have been naively reluctant on some fronts, but am slowly coming around bit by bit.
Value systems are built through marketing and publicity. This site makes way more than what it needs to for me to consider it successful, but there is a lot of money left on the table. I bet the upside potential from conversion improvements is at least 200%…maybe way more.
How Much Are Your Internal Search Results Worth?
If a site has conversion issues, the easiest way to fix them is to break down the conversion process into steps and processes. I thought I would take a step in that direction by advertising our community forums and training program on our internal search results.
Generally there is no better place to advertise than on your own site.
Each day hundreds of people use our public facing site search, and they have done over 100,000 searches in the past year or so. My average cost per click on Google’s search results is over $1 per click, and yet I have never advertised on my own search results. Think about that number…over 100,000 times people have found the brand then done a specific search on this site with 0 of them seeing an advertisement. As a marketer that is an embarrassing failure.
Advertising on Your Internal Site Search Results
Here is what I did to fix the above issue…
- Signed up for the Google custom search engine to allow us to include their technology into the site. Labeled and feature content from key portions of the site to promote them within those search results.
- Created a custom CSS file for the search page, which allowed me to make the search results skinnier and the related advertising column wider (when compared to other pages on the site).
- Included mini-logos, search boxes, and testimonials from the training section and user forums on the search page.
- Used a PHP page such that I could pull the search variable from the URL string and add the query in the page content (in various places - including headings and search boxes).
Here is how to pull a variable from the URL string
<?php
$val = $_GET['q'];
echo “$val”;
?>
Example Search Result
See how I added the advertisements on this search for page titles.
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Was the above worth the effort? I am not certain yet, but I have to imagine so. If it helps convert 1 person a day that is worth over $100,000 a year for the one hour of effort it took to implement. There are aesthetic improvements that can still be made, but at least now that page has potential to build revenue rather than just being a sunk cost.