Archive for May, 2009

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An Unfortunate Series of Server Events

Posted by randfish
May 31, 2009

Posted by randfish

It’s late night Sunday and rather than bringing you exciting news from the world of search and SEO, I’ve got some explaining to do. For those who hadn’t noticed, SEOmoz has some serious downtime and errors this weekend. Starting early morning Saturday and running through to Sunday, many parts of the site were inaccessible due to either A) an exceptionally unlucky set of simultaneous hardware/software failures on our host and backup servers, or B) the act of a vengeful Norse god (Odin, we’re looking in your direction).

In any case, this catastrophe was exacerbated due to our recent hosting move - whenever you’re shifting host locations, there’s a certain amount of finger crossing to be done, particularly with relation to data backups. Jeff & Mel did a great job here, but this unlucky strike had a few casualties which couldn’t be recovered.

For PRO members, we’re doing our best to make up this weekend’s events to you with greater access to those tools hit hardest. We’ll also work tirelessly this week (despite the SMX Advanced conference in Seattle) both to prevent future mishaps like this and to provide a high level of support for anything you need.

To our readers, visitors and regulars - I offer my personal apology. I know that you like to read and use SEOmoz on the weekends, and I’m sure this interfered with your regular course of business. We’ve got a great team of developers here at SEOmoz, and I’m incredibly proud of their performance under fire over the last 48 hours. Rest assured that all of us will put our shoulders to the wheel to make data integrity and uptime priorities over the weeks and months to come.

Thanks for your patience and understanding,
Rand Fishkin, CEO

p.s. Our thanks also to ex-mozzer Jane Copland, whose quick eye and catlike reflexes over IM brought the site issues to the attention of our dev team very early on and probably saved us additional heartache.

p.p.s. A few other areas are affected - Labs, Q+A Search & our RSS feed. We’re working to get these back online today as well. If you find anything else, please post in the comments; we appreciate all the help!

UPDATE 2: We’re going to go down for a couple hours around 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern today in order to secure our data in additional locations. We hope to be back up by 3-4pm Pacific this afternoon. You can follow the SEOmoz Twitter account for the latest on this front.

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7 Reasons Why You Might Not Be Making Money As An SEO

Posted by JoelJonathan
May 29, 2009

Posted by JoelJonathan

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony because I just don’t even know where to start with this one. Let’s just go for broke and see what happens:

  1. You Can’t Manage People – Even if you think you can “out-SEO” Rand, Aaron Wall, and Wikipedia to boot while riding a scooter down a hill with one brain tied behind your back as you make fun of Matt Cutts’ momma to his face, then guess what? You still need some skill managing people if you ever want to scale your income up dramatically. After all, even multi-millionaire, 1 hour a day worker Markus Friend pays people to do all of the tedious tasks that he needs done for his mega popular and mega profitable dating website.
  2. You Aren’t Organized – You can only let your list of link partners’ contact info that you should have kept up to date go stale for so long or forget to pay your copywriter for so long or spend too much time trying to find the password for your client’s site for so long, etc. etc. before you begin to see a serious increase in stress and a serious decrease in your productivity and ultimately your money making potential.
  3. You Spend All Day on Forums/Blogs – If the majority of your time is spent reading about SEO instead of doing SEO, then your income will never be what it could be. Of course, I am not saying that reading and learning about SEO is not important, and in fact it is extremely important to always be learning, but you and I both know that it can be easy to justify what is really just mindless browsing as “SEO training”.
  4. You Have No Process – The value of your time decreases if you have to keep repeating and trying to remember steps that you should already have documented. Call it an SEO cheat sheet, call it a list of steps for researching a new niche, call it whatever you want to call it, but write it down and document what your plan of action is so you don’t waste valuable time thinking about what to do instead of thinking about how to best do what you need to do.
  5. You Don’t Take Risks – Whether this means striking out on your own to start your own firm to do SEO work for clients ($ potential if you are good but also some risk) or whether it means getting serious about spending some time and money to do in house SEO for your own website(s) ($$$ potential if you are really good but of course some risk as well), you have to take some risks in order to really maximize your SEO earning potential.
  6. You Are a Cheap Son of a Gun – If you don’t believe in yourself enough to invest in tools that will make you a better SEO, then good luck because that is all you have – luck. Think of yourself and your SEO education as an investment. Pretend you are putting yourself through “SEO School” and spend some money all the while realizing that this investment in yourself will pay off in with a higher future earning potential.
  7. You Treat SEO as a Hobby – I’m going to tell you something that you may not enjoy reading… SEO is work. There, I said it and now I feel better. SEO has fantastic opportunities to make a great deal of money if you are smart, willing to learn, and you work hard. However, the same principles for offline business success hold true online in the SEO realm as well. There is no magic elixir that shoots through your cable modem into your PC and right through your mouse into your fingers that makes any halfhearted lazy SEO effort you might muster up instantly fill up your bank account. Work smarter AND harder and SEO can make you a lot of money. Treat SEO as a hobby at your own risk if your goal is to make money and not just have fun.

I run a domain name tools website and I see a lot of awesome risk takers that work long hours and research domain names until they are blue in the face, and then they pounce on great domain names that will likely make them quite a nice sum of money in the future. On the other hand, there are some who maybe don’t put in the necessary research and just snap up what-ever.info piece of junk domain name they come across that strikes their fancy, hoping that their domain name “lottery ticket” will pay off big in the future.

Be someone who is dedicated to working hard and making a lot of money as an SEO. Hopefully these 7 reasons are a help to you as you strive to be the best SEO you can possibly be and make the most money possible.

 

BONUS REASON: “7 Reasons” just sounds better than “8 Reasons,” but maybe even the #1 thing that can hold back your long term SEO money making potential is a Short Term Focus. A long term focus wants to provide loads of quality content and offer an enjoyable user experience while a short term focus is concerned only with “gaming” the search engines or exploiting flaws in the system with no regard for long term user loyalty. Concentrate exclusively on the short term to your own money making detriment.

DISCLAIMER: I love SEO and think that SEO is a lot of fun. Money is, of course, not everything, and there is nothing wrong with doing SEO purely for enjoyment or as a hobby. That being said, making a lot of money doing SEO is also a lot of fun.

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Whiteboard Friday - Path to Conversion

Posted by great scott!
May 28, 2009

Posted by great scott!

Acquiring users and getting them to take an action on your site is the absolute core of web marketing. Whether that action is making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, registering for a demo…it doesn’t matter, if you’re doing business online, your job is to acquire users and get them to take an action.

There are a million ways to go about this process, but it’s crucial for yourself and your clients to understand the funnel (particularly in terms of search patterns) that takes a potential customer from a vague notion of a want/need to converting on your site. You’re probably thinking that you already know your highest converting search terms, but you may be surprised. Watch this week’s video to learn about some important steps in the conversion funnel that you may have overlooked.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Path to Conversion from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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Website Submission

Posted by Ben Norman
May 28, 2009

I am still asked about website submission and whether to submit or not?
My advice would be to save your money as in my experience as soon as you have a few good quality links pointing towards your website all the relevent search engines will pick your website up.
The other point to note is that website [...]

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The Search Taxonomy: Getting Inside the Mind of the Searcher

Posted by PeterD
May 27, 2009

Bill from SEO By The Sea published a good article entitled “Writing Content for Small Businesses Online“, in which he talks about search taxonomies.

For those new to the topic, I thought I’d go over it, and show it applies to SEO strategy.

I’m basing this article on the study “A Taxonomy Of Web Search“(PDF), by Andrei Broder. Andrei is VP of Search Advertising at Yahoo, although he wrote this report while he was with AltaVista.

What Is A Search Taxonomy?

In summary, a taxonomy is the practice and science of classification.

In terms of search, we focus on classifying keywords into three distinct classes - navigational, informational and transactional.

If you can determine user intent behind keyword queries, you can better target your keyword strategies. For example, if your aim is to sell goods online, you may choose to focus on transactional queries e.g. “where can I buy an LCD monitor….”, as opposed to informational queries e.g. “power requirements of an LCD monitor……”.

There is, of course, a lot of cross-over between these three types of queries, which I’ll address shortly.

The Three Types Of Searches

In the study, keyword queries are divided into three groups.

Navigational

A navigational query indicates the searcher wants to find a specific site.

For example, a search for “BMW” most likely indicates the the user wants to find BMW.com. Navigational queries usually only have one “right” answer. The user either finds the site they are after, or they do not.

Informational

An informational query indicates the searcher is looking for specific information.

For example, “symptoms of cancer”, “San Francisco” or “Scoville heat units”. Informational queries tend to be broad. The informational query doesn’t tend to be site specific.

Transactional

A transactional query indicates the searcher wants to perform a web-mediated activity. For example, “buy LCD TV online”.

If your aim is to sell goods and services online, you might focus more on transactional queries than informational queries. The problem with such classification, of course, is that it is narrow. We can’t really determine user intent from just looking at the keyword, however this classification gives us a useful way of thinking about which keyword terms might be the most useful in achieving our goals.

Results Of The Survey

There are some really interesting results in this report.

24.53% of people want to get to a specific website they already have in mind. This is a navigational query

This is why brand, and making your brand memorable, is so important. Searchers often type a site name into a search engine, rather than type http://www….etc into the address bar. Optimizing for the name of your site is imperative if you want to catch navigational queries.

68.41% of people want to find a good site on a particular topic. They don’t have a specific site in mind. This is an informational query

A lot of SEO is focused on this type of query.

Why did people conduct their searches?

What were people looking for?

Interesting, huh. Site’s like About.com and Mahalo capture both these types of queries.

Eye Tracking Studies

Now, with these figures in mind, check out this eye tracking study.

Although the test data is limited, it is interesting to note that sites targeting a transactional query can be further down the search result set than the informational query and still receive attention, if not a click.

When conducting an informational query, if searchers don’t see the information they want in the first search result, they will refine their search. The same goes for navigational queries.

If you’re targeting the transactional query, however, the wording of your title tag could give you an advantage over those who rank higher than you. When conducting a transactional query, searchers often hunt further down the result page, or across to the Adwords, to see which listing sounds most interesting to them.

How To Integrate This Knowledge Into Your Strategy

So how do you apply this information?

If you choose to focus on one type of query…..

Know Your Users

There are many cues of relevancy left by the market. All you have to do is look for them.

Look at the ads

Google typically only shows AdWords ads above the organic search results *if* they generate a high clickthrough rate (CTR). And since advertisers using AdWords are paying for every click, you can presume that for expensive keywords many of those ads are matched up with strong user intent.

Tools like SpyFu ad history and KeywordSpy can help show you who has been advertising on those keywords for the longest period of time. Those who have been doing it a long time are typically either optimizing their ad copy OR losing a lot of money.

Where Are They Searching From?

Google’s keyword tools, Insights for Search, and Google Trends show where a particular search query is popular (and if there is any interesting news that is driving search queries). In addition to seeing the query breakdown by country (or state, or city), you can view ads from different locations by using the Google ad preview tool and/or the Google Global plug in.

Understanding Search Demographics

Google’s Insights for Search categorizes user searches for the broad match version of a particular keyword

Microsoft offers a tool to categorize content.


Google’s Ad Planner lets you select pre-defined audiences, websites, and keywords to analyze.

Both Microsoft and Quantcast offer similar functionality on a per website or per keyword basis.

What Did They Recently Search For?

Microsoft offers a search funnels tool which allows you to research keywords they recently searched for prior to searching for a keyword, OR keywords they searched for after they searched for a keyword.

Microsoft also has an entity association tool which can be used to find keywords that were co-occuring in the search or searched for in the same session.

Commercial Intent?

Microsoft’s Online Commercial Intent tool estimates if search queries or web pages have a high probability of being informational or commercial in nature.

Who is Getting The Click?

Since Google AdWords factors ad clickthrough rate into their calculations, you can presume that the top advertisers are either getting a decent CTR, or are paying through the nose for clicks.

Compete.com’s keyword destination data lets you know the relative click volume sites receive for a particular search query.

Further Analysis

Beyond data from the above tools, you can also infer a lot of data just by putting yourself in the mind of the consumer

The transactional user is more likely to forgive ads. In fact, they may even welcome them, so long as the advertising is relevant.

Conversely….

Integrate All Three Search Types

One of the problems with the study, as noted in the study, is that it is very difficult to determine intent just by looking at the keyword.

For example, an informational search could end up being a transactional search once the user is satisfied that with the answer to the information they were seeking. For example, “symptoms of flu” might turn into a purchase for a flu remedy.

That’s why it can be a good idea to target all types of query, in an integrated way.

Carefully consider how you word your title tags. Integrate brand aspects for the navigational query i.e. “SEOBook.com - SEO Training Made Easy”. Convey the information you provide “i.e. SEO Training” and transactional information i.e. the implication is that people can buy “SEO training”. This information is also repeated in the snippet, although webmasters often have less control over this aspect.

Keep in mind that transactional doesn’t just mean e-commerce. It can relate to any desired action, such as a sign-up to a newsletter, or a request for more information.

One aspect of web marketing that is getting more important is building communities and tribes. People who will return, in other words. You’re unlikely to engage a community of people if all you ever offer is transactions. This is why Amazon integrates reviews and other social aspects in order to hook people in on a number of levels, even though the primary aim is to sell goods. Also check out Bill’s excellent “Bills Blues” example.

What approach do you take? Do you narrow in on one type of query? Go wide and try to catch all three? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide Part X: Measuring and Tracking Success

Posted by randfish
May 26, 2009

Posted by randfish

I’m currently working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.

Where to Start with Web Analytics

That which can be measured can be improved, and in search engine optimization, measurement is critical to success. Professional SEOs track data about rankings, referrals, links and more to help analyze their campaigns and create road maps for success.

Recommended Metrics to Track

Although every business is unique and every website has different metrics that matter, the following list is nearly universal in appeal. Note that we’re only covering those metrics critical to SEO - optimizing for the search engines - and as such, more general but still important metrics may not be included. For a more comprehensive look at web analytics overall, check out Choosing Web Analytics Key Performance Indicators from Avinash Kaushik’s excellent Web Analytics Blog.

#1 - Search Engine Share of Referring Visits

Search Engine Traffic Share

Every month, it’s critical to keep track of the contribution of each traffic source for your site. Broadly, these include:

Knowing the percentage and exact numbers will help you identify strengths and weaknesses and serve as a comparison over time for trend data. If, for example, you see that traffic has spiked dramatically but it comes from referral links with low relevance while search engine and direct type-ins fell, you’ll know you’re actually in much more trouble than the raw numbers would suggest. You should use this data to track your marketing efforts and to serve as a broad yardstick for your traffic acquisition efforts.

#2 - Visits Referred by Specific Search Engines

Search Engine Share

Three major engines make up 95%+ of all search traffic in the US (Yahoo!, MSN/Live & Google), and for most countries outside the US (with the notable exceptions of Russia, China, Japan, Korea & the Czech Republic) 80%+ of search traffic comes solely from Google. Measuring the contribution of your search traffic from each engine is critical for several reasons:

If you find your site underperforming at one of the engines (based on broad market share numbers), don’t immediately panic. Remember that search engines have demographics and biases just like any other referral source. For example, in the US, Google’s market share is supposedly between 65-70%, yet the vast majority of sites we’ve ever worked with (and those reported by our friends and colleagues in the search marketing industry) show that 80-85% of traffic share from Google is actually far more common. A number of theories exist to support why this happens:

  1. Yahoo!’s top queries are navigational (their number one query is Google, for example), while Google’s queries are more informational
  2. Many experts believe (and some have private data to suggest that) Yahoo! has a preference for sites participating in their paid inclusion program
  3. Yahoo! refers a large amount of traffic to Yahoo!’s own properties (Google, meanwhile, seems to have a similar love affair with Wikipedia)

Don’t just rely on Comscore, Hitwise or Compete.com data to tell you what percentage of share an engine should provide - make sure to investigate. You can do this by running PPC ads on the various engines (and comparing impression data), checking rankings across the engines (if your Yahoo! rankings are just as good or better than your Google rankings, it’s not missed opportunity, it’s lower volume), and making sure you haven’t made any dumb mistakes (blocking other engines’ spiders, using the meta robots NOODP to control listings at Google, but forgetting to use NOYDIR at Yahoo!, etc.). 

#3 - Visits Referred by Specific Search Engine Terms/Phrases

Top Referring Phrases

The terms & phrases that send traffic are another important piece of your analytics pie. You’ll want to keep track of these on a regular basis to help identify new trends in keyword demand, gauge your performance on key terms and find terms that are bringing significant traffic you’re potentially under-serving (e.g., you rank well and get visits, but don’t have content that helps the searcher accomplish their goal).

You may also find value in tracking search referral counts for terms outside the "top" terms/phrases - those that are important and valuable to your business. If the trend lines are pointing in the wrong direction, you know efforts need to be undertaken to course correct. Search traffic worldwide has consistently risen over the past 15 years, so a decline in quantity of referrals is troubling - check for seasonality issues (keywords that are only in demand certain times of the week/month/year) and rankings (have you dropped, or has search volume ebbed).

#4 - Conversion Rate by Search Query Term/Phrase

Conversion Rates of Various Search Queries

When it comes to the bottom line for your organization, few metrics matter as much as conversion. However, analytics often misstates the impact of conversion rates from the last referral, clouding the true picture of what brought a visitor who "converted." For example, in the graphic above, 4.46% of visitors who reached SEOmoz with the query "check backlinks" signed up to become members during that visit. What we don’t know (at least, from this simple analysis), is how many of those visitors had already signed up, how many signed up during a later visit, or even what percentage of those visits were first-time visitors.

The real value from this sort of simplistic tracking comes from the "low-hanging fruit" - seeing terms/phrases that continually send visitors who convert and increasing focus on both rankings and traffic from that keyword referral as well as improving the landing pages that visitors reach. While conversion rate tracking from keyword phrase referrals is certainly important, it’s never the whole story. Dig deeper and you can often uncover far more interesting and applicable data about how conversion starts and ends on your site.

#5 - Number of Pages Receiving at Least One Visit from Search Engines

Pages Getting Google Traffic

Knowing the number of pages that receive search engine traffic is an essential metric for monitoring overall SEO performance. From this number, we can get a glimpse into indexation (how many pages the engines are keeping in their indices from our site), and, more importantly, watch trends over time. For most large websites (50,000+ pages), mere inclusion is essential to earning traffic, and this metric delivers a trackable number that’s indicative of success or failure. As you work on issues like site architecture, link acquisition, XML Sitemaps, uniqueness of content and meta data, etc. the trend line should rise, showing that more and more pages are earning their way into the engines’ results. Pages receiving search traffic is, quite possibly, the best long tail metric around.

While other analytics data points are also of great importance, those mentioned above should be universally applied to get the maximum value from your SEO campaigns. Additional sources to read on this topic include:

Free Analytics Software

Many very high quality analytics products are available entirely for free. These can be installed either on your web server to collect and analyze log-file based data or in the code on your pages (as javascript) to capture individual visit data. Without software, you’re up a creek - raw log file analysis is extremely tedious and time consuming and many organizations don’t even have the ability to access their logs. Use software and track - and don’t worry - the free options are not only better than nothing, they’re pretty darn good.

Recommended free analytics software packages include:

While choosing can be tough, at the time of publication, our top recommendation is for Google Analytics (so long as you have few privacy concerns and don’t mind the brief data delays), followed closely by Clicky. Once the Yahoo! Web Analytics beta opens to the public, that would also be a top suggestion (and SEOmoz itself has run on Indextools/Yahoo! for the last 3 years). If you cannot use tracking code on your web pages and need a log-file based solution, AWStats is our top recommendation, though any log file based tracking will suffer from the inability to track clickstream paths, first time vs. referring and other important metrics as accurately as cookie/session based software.

Paid Analytics Software

There are dozens (possibly hundreds) of paid analytics solutions, but for the purposes of this guide, we’ll list only the most popular services:

Unfortunately, we don’t have enough experience to recommend one particular package over the others, but you can read some very good analysis and comparisons, including:

Metrics for Measuring Search Engine Optimization

In organic SEO, it can be difficult to track the specific elements of the engines’ algorithms effectively given that this data is not public, nor is it even well-researched. However, a combination of tactics have become best practices, and new data is constantly emerging to help track direct ranking elements and positive/negative ranking signals. The data points covered below are ones that we will occasionally use for our clients’ campaigns and have proven to add value when used in concert with analytics.

Metrics Provided by Search Engines

We’ve already discussed many of the data points provided by services such as Google’s Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft’s Webmaster Tools (in part 8: Search Engine Tools & Services). In addition to these, the engines provide some insight through publicly available queries and competitive intelligence. Below is a list of queries/tools/metrics from the engines, along with their respective applications:

Employing these queries & tools effectively requires that you have an informational need with an actionable solution. The data itself isn’t valuable unless you have a plan of what to change/build/do once you learn what you need to know (this holds true for competitive analysis as well).

For more detail, see the Professional’s Guide to Advanced Search Operators, an extremely detailed and thorough resource on this subject.

Applying Data to Your Campaigns

Just knowing the numbers won’t help unless you can effectively interpret and apply changes to course-correct. Below, we’ve taken a sample of some of the most common directional signals provided by tracking data points and how to respond with actions to improve or execute on opportunities.

Fluctuation in Search Engine Page & Link Count Numbers

The numbers reported in "site:" and "link:" queries are rarely precise, and thus we strongly recommend not getting too worried about fluctuations showing massive increases or decreases unless they are accompanied by traffic drops. For example, on any given day, Yahoo! reports between 800,000 and 2 million links to the SEOmoz.org domain. Obviously, we don’t gain or lose hundreds of thousands of links each day, but the variability of Yahoo!’s indices means that these numbers reports provide little guidance about our actual link growth or shrinkage.

If you do see significant drops in links or pages indexed accompanied by similar traffic referral drops from the search engines, you may be experiencing a real loss of link juice (check to see if important links that were previously sending traffic/rankings boosts still exist) or a loss of indexation due to penalties, hacking, malware, etc. A thorough analysis using your own web analytics and Google’s Webmaster Tools can help to identify potential problems.

Falling Search Traffic from a Single Engine

If a single engine is sending you considerably less traffic for a wide range of search queries, a small number of possibilities exist:

Identify the problem most likely to be the culprit and investigate. Forums like Cre8asit Forums, HighRankings and Google’s Groups for Webmasters can help.

Falling Search Traffic from Multiple Engines

Chances are good that you’ve done something on your site to block crawlers or stop indexation. This could be something in the robots.txt or meta robots tags, a problem with hosting/uptime, a DNS resolution issue or a number of other technical breakdowns. Talk to your SysAdmin, developers and/or host and carefully review your Webmaster Tools accounts and analytics to help determine potential causes.

Individual Rankings Fluctuations

Gaining or losing rankings for a particular term/phrase or even several happens millions of times a day to millions of pages and is generally nothing to be concerned about. Ranking algorithms fluctuate, competitors gain and lose links (and on-page optimization tactics) and search engines even flux between indices (and may sometimes even make mistakes in their crawling, inclusion or ranking processes). When a dramatic rankings decrease occurs, you might want to carefully review on-page elements for any signs of over-optimization or violation of guidelines (cloaking, keyword stuffing, etc.) and check to see if links have recently been gained or lost. Note that with sudden spikes in rankings for new content, a temporary period of high visibility followed by a dramatic drop is common (in the SEO field, we refer to this as the "freshness boost").

Don’t panic over small fluctuations. With large drops, be wary against making a judgment call until at least a few days have past. If you run a new site or are in the process of link acquisition and active marketing, these sudden spikes and drops are even more common, so simply be prepared and keep working.

Positive Increases in Link Metrics without Rankings Increases

Many site owners worry that when they’ve done some "classic" SEO - on-page optimization, link acquisition, etc. they can expect instant results. This, sadly, is not the case. Particularly for new site and pages and content that’s competing in very difficult results, rankings take time and even earning lots of great links is not a sure recipe to instantly reach the top. Remember that the engines need to not only crawl all those pages where you’ve acquired links, but index and process them - given the almost certain use of delta indices by the engines to help with freshness, the metrics and rankings you’re seeking may be days or even weeks behind the progress you’ve made.

And with that, ladies and gentlemen, the Beginner’s Guide content is complete! Actually, I still need to write up the very important appendices, including the glossary, list of links to other resources, and credits, but I’m hopeful to get this done soon (and it’s about time - I started way back in October of 2007!).

As always - comments, criticisms and recommendations are greatly appreciated.

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Free SEO Tips

Posted by Ben Norman
May 26, 2009

If you are looking to get some great FREE SEO Tips and advice then your luck is in!
I am going to, over the next few months, aim to write a post as often as time will permit detailing a quality piece of advice, tool or service that will help you ensure your site starts whizzing [...]

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Internet Marketing in the Movies: Are People Starting to "Get" It?

Posted by rebecca
May 26, 2009

Posted by rebecca

Since I’m a movie buff and an Internet marketing nerd, I often notice Internet marketing and search mentions in various movies, and I always pay attention to the movie URL shown in trailers (my two recent favorites: the URL for Sacha Baron Cohen’s upcoming Bruno film was www.meinspace.com/bruno, but it looks like now it’s redirecting to MySpace.com, and the URL for I Love You, Beth Cooper is www.iloveyoubethcoopermovie.com, making me wonder why they had to append "movie" to such a specific URL). Recently I came across two examples where the movie industry referenced or directly utilized Internet marketing/social media marketing, and it got me wondering if Internet marketing is finally starting to become more mainstream (meaning fewer people will look at you with blank faces as you try to describe what you do for a living).

The first example comes from Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Available in theaters and via Comcast On Demand, the movie is about a high-end escort in NYC and her relationship with her boyfriend and her clients and their stresses about the current economic crisis and financial instability (the movie takes place right before the 2008 Presidential elections). In one scene the main character is having a conversation with a web developer/designer about her website, and one of her questions is "How do I get my site to appear high up in search engines?" His answer is so-so–he mentions that she has to submit her site to a lot of directories and other sites, which is a "well, yes and no" response–but he does sum up the conversation by telling her that she’ll need a lot of links, which was a pleasant surprise (I’m used to hearing a lot of really appalling search misconceptions).

I was pretty geeked to see that Steven Soderbergh kinda-sort of addressed SEO in one of his movies. Internet marketing isn’t really something you see in commercials or movies–I mean, there’s really nobody buying commercial space to advertise their marketing services, and you never watch a movie about the cute hipster Internet marketer who’s trying to woo the unattainable hot girl, only to find out that his nerdy best friend is actually the girl he’s in love with. Could the mention of SEO, albeit brief and a wee bit inaccurate (well, maybe not "inaccurate" so much as "requires more explanation"), be a step in the direction of mainstream notoriety?

My second example comes from the Cannes Film Festival. A movie is making the rounds at Cannes this year and attracting a ton of buzz. Not only is it a zombie movie (which is awesome in its own right), but it was made for a mind blowing $70. The movie, called Colin, is a zombie film that takes place from the zombie’s perspective, and it cost less to make than most DVD box sets. The filmmaker was able to put it together by utilizing Facebook and MySpace to round up movie extras, helpers and all sorts of people who wanted to be involved in the making of a zombie flick. This movie is a ridiculous example of how you can use social media marketing and networking to benefit your brand. Not only was he able to get volunteers for his movie and make his dream a reality, he generated buzz by building brand evangelists and by getting fans involved and having them spread the word.

If people nowadays are able to make a movie and promote it primarily through social networking and social media marketing, shouldn’t that reinforce the benefits to your clients or to your own team of marketers? You could argue that if it’s becoming more mainstream and commonplace to do SMM since it’s "all the rage" right now that it’s going to get too crowded, but I just think that means you have to ensure that your marketing efforts are that much more clever and better than everyone else. It’s certainly what this guy did–tons of people promote their bands and movies and comedy acts and whatnot via MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, etc., but not everyone succeeds. It’s a mixture of having the right product, clever and persistent marketing, and properly utilizing your social networking channels that equates to a great viral campaign.

So what do you guys think? Can you recall any examples from movies, music or television that lend credence to the notion that Internet marketing is becoming more "mainstream," or do we nerdy marketers still have to huddle in a corner to have our geek conversations while the masses go about their lives dishing about Jon and Kate’s imploding marriage and what Tom Hanks’ hair looks like in his new Robert Langdon movie?

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If I Could Go Back In Time & Give Myself Some Advice, This Would Be It

Posted by randfish
May 26, 2009

Posted by randfish

Dear 2007 Rand Fishkin,

Hi there - it’s me - your 2009 self. I know it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever get this email, but who knows? The flow of time could chaotically spasm and somehow drop a printed copy of this on your lap - stranger things have happened. And, in that unlikely event, here’s a few quick things you should know:

And now, in a rarely used tactic, I’m pinging some friends from other web startups to ask them what they’d like to tell their past selves. Dharmesh Shah from Hubspot, Richard Zwicky from Enquisite, Seth Besmertnik from Conductor, Will Critchlow from Distilled, Kelly Smith from Inkd, Glenn Kelman from Redfin, Ethan Lowry from Urbanspoon and Chris Winfield of 10e20 - can I convince you to write an advice letter to your former incarnations?

p.s. Anyone interested in more on this topic should check out my recent interview with the gang at Wildfire Marketing for Thought Leader Thursday.

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Social Cues & Increasing Sales

Posted by Aaron Wall
May 25, 2009

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

To someone new to a field, scams often look more legitimate than the real thing. Just ask anyone who has spent their share of the 100’s of millions of dollars on acai diet reverse billing fraud promoted through fake blogs advertised on the Google content network.

Quality vs Perceived Quality

In terms of sales, the quality of the product or service is typically nowhere near as important as how much mindshare you have. That last sentence sorta reveals one of the major weaknesses of most non-salespeople. You can’t just focus on having the best product and think that will be enough. You have to use push marketing until you build enough momentum that it starts becoming a force of its own. And it needs to be periodically refreshed through advertising, public interaction, and viral marketing.

This is where advertising, building trust, website credibility, and cumulative advantage play a big roll in making a business ubiquitous so the perceived risk of being a customer is much lower.

Word of mouth marketing is great, but you have to encourage it, and promote it.

Scaling a Website

The good news is you do not need a lot of employees to look large, so long as you are good at structuring your customer interactions. Through the above strategies (and being super-efficient), our site (which has 2.5 employees and has its highest value portions locked up as member’s only content) gets more traffic than competing businesses with 20 employees and some of the largest public forum websites (with 10x as many pages in Google & no barrier to entry).

The Alexa blog recently referenced the success of our site’s current model:

seobook.com gets more traffic than seochat.com and seomoz.org. But how do they do it? Loyalty. Despite getting less traffic from search engines, and despite having fewer links than seomoz, and despite scaring away potential customers with aggressive marketing, seobook is doing quite well. They are converting visitors to customers, and turning those customers into regular visitors.

The take-away lesson is that good SEO is important, but it can’t compete with a loyal and engaged user-base. Seobook.com is a perfect case in point.

Building Loyalty

Such loyalty does not come easy though. This quote represents the barrier you have to overcome if you want to build a lasting online community that matters:

In effect, this guy who has twenty thousand friends is completely alone in the real world.
…
In this age of great digital connectedness, we increasingly find ourselves clinging to illusions of intimacy, adrift in a sea of anonymity, surrounded by the great faceless, nameless masses from which no commonality can be extracted.

What barriers are preventing people from getting the most out of your community? What can you do to make your interactions more life-like? How open should your community be? What pieces should you focus on building most aggressively? How can you make it grow larger without damaging the quality of the community? How many customers can you have before you need to hire more people? Who should you hire? What should they work on? Where can you add value to your customer’s experience? How can you leverage your knowledge most efficiently?

Ubiquity

Growing a community is a quite tricky process because every type of marketing causes expected and unexpected consequences. Our ebook, when priced at $79, was coupled with a brand that was seen far and wide. The price-point was so low that it was an impulse purchase that reached virtually every piece of the market - entrepreneurs, small businesses, b2b, retailers, Fortune 500’s, hedge funds, etc. Direct interaction with 10,000+ customers made us quite good at knowing what questions are commonly asked, and how to answer them accurately and efficiently. The most common questions got worked into the content.

Death of Ubiquity

The growing complexity of search (particularly the subjective nature of Google hand edits), the general low perceived value of ebooks (largely destroyed by scammers), and Google teaching people to steal our ebook (via suggested “torrent” searches) killed our old business model. Luckily we saw those market changes coming, and shifted our business model in time to more than double our revenues while focusing on higher quality customers.

The minute a profitable business model appears on the web, many forces work to commoditize and disintermediate it. The only ways to stop that are to build a platform that other people build on, or to build deeper relationships with customers.

One of the most important points of Seth’s Tribes is that to build a community you have to have outsiders.

Growing a Community

Growth of a community beyond a certain point gets tricky though. Any membership site has some level of decay rate and some level of growth. If you push into markets where you don’t fit well then you (temporarily) increase your revenues while lowering your lifetime customer value, lowering average customer quality, polluting your community with people that do not fit, and increasing your maintenance cost of advertising to less receptive markets and supporting transient short-term members.

Rather than trying to get more members, it often makes sense to increase what you get from current members, and look for ways to increase the value delivered to members to increase member stay time.

Price as a Filter

Even though our training program has a similar price-point as the ebook did, it is perceived as being far more expensive because it is recurring. That increases the perceived risk to some of the potential customers who are less committed to learning SEO. This higher perceived cost shaped our community to filter out some of the worst pieces of the market (like the people who buy lots of internet marketing junk on Clickbank and reverse charge most of it) and attract many high quality customers (many of our members have 20x more the business experience and know-how than I do). But it makes it harder for the brand the site to be as relevant to as wide of a group as the old business model was.

More Filters

Our price-point and the stuff we write about on the blog likely makes many people think that we aim for high end experienced web professionals who have a lot of SEO experience. While that perception keeps our forum levels above the level of quality anywhere else on the web, it also causes us to miss 90%+ of the market.

The approach of simply having hands down the best customers, the best customer service, and delivering the highest level of value (which causes people to stay subscribed for a long time) was the best approach to take when running this site as a 2.5 person business, because churn is expensive when you do marketing, public relations, advertising, quality assurance, content creation, customer support, and customer interaction (all while keeping up with changes in the market). We still want to keep our core customers, but might try expanding.

Appealing to More Beginners

You are not your own customer. I am not my own customer. Designing for yourself gives you a good chance of creating something of value, but most of the buying market for how to information are people new to the field.

Put another way, beginners are the largest market segment, and everyone was a beginner at one point in time.

This is precisely why email list internet marketers make so much money. There is always a new, desperate, and gullible crop to feed off of - an Eternal September. And until they get burned a few times and hardened by the market (and/or go bankrupt) they convert at rates well above what other market segments convert at. Greed makes it easy to make poor financial decisions, especially when matched against seasoned marketers and promises of automated wealth generation.

If we are to expand, we will likely need to reach some of the market that thought our site was too advanced for them. Our offers won’t be as hyped as the email guys, but we do have a lot of channels we could use much more effectively. Our training program is certainly easy enough for most beginners to get it, but we need to make our marketing reflect that. My wife used to do offline tech sales stuff, and she is going to help try to do some of the online stuff for this site too. Given that she is up for helping out, I think we can grow the site again…there are lots of things we could make better (like re-doing the intro video, making more video content, and building a few more tools) that I had not got around to because the community was about as big as it made sense to be without more labor.

Websites and tools can be great for both beginners and experts. We just have to figure out how to better reach both market segments without alienating the other. :)

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