Archive for June, 2009
How Many Redirects Will GoogleBot Follow?
It was a simple question for which I did not have an answer. Luckily, finding this answer was easy enough.
Create a single 301 redirecting PHP file.
Make this PHP file grab the current REQUEST_URI, then use an MD5 hash of that REQUEST_URI to create a new URL to which it will 301 redirect (we [...]
The Triviality of On-Page HTML Tag Optimization
I have long speculated that on-page optimization was trivial. It meshed with my understanding of how a suspicious Google engineer may treat the content of a page in relationship to its rankings. Why trust anything a webmaster says about his or her content (keywords stuffed into H1, meta, or bold tags)? Why trust anything on [...]
Tips from a recovering journalist: How to write effective press releases that help SEO
Posted by MikeK@DanconiaMedia
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.
It’s been said here before: Press releases are much less powerful than they used to be for SEO purposes. While churning out news releases and submitting them to free sites may not do much, the medium can actually be more powerful than ever if used right. Convincing a single reporter or high-profile blogger to pick up your news is infinitely more beneficial than posting worthless releases all over the place and Digg’ing and StumbleUpon’ing them with your multiple accounts.
I have a somewhat unique perspective about news releases. Not too long ago, I worked full-time as a newspaper reporter, and my inbox was regularly inundated with press releases. Some of them caught my attention and were turned into lengthy stories. Others, however, failed to captivate me or my peers and, as a result, went nowhere.
Here are some tips on how to craft your releases in a way that increases the odds of them getting noticed by the media:
Get to the point. Make it clear from the get-go what your release is about. Don’t try to be cute. I used to get releases all the time from PR people who buried the news or tried to get creative with their writing. Sometimes, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what some releases were even about. If you’re looking for a creative outlet, press release writing is not the avenue. Try writing a short story.
At least pretend you’re objective. Obviously, you have a vested interest in what you’re writing about, but it’s still important to craft your releases like down-the-middle news stories. Avoid unnecessary adjectives; most adjectives are unneeded. You don’t want your release to read like an advertisement. Pick out the newsiest element and concentrate on that.
Speak English. I see releases all the time that are stuffed with industry jargon that most people do not understand. Don’t assume that what you’re writing about is a familiar subject for the people who’ll read your release. Dumb it down. Assume your release will be read by the densest guy in the room.
Send it out manually. Instead of just dumping your releases into submission sites and hoping someone important notices, email it yourself to media outlets and bloggers you think might be interested in it. If you’re publicizing a new product, send your release to newspapers in the company’s area. If you can, find out which reporters cover the relevant beat and send it to them directly; that usually only takes a phone call.
Have good timing. If you’re looking for coverage, sending your release out on Election Day or after hours on a Friday is goofy. Those are good times to release bad news you’re obligated to report – any White House spokesman will tell you that – but it’ll do you no good unless your story is wildly sensational. News outlets are typically more desperate for copy during the summer months and around holidays.
Act like a human. Interactivevoices’ post about getting a link from CNN.com – the only PR10 news site – illustrated this perfectly. There’s no harm in picking up the phone and calling reporters directly to see if they’re interested in your story. For all you know, the only thing preventing your news from being published is an over-finicky spam filter.
Don’t beg. When I was working as a reporter, I didn’t realize why some sources were so hellbent on me including links in my stories. Now I know. If your link is relevant to the story, the reporter will probably include it. If not, you’re still getting good publicity.
Of course, all of this will only help if you actually have something worthwhile to say. If you think there’s nothing interesting to say about your enterprise, you’re probably wrong. You just need to think long and hard to figure out what it is.
Your FICO Credit Score Follows You Around the Web
In one of the more absurd public privacy invasions online, Google has announced they are going to use FICO scores to help advertisers target ads at consumers in different credit buckets.
I wonder if at some point in time if AdWords advertisers selling the scammy government grand & biz-op offers will get to use this data to target poor people with low credit scores. It only makes sense that Google would spin this positively stating that it is good for brand advertisers to find credit-worthy customers, which is the story that was marketed in the above linked piece:
Consumers with high FICO scores demonstrate some unique attributes that show they shop carefully for the best cards. For example, shoppers begin using search earlier in their application process, they use the term “best credit cards” at three times the rate of lower FICO shoppers, and they are more likely to use branded terms.
Consumers with high FICO scores use non-branded search terms more than branded — approximately 60% of high FICO searchers. They tend to search on terms, such as “travel rewards,” “low rate,” and “balance transfer.”
From a marketer’s perspective this makes a lot of sense. Smart people who manage their credit well look for tangible benefits in their financial choices…they don’t just blindly buy the brand.
The problem is that (so long as the current bankruptcy “reform” remains in tact and taxpayers bail out any banking losses) bankers have little to no incentive to reach people with good credit scores. People who pay their credit cards on time are seen as deadbeats while the least credit worth are the profitable market segment because they use credit ignorantly and accrue billions of dollars in unneeded fees every year:
Overall, we find that debt literacy is low: only about one-third of the population seems to comprehend interest compounding or the workings of credit cards. Even after controlling for demographics, we find a strong relationship between debt literacy and both financial experiences and debt loads. Specifically, individuals with lower levels of debt literacy tend to transact in high-cost manners, incurring higher fees and using high-cost borrowing. In applying our results to credit cards, we estimate that as much as one-third of the charges and fees paid by less knowledgeable individuals can be attributed to ignorance. The less knowledgeable also report that their debt loads are excessive or that they are unable to judge their debt position.
Bankers have historically hidden these fees in illegible 30+ page contracts, as mentioned by Elizabeth Warren
I teach contract law at Harvard Law School and I can’t understand my credit card contract. I just can’t. It’s not designed to be read. Read the Government Accountability Office (GAO) study on this. The GAO looked at credit cards and they said: “Nobody can understand this stuff.” Are you kidding me? And understand when you’ve got terms that say: “In effect, we’ll charge anything we want any time we want for any reason or no reason at all,” what’s the point of reading it?
She later commented on the ideal credit card customer
Every credit card for a credit card company is like a lottery ticket. They’re just waiting to see who’s going to maybe stumble a little. Maybe get into trouble on a car loan. Maybe nothing at all except they just look vulnerable. They’re just in the right zip code. They’re just the right profile for people who won’t be able to run any place else. And those are the ones you slam. Those are the ones you hit with the 29 percent interest rate, the 35 percent interest rate, the new fees. And then, because of course if you can’t pay it, then you get hit with a fee for not paying or for paying late, for going over limit. And the game is afoot. With any luck at all from the credit card company’s perspective, these people will become little annuities that will just keep generating profits for the credit card companies for months, for years, maybe forever.
The idea of only servicing legitimate debt needs of customers that can afford their credit card bills has made banking industry executives so angry that they are threatening hitting consumers with lots of bogus new “conveninece” fees:
Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.
Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.
This new consumer-credit profiling Google is offering will be far more profitable to use on the poor, the weak, the desperate, the ignorant, and the uneducated. In early research Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin stated
Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. … We believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.
So were they right back then? Or are the right now? They can’t be both.
Update: Sandra from Google’s PR team emailed me the following
I’ve included an outline of the research methodology below the body of this note. Please let me know if you have questions or need clarification on any of the below — or anything else, for that matter.
Best,
Sandra
—–
* Compete conducted a clickstream analysis on their opt-in panel of 2 million US online consumers, to associate FICO score categories with sites in the Google Content Network.
o The analysis took a look at the online behavior of Compete’s opt-in panelists who shopped for or applied for a credit card online between January and March 2009, for the 30 days prior to the application and/or research.
+ Compete, via a sister company that provides secure matching of certain characteristics (one of which is FICO scores) to anonymous/anonymized individuals in the Compete panel, segmented the opt-in panelists into one of three categories, based on their FICO score: Super Prime (720 and above), Prime (600 to 719), and Sub-Prime (below 600).
+ Individual scores and personally identifiable information were not used by Compete, nor were they received by Google.
o Google provided Compete with a list of all sites in the Google Content Network.
o Compete compared how panelists in each FICO band searched and where the panelists spent time on the GCN, and ranked each GCN site based on its ability to reach consumers in particular FICO score bands.
o The ranking/scores of the GCN sites were passed on to Google — not any information about the credit scores of individuals.
My Startup Experience: VC, Entrepreneurship, Self-Analysis & The Road Ahead
Posted by randfish
(Intro: This post continues a series of personal growth focused entries. It doesn’t have much direct, applicable SEO value, so feel free to skip if that’s what you’re seeking)
I’ve learned more in the last 9 months than at any previous time in my life - about myself, about this company and about the worlds of venture capital, entrepreneurship and startups. And, in the spirit of transparency (one of our guiding principles and an ideal I haven’t been maintaining as well as I could of late), I want to share, to talk about where SEOmoz is today and why we’ve decided to explore additional capital opportunities. In fact, I feel compelled - because even if only 100 people, or 10 or just 1 learn something here they can apply to themselves, it will be worthwhile.
Segments in this Post:
- Brief History of SEOmoz
- How Outside Capital Helped Us
- SEOmoz’s Growth 2007-2009
- A Short Story that Led to a Decision
- What I’ve Learned About Myself
- My Top Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
- Got Questions? I’ll Try to Answer
A Brief History
Let’s start back in August of 2007. SEOmoz was tiny - 8 people growing a business out of a 1,000 sq. ft. office in Seattle’s University District (man, do I miss that place) and two people who believed it was going to be much, much bigger - Kelly from Curious Office and Michelle from Ignition. It’s only in retrospect that I can really appreciate their foresight, because when they invested $1.1 million in the company that November, I was an SEO geek who wanted to use that funding to solve an SEO problem. My dream was to better understand the web’s link graph and how the engines could use that to rank sites & pages. I should have been thinking about the problems faced by those wanting to do SEO and how a scalable, technology solution could be used to help them - like what Vanessa Fox did when she built Webmaster Tools inside Google (more on that later).
Our first round of capital raising was very unique, and for that reason, may be less applicable than other advice on the topic. Nevertheless, I’ll try to share that experience and the macro and micro-economic factors that impacted it.
Investment Data via NVCA Press Alert
You can see that not only was 2007 the most active year for venture capital investment, but that Q4 of 2007 was a particularly high spike. It’s probably not surprising that SEOmoz took its funding in this type of environment - possibly the best time to raise money from an entrepreneur’s perspective since 2000. Why? Because when deal flow is very high, terms tend to be more entrepreneur friendly. Ours certainly were.
It’s uncommon (though not unheard of) for a firm like Ignition Partners, with over a billion dollars under management, to put so little capital into a company. Between Ignition & Curious, the amount raised was $1.1 million, less than half the size of their next smallest public investment (Crunchbase has a list here, though SEOmoz’s funding amount is inaccurately reported as $1.25 million, and the participants inaccurately listed as 1 - and Ignition does do some smaller deals that aren’t listed). Quantity wasn’t the only outlier - our valuation, the terms themselves (things like vesting, board structure, preferences, etc.) were very good and the deal closed quickly. Today’s funding environment could be a very different story. As you can see from the charts above, the floor fell out in the VC markets last October, and although May 2009 may have been a step forward, entrepreneurs who seek capital today shouldn’t expect seed or series A rounds to look the way they did in November of 2007.
SEOmoz was also helped in this deal by an important factor I think every startup should consider - WE DIDN’T NEED THE MONEY. We were already profitable and growing, already had a brand name in the industry and had attracted interest from multiple investors. I think that every entrepreneur who’s considering startup-dom should think about establishing those goals before they go for institutional capital - a profitable, growing company with a product that’s on the market and a brand name that’s well known makes you:
- A) Lower risk to investors
- B) Interesting to multiple parties and multiple kinds of investors (angels, VCs, private equity, etc.)
- C) More confident in every step of the process
- D) Able to walk away from a deal you don’t like
This psychology is so powerful that I can’t imagine doing it any other way. If I wanted to build a travel portal to take on Kayak.com, I’d start a great travel site (maybe even just a really interesting blog), build up some brand recognition, use advertising or low-cost premium features to drive revenue and only after those numbers made for a compelling story, approach investors. I’d use that same formula even for a capital intensive business - start with cool ideas, great writing and valuable resources, become a hub for your industry, show web traffic and positive interest, then go fundraise.
We started as a consulting business - in fact, SEOmoz is on a .org TLD because when I started the site, there wasn’t even a business behind it (even the name "moz" comes from the ethos of open sharing pioneered by folks like DMOZ & the Mozilla foundation). Gillian and I were running a website design & development shop and learning SEO because our customers needed it and we had no other choice. Eventually SEOmoz got so big and popular as a blog that it made sense to conduct business under that name, and a few years later, we realized consulting wasn’t the right way for us to scale this incredible community around us. Those decisions - made much more by accident than grand vision - gave us the credibility and the story that made investors excited.
And yeah, it didn’t hurt that Q4 of 2007 was probably the best time to raise money in the last 8 years.
How Outside Capital Helped
Taking the outside investment proved to be an excellent decision, and, to be honest, even in today’s market, I’d still consider raising money if I were in the same position again. Outside capital made me a better entrepreneur, focused our company more seriously on the things we needed to do and made us more accountable and metrics-driven. Some companies feel that pressure internally and can build those processes without external help. We needed that external pressure and it’s been remarkable. I’ll try to detail some of the big ways investment has helped us:
- Metrics Requirements - Any outside investor will require reporting of specific data points about the business from financial, HR, marketing and development perspectives. You’re probably doing this already inside your business, and we were as well, but experienced outside perspectives distill the list into the critical pieces, identify important missing criteria and work with you to help develop the raw numbers into actionable data.
- Accountability - A lot of CEOs and company leaders choose that job because it means they’re in charge. And while that’s certainly an enjoyable perk, bringing in outside investors makes you accountable again - not in the same way a typical boss does, but the responsibility and pressure to perform. In many small companies, very few people beyond the CEO and perhaps one or two others are fully aware of the company’s performance or lack thereof - and when things go south (or simply don’t go as well as predicted), no one’s there holding your feet to the fire. If external pressure can help you excel (as it has with me), then funding provides a great benefit.
- Board Meetings - Rarely in small companies does leadership take a regular hard look at their priorities, strategy and direction (Will & Duncan, you’re the exception, not the rule). Board meetings provide that gut-level check on every facet of the business, and let you step back to see the forest for the trees. They’re not necessarily fun, but they will make you a better entrepreneur (and if they don’t, it means you’ve likely chosen the wrong board members).
- Thinking Long Term - Running a business is incredibly hard, and startups, doubly so. With so much time and energy devoted to turning the flywheel, it’s easy to miss an opportunity or ignore a fundamental problem that’s outside the scope of the day-to-day. Professional investment means you’ve got a partner watching out for precisely that issue.
- Adding Experience to the Team - Every new person we add to SEOmoz, that’s the biggest team I’ve ever led. Every dollar of revenue that comes in is the most money I’ve ever managed. With outside investors, they’ve seen and been through much bigger and can help guide you along the path - whether it’s filled with potholes or littered with opportunities that just need to be scooped up.
- Networking Opportunties - VCs know a lot of very important people. From strategic operators at big companies to C-level executives at startups to government, charity and press, you’ll rarely find a more connected group. This shouldn’t be surprising, as networking is one of the biggest value-adds VCs advertise. The problem is that for most entrepreneurs, myself included, the need for these networks is few and far between, so it seems less valuable than it really is - once your company is in a position to either do big enterprise partnerships or be acquired, those connections can "make or break" the firm.
- Oh Yeah, the Money - Did you know VCs also provide capital? Yep, it’s true - and having dollars to spend when you’re a creative entrepreneur with a great plan is pretty awesome.
There are probably a dozen more ways that venture capital investment has helped SEOmoz, and I’m certain that many of them will be immeasurable and possibly even invisible. All of this isn’t to say that VC doesn’t have it’s downsides - there are a few, and it pays to be aware of them:
- Funding is a Time Suck - I’m personally feeling this right now (as I’ll explain later), and it’s important to be aware of the opportunity cost of seeking investment. For most startups, the CEO and the executive team are essential to running day-to-day operations of the business. When you take time out to build slide decks for investors, meet with VCs, network amongst your contacts and field calls, it pulls time & energy away from the company.
- Control of Your Business is Diluted - VCs build company boards. In our scenario, the board is comprised of three voting members (Gillian, Michelle & myself) and one observer (Kelly). This structure means that company management and founders have the deciding vote in any contentious issue (only one has ever arisen on SEOmoz’s board). In a future round, though, we expect that another 2 members would join the board - one individual from the investment firm and one independent member we all agree upon. Just to be clear, though - even in our scenario, there are certain types of votes which must pass with 100% of the board’s approval (mostly things like sale of stock, funding, etc.).
- You Have a Boss - OK, it’s not a typical boss and you don’t report to them on a regular basis, but you do have someone who watches your metrics and performance closely and can replace you if/when that performance is unacceptable. One of the most significant powers the board holds at any VC-backed company is the ability to fire the CEO.
- You Have Fiduciary Obligations - Legal documents bind you to operate the company with its interests, not your own, at the heart of your decisions. This impacts quite a bit of the decisions you make at a company, particularly when you switch from something like a longtime, family-run business (such as ours). It’s definitely good for the company (and good for your own internal discipline), but it can be painful at times.
- Your Exit Options are Limited - Retire, walk away, close up shop, sell for a low price because you don’t want to go out for higher bids or you particularly like the buyer - these options (and many others like them) become challenging to impossible, once you take outside investment.
As you can tell from my opinions above and my previous advice to myself, I’m a big proponent in spite of these potential detractors.
2007-2009 Growth
This company looks very different than it did just 2 years ago, and I’ve been lax in sharing the kinds of numbers and data about the business that was once a signature of my blogging (see 2006 and 2007 financials, for example). While there’s a lot that I’m obligated not to share, I’m going to go right up to that line - not just because I think it will make this story more interesting, but because it’s part of our guiding principles.
Full-Time Employees
It’s tough to build this chart, because the number of full-time folks fluctuates even inside a single year, but I’ve done my best to approximate the annual averages.
PRO Members
PRO membership has really taken off in the last 6 months - and while we doubled membership from 2007-2008, we were able to do that in just the first 6 months in 2009.
Revenue
Sadly, while I can’t share exact numbers, this chart does give an accurate concept of where we are. 2009 is shaping up to be a very exciting year. Although I also can’t show margin numbers, I will say that from Nov. 2007 to Nov. 2008, SEOmoz burned capital (approx. 3/4 of the investment we took). Starting in Dec. 2008 and continuing each month through to June 2009, we’ve been profitable and rebuilt a respectable cash reserve (of course, if you ask Sarah, we still need to sweat every penny of it).
Visits to the SEOmoz.org Website
Traffic is growing nicely as well, though what this chart doesn’t show is that 2009 has been virtually devoid of the types of "linkbait" that were a hallmark of the site in 2007 (and much of 2008). We’ve found that while those efforts can produce great traffic boosts and link growth, we need to focus on conversion rate optimization and the PRO membership product before we return to viral content generation.
A (Not-So) Short Story that Led to a Decision
Last October, just after we launched Linkscape, SEOmoz started fielding between 2-4 calls per month from venture capital firms seeking to place investment. These are exciting, flattering and fun calls to get, and in those initial conversations, the focus makes for an ego-padding chat. It’s pretty easy to see why these investors were so interested - no, not because SEOmoz itself is all that awesome (they didn’t even know much about us when they called) - it’s because of the potential market for SEO:
Via eMarketer’s Search Spending Swells Worldwide & Online Marketing Effectiveness
SEO is at or near the top for four different categories:
- Where marketers get the most conversions
- Where they get the most branding impact
- Where they are planning to re-allocate budget
- Wherethey are planning to increase spend
VCs love this stuff, and they love it even more when the market as a whole appears to be big and growing:
_
Data Source: SEMPO State of the Market Surveys
A predicted spend of just over $2 billion on SEO in 2009 suggests that SEO may finally be earning some respect, just as the growth in PPC spend slows its acceleration rate. Richard Zwicky’s SEM analytics company, Enquisite, is an example of this market shift commanding respect. Enquisite’s raised over $11 million in venture capital in the last few years (including a series B round of $8 million in February) . His favorite mantra is the disconnect I wrote about last october:
PPC: 88% of all SEM spend VS. SEO: 11% of all SEM spend
PPC: 10% of all search clicks VS. SEO: 90% of all search clicks
Markets don’t stay this inefficient for long.
No wonder investors have jumped at opportunities like those Richard presented with Enquisite and others like Conductor ($10 million raised in April), Marin Software ($13 million raised in April), Optify ($2.75 million raised in Oct. ‘08) and Yield Software ($6 million raised in June ‘08). And no wonder they were calling up SEOmoz, hoping to learn more about us and see if there was an investment opportunity.
Despite these inquiries, our board meetings in October & November were very operational and tactical. We were at the tail end of turning around from cash flow negative to positive, and there were some high stress moments, capped off by a working "product" meeting in early December. At that roundtable, I presented some concepts for SEOmoz’s future product direction and got shot down. And thank goodness I did.
The problem with entrepreneurs like me is that our creativity, emotional attachments to technology and love of product "coolness" can sometimes get in the way of making things that real people find really usable & useful. When that happens, it’s even more essential to be surrounded by smart, secure people who feel up to the challenge of challenging you.
After the meeting ended, I spent a lot of time thinking strategically about where we needed to go. That thinking ended up in dozens of notepad pages, and I’ve shared a few below:
My goal was to get to the core of the "SEO Problem" with a software product, and luckily, I didn’t have to go that road alone. Adam Feldstein, a longtime friend of mine, joined SEOmoz in January and we spent an entire week together in the mozplex’s meeting room, diagramming a product evolution we’ve come to call "Turbomoz" internally (much as we did when Linkscape was called "Carhole").
Adam and I presented a walkthrough of our new plan in early April to a packed room, including the SEOmoz board and several internal folks. The feedback was terrific - they loved not only the product itself, but the simplicity, the design, the intuition behind it and the potential to reach a lot more of the market than just the intermediate-to-expert level SEOs that make up the majority of our members today. An early version of "Turbomoz" is set to release in late September.
A few weeks later, I headed to Boston, where I got to spend a lot of time with a great friend and mentor, Dharmesh Shah, the founder of Hubspot and blogger at OnStartups. Dharmesh and I talked a lot about our two companies - how they’re growing, what the economic downturn has impacted, where we see opportunities and what makes a startup successful. It was a tremendous learning experience, and something I can’t recommend enough to others. If you’re currently running a business and can find someone with a similar model who’s willing to exchange information and ideas, do it. Being a CEO can be a very lonely job - even close friends and family won’t be able to empathize in the same way another CEO can. Many cities even have startup support groups (although they’re not usually called that, exactly).
My visits with Dharmesh inspired me to be more self analytical and more self critical. If there are things in the business that aren’t working, places where opportunity isn’t being executed upon, and chances to make a difference, I owe it not only to myself, but to our investors and, most importantly, to my employees to make the change. As the late King of Pop said, "start with the man in the mirror."
Just a couple weeks later, I landed in San Francisco. If you haven’t read the back-and-forth between Silicon Valley vs. Seattle VC/entrepreneur/tech startup, check out Glenn Kelman (Redfin’s CEO) comparing the two, Michael Arrington responding & Glenn firing back. There’s a grain of truth to the staments they make:
Sure Seattle is beautiful (Kelman talks about lakes and outdoor stuff a lot in his post). And if you want to have a balanced, healthy lifestyle, that’s a great place to do it. If you don’t think you have what it takes to make it in Silicon Valley, maybe Seattle or other mini-tech hubs is the place for you. But the best of the best come to Silicon Valley to see if they’re as good as the legends that came before them. It’s a competitive advantage to be here. And if you aren’t willing to take advantage of every possible advantage to make your crazy startup idea work, perhaps you shouldn’t be an entrepreneur.
The "valley culture" of depriving oneself of everything else except work really does exist, and it’s easy to become both enamored and afraid of it very quickly. But I also agree with Glenn that:
So even though all of us in Seattle would probably concede that Silicon Valley is generally better for startups than anywhere else, that doesn’t mean that we have to agree with Michael that Silicon Valley is always better, or better in every way. For starters, people in Seattle have helped me in an open-hearted, small-town way that I might not have found in the Valley.
And where Michael and I really disagree is on whether it is good some times to be away from all the me-too Valley companies trying to make money on Internet ads, even though he complains about them every day on TechCrunch.
I was very lucky to get some of that same "open-hearted, small-town" help, even in the Valley. A few years ago, Michael Eisenberg introduced me to Nirav Tolia, a former EIR with Benchmark, and the two of us have become fast friends. Nirav’s just completed a test release of a great startup - Fanbase (should be launching formally in a few months) - and has introduced me to a number of terrific entrepreneurs, nearly all of whom have great interest in SEO. At dinner one night, a fellow CEO (Thomas Layton of Metaweb), crystalized the question that had been weighing on my mind for the last 8 months - should SEOmoz take another round of funding?
Here, word for word (to the best of my memory), is what Thomas said to me:
Let’s make this easy. I’ll give you three things, you prioritize them, and I’ll tell you whether you should take the money.
- Do you want to be the CEO and in control of the company’s destiny?
- Do you want to make the most possible money from an exit?
- Do you want the company to achieve the most and become the most it can be?
I don’t actually remember which one I picked on the spot… I think I struggled a bit to be confident in my response, and that’s because honestly, I hadn’t been asking myself that question, even though it’s something every CEO/founder should inherently know. A few days later, though, the answer was clear - #3. I want SEOmoz to be all that it can be. I believe in SEO. I believe in the people here. And I believe that with the right help - and another dose of all the positive things our first round brought us - we can achieve even more remarkable things.
Thus, we’re exploring the VC path, talking to those folks who’ve been calling and thinking a bit more seriously about a series B. It’s not something we’re definitely pursuing, and plenty of circumstances could change our minds about whether it’s the right option. As the media is quick to remind us, valuations and deal terms are not great right now, and with SEOmoz in such a strong position, we can afford to be patient, be picky and choose the right partner.
What I’ve Learned About Myself
- I do well with external pressure, even when it’s critical. I think that comes from childhood, when my Dad was obsessed with my grades and it made me work harder.
- I get inspired by those who’ve achieved amazing things. I want to meet more people like that and spend time with them - it’s a remarkable experience.
- I need to do a better job of thinking long term, even when I’m mired in the day-to-day. CEOs are supposed to be visionaries, and it’s irresponsible for me to be slacking off.
- I need to find ways to outsource more of my personal workload and trust others to do as good a job or better than I could.
- My stubborness is sometimes useful, but I need to do a better job of letting go when the situation warrants.
- I’m so lucky - so much luckier than I’ve ever considered - to be where I am. Thankfully, it appears I’m not alone - if Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (worth reading, BTW) is right, everyone who gets to do these kinds of exciting things in their lives owes that opportunity to the people around them, and I’m no different.
My Top Advice for Other Entrepreneurs
- Don’t be too scared of taking venture capital - it gets a lot of negative press, but in the end, you and the VCs want exactly the same thing - for your company to succeed magnificiently.
- Find VCs you love to work with - people you want to be friends with and spend time with and drink beer with. Find people who care not just about your company, but about you personally. I think this has been the best part about Michelle & Kelly on our board - they don’t just care about the numbers. They care about us. Seriously consider being flexible on deal terms if it means working with the right people (though often those "right people" are the same ones who’ll give you the best deals).
- Be relentlessly self-analytical and self-critical. Work hard to identify your flaws and pad them with team members who can compensate. My relentless optimism and cavalier march to spend money to grow the company is tempered by Sarah’s risk intolerance. It’s a great balance, and every company needs it.
- Leverage the entrepreneurial community around you. If my experience is any guide, CEOs and startup founders love to help and guide others - and that culture isn’t limited to Silicon Valley or Seattle or Boston, either. I’ve had friends from New York City to Reykjavik to Shanghai, Sydney, London and Nashville lend their time, their networks and their advice. I only hope that I can do as well to help others.
Questions & Answers
In the spirit of this post, and of SEOmoz’s guiding principles, I’d like to open the comments to questions and offer to answer anything I reasonably can in a post next week. You can also feel free to email me if you have private questions. One quick thing I’ll say is that for those seeking VC, three resources have been of great help to me - OnStartups, VentureHacks and Hacker News.
I sincerely hope this blog post has brought you value and helped bring a little more transparency to a world that’s rarely seen outside of Sand Hill Road meeting rooms.
How to Make Easy Money on Google
Want To Make a Living on Google Money?
AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand…
In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.”
It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com, all promising some variation on one theme: Just buy our guide and we’ll teach you how to make thousands from Google, right in the privacy of your own home!
Google’s 5-Step Easy Money Process
- Find a high paying affiliate program which sells a product about how easy it is to make money on Google.
- Ideally the program will just charge for shipping to get the credit card details, and make most of the money through back end reverse billing fraud.
- Create a fake blog (or fake news site) complete with fake comments about how you lost your job, this program took you from zero to here. And it makes you 6 figures a year.
- Do keyword research to find freshly desperate and unemployed people.
- Create ads targeting those people and market them through Google AdWords.
Drug Dealers ***ARE*** Affiliated With Their Drugs
The surprising thing about this process is that Google claims no affiliation to these ads. From the above AdAge article
“As Google is not affiliated with these sites, we can’t comment on individual claims,” a [Google] spokesman said.
Nice try, but Google ***is*** affiliated with such offers, since they create the distribution channel. Just as a guy who just happens to have a boat load of cocaine he is distributing to clients ***is*** affiliated with the drugs if he is caught in possession.
Businesses Are Responsible for Their Own Business Strategy
Google gives webmasters this guideline “Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to.” Why shouldn’t it apply to Google as well?
As long as Google has 30%+ profit margins they are making a BUSINESS DECISION to run these fraudulent ads. They could spend 1% of revenue on cleaning up this issue (if they wanted to), but they are making a choice not to. Hal Varian has probably done the math, and the offers stay after repeated media exposure of the issue.
Google keeps running the ads because they want the revenue. And they know exactly how much revenue comes from scamming consumers with these ads:
Amoral Ad Networks Constantly Promote Fraud
Is risked mis-priced? Is an asset class overvalued due to fraud? Are consumers unaware of a new type of fraud?
It does not matter where there is a bubble in the economy - amoral ad networks will find it. As Jay Weintraub put it:
The truly complex part of the problem comes from the size of the un-branded continuity program market and just how much it is helping certain companies hit their numbers, along with what happens were it to go away. In so many respects, the current fakevertising trend is the 2008-9 equivalent of the mortgage advertising boom from 2002-2006.
Not surprising that yield based ad systems promote the biggest scams in the marketplace. Mortgage fraud was a multi-trillion dollar industry, and even as the market heads south, there is still yet another way to exploit the public with ads by targeting their dire situation and desperation.
Could Fraudulent Ads Eventually Change the Web?
If the central network operators do not police their networks then eventually web users will stop trusting online advertising. That (plus pending affiliate regulation) could eventually lead to a significant thinning of competition for mindshare online. It might also push many media companies away from ad based business models to creating businesses built through actually taking money from real human customers.
Please Help Google Fix This Issue
Since Google has not put up consumer warnings and lots of consumers are getting ripped off, I believe it is our job as marketers to help warn consumers about this brazen looting and fraud. If you have a blog or website could you please write about this topic? Bonus points if you reference this post using keywords like “Google money” and “make money” as the anchor text such that we can try to rank a warning high up in the Google search results.
And if you write about this topic to help consumers and your site does not carry AdSense ads on it, please list it in the comments below such that anyone who comes to this page can see how big of an issue this has become.
A Bad Day for Search Engines: How News of Michael Jackson’s Death Traveled Across the Web
Posted by Danny Dover
Update: Google representatives responded to complaints of the Google News delay with the following explanation:
"The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We’re sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for." - Source
First and foremost, let me extend my best wishes to the family and friends of Michael Jackson. I can only imagine the pain of losing a close friend and then having to watch it play out on a global stage. He made an extraordinary impact on the world and although not perfect, he is a teacher even in death (as evidenced by this post).
The following is a timeline of how the news of the Prince of Pop’s death traveled across the internet. Not all the times are exact (they might be off by up to 5 minutes) and not every source is included. All times are GMT.
From an internet marketer’s perspective, I found this story fascinating to watch unfold. I was impressed by the speed of information distribution and very surprised to see which site posted the news first. Wikipedia is still the fastest news aggregator. It was faster than Twitter and much faster than Google.
19:21 - One of Michael Jackson’s employee’s calls 911
The next forty-nine minutes are best described as the calm before the storm. The Los Angles Fire Department arrived at Jackson’s rented mansion in Bel Air and family members were alerted of the news.
20:10 - (Story Breaks) A small entertainment site called x17online.com breaks the story.
They post photos and a brief story a full 20 minutes before the much larger entertainment site TMZ.com posts the news. Information goes live on the internet. BOOM!
20:30 - TMZ.com posts "Michael Jackson — Cardiac Arrest"
TMZ.com posts the story on its homepage and the story is distributed to hundreds of thousands of people via RSS. My guess is they paid a pretty penny for the image above and it paid for itself ten fold with all of the links TMZ got from the story.
21:12 - Wikipedia reports Jackson’s Cardiac Arrest
A member of Wikipedia adds the news of the Cardiac Arrest to Jackson’s Wikipedia article. This is well before any other news or social media source.
21:20 - TMZ.com posts story of death
Report of Jackson’s death starts to show up on RSS feeds and eventually Twitter. It is 11 minutes before the first person clicks on a bit.ly link to TMZ.
21:30 - CNNbrk tweets that Jackson goes to hospital
The official CNN account tweets to its 2 million followers that Jackson went to hospital after suffering from a cardiac arrest
21:31 - First bit.ly link to TMZ story
The first bit.ly link about the story is clicked by someone which leads them to the TMZ article.
21:45 - Wikipedia freezes Michael Jackson page
After an explosion of edits to Jackson’s Wikipedia article, editors take the step of locking it down in protective status.
21:46 - Wikipedia article discussion has first reports of Jackson’s death (Note: Event updated 6/27/09 due to new information)
Wikipedia editors first mention Jackson’s death on the article discussion page.
21:50 - bit.ly link reaches high of 2,500 clicks a minute
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Bit.ly link to TMZ hits high of almost 42 clicks a second.
22:03 - TMZ story on Jackson’s death is submitted to Digg
A bit late to the game, the story that would eventually go on to be one of the most dugg stories ever is first submitted to the site.
22:11 - TMZ story goes popular on Digg
The story is moved to the front page of Digg where its distribution erupts.
22:19 - "RIP Michael Jackson" tops Trends on Twitter
Story takes the next step and appears on Twitter’s Trends. Tens of millions of Twitter users now can see the story.
22:20 - MSNBC.com Confirms Jackson’s Death
One hour after the news of Jackson’s death hits the internet, the first mainstream news source publishes a confirmation article.
22:25 - CNN.com Confirms Jackson’s Death
CNN, out maneuvered by TMZ and MSNBC, confirms Jackson’s death.
22:27 - Wikipedia first reports Jackson’s death
Wikipedia editors get enough evidence to post Jackson’s death.
22:34 - Approximately 2000 mentions a minute of Michael Jackson on Twitter
Mentions of Michael Jackson hit an all time high on Twitter with nearly 1,500 a minute. That’s almost 20% of all tweets at that time!
22:38 - Twitter starts to overload. First signs of the fail whale
Twitter starts to falter as a result of the massive spike.
22:40 - First stories of Jackson’s death make it on Google News
1 hour and 20 minutes after the story is first posted on TMZ, Google News starts to report the story.
22:46 - Google News Results of Jackson’s death start showing up on the results page for the query "Michael Jackson"
Google News results top the Google results page for "Michael Jackson".
22:58 - Googlebot crawls CNN twitter feed
Google starts returning CNN’s twitter feed in "Michael Jackson" SERP and provides link to cached version.
23:00 - "Michael Jackson Died" shows up in Google Trends
Google trends updates and show’s "Michael Jackson Died" as hottest trending item.
23:18 - 4chan.org goes down
4chan members temporarily overload servers. I mention this mostly because I find it really funny. ;-p
23:47 - "Michael Jackson Heart Attack" and "Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest" show up as suggested search on Google Homepage for "Michael Jackson"
Indirect news of Jackson’s death (if someone types "Michael Jackson") shows up on Google’s homepage.
My Take Away:
Google has a really big problem and SEOs need to pay attention.
(Note: I choose Google rather than the other search engines because it leads them in all of the aspects I mention below. Everything I say about Google applies even more to the other search engines. I only have a basic idea of how difficult the technology problems are with the issues below. For better or for worse, I hold Google to a higher standard and I am not afraid to expect more.)
First, a little background information. I believe it was Ben Hendrickson who first mentioned to me the existence of three separate time priorities when indexing the web. He pointed out that the current version of Linkscape crawls and analyzes the slow moving web with a delay of about 4 weeks. (This is damn impressive given an index size of 54+ billion pages.) Blogscape (PRO Only) is much faster and aggregates the fast moving blogosphere of millions of feeds with less than 6 hours of delay. While impressive, we are still trying to catch up with Google and have started to run into the same wall as them. Sites like Twitter, have created a new real-time web. It is only in the order of perhaps hundreds of thousands of pages but indexing it is almost useless with a delay of more than a few seconds.
The events of Thursday demonstrated that Google is falling behind in the emerging real-time web. It was 3 hours and 17 minutes after TMZ first announced Michael Jackson had experienced cardiac arrest before it appeared as a auto completion suggestion on Google’s homepage. In the computer age that is a huge amount of time. It is 3 hours and 17 minutes during which consumers may choose to go somewhere other than Google to get the information they want.
As SEOs, we largely rely on the success of Google for our incomes. These are the same incomes that put food on the table for our families. It is easy to think that Google’s technology is flawless, after all, it really is incredible. However, it is experiences like the events of Thursday that reveal how truly vulnerable the search engines are.
For me it was humbling,
Teaser: SEOmoz does have a plan for the real-time web and we are excitedly working on it. More information to come in the future. 
If you have any other story sources that you think are worth sharing, feel free to post them in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me or send me a private message if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!
SEM Training: Do You Make These 14 Common SEM Errors?
There are a lot of parallels between Google AdWords and SEO, and a lot of the beginner mistakes are the same for both traffic acquisition strategies. I figured it would be worth outlining some of the most common ones to help save you money on your search engine marketing campaigns.
- Weak Domain Name
- All Search Traffic Driven to Homepage
- No Link Building
- All Links to the Homepage
- No Link Anchor Text Variation
- No Focus on Quality
- Lacking On Page Optimization
- No Site Structure
- Site With No Value Add
- Competitive Saturated Market With Inadequate Budget
- Picking a Market for 1
- Pick a Market Which Does Not Monetize
- Over-Aggressive Monetization From Day 1
- What Other Common SEM Errors do You See?
1. Weak Domain Name
Google AdWords
When I interviewed Perry Marshall about AdWords he recommended split testing URLs because the URL can and does have a major impact on your ad clickthrough rate.
Since Google factors click-through rate (CTR) into their quality scores, anything that influences CTR influences your click prices. And while competitors can and will steal your AdWords ad copy, they CAN’T steal your domain name.
SEO
There are many potential errors that can be made with domain names. Two of the more common errors are creating a domain name that is impossible to remember and creating a name that restricts expansion.
Recommendations
Some people feel the need to limit their domain name budget to $10, but it is a foolish strategy. Almost every piece of marketing you do will be influenced by your domain name. Your domain name has limited recurring costs associated with it, but can represent a huge recurring market advantage or disadvantage. Yeah for CreditCards.com, and boo for cheapest-online-apply-credit-cards-and-loans.info.
- If you are using Google AdWords for a new product or a non-branded product then test clickthrough rates across multiple domain names.
- Make sure your domain name allows you to expand as needed. This is sorta an error I made early on with this site…I had no idea how successful the site would become when I started it and did not anticipate us creating the #1 SEO training program back when I thought of selling an ebook.
- Avoid names that are impossible to remember. If you intend to create something that is easy to market online and offline then your domain name must pass the phone test, which typically means avoiding hyphens & numbers. This is especially true if you are trying to build a big brand.
- If you feel your company may expand internationally it is best to buy any matching domain extensions where you might intend to eventually do business.
- Exact match domain names can create a big SEO advantage if you can afford them - since some engines may give them a relevancy boost and your domain name influences the anchor text people use when they link at your website.
2. All Search Traffic Driven to Homepage
Google AdWords
1 page can only be relevant for a certain sector of search queries. In an efficient market anyone who directs all traffic to the homepage will lose a lot of money.
Every additional click you force users to make has some amount of slippage. When using Google AdWords / pay per click marketing a small change in conversion rates can be the difference between sustained profits and sustained losses.
SEO
It is sorta impossible to make a page “optimized” for hundreds or thousands of popular keywords because eventually after you add enough different keywords in the page copy it ends up reading bad and it harms conversion rates.
With SEO efforts mis-directing traffic is not as obvious as it is with AdWords because you don’t have to pay for every click. But giving users an irrelevant experience still means you are throwing money away and only operating at a fraction of your potential.
Recommendations
With the prevalence of Google (and web search in general) every page of your site is the front door. We navigate via search. So map out keywords against URLs and try to offer the most relevant user experience whenever possible.
Observe how we map out core keywords, variations, and modifiers.
Some Google AdWords advertisers take perceived relevancy one step further and use the search query to help define the page content through the use of keyword insertion into their page copy and/or altering the page based on geographic information based on your computer’s IP address.
3. No Link Building
Google AdWords
The equivalent of links to AdWords is keywords in your AdWords account. If you only advertise on 1 or 2 keywords you miss out on a large stream of relevant traffic.
SEO
If you build it they will come is simply not true in the search game. If it was easy to rank for competitive keywords without links then few companies would buy AdWords ads. You can’t typically rank a new site until you have some level of awareness. Search engines follow people. Links are seen as votes of trust.
Recommendations
With AdWords, don’t just bid on 1 keyword. Look for additional relevant variations that make sense. If you don’t mind splashing out $50 you can also look at what competing sites are advertising on using SEM Rush, Keyword Spy, SpyFu, and/or KeyCompete. There are so many new tools popping up in this market segment that I have not had the time to review them all.
For SEO, download SEO for Firefox and the SEO Toolbar and look at how many links competing sites have and how many domain names those links come from. You will likely need to build some number of links in the range of what competing sites have (from a similar set of sites) to rank. Today is the perfect day to start building links. And yesterday was even better. 
4. All Links to the Homepage
Google AdWords
Since you are buying the links from the search engines based on keyword, this problem would be corrected by solving issue #2.
SEO
A variation of the above thinking. Most quality sites have useful content somewhere that people link to editorially. If all your links point at the homepage then that means you are not using anchor text from external links to boost your internal page ranks. In most markets that creates a big loss considering that some of those pages would get a lot of traffic with just a few more deep links which would yield higher rankings.
Recommendations
Search is a winner take most market. Analyze your traffic patterns, rankings, and target keywords to ensure you are promoting key pages. Look at top competing sites and keyword ranking values to gain additional insights.
Create linkworthy content that people would want to link at and push market it. The objective (vs self-interested) viewpoint here is “if you did not own your site what is unique about it that would make you want to visit it every week and/or recommend it to a friend?”
5. No Link Anchor Text Variation (or AdWords Ad Copy Variation)
Google AdWords
You shouldn’t use the exact same ad copy on all of your keywords. You should segment it out by trying to understand user demand and create compelling advertising text that is relevant to the search query, relevant to the user demand, and relevant to your landing page. If you use a single generic boilerplate ad copy you are loosing a lot of money because your ad will not look as relevant as some of the top competing ads.
SEO
When people link to things naturally there tends to be some variation involved. If all your inbound links say “my keywords” then that can look suspicious…particularly if you are buying lots of links.
Recommendations
With AdWords, at a minimum you would want to use dynamic keyword insertion. But if you sell a lot of different products then you should try to find a way to match up small groups of relevant keywords against a set of ad copy. Make your core keywords stand out on their own, and be willing to be somewhat less descriptive with low search volume backfill keywords.
With SEO you should try to mix up your link anchor text when you are manually building links. If you create original compelling content that people want to link at (and push market it to the right audience) then that will also pull in natural anchor text.
6. No Focus on Quality
Google AdWords
Some advertisers are compelled to go after “cheap” clicks. But some of the more expensive keywords are expensive because they are associated with significant and valuable consumer demand.
SEO
Google algorithms estimate the probability of a new site being quality or low quality. If you start off with 2,000+ “free” directory links you align your site with sites that are often of lower quality. Similarly, if you try to promote watered down or average content then few people will be receptive to those efforts.
Recommendations
There is nothing wrong with buying cheap traffic, but make sure you track the business value you get from that traffic. If you buy “cheap” traffic from 3rd tier ad networks and/or keywords without any commercial intent those will not build your business anywhere near as well as developing a solid traffic stream from valuable industry keywords on leading search engines.
Start your link building efforts with quality links first. As your site gets more trusted you can fill in some lower quality links as well, but you don’t want to do it first, and you don’t want to do it in bulk.
When you decide to do push marketing for link building make sure the content you are promoting is unique, original, useful, compelling, & citation-worthy.
7. Lacking On Page Optimization
Google AdWords
Quality user experience and usability are crucial to converting well. When users come from search to your site they are switching channels. The more cues you can give them that they are in the right place (like relevant page headings + navigation) the higher your conversion rates and visitor value should be.
SEO
For really competitive queries links are crucial, but you can rank for many less competitive keywords and keyword variations without lots of links (because there is much less competition for those keywords). And even if you have lots of links, it is still typically hard to rank for keyword phrases that are not in your page copy.
Recommendations
With Google AdWords you can reach many of the stray searchers by using a combination of phrase match and broad match, and then using negative match to filter out irrelevant searches.
For every person searching for “seo” or “sem” there are probably 10 people searching for more obscure queries like “how do I promote my business on Google?” You can see how our page about link building ranks for hundreds of related keywords.
This is probably the single most powerful graphic explaination of why having lots of useful on-page content:
With SEO you can reach a lot of the searchers by using alternate word forms, alternate word orders, related phrases, and keyword modifiers in your content.
8. No Site Structure
Google AdWords
If your AdWords ad campaigns are not well organized then you are likely losing money. A strong site structure also helps ensure that your AdWords account has a strong structure, which can aid profitability.
SEO
If your site is not structured well then…
- navigation will likely be hard or confusing
- some of your key pages may not get much of your link authority
- some of your unimportant pages may accumulate a lot of your link authority
Recommendations
Most successful websites have a structure in which key pages which are mapped out against user demand and search volume.
- Create separate AdWords campaigns based on goals. Perhaps you can have campaigns for brand related searches, seasonal offers, public relations, campaigns that are based on ROI metrics, and even backfill campaigns like misspellings.
- Some content management systems (CMS) have major errors with duplicate content and site structure issues. A review of that topic is beyond the scope of this article, but search for the name of the CMS and SEO prior to implementing it to verify there are no serious issues and/or that there are easy fixes on the market.
- Set up site categories and sub-categories that are aligned against the keywords people use to search for your products and services.
- If you blog (or publish content regularly) reference older related materials when relevant.
- If your content is in a database you can use automated contextual links to help fix some site structural issues and redistribute PageRank down toward lower pages in your site structure.
9. Site With No Value Add
Google AdWords
If your site does not add much value it can be quite hard to sustain profit margins in the AdWords market. Affiliates routinely copy the work of each other and drive up click prices, which kills profit margins.
SEO
My very first profitable website was a no value add website that I got some spammy links for. The site did make thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions (a gift from God at the time), but that income was only made ***because*** I was a bad speller and misspelled some casino brand names back before search engines integrated spell correcting aggressivley. Such a site would simply go nowhere today.
Google often considers sites without value add to be unneeded duplication and/or spam. If you ever get a chance to read some of the Google Remote Quality Rater Documents you can see what Google believes is associated with “value add.”
Recommendations
- In competitive AdWords markets competing businesses are forced to keep improving their business processes and efficiencies to be able to afford increasing bids from competing businesses.
- If you have a lower lifetime customer value than competing businesses you may eventually be driven out of the market.
- With some seedy affiliate offers in many cases the only people with sustained profit margins are basically those who are surprisingly sleazier than the rest of the market or those who are barely breaking even themselves, but are using their blog to build a downstream of followers that they get commissions from.
- Some (perhaps most?) affiliate networks ***will*** shave your commissions AND steal your keyword list if you send them the data.
- If you don’t have a value add and want to play catch up in a competitive SEO market you need to have some sort of competitive advantage (be it nepotism, domain name, market experience, etc.).
- Making paid things freely available, creating useful software or tools, and having deeper & better editorial are 3 great ways to add value and win marketshare.
10. Competitive Saturated Market With Inadequate Budget
Google AdWords
In some markets it is hard to compete buying traffic without having a strong brand. If Geico pays Google $30 a click, but only pays affiliates $10 per lead then there is no way an affiliate can compete against Geico on the core industry keywords like auto insurance.
SEO
Want to rank for hotels and insurance? Me too. But I am uncertain if I have the resources to do it from scratch in a lasting manner given the algorithmic trends promoting well branded business and how corporations are increasing their SEO budgets.
Recommendations
- Have big ideas, but set reasonable goals, and measure progress.
- Do the math in advanced to estimate how much you can afford to pay for a click.
- Pick and chose your spots in the Google AdWords market. If after you do significant testing and optimization a word is still losing money consider dropping it.
- Try to pick a market position you feel you can dominate. The #20 result for “insurance” produces traffic worth ~ $0. The #2 or #3 result for “pet insurance” yields much more.
- Make at least 1 incremental improvement to your web business everyday.
- Aggressively re-invest early profits into growing your website and building a moat.
11. Picking a Market for 1
Google AdWords & SEO
If there is no demand for an idea then it is quite hard to create demand through search engine marketing. Search engine marketing works best when it captures existing demand.
Recommendations
- Keyword research tools can give you estimates of search volume.
- Since AdWords is so much quicker and easier to test than building a full site and implementing an SEO campaign, you can use AdWords to test market demand and interest for an offer before spending money building and marketing a full website.
- It can be good to be out front of trends (as one of the easiest ways to win a market is to be the first person in it), but just as easily you can go after an established high money market with your own original spin or angle.
12. Pick a Market Which Does Not Monetize
Google AdWords
If similar competing business models have much higher visitor value you may have to change your business model to compete. Some low earning business models might simply be precluded from participating in the AdWords market in a meaningful way.
SEO
There is nothing wrong with building a site about a topic you are passionate about and interested in without knowing how well it will monetize, but if you are trying to build a business you should pick something with a high enough visitor value to create enough profit potential to make it worth the time and money investment.
Recommendations
If you are planning on participating in the AdWords market, but have a low margin business then you should look for ways to increase profit margins, customer order size, and lifetime customer value.
If you run an editorial site it can be a good idea to under-monetize off the start to build market momentum without people viewing you as a competitor, but it can be hard to bolt on a business model if you have spent a lot of time servicing the wrong market segments.
13. Over-Aggressive Monetization From Day 1
Google AdWords
If you are buying traffic there is no problem with trying to monetize it. But most website visitors will not convert.
SEO
Sell in line text links & have pop ups? Is ever other post an affiliate link? If so, why would anyone want to subscribe to an ad stream when there are many useful alternatives to look at?
Recommendations
- Since most website visitors will not convert to paying customers on the first visit, you should look to establish a relationship with them by giving them a free offer and/or some reason to come back to your website. You can see the offer we make at the bottom of our pages and on our join now page.
- Existing leading trusted sites that have built up a following benefit from cumulative advantage. If your site is brand new and driven by editorial content it is a good idea to give away more value than you capture. Under-monetize until you build enough market momentum to make your rankings stick even when you do monetize.
- Consider monetizing some areas of your site more aggressively while not monetizing other sectors of your site, but instead using them for public relations and link building.
14. What Other Common SEM Errors do You See?
Whiteboard Friday - Correlation, Causation & SEO
Posted by great scott!
This week, Rand is joined by one of our in-house data geniuses, Ben Hendrickson, to talk more about some of our recently released correlation data to support guidelines for SEO best practices.
While correlation doesn’t always equal causation, it’s still very interesting to look at the attributes and features high ranking sites tend to have in common. Comparing this data to known and accepted SEO practices can help to reinforce widely held notions or give us some insight into how the algorithms are changing; both important areas of analysis for successful online marketers.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Correlation, Causation & SEO from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Want to learn even more about what Ben discovered in our data correlation analysis? He’ll be presenting his detailed findings at our SEO Training Series Seminar right here in Seattle, August 24th & 25th.
5 Ways to Improve your SEO Landing Pages
Posted by Sam Niccolls
(NOTE FROM RAND: Please welcome Sam Niccolls, SEOmoz’s newest addition to the consulting team - we hope you all like him as much as we do!)
A lot a marketers focus optimization efforts at the bottom of their conversion funnels. One effective way to examine conversion rates at the bottom of the funnel is to create a custom segment that excludes visitors who bounce. As this segment gives you a view of your engagement data that only shows interested visitors, this is a great way to inform site changes. After all, these visitors are the ones who are most likely to convert into paying customers.
But what about the top of the funnel? Are too many of your visitors leaving on arrival? If so, delve deeper into which pages are causing you the most bleeding. And don’t get too far ahead of yourself with site changes before you first identify your highest volume SEO entry pages. To make site changes without looking the top of your conversion funnel is to rent a tux before finding a prom date. It costs a lot and it leads to embarrassment.
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Yet many sites still don’t think of pages other than their homepage as landing pages. It is not just pimple popping amateurs making this mistake, either. Numerous startups and online retailers, who get 80% of their overall traffic from Google, fall into the trap of designing individual product pages that rank well, drive 50-60% of their overall traffic, yet have bounce rates over 75%.
Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist, always says your homepage is not a golden door through which all your visitors will pass. And he’s right. Search engines have flipped the funnel. Every page that drives traffic is a landing page. But just because Google decides your homepage doesn’t mean you can’t optimize the performance of your lower level pages. Do you have underperforming product listings, profile pages, articles, or other entry URLs?
If so, here’s a quick checklist to revamp your lackluster landings:
1) Reassuring Policies
If you have reassuring polices, whether they are privacy assurances, guarantees, rebates, returns, or whatever else, tell your first time visitors about them. These don’t have to be flashing lights or neon arrows, but look at how scannable your "deep content" pages are. Two things that can be tremendously effective are graphics and icons. In the absence of any images, however, a single line saying "We never sell your personal information" can do a lot. And don’t bury these reassurances at the bottom of the page. Put them at the top of the page, or next to your e-mail collection field (if you’re collecting e-mail from the page).
2) Testimonials
You have raving fans, right? I’m sure there are at least a couple in the woodwork. Why not let them sing your praise as part of your introduction to your visitors? Landing page optimization is not a cocktail party. It’s okay to brag a little. Especially if it means improving your bottom line. Amazon does a great job of prominently exposing five star reviews on their product level pages, as does Yelp. Both are good examples to look at.
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3) No Credit Card Forms
Single page forms are one thing if you are running a free trial period. Just last week I saw some massive returns for an e-commerce site off of some landing pages they created for an SEM campaign where they offered a 14-day free trial. But SEO landing pages are different. They are typically part of your internal site navigation. Plus, they are really more like first dates than "take it or leave it" offers. For this reason, don’t be too forward. Show some leg and entice your visitors to click a second time, but save the credit card forms for further down the funnel. I am not saying you can’t open the kimono later, but buy your visitors a drink first.
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4) Email Collection
If you have a newsletter, blog, or another way that you maintain an ongoing conversation with customers, you should offer a field for people to subscribe via e-mail and RSS. This might not impact bounce rate significantly, but this type of e-mail collection is inexpensive and it is a great way to increase user retention. Several websites whose sign up button treatments I like are Futurenow, Mint’s Blog and Fred Wilson’s Blog. As you can see, Mint doesn’t show a graphic for "sign up by e-mail," which is a wasted opportunity. More than likely e-mail will comprise the majority of your subscribers. So make e-mail sign up as easy as possible.
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5) Look at Bounce Rate by URL
Unless the volume warrants it, don’t analyze individual URLs; analyze URL structures. For example, say you have an article subfolder on your site – http://www.yourdomain.com/articles/title-of-post. Rather than looking at each individual article, run a landing page report and look at your pages in aggregate. As a sum, what pages are hurting or helping you the most? Where are you retaining visitors? Where are you losing them? If you can learn anything from your most effective pages, apply those learnings to your least effective pages. Whatever your RegEx writing tells you, focus on making the most global changes possible. In other words, change things that will have the greatest, most immediate impact such as headers, persistent a or c columns, and first time user treatments.
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Whatever you glean from your landing page analysis, abandon the myth of the golden homepage. And if you are not thinking of your "deep content" pages as landing pages, identify your biggest opportunities and let your design team go to work. There is probably a lot of low hanging fruit. Besides, if you don’t, you might find your website dateless at the conversion prom, and nobody wants to be standing in the rain with a wilted dandelion boutonniere. That’s a fate I wouldn’t wish on the worst of websites, not even Danny Dover’s favorite domain.