The Research Playbook

Archive for the ‘SEO Strategy’ Category

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Ask yourself this, “would I stay on my company’s home page or landing page more than 3 seconds?” Website experts tell us that new website visitors decide whether to stay and look around or leave a site in about 3 to 5 seconds. If this is true, and we believe it is the answer to the above question is critical.

It’s hard to be honest about this in regard to your own website, the only way to get a fair answer is to see what people do when they arrive at your website for the first time. A bounce rate analysis is just what the doctor ordered – think of it not as a cure, but as an x-ray that you read to see if there are any problems. However, you cannot just take one x-ray, you have to take different views more like a CAT scan when you explore bounce rates.

First step separate new visitors from returning visitors. Next, compare the bounce rates of these two groups. Now explore the new visitor group by the page they landed on to examine which pages are especially problematic. Then look at how visitors found these pages on your site.

Keep digging until you have a clear picture of what is driving your overall bounce rate – focus on the area that generates the highest bounce rate, fix it [often easier said than done] and move to the next problem. Systematically identifying and addressing bounce rate issues will make a material difference in the performance of your website.

Please tell a friend about this blog. Thanks!

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Recently, AboutUs published a very important update titled, “How to Avoid an Unnatural Links Penalty.”  This is important information to have and I want to make sure my readers are in the “loop.”

As the article states, “Google is constantly adjusting its search engine algorithm in an attempt to serve up the best websites and most relevant results to searchers.  They’re at it again, and this time it’s a doozy.”

Trust me they are not exaggerating this can cause more problems than just a few SEO leaks. It behooves you to be on top of this new change, which clearly is and will continue to affect the SEO world.

For more details simply click on the link below.

AboutUs has done a very good job of laying it all out, and they provide guidance on what to look for and what to do. The 50 plus comments also provide valuable insights and a balanced perspective – Read it!

How to Avoid an Unnatural Links Penalty

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I think it’s fair to call Pinterest a phenomena given the short time it has taken them to go from start up to tipping point to critical mass. This networking platform has achieved remarkable success and as comScore reports, Pinterest has attracted nearly 12 million unique visitors in the month of January. There are already numerous articles and blog posts about this new network which began in May of 2010,  less than 2 years ago – now that’s a phenomena!

What sets Pinterest apart is its visual nature and with approximately 10 million members (and growing) it is not surprising companies want visibility for their brands on this site. Interesting content has gone viral more then once on Pinterest – what company would not want that to happen to them?

No other networking site has focused purely on the visual, which is a perfect fit for a company’s logo-brand building campaign. Pinterest has already gained the interest of and some very aggressive practices from well know brands. Companies are trying hard to use Pinterest as a venue to expose users to brand messages using the uniquely visual approach.

However, Pinterest is facing some issues. The interface is not as robust as some would like it especially regarding links to other sites like Twitter. Perhaps more importantly Pinterest must resolve the legal issue concerning pinning someone’s work without permission. It seems they need to be more like Facebook in this respect, though I’m guessing they would prefer to be less like Facebook in most respects. If Pinterest cannot resolve these issues quickly the growth they are experiencing now may not last.

While only time will tell if this “phenomena” has staying power, it certain is off to a very good start!

Currently membership is by invitation only, if you have not been able get invited contact me and I will happily set you up.

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If You Said No:

I think you need to rethink your position. If you don’t have a .CO strategy you might be left behind. The .CO domain name is gaining popularity and could fast become the extension of choice. Shorter than .com and filled with possibilities .CO names are selling at a premium – you have to ask yourself why.

Don’t take my word for it:

Check out what is happening in the marketplace. There are several, noteworthy examples of companies that are branding and re-branding with .CO, here are but a few:

In the short time the .CO domain has been available it has attracted more than a million registrations in over 200 countries, including brands such as Twitter, Amazon, and Overstock. Google has acquired the domain name G.CO as a short cut for its products and services. Google believes it can use this URL to better communicate and engage with its customers worldwide. In addition, well-known Silicon Valley Seed Fund and Incubator, 500 Startups, is planning to brand its web address with .CO – changing from 500Startups.com to 500.CO.

A truly global domain name .CO is quickly becoming the most recognized and credible web address for branding an online presence. The cutting edge technology and superior security along with improved rights protection, have placed the .CO domain in a great position as the new worldwide premier web address. And all of that was in 2012 – there’s more to come!

I’ll ask you again. Does your company need a .CO strategy? What do you think now?

Of course adopting a .CO strategy is only one of many ways to enhance your company’s visibility, learn more as we explore the continually changing and always challenging world of Internet marketing . . .

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A Rhetorical Question
The title is, of course, a rhetorical question, but the answer I’ll give is, “Probably not.” Developing a marketing and market research strategy [a.k.a. a well thought out plan] is a critically important task for every business.

However, companies, especially small and midsized firms can easily fall into the trap of using a disproportionate amount of time and resources for strategy at the expense of implementation or other activities. A strong tactical approach can often substitute for an elaborate strategy. Some of the areas typically under valued or at least under resourced are market intelligence [which can come in many forms], market research [not necessarily large expensive studies] and targeted marketing plans and campaigns.

Strategy is a fancy word for planning your marketing approach. Keeping it simple but directive helps to move your efforts from cerebral to action. Here is a checklist of critical questions to address as part of this process.

Seven Critical Questions
1. Can you describe what your company does in 140 to 160 characters or less? This is the new “pitch” parameter.

2. What do you want most from your marketing program? Are you building personal awareness, promoting your credibility as an expert, creating a sales pipeline, maintaining a loyal following?

3. Thinking about your target market or audience, how do they use social media?

4. Now, please describe your perfect customer: What does the person or company profile look like?

5. Describe your brand, that is, what defines you what is your value proposition?

6. What market intelligence needs or questions do you have?

Would you like to know what your customers and/or prospects are thinking – get in their heads?

7. How will you measure success?

Answering these questions is a good first step toward developing your business strategy. However, as stated, sometimes you don’t need a complicated strategy. A set of well conceived tactics that fit together is a plan that can get you started. Thus, while I always tell business owners to Plan the work – I also tell them to Work the plan – nothing is written in stone!

Social Media TIP: Always Start Networking When You Don’t Need To!

Recently, within a discussion about Why Local Businesses Need to Embrace Social Media a tangential conversation centered on why it’s a good idea for businesses to hire Gen-Y professionals to work on social media marketing. Yes, the person making the suggestion was a Gen-Yer and admitted her potential bias, but she made an excellent point. “We’ve grown up with these tools and understand their capabilities and reach better than most marketing professionals who have been in the game for a long time.” Christina Galoozis also reminded us to “Remember to always use social media to connect with and listen to customers -never just talk at them.”

In general, I think most of us would agree that people who grow up with a new technology have an advantage and the advice that Christina gave is important for us all to hear. However, I would like to add two points. First, Gen-Y professionals like all the rest of us, will have to learn new skills as the marketplace evolves and it always does. Therefore, any advantage this age cohort has may be short lived unless for some odd reason the world stands still for a decade, which is highly unlikely.

Second, I have had the pleasure of teaching more than a few Gen-Yers how to leverage Internet marketing and in particular social media platforms. Gen-Y professionals do not have a corner on the SM market. Nearly anyone can learn to use social media effectively to promote a business. Unfortunately, some people are intimidated by the vast landscape and for others the time commitment is overwhelming

Building a meaningful social presence takes time and often the expectation is to achieve immediate results. Most of us know instant gratification is generally not part of the game. Many of the older dogs who have been in the pack for a long time appreciate this fact of life. We cannot only learn, we can still teach, new tricks!

Many of us, regardless of how disciplined we are, fail to monitor our website’s progress on a regular basis or we think about it too much.  Either way, to stay on top of website traffic, scheduling a web analytics report to show up on your desk every week or every month is a good way to solve this problem.

However, being more efficient is not all you can accomplish. Reports can be customized and you can create more than one report. Perhaps a weekly report to help you stay current on a few vital metrics or measures and a month report that provides more depth.

The next question you are probably asking is, “Okay sounds like a good idea how do I create customized reports and schedule them.” Or Said more simply; “How do I do it?”

Customization is a lengthy topic and requires a good deal of planning. However, let’s assume that you are using Google Analytics (if you have a more sophisticated software solution you probably also have access to tech help – use it). There are a series of steps (outlined briefly below) you can use as a good starting point, but they are only a starting point. Customizing your analytics report requires more “how-to” instruction and we will have to tackle that in another venue.

Sending a scheduled report to your email account is relatively straightforward; here are the nine (9) basic steps:

1. Navigate to the report you’d like to receive by email.

2. Click the Email button below the report title.

3. Select the Schedule tab.

4. If you’re sending it to yourself, select Send to me to have it sent to your login email address.

• If you’re sending this report to others, enter their email addresses in the Send to others field.

5. Edit the Subject and/or Description if desired.

6. Select a Format in which to receive this report:

• PDF – portable document format (you need free Adobe Reader software to view this file)
• XML – extensible markup language
• Excel – comma separated values (or CSV) a file format used by most spreadsheet applications and text editors
• TSV – tab separated values; also readable by most spreadsheet applications or text editors

7. If you’d like to compare the currently selected date range with either the Previous date range make your selection from the Comparison drop-down list.

8. Choose the frequency you’d like to receive reports from the Schedule list.

NOTE – Your options are limited and include:

• Daily (sent each morning)
• Weekly (sent each Monday), no option to send weekly reports on any other day.
• Monthly (sent first day of each month), currently no other option
• Quarterly (sent first day of each quarter), same limitation

9. Click Schedule.

Your DONE!

There is a good deal of hype out there about automating article submissions to directories; my advice is – caveat emptor [buyer beware]. While it may be possible to automate submissions for a select group of directories, which use the same user interface (UI), the quality directories have unique UIs. Therefore, it may not be desirable. 

Furthermore, the promise of high value back links is a myth. The major search engines (SE) are too smart to fall for these hat tricks. The best practice is to work with fewer directories that are productive, posting the same article across [not within] directories to create views, website traffic, and quality back links. 

However, do not assume that this is a static situation, directories like all sites go up and down on Google page rankings and Alexa scores – so keep an eye on them. Additionally, remember not all directories are created equal with respect to productivity for your particular content. It is not a set-it-up-once and done type of game. However, you can create a process to make it efficient! 

Use a spreadsheet to log the articles you have submitted to each directory and track which articles have been approved. Also, track the numbers of views each directory has produced. You can add other elements to your log, such as reasons for not being approved and the directories current Alexa score – if you care about such information.

An article-marketing log is also a good place to keep your username and passwords for each directory, information you’ll want at your figure tips. It may help to set up a folder for the content (with subfolders for drafts vs. final products) and perhaps a SWIPE file of article ideas. Getting organized and creating a routine process will save time and reduce errors.

P.S. I have achieved expert and platinum status with a number of directories – the secret is to focus on quality… shhh don’t tell anybody.

P.P.S. You can outsource this work and that may well be a good solution for many businesses. Selecting the appropriate partner to help you is a topic we can talk about in the future.

Written in Collaboration with Charley Spektor

During the past several months, we have examined several website registration forms. Different businesses have different registration needs, but we must all grapple with a similar website registration problem: High and sometimes extremely high drop off rates once website visitors reach the registration page.

In many cases, we have seen more than 90% of the visitors abandon the registration forms on a site. Registration for these and all sites is the lifeblood of their business and in some cases it is the business – selling completed registrations to outside vendors as sales leads.

Optimizing Your Registration Forms and Pages
During our years working with online products and services we’ve committed our share of registration page blunders. Here are three key problems and three remedies that have improved performance.

1. Eliminate extraneous registration form fields
Ask yourself, “Do I really need all of the information I am currently gathering? What are the essential data points I need to capture?” Scratch the rest. One site we examined had at least six form fields you could eliminate immediately, with no loss of quality, including two “create password” fields and four (4) “never-to-be-used” postal-mail fields.

2. Eradicate extraneous non-form-field content from the registration page
When a website user reaches your registration page, you want to provide just enough non-form information to help facilitate the completion of the form. Get rid of all the non-essential and redundant material that prevents the user from focusing on the task-at-hand. For example, at the top of the registration page of one form we reviewed were two text lines that said essentially the same thing. They simply employed a different syntax of words.

One line of text read, “You’re requesting information from Vendor X.” Right underneath this line the reader confronted this text: “Vendor X Requested Information.” To add a bit more confusion, a third line under these two asked the reader if they are a “member” of the site (less than half of 1 percent of previous visitors had bothered to become members). However, there was a fourth line of text which asked the user to “Log-in to pre-fill” the form. If you’re the typical reader, you’ve already spent five to 15 seconds reviewing (and thinking about the meaning of) these four lines. What a colossal blunder!

3. Eliminate extraneous website navigational routes that prevent successful registration-form completion
This last tip should be a no-brainer, but it occurs all too often. The journey many sites force you to take to really complete your registration and information request is round-about to say the least.

For example, after users click the “Submit” button on one of the sites we visited, they don’t get the PDF they’re interested in. Instead, a “thank-you” page is triggered, informing users that ‘a confirmation email’ has been sent to their email address. When users click on that email link, they still don’t get the material. The users are sent to the site’s home page, where they have to log in with a password, and then, to rub salt in the wound, they’re left on their own to find the proper navigational path to the PDF they had originally expressed interest in via a search query. Because of the poor navigational links from the home page, most readers did not find the PDF – talk about an unfriendly experience!

Are you thinking, “Wow I’d better go check my site?” Or are you still feeling “It can’t happen here; not on my site; not on my watch.” Just for kicks, take a fresh look at your registration pages and let us know what you find.

Rewritten from Jarom Adair’s  “How to break a search engine’s heart”

We often focus on things that search engines like. It’s equally important to know what will get you banned, blacklisted, and shunned by search engines. These are sometimes called “black hat” techniques, and they’re used to trick search engines into giving higher rankings in ways that search engines don’t like. However, search engines have deciphered most of the tricks, therefore, employ “black hat” techniques at your own risk.

If you’re unsure whether something could get you into trouble with search engines, there’s one rule of thumb that will serve you well: If it’s not human-friendly or it provides a poor user experience, search engines won’t like it.If something is good or helpful for a human visitor, a search engine will give you a better rank. On the other hand, if you do things that a human visitor wouldn’t find helpful, you’re likely to get into trouble. Some transgressions aren’t too serious. However, some are equivalent to what bankruptcy does for your credit score.  Here are a few of the tricks that will land you in jail

Keyword Spamming
Keyword spamming is probably the most common. Here is an example of key word spamming: “Real estate investing is great. Try real estate investing when real estate investing works. Real estate investing money is great during bad real estate investing economic times and good real estate investing economic times.”

Humans would have a hard time reading a sentence like that.  

Keyword spamming worked much better in the past than it does now. A spider would see “real estate investing” mentioned repeatedly on a web page and say to itself “this page must be an important real estate investing page…look at how often those words are used!”

However, websites meant for human use don’t read like the sentence above. Search engines are now intelligent enough to distinguish a readable vs. an unreadable sentence. If your site is useful for humans, it will mention “real estate investing” regularly, but it will also talk about things that go along with real estate investing like financing, landlord issues, different investment strategies and so on.

Keyword spamming includes trying to use key words on a page that human visitors can’t see. This includes:

• Making key word the same color as page background or close to it
• Placing key words in <input type=”hidden”> tags
• Placing key words in image <alt> tags
• Placing key words between the <head> tags
• Placing key words behind css absolute positioned objects
• Making the text really tiny so people can’t read it or don’t notice it

Here are a few other black hat techniques that search engines are figuring out and penalizing people for using. I’m not going to tell you how to do these things, but you should be aware of what they are:

Page swapping: Once a high rank is achieved, swapping that high ranked page with a page of non-related content

Doorway pages: Pages designed for good optimization, but humans who visit the page are immediately forwarded to a different page.

Cloaking: It’s possible to create a web page that shows one page to spiders and a completely different page to human visitors. The spider page gets the rank and the human page displays whatever the person using cloaking wants.

Duplicate sites: This approach tries to get more search engine attention by making duplicate copies of the same site under different domain names.

Page hijacking: If you copy somebody’s web site and put it under a different domain name, you can fool search engines and visitors into thinking it’s the original site (example: copying Gap.com and creating MyGap.com and tricking people into visiting your site).

Scraper sites, spam blogs, and link farms: Create a bunch of fake sites with content on them (usually content copied from other sites) and then link each site back to your site to get more incoming links. Rumor has it that search engines will look to see where sites are hosted, and if they’re all hosted in the same place they’ll suspect something’s up.

A Few Final Thoughts
The examples above are but a few of the most common ways to get yourself into trouble with search engines. No doubt, intrepid marketers will come up with more.

If these tricks seem to compromise of one’s integrity – it’s because they do. Techniques like these will often work for a short period of time and you could dedicate your whole life to keeping one step ahead of the search engines (and some people do), but trying to do so (or hiring someone to do so for you) will only end up hurting legitimate businesses and ultimately your own business too!

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