1. Fresh, Relevant and Enticing Content

Regardless of how exhausted the poor Panda may be, Google is almost certainly going to continue its focus on providing good quality and relevant search results by penalising sites with duplicate or low quality content. So the first of the SEO predictions for 2012 is that more emphasis will be placed on new and relevant content.

2. More Focus on Mobile

Tablets have become widely available to the public and this, combined with the popularity or Smartphones, is expected to mean a massive increase in mobile search. This was big in 2011 and the prediction for 2012 is that it will be even bigger. It is important that you get your site SEO ready and optimised for mobile search.

3. Things are Getting Personal

Google has been paying more attention than ever before to what you are searching for and returns personalised searches based on your browsing history (read their post here). Another factor affecting personalised search is that Google includes results shared by your contacts. While this may be good news for the average browser using the search engines, a prediction is that it will make things a little more challenging for SEO agencies in 2012.

Keeping these SEO predictions in mind for 2012 can have a big impact on your results and ROI.

What are your SEO predictions 2012?

Related posts:

1. SEO Predictions for Search Engines in 2011
2. Online Writing Predictions for 2011
3. Take a look from their point of view to find your core phrases

Top SEO Predictions 2012

A close friend, who I have helped over the years, phoned me on Monday mentioning that they have lost a lot of major rankings and is there any reason for it? They weren’t likely to be hit by any updates and have been ranking awesomely for 5 years so I thought it was probably a problem between the keyboard and the chair.

He then mentioned a few words that made me go cold, “The website changes went live a few weeks ago and we seem to have dropped off the planet.”
So I had a look at a couple of phrases and he was right, they were all gone. Page source looked ok so I had a look at the robots.txt and found the dreaded.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This was followed by a huge amount of colourful language and a fair amount of threats of bodily harm that I am not permitted to write about on a company blog. Safe to say I was pretty mad. I’ve helped him build his site up from nowhere to the market leader in his sector and 5 minutes of insanity from the new web developer has completely killed his business.

So the next port of call was WMT and according to the stats there are currently 30k+ URLs that are “Restricted by Robots.txt”. FFS. Crawl rate clearly also took a major dive. Funny that when you tell Google to ^*&^ off that they actually do!

(Crawl stats from WMT, spike at the end is as a result of fixing the robots issue)

Analytics also showed the same picture which at the moment is devastating to his business and with a brand new beautiful little girl in his family he seriously didn’t need this in his life at the moment.

The developer obviously uploaded the robots.txt from the production environment to the live environment and I wish its the first time i have heard of that excuse.

So I thought I’d write this post and ask people to share the biggest development mistakes they have seen, feel free to comment and rant away!

Related posts:

1. Are search rankings really that important?
2. Are rankings dead? What is the future of search?
3. Search engine and social media market share statistics for 2009

How to destroy your search rankings in one easy step

Google is attempting to layer a Chrome-like look onto all of its tools and analytics is their latest product to receive a new coat of paint. Today we look over these changes and see how you can adapt and then easily transition to the new, shinier Google Analytics v5:

The most glaringly obvious change is the new interface which eschews stark white borders and functional text for an pleasing look which takes a few minutes to get used to; but once you are familiar with the new look analytics, the streamlined aesthetic will assist you in more easily monitoring your campaign. When you first logged into the old look analytics, there was a snapshot of your accounts with bounce rate, visits and so on; the new screen allows you to handily jump straight to the most accessed pages – visitors, traffic sources, content and conversions to be more precise.

The newly tabbed interface facilitates a greater user experience and gives you the option of creating as many dashboards as you wish, with configurable widgets for added flexibility. For instance, if your business only requires content data then a customizable widget will ensure that the pertinent data is always on the front page of your reports. For everyone else who needs the full Monty, the ‘My Site’ button will display the usual statistics much like the old reporting system did. Any search marketing solutions based company worth their salt has already started incorporating customized reporting into their data, as should you.

Intelligence reporting is now built straight into v5, in contrast to the older reporting model where it was in the ‘Beta’ section. Intelligence reports allow you to set variables and detect variations; such as receiving an alert if your sites traffic dips below a certain level or if your content reaches a specific amount of views.  Other key enhancements include the page speed report and enhanced overview reports. Very recently, Google has said that page speed counts towards the overall rankings and learning to improve the speed of your site can be beneficial to your campaigns.

Sadly, one of the greatest failures in the beta version of the Google analytics tool is the loss of the ability to add secondary dimension drill-downs in custom reports. Users have bemoaned the loss of this feature which basically removes the ability to create high-level reports which could be drilled into on the microscopic level to analyze where each campaign was performing, or underperforming. Hopefully when v5 comes out of beta, this tool will be restored to full usefulness.

Excellent new for Webmaster Tools lovers, V5 of Google Analytics now enables users to view their webmaster data directly on their analytics page. Why this was not integrated sooner, no-one knows. Users can sign up for the pilot program here. You will have access to a new section called ‘SEO’ which offers data for queries and landing pages.

In summation, the new look Google Analytics tool is made up of the myriad improvements which Google has made to its analytics over the past years. The redesigned interface, combined with better access to your most pertinent details will ensure that v5 only goes from strength to strength as companies begin to harness its possibilities. For those who cannot handle the change, simply click ‘old version’ in the top right corner and enjoy the old Google analytics interface. For further details, the video below highlights the new features.

Related posts:

1. DO’s and DON’Ts of Using Annotations in Google Analytics
2. Google Introduces Social Engagement Tracking in Webmaster Tools and Analytics
3. Is Google Analytics sufficient for your click tracking needs?

Google Analytics – Winds of Change

Speakers:

Eric Papczun – Performics
John Mueller – Google
Richard Falconer – Bigmouthmedia
Preston Carey – Yandex

Some Golden nuggets from Andy

1. Google is dominant BUT there are other engines to watch. Baidu and Yandex stand out, Seznam, Naver, Bing and Ayna are all up and coming.
2. What is Geo-Targeting? Making sure you see Pages from Germany – Pages in German.
3. How does Google filter the web? a) by google domain, b) by language
4. Google.co.uk vs Google.de search for “Lufhansa” shows very different results. ”Billigflug” Austria vs Germany shows different results.
5. Keyword language tag “Casseroles” in English shows a dish, in French shoes a pot. So keywords have a language tag associated.
6. From targeting choose whether you want to target a country or a language first
7. World languages create duplication. Poland and polish are fine but Spanish….

Richard Falconer – Bigmouthmedia

Maximising localisation resources and where it goes wrong. Available budget and available time are always less than the required budget and time!

• Accept that the localised content won’t be perfect.
• Include innovative localisation techniques
• Find technology solutions (new companies that can do this cheaper and faster). Can get a lot more done for less these days
• Ship even if not 100% it will never be. Don’t let the project get delayed

80% of effects come from 20% of causes

• Content – cut down on content intelligently. What part is most important and prioritise in each country. Avoid jargon and slang will save a lot of time and effort.
• Language – can be quite tricky as some countries have multiple languages. Try serve the 80%, you may be surprised. Sometimes the official language may not be the predominant language. E.g. Middle East – 63% English and 12% Arabic browser settings. It is worth investigating which demographic you are targeting and which language they are using.
• Crowdsourcing – Facebook is translated into 69 languages. Took sections of content and let users translate –then they let people vote on the best translation. There are paid crowdsourcing services that could be of use. Duolingo is a new company that is trying to do this.

Consider a variety of techniques to maximise your resources.

Technology – User Generated content , Reviews, comments, Q&A can contribute to localised content.

Use Googles Alternate Language Link Element <link rel=”alternate” Hreflang=”a-different-language” href=http://url-of-a-different-language />

Images – if you use numbers with an index then you can caption the image multiple times with ease.

Eric Papczun – Performics

Although US growth is large at 12-18%, the Asian market and EMEA markets are growing faster. This is a very diverse landscape with religious variances and legal issues being complex.

• Understand Regional /local behaviour
• Match strategies to each region
• Tailor communications locally

Often with large brands it is mostly about getting them organised. Consider the marketplace positioning, Test and learn to develop competency and work towards a structure that can be rolled out.

Transcreate the experience – Translation vs transcreation. The aim is to get the same REACTION in each language, something that translation in itself won’t do. Nuances like Cell Phone (USA), Mobiles (US) or Handy (Germany)

Preston Carey – Yandex

Organise for success in emerging markets. There are various configurations in use: Either a global command centre, a regional hub or a local partner

What we are seeing is that from a global command center we have optimised for conversion (the number crunchers have worked out all the efficiencies and place budget accordingly). Local partners do the least on conversion, often it is “early days” for them. There are always tradeoffs. Global will be most efficient but have the least localisation success. Local partners will be least coherent and have least coordination and consolidation but will have the best localisation.

Trends: The engines have recognised that they have potential clients outside the country. They are providing dedicated teams for non local market clients.

At the end of the day it is about people.

John Mueller – Google

I see a lot of multilingual issues as I am from Switzerland.

Our goal – show users content in the language they are looking for. Your job to help google understand what you have

The primary language on page is recognised on page automatically. We don’t use html attributes for languages. We crawl WITHOUT an “ACCEPT-LANGUAGE”  http request header. Don’t let automatically translated content get indexed.

Multiregional:

Our goal – Show users geographically relevant results

Your job – Google needs to be able to see which parts of your site are for which regions.

Clear signs :

• Country specific TLD’s
• Webmaster tools
• On page factors such as phone numbers

We recommend separate URLs’ per location (Don’t change the content on the same URL!)

Let users view all content – do not force redirect users based on geo. It is not perfect.

Handling Geotargeting problems: Give users a choice – Amazon does it very nicely, Help users to get to the right site – don’t cloak.

If you need both Multiregional and multilingual sites consider that it creates a huge structure and you may end up with more problems than solutions. You might want to rel canonical if you have French content on a UK site, pointing back to the French site.

Related posts:

1. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence
2. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search
3. London SMX Coverage: Essential Paid Search Tools

SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search

Moderator:
Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Speakers:
Christine Churchill – Key Relevance
Richard Baxter – SEOGadget
Lasse Clarke Slogaard – MediaCom Denmark
Kevn Gibbons – SEOptimse

Richard Baxter – SEOGadget

This presentation is not so much about collecting data, rather on how to group it and make it actionable. By grouping phrases you can spot priorities in search behaviour that allow you to confidently construct site architecture.

By using Excel we can run some awesome queries. We use the functions FIND (), ISERROR() and NOT() to separate out the data from the list to get an idea of the order and types of queries being generated and to get a sense of the overall volumes involved for each.. We are going to use an array formula. {=NOT(ISEROR(FIND([KEYWORD-TYPES], $A2)))} and for (KEYWORD TYPES) use a table of attributes (such as Colours and of types) in different columns. {full description available from the presentation download}. Once you have this methodology, you can do a lot more with the data. Big data managed properly means you can make good decisions. Deep dive the volumes.

SMX London KW Tools bundle http://bit.ly/jai89j

Christine Churchill – Key Relevance

There are a lot of tools out there. You need a bird’s eye view so using a variety of tools is essential.

• If you are using Google keyword tool, it is important to use the [Exact match] option. More recently you can compare desktop to mobile search terms and there can be a dramatic difference between the two – for example on the phrase “pizza”.
• Google trends is great, for example compare Facebook to Myspace.
• Google insights shows seasonality in keyword data and shows geographic demand.
• Keyword discovery has multiple data sources and a great source.
• Google instant gives really valuable insight as it changes user behaviour. Definitely take a look. Note that under different tabs (Shopping) will give different suggestions
• Solve.com shows many different sources to compare
• Ubersuggest – This will mine the Google suggest and makes it easy to see what is being suggested
• There is also a Youtube keyword tool
• Google’s wonder wheel is a visual representation.. It is now called “Contextual Targeting tool”
• Adcenter has a lot of great tools.
• SEOMOZ keyword difficulty will give a yardstick on how competitive a phrase may be.

Remember the volumes are only an estimate and you need to look at the seasonality as well as many other factors.

Lasse Clarke Slogaard – MediaCom Denmark

Take a step back – we need to translate this into a strategy. No one cares these days if you are first or fastest. Slow down and get back to basics. I have a comparison to atriaditional shopping isle where products are on the shelf. The eye level products feature better than the ones on the bottom shelf. How do we get the attention of the consumer if our product is on the bottom shelf? If they know your brand the chances are going up of them finding you. They are still looking on the top shelf and doing their own research and decisions. You need to massage the consumer till they buy from you.

Different considerations depending on your objectives

So we use a scalable strategy we call PPPi (Pay-Per-Purchase Intent). You need to look at the marketplace and determine where you are in the field. There are different layers like on an onion and your strategy will vary according to your objectives. {See picture}

This is how I do my keyword research and how I present it to my clients.

Kevn Gibbons – SEOptimse

How do we apply keyword research to some of our clients in targeting long tail?

1. How do you optimise for longtail when it is not coming up in keyword research? (Google themselves say 25% of all queries are never seen before). Longtail has better conversion and is by far the higher volume.
2. It doesn’t have to be difficult. Consider “How”, “When”, “Who” and “Why” are queries that people use. If you can answer those questions you will attract a lot of traffic.
3. Use segments to analyse long tail
4. Use PPC and impression share data to see the full potential. Use broad and phrase matches to get sample data to see what is available
5. Use multiple tools to verify results. Wordtracker have release “Strategizer” which plugs into analytics. If you can afford Hitwise there is far more detail.
6. Estimate average click through rates. You can get average click through rate for your own website by using webmaster tools
7. Use excel to predict traffic values. Based on ranking position and the estimated value
8. Filter keywords into themed groups
9. Don’t overthink it and go too long tail. Think common trends and wide variations.

Tip – You need more than automated content now (After Panda)

Q&A

How do we normalise for seasonality especially when running PPC tests? Run tests for longer or perhaps use hitwise data.

Adwords API averages over the year and also goes down to a more granular level. This data can be more reliable.

How important is it to be first? It has been done before to put up a “Holding page” that then gets updated at the time of the actual release. Also make sure that it synchronises across all mediums like twitter and Facebook. Securing the number 1,2 position first can mean you will be able to hold onto it.

Can you use internal search queries as UGC? Kevin – Yes it used to work really well till Panda came along – These days it is more important to rather manually review these results and make decisions from that.

How do you pull data from the suggest tool? You can use adwords api tool to pull search volumes – hire a freelance developer for $100. Or use a front end tool like Google suggest.

Related posts:

1. Keyword research – remember “stop words”
2. SMX London Coverage: Search Analytics And Competitive Intelligence
3. London SMX Coverage: Essential Paid Search Tools

London SMX coverage: Keyword Research Ninja Tactics

Speakers:
Richard Baxter, SEOgadget
Martin Beijk, Onetomarket
Jonathan Hochman, JE Hochman & Associates
John Mueller, Google

SMX Coverage - Technical SEO

Richard Baxter – SEOgadget

12 popular, interesting & critical issues we have discovered recently.

1. Thin internal pages / no content and boiler plate content. You need unique text on page, persuasive, well written content to inspire visitors.
2. Resolve poor internal link architecture. Google “seogadget link architecture” for guide on how to.
3. Avoid excessive duplication via paginated navigation.
4. Indexed staging server – Clean up a leaky staging server. 301 redirect to production server.
5. Canonicalization and not just the www. Check for trailing slash and other versions of ww or wwww.
6. Soft 404 header or no 404 response. Google “Live http headers” and look for the Mozilla plugin to get a tool to check header codes.
7. “If modified since” query produces 500 error (www.feedthebot.com/tools/if-modified/ check it out)
8. Sitemap.xml produces 404 server header response even though the file was downloaded. Malformed header was causing problems.
9. Bingbot / MSNBot crawl was blocked. The dev team had banned the bot!
10. 40,000 internal 301 redirects!
11. Very easy to inject links with HTML – what happens when you put HTML into the site search box – Do you get a result with a link?
12. Do you have tons of data? Make it embeddable. Think how can others use this content on their sites?

Martin Beijk – OnetoMarket

Why speed matters?

Google announced “Lets make the web faster”.

• Google public dns
• Page speed indicator in webmaster tools
• V8 WebP compression
• Mod_pagespeed for Apache
• Page speed API
• Page speed load times in Analytics

All points to it(page speed) being a ranking factor. Get the code snippet for Googel analytics to correct problems and drive traffic to the fastest pages.

Database optimisation

Often the slowest load time. A recent case highlighted that googlebot suddenly indexed a lot more URLs after query load times were reduced from 9 seconds to below 3. Take the hint!

Consider which Mysql engine is fastest MyISAM or InnoDB

Webservers

Apache has largest market share followed by IIS. Consider how to optimise the webserver and also consider the application servers as well – have a stand alone Mysql server. Strip cookies from pages that don’t need them.

Virtual Host vs .htaccess : Using .htacess should be avoided at all cost

Nginx is up and coming and really fast especially when paired with Varnish

Investigate alternatives

Nginx – Super fast and solid alternative solutions. WordPress, Twitter and facebook use them

Make your VPS platform even better

CDN is not always necessary

Takeaways

If you are on shared hosting you are not taking webhosting seriously.

Watch speed of DB Queries.

Look at the quality of the code.

Running WordPress? Lookup ways to make it faster.

Jonathan Hochman – Hochman Consultants

Be carful when copying staging sites to live. You can copy a “disallow robots” file to live environment if not carful.

Be sure to setup redirects and 404 pages. Be sure to check using a tool to verify that the site returns proper pages.

Ecommerce and CMS systems: Most systems have issues that need to be remedied. A good plugin for WordPress is “WordPress seo” from Yoast.

Some CMS systems use the same title on all internal pages. It is critical to fix this.

Running out of crawl time? Code optimisation should be a high priority. Watch out for Infitie URL spaces like calendars that go on forever with URL’s. Submit a sitemap to Google to get feedback on how many have been indexed.

Spelling and typos. Have had issues with badly spelt title – use online tool to check spelling.

Check for broken links Xenu link Sleuth whenever Webmaster tools reports broken links

Enable gzip compression via htaccess

If your site gets hacked your traffic will die. The best bet is to do a file integrity check. i.e. have a backup copy to compare against for changes. This can be automated through a selection of available tools.

Failure to patch wordpress is number 1 cause of hacks.

HTML Validation errors – fixing can help load speed.

SEO Intangibles. Quality of web dev really matters. Happy visitors generate tweets, referrals, etc.

Printing – People like to turn to printing for big ticket items. Make sure you have a print specific CSS

Forms – try wufoo.com

The big picture – Think user experience as it is a ranking signal!

John Mueller (johnmu) – Google

The process of indexing is supported by the crawler and the scheduler amongst other processes.

Consider the scheduler – Googlebot will notice if the server slows down as a result of the crawl and will slow down scheduled crawls so as to be kind to the server and website. Other sites on a shared server (IP Address) can therefore affect your crawl site.

Crawling: checks robots.txt and then crawls URLs and gives feedback to scheduler. It will use different user agents to read robots file. The crawler will feed back to the scheduler the success of the crawl such that the scheduler can adjust the crawl rate.

How can I test this? Use Webmaster tools function “fetch as googlebot” and this will pass through scheduler and you will see if there is a delay because the scheduler doesn’t like your server.

Parser: looks at logical elements on page to find additional URL’s. Soft 404 pages are an issue.

Indexing: Analyses content and determines Indexability

Q&A

Some useful points that came from the Q&A sessions:

When client resources are limited then prioritising the changes into what is most important is essential. Out of a mountain of proposed changes to a site some are clearly more important than others.

Richsnippets/Microformats: The implementation seems to be sketchy. Get whitelisted for one format and then introduce the rest and they will also work. Microformats for reviews are proving difficult to implement. Microformats for breadcrumbs works perfectly. Reviews work well with a google preferred supplier

404 vs 410: Google will keep a 404 for longer because sometimes it is just an error and the page returns. For best results use webmaster tools to remove URL’s.

Related posts:

1. SMX London Coverage: Speaking In Tongues: Mastering Multinational Search
2. SMX London coverage: SEO 2011 What’s Working and What’s not.
3. SMX London coverage: Social Signals & Search

SMX London coverage: Technical SEO – What’s important for technical SEO?

I’ve been involved in online marketing for about 3 years now, having started out touching on SEO at a price comparison website. After that I moved on to become a project manager at an online marketing company and was bitten by the SEO bug. I moved to MediaVision to leave the complicated world of project management and get started with pure SEO work.

What a great decision! A year on and I have four of my own clients who are flourishing thanks to the knowledge I’ve gained in SEO, conversion analysis and effective copywriting. Here’s how I got to where I am now as an SEO specialist…

1. Read, read and read some more…

Starting out at MediaVision I was given some basic reading material on the way things were done at MediaVision. Once I understood what I was reading and how our basic strategy works, I continued to expand my knowledge by following industry experts on Twitter and reading some of the strategies they had tried and tested with some of their clients. This proved to be extremely useful as SEO is an evolving science and one can never stop researching to keep up to date with the latest practices. Some interesting people that I followed include:

- @brettpringle

- @louisventer

- @Searchcowboys

- @JonDMyers

- @theGypsy

- @DaveNaylor

- @avinash

- @mattcutts

Follow these people and you will not only learn some of the basics of SEO, but also learn some very advanced trickery that you can test and see if it works for you.

Reading SEO books and dummies guides to SEO might work here and there, but I would really suggest that the best way to get involved is to be taught and then to read as much as you can to really understand the MANY different views and strategies that people have all around the world. SEO IS NOT AN EXACT SCIENCE!

2. Master the tools

You need to master the use of the basic SEO tools if you wish to be able to do effective keyword research, index your websites and monthly reporting. Three of the most important tools that you will need to make use of include:

- Google AdWords external keyword research tool

- Google Analytics

- Webmaster Tools

Google AdWords external keyword research tool and Google analytics will become two of your most valuable online tools. Regardless of what people say, the fact is that Google is still the MAJOR market share leader in the world of search engines and therefore most of your research will be based on their tools.

The external keyword tool is a great tool for finding out what phrases are related to any website that you are working on. Google Analytics is a data collection tool that gives you ridiculous amounts of information about the traffic that is arriving at your (or your client’s) website. Based on the data presented to you in Analytics you will then be able to make strategic decisions regarding the promotion of your website and different keywords therein.

Most of the tools have their own help sections or courses that you can read in order to learn how to use them, but the best way of learning how to use them is to practice. That takes us on to our next step, Practice makes Perfect….

3. Practice Makes Perfect!

As I’ve mentioned above, SEO is not an exact science. What works for someone else will not necessarily work for you and your clients. It is essential that you practice, try out different strategies and tactics that you read about and see if they work for you. Obviously you can’t experiment too much at the expense of your own clients, so often setting up a blog of your own or having some sort of “side-project” will give you the opportunity to practice new ideas and measure the effect that they might have.

4. Live SEO

SEO is not a job, it is not a 9–5 type of career and it is not something you can learn about in a few days and then just apply your basic knowledge for the next 5 years – YOU NEED TO LIVE SEO. It needs to become a lifestyle, a passion and something that you talk about at any given opportunity. Some of the best knowledge that I have learnt over the last year has been in the pub after work as we wind down from yet another hard day’s work. Often, instead of chatting about cars, booze, sex, drugs and rock n roll (as you do of course), we opt to chat about different SEO strategies that we’ve read about during the course of the day. Sounds boring, but this is the sort of commitment and passion you need to have towards SEO if you really want to make a success of it.

5. Join in Forum Discussions

Another great way to learn more about SEO is to join forums. This is one avenue I am yet to try myself simply due to a lack of time, but some of the biggest names in SEO that I’ve had the chance of chatting to have told me that this is one way to take your SEO knowledge from an intermediate level to expert status. One of 2011’s resolutions is to get involved in forums and get the “SupaDave” brand out there whilst learning at the same time.

6. Conferencing

Attending conferences is a great way to expand your knowledge, get your name out there whilst at the same time getting to rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in SEO. I’ve attended smaller conferences here in South Africa, but some of the bigger and better conferences that take place annually in the UK include:

- http://searchmarketingexpo.com/

- http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/

- http://www.pubcon.com/ – Las Vegas

Conferencing is all about getting yourself known in the industry and learning what the absolute legends of SEO have to say about various hot topics. Attending a couple of conferences a year might seem like a large investment of time and money, but believe me, the knowledge learnt during these conferences is simply priceless – MasterCard style!

If I had to sit down with someone interesting in becoming an SEO expert, the above advice is the basic things that I would tell them. The biggest and most important thing to remember is that SEO, as with many other online careers, is a lifestyle choice and you need to be passionate about it in order to learn about all spheres of the industry.

Do you have any other resources or tips for anyone looking to become and SEO expert? Comments would be great….

Related posts:

1. Who exactly are expert SEOs?
2. The what not to do in social media guide
3. A (very) simple guide to Cost Per internet advertising models.

SupaDave’s Guide to Becoming an SEO “Expert”

This blog post focuses on the top 5 reasons why hiring a professional SEO company is a much better idea than doing your own SEO. Let’s take a look:

1. Time is money: SEO takes time. It takes time to learn, time to understand and most importantly – time to implement. You need to optimize your content, spend hours and hours building links and make any structural changes to your website that aren’t currently optimal. Sure, you could maybe learn to do your own SEO optimization, but you’re a business owner, your job is to concentrate on your clients, your business and how to improve it in as many ways as possible. Every hour you spend doing your own SEO is a billable hour stolen from your customers.

2. SEO is a lifestyle: An SEO marketing company employs SEO professionals who live and breathe SEO 24/7! They browse forums to research the latest trends and have the luxury of using new strategies on multiple clients which quickly helps them get an idea of what works best. The key to effective SEO is to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and developments in the industry. As a business owner you need to focus on your business and simply cannot keep up-to-date with all the most recent SEO trends (unless you trade the “luxury” of sleep in for time spent on SEO).

3. Professional copywriting: You may be an entrepreneurial genius, but this seldom means that you’re also lucky enough to be blessed with amazing creativity and expert writing abilities! Any decent SEO services company will have a team of professional copywriters who’d go so far as to eat alphabet cereal for breakfast if it would make them better writers. The grammar, punctuation and tone of the content on your website promises to be more professional and effective in converting visitors to buyers. And of course going back to point one above – copywriting takes time, time that you as a business owner simply don’t have.

4. Better conversion: A good SEO company will not only help improve traffic to your website, they will also know what to do with this traffic once it reaches your website. SEO professionals live for the internet and more specifically, e-commerce. They know all about web conventions, how people react to different web pages and how to ensure that a good percentage of your casual visitors will become customers. They can assist with changes to the structure of your website, the structure of your key landing pages as well as the look and feel of your website to ensure optimal conversion.

5. It’s a good investment: As you know, an investment is something that you pump money into in the hope that you get your money back and some. Hiring SEO professionals is also an investment, a safe one at that – if you hire the correct SEO Company. UK “investors” can also be assured that SEO optimization is a measurable investment which ensures that you will never be left wondering if you’re making returns on the money that you put in. SEO companies provide you with extensive tracking tools which give you a clear indication of how your investment is progressing.

It’s all about time and professionalism versus money. Make sure you choose an ethical SEO company with a proven track record and impressive ROI statistics and you won’t regret it. SEO will prove to be the primary reason for more traffic reaching your website, so why risk something this important by doing it yourself. Leave it to the professionals I say.

Related posts:

1. The importance of having a Company Blog
2. HR SEO a new weapon in reducing cost per hire
3. The merits of having a company blog

Top 5 Reasons to hire an SEO company instead of doing it yourself!

Jennifer Laycock from Search Engine Marketing has given an inspired suggestion on how to find out why your high traffic is not delivering the desired conversions with her blog, Showing all the right people all the wrong things. It’s as simple as, ‘ask Mom’. The point of this exercise is that the mom in question knows as little as possible about SEO and is approaching the website entirely from a usability point of view. You’ll realise what needs to be changed by taking note of when she starts getting frustrated or lost on the site.

In the SEO industry, we can easily get lost in analytics and technicalities, and while these are at the heart of internet marketing, sometimes it’s time to use Occam’s razor. And no I’m not on the topic of hair removal: Occam’s razor was thought up by a logician way back in the day (I’m talking the 14th century) and, according to Wikipedia, the principle stated “the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible”. So, all you need to do is sit back and let the user (who has come without a set of preconceived SEO ideas) do the work. The solutions will soon become clear with the statements that he or she makes.

For example:

Statement: “I don’t know how to buy this product.”

Solution: Get some catchy (but non-invasive buttons) to lead the user easily through the online purchasing process.

Statement: “I don’t understand what they’re trying to do/ sell/ say.”

Solution: You need to be clearer with your content. Give the user a short, snappy of overview of what you’re about and keep them interested and keen to explore your site further. A suggestion on a WebProWorld forum was to “tell me in a few short sentences that this is the site for me”.

Only then are you ready to get down to the nitty gritty details and start delving into your analytics accounts. If your site is ranking well for the keyword ‘home improvement service’ but the conversion you want is that people buy flooring materials, then you need to change your campaign so that keywords such as ‘tiles’ and ‘buy tiles’ start ranking.

Related posts:

1. Starting a fresh Adwords PPC account – unlinking re-linking
2. Ask.com tries to go for a more feminine approach
3. Big brands approach to viral marketing video’s: don’t worry, be happy.

All the traffic, none of the sales? Time for a fresh approach

PPC seems to be the Linus Blanket for marketing managers. I’m not 100% sure why, apart from it being a certain thing. I suppose if you choose an SEO agency that doesn’t perform it seems like the safe bet. We have internal battles for the cost per visit from SEO and PPC and I’m proud to say the SEO wins the most, by a serious margin. (Navigational/Brand search taken out of course )

It was highlighted for me again yesterday while creating a PPC and SEO estimate for client budget approval. The PPC was 3 times the price of SEO and would generate around a 10th of the visits per month. Conservative SEO cost per visit estimate was a mere 18p compared to nearly £5 per click from PPC.

So, leaving the drum behind and focusing on the Hitwise report, are marketing managers tightening PPC budget or comparing the ROI from SEO and PPC and reallocating accordingly?

Obviously, I’m hoping for the latter, as I truly believe that the amount of money spent is massively skewed towards PPC. The last we heard, Google admitted that 80% of all clicks come from Organic search yet, according to the IAB, 80% of all search budgets are spent on PPC. Google isn’t going to keep giving us accurate figures on this and these are a little dated but I can’t see any evidence of this mindset changing on the ground. I keep hearing “My marketing director won’t be happy to move budget away from PPC”.

Perhaps SEO appears to be too good a deal? Maybe it has been sold badly for a long time? There are still “top flight” SEO agencies today that over-hype it to the point that they simply can’t deliver on their promises. We still see an awful lot of bad SEO and promises made by account managers that don’t have the experience or knowledge to give advice.

My only advice to marketing managers would be to stop treating Organic traffic as free. Strip out navigational search and compute a real cost per visit and track it. Compare it to your PPC cost in the light of conversion and bounce rate and measure which is more valuable. If it’s PPC, then so be it. If not then reallocate some budget and test again next quarter. Carry on doing this. If your SEO agency can’t outperform your PPC ditch them and get a new one, it’s not hard to do.

I can only hope that the message is already getting through. Until then I’ll pick up my drum and keep on beating it.

Related posts:

1. Google Marketing, what should your search strategy and plans include?
2. How does search fit into the marketing mix?
3. The Rise of Mobile Marketing in 2010

Are marketing managers finally getting the message about balancing PPC and SEO budgets?