Online Marketing - Marketing Don

Viva SEO - Why SEO Is Not Dead

I have been reading articles and listening to people discussing how SEO and SEO experts are no longer needed.  I have read and heard, “once you have the SEO basics, that is really all you need.”  My opinion? If you feel that way you either do not have a lot of experience in SEO or do not have a lot of experience working with multiple websites.

SEO is alive and well, experts are absolutely needed for many companies.  Notice I wrote experts are needed for “many,” not “all” companies?  This is a key point and why I stated only those with lack of experience would make such a bold statement as SEO is dead. 

There are many factors in determining which sites need an SEO expert and which ones do not.  Everything from helping find bot crawling issues, choosing the correct keywords for each page of the site, navigation, creating optimized tags, creating optimized content, generating quality backlinks, marketing objectives, and more.  There is another factor in determining if an expert is needed, after you determine what the top keywords are, what is the demand for those top keywords and who is currently ranking for those terms? 

Ok, so you think you have the basics, you know all of your site SEO technical issues, you know the correct keywords (based on your goals and objectives), you know and can get quality backlinks, you think you are all set.  You may be right.  Yes, you heard me, you may be right and you are all set.  However, as noted above you have to determine what the competition is like for those top keywords.

If you are a small local company selling some niche product locally, SEO basics may be all you need.  I would think if you sell and want to rank for “Bright Red Bananas” in Apex, North Carolina you can do so with just the basics.  Now, if you want to sell something more broad and highly competitive like “laptops,” “womens shoes,” “Callaway golf clubs” etc.. to the U.S. or the world, this is a lot more complicated and not only may require more SEO strategies, but you may need to switch strategies based on competition and determine which one of the basics you should be focusing on more to improve your rankings.  This doesn’t even include having an experienced SEO person continually conducting tests to maintain and improve results and keeping current. Let’s say you do the basics and you are #7 on page one of Google. Now what? Are you done?  Why are there 6 sites ranking higher than you?  They are not higher than you because of luck.  Every time you move up a position, it can mean thousands of more clicks and thousands of more dollars every week.

What about redesigns and new products?  When a site is redesigned, when is the proper time for SEO?  What steps need to be taken with the old sites URL’s?  Again, this is where an experienced SEO person comes in.

Some may disagree, but I feel SEO is made up of:

60% to 80% SEO Knowledge of the Basics
15% to 35% An SEO Experts Experience and Direction
And about 5% “Gut Feeling”

1. Yes, some sites may be fine with just the SEO basics based on competition and needs.
2. 15% to 35%, where an SEO Expert is needed, may create a huge increase in leads and revenue. Ranking for the right terms and ranking in the top 3 of page one will generate a lot more clicks and conversions than ranking on the wrong terms and in the bottom 3 of page one.
3. What the hell does “Gut Feeling” mean?  “Gut Feeling” is this, there are times decisions need to be made that will affect site rankings.  Will the change hurt or help SEO, no one can answer that for all scenarios. I do not care who you are, not even Google engineers would know all results for every possible scenario.  So what are you left with?  You are left with experience.  You can present your thoughts based on similar changes you have previously made or sometimes it simply comes down to that “gut feeling” especially when it comes to those grey areas. Will the engines like/dislike this change? Will the engines feel this change is deceiving?  There are always scenarios that are new and once a conclusion is drawn and change is implemented, an experienced SEO person will also come in to fix any issues quickly if they arise.

Oh yea, one more thing.  The last problem with the statement, “SEO is dead” or “SEO experts are no longer needed” is that a lot, I mean A LOT, of people think they are SEO experts just because they know the basics and have optimized one or two sites before.  There is not a clear definition of what an SEO expert is. Many people think they are experts because they have been involved in optimizing a site or two.  Most non-experts will rattle off answers so fast without asking any additional questions, you know they have no idea what they are doing.  These “experts” simply may not have enough information to give someone a correct answer, but feel they do because they think all sites are optimized the same way and all sites need the same things. 

I think the person that thinks they know SEO but does not, is a very scary thing not just for the industry, but for their clients/companies.  Now, I am not saying I am the end all be all of SEO, because I am not.  There are a lot people that know SEO and are much smarter/better than me at it.  All I am saying is whether you write about SEO or declare yourself and “SEO Expert” that you take the time to know your limits and are not afraid to say to your boss or to clients “I understand SEO but I need more information for this particular situation,” or “I do not know, but will find out,” instead of stating something that is incorrect or may not apply.

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Meeting with Stefan Weitz, Director of Search at Bing

This was a very informal and informative meeting.  Stefan obviously could not tell us everything that Bing is doing, but everything seemed positive and steps in the right direction.

Here are some of the highlights of the discussion:

Bing is doing a lot of research.  They are trying to figure out why most searches hit the back button.  They feel improving search results by offering well organized search pages will help.

The biggest issue was lack of traffic.  Most in the room stated the traffic they are getting from Bing was great (high converting, high order size, etc..), but there just wasn’t enough of it.  Stefan believes Bing Cashback, better results, and other improvements rolling out soon will increase the number of users.

Cashback Shopping has increased over 300%

Bing is continually testing new features and even fonts and colors.  Stefan mentioned how amazing little tweaks make.  They tested 44 different colors of blue links and each variation had a noticeable different in behavior.

Did you know if you search in Bing and put your curser over the natural search listing you will see a small dot to the right. If you hover over the dot, you will get more information about the site and deep links to find what you are looking for faster.

Anyway, I think the meeting went well overall.  It really seems like Bing is interested in improving itself by improving their results.  It will take a lot of time and testing, but I think they will eventually do it.

Attendee’s:

Al Scillitani
Internet Marketing Manager
Global Value Commerce http://www.globalvaluecommerce.com
Personal Blog http://www.marketingdon.com
twitter.com/alscillitani

Jenny Halasz
Director, Operations
Acronym Media http://www.acronym.com
twitter.com/jennyhalasz

Donna Bedford
Global SEO lead
Lenovo
http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/

Dan London
Director of Online Marketing
ShareFile http://www.ShareFile.com
Personal Blog http://www.dan-london.com
twitter.com/danlondon

Rick Ferguson
Search Marketing Director
Bold Interactive http://www.boldinteractive.com

Wayne Sutton
Entrepreneur, Strategist, Producer
http://wayne-sutton.com/
twitter.com/waynesutton

Nathania Johnson
News Coorespondent
Search Engine Watch
http://searchenginewatch.com

Posted in Online Marketing | 7 Comments »

The One Company That Can Actually Bring Down Google Is… Google

That’s right BING, don’t pay attention to Google, just focus on improving yourself, your tools, your products, and search results for your customers while Google commits suicide.   Within 3 years BING and Google will be much closer to market share and within 5 years BING may even take over if they do things right.  How can this happen in such a short time?  Because Google is going to kill itself by abusing and taking advantage of their customers privacy and Google users are going to slowly migrate to BING and others products/services because of it.

If you are a user of multiple Google products you may know what I am talking about, if not, you soon will.  Google is slowly forcing its users to combine all of their products under one account.  If this does not scare you, it should.  I use several Google products: Google Affiliate Network, Adwords, Adsense, Gmail, Financial Portfolio, and Calendar.  I get emails from Google reps stating that they went into my Adwords account and then they email me recommendations.  I understand the Adwords account is actually Google’s, but I still feel they should ask before going into my Adwords account.  I really do feel my privacy has been violated when they do this.  When all of my Google products and services are under one umbrella, this dramatically changes things.  You may say that I am blowing this out of proportion, but let’s put all of these products under a single Google Account.  Google employee’s most likely can now log in and see not only my Adwords account, but my financial portfolio (my assets, stocks, bonds, banks, etc…), see my calendar (where I am, what I do, etc..), see my “private” emails, and more. 

When I emailed Google explaining my concern with this, their reply was to create new separate Google Accounts for every one of the products I use.   Why?  Why can’t they simply keep things as they are and allow their customers to combine the accounts if they want to and not make it mandatory?  Here is the text from the Google Affiliate website http://www.connectcommerce.com/global/login.html

We’re requiring all Google Affiliate Network users to update to Google Accounts so you can access all your Google products with a single sign-on.
• Use the same sign-in for Google Affiliate Network and other Google products, including AdWords, AdSense, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Personalized Search, and much more.
• Switch among Google Affiliate Network and other Google applications without having to sign in again.
Keep in mind that once you’ve updated your Account, you’ll no longer be able to use your old Google Affiliate Network username and password.

I am definitely not stating that all Google employees are deceitful, however if they are aware of an affiliate or Adwords account that is generating large sums of money, like Jeremy Shoemaker’s was http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/07/shoemoney-sues-google-employee-for-adwords-violations/ it would be very hard not to use that information for their own gain.  Again, I am sure this is a rare case, but it does happen.  Adding my calendar and email just adds to my concerns.

If BING continues to improve their search technologies and products they will continue to take market share http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090819-123636 . It may take 10 years or more, but I think it will eventually happen.  However, if Google continues to take their customer’s privacy concerns lightly, I am predicting BING will become a much larger threat to Google in half that time mainly due to Google’s own actions.

*Image created by Reinaldo (Tito) Rivera AnotherSession

Posted in Online Marketing | 28 Comments »

Google Image Ads Are Here

Doing some searches this morning I found something I personally have never seen, image ads and listings under “sponsored links” in Google.  Not only am I seeing this listings from some broad terms, but

1. They always seemed to appear at the top right of the page pushing all of the other paid links down.

2. It didnt seem to matter if the company already had paid ads or not, you can have these image ads AND still have paid ads under the “sponsored links.”

3. The results pages are showing shopping results from Google Product Feed as well.

This can potentially mean, one company can be listed for ppc, naturally, in Google shopping, and in these image ads. 

According to Chris Crums article http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/12/google-talks-future-of-search-advertising (thanks to Dan London for finding this) Google AdWords Business Product Management Director Nicholas Fox states, “The company is looking at matching information about your product or service and automatically building ads based on crawling your website.” Is this what he was talking about? That article was just posted yesterday?

Well, I gotta go figure all of this out and breakdown the algo’s.

Update: August 13, 2009 3pm ————————————————-
Here is more about the program from Google:
“The name for what you’re seeing is the AdWords Product Plusbox beta. This is a new feature being tested that allows AdWords advertisers to display multiple product offerings to potential customers with just one ad on Google.com. These products are being pulled from the advertiser’s Google Base feed. This beta is currently limited.”
Thank you “anonymous” for sending me this!

Posted in SEO | 27 Comments »

Others Online Testing May Be Worthless

The question: Will promoting individual products through an email or homepage convert better if you link directly to those products or to a category of products?
The pre-test answer: Based on everything I have read, the answer is a no brainer.  Conversions and sales to the individual products will far exceed having customers click around looking for products.
The post-test answer: The category landing page won, but why? It also brought up another question, the email and homepage results were very different. What the heck is going on?

The Test:
The company was promoting 6 different products. All 6 products were pictured and on the right hand side,  Each product showed the original price, normal sale price, and closeout price. Sale ended in seven days and were in limited quantities.

A- The six individual product images linked directly to each of the products.  About a quarter of the image, you could go to all products in this category
B- Same exact image, but the entire image linked to the category, total of 6 pages of products, rather than the individual products listed on the image.

This was sent to the email list of 100% opt-in customers and was on our home page.  Everything we set up so that half of our customers that clicked thru the email would randomly receive A and the other half B.  The home page test was similar, half to A (with individual links) half to B (category).

The results:
Email

Almost exactly the same number of orders and conversion rates. B actually had two more orders, but the average order size was about 30% higher leading to a much larger increase in revenue.  Now this was suprising to me.  If someone took bets, I would have bet on A blowing B out of the water, it just makes sense to me. If someone see’s a product and they are interested in it, send them directly to the product.

Hompage
These results are very different.  Much more of a clear winner.  B had 15% more orders and about 10% more revenue.  The only area that was lower was average order size. “A” had a 5% higher average order size.

These results brought up more questions. Besides, why did going to the category page perform better, my question is why are the results so different between the email and homepage if it was the same test?

My Answer and what I have learned: I will put this in bullet format to make it easier to read.

1. There are too many variables to read any website studies and think you can apply it to your own site.  Who are your customers, what is the sale all about, is the sale really a sale (did you check your competition), are these products really in demand?
2. The products we were offering were way below our competitors. I feel this is the reason B performed better.  Once the B people clicked and went to the category page, they not only saw the product they clicked on, but 100’s of other products priced way below the competition.  This combined with the “only a few days and limited quantities” messaging triggered more sales.
3. Why did the home page perform differently? My assumption is different customers performed different search behavior.  I know, I know you think I am crazy, but hear me out. The email list is of previous customers that opted in to the list. They have been to the site before, know there way around and trust us.  Fifty percent of the people that come directly to the home page through search, paid search, or other means are new to the site.  They may have come to our site from a much broader term through natural search and are in initial shopping mode.  They are unfamiliar with our site.  They are unfamiliar with us.  All of these lead to more clicking and looking around.  The new customers that clicked on A, went right to the product. Not be familiar with the site, they had no idea about all of the other bargain products and what our site has to offer.  The others that went to the category landing page, we gave the opportunity to see the entire category and products on sale.  This helped with letting them know what we have, showed them we were a large site offering multiple manufacturers (established trust), and our great pricing on the 100’s of products in that category.

To conclude:
Run your own A/B tests. It is the only way to really evaluate what works and what doesn’t work based on your product prices, product availability, the marketing message, and your customers.  There are very few absolutes when it comes to online marketing.

Posted in Online Marketing | 29 Comments »

Increase Your Online Conversions

Aligning all your promotional efforts in all channels. By doing so you are increasing your chances of marketing success. Imagine increasing your conversion rates by .5 percent to two percent, or possibly more, in each marketing channel. There are articles on improving paid search, SEO, email, or social media, but not many on how these channels must all work together to improve overall conversions of a promotion. Everyone needs to understand that online promotions should Click Here to Read More

Posted in Online Marketing | 3 Comments »

Summary of 2009 Channel Advisor Catalyst Conference Raleigh, NC

I really liked this years conference.  I think the panels were set up well and on target. 

The first panel was very interesting.  It started off with 8 or 9 random people that they picked and the moderator asked questions about how they search and buy online.

Most stated:

1. They use shopping engines and Google to search for the best deal, price.
2. Free Shipping is very important. Most expected it. One said it was more important than the price. If he didn’t see free shipping, even if price was a little less, he would leave the site.
3. Some would search for a product, put it in the shopping cart, open another browser and search for promo codes to use before they would check out. Some would abandon the cart if none found.
4. If they were unfamiliar with the company they would search the company name and look for bad reviews. Trust came up a lot. If they do not feel the site is secure, they will immediately leave.
5. All stated they do not opt-in emails at checkout unless there was some type of offer or stating they would get great offers. The offer should have a coupon valid for at least 30 days because they just bought and will not buy again so soon.
6. They stated a discount or sale of 10% or less is not enticing.

Summary of the rest of the conference:

Some areas of online sales are increasing
Sports and fitness up 16%
Video games up 10%
Electronics 3%
Apparel 2%

Also pet supplies and personal health predicting to increase.

Worst, music and dvd’s down 30%

Asia and China growing online sales

Online Shopping Engines (CSE) use and searching for products online is growing.  CSE’s use up 2% year over year and increasing, direct traffic down 2% year over year

Google market share in the US is about 60% and about 80% in UK

Most shopping engines used: Yahoo Shopping, Shopzilla, Shop.com, Pronto, Valueclick, Google Base, Nextag, MSN Shopping, Shoplocal, AOL, Pricegrabber, and Become.com

Amazon ecommerce growing at 20%. Cause- Prime Shipping membership and adding the Seller Services.

List of Recession Techniques:
Spend time on growth and efficiency
Smart sourcing
Accelerate turns strategy. Act like you just bought the place and need cash. Don’t get too attached to inventory.
Add channels
Avoid debt
Use google base
Improve conversions
Use surveys (will help improve conversions)
Customer retention is the new acquisition

Use www.google.com/domorewithless

Email segmenting- It is great IF you have a broad segment of buyers. Do not segment such a small group that your return will not pay for the design and development of the campaign.

Add an occasional survey banner to an email, with a prize, to get feedback.

Monitor and respond to bad reviews on all social media and other channels.  Each owner stated hands on customer service was one of the main actions that was helping them stay in business. A couple of the owners/CEO’s would call the person personally if it was really bad.  Bad rep on social media sites if horrible for business, a great rep is huge.

Ebay rep stated their philosophy is Selection, Value, and Trust in that order.  He stressed having a huge selection is the most important factor.  *Note: according to panel, this might not be the correct order. Yes, you need to have the product to sell, but according to the panel, if the product is not a “value” they will not even check to see if you have the product.

Looking forward to next year!

Posted in Online Marketing | 2 Comments »

New FireFox & SEOQuake Includes PPC Tool

Looks like the new version of Firefox and SEOQuake added a free version of http://www.semrush.com/ SEM Rush.  I just noticed when I completed a search in Google.

I noticed all the paid ads had a fire red badge (like a Google Checkout badge) under each one.  When I clicked on them I can see that companies keywords, their ad placements, CPC’s, Volume, and landing page URL’s.

 I am not sure if this a glitch or it is permanant, but so far I have found the keywords to be accurate.  The positions seemed to be a little off in the ones I checked, but it is still great information to have.  Plus, did I mention it was FREE!!!

Posted in PPC | 1 Comment »

Adwords Editor Affects Quality Score In Different Ways

Have you been updating your adwords account using adwords editior?  Your quality score will be affected.

I asked Google how quality score is affected when I completed a website url re-write and changed the urls in my account using the editor.  Their reply is below:

To answer these briefly, whenever you post changes with AdWords Editor, even bulk changes, the upload will update (not delete) all of the keywords, ad groups, and campaigns in your account. The impact is no different than manually makes the changes in the account. Your Quality Score, as it is based on historic data, is largely unaffected. However, updating keyword destination URLs will cause our system to recalibrate the relevancy aspect of Quality Score: how relevant the keyword is to the ad text and to the new landing page. Given that historic statistics such as CTR are unaffected, the shift in Quality Score is minimal and frequently very short lived.That being said, ad texts are the one exception to this. Whenever you make a change to an ad text, whether the change is made from the online interface or AdWords Editor, the old ad text is deleted and a new one created in its place. The historic information associated with the ad text is lost. Quality Score will take a momentary hit, but frequently rebounds very quickly assuming that the content of the ad and landing page are not dramatically altered.

It sounds like, if you need to update your urls, your quality score will be minimally affected.  However, changes to your ad text is treated differently.  When you change your adtext you are essentially creating a new ad in Google’s eyes so you will have to start over and potentially take a hit on quality score.  With this in mind, try to change adtext only when necessary.  You may be better off pausing the ad and creating a new one so you always have the option to restart the old ad again and go back ot the old quality score.

Posted in PPC | 5 Comments »

How To Stay In Business In 2009

Let’s face it, it is harder to sell your products today than it was 12 months ago.  Not only is it harder, but net revenues are dropping.  With all the discounts, promotions, and coupons to encourage sales, net revenues are getting smaller and smaller.  On top of all of this, it actually looks like it might be getting worse before it gets better.   There are a few things you can do to get through these tough times. 

In 2009, you are not going to make more money from selling each product online.  One the ways to compensate for this loss is to sell more of each product.

Think “dollar store” marketing rather than trying to hit that home run and sell a few products at a huge profit margin.   You normally sell 500 products a day at a net profit of $20 each ($10,000 a day).  You are now seeing not only the number of sales drop to 400 a day, but your net profit dropped to $15 ($6,000 a day).   In today’s economy it is going to be very difficult to bump up your net profits, so the alternative is to increase the number of orders.  To match your previous revenue number of $10,000 per day, you will need to sell about 667 products a day instead of 500 you were selling (667 products x $15 = $10,000). So let’s take a look at increasing products sales. 

STEP 1: Increase your current revenue streams

1. Increase the number of paid search engines
I will assume you are selling your products in Adwords, Yahoo, and MSN Adcenter already.  It’s time to explore and test those 2nd and 3rd tier engines.  Remember, we are not looking for blow out revenue numbers.  We are simply looking to increase the number of orders while maintaining a positive return on investment.  Even if the other main paid engines are generating tens of thousands of dollars a month and these little 2nd and 3rd tiers are only netting $500 to $1000 each, keep them open.  You will see why in a minute.  Examples of some 2nd tier engines are Ask.com, 7search, MIVA, search123, and there are various niche ones and country specific ones as well if you search for them online.

2. Increase the number of shopping engines
If you are not in Google base and you sell products online, I want you to stop reading this article, go to your google account, sign up and get your products in their asap.  It is 100% free.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but you have absolutely nothing to lose.  We sell a lot of products through google base.  Did I mention it was FREE!!!  If you are already using shopping engines, using the same concept as above, add more of them. 
 
Here is a list of some shopping engines (in no particular order):
Google Base FREE
The Find FREE
Yahoo shopping
Shopping.com
MSN shopping
Bizrate
Like
Shopzilla
PriceGrabber
Nextag
Smarter
Become
Shop.com

Monitor everything closely at first, but once they get going, again, you can generate anything from a lot to a little bit more per engine.

All said and done, let’s you are averaging $1000 a month each.  Depending on the size of your company, you may think individually this is not worth it, however in these slow, low margin times, when you add up those 5 new second tier engines and 5 new shopping engines at $1000, you are at $10,000 a month.  This side extra $10,000 a month could mean the difference between layoffs or closing up shop.

3.  This one has to do with search engine optimization and usability best practices.  I am not going to go to deep into them because they are all over the internet, but will add a quick list of must do’s:

a. Each product/service should have its own webpage
b. Each page of your website should have a totally unique title tag, meta tag, and content.  If you sell red sticks and blue sticks, do not simply replace the words “red” and “blue” on those product pages and tags.  The tags and content need to be 100% unique.  By doing this, you may add 1000’s of pages to the search engines search results and increase your chances of long tail sales dramatically.
c. Go through your website as if you were going to buy something.  Ask a friend to do that as well.  You will be surprised by what you see.  “Buy” button hard to find? Once you find the product are there clear instructions on what to do next? How long is your check out process?  Is it simple, fast, and easy to buy your product or service?
d. Using your analytics program, which is an absolute must have, look at your bounce rates, and where people are leaving your site.  Why are they leaving?  Also, it is time to start testing! Test upsell pages and adding x/y promotions.  Test different promotion modules- is “Save Up To 50%” better than “Free Shipping?”

STEP 2:  Time to add new multiple stream of income
It is time to step back from your business.  You look at your business everyday and you are immersed in it.  It is time to step back and look at your business as if you were an outside consultant.  What are you missing? Do you sell shoes?  Are there popular brands or models you are not selling?  Get those brands and start selling them.   Do you have an affiliate program?  Look into starting an affiliate program and have others sell your products for you.
What payment types do you accept?  Do you ship overseas?  By simply adding PayPal as a payment method you may increase the number of sales not just due to the addition of a new way for your customers to pay, but our overseas sales increased as well because it is a trusted source of international payments.  Remember, we are not looking for one home run, we are looking to increase the number of sales through multiple channels and “payment method” is just another channel.

Posted in Online Marketing | 1 Comment »