Central Perk: SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

miercuri, 6 aprilie 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Without CRO & On-Site Optimization, It's Tempting to Abandon SEO

Posted: 06 Apr 2011 04:20 AM PDT

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

Quick Synopsis

To make the most out of your SEO, use Conversion Rate Optimization and On-Site Optimization. If you only do SEO, you could find yourself falling short of the bottom line. Skip to the bottom to find some charts to help. To hear how I figured this out the hard way (!), please read on. Maybe the story sounds familiar.

Using SEO Tactics Excerpt: Our sales have been going down for a few months

Does SEO help in sales? Traffic to your site means more customers, and more traffic means more sales, right? But what happens when you did everything right in SEO and you didn't get the sales? It's tempting to adopt a misconception of SEO, and abandon SEO all together.

And that's what almost happened to me.

Being new to SEO at the time, I was an avid student. I'd read any article I could get my hands on. I'd attend any webinar possible. I'd follow the instructions to add more content to my site. I'd streamline my targeted keywords, slim my PPC campaigns, and be active with social media. Traffic was going up and we were moving up in the SERPs. Looks good, right?

After SEO Tactics

For my 6 month-evaluation, I was ready with shining colors. But the owners of the business had other concerns: our sales have been going down for the past few months. I thought to myself, "No, how can this be? I brought in more traffic to our site. Doesn't that mean more sales?"

After taking a deeper look into Google analytics (with even Dr. Pete helping me), we came to a startling conclusion: my company didn't do anything SEO that triggered the downward sales. SEO-wise, we did everything right.

Not Using SEO Tactics

Excerpt: I threw SEO out the window

That's when I threw SEO out the window for a few months. I resorted to good 'ol fashioned marketing. My company is a web-based time and billing software. So being online, we encourage shoppers to sign up for a free trial of the software. But even though we increased traffic, we weren't getting enough trial users and actual buyers. I needed to bridge the gap, so my team and I did the following:

Beefed up the KnowledgeBase and updated it on a regular basis based on the questions recorded in the Tech Support department.
Introduced weekly webinars that demonstrated specific aspects of the software.
Promoted the KnowledgeBase and webinars by our site, emails, and sales and tech support departments.
Called back people who called but didn't leave a message.
Reduced the automatic emails. Made the remaining emails more up to-date, concise, and easier on the eye.

I figured only “educated buyers” make purchases. If they know what they're buying, they'll buy it. Once they become trial users, they want to know how easy it is for them to use the software. And that's where we were falling short. We needed to educate them on how to use the software.

Within months of just good ‘ol fashioned marketing, our sales grew! The rate was so rapid, we now need to grow our tech support staff!
Sales Stats after CRO and On-Site Optimization
Questioning SEO Tactics

So what does this all mean? Is SEO useless when it comes to the bottom line? Does it increase sales? Should businesses ignore it all together? SEOMoz quote

I was seriously asking myself these questions. I finally gathered enough courage to ask SEOMoz and it wasn't what I was expecting. Jamie writes:

"Well, SEO and other online marketing initiatives are certainly complementary. But I'll be honest with you: you will see more sales from focusing on conversion rate optimization and site optimization alone than from SEO alone. That said, I'd never recommend you do only one...

...So if your resources are constrained, and you can only focus well on one thing, you would be smart to continue focusing on conversion optimization until you feel like you're hitting diminishing returns with on-site optimization, then it's time to start focusing much more on getting more people to your well-optimized site. Also, it's possible to be doing things that help your SEO while also focusing primarily on conversion optimization.

So CRO and SEO really do need to be related, but like I said, if you can truly only do one thing, start with optimizing your site first. Just make sure the optimization is for both humans (who you want to buy your wares) and the search engines that will be crawling and indexing your pages for search queries.”

Hello CRO & On-Site Optimization

So Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and On-Site Optimization is really good 'ol fashioned marketing! Jamie helped me put things into perspective. It makes sense. SEO is part of the puzzle.

But here's the thing. These aren't necessarily different things you do in a sequential way. It should all be integrated in each other. I would keep CRO & On-Site Optimization in mind during the entire time you're doing SEO. There are many ways of approaching this. Below is a suggested approach:

Click on this chart to get a larger view. It's a general idea of applying On-Site Optimization and SEO to the various areas of the Conversion Funnel.

So yes, SEO does indeed affect your bottom line. It may not directly affect your bottom line as CRO & On-Site Optimization, but it would be double the work if you had to redo your CRO & On-Site Optimization efforts because Google didn't see your website clearly.

Using a CRO Mindset with SEO

Going in the other direction, if you are looking at a site from an SEO perspective, it's essential that you don't loose sight of the CRO. Don't get lost in all the numbers. Make sure that it ties back to the bottom line.To give yourself a good idea where it falls in your priorities, this flowchart should help:

Flowchart to think CRO when doing SEO

These two charts aren't all-encompassing. There's so much more (Check out a recent YOUmoz post about it - it got bumped up to the main blog!). But if you maintain the right approach to SEO, you're on the right track. Feel free to add other suggestions in applying this concept.

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Retargeting: What It Is & How to Use It

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 01:18 PM PDT

Posted by JoannaLord

I've wanted to write this post for a couple weeks now, knowing that the topic of retargeting is hot, hot, hot. I noticed that as more marketers hear of retargeting there still seems to be quite a bit of confusion around what it actually is, and how it is different from regular display media buys. This post is meant to help with that confusion and hopefully leave everyone with a solid understanding of retargeting basics as well as some actionable ways you can utilize it. Let's start with some common questions...

So what is retargeting?

How is this different than regular display ad buys?
With retargeting you only target users that have visited your site and already had an experience with your brand. You can choose to target users that went to a specific part of your site, or open it up to your whole site, but either way you are guaranteeing that you only spend ad dollars on people who have previously visited your site. Normal display media buys tend to target users in the first stages of the buying funnel. With those ad buys you are tasked with introducing yourself, establishing trust, branding effectively, etc. all while going after an action.

How is it tracked?
You place a retargeting pixel on either (a) certain sections of your site or (b) across your entire site. As visitors visit the pages you have the pixel on they are added to what is called an "audience." This audience is cookied and as they visit other sites in the display networks you are running retargeting ads on, they are shown your ads. The size of your audience greatly affects the success of your retargeting campaigns. Even if you aren't ready to start testing retargeting, I highly suggest you start building your audience. The larger this qualified group of past visitors, the better!

If a person in your audience converts then a "burn pixel" will fire, which takes them out of the audience. You can also choose to add different pixels if you wish to show converting visitors different ads. You can get quite complex regarding the sequence of pixels you cookie these users with.

You can also control the sites that show your ads, just like on typical display network buys. You can decide that a site isn't cutting it, and cut them from the list. You have quite a bit of control around who sees your ad and who doesn't.

Whether you decide to start out with a smaller audience (maybe you decide to JUST cookie those users that made it a cart page but didn't complete a purchase) or whether you decide to put every possible visitor to your site into the audience, this tracking method is incredibly effective. At SEOmoz we have started passing back a unique conversion ID on our end, as to double and triple check conversions with the agency we are running our retargeting efforts through. This sort of granular tracking can be very powerful, and very robust, as we will explore in greater detail in a bit. Below is an image of the general process:

_{* Please note you don't have to be named Casey for retargeting to be effective}

How is it measured?
Unlike typical display advertising measurement, retargeting actually gives credit to both click-though, and view-through conversions. Often times if you work with an agency they will report both to you, as well as a total, and you will have to decide how you want to navigate the performance formula.

Click-through conversions are any conversions that happen as a direct result of someone clicking a retargeting ad they were served.

View-through conversions would be like assists. They are conversions that are attributed to another channel (on last click attribution tracking) but these conversions were at one point served a retargeting ad.

As you can imagine there is a lot to be learned about your ads and landing pages as these numbers change in ratio throughout your testing. We were very interested to find that our purely branded ads (just Roger and our logo) were incredibly effective for both buckets. This has helped us optimize our display strategy across the board.

Wait, so what is remarketing?
Google Adwords launched a form of retargeting in their display network about a year ago, and they call it "remarketing," which has caused nothing but confusion for most marketers. So Remarketing is specific to the Google Adwords display network, and Retargeting is the marketing approach behind Remarketing.

** Since Remarketing really is a beast all it's own, I have decided to focus this post on just retargeting. If you want me to write a post on how to set up Remarketing, and how to use it effectively, let me know in the comments below and I'll get on it!

So how can you use retargeting?
Now that you have the gist of how it works, let's talk about practical applications for this marketing channel. The simplest answer to this would be to say that remarketing gets previous visits back to your site. We all know there are lots of conversions that can happen when you get a previous visit to return. Remarketing can be effective at every step of the funnel. You know what? I hate that we always call it a funnel. So today I'm calling it the buying ice cream cone. Retargeting banners can be effective at each step of the buying ice cream cone (see below).

This is just a taste, the ideas are literally limitless. The truth is retargeting is one of the most effective ways to target a user at a given time with a given message. You know how as a marketer we are always trying to gauge where a user is in the buying funnel so we can better understand if our buys are failing, or if our messages are? Well retargeting takes a lot of the guesswork and replaces it with data and quite a bit of control, its a win-win.

Is this all too good to be true?
Well the short answer is yes. There are quite a few things to keep in mind when testing out retargeting as part of your digital marketing strategy. Here are just a few bigger challenges to keep in mind:

#1 Retargeting is a channel all its own
It is tempting to apply past display ad truths to your retargeting efforts, but this isn't your best decision Retargeting demands unique banner ads, custom landing pages, and ongoing optimization. So unless you have the time to truly research, learn, build-out, and measure another channel, you might want to hold off on retargeting. Like every other marketing opportunity out there, you can lose money if you don't put the time in.

#2 Banners can be more creative, less official
Not sure if "official" is the right word, but banner ads that are a bit more out there have huge potential on retargeting. These ads can be more personal, quirky or humorous. They need to catch a person's eye and trigger a memory of their last visit. Logos and brand names are still important, but retargeting ads are an opportunity to push your creative messaging. This is a chance to tell a story to a user that will continue to see you and interact with your site.

#3 Too much retargeting can work against you
Retargeting specialists believe that having a user see 7 to 12 of your ads in the course of a 30-day period is ideal, but seeing the same ad every time, or seeing more than that can have a negative effect. We learned this the hard way at SEOmoz. I was so excited when we first started running tests that I increased my budget to get some serious volume data, and quickly our help team as well as our Twitter stream was bombarded with users complaining that they were being followed by SEOmoz ads. It was clear that many of them wanted to see less of us on their favorite sites. There is a fine balance between targeting users, and bombarding them, so tread lightly.

#4 Retargeting is a commitment
I already mentioned that it requires a great deal of attention, but retargeting is also most effective after it is up and running for some time. First off, your audience grows larger, which only works to your benefit. Secondly, retargeting specialists agree that three months of seeing about a dozen ad impressions is more effective than just one month. There is a lot of power in staying front of mind. So for those of you all excited about retargeting possibilities, just remember it could take a few months to find your retargeting groove.

Those are the biggest challenges we have faced here at SEOmoz. When we first started testing retargeting we were starry eyed with the initial results, and since then we have continued to be impressed by its performance. However, we have also made a whole lot of mistakes along the way. Our latest mistake was actually firing the conversion pixel on the wrong page (resulting in about 8x more conversions being recorded)-- yeah that really happened. So just keep in mind, this channel isn't a "set it and forget it" answer to your marketing prayers.

Retargeting takeaways
I don't want to scare you off. Retargeting can be incredibly effective for advertisers that put the time in to manage and optimize spend effectively. I should mention that last month alone we saw 4X the number of free trial signups from retargeting than we did from a similar stand-alone site sponsorship. We actually ran identical banner ads for those two buys as well. The differences came in having a prequalified audience, and staying in front of our target audience.

So take it or leave it, but the marketing team over at SEOmoz is definitely excited to play around with retargeting and see how creative we can get with the sequences of our ad buys and landing pages (I hope to get some follow-up posts with case studies for all of you soon enough). The results make it worth the time, and in my opinion, it's like the Wild West in there right now. You don't have to worry about competition like with many other channels, you control every piece of this channel, and you have unlimited options on how to utilize it.

I would love to hear if any of you have been using it, and if so, what are you seeing?

As an added bonus, I thought I'd share my PubCon South Presentation on Retargeting & Remarketing. Here you go friends!

Unleashing the Power of Retargeting

View more presentations from Joanna Lord.

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