Community tips: How to turn customers into brand advocates

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• Community tips: How to turn customers into brand advocates
• How Ecommerce Sites can Leverage the 5 Stages of the Customer Buying Cycle
• Google Search Console: A Beginner’s Guide
• Matt Bentley on SEO tools, keywords & the future
• SEO Myths Busted – One week on
• 7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation
• Surveys – add authority to your content marketing
• #SMX London 2015 – SEM Key Takeaways
• How to get your tweets ready for Google’s Twitter integration
• Net-a-Porter have launched their own social shopping app, The NET SET, and we’ve reviewed it!

Community tips: How to turn customers into brand advocates Posted: 25 Jun 2015 06:19 AM PDT Today's digital opportunities provide brands with many occasions to connect with their core consumers in meaningful ways. But in order for this to work, brands themselves have to foster advocacy and make it a prominent part of their marketing strategies. In the age of consumer control and peer-to-peer influence, it's not a secret that brand ambassadors are amongst the most powerful partners you could wish to have on your side. Yet as many reports suggest, brands are largely failing at driving advocacy through social media. To help you grow a healthy environment on social media we are starting with letter A for 'ADVOCACY', which is part of our 'A to Z of social media: a guide to success'. If your aim is to become a great brand and produce a unique experience for your audience, keep reading as in this post we're going to share with you some advice, tactics, and suggestions on how to build an advocacy program. Why are advocates valuable to your business? Advocates, often mistaken for loyal customers, don't just consistently keep buying from you, they take a much more personal approach to your brand with authentic enthusiasm and endorsement. They champion your brand, making others pay more attention and trust. 7 surprising insights about brand advocates from Deloitte, Forrester, Zuberance: – 92% of consumers trust brand advocates – Customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate – Brand advocates are 5X more valuable than average customers – They spend at least 2X as much as average customers – Brand advocates spend 3X as much as average customers over the lifetime of their relationship with a company or brand – Every time they advocate for a product or service, they reach 150 people using social media As you can see from the this data, advocacy is a very powerful asset which is helping companies, big and small. Yet it's also important to point out that great online engagement doesn't just happen, brands have to work on it by supporting their efforts with an active plan to focus on identifying, engaging and retaining those visible and hidden advocates amongst their audience. As this diagram presents, an advocacy system is built upon trust, authenticity and the effort of creating a positive experience. A brand's culture, it's heritage, and personalisation, are amongst other ingredients which can lead to success. Let's have a look at some tactics to spur brand advocacy and inspire your next steps in applying it: 1. Share advocates' content with a wider audience & acknowledge their efforts Advocates' endorsements deserve recognition, how simple is that! Yet often these acts of kindness are being forgotten. Start with something simple: ● Like/Favourite their updates ● Retweet/Share their comments ● Turn their photos into photo collages ● Use the Flipagram app to create short photo movies Take this example from Taco Bell, who rewarded its top Twitter advocates with personalised handwritten notes and a custom ring. This small gesture not only created lots of buzz on social media, but also provided the brand with engaging user-generated content. TIP: When collaborating with brand ambassadors keep in mind the high value of content co-creation. Offer them tools to enhance their creativity and allow them to create branded content on their own. 2. Offer something special Paying attention to your advocates' activities will provide you with some ideas of how to show your appreciation for their work. You can start by giving them special access to VIP promotions, information, or events. These tactics will allow your brand ambassadors to increase and share their excitement while expanding brand loyalty for your organisation. TIP: If you are creating hashtags for specific events or campaigns make sure to track and record them in order to evaluate performance and pursue in the future the formats which resonated the best with your audience. 3. Inspire conversation and engagement with content Building a brand advocacy program can provide you with an opportunity to examine your messages and the content you're producing. Put aside the concept of using your blog, YouTube videos or social media just for selling your products. Instead, concentrate on providing useful information, tips and solutions to build further advocacy. For retailer Mr Porter, the blog is a place where people can find inspiration about style, history and fashion curiosities. To add extra weight to each article, the brand is using the correct tone of voice and copywriting style, as well as exquisite photography and illustration which are crucial elements of any good piece of content. TIP: Produce content that other people can believe in by aligning it with causes, emotions and lifestyle. 4. Focus on your fans' emotions and their stories Use social media to explore your advocates' passions and turn their visual storytelling into a much bigger campaign. People who build your brand create stories which are much more powerful, believable and portray your philosophy more effectively. TIP: Display your advocates' uniqueness and artistic skills by inviting them into a brand-consumer collaboration while challenging them to try something new. When building an advocacy ecosystem you must remember that it can only work when it's real and authentic. To make it work try to avoid the following tactics: ● Avoid paying or incentivizing advocates, instead acknowledge their efforts ● Don't view advocate marketing as short-term promotion, to make it work apply a systematic approach ● Don't just do it alone – invest in experts' help who understand this relatively new marketing approach and who are able to select the best tactics to fit your business. I hope this post has inspired your thoughts as I would love to hear what tactics you are planning to apply to grow your brand's advocacy. In my next blog post I will be reviewing the meaning behind the letter 'B' and explaining how social media should never be 'owned' just by one person but should reflect the character of the whole brand.   The post Community tips: How to turn customers into brand advocates appeared first on White.net.

How Ecommerce Sites can Leverage the 5 Stages of the Customer Buying Cycle Posted: 23 Jun 2015 01:42 AM PDT The customer buying cycle is a process that everyone within digital marketing should be familiar with. Whether you're redesigning a website or improving the site structure the stages within the customer buying cycle should be considered at all times. Identifying what your potential clients are searching for and the content required for each stage is paramount to turning a shopper into a client. Whilst it's common for online business owners to always focus on the sale, it's important to remember that shoppers go through a purchasing funnel before they become customers. What are the 5 stages of the customer buying cycle? Awareness: This is the first stage in the buying process where a customer has a need for a product and realises that your business might be able to fulfil their needs. Customers may become aware of you through a variety of sources e.g. PPC, organic, social media etc. Consideration: This is the research stage where the shopper wants to find out more about the products you offer and evaluate whether you would suit their needs. The shopper will likely also conduct the same research on your competitors' sites. The shopper is looking for ways to save money, more information about the product, the best delivery options, and so on Preference/Intent: The shopper has made a decision that they want to buy. This stage of the process needs to give them everything they need that will entice them to make the purchase. This is the most logical stage of the process where they are justifying why they want to buy with you. This is where your emotional marketing helps too Purchase: The shopper (soon to be customer) is going through the motion of buying your product and wants the shortest and easiest checkout process Repurchase:  Just when you think the hard work is done, how you target your customers after purchase is equally as important. This aim of this stage is to create a long term relationship with your new customer Why should I create targeted content for each stage? Search queries are the golden ticket in identifying what your customers are actively looking for. Targeting customers at each stage of the journey is vital for achieving the sale. The quality of a landing page sets the foundations of the user's journey. So, if it doesn't relate to their search query users will most likely bounce off the site, therefore resulting in a lost sale and poor engagement signals with search engines. Kissmetrics make a very good point that window shoppers that walk past a brick and mortar store are just the same shoppers that hover around online.  The difference with online shoppers is you can find out exactly what they are searching for and how they are behaving online. That way you can make more informed decisions about what content is needed for each stage. Don’t worry if you're unsure of how to find out the search queries, the next section covers this. But first we need to identify the search terms shoppers are using at each stage of the buying cycle. To put it into context I have used mascara as an example. 1. "mascara" –  This is a generic term that indicates the first stage in the buying process. The customer is aware that they need mascara but hasn't considered any preferences yet. Example content- Category page that includes all of the mascaras 2. "Compare mascaras" or "best mascaras'"– The consideration phase normally results in the shopper comparing products. The need to compare products indicates that they haven't yet made a selection but are looking broadly at what's to offer. Example content- Blog post that compares the mascaras 3. "Lancome mascara"- The preference phase usually takes place once the shopper has reviewed the products there are to choose from. In this case with a mascara, the shopper has selected that the brand they prefer is Lancôme. Example content- Sub category page that includes Lancôme's range of mascaras 4.  "Lancome doll eyes mascara" – The shopper knows exactly what they want and are intent on making a purchase. This is a very specific query that includes the exact product name as well as the manufacturer. This refinement in the search query indicates that the shopper is either looking to find this product on a website or is evaluating prices. Example content- Lancome doll eyes mascara product page How do I know what my customers are searching for? There are a number of tools you can use to dive into your search queries. I have listed below the top three search query tools I like to use. Google Analytics – this is the first place you should go to look at the search queries. Try and go back as far as you can when looking at search queries so you can get a big picture of what people are searching for. Webmaster Tools (recently rebranded to Google Search Console) – Provides you with search query data (see our guide for more info) Google Keyword Planner– Search for short tail and long tail keywords that you believe your customers will be searching for. The search volume with give you an indication of how common that particular search term is. It's important to remember that short tail keywords will have a much higher search volume than longer queries. If you want to discover more tools in addition to those listed above, my colleague Bobby recently wrote a really useful blog post which goes into further detail on all the tools you need for keyword research which is definitely worth a read. How do I convert shoppers into buyers? The most important step within the buying process is how we convert shoppers into customers. The last page a shopper will engage with before heading to the checkout is usually going to be the product page. This page should contain all of the content required to encourage shoppers to make a purchase. The following types of content should feature on your product page: Descriptive product pages Product advice User generated content (product reviews) Stock availability Delivery and returns information Payment options Add to wish list Live chat Blogs How to videos Product demonstrations Testimonials Product guides, dimensions, colours and size charts FAQs Why are shoppers abandoning products at the cart? There's nothing more frustrating than enticing customers all the way through the site for them to drop off during the purchase stage. With abandonment rates at 68% shoppers are failing to check out their goods, but why? There are a number of reasons why this can happen. The most common reasons why people abandon their shopping are: Needed to register before buying – no guest checkout Didn't want to pay the shipping costs Lumped with unexpected costs Total price was too expensive Discount code wasn't accepted Wanted to find out delivery times Item wasn't actually in stock Complicated checkout process Slow page load time Difficulty in filling out forms Wasn't easy to check out on a mobile device Didn't save payment details Concerns about payment security Website crashed Website timed out Payment was declined Changed their mind Decided to purchase from a competitor How do I create loyalty with my customers? Giving customers the best shopping experience will resonate with them when you make future contact. You want your customers to want to hear from you and be excited when they do. Econsultancy shared some great examples of how ecommerce sites have driven engagement at each stage of the buying cycle. The process of re-engaging with clients that are already satisfied is the easiest part of the process. If they had a good experience with you they are more likely to come back and purchase from you time and time again. Types of content that will drive repeat business: Feedback surveys Product reviews driven with incentives New products Newsletter sign up Loyalty programme Tailored email campaigns – new products, exclusive offers, etc. Special offers Free delivery codes Refer a friend scheme Competitions Understanding shoppers search habits enables you to create targeted content to help support each stage in the buying process. Focusing on the needs and expectations your audience at each stage of the buying process will help your business achieve its end goal which is for your customers to purchase from you. Do you have any other suggestions on how e-commerce sites should leverage the 5 stages in the buying cycle? Please let me know by adding a comment to and I’ll add them to the list.  I look forward to hearing from you. The post How Ecommerce Sites can Leverage the 5 Stages of the Customer Buying Cycle appeared first on White.net.

Google Search Console: A Beginner’s Guide Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:22 AM PDT This blog post supersedes the original version which was published by Daniel Bianchini in July 2011 under the title ‘Google Webmaster Tools: A Beginner’s guide to Installation’. Since Google Webmaster Tools first launched around 10 years ago, its been the first port of call for webmasters diagnosing issues with their website. In 2015 that hasn’t changed. We may have sophisticated  tools for monitoring web projects and software that shows us our data in a million different segments, but Webmaster Tools remains as valuable today as ever. Webmaster Tools in 2007   I should mention first and foremost that as of May 2015, it is no longer called Webmaster Tools but in fact, Google Search Console. It’s essentially the same set of tools, just with a different name and a greater focus on making the data within more accessible and open to less tech-savvy people. It follows a couple of minor UI changes and an overhaul of the ‘Search Queries’ tool. Check out Google’s John Mueller reminiscing over Webmaster Tool below… So what is Google Search Console? It is a free and useful way for webmasters to view their own website the way that Google sees it. It features the following information: How many pages on your site have been indexed Errors encountered while crawling your site The crawl rate of your site Analyse your website’s performance in Google organic search via ‘Search Analytics’ Which domains link to your site It also allows you to: Submit your xml sitemap(s) to Google and receive feedback on how many contained URLs are indexed and any URL errors found Test URLs against your website’s robots.txt file to ensure they are blocked/allowed See how Google renders (views) your website with the Fetch as Google tool Configure the use of parameters on your website Check the implementation of Hreflang tags, via the International Targeting tool Your  input Google Search Console allows you  to report the actions you have taken to solve some of the issues you have diagnosed, for example: Submit and update disavow files Reconsideration request Submit and configure new parameters Remove URLs from search results Search Console implementation and verification Many of us who have been using Webmaster Tools for years probably don’t even remember how we implemented Google Webmaster Tools across our websites. Often we get invited by another owner who has already verified the site previously. For new users of Search Console, the options for verifying your site are: Adding a meta tag to your home page (proving that you have access to the source files). To use this method, you must be able to edit the HTML code of your site’s pages Upload an HTML file with the name you specify to your server. To use this method, you must be able to upload new files to your server Verify via your domain name provider. To use this method, you must be able to sign in to your domain name provider (for example, GoDaddy.com or networksolutions.com) or hosting provider and add a new DNS record Add the Google Analytics code you use to track your site. To use this option, you must be an administrator on the Google Analytics account, and the tracking code must use the asynchronous snippet (all codes generated these days are but legacy ones may not be – it’s time to upgrade!) Verify via the Google Tag Manager Container Snippet which should be placed after the opening <body> tag of your page For many, the easiest option will be verifying via your Google Tag Manager Account or via your website’s Google Analytics code. We recommend  that you use the same account for all Google products and if it's a business account, create a central account for the entire business. Delegating access in Google Search Console GWT allows the administrator of the account to provide access to multiple users by adding them to the Verification Details via the "Manage" link as you log in to the tool. Once you have clicked the "Manage" link, you will be directed through to the Verification Details page, where you will be allowed to add/edit/delete the users who have access to the data via their own Google account. To add a new user, click the "Add an owner" button and enter their email address. This will only work for users who have a registered Google Account, so if they do not currently have one please refer them to step 1. If you would like to remove any users who have been previously added then just click the "Unverify" link.  What is Search Analytics? Previously called the ‘Search Queries’ report, Search Analytics is still in beta (as of 16th June 2015) however, its definitely an upgrade in terms of data and segmentation. Whilst this feature still only provides the last 90 days worth of data, you can get quite granular in order to identify impressions and clicks across: Keyword Landing pages Device Country Date range For full run through of how to use the data contained within the Search Analytics tools, see Google’s documentation here. Finding this data in Google Analytics… If you link your Webmaster Console account to your Google Analytics account, you can access this same data in the ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ section within ‘Acquisition’ in Google Analytics (see image below) This is helpful if you like to have all your data in one place, although it should be noted that this still only provides the last 90 days of data. So there you have it, our beginner’s guide to Google Search Console. If you have any tips to share or questions on making the most of this excellent, free resource that we haven’t answered here, drop us a comment below. The post Google Search Console: A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on White.net.

Matt Bentley on SEO tools, keywords & the future Posted: 16 Jun 2015 01:26 AM PDT SEO can be a hard craft. It can feel a slippery, fickle topic; the downside to the industry’s fantastic agility, adaptive streak and drive for constant improvement is a need to continually adopt new techniques, knowledge and tools. That does however give us the perfect excuse to always be trying out new software and tools, and who doesn’t like to kick the tyres on some new toys? It was while checking out one of the new keyword tools on the block, CanIRank, that I got chatting to Matt Bentley, the tool’s founder. Matt kindly agreed to turn our banter into a full interview. We discussed about how the tool fits into an increasingly crowded market, why he wanted to build it, and how he’d like to see the industry develop. During our conversation Matt showed he’s not only very passionate about SEO and building a tool that helps marketers, but is also one of the industry’s most articulate and forward-looking thinkers. CW: Hi Matt, thanks for taking time to speak with us; can you tell us a little about CanIRank – who is it for, and what can users achieve with it? MB: We call CanIRank an SEO Intelligence tool: it's part keyword research, part competitive analysis, and part artificial intelligence. The purpose of SEO intelligence tools is to improve your productivity by giving you a better understanding of why each site ranks where it does, which factors are holding you back, and what your biggest opportunities are. In short, we let computers do what they do best — compile and analyze data — to free up more time for marketers to focus on what they do best — coming up with creative ways to attract and engage potential customers. In the past 5 years SEO has become almost exponentially more complex. To really understand why a site ranks where it does you need to consider a huge list of factors (keyword usage, anchor text, topical relevancy, website authority, trust, speed, mobile friendliness, https, user behavior, etc…). It's no longer possible for humans to keep all of that in their head and really understand how sites compare in these hundreds of factors, and which ones might be making the difference. In the past 5 years SEO has become almost exponentially more complex But computers can make sense of it all. CanIRank collects 4,000 data points from 11 different sources for every single keyword analyzed. Our software can take 40 randomized URLs, collect data on them, and re-rank them in the same order as Google to a 60% correlation. I don't think the best human SEOs in the world could do that, even if you gave them a week. And honestly, SEO is just a whole lot more fun when you can focus on the creative aspects, the problem solving and relationship building, rather than spending all day poring over data in Excel. CW: I think for many folks it really is (though some of us still like geeking out in Excel!) For you, what’s the most exciting thing about CanIRank? MB: The most exciting part for me is seeing the results we've been able to help clients achieve. First is the massive time savings. So far we've analyzed over 200,000 websites, which means collecting 40,000,000 raw data points and distilling that down into 23,000 Action Recommendations. That's a 99.9425% reduction in data you have to pay attention to! For small teams or those trying to get results quickly, it can be pretty overwhelming trying to figure out where to start, so it’s a big deal to know specifically which issues you should address to make the biggest positive impact on your ranking. SEO is just too big these days to do everything. Of course, all of that wouldn't be worth anything if our AI models didn't make accurate recommendations, but we've tested that and clients who don't follow CanIRank’s Action Recommendations actually see a slight decrease in ranking on average, whilst those who follow at least some Action Recommendations for just 1 week see an average ranking increase of 12%, and those who spend 1 month completing Action Recommendations see an average 25% improvement. Obviously, that's just the average. We had 1 client who managed to increase search traffic 533% in just one month — and he was brand new to SEO!   CW: Is that what you built CanIRank for, to help those with less experience or technical nous or is it for everyone, including agencies? Who is the tool aimed at? MB: Our initial goal was to improve the transparency of SEO — to take all these ranking factors and distill it to something where anyone can just look at a CanIRank report and say "aha! so that's what's going on." So that's certainly helpful for someone who's a bit newer to SEO and maybe doesn't have the years of experience that really badass SEOs do where they can just look at all these numbers flying by and instantly see the big picture, kind of like operators in the Matrix. But as we've grown we've discovered that agencies and professional SEOs also appreciate being able to quickly diagnose issues, automate their keyword research, and find keywords they can rank for quickly. Basically, everyone these days is under pressure to deliver more results in less time, so even the most expert SEOs benefit from the productivity and efficiency increases of automating the most time-consuming analysis. You could give me detailed instructions on how to build a house, and I'd probably get through it with considerable time and effort, but it's not going to be the same result as you'd get from a master carpenter CW: You’ve built CanIRank to let users really develop their SEO understanding and ability – do you think it allows people to do SEO for themselves without outside training/expertise? Was this a goal? MB: The combination of increased transparency into search ranking factors along with detailed instructions means that CanIRank is a great way to learn SEO. It's "learning by doing" where each step is tailored to addressing the needs of your site, like a book that was written just for you. That said, there's always going to be a role for SEO experts. You could give me detailed instructions on how to build a house, and I'd probably get through it with considerable time and effort, but it's not going to be the same result as you'd get from a master carpenter following the same instructions. Experts can look at an issue that CanIRank uncovers and immediately think of a dozen different approaches for addressing that issue, some of which they have absolutely dialed. So for most businesses it's going to be worth it to let the experts do what they do best. But even for businesses who aren't doing the work themselves, CanIRank can serve as a kind of bridge between the business and their SEO agency. Put it this way: hiring an SEO shouldn't feel like a trip to the auto mechanic. I take my car in for an oil change, and the mechanic tells me there's a problem with my rear flux capacitor turnbuckle coupler, and I should pay £3,000 to get that fixed unless I want to put my entire family at risk. I have no idea if he's just making that up; the car seemed fine to me! Looking at a CanIRank report, even a novice can see where their website falls short of the top rankers and have a real understanding for the challenges that lie ahead and the value they're going to be getting from the work done by their SEO agency. CW: I think that’s a fantastic analogy – bridging the gap between what we do and what our clients understand is a big part of the job, especially when it can sound like gobbledygook… We’ve seen a fair number of new SEO tools enter the market as it starts to reach a new level of maturity; how do you see CanIRank fitting into an SEO’s toolbox? MB: It is a very crowded market! Only a few years back the problem was we couldn't get enough data. Now, the problem is there's way too much! It's almost a full time job keeping track of all the great data coming in from all these different marketing tools, there's no time to act on what you're learning. And I guess that pretty much captures where CanIRank fits in: we're a layer of machine learning intelligence on top of the tools that you're already using (Moz, SEMRush, Ahrefs, social media, crawlers, keyword tools, etc.) that automates the data collection, makes it understandable, and helps you figure out which things you need to pay attention to. We have a sister company (http://www.lightship.me/) in stealth mode that kind of hints at where we're headed: automation and intelligence that turns all your raw data into directly actionable opportunities.   CW: What other online marketing tools have you used that you really liked? Have any of them inspired CanIRank at all? MB: Well of course we're long time users and big fans of the companies that provide data to CanIRank — especially Moz, SEMRush, and Ahrefs — all do a fantastic job and are really the backbone of SEO analysis. More generally, I'm super excited about the potential of predictive analytics technology to transform online marketing. I think within a relatively short timeframe we'll all be doing our jobs in collaboration with an AI of some sort — companies like Adometry, Pretarget, TellApart, Preact, and 6Sense are some other leaders in this space. I owe much of the inspiration behind CanIRank's technology (not to mention the direction of my career in the past 7 years!) to coaching and advising from Dean Abbott of Abbott Analytics who helped me get started as a data scientist and lay the foundation for CanIRank's predictive analytics technology. I think within a relatively short timeframe we'll all be doing our jobs in collaboration with an AI of some sort CW: Now that is interesting. We’re big fans of SEMrush, Ahrefs and Moz here as well. I think the possibilities for AI predictive input into what we do is fascinating, probably deserves its own dedicated conversation! As you’ve brought up your background, I wanted to ask; you’ve been an online entrepreneur for many years, as well as working in data science, what’s your experience with online marketing? Is it something you’ve always been keen on? MB: Online marketing, and particularly growth marketing, has always seemed like the most interesting challenge in startup companies, and I've been lucky enough to have spent time in a variety of online marketing roles at startups, some successful, some not so much. SEO has always been a part of that, but I'm definitely more of a generalist than some of the other folks who have spent 15 years doing nothing but SEO. In a way, I think that's been beneficial as the tool we built was what I always wanted as a startup growth marketer trying to grow traffic on a limited budget: it's much more accessible than other tools that might only make sense to professional SEOs. Online marketing, and particularly growth marketing, has always seemed like the most interesting challenge in startup companies CW: What made you want to take on building an SEO tool? Was it simply about a gap in the keyword analysis market, or was it more about filling a need in the increasingly competitive industry overall? MB: I talked with a lot of startups and small businesses about the challenges they faced with their online marketing, and one of the most common scenarios went something like this: Pick a target keyword that's way too challenging Learn just enough SEO to be dangerous, start building links in all sorts of unsavory ways Get penalized by Google and end up worse off than when you started So we thought: what if we could build an app that could tell people whether or not a keyword was reasonable for them to target? They could avoid wasting time chasing impossible dreams, stay out of trouble with Google, and see results much more quickly. Since then of course we've added many more features and it's as much how can I rank? and what are my biggest opportunities as it is can I rank, but still the original name stuck! CW: It still works well as a different way to present the information – feeding in the terms you feel are important, and then getting a checklist of ideas. CanIRank gives out detail on next steps to take for on-page, off-page & technical SEO aspects – with so much debate on the best way to do things, how did you select the right advice to give? Is it all tied directly to the app’s machine learning? MB: Yes, the algorithm learns which factors are most influential based upon what's working well for each keyword. This is an important differentiator between us and other software that follows a standard "checklist" approach for every website: if we've learned one thing over the past few years, it's that SEO changes extremely quickly. By the time something becomes generally accepted as a "best practice" and starts getting pushed heavily by all the gurus, it's already on its way to being a penalty trigger. From directories to reciprocal links to guest blogging, many SEO tactics have tended to follow a similar evolution: Discovery -> Promotion -> Broader awareness -> Automation and abuse -> Penalty trigger One or two experts stumble upon something that works, they promote it to help build their brands and expertise, it becomes more widely known including amongst spammers, someone figures out how to automate it or otherwise do it at massive scale, it's now so widely (ab)used by low quality websites that it becomes a penalty trigger. So we rely on the results to teach us what's working, rather than expert opinion.   CW: What’s next in the pipeline for CanIRank? What do you hope the tool will eventually grow into? MB: Our primary focus right now is on making our Action Recommendations more intelligent and personalized. Whereas now we can identify a certain issue and recommend some specific actions that will address it, the next step iteration won't just describe the action, but will show you specifically where you can go for your website. For example, if you need to build more Website Strength, we'll be analyzing your competitors' links to determine which ones might represent an opportunity for you. Lots of actions involve something like looking for industry resource pages, or influential bloggers, or niche communities to participate in. Rather than just describe how to do that we'll go out and find resource pages/ bloggers/ communities/ etc. and analyze them to determine which ones represent the best opportunity for you. So in this case the AI will be used to answer questions like: Can I get a link on this page? Is it worth the effort for me to get a link on this page? How trusted/ relevant/ authoritative is this page? And then presenting you with the best opportunities based upon that analysis. So basically, new applications of our core theme: collect a ton of data, analyze it to determine what's most relevant and actionable for your website, then present just the best stuff to you so you can focus on getting things done!   CW: Wow, that sounds like a hugely impressive ideal to reach for. I’m curious, how much does CanIRank’s ability to correlate with Google’s order depend on stability? For example, has the recent Phantom update meant you’d had to reassess any of your learning? And what would happen if another Panda (the original affected 12% of English queries) was launched? MB: If you think about it, most search engine updates don't involve new signals, but rather new ways of processing and prioritizing those signals. So some of those shifts we’ll pick up automatically, others we'll pick up second-order effects that still let us reflect the change. Of course, as search engines start to prioritize new signals, like https or mobile friendliness, we'll have to add as many of those things as is feasible into our models. But as hard we try, we're not Google, and never could be. No one has access to the kind of data they have. We're just trying to make the data that is out there and available as actionable as possible. The cool thing about SEO is that it's a series of little competitions. In competitions, you don't have to perfect to win, you just have to be better than the other guy. So if (other things being equal, which they're not!) a tool gives you even a slight edge, say increasing your productivity by 5%, that can mean the difference between page 1 and page 2, translating into a 1,000% increase in ROI. On a side note, that's why it's usually worth it to hire the best SEO you can afford, since the difference between high rankings and low rankings is a lot bigger than the difference in their rates! We're just trying to make the data that is out there and available as actionable as possible CW: I love diving deep into keyword topic models and user-led content development, which is one of the reasons I was excited to try CanIRank. The way we analyse keywords with lots of data, their intent as well as relevancy, is becoming hugely important. CanIRank also values understanding what works for a keyword in detail – do you think this is the future of keyword research? MB: Yes, in any case it's certainly been the biggest change in the past couple years, as the actual keyword string has greatly declined in importance, and the amorphous "topic model" and even more amorphous "intention” have risen. In some ways this has made keyword research a lot easier: you no longer have to analyze every keyword micro-variation (singulars, plurals, sizes, etc.) or try to find a less difficult variant by adding superfluous modifiers or awkward plurals like very cheap iPhones 6+ case… Now the search engines just ignore your silly obscure keywords anyway, so you might as well focus on the real meat keywords, and instead use the extra time to dig deeper into truly understanding what it will take to rank. We still have some customers who come in with the mindset of wanting to analyze thousands of micro-variations in order to uncover some hidden gem that no one else has thought of. And unfortunately a lot of 1st generation keyword research tools that only look at keyword string occurrence will tell them "yes! very cheap iPhones 6 case is way easier because nobody's targeting that right now". So they waste time adding silly pages to their website, and still don't end up ranking.   CW: For me the rise of a topic model makes things easier, as you can concentrate on creating several excellent pieces of content, rather than being asked to develop tens of near-identical Panda fodder. It not only works for SEO, it just build better websites. Finally, as someone who has been a keen observer of the industry, and has now jumped right into it, what do you think the future holds for SEO and online marketing? Is it data-driven tools working alongside creatively-minded brand building? And what do we need to be doing better? MB: Well, it's definitely going to be an interesting time! Marketers have experienced this unprecedented explosion of data. Where once we were swimming blind, now we're all ADHD. When it's literally possible to know more about your customers' interests and behavior than previous generations knew about their own spouse, how do you even process that? I think online marketing right now is still going through the awkward teenager phase, struggling to incorporate all this knowledge, or worse, using it in creepy ways. As it grows up, we have an opportunity to reach what I consider the ultimate pinnacle of marketing: Helpful Marketing. Marketing that informs rather than deceives, and helps you make the best purchasing decision. Helpful marketing is some future version of FitBit or Apple Watch that can monitor my health metrics and say "Matt, you're starting to get some inflammation in your rotator cuff that could lead to impingement, here are the top rated shoulder specialists in your area. Would you like an appointment?" Or my Tesla monitoring its own performance, automatically identifying any issues and suggesting nearby mechanics or appropriate aftermarket parts. And perhaps some not-so-distant future version of CanIRank that monitors all of your online marketing metrics and can connect you to the appropriate experts for whatever challenges your site is facing. So when we're all constantly getting advice from Future Siri/ Google Now, our Tesla, even our refrigerator telling us when we're out of milk, will SEO evolve into helping companies better meet the demands of these billions of new "implicit search queries"? I hope so! In any case, for marketers it's going to be a great time. Our data processing tools will help connect us to people who have the exact problems our clients are able to solve. Only helpful and relevant messages will make it through the blockers and filters anyway (that's a hole we dug for ourselves!) Nothing feels better than being able to authentically connect with someone and help them out!   And that’s all we’ve got space for! A huge thanks once again to Matt for chatting with us. I hope you’ll agree it’s been a fascinating insight into the motivation behind creating an SEO tool. We’ll be taking a deeper look at CanIRank in the coming weeks and will be writing up our thoughts on how to use it. If you’d like to find out more about CanIRank for yourself, or jump right in and take a free 30 day trial, head over to canirank.com, or you can find Matt on Twitter. The post Matt Bentley on SEO tools, keywords & the future appeared first on White.net.

SEO Myths Busted – One week on Posted: 11 Jun 2015 04:40 AM PDT Myths. They’re everywhere, and they range from those that crop up in everyday life (cracking your knuckles gives you arthritis) to the downright odd (Tom Jones insured his chest hair for $7 million). Try as we may we can’t escape these falsehoods, and unfortunately it’s no different in the world of digital marketing. myth 1. A widely held but false belief or idea: ‘keyword research is all about choosing big volume keywords‘ Last week we launched our new resource: ‘SEO Myths Busted by the Experts & You!‘, aimed at creating a space where we can collate all the industry myths we discover, and attempt to debunk them once and for all. So, one week on, I wanted to explain the reasons behind the piece, as well as its hopefully exciting future! The inspiration We had the idea of creating content around SEO myths a while ago, and the inspiration for the piece originated from the website uxmyths.com, which presents 34 myths, as well as explanations for why each of the statements are in fact just myths. The site does a great job of simply presenting these myths to the user, and I personally found them to be a great learning resource. This got me thinking. As the saying goes, “practice what you preach”, so instead of creating just another blog post, or putting together another ebook, we decided to approach the task of myth busting in a whole new format. Instead of just using our own knowledge, we decided to get in contact with a number of industry experts, and ask them for their own SEO myths – who better to ask than our peers with experienced minds! Inspiration for the design came from the posters that were designed and created for the UX Myths project. The main poster presented each myth in different sized boxes, and each myth has its own poster, that includes explanatory copy. So we took the inspiration of the core poster, and applied it to our design, in turn working in our own interactive features, such as the more popular myth being in the bigger box, as well as the added Twitter handle, image, and total share count. Of course, the overarching inspiration for this whole project is to share this curated expert knowledge with the rest of the industry, with the hope that we can start putting these myths to bed, or at least educate those just starting out in SEO. Future wise, we don’t want to give away too much, but we’re certain that you’ll be seeing more of our SEO myths project. We will also be releasing some more myths on the page soon and hopefully on a fairly regular basis, as well as the ability to download each myth as an awesome wallpaper for your computer, or even your office wall, so keep your eyes peeled! Fancy seeing your own myth on our board? If you feel you have a myth that you want to share with the community, please don’t hesitate to drop me an email on bobby [at] white.net. As you may have seen from the piece, we’re looking for roughly 120 words to help put your myth to bed. We can’t guarantee that every myth will make it up to our board, but if we like it we’ll get in touch with you. Come and join the conversation over on Twitter with @whitedotnet, or myself, @bobbyjmcgill. Alternatively leave a comment in the box below; we’d love to hear what you think of our SEO myths project, or on a myth that grinds your gears! The post SEO Myths Busted – One week on appeared first on White.net.

7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation Posted: 28 May 2015 08:13 AM PDT I confess: when I’m carrying out a technical audit on a website I basically act like I’m running a police investigation. I know that there will be mysteries to solve, and it’s my job to find the clues that will lead me in the right direction. And with the right tools in hand, I’ll usually sniff something out when I get to the strange occurrences of rel=canonical. What is rel=canonical? In a nutshell, rel=canonical is a way to clean up duplicate URLs on a website. I know what you’re thinking, it would be much easier if duplicate content just didn’t exist at all. This would make my job all sunshine, rainbows and flowers rather than the sweat and tears it generally involves, but this is the real world and duplicate content is sometimes unavoidable. This is especially true when it comes to ecommerce sites which pose some of the most complex mysteries for SEO forces all across the nation. The way that many of these sites present information or products to users means that some pretty wacky things can happen to the URL – all designed to provide the most relevant results to users through the use of parameters. Guides for beginners Moz has a great guide on canonicalisation which I’d urge you to read if you’re new to the concept, as the purpose of this blog post is to guide you with proper implementation rather than a full explanation of what it is. Alternatively you could shimmy on over to the blog of Matt Cutts; he wrote a post in 2009 called “Learn about the Canonical Link Element in 5 minutes” which is just as relevant today as it was back then. Make sure to revisit this post when you’re familiar with the topic as you’ll find it much more valuable then! Rel=canonical: The good, the bad and the ugly If I’ve captured the attention of your inner geek, sit back as I share some of my recommendations for rel=canonical best practice. The reality is that I’ve seen lots of cases recently where issues have gone undetected for far too long, and I want you to be able to check that you’re not being taken for a ride by your own website. The source of duplicate content The first thing you’re going to need to do is identify the culprits that are causing duplicate content. My preferred sidekick for this job is the ever-dependable Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Once you have performed a crawl, you should be able to use the overview report on the right-hand side of the tool to give you a quick insight into where issues might be occurring. Is it showing results for duplicate page titles, URI or meta descriptions? If so, these may indicate where there are duplicate pages which all share the same content and meta data. Use this a starting point for deeper investigations by manually visiting each version and checking out the source code of each. Scroll down to the ‘Directives’ folder to see what is being acknowledged by the tool in terms of canonicalisation for more quick hints. Although it’s from the main ‘Directives’ tab in the top navigation where you can really start drilling down into individual issues. At this point you may start to spot strange occurrences that require a bit of manual investigation. Or a lot. But then it does help to know what you’re actually looking for. Here are the common causes for why multiple URLs can load the same content: A product has dynamic URLs as a result of user search preference or user session Your blog automatically saves multiple URLs when you publish the same post in multiple sections Your server is configured to serve the same content for the www / non-www subdomain or the http/s protocol Example 1 – a product has dynamic URLs as a result of user search preference or user session Example 2 – the blog automatically saves multiple URLs when you publish the same post in multiple sections Example 3 – the server is configured to serve the same content for the www / non-www subdomain or the http/s protocol Overcoming duplicate content issues When these issues occur, it’s important to choose a preferred URL for indexation by search engines. This is where the rel=canonical link comes in. As a side note, there are other ways you can do this, including using 301 redirects, indicating how search engines should handle dynamic parameters, etc. but this is deserves a post of its own, something I’ll come back to in the near future. The Google Webmaster Central blog has a great summary of rel=canonical: “Including a rel=canonical link in your webpage is a strong hint to search engines about your preferred version to index among duplicate pages on the web. It's supported by several search engines, including Yahoo!, Bing, and Google. The rel=canonical link consolidates indexing properties from the duplicates, like their inbound links, as well as specifies which URL you'd like displayed in search results.” The whole purpose of indicating a preferred URL with the rel=canonical link element is so that search engines are more likely to show users your chosen URL structure as opposed to any duplicates. It is important to remember that rel=canonical elements can be ignored, especially when there are conflicting instructions, making accurate implementation all the more important. Implementation Check out this example from the Google Webmaster Central blog; it sums up correct implementation pretty well: Suppose you want https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/ to be the preferred URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content. You can indicate this to search engines as follows: Mark up the canonical page and any other variants with a rel=”canonical” link element. Add a <link> element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the <head> section of these pages: <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome” /> Have you got rel=canonical implementation right? Whilst the concept of rel=canonical is easy enough to understand, it’s the implementation that can cause strange occurrences that require investigation (and probably a headache or two along the way). There are some common mistakes that webmasters and SEOs make when it comes to rel=canonical, although there are some excellent blog posts and guides out there already which may prove immensely helpful for you. Start off with 5 common mistakes with rel=canonical from the Webmaster Central Blog, and then read through Yoast’s rel=canonical: what it is and how (not) to use it. To help you avoid the common mistakes, I’ve put together a helpful list of 7 things you should remember when implementing rel=canonical. You can refer back to this blog post, or grab the PDF version here: PDF of rel=canonical guide 7 Things To Remember When Implementing Rel=Canonical Why are these considerations important?  Specify only one rel=canonical link per URL When more than one is specified, all rel=canonicals will be ignored! This can occur with some SEO plugins that insert a default rel=canonical link, so be sure to understand what plugins you have installed and how they behave. Use an absolute URL It’s possible to insert a relative URL into the <link> tag, but this almost certainly won’t do what you want it to. A relative URL includes a path that is “relative” to the current page. This means you need to add in the lot, including http:// (or https://). Don’t canonicalise a paginated archive to page one You will risk some content not being indexed if you specify that page-one is the preference. Put it this way, are the other pages duplicates of page one? It’s highly unlikely. Add rel=canonical link to the <head> of the HTML document Rel=canonical designations in the <body> are disregarded, so it’s best to include the tag as early as possible in the <head>. Watch out for self-referencing conflicts If your site can load on both http and https versions, check that you don’t have an automatically generated self-referencing rel=canonical. This could mean that both https://www.example.com/red-dresses and http://www.example.com/red-dresses are denoted as the preference. Rel=canonical specified link should work, so no 404s! It’s fairly obvious that you want the search engines to index URLs that provide actual value and a positive experience to users… Use trailing slash/non trailing slash preference consistently It helps if you pick a preference for use across the site to minimise the chances of referencing a URL in this way; ensure it is included in all internal links and within the rel=canonical tag element. Bonus: Twitter and Facebook honour your rel=canonical links This is something I learned from the Yoast blog post referenced above. He has put it quite eloquently, so I’ve included it here for your reference: “If you share a URL on Facebook that has a canonical pointing elsewhere, Facebook will share the details from the canonical URL. In fact, if you add a like button on a page that has a canonical pointing elsewhere, it will show the like count for the canonical URL, not for the current URL. Twitter works in the same way.” Now it’s your turn to get on the case and investigate whether your own site has any of these issues with rel=canonical. I’d love to hear if you uncover any hidden culprits, and I’m also happy to put on my investigator hat to answer any questions you may have on the topic too – please leave me a comment below or get in touch through Twitter. Hopefully we can then utter a collective “case closed”, and move our focus to other technical issues instead! The post 7 Ways You Might Have Botched Your Rel=Canonical Implementation appeared first on White.net.

Surveys – add authority to your content marketing Posted: 21 May 2015 05:00 AM PDT How can you add more authority to your content marketing campaign? Hard data!  Recently, I have spent some time planning and conducting a survey for one of my clients in an effort to boost their content marketing strategy. In a 2-part post, I want to summarise what I have learnt during this process to give you some tips on how to create your own survey and what you can do with your results. We’ll start with why you should create surveys and how to create them. Why carry out a survey? Surveys can be a relatively easy method of content marketing and depending on which service you use, it can be an inexpensive method. Surveys allow you to inform and educate your current and potential clients about your industry as well as enable you to set your business apart as a source of authoritative information. What can a survey tell you? Often people's opinions on surveys are that the data isn’t trustworthy because what people say they do can differ from, or can conflict with, what they do. Let me put this in simpler terms, if you ask people in a survey what they would do and then observe what they actually do, then you might see several differences. However, rather than measuring future behaviour a survey should instead measure preferences, characteristics or perceptions. For content marketing, effective surveys can look at the following: Audience analysis – preferences and demographics of your users or audience Expectations and perceptions of your brand and its content Impact of your content on offline behaviour when no other method to understand offline behaviour is available Creating your survey Perhaps the most time-consuming phase of the survey process is asking the right questions. It's important to break down what you are trying to gain from the survey – what are your goals? What are you trying to measure? There is little point going through the motion of spending money and resources on creating a survey only to realise there is nothing you can do with your results. Before writing your questions, have a think about the following points: What is your topic? What are your aims? What are you trying to measure? How many questions do you want to ask? Do you have demographic restrictions? What do you plan on doing with the results? Which service will you use to conduct the survey? Do you need a screening questions? (Do you want to eliminate certain respondents at the start so they can't continue with the survey?) Once you have the answers to the above, it should make things a little easier when writing your questions! What platform should you use? There are a number of platforms you can use to create your survey. I'll take you through some examples and their advantages and disadvantages. Google Consumer Surveys Google surveys is the platform I used recently for my client work. This service allows you to choose your target audience, type your questions and receive results within a 24 hour time frame. Advantages: Google surveys includes extra information within your results so that you don't have to use up questions to ask your respondents e.g. age, location, income and parental status (of course not all of your respondents will agree to allow you to use their income). If your survey can be improved they will email you! Before my survey was launched, I got a useful email giving me some recommendations on how to make it better. Customer service is quick and they are very helpful! Disadvantages: I thought the price was a little steep! Some of the types of questions you can use are confusing (open text, screening) – its worth doing your research before choosing your type of question. World's Opinion This is an app platform where you can ask anything to their worldwide community of more than 70,000 members and get answers within a few hours – they claim! Advantages: It's cheap (but perhaps not cheerful!) Easy to build our your questions 500 responses Disadvantages: Long responses – you may be waiting a week or longer. Questionable reliability Survey Monkey This platform is perhaps the most known out there where you can create, "any type of survey – from simple to sophisticated". Advantages: Clear pricing table on the website – you know what you're paying for Good audience database Mobile app Customise your branding on your survey Disadvantages: Data download: Open-ended questions and numeric questions need to be downloaded in separate files Invitation design – you can change the subject in the survey invitation but you cannot add a senders name (if you're sending to specific individuals to fill in). The 'from' field on your receivers end will be "on behalf of surveys@company.com" – not exactly professional? What you can do once you have got your data So now you have gone through the motions of choosing your topic and conducting your survey. What can you do with your results to aid your content marketing efforts? Press releases Infographics Videos Blog content Guides Memes Case studies Interviews As you’ve seen from this list, there are plenty of content options! The more strategic you are, the more powerful your marketing efforts become. It’s worth bearing in mind that you don’t have to try all of these examples, just choose one or two that you think will be the most effective to represent your survey findings to your audience. Don’t be afraid to try new stuff – too many people shy away from doing something new because they are afraid it will fall flat, but you could create something extremely powerful. In my next post, I'll talk you through using press releases and infographics as part of your content marketing as well as give you some tips on outreach! In the meantime, have you used surveys and have they been effective? What platforms would you recommend? The post Surveys – add authority to your content marketing appeared first on White.net.

#SMX London 2015 – SEM Key Takeaways Posted: 20 May 2015 02:36 AM PDT SMX London 2015 – Search Marketing Expo: Our takeaways from the 2-day event. Jason Denny & Holly Martin will be live blogging and tweeting from the #SMX conference in London. To make things easier we have organised the sessions by speaker so that you can click on the internal anchor below. Notes are added live throughout the 2 day event and will be filled out further, so be sure to check back for more in-depth content and examples. Day 1 – Wednesday , May 20, 2015 Maile Ohye – Developer Programs Tech Lead – Google Inc. (@maileohye) – The State Of Search (Keynote) Vivien Tombs – Associate Head of PPC – Periscopix (@vivtombs) – Tools to cut-down our admin time. Daniel Gilbert – MD – Brainlabs (@danielgilbert44) – Automation is not optional, learn to code. Brad Geddes – Founder – Certified Knowledge (@bgTheory) Russell O’Sullivan – Senior Digital Marketing Manager – Legal & General (@russosullivan) – Creating persona’s for increased conversion metrics. Maile Ohye – Developer Programs Tech Lead – Google Inc. (@maileohye) – Keynote “Data comes from down up, not dictated from up down.” – Maile Ohye Maile kicked off today’s #smx expo with a history of Google search: Back in ’98, Google SERP displayed 10 blue links, which were all derived from indexing search strings. Leaping forward to 2006 Google launched the Sitemap protocol. Google believed that site owners should be able to submit details of content on their site as they were best-placed to understand the content presented on each page – such as news updates. In 2007 Google unveiled Universal Search, blending images, news and web content onto one screen for mobile. Search ‘Prince Charles’ on Google and you receive an increased amount of information relating to the Prince. 2011 saw the launch of Schema.org taking unstructured content and allowing the site owner to provide ‘entities’ of data for a particular subject, rather than Google reading it as a bunch of random data strings. Schema defines relationships. Ask Google, ‘OK Google – What are the names of Prince Charles’s sons?’ and what you will receive is a bunch of linked entities to your query. Similarly, asking Google ‘OK Google – When is flight BA3024 due from New York?’ it will provide you with your answer on-screen without the need to load and navigate the British Airways site – perfect for people on-the-go. Alongside your answer you now see ‘actions’, such as ‘Book Flight’ buttons etc. Another example of this is searching for ‘comedy films’, and the results provide more than just a list of films… clicking ‘Anchorman’ from the results provides the user with a plethora of data and actions that can be taken… Mobile Friendly algorithm update April 21st – Is your site optimised for mobile? Top 100 Multichannel Retailers' Mobile Sites: 16 Load in Less Than 1 Second – MarketingCharts.com “We used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date, and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow – we try and speed them up, too.” – Carl Honore 5 Steps to Building a Mobile Site: 5 Steps to Building a Site for Tablet: Vivien Tombs – Associate Head of PPC – Periscopix (@vivtombs) “Nothing is a secret.” – Vivien Tombs on Google Adwords Today’s talk from Vivien took us through a couple of tools with AdWords that she likes and could help cut down the admin time that we spend within our Google AdWords accounts. Labels When reviewing accounts, few account managers appear to make good use of labels. These are a godsend when it comes to helping with account management. Manage large scale changeovers in accounts, such as sales and promotions – sale for weekend, allows for scheduling creatives by labels. Use labels to make notes of problem areas or particular success areas, labels allow you to come back at a later date to review easily rather than trawl though the whole account to locate those areas. Consider labeling based on CPA areas, or based on internal teams for easy reporting for last minute meetings etc. Label based on bid strategy, or analysis based on match types. Assign labels to team members – accountability. Keep them short and snappy. Labels cannot be automatically created by set parameters. Not currently supported in Adwords. Labels are now available in the latest version of AdWords Editor making it easier to label in bulk. Ad Customisers Standard text ads that are customisable elements that can be dynamically updated based on custom elements. Ad customisers are parameters that go within curly brackets {like this}. The parameter gets replaced by dynamic text when your ad is triggered by a user’s search. You can include ad customisers within any text ad on the search or display network, anywhere except for the URL fields. The benefit of Ad customisers are that unlink standard ads, when the customiser updates it does not erase/overwrite your historic ad data, instead it keeps history allowing you to later analyse for other upcoming events etc. Ad customisers can be used to create a sense of urgency for sales and keep users up-to-date based on latest product availability, in comes ‘Coundown Ads’. Countdown ads  for retailers has proven to deliver up-to and over 50% increase in CTR when ads counted down within last hour of a sale. Customisers fill in your ad text using ad customiser data that you upload, the COUNTDOWN function or both. The COUNTDOWN function: Customisers with a COUNTDOWN function include arguments, or directions, for that function within parentheses (like this). The customiser {=COUNTDOWN(Discounts.CountdownDate,’en’)}, for example, includes a COUNTDOWN function with 2 arguments. The first argument (Discounts.CountdownDate) tells the customiser what date and time to count down to, which is specified in a file named “Discounts”. The second argument (“en”) tells the customiser to display that time in a particular language (English). Key Takeaways Label Everything, always have a standard ad set-up in case customised ads are not running. Be careful of your character limits! Be creative! Remember, customisers are a short-term pain, but long-term gain.   Daniel Gilbert – MD – Brainlabs (@danielgilbert44) “1,000+ changes in AdWords interface last year alone – Automation is not optional, but necessary.” – Daniel Gilbert AdWords scripts are a game changer. Managine accounts manually takes time… and on larger account, a significant amount of time. Daniel lead us through some AdWords scripts which help alleviate some of the time required to manage your account, with the bi-product being increasing account performance. The main script discussed was Ad Scheduling. Optimising your keyword and ad group bids in order to maximise performance can be a tricky affair and very time consuming. Setting up a schedule to manage your bids is a great way to make sure that you're not spending too much at the wrong times and more importantly that valuable traffic is getting to you at the right times. AdWords built-in tool for modifying bids based on the time of day — ad scheduling — but the limitation of this tool is that it only allows you up to six bidding windows per day, and as we know, our traffic trends can vary significantly from one hour to the next. So we need greater ability to optimise bids for more than six windows throughout the day currently available within AdWords. For large-scale accounts that demand a more granular approach, with bids that need to be changed every hour, the above limitations just won't do. As an example, conversion rates for Domino's vary dramatically during different hourly slots on different days; the company doesn’t want to bid at the same levels at 7:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m., and 11:00 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Here’s Daniel’s step-by-step guide on how to implement the AdWords Script That Lets You Optimize Bids Every Hour Of The Day. Daniel then went on to discuss the benefits of the Google Anomoly Detector Script. The Account Anomaly Detector alerts the advertiser whenever an AdWords account is suddenly behaving too differently from what’s historically observed. When an issue is encountered, the script will send the user an alerting email. Only a single email for an alert is sent per day. The script by default is comparing stats observed so far today with historical stats for the same day of week. For instance, stats for a Tuesday, 13:00 are compared with stats for 26 previous Tuesdays. Adjust the number of weeks to look back depending on the age and stability of your account. Schedule the script to run hourly in order to get the most out of alerting. If the alert is too noisy, scheduling it Daily around mid-day might also make sense. Suppose the script runs at 7pm on a Tuesday. Since AdWords statistics may be up to 3 hours delayed, the script will only consider stats up to 4pm. The script will then fetch stats for 26 preceding Tuesdays, average them, and compare with today’s stats. No subsequent alerts of the same type will be triggered for the day. If you’d like to reset the alert, delete the Alerting cell value. Here’s a link on how to set up the AdWords Acount Anomoly Detector script.  Key Takeaways PPC Managers, learn to code! Tool-sets are available online to help you get over your ‘codephobia’. Automation not optional but a essential. Scripting is easy to learn, don’t dive in at the deep end. A little customisation of already available scripts can provide powerhouse tools for optimising your account.   Day 2 – Thursday, May 21, 2015 Bas Van Den Beld – Chief Editor – State Of Digital (@basvandenbeld) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’ Mark Mitchell – Senior Director of Client Services EMEA – Brightedge (@searchmitch) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’ Kelvin Newman – Founder and Managing Director – Rough Agenda (@kelvinnewman) – ‘Building Your Search Marketing Technology Stack’ Alistair Dent – Head of Product Strategy – iProspect (@alistairdent) – ‘What You Should Be Doing In Search & Mobile’ Bas Van Den Beld – Chief Editor – State Of Digital (@basvandenbeld) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’  “And to think our attention span is less than that of a goldfish.” – Bas Van Den Beld If you watch this video:   Can you now tell yourself what the name of this talk is that was given in the intro? Bas kicked of day 2’s agenda with an in-depth talk about how we are always looking to try and create fan bases… when actually we are the only fan. We are the fan of our own ideas. We as a race crave for information, be it at home, at work, on the tube, at the pub… we are always digesting data. But how do we get our ideas, our content over to users to digest… knowing that they have the memory span as a goldfish? It needs to be engaging and shareable. But why in general does our content not get the attention we feel it should? Because we are not looking at ‘why’ people are buying, only when. This ad from Reebok is a fantastic example of engaging and shareable content… it addresses the ‘why’ and it was first published in-line with the ‘when’…     Great huh? We need to understand and be ‘where’ the customer is in the buying cycle, not where we think that they should be or want them to be. Don’t try to get too fancy, aim to get the right attention at the right time for the right people. Answer their needs. If you want success in marketing you have to understand what they want and what they need, talk in the consumers language. Be passionate and engaging with topics that interest your target audience and gain their attention. There are 4 types of audiences: Seekers – Researchers, looking for information that answers their needs. Amplifiers – This is the audience that can share your content which answer their needs. Joiners – These are the ‘I like it, I’ll subscribe’ consumers. Activing looking for more content from you. Buyers – These are the consumers that actively purchased(d) your products. We focus mainly on the buyers when it comes to marketing, which yes can and dos work, but we need to understand that actually it is the other 3 audiences that create they buyers audience. We need to tap into these audiences as they all work hand-in-hand. truly research your audiences, what they ‘do’, what they ‘say’ and what they ‘read’. You may be asking yourself.. OK well that all a good read but how do I know ‘what’ my consumers are asking and ‘what’ can I answer? Well, we all have keywords in our accounts, and we know which works well for buyers. So, two examples on how to identify questions from our keywords are below: Quora – This is a great place to find such questions. In-short, sign-up, and start searching for your keywords. What Quora then does is locate and present questions to you (that have/have not been answered within the Quora community). It is these questions that you can then create your answers… answering your consumers needs. With some great content that is engaging and shareable, you’re tapping into the Seekers and Amplifiers audience lists mentioned above. Google – We all use Google and you know when you start typing into the search bar you get this: Well, amend this with some insight from Quora and you can do this… …finding questions that are commonly asked with Google that you have the opportunity to create engaging and shareable content to reach the Seekers and Amplifiers. Key Takeaways Create something people will recognise, engage with and share. Remember, not every piece of content needs to sell.   Mark Mitchell – Senior Director of Client Services EMEA – Brightedge (@searchmitch) – ‘Better Together: Search and Social’ “Start small, prove the concept, then drive larger scale” – Mark Mitchell Mark guided us through his take on shareable content and the value of creating engaging content. A real head-turner was the run-through of this site below: Click the image to open the interactive version (via Penny Stocks Lab). 5 Top Tips: Integrate your teams around your content. Focus all your teams, internal and external, on content campaigns. Bring all of your assets together to create and share a great piece of content. Social signs can help you drive up content rank. Can your content be shared? Benchmark against your competitors and ask yourself, ‘OK, so what does success look like?’ Understand your social media assets overall ability. Create content that drives social engagement. Use your social assets to dominate your brand space. If a user searches for your brand, can they locate your social assets too? Searching ‘John Lewis’ on Google provides a great example of brand space ownership: Key Takeaways Create engaging and shareable content. Start small, create a piece of content and prove the concept. Then drive larger-scale content campaigns. Own your brand space.   Kelvin Newman – Founder and Managing Director – Rough Agenda (@kelvinnewman) – ‘Building Your Search Marketing Technology Stack’  “By 2017 the CMO will spend more on technology than the CIO” – Gartner Kelvin’s talk today was around tools, platforms and suites, outlining the pros and cons to all. Before jumping in and buying what you think is best for you, establish your criteria, what does the solution need to solve? Then evaluate against the above pros and cons. “Somany of our marketing decisions are derived from data, purchases are often not.” – Kelvin Newman I guess reviewing the quote above, it demonstrates the need to ensure all users are involved during the purchase decision.Who will be using the tool? The CMO or marketing manager? Silver bullets do not exist. They can all help but the best tool is actually the one that gets used the most, not the most ‘fancy’. Time saved is often more important than % account performance increase. The benefits and savings of changing a solution are often lost by the cost of changing. More campaigns fail from poor execution rather than poor strategy. Two great tools that Kelvin discussed were IFTTT and Zapier. Both tools designed to help save you time, well worth a look. Key Takeaways More campaigns fail from poor execution rather than poor strategy. There is no ‘best tool’, only the best tool for you and your needs. Invest in yourself, automate some tasks to save you time.   Alistair Dent – Head of Product Strategy – iProspect (@alistairdent) – ‘What You Should Be Doing In Search & Mobile’ Alistair’s talk later in the afternoon was all around mobile, and what we should be doing, oh, and what we shouldn’t be. What’s Different About Mobile? Bid Modifiers Mobile Preferred Ads It gives you a signal to talk to the user differently as they are not at their desktop. CTAs should be tailored to the ‘on-the-go’ user in effect. What To Look Out For Web vs. App – They perform differently, but work together. Look at the conversion relationship. Ad formats – Mobile formats need to be carefully designed for screen size. Campaign structure – Think carefully about structure, separate keywords to allow for modifiers. Enhanced CPC (ECPC) can help edge you above your competitors on the SERP. Cross-device conversions – Be careful here, Google ‘thinks’ about cross-device conversions, but cannot formerly back these up with data. Ad positions – Look to bid to position. Big gap in CTR between positions 1-2 and 3+. What not To Do Do not apply negative bid modifiers from the start. Obtain data and experience, then make an informed decision. Do not assume mobile will not perform. Do no fear greatness, instead of applying a +5% bid modifier for mobile, why not try at +25% or +50%? With data you can always decided to increase or decrease rather than take little steps. Don’t rush – Use data to make sound judgements. Do not accommodate knee-jerk reactions. Complications Bids affect modifiers. Here is a great article around how multiple modifiers can work. Modifiers over-lap, keep track of them or spend could leap out of control quickly. The lifetime value of a consumer is important to mobile bids. Key Takeaways Mobile is often the upper funnel in a process. Track everything and watch closely. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, don’t force it. The post #SMX London 2015 – SEM Key Takeaways appeared first on White.net.

How to get your tweets ready for Google’s Twitter integration Posted: 19 May 2015 12:00 AM PDT Are you using Twitter to promote your business? The value of a tweet is about to increase as Google and Twitter are combining forces, making search and social tight like never before. Coming to light in May, Twitter's content will show in Google's search results which will help businesses using this social network expand their reach beyond the original service. Why did Google choose Twitter? As Twitter is one of the largest and most established text based social networks, it makes a safe bet for Google to team up with it. In the past (2009) Google and Twitter had a deal known as the 'firehose', which expired in 2011 with the launch of Google Plus. For Google, discovering new content and making real-time rankings was a much harder and slower task, as in order to index Twitter's public profiles and tweets, Google had to crawl them all. Now by getting access to Twitter's API, Google will be able to access more real-time data without the necessity to crawl Twitter to get it. This renewed partnership means that 9,000 tweets per second will become available to Google. For now it's unknown how and when your accounts will start showing in Google search results. What we know is that Twitter may become a crucial channel for your SEO strategy. Considering that Google commands 75% of the web search market and remains the number one most visited website globally, it brings a whole new level to the integration. This also means that for less effort of using Twitter, brands will be able to abstain traffic and strengthen visibility through indexed tweets. Here’s the effect that Twitter might have: Engagement – With Twitter's firehose back in place, Google will be able to see what is being shared and who is being discussed. Authority – Content created, shared and spoken about from authoritative Twitter accounts, which are not short of high engagement and social recognition, will become more credible to Google. Authenticity – Google will favour authentic human behavioural data not the automated spam which is easier to detect on Twitter. Real-time – Google's instant access to Twitter's real-data means that trending topics which often arise on social media, can impact the algorithm. How to get your account ready Your social media can benefit from a much higher discoverability too, but before you get excited about the upcoming benefits it's important to know how to get your tweets ready for Google's Twitter integration. #1. Break into search results with great presence If you don't already have a Twitter strategy, it's time to develop one as only relevant profiles with high engagement and sentiment might be amplified on Google's search results. #2. Think before you tweet Who has the chance to see your tweets? Basically anyone who is searching on Google for any topic. As your tweets will enter Google's public search, it means that they will be visible and accessible to everyone, not just users who are your followers on Twitter. #3. Optimise your tweets for search Before you get very excited it is worth pointing out that not all tweets will be shown in search results.Tweets which are not correctly optimized or do not contain specific content, won't be displayed. To prevent this from happening, make sure to add high-value (search volume) key phrases to your tweets. #4. Balance branding with calls-to-action As Twitter is expected to see a huge increase in organic search, it's important to use this channel to encourage visitors to take specific actions. Simple tweeting is not effective enough, to grab users attention you need to attract them with: a) branded content, b) calls-to-action like e.g. 'Please RT', 'Please share'; c) clear information about what you do and what do you offer #5. Create a healthy mix While trying to apply all of the mentioned above tips together it's important to take into count the golden ratio between promotional and curated tweets, to avoid overwhelming your audience with salesy-focused updates. The ration which we apply is: #6. Keep an eye on brand mentions Now and then every company experiences a negative comment on social media. But the way how you handle situations like this and how you respond will play a significant role as searches will be able to come across both negative and positive comments. More than ever, time and replies will matter as your comments back will be visible to others as well become a reassurance of how you deal with tricky situations and unhappy clients. If positive feedback and client testimonials are not part of your social media strategy, you may need to consider adding them soon, as Twitter's research has shown that "60% of respondents say they've made a purchase from an SMB based on something they saw on Twitter". #7. Leverage the long-term impact  Your tweets help you leave a long lasting image of your brand as messages which you posted even few months ago could show up in search. This is why it's so important to think before you tweet and craft messages which can benefit not just your audience but also search engine. Having tweets showing up in SERPs will impact your paid and organic traffic. This also means being able to get extra recognition from tweets that get retweeted by influencers and individuals with high social authority.   #8. Don’t forget about frequency There are hundred of businesses out there having inactive presence on Twitter. The new partnership is an opportunity for them to get grips with at least one channel which could truly benefit their business. By staying engaged, learning how to use it, they will be able to not just improve their social presence but also achieve tangible results. What are your thoughts about Google and Twitter integration? We will be keeping an eye on its progress to provide you with more information in the future. If you got inspired with this read, there is more to come! The post How to get your tweets ready for Google's Twitter integration appeared first on White.net.

Net-a-Porter have launched their own social shopping app, The NET SET, and we’ve reviewed it! Posted: 14 May 2015 02:00 AM PDT Online designer clothing retail behemoth Net-a-Porter, not content with 6 million unique visits a month to its desktop site, yesterday launched its new app, the Net Set. Having been impressed with their content strategy in the past year, which included the expansion of its online magazine and the creation of a dedicated print magazine, I decided to take a look at this new platform, dubbed in the invitational email, The social shopping network we have all been waiting for. Fortune Magazine this week called it Net-a-Porter’s ‘new weapon in [the] luxury eCommerce battle’ setting the tone for a new era of mobile device targeted platforms. The focus of my blog post in September last year was the way in which online retailers were utilising magazine-style and ‘curated’ or editorial content in order to improve the customer experience and blur boundaries between content and commerce. In many ways, the Net Set app, launched this past week, is simply an extension of this vision, which seeks to interfere with the traditional retail model, further creating an interactive, inspirational experience; the ultimate commerce/content hybrid. Knowing from the start that Net-a-Porter as a brand could not be seen to be devaluing its designers wares by offering discounts and offers, Net-a-Porter has focused on the customer experience. Reaching-out, addressing and hugging those consumers who have become advocates of the brand over the years has been an important focus of Net-a-Porter’s strategy. The fact that Net-a-Porter would bring out an app is not surprising given its standing as the go-to online retailer of designer brands. That it would seek to create its own social platform is a novel idea and little tested in the fashion, let alone the eCommerce world. The likes of Grabble and The Edit (not related to N-a-P) apps have trended in the past year, addressing the growing demand for aspirational fashion content in app form. Knowing that the likes of ASOS still have separate apps for their magazine content and shopping function, the Net Set may be a venture into a new platform, but knowing their content approach works as well as it has done, Net-a-Porter must be confident that this strategy is the right one. Natalie Massenet, founder of the Net-a-Porter group seemed confident upon launch that the app will be a success; "A lot of people are trying to create social shopping destinations, but they're missing some of the ingredients. Either they don't have the scale and reach and audience already, they don't have the relationship with the brands, or they don't have the logistics or in-house tech team we have," she told Fortune. Essentially the app creates a further touch-point for consumers who already browse on retail website, read the online magazine the Edit, and purchase the offline publication Porter. Research from Crowdtap and Ipsos found that user-generated content is 20% more influential than any other type of media when it comes to purchasing, and 50% more trusted. So lets look at how Net-a-Porter have utilised this kind of content in their new offering. Creating an app that will inspire The Net Set user journey asks users to complete their profile with 6 quick steps. These choices inform the content that users will receive in the app, through joining different ‘style tribes’, choosing  favourite designers, and selecting specific Style Council members (such as the likes of Laura Bailey and Poppy Delevigne, but strangely, no Paul Weller) to follow. Once registered, users are treated to a platform that is a mixture of Vogue-like features, trendy Instagram accounts and a an eCommerce platform. What is most astonishing is that this app seems to blend the three seamlessly. The look of the app will be familiar to Net-a-Porter’s following, especially anyone who has read their online magazine, The Edit. The interface is decidedly trendy and echoes the feeling you get in those really designer stores with plenty of shiny white walls and a few rails of stock. Simplicity and clean lines are key features here. The user interface is slick, with gorgeous imagery, and set out rather intuitively into 5 main navigation options: Browse, Find, Upload, Alerts and Profile. Most importantly, that little shopping bag icon reminds you that you can purchase so easily from inside the app. The idea of curated content that Net-a-Porter introduced in The Edit flows seamlessly into the app. The main content feed (Browse) is a mixture of popular products (measured in ‘loves’), instagram-style posts by Style Council members (which utilise hashtags, emoticons and the ability to tag other users) and new products from favoured designers or Style Tribes. According to one media report, the app has built-in visual recognition technology (presumably to recognise products and tag them to their designer/brand), however, I haven’t used this yet so I can’t comment on how effective it is. UPDATE 18/5/2015: According to Marie Claire, even if a product isn't available on Net-a-Porter, the app will use image recognition technology to find a visually similar item which may interest you. Find Find  is essentially a beautiful search feature. It includes 350 designer collections, and you can search products, people, brands, photos and Style Tribes within the same feature and most importantly, it displays instant search results, a function which seem to work well even on a 3G connection. Upload This is the section where you can create a post/image to upload and share. It’s pretty self explanatory and is kept simple and clean to encourage frequent posting and sharing. Alerts I’m not quite sure what this feature does at the moment – I hope to find out soon – it may be related to a ‘let me know when its back in stock’ type idea. Profile In this section you can edit your vital statistics and find all of the products and images you have ‘loved’. Products Pages Product pages on the app not only let users view a lovely carousel of images of each item from different angles, but also let users: Recommend a product to a Style Tribe View uploads by others users of how they have styled this and similar items The converting appeal of the product pages would always be the money-making aim of the app and thus creating product pages which blend the checkout process with the browsing and wish-list function was imperative. The NetSet seems to have done this rather well, ensuring that the purchase journey is clear, reinforces expectations and guides the user to purchase with as few steps as possible. Is it a seamless purchase journey? Whilst no purchase for £1,600 will be taken lightly (or maybe it will by the uber-wealthy), the checkout journey is reasonable slick and conveys simply an extension of normal app use. The checkout is a guided four step affair, which, in my opinion, could be improved a little bit in terms of the layout and, in particular, the payment screen where buttons are quite small to tap and rather too close together. I think the app should make greater play of the facility to pay by Paypal as this method does ultimately decrease the time it takes to make a purchase on-the-go, and ultimately, is less likely to lead to purchase drop-outs at this stage. I would remark that the summary information on the payment page should be condensed so that the payment form is not pushed below the fold of the average smartphone as the current look of this step of the payment process looks more time consuming than it really is simply due to the amount of words and boxes on the screen.         Conclusions: Net-a-Porter already has 4.1 million fans across its existing social channels and thus knows there is an audience for this app. They have set the bar high in entering the social media app world and I can see this becoming the app to flick through and drool over for followers of fashion and those that enjoy beautiful design. The Net Set has been created with Net-a-Porter regular shoppers and loyal brand advocates in mind, allowing a seamless registration that pulls in information from their existing online account to populate their feed. Net-a-Porter could have just designed a sleek looking shopping app, but it obviously believes this way of shopping, the softly softly approach outlined in my previous blog post, will reap dividends for them in the long term. I believe this app will put pressure on other retailers who have fallen behind in the eCommerce game. What is clear, is that marketing spend on eCommerce will grow immeasurably over the next few years as retailers strive to compete against one another in an increasingly innovative multi-touchpoint landscape. James Whatley, Digital Director at Ogilvy and Mather, seems to agree. He wrote in the Guardian on 14th May: ‘as soon as Net-a-Porter can prove the return on investment of having a profile in The Net Set, it won't be long before the burden of yet another social profile to manage fades away and we'll be drowning in amazing case studies.’ Don’t just take my view of it. Here’s what our own Social Media Specialist Kasia Piekut has to say on the topic:   The post Net-a-Porter have launched their own social shopping app, The NET SET, and we’ve reviewed it! appeared first on White.net.

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