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joi, 4 august 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Link Building for Ecommerce Sites - Targeting the Right Anchor Text

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 04:02 PM PDT

While search volume data can help you make more informed decisions when choosing keywords for link building campaigns, it is important to be driving traffic through terms that not only bring in more traffic but convert well. Targeting anchor text phrases that have above average conversion rates will provide a higher ROI on your link building efforts than focusing only on search volume. Further, targeting keywords with above average conversion rates tends to help you get buy in from your clients/managers for your link building efforts because you are focusing your efforts based on monetary conversion rather than just traffic.

Using conversion data will prevent you from link building to terms that statistically don’t convert.

Here is the process I use to find high value anchor text phrases.

1. Download your organic keyword report from Google Analytics

Make sure you are only looking at organic traffic and add “&limit=50000” to the end of the URL (and hit enter) to export up to 50,000 keywords instead of 500. Make sure to download as CSV (not CSV for Excel) or you won’t get the full 50,000 export.

Note: you must be in the old version of GA to extract the 50,000 rows by adding &limit=50000

2. Remove Keywords Without Significance

Delete all data that can’t be considered significant – to find the minimum number of visits a keyword must have, divide 1 by your conversion rate (site conversion rate in the ecommerce overview) (1/.0125). In general, this number is the minimum number of visits a keyword must have to have valid data. For this example, you would delete all keywords with less than 80 visits.

3. Remove Poorly Converting Keywords

Remove keywords that convert below your average conversion rate (conversion rate in the ecommerce overview). This will focus your link building efforts on high value keywords.

4. Get Difficulty Scores and Search Volumes

Plug the remaining keywords into the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool and paste (paste special: text only) in the resulting data next to the appropriate keywords.

The important columns have been highlighted

5. Get Ranking Data

Run the keywords through your favorite rank checker. I really like using the SEObook rank checker because it’s fast, pretty accurate and has a nice CSV export. Avoid running tons of ranking reports so that you don’t get your IP banned.

Pair the ranking data with the appropriate keywords

Remove keywords where you already rank really well (positions 1-3), and ones where you will most likely need a lot of work (less than position 20). The remaining keywords are most likely to give you the highest ROI on your link building efforts as they convert well and are already ranking within the first two pages.

6. Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts

Sort your keywords by conversion rate and identify the keywords that convert the best; put these on your list of anchors to use in link building. You should also consider prioritize link building efforts for keywords with a low Keyword Difficulty score (if they exist for you) as you can see significant results on a faster timeline.

Finding Balance

While conversion rate is really important, search volume also needs to be a consideration. If you have a 50% conversion rate, that’s great, but if there’s only 10 searches a month, you are really capping your potential for profit. While this is really easy to do quickly when you only have three keywords, reality is you will have a lot of keywords to comb through. Identify your most desirable keywords by plotting them on a graph.

Likewise, you should also look for an optimal balance between conversion and keyword competition to identify profitable quick wins.

You can take this one step further and create a “potential value score” to replace the search volume metric (vertical value).

While this metric has obvious drawbacks (such as you won’t be able to get 100% of the search volume), it does provide a high level value for a keyword.

What if You’re not an Ecommerce Site?

This is applicable to just about any site - If you are a lead gen or affiliate site, just set up your goals and then associate a goal value (average value per referral). Or, if you are a nonprofit, you could set up a goal for filling out a contact form and then creating a goal value based on average donation amount by users who initially contact you through your contact form. MFA site? Create a revenue per visitor value.

So the Excel in this wasn’t tough but if you want to be more proficient in Excel, check out Excel for SEO’s by Mike Pantoliano.

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Putting the "Customer" Back in Acquisition

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 03:20 PM PDT

Posted by JoannaLord

I hope you all don't mind me straying from the usual a bit here today. Instead of a specifically SEO-related post, I instead want to tackle a related science, the art of "acquiring" and what that means in marketing.

The Problem - An Outdated Approach

Not too long ago, acquisition simply meant driving mad traffic to your site. We see this in SEO today, and for those of us who have been doing this a while, its a scary reality that we can't seem to shake.

It's as though we have forgotten what we are acquiring all-together -- customers. A while back I read a great acquisition marketing post over on the Clickz blog in which one line really changed my fundamental approach to my job. It reads "Acquisition is about customers not action." W.h.o.a. Think about that for a minute.

When I think back to the most recent webinars I attended, the last books I read, and the tweets that fill my stream, I can quickly recall a lot of information that suggests the majority of advertisers have yet to evolve past "driving traffic." I know this, because when it comes to acquisition marketing, a lot of the material out there addresses these actions: more clicks, more successful form completions, and more purchase conversions.

A lot of today's tactics are stripped down to the action rather than perhaps the most powerful tool marketers have at our disposal -- intent. When it comes to the future of marketing we are all seeing a far more social, and customer-focused landscape. Guess what that means? You better start caring about the intent of your audience, and not just driving traffic into your funnel.

I know what you are thinking, "Well sure, but clearly the more we drive into the funnel, the better off we will be. I mean some of those have to convert, and if we keep a steady flow of opportunities coming in, some of them will shake out." Uhm. Yeah. No. While I think there are times that this sort of "group hug" approach might work (get as many people in there as you can), but in the long term you are going to have a lot of people in the hug that simply can't wait to get away. Let's be honest, that's a lot of wasted love. Okay maybe I took the hug analogy a little too far, but I couldn't help it.

Marketing Funnel Old
^{A completely fabricated example of the way acquisition marketing use to be viewed}

The Solution- A Change in Perspective

This concept of "customers before all else", is a hard one for data-driven marketers to appreciate at times. It pokes holes in the metrics we report on, it questions the formulas we build our spreadsheets on, and it certainly posits some interesting questions around skill-sets, strategies, and staffing.

My first few years in acquisition marketing revolved around three letter words-- CPC, CPM, CPA, VPV, and so on and so forth. More recently, I've focused my energy on measuring a broader outcome of my daily marketing efforts. I find myself asking questions like "WHO am I reaching?" and "What do THEY want from this engagement?" It really comes down to thinking less about what we need as a company, and more about what do we have to offer.

That's where the fun part begins. When was the last time you looked at your acquisition efforts and graded them solely on the element of customer value? I'm willing to bet most of us are more focused on these words -- branded, informative, captive, trackable, scalable, effective, etc. While also super important, they are very hard to balance with the elements of a campaign that the customer needs.

In a moment of personal transparency I'd like to note that it can sometimes be a challenge for me to manage paid acquisition channels here at SEOmoz. Here, we evangelize the value in moving your marketing efforts toward inbound marketing. What is important to remember is they aren't as polarized as we imagine at first glance. Keeping the customer experience in the forefront of our mind is the piece of string that ties it all together.

So how do we put the customer back in acquisition? What sort of tactics can we lace into our more traditional acquisition efforts to improve the quality standard from "leads" to "customers" and hopefully to "lifetime customers." Below are some questions I like to ask myself when I'm creating new campaigns (used in its broadest sense), to make sure I'm not just hoping to acquire leads, but that I am successful on a grander scale;

Have I done my research to know who I really should be targeting with my acquisition spend?
Have I utilized all available behavioral and demographic targeting options, as to ensure I only reach that who fit my product best?
Have I customized the message to directly answer the need of this customer?
Have I made the landing page as relevant as possible?

These are a great place to start, and many would say they are the bare minimum you should be doing to make sure your customer acquisition campaigns are performing at their potential. But there is more than just the top funnel experience to consider. Here are a few other questions to ask when creating campaigns;

Is there cohesion between the multiple campaigns I am running, as to tell a story through my active campaigns?
Do I have the tracking in place to help me understand how they relate and play off each other?
What followup sequence can I integrate into this campaign to assure we hold on to the quality leads we capture?
What feedback loops have I laced into my campaigns to make sure I hear what people want along the way?
What personal process do I have in place to assess the success of this campaign, to better guide my future decisions?

Marketing Funnel New
^{A much better example of how acquisition marketing should be approached}

The Reality of Acquisition Marketing

It's likely some of the latter questions you are less familiar with, and to be fair, it's not totally your fault. These are more difficult, because they involve collaborating with other teams, and additional work on everyone's plate. I mean that's no fun. I hear ya. But trust me, it makes all the difference.

Making sure you have these in place keep you connected with customers, even after you've secured their money. They keep you pushing yourself to improve with your next campaign launch, and in my opinion, they keep us acquisition marketers connected to the larger goals of the company (not just the revenue ones).

Let's be honest guys and gals -- acquiring leads isn't that hard. In fact, depending primarily on your budget, it can be quite easy. The problem is you can't build a sustainable business on leads. You need them to become customers. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, that every single lead I send SEOmoz should have the potential to become our best customer if I am doing my job right. This can be a lofty challenge, but with the right resources, and the right moves, it can also become the standard of which your acquisition team is built.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the above. Do you think as an industry we are closer or farther from "putting the customer first?"

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Infographic: The Bipartisan Debt Compromise

Thursday, August 4, 2011

After a long and heated debate, President Obama has signed into law a compromise that will reduce the deficit and avert a default on our obligations that would have devastated our economy.

To help explain this compromise, we’ve put together an infographic that explains what’s in it and what will happen in the coming months:

On Tuesday, President Obama spoke about the compromise and urged Congress to immediately take steps to create new jobs, raise wages, and spur economic growth.

Watch the video and read the President's statement.

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Photo of the Day: Burgers with Obama

Your Daily Snapshot for
Thursday, August 4, 2011

Photo of the Day: Burgers with Obama

President Barack Obama has lunch with a group of advisors who worked on the debt negotiations, at Good Stuff Eatery in Washington, D.C., Aug. 3, 2011. Seated clockwise with the President are: Bruce Reed, Chief of Staff to the Vice President; OMB Director Jack Lew; Nancy-Ann DeParle, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy; National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling; and Rob Nabors, Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Responding To Representative Ryan
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan offered an interesting take on the President’s leadership on dealing with our long-term debt and deficits the recent deficit reduction negotiations in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Here are a few of Congressman Ryan’s claims along with our responses.

The SBA 100 Showcase
Check out the Small Business Administration's showcase of 100 small businesses that have each created hundreds of jobs with SBA assistance, helping drive our economy forward.

The President Tells Congress: Don’t Put the Livelihoods of Thousands of People at Risk
The President calls on Congress to act immediately to end the stalemate on the Federal Aviation Administration authorities which is leaving an estimated 70,000 construction and related workers and 4,000 FAA employees out of work.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

12:45 AM: The President arrives at Joint Base Andrews

1:00 AM: The President arrives at the White House

10:30 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

12:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney

Indicates events that will be live streamed on WhiteHouse.Gov/Live

Get Updates

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SEOptimise

How to Import Your Customer Database into Google+ & Twitter

Posted: 03 Aug 2011 05:53 AM PDT

One thing I get asked frequently by clients is: how can we keep in touch with our customers on Twitter?

The answer is actually very easy, but judging by the reactions when I’ve explained this, it isn’t something which many people are doing at the moment. So I thought I’d list the process I’d recommend following in order to import your clients/customers into social media sites such as Twitter and Google+.

1) Export your customer database to CSV - you can do this with social media connections too – for example, exporting LinkedIn connections – or in the case of this example, exporting email blog subscribers from Feedburner:

FeedBurner emails

2) Trim down CSV & add Firstname & Lastname – so that your spreadsheet looks like this one – just use fake names, as we don’t need these:

Customer CSV

3) Import email as contacts into a Gmail account – I’d recommend setting up a contact group for this to make it easier to manage.

Gmail Import

4) Find friends via Gmail – Google+ will automatically suggest contacts from your Gmail account and Twitter allows you to import contacts via Gmail:

I’d recommend just selecting the users who are already using the site; you don’t want to annoy everyone with invitations and obviously you need to have a good social media strategy in place (but that’s for another post!). Don’t just follow them from an inactive account and expect to see great results.

So it’s as easy as that! I’d be interested in hearing in the comments how you connect with your customers using social media?

Seth's Blog : The heckler

The heckler

How dare you.

You should be ashamed of yourself.

Is this the best you can do?

I've written about the lizard brain and my friend Steve talks about the voice of the resistance.

It occurs to me, though, that most of us have to hassle with the heckler.

The heckler keeps a running critique going, amplifying its tone and anger as it goes on endlessly about all the things we shouldn't do, all the things we're not doing enough, and most of all, at our lack of entitlement to do much of anything new or important.

The heckler cannot be eliminated. It's been around since the beginning of our species, and we're hard wired to have it.

What can be done, though, is alter how the rest of the brain reacts or responds to the heckling.

If you engage with the heckler, if you qualify yourself, justify yourself or worst of all, rationalize yourself, the heckler will pounce, turning a small wedge into a giant hole. Like a standup comedian, it's almost impossible to outwit or shut down a dedicated heckler.

But there is a strategy that works. Acknowledge and move on.

When the heckler announces that you're incompetent, unqualified or hardly ready to step forward, think, "oh." And then proceed.

You give it no purchase. No opportunity to escalate. Each jibe is met with "noted."

Over time, the heckler gets quieter, because it just isn't worth the effort.

• Email to a friend •

joi, 4 august 2011

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

1. Download your organic keyword report from Google Analytics

2. Remove Keywords Without Significance

3. Remove Poorly Converting Keywords

4. Get Difficulty Scores and Search Volumes

5. Get Ranking Data

Pair the ranking data with the appropriate keywords

6. Prioritize Your Link Building Efforts

Finding Balance