Central Perk

miercuri, 25 aprilie 2012

Why It's So Easy to Get Marketing All Wrong

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 04:11 PM PDT

I got a couple emails last week I wanted to share in anonymized format. Here's the first one:

It's me again <redacted>, just wondering I have been learning allot more about how to link build without software like senuke x and other automatic software and becoming a better manual link builder with google alerts etc.

And here's the second:

I look after around 6 clients at the moment, but my daily jobs just seem to be very repetitive e.g. finding related blogs, commenting on them, submiting sites to decent directories and guest posting, an now and again creating infographics and sharing them with blog owners and across sites such as reddit/quora etc...mostly I'm just blog commenting though.

I get A TON of emails like this. When folks are relatively new to the field of online marketing, or are moving from classic marketing into SEO, they often reach out seeking advice and help. Unfortunately, the volume's become a bit overwhelming of late, and I'm only able to respond to 50%, sometimes less (side note: I tried an experiment w/ email scalability a couple months back that failed). Thus, I wanted to write a post to express some empathy.

Yes. Marketing is really, really damned hard.

I understand the temptations to phone it in, to spam instead of creating authentic value, to outsource responsibility, to proclaim for all to hear that you HATE marketing, to give up. You're not alone. In fact, I've been just inches from all of those perspectives time and again over the last decade.

But that's also what makes great marketing so powerful. When:

Very few people are qualified or capable to do something
Many people believe that thing to be impossible
Only a handful make exceptional invesments to achieve it

That, in my opinion, is when remarkable things are in your grasp.

The marketing channels we invest in - SEO, social media, content marketing, community building, virality - fit these parameters well. It's easy do the basics, tough to get the intermediate items right and mind-blowingly challenging to get that last few percent that takes us from mediocrity to extraordinary.

Roadmap for Great Stuff on the Web

So many times, marketing professionals are called in to execute on Step 3 after being handed half-assed 1s and 2s. My friend Philip Vaughn told me at a lunch some months ago that "startups aren't really an engineering, product or organizational problem. They're mostly a marketing problem." But if we're handed crap to market, we can't help but do crap marketing.

At the risk of pissing a lot of people off - A large portion of SEO is just compensating for not being awesome.
— Rob Woods (@robdwoods) April 23, 2012

So many of the questions I see around inbound marketing boil down to the same fundamental challenge:

Marketing's Big Challenge

The way I see it, we only have two options:

A) Give in to giving up.
B) Take/earn responsibility for Step 1 and 2

Embracing option B and taking responsibility for your product -> marketing lifecycle is something very few people are qualified or capable of doing, many people believe to be impossible and only a handful ever execute exceptionally well. And it means remarkable results are in your grasp.

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How We Managed to Benefit from the Panda Updates

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 03:28 AM PDT

Posted by Martin Panayotov

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

As I am into the online marketing field, I read a lot about SEO. This is my first post about SEO, so please don't be harsh in the comments. The Panda update is what made the SEO community roar about how many websites lost ranking and so on. There is so little information about the ones that benefited of the update and we are one of the winners.

I personally think that the Panda update made the SERPs quality a lot better and to some point buried the medium to low quality websites deep into the results. Even some of the high-authority websites went down.

I will share some insights of an user generated moving reviews website MyMovingReviews.com and how we got positively impacted by the Panda update. The website features many US and Canadian moving companies and provides the opportunity for people to rank them and write moving reviews. Additionally to that, there is a blog/article section with moving tips and info.

Industry specifics that influence the analytics data

Before we begin, you should know that the specifics of the industry add some additional noise to the analytics data. These are the main trends in the moving industry:

Weekly trends: People search a lot more about moving services in the beginning of the week in the working days. Mondays are usually the most active days. We assume that people usually search for movers at work during work hours.
Monthly trends: People search for movers more by the end of the month and less in the middle of the month and during holidays.
Seasonality: People search 30% more for movers in the summer months than during the rest of the year. Nobody wants to move in the winter (especially in the Northern states).

The Fist Panda update

Since the first Panda update in 2011 we started seeing some increase in rankings. Because of the specifics of the users behavior in our industry, the analytics data is looking weird but you can see the pattern.

first panda update mymovingreviews

Further benefits from the Panda update

As we saw a huge opportunity in the Panda update, we tried to adjust the website to better suit the visitors, give them alternatives once they visit the website and make visitors consume more of the moving industry related content. The goals were to increase the time on site, reduce the bounce rate and increase the pages per visit.

What we did to increase rankings/visitors

1. Reducing the bounce rate

We stared by working on the high bounce rate pages. We edited some of the content and deleted some of the pages. One of the very high bounce rate pages were the blog section posts. Since we are always committed to build only high quality content, we knew that the problem with the high bounce rate on the blog was elsewhere. We knew that visitors were able to find the information they were searching for and after that they were leaving the blog. We added a suggestion fly-box. The box appears on the right side on the page once the visitors scrolls by the end of a post and suggests another random post from the blog. This had a huge impact on the blog bounce rate by lowering it with more than 30%. From the highest bounce rate section of the website, the blog become the lowest one overnight.

2. Creating a mobile website

mobile visits my moving reviews We have about 11 percent mobile visits (we don't consider iPads to be mobile traffic). We decided to further lower the bounce rate by creating a full-featured mobile website. This of course brings the benefits of higher conversion rates. We've been postponing the mobile website for some time now and we finally decided to finish it and launch it by December. We kept the same URLs as the desktop version and only changed the templates.

3. More content

As part of the Panda update is the amount of content on page. We didn't want to have many pages with thin content so we increased the minimum text required for a moving review to be posted. After reading about how Zappos corrected the spelling mistakes of all their reviews, we additionally wanted to avoid spelling mistakes as much as possible. We included a spell checker on the moving review form. We are also planning to correct the mistakes on all old reviews in the future.

To recap, here are the changes we did:

Editing some of the content with the highest bounce rate.
Adding a spell checker on the write a review page and setting a higher minimum amount of text for the reviews.
Giving suggestions to users once they finish reading a blog post to reduce the bounce rate.
Started a mobile website to reduce the bounce rate and time on site for mobile visitors.

The results

We had almost 50% increase in visits in the next one-two months. Please note that we introduced most of the changes in December, so we can't really measure how fast did these changes influenced the rankings because of the holidays. Not surprisingly, the largest part of the increase was from the blog as this is where we managed to reduce the bounce rate the most.

MMR traffic increase

Conclusion

I can't say that all of the gained increase of visitors came because of the above changes, but given the changes and tactics we did at the time, these were the most significant ones. Targeting the visitor and thinking of how to enhance the customer experience results in more visitors. It is as simple as that. Working on the design and thinking of techniques to reduce the bounce rate will result in better rankings, especially if you are a high-traffic website.

What do you think about the bounce rate and its impact on rankings/visitors? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.

"Awwww Yeah": President Obama on Jimmy Fallon

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, April 25, 2012

"Awwww Yeah": President Obama on Jimmy Fallon

In July, if Congress doesn't act to keep interest rates low, more than 7 million students around the country will rack up an average of $1,000 of extra debt each. That's why President Obama is asking students to tweet using the hashtag #DontDoubleMyRate.

The President stopped by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night, where he had a message for Congress: This is not the time to make school more expensive for our young people.

Watch the President "slow jam" the news on student loans:

Google’s ‘Over Optimisation’ Algorithm Update – Coming Soon!

Posted: 24 Apr 2012 04:16 PM PDT

Many speculated for weeks over the launch of Google’s next algorithm update targeting websites that Matt Cutts described as “over optimised”. The new algorithm update is meant to launch in the next few days and according to the Official Google Search Blog, this particular update will affect sites that employ the following “black-hat” tactics:

Keyword stuffing
Link schemes (paid links, excessive reciprocal linking, links from (and to) spammy or unrelated sites etc.)
Article spinning

According to Matt Cutts, the change will go live for all languages at the same time. The update is meant to affect 3.1% of queries in English where “regular users” will notice. This number is relatively small when compared to the effect the original Panda update had on search queries (12% of search queries for regular users).

So how does one make sure not to fall pray to Google’s next update? Cutts emphasises that in addition to improving site usability, creating “great” content, and improving site speed; site-owners must also need to think of creative marketing campaigns that make sites more compelling “that help search engines as well as social media”.

The SEO community have long known the indirect benefits of launching “high level” online marketing campaigns that gain publicity and higher visibility on social networks and the blogosphere. However, this is probably the most compelling hint that the search giant has dropped on SEOs which stress the need for SEOs to graduate from it’s infant state and take it’s rightful place at a strategic marketing level.

Google’s ultimate objective is to provide the most relevant results for their users and this algorithm update seems to be an aggressive step toward that goal. We will be updating this space as and when we hear more from the search giant so be sure to watch this space. Also feel free to voice your opinions and share your thoughts with the community.

Seth's Blog : Don't expect applause

Don't expect applause

Accept applause, sure, please do.

But when you expect applause, when you do your work in order (and because of) applause, you have sold yourself short. That's because your work is depending on something out of your control. You have given away part of your art. If your work is filled with the hope and longing for applause, it's no longer your work--the dependence on approval has corrupted it, turned it into a process where you are striving for ever more approval.

Who decides if your work is good? When you are at your best, you do. If the work doesn't deliver on its purpose, if the pot you made leaks or the hammer your forged breaks, then you should learn to make a better one. But we don't blame the nail for breaking the hammer or the water for leaking from the pot. They are part of the system, just as the market embracing your product is part of marketing.

"Here, here it is, it's finished."

If it's finished, the applause, the thanks, the gratitude are something else. Something extra and not part of what you created. To play a beautiful song for two people or a thousand is the same song, and the amount of thanks you receive isn't part of that song.