Central Perk

miercuri, 7 decembrie 2011

Proving Trust on the Web

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 04:29 PM PST

For those of us who've been deep in the trenches of online marketing for years, the question of who to trust may seem inane. We've all gravitated to sources of one variety or another, and probably built up a few favorites based on past experience. I've shared some of my selected sources in the past and I (consciously and subconsciously) bias toward trusting news and advice from those over others.

But for those new to the field of web analytics, social media marketing, SEO or a myriad of other practices, it's a true challenge. Case in point, a Q+A question from earlier today:

How do you know what is junk information vs what is truly good SEO advice? Is it just simply trial and error? It seems to me that if people find truly good SEO information, they aren't going to be sharing it so easily. It's the whole, "You get what you pay for".

I've observed and heard this perspective dozens of times. Like the assumption that the "best SEO company in my city probably ranks first for cityname+SEO," it makes sense at first blush, but quickly loses any semblance of logic upon deeper analysis.

The reason is fairly straightforward; SEO at its core is about great content combined with earning great references. Sharing openly, honestly and adding value with that content is far more likely to produce returns in the form of links, reputation, references and customers than staying closed and secretive. Participation in a professional ecosystem almost always yields more value than hoarding "secret discoveries," particularly when those same secrets are being shared elsewhere on a gigantic, relatively level playing field (the web).

But let's say you're completely unfamiliar with the field. You need secondary cues - signals that help you sort the wheat from the chaff. On the web, these follow fairly consistent patterns:

When a piece of content (or an entire site) falls into the right-hand column of untrustworthiness, we tend to reject the information provided. When it falls into the left-hand, trusted column, our instincts are to assign credibility and all the positive associations that accompany it.

There's a lot of boxes to tick to earn trust, but also an incredible amount of value to be had in establishing it. Conversion rates rise. Links, citations, references and social shares increase. The propensity for virality improves. The likelihood of earning a subscriber or a follower or a fan (in all senses of those words) improves. Building trust is like adding an extra percentage on top of every activity web marketers engage in.

Thus, when an SEO reaches out for help earning top rankings or a social marketer wants to know how to get more Facebook fans or drive more traffic from Twitter on a site that looks like this:

Cart Before the Horse
(no offense, but they're ticking box after box from the orange column above)

I'm left wondering, why put the cart before the horse?

Users of the web have been trained through experience (online and off) to seek out indications of trustworthiness. When we enter a new field on the web, we'll use these same signals to evaluate possible resources and channels. So why is it that when we put on our marketing hats, we sometimes revert to paying thousands of dollars for a link building campaign, yet shy away from investing in the foundation of our success - the trustworthiness of the site and brand?

A wise man once said: "Let's stop putting lipstick on pigs and trying to rank 'em." I couldn't agree more (and, I suspect, neither could most of our bottom lines).

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A Tale Of Two Studies: Google vs. Bing Click-Through Rate

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 02:51 AM PST

Posted by Slingshot SEO

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.

Howdy Mozzers! You may remember us from our last study, Mission ImposSERPble (we know, that title was way better), but we're not done yet. After we finished with Google, we started in on Bing. Releasing A Tale of Two Studies in October we shook the foundation of my very desk, by jumping up and down like giddy school girls. But it wasn't all jumping and data. Our findings provided us with a terrible truth.

Did you know that every month, roughly 117 million searches are made for the keyword " google" in Bing? Yeah. Scary.

Now for the highlights: Results from the Google study showed that CTR was 18.2% for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for a No. 2 rank; results from the Bing study showed that CTR was 9.66% for a No. 1 rank and 5.51% for a No. 2 rank.

And so that I wouldn't have to write out all the highlights, and because our last infographic was such a success, we made this awesome infographic!

Have fun.

Bing vs. Google Click-Through Rate by Slingshot SEO

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"In America, We Are Greater Together"

Your Daily Snapshot for
Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011

"In America, We Are Greater Together"

Yesterday, a little more than a century after Teddy Roosevelt outlined a vision for a "New Nationalism" in Osawatomie, Kansas, President Obama visited the same community. The President spoke about what he called a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and laid out his view for the country:

It is a view that says in America we are greater together -- when everyone engages in fair play and everybody gets a fair shot and everybody does their fair share.

Watch the video and see the full speech.

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama waves to people gathered along the motorcade route from Osawatomie High School to Osawatomie-Paola Municipal Airport in Osawatomie, Kan., Dec. 6, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

SEOptimise

Conversion Conference London: The First 58 Takeaways

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 06:31 AM PST

There were many great tips at Conversion Conference London last week – too many to fit into one blog post. Here are the first 58 takeaways from the first day. More to come soon!

Mobile and Real Time Optimisation

The conference started with Amy Africa, CEO of Eight By Eight, packing many tips for mobile conversion optimisation into her forty-five minute keynote.

Three things matter for mobile:

You have to have some mobile presence (even if it's not a full mobile site)
Optimise speed. A page should have a size around 50k.
Navigation.

Mobile has a half to a third the number of conversions of a traditional site.
You have to concentrate on only one goal.
Get users' email addresses or phone numbers so you can profile them.
Pay attention to the user's context, and use diversions to show them appropriate content.

Where have they entered the site from? Different sources convert differently, or will want different information. Twitter converts well on the phone. People from shopping sites will want prices. Concentrate on your top referring sources.
Where are they? You may want to show them a different page if they are looking at your site while in your store.

Apps are not mobile sites. Concentrate on your mobile site rather than on making an app, unless you have a very good idea for the app.
Treat users on tablets separately to those on mobile.

Tablet traffic convert around twice as much as desktop.
Mobile traffic convert a third or less.

Navigation: Mobilise, don't miniaturise.

Streamline your navigation, and make sure it is intuitive.
Only have five to eight choices.
Top navigation is better than bottom navigation.
Use breadcrumbs, sorts and jump links.
Use big buttons. Colour doesn't matter, but size does.
Have a big search box at the top, and use auto-suggest.

Change forms and checkouts.

Fields need to be bigger so people make fewer mistakes.
Make it easy to spot and correct errors.
Have only three to five choices in drop-down menus.
Be clear on the length of the process, for example by saying "step 1 of 7".

Over 92% of time is spent on the first view, above the fold.

Limit your message to one page and have the important stuff at the top.
Don't waste space on adverts for other people's brands.

Don't use Flash.
The best way to get conversions is to have a click to call. Have your phone number everywhere.
Graphical icons can help, but make sure to test as the wrong icons can bomb.
Have images big but not too big.
Only people on 4G will watch videos.
Always have an option to email, so people can send a page to themselves.
Abandon programs are key – find out how to convert abandoners on other channels.
If a user shares something on social media, they won't come back to your site. Give them options to share after they have converted.
Always give the option to view the full website.
Get something that's good at tracking mobile, like Bango.

Turbo-Charging PPC & Display Landing Pages

First to speak in the session was Kai Radanitsch, from eBusinessLab, who talked about different sorts of searches and landing pages.

Work out user intent from the search term – is it informational, navigational or transactional?
Transactional searches have on average 1.5 words, while informational have 3.7.
The highest quantities of transactional searches are between 11am and 4pm.
When creating an ad for a keyword, use the keyword in the ad headline.
Expand the keyword with a benefit

For instance, if the keyword is 'London Hotel', the headline could be 'London Hotel from £44'.

Ads are more attractive if there is a customer rating

Get ratings displayed by getting 30 four or five star reviews on Google Product Search.

Use sitelinks – they may not be clicked on, but they broaden the offerings you can show in an ad.
Homepages do not make the best landing pages. You need something on them to grab visitors and get them to your offerings.
Article landing pages can have calls to action like newsletter signups.
Rapid conversion landing page are good for things like insurance. They don't give too much info, and make conversion quick.
You could have a page which asks for a priority code that was in the advert, and prefill the code.
From the search, get a mental hook to the landing page.
Repeat the ad's language on the landing page.

The second speaker was Guy Levine, CEO of Return On Digital.

Don't just think about keywords and landing pages, think about people and personas.
PPC testing needs a good campaign setup. Get a good setup with 'peel and stick'

Your first go at campaign structure is a stab in the dark.
When campaigns are running, find keywords that work
Peel the keywords out of their current ad groups
Stick them in new ad groups on their own, so tracking their performance is easier.

Keep a tight correlation between keyword and ad copy.
Track conversions

You want specific conversion actions, not pageviews and time on site.
Use phone tracking (like AdInsight).

Multivariate testing versus A/B testing:

Multivariate testing needs a lot of people to come to the site, or will take ages with low traffic.
A/B testing is quicker as there are only two variants being tested.
Use A/B testing first, then use multivariate testing on smaller details.

You want at least 100 conversions for each variant being tested before making decisions.
Testing is about overcoming objections.
The worst mistake is losing context. People get perplexed if a specific long tail search goes to a less specific landing page.
Having PayPal is good for B2C.
If you want to test alternative sources – like testing traffic from PPC rather than all traffic – then you need separate landing pages.
The Call To Action button is the biggest priority for buying pages, while more elements are important for lead gen.
Click Tale can tell you which form fields people don't fill in (even if they abandon the form).
Tell people

We are experts
This is what you should buy
Please buy it from us

SEO and SEM versus CRO – Tactics for Optimising Both Search & Conversion

The first speaker was Richard Baxter, Founder and Director of SEOgadget. His slides are available on Slide Share.

There are many types of search:

Query Deserves Freshness
Image search
Video search
Rich snippets (eg movie ratings and show times)
Google Places
Social – if you've shared something on Google+ friends see it in the SERPs

Understand user intent.

People searching for 'Chicago pizza' have a longer dwell time on local results than people searching for 'pizza'.
People searching for 'how to make pizza' look at the videos.
People looking for 'pizza cutter' look at the images.

Can you influence CTR in the organic SERPs?

Tested with SERP Turkey
Informational searches get better CTR with informational meta-descriptions.
Transactional searches get better CTR with meta-descriptions emphasising the price and other transactional information.
The CTR was even higher for a transactional search when the transactional meta-description had a customer rating rich snippet.

Can you change the description depending on the query intent?

Tip from SharkSEO – if you have a long meta description then Google will show the parts that are most relevant to the query.
If you have two descriptions the more relevant one will be used.

Patrick Altoft, Director of Search at Branded3. His slides are available here.

There are many reasons why people don't convert.

Some people may return later.
Some may not find what they're after (traffic can't be as targeted as with PPC).

To increase conversion rates

Increase keyword relevancy
Get more visits to convert
Attract users at multiple points of the buying cycle

Keyword research

Everyone uses the Google Keyword Tool so the top results are very competitive.
You can look at keywords from PPC and organic search, and use the conversion data on them to work out the opportunity for each keyword.
But even then you will have thousands of keywords, and you can't concentrate on them all.

Approach keyword research from a landing page perspective.

Work out the potential revenue per keyword per landing page
Use a pivot table to sum over landing pages to calculate the potential revenue per landing page.
Build links for the landing pages with the highest potential.

Don't build all links with the same anchor text

Vary anchor text with the top keywords for the landing page.
Add 'noise' and brand to some links, so it looks natural and adds long tail terms.

Use the same landing page for PPC and for SEO – there's more incentive to spend money to improve PPC landing pages.
Optimise pages for short tail searches, then research and optimise for long tail.
To get low competition long tail keyword ideas:

Put the page's URL into the Google Keyword Tool
Check the "Only show ideas closely related to my search terms" box
Filter to show only keywords with fewer than 1000 monthly searches.

This was just the first morning of the two days. More takeaways to come.

What’s Been the Most Significant Change in Search During 2011?

Posted: 06 Dec 2011 06:16 AM PST

Last week I setup a Facebook poll to ask people what they considered to be the most significant change in search during 2011. This has received a great response, so here are the results so far (you can still take part on the SEOptimise fan page):

To recap on what these changes were:

Google Panda (37 votes) – if you haven’t heard of Google Panda, I’m not sure where you’ve been. Myself and Daniel Bianchini presented at A4UExpo earlier in the year which may help to explain about the impact of Google Panda.
SSL Search (17 Votes) – as mentioned in the comments, if there was a poll for the most annoying change this would have won hands down – with Google deciding to take away a portion of keyword data from logged-in search for privacy reasons.
Social signals and integration (9 votes) – still debatable over social media’s current impact to search this year, but with the recent Google freshness algorithm update and the launch/continued push of Google+ it’s clearly something which should be high on the agenda for 2012.
Google+ (2 votes) – Google’s most successful attempt at social media to date, Google+.
Siri (1 vote) – thanks Nichola! If anyone else saw the keynote at Pubcon, they’d realise that Google is dead and the future is Siri. I certainly won’t be making any predictions like that myself any time soon!
Removal of Yahoo! Site Explorer (1 vote) – this is big news for SEOs, as many of us have relied on Yahoo! in the past to provide accurate link analysis. Now none of the search engines provide full link data, leaving us to decide which link analysis tool to use?
Roll out of Bing/Yahoo search alliance (0 votes) - of course, the increase in market share by combining Bing/Yahoo was announced last year, but the roll out of this has been in motion (or slow motion?) this year.