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miercuri, 10 iulie 2013
The President's Plan to Cut Carbon Pollution and Address Climate Change
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How Failure Can Make You a Better SEO
How Failure Can Make You a Better SEO |
| How Failure Can Make You a Better SEO Posted: 09 Jul 2013 03:22 PM PDT Posted by HappyBrooke 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 Moz, Inc. It’s been three months since the good Mozzers allowed my SEO from a Newb’s Perspective to see the light of day, and I’m back for another round. Except now HappyBrooke has had a dose of reality. That’s right â€" I’ve hit some potholes. And I found out that Brooke's list of essential qualities SEO pros need (which I listed in the last post), though it didn't claim to be comprehensive, lacked one: the ability to be resilient. Props to Heather Baker for noting this in the comments. In this post, I’ll share my fledgling thoughts on how to cultivate resilience in the face of failure. As Heather pointed out, if you want to do SEO well, you've gotta be resilient. My friends who are, like me, "newbs" to SEO will probably find my epiphanies more helpful than those of you who are old hat. But no doubt veterans have developed strategies on how to stay resilient in your daily battles to rank. If you’re willing to share your strategies with me in the comments below, I'd be tickled. Why SEO is a bumpy rideAs you and I both know, SEO done right can pay off in tremendous ways for our clients: through website traffic, conversions, brand awareness, loyalty, and retention (just to name a few perks that come from online marketing success). If you can rank, you can reap the benefits. But there are no guarantees. In my first four months on the job as an SEO, I’ve not experienced a major Earth-shifting Google algorithm update (yet), but I have experienced the daily joys and challenges of our field. You all know how it goes. Since starting my job at Happy Dog, this has all happened to me:
Boy-oh-boy am I realizing that to do SEO, you need a healthy dose of Dory’s “just keep swimming†resilience at times. Credit: Tumblr Watching the analytics and the SERPs, just waiting for traffic and rankings, feels awfully like trying to get a fire going at a summer night's bonfire (without the fun of hot dogs and s'mores). You stare into the flames and wait for a spark. Add another log. The fire dies down. You shiver. You frantically run to find twigs. Finally: a tiny blaze! Hallelujah! Then suddenly, a major gust of wind blows it out. Nooooooo! I don’t know about you, but my emotions follow a pretty specific pattern when I’m idling in no-rank-land. First, I’m frustrated. My client has a great business. He/she deserves better rankings. But then I feel a sense of entitlement: I'm putting in the hours, so it's maddening that my work isn't paying off. I feel desperate. My client is paying me to achieve results. Am I a failure? Stricken with grief, I eat candy bars and slump in my desk chair drinking straight from the coffee pot. What comes next? Well, I’m hired to help our clients optimize their web presence. I’m expected to drive traffic â€" my clients will not twiddle their thumbs and wait patiently. The pressure’s on. What am I going to do? The eventual outcome of this whole emotional journey is that I get a grip (finally) and muster up whatever resilience I have. Then here's what I'm learning to do: to take a marker to the good ol’ proverbial drawing board to see what can be done. This moment, my friends, is the essence of what we do in SEO. It’s not easy being creativeThe reason SEO is so challenging/exhilarating/frustrating/tiring/overwhelming is that, as many experts have already pointed out, there’s no secret formula to earn links, start ranking, and succeed at search engine marketing. There are literally as many ways as your creative mind can dream up, which means you could see astounding results if you climb out on a limb or you could see no results at all and completely, totally flop. There’s a risk to every creative endeavor we undertake. When we do it on behalf of someone else, the risk increases. In the face of all this pressure, we have to learn how to embody resilience â€" every day, every hour, every minute, no matter what the analytics are saying. I’m learning that just because I try a tactic and it doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean I have failed. I’m going to be honest for a minute and shed some light on three of my “failures†in the hopes that you will a) realize you’re not alone, and b) get some ideas of how to move forward. Brooke’s SEO Blunders I'm still learning Photoshop. Please don't judge. 1. Nobody wanted my contentProblem: I spent hours pouring research and creativity into blog posts for a client and then pitching them to appropriate platforms. For weeks, nobody bit. What I did next: Tweaked the ideas, made tiny edits, and re-pitched the content. People were unimpressed, so I created more content with gusto. Then I set aside the content nobody wanted for the time being and revisited it when I’d had a little space to see if I had any new ideas to improve it. Turns out, I did. Reality check: Failing to attract an audience’s attention is an age-old dilemma for artists (which we are). Hey, if there’s anything I learned from my college creative writing classes, it’s that if you expect a standing ovation for everything you write, get ready to be disappointed, hon. Plenty of writers spent years writing and pitching tomes that nobody wanted to publish (poor Jack Kerouac had On the Road done in three weeks, or so he claimed, but it took the guy years to find a publisher). Unless you’re already a smashing success, you’re not entitled to anybody’s attention. How to stay resilient: Learn from the rejection and tweak your overall strategy. Was the content too shallow or too technical? Did you choose an angle or approach that didn’t jam with your audience? Was the platform you chose to publish on the wrong fit for the content? Try something new next time. Don’t fret. You can’t hit it out of the ballpark every time. 2. I lost a clientProblem: All throughout the first few months of their campaign, my client seemed wishy-washy, always about to give up. I played cheerleader on every phone call and email, promising that the rankings for their brand-new, beautiful site were going to improve. But the client, waiting for the leads to roll in, was getting antsy. Just as things were getting exciting on the SEO-side, they bailed. What I did next: My boss and I did a “What went wrong?†analysis, and we affirmed that the campaign had been solid. The rankings had been slow to come by, but forecasting a month or two down the road, we saw that things were looking up. However, we realized how important it is to check in with our clients and make sure they are happy â€" this client had had questions but never raised them with us. This experience made us resolve to check in more often and create that opportunity to talk about our clients’ concerns. Reality check: Even if you perform high-quality work, clients often expect to get leads and see results in a shorter time period than it may take to achieve them. It is important to clearly articulate to your clients that in SEO, “slow and steady wins the race.†In our case, we should have communicated more with our client and made sure they did not have unrealistic expectations of us. How to stay resilient: If you do a good job but still lose the client, don’t hang your head in shame. The thing is, there will always (or at least often) be a better strategy you could have used. Losing a client can be an opportunity to reflect on how well your strategy worked. With SEO, even the best strategies take time, and you can’t force your clients to be patient. All you can do is focus on providing the best quality SEO services that you can. 3. I couldn’t figure out how to market a client in a boring, “blah†industryProblem: The day they called to request SEO services, I couldn’t even wrap my head around their product. Wait, so what do you guys do again? What I did next: I changed their entire keyword strategy three times, didn't sleep, and tossed idea after idea out the window. Honestly, this was a tough one. One thing that helped (at my client’s suggestion) was having learning sessions with them on the benefit their product provides. When I started to grasp that, it was easier to drum up ideas (I'm still drumming). Reality check: Not every client will be easy to market. Some industries are just doozies. How to stay resilient: Nick Stagg from Lemonpromotions brought up a great question in the comments on my first post: “How do you make a plumber sound sexy?†How, indeed? There are probably hundreds of ways to go about it. Overall, I think promoting the plumber will involve four steps:
TakeawaysIf you're stumped or failing:
Whatever you take away from this reflection (I hope it’s not just dissatisfaction at my attempts to provide solutions to common SEO ailments â€" comment below with your better ideas! I long to hear them!), remember that we’re all still learning how to do this business in an ethical, effective, exciting way. If you fail once, or fail again and again, cultivate resilience. Return to that drawing board. Remember that at the end of the day, your integrity and the connections you make with your clients are the most important things - not your ability to make them rank. My impression of the SEO community after just a few months of reading blogs and forums is that you people are hungry for the tools and tips to do your jobs better. You don’t want to just do an okay job. You want to succeed, and you want to do it in big, beautiful, bold ways. When you experience discouragement, consider J.K. Rowling’s words in her commencement speech at Harvard back in 2008 (they apply to SEO and to life in general): “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all â€" in which case, you fail by default.†Fail, but do it resiliently. And get back up. You’ll do better next time. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!       |
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How to Calculate Your Mobile Bid Adjustment
How to Calculate Your Mobile Bid Adjustment |  |
| How to Calculate Your Mobile Bid Adjustment Posted: 10 Jul 2013 01:12 AM PDT The Enhanced Campaign migration deadline is twelve days away. Even if you're leaving 'upgrading' until the last minute, you need to be prepared now. The biggest change will be how traffic from different devices is treated. Previously, you had control over what devices a campaign would show on – now Search campaigns* are always on desktop and tablet, and can be on mobiles with a bid adjustment. So if you had separate device campaigns, you now have to merge them, and work out what bid adjustment you should be using to best emulate what bids you want. But don't think you only have to worry about bid adjustments if you're merging separate campaigns! Previously, if you targeted multiple devices in one campaign, bids on mobiles would be automatically lowered. This won't be the case when you're enhanced: having no adjustment means you will be using the same bid on desktop and mobile, and that means you'll pay more for your mobile clicks. Everyone needs to set mobile bid adjustments. So how can you work out what yours should be? In today’s post I’ll look at what different methods you can use to calculate your adjustments. Then tomorrow and Friday I’ll go through how to implement some of these methods in Excel. (*Display campaigns still have the option to target based on OS, device model and operator. You could theoretically have a tablet-only or mobile-only campaign if you selected the right device models, but you'd have to keep it up to date to avoid missing traffic on new models.) 1. Set the mobile bid adjustment to -100%Pros: Quick and easy You may not be missing out on good traffic, of course. Maybe your site just doesn't work on mobiles; maybe your business doesn’t want mobile traffic (you are advertising PC software or Flash games, for example); maybe you've just found mobile traffic can't be made profitable in the past. Incidentally, if you haven't advertised on mobiles before, this is probably not a good time to try: pretty much everyone will be making bid changes, so auction prices are bound to fluctuate worse than normal. 2. Just use the suggestion from GooglePros: Quick and easy in the Upgrade Centre When you upgrade, Google will give a suggested mobile bid adjustment, but this is based on 'similar advertisers' rather than taking the campaign's actual performance into account. Adobe claim that "Google's MBA recommendations tend to be too high and mobile bids should be lowered further". So this method isn’t recommended. 3. If you have separate campaigns: look at your existing mobile bidsPros: You've already done the hard work They've work for you in the past, right? If you have separate mobile campaigns then you have separate mobile bids, and you can work out what percentage they are of your desktop and tablet bids. The problem is that mobile bids may not all be the same percentage at keyword level, and you have to set mobile adjustments at ad group level. If there's a really significant difference you could split up the ad group. However this makes management more difficult: while you want small ad groups for better ad relevancy and more precise bid adjustments, in some cases ad groups don't have enough traffic to be worth the extra managerial effort. So in most cases you probably want to use weighted averages – combine the keyword level adjustments together, but giving more weight to the adjustments from the keywords that do most of the spending. Tomorrow I’ll go through how to work this out in Excel! 4. If you don't have separate campaigns: look at your mobile CPCsPros: Fairly straightforward But what if you haven't split out your campaigns? In legacy campaigns, Google automatically uses a lower bid on mobile searches, so your historic CPC on mobile should be lower than desktop and tablet. So if you just want the status quo to continue, you can calculate
Again, there may be variance at keyword level. Again, you’ll want weighted averages, which I’ll talk more about tomorrow. This method is fairly easy – it just needs some Excel work – and you can see your current mobile performance to give you an idea of how it will perform. But it doesn’t take into account conversions: you’ll carry on as before rather than getting any improvement. Also, it raises the problem that CPCs are not bids: lowering a bid by 20% could reduce the CPC by more, or drop you off the first page. It depends on your competition. 5. If you don't have separate campaigns: look at the value of a mobile clickPros: The way you calculate your desktop bid is probably the best way to calculate any bid
'Value of a click' could mean revenue per click or conversion rate, depending on whether you have revenue tracking in place. This assumes your bids are set up according to value per click. You might instead be bidding for position, for branding purposes. Or you might be bidding less than your value per click so that you can get the most conversions from your limited budget. There is also the complication that mobile SERPs have fewer ad slots: higher position is more important and you might want to bid a bit higher to actually be visible. But basically the idea is: work out what the mobile bid should be, as if you were just targeting mobiles on their own, the same way you would for your desktop bid. Then find this bid as a percentage of the desktop bid. You could do this at ad group level, or work it out at keyword level and change that into an ad group level adjustment the same way as in method 3. I realise putting "it's effort" as a con sounds lazy, but if your process for finding the best bid is manual and you've got too many keywords then there's only so much you can do before the 22nd. You might only have time to work out the right bids for the most important campaigns, and use adjustments based on historic CPC for lower volume campaigns until you have time to work things out properly. 6. Look at a user location report segmented by devicePros: You can fine-tune bids more finely But wait! What about location bid adjustments? They will layer with the mobile bids – if you're using both you should probably check you're not throttling or exploding bids more than you want to in any particular location/device combination. Example: the people of Townsville have low conversion rates and high cost per conversion, so you drop bids there by 20%. And mobiles aren't doing well either, so you also drop them by 20%. What if it turns out that the reason Townsville isn't doing well is that it's full of mobile users? You'll effectively be dropping bids by 36% there, because the adjustments multiply – you'll be bidding less than what you actually want. It's unlikely that traffic somewhere is 100% mobile, but the proportion will vary by location. While you can't get a precise prediction of your adjustments' effects, you can make educated guesses – you can use a User Location report, segmented by Device, to see what the proportions are and what sort of overall adjustment will be made. This is another job for Excel – I’ll go through this on Friday. And Remember To Check PerformanceHowever you calculate your mobile bid adjustment, remember to monitor it! With all the changes of enhanced campaigns, the prices are bound to fluctuate when other advertisers try out their own bid adjustments. © SEOptimise How to Calculate Your Mobile Bid Adjustment            |
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Seth's Blog : Proving the skeptics wrong
Proving the skeptics wrong
"It'll never last..."
"Someone with her background will never make a go of this..."
"Are you kidding me?" "Pathetic! Delusional!"
"Social media is a fad, the iPad is a toy, you're never going to amount to anything..."
Here's the thing about proving skeptics wrong: They don't care. They won't learn. They will stay skeptics. The ones who said the airplane would never fly ignored the success of the Wright Bros. and went on to become skeptical of something else. And when they got onto an airplane, they didn't apologize to the engineers on their way in.
I used to have a list, and I kept it in my head, the list of people who rejected, who were skeptical, who stood in the way. What I discovered was that this wasn't the point of the work, and my goal wasn't actually to prove these folks wrong, it was only to do the work that was worth doing. So long ago I stopped keeping track. It's not about the skeptics. It's about the people who care about, support and enable.
Instead of working so hard to prove the skeptics wrong, it makes a lot more sense to delight the true believers. They deserve it, after all, and they're the ones that are going to spread the word for you.
More Recent Articles
- Nature and nurture (professional edition)
- Q&A: The resiliency of Permission Marketing
- Canaries and coal mines
- Polishing junk
- How long between leaps?
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marți, 9 iulie 2013
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
| A Little Known US Court Only Hears One Side of the Case: The Government's Side Posted: 09 Jul 2013 11:51 AM PDT In 1978, Congress created an 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), purportedly as a check against wiretapping abuses by the government. In practice, FISA only hears one side of the case, that of the government. Thus it should be no surprise to learn In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A. In more than a dozen classified rulings, the nation's surveillance court has created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans while pursuing not only terrorism suspects, but also people possibly involved in nuclear proliferation, espionage and cyberattacks, officials say.In issues like this, it is safe to assume whatever legislation is passed, that legislation will do the exact opposite of the publicly stated intention, in this case "prevent wiretapping abuses by the government". Clearly FISA, which only hears one side of the case can never function as intended. Political appointees will see to that. The only debate is whether the "stated" intention was actually the "real" intention in the first place. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
| Potential Mistakes and the Case for Doing Nothing Posted: 09 Jul 2013 04:32 AM PDT In Potential Mistakes (Wonkish), Paul Krugman wrote "It is important to have an idea of how much the economy could and should be producing, and also of how low unemployment could and should go." Much of the rest of the post is indeed "wonkish", complete with charts. Taking "wonkishness" at least an order of magnitude higher, Edward Lambert writing for the Effective Demand blog actually attempts to determine True Potential Real GDP by looking at previous recessions. Here is chart number 6 in an 8 chart series.  I am not going to bother explaining the chart, nor do I think anyone should spend any time studying it. Rather, let's discuss Lambert's two-paragraph conclusion. The global economy has been made unstable by low interest rates. I have my doubts that the economy can push against the effective demand limit like it did from 2006 through 2007. The Fed raised rates during that time to control a bit of inflation. Yet, this time around, if the Fed tries to regulate the economy in any way, the global reaction will be tremendous.emphasis mine Measuring Real Potential GDP I have no issues with the first paragraph above. The Fed (central banks in general) certainly have made the global economy unstable in recent years, blowing repetitive bubbles of increasing magnitude. However, I strongly disagree with Krugman and Lambert regarding the importance of figuring out real potential GDP. For starters, GDP is a blatantly distorted number. By definition, government spending adds to GDP, no matter how useless the spending. If the government paid people to spit at the moon it would add to GDP. Paying people to dig holes and others to fill them (as many Keynesian economists have proposed) is equally ridiculous. As a more practical example, GDP would rise by the same amount if government spent $100,000 or $20 billion to build a bridge. To compute "real GDP" one needs to take "nominal GDP" then factor in a measure of inflation. However, there is no accurate way to measure inflation. Sure, one could use the CPI, but the CPI does not contain a measure of housing prices or any other asset bubbles. And look at the mess the Fed made by ignoring housing prices between 2003 and 2005. I have written about housing and the CPI numerous times. Here are my latest two posts.
The first problem with measuring price inflation is there is no true representative basket of goods and services. Even if there was a representative basket, the basket changes over time and also changes by demographics. The second problem is price inflation is often a lagging effect of prior monetary inflation. The third problem is all widely used measures of inflation ignore asset bubbles. More Moving Targets Lambert takes a look at prior recessions to determine "potential". But what if potential changes over time due to demographics and other factors? Economist Point of View It's important to predict the "potential" of a moving target, of a very distorted number. To make the number "real" it must be adjusted for inflation even though inflation cannot accurately be measured and asset bubbles are ignored. Finally, there is an implied assumption that politicians and the central banks will do something intelligent with the number once they have it. Mish Point of View Even if there is a "potential Real GDP", it is a moving target that cannot be measured in any reasonable time. Constant GDP revisions and asset bubble implosions are proof enough. If by some miracle, economists did stumble on the correct number, the odds of Congressional bodies and central banks doing something intelligent with the number is zero. And we've certainly proven that over and over again haven't we? Choice #1: Let a group of central planners divine the future in a field of moving targets and things that cannot be measured at all, complete with constant revisions to input data, with the expectation the Fed and legislative bodies will do something sensible with the centrally planned number once they have it. Choice #2: Let the free market adjust itself. Uncertainty Principle For further discussion, here's a recap of the Fed Uncertainty Principle written April 3, 2008 before the Bernanke Fed started slashing rates in the Global Financial Crisis. Fed Uncertainty Principle:The fed, by its very existence, has completely distorted the market via self reinforcing observer/participant feedback loops. Thus, it is fatally flawed logic to suggest the Fed is simply following the market, therefore the market is to blame for the Fed's actions. There would not be a Fed in a free market, and by implication there would not be observer/participant feedback loops either.Rather than wasting time and energy in foolish attempts to divine what is impossible to accurately predict, I propose getting rid of the Fed and all the wonkish analysis, then stepping back, doing nothing, and let the free market economy work as it should. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com |
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