Geotargeting

We pair this with our Structure & Settings section, but really it could be an entire section all on its own because it’s so important. Here’s where to find your campaign split out by geographic location.

Let’s pretend this is your account. You are spending quite a bit of money in California, Florida, and Illinois.

There are a few options we recommend you take:

a. You can restrict your advertising from these areas to save the money if you aren’t seeing strong returns within 30 days or even through analytics.

b. If you are getting impressive returns for these states, you should consider restricting them from this campaign and create new campaigns for each state with state specific keywords and adverts

Ad Extensions

Enabling all possible ad extensions: Phone number, site links, products, G+, location, and even a mobile app ad extension. These are some of the things that make your ad stand out. Do you not have a product feed or mobile app? No problem. There’s still no reason to not use the other 3.

Opinion: Thirty or more Google maps reviews per location add ratings for non-eCommerce businesses. No one in paid search discusses brick & mortar star ratings (as far as I’m aware). I’ve seen some adverts with seller ratings extensions, and when I click on the stars they take me to the Places page with reviews. Just one more reason to pimp out your Google Places account and link it up with AdWords. This is where your mailing list and followers on Facebook and Twitter come in handy!

AdGroup Structure

One adgroup should contain one search intent so the advert is as closely targeted as possible. If you have 300 keywords and 25 adgroups, we recommend you separate your keywords by similar intent then expand your keyword list, segment by device and location, and label your adgroups and campaigns so you can easily filter data. This will help you quickly and easily review how different parts of the account are working.

A/B Testing AdText

With the latest update from Google being 30 day max rotation, A/B testing for the long tail/low impression keywords is probably going to be on the out. However, if you’ve been paying attention to your ads, you’ll see that Google has been favoring certain ads anyway when the setting ‘rotate’ was selected.

After you’ve created new ads for your adgroups, the least time consuming way to change over your rotation settings are to select ALL campaigns and go to the Settings tab.

If you’ve already done A/B testing and you have selected the best ads by statistical significance and you are seeing more than 15 conversions in 30 days, you should select ‘Optimize for conversions’ as Google will help you target people who are actually going to convert.

Search Query Report

If you don’t know what it is, you could be suffering from low Click Through Rates (CTRs), higher Cost Per Click (CPCs), decreased time on site, and wasted opportunity.

The search query report shows you the true search queries that are matched to your keywords. Broad and modified broad types throw the widest net (not always the best idea); phrase match connects your phrase “white boats” to “buy white boats” “white boat shoes for men” and many more; exact match pairs your ad with anyone who only searches for [white boats]. The modified broad match and search query report are now available in AdCenter as well. Make good use of them.

Pausing Quality Scores Below 3

If you just reacted negatively to this, let’s talk about it for a minute. You are probably receiving the majority of your traffic from broad match keywords with a QS of 3 or below, but any keyword with a 1 or 2 is barely showing anyway. You are only weighing down the adgroups and accounts by allowing these keywords to remain active. You need to do a few things:

a. Make better adgroups. I’ve seen keywords go from 6s to 10s when they were pulled out and regrouped with more closely associated terms. If you could increase QS just by restructuring, you need to do it.

b. You’re paying several times more than people who have higher QSs. People aren’t beating you because they are paying more, they are beating you because they have more relevant keyword groupings, ads, and landing pages (even though Google says landing pages don’t make or break QSs).

c. Your ads aren’t showing the way you think they are. Even if you’ve enabled all extensions, you are probably showing without them more frequently than not. Google won’t reward you if they think you aren’t good for [their] business, and CTR is the way they determine how amazing you are.

If you weren’t put off by pausing lower QS keywords, then you should:

a. Pause low-traffic, low QS keywords

b. Create tighter themed adgroups (potentially split by match type)

c. Pause low QS, higher-than-you-will-every-pay CPC keywords

d. Pause any low CTR ads.

If you take a massive traffic hit after pausing or deleting these low quality keywords, we would prefer you use broad match with higher QS keywords to supplement your traffic.

Segmenting by Network

It is now well known that we don’t mix display and search into one campaign. However, we always need to be cautious about the search partners network.

To see your campaign data by network, go to the Segment dropdown and select Network (with search partners).

This campaign shows exactly why we recommend eliminating the search partners.

a. CPA is much higher than that of just Google Search. If the CPA was lower, we would have kept the search partners network because it does not affect keyword quality score.

b. Google search network is more rewarding by $10+/conversion.

If you aren’t getting strong data from the search partners, go to the settings tab for that campaign and disable your ads from showing there. Remember to hit Save before leaving this page.

Segmenting by Device

This recommendation is very similar to the Network and Geotargeting advice we’ve already gone over.

If you either decide (based on data) that you should be targeting devices individually, go to the campaign settings to make your changes.

If you know your website is not mobile or tablet friendly (graphic heavy, small text, gray text & gray background, requires serious attention, etc), then create a duplicate campaign only targeted at tablet and mobile traffic, choose Wi-Fi traffic, and your  time on site will probably increase substantially.

If you are already low on budget and have high CPCs, you should stop advertising on devices that aren’t providing comparable, strong return.

There’s Always More

Segmenting by Device and Network is always a necessity, but don’t forget about the other ways to segment. Back in August I wrote about Top v Side, which is a great segment that allows you to bid more effectively. If you aren’t already familiar with all the available segments, you should spend some time reviewing them!

If you think your paid search account is so good it can’t be improved, you should start expanding to AdCenter, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Distilled can help you with your paid search agenda.

If you aren’t too sure about your account, we offer paid search audits to businesses looking to switch from their current agency or find their first agency. Our audits provide an in depth analysis of your AdWords and AdCenter accounts.

We review:

• account structure and settings
• keyphrase selection and match types
• search query report
• quality scores
• adverts
• CRO potential
• and display advertising.

We’ve recently started providing feedback on paid video ads as YouTube Advertising has recently been transferred to the AdWords interface.

If you would like to have our team review your paid search accounts (LinkedIn, Facebook, AdWords, Paid Video, or AdCenter), contact our sales team with your monthly spend, your current goals, and what you want to accomplish with your advertising (We like to think big. We’ll help you with your global conquest to the top!).

Jasmine Aye is the Paid Search Marketer in our Seattle office. She spends her time pivoting tables, analyzing data, and effecting change.

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Jasmine Aye

I’ve put together a few quick, easy, and free methods of gathering feedback that can give your CRO projects a more solid foundation rather than basing your tests on assumptions.

Start with Analytics

But before you start collecting qualitative data from users, you should work out which parts of your site aren’t working well. User engagement metrics give you an indication of what users like about your site, and more importantly what they don’t like. A good report to start with is page bounce rates vs. site average. To view this report in Google Analytics:

• Go to Content > Site Content > Pages
• Click the Comparison button at the top right of the table of data
• In the right-most column, select Bounce Rate from the drop down at the top.

As always, be careful with how you interpret bounce rates. A high bounce rate on a page where there is a desired next step, such as add to cart on a product page, is obviously a bad thing. On the other hand. a high bounce rate on an information page or resource might just mean that the user got everything they needed from the page and left, in which case a high rate could be interpreted as good. But in most cases, you should be able to pick out some pages that are genuinely underperforming.

This is just one example – think about other reports that you might be able to use such as traffic sources or your conversion funnel, and which other metrics might be useful to you, such as conversion rates or time on site in order to find weak pages or features.

Now that you know what isn’t working on your site, user research can help you to identify why.

Set up a survey

The most obvious way to get feedback. 4Q Survey is a great free tool that was developed to get the most useful feedback in an efficient manner. The free version allows you to collect up to 100 respondents per month which should be enough for most sites, but if you want more headroom you can set up a rudimentary imitation using Google Docs’ forms. I’ve set up an example here, which you can make a copy of (File > Make a Copy) and use yourself.

This survey is set up to get feedback about the whole site, so you may wish to tailor it to get information about specific issues you’ve identified above. Obviously you’ll need to find some participants, so leverage your email lists, social media accounts, or blog readers to drum up a sufficient number of responses. Google Docs allows you to embed the form on your blog or in emails.

Getting feedback from people who are already engaged with you through one of these channels can result in much more relevant feedback than paid feedback services, such as Feedback Army, whose random respondents are sourced from Mechanical Turk. Your followers = your potential customers = your target audience.

Here’s a great example from the Ordanance Survey blog, asking for feedback on the blog itself: http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/2011/01/tell-us-what-you-think/

Twitter

In most cases, a large proportion of a brand’s Twitter followers will be it’s customers and website users, so if you have a significant following it’s an ideal place to either solicit survey repsonses or ask for feedback directly.

If you’re asking for direct feedback, it can be specifically about a page such as “Just launched this page on our site – would love to hear some feedback” or it can be more specific to a product or service, for example “Why haven’t you signed up to our email newsletter? Would love to hear some feedback” or “Looking for feedback on our free trial – what did you think?”

Looking for feedback from SEOs on this page – bit.ly/v6fJti Why wouldn’t you sign up? — Rob Millard (@rob_millard) January 3, 2012

Asking for feedback directly can result in plenty of responses because of the low commitment required by participants, although the downside is that it won’t be particularly in depth. You might also want to consider whether you want to stimulate potentially negative conversations on Twitter about your site or product. If this seems likely, the opaque survey approach would be better.

With Twitter, consider using a unique hashtag to make responses easier to collate for analysis. You can use Google Docs to archive the tweets automatically so that you have them in one place for analysis later.

Feedback tabs

Most readers of this blog will be familiar with feedback tabs such as User Voice. They offer a means of gathering feedback on an ongoing basis rather than the single hits listed above. But I’m not sure how many people consider using this as a source of information when planning CRO tests. What do people love about your site? What do they really hate? How can you address these issues?

Remember that users are only really likely to use this feature if they’re either pissed off about something that happened on your site, or they really love your brand, so it’s not a fair reflection of the average user. It might be best to take some of the feedback with a pinch of salt, and perhaps combine it with some other research methods.

Ask your support or sales team

Talk to the people in your organisation that have the most interaction with your clients or customers. They are the ones who are most likely to be aware of the common objections, complaints, and general feedback they pick up from spending time talking to users, so conducting interviews with them can lead to valuable information.

Survey Incentivisation

Typically I’ve found that you often don’t need to incentivise feedback if your brand is strong. Followers and newsletter subscribers already like you and are likely to help you out, especially when the outlay is minimal for them like a short survey. Moreover, many customers love to give their opinions.

However, if you don’t tend to get a lot of responses or need to guarantee them quickly, there are a few things that you can offer in order to attract participants such as the chance to win 1 of 5 Amazon vouchers (gift card for US), or an extension on a free trial of your product.

I attended a usability testing seminar recently where the subject of incentivisation came up, and the majority of attendees said that they had found that the chance to win an iPad, even if there’s only one on offer, typically worked best for them. Obviously this depends on your budget, and how many responses you need, but keep it in mind if you’re really struggling!

Analysis

Once you’ve solicited enough feedback, you more than likely be left with a whole load of text that you need to turn into something more useful and actionable. The most common approach is Thematic Analysis, which essentially boils down to reading through your responses carefully and annotating them to identify commonly occurring or strong themes. Read more about it here and here.

This should leave you with some great user insights to use as the foundations of your CRO work. You might be left with usability or information architecture problems to fix, or there might be clear concerns and objections from potential customers that you can address on your landing pages. The point is, at least the work is based on something rather than nothing. There are no excuses for running speculative tests or experiments based on your own personal whims!

I hope this post goes some way to demonstrate that this approach can be quick, easy to set up, and cheap. If you have any further ideas or thoughts, please let me know in the comments or catch me on Twitter.

I spoke on advanced analytics at #SearchFest back in February and the topic of (not provided) was on everyone’s minds. The question – “What can be done about (not provided)” – is and will remain inescapable in any analytics discussion. My advice now and at the time: ignore it. Any ‘hack’ is really just extrapolation of known keyword data, and was a pretty irresponsible calculation on which to be making business decisions. It’s dirty data. At the very least, worrying about (not provided) is probably just a waste of time and energy. The slides from that presentation and my writeup are here.

I tend to lean toward a pessimistic outlook of the future of (not provided). One in which Google eventually owns your keyword data, and the only way to get real, hard numbers is by buying AdWords. Which, by the way, Google had to create a workaround for the standard way https operates in order to still pass keyword data, as Danny Sullivan says (Caller ID, below, is the full referrer string that contains keyword data),

Let me be very clear. Google has designed things so that Caller ID still works for its advertisers, but not anyone else, even though the standard for secure services isn’t supposed to allow this. It broke the standard, deliberately, to prevent advertiser backlash.

But I’ve been thinking about a rosier possiblity that I thought I’d share. Before getting into it, I want to cover where we are now and where we’re likely headed in the short term. I think it’s also important to understand the motivations at play, which solidify my rosier possiblity (I hope).

So let’s start with:

The State of (not provided)

Remember this?

“even at full roll-out, this would still be in the single-digit percentages of all Google searchers on Google.com”

That’s Matt Cutts on record as the secure search default was rolling out. As it turned out, when the full roll out was complete, a spot check of 100s of Google Analytics accounts revealed that not one of the websites had under 10% (not provided). Distilled.net was sitting at roughly 20%.

So in November if 20% of Google searchers are logged in and using secure search, it wouldn’t be far off to assume that today that number would have climbed. After all, Google is certainly taking every opportunity to have you sign up for Google+ (and now Google Drive). More people signed in, more (not provided).

Not having run the numbers in a while I was surprised when on April 25, Mr. Casey Henry of SEOmoz tweeted:

Wow, hadn’t looked at this in a while but (not provided) is now at 51.3% for @SEOmoz….

— Casey Henry (@caseyhen) April 26, 2012

Ew.

Sadly, Distilled was worse:

btw @caseyhen, @distilled‘s (not provided) over last 30 days: 54%.

— Mike Pantoliano (@MikeCP) April 26, 2012

Yikes.

The ugly Distilled graph:

So (not provided) is currently greater than 50% for both Distilled and SEOmoz. Granted, our users are likely a savvy-ass group, but that is a drastic increase. Now throw in Firefox’s subset, fast forward a year as Google continues to push Google+ signups… It ain’t pretty.

So,

Why, Again, was this change made?

Privacy, of course! Well, that’s what the Google PR would lead you to believe. There’s almost certainly some truth to it, but a few astute bloggers picked up on some possible ulterior motives that sounds pretty convincing to me. Danny Sullivan’s “Google Puts a Price on Privacy” is probably the definitive round up of motivations.

The strongest non-privacy reason for making this change has to do with Google’s bread and butter: ads. Before the change, 3rd party ad networks (AKA Google’s competition for ad space) that had inventory on a publisher’s site were privy to users’ queries. This allowed them to target and retarget ads across their network to match a user’s search history. Creepiness conversation aside, it works.

With keyword data no longer available for these ad networks, their relevancy and overall performance might suffer. It would be difficult for advertisers to target their ads at users who have shown a propensity to search for concepts that are closely related to their services. Relevance could be hard to come by. UNLESS, of course, you choose to use Google’s ad network: the only game in town with the data to know just how to serve your ad.

Another motivation: web analytics. There are a number of players out there, all of which have their own version of (not provided). The Google change does affect all analytics software the same, though. Whether its an on-page JavaScript or server log processing, Google’s “&q=” parameter in the referrer string is empty. No way around it. But how does this benefit Google? I’ll get to that in a bit.

The Future of (not provided)

Well, I think it’s fairly obvious that the Firefox change will lead to a modest bump, I’m guessing anywhere from 5 to 10%. Even after that, I would expect it to steadily climb as user’s are forced wooed into signing up for Google+ and other Google services.

But wasn’t there a rosy outlook?

Google Webmaster Tools

GWT has been pumping out updates and improvements over the past few months. The team recently revealed an overhaul to its dashboard, has improved the usefulness of server error reports, and has increased its communication with registered webmasters.

When the https change was first announced, Google was quick to point to GWT as an option for webmasters fretting about losing their keyword data. At the time, we weren’t thrilled with this idea, as GWT’s data search query data has proven to be rounded and sampled to the point of uselessness. But perhaps this is where Google gives back what hath been taken from webmasters by improving this data.

The “Search Engine Optimization” reports in Google Analytics that receive data from Webmaster Tools is currently pretty useless. I rarely utilize it. In this scenario, it becomes the go-to report for organic search marketers.

Obviously the flaw in this idea is one of the three motivations mentioned above for Google making the change in the first place: privacy.

But looking past that:

• How can Google provide the only ad network in town with real keyword data powering its targeting and retargeting? Turn off referrers.

• How can Google become the only web analytics provider with real keyword data? Turn off referrers. Pass keywords through to Google Analytics with GWT integration. GA Premium ends up looking pretty attractive compared to other paid platforms, no?

In the end, the only people unhappy: privacy advocates, 3rd party ad networks like Chitika and Chango, and 3rd party web analytics platforms like Omniture and Coremetrics.

And, what about that privacy thing? Ian Lurie pretty much nails it at Search News Central:

Don’t try to say this is a privacy thing. It. is. not. How exactly does this protect privacy, when you tie the text of e-mails to your advertising platform? How does this protect privacy when you’re photographing people’s streets, homes and whatever else you can lay your hands on?

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve not opposed e-mail ads, or Street View. But you can’t shut down search query data and then protest privacy. That’s like leaving one bite of steak on your plate and saying you’re a vegetarian.

Are you honestly telling me you had no way to deliver anonymous counts of keyword searches by signed-in users? You’ve never found a way to do this? ‘Cause that sounds like a load of horse hooey, if ever I’ve heard one.

Me, too.

This is all my opinion, not Distilled’s, and I could very well be dead wrong. For the sake of our keywords, I hope I’m not.

I would love to hear your take below or on Twitter.

Mike Pantoliano :SEO Consultant

Follow @MikeCP

Mike Pantoliano

For those of you who don’t know what the site clinics are: We are offering a limited number of one-on-one consultations with our expert SEO consultants. You submit your site prior to the conference, letting us know the main issues you are facing. Our consultants will go away and look at your site and then meet with you at the conference to offer their expert tips and advice.

Case Study:

Rob Millard, one of the consultants here at Distilled, talks us through one of his clinics:

The Brief:

Essentialtravel.co.uk submitted their site for our clinic with a brief that specifically highlighted a problem they have with getting the most out of the quality content they are producing.

Rob’s recommendations:

The best way to scale content promotion is to empower the writers themselves. More often than not, a digital marketing team does not have the capacity to promote every piece of content that is published on their site.  Moreover, the writer is closer to the piece and typically more involved with the content.

How to implement:

Create a promotion network using the likes of email, social media, RSS and more.  Tools like Followerwonk and Crowdbooster can help to get more from your social media activity.  Other recommendations included; changing RSS to full feeds with absolute links in case they are scraped, and using searches such as travel blog intitle:”round up”|”roundup” to find blogs that publish round-ups to reach out to, alongside existing link building tactics.

If you’re interested in attending a site clinic, send us an email to events@distilled.net once you have booked your ticket to SearchLove San Francisco.

Lauren Brady Lauren is the Events Coordinator for our search conferences in the UK and US, based out of the London office. Favourite part of her job? Organising the after-parties and seeing the delegates enjoying them.

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Lauren Brady

Weinburg talks about various ‘laws of consulting’ but the one which really hit home for me was this:

“No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.”

~ Gerald M. Weinburg

I think this was particularly interesting to me because we often get brought in to organisations to help with SEO ‘problems’. The sort of problems that at first glance ought to be easy to fix. However, it’s often harder than you might think.

“More often than not, SEO ‘problems’ are symptomatic of a larger people problem.”

~ Me

Let’s take a technical SEO issue as a starter for ten. Imagine an E-Commerce site suffering from duplicate content thanks to a poorly executed faceted navigation. From a technical perspective it’s pretty easy to figure out an appropriate solution; but how easy is it to actually get the problem fixed?

It’s a subtle difference, but an important one.

Writing up some documentation explaining how to fix the duplicate content issue is easy. But how do you get that documentation read? How do you go from the documentation being read to actually being actioned?

Those are people problems not technical problems.

The toughest challenges that SEOs face lie not in providing appropriate solutions; but in actually fixing problems.

These challenges become even more pronounced when we move away from ‘pure’ technical problems.

You’ve doubtlessly been asked the ‘Why doesn’t my site rank?’ question countless times.

Earlier this year I wrote a post about Meatball Sundae wherein I argued that our answer to this sort of question probably ought to look something like this:

“Your product / service and site content is unremarkable. Your site doesn’t speak to your consumer. You’ve failed to engage with your audience.”

Ouch! I’d probably elect not to word it in quite those terms, however the message is pretty clear. If you want your site to rank you will need to make big changes.

How do you get big changes like that actioned?

You’ll need to do a lot more than create some nice documents. You’ll need to influence people.

Whether you’re dealing with large or small projects, getting the changes you’d like to see actioned will likely mean influencing people across the business. Here are some of the common ‘people problems’ myself and my colleagues have encountered at various levels within businesses and some of the tactics we’ve used to influence change:

Board Level / C-Level – Managing Directors, Chief Executive Officers etc.

Winning over Board Level / C-Level execs is a sure-fire way to ensure that your plans come to fruition – on the occasions where we have managed to get a meeting (even if it is really brief) with people at this level it’s resulted in huge, positive changes for the project. But it’s easier said than done, particularly if your project isn’t even on their radar.

Common ‘people problems’ at the C-level – No one knows or cares about your project…

The rules of engagement:

1) Figure out what they care about and explain how your project feeds into that

Think meaningful metrics. Increased revenue, increased profit, likely return on investment. Increased indexation is unlikely to float anyone’s boat.

2) Speak their language.

Now is definitely not the time to be bamboozling anyone with jargon. This isn’t just about using plain English, this is about using the same terminology as them.

Check out this Whiteboard Friday from Marshall Simmonds for further tips and advice on this.

3) Follow up

Keep on top of communication and deliverables. Ought to go without saying

Middle-Management

Sometimes going straight to the top might not be possible or even advisable – no one likes to feel like someone’s gone over their head. Middle-managers are important because they’ll be likely to have the ear of the C-Level Execs; for example they may already attend meetings with the C-Levels and probably already have a relationship with them.

Common ‘people problems’ at middle-management level – I’m reticent to support this project as I’m not convinced it will really deliver results…

The rules of engagement:

1) Treat it like a first date, not a one night stand

You really want to build a good working relationship with these middle-managers. What are they finding tough right now? How can you help? Do they understand the project? Do they have everything they need to convince others that this is definitely the way to go?

2) Dig a little deeper

What do others in the business care about right now? What’s the message from the top? How do others in the business feel about that?

3) Make them look brilliant in front of their boss

Regardless of whether or not your middle-manager is outwardly ambitious, making them look brilliant in front of their bosses is a great move.

Your Peers

If you’re in-house, these are probably people who work in your department who are on the same management level as you. If you’re working agency-side, these are probably the people who you have the most direct day-to-day contact with – they are your in-house equivalent.

Working with your peers can be great; however, in some instances power-struggles and conflict can ensue.

Common ‘people problems’ with your peers – Conflict and / or resistance to work together as a team…

The rules of engagement:

1) Really get to know them

These are the people that you ought to be meeting for lunch, drinking beers with etc. Your handling of them will probably differ a little from the middle-management as they’ll (hopefully) be less hierarchical barriers. These are the people that you want frank, open and honest discussions with. If they disagree with you, you need to know about it and be able to discuss how to come to an agreement and get things back on track.

2) Share knowledge & support them

What have they done previously which worked well? What didn’t work so well? Take the time to make sure you’re sharing knowledge. Remember that you are on the same team. If they need help you need them to feel like they can come to you and you will support them.

3) Communication solves all problems

Seriously. You should be communicating with these people a lot.

Also make sure you’re communicating in the way which works best for them. Face-to-face and phone are great for catching up, but also think about integrating with their work-flow systems. Do they use something like Trello or Basecamp? If so, why aren’t you?

Working across functions

Search marketing projects have a habit of touching lots of different functions within a business, from the product team, to customer care, to PR and beyond so you’ll need to find a way to work together.

Common ‘people problems’ across functions – What’s in it for me? This is just adding to my workload…

The rules of engagement:

1) Communicate the benefits & find a way for many functions to ‘win’

Hopefully your project will also benefit the various other functions involved. If not – frankly it is unlikely to get off the ground.

Figure out a way for your project to add value to all of the functions that it touches. For example – can you help push through some technical changes that will help this department? If the department is under-resourced can you help them pitch for more budget / more staff etc?

2) Acknowledge the challenges & help provide solutions

With the best will in the world, your project is likely to cause problems for some other functions. Don’t attempt to gloss over those problems, instead acknowledge them and try to find some solutions.

3) Recognise the contribution of other functions publicly

When other functions deliver for you (and your project) make sure you take the time to thank them and give them the recognition they deserve. Remember ‘make them look brilliant in front of their boss’? That definitely works here too.

Junior Team Members

These are people who perhaps report into you or your boss if you’re working in-house; or if you’re working agency side these are likely to be people who report into your client contact. These people will likely be responsible for the lion’s share of the actual work which will see your project succeed or fail; so you’ll need to keep them motivated and excited about the project even when the going gets tough.

Common ‘people problems’ with junior team members – Failing to meet deadlines / Issues with the quality of work delivered / Poor motivation / Low morale…

The rules of engagement:

1) Allow them to ‘own’ key elements of the project

It’s really hard to care about anything that you’re not ultimately responsible for. By giving junior members of staff ownership of key elements of a project, you’re not only saying that you trust them to deliver for you; you’re also giving them an excellent development opportunity.

2) Praise in public, feedback in private

Offering public praise and recognition for a job well done is really important. Conversely if things aren’t going so well be sure to feedback in private.

3) Play to people’s strengths / interests & divide up the least exciting tasks equally

Typically the person who is most interested in taking on a certain set of tasks will be the person who is best able to deliver them. However, with any given project there’s likely to be a set of tasks which aren’t so sexy. Make sure these tasks are divided up equally rather than lumping all of the least exciting tasks on one individual.

By recognising some of the ‘people problems’ associated with projects, we’ve found ourselves far better positioned to actually fix SEO issues within companies as opposed to just suggesting appropriate solutions.

I’d love to hear your experiences too – do you have any tips / tactics for solving people problems you’d care to share?

Alternatively, if you’ve got a ‘people problem’ right now and you’re struggling to fix it do let me know – either leave me a comment below, or if you’d rather not make it public, then drop me an email – you’ll find my address at the bottom of this page.

Image credits

Fix, Influence

Hannah Smith is an 'accidental' SEO Consultant having previously worked in offline marketing for 7 years. She likes pictures of cute kittens a little bit too much and has been known to give away snow globes whilst speaking at SEO conferences.

Follow @hannah_bo_banna

Hannah Smith

Entrance or “Scent” CRO

Consistency of the “scent” is enormously important. If your paid advertisement, referring external page, or organic SERP headline promises something that the landing page doesn’t provide, well, that’s a recipe for a quick bounce. That’s why it’s helps to try and control the events that lead to an entrance so that entrants aren’t surprised by the content of your pages.

Why is this important? Well, if you’re wondering why 98% of visitors aren’t converting, isn’t it possible that a subset of them have landed on the right site but the wrong page?

query: “Cleveland Indians Sweatshirt”. PPC Ad click.

This particular site has a page that matches my query exactly…It’s just 2 clicks from the landing page.

Or the right page with the wrong (product) imagery above the fold?.

query: “Men’s Evolv Rock Climbing Shoes”. 1st Organic Result.

Bravo to Amazon for ranking first for this query with a user’s list, but the products shown are pretty poor matches for my query.

Or the right page with a misdirected headline?

query: “Men’s SeaVees boots”. PPC Ad Click.

Though there are boots on this page (not pictured), the headline reads ‘SeaVees Shoes’.

Web Analytics / Bounce Rate reports

Finding CRO scent problems is fairly simple on an individual basis through landing page and bounce rate reporting. This is a bit of a no brainer, but I’ll try to take it a step further. Sorting our landing page report by bounce rate is a great place to start, but we’ll definitely have a bit of noise to deal with. Google Analytics offers the weighted sort which will help see through the muck.

We could also limit our report to pages with more than X number of pageviews.

One of my favorite, favorite, favorite reports in Google Analytics is a slight variation on what we’ve just built. By adjusting the view to comparison view, we can see pages’ bounce rates as compared to the site average.

See those ones in red? This is a great place to start optimizing.

Prioritizing Scent Problems

Keeping close tabs on all of your landing pages can be difficult, especially for large sites. Each business will be different, but prioritization assistance can come from a number of sources.

• Severity of the Problem – A massive bounce rate compared to site average should be enough incentive to fix the issue.
• Cost associated – If you’re wasting a large enough of money with one of your paid campaigns, someone’ll notice soon!
• Opportunity – Maybe your bounce rate isn’t so bad, but a ton of seemingly qualified traffic isn’t converting.

Correcting Scent Problems – Paid

Correcting scent problems from paid channels is a bit of a simpler, more immediate fix. I’ll dive into AdWords specifically as an example because of its prevalence in most every web marketing mix, but the concept of scent maintenance can come into play anywhere:

Affiliates – Are your affiliates staying within the terms of their affiliate agreement? Are they using outdated media with promised incentives that no longer apply?

Comparison Shopping – The price and imagery on your product page better match what the user saw exactly on the shopping engine site.

AdWords

Once again, bounce rate tells the story of a lost scent. Building the bounce reports I covered above but in the AdWords reports should be pretty informative. Even more helpful is the fact that we can compare bounce rate AND a metric that includes cost like cost per conversion, ROI, or margin. If you’re not keen on flipping back and forth between the “Site Usage” and “Clicks” reports, a simple custom report in GA can be built to get them displayed together.

Just navigate to your AdWords reports in GA, and click customize.

Construct your own little super group.

And there you go!

If you stumble upon some poor performers, you should consider segmenting them out into separate ad groups, and better targeting ad headlines and destination URLs.

Correcting Scent Problems – Organic

Landing page optimization gets a bit difficult with organic search traffic. When we’ve identified a broken scent path we can either adjust the page to better match user intent, or build a better targeted page. With the former, we risk losing our rankings if we change the page drastically enough. With the latter, we could be looking at a long, uphill battle at getting a new page to rank.

For an example, let’s suppose our site gets a lot of traffic to our drum set equipment page for the “beginner drum set equipment” query. Bounce rate is terribly high for users coming in on that query, which we hypothesize is due to the user being overwhelmed by options upon entry. The beginner is easily shaken!

This might be a little intense for our beginner.

If we decide to adjust our page to cater to the beginner’s needs, we could include a “Getting Started” section on the page, or highlight some starter kits for novices.

We can highlight a product. Or…

Include a beginner section above the fold.

Alternatively, we could build a “beginner drum set equipment” page, and link to it from our original page using the exact query as anchor text. This should send a strong signal to the search engines that this deeper page is a better match for the query, and with any luck (and maybe some link building) your new page gets served within a few weeks.

Some revised copy with a link to our beginner’s page.

Thoughts?

I’d love to know if you’ve done any CRO on landing pages where you believe the user’s scent was lost. What did you do to correct it?

Mike Pantoliano :SEO Consultant

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Mike Pantoliano

Aligning Brand Architecture and Domain Architecture

Imagine finding the Dove Soap home in a sub-folder of unilever.com, or looking for the Colgate site to discover a separate domain for Colgate toothpaste and Colgate toothbrushes. Such misalignments of brand architecture and domain architecture will confuse customers, undermine branding strategy, and possibly minimize the positive effect of brand signals to search engines.

There are an obnoxious number of terms marketing papers and books use to describe similar branding strategies. For our purposes, the important point is that companies vary in the extent to which they market with the corporate brand, sub-brand, and/or individual product brand.

Corporate Brands

Consider a company that slaps its name on everything. The risk is that one bad product or story can damage the company’s perception across all business sectors. The benefit is that a positive halo effect from a good product can lift related products and create economies of scale in marketing. Name one such economy of scale that marketing textbooks always miss. Domain authority!

Apple is a good example of a company doing this right for the most part. All of Apple’s devices are strongly branded as Apple products. Accordingly, the “Apple iPad” has a proper home on http://www.apple.com/ipad/. No new domain is necessary for each line of products.

The purely-technical SEO inside of me likes having a single site and brand to worry about. I wish I could tell everyone never to launch a new domain, but there are times where it just doesn’t make sense for everything to live under one brand or domain.

The Product-Only Brand

This type of branding works best where there is a strong local connection, there are no related products, and there is limited interaction with “corporate.” The downside is that you’re going to be starting from scratch with your customers every time, and your domain name is no exception.

Many apartment complexes are owned by larger chains, but it’s common for each apartment to have a very separate brand. It helps that Rolling Pine Hills Heights sounds a lot better than the Surname Property Group.

As an example of doing this wrong, residents going through surnamepropertygrp.com to pay a bill makes a less-than-ideal best branding experience. I imagine it feels like sending money to an unknown corporate overlord.

If you brand a product entirely on its own, it should have its own branded domain. This mistake is often repeated online, and it diminishes from brand strategy. You don’t need to hide your brand, but presumably there was a reason for the individual brand in the first place.

Individual Branding

Individual branding means creating a bunch of brands, and slapping them on a bunch of related products. This branding strategy is usually best when you’re making a ton of products that are unrelated and have different demographics. The pros and cons obviously lie somewhere in-between product-focused and corporate branding. You receive some economies of scale within the brand, but you have to give each family its own identity – and domain.

The classic examples are Unilever and Procter & Gamble, who together make just about everything in the cosmetics and cleanings isles of major grocery stores. In the laundry detergents department alone, P&G makes Ace, Ariel, Bold, Dash, Dawn, Gain, and Tide. Ideally, each consumer-facing brand would get its own domain, but profitable domains have been understandably prioritized in that regard. The important point is that domains are both a tool for branding and a consideration for the brand strategy.

The Domain Name as a Branding Tool

There was a time when it seemed to make sense to choose a lot of exact-match and keyword-focused domains. Google was (is?) letting almost anything rank if the domain matched the query exactly. Product-specific domains sold (sell?) for millions of dollars. As with most weird-for-user-good-for-Google-type moves, the strategy just didn’t hold up in the long term.

It now seems obvious that for actual businesses, a product/service name that exactly matches the domain name turns out to be a major weakness. For the same reason that “Tow Truck Company” is a terrible consumer-facing name for a tow truck company, exact-match domains are terrible for long-term branding. It’s impossibly hard to differentiate yourself when your company name sounds inherently generic.

Unbranded domains: like trying to ice-skate uphill

Let’s stop telling clients to buy and use domains like towtruckcompany.com – it makes all of us look bad. For specific tactics on choosing a domain, I recommend Rand’s still-relevant domain selection tips.

International Domains and Branding

International SEO was, for many years, a confusing area with no good information, but that’s not true anymore. Please, if you’re thinking about launching  a new ccTLD, do yourself a favor by reading Hanna’s International SEO presentation slides and summary.

For the scope of this post, I’d like to emphasize that you should use a new ccTLD only if you have the resources to build your brand in the region. Launching a UK site with no UK presence for a better SERP CTR is not a good idea. Think about it from a branding perspective, because getting a new ccTLD to rank is an awful lot of work, and there’s no “rank first in whichever country I please” button.

The Need to Brand: Increasingly Important, Not Going Away

“Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

-Eric Schmidt

We may or may not see our sites as part of the cesspool, but if we don’t look like a brand we’re going to be treated like whatever-makes-up-a-cesspool (cesslings?) by Google. I recommend taking Dr. Pete’s advice: get over it, and act like a brand. A site that sounds and looks like a brand is the first step toward acting like – or even better, actually becoming – a brand.

Our industry is rapidly evolving and maturing past the point of relying on tricks to rank. This has been partly fueled by Google’s new focus on brands, and partly fueled by thought leaders who see the long-term profit potential. Branding has always mattered, but those who effective leverage their branding strategy will ride the wave with little to fear from Pandas, Penguins, or any of their friends.

Carson Ward Carson Ward G+

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Carson Ward

As part of the thinking I had to do in order to pull this presentation together, I put a load of effort into two things:

1. how to carry out a realistic evaluation of where a company’s gaps lie and where there are opportunities to cultivate “spikes of amazingness”
2. a methodology for improvement based on applying elements of lean startup and agile to the marketing mix (I came up with “Discover, Pitch, Experiment, Invest”)

I took the evaluation process and turned it into a self-assessment survey. If you’d like us to pull together a (free) brief report based on this evaluation methodology, start here.

We got hundreds of people signing up for this evaluation so unfortunately the free review offer is now closed. If you’d like our consultants to take a look at your site, you can drop us a line here.

(Note that depending on the volume of submissions, it might take us a little while to get back to you, but we’ll try to keep you up to date throughout the process).

The output is a heat chart showing areas needing improvement (orange / red) and the beginnings of “spikes of amazing” (yellow / green).

While you wait, you can check out my slidedeck entitled “mediocre to great”:

In summary, you can go here to buy linklove videos or here to get your free SEO strategy review.

Will Critchlow : Will founded Distilled with Duncan in 2005. Since then, he has consulted with some of the world’s largest organisations and most famous websites, spoken at most major industry events and regularly appeared in local and national press.

Follow @willcritchlow

Will Critchlow

Plus, for the first time you can now get full PDF versions of all the session slide decks with your bundle purchase.

The full collection includes the following sessions:

London

• Content Strategy vs Link Building – Rand Fishkin
• Quantifying Outreach – Mike King
• Which social shares actually get links – Branko Rihtman
• Getting Golden Links – Jane Copland
• Stalking: How you land the links you want – Wil Reynolds
• Putting the love back into links - Tom Anthony
• Tips, tricks and secrets from the trenches - Martin MacDonald
• Mediocre to Great - Will Critchlow
• Give it up

Boston

• Content Strategy vs Link Building – Rand Fishkin (different version)
• How to measure and report on link building – Justin Briggs
• Link building by imitation – Ross Hudgens
• Building a link development calendar – Rhea Drysdale
• Stalking: How you land the links you want – Wil Reynolds
• Tools for building links – John Doherty
• How to build links to product pages – Adam Audette
• Going viral on Pinterest – Colby Almond
• Mediocre to Good – Tom Critchlow
• Give it up

Buy the videos now direct from our store.

If you like what you see in these videos, you might be interested in attending our forthcoming SearchLove conference in San Francisco. If that’s too far for you to travel, we have SearchLove London and Boston later this year – tickets will go on sale late Summer.

Lynsey Little is the Events Manager for our search conferences in the UK and US, based out of the London office. She can often be found running around the conference venues in a red dress.

Follow @lynslittle

Lynsey Little

Image taken by HighlandBlade on Flickr

Another Google update has landed …. Penguin!

This update has been designed to target web spam and focuses on questionable tactics like link schemes, keyword stuffing, cloaking and misleading redirects.

Algorithm changes have been coming in thick and fast from Google over recent months. These changes have affected large slices of the web and this one has impacted particularly hard on commercially driven keywords, which historically have been known to be targeted by low quality websites.

The recent updates are thought to have affected 3.1% of English queries, which is a lot smaller than the original Panda update, which affected around 12% of queries according to stats taken from Seoptimise.com

As always the intentions behind these updates has been to benefit high quality websites, but it seems to be the case that some websites have been incorrectly identified as low quality and have been caught in the cross fire. Incidentally there is a form if you feel your site has been hit innocently

https://docs.google.com/a/distilled.co.uk/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ

The most recent Google updates such as newly termed ‘Penguin’ which was previously known as the webspam algorithm update and related to website over-optimisation, have made it more important than ever to keep a close eye on your website health, industry activity and to safeguard against future changes.

Putting a plan in place will protect your website against future updates and ensure you don’t have to break out into a cold sweat when you hear about new algorithm changes.

Assess the impact and plan ahead sustainably

The first thing to do is check whether your website has been affected by the recent updates and to what extent. And to get ready to do some cleaning up!

The main point to stress is not to panic as a number of high profile websites such as the likes of Seer Interactive has seen some pretty funky activity in SERPs.

Try to avoid making a bucket load of changes in a panic driven state as this could potentially make things worse in the long run.

The best way to check for issues on your site is to run a few feeler searches for key terms within your industry which you know are good traffic drivers to your website.

Also check if you are ranking for your brand terms. If you see changes in rankings for your brand terms i.e drops, then this could be an indication of something going wrong which will require further investigation!

Another metric to check is the amount of pages indexed for your site. A penalty will typically show up as no pages ranking for brand name searches but levels of indexed content may still be good.

It is also worth diving into analytics to check traffic levels on a keyword level.

So for the Distilled website a key indication that something had gone south would be seeing drops in traffic for brand searches like ‘distilled’ and a loss of visibility on the result page for the search term ‘distilled’

You can also use custom alerts within analytics to have emails pinged out to you if traffic drops below certain levels for specific keywords as part of your Seo monitoring.

This is extremely handy, as you will know about changes in behaviour on your site fast!

Webmaster Tools Notifications

If you have received one of the 700,000 notifications sent out from Google which appear within Webmaster Tools about unnatural links, then its time to access your back link profile and be brutally honest about the quality of links you have pointing towards your site.

Key points to look out for when accessing your back link profile are the following:

Distribution of PageRank – You want to make sure that the PR levels of websites linking to you is evenly spread and contains small amounts of very low PageRank websites (with the exception of newly created websites). Having a back link profile which is mainly populated with links from sites with low PageRank levels is a bad idea all round and may hinder the chances of your site ranking.

Link Velocity – Make sure that links aren’t being built to your website too quickly, as gaining high numbers of links quickly can easily raise flags to search engines and make your site appear as suspicious. A number of tools like ahrefs.com and Majestic Seo can be used to check historic links levels.

This is also particular important to monitor currently due to the all the recent talk about negative Seo.

Anchor Text of Links – Building too many links with the same anchor text can be another clear sign to search engines that something fishy has been going on. Make sure your anchor text profile is natural and that you have a nice spread of anchor text phrases. If all of your back links use the same anchor text this just doesn’t look natural can have a negative impact. A natural anchor text profile should be built up of a mix of branded, phrase and exact match anchor text which relates to your brand as well as keywords related to your website content.

Quality of Linking Websites – Again it is important to honest, if you are seeing links from websites that have been built with search engines solely in mind then you can probably afford to lose these links. Common examples of this are auto generated websites with little or no contact details with lots of content that covers a wide range of unrelated topics. Or sites that have extremely low social metrics.

Website Health of Linking Domains – Any sites that have been affected with malware or viruses that are linking to your website is bad news all round and should be avoided at all costs!

Links that are Passing Value – It is important to remember that Google may not be crediting value to all of the links pointing towards your website so it is important to keep this in mind when removing links. Some links are going to be inherently difficult to remove but they may not be having a negative impact on your site. A super quick way to tell if a site has stopped passing value is if the sites doesn’t rank for it’s own name or brand and has very low levels of indexed content. If this is the case then you can be pretty sure all value in those links is gone.

Recently a large number of link networks and associated websites have been closing down, so links which you are seeing in reports and feel are low quality may now be gone or no longer passing impact.

You can mass check the status codes of the websites linking to you to see if they are still live using a number of tools like Seo Tools for Excel or Screaming Frog’s Seo Spider Tool.

To mass check the status codes of your back links you can run a link report using your back link tool of choice and download to a CSV. Then upload the list to Screaming Frog using the list function and check the status codes.

Safeguarding Against Future Updates

The most effective way to safe guard your website against future updates is to avoid doing anything even remotely suspect. If you would feel uncomfortable talking to a Google engineer about your link building activities then chances are you shouldn’t be doing them!

I would recommend to anyone that has been affected by recent algorithm changes to take this as an opportunity to do some website spring cleaning

and remove any questionable links to your website and focus on building links from high quality websites in the future.

Now is as a good a time as any to put some safeguards in place, which will alert you to information about your site health.

I would recommend the following precautions, which will give you more information about how your site is performing.

I have recently found out about a cool feature within Webmaster Tools, which I suspect is underused. There is an option to set up email notification forwarding from Webmaster Tools to your chosen email account. Although this has been around a while it is something a few people may not know about so is worth a mention.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=140528

This means that when important notifications are sent out you will find out about them fast and get more time to access the situation. This is particularly useful as the frequency of Webmasters Tools messages being sent out has increased dramatically.

The custom Google alert I mentioned earlier which tells you about big changes in traffic levels will also let you know if there have been significant changes to your Google traffic and keyword levels and setup advice can be found on this blog post about Seo monitoring.

There are also a number of ways you can monitor your industry to see if changes are industry wide or have affected everyone on the web.

There are slightly hidden RSS feeds for twitter, which let you monitor tweets about specific keywords and even to a location level (hat tip to the Sociable for this one)

So the following URL lets you see Tweets from London (within a 100km radius) about the keyword underground trains:

http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=underground%20trains%20geocode:51.5081289,-0.128005,100km

This can be helpful to monitor industry keywords and give you a quick glimpse into what chatter is happening online around your keywords.

The key point to takeaway from all of the recent algorithm updates is to ensure that your activity online is future proof and to get your website into a situation that is unlikely to be affected by new changes.

To make your website and online marketing future proof you need to avoid questionable activities and build links and content with the user and your website audience in mind.

Examples of future proof Seo could include improving the health of your website, working towards better page speed levels and ensuring that your website is accessible for visitors on various browsing and mobile devices. Clean URLs and up to date sitemaps are also good examples of sustainable Seo that will stand the test of time.

If you want to learn more check out the Futureproof your Seo Whiteboard Friday from Rand which will never go out of date

If you need help identifying causes of drops in traffic or rankings get in touch…

Also it would be great to hear from people in the comments that have seen good results for websites getting turned around as a result of removing questionable links.

Luke Masters Luke an insatiably curious SEO Consultant working at Distilled in London, specialising in tech projects, playing around with tools and finding solutions to problems

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Luke Masters