Interactive Marketing Blog

As many of you may already have read, Google recently updated their algorithm in late April 2012. The change, called “Penguin”, has impacted high ranking websites and even helped some sites improve in rankings. This has left many business owners and companies wondering “why did this happen” and “how do I get my rankings back?”. To help explain why some sites fell and why other sites improved, lets look at the why search engines change their algorithms.

Quality – Search engines like Google are always trying to improve the quality of their search listings. They understand the practice of SEO exists so they are constantly looking for ways to stay one step ahead of activities used to alter search rankings that can impact quality. To do this search engines must find signals other than keywords and web page copy to determine which sites to list on page one. This is why the quality of your incoming links and social media engagement are becoming a bigger part of how search engines determine rankings.

Pssst… No More Secrets – To stay ahead of SEOs trying to alter results, search engines like Google keep the method of ranking sites somewhat a mystery. General best practices are common to many SEOs but the difference between ranking #12 and #7 for a given keyword may come down to a few secrets only known by experienced search marketers. The days of these secrets having a 3-5 spot listing impact on a site may be numbered. Industry secrets are starting to have less of an impact on search rankings which makes a truly engaging user experience all that more important.

Subject Matter Matters – For years SEOs have used traditional link building tactics, copy writing and keywords to optimize for a given keyword. While it is important to have some keywords strategically placed on your site, keywords alone will begin to have less impact. Google has already figured out what your site is generally about and even knows other keyword terms related to your site. Search engines are looking for sites that create great content around a given subject matter and have shared content within a community (read: social media).

It will be interesting to see what new changes appear in the coming months but it’s clear things are headed in a new direction. What do you think will be the next major shift by Google?

Location Apps Find Their Place

This is one that’s been talked about for years but is now starting to become a reality. Foursquare has become more popular, as have many other location based apps. According to Ad Age, more online adults became familiar with location apps (from 16% in 2010 to 30% in 2011). Location apps will become more wide spread with customers looking to take advantage of loyalty rewards and special offers used by marketers to drive foot traffic to stores.




Gone in a Flash

Adobe Flash animation, once a must have on every home page, will become obsolete as older versions of Internet Explorer (IE8 & IE7) begin to fade. With growing adoption of the iPad tablet, which does not support Flash, many publishers will opt for HTML5 to deliver interactive content for the web and mobile devices.




Social CMS Websites

New content management tools and software will continue to gain in popularity as website owners look to get more out of their investment. Tools that help companies integrate their social media presence with their website will continue to grow. Companies that use these tools will look to leverage Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels to grow their brand. Tools like PHP Fox and Social Engine will help site owners grow loyalty and improve customer service.


SEO Content Strategy Trumps Tactics

A mid-2011 report from SEMPO and Econsultancy notes a decline in SEO spending and an increase in Social Media spending during the same period. With social media taking more of the investment pie, online marketers will need to set a SEO strategy that focuses on social media. With much of social media results coming from good content, marketers will need to continue to place more emphasis on generating quality content people want to share on Twitter and Facebook. Simply adding keywords to pages and building a handful of links will fail to get results.




Mobile App Marketing Takes Off

To have real staying power in search engines and social media, content will require links, tweets, likes, etc. Content like info graphics and videos will still have an impact, but marketers will need to find ways to make the content more engaging. As more content viewing shifts from websites to apps, marketers will look to take advantage of mobile/tablet apps to gain the most exposure. Fisher-Price is doing a great job with their mobile app marketing efforts to support their products.

What are some of the online marketing trends you see in 2012 that will have the biggest impact?

When companies first get started doing SEO, they typically plug their site into a few tools and get a report that tells them what keywords people are searching to find their site. They take those keywords, weed out the obvious no-nos, put them in a list and let the optimizing begin.

One of the most often overlooked areas of search is brand reputation management. If your customers are looking for your brand, most likely these are folks that know who you are and what you’re about. If you’re lucky, they will remember your brand name and how to spell it. Hopefully they will find your listing at the top of the results page followed by brand related articles, blog posts, press releases and more.

In some cases, they will also see positive and negative articles that talk about your products and services. Even if you are ranking #1 for your brand, there are many different types of searches that could produce brand related results of which you may not be aware.

Below are some typical brand searches and what they mean:

Brand – These searchers know who you are, have seen an ad you just placed or want to do a little research on your company. These types of searches include “Company Name” or “Company Name + Location”. Growing brand searches are strong indicator that you are doing something right in your overall marketing and search campaigns.

Product – These are searchers looking specifically for your product. If you sell drills, then they will typically search for things like “Company Name + Drills”.

Product & Brand Reviews – These are searches for your company and brand for 3rd party sites that include positive or negative reviews. These include searches like “Company Name/Product + Reviews” or “Product + Feedback” or “Company Name + Scam”. These keywords are important to own since many potential customers will be doing lots of research before they decide to buy your products if they’re more than a few bucks.

Product/Brand vs. Product/Brand – These are searches for your company or product when someone is comparing two or more options and can’t decide what to buy. These searches are also important to own since these buyers are at a critical point in the purchase process. They are considering your product but want to make sure it’s the right one.

I hope the details above help explain what and why people are using these keywords. It’s important to look beyond the obvious brand research Google and other tools give you to drill down into what your customers are thinking. You may uncover some real gems that can influence your campaign performance and brand image.

More on Brand Reputation Management Strategy:
SEO Moz
Search Engine Watch

A Content Management System (CMS for short) is software you can install on your website to make it easy to manage web pages without deep knowledge of HTML. This is great for marketing teams and business owners who simply want to change web page copy, add pages and use their website as an effective communication tool. Thinking of upgrading your current website to a new or better CMS software package? Below are some reasons to consider making a CMS switch:

1. Your Site Uses HTML Tables – Table based layout was very common in the late 90s when the internet was young. Most current CMS software will render a website using web standard HTML / CSS based layout if the web designer who created the site did so as well. Search engines also prefer the clean source code that CSS layouts produce so this will help your website perform better for SEO.
2. Your CMS is Hard to Use – Just because your website runs on CMS software doesn’t mean your marketing team is happy using it. Does it take several weeks or months to bring new team members up to speed on your CMS? Do features on your CMS work as expected? Is it easy to add features? These are some of the things you should consider when evaluating CMS packages.
3. Your Developer is Too Busy – It’s likely your in house web developer is busy servicing clients. That means your team is forced to wait for site updates or look outside the company for help. Wouldn’t it be great if your CMS had simple plug-ins or modules that could be added with very little custom development? This frees up time your programmer can spend on client projects or improving core services.
4. Your CMS was Custom Developed – This is not to say that every custom developed CMS software package is flawed. Some custom developed packages do just fine for the companies that sell them and the companies that use them. What happens to the CMS software when the company that developed it closes it’s doors or fails to return your support calls? Many clients will be left to fend for themselves with little or no documentation. There are many benefits to a popular open source CMS or well known brand backing the software. Plenty of documentation, certified consultants ready to take your call, frequent upgrades, etc.
5. You’ve Outgrown Your Website – So your company has grown, continues to add new products and can’t keep up with the number of customer service calls. Your current website is 10 pages about how your company got started and the company dog. That’s a good story but your growing list of customers have problems they need your help solving. A website that can grow and expand quickly as  your company grows will help you service customers more effectively. Use a CMS to add and keep current things like FAQs, request a quote, etc. These tools help your customer service team save time and help qualify new customers.

When it comes down to it, there are many free and paid CMS packages that will get the job done. Which one is right for your business is key. Interested in upgrading your CMS or a new CMS web design? Contact us today for a quote.

Ok, so by now you have probably heard about location based social media services like Foursquare. If you haven’t here’s a quick summary. Foursquare is a social media website and more importantly a mobile app you can download to your iPhone or Android smart phone. Once you have the Foursquare app installed, you are presented with options like friends, places, etc.



Here are some tips when getting started with Foursquare:

1. Connect with your friends on Facebook, Twitter and email (Gmail, Yahoo). This is built into the Foursquare website which makes it really easy to find your friends and connect.
2. Search for locations in your area, and when you find where you are, check in (or add your location if not available). Checking in is what Foursquare is all about. Essentially you are competing with your friends and strangers to become “mayor” of a particular location. You can be mayor of many different locations but work places and your home are generally frowned upon in the community, just an FYI.
3. Look for deals. Some locations will offer a deal to anyone who is “mayor” of their location.
4. 
   We don’t need no stinking badges! (yes, we do) Badges are like feathers in your cap or actual cub scout merit badges (or brownie badges), which ever you prefer.
5. There are tons of apps. Lots of cool apps out there that connect to Twitter, Facebook and more.
6. Business owners: If you own a business, check to see if your location is on Foursquare. If it isn’t, create a complete profile for your company. If it is, make sure there are no incomplete or duplicate listings. You can report a duplicate listing if you find one. The more times people check in to your location, the more likely your brand (and location) is going to spread through social networks. Friends will see where their friends are eating, shopping and spending their free time. They can comment on their experience, good or bad by leaving tips. It’s a great way to take advantage of word-of-mouth (WOM) advertising.
7. Have fun and connect with me on Foursquare!

Every time a new search engine is released and makes the news there is usually a lot of initial hype, followed many months later by a “ho hum” (remember cuil?). Duck Duck Go is a new search engine, but doesn’t fall in the trap of trying to beat or become the next Google. Duck Duck Go is actually a lot more like the original concept the founders of Google released back in 1998.

Duck Duck Go is very simple, easy to use and includes many of the same features you would expect to find in a search engine. Some of the main differences included;

• AJAX like search results page with scrolling results displayed, no pagination required
• Bang! search for site and theme specific searches. A great feature for programmers and web researchers.
• Firefox search box for Duck Duck Go
• Zero-click info on searches from popular resources like Wikipedia and Crunchbase

To see how it compares to Google, I tried the same “super bowl” search in Duck Duck Go and Google. Below are some of my observations.





Observations

Google tends to serve up lots of pages from NFL.com where Duck Duck Go seems to pull different resources for each result and gives a nice result summary from Wikipedia. This could potentially drive a lot of traffic to resource sites like Wikipedia but I do like having a variety of website domains to choose from in the results. Duck Duck Go also displays a small favicon next to each result and the result changes color as you hover down the results page.

Other Google Alternative Search Engines

• Blekko – Blekko has some interesting search features such as “slashtags” where you can search by a specific site or type. It also displays 20 rather than 10 results for each page. Blekko also has a human editors to help clean up the search results. The name kinda of sounds like you have a bad cold. Read more about blekko.
• Powerset – Now part of Bing search.

Just finished adding a new resource to the website this weekend. After researching link building tools for part of 2010, I have hand picked the ones I feel had or will have the most impact on campaigns in 2011. Enjoy!

What SEO tools did you use in 2010 and what was the impact on your campaigns?

Online marketers have used Google Pagerank as a measuring stick to help determine the internet authority of a particular website and it’s ability to rank well in search engines. According to Google, it’s just one factor out of 200 signals used to help measure the search engine value of a web page. Each web page indexed by Google is given a score from 1-10.

… When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis.

Why should you be concerned with Pagerank (PR)? While it’s only 1 out of 200 factors search engines use, it is still an indicator. Below are some additional factors to consider when researching websites using the Google toolbar. Every indexed page in Google should fall into one of the three categories below.



PR Rank (1-10) – Generally the higher the better. Most sites fall in the 1-4 range, with few higher authority sites on the web such as large media websites like CNN.com or WSJ.com in the 8-10 range.



PR Rank (0) – A “0″ ranking is not good sign for a website, especially if it’s the home page. This could mean that Google has placed the site on a list of potential spam websites or even worse, removed all pages but the home page from it’s index.



PR Grey bar – Google may not have indexed this page and/or assigned a value to the website. This doesn’t mean the page or site has no value.

Some SEOs and marketers will tell you that Pagerank means very little when trying to rank well in search engines. It is true that what you see in the Google toolbar is just a snapshot in time, your Pagerank generally will not fluctuate much month to month. Over time, it becomes harder and harder to increase your PR score as Google continues to up the ante.

What other tools or data do you use to help measure the value of a website?

When planning online marketing efforts, do you consider who you are trying to reach with your search advertising, email marketing or keywords? I pulled some bullets from About.com on target audience analysis and provided some of my thoughts.

1. Who is your target audience? This can be someone loyal to your brand that could come to your website through branded searches. Look to see how they get to your site through referring traffic.
2. Where is your target audience located? Geographic location is important to know when looking for opportunities. Has anyone in Colorado heard of your brand or used any of your products? If not, there may not be a great response from targeting that region with ad dollars or link requests. Acquiring new traffic could get expensive in new regions. Local search listings such as a Google Places company listing can help give you some insight into regional activity and searches.
3. What do they think about your current brand? Basic social media monitoring is a good start. See what positive (or negative) comments are associated with your brand.
4. What would you like them to think about your brand? This can be tricky. Brands are not created overnight. What qualities about your services or products make you stand apart from the rest?
5. How will you attract them to your products or services? Online marketing, of course.
6. Who else is competing for their loyalty and devotion? A competitive analysis is key to determining who your competitors are in the space. Once you have identified 3-5 of your online competitors in the search space, see how they match up with tools like SpyFu.
7. Are you targeting business or consumer sectors? You will hear people say they are  no different, B2B and B2C are the same customer. What’s been your experience?

While digging through my Google webmaster tools accounts a couple months back I found an updated “Search Queries” feature with way more data and a chart. I noticed things like impressions, clicks, click through rate (CTR), average position and more.



Impressions – This is an estimate of how many times in the past month your website appeared when someone used a particular keyword to find your website.

Clicks – A round number of how many times your website listing that appeared in search results is clicked.

Click Through Rate – A percentage of clicks from impressions.

Average Position – Like it says, your keyword’s average position that month in Google.

This is all great data but what does it mean for website owners or SEOs?

Impressions – These are great to see but if your keyword is generating thousands of impressions but few clicks (or 0% CTR) this could mean a few things. One, your are targting the wrong keywords in your website’s content. Two, your search result page title and description is very poor. Three, the keyword is an unintended target and should just be ignored from an SEO point of view.

Clicks – The more clicks the better, right? Keep an eye on your CTR, which leads us to…

Click Through Rate – Ahhh, a great metric that marketers love to see when evaluating the performance of a campaign. CTR is very helpful in determining how effective your web page “call-to-action” or keyword is performing in the SERPs (search engine results page). Generally the higher the better. You will also notice that CTR goes up as your keywords move up the search results page. Position 1-3 will get the lion’s share of clicks with 4 through 10 gradually receiving fewer clicks. It all looks like the down slope of a rollar coaster going from 1-10.

I’m starting to use this data to project everything from gains in impressions/clicks by improvements in CTR. I’m also using it to help determine which pages/keywords to target with links. Gotta high CTR keyword underperforming in a less competitive niche?

How are you using Google Webmaster Tools new keyword performance data to plan your SEO activities?