The Maine SEO Blog

Chris Copeland, CEO, GroupM Search, The Americas

We were in a media delivery world, but now a media discovery world.

Consideration funnel

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Action
• Loyalty

Three forms of media today

• Paid
• Owned (website, PDFs, white papers, videos)
• Earned

Graham Mudd, Vice President Search & Media, comScore, Inc.

• Heavy searchers tend to be heavy social media users as well
• Social media users tend to be:
  - younger
  - more educated
  - enthusiastic
  - use internet more than non-social media user
• “exposed consumers” two times more likely to search
• influenced social + paid = significant CTR increase down the funnel
• searchfuel.com - white paper of research

John Antognoli, Senior Director, Account Management, M80

Eli Goodman, Search Evangelist, comScore, Inc.

What is driving sales?

• Search vs. Comparison shopping vs. Email
• Coupons

SEM on YouTube

• Is it worth it?
• How well is it working?

Search engines vs. Comparison Shopping

• Brands drive what people are doing
• In comparison shopping, brands hardly ever show up. Instead, it’s heavily weighted toward generic shopping
• Coupon sites continue to grow in importance – especially since Summer 2008

Searches on YouTube

• Searches are up 41% in the past year
• Retail searches are mostly generic (branded “commercials” are the exception)
• Great opportunity for video promotion
• YouTube promoted videos marketplace is much less crowded than search engine SEM
• Great long tail search opportunity in Paid Search space

Karon Thackston, President, Marketing Words

Copywriting Ecommerce Facts

• Most attention to design and content is paid to the homepage and individual product pages
• Only 40% of visitors arrive on homepage
• Close to 60% of all product page arrivals leave immediately
• BUT only about 33% of category page arrivals leave immediately

Category pages

• What they do well:
  - Highly relevant
  - Focused on one specific topic
• What they do poorly:
  - Small photographs
  - Sparse copy
• So what do you do? Add copy below the fold, beside the images
• Think of your category pages as your landing pages
• Your golden opportunity: add keyword-rich copy to category and sub-category pages and you’ll:
  - Rank more pages highly in search engines
  - Effectively introduce your site/brand to first time site visitors
  - Improve customer’s experience

Differentiate your site from other options

• Buy direct
• Exclusively from
• Manufacturer pricing
• Offer decision-making information
• Answer questions customers ask when decidiing to buy

Identify service offerings/brand messaging

• Say you offer free shipping
• Add branding

Make sure you test. What works for someone else may not for someone else!!

Khalid Saleh, Co-Founder & President, Invesp

• Average retail conversions: 2%
• How do I convince visitors to buy from me? Visitors are great, customers are amazing.
• The most important question: where should I start?
  - Because starting in the middle of nowhere isn’t a good idea – more often than not, it’s not the right place

Typical Analysis

• Focus on top landing pages
• Focus on pages with high bounce rate/exit rate
• Certain analyses don’t uncover site-wide issues

Important statistics

• Bounce rate
  - Compare pages vs. site average
  - Problem: bounce rates are skewed with high traffic pages
  - SO remove top 10 landing pages and recalculate bounce rate
• Category Pages
  - Goal: funnel to product pages
  - Traffic will: bounce away, exit site, navigate to parent/sibling/category page, navigate to product page
  - Bounce around effect: # of visitors navigate to a parent/ sibling page/total visitors to page (If bounce around is too high, work on product page

Your goal for category page

Bounce rate, exit rate, bounce around all < 5%

Product page effectiveness index

• # people who add product to cart/total visitors to page
• Consider: product page effectiveness relates to: product page design, product price

Product price

• General goal is to get PPEI from 10% to 15%
• Items less than $100 PPEI can increase to 25%

Adam Audette, President, AudetteMedia, Inc.

Smokin Tips:

• Speed
• Recommendations/Upselling
• Definitive product URLs (no duplicate content)

1. Be quick on the draw

What does the load time influence?

• Search engine crawl
• User experience
• Affects bottom line

What to do?

• Content (compress, externalize, expire)
• Service (redirects cause lag, too!)
• Best resource: Yahoo! Dev Network

2. Give ‘em Wind (Recommendations engines)

What can recommendations do?

• Increase average product views
• Upsell

3. Kill dead ringers

What’s wrong with duplicate content?

• Impacts indexation (crawl caps)
• Causes PageRank split
• Causes page duplication

To diagnose, use Google’s intitle: search

How to fix?

• Low intensive: parameter removal, link canonical tag
• Medium intensive: 301 redirects
• High intensive: URL re-structuring

Laura Thieme, President, Bizresearch

PPC Audit, using 13 months of data through AdWords editor:

1. Keywords with zero conversions (cut those terms!)
2. Higher than accepted CPC
3. Broad and/or phrase match
4. Lack of negative match terms

Tools for PPC cleanup:

• AdWords editor
• AdWords “see search term” button
• 4-6 hours to spend on analysis

Other tips

• Look in “many-per-click” in AdWords
• Pay for brand terms!

Jiyan Wei, Director of Product Management, PRWeb

What PRWeb news release customers do well:

• Meet audience demand with relevant topics
• Balance with staying focused
• Use images
  - CTR increases 15-25% when images are used
  - Drive to bloggers/writers; images drive the content
  - Increases your footprint with image search (for one release, 90% of traffic to website came from image search)
• Use video
  - Increases time spent on page –> increases conversions
• “Other stuff”
  - Anchor text
  - Alt tags
  - URL keywords
  - Description tag
  - Title tags

Other release options:

• Businesswire
• PR Log
• PR Leak

Questions

• Image size for PRWeb: they’ll resize it for you.
• More about crawl caps: Google crawls based on PageRank
• Sub domains are treated as new domains – you need to build up authority like you would for a new domain
• Tip for attribution: Google’s paid view through metric, Yahoo assist metric (BUT make sure you look at trend reporting FAR back into the past)
• Reinforce messaging by including [paid] search terms on landing pages
• Don’t allow comparison shopping websites to buy your branded search terms

James Fenelon, Interactive Product Director, nFusion

What is it?

• Usability testing provides measurement and ease of use and user success
• Helps explain how test subject respond in: time, accuracy, recall, emotional response
• Benefits:
  - First-hand data from users
  - Discovery of errors and areas of improvement
  - Saves development time and money
  - Reduces guesswork and arguing

Why is it important?

• Site impression is made in 1/20th second

Start with the right strategy

• Usability is about helping site visitors accomplish THEIR goals
• Start be defining:
  - Business goals
  - Visitor goals

Some Usability Options

• Can range from basic to high-end
• Basic Techniques:
  - Heuristic reviews
  - Card sorting
  - Prototype Testing

Heuristic review

• Evaluation method that helps to identify usability problems with the user interface
• Provides:
  - Identification of user experience/website usability issues
  - Prioritization of what to fix

Information Architecture and Usability

• Is the menu-naming terminology consistent with the user’s perspective?
• Are navigational titles clear and mutually understood?

Card Sorting – Validating your IA

• Many techniques
• Write the name of each main item on index card
• Shuffle deck and give to user
• Ask them to sort into groups and explain

Prototype Testing

• Using wireframes to decide best usability for website
• Best way to start? On paper.

When to do it?

• Earlier, the better
• Any usability testing is better than none
• Usability for optimization is not a one-time activity

Alissa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, Apogee Search

• How can I improve my conversion rate? It depends.
• You have to understand your problems before you can fix them.

Step 1: Goals

• Improving conversion rate
• Have you identified your goals?
  - Yes: Continue
  - No: Start over.
• What is the purpose of your website? (sales, leads, email signups…)
• Optimize to ALL of your goals.

Step 2: What is your traffic doing today?

E-Commerce:

• Start with purchase process (Do people abandon your shopping cart?)
• Moving on the Entry pages (Where are you sending your traffic? Homepage? Products? Categories? Test them.)
• Where do people abandon?
• Focus on your biggest problems first
• Use tactics that fits the issue (usability testing, page testing, focus groups, etc.)

Lead Generation:

• Is quality an issue? Integrate with a CRM system
• Instead of focusing only on web forms you could track past the lead and analyze & optimize towards
  - Human scrubbed leads
  - Qualified opportunities
  - Sales
• In a few years, tracking only leads will sound as silly as tracking only clicks now.
• What do people do when they enter your site?
• How’s your lead bait?
• It never hurts to focus on your forms
• How’s your call-to-action?

Conversion Strategy Summary

• Dig deep to understand & optimize to your goals
• Use your analytics to find your unique goals
• Tailor the therapy to the type of problem
• Look at level of difficulty compared to level of impact

Kimberly Krause Berg, Usability and SEO Consultant, UsabilityEffect.com/Cre8pc.com

What are your site requirements?

• Project Management
• Organizing and planning your web site
• Napkins, sticky notes, whiteboard
• Write everything down!
• Team signs off
• Test cases

Business Requirements

1. Sell products online
2. Provide information on our company
3. Provide excellent customer service
4. Be accessible to everyone

For example…

• About Us page
  - Provide bios of staff
  - Presidents message
• Blog
  - Global reach
  - Host ads
• Catalog
  - PDF version
  - Subscription
• Social Network
• Shopping Cart
  - Custom cart
  - SEO friendly
• Marketing

Functional Requirements

• Derived from use cases, mental models, user personas
• Programmers’ domain
• Determine specs for browsers, OS accessibility, bandwidth, performance, platform, mobile use, programming

Scott Brinker, President & CTO, ion interactive, Inc.

Landing page options

• Option A: Technology & psychology to “optimize” pages.
• Option B: Give them what they really want. –> “Wow. Thank you, that’s really what I was looking for.”

Searchers expect pieces to fit together:

• Intent
• Keyword
• Ad copy
• Landing page (where things tend to fall apart)

Other thoughts

• Think big, test small.
• It’s not about the number of tests, but what you’re testing?
• Find what they’re looking for and give it to them.  That’s what landing page usefulness is all about.

Questions

• Information foraging – how people interact and deal with your site
• How do you balance content vs. ad excitement to increase Quality Score? You can have a relatively small amount of content and still have a high quality score.
• Should you remove navigation so you can increase conversions? Don’t ever leave people without a choice. You could remove navigation if it’s too distracting, but still leave them with options.
• Can you change design for landing pages? You can experiment with a lot of looks and feels…people are used to micro-sites. It’s about quick, cheap tests.
• Quick tips from panelists:
  - Ask yourself what it would take to double, triple, quadruple how many landing pages you have.
  - Is your elevator pitch on your homepage/landing page?
  - Any usability testing is better than none.
  - Conversions happen when calls to action are available when people are thinking about them.

David Mihm, Designer & Local Search Marketer, davidmihm.com

What local search looks like

• the 10-pack
• driven by google.com, yahoo.com, etc.

Organic search ecosystem

• Google
• Yahoo/Bing

Local search ecosystem

A little more complicated…

Local search ranking factors

• Verified local business listing
• Off-page/off-listing criteria
• Customer reviews
• Traditional on-page criteria
• 7/ top 10 are specific to local

Developing your local mindset

• SEO is about optimizing sites, local is about optimizing location
• Consistency: name, address, phone number are critical (don’t use tracking phone numbers, don’t stuff keywords into business name)
• Building out business profile, you’re not creating an ad

Local Search

• location (verification, claiming, off-site references, categoreies, reviews)
• website

Traditional

• Website (on-page, title tags, link building)

Mike Blumenthal, Owner & Local Marketing Expert, Blumenthals

How Google Ranks your listing

• Web page totals in Maps (citations)
• Geo references and reviews
• Business name
• Business category
• content

The “new” PageRank

• Score of website
• # links referring to business
• Highest score of those links

How Google scores your website

1. In-bound links from documents that mention the business with full or partial name and/or address
2. in-bound links with business name in anchor text
3. business name in title tag
4. all or part of business name in domain

Takeaways

1. Choose your business name and domain carefully for use in local
2. Think about gaining inbound links with your business name as anchor text
3. Be sure your title tags reflect your name
4. Strike a balance between optimizing your site for local and Google Maps

Mary Bowling, SEO, Director of Search Marketing, seOverflow

• Sometimes the local 10-pack is a 3-pack
• 10-pack isn’t exactly the Maps results
• You cannot be in the 10-pack if you don’t have a Google Local Business Listing

Optimize your Maps listings

• Use your main keyword phrase and complementary terms in your profile descriptions
• Grab the long tail by including:
  - your products and services
  - the brands you carry
  - the locations you serve
• Choose – or create – the right categories (choose two/three existing categories, then create the remaining two/three that apply to your local listing)
• Create attributes (other information not already included – but DO NOT KEYWORD STUFF)

Create citations

• AKA web references
• They don’t have to include a link
• Mine competitors’ web pages (would that site also be willing to give you a citation?)

Get reviews!

• Reviews are exactly what people (and Google) are looking for
• Google pulls reviews from across the web (so it doesn’t matter where your customers leave them)
• Come up with a system to encourage reviews by happy customers
• Yahoo has mentioned after a certain number of reviews, they’ll start figuring out whether your reviews are positive or negative

Your website and the 10 pack

• Use your website to build trust and reinforce you LBL info by:
  - linking to your Maps lisitng
  -  get links from local websites (Center of Commerce,e tc.)

On-page optimization

• Add location!!
• Place full street address and phone number on every page of your website
• Optimizae your Contact/About page for business name/location

Standaradize

• Use same name, address, phone number everywhere
• Got to sources of business data and standardize
• Get listed on local directories

Check for Location Trust

• Check data providers
• Search for your business name
• Search for your phone number
• Search for your address

How to track the pack - how to track the 10-pack with Google Analytics

Will Scott, President, Search Influence

Barnacle SEO: attaching oneself to a large fixed object, then waiting for customers to float by in the current.

Local search: how?

• “Web references” = links, Links = trust
  - Yellow Pages
  - Local directories
• Links aren’t critical – the correlating factors are name, address, and phone

Places to submit:

• Wire Fan
• Mixx
• Yahoo! Local
• City Search
• Super Pages
• Insider Pages
• Yelp
• Yellow Pages
• BrownBook.com

How can you do the same

• Maximize local listings with SEO
  - Keywords in titles and copy
  - Links to local profiles (even low-quality links will do, leverage social bookmarking/directories)

Andrew Shotland, Proprietor, Local SEO Guide

Top SEO’d IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages)

1. SuperPages
2. CitySearch
3. Yelp
4. Yahoo Local
5. InsiderPages
6. Yellow Pages
7. Biz Journals
8. AreaConnect
9. MagicYellow
10. Switchboard
11. Here are more

Rankings by site type

1. Local Business – 32%
2. IYP – 27%
3. Vertical – 17%
4. Article – 6%
5. Local Vertical – 5%
6. LYP – 5%
7. Natl Chain – 4%
8. Unrelated – 2%
9. Gov – 1%
10. Edu – 1%
11. Social – <1%
12. Video – <1%

Which Yellow Pages sites should you use for which categories?

Questions

• Google’s Local Listing bulk upload instructions
• Choose a certain number of “barnacle” or IYP sites, because you’ll want to continuously update them.
• Like traditional SEO, keep profiles “fresh”. For example, in Google Maps, update coupons, photos, videos, etc. especially if your customers are used to it.
• What social media sites are good for local businesses? Twitter for a company like a pizza place, for a company like a plastic surgeon: Facebook. For a more professional company, LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the easiest SM site to talk people into, and to ease them into others.
• Vertical is important for review sites (Urbanspoon and Yelp is mandatory for restaurants, TripAdvisor for hotels)
• Barnacle sites outrank you: you can get ahead of yourself.
• Other important sites that will get picked up by a ton of others: Openlist, Zvents, Local.com, Mojopages, Immercifind
• How to prevent local listings sabotage? Make your listing consistent across every IYP and every submission.

Rob Jackson, Head of Conversion Analytics, Latitude Group

Conversion Analytics

• Web Analytics
• Conversion Attribution
• Website Usability
• Landing Page Optimization

Web Analytics

• $1 billion industry by 2014 – Forrester
• Growth area in digital marketing
• Some companies still aren’t getting the basic right

Top Tips – Web Analytics

1. Get your setup right (e-commerce, goal funnels, campaigns by channel, test conversions, have the right people in place)
2. Look beyond conversions (some keywords are at the beginning of the purchase funnel, If you are using last click CPA model, look at bounce rates and time on site)
3. Monitor site performance (scenario analysis and content reports show when pages are under performing; again, look at bounce rate and time on site)

Conversion Attribution

• Go beyond the last click metric (ways to create rudimentary cookies to track first click)
• Stop the keyword rot
• Remove keywords that never convert

Top Tips – Attribution

1. Report with last click (but analyze other weightings and share these with your clients)
2. Pull what doesn’t work (keep it simple and avoid over analysis)

Usability Software

• “Real-time customer research”
• You know where – now see why
• Link & form analytics
• Heat mapping
• Site issue resolution

Top Tips – Usability Software

1. Be proactive (the remit of a PPC manager is now beyond the click, look at what your users are telling you)
2. Segment if possible (use tools like Click Tale, Tea leaf)

Top Tips – Landing Page Optimization

1. Use Data not Intuition (Take opinion out of optimization by using analytics and usability)
2. Star over and repeat… (Continuous improvement yields better results than one off tests)

Allisa Ruehl, Manager of Website Effectiveness Consulting, Apogee Search

Favorite Things

• Advanced Segments
  - Default segments
  - Custom segments
• Looking deeper into GWO tests
• Custom reporting

Advanced Segments

• Like filters, but better!
• Easy to create
• Apply to past data
• Some are conveniently created for you
  - Paid traffic
  - Search traffic
  - New visits
  - Returning visits

Custom Advanced Segments

• Drag and drop functions
• Filter and segment by things like:
  - Hour of the day
  - Language
  - City
  - E-Commerce
  - Traffic Sources

Analyzing time periods – making dayparting decisions!

• Create a segment for traffic that arrives during a time you’re worried about
  - Time of day is less than 6 OR time of day is great than 22
  - If you currently have enough PPC traffic during that time, limit segment to PPC (pay attention to sample size)
• Compare conversion rate of that segment, to your overall conversion rate for PPC or search

A few other uses

• Turning any report into a PPC-only report
• Running specialized reports in seconds
• Aggregating engagement and conversion metrics
• Studying geotargeting decisions
• analyzing GWO tests

Looking deeper into a GWO Test

• Care about more than just conversions?
  - Order value by test page?
  - Bounce rate for landing pages?
  - Other engagement metrics?
• For A/B test only
  - Create segment for each page version
  - Run the desired report with each segment (e.g. ecommmerce reporting)

Segment Tips

• Mind your “or”s and “and”s
• Look at segment size (test segment size)
• You can compare up to 3 segments at once
• Don’t tell you’re boss/CEO/client how easy it was

Tracking Multiple Attributions

• By default, GA gives you last click attribution
• You can see first click attribution (with a little extra java coding)
• Stay away from “no override”
• Set user defined value
  - Decide what to track (search engine_keyword_PPC/SEO
  - Add setVar java below GA code
  - Create script that checks for cookies

Is this the best way?

• No
  - you only have 1 free value
  - it’s difficult to see entire history
  - you have to do manual work
• Yes
  - maybe if Google hears enough from us, they’ll add it

Andrew Goodman, Founder & Principal, Page Zero Media

Can we really simplify this incredibly complex universe?

• Yes, and we must

Google AdWords Conversion Optimizer

Non-obvious takeaways

• If you don’t love marketing, you’ll “manage” to mediocrity
• How patient are you? Check the right date range.
• Is granularity a great way to go crazy?

Other takeaways

• Use Google Advanced Segments to make better choices, especially when you don’t have revenue information

Wister Walcott, Co-Founder & VP of Products, Marin Software

Paid Search – Analytics Myths

1. Google will pick the best creative for you.
2. Look at all prior clicks for accurate bidding.
3. “Portfolio Management” is really really hard.

Myth #1: Google will pick the best creative for you.

• Periodically evaluate conversions/revenue per 1000 impressions
• Compare each creative in an ad group vs. the average (below average = loser, near average = draw)

Myth #2: Need to look all prior clicks for accuracy.

• Evaluated “path to purchase” for well-known brand
• Goal: ensure proper credit to product keywords
• Only 26% of paid search conversions had more than one click

Myth #3: “Portfolio Management” is really really hard.

• Use something like Google Conversion Optimizer and this is not as hard as you think

Questions

• Omniture? Used for large campaigns, and worked well

Ben Seslija, Senior Director, Analytics, Clickable Inc.

5 Tips for Utilizing Market Differences

1. Geo-modified campaigns (national/larger area)
2. General search campaign (geo-targeted)
3. Create local ads
4. Custom local city and general landing pages
5. 25 mile radius (not overly precise; i.e. using IP addresses)

True impact of quality score

• Ad Rank  = Bid x quality score

The better your quality score, the less you pay…

• QS 10 = $5/CPC
• QS 1 = $27.50/CPC

Increase Quality Score

1. Split keywords into smaller ad groups
2. Create relevant ad copy for each ad group
3. Optimize creatives
4. Experiment with matching options
5. Build SEO
   - Link Building
   - Implement keywords
   - Don’t forget about essential site pages (About Us, etc.)
   - Make sure Google thinks you’re relevant

Negative keywords

• Don’t forget about them
• They might acquire higher CTR’s than positive keywords
• To find them:
  - Use keyword tools
  - Search query performance
  - Analytics
  - Competitive analysis tools (like compete.com) [this is the one point I personally disagree with]

Andrew Beckman, President, Location3Media

Important tools through Google Analytics:

• Site overlay reports
• Create funnels
• Blocking IPs

Google Analytics (background/why you should use it)

• Comprehensive data
• Easy-to-use interface
• Free!!!

Site Overlay Reports

• Shows redundant areas (links that should be removed)
• Shows successful areas (links whose real estate should be increased)
• Flaw: link click-throughs are a total of all click-throughs to that page (in other words, if you have multiple links to a certain page, the click through percentage is a total of all of them). Work around: add “&location=x” (x = 2, 3, 4, etc.)

Other important tools:

• Top pages (Google Analytics)
• Crazy Egg
• Google Website Optimizer

Crazy Egg Heat Map

• Might help you decide to make images links (that people are clicking on)
• Further verify what people are clicking on

Funnels

• On-click events
• Cant track links, videos, PDFs

IP Filtering

• Block your, your developer, designer, etc. IP addresses
• Look at “pure data”

Resources

• www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools

Jill Emerson, Search Marketing Manager, Allegis Group, Inc.

Social Media

• Be sure to add value, other than what you give through the .com website (e.g. adding RSS feed from blog, etc.)

Takeaways

1. Answer the “so what”?
2. Translate for management (put it in lamen’s terms).
3. Clearly identify next steps.

Questions

Great book for GA: Measuring Success with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton