The Maine SEO Blog

First things first, there have already been a ton of great posts on how to use Buzz and what it’s all about. If you want a really great overview of all Google Buzz has to offer, check out this Mashable post. The official Google Blog also has a post with some great video how-to’s for both the web-based and mobile Buzz versions.

Here are some of the more interesting features of Buzz – the good, the bad, and the ugly – that I’ve noticed in a few short weeks of buzzing.

Gmail Integration

If someone replies to a “buzz” of yours, it is emailed directly to you. Even more cool: you can reply to the thread directly in the email.

Be careful though, comment on an influential Buzzer’s(?) post and you’ll get all of the comments thereafter. There are a few options for this: a) create a filter to put any buzz comments under a specific label in Gmail, b) “mute” the post, so that you no longer get the updates from it.

Also a negative: for those anti-Googlers out there, you have to have a Gmail account in order to Buzz.

Social Integration

Buzz has the option to integrate a ton of your other social media profiles, and I can only assume there will be more to come. But for now, your tweets, YouTube videos, flickr photos, and more will show up in your Buzz stream.

Watch the conversation

Like Facebook’s commenting and “liking” features, Buzz is superior to Twitter in the fact that you can actually watch a conversation – and follow it if you’ve come late to the game.

Alas, for every positive there is a negative. I love Mashable, but I unfollowed them because they were clogging up my Buzz feed. Lots of great info – I just don’t know if Buzz is where I want to get it. In the future, hopefully Google will help sort folks you follow so it’s more manageable. Again, currently you can mute a post, so that you don’t receive updates as people comment.

Mobile Integration

Access Buzz on your smart phone and you’ll see the same features, plus some – including Google Maps integration where you can see who’s buzzing around you.

I’m sure that as Buzz evolves, the less than desirable qualities will be ironed out. And until then, we can figure out the implications of Buzzing and add yet another social network to our list to join.

Nicki Hicks
Follow me on Buzz

Flyte recently wrapped up another SEO project; this one for Signal Communications (or SigCom) – a company specializing in emergency communication and alerting products.

SigCom offers a variety of high quality emergency communication products and accessories, including:

• Emergency Communication & Signaling
• Manual Alarm Stations & Accessories
• Incident & Alarm Reporting

With an already great looking website, flyte gave the SigCom.com a minor facelift, along with optimizing it. Then, to really give SigCom a competitive advantage, we built them a blog.

I’ve talked about it numerous times, but for many companies, blogging and creating fresh new content is just the catalyst they need to get a ton of qualified traffic.

So if you’re looking for a great new emergency system, alarm stations, or incident reporting, look no further than Signal Communications.

If you’re looking for a blog to increase your search engine visibility, look no further than flyte.

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Maybe you bought a directory listing at the Yahoo Directory. Or maybe you’re trying to leverage AdWords. Perhaps you (gasp) bought a link from a link farm. Or even advertising on a local news website.

Regardless of where you’re spending your money; at the end of the day, all of these incoming links are intended for one purpose and one purpose only: conversions.

If a free link you got after spending a few minutes courting a blogger aren’t getting you any conversions, well, what can you do really? But if you’re actively spending money for those links, the traffic had better be converting, right?

There’s an easy ways to check. Head over to your Google Analytics account.

First things first, do you have Google Analytics Goals set up? Do it immediately if you don’t.

Incoming Links

With goals in place, go to the Traffic Sources section, then Referring sites.

Now click your Goal(s) tab. You should have a pretty good idea now about which referring websites convert and which ones don’t.

Why does it matter?

Perhaps your links you’re not paying for are converting at a far higher rate than expensive directory listings or advertisements. Make sure you look at many months’ worth of data before you make any big decisions. But these conversions might help show you your expensive paid efforts aren’t worth the money.

AdWords Campaigns

If your goals are already in place, go to the Traffic Sources section, AdWords, then into AdWords campaigns.

Just like for referring sites, click on your Goal(s) tab.

Why does it matter?

Again, do you want to be bidding for keywords that aren’t converting? Same thing as referring keywords: gather enough data to make deleting keywords/ads/campaigns plausible.

Note: This is the Google Analytics version of AdWords conversions. In order to get the robust version of conversion tracking, make sure you use AdWords’ Conversion Tracking.

Nicki Hicks
Are you throwing away money?

The team at SEOmoz is taking four websites and reviewing them for us. I’ll get what I can, but some of the more valuable pieces of information will be the tools the team uses for a site audit.

Valley Wide Plumbing

• www.valleywideplumbing.com
• Local, small business plumbing company.
• Challenges: Want to rank higher in local search and improve conversions

Ranking Better on Local Listings

• Address on every page
• Google Local registration
• Registration with every local directory of competitors
• Reviews on local websites from customers
• Local links
• Consistency of phone/address/business name

For more help with local listings, Rand suggests David Mihm’s article.

Problems with this site

• No text-based phone number. (Customer can find number, but not Google – the phone number is an image.)
• Very few links

Conversion Rate Optimization

• What are visitors’ objections?
• Why do people choose a plumber?
• Short bullet points > Long paragraph text
• Simple, compelling call-to-action
• Web design quality (sometimes people consider better design more trustworthy than Better Business Bureau logos or security seals)
• Testimonials

Try the 5 second test: a kind soul looks at the site for 5 seconds and reports back on what they get out of it.

Quick Wins

• Submit to local directories
• See where your competition is listed – submit there

Content & Link Opportunities

• What do people what to know about plumbing?
  - Comparison of liquid uncloggers
  - Simple ways to maintain good pipes
  - DIY plumbing advice & help
• What’s interesting to the press?
  - Famous incidents in plumbing disasters
  - Plumbing stats (homeowner costs, geography, etc.)

Wizard Headquarters

• http://www.wizardhq.com/
• Magic trick products.
• Challenges: Decrease cart abandonment

Problems with this site

• Not working in Chrome
• Needs a redesign to create a visual structure
• Simple fixes need to be made (for example, something needs to happen when a customer clicks “add to shopping cart”)
• Many (most) titles are the same
• Text isn’t displaying properly (search engines see it, but visitors don’t! Yikes!)
• Massive amounts of duplicate content

Links & Content

• Links from suppliers
• Links from happy customers
• Promotional material to bloggers/sites
• Magic content – so much!
  - Top Magic Acts Around the World
  - Magic Acts Revealed
  - Magic & the CIA – how they share tactics
  - Magic for practical jokes around the home/office

Rand suggests that you shouldn’t create great content, but share content that people want to share.

Quick Wins

• Cart Abandonment fixes
  - Clean design – where are the products?
  - Design seems out of date/spammy
  - After adding product to cart, hard to find where to check out
• On-Page SEO
  - Why redirect to /servlet/StoreFront?
  - Add branding to the end of title tags – want keywords first

Tiki Master

• www.tikimaster.com
• Retail and wholesale of island lifestyle products
• Challenges: increase traffic, lower cart abandonment, increase search engine ranking

What they’re doing well

• Text-based navigation (check your cache to see how Google sees your website)
• Cross linking between categories and using great anchor text to do it

What they’re not

• Some links/text hard to see and use
• Keyword stuffed headlines

Quick Wins

• Links to pages which are robots.txt’d & 404′ing
• Use meta noindex,follow instead of robots in many instances
• Let Bot select crawl rate
• Every page 301 redirects right now; may want to update
• Blog hosted at Blogspot!

Winshuttle

Site issues

• Elevator pitch? (Complicated product, make it simple)
• Picture with button and finger pushing it, but isn’t clickable (Make it clickable)
• A lot of 302s that should be 301s
• Keyword targeting in titles

Have a page that’s already ranking for a keyword that you didn’t intend? Leverage it.

• Optimize it even more
• 301 redirect it to the page you want to rank for the term

Quick Wins

• Get list of top 20-50 keywrods and run keyword site:winshuttle.com. Make sure the right pages are ranking and the keyword targeting rocks
• Call to action & conversion focus could use help, particularly on the “demo” portion
• Blog hasn’t been updated since July 2009!

Speakers: Rand Fishkin, Jen Lopez, Peter Meyers - SEOmoz

If you’ve talked to a web marketer lately and they give you tips, I’ll bet I know one of them: Blog.

If you’ve talked to a friend about a wonderful idea you have, I bet I know what they said: Blog about it.

If you’ve asked a question online recently, I bet I know where you found your answer: A blog.

I think you get the point.

Blogs are just, well, awesome. Put aside reasons for the average foodie to take beautiful high def photographs of their latest creation and start a blog (though they do have the best recipes), there are a ton of SEO benefits to blogging.

You can target the long tail.

Through keyword research, have you found some of those beautifully extraordinary keyword phrases that you can seem to put anywhere on your website? The blog’s the place for ‘em.

It’s wonderful link bait.

Blogs are one of those mythical creatures where it doesn’t take a whole lot of link building work to build up those backlinks. Sure, you have to do some, but put a great resource online and people are sure to find it. Plus, people really appreciate specific, targeted posts that answer their burning questions.

Social media’s all the buzz, but don’t discount a space with a few more characters to say something.

Not only are people saying Get a blog, but they’re also saying Get on Twitter! Get on Facebook! Get on LinkedIn! Get on TheSuperCoolestSocialNetworkEver!

What do you do? If you can manage the time to blog and be on all the hippest social networks, then by george, do it. But at the end of the day, it’s all about content creation. That said, go where you can create content around more than 140 characters: to a blog. (Then, if you have another extra moment in your hectic life, just be sure to tweet about your posts )

Incorporate images, video, and podcasts.

Let’s not forget these things also rank well on the search engines. Optimize any of your images/videos/podcasts the best you can and make sure you’ve got some text!

Nicki Hicks
Blogging for SEO

Image by alamodestuff

If you use Google AdWords, you should be using the conversions measurement. If you’re not, never fear, all you need is Analytics!

I’ve been using Google AdWords conversions for quite some time now, but haven’t noticed (until today) that you can import your Google Analytics goals (as long as your AdWords and Analytics accounts are connected) as AdWords conversions. That way, you only need to install one set of code: your Google Analytics code. Evidently, the ability to do so has been available for almost a year!

Confused yet? These screen shots should help explain.

Under the Reporting tab, click “Conversions.” Without any conversions set up, you should see a screen that looks like this:

Again, you’ll need to connect your AdWords and Analytics accounts to see this screen.

Click “Import from Google Analytics”. In the past you would have had to insert a code (and you still can), but now you have the option to sync your Analytics goals.

Click import, and you’re good to go!

Nicki Hicks
Google: Making life easier one day at a time

Many blog platforms are set up, by default, to catch any spammy looking email address or website, as well as a comment with more than two links within it. Of course, the blogger always has the ability to refine these parameters; even approving on a comment-by-comment basis. If your comments are getting disapproved, this might be why:

Your name isn’t India SEO. That may be what you do – and kudos for the attempt to incorporate as much anchor text as possible; but I’m sure your mother didn’t see you for the first time and think I shall call him India SEO.

You’re not adding value. While “Really great post, I’ve subscribed to your blog” might boost the ego of the blogger, it does little more than that. The comments section is meant to create a conversation – not accentuate an ego trip.

You included links in your comment. While readers might find a substantial resource over at your website for Viagra, I’ll thank you to not include links like that. Every blogger is different, so while many don’t, I approve comments with links if they provide a valuable resource – especially when I know the commenter isn’t linking to their own site.

All of these things add up to one reason your comments are being disapproved: you look like spam. Whether you’re trying to be or not, commenting using these tactics makes you look like a spammer and any blogger, if they’re paying attention, will delete and/or block your comments.

Nicki Hicks
Are you adding value?

Recently flyte launched four new blogs for Berman & Simmons, a Maine personal injury and trial law firm with locations in Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor. The blogs include:

• Maine Accident and Personal Injury News
• Maine Nursing Home Law Center
• Product Safety at Home and at Work
• Maine Court Decisions

You may be thinking: four blogs? Four? Well, with such niche fields and enough manpower to create plenty of great content, it seemed like a no brainer – especially with all the great search engine visibility blogs provide.

So for the latest information about Maine accidents and personal injury, nursing home law, product safety and liability, and Maine court decisions, look no further than Berman & Simmons.

And if you need a blog to increase your search engine visibility, then give flyte a call.

Nicki Hicks
Maine SEO

Rand’s going to talk about how to make standard metrics actionable. [woot]

To make Analytics actionable, always ask:

Why am I measuring this?

What would I do if results were different?

Search Referral Analytics

# of visits per search engine over time – You want to see this number increase over time, in relationship to the search engine’s market share/overall global growth [Action: find out if it's a ranking/indexing issue]

# pages getting search referrals over time – Measure for each search engine and often. [Action: discover if indexation is an issue worth effort, read more about that here]

# of keywords sending traffic from a search engine over time – Look for increase in number of keywords sending traffic to your site – especially if you create a lot of content [Action: might be a rankings/demand issue; determine if content additions are accretive and what drives growth/shrinkage in search traffic]

Keyword Referral Analytics

# visits per keyword – Compare week by week, or even month by month [Action: Analyze top traffic drivers from a value perspective, check rankings for potential easy wins & get answers if traffic dips]

First time vs. returning visits per keyword – Business decision: which is better for you? [Action: Determine value of reaching new visitors vs. converting branded users (focus efforts on the more valuable one)]

Keyword rankings – They can be valuable! [Action: know if traffic spikes/dropoffs are from rankings, indexation or search demand shifts by matching traffic with rankings, SEOmoz has their own ranking tracker and you can track rankings using Analytics!]

Engagement Analytics

Time on site – Take it to the next level [Action: compare ROI metrics; if they correlate, improve on keywords/landing pages with low time on site]

# of Pageviews – Again, take it further than “sweet, it went up this month” [Action: Depending on your metrics, a "sweet spot" of pages browsed often dictates a conversion event - optimize towards it!]

Repeat visit ratio – [Action: Find what content/activities/referrers send engaged (read: returning) traffic and copy those while improving subpar pages]

Sharing/linking activity – Start tracking these actions, just like a conversion! [Action: Find patterns/sources that predict sharing activities (both content and CTAs) and make them testable conversion events]

Latent Conversion Tracking

Removing last-click attribution – Do you know what happens before their last click when they become a conversion? Look at full path analysis within Navigation Summary in your Analytics. This post will show you how to do this.

ROI Analytics

Lifetime Customer Value = CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value): how much money they spend, how many referrals

Cost of Acquisition = CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): how much spent on sales, SEO, marketing, advertising

ROI = CLTV – CAC

Always be asking “What’s the ROI?”

Q&A

Q: In your opinion what’s the best Analytics software?
A: Depends on the person using it. Omniture experts will have difficulty with WebTrends. You can get a lot of the same information from all of the packages.

Q: Why the symmetric dip in SEOmoz’s traffic?
A: B2B websites will usually see dips on the weekends.

Q: How can I see the number of unique visitors for a particular section of my website?
A: At the bottom of Google Analytics, you can filter  landing pages based on page, like:

Q: Is there a big difference between different Analytics packages?
A:  Eric Enge did an extensive study with this at StoneTemple.

Q: Is there a way to automatically see rankings in Google Analytics?
A: Yes, here’s the Yoast link again.

Q: What’s the best tool for measuring ROI?
A: Salesforce.com, SEOmoz uses Infusionsoft.

Q: In your opinion, what’s your favorite part about Google Analytics?
A: Simplicity; the greatest thing is it’s easy to use, fairly fast.

Q: How do you compare bounce rates with other websites in your industry?
A: Google Analytics will let you view your site stats compared to similar sites in your industry using Benchmarking. You can find these stats under Visitors > Benchmarking. [You can set your industry at the very top of the page.] It’s up to you whether you actually believe these stats or not, obviously.

Q: Tell us something about bounce rates.
A: I only care about them when they happen in my conversion funnel. Always tie it to conversion and ROI.

Q: Why is rank tracker different than actual search?
A: Make sure personalized search is off (use &pws=0 after your query); local search could also change your results.

Q: When looking at social media sites, what are the metrics to track?
A: It depends on what you want them to do. Branding? Time on site. Go to your site and look at ads? Maybe page visits.

You’ll be able to find the archive of this webinar here shortly. And here is all of the Twitter chatter about the #mozinar.

Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
@randfish

Meta-descriptions are one of the last meta-tags that search engines still care about; the extent to which, no one really knows. And while inserting all of your keywords may not help you, a call to action might.

For meta-descriptions (or search engine descriptions, as we lovingly refer to them), I always suggest clients incorporate their contact information – for those searching on smart phones, or simply searching for a way to reach them. More and more, even that may not be enough.

So how can  you really make your search result stand out?

I did a search for nike light running shoes, and found that there are a ton of techniques for trying to entice searchers to click. Disregarding titles, let’s take a look at ways to get searchers to click:

Strategy #1: A really great description

This tactic works incredibly well for individual products – but it could also work well for services too. This particular description incorporates keywords, all the while giving you a good idea of what you’ll find when you click on the result.

Strategy #2: Blog Teaser

In this case, sure, we know there’s going to be a bit of a product pitch; but what better way to research which shoe to buy than comparing them?

Strategy #3: Customer Reviews

Similar to Google’s new(ish) rich snippets, the page this result points to is specifically devoted to reviews for this shoe. Pretty powerful stuff.

Strategy #4: Discounts, discounts, discounts!

Who doesn’t love a discount? Or free shipping? Or both??

Strategy #5: Show me the money

Similarly, a popular strategy is displaying the price of the product or service directly within the meta-description. If that doesn’t entice the “right” people (those who will buy) and deter the wrong people (those who won’t), I don’t know what will. Furthermore, consumers can literally compare prices right from the Google search results.

Strategy #6: What’s the benefit?

Again, great for both products and services – why would someone want to (in this case) buy from you?

Now, obviously these results are for deeper level pages, hence more description and more detailed strategies. But the same goes for your upper level pages; what’s your call-to-action?

The fact is, regardless of whether meta-descriptions help you from an SEO standpoint, they’ll certainly entice searchers to click.

What strategies have you seen or used with meta-descriptions?

Nicki Hicks
Reliving the track & field glory days