Why is Great SEO so Expensive?

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Why SEO is Expensive.

How To Devise Your SEO Strategy The Easy Way - With a Planning Template

If there's one thing both business owners and SEO consultants can benefit enormously from, it's a strategy planning template.  Everyone knows that a strategy-based approach to marketing will trounce a competing approach that is purely tactical.  The difficulty lies in coming up with a winning strategy, especially when your organization hasn't formally devised one before.

Enter the SEO Strategy Template

It's a simple set of 'rules' (more like guidelines) that you can follow like a roadmap, adapt and tweak, modify and customize, until you have a unique strategy planning document for marketing your business. 

This is such an easily repeatable and reproducible process that it is surprising that everyone within the SEO industry is not already exploring, using or implementing such an approach to evolving an SEO strategy.

So if you're interested in formulating your company's strategy using an easy-to-follow and powerful process, then read about this method to create a planning template based on the SOSTAC model.

Introducing The SOSTAC Planning Model

In the 1990s, PR Smith introduced the SOSTAC strategy framework to help plan a marketing system that is comprehensive, yet flexible enough to be adapted to fit the varying needs of a wide range of clients.

SOSTAC stands for:

  • Situation - where you are now
  • Objectives - where you are heading
  • Strategy - how to get there
  • Tactics - how to execute the plan
  • Actions - who is in charge, and when should it get done
  • Control - measure and monitor to see if you get there

   This systematic approach to outlining a superior marketing strategy is both simple and elegant, while being powerful and effective.  You can use it as the framework of a planning template for your SEO strategy.  

Let's explore it in more detail.

1. Situation Analysis - Where Are You Now?

Before you begin any marketing effort, you must know where you stand at the moment.  From an SEO standpoint, you'll look at

  • your site performance
  • the search engine traffic you're getting
  • your best keywords with highest conversion rates, and
  • comparison against your competition

Taking stock will make your future endeavors more productive.  Asking the right questions, and coming up with the answers, is a good starting point.

a. Is business good?  Management guru Peter Drucker would begin consultations with the question, "How's business?"  Study your Web traffic, sales volume and profit, your assets and liabilities, your cash flow and expenses.  Is business booming?  If not, why not?

b. What are your strengths?  What sets you apart from everyone else in your industry or market niche?  Why do your customers seek you out?  How are you insulated against competition?

c. Do you have a marketing strategy?  Look at your current marketing campaigns and SEO efforts.  Do they work well?  Which activities are the most effective?  What impact does each one have on your business?

d. Are your goals clear?  Is your target audience clearly defined?  Do you know your best keywords?  Your most profitable clients (and top keywords) make up only a tiny fraction of the total.  Are you aware of them?  Are you focusing on serving them well?

e. What are you weak at?  Are you employing the most cost-effective and high impact marketing channels and SEO efforts?  How can they be made more efficient?

f. Is your business protected against adversity?  Will technological innovations or disruption in the status quo harm or destroy your business?  Or are you positioned to take advantage of seismic shifts in your industry?  Are your competitors more powerful, versatile, creative than you are?

2. Setting Objectives - Where Are You Headed?

Once you know where you stand, you must define your goals and objectives for the future.

a. What are your biggest goals?  Why does your business or website exist?  Is your mission statement clearly defined, and can you state it in a concise "positioning declaration"?  It will explain why you are in business, and whom you aim to serve.

b. What does your business set out to achieve?  Is bottom-line profit your primary motive?  Or do you want to achieve something else?  How do you plan to serve your market?

c. What marketing methods will you focus on?  Which elements of your SEO plan will bring you more clients, improve conversion to sales, and result in repeat business and/or referrals?

d. What does your marketing say?  Are you trying to generate more leads, pre-qualify serious prospects, close more direct sales, encourage referrals or seek out business partners?  Your message must be tailored specifically for each objective if you are to succeed massively.

When you have a set of well-defined objectives, run them through the SMART test to see if they are really your highest and best targets.

S - Specific.  Are your goals clear and specific?
M - Measured.  Can your goals be measured?
A - Actions.  What actions will make them happen?
R - Realistic.  Are they achievable goals?
T - Time.  Will they meet your deadlines?

Knowing where you stand, and armed with your major objectives, it's time to proceed to the next stage - and iron out your strategy.

3. Formulating Strategy - How To Get There?

Strategy is the high level blueprint for your SEO efforts.  It may involve a focus on local SEO, or brand building, or something else.  This is the 'big picture' phase, and you don't have to get into too many details.  But you do need to capture the soul of your SEO strategy in a clear and solid way.

The first step is to narrow down your focus to appeal to a specific section of your audience that you can serve better than anyone else.  Depending upon the size and scope of your business, this segment may be large or small.  But by defining your target market clearly, you'll avoid the major pitfall that defeats all non-strategic marketers - the mistaken belief that your ideal prospect is... everyone!

Once you know, in general terms, who your prospects are, you can proceed to learn more about them.  Getting into the mind of your buyers, and correctly figuring out what they want, and when, can be your biggest competitive edge and the driver of mind-blowing profits.  Targeting your marketing to appeal to this audience can skyrocket conversions effortlessly.

Based on this knowledge, you can refine your positioning and control how you will be perceived by your market.

4. Tactics - How To Execute Your Plan?

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link.  And your strategy is only as powerful as the actions that you will take to execute it.

This phase is about outlining the steps to take, and their desired end-result.  It's hard to predict SEO outcomes accurately, but you'll be able to make reasonable estimations, which will then serve as a roadmap for your SEO campaign.

a. Which tools will you use?  Every kind of marketing (including SEO) has an array of tools to deploy at will.  It's tempting to try them all.  But it's better to use just a few, using them effectively and well.

b. Plan your assault.  The same tools can be put to use with widely varying results.  Picking the right one for the right reasons can have a synergistic effect on your results.

c. Telegraph your message.  Target it at your ideal prospect.  Refine it to cut through the clutter and speak directly to your audience's biggest wants or needs.  Remember, confused prospects don't buy!

d. Be consistent.  Branding and direct selling both work better with repetition. 

e. Get a budget.  Marketing strategically can be expensive, at first.  Assign the resources and funds necessary to your marketing plan before you begin implementing it.  Otherwise you'll run out of steam, losing momentum and money.

5. Actions - Who Is In Charge?

With your strategy and tactics planned out, your template then points you towards the next step... assigning roles and setting deadlines. 

Without clearly defined responsibilities, and a time frame within which to complete tasks, your marketing will stagnate and lose speed.  This phase is about the nitty-gritty daily actions - what to do, who will do it, and when it should get done.  Whether you chart it out on a week-by-week basis, or choose a different time frame, what matters is having an outline that everyone can access and follow.

a. Pick a leader.  Put individuals in charge of specific components of your SEO activities.

b. Set a time frame.  Draw up a marketing calendar and set deadlines for completion of each action step.

c. Can they do it?  Assigning tasks to someone based on a job description rather than their ability, skill or capacity to get it done can be a critical mistake.

d. Measure progress.  Decide upon the metrics to monitor.  Will they show if a job is getting done?  Can they be easily measured?  How often will you keep track?

e. Document results.  Sharing visual feedback and results of your campaign's progress can help get a team energized, and working better together.  In today's complex SEO universe, having a synergistic team effort can compound your chances of success.

6. Control - Monitor & Measure

The Web analytics portion of any SEO project is where you'll look at progress, and review it in the context of the initial situation analysis.  The feedback serves to redefine and tweak your strategy, closing the loop, and making the system more powerful as it grows and evolves over time.

a. Keep measurements relevant.  Higher search rankings matter.  But it's more important to measure bottom-line impact on business profitability.

b. Who will measure metrics?  Scripts and software record data, but someone must compile and present it to team members.  If trends can be spotted early, you can modify actions to get higher results.

c. How often to measure data?  Collecting and analyzing information shouldn't
become an end in itself.  Choose an optimal schedule, and stick to it.

d. What tools and resources do you need?  How complex and costly your monitoring systems must be depend on the scope and scale of your business and the diversity of your SEO efforts.

e. How will the data be interpreted?  What will be the impact of this analysis on your SEO strategy?  Your planning template must explain this clearly upfront.

f. What's your back up plan?  If things don't go right, how will you bail out?  Who decides when to switch plans?  When will it happen?  While you can't factor in all eventualities, having a set of options is helpful.  Remember, when everything else is equal, the one with the most options wins!

So, there you are!  A planning template for your SEO strategy that can be reliably constructed through following a step by step plan modeled on the powerful SOSTAC framework.

Keep in mind that increased revenues and profit, achieving major business goals, getting to them faster, and lowering costs are the biggest advantages of having a planning template.  It beats blindly using SEO tools or following standardized SEO checklists, and hoping for stellar results.

A strategic effort is slightly more effort-intensive.  It will initially cost more to implement.  It may even take longer to fructify.  But when it does, the results will blow your competition out of the water - and skyrocket your results! 

That's what makes an SEO strategy desirable, and a planning template worth developing.

All roads lead to Rome.  There are many ways to arrive at a winning SEO strategy based on a planning template.  In more than a decade spent working in the SEO and digital marketing industry, this approach detailed above has been what worked effectively for me.  That's the reason I want to share this to help and motivate other business owners and SEO consultants who understand the importance of having an SEO strategy, but are not sure how to go about crafting one.

If you know of a better (or different) way to apply the SOSTAC model to evolve an SEO strategy and create a planning template, do let us know.  I'll do my best to answer questions and help in any way I can.  Please share your comments, questions or suggestions in a comment below, or write to me using the contact form.  I'd love to get a vibrant discussion going on this all-important topic of SEO strategy.

is the founder of Search Planet with over 10 years of experience. He can be found on Google+, Twitter and his Norwegian SEO blog.

The Death of SEO [Infographic]

Over the weekend Google did an update which continues their trend of diminishing the value of domain names in an SEO strategy as they "pump up the brand."

In light of that, we thought it would be a good time to get out in front of the tired "Death of SEO" meme that is sure to appear once again in the coming weeks. ;)

The font size is somewhat small in the below image, but if you click through to the archived page you can see it in it's full glorious size.

The Death of SEO.

Want to syndicate this infographic? Embed code is here. We also created a PDF version.

Curious case of small business and SEO

We all read the advice online: don’t build crappy links. Don’t use short term benefit tactics in SEO. But do we always heed that advice? Can we always afford to?

The latest reality check came in the shape of a small online business in the UK, Children’s Furniture Store (CFS). Jane Copland  tweeted about an online letter in which they announce that, due to Penguin update, they are forced to close their business down.

This really got me. Firstly, I hate to see a small business go under. These people put their hearts and souls into the business and it breaks my heart to see them being closed especially due to changes in Google algo. Furthermore, it seems from their closing letter that they were a victim of bad SEO advice and that reflects poorly on all of us. We have enough attention seekers out there calling us out for asshattery as it is so I would rather be pictured as someone who helps small businesses rather than the one that puts them under.

A lot of people started reaching out to Children Furniture Store’s twitter account, offering help and advice. Unfortunately, it was too late for them; they have already started folding up their business and have ceased trading.

I am sure this is not the only case that has or will have happened. As a matter of fact as a result of my activity on twitter around this, I was contacted by another small business asking for help on similar issues. Other people I know encounter these situations on weekly basis.

So why is this happening? Who is to blame for this? A business is closing down, people are losing their jobs, we can’t just dismiss it as “that’s life” and “business is hard”. We cannot learn anything from this case and other similar cases if we do not take a hard look at all the possible culprits responsible for these situations and try to understand what could have been done to prevent this from happening:

This is the list of guilty parties, according to my opinion, ranked by a decreasing amount of responsibility:

The business owner

The business owner is the most responsible party here. They probably didn’t mind when the money was rolling in and never thought about the “what if” scenario. These are the things that they did wrong:

  1. Never ever put all the eggs in one basket – I think this is the most common and widespread piece of advice given to website and general business owners, yet people manage to ignore it again and again. Had CFS had various sources of traffic (which they could have developed with the profits from the organic traffic) or even had they started developing offline business, Google Penalty would have hurt much less. This is true even if you are not using blatantly spammy SEO techniques, you never know where Google’s business goals may be tomorrow and when the line between what is kosher and what isn’t is constantly moving, you never know when you will find yourself on the other side of the line. Having additional sources of traffic/business immunizes (relatively) you against this scenario. Sometimes you have to bite the bullet and PAY for the traffic – for example Paid Search. Building a social presence would help too. Luckily they HAD kept their mailing list and were able to sell any leftover inventory using it – but mail is a good channel to optimize sales too.
  2. Get educated – there is a lot of SEO information out there. No one can follow all of it. But it is your prerogative as an online business to keep abreast of the most important best practices and pitfalls within the marketing channel that is providing you with the majority of your income. Had this business done their due diligence, they would know not to rely on only one stream of traffic, they would know that the practices used by their SEO provider are shady at best, they would know that they are paying too little for the SEO services for them to safely provide them with edge over their competition in their niche. They would also know what to do when shit hits the fan and not wait for a full year for the second hit which will ultimately decimate their business.


    In this case, the business owner did say that they spent a lot of time trying to read on the internet about similar issues – apparently they didn’t find any “real” advice. Should Business Owners learn to navigate online information a bit better? Or should we, as an industry, make sure that the information found on these issues is top notch? But more about that further down. In this particular case, the owner of the business did several things – tried reading about the possible problem, turned to an independent SEO (who told her to let the site die and start anew) and fired the agency that was probably the cause of all this. Still there was much more to be done and I hope other businesses will act differently in similar situations.
  3. Reach out – as their “we are closing the business” letter started circulating, more and more people started saying that they are willing to help. In a matter of minutes, both in public and private channels, a picture of what needs to be done to help this website started emerging. Getting this kind of analysis from industry experts can cost a lot of money, but if a business owner harnesses the benefits of the SEO community, either through Twitter, SEOBook Forum, Google Webmaster Central forums, SEOMoz Q&A forum, G+, Facebook groups, etc., they can get a pretty clear picture about what hit them and what needs to be done. They would be more aware of the risk levels involved with the SEO strategies they were using and would be able to move away from them much earlier, making the cleanup a more viable option. With all the misgivings of this industry, it has some of the most generous and helping people in it and this can be a tremendous asset for small businesses that are struggling to come with terms with the challenges involved in promoting your website in organic results.

SEO Company

  1. Spammy strategies – one look at the CFS’ backlink profile shows patterns of a backlink network.



    Further conversations with people that are connected to the company showed that this is indeed the case. Bunch of footer links, clearly paid-for blog posts, sidebar sitewide links from non-related sites in non-English languages… You took a small business that doesn’t know what they are doing, promised them wonders at three-digit monthly recurring price and it worked for a while. Did you warn them about the risks? Did you tell them that if Google decides to target these link-building practices, their whole business can go down the drain? Or did you encourage them to enjoy the party while it lasts? Did you instruct them to take the profits of these short-sighted tactics and invest them in diversifying their traffic sources? No you didn’t. You are no better than a drug dealer, reaping profits from the lack of knowledge of unsuspecting client, allowing them to risk their whole business and you should be ashamed of yourself for that. You sir, are an ass hat. 
  2. No responsibility – as the graph attached above shows, the CFS site was hit at two occasions, one in May 2011 and the other in May 2012. According to them, they have stopped working with you by the time WMT warning notices have arrived. Do you think that releases you from the responsibility for your work? What did you do in between those two dates? Did you take responsibility for CFS situation? Did you instruct them on how to fix their situation? How did you allow a business that found itself in a shitty situation, partially due to your actions, to get to the point where they have to close their doors? Do you honestly not care that people are going to be jobless because of the bad advice you have provided?

Google

Yes Google.

By allowing crappy linking strategies to work for so long, they have created a situation where the only viable option to stay competitive in certain niches was to join the bandwagon and use spammy links. You can stand on your soapbox only for only that long and preach “whitehat” techniques while your competitors are laughing all the way to the bank and cashing in. So yes, at some point they will probably be penalized, but until then they will have developed enough capital to be able to safely switch to some other domain/SEO strategy and have developed their brand to the point where they are practically immune from algorithmic changes. You have created a situation in which following your Best Practices was a financially unviable option for a lot of small businesses and for this you carry a part of the blame

Furthermore, you should realize that the information you give out about these penalties is not read only by sinister SEOs spending their days and nights trying to reverse engineer your precious algorithm. Why is it so hard to tell the business owner what is it they are getting penalized for? Tell them “your site has a large amount of paid links/unnatural anchors. You can find these links marked with a huge red exclamation mark in your WMT link report. Get rid of them”. Doesn’t Google have a responsibility of providing decent, informed content around these sort of penalties so that  a business owner can refer back to the source? When they penalize a business – shouldn’t it be their responsibility to say EXACTLY why? Is a bland, notification in GWMT sufficient?

When you Google “Penguin” or “Panda” etc – shouldn’t Google’s own written guidelines on recovery be ranked at top positions, so no one else gets scammed? Yes, it is not all Google’s fault that these businesses were told that it is OK to do whatever it takes to rank. Yes, Google does not owe anyone anything but it would be a sign of goodwill towards those that provide the content of the web for Google to crawl and serve ads on.

The SEO Community

How is the SEO community responsible? By greatly diluting the information space in our industry. The number of inane posts, all written in the same “10 ways unrelated-X affects your SEO-Related-Y” format, all based on conjectures and rehashed hearsay, make it almost impossible for a non-industry person to get to the meaningful information. I have seen articles with link building strategies that were covered in 2006 being peddled as “current” and “cutting edge” in 2012.

Without knowing the authors, companies they work for, their level of experience and history of their posting, there is no way that a person who doesn’t spend significant amounts of time wading through the noise created in the SEO space can know what is reliable and what not. Furthermore, the lack of propensity to call out crap information when we see one, complete avoidance of confrontation within the industry, limiting critical discussion on quality of content behind gated walls of private Skype chats and limited Facebook groups, makes the pruning of this jungle of nonsense an impossible task and for that all of us bear some part of responsibility.

I am really sad for CFS. It depresses me that a business can go under so easily from causes that could have been prevented. There are real people behind these websites, making their living, in spite of Google doing a lot to make their success harder (by promoting big brands and at a switch of an algorithm button making previously acceptable and successful practices - damaging). I hope that this post will help other businesses make sure that they are doing everything possible not to find themselves in a similar situation.

Many thanks to Rishi for helping with editing and some background info.


Branko Rihtman has been optimizing sites for search engines since 2001 for clients and own web properties in a variety of competitive niches. Over that time, Branko realized the importance of properly done research and experimentation and started publishing findings and experiments at SEO Scientist. Branko is currently responsible for SEO R&D at RankAbove, provider of a leading SEO SaaS platform – Drive.

Maximizing Google Analytics Insight for SEO with Custom Reports

Google Analytics - one of the most powerful tools for any SEO, assuming you know how to get the data you need from it. One of my favorite things about Google Analytics is how many tools that put at your disposal for quickly analyzing the data you care most about. But again, that all assumes you know how to get it.

A custom report in Google Analytics is similar to their custom dashboard features in a lot of ways. Remember, the dashboards are meant as snapshots of what's going on with your campaign, these custom reports are what you should be using to fully analyze the results.

Custom Report Categories

To start, you should consider setting up Custom Report categories to organize your reports by subject. You will find this to be the most aggravating/irritating/infuriating part of the process as you attempt to drag your first custom report into your new category folder. The secret is to drag your report slightly to the right while hovering over the category you want to place it in. Then let go and hope for the best. Once you have one report in there it gets much easier.

Creating a Custom Report

There are two key components to a custom report:

  1. Metric: a numeric measurement (like number of visits).
  2. Dimension: a description of visits, visitors, pages, products and events.

There are also two types of Custom Reports you can create:

  1. Explorer: Allows you to drill down into sub-dimensions and includes a timeline where you can compare metrics in the same graph.
  2. Table: Allows you to compare dimensions side by side, with metrics also populated within the table. There is no timeline in this report.

Creating the custom report is easy. You choose from a drop-down menu of metrics and dimensions that you're interested in segmenting your report by.

Creating a Custom Report

You can also create tabs in your report to keep it organized. Any filters you setup on one tab will automatically apply to any other tab that you setup (there isn't a way to turn them off for the other tabs).

Another great feature of custom reports is your ability to use them cross-profile and to share them. To share a report, all you need to do is click the Actions drop-down menu from the Custom Reports overview page, and click share. You will then be able to share the configuration (not the data) of the custom report you just created.

Sharing Custom Reports

SEO Custom Report Examples

If you'd like to save time in your SEO analysis, consider creating custom reports similar to the ones outlined below. I've included the share link for each custom report so you don't have to rebuild it yourself. I tried to mix up when I'd tailor the report to look at e-commerce data, and when it would only look at goal data. You'll need to customize those aspects of the report to best meet your needs.

Also, don't forget to modify the keyword filters I've added. You want to make sure to replace our branded keyword (book) with your own.

Audience Custom Report

Understanding your audience's demographics is an often overlooked SEO practice, but it can go a long way in making certain aspects of SEO (like link building) that much easier.

Audience Custom Report

There are two components to this custom report:

  1. City and Language Overview - this part of the report looks at what cities and languages you receive the most visits from and make the most money off of. You may be surprised to see languages your site isn't even translated in yet that are very profitable.
  2. Keyword Targeting - this part of the report lets you drill down all the way to the keywords that are used by each country and language visitor demographic, and calls out how profitable they are for you. This is a great way to refine your keyword targeting.

How this can help you from a link building front is seeing what foreign languages your blog/linkbait content is most popular in, and then translating it. You could then distribute the translated content for links to popular industry blogs in that language.

Add the Audience Custom Report to Google Analytics

Content Custom Report

The purpose of the Content Custom Report is to identify which content is performing the best with organic traffic. I've set this report up as a Explorer Custom Report so you can drill down and see which keywords are sending traffic to a specific Landing Page. This is a great way to make sure you're targeting the right keywords on the right pages in your SEO campaign.

Content Custom Report

There are a number of engagement metrics I have this report looking at. One in particular I think is important to have with this report is the Social Actions metric. This is a great way to see if the number of social actions correlates with increases in traffic and conversions.

You might consider adding an additional filter (or creating a new custom report) that only looks at your blog content. I'd keep similar metrics in the report so you can quickly identify which blog posts perform the best so you can try and duplicate the results in future content. You may also want to add any event goals you've created to the report, especially if you've set up a event to track comments on your posts.

Add the Content Custom Report to Google Analytics

Keyword Analysis Custom Report

I think this is one of the most valuable custom reports you can run, and it's one of the bigger custom reports that I like to create in my accounts. There are three components to the report: targeting, engagement and revenue.

Keyword Analysis Custom Report

Targeting
This part of the report is pretty straight forward. It's a Flat Table report that places the Page Title and the Keyword that is sending it traffic side-by-side. From there I've added a handful of metrics to determine if I am targeting the right keyword on the right page. Perhaps I'm getting a lot of traffic for this particular keyword, but the majority of people are going elsewhere and/or not converting. This may lead me to do some testing around changing which page I'm optimizing for this particular keyword.

Engagement
Similar to the Content Custom Report, this component focuses on how engaging visitors are when they visit the site via a specific keyword. I love traffic just as much as the next guy, but if that traffic isn't doing anything on my site - what good is it? This report will help you identify problems and opportunities for keywords that have low/high engagement rates.

Revenue
Just how much money is a keyword making you? This component of the report looks at the number of transactions, the revenue generated and the per visit value of organic traffic for each keyword.

Add the Keyword Analysis Custom Report to Google Analytics

Link Analysis Custom Report

Which of the inbound links that you've built are sending you the most quality traffic? Don't forget, there's much more to links than rankings, they are also opportunities for sending high quality traffic to your site that may even convert.

This custom report looks at which of your referrals are sending you the most engaging traffic. Knowing which links are sending you the most quality traffic will help you determine if you should be going back for more or if you can find other sites just like it to get links set up on.

Link Analysis Custom Report

If you're investing a lot of time in getting specific links built, you may even consider tagging them with Google's URL builder tool. This will allow you to track the effectiveness of your link building campaign.

Add the Link Analysis Custom Report to Google Analytics

PPC Content Custom Report

I'm a big fan of using paid search as a way to test which landing pages you want to target your keywords on for relevance. The goal of the test is to determine if you were to target a specific keyword on that page, would the visitor find what they are looking for and convert? This is a great way to minimize the risk of focusing on the wrong keyword on the wrong page and investing months of SEO work to get it traffic.

PPC Content Custom Report

You can use this custom report to look at just that: which keyword/landing page combinations are the most effective from a revenue perspective. Even if you don't run a test like the one I just described, you can still get a pretty good grasp on this just by pulling the report and looking for these opportunities.

Add the PPC Content Custom Report to Google Analytics

PPC Keywords Custom Report

Continuing with our holistic custom reports, the goal of the PPC keywords custom report is simple: identify high performing keywords from your paid search campaigns that you could consider targeting in your SEO campaign.

PPC Keywords Custom Report

The report calls out a couple qualifier metrics, including how much money bidding on the keyword is costing you, and what your cost per conversion is. This is a great way to decide if you can't afford to target the keyword via PPC, can you make up the loss of traffic via SEO?

Add the PPC Keywords Custom Report to Google Analytics

Social Media Custom Report

We've seen the influence social media has on SEO, and now it's time to make sure we're well-informed of any social media data that can be leveraged to improve our campaigns.

This report uses a filter created by Site Visibility to look at all referring traffic from a variety of top social sources. With this filter applied you can look at which social traffic is most engaged with your content.

Social Media Custom Report

If you're tracking social actions you can quickly see which content you've created is being shared the most, so you can figure out what they like about the content and duplicate the results.

I also like to see which social media is converting the best so I can determine if we should be increasing our participation efforts on that social network, or even start experimenting with advertising on that social network.

Add the Social Media Custom Report to Google Analytics

So there you have it, seven custom reports to help you analyze your analytics data faster and easier. What other SEO-focused custom reports have you found valuable?

Tracking Micro Conversions with Event Tracking for Improving SEO Campaigns

Conversions. The one metric we all know we should be focusing on, and yet it's the one thing that gets overlooked the most. So many of us focus on just one main conversion point, and forget how many other types of visitor engagement exist on our sites. These other engagement points, or less-important conversions are what experts call "micro conversions."

World-renowned analytics expert Avinash Kaushik is a strong supporter of the use of micro conversions. In his Excellent Analytics Tip series, he explains the benefits of tracking both micro and macro conversions:

3. It will force you to understand the multiple persona's on your website, trust me that in of itself is worth a million bucks. It will encourage you to segment (my favorite activity) visitors and visits and behavior and outcomes. Success will be yours.

When you understand your various visitor personas, you can create better targeted content, value-adds and better messaging overall. This will only strengthen your SEO campaign and will help guide you to improving your conversion rate and the ROI of your SEO efforts.

Event Tracking in Google Analytics

One of my favorite ways to track micro conversions is with event tracking in Google Analytics. Before I walk you through how to setup events, let's first make sure we understand the difference between events and your traditional goals in Google Analytics.

In the past, a goal in Google Analytics was when any action a visitor would take on your site that took them to a confirmation page. When the visitor reached that confirmation page, Google Analytics would count it as a goal completion.

An event, on the other hand, is when a visitor takes action on your site and there is no confirmation page. A good example of this would be when someone clicks a "Follow Me on Twitter" link on your site. It takes the visitor off of your website and makes you unable to add conversion tracking code to their destination page (because it lives on Twitter.com).

In addition to bringing us cool features like custom dashboards, the new Google Analytics also made it much easier to track events as goals. Which is what we'll be focusing on today.

Setting Up an Event

Events are much easier to setup then you might imagine. All you need to do is add a little piece of customized code to the URL a visitor will be clicking on to trigger the event, and you're halfway there. Let's start with understanding what our event tracking options are.

There are five fields in total that you can use to categorize your event, two of which are optional:

  • Category: The general name of the type of event you wish to track. If you'll be setting up events of a similar topic (like form submissions), you'll want to keep this consistent across all of the events you setup.
  • Action: A description of the action the visitor is taking to trigger the event. So if your category is set to "Forms", your action might be set to "Sales Inquiry".
  • Label: This is an optional field used to further describe the type of event. If you're tracking multiple forms of the same type (like contact forms), you may consider using this field to avoid any confusion with the other events.
  • Value: Suppose each micro conversion does have a monetary value of sorts for you, this is the field you'd use to track that numeric number.
  • Non-Interaction: A true/false field that you can use to prevent a visitor who completes the event and leaves your domain from being recorded as a bounce in Google Analytics

Still with me? Now here comes the fun part: building the event tracking script.

The framework of your event tracking script looks like this:

onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label', Value, false]);"

There are a couple of things you need to remember when you customize the various fields in the script (e.g. "Category"):

  • You must fill in the Category, Action and Non-Interaction fields
  • The Value and Non-Interaction fields do not have a single quote around around them like the others
  • If you choose to omit the Label or Value fields, also omit the single quote but not the comma that separates them from the other fields. In this example I've ommitted both fields, but not their commas:

  • onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action',,, false]);"

  • The Non-Interaction field can only be set to true or false (remember: no quotes!)

Now that you've set up the script, you should place it within the href component of any link you are setting up. Here's an example of what it would look like:

<a href="http://twitter.com/seobook" onClick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Label', Value, false]);">Follow us on Twitter!</a>

The final piece of the puzzle is adding the event as a goal in Google Analytics.

  1. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the Google Analytics profile you're setting up the goal in
  2. Using the sub-navigation where your Profile information is listed, select the Goals tab
  3. Choose the goal set you wish to add the event to (I like to categorize my goal sets)
  4. After you name your goal, select the Event radio button
  5. You now need to populate the event details exactly how you set them up in your script. If you omitted a field, just leave it blank

Event Tracking

You've now setup your event as a goal!

Types of SEO Micro Conversions

Now that the hard part is out of the way, let's brainstorm some micro conversions we could be tracking.

Social Engagement

You can use event tracking to track Share This links and blog comments. That way you can quickly see which content has the highest engagement so you can build more of it.

Affiliate Links and Ads

You may also wish to track when someone clicks one of your affiliate links or a banner you have on your site. This is a great opportunity to take advantage of the Value field so you can keep track of how much each of those clicks are worth (and perhaps double-check that you're getting paid the right amount).

Downloads

If your site has white papers, presentations, video, audio or any other type of file that users can download, you can easily keep track of those downloads with event tracking.

Follow Me/Like Us Links

If one of your macro conversion goals is brand awareness, you should consider adding an event whenever someone clicks a "follow me on Twitter" or "Like us on Facebook" link on your site. That way you can track back the source of those follows/likes to SEO.

Live Chats & Customer Support

Many service companies still utilize live chat to quickly address customer inquiries and problems. When someone clicks the live chat link, you can trigger an event to count it as a goal completion.

Additionally, if you use a third party customer support center, you can trigger an event whenever a user clicks the outbound links for those services.

These are just a few of the micro conversions you could be tracking on your site. While every site is different and is interested in tracking different things, hopefully this will give you a few ideas of additional conversion points you could be looking at to better understand your audience. The better we understand our visitors, the better job we can do as SEOs to attract more of them.

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How to Super Size Your Listings in Google

As Google continues to push organic search results further down the page in favour of greater ad exposure and universal search, it is important to maximise the amount of space your website receives from the search giant. The more real estate your listings have, the more likely you are to receive visitors to your website. Below are 6 ways to increase your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) real estate.

1. Dual Rankings

If more than one of your pages is relevant for a search query on any given page, Google will reward you by grouping these listings together:

For example, imagine your homepage was listed in position 2 for the keyword “running”. On the second page of Google in position 11 you have a different URL that also ranks for the same keyword. If you build enough links to push the secondary listing to page 1, Google will automatically promote it to position 3. The marginal effort needed to push a listing from position 11 to position 10 is typically much less than moving it from say position 3 to 2. This technique can have a huge impact on the number of visitors to your website. A listing in position 11 will receive about 0.66% of all clicks compared to 6.03% in position 4. To achieve dual rankings, build both internal and external links to the lower ranking page using the anchor text of the keywords for which you wish to receive dual rankings.

2. Meta Description

The meta description is the summary that describes your website and should provide a compelling call to action to for any potential customers. I often see websites using just a few words for their meta descriptions, resulting in only a single line in the SERPs. By adding a few more words, a website can take advantage of the second line that Google allows them for describing their site. Each line of the SERPs is valuable real estate and you should make an informed decision about whether you are going to forgo any space. One creative technique that Darren Slatten uses is to incorporate ASCII art into his meta description, increasing it’s space by 250% compared to a normal listing:

3. Forums

Not only are forums an excellent tool to leverage the long tail of search but Google also rewards them with up to 4 additional listings in the SERPs. These extra listings not only take up more valuable SERP real estate, they also stand out and catch a user’s eye compared to a regular listing:

Forum listings will often also contain an additional line detailing the number of answers, as shown in the example above.

4. Rich Snippets

Rich snippets are designed for sites that contain reviews, products, business listings, recipes, or events. Depending on the type of information your site contains, rich snippets will not only enhance your rankings, making them stand out from the crowd and improve your CTRs but they will also increase the size of your listings, as shown in the examples below:

You can add Rich snippets to your website by using any of these three formats: microdata, microformats, or RDFa. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo recently announced a joint venture called Schema which provides webmasters with a shared collection of recognized rich snippets that are supported by the major search engines.

5. More Results

Google won’t usually show more than two listings for each domain on each of it’s pages. However, if your site is a good source of relevant information, Google will display an additional line under your listing:

You can increase the probability of Google showing this extra line by having a diverse set of content on your site, interlined with relevant anchor text.

6. Sitelinks

If Google believes your website is highly relevant for a keyword phrase, especially one that is navigational in nature, you may be rewarded with sitelinks:

Google generates sitelinks automatically, you can’t do anything specifically to receive them (though you can block any that you don’t want via your Google Webmasters account). To improve your chances of receiving sitelinks, you should follow the best practice of using informative, compact anchor and ALT text for any links to your site.

The techniques listed above can help increase your SERP real estate by 2 or 3 lines, doubling the amount of space a regular listing receives as well as helping your website stand out in a sea of homogenous listings.

 

David de Souza is the founder of MatchingDonations.org, a website that allows your charitable donations to go twice as far. He is also the SEO strategist for the International Professors Project, a non profit that encourages professors to volunteer for teaching jobs abroad.

How to Start an SEO Business

flying-solo

Pretty basic question for an SEO right? It would be nice if the answer were equally as basic or simple. It's an important question, even more so since a sweeping update by Google knocked out unsuspecting webmasters.

Beyond the stuff we know got hit (some RIGHTLY so), we probably will never know the true ramifications with respect to how many "little guys" had their livelihoods or potential livelihoods destroyed by a heartless, unforgiving, and sometimes inaccurate algorithm.

Evaluating the Risks

I know people who worked their rear ends off and had their business fail, in addition to people who were lazy and failed. Sometimes it's timing, sometimes there's some luck involved (though luck is generally brought about by hard work), and sometimes it's just a matter of working harder or spending more then your competition.

The risks are plentiful for the self-employed and they only scale up if you:

  • have a family to support
  • have a mortgage
  • need to buy health insurance
  • have limited capital to invest
  • can't afford to lose on a few of your bets

Ways you can combat those issues are to:

  • live below your means
  • work a part-time job at night or during the day
  • have your spouse work part-time
  • not buy every single device that Apple makes :)
  • be prepared to work longer hours than you'd like

The problem is that self-employment, especially if you've worked in the corporate world before, has all the allure of the pipe dreams sold in The 4 Hour Work Week (I guess Tim Ferris doesn't count self-promotion as work, even though he does it about 100 hours a week :) ).

self-employment-beach

You might think self-employment is all about working less, spending more time with your family, going to the beach while everyone else is in a cubicle, and all that jazz. While it certainly can be at some point, it is not how you will start out 99% of the time.

Self-Employment Screw Jobs

Start looking around to find an accountant who will tell you what your tax liabilities will be as a sole-proprietor or a single-member LLC. If you really want to take a kick to the shins, get a quote for health insurance and see how much it doesn't cover.

A friend of mind recently pointed out to me that all the individual health insurance plans do not cover maternity costs. You can get coverage for that under a group policy but unless you have employees you are going to be paying roughly 4x the cost of an individual plan for you and your family.

He lives in the US, is self-employed, and has a family. The American dream right? For he and his wife to have a second child, they would need to get a group health plan at least 60 days prior to the wife becoming pregnant. Say that everything works out to be on-time, they are looking about an increased cost of about 20-25k over the course of a 9 month period to have a child in the United States!

All of that is assuming a perfect pregnancy and a 100% healthy baby. The point is to layout just one large, large risk you might be unaware of ( rubbish health insurance ).

Another thing to keep in mind, beyond the health insurance, is that unless you start one there's no retirement benefit, no paid vacation time, and no paid sick time. It is a really good idea to purchase short-term and long-term disability insurance for yourself as well.

It's Not an Either Or Question

staying-out-of-debt

The smartest thing to do would be to starting whittling down your household bills now and start slowly building your business. Keep your day job and work at night, you'd be working 15 hour days if you started from scratch anyway so why not do it now but get paid (with benefits) for your time?

Once you begin to make some cash on the side, see how far you can scale it (reasonably) before you need to make a decision on whether to fully jump in or whether to keep it as a side gig where you can eventually outsource a good chunk of the tedious work.

Some people loathe the idea of a boss and that's fine. Even good people have bad days so it's not always going to be peaches and cream but if you are in a spot where there is mutual respect and fairness then I'd say hang on to it until you can financially manage to go out on your own.

Even when you are "the boss" working for yourself if you have any level of success you will soon be "the boss" with employees of your own. And many successful businesses don't have 1 boss, but rather hundreds or thousands of them - their customers.

Maybe it's Not for You

Self-employment is not for everyone. It takes awhile for it to really pay off professionally and personally. When you first start out you may not have enough capital to outsource things like:

  • web design
  • programming
  • link building
  • bookkeeping
  • content creation

Not being able to outsource all that upfront is probably a good thing. Many attempts at outsourcing fail because the outsourcer is not competent themselves in those particular tasks. Having experience in these areas is helpful because if a freelancer or staff member leaves you hanging, you'll be able to keep things running efficiently while you search for another staff member.

Working for a family business or a steady corporation isn't something to be looked down upon by any means. The key to mitigating the risks on both sides (getting laid off for example) is to be financially prudent, continually invest in yourself (earn a degree, start a side business), and be loyal to whom you work for or with. If you do those three things you will typically be ok in any reasonable situation.

Start Off as an Apprentice

work-parttime

Maybe you know someone in the SEO or PPC industry that might be willing to have you work with them for awhile or perhaps you aren't ready to fully go at it on your own just yet. Most employers realize that the best employees sometimes are the more motivated and ambitious ones and with that comes the risk that those employees will look to move up and on at some point.

Starting off this way has risks too (might not be as stable as a large corporation for example) but you can learn a lot about the overall and day to day processes that make that particular person or group successful. I'm not for the idea of building your personal brand on the back of someone else's brand equity but if your brand develops from the hard, quality work you do for someone else then that's great.

I wouldn't go in with the sole purpose of using your position to quickly build your brand and bolt. I'd go in with the purpose of working your butt off for someone who gave you a great opportunity and see what develops from that. Usually the latter will result in both sides being more than happy.

Eliminating Distractions

This part is more relevant if you have a non-working spouse or a spouse who might work part time. Little things that can really add up to time sucks include:

  • paying the bills
  • making the monthly budget
  • dealing with household vendors
  • scheduling and rescheduling family appointments
  • doing the household shopping
  • etc...

You should be focused on your business and the associated responsibilities. If you are doing any of the above, try to transition that to your spouse or significant other. It's not just the hour or two it might take for you to do those tasks but it's the stopping of your business activities and the mind-flow disruption associated with starting and stopping tasks frequently.

Evaluating the Decision

In this weak and unstable economy it is really hard to reasonably project out 5 years on a life changing decision. There are so many variables to take into account that it's difficult to give a tailored answer to each situation.

If you are at the point where you need to make a decision or want to make a decision down the road, there are some key points to keep in mind but financial variables are some of the most important variables in this equation.

It's fine to want to do something and have the drive to do it but if it's going to potentially create a financial hardship quickly then it is really the wrong decision. There are a few really good options for someone who is on the fence for financial reasons.

We covered some of the reasons above, such as:

  • learn and work on your business part-time while keeping a day job
  • see if you can start by working with an experienced person in the field
  • take up a part time job and/or see if a part time job is a good option for your spouse or significant other
  • start living below your means and save some cash for rainy SEO days and for investing in knowledge + small ventures

self-employment-stress

The other elephant in the room is stress. The stress of being the breadwinner is stressful enough, but if you have no safety net or if your business is brand new (thus more unstable than 9-5 corporate stuff) as well then it is really stressful. This is something to keep in mind and something you might want to try and emotionally reconcile before you start.

You might also find that doing it part-time and maintaining a "day" job is a really good fit emotionally and financially. If Google blindly swings an ax, and you get hit, you can rest assured that the sun will still come up tomorrow and will that direct deposit on Friday :)

The point remains that there are many options available to you to help figure out if working for someone else or yourself is really the best fit. In either case, working and studying harder (and longer) than others is a solid base to start from :)

SEO For Designers, Developers & Managers

SEO on your own site is straightforward, at least in terms of the politics. SEO'ing a site that a team works on is another matter.

You will come up against barriers. These barriers are often put up by designers, developers, copywriters and management. Frustrating as it is for the SEO, this is the reality of working on a site alongside other people, all of whom have agendas and requirements that may differ markedly from your own.

So how do you navigate this space? How do you ensure your SEO objectives can be met when other people may be resistant to change, or openly try to block you? In this post, we'll take a high-level, conceptual look at the challenges the SEO faces when working on a client site, and talking-points to help explore and clarify concepts.

1. Why Are We Doing SEO At All?

SEO is a pain.

It's complicated. It gets in the way, particularly when it comes to design. Why do we need headings and a lot of text when a picture tells a story? SEO appears to be an arbitrary, dark art with little in the way of fixed rules, and the client probably doesn't care about it anyway.

The thing is - if SEO is done well, a client may throw a whole lot more money at the site in future. Everyone likes to build on success, and that means more business, and more exposure, for everyone involved. On the internet, traffic = success. Traffic = money. A site that few people see, no matter how well executed, will likely fail, just like a site that fails to engage and convert visitors will fail. The client may not know they want SEO now, but you can be certain they'll be asking questions about it after launch.

If SEO is done poorly, the site may not be seen by as many people as it otherwise would. What use is a beautiful design that is seldom seen? What use is great code that is seldom used?

The value proposition of SEO is that it helps get a site seen. It's a powerful marketing channel, because most people use search engines to navigate the web. Sites that deliver what the search engines want stand to gain a lot more traffic than sites that do not undertake SEO. If your competitors are undertaking SEO, this puts your work at a competitive disadvantage. Their site will be seen more often by search visitors. Their web agencies will likely get more business as clients see greater returns on their investment.

That's why we do SEO. To be seen.

Of course, a site can be seen by other means. Word-of-mouth, social media, links, brand awareness, and offline advertising. A site doesn't need SEO, but given that it is a relatively easy win in terms of cheap traffic acquisition, the extra effort involved is negligible compared to the upside benefits. It's like being given a choice of having a shop located on main street vs a location way out in the desert. Much the same effort involved in building, but significantly different traffic potential.

2. SEO Is A Design Element

Just as copywriters require space to insert paragraphs and headings, SEO's require space to do their thing.

If you're a designer, an SEO will likely provide you with a list of their requirements. These requirements need not be onerous, any more so than leaving space for copy is considered onerous.

There are two key aspects where SEO needs to integrate with design. One aspect is the requirement for machine readable text, provided in a format the search engines are able to read, and derive meaning. Search engines "think" mostly in terms of words, not pictures. Make design allowances for copy that includes lot of headings and sub-headings, a technique which also dovetails nicely with usability.

The other key aspect is crawl-ability. A search engine sends out a spider, a piece of code that grabs the source code of your website, and dumps it back in a database. It skips from page to page, following links. If a page doesn't have a link to it, or no crawlable link to it, it is invisible to the search engines. There are various means of making a site easy to crawl, but one straightforward way is to use a site map, linked to from each page on the site. Similarly, you should ensure your site navigation is crawlable, which means using standard hyperlinks, as opposed to scripted/executable links. If you must use scripted links, try and replicate the navigation elsewhere on the page in non-scripted form, or within the body of the text.

For most sites, that's pretty much it when it comes to design considerations. In summary, the inclusion of machine readable text, and a means for a spider to crawl easily from page to page.

An SEO may also wish to specify a page hierarchy and structural issues, where some pages are given more prominent positions than others. Of course, this needs to be weighed against navigation considerations for visitors who arrive at the site via other means.

3. SEO For Developers

Like design, there are two key areas of integration.

One is tagging. SEO's will want to specify title tags, and some meta tags. These need to be unique for each page on the site, as each page is an entry page as far as a search engine is concerned. A search visitor will not necessarily arrive at the home page first.

The title tag appears in search results as a click able link, so serves a valuable marketing function. When search visitors consider which link to click, they'll use the title tag and snippet to influence their decision.

The second aspect concerns URL's. Ideally, a URL should contain descriptive words, as opposed to numbers and random letters. For example, acme.com/widgets/red-widgets.htm is good, whilst acme.com/w/12345678&tnr.php is less so. The more often the keyword appears, the more likely it will be "bolded" on a search results page, and is therefore more likely to attract a click. It's also easier for the search engine to determine meaning if a URL is descriptive as opposed to cryptic. For an in-depth look at technical considerations, see "SEO For Designers".

One workaround if the database needs unique codes is to translation at the URL level, using URL rewriting.

4. SEO Is A Marketing Strategy

The on-page requirements, as dealt with above, are half the picture.

In order to rank well, a page needs to have links from external sites. The higher quality those sites, the more chances your pages have of ranking well. The SEO will look to identify linking possibilities, and point these links to various internal pages on the site.

It can be difficult, near impossible, to get high quality links to brochure-style advertising pages. Links tend to be directed at pages that have reference value. This is a strategic decision that needs to weighed during site conception. Obviously, few sites strive, or want to be, Wikipedia, however there are various ways to incorporate reference information into commercial sites where the primary purpose of the site is not the publication of reference information.

For example, include a blog, a news feed, publish the e-mail newsletter to the site, and/or incorporate a reference section within the site. It doesn't matter if this section isn't viewed by visitors who navigate directly to the site. It provides a means to get a lot of information-rich content into the site without disrupting design and other commercial imperatives. Think of it as a "mini-site" within a site.

Not every page needs to be for the purposes of SEO. SEO can be sectioned off, although this is often less ideal than more holistic integration throughout the site.

5. Strategic Factors For Managers

Concept, design and development can screw-up SEO.

Poor integration can result in loss of potential traffic. This traffic will go to competitors. The longer a site doesn't use an SEO strategy, the harder it is to ever catch the competition, as a head-start in link building is difficult to counter.

If your aim, or your clients aim, is to attract as much targeted traffic as possible - as most site owners do - then SEO integration must be taken as seriously as design, development, copy and other media. It may influence your choice of CMS. It may influence your strategic approach in terms of how and what type of information you publish.

Whilst SEO can be bolted-on afterwards, this is a costly and less-effective way of doing SEO, much like re-designing a site is costly and less effective than getting it right in the planning stage. If SEO is integrated in the planning stage, it is reasonably straightforward.

The time to incorporate SEO is during site conception. SEO is a text publishing strategy. Design and development will need to make minor changes to the way they approach a site build. Doing this retrospectively, whilst not impossible, is more difficult, and therefore more costly.

Coda: Flash Workarounds For SEO

There are various workarounds to existing search-unfriendly design, but I'd advise to avoid the problem in the first place.

Flash, whilst a useful tool for embedding within sites, should be avoided for the entire site. Flash is a graphics/animation format, whereas search - and the web in general - is primarily a text format. If you build an entire site using Flash, then your competitors will overtake you in terms of search visitors. The formats simply do not gel.

One work around is strategic - split the site in two. Use Flash as a brochure site, and create a hub site that is text based. Consider including a "printable" version of the site, which will give the search engines some text to digest. Whilst there are technical and strategic ways around Flash, they are often clumsy and tedious.

The search engines can make sense of most sites, but if you're expecting to get rewarded by search engines, then it pays to stick as close to their technological strengths and weaknesses as possible.

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