Vanity URLs on 3rd Party Websites Are Worth Almost $10

Best Thing Since Sliced Bread!

Recently lots of internet marketers hopped on getting Facebook vanity URLs claiming them to be a second coming of domain names. But the problem with networks like Youtube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc etc etc is that you end up being someone else's user generated content, and it is virtually impossible to move a person from content consumer on those 3rd party sites into a customer on your site.

Social Media Traffic Typically Lacks Value

Most social media traffic is too fast and shallow to build a meaningful relationship from. Rarely are social media visitors worth as much as a penny.

Sure you can drop them at the top of a sales funnel, but then you still have to convert them. And the people who are ahead of the curve with technology are often the hardest to influence via advertising, and are the least receptive of offers unless they hear of them recommended from friends.

Social Media Mentions vs Independent Reviews

If someone recommends us, then I would much rather have that recommendation point at our site from their site rather than through a 3rd party website that might go away at some point. The third party recommendations on social networks tend to be brief/short/limited in context, so they don't carry a lot of weight toward selling something, and those mentions are often people whining about free stuff not being good enough and people recommending to their friends that they just grab a torrent of your work.

The natural bias of social media sites is toward people who value their time lowly (or else they would spend more of their time in tighter niche communities and/or in higher order business functions). Sure I have mentioned some of the recommendations for our stuff that people have done on social networks, but a link to a more in-depth review like this one is far more appealing because there is so much more context, and people who have read and followed that blogger for a while likely trust that review more than a random Twitter user trusts a 140 character recommendation.

Viral Does Not = Sales

Even the canonical example of proof of value of viral videos was not that successful. Millions of Will it Blend? video views helped the Blendtec company grow by less than a factor of 10. Many successful professional SEOs use SEO to increase the value of websites by that in less than a year, and have done so over and over again. With SEO you can create a million dollar business from scratch in about a year's time, largely because search has so much implied intent...so you don't need a huge traffic stream to monetize if you pick the right markets.

Domain Names vs Usernames

I was a bit slow to buy the seobook.org and seobook.net domain names, but recently bought the pair for less than $500. They allow me to further dominate brand related searches, while blocking potential competitors in the search results. For $500, that is not bad!

Some Facebook user named Peter Simik is squatting the facebook.com/seobook vanity URL and thinks I am stupid enough to pay $10,000 for it (assetize.com/accounts/view/210). I wouldn't give him $1 for it on principal. But there is not even a competitive threat there...people already have hundreds of connections to my real profile there, and few people are going to associate with the fake account.

More recently a couple readers highlighted that someone is on the newly launched Hunch.com website using my picture and our site logo to promote some crappy SEO website I have never heard of (hunch.com/seo-techniques/result/do-it-yourself/1928754/). That is obviously illegal, but it will only serve to undermine the trust in such 3rd party networks if they are full of fake & squatted accounts.

Protecting Your Brand

Services like KnowEm allow you to register your username on over 100 web2 sites to minimize any time wasting that might be created by someone hijacking your brand. Most of the web 2 sites will fail, but time is money, and it is hard to know which ones will be a success right from the start.

Even 1% of All Web Page Views Can be a Poor Business

Sites like Geocities , Anglefire, and Tripod were stars from about a decade ago, back when general web communities were hot then. And most of those types of sites failed.

A year ago MySpace was predicting great growth, but they have since rescinded on their big real estate deal, Google complained about how hard it was to monetize the traffic, and just earlier today the WSJ reported further job cuts:

MySpace announced plans to reduce its staff by nearly 30%, saying staffing levels were "bloated" and hurt its ability to be an efficient company. The social networking site, owned by News Corp., named a new leadership team earlier this year in an effort to reinvigorate the service. The move brings MySpace's U.S. work force to about 1,000 people.

As the Google ad deal is set to unwind MySpace, is downsizing their operation! According to Alexa, MySpace has over 1% of web's pageviews and they are struggling to make a business out of it.

How many of these general social media sites will be around in a decade?

Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless

Rel=Nofollow Wastes PageRank

About 2 weeks ago Danny Sullivan highlighted that Google follows Javascript links, and that sculpting PageRank using rel=nofollow no longer works. Matt Cutts shared that second bit to the shock and awe of the SEO industry at the recent SMX conference.

And Nofollow Has Done so For Over a Year Now

While Matt Cutts only recently announced the change, this change is something that was done over a year ago:

More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Matt explained why they never disclosed the change back then:

At first, we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t. In retrospect, we’ve changed other, larger aspects of how we look at links and people didn’t notice that either, so perhaps that shouldn’t have been such a surprise. So we started to provide other guidance that PageRank sculpting isn’t the best use of time.

Why Google Engineers Once Pushed Nofollow PageRank Sculpting

Originally Google created rel=nofollow in what was claimed as an attempt to minimize the effects of blog comment spam on their search results. But the tag never decreased blog spam, it only decreased the ability of bloggers to influence search rankings by leaving back-scratching comments on each other's blogs.

Matt Cutts quickly extended nofollow's purpose to include use on paid text link ads as well. But given that Google AdWords sells links (and often to scammers) some people may have seen trade issues with forcing the new proprietary nofollow tag onto the web. Promoting PageRank sculpting gave Google a way to legitimize a tag which otherwise added no value to anyone except search companies.

After enough time passed and Google saw too much collateral damage popping up from rel=nofollow usage, they pulled the rug out from underneath it. Nofollow already had enough momentum, and was a functional part of the web. After a Google employee slipped nofollow into a working draft of the HTML 5 specifications it was time time to clean up the mess and inform SEOs about the nofollow change that happened over a year ago.

Some SEO Professionals Claimed Huge Benefits From PageRank Sculpting

Over the last year many SEOs have claimed that nofollow tests worked amazingly well which show up directly in the bottom line. And ironically, sharing/hyping this incorrect information worked well from a marketing perspective because...

  • it makes them look cutting edge and allows them to sell additional services
  • writing about things which are new, uncertain, and untested yields links (because for every person who is an SEO expert there are 1,000 ditto-heads linking to whatever sounds new or important)

What the SEOs were testing on their high profile public SEO websites was more a reflection of branding and marketing efforts. As they made noise in the marketplace their brand spread and that made more sales. We recently (maybe a month ago?) added nofollow to some links on our site, and we failed to see the lift that other SEOs claimed. And the SEOs that claimed to see the obvious huge amazing lift failed to report the drop off when Google changed how they handled nofollow, which sorta shows the error in the testing method.

Why Fake SEO Experts Recommended Using Nofollow Everywhere

It is no surprising that many self-proclaimed experts aim to misinform novices, as beginners are typically the biggest piece of a market and their topical ignorance makes them the easiest to monetize.

This is precisely why get-rich-quick email list internet marketers make so much money. There is always a new, desperate, and gullible crop to feed off of - an Eternal September. And until they get burned a few times and hardened by the market (and/or go bankrupt) they convert at rates well above what other market segments convert at. Greed makes it easy to make poor financial decisions, especially when matched against seasoned marketers and promises of automated wealth generation.

A More Holistic SEO Strategy

Part of my SEO philosophy has been to try to get the easy wins that you can figure out, but not to know the relevancy algorithms in intimate detail because it gets hard to isolate testing variables as sites get more established, and when you are competing for core keywords in big, competitive markets the SEO game comes down to industrial strength link building, public relations, social networking, branding, advertising, and other aspects of classical marketing.

Most of the SEO Market Misses Big Changes

Think of how many SEO blogs there are (literally thousands), and...

  • a month after a major update happen a lot of people say nothing changed (even though Google confirmed the change and we highlighted it on our blog, backed by hard ranking data across many industries)
  • nobody said anything when Google changed how they treat nofollow (we didn't notice the change because we have not used it much on many of our sites because we were afraid it would be taken as an SEO flag, given how Google profiles SEO professionals)

Lots of alleged testing in the SEO industry, but most of the stuff shared publicly is nonsense or misguided junk worth less than nothing.

What About "Experts" Who "Test" Everything?

About 6 months ago I talked to a person who claimed to be an expert at fine-tuned testing, and I was surprised as to how clueless they were about the influence of domain names on SEO. Even after I told them and showed examples they still didn't get it. They were clueless even after seeing the evidence. Domains are one of the few variables that are exceptionally easy to test, and it really validated my opinion that excessive testing can be a waste of time, as that the well known self-labeled "expert tester" was so ignorant about something that is so easy to test. Another self-promotional expert recently claimed that hyphenated domains were the way to go because he has data on 40,000 customers who are all using his misinformation. (Of course he didn't word it that way, but a sampling error he made, and 40,000+ people are losing money because of that advice).

Some People Know The Algorithms, but do Not Share

The one disclaimer I would on this front is that there are some SEOs who likely know the relevancy algorithms better than many Google engineers do. Guys like David Naylor, Greg Boser, Fantomaster, and Eli can do a lot of deep-algo testing based on how many sites they operate and how good they are at doing it. But those guys spend a lot of time and money doing their testing, and don't share their advanced research publicly until they feel it makes sense to from a strategic standpoint, as noted in our recent interview of Eli:

Isn't the value of many aggressive SEO ideas inversely proportional to the number of people using them? What makes you decide what ideas to share and when to share them?

In many cases that's absolutely correct. I've shared several techniques that have died within days of posting them. Just to list a few examples, my Abandoned Wordpress series, Wikipedia Series, and Amazon.com exploits. In all these cases I know before I ever post it that it'll die moments after I do. So most of the time I'll post it out of greed. They are usually techniques I've been using for several years and have since retired them out and quit using them. Naturally with any technique others are bound to figure it out. When I start seeing them popup underground and are being used against me in increasing numbers when I'm no longer using them myself I might as well wreck it.

If you only have a few sites testing many variables is much harder than many people try to make it seem, and it takes a serious investment and skill level to be at the level of the above mentioned names.

SEO "Experts" Jumping from 1 Bad Recommendation to an Over-Reactive Increasingly Worse Strategy

Based on the current Google information on nofollow, some SEOs are already recommending that you strip the ability of commenters to add any outbound links to comments so you can hoard more PageRank. And some are suggesting putting comments in an iframe. But in most cases, such advice is at best misguided. Why?

  1. Comments offer free relevant textual content that helps your pages rank for a wider array of related keywords.
  2. Allowing some relevant outbound linking makes the page more useful, and makes some people slightly more likely to want to comment.
  3. When you are competing for core keywords in big, competitive markets the SEO game comes down to industrial strength link building, public relations, social networking, branding, advertising, and other aspects of classical marketing.

Anything that makes your site more of an island (especially for new sites that need to buy market-share and momentum any way they can) makes it harder to compete against more open sites and well established competitors. If you close off a marketing channel then you are simply ceding a marketing advantage to a newer (or a more savvy) competitor.

What Does $14 Million Worth of PageRank Look Like?

From Hitwise:

CircuitCity.com is back after Systemax purchased the brand and domain at bankruptcy auction for $14 million. Systemax also owns TigerDirect.com and acquired CompUSA last year. CircuitCity.com was quickly relaunched last week to capitalize on the remaining brand strength and traffic to the website.

Not to mention the link equity, eh?

Not a bad strategy there Systemax. That traffic is cheaper than AdWords, will pay for itself in less than a year, and since they are a corporation the Google rankings + traffic will stick. This is probably even a better buy than CompUSA was.

If you are ever worried about creating a second site focused on a high margin portion of your business, just remember that this company owns at least 3 electronics retail brands targeting the exact same keywords. And Google loves it.

This sort of domain name + brands + links transaction highlights multiple fallacies in Google's broken view of the web...

  • Google tries to scare you about buying a link or two in the dark corners of the web (and even takes away your ability to funnel the link equity you earned), and here are these brands being bought and sold (with link collections) like true commodities.
  • If they don't like unnecessary duplication then should 1 company run 3 parallel competing websites with the exact same business model in the exact same niche targeting the exact same keywords? It is viewed as legitimate because they are a corporation, but since when have corporations been on a higher moral ground than individuals?
  • Brands don't make the web less of a cesspool. They often create the cesspool. They simply find something that works, wrap it in brand, and look for ways to scale it. They love.com to scale and automate. Any intelligent SEO that has many Fortune 500 clients will tell you that some of their clients are far spammier than they could be on their own websites, largely because of brand.
  • As corporations grow more web savvy, they will create more of the same "nasty" no-value-add duplication that Google complains about when passing judgement against the affiliate industry.

Which reminds me...I really should create a fake perceived large corporation (founded by lawyers, perhaps) to buy assets, which would mitigate Google engineer interference and profiling as we try to grow our humble web business.

Competitive Review

Once you've decided on a niche to target, you then need to determine the level of competition within that niche. No matter how good the SEO, if your competitors offer a better service, you're unlikely to see the payoff for all your hard work getting high rankings.

S.W.O.T

A SWOT analysis can help you determine how your site compares to those already in the niche.

SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. You perform this analysis on your own site, and those of your competitors.

SEO SWOT Method:

  • Query the serps for the keywords you want to rank for
  • Pick out the top few sites in your niche. The top sites will usually appear under a mix of keyword terms relating to your niche
  • Determine the strengths and weaknesses of the competition
  • Determine the strengths and weaknesses of your own site

This exercise need not take long. Whilst you can can go into incredible detail with a swot analysis, the key points are to identify what you are good at, and what the competition is good at. You're not looking at the SEO elements, you're looking at the service or product offering. If your site is informational, then look at the quality and quantity of information they offer.

Are there areas where you are better than the competition? If you can't find an area where you are better than the competition, either refine the niche you're targeting, choose another niche, or figure out a way to be *markedly* better than the other guys. Out-ranking them won't really help in the long run, because searchers seldom stop at the first site they find. They compare sites against each other.

This is why you don't necessarily need to outrank a site that offers a poorer service than you do, early in your campaign. You simply need to position against it. For example, your TITLE tag could be worded to show how your offer is better than theirs.

By going through this exercise, you'll also get a good feel for opportunities, and the level of competitive threat.

Barriers To Entry Are Your Friend

On the web, there are few barriers to entry. Anyone can start a website and copy your idea.

However, not everyone can start a Google. Or an Amazon. Or a Facebook. Those companies have barriers to entry in their markets, mostly to do with the scale of operations. It is very expensive to do what they do, and they're also entrenched as long-time crowd favorites. This barrier to entry plays to their advantage, and make s it very difficult to unseat them. Also, being the biggest, they also tend to grab the lion-share of revenue in their space.

Try to look for barriers to entry than are you can get over, but others can't. Is there something that will make it difficult for new entrants to follow you? Can you spend more money, or partner with someone to make your offer difficult top emulate? Can you leverage your personal reputation?

If so, you stand a good chance of fending off competitive threats from latecomers.

Beware Of Well Resourced Competitors

Can your competitors outspend you? Do they have more people working for them? Do they have waves of writers producing content and spreading the word?

It is difficult, although not impossible, to compete with such sites. You can work smarter. You can be more efficient. But your task will be harder than if your competitors have a similar level of resources to you.

In SEO terms, check out Mike Grehan's "Filthy Linking Rich" (PDF) for reasons why the rich get richer, especially in terms of SEO.

Perceptual Mapping

Perceptual mapping is a graphical technique that attempts to visually display the perceptions of potential customers. Typically the position of a product, product line, brand, or company is displayed relative to their competition.

Perceptual maps are very useful for finding unserved markets.

The Wikipedia example is a good one:

Cars that are positioned close to each other are seen as similar on the relevant dimensions by the consumer. For example consumers see Buick, Chrysler, and Oldsmobile as similar. They are close competitors and form a competitive grouping. A company considering the introduction of a new model will look for an area on the map free from competitors. Some perceptual maps use different size circles to indicate the sales volume or market share of the various competing products.

Do likewise for your niche, and look for areas of clear space. That's where the opportunity lies

Complete SEO Strategy, Based On Marketing Fundamentals: Part One

Given SEO is a recent phenomenon, many SEOs stumble into SEO from some other discipline or career.

Attend any SEO gathering, and you'll find ex-coders, designers, sales people, lawyers, entrepreneurs, techies and people from all manner of backgrounds. SEO talk often centers around the arcane technical aspects of the craft, such as tagging, linking, keywords, density and ranking.

However, in terms of function, SEO is most closely related to marketing.

Like marketing, SEO is about getting your message, product or service in front of people, and having them visit your site, and taking action. If that doesn't happen, an SEO campaign is near worthless.

By grounding an SEO campaign in proven marketing strategy, you can not only out-rank others, but also lead visitors to do exactly what you want them to do.

Such a strategy may be common knowledge to experienced SEOs, but those new to SEO will save a lot of time and effort by spending some time absorbing and understanding these fundamental principles. Experienced SEOs, it would be great if you could share your experiences and knowledge of the intersection between SEO & marketing in the comments :)

The Six Fundamental Principles Of Marketing

Like SEO, marketing is part art, part science.

Even if you cover all the technical aspects of SEO, that is no guarantee of ranking well. Ranking well has a lot to do with being interesting enough to link to, and influential and visible enough to attract attention in the first place. Likewise, there isn't a set of marketing specific marketing rules to follow. They will vary, depending on the niche you target. This is why it is important to understand the ideas behind them.

There are six fundamental principles of marketing that relate to SEO:

  • Market Analysis
  • Competitive Review
  • The Four Ps: Product, Price, Place & Promotion
  • Development Of A Marketing Strategy
  • Economics
  • Revision and Refinement

Step One: Perform Market Analysis

  • Ask "what does the consumer need?"
  • How many consumers need this product/service?
  • What is their buying process?

You must fulfill a need. If there is no need for a product or service, the SEO strategy will fail. You might get rankings, but rankings without traffic that can be converted into desired action - i.e. a sale, a click, a sign-up - are worthless.

How do you find out if there is a need? Undertake market research.

Market research falls into two categories: primary and secondary. Primary research is conducted from scratch. Typically, this means interviewing people and gathering information and collating that data. Secondary research is where the data has been collected for other purposes. You can obtain surveys and reports, and adapt them to your needs i.e. government census data.

SEOs use a mix of primary and secondary research, typically in the form of keyword research. They look for keyword terms related to their niche. By the way, if you're unsure about what niche to target, look for a niche that is growing quickly. You want to avoid saturated areas that are declining in popularity. How do you do this? A variety of ways, perhaps including...

  • Build where you have proprietary knowledge
    • it is easier to be successful if you already know a lot about a market
    • any experience you have lowers the investment needed to research the market AND ensures you can write at a higher and more compelling level than people who do not know the market
    • you can use your current experience, momentum, exposure, and market data to build out successful parallel projects
  • Go beyond the keyword
    • Look at demographic details for competing sites and keywords to get inside the mind of the searcher
    • Don't just look at search volume, but also consider the intent behind the keyword, how you would monetize that demand, and the visitor value.
  • Watch what companies are advertising? How they are positioning themselves for growth?
  • Look at political and macro-economic trends

Keyword research is a rough indicator of need. For example, approximately 130K queries per month indicates there is a reasonable need for "Britney Spears pics".

But this is the point where a lot of those new to SEO slip up.

Basic Market Analysis Applied

The SEO wants to create a site that will sell Britney Spears pictures - no doubt you've already spotted the flaw in this plan, which we'll discuss shortly.

The SEO has conducted some basic research, in the form of keyword research, using the Google Keyword Research tool, or any number of keyword research tools.

The SEO discovered this:

There is a lot of "need" for Britney pics. The first two steps of the strategy - what is the need, and how many people have this need - appears to be fulfilled. The SEO acquires a lot of Britney pictures, sets up a site, and ranks well for Briney pics related keyword terms.

And fails to make any money.

Why?

There are various reasons, but fundamentally the SEO failed to ask "what is the buy process?"

The Missing Link: The Buy Process

Had the SEO considered this aspect, he would have realized people don't actually buy Britney pictures. People just look at them for free, because there are a lot of places to get Britney pictures for free. A buy process simply doesn't exist, except in the b2b market between paparazzi and gossip magazine publishers.

That's obvious, right. But it applies to any SEO niche research. Seek to understand the buy process of those with the need, which will help you decide if a market is worth ranking highly for in the first place. What makes someone buy something? Will they buy it online? Are they capable of buying something over the internet?

In this example, the webmaster may choose to run ads instead. Again, this will likely meet with limited success, because people looking for Britney Spears pics aren't likely to be in a buying process, and so advertising, such as Adsense, will be priced accordingly.

Such traffic is near worthless.

Such a site might attempt to sell a closely related service, such as a subscription to gossip magazines, or music, or clothing. This is probably where this idea would end up. The one caveat is using this approach to drive brand awareness. Again, the SEO still needs to consider the buy process. What is the visitor really buying? An idea? A solution to a problem? Information? Awareness? We'll get into the economics of such questions over the next few days.

This is why SEO, like marketing, is a mix of science and art. There is science involved in ranking well, and there is art in knowing which terms are worth ranking for, and why.

The Search Taxonomy: Getting Inside the Mind of the Searcher

Bill from SEO By The Sea published a good article entitled "Writing Content for Small Businesses Online", in which he talks about search taxonomies.

For those new to the topic, I thought I'd go over it, and show it applies to SEO strategy.

I'm basing this article on the study "A Taxonomy Of Web Search"(PDF), by Andrei Broder. Andrei is VP of Search Advertising at Yahoo, although he wrote this report while he was with AltaVista.

What Is A Search Taxonomy?

In summary, a taxonomy is the practice and science of classification.

In terms of search, we focus on classifying keywords into three distinct classes - navigational, informational and transactional.

If you can determine user intent behind keyword queries, you can better target your keyword strategies. For example, if your aim is to sell goods online, you may choose to focus on transactional queries e.g. "where can I buy an LCD monitor....", as opposed to informational queries e.g. "power requirements of an LCD monitor......".

There is, of course, a lot of cross-over between these three types of queries, which I'll address shortly.

The Three Types Of Searches

In the study, keyword queries are divided into three groups.

Navigational

A navigational query indicates the searcher wants to find a specific site.

For example, a search for "BMW" most likely indicates the the user wants to find BMW.com. Navigational queries usually only have one "right" answer. The user either finds the site they are after, or they do not.

Informational

An informational query indicates the searcher is looking for specific information.

For example, "symptoms of cancer", "San Francisco" or "Scoville heat units". Informational queries tend to be broad. The informational query doesn't tend to be site specific.

Transactional

A transactional query indicates the searcher wants to perform a web-mediated activity. For example, "buy LCD TV online".

If your aim is to sell goods and services online, you might focus more on transactional queries than informational queries. The problem with such classification, of course, is that it is narrow. We can't really determine user intent from just looking at the keyword, however this classification gives us a useful way of thinking about which keyword terms might be the most useful in achieving our goals.

Results Of The Survey

There are some really interesting results in this report.

24.53% of people want to get to a specific website they already have in mind. This is a navigational query

This is why brand, and making your brand memorable, is so important. Searchers often type a site name into a search engine, rather than type http://www....etc into the address bar. Optimizing for the name of your site is imperative if you want to catch navigational queries.

68.41% of people want to find a good site on a particular topic. They don't have a specific site in mind. This is an informational query

A lot of SEO is focused on this type of query.

Why did people conduct their searches?

  • 8.16% were shopping for something to buy on the internet
  • 5.46% of people were shopping to buy an item, but not on the internet
  • 22.55% of people wanted to download a file (i.e. image, music, software, etc)
  • 57.19% None of these reasons

What were people looking for?

  • 14.83% were looking for a collection of links to other sites regarding a particular topic
  • 76.62% The best site regarding this topic

Interesting, huh. Site's like About.com and Mahalo capture both these types of queries.

Eye Tracking Studies

Now, with these figures in mind, check out this eye tracking study.

Although the test data is limited, it is interesting to note that sites targeting a transactional query can be further down the search result set than the informational query and still receive attention, if not a click.

When conducting an informational query, if searchers don't see the information they want in the first search result, they will refine their search. The same goes for navigational queries.

If you're targeting the transactional query, however, the wording of your title tag could give you an advantage over those who rank higher than you. When conducting a transactional query, searchers often hunt further down the result page, or across to the Adwords, to see which listing sounds most interesting to them.

How To Integrate This Knowledge Into Your Strategy

So how do you apply this information?

If you choose to focus on one type of query.....

Know Your Users

There are many cues of relevancy left by the market. All you have to do is look for them.

Look at the ads

Google typically only shows AdWords ads above the organic search results *if* they generate a high clickthrough rate (CTR). And since advertisers using AdWords are paying for every click, you can presume that for expensive keywords many of those ads are matched up with strong user intent.

Tools like SpyFu ad history and KeywordSpy can help show you who has been advertising on those keywords for the longest period of time. Those who have been doing it a long time are typically either optimizing their ad copy OR losing a lot of money.

Where Are They Searching From?

Google's keyword tools, Insights for Search, and Google Trends show where a particular search query is popular (and if there is any interesting news that is driving search queries). In addition to seeing the query breakdown by country (or state, or city), you can view ads from different locations by using the Google ad preview tool and/or the Google Global plug in.

Understanding Search Demographics

Google's Insights for Search categorizes user searches for the broad match version of a particular keyword

Microsoft offers a tool to categorize content.


Google's Ad Planner lets you select pre-defined audiences, websites, and keywords to analyze.

Both Microsoft and Quantcast offer similar functionality on a per website or per keyword basis.

What Did They Recently Search For?

Microsoft offers a search funnels tool which allows you to research keywords they recently searched for prior to searching for a keyword, OR keywords they searched for after they searched for a keyword.

Microsoft also has an entity association tool which can be used to find keywords that were co-occuring in the search or searched for in the same session.

Commercial Intent?

Microsoft's Online Commercial Intent tool estimates if search queries or web pages have a high probability of being informational or commercial in nature.

Who is Getting The Click?

Since Google AdWords factors ad clickthrough rate into their calculations, you can presume that the top advertisers are either getting a decent CTR, or are paying through the nose for clicks.

Compete.com's keyword destination data lets you know the relative click volume sites receive for a particular search query.

Further Analysis

Beyond data from the above tools, you can also infer a lot of data just by putting yourself in the mind of the consumer

  • Determine which type of search you're targeting - informational, transactional, navigational - and segment the audience accordingly
  • Align your site to the intent of the user. For example, a searcher who is after information is going to want to see an authoritative looking site. What is an authoritative looking site? It will differ depending on the market you are in, but it is highly unlikely the searcher will react well to a site plastered with advertising. The site will have markers of authority, such as recommendations, perhaps a display of qualifications, and information laid out in an "academic" way (Wikipedia), as opposed to a blatant sales pitch (Multi-Level Marketing). The transaction searcher will want confirmation (e.g. a big logo) s/he has arrived in the right place.
  • Look for emotional angles and user intent targeting strategies that competing businesses are missing. Is free shipping a big deal? Is everyone trying to sell to a person that is looking to research and compare? Find a compelling way to stand out and differentiate yourself from the competition. Even if you are only targeting 30% of searchers you can still get more traffic being the only person doing that rather than the 8th consecutive similar offer.
  • Track user behavior to confirm intent. Get people to sign up for more detailed information, note which pages people spend the most time on, which keyword terms lead to conversion, etc. Feed this information back into your strategy

The transactional user is more likely to forgive ads. In fact, they may even welcome them, so long as the advertising is relevant.

Conversely....

Integrate All Three Search Types

One of the problems with the study, as noted in the study, is that it is very difficult to determine intent just by looking at the keyword.

For example, an informational search could end up being a transactional search once the user is satisfied that with the answer to the information they were seeking. For example, "symptoms of flu" might turn into a purchase for a flu remedy.

That's why it can be a good idea to target all types of query, in an integrated way.

Carefully consider how you word your title tags. Integrate brand aspects for the navigational query i.e. "SEOBook.com - SEO Training Made Easy". Convey the information you provide "i.e. SEO Training" and transactional information i.e. the implication is that people can buy "SEO training". This information is also repeated in the snippet, although webmasters often have less control over this aspect.

Keep in mind that transactional doesn't just mean e-commerce. It can relate to any desired action, such as a sign-up to a newsletter, or a request for more information.

One aspect of web marketing that is getting more important is building communities and tribes. People who will return, in other words. You're unlikely to engage a community of people if all you ever offer is transactions. This is why Amazon integrates reviews and other social aspects in order to hook people in on a number of levels, even though the primary aim is to sell goods. Also check out Bill's excellent "Bills Blues" example.

What approach do you take? Do you narrow in on one type of query? Go wide and try to catch all three? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Social Cues & Increasing Sales

Honesty Tax

The anonymous nature of the web acts as a tax on anyone who is an honest merchant. Sales are driven by perceived value, and many marketers spend 90%+ of their time & effort on front end marketing and optimizing their sales channels, while providing little to no substance to anyone who buys from them. By the time those customers get to people like us, they are already more distrusting, cynical, and jaded due to having been scammed - in many cases multiple times.

To someone new to a field, scams often look more legitimate than the real thing. Just ask anyone who has spent their share of the 100's of millions of dollars on acai diet reverse billing fraud promoted through fake blogs advertised on the Google content network.

Quality vs Perceived Quality

In terms of sales, the quality of the product or service is typically nowhere near as important as how much mindshare you have. That last sentence sorta reveals one of the major weaknesses of most non-salespeople. You can't just focus on having the best product and think that will be enough. You have to use push marketing until you build enough momentum that it starts becoming a force of its own. And it needs to be periodically refreshed through advertising, public interaction, and viral marketing.

This is where advertising, building trust, website credibility, and cumulative advantage play a big roll in making a business ubiquitous so the perceived risk of being a customer is much lower.

Word of mouth marketing is great, but you have to encourage it, and promote it.

Scaling a Website

The good news is you do not need a lot of employees to look large, so long as you are good at structuring your customer interactions. Through the above strategies (and being super-efficient), our site (which has 2.5 employees and has its highest value portions locked up as member's only content) gets more traffic than competing businesses with 20 employees and some of the largest public forum websites (with 10x as many pages in Google & no barrier to entry).

The Alexa blog recently referenced the success of our site's current model:

seobook.com gets more traffic than seochat.com and seomoz.org. But how do they do it? Loyalty. Despite getting less traffic from search engines, and despite having fewer links than seomoz, and despite scaring away potential customers with aggressive marketing [editorial note: the quoted article was published while we were testing a pop up that we are no longer testing], seobook is doing quite well. They are converting visitors to customers, and turning those customers into regular visitors.

The take-away lesson is that good SEO is important, but it can't compete with a loyal and engaged user-base. Seobook.com is a perfect case in point.

Building Loyalty

Such loyalty does not come easy though. This quote represents the barrier you have to overcome if you want to build a lasting online community that matters:

In effect, this guy who has twenty thousand friends is completely alone in the real world.
...
In this age of great digital connectedness, we increasingly find ourselves clinging to illusions of intimacy, adrift in a sea of anonymity, surrounded by the great faceless, nameless masses from which no commonality can be extracted.

What barriers are preventing people from getting the most out of your community? What can you do to make your interactions more life-like? How open should your community be? What pieces should you focus on building most aggressively? How can you make it grow larger without damaging the quality of the community? How many customers can you have before you need to hire more people? Who should you hire? What should they work on? Where can you add value to your customer's experience? How can you leverage your knowledge most efficiently?

Ubiquity

Growing a community is a quite tricky process because every type of marketing causes expected and unexpected consequences. Our ebook, when priced at $79, was coupled with a brand that was seen far and wide. The price-point was so low that it was an impulse purchase that reached virtually every piece of the market - entrepreneurs, small businesses, b2b, retailers, Fortune 500's, hedge funds, etc. Direct interaction with 10,000+ customers made us quite good at knowing what questions are commonly asked, and how to answer them accurately and efficiently. The most common questions got worked into the content.

Death of Ubiquity

The growing complexity of search (particularly the subjective nature of Google hand edits), the general low perceived value of ebooks (largely destroyed by scammers), and Google teaching people to steal our ebook (via suggested "torrent" searches) killed our old business model. Luckily we saw those market changes coming, and shifted our business model in time to more than double our revenues while focusing on higher quality customers.

The minute a profitable business model appears on the web, many forces work to commoditize and disintermediate it. The only ways to stop that are to build a platform that other people build on, or to build deeper relationships with customers.

One of the most important points of Seth's Tribes is that to build a community you have to have outsiders.

Growing a Community

Growth of a community beyond a certain point gets tricky though. Any membership site has some level of decay rate and some level of growth. If you push into markets where you don't fit well then you (temporarily) increase your revenues while lowering your lifetime customer value, lowering average customer quality, polluting your community with people that do not fit, and increasing your maintenance cost of advertising to less receptive markets and supporting transient short-term members.

Rather than trying to get more members, it often makes sense to increase what you get from current members, and look for ways to increase the value delivered to members to increase member stay time.

Price as a Filter

Even though our training program has a similar price-point as the ebook did, it is perceived as being far more expensive because it is recurring. That increases the perceived risk to some of the potential customers who are less committed to learning SEO. This higher perceived cost shaped our community to filter out some of the worst pieces of the market (like the people who buy lots of internet marketing junk on Clickbank and reverse charge most of it) and attract many high quality customers (many of our members have 20x more the business experience and know-how than I do). But it makes it harder for the brand the site to be as relevant to as wide of a group as the old business model was.

More Filters

Our price-point and the stuff we write about on the blog likely makes many people think that we aim for high end experienced web professionals who have a lot of SEO experience. While that perception keeps our forum levels above the level of quality anywhere else on the web, it also causes us to miss 90%+ of the market.

The approach of simply having hands down the best customers, the best customer service, and delivering the highest level of value (which causes people to stay subscribed for a long time) was the best approach to take when running this site as a 2.5 person business, because churn is expensive when you do marketing, public relations, advertising, quality assurance, content creation, customer support, and customer interaction (all while keeping up with changes in the market). We still want to keep our core customers, but might try expanding.

Appealing to More Beginners

You are not your own customer. I am not my own customer. Designing for yourself gives you a good chance of creating something of value, but most of the buying market for how to information are people new to the field.

Put another way, beginners are the largest market segment, and everyone was a beginner at one point in time.

This is precisely why email list internet marketers make so much money. There is always a new, desperate, and gullible crop to feed off of - an Eternal September. And until they get burned a few times and hardened by the market (and/or go bankrupt) they convert at rates well above what other market segments convert at. Greed makes it easy to make poor financial decisions, especially when matched against seasoned marketers and promises of automated wealth generation.

If we are to expand, we will likely need to reach some of the market that thought our site was too advanced for them. Our offers won't be as hyped as the email guys, but we do have a lot of channels we could use much more effectively. Our training program is certainly easy enough for most beginners to get it, but we need to make our marketing reflect that. My wife used to do offline tech sales stuff, and she is going to help try to do some of the online stuff for this site too. Given that she is up for helping out, I think we can grow the site again...there are lots of things we could make better (like re-doing the intro video, making more video content, and building a few more tools) that I had not got around to because the community was about as big as it made sense to be without more labor.

Websites and tools can be great for both beginners and experts. We just have to figure out how to better reach both market segments without alienating the other. :)

Google AdWords Advertiser Statistics, via SEM Rush

Google gained popularity with advertisers in part through the accessibility and affordability of their AdWords ad program, which made it possible for almost anyone to advertise online. When the ad platform was young and inefficient (due to limited competition) you did not need to be skilled to profit. You only needed a credit card and a decent website.

But over the years Google has made their system much more complex, and increased competition + better competitive intelligence tools + all the layers of ignorance tax baked into AdWords (default match type as broad, expanded broad match, automatic matching, search syndication & content network on by default, tons of click fraud on the content network, etc.) have made profitably running an AdWords campaign much more challenging.

Google has hundreds of thousands of advertisers, but over 80% of their United States ad revenue comes from the top 1.35% of advertisers, according to a recent study of keyword data by SEM Rush.

The above number might be skewed toward larger advertisers due to the limited size of the SEM Rush keyword database, but the additions of expanded broad match, automatic matching, and quality scores means that the top advertisers are more likely to show up on longtail keyword search queries as well. And the limited database which over-represents some larger advertisers also misses inactive accounts and micro-advertisers which would likely mean that 80% of Google's ad revenues are coming from closer to only 1% of their advertisers (rather than the 1.35% in this data sample).

Why do brands sort out the cesspool, as Eric Schmidt fondly states?

  • brands provide most of the ad dollars
  • creating a brand typically requires buying a lot of awareness via advertising
  • branded keywords can be expensive
  • ad waste, fraud, and sloppy account management by brands can be justified as a brand spend, and is under less scrutiny than ad spend of direct marketers

More Google AdWords advertiser data from SEM Rush after the jump

Is Trust The New Competitive Advantage?

There is an interview on Open Forum in which Seth Godin interviews Richard Branson. The question is: Why is small business is better than big business?

Branson explains how he structures Virgin so that it is a series of small companies. People know each other by first name. People need to know each others strengths and weakness, and collaborate, and be responsible for the work they do. Branson believes this open small company results in a better service to clients.

Check out this article on Harvard Business:

In the worst economy we've seen in decades, Passlogix, a privately owned 100-person software development company, just received over a million dollars in prepaid commitments for the next three to five years of service....Now, how do you explain that? The bigger companies aren't getting similar deals.....I think it's a trend. And understanding it might just be the difference between failing and thriving in this economy.

The difference, the article goes on to suggest, is the trust factor.

People need to be able to trust companies to deliver. And in the current climate, where big companies are just as likely to go to the wall as small ones, big companies no longer have the advantage of being trusted to deliver by virtue of their size.

Small companies can build trust quickly in ways that big companies cannot.

How To Establish Trust

SEOs and marketers spend a lot of time trying to get traffic to sites. This is a difficult task, but it's a task that only solves half the problem.
The problem is how do you get traffic to you site and get it to do what you want.

If my traffic dropped by 50% tomorrow, I couldn't care less, so long as conversions stayed the same or increased. Traffic, like ranking, is is not a good metric of success, unless you're selling advertising by the page view, and even then it can be seriously misleading. i.e. how many people acted on the ads?

What makes people engage? Underlying all transactions, is that the buyer trusts the seller to deliver.

In order to help establish trust, consider these factors, especially if you're operating in an area where you're looking to sell an ongoing relationship:

Familiarity & Personality

It's never been easier to build a personal, trusted brand. Twitter, social networks, e-mail lists, blogs and other personal communication channels all make it easy for people to see how you think and act before they engage with you.

If you're seen often enough, in the right places, doing good things, people will come to you, because the known feels safe. The unknown is risky.

This is why PR and networking are critical. They help establish familiarity, which leads to trust, especially if the same person customers see writing articles/Twittering/networking is the same person who answers the phone.

Let customers to know you before you know them.

Reputation

Do you have markers on your site that show you have earned a good reputation? Credible media mentions? Recommendations from satisfied customers? Proof you've got customers?

Again, a quick search is likely to reveal the state of your reputation.

Stability

With companies going to the wall left right and center, stability is a major factor for any long term engagement.

Ever worked with a colleague who is inconsistent and unpredictable? Is that trustworthy? Consistency and predictability build trust.

Respond to emails and inquiries promptly. Say what you'll do, do it, and then tell people you've done it. If you've been operating for a while, make a point of saying it - anything that screams "consistency and predictability".

Immediacy

Do you trust that web site with (c) 2004 at the bottom? Is it still going? Google is chock full of outdated search results from companies, that, on face value, show no sign of life. That's not a good look in the current economic climate.

Staying up to date and engaged is important, especially if the real time web becomes more established, which I strongly suspect it will. Customers will expect companies to communicate using the same method and channels they do, and these channels increasingly favor the immediate and frequent over the slow and infrequent.

Transparency

Big companies have long indulged in being secretive, unapproachable and oblique. It isn't very appealing.

Why on earth would a small company follow this model? Plenty of them do, presumably to create the illusion they're just like a big company. But big no longer means better like it used to.

Open people and companies build trust. If a company is transparent in it's operations, people are more likely to trust them. Show people who you are, what you're about, and what problems you can solve for them. It's often a good idea to say if you can't solve someone's problem, you'll tell them, and recommend to them someone who can. By doing so, you'll even build trust with non-customers, and you never know who they'll talk to. Every engagement is an opportunity.

There is nothing worse, from a trust point of view, in a company saying they'll do something, and then not do it.

Big companies often fall into this trap because their sales force are separated from their operations divisions, and the sales people are working on commission. Sales people can promise the world in order to get the signature, knowing they're not the ones who have to deliver. That's some other faceless divisions problem.

Small companies seldom have this problem, a problem Branson also tries to counter by organizing small.

Got any ideas on how to build trust? How have you built trust with your customers?

The Next Big Shift In Web Marketing

There was an article on TechCrunch entitled "Jump Into The Stream"

In short, the article is about how the internet appears to be going through its next big shift. It is moving towards becoming a stream of immediate information. The web is being organized by "nowness"

This real-time stream has been building for a while. It began with RSS, but is now so much stronger and swifter, encompassing not just periodic news and musings but constant communication, status updates, instantly shared thoughts, photos, and videos.

I thought the article gives us a compelling way to think about this shift:

First and foremost what emerges out of this is a new metaphor — think streams vs. pages. In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration - yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pages and reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibility set were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser, sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. It’s dynamic, it doesn’t live very well within a page and still very much evolving. A stream. A real time, flowing, dynamic stream of information — that we as users and participants can dip in and out of and whether we participate in them or simply observe we are a part of this flow.

But isn't this just social media marketing? We've known about that for a long time now. Yes. But the concept of "nowness" and immediacy give us a great way to make sense of it, and a better understanding of how to make it work for us.

One of the criticisms we often hear about search engines is that a lot of the information is dated. Google has tried to address this problem by focusing on sources such as Wikipedia, that have a community of updaters, or pointing you towards news content, if your search is time dependent, or allowing you to sort by date. Search is also rather anonymous, as opposed to personal.

The appeal of Facebook/Twitter is that they provide an immediacy of information. There is a constant flow, updated often. They also provide this information in the context of a trusted filter i.e. your friend network. That's a big shift in how information will be accessed, especially as more and more people come to view the web from this perspective.

If the web is indeed a place, it is starting to look less like a library, and more like a river.

What Does This All Mean For The SEO?

It means SEOs will need to think more about what traffic is, where it comes from, and how to hook it.

Look at where people are spending their time. Increasingly, it isn't on web pages or sites. It's within a trusted channel that provides a flow of information. So a site owner needs to think about how to direct these streams towards a site, and make sure people hang around long enough to buy what the site owner is selling before they move on.

Obviously, search engines aren't going to disappear. Nor are people going to stop publishing web pages. Nor are they going to stop visiting web pages. But what are the characteristics of social media activity, and how does it differ from search visitor activity?

I think the main characteristics of this channel are immediacy, the fleeting visit, trust, relevancy, and remarkable-ness.

So:

  • Encourage user registration on your site to help lock people in
  • Offer time-limited membership deals
  • Offer forums, tools, multiple content formats, and other interactive elements that mimic the appealing aspects of social media
  • Be unique, memorable and remarkable so people talk about you to their friends
  • Go niche. Me-too and generalist is unremarkable
  • When going broad, leverage existing networks to facilitate faster growth
  • Focus on establishing trust

The Twitter/Facebook/Social Media streams are like the rest of the web in that most of it is junk. So how do people filter the noise and focus on the good bits? Trust is one aspect.

Do people say "Hey, look at this great secured loans site?". They don't. We'll, not unless they're pimping for said secured loans site. The stream is not going to favor the mee-too approach, either. It's going to favor the remarkable approach. Do people on social media sites point out the mundane?

So re-read Seth Godin, and think about "being remarkable", and how to apply it to your strategy.

Incidentally, when asked about Twitter today, Larry Page had this to say:

I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search. At first, my team laughed and did not believe me. With Twitter, now they know they have to do it. Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about realtime

Google aren't asleep on this issue.

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