My Biggest Mistakes as an Internet Marketer

May 17, 2012 By Mike Nierengarten 3 Comments

Avoiding mistakes in the evolving industry of internet marketing is near impossible, and I am not immune. I have outlined a few of my biggest mistakes to help you avoid a curious phone call from a client or an embarrassing slide in a monthly report. Make sure these misjudgments are not in your internet marketing repertoire.

1. I Listened to Google

We all know the friendly call from your Google rep offering to help optimize your account. When you’re new to the game, someone offering to do your work for you or let you test a new product sounds great (why not get paid for Google’s work). When Google first came calling, I was all about offloading some of my work to them. This is typically not a sound strategy.

Google is all about the money. Google reps are like stockbrokers looking to push the latest stock. The higher ups send word, and the reps push, push, push the latest product. One day it’s radio ads. The next it’s the Display Network then Google+ social extensions. Google’s version of account optimization is “spend more money”.

Next time a Google rep calls offering helpful advice, kindly let her know you have her number and will reach out to her when she’s needed.

The same holds true for SEO, Google is only interested in making its job easier. Google doesn’t want to hunt down every purchased link, private blog network, or link wheel. It certainly doesn’t want to get called out by the NY Times. Google wants site owners to fall in line and make it as simple as possible for Google bots to crawl and rank the web.

Blatantly purchasing links for an insurance company on a Japanese anime site has a higher probability of eventually being viewed as spam than creating your own network of private blogs. Rather than listen to Google, understand what works, why it works, and the likelihood that it will continue to work in the future. Remember: Google can & will change the rules of the game.

2. I Lacked Creativity

As an SEM/SEO strategist, I view myself as a numbers guy. I am neck deep in cost per click, conversion rate, link value, search volume, keyword ranking difficulty, etc. Too often I get lost in the data, forgetting to throw the numbers aside and get a little creative.

Numbers are clear cut and provide decisive strategies, but without creativity, I found it nearly impossible to discover a blue ocean, an untapped market, free of competitor ads. When I think of creativity, I picture the Old Spice campaign or Mad Men, but effective SEO/SEM requires thinking outside the box. A few examples:

Inserting “Too Cute to Eat” in the ad text for a chocolate company significantly increased clickthrough rate & sales (people simply wanted to see the chocolate)
Targeting key phrases from a competitor’s newsletter to appear in ads in their inbox
Retargeting to your retargeted audience, effectively marketing automation via the display network
Targeting an industry conference with a free ticket offer to the conference

3. I Ignored My Client’s True Needs

In retrospect, this seems extraordinarily obvious, but in the midst of battle, when you are out there fighting Google bots and competitor bids, what the client really wants can get drowned out. I remember one of my favorite accounts: the client had strong budgets, the account was complex, and best of all, we were killing it.

Even though CPA had dropped significantly and orders were breaking records, the client wasn’t happy. Why? My client couldn’t communicate why we were so successful. She didn’t understand what was going on and felt frustrated and lost. I was on one side of the phone, pumped that we were crushing it, and she was on the other side of the phone feeling completely left out of our accomplishment. My client needed to feel ownership, and because she didn’t, I was failing.

Every client is different, a limited few only care about improving sales. I have seen clients stay with an agency for many years without ever seeing their SEO improve. Most clients want a sounding board, quick response time, and to be included in decision making. If their company makes a little more money, that’s cool too.

Making Mistakes is Inevitable

I have made serious mistakes – quick example, changing an offer on my client’s landing pages from a whitepaper to a demo potentially cost my client 10′s of thousands of dollars. But, in the instances where I have failed, I explained why I thought the strategy would work and what we learned from failure. Clients are understanding, and many of my clients have left agencies that were less inclined to admit failure.

Undoubtedly, I am currently making mistakes that I will only recognize down the road, but the worst mistake you can make is not owning up to failure. I have never had a client fire me for admitting a mistake, but a client is near guaranteed to distrust you if you don’t immediately address any failures.

Filed Under: internet marketing, SEM, SEO

SEO Video Tutorial

May 1, 2012 By Brian Kane Leave a Comment

A Guide to Onsite Search Engine Optimization

We have been updating some of our video guides and have new versions of our general SEO best practice overview and hands on SEO Videos. For all the new online marketing opportunities now available to use creative social media, video marketing and so on, one of the biggest mistakes I still see businesses make when it comes online marketing is that they skip the basic step of proper search engine optimisation planning.

Indeed even when it comes to many web build projects seo is often seen as an afterthought of website development, an added (sometimes optional?) service, and something that is bolted on after the fact. Anyone who really understands online marketing knows that in reality a good SEO strategy should be the foundation of any web development project and indeed is a core component of the wider digital marketing strategy.

The basic idea of ‘optimising your website pages for words and phrases your potential customers are searching’ is still so obviously a fundamental part of online marketing. There is still nothing more targeted than a Google search for a product or service and when you consider all the activity that a company might get involved in to promote search engine rankings e.g. building links, digital PR, guest blogging, social interaction etc, it becomes clear that to get the maximum benefit from all this activity then good fundamental search engine optimisation is crucial.

The videos below only cover the onsite implementation side of search engine optimisation and do not go into detail on the all important aspect of keyword research (we may cover this in another video). Most SEO practitioners have their own process when it comes to keyword research and it’s worth noting that while keyword research is not “rocket science” there is some science involved.

Something else thing that disappoints me when I look at website proposals (the ones that include seo planning) is when I see only few hours work proposed for keyword research. The process of selecting the optimum choice of keywords should factor in all sorts of considerations such as achievability of rankings, visitor intent related to keywords, competitor keywords, exploration of buying keywords, research into long tail keywords and much more. It’s clear that to conduct this exercise properly is both important but also time consuming and involves a level of expertise. To skip or short cut this process would be a fundamental flaw to any web build and ongoing online marketing activities.

This first video outlines the principles of onsite search engine optimisation, the key role of content and the importance of optimising every single page of a website.

This video demonstrates the exact elements in each webpage which need to be edited in order to optimise the page for search engine ranking purposes.

Filed Under: SEO, SEO In House

WordStream’s Internet Marketing 150: The Top Internet Marketing Companies 2012

April 27, 2012 By Angela Wilkinson Leave a Comment

Whether it’s like a LOTR (Lord of the Rings) or a sought after treasure map, WordStream’s latest infographic is a reference list that’s both engaging and useful for explorers travelling the dynamic land of Internet marketing…okay I’m stopping with the map japes before I hit the “here be dragons” references.

Japes aside, it is a valid point that for many (even when your job role is not marketing), you have to engage in Internet Marketing or at least have a knowledge of what the key activity areas are. When you first venture into looking at the key activity areas, or are wanting to refresh your knowledge, it can get confusing; there is no end to the different companies offering services and products, be it Web Analytics or the latest in Marketing Automation.

Released this week the WordStream Internet Marketing 150, maps out the top Software and Saas Provider landscape; categorising 162 companies into 10 major business categories: Content Marketing & Blogging, Conversion Rate Optimization, Crowdsourcing, Email Marketing, Marketing Automation, Pay-Per-Click Marketing (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Management, Video Hosting & Management and last but definitely not least, Web Analytics.

WordStream have explained that the companies included in their provider map have been selected against the following criteria:

Are market leaders in their category.
Provide proven, innovative solutions to improve web marketing processes.
Have strong reputations in their field.
Provide tremendous value to individuals and businesses.

So while you wouldn’t be reading this unless you had some interest in marketing activities and you probably recognise some of the names in this infographic, it’s worth while holding onto this map and checking out those names you are less familiar with.

If you are at the beginning of your journey in Internet Marketing, or even regrouping your efforts before jumping back in, these 10 key areas will help give you a focus for reviewing your current strategy. For those with strategy in place, but seeking out a new provider, the map is a great place to start the initial research!

Internet Marketing Software List [Infographic]

Filed Under: Blogging, CMS, Conversion Rate Optimization, Email Marketing, Infographics, pay-per-click, ppc, SEO, social media, Video Analytics, Video Optimization, Web Analytics

Leveraging Content for SEO – a recent example

April 26, 2012 By Angela Wilkinson Leave a Comment

Who would have thought an Australian Driving School, one that started less than 18 months ago, would be getting a mention on TechCrunch within 15 minutes of alerting them to a new blog article?

When we received the email from No Yelling Driving School, I did wonder if perhaps it was linked to a new app to help learner drivers prepare for life behind the wheel, but no, the email clearly stated it wasn’t due to them launching the “latest and greatest Facebook app”.

What had been created was a new userstyle, a Linen Background for Google Docs.

What follows is an example of what you can achieve by using shareable content to gain placement in multiple sites, including high authority ones like TechCrunch.

Google Docs Background

Google Docs allows you to create and work with documents online, if you are using it daily you may appreciate its clean background, or perhaps you may find it bland and the lack of contrast hard on your eyes. I’ve put before and after screenshots below so you can see what the Linen Background looks like (click to see the images in full size).

We’ve been talking with two of the co-founders Matt Williams and Jasper Boyschau to learn more about how the background came about.

No Yelling is owned and run by three 21 year old Brisbane guys who were less than satisfied with their learning experience. Although they are a driving school, Jasper describes them as young and passionate about minimal design and modern tech; and they try and incorporate this as much as possible into No Yelling.

Matt is described by Jasper as having “some minor OCD” when it comes to the interface design of apps and software that he’s using regularly, so one day, inspired by iOS and OSX UI Design, Matt decided to put a simple background on Google Docs.

Enter the lightbulb moment…Matt realised that there would be others who’d appreciate this simple addition to Google Docs and this background would enable the team to levarage this shareable content to their SEO benefit.

“We had been struggling to find our niche piece of content. Suddenly here it was.”

Jasper handles all of No Yelling’s online marketing, he took the resulting blog post ad submitted it to 30 high authority blogs, including TechCrunch and that’s when it got really busy.

The Impact

No Yelling were already ranking number 1 for their major keywords, so they haven’t gained major jumps in their primary keyword rankings, but they did see the impact in traffic analytics and believe that their minor keywords will gain from the links and increased traffic.

Being able to gather analytics is a key part of SEO; in one day the team saw a site traffic increase of over 1500%, then when Smashing Mag tweeted their story, they saw a second spike of 1400%.

Using Majestic SEO program, Jasper can establish that they gained over 100 links back to the site’s home page (noyelling.com.au) and a large number to the page that held the actual user style. Jasper sees these links back to their site as the main benefit; contributing towards the site’s domain authority. This will be of help as the team are starting their Sydney driving school in next few months.

The team did admit to not anticipating the spike in traffic through social media/sharing and so missed out on making the most of this initial increase in traffic by not including social sharing buttons. A mistake they won’t be repeating in the future!

The future – Team Hustlebot Assemble!

This isn’t where the story ends as the Linen Background project made them realise that they’d a lot more to share and a core team of 5 formed Hustlebot, who have been working on another release and along with that the release of the Hustlebot brand. The five are:

Matt Williams – Founder, Ideation
Jasper Boyschau (myself) – Online Marketing, PR
James Gemmell – Project Manager, Copywriter
Tarik Menzies – Business Development
Jake Reston – Designer

Although Hustlebot has emerged from the SEO attempts on No Yelling, this brand is separate to the driving school and is on a mission to make Google products better. The next release in the team’s sights is a new GMail style aimed to make it “beautiful”. GMail has 300 millions users so if HustleBot can come up with a theme that’s useable and shareable, they may find that it gets even busier!

We’ve embedded Hustlebot’s first teaser video at the end of this post, I’ve enjoyed talking with Matt and Jasper and will be watching out for their next release!

Filed Under: SEO, social media

SEM Rush New Features

April 3, 2012 By Brian Kane Leave a Comment

Back in November I reviewed one of our favourite tools SEM RUSH – SEM Rush Review

The guys recently gave us a heads up on some features they have added to the mix and asked if we would do a quick post with our thoughts on the new additions. If you don’t know about SEMRush then our previous post will give you an overview of some of the key features but essentially it’s a very smart keyword research tool. Focusing primarily on Google data, it pulls all sorts of information on keywords, search volumes, trends, commercial values, advertiser competition etc. When it comes to building more effective, relevant and commercial keword lists; its keyword reports, phrase and exact match reports and competitor analysis are some of the ways that the tool can help.

So what is new in SEM RUSH?

The 2 new features recently added are Adsense Reports and Back links Reports.

The back link report lets you analyze your website(or anyone else’s) producing a full list of sites which link to your site. It provides the exact URL of the site/page which links to you and shows you the target URL (the page on your site that the link points to). It also gives you the anchor text of the link. This is very useful data for checking your own links, analysing competitor back links etc. however as it stands we already source this type data from a few other tools but I’m keen to see how the SEM Rush guys develop this report over time as I am sure they will be build in more features.

The Adsense Report
I found the Adsense report very interesting. For anyone who doesn’t know about Adsense it is effectively a Google run program which allows website owners (once signed up and accepted) to make space available on their sites (ad blocks) for Google to populate with Adverts. Revenue generated is shared between Google and the website owner. The flip side of Adsense is the Google Adwords program where Advertisers can use something called the Google Display Network to get their adverts placed in other websites. Essentially the Google Display Network is comprised of website publishers participating in the Adsense program.

Advertising effectively through the Display Network involves investigating and identifying a range of web properties that are relevant and complimentary to your own products or services and then targeting these sites through the network. There are broader, more general ways to use the Display Network however typically the more targeted, the better. Analysis of click through, rates and conversions can then tell you what sites are working for you and what ads are generating interest.

Using the Report
After entering a website address and selecting the Adsense option this report will give you all kinds of information and data on how that particular company is using the Google display network to publish adverts around the web in various web properties. It contains top level data on the total number of ads running, split between text ads and banners etc. it then lists all of the websites where these ads are appearing and actually displays each of the ads being run with key metrics such as number of publishers displaying the ad, first seen, last seen dates, frequency and average ad position on the page.

So how might this data be used ?
Aside from the immediate insights into exactly how your competitors are spending money through this channel, there are ways to use this report to inform your own Google Display network strategy. By analysing larger direct competitors you can find out all of the sites they are targeting through the Google display network. You can then check the ads they are actually displaying and get data on how long the ads have been running. The ads that have been running for a while are likely to be converting well so this is useful information to take note of.

If you have a way to compete with some of these competitors on price, quality or service you can then tailor an ad to reflect this and target the same sites. By conducting this research on a number of competitors and possibly even on related and complimentary websites you are likely to find a very targeted range of websites which you can target with your ads through the Google display network. Further tailoring of ads based on the nature of these sites and based on what you have learned from competitors can give you a real leg up when it comes to smart online spending and Return on Investment

Filed Under: adsense, Google Adwords, internet marketing, Search Keywords, SEM, SEO

Google Panda Explained [Infographic]

February 10, 2012 By Brian Kane 1 Comment

Since its release in Feb 2011, Google set Internet marketers into a spin trying to figure the new algorithm changes. While the premise of the update was to hit the spammy and poorer quality sites on the web the reality was not that straight forward. There have been league tables published listing ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and many of the large poor quality content farms have been hit but controversially not all of them.

As I said things are never clear cut or straight forward with Google’s Algorithm but I guess being the worlds smartest search engine gives it the right to be fickle.

Ignoring the nuances, quirks, and way too technical stuff that SEO’s argue about, the main premise of the update around more quality content and link relevance still stand. The infographic below does a nice job of summarising some of the milestones in the Panda Roll out as well as highlighting things like potential site penalties, new link building rules and advice on what to do if your site got penalised.

Oh and it has some cute pictures of Pandas in it as well!

Single Grain – A Digital Marketing Agency

Filed Under: Google, Google Analytics, Google Panda, SEO, Website Optimization

Tracking On-Site Campaigns with Google Analytics, Part III: 4 pros and cons of Internal URL Referral Parameters

December 20, 2011 By Lukas Oldenburg Leave a Comment

Facebook used to have them, Amazon still has them – parameters in the URL that show through which on-site campaign link the visitor has reached the current page. But unless you really have a thoroughly thought-through system in place, you should think twice about using them.

Internal Referral Parameters are not Campaign Parameters

First of all, let me clarify what I mean by “Internal Referral Parameters” (IRPs): Those are not to be confused with (external) Campaign Parameters (for Google Analytics, read “utm_campaign” and the like). As stated in the first article of this series, you should never use Campaign Parameters in the links of your on-site campaign because they will override the external source of the visitor.

To give you an example for an IRP: If you visit Amazon.com’s homepage and click on “Books” in the left-hand navigation, you get to a page with the URL:

http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=sa_menu_bo8?ie=UTF8&node=283155

See the “ref=sa_menu_bo8”? That is the IRP. It helps Amazon.com determine which links (=on-site campaigns) on its homepage, category pages, and so on are the most effective.

Another website that uses IRPs is YouTube. There, you often encounter URLs like

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx&feature=related

Here, the “feature” parameter is telling YouTube which link you used to get to the current video (in that case, I clicked on a “related video” on the right-hand side.

We stopped using them, and so did Facebook
My company used internal referral parameters for some months, but we stopped using them for the reasons I will explain in the full article. So has Facebook, which had used them extensively until a couple of months ago. They now seem to have dropped almost all URL parameters. Apart from the challenges those can cause for web analysts, they had other negative side effects: It was not easy, for example, to get a clean or “canonical” URL of your profile or fanpage because there always was “parameter clutter” attached to it, and every page existed in the form of countless URLs. You’d even see websites linking to the “wrong” (non-canonical) version of their fanpage.

In the full article, I will look at four pros and cons of Internal Referral Parameters. Although they are easily combinable with conversion metrics and make some basic reporting easier, there are hefty issues like SEO problems, cluttered advanced reports and more work up-front if you want to avoid these problems.

Filed Under: Google Analytics, SEO, Web Analytics, web analytics tools, Website Optimization