SEO – Page 3

Why we can’t just be SEOs: A reply to Rand Fishkin

May 8, 2013 by Himanshu Sharma 6 Comments

Image of a globe with the title SEO representing SEO practises Last week I saw this interesting whiteboard Friday which talked about ‘Why We Can’t Just Be SEOs Anymore’ by Rand. Though he has raised some valid points, like ‘perception of SEO is hard to change’, I have to disagree with him overall. Sorry Rand, you are missing the complete picture.

SEO is not bigger than SEO

SEO is all about generating relevant organic traffic to the website through search engines. That’s it. SEO is not about email, CRO, UX, Social Media, Branding, PR, Reputation Management, Coding, Advertising, Customer Service …

You may argue that there are 200+ ranking signals so I need total control on everything which influences SEO. While it is true that they are 200+ ranking signals, don’t forget the 80/20 rule i.e. 80% of your output comes from 20% of the input. If you have worked in the SEO industry long enough, you already know what that 20% is that will generate 80% of the SEO results.

That 20% consists of basic on-page optimization, keyword research, content development and above all link building. We can tweak brand signals, social signals, authorship, Page Rank, markups and other weak ranking signals all day long but they won’t generate any considerable amount of organic traffic on our website. What really drives traffic is that 20% I am talking about.

If we talk about the real world (which could be very different from the blogging world) there could be unlimited ranking signals. For a start, your client is a very strong ranking signal for you. Without his support and cooperation you can’t make any change on his website. No amount of SEO is going to help, if the client is not responsive to your needs and demands. Poor product, bad reputation, poor customer service all are sort of ranking signals which are beyond our control.

Just because something may impact your SEO so you must develop expertise in it or take total control of it is a wrong mindset. Here is why. When someone works as a marketing generalist who knows little bit of everything (well sorry but this is what specialists really think about him) he is eager to give suggestions to specialists (like CRO consultant, PR consultant, Community Managers etc) on how they can do their job better.

Since he is not a specialist, his suggestions may not be well received or align well with the recommendations of specialists. This creates disruption in digital strategies and work environment. So instead of creating synergy the marketing generalist could inevitably end up creating stress and chaos.

The Perception of SEO is hard to change so we should change the job title

There are lots of job titles out there which have earned a bad name over time like car salesmen, lawyers, brokers, cold callers etc. There is hardly any industry left where you won’t find people who give the whole industry a bad name. Even in a profession as noble as Health Care you can find doctors who steal kidneys and are involved in the illegal organ trade. So have they changed their job titles? No.

So this argument of bad perception of SEO is not strong enough to drop the SEO title.

We are selling ourselves short by not calling ourselves a SEO

That is true. When we say we do email, CRO, UX, Social Media, Branding, PR, Reputation Management, Coding, Advertising, Customer Service….all in the name of SEO or whatever titles we prefer, say ‘Inbound Marketer’, we are not only spreading ourselves too thin but are abnormally raising the expectations of our clients. With so many marketing channels being leveraged they will definitely earn tons of money. Won’t they?

We are also holding ourselves responsible for client’s sales ability as we are now in charge of CRO, UX, branding, customer service, PR etc. All of these are full time jobs in themselves. And if we have to do all of these jobs and practically run the entire business then a monthly retainer can never be profitable, partnership in client’s business and profit will be. While we can make SEO as big as we like, do as much volunteer work as we want, don’t expect the clients to handover their business to us just because we practice every marketing tactic in the book. At the end of the day even business development managers (who are specially hired to develop businesses) are handed over a monthly pay slip instead of partnership in business and profits, let alone SEO.

Here is why SEO is not for Small Business Owners

April 16, 2013 by Himanshu Sharma 29 Comments

Before I start, I want to clear up one thing. This post is not an attack on SEO (heck SEO is my middle name). This post is not meant to discourage SEO. This post is a “reality check” for small business owners from business perspective.

SEO is no longer just adding keywords in the title tag and getting links from cheap directories. Yes we all know that but many business owners don’t. Today SEO is:

Micro data and schema
Authorship
Twitter Cards
Open Graph protocol
Social Media (Facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube)
Content development and marketing
Local Search
Co-Citations and co-occurrence
Microsoft Excel
SEO Tools
Analytics (from data collection to interpretation and reporting)
REGEX
Data Scraping
Fixing/avoiding Google penalties.
Reading blog posts 24/7 to keep up to date with the ever changing Search Engine Landscape.
And the list is virtually endless to be honest

Best of luck if you, as entrepreneur, can do all of this and can still find time to run your business. SEO has become more complex than ever. Therefore it is no longer a question of whether or not you can do it yourself. You need outside help. Period.

The question that you should be asking is whether you can really “afford” SEO with a small budget. The answer is “No”. A lot of businesses don’t really understand the value of getting rankings esp. in the competitive market. They dream of outranking websites which have been spending tens of thousands of pounds in content development and marketing for years.

You need to understand that it takes real money to displace real money. So if a business has been spending say £70k a year on SEO for the last 3 years, then it has already spent £210K in content development and marketing. And if your idea of replacing this £210k worth of rankings is a £10k yearly budget then you need to wake up.

As a small business owner your first priority is to “survive” in your trade. Make enough money to pay your bills and keep trading next month. That means you need a strong hold on your cash flow. You need to focus on immediate gains and aim to get immediate return on your investment. You need to make sure that you squeeze out every possible conversions from each website visitor/visit.

This is possible only when you focus on optimizing your website for conversions and keep a close eye on every dollar spent. SEO can’t do that for you, not at your start up stage. SEO is a long term commitment. You may need to wait for several months or even a whole year before you can see considerable positive ROI.

Consider running PPC campaigns instead. You will either win fast or fail fast. In either case you will know where you stand in your market and what you need to do to improve your business bottomline.

If you can make money from PPC, you sure can make money from SEO in the long run. Consider PPC as a litmus test. You need to pass this test in order to be qualified for running SEO. If you fail then you need to test your landing pages, your offers and may be even your products. Once you have built a solid revenue stream then consider SEO to reduce your cost per acquisition and increase profit.

Now it is your turn. Do you think SEO can be done cheaply and small business owners are better off building their business through SEO? Please share your thoughts.

5 Ways Video Can Increase Your Landing Page Conversation Rate

February 5, 2013 by Joshua Hardwick Leave a Comment

How to Make Your Landing Page Videos More Effective

Attracting visitors to your website isn’t easy. In fact, it usually takes a pretty rigorous marketing campaign just to maintain a regular flow of visitors and even if you manage this, it’s likely that most visitors won’t convert to paying customers without a well-optimised, high converting landing page.

One of the most powerful ways to increase the conversion rate of your landing page is with the use of video. In recent years, more and more companies around the world have started to produce video content solely for the use on their landing pages as they quickly realised that if produced well, videos can send landing page conversions through the roof.

dollar-shave-club-landing-page

Screenshot: DollarShaveClub.com

In fact, a recent study found that video content can actually increase landing page conversions by up to 80% meaning that in some cases, you can almost double the number of sales achieved by your landing page. However, videos can also reduce or have very little effect on landing page conversion rates if they aren’t properly thought-out or produced to a high standard so here are a few ways to make your landing page videos more effective.

#1 – Don’t Bore your Visitors

You need to remember that people browsing the web get bored pretty easily and that also, alternative content is only one click away. When a visitor arrives on your landing page and you present them with your video content, it’s likely that they don’t want to be there for hours watching a video they didn’t plan to watch.

Now, depending on the complexity of your product, your landing page might require a relatively long video in order to explain all the required aspects that hopefully, will lead to a conversion but in most cases, you need to keep things short and to the point.

You need to make your video entertaining and interesting whilst still presenting visitors with information about your product/service. It’s not an easy task, but by keeping it as short as possible, you’ll likely increase the likeliness that the visitor will watch the video right until the end and then, make the purchase.

#2 – Autoplay vs. Non-Autoplay

One of the tactics that is often used to increase conversion rates is to automatically play the video when the visitor lands on the page. Now, if you’ve ever visited a landing page where this technique is used, you probably found it pretty annoying, right?

Setting a landing page video to autoplay can alienate and annoy your visitors which will often lead to them clicking the ‘back’ button almost immediately and leaving your site (something you don’t want them to do as this means no purchase will be made).

Strangely however, a lot of people have experienced higher conversion rates when this technique is used so the best option is to test it. You might find that the autoplay feature squeezes an extra few conversions out of your landing page and generates you more revenue, which at the end of the day is all that matters.

#3 – Include a Call-To-Action

Surprisingly, a lot of landing page videos don’t bother doing this but really, it is almost guaranteed to increase your conversion rate. Sure, a lot of landing pages usually have a call-to-action somewhere else on the page (usually in the form of a button) but using a call-to-action in your video can often increase the effectiveness of this.

For example, if you’ve spent a few minutes informing the visitor about your product/service and its potential benefits, make sure you actually tell them to sign up/make a purchase at the end. It doesn’t have to be anything longwinded, you could simply include a call-to-action at the end of your video that says “Sign up below for a 30-day free trial” – or something to that effect.

This call-to-action could either be done using a voiceover or even a graphic included at the end of your video. Feel free to get creative and do both if you like.

#4 – Upload to YouTube

One of the less direct techniques you can use to increase landing page conversions (and the amount of visitors) is to also upload your video to YouTube (and sites like YouTube). YouTube receives more than 800 million unique visitors a month and therefore, allows you to expose your landing page video to an even larger audience.

By doing this, you can increase brand awareness and quite often, attract visitors to your landing page. When uploading to YouTube, simply include a link to your landing page in the video description. If the video gets a lot of views then you will likely receive a lot of clickthroughs to your website which may result in sales.

Doing this will also generate a few links to your landing page (although usually nofollow links) which may help your landing page to rank even better and attract more visitors/potential customers.

#5 – Make it the Centre of Attention

A lot of landing pages make use of video but often, don’t put enough focus on the video itself. Try to make your landing page less cluttered and keep the video as the main focal point of the page. You want to draw the visitor’s attention to that ‘play’ button so that he/she watches the video and purchases your product.

You should also make sure to keep the video above the fold too. Although ‘the fold’ might be slowly dying out due to the fact that more and more people are now browsing the web on devices with much larger screens, a lot of people do still have traditional sized monitors, notebooks or tablet PC’s where the fold is extremely important.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that an effective online video will significantly increase the conversion rate of a landing page if produced to a high standard. Sure, refining the video might take a bit of trial and error but if you’re selling a high value product (or receiving a large amount of visitors), the reward can be huge.

It is unlikely you’ll get things perfect right away so remember to experiment with varying video lengths, calls-to-action and the autoplay feature. But also, remember to monitor the results!

6 Steps to a Successful Domain Name Transition

January 22, 2013 by Nick Herinckx 2 Comments

After months of hard work, you re-launch your website on a new domain name only to watch as your site’s search engine traffic plummets and doesn’t recover.

This is a scary and all too common occurrence, and it happens when a domain name change isn’t properly handled.

The goal of this post is to show you how to properly transition a domain so that current Google search engine visibility and traffic levels are maintained. We’ll walk through, step-by-step, the process for notifying Google of your domain change and managing the transition.

A Proper Domain Transition is Important

There are many reasons for transitioning your website’s domain name. Perhaps your company’s name has changed, or perhaps you’ve finally acquired the domain you’ve always wanted. Another common reason is that you have previously had international website versions in a sub-directory of your website (i.e. www.site.com/fr/) and want to instead give each country their own, localized website (i.e. www.site.fr).

Regardless of the reason, handling the change correctly is important because a proper transition will:

Help your new domain rank highly in the search engines for people still searching for the old name. This not only helps maintain brand search traffic, but also reduces customer confusion.
Ensure that search engine visibility (and traffic) for non-branded keywords is maintained, and in some cases even improved.
Significantly reduce the time it takes for the search engines to crawl and index your new website

The bottom line is that a proper domain transition is crucial to your business because it maintains lead and sales volume from SEO.

Steps to a Successful Domain Name Transition

After having successfully managed many domain name transitions, I’ve outlined below the exact steps that I use to ensure that SEO visibility and traffic is maintained after the domain transition. Note this process should begin BEFORE you transition your domain for it to be most effective.

Step 1: Add the old domain to Google Webmaster Tools

Make sure that your old domain is added to Google Webmaster Tools, complete with a submitted XML sitemap. This is important, because the way you communicate with Google about your new site and domain transition will be through Google Webmaster Tools.

To submit the domain you will be transitioning, visit http://webmaster.google.com, and sign in with your Google account.

From there, click on “add site,” enter your website’s URL, and then follow the instructions to verify that you are the owner of the old domain.

Add your site to Google Web Master Tools

For submitting an XML sitemap, there are plenty of guides dedicated to helping you do this. For detailed instructions on XML sitemaps, visit

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156184.

To easily create an XML sitemap for your website, I recommend http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/, which is a tool that will develop one for you to submit to Google Webmaster Tools.

Step 2: Settle on the URLs and site hierarchy of your new website

Much of ensuring a smooth domain transition has to do with understanding the URLs and structure of your new website. For this reason, I recommend not moving forward with any more steps until all of the URLs and pages have been outlined for the new domain.

Step 3: Map old URLs to their new counterparts

This step is very important, and involves mapping where old pages will be moving to on the new domain. For example, www.oldsite.com/solutions/ may be moving to www.newsite.com/solutions/, and we need to record this relationship in an Excel document.

The purpose of doing this is that we need to be able to redirect old, deleted URLs to the new ones when the site launches. This ensures that when customers visit an old, removed URL, they are automatically redirected to the new URL on the new site. This also tells search engine bots where the new page is located, which helps maintain the SEO traction you’ve built to date.

These are called 301 redirects, and will be implemented in a later step once the site is pushed live.

XLS matching old URLs to new

The spreadsheet above is what I use to complete this step. As you can see, we need to match, for example, the old Contact Us URL to the new Contact Us URL.

Note that if an old page does not have a similar page on the new site, just map that URL to the homepage of the new site.

Step 4: Run an SEO audit on the new site before it’s pushed live

After the site is built, but before it’s pushed live, I always recommend running multiple SEO audits and site crawls to ensure that on-site SEO is fully implemented on the new site before it’s pushed live. This ensures not only that search engine visibility is maintained, but perhaps even improved.

Step 5: Launch new domain and immediately apply 301 redirects

Now we’re ready to launch! Remember the URL mapping in step 3? This now serves as the guide to your web developer for implementing server-side 301 redirects.

A 301 redirect is a way to tell the search engines that a page has moved. This is the most important step, as without this step, Google won’t understand the site transition and you will lose your search engine visibility.

Step 6: Add the new domain to Google Webmaster Tools, and submit XML sitemap

Now that the site is live, we need to add the new domain to Google Webmaster Tools like we did for the old domain in Step 1, including submitting an XML sitemap.

This time, however, you need to also complete the Change of Address form from within Google Webmaster Tools.

Change of address form in Google Webmaster Tools

Just follow the instructions. Doing this will complete your domain transition and will allow Google to attribute all of your previous SEO traction and organic visibility over to your new domain.

What a Successful Domain Transition Looks Like

This process works! Using the steps above, I was able to work together with a database technology company to successfully transition their entire website from www.citrusleaf.com to www.aerospike.com, not only maintaining their old search engine rankings, but also improving them!

They saw:

171% increase in monthly non-branded search engine traffic (SEO traffic)
New website successfully ranking in the first position for past brand name, ensuring best possible user experience.

The process works as long as you make sure to follow it for your new domain launches.

SEMrush GEO Review

August 7, 2012 by WAW Team

One of my favourite tools to use when it comes to the research part of SEO is SEMrush. Everyone in the online marketing world knows that keyword research for SEO is not an exact science but SEMrush’s mix of search volumes, coupled with commercial value of keywords (derived from Adwords Data) really gives you something tangible to work with. Other strengths of the toolset are in its capability to analyse competitors on both in terms of commercial keyword search engine rankings and Adwords and campaigns activity. Drilling into keywords competitors are bidding on, viewing ad campaign copy, associated CPC rates etc is all very insightful stuff.

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