Book Review – SEO ROI: Rules and Tactics of Advanced SEOs

I’ve been feeling a little SEOfatigued of late. Sick of hearing the same old regurgitated advice and seeing the same old presentation. I’ve found myself withdrawing from Twitter and retreating to smaller communities where the discussion is much more specific and emerges from real, in-the-field observations and results. And you know what? I’m learning more, much faster, and in a shorter amount of time. So, this isn’t a Twitter-diss; but more a natural evolution of my own approach to (constantly) learning SEO. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased when this book landed in my inbox reason being the content is very much of the insider-perspective, using situational examples as opposed to any grand SEO theory.

About the Author, Editor and Book

“SEO ROI: Advanced SEOs’ 7 Curiously Obvious Rules and 30 Singular Tactics That Illustrate Them” is authored by Gabriel Goldenberg an SEO and CRO consultant of considerable experience, with a range of industry speaking experience.

SEO ROI is edited by Richard Kershaw, who again has considerable experience of many areas of online marketing from both blue-chip and affiliate perspectives and is currently running the successful gift experience website Wish.co.uk

Download a free chapter of the book.

Style

Divided into two sections, the first looking at overarching guiding principles, “the Rules”, which include sound advice such as “Teach Yourself” (rule 2); and the second section (30 singular tactics) looks at very specific, situational dilemmas and challenges any SEO or marketer in-the-field may face, with advanced solutions that solve or circumvent the issue with an ROI-positive solution. Each of the 30 tactics is premised on adherence to “the rules”.

As an example Rule 2 starts with useful points on how and where to seek knowledge within the industry; from blogs to books to good ole’ fashioned networking in the real world.

I particularly enjoyed the section on testing – classic A/B split-test methods looking at the object, existing theories, independent and dependent variables and how to measure the effects on the dependent variable. Included is a great step by step walk-thru in testing; from Step 1 “create a hypothesis, to Step 5 “Measure and Analyze”. There’s also a great deal of emphasis placed on critical thinking, as a mindset or effective approach for SEO practise, observation and test; and this is espoused throughout, including detailing some fundamental steps to thinking critically. Something that resonated quite clearly for me was Rule 5 “Define the Problem”. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen clients and staff react in something of a panic, making all kinds of plans and solutions prior to refining and defining exactly what a perceived issue may be.

Sensibly, Rule 6, recommends challenging assumptions; something I wholeheartedly agree with. Without those that dare to challenge there’s no progress surely? I was particularly pleased to see a section devoted to Inductive Validity “Inductive validity is another way of measuring the truth of an argument. Instead of setting the threshold as truth in 100% of the cases, inductive validity looks for a claim to be probably true.”

Here’s the thing…
DO NOT SKIP “The Rules” and head straight to the paydirt! Whilst the later sections of the book may be naturally more absorbing and resonating for a practising SEO I can assure you that this structure and the content therein is extremely valid.

Best Bits

I don’t want to give away too much of the excellent content detailed in the 30 tactics, but to highlight a few tactics that were fresh thinking for me: Writing Conditional  CSS for Higher Conversion – details a range of four solutions, including the ethics of each method, Link Prospecting Using Demographic Matching – with guidance on how to; and in particular a tactic Gab has described as “Message Matching”, which is an awesome tactic and unfortunately something I can’t really describe without giving away the crown jewels.

Room for Improvement?

I couldn’t find fault with this. And I’m picky.

Overall

A truly advanced book for experienced practitioners that are in a position to evaluate solutions based on wider business objectives and ethical frameworks.

Don’t just take my word for it – get your free chapter and see for yourself.

Think Your PPC Sucks? Find Out For Sure!

I scored better than 8% of Adwords accounts in my spend range. Wow, that’s…humiliating, and quite humbling.

Wordstream has an awesome new Adwords performance grader tool that’s free and compares your account to others in your spend range (that they have previously graded, but they say that it’s millions) using more than 60 different factors. You get a general idea of how you’re doing then recommendations, in sections, for improvement. I like.

grade

Naturally, this all ties into their PPC management software, which is available on a free 7-day trial. As PPC isn’t my main thing, I won’t be trying that out, but I do really like comparison systems, as I think they give us a great idea for where we stand in, um, comparison to everyone else. Everyone else, that is, who has run their account through this system. Still, it’s millions!!

So in addition to learning that I’m worse than 92% of people in my spend range, what else can this tool tell me?

  • I am wasting a lot of money and should add negative keywords to my campaign.
  • My keywords are too broad. They are like the backside of my fattest chicken, S. Epatha Merkerson.
  • I have no good longtails.
  • I am neglecting my account and probably losing ground to competitors due to a full 0 recent actions in the past month. That is dedication that you don’t find with just anyone.
  • I don’t have enough ads for each group. However, with my worst ad showing a CTR of over 4% (the expected average is 2.3%) I am still smirking slightly.
  • I have way, way fewer landing pages than my competitors. I like it that way though, so take that! Why create a landing page just for PPC? I know people do it, but how is that any different than cloaking? OK I’m joking. That rhymes.

Good news though! My Quality Score kicks ass!! I’m better than the rest of you monkeys with a 7.4 compared to the average of 5.2. Go me!!

My CTR is also awesome!!

OK that’s really all I’m doing well here…but seriously, this is one cool FREE tool. My favorite part is the end where there are happy green thumbs up images or scary and sad red thumbs down ones. I’m 50/50.

Now, I have said many times that I love free tools…I also really like tools that spit out data in eye-pleasing ways. I may be about 6, but I do love the graphics here because it makes the analysis much less boring. Once your report is ready it emails you a permanent link in case you want to look at it over and over and over again, or, more professionally, make tweaks to your campaign, then check your performance later on.

Here’s the thing about this tool: it does not compare your campaign to others in your niche, which means that while it is very valuable, you still can’t determine that just because you don’t have the same performance for asbestos removal as you do for discounted boots, you must suck. As mentioned above, it also compares your performance to others who have run their accounts through the grader. Still, since I like to look at performance in terms of trending rather than exact metrics usually, I do think that it’s really useful. I’d also find this quite nice to show to a client who balks at making changes. For example, I don’t have conversion tracking on this account for various reasons. Yes I know it’s critical, so don’t fuss at me, but still, I do not have it. I am not always at liberty to choose the ad wording or keywords either. A report like this is helpful because then my client doesn’t just think it’s me deciding to do something crazy just because I’m bored.

So try it out. It’s free, it’s cool, and you get to either feel superior to others or you can cry into your warm cereal at dinnertime.

Loss of Trust in Branding

On August 16th Abercrombie and Fitch asked Jersey Shore cast members not to wear their brand. Pretty rich coming from the company who was making pushup bikini tops for children.  Still,it was definitely a very clever marketing idea involving two tacky enterprises. Abercrombie certainly were all over the media right before all the kids who wear their overpriced and boring clothes went back to school. Clever indeed.

In my own tacky marketing move, here’s a gratuitous and totally irrelevant shot of hottie Raveonettes singer Sune Rose Wagner, doing nothing at all related to this industry or this post. He’s just maddeningly handsome. I think it’s quite obvious that he’s sadly toasting not being married to me right now. Poor man.

Sune Rose Wagner

At first this did look like a smart attempt to prevent brand corruption. While I happily confess to never having watched that show, I am bombarded by images of Snooki with her big hair and tiny outfits and The Situation’s abs (less hair but still unnerving) every time I read my (FREE…I swear on my grandma’s grave that I did not subscribe!!) copy of the heinous rag Star Magazine. You can’t go to Harris Teeter and buy the usual box of wine and a can of Pringles without seeing these guys whilst trying to figure out why your shit won’t scan whilst (again yes sorry, I like the word) the cashier stands there judging and not coming over to help you. Yeah, I know the damn Uscan is open people, but it never works for me so that is why I’m in THE LINE FOR AN ACTUAL PERSON. Anyway, initially I thought of how Tommy Hilfiger became a joke in the States as it went from classic American sportswear to something a bit more…urban. 10 years ago, who’d have imagined that Tommy would hit Axl Rose? Brand corruption did it, I am telling you. I won’t even get into the Burberry-chavs thing in the UK because it is still a source of agony for me, owning Burberry and traveling to the UK where I am unable to display the goods (the bag I mean) without someone asking me where I’m from in Essex. I don’t even have a fake tan so not sure why they make that assumption.

Brand corruption is obviously not what this Abercrombie stunt was about though, but initially I did think “wow, they are doing the right thing here, even if it’s just plain obnoxious” but after a bit, I realized that it’s just another way to generate buzz. It’s linkbait. I used to like things like this and appreciate them for their cleverness, but now? Not so much. Yes, they got loads of attention, but what did it actually bring them? Did more people buy their clothes? Did anyone forget they once offered padded bikini tops to kids? Press of any sort can be a good thing but will their historical bouts of nuttiness simply lead to their own brand corruption? Other lower-priced retailers already sell Abercrombie-clone items anyway (with the exception of the aforementioned padded bikinis for kids.) If your polo shirts are $12 you can probably get away with pissing people off or just irritating them, but if they’re $68? Jaysis. You need to be making a name for yourself by giving a free $68 polo shirt to kids in need every time some frat boy buys one.

Speaking of good ideas like that, here’s another one…a photo of Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand, who is not guilty of anything to do with brand corruption, polo shirts, or bouffants! He is only guilty of being insanely good looking and fronting a truly amazing band. People reading blogs like to see images it seems, and he’s prettier than Snooki.

Alex Kapranos

See how my ridiculous interjection of shots of men I like kind of take away from my message? Hey, at least I’m not selling a polo for $68. Tacky seems to be the new thing though, so I’ll roll with it.

Is this like the boy who cried wolf? Is it like Lyndon Antcliff’s divisive hooker story that brought out issues of trust and industry ethics? (for the record I thought that story was highly entertaining and honestly, anyone believing it should stop sniffing glue every morning) Not to pick on Lyndon at all here, but if you had the idea that he was indeed an untrustworthy shyster and he wrote something that was on the edge of believability again, would you trust him? I would, of course, as I actually understand satire and don’t think the Irish are really actually being told to eat babies. However, if Abercrombie does come out and say that they’re donating $10m to help clean up Vermont after Hurricane Irene, will it make you drive to the mall, risking being shot (or is that just here in Greensboro?), to go buy a $68 polo and hopefully see some nude models? Or will you just sit back and wait for the punchline? I’ll sit back and wait.

Coming back from PR hijinks can of course be done. Alec Baldwin has a successful show after that phone call. My lovely husband still gets us business after his performance in Seattle. However, it takes a lot of work and honestly, after dealing with fallout, why bother in the first place? Broken trust is very hard to rebuild. It’s difficult to trust a person who has betrayed you. It’s hard to try another BK veggie burger after you’ve bitten into one containing an ink pen. Hey, at least it wasn’t a tooth I suppose…

Lastly, let me leave you with this image, as it would be quite rude of me not to showcase Udo Kier. QUITE RUDE.

Udo Kier

  • by Judith Lewis 'deCabbit'
  • September 12th 2011
  • 1 Comment »

How to Choose a Search Engine Optimisation Agency

I keep hearing horror stories about SEO companies ripping off the very people they are meant to help. While there are some excellent search companies out there dedicated to helping customers and going above and beyond, there are others who, like cowboy builders, want to take the cash and run. This can often leave the client out of pocket but also unsure of who to turn to for help when something of this nature happens.

When I attended SES London some six or so years ago, I remember hearing the story of a charity who had paid an SEO firm five-figures and gotten nothing for it. Whether this was their perception or reality is always difficult to know but it left them thinking the whole industry was crooked. I continued to hear of agencies charging for Google Analytics (free), purporting to run PPC with no proof of any spend and continued hearing of SEO companies taking money and doing nothing at all.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the shoddy work produced by some led to sites being dropped down the rankings or worse – banned. Link buying is one example of a practice that can harm the client as well as the agency and as recently as March 2011 I have heard of companies continuing to buy links in competitive, but not extremely so, verticals. JC Penny and Overstock are just two examples of companies harmed by blatant link manipulation.

How do you know if you choosing a good agency? With no industry body and anyone able to set themselves up as an SEO, how do you know that they are acting in your best interest and in a professional way? I gave a talk on just that (and how to survive the zombie apocalypse) at the London Affiliate Conference.

How to choose an agency
View more presentations from Judith Lewis

Adjust Your Review Strategy, An Interview With @Chiropractic

One of the hardest questions to answer when anyone asks about online reputation management is how to deal with negative reviews. There are as many solutions as there are reviewers, and while it may be best to ignore some, responding to others with humour, a genuine desire to be better and a bit of imagination can go a lot further.

That’s why it caught my eye when the legendary @Chiropractic (come on, how many Chiropractors do you think there are in the world who know more about internet marketing than most internet marketers) aka Mike Dorausch tweeted about a negative review he had received, and the frankly genius way that he dealt with it.

This is the tweet I saw;

And being the nosey kind of person I am I immediately went to the site and read the review

I was immediately struck by how clean Mikes profile had been up to that point, and wondered, if I had seen it as a consumer, if I would have suspected it of being too clean. It’s a lot more common for people to review negative experiences than positive, so this review profile may indeed have raised some flags with me.
Instead of just talking to myself about it though, I thought I should get a better look at this partiular situation straight from the horses mouth.  So I emailed Mike and did a short interview on his experience of being negatively reviewed.

How do you think customers perceive a totally glowing review profile, and do you think having some less than glowing reviews can have a positive impact on customer perception (making the reviews seem more real?)

I think a totally glowing review profile can be of concern, and I’ve had some say it’s makes them question if all reviews are legitimate. As far as less than glowing reviews, I believe it depends on the type of negative review, in my experience it provides something to talk about and does help things appear real.

Can you explain how you handled the review, and what followed (both with the reviewer and putting the review on your wall)

We had a 2 star review on Yelp, which included some odd observations about our business, which made me curious. I took a screenshot of the review and printed it, taping it to the front desk where every client could read it (they all did). Observing how clients reacted was quite educational. Nobody publicly agreed with the reviewer but I asked each person if it would potentially affect them choosing a business had they not ever been to it. One of our new clients said they had read the review before calling, saying they thought it seemed out of context from what else was written about us online.

What do you think is more important as a small business, handling a review in terms of it’s impact on business, or working to turn it into a positive experience for you as an individual?

Both. I think very few people have any clue how much stress small business owners go through, so if it can be made positive it’s worth something. If the review is accurate, it’s an opportunity to improve on whatever can be done to see it doesn’t happen again. If it’s not accurate, there’s an opportunity to get feedback from clients confirming that. A few even went online to share their experiences, people that have been with us 1, 2 or 3 years, not merely for a single visit.

And finally, how exactly do you manage to stay so happy that people complain about it?

I love being a chiropractor and I believe that being passionate about what one does comes through to people. The reality is that there’s always someone who’s going to be turned off by another’s happiness, and they’ll often make an effort to bring you down. If we stop moving forward they win.

From talking to Mike about this particular situation, and thinking over how I have seen complaints most successfully dealt with in the past, I think I can boil the answer to the question ‘how should I deal with a negative review’ down to one far more simple answer than I ever could before;

Respond to negative reviews with a genuine desire to see things put right and improve on what went wrong, and if you can’t then perhaps no reasponse is the best response.

How To Create a Social Strategy

Habitat UK, Skittles, Nestle, Asus, and more are all tales of woe and warning for anyone going in to social media. Getting it wrong seems easier than getting it right at times. This is often because of lack of planning as opposed to level of difficulty.

As important as it is for SEO, planning your social media strategy is important to ensure minimal brand damage from mistakes. Social media, with its low barriers to entry, may seem easy to do. Many think ‘how hard can it be to tweet and update Facebook’? Well, as Nestle learned when the tit-for-tat between an angry consumer and one of its marketing team on Nestle’s public wall got paraded out by some media and social media experts as a premium example of what not to do, a lot can go wrong.

While some may see Skittles allowing all Twitter search results to be published to its home page as innovative, it became a place where users tried to out-gross each other. My screen-shot from the time has to be blanked due to the nature of the tweets showing. Making a blog of Facebook the homepage of your company may seem cutting edge but a blog can also be seen as unprofessional and Facebook is nota space wholly owned by the brand.

Getting the strategy right to both move in to social media and use it for SEO is not just important – it is essential. There are several things to plan but first and foremost is an inderstanding of the why. Understand why it is your business feels it should be in social media. There are a number of successstories from companies like ABN Amro, IBM, Vodafone and others regarding their forays into social media however they were success stories because a picture of success was planned from the outset.

After understanding your reasons and goals from being in social media, select the best outlet for that strategy. Twitter is not a broadcast medium and no matter what anyone says, Facebook is invisible unless you promote it to existing contacts. Understand the different social media platforms and what type of engagement they are useful for. MySpace may not be mainstream anymore but it is still perfect for music and Orkut is the only way you’ll get a Facebook-like platform in Brazil.

Next plan out what you are going to say and do in this platform. Having a strategy includes not just why and where but also what, how, when and who. Important in here is who will be the voice of the company and if that ‘voice’ leaves will the social media contact go with them or will they be restricted to the brand. Also how do you identify who the person is behind the brand if it is the brand tweeting. Vodafone handles this by having all tweets identified by initials. You have to trust the voice of your company and empower them to tweet according to the schedule and when necessary off schedule.

Connections and outreach should be part of your social media strategy. Understand and research who the influencers are in your vertical and reach out to them. Do not try and make demands of them and do not try and buy space on their blog/facebook page/etc. If done to manipulate rankings, purchased blog posts or links can harm both the place the link/blog is posted and the company purchasing the link/post can be penalised.

When all this is in place and your ‘who’ is in place knowing ‘what’ they are saying ‘where’ and ‘when’ they are interacting, by what method (how), then you will be ready to launch your social media strategy and succeed where others have floundered or failed.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »