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Applying Behavioural Economics to Digital Marketing

Classic economic theory works off of the assumption that consumers make rational, informed decisions about which products to buy. Under this assumption, market forces will lead to the best producers with the highest levels of quality and service to be successful, leading to a meritocratic marketplace.

Anyone who’s ever even taken a casual glimpse at consumer behaviour knows that this is simply not how people behave. We are not rational agents making informed decisions. Instead we are creatures of habit and instinct, making decisions based more on gut feeling and psychological biases than any rational consideration.

A relatively new field of economic theory called behavioural economics endeavours to understand human behaviour in the economical sphere, and give marketers tools and data to encourage sales. (more…)

Are Brand-Owned Channels the Future of Content Marketing?

I’m loathe to add to the mountains of hasty analyses of the Second Coming of the Penguin, so I’m keen to stress that this is not a ‘how to recover’ article.

Yet, whilst the SEO industry is writhing in the throes of Penguin 2.0, it’s worth looking at the type of activity that Google actually wants online brands to engage in.

A piece in the New York Observer, entitled “Journalists Take Refuge in the World of Branded Content”, outlines an emerging field for professional writers to explore: sponsored content written specifically for brands, intended for audience engagement and brand storytelling.

Instead of having sponsored stories published on existing platforms, many major brands are creating their own content channels and filling it with high quality material aimed at attracting the brands’ target audience. (more…)

Building The Case for Long-Form Content

The resurgence of long-form content on the internet is a hot topic at the moment. Last year Jonathan Colman wrote his powerful call to arms for the SEO industry to up their game and create more value with the content it publishes, and I joined the chorus with my own thoughts on how SEO could come to embrace long-form as a legitimate approach to content.

Long-form content, and whether or not it works on the internet, has been an ongoing debate for many years. Nicholas Carr’s alarmist book The Shallows suggests the internet ‘trains’ us to prefer short snippets of content, but the evidence is mounting that long-form is a legitimate publishing approach online resulting in a positive impact on many different fronts.

Last week Co.Labs published the results of their own long-form content experiment, in which they changed their usual quick & dirty tactic of getting stories out there quickly to a different approach, where they revisited and expanded existing articles and turned them in to growing stories. (more…)

Facebook’s IPO: One Year Later

It’s almost been a full year since Facebook’s Initial Public Offering, and it’s been an eventful year for the giant of social media.

Expectations were high for Facebook’s share prices, but those expectations were dashed on the very first day of the IPO. Initially the stock surged from its offering price of $38 to a peak of $45, but then quickly took a nosedive and had to be salvaged by Facebook’s IPO underwriters to prevent it from dropping under $38 on its first day. (more…)

What Google’s EU Settlement Means For Search

Last week news leaked that Google is about to reach a settlement with the European Commission in the EU’s antitrust investigation against the search engine.

As Search Engine Land reported, terms of the settlement include clear labelling of Google’s own services in its European search results, prominent links to at least three rival alternative services, and more liberal AdSense policies to give publishers more freedom to sell advertising.

Supporters of the FairSearch.org lobby group, such as Microsoft and Foundem, immediately criticised the settlement offer, which seems very likely to be accepted by EU regulators. (more…)

Can SEO Be Made Obsolete?

A common criticism levied against SEO is that it should be unnecessary. A lot of web professionals who don’t work in SEO say that a good website, built properly and filled with great content, will rank organically on its own merits without needing any SEO applied to it.

Now, as a SEO practitioner, I have an almost instinctual resistance against that argument. But it’s too easy to dismiss it out of hand. SEO is after all a multidisciplinary activity, relying on a great many disparate facets to be optimally deployed.

So let’s explore the issue in a bit more depth. Can SEO be made obsolete, if all other aspects of making and maintaining websites are performing at their best? Is it feasible to spread the role of SEO out amongst other web professionals, and not require a dedicated resource? (more…)

Fighting Sexism at Digital Conferences

There is no doubt that the technology sector is more than averagely sexist. The reasons for this are multitude and too complex to explore in this blog post, but suffice to say that the technology sector – and the digital marketing sector, as a subset of the tech industry – is infused with a laddish attitude and enjoys pervasive and embedded sexism.

I find this rather unpalatable. I think the tech industry needs more women, and more participation from women. We shouldn’t abide by companies and conferences using objectified women as enticements and attention grabbers. We’re not stone age cavemen any more.

If you attend tech conferences – and I include digital marketing events among these – there are a few things you can do to help encourage the industry to become more female-friendly, which in turn will encourage more women to join the tech industry and enable the entire industry as a whole to grow and mature. (more…)

Book Review: Outsmarting Google – Evan Bailyn

Outsmarting Google
SEO Secrets to Winning New Business
By Evan Bailyn with Bradley Bailyn
Book Website | Amazon UK | Amazon.com

Outsmarting Google is a book that’s been out since 2011, so I’m late with this review. And due to the fast-moving nature of the SEO industry, some parts of the book are expectedly out of date.

In the interests of full disclosure, before I began reading the book I was fully prepared to dislike it. Over the years I’ve developed a mild allergy for what I’d call ‘self-help business speak’. We all recognise this type of hyped-up copywriting when we see it: ‘Killer Strategies to Success’, ‘Hidden Secrets To Become an Instant Millionaire’ – books with such titles are a dime a dozen, and usually worth even less than the paper they’re printed on. (more…)

FTC Exonerates Google in Search Bias Investigation

Yesterday, after an investigation lasting nearly two years, the Federal Trade Commission in the United States has concluded that Google’s search results are fair and unbiased.

In a statement that could have been written by Google’s own PR department, FTC director Jon Liebowitz said that Google is “one of America’s great companies” and that the changes the search engine makes to its algorithms are primarily to “improve the user experience.” (more…)

2012: The Year The World Fell Out Of Love With Google

2012 has been a hallmark year for Google. I believe that this is the year the public realised that Google is just another corporation.

For years Google was perceived as the benevolent search giant of the internet. The Mountain View based company enjoyed a public image as a sort of pre-self-aware Skynet: technologically advanced but ultimately harmless and there to serve the best interests of the world.

Google helped foster this public image through its free tools, the “don’t be evil” motto (quietly dropped in recent years), and the company’s vocal support of internet freedom. But that image has been tarnished, especially in 2012. (more…)

Can The SEO Industry Embrace Long-Form Content?

A recent spate of blog posts have been published ridiculing the pervasive “What X Taught Me About Y” genre. Richard Falconer published a long list of them, I wrote my own parody here on State of Search, and Michael Kovis effectively demolished the genre. But there are also fans of these types of posts, and some have flocked to the relevant comment sections to proclaim their favour, sparking interesting debates in the process.

Do these type of posts add value? Are they worthwhile to write – let alone to read? Is this a type of blog fluff that we should embrace – like top 10 lists – and strive to do as well as possible, or is it better to mock and shun these metaphor-driven blogs? (more…)

Transition Rank as Propaganda

A couple of months ago the SEO world stirred when the incomparable Bill Slawski wrote about the ‘transition rank‘ patent. In essence, this Google patent outlined how a webpage’s rank could be randomised to thwart any attempts by ‘spammers’ to manipulate its ranking, thus confusing the spammer’s efforts.

This patent received widespread attention in the SEO blogosphere. And it has had a profound result on the mentality of the SEO industry. (more…)

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