Posts by Louis Venter

Louis Venter is the founding director and CEO of MediaVision, a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) company specialising in all areas of search. His particular interests are organic search marketing, paid search marketing, conversion strategy and online PR. More articles and bio from Louis Venter
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8 Development Mistakes to avoid when migrating a website

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There always tends to be a little bit of an “us vs them” attitude between SEOs and developers. A lot of developers think SEOs = spammers and a great deal of SEO’s don’t understand enough about architecture, language and data structures to have a meaningful conversation about development.  So when things do go wrong it’s very easy to point the blame at the other party.

The aim of this post is to hopefully bring us a little closer together and provide a checklist for a site migration, if you avoid these issues you will go a long way to not destroying your clients search performance followed by that dreaded phone call. I personally consider these to be in the remit for both developers and SEOs and they should definitely be checked on the testing environment. (more…)

Upgrading a website shouldn’t affect your SEO traffic

UpgradeOne of the key misconceptions from website owners’ is that a website re-launch will cause a temporary, or permanent, drop in SEO traffic as the search engines switch to the new URLs. In my opinion the search engines have got far better at ensuring the migration from the old to the new website is far more seamless than before. There are, however, many areas that you need to ensure are 100% to ensure uninterrupted service.

I recently ran a migration project for a key client of MediaVision’s where we had improved organic traffic by over 600% in the last two years. Clearly the client was concerned that the traffic from organic search would drop as it was a key lead generator for their business and would definitely affect their bottom line. What was very pleasing was that not only did we preserve the current rankings but by using the strategy below we actually increased non-brand SEO traffic by 23% month on month. (more…)

Using MajesticSEO for a quick competitor analysis

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MajesticSEO is one of the tools I use most when doing competitor analysis. From my perspective its origins as a search engine index puts it ahead of other link analysis tools in that the sample size of data is often superior. That said I have noticed that there is a large amount of link decay in the historic index so if you would like more accurate data use the Fresh Index. (more…)

Iphone vs Apple vs Android – Mobile Trends and the Future of Mobile

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Brett Petersen from global web index started by discussing their reach which is across 22 countries, they focus on only not what mobile users do but why they do it. They track 514 million mobile internet users.

Market Status

Mobile Market share: Nokia still dominant in the overall mobile market share especially in the emerging markets. In China they have more than 50% market share. Nokia is almost non-existent in the US market share. (more…)

Text Advertising on the Google Display Network – International Search Summit

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This session covered the best practises for the display network and was presented by Biren Kalaria from Google.

Reach consumers at scale through YouTube, Blogger, DoubleClick and various publisher networks. Use Ad Planner to optimise these opportunities.

Google reaches 79% of the Europe population in the display network. There are typically 501 ad exposures per user per month. Average CTR is 0.07% on display whereas GDN text receives is closer to 0.37% when contextually targeted. Contextual targeting of text ads achieves good CTR across most verticals. CPCs are typically very low. (more…)

Advanced Geo-Targeting

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The session after a much needed coffee was advanced GEO targeting which is vitally important when creating a multinational strategy.

Geo targeting is vitally important when ensuring your website appears in the geographic “pages from” results in the search engines. 15% to 40% of searchers use this setting which is largely based on keyword usage. Google is getting far better at filtering the web and identifying where you are. (more…)

Differences in International SERPS – Bas van den Beld – International Search Summit

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Good morning, the third session of the day was about the differences in International SERPS and presented by our very own Bas.

There are a lot of people and cultures around the world and each will have a different behaviour when using a search engine. Google confirmed that over 20% of all online searchers have a local intent therefore the results need to change for each location. Google still dosent have the entire world covered. (more…)

Creating a score card to identify the best markets for your global markets – International Search Summit

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Michael Bonfils outlined an approach when prioritizing international market selection. The wrong approach is to use your analytics to work out which markets to expand to.

The correct approach:

1) Choose your potential markets and list them down the left of a spreadsheet

2) Determine your components and rate each component for each potential market in the spread sheet.

Analytics data

Factors: amount of traffic per country but conversion rate is also vitally important. High bounce rate is an issue that needs to be addressed. Poor conversion and high traffic would mean a lower score. (more…)

Extreme Makeover , The SEO Edition – London SMX

The graveyard session was possibly the best of the day with a challenge in actual SEO.

Rob started the session with the motive of having the session. 4 SEOs proving that the stuff they do actually works. The challenge was to take a website not ranking within the first 5 pages and to get it to rank within 3 months. They couldn’t risk any other blackhat tactics.
(more…)

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