Posts by Sam Crocker

Sam Crocker is an online marketer specialising in SEO at OMD UK. Sam focuses on increasing traffic and conversions for websites whilst always keeping his eye on a company’s bottom line. More articles and bio from Sam Crocker

Behind the Code in the Hoxton Hotel’s £1 Sale

Codegent Plan

Hi Everyone! Some of you will remember that I wrote an article here on State of Search about integrating online and offline marketing efforts and as a case study I used the Hoxton Hotel’s £1 sale from January of this year (2011). Although there were a lot of positive things to say about the efforts in general – I still think it is one of the single greatest “free PR” efforts in recent times – there were some technical concerns with the site and a number of people who complained about their experience.

After the most recent installment of the sale yesterday I had a great chat with the men behind the website to get a feel for what they learned from last time, what they improved and what still needs improvement. A very big thank you to Mark McDermott (Founder) and Aidan Kane (Lead Developer) from Codegent for taking the time to speak to me about everything going on “behind the code”. (more…)

SEO Forecasting: A Poor Allocation of Resource

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As I’m sure we all know, SEO forecasting is one of the most tedious and frustrating tasks that many of us have to cope with for pitches. In my short time at OMD I am quickly learning how important these forecasts are to larger clients and as a result our team have been forced to  improve the sophistication of our forecasting models.

When I first spoke to Bas about writing this post my intention was to write a bit of a rant about the cost and time consuming nature of forecasting and as many have already illustrated before “a forecast for SEO is not even worth the paper it is printed on.” However, given our involvement in an ongoing pitch and the subsequent improvements we have made to our model I think it is worth sharing my findings and suggestions and would love to hear what sort of things others in the industry have come up with to cope with the myriad of issues thrown up by this reporting.

So, if you are a technical SEO and you already know how horrible the data is, I urge you to skip to the end of the post and to weigh in on the comments below about some of the techniques and modelling you all have done to make life easier (e.g. Excel hacks, estimation tricks, number of terms use when trying to create a sample, how you deal with the long-tail, etc.). Though you may find some of the statistics and arguments useful should you find yourself needing to forecast!

However, if you are a client, if you have to deal with clients or if you have to sell to clients I strongly urge you to read the below issues with the data most SEOs use for forecasting and also read about the amount of time this sort of work can take – time that we could be spending to make your website better! (more…)

Why Does Search Get All The Credit? – SES London

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This panel was particularly interesting to me as I work for a large media agency (referenced in both these talks as a potential for lack of coordination and multiple tracking tools) and also because quite recently we have been working on dealing with some of these very attribution issues across the team – so a lot of these issues were all too familiar to me.

We had Nick Beck of Tug as well as Paul Mead of VCCP search talking about a good number of issues with attribution. Essentially the panel was formed on the back end of a meeting Nick had with a client in which they found themselves facing an issue: clearly 200+200+200+200 != 200. As a result of working across a number of agencies it is far too common that everyone tries to claim the conversion based upon different tracking methods and the result is a false reporting figure that far exceeds actual revenue figures for the client. (more…)

Real Time Search Panel – SES London

Don't use search engines!

Hi again folks! This presentation was a very exciting one moderated by Yahoo!’s Jon Myers and featuring Dave Coplin from the Bing/Microsoft team, Paddy Moogan of my alma mater agency Distilled and Aaron Khalow of online marketing connect.

The panel was really well rounded and we got perspective from a search engine (Bing) that has, to its credit really been pushing things forward in terms of social and real time. We also heard from Paddy who had done a lot of tests around optimising for Real Time and had some great ideas. Finally we heard from Aaron who comes from a more traditional marketing background and asked some tough questions that all big companies will be asking: is it really worth it?

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Successful Information Architecture – SES London

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Good morning folks. We’re coming to you live this morning from the SES conference in London. We’ll be covering the sessions all day today as well as tomorrow so feel free to follow along with all the coverage.

For our first session this morning we’re having a look at Successful Information architecture with Alan Perkins from Silverdisc and Richard Baxter from SEOgadget (the image is also from Rich).

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Integrating Online and Offline Marketing Efforts

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One of the more interesting parts of moving from a small specialist search agency into a search team within a major global media agency has been the opportunity to work together with some of our other teams and focus on marketing and brand management beyond the SERPs. When I was working in a specialist agency we did a good job of integrating with internal marketing teams and external agencies alike but there is something unique about working directly with the folks who manage display, paid search, television and more for really big companies.

As part of my role we have been working really hard on better integrating these efforts and making sure that natural search has a seat at the table when broader digital meetings take place, but increasingly we are getting involved with some of the offline efforts for our clients as well. (more…)

SEO Dangers in 2011

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Before anyone starts shaking their head this is NOT another “SEO is dead” post. I don’t subscribe to that school of thought, though I do believe in the fact that a successful SEO by necessity must be willing to change and adapt with the times. With this in mind I have compiled a list of some of the dangers we will all face at one point or another in the new year. Many we have seen before and some others may be less expected. (more…)

So You Want to Run an SEO Conference? Lessons from ProSEO

Hi Everyone! My name is Sam Crocker, I am a Lead SEO at Distilled in London and I’m extremely excited to be writing my first post for State of Search (hopefully the first of many).  Today I’ve been asked to share some of the lessons we’ve learned from hosting this year’s ProSEO seminar.

It has been an exhausting few weeks for the team but I think there should definitely be some good lessons for anyone who has ever thought “this seems like an easy way to make some money”.

A very special thank you to our organiser Lynsey Little for sharing some of the things she learned and for everyone who filled out the feedback forms that helped me write this post. (more…)

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