Posts on State of Search about ‘Events’

Location: Fitting it Into the Marketing Mix

On the second day of SAScon one of the sessions I definitely wanted to see was the Location panel. Chaired by Dom Hodgson from Emberads with a panel consisting of Laurence O’Toole from Analytics SEO, Netbooster’s Teddie Cowell, Malcolm Maybury from 360spin, and Google’s Chris Johnson.

Local Trends & Ad Solutions

After the obligatory introductions the first presentation is from Chris Johnson, who talks about local trends & ad solutions. According to Chris 1 in 3 mobile searches has a local element. He shows an example of a Las Vegas company who utilised their Google Analytics data to customise their mobile campaigns, resulting in strong improvements in conversions. (more…)

Mobile Marketing Goes Mainstream

My next session at the 2012 SAScon conference is about mobile marketing and includes Richard Gregory and Ben Wightman from Latitude, Mark Kuhilow from MyMCart, and James Hamlin from Seatwave.

Mobile Statistics & Paid Search

First up is Latitude’s Ben Wightman talking about the latest deveoplments in mobile PPC. Ben points out the strong growth of mobile in paid search clickshare in the past 6 months, correlation well with the release of new smartphone models. There’s a similar growth trend for tablets though it still lags behind smartphones. (more…)

Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin

The next SAScon session I chose to attend is called ‘Breaking Free of Panda/Penguin’ and features my good friend Peter Young from Mediacom and Holistic Search, and the original SEO rapper and Jason Statham lookalike Neil ‘SEOmad‘ Walker.

Cause and Effect

Peter kicks off by listing the issues Google is looking out for in web spam, such as cloaking, malware, sneaky redirects, link wheels, paid links, and many more of such tactics that Google disapproves of. Temporal spikes – i.e. link velocity – is also a big warning signal for Google’s web spam fighters.

Neil asks who in the audience has been hit by Panda or Penguin, and who’s received bad link warnings in GWT. The most hands go up when asked about Penguin, indicating the severity of this latest update. (more…)

Advanced PPC Techniques

Next up for me at SAScon is the Advanced PPC panel moderated by Yahoo’s Jon Myers.

Duncan Fisher, Latitude – Quality Score

First speaker is Duncan Fisher from Latitude and he’s talking about Quality Score (QS). The Quality Score of your keywords is a vital aspect of your AdWords campaign, ensuring only the most relevant ads are shown on Google’s search results. It’s a ‘complex mathematical formula’ scoring the relevance of your ad & landing page to the keyword you advertise on. From the advertiser’s point of view it helps determine how much you end up paying per click. (more…)

King Content vs. Panda: How To Survive & Thrive With The New Content Rules

The session covered various strategies on how to avoid Panda and Penguin and focused on the future of link building. There were some very different viewpoints and some interesting takeaways.

Ken Dobell, President, Digital, DAC Group

Ken covered the why and the how of Panda and posed the question what is in the head of a panda or a penguin. Most adult search engine users say the relevance and quality of results are improving over time. This is probably because people are getting better at search. 43% of all searches consist of four or more words. 64% of these searches return zero exact matches. This shows the demand of search exceeding the supply of search results.

We as SEOs optimise for broad terms, this is a short sighted strategy and typically the first search undertaken before the search is refined. Relevancy is massively important as search engines try and become more focused on usefulness. Answering a skeletal question is no longer enough. This is why eHow got hit. Penguin was in response to Google telling SEOs to stop trying so hard. The next generation is universal and semantic search.

Google is going far beyond ten blue links and are moving towards a deeper more personal engagement. Combined with social signals this is only going to get more important. We need to keep it real and make sure you create great content which satisfies a need. People need to like you more than they need to notice you. Make sure your landing pages answer questions, are easy to use and are scalable.

Focus on what matters, create fulfilling user experiences and focus on where Google is going.

Simon Penson, founder, Zazzle Media LTD

Simon focused on understanding site penalties. Penguin is a filter to kill webspam but it’s had a far greater impact. It’s really ramped up of late as the rollouts get closer together. The greatest fear we have is the fear of the unknown. The continuum of understanding is a process that will help you deal with that:

1) Data – understanding your own link profile and work out where it’s weakest. Anchor text, relevance and low quality links are all issues.

2) Information – add context to the data and structure it in a way that helps you understand it. Add competitors. You should look for short paragraphs of text and groups of links & content, evaluate if you are there.

3) Knowledge – build up experience; look at your backlink acquisition graph. It should be a smooth graph, peaks and troughs are bad.

4) Wisdom – live with it long term

Key takeaways: understand your link profile using the methods above and rework if necessary.

Stephen Croome, Head of SEO Delivery, SEOGadget

Stephen shared a case study of PrezzyBox and how they got hit by Panda. They completely lost all rankings but recovered.

The work they did:

1) Get a good monitoring system – use AWR, GA, GWMT, Twitter, Email, if you don’t have a group of people on email you should do.

2) Use data to help clients make difficult decisions – getting clients to get rid of large sections of their website is tough. Check all the content that isn’t driving traffic, its low quality traffic and you could get rid of it.

3) Cleaned up the site’s index by dealing with extraneous URLs – there were loads of querystring based urls, they deleted or re-homed orphan pages. They cleaned up their internal linking and global nav.

4) Rewrote the content that drove money but got rid of the dupe content.

5) Throw away categories that had no depth of products – only target good content and throw away bad content

6) They created unique content for every category. Snippets were fine for now but they will need to improve that. They used related searches to build in snippets

7) Used UGC – each product was shared

Vince Blackham, Director of Social Media, 97th Floor (@vinceblackham)

Vince focused about how social is affecting search and how content plays a part in that. Last month 52 updates were made to the algo and authority was affected in 6 of them. Links are carrying less weight and there is more to come. With Google getting better at evaluating bad links content is going to be the best long term exercise. People are still more interested in data visualisation than a year ago. Bad designs won’t get you anywhere. Test various infographics and that helps you build up a case that works best.

Permabait is an interactive that’s based on an API that’s interesting and permanent. A breakdown on Warren Buffets money earning through a Yahoo API was a great success. Instruction based graphics target Pinterest and resulted in great visits but great revenue too. They also generate a lot of links and impact in the social graph. Do it all now and embrace social.

Life in a [Not Provided] World

What is [Not Provided] and why should we care?

SEOs were piling into the conference room to see Scott Krager of serps.com and Duran Inci of Optimum7, talk about the thing that’s bothering us all most at the moment, apart from the pesky penguins. [Not Provided] is a problem (for SEOs), because Google is hiding the keyword data that Google users are using when searching whilst logged into their Google+/profile account. Once signed in, Google users are automatically logged into a secure browsing function (https://). You may have noticed, in your analytics, that a large percentage of your traffic comes from keywords that you are unable to see. It’s frustrating! How do we know which keywords we need to work more/less on?

According to Scott, we are going to continue to see less and less keyword data. So we need to get used to the idea. Rolled out in March 2011, SEOs across the globe have questioned why Google have implemented this new ‘privacy update’, saying that it could have been designed to make Google more money. Is it possible that Google will, one day, charge money to get access to this data? It’s hard not to be weary at a time when Google is launching their ‘Premium Google Analytic’ packages, which also comes with a premium price tag.

A spontaneous talk with Google’s very own Pierre Far

As Scott and Duran challenged and questioned Google’s motivation to provide the [Not Provided] results, Pierre Far, one of Google’s leading analysts, made a surprising but welcome appearance. He proceeded to give us what felt like a good telling off for talking dirty about Google. Pierre was very defensive and told us all firmly that Google’s ‘privacy function’ was not just an excuse to cover up some other ‘evil’ plan, but was a genuine attempt to improve the user experience. Surprise surprise, another Googler telling us that everything they do is with the best interest of the user in mind. It was clear that Pierre genuinely believes in the privacy function of Google products, and told us all in his booming voice, that he was very proud to work for the first search engine to take its users’ privacy so seriously. In another defensive pitch, Pierre noted that far more keyword data is available than we realise, and that we should pay greater attention to our webmaster tools. He even tried to downplay the effect of [Not Provided] data, saying that not all industries will be affected by the update. This, however, was quickly, and aggressively dismissed by the majority of SEOs in the room.

Perhaps us SEOs are just becoming a little over sensitive to Google’s updates, perhaps we’re scared that they are going to make it impossible for us to provide our services and earn our bread. As if to echo my own thoughts, a member of the audience asked the question; “It all sounds really great, and I know we need to be willing to change, but are we all screwed?”

Scott Krager, quickly apologised for bringing the tone of the session down, and being ‘depressing’. He explained that we are not screwed, and that NOW is actually a very exciting time to be an SEO. Finally, Google are enforcing their rules and levelling the playing field. Spammy SEO is finally being punished by updates like Panda and Penguin. The rules remain the same as they’ve always been and promote quality content, easy usability, authentic links and generally ‘being nice’. We all know the rules, now is the time to play by them. Admittedly, the [Not Provided] mystery was not really ‘solved’, instead, it seems we are told “It is happening, deal with it”.

Where do we go from here?

In an attempt to lift our spirits, Scott gave us some advice on what we can do before 100% of our keyword data is [Not Provided].

Track as much keyword data now, while we still can.
Capture goal conversion rates by keyword.
Record (Not Provided) goal conversion rates.
What are the data sources that can’t be taken away?
Continue to compare today to yesterday, this week to last week. Etc
Calculate [Not Provided] at URL level to estimate lost referral numbers.
Find keywords in the Google Webmaster tools at page level.
Compare to page level keywords in Google analytics.

Scott also encouraged us to be transparent with our clients/bosses. We may not be able to show all of the keywords that are providing traffic, but shouldn’t be afraid to show how much traffic is being generated by [Not Provided] keywords. Scarily, Scott suggested that we should assume that ALL keyword referral data will be gone in the next 12 months. I guess it’s a case of “Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail.”

Takeaways

Track your goals and conversions by keyword NOW before it goes away.
Compare Google webmaster tools safe level queries to Google analytics page level.
PPC for Keyword research is the bomb!

Scott basically confirmed what we have all been trying to ignore. As he put it, Google aren’t all of a sudden going to change their minds and return to their old ways of sharing ALL keyword data. This is the way things are, we have to deal with what we’ve got. Be the opposite of [Not Provided], share everything, be completely transparent. Control what you can. Measure what you can. What more can we do?

Google+ify Or Die

Danny started by giving the background on Google+ and how we need to engage with it to expand and future proof our SEO strategies.

Bas van den Beld, Chief Editor, State of Search

Bas started by going through the numbers. Google + is still very small when compared to Facebook from an engagement and a visitor perspective. This leads to apathy towards Google+ but there is more to it than that. Eric Schmidt’s recent quote about everything moving towards the Google + platform in the future shows how important it is.

Mind set

People are using Google+ because they have to. The mind set is key. The most basic human needs is the need to connect with others. It’s a nice sentiment but how is it important? Google has started analysing how people work and are translating that to the search engine. People trust authorities, People want what others have which is largely fuelled by jealousy. We are also open to peer pressure. We also like to spread the word about products and other people.

Google + is bringing in these elements into the search environment. Stop thinking they will kick out Facebook, it’s to get a grip on who we are. It’s all about data. We are getting personalised results in the US already and that’s coming to Europe soon. This is all to figure out who you are, who your friends are, what you do and to which entities you are connected. Go to http://google.com/s2/search/social#gd and you can see who Google thinks you are connected to. These connections power Google social search and they are constantly trying to get more of the offline world online.

How do these factors influence the results?

They are showing authoritative people within each sector. Rel Author is also powering this. Personalised search is also sharing other things like who is at which event. The images increase the amount of click through for those results. You can also thank people that share your content. Google results are also showing conversations in Google+ and you can participate in that conversation in the search results.

How do you use this?

People are more interested in the stuff their social circle share than your stuff. Your target audience are the people that share your content as much as the people that are buying your product. Find your brand advocates. Make sure that you make your content shareable. Work on your social circle and create content that your market wants.

Kevin Gibbons, Director of Strategy, SEOptimise

Kevin wanted to share how much juice you get from Google+, in theory annotations can increase your CTR by 5- 10% according to Google.

1) Miele: 19% CTR without +1s and 0% with the +1s.

2) Soft32 has 456 people that like their brand page – 9% CTR without +1s and 5% CTR with +1s

Overall in both CTR cases G+ had a negative impact but it actually makes sense because the +1 listings are less relevant than the informational results. The second reason is that the brand CTR is always going to be big compared to the deeper pages. Kevin argues that the CTR is really not the major win. The win is that you are getting traffic you would not otherwise get.

He tested clients with G+ vs. clients without.

They saw a 19.5% decrease in organic traffic for clients that aren’t using Google+. The converse was true with clients seeing a 43% increase in clients that did use Google+.

Asos is doing a lot with Google+ which has had a major search impact for Asos.com search impact. They are seeing a 100% improvement on organic traffic.

This doesn’t mean that Google+ has a direct correlation to organic rankings. Google+ doesn’t really matter at the moment in the algo but it is very likely to be there in the future. Google + is being pushed like crazy with 353 million pages indexed.

With Google penguin making things harder links are becoming more outdated as an authority element. This paves the way for social signals to form a bigger part of the algorithm.

5 tips for G+

1) Focus your SEO strategy on great content, don’t chase the algorithm, build great content

2) Build a great content team. Community managers, bloggers, content strategists, infographic designers, guest authors and video producers are all key parts of SEO teams in the future. Bring in people that can make your content stand out more.

3) Use rel=author to get more value

4) Create a G+ brand page and link to your site this syncs up your home page + 1s with your brand + 1s. Brand page +1s have been shown to influence search more than home page + 1s

5) Go in once a day and share your post and comment on your friend’s posts

Google + Tools:

1) View your social connections to a scary level (link is above in Bas’ presentation)

2) Find influencers on findpeopleonplus.com

3) Analyse your reach on Google+ Ripples and evaluate people that share people like you

4) Social sources analytics stream in GA

So in summary G+ has a negative CTR but that doesn’t matter because they are ranking better because of it. Ensure that content marketing is a central part of your SEO strategy.

Hardcore Local SEO Tactics

Local search can be one of the most effective ways to target your marketplace, but it is surprising how many business get it ‘wrong’. This session showed us what to consider as a local business or as a national business targeting locally. (more…)

Mobile Trends: Search, Apps & Landing Pages

Welcome to SMX Day 2! This was a session that I was looking forward to as the year of Mobile is finally here. It was a great panel with some great takeaways from a stats and best practice perspective.

Andy Atkins-Krueger, Group CEO, WebCertain (@andyatkinskruge)

Andy started the session by saying how important the session was as it’s an area that is big. Mobile broadband is bigger than desktop in some countries. The mobile use segment is also growing rapidly. 33% of mobile is at home particularly in front of the TV. The trends show that mobile is catching PC. Tablet overlap is only 6.6% in the EU. 66% of all mobile traffic is on an Apple device hence Google rolling out the g+ app on Apple first. There is also 87% growth in mobile retail year on year. (more…)

Overlooked, Underloved and Unknown Analytics

There are many analytics packages that are used and each come with various features. One of the most used analytics packages by far is Google Analytics. In this session, four speakers who are experts in this field are going to show us tools and features that you may or not be aware of that will help you to improve the performance of your website and increase your ROI.

This is a session I am really looking forward to as Martijn Beijk, one of the State of Search bloggers is taking to the stage along with Anna Lewis, who is a fellow member of the Koozai team!

(more…)

Winning The Conversion: Creating “Can’t Say No” Paid Search Landing Pages

Running a paid search campaign isn’t just about getting your campaign optimised and driving traffic to your site, more importantly the landing pages need to convert otherwise you will not be getting the ROI you are looking for.

In this session at SMX London 2012, four great speakers take to the stage to share their tips on how to create effective landing pages that people just can’t say no to.