Posts on State of Search about ‘How to’

Time To Clean Up Your Facebook Page 101 Style

facebook-cleaning

So the new year has started, which means most people have New Years Resolutions. Some believe it’s a ‘fresh start’, though in some cases you could argue whether or not that is the best way to go.

For me the start of the New Year also meant that we were going to welcome several new bloggers to the website. There are more to come, but we welcomed three already. Setting up new bloggers means I had to give them accounts, create their profile pages and update the bloggers page. That made me realize I had to update something else: our Facebook page. Bryan Eisenberg always tells me that you have to keep improving your site, Facebook page and other properties constantly. He actually gives me homework for that. For the Facebook page, that ‘improving’ had been a while.

So I decided to sit down and ‘clean up’ the State of Search Facebook page. In this post I want to take you through some of the cleaning up I did. Because maybe it is time for you to do some cleaning too? (more…)

YouTube Analytics: the Full Break Down

YouTube-analytics-intro

Last week YouTube announced not only a new design for YouTube, but also a new feature which will replace the old “YouTube Insights”: YouTube Analytics.

With YouTube Analytics YouTube aims at getting video creators more involved. With video becoming more important not only because YouTube is the second largest search engine out there, but also because videos show up in Universal Search, it is a welcome feature. After all, more insights in your statistics can help you make better videos, which get more views and thus a better visibility on the web. And it can drive traffic to your website.

Time to take a closer look at the new YouTube Analytics. (more…)

Checking Google Analytics Is Installed On Every Page with Screaming Frog

Screaming-Frog

This is a guest post written by Kev Strong. Kev is an online marketing consultant at Newcastle Upon Tyne based digital marketing agency, Mediaworks. A lover of all things search and an ex-web developer, Kev Strong (a.k.a Goosh) is a specialist in advanced search engine optimisation.

Working with clients with hundreds of thousands of pages on their website is a cumbersome task to keep on top of; Ensuring that your analytics code, be it Google Analytics, CoreMetrics or any other analytics package, is present on on every page is another thing entirely.

During a recent project at Mediaworks, I encountered the possibility that Google Analytics was not installed on every page of a client’s website. Unfortunately, the solution I previously relied on (SiteScanGA) is no longer available and whilst there are great tools out there for checking if GA is installed on an individual page (e.g. GA? For Firefox) there is not an easy, non-enterprise way to check if Google Analytics is installed on every page.

Thankfully there is a solution to this problem by using Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider, Excel and a little jiggery-pokery. (more…)

Getting Started as a Freelance SEO

freelance

One of the most important pieces I’ve read as an SEO was Judith Lewis’ piece “If Your SEO is Not Moonlighting, Fire Them” (which I might add is a great piece to share if your boss is a bit touchy about you doing any work on the side). The fact of the matter is that most of us (especially those of us who work for larger clients) cannot take liberties and often cannot be at the cutting edge on some of these projects, and we certainly cannot and should not take massive risks with other people’s brands.

For this very reason (and as you may have guessed from my website), I feel confidently that doing freelance and/or running affiliate sites is definitely a great way to keep my SEO game tight and strongly suggest anyone who takes SEO seriously should be working on websites outside of work. (more…)

How to Spend Your Online Marketing Budget

money_roll

Greetings marketeers and search geeks. Today’s post comes as a result of the wonderful power of crowd-sourcing – which, if you have a decent network of friends in your industry is a great way to find blogging ideas, but that’s another post!

As a general rule I don’t like to blog about things that have been analysed to death and more importantly on things that people won’t be interested in reading. So, yesterday afternoon I put the question out there and a hat tip to Mr. Richard Fergie who suggested the following which I thought would be a great topic to cover: “if you had £1,000, £10,000 and £100,000 monthly budget what would you spend it on? And saying “it depends” is lame”. (more…)

3 Key Areas Where it is Essential you Think like a Marketer

brain-Google

The size of your agency or your client might dictate just how far you have to go to really help a site improve. Over the years I have worked with large clients both in terms of the size of the site, turnover and staff to clients whose marketing department consisted of 1-3 people. It is on these occasions that you really get involved in every area of a client’s marketing strategy and gain a much deeper understanding of the client. I have regularly found that larger organisations often have internal politics which affects the role you can play as certain information such as PR, social accounts and site updates is loathed to be given over.

I personally feel you should essentially be an extension of a client’s marketing arm, and have found that by immersing yourself within the business you discover aspects that the client never shared at the beginning of the campaign but can help you improve your content strategy, conversion optimisation or off page campaign. My fellow blogger Claire Carlile’s post on starting a campaign with client questions is a good start if you have recently taken on a new client. Thinking like a marketer means that you have a solid understanding on USPs, audience, marketplace, competitors and think more about the end user than a search engine. It also means that some issues which traditionally you might not have gotten involved in are exactly where you should. The price of a product is one example and the CRM systems is another. (more…)

Two ways of using Google Images for product keyword research

Today I want to share a way to do keyword research, specifically for products you want to sell online. Say you’ve got a new product you want to sell online. You’re going to start a webshop to sell this product and you want the shop to be findable for relevant keywords. But you don’t know how your target audience calls this product.

Normally keyword research would begin with an idea of how your audience searches. But there are other ways to find out how a product is referred to online. This type of keyword research is based on a few new functionalities of Google image search. (more…)

Five Ways to Encourage Branded Search Queries

brands

Incentivising people to search for your brand is more important than it ever has been. With personalised and social search growing in importance and prominence, the question that seems to be in the mind of a lot of online marketers is ‘how can we benefit from personalised or social search?’

The answer of course is to encourage more branded search traffic to make more searcher’s browsing history ‘biased’ towards results from your domain (Here’s a more in-depth explanation of how personalised search works by SEOmoz). (more…)

Time Management for an SEO: The Pomodoro Technique

time-management

“For every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned”

As an SEO, or in any industry where time is spent earning value for your clients, the ability to manage time effectively is a skill that needs to be learnt. I think this is particularly true for anyone, at any level, within search marketing and that mainly holds true because there are normally several activities that needed to be done yesterday.

A well thought out and constructed timeline can help with project management but if you are the account manager of numerous clients a certain amount of overlapping is bound to inevitable. Clients are not the only thing that requires your time and attention during a normal day at the office, reading and keeping up to date with news, strategies, studies and methods is essential. Add to this the constant stream of information pouring through Twitter and now Google + and you are faced with a persistent fight against your urges to check whether you have missed anything in the last minute. (more…)

Working with clients to develop a robust and informative keyphrase seed list

chapter 5 keyword research

It’s been over 3 years now since a potential client (a B&B owner) from Bridgend told me that he wanted to rank Number 1 in Google for hotels.

Try as I might, I was unable to convince him that both he as a business owner, and I as an internet marketer, would likely have more success choosing a range of keyphrases that were less competitive, and more relevant to the product and services that he offered.  Suffice to say, it was not the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship.  I wonder where he is now? (more…)

Structuring an SEO Project: Moving Away from the Retainer Model

brick-wall

There is no question that I have voiced my concern a fair few times about SEO needing to grow up, for us to become marketers, allow more transparency with our clients and so forth, though it has dawned on me that I’ve not really done too much to discuss how specifically we could go about accomplishing this. I do not hope (nor do I think it feasible) to address all of the issues we face in this one post, but I would like to point out one specific way in which I believe we can earn more respect from the people we work with directly and hopefully seek to avoid ever losing an existing client again (unless of course we choose to do so :) ).

(more…)

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