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Paid Search Ad Copy Auditing - Whiteboard Friday

rauschenbach — 2012-02-09T22:43:45+01:00

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

This week's Whiteboard Friday focuses on ad copy testing ideas and best practices. With these helpful tips you can make the most of your PPC search marketing dollars so that you can spend more time on SEO. What you'll end up with is a helpful ad copy worksheet template that can be used to develop new ad copy ideas.

Please give Brian Rauschenbach a warm welcome as he presents his very first Whiteboard Friday! Don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Hello, I'm Brian Rauschenbach. I am a principal at Add Three. We are a search engine marketing agency located in Capitol Hill in Seattle. Today I am going to talk to you about paid search ad copy ad testing.

We get a lot of questions from potential clients and current clients on sort of effective ways to optimize your ad copy on your paid search ads. We have this example today on a big head term for one of our clients, Sitter City, here, and the keyword is babysitter. It is a keyword that is searched a lot on both the head terms and with the geo keywords against it. So, this is the search result that we've taken from Google. In this example, you'll see that our ad copy actually has a localized listing against it, and our big competitor's has local in the listing, but the Seattle city has not been picked up in the ad, even though we didn't give Google a Seattle indicator.

So, a couple of the things that I want to talk about is sort of effective A/B ad testing and some best practices you could use around this. In this test here, we're basically showing a couple different examples here that I want to highlight. One is localization of the ad. So, we're doing it both by creating a geo ad group with Seattle as the ad group city location, and then what ends up happening is on a head term like "babysitter," we're still picking up a local region. Then we also use the ad copy behind it to say Seattle babysitters, where you'll see the other ad in here is just taking local because it's a head term and they're figuring that this term is actually getting searched by a lot of people in different regions and they are just putting babysitter in the copy.

When you look at this listing in Google, the babysitter gets highlighted in both areas, and if you see down here in the actual description, the ad copy description, we usually do a title case. So, we will capitalize each of the first words all the way through and then usually use an exclamation point or something to sort of draw some emphasis to the ad.

One of the things that I like doing is having a pure A/B ad copy test. In our AdWords campaign, we usually have only one ad running against what we call our champion ad so that we can get out data pulled together faster and be able to report on which the wining ad is.

So, localization is setting up your geo ad groups so that you're making sure that in your big local regions, where your conversions are the strongest, that you actual have ad groups specified for that.

Using the keyword insert tag is sort of a common practice. What we usually do is make sure that you are using that so that the title casing is being effective as well.

Strong call to actions in your ad copy. You'll see here that we've got find and join free as our call to actions. On this ad, they've got search, fast and easy, guaranteed results as sort of a statement but can be considered a call to action as well.

Another area where we've seen a lot of success in ad copy testing is Google gives you 35 characters per line for your description text, and then it puts it in this long sentence. If you are in the top two listings, sometimes you will see the extended titles appearing where they figured out in their algorithm that it clicks better. Then if you see the ads that are on the side, they are usually in two lines. So, another thing that we've tested in the past with different clients is to shorten the actual description line. So, even though they are giving you 35 characters, it doesn't mean that you have to use all 35 characters. In this instance, we might write an ad that just says, "Find sitters. Join free," and test that against the champion ad.

One of the other things that we always try to do to is isolate the test so that we're only testing the description. We're only testing the title tag on the ad, and/or in some instances we've even tested brands without the Ws in it against the www. brand URL on there and have seen different result sets. So, I can't really say that you should always have your brand sit at SitterCity.com or Care.com. In some instances, the www actually tests out a little better. A lot of that ad copy testing is done in the trade term buckets, and so we have those all separated out, so that would be the display URL piece here.

Another thing that we've seen recently is people are putting sort of a one- two step in their ads. So, if you can imagine this would be the first one and it would be "find sitters," and then the second one would be a call to action too. Then you might just say, "Join for free!" These ads work better we found if you are vying in the third through fifth position, because they'll get broken up on two different lines instead of showing up long on one line and then it usually doesn't translate as well. That is just sort of another thing that we've been doing some recent testing with lately. We're seeing it happen across other industries, like dating and people search, and they've had some pretty good success with it.

One of the other things that we usually do, like people always ask, "Well, how much data is enough data for this ad test to be successful?" What we found is that it varies from client to client, but usually if you are achieving at least 1% click-through rate on your ads and you pull in about 20,000 to 30,000 impressions, depending on what your conversion rate or where you have your conversion pixel firing, it is usually enough data right around the 30,000 impression mark to make sort of an informed decision on which ad is actually starting to edge out the other ad. We like to do this with just the two primary ads and not having five. Sometimes we look in campaigns and we see five different ad copies all being tested at the same time. That test to get those results back on those types of tests usually take two to three months, and in the meantime you are lowering your quality score on that ad group if you've got an ad that isn't polling as well as the other one. Google usually will go through and start serving the highest click-through ad with preference anyways. Even if you are doing it as a 50/50 test, we've seen that in the past as well. So, my best practice is to just keep it a pure A/B ad test, so you always have a champion and a challenger ad.

Another area where people make a big mistake when they're doing their ad testing is that if the is our primary ad right here, you want to duplicate this ad copy as your champion ad, and then you want to introduce the challenger ad and start those two pieces of ad copy at the same time. Once the ad copy has been approved by Google, usually happens within 24 hours, then you will pause the original ad so that you have a true start so there isn't any layover data that is being transferred over to the test. What we've seen before in the past is ads that might be getting assists from other head terms or other keywords might get triggered in a conversion cycle, and one will show up in a database that happened on traffic that was maybe a week before you started your test. So that's another really, really important piece that a lot of people overlook when they are doing their ad copy testing.

I'll have a couple other examples that I'll put in some notes on some other areas where we do a lot of social listening with tools like Radian6 and Social3i where we basically listen to what is happening in the social space to actually dictate what we are going to use for ad copy. One of the things that we might have heard in the past was that people really liked parent reviews or keywords like "trusted" for this type of business, so we have actually incorporated them into the ad copy and tested against that. So that is a good thing that you could basically use for what conversations are happening in Facebook and Twitter against your brand and incorporate that in to your ad copy.

That's it.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Putting Guest Post Outreach Theories to the Test [With Some Real World Data]

jamesagate — 2012-02-09T11:32:24+01:00

Posted by jamesagate

Following the positive response to my last post here on SEOmoz, I wanted to bring you all some data right from a few of our real-world campaigns.

As a business, we systemise a great deal and monitor a lot of processes so it made sense for me to put use to some of this data and try to prove/disprove any commonly held theories about outreach.

The following is based on a sample of 400 guest posts that we placed for clients over a three month period (November-January). Make of the data what you will, it isn’t conclusive but I feel it does go some way to providing some good starting points for you to explore in your own outreach campaigns – as with most things, the best strategy is for you to test it out for yourself in the industry/industries that you work in.

Theory #1 – Being a woman will get you more links

Speak to nearly anyone that has been building links for a while and they will have at least come across the theory that approaching a prospective link partner looking for a guest post is more likely to be successful if you are a woman. I would think this stems from the widely held belief (rightly or wrongly) that women are more trustworthy and well-meaning than men.

I wanted to investigate this theory in a little more depth. Quite by accident, of the 400 posts, it was roughly a 50/50 split with a woman conducting the outreach 52% of the time.

790 potential sites were contacted
411 by a woman
379 by a man

Battle of the sexes – who performed better?

437 positive responses received (remember there is a small attrition rate which has to be accounted for within the guest posting process where the link partner either doesn’t accept the content or doesn’t deliver on his/her end of the bargain).
263 positive responses received by a woman.
174 positive responses received by a man.

You might argue that this difference in performance between the genders could be attributed to a number of things:

Some are better at outreach than others – whilst this might be true, all receive the same training however, and any slight differences should be averaged out by this fact.
Consultants have different methods – similarly, some consultants may have slightly different methods although in reality we have systemised our process and continue to innovate as a team sharing best practices so again any impact is likely to be negated.
Consultants were contacting different websites – again, a very real possibility that the difference in performance is attributable to the ‘leads’ each consultant received. We do have different consultants who work and specialise in different industries so this could be a potential reason.

To really put this theory to the test though, we had one of our female consultants get in touch with five potential link partners who had either declined the offer of a guest post or requested payment for a guest post from one of our male outreach consultants.

When a female consultant made contact, they managed to reduce the price of the paid placement (we didn’t pay for it anyway) and we got a positive response from two of them. To clarify, that was pitching exactly the same website and roughly the same content as before.

That’s a pretty interesting find, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Theory #2 – Job title matters

Depending on whether the client has a preference, we usually approach the link partner as either an agency employee or an individual/freelancer.

Some clients like us to contact link partners as if we were employees of their company, others prefer we don’t disclose agency connections which on the face of it may stir some ethical debate however in these situations we merely act as the facilitator between our freelance content team and the host blog and since we strive to create win-win-win situations I have no problem with operating in this way.

In all honesty – each of these has its advantages and disadvantages (whilst contacting as an agency employee might invoke more requests for payment, it does make the option of continuing the relationship and benefiting your other clients much more practical) but let’s look at this from a pure success rate basis.

790 potential sites were contacted
297 were contacted as a freelancer
373 were contacted as an agency employee
120 were contacted as an in-house

In cases where the partner was approached by a freelancer, a positive response was received 189 times. In cases where the partner was approached by an in-house employee, a positive response was received 78 times and finally in cases where the partner was approached by an agency employee, we received positive responses 170 times.

The results surprised me because, one would think, that an email from someone directly working for an organisation that is going to benefit from the guest post would result in more declines or at least more requests for some form of payment. Clearly though trust is an important factor when it comes to largely unsolicited (albeit well researched and properly pitched) offers of guest posts.

Theory #3 – Timing is important

I was really excited to pull together the data for this one because I was confident that timing really mattered, especially when it comes to the initial introductory email.

Whilst we don’t actively record the precise time an email is sent, we do keep a note of the time of day i.e. Morning, Afternoon or Evening for the recipient. We’re UK based so running campaigns for our overseas clients requires rigorous planning and execution if we are to get the timing right.

In this case, I found no conclusion that could be drawn from this data. This is because when you average the response rate out across industries and countries (as I did in this case) it is only logical that no correlation will be easily identifiable because no two prospects are the same; different industries, different time zones and so on.

This doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of timing though:

Recording when your prospect is at their most responsive is helpful for keeping the process moving especially if they become a little wayward right before the agreed publish date.
Observing patterns in specific niches and putting this to work for you, for example, I have identified a responsiveness pattern across some of the sports blogs we work with (most, not all, but the majority respond late evening in their time) which could well be attributed to the fact they are hobby bloggers with full-time jobs and a family who sneak a bit of ‘blog time’ once their wife and children have gone to bed.

Theory #4 – Personalisation is worth it (or is it?)

We wanted to guarantee a quality standard with our outreach processes, which is we have approved templates that are then tailored to each prospect.

In certain situations where we feel it will be beneficial, we will write emails completely from scratch.

We don’t send out any generic emails which for the purposes of this exercise is a real shame because we can’t properly compare the difference in response rate when you send out a stock email and when you send out a personalised or even bespoke email.

We make a note of whether the email sent was tailored or entirely bespoke and the results align with what you might expect…

Completely bespoke emails generate a higher response rate although the caveat to this is of course that to custom write every email just isn’t possible if you want a campaign to be of a certain scale.

If you contacted 10 partners with a tailored email then you would get fewer positive responses but similarly, try sending 100 completely from scratch emails. You need a lot of people and that costs money which then impacts on the ROI of a campaign.

The trade-off and what I believe to be the happy medium is a solid template that is tailored to each recipient. Be flexible with your templates too and allow them to evolve as you see certain elements working better than others. Innovate then scale by applying across your campaigns.

Theory #5 – The style of outreach email has an impact

As I discussed above, we have a number of base templates for our consultants to customise, we have one version which are very conversion focused and another which is more soft-conversion – both variations are useful just in different industries.

I recently covered what goes into our high-conversion outreach emails and whilst I still don’t wish to reveal the exact format of our templates I will say the following:

Template A – very proactive wording that encourages moving to the next step, selecting one of the articles rather than asking whether they’ll accept a guest post.
Template B – much softer wording that works well in industries where guest posting is less prevalent and where the prospect needs their hand holding on the process a bit more.

As you will note, the more proactive template A is more effective in terms of generating a response. However, given that these styles are effective in different industries, so both templates will continue to have a place in our work. That being said, I found it useful and really interesting to compare their performance side by side.

Theory #6 – Persistence pays off

I believe in creating win-win-win situations when it comes to guest posting and because we go further to research and evaluate prospective websites, I see no issue in following up with the potential link partner three times before writing them off as unresponsive.

If you categorise the responses received in relation to the number of times contacted, it becomes evident that persistence really does pay off.

You will note from the chart below that around 30% of positive responses received agreed on the second or third email.

Had we not been persistent we would have needed to find, research and contact additional link partners which would have greatly increased our workload.

Persistence is one thing but relentless pestering is another. Follow up on leads, but be polite and for the benefit of all of us in the industry know when you should be taking no for an answer.

What’s the perfect combination?

Is it best to be an in-house female link builder pitching content in the evening three times? No, not always.

Different strokes for different folks. To summarise, it’s important to test out what works best in your industry.

Remember that this is a relatively small internal data sample so it is by no means perfect as there are always multiple factors in play at any one given time but despite this, I do feel it is valid enough to make it useful. Hopefully it acts as a starting point to develop your own study or to shape your initial guest post outreach strategy.

I’d be keen to hear from anyone running guest posting campaigns to learn about their methods and the kinds of response rate they generate.

James Agate is the founder of the content and outreach agency Skyrocket SEO. They offer a guest posting service that’s aimed at agencies and website owners looking for a semi-scalable, high-quality way to proactively earn links.

6 Reasons You Need to Charge More

Dr. Pete — 2012-02-08T20:30:15+01:00

Posted by Dr. Pete

I’m a reluctant Capitalist. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money (my dad was a country preacher, and my mom was a schoolteacher), and the transition from academia to building a start-up and then running my own consulting firm has been rocky at times. The one thing I still hear almost every week is “You need to charge more,” and I preach the same message to new SEOs even as I try to remember it. This post is a reminder to myself (and to you) of why what you charge matters, and why it’s not just about greed.

1. It’s Not All Billable

Almost every new consultant, freelancer, and even agency makes a critical math error. Pay attention, because this mistake could could haunt your business for years to come. It goes something like this:

I need to make $37,000 to pay the bills, and I’d like to make $50,000. A year is about 2000 work hours (50 weeks x 40 hours), so if I can just charge $25/hour, I’ll easily pay the bills and make my $50K goal.

I sincerely commend you for doing the math – it’s important to know what you need to pay the bills and to figure out what that means on a daily and hourly basis. Here’s the problem – in a 40-hour week, especially starting out, you’re going to spend half that week pounding the pavement (or more). You need to network, build your site/portfolio, blog, make phone calls, write proposals, and on and on. Once clients come in, you’ve got administrative work to do – somebody has to send the invoices, pay the taxes, and buy the toilet paper.

So, at best, only 20 hours of your week will be billable. Now, your $25/hour just netted you $25,000. You not only fell short of your $50K goal – you didn’t even pay your bills.

2. Delivery Kills Sales

But wait, it gets worse. That 20-hour billable week assumes that all of your pavement-pounding actually gets instant results. When it does finally pay off, what happens? You get a nice, juicy contract, pour all your time into delivering it, and then realize that you didn’t actually keep selling while you were doing the work. So, after you get that check, you go a month with no work at all while you rebuild your lead pipeline. Ultimately, you’ll be working a 20-hour billable week about every other week, especially for the first year or two. So, you’re averaging 10 hours per week and your $25/hour just netted you a $12,500 bottom line.

3. You Have New Costs

This one’s mostly for the freelancers and independent consultants. Revenue does not equal salary. Even being a consultant costs money – it’s not a high-overhead profession, but everything’s coming out of your pocket now. Some things that you didn’t think twice about when you were employed will suddenly seem shockingly expensive. Want to go to an industry tradeshow? With the full-conference pass, airfare, car, hotel, and meals, that’s about $2,000-3,000. Need a copy of Photoshop? You can’t just pop down to IT anymore – Adobe CS5.5 starts at $1,299. Suddenly your old boss doesn’t seem like such a cheapskate.

That doesn’t count the perks you’ve lost. You’ll hear all about the amazing tax breaks of self-employment from your friends who dream of self-employment but don’t actually have any idea what they’re talking about. Sure, you might be able to write off half your phone bill or a corner of your condo as office space, but meanwhile you’re paying both halves of your employment taxes, your own health insurance, and you’ve got no 401K. Even if you hit that $50K revenue goal, it’s probably more like a $40K salary. The $12,500 you barely squeezed out in the realistic scenario above is more like $10K, and that assumes you skip health insurance, which will run you roughly that entire amount.

4. You Set Your Value

People are funny – when we discount our prices, we expect the buyer will understand they’ve gotten a bargain. When we pay discount prices, we think we’ve walked away with something of less value. Let’s say you go to a fancy restaurant with a 50% Groupon – a month later, do you think “I should go back to that place, since I got such a great deal last time!” No, you think – “If I go back to that place, I’ll have to pay full price. That sucks!” My wife would rather die than go to Bed, Bath and Beyond without a coupon, and it’s entirely their fault for sending us 11 a day. They’ve set their value, and the message is “We don’t have any.”

What’s worse is that you send a broader message that that discount rate is your value to the market, and you even begin to believe it. Unless there’s an amazing opportunity and you’re 100% clear that this is a one-time deal, don’t even start. The legacy of discount pricing could haunt you forever.

5. Your Time Is Finite

We tend to price future work based on past work. On the surface, that makes perfect sense, but the problem is simple – the cost of 10 hours/week when you have nothing to do is a lot less than the cost of 10 hours/week when you’ve already got 40 hours booked. You only have so many hours in the day, and as you run out, they become more valuable. Think of your time like any marketable resource – with more scarcity comes higher prices.

Your time is like MegaBus. When the bus is empty, you may be able to charge $1 for a seat, but that last seat should fetch a premium price. People naturally want to book every available hour, but there’s an opportunity cost to being left with no time at all. Once the hours start to book, it’s time to raise your prices and protect your most non-renewable resource.

6. Cheap Attracts Cheap

Some people may take offense at this, but experience has taught me over and over (and by “taught” I mean “beat with a bat and left me for dead in the alley”) that the people who fight you over price will never stop fighting you. It’s easy to think that, since you gave them a discount and gave into all their demands, they’ll appreciate you more and manage their own expectations, but that’s never happened to me in almost 15 years of working with clients.

It’s almost never about the money – there are some people who just think vendors are meant to be beaten. If you win, they lose. Unfortunately, that means they’ll never see your relationship as win-win. Learn to recognize those clients during negotiation, and get out while you can.

There’s one exception – if you really want to help an organization and you know money is an issue for them, consider doing the work pro-bono. Scope a one-time project and donate your time. There’s nothing wrong with helping people. Where you go wrong is when you start letting other people define your value.

So, How Much Is “More”?

That’s the Million-dollar question, isn’t it? According to our SEO pricing survey last month, the most common hourly rate is between $76-$200 US. That’s quite a range. I think it comes back to that math in Reason #1. The trick is to do the math realistically. Be realistic about your costs and the number of hours really left in the day after sales and marketing are done (and you need to do sales and marketing every day, even when you’re working on deliverables). Maybe more importantly, decide what you want long-term and be careful about setting your value too low just to land a few clients. Today’s discount “just to pay the bills” could set your price for years to come.

Using blekko's SEO Data to Evaluate Web Directories

davidzimm — 2012-02-08T15:10:26+01:00

Posted by davidzimm

If you haven’t tried it out yet, blekko.com is a unique search engine. Along with allowing you to customize your own search results (or view results customized by one of its editors) it transparently provides a plethora of data showing why it ranks sites in the search results. The best part is, even if you aren’t trying to increase visits from blekko, their SEO data is very useful.

Getting blekko’s SEO data

It’s simple to get the SEO data from blekko. First you need a blekko account. Then all you have to do is type a URL into the search box, hit the spacebar, and add /seo (what they call a “slashtag”) at the end of your search string.

One of blekko's most distinctive pieces of data is “Host Rank”. This is not so much a ranking of websites but a measure of website authority- like Domain Authority or PageRank. Unlike these other metrics, Host Rank is on a linear scale rather than an exponential scale. Typically a linear scale is a little easier to wrap your brain around. For example, while you might be tempted to think that a website with a PageRank of 4 is only a little bit better than a PR 3 website, we need to remember that this is an exponential scale and the former has a significantly higher authority than the later. In other words the difference between a Host Rank 30 and 40 website is simply 10 points but the difference between websites with Domain Authority 30 and 40 is not 10 points, it is 10 to the power of X points (it is an exponential scale- what's the exponent? ask Mr. Fishkin). Host Rank also avoids a maximum value on its scale unlike the coveted PR 10 website (or comparatively strong DA 100 website).

There's much more to blekko besides another number to compare websites. The /seo slashtag also provides a nifty pie chart outlining what countries the links tend to come from. Although there is nothing wrong with a link from India, for example, if a website is based in the United States and the audience is primarily in the United States, the origin of the links can be indicative of some (shall we say) risky SEO techniques.

I also find the “co-hosted with” list at the bottom of the /seo page very interesting. Does this website have dedicated hosting? If not, that’s not necessarily bad thing but if it is co-hosted with some (shall we call them) questionable websites, that might be a neighborhood you wouldn’t want to be associated with.

Blekko’s data gets even more specific. You can also slashtag a URL with /domainlinks to find a list of inbound links (you can also access this from the right sidebar of the /seo page). Now this list of links most closely resembles the defunct Yahoo! SiteExplorer in that it provides a very long list of links that you have to manually filter through to be useful, but it does a good job giving you an indication of the source of this website’s link authority.

I also like to take a look through a websites /sitepages. This gives a list of all the pages on a website, as sorted by Host Rank. This is a great way of seeing how Host Rank (and presumably PageRank or even Domain Authority) flows throughout a website. Of course, the homepage of any website will always have the most authority- but does any authority flow to interior pages on the website?

Let’s get a little more concrete with this data. We can use blekko’s SEO data to evaluate a couple of web directories to see if we should submit our site to them. Starting with SEOmoz’s directory list, let’s take a couple of authoritative directories (as measured by Domain Authority) and a couple of low authority directories.

The Yahoo! Directory (Domain Authority 100): http://blekko.com/ws/dir.yahoo.com+/seo

Anyone with (shall we say) the means to afford $299 a year has probably submitted their website to the Yahoo! Directory. For a while Google’s Webmaster Guidelines even suggested it. Is it worth the cost? What will we get out of this listing? Let’s use blekko’s SEO data and find out.

/seo

With a Host Rank of 2,054.9 we clearly see this is a very authoritative website (at least in blekko’s mind). Although this number doesn’t mean much in itself, I bet it’s higher than your personal website.
Most of the links are from the United States (64%). Not to be so Amero-centric here but there’s nothing in the geographical distribution of the links that would make me concerned here. This is an international directory, after all.
The site is co-hosted with (wait for it) Yahoo!. Even though it’s been a while since I’ve used Yahoo!, that’s a neighborhood I wouldn’t mind being associated with.

/domainlinks

Websites actually link to the Yahoo! Directory (who knew) and these seem to be authoritative and clean. It seems like a legitimate and natural backlink profile to me.

/sitepages

Authority seems to flow very quickly into the directory listings and the Host Rank doesn’t seem to drop-off very fast. If your website falls into one of these top ranked categories you’d definitely want to be listed there.
One of the top-ten pages, according to blekko, is the list of newly submitted websites. FTW!

The Better Business Bureau (Domain Authority 99): http://blekko.com/ws/bbb.org+/seo

Got a brick-and-mortar along with your website? Why not submit it to BBB.org?

/seo

This site, according to blekko, actually has more authority than the Yahoo! Directory. It has a Host Rank of 2,948.4. This is tempting!
It makes sense that 86% of the links come from the United States- this is for US-based businesses, that’s how it should be.
WOW! What a list of sites are co-hosted with the BBB! Well, it’s co-hosted with pearljam.com so it’s gotta be a good neighborhood! (By the way, did you see Pearl Jam 20? Highly recommended)

/domainlinks

Sites linking to the BBB seem to be very similar to the Yahoo! Directory and they are all from legitimate and authoritative websites. You wish you could have a backlink profile like this site!

/sitepages

Unfortunately the first business I found was on the 6^th page of blekko’s /sitepages results. Most of the authoritative pages are designed to get you to sign up or are content pages. Getting a listing on this directory won’t pass much authority to your site.
Clearly the authority of the homepage does not transfer well to listings. The first business listing has a Host Rank 1/100^th of the homepage. Sure, you might get some eyeballs from a BBB.org listing, but I wouldn’t count on it for link building efforts.

Sporge (Domain Authority 33): http://blekko.com/ws/sporge.com+/seo

With a name like that, who wouldn’t want to be in this directory? (I’m not much for branding but I’d recommend a name-change in this case). Still, it might be worth something. Let’s see

/seo

The Host Rank of this website is 20.2. Now you start to see the value of a linear website ranking scale- the Yahoo! Directory is 100x more authoritative that this directory.
The geographical distribution of the backlinks is actually fairly similar to the BBB’s website. Nothing unusual here.
Also similar to the BBB, there is a massive amount of websites co-hosted with the Sporge directory. Most of them seem benign.

/domainlinks

Most of the links to Sporge.com come from other web directories. Could this site be part of a directory network. Is there any value of submitting to this directory as opposed to any of the others? If I submit to this directory, should I even bother to submit to any of the others linking to it?

/sitepages

The Host Rank ends very quickly, but there’s not much authority to this website to start with in the first place. At least what little it has is able to get to the directory listings easily.

The Brick Wall (Domain Authority 22): http://blekko.com/ws/thebrickwall.com+/seo

This is the least-authoritative directory, according to SEOmoz’s list. Is it even worth the 10 minutes it would take to submit your website?

/seo

The Host Rank is a whopping 4.3. This is another good illustration of the value of a linear ranking for websites. If you only looked at the Domain Authority of this website (as compared to Sporge- why do I blush when I say that?) you might think, “hey, that’s not so bad,” but blekko doesn't think very highly of this directory.
The links to this site come from four “other countries.” I can’t seem to find that on my globe. This is a little fishy.
It’s co-hosted with a few other UK-based websites. Nothing seems too bad among these websites.

/domainlinks

There really isn’t a large number of links to this website. Where is it getting its authority (what little it does have)?
There it is! Many of the links to this directory are reciprocal.

/sitepages

This little directory doesn’t have much authority to share, but if it did it seems it would get to the directory listings fairly efficiently.

Now blekko’s search market share is (shall we say) still growing, but the data they provide can help you do SEO in other search engines too. As with any third-party tool, you wouldn’t want to rely on this data exclusively- obviously neither Google nor Bing are using this data to determine how they rank webpages- but this information can still be a big help to any SEO attempting to evaluate websites for potential authority and value.

10 Ways Paid Marketers Can Leverage Inbound Marketing

JoannaLord — 2012-02-07T21:33:09+01:00

Posted by JoannaLord

It happened friends. After years of Rand exposing me to the many benefits of inbound marketing I am ready to admit it...{big gulp}...today's marketer needs to be doing more than paid marketing. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, if you are only doing paid marketing you are failing yourself and your company. THERE I SAID IT. I feel better. Way better actually.

Because it's true. Things have changed. There is no longer two main players in the game (SEO and PPC). Search marketing itself has evolved. We've covered a great deal of this here on the blog so I won't go into it too much. If you need a reminder, I urge you to go check out Rand's posts where he outlines The New Era of Inbound Marketing, and outlines how quickly it is growing. As marketers, we saw the shift coming, and now we are feeling it in our every day gigs. Our roles are expanding as traditional SEO itself expands. There is so much happening all around us. Who is freaking out? Yeah me too.

The real question you may be asking yourself is, "why is this paid marketing lady talking about inbound marketing?" Good question. The other day I was running through my to-do list and I couldn't help but notice how not-focused it was on paid marketing. In fact, most of my day was spent brainstorming with others on how to better share data, repurpose existing assets, and collaborate. While Justin and I manage paid marketing here at Moz, more and more of our time is spent on learning and leveraging our inbound efforts more effectively.

I thought I'd run through some ways that I'm leaning on our inbound marketing efforts to both reduce Moz's costs and capture more leads. Did you all know you could get leads for free? Yeah, crazypants I know. Anyway, here are the top ten ways I've leveraged inbound as a paid marketer here at Moz;

#10: Share Persona Outlines
You know who is really good at researching a target audience? Content writers. Recently, Michael King actually did a killer webinar on understanding your target audience and using social media tools to help define your best audience. It covers this concept really well. The idea is there are so many excellent demographic tools available to us now that these social networks want us to buy ads on them. We can look at audience sizes, location, categories, etc. All of this information has been helping organic marketers write targeted content for years. Paid marketers should be leaning on this data. What have they discovered that could help me better target high-value leads? Outline your target audience and extracting personas can be really challenging, but the more teams connect on this the better all our marketing efforts are targeted.

#9: Leverage Landing Pages
Design resources are hard to come by. Here at Moz we have Derric and Ramil basically sleeping in the office and we still have a backlog of projects that need their creative brains. Ask any paid marketer what is the bottleneck and often you will hear design resources pop up. So what can we do? Use landing pages that our inbound marketers have already queued up for us! Brilliant! Often times these pages are beautifully designed, and laced with excellent engagement opportunities. These are mandatory in a solid inbound marketing page and they are requirements of a successful paid search lander...coincidence? I think not.

#8: Exchange Conversion Reports
Oh conversion data, how sweet you are. I think most paid marketers are looking at the SEO data at their company. At least I hope they are! Beyond that though, there is more data you should be looking at. Here at Moz, we are a little data crazy. Jen, our Community Wrangler, puts together amazing metrics on our social activities every week. I have found that by mining her weekly data summaries I can see what content has gone hot and where. I can see where we are increasing brand awareness and what type of people are taking to the Moz brand. From there I can better allocate our budget to supplement these efforts.

#7: Collaborate on Keyword Research
So this one is one of those things we keep saying we are going to do, but rarely does it actually happen. I am always amazed by the keyword research process. First off, it's really time consuming. Secondly, it's not effective as a one-time step, it really needs to be done in an ongoing basis. Yet despite all this, both paid teams and organic teams have been doing separate keyword research for years. Ick. Yuck.

An awesome benefit to doing inbound marketing is the speed in which we can detect if something resonates. Where as before I might have used paid search budget to test an adjective or product description, I can now push out a targeted piece of content and see how the audience responds. It's immediate data collection and its statistically valid. I can't get over the power of the social graph when it comes to crowdsourcing reactions to certain keywords. This is the new keyword research in my opinion. We must combine our traditional keyword tools with audience response across these inbound channels.

#6: Repurpose Content
This one is pretty obvious, yet, so easy to skip over. I am guilty of this too often myself. Paid marketers need to be driving traffic to past inbound marketing wins. For example, about a year and a half ago we updated the Beginners Guide to SEO. This has gone on to be downloaded close to a million times, translated into other languages, and continues to be an excellent traffic driver. Guess how much of my paid marketing budget goes to driving traffic to this excellent piece of content? Yup you guessed it...none.

In the past, my argument was "it didn't drive enough free trial signups to show ROI." What I've realized over the past few months is I need to go deeper into what "conversion" means. What does acquisition mean? What does growth mean? My paid marketing efforts should be wrapped around these already successful content pieces. Repurposing hot viral content through paid marketing channels is a great example of how we can accomplish cross-channel marketing. Isn't it pretty when we all get along? Who wants to hug? Bueller?

#5: Share Customer Feedback
Customer feedback is gold, pure gold. Inbound marketing is about being found online through a variety of activities -- content publishing, social engagement, etc. A huge benefit of these conversations and interactions is the wealth of feedback you can receive from the community you have created. Often here at Moz, we will ask our community team to help us understand what our customers really love about our PRO service. We can hear right from them what keeps them happy, and what we can do better. This helps drive our marketing messages and our product roadmaps. Sharing the customer feedback and voice is so important, and the value found in sharing that across multiple teams in the organization is huge.

#4: Planning for Resources
Over the past few years we have seen the expectations of an online marketer change. We have more on our plates, more tools to log into, more reports to pull, more content to write, and so on and so forth. Inevitably these demands require more resources and more talent on any given project. I have found that by asking the organic marketers and community marketers here at the company what they are working on, I can better plan for my paid projects. If we are contracting a copyeditor for a content piece, I can slip in a request to revisit some ad copy headlines in the same contract. I can also repurpose design resources for banners, and landers. By knowing what your inbound team is working on, all of us can push out more faster. This is a huge benefit to connecting the to teams in both goals and resource planning.

#3: Fuel the Fire
I am a big fan of the halo effect as it applies to marketing. The halo effect, for those that might not know, is when customers show a bias to a product or brand based on some favorable or pleasant experience they have had previously. The beauty of it as it applies to today's marketing efforts is there are so many opportunities for a brand impression, and most of which are free.

A positive conversation a brand representative has with a user on a Facebook page may be enough to persuade a user to click a retargeting banner when faced with the brand's logo. Those two combined may build enough trust to persuade them to take a free trial. I call this "fueling the fire." While paid marketing may be measured on a CPA basis, there is a lot that happens prior to an action that influences the likelihood of a conversion. Inbound marketing offers mutiple opportunities to positively bias a potential customer. The goodwill a customer has in a brand often has very little to do with push marketing efforts, but has everything to do with these more organic experiences.

#2: Prequalify a Message
At the heart of it, marketers are story tellers. We love to persuade. As a paid marketer I spend most of my time coming up with ways to message my audience. Sometimes it's a new audience and sometimes it's my current audience, but either way I need to constantly be testing new ways to capture their attention. Prequalifying a message can be time consuming and can cost a lot of money depending on how I test it.

In the past I may have run a banner campaign on a relevant blog post and looked at metrics like CTR and CR. I may have also thrown money at a focus group (and whoa those can cost a lot) to see how people responded to a story we had crafted. These days I can use the power of social to test messages in record time. I can put together a presentation or a white paper and see how many times it gets shared, viewed, and downloaded. By counting these "social votes" I go beyond just clicks as a means of pre-qualification. It's a really great way for me to collect good data fast.

#1: Strengthen the Brand's Story
While the other nine ideas are great, this is my favorite. Nothing is more powerful than a consistent marketing message. Over the years I've worked to connect retargeting banners, paid search ads, landers, affiliate banners, and social advertising to send a strong and cohesive message. You know what stinks about that? All of those cost me money...which is no fun. Keeping money is fun. Spending all your money...not fun.

For promotions or time sensitive messages, if I really wanted to see an impact, I had to have serious budgets. There has to be a better way. Aligning some of these paid efforts with some inbound efforts makes for an even more compelling story for half the cost. As you push out new things and try to create buzz, you need to be asking yourself, "Is this the best use of my time and money?" I think as a paid marketer we can often forget to take that pause. We rest on the channels we know well but we need to push for more.

In Conclusion

Rand was right. In fact, all of my SEO friends were right. While paid marketing has a role to play in all of this, the direction the web has taken demands more from us marketers. While I am not sold that inbound marketing is all any marketer needs, I do believe there is a synergy between the two that can be very powerful. If we share resources, connect data, and collaborate rather than compete I think both teams win. I'm super excited about what this means for the future of paid search marketing. If you do paid and you aren't connecting with your organic marketing and social teams, you really are making your job harder than it needs to be.

I'd love to hear from you guys if there are other ways you have seen the teams connect and work more effectively together. Where do you see this all going as social marketing and content marketing continue to take more of our time as marketers? Where does paid fit into this?

Building a Technical SEO Process

Stephanie Chang — 2012-02-06T22:01:20+01:00

Posted by Stephanie Chang

One of the biggest challenges many of my clients face is building the right SEO processes in place, so that any problems are quickly accounted for before they lead to bigger issues. Below are three things you should consider when trying to create a more streamlined process for making sure the technical foundation of the site is solid. Though none are considered "quick" or necessarily easy wins and can initially take a significant amount of time, ultimately in the long-run, they will help make monitoring the SEO on your site more efficient. This means less time spent identifying and fixing site issues and more time focusing on other aspects of SEO, like linkbuilding, developing a content strategy, etc... Overtime, the impact this will have on your site can result in high rewards.

1) Technical Annotations in Google Analytics

Currently, many of my clients with Google Analytics accounts either don't include any annotations in Google Analytics, annotate only their email, PPC, social campaigns or use it to keep track of search engine algorithm changes (like Panda updates). However, the value of annotating any technical changes made to the site in Google Analytics creates a more efficient internal process.

Scenario 1: Let's say that you have set up Google Alerts to alert you of any spikes and drops in traffic. Then, having technical changes annotated in Google Analytics makes it quicker and easier for you to specifically determine the cause of this spike or drop, instead of investing hours later on trying to determine the cause of these changes in traffic. In addition, any major technical issue runs the risk of being implemented improperly (in terms of SEO considerations), simply because there are so many issues to take into account.

Here is more information on how to setup a Google Alert.

Scenario 2: Often times SEO is not a technical priority for the development team, mostly because it is difficult to measure the ROI of what is often times, a significant amount of invested time and effort. Creating annotations in Google Analytics could help with this process- for example, if a spike in traffic were to occur and the team was somehow able to attribute this to a technical implementation on the site, the technical team could be properly recognized as being the cause of this change.

2) Sitemaps- Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

SEOs should create an internal process where Google Webmaster Tools is checked at least once a month to ensure there are no major issues with the sitemaps or with bots crawling the site. Sitemaps are only useful if they are kept up to date and well-maintained.

Why is this important? Duane Forrester of Bing has stated that "Your Sitemap must be clean. We have a 1% allowance for dirt in a sitemap." His definition of dirt includes 404 or 500 status code errors and redirects. He continues by saying "If we see more than a 1% level of dirt, we begin losing trust in the Sitemap."

Best practices include submitting a new Sitemap regularly, depending on how often new content is generated on the site. A publishing site might need to update every few hours, an e-commerce site every week, and a relatively static site every month.

Sitemaps should be checked at least on a monthly basis in Webmaster Tools to ensure there are no issues with the Sitemap.

These include:

Checking for error messages
Checking number of pages submitted versus indexed
Checking for malware (and address these immediately!)
Checking for crawl errors (like 4xx and 5xx issues)

Using Screaming Frog

If you do have a Screaming Frog account, you can also use it to verify Google Webmaster Tools errors, especially because Google Webmaster Tools do not always update their errors. Thus, you don't want to be looking for 404s that have already been fixed. You can also use it to check your sitemap for errors. To do so, simply upload the XML sitemap into Screaming Frog and crawl it. Craig Bradford of Distliled work a fantastic blog post on how to use Screaming Frog to accomplish these tasks and more.

If Google Webmaster Tools is not periodically checked, the number of errors can seem overwhelming. Joe Robison wrote a fantastic SEOmoz post on fixing an overwhelming number of errors in Google Webmaster Tools.

3) Creating Automated Scripts

404 Pages Returning Status 200 Codes:

Barry Schwartz wrote a blog post on how 404 pages should not return status 200 codes. The reasoning being that it could be confusing to spiders as they see a page that exists technically have no content. This can affect rankings over time because it is creates massive duplicate content as bots are crawling through the same content over and over again across several URLs.

He also suggests creating automated scripts to check for this type of issue.

However, to initially help you determine the extent of this problem on your site and provide an estimation of the number of 404 pages that return status 200 codes, plug a site search query into Google. See example below:

site:example.com/ "page not found"

If the query returns results, you know your site is returning status 200 codes for 404 pages and that this issue needs to be fixed.

SEO Score Card:

I've talked about creating an SEO score card before. I've also recently recommended another version of this to another client who had hundreds of thousands of URLs. In this specific instance, they had difficulty making sure that only high-quality, non-duplicate content would be indexed. Being an e-commerce client, the site also had tons of products that were very similar (resulting in identical product descriptions and content on the site).

I suggested creating an internal score sheet that would automatically be re-run every month to make sure that all currently indexed pages are still considered high-quality, while also offer an opportunity for pages that were once deemed low-quality to reviewed regularly. Once those low-quality pages became high-quality, they will become automatically indexed.

This process could be used to generate the sitemaps - but the goal is to future-proof the site against future search engine algorithmic changes while improving the overall domain authority of the site.

There are caveats that need to be addressed when creating an SEO score sheet- we want to be careful about noindexing pages, especially as overtime, this could result in less and less of the site being indexed. Once the initial script is written, check the results and see if these are actually pages that you want noindexed. If not, the script might have to be rewritten.

The ultimate goal is to make sure that only quality pages are indexed, while also keeping tabs on how many more pages on the site need unique content. This type of knowledge can prove useful when creating the site's linkbuilding/content strategy.

Conclusion

The overall goal is to build a streamlined process for technically auditing a site that can be described and thus, communicated internally. Creating a more efficient process means more time invested in other important elements- compiling quality content, building an online community, and social media to name a few.

Find Your Site's Biggest Technical Flaws in 60 Minutes

Dave Sottimano — 2012-02-05T22:14:53+01:00

Posted by Dave Sottimano

I've deliberately put myself in some hot water to demonstrate how I would do a technical SEO site audit in 1 hour to look for quick fixes, (and I've actually timed myself just to make it harder). For the pros out there, here's a look into a fellow SEO 's workflow; for the aspiring, here's a base set of checks you can do quickly.

I've got some lovely volunteers who have kindly allowed me to audit their sites to show you what can be done in as little as 60 minutes.

I'm specifically going to look for crawling, indexing and potential Panda threatening issues like:

Architecture (unnecessary redirection, orphaned pages, nofollow)
Indexing & Crawling (canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, redirects, robots.txt, server errors)
Duplicate content & On page SEO (repeated text, pagination, parameter based, dupe/missing titles, h1s, etc..)

Don't worry if you're not technical, most of the tools and methods I'm going to use are very well documented around the web.

Let's meet our volunteers!

Here's what I'll be using to do this job:

SEOmoz toolbar - Make sure highlight nofollow links is turned on - so you can visibly diagnose crawl path restrictions
Screaming Frog Crawler - Full website crawl with Screaming Frog (User agent set to Googlebot) - Full user guide here
Chrome, and Firefox (FF will have Javascript, CSS disabled and User Agent as Googlebot) - To look for usability problems caused by CSS or Javascript
Google search queries - to check the index for issues like content duplication, dupe subdomains, penalties etc..

Here are other checks I've done, but left out in the interest of keeping it short:

Open Site Explorer - Download a back link report to see if you're missing out on links pointing to orphaned, 302 or incorrect URLs on your site. If you find people linking incorrectly, add some 301 rules on your site to harness that link juice
http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/bulk-http-header-compare/ - Check if the site is redirecting Googlebot specifically
http://spyonweb.com/ - Any other domains connected you should know about? Mainly for duplicate content
http://builtwith.com/ - Find out if the site is using Apache, IIS, PHP and you'll know which vulnerabilities to look for automatically
Check for hidden text, CSS display:none funniness, robots.txt blocked external JS files, hacked / orphaned pages

My essential reports before I dive in:

Full website crawl with Screaming Frog (User agent set to Googlebot)
A report of everything in Google's index using the site: (1000 results per query unfortunately - this is how I do it)

Down to business...

Architecture Issues

1) Important broken links

We'll always have broken links here and there, and in an ideal world they would all work. Just make sure for SEO & usability that important links (homepage) are always in good shape. The following broken link is on webrevolve homepage that should be pointing to their blog, but returns a 404. This is an important link because it's a great feature and I definitely do want to read more of their content.

Fix: Get in there and point that link to the correct page which is http://www.webrevolve.com/our-blog/

How did I find it: Screaming Frog > response codes report

2) Unnecessary Redirection

This happens a lot more than people like to believe. The problem is that when we 301 a page to a new home we often forget to correct the internal links pointing to the old page (the one with the 301 redirect).

This page http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure.html 301 redirects to http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure-2.html

However, they still have internal links pointing to the old page.

http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/bankruptcy.html?linkid=bankruptcy
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/category/credit-repair/page/10
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/bankruptcy.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/collections.html

Fix: Get in that CMS and change the internal links to point to http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/foreclosure-2.html

How did I find it: Screaming Frog > response codes report

3) Multiple subdomains - Canonicalizing the www or non-www version

One of the first basic principles of SEO, and there are still tons of legacy sites that are tragically splitting their link authority by not using redirecting the www to non-www or vice versa.

Sorry to pick on you CVSports :S

http://cvcsports.com/
http://www.cvcsports.com/

Oh, and a couple more have got their way into Google's index that you should remove too:

http://smtp.cvcsports.com/
http://pop.cvcsports.com/
http://mx1.cvcsports.com/
http://ww.cvcsports.com/
http://www.buildyourjacket.com/
http://buildyourjacket.com/

Basically, you have 7 copies of your site in the index..

Fix: I recommend using www.cvcsports.com as the main page, and you should use your htaccess file to create 301 redirects for all of these subdomains to the main www site.

How did I find it? Google query "site:cvcsports.com -www" (I also set my results number to 100 for check through the index quicker)

4) Keeping URL structure consistent

It's important to note that this only becomes a problem when external links are pointing to the wrong URLs. *Almost* every back link is precious, and we want to ensure that we get maximum value from each one. Except we can control how we get linked to; without www, with capitals, or trailing slashes for example. Short of contacting the webmaster to change it, we can always employ 301 redirects to harness as much value as possible. The one place this shouldn't happen is on your own site.

We all know that www.example.com/CAPITALS is different to www.example.com/captials when it comes to external link juice. As good SEOs we typically combat human error by having permanent redirect rules to enforce only one version of a URL (ex. forcing lowercase), which may cause unnecessary redirects if someone links in contradiction to redirects.

Here are some examples from our sites:

http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-education/rebuild-credit 301's to trailing slash version
http://webrevolve.com/web-design-development/conversion-rate-optimisation/ Redirects to the www version

Fix: Determine your URL structure, should they all have trailing slashes, www, lowercase? Whatever you decide, be consistent and you can avoid future problems. Crawl your site, and fix these

Indexing & Crawling

1) Check for Penalties

None of our volunteers have any immediately noticeable penalties, so we can just move on. This is a 2 second check that you must do before trying to nitpick at other issues.

How did I do it? Google search queries for exact homepage URL and brand name. If it doesn't show up, you'll have to investigate further.

2) Canonical, noindex, follow, nofollow, robots.txt

I always do this so I understand how clued up SEO-wise the developers are, and to gain more insight into the site. You wouldn't check for these tags in detail unless you had just cause (ex. A page that should be ranking isn't

I'm going to combine this section as it requires much more than just a quick look, especially on bigger sites. First and foremost check robots.txt and look through some of the blocked directories, try and determine why they are being blocked and which bots they are blocking them from. Next, get Screaming Frog in the mix as it's internal crawl report will automatically check each URL for Meta Data (noindex, header level nofollow & follow) and give you the canonical URL if there happens to be one.

If you're spot checking a site, the first thing you should do is understand what tags are in use and why they're using them.

Take Webrevolve for instance, they've chosen to NOINDEX,FOLLOW all of their blog author pages.

http://www.webrevolve.com/author/tom/
http://www.webrevolve.com/author/paul/

This is a guess but I think these pages don't provide much value, and are generally not worth seeing in search results. If these were valuable, traffic driving pages, I would suggest they remove NOINDEX but in this case I believe they've made the right choice.

They also implement self-serving canonical tags (yes I just made that up), basically each page will have a canonical tag that points to itself. I generally have no problem with this practice as it usually makes it easier for developers.

Example: http://www.webrevolve.com/our-work/websites/ecommerce/

3) Number of pages VS Number of pages indexed by Google

What we really want to know here is how many pages Google has indexed. There's 2 ways of doing this, using Google Webmaster Tools by submitting a sitemap you'll get stats back on how many URLs are actually in the index.

OR you can do it without having access but it's much less efficient. This is how I would check...

Run a Screaming Frog Crawl (make sure you obey robots.txt)
Do a site: query
Get the *almost never accurate* results number and compare them to total pages in crawl

If the numbers aren't close, like CVCSports (206 pages vs 469 in the index) you probably want to look into it further.

I can tell you right now that CVCSports has 206 pages (not counting those that have been blocked by robots.txt). Just by doing this quickly I can tell there's something funny going on and I need to look deeper.

Just to cut to the chase, CVCsports has multiple copies of the domain on subdomains which is causing this.

Fix: It varies. You could have complicated problems, or it might just be as easy as using canonical, noindex, or 301 redirects. Don't be tempted to block the unwanted pages by robots.txt as this will not remove pages from the index, and will only prevent these pages from being crawled.

Duplicate Content & On Page SEO

Google's Panda update was definitely a game changer, and it caused massive losses for some sites. One of the easiest ways of avoiding at least part of Panda's destructive path is to avoid all duplicate content on your site.

1) Parameter based duplication

URL parameters like search= or keyword= often cause duplication unintentionally. Here's some examples:

http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/mortgage-lenders-rejecting-more-applications.html
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/mortgage-lenders-rejecting-more-applications.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/credit-report-news/california-ruling-sets-off-credit-fraud-concerns.html
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/credit-report-news/california-ruling-sets-off-credit-fraud-concerns.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/one-third-dont-save-for-christmas.html
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/one-third-dont-save-for-christmas.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/financial-issues-driving-many-families-to-double-triple-up.html
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/credit-repair-news/economic-and-credit-trends/financial-issues-driving-many-families-to-double-triple-up.html?select_state=1&linkid=selectstate

Fix: Again, it varies. If I was giving general advice I would say use clean links in the first place - depending on the complexity of the site you might consider 301s, canonical tags or even NOINDEX. Either way, just get rid of them !

How did I find it? Screaming Frog > Internal Crawl > Hash tag column

Basically, Screaming Frog will create a unique hexadecimal number based on source code. If you have matching hash tags, you have duplicate source code (exact dupe content). Once you have your crawl ready, use excel to filter it out (complete instructions here).

2) Duplicate Text content

Having the same text on multiple pages shouldn't be a crime, but post Panda it's better to avoid it completely. I hate to disappoint here, but there's no exact science to finding duplicate text content.

Sorry CVCSports, you're up again ;)

http://www.copyscape.com/?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwwww.cvcsports.com%2F

Don't worry, we've already addressed your issues above, just use 301 redirects to get rid of these copies

Fix: Write unique content as much as possible. Or be cheap and stick it in an image, that works too.

How did I find it? I used http://www.copyscape.com, but you can also copy & paste text into Google search

3) Duplication caused by pagination

Page 1, Page 2, Page 3... You get the picture. Over time, sites can accumulate thousands if not millions of duplicate pages because of those nifty page links. I swear I've seen a site with 300 pages for one product page.

Our examples:

http://cvcsports.com/blog?page=1
http://cvcsports.com/blog?page=2

Are they being indexed? Yes.

Another example?

http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/page/23
http://www.lexingtonlaw.com/blog/page/22

Are they being indexed? Yes.

Fix: General advice is to use the NOINDEX, FOLLOW directive. (This tells Google not to add this page to the index, but crawl through the page). An alternative might be to use the canonical tag but this all depends on the reason why pagination exists. For example, if you had a story that was separated across 3 pages, you definitely would want them all indexed. However, these example pages are pretty thin and *could* be considered as low quality for Google.

How did I find it? Screaming Frog > Internal links > Check for pagination parameters

Open up the pages and you'll quickly determine if they are auto generated, thin pages. Once you know the pagination parameter or structure of the URL you can check Google's index like so: site:example.com inurl:page=

Time's up! There's so much more I wish I could do, but I was strict about the 1 hour time limit. A big thank you to the brave volunteers who put their sites forward for this post. There was one site that just didn't make the cut, mainly because they've done a great job technically, and, um, I couldn't find any technical faults.

Now it's time for the community to take some shots at me!

How did I do?
What could I have done better?
Any super awesome tools I forgot?
Any additional tips for the volunteer sites?

Thanks for reading, you can reach me on Twitter @dsottimano if want to chat and share your secrets ;)

How to Build an Advanced Keyword Analysis Report in Excel

Dan Peskin — 2012-02-04T09:04:41+01:00

Posted by Dan Peskin

Analyzing keyword performance, discovering new keyword opportunities, and determining which keywords to focus efforts on can be painstaking when you have thousands of keywords to review. With keyword metrics coming from all over the place (Analytics, Adwords, Webmaster Tools, etc.), it’s challenging to analyze all the data in one place regularly without having to do a decent amount of manual data manipulation. In addition, dependent on your site’s business model, tying revenue metrics to keyword data is a whole other battle.

This post will walk you through a solution to these keyword analysis issues and provide some tips on how you can slice and dice your data in wonderful ways.

With Microsoft Excel, we can create a report with all the keyword data you will need, all in one place, and fairly easy to update on a weekly or monthly basis. Then with all this data we can easily categorize segments of it to more quickly determine the better performing sets of keywords.

What we will need to do is push Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Adwords, Ranking data, and Revenue data all into one excel spreadsheet. Then we will put it all together into one master report and one categorized pivot table report.

To start, you should be especially familiar with pivot tables, the Google Adwords API, the Google Analytics API, and keyword research of course. Utilizing these APIs and being consistent in the formatting of the data you put into your spreadsheet will make it easy to update. If you aren’t familiar with these tools, I have provided resources below and some steps to organizing this data.

Here are some resources for learning to use pivot tables in Excel:

Excel for SEO
Microsoft Pivot Table Overview

Now let’s go fetch that data.

I Got 99 Problems, But A Keyword Visit Ain't One

First off we need to get our keyword traffic metrics through the Google Analytics API. I suggest using Mikael Thuneberg’s GA Data Fetch spreadsheet. You can follow the instructions, read the how to guide, and download the file here.

Make sure to build off the GA data fetch file or a copy of it, as it has the proper VBA functions (the Visual Basic code that allows for the API to work) installed for API calls. Once you have your API token and the spreadsheet setup you can perform your first API call.

We will be using the more complex query to extract organic keyword visits for a specific date field and filter by the number of visits. The query I use for example, will output visits, average time on site, page views, and bounces for any keyword with 5 or more visits in the last 30 days. However, you can modify the parameters to your liking. To see what other metrics can be used, check out the Analytics API documentation.

Your Analytics data should look something like this:

Google Analytics data called through the API in Excel.

Now select the whole keyword column and create a pivot table of the keyword list in another sheet. In the adjacent column create a table where the cells equal the values in the pivot table column. Label this table “KeywordList” or whatever you like. We now have the keyword table to reference for extracting Adwords data.

Pivot tables don’t have the same referencing abilities as regular tables, so the table in column B is what you will reference in future steps.

To Be, Or Not To Be Searched, That Is The Question

Next up is pulling in search volumes for our keyword table. Thanks to the wonderful Richard Baxter, there are a couple articles on using and installing the Adwords API Plugin. One on SEOmoz and one on Seogadget.

I know the Adwords API access is a bit of an issue for some, so if you cannot use the API, utilize the Google Adwords Keyword Tool (gathering data from this tool will unfortunately require a lot more work).

In a new sheet, use the Adwords API array formula called “arrayGetAdWordsStats” to pull in the average and seasonal monthly search volumes for your keyword table. Your formula should look something like this:

=arrayGetAdWordsStats(KeywordList,”EXACT”,”US”,”WEB”)

You should now have 12 months of historical search volumes and averages for all your keywords.

Results from an Adwords API call usually look like this.

Note: If your keyword list is greater than 800 keywords, you will have to break out the list into a few separate tables just to perform API calls for those keywords. If this is the case, make sure to keep each array of search volumes aligned in the same columns.

The Impression That I Get

No API required here, Google’s Webmaster Tools provides a pretty easy way to download its search query data. If you open up the Search Queries report in Webmaster Tools there is an option to “download the table” at the bottom. Download the table for the same date range you used earlier and drop it into a new sheet.

The report downloaded from Webmaster Tools. Note the “-“ is used for zero values, in the yellow columns I simply cleaned that up with an IF statement.

Impressions, CTR, and Average Rank can now been added to our metrics.

If You Ain't First Page, You're Last

Since we all know how accurate average rank is from Webmaster Tools, let’s get some current rankings into this report .Grab your main keyword list from the spreadsheet and run rankings for them with your application of choice. I usually use Rank Tracker, but I am sure everyone has their own preference. Once you have your rankings drop it into a new sheet.

The More You Know

The number of metrics we can add to the report are limitless, but there comes a point where adding too many can create more work for updating the report or create analysis paralysis. The only other metric I suggest adding in is the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty if you have a PRO account. Again this may be very time consuming to add for large numbers of keywords, hopefully you have an intern for that.

Mo Money Mo Metrics

Revenue data may come from different places dependent on how your business works, so I unfortunately don’t have a one stop solution to importing that data. However, most applications usually allow you to download that data to CSV or Excel. If you have Ecommerce enabled in Google Analytics, you can use the API to pull in this data. As long as you have some metrics to relate to your keyword such as Average Order Value or Conversion Rate, drop it in a new sheet and you will be good to go.

Some of you may be asking yourself what to do if your revenue data does not tie back to the keyword visit. This is where the categorization of keywords plays an extremely important part in this report. In this case, we want to create a bridge between the revenue data and keyword data. This can be done through categorizing your keywords into a category that relates back to a field in your revenue data. For example, you might be able to associate keywords with product names or landing pages. These products or landing pages would then become categories. Once you have determined what your categories will be, you can assign them to keywords in a new sheet that simply contains keywords in one column and the category tag in the other. You can learn more about keyword categorization here.

Categorizing the keywords above not only lets me group them to aggregate metrics for analysis, but it allows me to bridge the gap somewhat between the keywords and conversions in this example.

One Report To Rule Them All

Finally we have all the data; we just have to put it all together. Create a new sheet and pull in your master keyword list by using =NameOfTheTable, drag this down until you reach the last keyword on the list (paste values after if you want sorting capabilities). Now select your keywords and create a new table. In the columns next to the keywords all you have to do is a VLOOKUP of each metric you would like to add to your report. Once you fill in the first cell of each column, the column should automatically be added to the table and populate the other cells with the equation. Repeat this process until all your metrics are in this table.

There will also be a need to calculate some metrics such as the Bounce Rate or Conversion Rate if you pulled in revenue data. Those should be added in adjacent columns as well. Additionally, if you didn’t need to categorize your keywords earlier, I suggest categorizing them now in an adjacent column. When completed your master report should look something like this:

The master report.

Amazing. We have all the data in one place in a simple to sort and use table! Just wait…it gets better.

Pivotal Success

Now you may be wondering how this report can get any better. Two words my friends: Pivot Tables.

Creating a pivot table of your master report will allow you to segment your data in a number of ways that weren’t possible before. In the Pivot Table Field List, the Row Labels, Column Labels, and Values will define the layout of your report. What we first need to do is drag and drop the Category and Keyword fields into the Row Labels respectively. This will set your top level metrics to summarize at the Category level and allow you to drill down into each Category to see the associated keywords and their individual metrics.

Next you will want to start dragging your metrics into the Values section, which will automatically populate the Column Labels section with the Values field. As you add your metrics in, you can edit their names and the way they are aggregated. You will want to think carefully about how you will aggregate certain metrics so that viewing those summarized numbers at a Category level makes sense.

This shows you how best to setup your pivot table fields and their value settings.

For instance, I might summarize Impressions and Visits, but average CTR and Bounce Rate. Seeing the average CTR and Bounce Rate for a Category will allow me to narrow down which sets of keywords are performing better than others. Then looking at the total Impressions and Visits for those well performing categories will allow me to see where there might be a higher potential to increase traffic to my site. While this may not be an absolute rule to determine keyword focus, it is a good rule of thumb and can be a way to prioritize which ones to focus on.

Pivot table reports also allow you to add report filters, letting you filter out data by any metric or even multiple metrics. With this you could analyze keywords that only rank on the first page of SERPs using the current ranking as a filter. Hell, you could add a field to the master report calculating the number of words in each keyword phrase, then filter by that and bounce rate, giving you your well performing long tail keywords. Get creative, let loose, play with the metrics, you will be surprised at what kind of conclusions you can make about your site’s keyword traffic.

The final product.

Conclusion

Updating the report is simple. Rerun the API calls with the new date range, rerun your rankings for the new keyword list, and export the other reports you need with new date range. As long as you kept your formatting and equations the same, the rankings and other reports should be dropped into their respective sheets without having to change anything. The master report should automatically be updated once you update the keyword column and the pivot report should update once you hit refresh under the pivot table menu. That’s it!

Well I should probably stop talking now and let you get to your hours upon hours of keyword analysis fun. Hopefully this was informative enough to make building a report such as this fairly easy. I would love to hear your feedback and will gladly answer any questions or comments about the post below. If you have issues later on, you can always contact me via Twitter.

Excel Template

Added by Keri, from Dan's comments on this post:
Since there was some interest in sharing the data set I used to better understand steps, I have provided a download on my personal site. You can download the excel template here. Hope this helps

The Hidden Factors in Accomplishing Your Online Marketing Goals - Whiteboard Friday

randfish — 2012-02-02T21:42:02+01:00

Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Please note that we shot this week's Whiteboard Friday on a brand new video camera and we still need to work out a few kinks. I apologize for the slight purple tint on the Whiteboard.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today.

So in terms of impacting all of these items, there's traditional stuff that we know, we talk about. So things like, oh, and the click-through rate for the search results, I know that position matters. I know that getting a rich snippet matters. If I can have little stars next to mine; if I can have a picture, a photo, or a video, that usually increases click-through rate. I know that if I'm in special kinds of results, that can either increase or decrease my results. I know if I've got a listing and an indented listing below, that can help me. I know that with subscriptions to RSS and e-mail, I can test different buttons, different versions of the entry form; different calls to action. On links that I click, I can test different titles. All this kind of stuff, there are those traditional testing kinds of things, right?

So in that traditional CRO, that's been covered a ton of times. We don't need to cover this because you often know a lot of the things that are in there. You can find them. They're well-documented. The subtle stuff, the weird stuff is oftentimes around just two questions.

Number one: Does the product or service or thing that you want me to do meet my needs? It could be as simple as: Do I think when I click on this result in the search engine that it will answer the question that I originally asked? But there are so many subtleties that are involved in that, that we never think about, that doing traditional kinds of CRO testing and optimization, we'll never get there.

The second question is: Do I trust and like the brand and/or people behind the brand? This goes to fundamental marketing and branding awareness, and it is so pervasive in all the things that we do, whether it's in web marketing or in offline marketing, and yet oftentimes ignored by marketers like us, who operate in the inbound world of SEO and social media and content marketing and these kinds of things, because we're so analytics driven, that we see a lower click-through rate than we want, a lower conversion rate than we want, a lower subscription rate, a lower sharing rate than we want, and we think, hey, let's test these traditional types of CRO things. Sometimes the problem or the optimization tactics are at a much deeper level.

Let's start with the product/service meeting the needs. There's a bunch of things that go in here. Uptime and reliability is one of the biggest ones. So essentially, if I click a website and it is not speedy, delivering the things that I need, and consistent, I'm going to learn not to trust it, and I'm going to be less likely to click it. This is why you see things like speed being a factor, webpage load speed in Google's rankings, granted a very small factor, but certainly a much bigger factor when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm going to click this, and boy, it's going to take a long time."

I'll give you a good example. I personally think that a lot of the writing at Forbes is pretty darn good. Same with The Wall Street Journal, same with Bloomberg online. But they almost all have interstitial ads and very, very slow page load times. At least in my experience in the past, those websites have done that for me. Almost always have the interstitial, almost always takes a while to load, and then I have to wait through the interstitial. I hate it.

So if I see something else in the search results, a site in social media, I'm going to be less apt to share it. I'm going to be less apt to click on it. I've learned through the conditioning that those brands have given me that the uptime, reliability speed issues are problems.

Same thing with pricing. So I think Radian6 is an absolutely phenomenal product. I've heard great things about it, met the CEO, know some people there. Terrific product. Way too expensive! No way that I can justify affording it. Right now, I'm using Google Alerts and some combination of Google searches that I do every day, some other brand monitoring stuff that SEOmoz is working on in beta, the Blogscape Project, which of course I get kind of alpha access to.

Pricing is wrapped in there by necessity. When you worry, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm attracting all these visitors. They're not converting or they're not taking this action." They may have heard, or they may know, or they may have seen that your pricing simply doesn't match their market, or they have fears around that. That's why I'm such a big fan of transparency here, because I think that you will weed out and save your salespeople time, and save your customer service people time, and save your website bandwidth, if you're transparent about this most of the time.

Features and perceived features. Features is: Do you do the thing that I want you to do? When I'm talking about features, I could mean in software. I could mean in a product, like I'm buying a digital camera, I'm buying a car, I'm buying a whiteboard pen, I'm buying a subscription to a software service. I'm looking purely for information. The features are: Do you do the things that I want you do to? Oftentimes, that comes through brand perception as well.

So I know that a lot of the times when I visit an eHow type of website, that it doesn't have the features that I want, which is a reliable source that I know I can trust. Wikipedia's the same way. I only semi-trust Wikipedia, and I trust it on some topics and not others, and I always want to back it up with something else from some reliable source where I know the person there or I know the brand there, because Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, and I don't necessarily know who's behind it.

So those types of brands, and this is even true sometimes at About.com, where the writers in some categories are phenomenal. Southern food, I think is terrific. Some of the digital marketing ones are good. Some of them are mediocre. It's a trust factor around the features and the perception of features. Perception of features is often very different from actual features.

We find, for example, when we survey customers of SEOmoz that they have no idea that we actually will help track their Facebook pages, Insights data over time, and their Twitter data over time. Many people don't even know that Open Site Explorer and SEOmoz are offered in the same subscription. So this is clearly a problem that we have had on perception of features, not even on actual features.

Presentation. The way and the style in which the features and the information and the pricing and reliability and the uptime, all of that is presented is another big one. The thing about presentation is that it's a layer that impacts everything else, not just up here, but down here as well. It's often done terribly, terribly wrong on the Web.

Because it ties so much to the, "Do I like and trust these people," let's talk about those. This question, when you ask the question, "Do I like and trust the brand, and the people behind the brand," that goes to a bunch of inputs that are very, very far removed, all so far removed from traditional CRO stuff. That's things like design and UX, which we talk about many times here on Whiteboard Friday and on the site. Higher quality, more professional, more consistent with what your audience is looking for, just does a fantastically better job than, "Oh yeah, we bought some stock photography of some people in an office working, and don't they look attractive, don't they have perfect skin? And now, you know, that's our homepage, and then there's Services, and Contact, and About. Great, we have a professional website!" No, you don't. No, no, you don't!

Design UX isn't just about that. There are other inputs like domain name and brand name. One of the biggest reasons that I'm often against exact- match domains is because it is so tremendously hard to build up any sort of branding. If you name industries, you will very, very rarely hear that the generic, exact-match domain for what we call that industry is a market leader, a brand leader, and because of that and also because, to be totally fair, a lot of people in the domaining sphere and the affiliate marketing and SEO sphere noticed the power that these had in Google and abused them tremendously. So now consumers have an association, particularly savvy consumers have an association, a brand association with exact-match domains. That is, "Oh, that's probably a low-quality site. That's probably not the real brand. I don't know if I can trust it if I click on that," versus actual brand names.

I'll give you some very good examples. In the world of office supplies I've heard of Staples, right? I've heard of OfficeMax. I've heard of Office Depot. But if it's OfficeSupplies.net, I'm sure someone owns that domain. It could even be someone awesome. Maybe it's a great site, but if I see it in the search results, I'm going to be mighty suspicious. That suspicion just naturally creeps in. That's why domain name and brand name are so tied together in the perception of trust and can substantially impact things like click-through rate and conversion rate and subscription rate, etc.

Accessibility of contact information. It's funny, I was just on an e-mail thread yesterday night, and some folks in the SEO sphere said, hey, have you ever heard of this particular - it was an enterprise SEO software provider. I went, "No, I haven't heard of them. This is the first time. Let me go check out their site." I see they try and say a few futures, but there's literally nothing, no one mentioned on the site; no people who are using it, no people who are associated with the brand. The contact information is "Fill out a contact form" or "Here's our office." I think it was somewhere in the United States; I can't remember exactly where. But other than a mailing address and a phone number, there was no human being listed, which made me very suspicious, because why would you not show off the team? Like, here's the exec team behind it. Here are our engineers. That kind of transparency is natural in the software world. Something's weird if it doesn't exist there.

Being able to find that information - a phone number, e-mail, contact forms, here's our Twitter and our Facebook, and these kinds of things - you just expect those from web companies. When they don't exist, you become highly suspicious.

The authenticity of the content. One of my favorite examples is there's a brand that's been doing a ton of fantastic infographics. I think it's MBAonline or MBAeducation.com, one of the online education providers with a very generic name. They really do great infographics. They sponsor some awesome stuff. Sometimes they'll get featured on a Mashable or even a TechCrunch, or something like that. Tremendous work, excellent work getting that brand out there.

But I always look at them and think this doesn't have a relationship with what the services that you're trying to sell, which is you're an affiliate for a bunch of online education providers, which can be a little bit of a nasty, sort of spammy, aggressive field. The challenge here is, hey, yes, you've got the infographic, you've got the link. But when you're trying to tie back into consumers and earn their business, those of us who are savvy and sophisticated, we sort of get a funny feeling, like something doesn't match up. The content is not authentic to the brand. Why is it being produced?

I think a great example of this is OkTrends, which is OkCupid's blog. They essentially have dating content that matches up with what people are looking for from their site. So, here's how to optimize your dating profile, and by the way, we're a dating website. Great, makes perfect sense.

Hey, here's an infographic about the rise of Twitter or Twitter click- through rates or something - and by the way, we're an MBA online education provider. Why is that? It seems like it's just for the links and attention and awareness and has nothing to do with the actual brand. Highly suspicious, particularly in spheres that are very aggressive.

Industry reputation, word of mouth. I'll give you another example. So, there was another provider that was mentioned on this string in the SEO enterprise space. No, I'm sorry. It was another enterprise software provider, but not in SEO. There were some comments of, "Oh, hey, should we use this? Should we use this other one?" Someone remarked on an e-mail thread, "You know, the CEO of this particular company has treated women employees very badly."

You would never find that on the Web, right? That's not information that you're going to see. If you start searching for reviews, you won't find it on their website. It's something that's word-of-mouth only, but it's made its way to enough influencers that now that is an influential thing in the perception of, "Do I like the brand and the people?" Very frankly, I trust this source, and I know the source knows the CEO there, and I don't. I'm probably not going to buy from this particular enterprise software provider, even if they meet my needs up here. This is the type of stuff that influences conversion rate, that is so subtle and so hidden, that you're never going to realize it from a traditional CRO-type of perspective. And yet, it pays huge dividends to go and investigate this stuff and understand that perception.

The final one that I'll mention here is familiarity with the brand and social proof of the brand. A great example here, go to SurveyMonkey's website. If you're not logged in, the homepage is a woman from Facebook, her picture, she's a statistical analyst there, and she's giving an endorsement to SurveyMonkey. Now, Facebook is a phenomenal brand; they're very well-known. Their business practices are respected. People know that they're a great data-driven company, and so the fact that they trust SurveyMonkey strongly suggests SurveyMonkey must be a great provider. So, they've created that social proof, and they're using a brand that you're familiar with.

When you combine those things, it's absolutely excellent and incredibly powerful. When I go to websites and I see a lot of social proof from either people that are anonymous or people that provide only their fist name or people that I don't know, it's less powerful. When I have seen a brand, six, seven, eight times on the Web, at a conference, in various types of ways - I've heard from someone over e-mail, I know someone who's used them, I've had an experience with someone from that company - those types of things strongly influence these. Building up all of this builds up your conversion rates and builds up all of these metrics that you think about as an online marketer, and yet, we often have so little control or so little even ability to judge and record these things.

What I want to suggest is that, to those of you who are doing web marketing, when you're thinking about these metrics, remember that these are all inputs. Don't necessarily use them as excuses, but make sure that you're taking some action on them. Make sure that you're finding ways to measure them. Make sure that these aren't the reasons why your rates over here are low, rather than the stuff that you focus on, because it can be incredibly frustrating to find that, hey, the reason that we're not making good sales is because no one is familiar with our brand, and we don't have the right social proof, rather than, oh, it's because I didn't write the title tags correctly, and I don't have a compelling description for the content, and the page isn't optimized well. It doesn't have a good flow and conversion process and funnel. Sometimes these two things are mixed up together, and I worry about those hidden factors.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com