Search Marketing & SEO Blog

SAScon 2013 – Our Top Takeaways


By On June 13, 2013 In conferences, seo With No Comments

sascon

We really enjoyed our two days up in Manchester at SAScon 2013. Unfortunately, with three tracks going on and only two of us, we couldn’t get to every talk. However, we did our best to attend as much as possible. So here are our top takeaways from our favourite talks.

Day 1

Keynote – Alistair Thornton, Marketing Director thomsonlocal.com

The big focus of this talk was on local businesses and local search.
Some quick stats:

  • £1 in every £3 spent in the UK is spent in small businesses
  • 20% of UK business revenue comes from SMEs
  • 20% of desktop search and 40% of mobile search has local intent
  • In total, 61% of local searches result in a purchase

As such it’s more important than ever for small businesses to optimise themselves for search. However, it can be hard to balance the volume of leads they need to generate in order for it to be worthwhile with the costs of doing so.

To provide anything of real benefit to local businesses, you can’t use organic, paid, or local search alone. In isolation they don’t drive enough search volume at a low enough cost. Self-service isn’t a good option either, as it requires too much time and effort for the business owner, which they won’t get back in terms of leads or revenue.

The best option for local businesses is a solution which is as automated as possible and which will deliver multiple benefits. It needs to combine local, organic and paid results and deliver the maximum amount of benefits at the lowest possible cost per lead.

Small business owners are more interested in leads and conversions than they are in search rankings, so that’s what your focus should be. It can be best to find areas where they have already made some investment and build on it, rather than start from scratch – it’ll help lower overall costs which is essential.

The bottom line is to drive as much traffic as possible for the lowest possible cost. Small businesses can’t afford to spend too much time or money on search, but clever strategies can help to drive lots of traffic, improve conversions, and generate revenue. There is a huge market for local search, you just have to tap into it effectively.

How to Audit Your Facebook Advertising Account to Improve Campaign Performance


By On June 12, 2013 In facebook, ppc With No Comments
facebook a/b testing

Facebook account management best practices

Account Structure introduction

Facebook advertising is still more labour intensive than search advertising due to its limited platform functionality and interface. Therefore, it is imperative that ‘account structure best practice’ is adhered to in order to maintain control, improve efficiencies, increase ad effectiveness, and make sure anyone who takes over the account can get a grasp of the account hierarchy quickly and easily.

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Campaigns are the second tier that sits under the ‘account’ level. It’s at the campaign level that ads are held and daily budgets are assigned.

Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creatives, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it is best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads, as it makes reporting, analysis and managing budgets much easier.

facebook account structure

11 of the Best SEO & PPC Posts from May


By On June 3, 2013 In ppc, search engine marketing, seo With 1 Comment

If you are anywhere near as busy as we were in the SEOptimise office during May, it can be difficult to keep up with all the great blog posts that were published. I thought I’d ask the office to see the ones which they thought were worth a read. So, in no particular order, here is our top 6 posts from around the web…

It has also been a busy month on our blog, with May achieving the highest traffic figures of the year so far. So in case you missed any of them, here are our 5 most popular posts of the month…

Best Practice for Winning Enterprise SEO Clients: 3 Marketing Procurement Professionals Share Their Advice


By On May 30, 2013 In Business Development, ppc, seo With 1 Comment

For those readers who are unaware, procurement in the marketing industry is a services profiling and selection process that many larger organisations must go through when considering new suppliers. There are professionals out there whose job it is to develop processes that create the greatest chance of selecting the most suitable supplier for the company.

In my experience, it will usually consist of:

  • An initial questionnaire, which attempts to immediately identify tell-tale signs of the qualities the company is looking for in an agency/supplier. If you get through this stage,
  • The pitch: a face-to-face response to a brief, usually by way of presentation. And then,
  • Negotiations, if you’re lucky enough to get this far.

The difficult thing for suppliers throughout this process (speaking from personal experience once again) is that it is usually very closed-off. By this I mean that you aren’t really allowed any direct communication with anyone involved on the company side. Those in charge of procurement have to be very careful to make sure that this process is as fair as possible, and spending time speaking to a particular supplier could be perceived as giving them an unfair advantage. Needless to say, in some instances when procurement teams are looking at upwards of 40 suppliers for a single service, it would also be very difficult to spend time speaking to everyone. There are usually Q&A windows throughout the earlier stages in which you can submit written questions, but I believe that written questions and responses can sometimes be misunderstood (as I have found through email on a number of occasions).

Taking all this into consideration, I thought it would be useful if we could make contact with some people in the procurement industry and, bearing in mind that these conversations happened outside any procurement process, I asked them to contribute some advice. I believe that these people, having to deal with supplier selection on a day-to-day basis, would have the most experience in appointing suppliers, and therefore be able to contribute advice that would help me/us be successful in any selection process, whatever the size of the organisation.

I asked a number of people the same question: “What is the one piece of advice you would give to an individual/agency to give them the best chance of success when you are looking at them as a potential supplier?”

I intentionally left this as open as possible because I wanted people to respond with what they believed to be the most important aspects of the selection process.

To illustrate how closed procurement can be, I spoke to roughly 16 organisations, the majority of which were either unwilling or unable to respond. But three individuals have kindly submitted their responses.

8 Great Tools to use with Google Analytics


By On May 24, 2013 In google analytics, seo With 7 Comments

We hear so much about great SEO tools that we should be using, but we rarely see much written about tools to help you with your Google Analytics data. Over the past year I have been using more and more tools to help with Google Analytics data, from API extraction to data visualisation, and I wanted to share them with you. Below are just 8 tools that I used for Google Analytics on a regular basis that save me a lot of time.

ScreamingFrog

Who has come across GA traffic disappearing and it being down to some GA code being removed? How long has that taken you to find the pages that no longer has the GA code on?

Over the past few years I have been using ScreamingFrog to check websites for any pages that have missing Google Analytics code, and comparing it against those that have. Once I have a list of URLs with missing GA code, I supply this to the internal team to have them look at it and implement. Once implemented, I then re-run the crawl to ensure the missing pages now have the GA code.

Plugging the link leaks, part 2 – site canonicalisation


By On May 22, 2013 In seo With 1 Comment

A couple of months ago we took a look at how you can reclaim links that you are simply throwing away. For the second look at how to fix common link leaks, we’re going to look at issues around site canonicalisation, and how easy it is to lose link authority through simple duplicate URLs.

As before, this is a simple way many sites lose valuable links without even realising. By plugging these leaks, we’ve helped clients gain an instant boost in link authority, without irking anyone on Google’s anti-spam team.

The many faces of a homepage

The best place to start when digging for link leaks is actually one of the checks you should carry out when looking at a new or prospective client for the first time – how many ways can you find the site homepage? Type your domain name into your browser, and then do the same for all the possible variations:

  • http://www.example.com
  • http://example.com
  • http://www.example.com/index.htm (or index.html, .aspx, .php or whatever the CMS/server uses)
  • http://www.example.com/

SMX London 2013 – Top Takeaways from the Paid Search and SMX Advanced Tracks


By On May 17, 2013 In conferences, google adwords, keyword research, ppc, search engine marketing, seo With 1 Comment

We’ve had a great couple of days at SMX London – here’s what we learnt from the Paid Search track from day 1 and the SMX Advanced track from day 2!

Day 1 – Paid Search Track

Amazing Paid Search Tactics & Tools

Ann Stanley, Co-Founder and MD of Anicca Digital (@annstanley)

Ecommerce advertising has changed quite a bit recently: Google Shopping transitioned from free to paid last month in the UK, and Google have just announced that they’re getting rid of product extensions. That means having product listing ads is more important for ecommerce.

Having a PLA ad group set for ‘all products’ with a really low bid has got them good results – it can be a good way to turn up in searches no one else is appearing on.

There doesn’t seem to be a true quality score for PLAs, but CTR is a factor to whether they get seen or not. Improve CTR with negative keywords. Also check your feed – you may be using low quality information.

217 Takeaways from the SEO, Search and Social Track – SMX London 2013


By On May 17, 2013 In conferences With 1 Comment

SEOptimise attended this year’s SMX London, and came away with a number of amazing tips and takeaways. I have provided a list of all the takeaways that I took from the SEO, Search and Social Track.

Day 1 – From Authorship To Authority: Why Claiming Your Identity Matters

The first session on the SEO track saw Chelsea Blacker, Grant Simmons, Jim Boykin and Google’s Maile Ohye talk about Authorship and how to enhance your authority in an industry. The main draw to the session was as you would expect Maile Ohye, with the hope she would give away some inside information. Unfortunately this didn’t happen, but she did confirm that a lot of what the speakers had discussed was correct. I managed to take a lot away from this session, but here are a few of the key points.

The ultimate content audit checklist


By On May 15, 2013 In Content, online marketing, search engine marketing, seo With 8 Comments

I think it would be fair to say that Google’s major algorithm updates in the last couple of years have seen us all asking ourselves some tough questions about the quality of what we’re putting on the web. This soul-searching has seen many reform their link building habits, while others have seen Google’s clamp-downs on web spam as an endorsement of the high-quality link building they’d been doing all along. But the focus hasn’t just been on links: the Panda update in its various iterations has shown that high-quality on-site content is paramount. This has seen the necessary rise of the content audit, and as someone who has long been a stickler for top notch content, I thought I’d share with you the process I go through and the things I include when I audit a site. I’d be really interested to hear how yours differ from mine, so feel free to leave a comment and let me know about the processes you use and the things you look at!

The giant content audit spreadsheet – and why I don’t use it

A question that often comes up when a client wants a content audit is what form it should take. Many consider a content audit to be a giant spreadsheet with every single URL listed, along with marks out of 10 for various quality metrics. Because of the sheer scale, this method often relies to an extent on automation, but that only gets you so far; a true assessment of content quality requires a human eye, and for bigger sites it’s not practical to look through every single page. While the process of content auditing in this way certainly has its merits, the way I like to do it has more of a qualitative focus that I believe gives the client considerably more value.

Look at a representative sample

Most websites follow templates that ensure a uniform design throughout the site – or at least they should! This means that content can be split into content types – for example, homepage, service page, product description page, blog post, and so on. Each content type is there to fulfill its own purpose, and requires its own assessment as to how well it achieves its aims. So why waste time looking at every single URL on the site when the comments you’re going to be making about one page in a particular category are likely to apply to the others in that content group?

I believe that the key to a good and actionable content audit is to look at a representative sample of a site’s content, providing concrete observations and recommendations and exploring in depth the actual experience of people using the site. They are, after all, by far the most important consideration.

The big content audit checklist

I’ll start with a disclaimer: every site is different. I’m not a believer in sticking rigidly to templates, and I typically use the headings below just as a starting point. I will often add or remove sections according to what’s appropriate for the site I’m looking at.

So, here’s what I would look at…

Using Excel to Help Move to Enhanced Campaigns


By On May 8, 2013 In google adwords, ppc With 1 Comment

A few months ago Google announced Enhanced Campaigns. One of the major changes this brings is that segmenting Search Network campaigns by device is impossible. Tablet is now lumped together with desktop. Bids for mobile can be altered (as a campaign level bid adjustment), and you can turn off mobile advertising all together, but you can’t turn off desktop targeting to have a mobile-only campaign.

Your options are campaigns that target desktop and tablets, or campaigns that target desktop, tablet and mobile (with adjusted bids). This means that if you had different versions of campaigns for different devices, when you upgrade you can only keep one active. But if you’ve had separate campaigns they are likely to have grown apart, even if they started as simple duplicates.

So, let’s say you’ve decided to keep the desktop campaign but you have tablet and mobile campaigns you want to merge into it. You need to check for differences, then judge whether anything that was only in the mobile or tablet campaigns should be copied into the desktop campaign. But how?

From the title you may have guessed: I suggest using Excel.

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