ADOTAS

They usually have a poor understanding of the sales funnel. In online marketing as well as offline marketing, the understanding the sales funnel is critical to knowing how to sell a product. That’s why I’m sharing a few ways that online marketers can use to convert potential leads into leads (and leads into sales) and get more traffic to their site.

1. Draw them in on Google. People need to be in the sales funnel before they can travel down it, so before anything, you need to make sure people can find you on a search engine. Today, around three quarters of website discoveries originate in a search engine, and most of these are from clicking organic results instead of clicking AdSense ads. Therefore, companies and site owners who are serious about making money pay a premium to search engine optimization experts to rank highly on Google for relevant search terms.

You need to hire a good SEO company to draw in potential leads over the long term. Many less experienced online marketers make the mistake of hiring an outsourced company to bump them up on Google. They pay a company that pays writers who barely speak English to spam blogs and forums with backlinks to their website. This can work fine for a few months, but Google doesn’t stay fooled for long — eventually they figure out that all your links are coming from spam sites, and your site gets delisted from Google, which means nobody will be able to find you. The only way to get back onto search results is to have those links removed, which takes weeks or more.

On the other hand, if you hire a professional company with English-speaking writers (or at least people capable of posting on non-spammy blogs), you will get high-quality backlinks on sites that are read by actual people, so Google will not delist your site and you’ll continue to draw more potential leads to your site through organic searches.

2. Keep them there with an accelerated site. Once people are on your site, you need to make sure they stay there. But who wants to wait around for 10 seconds for a site to load when they could go back to the search results page and try a different link?

Your site may not seem like it loads slowly if the server is nearby, but what if your server’s in New York and they’re in L.A.? Or what if you’re in the City of Angels with your server, but your potential lead is in San Francisco or Seattle? Your site will load slowly for them and they will never see it. Most potential leads are lost within eight seconds of clicking on a link on a search results page. That’s why sites that really want to make money are being hosted on remote site acceleration services. These services host your site on multiple servers, just like big-name, high-traffic websites. This means that somebody in London doesn’t have to wait for a website in Sydney to travel halfway across the world before it loads. Because of this, site acceleration services greatly improve conversion rates at the beginning of the sales cycle.

Note: Author David Henzel’s company, NetDNA, is one that offers site acceleration services.

COVARIO

(This article was cowritten by Covario SEO Director Amanda Barnes, whose bio is below.)

The goal of this change is simple. For queries conducted by searchers where information changes constantly—which Google estimates is about 35% of the queries—there is a new rendering of the organic results page starting with “news for QUERY.” Two examples are used below: “greek debt crisis” which is obviously going to have recent news and “the history of money,” which is not.

Why Is Google Doing This?

Speculation is that this is a strategic response to Facebook and Twitter—i.e., provision of real time information through directed queries on relevant topics (as opposed to open stream of incoming information, albeit timely, from competing social media platforms). Also, at a technical level, Google is rolling out some new technology to Googlebot that helps the system better index AJAX/Java Script commenting systems like Facebook, along with Google+.

What Is the Impact?

Google indicated that it would impact 35% of search queries. To be more specific, queries that will be impacted fall into three categories:

• Recent Events and Hot Topics. This includes examples of breaking news, socially trending topics or sports scores and related information.

• Regularly Recurring Events. Political elections, annual or periodic conferences (Davos, WEC, G10, or even… INFLECTIONPoint) where there is repetitive and predictable query volumes that require monitoring.

• Frequent Updates. This includes queries for products and services where there is an on-going flow of changes to the underlying landing page, such as price updates, SKU changes, reviews, etc. Queries like “best camera,” “cheap airfare to San Diego,” etc. where there is volatility in the underlying content.

How Will This New SERP Be Rolled Out?

The change began Nov. 3, 2011, and will be rolling out as Google tests the impact of the change—as they always do. However, advertisers should expect this to become a new optimization variable in their SEO analytics for any effected query.

So What Should Advertisers or SEO Specialists Do?

We have a couple of recommendations for our customers to help them understand what impact this will have on SEO results, and what they need to do to address this change.

First, social media will be more intertwined into SEO. Remember 18 months ago, Google rolled out the “Latest” function; a secondary page that users could activate on the left hand navigation to see social media data. We wrote about that update and said at the time “that if more than 10% of queries ultimately go to this secondary page, then optimizing for “recency” as well as “relevancy” will become the key to SEO. And how will that be done—integration of social media programs with SEO.”

This is an upgrade to this function that a) moves the “latest” to the main SERP and b) does so only for a subset of queries where recency is relevant. So social media programs—i.e., updates to Facebook and Twitter comments by advertisers, updated reviews, and any time of blog based content generation will require infusion with high-value SEO keywords and link backs to other content pages in order to align with the high value queries and command the newly available premium shelf space.

Second, the high value generic keywords will make up the majority of the frequent updates (“Best camera,” “cheap laptop,” “best tablet”) category of affected queries. If advertisers are going to build their processes—we recommend this. Identify the top 25 queries driving traffic to their site. Conduct queries and see if the “News for” box is appearing.

If so, monitor competitor and advertiser presence on a series of queries over a week or two and see what happens. If there is degradation in corresponding web traffic during this time period, then these become the priority for the social media programs content generation.

Last, reputation management will also be impacted. Industry announcements, including company wins and losses will find their way to the top of the rankings and may begin to overtake historically high ranking pages for branded search terms. This is both positive and negative depending on how good the news is on a given topic. Reacting quickly to negative publicity, while promoting positive news, through the systems by which “News for” reacts will become a key aspect of public relations.

This change clearly is salient for advertisers. It impacts a large number of queries. It provides prime search engine real estate to content that is “recent” and “relevant”—which requires continued integration of advertisers social media programs (to provide the “recency”) and SEO (to provide the “relevancy.”).

Covario’s Amanda Barnes has more than nine years of Search Engine Marketing experience. Amanda has driven strategy and optimization for global enterprises in B2C and B2B verticals. She currently works with Covario as the Director of SEO overseeing a global team with direct responsibilities for a large consumer electronics client.

ADOTAS

Five reasons why everyone can cry wolf, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin may not care:

1) The Google+ products should be looked at as one entity – Google+ and Google +1 are interconnected

While Google + and Google +1 can live independently of each other, as one entity they are a forced to be reckoned with. Google+ provides users the ability to self-segment, which could prove quite lucrative for advertisers should Google ever provide the ability to serve sponsored links on Google+.

Concurrently, the +1 button platform is one of Google’s fastest growing widgets, with a growing following from advertisers. The marriage of the two occurs when Google injects endorsements from Google+ into sponsored links for brands who have gone ahead and implemented the +1 widget and have been endorsed by those in Google+’s circles.

2) Google +1 for websites is being woven into the fiber of search

For now, Google says that +1 will not affect the current search algorithm.  However, there is a significant impact to advertisers who do implement +1. There is the possibility that these advertisers may achieve incremental gains in CTR, which as a result will help improve ranking and quality score in the long run.

3) Google+ is growing at an exponential rate.

Paul Allen was recently reported to have estimated Google+ at 50 million users.  If this projection is correct, this means that 50 million users are potentially creating circles and segmenting themselves and their personal interests within their chosen circles whether professional, family, sports teams, etc.

4) Brands will win using Google+ and Google +1

Personal recommendations by friends will become the most effective way to advertise and thus  this will affect the new social search paradigm.

5) My favorite (and not-directly-related-to-search) feature is the live-stream hangouts, which have the potential to reach thousands.

Most recently, Google was able to demonstrate the power of the hangout with two very prominent political figures, the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. The experience which occurred last week between the two figures might be one of the greatest ways technology has recently been leveraged.

Small business owners do not have the resources of larger companies when it comes to marketing on a grand scale. However, just because they can’t spend major advertising dollars to push traffic to their site doesn’t mean it can’t be done effectively. Your website represents everything your company stands for; without it your business would be dead in the water.

Digital Face

Twenty years ago brochures served as the face of a company. A strong brochure would say who you were, provide accessible information, and entice potential customers to call or visit your business. An effective website today should be no different.

One mistake of many websites is to stick as much information as possible on the homepage thinking it will give the visitor everything they need at once. What ends up happening is that the site becomes cluttered and the customer feels overwhelmed and leaves. Do not allow your website to become cluttered with needless information. Your site needs to be direct and to the point.

Make sure your homepage allows for easy communication between you and the potential client.  Tell them your products and service, but keep it simple. If they want to learn more, think about creating a forum to engage a potential community.

Have your “Call to Action” feature be clear and precise so that the visitor can take the next step towards getting what they want and keeping them satisfied. Also always have a form where people can submit information to you if they are interested.

Bringing Traffic Your Way

Once you create a website that is well designed and capable of capturing leads you face the critical issue of actually getting traffic to your website. There are several different ways to accomplish this. Paid search advertising is a common one. Google search and AdCenter (Bing, Yahoo, MSN) are the major search engines that offer paid advertising to boost your traffic, but they aren’t very cost effective.

There are certainly less costly alternatives to drive a lot of traffic, such as using a social network for small businesses owners who looking to connect when building leads. Sites like these are a great place to start boosting your traffic — for example, my company SaleSpider currently boasts 900,000 members as of October 2011 and over a million job postings.

Search engine optimization (SEO) also drives traffic. It’s a slower approach then direct paid advertising. You need to have your website not only indexed by Google, but able to achieve a solid ranking so you can have more hits to your site.

Make sure your keywords and titles match easily indexed words by Google’s search. Try not to go for highly competitive keywords as it may take a long time before you even hit the second page of a Google search, let alone the first.

Just a Taste…

The online marketplace can be a savage beast, but with the right tips and strategies you can maximize your potential for strong traffic. This was simply an introduction summary to optimizing your website.  In our next installment, I will go into greater detail each of these and on other opportunities to drive revenue for your site.

Having a website without getting traffic on the web is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you’re doing but no one else does. Make yourself visible and heard, and you will find opportunities come to you.

Well… not quite. But Santa will be here in less than three months, which leads me to ask, “Is everything prepared for the SEO side of the season?” No? Then it’s high time!

Today, we’ll deal with how to approach predictable and recurring events from an SEO point-of-view. Even if it’s a little late to implement a few of these measures for this Christmas, we can be sure that it will all happen again next year anyway. And the same goes for the Easter Bunny, Valentine’s Day, Oktoberfest, school holidays, etc…

So, ‘Predictive SEO’ for Predictable Events – What’s the Point?

More Traffic, More Sales – But How Do You Make It Happen?

First up in our overview: the seven sensible steps for successfully planning “predictive SEO.”

1. Early Planning

Now is not the time to leap without looking first. If you are already thinking about how you want to earn your Christmas money at the start of fall then you’re on the right track. To be successful, we need to consider the following info and conditions:

• Who’s involved?
• How much effort should we expend and what’s our budget?
• What are our deadlines?
• Are there conditions that need to be clarified? (e.g. particular marketing campaigns, newsletters, claims etc.)
• What experience have we gained from previous years?
• And, of course, what are the right keywords?

2. Target Analysis

Which (sub)pages should we focus on and develop? Existing sites that already have good Google rankings for a keyword are ideal. If you have already found several pages from your own domain that rank well for a keyword then you should forward them to the target page via a 301 redirect or at least with a clear keyword link.

A skillfully deployed canonical tag is particularly useful for dealing with pages that are similar to each other. These pages are easiest to find when you are already monitoring your domain keywords via Searchmetrics Suite.

Who will be your strongest competition? It won’t necessarily be the pages that currently hold the best positions for the desired keywords. It’s worth your while to look back a few months using the Searchmetrics Tools Keyword Research. Who ranked well for ‘Christmas’ around December 19th 2010? You can see how the site looked back then using archive.org. All of this is useful for competitor analysis…

3. Building (or Refreshing) Appropriate Content

Just like users, search engines want to find the most current content for a specific date. For this reason, selected pages should be updated at least twice: A couple of days or weeks before the event (“St. Nicholas update”?) to remind Google that something is happening, and then once more just before the targeted date. And of course, it is always helpful to keep the page up-to-date on a daily basis throughout the ‘active’ phase of the campaign. Content is freshness is king…

In building content, you should also also be careful not to forget universal search. Are there any images or videos available? You can always rely on fresh results with news, but that only works when you’re already a publisher. For most sites, this isn’t really an option.

4. Link Structure

The linking of current content and (internal as well as external) backlinks is always a rewarding strategy and new content is always a good reason to direct link structures to target pages.

Of course, the old rule of ‘the more links, the better’ still generally applies. The refined version simply states that you should make sure the links are as varied as possible and come from thematically relevant areas. Either way, you can’t ignore homepage links. Ideally, of course, it is always best to include ‘Specials’ in navigation bars along with text from relevant pages.

5. Powerful Buzz for the Big Day

Timing is critical. It’s not just about getting as many tweets, likes or blogposts as possible – it’s about getting the most in the shortest amount of time and, above all, at the right time! For this, we can refer to the methods that we are already familiar with –  i.e. competitions, press releases, Google News, mail-outs and social media.

With that said, the success or failure of the entire project depends on planning. But good planning is nothing without communication. Ideally, you should already have a good name among the various market players. If you do, then it’s worth your while to notify journalists by mail or phone. And don’t forget – bloggers are people too and  generally appreciate being contacted directly.

6. Clean the page up again

As always, once the shopping season has passed – that is between Christmas and the New Year – you should make sure to collect and archive the relevant pages. This should be done properly and with more than just a few links so that no one will accidentally land on old content in the New Year.

Besides this, all specially set links and canonical tags should be reset and rebuilt with the next campaign in mind. You may also need to rebuild navigation menus. Yup, that’s right – everything has to be taken care of.

7. Analysis and Documentation

What worked? What didn’t? At the end of the holiday season, you should collect all the preparations, planning, used pages, links and buzz tools etc. in one file and save it somewhere. There are two reasons for this. First, it will be within easy reach at the end of next summer, and second, it won’t be long until April and Easter roll around.

And how exactly do you include link-building in all of this?

At the beginning of this post, I promised to talk a little about this topic. The early realization that Christmas is on its way is particularly useful if extra links are built in time. But, how do we do this exactly?

Behind this entire strategy lies the recognition that you are likely not the only one who wants to profit from Christmas and the New Year. And, if you look at the above list again, you might notice a particularly labor intensive point – namely, the creation of relevant content.

For example, there will be thousands of pages trying to write about Christmas gift trends but only a few of these will identify and reveal these trends. Others will then link to these posts – heavily. Anyone who isn’t already the size of Otto.de or Amazon can make a press release about these kinds of gift trends. Perhaps you can group a few trend studies together and provide high-value analysis for the very people who should be linking to you – other site operators.

Or another example: has anyone collected the dates of all the regional Christmas Markets together in one attractive map? This takes a bit of effort but costs less than many other link-building projects.

Or yet another example: what are the rights and obligations for exchanging gifts purchased online? Or, or, or… Most importantly, a topic should already be ‘deep’ enough to warrant a link after a quick look.

This will give the impression of a credible source and create a certain social media buzz that will hopefully grab the target audience (i.e. the blogger or web editor) with attractive tables and graphs. The more original, professional and comprehensive the content is, the easier this will be.

The most important condition is timing. Any of these examples above should already be available by the time others are in the content design and planning phases for their pages. So, pay attention:  if you’re looking forward to finding a few link gifts under the tree this year, then you have to think about Christmas before your competitors.

If you haven’t noticed, Google and other search engines tend to display more than simple links on the initial search results pages – according to research by Conductor, on about 80% of keyword searches videos, news and shopping results tend to appear, creating a blend of multimedia results that many SEOs aren’t taking full advantage of. The update allows Searchlight users to track assets such as branded videos, products for sale and news mentions — as well as their competitors’ — across these blended search pages, as well as tools for optimizing pixel position and general brand presence.

In addition, Conductor announced the ability to employ SEO programs such as Traffic Explorer and Visibility Explorer within the Searchlight platform, enabling clients to instantly leverage garnered SEO insight. Finally, the company also announced a major international expansion of Searchlight, introducing the ability to track and optimize keywords across various search engines in the G20 countries from a single platform.

The sold-out C3 Conference will host discussions on the issues that the Searchlight improvements are addressing and feature presentations by Crispin Sheridan, global enterprise and testing lead for SAP; Dave Lloyd, head of global SEO strategy for Adobe Systems; and Maura Ginty, senior manager of strategic research and strategy at Autodesk.

God, what a process! Who has the time? I demand convenience — where’s the WordPress plugin, dammit?

Oh, developer Eightfold Logic just released it right here. That was quick, guys — thanks! For those of you who prefer another CMS over WordPress, I’m told Eightfold Logic is working on integrations with additional popular online publishers. In particular, I think software like InboundWriter will come in very handy for companies setting upon branded content endeavors like those described by MovableMedia’s Andrew Boer.

Here’s my coverage from last week detailing how InboundWriter goes about the real-time content optimization process and a study detailing real-world results:

During less employed times, I would skim the classifieds for editing positions and grimace when I saw “knowledge of SEO writing and editing techniques” under qualifications. If you haven’t noticed, I’m one of those snotty writers who is horrified by the prospect of marring my Joycean prose with search-engine friendly terminology and phrasing.

OK, maybe I’m just not that great at SEO — I mean, it’s not like there’s a simple set of rules to follow, or a major search engine that doesn’t constantly update its algorithm. Besides, isn’t there some copy monkey who can do it for me? (That endangered species prefers the title “copy editor” and increasingly, no.). Or maybe some software?

Well, now there is, and it helps with that pesky “social media engagement” thingy too. (Guess I can’t use the excuse anymore that the unwashed masses are too uneducated to comprehend my extended metaphors.) Social writing application InboundWriter employs multiple SEO techniques during the composition process to improve not just organic search (by as much as 25% according to the website) but also social media engagement.

Currently in beta, the cloud-based software offers real-time (that is, during the composition process) insight into understanding audience and search keywords from topics discussed in social media conversations, search queries and similar content on competing sites. InboundWriter is not a content management system or a CMS plugin — writers compose within the software and then move it to the company CMS to publish. In addition, the software offers granularity in how much to push a certain goal (e.g., driving retweets vs. higher rankings on Google).

A new study by online marketers and social media pioneers Bryan Eisenberg, Jay Baer and Pelin Thorogood suggests that such “real-time content optimization” produces real results. For example. Baer rewrote five blog posts using InboundWriter, and witnessed traffic jump 33% compared to when they were first published 30 days before. Six out of seven new blog posts created using InboundWriter ended up in the Google top 10 rankings for their targeted terms within two days of publication.

Finally this quite hilarious marketing video from the company suggests that put-upon writers like me should actually be pitying those poor SEOs all alone in the underbelly of an organization, completing menial tasks across countless URLS when they could be playing with their friends. (Not outside though — everyone knows SEOs are deathly allergic to sunshine.)

“Optimizing the signal stream,” is the tagline from BrightEdge, which began incorporating social signals into its SEO platform back in March. S3 employs Facebook’s Open Graph, as well as the new Open Graph tags — introduced at F8, instead of just “Liking” something, users will be able to say they “Want,” “Own,” etc.

That’s quite useful for the new Social Site Audit tool, which provides customized recommendations to aid companies in employing social signals. In addition, the Social Signal Measurement enables clients to measure, manage and take action on Tweets and Facebook Likes. Then Facebook Page Recommendations are pretty literal — proven recommendations raising  the search profile of Facebook pages.

However, S3 isn’t all social fun and games – Search ROI Comparison puts real values on organic and paid search efforts, while Global Insight aid in improving rankings success worldwide via support for Google on 5 continents as well as data from Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo! Japan. Finally, workflow tool Collaborative SEO is aids in assigning tasks across internal departments to improve efficiency.

“The Internet is changing how companies engage with customers, and the rise of social networks and sharing is accelerating a user driven approach to marketing,” said BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu. “Just as strategies to manage and optimize search were essential for marketers during the past decade, CMOs will now require new tools in the next 10 years to leverage the torrent of data their customers generate everyday across site, search and social channels.”

BrightEdge is rolling out S3 to more than 100 of its over 500 clients, including major brands such as Microsoft, VMWare and Williams-Sonoma.

It’s interesting to say the least. Backed by its flight schedule technology, Google Flights seems like an evolutionary mash-up of Google’s Instant Search Feature and Google Maps. And while the system is not without its bugs currently–rates are not available for flights from the U.S. to international destinations and The New York Times reported that its flight search results are far from comprehensive–its suite of extra tools are impressive. Tools include a slider that allows you to filter by flight price and duration, and even recommendations for alternate destinations should a flight to your preferred destination be unavailable in your selected timeframe.

But what really sets Google Flights apart from Expedia, Kayak.com, and any number of competitors is its native audience. Thanks to products like Gmail, Blogger, its aggregated news channels, and so on, Google has a big advantage over competitors in that they could incorporate this new application into any of their other products. In fact, we’re already seeing this integration, as Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land points out. For example, a query of “flights from nyc to dc” generates the following result:

This might cause many SEOs to sit up and take note–as all their hard work results in listings that are now secondary to the output of Google Flights. By integrating Google Flights into its users’ extant internet habits (email and search alike), the internet titan stands to take over a lot of the market share in this particular niche from competitors like Kayak.com and Expedia, who, in addition to hosting external portals, lack the instantaneous results that Google Flights has, often subjecting users to intermediary loading pages.

This is also a sentiment echoed by Lifehacker’s Adam Pash, who writes, “It’s impressively intuitive, extremely fast, and though I hate to say it, I can see Google’s new flight search becoming a lot of people’s first destination for finding airline tickets online.”

Cross-published at the Blue Phoenix Network blog.