Online press releases and SEO strategy

Online, or electronic, press releases can be a highly effective way of building your online presence. In addition to generating buzz about your business, you can use e-releases to get high-quality incoming links for your site. We helped write and distribute another one last week for a client involved in the cloud computing space and it's already been picked up by some respectable sources, including Yahoo News. Read our release here.

BusinessWeek on the growing demand for social media directors

Last week's BusinessWeek covers corporate America's "rush" to hire social media directors:

Across the country, companies like Petco are going through a two-step process. First, they scramble to hire social media officers. Second, they figure out what it is, exactly, that social media officers do. Blending departments—promotion and marketing, customer service and support—and requiring the ability to be shameless boosters while maintaining a light, self-aware tone, the job category is experiencing a boomlet as companies try to keep up with the new media world. The chief social media officer may be supplanting the chief branding officer as the zaniest human resource innovation in memory.

These articles always make me cringe a bit, but you can't blame big companies for wanting to be active in this space. Towards the end of the piece the topic of metrics comes up:

Metrics used to evaluate success in corporate social media might include: number of Tweets; number of re-Tweets (a Twitter message that's resent by a follower); instances of "customer recovery," in which an irate civilian is successfully mollified; an increase in the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers; and the number of photos of your product that have been posted online.

What about website visits from Facebook and Twitter activity? Or leads or sales? Those seem much more relevant than number of Tweets.

NY Times on Trial and Error with AdWords and SEO

You worked hard to launch a new PPC campaign, picking the right keywords and creating brilliant copy--only to see no results. We've all encountered online marketing challenges such as this and it can be incredibly frustrating.

This is the topic explored by Adriana Gardella in her recent post "Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O" for the NYTimes.com's small business-focused blog, You're The Boss. Gardella chronicles the experience of Catherine Hill, owner of an online retailer of women's plus size fashion.

Hill ran an AdWords campaign and ended up incurring a monthly loss of over $10,000 because while her site was getting a lot of traffic from AdWords, the visits were not resulting in sales. Sound familiar? Lack of conversion is a sign that you need to play around with different keywords, copy and bids. And even then you still may ultimately conclude, as Hill did, that AdWords is simply not a good fit for your business.

The takeaway here is that, in most cases, not all online marketing techniques will work for a business. And the only way to find out which approaches are worthwhile is through trial and error. But too many people feel "locked" into a marketing strategy and are reluctant to make changes once they've implemented it.

Hill learned through trial and error that the key to her website's success lay in quality content and social media outreach. Maintaining a Facebook page allowed her to share style tips for plus-size women, updates about upcoming sales and more with her customer base. Setting up a Facebook page was free and quickly proved to be much more effective in attracting qualified buyers than the email list rental that Hill was previously paying big bucks for.

So, don't be afraid to admit that an AdWords campaign or other marketing activity you tried didn't work; take what you learned and build upon it. That's what Hill did and ended up growing sales by over 50% from the previous year--while spending approximately $14,000 less on marketing.

Inc. Magazine on Using Google to Improve Your SEO

Inc.'s recent article How to Use Google to Improve Your SEO brings up a good point: chances are you're already using Google to help you find what you're looking for online--but are you using it to help others find your business?

The article opens with a summary of three fundamental SEO practices:

1) Getting as many high-quality sites to link back to you.

2) Making sure that the other sites linking to you contain relevant keywords that you would like to rank on. "If you want to reach a high search engine ranking for 'Chicago tutors,' for example, your best links would come from other sites that also rank well for that search term," suggests Inc.

3) Posting keyword-rich content and integrating those keywords into your site's title tags and meta descriptions.

If you're new to the world of SEO, you're probably wondering how to go about choosing keywords that are relevant to your business. That's where Google AdWords Keyword Tool comes in. It will help you identify the terms that people looking for your type of business are searching on. The tool generates lists of keywords that allow you to compare search volume and level of competition for different terms. The article's author, J.J. McCorvey, recommends complementing your keyword research by using Google Trends, which allows you to see the search patterns for a given word over time.

So, you've gotten a respectable number of incoming links, identified the right keywords and integrated these words into your site's content and meta data--now what? How do you measure your newly optimized site's performance? McCorvey points us to the metrics tool Google Analytics. It provides a plethora of stats such as bounce rate, or percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page, average time spent on site and more.

The other performance analysis tool, Google Webmaster, has a Diagnostics feature that can help you identify weaknesses in your site's meta data, crawlability and more. Its Statistics arm, meanwhile, analyzes incoming traffic, including which search queries bring visitors to your site. This information enables you to go back and tweak your content so that it optimized on the best-performing keywords.

McCorvey goes on to say that the beauty of Google's SEO tools (besides the fact that they are free!) is the ability to use them in conjuction with one another. As an example, McCorvey points to Google Analytics, whose data you can use "in conjunction with Google's Website Optimizer, which enables split testing of modified pages. After you've made improvements to a page, you can set the Website Optimizer so that a certain amount of viewers see the old version of the page, and use Google Analytics to compare and analyze the results."

McCorvey closes with a reference to the SEO mantra "Content is King," the importance of which shouldn't be forgotten as you get better and better at using Google's optimization tools. If the Keyword Tool tells you that a given term gets a high number of searches and it "...isn't extensively covered on your website, maybe it's worthwhile to churn out a couple more pages on that topic."

Using Google Analytics filters to measure marketing results

We've recently found the "filter" feature in Google Analytics to be a great way to measure effectiveness of our SEO and other internet marketing efforts for clients over time. In this post I'll explain why and give an overview of how to use it.

The problem with unfiltered reports and totals

If you're like most small businesses using Google Analytics, you spend a lot of time looking under Traffic Sources looking at the Referring Sites report and the Keywords (non-paid) report. These reports tell you much of what you need to know about where your traffic is coming from -- and tracking their total numbers over time can give you a good sense of how well your marketing is working.

The problem is that your Referring Sites report will often be dominated by a small number of sites, and your Keywords report will often be dominated by a small number of keywords relating to your brand name. These sites and keywords are critical, but as you grow, your marketing and SEO efforts will focus more and more on traffic from new sites and new keywords.

Let's say you're an employment lawyer in DC named "Teresa Millbrook." Six months ago, both your Referring Sites report and your Keyword report were very top-heavy:

• Two sites - usalawyers.com and dclaw.com - were driving 95% of your referring site traffic
• A handful of "brand" keywords (i.e. keywords related to "teresa millbrook") were driving 95% of your organic search traffic

Since then, you've reached out to a bunch of relevant websites to boost your inbound links and optimized your website for non-brand keywords like "dc employment lawyer". Now you want to know what impact your efforts have had.

If you're like most people, you'll scan through your reports to see what new referring sites and keywords pop up, maybe comparing back to your list of target lists. If you're more advanced, you'll compare the total visits from referring sites and search engines 6 months ago to today (e.g. October vs. March).

The problem with these approaches is they miss the long tail, which is the most likely place you've had success. Sure, we all want to see a new referrer or keyword sending hundreds of visits, but the far more likely scenario from SEO efforts is that a large number of new sites and keywords are each sending you a tiny number of clicks. In aggregate, these new sources of traffic may be sending you hundreds or thousands of clicks, but because many of them are only sending you 1-3 clicks a month, they're easy to miss if you're just scanning your reports.

You may notice the trend if you compare total referrer or search visits over time, but you're doing an apples-to-oranges comparison. What if your traffic from usalawyers.com and dclaw.com dropped by 25% over the last 6 months? You might miss the increase from your new referrers. Or what if your traffic from brand keywords increased by 25% over the last 6 months? You might mistakenly attribute the jump in your total visits to your non-brand SEO.

How to use filters

The only way to get around the problems above -- and gain a true measure of your SEO and marketing effectiveness -- is to use filters. Filters allow you to do an apples-to-apples comparison of long tail sites / keywords before and after you implemented your marketing efforts.

If you're Teresa the lawyer, here's how you'd use filters in Google Analytics to measure your Referring Sites traffic growth:

1. Under Traffic Sources, click the Referring Sites report.
2. Select your "before" time period, let's say it's October 2009.
3. Click the Advanced Filter link on the bottom of the page.
4. Keep the filter on "Source", change the drop-down to "Excluding", and enter "usalawyers.com".
5. Click "Add new condition", choose "Source", "Excluding", and enter "dclaw.com".
6. Click "Apply Filter".
7. Write down the Total Visits number.
8. Select your "after" time period, let's say it's March 2010.
9. Repeat steps 3 through 7.
10. Compare the Total Visits between the two periods.

Then you'd use the same basic process for your Keyword report, filtering out keywords with "teresa", then keywords with "millbrook". If your brand name gets a lot of misspellings, include those too (e.g. "theresa", "millbrooke"); in some cases, you can avoid having to include all of the variations by just shortening a keyword to a "base" version that includes many misspellings (e.g. "mill"). (Just check to make sure doing this doesn't cause you to count traffic from non-brand keywords that share that same base.)

Final Thoughts

The next time you're in Google Analytics, try using the 10-step process above. Hopefully when you're done, you'll see a jump in the Total Visits from "before" to "after" and you'll gain new insights into what is causing the increase.

Keep in mind that the comparison this process enables isn't perfect; there may be seasonality and other factors at work. But it is much more scientific than the more commonly used approaches: eyeballing and comparing totals of raw traffic reports. By using filters, you'll gain a far more accurate view of what's working and what's not in your marketing efforts.

WSJ on measuring web traffic

Interesting recent article on the murky business of measuring web traffic from Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal. He elaborates on some points in a post on The Numbers Guy blog. Most interesting to me is his discussion of the gap between internal site numbers from web analytics tools (e.g. Google Analytics, Omniture) and competitive analysis tools (ComScore, Nielsen, Compete, Quantcast), with the latter's numbers much lower than the former's. My two thoughts:

1) While bothersome, this gap is much less of a problem if everything is "directionally consistent". If Compete shows that my site gets 60% as much traffic as Google Analytics does, I want this ratio to be true for all of my competitors. If Google Analytics shows my site's traffic going up 50% over the last year, I want Compete to as well. I think part of the frustration among website managers is that, not only are there big gaps between internal and external counting, there are also inconsistencies in these other areas.

2) If cookies create problems with double-counting users who visit sites on multiple computers, can't we focus more on visits and less on unique visitors?

Personalized search from Google and SEO research

Over the last 6 months I've had a number of occasions where I describe the Google search results I'm seeing to someone on the phone, or across the table, and they say "that's not what I'm seeing." I'd begun to suspect this was partly because Google was giving preference to websites/search results I'd previously clicked on. Today I finally decided to look into it ... and learned that 2 months ago Google made a major, official move to personalized search -- and past clicking behavior is a big factor.

Personalized search is not new, but previously it was only offered to sign-in users who had "Web History" enabled. In early December, Google's blog announced that "Today we're helping people get better search results by extending Personalized Search to signed-out users worldwide, and in more than forty languages." The post's author explained personalized search as follows:

Since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I'm looking for news about Cornell University's sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others.

Three days later, Danny Sullivan wrote on Search Engine Land that Google had "made the biggest change that has ever happened in search engines, and the world largely yawned."

This trend makes a lot of sense for users, but can lead to a false sense of SEO success if you're a business. Let's say you're a DC area dentist and you search for "DC dentists." Google's default results -- which most people see -- list your website on the 10th page. But because you've clicked on your site a number of times in past searches, your personalized Google results show your site on the 1st page, in the #3 spot. You think you're in great shape -- and you give your SEO consultant a raise -- when in reality you're as invisible as you were a year ago.

So if you don't want to purchase software like WebPosition, how do you see what most other people are seeing on Google? You can opt out of personalized search and you can delete your search history (which Google keeps for 180 days) at any time. But you probably don't want to do that, because then you lose out on the benefits of personalized search for your personal browsing. What I'm going to do is use a different browser (one I never use otherwise) when I'm doing SEO research and try not to click on any links. I'll let you know if I come up with a better solution.