Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Taking a 5+ Figure Blog to the Next Level
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Here are some quick tips on how you can use blogrolls to compose a list of as many related blogs as possible, then checking those blogs to see if any of them return 404s.
A good free tool to use for finding blogs is the SoloSEO link tool, which will pull up blogs (and other assorted advanced search operators) based on the keyword you input.
After going through the ways to build the list, I?ll run through a few ways you can use it.
Start off by finding a few related blogs that have blogrolls. The more blogs & the longer the blogrolls of each, the better. This is our seed list that will soon multiply itself.
Take the URLs of these blogs and throw them into Buzzstream?s blogroll list builder. In the example below, I just started off with one (an HR blog):
Once you hit Go, it searches the blog(s) and finds every blog in their blogroll (note: I was having issues with it in Chrome, so if you do as well, switch browsers):
Next, download the results as CSV. Open it up in Excel, then copy & paste the blogroll URLs back into the list builder tool (you might have to refresh/reopen the page).
Keep doing this until you have a sizeable list. The bigger the better, but as you keep expanding, you?ll run into the issue of irrelevant blogs entering the list, so just keep that in mind.
Next, throw your list of URLs into Citation Lab?s URL Status Checker tool. This will check to see if any of the URLs in the blogroll are 404s.
Once the report is finished, you can export it as a CSV.
Now it?s up to you how you want to use this list for broken link building. Here are a few popular options:
1. Blogroll Links
Go down the list of 404s and plug them into any of the bigger link tools on the market, Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs.Com, or MajesticSEO. Scan their top links for any that are coming from a homepage. These are almost always blogroll links.
Go to these homepages and use the Check My Links chrome extension, because if one link in their blogroll is broken, then there?s usually a few others.
From there, reach out to the bloggers letting them know of the broken links. Then ask them if one of them could be replaced with a link to your blog since it?s related.
2. Dead Content Links
Once again, plug the 404s into the link tool of your choice. This time however, instead of checking their links, click on Top Pages section in the tool.
Find their most linked to content, double check each to make sure the page is no longer available, then plug those URLs into Archive.org to see what content used to be there.
Next you?re going to rewrite the content, but do your best to make it even better. If it?s a little outdated, then update it.
This content will not only attract links on its own with proper promotion (the old one did, the new one probably will as well), but you can now use this for broken link building.
Take the URLs of the broken, linked-to content and plug it into your link tool(s). Go down the list and find the most valuable links to that content, then reach out to the webmaster/blogger of those sites and let them know that page is broken.
Tell them that ?you took the burden? of recreating it, and that for the sake of their readers, they should update the broken link by now linking to you.
You can also use the initial list of 404s to see if any of those domains are:
If they have enough links to them, you can put some content up and include a few links back to you. If you?re going to do this, make sure you put content up on their Top Pages, since these are already loaded with link juice.
Finally, you can take that list of blogrolls, remove all the 404s & duplicates, and use the Mozscape API (with excel) to find the most authoritative blogs in your niche. From there, build relationships, ask for product reviews, or anything else you can think of.
So many of the tools we have ready at our fingers can be used in various combinations. Don?t be afraid to experiment.
What do you think of this process? What do you think can be improved? I?d love to hear your thoughts below!
Jon Cooper is an SEO consultant and the author of Point Blank SEO, a link building blog. Follow him on Twitter @pointblankseo.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/broken-link-building-tips-jon-cooper
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 6 Simple Tips to Make Your Blog More Engaging
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WordPress comes with a “default” set of user contact fields, which has always looked random to me: AIM, Yahoo IM and Jabber / Google Talk, instead of what I’d want to have there: Twitter, Facebook and Google+. A while back I got frustrated enough to have a look at how this was actually dealt with…
User Contact Fields in WordPress is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
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Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
5 Simple Online Services for Checking Content Plagiarism
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© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. Remarketing Is Now Simpler
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The following is a guest column written by Rory Joyce from CoverHound.
Last week Google Advisor made its long-awaited debut in the car insurance vertical -- in the UK. Given Google?s 2011 acquisition of BeatThatQuote.com, a UK comparison site, for 37.7 million pounds ($61.5 million US), it comes as little surprise that the company chose to enter the UK ahead of other markets. While some might suspect Google?s foray into the UK market is merely a trial balloon, and that an entrance into the US market is inevitable, I certainly wouldn?t hold my breath.
Here are three reasons Google will not be offering an insurance comparison product anytime soon in the US market:
Finance and insurance is the number one revenue - generating advertising vertical for Google, totaling $4 billion in 2011. While some of that $4 billion is made up of products like health insurance, life insurance and credit cards, the largest segment within the vertical is undoubtedly car insurance. The top 3 advertisers in the vertical as a whole are US carriers -- State Farm, Progressive and Geico -- spending a combined sum of $110 million in 2011.
The keyword landscape for the car insurance vertical is relatively dense. A vast majority of searches occur across 10-20 generic terms (ie - ?car insurance,? ?auto insurance,? ?cheap auto insurance,? ?auto insurance quotes,? etc). This is an important point because it helps explain the relatively high market CPC of car insurance keywords versus other verticals. All of the major advertisers are in the auction for a large majority of searches, resulting in higher prices. The top spot for head term searches can reach CPCs well over $40. The overall average revenue/click for Google is probably somewhere around $30. Having run run similar experiments with carrier click listing ads using SEM traffic, I can confidently assume that the click velocity (clicks per clicker) is around 1.5. So the average revenue per searcher who clicks is probably somewhere around $45 for Google.
Now, let?s speculate on Google?s potential revenues from advertisers in a comparison environment. Carriers? marketing allowable is approximately $250 per new policy. When structuring pay-for-performance pricing deep in the funnel (or on a sold-policy basis), carriers are unlikely to stray from those fundamentals. In a fluid marketplace higher in the funnel (i.e.� Adwords PPC), they very often are managing to a marginal cost per policy that far exceeds even $500 (see $40 CPCs). While it may seem like irrational behavior, there are two reasons they are able to get away with this:
a) They are managing to an overall average cost per policy, meaning all direct response marketing channels benefit from ?free,? or unattributable sales. With mega-brands like Geico, this can be a huge factor.
b) There are pressures to meet sales goals at all costs. Google presents the highest intent of any marketing channel available to insurance marketers. If marketers need to move the needle in a hurry, this is where they spend.
Regardless of how Google actually structures the pricing, the conversion point will be much more efficient for the consumer since they will be armed with rates and thus there will be less conversion velocity for Google. The net-net here is a much more efficient marketplace, and one where Google can expect average revenue to be about $250 per sold policy.
How does this match up against the $45 unit revenue they would significantly cannibalize? The most optimized and competitive carriers can convert as high as 10% of clicks into sales. Since Google would be presenting multiple policies we can expect that in a fully optimized state, they may see 50% higher conversion and thus 15% of clicks into sales. Here is a summary of the math:
With the Advisor product, in an optimized state, Google will make about $37.50 ($250 x .15) per clicker. Each cannibalized lead will thus cost Google $7.50 of unit revenue ($45 - $37.50). Given the dearth of compelling comparison options in insurance (that can afford AdWords), consumers would definitely be intrigued and so one can assume the penetration/cannibalization would be significant.
Of course there are other impacts to consider: How would this affect competition and average revenue for non-cannibalized clicks? Will responders to Advisor be incremental and therefore have zero opportunity cost?
Over the past couple of years, Google has rolled out its Advisor product in several verticals including: personal banking, mortgage, and flight search.
We know that at least mortgage didn?t work out very well. Rolled out in early 2011, it was not even a year before Google apparently shut the service down in January of 2012.
I personally don?t have a good grasp on the Mortgage vertical so I had a chat with a high-ranking executive at a leading mortgage site, an active AdWords advertiser. In talking to him it became clear that there were actually quite a bit of similarities between mortgage and insurance as it relates to Google including:
Hoping he could serve as my crystal ball for insurance, I asked, ?So why did Advisor for Mortgage fail?? His response was, ?The chief issue was that the opportunity cost was unsustainably high. Google needed to be as or more efficient than direct marketers who had been doing this for years. They underestimated this learning curve and ultimately couldn?t sustain the lost revenue as a result of click cannibalization.?
Google better be sure it has a good understanding of the US insurance market before entering, or else history will repeat itself, which brings me to my next point...
Let?s quickly review some key differences between the UK and US insurance markets:
As you can see, these markets are completely different animals. Despite the seemingly low barriers for entry in the UK, Google still felt compelled to acquire BeatThatQuote to better understand the market. Yet, it still took them a year and a half post acquisition before they launched Advisor.
I spoke with an executive at a top-tier UK insurance comparison site earlier this week about Google?s entry. He mentioned that Google wanted to acquire a UK entity primarily for its general knowledge of the market, technology, and infrastructure (API integrations). He said, ?Given [Google?s] objectives, it didn?t make sense for them to acquire a top tier site (ie - gocompare, comparethemarket, moneysupermarket, confused) so they acquired BeatThatQuote, which was unknown to most consumers but had the infrastructure in place for Google to test the market effectively.?
It?s very unlikely BeatThatQuote will be of much use for the US market. Google will need to build its product from the ground up. Beyond accruing the knowledge of a very complex, and nuanced market, they will need to acquire or build out the infrastructure. In the US there are no public rate APIs for insurance carriers; very few insurance comparison sites actually publish instant, accurate, real-time rates. Google will need to understand and navigate its way to the rates (though it?s not impossible). It will take some time to get carriers comfortable and then of course build out the technology. Insurance carriers, like most financial service companies, can be painfully slow.
I do believe Google will do something with insurance at some point in the US. Of the various challenges the company currently faces, I believe the high opportunity cost is the toughest to overcome. However, the market will shift. As true insurance comparison options continue to mature, consumers will be searching exclusively for comparison sites (see travel), and carriers will no longer be able to effectively compete at the scale they are now -- driving down the market for CPCs and thus lowering the opportunity cost.
This opportunity cost is much lower however for other search engines where average car insurance CPC?s are lower. If I am Microsoft or Yahoo, I am seriously considering using my valuable real estate to promote something worthwhile in insurance. There is currently a big void for consumers as it relates to shopping for insurance. A rival search engine can instantly differentiate themselves from Google overnight in one of the biggest verticals. This may be one of their best opportunities to regain some market share.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/google-car-insurance
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Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Are You Wasting Time Guest Posting?
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Posted by gfiorelli1
As many of you already know, I am Italian and I am a web marketer. These two facts made me discover International SEO very soon because - let's face it - Italy is well-known, but there are not many people in the world who speak or understand Italian.
If you consider the nature of many Italian companies which rely on the foreign market for a good portion of their revenues, you can understand why SEO and International SEO are essentially synonymous for me and many others European SEOs.
This map explains why I must be an International SEO. Image by: http://www.hu.mtu.edu
This explains my interest in how search engines treat the problems associated with multi-country and multi-lingual sites. It also influences my interest in how a company can come in, attack, and conquer a foreign market. I've seen both interests becoming quite common and popular in the SEO industry during these last 12 months.
Many small and medium-sized businesses now have the desire to engage in a globalized market. Their motivations are obviously fueled by expanding their business reach, but are also a consequence of the current economic crisis: if your internal market cannot assure an increase from your previous business volume, the natural gateway is trying to conquer new markets.
My Q&A duties as SEOmoz Associate have made me notice the increased interest in International SEO. Rather than seeing a small number of questions community members publicly and privately ask us, we are seeing many questions based on the confusion people still have about the nature of International SEO and how it really works.
In this post, I will try to answer the two main questions above referencing a survey I conducted a few months ago, which (even though it cannot be called definitive) is representative of the common International SEO practices professionals use.
The answers given in the survey clearly show that people seem to prefer to use country code, top-level domains (ccTlds) against the sub-carpet option and the sub domain. (I'm still wondering what “other” may mean.)
The main reason for this choice is the bigger geo-targeting strength of ccTlds. However, this strength is compromised by the fact that you have to create the authority of that kind of site from the ground up through link building.
Does that mean more companies should go for the sub-carpet option? From an SEO point of view, this could be the best choice because you can count on the domain authority of an established domain, and every link earned in any language version will have positive benefits for the others. Sub-carpet domains could be also the best choice if you are targeting a general language market (i.e.: Spanish) and not a specific country (i.e.: Mexico).
However, there are drawbacks in choosing sub-carpet domains:
I consider the pro's and con's of both options, and I tend to be strongly influenced by non-strictly SEO needs in my final decision
For instance, it is quite logical that Amazon decided to base its expansion into foreign market using ccTlds. Apart from the SEO benefits, having all the versions of its huge store on one site would have been utterly problematic.
On the other hand, Apple preferred to use the sub-carpet option as its main site does not include the store part, which is in a sub domain (i.e.: store.apple.com/es). Apple chose a purely corporate format for its site, a decision that reflects a precise marketing concept: the site is for showing, amazing, and conquering a customer. Selling is a secondary purpose.
I suggest you to do the same when choosing between a sub-carpet and ccTld domain. Go beyond SEO when you have to choose between these options and understand the business needs of your client and/or company. You will discover there are bigger problems to avoid in doing so.
This is a classic issue I see in Q&A. Google personally responded to this issue in an older, but still relevant, post on their Webmaster blog:
"The server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone."
Nonetheless, in the case that you are using a CDN, examine where its servers are located and check if one or more are in or close to the countries you are targeting. The reason for this examination is not directly related to SEO, but concerns the Page Speed issue. Page Speed is more of a usability problem, but it has an effect on your site's SEO.
Finally, don’t confuse local IP with local hosting as you can use a local IP via proxy from your own server. In certain countries, a hosting solution can be a real pain, and that drives many companies to host their clients sites in servers located in another country.
Takeaway: do not get obsessed by having a local IP for your ccTld site, as it is now a minor factor.
In case you choose the sub-folder option, another important technical aspect is to create separate sitemaps.xml files for every one of them. Again, common sense, but worth mentioning.
If you are going to do International SEO, the first problem you will have is translating the content of your site in the language of the country you are going to target.
It is common sense to use a professional translator (or a translation agency), but some people lack common sense and tend to rely on:
The latter is nonsensical. Professional translators have studied for years and know the nuances of the language they translate, whereas a professional translator will usually translate from a foreign language into their own language, not vice versa. If your translator is bilingual, that's even better.
The first choice is officially deprecated because it is considered (correctly) as a bad quality signal to Google. Even though Google's translator tool was created for this purpose, it seems as if they are sending some mixed messages and I advise you to look elsewhere for translating services.
A professional translation of your content is the best ally for your keyword search.
For example, let's say you want to rank for “car sell” in the Spanish and Latin American market. If you use Google Translate (or Babylon, WordLingo, or Bing Translate), you will have just one of the many variants of that keyword possible all over the Spanish variations map:
Even worse, maybe you won’t discover that some countries have peculiarities in dialect expressions instead of “official/standard language” ones, or that people in these countries use both the English wording and the equivalent in their language. For instance, in Italy is very common to say both “voli low cost” and “voli a basso costo,” both meaning “low cost flights."
When I have to optimize a site for a foreign language, I give the translator a detailed list of keywords in which they will:
Once the site has been translated, I use the Adwords Keyword Tool suggestions copy pasting the translated keywords. The process includes:
Pro tip: Another step I take is to pull the final keywords list into the SEOmoz Keyoword Difficulty Tool to have a complete map of the difficulty and the competitors my site will have to compete with.
Do you think all this is possible using an automatic translator?
A correct translation is one of the most powerful geo-targeting signals a site can have, especially when a language is spoken in more than one country It is an extremely important usability tactic (which is correlated to better conversions), because people tend to trust a vendor who speaks as they speak.
Other classic geo-targeting signals are the use of local currencies, addresses, and phone numbers. Using them is very common sense, but again, some people don’t excel in that field.
However, you may have problems when you target a language all over the world and not a specific country. Obviously you cannot use the local signals described before, because you have the opposite objective. What to do then? I rely on the following steps:
If you reflect wisely about I have written up to this point, be sure to notice that "On Page International SEO" is not all that different from “On Page National SEO”. However, the slight differences arise when we talk about tagging for multilingual and multi-country sites, and there is a lot of confusion about this topic (thanks in part to some contradicting messages Google gave over the last two years).
The geo-targeting tags are needed to avoid showing the incorrect URL in a determined regional Google search. A classic example is seeing a US site outranking a UK site in Google.co.uk, usually due to a stronger page/domain authority. They don’t have any other function than that.
At first sight, its implementation is quite simple:
if Page A (US version) exists also in Page B (Spanish), C (French), and D (German) versions from other countires, no matter if they are in the same domain or different, then on page A you should suggest the last three URLs as the ones Google must show in the SERPs in their respective targeted Googles.
Those tags must be inserted in the <head> section and look like this:
<rel=”alternate” hreflang=”es-ES” href=”http://www.domain.com/es/page-B.html” />
In this line, “es” indicates the language accordingly to the ISO 6391-1 format, and “ES” the country we want to target (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format).
You can also submit the language version information in your sitemaps. This is the best choice in order to not burden your site code, and it actually works very well, as Peter Handley discusses in this post. Also, they offer pre-existing tools which integrate the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" value in the sitemaps.xml files, as this one by The Media Flow.
Is not so hard, is it? Unfortunately, SEOs had been discouraged by atrocious doubts, especially when their International SEO previewed targeting countries where the same language is spoken.
What is the reason of these doubts? It is the fear for the (substantially) duplicated content those sites (or sub-carpets) tend to have, and the correct use of rel=”canonical”".
For example, in a multilingual site, we have the US American portion of our eCommerce store on www.mysite.com/store/. In www.mysite.com/au/store/ we have the Australian version. Both sell the same products and their product pages are substantially identical.
As we know, duplicated and substantially duplicated content is one of the classic Panda factors. So, does that mean we need to use as canonical of the Australian store pages the American ones? The answer is: no!
Google lists a couple of reasons why this is the case:
In this cases, as Pierre Far wrote in August on G+: "The idea of rel-alternate-hreflang is to help you signal to our algorithms that although these two pages have substantially the same content, the small differences between them are still important. Specifically, the small differences are relevant for users of a specific language (and in a country). By the same logic, the title can be different too."
Therefore, using canonical to direct to a different URL will cause your users to miss a page with potential useful and important information.
Bing does not use the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” markup.
As written by Duane Forrester in this post, Bing relies over a series of signals, the most important being the meta equiv=”content-language” content=”x-X” tag.
Now we have our multilingual/multi-country site optimized, but even if we choose the sub-carpet way in order to have a first boost from the existing domain authority of the site and the flow of its link equity, we still must increase the authority and trust of the language/country targeted sub-carpet in order to earn visibility in the SERPs. This need becomes even more urgent if we decided the ccTld option.
So, why is the sum of the budget for all of your International SEO link building campaigns usually smaller than the one of your national market?
Logic should suggest that the first answer (“almost the same…”) was the most common.
The reasons typically used to justify this outcome is that “link building in X is easier” or that “the costs for link building are cheaper." Both justifications are wrong, and here's why:
My suggestion is to investigate the real costs for International SEO content marketing, link building, and – eventually – social media marketing. You should also ask the opinion of local link builders if you can, even in the common case that you will perform the link building campaigns internally.
In fact, those local link builders are the best source to explain what the reality of link building looks like in their countries. For instance, how many of you know that Chinese webmasters tend to prefer a formal outreach contact via email than any other option? I didn't know until I asked.
Modern-day link building does not mean anymore directory submissions, dofollow comments, or forum signatures than it used to, but it has evolved into a more sophisticated art which uses content marketing its fuel and social media as its strongest ally.
Therefore, once you've localized the content of your site accordingly to the culture of the targeted country, you must also localize the content marketing actions you have planned to promote your site with.
Luckily, many SEOs are aware of this need:
And they usually work with local experts:
If we consider SEO as part of a bigger Inbound Marketing strategy, then we have to consider the importance Social Media has on our SEO campaigns (just remember the several correlation studies about social signals and rankings). So, if you are doing International SEO, especially in very competitive niches, you must resign yourself to the idea that you will need a supporting International Social Media strategy.
International SEO for Google and Bing is SEO, no questions asked. It is also not substantially different than the SEO you do for your national market site.
Sure, it has some technicalities, but you may need to use them if you want to target other languages spoken in your own country, as Spanish is in the USA. All the rest of your SEO strategy is identical, other than the language used.
All the concepts related to Link Building and Inbound Marketing in International SEO and SEO are the same. The only difference lies in what tactics and what kind of content marketing actions works best from country to country.
What can really make International SEO much more difficult than “classic SEO” is one basic thing: not understanding the culture of the country and people you want to target. Don't make the mistake of having your International sites written by someone like Salvatore, the literally multilingual character of "The Name of Rose" by Umberto Eco.
Ron Pelman in the role of Salvatore in "The Name of Rose" (1986) - Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Here are a few other posts you will find useful about International SEO:
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The Video SEO plugin I have been talking about for far too long has finally been finished and released. The short version is, it’s for sale for $89, find out more here. Keep on reading for a bit of backstory. Video SEO is probably one of the most technically challenging aspects of SEO. There are…
Video SEO just became a lot easier! is a post by Joost de Valk on Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!
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(Image Source ? my poorly built logo creator)
In my long career as an Online Marketer, I have had to often pick an agency to partner with or to carry out the different mixes of online marketing, such as SEO, Paid Search, Affiliate marketing, Email Marketing, Analytics, Social Media etc etc. Fact is, I am a rounded marketer who, although spends time on SEO the most, understands and works in most online fields. This means I am often the go to person for brands when they want to pick an agency to work with.
One such day, while in the middle of listening to an agency pitch, I felt quite a bit perplexed. The two pitches I heard were vastly different, and I wasn?t happy with either. The core problem I had with agency pitches was around the following observations:
The above is often true, even if you have issued a clear brief to your agency as to what you would expect to see, or what questions you would want answered. Any agency can follow a brief and answer it, but very few in my opinion see beyond the brief. And as an experienced agency recruiter for brands, I would like to see much more answered within the pitch than I am still seeing.
Many agencies don?t make it CLEAR what they aim to achieve, nor do they try to CLARIFY what the businesses need or want.
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nomad9491/2399208582/
So I formulated the CLARITY model for briefs, which could be a frame work for answering pitches ? help you answer your brief, while allowing you to demonstrate much more than the questions at hand. CLARITY, in my opinion, is an agency model that would score very highly but would also form the ethos of an agency environment that is really geared to helping their clients.
At the same time, the model has helped me pick the right agencies over and over again, and as such could be used by in house Digital marketers to form their own judgement sheets.
Although many SEObook readers are SEOs, many are in the agency environment themselves having to pitch, or in house and may have to from time to time help pick an agency. Many are like me, interested in SEO, but involved in much more online and offline marketing. As a result, I felt that sharing my model may help at least a few readers.
Warning: This is a rather long post, and could sound a bit preachy.
The model is a mnemonic that covers the 7 elements below:
Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ventodigrecale/315084105/
When working with any outside agency, the type of communication is vital. The overall tone and approach as well as the individual team members all add to a business?s communication strategy. Some businesses like being overly formal, while others find that formal approaches are annoying and could hinder work. When picking the right agency for you, understanding how they communicate with clients and amongst themselves is extremely important to make sure that the working relationship is a healthy one.
For example, how your agency dresses and behaves in meetings is fairly important ? it is a subliminal communication signal. As part of a pitch process I was involved in, one very talented SEO turned up, but was wearing ripped cuff jeans.
The Head of Ecommerce was at the meeting and was not impressed that for such a large pitch, the key person delivering was in scruffy jeans.
Result? They didn?t get the gig because the Head of Ecommerce was distracted by the fact that this person hadn?t bothered to dress appropriately.
My tips to people running a pitch:
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In the digital world, things change daily. And sometimes small changes make big difference ? take the latest Penguin Algorithm update from Google. The change in the way Google is treating a majority of low quality links has caught many an agency unprepared to turn around quickly - and to my knowledge a few, if not a majority, have since drafted communication to their clients about the change and what it means for their SEO.
As part of a pitch process, identifying the potential for such large scale impacts on channels is important ? but more important is to show that your team is up to the challenge. It is important to indicate that your team is an ever learning, ever developing beast, and it may be worth showing some examples where you have bucked the trend, or foresaw changes and indicate how you managed to save, support or shift your other clients strategies.
For example, knowledge of your discipline isn?t enough ? you have to garner some knowledge about your potential clients industry and changes occurring within it, such as legislation.
In one pitch I was part of, we identified that the client was suffering from Voucher Code site abuse ? where the voucher code sites would consistently rank for long tails of the business. Interestingly, the client hadn?t picked up on the fact that the reason that they were losing a lot of organic traffic wasn?t because they had had ranking losses ? rankings were all fine. The reason they were losing their traffic was because this voucher code site was ranking immediately below the clients sites with a discount offering! Our strategy tackled that by investigating the legislation, both applied and subscribed to within the voucher code industry in the UK, and as a result managed to craft a communication brief, which would enable the client from stopping the abuse.
We won the contract, and the work we did was implemented. In the end we came to an agreement with the site in question and they stopped. Clients SEO traffic and conversions soared.
A good agency has an arsenal of resources at its disposal ? indicating these as well as how you constantly add to the armoury is very important ? after all, often agency relationships with clients can span years.
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For any business, support is important. For any business with large budgets and complicated marketing campaigns, support is critical. Although most agencies work in a 9am to 5pm daily shift 5 days a week, many brands don?t see themselves that way. Their business online is churning round the clock, 7 days a week.
Which means a crisis, issue or even an opportunity may raise itself at the least possible convenient time. Although in a pitch these sort of issues aren?t expected by most businesses, I often find that if an agency covers it, they tend to get ?bonus points? especially if they highlight likely scenarios and how they would respond to them out of hours. Although this point is a subset of communication, it is also important enough as a winning point to be isolated.
One SEO agency I hired for a holiday business proposed that during peak periods of the business refreshing site wide content, (an annual occurrence) they would send one of their content SEOs to sit with the content team to start optimising content as it gets written, and getting it to the publishing team within a very short period of time. Excellent foresight, and was one of the contributing factors to a contract that still runs 5 years on.
On the flip side, another agency pitching an email support platform worth $100,000 in fees a year to them insisted that they would prefer all the communication via email and had a very complicated tracking system that runs through to first line support, then second line and then finally to a specialist if the first two lines couldn?t solve a situation. This scared the client ? sometimes you just can?t wait for three layers of conversations before actioning an urgent change - and as a result they weren?t short listed.
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It sounds obvious that you have to be both respectable and responsive to potential (and current!) clients. However what you as an agency see as being ?respectable? may not be necessarily what they feel the definition of the word may be.
Respectable also implies respecting your clients intelligence. One of the key primary things I teach to agencies is that they should research their potential clients carefully. By making your pitch too simplistic may offend their intelligence and could cost you.
Take for example a UK SEO agency that was pitching to a business I was consulting a few years ago. The pitch was about SEO and how they would help the business grow its SEO. Before hand, they had a list of all the attendees, which included my name and the name of the head of Ecommerce (who would at least have a rudimentary knowledge of SEO).
Now if you are pitching to me, you SHOULD know that I know a bit about SEO, if only you bothered to Google my name :)
Yet, in the pitch, the starting slide was an animated slide, which was a web with spiders running up and down it ? explaining to us what a search engine bot was and how it crawls the web(!) apart from the fact that the animation was poor (a gif of a spider running up and down the web), they actually assumed that a multi million pound business that they were pitching to:
In addition, as I was in the audience I found this actually quite insulting ? the fact that they hired me to be in the room meant that they were serious about a decent SEO strategy. The Head of Ecommerce had the same horrified response as I had ? did the agency think we were complete idiots?
Needless to say, they lost the pitch in the first round.
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To be perfectly frank, expect a serious pitch to be faced with some serious questions. At the same time, you would be expected to show real intelligence in the way you present and prepare for the meeting.
Displaying intelligence isn?t showing how many clients you have, or sprouting your company?s internal strap lines. It isn?t displaying how many results you have gotten for other clients.
Intelligence is more about:
The worst case scenario would be that you have a really intelligent hands on SEO prepare your presentation, and then instead either get an account manager or sales person actually present it, without the SEO present to field any questions. Often the result is a disaster ? yet this a very common approach. Believe it or not, this has happened to me at least three times. Neither the account manager nor the sales person actually knew any SEO (PPC in one PPC agency pitch). Which meant though their presentation was solid, they ability to field questions intelligently was fairly limited to ?We can come back to you on that?.
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In the online world, when data flows (fairly) freely, technology has to be at the forefront to deal with that data, to rationalise, monetise and sanitise it. An agency coming in to pitch within the digital sphere needs to show (to me at least):
Similarly, an agency that doesn?t innovate is low on my ?like? list. I would be willing to spend more time with one that has interesting ideas about innovating, than one that actually just rehashes ideas that exist in the market and brand them as their own.
One agency years ago insisted that they have ?market leading? guides on SEO for internal staff - from content strategies to link building. When quizzed what kind of information they would share with the businesses content team for better SEO, we received a document that was clearly well set up, researched and written for the right audience. Sounds great right? Only problem was this was the SEOmoz guide that they simply wrapped up and presented to us. Seeing that I was on one of the top contributors to SEOmoz at that point ( I think I still rank in the top 10) I recognised the document and called them up on it.
Needless to say, I don?t believe they ever repeated that faux pas - and went out and had their own content written.
Similar situations exist when companies tell me of a revolutionary tool A or amazing platform Y - and in most cases they tend to be industry standards that they use and nothing out of the ordinary. Which is fine for a basic pitch ? but for a stellar pitch you need to stand out.
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Any campaign you build has to deliver a return. It doesn?t matter what the campaign is, it has to achieve its objectives. Which means if you have to pick an agency, the agency has to demonstrate the capability to not only come up with a plan or strategy that works for you it has to demonstrate that it understands what your businesses KPIs are.
This doesn?t simply mean an uplift in sales, traffic, but a clever demonstration of how the Return On Investment would be aimed at and achieved. If an agency cannot demonstrate a clear understanding of your businesses goals, and does not take the time to understand what the ROI of the specific channel being discussed should be, then they fail in using a yield based approach.
A few years back, an SEO agency pitched to me for a UK Holiday business. They were big on numbers by their own admission, and had a clear demonstration of how much it would cost us to rank for Keywords, and in fact had a clear chart identifying the top level ?Category Killer? keywords.
They then went on to demonstrate how one of their current Holiday clients achieved those rankings with their help by spending the same figures that they demonstrated. The top level Keyword was ?Holidays?.
2 problems with that.
First, if they already have a client in the space that they are working with to rank for those exact keywords, then I wonder to myself if the end result would become who spends the most to retain those positions. Which in itself is fine, I have no problem with agencies who have clients in the same niches, BUT, at what point does the competition with one client against the other show a negative return? If spend is the limiting factor, I wouldn?t want a competitor in that space to have the same resources as I do in terms of SEO talent, and then be simply beaten by their capability to throw more money at the campaign. Which wouldn?t be a worry, except if the agency was so willing to tell us exactly how much it cost their other client to rank, how can I trust them not to reveal the same data to our competitor?
The second problem with this scenario was they went straight for the proverbial jugular. They want to work on the money keywords (money for them!). A UK Holiday site may gain some sales on the back of ranking for ?Holidays?, but I promise you that the conversion rate would be dreadful, and probably in the third decimal percentages.
If I had to pitch that gig, I would have started at the lower rung, moving upwards towards the chain to the category keyword ?UK Holidays?. The spend to rank for most those would have equated to the total that the agency wanted as its fees, but the ROI for ranking for the RIGHT keywords would have been much, much higher. And an easier sell.
So the agency failed t understand the business, and as such failed to demonstrate that they could deliver the right ROI for them.
If you have stuck with me so far, congrats (and thank you!). I am genuinely hoping that agencies that pitch, take something away from this post, and people who are paid to listen to pitches, do as well. I know that these principles have been successful for a large number of agencies when pitching, despite the fact that the agency didn?t realise that they were following a successful model.
The aim isn?t to follow my thoughts flat out, but learn form a person who has been involved I both sides of a pitch process, with a decent success rate in both, picking the right agency, and being picked for a campaign.
Rishi Lakhani is a freelance Online Marketing Consultant working with a number of brands and agencies in the UK, and spends a large portion of his free time on twitter. Follow him at: https://twitter.com/rishil
Source: http://www.seobook.com/picking-the-right-agency
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Source: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2012/09/the-stench-of-anonymous-blogging.html
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Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
5 Fatal Landing Page Mistakes?and How To Fix Them
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Over the years we've encouraged the diversification of income-generating web properties to help webmaster stave off eventual onslaughts from Google.
Despite popular belief it's not just penalties and filters that cause said onslaughts, but also continued self-insertion by Google in its own SERPs. Not all insertion is bad, from a user POV, but when it consists of scraped content without source attribution it's a problem.
Recently I read about this idea that updates do not affect the best SEO's. So, here we can see what happens in saturated markets. That statement is meant to drive some kind of wedge between different types of SEO's or to somehow convince clients of an otherwise dubious claim.
I mean, what is "best" anyway? Does "best" mean to be so conservative that you never find the edges of your industry? Does it mean ignoring tactics over the last decade or so which could have generated a king's ransom and allowed you to invest in other areas of the business or start a new business or retire or what?
If you have never been effected by a Google update then you've been overly-conservative and never pushed the envelope on things. How many of the best of anything get to be the best without pushing the envelope? It's like saying the best employees never call in sick (has nothing to do with talent, really).
It requires to much intellectual honesty and time, apparently, to break things down to risk/reward so things tend to get defined in broad terms (black/white hat). Some tactics die off, some take off, some become more risky, some become somewhat less effective, and on and on and on. What "best" really is, when used as a divisive and self-promotional tool , is high school trophy-ism at best.
Again, in saturated markets folks resort to making outrageous claims to put themselves or their company on a imaginery pedestal for clients to see. Saturated industries can become bubble-icious so it's wise to look for strategies to diversify away from where the bubble might pop.
I've taken an interest in real estate this year and I read an excellent quote in a really solid book by Gary Eldred:
During irrationally exuberant boom times, investors perceive little risk, but real risks loom larger and larger as prices climb higher and higher, rental income yields fall, and unsustainable amounts of mortgage debt pile up - even though rent collections remain too low to cover operating expenses and debt service
You could substitute a few words there and wrap up the current state of a good chunk of web publishing (from the view of a publisher) inside of Google. However, it's still a worthwhile business model to pursue, if you practice good SERP profiling and SERP competition analysis but it's as important as ever to continue to diversify your income streams so you can withstand such bubbles.
For web business options, becoming a local SEO provider is still a solid option for diversification purposes and for a business in general. Not necessarily because there are huge money keywords in every locale, in abundance, but because of the other services you can layer on to your SEO service.
Local SEO services are alive and well, as evidenced by our recent interviews with Adam Zilko and Jacob Puhl of Firegang and Darren Shaw of Whitespark.
You'd could also diversify your self-publishing business by working with larger brands, which is a perfectly profitable model, but you'll likely have to scale up on staff and overhead. Again, zero wrong with that but before you jump into that ocean you might want to work with local businesses for a bit (especially if you haven't done a lot of formal client work in awhile) so you can:
It typically is a bit easier to be a full-fledged marketing agency for a smaller, local business because there is less red tape, quicker time to market with strategies, more willingness to allow you to run the SEO, PPC, social media, conversion optimization, and even offline marketing campaigns for them.
The more success you have, along with the more hooks you have into the business, the more likely the client is to spend more/scale more and recommended you to other business owners in the area.
Local SEO recommendations are *crucial* to success and they can spread like creamy, organic peanut butter :D (quickly and deliciously).
In local markets, trust is critical and it is pretty easy to be the big fish in the small pond, essentially becoming the default, go-to agency for local business marketing needs.
Margins are quite a bit lower out of the gate versus large brand work, but over time I've seen and experienced healthy spend increases once the initial fear of "oh no is this another cold SEO caller selling garbage services" is gone.
I suspect that as more and more "normal jobs" continue to either be cut, moved to part-time, or have measly wage increases new job market entrants will begin to start their own businesses, many probably starting out as local, rather than going to work for someone else.
Of course, this could be a few years out but not too far because the education bubble is likely the next bubble to pop and right now new college graduates can't afford to start a new business given the amounts of student loan debt many are saddled with.
Hopefully, this economic disaster will awaken upcoming generations to what's possible without large amounts of debt. This is likely years away though but in the near future there certainly needs to be more job growth at the small business level.
SmallBizTrends, an excellent resource for small businesses, published a post a few weeks back about children of entrepreneurs following in the footsteps of their parents. The post cited a study from 2010 from the Kaufman Foundation which states (among other things):
Nevertheless, the desire to start a business over other careers has risen slightly for young adults (18 to 21 years of age), from 19 percent in 2007 to 25 percent in 2010.
They have stats in there from the 8-12 year old age group, which I think is a bit early, but the overall trends for young adults and adults is trending upward. I can only imagine this will continue to rise as more and more parents begin to teach the new generation about how post-secondary education is largely a rip off when you look at the balance between debt ratios and income potential.
This is a great time to be in our industry. The diversification options for earning income are wide open and while some models have shrinking margins and elevated risk, there are other pools you can dip your toes into where you can leverage many aspects of online marketing:
The beauty of all that is these can all be approached individually or layered on top of each other, mixed and matched, etc.
The point of this post being about local seo services further illustrates the wide range of services you can provide once you break the monetization methods I mentioned above down even further.
Local SEO might start off as a discussion about organic and places rankings but it can quite easily turn into a discussion about PPC, social media, conversion optimization, email marketing, and offline marketing as all of these practices tie into the end goal of increasing revenue and exposure for the business you are trying to take on as a client.
Source: http://www.seobook.com/local-seo-gateway-service
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