March 14th, 2011 – Pi(e) Day I spoke at Conversion Conference on how you can use the same piece of data for both search engine optimization (SEO) tasks and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

This regular expression, often called RegEx, can be used to separate out your 2 and 3 word phrases coming from search engines:
^\s*[^\s]+(\s+[^\s]+){1,2}\s*$

That bit of code can be put directly in as a filter or advanced segment in Google Analytics, or used to filter your data in other programs. The import value is to look for 2 and 3 word phrases that drive traffic for your site. I generally use this on data that includes keywords and landing pages, and (when possible) conversion completion and conversion start data.

 

Why 2 and 3 Word Phrases?

They Can Produce Both Volume and Specificity

When you look at your data you will probably find that 50-60% of your organic search engine traffic is coming from 2 and 3 word phrases.

 

They Can Function as Roots for Other Long-tail Terms

Group your filtered data by keyword to find what phrases you can build on immediately.

 

Short Enough That Your Call To Action Can Be Included In The Headline

Think about what your calls to action are. Buy Now, Download Today, Learn More, etc. you want to have 10 to 15 characters (including spaces) to accommodate your CTA. Under filtered phrases that have fewer than 50-characters work well for Title elements for your landing pages and internal site pages, and filtered phrases with fewer that 35-characters will work well for PPC content lines.

 

I suggest that you filter your home page out from the this data set and look at what phrase you are driving traffic to that page. Unless you are a blog you should consider renovating, or creating, your site content for those pages. Phrases that land on your home page that do not include your brand name are often phrase that you lack compelling content for, but are acquiring links for.

You can download the PDF version of Combining SEO and CRO to see more of the ways I use this data.

There are three types of conversion optimization: Whole Site Conversion, Campaign Conversion, and Point Conversion. Depending on your specific situation they overlap, but here are some sample concepts.

Credit: scaredy_kat

Whole site conversion optimization considers buying cycle, entrance channel, on site action and sales cycle. These are comprehensive projects that are ongoing, like running a commerce site.

credit: Black Scratchy Lines

Campaign conversion optimization is focused by channel. This means New Visitors, PPC, Display Ads etc. and the drives behind these channels. Campaigns vary in length from one time event to extended paid search campaign or affiliate programs.

credit: iboy_daniel

Point conversion is channel agnostic. Think about standard forms or checkout procedures–it is rare that they are segmented by channel.

Starting a Conversion Campaign

Every type of optimization is defined by the users goal. We often talk about where a user is in their decision process and customer types that skew their behavior, but it really comes down to goals.

1. Decide who to engage (e.g. someone who is new to your product)
2. Figure out where in the buying cycle you want to approach them
   • Search
   • Evaluation
   • Decision
   • Purchase
3. Decide what you are engaging them to do

Step 1: Decide who to engage

Determine the customer type you are optimizing to. This will be the tone and language you use in calls to action and advertising.

Step 2: Figure out where in the buying cycle you want to approach them

1. Search and Evaluation Phase – use organic search, affiliate marketing, and research intent paid search.
2. Decision Phase — use organic search for action phrases, display ads, e-mail, and incentive and/or action message paid search.
3. Buying Phase — use display ads, e-mail, and incentive and/or action message paid search.

This is the step where Channel Conversion is most utilized.

Step 3: Decide what you are engaging them to do

This is your landing page and Point Conversion. The length of this page will be highly affected by how far through decision process the visitor is. There are many options for conveying information, informative is not the same as long. The messaging should be tailored to the audience chosen in step one. Finally you arrive at the action point.

You can read more about form design for lead volume vs lead qualification or checkout optimization.

This is the step where you need to follow through on the promises made in your lead in channel and match user expectation. If you dhow the visitor that you are fulfilling their goal then you just made a strong conversion funnel.

I’ve seen SEO + PPC = SEM referenced a number of times this week. I don’t agree with that formula.

So, here are the terms the way I use them.

Search Engine Optimization = Actions taken to improve position within organic search placement
PPC = Pay Per Click
CPM = Cost Per Thousand
CPA = Cost Per Action/Acquisition
Paid Inclusion = Search placements that are bought but not attributed as sponsored
Paid Search = Paid placements in search engines (includes PPC, CPM and Paid Inclusion)
Social Media Optimization = Actions taken to improve results from social media platforms (paid or organic)

Search Engine Marketing = All actions taken to drive traffic, money or impressions through search platforms. This term is currently evolving through the debate over whether Facebook and Twitter should be classified as person to person search platforms.

Search Engine Optimization + Paid Search = Search Engine Marketing

After making a hit-or-miss joke about salary compensation I want to follow up with a more informative post on the Forum One survey. Also, Jeff and I invite anyone working in web marketing, design or social media to take a short survey (18 questions) that will help answer the salary question in a more robust fashion.

A follow up on data from Forum One Networks.

• 52% of respondents are female.
• 54% of the respondents spend 50% or less of their time interacting with social media.
• 70% of respondents work for companies with more than 25 people.
• 38% have more than 9 people in their department.
• 36% of respondents are not attached to a department.
• Respondent had between 1 and 120 subordinates.
• More women are satisfied with their jobs (rate 4 0r 5 out of 5)

The following groups had decreased year over year salaries:

• Under 25
• 31- 40 years of age
• Over 60

Community Managers,  the most common designation for women, are paid the least. This group includes; Community Lead, Community and Training Manager, Social Media Manager, Head of Community & Marketing, Sr. Manager Customer Success and Community, User Community Manager, Research Community Manager, Senior Community Relations Manager and Communities and Forum Manager. Their reported salaries range from $22,500 – $46,500.

The numbers for men and women:

As you can see women fare strong except at $95 k and over $150k.

Here are the issues that I still have with the reporting.

• They included volunteers and un-waged business owners in the calculations. I don’t think that unpaid should be included in salary calculations.
• They did show wage by education, but, they did not show education by gender (education had a surprising effect).
• They did not show position by gender.
• They did not show “unpaid” by gender.
• They do not show experience by gender.

There are a number of things that I find to be questionable about the reporting. So, I would love for Forum One to either disclose their data differently or for some of you that are actually working in the industry to answer a survey to help answer the questions better.

Please fill-out this short survey (Salary For Web Workers) it will take about 5-minutes. We will provide a free download of all data we collect both in its raw form (Excel Files) and as charts.  We also invite you to share this with anyone you know who works in SEO, PPC, Social Media, Web Analytics or Web Design & Development (Click Here to take survey).

Thanks,

Carlos and Jeff

I want to share a guest post from Jeff Sliger to talk about the relationship between Search Optimization and the kind of Website Optimization we discuss in the book.
I come at SEO from the point that I was trying to get my own business website to come up when a potential customer was searching.  My website SpaCap.com is where our customers have found out about our custom made Hot Tub Covers since the Internet went public.

For the past ten years the most important, most commonly searched for phrase that was used to find our product has been “spa covers.”  Every time I did keyword research related to consumers looking for a replacement Hot Tub Cover, spa covers, with the S at the end was used almost twice as often as any other keyword phrase.

However, since Search Optimization is a process that is never really finished, I still do check search volumes for related terms.
Recently while doing some other research I ran my own key words through my research tools and found that a shift in search had taken place.  Here’s what I found:

The Diagnosis

Key word phrase	Google	Yahoo	MSN	Daily Overall
Spa covers	209	60	26	295
Spa cover	175	50	22	247
Hottub covers	21	6	3	30

Both of those were pretty much what I expected. What I did not expect is what follows,

Key word phrase	Google	Yahoo	MSN	Daily Overall
Hot Tub covers	359	103	45	506
Hot Tub cover	185	53	23	261

By not paying attention to search statistics I was missing out on keywords that were getting almost double the traffic I was getting now.

The Cure

In consideration of these results, my job now is to cull through my website and analyze each page and its performance.  I am looking for the pages that don’t get a lot of attention now.  From those I will pick the top ten that really could stand to be reworked.

Each of these pages will be rewritten to focus on the new target keyword phrase, “Hot Tub Covers”.  Once I have gone over the meta tags to make sure they aren’t causing a problem for the Search Spiders and made sure that the fresh content is not just relevant to my target words but flows well for my actual human visitors I will post them on the site. I will also take a look at my site linking structure to make sure that my own links to these pages uses my target phrase as anchor text.

I will make a note when the Spider has last visited my site and how my changes affect my search ranking.  Meanwhile I’ll get busy building links on other websites that use my new keyword phrase as the anchor text.

In about a month I should be ranking well for my new phrases as well as my original keywords.  So if done right I won’t loose any of my current volume from searches and I should get a significant boost in exposure and traffic just from being seen for more commonly searched relevant keywords.

<From Carlos>

Keyword research is one of the first steps in communication with your visitors. What are they looking for? By collecting this data and rewriting your content to fulfill their needs helps you get more traffic from the phrase and to pull the visitor through your content. Because Jeff has seen a significant change in the way people search for his product he should consider creating a custom segment to track the behavior of people using the phrase hot tub covers. He should compare their basic data against the data from spa covers to see who he is really serving.

Because Jeff is running an e-commerce site and maintains a pay per clisk campaign the most valuable in sight that may come from the tracking is better understanding of the regionality of searches. Spa vs. hot tub could me a result of dialect differences– in that case changing the geo-location of PPC campaigns and image content on spa and hot tub focused pages may be in order.

credit: chasingfun

Let me share a secret. Search engine optimization is not an event. It is a process, or a strategy (depending on how you think about it).

SEO is the combination of many changes, small and large, that add up to growth. If you stop working on your site it will degrade. Here are 5 small things you can do today. Take 15-minutes to do one of these tasks, none of them is particularly technical

• Update a page – it doesn’t have to be major. Take down references to events that have past. Reword a few sentences to read easier or better state your point. Freshness helps you stay valuable to searches; also refining your language helps you communicate better with your visitors.
• Fix a broken link – almost every site has them. Just getting one or two will make things a little better. You internal links aren’t of much value if they don’t go anywhere.
• Visit a competitor – what do they have that you don’t? Write down one thing you can say better than they can. Now put it on your site. Or, take a screen shot of your competitors and take notes on how you can improve your design.
• Use your contact form – a frequent problem that causes low conversions on contact forms is a broken contact form. There are a score of things that can go wrong with forms. Spot-check them at least twice a month to insure you are getting the submissions and the visitor is sent the right place after completing the form.
• Set up a 1-day PPC test – start with your brand and other very specific phrases. Compare your test to your organic results. Just a small boost in visitors can help keep your visibility growing.

Doing these 5 things on a regular basis will help keep your content fresh and current, your links working and get you a little extra data for ongoing campaigns. Each drop you put in the bucket will save you time when you do larger renovations.

credit: Mareen Fischinger

No, PPC competitions is not the same as SEO competition.

Let’s use my name, Carlos del Rio, as example.

Organic Search Competition

Organic content is a relatively slow moving target. As time passes there is increasing competition, and even stale content continues to compete for placement. The mass of accumulated links can keep out-of-date information high in search queries.

Assessing your organic competition involves looking at the natural results for your phrase and assessing the strength of your competitors:

1.) How many results are there?

Google reports about 2,320,000 results for Carlos del Rio.

2.) What major sites are involved?

• Amazon
• Flikr
• Linked In
• Facebook
• Emory University
• Center for Disease Control
• Travel Sites
• CNN

3.) Identifiable competition

• Me
• An AIDS researcher
• A doctor in Massachusetts
• A real estate agent in Colorado
• A painter
• An author
• A photographer
• A mission in northern California

4.) What visible links do they have?

Sites range from 700 to 79,000,000 individual pages range from 0 to 482 visible links.

5.) How optimized are the titles?

Most of the titles in the broad search are clearly different. Many of the URLs contain only part of the phrase, or none of it.

6.) How much is anchor text affecting the results?

An inanchor: search finds only 73 results. This combined with the low visible links to pages means that links are not a major factor in this search.

Results are largely driven by content, and not links, means that entering the space is fairly easy. However, there are many directly competing entities and large amount of competing content — so your results will likely be volatile at first.

PPC Competion

1.) How many competitors show up in a manual search?

As of today there are 5 regular competitors for Carlos del Rio: Travel, Medical, Painting, Shoes, People Search. None of the results are show location; so they are probably not geo targeted.

2.) What competition does the advertising portal show?

Google rates Carlos del Rio as a very low competition phrase; this means there probably are not a large number of regonalized/geo-targeted competitors.

3.) What search volume is there?

Google reports an average of 1600 searches per month and an average cost of $1.42 for first place.

Entering a paid space with 6 competitors and only 53 searches per day is rather bleak. In general only 1 in 5 clicks are on a paid listing that means you have a total of 7 ads competing for 10 clicks a day.

A Different Phrase

Compare that to the search space for Stephen Fry:

There are 2 million results for Stephen Fry; 1.5 million of them show up of inanchor: searches. Stephen is an author, a comedian, and an actor. Content about him holds every spot in the top 20 of Google, every result has the full query in it. Site links range from 114,000 to 400,000,000+ visible links and individual pages range from 1,100 to 114,000 visible links. In spite of a lower amount of results the competition to appear in this particular search result is significantly higher than ranking for my own name.

Now for PPC. Manual search finds only one advertiser. Google reports high competition, 33,100 searches per day and an average cost of $0.40 for first place. In spite of AdWords claim your real competition for clicks is extremely low (considering more than 1000 searches per day and no visible competition) for this phrase and your cost per click is relatively low.

Hopefully this gives you a sense of what you are looking at and what it means when you are assessing your competion

credit: Thomas Hawk

Search is growing. There is no denying that. Last year, 2007, $19.9 billion was spent advertising online, according to cnet. SEMPO projects that $1.3 billion was spent on search optimization. It is expected that 2008 numbers will be approximately 20% higher.

SEOMoz recently lamented the large discrepancy in spend between pay per click (PPC) and organic search spend, organic makes up about 11% of search marking budgets.

Concluding that:

SEO drives 75%+ of all search traffic, yet garners less than 15% of marketing budgets for SEM campaigns. PPC receives less than 25% of all search traffic, yet earns 80%+ of SEM campaign budgets.

I think that confidence in the “trackability” of PPC is largely to blame for the discrepancy. Because people are well aware of the how to measure the return on investment for dollars that create immediate action people feel safe with pay per click. But most people aren’t actually measuring the results of their traffic.

According to the Marketing Sherpa 2009 Benchmark Guide 9 in 10 search marketers employ web-analytics to track search, and 53% use Google Analytics. And the biggest complaint is that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of organic search spend.

In most situations I recommend that web traffic be approached with a pair of metrics. If you are currently running PPC and SEO initiatives I invite you to make three comparisons.

1. New Visitors from PPC vs. New Visitors from Organic Search by Keyword
2. PPC Spend VS Branded Searches
3. Number of Visits it takes to make a conversion

This will help you tease out how much your PPC spending is affecting how your site is searched for.

Credit: Kaptain Kobold

Last year I wrote a 3 part series on assessing PPC Competition. Today I received a comment on one of the posts about a customers experience. I have never personally used Keyword Spy so I do not know their customer service one way or the other. I feel the best thing I can do is pass on the experience of my reader. Please if you have any information that may enlighten future users of Keyword Spy please leave a comment.

Apparently Keyword Spy does not allow people to cancel their accounts over the Internet, instead you have to fax the information and wait 2-5 business days for the account to close. They do, however, engage in automated billing. This means that they may bill you while your cancellation is in process. On the Internet there is a certain expectation that you will provide online support for cancellation and billing of your online services.

The buyer really needs to be aware of how these companies handle billing. If a company does not accept cancellation in the same manner they handle billing you should be wary of entering into a recurring bill with them.

Keywordspy Scam Alert!

Firstly I do believe the concept to use such a service is great. Finding out what my competitors are doing is really a good idea. Unfortunately the way KeywordSpy go about it just doesn’t cut it for me.

Firstly what made me signup was the fact that I could see all the keywords my competitors were using. This is great in theory, but after I signed up I found that most of the keywords many of my competitors were using were rubbish. It seems that all my competitors were using keywords that were not working for them. After I signed up I found that over 2/3 of the keywords I received from my competitors were useless.

Secondly I decided to signup was to find the keywords with little competition.
Sure they supply these but out of the few that were actually related to my industry, the analysis was way out of date. All the keywords that Keywordspy said only had 1 competitor really had at least four.

And the final reason for never touching Keywordspy, is they recurring charges. As a merchant I feel it is the customer’s choice weather to stay, this does not apply for Keywordspy. I only wanted to test it for the first month, so three weeks later I logged on to cancel my account. THERE IS NOT AUTOMATED WAY TO DO THIS!

Here is the email I received..

Dear xxxxxx,

We regret to hear that you want to cancel your account with us.

To cancel your subscription, please click the link below and follow the KeywordSpy Subscription Cancellation procedures:

We will process your cancellation upon receipt of the Subscription Cancellation Form. Please note that cancellation request cycle normally takes 3-5 working days to complete.

We wish to join you again in the near future as we continue to include and integrate more features in our system.

Please feel free to contact us if you have any additional questions.

Sincerely,

KeywordSpy Support

I have to fax them a copy of a form which is available on their website. The issue with this, it has to be faxed and can take 2-5 working days. Even if I was to fax my application across I would run out of time and be billed for next month. I am unsure of the law on this but shouldn’t the consumer have the right to email KeywordSpy and ask to have their billing authority revoked?

After all this I declined to fax the form and contacted my bank. They told me to send an email to KeywordSpy stating that they no longer have any authority to bill my card. If they bill me again my bank will create an investigation causing a chargeback to Keywordspy,

I am very disappointed with this and believe that the consumer has the right to choose, not to be forced into a silly scheme intended to cost even more

One session that I wish I had attended at SMX West is Avoiding PPC Pitfalls. One of the speakers, Amy Konefal of Closed Loop Marketing, put her Powerpoint online so I read through it. I’m not sure how I feel about the things that she points out.

The basic premise is solid — broad match can kill your ROI. Okay that is 101 when you are training someone to manage pay per click. Amy says that if you broad match the term “car parts” you will show for “fish” queries. I have been playing broad match game, it is a mix of Jumble and a Will Short puzzle, for a few years and I can get to fish in three steps: Car Parts –> Spelling Filter –> Carp Arts –> Theme Filter –> Carp = Fish. Coincidently that logic makes it show for nature painting and sculpture. I have seen a number of strange results over the years from pay per click testing and that scenario above is not one of them.

Certainly the car parts to fish is an outlier to make a point. The point seems, from the powerpoint slides, to be that exact and phrase based matching have a higher number of relevant terms. That is true. It is also true, as Amy includes, that eliminating broad match can leave money on the table. What I don’t see in the slides is the topic of negative terms. Amy’s slides recommend phrase matching and use of exact matching on longtail terms. This is very time intensive and phrase matching still allows for diluted relevance that is the major downside of broad match.

So how do you correct dilute relevance without sacrificing volume?

Use negative terms following the rules that Amy discusses. Take a conceptually broad phrase or broad match term and subtract every concept that you don’t want. Instead of making an additive bidding structure make a subtractive one. What Amy describes is building a number of overlapping phrases that cover your money making zone. This leaves money on the table for you because you are losing out on the unique phrases being searched that don’t match and we know that Google has been steadily changing their model to show preference to the bids that cost you more money. So overlapping terms may be a source of hidden cost inflation.

A well managed campaign should be looking for the raw searches that are off-base and adding negative concepts that cut away the fluff terms. The important caveat is that you are employing phrase and exact matching on terms that are closely related to your intended target. So if you are bidding on car parts on Google -fish is good but -auto accessories is probably cutting into your valuable related terms. Use the phrase matching to remove -”wheel covers” should have you still bidding on terms like steering wheel without showing up for steering wheel covers. In either scenario it is important to put in the time to control your ad distribution, but there is more than one way to skin a car part — or fish.