Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Complete Guide to
Reconversion'
Posted by TomRoberts
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
A great deal of emphasis is placed on inbound marketing and attracting new
customers. However, we should be careful not to neglect the existing clients
that we may have. These people are just as important as new customers and more
often than not can provide you with a great return of investment. We should give
our existing clients the marketing focus they deserve.
In this guide, I will look at why remarketing and reconverting your clients can
be a valuable tactic for your business, while also providing examples on how we
can do just that.
I hope you find this guide to be something a little bit different than what we
normally see on Moz and, most of all, I hope you find it useful. Id love it if
you could read through the whole post, but for those revisiting or those
strapped for time, here are a few links to jump you to each chapter:
Prelude: What Prompted the Post
Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction
Chapter 2: Don't Count Out a Discount
Chapter 3: The Best Things in Life are Free
Chapter 4: The Lost Art of Email Marketing
Chapter 5: Community is Key
Conclusion: Let's Get Out There
Prelude: What Prompted the Post
I am just a poor boy, though my storys seldom told. We dont see an awful lot of
in-house SEO perspectives here on SEOmoz and even less so from the financial
services sector, of which my current role is in. This does give me the
opportunity, however, to provide a real case study of how a company has
identified the need to get more value from the client base and how they have
done so.
Basically, our company provides a way for people to trade the financial
markets, things like equities, currency pairs and so on. We provide this service
in a number of countries across Europe, with the UK being our primary market.
The curious thing about this industry, over the last 6-12 months is that, while
we as a company have acquired new clients somewhat exponentially, the trading
volumes of those clients, effectively the amount that they have been trading,
has not seen the same amount of growth. This is something that is reported to be
affecting the industry as a whole.
There are likely a number of factors that are contributing to this. Market
volatility as a whole is at a record low, while we are also reviewing our
marketing channels to see which ones are providing the most worth to us.
However, the thing that we felt we had most control over was ensuring that our
clients were as happy as they could possibly be with us, which in turn would
extend the time period they want to trade with us and would do so with more
frequency.
This guide will aim to show what we have done as a company to help ensure our
clients are satisfied with us and want to reconvert and how these methods can
apply to a wide range of industries.
Chapter 1: I Demand Satisfaction
If youre trying to get people to come back to your business and reconvert, they
better have had a bloomin good experience the first time round. It goes without
saying that people will need to have a positive experience with your company to
even consider returning, regardless of whatever marketing campaign you are using
to entice them back.
Therefore, the first part of any reconversion strategy is ensuring that the
conversion the first time round is as smooth as possible. If youre working on an
ecommerce site, cart abandonment is always a hot topic and I really like Russ
Henneberrys guide on decreasing abandonment over on CrazyEgg.
The best way to know whether or not you are being well received is to have an
open dialogue with your clients. SEOmoz is a great example of this, while at ETX
Capital we always display a free contact number on our website, so that people
only have to pick up the phone to talk with us. Being readily available on
social media, particularly Twitter, is another great way to garner client
feedback. Over 30% of top brands have launched a dedicated customer service
handle and Id advise you to check out the Simply Measured case study on brands
Twitter activity.
You may also want to consider asking your clients to leave you their feedback
on external review sites, such as Review Centre. Not only do you often get
detailed feedback from people leaving reviews, your ranking here can help you
obtain rich snippets in your PPC ads. If you receive over 30 reviews for your
business and keep an average rating of 4 or more, you can have fancy, shmancy
stars appear next to your ads like these:
Oh my God its full of stars!
Finally, you definitely need to check out Joshua Unseths SEOmoz post on using
Google Analytics for a Q&A strategy. Not only is it a brilliant resource, it can
also help you discover what people are asking about your brand in Google search.
You may find some trends on your service that you can address prior to people
converting.
Chapter 2: Dont Count Out a Discount
Source: NoSweatShakespeare.com
It might seem simple, but it is often effective. Offering discounts to
returning customers is a great way to have them return and to build up a bit of
brand loyalty. I can remember in November last year that I had a mullet to rival
Billy Ray Cyrus and I decided that it was time for a smart cut. I went to Rush
salon with no intention of returning for regular cuts, as I thought it was a bit
pricey. One loyalty card stamp and two 25% off cuts later and Im already looking
forward to my next princess day!
Repeat customers very often cost less than acquiring new customers, so when
youre working out your margins and what discount you can afford to give, cost is
definitely something you will want to consider.
Implementing the discount system is something that should not be underestimated
either. For the ecommerce SEOs out there, you can find some very useful
extensions for your CMS. OpenCart is arguably one of the best CMS systems out
there right now and these three extensions may be of interest for you.
Providing physical discounts is still a very popular method as well. Providing
branded cards with a discount code is a popular trick used by Amazon, when
sending out its products (I must have had 600 worth of wine vouchers sent to me
in three months, what are they trying to say?). I have to say I am a fan of the
loyalty stamp card and Ive often wondered why more businesses do not employ an
online solution to this. For all intents and purposes, the Tesco Clubcard is a
loyalty card that stores your data online, allowing you to redeem points for
discounts perhaps this could be applicable to your business?
It looks as though that more companies are heading towards loyalty stamp apps,
if sites such as Stampfeet and Stampme are anything to go by. This could also be
a useful discount solution for you.
Gamification is not something to be underestimated either. We see a lot of
gamification in the health industry Id love to see a gym take it one step
further and have a workout leader board. When you join the gym, you would be
given a chip that logs all of your exercise on the machines. The people who run
the most miles, burn the most calories, generate the most watts and so on would
be given discounted membership for 1/3/6 months. It would offer an incentive for
people to exercise harder, which can only be a good thing, while giving the gym
some really positive PR.
Chapter 3: The Best Things in Life are Free
The Fandom of the Oprah is plain to see
Everyone loves free stuff, am I right? But how does giving stuff away for free
translate into returning customers?
Remember, this is all about building brand loyalty and a satisfied consumer
base. If you can achieve that, not only might customers be more inclined to use
your services again, but happy customers may refer their friends to your
business as well. Repeat customers can be walking billboards for business.
Having said that, it would be wise to plan your giveaway so that you can gain
something else as well, in case the reconversions dont come. Let me use an
example of a recent contest we held on our Facebook page.
We recently offered some trading credit to our clients if they could correctly
guess the US employment report, also known as the non-farm payrolls, at the
start of the month. The ultimate aim was to reignite interest in trading and to
see an increase in trading volumes, but we knew that we could also see the
following benefits, if planned correctly:
An increase in likes on our page.
An increase in engagement on other posts.
An increase in traffic and conversions, assisted or otherwise.
Because of the potential multi-benefits, we were happy to go ahead with the
giveaway and Id recommend that people look for similar multi-level benefits
before parting with their product or service for nothing.
After contacting our existing clients by email on the day that the contest went
live, as well as previewing the contest earlier in the week via our social media
channels, we ended up seeing some great results. The likes on our page increased
substantially, analytics is reporting an increase in assisted Facebook
conversions that week and weve also been seeing some increased engagement on our
regular market updates, which is great to see. Having this open communication
with our clients allows us to keep in touch with their wants and needs.
The icing on the cake is that we have also seen increased trading volumes in
the days and weeks since the competition was launched. Without giving away too
much sensitive information, I think it would be safe to say our initial outlay
in terms of cost has been recuperated and then some.
Chapter 4: The Lost Art of Email Marketing
Source: poofytoo.tumblr.com
According to the DMA 2012 conference, for every $1 spent on email marketing
$40.56 is returned (The Email Marketing Trend Slideshare from Silverpop is a
great read, if youve not seen it already). It surprises me that we dont see it
mentioned more often here, as it can be a great way of getting your clients to
reconvert.
Many of the previous tips I have mentioned in this post have been used emails
in order to generate interest, such as contacting our client base to alert them
about the Facebook contest we were running. Thats not really marketing, but it
is an indication that email is still one of the best ways to communicate with
your customers.
Email marketing is a great way of interacting with your inactive user base and
get them reconverting. There is a great CNET case study on Marketing Sherpa that
looks at how offering incentives can get people to reconvert. The key takeaways
are making sure that you:
Accurately segment your lists ie knowing what group has been inactive for
60-120 days, which clients have been inactive for 120+ and so on.
Come up with a number of engagement tactics to test.
Identify with your team what constitutes as reactivation or reconversion.
If youre using a decent CRM system, you will be able to track user activity, or
lack thereof, in a lot of detail, such as date of last login, recent
transactions etc. Using this data, you can segment your users how you want and
can judge for yourself what classifies as an inactive user, for example. We use
SalesForce for this purpose, but different size businesses may find better
solutions elsewhere, so it is worth researching. PC World has featured five
useful CRMs for small businesses in the past.
The above CNET case study makes for a great read and I think an email marketing
campaign can be taken one step further by running a Facebook custom audience
campaign. There is an excellent SEOmoz blog post on this topic that you should
definitely check out, with one of the key highlights of custom audiences being
that you can import and target people from your email list only. This obviously
relies on a person using the same email for Facebook as they did with your
website, but theres a fairly decent chance that they would have. With this level
of targeting, you can serve them relevant ads to supplement your email campaign,
without breaking the budget.
If youre looking to learn more about email marketing, the Aweber and
Deliverability blogs are great places to start, while the email marketing
whitepaper from MailChimp is a great free resource as well.
Chapter 5: Community is Key
Erm...probably not this Community
Community managers: rejoice! This chapter celebrates you and all the things
that you do.
This is arguably the most important section of the guide. Nurturing your
community is essential for reconversion, which is something that I have alluded
to throughout this guide. The better the experience a customer has with your
site, the more likely there are to return, reconvert and refer.
Remember, your community is most likely an open forum and not just the people
who have used, worked with or are associated with your online business. This
means that you need to create a positive community for people pre-conversion as
much as you need to create a positive one for post-conversion folks.
Having high quality engagements with your community is one of the most direct
ways of catering to their needs. Social media is an obvious outlet for this, but
sometimes it can be hard to work out which social media channel would be best,
both for levels of engagement and also for usability reasons. We have already
talked about how customer service handles on Twitter can offer a direct response
channel, but LinkedIn is often overlooked.
Linkedin discussion groups can be a great place to engage with your community,
whether its in your own group or joining in the discussion elsewhere. More often
than not, when youre providing and contributing to useful discussions on
LinkedIn, you are not just helping your community, but also your unaided brand
awareness. One of the most famous examples of a big brand using LinkedIn is
Hewlett Packard.
That is a summary of the HP case study provided by LinkedIn, which you can read
in full here:
http://marketing.linkedin.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/LinkedIn_HPUKCaseStudy2011.pdf.
HP identified that their community and the demographic that they wanted to
target were present on LinkedIn and so created a non-branded, general small
business discussion group that allowed users to help one another out. Despite it
being non-promotional, HP saw great results as a result of unaided brand
awareness and the work that they had put into the community.
Hosting discussions such as these on LinkedIn brings with it an element of
trust, as it is being hosted on a website people can trust and they would
probably be more inclined to engage on than perhaps your own hosted forum.
Furthermore, the benefit of being able to connect with users very quickly is a
very valuable one, particularly when you bear in mind that HubSpot has reported
that LinkedIn is up to 277% more effective at lead generation than other social
networks.
It is worth noting that setting up a LinkedIn discussion group will be a
time-consuming task. Moderation and encouraging engagement can take its time, so
be sure that you can commit the human resource to the project in order to help
it be as good as you want it to be. Theres a great resource on social media
examiner on how to build a thriving LinkedIn group, while HubSpot also provides
some useful tips on how to manage groups.
Alternatively, Google+ is well on its way to matching and possibly succeeding
LinkedIn as the discussion group king. Google+ communities work very much in the
same manner as LinkedIn discussion groups, with the added benefit that they are
arguably more visible to people surfing the net. For some industries, there is
already a thriving presence on the network, with SEO being chief among them. The
Google Authorship community is probably the stand out example (and you should
definitely check it out if you have not done so already). It would be tough work
to host discussion groups on both networks with limited resources, so it is
worthwhile dipping your feet in some already existing groups in your industry to
see whether or not there is an appetite for what you want to discuss.
It is a good idea to find communities in your industry that are not based on
one of the big social media websites. There is a forum called Trade2Win that is
extremely targeted to our audience and it serves as a great resource to them. We
try to engage with our audience there as well, in order to let them know about
any of our new developments and for them to also offer feedback and ask
questions about our service. It can be a very open and frank discussion at
times, but you have to respect with communities like these that you, as a brand
rather than a consumer, are on their turf as it were, and so you should treat it
with the utmost respect. The one thing about engaging on a forum that you do not
control of is that you are potentially open to attack, with no way of removing
slander unless the forum master deems to do so. With that in mind, it is
important that you establish a clear social media policy within your
organisation before you engage, with clear rules of engagement for how to handle
certain kinds of negative engagement.
Of course, nurturing your community is not exclusively an online pursuit.
There are many great things that a business can do to connect with their
community offline. In London, where I am based, there is a relatively new
artisan bakery called Gails. Their mission statement is to not only provide the
best quality bakery products out there, but to also become integrated within
their local communities. They do this by customising what products they stock in
each store, for example in the region of Hampstead, where there is a large
Jewish community; the store stocks more rye bread goods, among others.
Gails goes one step further than this and also holds community events in each
store. Some events include book-reading clubs for their store based adjacent to
a primary school, so that families can come after school and enjoy themselves.
The Hampstead store also organises a garden party each year, where they invite
businesses that offer local produce to set up market stalls across the high
street and invite people to come and sample some tasty food. Both of these
events are not designed to generate profit, but to increase the brand awareness
of Gails and to also give back to the community that they are integrated in.
Incidentally, I dont have much need for Gails anymore, as Ive taken to making
my own bread!
Note: Pacman Onesie not obligatory
Theres method in my madness: can you imagine if Gails asked people to post
pictures of their loaves and funny bakes on their Facebook page, with the
entrants getting discounts or even free items? That would be a prime example of
a company engaging with its community online and to help them reconvert.
If youre looking for more community ideas, you should look no further than the
folks here at SEOmoz. They do a great job at engaging with their community. Just
this week I was sent this swag from the team:
The slap-wrist has brought me much joy and my office much annoyance.
Conclusion: Lets Get Out There
I hope this guide has inspired you to look at fun and engaging ways to spark
reconversion. Let your customers know you love them and theyll surely love you
back!
Id love to get some feedback from you in the comments below, as well as some
cool stories about how you have worked on reconversions and building up your
lovely communities.
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Tuesday 30 April 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Why SEO Is Like An RTS Game (and why you should care)
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Why SEO Is Like An RTS Game (and
why you should care)'
Posted by Jayson DeMersThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of
SEOmoz, Inc.
As...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6YNblnWKvAs/why-seo-is-like-an-rts-game
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
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why you should care)'
Posted by Jayson DeMersThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to
the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of
SEOmoz, Inc.
As...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6YNblnWKvAs/why-seo-is-like-an-rts-game
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
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[Build Backlinks Online] Funnel Vision: Why Companies Need To See The Light At the End of the Funnel
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Funnel Vision: Why Companies Need
To See The Light At the End of the Funnel'
Editors Note: This is an excerpt from Brian Soliss new book, Whats the Future
of Business? Learn more about the book and purchase a copy at
http://wtfbusiness.com. Over the years, businesses have developed sales,
marketing, and service strategies around the sales funnel. The model of
awareness, interest, desire, and action describes the likely steps [...]Funnel
Vision: Why Companies Need To See The Light At the End of the Funnel is a post
from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-business/funnel-vision-why-companies-need-to-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-funnel/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=funnel-vision-why-companies-need-to-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-funnel
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
To See The Light At the End of the Funnel'
Editors Note: This is an excerpt from Brian Soliss new book, Whats the Future
of Business? Learn more about the book and purchase a copy at
http://wtfbusiness.com. Over the years, businesses have developed sales,
marketing, and service strategies around the sales funnel. The model of
awareness, interest, desire, and action describes the likely steps [...]Funnel
Vision: Why Companies Need To See The Light At the End of the Funnel is a post
from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-business/funnel-vision-why-companies-need-to-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-funnel/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=funnel-vision-why-companies-need-to-see-the-light-at-the-end-of-the-funnel
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Build Backlinks Online
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Monday 29 April 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Competitor Research In An Inbound Marketing World
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Competitor Research In An Inbound
Marketing World'
Posted by dohertyjf
We all know that online marketing is changing. When I started in online
marketing a few years ago, all the talk was still about links and directories
and ways to get more exact match anchor text. Some SEOs were doing some pretty
nefarious things and profiting from it, but most of that came crashing down
starting in February 2011 (with the first Panda algorithm) and then over the
past couple of years with Panda, Penguin, and the EMD update all rolling out and
affecting websites the world over.
Rand talked last week about the changing SEO metrics, and today I want to talk
about the changing landscape of competitor analysis as more and more people make
the shift from just SEO to inbound marketing. Since inbound marketing includes a
lot more than SEO, if we want to be effective inbound/online marketing
consultants, we need to not only have proficiency or knowledge of the different
roles of an inbound marketer, but when we get into actionable recommendations
for our clients or our company we need to know how to analyze what our
competitors are doing across the whole marketing space, both to identify
deficiencies in their strategy that you can exploit as well as to see what they
are doing that you should also adopt for your company.
So today I am going to talk about a few of the key areas of inbound marketing
where you should investigate because they are likely to bring the largest
returns (I'm talking about the Pareto Principle, which I was reintroduced to by
Dan Shure in this post on his site about applying it to SEO).
By the way, if you're interested in more on this topic, I'm going to focus on
it pretty heavily in my upcoming Searchlove presentation in Boston. I'd love to
see you there! Ok, let's dive in.
Email marketing
If you've been in marketing for a while, you should know that email can have an
incredible return on investment for the small amount of setup that it takes. In
fact it's the 2nd best ROI for many businesses, according to eConsultancy:
What if I told you that 39.16% of our conversions on the Distilled website
(micro and macro conversions, including DistilledU, conferences, and lead gen
forms) were touched by an email during the conversion process? What if I told
you that this is more than either organic or social? Here's the proof:
If you're not doing email marketing, you probably should be. But what works
best in your industry? Often we're paralyzed by the multiplicity of options
presented to us by any choice, and research has recently shown that limiting the
number of choices can lead to better and less risky decisions than when we're
faced with a seemingly infinite number. By being smart about our analysis, we
can reduce the number of choices that we have to make around email, like:
What time do I send my emails?
How often should I send them?
Should I invest in good design?
What kind of call to action should I include to start with?
Stalk your competitor's emails
If you're interested in investing in email marketing, I'd first suggest that
you subscribe to your competitors' email lists so that you receive emails
whenever they send them to their entire list. You won't be able to learn how
they're segmenting their lists, but you'll find their frequency, their subject
lines that get you to click, and how they are calling you to action. Stephen
Pavlovich talked about this at Searchlove New York in 2011, where he suggested
that you save your competitor's emails to your Evernote, with a specific tag, so
that you can go back and get ideas for your own emails. While this is an amazing
tip that we should all do, it's step 1 and we should all go further. I like to
take the emails sent by my competitors and analyze them in an Excel spreadsheet,
taking into account:
Name
Email date
Time arrived
Custom design?
Call to action
Subject line
Did I click?
Was the email triggered (i.e. was it influenced by something I did recently on
their site)?
My analysis looks like this. Feel free to use something similar:
I recently found a chart on MarketingCharts.com (one of my favorite sites) that
talked about fallacies surrounding email marketing according to Experian. Their
way of setting up their analysis may help you as well:
Throw Into Wordle
Now we need to find what common themes our competitors are using when they send
out their emails. The best way to visualize this (I'm a visual person) is by
using one of my favorite tools, Wordle. When I put in the words that my
competitors have been using for their subject lines, I get this:
Protip 1: To get the best results, use the biggest dataset you can find.
Protip 2: Use this knowledge to inform the content you should be doing outside
of blogging :-)
Content production
Content is a huge part of inbound marketing. You know this, I know this,
everyone who reads Moz knows this. So why do I say it? Because once you go
beyond "content is king" knowledge, you can actually take this belief that use
it to create content that your readers want. When it comes to competitor
analysis, you can either choose to do this manually or in a more automated (but
possibly less accurate) fashion.
Manually
Using the information gleaned from the Wordle above, I can then go run advanced
queries in Google to find how much my competitors are talking about the
different content types listed. For example, if I run a [site:seogadget.com
"webinar"] search, I get 14 results:
That's not very many (and no, I'm not calling out SEOgadget here. They do
absolutely phenomenal work!), so if I'm starting a marketing agency, or have one
that I want to build, this may be an area that I should investigate. At
Distilled we run conferences because a) we had someone internally that wanted to
do them, b) we thought we could run a darn good conference, and c) because we
saw a need for the type of conference we could put on.
More automated
If you want to automate this a bit, you can at least find the number of times
that a competitor has mentioned the type of content on their site in the URL. I
chose to use the URL instead of just on the site because people will usually put
the important words in the URL. We're not looking for all mentions of a content
type like "webinar" - instead we want webinars that only they have put on and
published on their site.
So what I have done is built out a spreadsheet for you, a rough tool, using
IMPORTXML to scrape the number of results that a site has for the content type.
If you're at all good with scraping in Gdocs, you can make this sheet customized
to fit your needs and content types I'm sure!
Go here to open and make a copy of the spreadsheet.
Social amplification
You do follow your competitors on Twitter, or at least have them in a list,
right? Oh you don't. Go do that. I'll wait.
*Whistles tune*
Following your competitors on social media will allow you to see their
strategies for social promotion (if any). While this is nothing groundbreaking,
it's also not something that many people are doing already. You can see how
often they are tweeting their own content, if they are tweeting the content of
others, and it can also inform you about the kind of content that they are
creating.
Since you now know what kind of content they are creating, you can figure out
their social promotion strategy outside of their own accounts. Who are their
tweeterati (aka, who shares their posts)? Better than that, who are the
influential people that share their content? Once you find this, you can then
decide whether you will be able to get those same people to promote your
content, and how to do that, or if you need to find new people to connect with
solely (using a tool like FollowerWonk).
Lucky for you, Topsy allows you to find who the influential people are that
share a specific URL. After you enter a URL with "Tweets" selected on Topsy, you
can then select "Show Influential Only", like below:
This is all well and good, but want to do it faster? I built a spreadsheet for
you where you can take a URL and it builds the Topsy URL for you, then scrapes
the Influential people. Once again, throw this into a Wordle (or Tagxedo, which
is more stable) and see who the influencers are!
Go here to make a copy of the spreadsheet.
I hope this post gives you ideas for what is possible for the new competitor
analysis within inbound marketing. I'd love to hear in the comments what other
ways you are using to do competitor analysis these days.
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Marketing World'
Posted by dohertyjf
We all know that online marketing is changing. When I started in online
marketing a few years ago, all the talk was still about links and directories
and ways to get more exact match anchor text. Some SEOs were doing some pretty
nefarious things and profiting from it, but most of that came crashing down
starting in February 2011 (with the first Panda algorithm) and then over the
past couple of years with Panda, Penguin, and the EMD update all rolling out and
affecting websites the world over.
Rand talked last week about the changing SEO metrics, and today I want to talk
about the changing landscape of competitor analysis as more and more people make
the shift from just SEO to inbound marketing. Since inbound marketing includes a
lot more than SEO, if we want to be effective inbound/online marketing
consultants, we need to not only have proficiency or knowledge of the different
roles of an inbound marketer, but when we get into actionable recommendations
for our clients or our company we need to know how to analyze what our
competitors are doing across the whole marketing space, both to identify
deficiencies in their strategy that you can exploit as well as to see what they
are doing that you should also adopt for your company.
So today I am going to talk about a few of the key areas of inbound marketing
where you should investigate because they are likely to bring the largest
returns (I'm talking about the Pareto Principle, which I was reintroduced to by
Dan Shure in this post on his site about applying it to SEO).
By the way, if you're interested in more on this topic, I'm going to focus on
it pretty heavily in my upcoming Searchlove presentation in Boston. I'd love to
see you there! Ok, let's dive in.
Email marketing
If you've been in marketing for a while, you should know that email can have an
incredible return on investment for the small amount of setup that it takes. In
fact it's the 2nd best ROI for many businesses, according to eConsultancy:
What if I told you that 39.16% of our conversions on the Distilled website
(micro and macro conversions, including DistilledU, conferences, and lead gen
forms) were touched by an email during the conversion process? What if I told
you that this is more than either organic or social? Here's the proof:
If you're not doing email marketing, you probably should be. But what works
best in your industry? Often we're paralyzed by the multiplicity of options
presented to us by any choice, and research has recently shown that limiting the
number of choices can lead to better and less risky decisions than when we're
faced with a seemingly infinite number. By being smart about our analysis, we
can reduce the number of choices that we have to make around email, like:
What time do I send my emails?
How often should I send them?
Should I invest in good design?
What kind of call to action should I include to start with?
Stalk your competitor's emails
If you're interested in investing in email marketing, I'd first suggest that
you subscribe to your competitors' email lists so that you receive emails
whenever they send them to their entire list. You won't be able to learn how
they're segmenting their lists, but you'll find their frequency, their subject
lines that get you to click, and how they are calling you to action. Stephen
Pavlovich talked about this at Searchlove New York in 2011, where he suggested
that you save your competitor's emails to your Evernote, with a specific tag, so
that you can go back and get ideas for your own emails. While this is an amazing
tip that we should all do, it's step 1 and we should all go further. I like to
take the emails sent by my competitors and analyze them in an Excel spreadsheet,
taking into account:
Name
Email date
Time arrived
Custom design?
Call to action
Subject line
Did I click?
Was the email triggered (i.e. was it influenced by something I did recently on
their site)?
My analysis looks like this. Feel free to use something similar:
I recently found a chart on MarketingCharts.com (one of my favorite sites) that
talked about fallacies surrounding email marketing according to Experian. Their
way of setting up their analysis may help you as well:
Throw Into Wordle
Now we need to find what common themes our competitors are using when they send
out their emails. The best way to visualize this (I'm a visual person) is by
using one of my favorite tools, Wordle. When I put in the words that my
competitors have been using for their subject lines, I get this:
Protip 1: To get the best results, use the biggest dataset you can find.
Protip 2: Use this knowledge to inform the content you should be doing outside
of blogging :-)
Content production
Content is a huge part of inbound marketing. You know this, I know this,
everyone who reads Moz knows this. So why do I say it? Because once you go
beyond "content is king" knowledge, you can actually take this belief that use
it to create content that your readers want. When it comes to competitor
analysis, you can either choose to do this manually or in a more automated (but
possibly less accurate) fashion.
Manually
Using the information gleaned from the Wordle above, I can then go run advanced
queries in Google to find how much my competitors are talking about the
different content types listed. For example, if I run a [site:seogadget.com
"webinar"] search, I get 14 results:
That's not very many (and no, I'm not calling out SEOgadget here. They do
absolutely phenomenal work!), so if I'm starting a marketing agency, or have one
that I want to build, this may be an area that I should investigate. At
Distilled we run conferences because a) we had someone internally that wanted to
do them, b) we thought we could run a darn good conference, and c) because we
saw a need for the type of conference we could put on.
More automated
If you want to automate this a bit, you can at least find the number of times
that a competitor has mentioned the type of content on their site in the URL. I
chose to use the URL instead of just on the site because people will usually put
the important words in the URL. We're not looking for all mentions of a content
type like "webinar" - instead we want webinars that only they have put on and
published on their site.
So what I have done is built out a spreadsheet for you, a rough tool, using
IMPORTXML to scrape the number of results that a site has for the content type.
If you're at all good with scraping in Gdocs, you can make this sheet customized
to fit your needs and content types I'm sure!
Go here to open and make a copy of the spreadsheet.
Social amplification
You do follow your competitors on Twitter, or at least have them in a list,
right? Oh you don't. Go do that. I'll wait.
*Whistles tune*
Following your competitors on social media will allow you to see their
strategies for social promotion (if any). While this is nothing groundbreaking,
it's also not something that many people are doing already. You can see how
often they are tweeting their own content, if they are tweeting the content of
others, and it can also inform you about the kind of content that they are
creating.
Since you now know what kind of content they are creating, you can figure out
their social promotion strategy outside of their own accounts. Who are their
tweeterati (aka, who shares their posts)? Better than that, who are the
influential people that share their content? Once you find this, you can then
decide whether you will be able to get those same people to promote your
content, and how to do that, or if you need to find new people to connect with
solely (using a tool like FollowerWonk).
Lucky for you, Topsy allows you to find who the influential people are that
share a specific URL. After you enter a URL with "Tweets" selected on Topsy, you
can then select "Show Influential Only", like below:
This is all well and good, but want to do it faster? I built a spreadsheet for
you where you can take a URL and it builds the Topsy URL for you, then scrapes
the Influential people. Once again, throw this into a Wordle (or Tagxedo, which
is more stable) and see who the influencers are!
Go here to make a copy of the spreadsheet.
I hope this post gives you ideas for what is possible for the new competitor
analysis within inbound marketing. I'd love to hear in the comments what other
ways you are using to do competitor analysis these days.
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[Build Backlinks Online] Getting Started with Google Analytics Just for Bloggers
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Getting Started with Google
Analytics Just for Bloggers'
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free tools that Bloggers can use to
gain insights about the flow of traffic on our blogs. We can see where people
are coming from, how long they stay and what page they're on when they leave. We
can even use...
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Analytics Just for Bloggers'
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful free tools that Bloggers can use to
gain insights about the flow of traffic on our blogs. We can see where people
are coming from, how long they stay and what page they're on when they leave. We
can even use...
You may view the latest post at
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Saturday 27 April 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Last Chance to Get on Special Pre-Order List for My New Book
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Last Chance to Get on Special
Pre-Order List for My New Book'
My new book is called Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, not Hype.
Its the best thing Ive ever done in my career, and I really need YOUR help to
make it a hit when its officially released in June. Heres the plan. If you
pre-order the book from me, Ill give you a [...]Last Chance to Get on Special
Pre-Order List for My New Book is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social
Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/youtility-2/last-chance-to-get-on-special-preorder-list-for-my-new-book/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=last-chance-to-get-on-special-preorder-list-for-my-new-book
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Pre-Order List for My New Book'
My new book is called Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, not Hype.
Its the best thing Ive ever done in my career, and I really need YOUR help to
make it a hit when its officially released in June. Heres the plan. If you
pre-order the book from me, Ill give you a [...]Last Chance to Get on Special
Pre-Order List for My New Book is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social
Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/youtility-2/last-chance-to-get-on-special-preorder-list-for-my-new-book/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=last-chance-to-get-on-special-preorder-list-for-my-new-book
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Friday 26 April 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] You Must Avoid this Calamitous Guest Posting Mistake
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'You Must Avoid this Calamitous
Guest Posting Mistake'
I thought back to the 30 or more guest posts I churned out entirely unrelated to
making money online. I covered a variety of topics. Great. I showed my range.
But making money online focuses on hyper targeting prospects. I get no bonus
points for displ...
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Guest Posting Mistake'
I thought back to the 30 or more guest posts I churned out entirely unrelated to
making money online. I covered a variety of topics. Great. I showed my range.
But making money online focuses on hyper targeting prospects. I get no bonus
points for displ...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/C7fAThbGYxo/guest-posting-mistake.html
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posted.
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Build Backlinks Online
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[Build Backlinks Online] How to Maintain Your Brand’s Authentic Voice
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How to Maintain Your Brand's
Authentic Voice'
Brooks Thomas, Communications Specialist at Southwest, joins the Social Pros
Podcast this week to discuss the progressive setup of the Southwest social media
team, the widespread success of a long-running corporate blog, and keeping an
authentic voice for a large brand. Read on for some of the highlights and
tweetable moments, or listen to the [...]How to Maintain Your Brands Authentic
Voice is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content
Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
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Authentic Voice'
Brooks Thomas, Communications Specialist at Southwest, joins the Social Pros
Podcast this week to discuss the progressive setup of the Southwest social media
team, the widespread success of a long-running corporate blog, and keeping an
authentic voice for a large brand. Read on for some of the highlights and
tweetable moments, or listen to the [...]How to Maintain Your Brands Authentic
Voice is a post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content
Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-pros-podcast/how-to-maintain-your-brands-authentic-voice/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-maintain-your-brands-authentic-voice
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[Build Backlinks Online] TITLE
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Does Your Front Desk Know How To Properly Answer The Phone?'
(This is a guest post by Dr. Len Schwartz. He is an entrepreneur, speaker, author and master marketing consultant. Dr. Len has impacted thousands of chiropractors, doctors and other professionals in more than 20 countries. Over the last 10+ years it is estimated that he helped generate more than 150 million dollars of new business for his clients. Dr. Len is now the CEO of http://www.pro2pronetwork.com)
–
It is likely that you are unaware of how many potential patients call your office and ask typical "shopper" questions in order to decide whether they should become your patient.
Most chiropractors assume that their staff knows exactly how to answer those calls and that they routinely convert 
those potential patients into active patients.
If you have made this assumption of your staff, prepare to be shocked!
When was the last time you had a friend or family member call your office and "test" the person who answers the phone by asking typical "shopper" questions?
If the answer is, "Never!"…get ready to change that today!
Create a list of the ten most FAQs someone might have if they called your office looking to use your chiropractic services/products.
Some examples include:
1. What does a chiropractor do?
2. How will the chiropractor fix my _________?
3. Why doesn’t the chiropractor use medication?
4. Can I only come in one time?
5. Do I have to come in forever?
6. Does my insurance cover this?
7. How much will it cost me if my insurance doesn’t cover this?
8. Will he be cracking my back?
9. How long will it take to fix this?
10. Do I have to pay on my first visit?
11. How much is my first visit?
Then, have someone your staff does not know call and ask your questions.
You'll want feedback on how effectively they answered the questions, as well as the staff members demeanor, attitude, willingness to help, etc.
Plus, you’ll soon realize the need to put a formal FAQ Shopper training guide in place so that your staff knows how to answer those questions, the same way, every time. This is how you guarantee the right responses / answers and, of course, your best shot at securing the majority of those “shoppers” as new patients.
This is an effort you want to put in place immediately. And, you should test your staff on a regular basis. I recommend every 6 to 8 weeks!
Finally, track your stats. How many "shopper calls" do you get per month?
How many are converted into new patients?
What can you do to raise that percentage of new patients?
Any questions?
Let me know in the comments – I'm here to help
–
Did you like this post? Click the Facebook "like" button below and share it with your friends.
Related Blog Posts:
Free Facebook Training for Chiropractors [video]
Chiropractic Coach Challenges Doctors to Play BIGGER
Chiropractor Fractures Wrists in Accident! Now What?
5 COSTLY Mistakes Chiropractors Make When Doing Webinars
You may view the latest post at http://dcincome.com/blog/does-your-front-desk-know-how-to-properly-answer-the-phone/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.comThursday 25 April 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] TITLE
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Meet AdWords Keyword Planner – The New Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator Mash-up!'
AdWords has just rolled out AdWords Keyword Planner, a new tool that combines two of the most popular existing AdWords tools, the Google Keyword Tool and the AdWords Traffic Estimator, and adds to it a wizard-like integrated workflow to guide users through the process of finding keywords for creating new Ad Groups and/or Campaigns.
I'm guessing that at some point in the future, the AdWords Keyword Planner may replace the Google Keyword Tool and AdWords Traffic Estimator – tools which have been in service for over 10 years and are widely used for both PPC and SEO. So if you've used either tool in the past, take note here – your process is probably about to change!
Getting Started With AdWords Keyword Planner
The AdWords Keyword Planner supports three key use cases:
- Search for keyword and ad group ideas
- Enter or upload keywords to get estimates
- Multiply keyword lists to get estimates
The functionality is exposed via a wizard-like interface, as shown here:
Searching for Keyword and Ad Group Ideas Using Keyword Planner
Adding keywords to your account based on Google suggested keywords is the primary use case. The Keyword Planner (illustrated below), provides a robust keyword workbench for researching and picking keywords to add to your AdWords account.
Using the Keyword Planner Tool you can:
- Look for keyword and ad group ideas: Brainstorm keyword ideas based on individual keyword ideas, or based on your landing page, a product category, or any combination of the above.
- View keyword statistics and performance estimates: Specify targeting options that you select such as country, language and search network to inform your keyword estimates.
- Filter keywords: You can narrow your keyword list based on various criteria, such as average CPC and average monthly search volume. You can also include or exclude keywords containing specific terms, and exclude keywords that are already in your AdWords account.
List View vs. Grouped View and "Your Keyword Plan"
Keywords in the Keyword Planner appear either in list view or in grouped view, which is sort of analogous to the concept of keyword niches and keyword lists that we've long supported in WordStream's own keyword tools.
Additionally, you can add individual keywords or keyword groupings to "Your Plan," which is sort of a temporary storage area for saving interesting-looking keywords and keyword groupings for later.
The Keyword Planner maintains state for the duration of your session – keywords that you add are saved while you're in the process of looking for keywords.
Finally, when you're done finding keywords, click on the "Get Estimates and Review Plan" button.
Getting Estimates and Reviewing Your Keyword Plan
The next step of the Keyword Plan process involves setting a keyword bid and daily budget for your portfolio of keywords and keyword groupings.
Since keyword volume and CPC bid estimates vary wildly based on your budget, bid, location, and other factors, it's important that you provide Google with some information to customize your estimates.
For example, you could enter in a bid of $40 and a daily budget of $1,000.00 and based on those settings, the Keyword Planner will generate detailed daily estimates for clicks, impressions, average ad position, and costs, as shown here.
Enter or Upload Your Own Keyword List in Keyword Planner
Sometimes in search marketing, you're lucky to have your own analytics data, for example, a list of top keywords that generate conversions for your website. If you're this fortunate, it would definitely make sense to use those battle-proven keywords rather than the generic keyword suggestions you get from the Google Keyword Suggestion Tool. Here's what that looks like:
When you press the Get Estimates button, you'll be brought to the same keyword workbench area; the only difference is that you'll be looking at your own keyword list, rather than the generic keywords suggested via the Google Keyword Tool.
Multiplying Keyword Lists Using Keyword Planner
A completely new feature in Keyword Planner which isn't available in either the existing Google Keyword Tool or AdWords Traffic Estimator tools is the ability to mash up and multiply keyword lists. For example, you might want to multiply a bunch of names of cities and towns with different action words to come up with all the different keyword permutations, as shown here:
You can add up to 3 lists to mash up, and clicking on the Get Estimates button brings you to the same keyword workbench area.
Summary: The AdWords Keyword Planner
The new Keyword Planner tool supports various workflows for building ad groups and ad campaigns either starting from scratch, or based on your existing lists, and provides a more cohesive user experience by integrating the keyword selection, keyword grouping, keyword analysis and filtering aspects of the keyword selection workflow.
The Keyword Planner is currently available in a small number of AdWords accounts today. To find it, I just loaded up my MCC and checked every account to see if it had the Keyword Planner (thankfully, we have hundreds of accounts linked up). I found an account with Keyword Planner on around my 67th account. Google tells me that they plan to roll out Keyword Planner to a broader audience in the near future!
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
[Build Backlinks Online] Bon Appétit Magazine Tastes Envelope Glue In Preparation for Tax Day
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Bon Appétit Magazine Tastes
Envelope Glue In Preparation for Tax Day'
File this one under, oh no they didnt! In preparation for the dreaded Tax Day,
several intrepid Bon Apptit reporters took one for the team by taste testing and
ranking the best and worst envelope glue. And yes theres proof. Just check the
@bonappetitmag Instagram account. In a sea of crave-inducing food photos, this
[...]Bon Apptit Magazine Tastes Envelope Glue In Preparation for Tax Day is a
post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing
Strategy
You may view the latest post at
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Envelope Glue In Preparation for Tax Day'
File this one under, oh no they didnt! In preparation for the dreaded Tax Day,
several intrepid Bon Apptit reporters took one for the team by taste testing and
ranking the best and worst envelope glue. And yes theres proof. Just check the
@bonappetitmag Instagram account. In a sea of crave-inducing food photos, this
[...]Bon Apptit Magazine Tastes Envelope Glue In Preparation for Tax Day is a
post from: Convince and Convert: Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing
Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-image-of-the-week/bon-appetit-magazine-tastes-envelope-glue-in-preparation-for-tax-day/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=bon-appetit-magazine-tastes-envelope-glue-in-preparation-for-tax-day
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[Build Backlinks Online] TITLE
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How to Measure the ROI of Social Media (No, it's Not Impossible!)' 
You may view the latest post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WordStreamBlog/~3/HY18bjY7GRk/social-media-roi You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Measuring the success of various campaigns is a core aspect of a marketer's job. It's essential to see how your marketing efforts are contributing to the business's bottom line. Yet according to Social Media Today, 70% of online businesses that utilize social media don't bother to measure ROI.
It's pretty shocking to discover that the majority of online businesses are conducting their social media campaigns completely in the dark, with no clues as to how social media contributes to the success of their businesses. To be fair, it's not entirely their fault – social media ROI is a difficult beast to tame, the bane of marketers around the world.
Why is Measuring Social Media ROI Difficult?
Some say that measuring the ROI of social media simply can't be done! Like traditional billboard advertising, some businesses throw up their social media campaigns and hope for the best, trusting that something good will come of their efforts.
Part of the reason that measuring social media ROI is so difficult is that many marketers try to measure social media success through the social channel, examining metrics concerning "likes" and "tweets" that aren't easy to monetize, while businesses are primarily concerned with website visits, email subscribers, calls and sales. Throwing around foreign terminology that doesn't relate to the bottom line confuses business executives and can often make marketers sound like snake oil salesman.
Feel younger, look better, and become better endowed with N.W. Dickens' miraculous elixir!
When measuring ROI with social media, it's helpful to take into account how you measure other advertising channels, and incorporate familiar business phrasing. If you use PPC advertising, try assessing social media in terms of cost-per-click or cost-per-impression. If you focus on lead gen, try measuring in terms of cost per acquisition, etc. This adds credibility to your efforts and makes it easier to compare social media marketing with other forms of online marketing.
What Social Media Does Best: Generating Soft Leads
Social media is a prime tool for developing brand identity and familiarity, building engagement, and creating "soft" leads. There is a good amount of confusion about where social media exists on the conversion funnel, and understanding how social media serves as a place to gather soft leads helps provide some illumination.
Soft leads exchange their email address for something of value. This item of value can be in the form of a white paper, ebook, or physical commodity like a coaster set or free sample pack. The hope is that eventually, with the help of email marketing, soft leads will develop into hard leads, which are customers or very qualified prospects.
The exchange of an email address for an online or offline good is common practice on social media sites like Facebook. It gets a bit tricky because you can't get a user's email addresses directly on Facebook, but must instead go through a third-party app. It's fairly simple though – there are many third-party Facebook apps which help you build submission forms or contest pages that are then set up as tabs within Facebook.
Since most businesses use social media at least in part for lead generation, it can make sense to think about social media ROI in terms of cost per lead and/or cost per acquisition, especially if gaining new leads is a major goal for your business.
How to Measure Social Media ROI
We've talked a bit about why it's traditionally difficult to measure social media ROI, and where social media fits in the marketing big picture. So, exactly how do we measure social media ROI?
Social Media Built-In Platform Analytics Tools
Many social media sites, understanding the need for marketers to measure their social media performance, provide built-in analytics tools for tracking engagement, likes, shares, etc. There's Facebook Insights, LinkedIn Company Page Insights, and Pinterest Web Analytics to name a few.
Tools like these are handy at measuring your performance within the social media platform, but do little to show how your social media actions affect the bottom line or contribute to conversions, which usually happen outside that platform and on your own site.
Facebook Offers
If you are looking to get some glimpse into how online social media actions can affect physical offline sales, Facebook Offers provides some insight by offering online coupon offers than can be redeemed offline.
This lets marketers experiment with how social media actions can be monetized into in-store purchases. Facebook Offers operates similar to Google Offer Extensions for AdWords, which lets AdWords advertisers attach a discount coupon to a Google ad.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most powerful tool for measuring the ROI of social media. Google Analytics social reports can show marketers the impact of social actions, which social networks are yielding the best results, which content is most popular, and how social can result in conversions.
Google Analytics gets a fairly regular stream of facelifts, tinkering with where certain reports are nested. This is what the most current setup of Google Analytics' social reports section looks like.
Let's go through these reports step by step:
Network Referrals: This section shows how users get to your site from different social networks and how many visitors various social media platforms bring in. Marketers can also compare social referrals to the total number of site visits.
Data Hub Activity: The Data Hub Activity section shows an activity stream of how people are saving, liking, sharing, and commenting on your content across various sites. Some Data Hub Partners connecting to display activity through Google Analytics are Delicious, Meetup, Google+, and Reddit. You'll notice that many larger social media platforms with their own built-in analytic tools aren't included.
Landing Pages: The Landing Pages tab measures the popularity of your page content, showing which of your website pages are getting the most views from social media referrals.
Trackbacks: The Trackbacks report shows the sites that link to your content, what content is being linked to, and how many visitors are reaching you through that stream.
Conversions: The conversions tab shows you which social sites have brought in the most conversions and each conversion's value in a dollar amount. This section helps to monetize social efforts and aid in measuring social media ROI.
Conversions must first be determined by the business, setting up conversion goals in the Conversions>Goals section. This allows businesses to decide for themselves what they want to be considered a conversion and the conversion's financial worth. A conversion could be an ebook download, an online purchase, filling out a form – it's up to you! Once these goals are set, Google Analytics can show you which conversions come from where across various social media platforms.
The Conversions tab is key for being able to measure social media ROI against other marketing initiatives. Key performance indicators are as important with measuring social media ROI as they are with other marketing efforts.
Plugins: This section deals with on-site engagement, showing which social buttons are being clicked on your site and what content is being shared.
Visitor Flow: Visitor Flow illustrates the path various users take as they click through to your site from different social media sites. Visitor Flow shows which web pages users arrive at coming from social media platforms, their next interactions on your site, as well as where drop-offs occur.
URL Tracking: Google Analytics also has a feature that helps users add custom URL parameters to their thank-you goal pages, enabling marketers to track the amount of traffic driven through any given campaign.
The Google Analytics URL Builder makes this process easy, letting you append the end of a URL with information that tells Google Analytics the campaign, the medium, and the source of where the link originated from or was posted. The resulting URL is usually pretty long, but it can easily be shortened and shared across social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. You can then see in Analytics when people have gotten to your site from a social network, by looking for the appropriate parameter.
The custom URL parameters work with Google Analytics to show how successful various campaigns are at delivering conversions. This data can even by synced with sales data when using marketing automation software like Marketo.
These Google Analytics social reports and features are huge assets that help marketers calculate the ROI of social media, helping businesses locate the value of social media and discover how social media marketing contributes to a business's bottom line.
The Value of Social Media That Cannot be Measured
The flutter of a butterfly's wings, dewy morning grass beneath one's feet, the tender love for a Pinkberry sundae – these things can't be measured. In the same vein, not all the rewards of social media can be measured. As corny as it sounds, social media serves as a powerful tool for building relationships – and relationships really are difficult things to measure!
As with many online actions, it's often difficult to measure the offline benefits. Maybe a Facebook post today doesn't drive a conversion, but a user may see that post and become more familiar with your brand by doing so. That familiarity later on might mean choosing you over an unknown competitor, or clicking your Google AdWords ad since your brand rings a bell.
Social media also aids newer businesses in developing their brand's personality and building a voice. For companies that deal with dry topics relating to finance, insurance, and other yawn-worthy fields, social media can serve as a spot for introducing a more relaxed and casual demeanor of the company.
Hopefully you now understand a bit about how social media ROI can – and can't – be measured. Do you have any other tools or methods for measuring the ROI of social media? Let us know in the comments if you have any ideas!
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
Wednesday 24 April 2013
[Build Backlinks Online] Dusting The Website For Spring: Optimization and SEO Cleaning
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Dusting The Website For Spring:
Optimization and SEO Cleaning'
Posted by scottwyden
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Spring is here, so why not put some spring cleaning actions through on your
website?
With that said, I'm going to get straight to the action items. Below is a list
of many things you can look for on your site to adjust, add or remove.
On-site dusting
The following are things that you can do on your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Authorship: Extremely important SEO action item. Google authorship's role in
your website's rankings is more important than ever. In addition to being a SEO
tactic, it also acts as a conversion tactic. You see, it is estimated that SERPs
with authorship enabled receive around 120% more clicks.
+1 button: Going along with the Google Plus topic, make sure that you have a +1
button somewhere on your pages and/or posts. Why? Well, Google's Author Rank is
using +1 data as part of ranking. So in addition to the marketing benefits of
engagement, a simple +1 can help your website rank higher for keywords.
Pinterest button: Hopefully you are on Pinterest and pinning, liking and
commenting with your customers. If not, hop on it. Then also add the Pin button
to your website's pages and/or posts. People love to pin things, so make it
easier for them.
Metadata: If you're using a WordPress theme similar to ProBlogger and
Copyblogger (they're running Genesis), then there are SEO meta settings for
every page and post on your website. I personally don't recommend using a
theme's SEO settings. In fact, I much prefer WordPress SEO by Yoast - mentioned
in this article on WordPress plugins. My reasoning for this is because in
addition to providing meta functionality, it incorporates Open Graph for social
media and a page analysis feature that is amazing.
Open Graph: I might as well move on to Open Graph since I mentioned above. Open
Graph is what lets specific titles, descriptions and images show up on websites
like Facebook and Google Plus. By using the same WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin,
you can specify your image and descriptions for each.
Site speed: How fast does your website load? Could it be faster? Use the Google
Speed Test tool to find what is slowing it down. Sometimes, simple changes can
improve your load speed. Sometimes it requires development work. I like to tell
people who if you're over a score of 70 then you're doing well, but to aim for
mid 90s. Page speed helps for SEO and for user experience, so don't overlook it
anymore. Sometimes slow site speeds can be due to shared hosting that so many
websites are using.
Broken links: Log into your Google & Bing Webmaster Tools and look at any 404
errors that show up. Fix them by creating new pages in their place or redirect
them to another page using 301 redirects. (WordPress users can use this plugin)
Index status: Are you preventing important pages from being indexed by search
engines? To find out, go to Google and do a search that looks like the
following, "site:seomoz.org". A search like that will bring up every page that
Google has indexed on the domain listed. Dr. Pete shared a fantastic article on
the SEOmoz blog that covers all the important search queries that you can
utilize to see what content is indexed. The article also has queries that can
help for guest post research.[bonus!] It's also worth mentioning that you can
also log in to your Google Webmaster Tools panel to view all the URLs indexed by
Google. Take advantage of that tool!
User experience: To keep people on your website you need to make sure that
visitors can browse it easily. As a photographer, I use a related posts plugin
that shows other photographs that viewers might be interested in. That
technique, used similarly on many major publications like Mashable and Engadget,
is a great user experience tip to keep people browsing your website.
Off-site dusting
The following are things that you can do off your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Be social: Author Rank isn't 100% confirmed yet, but it's an inevitable ranking
system that will soon be on Google, and a form of it will wind up on Bing
eventually. To sum up Author Rank; it's where Google uses a combination of their
core SEO algorithm and PageRank and combine it with the social activity around
your website. For example, your commenting on and off-site, and +1s of your
content and the content that you +1.
Guest post: Writing a guest post on websites like SEOmoz do many things for
your presence. The two most common benefits are the relationships you build in
the process and the ability to create a backlink to your website which helps
with SEO.
Final Note
Sometimes dusting your website requires a fresh look. Do some searching on
Google for business WordPress themes and find one that suits your needs and
provides that fresh look that you've always wanted. Maybe it's a Genesis theme
or something else. Either way, change can be good at times.
So grab your dust pan, an extra cup of coffee, sit down for a few hours and
start cleaning up for spring time, both on and off-site. It's spring, so start
fresh.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/QULC-8J4Sqk/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Optimization and SEO Cleaning'
Posted by scottwyden
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Spring is here, so why not put some spring cleaning actions through on your
website?
With that said, I'm going to get straight to the action items. Below is a list
of many things you can look for on your site to adjust, add or remove.
On-site dusting
The following are things that you can do on your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Authorship: Extremely important SEO action item. Google authorship's role in
your website's rankings is more important than ever. In addition to being a SEO
tactic, it also acts as a conversion tactic. You see, it is estimated that SERPs
with authorship enabled receive around 120% more clicks.
+1 button: Going along with the Google Plus topic, make sure that you have a +1
button somewhere on your pages and/or posts. Why? Well, Google's Author Rank is
using +1 data as part of ranking. So in addition to the marketing benefits of
engagement, a simple +1 can help your website rank higher for keywords.
Pinterest button: Hopefully you are on Pinterest and pinning, liking and
commenting with your customers. If not, hop on it. Then also add the Pin button
to your website's pages and/or posts. People love to pin things, so make it
easier for them.
Metadata: If you're using a WordPress theme similar to ProBlogger and
Copyblogger (they're running Genesis), then there are SEO meta settings for
every page and post on your website. I personally don't recommend using a
theme's SEO settings. In fact, I much prefer WordPress SEO by Yoast - mentioned
in this article on WordPress plugins. My reasoning for this is because in
addition to providing meta functionality, it incorporates Open Graph for social
media and a page analysis feature that is amazing.
Open Graph: I might as well move on to Open Graph since I mentioned above. Open
Graph is what lets specific titles, descriptions and images show up on websites
like Facebook and Google Plus. By using the same WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin,
you can specify your image and descriptions for each.
Site speed: How fast does your website load? Could it be faster? Use the Google
Speed Test tool to find what is slowing it down. Sometimes, simple changes can
improve your load speed. Sometimes it requires development work. I like to tell
people who if you're over a score of 70 then you're doing well, but to aim for
mid 90s. Page speed helps for SEO and for user experience, so don't overlook it
anymore. Sometimes slow site speeds can be due to shared hosting that so many
websites are using.
Broken links: Log into your Google & Bing Webmaster Tools and look at any 404
errors that show up. Fix them by creating new pages in their place or redirect
them to another page using 301 redirects. (WordPress users can use this plugin)
Index status: Are you preventing important pages from being indexed by search
engines? To find out, go to Google and do a search that looks like the
following, "site:seomoz.org". A search like that will bring up every page that
Google has indexed on the domain listed. Dr. Pete shared a fantastic article on
the SEOmoz blog that covers all the important search queries that you can
utilize to see what content is indexed. The article also has queries that can
help for guest post research.[bonus!] It's also worth mentioning that you can
also log in to your Google Webmaster Tools panel to view all the URLs indexed by
Google. Take advantage of that tool!
User experience: To keep people on your website you need to make sure that
visitors can browse it easily. As a photographer, I use a related posts plugin
that shows other photographs that viewers might be interested in. That
technique, used similarly on many major publications like Mashable and Engadget,
is a great user experience tip to keep people browsing your website.
Off-site dusting
The following are things that you can do off your website to improve the
presence on the web.
Be social: Author Rank isn't 100% confirmed yet, but it's an inevitable ranking
system that will soon be on Google, and a form of it will wind up on Bing
eventually. To sum up Author Rank; it's where Google uses a combination of their
core SEO algorithm and PageRank and combine it with the social activity around
your website. For example, your commenting on and off-site, and +1s of your
content and the content that you +1.
Guest post: Writing a guest post on websites like SEOmoz do many things for
your presence. The two most common benefits are the relationships you build in
the process and the ability to create a backlink to your website which helps
with SEO.
Final Note
Sometimes dusting your website requires a fresh look. Do some searching on
Google for business WordPress themes and find one that suits your needs and
provides that fresh look that you've always wanted. Maybe it's a Genesis theme
or something else. Either way, change can be good at times.
So grab your dust pan, an extra cup of coffee, sit down for a few hours and
start cleaning up for spring time, both on and off-site. It's spring, so start
fresh.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/QULC-8J4Sqk/dusting-the-website-for-spring-optimization-seo-cleaning
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] TITLE
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '5 Things I Really Love About Being a Dad'
My son is a year and a half old at the moment. Ever since he was born, I’ve enjoyed this new adventure called Fatherhood. As a matter of fact, I love it! I find myself regularly reflecting on what I consider to be the best and most rewarding aspects of being a dad.
So, I wanted to share them on this blog with you. For time purposes, I just included the five reasons that came to mind first. They are in no particular order.
1) I love seeing Ethan’s smile first thing in the morning when he wakes-up.
We’re very fortunate he sleeps usually 9 to 11 hours per night on average. He always starts the day early, happy and enthused about life.
When I walk into his room and call his name, he gives me a HUGE ear-to-ear smile. It’s the coolest thing and one of the best moments of my day.
I then proceed to give him a bear hug and say I love you. After, we make a pit stop at the diaper change station then we’re ready to play.
2) I’m grateful I get to consistently train him for success.
Children are like sponges.
They observe and pick-up more than we think sometimes. I want to give him the head-start I didn’t get early-on in life with repetition and positive reinforcement.
I’m always telling Ethan what a champion he is, how handsome he is, how intelligent he is, what an effective communicator his is, how athletic he is, how special he is, and that he can accomplish anything he puts his mind to.
Encouragement is critical at a young age and affirmations are important daily.
I want him to understand there are NO LIMITS to what he can do, and / or achieve in life. He has so much opportunity and I’ve got his back 100%.
3) I like that he already has an abundance mentality.
Ethan likes to share. He knows there’s more than enough food and toys to go around. He even tries to feed me sometimes. It’s great! He has a genuine concern for others. This will carry him well throughout life.
4) I love watching Ethan be outgoing and kind.
He randomly waves to strangers (mostly women) and smiles. People practically melt when they see him. It’s so funny… he and I will be walking in the mall while mom is shopping.
Then, she’ll come-back and literally see a crowd of beautiful women around his stroller. I then have to make sure my wife understands that Ethan is the one grabbing the attention. It’s really a site to see… lol.
5) I enjoy that my son eats healthy and likes it.
He’s eaten organic greens since he was a baby. The overwhelming majority of his diet is organic fruits, vegetables and sometimes free range or grass-fed beef. It makes me proud.
He even loves to drink a green supplement called Perfect Food. This is ultra-healthy but tastes like dirt and grass. He’s had candy a couple times but he spits it out because it’s too sweet.
Nutrition is one of the the foundations of a healthy body and I’m grateful he’s so healthy and developing empowering habits.
Words cannot express how incredibly grateful I am for my family.
Ethan has brought a new dimension of life and happiness to our world. I just want to empower him at a young age with the tools to live a long, healthy life of prosperity and abundance. I want him to know we’re in this together.
This boy is unique and destined for greatness.
It’s wonderful to watch him discover new sights, sounds, foods, activities, body parts, and all life has to offer. I never imagined being a dad could be so amazing.
Are you a parent? What do you enjoy most about it? I’d love to hear your thoughts…
–
Did you like this post? Click the Facebook "like" button below and share it with your friends.
Related Blog Posts:
Your Past is NOT Your Future [video]
Cristal Champagne and Celebrating Life
Ferrari F430 Test Drive [video]
The Life Success Secret NO ONE Talks About
You may view the latest post at http://dcincome.com/blog/5-things-i-really-love-about-being-a-dad/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com[Build Backlinks Online] The Biggest, Yet Never Mentioned, Benefit of Content Marketing
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Biggest, Yet Never Mentioned,
Benefit of Content Marketing'
We can pretend weve all accepted the commonly understood benefits of content
marketing. But wed be pretenders. Lets deal with the digits.Content marketing
can help you make money. Planned and executed by marketing professionals, your
content marketing efforts willdrive traffic to your site and increase leads.Its
capable of playing a role in helping you better [...]The Biggest, Yet Never
Mentioned, Benefit of Content Marketing is a post from: Convince and Convert:
Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing-2/the-biggest-yet-never-mentioned-benefit-of-content-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-biggest-yet-never-mentioned-benefit-of-content-marketing
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Benefit of Content Marketing'
We can pretend weve all accepted the commonly understood benefits of content
marketing. But wed be pretenders. Lets deal with the digits.Content marketing
can help you make money. Planned and executed by marketing professionals, your
content marketing efforts willdrive traffic to your site and increase leads.Its
capable of playing a role in helping you better [...]The Biggest, Yet Never
Mentioned, Benefit of Content Marketing is a post from: Convince and Convert:
Social Media Strategy and Content Marketing Strategy
You may view the latest post at
http://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing-2/the-biggest-yet-never-mentioned-benefit-of-content-marketing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-biggest-yet-never-mentioned-benefit-of-content-marketing
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] Machine Learning and Link Spam: My Brush With Insanity
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Machine Learning and Link Spam:
My Brush With Insanity'
Posted by wrttnwrd
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Know someone who thinks theyre smart? Tell them to build a machine learning
tool. If they majored in, say, History in college, within 30 minutes theyll be
curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth while humming the opening bars of
Oklahoma.
Sometimes, though, the alternative is rooting through 250,000 web pages by
hand, checking them for compliance with Googles TOS. Doing that will skip you
right past the rocking-and-humming stage, and launch you right into
writing-with-crayons-between-your-toes phase.
Those were my two choices six months ago. Several companies came to Portent
asking for help with Penguin/manual penalties. They all, for one reason or
another, had dirty link profiles.
Link analysis, the hard way. Back when I was a kid...
I did the first link profile review by hand, like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Remove obviously bad links by analyzing URLs. Face it: if a linking page is on
a domain like FreeLinksDirectory.com or ArticleSuccess.com, its gotta go.
Analyze the domain and page trustrank and trustflow. Throw out anything with a
zero, unless its on a list of whitelisted domains.
Grab thumbnails of each remaining linking page, using Python, Selenium, and
Phantomjs. You dont have to do this step, but it helps if youre going to get
help from other folks.
Get some poor bugger a faithful Portent team member to review the thumbnails,
quickly checking off whether theyre forums, blatant link spam, or something
else.
After all of that prep work, my final review still took 10+ hours of
eye-rotting agony.
There had to be a better way. I knew just enough about machine learning to
realize it had possibilities, so I dove in. After all, how hard can it be?
Machine learning: the basic concept
The concept of machine learning isnt that hard to grasp:
Take a large dataset you need to classify. It could be book titles, peoples
names, Facebook posts, or, for me, linking web pages.
Define the categories. In this case, Im looking for spam and good.
Get a collection of those items and classify them by hand. Or, if youre really
lucky, you find a collection that someone else classified for you. The Natural
Language Toolkit, for example, has a movie reviews corpus you can use for
sentiment analysis. This is your training set.
Pick the right machine learning tool (hah).
Configure it correctly (hahahahahahaha heee heeeeee sniff haa haaa sorry, Im
ok ha ha haaaaaaauuuugh).
Feed in your training set, with the features the item attributes used for
classification pre-selected. The tool will find patterns, if it can (giggle).
Use the tool to compare each item in your dataset to the training set.
The tool returns a classification of each item, plus its confidence in the
classification and, if its really cool, the features that were most critical in
that classification.
If you ignore the hysterical laughter, the process seems pretty simple. Alas,
the laughter is a dead giveaway: these seven steps are easy the same way Fly to
moon, land on moon, fly home is three easy steps.
Note: At this point, you could go ahead and use a pre-built toolset like BigML,
Datameer, or Googles Prediction API. Or, you could decide to build it all by
hand. Which is what I did. You know, because I have so much spare time. If youre
unsure, keep reading. If this story doesnt make you run, screaming, to the
pre-built tools, start coding. You have my blessings.
The ingredients: Python, NLTK, scikit-learn
I sketched out the process for IIS (Is It Spam, not Internet Information
Server) like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Use a little Python script to scrape the content of those pages.
Get the SEOmoz and MajesticSEO metrics for each linking page.
Build any additional features I wanted to use. I needed to calculate the
reading grade level and links per word, for example. I also needed to pull out
all meaningful words, and a count of those words.
Finally, compare each result to my training set.
To do all of this, I needed a programming language, some kind of natural
language processing (to figure out meaningful words, clean up HTML, etc.) and a
machine learning algorithm that I could connect to the programming language.
Im already a bit of a Python hacker (not a programmer my code makes
programmers cry), so Python was the obvious choice of programming language.
Id dabbled a little with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Its built for
Python, and would easily filter out stop words, clean up HTML, and do all the
other stuff I needed.
For my machine learning toolset, I picked a Python library called scikit-learn,
mostly because there were tutorials out there that I could actually read.
I smushed it all together using some really-not-pretty Python code, and
connected it to a MongoDB database for storage.
A word about the training set
The training set makes or breaks the model. A good training set means your
bouncing baby machine learning program has a good teacher. A bad training set
means its got Edna Krabappel.
And accuracy alone isnt enough. A training set also has to cover the full range
of possible classification scenarios. One good and one spam page arent enough.
You need hundreds or thousands to provide a nice range of possibilities.
Otherwise, the machine learning program stagger around, unable to classify items
outside the narrow training set.
Luckily, our initial hand-review reinclusion method gave us a set of
carefully-selected spam and good pages. That was our initial training set. Later
on, we dug deeper and grew the training set by running Is It Spam and
hand-verifying good and bad page results.
That worked great on Is It Spam 2.0. It didnt work so well on 1.0.
First attempt: fail
For my first version of the tool, I used a Bayesian Filter as my machine
learning tool. I figured, hey, it works for e-mail spam, why not SEO spam?
Apparently, I was already delirious at that point. Bayesian filtering works for
e-mail spam about as well as fishing with a baseball bat. It does occasionally
catch spam. It also misses a lot of it, dumps legitimate e-mail into spam
folders, and generally amuses serious spammers the world over.
But, in my madness, I forgot all about these little problems. Is It Spam 1.0
seemed pretty great at first. Initial tests showed 75% accuracy. That may not
sound great, but with accurate confidence data, it could really streamline link
profile reviews. I was the proud papa of a baby machine learning tool.
But Bayesian filters can be poisoned. If you feed the filter a training set
where 90% of the spam pages talk about weddings, its possible the tool will
begin seeing all wedding-related content as spam. Thats exactly what happened in
my case: I fed in 10,000 or so pages of spammy wedding links (we do a lot of
work in the wedding industry). On the next test run, Is It Spam decided that
anything matrimonial was spam. Accuracy fell to 50%.
Since we tend to use the tool to evaluate sites in specific verticals, this
would never work. Every test would likely poison the filter. We could build the
training set to millions of pages, but my pointy little head couldnt contemplate
the infrastructure required to handle that.
The real problem with a pure Bayesian approach is that theres really only one
feature: The content of the page. It ignores things like links, page trust and
authority.
Oops. Back to the drawing board. I sent my little AI in for counseling, and a
new brain.
Note: I wouldnt have figured this out without help from SEOmozs Dr. Pete and
Matt Peters. A hat tip doesnt seem like enough, but for now, itll have to do.
Second attempt: a qualified success
My second test used logistic regression. This machine learning model uses
numeric data, not text. So, I could feed it more features. After the first
exercise, this actually wasnt too horrific. A few hours of work got me a tool
that evaluates:
Page TrustFlow and CitationFlow (from MajesticSEO Im adding SEOmoz metrics
now)
Links per word
Page Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level
Page Flesch Kincaid reading ease
Words per page
Syllables per page
Characters per page
A few other seemingly-random bits, like images per page, misspellings, and
grammar errors
This time, the tool worked a lot better. With vertical-specific training sets,
it ran with 85%+ accuracy.
In case you're wondering, this is what victory looks like:
When I tried to use the tool for more general tests, though, my coded kid
tripped over its big, adolescent feet. Some of the funnier results:
It saw itself as spam.
It thought Rands blog was a swirling black hole of spammy despair.
False positives remain a big problem if we try to build a training set outside
a single vertical.
Disappointing. But the tool chugs along happily within verticals, so we
continue using it for that. We build a custom training set for each client, then
run the training set against the remaining links. The result is a relatively
clear report:
Results and next steps
With little IIS learning to walk, weve cut the brute-force portion of large
link profile evaluations from 30 hours to 3 hours. Not. Too. Shabby.
I tried to launch a public version of Is It Spam, but folks started using it to
do real link profile evaluations, without checking their results. That scared
the crap out of me, so I took the tool down until we cure the false positives
problem.
I think we can address the false positives issue by adding a few features to
the classification set:
Bayesian filtering: Instead of depending on a Bayesian classification as 100%
of the formula well use the Bayesian score as one more feature.
Grammar scoring: Anyone know a decent grammar testing algorithm in Python? If
so, let me know. Id love to add grammar quality as a feature.
Anchor text matters a lot. The next generation of the tool needs to score the
relevant link based on the anchor text. Is it a name (like in a byline)? Or is
it a phrase (like in a keyword-stuffed link)?
Link position may matter, too. This is another great feature that could help
with spam detection. It might lead to more false positives, though. If Is It
Spam sees a large number of spammy links in press release body copy, it may
start rating other links located in body copy as spam, too. Well test to see if
the other features are enough to help with this.
If I'm lucky, one or more of these changes may yield a tool that can evaluate
pages across different verticals. If I'm lucky.
Insights
This is by far the most challenging development project I've ever tried. I
probably wore another 10 years' enamel off my teeth in just six weeks. But it's
been productive:
When you start digging into automated page analysis and machine learning, you
learn a lot about how computers evaluate language. That's awfully relevant if
you're a 21st Century marketer.
I uncovered an interesting pattern in Google's Penguin implementation. This is
based on my fumbling about with machine learning, so take it with a grain of
salt, but have a look here.
We learned that there is no such thing as a spammy page. There are only spammy
links. One link from a particular page may be totally fine: For example, a brand
link from a press release page. Another link from that same page may be spam:
For example, a keyword-stuffed link from the same press release.
We've reduced time required for an initial link profile evaluation by a factor
of ten.
It's also been a great humility-building exercise.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/2S1MEON6pH8/machine-learning-and-link-spam-my-brush-with-insanity
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
My Brush With Insanity'
Posted by wrttnwrd
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it
provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are
entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.
Know someone who thinks theyre smart? Tell them to build a machine learning
tool. If they majored in, say, History in college, within 30 minutes theyll be
curled up in a ball, rocking back and forth while humming the opening bars of
Oklahoma.
Sometimes, though, the alternative is rooting through 250,000 web pages by
hand, checking them for compliance with Googles TOS. Doing that will skip you
right past the rocking-and-humming stage, and launch you right into
writing-with-crayons-between-your-toes phase.
Those were my two choices six months ago. Several companies came to Portent
asking for help with Penguin/manual penalties. They all, for one reason or
another, had dirty link profiles.
Link analysis, the hard way. Back when I was a kid...
I did the first link profile review by hand, like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Remove obviously bad links by analyzing URLs. Face it: if a linking page is on
a domain like FreeLinksDirectory.com or ArticleSuccess.com, its gotta go.
Analyze the domain and page trustrank and trustflow. Throw out anything with a
zero, unless its on a list of whitelisted domains.
Grab thumbnails of each remaining linking page, using Python, Selenium, and
Phantomjs. You dont have to do this step, but it helps if youre going to get
help from other folks.
Get some poor bugger a faithful Portent team member to review the thumbnails,
quickly checking off whether theyre forums, blatant link spam, or something
else.
After all of that prep work, my final review still took 10+ hours of
eye-rotting agony.
There had to be a better way. I knew just enough about machine learning to
realize it had possibilities, so I dove in. After all, how hard can it be?
Machine learning: the basic concept
The concept of machine learning isnt that hard to grasp:
Take a large dataset you need to classify. It could be book titles, peoples
names, Facebook posts, or, for me, linking web pages.
Define the categories. In this case, Im looking for spam and good.
Get a collection of those items and classify them by hand. Or, if youre really
lucky, you find a collection that someone else classified for you. The Natural
Language Toolkit, for example, has a movie reviews corpus you can use for
sentiment analysis. This is your training set.
Pick the right machine learning tool (hah).
Configure it correctly (hahahahahahaha heee heeeeee sniff haa haaa sorry, Im
ok ha ha haaaaaaauuuugh).
Feed in your training set, with the features the item attributes used for
classification pre-selected. The tool will find patterns, if it can (giggle).
Use the tool to compare each item in your dataset to the training set.
The tool returns a classification of each item, plus its confidence in the
classification and, if its really cool, the features that were most critical in
that classification.
If you ignore the hysterical laughter, the process seems pretty simple. Alas,
the laughter is a dead giveaway: these seven steps are easy the same way Fly to
moon, land on moon, fly home is three easy steps.
Note: At this point, you could go ahead and use a pre-built toolset like BigML,
Datameer, or Googles Prediction API. Or, you could decide to build it all by
hand. Which is what I did. You know, because I have so much spare time. If youre
unsure, keep reading. If this story doesnt make you run, screaming, to the
pre-built tools, start coding. You have my blessings.
The ingredients: Python, NLTK, scikit-learn
I sketched out the process for IIS (Is It Spam, not Internet Information
Server) like this:
Download a list of all external linking pages from SEOmoz, MajesticSEO, and
Google Webmaster Tools.
Use a little Python script to scrape the content of those pages.
Get the SEOmoz and MajesticSEO metrics for each linking page.
Build any additional features I wanted to use. I needed to calculate the
reading grade level and links per word, for example. I also needed to pull out
all meaningful words, and a count of those words.
Finally, compare each result to my training set.
To do all of this, I needed a programming language, some kind of natural
language processing (to figure out meaningful words, clean up HTML, etc.) and a
machine learning algorithm that I could connect to the programming language.
Im already a bit of a Python hacker (not a programmer my code makes
programmers cry), so Python was the obvious choice of programming language.
Id dabbled a little with the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Its built for
Python, and would easily filter out stop words, clean up HTML, and do all the
other stuff I needed.
For my machine learning toolset, I picked a Python library called scikit-learn,
mostly because there were tutorials out there that I could actually read.
I smushed it all together using some really-not-pretty Python code, and
connected it to a MongoDB database for storage.
A word about the training set
The training set makes or breaks the model. A good training set means your
bouncing baby machine learning program has a good teacher. A bad training set
means its got Edna Krabappel.
And accuracy alone isnt enough. A training set also has to cover the full range
of possible classification scenarios. One good and one spam page arent enough.
You need hundreds or thousands to provide a nice range of possibilities.
Otherwise, the machine learning program stagger around, unable to classify items
outside the narrow training set.
Luckily, our initial hand-review reinclusion method gave us a set of
carefully-selected spam and good pages. That was our initial training set. Later
on, we dug deeper and grew the training set by running Is It Spam and
hand-verifying good and bad page results.
That worked great on Is It Spam 2.0. It didnt work so well on 1.0.
First attempt: fail
For my first version of the tool, I used a Bayesian Filter as my machine
learning tool. I figured, hey, it works for e-mail spam, why not SEO spam?
Apparently, I was already delirious at that point. Bayesian filtering works for
e-mail spam about as well as fishing with a baseball bat. It does occasionally
catch spam. It also misses a lot of it, dumps legitimate e-mail into spam
folders, and generally amuses serious spammers the world over.
But, in my madness, I forgot all about these little problems. Is It Spam 1.0
seemed pretty great at first. Initial tests showed 75% accuracy. That may not
sound great, but with accurate confidence data, it could really streamline link
profile reviews. I was the proud papa of a baby machine learning tool.
But Bayesian filters can be poisoned. If you feed the filter a training set
where 90% of the spam pages talk about weddings, its possible the tool will
begin seeing all wedding-related content as spam. Thats exactly what happened in
my case: I fed in 10,000 or so pages of spammy wedding links (we do a lot of
work in the wedding industry). On the next test run, Is It Spam decided that
anything matrimonial was spam. Accuracy fell to 50%.
Since we tend to use the tool to evaluate sites in specific verticals, this
would never work. Every test would likely poison the filter. We could build the
training set to millions of pages, but my pointy little head couldnt contemplate
the infrastructure required to handle that.
The real problem with a pure Bayesian approach is that theres really only one
feature: The content of the page. It ignores things like links, page trust and
authority.
Oops. Back to the drawing board. I sent my little AI in for counseling, and a
new brain.
Note: I wouldnt have figured this out without help from SEOmozs Dr. Pete and
Matt Peters. A hat tip doesnt seem like enough, but for now, itll have to do.
Second attempt: a qualified success
My second test used logistic regression. This machine learning model uses
numeric data, not text. So, I could feed it more features. After the first
exercise, this actually wasnt too horrific. A few hours of work got me a tool
that evaluates:
Page TrustFlow and CitationFlow (from MajesticSEO Im adding SEOmoz metrics
now)
Links per word
Page Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level
Page Flesch Kincaid reading ease
Words per page
Syllables per page
Characters per page
A few other seemingly-random bits, like images per page, misspellings, and
grammar errors
This time, the tool worked a lot better. With vertical-specific training sets,
it ran with 85%+ accuracy.
In case you're wondering, this is what victory looks like:
When I tried to use the tool for more general tests, though, my coded kid
tripped over its big, adolescent feet. Some of the funnier results:
It saw itself as spam.
It thought Rands blog was a swirling black hole of spammy despair.
False positives remain a big problem if we try to build a training set outside
a single vertical.
Disappointing. But the tool chugs along happily within verticals, so we
continue using it for that. We build a custom training set for each client, then
run the training set against the remaining links. The result is a relatively
clear report:
Results and next steps
With little IIS learning to walk, weve cut the brute-force portion of large
link profile evaluations from 30 hours to 3 hours. Not. Too. Shabby.
I tried to launch a public version of Is It Spam, but folks started using it to
do real link profile evaluations, without checking their results. That scared
the crap out of me, so I took the tool down until we cure the false positives
problem.
I think we can address the false positives issue by adding a few features to
the classification set:
Bayesian filtering: Instead of depending on a Bayesian classification as 100%
of the formula well use the Bayesian score as one more feature.
Grammar scoring: Anyone know a decent grammar testing algorithm in Python? If
so, let me know. Id love to add grammar quality as a feature.
Anchor text matters a lot. The next generation of the tool needs to score the
relevant link based on the anchor text. Is it a name (like in a byline)? Or is
it a phrase (like in a keyword-stuffed link)?
Link position may matter, too. This is another great feature that could help
with spam detection. It might lead to more false positives, though. If Is It
Spam sees a large number of spammy links in press release body copy, it may
start rating other links located in body copy as spam, too. Well test to see if
the other features are enough to help with this.
If I'm lucky, one or more of these changes may yield a tool that can evaluate
pages across different verticals. If I'm lucky.
Insights
This is by far the most challenging development project I've ever tried. I
probably wore another 10 years' enamel off my teeth in just six weeks. But it's
been productive:
When you start digging into automated page analysis and machine learning, you
learn a lot about how computers evaluate language. That's awfully relevant if
you're a 21st Century marketer.
I uncovered an interesting pattern in Google's Penguin implementation. This is
based on my fumbling about with machine learning, so take it with a grain of
salt, but have a look here.
We learned that there is no such thing as a spammy page. There are only spammy
links. One link from a particular page may be totally fine: For example, a brand
link from a press release page. Another link from that same page may be spam:
For example, a keyword-stuffed link from the same press release.
We've reduced time required for an initial link profile evaluation by a factor
of ten.
It's also been a great humility-building exercise.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/2S1MEON6pH8/machine-learning-and-link-spam-my-brush-with-insanity
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Backlinks Online] TITLE
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '5 Big Brand PPC Ads with Critiques: What We Like, What We'd Change'
What big brands are able to do with their enormous marketing budgets is inspiring – though sometimes it mostly inspires jealousy. The typical small business can't sponsor the Olympics or get an ad spot during the Super Bowl. You have to tinker around with more accessible campaigns that cost less but typically have smaller reach as well.
PPC is an example of an incredibly accessible marketing channel – it's being exploited by tiny one-man shops and huge multinational corporations alike. But how much better is a big-brand PPC ad than an SMB ad – if at all? Is it like comparing the latest Pepsi commercial to what your local furniture store puts together?
Let's look at five big-brand AdWords ads and see what they do well and what they could do better.
(More: Dear eBay, Your Ads Don’t Work Because They Suck)
By the way, I fully admit to stealing the format for this post from Oli Gardner at Unbounce, who recently did something similar with big-brand landing pages. Thanks, Oli!
Big-Brand PPC Ad #1: LightingDirect.com
A Google search for "chandeliers" turned up these three ads in the coveted top-of-page ad spots. Let's focus on the middle ad from LightingDirect.com (a Build.com network site), comparing it to its close competition.
What I Like:
- Seller Ratings – Both LightingDirect.com and LampsPlus are making use of the seller ratings extension available in AdWords. This helps them stand out a little more from the top-ranked ad. It's working to the second ad's advantage in particular because the company has over twice as many reviews as the third ad.
- Lots of Benefits – This ad manages to pack four different benefits (free shipping, easy returns, great selection, and friendly service) into a small amount of space. The other two ads only include two benefits in their message.
What I'd Change/Test:
- Punctuation – Putting punctuation at the end of the first line of descriptive text (a comma or period after "Easy Returns") would have made this ad easier to read, since top-ranked ads often find their two description lines expanded into a single long line. They could probably also increase CTR by including an exclamation point.
- Call to Action – There's no explicit call to action in this ad. (The first ad makes the same mistake; the third ad has the "Subscribe to newsletter" button to entice an action.) I might try losing one of those four benefits and turning one of the benefits into a CTA – for example, "Claim Your Free Shipping Offer" or "Check Out Our Great Selection."
Big-Brand PPC Ad #2: Audi
Unsurprisingly, Audi owns the top spot for a search on "Audi." (And yes, we think even small businesses should bid on branded terms.) So what are they doing with the prime real estate?
What I Like:
- Sitelinks – Sitelinks are an easy win: They make your ad bigger and give users many more places to click
- Verbs – Audi isn't missing a call to action like LightingDirect was – in fact, the main description line as well as every single sitelink includes a verb, enticing the searcher to take action.
- Social Extensions – Audi has an insane number of followers on Google+, so they're right to show that number off. (According to Google: "On average, search ads with annotations have a 5-10% uplift in click through rate and the AdWords Social Extension helps you show more of them.")
What I'd Change/Test:
- Headline – Since this is the top result on a brand search, it probably has a super-duper high CTR, but nonetheless, I think the headline could be doing more work. All it really tells us is that this is the official site. Compare to this BMW ad that also tells us we can use the official site to build our own car.
Big-Brand PPC Ad #3: Olay
I know some of you dudes out there are thinking "What the %^&$ is BB cream?" Basically, it's like gussied up tinted moisturizer … which is like a sheer foundation … never mind. The point is, it's makeup, and you can buy it. Let's take a look at the Olay ad and the other competition in the yellow box.
What I Like:
- Use of Symbols – Did you know that using symbols, like the registered trademark symbol, can boost your ad performance? Test this now! They're also using that powerful exclamation point.
- Offers – I like the specific offers in the sitelinks, especially "Get a Free Skin Consultation," which sounds like a great lead builder.
What I'd Change/Test:
- Shorter Headline – The headline is too long so it gets truncated. Instantly what? We don't know.
- Longer Description – On the other hand, the description line is throwing away its extra characters, space that could have been used for a call to action (Maybelline's CTA in the third ad is awesome) or to repeat the keyword ("BB Cream") in the text again. Remember, when the search query appears in your ad, it appears in bold face, so your ad stands out more.
Big-Brand PPC Ad #4: ULINE
ULINE is one of the top PPC spenders in the business and industrial category, spending over $35 million a year on AdWords advertising. Are they making the most of that big PPC budget?
What I Like:
………… <crickets> …………
I don't like much about this ad. Let's get to what I don't like.
What I'd Change/Test:
- Better Keyword Matching – It looks like they're broad-matching on "labels," but they're not using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), so the word "printing" doesn't actually appear in the ad – not a great intent match. The ad is all about designing and customizing labels, not printing them. They should be keeping a better watch over their search query report and building out more targeted ad groups.
- More Benefits – The only benefit here is "Over 27,500 Products" – which, some might argue, is actually a shortcoming. Who wants to search through nearly 30,000 products? Paradox of choice, anyone? Sounds like a waste of time. Compare this to the other two ads, which offer lots of information on price and specific details about label sizes and other information that would help the searcher make a decision.
- Ad Extensions – ULINE's ad doesn't make use of any extensions at all. Can we get a sitelink up in this piece?
Since ULINE's ad is relatively weak compared to the #2 and #3 ads, they're probably bidding higher and paying a lot more than their competitors per click.
Big-Brand PPC Ad #5: SelectQuote
Here's an ad that follows a lot of the best practices we've already mentioned – clear call to action, using the search query in the text, sitelinks, etc. What are they doing that's new?
What I Like:
- The Local Connection – SelectQuote has localized their ad to recognize my location. I'm in Colorado, so I might want to deal with a local agent.
- Communication Extension – Including a phone number means that your ad could lead to conversions even if they don't click the ad. (That means it's free, yay!)
What I'd Change/Test:
- Numbers – The top-ranked Metlife ad gets specific with numbers: "Pay as little as $1/day for up to $500,000 coverage." If I were SelectQuote's PPC manager I'd test out concrete dollar amounts in my text too.
- Appeal to Emotions – People looking for life insurance might be driven by some strong emotions – fear, compassion, concern for one's loved ones, etc. An ad that speaks to those emotions could really do well here. I'd test something like "Take Care of Your Family. Get a Free Quote Today."
Do you steal from the big boys when it comes to writing ad text? Or do the little guys do it better?
This post originated on the WordStream Blog. WordStream provides keyword tools for pay-per click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) aiding in everything from keyword discovery to keyword grouping and organization.
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