Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Career Paths and Top Tips from 27
Big Company Social Media Professionals'
Its Opening Day of baseball season, so what better time to launch the first-ever
Social Pros All-Stars baseball cards? What Is This All About? For more than two
years, each week Ive recorded an episode of the Social Pros podcast, where my
co-hosts and I interview a social media professional about their day-to-day work
and []
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Monday 31 March 2014
[Build Backlinks Online] So You Have a Mobile-Friendly Website. What Now?
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'So You Have a Mobile-Friendly
Website. What Now?'
Posted by bridget.randolph
This post is based on a presentation I gave in October at SearchLove London
2013. The full slide deck is embedded at the end of the post. Also, use this
link to watch the video of the presentation for free! :)
----
Lots of people can tell you why you need a mobile-friendly website. And lots
of people can tell you how to build one. Including me. There have been countless
posts and articles and guides written about how to build a mobile-friendly site,
and how to optimize it for search, and how to track mobile visitors, and why
mobile is important.
So at this point, most people would agree that having a mobile-friendly
website is a basic requirement for any online brand:
57% of users won't recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site, and
40% have turned to a competitor's site after a bad mobile experience.
If you're just starting to think about it, you're falling behind. And you
don't need me to convince you. Instead, I want to talk about what happens next.
This post will cover some big-picture trends, case studies, examples and
tactics, but the overall theme is "online everywhere."
By the year 2017, it is predicted that 85% of the world's population will have
3G coverage. (It could be even more; initiatives like Facebook's Internet.org
campaign have the goal of bringing internet access to 100% of the world's
population.)
Mobile data in the year 2012 was 12x the size of the entire internet in the
year 2000. In other words, it grew by 1200%. And by the year 2018 it is expected
to grow 12x again...meaning the rate of growth is now twice as fast as when we
started (12x growth in 6 years instead of 12).
What all of this means is that we're becoming more connected than ever. And
mobile is now a channel which can empower you to reach people you can't reach
any other way, as the number of mobile users worldwide is set to overtake the
number of desktop users in 2014.
We are increasingly living in a multiscreen, device-agnostic world.
And this means that "mobile" can't just be an add-on anymore. My boss Will
Critchlow likes to say "there's no such thing as mobile." I would disagree
slightly: I'd suggest that instead, "there's no such thing as mobile for the
user."
Mobile is not a separate channel; it's a technology. So although at this point
there's "no such thing as mobile" for the user, don't be fooled: Making it easy
for users is really hard. We can't be lazy. What we need to be doing is asking
the right questions.
What does this look like? Let's take 3 scenarios: Companies A, B, and C.
Company A (call them the "Average Joe Corp.") are asking the question: "how do
we do 'mobile'?" And this means they'll be getting answers based on what
everyone else is doing, regardless of whether it's right for them or their
users. For example:
a separate m. website
an app
SMS promotions
etc.
Company B ("Early Adopters Ltd.") have a slightly better question: "how do we
stay ahead of the next big mobile technology trend?" They're not interested in
what everyone's doing already; they want to be ahead of the curve. So they'll
end up investing in things like
big data tools
Aurasma technology for their app
fun stunts like including a solar charger in their print ads
But Company C is different (let's call them "User-Driven Business, Inc.").
They're looking at it from a different perspective: a user-centric one. They
ask: "how can we take advantage of new technology to anticipate our users'
needs?"
We all need to become more like "User-Driven Business, Inc.", because our
customers are people, and technology is for people. Instead of asking about how
to 'do' mobile, or how to stay on top of new technology, we need to have the
mindset of making mobile a core part of the customers' journey, and keeping the
user at the center.
Which looks something like this:
Phase 1: Discover
77% of mobile searches now take place near a PC. What this means is that
mobile devices are rapidly becoming the device of choice, even when other
options are available. And with new behaviors like sequential screening and
multiscreening, mobile is increasingly an integral part of the customer's
discovery phase. 90% of users use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a
task over time, and 98% move between devices in a single day. Smartphones are
the most frequent 'companion' devices used while multiscreening (i.e. using
multiple devices at the same time).
So the first big trend we need to be aware of here is the need for a seamless
and consistent user experience across all devices.
There are three main areas in which mobile technology impacts on the Discover
phase:
website
search
social
1. Website
We've all heard the people who say that responsive design is always the
answer. And responsive design is fine. But it's a basic approach. And if you
don't approach it properly, you can end up with a subpar user experience.
Example: Starbucks
Starbucks made a beautiful responsive website; but on the smartphone version
the 'BUY NOW' button has dropped to the bottom of the page, under many many
reviews, a video and other non-essential content.
Desktop version:
Mobile version:
Small Steps
Consider using dynamic serving instead of pure responsive: this allows you to
serve different HTML based on user agent, while maintaining a single URL for
simplicity.
Think in terms of "content everywhere:" the concept of "Create Once Publish
Everywhere," discussed in more depth in the book by Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
"Content Everywhere" is a system which allows you to relate different types of
content using markup for a more search- and user-friendly approach, regardless
of the platform used to access your content.
CASE STUDY: BBC Food used this approach for their recipes and saw an increase
of more than 150,000 visitors weekly from search alone and overall traffic
doubled, from around 650,000 weekly visitors to around 1.3 million. (data from
Content Everywhere book)
Use long-term cookies for login: keep people logged in longer and remove the
extra step of needing a sign-in each time your users visit your site
Sync user accounts across all platforms:
a great EXAMPLE of this is Amazon Kindle: if you leave off in the middle of a
book on the iPhone app, and then pick it up on your Kindle, it will know where
you last left off (cross-device)
Test, test, test: start by visiting your site on a mobile (or use the built-in
emulator in your favorite browser).
TIP: Make sure you test for all the devices your customers use, or at least the
majority (you can find out what these are from your analytics data).
Mobile CRO and user testing: there are loads of tools available for this type of
testing; three that we like at Distilled are Qualaroo, CrazyEgg and Optimizely.
2. Search
The first big trend to keep in mind when it comes to search and discovery:
it's the same person regardless of device. So context and user intent become
more important than asking whether it's a mobile phone or a laptop.
CASE STUDY- Bravissimo
Bravissimo used a tool called WeatherFIT to customize their PPC campaigns
based on individual user context. Basically they would only show lingerie and
swimwear ads to users who had sunny/hot weather in their area.
Results: 600% increase in PPC-driven sales revenue and 103% increase in
conversion rate.
Example: Google
Google is huge for online personalization and context-based content:
Google Implicit Search can understand the context of a query (such as 'how tall
is Justin Bieber?' followed by 'how much does he weigh?') and return the correct
answer.
Google Now aims to provide you the information you need before you ask for it
(such as bus times, weather, metro service information, etc) by figuring out
where you are and what you are doing.
This leads us to the second big trend for discovery via search marketing:
anticipating your users' needs before they themselves are even aware of them. If
you can do this, you will be getting your brand in front of a whole new
audience.
Small Steps
If your business has brick-and-mortar locations, consider optimizing for local
search. Local can be a big vertical for mobile search.
If applicable to your audience, consider applying to get your business
integrated with Google Now (although be forewarned, it's not terribly easy at
this stage)
3. Social
Social is a huge channel for mobile. Four out of every five people who use
Facebook (daily) and Twitter do so on a mobile device. So social marketing is
mobile marketing.
But social is tricky, because brands no longer own the conversation. And the
first big trend we see in social marketing is that permission's not enough
anymore. There is now so much content and so much information available that we
don't have time to read all the emails we sign up for. This has led to 'filter
bubbles'.
You're probably all familiar with the Mark Zuckerberg quote: "A squirrel dying
in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than
people dying in Africa." This may sound extreme but the mindset it shows has a
very real impact on our marketing efforts.
Between technology (like Facebook's EdgeRank, which shows more content for
pages we engage with more frequently) and the people our customers follow (who
only share and curate the content they find worthwhile), we need to be thinking
in terms of peer-to-peer marketing if we want to have any hope of our target
audience even seeing our content. One quick sense check for this is simply to
ask yourself: "is it good enough to tell my friends about it?"
A final point: make sure any content you want to share via social channels is
also mobile friendly. Given that 80% of these users are on mobile devices, you
don't want them to be faced with this:
Small Steps
Allow your social media team to engage in a conversational (rather than a salesy
or overly formal) way.
Create content which people will want to share.
Ensure that all content for social sharing is mobile-friendly.
Phase 2: Explore
Once your users have discovered your brand, that's just the beginning; they
may need to explore their options a bit more before deciding to purchase from
you. And you need to be aware of that whole journey from start to finish.
There are four main areas impacted by mobile in the Explore phase:
Tracking
Showrooming
Personalization
Online/offline integration
1. Tracking
Track the person, not the device. Other people (like Avinash Kaushik and Craig
Bradford) can explain this much better than me, but the short version is:
Stop tracking each session as if it's a different user. Instead, track people
throughout their journey from start to finish - irrespective of device.
In the image above, wouldn't it be better if we knew that:
The 3 online visits + single conversion (CID 111, 222 and 333) and the offline
visit + conversion (CID 444) were actually
One person using 3 different devices plus making an in-store visit with a
second conversion (UID ABC)?
Small Steps
Implement Universal Analytics: this is a great first step towards user-based
tracking. Be aware of the limitations, however: users have to be logged in to
track them across device.
2. Showrooming
It's easy to panic about showrooming (when people look up your products
in-store on a phone and find lower prices online from your competitors).
But this sort of thing is never a good idea:
...and it's unnecessary. Instead, we should view showrooming behavior as an
opportunity; to reinforce the value that our products and our store provide.
CASE STUDY: Best Buy
In 2012, Best Buy decided to tackle showrooming head-on: giving specially
trained staff members tablets to search comparison sites for the lowest price,
and allowing them to match that lowest price in order to complete the sale.
Results: It was successful - I don't have exact metrics, but in February 2013
they rolled out a permanent price matching policy based on the positive results
of this pilot.
3. Personalization
Personalization is huge, and especially so on mobile devices which are much
more 'personal' devices than most (think how frequently laptops are used for
work/school, desktops for families or in other shared environments like
libraries - but smartphones are primarily used by individuals in leisure time).
Small Steps
Implement a recommendation engine for your logged-in customers. You can also do
a form of this with non-logged-in users - Medium are a good example of this.
CASE STUDY: LK Bennett/Qubit
LK Bennett recently ran a campaign using the Qubit tag management system to
personalize their website content by user context. The first test was targeted
at UK-based visitors who had not purchased online within nine months, but had
visited the site more than three times. These users were shown a special offer
for free delivery if they were about to leave again without purchasing.
Results: an 11% increase in conversions from that visitor segment. Another
test offered UK visitors free 14 day returns, and this saw a 14% conversion rate
increase.
4. Online/Offline Integration
Because mobile devices are portable, there are many more opportunities for
integration between the online and offline worlds via mobile devices.
What does this mean? The obvious example would be something like a QR code in
a print ad or on a billboard. A more sophisticated version is something like
Debenham's virtual pop-up stores at famous UK landmarks, which users scanned
with a special app and then were able to view and order clothing (after
virtually trying it on, of course!).
My favorite example of online/offline integration is from IKEA:
Example: IKEA catalogue app
IKEA created an augmented reality app for their recent catalogue, which
allowed users to use their device's built-in camera to try out how different
pieces of IKEA furniture would look in a given location in their home.
All of these examples - Best Buy encouraging showrooming and matching the
lowest price, IKEA allowing people to 'try out' the furniture before they buy,
and LK Bennett providing personalized offers about shipping and returns - play
into the overall brand experience of your users, and help to determine whether
they decide to buy from you or not. Basically, these are all different ways of
helping potential customers past the "uncertainty" phase and giving them the
extra little push to feel confident that they're making the right choices.
Ultimately, whatever examples we use, the big trend for the Explore phase is
to recognize the value of every touchpoint/interaction along the customer
journey. The purchase isn't the only thing that matters anymore. ...and last
click attribution is the devil.
Phase 3: Buy
This is all very well, but...what about the actual conversion? Well, the big
trend here is to make mobile checkout EASY.
There are two main areas we can improve in order to engage mobile users more
effectively in the purchase process:
Smarter checkout paths
Online/offline integration (yes, again!)
1. Smarter checkout paths
We need smarter conversion paths for mobile. My rule of thumb for this is
KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. ;)
Small Steps
Link the form fields to the correct keyboard - have you ever tried to use a
form on a phone and had the wrong type of keyboard pop up? This is actually
surprisingly easy to fix:
For phone number fields:
<input type="tel" />
for a numeric keyboard, use this:
<input type="text" pattern="\d*" novalidate />
for any email fields, use this:
<input type="email" />
to disable autocorrect:
<input type="text" autocorrect="off" />
Keep people logged in long-term: The fewer steps people have to take to
complete a purchase, the less likely they are to abandon it. Mobile devices
(smartphones in particular, tablets perhaps less so) are often only used by a
single individual, so it is often much more convenient to use websites and apps
which don't require a login every time. By using persistent cookies (on
websites) and saving password details in the phone (for apps) you make the
process easier for your users.
Don't neglect microconversions: It's all very well trying to convince people to
make big purchases via mobile; but don't forget about the smaller stuff. Things
like email signups and social sharing are very important and sometimes don't
work well on mobile devices.
2. Online/offline integration
If you have a physical store location(s), in-store mobile payment can also add
convenience to checkout.
Example: PayPal
If you accept PayPal payments, you can allow people to use the PayPal app to
checkout in-store as well as online.
Phase 4: Engage
Once your customer has purchased, you may feel that you can relax. But you're
not home free yet! You need to keep customers engaged with your brand and your
services/products even after they purchase in order to turn them into repeat
customers and, eventually, brand advocates.
There are three main areas in this phase which are important for mobile:
Apps
Email marketing
Social
1. Apps
The first question you should ask yourself if you're considering creating an
app is: "are you sure you need one?"
The benefit is, of course, that it's a walled garden. The downside is that
it's a saturated market: there are 900,000+ apps in the Apple Store and over 1
million on Google Play. And despite the high volume of apps, only a few rise to
the top: 10% of all iPhone app store revenue in Nov 2012 came from only 7 apps.
So unless you really do need one, it's not worth the extra effort and hassle.
How do you decide? Ask yourself, does my app (idea):
Add convenience?
Offer unique value?
Provide social value?
Offer incentives?
Entertain?
These are the attributes of a successful app. If it doesn't do any of these
things, you shouldn't build it.
CASE STUDY: Tesco Homeplus
Tesco Homeplus, in South Korea, are an excellent example of how to use apps to
retain customers (and this is also a great example of using online/offline
integration in the Buy phase). As a mid-/large-sized supermarket brand (trying
to compete against a bigger rival), they knew that their target customers were
very busy, working very long hours and lacking free time to go shopping for
groceries. So they created a 'virtual store' in the subway, which allowed app
users to scan items they wanted to purchase and checkout on their phone. If they
did this before 1pm, the groceries would be delivered to their home that
evening.
Results: their sales increased 130% in three months, and their number of
registered users went up by 76%
Ultimately, the key when it comes to apps is creating a unique experience and
meeting a specific user need. If you can't do this with your app, you probably
don't need one.
2. Email marketing
62% of emails are opened on mobile devices. So email marketing is mobile
marketing. And remember, you can send push notifications via email (dependent on
the user's settings) which gives them a benefit we might have associated
previously only with apps or SMS promotions.
Small steps
Send emails your customers want to open
Example: Innocent Drinks are a great example of email content which is fun,
full of their brand personality and regardless of whether I always have time to
read the emails, I never consider unsubscribing because I don't want to miss out
on it.
Use personalization and context: the average open rate for 'triggered' emails is
4x higher than for email newsletters (45-55% vs 10%)
Example: Smythson - in a blog post on email marketing, Lucy Wilsden described
how Smythson sent her the following email in September (just around the time she
was thinking about purchasing a new diary for 2014). Note the
individual-specific personalization - they used her initials in the product
image.
Use mobile friendly templates: MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are two services
that offer this.
TIP: If your preferred provider doesn't offer this, you can use one of these
services to build your email and then export the HTML into your preferred
provider's template.
Test your email campaigns: we like Litmus; there are also other options.
3. Social
Social isn't just part of the discovery process; it's also a great channel for
maintaining customer loyalty.
Example: Red Bull Wings
Red Bull has an incredible social campaign called Red Bull Wings. They monitor
mentions on Twitter of keywords like 'allnighters', 'midterms', etc; then
contact the tweeters to mail them a care package containing a Red Bull 4-pack
and a personalized note.
This is just one example; but the big trend with post-purchase social
engagement is: make current customers feel appreciated - and make it
individually personalized, if possible.
---
Bonus example
I've covered a lot of things in this post, so now I want to share a campaign
which I think pulls a lot of these together. It's a great example of how to
merge the online and offline worlds...but more importantly, it's an example of
one of the key takeaways from this post: the value of extreme (individual)
personalization and context recognition.
BMW's MINI Salutes You (part of the #MININotNormal campaign)
I love this campaign because it keeps the (individual) customer at the center.
It makes great use of personalization and context, as well as online/offline
integration. And it hits the 'post-buy engagement' part beautifully by showing
loyalty to current customers.
Results: As part of the online aspect, it also had great social reach (as you
might expect). That video alone (part of a larger campaign) showed 1,941 offline
customers were reached during that time...but there are 58,139 views (to date)
of the video on Youtube. (The main campaign video has 1,661,042 views.)
So â what are the final takeaways?
Well, to "do mobile" right:
Make it a core technology
Keep the user at the center
Ask yourself: "How can I use mobile technology to anticipate and fulfill my
users' needs?"
You might be thinking, "surely these are all just marketing principles,
though". Well that's TRUE.
Because mobile isn't separate anymore. In some ways, it's just another
"browser", and we need to test and optimize and create content for it just as we
would for any other browser. This won't be easy, but it will be worth it. So
let's buckle up and enjoy the ride!
----
How do you think we should be approaching the rise of mobile technology in
2014? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Here are the slides from the presentation this blog post was based on:
So You Have a Mobile Friendly Website ... What Now? from Bridget Randolph
If you'd like to watch the presentation video (for free!), head on over to our
video store page using this link: http://dis.tl/1hqEyd3. With a free account
(just a username and password), you'll get free access to the video to download
and stream at your hearts content.
If you enjoyed this post and the presentation video, you might also be
interested in our upcoming SearchLove conference in Bostonâparticularly in
the session by Adam Melson, titled "Listening to Your Customersâ Wants to
Achieve Their Needs." It's happening Apr 7-8 at the Joseph B Martin Conference
Center. We'd love to see you there!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Website. What Now?'
Posted by bridget.randolph
This post is based on a presentation I gave in October at SearchLove London
2013. The full slide deck is embedded at the end of the post. Also, use this
link to watch the video of the presentation for free! :)
----
Lots of people can tell you why you need a mobile-friendly website. And lots
of people can tell you how to build one. Including me. There have been countless
posts and articles and guides written about how to build a mobile-friendly site,
and how to optimize it for search, and how to track mobile visitors, and why
mobile is important.
So at this point, most people would agree that having a mobile-friendly
website is a basic requirement for any online brand:
57% of users won't recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site, and
40% have turned to a competitor's site after a bad mobile experience.
If you're just starting to think about it, you're falling behind. And you
don't need me to convince you. Instead, I want to talk about what happens next.
This post will cover some big-picture trends, case studies, examples and
tactics, but the overall theme is "online everywhere."
By the year 2017, it is predicted that 85% of the world's population will have
3G coverage. (It could be even more; initiatives like Facebook's Internet.org
campaign have the goal of bringing internet access to 100% of the world's
population.)
Mobile data in the year 2012 was 12x the size of the entire internet in the
year 2000. In other words, it grew by 1200%. And by the year 2018 it is expected
to grow 12x again...meaning the rate of growth is now twice as fast as when we
started (12x growth in 6 years instead of 12).
What all of this means is that we're becoming more connected than ever. And
mobile is now a channel which can empower you to reach people you can't reach
any other way, as the number of mobile users worldwide is set to overtake the
number of desktop users in 2014.
We are increasingly living in a multiscreen, device-agnostic world.
And this means that "mobile" can't just be an add-on anymore. My boss Will
Critchlow likes to say "there's no such thing as mobile." I would disagree
slightly: I'd suggest that instead, "there's no such thing as mobile for the
user."
Mobile is not a separate channel; it's a technology. So although at this point
there's "no such thing as mobile" for the user, don't be fooled: Making it easy
for users is really hard. We can't be lazy. What we need to be doing is asking
the right questions.
What does this look like? Let's take 3 scenarios: Companies A, B, and C.
Company A (call them the "Average Joe Corp.") are asking the question: "how do
we do 'mobile'?" And this means they'll be getting answers based on what
everyone else is doing, regardless of whether it's right for them or their
users. For example:
a separate m. website
an app
SMS promotions
etc.
Company B ("Early Adopters Ltd.") have a slightly better question: "how do we
stay ahead of the next big mobile technology trend?" They're not interested in
what everyone's doing already; they want to be ahead of the curve. So they'll
end up investing in things like
big data tools
Aurasma technology for their app
fun stunts like including a solar charger in their print ads
But Company C is different (let's call them "User-Driven Business, Inc.").
They're looking at it from a different perspective: a user-centric one. They
ask: "how can we take advantage of new technology to anticipate our users'
needs?"
We all need to become more like "User-Driven Business, Inc.", because our
customers are people, and technology is for people. Instead of asking about how
to 'do' mobile, or how to stay on top of new technology, we need to have the
mindset of making mobile a core part of the customers' journey, and keeping the
user at the center.
Which looks something like this:
Phase 1: Discover
77% of mobile searches now take place near a PC. What this means is that
mobile devices are rapidly becoming the device of choice, even when other
options are available. And with new behaviors like sequential screening and
multiscreening, mobile is increasingly an integral part of the customer's
discovery phase. 90% of users use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a
task over time, and 98% move between devices in a single day. Smartphones are
the most frequent 'companion' devices used while multiscreening (i.e. using
multiple devices at the same time).
So the first big trend we need to be aware of here is the need for a seamless
and consistent user experience across all devices.
There are three main areas in which mobile technology impacts on the Discover
phase:
website
search
social
1. Website
We've all heard the people who say that responsive design is always the
answer. And responsive design is fine. But it's a basic approach. And if you
don't approach it properly, you can end up with a subpar user experience.
Example: Starbucks
Starbucks made a beautiful responsive website; but on the smartphone version
the 'BUY NOW' button has dropped to the bottom of the page, under many many
reviews, a video and other non-essential content.
Desktop version:
Mobile version:
Small Steps
Consider using dynamic serving instead of pure responsive: this allows you to
serve different HTML based on user agent, while maintaining a single URL for
simplicity.
Think in terms of "content everywhere:" the concept of "Create Once Publish
Everywhere," discussed in more depth in the book by Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
"Content Everywhere" is a system which allows you to relate different types of
content using markup for a more search- and user-friendly approach, regardless
of the platform used to access your content.
CASE STUDY: BBC Food used this approach for their recipes and saw an increase
of more than 150,000 visitors weekly from search alone and overall traffic
doubled, from around 650,000 weekly visitors to around 1.3 million. (data from
Content Everywhere book)
Use long-term cookies for login: keep people logged in longer and remove the
extra step of needing a sign-in each time your users visit your site
Sync user accounts across all platforms:
a great EXAMPLE of this is Amazon Kindle: if you leave off in the middle of a
book on the iPhone app, and then pick it up on your Kindle, it will know where
you last left off (cross-device)
Test, test, test: start by visiting your site on a mobile (or use the built-in
emulator in your favorite browser).
TIP: Make sure you test for all the devices your customers use, or at least the
majority (you can find out what these are from your analytics data).
Mobile CRO and user testing: there are loads of tools available for this type of
testing; three that we like at Distilled are Qualaroo, CrazyEgg and Optimizely.
2. Search
The first big trend to keep in mind when it comes to search and discovery:
it's the same person regardless of device. So context and user intent become
more important than asking whether it's a mobile phone or a laptop.
CASE STUDY- Bravissimo
Bravissimo used a tool called WeatherFIT to customize their PPC campaigns
based on individual user context. Basically they would only show lingerie and
swimwear ads to users who had sunny/hot weather in their area.
Results: 600% increase in PPC-driven sales revenue and 103% increase in
conversion rate.
Example: Google
Google is huge for online personalization and context-based content:
Google Implicit Search can understand the context of a query (such as 'how tall
is Justin Bieber?' followed by 'how much does he weigh?') and return the correct
answer.
Google Now aims to provide you the information you need before you ask for it
(such as bus times, weather, metro service information, etc) by figuring out
where you are and what you are doing.
This leads us to the second big trend for discovery via search marketing:
anticipating your users' needs before they themselves are even aware of them. If
you can do this, you will be getting your brand in front of a whole new
audience.
Small Steps
If your business has brick-and-mortar locations, consider optimizing for local
search. Local can be a big vertical for mobile search.
If applicable to your audience, consider applying to get your business
integrated with Google Now (although be forewarned, it's not terribly easy at
this stage)
3. Social
Social is a huge channel for mobile. Four out of every five people who use
Facebook (daily) and Twitter do so on a mobile device. So social marketing is
mobile marketing.
But social is tricky, because brands no longer own the conversation. And the
first big trend we see in social marketing is that permission's not enough
anymore. There is now so much content and so much information available that we
don't have time to read all the emails we sign up for. This has led to 'filter
bubbles'.
You're probably all familiar with the Mark Zuckerberg quote: "A squirrel dying
in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than
people dying in Africa." This may sound extreme but the mindset it shows has a
very real impact on our marketing efforts.
Between technology (like Facebook's EdgeRank, which shows more content for
pages we engage with more frequently) and the people our customers follow (who
only share and curate the content they find worthwhile), we need to be thinking
in terms of peer-to-peer marketing if we want to have any hope of our target
audience even seeing our content. One quick sense check for this is simply to
ask yourself: "is it good enough to tell my friends about it?"
A final point: make sure any content you want to share via social channels is
also mobile friendly. Given that 80% of these users are on mobile devices, you
don't want them to be faced with this:
Small Steps
Allow your social media team to engage in a conversational (rather than a salesy
or overly formal) way.
Create content which people will want to share.
Ensure that all content for social sharing is mobile-friendly.
Phase 2: Explore
Once your users have discovered your brand, that's just the beginning; they
may need to explore their options a bit more before deciding to purchase from
you. And you need to be aware of that whole journey from start to finish.
There are four main areas impacted by mobile in the Explore phase:
Tracking
Showrooming
Personalization
Online/offline integration
1. Tracking
Track the person, not the device. Other people (like Avinash Kaushik and Craig
Bradford) can explain this much better than me, but the short version is:
Stop tracking each session as if it's a different user. Instead, track people
throughout their journey from start to finish - irrespective of device.
In the image above, wouldn't it be better if we knew that:
The 3 online visits + single conversion (CID 111, 222 and 333) and the offline
visit + conversion (CID 444) were actually
One person using 3 different devices plus making an in-store visit with a
second conversion (UID ABC)?
Small Steps
Implement Universal Analytics: this is a great first step towards user-based
tracking. Be aware of the limitations, however: users have to be logged in to
track them across device.
2. Showrooming
It's easy to panic about showrooming (when people look up your products
in-store on a phone and find lower prices online from your competitors).
But this sort of thing is never a good idea:
...and it's unnecessary. Instead, we should view showrooming behavior as an
opportunity; to reinforce the value that our products and our store provide.
CASE STUDY: Best Buy
In 2012, Best Buy decided to tackle showrooming head-on: giving specially
trained staff members tablets to search comparison sites for the lowest price,
and allowing them to match that lowest price in order to complete the sale.
Results: It was successful - I don't have exact metrics, but in February 2013
they rolled out a permanent price matching policy based on the positive results
of this pilot.
3. Personalization
Personalization is huge, and especially so on mobile devices which are much
more 'personal' devices than most (think how frequently laptops are used for
work/school, desktops for families or in other shared environments like
libraries - but smartphones are primarily used by individuals in leisure time).
Small Steps
Implement a recommendation engine for your logged-in customers. You can also do
a form of this with non-logged-in users - Medium are a good example of this.
CASE STUDY: LK Bennett/Qubit
LK Bennett recently ran a campaign using the Qubit tag management system to
personalize their website content by user context. The first test was targeted
at UK-based visitors who had not purchased online within nine months, but had
visited the site more than three times. These users were shown a special offer
for free delivery if they were about to leave again without purchasing.
Results: an 11% increase in conversions from that visitor segment. Another
test offered UK visitors free 14 day returns, and this saw a 14% conversion rate
increase.
4. Online/Offline Integration
Because mobile devices are portable, there are many more opportunities for
integration between the online and offline worlds via mobile devices.
What does this mean? The obvious example would be something like a QR code in
a print ad or on a billboard. A more sophisticated version is something like
Debenham's virtual pop-up stores at famous UK landmarks, which users scanned
with a special app and then were able to view and order clothing (after
virtually trying it on, of course!).
My favorite example of online/offline integration is from IKEA:
Example: IKEA catalogue app
IKEA created an augmented reality app for their recent catalogue, which
allowed users to use their device's built-in camera to try out how different
pieces of IKEA furniture would look in a given location in their home.
All of these examples - Best Buy encouraging showrooming and matching the
lowest price, IKEA allowing people to 'try out' the furniture before they buy,
and LK Bennett providing personalized offers about shipping and returns - play
into the overall brand experience of your users, and help to determine whether
they decide to buy from you or not. Basically, these are all different ways of
helping potential customers past the "uncertainty" phase and giving them the
extra little push to feel confident that they're making the right choices.
Ultimately, whatever examples we use, the big trend for the Explore phase is
to recognize the value of every touchpoint/interaction along the customer
journey. The purchase isn't the only thing that matters anymore. ...and last
click attribution is the devil.
Phase 3: Buy
This is all very well, but...what about the actual conversion? Well, the big
trend here is to make mobile checkout EASY.
There are two main areas we can improve in order to engage mobile users more
effectively in the purchase process:
Smarter checkout paths
Online/offline integration (yes, again!)
1. Smarter checkout paths
We need smarter conversion paths for mobile. My rule of thumb for this is
KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. ;)
Small Steps
Link the form fields to the correct keyboard - have you ever tried to use a
form on a phone and had the wrong type of keyboard pop up? This is actually
surprisingly easy to fix:
For phone number fields:
<input type="tel" />
for a numeric keyboard, use this:
<input type="text" pattern="\d*" novalidate />
for any email fields, use this:
<input type="email" />
to disable autocorrect:
<input type="text" autocorrect="off" />
Keep people logged in long-term: The fewer steps people have to take to
complete a purchase, the less likely they are to abandon it. Mobile devices
(smartphones in particular, tablets perhaps less so) are often only used by a
single individual, so it is often much more convenient to use websites and apps
which don't require a login every time. By using persistent cookies (on
websites) and saving password details in the phone (for apps) you make the
process easier for your users.
Don't neglect microconversions: It's all very well trying to convince people to
make big purchases via mobile; but don't forget about the smaller stuff. Things
like email signups and social sharing are very important and sometimes don't
work well on mobile devices.
2. Online/offline integration
If you have a physical store location(s), in-store mobile payment can also add
convenience to checkout.
Example: PayPal
If you accept PayPal payments, you can allow people to use the PayPal app to
checkout in-store as well as online.
Phase 4: Engage
Once your customer has purchased, you may feel that you can relax. But you're
not home free yet! You need to keep customers engaged with your brand and your
services/products even after they purchase in order to turn them into repeat
customers and, eventually, brand advocates.
There are three main areas in this phase which are important for mobile:
Apps
Email marketing
Social
1. Apps
The first question you should ask yourself if you're considering creating an
app is: "are you sure you need one?"
The benefit is, of course, that it's a walled garden. The downside is that
it's a saturated market: there are 900,000+ apps in the Apple Store and over 1
million on Google Play. And despite the high volume of apps, only a few rise to
the top: 10% of all iPhone app store revenue in Nov 2012 came from only 7 apps.
So unless you really do need one, it's not worth the extra effort and hassle.
How do you decide? Ask yourself, does my app (idea):
Add convenience?
Offer unique value?
Provide social value?
Offer incentives?
Entertain?
These are the attributes of a successful app. If it doesn't do any of these
things, you shouldn't build it.
CASE STUDY: Tesco Homeplus
Tesco Homeplus, in South Korea, are an excellent example of how to use apps to
retain customers (and this is also a great example of using online/offline
integration in the Buy phase). As a mid-/large-sized supermarket brand (trying
to compete against a bigger rival), they knew that their target customers were
very busy, working very long hours and lacking free time to go shopping for
groceries. So they created a 'virtual store' in the subway, which allowed app
users to scan items they wanted to purchase and checkout on their phone. If they
did this before 1pm, the groceries would be delivered to their home that
evening.
Results: their sales increased 130% in three months, and their number of
registered users went up by 76%
Ultimately, the key when it comes to apps is creating a unique experience and
meeting a specific user need. If you can't do this with your app, you probably
don't need one.
2. Email marketing
62% of emails are opened on mobile devices. So email marketing is mobile
marketing. And remember, you can send push notifications via email (dependent on
the user's settings) which gives them a benefit we might have associated
previously only with apps or SMS promotions.
Small steps
Send emails your customers want to open
Example: Innocent Drinks are a great example of email content which is fun,
full of their brand personality and regardless of whether I always have time to
read the emails, I never consider unsubscribing because I don't want to miss out
on it.
Use personalization and context: the average open rate for 'triggered' emails is
4x higher than for email newsletters (45-55% vs 10%)
Example: Smythson - in a blog post on email marketing, Lucy Wilsden described
how Smythson sent her the following email in September (just around the time she
was thinking about purchasing a new diary for 2014). Note the
individual-specific personalization - they used her initials in the product
image.
Use mobile friendly templates: MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are two services
that offer this.
TIP: If your preferred provider doesn't offer this, you can use one of these
services to build your email and then export the HTML into your preferred
provider's template.
Test your email campaigns: we like Litmus; there are also other options.
3. Social
Social isn't just part of the discovery process; it's also a great channel for
maintaining customer loyalty.
Example: Red Bull Wings
Red Bull has an incredible social campaign called Red Bull Wings. They monitor
mentions on Twitter of keywords like 'allnighters', 'midterms', etc; then
contact the tweeters to mail them a care package containing a Red Bull 4-pack
and a personalized note.
This is just one example; but the big trend with post-purchase social
engagement is: make current customers feel appreciated - and make it
individually personalized, if possible.
---
Bonus example
I've covered a lot of things in this post, so now I want to share a campaign
which I think pulls a lot of these together. It's a great example of how to
merge the online and offline worlds...but more importantly, it's an example of
one of the key takeaways from this post: the value of extreme (individual)
personalization and context recognition.
BMW's MINI Salutes You (part of the #MININotNormal campaign)
I love this campaign because it keeps the (individual) customer at the center.
It makes great use of personalization and context, as well as online/offline
integration. And it hits the 'post-buy engagement' part beautifully by showing
loyalty to current customers.
Results: As part of the online aspect, it also had great social reach (as you
might expect). That video alone (part of a larger campaign) showed 1,941 offline
customers were reached during that time...but there are 58,139 views (to date)
of the video on Youtube. (The main campaign video has 1,661,042 views.)
So â what are the final takeaways?
Well, to "do mobile" right:
Make it a core technology
Keep the user at the center
Ask yourself: "How can I use mobile technology to anticipate and fulfill my
users' needs?"
You might be thinking, "surely these are all just marketing principles,
though". Well that's TRUE.
Because mobile isn't separate anymore. In some ways, it's just another
"browser", and we need to test and optimize and create content for it just as we
would for any other browser. This won't be easy, but it will be worth it. So
let's buckle up and enjoy the ride!
----
How do you think we should be approaching the rise of mobile technology in
2014? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Here are the slides from the presentation this blog post was based on:
So You Have a Mobile Friendly Website ... What Now? from Bridget Randolph
If you'd like to watch the presentation video (for free!), head on over to our
video store page using this link: http://dis.tl/1hqEyd3. With a free account
(just a username and password), you'll get free access to the video to download
and stream at your hearts content.
If you enjoyed this post and the presentation video, you might also be
interested in our upcoming SearchLove conference in Bostonâparticularly in
the session by Adam Melson, titled "Listening to Your Customersâ Wants to
Achieve Their Needs." It's happening Apr 7-8 at the Joseph B Martin Conference
Center. We'd love to see you there!
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[Build Backlinks Online] How to Tell Your Story and Connect with Your Audience on YouTube
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How to Tell Your Story and
Connect with Your Audience on YouTube'
Are you making the most out of your YouTube channel? Here's what I mean by that.
I'm sure by now you have uploaded a video or two to YouTube. Perhaps you even
created a playlist or learned how to add annotations that link back to your
website. Of cours...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/zjYkS0UvqPw/tell-your-story-youtube.html
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
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Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Connect with Your Audience on YouTube'
Are you making the most out of your YouTube channel? Here's what I mean by that.
I'm sure by now you have uploaded a video or two to YouTube. Perhaps you even
created a playlist or learned how to add annotations that link back to your
website. Of cours...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BasicBlogTips/~3/zjYkS0UvqPw/tell-your-story-youtube.html
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, 'The 9 Best Email Subject Line Styles to Increase Your Open Rates' 
You may view the latest post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WordStreamBlog/~3/Zg4BTy4ob88/email-subject-lines 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
How many unread emails do you have in your inbox? 300? 800? Or maybe, if you're like me and are on countless mailing lists, 2,644? And that's after a little Gmail spring cleaning!
We get a TON of emails every day, and a lot of them are never opened. People are inundated with boatloads of information – more than ever before in history! But we don't have more time to soak it all in. The chances of your email being ignored are pretty high – unless of course, you have a rockin' sockin' subject line.
Your subject line is your first (and maybe your last) impression on users. In many ways, your email subject line is more important than your email body. After all, a great newsletter is worthless if it never sees the light of day.
There are a few different schools of thought when it comes to creating slam dunk subject lines. We'll be covering 9 different types of effective email subject lines and sprinkling examples throughout.
1. Simple, No Nonsense Email Subject Lines
There's a lot to be said for minimalism – users need you to be clear and concise in your subject lines, as time is always an asset.
MailChimp conducted an email subject line study and found that short, descriptive subject lines fare better than cheesy lures. Some might bristle up at the accusation that humor and creativity should take a back seat when creating good subject lines for emails, especially since many marketing experts say otherwise. It's worth noting that this succinct approach is most applicable with notification emails, in which a user already has a connection with the content you're delivering.
Most of these subject line examples involve updates or notifications connected with a user's social media activity, order status, etc. These emails have a specific purpose, and so their subject lines should be specific as well.
2. Funny Email Subject Lines
A humorous subject line can really stick out among the dry, dull emails surrounding it. Humor it a touchy thing though – it thrives on exclusivity, which isn't always great if you're trying to appeal to the masses. However, if you know your audience well and your emails are targeted, a well placed joke can get your email opened and can earn major reputation points with folks on your wavelength.
Some funny email subject line examples:
- Please Touch Me! Enterprise Delight via Multitouch
- Defense Against the Dark Arts: ESAPI
- Do Gamers Dream of HTML5 Sheep?
- LEAN STARTUP: Baby Got (Feed)Back - Putting the Lean in Learn
The "touch me" line is a chuckle that will be understood by most readers, but the cleverness of the other funny email subject lines might be lost on some users who didn't attend Hogwarts or haven't taken their Voight-Kampff empathy test. But if you can recite every line of Sir Mix a Lot's Baby Got Back word for word…like some of us can… you'll love that "Lean Startup" subject line.
Note: The awesome email subject lines above and several text subject lines below are borrowed from this ClickZ article, full of many great examples.
3. Controversial/Shocking Email Subject Lines
Controversy (sometimes) sells, and it most certainly grabs attention. Using shock, controversy, or insult in your subject lines requires you to tread really carefully. You may get opens, but at the cost of customers. This strategy requires you to be confident in your understanding of your audience's tastes and perceptions. It's a bit of a gamble, but the pay-off can be pretty great – would you simply gloss over the subject lines below? Not likely.
- Everyone Is Gay: Social Media As Social Action
- Why Your 5-Year-Old Is More Digital Than Most CMOs
- Your Marketing Sucks: Why You Need to Think Local
4. Single-Word Subject Lines
One effective email subject line strategy involves going ultra-minimalist with one-word subject lines. Let's take a peek at the promotions tab of my Gmail. The promotion tab is scheduled for a major makeover – Google is starting to display promotional emails in a image-oriented design inspired by Pinterest. If this new setup sticks, pictures will usurp subject lines as the pivotal email element.
Until then, we still need to worry about the current state of the promotions tab. It's chock full o' mess, with stacks upon stacks of unopened emails. Which one stands out? For me it's Amazon Local's M3 subject line.
From a simple design perspective, you can see why the Amazon Local subject line catches the eye – its length and shape stand out from the other largely similar-looking structures.
Another great email subject line example comes from Mequoda with the simple subject line of:
- Panic
It's just a single word, but it's an emotionally huge one. What should I be panicking about? Am I in danger? What's going on? Am I having an existential crisis? Emotionally-walloping words make a big impression.
5. Email Subject Lines with Numbers & Lists
Many of the factors that make up a good blog post title also make a good email subject line. Incorporating numbers into your subject line attracts attention, as our brains are naturally drawn to digits. This tends to be why top 10 lists are so successful – lists are easier for our brains to process and they create curiosity, in addition to providing the promise of a quick and easy read.
Numbers and list email subject lines stand out for the same reasons that one-word subject lines or unusual punctuation do – they are visually jarring. An article at The New Yorker discusses our avid adoration of listmania:
"Whenever we're scanning the environment for nothing in particular, our visual system is arrested by the things that don't fit—features that suddenly change or somehow stand out from the background. A headline that is graphically salient in some way has a greater chance of capturing our eye, and in an environment where dozens of headlines and stories vie for attention, numerals break up the visual field."
Basically, the ultimate goal is to make your email subject line visually stand out. How you do that is up to you!
6. Personalized Subject Lines
Incorporating personalization techniques into email subject lines is another way to increase open rates. By personalization I don't mean incorporating a user's name into the subject line – this has become so common practice that many users glaze over these as spam. Instead, try location-specific offers and language, or interest targeting. LivingSocial and Groupon are old pros at this, sending emails with subject lines promoting deals in your area.
LivingSocial also sends me emails about deals I looked at but didn't end up buying by utilizing the very effective but always semi-creepy remarketing strategy. LivingSocial also sends me new deals based on my past purchases. I've bought a few Paint Nite and pottery deals in the past, so art-related offers are the ones I see most often in my inbox. They've got my ticket alright!
The subject line above combines personalization (via remarketing) with scarcity to create an effective email subject line. Brava!
In a broader sense, it's good practice to understand your audience well enough to know what language, style, and offers will be attractive to them.
Thrillist knows exactly who their audience is – the young, drinking crowd – and their conversational tone fits perfectly here with their fun email subject lines.
Thrillist knows their audience. Photo courtesy of Bem Devassa.
Thrillist is doing a ton of other stuff right too; they've got lists, localization, and pay tribute to a holiday. Who doesn't want to impress their buddies with fun Guinness facts on St. Paddy's?
7. Questions & Other Punctuation in Email Subject Lines
Question marks and unusual punctuation offer another method for standing out from the email masses. Exclamation marks can be useful, but are so over-used in subject lines that they don't tend to be very powerful. Instead, experiment with some fun symbols or loud punctuation to attract 'dem eyeballs.
Asking your readers a question, as opposed to a standard statement, immediately engages them. Questions enter an instant dialogue with users, making them more likely to be opened.
Above, Banana Republic combines a question with scarcity tactics. Sephora asks an emotionally-engaging question (really? you care?) with just two words, creating a truly great subject line.
8. "Missing Out" & Other Scarcity Tactics in Subject Lines
We have a deep, inherent terror of being left behind, of missing out – that flock mentality was a survival instinct once, but now it's just another subject line strategy to goad us into a purchase. Email subject lines threatening scarcity (limited time offer!) tend to perform well, and this language is also common practice with squeeze pages. People will commit some pretty cold actions to avoid "missing out." Yup, we've all got a serious case of the FOMOs. Throw in some scarcity words and you may be surprised how your click rates will change.
Examples above incorporate numbers, scarcity, punctuation, and partial capitalization (emphasis on the partial) for some serious subject line success.
9. Mysterious Email Subject Lines
As Scooby-Doo or Sue Grafton can tell you, people dig a little mystery in their lives. Giving readers a little taste of something intriguing might cause them to bite.
Email Subject Line Best Practices
Some general good email subject line best practices to keep in mind when crafting those lures.
- Write multiple subject lines. You should write 10 subject lines for every email, just as you should write 10 titles for every blog post. Then choose the best
- Keep it under 50 characters. It's general best practice to keeps subject lines to fewer than 50 characters. Subject lines with less than 50 characters have higher open rates and click-through-rates than those with 50+. Go over 50 characters and you risk being cut o-.
- Alliteration. An ample amount of alliteration attracts! Give it a try for some catchy email subject lines.
- More caps ≠ More opens. Covering your subject line in caps WILL NOT HELP YOU. Caps are powerful, but not to be trifled with. Use them sparingly and responsibly, like grenades.
- Know your audience. Your best bet for creating good email subject lines will be understanding your audience intimately and catering to them. This is a major rule for pretty much all aspects of online marketing, and while it can be a bit tougher in a limited character field like a subject line, matching your audience's interests and mannerisms is essential if you really want solid open rates.
- What's your tone? Most good email subject lines rely on a conversationalist tone to attract readers. Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, known for their super-successful article headlines, take advantage of a casual, conversational tone.
- Call to action. It's never a bad idea to try a call to action in your email subject line. While many opt-out due to limited character space, call to actions may improve open rates.
Even a simple "Go!" can serve as a motivating call to action.
- Using You/Your. While name-calling is on the out, it's still considered a best practice to use "you" and "your" wording to speak directly and comfortably with readers.
- Put Yourself in the "From" field. Keep your "from" section professional and consistent for business subject lines. This isn't this place to be a goof ball – with so much spam floods, users want to see that you are a legitimate and trusted source. Most business emails put their brand name in the "from" field, or go with something along the lines of "John Smith from InvitaCorp".
- Always A/B test subject lines. I must sound like a broken record – I know, I know, A/B testing blaa blaa, so important, blaa blaa. Well it is! You should A/B test everything you can get your keyboardy fingers on, email subject lines included.
- Pay attention to the preview. The email preview that follows the subject line is a valuable piece of property, and yet so many businesses ignore it or let it get filled with garbage text.
Doing it right:
Doing it wrong:
Many emails have text like this or something similar because they want the option to view in web browser for those reading on mobile devices. Instead, move the "view in browser" links and other mumbo-jumbo to the bottom of the email so you can make the most of the preview field.
- See something you like? Steal it! All the world's greatest artists are thieves – they "borrow" from others, building on existing works to create their own. Don't be afraid to break bad. If you see great subject lines that you think will work for your business, nab them! Tweak them a bit and try them on for size. Remember, imitation is flattery, so flatter the hell out of the best email subject lines.
Why Do My Open Rates Suck?
Having trouble with your email open rates? Working on your subject lines will help, but there may be other factors at play, such as:
- Is the email viewable? If your email doesn't read well on a user's device, they won't bother trying to decipher it.
- Are you being a pest? If you've been emailing folks every day, they may be fed up with you and won't be as likely to open your emails if you've been making yourself an annoyance.
- When did you send it? Many people don't check their emails as often on the weekend.
- Quality of your email list. Is this a solid, targeted email list? If your list isn't high-quality, it may reflect in your open rates.
Hopefully we've given you the information you need to make email subject line eye candy. These tips should help with open rates, but retaining those readers? That's up to you!
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.
Friday 28 March 2014
[Build Backlinks Online] Surviving the SEO "Slog" - Whiteboard Friday
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Surviving the SEO Slog -
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Working to ingrain SEO best practices in a company can take several months,
and can involve a lengthy period of diminishing returns that we sometimes call
the "SEO slog." To make things worse, our clients and colleagues often expect a
consistent improvement. The difference between those expectations and the
reality is what Rand tackles in today's Whiteboard Friday, offering you four
ways to minimize what he calls the "delta of dissatisfaction." Credit to Scott
Clark at BuzzMaven for the concept (see his original post here).
Surviving the SEO Slog - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
I also made a graphic version of the SEO Slog below (feel free to re-use):
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about the SEO slog. This is that really tough
experience that many, many SEOs go through where, essentially, you're putting a
lot of effort into improving your rankings, improving your content, improving
your keyword targeting, earning those links and mentions and social signals,
user and usage data things, all the things that are going to help you perform on
search engines, but you're not seeing results. Virtually everyone who's in the
field has experienced this over the course of their career.
It happens because, a lot of the time, Google has got many, many triggers in
their ranking systems to kind of check whether effort is worthy enough, or
signals are organic and ongoing enough, to earn the site continued rankings, or
whether there should be some sort of consideration and then evaluation and delay
between when the effort is put in and things are improved and when results
actually happen.
This is insidiously frustrating for lots of folks in the field. By the way,
Google isn't the only one responsible. Many times what happens is that SEOs make
recommendations for organizations or inside their own organizations. They work
with their marketing and their engineering teams to try and get things done, and
it just takes a long time. It takes a long time to see the results of those.
So I actually really appreciated Scott Clark from BuzzMaven in Lexington. You
can follow him on Twitter on @scottclark. Scott described this very eloquently.
I like the graphic that he put together about the SEO slog. His blog post, by
the way, was called "Thriving In the SEO Slog," and he talked to a number of
industry leaders, particularly those from consulting firms, about this process.
He had a chart very similar to the one that I'm going to show you here.
Essentially, we have on the side here, effort. So a little bit of effort down
on the bottom. Lots of effort and then a ton of effort right up on the top.
Then, sort of month one through six, as you're starting those SEO efforts and
campaigns. This can happen on an entire website level, but this can also happen
on a particular subsection of a website, or a new group of keywords, or a new
set of content that you're targeting.
What frequently happens is you see what's needed to see return on investment,
to see those improvements over time, versus what the expectations are, which
I've got in purple versus orange, kind of diverge. So at the start, what's
needed, a lot of the time at the very start of an SEO campaign, especially if
previous best practices haven't been employed, it's actually really minimal to
start seeing a positive return on investment. But, over time, that effort ramps
up a ton. You've got to do an incredible amount just to see a continued return
on investment over those first few months, and there's a delay between the
effort that you put in here and when you're seeing results towards the latter
few months of a campaign.
Unfortunately, expectations are the opposite. A lot of clients, managers,
teams, the people in your startup with you, the other folks that are in your
consulting group, your client, all of these folks are expecting to see that
effort is a little bit higher at the start, and then you kind of get the ball
rolling and it goes down. That actually is true. The problem is it takes a long
time to get that ball rolling. So what I usually see, what most of us in the
industry see is that that effort ramps up tremendously in those first few
months, and then over time it does go down a little bit. Maintaining those
ongoing best practices is a little bit easier.
But this, right here, the difference between expectations and reality, that's
what I call the delta of dissatisfaction. People just get really frustrated
around this.
There are a few good mitigation strategies, and some of these were mentioned,
actually, by the experts that Scott Clark talked to in his post. The first one,
the one that nearly every consultant mentioned, and I think is very smart, is to
create the right expectations.
If you go into a client meeting, or you sit down with your marketing team, or
you're talking to your CEO about what you can and can't accomplish, if you
create the expectation that SEO is going to be this not necessarily silver
bullet, but that you will make these investments and because things are done so
badly today and the company you used to work for or the other websites that
you've worked on had such success when you implemented these best practices,
that you feel confident you can increase their rankings and their traffic and
the acquisition of customers dramatically.
The problem gets created right then and there, because in the SEO world, for
the last decade, for some reason people have held these two beliefs about SEO.
Number one, that it's a one-time activity, which is just dead wrong as all of
you who are watching know. Number two is that once you optimize for the search
engines, you are now optimal, and that means you don't require additional
ongoing effort, and the search engines will reward your efforts once they see
them. Since Google's crawling us so fast, well, we must get that benefit
immediately.
Neither of these are the case. So creating the right expectations up front
can work wonders. In fact, if you want to go ahead and make this chart and put
it right in your presentations, as you're showing the team, here's what needs to
be fixed. Here's what we need to do. Here's what I think we can accomplish. But,
by the way, you're going to think this can happen a lot faster than it can
happen. If you tell them that up front, you're creating those right
expectations.
Number two, when things are going well, that's a dangerous time, a very
dangerous time. I urge folks not to just sort of celebrate and then create new
projections, like, "Hey, well, we accomplished X. Y is certainly going to
happen, and Y is going to be 2X, and 3X and 4X in six months and seven months
and eight months." Always create both a contingency plan, in case that traffic
increase is temporary, and a conservative budget.
So I actually really like making budgets around traffic, around performance
here at Moz, and in general that contain a best-case scenario and also a "and
here's what we'll spend before we know whether this is the truth." If you don't,
you can end up very, very sad.
Number three, make sure SEO isn't your only inbound traffic channel, and it's
not the only inbound marketing effort that you're working on. If you're doing
social media marketing and content marketing, you're building an email list, and
you're doing branding and PR and outreach and connecting with your industry,
you're speaking at events, you're doing paid forms of advertising as well,
great. Now you've got some mitigation. Now you aren't solely relying on SEO to
provide all of the returns, and, thus, you can handle being off budget. If
Google is 70% of your traffic and you miss by 10%, that's huge. If Google is 20%
of your traffic and you miss by 10%, oh, it's not so bad. It's only 2% off
budget.
Number four, the last thing I'll recommend here is that you measure and
report leading indicators. By leading indicators, I mean not just the pages that
are receiving traffic, but also things like link signals, rankings for long-tail
stuff, looking at social shares, these leading indicators, these things that
tend to, over time, correlate as rankings catch up to how your performance is
going. By reporting on that kind of stuff, higher engagement on pages, those
leading indicators will give you a sense of how things might be going two,
three, four, five, six months from now with your search traffic and your
rankings. That can be extremely helpful.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday,and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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/LB7PZB_SNPg/surviving-the-seo-slog-whiteboard-friday
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
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Working to ingrain SEO best practices in a company can take several months,
and can involve a lengthy period of diminishing returns that we sometimes call
the "SEO slog." To make things worse, our clients and colleagues often expect a
consistent improvement. The difference between those expectations and the
reality is what Rand tackles in today's Whiteboard Friday, offering you four
ways to minimize what he calls the "delta of dissatisfaction." Credit to Scott
Clark at BuzzMaven for the concept (see his original post here).
Surviving the SEO Slog - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
I also made a graphic version of the SEO Slog below (feel free to re-use):
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about the SEO slog. This is that really tough
experience that many, many SEOs go through where, essentially, you're putting a
lot of effort into improving your rankings, improving your content, improving
your keyword targeting, earning those links and mentions and social signals,
user and usage data things, all the things that are going to help you perform on
search engines, but you're not seeing results. Virtually everyone who's in the
field has experienced this over the course of their career.
It happens because, a lot of the time, Google has got many, many triggers in
their ranking systems to kind of check whether effort is worthy enough, or
signals are organic and ongoing enough, to earn the site continued rankings, or
whether there should be some sort of consideration and then evaluation and delay
between when the effort is put in and things are improved and when results
actually happen.
This is insidiously frustrating for lots of folks in the field. By the way,
Google isn't the only one responsible. Many times what happens is that SEOs make
recommendations for organizations or inside their own organizations. They work
with their marketing and their engineering teams to try and get things done, and
it just takes a long time. It takes a long time to see the results of those.
So I actually really appreciated Scott Clark from BuzzMaven in Lexington. You
can follow him on Twitter on @scottclark. Scott described this very eloquently.
I like the graphic that he put together about the SEO slog. His blog post, by
the way, was called "Thriving In the SEO Slog," and he talked to a number of
industry leaders, particularly those from consulting firms, about this process.
He had a chart very similar to the one that I'm going to show you here.
Essentially, we have on the side here, effort. So a little bit of effort down
on the bottom. Lots of effort and then a ton of effort right up on the top.
Then, sort of month one through six, as you're starting those SEO efforts and
campaigns. This can happen on an entire website level, but this can also happen
on a particular subsection of a website, or a new group of keywords, or a new
set of content that you're targeting.
What frequently happens is you see what's needed to see return on investment,
to see those improvements over time, versus what the expectations are, which
I've got in purple versus orange, kind of diverge. So at the start, what's
needed, a lot of the time at the very start of an SEO campaign, especially if
previous best practices haven't been employed, it's actually really minimal to
start seeing a positive return on investment. But, over time, that effort ramps
up a ton. You've got to do an incredible amount just to see a continued return
on investment over those first few months, and there's a delay between the
effort that you put in here and when you're seeing results towards the latter
few months of a campaign.
Unfortunately, expectations are the opposite. A lot of clients, managers,
teams, the people in your startup with you, the other folks that are in your
consulting group, your client, all of these folks are expecting to see that
effort is a little bit higher at the start, and then you kind of get the ball
rolling and it goes down. That actually is true. The problem is it takes a long
time to get that ball rolling. So what I usually see, what most of us in the
industry see is that that effort ramps up tremendously in those first few
months, and then over time it does go down a little bit. Maintaining those
ongoing best practices is a little bit easier.
But this, right here, the difference between expectations and reality, that's
what I call the delta of dissatisfaction. People just get really frustrated
around this.
There are a few good mitigation strategies, and some of these were mentioned,
actually, by the experts that Scott Clark talked to in his post. The first one,
the one that nearly every consultant mentioned, and I think is very smart, is to
create the right expectations.
If you go into a client meeting, or you sit down with your marketing team, or
you're talking to your CEO about what you can and can't accomplish, if you
create the expectation that SEO is going to be this not necessarily silver
bullet, but that you will make these investments and because things are done so
badly today and the company you used to work for or the other websites that
you've worked on had such success when you implemented these best practices,
that you feel confident you can increase their rankings and their traffic and
the acquisition of customers dramatically.
The problem gets created right then and there, because in the SEO world, for
the last decade, for some reason people have held these two beliefs about SEO.
Number one, that it's a one-time activity, which is just dead wrong as all of
you who are watching know. Number two is that once you optimize for the search
engines, you are now optimal, and that means you don't require additional
ongoing effort, and the search engines will reward your efforts once they see
them. Since Google's crawling us so fast, well, we must get that benefit
immediately.
Neither of these are the case. So creating the right expectations up front
can work wonders. In fact, if you want to go ahead and make this chart and put
it right in your presentations, as you're showing the team, here's what needs to
be fixed. Here's what we need to do. Here's what I think we can accomplish. But,
by the way, you're going to think this can happen a lot faster than it can
happen. If you tell them that up front, you're creating those right
expectations.
Number two, when things are going well, that's a dangerous time, a very
dangerous time. I urge folks not to just sort of celebrate and then create new
projections, like, "Hey, well, we accomplished X. Y is certainly going to
happen, and Y is going to be 2X, and 3X and 4X in six months and seven months
and eight months." Always create both a contingency plan, in case that traffic
increase is temporary, and a conservative budget.
So I actually really like making budgets around traffic, around performance
here at Moz, and in general that contain a best-case scenario and also a "and
here's what we'll spend before we know whether this is the truth." If you don't,
you can end up very, very sad.
Number three, make sure SEO isn't your only inbound traffic channel, and it's
not the only inbound marketing effort that you're working on. If you're doing
social media marketing and content marketing, you're building an email list, and
you're doing branding and PR and outreach and connecting with your industry,
you're speaking at events, you're doing paid forms of advertising as well,
great. Now you've got some mitigation. Now you aren't solely relying on SEO to
provide all of the returns, and, thus, you can handle being off budget. If
Google is 70% of your traffic and you miss by 10%, that's huge. If Google is 20%
of your traffic and you miss by 10%, oh, it's not so bad. It's only 2% off
budget.
Number four, the last thing I'll recommend here is that you measure and
report leading indicators. By leading indicators, I mean not just the pages that
are receiving traffic, but also things like link signals, rankings for long-tail
stuff, looking at social shares, these leading indicators, these things that
tend to, over time, correlate as rankings catch up to how your performance is
going. By reporting on that kind of stuff, higher engagement on pages, those
leading indicators will give you a sense of how things might be going two,
three, four, five, six months from now with your search traffic and your
rankings. That can be extremely helpful.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday,and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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/LB7PZB_SNPg/surviving-the-seo-slog-whiteboard-friday
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] How Early 20th Century Businesses Got Big With Content Marketing
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'How Early 20th Century Businesses
Got Big With Content Marketing'
Contrary to what many digital marketers think, the emergence of the Internet did
not give birth to content marketing it just enhanced its accessibility. The
truth is content marketing has been around for a long time since the late 19th
century to be exact. It can be as simple as sending out an []
You may view the latest post at
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/60144211/0/convinceandconvert~How-Early-th-Century-Businesses-Got-Big-With-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
Got Big With Content Marketing'
Contrary to what many digital marketers think, the emergence of the Internet did
not give birth to content marketing it just enhanced its accessibility. The
truth is content marketing has been around for a long time since the late 19th
century to be exact. It can be as simple as sending out an []
You may view the latest post at
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/60144211/0/convinceandconvert~How-Early-th-Century-Businesses-Got-Big-With-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
Thursday 27 March 2014
[Build Backlinks Online] After a Link-Based Penalty is Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?
Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'After a Link-Based Penalty is
Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?'
Posted by MarieHaynes
Are you familiar with the feeling of dread that comes with seeing this message
in Webmaster Tools?
Or perhaps, you haven't received a message, but have seen something like this
in your analytics:
If you've received a traffic drop because of a link-based Google penalty, the
results can be devastating. There are many articles written on what steps can be
taken to recover, but not many on what to expect once you have done the work to
get out of the penalty. Will your traffic increase suddenly? Will you see any
increase at all? Will you see a decrease in traffic because you have disavowed
links?
If you are looking for good information on understanding these penalties and
how to do the work to remove them, here are some good articles:
The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty
Lifting a Manual Penalty Given by Google
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo
How WMPU Recovered from the Penguin Update
The remainder of this article will talk about what outcome you can expect if
you are dealing with one of the following scenarios:
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
3. Escaping the Penguin algorithm
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
To determine whether or not you have a partial action penalty, go to Webmaster
Tools â Search Traffic â Manual Actions and you should see the
following:
The message from the screenshot reads:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of
the webmaster's control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on
the unnatural links instead of on the site's ranking as a whole.
Usually, when you receive a partial action warning you will get the following
message in your Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to
http://www.example.com
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are
outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your
site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural
linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link
schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality
guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for
reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or
remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our
Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Occasionally, you will get a more cryptic message such as the following:
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using
techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and
we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize
that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific
incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural
links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a
reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.
I have noticed that most sites that receive the "cryptic" message usually end
up losing rankings. And, in many cases, the sites were affected by the next
Penguin update. I would recommend that if you have a partial action, no matter
what message you received, you need to take steps to remove the warning. There
may be a few exceptions; if the manual spam action viewer tells you that a
particular page of your site is affected, it is possible that only that page of
your site has been demoted. An example would be if you were running a news site
and had published a story that was beneficial to a particular business. If that
business had built unnatural links to that page on your site in an effort to get
that page to rank higher, this could cause a warning for just that one page. If
this is the case, then you may not need to do anything as only that page is
likely affected and not your whole site.
In my opinion, for the vast majority of sites that have a partial action
message, it is vitally important for you to take the proper steps to get the
penalty removed.
In order to remove these penalties, a very thorough backlink audit must be
done. I have found that it is not enough to just address the worst of the links,
or even the most recently obtained unnatural links. Once you have gone under the
microscope of manual review, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to
remove almost every single manipulative link that was made in the past.
Success: Manual spam action revoked! Now what?
You've done the cleanup, and achieved success! The joy of seeing a manual spam
action revoked message never gets old for me. This message is usually the end
result of many weeks (or often months) of hard work. I love the emails that I
get from relieved site owners after they have seen this message. Invariably, one
of the next questions asked is, "When will I see my rankings improve?" This
question can make my heart drop because quite often, after a partial action
warning is removed, not much changes. I am always careful to explain this to
site owners when I first take them on as clients, but it seems that many of
them, despite my warnings, are still expecting to see a return to top rankings
once their penalty is lifted. Now, don't get me wrong; some sites do show
improvement, as I will show you soon. But with a partial action the improvement
is rarely drastic.
There are three types of traffic patterns that I tend to see once a partial
action warning has been removed:
Outcome #1 (most common): No improvement
Unfortunately, for many sites that have a partial action revoked, here is what
I usually see in their analytics data:
It is heartbreaking for a small business owner to go through months of work
evaluating and removing backlinks that they had paid for a well-known SEO
company to create, get their penalty revoked, and then see absolutely no
improvement.
Why would there be no improvement after a partial manual action is revoked?
For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty
was because of the power of unnatural links. In most cases, these businesses
have paid an SEO company to improve their rankings. Often, the SEO company has
stated that their techniques all fall within the Google Quality Guidelines, and
so the site owners are happy to see the great results and have no idea that a
penalty could happen. (I wrote about this type of problem about 18 months ago.
Many said that I was wrongly criticizing SEOs and that my article should have
been targeted only at cheap overseas link builders, but I have seen many sites
that were penalized after hiring well-known, reputable SEO companies that used
low-quality methods to obtain links on a large scale.)
For the site whose analytics chart is shown above, the rankings were primarily
gained through submissions to low-quality directories, bookmarks, and article
syndication. Once the penalty was given, Google stopped counting the PageRank
that was formerly received from these links. The resulting drop in link equity
resulted in a decrease in rankings. But, the work that was done to remove the
partial action warning, did not do anything to replace that lost link equity.
When those links were removed (or disavowed) there were very few links left to
support rankings. For many sites that have a partial action warning, the result,
once the spam action is revoked is that nothing changes.
So, why would a site even go through the trouble to get the penalty removed?
Are they doomed no matter what? No! It is certainly possible for a site to see
improvement some time later. For example, if a site escapes Penguin (because the
work that was done to get rid of the partial match action is the same work that
needs to be done to escape Penguin), or if a site starts to gain natural links
(either through good SEO efforts or naturally), then improvements can happen.
Those improvements would not have happened if the work was not done to escape
the manual action. I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a
blessing. Most sites that get demoted by the Penguin algorithm have no way of
knowing whether or not they have done the work necessary to be released from the
jaws of Penguin. But, if you have done the work required to get rid of a partial
match penalty, then you likely know that you have done enough to escape Penguin
as well.
Although many sites see no immediate improvement once their partial match
warning is lifted, there are some sites who do see an immediate improvement.
Outcome #2: Some improvement, but not a complete recovery
This can happen when the manual action is just affecting certain keywords.
But, unfortunately, in my experience, there is no real way of knowing whether
just certain keywords are being penalized or whether the penalty is on the whole
site.
An example of a situation where a site would be penalized just for certain
keywords would be if you had widespread publication of a widget in which you
linked back to your site using keyword anchor text. If you have used the anchor
text, "Widget provided by pretty green dresses," there is a possibility that
Google has given you a keyword penalty for "pretty green dresses." Once the
penalty is lifted, provided that your site has enough natural links and
relevance to support rankings for "pretty green dresses," then you may see some
improvement that happens within days of getting the penalty lifted.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts where he describes how Google could penalize a
site on a keyword level:
Here is an example of a site that had been penalized for a particular set of
keywords and saw a slight increase in rankings once their partial action was
lifted:
The site had been penalized for some main keywords. Once the penalty was
lifted, some of those keywords started to see a return to first-page rankings
(but only to the bottom of the first page rather than their former #1 rankings,
which is why the recovery is not more dramatic).
In some cases, if a site has been penalized for just certain keywords,
recovery from a partial action can be close to 100% if the site has a really
good base of natural links, but in my experience this does not happen often.
Outcome #3: No immediate recovery, but improvement happens once Penguin
refreshes
A site usually cannot escape from Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. For sites that see no improvement (or only a small improvement) when
their manual penalty is lifted, it is very possible that there will be further
improvement the next time that Penguin refreshes. For the two analytics charts
shown above, these sites have not seen a Penguin refresh since their penalty was
lifted. (The last refresh at the time of writing this article was October 5,
2013 and both of those sites had penalties lifted later on in October.) I
suspect that once Google refreshes Penguin, these sites will see some
improvement. See the section below on Penguin recovery for more information on
what to expect when a Penguin hit site escapes the Penguin algorithm.
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
If you have a sitewide penalty, you will see something like this in your
manual actions viewer in Webmaster Tools:
In this case, a yellow alert tells you that "This site may not perform as well
in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster
Guidelines." Google then adds the following message with a bit more detail:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of
buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
In most cases, a site with a sitewide manual action will not be ranking in
Google for their brand terms, and quite often, even a search for their url will
fail to show the site. This type of penalty is devastating. Usually this penalty
comes as a result of very obvious manipulation of the search engine results.
Every site that I have worked on that had a sitewide penalty had been involved
in a variety of link schemes including purchasing links, creating large numbers
of interlinked microsites or very widespread creation of spammy backlinks.
The steps that need to be taken to remove a sitewide penalty are exactly the
same as you would take for a partial match penalty, but the results are usually
more rewarding. Once a sitewide penalty is removed, there is almost always an
increase in traffic, although often it is just for brand terms.
Here is a site that showed a significant improvement once their sitewide
penalty was removed:
It looks impressive, doesn't it? Within a couple of days of getting their
penalty removed, the site started to rank extremely well again for brand terms.
Traffic increased dramatically almost overnight. However, did you notice that I
didn't show you the whole picture? Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot that
shows the traffic prior to getting penalized. This site previously was getting
several times this amount of traffic. When the sitewide penalty was lifted, the
branded traffic increased, but the site did not regain most of their non-branded
keyword rankings as those were primarily propped up on the power of links that
Google is no longer counting.
While some sites only see a return for brand terms after a sitewide penalty is
revoked, we have seen a number of sites that have had very dramatic improvements
across the board. Here is a site that was hit severely with a sitewide penalty.
Within 24 hours of receiving notification that their manual spam action was
revoked, they began ranking well for brand terms. A few days later, the majority
of their keyword rankings returned as well:
When a sitewide penalty is removed, in my experience, it usually takes 24-48
hours for brand terms to start ranking highly again. However, sometimes there
can be a very painful tumultuous week where rankings come and go and may change
depending on which data center you are seeing your Google results. We have one
client right now for whom we successfully removed their sitewide penalty a few
days ago. Within two days, we could see them ranking #1 for their URL, but brand
terms were nowhere to be seen. However, the client could not see the #1 URL
ranking. (And no, personalized search was not an issue.) The following day, the
rankings were gone on our searches in the morning and then we could see the URL
and brand terms raking again by the afternoon. Those rankings are still visible
to us. But, the changes took a few extra days to be visible to our client who is
in a different hemisphere and is likely seeing results from a different Google
data center. If you have received notice that your sitewide penalty has been
revoked, then please know that it can take a week (or possibly longer) for the
Google results to fully show that your site is no longer being penalized.
On a similar note, in regards to both sitewide and partial actions, if you
have received a message saying that your penalty has been revoked, but your
manual spam actions tool is still showing a penalty, don't worry, it will lift.
It can sometimes take up to a week for the manual spam actions tool to show "no
manual actions".
3. Penguin recovery
There are not many published cases of Penguin recovery. Escaping Penguin is
certainly possibleâwe have seen it! But, it is not easy. The work that
needs to be done is very similar to what needs to be done to recover from a
manual unnatural links penalty. Start with identifying the links that were made
with the intentions of manipulating the search engine results. Then, disavow
those links. It is debatable whether or not you need to remove links in order to
escape Penguin or whether disavowing is enough. If you control the source of the
links and can easily remove them, then definitely remove them. But, contacting
site owners and keeping a record of your work will not likely make a difference
for an algorithmic issue like Penguin, as no webspam team member is going to be
checking your work. Some would argue that it is good to do so in case you ever
do get manually reviewed, but my personal recommendation at this time is to
remove unnatural links that you control, and then disavow the rest. Make sure
you disavow them on the domain level.
It's also important to note that Penguin is not completely about links. You
will also want to clean up on site issues such as keyword stuffing as well.
To escape Penguin, you will need to wait until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. And, in some cases, you might even need to wait for two refreshes. In
this webmaster central hangout, at the 38 minute mark, John Mueller explains
that in order to completely recover from Penguin, the links in your disavow file
have to all be recrawled and the algorithm has to refresh, and in some cases
that whole process can take six to 12 months to be fully completed. Penguin does
not refresh on a regular basis; it can sometimes be six months in between
refreshes. The last announced refresh was October 4, 2013. (Some believe that
there are occasionally unannounced refreshes, but I'm not sure if I agree.)
So, let's assume that you have done a thorough backlink audit, removed links
where possible, disavowed the vast majority of your unnatural links, cleaned up
any spammy on-site issues, and Penguin has refreshed. Now what? Will you see an
increase in traffic?
The answer to this depends on what remains once you have done the cleanup.
If you have very few truly natural links, then you likely will not see much
improvement once Penguin refreshes. Here is the analytics data from a site that
was affected by the initial rollout of Penguin. The site owner did a thorough
link cleanup and disavow, but unfortunately did not see any improvement when
Penguin refreshed.
The reason for this is most likely that the site was only ranking previously
because of the power of unnatural links. In order to see improvement, they are
going to have to be able to attract some good links and in some niches that is
no easy feat. Gone are the days where a small site can outrank the big brands
simply because an SEO was able to build thousands of keyword anchored links. In
order to rank well these days you truly need to have an exceptional site that
can rank on its own merit and not only because of SEO tricks. A good SEO will
work on ways to improve the entire user experience and promote the site properly
so that it can gain natural links and not just focus on a "quantity" over
"quality" type of linkbuilding campaign.
If you do have a site with a good base of links beneath the unnatural ones,
then it is possible to see some improvement once Penguin refreshes. The Penguin
algorithm is Google's way of saying, "We don't trust this site because they have
a history of cheating to get good rankings in the past." If the Penguin
algorithm is viewing your site unfavorably, then even your good links do not
help you much. But, if you can clean up the signals that caused Penguin to
dislike you, then, when Penguin refreshes, your good links regain their power.
Here is a site that had a decent base of links underneath a large number of
unnatural links. They were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. They eventually did
a thorough cleanup, and on October 4, 2013, it appears that they escaped the
algorithm:
In my experience, when a site recovers from Penguin, this type of pattern is
usually what we see. It makes sense that the site would not bounce back to its
original rankings as some of those rankings were propped up by links that are
now recognized as unnatural. It looks like this site was able to attract some
new links but those links had only a small effect until Penguin refreshed and
recognized that the site had now reformed. Now, as this site gains new natural
links, it should continue to improve.
Here is another site that worked extremely hard to clean things up, and was
rewarded on the October 4, 2013 Penguin refresh. This site has an excellent base
of natural links and continues to gain links on a regular basis. They made the
mistake of buying links in the past and those purchased links along with some
low quality directory and bookmark links caused the Penguin algorithm to put the
site in a bad light. Doing a thorough cleanup of the unnatural links allowed the
site to escape Penguin. And now, their new links that have accumulated since
April of 2012 are able to really help the site.
Full Penguin recoveries like this are not common. You will read many articles
of people telling you what you need to do to recover, but I believe that there
are few SEOs out there who are consistently recovering Penguin-hit sites. In my
experience, unless you have a good site that can attract links on its own,
recovery from Penguin is going to be difficult.
As a side note, we have seen sites recover when Penguin refreshed two weeks
after filing a disavow, so it doesn't always have to take as long as six months
to a year to see improvement. But, if you have a good site with good links and
you have done a thorough cleanup, but you are still seeing dismal rankings,
unfortunately you may need to be patient and ride through a couple of Penguin
refreshes before you can tell if things are going to improve. I really wish that
Google would allow site owners have some sort of indication as to whether or not
their site is currently being devalued by Penguin. I can understand that one of
the reasons that they don't do this is because this would help spammers to
determine what is and isn't effective. But, it is extremely frustrating for site
owners whose livelihood depends on business coming from their website and don't
know whether they need to do more clean up or not.
A few added thoughts
Many people believe that once a site has been penalized, it will always be
penalized in Google's eyes. According to John Mueller of Google, this is not
true. In this hangout, John says, "If you've had a manual action on your website
and that's been revoked, then essentially there's no bad history attached to
your site. It's not harder to rank anymoreâ.It's not the case that there
is any kind of a grudge that our algorithms would hold against a site that has
had a manual action."
You may have noticed that I have not shown any examples where rankings dropped
after a penalty was removed. Many people are concerned that filing a disavow
file will cause your site to drop even lower in rankings. The truth is that any
link that is worthy of being disavowed has likely already been discounted by
Google. We have yet to see a site that had its ranking decrease after filing a
disavow file. In theory, this is possible, if you are disavowing truly natural
links. But, even when we have sites where we have had to disavow a large number
of links from authoritative sites (because of things like wide-scale
keyword-anchored guest posting or paid infographic placement), rankings did not
decrease.
Hopefully this article has helped to explain what you can expect once your
link-based penalty has been removed. It's rarely an easy process to recover from
a manual or algorithmic devaluing, but it certainly can be done.
I should also note that the scenarios described above depict my experiences
over the last couple of years of doing penalty removal work. It is certainly
possible that other outcomes can happen. If you have seen something different,
please do leave a comment!
Have a question? Leave a comment and I am happy to see if I can help.
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
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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/R-tm2gFi1aQ/after-penalty-removed-will-traffic-increase
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posted.
Best regards,
Build Backlinks Online
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?'
Posted by MarieHaynes
Are you familiar with the feeling of dread that comes with seeing this message
in Webmaster Tools?
Or perhaps, you haven't received a message, but have seen something like this
in your analytics:
If you've received a traffic drop because of a link-based Google penalty, the
results can be devastating. There are many articles written on what steps can be
taken to recover, but not many on what to expect once you have done the work to
get out of the penalty. Will your traffic increase suddenly? Will you see any
increase at all? Will you see a decrease in traffic because you have disavowed
links?
If you are looking for good information on understanding these penalties and
how to do the work to remove them, here are some good articles:
The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty
Lifting a Manual Penalty Given by Google
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo
How WMPU Recovered from the Penguin Update
The remainder of this article will talk about what outcome you can expect if
you are dealing with one of the following scenarios:
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
3. Escaping the Penguin algorithm
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
To determine whether or not you have a partial action penalty, go to Webmaster
Tools â Search Traffic â Manual Actions and you should see the
following:
The message from the screenshot reads:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of
the webmaster's control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on
the unnatural links instead of on the site's ranking as a whole.
Usually, when you receive a partial action warning you will get the following
message in your Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to
http://www.example.com
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are
outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your
site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural
linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link
schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality
guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for
reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or
remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our
Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Occasionally, you will get a more cryptic message such as the following:
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using
techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and
we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize
that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific
incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural
links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a
reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.
I have noticed that most sites that receive the "cryptic" message usually end
up losing rankings. And, in many cases, the sites were affected by the next
Penguin update. I would recommend that if you have a partial action, no matter
what message you received, you need to take steps to remove the warning. There
may be a few exceptions; if the manual spam action viewer tells you that a
particular page of your site is affected, it is possible that only that page of
your site has been demoted. An example would be if you were running a news site
and had published a story that was beneficial to a particular business. If that
business had built unnatural links to that page on your site in an effort to get
that page to rank higher, this could cause a warning for just that one page. If
this is the case, then you may not need to do anything as only that page is
likely affected and not your whole site.
In my opinion, for the vast majority of sites that have a partial action
message, it is vitally important for you to take the proper steps to get the
penalty removed.
In order to remove these penalties, a very thorough backlink audit must be
done. I have found that it is not enough to just address the worst of the links,
or even the most recently obtained unnatural links. Once you have gone under the
microscope of manual review, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to
remove almost every single manipulative link that was made in the past.
Success: Manual spam action revoked! Now what?
You've done the cleanup, and achieved success! The joy of seeing a manual spam
action revoked message never gets old for me. This message is usually the end
result of many weeks (or often months) of hard work. I love the emails that I
get from relieved site owners after they have seen this message. Invariably, one
of the next questions asked is, "When will I see my rankings improve?" This
question can make my heart drop because quite often, after a partial action
warning is removed, not much changes. I am always careful to explain this to
site owners when I first take them on as clients, but it seems that many of
them, despite my warnings, are still expecting to see a return to top rankings
once their penalty is lifted. Now, don't get me wrong; some sites do show
improvement, as I will show you soon. But with a partial action the improvement
is rarely drastic.
There are three types of traffic patterns that I tend to see once a partial
action warning has been removed:
Outcome #1 (most common): No improvement
Unfortunately, for many sites that have a partial action revoked, here is what
I usually see in their analytics data:
It is heartbreaking for a small business owner to go through months of work
evaluating and removing backlinks that they had paid for a well-known SEO
company to create, get their penalty revoked, and then see absolutely no
improvement.
Why would there be no improvement after a partial manual action is revoked?
For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty
was because of the power of unnatural links. In most cases, these businesses
have paid an SEO company to improve their rankings. Often, the SEO company has
stated that their techniques all fall within the Google Quality Guidelines, and
so the site owners are happy to see the great results and have no idea that a
penalty could happen. (I wrote about this type of problem about 18 months ago.
Many said that I was wrongly criticizing SEOs and that my article should have
been targeted only at cheap overseas link builders, but I have seen many sites
that were penalized after hiring well-known, reputable SEO companies that used
low-quality methods to obtain links on a large scale.)
For the site whose analytics chart is shown above, the rankings were primarily
gained through submissions to low-quality directories, bookmarks, and article
syndication. Once the penalty was given, Google stopped counting the PageRank
that was formerly received from these links. The resulting drop in link equity
resulted in a decrease in rankings. But, the work that was done to remove the
partial action warning, did not do anything to replace that lost link equity.
When those links were removed (or disavowed) there were very few links left to
support rankings. For many sites that have a partial action warning, the result,
once the spam action is revoked is that nothing changes.
So, why would a site even go through the trouble to get the penalty removed?
Are they doomed no matter what? No! It is certainly possible for a site to see
improvement some time later. For example, if a site escapes Penguin (because the
work that was done to get rid of the partial match action is the same work that
needs to be done to escape Penguin), or if a site starts to gain natural links
(either through good SEO efforts or naturally), then improvements can happen.
Those improvements would not have happened if the work was not done to escape
the manual action. I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a
blessing. Most sites that get demoted by the Penguin algorithm have no way of
knowing whether or not they have done the work necessary to be released from the
jaws of Penguin. But, if you have done the work required to get rid of a partial
match penalty, then you likely know that you have done enough to escape Penguin
as well.
Although many sites see no immediate improvement once their partial match
warning is lifted, there are some sites who do see an immediate improvement.
Outcome #2: Some improvement, but not a complete recovery
This can happen when the manual action is just affecting certain keywords.
But, unfortunately, in my experience, there is no real way of knowing whether
just certain keywords are being penalized or whether the penalty is on the whole
site.
An example of a situation where a site would be penalized just for certain
keywords would be if you had widespread publication of a widget in which you
linked back to your site using keyword anchor text. If you have used the anchor
text, "Widget provided by pretty green dresses," there is a possibility that
Google has given you a keyword penalty for "pretty green dresses." Once the
penalty is lifted, provided that your site has enough natural links and
relevance to support rankings for "pretty green dresses," then you may see some
improvement that happens within days of getting the penalty lifted.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts where he describes how Google could penalize a
site on a keyword level:
Here is an example of a site that had been penalized for a particular set of
keywords and saw a slight increase in rankings once their partial action was
lifted:
The site had been penalized for some main keywords. Once the penalty was
lifted, some of those keywords started to see a return to first-page rankings
(but only to the bottom of the first page rather than their former #1 rankings,
which is why the recovery is not more dramatic).
In some cases, if a site has been penalized for just certain keywords,
recovery from a partial action can be close to 100% if the site has a really
good base of natural links, but in my experience this does not happen often.
Outcome #3: No immediate recovery, but improvement happens once Penguin
refreshes
A site usually cannot escape from Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. For sites that see no improvement (or only a small improvement) when
their manual penalty is lifted, it is very possible that there will be further
improvement the next time that Penguin refreshes. For the two analytics charts
shown above, these sites have not seen a Penguin refresh since their penalty was
lifted. (The last refresh at the time of writing this article was October 5,
2013 and both of those sites had penalties lifted later on in October.) I
suspect that once Google refreshes Penguin, these sites will see some
improvement. See the section below on Penguin recovery for more information on
what to expect when a Penguin hit site escapes the Penguin algorithm.
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
If you have a sitewide penalty, you will see something like this in your
manual actions viewer in Webmaster Tools:
In this case, a yellow alert tells you that "This site may not perform as well
in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster
Guidelines." Google then adds the following message with a bit more detail:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of
buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
In most cases, a site with a sitewide manual action will not be ranking in
Google for their brand terms, and quite often, even a search for their url will
fail to show the site. This type of penalty is devastating. Usually this penalty
comes as a result of very obvious manipulation of the search engine results.
Every site that I have worked on that had a sitewide penalty had been involved
in a variety of link schemes including purchasing links, creating large numbers
of interlinked microsites or very widespread creation of spammy backlinks.
The steps that need to be taken to remove a sitewide penalty are exactly the
same as you would take for a partial match penalty, but the results are usually
more rewarding. Once a sitewide penalty is removed, there is almost always an
increase in traffic, although often it is just for brand terms.
Here is a site that showed a significant improvement once their sitewide
penalty was removed:
It looks impressive, doesn't it? Within a couple of days of getting their
penalty removed, the site started to rank extremely well again for brand terms.
Traffic increased dramatically almost overnight. However, did you notice that I
didn't show you the whole picture? Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot that
shows the traffic prior to getting penalized. This site previously was getting
several times this amount of traffic. When the sitewide penalty was lifted, the
branded traffic increased, but the site did not regain most of their non-branded
keyword rankings as those were primarily propped up on the power of links that
Google is no longer counting.
While some sites only see a return for brand terms after a sitewide penalty is
revoked, we have seen a number of sites that have had very dramatic improvements
across the board. Here is a site that was hit severely with a sitewide penalty.
Within 24 hours of receiving notification that their manual spam action was
revoked, they began ranking well for brand terms. A few days later, the majority
of their keyword rankings returned as well:
When a sitewide penalty is removed, in my experience, it usually takes 24-48
hours for brand terms to start ranking highly again. However, sometimes there
can be a very painful tumultuous week where rankings come and go and may change
depending on which data center you are seeing your Google results. We have one
client right now for whom we successfully removed their sitewide penalty a few
days ago. Within two days, we could see them ranking #1 for their URL, but brand
terms were nowhere to be seen. However, the client could not see the #1 URL
ranking. (And no, personalized search was not an issue.) The following day, the
rankings were gone on our searches in the morning and then we could see the URL
and brand terms raking again by the afternoon. Those rankings are still visible
to us. But, the changes took a few extra days to be visible to our client who is
in a different hemisphere and is likely seeing results from a different Google
data center. If you have received notice that your sitewide penalty has been
revoked, then please know that it can take a week (or possibly longer) for the
Google results to fully show that your site is no longer being penalized.
On a similar note, in regards to both sitewide and partial actions, if you
have received a message saying that your penalty has been revoked, but your
manual spam actions tool is still showing a penalty, don't worry, it will lift.
It can sometimes take up to a week for the manual spam actions tool to show "no
manual actions".
3. Penguin recovery
There are not many published cases of Penguin recovery. Escaping Penguin is
certainly possibleâwe have seen it! But, it is not easy. The work that
needs to be done is very similar to what needs to be done to recover from a
manual unnatural links penalty. Start with identifying the links that were made
with the intentions of manipulating the search engine results. Then, disavow
those links. It is debatable whether or not you need to remove links in order to
escape Penguin or whether disavowing is enough. If you control the source of the
links and can easily remove them, then definitely remove them. But, contacting
site owners and keeping a record of your work will not likely make a difference
for an algorithmic issue like Penguin, as no webspam team member is going to be
checking your work. Some would argue that it is good to do so in case you ever
do get manually reviewed, but my personal recommendation at this time is to
remove unnatural links that you control, and then disavow the rest. Make sure
you disavow them on the domain level.
It's also important to note that Penguin is not completely about links. You
will also want to clean up on site issues such as keyword stuffing as well.
To escape Penguin, you will need to wait until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. And, in some cases, you might even need to wait for two refreshes. In
this webmaster central hangout, at the 38 minute mark, John Mueller explains
that in order to completely recover from Penguin, the links in your disavow file
have to all be recrawled and the algorithm has to refresh, and in some cases
that whole process can take six to 12 months to be fully completed. Penguin does
not refresh on a regular basis; it can sometimes be six months in between
refreshes. The last announced refresh was October 4, 2013. (Some believe that
there are occasionally unannounced refreshes, but I'm not sure if I agree.)
So, let's assume that you have done a thorough backlink audit, removed links
where possible, disavowed the vast majority of your unnatural links, cleaned up
any spammy on-site issues, and Penguin has refreshed. Now what? Will you see an
increase in traffic?
The answer to this depends on what remains once you have done the cleanup.
If you have very few truly natural links, then you likely will not see much
improvement once Penguin refreshes. Here is the analytics data from a site that
was affected by the initial rollout of Penguin. The site owner did a thorough
link cleanup and disavow, but unfortunately did not see any improvement when
Penguin refreshed.
The reason for this is most likely that the site was only ranking previously
because of the power of unnatural links. In order to see improvement, they are
going to have to be able to attract some good links and in some niches that is
no easy feat. Gone are the days where a small site can outrank the big brands
simply because an SEO was able to build thousands of keyword anchored links. In
order to rank well these days you truly need to have an exceptional site that
can rank on its own merit and not only because of SEO tricks. A good SEO will
work on ways to improve the entire user experience and promote the site properly
so that it can gain natural links and not just focus on a "quantity" over
"quality" type of linkbuilding campaign.
If you do have a site with a good base of links beneath the unnatural ones,
then it is possible to see some improvement once Penguin refreshes. The Penguin
algorithm is Google's way of saying, "We don't trust this site because they have
a history of cheating to get good rankings in the past." If the Penguin
algorithm is viewing your site unfavorably, then even your good links do not
help you much. But, if you can clean up the signals that caused Penguin to
dislike you, then, when Penguin refreshes, your good links regain their power.
Here is a site that had a decent base of links underneath a large number of
unnatural links. They were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. They eventually did
a thorough cleanup, and on October 4, 2013, it appears that they escaped the
algorithm:
In my experience, when a site recovers from Penguin, this type of pattern is
usually what we see. It makes sense that the site would not bounce back to its
original rankings as some of those rankings were propped up by links that are
now recognized as unnatural. It looks like this site was able to attract some
new links but those links had only a small effect until Penguin refreshed and
recognized that the site had now reformed. Now, as this site gains new natural
links, it should continue to improve.
Here is another site that worked extremely hard to clean things up, and was
rewarded on the October 4, 2013 Penguin refresh. This site has an excellent base
of natural links and continues to gain links on a regular basis. They made the
mistake of buying links in the past and those purchased links along with some
low quality directory and bookmark links caused the Penguin algorithm to put the
site in a bad light. Doing a thorough cleanup of the unnatural links allowed the
site to escape Penguin. And now, their new links that have accumulated since
April of 2012 are able to really help the site.
Full Penguin recoveries like this are not common. You will read many articles
of people telling you what you need to do to recover, but I believe that there
are few SEOs out there who are consistently recovering Penguin-hit sites. In my
experience, unless you have a good site that can attract links on its own,
recovery from Penguin is going to be difficult.
As a side note, we have seen sites recover when Penguin refreshed two weeks
after filing a disavow, so it doesn't always have to take as long as six months
to a year to see improvement. But, if you have a good site with good links and
you have done a thorough cleanup, but you are still seeing dismal rankings,
unfortunately you may need to be patient and ride through a couple of Penguin
refreshes before you can tell if things are going to improve. I really wish that
Google would allow site owners have some sort of indication as to whether or not
their site is currently being devalued by Penguin. I can understand that one of
the reasons that they don't do this is because this would help spammers to
determine what is and isn't effective. But, it is extremely frustrating for site
owners whose livelihood depends on business coming from their website and don't
know whether they need to do more clean up or not.
A few added thoughts
Many people believe that once a site has been penalized, it will always be
penalized in Google's eyes. According to John Mueller of Google, this is not
true. In this hangout, John says, "If you've had a manual action on your website
and that's been revoked, then essentially there's no bad history attached to
your site. It's not harder to rank anymoreâ.It's not the case that there
is any kind of a grudge that our algorithms would hold against a site that has
had a manual action."
You may have noticed that I have not shown any examples where rankings dropped
after a penalty was removed. Many people are concerned that filing a disavow
file will cause your site to drop even lower in rankings. The truth is that any
link that is worthy of being disavowed has likely already been discounted by
Google. We have yet to see a site that had its ranking decrease after filing a
disavow file. In theory, this is possible, if you are disavowing truly natural
links. But, even when we have sites where we have had to disavow a large number
of links from authoritative sites (because of things like wide-scale
keyword-anchored guest posting or paid infographic placement), rankings did not
decrease.
Hopefully this article has helped to explain what you can expect once your
link-based penalty has been removed. It's rarely an easy process to recover from
a manual or algorithmic devaluing, but it certainly can be done.
I should also note that the scenarios described above depict my experiences
over the last couple of years of doing penalty removal work. It is certainly
possible that other outcomes can happen. If you have seen something different,
please do leave a comment!
Have a question? Leave a comment and I am happy to see if I can help.
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
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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '3 A/B Tests That Surprised the Heck Out of Us (See You at the Opties!)' 
You may view the latest post at http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/WordStreamBlog/~3/xi4GUqPCGH8/ab-tests 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
A/B tests are a vital part of WordStream's marketing efforts. Seriously, we split test everything: banner ads, registration forms, landing pages – you name it. My colleagues keep telling me that buying two different burritos for lunch then tweeting about which one I like best doesn't count as "real" A/B testing, but I beg to differ.
One of the tools we use for A/B tests is Optimizely, a comprehensive solution that allows us to conduct tests quickly and easily. It's awesome when we find tools that help us understand our audience more effectively, but it's even more awesome when the people behind those tools recognize us for how we use their software. That's precisely what happened recently when Optimizely told us that WordStream is a finalist in the inaugural Opties 2014 awards! The Opties honors Optimizely customers "who create delightful online experiences for their own customers and empower their organizations to turn data into action," and we're both thrilled and honored to be recognized.
WordStream is one of three finalists in the "Testing Hero of the Year" category. Although we're confident that the quality and rigor of our A/B tests will help us emerge triumphant, we'll have to wait a little longer for the official results – the winners are due to be announced at OptiCon on April 17 in San Francisco. While we wait with baited breath for the big reveal, let's take a look at how WordStream uses Optimizely and A/B tests to target our audience more effectively.
Landing Page A/B Tests
We used Optimizely in a series of A/B tests we conducted last year during our Grade and Get Paid Marketing Makeover competition. We wanted to learn which landing page was more effective in terms of driving conversions.
The Test
- In the control version of the landing page (A), we included a button that, when clicked, brought visitors to a separate page where they could enter their email address for a chance to win.
- In the variation (B), we switched out the button with an actual submission box. We also removed the "Enter Here" navigational element from the header to reduce the number of entry placements in one view.
The Result
- By making the change from the control to the variation, we saw a 128% increase in contest entry submissions and a 58% increase in the number of users who completed all three stages of the process.
Banner A/B Tests
Like many sites, we use a variety of banners to highlight our various offers, products and services. However, although we were keen to see which of our banners had the highest click-through rates, we ultimately wanted to determine whether contextual relevance – placing relevant banners in blog posts focusing on a similar topic – had a noticeable impact on CTR.
In keeping with A/B testing best practices, we began our A/B tests with a specific hypothesis in mind, namely that contextual relevance would have an effect on the CTR of our banners.
The Test
- In our first round of A/B tests, we set out to see which designs overall had the highest CTRs.
- After the preliminary round of tests, we then split test the winning ads against each other to create a shortlist of the most effective banners.
- We then experimented with the placement of the banners to see whether contextual relevancy improved the CTR of the strongest banners.
The Result
These A/B tests demonstrated that our original hypothesis was incorrect, despite our expectations to the contrary.
- We initially thought that contextual relevancy would play a role in the banners' CTR, but the opposite was the case.
- Ultimately, it didn't matter where we placed the banners – the designs themselves had the greatest impact.
Interestingly, we discovered that in this series of A/B tests, users responded negatively to banners featuring images of people – in every single instance, banners featuring people performed poorly compared to the graphical banners.
Form A/B Tests
As a vital lead generation tool, forms are one of the most frequently split-tested elements on a site. Ask for too much information and you risk losing your visitor; ask for too little and it's hard to qualify your prospects as viable leads. With this in mind, our Fearless A/B Testing Masterminds™ set out to see which of the following two forms was the most effective.
The Test
- We designed two versions of a thank-you page to be presented after a webinar to help boost the number of users completing a PPC audit using the AdWords Performance Grader Plus.
The Result
- We found that using a form embedded directly into the webinar thank-you page (A) was much more effective than linking a button labeled "Get Your Free Report" that redirected visitors back to the AdWords Performance Grader Plus homepage.
- However, greater visual separation led to increased conversions. After implementing color and headline changes to the variation, we drove conversions to stage one Grader completions.
- In addition, including an image to visualize the grading process and presenting the Grader as a "bonus" offer helped increase the number of full Grader completions.
What Do A/B Tests Have to Do with PPC?
The examples above deal primarily with visual elements, but A/B tests are invaluable to advertisers hoping to maximize their return on investment from search engine marketing. This can (and does) apply to everything from keyword research to ad copy.
In a recent eBook, "How to Increase ROI from SEM with A/B Testing," WordStream's founder and CTO Larry Kim spoke with Optimizely about how testing elements of PPC, such as bid amount, long-tail keywords and negative keywords, can significantly improve the performance of an AdWords account. Larry urges advertisers to test their ad copy ruthlessly, as the top 1% of all AdWords accounts focus on high commercial intent keywords. To see what else Larry suggests, get your copy of the eBook here.
Although we won't know the winners of the Opties 2014 for a while yet, we'd like to wish the other finalists the very best of luck. In the meantime, why not tell us how you use A/B tests in the comments?
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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