The Online Spend Disconnect – PPC And SEO

An interesting post over at SEOMoz highlights the spending disconnect that exists in the way that many companies allocate their online marketing spend.

Not surprisingly, search advertising should continue to be the largest category, growing from $9.1 billion in 2007 to $20.9 billion in 2013.
- Source: C|Net News, June 30, 2008

While the current spend on natural SEO?

SEO: $1.3 billion (11%)
- Source: SEMPO data via Massimo Burgio, SMX Madrid 2008

So, out of a total of around $10.4 billion spent on search, only $1.3 billion, or 12.5% is spent on natural search placement. Therefore you would expect the potential traffic from natural search to be the smaller piece of the pie, right?

Wrong.

Looking at the Google heat map we can see that it’s the natural results that catch the attention of users viewing the page.

This superior visibility is matched by the click through rate data,

The natural results in Google drive more than 70% of search traffic, though only account for 12.5% of online spend.

Why is this? Take your pick from any one or more of the following,

• PPC is an easier concept for people to understand, there is a general lack of education and understanding of the SEO process.
• PPC is quicker (almost instant) to get results and you only pay for traffic that you actually receive. There is a higher perception of accountability and control.
• Traditional marketers pay far less attention to SEO, column inches in the business press given over to SEO are far less than PPC. Again this may well be due to a lack of SEO understanding amongst journalists.
• There is a lack of trust in a segmented and unregulated SEO marketplace. A basic lack of understanding handicaps buyers and can lead to acceptance of poor advice and wrong buying decisions.

Link Building- What’s the Point?

All website owners and business owners want their websites to succeed online. Whether it’s an ecommerce site, company site, forum or any other type of website, you want your site to be seen by others, and you want to be seen as an authority within your particular industry.

If you take your website seriously, you’d hire a professional Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company who dedicate their time to improving the visibility of your website, and all good reputable SEO companies will provide link building within their package… (and if they don’t then I’d stay well away!)

BUT… what exactly is link building- What’s the point?

First we need to understand what a ‘link’ is. Short for hyperlink, a link is navigation to another web page- this can be on the same site or a completely different website. Search engines ‘crawl’ the web based on these links, and more importantly, links from other websites are considered votes or recommendations. The more links your website has from greater authority websites, the more ‘votes’ have been assigned to that page, which search engines take into consideration when ranking your website in their search results.

A web page can have two types of links- inbound and outbound links, inbound being links coming to your page from other websites, outbound going to another webpage on a different website.
Reciprocal links are links from different websites that exchange links for the purposes of creating more inbound links. Search engines can see that the two (or more) websites have linked to each other and give less weight to these links in comparison to one way links.

Inbound links are the focus of a link building campaign, and there are several ways of achieving inbound links. There are also several other factors to consider in inbound link building. For example:

credit

•    The topic of the webpage linking to you- If a site linking to you is within the same topic as your site and the page being linked to, the link will have more weight than from a page from an unrelated topic. E.g. ‘dog grooming’ page linking to ‘dog brushes’ on a different site will have a greater weight than a link from a ‘real estate’ page to ‘dog brushes’.

•    The authority of the site linking to you- The authority of the linking website is also important- a link from CNN.com to your website will be far more important than a link from AdamsHomeMadeNews.com as CNN have a higher authority.

•    The location of the link on the page- The location of the link- search engine robots read the code on a webpage from top to bottom. Generally links at the bottom of the html code have less weight than a link in the middle of an article.

•    The text used within the link- (known as ‘anchor text’) The text used in an inbound link- the anchor text helps inform the search engines what the page is about as it crawls your page. So if your webpage is about dog grooming brushes and the anchor text is ‘dog grooming brushes’, this link will have a greater weight than the same link but with less relevant anchor text such as ‘dog stuff’.

•    The text on the page linking to you- (including the text surrounding the link) The text on the page and around the link also helps in the weighting of an inbound link. The text on the page and surrounding the link (i.e. within the same paragraph) should contain the keywords to the pages topic, and if the topic is closely related to yours (as it should be), the search engines can identify this is relevant to your page, thereby increasing the weighting of the link.

… as well as several other factors.

So now you have an idea of some of the factors used in link building, how can this help your business? Well firstly, if you are performing your own link building of your site, taking these considerations onboard can greatly increase the effectiveness of the inbound links you get.

If you’re already hiring a company to do this for you, you can evaluate their efficiency. If you’re currently looking to hire a company to do this, you can find out how much they really know about the topic.
You can also assess the status of your current inbound links. You may find that potential changes could increase the visibility of your website in search results (inbound link statistics are taken into consideration when search engines rank your website in their results), you may also find that changes may need to be made to improve the navigation to your website for human visitors also.

You may want to suggest to other website owners within your industry to link to you (legitimately)- by providing your own linking html code (which of course takes onboard the above considerations), website owners may be more likely to link to you if you’ve made it easier for them by giving them the code to do so.

I believe it is important for any website owner, manager and webmaster for any business to have an understanding of link building, and how it affects your website. For human navigation, inbound links can bring visitors who are already targeted (may have read a review and now want to buy from your online shop, for example) which can maximise the conversion of your website. For search engine rankings, effective link building can have a massive impact in the ranking of your website in the results, thereby having an impact on the number of potential leads coming to your website. It’s a fact- good link building campaigns can make your website stand out from the crowd, and can make your company an industry leader—if done correctly.

New E-commerce launch – www.Yapp.co.uk

We took a dogs dinner of an old website and transformed it into a work of art that converts users to buyers. As always the project was delivered on time and on budget.

Design

Yapp Wine Merchants website now has a fresh, modern design, packed with tools to help you find the wine you need.  It is unfrightening and designed to cater to Yapps broad user base.  We’ve made searching for wine fun and easy whilst retaining Yapp’s connoiseur edge.

Usability
Everyone has their own ways of looking for wine so we implemented 4 ways to navigate the site:

• The Easy Wine selector uses dynamic searching
  Watch your search results change dynamically with easy to use search sliders. Have a play.  The great advantage of this is that it all happens on one page with no hopping backwards and forwards to and from search results.
• The Food and Wine selector allows you to search for wine by Food Type by clicking on images of different food types.  This is not rocket science but is dis-armingly useful.
• Advanced Search - for those who really know what they are after.
  Search by Regional maps
• “You recently looked at”
  Isn’t it annoying when you look at lots of different items and then have to re-find them by re-doing the searches.  Well we eliminated this problem with the “You recently looked at section” so you dont have to re-do previous searches.
• Tell a friend / Bookmark tools
  Not strictly a navigation tool but so simple and effective.  How else can you let your loved one know what you want for Christmas?  Simply post your choices to your Facebook page and invite others to have a look.

Search engine friendly

As always with Datadial, the site is built to be search engine friendly
All pages from the old site have been redirected to the relevant new pages.
The site uses Friendly URLs so http://www.yapp.co.uk/Wine-List/Rhone-South/Chateauneuf-du-Pape/ instead of

http://www.yapp.co.uk/?catid=6/?type=3/desc?=12/

Technology

Integrated stock control – the site is integrated to draw stock levels from Sage accounts.
The site is fully content managed, giving Yapp control over all aspects of the site including creating offers, mixed case offers and product information.
The site is also integrated with Datadial’s email marketing system.

SMX London – 25 Killer Tips, Tools And Strategies

Having just got back from SMX London I thought that rather than be one of 50 recap blog posts I thought I would try to do something a little different.

Sitting though about 15 hours of presentations and Q&A over the past couple of days was no mean feat. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for people with a short attention span!

Taking this sentiment on board I have put together a list of the best hints, tips, tools and strategies from the past couple of days, not just from the speakers themselves, but also picked up from around the conference halls and bars.

1. Download the Microsoft AdCenter Excel plugin for keyword research. It’s incredibly versatile, users can easily manipulate long keyword lists and data. It even goes as far as adding extra data sets into the mix by offering historical data and demographic breakdowns. Unfortunately, since the is currently still in beta UK specific data hasn’t yet been made available.
2. In ushering in a new era of transparency MSN is giving users an unprecedented amount of access to actionable data though the impressive AdCenter labs, some of the best tools include,
   - Detecting commercial intention based on a URL or keyword phrase.
   - Keyword group detection tool for detecting related keywords.
   - Search funnels, for visualising search sequences and search funnels.
   - Ad text writer, for the lazy PPC marketer! Enter a page URL and it will spit out a list of ad text.
3. MSNs webmaster centre is now displaying lists of pages your pages that are penalised, contain malware or link to pages that contain malware.
4. “More than 60% of companies are planning to increase their PPC or SEO budgets in 2009″ Linus Gregoriadis. Recession? What recession?
5. Keyword phrase composition – consider all of the elements that may make up your users potential keyword phrases.
   For example – Use (For school) + Action (Buy) + Price (Cheap) + Attribute (Black) + Brand (Sony) + Location (UK) + Quality (New) + Your Keyword.
   Consider the alternatives for each of these and build your keyword lists accordingly.
6. There is a real lack of awareness of new UK laws (enforced by Trading Standards and The Office Of Fair Trading) that now make it illegal to offer fake editorial content, without first making this fact clear to the reader. This will also affect fake internet reviews, promotional blog posts and comments that don’t offer disclosure of payment. – Judith Lewis
7. Although there is/was some obvious disagreement, the consensus is that owning the local TLD is by far the easiest way of of ensuring rankings in the correct local search engines. Other factors include local hosting, links, translation and address data in both the WhoIs and on the pages themselves.
8. The Redfly Google Global Firefox extension is perfect for searching local versions of Google quickly.
9. Linkbait – It is now vital to keep it on topic/niche. Wandering off topic may make things easier, but it’s probably tempting fate. Jane @ SEOMoz
10. Facebook fan pages are live, indexed and the links are non-nofollow.
11. The Forrester Groundwell tool is great for understanding the likely social media engagement level of your target market demographic.
12. Social media campaigns must should be carefully planned – be sure that you know who your audience are, which social media channels they’re likely to use, the creative message that you want to get across and your delivery strategy – Ciaran Norris
13. Vanessa Fox – Duplicate content across local TLD properties “should” be properly dealt with by Google, the correct verion “should” be delivered in the equivalent local version of Google. – Notice emphasis Again, I would say to be sure to have key content rewritten.
14. Use psychological hooks in your linkbait. Take your core niche and add in a social media angle – environment, politcal, geeky etc. Be aware of the linking demographic, they’re typically male, intelligent and tech savvy. Linkbait isn’t linkbait if it doesn’t elicit links! – Lyndon Antcliff, Cornwall SEO
15. Use search operators to find expired pages such as keyword+”this page is no longer available” either, contact the page owners for them to add a link to content on your site, or, contact the sites linking to the expired page asking them to link to your content instead. Tom @ Distilled
16. Keep an eye on competitor business closures or bankruptcy, this gives an opportunity to either buy they domain, or contact sites linking to them to link to your site instead. Wiep Knoll
17. Use forums and similar Web 1.0 communities for user generated linkbait
18. Always try to use your keywords in the article title of linkbait pieces – it really helps getting your keyword phrases in links.
19. Try launching linkbait on forums before onto social sites. In this way you can test it’s effectiveness, get feedback, and frequently pickup better quality content.
20. Avoid foreign links from foreign sites, in large quantities these can be an obvious flag for closer inspection. Jay @ LinkFish Media
21. Some “killer” tools worth taking a look at – Linkscape, Majestic SEO, TubeMogul, Optilink
22. Buying websites for SEO can provide a competitive advantage in terms of links, or 301 redirecting the site to pass domain trust/authority and the backlink profile. Use these tactics sparingly though, too many sites being redirected can lead to a search engine penalty. Concentrate on buying traffic and relevance over PR and backlinks.
23. Web 2.0 linkbuilding! We’re moving away from Web 1.0 methods like exchanges, link pages, paid links and comment spam, and moving towards internal link optimisation, online PR syndication, targeted PR submissions, guest writing, linkbaiting and social media.
24. When buying domains change ownership indicators slowly, things like Whois data, hosting, design and content should be left as long as possible and changes staggered, Google will zero any link and age benefits if there is an obvious change in ownership. DaveN
25. Finding domains for sale – Google searches, forums, DMOZ listings etc Richard Kershaw

Thanks also to Rob, Bruno, Chris, Rob, Rishil and many other people who I had a lot of fun discussing all of this with!