Why Google’s Redesign Could Be Good News for Social Marketers

It’s all about the real estate. Google results pages have historically been about simplicity. Any search “options” have been such a little part of the UI that, let’s be honest, hardly anyone knew they were there.

Before now, Google attempted to predict what users wanted by including universal search (such as news, videos, and images) right in the organic results. Most recently, social conversations (blog posts, twitter updates, etc.) have made their way into the SERPS. Today, a clear left navigation gives users quick access to specific vertical search features right from the results pages:

While universal search results had created added opportunities for search marketers to capitalize on SERPs, this latest change favors social marketers. In addition to video, images, maps, and news search; blogs, Forums (Discussions), and Twitter/Buzz like services (Updates) have been given their respective real estate from Google results pages. So if you’re not already involved in these as a part of your internet marketing strategy, you’ve just fallen further behind.

Blogs

While Google blog search is nothing new, this new navigation is sure to generate some increased usage. If you own, run, or write for a blog, that could mean an increase in traffic from Google. If you don’t, it’s probably time you started one…

Freshness of content will also be a consideration for users. While the results are set to sort by “relevance” by default, buttons to sort by date, and/or limit results to the last 10 minutes, hour, day, week, month, and year are easily accessible. The default results, too, even seem to favor the fresh content and include information on how old the post is within the SERP listing. What does this mean for you? Keep blogging…as often as you can.

Updates – Twitter & Google Buzz Search

In December, Google released their “real time search” feature. Tweets were included within results and a full page of real-time tweets was just a click away. Last month, Google added a dynamic archive function which gave users the ability look back at specific days & times or track twitter trends across an entire year. Now, Google has given this search feature a place in their new navigation.

For marketers and content producers, the “Top Links” section of the results is just one more opportunity to spread content by promoting it on Twitter and Google Buzz. While the potential for consistent traffic may not be as appealing as the blog search section, it’s certainly another good reason to make services like twitter and Google Buzz a part of your social media strategy. And if nothing else, it makes for a great tool for ORM or tracking and monitoring social campaigns within the twittersphere.

Discussions – Forum Search

Who says forums are dead? “Discussions” is the final social addition to the new Google navigation and it focuses on forums and answer services like Wiki Answers and Yahoo! Answers. It’s quite useful to users who may be looking for solutions to questions that others might have already posted online. Much like Blog search it’s not a completely new service, but again, this change will likely mean increased usage. So if you own, run, or moderate a forum, this could translate into increased traffic and thus additional activity.

For the rest of social marketers, however, it means allocating more time to participating in industry forums as a part of their social media strategy. Being active within forums and providing answers to common industry related questions on services like Yahoo! Answers can give an individual or brand extra exposure and more importantly: credibility & authority.

Bad news for SEOs?

The down side to Google’s new navigation could be reduced use of the general results. With these extra options easily accessible for users to refine their search, Google has essentially marginalized their search algorithm. The effect could be reduced clicks which could drive traffic down for sites that typically do well in organic results. But as search & social media continue to blend into small parts of a larger entity; marketing strategies will need to adjust. And this change by Google is just one more example.

Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/why-google%e2%80%99s-redesign-could-be-good-news-for-social-marketers/20715/

Competitive Intelligence in SEO & Social Media

Understanding thy competition is a golden rule in any kind of business, ranging from online marketing to politics to running the local mom & pop corner grocery store.

I would like to reprint some competitive intelligence tactics that I previously put together here on Search Engine Journal that will also be helpful.

Understanding what your competitors are doing online is a must and absolute priority when launching a new website that is entering a competitive space and also when established websites want to keep an eye on their competition. By knowing what your rivals are doing in their SEO and social media space, not only will you have a better knowledge of their online marketing strategy, but you can also emulate what is working for them, and generate internal ideas to stay proactive.

Furthermore, by understanding what your competition is doing in terms ofon-site SEO, link building, social media marketing, developing third party properties and other search marketing tactics; you can also identify potential new threats which are making it up the rankings and also unearth tactics which are working from them (or not working for them), that you can improve upon, and thrive from in your overall marketing strategy.

And doesn’t everyone love playing spy every once in a while?

Identifying the Competition

The first step in identifying your online competition is checking out the search results for your most popular keywords. Do not look only at keywords which drive the most traffic, but also your longtail keyterms and also the keyterms which convert the most sales, leads or phone calls.

By comparing the sites which you compete with in these various groups of keyterms, you will more or less identify different styles of competition that you can learn from and monitor. Here are some types of sites which may not appear for your basic keyterms in the serps, that you need to monitor.

• Affiliate sites are your competition. Not only sites which run the affiliate ads of your rivals, but also your own affiliate ads, because if they are ranking above your company’s site, they are taking money out of your pocket (or the search division’s pocket) by driving traffic and sales that you should be driving. Furthermore, affiliates don’t have to deal with internal regulations and beauracracy, so they can more or less get away with more tactics like publishing loads of content, paid linking, and taking full advantage of the social media outlets your management or PR division is not letting you tackle. Affiliates are the ninjas, mercenaries and dark armies of your industry, learn from them.
• Offline competitors sometimes don’t do the best SEO, maybe they just launch a flash site or brochure page and don’t rank at all, but they may have an advertising agency with a massive creative team building up their social media presence, hold contests or sweepstakes, build up Facebook followings, have a massive PPC budget and spend a lot of money on site advertising and sponsorships. By monitoring what the do in online advertising, you can identify keyterms and copy which work for them in their PPC campaign and also find out the sites or networks where they are serving graphic advertising, and contact those same networks about striking a deal which will assist with your SEO or linking. If your competition is serving ads there, then those sites hit your target market.

On-Site Competitive Intelligence

Now that you have identified the sites you need to monitor as part of your competitive intel strategy, now start looking into the on-site factors which help them rank in the search engines. You may find not only what they are doing right, but what you are doing wrong. When performing a competitive intel report, I suggest including your own site in the report and even having a third eye, like an SEO consultant or internal staff member, do the research on your own site.

• Site URL Structure : By tracking the URL structure and file naming structure of competitors, you can determine the best route to gain a competitive advantage over other companies.
• Site Development and Coding Structure : Which language is the site being coded in. Are there any conflicts in programming language or separate IP’s? This information is vital to SEO competitive intel.
• Use of Analytics : Is the competitor tracking user behavior and referrals via Google Analytics, Hitbot, Omniture? Looking into their analytics systems help give an idea of how much information they are capturing from their visitors and how advanced their internal tracking is – which may define how advanced their SEO team is.
• The directory files and URL structures of listings pages : This will be used to determine which techniques these competitors are using for their individual pages, their content, meta and URL structures, and how these reflect in the Google, Yahoo and MSN rankings.
• Page Title and META Title Review: Page titles are one of the most influential HTML elements used in an optimization campaign. Since the optimization of this variable is connected to rankings and actual links in the Search Engine Results Pages (or “SERPs”), an analysis has been conducted to provide which sites use a preferred title structure and which just use repetition of their company name.
• META Tag Review (Description / Keywords): META tags have limited relevance to rankings, but do play a part in that search results often feature the META Description tag. Knowing this, an optimized description that instigates action from the searcher is preferred. Further, integrating the targeted keywords allows for them to be bold or otherwise emphasized in the listings – which helps to convert more clicks in the SERPs through to the optimized site.
• Navigational System Review: Search engines spider, or seek out new content based on the links they find to resources on a page. Navigation systems are the most consistent manner for building internal link popularity, so research evaluates the overall strength of these systems used. For example, a Flash based navigational system is horrible for SEO, whereas consistent keyword driven links with keywords integrated are optimal.
• Broken Links : If a site has broken links, broken files or lists non-existant pages, then Google will lower the ranking of that site because the engine believes that the site is under construction. Run a link check using Xenu Link Sleuth to see if your competition is overlooking such linking and internal navigation issues.
• HTML Code Validity: Using the W3C Validation tools, your competitors’’ web sites have been reviewed. This allows the engines to promote sites that deliver a consistent and predictable user experience. Run each site through the validation tool, and reported back the number of errors noted.
• Design & SEO Integration: Similar to the internal navigational structure, the use of some HTML elements are preferred over others for SEO purposes. Our research and analysis of competing site designs have been provided in this document.

Offsite Competitive SEO Elements

Not only do onsite tactics assist with the ranking of a website, but sometimes more importantly offsite tactics can benefit the competitive advantage to boost a site from the bottom of the front page on Google, to the top three traffic driving positions.

By monitoring offsite SEO tactics, and social media tactics, you can get a rounded feel for the link building strategies your competitors are using, their participation in blogs, sites they may own which are harnessing social media equity and directing it to their main site, if paid linking is working for them, and how they’re doing on Delicious, Digg and in vertically targeted social networks. All of these factors have a direct influence on search engine rankings and you will not only learn what your competition is doing, but what they are not. And by identifying these holes, oversights or even genius ideas… and applying them to your marketing strategy, you can further excel within your industry.

• Local Listings : Determine the local SEO listings that your competition has made on Yahoo Local, Citypages, BOTW Local, MSN Live and other local search engines or local profiles. These differ from the results shown in organic web search sometimes and can be an indicator of local seo techniques used or overlooked by the competition.
• Number of Inbound Links: Using Yahoo! Site Explorer, report on the number of inbound links to each of the analyzed web sites. As a rule, the more links and the more relevancy – the better. Search Engines like Google use inbound links to help shape the overall level of authority of a web site.
• Linkbait or Viral Marketing : How are these competitors building links? Are they running link baiting programs and actively having articles submitted to Digg & StumbleUpon? Are they using any Viral Marketing techniques like videos, widgets or badges which link back to them and assist with their rankings. Dig into their campaigns to find out what they are using, and monitor the social networks to identify future social linking campaigns.
• Social Media : Do they actively use social media to market their business? Does their company have a Wikipedia page? How do they rank for their own brand name and are social profiles served in these results? Have they even secured their brand across social networks? Do they distribute online video? This research will help determine a social media plan and also identify competitive advantages that you can use to your advantage.
• Blogging : Do these companies blog and who is doing their blogging? Are the blogs on a subdomain, a whole other website or in an internal directory file. How often do they post? How many subscribers will they have? This information will assist you construct your blogging strategy and possibly unearth some ideas.
• Paid Link Research: It is difficult to say with certainty that an inbound link has been purchased. There are however signs where common systems like Paid Directories and Link Networks are used on a site. Research of inbound, paid links to your competitors from sidebars, ads on newspaper sites or bad paid linking in footer links may give you some insight as to which anchors they are targeting and what is working for them.
• Site visits and Traffic : Using a mix of data from Alexa, Compete and other web traffic estimation tools, estimate the traffic of the competitors in terms of visitors, time spent on site, top referrals and other information driven by third party tools.
• Page Rank and other Metrics : Compile a list of competitive metrics including Google PageRank, SEOmoz PageStrength, Delicious Bookmarks, StumbleUpon voting, Google Page Indexing, Google Competitive Indexing.
• Competitive Rankings : Last but not least, run a ranking check using a search engine friendly software for each of the terms which you have determined for targeted SEO keyterms via your comeptitive research. Check the rankings for these sites and terms in Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Bing and maybe some engines which are used specifically by your industry.

This may sound like a lot of information to monitor, and you’ll probably want to add more industry specific metrics to your research dependent upon how SEO savvy your market is. But in the long run by documenting this information now, and revisiting it once a quarter, you will have a pinpoint idea of the tactics your search rivals are utilizing, what they are not, and even what they are picking up.

If you need any help with the tools needed to perform a lot of this research, please contact me via email or Twitter (in my profile box at the top of this post) or check out our SEO Tools post for some ideas.

Are there any other competitive intel tactics you recommend? Please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Search Engines and Optimization

Search engines, search engines, search engines….Who knows which one to optimize for? Why does everyone behave so silly when it comes to search engines and optimization for a particular engine or keyword even? As most know, Google is the flavour of the month. It appears that everyone is excited about it. What about the other engines? Did someone forget that they exist?

Because Google is the leading engine, this years “in engine” , word of mouth spreads, more people use it, website owners begin optimizing for it and SEO goes nuts. How easily we forget, that only a year or so ago, Yahoo was the leading search engine. Which one next I wonder?

I think it is quite humorous that people have become strung up about one particular engine and one method of advertisement because they do well for a short period. By a short period, I mean a year or two. This is short when your running a business over decades. Google changed their algorithm end 2003 and sent the world a shockwave. Someone forget to tell these many upset businesses and website do it yourselvers, that relying upon one method of advertisement is not good business practice. If that’s the extent of business knowledge , then some businesses are in lots of trouble.

Florida (Google HQ) decided to change their system. As a result, many website owners, who had paid thousands of dollars or suffered thousands of man hours building a website came unstuck. Why? Because all of their efforts were built around the characteristics of one system. Who did they blame? SEO’s, Experts, Copywriters, Link Building Companies, Google or anyone who would listen – often the media. Someone forgot to tell them that Google is a business, and if your manipulating a website within their search engine rankings, your messing with their business. Keeping this in perspective, only those negatively affected are crying to the press. Those businesses or individuals who gained rankings as a result of this change, strangely enough, don’t have anything negative to say.

I think the moral of the story is, people need to stop attempting to over optimize a website and never concentrate on only one source for rankings. Website owners need to focus on reality and market their websites across as many engines as possible. It is also necessary to keep a focus on what you are trying to achieve. Essentially, a website to attract visitors and stimulate their attention for your information and products.

Written By: SEJ

Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information

Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. The proof is in the pudding as they say and if you ignore your analytics information you could be missing out on a great deal of potential business and traffic.

Here are some basic areas for you to review in order to find any holes in your website and to help you decipher data that you learn from your analytics:

Conversions: In case you don’t know, a conversion is a completed action on your website, such as lead, sign up, sale, etc. The most important factor (I think) to learn from your analytics software is the conversion data. Understanding and learning about how and where you conversions come from can help you make much more educated and better SEO, PPC and Social Media marketing decisions. I can’t tell you how many people I still speak to think that the best goal for an SEO campaign is rankings or positioning. Sorry to break it to you, but it is not. Increasing conversions (and visitor growth) should be the starting goal(s) of your SEO and search marketing efforts. I won’t get too deep into that as that is not the main point of this post J

Bounce Rate: Whether you are looking at this overall or down to a single page if your bounce rate is really high try to figure out what is turning people off from that web page. It could be a variety of things depending on your business so take a deep look at your page. Is it too much info? Or a lack of info? Do you have too many ads on that specific page? It could also be a combination of all these items. It might just be that your page needs to have a serious over haul. Bounce rates vary for each client and industry but understanding what yours is and try to improve your bounce rate is very important.

Visitors: When you start to really get into advanced SEO techniques you will need to understand even more so where all of your visitors are coming from. Visitor quality is just as important as visitor growth. You never want to rely on just one stream of traffic because if that stream dries up so does your business. You have to understand where your traffic is coming from because often times it might be from an area that you least expected it to come from. Analytics information allows you to find new locations along with locations of where you might be able to place yourself to find new traffic.

Keywords: Analytics information will tell you what keywords your website traffic is using to find your website. This is a potential to really open things up for you as you grow your business online. As new keywords develop you can capitalize by finding new variations on those specific keywords and using them throughout your website. You have to look at your analytics information very closely otherwise you won’t find those windows of opportunity to help improve your SEO and overall search marketing efforts.

Analytics keeps your approach to marketing your website efficient and smooth. It is all about finding opportunities that could already exist right in front of you. Data and information that you can get from your analytics allows you to find those areas where you can really maximize your efforts in the online world.

Author:

Nick Stamoulis | SEJ

SEO: To Outsource Or Develop In-House Resources?

Online marketing is complex, and it seems that the number of factors you need to consider to make sure you have the optimal strategy is only increasing. Therefore, it might be tempting to conclude that SEO, or more broadly, online marketing, is something that needs to be outsourced. There is certainly a strong case to be made for hiring external expertise, but outsourcing your SEO strategy completely does have some disadvantages. On the other hand, bringing people in-house has some advantages, but requires in-house people to stay current with developments in the industry. Today’s column will investigate the pros and cons of each approach, and the case for doing a bit of both.

The outsourcing option

Whether outsourcing is best for you depends on your situation. Here are some of the pros and cons of taking this route:

Pros:

• Expertise. It can be easier (sometimes much easier) to find someone who has the expertise you need now.
• Leverage industry exposure. SEO consulting firms have visibility into many different projects across many different types of sites. This breadth of experience is very difficult to recreate in-house.
• Persuasive power of an external authority. In my last two columns I discussed how important it is to sell management on the benefits of investing in SEO. Management may simply by more willing to believe the advice of a recognized industry authority over their in-house people.

Cons:

• Lack of understanding of the internal company environment. Any external organization, no matter how skilled, is simply not going to understand your company as well as someone who lives and breathes your company culture every day.
• Less committed. SEO consulting firms are likely to have many clients. Losing one client is not desirable, but it is not a disaster either.

The in-house option

Here is a brief look at the pros and cons of hiring your own internal SEO talent:

Pros:

• Internal expertise. Consulting relationships are often designed to be temporary, and once a consultant is gone, so is a lot of the knowledge gained around a search marketing campaign. Of course, employee relationships come to an end too, but usually not as often, or as quickly, so the knowledge is retained by the organization for a longer period of time. If you have more than one internal SEO resources this risk is reduced even further.
• Better positioned to sell internally. Somewhat paradoxically, external authority can be helpful in selling the benefits of SEO, but an employee is in a better position to sell to many different stakeholders within an organization. There are many groups that are impacted by SEO, and they all need to be sold on the process.

Cons:

• Potentially more expensive. You can hire a consultant and engage only a portion of their time, but an employee generally requires full time work and benefits.
• Scarcity of top talent. You may need to train your in-house talent, because many of the top SEO consultants are making a lot of money, and bringing them in-house to work for you could cost you more than you might be willing to pay.
• Learning on the job. A corollary to the prior point is that to keep costs down you may need someone to learn the necessary skills on the job.

The argument for doing both

While there are compelling arguments for both outsourcing and hiring in-house talent, there are also some strong arguments for doing a bit of both. Given the challenges of staying current with developments in SEO and online marketing, consulting with a firm or individual who makes a living doing just that can be a big advantage. The consultant’s ability to work on different sites and with clients who have a wide range of needs can be a pretty compelling advantage.

On the other hand, hiring an in-house SEO position has advantages as well. As outlined above retaining knowledge and expertise, and the ability to sell across multiple departments in the company can be a huge benefit.

Of course, the needs of every organization are different, but SEO and online marketing are must-haves for your organization. For many, the best choice will be to decide on what expertise is essential to have in-house, and make a plan to build it or buy it. Then, supplement that with external expertise to make sure your in-house team can leverage all of the expertise of external SEO professionals.