This is the 12th step in my 12 part series on SEO. In this article I’m looking at the role of voice-of-customer programs to help SEOs learn what is, and isn’t, working on their website, helping to inform optimisation and testing programs. It’s going to be short and hopefully sweet.
Why is Voice-of-Customer relevant to SEO?
Consider this scenario: You’ve got a webpage ranking well for a primary keyphrase. It’s driving muchos traffic, but your bounce rate is over 90% and has blown the site average for organic landing pages. As a result, you start to see your ranking drop. The search engines are starting to think your webpage isn’t so great after all.
You can dig into your web analytics data to find out what is happening – visits, bounce rate, time-on-site etc, but...
What web analytics data won’t tell you is why that’s happening
This is where voice-of-customer (VoC) programs can help. VoC techniques…
The 'DARC' framework can help companies in selecting staff with the right digital skills
The rise in digital marketing has created a wealth of opportunities and at the same time, removed barriers to entry to a number of sectors where a start-up, sole trader or large corporation is now competing with one another globally. Smart Insights recently reported on a survey showing the digital marketing skills that employers are looking for, yet many of these skills aren't widely taught at college or university.
For an example of a sector with increasing need for digital marketing, take online retailing: A recent article from Internet Retailing reported that in the UK, shoppers spent £5.8bn online in March, a rise of 14% compared to the same time last year and this is within the retail sector, a sector that has taken a pounding within the current economic climate, witnessed by the …
A way to save time (and money) for companies and agencies managing more complex media tracking
Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google’s announcement of the Tag Manager
Our advice on whether the Tag Manager is relevant for you
Although it's a significant new feature for marketers from Google, this tool isn't relevant for all businesses. I'd advise that you don't need to worry about this tool if you're not investing heavily in display advertising or affiliate marketing. If most of your visits are currently referred by direct visits plus paid or natural search, social or email marketing it's likely overkill and the basic Google Analytics tag setup is sufficient to track and report these through Google Analytics.
However, for larger companies and their agencies managing complex sites using a range of media investments to drive visits it could save a LOT of time (and expense from using paid tag management solutions). With this new tool, Google…
The big data opportunity - 4 key parts towards creating a strategy
Today’s growth in interest in "big data" represents a phenomenal opportunity for creative and forward-thinking marketers. On the one hand big data is arguably nothing new, relative to any moment in time we've had too much data to be able to make effective use of, at least from my personal, marketing perspective. The data warehousing and statistical analysis that drove direct marketing forward through the nineties and early years of this millennium felt like pretty big data back then - lot's of disparate, 'unclean' sources, usually lacking in structure let alone a common location. Relatively speaking, nothing's really changed - really it hasn't. Today we have more channels, management software, disparate databases, automation, computer processing power, skilled people and yes - data - to deal with. As marketers, I believe that this in turn means we need…
Examples of how to communicate your offer effectively
Simply put, value propositions are the reasons retailers use to persuade us to buy products or services from them rather than competitors. From a retailer's perspective we also consider them sales tools. This includes benefits provided by products/services or even the website, functionality, customer service, loyalty schemes etc.
This tends to be done really well by retailers offline, but for some reason online value proposition (OVPs) becomes a watery-at-best version – and this is something that is quite possibly MORE important online than offline.
One common theme that I’m sure many can resonate with is that website owners will often say ‘I thought the designers would do that’. But here’s the thing: most designers have studied design, not marketing. Typically, when you ask for them to design an ad, you usually provide…
Are you part of the Google Authorship Program?
You may not be using Google Authorship yet, but will almost certainly have noticed photos of authors appearing more and more as you search. You may also have read SEOs discussing the benefits of "rel=author" which is the markup contained within HTML on webpages to link the page to the users Google+ page:
<a href="[Google+_profile_url]?rel=author">Google</a>
We believe, the Google Authorship program is a must for any regularly updated content site, whether you run your own blog or your company has a blog with multiple contributors. In this post I'll review why it's important to online marketing and show you how to get "enrolled".
The Authorship program allows Author information and news, webpages and blogs to be associated with authors. It will also change the look of any items you have in search results too as per the example below:
…
Haphazard social media adoption is putting your brand at risk
A report earlier this year from Altimeter raises some interesting questions around how well brands are prepared to control social media as it proliferates throughout the organisation. It's an interesting and important question, since unlike any other marketing tactic, social media isn't actually about marketing first and foremost, it's about customers and their adoption of technology is changing the landscape for marketers every day. This change means that multiple stake-holders within an organisation are motivated to leverage social media, whether it's sales, customer service, product development or marketing, leading to a silo'd, poor customer experience.
Varied risks, the same solution: orientate around the consumer
Research and recommendations from Altimeter are heavily based around large, enterprise clients (Adobe, Avaya, Cisco, Hallmark, etc.) with an equally very heavy weighting towards B2B. It's easy to dismiss the insight if that's not your brand. However, the…
A scannable summary of developments marketers using digital marketing need to know
New digital technology
Autographer - a new category of wearable device announced - while Autographer isn’t a platform for marketing, it does highlight a trend towards wearable mobile devices which are increasingly used as part of “life-streaming”. There are possibilities for integrating this into campaigns as map-based mashups have been.
Autographer is different from other wearable devices in that it can automatically capture and store thousands of high resolution photos based on motion-sensing intelligence. It has five sensors and GPS capability which show when to take a photo based on subtle changes in light, colour, motion, direction and temperature. All of these parameters are recorded too.
Disclosure: I’m mentioning this launch since I’ve been involved in advising on the marketing of the product, but also because it’s a real innovation and…
What is Location Marketing and how to get started for free
In this post I take a look at the opportunity location marketing presents, provide some ideas on the types of campaigns you can send and show just how easy it I to get started.
Why Should you Care?
A recent report by Deloitte showed that mobile influenced 5.1% of in store sales in the US, accounting for $159bn in forecasted sales for the whole of 2012, way over the $12bn forecast for mCommerce.
Radio Shack has noted that Foursquare users spend 350% more in store than non-users and a pet food brand in the US saw a 14% uplift in sales after using Foursquare to promote free dog food for every unique check-in.
Additionally there are 200 million people sharing location on Facebook, Foursquare is adding 1 million users a month and the recent report by Jiwire shows that 62% of us are willing…
5 reasons why content is core to B2B digital strategy
The importance today of using digital marketing in organisational or business-to-business (B2B) marketing is highlighted by the latest Buyersphere report from Base One. Supplier websites, web searches and in most countries emails are now primary information sources for business buyers.
Online events and social media are also significant, more so if you drill down and look at their overall influence on purchase.
I've shown through my previous posts of examples of how companies use B2B marketing, that many companies have responded well to the opportunity from digital media. Many B2B organisations are already successfully using digital marketing in specialist sectors like financial and professional services, IT and software, manufacturing, engineering and science to name a few. But because they don't have a planned approach, they fail to make the most of…
