How can Digital Marketers use SEO ranking factors correlations?
Love them or loathe them, correlation studies seem to be everywhere when discussing 'best practices' in SEO. So we have to ask - 'how can we use them' and 'should we trust them'?
Moz and Searchmetrics are the best known publishers of correlation studies who produce reports from sample sizes in the order of hundreds of thousands of webpages, with the purpose of identifying what’s important and what’s not in the world of search marketing.
So how do you use them to inform your online strategy - do you try to remove yourself from all human emotion and blindly go with these numbers or do you ignore them and trust your gut instincts? Or is there a middle ground? You can see the challenge from this recent Searchmetrics SEO Ranking factors infographic.
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An example of using Audience Insights and Ad Manager to reach your target audience
If you’re a digital marketer there is a high chance that over the last year you have noticed the increased relevance of content as the key factor to a successful content strategy. Algorithm changes at Google have become more reader focused meaning that good quality content is now priority number one.
The most difficult part of distributing content is pretty much down to the fact you are posting it online. With over 3 billion active Internet users in the world and counting meaning that the net is becoming an increasingly difficult place to get noticed. Social, and particularly Facebook, has always been a great way to publish your content to people who care about your brand.
No need to worry right? We’ve got a huge Facebook page with 500,000 likes so plenty of people in our audience will see this…
A 9 step tutorial and example of Facebook's multi-product ads
Facebook has rolled out an exciting new update in recent weeks - the Multiple product ad - not to be confused with Dynamic Product ads which are a retargeting option most relevant to retailers .
The Multiple Product ad option means that you can feature more than one product or service (or blog post even) in the sponsored News Feed without having to create multiple adverts. You'll need to be using Power Editor (if you don't know about that well I have a one day training course as well as an Online Masterclass you can sign up for...). Multi-product ads will allow you up to five images at a time. Obviously you can use them to show more products, but you could also use a succession of images to tell a story or provide more details and close-ups of…
12 key issues you must consider for Mobile SEO
Mobile SEO refers to the search engine optimization of websites combined with flawless viewing on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. Thanks to the increasing boom of portable devices, webmasters should be highly concerned with their mobile SEO plan. After all, more than 50% of Internet users now report surfing websites through their mobile devices daily. Google is already favouring mobile friendly sites.
Based on my experience of different mobile SEO projects, I have created this detailed guide on mobile SEO. I hope it will help newcomers to mobile SEO missing some of the key issues. Below I will spend time offering my recommendations to boost your understanding on how to properly optimize your website for optimal user experiences across all mobile devices.
First and foremost, according to Google mobile websites typically run on one out of three different configurations:
1. Responsive Web Design
2.…
Dynamic Product ads bring product retargeting to Facebook
Importance: [rating=4] For Retailers looking to retarget their audience on Facebook
Recommended link: Facebook announcement of Dynamic Product ads
Facebook announced Product Ads this week. Here's an example to show why they're dynamic:
In their post announcing product ads, they explain:
“Product ads, a solution designed to help businesses promote multiple products or their entire product catalog, across all the devices their customers use. With product ads, businesses can showcase more products and people on Facebook can discover more relevant products”.
So this ad option extends Custom Audiences which can already be used for targeting to reference individual products. While it’s of most interest to retailers and all of Facebooks ads show this, it does look as if manufacturers or brands could use the service too.
Given the popularity of Google's PLAs this is likely…
What does the 'Relevance Score' actually mean?
Importance: [rating=4] (for Facebook advertisers)
Recommended link: Facebook for Business Advertising - new 'Relevance Score'
Facebook have introduced a new metric to help Advertisers refine and optimise their ads. They advise that it's not to be used as a single metric to review the effectiveness of your campaign, but is clearly a way to help them deliver more relevant ads which increase earnings in a similar way to Google's Quality Score. It's being positioned by Facebook for use in ad optimisation and testing to:
'Reach your audiences at lower cost, and to test and learn about your ad creative and ad targeting. But understand that having a good relevance score is not an end unto itself.'
So what does this new Facebook Metric look like?
The relevance score will be calculated when a Facebook Ad has been served more than…
Tools for benchmarking and comparing average media mix or percentage of different traffic sources between websites
Naturally all digital marketers want more (quality) traffic. This begs the question where do we find this traffic? What is our optimal mix of online media?
One approach to answering this question is to turn to the traffic sources report in Google Analytics. Where Google Analytics benchmarking once again presents your mix of referrers relative to others in your category. Your relative performance is shown under the Audience menu accessed via the Benchmarking option like so:
If you're not familiar with these, the four main traffic sources reported at this level in Google Analytics are:
Search traffic – This is separated into natural or organic and paid search (Adwords)
Referral traffic – This is traffic from other sites which have direct links to your site
Direct traffic – Direct traffic results…
Case study shows how digital tech and digital marketing techniques combined to boost visits to the Metro newspaper sites
We've seen a lot of interest when we have written about how to apply growth hacking to marketing, so I thought this was an interesting case study to share in outline. It's also a great illustration of the power of combining SEO, Content, Social media and Email marketing. The growth in uniques over a short time scale is dramatic to say the least!
The case shows how businesses can tap into the continuous demand for content via search engines and social media to grow their audience. In this case, the business is a news publisher who many other types of online brands must compete with for a share of audience. So similar principles apply for non-publishers since "Every Business is a Publisher Today" - or should think…
New research on the importance of discount codes for retailers
If any evidence is required that voucher codes are mainstream currency, then look no further than the success story of Mark Pearson founder of My Voucher Codes. Having identified US coupon sites as a lucrative business model and realised that no-one was replicating it in the UK, he launched his business with a £300 website and eight years later, sold the business for over £60m.
Whilst I’m sure good management is partly behind the success of this and its competitors, contrary to popular belief, it’s also the case that recession-generation businesses can often perform well if they capitalise on the mood of the people, as is the case here.
One the whole, the financial pain felt by many is lifting but our love of voucher codes is not diminishing and whilst their use was previously a clandestine operation, we’re now…
With ½ billion ads banned in 2014 it could happen to you
We know you will be a squeaky clean Google Advertisers; you don't breach advertising policies or deal in counterfeit goods! But how good are you as an individual at spotting a harmful advert which will download malware or spyware software, or is selling dangerous healthcare products ? Let's be honest, we are not trained police or specialists and even the most alert person can be drawn in by fraudsters. Consumers have the 'web busters' looking out for them as the consortium TrustinAds.org helps to fight this on-line advertising crime by removing or rejecting adverts - though we still need to be vigilant!
In this new infographics from Google its seems there is shortage of scammers - last year alone, more than 7,000 Advertisers promoted counterfeit goods, 250,000 sites from Google's network were removed for hiding malware and 2.5 million ads related to weight loss…
