Presented to the Internet Retailing Expo conference in Birmingham
The techniques I recommended in this talk are reviewed for a case study company with their permission. Although the recommendations use a retail example, they apply to other types of business also.
Here's a preview of the recommendations:
1. Identify Consumer search behaviours NOT just keyword lists
2. Use a gap analysis to drive performance
3. Improve your brand messages: Communicate your OVP for a smooth customer journey
4. Check the relevance of blended search – here Google Places
5. Don’t forget the second biggest search engine…
6. Evaluate paid search YouTube options
7. Obsess about links
8. Obsess more about content
9. Integrate “added value content”
10. You can always re-engineer your title tags more…
11. Even keyword density analysis can help…something you shouldn’t do?
12. Make the most of your home page and high-level utility pages
13. Get the balance right oncategory and sub-category pages
14. Review…
A tutorial on reviewing consumer search behaviour in the 2nd Largest Search Engine in the World
As you'll know, YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google in many countries. It's the number one ranked entertainment site and 3rd most visited in the UK by Hitwise. Given this and since popular videos are displayed in the "one-box" of blended search results for some queries it's worth investigating how YouTube can be used to reach a wider audience.
In this post I'll give a short tutorial on how to find out it's relevance in your market by finding out the number of searches. I'm not suggesting it will give instant results or as Forrester misguidely advised that it's the Easiest Way to a First-page ranking on Google. It may even help you "push back" against colleagues who are asking why you're not doing more work in YouTube.
It's an enormous site…
A comparison of the three most popular influencer finding tools: Klout, Kred and Peerindex
As social networks continued to grow rapidly, so has interest in influence. Global companies are realising the importance of targeting high profile bloggers, journalists and celebrities, and have increasingly sought to reach out to these influencers for endorsement and to drive word-of-mouth about the brand.
While FMCG brands like Snickers can easily identify popular celebrity bloggers, businesses in other fields can have a harder task to find relevant influencers. To cater for this, a new wave of influencer scoring, based on social media analytics, has emerged, most notably Klout, Kred and PeerIndex.
Dan Purvis from the Meltwater Group, explains why these tools are growing in importance:
"Identifying who wields influence has lately become a hot topic of considerable proportions in marketing, PR and comms teams the world over. As…
A tutorial showing how to find the keyword qualifiers that Google prompts searchers with
There are a good set of tools available that aim to make compiling keywords easier; we have documented a range of keyphrase analysis tools, but you still need to filter and refine. We find that, these days, many know about the Google tools and others like Wordtracker or Wordstream, but relatively few know about Übersuggest, so we thought we'd do a separate post to introduce it, with an example, for those who don't know it.
The prompt for the alert is an interface update. It helps you understand consumers keyword / keyphrase behaviour so you can ensure you are creating the most relevant content.
The difference with Ubersuggest however is that it utilises the Google Autocomplete engine, this means the keywords it delivers…
Five types of tools and techniques to keep up with the socialsphere
I think you'd agree that trying to stay informed and up-to-date with the latest developments in digital and social media marketing is a bit of a challenge? The scale of this challenge was brought home to me by these 60 seconds in social media infographics.
This is a particular challenge for me since I'm keen to keep my books up-to-date and deliver the most relevant info via SmartInsight to our Enewsletter, Facebook and Twitter subscribers. So I need to scan a lot of sources across the whole of digital marketing, as many non-specialist marketers/digital marketers do, but then find the most important ones - this is where software can help. So in this post I thought I'd share a couple of the approaches and tools I use.
It's not at all sophisticated really, so do let me know about how…
Not Provided search queries will affect how your report on your search engine marketing
Source : Google Inside Search Blog
Importance : [rating=4]
Our Commentary
A recent announcment on the Google Inside Search blog post confirmed Google's plans to roll out encrypted search across local Google services (.co.uk, .fr, .de etc).
You may recall this change was rolled out across Google.com in October last year and you will have undoutedly seen the impact in your own analytics as the amount of keyword data set to "Not Provided" has grown.
Consultant and Smart Insights commentator Dan Barker has catalogued the impact of the recent change in the UK and we have seen this also in our analytics. Here he shows the recent change.
Dan refers to this as Google "hiding search data" and that's how we see it - it's…
Are free press release websites worth using?
The question of whether to use free press release websites is a common one amongst many hands-on marketers trying to get a benefit for SEO and PR... Quickly followed by how many of these should we use and is it worth paying?
To help answer this question, Vitis public relations conducted a month long trial which investigated the value of free PR Websites from different angles. I'm alerting readers to it since it's a fascinating and immediately valuable / actionable for business and clients. The point to stress in all of the comments below, is that I am referring specifically to free PR websites, not the more quality controlled paid for services. The report shows the best sites you can use based on different criteria.
What are Free PR websites?
Such websites exist as content hubs for press releases from all manner of business. View them as a press…
What is the objective of your SEO program? Actually you will have many but at the heart will be the desire to increase the amount of relevant traffic that hits your website(s) from natural search.
The total number of potential keyword searches that could drive traffic to your website is enormous. Some web owners get traffic from hundreds of thousands of different keywords. However, not every keyword delivers high quality traffic that adds value to the bottom line of the business.
One of the biggest challenges for SEO is to learn which keywords are contributing to ROI, focusing efforts where they can deliver the most reward. To achieve this you need to separate the wheat from the chaff and that means using the data available to discover what doesn’t work.
This article takes a look at some of the techniques you can use to identify and screen poor performing keywords, enabling you to…
New European Facebook marketing pages launched
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Facebook UK Marketing page
We’ve found the global / US Facebook Marketing Page useful for ideas on Facebook Marketing - it seems others do too - there are nearly 900,000 Likes for this page - that's a LOT of people following Facebook marketing.
Until recently, most posts and examples referenced, the US market, but similar sites have now been created in some European countries which we thought we’d alert you to - it could be worth putting them in your Feeds.
In the UK version, it’s good to see Facebook practicing Permission Marketing with a gated page to get access to their resources.
These are the other countries which now have a special marketing page - you can access them from the bottom of the UK page:
…
Using nofollow tags to support SEO
Nofollow tags are important in SEO, but I find many marketers I speak to haven't heard of the approach.
That's understandable since you would only expect SEO specialists to be aware of them. However, I think they are a useful concept to understand as a "hands-on" marketer, since they will effect conversations you have about buying media or understanding the way links in social media work.
Nofollow tags explained
A nofollow tag is a basic piece of HTML. Appended to a hyperlink, it allows webmasters to control whether search engines follow a link or not.
For example, the following URL on a page of another site allows search engines to visit Smart Insights’ website and credit the website with the link; each link is scored by the search engines, supporting SEO:
<a href="http://www.smartinsights.com/" title="Smart Insights">Visit Smart Insights</a>
Here's the same hyperlink,…
