Part 1. Using web analytics to benchmark website performance and drive insight through data
This is the first in a 12 part series on website optimisation to boost natural search traffic. The series started in 2011 and will continue into 2012. We're featuring it as a part of a series of posts about optimising marketing in 2012. You can see all my posts in the series here.
I hope these articles will provide you with a solid framework to review and improve your current approaches to SEO or to apply SEO to a new site. I've discussed this advice with Dave Chaffey and Dan Barker who write for Smart Insights too, so I'd like to thank them for their input.
As this data on site visitor traffic sources shows, search engines are still one of the major drivers of visitor traffic to sites, so there's good potential for driving more visitors…
Improving the accuracy of web analytics for social media tracking
There is a big elephant in the web analytics room... We are less likely to accurately track visits referred from social networks than we are visits from more traditional sources. ‘Less’ likely because the rise of those sources of traffic has coincided with (or helped cause) the rise in use of mobile apps or desktop clients at the expense of traditional web browsers.
So the visits you see as being reported as referred from one of the social networks are only the tip of the iceberg.
You’re almost certainly getting a better return on your social marketing that you think. It’s just not showing up where you’re looking for it. As we near the end of 2011 many are asking:
“If social is so ‘big’ why can’t I see those visits in my site’s analytics?”
If your calculations of the return on your efforts in…
Leaked Email from Twitter reveal costs per follower
Value/Importance: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Original post on the Drum
These are the costs revealed in the leaked email from Twitter’s ad sales department:
Cost of $2.50 and $4 per follower
$0.75 to $2.50 for each click, favourite, retweet or reply.
Commitment to a minimum campaign spend of 3 months and $15,000
Since Twitter introduced it’s advertising through it’s Promoted Tweets we’ve had questions from marketers about costs and whether the service would become available to advertisers with smaller budgets as is possible through Adwords, Facebook and LinkedIn.
This leak gives an idea of the costs and suggests the programme isn’t likely to become available to small and medium businesses any time soon.
While most marketers will continue to use Twitter as a…
Covering the 6 core components of a marketing campaign
We've created this new template to help marketers plan a campaign if they are managing it themeselves in a small business or are briefing colleagues and agencies in a larger business. Agencies may find it useful for reviewing their campaign processes. We also hope it will help prompt you to think of different ways of integrating new digital marketing approaches into your campaigns.
The marketing campaign planning template can be downloaded by Expert members in Word format so you can modify it to best suit your marketing campaigns:
Download planning template
Structure of campaign planning template
The stages of marketing campaigns and key issues covered are:
Campaign goals and tracking. What are we trying to achieve through our campaign and how will we know when we achieve it?
Target audience, customer insight and targeting.…
My experiences of using attribution as a social media marketer
Attribution modelling has certainly been a hot topic in 2011 and many brands have started to reap the rewards of optimising their online marketing budgets and reallocating marketing resources using it. Additionally, it can also provide incredible insight into customer behaviour and the touch points that they come into contact with up to and including the point of conversion.
To get an idea of the types of benefits brands can experience take a look at this post on the Econsultancy blog and see Dave's post giving this introduction to attribution modelling options.
Attribution modelling and social media
I’ve heard a lot recently about how the time of experimenting with social media without true measurement is coming to an end. And let’s hope that’s the case. Whilst attribution modelling certainly isn’t a panacea, using it does allow marketers to start to understand customers’…
5 DIY options for identifying duplicate content to improve SEO
SEOs talk a lot about why duplicate content matters and what to do about it, marketers don't tend to.
I think an understanding of duplicate content is important to all marketers who manage SEO so they can ask the right questions of their search specialists or agencies or fix the problem themselves. So to help bridge the gap, this is first of two posts explaining what duplicate content is, why it matters and what to do about it.
What is duplicate content
Duplicate content is where a search engine identifies different pages as similar. As a result it either doesn’t include them in the index or down-weights their importance. So you may have pages that you think are unique and should attract visits, but the search engines don't see it that way and pages identified as…
A survey of the most popular SEO tools
I found this infographic really interesting since it shows the range of tools available for SEO. It also shows how other people approach managing SEO and the kind of reasons they choose to use software to help.
I think software that helps review and improves SEO is great, as long as it is not trying to help cut corners, such as automated link building!
I have used a majority of the software mentioned in the infographic below and we have paid subscriptions for Majestic SEO (Backlink analysis) and Screaming Frog (Managing internal links).
Our reviews of SEO services:
Over the last eighteen months we've introduced the main types of SEO tools for marketers - here are the options:
Rank checking
Google Webmaster Tools
Keyword research and specifying target keyphrases to monitor
Monitoring competitor activity
Backlink analysis
Link-checking tools
Here's the infographic from Search Engine Journal:
…
How BBC Worldwide grew traffic to the Good Food website 60% + in 12 months
I recently caught up with BBC Worldwide Digital Marketing Manager, Selina Holliday, to talk through what's involved with managing a popular online publication. I’d heard about their success across multiple BBC web properties including the Good Food website, so I wanted to quiz Selina to learn how she and the wider BBC Worldwide team managed to grow one of the sites in their portfolio as much as they did (BBC Good Food). Let’s recognise that this growth is quite an achievement for a website that already receives high volumes of traffic.
So what's the secret? My takeaway was "Keep it simple and focus limited resources on getting the basics right".…
Part Two of a 12 part guide to Website optimisation
In Part 1, we explored how to use web analytics to benchmark performance and drive insight through data which is a theme throughout this series of in-depth articles. We continue this theme in this guide where I will look at approaches I use to review competitors. I hope you find the approaches interesting and I'll be interested to hear how they differ in the approaches and tools you use.
Competitor research is a core part of optimisation and involves studying websites that rank well for keyword targets.
While it's common to think of which keywords you should target, it's less common to research competitors in detail. But I think this is really important since each keyword and industry can be vastly different in terms of what puts a website at the top…
How should we manage social media conversations in the real world?
Did you see the publicity late last year around the launch of these "command centers" by two megabrands? Think nuclear power station or space shuttle consoles, very futuristic. I thought their launch campaigns were really interesting in the way they were used to highlight, the importance of listening and responding, both to consumers and other people within the company.
Gatorade Mission Control
Here is a great example of how one brand uses social listening not only to monitor, but to engage and influence too.
Mashable wrote-up the thinking behind this. If you take a look at this promo video, you can see how they emphasise the importance of listening to ALL conversations, but not only to monitor negatives, but find a way to engage and create dialogue. You can also see the scope of the control centre is not just…
