SEO
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In my last post I talked about marketers that fail to track phone calls and social media ROI. They track online conversion rates fastidiously, but then they stare at you blankly when you ask how many calls their marketing generates, or when you ask them about social media ROI. My goal today is to lay out clearly how to increase landing page conversion rates by implementing call tracking.
5 Ways to Increase Landing Page Conversions
Why Google is Smart Banning Agencies For Link Buying | Jennifer Slegg – Search Engine Marketing Consultant
Unless you took an extra long vacation for Memorial Day, you have probably heard the big SEO news of the month. Google deindexed a search agency, Iacquire , for buying paid links to client sites. Yes, it wasn’t the beneficiary of those paid links who got nuked (which has happened countless times, and no clients have publicly said they got banned due to Iacquire practices that I have seen), but the agency that was buying the links as part of their SEO strategy for clients.
Most of the time when it comes to landing page testing, whether it be multivariate or split testing, you read about gleaning successes, where “we increased our conversion by 454 percent!” But what do you do your test fails? Let's focus on what causes your A/B/n experiments to fail, because this is the most common type of landing page testing done by small- to mid- size webmasters. We will also explore how to gain value from even failed tests. Some Causes of Experiment Failure Poor Test Design
What to do When Your Split Test Fails
Audience vs Community: Do You Know the Difference?
We had an amazing conversation with Allison Aldridge-Saur of Chickasaw Nation on Friday and I would encourage you to listen to it. Allison has been working on a fascinating project as part of the Digital Vision grant, writing a series on Native American Lessons for Community Building . In part two of her series, Allison discusses Audiences versus Communities . This struck me as one of the most important elements of the entire series.
Writing by Nick Stamoulis in SEO ShareThis An SEO client of mine came to me one day and wanted to know why their traffic was down.
Don’t Judge Your SEO in a Silo
Five fashion brands boosting traffic with Facebook apps
Pinterest’s rise from niche website to social powerhouse has been built largely on the back of fashion and lifestyle users. And we’ve seen a few case studies recently that suggest Pinterest users are worth more to e-commerce sites than visitors from Twitter or Facebook. Perhaps to reassert its authority as the number one social network, Facebook has released stats to show that its platform is just as popular with “shopaholics and fashionistas.” A developer blog post by Austin Haugen flags up five examples of fashion brands that have increased traffic and mobile installs through the use of Open Graph apps. Fab
Brochure websites are dead. Having a company website only featuring your contact information, “about us” page and a list of your products and services is no longer good enough if you want to have a successful online presence. Your business must develop a content marketing strategy to actively engage your customers. One of the most effective ways to do this is a company blog.
Should your Company Have a Blog?
Yesterday, Search Engine Land released the results of the third and final round of BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey. Conducted between January 15th and March 1st of this year, this survey looked at the current state of local consumer purchasing behavior, and compared it against results from 2010. We referenced some of the data from previous installments of the survey in an earlier post on this blog about how to accumulate more online reviews for your local business, but the data from this installment of the survey focuses on consumer recommendation behavior for local businesses. In other words, how can you turn your customers into word-of-mouth marketers for your local business?
How Businesses Can Increase Word-of-Mouth Recommendations [Data]
What ‘Doctor Who’ Can Teach Search Marketers
On November 23, 1963, a day after the assassination of President Kennedy, a family television show aired its first episode on the BBC . "Doctor Who" was a program about a strange, crotchety old man and his granddaughter, who accidentally kidnapped a pair of teachers and took them on adventures throughout time and space in what appears to be a blue, wooden 1950s style police box. So what could this possibly have to do with search marketing? Let me give you some examples. Every Week is a New Adventure
7 Common mistakes to avoid for building a natural link profile | iSEOforGoogle
If you have been following SEO for some time, by now you would have a fair idea that quality links are everything. Okay okay, if not everything then certainly one of the most important things. All too often however, link building methods have raised quite many questions by being associated with questionable SEO practices such as link buying or link spamming. 1. Using the same anchor text for all the links
How Unique Can an SEO Firm Really Be?
I was talking with an SEO prospect a few weeks ago and they asked me “What differentiates your SEO firm from everyone else?” In essence, they wanted to know what my unique selling proposition was so I gave them the usual run down I tell all my prospects; we’re a strictly white hat firm. Since we’re a smaller SEO company that means you get more personalized attention and your account manager isn’t going to change every 3 months. I also only like to take on clients that I truly believe we can help so as to not waste your money or our time. After the call though, it hit me, how many other small, white hat SEO firms could say the exact same thing?Mobile Targeting Definitions Every Marketer Must Know
A number of new terms have come to the marketplace since mobile’s explosion, such as SoLoMo, geo-fencing, UDID, the list goes on. Some of these terms will become part of popular culture, while others don’t even make sense! But the sooner we all get on board with more correct, local-mobile terminology, the better off our industry will be. We’ll start by highlighting essential industry terms related to mobile targeting, cutting through the overused jargon to handpick and clearly define a number of mobile targeting terms that have become part of the industry landscape for veterans and newbies alike. Geo-Fencing & Geo-targetingJust How Important is On-page SEO?
Ever since we have been able to game search engines optimise websites, huge importance has been placed on an array of on-page factors. First it was Meta and keyword stuffing, then it was anchor text links and creating unique copy. But in a post-Penguin world, where over-optimisation could result in punishments, the game may be changing ever so slightly.The UK paid search market is expected to grow by 14% and reach a value of £4.19bn by the end of 2012, up from £3.68bn in 2011. The figure, published today in our UK Paid Search Agencies Buyer’s Guide , includes media spend and money spent on agency services and consultancy. Despite challenging economic conditions, the growth in the amount of money being spent on paid search reflects the fact that it remains an effective and measurable channel for generating a positive return on investment . The flexible nature of paid search, whether in terms of spend, campaign duration and timing, or user targeting, also provides benefits which are not so direct in other forms of marketing. This year’s estimate for marketplace growth, which factors in the worsening economic climate, is broadly in line with published quarterly earnings reports from Google , which now break out UK revenues.
UK paid search market worth more than £4bn – new report
As Google vies to maintain their dominance of the online advertising market, they made a play today for a bigger chunk of the mobile ads pie. Google Places have been swallowed up by Google+ Local Pages , merging all business listings into one to be used across search, Maps, mobile, and Google+. Users can access enhanced local listings via a new Local tab in the left sidebar of Google+, by performing searches on the fly on their mobile (currently supporting Android, iOS coming soon), in Google searches, and through Maps. One notable addition: Zagat’s reviews are incorporated, taking the place of Google’s five-star rating system. Google purchased Zagat’s last year and working the review system into Google+ Local has taken down the paywall, making the service free for all users. Here’s how it works, demonstrated in a video released by Google this morning: