Since you haven’t seen me in this space before I’ll go ahead and give you a rundown of how I got here. I worked in PR, Marketing and Social Media. Anyways, I thought the next natural progression would be SEO. Well, nothing about this progression was natural or even remotely fluid. Everything I had learned up to this point (three and a half years) equated to nothing more than a big pile of crap! Yep, that’s right, it was crap!
So, what is it that I now deem to be crap and what have I learned in the last month? Here’s a small sampling of what I have learned to be true:
Formal outreach to bloggers for links does not have to be so formal. The more casual you are the more likely you will be to have them actually respond to you. (Dear nuns, thanks but no thanks for your MLA training!)
Those ‘crappy sites’ I used to bounce from only seconds after clicking on them – apparently they aren’t so bad after all. Just because it is aesthetically displeasing doesn’t mean that site isn’t valuable in the eyes of an SEO professional.
Mommy bloggers are racking in the dough! Seriously though, these women have cashed in and understand the value of working with SEO professionals. Not to mention they are usually very accommodating of our requests.
Forums, who knew! These sometimes-overwhelming website destinations can hold a lot of value, through profile links and other fun stuff.
People are actually talking about hedgehogs, that hangy ball thing in your throat, dreams and even dreams about hedgehogs, hens and floating. Who knew?!
If you’re being shady with links and websites, Google will find out! Then you’ll be in deep-dark, un-rankable trouble.
If a client’s rankings drop – keep calm and carry on (unless they have been trending down for more than 2 weeks, then it’s time to rethink your strategy).
It’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. If you have an idea – run with it. Satisfy your curiousity.
The biggest lesson I have learned so far – social media cannot be quantified…yet. (I still hold hope that one day I will be able to quantify it as something that helps rankings but until then I wait in anticipation like a five year old on Christmas eve.)
My hope is that some of these initial lessons help other SEO neophytes who are transitioning from PR, Marketing or similar industries.
Recently, Google integrated Google+ into AdWords . Now they have launched another ad extension beta for promoting offers/coupons for brick-and-mortar or online stores– Offer Extensions. This new feature allows you to attach coupons, discounts, rebates and more to your ads – integrating Google Offers into AdWords.
As expected, these extensions are reserved for high-quality ads that display above the search results. They will be shown to both desktop and mobile users with full internet browsers. Upon clicking “View offer”, you are directed to either a) your website if the offer is online or b) a page similar to the screenshot below so a user may print the coupon for in-store use.
Now, users have a more direct path to conversion and advertisers have a great, new opportunity to promote their product or service.
How to Implement
Like other ad extensions, you will find this in the Ad Extensions tab located within the AdWords dashboard.
You’ll need to complete a few fields of required information to continue depending on whether your offer is redeemed online or in-store.
Online Offer – Required & Recommended Information
After you select a campaign, you must submit the following for an online offer:
Offer headline – 60 character limit. Must state essence of the offer (e.g., $ off, % off)
Redemption start / end date – Dates a user can redeem the offer
Discount – Percent, Amount or Other. You’ll need to fill in additional info once you select an option
Offer restrictions (optional) – Include any restrictions to your offer (e.g., Must spend $X before offer applies)
Image – Either select an existing image or upload a new image. Should be a .gif, .png or .jpg file, and shouldn’t exceed 100 x 100 pixels. This may be used in your ad
Where to redeem – You’ll submit a URL to the offer on your website. Must contain offer information and instructions for how to redeem
Offer serving start / end date (optional) – Dates Google will show offer. The offer will begin to show as soon as it’s approved and end on the redemption date by default. Note that this does not have to be the same as the redemption start/end date
In-Store Offer – Required & Recommended Information
Similar to the online offers, once you select a campaign, you’ll need to submit some additional information for in-store offers:
Offer headline – 60 character limit. Must state essence of the offer (e.g., $ off, % off)
Offer details – 250 character limit. Must elaborate on details such as how to redeem
Terms & Conditions – 400 character limit. Must include any legal statements you need to make, restrictions and dates
Redemption start / end date – Dates a user can redeem the offer
Barcode Type – There are a limited options to choose from as well as NA which defaults to a promo code
Discount Code – The code will either be printed on the offer as a barcode or promo code
Legal Business Name – Name associated with the Terms & Conditions attached to your offer
Image – Either select an existing image or upload a new image. Should be a .gif, .png or .jpg file, and shouldn’t exceed 100 x 100 pixels. This may be used in your ad
Offer serving start / end date (optional) – Dates Google will show offer. The offer will begin to show as soon as it’s approved and end on the redemption date by default. Again, that this does not have to be the same as the *redemption start/end date
Costs
Similar to sitelink extensions, you’ll only pay for clicks on the link that leads to the offer. For the in-store offers, a user is provided with the option to print, save, email, etc. after the initial click. There is no additional cost for clicks on Print or Save within the search results or Email, Save or SMS on mobile.
Reporting
You can easily report on many metrics for Offer Extensions. This includes clicks on the offer or whether a user printed or saved your coupon.
To view offer clicks, you must segment ‘Click Type’ in the Campaigns tab.
You’ll now see a ‘View Offers’ row in the dashboard.
The other metrics – such as printed offers or saved offers – are located in the ‘Free Clicks’ segment of the Dimensions tab.
Conclusion
I believe this is a great opportunity for advertisers with promotional offers. Luckily, I’ve been involved with this beta for a quite some time and my clients have been happy with the results. Glad to finally see it implemented in the dashboard.
Similar to my expectations with the headline changes in the top ads, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is yet another reason why advertisers will be fighting for the top positions.
For more information about Google Offers, please see the AdWords Help section about adding an offer to your text ad.
Happy Holidays everyone, today (like 10 minutes ago) I was working on this project to expand my thinking on how to improve QUALITY linking opportunities for a client in a creative way. Instead of keeping it all to ourselves at SEER – I decided to take the client examples out, and re-record the video, and share it with all of you. I hope it helps give you some ways to use tools to spark that creativity to go out there and build some high quality links.
Hello All, I am 3 months in at SEER and have been doing a lot of outreach for guest posts and offering other great content from our clients to bloggers. While doing the outreach I have developed some nice tricks and tips that have helped me speed up the process but not sound spammy so I figured I will share them with the SEO community. I know there are other tools and ways you can get information but below are the things that I use, so hopefully you can benefit from using them.
Tip 1 – Create Custom bookmarklets for each client
A JavaScript bookmarklet is a small piece code that your browser can use to perform an action or task via clicking a bookmark. I created custom bookmarklets to quickly search a website that I am currently looking at to see if they mentioned my client (example 1) or to see if they offer guest posts (example 2). Here are 2 examples:
Just change the red bolded text to your clients name or any text that you want to search the current page for
javascript:location.href=’http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A’+document.domain.replace(‘www.’,”)+’%20″Guest Post” OR “write for us”‘;
Just copy that code, create a new bookmark and past that in the url
Why it helps? It will save you time and a couple steps in research/digging process. What that bookmarklet is saying is: take the page I am looking at and do a site:domain.com search for SEER Interactive or whatever you swapped the red text for.
Tip 2 – Get a Little More Information From Rapportive
What is it?
“Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox. You can immediately see what people look like, where they’re based, and what they do. You can establish rapport by mentioning shared interests. You can grow your network by connecting on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and more.”
Why is it good and why do I use it?
It’s a great tool when doing outreach because it gets you a little more familiar to the person you are trying to contact. Not everyone has an email addresses with their name in it for example, info@domain.com. We all know the key to effective outreach is not having it look like a spammy template or mass email. This tool can give you their name and location so you can properly address them and offer them something they might like. Now think you’re reaching to a coupon blogger for a guest post or widget/badge, if you know their location the outreach and offer will probably change if they are in Philadelphia, Aspen, or Las Vegas.
Here’s what you see if you put my email address in
This tool also shows you their recent tweets and their photo. Now think what how much more you can learn about the person you’re reaching out to when you know what they look like or notice they recently twitted about a sports team or hobby that you share. Obviously you can get all this information with digging but this post is about speed. Throw their ambiguous email address in the bar then boom you got their name, where they are from, and social networks which will help you create a better email and more importantly create a longer lasting relationship with the blogger.
Tip 3 – Speed Up Outreach Without Sounding Like A Mass Email
Link Building outreach comes with another side, a side that is an unfortunate necessity, the mass outreach. This is when you have a lot of bloggers or sites that you want to reach but you’re on a time table and don’t have time to personally write to all of them so you create a template. Now we have a template which will save time but we aren’t out of the woods yet – we have to copy it in to Gmail and replace the space fillers with the bloggers name, site, incentive, ect ect. But after you knock out 20 emails you then notice an error, (and if you are in SEO and do a lot outreach you know the feeling I’m about to express) – it hits you and then time slows down almost to a screeching halt and your stomach drops to the floor because you just realized that you left in a space filler and have been saying “I really liked [blog name here] and think it will be a great fit.” You know that you actually did check out the blog and liked it but now it looks like you don’t care at all (Check out Brett’s post about how to recover from that). But there’s a solution and easy fix to stop that from happening! Mail merges AKA form letters can solve that problem.
What are they?
They take your letter in MS Word and let you add in space fillers that correspond with an Excel workbook and will populate what the contents of a certain cell/row into your MS Word document.
This is definitely the best tool that I use! Once you link your Word doc to Excel and your Excel doc has all the right information you can never miss a space filler. However, I don’t like to automate the entire process; I just use the filled in letter and copy it in to a Gmail message. Sometimes I like to add in another line or something else I liked about their site that isn’t always mutual with the other sites. Also, a lot of the time you are going to have to copy the message and paste it in a contact form.
Tip 4 – Following Up Just Became Easier
Boomerang for Gmail is great tool that I mostly use this for is follow up. Let me present you with a scenario to show why it’s so is great for a linking builder doing outreach.
You just outreached to 50 different bloggers for a new cool infographic and you tag them all with a label but you want to make sure you follow up with all of them. Now you can set a reminder and leave yourself a note but we all know that some of them slip through the cracks.
Now to solve this problem I use boomerang for Gmail, because you can set the email when you want to be reminded – and the way it reminds you is by putting the email at the top of your inbox’s unread section. I use this in addition to labels and reminders but I just feel it works a little more effective because it’s pretty hard to ignore a new email that is sent and personally I am one of those people who hate unread notifications on my computer, email, and cell phone.
Another great thing that you can use Gmail for is scheduling outreach so it hits bloggers email accounts at a time that is great for them. Let me present you with another scenario to show you why it can help.
You are outreaching to mom bloggers but your schedule was crazy and didn’t finish the outreach message ’til the evening but you are worried that if you send them the email at night or before a long weekend it might get bunched up with other emails and over looked or deleted.
Now I do know there are other ways to handle this problem but so far boomerangs Send Later feature works the best for me. This is also useful for dealing with time changes, sending an email at 9am to someone on the west coast? Schedule the email to be sent in 3 hours so it hits their computer at 9am LA time. Are you a night owl and working late but don’t want to bother bloggers with email at 2am or on the weekend? Schedule the email to hit later, and they now even have an App for mobile phones!
Tip 5 – Don’t Repeat Emails, Use Canned Responses
Canned Responses is mentioned in a couple different SEER Posts but I use it for a slightly different reason. A lot of times I will get similar questions from people who I reached out to along with having to follow up with some unresponsive folks. So what should I do to make this faster? Should I create a bunch of templates in word and fill up my Documents folder? No! There is a nice little gem called Canned Responses that can be found in Google Labs and it saves me lots of time when following up because it holds a formatted block of text. I can start an email and answer their questions that are unique, then use Canned Responses to answer the ones that are common.
Do you have any outreach tips that have helped you in the past? If so, please share them in the comments section and don’t forget to follow me on twitter
In actuality I wasn’t inspired by the song, if I could I would probably change Take to Make for the sake of this blog, but the idea is the same – you don’t need to have a hyper-personalized message to get a good response rate.
There are some popular schools of thought that state an outreach message that can be tailored to each individual will give you a much higher response. I am not going to disagree with these people; they are right. But if you’re like me you’ve tried this method, sunk a good bit of your time into identifying personas and crafting the perfect message only to get the same number of responses that you were getting before – maybe even with a few more typos :-).
What I propose you do instead – and what I will explain below – is hold onto your form letters.
A Poor, Customized Template
This is an example of a guest post email template that I wrote and used to use, and probably couldn’t even boast more than a 5% response rate for.
Pretty basic, but let’s take a second to dissect this and why it didn’t work.
The first paragraph talks about nothing but ourselves. Yawn – and we probably just lost their attention.
In the second sentence we’re tasked with choosing a blog type that encompasses the whole blog and one that the blogger agrees with.
Also in that second paragraph we have to come up with an attribute of the site that was “impressive”, and write about it as though we were genuinely impressed by it.
We are not offering them anything to them, rather asking them for reassurance.
Alright, by the third paragraph the flattery is sounding pretty cheesy.
So, granted with a tad better flow and a topic in hand it might have gotten a few more responses, the point is that even then there were more opportunities to slip up and say the wrong thing. And saying the wrong thing might still take you a lot of time to do. We are not mind readers, just nerds.
A Strong Form Letter
The two items that will elicit a response is a quality offer and a good subject line. The subject line to get them to open it, and the offer to encourage a response.
Here is an example of a short and simple outreach template that I‘ve been running with lately for guest posting.
It has been working pretty well. A 50% response rate on the relatively small sample I’ve tested it for, compared to my prior response rate of about 15% for guest post outreach.
This is the structure for almost all of my guest post outreaches; an introduction of myself and the offer, a brief explanation, and a closing line. I would make a small adjustment if I am presenting them with multiple topics.
What makes this work?
Spend a minimal amount of time.
Not losing anyone’s attention because of length.
Don’t run the risk of offending anyone by saying too much or being overly flattering.
Now I can’t just leave off here else I would be cheating you all of some of the other good stuff to better your guest post outreaching – the subject line and the topic (i.e. the offer).
So here are some tips.
The Subject Line
You want to get this right, because the chance of your message even getting read depends on it. Here’s a punch list of some of my own best practices:
Keep it short – This will help you stand out among a crowd of messages trying to explain themselves away in the subject. Also, consider a lot of these folks are reading their emails on their mobiles and a long subject line is likely to get cut off (thank you Brett).
Make it relevant – Be straight up, don’t try to fool bloggers. They are over it. Just ask Cecily K.
Get creative – If you can. We don’t always have the freedom to do so, depending on the client and the offer, but it does help you stand out (hint!). Some good tips in item 2 of Mike King’s post on writing better outreach.
The Topic
This is where you should spend a few minutes. Come up with a topic that relates to the blogger and their readers so that you are giving them something that would actually benefit their site. Some tips:
Scan the site – Read through the headlines to get a sense about what people are writing about. Make notes of the comments to see what is generating the most popularity among their readers.
Use Topsy – Wil has talked about this tool a few times. Plug in the blog URL and Topsy will tell you which blog posts have been the most popular.
Use current events – Blogs and their readers love something that relates to what everyone is already in the news. Like, How Does The Occupy Movement Affect… A couple months too late, but hopefully you get the idea.
I hope that you all can use some of this stuff to help you get a higher rate of return for the time you put into your next guest post outreach. If you have any questions or thoughts about any of this stuff drop me a line on twitter (@abbott_shea) or in the comments below.
We’ve discussed how to set up remarketing campaigns. We’ve discussed custom combinations which allow you to target specific audiences through AND/OR/NOT operators.
Many of us know the usual remarketing tactics: targeting users that visit specific pages, users that left items in cart, users that clicked your ad but didn’t converted, etc. Are you really active with social? What about all those people that ‘like’ your Facebook page, but never cared to visit your website? Maybe you have an email marketing strategy. What about those users who read your newsletter, only to not react to your offer?
Here, we’ll talk about how to reach users outside your typical remarketing audience – Facebook & email.
Tagging Your Audience
Facebook allows you to use any language as a regular webpage (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) so you basically follow the same process as placing remarketing codes elsewhere.
With custom Facebook pages, you can easily paste the code directly in the content of your custom pages such as this one below:
You should see this box when editing your page:
Similarly, if your email newsletters are HTML, you could place the code just like any section of your website you would like to track. However, this will also only work for users who open the HTML version vs. plain text AND if JavaScript can be rendered. Most email providers disallow JavaScript but if you have a specific landing page for your emails, you can tag that as well.
I’ll admit that I have not tested the email tagging yet, but I am currently gathering a Facebook audience. I will be posting up my results as soon as the test is complete!
Custom Combination Ideas
To follow up on the questions posed in the opening paragraph: say someone visited your Facebook page, but never came to your site? Remarket them! Your ad copy can really focus on these specific users. I recently read how mirroring your site design can help improve conversion rates and it seems pretty intuitive since these users are obviously familiar with it. Maybe now you can incorporate all features – Facebook & website design – within your creative.
Now let’s say someone took the time to open your email, but never visited your site? Remarket them! One scenario involves an advertiser that sends a reminder email to potential leads that never completed their offline conversion. Before, you would have never been able to reach this specific audience – you would rely on remarketing users who never finished the online conversion. Now you can really focus on these users to get that lead into your pocket.
Depending on the advertiser and their industry, some of these tactics will not applicable… but hopefully now you’ll start thinking outside the box when it comes to remarketing and how to target on really niche audiences.
Let me know of your thoughts or other ways you’ve remarketed to people below!
So you’ve decided it’s time to freshen up your website? Fantastic!
Whether you’re changing your backend CMS or just giving the site a new look and feel, it’s important to plan each phase of the redesign process so you don’t lose your existing rankings and traffic.
I like to split the redesign process into three parts: Pre-launch, Launch & Post-launch – pretty creative, huh?
If you invest the time in planning out the redesign during the pre-launch, post-launch will be a breeze. Here is the SEO website redesign checklist I follow for a successful redesign:
Pre-Launch SEO Redesign Checklist:
Remove dev/staging site crawler access
Best case scenario – password protect the dev/staging site
Second best – noindex, nofollow and disallow in robots.txt file
Determine the redesign variables – What’s going to change?
Will there be new URL creation through a domain switch or a new CMS?
Determine where these pages will fit into the existing site.
Will all content be brought over?
With the potential to lose pages that are driving traffic to the site, a proper 301 redirect strategy is necessary (see #4).
Will there be new site architecture?
Ensure that key internal pages don’t lose link juice through changing the main navigation, removing footers, removing key links from the home page, etc. Use GWT to determine where pages are linked internally.
Will there be a server switch?
While usually not a factor, switching servers can cause issues during a redesign, especially if it’s not as stable as you thought (see #3).
Minimize the variables – if possible:
Switch servers 2-4 weeks before or after the redesign to ensure any problems that occur aren’t from this step.
Don’t change your content, including title tags and H1s. Leave everything the same, with the exception of new pages and pages being removed.
By holding off on these two items, you reduce the number of variables that could cause rankings and traffic to plummet. Content can always be added later and a server can be switched before or after the redesign.
Create a 301 redirect strategy
Create an index of top pages on the site
Use analytics data to help develop a strategy for top content
Determine if there will be new pages, where pages can be eliminated and what pages should be recreated
Individually map old URLs to new URLs, organized by site architecture
If a page is being eliminated, find the most relevant page for a 301 redirect
I can’t stress the importance of mapping out a 301 redirect strategy enough. In fact, let the results speak for themselves from our 301 redirect case study. This may be THE most important step in the entire redesign process in terms of retaining traffic and rankings.
Plan your analytics software setup
You may need to determine whether a new user account (for GA) is necessary or if you can continue using the current one, which is recommended in order to maintain historical data. Also account for adding the analytics software code into the new design.
Benchmark current metrics – for comparison post-launch.
Rankings
Home page PageRank
Domain Authority
Number of pages indexed in Google with a site:domain.com search
Run a preliminary arch audit (see Launch questions)
This is the first of three audits and helps minimize errors at the launch.
Launch Checklist
Launch architecture audit – try to break everything!
Are titles, meta descriptions and H1s correct and unique?
Were Google and Bing Webmaster Tools installed properly?
Was Google Analytics (or another analytics software) installed properly?
Were passwords/noindex, nofollow and robots.txt disallow directives removed?
What is the total number of links on the home page? More than 100? Cut down.
Are the new drop-downs crawlable? How about the rest of the content on the site? (While there are many tools to check crawlability, this is my favorite to view a webpage as Googlebot.)
Annotate the site launch in analytics software
This will be a helpful note in the future as a benchmark for increases/decreases in traffic and conversions – an easy reference should anyone ever question why the site is doing so well all of a sudden!
Submit your new XML sitemap in Webmaster Tools
Fill out a change of address in Webmaster Tools for a domain switch
Post-Launch SEO Redesign Checklist
Checking in on these metrics weekly, or even more frequently, will help catch errors and issues early on in the process.
Number of pages indexed – use site:domain.com
The number of pages indexed will likely drop off post-launch. Once 301s are picked up, this number should climb back up. Be sure to check that there aren’t duplicate pages being indexed either.
Error-proofing: Should pages indexed remain low, something could be wrong with the implementation of 301s or crawlability of the new site. If duplicate content issues crop up, develop a plan to remove the duplicate pages either through 301s or the canonical tag.
Cache Date
Monitoring the cache date will give you an estimate of when you can expect to see changes being picked up. This will depend on the crawl rate of your site, but once the redesign is cached, you should begin seeing changes in the index in a couple of days.
Home Page PageRank, Home Page Page Authority & Domain Authority
HP PageRank, HP Page Authority and Domain Authority should remain constant throughout.
Error-proofing: You won’t notice a drop in these metrics right away, as it will depend on Google and Moz updates, but a drop could indicate an internal linking issue page to the home page. Highly unlikely, but still good to monitor just in case.
GWT Errors
GWT errors will begin to climb and then diminish as you assess and take care of them. Be sure to clean up 404 errors and 301 redirect them to the most appropriate pages. 404s are inevitable during a redesign, as it’s near impossible to catch every page on your website when planning you 301 strategy.
Rankings
You will also see rankings take an initial dip while the engines are picking up your 301s and assessing the new pages. Rankings could be down for 1-3 weeks, possibly more, so plan a redesign during your slow season or low traffic period.
Analytics data
Number of keywords driving traffic per week
Error-proofing: This will drop and then return, but could indicate that you’re missing out on the long tail if you don’t see numbers return to normal.
Top keywords driving traffic post-launch compared to pre-launch
Error-proofing: Similar to monitoring rankings, you want to know how much traffic you’re missing out on and make sure it returns.
Top content driving traffic post-launch compared to pre-launch
Error-proofing: If you see that there is content that drove traffic and is now bouncing, you may want to consider adding this content back to the site.
This table shows a sample of the above monitored data. This client actually ran into issues with the implementation of 301s on the server level. We picked up on the error immediately; however, it severely impacted traffic since the search engines were seeing duplicate content of the old and new URLs.
(Click for larger image)
Once the site launches, you should see traffic and rankings take an inevitable dip, as the above case study illustrates; however, within 2-4 weeks (depending on the crawl rate of your site), you should see everything return to normal. If traffic and rankings do not recover, walking backwards through the process should point you in the right direction and careful monitoring of the above metrics should help pinpoint where an issue may be. Hopefully your metrics surpass the norm with all of the upgrades you’ve made, though. That’s when you can do your happy dance!
Have you redesigned a website before? Did you follow any of these steps, or do you have anything to add to the list?
