If you have the slightest interest in professional sports, you have probably heard a thing or two in the news about Peyton Manning’s current situation with the Indianapolis Colts. The CliffsNotes: He’s coming off a serious injury, he’s due a ton of money, the Colts have the number one pick in the draft and have all but secured selecting Andrew Luck (considered to be the next great QB). All signs point to Peyton’s release and the biggest free agent prize in quite some time.
Everyone has their opinion about Peyton, including people in the office here at SEER. Adam and I believe that Peyton will play the bulk of the season next year, where Mark believes he is washed up and is all but a press release away from announcing his retirement.
But we are not the only folks speculating about what happens next. Peyton has created serious buzz in the sports world, as well as the search & Twitter worlds. This morning, doing a Peyton Manning search on Yahoo showed something interesting: a tab for the latest stories, and an additional tab for the latest Twitter results about Manning. Even more interesting is that you can filter for the type of tweets you want to see – “Everyone” vs “Insider” tweets.
I wonder if baby bro Eli Manning, who just won a Super Bowl, is getting the same treatment when you search his name? Nope.
What about Tim Tebow, the most polarizing/debated QB in the league? Nothing.
Fine, let’s get off the QB kick. What are some other hot topics trending right now? Looking at the top 10 “Trending Now” topics on Yahoo, sure enough Peyton was sitting at number 2 around the time I searched. Is this the criteria for a query to have a separate tab for the latest tweets?
I decided to click on Nicolas Cage to see if he receiving the same Twitter love as Peyton. He sure is. But now you are filtering for everyone versus “Hollywood Insiders.”
What if we looked at a trend that wasn’t a person, say “Unemployment?”
This is something we’ve seen before (via Mashable): showing the latest Twitter results without filter options and included with tabs for photos and videos.
Okay. So only if you are a person trending on Yahoo do you get the latest Twitter results in a separate tab with filtered options? Wrong. “U.S. Stocks” results offer the Twitter tab with only one filter option of “everyone”, Reese Witherspoon defaults to an Associated Press photo slide show, and “gold prices” gets nothing.
The Top 10 trending results are constantly updating, but I wanted to run searches on other top newsworthy people/topics. I decided to jump on CNN.com, and run Yahoo searches on some of the headlines across a number of categories.
Oh yeah, we are in an election year. A search for Barack Obama gets the Twitter tab with filter options. Rick Santorum as well.
What about countries being discussed on CNN? Searches for “Syria,” “Israel” & “Iran” are all showing the Twitter tab with filter options.
Any other people on CNN showing these type of results? Lindsay Lohan and Whitney Houston. Lindsay even gets an additional filter of “Official Tweets.”
Any Musicians, Artists or Bands Getting any Twitter Love in Yahoo Search Results?
A Red Hot Chili Peppers die hard, they were my first choice for inspection. Not only do they have a Twitter tab, but an “Albums” tab as well. This was seen for some other artists (Foo Fighters, Alicia Keys) but not others (Beastie Boys, Bob Dylan).
What does it all mean?
While it’s clear that Yahoo is ramping up its Twitter integration within search results by offering latest tweets for hot topics and people of interest, how they determine which queries will earn the additional tab is unknown. Jeremy Lin is the most discussed athlete in sports right now; why doesn’t he have a tab for latest tweets? How is Yahoo deciding which queries receive specific filter options? What qualifies a Twitter handle to be classified as an “insider”?
Sometime last Monday, Google made changes to their results page. ImportXML doesn’t work anymore. So here’s a function you can use to get SERP results from Google.
(Correction: What I meant to say is that if you used =ImportXML("http://www.google.com/search?q=philadelphia seo company&num=100", "//h3[@class='r']/a/@href") it wouldn’t work. ImportXML, the function itself, works fine.)
As one of the newest members of the SEER PPC team, I was immediately thrown into becoming an Excel Ninja, as our fellow colleagues call us. I quickly learned some of the bells and whistles that Excel has to offer and I am honestly quite disappointed that I hadn’t previously learned about pivot tables and vlookups.
Recently, I discovered yet another huge timesaver: the ability to link data from Excel to PowerPoint. This feature is perfect for PowerPoint presentations that are in need of constant updates.As we always love to share our favorite lifesaving formulas, tips and tricks, I wanted to share a quick how-to with you. Follow this simple step by step process to link your Excel data to PowerPoint.
Step 1: Create your table of data in Excel as you usually would. Make sure you save the workbook before linking it to the PowerPoint file.
Quick Tip: If you are sharing the PowerPoint with people who may not have the Excel file but might need to update the data, make sure you provide them with the most up-to-date Excel file on their device saved as the same file name as the original file. You may want to consider using the Microsoft Office “Save & Send” feature or online collaboration tools such as box or Dropbox.
Step 2: Insert a chart to portray your data and adjust the appearance of the Excel chart.
Quick Tip: If you have multiple Excel charts that you wish to link to your PowerPoint, make sure they are all in the same Excel file (they may be on separate tabs within the same workbook).
Step 3: Once you’re satisfied with your Excel chart, copy and paste special it to the corresponding PowerPoint slide. The “Paste Special, Paste Link” paste option will update the chart every time the presentation is opened to reflect the current data in the Excel file.
Quick Tip: Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + V for Paste Special Options when pasting charts into PowerPoint. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl + V will simply paste the chart into the PowerPoint Slide without linking it to the source file.
Step 4: Your charts are now linked between Excel and PowerPoint! Double-clicking on a chart in PowerPoint will open the Excel file where you can edit the data. Any changes you make in Excel will be reflected in both the Excel and PowerPoint charts.
Quick Tip: If you are adding rows/columns, you will have to right click on the corresponding chart in the Excel file and click “Select Data” to select the chart data range. The updated data source should then be automatically applied to both the Excel and PowerPoint charts.
Step 5: Each time you open a PowerPoint file that is link to a Microsoft Office product, you will be prompted to update the links in the PowerPoint file. Simply click on the “Update Links” button; this process may take a few minutes depending on the number of charts that are linked. If the linked file is not available, click “Cancel;” the PowerPoint will still work and the data will be updated once the linked Excel file is available.
Quick Tip: Before sending the PowerPoint presentation to clients (who will not be receiving the source file), you may want to consider breaking the link between Excel and PowerPoint. This can be done in PowerPoint from the Home Button > Prepare > Edit Links to File. Individually select each file you wish to unlink and click “Break Link.” Consider saving the unlinked file with a different file name so you can still access the linked PowerPoint for internal changes and updates. Another alternative solution is to PDF the presentation before sending it out.
Now that you know the simple five step process of linking data from Excel to PowerPoint, check out Morgan’s blog to learn more lifesaving tricks and be sure to share your Excel lifesavers with us!
Sometimes it can be difficult to consistently come up with great content ideas — both for guest posting but also for on-page optimization. The below process will help you find new ideas — whether you’re new to an industry, or are a veteran — to both get links from guest posts but also create a rich content that can help improve rankings.
We’re going to use Google Suggest, Ubersuggest.org and Tag Crowd to find some excellent content ideas — a technique pioneered by Mr. Wil Reynolds. Like most things in SEO, let’s first start with Google.
Go to Google.com, and use the search query: how to [INSERT TOPIC]. For example, you would use the query: how to travel . This will bring up suggestions people have search for around how to travel.
In this example, we don’t have too much helpful information to start with. “How to travel around the world,” “how to travel abroad for free,” aren’t really groundbreaking. Once we begin finishing out our query with a, b, c, etc, we can see Google suggesting a lot of great content ideas. For instance, “how to travel by train in Europe” could be a great guest blog post on a travel site.
Going through the alphabet (e.g. “how to travel a,” “how to travel b”) in Google Suggest can be daunting and incredibly time consuming. This is where Ubersuggest.org can come in handy. It will use your query and go through the alphabet just like we have been doing in the above and Ubersuggest.org will give all results on one page.
Now begin scrolling down the page and as you can see, there are some really interesting ideas. For instance, “how to travel for free volunteer.” This could be a great blog post or on-page content about how to volunteer and travel abroad for free. Include some programs such as the Peace Corp and you have an excellent, informative post that people are searching for.
Another great example is “how to travel gluten free.” To diversify your backlink profile, you could use this content idea to guest post on food blogs.
Going through all of the ideas can also be daunting. So let’s extract the main themes around how to travel . Select the txt button below the search box on Ubersuggest.org and click the suggest button:
This will download all of the results into a .txt file. Copy the results from the .txt file and go to Tagcrowd.com and paste all of the Google Suggest ideas into text box.
Click “Visualize” and you’ll see all of the most commonly used words:
This will give you some insight into travel trends and what people are searching for around travel. As we can see, “cheap” is very popular. So we can go back to Ubersuggest.org and drill down on what people are searching for around cheap:
What I would encourage you to do is if you’re pursuing a guest blog post linking strategy or optimizing pages on your site, go through the above process and see what comes up. Again, often times when we have been in an industry for a long time or are new to it, we sometimes have writer’s block.
The above process should help bring some fresh ideas to the surface to help you build out rich on-page content to rank better while also being a resource for guest blog post content.
Time is always crunched to find a few queries that provide quick wins for linking. Short & simple below, these worked tremendously well in the past week.
When you’re kicking off a new client, you want to know everything about them. SEER gets this done through a lengthy questionnaire among other things. We get a ton of info, but there are always some items we’ve missed that are easy linking opportunities:
The larger the company, the more likely they will not know every event they sponsored. Running through the first few pages of SERPs could provide logo linking opportunities or branded anchor text links. If it’s already paid for, why not make sure you’re getting the link value?
Is your client/your company open to sponsoring events? Reverse that query so it looks like:
This will bring back all sites that have the word “sponsors” in the URL as well as bring back affordable sponsorship opportunities starting at $100. This query brings back GREAT results, but has two holes:
1. Brings back sites that may mention sponsors at a $100 level, but those pages don’t link out to anyone.
2. Brings back $100,000 sponsorship pages. I don’t want to knock $100k sponsorships, if it makes sense it makes sense, but I’m going to be looking for more affordable ones.
Are you in need of some higher domain authority sites? Add onto that query:
You can qualify the value of these sites by running it through OSE or other tools that can automate your evaluation just by dropping in the URLs. The big things on my radar when doing this are number of backlinks to that page, PR, DA & to make sure that the sponsorships aren’t outdated. We have a post from last year about 25 ways to qualify a link if you need some other suggestions on how to determine the value of a page.
Also, you don’t have to include the AND depending on your query, but it organizes the different variables in my mind.
You can switch it out to be .gov instead of .edu, but you can also make it even longer so that it fits your business:
Of course, switch it up to see what brings back the best results that fit your site:
Downsides to expanding your search:
1. Will bring back fewer results or zero results.
2. Will bring back other sponsors that are in your industry & less of a page related to your industry.
The second downside can then be turned into an upside. Find where else your competitors are sponsoring/advertising/promoted & figure out how to get there too.
Alright, so we have one idea about finding existing sponsorships and one about finding new ones. Insert your paid link argument here, but if your company sells skis and you sponsor a college ski club without being crazy about your anchor text, I can only see that as a win.
Moving away from sponsorships to other places where you client/business might already be mentioned:
The interview might be recent, it might be 5 years old, but finding existing interviews with your company/client should be easy wins to ask for a link.
Downsides:
1. Many articles might already be linking.
2. It could be a stretch to reach out about a link years after the fact.
3. There might not be any results if the client/company is new.
If you never ask, you probably (writing a post after a test is finished about NOT asking for a link) won’t ever get one.
For the #3 downside, again, reverse it to find where your competitors have been interviewed.
Repeat that over again with your competitor company name as well as their C-levels.
Hopefully these queries will help you find more linking opportunities. If you find these useful, play around with more. You can also follow me on twitter, @adammm, or find other SEER people on twitter by following @seerinteractive.
Lastly, check out the Link Search Tool from soloseo. There are a TON of queries there similar to those above that I go to on a regular basis.
The SEO team here at SEER Interactive was proud to host our first #SEERQandA session via our Google+ page this past Wednesday, January 25th. What resulted was an hour full of rapid-fire SEO questions and answers from users all over the world interested in learning more about our industry and company. Read below for some of our top questions and answers on best practices for SEO, the SEO culture in a small business, and site audits! For the full thread, please view it here!
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Ed Fry - Two burning questions about SEO for online marketplaces where users are creating listings where users buy and sell products. So here goes:
1. When a listing expires (e.g. product runs out permanently) should you 301 or rel-canonical, and point the result to either the users profile or back to a category page (the one you want to rank) based on link juice, optimal user experience and appeasing Matt Cutts. :]
2. How do you try and rank for competitive terms if you’re a marketplace and you’d really like to rank in one country where you have lots of users (e.g. the UK) without ranking in another country where you don’t have as many users (for instance, you haven’t got critical mass of sellers in the USA, and the USA is really several different markets – East Coast vs. West Coast if the product is really local). And no, we don’t have the budget or resources for the multiple TLD’s and hustling across every country :( Any advice?!?
Wil Reynolds - +Ed Fry thanks for coming out and supporting us…You are asking the tough questions. So here is my take… I am a bigger fan of 301′s than anything just because they are tried and true. +Rand Fishkin has done more research than I have on how they pass juice. The one thing I wonder about is how does 301′ing vs canonicaling impact social signals for a product (I know that 301′s don’t pass vote value) but let’s say that as Google starts using Google +1′s to value pages, then I bet you a canonical is better because you keep the social voting juice and push the link juice as well. I think as long as the 301 is on topic our buddy Matt Cutts would be OK with it. That is a great question, cc: +Mike Essex +Dana Lookadoo
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Andrew Dunkle - Do you guys have any advice for developing an effective SEO culture in a small business? We have a team of 8 and I’m looking for ways to get everyone involved in the process so important SEO related decisions are understood by everyone. Thanks!
Adam Melson - +Andrew Dunkle Love this question. It’s totally important to get this across your developers, PR person, President, etc. Everyone has to get on the same page as to why SEO is important and what you’re working toward. This can be shown to the web devs by showing them the impact of a page that was optimized. It helps get more conversions & doesn’t have to take forever. The PR person can start linking in releases and they’ll also be tracking who picks up the release and might have a contact at that website to get links in there if they were taken out during distribution. Copywriters can be briefed on different keywords they will want to include in their copy so that their articles/blog posts/pages get more visibility. The ego stroke is always a great route and if their content gets more eyes, your company gets more eyes. If there are 2-3 big keywords that you know are your money makers, share these as a goal with the team. Share that it’s important to have them rank. Maybe show how these keywords convert in PPC and the actual value of a sale. If you can save the cost of paying per click, it makes the company stronger, job security stronger, but more importantly it shows people that what they’re doing for SEO contributes to the bottom line of a company. If people are having trouble understanding why SEO goals are important, everyone can relate to dollars. “We need to get this SEO recommendation implemented because it could get us moved from #5 to #4″ isn’t motivating. “We need to get this SEO recommendation implemented because if we move from #5 to #4, it could bring in another $10k over the course of the year. Do you have an hour to implement?” is much more motivating.
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Cleo Kirkland - Hi all, What’s your process for a technical site audit? What are the top 10 errors you look for, how do you find them, and what tools do you use? I come from a link building and copywriting background, so trouble shooting site indexation issues is a bit foreign to me. Thanks!
Rachael Gerson - +Cleo Kirkland We have some basic starting processes, but every site ends up being different, so part of the plan needs to be flexibility. We may start an audit only to find there’s an issue with this particular site that we haven’t seen in hundreds of sites previously. Some basic things to look for: * Is the site content spiderable to the search engines? Try spider simulators like http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php. * Is the navigation spiderable? The Web Developer Toolbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/) is an absolute favorite. Get it for Firefox and Chrome, b/c Chrome is missing the ability to disable JavaScript. Do basic things like checking out Google’s text-only cache of a page. * Do you have redirect issues on the site? We had a client previously on a platform that 302 redirected every single link on the site to another URL. Since 302 redirects tell the search engines the redirects were temporary, the actual pages weren’t being picked up. The platform couldn’t be edited. If the site was/is redesigned, make sure there’s a redirect strategy in place. My favorite redirect checker is http://gsitecrawler.com/tools/Server-Status.aspx. * Using the same tool, check to make sure that either http://domain.com 301 redirects to http://www.domain.com, or vice versa. * Make sure 404 pages actually return a 404 server status. * Go through Google Webmaster Tools. Find the errors, figure out how to resolve. * Review the robots.txt. Are pages being blocked that shouldn’t be? This can be a huge issue! * Are there duplicate pages/domains/subdomains? Would a multi-faceted navigation make more sense for the site? * Do they have basic things like HTML & XML sitemaps? * Check for pagination issues, mistakes with canonical tags, etc.
Pausing my response here b/c just got a note that you were already answered… :)
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Now what does this all mean?
Besides the 100+ comments we received and an admirable attempt at justifying having a Google+ page, what we noticed more was the increase in our overall social media following. Here at SEER, I help manage the many social media accounts we have and find myself always looking for innovative ways to increase our fans and followers. We know that as a company, we have extremely valuable insight in both the SEO and PPC worlds, and we want people to know our thoughts and opinions! Hosting this G+ Q&A gave us exactly the push that we were looking for! Using our lunch break on a Wednesday afternoon, we were able to boost our name virally for an all-time high of 63 mentions and gain over 1% more followers (and beat our competitor’s follower growth that day)! Using SEOmoz’s Social Dashboard (which I highly recommend), the below two graphs highlight my exact enthusiasm (SEER is represented as the green line in the Follower Growth graph and competitors are represented as the red, blue and purple lines, respectively).
Interactions from the past 30 Days
Follower Growth from the past 30 days
In Conclusion
Now, looking back, I see that our first Q&A session was a huge success. We were able to inspire people with our knowledge and our creativity using Google+, all while enabling new benchmarks for our future social media efforts. My simple and quick words of advice for other small (or large) businesses that are trying to actively increase their presence online is to be provide knowledge or actionable items for your users, think of creative ways to invite and include your audience and have fun! I hope to continue learning more about social media and implementing new trends for SEER, but as for now, stay tuned for our next #SEERQandA session coming up in early February! We’ll be switching things up with SEO and PPC-themed discussions, so bring out your best questions and let’s rock and roll.
I’d love to hear about your social media successes and failures! Follow me @Melissa_Alam and fill me in!
Speak with any consultant, SEO, PPC or otherwise and you’ll hear at some point a ‘complaint’ they just can’t get their clients to say yes to their strategy ideas and recommendations.
It’s inevitable that clients will not be able to carry out every recommendation you may have. And let’s be honest, sometimes after looking back the idea isn’t always as earth shattering as we initially thought.
Part of being a great consultant is being able to pivot and take the project in a new direction when this happens. However, there are certain instances where a proposed strategy is critical to the success of the project and therefore to the client’s business (ALWAYS the ultimate goal).
When you get a “No” to a strategy idea that falls into this bucket, you shouldn’t just pivot in a new direction; you should sit back and analyze where the disconnect occurred and how you can get your client to understand the impact.
As I’ve been working in the Search space for over 6 years now, I’ve been challenged with this type of situation hundreds of times. Each time I’ve gotten a “we can’t do that” response, I’ve taken it as a learning opportunity to step back, evaluate and analyze my approach, and revise my next attempt to better connect with the client, often times re-proposing the same strategy idea!
By using the “No’s” as a learning opportunity and understanding how to better connect with clients to get them to approve my strategy idea it’s not by my mistake that I’ve been able to create account growth across PPC accounts for multiple years with increases of 1000+%, 800+%, 300+%, etc. And years ago, to get my SEO recommendations implemented, from linking strategies to content generation.
Growing the PPC accounts I am proud of, but what I am even more proud of is that by growing the accounts, I’ve helped my clients businesses grow as well – This is what the ultimate goal of getting your clients to being ‘Yes Men’ (& women) should always be!
So while this list is exhaustive, here are 10 tips that I’ve found to help connect with clients and get them to be Yes Men (& women).
Tip #1 – Honesty is the best policy
The age old idiom rings true in any partnership.
Start off a client relationship hiding the truth and you’ll find yourself covering your tracks instead of working on what matters to the clients business.
I’ve always found that by being an open book, from having clients own accounts (& therefore having the ability to login and see how things are going at any time) to being completely open about what exactly I am working on and all the details of the strategy, clients value the transparency.
Transparency builds a relationship.
A relationship builds trust.
Trust builds Yes men.
Tip #2 – Be Proactive
No one bats 100% all of the time.
As such, not every single strategy idea will result in success.
The key is to always be proactive in setting expectations, reporting on results and calling out failures FIRST.
If you notice your Adwords conversions take a dreadful downward trend for a few days after you implemented a change or the linking strategy you executed is not leading to the expected outcome – Be the FIRST to call this out.
It’s always better to be the one to call out a failed test and have a game plan ready for how to turn things around!
Tip #3 – Say “I’ll look into it”
Don’t answer questions on the fly if you don’t know the answer with 100% confidence.
When I first started at SEER 5 years ago, I knew little to nothing about SEO, my focus had always been Media & PPC. I used the phrase “Let me check with the team” more times than not and I never once had a client demand an answer on the spot.
Do your homework, tap your resources, get the accurate answer for your clients.
They will always appreciate the correct answer versus the fast answer (Check out Rand Fishkin’s take on this).
Tip #4 – Always do what is best for the client
Agencies overall have an unfortunately nasty reputation for doing what is best for THEM, not what is best for the client.
Our focus at SEER has been the complete opposite – ALWAYS do what is best for the client, even if that means it may decrease budgets for you or cause a pause in a project.
Check out Wil’s post where we outlined strategies for slowing down payments, or pausing projects when it benefits the client.
Tip #5 – Know what resources are available, or aren’t
Resources to carry out recommendations when it comes to things like developing content for example, can be a hindrance for driving clients toward success.
Without understanding resource situations for your clients, your strategy recommendation may have been shot down for a simple reason that you can offer help on or better yet build directly into your recommendation!
Tip #6 – Track your results
Nothing is worse than hearing a really great idea, hear it was implemented, and then hear crickets.
Before you propose any great strategy, be sure you have a plan to track and report on results throughout the execution phase. This is key to how SEER has developed our processes.
Tip #7 – Prove it
Nothing helps a client see the benefit to their business quite like showing them real results.
Do you want your client to buck up for a linking strategy? Show them what success you’ve had with a similar strategy for another client!
Share blogs (like this and this ), case studies, share real examples, create scenarios that show them the potential success.
Tip #8 – Understand the BUSINESS
Even if you are the PPC consultant, or SEO consultant, you need to understand your clients’ business, not just the small slice of the pie you focus on.
What are the overall goals for the company? What future initiatives are they focusing on?
By understanding the business, you can tie how your PPC strategy recommendation or SEO strategy recommendation ties back to the overall business goals, which ultimately is why they are investing in PPC or SEO. Check our Ryan’s Post on Talking Revenue With Your Clients.
Tip #9 – Be a student
You should always be pushing yourself to learn more – about the clients business, industry, about your own industry, about competitors, etc.
The more knowledge you bring to the table, the better strategy recommendations you can propose that tie back to the clients business.
Tip #10 – Be persistent
Hearing “No” to a strategy idea that you really believe will drive success for the client can make you feel defeated and feel intimated to bring up future “great” ideas.
However, it’s important that each time you hear a “No” you don’t give up or get frustrated that you have a “No” client.
Instead, evaluate the situation – it’s likely that there was a miscommunication in how you presented your idea, how it ties into the clients overall business goals or even who you presented the strategy to.
Analyze what you can do differently the next time to help get your strategies approved that will drive success for the clients business!
Overall Takeaway
You can only understand the overall business and goals by becoming a true partner and become engrained in the clients business and industry. To get your ideas and strategies approved by clients consistently, you need to earn the trust & clearly tie everything back to driving success, not just for PPC or SEO (for example), but for the overall business!
