I became one of the hoards of shoppers who needed to do everything online. It’s almost cliché to point out that mobile shopping, or m-commerce, is becoming larger and larger. The research site eMarkerter has a great graph that shows exactly HOW large m-commerce is getting, projecting $11.6 billion in spend for 2012, up 73.1% over 2011.

So as I sat there eagerly ready to contribute my portion of those billions I ran into the same problem over and over again— subpar website experiences.

They were creative, they were good, but they were not optimal for viewing on a mobile device.

Since SEM is well, my job, I saw a great opportunity to dig in further to something that is already affecting search.

Google announced late last year that mobile site optimization would become a factor in quality scores for campaigns that were targeting mobile devices. It makes sense!  If a consumer is just going to get frustrated by your website anyway, why would Google reward you with a top spot in the paid search results?

Google put together the site www.howtogomo.com which has a lot of ways you can test your website for mobile usability, design tips, and even build your own. For now, I zeroed in on five of their ten mobile top practices!

1. 1.       Keep It Quick

This is for the impatient among us – which is all of us. Personally, if my little status bar takes more than three seconds I’m already hitting the back button and going to another site.

The Tip to Implement: compress images, use bullet points, and make it easy for your page to load

1. 2.       Simplify Navigation

Your mobile site is the place for your most succinct writing. Only put on the page what you really feel is important because here people will get lost in the details.

The Tip to Implement: Google’s recommendation is 7 links or fewer so make them count! Adding a search box for a complex site is ideal!

1. 3.       Be Thumb Friendly

Two words: Fat fingers. High on the list of annoying things about mobile sites is clicking a too small link and ending up somewhere I didn’t want to go because my fingers were too large!

Tip to Implement: Use large centered buttons and pad them!

1. 4.       Design for Visibility

SEER doesn’t give design tips. We won’t tell you what colors to use or which general images work best, but we can let you know that how you use your space is important for conversions. Do make use of size and color for the button that leads to your call to action. Don’t ask people to fill out long forms, mobile is not the place to get their entire consumer profile, and Do make sure that they are not having to surf it, scroll it, pause it, click it (Technologic!) in order to read your page. They may leave first!

Tip to Implement: Make it easy for your customers to read and eliminate the need to pinch and zoom to view content.

1. 5.       Make it Easy to Convert

This is important for all websites but where could it be more important than PPC? If someone comes to your site through a PPC ad tell them what you need them to do and allow them to complete this step in as few actions as possible. You can make it even easier on your customer by trying a function like click to call!

Tip to Implement: Make it as easy as possible for consumers to complete your desired call to action.

Now that you have some of our tips here is a great example from Einstein Healthcare Network in Philadelphia that has all of these tips in action:

• In just three lines of text you know the benefits of FastCare.
• There is a clear call to action (Call now for Hours Directions or services!)
• There is only one large button to press, and you know exactly where it will take you!

This page was created in less than 30 minutes using Google’s Mobile Landing Page site templates (http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/mobile-landing-pages/mlpb.html) and has seen a 30% call rate since implementation.

With so many tips and tools it doesn’t have to be time intensive to revamp your mobile site for success. When you are all done fixing it up, learn about Creating a Mobile Profile in Google Analytics.

What is Tynt?

Tynt’s website states that for every user who clicks on a “share this” button, there are 90 users sharing through copy and paste. Tynt is a free tool that aims to leverage this fact by automatically inserting a link back to the site whenever a user copies and pastes an image or text.

How does it work?

You can install Tynt by adding a snippet of javascript to your site’s source code. If you’re working with a WordPress site, there are also two plugins available.  Once the code is in place, Tynt’s attribution link will appear whenever someone pastes your content into an email or adds it to a website. It is then up to the user to decide if they would like to keep this link in place, or easily strip it out by deleting it.

Results

Three months ago, we added Tynt to a client’s blog. Now whenever someone pastes their content, an added link reads “More from [Client Name]: URL.”  In the past 30 days alone (Dec. 24 – Jan. 22), Tynt monitored 778,154 total page views, 41,196 image copies, and 391,039 word copies, which lead to a whopping 4,614 new links.

There are some important things to note about this data. First, only 1.07% of image and text copies generated a link, meaning that 99% of users either pulled this link out before republishing online or shared the content through email.

Second, the majority of these links are nofollowed. In this case, three of the top sites where this content was shared were Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and while it is great to have visibility on these platforms, the links pass little to no SEO value.

Lastly, very few of these links are high quality. Tynt separates the links into three categories: Gold for sites the search engines will find, Silver for sites behind logins or of low quality, and Bronze for sites that won’t impact SEO, but may refer traffic. Of the 4,614 links Tynt contributed, only 25 qualified as valuable Gold links. While this is small fraction of the links Tynt reports, I don’t know a single SEO who wouldn’t gladly take 25 easy links.

Additional Benefits

Tynt has its own analytics suite that provides some interesting metrics. For example, you can see which images and features generated the most shares, broken down by the top 28 images and top 20 posts. You can also discover which regions generated the most copy and pastes. This information can then be used to plan and create new content that caters to user preferences and these geographic areas.

In conclusion, Tynt is a low maintenance tool that quietly works to drive SEO value to your site. It requires little effort once it is set up. If you have a client with engaging content, we recommend testing Tynt for a month to see if it can benefit as an easy supplement to your current linkbuilding efforts.

If anyone has any experiences with Tynt or questions about the tool, feel free to leave a comment below or reach me on Twitter at @alliebrown89.

Huge thanks to our resident Analytics junkie @RachaelGerson for introducing me to this tool! 

Hey there! My name’s Ryan and I am another new member to the SEER team. I’ve learned so much since starting at SEER but I thought for my first blog post I would cover something I have some background in, WordPress. I am helping to set up SEER’s upcoming blog on SEO for college students and I thought I would share the checklist I go through every time I start a new site on WordPress. If anyone’s New Years resolution was to finally start blogging then hopefully this post will give you a few ideas and tips or possibly save you a headache down the road.

The great thing about WordPress is that it really does simplify every step of creating and running a site. I was in a meeting with SEER’s developer Chris Le and half the time I thought he was speaking a foreign language when talking about advanced site design. I know some coding basics but thanks to WordPress and the plug-ins and themes created around it I’ve built more than a dozen sites ranging from your basic blog all the way to e-commerce and password protected membership sites. Although WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) that will simplify running your blog it doesn’t mean you won’t run into any issues along the way. For SEO purposes and your readers experience it’s important to get your initial setup as close to “optimal” as possible. So without further ado, here is my 10 step checklist to creating your WordPress blog.

NOTE: I am not going to cover how to install WordPress. If you have a hosting company they will almost always have tutorials or customer support on installation.

1.)  Layout: Draw up a layout of how you would like your site to look. Brainstorm the major categories you are going to cover. Research other blogs that you enjoy reading to help you get a feel for how you want your site to look. One big decision is whether you want to have more than one navigation bar.

•  Tim Ferriss’s site Four Hour Blog covers a wide array of topics, way too many to fit across his primary navigation bar. He uses his primary navbar to cover the basics and then a site wide sidebar to cover the topics he frequently writes about.

•  This navigation bar was taken from a successful affiliate site. They are using their targeted keywords across the navigation bar to maximize the link juice passed across each page. From an SEO perspective, their can be a benefit to limiting the links you have on your navigation bar and each page in general. This sites news section uses a sidebar but it is not used site wide.

2.) Choose a theme:  Many themes are available for free and some great ones are out there for purchase. If I had one piece of advice for choosing a theme it would be to keep it clean. You don’t need a million widgets, images or menu bars on your pages. If you are providing educational or entertaining information that is what the readers will be there for. If you are researching other WordPress blogs while planning your design then at the bottom you can often see what theme they are using.

• If you just want to use one of the many free ones available then in your WordPress dashboard go: Appearance —> Themes —> Install Themes —> Search

3.) Get a Logo/Header: One of the things I love the most about WordPress is outside of a theme, a logo is the only thing you have to spend extra time or money on. Unless you are great with photoshop, I recommend hiring someone from ELance or a forum to design a logo for you. I know I have gotten really nicelogos for as little as $20.00. Make sure you get the pixel specifications from your theme correct and that the logo will mesh with your sites theme and color scheme. Also tell your designer that you want at least one edit as part of the agreement.

4.) Set your permalinks structure: I’ve seen some debate on what the best permalink structure is but you definitely don’t want to leave it on the default. Below is my recommendation but feel free to do some more research.

• In your dashboard go to Settings->Permalinks. Change the URL to a custom structure, and use /%category/%postname%/ as this will allow for SEO friendly URLs like yoursite.com/SEO/links/ as opposed to: yoursite.com/?p=001.

• Change the Category Base to ./ then click save.  Once you do that, only the . will remain there.  If you leave it as is, your SEO category URL will be yoursite.com/seo/links/ when you want it to be yoursite.com/seo/

5.) Create your primary pages: Now that you’ve set your permalinks it’s time to decide on what will be included in your primary navigation bar and any site wide sidebars. This is a good time to breakout the Google keyword tool and run through some searches on what topics you will be covering the most. Test your assumptions and try to come up with at least five primary keywords for each category. Create these pages (even if you don’t have all your content ready) and organize your navigation bar. On your blog you might want a secondary navigation bar that expands on the topics you will write posts on.

I always recommend creating the following pages which are considered fundamental on a legal and ethical level:

• Privacy Policy: A privacy policy is where you disclose if you have cookies on your site, what your doing with e-mail you collect and more. Here is a free template but I recommend doing more research specific to your site.
• Terms & Conditions: This describes how users are allowed to use your website. These vary based on what you include on your site (software, free downloads, etc.) so research what other people in your industry, topic are using.
• About/Contact: It builds user trust to know who runs the site and if they have a way to get in touch with them. This doesn’t need to be long just a short bio and an e-mail or contact form will suffice.
• Disclosure: The FTC requires bloggers to disclose if they are getting paid or compensated in anyway for the content on their blog. Many use a disclosure page to go over what content is and is not sponsored or affiliate related.

6.) Set your home page: The WordPress default is to show your latest posts on the front page. If you’d like to have any kind of landing page for home and a blog section than do the following.

• Settings – > Reading: Choose a static page then select your desired home page from the drop down menu. Right below it you can select the page where you would like your blog posts to show up.

7.) Set your navigation menus and widgets: Now that you’ve created your pages you need them to show up on the page where you want. This is very specific to the theme you choose so I don’t want to show visuals that could end up being contradictory. That being said, the general steps are:

• Dashboard —> Appearance —> Menus – From there you can add pages to your top navigation bar and put them in the order you want.
• Dashboard —> Appearance —> Widgets – This is generally where you would build your sidebars. You can have more than one sidebar on a page and you can customize what pages they will show up on. As I mentioned previously many sites only have a side bar on their blog page.

8.) Plugin’s: WordPress has a huge variety of  plugins available to help you improve site functionality, SEO, collect e-mails and thousands of other things. The plugins I am recommending here are all free and can be found by going to Plugins —> Add New and searching for the name.

• XML Sitemap Generator – Generates an XML Sitemap for better indexing of your site by the SERPS. This also makes it much easier to get your site setup in webmaster tools (Don’t even consider not using this one)
• SEO Ultimate – Another plug-in you shouldn’t go without even if your theme has solid SEO capabilities. This is the best all around SEO tool for WordPress and its free. You can do everything from changing multiple title tags to editing your meta tag descriptions and adding pages to your robot.txt file.
• W3 Total Cache and W3 Super Cache – These can majorly improve your sites loading speed and greatly lower the risk of your site crashing from too much traffic.
• Broken Link Checker – Will notify you of broken links on your site.
• Permalink Trailing Slash Fixer – If you used my recommended permalinks structure this will add a trailing slash in the URLs if its missing.

9.) Google Analytics: For those that don’t know, Google Analytics (or any other analytics service you might use) allows you to see how many visitors come to your site, what pages they visit, how long they stay and much much more. You may want to do add your analytics code earlier in the process but if you have a theme or plugin that can post your analytics code site wide then it’s fine to wait until the rest of your site structure is setup. To register your site go to Google Analytics and they will walk you through the process.

10.) Webmaster Tools: Submit your site to Google and Bing Webmaster tools (which now covers Yahoo). They have solid instructions in both Bing and Google so I won’t explain this step by step. Depending on the XML sitemap plugin you choose the instructions will also vary slightly. My only other point would be to do this as soon as your site structure is setup if you want the SERP’s to start indexing your pages. I once forgot to do this for two months and couldn’t figure out why a lot of my pages and links weren’t showing up. The data you get from using these tools is also crucial.

Now you have your site setup. It’s getting crawled by the search engines and feeding you data. The hard part comes next, you’ve gotta start posting! Blogging can be very competitive but if you have something interesting to say and you stick with it then good things will happen.

P.S. – I know I didn’t cover how to setup your RSS feed or integrate with your social media (facebook, twitter, etc.). Although that stuff is important I didn’t consider it fundamental in the first steps to getting a site up and running. Leave me some feedback and if anyone would like me to cover that I can come back with a separate post.

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And now they have added another wonderful, FREE feature called Lead Collection for advertisers who are running LinkedIn ads. This new feature gives users that click to your site an easy way to contact your company by showing a “Request Contact” button above your website.

How it works

When a user clicks on your LinkedIn ad and is directed to your website, they will see a lead collection bar above your site which gives the user the option to be contacted by your company.

For each lead you will receive the member’s name, headline and a link to their LinkedIn Profile. LinkedIn members have the option of sharing their email address as well. You will receive this information via email to either the email address associated with a personal account, or the contact associated with the Business Account.

You can also view your leads in the Ads Dashboard under the leads tab. Here you can filter out leads by time frame, contact status and you can even see which campaign the lead came from.

You will also see a Lead count in the Ads Dashboard in the Ad Campaign Tab.

How Do I Set This Up?!!?

The great news – it’s very simple … so there is no excuse not to use this feature! (Did I mention, it’s FREE?)

All you have to do is go to your campaign settings and check “Yes” for the Collect Leads option:

No tracking or back-end coding needs to be set up as everything is tracked in the LinkedIn interface.

My 2 Cents

LinkedIn is still a relatively new player in the PPC space but this shows that they are making improvements to their product and offering more options for advertisers to connect with potential leads.

While you are most likely sending users to a landing page with some sort of contact form, it doesn’t hurt to give them as many options as possible to reach out to you! Especially when you can track the lead!

By collecting the leads via LinkedIn Lead Collection could also hold much more value to your sales team. For example: You are already (or should be) targeting users in your key demographic. The user resonated with your ad, clicked to your site and reached out to be contacted by you. You then have insta-access to their company information to determine if that lead actually holds value to you and whether or not it will be worth pursuing.

On the downside, this feature could get tricky if you are using a dummy account for your campaign (which I do not recommend via the tips section in my previous post, Using LinkedIn For Your B2B Strategy.

At this time, I am not exactly sure how contacting the leads will work as I have not set this up for a client yet (working on that), but I am assuming you will only be able to contact the lead directly via the account associated with the ad campaign. If you are using a dummy account you will need to be sure to check the email address associated with the account often as well as the campaign performance in the interface (which you should be checking daily!) to ensure you are following up with the lead in a timely manner. You may still be able to contact them as you choose since you will have the users information. You just won’t be able to see a breakdown of leads contacted vs. non-contacted in the leads tab of the LinkedIn interface.

This leads me to a few questions – Will this affect ad quality if users do not interact with the Request Contact button? Will LinkedIn remove the feature for companies that do not follow up with the leads properly? Will users interact with the button and find it helpful, or is it a bit creepy?

What are your thoughts? Will you test this new feature?

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But there is one problem. They don’t see the value of the return on their investment.

Too often we get caught up in winning the rankings race, but not explaining to a client how it will directly impact their business.  We are all on the same page that increased rankings means increased visits means increased conversions means increased revenue.  But how much money are we talking here?

That’s why providing data to your clients that speaks in dollars and cents is critical.  In this particular example, I’m going to show how to get approval for that linkbuilding budget by showing wins in the revenue column.  Note: this strategy works particularly well with ecommerce clients that have transactions set up in Google Analytics.

Identify Keywords with High Average Values & Strong Conversion Rates

For larger e-commerce sites, it’s virtually impossible to track every keyword that builds revenue.  As SEO’s we often talk about “low hanging fruit” as part of a long-tailed keyword strategy to identify opportunities that we’re not always tracking/pushing to optimize.  Looking at a site’s past performance based on average values is just another way to attack the quick wins.

In this analysis I looked at one of our clients in the motorcycle apparel space.  For this particular industry, six months of data made sense because “hot products” tend to change relatively quickly.  In most cases the more data, the better.   But if your client sells products that have a quick turn over or are seasonal, set your data accordingly.

Along with date range, using the right filters will help with your analysis. Again, this all depends on the industry and your client’s product offerings.  You know their business, so set filters that are going to give you insight on real opportunities.

Next, sort by Average Value, determine the amount of rows you’d like to include and export your results to a CSV. Rather than explain how to quickly put this data together, I’ll refer you to Mark Lavoritano’s post on Striking Distance Keywords. It’s a great read and it shows you how to use RankChecker to quickly find where all of your potential opportunities are ranking on Google.

Let’s fast forward to the results.  Here I have a spreadsheet that shows keywords (sorry, had to block those out) with high average values, along with their respective ranking and conversion rate.  This additional data gives you even more insight on what will gain the quickest win. Off the bat I immediately identified three keywords that were long-tailed, had high average values with strong conversion rates and ranking within striking distance (Note: run a quick spot check on the keywords to make sure their positioning is accurate.  RankChecker is a great tool for proximity, but you may find slight discrepancies when doing a Google Chrome Incognito, Location USA search).

I Have My Data. I Have My Target Keywords. Now What?

Slingshot SEO’s recent Organic CTR Study has provided updated information that you should use to your advantage. While the AdWords Keyword Tool is also great measuring stick, using these CTR rates combined with actual data may provide a stronger analysis when pitching your client.

Let’s look at Keyword 1 and what we already know about it based on six months of data:

- It’s ranked 7 (let’s assume this as constant over the last 6 months)

- It has an average value of $490.32 (this can be skewed by outliers, so go back into GA to find out)

- It has an average 306 visits a month

- It has earned $2,043 a month

- Using Slingshot SEO’s CTR data, we can conclude that with a 1.88% CTR for keywords ranking 7^th, Keyword 1 has been searched 16,114 a month (Note: AdWords Keyword Tool estimates 14,800 exact match, global searches).

Now that we know the amount of searches a month, we can project what it’s worth to move up in the rankings.  If Keyword 1 ranked 3^rd, here is what we could expect:

- With a ranking of 3, Keyword 1 can assume a 7.22% CTR on 16,114 searches a month = 1,160 projected monthly visits

- Using Keyword 1’s conversion rate, ranking number 3 would bring 14.5 conversions a month

- Using Keyword 1’s Average Value, ranking number 3 would earn $7,122 a month

- Therefore, ranking number 3 for Keyword 1 would bring an additional $5K each month and an additional $60K a year

Drawbacks

Because everyone looks at data differently, it’s easy to see some of the drawbacks by using the data outlined above.

We’re looking at a fairly small sample size; what if one transaction skewed the data for the average value?  Go back and look to make sure it’s been relatively consistent. If not, find another keyword.

What if Slingshot SEO’s data isn’t accurate? Chances are, it’s not 100% and varies depending on the industry and the type of results. So play with the numbers and maybe use past data to form your own conclusions on CTR.

What if the keyword’s ranking fluctuated throughout the six months, further skewing the data? You’re probably right that it did have some movement.  But even if you were half off, you’d still see an additional $30K a year in revenue.

Keep in mind that SEO is not the only industry that uses data based on market research to make dollar-value projections. The underlying point is simple: Money talks. Speaking to your clients about rankings combined with revenue will help get you what you need to succeed.  Use keywords that have historically performed well, and show them a quick win where you can point out what it means to their bottom line by improving rankings.  Don’t just tell them you’re going to build 20 links.  Tell your client that building 20 links means moving a valuable keyword from 7 to 3 on Google, and increasing revenue by $60K a year.

The rest is up to you. You’ve shown the numbers, now you’ve got to show the win.

And, as the late great Al Davis once said, “Just win, baby.”

USE THE TOOL YOURSELF:

Special thanks to Mark Lavoritano for building an easy to use spreadsheet to share with everyone. As I was putting together this data, Mark was kind enough to put his excel chops to work and build a tool that involves very little work for the user and provides a quick snapshot of the impact on revenue based on keyword positioning. 

Download the tool here, add some data and let us know what you think.  Have a suggestion for improvement? Drop us a line in the comments and share your feedback!

Follow Ryan Fontana on Twitter

Last week I was using Google to find blogs that accept guest posts in the small business space — using advanced queries like, “guest post” OR “guest author” AND inurl:blog OR inurl:business. At first glance, the results looked fantastic. However, most of them were low quality and not worth pursuing.

The gears started turning and, on an off chance, I turned to Twitter. It seems every SEO blog and every conference has someone talking about using Twitter to get links. In my experience, most Twitter linking strategies are long-term, such as:

• create a top influencer list on your blog and Tweet it out to see if they’ll mention you
• find people that want something and reach out to make a connection
• create content to answer questions on Twitter

Rand Fishkin, from SEOMoz, has a great video on 8 ways to build links using Twitter, which you can find here. All great strategies, but I want to take another spin on using Twitter to get links — using Twitter Search.

For years I’ve been using advanced search queries in Google to find linking opportunities and guess what? Twitter also supports advanced search queries. Find the complete list here. Some of you out there might already be wise to advanced search queries on Twitter but for those of you that are not, here is how you can leverage Twitter for guest posts, contests and other linking strategies:

Guest Posts

Finding Guest Posts

Twitter Search query: “guest post” OR “guest author” “[industry]” filter:links

This search query will bring back Tweets that contain “guest post” or “guest author,” the industry keyword (e.g. travel, education, auto, etc) and links.

If you’re not finding a lot of opportunities, open the search to something like, “guest” “[industry]” or if there are irrelevant results, use the “-” sign to eliminate tweets with irrelevant keywords.

Here is an example you can use for the travel industry:

“guest post” OR “guest author” “travel” filter:links

After performing the query, in about 10 seconds, I stumble onto Alexis Grant, who’s written a fantastic guest post about travel. The site she’s done a guest post on could be a great place for me to reach out to for a guest blog.

If you’re thinking, “the travel industry has a ton of guest post opportunities but my industry is so niche no one does guest blog posts…” think bigger. Let’s say you sell homemade throw pillows (pretty specific, right?), search for “crafts,” “home goods,” “furniture.” Looking at the big picture can help you find more bloggers that accept guest posts.

Finding Additional Opportunities

Some guest authors publish on multiple blogs which gives you an opportunity to find sites that accept guest posts that might not have popped up in your initial query.

Search query: @[guest writer’s Twitter handle] “guest post” OR “guest author” filter:links

Example: @alexisgrant “guest post” OR “guest author” filter:links

As you can see, @alexisgrant has been a guest author on more than one travel blog. If you want to dig even deeper, you can throw her website into Open Site Explorer, download the backlinks and put “guest” in the title and / or URL filter.

Finding Industry Topics

If you’re struggling to think of great content for your potential guest blogging prospect, use Tag Crowd to find longer tail / related terms. Copy all of the content on the Twitter results page and put it into the text box on tagcrowd.com.

These word clouds are going to change as frequently as the Tweets you use, so you can have fresh content when reaching out to bloggers.

Make Publishing Your Content Even More Appealing

If you want to make bloggers a more appealing offer (other than “here’s content, publish it!”), create a contest around the content. So you can say:

“I have 5 pieces of content and I’m reaching out to 10 sites to publish it. The first 5 bloggers to publish the content before [INSERT DATE] will receive [INSERT PRIZE].”

(Full disclosure: Big thanks to Wil for coming up with this idea!)

Stuck on what might be appealing? Use some of the themes from your Twitter search in Google Products to find prizes that might be appealing to them. So if we’re going with the travel industry, simply type travel into Google Product search and see what rises to the surface.

Google Product search can help you find cheap items that might be appealing under a certain price. I’m seeing products for different travel bloggers. Take a look:

We can give the traveling baby stroller to mommy travel bloggers and the Apple and router to other travel sites. Try doing a site:[domain name] [product] Google search to see if they’ve talked about the products in previous posts. This will help you build an even more compelling argument to publish your content.

Contests

Let’s say you’re running an iPad giveaway contest to get links. You can use Twitter advanced search queries to find other contests and see how they’re getting links:

“contest” OR “contestant” “[industry]” filter:links

Once you find a contest in your industry, use Open Site Explorer to find sites that are linking to the contest. Then you can reach out to those sites to see if they’d be willing to link to your contest.

If Open Site Explorer doesn’t have backlink data on the competitor’s contest URL, try:

• the Google query: “[competitor brand name]” AND “contest.” OR, if the contest requires you to paste a snippet of code or phrase on your site to qualify, simply copy it and throw it in a Google search with quotes.
• the Twitter query: “contest” OR “contestant” @[Twitter handle] filter:links until:[insert date (e.g. 2010-03-30)]

Answer Industry Questions

Find people that are asking questions in your industry by using the search operator “?” and your industry:

“?” “[industry]”

Then you can use RowFeeder to find those users that have websites. When you find a user that has a website, reach out to them and ask if you can do a guest post on their blog.

Find Local Linking Opportunities

If you’re trying to find local links, use the “near:” operator. So if I want to find local guest post opportunities for tourism in Philadelphia, I would use the query:

near:philadelphia “guest post” “travel” OR “tourism”

Don’t Drop This Idea After You Get a Handful of Links!

I used to be the biggest offender of this. I’d read a great blog post about a new way to get links, do it for a couple of weeks, then move onto the next shiny linkbuilding strategy. I did this until I made a habit of checking on almost all of my easy link strategies EVERY DAY. First thing in the morning, I wake up, grab some coffee and breakfast, sit down at my computer, check my client’s stats and then spend 30 mins finding quick linking opps in Google Reader, EVERY DAY.

I’ve used Google Reader’s Twitter Search functionality (browse for stuff > search > track keywords and searches > enter keyword > select Twitter > now subscribe) to track guest post, contest, directories and other basic linking strategies.

So that’s how I use Twitter to find linking opportunities. If anyone else has other ideas on using Twitter search to get links, please add them in the comments below.

So picture this: After months of hard work, you’ve got top rankings for some of your keywords (bravo SEO’s!) and want to write some content to expand your reach into the long tail. More than likely, you would head over to Google Suggest/Promediacorp’s Suggester/Soovle or any other tool of choice and get some ideas for keyword variations you’d like to rank for. Then, you drop these variations into your traffic estimator of choice and boom; you’ve got keywords with volume. Finally, you would start developing content that’s designed to rank well, attract links and (above all) customers. You know the content development phase is going to take a long time, but eventually you’ll get those rankings and sweet, glorious traffic!

The fatal flaw in the (commonly used) method above is that you have no real idea how that traffic is going to convert. You’ve got about 900 possible long tail versions of that keyword that you’d love to rank for. But, can you really write content for all of those 900 keywords? Which keyword do you choose if there are 10 variations, all with the same search volume?

The answer to all of these questions lay within a gigantic dataset that your resident PPC Professional already has – Search Query reports! For those of you that don’t know, a search query report is a tool offered  by most major search engines and contains key metrics (impressions, clicks, cost, conversions) broken down by the exact query searched. That means you can find the exact keyword variations that haven’t just driven traffic but (drumroll please) CONVERTED!

Pretty valuable stuff from a PPC perspective, but here’s a trick that Wil and I came up with to help the SEO’s of the world to write content with keywords that will not only generate traffic volume, but are most likely to drive conversions as well.

Note: The guide below assumes you have excel 2007 or later. If you need old school instructions, leave a comment and I’ll write a guide for other versions.

1: Pick your lead horse

The first step is picking the lead keyword for which you’ll be optimizing the page. In this case, we’re going after Help Desk Software, which has 6,600 monthly searches.

2: Pull your SQ report

Navigate to the “keyword” tab of your AdWords interface and click on “See Search terms – All.” You could filter now, but I prefer to toy with the excel sheet itself once we have all the data so we don’t miss anything.  Make sure to pull it for a long time period – in this instance I’m going for the last 14 months but the more data you have, the better.  

3: Clean the data.

After you’ve exported the data into Excel, we need make it easier to work with. First, eliminate all of the columns you don’t need. Eliminate EVERY column except for Clicks, Impressions and Conversions (we’ll need conversion rate as well, but don’t worry about that now). If you really want, you can keep cost in there, but for this purpose it’s not necessary.

4: Organize the data

Hope you’ve got plenty of RAM. Depending on how much you spend and how large the account is, you’ll likely have a TON of data. In this example I ended up with approximately 18,000 rows, many of which are duplicates (a single query could be sourced from several different campaigns/countries/keywords). This is where our good friends Pivot Tables and Patience come into play. First, create a pivot table with the entire Search Query report included.

Add Search Term as the row label. Add Impressions, Clicks & Conversions as the values. This will create a dynamic chart that totals all the duplicates for you.

Ta-da – we have totals! (Note: you could use Sub-totals for this, but I find that takes a bit longer and is kind of annoying). Copy the entire pivot table into a new sheet (copy – paste special – paste values) so you can…

5: Play with the data

There’s a ton of great data, but in this case we’re only concerned with tails that contain the phrase “help desk software.” On the excel sheet execute a find-and-replace for help desk software, only changing the color.

Sort the cells by color (custom sort – sort on cell color – your color on top) and voilà, you’ve got all the “help desk software” queries isolated. I’d advise you to set a threshold from here on out (i.e. remove any queries with less than 10 conversions) so you’re only looking at significant data. Add in and calculate a “conversion rate” column, and sort the list in descending order. Depending on how big your initial data set was, you should have a nice little list of tail terms to weave into content.

It’s not a bad idea to run these through a traffic estimator just to make sure they get some traffic. In this case, all but 2 keywords showed up in the estimator.

6: Write!

So what do you think? Will you be using query data to help with your content efforts?

For a few more PPC-to-SEO ideas, check out Our Powers Combined Part 1, written by Ryan Fontana and myself!

There are several helpful tools I used in the process of creating my analysis, which can also help you in developing your own competitive analysis.

• Keyword Spy is a helpful research tool which exposes what ads and keywords your competitors are showing for, in addition to ROI estimates.
• Google Insights for Search allows you to search keywords search volume and interest over time across categories, time ranges, and geographic distribution.

Using Keyword Spy I pulled the keywords competitors were bidding on, including our client’s keywords. Next, I compiled these terms and deleted keywords that were showing for less than 25 days. This was done to make the analysis more manageable and can be changed based on your needs. Following this, I inserted a pivot table showing the competitor, keyword, and number of days seen. Next I sorted the pivot from largest to smallest days seen and deleted keywords if less than half of competitors were bidding on them. I would suggest making note of the terms your client isn’t bidding on that your competitors are. This may indicate possible room for keyword expansion. Running them through Google’s Traffic Estimator will give you a better idea of how they could affect your budget and how much traffic they could generate. It is important to keep in mind that the numbers Keyword Spy and Google Traffic Estimator generate are estimates, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Through Keyword Spy I was also able to pull ads our competitors were showing for. Looking at competitors ads, allows you to see what ads are receiving a high ROI and insight into ways to manipulate and optimize your own ad copy to receive more clicks and conversions. Another important tool discussed above was Google Insights for Search, which allows you to pull interest reports to see search terms trends over time- weekly, monthly, yearly etc. You can also narrow your search by geographic region. The reports which allow you to see trends in search volume index geographically, could peak an interest in possible regional, national and international campaign expansions.

Another way I analyzed competition in my analysis was by evaluating the competitors landing pages through exploring a series of best practices.  By analyzing their landing pages, we could visibly see aspects we liked and disliked on their pages and room for improvement on our own landing page. In order to increase conversion rates, it is important to optimize your landing page.  An interesting call-to-action, formatting selection, or testimonial could motivate you to enhance areas of your own landing page. Whether you are moving the form, changing fonts, or adding video, testing allows you to see what incites users to convert, which can ultimately determine which strategy is best for you.  Although there are many steps you can take to create an effective landing page, we recommend keeping changes to a minimum, that way it is easier to determine which aspects of the page affect the results.

There are many ways you can create a competitive analysis and many tools which can assist you in the process. Overall you want to expose your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, give you a better understanding of what your competitors are doing and ultimately determine how you can generate strategies to create a competitive advantage. Have any tips, suggestions, or further insight on forming a competitive analysis? Comment Below!

Ad Split Test Tool

One of the first major analyses I learned when I started here two months ago was the Ad Analysis. It’s with an Ad Analysis that we determine which ads we run that are worth keeping and which need to be paused and replaced. Generally speaking, most ad groups should be running with at least two distinct ads. After collecting enough data on these ads (give it a few weeks or more to aggregate), we can run a test to determine which ad is the “winning” ad with a statistical significance – meaning it really earned the win and didn’t just squeeze by. The Ad Split Testing tool makes it nice and easy by taking all of the complicated math off your plate. Just copy over the appropriate data into the fields, choose your confidence level, and run. If there is a statistical difference in performance between the two ads, it’ll tell you which performed best in terms of CTR and Conversion Rate – like so:

You’ll then be able to determine which ad has the stats to support that it will continue to outperform the other. With that information, you can pause the loser and add shiny new ad copy. Lather, rinse and repeat when data aggregates again to see if you have a new winner on your hands.

Percent Increase Calculator

I find myself creating client reports on a daily basis. Above all, it seems as though the most important bit of information to my client, in my very detailed reports, is how much performance went up or down from one report to the next. I didn’t major in advertising to do complex math, so I try my best to cut it out of my daily routine. The Percentage Increase Calculator allows you to input two numbers, and it’ll tell you what the difference in percentage is between the two. So pop in last week’s conversions, then this week’s conversions, and it’ll tell you exactly how much your conversions went up or down (hopefully up!). Do this with any of your metrics – my clients also like to see negative percentages on CPA!

URL Opener

The last tool is one I’m proud to say I found myself. One of the very first tasks I was assigned was a placement report for one of our clients. I had a list of a hundred URLs I needed to visit to determine if they were appropriate pages for our ads to appear. I began copy and pasting one at a time, and it was taking forever. Enter the URL Opener. Copy and paste multiple URLs directly from the Excel report into the URL Opener, and it will give you the option to quickly open each web address in its own separate tab. But know your computer’s limits – don’t try to open so many that it hangs up your system!

While it might not seem like much, the time saved in copying from Excel, pasting into the browser and waiting for the page to load really adds up. Just think of all the additional reports you could run with your saved time!

Do you have any secret tools you’d like to share with the group? Quit holding out on us all, and spill the beans in a comment!

In this video, I’ll show you how to check your Google Analytics tracking codes without needing to wait for the data to show up in Google Analytics.

Links:

Google Analytics Debugging Tool

ScreenFlow

Transcription:

Hey everybody, this is Chris and I’m a developer here at Seer Interactive.  Today, I’m going to show you how to use the Google Analytics debugging tool to make sure your GA changes and code changes work without needing to wait 24 hours for the data to show up.  We’ll be using the Google Analytics Debugging Tool.  So let’s just get started!

On the left hand side of the screen here, I have the webpage in question and on the right hand side near the top, I have the HTML code for the webpage and at the bottom, I have my Apache log.  So, when I go to the page and refresh it, I can see some stuff happening.  We’ll see the HTML run, grab a picture, and try to grab the favorite icon.  But we don’t have one, so it’s not there.  No big deal.

Let’s take a quick look at the HTML first down here, somewhere on line 121.  This is our Google Analytics code.  It’s the top half of it that sets up the account and starts to track our page views.  The second half is actually at the bottom.  You’re allowed to split it.  That’s OK.

This is our form.  Somebody fills in the form, hits the submit button, and it sends them off to a PDF file. What we want to do is track when somebody hits that submit button and gets a PDF.  That’s what we want to track.

So, to do that, you’ll need to get the Google Analytics debugging tool.  To get that, just type in “google analytics debugger chrome” into Google.  (Or just follow this link) And I think it’s the first link. Yup.  There it is.  Go ahead and install that plugin and what we need to have it turned on so I’m just going to right click on it and turn it on.  (Correction: left click!)  My plugin is already turned on so I’m ready to go.

Now that I’m ready to go, I’m just going to hit refresh one more time. Alright.  Great.  And I’m going to right click on any part of the page and  click on inspect element.  The first thing it’s going to do is send me to the elements page.   We want to click over to the consoles page.

You can see that this consoles page shows us everything that’s happening with Google Analytics.  So here’s our tracking code, and there it is, our tracking code as reported by Google Analytics.  _trackPageView, and there it is again it’s tracking our page view.   The rest of this stuff is just information parsed out from this giant URL.  The hit ID, the referring URL,  page, time, session time, local time, what my browser is, you know.  Things of that sort.

What we’re going to be doing is filling in the form and what we want to see is our virtual page view show up at the bottom of this list as soon as we hit that submit button. So again, we’re looking for our tracking page view, this URL, and looking for it way down here at the bottom. So let’s go try it out!

Type into the form.  Test, test, test, and my email address which is very much not a real email address, but that’s OK, and hit submit.  It should show up here.  Now, this is going to show up pretty quick because this is going to refresh and immediately go to a PDF which means all this stuff on the screen is going to go away.  But I’m going to rewind the tape (video, actually) so we can actually see it and I’ll show you how it works.

So we hit submit now.  Boom!  There you go!  Did y ou see it?  You might have missed it. That’s OK.  You’ll notice that before we hit submit, it did actually go to the form, register through the 3rd party data collection stuff for the form, and gave us back the PDF.  So we know that the form itself worked and I’m pretty sure that our tracking worked too. But I’m going to rewind the tape (aka, the video) to check to make sure that works.

So this is ScreenFlow.  This is the program I used to record this video but what I’m really interested in seeing is slowing down the time and watch the processing that’s happening.

So I’m right here, right at the point where we are about to hit the submit button.  I’m going to scroll this over a little bit until maybe about… Hit submit now?  There it is!  I hit submit and we can see our tracked page view and our URL registered with Google.  It actually sent the tracking beacon.

You’ll notice it hasn’t actually refreshed the page just yet. If I scroll a little bit further… there it is.  It just refreshed the page, it grabbed the PDF, all of our information (on the screen) is gone and you’ll see the browser … just about here … there it goes… renders the PDF.

And that’s it!  So now we definitely know this works so we can probably push this out to the real website and I’m pretty sure it’s going to work now.

So that’s it.  Hopefully, it will help you guys out without having to wait 24 hours.  Talk to you later!