How Combining SEO & Usability Solves 4 Common On-Site Problems

One of the most trying points in my search marketing career has been molding a mindset coupling both SEO and the user experience. This primarily means stepping away from “bot obsession” and solely thinking about rankings and traffic.

Every campaign must meet site objectives while hopefully maintaining heightened organic visibility. SEO is evolving more to focus on satisfying the end user.

However, there are many times where I still want to make SEO, bot-focused revisions to a site that may impede upon site usability and the user experience. So this begs the question: which should win?

Both.

SEO, Meet Usability

While it may seem difficult to meld both SEO on-page implementation while also providing the best user experience, those who can do this well will be the more successful search tacticians.

What I have compiled below are what I seem to encounter the most day-to-day in the ongoing relationship between usability and SEO with my clients.

Problem

We need more content above the fold but if we do add a few paragraphs it will push our product listings below the page fold. This is a logical worry. We can appease the engines with above-fold content but what if it is at the cost of losing product listing visibility?

Solution

Use tabs or an expanding div. With this, you will be able to show introductory page content with an option for an interested reader to read more while also having product listing visibility about the page fold.

If you're using an expanding solution that is visible text to search engines, then you should have no worries. Where folks go wrong is with the usage of frames. The framed text is invisible to bots.

Problem

Instead of posting text content on page we have a lot we want to say it in a more entertaining manner. We want to use video.

Solution

Video? That’s great! If you choose to go the video route you need to take advantage of video SEO needs such as titling, video sitemap, video schema, and placement on video sharing networks.

Instead of descriptive video copy, provide an expandable area featuring a transcript of the video. With this you are again taking advantage of the fore-mentioned copy tactic above or if you wish you can just list it below the page fold. Now you have one message separated into two different content types.

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Trust is the Most Valuable Currency Online, Is It Your Top Priority?

Trust has been a factor in the human economy forever, and today is no different. But, the way trust can be evaluated has changed dramatically over the past 100+ years, and the web has accelerated this change dramatically. It has created a world in which trust is at a premium, and smart businesses are focusing substantial effort on creating it for themselves.

The Corner Store

A hundred or more years ago, you didn't have a lot of choices for where you shopped. You more or less went to the corner store. The store may have been run by a congenial fellow named Sam, and he and his wife might be over your house once a month or so for dinner.

You knew each other. Developing trust was easy.

Sam may be a tougher businessperson than Joe, over in the next town, but he can't be too tough. Trust goes both ways and Sam knows it. Everybody works to get along with Sam (and vice versa), partly because the community just couldn't work otherwise.

Fast Forward – The Shopping Mall

As urbanization grew, more shopping options become available. In time, shopping malls make the scene.

Shoppers have many options, and the people they interface with at the stores aren't the owner. The salespeople have a lot less at stake than Sam.

However, there is still a store owner. They will still work to make sure that their customers get well treated and feel good about the experience. Why? Because there are competitive options. Nothing forces anyone to shop in their store, and if word starts to get around that their store doesn't provide good value, that would really hurt business.

To make matters worse, the rent to pay for the store location is really stiff. Losing a few customers can do more than reduce profits, it can easily put the store owner in a hole. They depend on their reputation in the market to remain in business and make some money along the way.

Fast Forward Again – The Early Days of the Web

Then came the Internet and the Web. People could throw up websites easily and cheaply. If they were smart about SEO, they could rank quickly for their websites for almost any search term, and sell people stuff. Many of these sites were churn and burn sites, and as the owner could replace it quickly if it failed, they had nothing at stake.

In addition, they were faceless, with no identity associated with the business. Searchers assumed that the sites that ranked high in the search engines were good sites, but sadly it was not always the case. Many people got badly burned.

Perhaps the pinnacle of all this was the scam emails looking for help with tens of millions of dollars:

Fast Forward One More Time – The Loop is Closing

This breakdown of trust was an anomaly, and it is in the process of fixing itself. There are many factors at work in this correction. Three of these are:

1. Search Engine Algorithm Improvements: The search engines are doing a better job at weeding out the bad sites. Not a perfect job just yet, but they are making progress.
2. Social Media: More and more people are using one or more social media sites. Bad news travels fast in social media, and anyone with a complaint can get an audience. Building a reputation on social media sites takes time, and a lot of work, but it is one of the best ways to build an aura of "trustability" around yourself and your business.
3. Online Reviews: There are an increasing number of ways to review businesses online. You can use sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp, or you can find reviews for businesses in Google Places. Many users make use of these mechanisms to evaluate a business before buying from them.

Generating Trust

One of the best ways to do this is to be visible. Like Sam and his corner store, make yourself accessible to others. You can do this by sharing useful and compelling content on your site, being active and engaging in social media, responding to complaints online, and proactively helping others online.

We won't get into what signals the search engines are measuring on social media here. But, I can tell you that if many people across the web trust you, somewhere along the way they will generate the signals the search engines are looking for, be it links, or something else.

Building trust online may just be your top priority. Remember, be like Sam.

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Humans or Search Engines? Which One Should Your Content Marketing Strategy Be More Focused On?

There are times when it may seem like the hardest part of content marketing is engaging the actual people searching for content via search engines. As a result, many sites opt for the easier route: targeting search engines with black hat tactics like keyword stuffing and cloaking, ensuring that the people searching for content don’t actually end up finding what they’re looking for. However, these tactics are not actually very effective and, if anything, can be hugely damaging to businesses’ websites, which end up penalized or even removed from searches entirely.

Good quality content should never come last. As a matter of fact, Google’s constant updates to its algorithm – including its latest, Hummingbird, which was released toward the end of 2013 – are making it so that businesses now have no other option than to properly target their content to individual users.

How to Cater to Human Readers  

Let’s take a look at how users are searching lately. Many searchers are using more natural language than ever before – and this is largely as a result of voice searches. That’s because mobile browser use is greater than ever before. Thus, Google will substitute words like “restaurant” for “place.” So if you’re searching for “best Chinese place in town,” the algorithm will know that you really mean that you’re looking for a Chinese restaurant.

Okay, so searchers are becoming more conversational in tone. But what does that mean for content? Ultimately, the answer is this: simply put, content needs to be good. Targeting humans entails creating content that they are going to want to engage with.

SEO Basics: 8 Essentials When Optimizing Your Site

Basic search engine optimization (SEO) is fundamental. And essential. SEO will help you position your website properly to be found at the most critical points in the buying process or when people need your site.

What are search engines looking for? How can you build your website in a way that will please both your visitors/customers, as well as Google, Bing, and other search engines? Most importantly, how can SEO help your web presence become more profitable?

What is SEO, Exactly?

The goal of foundational SEO isn't to cheat or "game" the search engines. The purpose of SEO is to:

• Create a great, seamless user experience.
• Communicate to the search engines your intentions so they can recommend your website for relevant searches.

1. Your Website is Like a Cake

Your links, paid search, and social media acts as the icing, but your content, information architecture, content management system, and infrastructure act as the sugar and makes the cake. Without it, your cake is tasteless, boring, and gets thrown in the trash.

2. What Search Engines Are Looking For

Search engines want to do their jobs as best as possible by referring users to websites and content that is the most relevant to what the user is looking for. So how is relevancy determined?

• Content: Is determined by the theme that is being given, the text on the page, and the titles and descriptions that are given.
• Performance: How fast is your site and does it work properly?
• Authority: Does your site have good enough content to link to or do other authoritative sites use your website as a reference or cite the information that's available?
• User Experience: How does the site look? Is it easy to navigate around? Does it look safe? Does it have a high bounce rate?

3. What Search Engines Are NOT Looking For

Search engine spiders only have a certain amount of data storage, so if you're performing shady tactics or trying to trick them, chances are you're going to hurt yourself in the long run. Items the search engines don't want are:

• Keyword Stuffing: Overuse of keywords on your pages.
• Purchased Links: Buying links will get you nowhere when it comes to SEO, so be warned.
• Poor User Experience: Make it easy for the user to get around. Too many ads and making it too difficult for people to find content they're looking for will only increase your bounce rate. If you know your bounce rate it will help determine other information about your site. For example, if it's 80 percent or higher and you have content on your website, chances are something is wrong.

4. Know Your Business Model

While this is pretty obvious, so many people tend to not sit down and just focus on what their main goals are. Some questions you need to ask yourself are:

• What defines a conversion for you?
• Are you selling eyeballs (impressions) or what people click on?
• What are your goals?
• Do you know your assets and liabilities?

5. Don't Forget to Optimize for Multi-Channels

Keyword strategy is not only important to implement on-site, but should extend to other off-site platforms, which is why you should also be thinking about multi-channel optimization. These multi-channel platforms include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Email
• Offline, such as radio and TV ads

Being consistent with keyword phrases within these platforms will not only help your branding efforts, but also train users to use specific phrases you're optimizing for.

6. Be Consistent With Domain Names

Domain naming is so important to your overall foundation, so as a best practice you're better off using sub-directory root domains (example.com/awesome) versus sub-domains (awesome.example.com). Some other best practices with domain names are:

• Consistent Domains: If you type in www.example.com, but then your type in just example.com and the "www" does not redirect to www.example.com, that means the search engines are seeing two different sites. This isn't effective for your overall SEO efforts as it will dilute your inbound links, as external sites will be linking to www.example.com and example.com.
• Keep it Old School: Old domains are better than new ones, but if you're buying an old domain, make sure that the previous owner didn't do anything shady to cause the domain to get penalized.
• Keywords in URL: Having keywords you're trying to rank for in your domain will only help your overall efforts.

7. Optimizing for Different Types of Results

In addition to optimizing for the desktop experience, make sure to focus on mobile and tablet optimization as well as other media.

• Create rich media content like video, as it's easier to get a video to rank on the first page than it is to get a plain text page to rank.
• Optimize your non-text content so search engines can see it. If your site uses Flash or PDFs, make sure you read up on the latest best practices so search engines can crawl that content and give your site credit for it.

8. Focus on Your Meta Data Too

Your content on your site should have title tags and meta descriptions.

• Meta keywords are pretty much ignored by search engines nowadays, but if you still use them, make sure it talks specifically to that page and that it is also formatted correctly.
• Your meta description should be unique and also speak to that specific page. Duplicate meta descriptions from page to page will not get you anywhere.

Title tags should also be unique! Think your title as a 4-8 word ad, so do your best to entice the reader so they want to click and read more.

Summary

You should always keep SEO in the forefront of your mind, and always follow best practices. Skipping the basics of SEO will only leave your site's foundation a mess and prevent you from fully maximizing revenue opportunities.

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SEO Really is Dead, Long Live...Uh...What Should We Call This?

Buying banner ads on search? Measuring keyword success in SEO via a ranking report? Google looking more like a portal (a la Lycos back in the day)?

No, it isn't the year 2000 all over again. This is today's search environment.

The More SEO Changes, the More Things Stay the Same

SEO, at its core, has always been and will continue to be about gaining a natural presence in the search engines. Certainly, over the course of the past 10 years, what that natural presence might be has changed quite a bit (search results are no longer links to "just" 10 web pages).

The changes we've experienced over the past few years have certainly gained the attention of our industry. "Content marketing" became a buzz word. Social media marketing has become a routine part of SEO recommendations. Content promotion is key to gaining natural links.

SEO Engagement Today

There are many components of an "SEO engagement" today. Some of those that existed years ago that are now "hot topics" include:

• Content Marketing: This buzzword has caught fire over the course of the past few years. Many people define "content marketing" as "writing content", and I suggest that without "content", you can't have a web presence. So, is this really all that new? Nope. Been doing this forever, but it is much more than "just" textual content on a web page, now. Infographics. Video. Viral/shareable content. Content takes many forms. The definition of what "content" is has certainly evolved over the years.
• PR: In the SEO world (years ago) this abbreviation was strictly used for "press releases". In today's SEO, it's more about "public relations", finding influencers and pitching stories/content or using services such as HARO to find opportunities to have our clients contribute to an article. Yeah, we'll still involve ourselves in press releases, but it's more about the promotion of something of substance in order to gain traffic, awareness, and the possibility that someone might actually write about (and link to?) what we're promoting. "PR" has evolved.
• Link Building: It's still important – dare I say "vital" – to work on gaining links for a website to gain a natural presence in the search engines. While the engines work toward lessening the importance of link building, the value of links isn't purely for SEO. And, today, as we all know – it's not just about "links" but rather "citations". These can take many forms, but essentially link and citation building is about "good marketing/promotion". Link building has evolved.

What Should We Call This New Industry of Ours?

We are, more and more, talking with our clients about things that include what they're doing with email marketing (wasn't that supposed to be "dead", 10 years ago?), video (ideation/production/promotion), and viral content production/promotion.

Krista LaRiviere wrote a terrific piece, "Web Presence Optimization", about the shift of SEO. It's absolutely true.

Many SEO/SEM agencies have evolved toward this truth. The SES Conference has evolved toward this truth.

Perhaps "the truth" is that "search" engine optimization has gotten to the point where we need to refer to it as "digital marketing optimization" or "web presence optimization", or some combination thereof?

What are your thoughts? What should we call this "new" industry of ours?

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From Keyword to Products Sold

Here are some thoughts to leave you with when you optimize your campaigns:

• Understanding this relationship overall, and even at a category/subcategory level, can be helpful when thinking about pausing or activating sets of keywords
• Use this data to find out what things consumers are buying with various keyword sets. If, for example, you find that a large number of people buy smartphones after searching for the keyword "digital camera", you might have a cross-sell or optimization opportunity. The same can be said when you're out of stock where you might redirect someone
• Consider the variances in your data set by search engine. This is true for more things than the keyword to product purchased relationship. It can include bids, ad copy, landing page, and other performance metrics.

Leveraging data is one of the reasons why we all love paid search. Finding new and interesting ways to cut that data up to identify optimization worthy insights is what will ultimately set apart the best performing campaigns.

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Search spend increases in 2012

Search spend increases in 2012

New stats from Covario show that global spend on pay-per-click search advertising was 15% higher in Q4 2012 compared to the same period in 2011.

Overall annual search expenditure for last year was 18% higher than in 2011.

In Europe search spend grew by 10% year-on-year during the Q4. In comparison the Americas recorded a rise of 21%, while Asia-Pacific grew 13%.

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How to Make Call to Actions More Effective

All good search engine marketers (SEMs) know that call to action words (CTAs) play an integral role in developing compelling ads. They also know it’s difficult to determine which CTAs to use.

To make the task even more challenging, CTAs tend to perform differently across verticals, so there is not a one-size fits-all approach for selecting the highest performers. For example, the best performing CTAs for a financial services advertiser ("analyze," "trade," "sign up for," "open an account,” etc.) might be completely different than those for a clothing retailer ("buy now," "order,” “purchase,” etc.).

To help determine which CTAs to use in your various campaigns, you need to know how to properly analyze the performance of your CTAs.

The Value of CTAs

CTAs allow advertisers to clearly state what they want consumers to do — buy, shop, review, etc. They also present advertisers with the opportunity to engage with consumers. With the abundance of online advertising today, effective use of CTAs is a great way to make your ads stand out and appeal to potential customers.

To figure out how CTAs best perform, we spent some time analyzing their performance. Here is what we found.

Data Collection and Methodology

For our analysis, we collected data on seven common CTAs in the retail vertical:

• Buy
• Find
• Get
• Order 
• Purchase
• Review 
• Shop

To ensure the data represented various types of retail markets, we extracted it from multiple live campaigns representing various categories, including handbags, bedding, car suspensions, and electric appliances.

While the data shown is statistically significant, it should by no means be seen as comprehensive. Instead, the data and findings should be seen as a call to action in and of itself.

You should regularly test your CTA performance starting with impressions and ending with return on advertising spend (ROAS). Then use the findings to inform your business strategies.

We tested a simple hypothesis: CTAs with the highest click-through rates (CTRs) also have the highest conversion rates and conversions per 1,000 impressions.

Impressions, Clicks & Conversion Rates

Let’s start by analyzing how much traffic specific CTAs drive and how that traffic leads to conversions. The chart below illustrates that high CTRs sometimes result in high conversion rates, but not always.

In this analysis, “Buy” has the best CTR, but produced the fourth best conversion rate. “Order” has the best conversion rate, but its CTR was nearly three points lower than “Buy.”

Conversions per 1,000 Impressions

Now let’s examine which CTAs produced the greatest number of conversions per 1,000 impressions. To do this, we need to examine conversions per 1,000 impressions by simply multiplying CTR by conversions by 1,000.

It's clear that our hypothesis was wrong – while CTRs may be an indication of conversion rates, they cannot be considered predictors of a successful campaign. As a result, viewing CTA data in isolation can be misleading and potentially costly.

Conclusions

There are three key takeaways from this analysis that can help inform your future CTA strategies:

1. When analyzing CTAs, CTR is not the end-all, be-all. CTR and conversion rate are equally important. You need to consider both (multiplied together) to determine conversions per 1,000 impressions and the true effectiveness of a CTA.
2. Test your own CTAs. While not shown in the analysis above, there were definitely differences in CTAs across the different categories. Recognize that some CTAs may work better than others for your category.
3. CTAs can make an enormous difference to your campaign performance. The difference between a good CTA and a bad CTA can create as much as a hundred-fold difference in performance.

By keeping an eye on CTAs and analyzing their performance, you can maximize the effectiveness and ROAS of your campaigns.

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