By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
The evolution of search engine algorithms has added to the complexity of search engine optimization. More significantly, it has impacted the level of integration that is needed with other forms of Web optimization. SEOMoz has a great page that shows the updates year by year.
Search engine optimization is no longer strictly about publishing quality content and building the authority of the content. SEO now involves engaging consumers and building relationships.
The new paradigm of SEO is that it must be implemented in tandem with other website optimization efforts. These include user experience design and social media marketing.
Optimizing for the Desired User Action
Getting qualified traffic to a website is only half the battle; once visitors arrive, they need to perform an action. Whatever the desired action may be, whether it’s filling out a lead form, signing up for a newsletter or completing a purchase, the landing pages and the site in general must be optimized in such
a way that makes the desired action clear and compelling to visitors. Otherwise, the SEO efforts and investment that drove people to the site will have been done in vain.
Given the importance of both driving traffic to a website and influencing that traffic to execute a conversion, it is important not to think of these as two mutually exclusive tasks. The ability to drive traffic is partially dependent on the actions completed once visitors land on a website.
The engagement value of a website is a ranking factor. If a website has low engagement, the site’s organic search rankings can be negatively affected. For example, search engines can easily determine that a website has a high bounce rate if users click on an organic listing then quickly return to the search engine results page. This is a strong signal to the search engines that the site has either poor-quality content or simply provides a bad user experience and, therefore, the search engine will no longer want to send its users to that site. This results in lowered rankings. For this reason, it is essential that SEO efforts are integrated with usability/user experience optimization. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Native ads here, native there, native ads everywhere. That seems to be the prevailing theme of digital marketing nearly halfway through 2013. Native ads — or sponsored stories, or advertorials, or whatever is the trendy buzzword of the day — are all the rage at the moment.
A recent eMarketer report puts some numbers behind all of the hype. According to eMarketer, native ads are providing new ways for marketers to reach target audiences and new avenues of monetization for content sites that are under intense revenue pressure.
But, as we wrote back in February, native ads aren’t without their detractors. Some media and marketing executives are concerned about the potentially negative effects of blurring the lines between content and advertising. Others questions the return on investment of these ads, arguing that native ads cannot scale for multiple placements (we happen to agree on latter).
Despite those concerns, there is no doubt that native advertising has grabbed a significant foothold within the online marketing industry. eMarketer estimates that native ads will generate $4.57 billion in revenue in the U.S. by 2017, up from $1.63 billion in 2012.
So what makes for a great native ad? As my colleague Sultan Riaz wrote last February, a powerful native ad comes down to two crucial factors: a seamless blending with the editorial content and a non-disruptive message that is relevant to the consumer.
Below is an example of native advertising on Twitter.
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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Today’s announcement by Twitter of the launch of its new Lead Generation Card represents a major milestone in the evolution of both the microblogging site and performance marketing. Lead Generation Cards are part of the suite of Twitter Cards, which are essentially expanded tweets that allow organizations and businesses to promote their content and offers.
For Twitter, it is a recognition that engagement and social media buzz are great but the days of advertisers being able to live solely off of that as justification for investing in social media campaigns are quickly coming to a close. As Twitter said in announcing the new direct marketing offering, the key goal for many marketers “boils down to one more theme: generating leads and ultimately driving purchases.” We couldn’t agree more.
For performance marketers, Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards should become a useful tool in their performance social marketing campaigns. Performance marketers have longed argued for more lead-gen-specific capabilities within social platforms. As we wrote recently, Facebook’s recent development of CPA bidding for direct marketing advertisers is an important step toward making that social network a more performance-marketing-friendly advertising platform.
So how do Twitter Lead Generation Cards work? Here is how Twitter explained them on its blog:
Twitter Cards let you bring rich experiences and useful tools to users within an expanded Tweet. The Lead Generation Card makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.
When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.
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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Ahh, summer. That most glorious time of year. The sun is shining, the beaches are beckoning and everywhere you look, people are on their smartphones — shopping and watching entertainment.
At least, that appears to be the trend for summer 2013. According to Adweek, “brands are preparing for what could be a break-through quarter in mobile advertising as consumers spend more time outdoors while constantly checking their iPhone or Samsung.” Summer, according to Brian Ng, marketing director and lead for brand strategy and trademark development at Del Monte Foods, presents an “unstructured environment” in which mobile is key to bridging the “planning-to-purchase divide.”
Mobile marketing and the summer go together like peas and carrots, to quote Forrest Gump. And to that combination a mobile performance marketing functionality, such as mobile lead gen, and marketers could see a big growth opportunity for their brands over the next three months. (more…)
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
The continuing rise in worldwide mobile device usage has pushed mobile SEO to the forefront of marketers’ attention. This is especially true for local businesses, which benefit greatly from search results on smartphones due to the location influence of local search results. Nearly half of mobile phone owners use their device to look for local information,according to a new report from the Local Search Association.
Traditional and mobile SEO can’t continue to work as separate marketing initiatives. They must become synonymous.
According to the venture capital firm KPCB, there are more than 244 million Internet users in the United States and 358 million mobile device subscribers, 48% of which have smartphones.ComScore reports that 52.1% of U.S. mobile phone users access a browser on their device. This equates to 187 million U.S. mobile browser users.
Does this mean marketers need to shift all of their attention to mobile search? Not yet. But the trend indicates a definite shift in the devices people use for search. And that will have a significant impact on how digital marketers engage, acquire, and retain customers for years to come.
The rate of increase of mobile Internet users illustrates the need for marketers to stop thinking about traditional and mobile SEO as two distinct programs. Marketers need to start developing strategies to merge traditional and mobile SEO into a single multichannel marketing process that is device and platform agnostic. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.
We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.
And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.
Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.
That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Much of the recent talk in the online marketing world has centered around the emerging concept of SoLoMoCo. For the uninitiated, that stands for SOcial LOcal MObile COmmerce. Boiled down to its most basic parts, this funny looking acronym encapsulates the future of digital marketing: everything social, everything local and everything mobile.
It’s with that perspective in mind that a recent report issued by the Local Search Association (look them up here) caught my eye. The report finds that nearly half (48% to be precise) of mobile phone owners use their device to look for local information.
The Local Search Association findings point to the increased role that smartphones and tablets are increasingly playing for the search industry in the United States. In particular, the report points to the need for marketers to view mobile at a local level.
From local search and SEO, to local mobile (what we at MediaWhiz call “LoMo”), online marketing is becoming more targeted and geo-specific. That presents huge opportunities to marketers that wisely find ways to blend their traditional and mobile SEO campaigns to achieve comprehensive search results.
As my colleague Marc Purtell, MediaWhiz’s director of SEO, attests, the future of SEO is local mobile. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.
According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.
These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.
What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities? (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.
That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.
About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services
MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!
We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.
By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers. (more…)
Editor’s note: This is the third post in a three-part series on the best free SEO tools. A more detailed analysis can be found in MediaWhiz’s new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools.” Download here.
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
It’s not uncommon in today’s SEO landscape to wake up and find a sudden drop of organic search traffic and/or keyword rankings. When such a disaster occurs, most large brands have access to a qualified SEO agency or robust in-house team to identify and rectify any issues that led to the drops. For smaller brands with limited budget allocated to SEO, this could mean the end of the organic search channel as a driver of business.
It doesn’t have to be this way. As I explore in a new report, “10 Free, Must-Have SEO Tools,” there are a variety of excellent free SEO tools that marketers can use to analyze the situation and identify the problem and solution.
By taking advantage of the intelligence that is available for free, brands with low budgets can recover from SEO issues in order to return to leveraging the organic search channel as a revenue generator. Below is a review of three such SEO tools.
RELATED: 3 Free SEO Tools for Auditing and Troubleshooting Onsite Issues
Google Webmaster Tools
An invaluable resource for SEO experts and webmasters alike, Google Webmaster Tools suite provides insight into the overall health of a website and explicitly points out many issues that can negatively affect a site’s organic search health.
Getting started is as simple as signing up for a Google account and verifying ownership of the website in question by adding either a verification file to the website’s server – including a verification meta tag on the homepage – or signing in to the site’s domain name provider.
This tool is provided by Google at no charge so there is no excuse for any website to not have an account.
Once a Google Webmaster Tools account is active, upon logging in Google will provide a list of recent alerts for each website being managed under the account. This is the first place to look for any issues that may have caused a loss of performance. More information on the issues identified as well as a list of recommended actions can be seen by clicking on “View details”.
If there are no alerts or if the recommended actions from the alerts do not remedy the issue, the next place to look is in the “Health” section within the Google Webmaster Tools interface using the left sidebar navigation. There are several reports in the Health section, including Crawl Stats, Blocked URLs, Fetch as Google, Index Status and Malware.
The Crawl Stats report is very useful in troubleshooting because it provides both a list of URLs that return errors and a timeline showing the total number of errors found on a day-to-day basis. This timeline can help pinpoint the day things went awry if there is a sudden increase in errors detected. For example, if a recent change to the website caused a number of pages to return server errors, that could definitely account for the loss of organic traffic. (more…)
