Trial and Error with AdWords and S.E.O.
Catherine Wood Hill and her mother Michelle Wood co-founded La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing, to offer stylish options in a market Ms. Hill said is rife with “stuff that looks like it’s for your grandma.” They knew a need existed — their research indicated that 62 percent of American women were plus-size, including Ms. Wood, 51, who wears a size 18 and was frustrated by the lack of alternatives — but were unsure how to reach prospects. After reading up on search engine optimization (also known as S.E.O.), the younger Ms. Hill, a 28-year-old former public relations professional, thought she had the answer: “It seemed like Google AdWords ruled the world.”
So when the Web site made its debut in April 2009, she chose a marketing strategy that was heavily focused on AdWords, Google’s pay-per-click advertising product, which competes with similar offerings from Yahoo, Microsoft and others. La Grande Dame purchased Google search terms like “plus size clothing,” “trendy plus size dresses,” and “Marina Rinaldi” (a plus size designer). In addition, Ms. Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive, experimented with e-mail list rental and retained a public relations specialist.
In June 2009, La Grande Dame spent $13,930 on marketing but made only $3,838 in sales, for a monthly loss of $10,092. “We got a lot of traffic, but it didn’t convert to sales,” Ms. Hill said. “We’d spend $500 a day on AdWords and make $250.” Something had to change.
Seeking a better return on her investment, Ms. Hill, who is based in Los Altos, Calif., began tweaking La Grande Dame’s AdWords campaign. She opted for more specific search terms, like “Anna Scholz strapless cotton poplin dress.” This “long tail” strategy envisions a bell curve with the greatest number of online searchers clustered at the center, typing in general terms like “plus size clothing” — but not necessarily being ready to buy. At the ends of the bell curve — the so-called long tails — are people using more specific terms who are, in theory, more serious shoppers. But the theory wasn’t proven, and sales remained elusive.
Ms. Hill kept tweaking. She set a daily $50 limit with Google, which meant that once La Grande Dame incurred $50 worth of charges, its ad would no longer display. “We spent less money but still weren’t getting qualified buyers,” Ms. Hill said. The same thing happened when La Grande Dame began showing its ads only between the prime online shopping hours of 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Similarly, having Google target the top 10 — and then the top 100 — ZIP codes in terms of household income proved ineffective.
Meanwhile, La Grande Dame had a six-month contract with a public relations specialist who received approximately $500 a month to place stories about the company in suitable publications. For example, the specialist got La Grande Dame mentioned in a magazine that aims at plus-size models. But Ms. Hill noted that the women who pursue plus-size modeling are typically too young to afford La Grande Dame’s relatively expensive clothing, so it wasn’t a great match.
In the months after La Grande Dame’s opening, Ms. Hill also turned to a list vendor to rent the e-mail addresses of 500,000 female online shoppers with household incomes of more than $100,000. Of the 500,000 e-mail messages that La Grande Dame sent out, only 10,000 were opened. Of those, only 1,000 people signed up for La Grande Dame’s newsletter. Within three months, half of them unsubscribed. Ultimately, only 15 shoppers bought anything. “We were too new for that strategy,” said Ms. Hill. “We had no name recognition.” Additionally, she said that she would only try this again if she could ascertain that her e-mail messages would reach plus-size shoppers.
Eventually, Ms. Hill chose to lose the P.R. specialist, ditch the e-mail list vendors, and skip AdWords altogether. “Now, I do everything myself,” she said. She concluded that successful S.E.O. had three components: the content on your pages; getting other sites to link to yours; and the way in which your site is coded. “I can control the first two on a daily basis,” said Ms. Hill, who has no coding background.
She reviewed each of her Web pages to ensure that they highlighted the keywords that get the most hits. For example, “designer plus size clothing” does very well in organic search results. That’s why the term appears on almost every page of La Grande Dame’s site. “The key is to frequently use phrases like that without sounding robotic,” said Ms. Hill, who also makes sure to use the terms in her daily blog posts.
She also began to seek links. Each morning she visits her favorite blogs, posting relevant comments and always leaving La Grande Dame’s Web address. Next, she does a Google search for every mention of “plus size” within the previous 24 hours. That’s how she stumbled across a blog for plus-size mothers and found a post about a dog. Ms. Hill, a dog lover, posted her own thoughts on the subject and — of course — a link to La Grande Dame.
Finally, she gave the company a social media presence. La Grande Dame recently had 2,200 Facebook fans, and more than 1,500 Twitter followers. They read tidbits on things like La Grande Dame sales and the best hairstyles for large women and updates on Ms. Hill’s pregnancy (her first baby was born on July 25).
“These tactics are more personal, bring in more qualified customers, and cost significantly less,” Ms. Hill said. Better yet, they’re effective. In June, the company spent just $30 on marketing, but had sales of $6,053 — up more than 50 percent from the previous June when Ms. Hill spent almost $14,000 on marketing.
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UK SMEs 'failing to pick up on SEO'
Small businesses in the UK are not taking advantage of search engine optimisation (SEO), according to a new report.
Analytics SEO found that more than half of the 1,000 SMEs surveyed had negligible, ineffectual levels of SEO, while some had none.
Seventy per cent of firms with fewer than 50 employees had basic or non-existent SEO.
Overall, only two per cent had invested in analytics software to monitor return-on-investment – meaning that more than nine in ten businesses were failing to track responses.
There was a huge disparity between small and large companies, with the average small firm only possessing 408 inbound links.
In comparison, the average UK company has 6,874 inbound links.
Writing in Econsultancy, media expert Graham Charlton commented that companies could be losing out on sales.
"[Small] businesses should be looking to correct this as, implemented well, SEO has the potential to be a very important and cost-effective sales channel.
"Whilst not every company will have the resources or know-how to run an effective campaign, simply getting the basics right, such as ensuring that a site can be indexed and contains relevant content, can make a noticeable difference to search results," he said.
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Firefox – SEO Programmers Heaven
You’ll have no doubt been working one day and asked yourself, “There must be a simpler way to do this”. You’re right, there probably is, in the form of a Firefox add-on. There are thousands of add-on’s to choose from for Firefox, some are useful, some are pointless, and many you’ll wonder how you ever lived without.
For SEO purposes, Firefox add-on’s are a programmers heaven. There are dozens of useful add-on’s for SEO in the Mozilla database. A few of SEO Consult’s favourites are listed below with a description of their use. Try them out, you won’t be disappointed!
Firebug – This tool is not just one for the SEO programmer, but also for any website developer too. It gives you a small icon in the status bar which when clicked brings up a console style window. Inside is a multitude of tools designed to help you diagnose and repair broken web pages. By far the most useful feature is the ability to edit and monitor on the fly changes of CSS, HTML and JavaScript live on any web page. This is far quicker than editing a page, uploading and refreshing.
Live HTTP Headers – This tool shows you the headers served up from the web server so you can see if there are any redirects in them, such as 301 or 302 redirects. It will also show you if there are any elements not found with a 404 error. 302’s and 404’s are like the plague to Google, and they won’t get indexed. Use this tool to help you identify and remove them.
Server Spy – This is a basic but very useful tool to tell you which version of Apache, IIS or other web server software the server hosting the website is running. This is especially useful if you need to know whether you can use an htaccess file or not, or see if a script is likely going to be compatible with the website or not.
HTML Validator – Tired of the W3C Validator being so slow? We were too, so we installed this tool which uses a very close algorithm to the W3C Validator to help us diagnose HTML/XHTML errors. The tool installs itself to the status bar where it displays the number of errors on each page you load automatically. Double clicking brings up the source code window and the validator console for your diagnosis. When all the errors are repaired, finish off with a check using the W3C Validator to be sure, as the algorithms aren’t identical. A validated page is a good looking page to Google.
Web Developers Toolbar – This is by far the most useful tool any web or SEO programmer can use. The variety of features included is huge, and it allows you to do hundreds of things you would normally crawl through browser menus to do. Some examples are outlining elements, disabling images and JavaScript, viewing the CSS file, disabling CSS, resizing the browser window, view the source code and page headers… The list is almost endless. Ease of use and compatibility is a large factor in conversion rates, so make sure your website works the way it should.
Now you have some useful tools, install them and see how well they help you. And remember, they’re all free and get regularly updated. From an SEO perspective, you can increase your throughput by a long way with these simple tools.
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5 Things You Need to Know to Succeed With Bing
With the impending implosion of Yahoo’s disappointing Panama project and seeming overnight surrender of search to the big boys of Google and Microsoft it’s time we all started paying a little more attention to Bing and particularly Microsoft adCenter.
Just the other day I was talking with some bright minds in the search space and when we got to the topic of Bing the lights were on but no one was home. Which got me think about how since its launch most of us have largely ignored the MSN/Bing advertising platform, as illustrated by the small number of advertisers on Bing compared against Google’s estimated 1.5 million advertisers, due in large part to the limited consumer reach and previously very poor functionality. And while it’s still a few months away I think it is high time we start thinking about how we manage search in Bing and want to share with you 5 things you’ll need to know to find success with Bing.
* Dynamic Text Insertion: Most advertisers are familiar with Google’s dynamic keyword insertion function that allows an advertiser to take the search query and dynamically insert it into ad text. Bing takes this feature to a whole new level. Not only can you dynamically insert the search query into the ad but you can also conditionally insert other pieces of text into the ad or display url. For example, if the search query is red roses you could insert the word red rose into the ad text but could also make a condition that shows a price of $24.99 when the search query is red roses but $19.99 if the search query is yellow roses. Proper use of this should improve relevance which will help improve CTR and/or conversion rates.
* Scheduled Bid Adjustments: On both a campaign and ad group level advertisers can both increase or decrease their bid levels based on geography (by city, metro,. state/province, country/region), demographics (age and gender), day of week, user device (mobile or desktop/laptop) and time of day. This requires marketers to really understand their underlying core business metrics but the marketers that know their metrics and understand these features can heavily skew the Bing search landscape in their favor.
* Bing Uses Quality Score Metric: While this doesn’t come as a surprise to many it is important to note that Bing also uses a similar metric to Google’s Quality Score and Yahoo’s Quality Index (they call their metric Quality Score Unfortunately this is one area that is pretty crappy in Bing. At this stage Bing doesn’t display quality score that ties to a keyword, ad, or account. However, there have been some instances we’ve heard of that in order to establish high quality scores bids have been increased by 2x which have driven bids down in the mid to long term. Note that everything we’re hearing is that Bing is in alpha or beta of rolling out Quality Score for advertisers.
* Search Management Tools: Microsoft’s adCenter has a tool similar to Google’s desktop tool (Adwords Editor) that resides on an advertiser’s local machine. The name of the tool isn’t the most original – Microsoft adCenter Desktop but the tool has some great functionality
o Extract keywords for your ad group based on a URL or MSN’s keyword tools
o Ad distribution (search vs. content) and geo-targeting and add ad group-level negative keywords
o Similar functionality to the excel plug-in described below.
On top of their desktop application adCenter also offers an excel plug-in feature with features that provide deep keyword research insights. Learn more about Microsoft Advertising Intelligence.
* Dedicated Time and Resources: Once Bing is powering the organic and paid search results for Yahoo there reach will be extended and their resources will be more heavily focused on improving their advertising tools to allow them to increase monetization per query. The advertisers who will win in the land grab for search real estate are those who are willing to dedicate their time and resources to test and optimize Bing early and often.
It’s going to be rocky at first and there are lots of things that adCenter needs to fix such as exposing their quality index, improving their reporting interface, and many more items but with nearly 30% market share (Yahoo+Bing combined) we can’t afford to ignore Bing any longer. Check for more information about Bing in the upcoming weeks. I think you’re going to love Bing!
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How to Re-Purpose Your Content to Optimize it for Traveling Season
I feel lucky enough to work from home for about 3 years now and to be able to travel wherever I want with my family. This is what I have actually been doing for the past month – traveling (and struggling with somewhat screwed schedule). However another side of this story is that being an Internet marketer who works from home, I am never free. I work while traveling and try to make each of my vacation minute “useful” for my work and business.
This has inspired me to share some ways that would help those hard-working travelers like me and let them use your content while on the go.
1. Offer Various Ways to Download Your Content
I have mentioned this tip in one of my previous posts on adding “Save as PDF” button to your (most useful) posts:
* This makes it easy (as well as actually encourages users) to save your content locally for further reference (Then in case they have no Internet connection but want to kill an idle hour reading something useful, your article will get the second chance to get noticed);
* It makes your content print-friendly (which is essential for those who prefer to read “normal” books while traveling);
* This makes it easy to save an access from popular devices like iPad (which has plenty of widely used applications for reading .pdf files):
Besides simply offering your readers an alternative format enabling them to download and access your content, a pdf file could also increase your reach. For example, Scribd, a popular document sharing site may generate some decent traffic to your blog.
2. Create Quick Outlines of Your Monthly Editorial
Imagine how many people are now coming back home from holidays: you may help them a great deal by offering a quick but useful recaps of your previous posts (for the past month, week, etc). These overviews won’t probably generate many Tweets or comments but they will engage users in another way: they will encourage them to go through the content they may have missed.
An alternative way to represent the information you have previously blogged about would also be nice. For example, a well-branded PowerPoint file representing your previous posts will be much appreciated. Besides, this way you can re-use your content by publishing it to SlideShare (which, in turn will be shared in your LinkedIn network if you use SlideShare official LinkedIn application):
You can also create a downloadable copy of your recap (in an eBook format) to allow various ways to access and go through your outline on- as well as offline.
3. Create an Audio Version of Your Content
An audio post comes incredibly handy (and appreciated) while you are on the go. While PDF version of your content makes it more “offline-friendly” as well as easier to use on iPad, the audio version makes it possible for your readers to listen to your articles on their iPod while on the plane or even on the beach.
I have reviewed one plugin that “adds voice to your posts” – Odiogo automates the process of turning each of your blog posts in a podcast (as well as adds the option to download your content to your blog feed):
If you want to make the process more selective and the voice less “machine-like”, there are other applications like Audacity which is free recording software.
Creating an audio version of your blog posts will also increase your exposure as you can submit your content to heavily-used podcast directories like iTunes (To submit to iTunes, go to the iTunes Store, navigate to the Podcasts directory, and click on the Submit a Podcast link.)
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