Too Much Traffic? Too Many Leads? Try Search Engine Optimization.

Yes, you read the title right. My organization recently performed comprehensive seo on a customer web page, and the outcomes were incredible. Within a month, look for guests had reduced by over 60%. Inbound brings from look for had reduced by over 50%. And the consumer was absolutely thrilled with the outcomes.
So when is less look for guests better? And when are less brings from natural guests better?
Less guests from look for guests can be better when the website draws the incorrect type of guests, and less brings can better when the website draws the incorrect type of brings.
To give you some background, this particular customer offered a highly-specialized assistance to B2B organizations. The reputation of the organization and the great company's assistance instructed a higher dollar figure per engagement. They were THE significant player in an industry that they had practically developed. However, their before seo agency did not factor in any of these very essential concerns whilst improving the web page.
The company in question was clearly from the “traffic-at-any-cost” school of seo, and they never involved the consumer with the type of concerns that you would expect from a real business associate, such as the most concerns, such as “Who is your target market?” They were not a promotion associate – they were a guests delivery procedure. They were not definitely involved in the customer's achievements, because to them, improved look for guests was the only measure of achievements.
They certainly were not lacking in technical skill – they were able to deliver great quality positions for competitive keyword phrases. And the technique was not suppose, as all techniques were well within the conditions of all significant google. So what exactly was the consumer validated in stressing about?
It turns out they had plenty of genuine problems. Although positions and look for guests were up, revenue were down. Additionally, web type brings were coming in and the phones were ringing, but nothing was closing. The revenue agents was spending lots of your energy and energy following up on brings that were, quite seriously, junk. Confident sales had come to a dead stop because salesmen had walking purchases to follow up on inbound brings, which were certainly numerous.
After a brief research, it easily became clear what the root of the problem was. The before seo agency, with their “traffic beats all” mindset, had converted the website into a magnetic for do-it-yourselfers, small firms or individuals with very low costs, and guests looking for no cost advice.
In their pursuit to obtain the most look for guests possible, the before seo agency had erred with the most fundamental foundations of the strategy – keywords selection. Instead of carefully selecting keyword phrases that were suitable to entice the high-end customers that the consumer was acquainted to, they successfully (in the sense that they achieved great rankings) targeted keyword phrases with modifiers such as “free,” “advice,” and “ideas.” All of these keyword phrases were hugely popular, all of these keyword phrases were difficult to achieve higher positions for, and all of these keyword phrases should not have been utilized in the strategy in the first place.
When you boost for low-quality phrases (“low-quality” obviously means different things, based on a business's goals) you receive low-quality look for guests in return. When low-quality guests transmits a type cause from a web page, it makes sense that the cause itself will also likely be low-quality. This was, of course, exactly what was happening to our customer.
After our research, we broke the information to the consumer that the strategy had been essentially defective. They were not happy to hear this information, but it did match up with their experience. We also told them quite seriously that advancing, we would be focusing guests great quality over amount, and by expansion, cause great quality over amount. They were easily assured that look for guests was not the most essential measurement in a seo strategy, and were thrilled about a new, ROI-based approach.
Luckily, we did not have to throw out all of the work from the previous company. They had laid a company foundation with regards to techniques, which allowed us to recalibrate the keyword phrases and recognize outcomes in a very not much time.
So, to review our achievements, look for guests reduced by 60%, brings were cut in half, and revenue improved considerably. The reducing pace of the incoming brings was more than balanced out by the great company's brings – many brings derived from the Fortune 500 organizations with whom this customer was acquainted to working. Previously, guests from these desired organizations had been converted off by keywords modifiers such   as “free” – they were serious individuals looking for a serious solution and they recognized that what they needed was not going to be no cost.
For too many individuals, such as experts, seo has a very tight meaning – acquire positions and guests from related keyword phrases. Until more organizations understand that seo is a promotion to be assessed and analyzed just like any other, there will be countless examples of strategies considered a millionaire by those who worked on them, but as breakdowns by those who have to deal with the consequences.
By:  Scott Buresh

PPC Bid Optimization Without Conversion Tracking

Lesson 1 of running a PPC campaign: track your conversions. A simple rule that we all try to stick to. But sometimes we can't.
Not all campaigns work so easily. It may be that conversions are too few and far between to make a difference. The website may convert everything over the phone through a system to complex/entrenched to track back to keyword level.
Whatever the reason, there are two techniques you can use to help get your PPC account delivering more value, even if you can't track it.

Option 1: Engagement Metrics

This one is hopefully going to seem like an obvious first step to most of you. If you have Google Analytics linked to your AdWords account, then you can create "engagement goals" and import them into AdWords as a conversion.

Engagement goals consist of tracking visitors who meet a threshold time on site or pages visited. In the screenshot above you can see how a goal would be set up to create a pages visited requirement of greater than 1. Doing this would let you see a goal in AdWords for any visits that did not bounce.
Based on the type of website you're running you really need to think carefully about which metric (time on site or pages visited) is going to be more useful for you, and what your requirement is going to be to log it as a conversion in AdWords.
Remember! Google Analytics does not track the time the user spent on the final page of their visit. If the user read that page for a long period then left the site, you won't see how long they spent on that final page. This can make time on site a slightly misleading metric for websites where visitors won't view many pages.
If you want to log pages per visit, then decide what kind of visitors qualify as "engaged" enough to be worth logging. You will find that many visitors will either bounce, or look at everything on the site. Averages suck. Your averages are being skewed by bounces and by visits with many many pages viewed, so don't base your assessment on logging visitors who visit more pages than your site average.
Visiting more than one page (i.e., not a bounce) can be a good signal. If it takes at least two clicks to reach a product page or view a price, then your ideal threshold may be greater than two pages viewed.

Option 2: Relative Weighting

For some sites you can't even accurately track the above behavior. One page visits might still be worth a lot to an information or blog site. You may have organizational reasons that you can't use Google Analytics or other web analysis packages.
You need to be more creative in these situations.
Step 1

Take your top 20 keywords by traffic. In most cases these will account for the majority of your total clicks, but if not then take 30, or 40. Don't take too many at this stage, or you're making a lot of extra work for yourself for not too much value. Exclude any of your brand keywords from this list.
Step 2
Rank these keywords by a "likelihood of conversion" factor. You need to know your business really well here, but you have to put your keywords into order sorted by how relevant and targeted they are. A particular keyword might suggest that everybody searching for it is looking for exactly your product. Alternatively it might have other meanings or be more generic. Rank these keywords by their "awesomeness" factor.
Step 3

Give each of these keywords a score from 1 to 10 for relevance. The best and highest should be 9 or 10 (this won't always be the case, if none of your best keywords are in your top 20 by traffic) and work from there. Don't feel like you need to go all the way down to 1. If the lowest keywords have maybe half the likelihood of conversion of the highest keywords, then respective scores of 5 and 10 would be appropriate.
Step 4

Add a column to your list that indicates the potential value of a conversion. This is only really necessary if different keywords imply a different value (e.g., they might be searches for a different product). If your website sells just one service, or value is not related to search term at all, skip this step and just add "1" to this column next to every keyword.
Step 5

Multiply these scores together for each keyword, and divide each one by the total sum of all scores added together. What you have now is an estimate for what proportion of your budget you should be spending on each keyword.
Remember that these keywords didn't make up your total spend. If the top 20 keywords spent 80 percent of your budget, then these proportions you've found are proportions of the 80 percent.

Deciding the Bids

You should now have each of your top 20 keywords with a score from 0 to 1 representing the proportion of your spend that should be going to this keyword. Achieving this takes some time. You're going to need to analyze your spend levels on a daily basis, and make changes accordingly.
Each day, download the keyword data for the previous day from the account. For each keyword in your list, work out how much it spent (proportionally) compared to your target. If the keyword's spend is too high, reduce the bid by 10 percent. If it is too low, increase the bid by 10 percent. Set a sensible level of tolerance on this, or you'll be changing your bids even if your keywords are reeeeeeally close to perfect.
The process that will occur is this: every day each keyword that is spending too much will have its bid reduced a little. If the next day it is spending correctly, then you'll stop making that change to that keyword and it's nicely on target. If it still hasn't reached target then the process will happen again.

The Inevitable Complication

You're working from assumptions based on gut instinct and guesswork. These aren't accurate and they never will be.
Don't go crazy looking to make each keyword fit your target perfectly, since your target is an educated guess at best. The process outlined above will give you a bidding strategy to meet your target but it doesn't validate it if you were wrong.
The second issue to be aware of is that every time you change your bids, the proportion of budget spent by each keyword will change. But it will affect the proportion spent by all your other keywords too.
If we imagine a situation with two keywords, "keyword a" and "keyword b". "Keyword a" spends $10 per day and "keyword b" spends $20 per day. If I conduct this analysis and increase the bids on "keyword a" so that it spends $20 per day, then "keyword b" is now spending a lower proportion of my new, higher budget. And if my budget is limited, then I may need to reduce "keyword b" to compensate.
Each action on a keyword affects the proportional spend on the others. Don't be surprised if your keywords overreact.

In Summary

Having a lack of good conversion data is no excuse for not optimizing bids in a campaign. The campaign can still perform better and deep down you know it!
The two methods in this article will give you some pointers to go about pushing your spend towards your best converters and most profitable keywords, but your overall budget must still be determined by the profitability of PPC as a whole.
Re-assess your assumptions regularly. Don't take your first best guess as fixed. Make changes and improvements over time as your knowledge grows and you can keep making the campaign better and better.
By: Alistair Dent

18 Minutes a Day to Social Media Time Management

There is a saying that goes something like this: “Are you working in your business or on your business?” Translate that to social media, are you working in social media or on social media? If you are “in” it, it’s time to figure out a way to be “on” it.
But what if you could improve your social media time management in just 18 minutes a day?
Let’s face it, we have a finite amount of time each day and usually we underestimate our to-dos and overestimate our time. If you’re in any type of online marketing position and reading (OK, skimming) this article, chances are high social media is part of your mantra. Bets are probably higher still that you spend more lost time in unaccountable social media diversions and distractions.
Whether you’re on the front lines, sidelines, or bylines, social media can easily monopolize hours of our day.
Scanning, curating, and aggregating content requires serious organization skills. Writing, reporting, and re-purposing content is best served with minimal distractions and maximum focus. Social media can be a 24/7 black hole or, if managed properly, a gold mine. It all depends on how disciplined, organized and aware you are of the time spent in social media.
I recently read Peter Bregman’s book "18 Minutes." It was just released last month and the result of a blog post he wrote for the Harvard Business Review that became one of the most popular and most commented posts on the site. That post, “An 18 Minute Plan for Managing Your Day,” began with Bregman’s humbling admission that we can all relate to, but here is my slightly modified version:

“Yesterday started with the best of intentions. I walked into my office in the morning with a vague sense of what I wanted to accomplish. Then I sat down with my laptop and a Starbucks, checked my Facebook, Twitter stream, iGoogle and e-mail. Two hours later, after fighting several digital fires, solving other people’s PR problems, and dealing with whatever happened to be thrown at me through my social media world via screen and phone, I could hardly remember what I had set out to accomplish when I first grabbed my Mac Book Air. I’d been ambushed at social media gunpoint. And I thought I knew better...”

Bregman’s takes you through specific and actionable strategies to seriously shut down the daily distractions and open up windows of social media opportunity. As I read this book, my social media fog began clearing and my days are now busier doing social media right.

Pick Your Social Media High Five

Look at your social media year and pick five areas that will make the most difference in your business. Social media is enchanting because there are so many interesting things to read, people to meet and places to go. It's challenging to prioritize and pick just a few; so instead we end up trying to do it all.
One of the secrets to thriving in social media is to look at doing fewer things better and pick the ones that matter most. When you decide on your five areas, commit to spending 95 percent of your social media time on these things and allow 5 percent for the rest of experimental or unforeseen unknowns.

Getting the Right Things Done

I’m always busy. But I asked myself after reading this book: Am I busy doing the things that matter in my social PR life? "18 Minutes" brings us to the reality that it’s possible to be busy in social media, look busy in social media, and unfortunately … get nothing done.
Making sure we’re getting the right social media things done is key – because it’s so easy to get off track when exciting breaking news happens, like Facebook F8 developer’s conference latest updates or industry shaking news like Steve Jobs passing away last week. I lost hours of focus to the reality and shock of losing one our greatest innovators. But to me, that was my 5 percent bucket of the unknowns you have to plan for.
Once we have our five buckets of focus, the goal is to make sure we spend 95 percent of our social media time each day doing things that fit into our five most important areas. Our focus is making sure the right things get done, as opposed to making sure everything social media gets done.

The 18 Minute Social Media Day

Step 1 (5 Minutes) Your Social Media Morning Minutes

This is your opportunity to plan your social media for the day. Before turning on your computer or picking up your PDA, sit down with the to-do list and decide what is happening to make this a social media successful day. What can you realistically accomplish whether it’s writing a blog post, researching a new Twitter tool, sitting in on a webinar, or getting ready for that next conference?

Step 2 (1 Minute Every Hour) Social Media Refresh and Refocus

Managing your social media time hour-by-hour is both a discipline and a science. Don’t let the hours manage you … How many times do you all of a sudden realize you have spent the last 20 minutes reading Twitter updates, surfing Facebook Pages, or reading an article from an e-mail subscription?
Set your phone, computer or watch to ring every hour and start the work that is listed on your calendar. When you hear the beep, do a social media check up. Assess your progress and recommit the next hour to get back on track.

Step 3 (5 Minutes) Your Social Media After Dark

At the end of your day, shut the laptop and review your social media day. Ask yourself some questions: How did my social media day go? What did I learn today? Whom did I interact with? Did I meet new followers on Twitter that I should send a quick @ reply? Was there a nice RT of me I should acknowledge? Any comments on my blog I should respond to?
Building and maintaining relationships is critical in social media and it is easy to forget that it takes just a few minutes to share appreciation, congratulate someone, or offer thanks.
All that seems easy, but here are some tips to add to the 18 minute plan.

Social Media Delete

It’s very hard to say no. I get invites every day to join a webinar, take a survey, look at this press release for a nonprofit who has no money, help my brother-in-law send a logo that I have sent him 20 times already, take unscheduled phone calls, or get sucked into a technical problem with Apple support.
All of these unscheduled things can rob you from important and strategic social media time. To get the right things done, choosing what to ignore is as important to choosing what to focus on.

Social Media Calendar

Bregman emphasizes and I agree: Place the hardest and most important items at the beginning of the day. He also notes the power of the when and where. Statistics show that when you schedule an action item with a time and date, the chances of it getting done are far greater than letting it float.
Mastering distractions and getting things done efficiently and effectively goes far beyond social media. Bregman offers a system and practical guides of how to get done what matters most to us and our business in 18 minutes.
By: Lisa