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

Successful SEO Tactics: Reporting & Analytics

As we close out our four-part series on the SEO Tactics chart, we touch on the most powerful of all of the pillars – measurement, reporting, and analytics. This is the subject I’m most passionate about as it lies at the core of a solid organic strategy and ultimately the long-term success of an organic program.
It’s striking that there is still such casualness when it comes to the discipline of SEO. There are still a remarkable number of companies that can’t differentiate organic traffic from direct load and referring traffic.
If you’ve managed or been close to paid search campaigns you understand the degree to which measurement and analysis impacts successful efforts. One of the first pieces of advice I give to clients and colleagues is to apply this same mindset to organic search.
Data is useless. Insight, and then action, is the key to advancing your program. This article will highlight some of the more important, and underutilized, metrics that can help you find performance breakthroughs, as well as discuss exactly why it’s so critical that you get this part right.

Justify Your Existence

If you aren’t tracking conversions, then you’re probably in for a short ride. Rankings will only get you so far.
Justifying your retainer (agency) or salary (in-house) is going to be difficult without demonstrating the business impact you are making. We’re talking about revenue, leads and margin – not rankings.
Be persistent about the need to track these metrics before you engage with a company. If the tracking isn’t present and they aren’t willing to put forth the effort to measure these goals, you should pass on the opportunity until the proper tracking is in place.

Understand Causality

Without taking the time to analyze data it becomes incredibly easy to chase your own tail. Chances are you’re putting forth a ton of time, energy, and effort to make an impact on your program.
But what’s really moving the needle and what’s simply an effort of futility? If you find yourself asking this question, slow down half a pace, execute, monitor, measure, and make note (as best you can) of which tactics indeed moved the needle.

Conversions, Then Traffic, Then Rankings

Focusing attention on keywords that have the highest likelihood to convert to a sale or lead isn’t always synonymous with high traffic terms. Spend the time in your analytics package to understand the difference and apply more pressure to keywords that will increase revenue/leads. As mentioned earlier, if you keep your eye on conversion, you have a better chance of keeping your job.

Differentiate Between Brand & Non-Brand

In relation to measuring keyword-level conversion (and in proving your value), be sure to clearly differentiate performance of brand and non-brand terms.
Non-brand growth is the leverage point in most programs. If you’re analyzing, or worse presenting, data that is only rolled up as overall organic traffic, it’s possible to be misleading yourself and others. If the overall organic program experienced a 36 percent year-over-year lift in traffic and 14 percent lift in conversions – ask yourself why and where. Was it driven by brand terms as a result of an aggressive offline campaign that is running?
Know why, take credit for your efforts, and be transparent when you’re riding the wave of brand terms. Transparency and honesty go a long way.

External Influences

It’s easy to get caught up in your own site and analytics and forget about external factors that impact your program’s performance. One of the most critical is seasonality. It can impact everything from traffic volume to competitive pressure and conversion rate.
Many verticals have peak seasons, some more dramatic than others. These peaks are sweet spots, and you should be planning around them.

The graph above is an example of peak query volume for a client in the home services vertical. Knowing that 45 percent of the annual query volume occurs within a three-month window is critical knowledge and impacts both what you do and when you do it. Google Insights for Search is a great tool to model this data.

Benchmarks & Baselines

Early on in my SEO endeavors I can’t tell you how many times I wished I had a time machine so I could go back and capture benchmarks that I missed as I was begging to work on a program. Live and learn.
Fortunately, you’ll have many of the most critical KPIs captured within your analytics package. Obviously you will want to capture a benchmark of the rankings of keywords you are focused on.
A few suggestions: Use SEMRush to capture a more holistic view of all keywords that are ranking as you begin. You might be surprised at what you find here. Download this, and keep it! Watch the growth in non-brand terms that rank over time. Consider the same for inbound links. It’s a snapshot in time, so be sure to take the picture before you begin. Open Site Explorer makes it easy. Do the same exercise for major competitors so that you can track their velocity versus your own. These all become compelling stories over time.

Track Your Calls

Whether your goal is to be driving leads or revenue, you should be taking credit for organic conversions that are resulting in the call center. More than 90 percent of the businesses we’ve encountered have overlooked this – even in instances where they are tracking call center conversions from paid search.
The technology is there (e.g., ClickPath), and if your business model is reliant on call center activity for conversions, the information available through this tracking typically opens up new opportunities and gives you a much more accurate view on the entirety of the results you’re driving.
This is just a snapshot of some of the tracking and analytics themes that are performance drivers, but certainly not the entire list. I welcome you to add to it through your comments, as your insights can likely help others who find interest in this topic.
And that wraps up our four-part series on Successful SEO Tactics. If you missed them, check out Keyword Selection, On-site Optimization, and Off-site Optimization. Hopefully, you’ve found the information relevant and useful. Good luck in your organic efforts!
By: Ryan Woolley,

PPC Ad Optimization: This Week, Don’t Diss the Tweak!

When it comes to PPC ad copy optimization, there are generally two schools with few practitioners working both approaches.

1. Fresh Approachers: The school of wholesale rewrites and the testing of new approaches, alternate messaging, and creative ad copy.
2. Tweakers: The school of one-variable-at-a-time, refining what’s already proven to work, and making small tweaks to language.

But the good news is that you don’t have to be an exclusive subscriber to either. Enough writing and testing will show you that optimal improvement requires both approaches, though I often find a fair amount of resistance to the worth of the tweak. It’s almost as if some clients feel that small changes can only produce small results, or that it isn’t worth paying for merely “tweaked” ad copy. (Stop nodding, your neck will hurt!)
So this week, I want you to look those tweak-haters in the eyes and say:
First, it’s psychological change in the prospect, not the physical change in the ad, that’s important to results.
The question in evaluating an ad tweak is not, “how many words or phrases has the writer changed?” but “how much does the new ad improve or alter that ad’s meaning and persuasive power within the mind of the searcher?”
For example, the difference between, say, “Put money in your pocket” and “Puts money in your pocket” in terms of a headline for a metal detector, isn’t the difference of one measly letter, but the difference between an invitation for an opportunity to do some work, and a gadget that’ll seemingly do the work for you (at least on a connotative level).
Physically it’s one letter; psychologically, it’s a much bigger difference than that!
Second, if you’re not testing both fresh approaches and tweaks, you’re probably testing great approaches with inferior wordsmithing.
In other words, what’s to keep from your testing a bad execution of an optimal approach, but passing it over for a better execution of an inferior approach? Nothing! Because you’re never tweaking the execution to find out.
So if you’re not testing tweaks, it’s very likely that you’re not getting the mileage you ought to be getting out of all those “fresh approaches” you’re testing.
Taking this into account, check out the tweaked PPC ad below:

Only two words distinguish the winning ad from the losing ad:

1. “Enhance” vs. “Improve,”
2. “Fun” vs. “Scientific”

What impact do you think these minor tweaks had on improving the ad’s CTR? Five percent? Ten percent?
No, the winning ad improved CTR by whopping 30 percent because the difference between “enhance” and “improve” isn’t just a slight tweak between synonyms. After all, advertisers sell male enhancement products, not male improvement products, right? “Enhance” doesn’t imply the need for improvement, but “Improve” does.
And when you’re looking to play Brain Training Games, “Fun” is more promising than “Scientific.” Yes, you want the games to be scientifically proven, but that’s not the same thing as “Scientific” is it?
So take a tip and this week, don’t diss the tweak! Always make sure you’re cycling in both fresh rewrites and tweaks for your PPC ads to make sure they reach their optimal performance
By: Noran El-Shinnawy

The 4 Ps of Search Engine Optimization

If there is any one reality to SEO, it’s that there are winners and losers. There are certain qualities that are necessary for any winning SEO strategy that can be broken down into the 4 Ps of SEO: proactive, persistence, perseverance, and patience.

Proactive

Being proactive is fundamental to being a good SEO for a couple of key reasons:

Latency Effect Between Work and Results

Any SEO work done today likely won’t affect traffic or revenue today. When it comes to SEO there is a latency effect as new changes to your website or your off-site profile (backlinks, social activities, etc.) get indexed by the search engines and filter into the SERPs.
How long the latency period is depends on the situation. If you put up a new targeted page on your site that gets indexed quickly, you could indeed start to see some new traffic from new keywords within a day. If you’ve made a lot of sweeping on-site and off-site changes to your website, it might take a month to see the results you’re looking for.
The idea here is that it will almost always take longer than you would like to get the results you want from the activities you’re doing today, no matter how hard and smart you work. Think and plan ahead. Make sure you factor in the long-term into your day-to-day activities.

• Actionable tip: Use a calendar to plan all SEO activities ahead. Compare this on an ongoing basis against results tracking to make sure your plan is consistent with your SEO gains. This may also help you see whether you have space for innovation within your tactics.

Stay Ahead of the Curve

The other key point here is to be proactive as opposed to reactive – do your best to keep yourself ahead of the curve. Time and time again I see knee-jerk reactions to changes in the SERPs, and that is the worst thing you can do because new changes are made to the search algorithms all the time.
Firstly, you should have seen the changes coming and changed your strategy months ago. Secondly, if it’s already too late, you’re just going to need to accept reality and adjust your strategy accordingly.
You might be able to get back to where you were before, but it won’t happen overnight – sorry. Engaging in a huge flurry of SEO activity immediately following an algorithm update, for example, has a good chance of doing you more harm than good.

• Actionable tip: Meet with your team regularly to discuss the trends and whether your strategies require adjustment. Where do you see the industry in two years? Five years? Make sure your strategies are in line with long-term trends and are built to last. That way you’ll be more likely to ride out the future Panda-type algorithm updates with no trouble and stay ahead of the curve.

Persistence

SEO isn’t something you can spend a few weeks doing, and then sit back and watch the money roll in. In just about any given niche, several or even dozens of other individuals or groups are attempting to beat you.
In competitive niches, the competition is going to be doing something every single day to reach that goal. Unless you’re doing the same or better, you’ll simply fail.
You need to work every single day at something that contributes to your SEO success. That could be something as simple as publishing new content or developing your branding, but it should all be considered within the scope of your global SEO strategy.

• Actionable tip: Work harder than the others! The minute you stop working is the minute you stop winning, even if it takes a few months for it to become apparent.

Perseverance

No matter how strong your SEO strategy is, you don’t control the SERPs, the search engines do. What that means, fundamentally, is that you’re investing resources into something you have absolutely no control over. Yes, you can influence it (sometimes very heavily), but you can’t control it.
What that lack of control means is a high potential for volatility. Inevitably, you’re SEO campaign is going to have highs and lows. You might have huge successes, with money pouring into the coffers, followed by catastrophic losses that set you back months or even years (think of some of the Panda losers).
OK, those are extreme cases, but you need to be prepared to not always be winning, and to ride out the tough times. Those who persevere in SEO are those who eventually win.

• Actionable tip: Ensure that you are prepared for possible periods of no-growth or decline. Preparedness will help you understand the reasons behind the poor performance, which in turn will help you to respond faster and more effectively to get back on track.

Patience

This is maybe the toughest of all the Ps. No one is really patient, especially in business – everyone has bills to pay, executives to report to, investors to satisfy… considering that financial planning typically works on a quarterly basis, it can often be difficult to justify SEO spend in one quarter when results might happen the next quarter.
The fact about SEO is that results happen on their own timetable, and that’s just the way it is. Results sometimes come later than expected, particularly if you are taking a softer, lower-risk approach.
You really want results next month? Sure, go ahead and build 200 new backlinks this week with the exact same anchor text for the big-money keyword… and see what happens (hint: don’t do that).
Want to win in SEO? Create a solid foundation and gradually – patiently – build on it.

• Actionable tip: Take the evening off and smoke a cigar. You’ve got a lot of work to do tomorrow and if you’re smart about it, the eventual payoff might be big.

By: Guillaume Bouchard

Understanding htaccess: Rewrite and Redirect

One of the tools available to system administrators that will work to make their job easier is their becoming conversant in .htaccess. This ability allows you greater control of your server's configuration and allows you to make changes without adjusting settings for the entire server. These changes are not only completed for the directories, but are picked up and used by subdirectories as well making your job easier and on the fast track to completion. Some favorite tools and tricks used by experts in system administration include redirects and rewrites.

Using Rewrites & Redirects

For redirects using optimal Search Engine Optimization (SEO) implementation, you first need to determine whether you want your redirects to point to the "www" or the "non-www" page of your website. It is crucial that whichever option you choose that you stay consistent.

This code below redirects non-www to www

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You can use this code sequence to direct any traffic from one website, a blog for example, and redirect it to another site permanently. This can be installed using this code:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteRule .* http://www.newdomain.com/ [R=301,L]

Another similar tool that is used frequently for redirects is using a 301 redirect:

Redirect 301 /formersite.html http://www.yourdomain.com/bloghome.html
Redirect 301 /formersite2.html http://www.yourdomain.com/folder/Security

This code sequence changes a simple website page into a secure one with the use of SSL, assuming you have a dedicated SSL certificate available. Customers will be secure in the knowledge that their personal information is safe, especially on an e-commerce website. To implement this, use this coding:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Setting Website Access With .htaccess

Concerns about website security cannot be overlooked in today's technological world. Using .htaccess easily controls who has access to any part of your website. This includes development, testing and administrative access. To accomplish this, initially it is required that a file is set up to install a username and password. To build this file visit (http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/password/) and use the following coding to set a password protection for a specific directory on your website:

AuthUserFile /home/dave/.htpasswd
AuthName "My Personal Login"
AuthType Basic

require valid-user

Disallow Hotlinking For Optimal Security

One mistake that should never be overlooked is to allow hotlinking on a company website. Hotlinking allows copying of website content such as videos or images and enables embedding it into another website. This pulls on your bandwidth each time the website loads. This is easily avoided by preventing files from being hotlinked and stops the hijacking of bandwidth by thieves by using the following coding:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?domain.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/handsoff.jpg [L]

Error 404s And Custom Error Pages

Another major tool used frequently in the use of .htaccess are custom 404 error pages. This script sends visitors landing on a bad page with a redirect to a valid page. These pages typically include a sitemap and/or search bar rather than the dead end typically found on 404 error pages. By creating an error page that actually assists visitors, you will help avoid frustration and keep visitors returning. Building a custom error page can be done by using this code:

ErrorDocument 400 /errors/badrequest.html
ErrorDocument 401 /errors/authreqd.html
ErrorDocument 403 /errors/forbid.html
ErrorDocument 404 /errors/notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /errors/server.html

Learning to use .htaccess will give you the options you need to administer and control your website to provide great customer service and an efficient, easy to manage website.
By: Site Reference

How To Improve A Sites Conversion Rate

Building a successful and profitable site will ultimately depend on the amount of traffic your site receives. The content you produce and how much effort goes into promoting your site will help attract visitors and dictate the quality and how targeted that traffic is, but ultimately, how well your traffic converts  will be the deciding factor in whether or not you have a successful and profitable web site.

Conversion rates are well documented as being poor across the internet. Between  1 and 3% conversion rates seem to be an almost standard rate across the web. Calculating a sites conversion rate is relatively straight forward; If 2 visitors out of 100 convert then your site has a 2% conversion rate. Most marketers will accept this and then focus on increasing the levels of visitors to their site, which in truth is never a bad thing. But it is important to remember that it is often easier to increase a sites conversion rate rather than its traffic and here are some of the best ways of doing that.

The road to increasing a sites conversion rate lies with the traffic it already receives, how that traffic got to your site, what pages they landed on, the keywords they used and the pages they viewed once they did hit your site. To get a clear view of your traffic you will need Google Analytics and you will also need to set up goals, conversions and funnels for your site. The data stored in your analytics program will help to give you a clear picture of your traffic and what they are doing on your site. You will also get to see what actions lead to a conversion, the pages they landed on before converting and the content they viewed that prompted them to take the action that you wanted them to. Replicating the elements that are successful will help to increase conversion rates on other sections of your site.

Google analytics will paint a picture of why some visitors converted while others didn’t. Using another tool by Google called website optimiser will also help your conversion rates. Your Analytics program will tell you which pages on your site helped to convince a visitor to take the action you wanted them to.  Google’s website optimiser will tell you want elements on that page and in what combination will return the best conversion rate.

How to test?

If you are new to Google optimiser, then use a simple A/B test, this will allow you to test 2 versions of a page against each. Once you add the java script to the pages you want to test Google will begin to show the competing pages to your visitors and once it has gathered enough data to make a comprehensive decision on which page has yielded the best conversions you will have a winner.  A/B testing will allow you to familiarise yourself with how testing works and the processes involved, to move your testing to a new level you will need to test the different pages elements and what combination of these elements will work best and you can do this with a multivariate test.

Test every element on a page and test multiple versions of each element

Google will take a lot of work out of putting these tests together. But it’s very tempting to set up multiple elements and just let the test run. Unless the page you are testing gets thousands of hits a day you will wait a long time before the results of your tests are in. Keep your tests small and you will see results and improvements in your conversion rates much sooner.

Improving your conversion rates is usually a slow process and to do it successfully you will need to have in-depth knowledge of your site, the traffic it receives and what has convinced your visitors to convert in the past. Once you know this you can build on this success and further improve your conversion rate.
By: Site-Reference 

Social SEO – Facebook & Twitter Best Practices

Optimizing your social presence for search is important, right? That is certainly what we've all been told for some time, but determining why it's important and deciding where to focus can be challenging. Exponential growth of a medium is great and all, but your problems figuring out how to tame the wild beast tend to grow exponentially as well.
Let's discuss a couple of simple ideas regarding conversational media (i.e., social networking sites and blogs) and its relation to search:

1. How to help your social pages rank better
2. How to help your website rank better with social influences

A Little Perspective About the Market as a Whole

The growth in activity at conversational media sites is undeniable. The number of unique has increased more than 80 percent since 2007 to 213 million in May 2011, while total visits to the category grew 136 percent to 6.2 billion.
Since a search click to a website represents one type of site visit, this is where we can begin to connect the dots on influence between navigation events. The number of search clicks to the category reached 845 million in May, accounting for 13.5 percent of the total visits to the category. That number has grown 145 percent since 2007, outpacing gains in both unique visitors and total category visits.

Branded social media searches (e.g., Facebook, Twitter) and people searches (e.g., friends, celebrities) appear to be the two primary growth drivers of search clicks.
Although these types of terms still make up the vast majority of the terms driving traffic to conversational media sites, the fastest growing search traffic segment is actually big name brands. Well-known consumer brands have finally begun to embrace their conversational media assets and are driving a considerable amount of traffic directly to Facebook and Twitter in addition to their own websites.
When combining the top 20 brand names in retail, finance, and travel, their branded searches delivered over 1.6 million clicks directly to Facebook, a 1,300 percent increase since mid-2009.

How to Help Your Social Pages Rank Better

Links on SERPs are like shelves in a store: Owning more shelf space, and the more varieties you have to offer, invariably will drive more sales (clicks). Because you will already own the premium position for your website for your branded searches, further promotion of your social media assets can only improve your end game.
In collaboration with SEO software vendor BrightEdge Technologies, we've identified three simple steps you can take to improve the rankings of your social pages.

Link From Your Homepage

It can’t be as simple as linking from your homepage, can it? Actually, it can because search engine algorithms absolutely value these links when scoring sites (more on this later).
Despite this reality, 6 of the top 20 most searched for Retail brands did not have any sort of social media integration on their homepages. Talk about a missed opportunity! Linking from your home page and using your brand name in the link will have immediate impact.

Use Brand Names in Posts

URLs that match search terms have a built in advantage for high SEO rankings on that search. This same principle will apply to the words you use in your social media posts, so be sure to use the brand names of your company and your products when posting for maximum effect.

Get Likes

Search engine algorithms value crowd science quite heavily in their rankings (link building relationships). This same type of value is given to likes, follows, +1's, etc. This is an inherent trust metric and will impact rankings as well.
Getting likes can be easier said than done. It may require some creative marketing tactics that engage your customers and make them smile.

Helping Your Website Rank Better With Social Influences

The first part of this column discussed how to drive better rankings for your social media pages. Clearly this has become more of a priority than it was a couple of years ago – particularly for branded terms – but will never be of the same volume and SEO coverage as your own websites. The more important goal is figuring out how to use social media influence to impact your owned media assets.
Social signals drive SEO performance, but how important is it? According to data from BrightEdge, between 75 and 90 percent of the top 10 search results on any given SERP have at least one Facebook like or Twitter tweet. These numbers and the related influence will spike sharply, especially for industries such as retail and finance.

Start With the Basics

Visitors to your website are usually interested in your company and your products, so don't miss the opportunity to invite them into your treasured social media circle. Invite them to connect, like, follow, and/or share your company and your product pages.

Target Head Terms With Social Media Friendly Pages

For most companies, head terms make up a large percentage of their referral traffic. Although these terms drive high volume in both searches and clicks, they are often very competitive for page/position rank.
Ensuring that your head term landing pages are social media friendly with further impact your overall SEO ranking for these coveted terms. The more likes and follows your landing pages have, the higher they will rank.  Therefore, encouraging visitors to take social media action with a “bookmark & share” drop down menu will further your landing page SEO efforts.

Create Tools That Are Easy to Share

An easy to share tool is something that is visually appealing and simple to use. Too many times you arrive at a website that has expert only tools available for analysis, searching, sorting, and the like.  Or you find a tool that is easy to use for all of these things, you would love to tell someone about it, and there is no sharing drop down.
Either of these scenarios is negatively impacting your use of social media SEO influence. Think about the types of assets you have on your site that begat social involvement and make it simple to do.

Drive Social Engagement to Your Website

Facebook offers a variety of social plugins you can utilize on your site. Different plugins encourage different types of engagement, so choose wisely on which ones work best for each part of your site.

Conclusion

Social media and search share a two way street of influence. Social media assets have reached enough critical mass to rank on the first page of search results, as well as directly contribute to the SEO ranking of your website pages.
Although many companies are taking advantage of this established medium, many others have not and are missing a sizeable opportunity. By implementing some of the best practices mentioned here, you can ensure that your social media and search teams are working together and that your organization isn’t being left behind.
By: Eli Goodman, 

Balancing Your Paid & Organic Keywords

Google recently posted a study that showed 89 percent of paid search clicks were incremental. This got me thinking about a piece I wrote last year on how to balance paid and organic keyword lists. One of the data points in that article was the number of brands that had both a paid and organic listing for the same keyword.
Many things have changed in our little search world since that time. I thought it would be valuable to review that research to see what’s changed, but also identify a few things that needed a bit of a refresh. (Side note: Thank you to Julianne Zhang who was one of our many great interns this summer for helping compile this data!)

PPC/SEO Ratio: 2011 vs. 2010

In reviewing the same keywords year over year, there are a couple of interesting highlights.

• While getting better, only one in five ads are owned by the same brand. Brands are getting better at aligning their paid and organic listings. An increase in content quality is the likely reason large brands have the ability to play a larger ownership role on the search results.
   
• Financial services was the only vertical to decrease by 2 points. This vertical had the greatest amount of external events (surrounding the credit and financial markets), in addition to the larger rollout of Google’s comparison ad product for many financial services.
   
• Technology had the largest increase – 12 points. A lagging vertical last year leaves only room for improvement. An increase in technology available and competition also increases the need to own the space.

How to Balance Your PPC/SEO Ratio

To position your brand correctly in the search results page you need to consider these things:

1. Digital asset optimization: This didn’t make the list last year, but more than ever a variety of elements are appearing on the search results page, including news, videos, maps, and images. While these additional elements don’t necessarily bump out traditional text results from the first page, they do create an additional opportunity to appear on the first page, and a larger list of results for consumers to get through prior to seeing your ad in position 6.
    
2. Social results: This year Google introduced both Google +1 button and the Google+ project. While these new product offerings have a long way to go to create critical mass, you can’t deny that social signals across Twitter, Facebook, and Google will play a larger role in where pages rank. This is a new element in quality score for paid search listings, and a supplement for inbound links in organic rankings.
    
3. The classics still apply: Ultimately search engines are driven by keywords, and delivering a compelling experience that meets the consumers’ expectations. How you map your keywords, ad copy, and landing page is not only something that needs to be done for organic and paid search separately, but together. Can you align offers to take over the page, or have organic speak to your brand value prop and paid speak to a call to action?
    
4. Search drives new customers: It’s important to do both paid and organic search to drive new customers in addition to sales. In reviewing our client’s attribution data it becomes clear that both paid and organic search results are very good for driving new customers in addition to being a very strong closing channel. About 40 percent of paid and organic search volume plays the role of introducer or influencer in a consumers purchase path.

Summary

Our best coordinated client saw these results from an improvement in search ownership:

• For each organic position gained with SEO strategies, the client saw a 9 percent decrease in paid search cost per click. Quality score increased due to overall page relevancy improvements. 
• Organic rankings between 1 and 3 reduced paid search investment on the same keyword by more than 70 percent while maintaining performance.

Search plays a critical role in demand generation for any business, so why not have as many listings as possible on the page? Think carefully about how you coordinate your strategy. A collective PPC/SEO keyword strategy will have significant impact on your overall search performance.
By: Jason Tabeling,