1) Write for humans first, search engines second

Many people make the mistake to stuff their blog posts with keywords. They think it will help them rank better and higher. This tactic might have worked in the ‘90’s and early 00’s, but is really out of date nowadays. The best advice I can give you: write for human beings. Keep your target audience in mind while writing and be natural.

2) Use proper formatting & lay-out

Make sure to spend some time properly formatting your article. Use titles, headings, sub-headings. Give it some structure. Use white space to make it easier to read. Pay attention to contrast to improve readability.

3) Make your posts SEO-friendly

When you spend time crafting all those great blog posts, you want to make sure both people and search engines can find them. Therefore, use proper, compelling titles to attract the reader’s attention. Also, add a unique Meta description to help your post stand out on the search engine results pages. Having a good title and meta description can increase the chances of people clicking on your post instead of on your competitors listings. For SEO, the most basic important elements are the title tag, meta description, meta keywords, and ALT text on images.

4) Link to other useful pages on your site

When writing a post, include links to other relevant, useful pages or posts on your website. This makes sense from a user experience and navigation perspective. In addition, your improving your internal linking structure too. You can create links by creating hyperlinks on words (those words will become the link text or anchor text). In most CMS platforms, it’s pretty easy to do: look for a little chain icon where you can provide the page the words should link to and the name of the link (use a few descriptive keywords).

5) Cite sources properly

When you use someone else’s content, you need to cite that person/source as the original source of the content. I recommend you create a link by making the name, or title of the content, or action (i.e. Site X mentioned that…) the hyperlink.

6) Use ALT text on images

Use ALT text to help search engines understand what your images in your posts are about. ALT text stands for Alternative text and is mainly used for search engines. Besides naming your image with a few descriptive words (i.e. red-flower.jpg), also use keywords in your ALT, but don’t spam or stuff it with dozens of words. Again, keep it natural.

7) Check your spelling and grammar

For both humans and search engines, it’s important that your spelling and grammar are correct. In fact, Google uses this as one of their rankings factors. So, make sure to run your text through a spelling checker or a similar tool to correct any mistakes.

8) Use a clear all-to-action (CTA)

When writing about products or services, you can include a call to action at the end that encourages people to take a certain action. This action can be many things. For example, if you provide a professional service and you talk and explain it in your post, you can encourage people to contact you or check out other related pages if they have questions or concerns etc. If you’re writing about a new product you sell, place a link in the text or as a button that points directly at the page on your (e-commerce) site where they can purchase the product. Don’t let people guess what they should do. Instead, make it really obvious and keep it simple.

However, in this post we’d like to look ahead of us and discuss some predictions about the future of search, meaning: in which direction are search engines like Google, Bing and others developing and how does this affect consumers and us, the online marketers?

The people at Distilled recently wrote a great summary on this topic. Basically, they argue the future of search likely consists of the following:

Improved Understanding

Search engines -particularly Google- are getting more and more advanced. They do a better job at understanding what people are looking for – their problems, needs, and provide the most relevant search results for these queries. Consider the following example Distilled gave:

This is a very vague search query. Yet, Google is able to understand and do something useful with it. This is possible due to machine learning/Google’s algorithms ‘getting smarter’, meaning they have so much data to work with and past experiences that they are able to better ‘understand’ what users want. I believe this is likely to continue in the future.

Being signed in everywhere

Are you currently signed in to a Google or Microsoft account? Big chance you are…As it’s getting easier to sign in and use services across multiple devices (i.e. laptop, smartphone, tablets) there is a trend to being signed-in more, if not all of the time. The effect of this is especially noticeable for local search/marketing. Consider the following example:

Example of what is happening with local search queries. Source: Distilled

Do good marketing

The future of search is doing good, real marketing for your business. With search engines getting smarter and more advanced, people are not really getting away anymore with some technical SEO or link building tricks that might have worked well in the recent past. For example, with Google’s many updates over the past few years (Caffeine, Panda, Penguin etc) Google is getting more strict, punishing those who try to fool and game them,  and basically encouraging businesses to act more like brands: real brands do real marketing. Focus on this and I believe you will be successful in the long run.

Over the past years we have seen an increase in visuals on the results pages that search engines present to users. Examples include images, thumbnails from YouTube videos, pictures from paid Product Listings Ads, and more recently pictures from authors next to the search results pulled from the Google Authorship code

I have to admit I like the idea of having pictures along with your search ads. Like Google itself says: you can show and tell now with Search Ads. This might make ads more relevant to users and help you – the advertiser who’s on top of the PPC game and includes this new feature – stand out and do better than the competition.

The web has developed and is a more interactive and richer place (in terms of variety of content). Google knows this as well and explains:

As the web evolves, Google users expect richer and more diverse content. More than one in six searches on Google today provide results with visual content. Image extensions will show in some cases when we determine that a search is likely for visual content. For example, it is more likely that your image extensions will show for a query like luxury car designs than locations of nearby car dealerships.

Example of Image Extensions with Google AdWords Search Ads. Source: Google

Ad Extensions

During the past years, Google has been rolling out multiple types of ad extensions to make ads more attractive and relevant to users including:

• Call extensions: show your phone number with your ad
• Location extensions: show your office/store location
• Sitelinks: add links to relevant, valuable internal pages on your site
• Social extensions: show +1′s and connect to your Google+ account
• Offer extensions: show offers (part of the Enhanced Campaigns)
• and more…

So Image Extensions are the latest innovation and addition. The have just been launched as a beta and so testing and refining is still going on.

As an advertiser you can choose the images that you want displayed with your search ads and send them to Google for review. Note that you must have the necessary rights to the the images you wish to display with your ads. Image extensions are currently running in English globally. For more information, read this article. Exciting to see how this new feature will perform and the impact it will have on important KPI’s such as CTR and conversions.

What is conversion tracking?

Facebook enables you to track the conversions that happened as a result of your Facebook ads. This is very important because without it, you have no clue. Let’s say that when you ran your ad, your conversions went up 20%. But how many of those conversions were a result of your ads? Could they have been driven by something else instead?

With conversion tracking, Facebook knows that visitors went to your site from your Facebook ad. And with the help of a so-called “offsite pixel“, they know that the user then performed your desired action. Let’s have a look.

What is an offsite pixel?

An offsite pixel is a snippet of code provided by Facebook that you place within the < HEAD > tags of a specific page of your site to alert Facebook that a conversion is complete.

You would add that offsite pixel to a confirmation or thank-you page. This page should only be reached when a user has taken the desired action on your landing page (which could be a signup or purchase etc). Facebook then knows that your ad resulted in a successful conversion.

Conversion types & Optimized CPM

According to Jon Loomer:

One of the amazing things about conversion tracking is that Facebook utilizes Optimized CPM (oCPM) to determine who sees your ads.

oCPM allows advertisers to prioritize their marketing goals, and then automatically delivers ads against those goals in the most effective way possible. This allows advertisers to maximize the value they get from their budgets.

This means your ad is optimized to be shown to the people most likely to perform your desired action. When you set up your offsite pixel, you can optimize for the following conversion types:

• Checkouts
• Registrations
• Leads
• Key page views
• Adds to cart
• Other website conversions

Facebook learns which users perform these desired actions through advertisers using conversion tracking. This intelligence and data helps Facebook target your ad at people most likely to convert. Here’s how to implement this for your advertising today!

Step I: Create an offsite pixel
First, I suggest you need to use Facebook’s Power Editor tool.

1. In the top-left menu, click Conversion Tracking.
2. Click Conversion Tracking within left menu in Power Editor.
3. Now click the green Create Conversion Pixel button at the top right.
4. Now name your pixel and choose a conversion category. This is the action that Facebook will optimize for.

Step II: Get the code
Now you’ll be given a box with some code. This is the offsite pixel. Copy this code and proceed to #3.

Step III: Paste the code
You will need to paste this code between the < HEAD > tags of a specific page on your website. But how and where you do that will depend on a several things and can differ per website.

How you do this will be determined by your content management system (CMS). In WordPress, you should have a text box for Custom Tracking/Conversion Code when editing your page or post. The page that you add this code to will depend on your desired action. Place it on the page visitors get directed to when they have performed a desired action (the ‘thank-you’ confirmation page).

Step IV: Verify the pixel
Within your list of conversion pixels in Power Editor, your new pixel will either be listed as Active, Unverified or Inactive.

• Active: In the past 24 hours, people have viewed the pages that contain the pixel on your website.
• Unverified: Your pixel may not be installed or properly configured because there have been no reports of people viewing it on your website.
• Inactive: In the past 24 hours, people have not viewed the pages that contain the pixel on your website.

Make sure you refresh the page (press F5) of your website after you add the pixel to it. That will send a signal to Facebook that it is now active.

Step V: Create your ad
When you create an ad within Power Editor to drive conversions for this pixel, you will now need to apply your offsite pixel.Within the Creative & Placements tab, click the Conversion Tracking checkbox and select your pixel.

Step VI: Monitor your conversions
Now when you go into the Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll be given the following stats:

• Conversions: The number of times your conversion pixels fired
• Conversion Value: The value that your ad returned to you based on the conversion details you set up (if available)
• Cost Per Conversion: The average you paid for each conversion

Assuming you know the value of each conversion, you can now determine ROI of your ad campaign!

Your website likely plays an important role as a first point of interaction with your business. It’s like your business card, but online. Furthermore, you might be actively marketing your business online, but: is it any good? Are you getting any results beyond more likes, tweets etc? You only have a small budget so let’s see how you can make the most out of it.

First, I’m assuming you’re already using some form of web analytics (probably Google Analytics) to gather data. If not, start today – this is crucial. There is such a wealth of information that it can be hard to decide what to analyze and how to interpret the data. Not to worry, help is on the way! Today we’ll look at 4 great metrics that you should focus on for small business websites. Let’s get started.

1) Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

This means: how much does it cost you to get people to convert (take a desired action such as a purchase or sign-up)? As a small business, you have a small budget. Make every dollar count. You need to know which parts of your website and marketing efforts get results and which ones don’t. According to Avinash Kaushik, an expert in web analytics, you should obsess about this metric:

You have very little money. You need to know, obsessively, what you get for it. This metric delivers that insight. Oh, and everything has a CPA (not just your paid search or display/banner ads). If you are doing SEO then you are likely paying for someone. That’s the cost. Kill things that don’t have an optimum CPA. Invest more in ones that do. Simple enough, right?

Tip: Remember this is just cost, not profit. If your product costs you $15 to make then, in the above scenario, you are shipping a crisp $5 bill along with every Social Media order!

Calculate your CPA’s and take action. Source: Avinash Kaushik

How do you get this data? You will most likely have to do a bit of math to get these numbers. For Search you can get the data through Google Analytics or Omniture Site Catalyst reports. But for most other programs (Affiliate, Email, Social, Display) your cost is likely sitting outside your web analytics tool. So extract the number of conversions, import into Excel, add a column for Cost, do the math, and then take action based on the data you got.

2) Bounce Rate

This means: people that land on your website and leave without viewing any other page on your site. So what? Well, bounce rate is an indication of quality and relevancy.  It helps you identify campaigns where you might be targeting wrong people (who then come to your site and leave right away) or sending relevant traffic to irrelevant landing pages. The lower the ratio, the better it is.

One note of caution: if you use stand alone landing pages (such as for PPC) that are focused around one action  (i.e. request a quote) and do not contain other links/navigation, then by definition the Bounce Rate will be high, because there is only one page to visit.

You can find Bounce Rate data in every web analytics tool worth anything. Look at your All Traffic Sources report and your Landing Pages report.

3) Checkout Abandonment Rate

Want to make more money with your website/webshop? Focus on optimizing the sales funnel. As Avinash Kaushik explains:

I find the fastest way to make money is to take it from the people who have already decided to give it to you. Obsess about checkout abandonment rate (the percentage of people who click Start Checkout to those who complete that process).

Focus on checkout steps with the highest abandonment. Tweak like crazy. A/B & Multivariate tests are a good option. But you are a small business… so just take away as many fields as you can, play with where to show shipping cost (I vote for way up front), reduce the number of checkout steps if you can, ask for account creation at the end of the process rather than at the start. Try, test, measure, be rich.

You can find this data in Microsoft Excel. Or if you use Google Analytics: In Paditrack for free. (Google Analytics’ native funnels are not ideal). For other tools such as KissMetrics: Create a funnel just for the checkout process (from clicking Start Checkout to Thanks for your Order) and both these tools will give you the metric automatically. They also allow you to segment the data which provides you with even more insights!

4) Macro Conversion Rate

You are a small company. Therefore, obsess about conversion rates and everything connected to improving them. For example, what products are people buying? Every week or month, have a look at your All Traffic Sources report and seek out the Conversion Rate metric.

Stop or change sources that are not working well and reward the good ones. Be they Earned, Owned and Paid media. Also, be sure to have a marketing strategy that has each of those elements or as a small business owner you are not going to win a lot.

Obsess about conversion rates. Source: Avinash Kaushik

You can find the Conversion Rates in all analytics tools. Remember to look at both the rate and the raw number of conversions for context. People make silly decisions when they don’t do that. You need to have enough data before you make any decisions (need to be statistically significant: i.e. you cannot judge performance of a source on a few visits).

Conclusion

Focus on these four key performance indicators to start driving more leads and improve the overall bottom line for your business.

The local online system can sometimes be an overwhelming place. The major players in the maps/local information field are Google, Bing, Nokia and Apple. As Google is the most widely used and well-known we’ll focus on this giant for this post.

If you have an issue with your business information or address on Google Maps you can fix it. Before you contact the Google Maps team, make sure the problem is not on your end.

Here’s what you should do: log into your Google Places dashboard (assuming you already have an existing Google Places listing) and check to see if you entered all information correctly. Same thing with your Google+ Local and/or Business listing. If these contain incorrect information, it will also show incorrectly on Google Maps.

If you checked Google Places/Plus Local and all is fine, then it might be a bug or mistake in Google Maps itself. We’ll now look at how you can fix this problem.

How to fix problems on Google Maps

When viewing the map, you will see an option in the lower left of right hand corner that says “Report a problem”. Alternatively, you can right-click with the mouse on the map itself and various options will show, one of them being “Report a problem”.

A menu will appear and you can select which type of problem you have. You can then add a description and in some cases even select and highlight a part of the map that contains the error. This helps Google’s team to identify and solve the problem. You can also mark the little check box to get notified by email when your problem has been addressed by Google.

Watch below video for a more detailed explanation on how to report problems with Google Maps:

This tool provides insights for many different industries and countries including the United States, Canada, Brazil, UK, and more. As a business owner or marketeer it’s very important to understand the buying cycle (the green/blue bar in the image below). And, as the image shows, people can be influenced by multiple channels and interactions including emails, paid search (like Google Adwords or Bing Ads), social media and from referring sites:

Source: Google

Google’s tool helps you to dial in on your market to gain a better understanding of the whole process and where you should focus your attention on. For example, when looking at the travel industry in Canada, we can see that the channels Email and Social play an important role as Assistants. This means these are valuable channels that help drive conversions/purchases. Click on the screenshot below to enlarge.

Source: Google

I suggest you play around with this new tool and see if you can get some new insights from this valuable data. This in turn can help you make better informed marketing decisions that enables you to increase sales and optimize the use of the various online marketing channels available to you.

Therefore, when it comes to SEO, most marketeers and business owners focus on Google. This week, Matt Cutts published a video about what we can expect in the upcoming months from Google regarding SEO. He talks about initiatives they’re working on, new planned Penguin updates and much more. For your convenience, we have included the video right here below. Alternatively, you can read a summary of the most important points right below the video.

New Penguin Update
Google will continue to roll out Penguin updates, starting with what has been described as the biggest Penguin changes ever made. It will go live in the next few weeks. It is believed that this update will have have a bigger impact than the original Penguin update. I believe we can expect significant rankings impact in both directions (drops and gains).

Paid Links via “Advertorials”
They will get more aggressive looking for signals that indicate an article containing a link may be an “advertorial”, which in reality is just a paid link wrapped up to seem like it’s an unpaid editorial. Note, this is different from the guest blog post, however, the difference is very subtle. There might be signficiant collateral damage when this update rolls out.

Spam Queries
Some industries simply attract bad SEO/linking techniques (black hat) more than others. Viagra? Yes Beekeeping supplies? Not so much. Keyword phrases like online pharmacy, payday loans, are classic examples. According to Cutts, certain terms are going to be on the spam team’s radar.

Upstream Targets
Unnatural link networks have to start somewhere. These networks are often layered in such a way that it’s difficult to spot and identify them. Google will be using new techniques to identify the originating sources of these networks, and penalize them.

Detailed Link Analysis
They can now create a much more sophisticated back link profile for your website, meaning they have more details about the links in and from your website. They can use this information to assess whether manipulative link building has taken place, which could result in a penalty.

Hacked Sites
Google will launch improvements/warnings of potentially hacked sites and notify webmasters. This will help webmasters in the unfortunate event that their site got hacked. Clean up and fixing a hacked site can be a difficult and very technical process so expert help is very welcome.

Authority Sites
Matt took the time to state that authority/expert sites will give greater ranking boosts.

Panda Update
Google will soften the impact this update had on sites that should not have been hit. The Panda update is mostly about on-page quality factors.

Multiple Domains in SERP’s
They will reduce the number of pages from the same domain that are displayed in the search results, to provide a better user experience to Google users.

Webmaster Communication
There will be more transparency and perhaps communication (in the form of messages and alerts) to alert you of noteworthy events or changes regarding the performance of your website.

Call extensions have been around for a while in Adwords, but with Google’s recent Enhanced Campaigns upgrade, they are now more functional and flexible. In this post I’d like to explain the new features and discuss how you can best use them.

Call Extension Options

In the image below you can see the new Call Extension window, with its new options:

Phone number: when you add a new Call Extension, you’re first asked to enter the phone number. Make sure you pick the correct country.

Then there is the option to either show both your website and the phone number or just your phone number. Pick the last option if you prefer that people call you right away, instead of going to your website.

At Device Preference, you can mark the check box if you want Google to optimize your ad or extension for mobile devices. Google explains:

Mobile-optimized text ads and extensions will be given preference on mobile devices. Standard text ads and extensions will be given preference on desktop and laptop computers or tablets.

Good to know: If your ad group contains mobile-optimized text ads only, those ads may appear on desktops and laptop computers and tablets.

Scheduling: this is the biggest changes and most useful feature, in my opinion. You can now specify to run your call extension on a schedule that suit your business needs, for example, only on weekdays, from 9am to 5pm. That’s really useful!

Display Clock Setting: finally, choose if you prefer 12 or 24 hour display and the time zone (note: cannot be changed as the time zone was set in the very beginning when you created your AdWords account).

I hope you now have a better understanding regarding Call Extensions and see the benefits of the new features. I recommend you give it a try and see how you might get more customers and therefore improve your advertising return on investment (ROI). If you need help creating and managing AdWords campaigns, don’t hesitate to contact us.

What is Sendola?

The Sendola web button is an online tool designed to give your website visitors a fast and simple way of saving your company details. The button uses a SMS to deliver the details straight to the visitor’s mobile phone. It’s simple to install, and it’s free to use for both you and your users. Basically, this service lets website users click a button while on your website and have your business information and details sent instantly to their mobile phone, and for free. I think this is great for local businesses such as hotels, restaurants, retail stores etc to make it even easier to find you. This can provide you with a competitive advantage.

How to use Sendola

Let’s look at an example of how you might use Sendola. For instance, you are at home on your PC, laptop or iPad, and you find a new restaurant. You want to try it out. You can send the restaurant’s address and details to your mobile before you head out in your car. Now you have directions, a map, menu, phone numbers, etc. with you in the car, all because of a small button that took one second to click when you were on their web site.

For business owners and online marketeers, this might be a useful new tool to help attract new customers. Be sure to check it out at http://www.sendola.com/