SEO News

Posted by larry.kim

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Today, I’ll share with you a case study on how we used remarketing to make our content marketing and SEO efforts up to seven times more effective. In the last two years, we’ve moved beyond just doing SEO to kicking some major online marketing butt and I’d love to show you the lessons we’ve learned in the time it took to get here. Hopefully you can cut your own learning curve and get right to it!

Rockin’ SEO and the company no one knows

WordStream’s website launched late in 2008. My company is pretty much your typical B2B brand using content marketing and SEO to drive leads for the business. Today, our blog gets around half a million visitors each month; we’ve seen a compound monthly growth rate of 8.4% every month, for the last five years!

Here’s what that looks like:

At first glance, you might consider this a huge SEO success (doesn’t everything look better if you only take a glance?). As you might expect though, we’ve faced a few challenges over the last few years:

Issue 1: Low visitor engagement

Here’s what it looked like over a 60-day period last year, back when we had pretty weak user engagement metrics:

• Just 1.9 pages per visit.
• An average visit duration of 1 minute and 34 seconds.
• A new visitor ratio of 79.2%.

We knew we could do better than this… yet we weren’t.

Issue 2: Low conversion rate

Our second challenge had to do with low conversion rates from website visitors to offer sign-ups. Like many other companies that do SEO/Content Marketing, we’re hoping to turn some of that traffic into offer sign-ups for things like white papers or free trials. We want to get interested prospects into our system so we can communicate with (and market to) them on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, our conversion rates were pretty low–just under 2%–as people were bouncing away and often not returning. I don’t care how great you are at getting eyes on your content; if you’re not converting, it’s worthless.

Issue 3: Virtually no branded searches

This one was probably our biggest problem. In organic search, only 3% or so of our approximately half a million monthly organic searches were branded searches. Check out this snapshot from last year, back when “not provided” was only around 10% and it was still possible to do this kind of analysis.

(Let’s just stop here briefly, shall we? We must have a moment of silence for our lost organic keyword data.)

Okay, we’re back… have a look:

I’m sure we’ve all seen our share of clueless clients, where 95% of the organic search traffic is branded search. I wouldn’t want to see all branded search; it means your SEO sucks if you’re only appearing in front of people who are already looking for your business by name.

My site was the exact opposite. We were driving hundreds of thousands of visits per month via SEO and only 3% of that came from branded search. What does that mean? It meant our SEO had gotten too far ahead of the brand.

On the one hand, it’s great to have growing SEO traffic numbers. However, as I pondered the issues above—low engagement, low conversion and very little branded search—I realized the situation was more like:

(image via Flickr)

Essentially, we were just driving tons of traffic to my link-juiced up domain using the amazing, optimized content we’d created, but people wouldn’t stay that long, convert, or remember the company brand.

That’s not a good thing at all. It’s pretty anti-climactic, actually; you do the work of creating killer content, optimizing it for both users and search, get it out the door and in front of the right people… and they still have no idea who you are. We had to stop throwing money out the door. We couldn’t just be SEOs anymore.

Remarketing primer for the uninitiated

Remarketing is basically the process of tagging people who visit your site, then targeting them with banner ads after they leave your site. No, this is not otherwise known as stalking—not if you’re doing it right, anyway. Remarketing can be a very powerful tool, if you avoid crossing over into the creep factor.

It gives you the opportunity to appear in front of people who had already expressed an interest in your brand as they go about their business on the web. They could be checking their email, reading the news, watching a YouTube video… and there you are! Reminding them of that thing they were going to do when they checked you out a few days ago.

Why remarketing?

We did a lot of thinking about our issues and how to fix them. We were totally killing it with our SEO and driving traffic like no one’s business, but clearly, that wasn’t enough.

Remarketing was actually one of the first potential solutions I considered seriously, because by definition, remarketing provides opportunity to:

• Turn abandoners/bouncers into leads
• Increase brand recall (and thus increase branded searches)
• Increase repeat visitor rates and engagement
• Increase the effectiveness of SEO and content marketing

What we needed was to better connect with the people who were interested in visiting us in the first place. Obviously, we weren’t excelling at grabbing and keeping their attention, but then, we weren’t getting the chance to follow up with this mass of search traffic.

Remarketing would allow us a second chance to make that first impression, if you will (and even a third, and a fourth). We had to get past being forgettable. We had to get sticky.

And why remarket with Google, you ask? Why not? Quite simply, they were the largest and most recognized marketplace going; they just made sense for us. The Google Display Network is one of the largest remarketing networks in the world, with over two million sites in the network. It also includes AdMob for mobile targeting, meaning you can get your ads to show up in Angry Birds and other mobile apps.

Generally you can find your tagged site visitors on the network many times per day, several days per week, and across many different sites. On average, you’ll be able to connect with:

• 84% of the people you tag
• 10-18 times per month

Soon, Google DoubleClick users will also be able to buy retargeting ads on Facebook, which is proving an incredibly effective platform for the tactic.

Remarketing as a Conversion Rate Optimization Tool

According to research from Forrester, 96% of people who visit your site don’t convert to a lead or sale. And 70% of people who put stuff in a shopping cart leave without placing an order. These people really are the low hanging fruit and from that perspective, I view remarketing as an effective conversion rate optimization tool—sort of.

This was another major reason retargeting made sense for us. We really needed that help with brand recognition and getting people back to our site to convert (or at least get back on site and connect so we could nurture the lead).

So, with the decision made to at least try it out and test, we got started.

Important things to consider when starting remarketing

In remarketing, you usually need to create different audiences to remarket so you can adjust your bidding strategy and your ads. For example, we created one audience for people who visited our blog, one for home page visitors and another for people who visited one of our free tools (e.g.: Our Google AdWords Grader for PPC auditing). We can assume each of these high-level groups was looking for different types of information.

This basic segmenting allowed us to show different ads, depending on which section of our site they visited.

A secondary benefit was that we could bid more aggressively (get more impressions, higher more prominent ad positions) for visitors to our AdWords Grader, which is worth way more to us as a business than someone who visits our blog (because we blog about all sorts of random stuff that has nothing to do with WordStream there, intent is far lower, if at all).

Another cool remarketing strategy for content marketers is to define audience categories based on the different post categories in your blog. If you already have a ton of blog content that is classified by topic, leverage those existing classifications in your remarketing audience definition strategy.

Also, consider membership duration; that is, how long do you want to keep chasing these people around the Internet? I set ours to 30-60 days, which is pretty aggressive (you might even call it spammy). A shorter membership duration would improve cost per conversion metrics, since people are less likely to convert as more time passes. Also, consider the difference you might see between B2C and B2B. You know the length of your average sales cycle and will have to test to see if it’s worth going beyond that time, or if they’re apt to have completed a purchase.

Remember:

• Create audiences, groups of visitors based on the pages they visited or other factors.
• Bid more aggressively on visitors who showed greater intent.
• Segment your audiences based on the different content topics on your site
• Test against the length of your sales cycle as a starting point to finding the right audience membership duration.

Killer ad creative strategy for remarketers

Now that we’ve tagged visitors and segmented them into different audiences, the key is to create cool ads in different formats that:

• Drive a call to action.
• Feature branding or images that will improve brand recall.

Lousy ads have sunken many remarketing efforts, so the key is to keep A/B testing with different ad designs. You want to have a high CTR (ideally more than 0.4%) and find the most memorable copy and image combinations, since one of the objectives here is to improve brand recall. You know you have finally “made it” when you get people tweeting your ads! Like this cute little puppy dog!

Another company killing it with their remarketing ads right now is none other than Moz, who has some of the cutest remarketing ads featuring the amazing Roger Mozbot!

Remarketing results 18 months out

We started our remarketing efforts early in Q1 2012, just over 18 months ago. How are things going today? Based on the title of the post, you know this was the best move we could have made, but how big was the impact?

Impact on brand recall

One of the biggest issues I had was poor brand recall – that a measly 3% of my organic searches were branded searches. Unfortunately, the whole keyword (not provided) mess makes it pretty much impossible to trend this branded searches over time [shakes fist at Google], however a proxy for brand recall is direct traffic. Meaning, to the extent that you’re building your brand, you would expect more people to visit your website directly, as opposed to stumbling upon your SEO’ed content. Here’s what my direct traffic looks like over last 6 years.

Impact on repeat visitor rate

Earlier, I mentioned that last January, we had a 20% returning visit rate. Today, it’s more like a 33% of our visitors are repeat visitors. That’s a massive over 50% improvement. We love to see the steady increase in repeat visitors (decrease in new visitors) over time.

Impact on user engagement and conversion rates

Check THIS out. Remember that ridiculous 1 minute and 33 second average visit duration? Today, it’s up 300% and is approaching 5 minutes. Furthermore, our website visitor-to-lead-form-submitted conversion rates are up 51%!

It’s important to note there was one other major factor that helped us here with the huge increase in visit duration and that was to embrace longer form content. Both were important for the overall strategy and I’ll write about that in a future post.

Repeat visitors +50%, conversion rate +51%, and and time on site +300% = 7x more awesome!

A few closing notes on our remarketing strategy:

Basically, we buy a truckload of impressions ever month. Around 44 Million of them per month—take a look below—I allocate my PPC budget 50/50 between search and display remarketing.

Why so much remarketing? At this point, we’re already generating hundreds of thousands of visitors to the site every month via SEO and content marketing, so it’s worth that much more to the business to convert the organic traffic we’re getting. I think this is very common among sites that do SEO well.

As we’ve gotten better and better at driving traffic via SEO, our PPC search strategy today is much more about getting additional ad space coverage around a very narrow set of high commercial intent keywords, which have lots of ads crowding out the organic results.

It’s important to note that my “7x More Awesome” metric was our ROI from remarketing as we specifically sought to improve engagement rates, brand recall and conversion rates – if you choose to test remarketing for your business, the ROI will depend on your goals and objectives.

Remarketing: moving beyond SEO towards building your brand

In summary, SEO is a great traffic acquisition method, but by definition, you’re going after people who are unfamiliar with your brand (since if they knew where to get whatever they were looking for, they would have directly navigated to your site).

In order to grow your business into a more mature company, you need to go beyond just SEO and build your brand!

Remarketing is an incredibly effective way to leverage and capitalize on your SEO and content marketing investments to build:

• more repeat visitors,
• more brand recall (branded searches, direct traffic),
• more engagement (pageviews per visit, time on site, lower bounce rates)
• and more conversions/leads/sales.

Personally, I think it’s crazy to be doing SEO without at least some remarketing. No, it’s not free, but neither is SEO/Content Marketing. The point is to understand where each tactic is most effective and how they work best together to drive audiences, then convert/retain to get way more bang for your buck. Like Rand has said, we can’t just be SEOs anymore!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by jamesporter

The John Lewis Christmas 2013 campaign has smashed it virally. Since it launched two weeks ago it’s had:

• 8 million views on YouTube
• 150k Twitter mentions
• 70k Facebook interactions

As content marketers, those kind of engagement statistics seem incredible. Admittedly, brand marketers have much bigger budgets, but as content marketers, what can we learn from brand marketers about creating, launching and promoting content?

If you’re in the UK, then you will undoubtedly have seen it, but for everyone else, here’s the video:

If you’re a bit skeptical and think that content marketing and big brand marketing are totally different, then read this quote from industry marketing bible The Drum:

“Shares are the currency of social success and for leading brand marketers discovering how to create and distribute highly shareable content repeatedly and at scale is now at the top of their wish list.”

Sounds familiar, right? Basically big brand marketing and content marketing are converging.

Hopefully you’ve bought into the idea that we’re becoming the same industry…so what can we learn?

Lesson 1: Don’t launch on your own site (launch where your target market is)

John Lewis is a big brand, but they didn’t launch their campaign on their site. They launched their campaign via Twitter and YouTube.

Why? Because that’s where their target market is, that is where they are going to get traction with their audience, and that is where they have the highest chance of virality.

Lesson: Could you launch your content where your target market is? A great example of this happening in the SEO community is Stephen Pavlovich’s Definitive Guide To Conversion Rate Optimisation. It’s a fantastic piece of content that was launched on Moz and helped to build Stephen’s name in the industry.

Pro Tip 1: If you’re worried about losing link equity, use the cross domain rel=canonical tag to transfer value back to your site.

Pro Tip 2: If you can’t get your content onto a platform where your target audience is, can you use paid promotion to get your content on there?

Lesson 2: Don’t make links your main objective

We all want more links. But at Distilled we’re now optimising campaigns for other metrics as well.

Question: Would you rather build your brand with new audiences or would you prefer a link from a DA30 site on a page that nobody ever visits and that provides zero referral traffic?

Lesson: Set your content objectives not purely on links or views, but on other levels of engagement. Still factor in links but consider other metrics like sharing, data capture, brand uplift, or online purchases/enquiries.

Lesson 3: Target your content broadly

When you’re creating content at the level of John Lewis, then arguably your audience is the entire population.

As content marketers, we’ve got narrower audiences, but there’s a fine line between targeting your content too broadly:

and targeting your content too narrowly:

Lesson: Make sure that the audience that you are targeting for your content piece is large enough to achieve your objectives. Otherwise you have failed from the start.

Pro Tip 1: If you’re worried about the reach of your target audience, try and combine several audiences into one content piece. Wiep Knol in his Searchlove 2010 presentation (no longer available, unfortunately) gave a great example of combining several target audiences with his piece the “70 Most Beautiful Churches In Europe,” which brought the travel blogging and religious communities together.

Pro Tip 2: Another way you can target content more broadly is geographically. Bingo site TwoLittleFleas has used a US/UK switch on their quiz to broaden their potential audience from 63m (UK population) to 377m (US and UK population).

Pro Tip 3: Another way of targeting your content is including many niche audience groups within a piece of content. This works as the piece of content speaks to pre-existing communities, and their automatic thought when seeing the piece is “that’s for me!.”

The “From Gospel to Grunge: 100 Years of Rock” piece is not just for people interested in music, it also references various music communities and that will encourage people to engage with the piece.

Lesson 4: Build influencers into your content

John Lewis has embedded an influencer with a massive online community directly into their content. Lily Allen is singing on the ad, which is a pretty clever play from John Lewis considering that she’s got 4.3m followers on Twitter.

Lesson: Build influencers into your content launch plan. Ask them to contribute or comment, give them a free trial, or offer them beta access.

Pro Tip: When doing outreach, find people who you can help out. This changes the mindset from “what can this person do for me” to “how can I help this person” (great tip from Marco Montemagno at SearchLove 2013).

Lesson 5: Focus your marketing on innovators/opinion leaders

Hat tip to Seth Godin (and his Purple Cow) for this one. Why did John Lewis launch their campaign online, even though TV is the primary channel? Because online is where innovators and opinion leaders hang out. These are the people that are on the lookout for something new or different. Innovators and opinion leaders have the ability to change the behaviour of the early and late majority.

Lessons: Opinion leaders matter. Use this process from Richard Baxter to find the influencer intersect for your market, and then build relationships with these people as a long term strategy for success in your space.

Lesson 6: Get your creative right (people need to love your marketing)

Didn’t you know? Google and other social networks (particularly Facebook), are filtering content through to you based on what they think you’ll like. Just because you’re publishing content doesn’t mean your audience is getting it. (not convinced, read this book).

If other people are reading and sharing though, then your content is likely to get through the filters. So people really do need to love your marketing for it to work.

So, how can you get your creative up to scratch?

If you’re just starting out with content marketing, then there are a few things you need to do first:

• Manage expectations and educate internally that content marketing plays like this can fail.
• Do something small first that requires limited budget. Build confidence. Get buy in from the C-suite. THEN go big!

Pro Tip 1: Mitigate risk. Offset some of the risks of content marketing by emulating the fundamentals of a piece that has ALREADY been successful in a different geographical location or industry.

Pro Tip 2: Need creative inspiration? Check out this great post from Kelsey Libert on creative ideation, or this classic from Larry Kim “How I got a link from the Wall Street Journal“.

Lesson 7: Spend more on outreach than you are spending on content creation

The John Lewis campaign cost £7m. £6m is going to promotion (advertising). £1m went to creative.

What ratios are you working on in terms of spend on content creation to outreach? The loud and clear message here is that in brand marketing outreach isn’t an afterthought. It’s fundamental to the campaign.

Lesson: Double your outreach budget. Do outreach yourself? Spend twice the amount of time on it for your next project.

Lesson 8: Keep your content non-promotional (but plan for sales post-launch)

If people feel that they are being sold to, they are less likely to share. So keep your content as non-promotional as possible.

Lesson: For your next piece of content, strip out your sales focused header and footer, and remove the sales spiel and the ‘buy’ call to action. This is an example piece of content marketing for Simply Business. As you can see, the content, sharing and utility of the piece is the main focus, not any specific marketing or commercial messages.

Pro Tip: Add remarketing tags to your content so you can promote to your audience at a later date (even if it’s just to promote your next content piece).

Lesson 9: Are you creating a reaction with your audience?

What reaction are you stirring up in your audience? Is it curiosity, surprise, sorrow or pride?

Interestingly, John Lewis adverts are deliberately sad and they evoke an emotional reaction with their choice of music and the story.

Lesson: At the concept stage, if your concept doesn’t evoke a visible reaction with a small group of users, consider it a no-go. No reaction = No social shares.

Conclusion

As content marketers, we know a lot of the strategies and tactics that brand marketers are using. But there’s a big difference between knowing what to do, and actually doing it.

In my opinion, there’s still a lot we can learn from brand marketers, specifically in terms of strategy, scale, reporting and measurement, and ultimately in the results they get. I’m excited about the way that our two industries are converging.

If you need more inspiration here are a list of resources that I follow to keep up to date with the creative digital sector, and of how I keep up to date with what people love online:

Ads/PR/content making waves:

• Top 20 Most Shared Ads of 2013
• AdAge Viral Video Charts (updated each week)
• Adage Creativity Pick (updated daily)
• Adweek Adfreak
• PR Examples (sign up for the email newsletter)

• Buzzsumo (my new favourite tool for find out what’s big on any website. It’s fast, low on bugs and gives you accurate share counts for facebook, G+ and Twitter)

Hope you enjoyed the piece, if you’ve got any examples of great content marketing or brand marketing that have blown you away, drop them in the comments. Would love to see them.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!