SEO News

Scammers and spammers operate in almost every niche. If it’s not an email from an African prince, I am being forwarded fake chain messages from friends and family.

This gave me the idea to make use of this spam and become the Snopes.com of my niche. People often search for myth busting information and you can use it as an opportunity to make lemonade from the lemon spam that you receive.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Set up a section on your site where you highlight scams and feature fradulent/spammy emails. You could create a standalone section on your website or it could be part of a weekly feature on your blog. You could call it ‘Spam Sundays’, for example. Once you have decided on a schedule, it is important to stick to it. You can use automated posts to help with this.
2. Ask your blog readers, Facebook fans and Twitter followers to forward any scam emails they receive which are relevant to your niche. Offer a weekly prize to motivate them and to keep them coming back. It’s amazing what people will do for a free tshirt!
3. Go through your own email, searching for any relevant scams or spam. If you use Gmail you can use filters so that any emails that match a certain criteria are automatically highlighted or you can search in Gmail for: ‘in:spam [your niche]’

   

1. Each week, copy and paste the email address, subject and body of any emails into a blog post or article. Include some narrative explaining why the email is obviously fake and how to spot similar ones. For example, people often receive fake phishing emails from HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) stating that they are due a tax refund. In your post you could mention that HMRC would never send a tax refund notification by email.
2. When the post is live, contact blogs and websites in your niche. Inform the bloggers about the scams that you have uncovered and mention how the information might be useful to their readers. Also ask them to forward any emails that they might receive in the future. This will give them a call to action to become an ally for your worthy cause, helping to form a relationship for any future content that you might need help promoting.
3. Follow up in the comments to any questions that your readers might have.

The benefits of using spam as a content strategy

As ironic as it sounds, using spam as a content strategy will have a number of benefits. Firstly, you will be helping your community. You will be the spam superhero, stopping unsuspecting people from being scammed.

This is a good enough reason to implement this content strategy but there are also added benefits to your business:

Inceased traffic

• When I am forwarded an email that I think might be fake, I copy and paste the title or a snippet from the email into Google. If your site features these emails there is a good chance that you will receive more visitors from these types of searches.
• People are often searching for ‘fake’ or ‘scam’ related keywords. For example, if someone has heard about a tax refund scam, they might use Google to research it further.

  If your website has a section dedicated to featuring scams, with enough authority, you will rank highly in the SERPs for these keywords.

• You will benefit from long tail keywords. The long tail makes up the majority of search volume. The more relevant content and comments you have on your site, the more likely you are to receive visitors from the long tail of search.

Links

People love to win an argument and confirm that they are right. You’ll often find people linking in blogs, emails and comments to Wikipedia or Snopes.com to prove they are correct. If your site becomes the authority in your niche for outing scams, people will naturally start linking to you.

These links will increase the standing of your website and help to lift it in the search engine results pages (SERP) for other keywords too.

Reputation management

A common reputation management problem can arise if people start searching for ‘your company + scam’. When enough people search for this keyword phrase, Google will start to show it as an autosuggestion.

An added benefit of using this content strategy is that negative mentions of your brand will be suppressed in Google as your own site should rank with information about the scams which you have highlighted.

Trust

By helping your community and dispelling myths from spam emails, you will gain trust from potential customers. This will increase your chances of acquiring new customers when people require the service you offer and from people passing on your name through word of mouth. 

User engagement

Visitors to your site who submit fake emails will likely come back to see if their submission was included, especially if there is the chance of winning a prize.

People will also leave and reply to comments and this will help with user engagement and brand related searches.

The principal behind this content strategy is turning a negative into a positive. Do you turn any negatives to your advantage for your website or business?

Execution without insight = guesswork

I like to work with companies who understand the need for insight, strategy and planning, and are prepared to invest in it, taking the view that execution without insight is nothing more than guesswork.

To help visualise the importance of insight, I use a very simple, pyramid graphic (where X represents the end goal).

As you can see, insight is the foundation from which the search strategy is formulated (keywords, channels, tactics and campaigns), which in turn, informs content creation, both on- and off-site. 

Time and time again though, I see retailers and agencies jump straight in at the execution stage. The necessary interrogation of objectives, products, target audience, marketing plans and so on is bypassed in pursuit of a fast buck or short term needs.

In other words, insight isn’t gathered, analysed, and ultimately used as a means to shape the overarching search strategy. By default, tactical execution is ill-informed. At best, it’s a shot in the dark.

The outcome of this is waste, in terms of budget, resource and time. Is it any wonder that search campaigns so often fail to meet expectations?

Putting the customer at the heart of everything

Whilst there is a whole load of stuff that we pull together and analyse when shaping a search strategy, from business plans through to in-house capacity and skill, I want to continue a theme from a previous article on ‘search experience optimisation’ – that of placing the customer at the centre of your search (and wider retail) strategy.

In particular, let’s look at how both transactional data and qualitative insight can be used to help turbocharge your search efforts:

Transactional data

In the last couple of years, we have found the outputs of RFM modelling an essential component to informing and shaping a client’s search strategy.
RFM stands for recency, frequency and monetary.

It is a process by which you analyse sales data and segment your customers based on their historic purchasing behaviour. As I have cited in a previous article, fundamentally, there are just three things you can influence in retail:

• How many new customers you acquire.
• How much your customers spend on each transaction.
• How much they spend in a year (or in their lifetime).

RFM modelling allows you to understand your customer base in this context, which in turn can be used to drive decision making and budget allocation. For example, in meeting financial goals, is the priority to attract new customers?

Or does the focus need to be programs to encourage low frequency customers spend more? Or do we need to re-engage customers who haven’t bought anything in the last year?

This insight should filter down to the search strategy. For example, if the primary goal is customer acquisition, then the search strategy is likely to focus predominantly on non-brand terms to increase awareness at the earlier stages of the buying journey, thereby driving visitors who may not have been previously familiar with the brand.

Furthermore, by understanding the products that new customers typically buy first, the keyword strategy can be further honed.  This is purposely simplistic but you get the picture.

Transactional data is therefore the bedrock for establishing the role that search needs to play within the wider retail strategy. 

By understanding the products that typically ‘recruit’ new customers, average order values and repeat purchase rates, you can make much more informed decisions on how much time, money and resource needs to be invested in your search strategy, as well as a more accurate view of what you can expect in return.

Customer insight (of the qualitative variety)

In speaking with a prospect, one of the first things I seek to understand is how well they know their target audience. ‘We target ABC1s’ is all too often the reply (a reference to the geodemographic classification of British social classes, ACORN).

This is fine as a starting point. However, beyond this many of the companies I speak to know very little else about the audience they are trying to reach, namely the specific behaviours, habits, needs and expectations of this audience.

So what you ask? What relevance does this have to their search strategies?

The answer lies in how customer insight can be used to inform a rather important aspect of search strategy; content creation. Using keyword tools is of course one method by which you can build a general view of how people are searching for information, advice and inspiration around your products.

But you can go deeper than this by involving your customers in the content planning process. This isn’t rocket science I know. But it just doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should meaning too many content ‘strategies’ are not fully aligned to the needs of the customer.

It’s so easy to ask

To better understand the behaviours of your customers (beyond what an analytics package can reveal) is neither expensive nor complicated. Creating email or exit surveys, for example, cost very little. There is an art to survey design so utilise an expert if you do not have the experience in-house.

But even then, you are talking pittance to gain the kind of insight that not only powers your content and search strategy but can also reveal traits, behaviours and needs to inform other tactics and activities, such as website functionality, social media and email marketing programs.

It is important to make the distinction here between data and insight. Focus on trying to uncover the stuff you can’t get from an analytics program. From what I see, search marketers are very good at the data and analytical stuff.

I’m not convinced enough search marketers understand the value of customer insight to inform their strategies. Search engines don’t buy stuff, people do. Therefore, a search strategy should begin and end with a fundamental understanding of the customer.

As content plays such an integral role in raising awareness and increasing engagement, conversion and retention, involving the customer in the process should be standard practice, not a nice to have.

To conclude

In the turbulent (yet exciting) world of retail, the winners and losers will ultimately be defined by their understanding of their customers and the ability to meet their ever-evolving needs and expectations. Search remains an essential part of the customer journey. 

In fact, retail search volumes are continuing to grow year on year. Yet the value of strategy (and the use of transactional data and customer insight to inform it), is too often ignored in the pursuit of short cuts and quick-wins.

This isn’t always driven by the agency. Retailers are under a lot of pressure just to get stuff done. I get this, I really do. But not one retailer I have spoken to this year had specifically set aside budget for insight and strategy.

Yet taking a step back, analysing the landscape and putting in place a more informed plan will always drive greater efficiency, less waste, more revenue and satisfied customers, compared with simply jumping in feet first.

I’d love to hear of your experience…how much value does your agency / company place on customer insight and strategy?

Image courtesy of ChuckCoker

But in truth Google’s new update hasn’t really changed that much at all, as it’s just taken a few extra steps to clamp down on overly optimised anchor text, which is something Google has been doing for several years.

As a former SEO now working for Dynamo PR, Lexi Mills is probably more versed than most in the intricacies of search so I asked her whether she thought the updates would impact how digital-savvy PRs work.

Mills said it depended on the campaign objective, but she doubted that many PRs spin out press releases across newswires in the hope of gaining an SEO benefit.

I think that generally PRs are quite careful on where they place links. Personally I avoid anchor text, so for example I hyperlink ‘see here’ rather than ‘info on [company name]’. I think that we’ll probably see people writing out URLs a bit more as well.

Google has actually suggested that to be on the safe side, all links within press releases should potentially be made nofollow as standard. This would potentially be a bonus for PRs, as it means they can include important links without fear of being penalised.

For example Mills does a lot of work around Kickstarter campaigns and without hyperlinks it’s unlikely that journalists and, more importantly, consumers would be able to find the relevant webpage.

Is PR just about press releases?

Another problem with ZDNet’s article is the suggestion that PR is all about pushing out press releases.

Ketchum’s associate director of digital Danny Whatmough argues that it’s incorrect to assume that PR is intrinsically linked to journalists and press releases.

PR has always been about building awareness of a brand or a cause and raising, upholding reputations. PRs have used an array of tactics to achieve this of which the media and organic/paid search are one.

In fact, Whatmough said that the new Google updates are actually of benefit to the PR industry as the increased focus on quality content presents an opportunity that plays to the traditional strengths of PRs.

One of the points made by ZDNet is that brands should focus on creating great content that their audience will automatically want to share, and Google should take care of the rest. So again, where’s the threat to PR here?

Are all PRs aware of SEO tactics?

Unfortunately not all PRs will be as aware of how SEO works, so there may be some who come undone as a result of the latest Google update.

Mills said that the lines between SEO and PR have begun to blur, and PRs are now competing for part of the same budget as search marketers. Therefore PRs need to be careful not to lose clients as a result of badly executed attempts at SEO.

Having a limited knowledge of SEO is probably more dangerous than having no knowledge at all. If you put links in anchor text because you think it’s the right thing to do, that could harm you and your client. Modern PRs really have a responsibility to know about SEO in order to best serve their clients.

Whatmough agreed with this sentiment, pointing out that if PRs use unsavoury tactics, such as buying links or fans, then they will quickly become unstuck. However he said that’s not what modern PR is about and it isn’t what the very best PR agencies are focused on in 2013.

The best PR agencies are focused on creating new communication strategies that make the most of the vast array of channels and platforms out there. Yes PR has had to adapt and change to new technological developments just as many other industries have. But the opportunities are there for all to see. It’s why we see agencies from across the marketing sphere hiring PRs and content specialists.

Do you think Google has killed the PR industry? Let us know in the comments.

Posted by CraigBradford

One of the things that I like most about Google Analytics is that it can be as simple or as complex as you like. Out of the box it’s very easy to use. Without much experience, you can quickly see the basics, like the amount of traffic you receive as well as the medium and source of traffic. But: We have a problem. The problem is that that’s where most people stop. Too many people are making bad decisions by looking at Google Analytics data from a 30,000-foot view. With a little more work you can reveal some quick insights that could reveal easy CRO wins. To demonstrate how, I’ll cover a couple of advanced segments that I like to use and explain how to set each of them up using custom variables, event tracking, and filters. Advanced segments are a huge area; you can make almost unlimited variations, so I’ve just picked a few that will hopefully inspire you to create some advanced segments of your own (I’d love to hear about them in the comments).

Attribution

Before doing anything, it’s important to have a data set that you can trust, and that starts with proper attribution. If you haven’t already read Annie Cushing’s blog post “Take Credit Where Credit’s Due,” I highly recommend it, as it goes into a lot more detail on attribution. The full video is also available on the Distilled store.

Attribution starts with ensuring the correct mediums and sources are getting credit for the sales and actions they generate. The opposite is also true: You don’t want good channels getting diluted by cross-contamination of bad channels. By default, Google has the basics covered, as shown below.

But for some websites, that “(none)” category can make up a significant portion of your traffic. Referral traffic isn’t great either, as it doesn’t tell you about the “why” part. Was it a press release that drove a lot of that traffic? Or was it email?

Thankfully, we have the ability to do campaign tracking using URL parameters that can help make these mediums more useful. The medium that’s usually impacted by this the most is email. By default, Google groups email into the referral bucket.

To avoid this, you can create a new “email” medium by tagging all links in emails with URL parameters. Explaining tagging in detail is out of the scope of this post, so I’m going to assume you know how to do it. If you don’t, you can read up on how to track emails in this post.

#Protip: The most common objection people have to using URL tagging is that it creates ugly URLs for users. Here’s a solution.

Let’s assume I want to track the people that visit the Annie Cushing video I recommended. The URL might look something like this:

http://www.distilled.net/store/sl-bos-2013-cushing/?utm_source=moz.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=annie+cushing+video

Pretty horrible. But your users never need to see it, thanks to some HTML5 goodness. You put the link in some anchor text, such as click here. Then on that landing page you would add something like this:

_gaq.push(function() {
window.history.pushState('','', 'some-page');
});

This means after the Google Analytics code has fired and collected all the attribution data from the horrible-looking parameters, the URL will be changed to whatever you set in the quotes. In this case it would change the URL to:

http://www.distilled.net/store/sl-bos-2013-cushing/some-page

But it could be anything you like. See this blog post from Rob Ousbey on the topic.

The downside to this is if people then share or link to that page it will 404, so if you just want to chop off the parameters, just replace the “some page” part with a ‘#’. There’s probably a better way to do this so that there’s no #, but I’m not a developer so I settle for “good enough” on this kind of thing.

So, to be clear, the action here is to get all your attribution set up correctly. For lots of details on how to do that, see Annie’s post. Doing so will allow you to do some proper CPA analysis for the various channels you use.

Tracking form errors

Regardless of how easy you make your checkout process, there will always be people that struggle with the forms, so we want to know how and where these people are having problems. If we manage that, we make more sales. There are solutions such as Clicktale that allow you to analyse the forms on your site, but they don’t allow you to tie that together with other metrics from your GA, such as conversion rates. To do this, I want to use Google Analytics event tracking to create an event any time someone fails to do something correctly on any of the fields in the form. Events use the following format:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', action, opt_label, opt_value, opt_noninteraction)

In my case I want to set:

• Category = Form Error
• Action = Submit
• Opt_label = A way to identify the field that caused the error, for example “Phone number” or “Post Code”

You then need to set this to fire only when there is a validation error on the page. A validation error is that annoying red text that appears when you mess something up on a form. From a technical point of view there are a couple of different ways this can be done, depending whether the form is validated on the client side via JavaScript or on the server side (in which case the page will be reloaded).

Server side

On the HTML that gets sent to the browser when an error occurs, you’ll need to add the event tracking to the text that fires next to each of the fields. Doing it this way allows you to not only see users that had problems, but will also let you see specifically what fields people have the most trouble with. You can then slice and dice that data however you like in GA to find other things like browser OS, etc.

Client side

If the validation is being done on the client side using something like JavaScript, the same process needs to be used, but the events will need to be fired by the script that creates the errors.

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'form error', 'submit', 'phone number']);

Tracking email unsubscribers for content analysis

Most email management services will allow you to see stats like open rates, number of people unsubscribing, etc., but they don’t give you many insights into why those people unsubscribed — which is what we really need to know. To help get some insights it can be useful to find out which content those people have read the most, as this could potentially let you see what kind of content your audience doesn’t like. You could even go as far as looking at authors.

To do this, you’ll need an email provider that lets you add some custom code to the unsubscribe page. At Distilled we use MailChimp, which I know has this feature, but I’m not sure about others. You can then use whatever method you like to bucket these users, you could add a custom variable or event tracking to your Google analytics code, like this:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'email', 'unsubscribed']);

The advantage of events is you can use them with goals, which would allow you to track over time and set up alerts for spikes in unsubscription rates.

Once this is set up, you’ll want to create an “unsubscribed” advanced segment in Google Analytics for the event name like that shown below in the example:

Once you have these people in a group, you can start to slice the data however you like to find trends among the people who don’t want to be on your list anymore.

Logged in/out

Depending on the type of site you have, it may or may not make sense to create segments based on whether your users are logged in or out. For example, you may have a different checkout process if you’re logged in. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see the difference between conversion rates between logged-in and logged-out users? Or compare the behaviors of logged-in users compared to logged-out users? Thankfully, this is pretty easy to do. In fact if you look at the source code of this page, you can see how. Do a search in the source code for “setCustomVar” and you’ll see what I mean. You’ll see one of a few options but they will all follow a format like this:

This sets a custom variable with “user-type” as “visitor.” If you’re logged in and a pro member, you might see “Pro.” From a CRO perspective, the point in doing this is you can see how different groups of people act on the site and use that information to increase the conversion rate of each group. You’ll typically find that logged-out users convert less, as they have extra steps in the process, but you can always optimize the registration process to make it as painless as possible. When possible, I’d always take the Amazon approach and leave people logged in as long as possible, and have their credit card details saved to allow for quick and painless payment.

Also, once you can track people that are logged in, you can create advanced segments for things like “logged in users that added an item to their cart but didn’t buy.” These are easy pickings; on the server side you can segment by these users and send them an email to remind them that they have items in their shopping cart that they are just one click away from buying.

Find the “whales”

Photo by Gerard Lacz

I got this idea from Avinash. You can read the full post here. The idea is that you create a segment of users that typically spend more than the average customer, hence the term “whale.” This is also why it’s a good idea to have your attribution tracking set up correctly from the start, as you need to know where those whales came from as well as how much they cost to acquire compared to the average customer.

To do this, segment by users that bought more than a certain number of items:

Image credit

Once you have this data, you can begin to focus on the other data that’s available to you, such as the medium and source of those users, and double down on the best channels.

That’s all for now, I hope you’ve found this useful and I’d love to hear some of the custom segments or interesting ways you use Google Analytics in the comments.

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