SEO: What to expect in 2014

SavvyTravellerBlog link building, marketing, metrics, Panda, Penguin, ranking, search engines, SEO, SERPs, social media, strategy, web development No comments

Improved Webmaster Communications

First and foremost with Google constantly looking at Link Devaluation and more Penguin updates expected this year, I’m hoping that Google start to help webmasters out a little more by providing a tool that can quickly detect poor linking patterns and allow you to simply Disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with anymore.

On the subject of Disavowing links I’d like to see Google working towards helping webmasters by providing an easy way to send a request the webmasters of external links by using the Google Webmaster Tool inbox. The advantage here is that Google will be able to see clearly when a webmaster is trying to clean up their act.

Content, content, content

Quality content creation will become the watch word for all SEO practitioners during 2014 (if it isn't already!) as Google will tighten the noose around the neck of thin sites.

Content needs to be seen as a valuable business resource that can be reused or reworked for web pages, social media, audio and video etc

The technical aspect of SEO

SEO will become more technical, so that we can deal with the likes of schema, authorship, crawlability, etc.

KISS – Kall It Sales Stupid!

I see more of us focusing on real lead generation, conversions and sales rather than simply how are our keywords doing in SERPS! We need to move to really help businesses with the bottom line.

Personalisation

If nothing else then the personalisation of search results will change what SEO means; when I search for “Dolphins” I expect Google in the future to provide more personal results for me and supply more Miami Dolphin sites; if my eldest daughter (who wants to be a Marine Biologist) conducts the same search I would expect her results to show more instances for the marine mammal.

Other stuff

I see further strengthening in AuthorRank and now we have Hummingbird, more natural language capabilities.

Finally I see lots of ‘SEO’ people around the globe complaining that Google updates have ruined their ranking simple because they failed to follow good practice!

Social Media for Ranking

SavvyTravellerBlog Facebook, Google, SEO, SERPs, social media, Twitter No comments

Top retailers will tell you that Social Media isn’t very good for generating traffic direct from the links that you put in your Twitter feeds, Facebook pages or Pinterest boards; but what it is good for is providing the big search engines with suggestions on your engagement with the social sphere.

If you post lots and people engage with you more than others in your market, then that alone is a good indicator that your pages might need to rank higher than your competitors. That is the REAL value of social media to businesses today.

Your Search Engine Profile

SavvyTravellerBlog Google, ranking, search engines, SEO, SERPs, strategy No comments

SEO (Optimising your site for search engines) is a balancing act and its becoming much clearer to more and more SEO professionals that this balancing act can be a very delicate one when looking at activities needed to help a webpage move up the rankings; and these activities go towards developing a Search Engine Profile for a particular page or site.

There are numerous factors that you can spend your time on, some of the more basic ones being:

On Site Factors

Is the HTML coding clean and correct?
Can search engines easily see all of your webpages within a couple of ’clicks’?
Is your navigational structure working in favour of visitors and search engines?
Are all your internal pages linked to from other internal pages?
Do you have a good robot.txt file on your site?
Etc etc

Off Site Factors

Are you Followed and Liked on key social media channels?
Is your site mentioned often on social channels?
Do you have a good number of backlinks to your site?
Are ALL backlinks of a good quality?

Do too much of one element and not enough of another (i.e. too much time with social media without building fresh new content on your site) and you’ll find it difficult to rank well, you need a good blend of a number of different factors (social, on site elements and quality link building etc).

But to what degree you do each of these (your Search Engine Profile) differs from sector to sector and website to website, the important element is to work out what your key competitors are doing and what their likely Search Engine Profile is, then attempt to get somewhere close to that.

It is unfortunately a long, manual job, but it’s a job worth doing and will pay you dividends in the long term.

Optimise your LinkedIn pages

SavvyTravellerBlog business development, LinkedIn, marketing No comments

Whether it’s your person page and you want the next great job offer, or it’s your company page, a well optimise page will do you a world of good.

Think Visually
Use bold images to provide a real world glimpse into you or your business.

Think Digitally
Whatever you say, keep it brief. Remember that online, attention span is shorter.

Think Video
Showcase with real stories or examples to engage members more deeply.

Think Customised
Adapt your content to viewers based on their LinkedIn profiles. Target based on geography, job title, industry that you want to attract etc.

Lost rankings due to Hummingbird?

SavvyTravellerBlog Google, Hummingbird, Panda, Penguin, search engines, SEO No comments

Impossible. Googles major overhaul of their algo that was recently announced, but unlike their previous Penguin and Panda updates, Hummingbird is not a penalty-based update (i.e. aimed at cleaning their SERPs from low-quality content), instead their changes is in response to the way that we are starting to query their search database. Google now better understands the meaning behind our searches rather than understanding the ‘search terms’ that we might actually use.

This is needed as more of us generate conversational queries, these are longer more complex questions and are growing as we use mobile and in particular voice searches more.

If for example you are using a mobile device and you talk about Starbucks then Google knows that there is a good chance that you want the location of your nearest coffee shop, so it is more likely to serve the stores location results to you rather than information about the chain – Google is starting to better understand context.

So a quick tip to help Google provide better search results would be to understand what your users might actually be asking of your products or solutions and use those keyphrases in your pages; questions like “how do I ….”, “where can I ….”, “what is the ….” etc etc This will help future proof your rankings.

So Hummingbird didn't hit my rankings!

You haven’t been hit by Hummingbird but your rankings have been hit (as many have), what is the reason?

Just prior to Hummingbird, Google did release a number of updates to Penguin and Panda, and it is highly likely that one of these has hit your site.

Let’s consider what Google wants to achieve for its users. It wants to be able to provide the best search results. How will it know when it has achieved this?

Quite simply is a search user visits and interacts with a page that was served in search results, then Google can pretty much accept that its ranking for that particular page must have been right.

But what indicators can Google take that a visitor is happy with the page that they found? Well in really simple terms, ANY interaction with a site is likely to equate to longer time on the page (and site), this means longer average time on page AND lower bounce rates.

So I would look at the pages on your site that have the highest & exit and check their bounce rate and average visit duration; if they look wrong, then that would be a good indicator for me as to why Google has slapped you in their SERPs.

If visitors are leaving your site quickly, why would that be? What are they expecting to see that they are not? What information is missing? What expectation isn’t being satisfied? Fix these page problems and your rankings will slowly improve.

Now I realise that this isn’t a perfect science. IF like many site you have contact details for example on all pages and that’s all the visitor wants then you will tend to get a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average duration time, but the figures must stack up in Googles mind.

What’s the Purpose of Business Development?

SavvyTravellerBlog business development, planning, sales, strategy No comments

You have a business with a great marketing plan, an absolutely brilliant brand image, you’re growing brand equity, have a constant supply of successful campaigns going out, through social media channels you are increasing your Fans, Followers, Pins etc and engaging with your market.

Are you booking the right kind of (profitable) work with the clients you pursued, or are you a hapless bystander who took whatever projects (and price) that came your way?

So what’s next, how do you take your business to the next level?

Answering these questions is where business development comes in.

Business Development Role

A supreme understanding of all media (both online and offline) is just the start, the key role of business development is to understand to the nth degree customer relationships, how to build brand advocates, and how to cultivate strong brand equity through customer service.

Business development must involves an evaluation of customer feedback and some form of sentiment analysis to determine if current the marketing strategies and tactical outputs are indeed as effective as originally planned.

Only by working through this analysis can it be determined if there are any missed opportunities or refinement to existing strategies or campaigns.

Where Businesses Fail

We are all seen businesses and business owners start off with the very best of intentions. They go big (often punching above their weight), as they should, they employ the perfect marketing strategies designed to target their perfect audience (and customers), and slowly they start to build their brand equity. However, if their marketing plan is not evaluated and re-evaluated how can they be sure that their plan is continuing to be effective (or are they simply wasting time, money and energy!).

As technology changes, trends change, and the target audience responds differently to marketing messages, so much the marketing plan needs to change. Consider the following questions when re-evaluating marketing plan:

Have the core demographic changed?
Is there any new technology been employed by the market? (apps, mobile devices, web platforms, media etc)
Have the trends changed? How have changing trends altered your audience’s behaviour or attention?
Are you still making the best of your company’s available resources?
Have there been any legal, political, social or major economic changes since the marketing strategy was devised?
Is every aspect of the business on track with the marketing plan? Is every department remaining consistent?
Is every aspect of your marketing and advertising still remaining true to your brand message?

The Purpose of Business Development

As already mentioned, Business Development should understand completely customer relationships and how the market and customer behaviour changes, how the interations you have within your business alter those customer relationships.

With this knowledge, business development teams are able to refine marketing plans and improve your overall business plan.

They should be in a position to be able to:

Identify gaps within your marketing strategy
Recognise unused internal resources and missed opportunities
Cultivate and grow current customer/partner relationships
Attract new customers and partners
Brand advocates

The more you can let ‘business development’ into the marketing planning process, the more you can tie activity to desired results, the more leverage you have in driving client development behaviour.

TOP 5 Important Rules in Website Design

SavvyTravellerBlog conversions, UX, web design No comments

When it comes to designing your website, extra attention should be paid to every tiny detail to make sure it performs the best that it can do in serving its purpose. Here are five vitally important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.

Rule 1: Do not use splash pages
A splash page is the first page that you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like "welcome" or "click here to enter", and that's it! They are just pretty doors with no real substance. All websites have one purpose and that's to get people in looking at your content - don't make your visitors come to a door first and don't give your visitors have a reason to click on the "Back" button!
Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.

Rule 2: Have a simple and clear navigation
You MUST provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child would know how to use your site.
Definitely stay away from complicated Flash based menus or complex multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

Rule 3: Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to ensure that they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site with the utmost of ease. Don't confuse your visitors because confusion usually leads to "abandon ship"!

Rule 4: Avoid using audio on your site
If your visitor is going to stay a long time at your site, reading your content, you will want to make sure they're not annoyed by some audio looping on and on on your website. If you insist on adding audio, make sure they have some control over it -- volume or muting controls would work fine, better still if you like the idea of using audio place a 'Play Music' option/link/button somewhere prominent so that they can play it of they want to. Similarly with video, there is nothing more annoying that video starting before I've clicked the 'Play' button!.

Rule 5: Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Some form of advertising is perfectly fine and is acceptable to most browsers and visitors; anyway, most net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate.
A different approach would be to provide easy access to your most valuable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.

Advertise, Don't Spam

SavvyTravellerBlog campaigns, email, marketing No comments

There is a really fine line between advertising and spam and unfortunately many business owners and new marketeers do not understand the difference between the two.
This is really important because while a clever, well designed and executed internet marketing campaign can help to attract new business and keep existing customers loyal, spam is highly likely to alienate both new customers and existing customers alike, resulting in damage to your profit margin.

During this post will take a good look at just three basic online marketing strategies such as email campaign, banner ads and message board posts and describe how each can quickly cross this fine line from great advertising to spam.

Email Campaigns
These can also be very useful tools to internet marketers, but again, they must be done correctly.
These campaigns may involve sending periodic e-newsletters filled with information as well as advertisements, short, informative email courses or emails offering discounts on products and services.
Loyal customers who opt into your email list (and you MUST get opt-in addresses to ensure the success of your campaigns) will likely not view these emails as spam as they may know your business or have dealt with you in the past, and therefore may purchase additional products and services from your business as a result of this marketing strategy or at the very least you will remain 'front of mind' when they decide they need to purchase solutions that you offer. Additionally, potential customers who have specifically requested additional information on your products and services will also find this type of marketing to be useful.

However, email recipients who did not request information are likely to view your emails as spam and unlikely to result in a sale or goodwill, further more if the recipients of spam email decide to take action against you then you could find a fine coming your way.
Harvesting email addresses in a deceptive manner and using these addresses to send out mass emails will likely always be considered to be spam.

It's also worth noting that sending an email to someone you did business with too long ago may be inappropriate too; so remove anyone on your list who you haven't have any dealings or contact within the past 2 years.

Banner Ads
These were once one of the most popular strategies accompany an internet marketing plan, and they still have their place in modern online marketing tactics.
These ads are usually the ones that appear at the top of websites and they tend to take up the full width of the site; its is from this appearance that they earned the name banner ads but actually banner ads can refer to a variety of different sizes and shapes which appear in an array of different locations on a website.

In many cases the business owner purchases advertising space on these websites but the banner ad could also be placed as part of an exchange or an affiliate marketing campaign. Exchanges are situations in which one business owner or marketeer is granted permission to place a banner ad on someones website, in exchange for this other business owner is allowed to post a banner ad on his site.
These are great agreements and are usually made made between individual business owners with complementary businesses or as part of exchanges facilitated by a third party. In the case of affiliate marketing, an affiliate posts and advertisement for your business in exchange for compensation when the banner ad produces a desired effect such as generating website traffic or generating a sale. The terms of these agreements are determined beforehand and are generally based on a scale of pay per impression, pay per click or pay per sale or lead.

Now that you understand what banner ads are, it is also important to understand how they can be easily overused and appear to be 'spammy'.
Expertly placing your banner ad on a few websites which are highly likely to attract an audience similar to your target audience is very smart marketing, placing your banner ad on any website which will display the ad regardless of the target audience can be construed as spam. Internet browsers who feel as though your banner ads are everywhere could take an instance disliking to your business and may become extremely unlikely to purchase products or services from you as a result of your banner ads.

Message Boards
Finally, message boards provide an excellent opportunity for business owners to obtain some free advertising where it will be noticed by members of the target audience.
If the products and services you offer appeal to a specific niche, it is worthwhile to join message boards and online forums related to your industry of choice.

Here you will find a large population of internet users who may have an interest in your products. You might consider including a link to your business in your signature or posting the link when it is applicable to the conversation. However, care should be taken to carefully review the message board guidelines to ensure you are not doing anything inappropriate. This is smart marketing. Conversely, replying to every message with a link to your website when it is not relevant to the conversation is likely to be construed as spam by other members. Once they begin to view your posts as spam, they are not likely to visit your website via the links you post.

Some forums attach various rules to their posting guidelines (i.e. you can only post a link after a certain amount of time or after you post a certain number of helpful posts for example).

The Ultimate Twitter Starters Guide

SavvyTravellerBlog Twitter No comments

Setting up and getting started:

Choose a short username so that users can easily retweet your posts easily without running out of 140 characters
Ensure that you have completed your profile fully
Write a short description of yourself and your business
Include a link to your website in your description
You have added a clear picture of yourself/logo
You have connected your Facebook profile to your Twitter profile so that you can also post tweets to your Facebook page automatically
Ensure that you can choose which notifications you want to get by email so that you never lose any opportunity for engagement
You know that you can get a Twitter app for your smartphone and tablet so you can tweet on the go
You are aware that you can change your profile theme so that it is more appealing to your audience
You are aware that you can create and manage widgets from your settings menu

Tweeting:

You are aware that a tweet can only be 140 characters or 130 characters if you include a link
You know that you can use tools to shrink the URLs you want to include in your tweets
You are aware that it’s better to keep your tweets shorter than 130 characters so that other users can retweet them and not lose any valuable information

You know what hashtags are:

You are aware that you have a list of trending topics and hashtags on the left hand side of your Twitter home page
You are using one or two hashtags for each of your tweets
You are using trending hashtags in order to raise engagement and get more followers
You are aware that you can promote a tweet so that more people can see it
You know that you can add photos and images on your tweets, not just text posts
You are aware that if you ask in your tweets for people to “retweet” and you don’t shorten it to RT then you have a better chance of getting retweets
You are asking questions and answering other peoples’ questions in order to raise engagement
You are aware that you can use tools to schedule tweets for when you are busy (try Hootsuite or Socialoomph)

You know what a direct message is:

You know that you can only send direct messages to people that you are following and that are following you back
You are aware that you can schedule direct messages to send to all of your new followers via Socialoomph
You know that you have to tweet often as your followers’ home pages or constantly changing

BUT

You are not sending too many tweets at the same time so as not to flood your Followers streams
You have checked your analytics and You know when your audience is most active on Twitter and that is when you tweet the most

Following and Followers:

You are aware that it’s better to have less, but more engaged followers than thousands of uninterested followers
You are following people that are part of your target audience
You are aware that you can use tools to bulk unfollow people who are inactive or are not following you back
You are constantly interacting with your followers:

Retweeting their posts
Answering their questions
Thanking them for retweeting or sharing your tweets and posts
Favoriting their tweets

BUT

You are no sending out too many sales messages

Tools:

You have searched Google and you are aware that there is a plethora of tools that you can use to:
Manage several Twitter profiles and other social media profiles from the same dashboard
Schedule tweets and DMs
Schedule recurring tweets
Shrink URLs
Get your Twitter analytics so that you can tweet better

And:

You are committed to mastering the art of Twitter engagement – and growing your business!

Pay By Results SEO (Risk and Reward)

SavvyTravellerBlog SEO No comments

I've done a lot of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for a lot of businesses in the past, but I rarely know the specific ins and outs of the business that I do the SEO for; I obviously understand the basics – I understand what they are selling and how they prefer to sell it, I understand the market they want to sell into and more importantly I spend time trying to understand the market, but I often don’t know the ins and outs of how they run their business.

The point is I don’t need to know, I only need to know how to get the best from their website, and determine how best to get traffic (the right traffic) to their site; it’s the owner of the businesses role to understand their business end to end; and that’s why businesses sometimes need SEO ‘experts’ (I would never personally class myself as an expert!).

We take away the stress of getting pages to the top search engine rankings; we do the strategic thinking, we look at and determine the best keywords (often in partnership with the business), we then go out to other sites on the world wide web and try to get links back to the clients site (the best way to improve search engine ranking btw).

So when people say, “You don’t need an SEO expert or consultant” – I sometimes think they are wrong; sometimes businesses do need help in this area.

One area where I do agree with these people is that often, these SEO companies are just after your money, they aren't bothered about your ranking – they just want you to pay them a monthly or one-off fee and that’s it.

What businesses do need is an SEO person that understands that they are putting a lot of faith and trust in their site and their brand, and that they do not want to may a lot for no/little results. Payment should only be made if you get A, B, and C pages on the first page of Google (top 10 results) for X, Y and Z keywords. That SEO person is me.

I will only charge you if I get the results that you want. Contact me for more information andrew@andrewscaife.com

Link Building is NOT Dead!

SavvyTravellerBlog Google, link building, strategy No comments

I recently read a short blog post about how Link Build is supposed to be dead (in fact illegal!), but that Google's Eric Enge it's been suggested that "webmasters to change their thinking about how they build links", in fact it was suggested that "[webmasters] need to reverse their process and should really think first about compelling content."

Hang on! This is exactly what real link building has been about since day one, any webmaster or SEO bod worth their salt will first ensure that the target website is fit for purpose, it stands to reason.

Whilst I recognise that this is a really simplistic explanation of the process, but lets imagine that you have a really poor website design with poor content but my sheer dumb look or black hat techniques you manage to get more links that everyone else for your chose keywords/keyphrases; get to the top of Google SERPs anyone that clicks through to your page is going to be mightily disappointed and push that back button!

So stop thinking first about getting those links, and instead build a great site with fab content that will make people want to visit you in the first place!

PPC: bid for the right position

SavvyTravellerBlog AdWords 1 comment

This tip isn't the most obvious for lots of Google AdWords users so I thought I would pass it on as it could a) save you money, b) get you an improved CTR and c) get an improved conversion rate.

Let me start my saying that most new AdWords users start off with a single bidding strategy for AdWords and that strategy pretty much stays with them forever, it’s a good strategy, it’s easy to measure and it does bring with it some success, but it’s flawed!

Adwords offers fairly simple system where the amount you bid, combined with your Quality Score (a figure calculated by Google), equates to what AdWords position on Google your ad will end up with (a position from one to ten)

As a reminder, here the Adwords (Sponsored) ads are highlighted in red; I've also highlighted in red the ad position number.

This strategy that new AdWords users deploy is that they want position 1, it’s the highest position and is therefore the best position to be in right! It’s the topmost position, so will be seen first as users scan the search engine results, it must be a winning strategy! Wrong (well sometimes it’s the wrong strategy to adopt).

A general rule of thumb and the one that should sound alarm bells is that the users of Google have become blind to the top ads, rather like we all have with banner ads (the ad images that appear at the top of web pages), we all tend to ignore those now.

What you need to do is look at your AdWords stats to determine which ad position you tend to get the most clicks and again as a rule of thumb the lower the average position the cheaper your clicks will be.

Take my latest gig as an example, we were paying more and more for top position ads and we got into a price war with our competitors, so it was getting expensive; no-one really knew what ad position was best for us, but a quick analysis showed that we got more clicks and an improved conversion rate when our ad was around position 3.

Armed with this little bit of knowledge I did a simple test, I reduced the Max CPC bids where we had an average position better than 3 and increased the Max CPC where we were below position 3. (The plan was to bid for position 3 in all case).

These reduction in bid strategy meant that our ad was less likely to be shown; but where the ad was shown we would be closer to the natural search links, therefore be seen as more relevant, hopefully resulting in an improved CTR and conversion rate.

In just two weeks impressions dropped 18%, clicks dropped 15%, but CTR went up 5% and conversions increased a whopping 17%. I’m now paying 30% less for AdWords here but gaining on my better conversions.

Don’t get me wrong, years ago when I started using Google AdWords I bid for the position 1 and did everything in my power to maintain it, it worked for me, it brought in business, but little did I know that I could have reduced my costs and brought in more business!

Remember, calculate where you best ad position is and bid for this ideal position, which isn't always the top one!

Good luck

What can your website learn from Social Media?

SavvyTravellerBlog conversions, customer retention, social media, Twitter, UX No comments

Social Media is the internet success story, we all engage with it in some way shape or form, we love the social channels that we have signed up to, they keep us coming back several times a day; but what exactly attracts us to these sites, and what can we learn from them that we can implement in our own websites to keep visitors engaged and coming back for more?

Most social media sites have the same six attributed that make them successful:

They are Fulfilling – in that visitors can easy discover when they can and get immediate delivery of information and actions. Does your website allow visitors to get to what's important to them quickly and understand what they can/should do on your pages?

They are a Rich source of information – all sources of information at your fingertips, no digging around for what's important. How does your website stack up? Do you supply rich data? Can visitors see content, price, availability, images, reviews, comments etc all on one page?

They are very Open - very easy to easy to sign up and start their fulfillment process; how is your sign up process? Can users sign up with with an email address and password or do you want their life story first?

Participation is welcomed - not only welcomed but it is positively encouraged in many ways - reviews, comments, ratings etc Does your site see this level of engagement, so you make users feel that they can contribute and that their contributions are worthwhile?

Remixing the data - many social sites mix up their data a little, so in Twitter for example I can easy find other tweets that the people I follow find interesting. It's yet another example of how social channels are providing a rich stream of relevant data even if it is pulled from different sources. Do you supply just the data that you can on your site or are you mixing it up a little? How about providing news from different news channels for example!

Personalised experience – these social sites are learning from individuals interactions and use that to suggest other things that you might be interested in; they know you are logged in, what you have done in the past and what you might like to do in the future - does your site touch any of that?

I'm not suggesting that your website does all of this - but learn from the social media sites that you use and ask yourself if you can take some of the great elements that you love and put them on your site.

Search Remains First, Social Second For How People Find Websites

SavvyTravellerBlog Facebook, search engines, SEO, social media, Twitter No comments

In an interesting report by Forrester Research they highlight that the majority of consumers still find websites through natural search (Google, Bing etc) rather than through Social Media (Twitter, Facebook etc); which to those of us that have been around search, SEO and Social Media for more years than we often care to remember doesn't surprise us.

Even the larger Retail businesses who originally set out to capture lots of web traffic from social media have given up on it and instead use social to influence their search engine rankings and thus bring in more traffic through natural search.

Remember that Google loves it when consumers love your brand, in their eyes, if consumers really love your brand then thy probably want to see your in the results when they try searching for you.

Social channels is a excellent place for Google to try to understand how much love the market has for you, so if you engage with your social media Followers and Friends, Google will pickup this signal and improve your search rankings.

Panda and Penguin updates from Google

SavvyTravellerBlog copywriting, Google, Panda, Penguin, search engines, SEO, social media No comments

Lets first of all remember that Google simply loves sites that users love, they want us all to create sites that people love to share with their friends, post of social media sites, bookmark and come back to time and time again, so over the coming months Google is planning a number of updates to it Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to help then serve up great sites.

Panda was introduced in 2011 to weed out sites that have a low quality content (scraped or stolen from other sites or just not useful enough); Penguin was rolled out in 2012 to weed out sites that got links from dubious sources (usually link farms, low quality sites/forums/blogs etc).

Panda

Looks like Google is trying to soften the edges of what they class a poor quality site, certainly some sites with little content (mainly because volumes of copy are not necessary) did get hit by Panda, but in the near future Google will be using some new Authority signals to address this.

These changes to the Authority signals routine should improve the ranking for smaller sites that have a single theme, and has a decent number of good authoritative links. Better for the smaller sites than the big boys.

Penguin

Google learnt a lot from the original Penguin updates and they did manage to find and destroy a lot of spammy sites that did well in rankings because they got their links from link farms and other low quality sites; they now have a deeper understanding of this murky areas of SEO; so with this extra knowledge they are updating their link analysis algorithm to capture more spammy linked sites.

They will also look to reduce the cluster of results from a single domain on page one of their SERPs.

All in all it looks like some good changes for webmasters that just want to create a decent site for their visitors and are not interested in gaming Google.

Optimising Your AdWord Ads

SavvyTravellerBlog AdWords, Google No comments

I’m not going to teach you to suck eggs, but let’s get some basics out of the way.

You have the following to play with:

Headline – 25 characters

Description Line 1 – 35 characters

Description Line 2 – 35 characters

Display URL – 35 characters

Destination URL – 1024 characters

Headline

This is the most important part of your text ad. It should feature a top keyword in you ad group to show clear relevance to the users search query. Consider using the dynamic keyword insertion feature for an even stronger relevance.

Description Lines 1 and 2

This is your opportunity to better describe your offering and compel the searcher to the action you want them to take next. Use these lines to describe the value proposition of what you are offering. Be sure to include keywords and a strong call to action – tell everyone why they should click on your ad, create a sense of urgency.

Display URL

The Display URL should include a top keyword if at all possible (i.e. www.company.com/top-keyword) to further engage with user and to indicate that your site is highly relevant to their search. This will improve your click through rate (CTR).

Destination URL

The Destination URL is the actual landing page that users will reach if they click on your ad. Any offer that you make in your ad should be easily visible on the landing page so that the page becomes more relevant to the ad and in turn helps to maximise your Quality Score.

10 Common Business Website Mistakes

SavvyTravellerBlog business development, marketing, web design No comments

I've managed many different website projects and now feel that it's time to show the 10 most common business website mistakes out there.

1. Using A Brochure Design

Numerous businesses basically take their print brochure and turn it into a website. A website isn't a print medium; websites and printed material are used differently by their audiences, the interaction with the reader is completely different for both, and hence the designs and user experience need to be completely different.

2. Not Having A Strong Call To Action

What do you want visitors to your website to do? Fill in a form? Visit a download page? Call you? Focus on what the primary action is that you want your website visitor to take and ensure that the action is obvious. Use buttons that are a different colour to anything else on the site to draw their attention. Use a subtle shaded background to draw their attention to particular pieces of information or calls to action that you want them to take etc.

3. Ignoring SEO

I must admit that I've been guilty of this myself, but it's important to get some of the basics right here. Ensure that all your pages have the basic Meta Tags completed (specifically the TITLE and DESCRIPTION one as these could be used and displayed in search engine results.
Read my Real Basic SEO Tips for more information.

4. Paying for Design and Not Copy

Too many businesses will pay a heap of money for a great design then ruin the finished product by inserting all of their old, lousy content into the site. If you are willing to pay for a designer then you are willing to pay for a good copywriter! Even if you can't afford much and can't afford to rewrite all of your pages then just search Google for "Cheap Copywriters" - remember to get a few quotes before you pick one!

5. Failing To Define Who They Are

Your brand is important to you and your business; without it you are nothing.
I guess you know what your brand stands for, so here is a quick test for you. Visit your website and see if you can see evidence of your brand promise or value proposition within THREE seconds! If you can't then I'm sure your visitors can't either!

6. Contact Forms

People really hate filling these out and many website just have them to ask for [name], [email address] and [comments]! What's the use? Just provide an email address and your prospect will supply you all this without asking and without they having to complete a silly form!

7. About Us

Much of what a website should be about is providing some element or trust and confidence in your business and brand ... so why do so many sites miss out lots of information about themselves in the "About Us" section of their sites. As these are one of the most visited pages on your site then this is one great chance to sell yourself and your achievements.

8. Using Flash Intros

Don't do it, no-one likes them and they add absolutely no value to your website at all! They are just very annoying.

9. No Goal

Some business owners make their sites an extension of their business cards and as such their sites lack a direct goal. Every website should have a purpose whether it's to generate a lead, generate a sale, build brand exposure or give more information. Homepages should be making visitors click though to a great landing page that will convert.

10. Ignoring Social Sharing

Whether you simply have your Twitter account in good view or allow visitors to share the page they are on through their own social networks, you need to include them. More and more of us are engaging with social networks and we are happy to promote great content through them.

Google AdWords Quality Score

SavvyTravellerBlog AdWords, campaigns, Google No comments

Google uses an algorithm to decide an ads Quality Score, the higher your Quality Score the more your ad will be shown and the cheaper each click will be!

Whilst the exact working out of the scoring system is a big Google secret we can confidently say that the main elements that decide the Quality Score are - Ad Click Through Rate (CTR), Relevancy of the text used in the ad and the relevancy/quality of the landing page.

It’s estimated that the importance of these are:

Ad CTR = 65 percent

Relevancy of ad text = 20 percent

Relevancy of the landing page = 10 percent

Other = 5 percent

It seems clear therefore that the best thing you can do to get more AdWords clicks to your site and pay less doing it is to improve your ad copy; doing this will definitely improve the CTR and improve your Quality Score in doing so!

I’ll take more about how to improve your AdWord Ad copy later. Keep watching.

Eight Hour Marketing Plan™

SavvyTravellerBlog business, business development, customer retention, marketing, metrics, planning, sales, strategy No comments

Develop a basic Marketing Plan in only 8 hours with the 8 Hour Marketing Plan™
I first published my eight hour marketing plan in 2000 when I worked with a number of online businesses to try to get them to understand how easy it was to develop a simple plan. This is a little out of date now and I will get around to updating it at some time; but I thought it was worth publishing anyway.

Hour 1 - Information gathering about your business

Get yourself a large box. Gather as much information as you can in one hour. This may not seem like long, but believe me after one hour you will be glad to stop ... and surprised at how much information you have gathered!.
Do not stop to read any of it ... this is the gathering phase. You may enlist others to help you in this or any other phase, but keep them within the same one hour restriction.

Your gathering should include all of your past advertising and marketing materials. Include items such as letterheads, envelopes, business cards, direct-mail pieces, magazine ads, Yellow Pages ads, invoices, statements, counter cards, sales samples, packaging materials, press releases, PR stories, promo items, print outs of web pages and anything else used to market your company.

Next, add sales statistical information available about your company. Place sales reports from the past three years in the box. Look for breakout information such as sales by year, month, product line, customer and geographical area. Place any target information or sales rep information in the box. When your time is up, stop. If you happen to run across something else, drop it in the box, but don't spend any more time on this. The secret is to keep to the time limit.

Hour 2 - Information gathering about your customers and competitors

Use a second box to gather information about your customers and your competitors, but again, do so within a one-hour time frame. Put in the box copies of your customer/client lists, details about your top customers, mailing lists, etc. If you have time, talk to your best customers and ask them why they do business with you.

Competitor information can be easily gleaned from several sources (web sites, in-house material etc).
Find copies of their magazine ads. Focus on the information that is readily available.

Hour 3 - Preparation

This third block should be used to compile the documents you have gathered into meaningful information. Again, give yourself one hours of uninterrupted time and, this time, you may want to consider getting away from your office or normal place of work.
Spread out all of the contents of your first box onto a table. With a note pad handy, start by looking at the sales numbers. Take a few moments to jot down the answers to these questions, as well as others you may have:

Who are your biggest clients?
What do they buy from you?
What months are the most successful for you?
What is your best product line?
What are your sales trends?

Next, look at all of your marketing materials. Spread them out on the table. Think about each piece, as well as the entire collection. Obviously, you could spend a whole day critiquing your sales numbers and your marketing items. But by keeping the exercise to just one hour (remember you can build on this work later), you will better focus your attention. Here are some questions for this part of the exercise:

What do your marketing pieces say about you?
Is there a consistency to your approach?
To whom are you speaking?
Do the pieces tell the message you want told?
How do your message increase sales?
What relationship does your marketing team have with your sales team?

As you're making these notes, take one sheet of paper and designate it the "ideas page". As an idea comes into your mind ... no matter how crazy ... write it down.

Hour 4 - More Preparation

Now, put the sales numbers and the marketing materials aside.

Take the information and materials about your clients and your competitors and place them on the table. Select your three strongest competitors and your 10 best customers.

Spend a few minutes (3-4) thinking about each of them. Then ask yourself the following questions:

Why do your best 10 customers choose you instead of your competitors?
Do your competitors spend all their money with you or some with your competitors too?
Do you offer your customers anything unique?
Why are these competitors good? (if they are!)

This is the critical step in this process. An hours sounds like a long time on this, but it isn't!.
Once you have finished, put everything back in the boxes and stop (remember the time limit).

Congratulations ... you are halfway through the process.

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Get your notes (for this part you can refer to specific items in the boxes if needed).
Unlike the other sections, you need two hours of uninterrupted time to complete this next stage. Beginning with your notes, build a brief outline of where you are. To help in the process, I've put together the following questions; most questions should have between three and five answers:

What were your sales in the past three years?
What do you want your sales to be next year?
Why do your best customers do business with you?
Who are your main competitors?
Why do our customers do business with someone else?
If you lost 2% of your average sized customers, what revenues would you lose ?
How many customers are you losing each year?
What does your current marketing materials say about you?
What is the single best thing you do to market your business?

Hour 5-6 - The Outline

Remember you have two hours to complete this Outline stage, if you are asking the right type of questions, and really thinking about the answers, honest, truthful answers .. you need the two-hours.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

This is another two-hours stage.

Use your notes and the items you have in the boxes to help with this final stage. You are now going to prepare the first draft of your marketing plan.

The idea is that you now have enough information and ideas to put together your marketing plan. Don't worry if you find you cannot complete yours as shown here, just do what you can with the information you have, use your plan as a start of your activities and go from there.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Hour 7-8 - The Plan

Remember that this is another two-hours stage.

What you have done will start as a guide for your day to day marketing activities, and you should be able to answer simple questions like; what do you want to say? why do you want to say it? to whom do you want to say it? where do you say it? wow do you want to say it? etc.

If you spend the Eight hours wisely, you will have a simple plan for marketing and the beginnings of the full marketing plan.

Continue working on the plan on a day by day basis, NEVER let it gather dust, you really need to revise the plan at least every quarter to get the most from it, and next year, it may only take you one hour to completely revise for the new sales year!

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