There are reasons why SEO and PPC should always be in cahoots: On the SEO side, a simple look at the analytics queries that come through and spend time on site are usually from keywords that are relevant and have a value. If there is evidence that some terms that show up organically on page 2 or deeper in the SERPs are getting hit are are converting, then these are that have value for PPC. We can immediately pay PPC to be seen next to the top ranking organic sites showing for these competitive terms. Of course, because this is PAID traffic, and because CPCs can be so wildly different for each industry or vertical, ROI calculations should be applied constantly.

Now it gets interesting. On the PPC side, and before SEO goes to work creating targeted landing pages, title tags, keyword rich content on the site, etc., wouldn’t it be great if there was an idea of ROI that stood independent of search volume statistics? Well, unfortunately this is the risk of PPC at every turn in the game. Yes there are competitive analysis tools, bid optimizers, keyword research tools, and on and on… These amazing tools, while infinitely helpful for a modern marketer, just do not round out the actual field of search. When it comes down to it, every search is still based on user generated content, and this content, even if sometimes predictable, is just as often counterintuitive.

I propose that while entering an SEO commitment, you should be testing the viability of the keywords you want optimized on your web pages by employing PPC. This way you can build out the particular keywords on the main targeted pages of the website while keeping tabs on the PPC keyword statistics which perform best for your site’s ROI.

Through Google, this should be done in a couple ways:

1. Use your usual keyword research tools to come up with a nice grouping of unique keywords in order to test how they react in the live market. Remember to only use the exact match option for these keywords, be sure to bid them to a desired position, and most importantly, make sure content network is set to “off”. Obviously this could get pricey as you want to ensure that your keywords show up before the fold on page one and keep in mind that you want enough data in order to make decisions, but this method will give you an idea on how often your keywords are currently queried and how well they convert for your site.

2. Set up a separate ad group for testing. This adgroup should be phrase matched and include peripheral keywords that are more open ended. Pull a Search Query Report every week or so. Depending on volume and conversions, this adgroup should yield a bit of information. Use these newly found keywords that have converted for your site in the exact match campaign - overall, you may be surprised by what has brought in revenue.

Remember to continue to test new keywords, and certainly don’t forget to put a good spin on your ads. Don’t forget to test ads and don’t stop coming up with new approaches to test.

After a couple of months you can take your PPC metrics and compare them to your old keyword research tools… odd how PPC traffic and traffic estimate tools seem to vary so much sometimes. no surprise… no surprise… what the f….?!?!?!

Now you can take both statistics into account when optimizing your pages - using PPC to find keywords that are actually profitable for your site can save a tremendous amount of time on the SEO side. There are times when the highest volume keyword that a site could rank for is not the most profitable, and these are the times for which we need to test. Suddenly the PPC advertising budget can become an investment in a long term search strategy.

I just downloaded Chrome and started testing it out. I have to say it is definitely a lot faster. I tested it out on gmail which always runs really slow for me in Firefox and Chrome runs like 5 times faster. Pretty cool… I’m sure they still have a few bugs to figure out but it looks like this might mean trouble for Internet Explorer which still dominates around 80% of the browser market. I also like that when i open a new tab or a new window they show my most visited sites for easier access:

I’m still going to continue to use Firefox because of all of the plugins that I have installed but as soon as we start seeing some plugins for Chrome I might take the leap!

I find this kind of insight fascinating as I grow my company. I’m so glad that I decided to take risks in my career. Starting my own business has been one of the hardest jobs I have ever had but I love what I do and I know that I’m helping my clients grow in the process which makes my job so rewarding. The one thing I have learned is no matter what your job is, unless you take some kind of action, you won’t get anywhere.

I’d like to leave you all with a little quote.

“In any moment of decision the best thing you can do is the right thing,
the next best thing is the wrong thing,
and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)
26th president of the United States

Happy Labor Day Folks!

Goal Funnels and Funnel Visualization:
Setting up funnels for goals and watching the visitor patterns in those funnels can help us see if people are doing what we would like them to do on the site.

Three examples of funnels we can track are:
1. How many people are going to the “join our newsletter” page and joining the newsletter vs. how many of them are leaving the page.
2. How many people are going to your “contact us” page and filling it out vs. how many of them are leaving?
3. How many people are going to your “shopping cart” page and actually checking out?

Setting up the funnels is pretty easy but it depends on what kind of URL’s you’re dealing with and whether they are dynamic or static. You can read more about setting up goals in google analytics here.

Important Metrics and What they mean:
Another thing we can keep track of are the metrics for the important pages on the site which are usually the homepage and you main category pages. Here are the main metrics on those page and the explanations for each.

• Pageviews – Amount of pageviews (includes people that left and came back)
• Unique Views (only counts unique visits)
• Time on Page (average time a visitor spent on that page before they left to a different page)
• Bounce Rate (clicked the back button or exited the website)
• % Exit (exited the website from this page)

So for example, if you notice that the amount of Pageviews go down on the homepage then you know there is a problem. If you notice that the bounce rate is really high on one of your category pages for example, you might want to think about ways to improve the page or figure out where the traffic is coming from since so many people are bouncing.

Search Engine Traffic & Goals:
Last but not least, another valuable metric for us to track would be the amount of search engine traffic that the site receives broken down by search engine (In Google Analytics this is the search engine traffic and goals report). This report shows the amount of traffic that each search engine sends us as well as how much of that traffic completed the goals we have set up above. This report can also be broken down by keyword for each search engine so you can track exactly which keywords brought you how much traffic and whether or not those keywords completed your goals on your site.

These are just some of the ways you can begin to track your goals. If you’re not tracking anything right now then you are missing out on one of the most effective ways of improving your conversion rate and your site overall.

Today’s question is: What’s worse…duplicate content from within your own site or duplicate content from other sites?

The person asking this question wants to know if having duplicate content on pages within your own site is better or worse than stealing content from other sites and putting it on your site. This is like asking, what’s worse, a broken radiator or a broken transmission? Obviously, both are equally as bad, in different ways.

Duplicate content within your own site:
If two pages within your own site have the same content or a very high ratio of duplicate content, search engines will typically pick one of the pages and devalue the rest that are duplicate. This type of duplicate internal content is very common.

Duplicate content from other sites:
If you use content from other sites, search engines will penalize your site by devaluing the page on your site that has the duplicate content. But what if I had the content on my site and somebody stole it from me you ask? Search engines will typically know who had the content first because they look at the cache dates of both pages. Whichever site was first to be cached will usually be awarded as the original content owner. There are some exceptions to this rule but this is how it is generally decided.

A question that I get asked a lot is, how do I know if my content is unique enough? Basically, it comes down to ratios and percentages. If a large percentage of your content is duplicate, search engines will either devalue the whole page or the whole site. This is not always noticeable. For example, your site might have 30% duplicate content that has been copied from other sites compared to 70% of high quality unique content. If this is the case, search engines don’t want to throw out the 70% of your Unique content that is valuable to their users. Therefore, the solution is to just devalue the pages that have the duplicate content so that they don’t necessarily rank as high for competitive searches but would still rank for longer tail searches. This might be happening right now to a lot of your pages and you don’t even know it. While its great to rank for long tail searches, you don’t want your pages devalued if you can avoid it, so let’s get working on that duplicate content people!

This all took on new meaning in the 90’s when domain names started to pick up popularity and you had another issue to worry about, how well your business name translates online. Take for example, a local Chicago favorite, George’s Hot Dogs. They are celebrating 60 years this year, so they have definitely done something right, but with their new website, George’s Hot Dogs (www.georgeshotdogs.com) looks a lot like George Shot Dogs when you look at the domain name!

Obviously this one is tough to plan ahead for when you’ve been in business that long, but without a doubt something you want to keep in mind for future business endeavors.

What types of business names have you seen lately that have made you laugh or think twice?

While Cuil claims that the advantage of the new search engine over other engines like Google is that the results will be displayed and ordered based on the content of the site more so than the quality of the site and the links pointing to it, it also appears that they took a stab at a new visual layout as well. Unlike search engines that have come before it, Cuil definitely has a different way of showing results with the top 3 (or 1, 4 and 7 in the search results - it doesn’t really say) results spanning the first row of the results with the rest down below. On smaller monitors, this definitely gives a much larger advantage to those that appear in that first row.

Cuil also appears to grab random images from the site and displays them next to the result. Some are appropriate, some probably detract but by displaying pictures next to the result it gives even further advantage to those that are shown with better pictures than those without pictures, regardless of the value of the page itself.

The one advantage that I do think that is visible in its current state is the ability to navigate through similar subjects and categories with ease. Sure, other engines employ this subject fairly readily, especially Yahoo, but Cuil does it without overpowering the page and with fairly simplistic functionality and use.

Cuil also seems to claim over 120 billion indexed pages, which far surpasses that of Google. I only seem to get results half of the time though when searching for things and am greeted by the following page:

Really, 120 billion pages indexed and nothing about call tracking? Clicking search a second time found results, but a 50% success rate at even showing any results is nothing to write home about. Google killer, definitely not. Overtaking Hotbot, a fair possibility.

There has been a lot of attention on page load speed lately. There used to be more focus on page load speed back when everybody was on 56k modems, but it seems a lot of the best practices from those days have gone out the window since high speed internet came along. I’d like to remind people that it’s still important to optimize the speed of your pages. It can affect how much traffic your site receives, how many vistors stay on your site after you get them there and the bottom line…how much money your site makes. This is especially true for ecommerce sites that naturally get more browsing and page views per visitor.

To make this as clear as possible: Slow loading pages = Money being lost.

Here are 3 key areas to consider:

Usability - How quickly a webpage loads has always been important for your visitors. Personally, I can’t stand waiting for slow webpages…it’s like Chinese water torture sometimes. I have a super fast computer (3.1 Gigawatts) and a high speed cable internet connection (3.2 Gigawatts), but I would still sacrifice my left arm to further cut that time in half (Ok, maybe not my left arm). My point is that your visitors won’t like browsing your site if the pages load slowly. If they still continue to browse because they really want something on the site, chances are they won’t come back unless they really have to.

SEO - All things being equal, sites with faster loading pages tend to rank higher than sites with slower loading pages. Search engine representatives have never come out and said this word for word but they have hinted at it in various ways. For example, do a search for a keyword that your site ranks for in Google and you’ll find a number under each listing (looks something like this “45k”) that tells you how large the page size is. There is no hard and fast rule for how quickly your pages should load in order to rank higher but if your site’s pages are larger than your competitor’s you should probably look into making them smaller. Of course this doesn’t mean that if you have a slower site you won’t rank at all, it just makes it easier to rank if your pages load faster.

PPC - Google knows how important page load time is to visitors, which is why they recently added page load speed as a factor in your adwords quality score. Making page load speed a part of quality score sends a clear signal that Google thinks this is an important issue. Unless you like to pay more for clicks, you should definitely think about how to speed up your pages. If Google thinks it’s important for their sponsored listings you can bet they think it’s important for their organic listings as well.

So how do you make your pages load faster? There are a few ways that all have varying degrees of effectiveness depending on what’s slowing you down.

Code Bloat - The more code your pages have the longer it’s going to take for them to load. Having a high code to content ratio also slows down the crawl rate of search engines. Moving CSS and Javascript code to external files is highly recommended so that the browser or search engine only needs to download it once instead of every time a new page loads. Also, remove extraneous code like comment tags and unneccessary large amounts of white space.

Images - Having extremely large images can severely slow down your pages. When I say large, I mean large in file size, not height and width. Use any of the free image editing programs out there like Jpeg Wizard to compress your images. Sixty percent quality compression on jpeg images is usually good enough for the web. Also, adding simple height and width attributes to your images increases the speed that the browser can download the images.

Gimmicky things - Try to stay away from gimmicky things on the page such as Flash, audio or videos that play automatically. These are also usually bad for useability, especially audio. Sorry, nobody wants to hear the cheesy background music on your site so get rid of it. Anything that takes extra time to load on the page will slow it down including RSS feeds and widgets.

Analytics - Put analytics tracking code towards the bottom of your pages. If there is ever a problem and the tracking code doesn’t load at least the whole page will load first so that your visitor will see the content. This is more a usability issue than anything else.

File compression - If your site is on an Apache server you can also do some fancy footwork by enabling Apache file compression. That’s probably something that your web developer can implement for you.

In the end it really comes down to usability and the visitor. Improving your SEO and PPC is a byproduct of improving the user experience on your site. Make your visitors happy with speedy pages and everything else will fall into place.

First there are keywords. In the web world, and as I’ve said before, this is the cornerstone of the search game. Fine and dandy. But what happens with keywords? They can’t just be stuffed into content and layered transparently in an attempt to game search engines. They can’t just be placed anywhere any longer. In PPC you can bid on them, but even Yahoo has tried to deny random bidding strategies by implementing a minimum CPC for a site to advertise for certain keywords based on relevence. Google has been doing so for some time.

As far as the stringent restrictions applied by search engines go: I think we can all live with that. Anyone reading this post has certainly used Google or one of its competitors within the last few days, and most likely some searching was done for a personal reason. Now personally, I’ve been searching for movie reviews, today’s MLB All Star game line up, personal products I wish to compare, and even local restaurant reviews. I go to these search engines because of the whole idea that I will be able to receive what I am searching for in a quick and efficient manner. If I did not receive what I wanted out of this search, I would refine my search - if this tactic often failed me, I would discontinue using the search engine that repeatedly failed me. That is, after all, the service they provide in order to get advertisers in front of my, your… our eyes.

Too often this idea just does not bleed through to PPC advertisers. At the current state of the PPC game, this is almost appalling. I know that the entry fee is easy and that’s part of the allure - anyone can enter the gate - but why would they want to enter? Traffic is enticing - it’s glamorous… they are looking at YOUR creation, YOUR idea. Don’t let ego seduce you into bad marketing.

The first thing to do with PPC is to identify keywords and group them. If some of these groups don’t have a place to go - a proper landing page - then these words should not be used. This is a good excercise to identify opportunities for other web pages, expanded content, or maybe even as a way to trim the fat. Any keyword should always have a place if money is going to be bid on it.

This idea concerning relevence is not simply for the benefits of paying less as far as advertisers are concerned. If your site sells shoes there are probably multiple layers to the site… if not this should probably be remedied. For example, if your site is about shoes and you bid on the keyword “shoes” then the home page may be the optimal page to send people (whether this keyword actually results in ROI is a totally different question). Now if you also have ad groups for specific brands, you should have a page set up for those specific brands. If you are dumping that traffic at the home page, you are not only going to have many bounces and back-hits from the page, but those who do stay on your site will have to click multiple places and learn your navigation in order to find what they initially thought they were getting to. It’s a bit of false advertising akin to saying 80% off, but with ultra-fine print underneath saying “some items,” or worse, “Puma shoes for sale,” when in fact not a single pair is visible in the store. If you don’t see them, do you ask for them? If you do ask, are you pleased you had to do so?

No one likes to be mislead. No one likes to click and navigate more than is necessary. So make the consumer’s job easy. Make it easy to buy what is advertised, or don’t advertise it. If you are bidding on a product type, make sure there is a page devoted to that product so you can send them directly there. At very least, the product should be visible on the page and should be found above the fold (within the default visible area of a clicked result). These product-type-specific searches will be fewer in number than the generic “shoes” - to be expected, but the page will display what was initially searched for, which will help conversion rates. If someone is looking for an exact product, they are typically further along in the sales cycle, exhibit being an educated consumer, and are generally more likely to act (take action, fill out a form, BUY!) if they see what they want…. of course price, selection, service, quality, etc. all play a factor (perhaps another post).

If there are ever related or tangential keywords for which you would like to advertise, hold off until you can offer what it is you are about to advertise. Your PPC budget will thank you, as will your shoppers.

***I realize this post is bereft of real world examples, so as I find new and interesting examples through my regular commercial life, I will be adding them to this post. Perhaps that will perk up a few ears and let whatever readers are out there key in on some of my shopping proclivities…