6 Key Areas to Focus Your SEO Campaign

An effective SEO campaign needs a clear strategy that addresses the main issues that exist with a website. This should be straightforward but is often overlooked or not properly analysed before a campaign is begun.

One area that should be prioritised – but is often overlooked – involves analysing what the search competition is doing to rank; after all, any site would rank first without any competition! Having a well-researched view of competitors’ sites allows you to plan how to rank above their websites on the first page.

To do this, you’ll need to look at all aspects of SEO and build a profile of what the competition does well and where it could improve. This could become more difficult as Google relies on entities instead of backlinks. However, it’s still possible and remains vitally important.

Once the data – that demonstrates what is required to succeed – has been collected, it’s important to identify the major problems that exist with your site. If a competitor is ranking effectively even though both their site and yours have duplicate content issues, then this is unlikely to be the place to start when it comes to prioritising a campaign. Without this information, a huge amount of time could be spent resolving internal or external duplicate content issues that may not provide any significant benefit to the site visibility.

Content

One of the major areas for SEO is to look at the site’s content, including any blog or news sections. Content should become a priority area if competitors are producing quality information that’s shared by others or including a large amount of relevant text on important pages that rank well.

If your site is unable to match or improve on what your competitor is offering, this will be a major setback for a campaign that aims to rank above them. Producing content frequently and keeping it fresh and up to date will have a significant influence on the search results.

Any information on product and service pages should also be a priority when it comes to building a successful SEO campaign. If other results for your primary terms have content that is up to date, this will be a key issue to resolve.

Backlink Risk

The threat from a poor and unnatural backlink profile is real: in the past, this has almost certainly caused some huge multinational brands to lose a fortune on their share price because their search visibility had taken a tumble. Google uses algorithms and humans as well as the competition for each SERP vertical to determine whether the link profile will damage the site visibility.

This is another reason why understanding competitors and your own site from the start is important: it allows you to identify whether backlinks are really holding the site back or whether they are similar to the rest of the search results.

Authority Building

Does the site have a strong existing search presence or does Google barely recognise that it exists? This is often a priority for a new company: search presence should be established by getting quality websites linking to the site. This is usually achieved by creating content but also by engaging with local/national events, working with existing communities and ensuring that citations are in place from leading industry sources. If the site does have a presence, it’s important to establish whether it’s strong enough to compete.

Some business owners can’t understand that their organisation is an industry leader and yet doesn’t appear on the first page of relevant searches. Only by examining the site’s position and comparing this with the competition can you establish the need for good quality backlinks and citations as a leading priority.

Page Relevance

Most of the time, a web page will have some relevance to a keyword it’s trying to rank for. However, when mathematical calculations and rules determine the ranking of a web page, this may not be enough, especially in competitive search verticals. A detailed review of key pages is required, which involves looking very closely at the content on page and analysing where and when the page is referencing important terms and how the page is internally and externally linked. The days of external exact match anchor text may be fading but relevant linking sites and strong internal navigation are still hugely important.

Remember to analyse the importance of page relevance by comparing your site with others, and make sure you understand how those sites are seen to be more relevant by search engines. This review should also help give you ideas regarding how to improve your own site.

Technical Improvements

Sometimes huge gains can be made by resolving technical issues that prevent or restrict search engines from crawling important parts of a site. This happens all the time with both new and old websites and usually involves issues related to mainstream Content Management Systems. By controlling the pages that a search engine indexes and by correcting site structure, navigation and layout, a website can really improve on its existing search visibility.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is usually a prime candidate for e-commerce stores selling branded goods, as the product descriptions are often the same across the web. That said, this issue may be less important for sites specialising in unique goods or services that have less serious duplication or where only some pages are affected. It’s always good to ensure your site is as unique as possible but if there are other issues, it’s crucial to understand which would provide more value. Carry out an initial review and check what’s common amongst other sites in the same search vertical to help determine where to focus your resources.

Conclusion

The six areas listed above should give a clear guide into the priorities of any SEO campaign. A solid platform of initial research encompassing competitors and a detailed analysis of your site will help form a strategy for a successful campaign and, potentially, a greater return on investment.

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Are Thanksgiving traditions a relic of the past? A Google Trends investigation

Using Google Trends data, here’s a look into what the most popular traditions are and find out just how much things have changed since 1621.

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5 Common AdWords PPC Mistakes

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hello. I often get asked about quick wins when it comes to PPC, and I really think that the quickest wins are fixing some of the most common mistakes.

So when I first get hold of a PPC project, these are the sorts of things I look for, and more often than not I find issues in at least one or more of these areas. Fixing them can actually have those quick wins that you’re looking for, and you can see a quick turnaround and improve ROI in a short the short term.

I’m going to talk you through the top five mistakes that I see all the time. The first one is brand and more specifically not bidding on your brand.

So many companies are using AdWords and they’re bidding on all the target keywords and the keywords in their niche and all the things they need to be bidding on, but they think that they don’t need to bid on their brand because they rank first organically for their brand name. If people are looking for them, they’re going to find them anyway. Why should they pay for that?

But really you’re missing a really big opportunity. There are a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, when it comes to relevancy, there can be no more relevant keyword. As such, you’re going to have a really great quality score. You’re likely to be always at the top of that paid listing unless someone is aggressively trying to outbid you.

The result of that high quality score is that you’re going to be paying less per click, a lot less per click. So typically, brand campaigns have really low cost per click. On the flip side, they have a really good CTR, a really good click-through rate as well, because it’s really relevant. People are looking for you.

So you’re not paying very much. You’re getting a really good CTR. What that does is it improves the quality of the campaign and therefore the account. It brings your average click-through rate across the campaign right up, and it gives you a really good advantage there.

Of course, there’s the added value that you’re taking up more real estate in the search engine results pages. If competitors are bidding on your brand, you want to make sure you are as well, or you could be losing out to them in that area anyway. So it’s really important that you do bid on your brand. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it improves the quality of your campaign.

Negatives, this is a big one especially with old accounts. Sometimes they can’t work out where they’re going wrong, why they’re wasting so much budget. They’re doing a lot of other things right, but they’re completely forgetting about negative keywords.

It’s really important that you’re using lots and lots of negative keywords. You should be scouring through your search term report to find things that aren’t relevant and making sure that you don’t show up again and waste budget. Or even if people aren’t clicking, because the ads aren’t relevant for certain keywords, you’re still wasting impressions, which means your CTR, your click-through rate is going down.

So effectively using negative keywords is really, really important, and you should be adding them in regularly. There’s always going to be more coming up, and even when you think you’ve completely saturated it, you’d be surprised what you see in the Search Query Report. So be really vigilant when it comes to negative keywords and make sure you’re not wasting any budget or impressions.

Split-testing. A lot of time people put one ad in each ad group and they run that for a long period of time and then periodically they might change it. But they’re not constantly running two or more ads at the same time to see which performs better at that time. If you’re not doing that, then you’re missing an opportunity to improve your ads.

So you should be running at least two ads in each ad group all the time. Once you’ve got enough impressions, at least over 100, ideally over 100 clicks if you’re running a bigger campaign, then you can really see which is performing better.

If there’s obvious discrepancies in the CTR, then you can pause the underperforming one, make a duplicate of the one that’s performing better, and then tweak something else to see if you can find further ways to improve. So this is a really good opportunity to improve click-through rate and then obviously all the other metrics that go along with it.

Ad extensions have been around for quite a while, and they’re increasingly important. A lot of brands still aren’t using them or aren’t using them effectively or aren’t using all the ones that are available to them.

You definitely want to be using ad extensions. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t use at least two or three of the available ad extensions. There’s quite a few out there now — location extensions, call extensions, call-out extensions, site link extensions to name a few.

There’s going to be some that are relevant for you for all businesses. Using them gives you more real estate in the ads so you take up more space. It makes your ads stand out more. It gives your users more information. They all do different things.

But the important factor to remember with ad extensions is that they now also contribute to your quality score. So using them is going to essentially help you bring your costs down as well. Failing to use them and your competitors are using them, they’ve got an advantage.

There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be using them. Make sure that you’ve gone through and you’ve checked all the ones that are available and you’re using all the ones that are appropriate, which is going to be a good few of them, probably three or four at least.

Lastly, mobile. We go on and on about mobile at the moment in the whole digital marketing industry, specifically on the SEO side. But we cannot forget mobile on the PPC side either. It’s increasingly important. The search engines are making lots and lots of noise about it all the time. It’s not dying down. People are using more mobile searches. It’s only going to grow, and it’s going to continue to grow on the paid side as well.

So there’s no reason that you should be thinking about mobile on the SEO side but neglecting it on the PPC side. What that means is having mobile specific ads, mobile specific ad extensions, all of which are available, making sure you’ve set your bid adjustments accordingly so you’re bidding where you want to be bidding for mobile searches, and most importantly that you’ve got mobile friendly landing pages that are optimised and are showing properly for your mobile audience.

It might be that you have different landing pages for your mobile ads, or it might be you have a responsive design and it’s the same landing page, but as long as it renders properly on any device. So it’s really important to consider this so that you’re not either wasting budget or neglecting a growing audience when it comes to your ads.

So if you go through these five things in your AdWords campaign, I expect you’ll find something that you can tweak to improve performance. A lot of these have got some quite quick wins associated with them. So I recommend going away and having a look at your campaign.

If there is any more help you would like with that, then please feel free to get in touch, leave a comment at the end of the video, send me a tweet, or give us a call.

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Boosting Your SEO by Helping Googlebot

What’s the secret to Google loving your website and indexing it? The secret is to steer crawlers to the most important and useful pages of your site and ignore those pages with little value to searchers. You may think that you want Google or Bing to index every URL of your website but you could be preventing it from crawling your most important pages by using up your ‘crawl budget’ on poor or irrelevant pages.

What is ‘crawl budget’?

When Google’s crawlbot (or Bing’s for that matter) comes to your website, it has a finite amount of resources to spend on accessing your website’s pages; after all, Google has millions of other websites to crawl that day too.

Your crawl budget can be determined by the value or quality of your website already, including but not limited to the quality of backlinks to your website. I won’t speculate on more factors here, but there are some good research pieces on the web where people have tried to identify these factors.

Why control access?

Give important pages priority

By controlling where Googlebot is allowed to crawl within your website, you are increasing the likelihood that important and valuable pages will be crawled every time Google visits your website.

Examples of these could be your product or service pages, blog post pages or even your contact details page. All of these are pages you want to have ranked highly in the search results so users can find this information quicker.

Ignore pages that don’t need to be ranked

There will be pages of your website that have no need to be indexed in the search results. These include pages that a user wouldn’t typically look for in the search results but perhaps will browse to whilst on your website. These could be your privacy policy page, terms & conditions page or your blog tag or category pages.

How to help Googlebot access the right pages of your website

There are a number of different ways in which you can help Googlebot access your website. The more of the following you can adjust or implement, the more control you should have over Googlebot or Bingbot.

Robots.txt file

The first thing to look at is setting disallow rules in your robots file for all pages, folders or files types on your site that do not need to be crawled. Upon visiting a site, the first place a crawler will look at is your robots.txt file (provided it is always located at http://ift.tt/1aTsSRf). This will help indicate to various crawlers which parts of your website it should not attempt to crawl. You can set rules depending on what crawler bot you want to control.

You can learn all about robots.txt and common issues in this Koozai blog post from Irish Wonder. Always test your rules in Google Search Console’s robots.txt tester tool before you set live any changes as some rules could block your whole website or pages you didn’t want blocked.

NoIndex tags

To help prevent certain pages from being indexed, it is also recommended that you add the NoIndex tag to the header code of those pages. Once added to a page, you should test these tags by doing a ‘Fetch as Google’ request on the URLs in Google Search Console.

URL parameter rules

If your site is powered by a CMS or an e-commerce system, you’ll need to be careful with dynamically generated URLs causing duplicate pages. Googlebot can easily get caught up and waste time crawling these URLs. The URL parameters section in Google Search Console can help you tell which of the dynamic URLs are found by Google and set a preference over those it can ignore.

Be aware that this is a powerful tool and you must use it with caution as it could prevent crawling of important parts of your website.

Up-to-date XML sitemaps

Although Google won’t take your XML sitemap as a rule of which pages to crawl, it takes it as a hint – so make sure it’s up to date to help reinforce which pages of your site it should be indexing.

Remove any old pages from your site and add any new pages.

Fix internal links

Googlebot will follow links it finds in your webpage content so make sure you aren’t going to waste its time by letting it crawl links to missing pages. Use a crawling tool such as Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool to find these broken internal links and fix them at the source.

Page load times

Googlebot will need to load each of your pages when it visits them so by reducing the load time of each you can allow it to crawl and index more pages within the same overall time. There are a number of free tools available to help you analyse and improve site speed.

Site Structure

A good site structure is an underrated method of helping Googlebot crawl your website a lot easier. Clearly categorising page content and not hiding pages away too deep in your site structure increases the likelihood they’ll be found by the crawler.

The SEO Benefits

If you’ve managed to implement some or all of the above recommendations and tested them using the tools mentioned, you should begin to see some changes in crawl stats shown within Google Search Console.

Here we’re looking for the number of pages crawled to be similar, or just over, the number of actual pages on your site in the first blue graph. The reduction in kilobytes downloaded (in red) should mimic the reduction in pages crawled if you previously had lots of pages being crawled.

Below is an example of a site with a significant number of URL parameter issues in which Googlebot crawled up to 12,000 URLs when in fact there were just a few hundred actual pages of the site. Through the application of URL parameter rules and the other factors mentioned above, the number of pages crawled became much more consistent and realistic.

If Google is crawling your useful pages each time, the rankings of your pages will be more likely to change frequently, and most likely for the better. Fresh content will get indexed and ranked a lot quicker and time won’t be wasted from your ‘crawl budget’.

The post Boosting Your SEO by Helping Googlebot appeared first on Koozai.com

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What are the busiest times for stores on Black Friday?

If you want to avoid the crowds on Black Friday, avoid shopping between 2pm and 4pm. At least, thats what Google’s location data says.

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Google announces new store visit metrics in AdWords

Google has today announced new features for its store visits metric for AdWords users.

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Beginner’s guide to paid search and PPC

This will hopefully touch on all the various elements you might hear uttered in the same breath as paid search, taking in such puzzling acronyms as PPC, CPM, CPC and SERP.

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61 Places to Find FREE Visual Content Marketing Resources

Calling all Content Marketers! Are you bored of using the same old stock images? Looking to spice up your content without spending a penny?

If that’s the case, listen up, because this post is for you.

Stocked and Loaded

Let’s face it – the majority of standard stock photography isn’t great. At its best, it’s generic and bland, and at its worst, well, things just get plain weird. I’m tired of stale boardroom pictures filled with fake smiles and phony actors; and baffled by the deluge of random images which make absolutely no sense.

Disillusioned by the quality (and often extortionate price) of images on offer, I decided to search elsewhere, to see if there was such a thing as high-quality, usable, royalty-free stock images.

The results blew me away.

There are so many sites out there with such amazing images freely available, that I felt the need to put together the following mega-list, compiling all my research into one easy-to-browse blog post.

But why stop at images? I’ve also gathered a number of free resources to help spruce up your content even further, including free stock video, free data visualisation tools and free web design templates.

A Quick Note on Legality

Licensing is a huge issue when it comes to the use of images. Before you use any images or content from the following sources, be sure to check whether you need to give credit to the original creator, or whether you’re allowed to alter the images in any way.

The brilliant Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence allows you to both use and edit images for private or commercial purposes, completely free of charge. However, it’s still worth checking with the source of the photos if you’re unsure of where you stand. Do this now, and avoid a nasty fine turning up on your proverbial doorstep at a later date.

So, with that settled, let’s get cracking.

Free Stock Image List

Barn Images

A great resource for both free and premium non-stock nature photography.

http://barnimages.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Crow The Stone

Candid photos from across the world. Subscribe to their newsletter and receive new photos in your inbox each week.

http://ift.tt/1FhzYgp

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Death To Stock

Another subscription-based service, you can either sign up to receive a free batch of photos each month, or go premium and have access to everything.

http://ift.tt/Ivxz8B

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Designer Pics

High-resolution stock photos, free for both commercial and personal use.

http://ift.tt/1pEuIwv

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Free Nature Stock

Looking for stunning snaps of the outdoors? Look no further than Free Nature Stock. Updated daily.

http://ift.tt/1C8C8eI

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Get Refe

Find royalty-free, high-quality photos for free, or purchase pre-curated packs for all your visual needs. You can even use the site to start selling your own snaps!

http://getrefe.com/

Restrictions: Royalty-Free Licence

Gratisography

Photographer Ryan McGuire has set up this brilliant collection of weird and wonderful images that he offers completely free. Updated weekly!

http://ift.tt/16yV85U

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Iso Republic

Fantastic free resource filled with creative images. Sign up to get the latest pictures delivered directly to your inbox.

http://isorepublic.com/

Restrictions: Bespoke Licence

Jay Mantri

Jay manages to perfectly capture the magic of his surroundings in these gorgeous shots. As he says on his site: “Free pics. Do anything. Make magic.”

http://jaymantri.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Jé Shoots

Free and premium photos sent directly to your inbox as and when they’re uploaded.

http://jeshoots.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Kaboom Pics

With 1,153 photos and 439,444 downloads at the time of writing, Kaboom Pics is an amazing resource for free photos.

http://kaboompics.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Life of Pix

A stunning collection of high-resolution photos that have all been donated to the public domain.

http://ift.tt/V9DkiB

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Little Visuals

A saddening entry on the list, as Nic, the creator of Little Visuals, tragically passed away in 2013. His family, however, have been kind enough to maintain the site and its beautiful collection of nature photography.

http://ift.tt/15hxUDN

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Lock & Stock Photos

AJ Montpetit does his bit to give back to the online community by posting freely downloadable photos on a daily basis.

http://ift.tt/XXiHay

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Move East

Follow one Portuguese man’s journey through life by downloading all of his photos for free.

http://moveast.me/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

My Stock Photos

Enjoy a collection of stunning photos for free, because, as the site says, “not everything in life has a price.”

http://mystock.photos/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

New Old Stock

If you’re looking for vintage photography, this is the ideal resource for you. All photos are taken from public archives and free of any known restrictions.

http://nos.twnsnd.co/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Pexels

Download and submit awesome free stock photography!

https://www.pexels.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Picjumbo

A brilliant resource that offers hundreds of free photos. You can even pay a small fee to download all of their photos in one go!

https://picjumbo.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Picography

Awesome free photos offered by Irish web design studio Hidden Depths.

http://picography.co/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Realistic Shots

With 7 realistic new photos added every week, there’s plenty to see at Realistic Shots.

http://ift.tt/1ALOxYg

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Shutteroo

Fantastic free images from Australian web developer Klaye Morrison. Sign up to their newsletter for special, exclusive photos.

http://shutteroo.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Skitterphoto

The Skitterphoto team have been posting original photos every day since May 2014, and because of that, they’ve built up an amazing collection of authentic images.

http://ift.tt/1oW5w4A

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Skuawk

Artistically loud images that stand out from the crowd.

http://skuawk.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Snapwire

Can’t find the images you’re looking for? As well as housing a decent library of free photos, Snapwire lets you submit a request for a specific photo which you can then buy.

https://www.snapwi.re

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

SplitShire

A cool selection of copyright photos from all over the world.

http://ift.tt/1pwoGvp

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Startup Stock Photos

If you’re looking for office-based images that aren’t completely banal, check out this site.

http://ift.tt/1m6GBtW

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Stocka

As the site’s by-line says: “stocka.co wants to be your source for free stock photos.”

http://www.stocka.co/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Stocksnap

With its beautiful collection of free, high-resolution photos, Stocksnap even lets you see which photos are trending, giving you an insight into the most popular images.

https://stocksnap.io/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Superfamous

If you’re looking for something a little different, Superfamous is ideal for abstract landscapes and patterns.

http://ift.tt/1F3zHuf

Restrictions: CCA3 (Personal Use With Credit)

Tookapic

Tookapic has an insane collection of over 13,700 free and premium stock photos!

http://ift.tt/1iaJUBk

Restrictions: Bespoke Licences

Travel Coffee Book

Submit and share beautiful travel photography from all over the globe.

http://ift.tt/1siYPec

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Unsplash

Unsplash publish jaw-dropping images of the outdoors, completely free to download.

https://unsplash.com/

Restrictions: CC0 (No Restrictions)

Stock Image Search Engines

Still can’t find the images you were looking for? Try these handy stock image search engines:

• Compfight: http://compfight.com/
• The Stocks: http://thestocks.im/
• Pixabay: http://pixabay.com
• Findaphoto: http://finda.photo/
• CC Search: http://ift.tt/wf3cdS
• Freerange: http://ift.tt/20ounzr
• Librestock: http://librestock.com/

Gif Search Engines

Static images are so last summer. Gifs are the new black.

Giphy

Giphy has a huge library of readily accessible gifs, paired with a powerful set of advanced sharing options:

http://giphy.com/

GIF Mood Board

Find a gif for every occasion with this handy mood search engine from Buffer:

http://ift.tt/1EXTAsN

Still can’t find a suitable reaction in gif form? Make your own instead:

Gif YouTube

Turn any video into an awesome gif with this handy tool:

https://gifs.com/

Data Visualisation

Of course, you don’t just have to rely on awesome photographs to spruce up your content. If you’re working with some interesting data, why not turn these into a slick visualisation by using one of these handy free tools?

Word Clouds:

• Tagxedo: http://www.tagxedo.com/

Diagrams:

• Creately: http://creately.com/

Maps

• Leaflet JS: http://leafletjs.com/
• Google Fusion Tables: http://ift.tt/214y1Pl

Timelines

• Knightlab: http://ift.tt/1eIvMrg
• Read Write Think: http://ift.tt/1X0Qz3q;

Infographics

Ah, infographics, the format everyone loves to hate! Knock them all you want, but these colourful visualisations are still a powerful and effective way to showcase data. The below sites allow you to create fast and free infographics in all shapes and sizes:

• Easelly: http://www.easel.ly/
• Piktochart: http://piktochart.com/
• Infogram: https://infogr.am/
• Good Labs: http://labs.good.is/
• Venngage: https://venngage.com/

Free Video Footage

Take your visual game to the next level with awesome free video footage from one of the following sites:

• Videvo: http://www.videvo.net/
• Dissolve: http://ift.tt/1I0uJAS
• Motion Elements: http://ift.tt/NML3PJ
• Free HD Stock Footage on Vimeo: http://ift.tt/1juk3jr
• Free HD Footage: http://ift.tt/1aFjMZI

Web Design Resources

Last but in no way least, the following two sites offer a wealth of free web design resources, including templates, patterns and audio:

• IM Free: http://ift.tt/1goZPIY
• All The Free Stock: http://ift.tt/Yy2gSp

Crunch Time

Phew, what a list. I know what you’re thinking now though: “Harry, how am I meant to remember all these sites when it comes to crunch time?”

Don’t panic, dear reader, I’ve got you covered. You can download your own copy of all the links listed above in a handy Google spreadsheet, right here. Alternatively, bookmark this page and visit any time you need to find new resources.

Have I missed something off the list? Let me know in the comments below, or tweet me your favourite visual resources @hr_gardiner.

The post 61 Places to Find FREE Visual Content Marketing Resources appeared first on Koozai.com

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Three B2B landing pages and how they were improved

Today, we’ll take a look at three unique cases of B2B landing pages, the challenges, the recommended solutions and what happened.

from Yong Johnson’s DM blog http://ift.tt/1HaSyuM via transformational marketing

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Helping Googlebot To Help Your SEO

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi. Today we’re going to be talking about helping Googlebot to help improve your SEO results. You may think that you want Google to come and crawl and index every page of your website. However, there’s a thing called crawl budget, which is a finite amount of resources that Googlebot has to crawl and index your website every time it visits it.

Crawl budget varies by site to site, and this is going to be based on your site’s strength. There is some research out on the Web that tries to identify the fact: Does that affect the crawl budget assigned to each website?

An example of this may be the quality of your backlinks. If Google sees that your site has got good quality backlinks, then it may assign a better crawl budget to your site as opposed to a site that doesn’t have good quality backlinks, because it’s going to try and index more of your content because it thinks it’s going to be more useful to the users that are searching for that content.

Why should you control access? Basically, you’re giving your important pages of your site priority when it comes to Googlebot crawling those pages. An example of these may be your product pages, service pages, blog posts, and even your contact details page as well, because people are going to be looking for that in Google.

You’re going to want to ignore or prevent pages that don’t need to be ranked, such as privacy policy, terms and conditions, and blog category pages maybe because they’re just a means to get to the blog posts. There is no real useful content on there that needs to be ranked in Google.

We’re kind of making the most of this crawl budget by telling Google what pages are going to be the ones that we really want to be crawled every time and ignore the ones that aren’t so good.

So how can we do that? First thing to look at is the robots.txt file. You should make sure that you have a robots.txt file in the root of your website. This is simple text file script that tells Googlebot what areas of your site to not crawl and which areas to crawl. This may be pages, even folders and file types as well. So if there’s like PDF files on your website that you don’t need to be indexed, you can put that in the robots.txt file.

When you are working with this, though, make sure you go to Google Search Console’s robots.txt file testing tool just to make sure you haven’t got any rules in there that could accidentally deindex your whole website. So be careful with that one.

If Googlebot comes to your website from an external link, for example it comes straight to a page that somebody has linked to, it may not take into account robots.txt file rules, in which case you’re probably going to want to back up, ignoring the pages that aren’t good by adding noindex tags to the actual header code of the specific pages. This is used for telling Google that it shouldn’t be in the index. Of course, it’s kind of come to the page already and it’s tried to craw it and index it. But you’re just specifying that you don’t want it in the index, and then next time it probably won’t attempt to come back to that page.

Again, in Google Search Console, there is a testing tool you can use. If you go Fetch as Google, you can see if that noindex tool script is actually working.

URL parameter rules, this is something you can set in Google Search Console as well. You can only do it in there. Basically, it’s a really powerful way of telling Google about dynamically generated URLs that may be duplicates of normal URLs of your website. So if you’ve got a CMS system or an ecommerce system that you use on your domain, chances are it’s probably generating these dynamic URLs that just reorder, sort, and narrow content.

In this tool, you can tell Google what are duplicates based on what actions that are being done on those pages. So you can help prevent a lot of wasted time on those duplicate pages and only focus on the ones that need to be indexed.

Be careful with that tool, because again there’s potential to deindex your whole website if you’re not careful with what rules you set for the different parameters. So you need to understand what the parameters are and make sure there are no issues with that.

Keep an up to date XML sitemap. Although Google doesn’t live by the rules of what’s in your sitemap, it won’t go and specifically index every page that you specify in your XML sitemap, it does give it hints to what content it should be indexing. So make sure you’ve got your new pages in there, and you’ve got old pages that don’t exist that are taken out of the XML sitemap, because if it tries to follow these links and then gets a 404 page, that’s a bit of the crawl budget that’s wasted.

So moving on to fixing broken internal links, again if it’s following broken links within your website to other pages of your website and those pages don’t exist, it’s wasted that crawl budget. Use a tool such as Screaming Frog to crawl your website and identify broken links and fix them at source.

This kind of plays well into site structure as well. Having a good site structure is a really underrated way of controlling users and search bots that come to visit your website to find pages that matter. So if you’ve got an important page that’s three or four levels deep, hidden within navigation, chances are the crawl budget may be used up and users won’t be able to find it because it’s hidden away.

Plan a good site structure and move pages around. Put your important pages top level or second folder down in the URL structure. Have them in your main navigation. Make sure that they’re crawlable through links that are easy to find on your page.

The last one I’ve got here is page load times. As you can imagine, the faster your page loads, the more pages Google can get through within this allocated crawl budget. There’s a lot of blog posts and tools out there to help you identify ways to speed up your page load time. If you do it across your website, you can really make a big difference to how many pages are being crawled and indexed within that crawl budget.

So there we have kind of a why concentrate on this. I think it’s really important and an underrated way of boosting your crawl and indexation and even rankings in Google as well. Here are some ideas on how you can control that.

So I recommend giving that a go. If you’ve got any questions, contact me on Twitter @Koozai_Dean, or just get in contact with the Koozai sales team, and we’ll be happy to help you. Thanks.

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Seasonal Content Creation – The Dos and Don’ts

When it comes to creating a successful seasonal content strategy, there are a number of common traps that brands and businesses can fall into.

But if used in the correct manner, seasonality can be an all-important tool in a Content Marketer’s vast arson of content creation weaponry.

So instead of creating cringeworthy content littered with tenuous seasonal links that’s greeted with a frosty reception: opt for seasonal pieces that work.

Seasonal Content: The Positives

There are countless reasons why – if well thought out and implemented as part of a considered strategy – seasonal content can work wonders:

• Relevancy – Producing seasonal content means you are consistently creating content that is highly relevant to your audience; this adds value for your audience and increases your chances of creating a genuine buzz and resonating with them.

• Context – Seasonal pieces work well because they give your content immediate context. Clear hype around a given season means your target audience is already geared up for associated content. This makes life easier when it comes to promoting your work too.

• Helpful – No one likes seeing content that’s just been produced for the sake of it. Content centred around a season that’s already being talked about is more likely to be helpful to, and valued by, your audience.

• Perceptions – Creating compelling and meaningful seasonal content communicates the crucial message that your brand is current. This drives the perception that your brand image is on point and knows its place and audience inside out.

Come rain or shine, if executed in the right way, seasons can be used to create cracking content tied in with what’s happening in the world.

Seasonal Content: Potential Pitfalls

On the flipside, there are a number of common traps that brands and businesses risk falling into. Ensure your seasonal content isn’t a washout by addressing the following:

Avoid Shoehorning

It’s a common trap to cram in seasonal tie-ins to otherwise uninspiring pieces, in the hope that these tenuous seasonal links will propel a particular piece to viral stardom.

Whilst it may seem like you’re creating something innovative and different, seasonal content can at times appear to be littered with links and references which struggle to add value to the piece.

Seasonal content can sometimes be guilty of shoehorning metaphors or seasonal clichés into the overall message. So, avoid these clichés to try and fit your content more closely to a given season or holiday.

Embrace A Different Approach

Avoid thinking about a holiday or season and then attempting to fit content around it. Instead, flip it on its head and embrace the following approach:

• Focus on your brand, products or services and how your offering/service naturally fits into the season

• Source real connections which are genuine and authentic

• Deliver relevant and helpful content

Ticking these boxes will ensure you avoid weak links and focus your approach on producing genuine content with real connections to the seasons.

Don’t Lose Your Audience

Try and stay clear of titles such as “why a brand is most like a snowman”, or “countdown to Christmas with our products”. These posts will struggle to engage your audience and draw them in. The last thing you want to do is churn out content that lacks originality.

With a shift in mindset towards naturally fitting a season into the brand’s content marketing strategy, you will produce richer content with more genuine value.

This technique will be more trusted and your content will be seen as more authentic by your target audience too.

Time Is Of The Essence

When it comes to seasonal-based content, timing is also important.

Knowing when to publish content can be a tricky balancing act. Maximise interest and visibility by publishing content just before the height of the seasonal spike, whilst carefully ensuring you’re not too premature in your efforts.

It’s crucial to get your timing spot on by keeping a close eye on trends – mistime this and you could miss the boat.

The Power Of Seasonal Content

If delivered in the right way, seasonal content unlocks an exciting door to deliver relevant, on point and amusing content which will resonate with your audience.

By using the correct techniques, seasonal content will also be remembered for all the right reasons.

Impress your audience with jaw-dropping seasonal content that works.

If you would like to find out more about different content marketing strategies, content types and techniques, speak to Koozai today.

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Remarketing tips with Bing Ads

Remarketing allows you to re-engage with the audiences that have previously visited your site. Here’s three valuable audience segments and some insider tips that will get you off to a flying start with remarketing.

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Koozai Twitter Handles

The day has finally come to retire. Retire the ‘Koozai_*name*’ Twitter handles, that is.

When we rebranded to Koozai in May 2011, we wanted to make sure it launched with a bang. There were various methods we used in order to achieve the ‘bang’ and branded Twitter handles was one of them.

Having branded handles for everyone in the company was extremely useful in the months following the launch as it gave the new brand name instant exposure to all of our existing connections and to anyone else watching the conversations.

Before we rebranded, we weren’t really known in our industry but everyone in the team did have a following on Twitter (big or small). This meant that launching the Koozai brand with the Twitter handles (coupled with remarketing as it had only just launched) gave the illusion that we had suddenly appeared everywhere! It looked like Koozai had literally come from nowhere but spread to everywhere very quickly.

So why the change?

Over the last four and a half years we have found that, although in many ways branded Twitter handles can be a great help with brand awareness, there are also a few drawbacks.

Loss of Personality

Any social media account that is tied to an individual is a personal platform. When it becomes a branded account, people are undoubtedly censored from continuing as they typically would from a 100% personal account. Even if this is very slightly. It’s kind of like trying to have a personal conversation with your boss sat right behind you.

Employee Turnover

Employees inevitably move on from the company and, of course, they take their Twitter account with them. We stipulate that they have to change their Twitter handle (to remove the @Koozai_ bit) and any other company branding. The employee still retains all their followers, but followers can get confused as to who the person is and this potentially means a loss of personal branding for the employee.

From a company point of view, when an employee leaves we need to register that old @Koozai_ Twitter handle to protect it from someone else registering it. The danger here is that if a previous employee @Koozai_ Twitter handle got into the hands of the wrong person, they could pretend to be part of our brand and even represent us in a bad light. Luckily, we have a pretty effective process and have never had an issue with losing an established handle – but the risk is always there.

Twitter Trolls

By far the biggest branded Twitter handle related issue is the potential threat of someone setting up an @Koozai_ branded Twitter, making them appear as one of our employees. We have only encountered this issue once but it was still something we had to clear up and monitor moving forwards. It takes a large amount of time and can cause issues if people genuinely believe that the person in question is representing the brand. After all, why wouldn’t they believe it since that is the way we designed it to work?

Moving Forwards

Taking into account all of the above and the fact that we have been operating as Koozai for almost five years now, we have made the decision to stop using the employee company branded accounts. We will of course continue to use our main company brand account – @koozai – where you can keep up to date with all things Koozai and industry related.

Wondering who everyone is now? I am sure that most of the team will keep their company photo (unless of course they wish to change it) so you should be able to tell who is who, but we have also created this handy list of before and after names for you:

Ben Norman was @koozai_ben now @BenNorman

Samantha Noble was @koozai_sam now @SamJaneNoble

Rob Arkell was @koozai_rob now @RobArkell

Hannah Norman was @koozai_hannah now @HangryHannahLou

Andrew Curtis was @koozai_andrew now @Mad_Hollywood

Oliver Ewbank was @koozai_ollie now @Oliver_Ewbank

Dean Marsden was @koozai_dean now @DeanMarsden22

Emma North was @koozai_emma now @MorphNorth

Graeme Benge was @koozai_graeme now @GraemeBenge

Ali Moghadam was @koozai_ali now @AlMoghadam

James Challis was @koozai_james now @JamesaChallis

Luke Monaghan was @koozai_luke now @LukeTheMono

Sophie Howell was @koozai_sophie now @SophieeHowell

Jack Evershed was @koozai_jack now @Jack_Evershed

Sally Newman was @koozai_sally now @Sally_Newm

John Waghorn was @koozai_john now @John_Waghorn

Nicola Churchill was @koozai_nicola now @Coco_Nicol

Jenny Williams was @koozai_jenny now (TBC)

Harry Gardiner was @koozai_harry now @Hr_Gardiner

Ruth Walker was @koozai_ruth now @RuthlessOnFilm

Lucy Stamp was @koozai_lucy now @LucyStamp

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Google AdWords Customer Match E-mail List Strategies

Customer Match was released on 27^th September 2015. It gives you the capability to upload e-mail addresses that your customers have given you to target users on the Search Network, YouTube and Gmail Ads within Google AdWords. Today, I will be discussing the different e-mail list strategies you can use to segment your campaigns.

Before setting up your e-mail lists, you need to plan how to split the e-mail addresses up and how they will relate to the ads you create. I have split this post into e-Commerce and lead generation ideas to describe the different tactics to use for each of these.

e-Commerce

Type of Products

You could segment your lists by type of products to target users with an interest in a certain category. For example, if you ran a bathroom store, you could have one ad group for “vanity units” and another for “basins”, with the relevant e-mail list and ad text targeting this.

Previously Converted

This strategy would be useful for those with big e-Commerce stores and would work if your aim were to bring previous customers back to your store. For example, this would be a great strategy for clothes shops. You could find out what the user bought from you and direct them to the most relevant landing page. Be sure to use highly targeted ad text if you go for this option.

Average Order Values

Find the users who spend a large amount of money on your website and create a highly targeted campaign for them.

Lead Generation

Topics

By segmenting your e-mail lists by topic, you’re able to narrowly target the users who are interested in a certain section of your business. For example, a marketing agency could segment its lists on the basis of the different services offered, such as “Design” or “Branding”.

Sales Funnel

Identify the different levels in your sales funnel and target the user at each level. An example of this could be a leisure centre: if a user completed an enquiry form, target them to sign up for the leisure centre’s services. If a user applied specifically for a gym, target them to sign up for the gym.

Last Action

Target users based on the last action they took on your website; check out the “Behaviour Flow” funnel in Google Analytics to find this data and analyse from there.

Downloads

Did the user download a specific whitepaper from your website? Where did the user’s e-mail address come from? Figure this out and create an e-mail list with details of where you originally found them.

What Else?

It is also worth creating a campaign targeting all e-mail addresses in order to catch all traffic with a generic ad describing what your business does. You don’t need to use bid adjustments on this list, but you could use bid adjustments of +5-10% on the segmented lists. Another thing to note is that your e-mail lists need a minimum of 1000 e-mail addresses per list in order to work with your campaigns, so work out whether you have enough e-mail addresses to split out in the first place!

I’m sure there are many more strategies out there that you can use for your campaigns, but these should help you get started.

If you can think of any other strategies to use with Customer Match, please comment below. Alternatively, feel free to ask me any questions on Twitter via @Koozai_Sophie.

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10 years of Google Analytics… and 10 features you’re probably not using

Back in 2003 Google bought a company called Urchin Software, and subsequently launched the first free, commercial-grade analytics platform. How time flies!

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How To Build Brand Loyalty

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hi. My name’s Harry Gardiner, and welcome to my latest video, building brand loyalty. Now having a loyal following of customers is incredibly important for business success. To start off with that, you’re going to need to build and cultivate a community of fans and followers. This video will hopefully explain how you can do that in a few ways and how you can encourage that community to keep following you and earn their trust.

Let’s start off with telling a story. If you tell a story with your brand, you can keep your brand message consistent and make the business as a whole relatable. Take Netflix for example. Reed Hastings, CEO and co-founder, once said that the reason he came up with Netflix is because he had a DVD with a late fee that he didn’t want to pay. Now he invented an entire business off that one idea, supposedly. Within that one sentence he’s made a multibillion company very relatable to the average user. You, too, can make your content relatable and story driven to help encourage users to follow along with it.

This will obviously get them connecting further as well. You can use a variety of different tools, such as social media, to connect with your audience and to get one on one with them. Obviously, if you are using social media, remember to reply to the good and the bad comments on social media. Don’t just favour the good ones. Anyone who is a negative is just a positive in waiting really.

But social media isn’t the only way to connect with your audience. There’s plenty of other ways, including online surveys, offline polls and focus groups, and customer analysis to understand what your audience actually want from your brand and connect with them better.

Once you do understand what they want, you can start personalising content. Look through purchase history, look through customer analytics, and look through how people are treating your brand to personalise content right there. I know some brands who do personalisation really well, include Boots who obviously send you out personalised rewards from what you’ve used on your Boots card. Obviously, O2 on Twitter and JUST EAT on Twitter as well are really great with personalising special presents towards users who shout about the brand.

So don’t be afraid to get really personal with the content. You can either personalise it on a grander scale and segment your audience and personalise it to different segments, or you can go real micro personalisation and personalise pieces of content or rewards to one particular person. If you make one person feel special and they start shouting about the brand, that’s a loyal customer for life right there.

Once you’ve got loyal customers, make sure you stay true to what you’ve said and the promises you’ve made. Don’t ever make promises your brands can’t keep. If you do falter on this, or if you do come across problems or mistakes, don’t just defer back to the standard terms and conditions robotic brand. Try and overcompensate and over deliver for the people who’ve been let down. You’ve got to remember that if you’ve made a promise, your audience will expect it of you. So if you can’t deliver on that, do something better. See what you can do and try and turn all those negative reactions into a positive situation.

One way to do this is to reward your customers and to keep people loyal is to consistently reward those who’ve been there with you from the beginning. If you’ve had people who started off with your brand and started shouting about your brand, don’t forget about them once you get bigger. Make sure you consistently reward them with exclusive discounts and loyalty schemes so you’re not just offering the people who newly join you but also those who’ve been with you for ages.

Finally, testimonials are a great way to gain brand loyalty from new customers and a great way to have your old followers show you exactly what it is they like about your brand. A great way of getting testimonials is obviously just to ask for them on site or to use post-purchase surveys or even email marketing. Another great way is just to go on social and maybe ask people what they love about your brand, what it is that inspires them about your brand, or even just ask them to shout about how great something is. There’s no harm in asking your audience to say what they like about your brand, and obviously that’s a great way to understand it better as well.

These have been a few couple of whistle stop tour around building brand loyalty, a few couple of tips for you to understand better. If you have any more questions or if you’d like to discuss this further, feel free to hit me up on Twitter @Koozai_Harry or check out the blog around this site and the other videos for more information.

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Eight steps for an advanced PPC competitor analysis

The battle for leads, customers and revenue through PPC advertising is fierce and it’s getting harder and harder to differentiate yourself.

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Lowe’s: the customer journey from search to checkout

In which we take a look at the experience of searching for a product, testing the relevancy and helpfulness of its PPC ad, the subsequent landing page and clicking-through to purchase an item, all from a customer’s point of view.

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Steps to Effective App Market Research

In order to market a successful app, it is essential that you first carry out comprehensive research to really understand your market and audience. This research allows you to shape the app and your strategy accordingly, including choosing the right marketing channels, setting realistic goals and measuring the right success metrics.

Fail to plan and you plan to fail, as they say.

Know Your Audience

It is vital that you fully understand who your target audience really is and how to approach each different type of target user.

When considering your target audience, identify any relevant core demographics; these may include:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Ethnicity
• Income
• Marital status
• Residential status
• Employment status

Of course, understanding your audience is about more than top-level demographics such as these. To really drill down into the behaviours of your target audience, you need to consider individual information, including hobbies, interests and behaviours, particularly in digital and social.

Start to plot who your target audience is, what these people do and what interests them. This will allow you to consider what will resonate well with them, how you can find them and what they might expect from your app.

Study Your Competitors

A critical and often overlooked step in any type of marketing research is competitor analysis. To understand who your app competitors are, start by reviewing apps that appear in the various app stores for the sorts of keywords you’re likely to want to appear for.

Download as many of your competitors’ apps as possible and thoroughly test each one, asking yourself:

• Are they targeting the same audience?
• How does their app compare to what you intend to offer?
• How do they work to retain users and avoid uninstalls?
• What do they do well and what can be improved upon?
• What features do they use which could work for your app?
• What are their reviews like and how do they encourage positive reviews?
• What channels are they using to drive downloads?

Select Your Channels

Once you understand your audience and have reviewed what your competitors are doing, you can start to think about how and where you will market your app. Different app markets will work differently across different channels, and assessing the success of competitors across different platforms should help you make informed decisions on your own marketing.

Social is often one of the most successful channels for app marketing, but different platforms may perform better for different markets and target audiences. For example, for a dating website you may find Facebook advert targeting options are perfect, allowing you to target single users and even drill down to gender and sexual orientation for highly tailored ads. Jumping on the back of trending Twitter hashtags, on the other hand, could be a great way to get in front of an already-interested audience.

Social platforms which may be appropriate for your app include:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• LinkedIn
• Other relevant niche networks

Other channels to consider when marketing your app include:

• Paid search – are there target keywords you can bid on with relevant text ads?
• Email – do you already have an email list you can market to?
• Organic – do you have an optimised website about your app?
• Referrals – what relationships can you build with other relevant sites and publications?

Set Your Goals

Once you have researched and put together your go-to-market strategy, you need to carefully select achievable, measurable and time-centric goals. Think SMART. Goals may include:

• Achieve x amount of downloads by y
• Retain x% of users for at least y
• Maintain x% active users

Using insight gained from your competitor research will allow you to set achievable goals. The more research you carry out before going to market with your app, the better your chances of succeeding and meeting your goals.

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Three things advertisers should consider about Yahoo and Google’s deal

While many in the SEO community debunk the myths that the new domain extensions will have any impact on SEO status, pioneers in the space have proven otherwise.

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10 things to look for in your site search data

The terms that visitors type into your site search box can provide valuable insight which can be used in other marketing efforts.

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Keyword Anchor Text – Good or Bad?

Remember Google Penguin updates? Of course you do! If you’re one of the SEOs that got your sites smashed into the ground by the updates, you’ll probably be a little cautious of keyword anchor text links. But are they really the devil they’re made out to be?

Fear of using keywords in anchor text has led to many SEOs discarding the practice altogether. Of course, a natural and balanced link profile will have all kinds of links with all kinds of anchor text, but they’ll naturally centre on the brand or the products they sell. I still think there’s room for it – just hear me out before you call the spam police!

Adobe Reader – Click Here

I remember this old example from my first days in SEO. Google searching “click here” or just “here” would pull up the Adobe Reader download page as the number one ranking. Why? Because so many sites had linked to the page with “click here” or “here” as the anchor text.

The page wasn’t optimised for targeting the word “here”. It only ever ranked so well off the back of the links it had.

And now, after all the Penguin updates have rocked the foundations of SEO, it’s still there. It’s still ranking (and damned well too) for the word “here”.

Note that the image has been edited to remove the map listings – but that’s a number 4 organic ranking for a page that isn’t even trying. It’s there because of the anchor text used in the referring links. Here’s a look at the anchor text in Majestic:

The second most popular anchor text after the product name is “here”. And that’s why it’s getting found. So what does this mean? Can you start using keyword anchor text links again? I’m going to say yes, yes you can – but only if you do it right.

Indeed there are ways of doing it right, just as there are plenty of ways of doing it wrong. No black, white or grey hats involved – this goes beyond the old-timey SEO hat chat. Just use the thing under the hat (your brain) to determine if what you’re doing is useful or spammy. But don’t be scared of using them – they have a place and it works for SEO.

Don’t be Scared – Be Smart!

Here’s my argument: there are many situations where branding a link, using generic anchor text or using an unpacked link just aren’t a contextual fit. For example, a user reading a piece of content with a group review of products will be happy to click the name of the product and be taken to a point of sale.

With links like that, I say go for it – keyword anchor text that link up. But be smart about it and make sure the text makes sense in the sentence, not just contextually. No more “buy used cars Southampton” shoehorned into every sentence with a keyword anchor text link each time.

To be fair, this works better with products than it does with services and locations, because it sort of feels natural to click on a product name. In fact, we expect it when we’re shopping online. That doesn’t mean that there’s no situation where it can’t work for services and localities too – you’ve just got to play it smart and give each situation individual treatment.

Still, a lot of content requests flying around out there are asking that branded anchor text links are used to take the user places, but is this really the most useful way to do your linking? Is it just a misunderstanding of what the Penguin update was supposed to achieve?

Why All the Fear?

I won’t go on about the Penguin update too much (although a new one is almost with us) – by this point, anyone with an interest in SEO knows what it’s about. It targets sites with abundant links that look unnatural. With the information, the site is penalised either manually by a Googler or algorithmically.

Neither is good, but a manual penalty is hard to remove and requires lots of time and resources. The site may never recover from it fully.

I remember reading a comment in the Google Webmaster Blog from a user claiming innocence after getting a manual penalty and making scathing remarks about how unfair Google was being.

A Googler replied to them with something along the lines of this: “you’ve made thousands of blog comments linking to your site from your username ‘Buy Used Cars Southampton’ (or whatever the keyword was, I don’t remember specifically) – that’s spam”.

Too right that’s spam. It’s stupid to assume Google will let that slide. But linking to a product with the name of the product as the anchor text isn’t spam per se. When you apply the tactic above – that’s spam. If you do it by other means (I’m talking about content marketing here!), then you’re not only safe, you’re going to absolutely smash it.

So What Should You Do?

Each link needs to be treated differently. It’s funny – pre 2012, SEOs would be thinking about getting their links in thousands at a time. Now, it’s almost on a one-by-one basis (or at least it should be).

Remember it’s not just the anchor text – the source and context are important too. Let’s say you make an awesome piece of content (I hate myself for using that blanket phrase…). It’s got interactive elements and some audience-focused points of interest. It’s titled “Shimano vs SRAM” for a mountain biking blog.

You share the post and do some outreach to influencers in the mountain bike community. That title is probably going to find its way into the anchor text linking to it several times. Not by force, but by nature.

And that’s a good thing. You should encourage it. There’ll be links from other mountain bike blogs and if it gets shared by your influencers, it could get forum links, bigger social shares and a whole heap of eyeballs on it.

And if you get “Shimano vs SRAM” as the anchor text in every link you acquire? Don’t start freaking out that Penguin is coming for you. You didn’t do anything wrong. You did EVERYTHING right. The content rocks. The title is on point (and just so happens to be a keyword). Most importantly, people love it and it’s getting shared.

Always aim for that kind of link – the one your user made. If they make it with keyword anchor text, then you did a good job!

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4 Content Ideation Methods

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Coming up with content ideas can sometimes be a little tricky. This is even more apparent if you’re working towards specific deadlines. So if you’re in charge in your company of coming up with content ideas or you do this within a team internally, this video for four content ideation methods will help you.

We’re not talking about the specific forms of content, for example blog posts or infographics. This is basically the initial ideas, how you come up with the actual piece of content you want to write before it takes a form as it were. So this is right at the start of the content marketing strategy, just looking at the ideas and how you formulate them to start off with.

Number one on the list is key dates, events, and seasonality. It’s worth creating an events calendar or using an Excel spreadsheet or some form of table to basically log these three things. Key dates being things like conferences, trade shows, events, product launches, any breaking news in your industry, any news related to the company and the business and transformations in the business as well. Anything you can think of, just write it down. At this stage it’s all about choosing lots of ideas and refining them later, rather than not sharing any at all.

Put them into a calendar. Look at the events that are coming up in your industry that you might not necessarily be associated with initially, but it still helps for you to write about when it actually comes around to that event. Very good for ego bait and linking out to other sources as well. So put them in there. You don’t always have to choose them. Obviously, you’ve got the record, and this will help with ideas of how you can begin to start creating content.

Seasonality as well. Are there certain times of the year, i.e. Christmas, Easter, and Halloween, that you could basically use to come up with title ideas off the back of that and focus content around those particular areas?

It’s best to present that information in an Excel table or a calendar, because then you’ve obviously got all of it at hand. But maybe break it up into those three subcategories so you’ve got the key dates, events, and seasonality, and then off the back of that you can then look at focusing in on particular ideas.

Second on the list is problems and solutions. No doubt when you’re doing your day-to-day job you’ll come across a number of questions that you might ask yourself or questions that customers might ask as well. This is even more apparent if you use social media, because a lot of the time people will complain or they’ll ask questions for you to solve on social media as well.

So you can actually use that. You can use a specific problem and then try and use those as ideas for content to provide a solution to that problem. That’s a great way, instead of emailing people back or telling someone over the phone or repeating yourself over and over again at networking events or conferences. Use that as a way to solve people’s problems and put that into a piece of content, be it an infographic or a blog post. Again, you will decide further down the line, but you can use those particular problems to format that into your content.

Third on the list is the “5 Ws and 1 H Method.” This basically stands for … the 5 Ws are what, who, why, where, and when, and the H is how. So this basically involves choosing a particular topic or theme and then addressing all of these six questions.

You might have a massive trade show event coming up in your industry. So you could look at what the event involves, who’s involved, why people would need to attend in your industry, where it’s being held, when it’s being held, and how to get there or how you can get involved or how you can present at the trade show. Picking a theme and answering these questions again gives you ideas for what you can write about further down the line.

Lastly on the list as number four is mind mapping. This is more of a visual way of doing things. If you work better doing things visually as opposed to just lists and putting things in calendars, it’s a very good one for you. So I’ve given an example of what it is here. But essentially it’s about picking a theme and then picking your sub-themes and smaller categories off the back of that.

As an example, the main theme we’ve got for my mind mapping is marketing. So we’ve established that we want to write about marketing. Which areas do you want to cover that expand from that central theme? We’ve broken that down into SEO, PPC, and content and then again you can break these sub-categories down even further to look at things like Meta if it was SEO, or web copy for example in content.

Doing this, take a large piece of paper, plot all your ideas down, and you will end up with a big visualisation of all of your ideas for the different subcategories. Once that’s complete, you can basically look at which areas you want to write about off the back of that. Or again, it doesn’t have to be written content, but it gives you a much more visual way of seeing all your ideas in the different subcategories.

Again, any of these can be dropped into tables or things like this, or the problems and solutions if you create a table for that as well that you can refer to later on.

What I would say is don’t be afraid to put your ideas out there. It’s much better to start off with loads and then reduce them, rather than trying to pick the best one straightaway, because you might find that you come up with an idea that you don’t think is right, but you might adjust it slightly later, or you might find another unique angle on it that someone has not done before. So no idea is wasted.

Best of luck when it comes to creating your own content ideas. Thanks for watching. For more information, please visit Koozai.com or visit any of the social icons at the bottom of this video.

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Four easy calculated metrics you can implement in Google Analytics

Until now there was one little feature that was missing but it’s finally here: the ability to create personalized metrics from existing ones.

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Rugby World Cup 2015: Which Brands Got It Right?

For those of you who may have been living in a cave for the past two months, England hosted the Rugby World Cup this year and it is been hailed as the most successful world cup to date. 20 national teams participated in the World Cup on the pitch, however, off the pitch 100s of brands were competing.

From traditional TV to social and digital channels, print to experiential, all marketing channels were used as a communication vehicle to get brands’ rugby-themed message out.

Approaches varied from brand to brand, with some focusing their marketing strategy around backing the tournament whilst others were backing individual teams.

Now the tournament has come to a close, the most important question is this: Which brands won the Rugby World Cup?

Heineken

With Heineken being an official worldwide partner of the Rugby World Cup, it was expected of them to squash competition from other brands. Whilst they didn’t exactly ‘dominate’ with their marketing strategy, they did manage to successfully run one of the best campaigns.

Heineken set out a marketing strategy that aimed to increase brand loyalty alongside awareness for their brand by getting fans involved with the tournament. From social media to ambient marketing, they ensured they utilised as many channels as effectively possible to ensure they achieved optimal reach.

It’s your call

“It’s your call” was the global campaign run by Heineken; this gave rugby fans the chance to flip the coin at the start of their country’s game:

It’s official! #ENG play in red. Here’s Coin Toss winner @Chris__Ralph opening the tournament. #ItsYourCall #RWC2015 http://pic.twitter.com/AG56kEBkCH

— Heineken (@Heineken) September 18, 2015

Social media was a primary vehicle used to engage with fans. Through this channel they regularly featured two activities: the Coin Toss and Rugby Studio.

Rugby Studio

Rugby Studio allowed Heineken to position themselves as an expert in the game. Calling upon rugby experts and legends of the game, games were analysed and short clips were regularly shared across Heineken’s social media channels.

.@Matt9Dawson and @WillCarling weigh up #ARG’s chances against #AUS and #NZL. #ItsYourCall #RWC2015 https://t.co/HE1d0h2fnv — Heineken (@Heineken) October 25, 2015

Fight or Flight

This ambient marketing stunt offered shoppers at a Tesco in Ireland the opportunity to win a VIP trip to the Rugby World Cup, although this didn’t exactly go ‘viral’, it still managed to attract and involve an audience of different demographics.  

So how did this official sponsor do in the grand scheme of things?  

Heineken managed to engage mass audiences through multiple marketing channels, ensuring engagement with their brand and tournament. Although they may not have monopolised as much as they would have wanted (with Guinness closing in on them with their marketing activity), they certainly raised and set the standard for marketing in which not many brands were able to meet. 

O2

As an official sponsor of the England national rugby team, O2 focused their marketing efforts towards encouraging the nation to support their team.

Make Them Giants

‘Make Them Giants’ was the campaign run by O2, which accompanied the ‘#WearTheRose’ hashtag. The concept of this campaign revolved around making the English rugby team stronger, making them ‘giants’ by supporting them and wearing the English rose:  

All acts of support shared across social media were pulled through to a hub hosted on the O2 website where fans could see other acts of support.  

Potentially one of the bravest campaigns discussed in this post. It’s easy to assume that England’s early exit from the competition would have greatly affected the success of this marketing campaign. So, did England’s early exit massively impact this campaign? I personally don’t think so. O2 managed to capture the feelings of the nation and keep them united even past their exit, using social media channels to do so:

Standing beside you. Always. #WearTheRose http://pic.twitter.com/pgPjsfq3pe — O2 Sports (@O2sports) October 3, 2015

From what could’ve been a complete failure of a campaign, O2’s responsiveness enabled them to cement themselves as a true brand that embodies the spirit of the sport, with over 5.4 million acts of support being recorded.

Samsung

Being an official partner of the Rugby Football Union, Samsung set out a marketing strategy that aimed to enhance people’s experience of the game whilst reaching to a wider audience, utilising the expertise of English rugby legends in the process.

School Of Rugby

Samsung’s ‘School of Rugby’ adverts set out to teach newcomers to the game about some of the most confusing rules. Featuring comedian Jack Whitehall, England rugby legends take Jack through his paces, teaching him (and the people viewing) some core lessons.

Along with the adverts, Samsung also launched a School Of Rugby hub on their website, a spot where fans can go to watch exclusive content and read further into the rules of the game.

Although the ‘School of Rugby’ campaign didn’t exactly make me think ‘I want a Samsung product now’, it was still a very effective idea, and helped position Samsung as experts in the sport. It made for really funny TV and excellently targeted those followers that were new to the game (me), opening the sport up to a wider audience.

MasterCard

Another official worldwide partner of the Rugby World Cup, MasterCard were able to create a campaign that forged a strong brand bond with consumers during the tournament.

44 Days of Crazy

MasterCard launched their ’44 Days Of Crazy’ campaign that ran through the duration of the tournament, aiming to create priceless moments for people and turning the world ‘oval’.

The world turned oval during #RWC2015 to create some incredible memories. What has been your Priceless moment? http://pic.twitter.com/ExtDd22r8j

— MasterCardUK (@MasterCardUK) October 28, 2015

 
A range of ambient stunts were held in various locations, creating truly viral content that involved genuine people with genuine responses, such as the surprise Haka at Convent Garden days before the tournament started.  

MasterCard remained mostly online for the duration of the campaign, where they used social media channels to keep users engaged with the campaign using the hashtag #44DaysOfCrazy. Along with this, they also created a central hub on their website where users were able to receive live updates around the campaign.

Man Of The Match

With MasterCard being the brand that sponsored the Man of the Match award, MasterCard decided to put the decision to the public to vote for their winner. Fans could do this via Twitter using the #MOTM hashtag and MasterCard’s Priceless website, where one fan had the chance to present the award to the player themselves – this obviously went down very well.  

MasterCard truly understood how to keep users engaged both online and offline, providing fans with plenty of opportunities to become directly involved with the tournament whilst creating unforgettable moments. MasterCard clearly demonstrated their forward-thinking approach to marketing and showed rugby fans why they are a global brand.

Guinness

Although blacklisted from being served at any stadium throughout the duration of the Rugby World Cup (Heineken’s request), Guinness’ long association with rugby helped them to remain a strongly connected brand with the game.

Made Of More – Never Alone

During the build-up towards the opening of the Rugby World Cup, Guinness aired their ‘Never Alone’ video, part of their long running ‘Made of More’ campaign.  

This advert fitted nicely into the type of inspiring content created by Guinness and really managed to capture the passion of the sport and players both on and off the pitch. Focusing around former Wales captain Gareth Thomas, the video managed to resonate with rugby fans and people alike, capturing the attention of a mass audience right before the start of the tournament.

Social Media

Guinness’ activity on social media was certainly the area where they excelled and blew competition out of the water. Their ability to create stunning reactive content that addressed events during the tournament really helped them stand out from the crowd.

Japan makes Rugby history. #Madeofmore http://t.co/7cTGIiHwED http://pic.twitter.com/R4iaSlAqOt — Guinness GB (@GuinnessGB) September 19, 2015

The cup goes back to black. #madeofmore https://t.co/7cTGIipVN5 http://pic.twitter.com/w6eYX234ZB — Guinness GB (@GuinnessGB) October 31, 2015

The content shared by Guinness simply but very effectively created a strong link between their brand, their product, and the game, strengthening their association further.  

The marketing activity seen by Guinness throughout the tournament really showed why they are at the forefront when it comes to emotive adverts. By pairing emotion with the intensity of the game, Guinness really were able to captivate and speak to a mass audience, something a lot of brands struggled to do.

Conclusion

The brands that focused on living and breathing the tournament, sharing daily updates and constantly engaging with their audience succeeded the most.  

The brands that took marketing to the next level were those that grew with the tournament, the likes of Guinness and O2. Their adaptive marketing strategies helped them to truly capture the emotions felt by those involved in the tournament – those are the brands that won in my opinion.  

I’d love to know your thoughts on any marketing activity you’ve enjoyed during the Rugby World Cup. Feel free to leave me a comment or contact me via Twitter.

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