Posts Tagged ‘Site Ranking’

SMX East 2011 Recap Pt 2 – Personalized Search and Data Consistency

October 3rd, 2011

This is Part 2 of the Search Marketing Expo East 2011 wrap-up.

The Search Marketing Expo in New York, also known as SMX East, concluded September 15th after three days of speakers and programs. Produced by Search Engine Land, SMX East was an awesome educational and networking experience for hundreds search marketers, techs and business professionals from all over the globe.

In the first part of our SMX East wrap-up, we covered Google +1 and Search Rankings and how Microformats are changing the way that content is found. In this installment, we’ll cover two other important takeaways from the programming.

3. In the Google Personalization & Robot Gatekeepers keynote address, “If personalized search is here, are keyword rankings dead?” was the question addressed by Eli Pariser, Board President of MoveOn.org and author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You.

Personalization may be the greatest achievement or greatest downfall of the web. Think about it in this perspective: Total personalization – that is, a web that is tailored to your interests, associations and activities – is no longer service-specific. It’s a buyer’s market vs. a seller’s market. When personalization factors alter or impact what you see on the web, then the web will show you what it thinks you want to see, not the information world as it actually exists.

Is this evil? Not necessarily. Although some attendees were wide-eyed at the thought, some skeptical, Eli explained it in simple terms: “Google most likely doesn’t have malicious intentions with personalization. Google is trying to make the web experience a little more passive, give you a better user experience.”

Okay, that’s an understandable approach to their personalization effort. But we all hope that Google understands that they don’t really know who we are. Google only thinks it knows who we are, based on our actions, our preferences and the content we regularly consume.

One of the additional problems with a wholly-personalized web experience is that a significant portion of the web-searching market may not know when the results are being personalized and when they are free of filters and solely native to the keywords in their search terms. Of course, the other glaring problem is that personalization may pose a great filter barrier for those SEOs and site owners that rely on keyword rankings and a level playing field to get their message out to the broadest market.

One last note from Eli, a well-stated suggestion for the powers that be at Google: “It would make it easier if we (the users) were able to understand the filters, able to turn them on or off, rather than having them imposed on us.”

A large part of this keynote was pulled from his Beware of Online Filter Bubbles TED talk. If you have not watched it yet, it is highly recommended.

4. “On local search, Data Consistency is key,” said Mike Ramsasy, one of the speakers at the Hard Core Local SEO Tactics panel.

Some would say that data consistency is a mantra that has been chanted to death. Not true. Now, more than ever, data consistency is crucial to local search rankings. Ramsay kicked off the discussion by claiming that “correlation does not equal causation. You cannot cause your page to rank by merely claiming your Place Page.”

Ramsay is correct. Any first-year statistician knows that correlation between two variables does not automatically imply that one causes the other. Ramsay goes on to say “build out your Place Pages with purpose. Own your data and fill out everything accurately.”

Some of the “most recommended” Place Page factors to focus on include the following:

  • Consistent NAP (name, address and phone) data
  • A manually-owner-verified Google Place Page
  • Proper category associations for your business products or services
  • Local area code on Place Page

Each of those recommendations suggests that you work to eliminate data confusion. For those who may not know, your Google business listing is commonly known as a Place Page. As a business owner, you can verify your business, add content to your listing, just make certain that your business name, address and phone number is consistent everywhere. A great tool to see if you have good verification metrics is GetListed.org. This tool can quickly check Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, YELP, Best of the WEb and hotfrog.com.

The reason for all this consistency is this: Ramsay and the other speakers have rightly suggested that “citation” is a ranking factor of highest importance. A citation is where your business name and address is mentioned on another website. These citations can come from directories, blogs, articles, or merely appear on other sites for whatever the reason. Citations do correlate highly with rankings. A citation is founded on data you can control and make consistent.

One easy way to verify data consistency is to search for “address” and/or “phone number” and check the results several pages deep.  Name, Address, Phone = NAP. And NAP creates your citation. Build out pages to reinforce your data and consistency. Easy. Worthwhile.

Tags: citation, Google, Map Listings, PageRank, search rankings, SEM, seo rankings, Site Ranking, smx
Posted in Google, Local Search, SEO | No Comments

Social Media & Search Engine Marketing in 2011

August 19th, 2011

There are those who believe that social media is nothing more than chatter and noise, an unending stream of absurd prattle that is clotting our bandwidth and deafening our ears. Balderdash.

For the purposes of this article, we’re going to talk about the impact of social media on search engine marketing (SEM) in terms of measurement. Reason is: we’re all in the social media game to drive traffic to our websites, right?

At its best, social media is this: Exposure, Influence, Engagement, and Action. All of this chatter and noise should lead up to the sound of the cash register ringing. As far as social media marketing planning and goals are concerned, you need know little more.

Recent State of Search Data on Social Media Marketing:

The proportion of companies who don’t engage in any social media marketing activity has dropped from 18% in 2010 to 13% this year. In the same time-span, the number of SEM agencies that treat social media marketing as a part of their regular service offerings has grown from 48% to 54% (more than half). And although social media marketing efforts are more common for Business to Consumer organizations, rather than Business to Business, we expect to see B2B social media trend up as organizations of all types begin to see the impact that social media marketing has made for B2B social media stars like Cisco, Oracle and Intel.

Side note: Forrester Research predicts that “B2B companies will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.”

It’s clear that more businesses and organizations are getting into the social media game. They’ve learned that social has a direct impact on their SEM interests. Traffic = Numbers.

Some companies are already leveraging the full potential of social media exceptionally well. For example: The Ford Motor Company uses Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and an excellent blog called The Ford Story to engage their prospects and customers. They encourage their blog readers to share their own pictures or stories and feature this content on the home page of the official Ford website.

If you haven’t seen the Hollywood megamercial video of professional rally driver Ken Block drifting his 2011 Ford Fiesta at YouTube, go watch it now. Ninjas, sharks, zombies, an ape on a rocket-propelled Segway scooter, blistering pyrotechnics, the Epic Meal Time guys, Bollywood dancers and a healthy dose of product placement for Ford, Monster Energy, DC Shoes, et al. makes for good traffic stats all around. At 3.6 million views to date, that’s good social. Respect.

But what is all this really doing for Ford? Well, against their top two U.S. competitors, Ford presently has a 2,941 worldwide Alexa Traffic Rank vs. 16,392 for GM and 21,609 for Chrysler. For Ford, that’s 5x better than their nearest U.S. competitor – for the win.

Traffic rank (over time) is just one way you can measure the effect of social media on your site. But please remember that quality of traffic often beats quantity. Big numbers for unique visitors is always nice, but time on site, pages per visit, frequency, and depth will show you a level of engagement for your visitors. You can track most of these metrics with web analytics tools like Google Analytics or the Adobe Online Marketing Suite (aka Omniture).

As a social media savvy company, Ford is doing something with their social media efforts that too many companies are missing entirely. Ford is creating exposure and engaging their consumers at the social level and converting that interest into influence and traffic numbers.

Remember: Exposure, Influence, Engagement, and Action = Revenues.

Engagement what? How is this different?

Let me be clear. Someone once said that social media should activate your customers, not collect them. We all know that brand awareness is a top objective for social media marketing, but who really cares if your Facebook page has 50,000 people who like it, or if you have a million Twitter followers. If your website isn’t seeing regular improvements in traffic numbers and traffic stats from one quarter to the next, you’ve missed the point of social media marketing entirely.

Here’s the takeaway on social media measurement:

Social media is a combination of spreading the word about your business and gaining a direct response. Contrary to the beliefs of the few, social media marketing is not some fleeting blip on the marketing and advertising radar. The effects are obvious and measurable. Although your return on investment (ROI) calculations may be somewhat different to figure, you can absolutely measure the effect of your social media efforts at the site analytics level and attach dollar figures to the details.

Conversely, if your marketing department is investing in billboards, TV advertisements or print pages in the phone book or whatever, your rep may be all-too willing to take credit for any improvement in sales you may see – when in all reality, these sales numbers may have little or nothing to do with these ads.

In the social and SEM game, performance is measured first by attribution. And any analyst can watch the traffic source stats, time on site, pages per visit, frequency of visits, depth of visit, event goals reached, URL destination hits and directly relate those numbers to money in the bank.

Chatter and noise are beautiful things, are they not?

Tags: Alexa, Analytics, Facebook, Google, PageRank, Reports, Site Ranking, Social Networking, Twitter
Posted in Facebook, Social Networking, Sweet Spot Marketing, Twitter | 1 Comment

Understanding Alexa Rank

January 8th, 2010

Alexa.com is a website which provides information on traffic levels for websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed.

More simply, Alexa is a ranking system which is based on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who have the Alexa toolbar.

Alexa Bias

Undoubtedly Alexa rankings are skewed towards websites which have a large webmaster/tech audience. This is because a more web savvy audience is much more likely to have the Alexa toolbar installed than whose visitors are unaware of Alexa.

As such, many have indicated that Alexa is a vastly inaccurate method of measuring a website’s reach, traffic and potential. Ultimately the web has a finite amount of website ranking systems for measuring site value. Sweet Spot Marketing looks at the Alexa ranking as it might compare with your competitors sites in the same industry.

Alexa Results

Think of Alexa Rankings like a Golf score – the lower the better. As you might image, SweetSpotMarketing.com falls into a more tech savvy category than many other websites. Internally, we have several employees who have downloaded the tool bar. Also, many of our friends, clients, and general site visitors are perhaps more apt to have the tool bar installed.

Back in September of 2008, our domain name was actually SweetSpot-Marketing.com, our company site was in its infancy and our Alexa Rank was over 17 million. A year later we have a new domain, but more importantly our Alexa Rank moved into the top 200K sites.

Sweet Spot Alexa Rankings

Sweet Spot Alexa Rankings

How do I improve my Alexa Ranking?

There are methods which will allow you to bring an Alexa ranking in the millions down to the sub-million level for most any site (tech or not). Getting past the 100,000 or 10,000 mark is a considerably more difficult process these days. If you are interested in knowing who the best of the best are, Alexa ranks the top 500 sites for you.

Before getting into tips for improving your Alexa ranking, it’s important to first emphasize that you should devote most of your efforts in growing your site audience alongside strategic implementation of original content.

Having great content always leads to natural traffic and naturally increases links. In the long run, focusing on maintaining a site which attracts a larger audience will ultimately improve your Alexa ranking beyond what any one person can do alone. The power of many always trumps the power on an individual on the web.

Step 1: Start using Alexa yourself. If you are using Internet Explorer, visit Alexa.com and download the Alexa Toolbar. A better option, if you’re using Firefox, is to download the Search Status extension. This Firefox add-on will give you other data beyond Alexa ranking.

Step 2: Encourage others to use the Alexa toolbar. If you are part of a larger corporation that employs several people, then have an IT person install the toolbar on everyone’s computer for them. Imagine the potential if everyone’s default home page was the company website!

Step 3: Setup an Alexa profile and verify your site. By signing up at Alexa.com and verifying your site (simple file upload) you can customize what Alexa info is presented about your site.

Step 4: Get others to rate your Alexa profile. This may be a roundabout way of improving your score, but letting Alexa know that others care about your site is positive. It definitely can’t hurt to generate some positive PR even if it does not directly impact your ranking like site visitors do.

Step 5: Use an Alexa widget. Alexa currently provides 3 widget options depending on what information you may want to share.  Some webmasters think Alexa can monitor these widgets so each click counts as a visit, even if the visitor does not have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computer. Don’t be totally consumed with improving your Alexa rank (remember the bias) to the point that it begins to hurt your website and negatively impact user experience. If you can place the widget in a non-distracting location on the web, this tactic may work for you, but it’s not for everyone.

Step 6: Use Pay-Per-Click Campaigns. If your site is relevant to a more tech savvy crowd, then buying traffic on search engines will likely bring in more Alexa toolbar users. It’s a side benefit of non-converting PPC traffic if you are looking for a silver lining.

The easiest way to know if any of the tips mentioned really work is to actually try them for yourself and monitor the results. As a Sweet Spot Marketing SEO client we monitor this trend for you.

Tags: Alexa, Site Ranking
Posted in SEO | Comments Off