Video marketing isn’t necessarily a new marketing strategy, but it’s definitely becoming a very popular one, because video in general is becoming more widely consumed by the general public. Let’s face it, people love video.

YouTube is now the second most popular search engine, just behind Google. There are over 800 million unique users who visit YouTube every month, and how they’re getting there is changing. Video is much easier to view from a mobile device than is text, and thus more than 20% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices. Not to mention that 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute from mobile devices.

If you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or involved in marketing in anyway, you need to know what video marketing is, why you should use it, and how to excel at using it.

What is Video Marketing?

In its most basic form, video is the integration of aesthetic concepts: visual, aural, and conceptual; it’s music, image, and story all rolled into one. This is how video should be approached when we begin thinking about the web – not as a type of content which is an interchangeable format to text and image, but an integration of these elements, demanding full time attention from an audience.

Just to clarify, there is a big difference between marketing WITH video and marketing A video. I’m talking about marketing WITH video, which means incorporating video into your overall marketing campaign. There are several strategies you can take in video marketing: viral video marketing, video email marketing, video campaigns, mobile specific video marketing, video advertising, etc. Whichever avenue of video marketing you choose your content creation process will remain basically the same.

There are two parts of video marketing: creating a video that is relevant to your audience while maintaining your business goals, and the actual process of marketing your video. Simply throwing your video up on YouTube is not going to get you thousands of viewers; you need a specific strategy that gets your video out to your intended audience. Before you launch your video you need to prospect for blogs, sites, and people who you think would be willing to host your video. Once your video is actually launched, you then need to outreach to those prospects to see if they are able to host your video.

Why You Should Use Video Marketing

Beyond using video because of its rising popularity that I discussed earlier, there are other perks to using video in your marketing campaign, including user engagement, branding assistance, and SEO benefits.

User Engagement
Video as a medium allows users very little freedom in terms of consumption – it’s easy for users to skim text and decide which sections are most relevant to them. However, video offers no skimming option, you either watch the video in its entirety, or it fails to hold your attention and you stop watching. Additionally “watching” a video is a somewhat passive experience. When users decides to press “play,” they are asking to be shown something, asking to be given the content in an integrated, multi-disciplinary form rather than digging through and exploring the meaning themselves.

Video, therefore, engages your audience differently than will text or pictures. With video, the experience of comprehension is more immediate, driven by story-telling elements and a restricted timescale. The amount of information that can be displayed through one second of video vastly outnumbers the amount of information that can be read.

Branding Assistance
When using video it is much easier to create the experience of a physical interaction than it is through audio, image, or text. Through video, we can display much of who we are honestly. For branding, this is extremely important, as it allows companies to display a humanistic aspect much better than through image, audio, or text. By creating a human side and relatable characteristics, a company can build trust with their viewers much easier through video than text or images.

Due to the relative low uptake, online video can also indicate professionalism and brand quality. If a company has enough time, money, and skills to create high quality video, viewers assume they are a legitimate business with a genuine interest in providing a great service.

SEO Benefits
Video is also an extremely valuable resource for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), specifically by assisting with the following goals:

Conversion Improvements
Through increasing engagement and trust, video content can be a great way of driving greater conversions, particularly on commercial pages. This is the main reason why product videos have become popular in the Ecommerce world – as a method of improving the rate at which users click “add to basket” and complete a full purchase.

Link Building
Links continue to be the main metric with which search engines determine the authority of a piece of content, so link building is crucial to your website’s success. Links to a website are counted as “votes,” so the more links and social shares a website has, the more popular that page is. Search engines read that popularity as authority, so more links means more authority. Search result rankings are then based on a combination of relevancy (determined by the content and terms used on the page) and authority (determined by the number of referring inks and social shares). People link to pages with video more than to pages without, and people embed videos on their sites, which means more links and higher rankings for your website.

How to Excel at Video Marketing

As I mentioned earlier, video marketing has two parts: creating your video and marketing your video. In order to excel at video marketing as a whole, you need to be successful in both parts of this process.

Creating Your Video
Even if you have a video production team on board to actually produce your video, there is still a rigorous creative process you need to undergo in order for your video to be relevant to your viewers and your business objectives:

1. Content Gap Analysis: This basically determines who your audience is, and thus, what your approach will be. Ask these questions: What do people care about? What might work in your niche? What have other people done in different verticals?

2. Determining Success: In this step you need to outline what successes you want to achieve. Pick out key performance indicators (KPIs), and good, better, best scenarios.

3. Form Gap Analysis: In this step you will determine what form your content needs to take. Ask these questions: What style of content do you need to achieve your objectives? Should you split the content across the different KPIs or hit all KPIs with one bit of content?

4. Define the technical implementation: Hosting, embedding, integration etc.

5. Define subject and theme.

6. Pre-production: Determine level and style of product required, and script your video.

7. Production: Make your video.

Marketing Your Video
Like I said earlier, you can’t simply put your video on YouTube and expect it to go viral. There are processes involved in getting your video on YouTube successfully and getting it on other sites (blogs, informational sites, etc.).

Getting Your Video on Non-Video Search Engine Sites
1. Pre-Outreach/Prospecting: Sifting through potential sites that you can outreach to.

2. User Testing: Determine on page location, size of video, and calls to action.

3. Launch your video.

4. Outreach: Contact your prospects and ask them to host/embed your video.

Getting Your Video on a Video Search Engine Site
Every company should have some presence on YouTube, as it’s the world’s second largest search engine. YouTube is only suitable for creative, interesting content that users will want to watch voluntarily (unless you are creating ads and seeding them through YouTube advertising). YouTube should be seen primarily as an avenue for branding, reputation, notoriety and to help content “go viral.”

Advantages:
• Content is available to the largest audience
• Gets indexed very quickly and will typically rank well
• Content often gets socially shared, allowing great creative pieces to “go viral

Disadvantages:
• Cannot secure content
• Social shares, embeds and links will typically point to YouTube
• YouTube.com may often rank instead of your domain, especially if the content is very successful

This is only a taste of the who, what’s and why’s of video marketing. Distilled created a guide to video marketing, which is a your comprehensive handbook for creating and marketing your video as a part of your marketing campaign. You can download the PDF guide below:

With over 800 million unique users visiting YouTube every month, video is obviously incredibly popular, and if you’re involved in any sort of marketing campaign or small business, it would be wise of you to utilize video’s popularity. By using video you can better reach mobile users, as well, as video is much easier to view from a mobile device than is text. Take advantage of a captive audience now that you know what exactly video marketing is, why you should use it, and how to excel at using it.

Yesterday was the second day of #SESTO and I was excited to start off the day and learn more on Search Engine Strategies!  See below for highlights of the sessions I attended:

Social Media Solutions on a Budget

The first session of the second day was presented by Danny Iny, Co-Founder of Firepole Marketing and Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital.

-       Social Media is technically free, so when one says implementing social media solutions on a budget it consists of time commitment

-       Use social media to build three components that companies need to build with their customers:

• Know you better
• Like you
• Trust you!

-       Most believe Twitter and Facebook is the best tools to use in social media, however, there are plenty of other outlets that can help get better results such as:

• Pinterest
• Slideshare
• Scribd
• Review sites in non obvious categories

-       Social media is one of the only advertising methods that allows a company to have specific targets.  Keep your social media marketing efforts as targeted as possible

-       Use the marketing funnel to help you understand where you want to go with your social media marketing efforts

-       Most social media marketing efforts fail because a conversion funnel is not created, make sure to map it out in detail

-       There are brands out there like Swiffer who rather have their customers tweet or write on Facebook about how much they love using the product instead of spending time and money to get their customers to “like” their Facebook page.  Swiffer may not target a specific group such as men 20-30 which are unlikely to “like” Swiffer’s Facebook page, however they may tweet on their own measures telling their friends how much they love to use the product

-       There are possibilities to build partnerships with other companies that have the same target group as you – that way working together can build and market a larger target group

-        It’s important not to have content just to have it for the sake of content – it’s about being engaged with your target audience

-       http://bit.ly/get-naked – how to create something amazing

-       It is recommended if you don’t have a lot of unique visitors a day to only blog a certain amount of time because, no one is reading your posts.  Use that other time for something more productive

-       Try going to a brand and telling them how wonderful their product or service is and ask to write a review and if they can put it on their blog – that is a good way to get attention from the authoritative brand

-       It’s a good idea to repurpose your content from a blog post into a video etc.

Remarketing/Retargeting Done Right…&Wrong

Dax Hamman, Chief Revebue Officer, Chango and Kevin Lee, CEO, Didit were the presenters at the second session I attended.

-       If you use a CPC you may want to use a pixel measurement to see how many click-throughs you get

-       Success Factor: Considered Purchases: What is the window of opportunity for the buy funnel? The longer your prospects are in the market the more opportunity you have to remarket to them!

-       Think about how much time you have to retarget before you start thinking of ways to target your audience

-       Simple retargeting can be done in Google AdWords

-       Before retargeting it is vital to understand how much each of your target groups cost per impression before you start retargeting

-       Ghostery – Firefox – is a tool that can let you see what cookies your competitors are firing off

-       The seven types of effective retargeting:

• Search
• Site
• SEO/SEM
• Email
• Contextual
• Engagement
• Social

-       Search and Site retargeting work hand in hand and should be dealt with together

From Keywords to “Buy Words”: Finding High-Value Paid Search Keywords

The last session I attended on day 2 of #SESTO was presented by Andrew Goodman, President of Page Zero Media and Matt Van Wagner, President of Find Me Faster.

-       Keyword Primer:

• Queries vs. Keywords
• Normalization
• Keywords Match Types
• How to control keyword matching into and within your accounts

-       Bing matches keywords to plurals and Google matches to plurals and close matches (which you can opt-out of)

-       Search engines have different rules for ignoring extra spaces, punctuation marks and noise words.  Should you have a “&” or “and” – most punctuation marks are thrown away and not really important

-       There is a difference between Google and Bing – Google is more strict on the keywords and the precision of what is searched

-       The degree of closeness between what users want and the response process you offer them will determine your success

-       What could go wrong before getting to the landing page?

• Wrong geography
• Keyword intent is off
• Ad or listing is ambiguous

-       What you may be doing wrong with adwrods?

• Too many, stay, unmanageable keywords lurking in long tail ad groups
• Match type problems overshadow diligent keyword research
• Constantly reinventing the wheel, scanning search query reports after the fact to discover “converting” keywords
• Overreacting to isolated conversion events

-       Keyword Selection: Some quirky errors:

• Majority of intent on queries is informational
• Breaking new category
• You’re b2b; too many consumer searches

-       Google is always updating quality score keywords

-       Intent keywords have a higher quality keyword score

It has been another awesome year at #SESTO – thanks to the SES team and to all the experts that shared all their knowledge!

UPDATE – Showing Greg the blog post

It’s Day 2 here at Search Engine Strategies Toronto.

Here are some of the highlights from the sessions today:

Information Architecture for the Modern Website with @BrentDPayne

Subdomain or Subfolder?
- If you have a lot of content that’s not related to the core of your website, use a subdomain

Expired Content
- Challenges: time sensitive content, discontinued product line, changing news facts
- Opportunities: PageRank consolidation, up selling/cross-selling, news one-box refresh
- Repurpose expired content to breathe new life into your website and help your rankings
- Or redirect expired content to relevant pages on your site to consolidate your PageRank

Canonical Tags
- Tell Google the version of the duplicate content they should show in search results
- It passes PageRank to the original source
- Remember the versions need to be very similar

Google will continue to look at the user signals to determine rankings.

One of the biggest ranking factors for ranking mobiles sites is the page weight / load time.

Google changes its mind all the time.

Black Hat
- Twitter link profile goes to Google search to get people clicking on your website for important keywords

SEO 2012 – What Still Works with @BrentDPayne and @TerryVanHorne

Response rates and open rates are dropping due to “crap marketing” – Van Horne

Guest blogging will always work, but you need to be careful where you get your links from – Van Horne

Use Link Prospector to find bloggers who are already ranking for the keywords you’re after and connect with them to do guest posts – Van Horne

Any type of major media links still works, anything with high authority that is editorial content (not comments) – Payne

Social media and user interaction signals are also becoming very important ranking factors. They are as important as links – Payne

Too many people have hit the links segment of the algorithm for too long – Payne

Advice for running local directories
- Niche and local directories – yes, general – no – Van Horne
- Don’t put do follow links on directories unless there is value add (ie review) – Van Horne
- Pull value-add information into the directory so it’s not just a simple listing – Payne
- Make the content so valuable that people want to link to your directory content – Payne

Focus on the .com, the other extensions are not ranking anywhere close to the .com versions

The only time you want to buy exact match domain names and try to rank them is if that exact match keyword has a lot of searches for it – Payne

301 redirects don’t pass all the Page Rank like they used to – Payne

Should I outsource my link building overseas?
- My experience has been EXTREMELY bad hiring people from the Phillippines to build links – Van Horne
- If you’re hiring people overseas and they’re building you real links on real websites then it can be valuable – Payne
- Stop faking it and get people to actually do work – Payne

Is reciprocal linking dead?
- Yes, as of 2003 – Van Horne

Mobile sites – Does having one help your SEO?
- Mobile search is eating desktop search’s lunch – Van Horne
- They haven’t figured out how to do PPC effectively on mobile – Van Horne

Do you get link value from commenting on blogs?
- Engage on the blogs first before being self-promotional – Payne
- Start softly, build up a reputation and get known on the blog first, then promote your stuff – Payne
- If you’re doing it for engagement, go for it – if you’re doing it for SEO, forget about it – Van Horne

Should I have one website or multiple domains?
- Focus your energy on one domain so you don’t split your attention and you can make the content really good – Payne
- Having multiple domains also splits up your links and weakens both domains – Van Horne

Should I create a video site map for my YouTube videos and submit to Google?
- Yes – the more data you can give to the search engines about what you want them to see, the better – Payne

Any advice for a new startup?
- Be a markerter, not a scammer – Payne
- It’s not about link bait, it’s about getting people to do something – Payne
- You have to get a lot smarter of becoming a good markerter instead of coming up with schemes to get around the rules – Payne
- The best time to someone as a client is in the startup phase – you can start them off properly – Van Horne
- Clients who have been around for a long time don’t have baggage, they have troubles – Van Horne

Is affiliate marketing dead with Penguin?
- Make sure you’re adding value and not just doing redirects – Payne
- Google doesn’t like resellers – they like the people who are making the products so if you’re reselling or being an affiliate you need to add value – Van Horne

That’s it for SES Toronto 2012! I hope you enjoyed the updates and I’m looking forward to next year!

Stay tuned tomorrow morning for Marija’s final update on the conference.

With Marija at SES Toronto 2012

Today is Day 1 of Seach Engine Strategies 2012 in Toronto. I’m here with Adis and Marija from my team and we’ll be covering the hilights from the conference.

Here are some of my favourite comments from Day 1:

@lyndseo talking Enterprise SEO

Enterprise-Level SEO with @lyndseo

Reporting – the SEO funnel
- Crawling – Are your pages being looked at by the engines?
- Indexing – Are your pages healthy enough to be included in the search engines?
- Ranking – Are your pages relevant to a searched keyword?
- Clicking – Are People clicking on your pageas?
- Converting – Are poepel converting once on this page?

Break down by segment – line of business, product group, etc.

Keywords should fall into at least one of these categories
- Driving traffic
- Driving conversions
- Non-branded

Metrics
- Traffic to site
- Traffic available (use Bing’s keyword tool for this)
- Conversions
- Conversion rate
- Rank
- Landing / ranking page

Tools
- On-site data – Omniture or Google Analytics
- Webmaster Tools
- Raven Tools
- Xenu

Tactics
- PR – link building, brand building, keywords
- Design / Usability – build wireframes for users and robots
- IT – customize (CMS not friendly? Have your IT team implement the fields and data you need. Great external links but the pages don’t exist? Build a script that’ll detect the broken URL and serve an appropriate 301)

Content Source
- Call centers
- Customer support teams
- Internal search

Sitemaps – create many
- Broken down by segment
- Helps identify issues

Anchor text – starting to see trends away from exact match

Canonical tag – a site your size? Yeah you have duplicate content

Don’t underestimate the meta description tag

Compress – how many JavaScript files are you calling from your pages anyway? How about CSS files?

Brand at the back (of the title tag)

If you do nothing else… Verify your sites with Google and Bing. The information is staggering!

@gregjarboe talking Video Optimization

Video Optimization with @gregjarboe

Pay people for what they love to do… create videos! You can gat a much higher ROI than just advertising.

Use annotations at end of videos to promote your other videos and to subscribe.

Invite your audience to create videos
- Create a contest
- You get original video content
- You also get market research on your target audience

Create video that is inspirational, entertaining, enlightening, educational

Optimization tips
- Use the Metadata
- Create playlists
- Optimize your channel page
- Use annotations
- captions (especially multi lingual)

There are more searches done on YouTube than Bing or Yahoo.

Programming tips
- The first 15 seconds – make the beginning compelling
- Calls to action – tell people what to do next, use annotations
- Regular schedule and frequency – give people a reason to subscribe
- Tent-pole programming – create, release, and package content that it themed around your own event

Social media tips
- Involve your audience
- Reach out to related bloggers
- Work with other content creators and cross promote between audiences
- Auto-share your videos on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Google+ Presentation

Google+: Improve your digital marketing

Small business have a huge advantage over brands in social media.
- Faster decision making, easier to make a human connection, better able to connect your passion to your customers

57% of people talk more online than they do ion “real life” – Word of mouth marketing is happening more and more online.

With Google+ Hangouts you can also share documents through Google Docs and slides through SlideShare in addition to videos with your audience.

Google+ Ripples shows you how your posts are being shared with in depth analytics. It will show you who is influenced by your posts and how they are sharing your content.

How to get started with Google+:

Create – Complete Your Google+ Page
- Create a page from your personal profile
- Fill our your About section, including your website
- Keep the conversation going

Share – Connect with customers with Hangouts
- Use Hangouts for customer service, to educate, and for internal meetings

Promote
- Link your page, site, and ads – Increase the chance of recommendations showing
- Add a Google+ Badge to your site – For top sites, the badge accounts for 38% of followers

Measure
- Make social accountable – AdWords, Ripples, Google Analytics
- In Google Analytics you can see which social media sites are generating traffic for you through their new Social Sources report. To find it click on Traffic Sources –> Sources –> Social
- The conversion report (Google Analytics) will show you the ROI of each network. You can measure direct and socially assisted conversions. You can also define the goals that are important to your business.
- Through Social Visitor Flow report (Google Analytics) you can see how social visitors navigate through your site and see what pages they visit.

Google+ is releasing a new feature every day. It has 170M+ users and 1M+ brand pages.

Google Hangouts automatically records your videos and posts to your YouTube page if you want to keep a copy of it and share it.

Talking with Team Google

That’s it for Day 1 – more coming tomorrow!

Tina Kelleher is a Community & Social Media Manager at Microsoft. The brand page she manages on Facebook continues to get high levels on engagement so I asked her a few questions about her Facebook strategies and Microsoft’s upcoming involvement at SES Toronto 2012 in June:

What is your role with Microsoft and why did you choose to get into your field?

I’m one of the three Community Managers on the Microsoft Advertising Community site.  I manage the adCenter Blog content and social media channels for the US and Canadian small business audience. My colleague in the UK, Simone Schuurer, does the same for the European audience.  Mel Carson manages the content on the Microsoft Advertising blog and social channels, which are primarily geared towards the Marketer and Agency crowd.

As for why I chose this as a career, Joseph Campbell once said, “Follow your bliss”… that’s essentially what landed me here.  I got started in social media back in 1994 with the old BBS systems (they didn’t call it “social media” back then, but that’s what it was).  From there, I moved on to Prodigy, AOL and have followed along with most of the trends since then, all the way up to Facebook, Twitter and now Pintrest.  I majored in English, so after graduation, I started thinking about what kinds of careers would let me marry my love of the written word with all the time I spent talking to people online.  Community Manager made the most sense, though there weren’t a whole lot of full-time positions in this field back then, so I took a detour into online marketing and PPC management before finally landing my dream job.

Why did Microsoft Advertising set up a Facebook Page?

Two reasons.  One, we wanted to give our readers a simple and convenient way to stay updated on the latest from the adCenter Blog. Where our content includes a mix of adCenter release news, pay-per-click optimization and campaign management tips along with other topics relevant to small business owners, we thought Facebook would be key for not only delivering that content to our audience, but in opening up opportunities to expand our readership through making our posts easily shareable.

Two, while we use both our Community forums and Twitter to respond to support-related questions and to gather feedback, we didn’t really have a vehicle that would help enable non-support discussions around topics relevant to the PPC/SMB audience.  We thought Facebook could lend itself well to that as discussions can be sparked with an interesting article or a simple question that could get people talking, both to us and to each other.

You’re consistently in the top 5 Pages for brands who target entrepreneurs (most recently #3 at http://www.evancarmichael.com/blog/2012/04/24/most-engaged-brands-for-entrepreneurs-april-2012/) – What do you do to keep your engagements levels consistely double the average for your industry?

We respond to every question that’s posted on our wall, we ask questions both as stand-alone posts and within the blurbs that accompany content postings and to help start discussions, and we post content gathered from SMB expert sources all over the web from sources like Entrepreneur.com, SCORE.org, etc.  As long as your content is relevant to your audience and you’re willing to have a conversation with them about that content, you can’t go wrong.

How do you determine what type of content to post on your Facebook page?

If it’s timely and relevant to the do-it-yourself marketer and/or small business owner, it’s prime fodder for our Facebook page.  Although getting eyeballs on our content is important, at the end of the day, we want to add value to our fans’ newsfeeds.  The goal is to provide information, not only about our products and services, but about topics that might be of use to small business owners, from PPC optimization tips to best practices for time management to what to look for when hiring a web designer.

What does a typical week look like from a posting persepctive on your Facebook page?

A typical week on usually has one post per day from the adCenter Blog, one post per day from another source not related to Microsoft Advertising – these can be anything from an article on Entrepreneur.com to a post from an SMB Blogger about some of the challenges they’re facing to a video from Office365 on using Excel more efficiently – and perhaps a few fill-in-the blank or open-ended questions to see what’s on our fans’ minds.  We’re very conscious about not spamming our readers, so we stick to a maximum of 3 posts per day, each one spaced out several hours from the last.

What advice do you have for business owners who are launching a Facebook page or trying to boost the engagement on their current Page?

First and foremost, know your audience: know what’s important to them, know what they value, know what excites them.  Once you’ve got a firm grasp on that, your next step is to be ready to have a conversation about those things – ask questions, share information – not just about your business, but about what you find valuable, interesting, exciting, etc.  Social media is about connecting people, not only to the information they’re after, but to each other.  If you know what your audience is passionate about, you can tap into that with the content you’re sharing to get them talking to you, and each other.  For more tips on managing your social presence, I’d recommend reviewing my coverage from the SMX Social Media Marketing conference last December… there’s some great info there from industry experts.

What is your team going to be showcasing at SES Toronto 2012?

We’ve got a couple of things going on at SES Toronto this year.  First, John Gagnon and Paul Corkery will be showcasing some of the adCenter team’s latest technologies and features in the Microsoft Advertising adCenter New Features Lab.  This session will cover new areas of innovation, best practices and “hidden” features (plus there might also be a preview of the next release!).  Second, we’ll have search experts on-hand to host a 20 minute one-on-one search optimization consultation.  Check your conference guides for detailed info on when and where these sessions will be.

To learn more, come check out SES Toronto 2012 in June - I’ll be there so if you’re planning on coming, drop me a note and we’ll meet up!

Through his blog, Occam’s Razor, and his best-selling books, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0, Avinash Kaushik has become recognized as an authoritative voice on how marketers, executive teams, and industry leaders can leverage data to fundamentally reinvent their digital existence. Kaushik puts a common-sense framework around the often frenetic world of web analytics and combines that with the philosophy that investing in talented analysts is the key to long-term success. He passionately advocates customer centricity and leveraging bleeding-edge competitive intelligence techniques.

I asked him a few questions about his upcoming session at SES Toronto 2012 in June:

1) You recently wrote that you love the quote “To guarantee success, spend 95% of your time defining the problem and 5% of the time solving it.” Please elaborate on the the biggest mistake website owners make in defining their analytic challenges?

The biggest mistake is not defining their web analytics challenges (we have more than we want of it). The mistake is not defining the purpose of their analytics efforts.

We have so much data on the web, almost all of it available for free, that we dive into the the data ocean hoping that magically awesome things will follow. They never do.

So my recommendation is that before you ever touch SiteCatalyst or WebTrends pause and figure out what the purpose of your analytical efforts is. What are your digital business objectives? What exactly is your acquisition strategy? What are the primary purposes you are trying to deliver against on your site?

Identify the purpose. Create a Digital Marketing Measurement Model. Then go after data.

I share a lot of specific guidance on how to do this in a recent blog post: The Biggest Mistake Web Analysts Make… And How To Avoid It!

2) Most people have access to web analytics tools but don’t fully make use of them. What are some of your favorite metrics that digital marketers can quickly leverage and pique their interest in doing more with their own analytics?

Here are some of the metrics I’ve called super lame, as they do not deliver material insights: Page Views. Impressions. Clicks. Time on Page. Even Visits.

Here are some of the metrics I’ve called super awesome, they are harder to measure but deliver a level of actionable insight that is bottom-line impacting: Days & Visits to Purchase. Assisted Conversion Rate. Economic Value. Share of Global Search. Task Completion Rate.

3) You’ve written about the “So What?” factor when it comes to measuring the value of one’s social media efforts. Please highlight a couple of those key social media metrics that brands should be focused on.

Most social efforts can be categorized as “Like quest,” or to put it more crudely: “Please please please validate my existence and click this Like or Follow button!”

The problem is that for most brands and companies this is almost completely disconnected from any business impact (short or long term).

I like using data to drive optimal behavior by companies. For social channels I’ve defined four metrics you can measure ascross all social channels to ensure that 1. You are participating in and optimal manner and 2. You are creating a long term asset for your company.

The metrics are: Conversation Rate, Applause Rate, Amplification Rate and Economic Value. I’ll be presenting this in my keynote in Toronto.

To learn more and hear him speak, check out SES Toronto 2012 in June - I’ll be there so if you’re planning on coming, drop me a note and we’ll meet up!

A while back I wrote a post about finding your site’s biggest technical (SEO) flaws in 60 minutes, and I had Evan contact me about doing a similar type of audit for this website.  Evan you’re a brave man, and I promise to be as ruthless as possible ;)

The point of this post (audit) is to show you what a professional SEO can do for you in less than an hour to help you improve your site. Since I’ve only given myself 60 minutes to complete this, I’ll likely miss out on some things but I’m going to concentrate on big issues such as:

1. Algorithm readiness – specifically Panda related issues (duplicate content, freshness, page layout)
2. Crawlability / Architecture & On page issues (markup, keyword targeting, JS etc..)
3. Identifying opportunities for Evan (new markets, keywords to target)

Here are the tools I’m going to use to rip through this:

1. Microsoft IIS SEO Crawler – Specific for types of redirection, markup errors, meta data
2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider – All meta data, response codes, and more
3. Seomoz toolbar - Nofollow links
4. Searchmetrics Essentials - Check for traffic / ranking anomalies in a flash
5. Spyonweb – Anything owned that might have dupe content?
6. Builtwith.com – Understand what server / technology is powering the site
7. Pagerank toolbar for Chrome – Mainly for spotting architecture problems
8. Chome (regular), Firefox & Opera (JS disabled) – The browser line up
9. HTTPfox – Firefox plug in to listen to HTTP requests
10. Compare text files online  and cloaking checker - Check for bot / user cloaking
11. Lots of Google search queries and looking through source code

The 1 hour SEO audit starts now…

Without analytics data, I need Searchmetrics to give me a picture the site’s status (search visibility, problems, keywords ranking).  Right away I can see a steep drop around late February of 2011, which is very closely correlated to the initial Google Panda update. (http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change#2011)

So I could be wrong and it could be something completely different (but I’m probably not wrong ;). This drop has my attention and I’ll be paying close attention to thin content, low value pages and duplicate content.

Potential Panda threats

Problem: http://tags.evancarmichael.com/

This is an entire subdomain devoted to duplicating content based on article tagging. I’m about as happy about tag related pages as I am about sitting to someone who smells on the bus.

Why is this a problem: This is a breeding ground for low quality pages that are essentially duplicate content. Duplicate content is a big no no for SEO because it confuses ranking ability between pages and in worst case scenarios, can harm all pages with similar contents’ ability to rank well..if at all. Also, Google wanted to weed out low value, duplicate content pages in their series of Panda updates – this subdomain could be one of the victims.

How did I find it: By using this Google operator search query

How much of a problem is it: We’ll call it ~50k pages worth of duplicate content on a site of ~150k pages – so, pretty bad.

How does it happen: This page exists because it’s been tagged in a category called “growth” (maybe automatically by the CMS or an author). If you copy and paste a snippet of text from the page, you should see it ranking 1st if it’s unique, except this page isn’t ranking at all for the snippet of text!

What to do: Cull them all. With poor page titles such as “growth” and reeking of duplicate content, the best thing to do here is to 301 redirect all of these pages back to the root domain (brownie points if you can 301 each tag page to a related deep page on the main domain).

Potential Page Layout Algorithm Update

Problem: http://forums.evancarmichael.com

The forum content on this site is actually pretty darn good. Evan and co. post some great topics, but you might not think it’s that valuable based on first impressions. Google released a page layout algorithm update this year that targets pages with excessive ad content above the fold. Every forum page has a banner ad and Google adsense block before the actual content (example: http://forums.evancarmichael.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4023&start=15) which makes it a perfect victim for the update or future roll outs. Also, if you’ll notice in the example forum page I provided, you’ll notice &start=15, remember that..I’ll explain below.

How did I find it: By using this Google operator search query and I found the &start=15 parameter by going to page 2 of a forum post and then used this Google operator search query.

How much of a problem is it: From what I can see, it doesn’t seem like the forum has been affected (please note, I don’t have access to Evan’s analytics and I could be dead wrong). However I do know that the &start= parameter (for pagination) is causing around 3k duplicate pages.

How does it happen: (only explaining the start= parameter) This is basic pagination for most websites when you have too many items / products / posts to consume on one page, you paginate. How you structure the URLs for page 2,3,4 doesn’t really matter – it still affects the site exactly the same way.

What to do: 

For the page layout: Move the adsense to the sidebar, or make it less prevalent on the page – I would keep the banner ad at the top.

For the pagination parameter: In this case, we want Google to index all of the forum posts, give the forum post links pagerank – but not the paginated URLs. This is a perfect case of using the robots directive to NOINDEX,FOLLOW which means “Hey Google, I want you to see what’s on page 2,3,4 but I don’t need you wasting your time adding these pages to your index. Also, the first page is the only result I want users to see.” Ok, so I uncomplicated it – hopefully you get the picture.

Alternatively, you could also use rel=canonical to point every paginated version back to the first page. Technically, it works – but it really shouldn’t since the content on the paginated versions isn’t entirely duplicate. The rel=canonical tag transfers pagerank (page/link authority) where the NOINDEX doesn’t. This is a bit devious and that’s why it’s my second choice in this case -so use at your own peril to game the engines!

Crawlability / Architecture & On page Issues

This is the bulk of this post, and I’ll keep it as brief as possible to fly through it.

Problem 1:  A full copy of the website (www and non www version exist)

One of the basic checks of a seasoned SEO is to check if the www & non www version of the site exist.  Basically, they are different sites that host the same content and that’s just how the internet was made :) Although Google does a good job at trying to canonicalize the preferred version you set in webmaster tools, it’s still cutting the domain’s link authority. People don’t always link to you with your preferred version, and since they are separate sites – you won’t get all of the “link juice”.

How did I find it: By using this Google operator search query

How much of a problem is it: It’s a biggie, I think this site is missing out on around 65 linking root domains and around 600 links.

How does it happen: When you buy a shiny new domain, you get the www and non www version.

What to do: Write a redirect rule (in this case the HTACCESS file for Apache) to redirect all non www pages to their www counterparts.

Problem 2: Unnecessary Redirection

Our principle example is: http://www.evancarmichael.com/blog/famous-quotes/inspirational-business-quotes/ and the redirection link is “#2: Oprah Winfrey, Harpo”

But here’s some more:

• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/514/Lesson-5-Find-Your-Passion.html
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/blog
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/614/Walt-Disney-Florida.html
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/614/Lesson-2-Chase-Your-Dreams.html
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/592/Lesson-5-Have-Fun.html
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Forums/

How did I find it: Screaming Frog, Internal links report & IIS Crawler. Confirmed it by using HTTPfox.

How much of a problem is it: A straight link to a page passes 100% link juice, but a 301 redirect won’t pass the full value. It’s hard to control on external sites because we can’t always control how someone links to us, however it shouldn’t happen on our own sites.

How does it happen: You create a new page and 301 redirect the old page to the new page to conserve link authority. Except, you forget to correct internal links pointing to the new pages.

What to do: Change the links to the right targets. For example, the link to Oprah’s profile (http://www.evancarmichael.com/Famous-Entrepreneurs/514/summary.php) on this page (http://www.evancarmichael.com/blog/famous-quotes/inspirational-business-quotes/) should go directly to http://oprahwinfrey.evancarmichael.com/.

Problem 3: More duplication, this time it’s WordPress powered blog.

This is the same type of problem I discussed above as a Panda threat, except this time it’s a stock problem with the WordPress CMS. Category, Author and Tag pages are just duplicate content pages that can serve a user well in terms of navigation – but can be a problem when they compete with actual blog posts.

How did I find it: Screaming Frog

How much of a problem is it: Right now there are a ~2k of  pages with duplicate content – however the bigger this blog gets, the worse the problem will become.

How does it happen: It’s just a WordPress stock feature

What to do: Easiest way to fix it is to include the NOINDEX, FOLLOW directive again on all author, category and tag pages. To do this super easily I recommend Yoast’s SEO plugin – it’s so good it could put me out of a job, trust me on this one.

Alternatively, you can also use the rel=canonical tag to point back to a main article. It works to transfer page/link authority, doesn’t reduce Googlebot crawl inefficiencies and also is not the correct use of the tag (because the pages aren’t entirely a duplicate, only sections). Use at your own peril to game the engines!

Problem 4: Duplicate & inefficient page titles

Duplicate examples:

• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Retail/3844/What-is-CRM.html  title: What is CRM?
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Technology/6763/What-is-CRM.html  title: What is CRM?
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Business-Coach/2830/Managing-Change.html  title: Managing Change 
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Leadership/2076/Managing-Change.html title: Managing Change 

Poor page title keyword targeting

• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Going-Green/2340/Cars.html title: Cars
• http://www.evancarmichael.com/Business-Coach/2554/Be.html title: Be

Page titles are crucial for SEO and need to be as descriptive as possible, as well as completely unique. There is no compromise here, we just have to do it to help Google match content to queries.

How did I find it: Screaming Frog

How much of a problem is it: These pages aren’t being seen, either because they have duplicate page titles and Google is confused on which page to return, or the titles aren’t relevant matches to the queries – example: “be”.

How does it happen: I * think  * this is due to user generated content.

What to do: Evaluate each article, do some keyword research and title each page according to it’s content. As a general rule, each page title on your site needs to be absolutely unique. You can read more about cannibalization here.

Opportunities

Bearing in mind I did a quick check – I looked at top keywords surrounding Entrepreneur and sadly, didn’t see the site ranking on the first page for top volume terms. So I’d like to see this site take a piece of the ~50k exact match searches per month (US) around these terms:

Also, I’d like to point out that there’s a new kid on the block in this field that’s gaining momentum – how about we create some pages targeting “startups” ?

Source:http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=startups%2Centrepreneurs&cmpt=q

Things I should tell you

Overall, it’s a pretty good site – but there is opportunity. I’ve only included a few points in this post but rest assure I performed well  over 50 different checks in an hour.  In the interest in the length of the blog post and to make sure you’re still awake – I kept it brief.

A special thank you to Evan for volunteering his site for the audit – it’s been fun!

So what did you think, was it useful? Do you have any questions?

Feel free to leave them in the comments below, and feel free to send me a tweet every now and again ;)

Image credits:

Baby Panda http://icanhascheezburger.com/

With part of my EvanCarmichael.com team Marija and Adis.

Today was Day 2 of SES Toronto and it I was excited to kick off the second day of sessions.

Check out all the photos from Day 2 here.

I wanted to highlight some of the takeaways from three of the sessions I went to today.

Video Optimization Panel with Jonathan Allen and Terry Van Horne

Jonathan came on board as director of Search Engine Watch with Incisive Media in December 2009. This newly created role will see him bring the spirit of collaboration back to Search Engine Watch and transform the site into a vibrant community of search and tech marketing professionals.

Terry Van Horne has been developing and marketing websites since the early 90′s in various marketing and development positions including working as internet marketing manager for one of Canada’s largest real estate developers; SEO for an award winning real estate search engine and marketing manager for ecommerce stores in the apparel and musical instruments.

• Name your video according to the suggestions that come up in YouTube search.
• Copy the tags of the most popular videos around the same subject so you show up in related videos and start to drive traffic from their videos. It can lead to a huge spike in traffic.
• Create playlists around keywords to get a boost in your rankings.
• In your YouTube Analytics you can see other videos and see what’s driving traffic to them and where it’s been embedded on other sites.
• The more you get your videos embedded the higher up you will rank. It’s one of the most important Youtube ranking factors.
• Take long videos and chop them into chunks and then create a playlist for them. Think of 2-3 minutes as a maximum for each clip.
• How-to videos are extremely powerful. Entire companies are forming around creating how-to videos. Share your expertise!
• The low production cost how-to videos tend to outperform the high budget ones.
• People want to see that you’re excited about the topic and that you’re being authentic.
• A popular video trend is unboxing. People show themselves opening up new products.
• Check out Treepodia – it turns XML site map feed into videos and is a great option for e-commerce sites.
• Also check out YouTube.com/create – It contains 4 free software packages to turn articles into video
• Create partnerships with YouTube power users and find innovative ways to work with them and get the to talk about you.

The Panda-pocalypse Survival Guide For  SMBs Panel

The panel members were:

• Moderator: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch.
• Speakers: Thom Craver, Web and Database Specialist, Saunders College (RIT), Dave Davies, CEO, Beanstalk SEO, Garry Przyklenk, Founder, Eclipseo Online Marketing, Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo

• Google’s Panda update came in response from pressure from the industry for Google to improve the quality of their results.
• This was the first update that used a user panel to benchmark their algorithmic changes with a human audience.
• Some of the signals Google is using includes: click through rates, number of times site is viewed through Chrome, site blocking in chrome, and time on site.
• Some of the suggestions to help you recover: change your user interface and make it more user friendly, use canonical and rel=author tags, and look at social to build communities and build your links.
• Diversify your traffic so it’s not all coming from Google – try to have less than 40% of your traffic coming from Google.
• Diversify your SEO techniques as well – most people that were hit by Panda were using 1 or 2 techniques to generate links – ie just doing article marketing or just directories, etc – you need to mix it up.
• Don’t just look for links, look for audiences.
• Google’s new +1 button is like Facebook’s like button but for Google.
• Google created +1 because they don’t want to have a high dependency on other sites for social signals.
• A +1 vote is an indication that the site is good quality.
• +1 will be a signal but the strength of the signal is still unknown – especially in the short term.
• If Google sees that users are using it then it’ll become more important.
• Google is offering bonuses to their employees who are using the plus one button.
• If you’re going to diversify your traffic sources, look at social strategies instead of site architecture first.
• Check for duplicate content, take it out.
• Make your site move faster, make it look cleaner.
• Install webmaster tools for Google and Bing, make sure all your errors are validated and improve your site speed.
• Outside of the Internet community, most people don’t know what a +1 button is so there is a big education component still to come.
• Build your website for users not from search engines. Users buy things from you – Google will never buy anything from you.

The Secret Formula To Boost Response with Bryan Eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg is the co-author of the Wall Street Journal, Amazon and New York Times bestselling books “Call to Action”, “Waiting For Your Cat to Bark?” and “Always Be Testing”. Bryan has been the keynote speaker for Search Engine Strategies, Shop.org, Direct Marketing Association, MarketingSherpa, E-consultancy, Webcom, SEM Konferansen Norway, and the Canadian Marketing Association.

• Every marketing campaign needs to have a unique landing page. If you’re getting traffic from Twitter, Facebook, or Pay Per Click then you need to have separate landing pages targeted for each.
• The conversion trinity: 1) Are you relevant to MY query? 2) Do I know WHY you are the right solution for me? 3) Is it obvious WHAT I need to do next and have you given me the confidence to move forward?
• To boost signups for a newsletter: show a sample newsletter, tell people what they’re going to get, don’t make them fill out too many fields – name and email only.
• The most important page elements that have a significant effect on conversions are: headline copy, content images, body copy, and form layout.
• When using Pay Per Click advertising make sure the exact wording in your ads also appear on your landing page. Maintain the “scent” and you’ll improve your conversions.

Next Gen YouTube Marketing

The panel members were:

• Moderator: Krista Neher, CEO, Boot Camp Digital
• Speakers: Jonathan Allen, Director, SearchEngineWatch, Greg Jarboe, President & Co-founder, SEO-PR
• Q&A Speaker: Terry Van Horne, Partner, Reliable SEO and SEO Training Dojo

A lot of the content was already shared in the Video Optimization Panel but here are some other tidbits of information that I found useful:

• Check out Tadcast,  a dating agency for brands who want to get their products placed in YouTube videos through power users.
• Monetization – can make $10k from every 1 million plays in YouTube.
• Curate video on your own site through services like Magnify.
• User generated content (UGC) should be authentic, no actors, no marketing budget, short form and promoted on YouTube and Facebook.
• Zero budget UGC: Make video out of text via Xtranormal and Moviestorm.
• Zero budget UGC: Make video out of photos via Animoto.
• Zero budget UGC: Remix Creative Commons videos on YouTube – use it to post video responses.
• Channel Tactics: upload email forwards, report on events.
• Video Tactics: keyword rich titles, target known search queries, transcripts, copy tags, tag people in the video (Facebook & Twitter).
• Framing the subject: Interviewee should be framed slightly to the left or right of the screen, looking off camera with both eyes visible with eyes 2/3 up the screen.
• Try to use your logo in the background.
• More than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute but nearly 30% of all the videos on YouTube are getting 99% of the views.
• You can’t make it on YouTube alone, so make friends and build relationships.
• Keep to a schedule as well as a theme when publishing your video content. Expectations are important. It’s better to upload one video a week than 7 all at once and not do anything for 7 weeks.
• Video has become a subscription business – you need to get people subscribing to your channel.
• Encourage people to thumbs up your video, leave a comment, and subscribe to your channel.
• Cross-platform promotion and the first 24 hours are both huge on YouTube. Tell everyone on all your channels as soon as you launch a new video.
• Don’t watch the comments too closely, but obsess over YouTube Insight.
• If you discover that a particular blog is sending you a lot of viewers, reach out and say thanks.
• Hot spots will also tell you where users stop paying attention and drop off.

I hope you enjoyed the 2 day coverage and if you have any questions just leave a comment below!

It has been another pleasurable day at the SES Conference and Expo here in Toronto!  The theme of today’s sessions was Social Media  – the topics varied from Social Media 101, Social Media Solutions on a Budget to Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics.  Below I have listed some of my favorite points from the sessions I have attended.

Social Media 101

This was a solo presentation by Krista Neher, CEO of Boot Camp Digital; throughout Krista’s session the audience was exposed to the main issue most business owners have – creating value for your audience.

• A successful approach to social media is to create value for the communities that include you, not to promote your product, service or yourself.  The more value you create for the community the more value they will create for you.
• When companies decide to join the social media network – they always start from the bottom.
  - First you should listen, holistically understand the person you are trying to reach.
  - Second think about your marketing strategies and what you are trying to achieve with social media.
  - Third you have to know who your target audience is, figure out how your product or service can solve a problem for them.
  - Fourth step is to figure out your content (good strategy & creative execution)
  - Final step is to track and measure, and then make adjustments accordingly.
• If you want people to like you, keep them around you more often – to do that you have to bring them into your marketing funnel which includes four points:
  • Awareness
  • Interest
  • Desire
  • Action
  • When you create content make sure you think about the easy ways other people can share your content.  Also look for social networks that apply to your network, it will make it easier to find people that are interested in your products/services.
  • Twitter is the most powerful social media because you are able to connect with anyone whether you know them or not.  13% of Americans use Twitter (which is up 5% from 2009)
  • Ratings are very important when it comes to your product or service – people are willing to pay 50-99% more for a 5-star product over a 4-star product.  You can use LinkedIn to get reviews from people you have made connections with.
  • The 8 categories of Social Media include: Publishing, Sharing, Social Networks, Microblogs, Co-Creation, Public Relations, Discussions & Review and Mobile.

Social Media Solutions on a Budget

This session contained wonderful tips from Lisa Buyer, CEO of The Buyer Group and Jason Yormark, VP of Marketing and Social Media, Strategies 360.  I will provide the abundance of programs they have listed for the audience below for various Social Media Networks.

• Keep updates short, sweet and optimized
• Since Social Media takes up so much time, and time is money Lisa has given an efficient scheduling timeline for one hour a day:
  8:00 am – 15 minutes
  12:00 pm – 15 minutes
  4:00 pm – 15 minutes
  15 minutes – unpredicted
• Results:
  • Referring traffic to website or blog
  • More engagement/interactions
  • Increased followers
  • Increased subscribers
  • Blogging Resources for Themes since the design of the website is very important check out these links:
    • ElegantThemes.com
    • WooThemes.com
    • StudioPress.com
    • ThemeForecast.net
    • 99designs.com

Twitter

Building Reach:

• • Listorious.com
  • WeFollow.com
  • Twellow.com
  • Branding:
    • Twitrbackgrounds.com
    • Fuelyourcreativity.com/free-new-twitter-psd-background-template
    • CRM:
      • Hootsuite
      • Tweetdeck
      • Seimic

YouTube

• GoAnimate
• One Time Media
• Xtranormal Movie Maker
• Stuperflix Video Maker

LinkedIn Groups

• Great resource for new leads, customers, web traffic
• Identify relevant groups to join
• Contribute regularly outside of sharing your own content

Social Analytics

• Social Mention
• Hootsuite
• Postrank
• Google Analytics
• Klout/Peer Index
• Google Alerts
• Export.ly

Golden Tool of The Day!

Triberr.com – is a reach multiplier which is an invite only website (you could request to join), it allows you to interact with people that are related to your business.  The reason the website is invite only is to keep spammers out however, it allowed Jason to grow his initial reach over a million in one month!

Killer Facebook Targeting Tactics

Actual Bio:

Marty Weintraub, CEO of aimClear, an online marketing agency that has managed Facebook ad campaigns generating over 10 billion impressions internationally.  Client credits include MarthaStewart.com, Siemens, Second Life, Budget Direct, and other global brands.

• PPC is to SEO as Facebook Ads are to Social Media
• Targeting Creativity:
  • What personal traits?
  • Who’s professional characteristics?
  • Which radically private predilections?
  • Concept transcends Facebook
  • Inspired by bottomless personalities
  • Facebook ads are targeted by location, sex, age, relationship statuses, profession, and education etc – what people are interested in.
  • If you are trying to sell noise cancelling headphones it is best to advertise to people on Facebook that like travel agencies such as Expedia.com etc.
  • Make sure to differentiate where the potential lead works instead of the company they like – it can be as different as a page they like or a company they actually work at so you have to be careful where you are marketing.
  • There are over 35 million people in the world who speak English in countries other than US, Canada, Australia and UK
  • When advertising on Facebook
    • Do not take hard core sales positions
    • Offer value
    • Serious Marketing Power
      • Your target is never truly off duty, whether they are home or at work they could log into their Facebook
      • Catch them at home off guard

It has been an amazing experience at SES Conference and Expo – being around the SEO experts themselves has allowed me to learn so much!  I look forward to attending the SES next year!