Benefit of Syncing Business Google Plus and and Local Pages

Sam Harrelson on December 4, 2012

In doing some research for a client, I came across this piece and I couldn’t agree more:

Syncing Your Google Plus and +Local Pages: Plusses and Minuses | Mihmorandum: “Having gone through the process, the benefits of the extended descriptions and links you can add to a sync’ed +Local page, and the early-adopter ability to promote ONE single Plus presence for your business seem pretty substantial.”

We’ve helped a few clients verify their address with the snail mail postcard-from-Google method and it’s been painless every time with nice benefits in search engine results.

So, if you’re in need of having your physical address linked to a high ranking result in your serp’s, we highly recommend going through the process.

Top 2012 Yahoo Searches Across Categories

Sam Harrelson on December 3, 2012

From a meme point of view, this is fascinating data…

2012 Yahoo Year In Review: Over 500 Top Searches In Over 50 Categories: “Below are some of the most interesting categories overall, and I’ve highlighted items in Yahoo purple that may be of particular interest to tech / Internet geeks and have also linked to relevant stories on Search Engine Land /Marketing Land about some personalities mentioned below, and for topics such as SOPA and Facebook’s IPO.”

While “Top 10” lists by themselves are static noise, lists such as these in aggregate are a goldmine.

Rising Cost of Pay Per Click

Sam Harrelson on October 18, 2012

We like to preach about discovery (social media + organic search engine optimization + paid search) because we realize that channels such as Facebook Ads or paid search are not as effective at getting people to your site and performing an action there alone as they are in a healthy combination.

This report in the NY Times today comes as no surprise to us…

This concern has become increasingly common as online advertising has become a standard channel for large companies. Attracting those additional advertisers has been great for Google, which reported  a 42 percent increase in paid clicks, year over year, for the second quarter of 2012. But the heightened competition has driven up the prices for keywords and made it harder for small companies like Mr. Telford’s.

While about 96 percent of pay-per-click advertisers spend less than $10,000 a month, according to  AdGooroo, a research firm that studies the pay-per-click market, big-budget advertisers spend hundreds of times more. In the first half of 2012, Amazon reportedly spent $54 million, and the University of Phoenix $37.9 million. “AdWords can bleed many a small business dry,” said Sharon Geltner, an analyst at the  Small Business Development Center at Palm Beach State College in Boca Raton, Fla.

It’s no secret that paid search is highly effective if you know what you’re doing with setup, keyword selection and eventual optimization.

What we do (and what we really enjoy doing) is helping small businesses realize that tactics such as targeting demographics or locations or keyword buying with a specific goal in mind can help level the playing field of the competitive pages of a Google result.

My Favorite SEO Plugin

Sam Harrelson on January 2, 2012

I do most of my own SEO but when I have an affiliate site on WordPress (as most of mine are), I like to use the great SEO Ultimate Plugin. There are a few others out there (probably equally as good) but this plugin is my go-to when it comes to quick link masking, 404 detection, deep linking prefs etc.

There’s a new update out that expands on some of the functionality…

SEO Ultimate WordPress SEO Plugin Version 7.2.1 Released: “Link masking has two benefits: First, it lets you replace lengthy affiliate URLs with short, clean, internal URL masks (using 301 redirects, which have no search engine penalty). Second, Link Mask Generator automatically generates robots.txt rules that disallow your masked URLs, effectively neutering the juice-flow of the link, without resorting to the rel nofollow attribute. This combination makes Link Mask Generator a perfect tool for affiliate marketers.”

If you use WordPress, it’s worth a look as a plugin.

Here’s a PDF with all of the new features.

All Traffic is Not Good Traffic

Sam Harrelson on December 30, 2011

Affiliate Summit published its latest webinar today on the topic of traffic generation. Evan speaks for an hour about how he generates traffic and “fans” organically through search, via social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook, with email and paid search…

10 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website: “Affiliate Summit ran a free webinar featuring Evan Weber, of online marketing agency Experience Advertising, on 10 Proven Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Affiliate Website, and it’s now available to watch on demand.”

It’s an interesting video for people new to the area of affiliate marketing and Evan does a good job of showing how to get traffic via tried and true techniques that do increase page views.

However, my reminder to advertisers and publishers I work with (especially folks new to the industry) is that not all traffic is good traffic.

For instance, ping.fm is spam (still waiting for the mud fight, Kim). It’s a fantastic tool if you’re looking to broadcast like you’re Dan Rather, but that’s not what the effective media tactic of 2011 looks like and you’re not CBS.

In Evan’s webinar, he makes great use of tools like ping.fm, a Chrome extension for blasting out links to Digg, LinkedIn, Reddit, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Status.net, Plurk and God knows what else, but most, if not all, of the traffic gained from such blasting will do little to help you conversion numbers and in fact drive the type of dilution that could lead you to make poor choices about ad placements, keyword buys etc.

In other words, this type of traffic generation is great if you’re doing CPM advertising, but CPA and PayPerSale in 2011 requires different strategies based on community growth in the long term.

A much more realistic strategy for effective and sustained traffic and conversions generation is to hyper-focus. Build out the profile of your ideal user. What networks do they use? What things do they search for? What will lead them to your site, make an action on your site and then refer your site to others and come back at least once in the coming three months? What do they look like? Where do they live (don’t be creepy)? What do they wear? What kind of pets do they have? What games do they play? What do they drive? Be obsessive. Sweat the details and do your research.

Take the portfolio of that person you create and work incessantly to sell your story to that person. It’s not easy, but it will pay off. If you get that one person to your site, you’ve made it.

Stop reaching for millions of page views via artificial keyword buys and blasted out social media messages and thousands of indexed pages with forums that no one uses and work to convert that one person that you’ve created.

At least that’s what works for me and why you’re reading this now.