May 13, 2013 – It was a full house Tuesday night at this year’s Members Only event. Local Search expert David Mihm, SEOmoz, gave a comprehensive session on the local landscape, including the latest changes and strategies to maximize results.
Among the top 7 changes that have occurred in local is the importance of Google+. It’s amazing to consider that Google+ Local is just under a year old. Aggressive changes continue to roll out and now more than ever, brand plus location is paramount regardless of your company size. Help Google help you by implementing rel=publisher and rel=author tags and imbedding your map from My Places.
Another big change in Local Search is with Google’s backend. Google Map Maker has decreased the amount of time it takes to review and it’s also improved the quality. And believe it or not, reporting a problem to Google actually works now. In all, it’s much easier to clean up data problems.
David closed the evening by sharing two process suggestions for improving time management: assign fundamental tasks to the agency and high return projects to the client.
If you’re not an SEMpdx member, join now and benefit all year!
April 9, 2013 – ISITE Design’s Ryan Summers and Amanda Bernard joined us Tuesday night to share their analytics expertise. It was an event jam-packed with tips on accurately measuring SEM and effectively interpreting analytics to surface key insights.
Ryan began by quickly reviewing several important elements for ROI including tracking codes, CRM, custom data source and universal analytics. From there, he dived in to some of the latest measurement strategies and tactics you can use to understand the results of your SEM efforts. One integral strategy is personalizing the site experience. Keywords, landing pages and other data will show you visitors who were interested in your product or service but didn’t buy anything. Based on the data you collect, you can then re-target to these visitors.
Three key areas where inaccuracy can come back to bite you are self referrals, non-qualified visitors (e.g. jobs, investors, internal) and conversions on 3rd party channels. The data is there, so take advantage of your analytics to prevent these mistakes.
Amanda walked us through a quantitative approach to building personas. The 3-phase process – research, consideration and decision – taps in to the expectations of your customers so you can determine the types of people coming to your site. Tools such as Yahoo Clues and Google Trends provide insights on how to keep site visitors more engaged.
Once you’ve built your personas, design your website accordingly. Implement, test and analyze for PPC landing pages and ad copy, home page re-design, and blog and social content. You should also review your persona-based site paths and evaluate specific content pieces by persona type.
March 12, 2013 – This month’s event zeroed in on conversion rate optimization. Click Advisors’ Theresa Baiocco joined us for the evening to share her tips on CRO, including a 7-step process that will convert more traffic and ultimately, improve profits.
Before diving in, always begin by looking at the big picture and decide where conversion rate optimization fits in. Calculate the revenue equation (Revenue = Traffic x Conversion Rate x Value of Conversion). It’s important to focus on each component equally.
Once you’ve looked at the big picture, work through the following seven steps to increase your site’s conversion rate:
1) Who are our site’s visitors? Build customer personas, focusing on psychographics rather than demographics.
2) What are they trying to do? Continue building customer personas in this step. Differentiate between primary and secondary personas.
3) What do we want them to do? Define KPIs based on your business objectives. Configure both macro and micro conversions in analytics.
4) What’s preventing them from doing it? Look at analytics and user feedback. In analytics, ensure goals are configured and the correct tracking is installed. Figure out which page is the problem. When gathering user feedback, continue to focus on the data. Tools such as FiveSecondTest, UserTesting.com and Lucky Orange provide great insights into users.
5) Develop a hypothesis to fix it.
6) Test. Don’t get hung up on the tools.
7) Repeat steps 4 – 6. What else can we do?
After working through these steps, go back to the big picture. Calculate the revenue equation with your new numbers and reinvest the extra revenue in traffic.
We are proud to announce Bend, Ore.-based company, G5, as sponsor of the Members Only Mixer held the night before SearchFest. The event is exclusively for SEMpdx members that are attending SearchFest the next day. Members will mingle with their digital marketing peers, including the SEMpdx board and SearchFest speakers, in an informal setting. The full-day digital marketing conference will offer attendees rare insight on Friday, February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Ore.
“G5 is one of the fastest growing companies in Oregon, but we’re known nationwide as search engine marketing experts in the property management sector,” said Dave Beltramini, Director of Online Marketing Strategy & Performance at G5. “SEMpdx’s line-up of speakers and content is stellar, and we’re thrilled to be part of the event.”
SearchFest is currently the only search and social media conference organized by a nonprofit business organization (SEMpdx) in the Northwest — allowing tickets to be one-third of the cost of other conferences featuring the same caliber of speakers. Lower ticket prices paired with national experts has led to tremendous growth of the event.
Keynoting SearchFest this year will be Duane Forrester of Bing (the search engine based in Seattle, Wash.) and Marty Weintraub of aimClear (an INC. 500-honored digital agency based in Minnesota). Additional companies represented at SearchFest include: Disney Interactive, REI, Rosetta and a variety of local, regional and national marketing firms.
ABOUT G5
G5 is the leading provider of Digital Experience Management (DXM) software and services in the property management sector. The G5 DXM Platform enables owners and operators of multifamily, senior living and self-storage properties to put the right renter in the right property to maximize profitability. G5 helps thousands of properties turn renters into brand advocates by delivering amazing experiences at every digital touch-point. As brand advocacy grows, so does demand — allowing properties to raise rents and revenue without adversely affecting occupancy.
Founded in 2005, G5 was recently named one of the fastest growing private US companies by Inc. Magazine (fourth consecutive year), one of North America’s fastest growing technology companies by Deloitte (second consecutive year), and one of Oregon’s fastest growing private companies by Portland Business Journal (third consecutive year). The Bend, Ore.-based company is backed by private equity investor Volition Capital.
January 8, 2013 – It was back to the basics Tuesday night as SEMpdx kicked off a new year. Formic Media’s John McPhee began the evening by covering SEO fundamentals and touching on a few current best practices we should all be doing. Among them were his tips for successful design and development such as utilizing HTML, using text navigation and implementing SEO elements. He advised against flash sites, too many images and too much java script. Onsite optimization is another key area to focus on by creating search friendly URLs and always optimizing with tags (e.g. title, meta description, H1 header and ALT image). John also touched on local SEO, explaining that, while you still need to follow all SEO tactics, there are additional steps to take like claiming and verifying local listings. You should also include your NAP (name, address, phone number) on everything from your website to directories, etc. And, of course, take advantage of GetListed.org.
Aliza Earnshaw, from AboutUs, covered content and social media marketing. There are three components of social media marketing: create great content, promote relevant content via social media and engage with people. Doing these at the same time is key to a successful marketing strategy. Good content must be useful, show expertise and be easily shareable. When promoting your content, avoid a title or link formula. Vary your content so you’re not being repetitive and promote new posts whenever relevant news is released. To develop an engaged audience, avoid boring posts, respond to criticism promptly and politely, and have real conversations.
The night ended with Amplify Interactive’s Ryan Campbell giving us the rundown on paid search. He stressed the importance of utilizing conversion tracking and key performance indicators in any campaign you run. When choosing keywords, be careful to include those that customers use when talking about your product or service. Set negative keywords and take advantage of the various match types. There are different ways to structure your campaign and ad groups. A good way to start is by looking at how your website is set up. When creating your campaign, hyper-target your audience by setting a daily campaign budget and adjusting the ad schedule. Separate search and display campaigns and set geo-targets. You can also choose how ads are rotated. Ryan’s preferred setting is “rotate evenly”. Finally, while it’s hard to identify best practices for writing successful ads, there are a few tips to remember such as capitalizing the first letter of each word and utilizing ad extensions. Make sure your landing page is targeted, reflecting the keyword in the ad.
November 13, 2012 – This month’s focus was on Google Authorship, likely the next big game changer in search. Mike Arnesen, Senior SEO Analyst from SwellPath, provided an in-depth look at Authorship and how Google+ can improve your AuthorRank.
Mike began by sharing the three basic steps to setting up Google Authorship. Once you’ve created your profile and told Google you’re an author, you can complete the circle with either an HTML link, a head link or email verification. As you begin, be sure to test, use a high quality headshot and link 2 – 3 pieces of content. Authored content will not only increase your organic CTR from 38 – 400%, but real estate and quality signals will also improve.
Authorship is proving to be a prerequisite to AuthorRank. In preparation for the inevitable AR, make sure you have an area of expertise and put out great content. Also focus on making friends with influential authors and engaging on relevant social media sites such as Quora.
In order to get the most out of AuthorRank, you need to play by Google’s rules. This means using Google+. Be sure to optimize your profile, sharing and interactions. For example, add a headline, italicize descriptions and notify sparingly. Also keep in mind that Google favors Open Graph images. Finally, use ripples to follow up. AJ Kohn’s Ripples Bookmarklet is a great resource.
Google is pushing authorship more and more each day and we’re seeing signs that they may be favoring authored content. AR could be more disruptive than all Panda updates combined, so don’t delay in getting your company and clients set up with Authorship and Google+.
Tuesday, October 9, 2012 – This month’s event focused on Google’s two biggest algorithm changes in the past two years: Panda and Penguin.
SEO expert Michael Cottam began by dissecting the Panda update, including the human quality raters, machine learning and Panda 1.0 algorithm tweak. He then took us through some of the factors that define quality. For example, pages need to include lots of content, original copy, and plenty of images, maps and videos. Dwell time on site, low bounce rate and trust and authority signals are also key factors.
Michael provided a few tips “to make the fur ball chew for you”, such as including rich content, consolidating similar pages, minimizing ad real estate above the fold and using original images. He suggests doing a reverse image change to find images that don’t appear elsewhere.
The evening ended with Amplify Interactive’s Ben Lloyd walking us through a Penguin case study. He shared his Penguin toolkit which includes Penguin 1.0, Mozcast, Analytics, Open Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools. Pie charts on data such as anchor text profile, inbound links per page and links by domain are invaluable in shedding light on where Penguin nailed you.
Ben closed by providing three recovery options when hit by Penguin. First, delete any bad links you can. Destroy 404 offending pages and move to a new domain. Finally, dilute bad links by getting good links. This last step involves creating a strong content marketing strategy.
September 11, 2012 – SEMpdx kicked into high gear Tuesday night with its first educational event of the new year.
Matthew Brown, of AudienceWise, presented his guide on structured data, covering the latest on structured data markup, Open Graph, Schema.org and data markup for SEO.
Here are just a few key takeaways from the evening:
Use the right kind of data markup for your situation. There are many languages and vocabularies for structured data. Schema is just one of them.
Rich snippets can take up to 30 days to appear, so don’t panic.
Track CTR changes for keywords that get rich snippets. This is a great way for consultants to measure ROI for their clients.
Facebook is an excellent example of a company that is using Open Graph. In fact, almost every “entity” out there is in Facebook’s ever-growing graph.
Use Open Graph Markup in addition to Schema.org and other markups.
Sindice.com is a great resource for competitive research. This tool shows what other sites are doing with linked data.
Matthew closed by reminding us to keep apprised of new schema. In doing so, you’ll be among the first to know of proposed extensions to act on. And, in being the first to act, you’ll gain more clicks.
If you didn’t attend this meeting you missed a great presentation, and here are his slides…
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Facebook Advertising
Google Adwords Pay Per Click
SEO 101 for 2013
WordPress SEO
A/B & Multivariate Testing
Google Analytics
Google Webmaster Tools
Social Media
Affiliate Marketing
Links After Penguin
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