Email marketing for many businesses is a significant driver of traffic and revenue and there are some excellent email marketing campaign tools out there such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor which offer the ability to create and send effective emails. The problem with these tools is the reporting options that they offer, although impressive, is limited to email interaction data such as open rates, clickthrough rates, bounces and so on. Conversion, sales and revenue data isnt readily available however except in limited instances e.g. I believe MailChimp has a module that will work with Drupal sites to measure sales.
Who’d of thought you could trademark a colour?
Yes, thats right you can trademark a colour.
Was astounded to see this on the hotel aggregator Late Rooms web site footer….
I did a quick Google to how this was possible, after all surely no-one can own a colour? Are they going to sue a bunch of flowers or a poor old butterfly for infringement?
I was then even more astounded to find its common practise
Adjusting bidding by most specific location retired from Adwords Enhanced Campaigns
Ive written here a few posts about the new Adwords Enhanced Campaigns and proclaimed just how cool it was to now be able to bid by location at the most specific level available, usually, zip or suburb. This is particularly useful where physical or other boundaries might mean someone living in zip code x is twice as likely to convert as someone a couple miles away. I reported earlier that functionality seemed to have dissapeared and can now confirm its gone after just a few weeks in service.
Whats happened to the Adwords locations bid adjustment and exclude buttons?
A really neat feature of the new Adwords Enhanced campaigns, maybe the best feature, is the ability to get detailed traffic and conversion data from the most specific location that Google can reveal and to be able to adjust bidding per location, or even exclude locations. As of yesterday the buttons which enable you to make this adjustments has disappeared for me.
Adwords enhanced campaigns, tablets & responsive web design
The problem: desktop and tablet biddding is now one and the same Ive been using the new Adwords Enhanced campaigns now for a little while and it has some really great things about it and I promise ill be sharing some of those great things here shortly. I cant help feeling however exceptionally frustrated about Google not allowing me (and you) the ability to bid differently for tablet devices. Ive read alot about others finding tablet traffic converts higher. My experience is usually the exact opposite in that they convert significantly worse.
Google Adwords Enhanced Campaigns Explained
Changes have been coming and some seem great, some seem like a way to squeeze more revenue out of its advertisers, though I reserve judgement just now. The biggest gripe would appear to be about the inability to target campaigns individually at desktop/pc/tablet level which is an important tactic as cpc’s conversion rates and CPA’s differ across devices. Ill report more soon. Heres an email I had from Google today together with my analysis, which admittedly is based purely on my understanding of the imminent changes and not based on my actual experience of them yet…
The long tail – keywords you really do want to rank for and why
So you really want to rank highly for a keyword but you just cant get there. Really annoying isnt it?! I wonder how many site owners forget to pick up all the loose change on the way to the pot of gold (so to speak). The reality is we’d all love to have those big keywords right at the top of Google (and im pretty good at doing it) but even more traffic and revenue is to be had from all the keyword variations that are much easier to rank for and which, accumulatively generate more visitors and business.
Focussing on maximising these ‘long tail’ keyword opportunities is a favourite strategy of mine and often it can blow clients competitors clean out of the water. By building out pages and often whole new directories gives a site so many more opportunities to rank well and outrank the competition.
Lets look at a made up example of how it can be done.
How to track affiliate traffic & sales in Google Analytics
You’ve got Google Analytics setup perfectly to accurately track almost all traffic sources and sales but you’re really frustrated that you cant track your affiliate traffic and sales and it messes your whole stats up, aaargh! Well dont dismay theres a relatively ‘easy’ way to get this sorted so that all your affiliate links get traffic and sales credit in analytics.
Page title and meta description length tool
Ok so we all (should) know how important page titles (or meta titles) and meta descriptions are. Page titles help you rank for keywords and meta descriptions really help increase your CTR (clickthrough rate) from search engines. Page titles also being your search result title (most of the time) also greatly helps CTR so you wanna get the title and meta description length right, right?
Top SEO predictions for 2013
I polled some fellow consultants in the industry and most agreed with me that the following are likely to be some of the significant changes in SEO next year.
Importance of unique product descriptions on ecommerce sites
Ecommerce sites can be a haven for duplicate content. Many site owners wonder why it is that they can have such poor rankings and traffic when they have so much content. Much of the time its because the content that they rely on – the product descriptions – are not unique. In fact not only are they not unique seemingly everyone else selling the same product on the net has the same description!
Google Adwords adds time comparison feature
We all know how great the Google Analytics date range ‘compare to’ feature is at helping to work out time based trends, campaign change effects and dozens of other things. Well Adwords today includes a similar feature and boy is it overdue.
10 Tips On How To Write Powerful Page Titles
I believe the ranking power of page titles (or meta titles) isnt as strong as it once was but boy are they still strong. Probably still the strongest on page ranking factor and massively helpful to help increase clickthrough rate (CTR) and therefore traffic.
Domain diversity update confirmed by Google
Another domain diversity update was confirmed by Google last week.
In addition to already trying to reduce domain crowding in SERPS by having at least one similar algorithm update already and recently reducing the number of search results for branded terms to 7 (as I reported a week or so ago) Google is really trying to prevent sites from dominating page 1 organically. I think more so its aimed at whittling out aggregators in preference of brand owners who may have 2 or more pages ranked for the same search query which may reduce the ability of the brand to receive traffic. Im especially convinced that ‘domain diversity’ is less applicable to non branded terms as a search for a branded term e.g. ‘marriott london’ returns just 1 non marriott.co.uk page on page 1 of the organic search results.
‘Google Pirate’ or other ‘Brand’ update looming
I wrote earlier about what some were calling the Google Pirate update, which was affecting those sites with DMCA requests against them. Since then ive seen and heard of a number of sites which rely heavily on branded terms with severe ranking and traffic fluctuations from Google with ended as abruptly as they started. In addition to this theres a few reasons why I think that there is either a new update of Google Pirate 1.2 update imminent.
The Google Pirate Trademark / DMCA Update, Info & Help
Fri 10th Aug 2012 a new but potentially site killing Google ranking algorithm update rolled out which went largely unnoticed amongst the SEO community. Without an official name (yet) the Google ‘Pirate’ update seeks to remove domains/urls from its search results, or in what seems to be alot of cases simply render those sites lower in its search results, that it deems is pirating other sites content.
Find and fix duplicate page titles and reap the ranking benefits
If your site has a lot of pages and especially if its an ecommerce web site one of the really quick and legit gains you can make in the serps is by addressing the duplicate page titles you may have on your site.
Page titles still remain ‘the’ most important on-page element in helping to rank for specific phrases so having a whole bunch of page titles that are duplicate, and worse – not even representative of the page content/product is a real wasted opportunity.
Reason for absence
I started this blog recently as I wanted to make a serious effort to re-humanise my work, what I have to offer professionally and the knowledge I have to share. I want to keep up with that and make this blog something to be proud of and that will attract a willing and new audience. Its a pet hate of mine starting and not finishing new web projects (ive done that lots) but I will continue with making this site something to proud of.
Without going into detail (heres not the place) my wife and I have had some tragedy in our lives recently, and although our situation isnt as dire as it could have been, it has put a strain on work and simply just doing everyday stuff. Im slowly getting my head back in ‘the game’ and ill be publishing more regularly on here…
Top tip for Google Local optimisation – use the categories!
We all know (hopefully) its mega difficult to get to the top of Googles search results, unless using and having an ongoing budget for Adwords (and even then its not guaranteed).
There is a really great way to get to the top of Google in the search results via some smart optimisation of your Google Place listing however, which not enough people know about and its POSSIBLE to get there easily and fast ! I repeat – its POSSIBLE.
Relaunching or redesigning a website? Use this SEO checklist and avoid disaster
If you’re redeveloping your website, for example a redesign or changing cms, you MUST take steps to ensure you dont lose your hard earned rankings and organic traffic otherwise you’re heading for trouble.
Googles over optimisation penalty hits
Here it is – proof Googles post Panda over optimisation penalty is almost here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html
Meta keyword spam – you dont need meta keywords anymore folks!
I still get asked about the value of meta keywords, often called meta tags, all the time. If you thought you still need meta keywords placed in your site think again…