Removing a Manual Penalty from Google

We’re currently in a transitionary period in SEO, where the old rules are dead and a new era of SEO prevails. The problem is, many of the SEO tactics that used to get your website ranked at the top of Google can now actually hurt your rankings, often times resulting in a penalty against your website.

If you’ve been hit with a penalty, then you would have received a Manual Action email. In this blog we explain why you received a Google penalty, what the different types of penalties are, how to remove a penalty, and the lessons we’ve learnt that ensure a 100% success rate fixing Manual Penalties.

SEO tactics that HURT your rankings

If you’ve received a Manual Penalty from Google, it’s because you have too many ‘bad’ links pointing to your website. Here are the characteristics of ‘bad’ links:

• Keyword-rich anchor text – this is where you put the keyword you want to rank for in the links pointing to your site. In the past, the more links you built with the keyword you wanted to rank for, the higher you ranked. Now if you have too many links with the same keyword in them, you’ll likely be penalised for that specific keyword.
• Links from low quality websites – in the past you could build a large volume of low quality links and rank at the top of Google (especially combined with the first point above). Now, too many low quality links (as an overall percentage of all your total backlinks) will hurt your rankings.
• Links ‘made for SEO’ – these are links you only built for SEO. They’re listed on websites that nobody visits, and that add no value to the Internet at large.
• Here are some of the SEO tactics that used to work, which are likely to have contributed to your Manual Penalty because of the characteristics listed above.
• Low Quality Web Directory links – the easiest way of building up a large volume of links with keyword rich anchor text was submitting your site to hundreds of website directories online. Now don’t get me wrong, getting your site listed in high quality directories will help your SEO. But getting listed in low quality ‘made for seo’ directories will certainly hurt your rankings.
• Article Directory links – similar to Web Directory links, an SEO tactic used to be that you would write one article (with a keyword-rich anchor text link in it) and then submit it to thousands of article directories online. This strategy doesn’t work at all anymore.
• Low Quality Guest Blogging – in January 2014, Matt Cutts (head of webspam at Google) published an article on ‘The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO’ where he explained that low quality guest blogging will no longer work. This doesn’t mean that high-quality guest blogging doesn’t work (because it does) but low-quality guest blogging is now finished.
• Press Releases – as with the other SEO tactics above, Press Releases with keyword-rich anchor text can actually hurt your SEO rankings. Again, doing Press Releases the right way (not just for SEO purposes) can work really well.

These are just a few examples of tactics that can hurt your SEO rankings. There are many more. But rather than listing all of the tactics that can hurt your SEO rankings, it’s better to explain what will help your SEO rankings, because anything else will usually hurt them.

SEO tactics that HELP your SEO rankings

Removing a Manual Penalty from your website means keeping the links that are of the highest quality, and removing the rest. Here are the characteristics of high quality links:

• Branded links – these are links that have your business name in them. In the past, these types of links were avoided because it was all about getting the keyword you wanted to rank for in the link. Now you only need a small percentage of links with the keyword in them to rank for that keyword. The rest can have a variation of your brand name in them, which reflects Google’s aim to rank the big brands based on their natural link profile (which usually contain a lot more branded links).
• Links from high-quality sites – anybody can tell what a high quality site is. It’s obvious. It’s those sites that have great content and are run by real people (not just made for SEO). These are real sites that already have an audience, and are part of a business. Links from these sites are much harder to get but they will have a significant positive impact on your rankings.
• Links from relevant websites – these are links from websites your audience visits. The more relevant the website, the higher the value of the link pointing to your site. For example, if you’re an electrician in London, it’s far more valuable to get links from London based websites than from US-based sites. Similarly, it’s more valuable to get a link from a UK based Trades directory than from an overseas general directory.
• High-quality content – the days of ‘SEO content’ are over. Any content you produce needs to be of the highest quality – the level of quality that you’re happy to share with all of your friends on Facebook, email to your database, and publish in an industry magazine. This is the level of content required not just to succeed with SEO, but with all forms of online marketing. By producing content that really stands out in your market (which can be hard) you’ll be able to leverage it for both long-tail SEO traffic as well as links.

It doesn’t really matter what kind of link you build so long as you ensure they are of the highest quality and that you’d be happy to openly explain them to Google. For example, guest posting is really valuable as long as it is a high quality site, in a related industry, with great content, and a branded link back to your site. If you focus your SEO strategy on acquiring the highest quality links, you’ll not only rank your site at the top of Google but you’ll also future proof your SEO for years to come.

So why did you receive a Manual Penalty from Google?

If you’ve received a Manual Penalty from Google, it’s likely that you implemented too many SEO tactics that HURT your rankings and not enough tactics that HELP them. Google’s filters then identified your website as implementing SEO tactics that were in violation of their Webmaster Guidelines, and either gave you a Site-Wide or Partial Manual Action.

Site-wide Manual Action.

This is when Google has penalised your entire site, and usually happens if your linking strategies have been too aggressive across your entire site. When this happens, you will likely have lost the majority of your rankings.

Partial Manual Action.

This is when Google has only taken action against specific web pages on your site, usually for a specific keyword. While a Partial Action isn’t as bad as a Site-wide Action, it’s usually for your most valuable keyword – the one you were focusing all of your SEO efforts on. So even though it’s a Partial Action, you’ll have lost your ranking for the keyword that was generating you a lot of new business.

So what do you do when you receive a Manual Penalty?

It doesn’t matter whether you receive a Site-wide or Partial Action. The process of fixing it is the same (this is one of the things that took us a bit of trial and error to figure out). You see, when Google takes a Manual Action against your site, the only way to fix it is to remove all of the offending links from your backlink profile, even if you’ve only received a Partial Action.

Why?

Because Google will look at every single one of your links before lifting the penalty. With that in mind, the theory of recovering from a Manual Penalty is simple – remove all of the low quality links from your site. Saying that, the implementation is a little harder. Why? Because you need to identify ALL of the low quality links and remove them, while keeping the high quality ones.

Why you don’t want to remove every link.

It’s actually really easy to lift a Manual Penalty from your website… just disavow every single link to your site (‘disavowing’ is where you tell Google to ignore certain links to your site). But if you do this you won’t have any links left to actually rank at the top of Google.
That’s why you need to be really careful with which links to keep and which ones to remove, because you want your traffic and rankings to improve after the process is complete, rather than having to start again.

Fixing Manual Penalties – Here are a few of the lessons we learnt:

You need to find every single link – you need to actually find every single link to your site to identify the ‘bad’ ones. This can often be an issue because finding every link to your site can be a challenge (especially if you have thousands of links to your site). That’s why you need to use multiple backlink tools like Majestic SEO and Ahrefs, so you can get all of the links. Because if you miss some ‘bad’ links, Google won’t lift the penalty.

You need to get every ‘bad’ link – at first we went a little less aggressive with the quality of links we removed. But we found that Google knew which links were ‘made for SEO’ and required them to be removed before they lifted the Manual Penalty, even if they looked ‘okay’.

If you don’t get all the ‘bad’ links, you can lose a lot of time – every time you ask Google to remove the Penalty, by submitting a Reconsideration Request, you need to wait anywhere from 2 to 6 weeks for them to respond. And if they come back with more issues, you need to wait 3 weeks before submitting another Reconsideration Request. Which means that every time you aren’t successful, you lose at least a month of progress. The important part here is to understand that there are no real shortcuts – you really do need to open every single link to see which ones are good and which are not.

Google targets keyword-rich anchor text – even if you think a link is high quality, if you’re using keyword-rich anchor text in the link, Google will most likely want it removed.

Remove all of the ‘SEO’ links – you know which links these ones are. They’re the ones that have the keyword you want to rank for in the links. Think about it, how many times does a website link to you naturally, with the most valuable keyword in your industry? Not very often. Because of Adwords, Google knows which keywords are the most valuable because they have the highest search volume and highest click-costs. So it’s easy for them to know which keywords are likely to have SEO done on them. Those are the ones they target.

Don’t just disavow – Google wants to see some effort on your part. They want to see that you’ve tried to get links removed – not just disavowing them. So make sure you’ve contacted the low quality sites and asked them to remove your links. Only after you’ve attempted to get your links removed (without success) should you disavow them. You need to explain what action you’ve taken to remove the low quality backlinks when requesting your website be reconsidered for ranking.

We often speak with business owners that have been trying to get a Manual Penalty removed for many months, without success. The reason is because they missed one of the points above. To get a Manual Penalty lifted, you need to implement every single one of the points above.

Good Luck!

10 Important Online Marketing Lessons

Here are the top 10 online marketing lessons we’ve learnt over the years.

1. Never Pay for Impressions

The old school method of advertising was paying for your ad to appear in front of your prospects (think magazines, newspapers, radio and TV). It’s how online advertising started out as well, before search engine advertising came onto the scene. You’d place a banner on websites your prospects visited, and you’d pay a fee every time your ad appeared. You can still advertise this way.

The problem is, only a small percentage of people who see the ad are interested enough in what you’re advertising to actually respond to it, which means that you’re throwing away money advertising to people who aren’t interested at all. And when you waste advertising dollars like that, your return-on-investment is a fraction of what it could be. One of the reasons that Google is so successful today is because they changed the way advertising was sold. Rather than paying every time somebody saw your ad, now you only paid when somebody clicked your ad. That meant that you’d only pay for people who were actively interested in what you were selling. And that meant a far better return on investment because your advertising dollars were only spent on people who were so interested that they clicked on your ad.

Most other advertising networks have since followed suit, as Google captured an increasingly greater share of the advertising market. What most people forget is that even with a pay-per-click model, you still have the side benefit of ‘free’ impressions because people see your ad even though they haven’t clicked on it. It’s just that the primary focus is on conversions, and secondary on impressions.

2. Your Conversion Rate Defines Your Success Online

We are still often surprised at how few business owners know what a website conversion rate is, and how it relates to your success online. Often you might hear someone say ‘I’ve tried Adwords… it doesn’t work for my business’, when often it’s that their website conversion rate wasn’t high enough to make advertising profitable. Let’s take a quick look at the numbers to see why…

You’re advertising on Google Adwords. The cost for one of your top keywords is £5 per click. If your website converts 1% of those clicks into sales, your cost per sale is £500 (ie 100 clicks x £5 per click). The problem is that if you don’t earn at least £500 profit from that sale, you won’t be able to continue advertising. On the other hand, if your website converts 5% of those same clicks into sales, your cost per sale has been brought down to £100 (ie 20 clicks x £5 per click). Or in other words, 5x more sales for the same ad spend. One of the best ways of dominating your competition online is to convert clicks at a higher rate than your competition, because it means you can outspend them on advertising and still make more profit (allowing you to capture the lion’s share of the market). For example, if you’re converting clicks at 5% and your competition is converting them at 1%, you can spend 5x as much per click and still make the same amount of profit. Now that’s power!

3. CPA is More Important Than Conversion Rate

Even though we’ve just mentioned the importance of your conversion rate, it’s not the most important metric you should be measuring. Far more important is your CPA (Cost-Per-­Acquisition) of a new lead or sale. Your CPA is the amount you pay for a lead or a sale, and it’s dependent on the amount you pay for traffic. For example, let’s say you’re advertising on Adwords and you’re paying £5 per click with a 10% conversion rate. That means your CPA is £50 (ie £5 x 10 visits). Facebook advertising costs less than Google but also usually converts at a lower rate than Google. If Facebook Ads cost £1 per click, you only need a 2% conversion rate to achieve the same CPA as Google Adwords (ie 50 visits x £1 per click). So even though the cost-per-click and conversion rate are both lower, the CPA is the same. As you increase the number of places you advertise your business, the cost and quality of the traffic changes, but you can always compare ad network performance by comparing your CPA.

As long as you know the maximum amount you can afford to pay for your CPA, and you’re converting traffic at a lower rate than that, you can advertise your business wherever there’s the possibility of quality traffic.

4. The More You Pay Per Click, the Higher the Conversion Rate

This one is counter-intuitive. Often it seems that to achieve a better return on investment (ie lower CPA) you need to reduce the amount you pay per click, but the inverse is often true. By paying more per click than your competitors, your ad appears higher up in the ad rotation (whether it’s Adwords, Facebook or Display) and you get the highest quality traffic, which usually converts higher. If you have the right targeting for your ads but the CPA is too high (ie they aren’t converting high enough for you to make a profit), you might be better off increasing how much you’re paying per click so your ad appears higher than your competition.

For example, if you’re advertising on Google Adwords and you’re not in the top 3 positions, you might be getting the price shoppers who go through all of the advertisers to find the best price. Whereas if you were in the top 3, you are more likely to get those serious about making a decision now, and have a bigger budget to invest. The same goes for Facebook advertising and other cost-per-click advertising where the advertiser that pays the most gets positioned in the highest value locations, and displayed to the highest quality traffic.

5. Generating a Volume of Conversions is Hard… and it’s ALL About Volume

It’s easy to have a good CPA when all you need is one conversion per month. It’s a lot harder to do when you want 100 or 1000 conversions per month. Why? Because when you only need a small volume of leads, you can focus your budget on the most targeted advertising you can – advertising that is so specific that only an actual buyer would fit into the targeting. The problem is that there isn’t a lot of traffic at this level of targeting, which means that if you want to increase the volume of conversions you need to start ‘widening the net’ and broadening how you target your advertising. And the broader you go, the harder it is to convert traffic because people are all at different stages of the buying cycle. To drive volume you need to have a multi-step conversion strategy with different funnels for prospects at different stages of the buying cycle. Which leads us to our next lesson…

6. Advertising on Google Adwords Doesn’t Make you a Good Marketer

It’s easy to think you’re marketing your business well online because you’re generating new business through Google Adwords. But it’s actually a false reality. Why? Because people who find your business from a Google search are already very far down the conversion funnel (ie close to a sale), and the search is usually one of the final steps in the process. They don’t need to be sold on your service (as they’re already searching for it), they’re ready to talk price and they actually want to hear about your company. This is one of the main reasons why Google is as successful as it is today. With Google Adwords (and any search engine advertising for that matter), most of your job has been done for you. All you need to do is have your business appear when prospects are searching for what you sell, have a landing page that effectively communicates your offering, and you’ll get a steady stream of new business coming your way.

So why is this a false reality? Because you’re quickly limited by the traffic available on Google, and you’re only able to convert people who are actively looking for what you sell. You can’t make any other source of traffic profitable because you can’t convert people that aren’t actively searching for what you sell. You’re stuck with Google Adwords, you’re at their mercy, and you’ll be quickly limited in the amount you can grow. The other problem is that most of your competition also relies on Google’s high-converting traffic to grow their business, which means the click-costs are steadily being pushed higher until it will soon become very difficult to advertise on Google and make a profit.

A solid online marketing strategy is a multi-channel strategy that incorporates social media advertising, search engine advertising, display advertising, mobile advertising, native advertising, email marketing, remarketing, SEO, conversion funnels, and constant experimentation. When you rollout an effective online marketing strategy you’ll never be limited by one traffic source and you’ll be able to grow your business faster than you ever thought possible. Plus it ensures that you’re easily able to adapt your advertising to the rapid changing online world.

7. Don’t Rely on Just one Traffic Source

Whether its Google Adwords or some other source, you can’t expect to grow if you rely on one channel for all of your new business. Also, what will you do if that one channel suddenly dries up? With this in mind you should have at least 2 different advertising channels that drive new business at any one time, 3 would be better. That way, if one dries up (for whatever reason) you can increase your spend on the others so your business isn’t affected.

8. Email Marketing is the Ultimate Force Multiplier

A force multiplier is a military term that describes the increased effectiveness of a particular tactic when combined with one or more other tactics. For example, if by using GPS, a force can achieve the same results as a force 5x the size without GPS, then the force multiplier of GPS is 5. Email marketing is like the GPS force multiplier in the example provided above. When combined with any form of online marketing, email marketing multiplies the results you achieve. For example, if you were getting 10 leads per month from a particular traffic source without email marketing, you could generate 20 leads per month from the same budget if you use email marketing effectively. When you really start to take full advantage of email marketing, the performance improvements you’ll achieve from your online marketing can be significant.

9. Be the Market Educator

If you really want to differentiate your company from your competition, you need to position yourself as the market educator. By educating your prospects on how to solve problems they’re facing, how to buy better, or how to understand your industry better, you position yourself as their trusted adviser. And that is a position that’s hard to compete against. And you can’t fake this one. You can’t share two-bit ideas to just tick a box. You really need to figure out the biggest challenges your prospects are facing and then help them for free. The more value you give them up front (without asking for anything in return), the stronger your positioning in the market.

The biggest piece of advice we can give is don’t hold anything back. Don’t let fear stop you from sharing your very best information – share it with your prospects and see what comes back.

10. Never be Satisfied with Your Results

It’s really easy to get complacent with average results, never knowing how much more you could achieve. There are literally dozens of areas you can focus on improving. From the targeting of your ads, to the ad text, to the landing page, the source of traffic, the offer you make, the emails you send… the list goes on. As long as you’re continually looking for new and better ways to convert traffic at a higher and more profitable rate, you’ll achieve results most people would never dream of!

Good Luck

7 Great Tips for Better Email Newsletters

Could your email newsletters do with a helping hand to make them more successful? Here are 7 great tips to improve them:

1.  The Subject Line + Preheader Really Matter

Your emails are showing up in the same space as emails from family and friends. Subscribers are letting you into their lives. Embrace that. Whenever writing a subject line, try to make it about the reader as much as possible. And then the preheader just drives home the message. For instance, if the subject line of a Food email is, “This Is YOUR Month” the preheader reads, “February is here, and it’s time to take control and plan out a month’s worth of delicious recipes.” When they work together, it can really give subscribers a reason to click.

2.  Don’t Just Have An Audience in Mind — Have A Person

Write every email with two very different readers in mind. An example we use is 1) a twenty-something friend who’s always busy at work. Our email is her link to what’s happening. The other is my mother, and she’s got a great sense of humor — but I don’t want to share anything that’s not appropriate or suitable with her! Before you send out any email marketing campaign ask yourself: Would my friend like this? Would my Mum? If the answer is “yes” to both, it’ll almost always do well.

3.  Be Personable/Be Consistent

Again, your email lives in the same inbox as emails from family and friends. This is a space for humans. Be personable, and be a consistent source of awesome stuff. Do that, and subscribers will keep reading (and keep sharing your emails).

4.  Write Honest (But Amazing) Headlines

Make sure your headlines aren’t creating false expectations. If you’re promising the best Travel deals to Cornwall anywhere in the UK then you better make sure they are the best! Don’t trick readers into clicking — readers are too smart for that, and too busy not to unsubscribe from emails that deceive.

5.  Don’t Be Afraid To Share Stuff That Doesn’t Directly Help You

For example one of our clients send out a Sunday round-up email and its their most-opened (40-45% of subscribers open it every week) — but it’s also the one that features the most non-client generated content. Their team curates relevant content from around the web, and readers really appreciate that approach. Sharing only their content would drive more clicks in the short run, but this approach (once a week) has given them more subscribers over time that have not only turned in to purchasers of their products and services, but regular, repeat customers.

6.  Embrace The Animated GIF!

We don’t recommend including one in every email. But if there’s a really amazing GIF, always try to feature it. It’s a great way to make your emails stand out — and they also look great on mobile!

7.  Mobile Is What Matters

If you’re not building your emails with mobile readers in mind, you’re losing half your audience. Try to keep the content easy to scroll through on your phone, and ensure that newsletters are fluid-width, which mean that they’ll look fantastic on mobile — and also really good on your desktop.

Why Your Website Isn’t Bringing You Any Business

We know that, for a number of reasons, a large percentage of clients who come to us for consultation have websites that are missing a number (if not all) of the key elements that they need to ensure success. And whether success is based on pure sales or a range of metrics, failing to get even some of the basics right with your website can result in online failure. Our latest blog looks at 4 key areas you need to concentrate your efforts on to ensure your website delivers.

1) A Good Aesthetic

Guys set up “web design businesses” all the time as they feel that, with a little coding knowledge, they can be a web designer. The problem is that it’s not just about being able to code up some incarnation of a site that can be placed ‘online’. The aesthetic can build trust, impress and can even do a good portion of converting a prospect, for that very reason. Plenty of times online people will buy from a site simply because it looks professional or trustworthy. The effort that has gone into designing a slick site makes many consumers feel confident in the company because it looks like they take their business seriously.

2) Traffic-Generating Strategy

It’s one thing to have a beautiful website sitting waiting for your next big prospect to arrive. The problem comes in targeting those prospects and bringing them to your website in the first place. This is where you need to develop and implement an effective strategy for actually attracting people to click on the link to your website. Here are some of the base strategies you should be implementing right now:

• Online Advertising – Run a Google, Facebook, Linked In, Youtube or Bing Ad Campaign – Paying for your traffic is an essential form of traffic generation, especially upon launching your website. It’s super easy, though Google sometimes make it trickier than necessary – here is a good Google tutorial which should help.

• Social Media – If you’re interested in using social media to drive traffic to your website here are a couple of important tips. First, on your Facebook page, make sure your website link is present at the top of the page description. It makes it easier for people to just ‘click’ through. Next, make sure any relevant links back to your website have a call to action attached.

• Blogging & SEO – If you’re a small business with a goal of building interest and engagement on your website, blogging is almost essential. The reason we’ve included SEO here is that it’s actually very difficult to build ‘organic’ (free) traffic to your website without SEO and it’s subsequently much, much easier to do that if you are blogging about what you do.
• Direct Response Marketing (in the email sense) – This sounds a little confusing but all this term really relates to is the strategy of email “list building” and then marketing to that list. When we refer to ‘direct response’ or  ’list building’, you may also have heard it called “database marketing” or “email marketing”. So the key here is to start building a list. You do this by having a focused area of your website geared toward offering something of perceived value to your prospect… in exchange for their email address. The most common forms of “bribe” are ebooks, video training, webinar access, discount codes etc. The key here is to identify something that really is of ‘value’ to your visitors and then making sure they can get instant access to this by signing up there and then. To facilitate this you would need to use a service like www.mailchimp.com to manage your list for you. You also need to set up a sign up form on your site to facilitate your list building.

3) Content (e.g. Better Engagement)

It is highly important that the images and written content on your website attract, and then engage, visitors. This ensures loyalty, trust and ultimately, conversion. So, pay attention to each image, written word and link on your website – throw out images or text that are surplus to requirements. Make sure they all make sense, are free of typos and offer valuable, bite-sized chunks of information for visitors who will then be prompted to subscribe, buy or contact you (whatever your goal may be).

This is especially true if you are blogging as your website will be regularly updated with new content – so make sure it’s “all killer, no filler” by writing information down which is of true benefit and value to your potential customers. The era of hiding your information away is dead; people want answers and help, and they want it now – if they can’t find it with you (fast) they will simply go elsewhere – so give it to them in order to establish and cultivate all important trust, upon which you can then build upon and convert them into paying customers.

4) Calls to Action (for Conversion)

It’s really quite baffling how many websites have no focused calls to action on them. A call to action is simple a link, button or instruction which tells the visitor to take a very specific, intended course of action. Without these on your website you’re leaving a huge chunk of money on the table, because it makes it very difficult for a visitor to decide what to do next.

So, you may use buttons/links that say:

– Click Here
– Learn More
– Add to Cart
– Checkout Now
– Buy Now
– Get Instant Access
– Start Your Free Trial
– Enrol/Register Now
– Take the Next Step
– Secure The Deal

Whatever you choose to use should be affirmative in its’ wording and should make it abundantly clear to your prospect exactly the course of action they need to take next to get access to your product/service.

If you start by making sure each of these key elements is in place on your website you’ll start to see more visitors, spending longer on your site and spending more!

Good luck!

Negative Keywords That Every AdWords Campaign Should Include

These Essential Negative Keyword Lists Will Save You Money In Adwords.

If you are using AdWords to promote a small to medium business, then every penny counts so it is important to ensure that your ad groups are as focused as possible. Using negative keywords to qualify your campaign can make the difference between attracting someone who is looking to buy your product and someone who is looking for a job! If you are a local business and want to make sure that you are paying for the right type of clicks in your AdWords campaigns, then consider using one of the negative keyword lists that we have provided below.

Note: Some of the negative keywords provided may not be relevant to your campaigns, so be sure to use your discretion when adding any of them to AdWords.

Negative Keywords That (Almost) Every AdWords Campaign Should Include.
This is a list of keywords that don’t belong in any campaign and should be added by default to all of your campaigns.

• free
• cheap
• nude
• naked
• sex
• porn
• porno
• torrent
• torrents
• youtube
• craigslist
• ebay
• kijiji

Employment Search Negative Keywords
These are searches that someone looking for a job would typically include in any search query. By adding these negative keywords, you can eliminate job seekers from finding (and clicking) your AdWords ads.

• hire
• hiring
• employment
• employer
• employers
• job
• jobs
• occupation
• occupations
• career
• careers
• occupation
• occupations
• full time
• part time
• work
• resume
• resumes
• salary
• salaries
• pay
• intern
• recruiter
• recruiters
• recruitment
• resume
• resumes

Education Search Negative Keywords
These keywords would typically be included in a search query by someone looking to upgrade their skills i.e. not to buy your product and/or service.

• training
• learn
• class
• classes
• school
• schools
• college
• university
• tutorial
• tutorials
• course
• courses
• textbook
• textbooks
• book
• books

Research & Information Search Negative Keywords
This list is essential for anyone with an eCommerce website. Reduce the amount of window shoppers and tire kickers who click on your ads by adding these negative keywords.

• review
• reviews
• rating
• ratings
• opinion
• opinions
• article
• articles
• information
• info
• pics
• picture
• pictures
• photo
• photos
• how to
• how do i

After spending hours crafting an effective AdWords campaign, it can be easy to forget about adding negative keywords to that shiny new campaign. By forgetting to add them, you could be wasting hundreds of pounds per month in unqualified leads to your business.

Good luck! 

Google’s Gone Dark on Keywords – What Now?

The recent big news from Google is that they are extending the https secure search to 100% of organic searches. This means that if, until now, you were using Google Analytics to track the keywords sending traffic to your site, you can no longer have access to all that valuable data. In other words, you will no longer be able to see the exact keywords used by people to reach your pages from organic search.

Why is Google going dark?

Google have justified the change in terms of protecting personal privacy and security – in essence ensuring that third parties can not spy on your search activity on the web. However, what’s interesting is that keyword data is still openly available for site owners who have a Google AdWords account. So, ad search traffic is not fully encrypted if you’re using Google AdWords and are running paid search campaigns on Google. A push to get everyone on to Google AdWords and paid search perhaps!

Keeping your keyword research up to date

These changes don’t mean that you have to panic though – there are still things you can do to get some valuable data and keep your keyword research up to date. For instance, a way to get access to some (limited) search data is through Webmaster tools. Click on “Search Traffic” from the menu on the left, then on “Search Queries” to see what keywords people use on Google to get to your site. While the data is limited to 2,000 terms and only goes back 90 days, it’s still useful.

Another thing you can do is look at historical data for well performing keywords prior to the SSL switch to Google. Ok, it’s not new data but it’s still valuable as you also get to see the “evergreen” data with keywords that have been performing well for a long period of time.

SEOORB has published a fantastic list of 11 actionable posts on effective ways to determine some of the keyword data that is missing with the new SSL change so do check it out.

Here are our favourite’s:

Smarter Data Analysis of Google’s https (not provided) change
A great post written by Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google and author of analytics books “Web Analytics an hour a day” & “Web Analytics 2.0”. Using step-by-step instructions Avinash shows how to:

• Establish Macro Content
• Understand the Performance Profile of not provided traffic
• Match up Performance Profile to Brand & Non-brand Visits
• Establish Conclusions
• Landing Page Keyword Referral Analysis

7 Best SEO Tips for (not provided) Keywords
Former in-house SEO at SEOmoz and current chief marketer at PlaceFull, Cyrus Shepard shares some useful strategies to help you deal with the “not provided” problem and reclaim your lost data. This also includes buying the data as Google makes it available to anyone who purchases advertising through Google.

Set Up Internal Site Search Analytics
Another fantastic post written by Russ Henneberry, content marketer and the managing editor of The Daily Egg, who explains how to set up Google Analytics to track internal search on your website and see exactly what users are looking for – on your website!

The future?

Who knows with Google, but one thing is for sure their encrypted search is here to stay. Combat this by maintaining high quality content and a robust SEO strategy and you have a good chance of maintaining and improving your websites ranking.

Good Luck

10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analysing the data and using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy.

If you are a social media rookie, this list of the Top 10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools might come in handy. When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple of them and choose the one that suits your needs best.

Here are our top pick of the free monitoring tools:

1) Hootsuite

This is a great tool that allows you to save time when it comes to managing your social media accounts: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+.

The weekly analytics reports and the excellent team management facility (delegating tasks, sending private messages) can be very useful when there’s more than one person handling the social media accounts.

2) TweetReach

TweetReach is the right tool for your business if you’re interested in monitoring how far your tweets travel, as TweetReach measures the actual impact and implications of social media discussions.

It is a good way of finding out who are your most influential followers, implicitly guiding you towards the right people you should be targeting when aiming to share and promote online content.

3) Klout

Klout is probably one of the most controversial social media monitoring tools. There are those who hate it and claim that its scoring system is completely inaccurate, but on the other hand, some people find it useful, as it measures influence through engagement on Twitter and it is a good means of keeping an eye on what people think about your brand, and to see what influences them the most.

In this way, you can adjust your posts according to your target audience’s interests and increase your engagement rate.

4) Social Mention

Quite popular among social media enthusiasts, Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites. It is probably one of the best free tools on the market, as it analyses data in more depth and measures influence across four key categories: Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach.

5) Twazzup

Twazzup is great for social media beginners looking for Twitter monitoring. You just enter the name you want to track and you instantly get real-time updates, meaning the most active top influencers, top RT’d photos and links, and most importantly, the top 10 keywords related to your search.

6) Addictomatic

If aiming to get an overall view of a brand, Addictomatic can be very useful and as straightforward as Twazzup. The only difference is that Addictomatic focuses on a variety of platforms such as: Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Bing News, Delicious, Google, Ask.com, etc. It’s really useful for keeping an eye on recent industry developments and brand reputation.

7) HowSociable

A free account allows you to track 12 social sites, including Tumblr and WordPress. However, if you’re interested in 24 more, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. a pro account is a must.

HowSociable’s approach is a bit different as it breaks down scores for different social media platforms, allowing you to see which social media platforms work best for you and which ones need further development.

8) IceRocket

This tool offers blog, Twitter and Facebook monitoring in 20 languages, as well as results graphs that you can play with. It allows you to choose the periods of time you are interested in monitoring.

It can be used for keeping an eye on your blogger activity, as they have around 200 million blogs in their database and they also provide the possibility of finding the latest trend terms related to your search.

9) TweetDeck

TweetDeck covers the basic needs of any Twitter user, so is a good option for beginners. It’s a great tool for scheduling tweets and monitoring your interactions and messages, as well as tracking hashtags and managing multiple accounts. However, it lacks regular updates and can be prone to bugs.

10) Reachli (formerly Pinerli)

As image and video is quickly becoming indispensable for many businesses, our last recommendation for you is Reachli; a tool that measures and optimises video and image content. It offers various features for measuring image and video effectiveness, and is particularly famous for its Pinterest analytics.

Good luck!

How Much Mobile Traffic is my Website Receiving?

It’s no secret. The use of smartphones to access the Internet is one of the fastest growing mediums in the world today. Recent research shows one in two smartphone owners used their phones in the last 12 months to “pre-shop” or buy items.

So that’s all good and great… but how much traffic is your website receiving and how do you monitor / track this?

Mobile – why should you care?

With the rapid growth in mobile Internet usage, there’s a high likelihood that a growing percentage of your website visitors are accessing your site via their smartphone or tablet. And that means you need a mobile optimised website to maximise your conversions online.

Google Analytics mobile reports

It’s really easy to find out how much mobile traffic your website is receiving. All you need to do is go to Google Analytics and click on…

AUDIENCE > MOBILE > OVERVIEW – to see the breakdown of the devices your visitors are using to access your website.

And if your mobile traffic is greater than 10% of your total traffic then you should either get a mobile website developed or update your website to be responsive.

You can also click on the DEVICES link to see the type of mobile device your visitors are using to access your website.

Tip: If you want to see how your website currently looks on a smartphone, use a service called Browser Stack that allows you to see how your website looks on different browsers and different devices.

What’s next?

With Google’s latest push converting all Google Adwords campaigns to Enhanced Campaigns (which include mobile) and its requirement that mobile SEO rankings have mobile-optimised websites, your total mobile traffic is only going to increase.

Add to that the growth of mobile use of social media (think Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn) and not having a mobile optimised website will really give your competitors (who do) the advantage they need to take market share away from you.

To find out more, get in contact with one of our experts. Good luck!

10 Tips for Promoting Your Organisation Online

1.    Social – join the conversation. Use spaces like Facebook and Twitter to discover what people think about you and your competitors. Use platforms like Twitter for customer service; meet your customers where they hang-out online.

2.    Search – send out the right signals. Make sure your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy is up-to-date, so that you’re visible to people searching for you online. For example, Google is making search more human, so create fresh, authoritative, shareable and relevant content.

3.    Content strategy – think like a publisher. With so many ways to engage audiences, you need a joined-up, editorial approach to content. Develop a unique point of view to drive content that your audiences will value and share.  Don’t forget to make it mobile friendly.

4.    Analytics – measure what counts if it moves, you can track it, but don’t report on everything or you’ll drown in data. Identify your goals and track the metrics that give you real insight.

5.    Customer service – tap into opinions. Customers expect genuine reviews at all stages of the decision-making process. Respond systematically, gathering insight from both positive and negative reviews, because these are your most engaged customers.

6.    Mobile – pitch it personal. Over half of UK mobile phone users now have smartphones. Adopt ‘responsive design’ for easy mobile viewing. Mobile apps have to be genuinely useful or entertaining to survive.

7.    Dual screen – join them on the sofa. Nearly a fifth of people now have an iPad or tablet, which they use in lean-back mode, often while watching TV. So provide immersive, visual content that complements this.

8.    Loyalty and retention – reward the right things. Find out what creates loyalty for your brand first, then create a platform for it (for example saving people time might create loyalty) before deciding on the need for a loyalty programme. Do not incentivise behaviour unnecessarily.

9.    Online reviews – tap into opinions. Customers expect genuine reviews at all stages of the decision-making process. Respond systematically, gathering insight from both positive and negative reviews, because these are your most engaged customers.

10.  Ecosystem – fitting it all together. Digital doesn’t sit in a vacuum – your customers expect a seamless experience. Map out key touch points across digital and in the real-world, so you can see how they relate and design journeys that make sense.

Good luck!

 

 

Leveraging Your Expertise for SEO Success

The centrepiece of an effective Search Engine Optimisation strategy is great content. While your SEO provider will take care of some of this, you have something that they don’t – years of industry experience and up to date knowledge about your industry.

So how can you harness your expertise in order to complement your strategy and solidify your SEO results? What do you know that your customers don’t?

Lots! When you are an industry expert, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that your knowledge is common knowledge. If it were common knowledge, you wouldn’t be in business. While you may have educated your clients at different times, chances are that they’ve retained very little, if anything. Providing this information through blog content means that clients can refer to it at any time, build their knowledge and gain a deeper appreciation of what you offer.

Start by identifying information that your clients would find valuable, interesting and practical. These points can then be used as the basis of your content.

Can’t write?

If you believe that you can’t write, then maybe it’s time you learnt the basics of this vital and unique form of communication. Start by reading widely online. Dissect the articles that you really love and work out what it is about them that most appeals to you. Then read some more! This doesn’t have to take a lot of time. Most of us read a newspaper everyday – simply pay more attention to how writers achieve impact through their words and structure choice. Great writers are often voracious readers as it’s here that you’ll be exposed over and over again to the tricks of the trade.

All good articles have the follow core elements;

Accuracy:  You will inherently have this as an industry expert. You simply need to get your ideas on the page in an easily digested format. Start by listing the points your want to get into your article (5 or 6 is a good start) and include a few examples and tips along the way.

Clarity: Usually clear and concise go hand in hand. If you find that it takes you a few sentences to make a simple point, maybe you are going about it the long way. Experiment with different words and/or different formats (bullet points, lists, quotations etc). Read it to a colleague and if they don’t catch it the first time around, keep cutting down and re-arranging until it’s crystal clear.

Hooks:  A great article will thoroughly and memorably fill a knowledge gap for your clients. Make sure your main title lures the reader into the article and that the opening paragraph alludes to all the great things they are about to learn.

Pauses:  People love free information, but time is always a factor in the online world. Your article must be easily scanned with clear pointers in the form of sub-headings. These allow your audience to hone in on relevant sections and zoom out of those less so. Test this by asking a colleague to spend ten seconds scanning your article and see how much they absorb (they should be able to state all of your key points).

‘Meat on the Bone’:  There are endless examples of superficial content out there – you won’t impress anyone by adding to this! While we’re not advocating giving away your company secrets, it’s imperative that you entice your readers with something useful, something that they can get their teeth into and share with others. In this way, you will not only solidify your position as an expert, you will instil trust in your client base and possibly score a few leads in the process.

Collective Knowledge

Never underestimate the value of your staff. While you all might be engaged in similar roles now, chances are your educational and working backgrounds are varied and colourful. Perhaps one of your staff members excels in a specific area of your business – chances are they will not only be able to write an in-depth and fascinating piece of copy, they will probably jump at the chance to showcase their knowledge to both clients and colleagues.

Collective Skills

Statistically there is bound to be someone in your business who is a good writer, has a knack for grammar or a keen eye for detail. These people probably don’t have the knowledge you have, but they might have more time – so pool your skills. Jot down your ideas for the article and let your best writer have a go at it. This format will also double up as unofficial training and serve to update the knowledge of your more junior staff.

Consistency

Central to any SEO strategy is consistency. Committing to a weekly or fortnightly blog article can really drive your existing strategy. This rate can be spread across your entire team, making individual input fairly manageable. Over time, good habits will equal great results as your blog grows and you become more important in the eyes of Google. Make a realistic schedule and stick to it.

Sharing your expertise doesn’t have to be a tiresome or time-consuming affair. Breaking up the load and utilising the peripheral skills of your staff is a wonderful opportunity to remain current as a business while you fast-track your journey to the top of Google.

Good Luck!