The Week in Review
Smartphone Users Are Ready for Action
There’s good reason for all the attention smartphones are getting from advertisers, payment processors and local merchants. Smartphones are powerful and popular tools for consumers searching locally and acting quickly. According to a study commissioned by Google, 95 percent of smartphone users have looked for local information, with 88 percent of these users acting on that information within a day. (GigaOM)
The Next Wave Affecting Email Design
Email design is always changing. Among the current wave of changes affecting email design are small screens, touch-friendliness and text-only versions of messages. This post highlights these and offers recommendations. (MediaPost)
The Purpose of Gamification
Gamification is hounded by questions of “suitability of purpose, appropriateness of context, or even the semantic conflict around the use of the word ‘games’ itself.” What can gamification do? Why should we care? What are its limitations? This post addresses each of these questions. “Gamification makes it possible for big brands and startups alike to engage us in meaningful and interesting ways, with an eye on aligning our personal motivations with their business objectives. The net product of this effort will be more engagement, better products and — generally — more fun and play in all spheres of our lives.” (O’Reilly Radar)
Getting Great Content for SEO From Searchers
Who knows what searchers want better than the searchers themselves? That’s a good starting point when looking for great content for SEO, and acting on it isn’t all that hard. Here’s a look at an example using a simple survey. (SEOmoz)
The Secret to ROI on Facebook Display Ads
Facebook offers big value as an advertising channel, but you need to really understand its unusual metrics. For one thing, you need to discern between targeted and untargeted ads when measuring click-through rates. (AllFacebook)
Email’s Future Place in the Engagement Pecking Order
A post that starts with a joke about three statisticians hunting in the woods can’t go wrong. What does the future of email marketing look like? More specifically, will email continue to deliver great notification, informational/educational, promotional and social value? Email will diminish in prominence as apps/devices and the mobile Web continue to gain traction. (MediaPost)
5 New Post-Panda SEO Tactics
If you’re one of the many people wondering what’s to be done with SEO post-Panda/Farmer, this post is for you. In a world where indexing as a metric or signal is no longer viable, there are five important SEO tactics to look into. Among them are deciding which URLs are the most valuable and ensuring they’re indexed and well optimized; building internal links to canonical, high-value URLs from authority pages; and building high-quality external links via social media efforts. (Search Engine Land)
7 Tools and Resources for Domain Research
When shopping for domains, be sure to take a look at these tools: Google AdWords Keyword Tool, U.S. trademark search, KnowEm, DomainsBot, Just Dropped, Wayback Machine and Yahoo Site Explorer. (Search Engine Journal)
3 Use Cases for SEO Tools
Why bother using SEO tools? Here are three use cases for SEO tools: 1) performance reporting, 2) identifying opportunities and 3) site optimization. “Leveraging the automation technology that these kinds of tools provide can save you hundreds of hours of time and in some cases, allow you to do things that are just not possible to do manually (like tracking traffic changes over time across thousands of pages and aligning that data with changes in the site optimization to understand SEO performance).” (Search Engine Watch)
Why Content Farms Are Here to Stay
Content farms are here to stay – it’s an “economic inevitability.” Here’s a thorough discussion of many subtopics, including the attention economy, the economics of content creation and the microeconomics of content farming. “Slashing content farm’s ability to rank across the board by 40% just makes a fraction of the content space monetarily unattractive to them, but the content space is virtually infinite and the ability to monetize attention is increasing all the time. If Groupon will pay for remnant inventory on a page about How To Pick Your Nose, who will compete for that attention except a content farm?” (SEO Book.com)
7 Ways to Filter out Lame Searches
“If you play your cards right, the act of sending cues to "your" prospects can simultaneously achieve the purpose of filtering out non-buyers. Apparently, for every searcher with high buying intent, there may be dozens of lame people just casually roving around the web, looking for diversion. Don’t cozy up to them!” This post goes over seven categories of meta messages that could be relevant to your ad strategy, including providing some reason for customers to be drawn to you, a clear “buy now” cue and geo-signals. (ClickZ)
Paid-Search Fire Drills
If you’re managing a paid-search campaign, you’ve seen your share of paid-search fire drills. While some of these emergencies are unavoidable, there are steps to take to better control them when they arise. Here are some tips for when you unintentionally serve a competitor’s brand name in your ad copy, serve an ad on ridiculously unrelated keyword and double count orders or leads. (Search Engine Watch)
How to Use Automated Rules in Google AdWords
Google AdWords’ “Automated Rules” is a fantastic product that can make a one-man/-woman show look like a three-person department, “with minimal time, setup and investment.” The tool can be used to automate your bids to reduce or turn your ads off during hours when you’re not staffed to meet phone demand; boost your AdWords visibility right after an ad of yours runs on radio or TV; or increase your bids when your conversion rate for a keyword, ad group or specific ad pass a certain threshold, among other things. (Search Engine Land)
What Visible Quality Score Isn’t Telling You
“True or False: Quality Score is a number between one and ten that is assigned to every keyword in your AdWords account.” It’s a trick question, since it depends on which quality score you mean. This post offers an overview of visible quality score: “a simplified proxy for the average ‘real’ quality scores for a keyword. It is based on a simpler formula than the one used by the real quality scores. It’s also expressed in a different numerical range and distribution.” (PPC Hero)
How Email Marketers Can Protect Themselves from Email Fraud
Relying on your email service provider when it comes to email fraud isn’t the best way to go. Among the steps to take are showing ISPs your legitimate emails, authenticating your sender ID, updating and elevating your privacy policies, and dedicating an internal resource to marketing-data security. (Forrester)
5 Tips for Diversifying Your Organic Traffic Acquisition
Organic traffic can be diversified, a fact that’s often missed amid all the talk about diversifying your revenue and traffic channels. Image search, product news, blogger outreach, owning navigational queries and converting from how-tos are a few ideas. (Search Engine Land)
Blekko Gets Social – but Why?
Alternative search engine Blekko continues to make strides, recently integrating Facebook comments into its search results pages. While Blekko has been lauded for its relative freedom from spam pages, this move gives it a social flair that it’s been lacking. The question that begs to be asked is, “why?” A case can be made that search is not social by nature, thus rendering this move excessive at best. (TechCrunch, Search Engine Land)
Group Buying Meets Local Search
How will daily deals impact the local-search industry? This post looks at the fallout for business listings, relevance and comparison shopping. “Over the next year, we’ll continue to see enhanced content like daily deal offers tie back to a specific merchant business listing as search engines and directories try to make more information about a business available to customers.” (Search Engine Watch)
25 Reasons Why You Should Be Blogging
Blogging is a must for the online marketing community – for at least 25 reasons. Among those reasons listed in this post are the benefits for organic SEO, building corporate authority, extending beyond Twitter and giving your company a personality. (Econsultancy)
Post-Panda: Original Content Being Outranked by Scrapers and Partners
Google’s Panda update has done a bad thing – it’s allowing some websites with original content to be pushed below partners who syndicate and republish that content, and even below scrapers who basically steal and republish that content without permission or credit. Here’s an overview of an example of this, as well as some tactics for finding your “problem content.” “This behavior seems contrary to the fundamentals of search quality, and Panda specifically. Without making some noise about it, it may never be corrected.” (SEOmoz)
6 Smart Email Marketing Tactics
Email marketing is an evolving medium, so you best be evolving with it. Here are some examples of emerging email marketing trends that brands are using with some success. Among them are tapping into current events and pop culture, using Twitter and Facebook to promote opt-in URLs, and segmenting your database. (Mashable)
Email Marketing Post-Epsilon
Epsilon got email marketing a lot of attention all right – just not the good kind. “Email marketing is not just in the spotlight — it’s under the microscope. And it’s easy to see why. While spam has made it difficult to find relevant messages, consumers now have to take extra care in navigating an increasingly dangerous Pandora’s Inbox full of phishing and virus-laden emails.” Email marketing remains one of the most effective direct-marketing channels a marketer can find, which makes it all the more important to protect it. “Whatever email marketing deployment model you choose, protecting customer data can no longer be an afterthought.” (MediaPost)
A Look Inside Yahoo’s Search Revenue Disaster
Yahoo reported huge declines in its second-quarter search revenue this week. Despite the reasons the company may offer, this is just a part of a troubling pattern that found its start back in 2008. Here’s an in-depth look at this issue. In the end, it’s tough to trust Yahoo’s words or the notion that Bing will save its search business. (Search Engine Land)
Advertisers Are Looking for Better Reach, Measurement for Online Video Ads
According to a recent survey from DIGIDAY and YuMe, 75.4 percent of North American advertisers/agencies would be influenced to buy more online video ads if better reach was offered, while 72.5 percent said the same for better measurement. The survey also found that 40.6 percent of advertisers/agencies want brand awareness when they use online video ads, while 26.5 percent want brand engagement. (eMarketer)
Mobile is Better Than the Desktop for Paid-Search Ads
According to Latitude, a digital marketing agency, mobile costs per click are 37 percent cheaper on average than those on the desktop. Click-through rates for mobile search ads even rose 4.9 percent in March compared with 3.3 percent for desktop search ads. The company also found that about one in 15 paid-search clicks came from mobile during the first quarter of 2011. (New Media Age)
