The Week in Review

Is Facebook Becoming Less Viral?

With all its changes, Facebook is making it harder for things to go viral on its site. If Zynga, for instance is having trouble, what does it mean for the smaller players? Maybe the biggest blow to Facebook’s viral value is the recent change to its News Feed. "The fact that different people using your apps might not see the same updates is something of an obstacle in and of itself, but now there is perhaps more uncertainty than ever as to who is going to see what in their news feed." (WebProNews)

Google Dominates Paid Search, Yahoo-Bing Offers Better ROI

According to Efficient Frontier’s "Global Digital Marketing Performance Report: Q3 2011," Google claimed 81.9 percent of spend and 82.5 percent of clicks in paid search in the third quarter. However, Yahoo-Bing offered higher quality traffic and better ROI. (Search Engine Land)

PPC Bid Optimization Without Conversion Tracking

Even if you can’t track your conversions, there are two tactics to help get your PPC account to deliver more value: 1) engagement metrics and 2) relative weighting. "The two methods in this article will give you some pointers to go about pushing your spend towards your best converters and most profitable keywords, but your overall budget must still be determined by the profitability of PPC as a whole." (Search Engine Watch)

Click-Throughs on Facebook Increase 18.5 Percent in Third Quarter

According to a study from TBG Digital, click-throughs on Facebook ads rose 18.5 percent during the third quarter. The study also found that advertisers’ cost per click declined 10.8 percent, while the cost per thousand impressions rose 7.1 percent. (All Facebook)

5 Trends for the Future of Mobile Advertising

To help clarify the future of mobile advertising, here are five trends to consider: 1) more relevant behavioral targeting, 2) growing mobile search, 3) better analytics, 4) greater interactivity and 5) mobile-social as the "personal cloud." (GigaOM)

How a Reverse Proxy Can Help With Your SEO

This infographic offers a helpful rundown of what a reverse proxy is and how it can help with your SEO. The short version: a reverse proxy can help alleviate the headaches that come with subdomains. (SEOmoz)

How to Manage a PPC Account With Overall Low Search Volume

In the first post of a series on “How I Manage A PPC Account With/Without…” this writer talks about how she manages a PPC account with overall low search volume, which can be a tricky endeavor. Among the tips are to broaden your account, identify your key performance indicator and don’t discount the Opportunities tab in AdWords. (PPC Hero)

5 Key Metrics to Measure the Success of Paid Search Campaigns

Here are the five metrics that will give you the most bang for your buck when it comes to measuring the success of your paid search campaigns: 1) Quality Score, 2) click-through rate, 3) conversion rate, 4) cost per conversion and 5) wasted spend. (HubSpot)

SEO Pricing Models: How Much Should You Charge?

How do you price your SEO efforts? You must determine your profit goals, which involves fixed overhead costs, variable costs and direct costs. Then come cost of talent, cost of software, amount of talent needed, ROI estimation and amortization of efforts. (Search Engine Watch)

Email Marketing Thrives: Stats and Trends

Email marketing continues to be a valuable way for businesses to communicate with their customers and potential clients. Here’s a roundup of some recent stats and trends to highlight this point, including that email marketing had an average ROI of $43.52 for every dollar spent in May. (MailerMailer)

Ads as Answers

When Google tries to say their ads are just answers, a grain of salt is needed. “The problem is, there’s often a disconnect between what the ad promises and what I get when I click. I hate when an ad appears to be specific (probably because it’s making use of dynamic keyword insertion) but takes me to a general landing page and not the exact page I want.” Nevertheless, ads can make good answers. Relevance is the key. (WordStream)

The Future of Content in SEO

In a world dominated by social, local and personalized search, is content still king? This post discusses how the way content is delivered on the Web is changing (not dying) and how content creation must be viewed in a different prism. “Bottom line, if content is ever going to be ‘king’ again, it will happen when the content creating ‘tactics’ have given way to the understanding that the only way to drive real customer engagement is to let go of what you’d like your customer to do for you and embrace what you can do for your customer.” (Social Media Explorer)

Why Social Media and SEO Can’t Be Separated

“No site that favors SEO over social media (or vice versa) is going to be as successful as one that implements both.” The two realms are growing closer and closer as time goes by. Social media and SEO are merging to make a new hybrid social SEO. (Search Engine People)

How the Rise of Mobile Devices Has Affected Search Spend

In the span of less than a year, mobile paid-search spend jumped from 0.5 percent to 4.2 percent. This report shows that by the end of 2011, mobile spend will finish between 7 percent and 9.5 percent of all paid-search spend. (Search Engine Land)

The Anatomy of an Effective Homepage

This infographic offers a helpful rundown of what makes an effective homepage. It covers the basics, the objectives and the purpose a homepage should take into account. (KISSmetrics)

Who Are You Writing Blog Posts For?

Who are you writing your blog posts for: people or search engines? You have to consider whether you’ll be writing content for today and a short-term, day-to-day audience, or long-term, evergreen content. A hybrid of both worlds is the way to go. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)

8 Tips You Should Know About Mobile SEO

Mobile search has boomed in the past five years and the end of its growth is nowhere in sight. This means, of course, that mobile SEO is going to be important going forward. Here are eight tips to get you started. For example, don’t forget to use a "rel=canonical" tag, focus on mobile keywords and focus on the Web (not the app). (HubSpot)

A Guide to Measuring the ROI of Social Media Marketing

Social media certainly deserves its place in your marketing plans, but you should have a definite system for measuring its return on investment (ROI). First look at Klout scores and Google Alerts. Then move on to these three steps: 1) set up a Google Analytics goal, 2) set up advanced traffic segments and 3) analyze your goal conversions. (Search Engine Journal)

Keyword Research: Dealing With Uncertainty

Here’s a look at how to minimize some of the uncertainties that come with trying to rank for keywords you’ve selected. "Uncertainty can be reduced by further investigating the probable SEO effort of the competition over time." Included in this overview is a graphic showing the main steps of the process: effort to ranking, ranking to visitors, and visitors to conversions. (Search Engine Watch)

Type-in Ads Boost Brand Recall by 67%

According to a study from Solve Media, type-in ads, or CAPTCHAs, improve brand recall by 67 percent. CPG companies benefited from a 146 percent lift in brand awareness thanks to these ads. (MediaPost)

50+ Helpful Resources on Conversions

If you want to learn more about conversions, this roundup of 50+ posts on the topic is a good place to start. Among the topics are a debate of Web sidebar design and conversions, how to measure blog conversion, how messaging and design affect conversion rates, and ways to boost conversions on mobile app landing pages. (Unbounce)

My Favorite SEO Research Tool: PPC Data

Until companies can gather the digital assets or domain authority to compete in SEO, it’s a good idea for them to get PPC campaigns in place as soon as possible. "One of the hidden benefits of PPC data is that it brings great clarity to the SEO strategy." PPC data offers a more accurate understanding of monthly search volume, integrated ROI data for highly refined keyword research and effective call-to-actions based on keyword type, among other things. (Search Engine Watch)

6 Ways to Use PPC and SEO Data to Improve Overall Results and Focus

SEO vs. PPC doesn’t have to be a winner-takes-all debate. Some of the best campaigns don’t pit these two against each other. In fact, both can be used in tandem to boost overall campaign performance. Start by creating a dashboard that combines the various data points. (Search Engine Journal)

Copywriting for PPC Ads: Focus on What Searchers Really Want

Put yourself in the shoes of a business owner looking to hire a new secretary. What kind of information would you like to know about a candidate? Take a look at these two PPC ads and see why one performed more than twice as better as the other. There are five takeaways: 1) the title of the winning ad is more descriptive, 2) "our" is a wasted word, 3) the winning ad promises what employers really want, 4) the word "verify" is the perfect word to lead with and 5) the winning ad uses a stronger call-to-action. (WordStream)

Why Rank Checking Isn’t Critical

Here’s a case for the argument that rank checking isn’t critical. There are five main points: 1) Google personalizes all SERPs, 2) Google throttles rankings, 3) Google’s universal SERPs make ranking data inaccurate, 4) automated rank checkers are unreliable and 5) rookie webmasters check rankings for wrong keywords. Monitor analytics instead. (Graywolf’s SEO Blog)