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If done right, SEO will literally outlive your website. On the internet, we don’t often think of our media as having any intrinsic permanent value. News headlines are expired within minutes; tweets are gone in a flash. Blogs squabble and compete for our momentary attention before disappearing again into obscurity. Even websites rarely stand the test of time: In a survey of over 160 companies, more than one third said they had redesigned their website within the last three months. In recent years, marketers have played along. They’ve taken to social media and “#hashtag” campaigns, with performance measured in durations of days or hours. They’ve pushed press releases onto the digital wires, to watch traffic spike for a day or two at best. An occasional campaign may outlast expectations — a viral video might last a few weeks before falling out of fashion — but then it’s back to the drawing board for another short-lived campaign push. Search engine optimization … Continue reading
Posted in: Marketing Strategy, ROI, Search Marketing
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Let’s talk for a minute about the word “online” in the world of SEO. Online education isn’t what it used to be. Students, parents and educators alike are embracing the benefits of taking classes online, at a distance, as scheduling allows. More and more universities are offering the very same courses at a distance, with the same paper diploma at the end. As a result, millions of working adults are able to pursue a quality higher education. Enrollment is booming, profits are up. Even employers are shifting towards indifferent acceptance when it comes to what method a person used to receive his/her degree, according to a recent study. With this sea change toward legitimacy in online learning, I pose a very simple question: how has search behavior changed for the search term “online“? Let’s look at Google Trends: Take a search like “online criminal justice degrees”. This is a term similar to one we optimized a couple years ago for … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
There’s a lot you can do with Google Analytics, but a lot of it is hidden behind the scenes. Sure, the Google Analytics graphical interface allows you to setup advanced filters, track secondary dimensions, and compare date ranges. That’s all fine and dandy, but if you’re like me, you need some tighter control over how you pull your data. Enter the Google Analytics API. I’m going to show you a trick that we use here at Elliance everyday. I’m sure Google is aware that people employ this tool in this way, but it’s not openly advertised. Think of this tutorial as an early Christmas present from your friends at Elliance! The Google Analytics Query Explorer This tool was introduced for developers who are building their own custom API applications. Google wanted to provide a way for people to test out API queries through a sandbox-like page, to make it easier to debug complex API queries. But you can also use … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics
My fellow webizens: As millions gather today and cast their votes for the next President of the United States, we are reminded of America’s fundamental commitment to democracy these last 237 years — from the throwing off of monarchy and oppression in 1775, to the continuous and peaceful transition of power within the world’s most diverse society. Yet somehow on the Internet, we now find ourselves in a struggle against tyranny in its most pervasive form. The Age of Revolution was arguably the crowning achievement of democracy in human history, which saw the founding of the United States and the French Republic, the restructuring of tyrannical societies, and the kindling of self-determination. The world was reawakened to Greek political ideals, brought forth through the writings of philosophers like John Locke and Rousseau, who wrote that the human spirit always longs for democracy. I propose that today we are in the midst of a Second Age of Revolution, this time farther … Continue reading
Posted in: Search Marketing
At Elliance we are in the process of overhauling our clients’ monthly SEO reports – an effort which involves sifting through the mountains of data we collect on a regular basis, and identifying which metrics are most interesting and most valuable to our search clients. In this process, I realized that there are really three distinct actors in any SEO campaign, identified by three sets of interconnected activities: A) Our clients’ marketing efforts B) Our own SEO efforts C) The impact of external forces It turns out that during the course of an SEO campaign, and in our SEO reports, we define success by measuring the blending of these three efforts in four different ways: A) Elliance-Client Outcomes B) Elliance-External Outcomes C) Client-External Outcomes D) Elliance-Client-External Outcomes Since each of our SEO metrics measures a portion of one of these outcomes, we can place each metric at the intersection of two or more actors’ efforts. Take a look: SEO Metrics … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
You’re getting sloppy, SEO people! Let’s talk fundamentals. I’m sick and tired of hearing your excuses, about how the game has changed, and you’re caught standing there flat-footed like a kid who just hit his first tee ball. Shape up! I’m busting out the playbook. The following are inexcusable excuses: 1. “Search has changed dramatically and we’re still learning how to cope.” Search algorithms change all the time, each day in fact. Some changes are minor, and some are massive. You are allowed some leeway to rethink your strategy after a major algorithm change, like the Panda updates or Penguin, when those changes require a dramatic shift in link building techniques, content optimization, social messaging activities, etc. But you must not use this as a crutch, or throw your hands up in the air and blame Google. It’s like blaming the refs, people! Adjust your game plan! 2. “Demonstrable results are hard.” If you can’t show a client actual, tangible, … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing, Social Media
Anyone who has ever spent more than a few hours in Pittsburgh has probably seen it: the view from Mt. Washington. Rising above the city on the south side of the Monongahela, Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, the steep hill provides a breathtaking view of Pittsburgh’s skyline. Far below are the city’s many modern and historic buildings, bending streets and colorful bridges. Boats glide up and down the rivers, trains wind through the hills, a million lights twinkle as far as the eye can see. When you stand on Mt. Washington, you are looking down on one of America’s great cities, nestled in some of the most dynamic terrain in the country. (In fact, USA Today named the view from Mt. Washington the second-most beautiful view in America!) This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a friend from Germany up to Mt. Washington. This was her first trip to the United States, and she knew almost nothing about Pittsburgh. … Continue reading
Posted in: Search Marketing, social media campaigns
You’ve probably been through this before. The status reports you prepare (regularly or by request) are well-researched, carefully detailed… and they’re going right over the heads of less SEO-minded people at your company. Your boss, your marketing folks, your IT team: they want the highlights, and they want to know that everything is going ok (or not). But spare me the details, please, because I have another call at noon. Call it lack of time or bandwidth on their part, but in the truth is, these internal “clients” just don’t speak your language. It’s not that they aren’t interested in performance, but everybody has a full plate of his or her own. They just want to get a high level survey and move on to the next thing on their busy agenda. So let’s talk about your SEO reports. What can you do to streamline some of your more arcane data points and help surface your most valuable information? Reset … Continue reading
Posted in: Analytics and Metrics, Search Marketing
In 2002, the Oakland Athletics made Major League Baseball history by wining 20 consecutive games and finishing first in the American League West, despite spending only $41 million dollars on player salaries — nearly $100 million less than big market teams like the New York Yankees. Their storybook season was later enshrined in the popular book and film, Moneyball. The secret to the A’s success was the team’s adoption of the principles of sabermetrics, which, while incredibly bold and innovative at the time, held simply that each player’s performance could be predicted based on objective, analytical evidence of his past performance. Remove all sentimentality, ditch any gut instinct or human intuition. Baseball success could be reduced to one simple metric: how often does a player get on base. As web marketers, we all too often make decisions based on intuition or feeling. It’s easy to fall in love with a major decision or to find ways to justify continued poor … Continue reading
The Internet has evolved precisely at the same time in history as an evolution in the treatment and integration of people with disabilities. In recent years, cognitive and physical handicaps have become better understood and diagnosed, and growing fields like occupational therapy and mental health have revolutionized the concept of what it means to be “disabled.”. Society is more educated and tolerant of handicaps than it was even twenty years ago, and the Internet has played a major role, even enabling disabled people to interact with others and find new comfort and purpose in their communities. But as a Search Marketer, I can’t help but wonder: is SEO keeping up? All too often, websites with poor accessibility are given prominence in Google’s search results. Sites which misuse image alt tags, for example, or mislabel their title or headers to pack in keywords, can trick Google’s robotic crawlers into ranking a page highly — but also trip up people with visual … Continue reading