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39 percent of search related traffic information from Google is now gone

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PercentGoneDid you know that for over a year ago Google started to encrypting search by default for signed-in users?

I just found a study from Optify that shows that 39 percent of the search related traffic from Google to our websites now is gone. Google will show the search terms as withheld.

Qptify made a study with 424 websites with over 17,143,603 visits and 7.241.093 referring keywords. This way they could check out how seriously the “not provided” issue is.

 

What does it have to do with me?

So why should you care about all this? Well imagine you have a shop in a shopping center  Normally you will approach your customers and ask them if they are looking for something special right? But then one day you are told you can’t do this anymore.

You are only allowed to approach customers if they are specifically forthcoming and request help. Now you have lost the ability to proactively help your customers right? You will also lost some valuable information and feedback about your customers.

Google has started to encrypt search queries about 1 year ago. So now you will no longer receive “referrer” data from Google when the user is sign-in.

So you don’t really know what your visitors was looking for. Was it cheap dresses? Or quality dresses? Secondhand dresses? Blue dresses? You don’t know. So you can’t tell if they found what they were looking for.

Maybe half of your customers from Google was searching for blue dresses – but you only have red dresses in your shop. Bad for you right? And now you will not know that your customer love blue dresses.

 

You have lost a lot of insights. 

So a hot term now in search marketing is behavioral targeting. You will have to know what the customer was initially looking for.

But now you will need to rely on later user interactions. You can use log-in information, or cookie based personalized experience.

If you are in the B2B business you can still get a lot of great information from Google Analytic about who are visiting your website and  which pages they are looking at. Check it out here. But its getting harder to know about the initial search term.

If you have a newsletter – which search term did they use in Google to find your website? This is a very usefull information. But now its getting harder to get.

Google’s concerns about privacy is driven by a bigger force than this search marketing industry. So we might as well get use to it.

 

All the best to you as always, Henrik

 

 

 

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7 Great Remarketing Strategies

Types of Retargeting by ChangoSmallDo you know about  retargeting or better known as remarketing? This marketing tool is getting more and more important in Search Engine Marketing.

With the right remarketing strategy you can retarget the people who might already be interested in your product and therefor get a much higher conversion rate than with your normal Adwords.

In basic it’s a way to tag visitors to your website and target them later on with some kind of advertisement at a later time. Typically you use the Google Adwords Display Network to show your ads on other websites, if the user has already visited your website.

It’s the same marketing principle you might be using already if you have a newsletter for your customers. Your customer has already visited your website, so he or she is interested in your product or service, and with a newsletter you can retarget the potential customer.

When the Remarketing started years ago, the businesses tried to retarget the people who almost bought something from their website. Maybe they left the shopping basket just before buying something.

But now you can use a lot of different Remarketing strategies.

 

The Seven Types of Effective Retargeting

I found this awesome Infographic at Chango.com. Click the image to see it larger.

Types of Retargeting by ChangoSmall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The classic remarketing

This is good old fashion classic remarketing strategy. Typically you have had a visitor who started the sales funnel. When the visitor is loading the page, it will place a cookie right on the visitor’s computer.

Your remarketing campaign will check out the visitor’s computer to see, if the little cookie is on the computer. If it finds your cookie, it can show a banner ad.

Your ad is retargeting a person who has already been interested in your product and this will (almost always) guarantee you a high click through rate (CTR) and you will get some high quality web traffic for a low cost.

 

Remarketing for excluding visitors

If your visitors are very unlikely to convert more than once to your product, it might be a great idea to exclude the visitors from seeing your ad, if they already have bought your product.

Maybe you only have one product (only one book in your web shop), or a very expensive product like a car (and the customer will only buy one car right?) or can only use one iPhone.

 

Remarketing for profiling and upselling

If somebody has bought a car from you, they might later on be interested in buying some new wheels from you too. So if you have accessories or similar or related products you can use this strategy.

This could increase your CTR, and therefor your quality score will get higher, and your cost per click will get lower.  By the way remember that the quality score from Google Adword is calculated separately for the Google Display Network.

 

Remarketing for introducing new products

When it’s time to introduce a new product you may want to remind your customers that you have got this new product. Maybe it’s time for a replacement of their old product.

Using this strategy will ensure that you are targeting interested people in your online marketing strategy.

 

Behavioral remarketing

This remarketing strategy is based on more advanced remarketing strategies.

You can choose between a lot of difference criteria’s

  • You have to visit specific pages on a website
  • Maybe your language setting has to be English (or Danish or Swedish)
  • Other technical details about your computer or browser
  • Your IP-address has to be from a specific country
  • Arriving from a specific homepage or campaign, URL,
  • Maybe have typed a specific keyword in the search engine
  • Or any combinations of all these.

You can use tags from other websites to decide if your banner is going to be shown or not.

Let’s say that somebody has bought an iPhone on a competitor’s website, and then your remarketing strategy is “not to display your banner ad” if you are selling Android phones.

It is unlikely that somebody who has just bought an iPhone will buy an Android a week later (yeah yeah yeah.. I know it is possible but very unlikely right?)

You really have a lot of combinations – so you can target the customers and get only the customers you think will buy your products.

 

Good luck

I hope this could give you some inspiration for your next remarketing campaign. There are a lot of possibilities using remarketing. And with a little creativity you can try new ways to market your products.

Remember to sign up for our newsletter and join our LinkedIn group.

Good luck with your remarketing campaign.

Henrik

 

 

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Tips to Get More Traffic by Using StumbleUpon

StumbleUponLogoStumbleUpon is a social media bookmarking site, and as such it does not respond to SEO or other techniques of social marketing to generate traffic.

It is a closed system where user participation determines outcomes. Heavy users of StumbleUpon thumb up or down a lot of content, and that allows the system to understand their demographic better and associate users within a certain niche.

 

Be an Active User

1. Participate in the community and spend time thumbing up or down websites you discover while there. StumbleUpon uses your thumbs up to help find your niche.

2. Make friends with those who share similar tastes since StumbleUpon shares content with your friends within a niche. This will encourage people to follow you and that will increase the chance they will stumble upon your own content.

3. Contribute content to the website. Eventually, those who are in your niche and follow you will discover your content. This leads to traffic generation.

 

Buy Traffic

StumbleUpon lets you influence their recommendation system with advertising sold at five cents for every stumble.

There is a lot of advertising on the site, so it is not considered spam, but Stumbleupon users may thumb down your content if it seems too blatant an attempt to influence them.

The more users thumb up content, the more it appears to other users, thereby generating traffic to the site, but the reverse is true for content that receives a lot of thumbs down.

Wait until an especially poignant piece of content is in your posssession then use advertising to help more people stumble it.

 

Be a Follower

User ratings and their friends’ ratings help StumbleUpon form a collaborative view of the websites in their system. Users will only see content approved by people in their niche.

1. Follow those who seem like they might like your content, since the more StumbleUpon associates you with them, the greater the chance they will see your content.

2. Follow those who said they liked your content by giving it a thumbs up.

3. Follow those the system suggests for you since they are showing similar demographics to you.

4. Follow those who follow you. This is a bit of courtesy, but also a good way to build followers. If they follow you, then there is something that interests them.

 

About the Author – Jo Harris is a writer and the Director of Content for the Morgan Law Firm, an Austin, Texas divorce firm. Please visit the Morgan Law Firm Blog for additional content.

 

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How local businesses can use QR codes in marketing

QRHave you ever noticed those little black modules that are positioned in a square pattern on a white background on some pages of the magazine and even at the back of your favorite beauty product?

Well, it’s called the QR code which is short for Quick Response Code, what exactly is a QR code? It is a popular two dimensional barcode that was invented by Denso Wave in 1994 to scan parts at high speed, but now QR codes are widely used in social media, advertising, businesses and many more.

Below are some of the examples how QR code can be effective in promoting your local business.

 

QR codes on business cards
Business cards are one of the easiest ways to advertise your business by integrating and utilizing your own QR code.

There are plenty of examples of varied styles that manage to take advantage of the code as a style factor as well.

 

QR codes in your website:
QR codes can make your own website more accessible on mobile devices.

With smart phones overtaking online functions, it is critical that you are making your website as user-friendly or mobile friendly as you can.

QR codes used in websites enable your trusty mobile phone to easily get in touch with websites without experiencing the complicated approach of getting the URL into that small framed mobile web browser.

With the use of QR codes, it is possible to provide your prospective customers access to the right information easily on their mobile device by simply scanning the QR Code from a print out media or on the display screen.

With different competitors in e-commerce, producing the product or service information accessible to the customers through these little codes will be very useful. Consumers are likely to pursue products that provide them more descriptive facts in an easily accessible way.

 

QR code for twitter:
Twitter is one of the best ways to promote a local business. Putting QR code on your Twitter will definitely boost your followers and your business.
Having a Twitter QR code, you may also make use of twitters text update service.

For those who have not heard about this Twitter enables individuals to subscribe to your updates via text message so whenever you put a brand new Twitter update everyone who subscribed to text changes will get a text alert.

This is an effective service that could be frequently incurred for from other text message advertising businesses.

QRmobil

 

QR codes in print ads:

Print ads are one of the most influential ways of promoting your business. Putting QR Codes in magazines, newspapers, brochures or flyers can provide quick access to your website so customers will have quick access to your website.

QR codes can be considered as one of the most intelligent inventions in terms of advertising, people who would like to promote their business can take advantage of integrating QR codes in whatever way they would like to promote their business with, the inbound marketing firm can provide us a lot of ideas on disseminating information about our business using QR codes.

QR codes can definitely call a customer’s attention by just simply scanning your code.

 

 

Author Bio:- Sunny Popali is SEO Director at tempocreative.com. Tempo Creative is an Arizona Inbound Marketing firm that has served over 700 clients since 2001. Tempo’s team specializes in digital and internet marketing services including web design, SEO, social media and strategy.

 

 

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10 Dos and Don’ts of Blogging for Your Business

DosDontSuccessful and effective blogging does not happen overnight or by luck. In fact, seasoned bloggers work hard and constantly learn more about the craft. These basic Dos and Don’ts are a stepping stone for making a successful business blog.

Do spread the word offline about your blog. If you want a successful blog, you must make it a priority. Don’t be ashamed of what you’re doing online. Spread the word around the office, to customers and to your family.

Don’t have music automatically playing in the background. While this may have been cool in the early days of the Internet, it’s simply a hassle now. Music playing in the background will simply distract, and possibly aggravate, your visitors.

Do post regularly. Make a posting schedule and stick to it. Your blog needs consistent fresh content. When visitors know you post often, they are more likely to visit again and again.

Don’t fill your website with ads. You are a business. The goal of your website is to drive people to your business, not to advertise other products and services. Focus your energy on great content, not generating money from third-party advertisements.

Do create a relationship with other blogs in your niche. As a business blog, connect with other businesses in your area. You can start building this business relationship through commenting on other business blogs. Not only does it help build relationships, but it also helps your blog because it gets you name out there even more.

Don’t post irrelevant, fluffy material. When you spend time creating a blog post, make it count. Posting for the sake of posting does not help your readership, and doesn’t help you either. If you can’t come up with three quality posts a week, that’s okay. Only post once a week. Make every post count.

Do share your blog through your social media websites. It’s okay if you do not have a social media plan for your business. But if nothing else, you should have a personal account. If you do, make sure to share links to your blog through social media. Encourage your family, friends and co-workers to do the same. The more people that share, the greater chances you have of more visitors.

Don’t use spammy, questionable methods to get visitors. There are plenty of black hat marketing methods that you may come across during your study of successful business blogging. However, steer far away from these methods. You may get more visitors at first, but the end result could give your business a bad name and even get you banned from search engines.

Do build a relationship with your readers. Engage with your readers through the comments section. If someone comments with a question, promptly respond. This is all a part of customer service and public relations. Work hard and keep visitors and customers happy.

Don’t get discouraged. You may not see overnight success from your business blog, but keep at it. With a bit of hard work, you can make this tool a huge asset for your business.

 

Chelsei Henderson enjoys blogging about and helping others with website building when not building websites herself. Check out Webeden to learn how build your own website and become successful online.

 

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SEO the Porter Way

Do you know Porter’s 5 forces analysis? It was developed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School in 1979.

Everybody who has read or studying marketing ever since, knows about this analysis and has been reading about it. Most of the marketing people are also using it to determine the competitive intensity and the attractiveness of a market. I have been studying marketing too – so I love it too. But did you know you can use this model to describe the competition of a keyword?

With this model you can get insight into how competitive the current environment is for a keyword? And how strong the rivalry and intensity is for a keyword? And maybe the most important knowledge we will get from this is, that we can’t control everything when we do SEO. So if your boss asks you – When will the “coffee” keyword rank number 1 – you might tell him or her about the uncontrollable forces.

So let us check out Porters’ 5 forces model for the keyword “coffee”. So are you ready for some Porter?

Porter

New entrants in the coffee keyword market

A new coffee seller might show up on the internet. They also know about SEO, and they sure want a good ranking on keyword market for coffee. This is really a new entrant. You might also have had a competitor who never really has done anything regarding SEO for many years and suddenly they have hired an SEO guy (maybe me). So this competitor is also new to the keyword market for coffee.

Another company has been selling coffee for years and has done SEO for years but suddenly they have doublet their budget for the SEO. So they also want a ranking (or higher ranking) for the “coffee” keyword. This analysis is about the keyword market for coffee. To start a business on the internet is really simple – also for business selling coffee. So you will have to set up some barriers to make it more difficult for your competitors to outrank you.

So of course you will have to optimize your own content for the word coffee. Another great way is to try to optimize your site for more unique, uncommon and longer tail keywords. It could be “black coffee”, “Arabic coffee” or “hot coffee”. Another way is to own the keyword not only for your website but on the entire internet. If you have a twitter account, Facebook account you might have the rank 1, 2 and 3 for the keyword coffee. And you might have an Pinterest account for your pictures that rank number 4. This way you can make it very difficult for a new competitor to sell its coffee on the internet.

Coffee suppliers

The suppliers for the keyword market for “coffee” are the search engines. So Google, Bing, Yahoo are the big suppliers for the keyword market for  “coffee”. Don’t forget YouTube – this is the second largest search engines today. But also the social media is a supplier. Who brings in most referrals for your keyword on the internet?

Of course Google.com is properly is your biggest source for traffic. But don’t forget to check out the other suppliers too. And remember that Google is changing its algorithm maybe 500 times a year. Most of the algorithm changes are really small, but sometimes – like the Panda or Penguin updates – it can really change the ranking of the coffee market.

So if you normally rank as number 1, 2 or 3 and suddenly drops down to number 8 (or worse 11) you have a problem.

The threat from coffee buyers

When Porter talks about the forces, he is talking about the threat of buyers. And the threat these days are growing. Maybe the coffee you are selling has been harvested by some underpaid children. They are almost living like slaves. And suddenly the news is out in the social networks. “Did you hear that this coffee company is using children slaves to harvest its coffee?” So the people will tell their friends on Facebook and Google+ and Twitter. You will see within days that your sale is going down.

The social signals are also factors for the search engines like Google and Bing. Yes. If people start to write bad reviews, making bad press releases the search engines will lower your ranking for the coffee keyword. Positive and negative social signals affect the organic ranking. Buyers can also click on like to local coffee business. This way they will help the local shop. And local searches are getting more and more important these days. So be sure people like your shop too.

Coffee substitutes

This is the threat of substitutions for the coffee keyword. Are there new ways you can use the keyword for coffee? The total market for the keyword “coffee” is not on Google. You might have to do some alternative marketing tactics. Do some Google Adwords? Or other PPC ads. Maybe you should try YouTube or Facebook PPCs? Maybe search retargeting. Build up a large audience in your social networks or start an email club with special offers? Well you should always do this anyway right?

Imagine what happens if Google suddenly changes its algorithm and you were getting 80 percent of your traffic from Google. You have spent years building up backlinks to your site, and suddenly Google thinks the social network is much more important than backlinks. Then you will have a problem right? Like in the real world, it is a thing to have an ongoing check of your competitors. What are they doing regarding backlinks, in the social network? Have they hired some new SEO guys?

Don’t let the competitors take the lead.

Coffee competition rivalry and intensity within the coffee industry

The rivalry and intensity for the coffee keyword is depending on all the above forces and your marketing strategy and your SEO strategy. For most industries the intensity of competitive rivalry is the major determinant for the competitiveness of the industry.

How to check competition in Market Samurai

How much money are the other companies spending on SEO? On Google Adwords? PPC budget? Are they working with video? Social networks? How big are the marketing budgets? The online budget? You can also do a keyword analysis for the keyword, like this from Market Samurai (But you can get analysis like this from many other companies too).

Coffee conclusion

You know the conclusion already. You can’t really say if you are going to rank number 1 for your keyword. You are depending on the entrants, buyers, suppliers, substitute and the rivalry and intensity within the coffee keyword market. The external forces are strong – so if you meet an SEO company telling you they can get you a number one ranking for a keyword you will know now that it really is impossible to promise.

And now it’s time for my coffee.

All the best, Henrik

PS – did you read about how to use AIDA to boost your traffic?

 

 

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The Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

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seooptI just came across this Infographic about the conversion rate optimization – and wanted to share it with you guys.

All our efforts getting traffic to our site really doesn’t matter if we can make the visitors do what we want them to do right?

So choose “The Good Path” in the Infographic.

Enjoy your day 🙂

Henrik

 

 

 

 

 

seogadget cro pxhsjRead the full guide on SEOmoz

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