The Goal

Understanding your real goal is a great place to start.

• How does your website help you achieve your goals?
• Direct sales?
• Leads?
• Referrals to others?
• Page views (advertising or dissemination of information)?

Whatever you do with your site promotional activities, it is critical that you tie these all back to the goal of your site.

For example, how does a strong social media presence help your business?

For many businesses, it will not result in much in the way of direct sales (though there are some businesses where social media does a great job of doing just that!). If it does not directly drive sales, is it a branding play? Or, is it a channel to develop relationships with major influencers in your market space – where such relationships can become major drivers of high quality links to your site?

I am strong proponent of designing social media strategies to help drive a strong mix of signals to your site, including links. This can be amazingly effective, and it is something that my company has done with many enterprise class customers. I do think that the search engines are already be looking at sites to see if they are getting a reasonable mix of links and social media signals.

For example, imagine that you have a set of links to a webpage that has a value. For sake of discussion, we will call that value 100. Let’s also say that you have a set of social signals that has a value of 50. I would argue that the combination of the links and the social signals together may have an aggregate value of 200.

However, for some businesses, social media is best used for pure branding value, or even to build a community that helps drive direct sales and use. These are perfectly valid strategies as well.

While I have highlighted social media in ths discussion so far, the same process of understanding how any of your marketing strategies, whether it be PR, a blog on the site, or content syndication, needs to targeted at helping your site achieve its goals.

The Major Problems

This all sounds pretty straightforward, but getting it together is a lot harder than it sounds. What happens with many enterprises is that the people involved already have a lot of other stuff on their plates. The exec team knows that they need to do something, so they take some tactical actions to get it started. But, then they don’t get the value out of it they are looking for.

Here are three of the main reasons why:

1. Uncoordinated Strategies: The company is very progressive, so they have setup a blog, an SEO team, a solid PR organization, and a social media team. They also actively pursue content marketing as a way of exposing their message and expertise to the audiences of other influential people. The problem is that they are not all singing from the same songbook. Getting each of these marketing initiatives to promote the same types of content and messaging is something you simply must do.
2. Part-time Owners: A lot of times the people assigned have many other responsibilities. The exec assigns one of the tasks (for example the blog) to their favorite marketing manager as an additional responsibility, yet that markateing manager has tons of other things on her plate. This is not going to get great deal of attention!
3. In Different Departments: For example, social media gets placed in the PR department, the blog in another area of marketing, and the SEO team is in development. What are the chances that all of these teams are going to work in close coordination? Sadly, many time they just don’t.

Possible Solutions

I believe that one of the best solutions is to have one owner that oversees all of these initiatives – SEO, social media, the blog, and content marketing. They should also have the ability to influence what happens in PR, and/or follow-up with media people that are reached by successful PR efforts.

This person needs to have four things going for them:

1. Focused – Don’t pile this big responsibility on someone’s already overflowing plate.
2. Passionate – They need to believe in the importance of the work and be a true evangelist.
3. Supported – The exec team needs to support them and make it clear from the top that this is an important initiative.
4. Authority – They need to have the ability to make things move as needed.

A single owner is the best way to set this up. If you can’t do that for some reason, then setup a team that has the same qualities. A clear mandate, a clearly defined set of responsibilities, and one or more people that are Focused, Passionate, Supported, and with Authority to drive all four disciplines toward the same goal – yup, it really can be as good as it sounds!

Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team on that trip. One of the things I learned is what the adCenter team is doing to make it more attractive for enterprise scale customers to leverage adCenter to expand the PPC efforts.

Firstly, there was a clear recognition by the adCenter team regarding the challenges they face. They have a large and dominant competitor. Advertisers will start with AdWords, and then consider adding adCenter if the budget allows. However, even this is not a given.

For an enterprise advertiser that wants to increase their spend by 20%, it is far easier to simply jack up their bids in AdWords than it is to build new campaigns in adCenter. There are many reasons for this, including basic differences in account structure and capabilities.

The adCenter team is heavily focused on addressing this issue. The key elements of their efforts are:

1. Simplifying the user experiences across all touchpoints.
2. Reducing the time and effort to import an AdWords campaign into adCenter.
3. Achieving feature parity as quickly as humanly possible.

The adCenter team refers to this as improving “Return on Time Spent”. The focus of the initative is to offer a better return for those advertisers who put their incremental dollars into adCenter. It is the right focus. And adCenter has some serious benefits to offer to enterprise advertisers, let’s look at the two biggest.

1. Audience Reach Is Still Sizable

comScore data shows that Bing’s market share is approximately 30% of the search market in the US. This is approaching 50%of Google’s market share, which is sizable enough to pay attention to.

The people searching on Yahoo, MSN, in Internet Explorer, and on Bing are often a different audience that the audience on Google. comScore data shows that 57 million of the searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo don’t use Google:

2.  Higher Likelihood of Purchase

There is also data to sugggest that there is a higher propensity for Bing users to convert into sales. According to ComScore, the unique searchers on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites (including Yahoo! Search, Bing, and partners) are likely to spend 24.1% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 5.5% more than Google searchers in the U.S.

These two benefits merit serious consideration. No doubt that the adCenter team will face ongoing challenges, but advertisers can find incremental market share and potential conversions here.

The adCenter team is also working on making adCenter experiences more intuitive for their customers; delivering better insights for campaign optimizations; and new ad formats and features that will help customers unlock additional volume.

All in all, I conducted 10 different interviews of adCenter team members, and I saw a highly engaged team focused on their goals. I think that it is likely that they will succeed in significantly improving the Return on Time Spent for enterprise advertisers.

For those who are interested in more detail, I will be publishing these interviews in the coming weeks on the Stone Temple Consulting blog.

Some of the biggest factors that mark a Made-for -SEO Site are:

1. Thin slicing on search phrases – i.e. pages on the site which are not very distinct from each other, but which were created so they could each compete for minor variations of similar search phrases. Many large sites have this problem. The question that needs to be answered for every page is why does it need to exist, given the other pages already on the site? Capturing additional search traffic is not the right answer!
2. Pages created for products not sold on the site – where the intent is to cross sell the visitors on a different product. This is again a problem that some large scale sites have.
3. Lack of any real added value content – for example a site that has no distinguishing content from its competitors. Unfortunately, many legitimate e-commerce sites that have failed to build a brand or add any unique content may fall into this category. Score a double minus for using manufacturer supplied descriptions.
4. Lack of an authoritative link profile – sites that get no recognition from authoritative sources are at best non-distinct, and could be classified as a Made-for-SEO site.
5. No brand searches – if the business has no brand searches taking place then it is questionable whether or not the world at large cares whether they exist.
6. Poor user experience – as shown by user engagement metrics that is worse than competition.
7. Over commercialized – what balance does the site have between adding value to the users and closing the sale? Note that if you are a major brand with lots of brand searches you get some leeway here. A large part of your added value is the trust people place in your brand. If not, you need to think about what your value add is, and being the site someone found in the search results is not it!
8. Affiliate only model – being an affiliate site is not a sin by itself, but if it is combined with several of the other factors above, the use of affiliate links makes it clear that there is no value add in the production of the product or service.
9. Reseller only model – this is basically the same as the affiliate only model. It is OK to be a reseller, but given that your value add is not the creation of the product or service you better excel at something else!

These are just some of the factors that go into whether or not a site is a Made-for-SEO website. A more general way to think about it is how the company goes about making decisions. If the only thing considered in making business decisions regarding the site is (a) getting more traffic, or: (b)converting users into sales, then we have a problem.

Let me illustrate how this unfolds with an example of how thin slicing can be done, and what should be done instead of that.

The Basics

One of the greatest marketing inventions in the search engine era is keyword research tools. These tools can give you tremendous insight into the terms used by people when referring to products or services like yours.

When thinking about your site structure and what pages to include, a keyword tool is a great place to start. I will walk through a quick example for a fictional site selling a variety of new cars online, using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Here is how I configured my initial query:

Based on this query, I received the following results:

This is a great start, but I can quickly see many things I don’t want to include. There are references to used cars, remote control cars, rental cars, and other unrelated terms. So the first step is to filter that out, which leaves me with something like this:

Now we have a start at a top terms list, and we probably want our pages to cover most of these terms in one fashion or another. We also need to start thinking about our site hierarchy. To do that, we need to take our terms and break them out into categories.

Here is an initial cut at that:

The Finer Points

We have a good start with our categorization, which helps us think about our hierarchy, but before we finalize that we need to make some other decisions.

For example, at the top level do I have different pages for cars, cars for sale, new cars, buy cars, and buy cars online? In a Made-for-SEO site you might do that, but in a “Made for Users” site you would not. There is no reason for those terms to be covered on different pages.

With the feature category, you may well have different pages for many of these terms, such as: muscle cars, luxury cars, diesel cars, exotic cars, safest cars, 2011 cars, most reliable cars, awd cars, convertible cars, and 2010 cars grouped together with best cars 2010.

Each of these pages may also cover additional terms. For example, the “awd cars” page would also be targeted at “all wheel drive cars”, and your “diesel cars” page would also target “diesel fuel cars”.

Even on enterprise level sites, you want to avoid generating large quantities of pages just to pick up search traffic on micro terms. For example, you don’t want to create a page for a car brand that you don’t carry just so you can cross sell them on a different brand.

In the short term, this may generate some sales for you, but in the long term, user dissatisfaction signals will come back to haunt you. This may show in the form of people bouncing off your site and clicking on other search results, or in some other signal, but it will show. This is another clear sign of a Made-for-SEO Site.

Creating large volumes of pages is not by itself bad, as long as you have real content of unique value on each of those pages. If you are the owner of this fictitious car site, and you are not the company that manufacturers the cars you are selling, you need to think long and hard about how you add value.

Some ideas include:

1. Develop a recognized brand
2. Be the most active on social media
3. Offer the best customer service
4. Provide the most helpful content and tools
5. Create an exceptional user experience
6. Develop strong relationships with industry influencers

Summary

There are many other possibilities, but the key thing is to find ways to stand out. I will expand upon these more in the Differentiate or Die panel at SMX West at the end of February.

Sites that are built as Made-for-SEO Sites, such as the content farms I wrote about in The Rise and Fall of Content Farms (three+ weeks before Panda was released by Google!), are in trouble. Their only reason to exist is to get and commercialize SEO traffic, and they prioritize that over the user experience. Trust me when I tell you that this is not a place you want to be.

This does not mean that you can’t build a site that has SEO traffic as its primary source. SEO is not bad, and it is not dead. The important subtlety is whether or not you prioritize short term SEO over content quality and user experience. Made-for-SEO sites do. Don’t go there. The days when those types of sites work will soon be gone.

UGC is very helpful for differentiation because it can add a layer of valuable content to your site that your competitors don’t have. Of course, don’t simply slap up any old blocks of user generated content for the sake of having it. Take the time and effort to figure out what content will add value to the user experience on your site.

Adding UGC to your site should be about engagement, not about adding blocks of text. Google’s Panda update made it more obvious that user engagement is a SEO ranking factor, and I expect the influence of engagement metrics to grow. As an added bonus, you can see what language real people use to describe products like yours.

As an example of effective UGC, Amazon does a great job with the way it integrates user reviews into their site:

Leveraging Your Own Site Traffic

One of the first things you should consider is leveraging the traffic you already have on your site. This can provide a lot of valuable content very quickly. Techcrunch does this very successfully as they get lots of comments on their posts. Creating UGC in this fashion requires that you already have a substantial level of traffic.

It also requires that you have a commenting platform in place, which is something that comes for free with blogging platforms. It is also useful to have an anti-spam system installed such as Akismet (also free). However, you can also consider using a platform such as Facebook Comments, which is exactly what Techcrunch does:

Facebook Comments provides a certain amount of natural anti-spam protection as you need to be logged into your Facebook account to use it. This certainly gives users with real accounts an incentive to avoid being a spammer with their accounts. Likewise, Facebook has a strong motive to remove bad accounts as well.

As of November 2011, it became apparent that Google is indexing Facebook Comments. This is good for SEO as it means that all the great content being created on your site is now credited to your site.

Other popular platforms you can incorporate on your site include BazaarVoice and PowerReviews. These are platforms for incorporating customer reviews on your site. This is a great way to capture content, though I have not yet seen any evidence that Google is indexing this content as yet. If you know of any proof of that, please let us know in the comments.

You can also use a non-platform approach. Developing methods for gathering content from visitors to your site is not hard. For example, include a poll, as NFL.com does:

A poll is not going to give you reams of text on your page, but reams of text is not the goal here – added value is. Relevant polls do a great job at increasing user engagement with your site.

If you have brick and mortar locations, you can also leverage your foot traffic. Ask people that come into your store to fill out a short survey. This is an awesome strategy, because you can provide them with a small discount as an incentive, which may directly increase your sales, and you collect some great data that you can publish.

Design your survey to collect data that is relevant to visitors to your website. One idea is to have them write a review for your product.

Leverage Social Media

If you have built a strong following in a social media community, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, you have another ready made audience to leverage.

Building these communities is pretty easy for companies with strong brands, but harder for those who are less known. I won’t cover how to build such an audience here, other than to say that building a strong social media presence can be hugely valuable.

One more quick tip: if your resources are limited focus on building one large audience on one platform instead of medium sized audiences on multiple platforms.

Once you have a good sized audience, you can try running polls here too. Kaplan University did a nice job with this poll:

A total of 109 comments is not bad, and gives them a nice set of data to make use of on the site. Another idea is to try the top 10 tips for using one of your products. This could collect some great data for you.

If you don’t have an audience yet, and you want to do something right away, consider making use of Facebook ads. Once again, polling of some sort works well here.

To make this work, here are a few keys to success:

1. Use the targeting feature to reach the right audience. You may need to play with this a bit to get this right. Remember that a pretty small percentage of the audience numbers you see when setting up your ad will respond to your ad – less than a tenth of a percent.
2. Refresh the ads, and change the positioning of the poll, regularly. When someone sees the same ads more than once their chances of responding go way down. But, if they did not respond to the first one, they might to the second.
3. Experiment with different polls over time. It may take you a while to get ones that play really well in front of the audience you target.

Creative Ways To Get Data

If you don’t have strong traffic on your site or a large social media audience, one of your options is to make use of Facebook ads, but you have other options as well.

Consider using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT). The labor here is incredibly cheap, which may cause you to worry that the workers on MT are not the right group to provide UGC for your site.

Data published by NYU on Mechanical Turk Demographics shows that 70% or more of the participants are based on the US, and 35% of them have income of $60K or more (as compared to 45% of the general US population). MT also allows you to specify US only participants.

The beauty of Mechanical Turk is that you can construct some pretty complex surveys and collect a lot of useful data. Here are some of the things you can do:

1. Reviews of your product or service
2. Opinion polls
3. Collect essays on any relevant topic, and then extract great quotes or publish the entire essay
4. Competitive comparisons

There are any number of ideas you can try. Let creativity reign! The main thing that you can’t do is collect personal information. This is strictly forbidden on Mechanical Turk, and if you try to do that you will get your task pulled down quickly. Repeat offenders get their account suspended.

There are a few alternatives to MT that you can consider as well. These are:

1. Short Task – similar to Mechanical Turk
2. Microworkers – similar to Mechanical Turk
3. Put together a charity campaign for a non-profit related to your space. Pay them for each response obtained for your survey or poll received from their member base. Put the participants in a drawing to win a nice prize.

Summing It Up

As I noted at the beginning, remember that it is about engagement not globs of text on your pages. The hardest task is to come up with ideas that fit your audience on your site.

Stuck for ideas? Take some time and poll your audience for ideas, or use Facebook ads or some of my “Creative Ways to Get Data” and poll those folks for ideas.

Take your time and get the ideas right first. Once that is done, there are plenty of ways to then go collect lots of data samples and get engaging content for your site.

Today, I am going to address that topic from the perspective of its impact on SEO. What is particularly interesting about this topic is that structured markup provides publishers a way to provide the search engines information about their website(s).

One of the original ways of doing that was with metatags. Unfortunately, these were so badly abused by spammers that Google stopped using it as a ranking signal. Google finally stated this publicly in this post in 2009, which notes that “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”

Google continues to indicate that markup is not used as a ranking signal: “Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time.” However, there are important SEO benefits to using markup, and I will explore these in today’s column.

Markup In Search Results

The first benefit is that you can impact the appearance of your search listings, creating what we call a “rich snippet.” Here is an example of rich snippets in the search results, as shown on a search for one of my favorite recipes, loc lac:

The presence of the stars in the search listing will tend to draw the human eye and increase the click-through rate for those results. These modified listings are a result of the use of markup in the source code for the webpages.

The next two screen shots will give you a view as to what the code is for the first of the two search results. The first screen shot shows a piece of the hrecipe format (which is a type of Microformat) that includes the code for specifying the breadcrumb links:

Looking farther down in the hrecipe format, we get a look at the code which shows an implementation of a review (in the hreview-aggregate tag) and also shows the cook time for the recipe:

You will see additional elements included in the markup as well. My purpose in showing you this is not to try to teach you the coding details, but to illustrate the connection between the use of publisher tagged data and an impact on the search results.

There are many more examples of rich snippets and a discussion of different types of markup here. You can see information on microdata, microformats and RDFa, as well as the types of categories supported by Google. Some of the more common types of markup are:

• People
• Products
• Events
• Businessess and Organizations
• Video

In June, Google announced support for the “rel=author”, which is another form of markup. This adds the author’s picture in the search results next to search listings for the articles they have written.

Implementing this is not simple, but you can read an excellent article on how to implement rel=author here. Here is an example of what this looks like in the search results:

It’s About Click-Through Rates

One thing I have learned (over and over again!) in my time as an Internet marketer is that a morass of boring text is … well, boring. The eye is drawn to search listings that look different.

Images, such as result from rel=author, or the asterisks in the recipes (you can also get pictures in your recipes as well) do wonders, but any level of difference that breaks up the 10 blue links will do great things for you.

As a result, your click-through rate will go up, and this will bring you more qualified visitors, and that is, after all, what SEO is all about.

In addition, if you believe (as I do) that click-through rate and search results interaction is a ranking factor (you can see what Bing’s Duane Forrester had to say about Click-Through Rates and Search Rankings here), then this starts to sound like a double win.

You get higher CTR without changing your ranking; and provided that the user does not simply bounce back to the search results and click another listing, you get higher rankings to boot.

How do I reconcile this belief with Google’s statement that they don’t use markup as a ranking factor? Actually, there is no conflict there. I believe that they use CTR as a ranking factor, not the markup itself.

Remember, Google is often quite literal in the way they express things. The influence in rankings is indirect, so their statement would still be true.

Enter Schema.org

On June 2, Bing, Google and Yahoo announced the launch of Schema.org. This is markup based on the microdata specification. Google indicates that the reason the companies chose microdata over other types of markup such as microformats and RDFa is:

Instead of having webmasters decide between competing formats, we’ve decided to focus on just one format for Schema.org. In addition, a single format will improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.

I don’t think that the search engines will end their support for the other formats any time soon, but the weight of their attention will shift to Schema.org (microdata), and as a publisher your attention should shift in that direction too. As they add support for new rich snippets, that will most certainly focus on the microdata approach since they can all count on each other to support the same format.

Summary

I am bullish on adding support for Schema.org markup in your content, particularly in those cases where it is already known to be supported. The click-through rate benefits are enough to make this effort worthwhile.

If you have content that fits a format that is not yet supported by rich snippets, you may want to wait and invest your development effort elsewhere, but I would move quickly once support is announced.

I am excited that Google, Bing and Yahoo are all involved in Schema.org. When the search engines band together to define a standard, it is a major sign that something is here to stay, and that it is important. This makes it a more interesting area for us as publishers to invest effort into.

Some Auto Insurance Examples

GEICO was the first auto insurance company to make a big splash by promoting their products with humor with its famous GEICO gecko. The campaign was extremely successful, and the message was very simple: “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance.”

This approach helped it build a major national brand. Humor was the vehicle for getting consumer attention, but the critical element was the simple and compelling value proposition for their product.

GEICO has continued to push the envelope in many ways. Its “even a caveman can do it” commercials deliver the message that even if you are stupid, you can do this. Everyone feels stupid at times, and many potential auto insurance customers are intimidated by computers and the Internet. Obviously, if a caveman can do it, so can you.

You have to love the subtleties in their series of commercials with the Pierce Brosnan look-alike. They deliver their message while creating associations with the audience’s childhood experiences. They use these associations to address the concern that people may have that the savings are not really there. Can I really save that much money with that little effort?

Did the little piggy really cry “wee wee wee” all the way home? Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle? Associating the answer to these questions with the answer to whether GEICO can save you money on car insurance is brilliant.

One twist on this I like is providing an answer to a question that has never been answered before: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Now you know: They won’t stop until the farmer makes them. Here, GEICO creates a sense of satisfaction by answering this question your brain may have heard hundreds of times or more, and then you’re hit with the discount message again.

Looking at the GEICO home page, however, the follow-through on this is a little weak. I think they would be better served by redelivering the “15 minutes can save you 15% or more” message prominently on the home page, and also showing both the gecko and the caveman to fully reinforce their TV messaging.

Their TV campaigns are so ubiquitous that they may not have felt the need to do so, but personally, I like to stack the deck as much as possible.

Progressive was later to the mass TV advertising campaign game, so its task was inherently more complex. A campaign based on humor and saving money was going to have to be different to work.

To their credit, they recognized this. Even though they were going after the exact same message of saving money on car insurance, they chose to offer a higher level of proof. They published their rates and those of their competitors for each market. This new level of transparency was novel, and they took it further by publishing competitive rates, even in those markets where their pricing was not the lowest.

As they grew, they started to introduce a dry humor, with the quirky Flo, but continued to offer clear examples of differentiation in their messages. Here are some examples of things that they promote:

1. Safe driver discounts
2. Boat insurance
3. #1 in motorcycle insurance

Note that Progressive does a great job or reminding us that they are associated with Flo, and that you can save a lot of money with just a little time. The messaging is tied together really nicely here.

Even well-established brands such as Allstate have focused on clear differentiating messages. These include:

1. Going back to basics with a company that has stood by you through depressions and 12 recessions.
2. Comprehensive coverage (as emphasized by their mayhem commercials).

Allstate also does a nice job of tying their home page messaging to their TV commercials:

Studying other industries can be a great source of ideas of ways to differentiate. The key lesson is how quickly and simply the message gets delivered.

Don’t rely on your brand to make the sale for you on your website. Make sure that you deliver your value proposition message as clearly, simply and quickly as the auto insurance industry does with its TV commercials.

How Differentiation Impacts SEO

Figuring out how to differentiate your brand and your website is the single most important thing you can do from an SEO perspective. The auto industry insurance example above shows that just being a large brand is not enough.

You need to offer a unique value proposition that is obvious and apparent to casual visitors to your website. If a first-time visitor can’t tell why you are different in the first three seconds on your site, then you are not different.

And, if you aren’t different, your SEO will fail for many reasons, including:

• Potential linkers won’t link to you
• Social media influencers won’t +1/Like/Share your content
• User engagement metrics on the site will stink compared to competition

The same underlying psychological reasons that drive major brands to differentiate their message in TV advertising need to drive you to differentiate your message on your website. Linkers, influencers and search engine users are people.

Creating A Differentiation Strategy For Your Website

1. Brainstorm a list of value propositions.

Get your key staff into a room and lock the door. Give them whatever they need to stimulate their creativity, and brainstorm various ways to position your products/services on the web.

Spend a long time on this. Make sure you do this before you survey users or study in detail what the competition is doing. Do allow people to look at other industries, such as the auto insurance industry, for ideas.

I urge you to do this before studying the competition (any more than you already have) because the human brain is often more creative when it has less information. Many of you are going to want to skip this step (because we are all impatient), but don’t bias this part of the process with facts and data.

If you have already done the competitive or surveyed customers, make sure you don’t allow that information into the room during the brainstorming.

2. Survey prospective customers.

Put together a survey to get an idea from potential customers (some survey creation tips here). Instead of focusing on your value proposition, focus instead on their needs. Do they need to save money? Best service? Most features? Some particular features? Fastest results?

Include an open-ended question or two to solicit their ideas. For example, ask them what they are looking for in the product/service that they don’t think anyone in the market offers today.

If you are offering mass-market products you are in luck, because you can probably use a very simple mechanism such as Mechanical Turk to run your survey and get lots of data fairly cheaply. Or, if you already have decent traffic on your website, you can survey the people there. But if your brand is already known for something, this could bias the survey because your existing value proposition may already be in the visitor’s mind.

I prefer to use an impartial source. If neither of these work, then reach out to places where your prospective customers cluster. For example, industry associations, trade shows or other industry events, social media communities, or similar places.

3. Research your competitors.

Now that you have allowed your creativity free reign, go get some facts. Take the top three to five competitors you have and study their value propositions. Develop a detailed list of what you see on their site. Then, go do some more surveys, one competitor at a time, but focus these surveys on asking prospective customers what they believe the competitor offers. This will allow you to see how their message is bring received by the potential customer.

Make sure to get the people surveyed to indicate how strongly they believe in the message from the competitor. They may say that the competitor is promoting high quality, but does the customer believe it?

4. Look for the openings. 

Get all your people in a room for the next brainstorming session, and dig in to analyze what you have found. Where are the opportunities? Is the competition weak in one or more areas? Are they making claims that they can’t substantiate but you can?

This discussion can often have a bit of a party atmosphere to it, and you should foster that. Have fun with this! You can mock your competitors and come up with outrageous ideas. At the end of it all, make sure you break this down into a few key ideas you are going to pursue.

A big focus at this point is the messaging of the idea. It’s great if you can come up with a benefit that everyone wants, but if it someone has to read two paragraphs of text to understand what it is, it won’t work. One sentence maximum, and ideally a sentence fragment.

5. Test out your ideas.

Now go back to your prospective customers, however you reached them last time, and test out the ideas. Try a new survey and see which ideas resonate.

An important subtlety here is the context. Offering a 15% discount on auto insurance in 15 minutes or less at this point is not novel. So the customer may pay for that, but there are going to pay GEICO for it, not you.

So make sure your survey positions these potential value propositions against existing competition. Are these benefits you don’t see others offering in the market? Are they powerful enough to cause the customer to buy your stuff instead of existing products?

6. Implement it on your site and test it again. 

Once you have a value proposition that you can measure, it is time to figure out how to implement that on your site. As noted above, you have just a few seconds at most to help people get what it is they can get from you. On the site, the messaging can be quite subtle. Read Scott Brinker’s recent article on seductive landing pages for some ideas on messaging.

Seducing is not the only method. Humor works too, as exemplified by the GEICO and Progressive auto industry insurance commercial examples I used above. Another technique is establishing yourself as the most trusted, similar to the Allstate approach.

Whatever underlying tactic you use, make sure that the key benefit the customer is going to receive leaps from the page at them. Try some different versions of the implementation and go out and test how people respond to it.

Pay particularly close attention to how fast they get the value prop. On the Web, a lack of speed kills.

Summary

This all seems suspiciously like traditional marketing, doesn’t it? This is the way that things are headed.

What is different online than the TV environment is that the consumer has a lot more ways to make choices, and advertising is less about “interruption” and more about “informed choice.” TV ads interrupt your activity of choice. Searchers and people on social media sites are in control of the timing, and they are making informed choices.

But they are still people, and they respond to benefits. You need to offer them a benefit that is, or that you can help make, their biggest concern.

Use the power of the Web to help you refine your message. The constant surveys in my process follow the old-fashioned philosophy of “test, test, and then test again.” Collecting the data is relatively cheap. Rolling out a boring and undifferentiated strategy is not.

It will cost you in the traditional marketing sense, but it will also kill your SEO efforts.

It will send signals to potential linkers and social media influencers that there is nothing to see here, and nothing worth sharing. Visitors to your site will vote with their clicks and mouse movements. “Same old stuff I saw somewhere else. Nothing special here, so time to go.”

Meanwhile, the search engines see it all. They are looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

What is resonating with all the audiences that should be interested in your site? They will measure, measure and measure to find which sites linkers, influencers and customers will respond to the most, and so should you.

Google told Barry Schwartz about the update: “this update incorporates some new signals that help differentiate between higher- and lower-quality sites. As a result, some sites are ranking higher after this most recent update”.

So what is the formula for Panda success? It starts with understanding what the underlying causes are.

Restating Google’s Goals

I view Google (and Bing) as having two major objectives with their search results:

1. Find the fastest possible answer to the searcher’s question. It is important to internalize this. Can the user see what they want in a sub-second scan of your page? Or at the very least, can they tell that they will be able to get what they want, even if it requires a bit more effort, in less than a second? Consider this a working definition of a quality page.
2. Sites with the highest level of engagement. Put very simply, this equates to a site that can be trusted. Search engines like sites they can trust. Why? Because they are not likely to spam their customers, and are more likely to provide fast answers to user’s questions.

Measurement

There are tons of tools that Google has to measure engagement and trust. One of the most important ones, in my opinion, is the user’s click interaction with search results. If the position you are in normally gets a 10% click through rate for a given search phrase and you are getting 5% CTR, that is a strong signal to move your ranking down.

If users who click on your result have a higher than normal tendency to hit the back button and click on a different result – this is also a bad signal.

In my example image, the user clicked on the first result, did not like it, came back tried the second, did not like it, and so forth. This is exactly what search engines want to avoid.

In their ideal world, each of these SERPs has different takes on the problem of making french toast, and a title and description that clearly calls out what that that difference is. So if the answer to the user’s question is to be found by clicking on the 3rd result, they can easily figure that out right in the SERPs.

Engagement is a different matter, and there are tons of available signals. Here are some examples:

1. Average Time on Site
2. Page Views Per Visitor
3. Repeat Visitors
4. Brand Name Searches
5. Social Media Mentions / +1s / Likes / Tweets
6. Traffic from Non-Search Sources
7. Pages Printed
8. Scroll Bar Usage

Which signals the search engines use do not matter at this point. I know we all like to know what they are, and I am no exception in that regard. But, if you are looking to future proof your SEO, you need to start with the assumption that the particular signals that are in use are going to change.

So even if you can determine the precise signals that matter at the moment, you are well advised to solve the bigger problems of providing fast answers and high engagement.

9 Panda Diagnostic Steps

The place to start is with figuring out what is going on with the user experience on your site. Here are some key steps in that process:

1. Ask yourself some tough questions. Did you put a lot of editorial effort into the content on your site? If not, you will probably need to address that. Poor quality content will be noticed by users and they will vote with their clicks. For e-commerce sites that use manufacturer supplied descriptions, this may mean some tough challenges ahead. If you are competing with Ebay, Amazon, Macy’s, or other major brands, and you are selling the same items with no added value you have some big issues to address.
2. Now for the second tough question. Did you have providing the user the fastest possible response to their question in mind when you designed the site? If not, you will have to think about addressing that too.
3. Compare your engagement metrics with those of your competitors. You can look at signals such as time on site, repeat visitors and page views per visitor with services such as Compete.com and others like them. Yes, the data accuracy is crude at best, but you are looking for directional indicators not a calculation required to land a spaceship on the moon. Compare your brand search volume using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. If these metrics seriously lag your competitor, this may be telling you that you have work to do.
4. Examine your incoming search queries for more information. What do they tell you about what the users coming to your site are looking for? Are you getting the right visitors? Do you need to adjust your titles and the content to make sure you are getting people to your site that you are going to be able to help?
5. Survey the visitors to your site. Ask them what they are looking for. Give them a multiple choice list of logical answers, and then an “Other” that they can check where they can manually enter in anything else that they feel better describes what they want. This is a great way to truly determine what they are looking for.
6. Do some surveys of people who are not at your site. Mechanical Turk is a surprisingly good way to get this data. A survey there can give lots of interesting data, and if your traffic is low at the site might be the best way to quickly find out what people want when they come to a site like yours.
7. Set up mouse movement tracking software on your site. See what users are looking at on the page. Do the majority of them go straight to the right column of your 3 column site? If so, then that content is closer to what they actually want then what is currently in the center of your page.
8. See if you have pages on the site with a very high bounce rate as compared to other pages on the site. It may be that you have one section of the site that is hurting you. Unfortunately, it is probably rare that life will be that simple for you, but it is worth taking a look. If you see that this is the case, consider no-indexing those pages.
9. Ask yourself if you are hitting the users with too many ads. Is a large portion of the above the fold real estate used up by advertising plus your own banner graphic if you have one? If so, plan on changing that.

A Couple of More Key Points

The above diagnostic steps are a great place to start. Next up are two specific areas that I want to highlight.

Review your content for uniqueness

Certainly duplicate content is not a good idea, such as the use of canned manufacturer descriptions on an e-commerce site, but it goes much deeper than that.

For example, if you write an article on “how to make french toast” you have lots of company (854,000 results come up for that search query in Google including the “”). There is no way that you are adding any new value.

The same is true if you write an article with basic mortgage advice. Unless you are a major brand, you won’t stand a chance competing against major brands unless you do something different enough that users will notice it and vote with their clicks, shares, +1s, and other similar signals.

This is largely because the trust users place in a brand will cause them to generate better engagement signals on their article about french toast than yours – unless yours is a lot better. Superior site design or some unique new angle might do the trick. However, some of those pesky brands may be investing in their website engagement too.

Even if you are a major brand, points of actual differentiation in the content and experience you provide will provide you with major advantages over your competition. Invest in it to give yourself an edge.

Include positive brand signals on your site

Are you a major brand already? Great, but you can still dress that up with testimonials, case studies, endorsements, Truste logos, a clearly stated privacy policy that anyone can read, and similar items.

Not a major brand? Then these things are even more important. Your site needs to scream credibility and trustworthiness.

Following up on one of Google’s suggestions, survey site visitors, and groups of non-visitors too, and ask users if they would give a credit card to your site. Keep making tweaks and enhancements until a lot of them start saying yes.

Summary

As you can see, this approach is designed to attack the two basic Google Goals head on. This is not easy work, but it is the work that must be undertaken if you are going to get out from under a Panda setback. It will take time.

I have focused mostly on the initial diagnostic steps and not the follow up actions, but at the end of the day, the major items you will most likely have to work on are:

1. Content Quality / Uniqueness of Content
2. Site Design and Layout to help users find answers faster and improve engagement
3. Creating a Positive Brand Experience – make the users comfortable with your site

All evidence points to this being a grinding process for most people. This is unfortunate, but it is best to start the hard work now.

If it does not make sense for you to take the long and thorough road, you may want to consider cash cowing the site, and taking what it can still give you and investing in other projects.

To all of you who are offended by the prior statement, my apologies, but I am not making the rules here, I am just trying to help with interpreting them the best I can.

For many companies, one of the biggest current challenges is to decide how much energy to invest in SEO vs. Social Media.

Should you do both? Just SEO? Or is SEO dying and should you focus on Social Media? This is what I will try to address in today’s column.

Discovery vs. On Demand

I recently had the pleasure of doing an interview with Danny Sullivan, and we talked a bit about the balance between social media and search. Danny nicely characterized the search related value of social media as follows:

“I think search has his cousin called discovery, which is showing you things that you didn’t necessarily know you wanted or needed, but you are happy to have come across. I think social is very strong at providing that”.

My own personal experience lines up with that viewpoint. I always had trouble keeping up with my RSS feed reader and was not very good on staying on top of the latest news.

However, ever since I have been more actively engaged on Twitter, and now Google+ as well, I have found that I am much more current at all times. These social sites are keeping me abreast of the latest events. I get exposed to new content I might not see in my reader for a week, and also to content that would not have shown up in my reader at all as well.

So where does search fit in then? Let’s see what Danny had to say in the interview about that:

“… when a pipe breaks in your house, do you go onto Facebook and ask friends who you should call or do you go to Google and search for a plumber? You (go to Google and) search for a plumber. It’s an on demand need.

On the other hand, you need a dentist, it’s not an emergency, and you need a good recommendation. Tapping into your friends is very powerful. How the search engines figure out a way to integrate that is a next big step”.

I also think there are other needs the search fills that social does not. If am researching something, which is not an on-demand need, but for which my friends may not have the answer, or the complete answer, I will also go to search.

You can even see scenarios where my friends might help me get started, but I also use search to dig deeper. I think there is a lot of interaction that takes place between the two.

Don’t Forget Social Signals To Search Engines

This topic has been written about many times, so I won’t cover it again in depth here, but remember that social media activity is monitored by the search engines, and is used as a ranking signal; Danny Sullivan confirmed this in December 2010.

While this has evolved, and will continue to evolve, it is clearly a rich source of data that can help the search engines determine what content on the Web is the most important.

What Is The Right Balance Between SEO & Social Media?

I would argue that the great majority of enterprise class organizations need to be highly active in both arenas. There is too much traffic available from both sources. How a B2B organization might approach that is probably quite different from how a B2C organization would, but I believe the need is still there in both cases.

Should you have an equal investment in each? That might be the right answer depending on your organization. I think it is clear though that the scope of the investment at the point should be similar. You do not want to spend 90% in one discipline and 10% on the other. If you do, you are leaving a lot of opportunity on the table.

Social referrals and non-branded organic search referrals both bring you new customers. Whether you are a B2B or B2C organization, strong endorsements from a social network, or someone finding you on a non-branded search query will help bring you new business.

Let’s Dig Deeper

The most important aspect of this is that both strategies be interconnected. You do not want your social strategy and your SEO strategy to be operating independently of one another. This would be a mistake, as there is a great deal of connectivity between the two disciplines.

For example, I recently did an interview with Google’s Tiffany Oberoi. This interview was tweeted 181 times, including by Matt Cutts. As a result of this, it received 181 tweets, 39 +1s, and 166 links (as of August 7, 2010). This is a great yield for an article on the site. It has also generated over 5,000 page views, largely driven from social sources (so far), but those links will help drive the SEO strategy.

So what was the impact on search? Here is the ranking of the site for the search phrase “reconsideration requests”:

So not only did it get a burst of highly relevant traffic from social media, it is also poised to keep driving traffic over time for a highly relevant search phrase. This ranking is relatively new, but it has already begun to send some traffic, and the average page views per visitor coming in on the term is over 4 pages. Now that is an engaged visitor.

You want to build this type of virtuous circle where your social strategy is closely tied to the value proposition of your business. This will give you the right connections that will enable you to derive meaningful traffic from social media, and have it help your SEO efforts to boot.

There are two major reasons why you should make this switch, one of which is more obvious than the other:

1. The search engines are gunning for you. The paid link does not add value to their algorithm. Links are not useful as a ranking factor if they aren’t freely given as true endorsements. They just aren’t. So they want to discount them. The impact of this is that once your paid links are discovered, your investment becomes a waste of time and $$$.

2. You don’t get ahead. Regardless of what you spend per month for the links you have now, you have to keep spending it just to stay in the same spot. Even that is not a given if your competitor gets more aggressive than you and passes you. Organic links are the gift that keeps on giving. No monthly spend and constant value without risk. Does it cost money to build organic links? Of course it does, you need to do the right things (create content & promote the site) for that to happen, but the money you spend each month grows your link profile, instead of just maintaining it.

First Stage: Assessing Your Situation

Start by getting a handle on your particular situation.

For example, if you have 1,000 backlinks and 900 of them are paid for, you are in a tough spot. Weaning off the links can still be done but you need to go more slowly. These are the main things I would look at:

1. Total volume of paid links. More links means more work to do, but you do need to know what the task is before you start!
2. % of total links which are paid. The larger the percentage the more careful you need to be in making the transition. However, the larger the percentage, the more urgent it is to get started!
3. Total monthly spent on paid links. This is the money you can save by unloading those paid links. It is also the money you can invest in developing organic links going forward.
4. Determining which ones are providing the most value. You won’t know for sure, but you can probably come pretty close to figuring this out.
5. Determine which ones are adding the least value. These are the easiest one to dump, so they will go first!

Getting Link Data

Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools both offer ways to get a view to seeing what the search engines have for links for your site. This is great data. To get at this in Google’s Webmaster Tools, just click on the links as shown in this screen shot in order from top to bottom:

When you have gotten to that screen, scroll to the bottom and then click on Download all Links as shown in this screen shot:

Bing also allows you to download all your links. To get to the report, follow the click path from top to bottom shown in this screenshot:

When you get there, click on “Export All” which is over on the right side of the screen as shown here:

Sadly, Yahoo! will soon no longer be an option as Yahoo! Site Explorer will be closed down before year’s end. Fortunately, we do have two other great tools we can use. These are Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO. Both of these require cash to use, but give you a great deal of visibility on links to your site. You can also use them to review links to other people’s sites, and with Yahoo! Site Explorer going away, they will be the best two options for doing that.

With all of these options, you will get a representative list of links to your site. Unforunately, no tool will show you all your links, for various reasons. For Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO, the process of crawling the Web is a very expensive proposition, and each does the best they can. For the search engines, which obviously have much larger budgets to pay for their crawls, they have their own reasons for not showing you more data.

In the end, you need to pick the tool that is most comfortable for you. I like Open Site Explorer because it gives me the cleanest metrics for valuing the inbound links, as you can see in this screen shot:

With this, you can analyze the value of the inbound links you have received. I tend to weight Domain Authority more than I do Page Authority. So I start by sorting the output by Domain Authority in descending order and then by Page Authority in descending order.

Once I have done that, I filter out the organic links in the list, since I am analyzing paid links. After that, there are still a couple of key things to watch for:

• Filter out NoFollowed links, as these will not be perceived as link manipulation. If you want to keep those links, go for it!
• For some domains, the Domain Authority is irrelvant. For example, a link in the Yahoo! Directory is not likely to be valued based on the Domain Authority of Yahoo! overall. Similarly, a link from Blogspot.com is based on a decision made by an individual blogger, not the management team of the company.
• While I to lean towards Domain Authority, take into account Page Authority as well. So I might weight a Domain/Page Authority of 75/55 over a Domain/Page Authority of 85/25.
• Consider the relevance. Simply put, relevant links are worth more.

Second Stage: Making The Plan

Now that you have your raw data you need to make your plan. This is the fun part! I help clients with this process often, and it is exciting to transition your marketing efforts to a more solid and secure plan to build your business. Here are some things to do when thinking about this:

1. Plan on losing the low value links first. The reasons for this are simple: lower risk and it frees up money to invest in the rest of the plan. This is a great step which is designed to help you build momentum.
2. Build your plan for organic links. This could really be its own book, so I will just touch on this briefly here. Focus on very high value links. You can get some ideas on how to do it from the Link Building Presentation I did at SMX Advanced.
3. Develop a timeline for the addition of organic links. Decide what you are willing to commit resource wise to get this done, and make an estimate for how quickly you think you will be able to obtain these links.
4. Decide on a rough timeline for losing the paid links. You need to decide on this part of the plan based on your plan for adding new organic links and your growth goals during the transition process.

Finally, Commit!

The most important reason for making a plan is that it puts you in a better spot to respond to change. In this plan, be prepared to adapt based on your experiences. If you are adding organic links at a faster than expected rate, you may want to speed up the deletion of the paid ones. Of course, if you are having trouble getting the high value organic links, it may take longer to dump the paid ones than planned to.

Whatever happens though, don’t lose your commitment to see this through. It is definitely worth it. The process of building organic links is a different one, and it will force you to sit back and think about your website differently. After all, why would someone give you that link?

You will need to solve this problem, if you haven’t already, in the very near future. Search engines are actively reassessing the role of links in their algorithms. Links are not going to go away as a ranking factor, but their importance will be adjusted. We know that social factors are already a component, and their role will probably increase. The same is true for factors like content quality and user engagement.

These other factors are going to place a lot more demand on the quality of experience you provide on your site. The sooner you get focused on that, the better!

There are two major scenarios that we will examine, including a look at the potential solutions and the choices that publishers can make.

No Place For Rel=Canonical

The “The Really Complicated Technical SEO Infrastructure Issues” panel at SMX Advanced started with controversy when REI’s Jonathan Colman said that REI.com benefitted from using rel=canonical on the product pages of its catalog.

For example, if there were 10 pages of tent products, pages 2 through 10 all implemented a canonical tag which pointed back to page 1.

This is when Google’s Maile Ohye, who was also on the panel, piped up and said that this was not a proper implementation of the canonical tag. So ideally, do not use this approach. Even though REI thinks it is working for them currently, and it might be, there is simply no assurance that it will work that way in the future.

Search engines implement their algorithms and update them from time to time based on the way they believe things are supposed to work, and any time you use a feature such as rel=canonical in a way other than intended, you face material risk of a problem at some point.

The rel=canonical tag should only be used when the target page (the one that the tag points to) has substantially all of the content on the source page (the one implementing the tag).

Scenarios where this works can occur when you have different sort orders for products, or pages that show subsets of the products on the target page.

The Scenario: Article Pagination

This scenario arises when a magazine has a very long article. One possible approach to this is simply to have a “more” button which populates the content on the existing URL if the user wants to see it (Salon Magazine uses this approach).

However, there are some publishers that choose to continue the content on one or more additional pages as you can see with this example from Discover Magazine:

In this particular example, the content for the article lives on these two different URLs:

• http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/09-vital-signs-those-who-know-us-best
• http://discovermagazine.com/2011/mar/09-vital-signs-those-who-know-us-best/article_view?b_start:int=1&-C=

This scenario could lead to potential SEO issues. There are two major ways to approach this situation:

1. Do Nothing

In other words, let the search engines find and index both pages. There is a strong argument for this, as the pages have different content and some searchers may only be interested in the content on the 2nd page of the article. To get the most of this strategy, consider some of the tips by Tedster on Webmaster World for optimizing paginated articles.

2. NoIndex the additional pages

You should consider this option if you believe that having visitors land on the 2nd page of the article (and other pages other than page 1) would be a bad user experience. Note that if third party publishers link to your 2nd article page, that it can still pass link juice back into the rest of your site, and that is a good thing.

The Scenario: E-Commerce Catalog Pagination

Anyone who has done shopping for popular products online has seen this scenario.

Here is an example from the Men’s Boots page on Zappos.com:

The major choices remain the same, but the arguments about them are a bit different:

1. Do Nothing

On the SEO Infrastructure panel, Maile Ohye argued that the search engines still see value on those pages because they list different products than the first page of products. The basic argument for leaving the pages alone is that they are not duplicate content and they may pick up their own search traffic.

2. NoIndex the additional pages

The counter argument to the do nothing scenario is that the unique text content on the pages is likely to be quite low. For that reason, it is not unreasonable to be concerned that the search engines will perceive these as low quality pages, and that they may therefore have a negative impact on search traffic.

Obviously, the latter would not be the goal of the search engines, but there are software algorithms involved, and these algorithms deal with a nearly limitless number of scenarios.

In spite of their best efforts, sometimes there are sites that get hurt for unintended reasons. Given that pages that simply list a bunch of products are not that likely to garner much direct search traffic it may make sense to avoid that risk.

No Place For NoFollow

If you do decide to NoIndex pages on your site, I do not advise that you NoFollow the links to those pages. NoFollow does not conserve any link juice when you implement it. It just does not pass the link juice to the page receiving the link, and that link juice is thrown away (it is not redistributed to other pages on your site).

Let the juice flow to your pages with NoIndex tags, because those pages can accumulate and pass PageRank, and they can then vote a portion of that PageRank back into the rest of your site.

Key Considerations Regarding Pagination

My inclination in the Article Pagination scenario is to simply do nothing, and let the search engines discover and index pages in the article beyond the first page.

There is little downside, and with a little page design effort, you can pretty much eliminate any concerns that users will have a poor experience landing on the 2nd page of an article.

Whether or not to place NoIndex tags on additional pages on e-commerce sites is a judgment call. Just be aware that the search engine’s preference is to discover and index that content. They want to be aware of it, and they want to handle it properly.

That said, it is not a webmaster guidelines violation to NoIndex the pages, nor is it an improper use of the NoIndex tag. In addition, there is some risk that the search engines will make an unintended mistake in understanding the value and uniqueness of the additional product pages. You need to decide which path makes you more comfortable.