There is little doubt that mobile search is the hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Some brands are now finding that more than 30 percent of all searches come from mobile devices, according to Mobile Marketer. It’s fair to say that mobile search is quickly moving out of the Stone Age and into the digital age. That's the premise of a new insight paper, Mobile SEO Best Practices, published recently by my company, MediaWhiz (disclosure: I lead MediaWhiz's search marketing and digital strategy divisions). In addition to a list of our top-10 tips for effective mobile SEO, the paper offers [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Mobile | How To | How To: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Search

Google’s display network is massive, encompassing more than 4 billion daily page views, 700 million monthly users, and reaching more than 80% of the online audience. Yet, with all this inventory, many marketers fail with display marketing. The major reasons are they either are trying to reach the incorrect goals or they don’t understand how all the targeting options work. In this article, I’m going to walk through how to get started with display advertising so you can avoid some of the most common mistakes that cause marketers to fail with the network. Display Keywords Most ma [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Paid Search

Remarketing has been around for quite a while as part of the Google AdWords suite of tools. Remarketing works by creating a "list" or "audience" within Google AdWords. The pages that are pertinent to that audience are tagged with special code that allows Google to place a cookie in the browser of anyone who visits that page. It's a great way for you to get your brand out there in front of your website visitors, even when they're not thinking about shopping and buying from your site. There are tons of ways for you to segment your website to serve remarketing ads; you can even get as granular [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: AdWords | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Intermediate | Search & Analytics

In my last column, I looked at some of the differences between small and large accounts as the best practices vary for each. In this column, we’re going to specifically focus on one of the most common small accounts: local accounts; and examine some of the best practices for this type of small account. A local account is where there is a limited geographic area being served. When you combine a limited geographic reach with a small budget, you often run into problems trying to balance spending the budget on highly relevant keywords while getting a high enough return for the budget so th [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: PPC | Paid Search

As search marketers, we are constantly digging around in analytics, finding data, thinking it looks neat, then stepping back and saying, "But is this important?" I've done this a million times, and recently came across a quote that put some of what I'm always looking for into perspective. Don't make the measurable things important but make the important things measurable. The data you have is not necessarily the data you need to succeed. I think we go about this all wrong sometimes. Instead of finding data in Google Analytics or some other tracking program and trying to figure out if [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Keywords are important. I've heard from several potential clients recently who have talked to other "professionals" who told them keywords are no longer important for SEO, and that good content is all you really need. Here's the thing. Keywords are language. They'll always be important because words are how we communicate with each other. So until someone invents the microchip that can be implanted in your brain and read your thoughts without using words, you'll need to think about language in marketing. And I can only hope that those potential clients were told this by one seriously mis [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEM | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content | SEM Tools: Keyword Research

Mobile is all the rage right now. Just a few days ago, Google came out and said that they recommend responsive design for mobile SEO and now, the Google Analytics division has just launched a new mobile solution. Allow me to tell you about this… Just recently, I received an email from Google Analytics offering me the opportunity to, "Make your website mobile-friendly in minutes, and measure the impact with Google Analytics!" This sounded like a great offer to me, so I decided to explore it further. Basically, Google Analytics is offering a new mobile solution known as Google Analytics [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Mobile | How To | How To: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Search

It’s the 'new' social network everyone is talking about – and if you’re a local business owner, it could be a strong addition to your online marketing strategy. For the past few years, marketers have stressed the need for local businesses to leverage social networks like Facebook and Twitter to drive engagement with existing and potential customers. Now Pinterest, the visual scrapbook network that allows users to "pin" images and video they want to share from across the web, is becoming part of the conversation for a number of reasons: Unprecedented user growth. In March, Pinterest [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Social | How To | How To: Social Media Marketing | Local Search

We all know that Adwords is the most used system in the world to drive paid traffic to websites. The Adwords system is an extensive system with a lot of complex options to optimize campaigns and increase conversions. Advanced PPC managers should already know all of these features, but beginners and intermediate level Adwords users can definitely get some new inspiration and ideas from this list to boost up performance. In this article, I will highlight 10 features that I love and frequently use. 1.  Adwords Keyword Tool The Keyword Tool is a great starting point when starting a new Adwo [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: PPC | Intermediate | Search & Conversion

There’s no denying the synergy between SEO and paid search marketing, and paid search marketers would do well to take away a lesson or two from the world of organic search engine optimization to improve their campaigns. 1.  Keywords! Keywords! Sherlock Holmes exclaimed, "Data! Data! …I can't make bricks without clay." And likewise, keywords are the backbone, heart and soul of all search engine marketing, paid or organic. There’s a whole mess of keywords work and reports done for organic search optimization that paid search marketers can and should utilize. On the most basic level, [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEM | How To | How To: SEM | Paid Search

As part of a site audit special series, we're going to review an interesting website, Bank Information Center (BIC). BIC is a non-profit organization that does some very cool things but, like most non-profits, hasn’t updated their website for many years. Needless to say, they have almost no Internet marketing or SEO strategy which led them to ask for help by submitting their site for this series. In this post, I’m going to break down: Who the business is and what they do First Impressions: Overall analysis of website look, feel, targeting and usability Second Impressions: [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | Features | Features: Site Audits | How To | How To: SEO | SEO - Search Engine Optimization | SEO: General | SEO: Titles & Descriptions | SEO: Writing & Body Copy

As relative newcomers to the world of analytics and site and revenue improvements through analytics, many clients ask me about the traffic sources chart in their Google dashboard:   Why is this important? I give one explanation of this as a measure of "Are my eggs all in one basket?" and "What happens if they are?" For example, the client above has 66.57% of their traffic from search engines. This is a combination of organic and paid traffic. Of that 66.57%, when we drill further into that segment of data, we see that 84.5% of that is from Google alone with a breakdown of 45% [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

I love my Google Analytics dashboard and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It saves me time, helps me look like I'm 100% on top of things when a client calls, and helps me add hours back into days that were previously spent hunting and pecking for information. Right now, my client load consists of about 19 different domains that all have their own analytics installs. Each week that's a lot of information to check, verify, monitor, and create an action plan from. Without my dashboards, and most importantly, my consistently formatted dashboards, I would spend hours finding information - now I have [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

When I do an SEO audit on a webpage, one of the first things I check is the <title> tag. Why? Well, I have several reasons. [caption id="attachment_112710" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Best Practices for Title Tags in SEO"][/caption] In my book, the <title> tag possesses all of the following: It has the most SEO power of any tag on the page for establishing keyword relevance Its contents are the source for the blue-link text shown in the search engine results pages (SERPs) It’s the best place to get a concise description of the content on the page (well, th [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO

I'm obsessed with Google. (I mean, you kind of have to be if you're in this industry.) But sometimes, you need a break from the hand that feeds. There's no denying the power of advanced search queries, but you'd be surprised how many other and different prospects you can find without using the search engine at all. Curated Lists OK, I lied. You do have to use Google for this, but not nearly in the capacity you would with normal searches. With lists, you have less sources to sift through but the value of the sites far outweigh normal SERPs. My favorite searches — thanks to SEOmoz — [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: Links | Link Week

Every day it seems that there's a new tool out there to monitor, measure, track, and suggest what we should be doing. Many of these are free or offer free trials, which I love, but finding the time to test out a new tool in order to see if it suits you isn't always easy. My objective in using these tools is, of course, building links, so I'll go over the tools that I use and show you how I'd use them. And hey, they're all free!! For the record, I'm not interested in competitive analysis, analyzing sites, using social media (with one notable exception, and my exclusion here is only becaus [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: Links | Link Building | Link Building: General | Link Week

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what is wrong with some clients’ analytics installs. Unlike types or broken code, or misspelled words – issues with tracking scripts don’t always raise their hands and scream, "Hey dummy, you deleted the </script> tag!" I thought it would be handy for the beginners out there to have a few tips for finding issues with your tracking and some tricks to resolving those issues without tearing your hair out. I’m Referring To Myself… This is probably the most common error I find, your own domain is showing as a referrer to your s [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

In this article, I’ll outline the steps I take to optimize a webpage to try to improve organic search results;  both increase rankings and improve click-throughs from the search listings. If you’ve been following along in this series, we covered the first steps in the previous two articles. 1. Choose The Keywords To Focus On In Organic Keywords: The First Step In Search Engine Optimization, I covered how to use Google analytics to choose the organic keyword phrases to focus on first in your optimization efforts; those keywords already contributing to the business goals. We then looke [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO | Keywords & Content

If you’re working in online marketing in some function, you’ve battled this – the need to justify your marketing budget to the bean counters in the office 10 floors up, or even next door. Those not "in the know" about the truly trackable benefits of online marketing are generally skeptical at best when told "I can show you where every penny went, and what we got back in return." The inability to track return on radio, tv or even print ad buys without extensive (and frankly pretty difficult) work and integration between multiple departments makes these less than desireable mediums i [...]

Related Topics: Beginner | Channel: Analytics | Google: Analytics | How To | How To: Analytics | Search & Analytics

If you haven’t heard, local SEO is taking over. More than 20 percent of Google searches are for a local business. That number doubles on mobile devices, and it’s starting to show in the SERPs. When was the last time you searched and got only the traditional 10 organic listings? SERPs are being inundated with images, videos, rich snippets and above all, local listings, and these are exactly where consumers are navigating to. Recently captured eye-tracking data for Google searches found that users are gravitating toward the Google Places listings over the organic listings, whether it’s [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Beginner | Channel: SEO | How To | How To: SEO