Nick Garner's Blog

Comment from http://www.michaelejahn.blogspot.com/
Michael’s comment about: Hey, don’t forget about the conversions! PT 2

(hes referring to a typo I made) It was Ogilvy on advertising, not Oglevy, and this was written in the relative stoneage – 1983 – bublished first 2 years later – by a guy who set up shop in 1949 and to him – Televison was brand new. A wonderful book. Advertising is dead. PR is king. SEO is not about ads – it is about eanbling people to discover you site. Try suggesting ???The Fall of Avertising & the Rise of PR by some people who are still alive Al and Laura Ries. (see amazon here http://www.amazon.com/Fall-Advertising-Rise-PR/dp/0060081988)

Why people like you actually think you can write copy that will magically make me decide to make an impulse buy, I have no idea what you are smoking.

I search for my keywords when I am shopping – all one can do is STD (stack the deck) to bring me to their site so I can find what I am looking for – once I am there, no amount of the rubbish you describe above would sway me one way or another.

That what I think, perhaps I am in too big of a hurry.

SEP Guy comment:
Just clearing up a few small things. I cant type very well and im usually short on time hence the typos. But importantly good ideas dont really change that much with time – hence the claude hopkins book being so relevant for response driven advertising and marketing.

On the PR point, I agree to a great extent – link baiting is PR , web style, and it works really well. Interestingly I have real problems finding good online PR people to work with. And if it did, I could give them a ton of work.

Re the copywriting thing. I have tried recently to get 2 important content provision companies to write up stuff that is persuasive and to no avail . And on the pay per click side, I have been working with one of the PPC biggest agencies here in the UK and they just produced really mediocre stuff….So I have got on with it and begun writing content (under duress). At least its better than the ‘professionals’

Michael is right about copywriting – its a great skill, but you know, persuasive copy does?? not sell in isolation. it simply adds to momentum. A salesman wont sell you soemthing you dont want, likewise for a copywriter.

And following on from that, SEO will hopefully draw out the person who more or less wants what I have got to offer and good informative momentum building content will turn at least one in 75 of them into a customer.

Just a quick one.

Looking through some stats, rankings and keywords being used to accss a particular site driven only by advertising and affiliate links, i noticed how yahoo was giving a reasonable amount of link love to the site.

Anyway I found that comparing the top search terms for this promotional site, only Yahoo was ranking for these. Google was no where to be seen. But saying that, many of the pages were getting page ranks of 5.
What does that tell me ? Yahoo are passing on the link love? I don’t know ….

I WANT MORE CONVERSIONS !

Fortunately for me I can write persuasive copy and I have studied online conversion for long enough now to have a few clear ideas on how we are going to do this.

One thing I will be doing is making the SEO pages i am working on , more linear. I.e. harder for the users to jump out and go somewhere else. All I want them to do is buy from me. To do that they need to click a big button saying join now.

(I am also using this conversion page for pay per click traffic, since I think the mind set is very similar. it may be in time I’ll seperate the two, but for now I’m thinking combo pack!)

Interestingly I have noticed an obsession with MORE TRAFFIC ! ! ! ! and not with conversion. this explains why the relatively inexpensive process of improving conversion often gets ignored , or simply not given the priority it desserves.

So the user has clicked and they start travelling along the road to understanding and value build.

So last week, me and the creative guys got on and set up some ideas for an ideal user
path.

The Pathway
The user clicks one of 3 links on the SEO pages to a landing page. (or they click on a pay per click advert) These links are embedded with keywords which trigger off a tool run by mediaplex which then presents text tied in with the keywords they came in on.

The cool thing about a text based pitch is that:

• It is ‘words that sell’
• It is very easy to change.
• I can have different pitches for different users
• I can test, test, test to see what pictches work best
• It will upload immedately, so in the 1st 2 seconds it will be read.

The other plus is that different keywords = SEO’able content. I’m not suggesting that its going to do terribly well, however Its more keywords for engines to hang on to.

The diagram below explains the structure of the page. The core ideas are:

• 2 seconds to check the page out
• 8 seconds to decide wether to stay or not
• Build up the value by treating the page like a pyramid, with the most basic info atB the top and the most detailed at the bottom
• Have jump off points to registration
• Where they do want to trawl around, make sure the users dont stray too far, hence the i frame at the bottom.
• When I’ve got this page together I’ll set up a proper demo for you to play with and hopefully it will all work!

So there it is – now we will have to see if all this big talk works and gets me the results!

for your interest books I have read, and read, and read on this subject are:

• Scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins. It was written 85 years ago and is about direct response advertising. the core principles appily today as they did then , excepy you dont have any .com hype. Just sensible practical ideas totally relevant to online marketing. (now out of copywright, so its downlaodable) Here for the HTML version | Here for a PDF | and here for audio
• NEW AIDA – a great common sense book with a focus on direct mail marketing.
• Ogilvy on advertising. A seminal book on solid ideas for advertising. not specifically geared for direct response, although he was a passonate for getting your moneys worth from ad spend.
• And of course look at competitive terms on google and read the adverts. Try phrases like ‘home loan’ ‘credit cards’ ‘new car’. remember the top ads are paying about ??5 a click, so they have to make whatever they sell very, very persuasive!

It’s goal setting time for me and that means presenting various people stats on how rankings are progressing.

It’s nice to show an upward trend and everyone gets excited…too excited I think. Just because you rank for a keyword , does not mean traffic, or good traffic.

On looking across my BIG income generator’s rankings, it seems to me that converting the traffic is a bigger immediate priorirty than just getting more users.(on to that later)

I have a rough idea of what keywords matter to me, through measuring the monthly search volume using overture keyword finder tool, but what is most revealing is when I measure the traffic for given keywords against my rankings.

And I have found an interesting disconnect. For instance on keyword X were ranked 4th or so, but on a particular site I’m working on, it has been the biggest single keyword referred to us by google forthe last month.

So I guess what im saying is that chasing rankings for their own sake can be like looking into fog when it comes to the bottom line.

Its chasing the keyword that converts, which matters and they may not be the keywords ones overture or other keyword tools suggest.

This is because the numbers are distorted by loads of factors, like automated queries….and seasonal variations ( becasue the stats are about 30 days old.)
Overture are happy to let the inflated figures persist, since it jacks up their numbers for potential advertisers.

So on analysing my stats, I found that we are getting the usual SEO conversion rates of about 1/2% and for me to meet targets, I need to jack up the traffic by 30% and bring up the conversion rates by about the same.

Then I should be doing ok.

Just a quick thought. as many of you know, wikipedia has set up ‘no follow’ with all the outgoing links form the site.

‘no follow’ is a tag used to tell search engines not to follow a link. of course its up to the search engines as to weather they actually do or don’t follow a lnik. Google say they acknowledge this protocol, but i bet they follow the links nevertheless, but don’t give those links any value to the reciepient site.

So there are 5 strands here:

1. Wikipedia is a give / take thing. you give your effort and in return you are rewarded with something which will help you in the search engine rankings with Google and possibly the other major engines.

2. The founder Jimbo Wales has recently launched a new search engine called wikiseek which trawls through wikipedia for results and shows links shown on the site. These results rely on great entries and a buzzing community adding new content and keeping the whole thing in order.

Wiki seek say “The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes. ” – so what if there is no incentive by a huge part of the online community to add content and place links ?

3. I thought wikipedia was a democratic thing!, so whats with Jimbo simply telling us all – ‘no follow’ where was the community participation ? For more on wikiseek see Danny Sullivans comment

4. whats Search Wikia all about? and why take on the search engines? As you may know search wikia uses community participation to rank content. you may remember Yahoo triedhuman editing with their directory… and ultimately failed with it. So can humans do a better job than an algo? We shall see. I think the spammers will kill it in the end.

5. ever heard of a wiki nazi? with any society, when the ‘police’ get out of control it turns ugly. I think of my personal wikipedia experiences HERE and the laughable case of the linkbait page where all the references to Matt Cutts the google engineer and blogger were savagely culled. They were only reinstated after uproar from the SEO community. Fools.
So in conclusion, I see too much power with too few. fast erosion of goodwill. open day for the spamming community. dictatorship with a community front. Too many things on the boil at one time. And the core principles of ‘give and take’ being eroded with Wiki. All this will probably come to an unhappy ending much like DMOZ

Google created a superb service by being engineering driven. it also understood the power of influencers – the likes of you and me (ordinary poeple dont read blogs generally) who raved about it and made sure when ever they were asked to fix a PC, Google would become the default page of IE

And of course we would always be asked our opinion and most tech users will always say google.
Aside: to those of you in internet marketing, you will know that the MSN search demographic is better converting and more non-internet savvy than traffic from google. I believe its because they cant tell the difference between natural search results and paid for ones.

So what if MSN live began doing stuff which impresses the influencers? Stuff like being able to hack the search box when you embed it onto your web page:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa905322.aspx??

______________

or the new operator LinkFromDomain

See it here:?? LinkFromDomain

Syntax
Green???? LinkDomain:YourSite.com
Yellow???? LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com
Blue???? Either LinkDomain or LinkFromDomain
Green + Yellow + Blue
LinkFromDomain:YourSite.com | LinkDomain:YourSite.com

See diagram:

Or MSN AdLab keyword cluster tool
Interesting tool which shows you how MSN clusters keywords. If you a google centric SEO person (most are) then you could try using the google equivalent of typing the ???~??? berefore a keyword i.e. ~sep , ~seo and so on in the search box.http://adlab.msn.com/src/

other MSN tools:- Demographic Prediction Tool - predicts the demographics of searchers by keyword or site visitors by website

Online Commercial Intention Detection Tool – estimates the probability of a search query or web page being commercial, informational-transactional.

http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/ How users search before and after a given search query

There is just a ton of geekery here and I do think there will be a tipping point when microsoft turn from being seen as evil, to being the good guys and when MSN Live becomes both the geek ( influencers ) and dumb end users favourite.

The outlook isnt great on the market growth numbers for MSN, but remember when the tipping point, tips it will spread like wild fire. My guess is that this time will come in about 3 years.