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Your office pool is fun, but how about competing against fellow search marketers far and wide? It’s time for the 4th Annual “SEO Madness” College Hoops Pool, where we all make our March Madness picks, and the winner gets the links.

Teams and brackets are being announced today and you can sign-up now.

Here’s what you need to know:

What’s it cost? Nada. Free. All you need is a Yahoo account.

Where do I join? Sign-up here. This link should put you directly into the SEO Madness 2010 group, but if not, you’ll need this info:

Group ID: 60624

Group password: seorocks

That’s all! Get yourself signed into the SEO Madness group and then tell your friends on Facebook or Twitter — the more, the merrier. May the best man/woman win!

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

College Hoops: SEO Madness 2010 is Here!

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College Hoops: SEO Madness 2010 is Here!

ClickZ is running an article today about Yelp’s current legal troubles. I’m quoted in the article (at the end) and I come across as a staunch defender of Yelp.

While I do admire the loyalty they’ve built up amongst users, I’m actually more in the middle than the article portrays. I really believe Yelp needs to improve its overall messaging to small business owners if it wants to gain wider adoption and acceptance as a marketing channel. And, as I posited in my earlier post on Yelp this week, I definitely wonder if “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” applies to Yelp. It very well could.

But aside from how I feel about Yelp, the bigger issue is the impact of these legal troubles and claims on Yelp’s trust. The ClickZ piece gets into that a bit, but I think this post by Mike Blumenthal today says a lot more about it. Mike interviews a small business owner about reviews, and here’s what the business owner says about Yelp:

We avoid them like the black plague. You can find a lot of articles on the subject so I won’t get on a soap box…but we’ve had around 30 satisfied customers post positive reviews on Yelp and none of them posted to our profile. When we asked why we were told that the customer has to be an “active Yelp user” or the reviews will not show up. When we asked what constitutes an “active Yelp user” we were told that formula was proprietary and confidential. Of course, this didn’t stop them from making a sales call and offering us assistance in getting more positive reviews on our account. After doing some research and realizing this was a much bigger problem with other business owners, and that they were involved in a class action lawsuit for similar accusations, we just decided to avoid them all together.

I’m guessing that attitude is more widespread than we think. And it speaks to one of Yelp’s fundamental flaws: The mysterious algorithm has a natural bias against first-time reviewers. It’s the old job search catch-22 — you need experience to get a job, but you can’t get experience if no one will hire you.

How can Yelp reach its full potential if it regularly punishes new users by not posting their reviews? There’s a trust problem here with small business owners who see real reviews from real people being zapped from the site, and from people who’d like to become regular users, but have a bad experience when their first taste of Yelp is essentially, “We don’t care what you have to say.”

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Yelp’s Trust Problem

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My worlds are colliding. I mean my “U2 world” and my “SEO world.” I try to keep them separate, but this story makes that impossible. Check it out on the Somerset County Gazette web site.

Apparently, a local/small business owner recently got a job fixing a broken GRAMMY Award that belongs to U2. The article makes several cheesy references to U2 song titles, but here’s the part that matters:

“…one of the band’s management team got in touch after typing in ‘trophy repairs’ into Google.”

SEO FTW!

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

U2 Validates Benefits of SEO

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U2 Validates Benefits of SEO

That was one of the topics of Luther Lowe’s presentation Tuesday at the annual SearchFest conference in Portland. Lowe — Yelp’s Manager of Business Outreach — gave a generally clear description of what the company says are the benefits of advertising on Yelp. I say “generally” because he said that advertising on Yelp gets a business owner “SEO,” but he really meant to say “visibility.”

These are not the same examples he used during the presentation, but they show the same points he made.

1. Visibility on Yelp search result pages

Advertising on Yelp gives a business the opportunity to show up above the regular search results for category/city combinations, like this search for dentists in Los Angeles.

2. Visibility on other business profile pages

A Yelp ad may show up on a competitor’s business profile, like in this example here.

3. No competitor ads on your profile page

Using the example above, no competitors’ ads will show up on the profile page of that dentist because she’s advertising. She’s essentially paying to keep competitors from advertising on her profile page. But note that Yelp still does show other competitors on the page under a “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed” heading.

4. Added content options

Yelp advertisers can also add extra content to their business profiles, such as a photo slideshow and an extra content spot to post alerts or discounts.

5. Promote a “favorite review”

Yelp sponsors can also choose one review of their business and mark it as a “favorite.” In doing so, that review will show up first on the business profile page, as seen here.

Lawsuits: The 800-lb. Gorilla

Before his presentation, Lowe called out the 800-lb. gorilla in the room: the recent lawsuits from small business owners who claim that Yelp has offered to remove negative reviews in exchange for payment. I don’t recall his exact wording, but Lowe rejected the claims of the lawsuit, saying that the alleged behavior — if it were true — would cause Yelp to lose the trust of its users and advertisers.

But from several conversations I’ve had at conferences over the past two weeks, that trust is on shaky ground with some. This isn’t the first time Yelp’s been accused of taking money to remove negative reviews (see Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 from last year), and some are wondering if the phrase “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is appropriate.

One suspects that, as long as Yelp offers a way for business owners to manipulate reviews in exchange for advertising (see #5 above), they’ll continue to run the risk of lawsuits — no matter if the lawsuits are justified or just the result of misunderstanding.

Advertisement: Improve your website rankings and traffic in just 15 mins/day! LotusJump will show you how to do your own professional-grade SEO. Find Out How Today!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?

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The 4th annual SearchFest conference is in the books, and this one was a lot different than previous SearchFests. The venue was bigger, the crowd filled it, and — for the first time — there were three tracks running concurrently. I’m hoping to do another post on one content-related element from the show, so this post is only going to be a link to my Flickr photoset and an embedded slideshow below. (Disclaimer: The lighting made photography exceptionally difficult, so don’t be alarmed if some of these look … different.)

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SearchFest 2010 Photos

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If you’re reading this while at SearchFest 2010, a big welcome to you. Thanks for visiting SmallBusinessSEM.com. In my presentation, I mention a few web sites that you may not have had time to jot down while I was speaking. If that’s the case, here are all the references I made in chronological order:

• Nielsen: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most
• Local Search Ranking Factors
• Yelp FAQ (most reviews are positive)
• Bazaarvoice Industry Statistics (most reviews are positive)
• Post the good, the bad and the ugly in customer reviews, Dell and evo say

If you have any questions or feedback about my presentation or the session in general, feel free to leave a comment below. There’s also a Contact button at the top of the page. I’d love to hear from you!

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Welcome SearchFest Attendees

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Welcome SearchFest Attendees

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”

We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:

• Google Wave: Google wave is cool. It doesn’t solve any problems that any real people have but it does a lot of great things that developers get excited about. It includes embedded video, sound, and chat from multiple users that a user can enable playback from… Yeah, I was saying just last week how I wished I could do that. The only useful thing I’ve ever seen done with Google wave is the Pulp Fiction movie (1000% NSFW).
• iPad: When the IPad first came out, I (like many others) complained that it was an oversized iphone with less functionality. However what we missed was that it really wasn’t for us. The iPad is for regular users, not developers or techno weenies. In other words, people–in fact, most people– want an internet appliance that just works. They don’t want to have to deal with nonsense like registries, print drivers, patches, updates, and so on. Why does everyone have a refrigerator in their house? Because it’s easy to to use! You plug it in and go. Imagine for a minute if you had to play with the evaporator driver or download and install a thermometer patch update every week. Your refrigerator “works” because 99% of the time it just does its job without any fiddling.
• Google Buzz: Google assumed that everyone wanted to share all of the stuff they are doing, reading, and looking at with people they talk to. Because many Googlers have become victims of their own hubris, they assumed everyone is like them, wants to be like them, or should be like them. However when the realities of everyday life entered the equation, in the shape of something like an abusive ex-husband, it was a condition that didn’t exist in the artificial utopia of the Googleplex. Google failed to test the program in the real world and instead relied on the developer’s vision of what the users wanted. The result? Failure.

So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:

• Can’t the users open their eyes and just read? The answer is right there in front of them.
• The users need to use a little common sense. We can’t keep dumbing down the world for them or we’ll end up like (insert tv/movie/pop culture reference for stupid people here).
• They use the term UX to mean user experience or UI to mean user interface in common everyday speech and would feel comfortable using it when speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:

• In most cases, developers don’t make good team/project leaders. They carry with them the bias of wanting to be cool, respected developers. If you have or can find a developer who has a proven track record of placing user needs above cool programming features, ignore this recommendation.
• User testing: find someone who is not involved in the project or, even better, get a NIF (non internet friend) to try out your website. Put them on the homepage and ask them to try and do what your primary goal is, whether that’s to create a gift registry, put something in a cart and checkout, find a specific piece of information, or something else. Whatever it is, ask them try and do it. If you can video tape them, that’s great; otherwise, watch without interacting and take notes.
• Test different options. Use services like Crazyegg or Google multi variant testing to try out different options. See where users are and aren’t clicking then make adjustments based on data not on intuition. (disclosure: Crazyegg is an advertiser here)
• Don’t make changes because they are cool, neat, interesting, or stroke the ego of your developers. Make changes that solve problems people have. This is one of the biggest complaints I have with Wordpress as a platform. They coddle developer’s whims instead of addressing real problems like security.

At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Developers VS Users

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My friend Jonathan Volk is hosting a free PPV (Pay Per View) webinar this Wednesday night for all the people who downloaded his new Affiliate Marketing 101 guide. If you have the guide, you’ll be receiving an email with the time and URL to the webinar room sometime today or tomorrow.

If you haven’t downloaded Affiliate Marketing 101 yet, you’re missing out big time. The guide contains 17 sections of pure content. It even comes with a warning declaimer that states, “Your brain might explode from awesome information.” Not only is the guide free but it might win you a brand new Apple iPad as well!

Learn the techniques I have used to personally generate over $4,000,000 in affiliate commissions!

In this guide I go over the who, what, where, when, and why of affiliate marketing. I then take you step by step to learn Pay per click affiliate marketing, Pay per view (cost per view) affiliate marketing, social media marketing (facebook ads), and finally media buying.

Download Affiliate Marketing 101

I have been getting more and more into PPV marketing. In many ways, it’s better than PPC marketing and has more potential. Johnathon Van Clute used PPV to win the Top Affiliate Challenge. He was generating over $4,000 per day in affiliate commission with PPV.

This is one webinar you will not want to miss. Jonathan promises to reveal a bunch of great tips and inside secrets on how to really make money with PPV marketing. Ensure your spot now by downloading Jonathan’s free guide. See you at the Webinar!

Download Affiliate Marketing 101 by Jonathan Volk

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Free PPV Webinar with Jonathan Volk This Wednesday

Moderator: Christine Churchill, President, KeyRelevance.com

Speakers:

Rich Devine, Director of Search, ZAAZ
Dennis Hart, Vice President, SE Jones, LLC
Ryan Lash, Vice President, Search, ymarketing
Ian Lurie, CEO, Portent Interactive

My last lunch of SMX West hit the spot. This session is sure to do the same. Dennis is up first.

He wants to challenge us to think of the goals of your site before you set up an AdWords strategy. They categorize customer needs with some of the first questions they ask them. How many hits can we get? Not a great sign. How can we get more data? Also needs coaxing to get them thinking in the right direction.

What is User Engagement?

• Turning on a prospect and surrounding them with useful information.
• A deeper understanding of site visitor behavior and intent.
• Rarely possible in one metric or KPI
• Beyond: UX, conversion tracking, or time on site
• Beyond satisfaction: it’s a measure of interest and action and may be represented as loyalty
• Importantly, it requires a plan to measure effectively and affect improvement

Observations

• It’s rare to find a company satisfied with their analytics plan
• Too many confuse reporting with analytics
• Too many suffer from analysis paralysis
• You don’t know what you don’t know, and that’s the biggest challenge. Figuring out your marketing goals 6 months or a year from now is hard. But you don’t want to lock yourself into a solution that can’t change with your changing needs.

Analytics Planning Strategies

• Access
  • Do you have access to good data
  • “and” strategy, not “or” (Reflective of Avinash’s comment at this morning’s keynote)
  • There is no perfect or complete tool
• Configuration
  • Conversion metrics (Think of soft conversions as well)
  • Segments
  • KPIs
• Scheduling
  • Reports are not analytics
• Ad Hoc Exploration
  • Plan to fumble around. That’s how you learn.

Here are some search KPI examples (note: all KPIs assume across time)

• SERP rankings for targeted keywords/phrases
• Competitive organic search share for top 200 industry search terms
• Organic search traffic trending

The info in the slide above doesn’t show you compared to what, over time. Plus with new technologies, a single KPI could change meaning over time.

• User engagement KPIs
• Average PVs per visitor from search
• Conversion rate from paid search
• Bounce rate against “competitive benchmark”
  • Review comp sites
• Downloads from socially referred visitors
  • Encourage sharing
• Form completions (leads) from organic
  • Enhance conversion opps on top organic pages

Instead of looking at ranking, it can be better to look at “Breadth and Depth”:

• Breadth=total traffic from organic search
• Depth=total number of keywords from organic search

Ryan is next. He says there are lots of metrics that can be measured and he just threw out 20 different acronyms. So much data, so little time. So what to do about it?

1. Stare at your screen
2. Spreadsheets
3. Take a stab in the dark
4. Or take a step back and audit the situation.

Did you say audit? They take a long time and can be painful. But it gets results. So what to expect?

WoW

• CPC -74 percent

MoM

• PPC CR +264 percent
• SEO CR +250 percent

YoY

• Leads +40 percent
• Cost per lead -40 percent
• Orders +54 percent

With an audit you come up with an actionable plan based on analysis of results.

The PPC scorecard:

1. quantitative
2. qualitative
3. unique KPIs

Here are 20 questions that speak to 1 and 2 above.

1. Number of PPC accounts

• 1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5(+)=5
• 1=1, 2=2, 3-5=3, 6-10=4, 11(+)=5
• 1=1, 2-5=2, 6-10=3, 11-19=4, 20(+)=5
• 0-100=1, 101-1,000=2, 1k-5k=3, 5k-20k=4, 20k(+)=5
• 1=1, 1,000(+)=2, 51-1,000=3, 6-50=4, 2-5=5
• 1=1, 2-5=2, 6-10=3, 11-19=4, 20(+)=5
• 1=1, 8(+)=2, 5-7=3, 2-3=4, 3-4=5
• 1=1, 2-5=2, 6-10=3, 11(+)=4, Infinity (multivariate testing)=5
• 1=1, 2=2, 3=3, 4=4, 5(+)=5
• 0=1, 1=2, 2=3, 3=4, 4(+)=5
• Non-specified=1, account level=3, campaign level=5
• Broad=1, broad+negative=2, exact=3, phrase=4, embedded=5
• Search Engine=1, Customized SE=2, Google Analytics=3, Customized GA=4, Paid analytics=5
• Annually=1, Monthly=2, Weekly=3, Daily=4, Intraday=5
• None=1, One TFN=3, Multiple TFNs=5
• None=1, Manual=2, Conv. Optimizer=3, 3rd party=4, 3rd party w/ attribution=5
• None=1, Manual=2, Free (WSO)=3, Customized WSO=4, Paid w/ Segmenting=5
• None=1, Location Based=2, Network Selection=3, Bidding/Budget=4, Advanced=5
• DKI=1, Static=2, DKI+Static=3, DKI+Static+Custom Display URLs=4, High KW Dense Converting Static=5
• Never heard of it=1, w/ Text Ads=3, w/ Display Ads=5

1. Number of campaigns in an account

1. Number of ad groups per campaign

1. Total number of keywords across an account

1. Number of active keywords per ad group

1. Number of text ads across entire account

1. Active text ads per ad group

1. Unique landing pages

1. Number of goals (conversion events)

1. Bid rules

1. Budget

1. Keyword match types

1. Conversion tracking

1. Campaign update frequency

1. Call tracking

1. Bid management

1. Landing page testing tools

1. Campaign settings

1. Text ad copy

1. Retargeting/Remarketing

Now tally up your score.

D: 20-50

C: 51-70

B: 71-90

A: 91-100

Rich takes the podium next. They focus on the intersection of creative and data. You can be both, and here’s a new hybrid approach.

Agenda:

• Goals driven analytics
• Beyond the conversion
• Monetization modeling
• Some examples

When we succeed with clients, 5 characteristics pop out

1. They know analytics and technologies
2. They seek first to know their business and goals
3. They seek to improve access and appetite for data – upward and across the organization
4. They focus strictly on actionable data that empowers stakeholder decision making
5. They don’t avoid the weeds, but they don’t get stuck in them either

Getting Started

Identifying stakeholders :

1. Ask really good questions
2. Identify their unique business objectives
3. Roll up stakeholder feedback
4. Define collective business goals
5. Review and seek consensus across stakeholders

Business goals dictate site goals, which inform other digital channel goals.

• Less is actionable
• More is nice to know, or at worse, paralyzing
• Okay to have sub-goals

Looking Beyond Conversion

There’s a lot of site traffic but only a small portion of that is measured as success. All the other activity also has success, so they try to understand the value of it. They build models that define the money value of micro-conversions. They are custom-built performance models.

Examples:

Use monetization to guide project or optimization priority. Score each project for size of opportunity, ROI, and business priority. Weight each score to determine an aggregate weighted score. Use score to guide decisions, not as an absolute rule. As revenue / cost estimates are revised, so is the monetization model.

What’s the opportunity cost of in-action? This is very effective for justifying longer-term, higher-cost projects.

Ian is our final speaker. (BTW, check out our awesome interview from this week’s SEM Synergy!) He says he’s going to get into the weeds. Who has seen a raw log file? A good number of people have, so he says this shouldn’t be too awful.

If you stick your head in the sand, the only thing you can out of is your bum. With organic search, worry about three things:

• Opportunity
• Competition
• Attribution

Opportunity and competition are about optimization, improving rankings on terms you want. Attribution is about keeping your job, showing evidence that what you’re doing is working, and if you need to do more of one thing or another.

Keyword driven research isn’t bad, but you have to look at other things first. You’ll miss opportunities for keywords that are almost on page one. You’ll miss the opportunity gap. If you can follow that up with a narrow competition gap, that’s a good position to be in.

Step 1 is to determine opportunity. Start by looking at pages, which pages are getting the most pages from organic search. For each of those pages, look at which organic keywords are driving traffic to those pages. Now look at keyword data. If you see 2,900 searches for your keyword, and 250 visitors from that term, there’s an opportunity gap. The question now is, can I compete. He recommends the Keyword Difficulty Tool or SEO for Firefox that show you how hard it is to compete on a term.

Now you can optimize the ranking page. Link to newer content to drive people to updated content on your site. A tool that will show clicks from page 2 and one that will show pages with no clicks, will help you.

The only way to do attribution is to learn to love your log files. Scrub the log file so all you have are pages, and sort traffic by cookie and IP address.

I betcha Ian will post these on his vimeo!

[Ian also shared his Google Analytics Cheatsheet. --Susan]

Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO was originally published on BruceClay.com, an SEO tools provider.

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Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO