SEO News

Thank you to the following panel of experts for their invaluable guidance:

• Malcolm Slade the SEO project manager at Epiphany Search.
• Andrew Girwood the media innovations director at DigitasLBi. 
• Kevin Gibbons managing director of BlueGlass.
• Mags Sikora, an SEO consultant who I interviewed earlier this year on the current SEO landscape.

Does PPC have any effect on SEO?

Malcolm Slade

Anything that raises brand awareness has a positive impact on SEO. Outside of being a great revenue stream in its own right, PPC is a great way of making customers aware of a company’s product or services.

This generates an initial interest that over time turns into increased brand searches and increased brand + keyword searches.

Andrew Girdwood

You can use PPC to send people to great looking content pages. If those pages are able they can earn links and other quality signals that have an effect on SEO.

That’s a better SEO strategy than just publishing the content and not trying to show it to people.

Equally, brand building is possible through PPC. You can introduce new brand or even product and service ideas in response to keyword searches even if that might be an expensive approach.

Kevin Gibbons

Google will tell you that organic and paid search teams are completely separate and there’s no correlation between advertiser activity/spend and organic search rankings/traffic. Personally I have no reason to doubt this.

However, there is likely to be an indirect benefit – due to the fact that you are building a brand. The more brand trust and signals you can have, the better for Google.

If PPC is part of your marketing mix, you’re obviously increasing your audience via this channel, and in turn increasing the chances that people will come back again. This all helps towards creating a more rounded and multi-channel strategy for your brand.

What are the benefits of combining a PPC campaign with SEO?

Mags Sikora

The most obvious is visibility. Even if you reach the first position for the most desirable terms in organic search, it doesn’t guarantee maximum coverage for your site, especially if you run a business in a competitive space.

Your online rivals will definitely bid for most of those keywords to attract at least some of the traffic from search. In these situations, when terms attract high quality traffic (traffic that converts) it definitely makes sense to maximise your visibility in Google. 

Kevin Gibbons

It’s hugely beneficial – both in terms of key learnings and historical data which you can apply both ways. In order to get the best results, I would suggest it’s now essential to align your SEO and PPC strategies. 

We approach content strategy and PPC account structure building in the same way – each should be prioritised by value and demand to maximise ROI.

Obviously as you get deeper there are additional considerations, such as CPC prices vs. the competitiveness of ranking organically, balancing landing page search/quality score optimisation vs. conversion – but the starting point is the same.

Andrew Girdwood

Ideally, you don’t want to buy PPC traffic that your SEO will collect anyway. It is true to say that a combined PPC and SEO campaign can drive more traffic than two separate campaigns though.

A long-time favourite of mine was an ecommerce site that had good SEO listings for product names and used PPC messages (roughly) beside the organic listing to give a sales and discount message.

Searchers tended to click on the organic links as they matched the search term and conversion was greatly improved. 

Are there any drawbacks in running both at the same time?

Andrew Girdwood

The two skill sets are very different. I would argue that PPC is an expert layer on top of biddable media whereas SEO is an expert layer on top of social media.

If brands cannot find agencies or in-house teams expert at both then it may be awkward to manage and coordinate. Running an SEO campaign and PPC campaign in conjunction inevitably leads to conversations around attribution.

Conversations about attribution inevitably lead to hair pulling and sanity loss.

Kevin Gibbons

The only downside may be if you end up paying for traffic that you would have otherwise received naturally.

There’s lots of case studies which show you’re likely to receive an uplift here because of the additional on-page real estate – but if the spend is a significant proportion of your budget, I’d definitely recommend you dig deeper into proving the value of this. 

Otherwise, the learnings should only benefit you – and in theory you should be able to spot trends quicker within paid search, which can later rolled out to your organic strategy.

Mags Sikora

There is always the conversation about brand terms. Should we bid on brand keywords since we usually reach first SEO position for that term?

The problem is if we are not present in PPC space especially for brand extended terms, there is a possibility that our competitors may take advantage of that. Can we really afford to lose the most valuable visitor, the visitor who comes to us directly?

Do you think it’s obvious to conusmers that PPC links are adverts rather than natural results? Should there be more clarity, or is that detrimental to a successful campaign?

Andrew Girdwood

I think they’re pretty clear. In Google right now, for me, there are obvious yellow squares with the word “Ad” in them. On Bing the ads have green backgrounds and a less obvious ads label in the corner. 

I don’t worry about clarity detracting from a search campaign. I would worry that the sort of clarity needed for those stuck in the slow lane would significantly impair the search experience for the rest of us.

Kevin Gibbons

I think they are visible enough myself, but I also know what to look out for. Last year 40% of consumers were reported to be unaware of AdWords ads. I’m sure Google will be happy with these figures, as they always like to mix things up here – keeping CTRs high is good for the advertiser as it generates you more traffic – and of course makes Google more money!

Mags Sikora

It is difficult to judge when you work in search marketing. I recently watched my parents searching for some holiday information on Google. They knew that the right hand side listings in SERP are the actual ads, but didn’t notice the difference between the top ads and the first SEO listing. 

I think it is even more controversial on mobile, where very often ads cover almost the entire screen. Google tests its landing pages all the time. When an online company runs tests on its site, the most common goal of the exercise is to increase CVR.

There must be some correlation between the way Google’s search results pages changed through the years and the financial results Google announces each quarter.

What do you think are the reasons behind the removal of author photos from search results?

Andrew Girdwood

Google is a test and learn machine. I speculate that Google was not happy with the cluttered look of the search results, about the quality of some of the author bio photographs or about the type of content that was managing to qualify for the feature.

Mags Sikora

I think Google said that it decided to take them off to clean up the SERP in order to improve mobile experience, but maybe there was another reason? 

Rand Fishkin from Mzz tweeted that the profile pics distracted too much from ads and lowered amount of clicks on the PPC listings. The truth is, if the CTR increases on some listings in the SERP, the CTR somewhere else has to go down.

If it harmed the ads, the profile pics had to go.

Kevin Gibbons

We ran some tests on this last year and were surprised to see a significant drop in click-through rates reported in Google Webmaster Tools for organic listings where authorship appeared. 

At the time, we put this down to the fact that Google is inflating the rankings of content due to a combination of both authorship being linked up and personalised search connections to the searcher.

What the searcher wants to see is the best results for a given query, so if these listings don’t deserve to be listed in their own right – perhaps the negative impact to CTR is more explainable – as is Google’s decision to pull this from search listings.

Malcolm Slade

I’m not sure what Google was trying to achieve with having author photos in the first place. Part of me thinks it was solely a ploy to get more people using authorship mark-up and Google+. Give them some obvious benefit from making the effort kind-of-thing. 

Presumably this didn’t work or was never planned to be long term as the inclusion of author photos in SERPs will most definitely have had a negative impact on PPC CTRs. 

I’m still a firm believer in the long term benefits of authorship and stand by everything I said in Google and authorship, more than just a picture.

What are the differences between running a PPC campaign on mobile and on desktop? What factors do you have to consider?

Mags Sikora

Mobile search behaviour is completely different than desktop. We all know that people like to browse on their mobiles on the way from/to work to finally convert on their laptops or tablets when sitting comfortably on the sofa and watching latest episode of Game Of Thrones.

There are however many great tools we can use to target the most relevant user especially for location related searches. You can create mobile preferred ads, utilise bid modifiers for mobile devices, time or even geography, and when you enable some of the available ad extensions, your ad can become a really powerful marketing tool.

For instance you can bid higher for users who are within a mile from your shop and show them an ad with an offer message to make them come to the store.

Malcolm Slade

Ultimately you have to consider your mobile and desktop audiences as separate. It is very likely that your mobile audience and desktop audience want different things out of their journey.

This should be reflected in the landing pages you use. Mobile user -> mobile optimised landing page.

Kevin Gibbons

I think the main consideration is behind the user intent. Mobile usage has significantly increased of course, but you’ll often find that queries are more research based. That means you need to capture traffic at all stages of the buying cycle, which is where providing great informational and educational content can come into play, with the call-to-actions perhaps less directly revenue focused and more on providing value and capturing user information – so that they can convert further down the customer journey.

Andrew Girdwood

The search trends are different. Mobile searchers tend to use shorter phrases. The biggest difference is in how people interact with pages on mobile and desktop.

Speed of loading is very important for mobile, for example. Sites that perform badly on mobile for user experience and conversions will always do badly in mobile no matter how clever the PPC campaign. 

Searchers are very often logged into apps running on their phone – apps like Facebook or Gmail. As a result, mobile visitors have a different data value to desktop visitors.

What do you think the SERP of the future will look like?

Kevin Gibbons

Google is clearly looking more towards the knowledge graph and entities in where it’s heading. Providing searchers with information in the fewest amount of clicks is the main goal here.

Many verticals have experienced this already and this is only likely to be rolled out more heavily in the future in my opinion. 

The other thing Google is doing already is the re-writing of SERP snippets. For example, try performing a query for ‘shoes’ and you’ll see PPC ad descriptions consolidated onto a single line description for top ads, domain names included within headlines, sitelinks inserted:

You can learn a lot from this, because Google knows what gets the best CTRs – so it can write better copy than you for a specific search.

It’s also doing the same in organic search, not just with sitelinks and descriptions (which often get pulled from the page, if that’s more relevant than the meta tags), but also testing with re-writing your organic SERP title tags – definitely keep an eye out for this!

Andrew Girdwood

I don’t see much change in the near term – although Bing still has plenty of its more sophisticated features to roll out from the US. In the longer term I think we’ll see more cards.

Cards are smaller snippets of data which are better suited to smaller screens or which act as supplemental data. Right now we talk about artefacts like the OneBox but in the future we may just consider that another Card result. 

Google Now is a good example of a card based results page (with implicit search rather than explicit).

Malcolm Slade

While I don’t ever think Google will go 100% paid, I do think we are on the cusp of most if not all of the above-the-fold SERPs real-estate being 100% controlled by PPC.

Especially now we see more waterfall/infinite scroll usage where in reality there is no bottom of the results.

For even more guidance on SEO, download our massive 400 page SEO Best Practice Guide.

Posted by Bill.Sebald

In rock n’ roll music, stealing is expected. Led Zepplin allegedly lifted from lots of earlier blues and folk artists. The famous I-IV-V chord progression of The Wild One’s song “Wild Thing” was used only a couple years later on “Mony, Mony.” My favorite example of musical larceny – “Let It Be” by The Beatles, “Farmhouse” by Phish, and “No Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley are built around the exact same chord progression. Yet in all these cases, the songs were tweaked enough to stand on their own in meaning, served as distinct entities, and inspired unique feelings from the listener. Granted record company execs often disapproved, but some artists were often flattered to see interpretations of their riffs and progressions. At the end of the day, this is what spawned (and advanced) the rock music genre. Sometimes stealing is the engine of innovation.

“Your idea isn’t new. Pick an idea; at least 50 other people have thought of it. Get over your stunning brilliance and realize that execution matters more.” —Mark Fletcher of Bloglines.com.

In marketing, we don’t just “steal” the minds of consumers, we sometimes steal – and interpret – from our competitors. Sometimes we’re lazy about it, and sometimes we’re perceived as originals. Remember one of the immutable laws of marketing – always appear to be first. Well then why not be first to make someone’s content strategy more effective (for your own gain)?

Wait – so do I condone being a pickpocket, cat burglar, or politician? No. What I’m suggesting is reviewing what inspires you, analyzing why it was successful, and inspiring yourself to make something better. Better for us, better for our clients, and better for their customers.

Oh no; is this another “Content Is King” post?

I’m not a huge fan of that phrase anymore. SEO has gone through some serious developmental stages in its lifetime. Once the hype was all about “keyword density,” then “anchor text,” then “duplicate content;” now I feel like our latest bandwagon concept is the semi-vague “content is king.”

These are certainly all valid concepts in SEO, but without proper context, they often fall short of sound advice. They become blind directives. So here we are in 2014, with many business executives nodding along, “yes – content is king. I’ve read that a trillion times. We need to crank out 100 posts a month. Go, go go…” But I think this is a problem. Now that SEO is mainstream, there’s so much “good content” that the noise ceiling has simply been raised. I’ve said it before, “Fair-quality copy is becoming the new Google spam.” I go into pitches now where businesses can’t understand why their legacy content isn’t getting searches. In other words, they ask why “content is king” isn’t producing results. It’s usually because content was treated as a homogeneous tactic where a marketing or SEO strategy wasn’t put in place to link the pieces together.

I think it’s time SEOs put that phrase to rest, and start thinking in terms of how a traditional content marketer would think about it. “Content that is unique in value, strong in expertise, provides a necessary point-of-view, and leads the pack in terms of usefulness is more than king – it’s fundamental to success.” A bit of a mouthful (and less sexy), not to mention harder to develop, but it really needs to be adopted.

So if you would, please keep that in mind during this post. Continue on!

What are your competitors doing?

Content ideas come from lots of sources. Some are vapid (like content topic generators) and some are interpreted (like reviewing customer poll results). Often a simple interview with your sales or service team can teach you plenty about the mindset of your consumer. Studying on-page product reviews can also be inspiring. Focus groups, experiments; all this and more can help produce pieces of content that can be strung together and tracked in order to build a truly converting funnel.

We all know the most effective content is inspired by data, versus “crazy ideas” with no concrete evidence quickly thrown against the wall. While this occasionally has some SEO benefit (arguably less and less with Panda updates), it rarely does much for your conversion funnel. It takes that extra digging that some aren’t quick to execute (at least in my experience). But what happens when your competitor is willing to do the work?

That’s where you can learn some interesting things. Marketing espionage!

Granted, most competitors don’t want to share their data with you, no matter how much beer you try to bribe them with (believe me, I’ve tried). We have tools like
SEMrush to estimate search metrics, and services like Hitwise and Compete to get more online visitor data. While that is certainly helpful, it’s still directional. But we’re marketers – so what do we do? We get creative.

How to get a birdseye view of a content play (with common SEO tools)

It’s time to lift the hood. I like to start with 
Screaming Frog. Most SEOs know this tool. If you don’t, it’s a spider that emulates what a search engine spider might find. In my experience there’s no better way to find the topics a website is targeting than with a “screaming” crawl.

Filter down to HTML, and you’ll find the URL, Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, and sometimes the Meta Keyword data. If you already have your own keywords and entities in mind, and want to see what a competitor is doing with them, it’s as simple as searching for them in Screaming Frog (or an excel export) and scanning for it.

Click for a larger image:

Consider this totally random “shammy” example in the screenshot above. If I worked in the shammy business, through a quick scan I might be interested to know that at least one of my competitors found value enough in creating a section around an iPad cloth. Is that a segment I never considered?

Don’t have Screaming Frog? The site:operator is a less powerful option. You can’t export into a spreadsheet without a scrape. 

Ubersuggest or keywordtool.io can be used in clever “quick and dirty” way – put in a keyword you think there’s opportunity for, and add “who,” “what,” “where,” “why,” or “how” to the query. Your fragmented query will often show some questions people have asked Google. After all, plenty of great content is used to answer a query. Search some of these queries in Google and see what competitor content shows up! At the very least, this is a nice way to find more competitors who are active with creating content for their users.

At this point you should be taking notes, jotting down ideas, observations, potential content titles, and questions you want to research. Whether in a spreadsheet or the back of a napkin, you’re now brainstorming with light research. Let your brain-juice flow. You should also be looking for connections between the posts you are finding. Why were they written? How do they link together? What funnels are the calls-to-action suggesting? Take notes on everything, Sherlock!

Collect the right data

Next, step it up with more quantifying data.Time to trim the fat.

Search data

By entering and measuring your extracted in Google’s Keyword Planner, you’ll see not only is there interest in an iPad cleaner (where an “iPad Shammy” might make sense with its own strategy), but some searcher interest in the best ways to clean an iPad. That could be fun, playful content to write – even for a shammy retailer. It could tie directly to products you already sell, or possibly lead you into carrying new products.

Click for a larger image:

Estimated searches don’t tell the whole story. We know plenty of keywords and metrics from this tool are either interpolated or missing. I’ve found that small estimated searches can sometimes still lead to more highly-converting volume than expected. Keep that in mind. 

Social data

What searches enter into Google’s search box isn’t the only indicator of value. Ultimately if nobody likes a certain topic or item your content, they aren’t going to share or link to it. Wouldn’t it be great to have another piece of evidence before you get to structuring a strategy and writing copy? That evidence may lie with your competitors’ social audience.

At this point you have keyword ideas, content titles, sample competitor URLs, and possible strategies sketched out. There are some great tools for checking out what is shared in the social space. Topsy, Social Crawlytics, and Buzzsumo are solid selections. You can look up the social popularity of a given URL or domain, and in some cases drill down to influencers. If it’s heavily shared, that may suggest perceived value. 

Click for a larger image:

Look at the image above. If my agency is a competitor of yours, you might be interested that one of my posts got 413 social shares. It was a post called “Old School SEO Tests In Action (A 2014 SEO Experiment)”. You can dig in to see the debates boiling through the comments or the reactions through social media. You can go so far as see who shared the post, how influential these people are, and what kind of topics they usually share. This helps qualify the shares.

With these social metrics I believe It’s reasonably safe to infer people in the SEO space care about experiments, learning about things that move rankings, and that most believe older tactics aren’t worth pursuing. With very little time at all, you might be able to come up with ways to improve upon this post or ideas for your own follow up. Maybe even a counter argument? Looking at who the post resonated with, you could presume my target audience was SEOs with a goal of providing industry insights. With a prominent lead generation form on this post, you might even suspect a secondary interest was as a source of new client leads.

If you surmised any of these things from the social data, you’re 100% right! This was certainly a thought out post with those goals in mind.   

Backlink data

Let’s examine link popularity and return to the shammy industry. Specifically let’s look at a pretty unique item – a shammy for Apple products – 
https://www.klearscreen.com/detail.aspx?ID=11.

• Open Site Explorer found 1 link from a retailer.
• Ahrefs found 8 links from 8 domains, one being a forum conversation on Stackexchange.com, and the others from a retailer.
• Majestic found 13 links from 6 domains. Similiar to what Ahrefs found.
• WebMeUp found 30 backlinks from 9 domains.

From this data it looks like the iPad shammy market isn’t exactly on fire. Now it doesn’t appear iKlear (or Klear Screen) is doing much marketing for this particular product – at least not according to Google. Their other Apple product cleaners seem to get more attention, but perhaps iKlear simply knows this isn’t a high demand product. It could be true – after all it hasn’t gone viral. It hasn’t generated much in the way of online discussions. But it also hasn’t been marketed much.

This is why all the data needs to be collected, correlated, and analyzed.  You want the best hypothesis you can get before you start committing your time to a content strategy. Did this just kill a possible content strategy for an iPad Shammy, or is this a huge untapped opportunity? It entirely depends on how you interpret all the data you collect. 

You’ve got some ideas; now what’s the execution?

You just did a lot of work. You can’t go off half-cocked throwing up willy-nilly content. Jeepers, no! The next step is the most crucial!

At this point you should have uncovered some great ideas based on your competitor’s clues. Now comes the part where you thoughtfully determine how to implement these ideas and craft a strategic roadmap. The options are endless, which could provide a decision-making struggle. From new microsites to overhauling existing content, there’s so much you can do with the gems you’ve dug up.

Remember to examine what your competitors did. How did they plug everything together? 

But sometimes your competitors don’t have a discernible content strategy. Instead just fragmented content floating like an island. This is even better for you. Now you have opportunity to not only outshine in the actual content, but put together an actual experience that your users will value, thus providing a likely positive SEO result. Here are three options I tend to build a strategy around most often: 

• Create a new funnel
• Create content for off-page SEO
• Create emphasis content

With fresh metrics, the
new funnel is often necessary. Chances are you discovered uncharted territory (at least from your website’s perspective). All future or existing content should have pre-conceived goals – there’s a top and bottom to every funnel, and maybe some strategic off-ramps leading to forms, contact pages, or products. Remember, you’re goal is to be driving the reader through an experience, eliciting emotions and appealing to their needs of which you’ve already built a hypothesis upon. This new funnel can dip into your current website or run parallel (ie, a microsite, sub-domian, or otherwise disconnected grouping). The greatest thing about digital marketing is that nothing is in stone. It’s so easy to test these funnels and redesign with collected data when necessary.

Off-page is also very common (right link builders?). Find something that is popular, and go share it with sites more popular than yours. Maybe you can even start generating new popularity and create a segment of its own. Build a strategy to take this burgeoning topic and let the widest audience know about it. Get branding, mind share, links, and ideally profit like a beast.

The
“emphasis content” (as I call it) has been a solid go-to plan for me when I discover small pockets of opportunity; notably the stuff that may have a smaller impact and isn’t worth a month long content strategy. If I were to create my own iPad shammy play, based on what I’m seeing so far, I’d probably think about a page or two as emphasis content. 

This content is like an independent port of entry or landing page, either to an existing funnel or a direct money maker. In a previous post I talked about 
creating niche collection pages for eCommerce. That could serve as emphasis content to a parent collection, but I’m usually thinking of heavier use of text in this case. Where you really take your goal, slice it up, and provide nice, beefy communication about it.

This play can be nuclear. By creating these one-off pages based on all the metrics discussed above, it’s usually much easier to do targeted outreach and social marketing. A well placed page, providing well placed internal links (ideally off popular pages), can pass PageRank and context like a dream, A tool like 
Alchemy API can help you see the relevance of pages and help you determine the best place to publish this page

Summary

A content strategy doesn’t go far if it’s phoned in. Take all the help you can get, even if it’s from a competitor. Learn from businesses who took steps before you. They may have very well discovered the holy grail. Competitive research has always been a part of any marketing campaign, but scratching the surface only gets you superficial results. Look deeper to uncover more than just a competitor’s marketing plan, but the very reason why the competitor may be beating you in search. Then, hopefully you’ll become the rock star others are trying to copy from. That’s a good problem to have.

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