Matt Cutts, Bing & MSFT Phone Team Keynoting SMX Advanced
Year after year, Search Engine Land’s SMX Advanced keynotes deliver first-hand insights. This year is no exception. Google’s Matt Cutts takes questions from you, the audience, in his “You&A” keynote, moderated by SMX’s own Danny Sullivan. Bring your toughest questions and don’t miss this…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
BrightonSEO: Lessons Learnt About Keywords and Rankings
Jo Turnbull reports back on the lessons learned on keywords and rankings from the key speakers at BrightonSEO.
Post from Jo Turnbull on State of Digital
BrightonSEO: Lessons Learnt About Keywords and Rankings
Google: We Currently Treat New TLDs As gTLDs
As you may know, there are tons of new TLDs that hit the market, such as .cash, .foo, .best and so on…
DuckDuckGo Adds Carousel, Auto-Complete, Local Results & More
DuckDuckGo announced the next version of their privacy search engine at https://next.duckduckgo.com/.
Note, this is where users like us can play around with it and give them feedback. DuckDuckGo wants to switch over to the new version in about a mont…
4 Social PPC Misconceptions
Social PPC can be a highly effective way to generate leads and sales. Because social PPC is still relatively new, mistaken beliefs abound about advertising on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. This post clears up four of the biggest misconceptions.
Is Google+ Becoming a Blog Platform or Just a Billboard?
Lately, there seems to be a rise in the usage of Google+ as a platform for expounding theories and explanations, as well as the building engagement with others. How effective is the practice, and for what purpose(s)?
Le Tour de France: six lessons for search marketers
We found that marketers can learn from Team GB’s success in the 2012 Olympics, which British Cycling’s performance director Dave Brailsford put down to the team’s absolute obsession over detail:
The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.
Our research into the digital marketing activities of some of the UK’s biggest cycling brands suggests that Brailsford’s ‘marginal gains’ apporach is also true for digital success.
Here are six things that digital marketers can take from cycling brands gearing up for summer 2014.
1. Provide brand content across the customer journey
Providing help across the whole user journey positions you as a trusted brand and can be the driving principle behind a PR and content marketing strategy.
This is especially true for cycling brands as buying the right bike for your needs is a very personal matter and consumers want tailored advice that’s right for them.
Most cycling brands still have opportunities to improve their performance in this area, especially when it comes to creating content that demonstrates expertise, builds consumer trust and improves organic search rankings.
This is something that Sigma Sport seems to understand having earned coverage with comment and stories on a series of authoritative sites that has lead to them competing with the likes of Halfords and Evans Cycles despite them being a smaller brand.

Sigma Sport has earned coverage on a series of influential sites with high SEO value (domain authority) including The Guardian, FT.com, Telegraph, Men’s Health and Cycling Weekly.
In addition to the PR value of coverage on these sites, Sigma Sport has sent a clear message to search engines, “look, we’re a reputable and trusted brand with something to say, rank us!”
Halfords, despite being the most visible cycling brand in organic search, doesn’t fare so well when it comes to optimising its content and doesn’t seem to have joined up its content strategy.
With little content onsite (relative to other cycling brands) and coverage earned as a result of brand reputation rather than creative offsite, it could find itself losing ground in organic results to the likes of Evans Cycles and Go Outdoors.
Halfords does, however, have a clear video strategy which means that its video content often appears in Google’s search results pages for a series of high-volume product-related search terms.

This is a tactic that other cycling brands could learn from, as video and photography is increasingly incorporated into search results pages.
Chain Reaction has a totally separate domain acting as a content hub.
Although it is extremely active and engaging it is potentially a missed opportunity as all social engagement, inbound links and buzz they generate won’t be directly impacting its primary domain’s organic visibility for product related searches.
2. Move with your customers
Mobile and tablet searches in this sector drove 44% of all bicycle and accessory-related searches in the final four months of 2013, up from 34% in the final four months of 2012.
This reflects the growing importance of providing a well-designed mobile user experience both on and off your website.
The subject of responsive, or mobile-first, design is well documented already, but it’s also important to provide a good brand experience for mobile customers before they hit your site.
For example, customers who call you are ten times more likely to make a purchase than those who click on a link, according to Google. Call extensions, which give the customer the option to call directly from a PPC ad served to a mobile device, lead to a 6% increase in click through rates on mobile devices.
Cycling is a great example of a market in which the customer often wants to talk directly to a specialist before purchasing.
3. Act local
The ability to advertise a local presence to consumers is one of the few advantages bricks and mortar retailers have over online-only retailers, as a greater presence in search results pages can be achieved through Location Extensions.
For products like bikes, where much of the purchase decision is very personal (based on look, feel and personal preference), the ability to find and visit local shops can be key. Evans Cycles is implementing this approach well.
The research online, purchase offline (ROPO) effect is evident here, though the opposite is also often the case.

By being highly visible both on the high street and online, bike retailers like Evans Cycles are able to convince ‘showrooming’ visitors not to purchase through a different supplier after examining or test-riding a bike in store.
4. Use social proof
A successful social proof strategy usually brings together a range of tools including ad extensions (such as review extensions and social annotations), onsite customer reviews, social PR and social CRM to manage reputation and customer feedback.
Customer reviews play an important part of the conversion process, and Seller Ratings let consumers know who their peers rate via a star-rating in adverts.
With a potential increase in click-through rate of up to 17% (according to Google), a high rating could be a crucial differentiator for online-only cycle retailers looking to overcome their lack of high-street presence.
Very few cycling retailers are using Seller Ratings in comparison with new non-specialist entrants to the market including Very.co.uk.
5. Don’t leave your PPC account structure to chance
Given that paid search advertisement click-through traffic rose by over 30% year-on-year, and overall cycling-related search traffic climbed by 3% in 2013, it was surprising to see that even the most visible brands have opportunities to improve their paid search strategies.
For example, only three out of 10 of the brands that ranked top for generic bike related searches had well-structured accounts.
Most had gaps in their keyword strategies (e.g. bidding on ‘women’s mountain bikes’ but not ‘ladies mountain bikes’) and some were running out of budget and disappearing before the end of the day.
6. Look for further ranking opportunities
Websites with high organic visibility inevitably rank well for many of their keywords. Still, there’s often the opportunity to significantly increase organic visibility by moving keywords just a few positions upwards.
Of the ten most visible brands in organic search results for cycling, most have a reasonable share of their keywords on page one. Despite this, there are still significant opportunities to improve further.
To understand the size of the opportunity for each website, it’s important to consider the context of the number of keywords.
For example, Halfords has just 21% of its keywords appearing on the second page. However, due to the vast size of its website and product set, the real number is a lot more significant in that the 21% equates to over 1,000 keywords.
A focus on improving the rankings of those keywords – in many cases, by just a few positions – would result in a significant increase in organic search traffic.
Every site has a significant amount of keywords appearing on pages two to five, which presents big opportunities. Those sites with the biggest potential relative to their current performance are:
- Decathlon, which has 32% of its keywords on page two alone, equating to over 1,000 relevant keywords.
- Wiggle, which has just 32% of its keywords on page one, equating to over 1,400 relevant keywords on pages two to five.
- Rutland Cycling, which has a huge 76% of its keywords on pages three to five, equating to just over 150 keywords on pages one and two.
- Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative, which has just 12% of its keywords on page one, equating to over 600 relevant keywords on pages two to five.
- JE James Cycles, which has 35% of its keywords on page two, equating to over 270 relevant keywords falling a few positions short of page one.
So who should we be backing for the online yellow jersey this summer?
It’s a close call, and there’s time for a late sprint for the finish. The table below illustrates the top 30 brands in organic and paid search for cycling related keywords.
Halfords leads the way in organic results, facing stiff competition from Amazon, Argos and Tesco in paid results.
However, with opportunities in both paid and organic search, brands like Wiggle, Tredz, Winstanleys bikes and JE James Cycles are leading the chasing pack and could field a late challenge as interest in Le Tour heightens this summer.
The top 30 brands in organic and paid search for cycling related keywords:
The 2014 Cycling Sector report is available from Epiphany’s website.
Social Media & Link Building Strategies for Small Businesses
5 easy steps to sync your social media marketing & link building into one approach – perfect for small businesses with limited resources.
Post from Sarah Bradley on State of Digital
Social Media & Link Building Strategies for Small Businesses
Is Your Content Strategy Guided by Audience Intent (or Just Keywords)?
Posted by Laura.Lippay

All too often I see content strategies that:
- Look at what people are searching for (keyword research).
- Create landing pages for as many keywords as possible.
- Write gobs of (often meaningless) keyword-optimized content.
This is a typical old-school SEO strategy, but what about audience (visitor) intent?
There’s a lot of focus in SEO around optimized landing pages (as there should be). An optimized landing page has a targeted topic and keywords, a targeted page title, a clean URL, a compelling meta description, intuitive layout and navigation, loads quickly, looks amazing, and has calls to action most likely above the fold.
means of communicating and building a relationship with an audience.
What is audience intent?
That core audience you’re trying to attract needs something. Maybe they’re researching the best hiking vacations around the globe. Maybe they want to know where they could go hiking specifically in Utah. Maybe they know they want to go hiking in Utah and are looking for Utah vacation packages that include hiking. Or maybe they just need to book a trip from Boston to Park City. Their intent can be very vague or very specific, and when coming up with content for a landing page you need to put yourself in the mind of your audience and consider what it is that they really want to see. The audience intent would consider:
- What kind of content would help to easily and satisfactorily meet the intent of that visitor?
- If the intent is vague (ex: “hairstyles”), what are the various types of intents that they may have? Ex: hairstyle how-to videos, hairstyle lookbooks, short hairstyles, long hairstyles, hairstyles for curly hair, thin hair, frizzy hair, specific hairstyles like up-do’s, braids, etc.
- What would they consider useful?
- What would they consider interesting or engaging?
- What would they consider sharable?


The basic requirements of content strategy
- What are the goals of this content (why are we creating it)?
- What are the goals for the business (how do we make money)?
- What does it need to solve for the consumer (what is the audience intent)?
How do we build something that meets (and exceeds) user intent, while satisfying our business goals, and is better than anything else out there?
Content strategy example 1:
Content vs. lifestyle
The company in this scenario is currently purely transactional.
The setup (in brief):
- Audience: Women age 25-55, typically moms.
- The audience need/intent: Discover smart and innovative ways to be awesome and live fabulously while being budget-conscious.
- Content goals: Extend the currently purely transactional brand into a lifestyle brand through an extensive, multidimensional content plan.
- Business goals: Sell product online.
Lifestyles in this case is the key. Producing content is very different than immersing your brand in a lifestyle:
| CONTENT | LIFESTYLE |
| Landing pages | Self-expression |
| Articles | Community |
| Blog Posts | Culture |
| Videos | Identity |
| Slideshows | Associations |
| Guides | Experience |
| Maps | Emotion |
Consider these brands embracing lifestyles through content. They’re all there to sell product, but their content attracts and engages audiences, draws them in like moths to flames. Their content isn’t based on keywords and optimized landing pages, it’s based on giving their audiences what they need and getting them excited about it in the process.
|
GoPro: Be inventive, buy cameras. |
Nike: Do sports, buy shoes. |
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|
Airbnb: Travel hip, rent places. |
Martha Stewart: Be crafty, buy products. |
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The approach proposed for this particular client in this example:
- Client: Live fabulously on a budget, buy products.
- Client: Optimized landing pages derived from high-volume keywords, buy products.
Content strategy example 2:
Articles vs. awesome content
- Audience: Primarily women, primary age group: 35-55.
- The audience need/intent: Get fashion and beauty inspiration, tips, ideas.
- Content goals: Reach and engage more women.
- Business goals: Page views (ad impressions).
- Market research on online beauty and fashion trends.
- Extensive competitive research.
- Extensive research into trends on what’s popular in beauty and fashion online and in social networks.
- Videos or slideshows comparing different makeup brands (example: different thick lash mascaras or long-lasting lipsticks).
- Makeover tools.
- Various types of “lookbooks” for things like pixie hairstyles, colorful eyeliner ideas, nail trends, etc.
- Working with brand partners to deliver samples boxes to subscribers.
- A series on recreating celebrity looks for less (and where to buy).
- Local fashionista bloggers in major cities who blog on where the latest coolest fashion finds, fashion events and fashionable places to be are in that city.
- Weekly collections/series around various topics like This Weeks Cutest Shoes (in your inbox), Must-Have Dresses, Craziest Fashion Trends, etc.

Content strategy example 3:
Selling vacation packages
- Audience: Adult international travelers coming from the United States.
- The audience need/intent: Find things to do in the area, find tours in the area, find vacation packages, plan a vacation in the area.
- Content goals: Attract, engage and convert more people.
- Business goals: Primary: sell flights. Secondary: sell packages.
- What do searches tell us about the various types of intent the searchers have? People may be searching a specific attraction or they may be looking for hiking tours. We found at least 4 high-level ways to slice and dice intent (in addition to looking for packages): By specific attraction name, by town, by type of attraction (ex: waterfalls), or by activity (ex: bird-watching).
- Does the site architecture currently meet those intents? In fact, no. The architecture was somewhat random. It is difficult to find some of the things on the site based on those 4 types of intent. Some of the content that could be easily cross-sold was also buried as landing pages in the packages section.
- How do visitors with these intents navigate the site now? We did user testing asking visitors to find and book a specific attraction and to find and book a specific activity. Many were unable to complete the tasks, and all of them went about it in completely different ways. We learned a lot about what people expect to find and how they expect to find it that could help guide our content strategy (including additional types of intent like time of year the package is available for instance).
- What content assets do we have to work with? A content inventory was done with a sample size of content currently in season and live on the site, and content out of season that they currently remove from the site. Each page was “tagged” with the specific attractions, towns, type of “thing to see,” and activities that were included in the package along with package price, travel period, whether or not it includes a flight, departure airport, number of nights.

With all of this in mind, the end content strategy proposed things like:
- Architecture: An updated architecture with landing pages to meet the specific major intents.
- Navigation: A newly proposed navigation (which is slightly different from the architecture).
- URLs: Of course.
- Tools: A proposed filtering tool/system to filter anything from type of activity involved to price range to number of nights and everything in-between.
- On-Page: On-page content recommendations based on what we learned from user testing + adding in related content for higher engagement and search-friendly cross-linking of relevant content and pulling things like transportation options out from being a buried landing page under packages to being a module cross-linked from relevant package pages.
- Seasonal content treatments: Adding the ability to book packages that aren’t in season right now + how to address long term landing pages for seasonally available or annually changing content.
Remember, we’re creating content for people, not search engines
It all goes hand-in-hand. When you create something that your audiences like, that they link to more, share more, and engage with more, it’s likely to affect search engine rankings and traffic, too. Of course this isn’t your good ol’ typical “SEO,” but its also not 1999. The best SEO is—and for many years has been—a good product, so taking the time to consider your audience intentions when creating a content strategy can pay off in more ways than one.
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Is That A 5″ Screen in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy To See Me?
That was the proposed name of the awesome panel I am going to be moderating at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco on June 3rd: Hot, Local Action Sure, smartphones are great for finding a nearby restaurant or getting an Uber car, but the true innovation was making it easier for all of us […]
The post Is That A 5″ Screen in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy To See Me? appeared first on Local SEO Guide.
SearchCap: Matt Cutts On Links, Spiderman Drops Bing & DuckDuckGo’s New Design
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: DuckDuckGo Releases New Beta Site With Redesigned Look & Added Features DuckDuckGo. the search engine known for protecting the privacy of its users,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
DuckDuckGo Releases New Beta Site With Redesigned Look & Added Features
DuckDuckGo. the search engine known for protecting the privacy of its users, announced a new “reimagined and redesigned” beta site today. According to the announcement, the new site will deliver smarter answers and have a more refined look. DuckDuckGo has also added new features,…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google’s Matt Cutts: Over Time Backlinks Will Become Less Important
Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, said in a video that backlinks, over time, will become a little less important. Matt did say that backlinks in the Google ranking algorithm still have many years left in them. Matt explained that Google is focusing a lot now on working on ways to…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Marketers Failing Badly on Mobile-Specific Landing Pages, PPC Ad Copy [Report]
Where are the biggest gaps in mobile opportunity for online advertisers? Yahoo and Kenshoo teamed up for a survey that analyzed just that, and found that while most advertisers know the mobile experience is key, less than half optimize for it.
6 Takeaways from Native Advertising vs. PPC
What is Native Advertising & Content Promotion? Native advertising and paid content promotion, from sites like Taboola and Outbrain, are becoming powerful tools for engaging new audiences and expanding the reach of creative content. This method for online advertising provides content within the context of a user’s experience, making the paid content feel less intrusive […]
Secret Contracts Keep Google In Control Of Mobile Search Argues Lawsuit
A would be class action lawsuit was filed last week against Google in Federal Court in California. The action seeks to resurrect some of the themes and arguments raised in the now settled FTC antitrust case against the company. While repeating familiar…
How To Build A Local Brand Through Online Marketing
The terms “Brand” and “Brand Marketing” are usually associated with large businesses. Having a “brand” is seen as something significant — something that only businesses with big ideas and even bigger wallets can afford to invest in and create. But…
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May 2014 Google Webmaster Report
April was another month chock full of Google webmaster and SEO tidbits. We also suspected at least two updates, FYI, there were some signs of a possible update on May 2nd, although that buzz died down quickly…
Where SEM Is Concerned, Google+ Appears To Be Alive And Well
Last week saw a flurry of speculation on the future of Google+ after the head of Google+, Vic Gundotra, announced his departure. The question raised most often is whether Google+ is going away. Although some are reporting that G+ will kill the product …
Escape Google With These 12 Search Engine Alternatives
Google isn’t the only game in town and isn’t even the best alternative for many specific search tasks and needs. Here’s how to escape Google’s grip with Bing, Blekko, BuzzSumo, DuckDuckGo, SocialMention, Quantcast, Topsy, Wolfram|Alpha, and more.



