Who's who in Usability
Jakob Nielsen
-Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a UserAdvocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman [formerVP of research at Apple Computer).
- Before starting NNG in 1998 he was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer.
- Dr. Nielsen founded the "discount usability engineering" movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.
- He holds 79 United States patents, mainly on ways of making the Internet easierto use.
SEO and PPC Need to Stop Being Enemies
Erin Everhart, September io? 2014 0 Comments
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(5j SEO Evolution: Sell, Discover, Deliver & Report on Highly Converting Keywords by Krista La Riviere, q Shift
There. I said it. I'm willing to put down my battle ax if you're willing to cease fire.
For as long as there have been search engines, there have been two views of the best way to own them. Paying vs. earning. Bidding vs. optimizing. PPC vs. SEO.
[ You don't play for both teams, and rarely is there crossover of leaving one discipline for the other. ) I here's as much tension between them as Honda c^atortans and Urban Meyer, which is downright frustrating given how well they could work together.
But I get it.
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About this time in the year, people start thinking about budgets for the upcoming year, and
wherever there are two competing marketing tactics, one will inevitably get shafted and the other will inevitably be bitter about it.
Still, vou don't see this type of rivalry between affiliate and email or PR and social — or maybe you do; I don't know. Either way, the tension is especially thick between SEO and PPC. Maybe it's because of budgets. Maybe it's because they're so tightly aligned and often get grouped under the blanket "SEM." Maybe it's because Google AdWords keep taking up more and more real estate in the SERPs.
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Whatever it is, no matter what side of the fence you're on, we forget we're all working toward one
common goal: to make money. Regardless if traffic or conversion rate are your key metrics, your job as a marketer is to make your company money, and we can make a lot more of it if SEO and PPC start playing nicely.
Two Tactics, Two Parts of the Funnel
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Part of the problem may be because we're comparing SEO to PPC on a 1 -to-1 ratio: If SEO isn't working, just move everything to PPC and vice versa. But what happens when you do that is that you're misallocating the budget to two different parts of a customer engagement.
SEO is a top-of-the-funnel marketing tactic. People do often buy when they enter your site organically, but primarily it's a research-driven action. Conversion rates are low. They're seeing what's out there. They might just be starting their research process. They probably come back a fewMimes^efor^Jete^^
In fact PWC found in their annual multi-channel shopping survey that 88 percent of U.S. respondents first research online before buying a product. So remember, they could research online and buy in store, but SEO wouldn't be created for that conversion, and they would never buv online if vou're not first there when thev look online.
Replacing PPC with SEO won't necessarily bring you more results or even better results because you're using budget to target an entirely different type of consumer.
How We Can Work Together
Keywords
Since Google switched to secure search and we lost our keyword data, the next most reliable way for SEOs to know which keywords to target comes from PPC.
While you can get traffic data from tools like Keyword Planner or SEMRush and impressions and click-through rate (CTR) from Google Webmaster Tools, PPC teams have access to an even more valuable metric when it comes to determine how profitable a keyword is for you: conversion rate.
Armed with that information, SEOs now know not only what keyword drives the most traffic but what keyword could potentially drive the most revenue.
Pages
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
If you're not creating PPC-specific landing pages, you'll likely be using the same landing pages
from SEO, which can tell you a lot in terms of how popular a page is, conversion rate, and revenue. The work the SEO team did on the landing page will also boost your PPC Quality Score, driving down your overall cost per click (CPC).
Secondly, both PPC and SEO can benefit from knowing what customers actually considered quality content. A PPC campaign can let you test which content works best for your users very quickly, which you can then migrate into your SEO strategy, and vice versa if you're setting up J^PC to supplement your SEP. ^
Thanks to the multi-channel funnel report in Google Analytics, we now have a better way of giving credit to each channel involved in a customer's purchasing decision.
How else have you used PPC and SEO together in order to drive more revenue?
Bing Released A URL Keyword Stuffing Spam Filtering That Impacted Three-Percent Of Queries
Barry Schwartz on September 10, 2014 at 9:49 am
(Igor Rondel, the Principal Development Manager of the Bing Index Quality, posted on the Bing Search news that they released a spam filter a Tew months" ago that impacted about 3c'o of all search queries. The spam filter was aimed at URL keyword stuffing.
i^or Rondel it targeted spammers stuffing keywords in the URL or domain in an effort to artificially boo; /their rankings in Bing. He specifically documented the types of URLs Bing looks at with this:
Multiple hosts, with keyword-rich hostnames: http://account.free.Qnline.savings.samedaypaydaylQansusa.com Host/ domain names with repeating keywords: http://loan.payday.paydayloanspaydayloansusa.com
URL cluster across same domain, but varied hostnames comprised of keyword permutations o http://contososhoeswomen.shoesonsale.com/ * http://bestwomensrunningsneakers.shoesonsale.com/ o http://discountrunningapparelforwomen.shoesonsale.com/ URL squatting
o This is a little different as the spammer is playing on a human tendency to misspell keywords &
in effect syphoning traffic off of existing (typically high profile/ traffic) sites o E.g. http://nytime.comfmisspelling ofhttp://nytimes.com). http://ebey.com (misspelling of http://ebay.com)
Bing Detects Keyword URL Stuffing
How does Bing detect this form of search spam? They wouldn't say exactly but did document signals they look at to detect the spam, such as:
Site size Number of hosts
Number of words in host/ domain names and path Hosť domain/ path keyword co-occurrence (inc. unigrams and bigrams) % of the site cluster comprised of top frequency host/ domain name keywords Hosť domain names containing certain lexicons/ pattern combinations (e.g. ["year", "event | product name"], http://www.turbotaxonline2014.com) Site/page content quality & popularity signals
Impact Of This Spam Filter On Bing s Search Results
With extreme transparency for a search engine, Bing shared the impact this spam filter had on their search results. They said it impacted about 3% of all search queries. Specifically impacting about 5 million sites, comprising around 130 million urls. They even documented some example sites impacted b v this spam filter.
Users: This update impacted -3% of Bing queries (on average -1 in 10 URLs was filtered out per impacted query.)
SEO community: -5M sites, comprising > 130M urls, have been impacted, resulting in upwards of
75% reduction in traffic to these sites from Bing.
Example queries: {hotmail login}, {bestbuy on sale}, {cheap hdtv}
Examples of spam sites impacted:
* www.cheapviagrausa.com
o www.cheapviagrapharma.com
* www.buyviagracheapviagraergr.com
* www.gmailloginsigninup.com
NOTICE