Brighton SEO Slides – Technical Marketing
Here are the slides from my presentation at Brighton SEO in September 2013, where I spoke about technical bits and pieces from internet marketing.
And the script:
I’m Katrina Gallagher from Digitangle, today I want to talk about some common technical pitfalls, and use tools to make life a little easier and more effective.
Marketing can be like an assault course… have you ever worked on a successful SEO campaign, only to find that the company are re-branding, relocating, changing focus or implementing a new, ‘clean’ Design with no space for text.
You’ve probably all experienced this type of nightmare.
Sometimes you’ve got to justify a change of plan or prepare your boss or client for the results.
Marketing is much more powerful when it’s integrated.
Customer feedback and analytics can help you figure out why you’re fighting an uphill battle in your link building campaign. Great design and good content can improve conversion rates & make link building easier; but there are knock on effects of the different disciplines, so look at marketing as a whole rather than its individual parts.
Taken to the extreme, if you look at any element of marketing in isolation it’s ugly… unless you’re looking purely at the design… then it’s probably a beautiful work of useless.
If you’re effectively driving traffic for your target terms, but conversion rate and engagement are low, then user feedback and A/B testing or a chat with a designer or copywriter can help turn visitors into customers.
Conversion rate optimisation can be hugely beneficial – if you double your conversion rate, there are multiple knock on effects, the result is often much more than a double in profit.
But be careful you don’t pick up any duplicate content penalties :
Have a look at Conversion Rate Experts – they’ve got loads of resources & examples.
Restructuring a site or moving domains can be catastrophic for an SEO campaign if not managed well. Its important to set up useful 404’s which you can track, and ensure all old pages are 301 redirected if it’s a new url, and tell Google Webmaster Tools. There’s a great checklist to help with website migration at virante.org.
Make the absolute most out of your feedback –
Embed Twitter mentions and comments – this is especially useful for demonstrating the authenticity of positive customer feedback. You can do the same with Facebook. The Huffington Post have compiled a list of their favourite updates which makes for an interesting remix of content.
Auto-post to social networks, the snap plugin lets you post to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and importantly Google+. You do need to upgrade for this feature though, but it saves a lot of time.
You’ll often get a better response from carefully crafted newsletters, but if you’re time starved, you could publish a collection of your latest blog posts each week or month. There are still many people who don’t understand or use RSS feeds, and you can’t expect people to keep checking back to your site.
Targeted emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. So You could consider RSS feed by category & send to a segment of your email list. Mailchimp has a brilliant RSS to newsletter tool.
The Google+ Badge & +1 Button, and a lot of social plugins send social tracking to Analytics automatically. But this is the code you need to add if you need to send social tracking to the Google Analytics Tracking Code.
You can track offline & email activity using Google Analytics url builder. Lots of email software tools have this integrated now, and you can wrap the resulting url in a shortened link (e.g. bitly)
The Apple App Store is a bit of a black whole for data, but you can track properties in the android app market. Its a Similar process to offline and email tracking with a url builder.
A lot of the social media plugins and conversion rate optimisation tools can slow down a website, which obviously isn’t good for users – and its also bad for search rankings.
Identify your weakness, and plan how you’ll tackle it.
Thank you!
Leave a comment