I’m talking about the SEOMoz Industry Survey.

What The Survey is Not

This survey is not to be confused with the even more important SEOmoz Ranking Factors survey (which I had the honor of contributing to last year) that digs deep into the “how and where” of how search engines might work.

No matter how accurately participants answer the dozens of questions, no matter how carefully and considerately the Moz team convert that data into pie charts and bar charts and pretty infographs, it really isn’t ever going to be more than a platform for consensus on a narrow aspect of who we are, how we’re doing and how we go about our work.

Why The Survey Is Vital

There’s enough tidbits of value in this survey if you pay attention.  Both from a pulse of the industry perspective as well as a “how we might be able to do our jobs better” perspective.

Even with the limitations such a platform has, this biennial crowd-sourced knowledge dump is by far, the single most valuable tool we in the industry have to help gauge the general state of where we as an industry are, and where opportunities might exist for efficiency and productivity, and insights and answers that we may have not given enough weight to on our own.

As long as we recognize its limitations, just as we have a responsibility to do when analyzing ANY data in our industry, regardless of source, this one resource has the capacity to bring crowd-sourced based clarity to what is likely a laundry list of questions that many if not most of us have regarding at least some aspect of the work we do.

Over Dramatization Or Spot on Opinion

In 2012, Click2Rank is growing dramatically. We’re in a multi-phase hiring frenzy.  And we’ve increased our budget for outsourced vendor support services from a mere $30,000 a year to a quarter of a million dollars for the coming 12 month cycle. And that’s JUST for outsourced support services!

For some of you, the work you do may not involve millions of dollars of potential revenue increases for your employer or clients.  Maybe it’s only thousands.  Yet even then, wouldn’t you rather go to sleep at night knowing the way you do your work, and the things you focus on are the best possible?  Is it not enough that  you’ve made a commitment to your employer or client to provide the best possible service?

Its because of that perspective that as far as I’m concerned, since I give 110% of my passion for excellence, even the narrow focus of this survey is going to help me move ever closer toward that excellence in my work.

How We Do Our Jobs

One of the things I love about this survey is it opens my mind when I go about my work of deciding what tools, resources and solutions might help my team become more efficient, more productive and more focused.  A few years back, I was adamantly opposed to tools for automating my audit work, for example.  It was my belief that tools are imperfect, and no tool can pick up on the often subtle patterns that my  trained eye can see when looking at raw data.

When I got enough input from enough people in the industry that they were using various tools, with great success, I opened my mind.  And now, I can’t even begin to comprehend how I was able to be truly efficient without the tools I rely upon every day of my working life.

That I also now have an entire team relying on my guidance, my direction, and my recommendations, having a crowdsourced data point is even more helpful in my decision making process.

Perfect In Its Imperfection

Even though many people who take the survey are quite likely to be beginner or intermediate marketers, even though many who are seasoned will, themselves, be off-base in their own way of doing things,  the shear volume of data collected is itself at least a partial buffer from too much “questionable” or “shaky” data from causing survey results to invalidate the data’s usefulness.

How can I make such a claim?  How can I not take the position that if too many people provide inaccurate, half-valid responses, the survey is then useless, or at worst, harmful to our work?

We’re an industry of professionals.  We’re not, generally speaking, a bunch clueless hacks stumbling in the dark.  Enough people within our industry get enough results in the “positive” column, that collectively, we must be doing something right.

The Testing FailSafe

Just like any other input we choose to take in our research and learning of our collective craft, if you truly are professional, if you truly do implement best practices in your work as a rule, you’ll take what you think the survey is telling you, and you’ll test it on your own.  You’ll be responsible in your testing, and you’ll do so cautiously and consciously. Just like you do with more direct ranking and conversion based method choices.

Testing Begins With Assumption

It’s dangerous to make assumptions.  No. Actually it’s not.  Instead, it’s dangerous to make assumptions, then blindly make decisions that directly have the potential to negatively impact people’s lives.  In this case, it’s mostly related to efficiency and methodology.  Yet those alone can cause an agency or department to totally go sideways or off the rails.  So testing even in this scenario, is vital to the health of the work you do.

Assumptions Require Input

In order to make assumptions, we need input.  Either from our own past experience, or that of others.  The more input we get, is not necessarily better.  Too much input from too many people can, in fact, cause our senses to be overwhelmed.  So how then, is the Moz survey a good thing?

Consensus Based Input

The golden key to making use of mass volumes of data in our assumption making process is where that mass volume can be consolidated into digestible chunks.  In a form we can understand and make sense of without feeling overwhelmed.  And last I checked, no other organization in our industry goes to the lengths gone to by the Moz team, to both gather this data and then in turn, present it in such digestible chunks, let alone on such a massive scale.

Help Make Our Industry Better

If you totally think I am high as a kite in my logic here, that’s great.  Continue going about your work however you choose that you believe works for you.  If, on the other hand, you agree with my thinking, I highly encourage you, if you haven’t already, to take the time to participate in the Survey.  Those of us who rely on it to help formulate our assumptions (as one of many data points, thank you very much), will thank you for it…

Industry Consensus – Why I Encourage you To Take the SEOMoz Survey is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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In my last article regarding how TopSEOs continue to use deceptive business practices, I closed out the article looking for opinions by “award winners”.  Essentially, I believe that one of the most serious problems our industry faces when it comes to cleaning up the SEO cesspool is that seemingly upstanding and highly regarded companies don’t go far enough in railing against the scum that causes harm to unsuspecting business owners looking for services from our industry.

Looking For Opinions

To this end, I visited a number of web sites for companies that are listed in the TopSEOs system where those companies otherwise appear to be legitimate.  Believe me, that was a challenge simply because so many of those listed have turned out to be ripoffs.

Nonetheless, there are companies out there doing good work from an overall perspective, (or there are complaints floating I have not personally been able to verify) and I was curious to find out, directly from them, why they continue to sport TopSEOs banners that make the claim they’ve gotten an award for quality service even though everyone now knows that TopSEOs themselves don’t really perform an unbiased comprehensive review, and that their new disclaimer page actually states that there’s no reason to believe that their claims are based on any facts whatsoever.

By developing and posting such rankings, topseos.com makes no representations or warranties as to the accuracy or factual basis of the rankings

Now any reasonably intelligent human being who reads that line can clearly see that their “rankings” are complete bullshit.  Yet while that tidbit is buried deep near the end of a 942 word disclaimer (that only appeared on their site after my scathing Jeev Trika interview article and a plethora of complaints came out during this year’s initial Sphinn push initiated by Edward Lewis forced them to issue a public apology and vow to change), the fact remains that they continue to distribute and promote those asshat badges.

And those seemingly legitimate companies in our industry I reached out to continue to display them.

Which means a business owner who doesn’t know better will see that and may think “Hey – wow – this company looks legit – they’ve even won an award…”

Which we know is complete bullshit.

You Can Run but You Can’t Hide Forever

Long story longer, not one single response came from any of the companies I reached out to.

Until SMX Advanced.

Up in Seattle, the first night of the conference, Third Door put on a “Meet & Greet” – where early arrivals could socialize, get introduced, and begin the experience that I think is the most valuable of all at conferences – networking.

One of the first people I had the pleasure of meeting was Bruce Clay.  Generally speaking, I have always appreciated how successful Bruce has been over the years.  By some people’s accounts, the size, scope and scale of his company is something they only wish they could achieve.

Personally, I don’t aspire to run a company with a global reach and such a large staff, because I’m not that type of business person.  Let’s be real right?  I’m such a renegade, so fiercely independent, and thoroughly inappropriate in my approach that there’s no way even I could tolerate me as a boss. 

Bruce, on the other hand, is obviously more than skilled at running such a venture.  His business acumen is proven through and through.  And his employees sure look like they have a lot of fun at all those company parties

And while there has, over the years, been some controversy around Bruce’s linking methodology, I personally haven’t seen or explored enough of that to be able to say, with complete certainty, that it’s anything other than grey-hat stuff, if that.

Bigger Problems

Yet one of the biggest thorns in our industry is how BCI, with all their recognition and weight, sports a TopSEOs “award” right there on the BCI site – right along with their own Bruce Clay Inc. code of ethics badge…

(note – at the time of this article, that “award” has been removed from the BCI home page, replaced by their “SEO & PPC Competition” banner, however the “award” remains on their About page)…

So naturally, I felt compelled to speak with Bruce about that.

Curiosity And The Cat

Why, I wondered, would such a pillar of the search marketing community, need to display their “best in” badge, knowing full well that it’s not an independent rating? Why would they want to be associated with such a deceptive company at all?

To Bruce’s credit, our conversation was not only polite, it was downright relaxed.  Having never previously met or spoken with Bruce, I had no idea what to expect going into this.  It turns out (no surprise to anyone who has actually dealt with Bruce, I am sure), that he’s a really decent guy.  There was no arrogance, no holier-than-thou energy about him at all.

And he proceeded to explain to me why he continues to associate with TopSEOs.

Profit As A Business Motive

It turns out that BCI actually gets a fairly substantial amount of business that comes through that channel.  Even though Bruce told me exactly what percentage, he didn’t say I could share that here, so I’ll just say this – you might be shocked if you heard the number…

So that’s a major factor right there.  It’s not personal – it’s just business.

But what about the whole deceptive practices issue?

Bruce was very clear on this point.  He told me that he most definitely doesn’t like all of the things they do over at TopSEOs – from article scraping to the concept of bait and switch (for the record, Bruce said that to his knowledge not one time did any such unsuspecting prospect get referred to BCI), and just as important – he clearly thinks there’s a serious problem with how some highly questionable companies get top billing.

The Good Guy Hat

Since they do get a serious amount of business from that channel, Bruce doesn’t see any problem in participating in that way – he says that since his company does quality work, he figures if he didn’t get that business, there’s a good chance that those clients might just end up at a less than reputable company and get ripped off.

That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t previously considered.  That while TopSEOs steers God knows how many unsuspecting businesses toward scummy solution providers, at least some percentage of them are potentially going to be sent to companies that actually deliver real solutions…

Now, personally, I don’t think it’s enough that legitimate companies are thrown into the mix.  The sheer volume and weight of the asshattery, in my opinion, far outweighs the good that might come out of this whole deal.

Yet as far as Bruce is concerned, and according to him, “I prefer to remain neutral in this” – it’s not his policy to address such concerns…

The golden Ticket

Here’s where things really get fascinating.  And why we have a critically serious problem in our industry.  What I’m about to share was, when I heard it, both shocking and not surprising in the least…

Bruce told me that he doesn’t pay TopSEOs one cent.  Nadda.  Nothing.  No monthly membership fee whatsoever.

Of course he doesn’t.  He doesn’t have to.  TopSEOs needs the “legitimacy” factor that comes with the relationship.

By sprinkling in highly visible and highly touted industry players into the mix of craptastic thieves, it lends a massive amount of credibility cache’ to what they’re doing.

So how many other companies (legitimate or otherwise) are not paying for those badges?  And how many who ARE paying, know that someone else ISN’T paying?  but I digress…

And That’s The Rub

As long as companies such as BCI continue to sleep in the same bed as TopSEOs, Jeev gets to play his game.  For all the negative that comes when the industry cries out against them, every service provider that plays, and every industry conference that continues to allow them to play the role of sponsor or “partner”, counters the outcry.

A Matter of Business Ethics Perspective

And that brings me back to a point I brought up a while ago in this ongoing discussion.  Business Ethics.  While many of us have defined the concept of business ethics, as it applies to the TopSEOs situation, to mean that you’re either against TopSEOs altogether (and refuse to have anything to do with them), or you’re not.  And if you’re not, in our view, you’re contributing to the problem, and that, in turn, means you yourself are running an unethical company.

Except to some people, that’s just our opinion.  And it’s not good business sense or realistic, according to them. In fact, when we look at what goes on in the business world – whether it’s participating in a TopSEOs type scheme through the display of phony “awards”, or it’s outsourcing overseas and paying people 80 cents an hour for work that generates your company hundreds of dollars an hour in profit, capitalism from a detached perspective doesn’t factor in moral or ethical issues the way some of us would prefer.

It’s a cold, hard, reality.

Exclusive Insights – Bruce Clay talks TopSEOs is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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The core concept is that Google is now beta testing the serving up of contact forms right within an AdWords ad, thus preventing the person doing the search from having to click through to a web site.

This is a terrible step in Google’s ever increasing goal to keep searchers on the Google site.

First, the concept that you can’t know which questions you’ve submitted will show up in the ad – Google will determine which show up based on quality score variables. So you can’t even control the data collection requirement.

Second, you don’t get direct access to the client – you have to go through Google – who can track the engagement data. And ultimately still controls the prospect. By having a prospect remain at Google and never get to your site, you have no capacity to control the flow of information at all if they choose to use Google’s form.

Third, by allowing Google to gather the answers and contact info, this is only a win for Google in their aim to have an infinite amount of personal data on people looking for services and solutions online.

Finally, This is a complete crap-shoot for the AdWords account owner.

With a form on your own site, there’s an infinite number of additional action items you can present that prospect. This is a core concept of extending the marketing message, and tailoring the ability to further engage the prospect.  It’s also a matter of having the ability to gather prospect data and being able to make use of that data in several ways after the initial contact. All of which you lose with this new “solution”.

In addition to all the other problems this creates, by allowing Google to gather that data, marketers and site owners lose a critical piece of first-contact information and need to go through Google to even get a phone number to call.  That is insanity.

And Google stipulates you have to contact the prospect within 24 hours.  Are they kidding?  Sure, I expect immediate response to online inquiries.  But to force this nonsense is beyond controlling and completely kills any potential sales opportunity if circumstances out of your control prevent that response time.

And finally, if someone does a search, clicks on the link, and gets the instant contact form, there’s nothing to stop, or at the very least, slow them down from immediately clicking on a competitor’s ad.  And therein lies what may be the biggest flaw in Google’s crack-smoking mentality, from a business owner’s perspective.

No, Jami, I’d say this is not pretty cool at all.  Unless you’re Google.

UPDATE 1/8/10 – Got a response comment from Jami, who brings up a counter-point.  And from there, I realized even MORE problems with this whole thing.  So go ahead and be sure to read the comments, then offer your take on it…

Google AdWords Contact Forms – A Bad Idea is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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Rather than trying to cover everything, I’ll focus specifically on one feature, the bing “Quick Preview” and the text that shows up for search results themselves. I’ll leave the rest of the reviewing to other bloggers or to a future article of my own.

BING SEARCH RESULTS – PAGE TITLE PROBLEM?

When I first did a search to see what pages come up for my name, I got mostly valid, current results.  But what struck me as odd was that the results weren’t displaying the page title for the first couple entries.

Note how the first two results just say “Alan Bleiweiss”?  Well the page title for my blog is really “Search Marketing Answers”… and for my company site, the home page title tag starts out with “Hey Dude Wheres My Site | Search Engine Optimization”…

I follow proper HTML syntax in my page titles, and most page titles show up properly for most of the results. But some of the other searches I did got similar results for sites I don’t own.  And for all of these, Google seems to have the proper page title displayed.  So what’s going on with Microsoft’s system?

BING QUICK PREVIEW FEATURE

When I first started playing with the results page, I discovered almost right away that when you roll your mouse over most search results, you see a thin line off to the right of that entry, with an orange dot in the middle of it.

As I rolled my mouse over that orange dot, a slick preview window opened up to reveal content directly from the site linked to off to the left.

While the initial text that’s shown for my pages is coming directly from the META Description tag, the info that shows up in the preview window is coming directly from the page’s content.

Now here’s where I think Google needs to sit up and pay attention.  For the first time in quite a while, I really think that Microsoft is actually delivering on a promise.  In this case, it’s the promise they’re making that bing isn’t a search engine, but instead, it’s a “decision engine”.

For those sites that they can do this with (not all sites allow replication of content), it’s going to help a lot of people make a more qualified decision on whether to click through to a site than they can now do at Google.  By providing the Meta Description AND the initial content that is actually on the page linked, Microsoft is giving us more information to process.

I like this feature a lot.  And quite frankly, it was a very pleasant surprise to see.

PAGE LINKS – NOT JUST FOR THE ELITE

I also found that for several entries in the results page, bing is also showing site links within that preview pane.  These aren’t just showing up for the top results either.  I found the same thing on results that were on the 2nd page as well.  They’re not showing for every entry, but this too goes beyond what Google is presently offering to their visitors.  Yet one more feature that may help Microsoft gain market share…

MICROSOFT IS LISTENING – SORT OF

When I tweeted my revelation tonight, I got a quick “thank you” response from “Betsy”, who was, at least at that moment, monitoring the @bing Twitter account.

While that too was a pleasant surprise, it was no surprise that Betsy ignored my first three tweets preceding my compliment.  And my tweets earlier today questioning bing’s potential for blurring the advertising and pure organic results also went unanswered.  Yet it’s nice to see that they’re eager to return the favor when the post is in their favor.

THE COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION

Well, in any case, we’re ultimately going to have to wait and see how this all unfolds.  Whether the site “Quick Preview” feature will be enough, or how the whole user experience goes is anybody’s guess at this early stage.  Yet I seriously believe that the potential does exist in Microsoft gaining market share, now that I’ve tasted the preview feature…

POST A COMMENT – SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

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Bing Search Engine Initial Review is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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Since then, Google has taken major steps to provide refinement tools within the Content Network system.  Apparently enough people had complained about the poor quality of the system.   This was at a point when there was little control over what sites your ads showed up on.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Content Network, it’s essentially any site where you see those “Ads by Google” boxes.  Not search engines or news sites that have a “search the web” feature.  But actual web sites that ostensibly provide content for it’s own sake, and where that site owner participates in the Google AdSense program.

AdSense Program Refresher

The AdSense program was designed to allow AdWords account owners to have their ads reach more people.  And to allow site owners to monetize various pages on their sites.  Every time a visitor clicks on one of those Ads by Google links, that site owner makes a few cents.  And Google charges you for the click-through.

Content Network Clicks – worth the cost?

While the cost per click of an AdSense displayed ad has always been a small fraction of the cost of a Search network sponsored ad, the vast majority of sites where these appear have essentially been sites where people just want to make money from people clicking on those ads.  So the quality of those sites by that nature, tends statistically, to be low as well.

Granular Control

Fortunately, Google has implemented a host of ways by which you can now control, to the granular site-specific level and beyond, what sites you want your ads to appear on within the content network.  We’re talking about choosing individual sites, narrowing the display down by a number of criteria, even designating that you want your ads to only appear for visitors whose demographic fits your target market.

Of course, none of this is ideal – you’re still limited to sites within the AdSense system.  And the demographics are only valid to the point where that site owner captures and retains such information.

Yet it’s a much better way of at least having some modicum of control over the quality of clicks.  Since I only reluctantly allowed my team to start having certain clients ad show up within the content network I haven’t yet come to any conclusion as to whether it’s now a good place to expend marketing dollars.  And there are so many factors to consider that it’s just making an evaluation of our work that much more of a challenge.

However it may help under some specific circumstances.  So I’m willing to see where this goes…

Google Content Network – Opinion Update is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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As a consultant who manages a team with client PPC budgets ranging in value upwards of $300,000 a year in PPC spend, I and my team have been assigned a Google Account PPC Management Team. We work closely with them through all phases of some of our larger client pay per click campaign initiatives.  For most clients, the average cost per click ranges from $2 up to about $6.  For others in more competitive fields, that cost can climb to $20, $50 or even as much as $90 for a single click.  So one of our primary responsibilities is to do all we can to manage the AdWords account in a way that ensures the highest position possible with the lowest cost per click.

One of the things they taught us was the importance of setting up individual ad groups with specific keyword phrases, where each ad in a particular group links directly to a web site’s landing page that is optimized for those specific phrases.

The importance of ad to landing page matching can’t be overstated.

Because Google wants to present the absolute best matches to a person doing a search organically, they naturally focus much of their algorithm on evaluating how high the quality of a given page is to a specific search phrase. The more closely that page matches the search from this regard, the higher it will appear in the organic results.

The Google Quality Score

The more closely an ad group matches a specific page’s phrases, and the higher the quality of that page organically, the higher your overall quality score, and in turn, the higher your ad will appear in the PPC (sponsored) listings and here’s the inside scoop – the LOWER your cost will be for each click.

That’s right – the actual cost of an individual click is NOT determined solely on how many others are bidding or what they’re paying!

If you have two companies bidding on the exact same phrases and using the exact same wording in their PPC ad, the one that has a better match to the landing page that ad links to, the lower the cost per click.

And the better optimized that landing page is for organic purposes, the lower still the cost per click.

These are aspects of the quality score of an ad group that many “SEM” and “PPC” experts aren’t even aware of or discount in terms of importance.

Smaller Ad Groups For Better keyword Matching

So one of the most important aspects of our PPC internet marketing services is to first group those vital keyword phrases together into sub-sets as related to the client offerings. One ad group might only have  three to five phrases set for broad match, and then those same phrases set for “exact” match and phrase match. This ensures we can closely tie an ad group to a specific page since we try to never maximize the organic optimization on any single page for more than three to five phrases.

Only when you take this approach are you going to provide the best PPC management for a sites needs, because it’s inexcusable to rationalize or justify or make excuses as to why the AdWords account budget is being expended at a higher than possible per-click charge.

Google AdWords Ad group phrase to landing page matching is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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Google is a great place to allocate a portion of your online advertising budget.  They’re the #1 search engine, and they do a great job at helping site owners get exposure to people who would otherwise never learn about a site.  Paid listings (Google AdWords) can help bring you high quality new business prospects.  But let’s be real – Google is in the business of making money, and if you’re not using AdWords best practices, you could very well be throwing good money out the window…

One of the ways Google makes a lion’s share of it’s revenue is that by default when you set up a Google AdWords account, there’s a default setting to include your ads in their “Content Network”.

If your account is set up this way, your ads will show up both in Google’s search results on the Google site itself, and they will be displayed in hundreds or thousands of other web sites.  You DO want your ads to show up at Google itself.  That’s the whole idea – to get your paid (sponsored) listings coming up when someone does a search.

What you most definitely do NOT want, is for your ads to show up in the Content Network.

What the Content Network is:
As you surf the web, I am sure you’ve seen many web sites where somewhere on a web page, there’s a box labeled “Ads by Google”.  In that box, you’ll see one, three or several text ads that may or may not be related to the actual content on that page.  For example – go to www.CNN.com – scroll down -  on the right side, about 3/4 of the way down, you’ll see that “Ads by Google” box.

While having an ad show up on the CNN home page might seem like a great marketing strategy, the fact is that 90% of the sites in the Content Network are essentially web sites that have nothing to do with your specific market focus, and there is no way for you to specify the type of sites you want to be on.

In my years of experience with managing both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing accounts, I have consistently seen where clients who are in the Content Network have expended on average 50 – 80% of their ad dollars for clicks that come through that network.  From a sales conversion perspective, I have also observed that on average, Content Network generated clicks result in less than 5% of actual conversions.  So it’s literally like throwing money out the window.

If you have ever heard of AdSense, it’s Google’s program that allows anyone with a web site to display Google’s ads on their site – and that’s the “Ads by Google” box.  There are literally millions of people who have web sites with the AdSense program running – and many of those have web sites that are completely created for the sake of displaying dozens of Ads by Google.  They do this because every time someone clicks on one of those ads, that site owner gets a small slice of the AdWords click fee.

It’s a terribly inefficient place to advertise and I urge you to opt OUT of the Content Network.  Doing so will ensure a much higher quality click-rate for your ad dollars.

HOW TO OPT OUT OF THE GOOGLE CONTENT NETWORK

1. Log into your AdWords account
2. Click into the “Campaign Summary” link.
3. Click the title of an individual campaign
4. Click “Edit Campaign Settings”
5. The third section down on that page is “Networks and Bidding”
6. UnCheck the box next to “The Content Network”

Repeat this for each campaign you are running.

If you are maintaining a Yahoo Search Marketing account the same issue exists and you’ll want to take the same action, because every dollar you spend on advertising needs to be put to use in the most cost-efficient way possible.

Google AdWords Best Practices – Avoid The Content Network is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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Of course, I knew it for what it was without having to read the “question”, but of course, I love seeing the newest spin on the oldest scams… Here’s what the person who sumbitted it wrote as the details to the “question”:

The operative words here as far as I am concerned are “REAL visitors to your site”.

So just to confirm my intuition, I went to the site listed. Before I did, I made sure my McAfee SiteAdvisor browser tool was operating properly (a great free tool that shows the status of a site you’re visiting on your browser’s status bar – green is safe, yellow is questionable and red is dangerous. In this case, the site was “safe”, but only because they don’t have hidden software ready to automatically download without your knowledge…

And here’s what this site says about “how it works”:

So is this really a scam? Or should I get sued for even putting this up on my blog?

Now why would I slam this guy’s posting at LinkedIn, and why would I label it as a scam, deceptive and manipulative? After all, I have no desire to be slapped with a lawsuit for libel or slander right?

Well let’s consider the posting. It was at LinkedIn, and the category was in the Internet Marketing category. I suppose if there was a category for “Click fraud” or “Shady ways to get millions of visitors that don’t really come to your site for any other reason than to build your traffic statistics”, I wouldn’t have a problem here.

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So if all you want is to get people to show up at your web site for 15 seconds then leave, then I suppose you can if you want to. but obviously if you want people who are going to come to your site to buy your products or hire you for your services or read your blog or participate in your social network in an interactive and return-visit way, then the offer is most definitely in my opinion, deceptive and manipulative.

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 Update:  when I saw this question posted and did my research, I felt obligated to supply an “answer”, to help warn potentially unsuspecting small business owners who might see it and out of desperation, think they should participate.  I essentially said what I say here, but in a synopsis.  I also flagged the question to alert LinkedIn staff to this issue.

It’s now two hours after the original question was posted and I am happy to report that that question is “no longer available”.

Beware Link Clicking Schemes & Guaranteed Visitors offers is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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You see them every time you do a search.

Sponsored Ads.

You know – those ads at the top of most search engine results pages and/or down the right side of those pages.

“Sponsored” meaning that someone is paying Google (AdWords) or Yahoo (Yahoo Search Marketing) or Microsoft (MSN Live) money for their ad to come up in such a prominent location on the search engine. Above millions of other listings.

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So what does it cost, and is it worth it?

Well, the cost is “Per click”. You pay the search engine company only if someone actually clicks on that link to go to your web site. And it’s on a “bid” process – whereby three, five, fifty or several hundred companies all want to be listed for a particular search phrase. Some are willing to pay more than others. Others just want to be found, even if it means their ad comes up on the 2nd page or the 3rd page. So they pay less.

In all my years of managing pay per click advertising accounts for clients, whether they be luggage retailers, artists, lawyers, jewelry makers, personal coaches.. I have seen the cost per click for being in the top results of sponsored ads range anywhere from a few cents per click all the way up to $97 per click. The more fiercely competitive the industry, the more money that is at stake to get just one customer or client, the higher the cost per click.

So in an industry like luggage, the cost could typically be anywhere from $1 per click up to $6 or $10, depending on the particular search phrase or the time of year. (Winter holidays the cost goes up of course).
For attorneys where one client can generate millions of dollars in jury awards, it’s in the $60 to $100 range usually. For a personal coach or event planner, it can be 25 cents a click up to a couple dollars or so.

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Can I afford this?

Okay – so if I advertise in the sponsored listings, and if each click through to my site costs me $1, will this cost me thousands of dollars every month? The good news is that you can set a maximum you are willing to spend on any single click, or as a total within a day or month.

Actually it’s not such a cut and dried thing.Just because someone comes to your web site doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed that they’ll buy. First, was your selection of keyword phrases and your ad copy chosen to target your ideal prospective client or customer? And once they were at your web site, is your site so compelling that more people than not actually stay long enough and feel motivated enough to convert to a sale?

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So how do I succeed with PPC advertising?

The process of creating a successful advertising campaign with PPC advertising is a vast and potentially all consuming one, and there are not specific hard and fast rules that fit every situation.

But generally, there are some pretty common factors, a little of which I have already touched on above. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive book-length answer here, I’ll instead provide a bit more clarity here, and leave it up to you to choose to find out more if you’re still intrigued by the possibility.

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AD CAMPAIGN QUALITY

Choose the absolute best keyword phrases.

Sometimes this means choosing a phrase that is searched less often than others, but where there is less competition among advertisers, and thus the cost is less to get you higher up in the positioning of your ad.

Fewer high quality phrases is sometimes better than scattershot low quality phrases

If you know of fifty possible phrases people use to search for your offerings, it may be better to only put your cost per click dollars into the higher performing or the more common phrases to one degree or another, rather than trying to spread your limited budget too thin. Alternatively, you might try and experiment for a couple months only going with less popular or less expensive phrases but more of them. Only your actual results will tell you how to proceed and what really works for your needs.

Ad Variations

Create a variety of ads, experimenting with the wording. And sometimes, changing the wording on an ad makes sense just because of the change of a season, or special promotions you run, or because of something happening in the news that relates to your products or services that your ad can speak to… Over time, you will be able to see which performs better as related to which keyword phrases.

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Google or Yahoo or MSN

I will say this but it’s just my opinion- while Yahoo has it’s place, in my experience managing countless campaigns for clients all across the country, Google’s results far outshine those at Yahoo over and over again. Yahoo is actually much better suited to display advertising. But by all means, if you have a large enough marketing budget, put some money into both – building brands is always a good thing if you can aford it. MSN of course can possibly help, simply because of the eyeballs it reaches, but when dealing with percentages, most of my clients find the most success with Google.

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How Big A Budget?

It’s also about having the ability to devote enough budget. For example, if you have less than $500 a month or $1,000 a month, or $5,000 a month, depending on the cost per click, if the daily portion gets used up early in the day, that means your ads may not be seen by the vast majority of people who might actually be your best prospects. So then you have to address that.

If your offering is geographically located, and you are trying to reach a specific market on the physical map, you’ll need to also work in geo-location techniques for more refined targeting.

Then there’s the issue of needing to be able to stay with it long enough to experiment with variations on phrases, variations on ad copy…

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It’s as much an art as a science.

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Determining success

Having the conversion code from Google or Yahoo on your site – on the confirmation page or the thank you for contacting us page is really one of the only ways to know what the ultimate cost is per conversion.

Having a site visitor trending solution such as Google Analytics on your site is also paramount to helping you refine things along the way as well. And you can tie Google Analytics in with conversion tracking for even more clarity.

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Combine PPC and Organic for Best Results

On a final note, the absolute best success comes when you have PPC ads AND you rank very high on the first page of Google or Yahoo. People conducting a search that see your ad in both the sponsored area and organic listings does a great deal to build your brand identity and motivate more people to click on either based on whether they don’t mind clicking on a sponsored ad or they only click on organic listings…

It’s definitely possible to find success with enough footwork, but also only if once someone gets to your web site they stay and are drawn into your actual product or service offerings!

Pay Per Click Advertising – is it worth the cost? is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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As the resident SEO and SEM expert at WebSight Design, Inc., I am responsible for managing the search engine optimization efforts for all of our over 600 web sites. At WSD, our clients range from the smallest sole proprietors to Carlos Santana, Sammy Hagar, and the band Tool. The vast majority – over 90% of our clients, either can’t afford full-on SEO work, or don’t yet understand the importance of this aspect of business marketing strategy. As we continue to help educate our clients, at the very least, we provide basic SEO services – keyword research, proper “under-the-hood” and on-page content seeding, and more recently, providing sitemap.xml files (to help Google, Yahoo, and soon MSN to better index entire web sites).

One thing that more and more clients are asking for is Google Analytics. We previously provided WebTrends site activity log crunching and reporting. WebTrends, in our experience and in the experience of many other industry professionals, is too much of a drain on precious shared-hosting server resources. In addition, server based analytics solutions typically don’t filter out non-human site activity. This can include search engine spiders and web crawlers (bots)- automated software designed to scan web pages, either for legitimate or quite often illegal purposes (such as hackers looking for vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

So like many other web hosting providers, this past year we began setting up Google Analytics (GA) in many of our client’s sites. Their code resides right on web pages, thus dramatically reducing server drain. It’s free, which our small business clients appreciate, and it’s provided by one of the most well known brand names.

While less than ideal in it’s reporting and analysis methods (a topic I will discuss in an upcoming blog post), the user interface offers what has become a quite popular experience for many small business owners. Big charts and graphs, large fonts, and bright bold colors. Everyone loves all things Google. Well, I don’t anymore – read on to learn why.

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For a few months I have been faced with a new challenge in the SEO arena – why Google Analytics is consistently showing dramatically less site traffic than WebTrends or my own web site visitor log analysis software. Upon my initial research, it was discovered that Google filters out spiders, bots and web crawlers from their statistics, in an effort to show only actual human visitor activity.

While this is a noble goal, it can not explain the vast difference I’ve seen consistently regardless of the size or scope of web site, or what the market focus of the site. For example, on one site, WebTrends was reporting over 100,000 unique visitors, while for the same period, GA showed just over 6,000!

Why am I so upset? Isn’t Google providing reliable information? Why would Google provide a flawed solution to millions of business owners?
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EXPECTED AND TRUSTED BY ADVERTISERS

Some of our clients reach market segments that big name advertisers want to reach. So they sell ad space on their sites – typically big Flash banners. Those advertisers won’t bother placing ads on web sites that don’t garner what they consider to be a large enough viewership. They want to put their marketing and advertising money where it will do the most good. So they rely heavily upon marketing metrics (statistics that show how many unique page views a site garners, or how many unique visitors, or average time spent on a page are just three such metrics guages).

Because these major corporations spend big money, they need to find a way to get reliable, trustworthy information. It’s too easy for someone to generate phony, beefed up statistics, and there are hundreds of analytics tools out on the market.

Google has done such a great job at marketing their brand (have you seen their stock charts?) that they’re the darling of the advertising and public relations industry. Everybody wants to be the next Google, or they have Google on a solutions provider pedestal. Kind of like Microsoft was in the late 80′s and 90′s.

So here we have a situation where WebTrends was reporting ten, twenty, even 100 times as many visits to our client sites as compared to Google. If GA filters out non-human activity, then it’s easy to assume GA is going to be more trustworthy when the advertisers determine whether a site is worthy of their ad spending dollars.

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RELIED UPON BY PROSPECTIVE INVESTORS

The other major area that GA can play a major role in affecting positively or negatively, is with prospective investors. As a web site garners more and more visitors, a time might come when the site owner seeks out investment money so they can grow or expand. Prospective investors rely on reliable and trustworthy market metrics to help in their “due diligence” process when deciding whether to put their money into the hands of web site owners.

For many of the same reasons as advertisers, and most especially because of how much money Google has generated in profits for early-on investors, a start-up’s prospective investors tend to view GA statistics as reliable and good enough for their decision making processes.
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BUT WHAT IF GOOGLE’S NUMBERS ARE WRONG?
Because this issue has been bugging me for a few months, I’d already done some base-line research on where the discrepancies come from, however I’m a busy guy – there’s only so many hours in the day, and oddly enough, I have a life outside of my work. Until recently, I hadn’t had enough motive to figure out the nitty gritty details, and as a result, I’ve had my intuitive and preliminary beliefs, but hadn’t had a fact based professional opinion.

That changed recently when a client came to us in a panic – they recently switched to GA, right at a time when they are seeking major investor money. So how can they go to prospective investors and say that the numbers they were seeing through WebTrends were severely inflated, and that GA doesn’t justify investor money? IF GA were truly accurate, they would need to abandon investor opportunities. Their hopes and dreams, and all the hard work they put into their venture until now would either be lost forever, or at the very least, their business growth would be put on hold indefinitely.

This prompted me to really dig. As deep as I could. Casting as wide a net as possible to find what others have experienced, to learn more about how GA works, and once and for all, either confirm my suspicions and preliminary findings, or to back off and be in the position of needing to break the bad news to our clients. And if it turned out that I was right, I would need to be willing to find another solution – one that I would have the confidence to communicate to my clients that we were providing them a truly reliable and trustworthy analytics solution.
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DOING THE HOMEWORK – AND WHAT I FOUND

The Google Analytics tracking code is a small snippet of code that is inserted into the body of an HTML page. When the HTML page is loaded, the tracking code contacts the Google Analytics server and logs a pageview for that page, as well as captures information about the visit and non-identifying information about the visitor.

If there is a disconnect between the site and Google when a page is loaded, that page view is not tracked.

If Google’s system is down, no visits during this time can be tracked. This happens from time to time. How often? Google claims it’s rare, and they also claim that even when their system is down, they’re still tracking – I don’t believe that’s 100% accurate at all.

If a site visitor has Javascript turned off, that page view is not tracked.

If you are in a different timezone than where the server is located, GA will report you visited the site at a different time, or even on a different day than you really did!

Google Analytics only records pageview requests with a status code of 200. If any of your site’s pages give a status code other than this, the page views won’t be recorded even though someone did view those pages.

Something the Google help files don’t discuss is on-page Javascript conflicts. I got hold of a live Google rep, and they confirmed that if there is other javascript on a page, a possibility exists that the code in that can conflict with Google Analytics – and an error in tracking can occur.

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SO WHAT ABOUT SOLUTIONS LIKE NetRatings, Omniture, CoreMetrics?

Everyone has a solution. They all claim to be the best, the most accurate. If they do their statistics from code directly embedded on the site or from the server’s log files, the information is based on how well they filter out the noise of bots and spiders – yet none are perfect.

If they rely on their own pool of members – people who have agreed to put that company’s code on their computer so that the company can track their web surfing – then that company will create a baseline trending system – for example – if ten thousand of their members visited site X, the company will claim that 100,000 or 10,000,000 people around the globe visited that site during the same period.

How can they claim that? Well, they claim that their members are a “fair” or “reasonable” sampling of web users from enough different consumer groups, and that statistically it’s an accurate measure.

Personally, I say Bull! Too many sites are in too many niche-focuses – too many people surf the web for different reasons at different times… Having many years ago been a crime statistician, I know too well that such extrapolation is horse-hockey.

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THE BOTTOM LINE – GOOD FOR TRENDING, BAD FOR FACT STATING

Okay – so Google Analytics isn’t perfect. No web visitor tracking solution is.

You can not say for a fact that the number of people supposedly visiting your site is really what they report.

But you can use it to get trends

If three months in a row Google or one of the other javascript or log file crunching solutions says 80% of your visitors go to a particular page or section of the site, that’s pretty much going to be accurate. If in that same three months nobody apparently went to that great FAQ page you spent fifty hours on, then maybe you don’t need to spend that extra 20 hours this month adding to the FAQ page.

In addition to having Google Analytics, it can’t hurt to have the site’s actual log files processed through a reporting solution that does a decent job at filtering out spiders and bots. There are many such solutions out on the market. I happen to use a program called WebLog Expert. The professional version filters out spiders and bots.

To what degree and how accurately Google or WebLog Expert or any analytics and site visitor tracking program filters out the noise is anyone’s guess. But if you use multiple solutions that each handles things in it’s own way, you can at least get a much better handle on general trends.

Why Google Analytics is flawed is a post from: Search Marketing Wisdom All content copyright protected - all rights reserved.

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