SEO is a means to an end, not the end itself. You want your site to rank higher so you get get more traffic, but what use is more traffic if it’s unqualified traffic? Traffic that just bounces and whose intent doesn’t match your website’s purpose? I believe that the biggest mistake in SEO is that we are far too obsessed with ranking instead of focusing more on what the business impact of our SEO efforts are.
Here are a few tips in Google Analytics to see if SEO is paying off:

1. Log into Google Analytics and click on the Advanced Segments box in the right hand corner. Create a new segment for Organic traffic.
Then go to Content > Top Content and apply the Advanced Segment. Stretch the timeline back to when you first started your SEO efforts. Do you see your segment line going up and to the right? Then something is working. You’ll want to see if organic traffic is improving on the pages of your site that you are optimizing. You can drill down to these pages in this report and see how your organic segment looks.

2.When looking at a specific page’s traffic, next to Analyze:, pick Entrance Keywords from the drop down. Do the keywords match the intent of the page? Do they contain keywords you were specifically using to optimize the page? No? Why not? On the other hand what are the surprises? Is there customer intent contained in the keywords telling you how to change or improve the page? Re-evaluate your list of most important keywords for this page with this report.

3.Change the view to the Comparison View and then change the dropdown to Bounce Rate. This will compare these keyword’s bounce rate to your site’s average. If you are pushing keywords that have a bounce rate in the red you might consider choosing different keywords for this page since they aren’t a good match with the customer’s intent.

4. Go to the Ecommerce report and apply your organic segment, stretch the time period, and report how well your SEO efforts are delivering value to the business.

If you’re working in an environment where you have to do weekly reporting on your AdWords performance, and the reports in AdWords aren’t cutting it, you may want to invest some time into making your own PPC dashboard in Excel. Plus I think putting the data together in this way leads to insights that aren’t as easy to notice in the AdWords interface. This is an example of a dashboard for a mock small rental company with only 5 campaigns in their account. If your account is bigger and than this and runs campaigns in the double digits you may want to consider a different layout.

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The “spend/budget wk” in-cell graph was made using Sparklines and a tutorial on how to make the interactive line charts can be found here. (You can download the Excel file below and play around with it too.)

I’m going to walk you through how to use this dashboard and hopefully discover some insights along the way:

Going counter-clockwise through the report allows you to dig deeper into what is going on and hopefully make some actionable insights.
Starting with the graph in the upper right, you can switch between any of the metrics at a higher up account total level. Lets say you’re looking at the cost/conversion view and notice that cost/conversion has been around $8 for a while and then in the last few weeks it has risen to $9 and above. Let’s see if we can figure out the reason.
Moving to the next graph to the left, you can set the first drop down to highlight a particular campaign and then in the next drop down you can choose which metric you want to focus on, in this case I want to look at Avg. CPC to see if any campaign is going up in cost making the cost/conversion go up. Flipping through the different campaigns I can see that they are all pretty even except that the Fishing Boat campaign jumped up in Avg. CPC over the last few weeks.What happened?

Leaving the first dropdown highlighting the Fishing Boat, I can now switch between the different metrics associated with the Fishing Boat in the next drop down. It looks like impressions have been going up, possibly to seasonal demand, and clicks have been going up right along with it together showing CTR maintaining at that same 3% range. But when impressions and clicks went down again, presumably after demand has fell off in July, you can see cost/conversion start to jump higher and higher.

Is it possible that bids were increased to keep up with demand but as soon as demand fell off, those bids weren’t decreased at the right time to adjust for that change in demand? Insight – try lowering your bids!
You can also see conversion rate drop a percentage point from the beginning of July to the end of July for the Fishing Boat campaign. Is it possible that many of the keywords that convert well during the peak of impressions at the start of July don’t work as well towards the end? Look in AdWords for bad performing keywords.
Have you noticed that the Sail Boat campaign has the 2nd lowest Avg. CPC, highest conversion rate and the second highest amount of conversions? This campaign is kicking butt! Is there more you could do to maximize it, ad more keywords, up bids, etc.? Take a look at it’s landing pages, what is it doing that the others aren’t?
Below the graph on the left is a Cost and Budget chart. As long as your cost/conversion is at an acceptable amount you want to make sure you arn’t hitting your daily budget. In this screen shot you can see that the Fishing Boat is getting close so you may want to increase it’s budget.

In the next chart over you can see the total conversions and total cost/conversion. Although the Fishing Boat campaign has the highest amount of conversions it also has the highest cost/conversion. The powerboat account has the lowest amount of conversions and the highest cost/conversion. It might be a good idea to go back to the upper left data graph and look at the different metrics around Powerboat to see if anything can be improved.
Here’s the Excel file for the PPC Dashboard, feel free to download and play around with it yourself and let me know what you think!

This flowchart is from my Social Media Strategy eBook. Getting your blog, Facebook and Twitter to work together is a challenge. I think deciding where an idea should go (and just as important, where it shouldn’t go) can be difficult. That’s why I put together this flow chart for deciding on whether your your idea should be blogged, Facebooked or Tweeted. You’ll notice the arrows going from the blog to Facebook to twitter; these mean that what gets posted on your blog can be posted on Facebook which in turn can also be tweeted. Doing the reverse is a bad idea (ever been annoyed by a ton of someone’s tweets in your Facebook news feed?). I’d love to hear your feedback if you have any…

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There are two types of job seekers: active and passive. An active job seeker is someone who is unemployed and is actively searching for a job, posting their resume on internet job boards, responding to available positions on Craigslist and networking with friends to find a job. A passive job seeker is currently employed. They aren’t actively looking for a job by posting their resume where ever they can, but if the right opportunity came up, they might consider a change. If you’re only recruiting from active job seekers, you are limiting your potential to find great talent.

Passive job seekers are much more sought after by recruiters and head-hunters than active job seekers. Active job seekers are riskier since they are currently unemployed (and may be that way for a reason), potentially desperate which could make them over-eager to the point of exaggerating their skills and unproven that their skills are adequate to do the job.

Internet marketing tools lend themselves perfectly to attracting passive job seekers since recruiting is in itself marketing:

The recruiter doesn’t solve an urgent problem for the person being recruited, in fact, they create one. That person already has a job (hence no problem). The problem being created is that until they change over to your job, they’ll be unhappy. (Seth Godin, The Difference Between Hiring & Recruiting)

Passive job seekers are out there online reading blogs and consuming content just like everyone else. Using Google’s AdPlanner and AdWords tools, you can select your demographic, get targeted ads in front of those passive job seekers within that demographic, send them to engaging landing pages after they click that invite them to submit a resume and use cost per resumes submitted (CRS) as your driving metric and then accurately measure your cost per hire. I won’t go into full detail on all the strategies that could be used to do this (because there are many), instead I’ll hopefully open your eyes to how effective and affordable recruiting for passive job seekers online can be.

Lets say you need to recruit a web designer to work for your business in Denver. Using Google Adplanner, you can create a detailed media plan based on the demographic of that person. In the “Research Tab” of AdPlanner you can search by site if you know of particular sites that you think your passive job seekers are going to, or you can search by audience.  Whenever you search by site you can see stats for that site to see if it aligns with the kind of candidate you’re looking for. I choose the site SmashingMagazine.com for this example so you can see the kind of detail it gives.

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The other option is to use the “Search by Audience” tab. You can filter by Geography and either target the whole state or click the plus box and choose a region within the state. I also recommend using the Ad Specs button to choose “In Google Content Network” so that only sites that allow ads from Google show up and also the “Ad Specs” button to filter the kind of advertising you’re going to do, there’s no sense at looking at sites that don’t support image ads if that’s what you’ll be using.

You can also filter by demographic to build your targeted list. For targeting a web designer I would choose the “Sites Visited” button and enter a few sites that have to do with web design and then I would click on keywords searched and choose words like “web design blog”, “MYSQL update” or “photoshop brushes”. Sites meeting your criteria get listed and you can ad them to your plan. If you sort by “Comp Index” it will sort by the sites that closest meet your requirements. Once you have your Media Plan made you can export it to excel for uploading into Adwords.

In Adwords you can create a campaign for your Web Designer candidate and choose to have your ads show only on the sites that you chose. You can also set the location that your ads will be seen, in my example case this would be Denver, schedule the ads to only be shown during work hours (for catching those passive job seekers while they are browsing the net while at work) and set a daily budget for how much you are willing to spend a day.

After the ads get going you can start to optimize your ads by testing different ad variations, excluding sites that aren’t performing well and use Google’s Website Optimizer to do A/B testing on your landing pages to get the most resumes submitted as possible.

Utilizing these tools for recruiting passive job seekers is a must for any organization looking to find good talent without spending large amounts on head hunter finder fees and job placement companies. Let me know any questions that you have in the comments!

It’s that time of year again for new years resolutions. The trick to accomplishing your resolutions is this:

If You Measure it, it will improve.

Having an easy to use system for recording progress on your goals is essential. Here is a post on some iPhone apps for keeping goals. And here is another post on online tools for keeping goals.

Here are some recommendations of tools I have used for measuring my goals:

• For reading books I use Goodreads. In 2009 I read 18 books. Still shy of my goal of reading 2 a month.
• For running I use Nike Plus. I ran 205.27 miles in 2009. If you don’t want to buy the Nike Plus and have an iPhone, RunKeeper is a pretty sweet alternative.
• Mint.com is a popular way for measuring your finances.

This year I want to remember to send birthday cards to all of my family. I’m setting up reminders in NotifyMe 4 days before each birthday for the whole year.
I’m using Evernote to keep track of ideas I get for writing more posts, songs, film ideas, business ideas and fun things to do to achieve my goals of: building my personal brand, being in a touring punk band, making an indi film, starting my own business and making memories with my family. I really like the tagging feature in Evernote that lets me tag any ideas I get for easy filing.

Another goal of mine is to exercise more and lift weights. I haven’t found a good way to track lifting other than keeping track with paper and pencil since I don’t want to  carry my iPhone in the gym. I have a spreadsheet that I record how much weight and how many reps that I carry with me in the gym instead. This way I never forget how much weight I did the last time and I can push myself when I start to see myself plateauing. I will be using a calorie counting app called DailyBurn on the iPhone to track how many calories I’m getting. We’ll see how it goes.

Best Purchase: M-Audio Firewire Solo Runner up: Two tennis rackets and 20 tennis balls at the thrift store for $12
Best Moment: Hearing Jane laugh for the first time
Biggest Achievement: Getting hired at Crocs
Scariest Moment: Getting caught in a thunder storm while jogging, thought I was going to get struck by lightning.
Most Painful Moment: Getting jalapeño juice in my eye, thought I was going to go blind
Suckiest Moment: Getting my first driving ticket. Runner Up: Sinus infection
Biggest Drag: Going to Mt Rushmore for the 4th of July but not being able to see the fireworks because it was too foggy.
Biggest Letdown: Hot stone massage, wasn’t that great
Thing I Thought I Would Never Do: Run a half marathon (2 hrs. 19 mins.)
Funnest Moment: Being in Teenage Bottlerocktet’s music video.
Best Movies I saw: Adventureland, Star Trek, Taken, 500 Days of Summer, Office UK Christmas special, Drag Me To Hell, Man On Wire
Best Music I Got: Dillinger Four – Civil War, Teenage Bottlerocket – They Came From The Shadows, Off With Their Heads – From the Bottom, Rancid – Let the Dominoes Fall, Cobra Skulls – American Rubicon, Everything by The Lillingtons
Best Books I Read: Moneyball, Predictably Irrational, What Would Google Do, Punished By Rewards
Worst Movies I Saw: Bride Wars, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Knowing, Synecdoche New York, Paul Blart, Ghost Of Girlfriends Past

A lot of businesses don’t take advantage of their Contact Us page. Most Search Engine Optimization comes down to keywords in the meta title and content on the page and the typical business’s Contact Us page meta title says “Contact,” and the only content on the page is an email form, phone number and physical address. Yet there is much more you can include to get the most of of your Contact Us page.

One of the most frequently searched add-on keywords is “find a,” “how to” and “where is” – as in “how to find a good dentist,” and “where is the nearest dentist.”  These kinds of keywords are highly used in search engines by people looking for businesses but not always easy to place on the website. The Contact Us page comes in as one of the few places on the website you can use these keywords.

In the meta title and content say things like, “Looking to find a local dentist?” or “How to find a dentist can be hard…”

Also in the meta title include your business name and location.

Other things to consider including in the page content: Realize that your Contact Us page might be the first interaction someone has with your website. People don’t just enter into your site from the homepage. You’ll want to include important keywords like your location and what services/products you provide.

• If yours is a local business say something like, “At [business name] we are here to help you with all of your [business services keywords] needs. Please contact us at our local [your city] office.
• Give a brief synopsis of what you do. Treat it like a mini About Us page.
• List your services. Use the keywords people use to find a business like yours.

And don’t forget to include a map, directions, picture of your business and all that good stuff.

These are a few examples of posts including lists that took me about 5 minuets to find:

“6 SEO Website Redesigns Your Developer May Not Know,” “7 Tools to Optimize the Speed of Your Website,” “Top 100 Internet Marketing Posts of 2009,” “12 Best Free Online Resources for Learning SEO,” “55 Google Website Optimizer Tips & Tricks, “9 Great Collaboration Tools For Teams,” “10 iPhone Apps To Avoid Disaster,” “5 ways to Expand B2B Blogging Beyond the Marketing Staff.”

People write posts about lists because 1. They get lots of clicks; you are curious to see if you know about all 10 ten things. 2. They are easy to put together; a few Google searches and you’ve got a pretty good list going.

I love lists. But only when they are from people that I trust and put those items in some context.

Finding tools and tips and tricks and ideas doesn’t make you smart. Using all those ideas and then reporting back with experience and a suggestion on the best way to go forward is. What the Internet needs now is not more lists. What the Internet needs now is more analysis and commentary  that looks at all of the stuff out there, and says this one is the best. I need more recommendations from smart people who have my best interests at heart and less “comprehensive lists.”

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Does anyone else ever feel like me when reading content online that too many writers take too long to get to the point? I’m annoyed by long introductions in blog posts. People feel like they need to give me a synopsis of the history of what they are about to write and tell me why what they are about to write is important. Get to the point.

Or maybe my attention span is shrinking. According to the trends tab in my Google Reader: “From your 98 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 3,466 items, starred 0 items, shared 67 items, and emailed 5 items.” I do most of my reading on Tuesdays with an average of 1068  items that day and my favorite time of day to read articles is at 7 p.m, with an average of 818 items. I guess it’s easy to see how the average American could consume 34 gigs a day.

Most of these barely count as reading (Photobomb, Punknews.org, FreeAppAlert, etc.). But in the case of actual articles, I see a title and decide quickly weather or not it’s worth reading further, in the case I do end up reading further, I skim and pick out ideas and move on. Engaging headlines help, so do pictures, charts and lists. Long winded introductions don’t.

Some examples:

Mashable: As the news industry looks to reconstruct its suffering business model, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media. Because of cutbacks at many news organizations, the jobs available are highly competitive, blah blah blah.

PPCHero: Testing your ad copy and your landing pages can significantly improve your paid search efforts. Of course, building a solid keyword base, creating an optimized account structure, and executing a well-planned bid management strategy are also crucial. However, testing blah blah blah

Hubspot: Calls to action are the gateways that your visitors must click through to become leads. If your calls to action aren’t optimized and attractive to your visitors, they are less likely to complete the actions you want them to on your website. Creating a great call to action isn’t simple of course, blah blah blah