Dark Patterns: dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff

You could pick pretty much any element of the Ryanair website, but a particular favourite of mine, if you could call it that, is the way they subtly force you to buy travel insurance. The question is labelled as “Buy Axa travel insurance”, but the select field has a default value of “select country of residence”.

Buried in the middle of the options, which are almost in alphabetical order, is the option “No travel insurance required” – between Latvia and Lithuania!

I ran some usability testing with this site and a number of similar sites for a client of mine (not Ryanair) and almost every participant simply accepted they had to buy travel insurance, because they were blind to this option.

Horrendous, immoral, but quite clever at the same time…

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Successful SEO Tactics

s we close out our four-part series on the SEO Tactics chart, we touch on the most powerful of all of the pillars – measurement, reporting, and analytics. This is the subject I’m most passionate about as it lies at the core of a solid organic strategy and ultimately the long-term success of an organic program.

It’s striking that there is still such casualness when it comes to the discipline of SEO. There are still a remarkable number of companies that can’t differentiate organic traffic from direct load and referring traffic.

If you’ve managed or been close to paid search campaigns you understand the degree to which measurement and analysis impacts successful efforts. One of the first pieces of advice I give to clients and colleagues is to apply this same mindset to organic search.

Data is useless. Insight, and then action, is the key to advancing your program. This article will highlight some of the more important, and underutilized, metrics that can help you find performance breakthroughs, as well as discuss exactly why it’s so critical that you get this part right.

Justify Your Existence

If you aren’t tracking conversions, then you’re probably in for a short ride. Rankings will only get you so far.

Justifying your retainer (agency) or salary (in-house) is going to be difficult without demonstrating the business impact you are making. We’re talking about revenue, leads and margin – not rankings.

Be persistent about the need to track these metrics before you engage with a company. If the tracking isn’t present and they aren’t willing to put forth the effort to measure these goals, you should pass on the opportunity until the proper tracking is in place.

Understand Causality

Without taking the time to analyze data it becomes incredibly easy to chase your own tail. Chances are you’re putting forth a ton of time, energy, and effort to make an impact on your program.

But what’s really moving the needle and what’s simply an effort of futility? If you find yourself asking this question, slow down half a pace, execute, monitor, measure, and make note (as best you can) of which tactics indeed moved the needle.

Conversions, Then Traffic, Then Rankings

Focusing attention on keywords that have the highest likelihood to convert to a sale or lead isn’t always synonymous with high traffic terms. Spend the time in your analytics package to understand the difference and apply more pressure to keywords that will increase revenue/leads. As mentioned earlier, if you keep your eye on conversion, you have a better chance of keeping your job.

Differentiate Between Brand & Non-Brand

In relation to measuring keyword-level conversion (and in proving your value), be sure to clearly differentiate performance of brand and non-brand terms.

Non-brand growth is the leverage point in most programs. If you’re analyzing, or worse presenting, data that is only rolled up as overall organic traffic, it’s possible to be misleading yourself and others. If the overall organic program experienced a 36 percent year-over-year lift in traffic and 14 percent lift in conversions – ask yourself why and where. Was it driven by brand terms as a result of an aggressive offline campaign that is running?

Know why, take credit for your efforts, and be transparent when you’re riding the wave of brand terms. Transparency and honesty go a long way.

External Influences

It’s easy to get caught up in your own site and analytics and forget about external factors that impact your program’s performance. One of the most critical is seasonality. It can impact everything from traffic volume to competitive pressure and conversion rate.

Many verticals have peak seasons, some more dramatic than others. These peaks are sweet spots, and you should be planning around them.

The graph above is an example of peak query volume for a client in the home services vertical. Knowing that 45 percent of the annual query volume occurs within a three-month window is critical knowledge and impacts both what you do and when you do it. Google Insights for Search is a great tool to model this data.

Benchmarks & Baselines

Early on in my SEO endeavors I can’t tell you how many times I wished I had a time machine so I could go back and capture benchmarks that I missed as I was begging to work on a program. Live and learn.

Fortunately, you’ll have many of the most critical KPIs captured within your analytics package. Obviously you will want to capture a benchmark of the rankings of keywords you are focused on.

A few suggestions: Use SEMRush to capture a more holistic view of all keywords that are ranking as you begin. You might be surprised at what you find here. Download this, and keep it! Watch the growth in non-brand terms that rank over time. Consider the same for inbound links. It’s a snapshot in time, so be sure to take the picture before you begin. Open Site Explorer makes it easy. Do the same exercise for major competitors so that you can track their velocity versus your own. These all become compelling stories over time.

Track Your Calls

Whether your goal is to be driving leads or revenue, you should be taking credit for organic conversions that are resulting in the call center. More than 90 percent of the businesses we’ve encountered have overlooked this – even in instances where they are tracking call center conversions from paid search.

The technology is there (e.g., ClickPath), and if your business model is reliant on call center activity for conversions, the information available through this tracking typically opens up new opportunities and gives you a much more accurate view on the entirety of the results you’re driving.

This is just a snapshot of some of the tracking and analytics themes that are performance drivers, but certainly not the entire list. I welcome you to add to it through your comments, as your insights can likely help others who find interest in this topic.

And that wraps up our four-part series on Successful SEO Tactics. If you missed them, check outKeyword Selection, On-site Optimization, and Off-site Optimization. Hopefully, you’ve found the information relevant and useful. Good luck in your organic efforts!

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ppc-google-adwords-express

Google’s search engine empire has been expanding more and more rapidly over the past two years for some time, flirting with all sorts of new types of functionality: entering the social sphere with Google+, introducing cloud computing to the masses with the Google Chromebook and launching the Google Voice VoIP service. Google is on the forefront of the move to the cloud, and this shift—from dedicated servers to cloud-based systems, and from traditional hardware to cloud hardware—is likely to be the industrial-strength blockbuster of both the manufacturing sector and many of the markets for the next few years.

Google has cultivated an expertise at creating scarcity: infiltrating and making themselves necessary in our everyday lives. Google Apps are crucial to functioning of many companies, making everyone’s work easier by storing and processing information and streamlining collaboration.

Now they are looking for ways to bring PPC to the masses: Say hello to AdWords Express.

AdWords Express is basically targeted at small business users. This tool allows business owners to generate PPC campaigns in a few easy steps, getting them into the Internet marketing game without much hassle. But what does that mean for human PPC campaign managers? Will they see reduced demand? Will their services be seen as less valuable, requiring them to rethink their business practices?

AdWords Express

AdWords Express is fairly straightforward. Small business owners sign up via their Places page or they can sign up by going through the AdWords Express page. Express users give Google some basic information about their business: its name and location, any applicable business categories, the business’s official website, a simple business description and the desired budget ($50 minimum). Google then uses that data to find appropriate keywords to target and establish a PPC campaign for the keyword that is most likely to present the greatest return. Users can create different ads for each business category and split the budget among them however they see fit. Businesses will show up in local searches and will appear on Google Maps as blue pins, making them stand out from the normal red pins. Express is geared entirely towards local search results, which helps keep the cost for business owners small by keeping them from having to compete with national brands. As a small business tool, Express imparts great value for business owners and can help them reach far more customers than they could without an Internet marketing campaign.

Human-Managed Campaigns

Where does that leave professional PPC managers? While some may see Express as a machine rival to human PPC managers, it’s more likely that it will actually generate more interest in Internet advertising, giving rise to more customers for knowledgeable professionals. AdWords Express is a great introduction to PPC advertising and will help business owners see the value of local marketing and SEO, but it’s a very basic service with extremely limited options for the customization of your campaign. In order for most businesses to see continued growth through internet marketing , they need to gradually widen the funnel of their internet advertising campaigns, chasing after longtail keywords and monitoring their click-through and conversion rates with a close eye to figure out how to spend their budget. Obviously, this would be overwhelming for most small business owners, which is where the professionals step in. Human-managed PPC campaigns are much more flexible and can be broadened or narrowed, depending on the business owner’s needs. PPC campaigns can be calibrated according to a level of sensitivity and specificity that AdWords Express just doesn’t have.

Internet advertising is Google’s bread and butter. The majority of Google’s $20B annual revenue over the past few years–$8 billion Q1 2011– revenue coming from advertising. While it’s ramping up its cloud efforts, with products like the ChromeOS and the Software as a Service offering of Google Apps, its concentration on increasing interest in PPC campaigns hasn’t waned; AdWords Express is proof of that. The ease with which a business owner can create a low-cost, locally-targeted advertising campaign will serve to whet their appetite. At that point a human PPC campaign manager can step in, offering them even further growth when they see that the investment will bring desirable returns. AdWords Express won’t be putting human advertising professionals out of business any time soon. The fact is that it will likely end up boosting their business in the long run.

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seo compititive tool

seo compititive tool,

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why blog seo

Why Blogs Are Different Than Static Websites

SEO for a blog is different than SEO for most other websites, largely because of the social elements baked into blogging technology. SEO for blogs is less about buying links or tricking inadequate search technology. SEO for blogs is more focused on giving people something to talk about and creating something worthy of attention.

The Social Nature of Blogs

1. RSS and feed readers make it easy for readers to subscribe to every post you write, and be notified the moment you publish it.
2. Many people who read blogs also write them, and many of them have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. If a few reputable bloggers syndicate your story it can have a cascading effect where many of their readers share your story.
3. Popular blogs that solicit reader feedback may have dozens or hundreds of comments on each post, adding unique content which the page can rank for.
4. Optimizing a blog is more about capturing attention and getting credit for spreading ideas than it is about optimizing page copy to match search relevancy algorithms.

Domain Name Registration & Blog Hosting

Services such as TypePad, Blogger, and Wordpress.com allow you to host your site as a subdomain off of their sites. Do NOT do that! Some of those services offer a limited set of features and/or prohibit placing ads on your site. It can take months or years to build an audience. Rather than eventually moving your site away from one of these services, you are better off starting with your own domain name and hosting it with a reliable web host.

You can register your own domain name for less than $10 at GoDaddy.com. Dreamhost is an affordable web host, and they offer one click install of the Wordpress blogging platform.

Keyword Research

Traditional Keyword Tools

A wide array of free and paid keyword research tools exist. Many of these tools, such asWordtracker, have traditionally return keywords that people recently searched for.

Trend Related Keyword Tools

As a blogger, you are not only looking for what is historically popular, but also what is fresh. You can gain insights into what is going on right now by performing searches on Technorati, Google Blog Search, and Google News. Services like Google Trends and Yahoo! Buzz Index show you what searches were popular in the last day.

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What Google Knows About Your Blogs

What Google Knows About Your Blog

What Google Owns

Search engines have a wide array of trust measurements for blogs. Google knows a lot more about your blog than you think. Consider that Google owns...

• the #1 search portal
• a leading email service
• a leading customized home page
• a leading feed reader
• the leading feed management system
• the leading analytics product
• the largest distributed ad network
• the most widely distributed traffic monitoring toolbar
• the largest video content hosting site; and
• Google collects data from millions of Google accounts every day

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