Visitor Intelligence in SEO & Marketing

You’re a search engine optimization hero. You've done all of the requisite work to set-up and improve the health of your site's SEO. You've got the balance right, so that your site isn't over-optimized and free from risk of being penalized by the search engines.

Things are humming. You’re ranking for your target keywords, you've succeeded in driving traffic to your website, visitors are converting and leads are now sitting plentiful in your CRM.

Now what? How do you take your SEO to the next level?

Have you collected enough data about your visitors and leads to gain more insight on what is actually driving revenue? Do you know how valuable each visitor is? Do you have a standardized process to measure this?

Do you have some sense of how well you are targeting your search personas? Do you know how to segment and prioritize them?

If not, it may be too late to augment the data you've already collected. But it isn’t too late to set the proper systems in place to fully maximize your SEO efforts.
SEO & Visitor Intelligence – More than Just Rank

Visitor intelligence allows you to proactively collect visitor information from the search data you are capturing at the time visitors come to your site. Information you can later use for analysis, segmentation, and prioritization of your visitors and leads. This includes more than the basic information you are likely to have in your core search analytics systems, such as source, campaign, and landing page traversed.

Visitor intelligence allows you to consistently determine the quality of your website’s visitors and leads. You can scan, review, and segment that traffic to give you more information about the visitors and leads you attract.

Let's look at seven ways to use visitor intelligence in your SEO and marketing work.
1. Simplify Your Analysis

Visitor intelligence coupled with scoring allows you to better understand visitors through a clearer system of rankings that makes it easy for anyone in your organization – whether they be in sales, marketing or support – to determine the value of that visitor. Visitor intelligence can be used to score visitors and leads and assign a value to a keyword, page and link based on the quality of the visitors and leads it generates.
2. Take an In-Depth Look at Your Demand & its Drivers

Visitor intelligence takes into account more than just the fundamental aspects of a referring source and website action.

For example, an ideal intelligence system should include demographic, firmographic, behavioral and social data. This can include company size, industry type, job title, website visits, referring keywords, LinkedIn profile and so on.

A great intelligence system will also capture the visit history of each visitor and lead as well as the various visit attributions – first touch, last touch, and tipping point. This will give you an opportunity to learn more about what activities are working for each of your search personas.
3. Prioritize & Follow-up With Leads

Once you understand the current situation of the buyer and have the visitor’s “story” told through its visit history, you will be able to approach the sale in a more effective manner.

For example, using the data your system collected, you can now score visitors and leads to allow simple prioritization of your new leads. If you know that a specific referring keyword has a higher likelihood to drive sales-ready leads, you can assign a higher value to visitors coming from that keyword and instruct your sales team to immediately follow up with any lead that came to your site using that keyword.
4. Build a Good Relationship With Clients

Visitor intelligence limits the chances of overstepping boundaries with prospective buyers.

It’s easy to get carried away while trying to finalize a valuable sale, but appearing too desperate can be a turn-off or even an annoyance to some prospective buyers. By properly gauging their interests, businesses can maintain a solid relationship with clients by not coming off as pushy or annoying.
5. Organize Your Information

Before visitor intelligence and scoring, there wasn’t really a standard method of measuring the current state of a visitor and lead. Thanks to visitor intelligence and scoring systems, businesses can properly analyze a lead from numerous angles to verify with confidence what approach should be taken next.

Scoring gets sales and marketing on the same page, and offers a consistent and objective measure of what is considered to be attractive. Without these systems, decisions are usually made based on vague descriptions vs. concrete rankings.
6. Refine & Repeat Your Successful Marketing (and SEO) Activities

Visitor intelligence gives you better insight into what working in every stage of the marketing-sales funnel. With the added insight you will know what keywords are driving content leads, and what keywords are driving marketing-qualified leads. You will know what campaigns are hitting your target audience and be able to adjust or terminate the ones that don’t.
7. Take Your Keyword & SEO Analysis to the Next Level

With the abundance of data your visitor intelligence will provide you, you will now be able to analyze your SEO efforts, and specifically your keyword performance, at a level you’ve never experienced before. Visitor intelligence can take your SEO to a scientific level not possible with simple SEO software.
SEO and Visitor Intelligence – Why You Need Both

You can use this additional data that you capture to test and see if your SEO campaigns are aligning to the right types of buyers for your organization. Connect to your CRM to determine if the deals that you closed are actually "desired" or profitable deals.

Use the information in your CRM to further refine your visitor intelligence scoring criteria. Determine which keywords are driving your most profitable customers, and invest in that content.

With SEO becoming harder and more complicated to measure and predict, a more comprehensive data approach is required to give you the insight into what’s actually moving the needle for your business. Traditional SEO solutions are lacking the connection between SEO KPIs and visitor intelligence. Find a system that provides insight to both, because rank data is just not enough.

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Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2167814/7-Ways-to-Use-Visitor-Intelligence-in-SEO-Marketing

Landing Page Optimization Tips Can Also Hurt Conversion Rates

Everyone should know by now that landing page optimization is a critical tactic in your overall online marketing strategy. Optimizing your conversion rate can effectively boost your return on investment in digital marketing, as well as reduce churn and overall spend.
What most marketers won’t tell you, however, is that landing page optimization can be a double-edged sword; immediate improvements in micro conversions high up the funnel may result in lower overall prospect quality.
Consider the pitfalls of some of the most popular conversion-optimizing tips.

1. Keep Your Copy Short, Sharp, Concise

It’s hard to argue that reducing the overall content on a landing page would be anything but successful for most campaigns, as it does in fact reduce the probability that a landing page will overwhelm a prospect. However, answering fewer questions about your products or services may cause havoc to your overall conversion rate over time. When dramatically reducing your landing page content, keep a close eye on offline channels such as phone and email.

2. Remove or Deemphasize Primary & Secondary Navigation From the Template of Your Landing Page

Less escape routes mean more probability of prospects continuing along your chosen path. But without consistency across the rest of your site, overall new visitor trust may result in higher abandonment.

3. Add Trust Marks to Your Landing Pages

While I certainly can attest to the conversion lift trust marks can provide for widespread (but tasteful) use on an ecommerce site, landing pages are somewhat different. In most cases, broader phrases that ensure security that link to your trust marks or certificates can be more powerful to win prospects over and convert.

4. Testimonials & Client Logos Can Boost Your Brand

In B2B campaigns, association between large-scale brands that you do business with can definitely touch a nerve with prospects, especially for smaller start-ups. Make sure you’ve done due diligence in establishing good relationships with your partners and seek written approval for logo usage. The worst thing a marketer can do is include a logo on a landing page meant to generate interest that ends up causing turbulence with a long-term lucrative client.

5. Incentivize Your Prospects With Freebies, Calls for Urgency, etc.

While these tactics can elicit a strong reaction to first time visitors, it can also have very undesirable effects on lead quality. Many visitors are conditioned to fill out forms and commit to agreements without reading anything else on a landing page. Sometimes it’s worth it to lose a few people on your landing pages than to sacrifice your overall profitability.
The key to any good experiment is strong analysis. Ensure you closely monitor the net effect landing page tests have on the rest of your website’s performance.

Twitter Will Show Tweets From Accounts You Don’t Follow

More advertising is coming to your Twitter stream, even from accounts that you don’t already follow.
Twitter announced Tuesday that its Promoted Tweets program is expanding to “a small number of users,” and a Twitter help page explains where those ads might appear:

* At the top of relevant search results pages on twitter.com.
* In search results for a Promoted Trend.
* Users’ “home” timelines.
* Official Twitter clients.

* Third-party Twitter clients.         

       
Promoted Tweets have been around since April 2010 and an expected backlash never seemed to materialize. Originally, Promoted Tweets could be targeted based on keywords (used on Twitter search) or geography. In July of this year, Twitter allowed advertisers to start showing Promoted Tweets to followers.
This new move lets advertisers go further and have their Promoted Tweets show up to non-followers, too. Twitter promises that the ads will only appear “if the Tweet is likely to be interesting and relevant to that user.” That help page I linked to above expands a bit on how Twitter is determining relevance:

Our platform uses a variety of signals to determine which Promoted Tweets are relevant to users, including what a user chooses to follow, how they interact with a Tweet, what they retweet, and more.

Twitter is purposely limiting the intrusion of ads: Promoted Tweets will only appear once at the top of the user timeline, then it will scroll through the stream like any other tweet. Also, once a Promoted Tweet appears in a user’s timeline, the user will never see that tweet again. There’s also a small “Dismiss” link that users can click to immediately remove the promoted tweet.
This is the first time that Twitter users will see ads from accounts that they don’t follow, and Twitter says only a single-digit percentage of Twitter users worldwide will be opted-in to the expanded Promoted Tweets. Some of the initial advertisers in the program include American Express, Disney, Lexus, Pepsi, Xbox and Yahoo.
  

Developing a Formal B2B SEO Process

MarketingSherpa highlighting the 2011 SEO benchmark report revealed that 20 percent of organizations surveyed had no process for performing SEO and 46 percent of marketers only had an informal process they randomly performed for their SEO programs.

The numbers actually declined in SEO marketing maturity among organizations surveyed.

• 21 percent of companies had no formal SEO process.
• 48 percent had an informal process; sporadically checked.
• Respondents with a formal process, with guidelines and routine initiatives declined 5 percent (from 34 percent to 29 percent)

After reviewing marketer insights with respect to each SEO maturity phase, I would argue a significant percentage of the “informal process” respondents were much closer to the “no process” side of the scale as well.

What is a Formal B2B SEO Process?

If your organization is struggling with the development of a formal SEO program, this article provides eight questions B2B marketers must answer when considering process implementation. These questions address critical components of SEO strategy, which need to be considered when developing a formal SEO process.

1. Do you have agreement on core keyword targets?

Key stakeholders must be in agreement with keyword strategy and core keyword themes that SEO campaigns will revolve around. Keyword research provides the basis for establishing effective keyword targets and eliminating (or at least compromising) on vanity terms, that aren't driven by data.

2. Do you have your arms around the online assets already developed?

It isn't uncommon to find stray domains, microsites, or orphaned pages on a website, when auditing SEO strategy for a new client. B2B search engine marketers need to take inventory of the following online assets:

• Web pages on primary websites (and SEO properties such as HTML titles, meta descriptions, etc.)
• Domains (and sub-domains)
• Marketing and media collateral online
• Microsites and landing pages

While organizations should have centralized internal resources for domain administration and marketing collateral, free and premium tools like Xenu, Screaming Frog, and A1 Website Analyzer help crawl and organize website page assets and SEO properties.

3. Does your team understand the competitive landscape?

It's critical to realize your competition for SEO is often a mix of traditional and online organizations. You aren't only competing with product marketing initiatives that add a competitive advantage in the sales cycle, but content marketing initiatives that help websites acquire links and establish keyword strategy.

4. Do decision making personnel understand how their role and department can impact SEO?

While the website development team is an obvious first start, don’t forget the impact other departments can have on a SEO formal process.

• Marketing communications and social media for link acquisition and traffic building.
• Product marketing integrated with competitive SEO analysis.
• Strategic leadership must support SEO initiatives and keyword strategies.

5. Do you have performance KPI’s in place?

Search engine marketing benchmarks are critical for establishing business value. B2B marketers need to consider a combination of metrics that should incorporate keyword visibility, organic search traffic, lead generation, and overall campaign productivity.
These metrics need to be measured on a consistent basis. My suggestion is a combination of monthly, month-to-month, and year-over-year analysis and review.

6. Are your reporting metrics universally accepted?

This might seem like a no-brainer but in larger organizations, with several sites and site owners, web metrics may be run under different programs and priorities. Be certain to review web reporting tools, and the KPI’s which will need to be derived from them, across departments and business units.

7. Do you have internal communication strategies established?

Communication needs to be set with applicable stakeholders with respect to:

• Performance check-ins and status meetings
• Developments in product marketing and communication strategies
• SEO program review and refinement

The best B2B SEO programs keep all applicable parties aware of ongoing initiatives and program successes (and challenges), and provide communication back for continued development.

8. Do you have the proper support structure internally and externally?

Lastly, an SEO program is doomed to fail without the right support structure, which may include upper management and outside vendors and partners. At best, it is “difficult” to run a comprehensive SEO program for even a small organization as a solo practitioner (let alone if other responsibilities are on one’s plate).
The last piece of MarketingSherpa data I will leave you with is that while 84 percent of organizations surveyed ran at least portions of SEO strategy in-house, 30 percent recognized the need to leverage specialized resources (agencies and consultancies) when internal SEO resources were exhausted. SEO for B2B organizations rarely falls on the shoulders of just one individual anymore.

Final Considerations

While this list of questions should be a good start, it is difficult to cover every aspect of a formal B2B SEO process, since organizations have individual requirements and processes already in place, that need to be considered. For example, some B2B organizations blend lead generation and e-commerce in their website experience, which would necessitate a much broader set of requirements.
Hopefully being able to answer (or find answers) to these questions will be a good starting point however, in shifting your organization from running an SEO program that is largely hit or miss, to one that can impact long-term business results.

What is search Engine Optimization? Know in 3 Minutes

Some times it is very difficult for us to make people understand what is SEO? Here is the video of 3 minutes which will be very helpful to make them understand the facts of SEO.

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Identify causes of a PageRank drop

In a new Matt Cutts video, the Google engineer answers why webmasters are likely to see a toolbar PageRank drop for their site. He mentions three reasons:
(1) You simply lose a link from a third party page that had a lot of high PageRank.
(2) You have weird canonicalization issues with your site and domains that caused confusion.
(3) The most common reason, Matt said, was because the site is selling links and thus Google will demote the PageRank of that site in order to remove the incentive from link buyers to purchase links from that site.

Matt also explained that – Google PageRank Toolbar is updated three to four times per year, in order not to have webmasters focus on the PageRank, over content and other SEO concepts. Also, Google PageRank Toolbar data is not unreliable, just rounded on a scale from 0 to 10.
Finally, if you are/were selling links and have seen a PageRank drop, simply stop selling links, submit a reconsideration request and Google will review the site.

Source: search engine land

Things to Remember When Selling SEO Services

 By Ray Comstock(SEW)

Over the last six years, I've been fortunate enough to be part of a number of successful SEO sales pitches to a wide variety of companies, from startups to the Fortune 100. And I've also been part of a few that weren't so successful.
When I analyze all the pitches, three common elements become apparent as the keys to successfully selling SEO services. Keep in mind the following three things to help you win new SEO business.

1. Keep it Simple

When selling SEO services, it’s important to remember that most of the time you aren't talking to an SEO geek like yourself. You’re talking to a digital marketer who knows just enough SEO to be dangerous, but not usually enough to follow along with your rant about canonical tags and PageRank sculpting.
While you certainly want to let people know that you’re qualified to handle the job, you don't want to confuse your audience and alienate them by talking over their heads.
Explain your process at a high level. Talk about the opportunities that you have identified for their site. Then speak a little about the success that you’ve had in the past for similar clients.

2. Have a Plan

Always do your research for a prospective client's site and identify which opportunities will be the most impactful before pitching SEO services.
It's kind of like going to Midas to get your car looked at. They check out your car, figure out what's wrong with it, and then tell you how much it will cost to fix it.
You don't want to give away solutions in your pitch, obviously, but you should be able to point out to your prospective client where they are currently falling short in their SEO efforts and a general plan on how you will approach fixing it. This allows your prospective client to understand the opportunity on the table and it gives them confidence that you’re the person (or agency) most capable of fixing their problem.

3. Be Passionate About What You Do

Being passionate about SEO is easy for me because I love what I do. And so do many of the folks reading this article.
Make sure your passion and enthusiasm are evident to your prospective client in the way you talk, the way you carry yourself, and the energy in your presentation.
While there is a balance between passion and professionalism, you want to be sure to convey how excited you are to work with the prospective client. It goes a long way in making someone feel confident that they’ve hired the right person for the job.
Good luck!

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