These tools provide a wealth of information but we also use another great tool. One that’s often overlooked in the SEO world…our eyes.

Usability, Design and Interaction
These 3 items are rarely talked about in search circles since they’re not necessary to have a properly optimized website (or at least they weren’t). However, investing in these elements can deliver tremendous value to the overall site and can actually help strengthen more traditional search metrics.

The Human Test
Search engines are increasingly becoming more human and the Google Panda update is a great example of this. With it’s release, Google was able to take feedback from human quality raters, apply it to their algorithm and scale it on a massive level. All of a sudden Google became a much better judge of website quality.

Measuring a Feeling
Now, you can argue that aspects of usability, design and interaction can be translated into quantifiable metrics like browse rates, facebook likes and so on. It’s true. Our audits include these measurements and more like it, but these numbers provide you with the outcome, not the cause. You need to understand what the data is telling you.

Seeing the whole picture
If you’re not using your eyes and reviewing the website for design, usability and interaction, you are missing a huge aspect of the website and its ability to perform well in organic search. Technical aspects, content and information architecture are all incredibly important, but they’re still only pieces of the puzzle. They don’t tell the whole story.

The time to focus on site design, usability and interaction is now! These elements will only increase in importance as time passes and will separate the sites that attract massive amounts of search traffic and those that do not.

You may also be interested in these articles:
Calculating Website Redesign ROI
Don’t Settle For Bad Web Design
Shame On You Apple

Photo courtesy of Thomas Shahan.

See With Your Eyes, Not With Your Tools is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog

What makes a good affiliate marketer?
Here are 3 strategies that you can employ to become better at search marketing.

1. They are opportunity based – Affiliate marketers are quick to spot opportunities and exploit them even if the benefit is short lived. Much of what we do in search marketing is based on long term strategies but that doesn’t mean you should ignore changes in the search landscape. Paid search marketing is perfectly suited to take advantage of internet memes, recent events and relevant pop culture happenings. Organic search, while less likely to be influenced by these items can also provide some really good opportunities if you keep your eyes open.
2. They are results based – Affiliate marketers are focused on conversions because conversions = commissions. Now, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not saying you should be charging for results, I’m saying you should be focused on results. SEO is especially labor intensive and if you put your effort into areas that don’t generate results you are wasting time and money. Focus your efforts on the tactics that deliver the best results.
3. They are constantly optimizing – The best affiliate marketers and are always looking for ways to increase their returns and you should too! Whether it’s paid or organic search you should always be optimizing your campaigns in order to maximize your returns. Analyze your results and improve upon them.

Now get out there and start acting like an affiliate marketer!
Image courtesy of left-hand.

Act like an affiliate marketer is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog

Advanced web ranking's free offer.

Sure free is all the rage now but is this an intelligent way to encourage natural links for a website? Well, assuming the company is giving away their own product (and not a third party good), your willingness to create an editorial link implies a genuine endorsement of the offering. And this endorsement is exactly what natural link building is all about. Plus, the links that will be created are all one-way inbound links which gives them more weight then reciprocal links.

You can see how this tactic won’t work for every company – I doubt Ford will start giving away cars in exchange for links anytime soon. However, for many websites, this method of link building can deliver some amazing results. For companies with a low cost of good sold (software, web company, etc.), the incremental cost of giving away a free product is very low while the returns of ranking well organically can be incredible.

If an incentive-based link building program sounds like a good idea for your website, make sure you cover the following items before diving in.

Have a clear criteria
The last thing you want to do is confuse consumers. Be clear in your requirements and provide detailed instructions on how to link to your website.

Manually review all submissions
Be sure to review all of the submissions to ensure they meet the requirements and aren’t spam submissions.

Switch up your anchor text
To ensure your link profile looks natural switch up your anchor text every 30-90 days.

Add other tactics into the mix
An incentive-based link program can create some awesome inbound links but this should only be one part of your overall link building strategy.

Have fun and be creative
Understand the value of the links you’re getting and what your giving away in exchange. After that, have fun with it and be creative in your link building incentives. The more valuable the incentives are to the user, the more links you’ll create.

What about you? Is there anybody out there that has used this tactic to build inbound links? Leave a comment below telling us about it.

Don’t feel like paying? How about a link instead? is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog

The answer can be quite telling. Maybe this client has an amazing product that is better than anything else on the market. Or, maybe they produce content that is 10 times better than any of their competitors. Or maybe, just maybe, their website is exactly like their competitors.

If a clients website doesn’t deserve to be #1, what do you do?

RUN! Okay maybe you don’t run but you definitely need to have a candid conversation with the prospective client in which you make it clear in no uncertain terms that their website needs additional content and value to be competitive in search.

I know what your thinking as the client will often say, “Yes, we know that but we don’t have the budget or resources to put toward that right now.”

This statement is far too common and frankly very unsettling. Besides not being 100% true (I’m sure there are resources – otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking about SEO) it’s very unfortunate to see someone not value an investment in their website.

Why spend a ton of money driving visitors to your website if there is no reason for them to be there.

How do search engines rank websites?

Currently, search algorithms are based on the number and authority of inbound links pointing to your website. (Note: This is an overly simple explanation of search engine ranking factors. For a more detailed analysis, check out SEOMoz’s search engine ranking factors). So what do good SEO professionals do? They create a bunch of high authority inbound links to your website. And over time, your website should see an appreciable improvement in search rankings.

What will happen when you stop paying for link building services?

Since your website never really deserved to be on the first page of search results and you were essentially buying your way there, once you stop paying for links your organic rankings will suffer. Because you decided not to invest in the creation of engaging content or add value to your website, there is no reason for a regular user to promote or link to your website.

Maybe we should look at SEO differently.

…people can think hard about whether they’re optimizing for users or whether they’re optimizing primarily for search engines…social media optimization, link bait, things that are interesting to people and attract word of mouth and buzz, those sorts of sites naturally attract visitors, attract repeat visitors, attract back links, attract lots of discussion. Those sorts of sites are going to benefit as the world goes forward. – Matt Cutts on personalization and the future of SEO.

Instead of trying to fool the search engines into thinking that your website is more popular that it is, invest money to genuinely make your website more popular. Great content is much easier to promote and you’ll spend less (or get a better return) on your SEO investment. Search marketing shouldn’t be a stand alone marketing tactic or an after thought to website design. It needs to be included in everything you do and viewed as a piece of your overall internet marketing strategy.

What you should do.

1. Develop solid on-page SEO.

This means a well-coded website, properly optimized title tags and really, really good content. You want to make a website that is useful to your visitors and gives them a reason to come back.  Encourage visitors of the website to promote and link to your website, either through incentives or by offering something they can’t get anywhere else.

2. Promote your content on the web.

Once you’ve given users a reason to visit your website, utilize the expertise of an SEO agency to help promote your content and earn some well-deserved high quality links. While a great website should naturally create some links as word of mouth spreads, a qualified SEO consultant will be able to seed the process and get links to your website much sooner than natural efforts.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start building content!

It’s all about the content is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

If you’re like us, you probably jumped out of your seat when you heard this news…then again you probably aren’t search nerds so maybe you just wondered what implications the change would have on your keyword rankings. So far there have been a lot of discussions going on across the web, between SEO experts,  tech bloggers and just about everybody else. So to make your life a little easier, we aggregated and compiled the best content out there.

Resources from Google
Original blog post announcing Google Caffeine testing

Web developer preview of new infrastructure – This is the official preview of Google Caffeine

Matt Cutts: Q&A on the Caffeine update

Matt Cutts: WebProNews interviews Matt Cutts regarding Caffeine (video is embedded below.)

Google Caffeine Comparison Tools
Compare Caffeine allows you to search Google &  Google Caffeine at the same time and compare results side by side on a single page.

Google Caffeine Compare – same as above

Add Caffeine to you Firefox search bar – This tool will install Google Caffeine search to Firefox

Google Rank vs. Caffeine Rank – This tool compares your keyword rankings on Caffeine and Google

Caffeine Commentary, Theories and Testing Results
The Register: Google Caffeine: What it really is – wake up and smell the file system

Andy Beal: Google Caffeine Test Suggests Too Much Emphasis on Real-Time Indexing

Mashable: Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google

Search Engine Land: Google Caffeine: Google’s new search engine index

ClickZ: How Google’s Caffeine will impact PPC

Webmaster Word discussion: Google’s Caffeine contains a rewrite of the Google file system

What you should do to get ready
Relax, this isn’t the end of the world. However, you should run some comparison tests on Google and Caffeine and compare the results. Most likely you won’t see big differences between the two but it’s always best to be proactive. Next, continue producing link worthy content and promoting your website. The fundamentals of SEO aren’t changing and the efforts you’re making today aren’t going to be undone when Caffeine rolls out to the public in a a couple of months.

We’ll keep this post updated as new information becomes available. To ensure you have the latest in Google Caffeine news, subscribe to our RSS feed here.

The Ultimate List of Google Caffeine Resources is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog

The setup
Often, you’ll write an article, get a little exposure (maybe even some RT love on twitter) and then forget about the article and move on to the next topic. But search engines don’t forget and people will start to discover your website through the normal course of search. Sometimes, through good planning (or shear luck) you’ll find you have a real winner on your hands – a blog post that is reaching a lot of new visitors through organic search. While this in itself is great news, you may be able to increase the amount of visitors by making a small change to your title tags.

Determine if you have a winner
To determine if you have a winning post, log into your web analytics software and navigate to traffic sources – organic traffic – keywords. Depending on what tool you have these instructions will differ but ultimately you want to see what keywords drove people to your website. A winning blog post will generate a lot of organic traffic through small variations of 1-3 search phrases.  If you locate a winner, congratulations, the search engines have deemed your post relevant and you can move on to the next step.

If you have a winning post
Locate the first and second search phrases (as measured by visitors) that are sending traffic to your post. You’ll probably have many more unique variations of the keywords (long tail) each sending over a small number of visitors. While the long tail is great, for the purpose of this exercise we are concerned with the higher volume search phrases. Enter these search phrases into Google (or Bing) and determine where you rank organically. You may be surprised to see the blog post already ranking somewhere on the first page. If you’re not listed in the top organic spot, there’s always room for improvement and it’s time to tweak your title tags.

Optimizing Title Tags
Great title tags aren’t going to deliver a top organic ranking by themselves (that’s what links are for) but a properly formatted, keyword rich title tag can generate appreciable differences in your positioning. If you’d like a good run down of best practices for title tags, I recommend you check out SEOmoz’s article on the subject. It’s a little old but it still has really good ideas.

If your title tags for blog posts are formatted like most blogs they probably have the structure of “Post Title | Blog Name”. And while your post title probably includes some of the keywords that are driving traffic, it’s most likely not the best it could be. This is where the easy tweak comes in. It’s time to rewrite the title tag for this blog post with one or two of the search phrases you found in the step above. Your new title tag will look something like “search phrase 1, search phrase 2 | Blog Name”, with the most valuable search phrase appearing at the front of the title tag (far left).

That’s it, make the change and update your blog post. After a week or so check your organic rankings again, hopefully you’ll be surprised to see such a small tweak has helped you gain a few positions.

Increase your blog traffic by tweaking your title tags is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog

This subject is widely discussed in the SEO/SEM realm and there are arguments on both sides as to whether or not organic search is beneficial or detrimental to organic search when you have high rankings. We believe a well designed paid search campaign will supplement organic search and can provide an overall lift in net profit. This is of course if it’s done correctly. But the real answer is, no two campaigns are the same and you need to test each campaign to determine the degree of cannibalization you are experiencing.

On the surface, paying for free clicks seems like a dumb thing to do, something that was once free now costs me money. However, the degree to which paid search is stealing sales from organic search isn’t the only metric you need to measure. Below are 6 factors you should consider before pausing your paid search campaign.

- Conversion rate differences
- Average sales price differences
- Cost per click (media spend)
- Conversion attribution
- Lifetime value of a customer
- Competition

1. Conversion rate differences
It’s not uncommon for your organic search traffic to have a different conversion rate than your paid search traffic. In this post conversion rate is defined as the number of visitors that complete an action (sale or contact) compared to the number of visitors that could complete the action (visitors to the site). The reasoning behind the difference is commonly attributed to differences in landing pages visitors reach. With paid search you decide what page to direct a visitor to. Normally this is an optimized page with limited or focused choices for the user. With organic search, the engine decides for you and sometimes it may not be the best suited page for a conversion (see the variations of Nike’s landing page below). The key is to measure the conversion rate of both organic and paid search. If your paid search campaigns have a higher conversion rate you will be able to tolerate a higher percentage of cannibalization.

Nike sponsored landing page

Nike organic landing page

2. Average sales price differences
Similar to conversion rates, you may discover that the average sale price for organic and paid search traffic differs. Again, because you choose what page to direct a visitor to, you also select what products/services to highlight. If paid search has a higher average sales price, you can tolerate a higher cannibalization percentage.

3. Cost per click (media spend)
Often the most likely candidates for cannibalization are product or company name keywords because most websites rank well for these search terms. These keywords are often the All Stars of paid search because they achieve a stellar click through rate (CTR) and generate a lot of sales, although, they may be doing it at the expense of organic search. However, often these keywords are fairly cheap on an individual per click basis. So even if you are paying for some organic traffic, the cost is less than the additional revenue it brings in.

4. Conversion attribution
We often credit the sale to the last source the customer touched; however, an experienced marketer will tell you the customer conversion cycle is not a simple 1 to 1 relationship. Often it takes multiple sources to convert a prospective customer into a sale. If you dig a little bit deeper, you may find that some of your sales come from customers that have clicked on both your organic listing and your sponsored ad. You need to be careful that you don’t attribute the entire sale to one medium when it should be partially attributed to both. If you would like a more detailed analysis of the conversion attribution problem check out SEOptimize for a good write-up on the subject. Thanks to @heygregwood for sending me this article.

5. Lifetime value of a customer
When analyzing your search marketing efforts, consider the lifetime value of the customer not just the initial sale. At Radium, we have numerous clients that generate the bulk of their sales from direct traffic from existing customers. Even if they pay a little more initially to capture the sale, over time the ROI for this lead will increase because the customer purchases additional goods with no (or very little) additional marketing dollars.

6. Competition
Even if you’re the first organic listing for a particular search phrase you might not be the first listing a user sees. There could be sponsored listings, Google shopping results, alternative search suggestions or local search results shown above your organic listing. All of these items are competing for the users’ interest and some percentage of searches will click on these links instead of your ad. If the sponsored link points to a competitors’ website, you may be giving away potential sales. For some organizations, preventing a competitor from capturing a sale is worth the incremental cost.

You may also want to consider the resellers of your product. Many of them probably run sponsored ads. Having a sponsored ad listed among the resellers of your product may cost you more than your organic listing but if the margins are greater for direct sales than the margin you get from resellers, it may be worth the additional cost per click. The example below shows a search for the word “Converse”. Notice that the official website is both the top organic and sponsored listing. Target and Zappos (both resellers) are also listed but the margin from a sale on these sites is probably much lower than for a direct sale.

How to determine cannibalization levels
The most accurate way to determine cannibalization levels is to compare organic search sales with your paid search campaigns turned on and turned off. If you compare two like periods (i.e. no seasonality, promotion or advertisement differences exist) a loss in organic sales can be attributed to paid search cannibalization. Don’t be alarmed if some degree of cannibalization is occurring. If your keywords rank organically in the top 5 positions most likely you’ll experience some level of cannibalization. But keep in mind, the key factor is not the cannibalization percentage itself but your overall net sales. If net sales are higher in the period with paid search turned on, then even with cannibalization you are better off employing both paid and organic search.

Please note when you compare differences in paid and organic search, you should do it at the individual keyword level, not the overall campaign. This will account for keywords differences.

Calculate your break even cannibalization percentage
For whatever reason testing may not be an option for you. If this is the case I suggest you perform a rough calculation to determine the level of cannibalization you can stand before net profit decreases. While this isn’t as good as the actual test, it will give you the degree to which cannibalization will effect your campaigns.

To simplify the process we’ve built an Excel spreadsheet that will compute organic search cannibalization break even percentage by keyword based on your campaign results. To perform the calculation simply download the spreadsheet and follow the instructions. You are free to use, modify and distribute the spreadsheet as you see fit, I just ask that you retweet or share this post if you find it useful.

Download the spreadsheet -> Organic search cannibalization calculation

Is paid search eating your organic sales? is a post from: Radium
Check out more articles on our Search and Social Media Blog