We’re Recruiting (Again!) – Link Building Exec

March 10th, 2010

Hot on the heels of our latest round of recruitment activity, we’re at it again and are seeking a Link Building Exec to join our rapidly growing Search Marketing Team based at our offices in Hampton Hill, TW12 1ND.

Gravytrain is an established online marketing agency servicing clients from a variety of sectors from insurance to charities. We are seeking an enthusiastic Link Building Executive to help us build excellent backlinks to our clients websites.

Duties & Responsibilities

  1. Find and research websites relevant to our clients websites and niches.
  2. Assist in the planning and implementation of our broader SEO strategy.
  3. Identify and analyse key metrics and assess the performance of link building campaigns, providing clients with written monthly reports
  4. Keep up with industry news and developments
  5. Monitor tools and alerts to monitor and act on new link opportunities as they arise
  6. Interacting with publishers/websites to understand their requirements for linking out to our clients
  7. Negotiating with publishers to secure links and/or mentions on their websites

Person Specification

Personality

A self-starter you will be driven, positive and focused on delivering results. You will flexible, adaptable and willing to get stuck in to get the job done.

Skills / Experience:

Essential:

  1. Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  2. A genuine passion for the web, online marketing and blogging
  3. Computer literate with an excellent understanding of the web

Desirable:

  1. University graduate
  2. Be active within the online marketing community
  3. Knowledge of html
  4. Experience in blogging
  5. Previous experience of SEO, social media & link building

Working Hours

Monday – Friday 9am – 5.30pm.

Salary

To £21k per annum depending on experience

Benefits

Private health care and subsidised gym membership.

How to apply:

Applicants are invited to send their CV and covering letter via email directly to:

Hannah Smith – SEM Team Manager:    hannah@gravytrain.co.uk

No agencies.

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The Seven Deadly Sins of PPC

March 9th, 2010

The seven deadly sins have been used since early Christian times to educate and instruct followers against vice. Today I’ll be using them to illustrate the potential pitfalls in paid search…

Whilst falling prey to these sins is unlikely to see you in one of Dante’s nine circles; chances are you will be adversely affecting your campaign; and so, without further ado – I give you the seven deadly sins of PPC…

Wrath

Also known as anger or rage; wrath encompasses both actions against others, and indeed self-denial. It also includes the desire to seek revenge, and generally wishing to do harm to others. In PPC such acts of wrath might include clicking on your competitors ads in order to run down their budget…

Don’t do it. Google in particular are pretty good at spotting click fraud so chances are your efforts are being wasted in any case. Your time and energy would be much better spent focusing on improving your own campaign.

Avarice

More commonly quoted as greed, avarice is an excessive pursuit of wealth – perhaps at the cost of everything else. Now in PPC terms this perhaps isn’t quite so sinful; unless of course it’s misguided. Are you so busy ensuring you’ve covered every conceivable keyword that you’ve forgotten to optimise your campaign and focus on what actually works? If you’re in e-commerce are your prices competitive? Alternatively it may be that you’ve swung the other way entirely – in your quest for a perfectly optimised campaign you’ve created a narrowly targeted campaign which works brilliantly from a cost per acquisition/sale point of view; but fails to deliver the volume you really need.

Envy

Envy can cause poor PPC management decisions. You see your competitor consistently appearing for a set of keywords (often head terms) which despite rounds and rounds of testing you’ve never managed to make work for you. You think, how are they making that work? Why is it that they can make it work and I can’t? Focus on your own campaign and your own objectives. Many companies run ‘loss leaders’ within otherwise successful PPC campaigns. Maybe those keywords are just that – loss leaders. Are they something you can afford? If not, pause them. Similarly, some go to great lengths to copy their competitors landing pages, just because they assume they will convert better; rather than checking their assumptions by split testing first.

Sloth

Sloth is the most common of PPC sins. If you want your campaign to deliver, you’ll need to work at it. You’ll need to consistently improve and refine your campaign – you can’t just set it up and let it run…

Pride

Pride is described as an excessive love of self. In PPC those who are overly proud probably think that there’s nothing left for them to learn. They believe that their PPC campaign is so well optimised that it really couldn’t be improved. I’d suggest that’s unlikely. No matter how well your campaign’s performing there’s always something which could stand to be improved, so continually test and learn.

Gluttony

This sin refers to the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste. In PPC terms this might be likened to those who regardless of the cost *want* to appear in the top spot. Appearing first isn’t always the most cost-effective place to be in terms of conversions. Sure in some instances there may be some excellent reasons for wanting to appear in the top spot; but to optimise a whole campaign with this goal in mind is wasteful in the extreme.

Lust

Ordinarily thought of as sexual in nature, I’m going to be use a little artistic license here and use Aristotle’s definition – ‘an excessive love of others’. Some believe that other people’s PPC ads are so good that all they really need to do is copy them. This is a little short-sighted – it may work in the short term, but without developing your own key selling points / benefits / points of difference etc you’re likely to fail in the long term.


Image credit Lori Greig

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Are you Tempted to Report your Competitors to Google?

March 4th, 2010

Google have today announced a new link spam detection algorithm, alongside a new form to report competitors with.  While both link spam detection and reporting of link spam have both been possible for many years, today’s announcement could cause the practise of reporting competitors to become more popular.

Whether this proves to be significant will depend largely on whether Google takes the reports submitted seriously. If there is a strong indication that submitting such a report leads to your competitors rankings suffering, it’ll become too tempting for many SEO’s to ignore.

As it becomes increasingly easier to analyse your competitor’s backlinks, it also gets increasingly harder to hide what you are doing.

Such a scenario create a tricky dilemma – are the benefits of reporting your competitors more significant than the drawbacks? While the benefits might seem obvious (your competitor could drop in the SERPS, possibly below you), the drawbacks are probably more complex than you might first think.

Firstly , the new form isn’t anonymous, meaning that you need to submit from an actual Google account , and whilst I’ve no doubt that most would-be-reporters will use a fake/spare Google account for this purpose, it doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t be traced back to your website. If there is any way of Google knowing who’s behind the report, then you better be sure your website would stand up to similar scrutiny.

Then there’s the problem of shared links – even if you have used a disconnected account to report your competitors from, you might still lose out if you have shared links with your competitor. Should the algorithm be used to apply penalties to sellers (and it likely will be), you might find that Google discounts all links from websites linking to both of you. Imagine you gained a natural editorial link from a website – it wouldn’t be unforeseeable in competitive industries for your competitors to have approached the publisher and ended up paying for a link; in this scenario it’s quite possible that both the editorial and paid links were invalidated.

The ultimate question in both of the above cases would be your view of the playing field – given most websites will likely have some questionable backlinks (even if you haven’t bought links or spammed blogs, there’s previous SEO agencies to think about, ex-employees, competitors, or just being unlucky enough to have attracted links from websites that are usually spammy), your strategic call would depend on where you see your websites links compared with those of your competitors. If you are low in the SERPS but have a much cleaner link profile than your competitors, then you are probably well placed to submit reports.

Even if you do judge yourself of having more to gain though – it doesn’t mean you will actually want to do this. I’ve never personally reported a competitor, and I know many others who would say the same – it just feels wrong. Even if you do feel it’s the right thing to do, do you really have time? It’s kind of like playing a game of Darts – you can try and put off your opponent, but may just prefer to focus on your own game.

All things considered, savvier SEO’s may come to another conclusion altogether – whether or not you choose to report your competitors, future proofing your own links has to be the way forward.

Image credit Drew_

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Using Google Analytics Filters to Remove Session IDs from URLs

March 3rd, 2010

One of the great things about working online is that you can track and monitor virtually anything and everything. That is of course, as long as you have some sort of analytics package set up. We use Google Analytics for most of our clients. It a pretty powerful solution (when used correctly), and of course has the added advantage of being completely free… and we all like free, right?

Google Analytics is pretty easy to set up – you simply need to insert a small snippet of code into every page of your website. However, there are certain instances whereupon URL structure can adversely affect the data which you get out of the package.

For example, if you want to monitor conversions through your website via Google Analytics, the easiest way is to set up goals and funnels.

Goals are very easy to set up – all you need to do is insert the URL which all users who complete the goal hit. For example – if you were looking to track purchases, you’d probably use the ‘thank you’ page URL which users hit once the goal is completed.

Funnels are simply the steps a user has to go through in order to complete a goal. So, again taking our purchase example; step one might be a page where the user completes their name and address; step two might be where they insert their payment details; step three might be the confirm purchase page; and step four might be the thank you for purchasing page.

All of this sounds simple enough; however, you are reliant on all users hitting the same pages. Which, if a site uses Session IDs can be a problem…

We came across one such example a couple of weeks ago. We won ourselves a lovely new insurance client. Like many they were using a white label quote engine. Not unusually, the quote engine utilised dynamically generated session IDs. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem as the URLs are typically configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html?uniquesessionid

These types of session IDs are simply ignored by Google Analytics, and as such you can get aggregated data on all of the users who viewed www.website.co.uk/quote-form/step-one.html – this means you can track conversions by setting up goals and funnels as normal.

However on this particular site the URLs were configured as follows:

www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

As such a new URL was being dynamically generated for each user. This was causing problems in Google Analytics, making it impossible to track conversions via goals and funnels in the usual way.

However, there’s a nice little work around – by using a filter you can solve the problem:

Let’s use this URL as an example:  www.website.co.uk/quote-form/uniquesessionid/step-one.html

  1. Login to your analytics account, however rather than clicking on ‘view reports’ click on ‘edit’.
  2. You’ll be taken to your profile setting page
  3. Click on add filter
  4. Give your new filter an appropriate name
  5. Select ‘Custom filter’
  6. Select ‘Search and Replace’
  7. From the Filter Field drop down list, select Request URI
  8. In the Search String box insert:       quote-form/.*/
  9. In the Replace String box insert:     quote-form/
  10. Select ‘No’ for Case Sensitive
  11. Hit ‘Save Changes’

Effectively this will filter out all of the Session IDs from the URLs – so rather than reporting on individual user’s URLs you will be able to view the data in aggregate, and set up goals and funnels as usual. Smart, huh?

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Should you use Facebook for your Business?

March 2nd, 2010
Everyone is on Facebook these days, so they say. It is thought that in excess of 400 million people use the website, so it could be a great way of reaching a great number of potential customers. Many businesses have set up Facebook Fan Pages that give customers a forum to talk about their favourite products or services. On February 24th 2010 Google announced via Twitter that it was now including public status updates from Facebook Pages in real-time searches. That means if your Facebook page is open to the public Google will pull your status update instantly into it’s latest search engine results. This is indeed an effort by Facebook to compete with Twitter’s ability to be up to the minute relevant on searchable content.

This sounds like a great way to get content about your business immediately onto Google. So should you invest time and effort into promoting your business with a  Facebook Fan Page?

Of course, why wouldn’t you want to use a free service that can reach hundreds or thousands or even millions of potential clients? Many small to medium businesses benefit from having people following them on Facebook. Some usually start off by having the people they know become fans at the start. The friends of these friends can see that they are a fan of that business and the company builds small scale viral recognition.

Provided that a business can give people a reason to become a fan – e.g. a high street boutique may offer exclusive discounts, while a nightclub might announce events, offers, who is DJing at it’s venue each night.  If you can offer information that people might want to have then you could gain potential business.

However there is a lot that  could  go wrong with using Facebook as means of publicising your business.

If you read an article on Outspoken Media you can find out about American reality TV show Tabatha’s Salon Takeover. It followed small salon owner Nikki Mallon of Brownes & Co. portrayed on national TV as a cold hearted boss from hell. Most likely edited to make her look worse than she probably was. It was a PR nightmare. The Brownes and Co. Facebook Fan Page was ransacked with negative comments from outraged viewers of the show. Unfortunately it took  them 12 hours to moderate the damage done and they have garnered some much unneeded notoriety.

Now whilst this is an extreme case, and probably very unlikely to happen to your business, it is worth noting that as fans can comment on your page, you will need to allocate some time and resource to answer any queries your fans might have; take part in discussions and of course in some cases act as a moderator. If you can give people a good reason to “Become a Fan”; by all means use it as a tool to promote your business. Just remember to manage it, as your brand’s reputation could be at stake.

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