Clicks and Clients

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/empathy-button-affect-facebook-advertisers/

The Empathy Button And How It Will Affect Facebook Advertisers

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Last week, Facebook announced that the social network would soon be coming out with an “empathy” button. The newly-announced button will allow users the ability to share a “I feel you” with friend’s or brand’s posts. Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged that the button will not allow users to share negative sentiment, but also mentioned that building out the new system has been “surprisingly complicated,” though it is due to be released for testing soon. Facebook has long been a social network where people share life events, of both the happy and sad variety, so the announcement an “empathy” button shouldn’t come as a major surprise.

Nonetheless, many advertisers are now wondering how the new button will affect the way users engage with brands on Facebook. The social network announced one month ago that “engagement clicks” such as likes and comments will no longer count as “paid clicks;” so we know, the new button won’t cost advertisers anything up front. But will it result in paid posts and campaigns being bombarded with negative sentiment? The answer solely depends on how true Facebook stays to their word. If the button carries any negative connotation at all, it could spell trouble for advertisers. Users would have the ability to quickly express negative emotion towards paid ads, which could stop many paid advertising efforts in their tracks. Anyone who has ever surfed the internet knows a “dislike” button could be a recipe for the next-level trolling from users who are either tired of seeing ads or have a distaste for a particular brand.

On the other hand, If Facebook stays true to their initial announcement, users should be using the button to share their solidarity with posts (rather than their distaste), which could allow for further positive engagement between brands and consumers. The most exciting part about the button is that it could open another avenue for advertisers to explore with their content. For instance, brands that are able to evoke an emotional response with their content may be at an advantage for gaining a higher relevancy score, which can actually lower the cost of serving the ad. “Connecting with customers on an emotional level” could carry a whole new meaning if “empathy clicks” end up lowering the cost of your ad serve.

Larry Kim and PPC Hero's Matt Umbro just put on a pretty awesome webinar. Here are a few takeaways I had from the webinar. http://www.clicksandclients.com/takeaways-ppc-hero-webinar-w-larry-kim/

Takeaways from PPC Hero Webinar /w Larry Kim

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Larry Kim –@LarryKim (Wordstream founder & CEO) and PPC Hero’s Matt Umbro @matt_umbro just put on a pretty awesome webinar.

I thought I’d share a few takeaways I had from the webinar.

http://www.ppchero.com/new-webinar-with-larry-kim-top-ten-paid-social-media-advertising-hacks-of-all-time/

Twitter hash #thinkppc was used throughout the webinar.

LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+ & other social networks are far behind

As a company that handles a lot of paid social media advertising we already knew this. We’ve tested various client projects in many advertising platforms but find social is still pretty limited.

We sort of work in a box a lot of the time. With our sole focus being on client campaigns and not as much time is spent keying into the industry to find out if other people are using these social network paid advertising solutions.

Larry said it pretty clearly and the best places to be remain Facebook and Twitter, but even twitter is a distant second.

Relevancy scores are where it’s at

We deal with some of the more basic principles Larry provided, like targeting and demographics in mass. I think this is pretty common at this point. What I think not enough people are paying attention to, that Larry pointed out is, relevancy.

When it boils down to it, quality score in Adwords can impact your ads by as much as 5x. That’s big, but it’s nothing compared to social networks. Ad relevancy is a make or break issue in social networks. Larry pointed out 10,000x impacts from highly relevent ads. That’s not an optimization metric, that’s a requirement metric.

Twitter can be successful (or so I hear)

Twitter has been the hardest nut to crack. Even remarketing ads in twitter provide negative ROI for any clients we’ve tested. We’ve done quite a few test’s trying to crack this nut.

Larry took the time to respond to a few of my tweets during the session where I had questions on how he was successful with Twitter.

    @ChaseSEO the more narrow the audience size, the better, i’ve found. Quality over Quantity. #thinkppc — Larry Kim (@larrykim) June 25, 2015

  That’s pretty sound advice, but I still don’t know how seriously the accuracy of these have been tested. More work to be done here I think.

Another question I posed:

  @ChaseSEO why not use the “website clicks” campaign type – only pay for clicks #thinkppc

— Larry Kim (@larrykim) June 25, 2015

Now, for this reply, I had to ask a follow up question. We’ve done testing with website click ads before and found they have a difficult time with reach. That makes sense. Twitter’s ad rotation isn’t getting paid much if less than 30% of the clicks on that tweet result in a website click. It’s a simple matter of revenue from ad impression for twitter and when the ads aren’t being engaged heavily by the audience things tend to stop reaching the target audience, even if you’re willing to pay a whole lot for those clicks.

Larry talked about account level engagement playing a role in your relevancy. This was somewhat of an aha moment for me. We rarely pay much attention to the organic efforts of the twitter accounts we’re managing. Why? Because there’s no direct ROI on tweeting about game of thrones images. But Larry corrected this assumption and even went into some detail about how important this was.

What if i told you you never need a developer to place conversion code again? How to get started measuring ROAS and CPL. http://www.clicksandclients.com/marketing-working/

How to know how your marketing is working

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The most common problem we face every day with our customers is getting enough data to know if their marketing is working. A lot of new business have a chicken or egg issue as well. Trying to decide where to best invest their money can only be done when you have the performance information for all of the various channels you are considering.

Here are some simple steps and resources to start getting a better measure on your marketing.

Metrics

Having the right metrics to measure is important so let’s cover the most common and important metrics.

CPL – Cost per lead:

Maybe you’re not generating leads, don’t be fooled. You do have a CPL. Your leads might be phone calls, contact forms or even shopping cart payments. A CPL is the most basic requirement for advertising online.

$1,000 spend / 50 leads = $20 CPL

ROAS – Return on ad spend:

ROAS is one of my favorite metrics. It really tells a story about your advertising. Your return on ad spend will tell you how much revenue you receive from each dollar you spend in advertising. This can be done most easily for eCommerce clients with revenue per transaction being calculated accurately (more on that later). If you’re more lead based you could use your estimated ROAS based on your average order value or value per customer also.

$5,000 revenue – $1,000 spend / $1,000 spend = $4 ROAS

or for average order/customer value

50 leads x $100 per lead = $5,000 revenue – $1,000 spend / $1,000 spend = $4 ROAS

Attribution

It wouldn’t be fair to start talking about advertising performance without talking a little about attribution. Attribution answers the question, “what if I have a visitor who comes to my site from Paid advertising but they come back and purchase the next day by visiting my site directly.

Each advertising channel will have attribution settings to know and understand. For example, Google AdWords will attribute any unique conversions to it’s advertising if that person converts in 30 days by default. In most cases where you are sending traffic directly to your main site this means you’ll attribute any referral source to AdWords if they convert within the set time frame.

Your Analytics profile might not totally agree in this situation. Analytics uses a simple last attribution model. For example, if a visitor comes from AdWords but then later returns from clicking your post in Facebook the sale is attributed to Facebook, not AdWords.

There is no ‘right’ answer with attribution. In many cases, it’s important to review attribution trends to identify if you’re receiving more or less value than your ROAS or CPL might be indicating.

Find more information about how to use Analytics to review your attribution here:

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1662518?hl=en

Tracking conversions

Getting trustworthy tracking setup is the most common issue our clients come to us with. So, let me introduce you to the requirements of tracking and the resources that can make this a much less daunting task.

Google Tag Manager

Tag manager allows you to fire codes via rules simply by placing the GTM code on your site. Here’s a list of common things GTM can handle for you easily once you’ve placed it on your website:

Conversion tracking of forms

Cross domain tracking

Analytics

AdWords conversion pixels

Facebook conversion pixels

Custom audience tracking for AdWords

Custom audience tracking for Facebook

Phone call tracking

etc.

So, get GTM installed and make your life a whole lot easier!

Even today, link building is a must to continue to improve rankings for most businesses. Link building strategies can always be gamed and go from being acceptable to pure manipulation of Google's results. These 3 strategies will ensure your links stand the test of time and drive real value to your site.http://www.clicksandclients.com/3-link-building-strategies-work-2015/

3 Link Building Strategies That Work in 2015

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Credit: http://www.touchpointdigitalmarketing.com/

When an SEO says they’re link building. You should beware!

SEO link building strategies have a wide range of acceptability. Guest blogging, can be good or very bad.

Blog commenting can be good or very bad.

Content farms

Forum content

etc.

Links play a major role in Google’s algorithm. To explain how links impact your ranking, I regularly use a car as an analogy. The onsite optimization represents the aerodynamics, suspension tuning of the car. Links represent the engine. In a competitive search result, you’ll need the horsepower and the tuning to compete. Maybe you have a 4 cylinder and your competitors have 6 or 8 cylinders. You’ll need more horsepower to be competitive. The search for more horsepower is what drives companies to build links. Unfortunately, if you go about gaining those links by manipulation instead of by earning those links you open yourself up to problems.

So, what’s a business owner to do? The first question you should ask yourself is, “does my website deliver added value”. Ask yourself, honestly, if having your page appear in the search results for your target keyword improves that result or reduces it. If your site/pages provide unique value, and in truth the answer isn’t always yes, then you should consider it worthwhile to pursue ranking for that term.

Onsite optimization is a subject in itself, but it’s not to be ignored. Improperly tuning a website will ensure that regardless of your backlink profile, you won’t see the results you expect. If the site is optimized and it’s really time to start building more links then you’ll need to plan out a strategy and begin to execute on it.

Links Building Concept #1 – Blogging

Credit: http://www.charlenebakerspeaks.com/how-can-i-start-a-blog-for-my-business-full-report/

Operating a blog is more than just writing a 300-400 word post once a week. Most companies start a blog because they heard it was a good idea. They haven’t developed a content strategy nor have they invested the time to evaluate how to see a ROI on the effort they are investing. We strongly encourage companies to evaluate any activity by its impacts to their bottom line, far too often blogs are an area of wasted effort.

One way to effectively invest time into blogging is to leverage it as a means for earning links. Links can be built to your blog by any/all of the below sources:

Syndicated content

Your posts are re-published on external sites. This is something companies do to deliver more targeted traffic to their articles but it can also deliver some backlinks to your website. Caution: I wouldn’t recommend syndicating your website to everyone you can find who will take it. Select relevent sites who will provide value on their own merit. A syndicated like especially en masse is not a good idea. You should also use a rel=canonical tag to identify the original source/publisher

Weekly News Recaps

In some industries it’s common to find weekly recaps where interesting or popular topics are condensed into a blog post or article for easier digestion. Earning visibility in these should occur naturally over time but if your blog is new or your in an industry where it’s less common you might need to give your best articles a little nudge to gain visibility of people operating these types of sites. Develop a list of industry related news recaps or blog recaps and reach out to them via social media and/or email with a tip to encourage them to read your article. Perhaps they’ll like it enough to include it in their recap. This is obviously best done for only the best articles and with a degree of tact. If you abuse this, as with just about anything, people may become opt to ignore you, as with any self promotional activity.

Dialog Blogging

Another interesting and fun way to earn links to your blog is to use it to start a dialog. Comments are often sought after and can even be a gauge or performance metric for the quality of blog posts. When you start with the end in mind, blog posts designed to build discussion are a good idea. Any heavily read article that inspires content from your visitors is likely to pick up the interest of another blogger or perhaps journalist who might carry that or expand on that content for their own site.

This can often result in a link but in some industries this is much less common than others. Sometimes, you need to sprinkle a little link building dust on a topic by making more social or by sharing it. If you’ve discussed a topic where others have previously shared their opinions or interest, reach out to them and let them know about your article. For example: a topic around a pain point or frustration you’ve experienced with a tool or standard in your industry is likely also experienced by your peers. Reach out to people who have shared that experience or to companies or individuals who might be responsible for that issue.

Links Building Concept #2 – Infographics

Credit: http://www.jeffbullas.com/

Guestographics is a term that’s been around since about 2013. Although I’ve yet to identify who originally coined the term it’s a proven successful method for earning links from sites in your industry. An infographic at it’s core, you start by identifying a topic that appeals to your industry. Perhaps it’s a question that people are asking on Quora or Yahoo answers. Picking a topic and doing research/collecting your own data is an important step to a successful infographic. Take the time to identify interesting data points or you may find all of your following efforts are hindered by a sub-par and uninteresting infographic.

Design

People tend to be discouraged about dealing with infographics because of the design requirements associated with them. Luckily this is a common objection and Visual.ly has a simple quote form that can make finding a qualified and experienced designer for your project easy. Our you could look at sourcing the content creation yourself via a site like upwork.com or even Fiver. Beware, when you’re tasking yourself with recruiting your own designer you will find more complications with this strategy than if you perhaps pay a bit more to have someone handle this effort for you.

The core issue here is that good design is worth the effort/cost. Find a designer who you like and you think has a style that fits with what your industry is likely to be receptive to. What will your industry be receptive to? Great question, go check out the top performing infographics in your niche. Stop by http://visual.ly/view and search for your topic, sorting by views, to see the top performing infographics. Here’s an example of such a query for SEO

Publication

Publish the infographic on your domain first, it’s a good idea to do this in a blog but simply uploading it to your server where it can be linked to can be sufficient.

Once you’ve completed your design and published it on your site, you’ll want to share the infographic on sharing sites like:

Visual.ly

DailyInfoGraphic.com

AmazingInfoGraphics.com

OmgInfoGraphics.com

Slideshare.net

Bonus – Additional sharing opportunities: 20 Infographic sharing sites 100 Infographic sharing sites 40 Infographic sharing sites

But don’t count on this effort being your only source for links. In fact, these sharing sites will deliver limited value for you. The real value of an infographic is getting coverage from other sites and social sharing of your infographic across the industry.

Promotion

Start by identifying, collecting and organizing outreach targets for your industry. Collect contact information including email and social profiles for all of your targets. You can find targets by:

Reviewing backlinks to similar industry infographics

Search google for blogs and news sites in your industry

Use followerwonk to find twitter profiles with the most influence in your industry & even better, find their websites

Search for sites publishing infographics that are currently trending on visual.ly

Tip #1:

Use Buzzstream to help with organization and outreach efforts.

Tip #2:

Use a link scraper to help simplify the collection of targets in Google search results like this one

Tip #3:

Use scraper chrome plugin to make collecting links from sites like followerwonk easier.

Prioritize the best targets & begin your outreach. Don’t be a nuisance. Take the time to comment on few of their recent posts or engage with them on social media to start a relationship. Take the time to write them an email but don’t just start blasting a link to your infographic. In fact, don’t include the link in any of your first contact attempts. Only after you’ve engaged with them should you consider introducing them to your infographic.

Find those few responsive and engaging new friends to send your infographic out to. Make an effort to establish a relationship with these people. If you can build advocates for your business over time you’ll reap the rewards with greater visibility on your future efforts simply by reaching out to these individuals. It’s important to maintain a giving spirit with your advocates. Try to help them whenever you can, be a giver!

Links Building Concept #3 – Become contributing author

Guest blogging is dead. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. There are literally thousands of terrific publications on the web that could benefit from expertise you have. Finding a site that could use a regular contributor with expertise in your area is probably a lot easier than you think.

Find a good fit

The best place to start looking for sites needing contributions is to review the types of content you read yourself. Where do you stay up to date on industry news? What blogs do you read? What authors or websites do you recognize as industry leading? Stop by these sites and start looking around. Here’s some tips for things to look for to see if the site might be interested from hearing from you:

Visit all types of contact pages. Press pages, about pages, editor information pages may all contain hints or even outright requests for interest in contributors.

Look for community pages & site search

Use google site:domain.com for content that mentions “contribute”, “guest authors”, “write for us” etc.

Review the ‘Authors’ page or the individual author profile pages. There is often a link to a author profile from individual articles on the site. See if any authors are not regularly employed by the site

Reach out

Site’s already accepting content from external sources are much more likely to be receptive to a pitch on contributing a piece. Once you’ve identified if a place you would like to contribute to, you’ll need to reach them. This is often easier said than done. The more difficult this is though, the more likely you’ll be to succeed if/when you do reach the right people.

Your goal here is to ultimately pitch one or several ideas and even in many cases you should be prepared to tout your qualifications and writing samples. Start a relationship. Offer a correction or praise on recent content. Provide an in-depth review or perspective of a recent topic to display your expertise. Show your value and make it clear that you can be a positive influence for the publication.

Start by using publicly available contact information on the site. Contact forms, emails, even direct mail to request assistance in locating the person who would be responsible for speaking to content contributors. Persistence and creative language can be the key here. Depending on how often these types of inquiries come in and the policies of the company you might find your initial efforts fail to result in any progress toward having a meaningful conversation. Persist, even over years, if you value the publication and feel the value is there should you succeed.

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/facebooks-lookalike-audiences/

Why YOU Should be Using Facebook's Lookalike Audiences

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As Internet advertisers we are slaves to the numbers, and nothing makes us happier than to see a target audience perform with high conversions and a low CPL. (Seriously, don’t you dream about that?)

So, what happens when you are advertising on Facebook for a super niche market and have exhausted all of your targeting options?  You could go for the really strange (and really small) audiences, but chances are they may not work very well and you will probably reach all of them within a week, if you are lucky.

When options and ideas are running dry, it may be time to implement Facebook’s lookalike audiences. (In all actuality, it is a good idea to use these earlier on, but I digress.) Let me delve into the awesomeness that is Facebook’s lookalike audiences.

What Exactly, Are Lookalike Audiences?

I may not often have nice things to say about Facebook’s advertising platform, but I will say that most of the time, these lookalike (or “sim” as we call them) audiences are pretty stellar.

Facebook takes data from any custom audience you have created (say, a Buyer audience) and is able to find other people with similar qualities and targets them. Basically, Facebook does most of the targeting work for you. As Facebook describes it, utilizing these audiences creates “more paths to customers” by reaching more interested prospects who may not be currently targeted.

These sim audiences or groups can use data from website custom audiences (such as an “All Website Traffic” audience), page fans, conversion pixels and even uploaded customer database lists.

These audiences are like homing missiles for new leads.

How Do I Make a Lookalike Audience?

As luck would have it, creating these lookalike audiences is SUPER simple (thanks Facebook). I will provide a quick lesson on populating one of these bad boys:

Once on the Audiences page in Business Manager, click the Create Audience button and select “Lookalike Audience”.

Then, select a custom audience that you would like to find similar customers to as well as an appropriate target country. (ProTip: Currently, you can only choose one country at a time, but you can create lookalike audiences for other countries separately and combine them within your campaign audience targeting.)

Using  the slider tool, you can select different sizes of lookalike audiences ranging from 1% to 10%. (These audiences take some time to fully populate but once they do, it’s like Santa just dropped his sack of gifts right onto your lap.)

Click “Create Audience” and you are DONE! That is easier than creating a regular ol’ custom audience. And BOOM, there it is, just waiting – no – begging to be added to your campaign!

This is a picture metaphor of your audience begging to be used.

So now what?

Now it is time to start using these lookalike audiences in your campaigns. These audiences are like Type O blood; they are universal and can be combined with anything. You can use them by themselves, or better yet, paired with an interest or a behavior. The combinations are endless and it is really up to your imagination, creativity and ingenuity to find the best possible recipe to find you new favorite audience.

A great place to start is pairing these babies up with the top performing audiences that are currently running. For example: we like to start with 1%, 2% and 3% lookalike audiences paired with the top two or three performing interest (or behavior, or demographic, whatever is providing the most leads at the cheapest price).

Generally, this seems to work very well across all of our various types of clients’ campaigns. Sometimes there are hiccups where a 5% sim group performs great while the same 1% does not at all. But that is just one of the many quirks of Facebook, amirite?

However, once you find the right mixture of sim group and other targeting pairings, you can really hit the jackpot!

#Winning

Now Go and Win at Facebook Advertising … 

If you have not been using Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences yet, there is no better time to start then NOW.

These are great tests to implement within your campaign once your list, WCA, conversion pixel, etc. has enough data to populate a sim audience. Don’t necessarily wait until your campaign is stagnant either; these lookalike audiences can add a lot of value and really help you hit your advertising goals. In fact, we have whole campaigns running using ONLY sim audiences because they are just so fantastically great.

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/facebooks-relevancy-score-keeping-googles-quality-score/

Facebook's New Relevancy Score, Keeping Up With Google's Quality Score?

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Recently, Facebook began rolling out another update to its ad platform. This new update appears to give the ad platform more transparency in how your ads are received by Facebook users as well as how much your pay versus other advertisers. Something unique Facebook is doing versus Google AdWord’s Quality Score, Facebook has information on Positive and Negative feedback for your ads.

Positive feedback can include Facebook users converting, liking the ad, liking the page, sharing, etc. Negative feedback may consist of users hiding the ad, reporting the ad, or choosing not to see ads from you. As Facebook noted, if your ad has high Negative Feedback, users don’t want to see the ad.

Note: The Relevance Score and Feedback has not been fully released. Out of the many ad accounts we manage, only one has this new feature. 

This is a screenshot from the reporting tab. Under performance (if your account has been activated) you will see this section.

Here is another view of ads as they are sorted by Website Conversions. The highest Relevance Score I have seen so far is 5.

It’s easy to see if your account has been activated. Simply go to a campaign and view the ads. If you see the Relevance Score, then your account has been activated and you can go into the reports to see the Positive and Negative feedback scores. I tried reaching this point within Reports on an account that was not activated and sure enough, there was no option to see any of it.

This last screenshot includes the campaign view of Relevance Score with a note about a higher score means a lower cost. 

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/ppc/

PPC: How We Do What We Do

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Here’s how:

STEP 1: PPC Strategic Planning

We listen to you and learn about your business — your goals, your priorities, your rivals, your deadlines — in order to determine the baseline results we’ll work to improve.

STEP 2: PPC Media Plan

We review searcher behavior, keyword and geo-targeting strategy, ideal ad networks, ad formats and budget allocation before we make any media buys.

STEP 3: Account Setup and Refinement

Now we can setup or restructure your PPC account, including campaign/ad group/keyword structures, budgets and bids, billing and contact preferences.

STEP 4: Ongoing Optimization

Here’s our strike-zone. We’ll find ways to optimize performance analysis and program data. We’ll establish automated bid management, continual keyword testing, ad copy testing, match types, bids, position, landing page selection – anything and everything that affects PPC campaign performance.

STEP 5: Results Reporting

We’ve reached a point where we can pick apart the data. We’ll spot trends, show comparative results, and show you what the data means – and what to do about it.

STEP 6: Program Management

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/thank-you-for-subscribing/

Thank You for Subscribing

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New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/almost-finished/

You're Almost Finished

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You’re almost there, we just need one more thing from you.

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/is-social-media-profitable-for-businesses/

Is Social Media Profitable for Businesses?

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Photo credit

A lot of companies have one goal in mind when they pursue any new marketing endeavor: ROI!  But many businesses stay away from Social Media platforms like Facebook because they’re just not sure if their marketing dollars will make a return on their investment. We reached out to a number of companies who use social media marketing, as well as a few other Internet marketing businesses to tell the tale of their success, troubles and ROI with social media marketing.

  Mike Kawula – Self Employed King

“I love Social Media. It helped my last company rank as the 144th fastest growing on the Inc. 500 and is currently helping me in my new business. My favorite Social Platform for selling is on Twitter. Twitter is a great medium that isn’t as noisy selling wise as Facebook and drives a ton of traffic to my website.   

I use a tool called SocialQuant that helps you build a following of real targeted people around Keywords I choose. What’s great about this tool is it gives you great analytics on what Keywords resonate the best for your followers. You can then take that data and create marketing materials and copy for your website. The trick with Twitter is once you build a following using SocialQuant, put them in list and start interacting with them to build relationships.

It’s social remember, so be social!!!!!”

    Marin Perez – Blue Nose Analytics

“We firmly believe that the company that’s going to win in our space is the one that can demonstrate the most empathy with its customers. Social media allows us to to broadcast our authenticity of this belief. It also provides another way to listen to our customers.

As a young startup, we’re always concerned about ROI and our social media efforts reflect this. We run weekly and monthly reports on our social accounts and tie those into larger company goals like qualified leads or ultimate sales.

Social media is still in its early stages, as we’re just beginning to get comfortable with what it means for every person to have a significant voice. One single tweet can go viral and do irreparable damage to your brand but the converse is also true: a wonderful customer experience can be amplified to a degree that’s worth more than any advertising.“

    Ty Swartz – Chief’s Touch

“We’re a small disabled veteran owned business that supports small and medium businesses with inbound marketing. We teach our customers to identify their customers personas and then develop messages based on each persona while tracking time of day and engagement levels. We use content social selling to increase engagement and build business champions that talk about the company.

By teaching employees at the business to develop messages to specific audience members we are seeing up to 40% increase in engagement and an average of 15% increased purchases. We are currently developing our first white paper for a company that as an increase of 23% in event purchase and 60% increase in event engagement. This translated to nearly $118K over the same event dates from the previous year.”

      Megan Light – Gravity Defyer

“We are a comfort shoe company, that focuses on health and wellness. Our shoes have patented technology that helps alleviate pain. We put a lot of energy and resources into marketing every year. A lot of those resources are directed towards Facebook and paid Facebook advertising. Each of our paid Facebook advertisements focuses on an individual shoe and the technology that goes into making each of them.  We have found that social media has been hugely successful for us. It is a major factor in our overall revenue. Lately we have been experimenting with boosted posts. I’ll boost a post for a couple hundred dollars and get a return of 200%.”

  Jason Brietstein – Brandamos

“Is social media profitable for our business? Yes. We receive inquiries from other businesses that have participated in social media, but their strategy is lacking and want consultation to see if they can boost their social media channels. Often our social media efforts lead to other business opportunities as well such as for our web design and SEO services.

Social media shouldn’t be an endeavor that you do until it works. You should think about what type of content you want your brand to represent and then create a stream of content that reflects that brand. Don’t just post to post. The more time you put into the strategy portion the more profitable your social media ROI will be. You want to follow and engage with like minded audiences so that new like minded audiences will find you.”

  Lisa Chu – Black N Bianco

“Social media is one of the greatest platforms to market my business online. My main social media objective is to share fun valuable content. From my own personal experience great content will be naturally shared by my followers. It also has the potential to reach new followers and customers. I also use social media as a way to communicate with my target audience. I encourage our followers to contribute their own content, ideas and questions.

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/seo-weekly-recap-i-rollin-edition/

SEO Weekly Recap (I Be Rollin' Edition)

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Hey folks, Austin here, and it’s time for another Weekly SEO Recap (I Be Rollin’ Edition) .

What happens if you Google SEO? You get all the latest SEO articles Google thinks are relevant to your search. But are they relevant to you? Let me be the judge of that and help you cut to the chase.

Everything You Need to Know About Sponsored Content

By: Chad Politt

O…..MY…..Gosh…..this was AWESOME!  I loved everything about this piece!  I think it just hit me at the right time because I’ve always had questions about all the different sponsored content platforms out there, and I didn’t feel like putting money down to get the answers.  BUT Chad did just that, looking into 550 different sponsored content programs!  This article just has so much awesomeness rolled into it that it may go into my article of the year category.  Bravo….Bravo Chad!

Pro:

- Lots of Data

- Extremely Indepth answers lots of questions

Cons:

- Long….but that’s ok

Overall: Love It!

  How to Dissect Your Organic Traffic By Intent & Funnel It Into Sales

By: Neil Patel

  I’m starting to become a fan of Neil Patel he just continually writes great, useful, actionable content that ups my game!  In this article Neil breaks down his system for organizing keywords by intent, which could also be used for keyword research purposes on a new client, and help direct that traffic by intent into sales.  The system in my opinion is actually very similar to other systems I’ve looked at, but Neil does a better job at explaining the nuances so you can use it as a turn-key strategy.

Pros:

- Great breakdown of turn-key strategy

- Lots of Good Examples

Cons:

- Needs links for more info in areas

Overall: Read it!

  7 Indispensable (and Free!) Website Graders and Content Scores

Nothing beats out the old eyes on a website routine, but if you need an automated website grader to get you on the right track…nothing beats free!  Kevan Lee takes you on a brief tour of multiple different website/content grader tools that many of us in the industry have either played with or used before.  If you’re a long time professional you’re probably already committed to your favorite, but what’s nice about this article is it lets you quickly eye that “other” platform up and down before the ole’ misses catches you.  So if anything the curiosity of that one platform that you keep seeing here and there but you’re not interested in actually checking out, may finally be satisfied. Pros:

- Lots of Platforms

- Both Automatic and Do-It-Yourself

Cons: 

- Nothing super decisive

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/kpis-good-for/

KPIs - What Are They Good For?

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Spend, Conversions, Revenue, CPL.. all terms we are familiar with as pay-per-click advertisers.  But what exactly are these metrics telling us?  How can we translate these digital goals into real-life performance benchmarks?  Let’s discuss the role of KPIs.

What are they?

KPIs are Key Performance Indicators – they help “indicate” the success (or lack thereof) of your PPC campaigns by setting empirical goals to measure against actual performance. KPIs can be tracked daily, weekly, monthly or for any period of time – they help paint a picture of the performance from your advertising campaigns for any given amount of time. The term did not originate specifically with online marketing, but with the power to track every click, sign-up and online sale, KPIs have never been as easy to measure or utilize to our advantage.

If you are running an eComm store, then the natural KPI is your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).  But the total revenue generated is important, too. If you want to generate leads at a certain cost, then you will look at cost-per-lead (CPL). But what can the bounce rate tell you? An effective advertiser will identify its primary KPI to determine success, but also will look at secondary KPIs to tell the whole story.

How to measure?

The big agencies use fancy (and expensive) proprietary tools to help keep track KPIs of their client portfolio. These tools are helpful, but can really cut into your margins if you are promoting your own website, or just have a small set of clients. With some moderate Excel knowledge, any advertiser can create a snapshot of overall performance based on a few KPIs.

Most clients have set advertising budgets, and even if they do not, will at least have a minimum amount of money to be spent (for simplicity, we will set the time period to one-calendar month). Simple Excel formulas will allow you to see where you stand for the month, whether it is the 3rd or the 30th. The end of the month can be a ripe time to drive some conversions, when other advertisers have already blown through their monthly budget. Many times, it is a good strategy to make sure you have dollars left to spend at the end of the month, when greener advertisers may have already shut down until the first rolls around. Set Up another formula to tell you how much spend to target on a daily basis to carry you through while still hitting your budget goal.

For lead generation advertisers, CPL is the most common indicator of success. But what if your lead count is low? What other data can help? Pages/visit and bounce rate are good indicators of the engagement with the site. Measuring phone calls is also a must, and people who would rather pick up the phone and talk to someone still exist.

For eComm advertisers, the most common KPI for success is revenue and ROAS. ROAS is simply revenue/spend, or how many dollars you generate for every dollar you spend. eComm advertiser is generally straight forward, but you also can consider actions such as newsletter signups or requests for more info, as these can lead to sales in the future  whether online or offline.

What they mean?

At Clicks and Clients, we like to think of ourselves as a profit-based agency. Key performance indicators are just that – they indicate success. But we need to take it a step farther.

How many of the leads generated are actually turning into customers?

How many of the orders received are being cancelled because the item is currently out-of-stock?

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/ass-yourself-building-data-driven-culture/

How to Not Make an Ass Out of Yourself: Building a Data-Driven Culture

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Back when I was in journalism school, one of my professors gave me a valuable piece of advice.

“When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.”

It sounds silly, but the world of online marketing would do well to follow that advice a little closer. Like a lot of folks, I made the jump from journalism to digital marketing once I got a serious taste of just how bad newspapers are right now.

When I made that transition, I was really struck by the sheer amount of careless assumption that gets thrown around in this business.

We live in an era of unparalleled data access — a world where Target can figure out that you’re pregnant before you do — and yet, there’s a number of marketers out there who are still using the Medieval alchemist’s “let’s throw chemicals into a bowl and see if it makes a duck” method. It’s madness, and as a survey from Adobe points out, it’s a huge waste of money.

Adobe’s survey asked 1,000 marketers to detail how much attention they pay to data analytics and to share their conversion rates. Respondents in the 80th percentile or greater reported conversion rates of 9 percent and above. They also reported a vastly higher level of attention to data than other marketers.

The bottom 35 percent checked in with conversion rates between .5 and 1.9 percent.

Simply put: paying attention to your data can quadruple sales or leads from your existing traffic. It’s not even talking about an extra investment in building traffic or advertising; if you just pay attention to what your customers want, you’ll do better at this.

What’s the common thread?

Marketers with stellar conversion rates don’t base decisions off of assumptions. They pay attention to data, and they do it well.

Once you’re using data to make decisions, you are now testing.

In the study, 70 percent of top performers said they used testing in various capacities. The low performers did not.

Photo courtesy

How you test is a matter if your business’s individual needs. After all, the point of this post is to emphasize that there are no real “rules of thumb,” and that you should be looking at empirical data to determine your priorities.

How to build a culture

Instead, Adobe’s survey found that businesses should build a culture toward data-driven strategy, and it’s something I agree with wholeheartedly. It’s not simply the responsibility of the ecommerce department or the SEO person to look at the numbers. It’s everyone’s responsibility.

Respondents in the top 20 percent were 88 percent more likely to use other departments in testing efforts.

Photo courtesy.

How can you develop a culture like this?

Base your decision making on quantitative data That means taking and interpreting data for what it is, not allowing biases or reporting methods to skew what you are collecting. Your data should be clean, consistent and trustworthy.

Once you have a solid quantitative understanding of your business’s strengths and weakness, you can begin qualitative research. Build a road map off of what you know. If a page isn’t converting as it should or if your mobile traffic is crap, use existing data to develop a hypothesis as to why, test it to the point of having a statistically valid result, and then make changes based off that.

Don’t be afraid to fail. Many of the bottom-ranked marketers in Adobe’s survey did pay attention to testing, but were making hasty decisions on tests or weren’t interpreting data correctly. It’s better to wait and have statistical validation that your test failed than it is to implement a bad test, and then have to go back and fix your mistake.

Include stakeholders in other departments in your analytics and conversion testing. Create top-level summaries of what you’re doing and the potential ROI that could be generated. Use this to develop involvement.

Keep them in the loop with consistent reporting. Even using a rudimentary analysis of data, you’ll quickly be able to grow an understanding of your customers’ behavior. By keeping everyone informed, you’ll spur cross-departmental growth. For an online store, information from the ecommerce department can help the merchandising department make smarter decisions with stocking product.

As the data shows, organizations that simply work toward a culture of data analysis and optimization already have a leg up on the competition.

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SEO Weekly Recap (Watch Out Edition)

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Hey folks, Austin here, and it’s time for another Weekly SEO Recap (Watch Out Edition) .

What happens if you Google SEO? You get all the latest SEO articles Google thinks are relevant to your search. But are they relevant to you? Let me be the judge of that and help you cut to the chase.

  Local Search Expert Quiz: How Much Do You Know About Local SEO?

By: Cyrus Shepard

Local SEO/NAP has increasingly become important in a company’s digital strategy.  There is a ton of mixed information in how Google’s algorithm ranks on maps, and this quiz can allow you to better your local SEO knowledge.  It’s actually a pretty good quiz, but a lot of it isn’t based on the algorithm, but based more on being “in-tune” with the news of the industry.  Besides that the quiz is fun, and I second-guessed myself out of Guru ranking….but I’m fine with being a Pro!

Pros:

- Fun Local Quiz

- Learn more about local ranking Algorithm

Cons:

- I wanted more Algorithm questions

Overall: Do It!

    The Franchise Challenge: How Do You stand Out When You’re One of Many?

By: Rachel Lindteigen

  I must be on a local kick this week because we’ve got a small local SEO case-study on how franchisees don’t have to compete with each other.  This actually a situation I find myself working on everyday with multiple franchisees all competing for the same clients.  If you’ve done a lot of local SEO you’ll probably be able to predict each step of their strategy, but if you haven’t found yourself competing against other franchises you’ll learn a lot.

Pros:

- Classic case-study on competing franchises

- Quick and to the point

Cons:

- Data showing how balance the “wins” were among franchises

Overall: Skim It

  Yahoo Achieves its Highest Search Share Since 2009

By: Mike O’Brien

  Remember back in the day when Yahoo dominated internet search?  Well it took me a while back in those days before I switched from Yahoo to Google, but for some reason I have this soft spot in my heart for Yahoo.  Though I have no interest in turning back the clock just so I can use Yahoo more frequently, I do like to keep up with what’s going on with Yahoo, especially since Marissa Mayer took over the show.  This article doesn’t really have much in it except an update on some industry titans, but it does go into why Yahoo has increased.

Pros:

- How changes influence search

Cons:

- Nothing really meaty

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/our-keyword-tracker-is-better-than-yours/

Our Keyword Tracker is Better Than Yours

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If you’re in SEO and don’t use SERPs, you’re not doing it right.

One of the most common questions we hear is: “How do you do SEO? How does that even work?” SERPs is one of the critical items in our Internet marketing toolbelt that makes it all possible.

To help people get a better grasp of how we do our jobs and get you the results that make you money, we decided to detail the tools we use. Without them, we would be lost. These tools make our jobs possible. They make our lives easier.

In December, we detailed how crucial Screaming Frog is to SEO.

This month, we look at SERPs.

As it says on the homepage of the website, “SERPs allows you to test and prove your SEO strategies work for your clients. It allows you to get accurate daily keyword rankings and, in the process, impress your boss and/or client.”

Founded in 2012 in Portland, SERPs tracks data for 200,000+ keywords and over 5,000 websites every day. It has customers in 93 countries.

As SERPs says on the “about” page, “Our goal is to build the most powerful platform to help SEOs understand, measure, test and prove their strategies and work to anyone.”

“It was originally built as an internal tool for my own portfolio of websites,” CEO and founder Scott Krager told me recently. “It was ugly as heck, but did some basic functions to replace piles of spreadsheets that were building up. We originally called it ‘the turk’ and the tagline was ‘less spreadsheet, more traffic,’ which, looking at it today is still pretty catchy.”

In terms of sports analogies , SERPs is the video coaches use to help diagnose issues and develop the best strategy going forward.

What is it?

As it says on the SERPs features page, “take your SEO reporting to a new level of awesome.”

As noted above, it helps you test and prove your SEO strategies. The big way SERPs does that is through rankings. There is no better way in SEO to see how something you implement is doing than by checking the rankings. If the rankings go up, you know it works. It they go down, you should probably alter or change what you’re doing. SERPs allows you to do that.

You get easy access to analyze all of the data you need to monitor. Whether you do it daily or a few times a week, the choice is yours, but you see rankings, traffic, tests and more all in one central location on the SERPs’ SEO Dashboard.

In terms of organic tests and strategies as the features page says, you monitor the results of your SEO campaigns. You also can track progress of individual changes to pages and the return on investment they may achieve.

You can track daily local and global rankings, depending on the size of your company. The SEO Dashboard allows you to receive daily ranking reports from hundreds of locations (city or zip codes) and over a hundred countries.

The other benefit the dashboard offers is that it tracks how well your content does in search. As the site says, you can run correlation tests to monitor the effect of changes you make on your content’s performance.

Scott mentioned the stacks of spreadsheets he had prior to SERPs. The same image keeps running through my mind from “The Santa Clause” with Tim Allen. The Naughty and Nice list is delivered to his home and an overflow of boxes quickly follows. Without SERPs, the amount of spreadsheets would pile up in similar fashion. Good luck trying to keep them organized, find what you need and still have room to get around. One could refer to you as “The Hoarder of Spreadsheets.”

On top of making a SEO’s job easier, it saves a countless amount of time. For companies with multiple clients, it’s a lifesaver, and that’s not an exaggeration. I know if we didn’t have SERPs to track our keywords and rankings, we would be up a creek without a paddle.

What makes this tool even better is the price. You can get it at a monthly rate of $99 (more on that later).

“The inspiration was pretty basic: I didn’t want to shell out thousands of dollars a month for the current ‘enterprise SEO’ tools that had some of the function we wanted,” Scott says. “So I hired a smart college kid Joel (Bradshaw, now our CTO), and we got to work building our own tool. Of course, looking back now, it would have been much cheaper for me to just buy the darn expensive tool, but this path has been much more fun.

“I acquired the SERPs name in 2010, before we had even thought about making our internal tool into something public. I got pretty bored doing content sites in 2011, and we started really thinking about turning our tool into software that advanced SEOs would like. Joel and I both really started working on it full time in the fall of 2011.

“There were tons of ‘ha-ha’ moments along the way. Too many to count. In terms of the ‘ah-ha’ moments, I would say getting our first customer was a big one. We’d been working for a few months and getting the first paying customer felt like some early validation that we were on a good track.”

How We Use it

Whether it’s a new a client or one you have had for a few years, SERPs makes what we do for SEO possible.

For a new client, you see where it ranks in keywords and search before you take over. It gives you the starting point and what you need to change and where to change it. Paired with Google Webmaster Tools, and Screaming Frog, it’s the only way to conduct site audits.

The site structure audits we do will ultimately result in a significant amount of key learnings for us. We complete a checklist review of your website to look for larger indexing, crawl ability and duplication issues. We’ll also identify key metrics where the site needs improvement.

Without the benefit of SERPs, there’s no way we could track the keywords and their effectiveness. (There are other tools out there that do work similar to SERPs, but we feel it is the best). You get an idea of the competition for the keywords with Webmaster Tools you want to use when you do a site audit but you can’t track it and see the effectiveness of them after that. You would probably have to do an individual Google search for each keyword you choose to see the competition and where you rank. That’s incredibly time consuming, and if you have multiple clients, it would be impossible to make it work.

You would miss something but how would you track or record it if you did it this way? Would you do that every day? That doesn’t sound like a wise use of time, nor does it benefit the client in any way.

SERPs also proves its value by offering daily reports to ensure everything still works and there aren’t any problems. If you want to test something new, do it and see how it does. You don’t have to check your dashboard every day, but it doesn’t take more than a few minutes to check all of your clients’ reports.

What we’ve found works the best is to do it weekly. What were the gains? What were the losses? How does it compare to the week(s) prior? Are there any concerns? Is there anything we can improve upon and do even better with?

“I think the initial expectations were that we would be this low-end tool and bring great SEO software to the masses,” Scott says. “That ended pretty quickly when we realized selling $9/month software is not a great business in this space. We eventually got pricing more correct, although it’s something we revisit often as the tool continues to get better.”

When SERPS is combined with Screaming Frog, our jobs are made possible. We do what we do because of these tools. The success we have as a company is connected to the success we bring to our companies in SEO. SERPs makes SEO possible.

What do You Get with SERPs?

As the site says, whether your monitor just one website, a dozen or even a hundred, having all key data in one place will help you keep track and report on your progress.

SERPs allows you to track progress after starting new SEO campaigns and track those changes to individual keyword rankings after implementing those strategies. The site adds that its reporting tool allows you to quickly output ranking reports that are understandable to anyone.

SERPs tools you can use:

Rank Tracker

Correlation Tests

Pages Management

API

Mobile App (IOS and Android)

Google Analytics Integration

Social Media Activity

Keyword Researcher

One of the first steps we take when we onboard new clients is to find the keywords we want to use on specific pages. As noted earlier, that means we find the competition for those in Webmaster Tools. When the keywords are selected and put on the specific pages, they are added to SERPs.

At the top left of the navigation menu, you see the list of clients. When you hover you mouse over the tab, it drops down and allows you to add a new website.

When you click on the “Add New Website” option, a new window opens that allows you to add the site from your Google Analytics account. This is the recommended choice, and what we do for each new SEO client. You can add a single site, and it’s good for sites that do not have Analytics installed on them. You can use this option to show prospective clients a preview and add competitor sites to track. But you are only limited to rank tracking features.

After the site is added, you can add the keywords you want to track. To do that, click on the “Add Keywords” tab at the top right of the menu. From there, all you do is copy and paste the keywords. We don’t typically go over 100 since more than that is overkill. You usually want to give it a day to allow it enough time to run and get everything in place.

From there, you will want to regularly check the dashboard for each client you have. This is where you have the numbers for 1-day Organic, 7-day Organic, Organic Share, Unique Backlinks, Total Backlinks and Domain Authority. It also gives you the breakdown of your Top Keywords, Actual Organic Visits vs Expected Last 30 days, Top Shared Pages, Google Visits Last 30 Days and Total & Organic Visits Last 90 Days.

When you click on “Keywords” (and they’ve been successfully added), SERPs shows you how much the keywords moved up, down or not at all, as well as #1 Rankings and the keywords tracked. You also get the weekly averages.

Underneath those options, you will see the highest-ranking keywords you have with the ranking, day ranking, week, month and start. The start function is awesome because it lays out the success you have had with your strategies. You also see the volume and cost-per-click amount. On the left, you can select “All,” “National” or the local city where you are.

The other awesome addition to SERPs is the map function in keywords. When you click on the “Maps Only” function it shows you where you rank for local injection.

Local injection means when you search for something, it injects the city you’re in. For example, with plumber, the top results are all local injection (in search tools under the search bar, you can set your city) . SERPs’ maps function tells you where you rank in local. For businesses like plumbers, this new addition is gold for SEOs.

When you click on “Links,” you can check the competition or your own links. As it says on the site, SERPs’ Meta Site Explorer tool is smart. It searches every variation of a URL at once with no multiple searches needed. With that single search, you see accurate social and link reports for every URL variation.

You can also use Meta Site Explorer to:

Find the latest links your competitors are getting

Discover high-quality link opportunities

Quickly identify how a site is ranking

Get accurate social media metrics

Export links to a CSV

What’s in a report you run?

Links to URL the last 30 days

1,000 highest quality links (sort by Domain Authority, Blekko Rank or Ahrefs score)

Top 10 anchor texts to URL

Tweets/Likes/+1/Shares

When you click on “Test,” you can either create an event test or start a test.

The test report looks something similar to this and gives you KPI Values and KPI Change, amongst other variables.

As for “Pages,” you add the URL you want to get numbers for. You add the data you want to chart, from Google and Yahoo Rank to organic visits to the page. You can track Web Organics, Page Authority, External Links, Websites Linking, Social Media and decide if you want Estimate traffic turned on.

As you probably gathered by now, the work that SERPs does is invaluable.

“Thanks for the compliment,” Scott says. “You know, when Google rolled out (not provided) fully, keyword data really died. I think the importance of accurate rankings data and other insight that you can get from software like SERPs just became more important.

“Rankings are a leading indicator of SEO gains or losses. You’ll see rankings shift before you’ll ever notice changes in traffic. That’s a really important signal. I mean, is this campaign we are doing going in the right direction? Maybe it’s not showing up in traffic quite yet, but you can see when it will start to with rankings shifts.

“I think for agencies, tools like SERPs where you can white-label the platform, are great for impressing new clients and retaining existing ones longer. You kind of open the kimono a bit, and clients appreciate that.”

What’s Next?

If there is a SEO who doesn’t use this tool, run away. One of the questions potential clients should ask prospective agencies: “Do you use SERPs? Oh, you don’t. Well, have a nice day.”

“We’ve grown a lot this year. It’s a been good year,” Scott says. “I’m not sure we’ve quite ‘blown up’ yet. But that’s the plan for 2015. It’s amazing how much of our growth is word of mouth now. Pretty much every demo I do lately is from a company who says, ‘Oh yeah, we heard from so-and-so that we have to talk to you guys.’

“So that’s been really nice. We spend pretty much no time marketing, and all our focus is on creating great software. We will continue with that path, but doing a bit more marketing in 2015.”

As for the future, there’s really no end in sight. This could be the best year yet for SERPs.

“We have some big launches for early next year,” he says. “We’ve been building a Google Analytics-style customizable dashboard for one of our larger clients the past six months that we will be releasing to everyone soon. So I’m really excited about that. It’s very cutting edge and will allow us to generate more insightful data widgets for SEOs much faster in the future.

New Post has been published on http://www.clicksandclients.com/seo-weekly-recap-face-fail-edition/

SEO Weekly Recap (Face Fail Edition)

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Hey folks, Austin here, and it’s time for another Weekly SEO Recap (Face Fail Edition) .

What happens if you Google SEO? You get all the latest SEO articles Google thinks are relevant to your search. But are they relevant to you? Let me be the judge of that and help you cut to the chase.

12 Common Reasons Reconsideration Requests Fail

By: Modestos Siotos

Over the year we’ve done our fair share of reconsideration requests to clean up the mess other SEO companies have created, and I can tell you from personal account it is long, hard, annoying work.  The most annoying part is every time you send your reconsideration request it seems like Google has something else they want changed.  If you’re walking down that same road you’re going to need some help, and this article is required bookmarking.  You might not need to read it now, but you want it in your toolbox

Pros:

- Very detailed

- Good explanations to fully communicate needs

Con:

- Links to examples/case studies could be helpful

Overall: Bookmark it

  How to Build The Perfect Landing Page For SEO or PPC

By Jayson DeMers

  Landing Pages are extremely important for conversion rates, but there is a lot of back and forth discussion if websites should turn into 10 stringed together landing pages.  I for one am in the camp that a website needs to have squeeze pages, but every page shouldn’t be a landing page.  That’s not to say that your website pages shouldn’t have multiple call-to-actions, in fact it’s quite the opposite.  But if you don’t know the difference between a landing page for PPC and a squeeze page for SEO this is a good article to read, otherwise you can skip it.

Pros:

- Basic testing

- Importance of Branding

Cons:

- No action items

Overall: Skip It

  Matt Cutts Update: Head of Web Spam To Speak About Early Days at Google

By: Barry Schwartz

  Matt Cutts has been a hard charger for Google since the beginning, but Matt has been absent since July 2014.  Many have predicted his return back in November, but his extended vacation has now peaked it’s head into 2015.  Now the SEO world is scratching its head and wondering if Matt Cutts will return to Google at all.  Well SEORoundtable had a poll with over 500 responses to the questions, “Will Matt Cutts return to Google as the Head of Web Spam?”  Well the results were 56% Matt will never return to Google, and 37% say he will return, and 7% don’t care if returns or leaves.

Pros: 

- Interesting Poll

Cons: – The potential loss of a legend