I saw a Christmas ad last week. Complete with one of those sanity-imploding ditties that make me want to scoop out my medulla. I won’t tell you the title. You’d share my curse and hum the stupid thing until mid-January.

It’s not even Halloween yet, people.

Hopefully, you aren’t responsible for this atrocity. And hopefully, if the holidays are a big sales season for you, you’ve already got your holiday strategy up and running.

If not, you’re at a disadvantage. But you can still get some easy wins:

Speed things up

A faster site makes more money. Do the easy stuff:

1. Compress photos. Download all product images and other photographic art. If the image is larger than 200 pixels, compress them using JPG. Try around 80% compression. If it still looks good, increase compression as far as you can. If the result is a smaller file, upload back to your site. That reduces bandwidth usage and speeds things up.
2. Compress line art and small images. Download all icons, patterns and smaller line art/photographic images. If they’re JPGs, convert them to PNG format. See if those are smaller. If they are, upload them again. Again, reduced bandwidth requirements.
3. Put your code in order. CSS first, then javascript. If possible, put javascript at the end of the page. This improves page rendering.
4. Remove unecessary pixels. If you use third party analytics tools, chat boxes, advertising platforms or anything else that requires you to paste in a javascript, chances are you’re placing pixels on visitors’ computers. That placement slows your site. Remove any you don’t use.

Those are the easy speed wins you can do between now and the entire week that used to be Black Friday without serious site testing or developer time. It’ll get harder if you have thousands of images. But if you have thousands of images, you should the resources to compress them, too.

My favorite tools for compression:

Caesium
Photoshop (I don’t love it, but Fireworks is gone, so…)
ImageOptim

You can also use Google Page Speed Insights to get compressed versions of bloated images.

Prep for e-mail

E-mail is still one of the most effective marketing mediums, if you use your house list—the people who’ve checked the ‘yes, send me more information’ box. Do the simple things to ensire you make the most of that list:

1. Scrub the list. Find bounces and unsubscribes. Remove them. Don’t trust automated tools! Every now and then, you need to check yourself.
2. Check if you’re blacklisted. Use mxtoolbox and check on Spamhaus. If you see a problem, reach out to the relevant party. Don’t argue—ask for help, do what they ask and move on.
3. Set a schedule. Figure out when you’ll send what you’ll say. Don’t go nuts. And no, there’s no ‘go nuts’ magic number. Watch your unsubscribe rates. If you’re steadily losing subscribers, you’re probably trying to hard. Send fewer e-mails.
4. Design the e-mails. Unless you have a proven design, get a professional to design the e-mails for you. It’s not that expensive. You can probably find someone to help you for a few hundred dollars. It’ll pay off.
5. Build the list. If you haven’t already, place an offer on your site: “Sign up to receive holiday offers!” Offer enough context that people want to be on the list. You’re not Santa (or Harry Hanukkah). Explain the value.

Improve contrast

If your ‘buy now’ button blends in with the rest of the page, use a higher-contrast color. I know the branding concerns. If those trump everything else, so be it. But if revenue is the absolute number one priority, try a high-contrast button. We’ve seen conversion rates go up 20–30% by switching from blue-on-blue to orange-on-blue.

Tune up your PPC accounts

With PPC, the best quick-win is to make sure you’re not missing huge opportunities. Seems obvious, but be sure that if you do any pay per click marketing using Adwords, Bing or other networks, you do a little homework:

1. Check your budget and spend. Consider whether you should increase for the holidays, or decrease and use the money elsewhere.
2. Look for really poor performing ads. Even if you can’t measure conversion rate, you can find ads with terrible clickthru and place them in a separate group for easier management.

Even if you don’t run any PPC campaigns right now, see if you can:

1. Add Product Listing Ads to the equation. PLAs are great selling tools, these days, and you can’t afford to ignore them. We have a free ebook on the subject, by the way. But be sure to check Google’s current info, too.
2. Take advantage of new tools like Google Customer Match. I can’t list ’em all. Check Customer Match first, though. It lets you target ads to e-mail subscribers. It’s chock-full of nift.

Create landing pages

This one isn’t exactly an easy win, and you may not have time to do it. But if you can, create a few landing pages customized for any holiday offers. If you can, use a tool like Unbounce or Optimizely for testing.

This is more work, but if you can create these pages, then point e-mail and paid advertising at them you can figure out what works and adjust on the fly.

Think about paid social media

Yes, it’s hard to measure. Yes, it costs money. But paid social media remains an under-exploited channel. You can precisely target by psychographics and demographics, try little teeny spends and put offers right in front of idea customers.

Facebook’s been snooping for gift preferences since 2004. They can probably help you show relevant ads.

Just think about it, OK?

Get your passwords

Sounds trivial. But make sure you can log into your:

• Social media accounts
• Analytics software
• E-mail marketing software
• Site content management system
• Pay-per-click accounts
• Other advertising accounts

That’ll avoid the heartbreak of premature logout.

The endless list

I tried to stick with the easy stuff that you can whip into shape in the next couple of weeks. If you want to get crazy, look at stuff like:

• Writing some holiday-focused content. Real content, not crap. Stuff that’ll help people get through the most stressful/most fun time of year. Then promote it using paid social media.
• Set aside budget for targeted display advertising. The trendy term is ‘programmatic’ advertising right now, I believe. It’s hard to keep up with the buzzword freight train.
• Hire your friendly neighborhood web consultant. Hey, I had to try, right?

The post The Last Second Guide to Holiday Marketing appeared first on Portent.

Part 1: The marketing stack ← You are here
Part 2: Infrastructure
Part 3: Analytics
Part 4: Content
Part 5: The channels – paid, earned and owned

The Internet Marketing Stack

Internet marketing is this ridiculous pile of stuff. It looks like this:

This fantastic image by Phunk Studio, Copyright 2003

Chaos. Don’t get me wrong. Marketing’s chaotic nature is important. Without it, we’d all be out of a job. But looking at it every day may cause you to go blind, or insane.

The stack is one way to impose a little order over it all:

The internet marketing stack: It’s a stack. About marketing. On the internet.

The bottom three layers are the elements. If you leave one out, you’ve got no marketing at all.

The elements

The top layer contains the channels that exist no matter what the tactics, devices or techniques: We’re always speaking to our audience through paid, earned and owned media. For examples, think of pay per click (paid), SEO (earned) and your website (owned).

The channels

Dependencies

The stack shows dependencies. If the bottom of the stack is weak, the whole thing starts to wobble. Every layer depends on the layer above.

Lousy infrastructure — a slow site, broken links, siloed teams — will suck the life out of everything you do. Without analytics, you can’t adjust what you’re doing. Content connects you to your audience. Without it, there is no marketing at all.

Convection

It also shows convection: Your audience moves up and down through the stack as they interact with you.

Convection in the marketing stack

Here’s an example: I’m shopping for a new cell phone (tempted by the iPhone 6, looking at the Nexus 6, probably sticking with my Nexus 5).

1. I start by asking (in my case, on Facebook) friends which phones they like.
2. Because of that, I do a search and read content about each phone.
3. I navigate to brand sites and stores.
4. Those stores see me arrive and set retargeting pixels, or improve the user experience based on my actions.
5. I drift away for a while, guilt-ridden about plunking $400 on a new phone.
6. I see a few more ads, a review or two and maybe a recommendation from a friend.
7. I arrive on a brand’s website.
8. I read about the product.
9. But their site is so slow, or so hard to use on my existing phone (irony) or their checkout is so infuriating that I give up. Or, in my case, my cell provider’s policies around upgrades are harder to figure out than the US Tax Code, so I surrender and stick with what I’ve got.
10. I start the cycle over again until I have a good experience, top-to-bottom. Or until I decide my trusty Nexus 5 is sufficient. In which case, cell companies, your marketing utterly failed, and may I suggest an agency in Seattle…?

Part 1: The marketing stack ← You are here
Part 2: Infrastructure
Part 3: Analytics
Part 4: Content
Part 5: The channels – paid, earned and owned

Note: We have a Marketing Stack Explainer if you want to see it all in one, interactive chunk.

The post The Internet Marketing Stack: Overview appeared first on Portent.

Ready to get to work? To learn how to use the chart, see the quick guide below the graphic. For further explanation and exploration, check out the link bundle here with a slidedeck & more good stuff from our International SEO Webinar.

Overview

International SEO is a tricky subject, and every brand has a unique situation to consider. While Google provides some very high-level documentation on how to structure your site(s) and implement hreflang, there isn’t a lot of information about how to choose the best approach for structuring your site(s) in a way that makes the most sense for your brand.

That’s what I love about International SEO – the challenges of consulting are always fresh and interesting. It’s also why I created this flowchart – to lend clarity to the thought process that stakeholders need to go through before rolling out international sites. It’s part of mapping out the right strategy before you begin technical implementation.

It’s important to note this flowchart is designed to be simplistic; It does not account for every scenario or every consideration. To include every scenario would mean sacrificing clarity. The important thing is to focus on a chain of questions that will help you determine your strategy. On that note, I’d like to give a shout out to @blakecscott, who gave me great feedback and helped me with the design.

Here’s a text summary of how to use the above graphic when planning your International SEO strategy:

Step-by-Step Strategy

The first question to ask is whether there is significant search volume for the countries or languages that you are interested in targeting. Would it make sense to target a language-country combination where there are hardly any people in that market? No, not really. Be judicious and set realistic expectations about what markets you really want to expand into, before you go over-extending your empire like Alexander the Great. If there isn’t significant volume, and/or if traffic from certain countries doesn’t convert well, then those markets may not be worth pursuing.

The next question to ask is whether you honestly have the resources available to manage international content. Do you have design & development resources to handle multiple sites? Do you have writers to develop unique, localized content and professional translations? Do you have the budget and savvy marketing team capable of doing regional link outreach, to help your international sites build up authority? These are some of the determining factors in deciding whether to go with separate sites or not. If you don’t have the resources to accomplish all that, then sub-folders on one domain is your best bet, and you will benefit from a consolidated link profile.

The third question to ask is whether you have a compelling business reason to justify building multiple sites. If you are going to create significantly disparate sites, such as with different product catalogs or different information architecture, then separate sites is a good option. Choosing ccTLDs requires significant investment upfront, but it can be the right choice for larger companies, such as well-known retail or e-commerce brands. ccTLDs benefit from having the clearest geo-location signals and from receiving higher click-through rates.

Note: this flowchart doesn’t recommend sub-domains, because sub-domains are generally viewed as separate domains, so they suffer from the same disadvantage as top-level domains: separate backlink profiles. They do allow for the easy separate of sites and allow for different server locations, but these are not strong enough advantages to make sub-domains a better option than ccTLDs.

Implement and Refine

Once you’ve chosen the right structure for your international site(s), it’s time to implement and refine. First, you need to make sure that hreflang annotations are implemented correctly across all of your sites. Whether you choose to add hreflang tags via XML sitemaps or via the page tagging method, make sure to avoid these common pitfalls:

Hreflang tags need to be added to all pages within the page grouping. For example, if page A, page B, and page C are all variations of each other and are targeted towards different audiences, all three pages need to have hreflang tags that mention all three of the pages in the group. Don’t leave any of the three out of the hreflang club.

It’s also important that if you use canonical tags in tandem with hreflang tags, you do it right. Hreflang tags need to reference self-referential canonical URLs. For example, page A should have a canonical tag pointing to page A, page B should have a canonical tag pointing to page B, and page C should have a canonical tag pointing to page C. All three pages should have hreflang tags as mentioned above. You do NOT want to canonicalize only one version of a page in a page grouping, as that would interfere with hreflang annotations.

The next step is to “regionalize.” It’s not enough to duplicate your content across multiple sub-folders or TLDs and then hope that hreflang markup will eliminate the problem of duplicate content; the whole purpose of creating international targeted sites is to create custom web experiences for your target markets. So, you also need to regionalize your content by using professional translators, regional vernacular, local currency and contact details, and custom meta data. These things aren’t just “nice-to-haves;” these are necessary signals of quality in a post-Panda era.

The last step is to make sure that it’s all working properly, and to adjust as necessary. In evaluating progress, some success metrics to look for include SERP tracking across your target regions with AWR or similar, monitoring Google Webmaster Tools for hreflang errors, and tracking the flux of traffic from your target regions in Google Analytics.

Share your questions and insights in the comments, and get in touch with our SEO specialists for help with implementing international SEO for your company. If you’re interested in getting more advice on international SEO strategy, check out the link bundle here with a slidedeck & more good stuff from our International SEO Webinar.

The post International SEO Strategy Guide – Plus a Flowchart! appeared first on Portent.

Well, over the years, MozCon has evolved its schedule to include social, content and much more, just as the industry has. The speakers are hand picked by a committee at Moz each year and the 2014 line up included topics on:

• SEO
• Analytics
• Psychology
• Branding
• Social Media
• CRO
• Mobile
• Local SEO
• PR

That’s a heck of a list.

Why is PPC Here?

Short answer: because you can’t ignore all this red:
my presentation for MozCon, with the guidance of the MozCon queen, Erica McGillivray, we very intentionally chose Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads as the subject, because of its past close ties with SEO. In fact, when it first launched as Google Base, it was technically SEO. SEOs would go into Base, upload product feeds and see if they could get traffic from Froogle or Product Search, as it was called before it went to an entirely paid platform in October of 2012.

Nowadays, it’s called Google Shopping and it’s all paid – but the advancements and optimizations that are made through paid have serious SEO and content benefits. In fact a recent post on the YouMoz section on leveraging panda to get out of product feed jail, while geared towards SEO and content, could make a powerful argument for a site or navigation restructure using data or content from paid product feeds. So, yeah, PPC belongs. (Even if just a little bit.)

Disclosure: I did test the outline and the presentation itself on a few SEOs at Portent first. They seemed unharmed by it.

In fact, after I gave my presentation at MozCon, I had several SEOs come up and tell me they learned something or realized something about PPC that they didn’t know and that it was relevant to their own work. Heck, in the future they threatened to go to more sessions on paid search tracks, instead of always just going to SEO.

To me, that was a win.

Cross-Geeking Out

It also occurred to me that sometimes, we continually send people to the same conferences or they go and they stick only to the track that is their everyday specialty. I think we need to break that pattern. We should be challenging ourselves to cross-conference and learn more about the specialties we aren’t in everyday. I would rather have a session be over my head (like a super technical SEO session) and I have to stop and think about how all the pieces fit together rather than complain that the last session I was in wasn’t advanced enough.

Considering the rise of paid social and content promotion as well, we’re all blending into “marketers” more and more, away from that “specialists” label whether you like it or not.

So, I challenge you to go cross-geek out. Go to a social media session where they talk about their tools. Go to an SEO session where they talk about the changing SERP. Go to a content session where they talk about how they decide what to write. You’ll be glad you did. You might even make a friend.

I know I enjoyed MozCon as a PPC person. I cross-geeked out on social communities, web psychology, international SEO, semantic search and mobile SEO. What’s not to like about that?

How Did YOU Get In?

Yes, that was a real question and by more than one person. The only answer I have to give on that is “because I’m awesome.” And I can prove it:

Thanks, LinkedIn and my students at the University of Washington.
(The serious answer can be found on the Moz blog.)

Now What?

Feel free to check out the line up for MozCon 2015. (I’m not on there again, but that’s OK, I’ve started therapy.) Next time you go to a conference, be sure to read all of the sessions, not just your usual track. Sign up for webinars on different subjects, there are tons out there everyday and for every level. I went to one on email marketing the other day, something I’ve never really done! Ask someone you know or trust either in your field or at your company that is in another field to make a recommendation. And if you like to deal in volume, ask on Twitter, you’ll get a ton of responses.

And last, but not least, after 8 years and 8 months at Portent, I have to say that this is my last blog post on the Portent blog. This post is my 107th post in total. A distant 2nd to Ian’s 1500+ posts, but it’s a second place I’m proud of.

It has been an honor and a privilege to be a part of Portent. I will miss the culture, the work and most of all the staff, immensely.

Most of all, thank you for the opportunity to learn how to be a “pay per clip” marketer! It’s been a great ride.

To stalk me on future adventures, you can find me on Twitter @ebkendo

Live long and prosper!

The post PPC at mozCon – Challenge Yourself to Cross Geek Out appeared first on Portent.

It’s a miserable approach.

Ready-and-waiting rockstar social amplifiers are slightly less common than mint-condition K cars.

K Cars: Bask in the awesome

The Rockstar Method has its place with major brands, pure luck and the well-connected. Mere mortals like you and me, though, need allies, not rockstars.

Find rockstars you like. Then sift through their followers, looking for allies: Knowledgable, valuable, selective curators who benefit as much from your relationship as you do. That’s it. Nothing sexy. No fantastic automation. Just good old research. If you haven’t snorted derisively yet, keep reading, and I’ll explain how I do it.

Overall technique

The rest of this post walks through research examples using five different sites I can use as proxies for the social/knowledge/whatever graph.

If you’re a scientist and ready to punch me in the patella for savaging the definition of social graph, I apologize. Note that both my patellas are pretty much shot, though, and take comfort.

But you can do this research anywhere people gather. The process is the same:

1. Select the network. That’s the gathering place. I usually use two or three, bouncing back and forth as needed to improve my data.
2. Find potential allies. Dig through the network to find the kinds of people who might be good allies.
3. Expand. Look at their friends. Expand your pool until you’ve got 100-200 possible allies. It’s a shortcut: Instead of researching person-by-person, you can look for overlap and more easily build a pool of potential allies.
4. Focus. Once you have the pool, comb through and narrow it back down to 1-2 people. Do not spam people. You can always add folks back later on. Talk to and learn from specific folks. Don’t scream at them as they walk by.

I always assume a 1-2% ‘conversion rate’ from stranger to ally in my research: Look at 100 people, find one good ally.

I’ll be the example here. I write about marketing a lot. I’d like allies who will amplify my writing, and who have stuff I’d like to amplify. Here’s how I do it:

These are my five go-to research networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Google+
• Retail sites

There are others. Depending on the topic, I sometimes use Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, StumbleUpon, etc. But the five above are almost always winners.

Selected network: Retail sites

Most retail sites have product reviews. Many have huge communities of reviewers, and those reviewers are a great starting point for my research, and fantastic potential allies.

Why not just start with Twitter, or another social network? Heisenberg. Not from Breaking Bad. From physics. On social networks, we know we’re being observed, every moment. 90% of our time on these networks, we’re there to get attention for expertise. I know reviews are similar, but there’s usually more of an emotional component. It’s more organic. Using Twitter to find allies is like trying to sell in a room full of salespeople.

Find

This is about writing, so I’ll start on Amazon and find a relevant book or product or author I liked a lot. Then I’ll look at the top reviewers. They read the same stuff I do, so they’re great potential allies. I research them with three questions in mind: Who are they? What are they like? How can I help them?

I really like stuff Marty Weintraub writes, and I know he has a book, so I search for him. I find his book about Facebook ads. It’s got 38 reviews, and some verified purchasers (folks who actually bought the book). So I browse through a few of the reviewers.

Browsing Amazon reviews

I’m not a Marty Weintraub fanboy. More of a stalker, really. But you should read this books, and his psychographics articles. You’ll learn a lot.

I usually sort by Most Helpful First, to avoid wasting time. I look for verified purchasers or folks with Amazon’s special reviewer badges.

Amazon special reviewer badge

I find a verified purchaser and take a look:

Amazon verified purchaser label

I take a quick look at her reviewer profile:

She reads other marketing books and has very similar opinions to mine. I take note. She’s not a top 1000 reviewer, I know. But that’s OK. She’s also reviewed other stuff. That’s actually good. It means she’s not just out there to push her profile as a marketer. I like that.

I can get in touch directly via Amazon: Respond to a few of her reviews, helping to build buzz around her as a reviewer, for example. That’s a great way to strike up a conversation, and help out at the same time.

Expand

I can expand my ally pool by:

• Finding others who review the same products. They may be similar to this reviewer
• Checking reviewer discussion forums on the site (many retail sites have forums for reviewers) to see if she converses with anyone
• Checking if she herself has any products, and if so, who’s reviewed those

I can also build on my research by hopping on Google and searching for her name. Search for the name with and without spaces. Many folks use their name without spaces as their Twitter handle. It’ll give you a head start. Then, you can take what you learn and apply it to the other networks.

Then I can follow her on Twitter, etc. I can share interesting stuff she posts, help answer questions, and otherwise build a real relationship. Poof. Ally.

Focus

Pretty basic, really. I sift through my results and narrow my list based on:

• Quality. I want to make sure you’re not spamming your way to fame with lousy writing. On Amazon, for example, I’ll look at the percentage of readers who find reviews helpful. 90%? Great. 30%? I don’t think so.
• Specialization. If you’ve written 10,000 reviews on everything from bicycles to baby powder, you might still be a good ally, but I need to check

Selected network: Google

Google’s a damned good source of allies, what with its near-infinite index of everything on earth.

Find

I use Google to find specific kinds of conversations, with searches like these:

interview + “[famous person’s name]” if you want to find folks who interviewed a major personality. The interviewers could be allies. For example, interview + “neil degrasse tyson”

ama + “[famous person’s name]” will find ‘ask me anything’ threads for a major personality in your space. For example, ama + “neil degrasse tyson”

article + “[topic]” is great, too.

Note that ‘ama’ tends to work best for somewhat glamorous or fan-filled fields. It’ll be hard to find anything under ama + “eggplant.” I tried.

On the other hand, interview + “alpaca farming” worked rather well.

Alpaca Farming Interviews! For real!

If you want to get more meta and see an actual example, try article + “influencer research.”

Expand

I look at the first 2-3 pages of search results. I also look at the interviewers and those who asked questions in the AMA. They’re my potential allies. I’ll also bounce back and forth between the other networks, finding friends of friends.

Focus

It’s hard to narrow down this group without digging through AMAs, interviews and other digital gatherings one-by-one. I reallllly don’t want to do that, so I’ll try a few other things, first. Look for:

• Relevance. I once accidentally did an interview with a site that sold umbrellas. Except it wasn’t umbrellas. Sometimes, interviewers fib, and you’re careless, and you end up being link/ego/tweet bait. So, when you find an interviewer, make sure they’re legit before you add them to the ally list.
• Quality. A little like quality, above, but make sure the writing is solid, they can spell ‘license’ and they use the right their there
• Plagiarism. Make sure it’s not a copy. If it is, treat as directed

Method 3: Twitter

A lot of people start and finish their influencer research on Twitter. You could do worse. There’s a lot of great data in there. For me, it’s one of several tools, but it’s still awesome.

As I was writing this, I realized I could do an entire article just on Twitter. I tried to trim this back, but Twitter really does have some amazing tools. Just don’t get addicted. Mix in the others.

Find

If I’m starting from scratch, I’ll kick things off with Twitter’s “who to follow” tool. It’s not perfect, but it can help.

Twitter’s who to follow tool is a good research aid

Then, I can compare a recommended person to myself using Followerwonk:

Comparing followers in Followerwonk

@paulmay I hope it’s OK that I’m digging into your Twitter life in public.

A small overlap is good! That’s a nice, small audience I can look at. It verifies that we have a chunk of followers in common, but we’re not freaky marketing Stepford Wives. It also means a lot more potential allies among followers we do not have in common.

Expand

Now, I can grab that list of 373 followers, and look at them.

I can also grab the followers we do not have in common, and see if any of them have bios or other information that implies they’ll be great allies.

I can dig through Twitter data lots of other ways:

• Look at allies’ followers who do not also follow me
• Look at the followers’ followers
• Look at the followers for an industry rock star, and see if any of them are good potential allies

This is about quality, not quantity. Someone with 20,000 followers may be a terrible ally. Maybe they’re too busy to ever read anything I post. Maybe 19,999 of their followers are bots. Or maybe they just despise me. Just never assume more followers is better.

Focus

Twitter is the hardest place to focus, because you can find so many people to follow. When I’ve got lots of data, it’s Excel to the rescue. I download a CSV from Followerwonk (I promise, they don’t pay me a dime):

Twitter allies CSV

To find allies, I’m going to look at:

1. When they last tweeted
2. Total number of tweets they’ve sent
3. Number of tweets that contain URLs (those are citations, which is what I’d prefer)
4. Percentage of tweets that have @contacts in them
5. Social authority
6. Followers

Using those criteria, rows 1, 3 and 4 are great potential allies. They all frequently tweet when compared to audience size. They’ve all tweeted recently. They cite content at least 30% of the time (% w/ URLs).

Now, I’ll use Followerwonk’s Analyze Their Tweets tool to check who they most often mention. This person already is an ally:

This person already cites me. A lot.

I should probably say thanks, if I haven’t already.

Here’s someone who isn’t an ally yet, or if they are, they don’t tweet about me very much. Sniff. Who do they talk about? Take a look:

This person doesn’t tweet about me yet.

Someone’s got a face-snapping coming.

And what do they talk about? I’ll take a quick glance at their Tweet stream and find out. In this case, I found they post lots of marketing stuff, so this is a great ally. I’ll follow them straightaway.

Method 4: Facebook

Well, duh. Facebook has the most powerful (if not the only) social graph search capability out there. Social Graph Search is so damned cool and so damned clumsy that I want to squeal with delight and slam my head in a car door every time I use it. Still, it’s too good to skip.

ind & Expand

For this, I’ll pick two interests of mine and do a search:

Facebook Social Graph search

That’s pretty cool. Facebook sifts through users and finds the overlaps. Alas, after that it gets annoying in a hurry. For example, it’ll show 1 million+ matches, and then list only 10. Or, it’ll show 1 million+ matches and then show ‘none found’ when you try to list them. Like I said: Annoying.

But persistence pays off. I tried a few different searches and got a list of folks who have exquisite taste:

Facebook search result. Look at all those cool people.

Focus

Some of these folks are already my friends (why wouldn’t they be!). Time for some filtering.

Filtering for new friends

I can zip down this list and add folks as friends as desired. I can also get pickier, filtering by city. That can get me some fantastic matches. I recommend you play around with it. You’ll find lots of good allies.

Then I can follow them on Twitter, too, and consider whether any of their friends might be potential friends, too.

Method 5: Google+

Ah, Google+. You’re like that one aloof person we all dated. The one that we liked a lot, but made us so insecure we tried too hard.

Google+ has a fantastic interest graph. I know it does. But it’s inscrutable.

There is one saving grace. Google+ provides a tool that lets you expand your search: Ripples. If a post got re-shared, you can click ‘Ripples’ to see who the amplifiers were.

Find

I usually start with a hashtag or keyword search in ‘people or pages’ or ‘communities:’

A hashtag search. Yes, I’m obsessed with 100-pound rodents.

Then I’ll look at posters within that topic. The top posters are often in a whole different social strata, and the odds that I can get their attention equal zilch. Le sigh.

Expand & Focus

Fortunately, I can use ripples to find anyone who shared their stuff. First, click the little arrow that appears when you roll over the top-right corner of the post:

Click to see ripples

Note that you’ll only see ‘View Ripples’ if the post has been shared. No shares, no ripples.

Once you click, you’ll see the ripples. Pretty neat:

Ripples!

There you go. I can take a look at those sharers, looking for great potential allies. Smaller circles had less influence. I can gauge the right balance between influence and accessibility. I can even download all of their profiles using the Scraper Chrome extension.

Best plugin ever: Scraper for Chrome

Now I can zip through them, scanning profiles and figuring out who I’d like to add to the pool.

I can also research the same people on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Given Google+’s, er, quirks, that’s probably the better way to go.

You can get fancier, using the Google+ API to pull all accounts with certain interests, etc. It’s definitely possible. I built a horrific monstrosity that did it, until it nearly melted my Google APIs account down. My creation turned against me. It haunts me to this day.

Ongoing research

Your best allies are the ones you already have. Don’t squander good will.

Sometimes, people re-share your stuff without knowing you because it’s, you know, good stuff. You need to conduct regular audits— see my Twitter audit for an example.

You should know who your friends are. And be nice to them. It’s a lot easier to keep friends than find new ones.

That sounds horribly cynical, I know. It’s the truth, nevertheless. Ongoing research matters.

Great. Now what?

Once you’ve chosen your allies, it’s time for the real work: Conversing, helping them as much as you’d like to be helped, and generally giving a crap. Don’t treat them as receptacles for templated messages and auto-replies. Lend a hand and ask for one.

Allies!

Someday, I’ll get my big break. I’ll have a nice dinner with Patrick Stewart where I spend two hours wowing him with my insights. After that, he’ll slap me on the back and say, “Dammit, Ian, why doesn’t everyone already know about you! I’m going to go out and start tweeting the crap out of your latest book right now!!!!”

Even then, it’ll be my allies who keep me in Scotch and scones. Build and nurture your allies. Help them grow, and they’ll help you back.

The post Allies, not rockstars: Influencer research for us mortals appeared first on Portent.

We won! Best SEO Campaign of 2014. Allow me to wax philosophical for a second:

My team constantly teaches me new stuff. Their skills and approach are a constant inspiration, and I can’t say it enough times: It’s such an honor to get to work with this team. Every day, through ups and downs (and ups again).

So when Portent got nominated for five Search Awards, I was pretty dang proud, and a wave of high fives traveled through the office.

When we won the Best SEO Campaign of 2014, though, I was overjoyed. In addition to celebrating Ken Colborn, the primary SEO Specialist on this project, I want to point out our entire team’s efforts. Marketing campaigns only succeed with collaboration. Everyone at Portent helps with these projects: Project managers, account managers, content folks, technical and UX SEOs, offsite and social. Everyone.

Thanks folks. You earned this one.

Update: If you want to learn what we did to win the Best SEO Campaign of 2014, checkout our RealTruck.com case study.

The post Search Awards 2014 – Best SEO Campaign appeared first on Portent.

Google rolls out custom affinity audiences ad tool for targeting very specific groups of people

We’ve been researching this for a few years now. We started showing our results when I babbled about random affinities and such a few years back at MozCon. Right now Google is discussing this in terms of paid ads, but I strongly suggest getting in line with best practices on the organic and social side. There’s one crucial action to take:

Clearly define relationships between content

1. Mark up products, etc. Use related to in your product info.
2. Link articles to related material using, well, links.
3. But also use is based on.
4. Mark up reviews.
5. Make sure you’re doing it right using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool.
6. Use OGP, because it can’t hurt.

Oh, and read carefully between the lines when Google says, “we don’t need authorship anymore.”

In the past, we’ve learned that “we don’t need” is very different from “it won’t help.” I’m not a conspiracy theorist — Google isn’t just messing with us (well, I prefer not to think so) — but they have a lot of different issues to juggle, from spammers to search quality to resources. Keep using this stuff.

It’s just smart

Even if I’m 100% completely utterly wrong, these are the right things to do. They help with SEO. They help with social. They future-proof your content. And, they’ll make you the talk of the town at every nerd party. These steps take very little time. Go do ‘em.

Read a bit more

A few points of clarification, and why we’ve seen this coming for a while. If you want to read how I think this came about, read these bits:

All about dispersed citation

My Whiteboard Friday about random affinities: The IdeaGraph

And my YouMoz article: Growing Your Audience With Random Affinities

Where it’s all going

I can’t say “HELL YES WE NAILED IT BABY THIS IS WHY WE’RE CALLED PORTENT!!!!!” I’m sure Google is taking this in other directions. They’re only talking about this in the context of paid advertising.

But if you look at the Knowledge Graph, In-Depth Articles and other developments, you can see Google, Facebook and others are in a race to connect ideas using more than words and links. And everything we need to do to capitalize makes sense, anyway.

Like always, if you help Google achieve their goal, they’ll return the favor. Make relevance measurement easier, and they rank you. Make random affinities detection easier, and that will probably pay off, too. It’s up to you.

The post Google Custom Affinities Is Here: What You Should Do appeared first on Portent.

Look at this expert search result!

Then, over two years later, it happened. First, Authorship pictures were significantly reduced. Then they disappeared entirely. Next was the data from Webmaster Tools. Finally, a modest Google+ post formally announced its death. This is the way Google authorship ends; not with a bang but a whimper.

Upon hearing this grim news, I mustered the strength to send an email to my fellow Portent marketers to get their thoughts and predictions about the death of Authorship. What’s different now? Why did it happen? What does its death mean? Did it ever really mean anything in the first place?

Why did it happen?

The first thing many asked was “why?” Why did they do this to us. Marianne Sweeney, our own SEO/UX expert gave her insight on this:

“Google is a for-profit company. I believe that they initiated the enthusiasm for Authorship to build participants for their social network. They have failed miserably to draw close to Facebook’s membership numbers and so have decided that the cost of processing results with this feature does not warrant the benefit that they are getting.”

Another one of our SEOs, David Portney, is suspicious of Google’s motives:

“I’m not the only one who finds it pretty interesting that the death of Google Authorship markup does not include Publisher markup… but can it be far behind? Same for Google Plus altogether?”

For me, the main take away from both Marianne and David is that Google wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t somehow making more money. How that is, exactly, is the question. Perhaps our VP of Search and PPC expert, Elizabeth Marsten, has the answer:

“More space for ads.”

How will it impact websites and authors?

“Is it really dead or just keywords dead, which is not dead at all, but just not something you can’t track anymore? ” – Meegan Kauffman, Content Strategist

The impact of this is difficult to say since, unfortunately, none of us at Portent are also Google. But a few Portentites did have some thoughts about this, starting with our CEO and Overlord, Ian Lurie:

“Google is being carefully vague about this. “They’re no longer processing this data” but we should still use schema markup. And they’re still using publisher markup? My gut tells me they’re still tying citations together across the internet, and this markup is still playing a role. They’re likely seeing abuse, and want to nip it in the bud.”

Marianne similarly predicts that the data driving authorship may still play a role:

“This is hard to predict as it was not so much the Authorship use but the association with Google+ that seemed to enhance ranking during Google’s fascination with social annotation phase. Authors may notice a drop in traffic to their sites from searchers that actually clicked on the thumbnail image or the More from link in the SERP blurb. “

Another of our SEOs Katilin McMichael, saw a silver lining many people were skipping over:

“Google+ profile pics still show up, if they’re in your circles. I think that’s a distinction most people miss. “

While this may not seem significant, people should remember that the default setting in Google search is to have your results personalized. This means that if your active on Google+ your activity still affects people in your circle. As a matter of fact, since sharing a post still actually puts your profile picture in search results, you could argue that this move highlights the person who shares a post on Google+ even more than the author that actually wrote the post! And down the rabbit hole we go…

What will you miss most?

For whatever reason, the Authorship show has come to an end. And, as with all endings, opinions differed. I asked the folks at Portent if they wanted to share any parting words before heading back to our respective corners of the Internet.

“[I’ll miss] the image of the author in the SERP. I actually found it to be useful amongst the noise.” – Elizabeth Marsten

“Nothing. Now I can delete my neglected Google+ page.” – Marianne Sweeney

“The awkward headshots” – Mike Fitterer, Account Wrangler

“My thumbnail made me look fat, so good riddance.” – Braxton Kellogg – Social Media Diva

In the end, though, our Social Media Strategist Madelaine Kellman probably summed up the number one concern for most all of us consultants out there;

“This was my biggest argument for a brand to actually use Google+.”

I guess we’ll see if Google sees things the same way.

What are your thoughts about Google’s shutdown of authorship? What will you miss most about it? Share your thoughts and concerns in the comments below.

The post Team Portent Bids Farewell to Authorship appeared first on Portent.

I agree with my fellow search colleagues in the area of outrage, it’s just not acceptable what is being taken away in favor of a murkier, harder to control setting in terms of managing your keyword list. Some of us were using true exact match in a very specific and profitable manner and this loss of control seems senseless.

For example, we have a couple of clients that have a huge brand name, brick and mortar stores, online presence and a rabid social media community. We’ve been using the exact match of their one word name to dispel same named entities and direct traffic to the appropriate places, at a great CPC and high CTR. Everyone wins in this scenario, Google gets money for the clicks (instead of organic), users find what they’re looking for and we get the visits for Google at a great rate with the corresponding transactions.

So that brought me back to the WHY. Seriously, WHY?

The default setting for new campaigns is close variants, so only those that are well versed in PPC marketing would know to not only change that setting  but also why you would want to change it. Additionally, the advanced search community practitioners number far less than those out there new to running their own campaigns for their business, in house or otherwise, so what would it hurt to leave that level of control available for those that know how to use it?

The claim by Google is that only 7% of queries are misspellings and that we’re missing out on those queries. I would say that if I had two campaigns, one for that true exact match and one for the rest, would I not I still get that query anyway? The claim that it would “simplify” things and therefore you would only need one campaign with the close variants argument ignores that now we’re going to have to comb through search query reports (which aren’t available in real time) to add negative keywords, after the fact. And after we may have paid for a click or two as well, which if you deal in $100+ clicks is just not OK.

So, again, WHY?

The conspiracy theorist in me started going to a couple of different places; the timing, surprise and overall oddness of this change just isn’t sitting right. At least with enhanced campaigns it was clearly a money thing. (It’s always a money thing, but that trail was a lot easier to follow.)

1. Rolling this change out in September, right before holiday, means that Google will be capitalizing on matching more ads to queries, driving up clicks/cost as traffic volumes increase.
2. Google’s filed a few patents focusing on entity names, relationships between queries and intent and their database about entities (especially since acquiring Freebase) has swelled to over 250 million. This means that they can match a query for “Dec” to “December” and “Michael Jackson” to whether or not you mean the singer or the Homeland Security guy. Check out Bill Slawski’s recent article on this.
3. Then check out how Knowledge Base Entities can be used in searches– these example queries may be longer and in question form like, “what is the movie where Scarlett Johansson is the computer” and more likely will trigger the result you’re looking for based on the additional attribute information given in the query, especially when checked against their Knowledge Base. Whereas if you were to search for “Her” as a keyword, the SERP could be very different looking. Are they trying to close that gap so that they can start showing ads on those longer queries more often? It’s very unlikely that you’ve bid on that phrase in a keyword list.
4. The accuracy and quality of matching has improved in AdWords immensely in just the last few years.  Stop and think about what “broad” match meant in 2007 and the types of queries that would match the keywords on your list versus how it works now in 2014. This is probably where the confidence is coming from in a move like this. If the search query report still resembled anything like 2007 with a broad match, people would have stopped using the platform.
5. How long do you think it is before we get “intent” or “informational” as bidding options? Or something along those lines? Aren’t we already kind of doing that with Google Shopping and Product Listing Ad units?

My hope is that we (the search community) are able to change Google AdWords’ mind on this loss of control, because as long as people still type words into a search box, keywords are still relevant, and until we are in a place where we can control these intent, entity and attributes like keywords, we’re still going to need that level of control.

Sign the petition here, if you haven’t already.

The post Unexpected Loss of Control: Google AdWords Exact Match Controversy appeared first on Portent.

I’m back as CEO of Portent after six months as Chairman and Principal Consultant. I’m damned happy about it, too. Here’s why:

1. We hit our goals. Steve came on board to get our business house in order. Frankly, I suck at that. Steve is great at it. He got it done. At that point, he could see Portent needed me back in the job, doing what I love.
2. The bear left. I’ve said that running an agency is like wrestling with a s–t covered bear. I got some time to wash the stink off. After 19 years, I needed that. In another 19, I’ll need it again.
3. Job reboot. A founder CEO can really suffer from job creep. I was CEO, client troubleshooter, head SEO, head writer, head strategist, executive team… It was just bad. With time away I was able to ‘reboot.’ It was like moving to a new town as a teenager. I left all of the bad habits behind. I’m ready to create new ones!
4. A fantastic leadership team. Portent’s strong leadership team has gotten even better. I can absolutely rely on them. No more job creep for me.
5. Job clarity. I reread The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. Oooohhh. So that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. Well, since I rebooted, I can start off right.
6. Impostor syndrome in remission. I realized I may actually know what I’m doing. It’s amazing how much a few days of feeling competent can motivate a guy.

My job, this time around

So I’m back as CEO. But it’s different. This time, my job is:

1. Mad Prophet of Portent Culture, which you can read about here
2. Speaking and writing, like always. I’m an addict.
3. Staying in the clouds and dirt. Gary Vaynerchuk can explain.
4. Helping the entire team focus on the same ‘Portent-ness’ that’s gotten us this far.

This seems to be the right job description: My second tenure as CEO has so far been flawless. 2-3 weeks without a world-crushing blunder, or making someone cry, or curling up under my desk in a ball. Nice!

Seriously, I’m excited. We’ve got a lot of great stuff going on. I’m back in the corner office, being deliberate about defining my job.

And I like the view from here just fine.

The post Yep. I’m back. appeared first on Portent.