Introduction

As this was part of a panel (with Shira Abel of Hunter and Bard, Jon Sumroy of National Positions and our fearless moderater Sam Michelson of Five Blocks) I wanted to focus quite specifically on reputation in the search results; rather than the social media sphere in order to prevent too much overlap.

My perspective on ORM in the search results (and therefore the wider content/reputation messages these results point to) is not about trying to “control” search results, but more about a strategic approach to message-management; with content-strategy, message position and communication tools being the essential stages to managing a campaign.

This Sunday is the annual SMX (search marketing expo) Israel.SMX is a fantastic, global search conference, which takes place in many locations throughout the year. I’ve been lucky enough to attend the London event for the past couple of years, and this year will be speaking at the SMX Israel conference on two subjects; namely Online Reputation Management, and Mobile Search practise.

Tickets have already sold out, so if you are interested in further SMX events, I’d definitely recommend an early calendar reminder! I’m sure that for those that can’t attend, there will be tweeting and blog coverage, so that you can follow some of the content online. The hashtag is #SMXIsrael.

I can’t reveal too much about the content of my presentations at this stage, however for those undecided as to which sessions they will attend, here’s the full schedule, and a brief description of my presentations – to help you decide either way.

Online Reputation Management – My perspective is that there’s generally no such thing as bad publicity; it’s all about message management and I’ll explain some of my favourite rapid response tools for such message management.
Mobile SEO – I’m talking about Google’s Serendipitous Search product (a mobile, opt-in service, currently in development under Marissa Mayer) and explaining what data-types and technologies would be required to realise this as it is currently described.

I’m very much looking forward to this event, as it will be a great opportunity to get to meet fellow professionals whose’ content and industry contributions I’ve been enjoying over these past years; including Barry Schwartz, conference organiser, Search Engine Land News Editor and Executive Editor of Search Engine Roundtable. I’m also looking forward to meeting fellow speakers, such as Branko Rihtman of Rank Above who I’ve been speaking to for a couple of years (via Twitter) but am still yet to meet!

In my last role, we had a number of internal tools that I’ve had to find replacements for or just stop using the equivalent of. As a result, it’s made me think closely about the tools that I needed to be bringing across, look for some more modern variants in some cases, as well as making sure I find some new ones to help with the day to day role.

Some of these are SEO specific, and others are more general useful tools to aid productivity, but I thought that this would be a decent topic to write my first blog for theMediaFlow on. I hope you find some of them useful, and be prepared for a fairly long list!

SEO/Search Marketing Tools:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider -

This tool has changed my working life immeasurably for the better. I first started talking to the Screaming Frog tool about this whilst it was in development well over a year ago now, as I was looking for a tool that could help me check with the implementation of the canonical tag across a website.

From an on-site audit perspective, nothing beats this for me. You can evaluate titles, descriptions, keywords, headings, canonical tags, internal link patterns. You can review specific inlinks and anchor texts to specific pages, review broken links and links passing through internal redirects. I’m sure that there are plenty of elements that I am still not getting the full benefits from still, but this is a tool I love and recommend incredibly strongly that you try it if you haven’t already.

Google Keyword Tool - I’ve used lots of keyword analysis tools over the years, and found most of them fatally flawed by the data sets supplying the information. Who knows, they may have got better over the years, but I have my doubts (let me know in the comments if there are any worth having a look at).

I don’t exactly trust the data that this tool gives as the potential traffic levels available on terms are rarely anything like what the exact match data suggests is possible. However, I do find that in terms of comparative volumes between phrases that this is a useful indicator of how a keyword might perform in terms of traffic potential.

Excel - I definitely need to get better with spreadsheets, as I’ve been known to tear my hair out at times, but where would I be without Excel? 2012 is the year where I am really going to get my head around better spreadsheet usage.

I know a large number of the SEOs are talking about learning to code this year, but for me, maximizing and improving my Excel usage is a considerably higher priority.

Already though, I wouldn’t be without it, and its an essential part of the Search Marketers tool kit.

Raven Tools - in particular this is replacing the internal tools that I have previously used.

I have a long way to go before I get to grips with everything that its possible to do with Raven – I’ve mostly thus far been using it for the rank checking & competitive intelligence elements for campaigns that I am working on a the moment, and am planning on spending a lot more time getting to grips with all the extra features over the coming weeks and months.

Header Status Checkers – I actually tend to vary my use between 2 tools, the HTTP Status Codes Checker and check your server result codes. I find it useful to double check the results from time to time, and I don’t always find they give precisely the same data.

GSiteCrawler - this has been mostly superseded for me now with the additional features being added to the Screaming Frog tool, but this is one that I’ve historically had a lot of use from. I used to use it to create XML sitemaps (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider), spotting duplicate content issues (now a task for the Screaming Frog Spider) and… ok, maybe I don’t really need to be using this one anymore – if you don’t have a paid subscription for the SF SEO Spider, then it could be useful for creating fairly big XML sitemaps.

Google Analytics & Google Webmaster Tools - goes without saying really!

Google URL Builder - A handy tool for tagging links up for campaigns.

Google Analytics Configuration Tool - This is a newly released tool from the Raven Tools team to help configure Google Analytics in the way that you need for your website. It has options for helping you to setup Google Analytics accounts for websites with multiple subdomains, track multiple domains in one account as well as configuring site search and 404 tracking. It also helps you to setup Goals for the website, using event tracking methods, helps you to track Facebook page traffic and has a URL Builder.

I’ve actually not used this yet beyond a couple of tests, but can see plenty of uses for this in the future and can definitely see how simple this could make configuring some of these options.

Piwik - This is a new one to me, but I’ve been starting to have a look at this open source analytics package since starting at theMediaFlow. It seems to broadly collect the same sort of information as I am used to seeing in Google Analytics, without Google having access to that data specifically.

MajesticSEO - The link analysis tool that I am most familiar with, I regularly use this one. Useful for identifying potential problems in your backlink profiles, performing competitor intelligence and comparisons. So much data available to be looking at it can be a little daunting at first, but once you get your head around what’s on offer its a valuable resource.

OpenSiteExplorer - Since the demise of the Yahoo Site Explorer, this has been my go-to for quick link spot checks. It also does some good comparisons and visualisations of the data.

Link Research Tools - I’ve historically only really used free tools and MajesticSEO for backlink analysis and have enjoyed having access to these Link Research Tools to review that data from a slightly different source

Cognitive SEO Tools - this is a fairly new tool, and one that is certainly new to me. However, I’ve started to play around with the data that this is collecting for a few clients of late and have really liked the data visualisation that you can produce from it. I suspect that as I start to use this a bit more in the future that I will be finding plenty of additional uses for it, as it seems to have a lot of additional features beyond the link analysis elements that I’ve been using it for mostly so far.

Schema Creator - I actually only found this tool today, but I can see this being really useful for using Microdata as set out by schema.org to mark up People, Products, Events, Reviews and more. It gives you a preview and then the HTML to copy and paste where you want to use it.

Google Rich Snippet Testing Tool - Well, once you’ve implemented schema for your reviews (and recipes which I’ve used a fair bit too), you want to make sure that its possible for it to display with those 5 star reviews in the SERPs. Drop a URL into here and see how Google *might* display your rich snippets. It’s also useful to find any problems that you might have with your code to help you get these working properly. Rich snippets are everywhere in search results at the moment and seem to have fewer barriers for entry at the moment, so now is the time to get them on your site!

Google SERP Snippet Optimiser - I’ve loved the SEOmofo SERP snippet optimization tool since i first stumbled across it. It lets you put your title, description and URL in and generate a preview of how that snippet might look when its live on a Google search.

WHOIS Domain Tools - Always useful to do a bit of snooping. Find out details on the Whois record, registration details and some hosting information on websites you want to know more about.

First Link Checker - I’ve used this tool for a number of years now; it lets you look at the links outgoing on a page and flags to you when you link multiple times to the same URL. It can be useful to identify when you might be over-linking internally to a page on your site – I particularly use this a lot on website home pages or specific pages that I want to investigate further.

SEO Browser - Another old one, but I still find it useful to have a quick look at text only views of a page from time to time.

Hitwise Intelligence Dashboard - Whilst this isn’t a tool as such I tend to find myself checking this data a couple of times a month. I find its search engine share statistics particularly valuable to check in on (it always amuses me as well that Google has the top 2 slots here, with .co.uk and .com engines).

Assorted Productivity & “Other” Tools:

Percentage Calculator - I used to get a lot of stick for this one being in my bookmarks, and yes, I can calculate percentages in excel. But this has been in my bookmarks forever, and for a quick and easy percentage calculation that I don’t want to attempt in my head, I always visit here.

Skype - to keep in touch with those around that I need to be able to communicate with at all times (it’s mostly a smaller extension of my Twitter network).

ToodleDo - I resisted using this in my last place of work, but particularly now, where I am working in multiple locations, the importance of a to-do list that syncs everywhere I go has grown to be invaluable. Throw in the iphone and ipad app and I can access my to do list wherever I am in the world. Much better than the post it notes and scraps of paper that used to litter my desk space.

Evernote - Another app that I’ve started to use as a result of working more frequently in multiple locations (and the primary location that I have written this blog from), Evernote allows you to write notes and attach data to it, and have a central storage and access to that wherever you go, on all the devices that I own. In tandem with Dropbox and Toodledo, these are keeping me organised at the moment.

Dropbox - I’ve used dropbox every now and again over the years, but not really with any seriousness. However, since starting here, having an online storage space where I can access what I am working on everywhere that I am working has become more important. Again, using iphone and ipad apps has proved invaluable whilst out and about

Google Chrome Extensions:

I made the switch to Google Chrome about 18 months ago for the most part, although of course keep other browsers to test differences in SERPs and the like. I regularly make use of the following Chrome Extensions to help make SEO’ing that little bit easier!

SEO Site Tools - A fantastic extension for Chrome, my main browser based tool. Contains a ton of offsite and onsite data about a wealth of factors, it lets you have a quick snapshot of a pages primarily important on page items. A must have for Google Chrome using SEOs.

Pinterest Right Click - Not a search marketing tool at all I guess, but I have really enjoyed adding things to my Pinterest boards – particularly since I found this extension that allows you to right click on an image and pin it without any faff.

PageRank - Pretty simple extension – displays the PageRank of a page. Maybe I shouldn’t be looking at it with any credibility, but hey, I still like to know.

XML Tree - I didn’t like how Google Chrome displayed XML sitemaps when I looked at them, and this makes them more usable and readable

Number Search Engine Results - Does what it says on the tin, and numbers search results for you – simple!

Google Global - an extension to let you see Google results in different regions. I often forget that I have this extension, but it is handy for some quick research on how your results might appear in other locations when I do remember to use it!

Evernote Web Clipper - in conjunction with using Evernote I’ve been using this to clip articles to Evernote for later reading.

Honourable Mention: 

Spotify… ok, this isn’t a search marketing tool at all. But everyone needs some background noise to help the day on its path. I’ve also been enjoying starting to build some playlists for sharing, and will be tweeting about some more of these over the coming months. I am someone that isn’t a complete iTunes hater, and have previously run my music collection mostly through that, but similarly to some of the other things I’m using at the moment, the accessibility between multiple locations is growing in its importance for me these days.

Finishing Up: 
For things like Twitter & Facebook, unlike many search marketers, I actually just use the web interfaces. I find that I can dip in and out of the activities on these platforms much more simply as a result of closing down the browser windows, rather than receiving a barrage of notifications when there have been new updates and getting distracted all the time. For the same reason, I have notifications switched off for most things, particularly email.

Hopefully not all of these were completely the usual suspects for this sort of post, although I appreciate that a lot of these are popular tools and bookmarks. I’m always on the look out to develop this toolset further though, so I’d love to hear if there are some obvious tools and bookmarks that I should be adding – please let me know in the comments.

Pete is one of the most personable and well-thought of people in the SEO industry; with a reputation for honesty, loyalty, customer-retention and some kick-ass SEO skills too! With five years experience of managing over 100 clients at Portsmouth based Vertical Leap, Pete’s a veritable old-hand in the industry.

Pete is going to be a great asset to theMediaFlow, and we are both super-excited about developing our client base and industry profile in the coming months. We’ve got an exciting conference-speaking schedule already lined up for Q1 2012 (more anon), plus a range of new clients to get cracking on in the next few weeks.

Please join me in welcoming Peter to the team!

iAnnounce

theMediaFlow were hired by iAnnounce to review current organic search performance to identify if there was any room for improvement.

Within six weeks of implementing the changes recommended by theMediaFlow organic search traffic grew 18%, with Google traffic increasing at an even greater rate of 20%. It is worth noting that existing levels of organic search traffic were already considerable therefore a 20% increase post-recommendations is a very significant number in absolute terms.

Getting decent citations and links from local websites should be a fundamental part of any local SEO strategy. I’m a firm believer that this should mean getting out and meeting real people and forming real relationships. Spurting out link requests all day long can drive pretty much anyone to despair. Getting involved in your local business community is a lot more enjoyable and can be really productive in terms of business development AND your local rankings. In fact, this is all about thinking way beyond just getting links. If you can build up real partnerships and earn a good local reputation, the links you need should follow.

What I’m not saying is that the normal methods of SEO and link building can just be forgotten about; making sure your website is SEO friendly and optimised correctly, whilst at the same time building your domain’s authority are still vital. But how about going the extra mile and making a real impact in your local area? If you can incorporate this into your existing online work, then you should be in a much stronger position to dominate the local search results.

So how can you go about making a start in taking your online efforts offline? I’ve personally been looking at ways in which I can improve our local presence at Go Search Marketing, and without too much effort found some pretty interesting ideas:

Networking Events

Just by searching for networking events in my local area, I immediately found quite a nice selection of organisations who host a variety of different networking events where local businesses can get to know each other. One of the most popular style of events I found were breakfast meetings where for the price of a decent breakfast you get to get to know other business owners over a plate of bacon, eggs and of course a fresh coffee.

Due to my standard pre 9am personality failure (just ask my wife), I thought I’d search for some other options and there were plenty around. Ranging from evening events, business awards and workshops, there are absolutely tons of ways that I could go out and start getting involved with other like minded business folk. Taking this back to local SEO, it shouldn’t be too hard to find people with websites that could be interested on working together on some content, or recommending each other’s services (via links). If all else fails then at least you’ve had some decent grub along the way.

Partnerships

It would be pretty unlikely if your local area didn’t feature some businesses with which you could potentially partner up with in some way. Even if it’s just a case of recommending related services, or coming to some agreement with regards to referring clients; there are always opportunities, you’ve just got to find them.

Even though your end goal might be to get some links, try to separate yourself as far as possible from that state of mind. When contacting someone for the first time try not to even mention links or anything to do with SEO. Instead, why not try asking if they’d like to meet for coffee sometime and seeing if there’s any possibility of getting involved and potentially helping each other out with business?

Local Community Projects

How about looking out for local community events and projects that your company can get involved with? If you’re reading your local press on a regular basis, you should easily be able to find some events or projects to help out with or maybe sponsor. For example, in my town every year we have a ‘Race for Life’ which helps to raise awareness for breast cancer. That’s a great opportunity to get involved and help out. Are there any small charities operating in your area? Small charities are usually really gratefully for any help they can get, so why not get in touch and see if you can help out a little?

There’s quite a lot of debate over whether it’s ethical or not to donate time or money to charity for the purpose of building links. My personal view is that it all depends on your attitude and relationship with the charity or local project. If you’re fully committed to helping out and being involved and you happen to get a few links for it, then to me that’s no problem.

Local Societies

Does your town or city have any clubs or societies that hold events? It would be quite unlikely if there was nothing going on at all. Often, smaller societies and clubs are on the lookout for new ideas for their events as they need to fill their calendar and keep their members entertained. It might be Worthing speaking to some of them to find out if there are any speaking opportunities, or maybe to find out if they are looking for anyone to sponsor any upcoming events.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about how SEO and online marketing needs to become more and more integrated with offline marketing and genuine relationship building. With all these great opportunities right on your doorstep, this is approach is none more true than with local search.

About me: I run Go Search Marketing, an SEO consulting business offering advice and services to SME’s and local businesses. Feel free to come and say hi or throw me any questions on twitter @jonquinton1

The UK Search Awards 2011 will take place on November 3rd at the prestigious Emirates Stadium and will bring together the biggest and brightest stars of the search marketing industry.

A total of 17 categories of awards are to be judged by some of the most experienced names in the search industry.

We’re thrilled to be short-listed for an award for Best use of Search – Retail, for our work with our client BathEmpire. We have some extremely tough competition from a number of agencies much older an larger than us, so even to be short-listed is an honour, and of course the awards night itself promises to be a riot.

I (Nichola, MD of theMediaFlow) do promise to follow-up with photographic evidence of all that transpires on the evening, which will be published on our Facebook page. I’m sure our table will be very well behaved.

On Thursday the 3rd November, The Emirates Stadium in North London, will play host to the first annual UK Search Awards.

The UK Search Awards 2011 is organised by Don’t Panic, in association with Manual Link Building and SEMPO and will cover a range of categories, from vertical sectors (travel and finance) to site types (retail, social media).

theMediaFlow will definitely be in attendence to support our industry peers and friends, and not least because we have been shortlisted for the award “Best use of search – retail”, for our work with BathEmpire.

Within six months of working on the BathEmpire website, theMediaFlow grew both visits and revenue from organic search traffic by over 1800%.

Panellists are;

Mikkel de Mib (our MC) – deMib

Richard Baxter - SEOGadget

Christine Church - KeyRelevance

Lasse Clarke Sorgaarde – MediaCom Denmark

Kevin Gibbons – SEOptimise

First up, Richard baxter…

Data is problematic in that it needs to be organised into actionable segments. How do we get from a data-set, to an information architecture?

Can we group keyword types together into an actionable “journey” as such?

Baxter demonstrates an example looking at “buy used audi s3 black london” and segments the token types e.g “buy” is an action, “new” is a condition (and so forth). However before we can get on to this segmentation principle we need to understand the demand curve. (Specific to product).

Using such data (typed) gives a richer understanding, providing we have the analytical tools to do so; which leads us to excel and a couple of recommended commands.

FIND()

ISERROR()

NOT()

Baxter shows a spreadsheet with segmented query tokens per column, e.g. Make, colour, action etc.

{=NOT(ISERROR(FIND([KEYWORD-TYPES],$A2)))}

This query checks an array for strings that can be found common to groups, which can then be charted to give insight into demand per token type.

Increase data sets – Improve your perspective

• Download all of your analytics data
• Use he suggest API
• Capture rankings
• Build sweet data models

Why is this awesome?

Such data reveals more about discover mechanics e.g. “how” do people search for my product.

Christine Churchill

Christine will be focusing on tools and is a huge proponent of the use of varied tools for a greater perspective, and varied data-sources.

Google KWT = Christine points out that in Sept 2010 GKWT dropped “partner sites” data at this time.

Christine gives an overview tool of some of her favourite tools, from Google tools to SEOMoz.

Lasse Clarke Sorgaarde

Preso is entitled “Searchenomics”, so hoping for some interesting data observations.

Setting the scene Lasse points out that first and fastest is not the winning technique in today’s market-place.

Using a supermarket shelf analogy Lasse compares the decision funnel to position on shelf. Essentially we need to funnel people to “eye level” goods. Purchase intent is a key principle to understand.

Understanding the relationship of term type to customer intent is key to driving ROI – which is really the most sensible objective.

Kevin Gibbons – SEOptimise

Kevins Preso “10 Steps to Target Long Tail Traffic”

How do we optimise for this traffic when Google themselves say 20 – 25% of queries have never been recorded before! How on earth do we understand/predict/optimise for them?

Kev shows us a case study for Audley Travel, for whom they increased longtail traffic by 181% – such traffic being good quiality with high propensity to convert.

1. Find common trends KW add-on – good example looking at GTrends “how, why, when, who, where”

2. Answer industry-specific FAQ’s

3. Pick out “themes” in GA

4. Use advanced segments in GA e.g. only visits from 4+ token keywords

5. Use PPC data (impression and SoV) – even if just for a month as a data collection exercise. (Broad and phrase to get best data-spread.)

6. Use multiple tools (Hitwise data is explicitly mentioned)

7. Estimate average CTR, as this varies wildly in the tail.

8. Use excel to predict traffic values

9. Filter KW into thematic groups

10. Don’t overthink it and go too long tail – work smarter.

Now for the Q&A

A question from the audience about PPC data tests – diffs with seasonality in short-terms tests. How can other data sources be used to normalise?

Kev agrees this is a problem, and recommends Hitwise for best data sample for normalising and also points out to exclude brand terms (inc. missplells).

Q – what about webmaster tools data? Does it include paid search?

Kev – no

Richard – avoid Google Keyword Tool for anything other than a yardstick measure.

Q How important is first to market on a new KW e.g. “2011 car insurance”?

Richard – there does seem to be some advantage to being first with content.

Christine – recommends to back up with other marketing techniques e.g. twitter etc.

Kevin – it’s important to get this is out as soon as possible. Citing an example of a Billy Connelly TV program, where they pushed out client content months in advance, beating ITV themselves when the show was aired.