Alchemy Viral

Search Optimisation

Optimise your website for web search – not just the search engines. Look beyond Google to ensure your brand is searchable to benefit relevant and loyal people looking for your offer
Audience Outreach

Reach out to audiences and build an online reputation to increase relevant and loyal traffic to your site
Reputation Bureau

Your reputation is everything, defend/protect your business life online with Reputation Bureau.
Lead Generation

We generate qualified leads and ecommerce sales using our network of partners and platforms

Audience Modelling

There is a great deal missing in todays digital environment. We have all this web analytics information yet is is quite shocking that despite the advances in thinking and data at our disposal, that we still don’t know who our audiences are. Part of the problem is that people seem to have forgotten what a target demographic is and perhaps some of them have been promoted through the ranks from being account managers or professional copywriters. Even if you’re an SEO or into analytics, knowing which source of traffic is worth cultivating or buying still doesn’t cut it.

Perhaps I am being harsh, bear with me here. We’re inundated with best practices for Google Analytics, Link Building, site design and usability. Has anyone bothered to ask the following?

What trends can we share with the public at large? (you can feed this to your PR agency)
Who’s buys our Rolex watches?
Who do they buy them for?
Where do they live?
What are their income levels?
What is their gender?

Site analytics tells you about everything apart from the fundamental listed above, say:

Time on site
average pages per visit
Search phrases
Landing pages
Referring sites
Geography down to city/town
Device
Browser

Great stuff, but none of the above gives you a handle on:

How do I brief my graphic designer on designing the ad or landing page creative?
How do I brief my copywriter on the audience I’m writing to? i.e. are they old, young? Are they rich/poor?
Where do I show these ads or run radio broadcasts? Which target media?
What do I share with journalists to make my brand an authority?
What stories can I tell to make my data into a video, whitepaper or infographic?

Fortunately you can overlay this data using analytics. There is a lot of clever technology that can boost conversions but that only happens once you get the user to the website. But what about a solution that helps you get the target audience to the website in the first place? Surely making smart advertising decisions is what will make you a hero in the first place?

Until someone gets a grip over their analytics with demographics, they are fumbling in the dark. Yes you can do split testing, create surveys, which is expensive and inefficient when you consider the data is right under your nose. As Hannibal Lecter says,

you have looked but you have not seen.

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What your Penguin 2.0 analysis is worth

Your Penguin 2.0 analysis is probably not worth a great deal. Here are current theories and analysis that I’ve read around on the internet. So far we have:

Winners and Losers

Really? Okay so we have a bunch of scrapers masquerading as cloud based SEO software telling us who the winners and losers are from Penguin 2.0 – and what is that worth? Okay, you know theoretically which types of sites benefitted form the recent update. The only problem with these winner loser analyses is that this is unlikely to be based on actual traffic numbers. The number of times I’ve been disappointed by analytics data based on scraping the net is woefully heart breaking and doesn’t amount to anything.

For example, let’s take the analysis undertaken by SEO Clarity, they looked at over 300,000 keywords for 333,000 unique domains. The conclusion was brands win and lead gen sites plummet and if you want to better, look at your link profiles and do better link building. Whoopee do, I never heard of that one before.

Yet none of this analysis was based on their client data which would have been far more useful as they would have the organic search traffic. Nothing was offered as to what it was about lead gen sites that suffered. As for brands benefitting, what was their definition of the brand? At least when Bryson Meunier shot down Aaron Wall, he defined brands before finding the data.

Searchmetrics also used a winners and losers, which is equally useless. Perhaps it’s best these SaaS providers didn’t offer more detailed explanations. they have the data but not the skills to use it. Frankly, I’m surprised a highly respected SEO site such as Search Engine Land came anywhere near it.

Articles

Although the article by Kristine doesn’t appear to be based on data other than her own client data. At least it didn’t pretend to reveal the secrets of Penguin. She simply offers some things to look out for and dispells the myth of content marketing being the new SEO. And she’s quite right. It has always been about having content on your site that is link worthy.

Still we are none the wiser as to what has driven the latest static algorithm update.

Deep Dives

Then we have supposed deep dives into Penguin that claim to offer reasons as to why a site like Cheapo Air apparently got slammed by the recent update. To be fair, at least they actually attempted to use data to pick out the variables that attempt to explain Penguin. The study looks into a good number of characteristics about the link profiles, however there is something still missing.

How we could do so much better

First off, it’s too early at this stage to evaluate Penguin unless you have a lot of search traffic data. The higher the SEO traffic site, the shorter the time period for evaluation. There I let the cat out of the bag. We should be assessing the algo by organic search traffic data. As with any sensible engineering analysis, we’ll also need to smooth out the cyclical noises that often happens with daily traffic. Then we need to do a before and after, with a sensible timeframe assuming we have enough search traffic. Plus, should we be looking at other elements of the linking pages such as web design, content and site architecture? It’s all links, links, links but it seems everyone has forgotten the basic premise of SEO being site design and content of the actual site being evaluated.

Watch this space

Our Penguin 2.0 analysis is in the making…

SOPR = Winning SEO in 2013 and beyond

So yes I’ve done quite a few posts in the past about how to achieve success in SEO but since I’m giving a speech on this in the near future, what better excuse than a recap?

Audience – that’s right you haven’t built a site yet you’re being advised to think about the audience. Okay so assuming you have then you have to think about having the relevant copy and site architecture covering:

Home page – the most complicated page of all
Service/Product Landing Pages (Sell Sell Sell! these are a euphemism for Doorway pages – Google knows this SEOs are in denial), you can add FAQ, buyer guide pages that are sub pages
About the company, charity or organisation
Key personell like the company directors
Newsroom
Blog
Contact
Investor relations – why not?

Web design – you have the content, now you have to make it look nice and think about integrating all the share buttons,navigation, colours, logo etc.

Web Development – which CMS? Wordpress? Either way you’ll want something non computer people can administer and makes the content fairly searchable. Just follow some protocols. Use custom web design themes as it is a strong signal to the search engines that you give enough of a damn to be unique and not use the same templates used by spammers.

Audit – SEO is the journey not the destination, chances are things got overlooked during development stage so do an audit to iron out these issues.

PPC - Start taking out PPC advertising, you’ll soon learn which commerce phrases are working for you.

Blog – start blogging on topical things that relate to your industry. If you don’t want to depend on links. Start hiring a team of reporters, editors, photographers, video camera crew so you can become the go to source of content for your industry. Otherwise it’s time for link building.

Link building – do what every SEO does and start submitting your site to worthwhile directories including Yahoo! and BOTW. Do create useful sites hosted elsewhere especially if you have corporate restrictions or different audience segments that deserve a more bespoke and dedicated experience.

Content Marketing – Do some research, produce the creative, and then do some PR. The creative could be a whitepaper, infographic, video or something else.

Predictive modelling - Start correlating different elements of your entire website to ecommerce revenue and organic search traffic. There’s a very good chance that you’ll find swetspots nobody else will find and therefore you’ll have the bleeding edge when it comes to website optimisation.

Broadcast PR – Google is reputation based so you can be sure that having more brand searches against your name compared to competitors in your space is very strong indicator of your PR value and thus is likely to be reflected in your subsequent rankings. Being mentioned on the radio, TV and press will increase your organic brand traffic and thereby positively impact your rankings.