SEO has long been perceived as a natural, effective way to boost your rankings in search engines. And it still is – for the most part.

Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. Some days more drastically and noticeably than others, but nevertheless, it’s ever-evolving. As a result, some business owners are finding it increasingly difficult to rank for important, relevant keywords which would drive valuable traffic to their websites.

Following a logical process of deduction, if you’re not ranking, then you’re not getting any traffic. If you’re not getting any traffic, then you’re not generating any sales. If you’re not getting any sales, then you’re up the proverbial creek without the proverbial paddle.

However, rather than actually trying to improve their own website to fix the issue, some find it easier to simply tear down those around them until they’re the last ones standing. Enter negative SEO.

To break it down simply, negative SEO is when one website either:

• Hacks your website and makes changes that Google would perceive as bad for rankings
• Reports your website for illegal activity (regardless of whether or not it’s true)
• Purchases or builds spam links to your website
• Creates fake negative Google reviews about your business from fake accounts

Sounds scary, right? You need to make sure that you’re aware if any of your competitors are targeting you with negative SEO. Especially if you’re in a high position in the SERPs, ripe for attack from jealous wannabes. One way of doing this is via Webmaster Tools. If your website isn’t registered with Webmaster Tools, it should be. Immediately. Like, right now.

For a better understanding of negative SEO and how it works, I’d highly recommend watching this video:

Negative SEO isn’t a fallacy. It exists. Luckily for all of us, Google is actively trying to help solve this issue. Its latest major update, titled Google Penguin, was partially targeted at negative SEO. But until there is an external, reliable fail-safe, you need to take charge of protecting your website by constantly monitoring any activity affecting it.

In paid search, a successful campaign is all about having good aim. Good aim involves excluding the people who aren’t likely to convert from seeing your ads to reduce your wasted spend, resulting in incremental top line growth for your business.

Adding negative keywords to your paid search campaign may seem a simple solution for improving its aim, but most of the time this isn’t enough by itself. Other factors that you must also take into consideration are:

• The level of targeting
• Whether to use keywords or lists
• The different match types of your negative keywords

Level of Targeting

Negatives are a filtering tool used to limit your potential impressions, thus your level of targeting. At the highest level, you can exclude impressions for entire campaigns, e.g. luxury brands will commonly want to avoid wasting impressions on search queries containing the words “free” or “cheap”. Thus these words would be added as negatives at the campaign level.

Alternatively, you can exclude impressions at the ad group level. One instance where you might want to do this is if you are running a campaign for a branded products. The keyword “Mossimo Sweaters”, for instance, may trigger impressions for ads in the Mossimo brand ad group, the sweaters ad group,  or a custom ad group built around both the brand Mossimo and the product sweaters. If you want to spend all your budget on the custom ad group, you can add “Mossimo Sweaters” as a negative keyword to the brand and sweaters ad groups so they don’t appear for that keyword, leaving more impressions to be had by your custom ads.

Keywords or Lists?

There are two ways to add negatives: through keywords combined with a match type or by using keyword lists.

• Keyword lists: These allow you to create and save groups of your commonly used campaign negatives. You can find this in the Shared Library section of your Campaigns tab.
  
  Once you form a list of negative keywords, you can apply it to your campaigns more efficiently than adding each individual keyword one by one. This is also the best option for excluding frequently avoided terms (“cheap”, “free”, adult terms, etc.)
  

• Match type: By default, Google adds negatives as broad match, but you can use any match type (broad match, phrase match and/or exact match) to fine-tune your list of negative keywords. To learn more about the different match type options, click here.

Negatives for Other Ad Types

Each type of ad requires some degree of filtering to opt-out of potentially useless clicks.

• Product listing ads work by connecting your product feed from your Merchant Centre account to your ad. These also have negative keywords which can be useful for handling product specific queries, such as size, colour or material.
• Display campaigns have two types negatives: excluded placements and excluded audiences. Excluded placements ads allow you to filter your ads from specific websites and web pages you don’t want your ads to show on. For example, you might want to prevent your display campaigns from appearing on apps or mobile sites. And the excluded audiences function groups the people you have cookied with an AdWords tag (usually for remarketing purposes) whom you wish to distinguish from the rest of your ad viewers. A common example is to filter out those who have already converted from your remarketing campaigns.

How to Find New Negatives

Here are some less common ways to discover additional negatives which you can use for your campaign.

• Keyword Research Tool: Rather than just accepting the list of negatives or search queries that have been auto-suggested to you by Google, run them through the keyword research tool to come up with synonyms and related terms. This is particularly useful if you’re planning on using more restrictive match types with your negatives.
• Organic Keywords: Filter your organic keyword report in Google Analytics for any words that may have a lot of clicks but hardly any conversions.

Excluding Impressions Without Using Negatives

Even if you’ve built out an extensive negative list, you can filter the way your ads appear with by using a few advertising and conversion rate optimisation tricks.

Text ads are the best way to qualify people before they click. Is your product for small businesses? Then you should consider adding the price to your ad to attract or filter out price-conscious consumers.

If your business is geographically specific, make sure your ad clearly mentions your locations, so locals can opt in and others will opt out.

Much like eating healthy and getting enough exercise, adding and refining negatives is a never-ending commitment. You will constantly need to work at it in order to keep your paid search campaigns optimised and running as profitably as possible. The good news is that it gets much easier the more you practice. And once you get to master it, your expertise with paid search negatives will allow you to play at a much higher, aggressive, and more cost-effective level than your competitors!

The below was originally posted on www.mobilemediamarketing.com.au

In a time where mobile marketing is reaching critical mass and is well past due being part of any company’s overall marketing mix, I often hear the question of “How do I start with this channel?”

My answer to this is quite simple and if you considered it for long enough I’m sure you would reach the same conclusion.

When making marketing decisions for your company, they are almost always based (at least to some degree) on historical data. Contributing factors can include:

• Where your ads received the most interaction
• Where your ads generated the most sales
• Which one of your ads cost you the least
• Which one of your ads added the most value, or ROI

Your decisions have been adding value or else you wouldn’t be where you are now. However, if you don’t have any of this data (specific to the new strategy that you want to get into, such as mobile marketing), then your next best bet is to look at companies that have already taken the leap of faith, and apply the lessons of their experiences to your own business. Things to consider:

• Why did they do it?
• On what did they base their decisions?
• What costs did they incur?
• What was challenging about it?
• What did they find easy?
• Who did they get in touch with or speak to?
• Did they get help from other people/businesses?
• What wouldn’t they do again?
• What would they do again?

The last question you want to ask is probably the most important:

• What benefits or value adds did they receive from their campaign/strategy? Did it add to their bottom line? If not, why not?

The goal of all of this is to stamp your brand and authority across the mobile market before your competitors do. With an established foothold in this ubiquitous channel, you’ll doubtless be able to add to your company’s bottom line. Not to mention develop your professional reputation for being the first to implement a killer strategy.

Enlisting the help of a mobile marketing expert is another option you have to get started. They should have all the right tools to come up with a strategy and help you get your feet wet.

In my next post I’ll be going over the typical costs involved with mobile marketing, so stay tuned!

Microsoft recently announced that its search engine Bing will soon go live with some major changes. A few of the more noteworthy updates for what Microsoft has dubbed “the New Bing” include a new sidebar, a snapshot of related information, and improved search results.

The Sidebar

A collapsible right sidebar shows looping social results. From here you’re able to ask Facebook friends, as well as see information from experts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Foursquare and even Google+. This all-inclusive approach is in stark contrast to Google’s attempt to socialise search engine results with Search Plus Your World. Much of this design’s inspiration apparently came from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said “Don’t try to do social by building social on the side. Build it into the experience”.

In addition to its real-time activity feed, the sidebar has options such as asking friends, suggesting friends you might know, and referring people who know (the experts).

The Snapshot

Bing's Snapshot

The snapshot feature is very similar to how Google currently returns previews of Google Maps listings. It shows information such as reviews, directions, contact info, trading hours and more.

Improved Search Results

According to Microsoft, the new Bing should be much faster, less cluttered, and more relevant. Though these latest updates to its algorithm have a social focus, Bing will continue to show its core web results instead of cluttering its SERP with social updates. This allows Bing users to focus on the web links they need to get the information they want. With Bing surpassing Yahoo in search market share early this year in U.S., it is slowly edging closer to Google – though the Big G remains the dominant player.

The changes to Bing are slated for an early June release in the United States, with the rest of the world to follow shortly afterward.

On the second Sunday of May we honour and dedicate all our love to the woman who gave us life and shaped us into the person we are today.

So, besides valuable time together, what else were our mothers hoping for this year? Increasingly, our mums are getting techy on us! At least 58% of mums can work basic gadgets, with over 91% preferring to receive an iPad over flowers. Gone are the days, it seems, when your mother would ask you how to send an SMS. Here are some of the techy highlights for Mother’s Day this year:

[Via: TechBargains]

Now for the fun part! What awful name can we appoint to this new wave of mothers day gift giving? iMum? Mum 2.0? Leave your suggestions in the comments!

When people first start thinking about online marketing, the first thing that pops into their heads is getting tonnes of juicy Google traffic to make them more money online. But have you ever thought about what really happens to your website’s traffic?

Some important questions you should be asking about your website’s visitors are:

• Where do they click?
• Do they read your content? How much of it?
• What are their first impressions about your business?
• Do they come back?
• Do they even want to come back?

If you are a smart business owner who has installed Google Analytics and is regularly viewing the data, then well done! Give yourself a tick. If you have set up Goal Tracking within your Analytics, even better. Give yourself another tick!

Now it comes down to the nitty-gritty – now that you have the data, how do you go about improving your Goal Tracking conversion numbers? This process is called Conversion Rate Optimisation (commonly abbreviated to CRO). It is the scientific process of increasing the number of website visitors who turn into customers.

In this blog post, I would like to guide you through how E-Web Marketing performs CRO on our clients’ websites, so that you can understand the service better. You will even be able to adapt and implement some of our procedures yourself, in order to increase the numbers of sales and leads your business generates online.

The E-Web Marketing Methodology

 1.       Analyse

This step involves:

• Industry research
• Web analytics review
• Performance review
• Usability testing

Knowing what is going well and not so well will make conversion strategies and tactics most efficient. In this stage, understanding where visitors come from and what they do on the website will ensure that any changes made have maximum effect.

2.       Strategise

This step involves:

• Strategy formulation
• Data analysis
• Wire framing

A formulation of strategies is made from analysing the data collected. Here is where wireframes can be created to give an overview of what the changes will look like. These strategies are compiled into:

1. Written report
2. Live workshop

The live workshops have been a favourite so far among clients as they are more cost-effective, fast, and clients enjoy the interactive learning environment where they can bounce ideas around.

3.       Create

After the changes have been agreed on, it’s time to start implementing them. This step can include:

• Applying best practices
• Copywriting
• Design tweaks
• Web development

4.       Refine

Simple changes to seemingly trivial elements on a page, such as the colour of a button or wording of a heading, have been known to double the conversion rate of a page. However, sometimes these changes seem counterintuitive. The only way to make absolutely sure you are improving the conversion rate is by testing different variations of pages to a statistical level of confidence.  This is a process called A/B testing, whereby half of the visitors to your site are shown a control page (the current page) and the other half is shown a variation with a slight visual tweak.

This step may involve:

• Layout adjustments
• Message adjustments
• Copywriting fine tuning
• A/B and multivariate Testing
• Design tweaks

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should I spend money on CRO?

With CRO you can improve the number of sales and leads you get to your business without spending a cent more on advertising. Why pay to drive more traffic to your website when you aren’t even selling effectively to your current numbers of visitors?

How much does it cost?

This service with us starts at $2,500 and can be scaled to meet your website’s needs.

How much involvement is required from me?

Little to none. All that’s required from you is to approve changes to your website. We will however need involvement from your own web developer to implement the recommended changes. E-Web Marketing is not a web development company (though we can refer you to a suitable developer if required).

When will I see improvements?

Once changes have been implemented on your website, you will instantly see changes to your bounce, exit and conversion funnels in Google Analytics. The more dramatic the change, the more of an improvement you will see.

Do you have case studies and examples?

Yes. If you would like to see them, fill out our free proposal request form www.ewebmarketing.com.au/free-proposal and mention that you’d like to be sent some CRO case studies.

Are there tools out there you can recommend for me doing CRO myself?

One we would highly recommend is Usertesting.com – this website provides a cheaper alternative to usability testing done by professionals. We recommend running these tests at least once a month. CrazyEgg.com and Clicktale.com are other helpful tools.

My industry has low search volumes – will CRO work for me?

Yes. Traffic volumes don’t necessarily affect conversion rates, though they usually increase the time it takes to run an experiment.

What can I do in the meantime to improve my conversions?

You can first run your own automated CRO health check audit:

www.ewebmarketing.com.au/audit

It will give your business a score out of 100% for how well your website embodies 10 best practices of conversion rate optimisation. After you run through it, go through each best practice one by one to improve your score.

This CRO health check audit is something we have only just released – did you find it helpful? If you did or didn’t, please share your experiences and findings below so we can improve it if needed. And if you have any other questions about improving your conversion rate, or about E-Web Marketing’s CRO service, then we’d love to hear them!

What if I told you that you’re wasting your precious time on half the social media platforms you’re currently using? While social media has become one of the biggest touch-points between brands and their customers, far too often you find companies jumping head-first into the social pool, only to realise they had no idea just how deep it actually was. As any lifeguard will tell you, this is extremely dangerous – not to mention counter-productive.

Every social platform has its pros, cons – and above all, purpose. Before starting any activities, you should be researching where your target audience is most likely to be. Industries differ vastly from each other, and so do their consumers. Potential customers for Nike will have different habits (and use different social platforms) to Duracell. Connecting with your audience on the right network and on a personal level is key. Here’s a glimpse into each network, and the best uses for each:

Facebook

Facts and figures:

• Over 840 million users
• Largest segment is 21-24 year olds, accounting for around 30% of all users
• Facebook is a very casual, interactive network
  • Used to share photos, videos and random content that people find interesting (like blogs and music)
  • 250 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day
    • If your business is in a highly visually-oriented industry (e.g. the travel or fashion industries), then this could be a major advantage

Best used for:

• Companies with an interactive brand, product or service
• Companies with an engaged consumer base
• A business Facebook page can be a one-stop-shop for information
  • Latest events / services / products
  • Special offers
  • Good channel for customer feedback
  • Photos and videos associated with the brand
  • General engagement with fans

Twitter

Facts and figures:

• Over 140 million users
• Largest segment is 31-49 year olds, accounting for around 42.3% of all users
• Average of 340 million Tweets per day
• Can be used for quick, short updates about your brand, product or service
• Useful tool for responding to customer service queries

Best used for:

• Businesses with a lot to say, share and ask:
  • New developments
  • Upcoming launches
  • Latest sales
  • Major announcements or changes
  • Asking followers to provide their opinion on various topics
  • Finding and connecting with users who are interested in the same topics as your brand, product or service

LinkedIn

Facts and figures:

• Over 150 million users
• Largest segment is 35-44 year olds, accounting for around 23% of users
• Strictly a professional network
• Used to display professional accomplishments and connect with those in similar industries all around the world

Best used for:

• B2B brands, products and services
• Establishing connections with like-minded professionals in related industries
• Creating your own group and inviting like-minded professionals to share thoughts and information about the topic

Google+

Facts and figures:

• Over 100 million users
• 70% of users are male
• It’s still being used by a very technology-oriented crowd
  • Mostly those working in the engineering, web design and software development industries
  • It’s a good source to share interesting articles, blog posts and information relating to your industry
  • Thanks to Google’s latest algorithm changes, it now has an impact on your rankings too!

Best used for:

• Companies in the IT sector or any business in the technology industry

YouTube

Facts and figures:

• 3^rd most visited website, accounting for 10% of the internet’s traffic
• Receives 2 billion views per day
• Largest segment is 18-34 year olds, accounting for around 45% of users
• If it’s worth watching, then it has the potential to be shared virally very easily. This is an important point when creating videos for YouTube.

 Best used for:

• A video content sharing website, it can be used for almost any purpose imaginable. Sharing videos that are:
  • Educational
  • Informative
  • Humorous
  • Serious
  • Relevant to your business

There are more and more platforms being created on a seemingly daily basis. These five are merely the giants in the established hierarchy of the social media world. Use them wisely, and they can put you in a powerful position with your fans. But with power comes great responsibility: if you misuse a network, ignore your consumers, or approach them through the wrong channel, it could end up burning you.

Day 1: The Firewalk

Burning down the coals for the Firewalk

Fear is the biggest factor that stops us from growing. We often only do what we believe we can, not what we are really capable. This makes it critical to break through our comfort zones and become stronger emotionally and physically. Day 1 was all about annihilating our fears – and what better way than to walk across a little fire?

But as I’m sure you can agree, treading across white hot coals is not something you just want to “walk into”. We had to get our minds ready first. Tony began the mental preparation process by explaining that emotion and meaning are what controls and determines our thoughts, and thus the qualities of our lives. At the most basic level, emotions are divided into pain and pleasure and out of human survival instinct we will always choose to avoid pain (like, say, fire) over seeking pleasure (like the feeling of “OMG I just walked on fire – how awesome am I?!”).

However, many people don’t realise that there is no permanent connection between an event that happens in our life and the feeling of pain or pleasure we associate to it. They change as your state changes and when you know how to control your emotional state, you can then create the outcomes and future which you desire.

Being in a “state” refers to being in a certain mental or emotional condition which is defined by the constellation of your physiology: what you focus on and the language that you use. Tony taught us that the way you move your body can have a significant impact on the emotional state you are in – strong movements create empowering states whereas deflated postures lead to depressed states. That means we need to first change our physiology if we expect to change our psychology.

By changing our physiology, language, tone of voice, and simultaneously making what Tony calls a “Power Move”, we can change our state. Once this is repeated over and over with absolute certainty, we condition our brains to consider this empowered state second-nature. Motion thus creates emotion!

During the final part of Day 1 we were drilled in the following practical steps for successfully completing the firewalk:

1. get into a powerful state
2. focus on the end result
3. walk normally
4. celebrate when done

Tony conditions you to feel absolute certainty by visually guiding you through the celebratory outcome and making sure that you can break free of your greatest fears. Once we reached our peak state, all 4,000 of us walked outside to the smell and smoke of 20 paths of coal, burning at temperatures between 400-800 degrees Celsius! One by one we annihilated all our fears and walked across the fire. What an amazing experience!

Day 2: The Ultimate Success Formula

We did, in fact, walk on fire

Once you’ve taken action to create a change in your life, it can be all too easy to fall back into old habits. Day 2 was designed to give us the clarity and power we needed to accomplish whatever we set out to do. Tony and his chief trainer Joseph McClendon took us through the Ultimate Success Formula to help us create lasting success and change.

Change is never a matter of ability, it’s always a matter of motivation. To create a lasting change, therefore, there are three things that must be done:

1. We must find leverage by understanding that failing to change now will result in immediate and unbearable levels of pain
2. We must interrupt our normal patterns to annihilate the limiting pattern we’ve become accustomed to
3. We must create an empowering alternative and reinforce it until it is a habit

We learned how to activate the driving force inside of us which moves us to action and set new goals that will enrich our lives at the deepest level. In between the exercises, workbook notes and material presentations, Joseph allowed us to take several breaks, dance to music to reach our ‘peak state’, get massages and make plenty of new friends.

Day 3: Transformation Day

Anthony Robbins live on stage

Day 3 was the most empowering and emotional day of the seminar, as we learned how to change our belief systems and move forward with so much strength that we’ll never look back. In order to do so, we had to first feel pain in order to get pleasure. Tony guided us into a painful state by talking us through the limiting beliefs that have damaged our lives and using our physiology we visualised what will happen to us in 5, 10 and 20 years time if we continued to live by these beliefs. Many people in the audience were in tears during this exercise.

Once we were in our most painful state, we were lead to associate that pain with our limiting belief. Tony then conditioned us to feel pleasure about the new belief systems that we desire by stimulating our nervous systems and changing our states. To put ourselves into peak mental and physiological state, we identified our passions and desires, decided to commit and resolve our limitations, and resolved that we must take immediate, intelligent, consistent and massive action NOW.

Day 4: Achieving Vitality

Acid and Alkaline Food

The last day of the seminar was about how to take care of life’s most precious gift: our bodies. Tony went through the importance of vital breathing, high water content and alkalising food, aerobic power, nutrition nourishment and structural support in order to achieve and maintain optimal health and an alkaline pH level of 7.34.

Having a diet that is high in acid-forming foods can cause us to be lethargic, trigger degenerative diseases and of course weight gain. Tony challenged us to each eliminate acid food, dairy products and animal flesh intake for at least 10 days so that we can see and feel the difference in our bodies.

Since UPW, the E-Web Marketing family have each supported each other in healthy living, healthy eating and maintaining our peak state. We have pump up sessions in the morning before work and after lunch; new mini trampolines or “rebounders” in our recreation room (recommended by Tony because bouncing on them stimulates cleansing of the lymphatic system); all-organic catering for breakfast, lunch and snacks throughout the day; plenty of alkalizing fruit and lemons in the kitchen; and now we make our “Power Move” to change our state in every Friday family meeting.

Unleash the Power Within was a lifechanging experience that anyone who’s attended it will wholeheartedly recommend. If this sounds like something for you, you’ll be pleased to know that Tony is coming back to Australia to repeat Unleash the Power Within next April. You may even meet a few of the E-Web family there for a refresher course in Happiness, Success and Fun!

Google Analytics continues to get new and improved features. In the past few weeks we’ve seen load time and social tracking as new additions to the Analytics family. The newest toy is trackbacks.

If you’re unfamiliar with trackbacks, here’s a very simplified explanation:

When Blog A links to Blog B, Blog B is automatically notified about the link from Blog A. What this means for you is that each time a new link has been created to your blog, Google Analytics will automatically notify you about the link, as well as showing you the URL and post title it came from.

This feature hasn’t appeared yet on any of my Analytics accounts but it’s only a matter of time before we begin seeing this rollout in action. I’m very excited about being able to see which posts and pages are generating trackbacks.

You should be too. Knowing which pages are generating you backlinks will help you immensely in generating the right kind of content for your visitors. Because chances are, if you’re generating backlinks, then you’re also generating sales or leads or followers.

Late last year Google announced Hangouts on Air for a limited number of Google + users, allowing them to broadcast live video to friends and fans worldwide. This week it was announced that this feature is now available to all Google+ users around the globe.  You’re able to broadcast publicly via Google+, YouTube or directly from your website. Hangouts on Air lets you see the number of live viewers you have as well as the ability to record and share the video once the broadcast is over!

Google is rolling out this feature to all Google+ users within the next few weeks. In the meantime, why not see what’s streaming right now?