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What is SEO Copywriting?
In the simplest terms possible, SEO Copywriting refers to the writing of copy that has been optimised for use on Internet websites.
Whilst a Copywriter in the past may have produced content for advertising or marketing purposes, an SEO Copywriter is required to create site content that seamlessly integrates key terms and phrases. The reason behind it is to create website content that will inform users, whilst helping individual pages to gain strength and rank higher for their unique keywords.
Today many Copywriters shun the SEO moniker, as the process of developing content has altered slightly over the years. Rather than making keywords the primary focus, many writers prefer a more naturalistic style, targeting the reader first and foremost. The relevant terms should appear organically, although most SEO specialists will go back and ensure that the most important phrases are in the most optimal position.
Online and offline copy, although similar, have very distinct charateristics. Whilst offline you simply need to grab the reader’s attention, inform them and perhaps incorporate a call to action, online you need to do all of these whilst also integrating language that will optimise the website. It’s not always a straightforward process, but it can get extremely favourable results – both with customers and search engines.
SEO Copywriting services are still widely available and as with most technical practices, it is often better to seek professional assistance. A Copywriter versed in generating online content should be able to provide copy that is engaging, informative and emotive for any website or blog. It isn’t simply a case of stuffing keywords in at every available juncture; modern SEO Copywriting requires a good deal of understanding both on the part of search engine rankings and online visitors.
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What is Local Search?
As a branch of SEO, Local Search is a process, or series of processes, designed to optimise a website within a specific geographical locality.
The primary benefit of Local Search is that it increases your website’s visibility when people look for businesses and services within their area. This helps to narrow your site’s focus, whilst helping to ensure that it is seen by consumers who are more likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Optimising a site for Local Search involves many of the same techniques as conventional SEO. Primarily you need to anchor your website to a certain location, how specific this is can be determined by you. It can be achieved through alterations to the content, signing up to local business directories and implementing geotagging (a process that includes adding global coordinates within your website’s Meta).
Just as with SEO, the results can vary and won’t necessarily happen immediately. However, with a stronger local presence you will be better able to tap into a market that is stripped of global competitors and reach out to your surrounding community directly.
Local Search is very much about increasing your site’s focus without damaging your wider optimisation programmes. It is the perfect complement to SEO and other online marketing procedures. Because it won’t interfere with the readability of your content, it is largely invisible too. Therefore if you’re looking to get noticed wherever you are, Local Search can provide the ideal solution.
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Does your email marketing and Google Base traffic get mixed up with your direct, referral and organic traffic?
In today’s modern, online world where return on investment (ROI) is at the centre of all spending decisions, it is essential that you are able to separate all of your marketing activities in Google Analytics.The Google URL Builder enables Marketing Managers and Webmasters to create individual tracking URLs for different marketing activities.
By entering your identifiers in the correct fields and then clicking on Generate URL. This will provide you with a URL which will be tracked in the Traffic Sources Report in Google Analytics. Please note that the minimal amount of data required includes, Source, Medium and Name. Of course you are able to expand this to include Term and Content
For example, if you wanted to track an email marketing campaign you would enter the following:
Campaign Source – newsletter
Campaign Medium – email
Campaign Name – oct09 (this can be changed so you can identify different newsletters)
This would generate the following URL – http://www.yoururl.co.uk/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=oct09
Of course, the URLs don’t just have to be for your Home page. The URL builder can be used to identify traffic from Google Base. At present, Google Base traffic gets mixed up with organic traffic but by adding the identifier on the URL this will separate the traffic and enable you to see how many sales have been as a result of Google Base.
For example, for Google Base:
Campaign Source – google
Campaign Medium – base
Campaign Name – version1
Generated URL: http://www.yoururl.co.uk/product1.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=version1
If your site is an e-commerce site, you are also able to view which products and the value of orders which each source has delivered.
This Christmas if you are considering expanding your marketing channels, use the URL builder to ensure that your efforts aren’t wasted and work efficiently for you.
The URL Builder can be found in the Google Analytics Help.
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What is PPC Advertising?
PPC is an acronym for Pay Per Click. It is the most prevalent and popular form of advertising on the Internet and works by charging a pre-determined amount each time an advert is followed by a visitor.
Sponsored adverts appear with the vast majority of search engine results pages (SERPs). They can often be seen in a coloured box at the head of the main search results as well in a column running adjacently to the right.
PPC advertising is very much a unique concept when it comes to marketing products and services. Offline, the results of a campaign are often difficult to gauge, with market research and sales performance analysis required to estimate performance levels. With PPC, data is continuously being generated. When coupled with a programme such as Google AdWords, you don’t just accumulate expense, the adverts generate user information; this includes what they searched for, where they navigated to and how they left the site.
These statistical snippets come together to create a viable measurement of success, whilst also constructing behavioural patterns that can help you to alter your ads, the landing page or the website itself. You can bid for certain terms too, allowing greater flexibility when it comes to budgeting. The more competitive the key phrase your targeting is, the higher you’ll need to bid to secure a top position.
The search engines measure how many people see your advert and compare it to those who actually click on it. This is then given as a percentage and called your Click through Rate. Perceived wisdom suggests that the more people who click on your advert, the more relevant they find it. This in turn leads the search engine to give it greater weighting, which ultimately allows advertisers to lower their bids and still achieve the same high ranking. Google, Yahoo and Bing are looking for the best quality adverts, not necessarily those who will pay most.
Statistics are available for analysis almost instantaneously. This means that you can pinpoint any issues early on, helping prevent any seepage of your budget. There are no upfront costs and you can even choose to show adverts at certain times of the day; Google AdWords, for example, now allows you to define visibility parameters to within 15 minutes. The more unnecessary impressions you can avoid, the better your CTR. The better your CTR, the more money you can save.
Effective management is key to any PPC campaign’s success. By refining each advertisement, including specific scheduling and the removal of negative keywords, you can help to target your key demographic audience. This will help the cost efficiency of your marketing, whilst also ensuring your website gets greater exposure online.
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Why is Link Building Important to SEO?
Links are the lifeblood of the Internet. If there were an online currency, it would be represented by this network of interconnecting sites. As with any currency, your fiscal strength is determined by the amount you have in the bank; the more you have, the stronger your position.
The search engines have to act as a moderator for the Internet. It is there job to sift through the trillions of pages and order them in terms of relevance. To do this they first need to be able to judge a site’s authority, one of the key factors used to determine authority is by reviewing the linking structure.
A website without any inbound links may be construed as having little or no relevance by a search engine spider. Using the principle that a website will only link to another one if it considers it to be of value to their own visitors, it’s not hard to see why a site with no links could be considered of little or no value in the eyes of a search engine.
When a search engine crawler goes through a website it is unable to see the design or to rate your level of service, all it can see is the text content and linking structure. This puts a huge emphasis on the quality of your content as well as your linking structure; just one reason why link building is so important.
Every link that you do manage to gain, whether it’s from a directory, blog or website, will help build your site’s core strength. As in most areas of SEO, some are more effective than others though. The relevance of the link and the strength of the site that has provided will often determine just how much strength you gain. Whilst quantity is extremely important, so too is the quality and diversity of a linking structure.
To get a good number of links from a diverse range of high quality sites is the ultimate ambition for any link building strategy. It can take time to do build this kind of infrastructure and is rarely straightforward, this can deter some websites. You need to know where the best sources are to obtain links, how best to go about it and how to avoid the toxic ones that will do more damage than good to your site; so it’s not always straightforward.
Good original content, in time, should attract website owners and Internet users to want to provide a link. This is a very naturalistic way of doing link building. Obviously there are no guarantees, but as quality content represents effective and ethical SEO, it’s certainly a positive way of adding to a more deliberate link building strategy.
Links may be important to SEO, but they are also a good way of driving targeted traffic from sources other than a conventional search engine. The more you have coming in, and the better the sources of those links, the better your chance of having your site seen by a wider cross-section of the Internet’s populous.
So link building isn’t just important in SEO, it’s essential.
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What is the difference between Conversion (Many-per-Click) and Conversion (1-Per-Click)?
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In April, a new conversion column started appearing in AdWords reports and eventually the main AdWords homepage; it was called “Conversions (many-per-click)” and the old Conversion column was changed to “Conversions (1-per-click)”. This was done with no real fanfare at the time, especially considering the importance of the column. But what is “many per click” and is it better than plain old conversions?
Conversions (1-per-click)
Conversions (1-per-click) count a conversion for every AdWords ad click resulting in a conversion within 30 days. This means if more than one conversion happens following a single ad click, conversions after the first will not count.
Conversions (many-per-click)
Conversions (many-per-click) count a conversion every time that a conversion is made within 30 days following an AdWords ad click. Conversions (many-per-click) will count multiple conversions per click.
In other words, one click can now record multiple conversions.
So let’s break this down with examples:
Let’s say you have a Google AdWords campaign which you have conversion tracking set up for the sale of a product, a contact form enquiry and a newsletter sign up. These are pretty normal methods for collecting conversion data.
Before the conversion tracking changed, if a user found your site through Google AdWords bought something, signed up to your newsletter and filled out your contact form this would count as only one conversion.
But now if that happened it counts as three conversions, which it should.
So this is brilliant right? We get to see exactly how our visitors are converting and the data is more of a true value. Well no, not always unfortunately. The new conversion method can be skewed and very easily at that.
Take this example. A person clicks on your ad text and joins your newsletter, whilst on the converting page they refresh their browser. According to AdWords that is two conversions.
How about another example? A person comes to your website and contacts you via the form on your site which you have conversion tracking set up on. Unfortunately you fail to contact them back (I’m sure this does not apply to anyone reading this, obviously this is hypothetical). Three days later they come back to the site and fill out the contact form again to follow up their previous enquiry. Because of the 30 day tracking, this is classed as another conversion.
One more example. Someone buys something from your website which triggers a conversion. They then browse through your site more but hit the back button and land on your landing page. This again is classed as a secondary conversion.
Another factor that the new conversion tracking brings up is the Cost per Conversion and Conversion Rate. These now have the opportunity of changing drastically for each method, a 50% conversion rate can now become 100% very easily and £1 Cost per Conversion can become £0.50. This is a big difference, especially when running into big numbers.
So do you just ignore the (many-per-click) column then? Of course you don’t, in the same way that when looking at the (many-per-click) column you should not ignore the (1-per-click) column; you have to use them together along with any other reporting method you have.
Essentially you shouldn’t just rely on Google AdWords to tell you how many conversions you’ve received; instead you should use your analytics package and compare it with the data you can see on AdWords. If things look as though they are wrong then look into it. If your (many-per-click) conversions are triple that of your (1-per-click) conversions then don’t just take it at face value and pat yourself on the back for your high conversion rate, investigate it and see if it is right.
Most of all look at both columns all the time and use them concurrently to achieve a successful AdWords campaign.
Further reading from Google’s official help site: What is the difference between conversions (1-per-click) and conversions (many-per-click)?
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How Will Analytics Help My Website?
Analytics acts as the eyes and ears for a website. It produces in depth information on visitor habits, providing an insight that would otherwise prove impossible.
It doesn’t simply track the amount of clicks a website receives; most packages will be able to analyse how they found you, which pages they visited, how long they spent on the site and the page they exited from. This data is extremely important in the ongoing management and optimisation of any website.
Google Analytics is a free programme that is favoured by many webmasters. There are numerous other packages available, but most will charge a premium for their services. All these analytics services work by embedding code in each page of a website, which is triggered each time somebody visits. It can track what they were searching for when they found you as well as their navigation and actions once on your site.
The statistics are formulated in a straightforward programme, which can then be used to track the progress a website is making on a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly level. It will help to plot the various peaks and troughs that a website will pass through during its lifetime, whilst helping to flag up potential issues.
To optimise effectively you require the data that analytics packages offer. Without understanding basic visitor habits you can’t ever be entirely sure where a website is succeeding or where it is failing. Therefore analytics will help your website by giving it a clearer direction and ensuring that it has the necessary focus for future development.
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Could SEO Harm My Website?
Over the years there have been lots of stories of people being dropped from Google due to poor SEO practises. Indeed, for an SEO company like us, it’s not rare for us to be work with people who have suffered as a result of some unethical optimisation.
When it comes to SEO, there are three layers of practitioners:
White Hat – Good, ethical optimisation within Google’s rules
Black Hat – Deliberately flouting the rules to make quick gains, often not worried about the consequences
Grey Hat – Slightly questionable practises, although not illegal in the most part; usually somewhere in between the two, which often means that it may be punished.
When it comes to black hat SEO, yes, there is a chance that your website could actually be penalised by search engines rather than be rewarded with higher rankings. However, due to the risks involved in optimising in this way, black hat SEO is on the decline as are businesses who tout it.
White hat, or ethical SEO, is almost completely safe. By sticking to the guidelines that are set out by the search engines and not breaching their codes, optimisation won’t have a detrimental effect. If you have had some black hat work done in the past, it is important that all traces of this are removed – even if that means removing thousands of links or pages of Meta – to ensure that it doesn’t continue to hold you back.
SEO isn’t about spamming directories or getting links at all costs, it’s about methodical strength building and improving the quality of your website. It can be a long process, but with some professional assistance and avoiding the numerous black hat pitfalls, you should begin to see improvements in both search rankings and traffic.
So can SEO harm your website? Well, the honest is answer is that yes it can. However, this is only in the rarest of examples when unethical practises are used, whether deliberately or accidentally. If you continue to do honest optimisation, or employ a respectable agency to manage your SEO, you should only see positive gains from it and will avoid any negative repercussions from Google et al.
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