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Facebook SEO Now a Reality

Published June 27th, 2010 Industry, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When Facebook announced Open Graph and everything that came along with it I wrote about how I thought Open Graph integration would become part of almost everyone’s websites. I wasn’t explicit about the primary way in which I suspected this would happen, but these were the main questions I had at the time:

1. Would having Open Graph meta data in conjunction with Like buttons become as necessary for sites, from an SEO perspective, as having proper meta descriptions, title tags, and other on-site components of a solid SEO strategy.

2. Would SwellPath need to begin scoping this into our SEO engagements for clients?

In our opinion, the answer to both of these essentially became yes this week. Earlier this week, All Facebook reported on larger sites with Open Graph integration having pages returned in Facebook search results. It is now clear that Facebook will be indexing pages that have Open Graph integration and have been Liked. These are not “Facebook Pages” but actual pages from other domains.

Now when I bring this up to many people, the response is something along the lines of: “well, how many people are going to use Facebook to search the web anyway?” My response to that is pretty simple: how many people thought they would use Google for email in early 2004? Or how many people thought they would use Google for analytics in early 2006? How many people thought they would use Facebook for showing friends their pictures 4 years ago?

You see where I’m going with this: consumers will shift their behavior. I have no doubt that there is at least the potential for many Facebook users to suddenly find it far more convenient to just search from the page their on.

And what about Facebook’s partnership with Bing? Is it possible that Facebook will give Bing access to this data also? That Bing will begin incorporating the “social value” of pages into their results? I don’t see why Microsoft wouldn’t jump on this opportunity if it becomes available. Alternatively, we might see the relationship between Bing and Facebook sunset as Facebook takes on the search industry solo.

Some concerns here revolve around Facebook’s ability to crawl and index. Google, Bing, and Yahoo, have all been doing this for a long time, and have the technological components in place to crawl and index the web at amazing rates. Will Facebook be able to “catch up”? If they can’t, who will be left out? Likely the “little guys”, i.e. the long tail, which is a fundamentally valuable (the most valuable?) component of Google’s search results. My feeling is that technology can be bought for a high enough price; Facebook has been building the technological infrastructure to handle this, and they have been and will continue to hire the appropriate people to lead this initiative.

Bottom line: this will stick, and SEOs, publishers, retailers, and anyone else who wants their content to be delivered to Facebook users better begin implementing Open Graph functionality into their sites. If we’re wrong about this, that’s great; one less thing to worry about with SEO. I don’t think we will be though, and I don’t want us to be. Disruption is good for any industry, and search is no exception. I’d love to hear others thought’s on this, and how they think this will affect SEO.

Semantic SEO: 5 Keyword Research Techniques & Tools

Published June 7th, 2010 SEO, Social Media No Comments

Semantics in search is evolving quicker than ever with the inevitable convergence of search and social. Search engines have been using latent semantic structure for a while to classify pages and uncover the meaning of a user’s query. However, semantics is no more transparent than it is in social content and the relatively recent indexing and inclusion of social content unveils an evolved direction from the search engines.

With keyword research as the foundation of SEO; incorporating a more semantic approach is essential and also effective to find variations and relationships of keyword groups to drive optimization and IA. Extracting meaning from keywords and additionally identifying variations to drive your SEO strategy takes time and experience. Here are 5 semantic keyword research techniques and tools:

1) Social Media Monitoring

Most marketers use some social media monitoring app to track brand or competitive mentions. For keyword research though, it’s just as valuable. We use Jive’s Market Engagement, formerly Filtrbox (full disclosure, Jive Software is a client) for ongoing keyword research. Trackur and Radian6 are 2 other popular monitoring tools.

Tracking your keywords will help to build a conversation environment and emerge other uses and variations. Jive Market Engagement is great because it shows you the conversation cloud around your terms, or terms most likely to appear with your keywords.

2) Tags

Tags are a way of classifying information, but for keyword research it’s a focus group. As users tag their social bookmarks, they’re essentially telling you how they would classify and structure your website.

Let’s use Foursquare as an example. There are over 4,000 Fouraquare bookmarks on Delicious and probably 5 – 10x as many tags (multiple tags per URL). Spending a bit of time pursuing user tags can returns some interesting results:

Geolocation, community, game, hyperlocal, ridesharing, application, geo-locator, lbs, social media, social media location, blackberry, gps, tools…

Not only can you look at tags but users’ descriptions about the domain -

“…explore their environments using cell phones.”

“…no more location updates. Yay.”

“…and also a game.”

This might be straightforward to some but for a marketer trying to position their offering, this is gold. Rinse and repeat for other social bookmarking sites.

3) Trending

Keywords rise and fall with the advent of new spaces and products. Understanding when to optimize around a rising keyword/topic is key to positioning your page in front of the storm so to speak. Here are some tools we use for trending purposes.

TweetVolume – Compare trends and popularity of keywords on Twitter.

Ice Rocket - View how often a term has been mentioned in social media over time.

BlogPulse – Automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.

Trendrr – Tracks the popularity and trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads.

4) Social Search

Sometimes, simple one-off searches can provide the most insight into semantic keyword variations and synonyms.

OpenBook – With Facebook’s new privacy settings, it’s all open. Search FB updates for keywords and connections.

Twitter Search – Search terms in Twitter mentions. Be sure to use their search operators to refine and target searches.

5) Cool Social Tools

Here are some other random tools we find useful to derive keywords from social media.

Addict-o-matic – Aggregate tool that searches sites for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images pertaining to a specific topic or keyword.

Backtweets – Search for tweets linking to any url, and setup email alerts with via the advanced search page.

MentionMap – Great visualization tool that pulls in hashtags as well as relationships between tweeps.

Time for a Facebook Backlash?

Published May 24th, 2010 Social Media No Comments

Facebook made another potentially controversial announcement last week by limiting landing tab options for Facebook Pages to what they describe as “Authenticated Pages”. The requirements for being an “Authenticated Page” are either exceeding 10,000 Fans or getting the page approved by your Facebook Ads Account Manager. Of course to have an Ads Account Manager you must be running ads through their ad platform.

What this means for Facebook Page owners and administrators is that they can now only use the Wall or Info tabs as the default landing page for non-Fans unless they become authorized. This is a major blow to small business Pages on Facebook, as most will not be able to easily achieve 10,000 Fans, especially without being able to use a custom tab to explain the benefits of Liking the Page and enticing visitors to do so. Although I would consider the Wall to be the heart of a Facebook Page, a custom landing tab is an amazing way to introduce new users to your Page and stand out from the crowd by creating something unique and fun for your visitors.

Say goodbye to custom landing tabs for small business

It will be interesting to see the decisions that Facebook makes over the next few months and how these moves change their public perception. At this point the backlash against the dominant social network has been mostly within the tech savvy community, people who follow the F8 Conference are now the ones threatening to delete their accounts. General users, however, are probably in the dark about most of this. These issues may start to gain more mainstream attention, especially as major news outlets start covering them. Time Magazine will start the ball rolling by featuring a Facebook privacy piece as their cover story.

In my opinion, Facebook needs to tread carefully with those in the industry, avoiding changes like the new “Authenticated Pages” decision. The people who are going to be most frustrated about these type of changes are also going to be the most vocal, and Facebook should know better than anyone that backlash will spread like wildfire online.

Facebook’s Growing Problem

Published May 14th, 2010 Social Media No Comments

Yesterday the New York Times published a pretty interesting visual of Facebook’s privacy settings. They’ve broken out every single setting in a neat little tree designed to show you just how expansive (read: confusing) Facebook’s privacy settings are.

Actually, it looks like pretty solid information architecture to me.

Anyways, in the related article Nick Bilton makes an interesting point when he compares Facebook’s privacy policy to the United States Constitution. He highlights the fact that Facebook’s privacy policy is 5,830 words, while the US Constitution is a measly 4,543 words. The caveat here (which will most likely be overlooked by most readers) is that’s the number of words in the Constitution not including the amendments.

Now, I’m no historian here, but I do remember enough from my civics class to know that the main body of the constitution was purposefully left vague, because a couple of particularly zealous members of the Constitutional Convention thought it was important to keep things like the right to bear arms and free speech in a separate, editable portion of the document that would allow it to evolve over time as the country’s needs changed (hence all those amendments). When you run a site with 400 million active users, you don’t exactly have that same luxury.

The Times’ graphic also has a handy visualization of the actual length of Facebook’s privacy policy over time:

When I see this, here’s what I see: as Facebook’s user base grew, so did its privacy policy. The amount of legalese you need to cover your ass when you have a user base of 1 million college students with educational email addresses is drastically different than when nearly half of internet users access your site on a daily basis. Back in the olden days of Facebook, you didn’t really need privacy settings because you had to have a legitimate university email address to create a profile in the first place. I remember friends who preferred it to MySpace, because it was a whole lot harder to create a bogus profile on Facebook.

Ah, memories.

But then those kids graduated college, and lost access to their university email accounts (my university killed my account 8 months after I graduated). Now what? You can’t really tell those people they’re out of luck and will lose their Facebook accounts because now they don’t have a legit university email address. Plus, Facebook isn’t run by a bunch of idiots.

What does a good businessman do? Offer that same service to MORE people, and make more money.

That means opening up the pearly gates and allowing people with any email address to create a profile. But with that wider access comes more security concerns. Like the MySpace of old, any weirdo can now hop on Facebook and start creating profiles and even impersonating other people. This creates a need for more privacy controls and a more comprehensive privacy policy. With recent advancements in Facebook’s Open Graph, these privacy settings need to be even more complex in order to provide users with the control they need over sensitive personal data.

This data is a kickin’ tool for us marketing types, giving us the ability to put content in front of users they actually care about. As a user, that means you’ll see less of the clutter you don’t care about, and more meaningful content that you would actually find useful or interesting. As a digital marketing agency, getting relevant content and offers in front of user eyeballs means a better chance of snagging that precious conversion, and boosting the ROI of online campaigns.

On the flip side, marketers have an ethical duty not to abuse that precious data, although Facebook isn’t making it easy to convince users abuses won’t happen. Steamrolling straight into the opt-out model they’ve been using with the Open Graph is a bit rude and kinda creepy for the vast majority of users out there. IMHO, Facebook could benefit from adopting a bit more touchy-feely approach to this kind of thing. That said, whether or not their blasé approach to privacy changes will have a lasting impact on the user base is the subject of another blog post.

Do I think personal data should be served up on a silver platter to Facebook and the third party apps that use its platform? No. But I do think we all need to be mindful when it comes to the information we are putting on the internet, and diligently monitor our privacy settings on services like Facebook. After all, the security of our personal information is ultimately our personal responsibility. Facebook is giving us the tools to protect it. Let’s make sure we do it right.

How the Facebook Open Graph Will Change Your Web Site

Published April 27th, 2010 Industry, Social Media No Comments

Facebook announced some major changes last week; in a nutshell, the changes facilitate and enhance how marketers and brands can exchange their own site visitors’ data with Facebook. There are a number of great resources out there, I’ve compiled several in the SwellPath Diigo account.

So, what exactly has changed, and what does it mean for you and you’re own digital marketing initiatives? 18 months ago it was considered forward-thinking to have a link to your Facebook page on your brand’s website; now what is forward-thinking, and what is standard best practices? I’m not sure I can entirely answer those questions in this post, but I can address what I think the key opportunities are, and how SwellPath will play in this space. First, a quick overview on the changes:

The Basics

First, the basic opportunities. The changes allow us to lay the social framework of Facebook into our own web properties. In the simplest form, this is made possible with 5 new social plugins. These plugins allow for integration of data into your site, but also the opportunity for authenticated Facebook users to modify their own profile via your site. For example, we can now put a Like button anywhere, and anyone authenticated on Facebook can click it and indicate that they like an object. Click the Like button below if you like this post (you can wait until you’re finished reading it):

Beyond Basics

In the more complicated forms, this “weaving” is enhanced with the Open Graph Protocol and the complimentary Facebook Graph API. This is where things get interesting, and possibly revolutionary, in terms of how you’ll be able to leverage the new features on your sites. Just as you raced to gather fans of your brand’s page on Facebook, and waited for those fans’ friends to come to your page, now you can gather “likes” of your content (your objects) throughout the web, and links to that content are syndicated through users’ feeds. Likewise, just as proper meta tag implementation for SEO purposes has become a necessity, proper Open Graph integration may also become a necessity to maintain adequate site visibility. It enables Facebook (and whomever else) to quickly “read” and sort the nature of your objects (i.e. content).

Open Graph & Your Site

So, how will this change your web site, or sites you’ll be building in the near future? Well, if you do things the right way, you’ll now be able to “borrow” the social experience we all have with Facebook, for your own site. You’ll at least want to carefully assess how if you can leverage Open Graph to socialize your site, or areas of your site. Once you’ve figured out there are opportunities, you’ll want to work with the appropriate stakeholders to decide the best way to integrate the various options Facebook has created, and ensure you’re optimizing the syndication potential for your content, and that you’re following best practices. While the opportunity that Facebook has created is way beyond the old days of slapping a Facebook icon on your footer, it also is way more complicated, and there are written and unwritten rules that need to be followed.

SwellPath & Open Graph

Here is the shameless plug for SwellPath: we will continue to help our clients navigate the social media marketing landscape, Open Graph now just increases the options we can present to our clients. There no longer is a massive gap between those who can afford to promote their brand through costly Facebook applications, and those who simply can afford to have a vibrant Facebook page for their brand. That gap is gone, and in it’s place are a fantastic variety of possibilities for web designers and developers to creatively loop in Facebook. We’re excited to see these possibilities come to life for our clients and the rest of the industry.

Real-Time Analytics Solutions

Published December 18th, 2009 Analytics, Email Marketing, Social Media No Comments

Real-time web analytics reporting is more critical than ever for many organizations. It’s not realistic to wait 4 hours, or even 1 hour, to see how visitors are consuming fresh content, navigating new product sections, or generally browsing, on many sites. With the recent changes to Google’s search results, integrating real-time social media content, the transition from launch (or post, or release, or whatever) to tracking and refining, has been shortened even more. But even before the social media revolution, marketers have wanted to get real-time data when an email campaign is sent, a microsite is launched, their product is featured on Oprah, etc.

So how do you monitor your website in real-time? Omniture will provide you with some real-time data, likewise with WebTrends, but it isn’t complete. Google Analytics provides you with none (though I see this changing in 2010). So you need to employ a different analytics solution for this need. For enterprises, this might not be for your entire corporate site but maybe just your blogs. For smaller organizations, this may be something you want on your whole site. Regardless, here is a quick breakdown of three popular real-time web analytics offerings, and what I like about each of them.

Clicky

I’ve written about Clicky before as a low-cost analytics solution, and it is pretty cheap. You can get a base level package for just $9.99. We use Clicky on this site and we love it for its ability to breakdown the pathing that specific visitors took through our site. This can be done in real-time or historically. I literally can look at the Visitor report, see what organizations are on my site, and then see what paths they’ve taken, and what source brought them to the site. So, if your reading this shortly after I’ve posted it, I’m probably looking at your network (your ISP or organization name) of the corner of my eye on my extra monitor. If your with a Fortune 500 company, chances are I’m watching the path your taking through my site. Can you see the sales benefits we get from Clicky now? Deployment of Clicky is straightforward and it has some cool “event tracking” type capabilities that can be leveraged.

chartbeat

Admittedly, I’ve only been using chartbeat for about a week, but I really like it. The interface is a simple yet effective dashboard. Instead of looking at standard analytics metrics and reporting in real-time; it defines its own reports and metrics, ones that are more relevant to real-time needs. For example, page density and whether visitors are idle, reading, or writing (dependent on your CMS). It also integrates Twitter conversations and incoming links into the dashboard. Chartbeat also runs about $10 a month (for up to 5 sites) and has a 30 day trial for you to check the product out.

Woopra

I was a big fan of Woopra at first, but I don’t really use it as much as I used to. My biggest problem with the product was that it isn’t web-based, but required an installed application. That aside, it also has a great dashboard, and more comprehensive reporting. It also features the ability to chat with any visitor currently on your site. I haven’t employed that in a real business situation yet, but I have played around with it a bit. Most folks tend to think that Woopra is great for monitoring, and covers the same bases that chartbeat does, so if you’re looking for that type of solution it is worth checking out. Woopra has pricing plans from $5 a month up to $180, based on number of pageviews, so it seems more focused on pursuing larger customers. So if you’re enterprise level, it definitely is worth checking out.

Managing Social Media Backlash

Published September 23rd, 2009 Paid Search, Social Media No Comments

A few weeks ago, John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Obama’s health care reform initiatives. The comments made by the chief executive have been stirring controversy on the web and social media, spreading a Whole Foods boycott off and online through protests, a website, blog, Flickr page, Facebook page and group with over 30,000 fans, and a Twitter account with close to 630 followers.

There is an old saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, though ignoring Internet press, good or bad, can hurt a company and their online reputation. Here are a few ways you can respond and manage a spiraling viral incident in a strategic manor.

Corporate Social Media Guidelines

First and foremost, make sure you company has corporate social media guidelines in place. Policies regarding social media are becoming a standard for today’s organizations and by outlining rules or best practices within your company, you can express the importance of your brand.

React, Don’t Retract

Be aware of the comments and confront them with positive feedback. Use the credibility and knowledge of your brand to interact with these users, answer questions, offer insight on marketing decisions and clear up any rumors or misconceptions.

Mackey posted a blog thread to set the record straight on his comments and also invited consumers to participate and share their thoughts through a forum devoted to that topic. Social networks may not capture your complete key demographic, but as seen by this Whole Foods incident, the Honda Accord Facebook fiasco, and last year’s Motrin Mom advertisement, consumers can have a strong and effective voice. If your marketing resources allow it, consider involving your audience on marketing decisions in the future.

Utilize Another Online Medium

When news spreads like wildfire people are searching online for what is being said. Use this targeted traffic to your advantage and customize a pay per click campaign. Using paid and organic search strategies together will result in a higher brand awareness as well as greater authority and sincerity from consumers. Since paid search advertisements are displayed along with search results, run a campaign with keywords based around your brand’s press-worthy events. This brings searchers into your domain, where you can develop a controlled and customized landing page to promote your company on your turf.

Consider a Niche Network in your Social Media Marketing

Published August 20th, 2009 Social Media No Comments

I often find myself twittering, writing or discussing one constant topic: food. I follow @PDXfoodcarts on twitter, am a fan of bacon on Facebook and my latest tweet was about a new recipe I tried this week. I am not a gourmet cook or would even call myself a foodie, but with the vast amount of online resources devoted to this topic, I have a smorgasbord of social activity to make me feel like a world-class chef.

Niche social media networks seem to be popping up everywhere, and with the rate of social media users in general, it is not a surprise. With online platforms like Ning, anyone can create or join an online community, though as a user or a company, how do you know when you should participate in or start a personalized network around your potential clients?

Niche communities allow visitors of the same industry, demographic, area or hobby to interact in an environment based only around those specifics. Of course these users are probably already on Facebook or have their own blog, though instead of sorting through the groups, finding similar followers or Digging a link or post within a pile of pages, users with the same interests are located and communicating in a single, focused place. Due to this undivided attention visitors are more loyal, concentrated, and more likely to convert into a subscriber of your website or better yet, a customer.

While an industry specific site may seem like the golden ticket to an advertiser or marketer, it is important to focus on the niche social sites that are right for you, your business and where your potential customers will be visiting. Here are a few hints to help you venture into a niche network.

Do your research.

There are hundreds of niche sites out there as well as platforms to make your own. Review the ones available as well as where your competitors are socializing. Develop a strategy to help you get started with social media marketing.

Quality is better than quantity.

Be cautious about marketing on networks that are outside your industry or you will lose your trust with users and eventually be considered as spam. If you knit, trade pattern ideas at Ravelry rather than Footbo, a social network all about soccer.

Know your audience, know your content and interact with users.

What can you offer that can’t be found on other sites? If you are promoting a new snack or food, post recipes using your product on Food based sites like Allrecipes.

Try it out!

Choose a site, which is relevant to your interest or business objectives. Register as a member; tour the site and its features. Watch interactions, content and existing users. Submit posts, search for friends and you are on your way!

Popular Corporate Social Media Guidelines & Policies

Published August 11th, 2009 Social Media No Comments

Social media guidelines are becoming a standard for today’s organizations and a way to explicitly set the rules of engagement while trying to mitigate corporate risk. Effective policies outline best practices of engagement and importance of brand rather than restrictions on access or conversation.

However, rather than put social media guidelines in place, some organizations have attempted to attain more control over the conversation by limiting access and pushing mute – most notably, ESPN and the NFL. So why such the Web 2.0 hate from organizations? Most organizations are wrestling with social media because they fear the disclosure of proprietary or sensitive information and their employees are the organizations, thus their comments represent the organization as a whole.

Organizations that “get it” are able to empower their employees to be representatives of the brand and furthermore, foster relationships with customers and diffuse potentially disastrous issues before they explode. Here is a list of savvy organizations that have developed social media policies:

Intel - http://www.intel.com/sites/sitewide/en_US/social-media.htm

IBM - http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html

Opera - http://my.opera.com/community/blogs/corp-policy/

Cisco - http://blogs.cisco.com/news/comments/ciscos_internet_postings_policy/

GM - http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/about.html

BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/advice/personalweb/blogging.shtml

Sun - http://www.sun.com/communities/guidelines.jsp

Dell - http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/policy/en/policy?c=us&l=en&s=corp&~section=019

United States Airforce – http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-090406-036.pdf

Hewlett Packard – http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/blogs/codeofconduct.html

So what are SwellPath’s social media guidelines you may be asking? Simple – Tweet long and prosper.*

*But don’t tweet on the weekends, but do tweet about how great we are, but don’t tweet about our secret sauce, but do tweet about how good the secret sauce is, but don’t tweet about Adam’s mom, but do tweet about corporate tweeting…”

My point is, you don’t nor will you ever own the conversation. Corporate social media guidelines can be useful for employees unfamiliar with this medium and possibly unclear about the importance of brand. Rather than focus on the control over a medium where you have no control, focus instead on your culture, product offering, customer service, ect. – things your organization can control.

Alternative Value in Paid Search Traffic

Published August 5th, 2009 Analytics, Ecommerce, Email Marketing, Paid Search, SEO, Social Media No Comments

When analyzing paid search traffic the central focus is obviously on conversions, the sale, lead gen form completion, or whatever the primary conversion event is. But this shouldn’t be the only focus, and you shouldn’t calculate the value of your paid search activity entirely by conversion rate or ROI. Here’s some other ways you may find value in paid search, and some ideas for calculating that value.

Usability & Conversion Improvement

What does paid search traffic have to do with usability? Look at it like this: paid search traffic is a random sampling of visitors that have strong purchase intent, or strong intent to learn about your offering. Those that don’t convert, as a group, provide insight into what is “not working” with your site. You should be able to ask and answer questions like these:

Are these visitors bouncing at high rates? If so, you need to start testing out some different landing pages, or take a good look at your offering.
If they aren’t bouncing, are you tracking specific events on your landing pages? Implement event tracking on any key potential actions on your page and see if visitors are engaging at all.
Beyond the landing page, are they navigating to other pages or areas of your site? Why are they not finding what they came for on the landing page? What are the common paths their taking, and where are they exiting?
Are they using your site search field, and if so, what keywords they searching for? Are they getting results? How do these terms and results relate to the original paid search keyword and landing page offering?

Answering these questions will initiate a process focused improving conversion. Use unconverted paid search visitors as a “focus group”, and look into your analytics data for their “responses” and “feedback”. You’ve paid for them to visit your site, get value out of their behavior and actions.

Email Sign-ups, Catalog Sign-ups, & Social Media Follows

Let’s suppose I’m shopping for vitamins. I’ve decided I need to start taking ginko biloba supplements again to combat the lack of sleep that seems to come with running an interactive marketing agency. Disclaimer: I have no idea if ginko would help with this, or of the actual health benefits of this product, it is just a good example. So, I normally buy my vitamins and supplements at VitaminShoppe.com or Trader Joe’s or some other grocery store. But I decide to price it out and buy it on the internet, so I search for “ginko biloba” on Google. I see a paid search ad for Vitamin World and I click through. After researching their products a bit, I decide I’m a little skittish about buying this new addition to my diet on the internet, so I’m just going to buy it at Trader Joe’s the next time I’m there. Failed PPC conversion for Vitamin World right? Maybe not, before I exit, I notice the two links highlighted in the image to the left: Email Specials and Request a FREE Catalog.

You know how the story ends: I sign up for a catalog, end up visiting a Vitamin World store in my local mall the next time I’m there, and become a lifetime customer worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars to the company. So, that’s best case scenario. But the gist of it is, Vitamin World is making an effort to keep the “conversation” going with me. While I’m not a big fan of the Email Specials link, I love the big call to action on the catalog request link. Beyond catalogs and email, you might also track if visitors are clicking through to your social media profiles. Track these actions specifically for y0ur paid search visitors and develop a value for them. This may be a more complicated equation if you have advanced analytics and direct marketing programs in place, where you can track multiple touch-points and segment customer types based on product categories; or something as simple as calculating the estimated value of an email recipient, then applying that to number of signup conversions you have in your PPC account. Now, obviously you can track these as conversions in your PPC account, but that can muddy up your PPC data. Using analytics to track the goal, and segmenting your PPC traffic out for analysis is usually a better option.

Keyword Testing & Strategy

I’ll tiptoe around this, because I’m definitely not the SEO specialist (or PPC for that matter) around here but the gist of thsi is that you can use your PPC account to test and refine your SEO strategy. If certain PPC keywords are limited in their conversions, but result in high-levels of engagement or some other key performance metric, you may decide to integrate them into your SEO strategy and target some pages for them. This is somewhat of an extension of the usability and conversion improvement section, but with an obvious focus on SEO and the value of certain keywords.

In conclusion, don’t write off your failed PPC conversions. You paid for those clicks – get some value out of them any way you can. This might mean putting in some sweat in the form of analysis, testing, or development, but those costs will likely be recouped over time, because you will never convert 100% of your search traffic.