Performics Performance Marketing Blog: SEM, SEO, Social & Display

Do You Practice Safe Link Building?

Posted by Jonah A. Berger, Senior Specialist (SEO) & Jason Walker, SEO Specialist

The first quarter of 2011 provided some of the most dramatic news in recent search engine marketing memory. Major retailers and publishers were punished, particularly by Google, for a variety of link building and content-related guideline violations. However, the visibility of recent violations exposed by publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, not to mention heightened industry chatter within C-suites, proves link building practices are top of mind for many of today’s leading brands.

J.C. Penney was the first to be scrutinized, then Forbes (albeit to a lesser extent), and then Overstock – all for questionable linking tactics and all within the course of a month or two. In early March, Performics issued a POV focused on several popular content farms that also made headlines for violating Google’s content guidelines that, while previously enforced, were not under the glowing media spotlight.

The message Google is sending is clear: No matter your longevity in the industry or how great your brand reputation, the search engine is cracking down on questionable SEO tactics. In light of this fact, the Performics SEO team decided to ask the million dollar question: Who’s next?

OUR LINK BUILDING SNIFF TEST

Performics took a close look at the link building practices of the top thirty retailers in the Internet Retailer 500. The retailers – as part of a list that includes mega names like Amazon, Staples, Dell, Apple, Office Depot, Walmart, OfficeMax, CDW and the aforementioned J.C. Penney and Overstock – are ranked by the e-commerce magazine based on full-year online sales and related data. If major SEO performers like J.C. Penney and Overstock were called out and punished by Google and other search engines, what other big brands are in jeopardy due to high-risk link building practices?

Shouting in an Empty Room: Why the Audience Matters More Than the Content When It Comes to Social Media

Posted by Theron Lalla, Associate Account Manager

There seems to be two general schools of thought concerning when social media really took off. The first school thinks that it started with social networking sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook. The second school traces its beginnings back to the first e-mail sent in 1971. Personally, I think they’re both wrong, and if we really want to think about the advent of social media, we need to look past the invention of the Internet, all the way back to 2500 B.C. Egypt—the first record of live theater performances.

For the purposes of this Article, we can break down any performance into two key elements—the media and the audience. Without an audience, the story may as well have gone untold—and for this reason, the audience matters more than the story when it comes to social media.

Most modern-day proponents of the virtues of "social media" are very big on publishing content in a place where users can see it; the more the better. Yet, many of these people don't actually facilitate audience feedback.  Instead, they hope someone cares enough to start a discussion. The truth is, everyone has an opinion, and the ability to share it—often loudly—is what makes social media… well, social. So the advertisers that haven’t facilitated a community discussion have essentially put on a great performance but prevented their audience from clapping or cheering, either because they forgot about the social side, or perhaps they’re afraid of the audience booing. So they hope the media is compelling enough so that audiences retreat to Facebook and share their content. Is leaving it completely up to fate how you want to approach your social media efforts?

Competitive Insights Catapult Results for a Party Supplies Retailer

Challenge

A party supplies retailer sought to fully understand competitor paid search strategies around highly-competitive generic keywords

Solutions

Performics leveraged our proprietary competitive monitoring tool, Benchtools, to identify keywords that our client’s competitors were bidding on, their positions and their market share.  These insights enabled us to solve problems that other agencies cannot:

• Benchtools informed us when the retailer’s top competition aggressively bid on certain keywords, allowing us to attack the marketplace with more educated bids and account management decisions at the right time
• Benchtools also provided insights into keywords that our client’s competitors—but not our client—were bidding on.  This allowed us to identify categories in our client’s market where we weren’t present, and understand if there were opportunities for keyword expansion.

 

Search Engine Optimization for Recipes on Google

Posted by Sam Battin, Senior Natural Search Specialist

SEO for Google Recipes

Google Gives Food Site Owners a Great New Way to Get Cooking on Search Visibility

If you’ve been searching for food online, you may have noticed that Google now has a “Recipes” link on the left side of the results page.  This link (shown below) appears when you enter in terms related to food; that is, you’ll see “Recipes” when you enter actual ingredients (steak, potatoes, etc.) or methods of preparation (au poivre, polenta, etc.):

 

When you click on the link, the results for your query show recipes related to the food item or preparation method for which you’re searching.  For example, here are some Google recipe results related to the search “carrots”:

 

Help! Save a Family from Their Burning Home in Less than 80 Seconds

A house fire happens every 80 seconds. 70,000 families a year face losing everything.

In less than 80 seconds, you can save them.
 
See what it’s like to lose your most precious memories, and empower people to help by visiting http://every80seconds.com/ today (works best in Firefox with pop-ups enabled).
 
Red Cross responds to 10% more fires than it did six years ago. The problem is spreading. But with your support, hope can spread just as fast.
 

Performics' POV: Google Content Farm Update

OVERVIEW

A recent Google ranking algorithm change—now widely referred to as the “Farmer Update”—has led to a shuffling of the deck in Google‘s search engine results pages as “content farms” (i.e. content aggregation and scraper sites) have been punished in the form of negative ranking changes and even search index removal. Google has made the decision to target a slew of sites in an effort to clean up its search results by weeding out sites that it feels may “ride the coattails” of others. By repurposing, using automated programs to scrape or implementing shallow, low-quality site content, these sites are in effect attempting to improve visibility and ranking—and are in violation of Google Webmaster quality guidelines. This document provides a timeline of the events that led to the algorithm change, discusses what has happened since, identifies how Performics’ practices remain unfazed and introduces strategies that have helped Performics’ client roster steer clear of any content-related algorithmic shifts.

PRELUDE TO THE UPDATE

As early as Jan. 21, 2011, Google Principal Engineer Matt Cutts wrote a blog post on the Official Google Blog titled Google Search and Search Engine Spam. Cutts touches on webspam in the post and how Google has improved its ability to detect spam on Web pages. Cutts then shifts his focus to content farms and states:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content.

Performics Increases Average Order Size with Advanced Bid Strategies

Challenge

A multi-channel retailer sought to gain paid search efficiency and increase average order size through advanced bid strategy techniques

Solutions

Performics implemented Average Order Value (AOV) bidding:

• We determined which keywords historically  received the highest sales margins
• We then implemented a bid strategy in which large AOV keywords were given a higher ERS threshold, regardless of conversion frequency
• For example, typically, keywords with an AOV of $35 would follow the same bid strategy and ERS goal as keywords with an AOV greater than $75.  But with an AOV-focused bid strategy, keywords with larger AOV would run in higher positions for longer amounts of time, giving them more time to convert.