In this video blog we'll discuss how to create a video sitemap file so search engines can better understand your video content. We'll also briefly discuss some other basic video SEO best practices.
A web consultant probably does not have to tell you that search engines are including more videos in their results than ever before. Articles such as this one in Tech Crunch explain the benefit and effectiveness of getting your videos optimized and appearing in Google's search engine result pages (SERPs)
Try searching for anyone famous, your favorite sport or drunken monkeys (see the video for an explanation) and chances are you will see videos returned near the top of the search engine result page (SERP).
There are less videos (10 billion approximately) than webpages on the Internet and many video producers are not providing Google with enough information about what the video contains in order to get them indexed nor are they optimizing the videos for search engines.
In addition, actual searches are tending to favor videos over traditional web copy which is resulting in greater click-through rates for video over web pages. Wouldn't you rather watch a video on drunken monkeys than reading about them?
When creating a video for a blog, your corporate website or social media campaign its important to add information about the video to a videositemap.xml file that Google can spider and index in order to help them understand the video’s content.
The video below explains how in less than an hour you can create a video sitemap and submit it to search engines like Google in order to increase the chances that the video will appear in the top positions of search engines. The video also briefly discuss how to upload the video using SEO best practices.
I am currently working with Ultimate Construction to design a landing page for a Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign that we intend to run in San Diego County for keywords related to "kitchen remodeling" and discovered another great use of the heat mapping tool.
When we received back the initial design we felt that the landing page wasn't focused enough. It was very difficult to communicate back to the designer that the landing page wasn't focused enough and didn't assist in helping us determine where are attention was needed. I decided to run the design (which was provided in JPG format by the designer) through Feng-Gui.com and the tool did a great job of visually illustrating that the eye was being pulled all over the place and not neccasily on the most important part of the webpages (like the form submit button). Here's the screen shot.
I sent the heat map to the designer while explaining some of my concerns and offering additional recommendations like moving up the landing page (by removing the logo from the top), de-emphasizing main navigation, replacing one of the 3 pictures with an area where Ultimate Construction could list their unique selling points, etc.
The designer was able to take the heat map and feedback and produce a much more focused landing page. The heat map of the updated landing page showed (that after the prominent kitchen remodeling image in the top left section of the landing page) the visitor would focus on the "Get Free Quote" button, Other Kitchen Remodeling work Ultimate Construction has done and then back up to the main banner area with client's key messaging. The eye movements seem to "jump" less (the numbers are sequentially closer to each other) and are focused on the most important parts of the landing page which should result in a great number of form submissions, ("conversions"), for Ultimate Construction. Here is a screen shot of the revised landing page although we made some additional improvements before launching the final landing page.
Note: The text in the creative comps was only used for illustrative purposes and does not represent the final text used on the landing pages. You can see the final landing page here. In addition, we highly recommend using Google Website Optimizer and reviewing your Google Analytics data to better understand how your landing page can be improved after it is launched.
I recently worked as a web consultant with Ultimate Construction, a San Diego based construction company that was interested in advertising in the two major Yellow Pages (produced by Verizon and AT&T) in the North County San Diego region but wanted to know if it was a good investment.
After talking to Verizon and AT&T's sales representatives and obtaining several figures (e.g. ad costs, expected number of leads, etc) and asking Ultimate Construction what are the companies average conversion rates (on leads and actual work estimates) we were able to clearly identify which company and ad size offered the highest value for his investment and which ones were completely unprofitable.
See the video and spreadsheet below for a quick explanation on how any small business can determine profitability of an offline marketing channel. By using the spreadsheet template you can just plug in a couple of your companies metrics and some of additional advertiser metrics.
Prior to being launched, most websites go through a Quality Assurance (QA) process but rarely does this process address even the most basic Analytic or Search Engine issues that are affected by a website launch. When launching a new (or redesigned) website make sure you have at least addressed the following issues:
Website Analytics (note: urls are for illustrative purposes only and are not meant to work).
Verify the website analytic code has been implemented on the new website.
If your using Google Analytics its usually more effective to setup a new profile for the new website analytics (while retaining the old profile for the old website seperately).
Redirect popular URLs of the old website to the most relevant new webpage.
New or existing subdomains on your website. Example: http://xyz.rwebconsulting.com/.
Popular landing/entry pages that are marketed offline or online. Example: http://www.rwebconsulting.com/email-campaign.
Top 25 Entry Pages – Use your analytic reports to find the most popular entry pages on your website and setup redirects to the most relevant new webpage.
Business Critical Landing Pages – Meet with product owners to determine any landing pages that they might be using in online/offline communications. Example: www.rwebconsulting.com/top-product.
Other Domains Being Used. Example: www.rweb-consulting.net, etc.
Analytic Setup – Verify you have configured and setup the following:
Goals that are dependent on page urls, etc.
Filters that are dependent on page urls, etc.
Segments that are dependent on page urls, etc.
Downloads, Flash or Outgoing links - Create "virtual page views" for document downloads, mail to links, audio files, social media links. For info on how to set this up in Google Analytics click here.
Add appropriate GA code to 3rd party applications.
If the 3rd party application is hosted elsewhere (example: the root domain is different) you will need to "pass" the GA cookies b/w domains. For info on how to setup this up for Google Analytics click here.
If the 3rd party application is hosted on a server that has the same root domain add your default GA JS code to those applications and consider setting up a unique profile in GA to track usage of only that application. For info on how to set this up in Google Analytics click here.
One of the most important milestones in a website redesign project is during the 1st round Creative Comps presentation which is usually attended by various internal website stakeholders. Unfortunately, it is common for the the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) to have plenty of feedback on the creative comps even though the HiPPO rarely knows much about web design nor is familiar with website's analytic data (or any other strategic analysis that was done to develop the wireframes) which were then used to design the creative comps.
Instead of presenting first round creative comps to a bunch of HiPPO's why not quickly test them against the actual audience they were intended for? By using several free tools on the web you can give your websites audience a voice in the creative process!
FiveSecondTest.com is a great free tool that allows you to upload and present a design (e.g. your creative comp) to a user for 5 seconds and then asks (in words) what they remember of the website. Is it design elements, the marketing slogan, the call to action? The FiveSecondTest will help you determine how effective the new home page design is in driving traffic that support your website's key performance indicators (think goals) and the websites branding (e.g. are you a paper company and no-one mentioned the keyword "paper" in your test)?
Feng-Gui.com is a free artificial heat mapping tool. It has proven to be surprisingly accurate and it's free (compared to the real eye tracking tests which can cost tens of thousands of dollars). By combining the heat mapping data along with the FiveSecondTest you can gain a better understanding of how the websites intended audience will scan your home page and where they are most likely to click on (e.g. if your main call to action isn't even being registered on the heat map you probably have a design problem).
If you have time create the HMTL for the creative comps and use Clicktales.com to predict mouse movements and where your visitor will actually click. You can have all the links go to dead pages but it is interesting to see if a majority of the intended audience will your home page links that directly support your websites key performance indicators.
For example, when my website was launched I believed the "Learn More" button would attract the most number of clicks on my website. Neither the 5SecondTest, the AI heat Map (Feng-Gui.com) or the Click data (Clicktales.com) confirmed this assumption.
What people remembered most about the website was overwhelming the bee (over 50% of respondents listed this keyword first) which the AI heat map confirmed. In addition, the Clicktale data showed that over 50% of my visitors where clicking on the Read More link for the Blog and the Website Consulting list. See screen shots below.
If I like the idea that my website design is strongly "bee" branded (so hopefully its easier to remember) and I want most of my website visitors to click on the Consulting and Blog links then the design probably works for me! I don't want the website associated with the bee/buzz theme nor clicking on the SEM or Blog links, I should probably move onto the next creative comp and conduct the same type of tests.
Remember, although the design of a website must adhere to a companies branding guidelines the design still needs to focus on driving traffic into the areas of the website that support the websites' key performance indicators. By conducting these fast, free, simple tests prior to a creative comp review with several HiPPOs in the room you can be armed with specific data when a HiPPO makes a comment like "No one will remember we are a paper company with that design" or "No one is going to going to click on that Learn More button".
Its amazing how many paid pay-per-click (ppc) ads appear in search engine result pages (serps) that are poorly written or irrelevant to what I was searching on.
Here are some basics principles to keep in mind when launching a pay-per-click campaign:
Keywords - Only bid on keywords that are highly specific to your business and are likely to convert into a sale. Limit your ads to only display in certain geographic regions if it makes sense to do so.
Ads - Include the keyword in the ad headline and then explain your "unique selling point" (USP). Basically, whatever makes your product or service better than your competitors. If you can, offer a teaser of some kind; a free gift, a discount or a trial sample of your product.
Landing Page – Include the keyword you bid on, reinforce the messaging of the ad, include product screen shots and a clear call to action.
See our videobelow to see how we used the basic principles described above to achieve a 10.15% click-through-rate (CTR) and 4.79% conversion rate for a client during a 6 week PPC pilot program (even before we did any keyword analysis or A/B testing on the landing page).
Many websites use sub domains to make it easier for the public to find specific content on their website. A sub domain is logical name that is used before the root domain instead (instead of www) like energy.ihs.com or pharmacy.ucsf.edu.
By placing the same Google Analytics Javascript on all your sub domains, you will have one profile in Google Analytics that will aggregate all your website data.
It is still probably a good idea to setup a unique profile for each sub domain, especially if the web content on each sub domains belongs to different business stakeholders.
To setup unique profiles for each sub domain within Google Analytics you will need to create a new profile for each sub domain and then only include the analytic data from that sub domain.
Create a New Profile
Click on the "Add New Profile" link.
Select the "Add a Profile for an existing domain" radio button and enter a Profile Name that can be easily identified to the sub domain before clicking on the Finish button.
Create the Filter
Click on the "Filter Manager Link" and then the "Add Filter Link".
Enter a filter name that can be easily identified to the sub domain, select the radio buttons "Custom Filter" and "Include" and under the Filter Field dropdown menu select "Hostname".
In the Filter Pattern field type in the subdomain you are creating this profile for followed by a backslash that is immediately followed by a period, then type in the root domain followed by another backslash and period and then type in the top level domain suffix of your website (such as .com, .net, org, etc). Hence, your Filter Pattern should look something like this analytics\.rwebconsulting\.com.
Under the Available Website Profile list, select the profile you created in Step 1 and click on the Add button and then the Save Changes button
Here is a video describing how to setup unique profiles for each sub domain in Google Analytics:
Do you have a great product/service that most of your customers love? If so, you should be able to further increase product awareness and sales by creating "online buzz" for your product through social media channels (social networks, wikis, email, calendar events, podcasts, blogs, videos, etc); especially in industries that are competitive in feature sets and price.
In an abbreviated form, atypical sales process can be summarized in the following phases:
Awareness – customer defines a need for a product or service.
Research/Consideration – customer researches different company product offerings based on factors like price, features, support, design, reputation, etc.
Purchase – customer purchases the product online or in-store.
Take for example, the portable music player industry which has dozens of companies that offer similar products at similar prices. Two of the most popular include the 32 GB Apple iPod and Microsoft Zune which have very similar features, specs and pricing (see a competitive review at: http://reviews.cnet.com/zune-vs-ipod/). There is a good chance that a customer might buy the iPod over the Zune (or vice versa) depending on the positive social media generated for it – customer recommendations, product reviews, blogs, videos of the device, number of social network followers, etc.
If you offer a great product or service that develops a large advocate base, consider adding social media tools to your website like the free one at addthis.com which is being used on this blog. Your advocates will use the social media tools to promote your product which will increase sales from those that are considering/researching your product.
In my "What Makes a Good Keyword" blog I wrote about how important it is to do a through analysis of potential keywords before investing the effort optimizing your website or launching a pay-per-click campaign
If your website sells a product or service, keep in mind the most probably intent of the user between different keywords. Is the user just browsing the Internet on a subject or is it more likely they are ready to make a purchase?
For example, imagine you have a website that sells all types of shoes and are considering which of the following keywords to optimize your website for: "top shoes", "running shoes", "ASICS Gel-1130". In general, the more specific a keyword search is ("ASICS Gel-1130” in our example) the more likely it is that the user is ready to make a purchase and not just researching the subject ("shoes" in our example) anymore.
Beware: While identifying keywords with buying intent (or whatever your definition of a site conversion is) verify the number of searches on the keyword phrase (by using a tool like Google’s External Keyword Tool). Many keywords that are buying orientated are less searched upon but you’ll find that you will be able convert more of these visitors.
Our analytics consulting team frequently receives calls from people asking if RWeb Consulting can get their website ranked on the first page of Google’s search engine result page and we always respond the same way. "Only if we can pick the keyword so we can fool you." Trying to optimize your website so it appears in the 1st page of Google for a keyword like "mortgages" is nearly impossible since your competeting with companies that have multimillion dollar web marketing budgets (like lendingtree.com who currently appears first). Optimizing your website so it appears number 1 in Google for a keyword that no-one searches for isn’t to useful either (eg. "duke togo").
When analyzing keywords to optimize your website for, try to find a keyword that has a reasonable number of searches on but isn’t overly competitive. For a relatively small, new website I like to go after keyword phrases that have approximately 5-20K searches a month. A top 5 listing should get at least several thousand visits for the website per month.
In addition, make sure the keyword phrase(s) you want to optimize your website for aren’t overly competitive. Usually, the more searches on a keyword the more competitive they are (eg. "mortgage" which is searched on 185,000 times a month). One of the quickest and free ways to do verify competitiveness is just to search for the keyword phrase and visits the sites that are returned. Is the keyword listed all over their landing page? Is it in their website URL? Is it in their meta data? Its it in large bold letters? Is it being hyperlinked (from within the site and from other websites)?
If the keyword(s) doesn't hit the "sweet spot" criteria above, keep searching for other keywords that you can generate leads for your website once its search engine optimized. Or better yet, contact our analytics consulting team and have us do the work for you!
