A typical question we hear from our clients is – Should I/we invest $_X.xx_ on {fill-in-the-blank} project on the website? One of the secrets of the internet marketing is that there is a way to measure impact of efforts on pretty much anything. Because of this beauty of the Internet Marketing, investing on website can always be tied with the some form of Return on Investment (ROI), allowing us to make insightful decisions.

Here is a typical scenario – A favorite client of ours had a nice website (with eCommece and blog) and they were wondering about if it is worth investing $100 (for easy math) on their blog to add social sharing icons, which will allow readers to share the post with their friends.

Should they spend some money to get social sharing icons installed?
There are 2 answers. Short answer is YES. If you believe me, there is no need to read any further, however if you don’t, then below is the long answer.

How to calculate ROI on your investment on a website project?
Let’s start with your web analytic software – most likely Google Analytics. The first piece of data comes from GA’s Traffic Sources. In this case, we noticed, in last 30 days, there was 287 unique visitors on the blog site who visited 618 pages. From opportunity point of view, the blog missed out 618 times to allow its visitors to share the story in their circles. Techie speak – missed out impressions opportunity.

How many of them would have actually shared your link?
Here, we can assume 1% “Impression to Share” ratio, which is typical. Even if 1% of people had shared the link, 6 people would have shared it.  According to Washington Post Story on Facebook, an average users’ number of friends is 245. Let’s say 200 to be conservative for our math. With 6 shares, there could have been potentially 200×6=1,200 new views on your link. Now, let’s assume 5% Impression to Share ratio. With that we get 5% of people who were exposed to the link clicking on it, allowing our client 5% of 1,200 = 60 additional visitors every month. Isn’t that impressive?

What if the story is great?
Instead of 1%, if 10% would share the link, the new traffic possibility sky-rockets to 12,000 in a month. Out of 12,000 impressions, if we get 5% of them actually visit the site would allows us to have 12,000×0.05 = 600 new visitors in a month.

Taking a step further – calculating Year to Date

Just for the heck of it, we did the same math for the entire year of 2012. Our client had959 unique visitors year to date who with page-views at 2,397. With 1% share and 200 average facebook friends, you are looking at 1% of 2,397 = 23 x 200 = 46,000 possible views. Mind boggling, isn’t it? That’s what the social media possibilities are all about.

Bringing Money into this equation: Calculating ROI

Say, the client blog is about “tips for parenting”. It looks like if they have to purchase traffic from google adWords using this keyword, the cost per visit is around $1.42. (Llooked it up in adWords tool) and for “parenting with purpose”, the cost is $1.01. For simple math purposes, let’s assume the cost per paid visit is $1.00. Techie speak – Cost Per Click (CPC).

What would have been the cost of 60 new visitors in a month?
From last 30 days data, our client’s realistic potential was acquiring about 60 new visitors in next 30 days. That would have cost them approximately $60.

If things move on this average target, the breakeven point is about 2 months (may be 70 days), after which it’s all gravy.

Here is a simple ROI calculation in 6 months:
Income of 60 visitors x 6 months = 360 visitors * $1 = $360 with $100 development cost, allowing ROI to be $360/$100 = 3.6 = 360%.

How data produces insight on Internet Marketing?
If the client were to make an investment of $100,  in 6 months, their ROI would have been 360% with break-even point somewhere around 2 months.

This is how data driven decisions are made on web!

Long answer to the question is still YES.

We often hear this question on what kind of email addresses should be used in email marketing. Based upon various situations, there are appropriate uses for both – personalized email or general email.

What is a Personalized Email?

Obviously, these email address speak to the audience that the email belongs to an individual person. E.g john.doe@yahoo.com. These emails would most likely end up in a personal mailbox.

What is a Generalized Email?
Generalized emails are simply email addresses that would tend to represent the entire organizations or department. e.g. sales@mountport.com or info@google.com. These emails would tend to go to more than 1 person in the team.

Advantages and Uses of Personalized Email in Mass-Mail

When sending out thousands to emails, sending them from personalized email address play an important role in the Click Through Rate of the campaign. For an example, if you bought your Mercedes from Jill Doe in your town, you are more likely to open the email coming from jill.doe@local-car-shop.com than if the email came from general sounding info@local-car-shop.com.

While it is personalized, only slight disadvantage in this case would be when a recipient replies to the email, the response will go directly to the sales person (who may or may not be the best person to receive that piece of communication at that time), and the marketing team will lose control on the communication.

Sending blast-mail from a personalized email offers warmth of human touch however for marketing perspective it loses control on the consistency of the message delivery.

Advantages and Uses of General Email in Mass-Mail

For similar test cases conducted, email open rate from a general email address such as (sale@company-name.com) has lower open rate than campaigns with personalized email address (jill.doe@company-name.com). However, when responses are received from an email campaign in a generalized setting, all replies would go to marketing department making it convenient to send OFFICIAL and consistent marketing message.

For the inbound emails using forms though, a generalized email has an advantage over personalized emails for following reasons:

• For example, if all emails are going to shelly@company.com then would someone be receiving Shelly’s personal emails while she is in vacation or whenever she is not around.
• Instead of going to Shelly@, if it would be going to Contact@, users would think it is more authentic and someone (from the entire team) will certainly be looking into it.
• General emails in this case would also protect employee’s private email from public view (and aha from spammers.)
• A general email makes a small organization look structured and “big”.

Though, success rate of an email marketing campaign could depend upon a lot of other factors namely subject line, content, graphics, html vs text and so on, which kind of email-address is used in “FROM” also matters. Similarly in an inbound form, a more generic email address looks more authentic building trust with the customer to win his/her business. A right use for each for right purpose will make a winner.

WordPress is beautiful and it has fully arrived on mainstream. Now, I find WordPress based websites in the most unusual places (translation: rich companies), that it only makes a lot more sense for smaller organizations to have WordPress based sites for ease, SEO capabilities, easy to learn CMS, and oh well to establish a blog.  Originally designed as a blog engine, now the WordPress has become a way to generate websites and writing one’s own stylesheet to make the site unique. There comes another beauty of WordPress – its ability to create a Child Theme.

Customizing WordPress Theme

Once WordPress is installed and you want to make your site unique from the default style, you have basically 3 options:

1. Edit the Style.css of default theme
2. Add Custom.css on the default theme
3. Create a Child Theme

Option 1 of editing default style.css is not a good idea because when the WordPress is periodically updated, all the changes would be gone. While adding custom.css is a better option it only allows CSS changes. A Child theme not only provides ability to update CSS styles but also functions and lot more abilities.

What is a Child Theme?

As the name suggests, the Child Theme, inherits style and functionality from its “Parent Theme”. In a generalized case, the Parent Theme could be WordPress’s default theme, say Twenty Eleven or Twenty Ten, and each developer can build a child theme based upon the parent theme by modifying or adding the style/functionality of the parent theme. Using a child theme allows bigger control over the code without risk of messing up the original WordPress codes.

How to Build a WordPress Child Theme?

1. Start by creating a folder/directory inside the Parent Theme. For example, if you are creating a Child Theme for Twenty Eleven, your new folder should go into hosting_root/wp-content/themes/twenty-eleven/child1.
   You can give a valid name to your child theme.
2. Create a style.css file (Details below) and add your styles here. You must have style.css in a child theme.
3. Create a functions.php – any additional functionality goes here. This is optional.
4. Template file and other files – this is for advanced users only and we are ignoring it for this blog.
5. Once Steps 1 to 4 is completed, login to WordPress, and go to Theme Options and you will see a new theme available. activate it and

Sample Style.css in a Child Theme

Consult WordPress documentation for details, but here is the quick sample, without getting into too much details.

/*
Theme Name: Twentyeleven Child
Description: Child theme for the twentyeleven theme
Author: Your name here
Template: twentyeleven
*/
@import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");
#site-title a {color: #009900;}

WordPress Development With WordPress

Since web development has become so easy with WordPress, we are building many websites using the free blog engine which makes our clients happy for the CMS they receive as well as great SEO abilities.

Contact us to see samples of WordPress based websites.

Search Engine Market Share, October 2011

As we all know, Search Engine Market Share is always changing, and this is more interesting since Bing has pushed with all its might to capture some market share from Google, the behemoth of search. Recently, it’s seeing some success due to heavy marketing of Bing as well its partnership with Yahoo on both organic ranking as well as “Pay per click” listings. Well, Bing getting smarter as well.

According to latest release of number from comScore, Bing is gaining a bit while Google has lost some ground in year to year numbers.

Current Search Engine Market Share

As of October 2011, here is the current search engine market share.

Google = 65.6% | Same time last year = 66.3% ( down 0.7%)

Yahoo: 15.2%

Bing: 14.8%

comScore has full details on how it was calculated.

Is your site ranking on Bing for your keywords?
Contact Us to see how you can start ranking on Bing as well as on Google.

On the month of November 2010, Google launched Google Instant and most of us were loving it. Other than one of my friend’s facebook status said – “Google, let me finish typing what I am trying to search for.”, everyone else liked it. Yahoo shortly followed suit as well. So we are all in world where we are suggested on what could be best phrases for our searches.

What is Google Instant?

Probably all of you have already noticed Google Instant in action when you are tying for something in Google search bar on its homepage. Basically, Google Instant suggests the most likely key phrases when we are typing for any keyword. This seems to be specially useful if you are searching for a longer phrases rather than 1 or 2 word phrases. Google also claims to have saved lot of time that would have been spent while typing queries, and displays most likely search phrases from its records to better serve its users.

 Features of Google Instant and its Impact on SEO

Before Google Instant
Well, we simply used to type whatever we searching for. In theory, there are numerous ways to search for the same item. Have 5 people search for something on Internet and their key phrases would most likely be different. This results in Long Tail Keywords. For any particular keyword, there are always tens (or sometimes 100s or more) long tail keywords.

After Google Instant
As soon we start to type our keywords, Google Instant suggests most likely searched-upon terms, so now, rather than typing-out the our original phrase, we are quite likely to select one of the closet choices. Since Google Instant predicts the search term as we type and changes the SERP real-time, more than likely no one will quite type the their original key phrase in its entirety. Now, the long tail keyword is practically limited to what Google Instant defines it to be.

Impact of Google Instant on SEO

Google Instant is having some interesting impact on the SEO content writing and optimization. For those who are familiar with Long Tail Keywords, know that generally Long Tail Keywords tend to follow 80/20 rule. Meaning, top 20% of keywords will bring 80% of traffic. Rest of 20% of traffic would come from rest of the long tail keywords made up from the various combinations of primary keywords. In post Google-Instant world, SEO professionals can spend much less time focusing on long tail keywords and simply use the terms provided by Google Instant.

On the other hand, Google Instant also opens more opportunites for optimization in the website. For example, when we type “mortgage”, Google Instant suggests “mortgage calculator, mortgage rates, mortgage payment calculator, mortgage rates” which are slightly different from what we’ve been relying for – google external keyword tool or adwords keyword tool. Now, when your the user is exposed to related keywords, the question is is your website optimized for such related terms? If not, you should.

What this means for SEO professional?

After about a year of observation, we have observed from our Analytics that the long tail keywords traffic has reduced.
So for content writing as well as SEO purposes, it’d make sense to make a note of what Google Instant is suggesting in addition to our usual google keyword research using Google external keyword tool or AdWords tool or any other keyword research methods. Additional focus should go into geo-targeted terms. Related searches get higher importance and should be added to the text-copy and so on.  Finally, special attention should be paid to Local Search and Mobile Search.

Google’s goal is to save user’s time to type however in the process they have also redefined how the keyword research should be done for SEO purposes.

Your thought, experience, comments, questions are welcome below.

Link-building Strategy – Removing An Undesired Link From Google?

Recently one of our existing clients came up with unique (not so unique for SEO professionals) question:

Is there a way I can remove the first link on Google when I search my own name?

Background:

Our esteemed client wanted to ensure that the first thing that comes up in a google search on his name was on NOT the grievance he had filed against his ex-lawyer. Interesting, right? Not just his business was suffering because his potential clients were skeptical about his business practices, but also his love life was getting hurt as his potential dates were looking at him with suspicious eyes, or at least what’s what we were told.

So when we Googled his name, this is what was coming up in the Google SERP:

#1:  A .gov page documenting a lawsuit between our client and his lawyer (www.jud.ct.gov)

#2:  His LinkedIn Profile

#3: Local newspaper article covering the client

#4: His Business Website

#5: Facebook

#6) Another blog site promoting the business site

#7)-#10 Other Coverage/membership sites

Everything was fine and dandy other than the horrific first link because of which he was probably losing many clients and money on daily basis.

The request was to “get the undesired link removed”  from Google.

SEO Analysis

Wow. What a textbook situation. We were talking about “REMOVING” a .gov link from the 1^st position of Google on a search term with “700,000” pages – It certainly seemed like there is a need of heavy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) (and ahem ahem tons of budget).

First of all, we had to explain to our client the reason why the .gov link was where it was at #1 and ruining his online reputation. The lesson here was that, a link from .gov (or .edu) is highly trustworthy for Google and they carry a lot more weight, certainly more than his company websites or even the LinkedIn url.

Challenge from Reputation  Management Perspective

This was a special case of reputation management from the perspective that we were not dealing with a rogue comment on Yelp or one of the review sites. We were dealing with a genuine government site that had a valid entry on the subject. While we specialize in Reputation Management by pushing such negative comments down off of the first page (sometimes to below 10^th page), we could not claim that we were able to push a government link consistently and with great success.

Steps taken – Link Building

Next step was to tell our client, what we be done to restore his online reputation. We resorted to well tested weapon of Link building. As all SEO professionals would probably agree there is hardly a way to get a link (especially from a .gov) site out from Google SERP. Most plausible answer would try to not “remove” it, rather try to “bury” it by promoting other links.

Following steps were taken to begin to bury the undesired link from the most prominent position.

1) A Google Profile page was created and linked to all prominent existing webpages and blogs.

2) Since #2 link was LinkedIn – We focus on this.

On all the webpages the client controlled, we added a link to his linkedIn profile page, as well as requested his friends, and online partners to do the same.

3) Same step was done for Facebook – a lots of new links from existing pages were created pointing to the Client’s Facebook page

4) New blog posts were written and a link to prominent pages were added.

5) We searched if client had any access to university .edu domains. The idea was to have a link back to #2, #3 and #4 links to push down on #1 undesired link. The published article was relevant to our client’s business and a correct anchor text of his name was used for this purpose, wherever possible.

6) Wikipedia – In theory, we’d love a get a link from Wikipedia – however this was not possible at this juncture.

7) We bought a new relevant domain name, installed WordPress and quickly published few blogs with strategies outlined above.

Other 4/5 review sites: We added relevant links …  links and links. This was an war level link-building campaign.

I’m sure idea of link-building is clear now.

Result of LinkBuilding:

In about 2 weeks of completing above steps, the undesired .gov link dropped to #4 position with his LinkedIn and Twitter links taking #1 to #3 positions. The business website climbed up and a Google Profile page showed up in the first 10 results – the undesired .gov link fall down while the business website went up in SERP– making everyone happy.

Now, at least when our client goes out on a new date, the first piece of conversation won’t be around why he had to sue his ex-attorney.

Happy link-building, one of the most difficult tasks on Search Engine Optimization.

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To learn more, please contact us at contact {at} mountport {dot} com.

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