My Dad - The Twitter Lover

Over the weekend I had the opportunity to go camping & fishing with my Dad, and two sons.  It was a wonderful weekend to disconnect and just have some good times with those I love.  If you are wondering how any of this has anything to do with Twitter, I am getting to it!   I learned a lesson about Twitter that I never thought possible.

My Dad, a retired Boilermaker (Welder) of 50+ years has never been one I would call “technical”.  He could care less about iPads and computers and technology in general, but he shared something with me that every business owner should pay attention to.

We were talking about gas prices, he was telling me how he remembers paying .15 cents or something like that a gallon, and how hard it is to pay almost $4.00 these days.  He then began to tell me about a local gas station in his town where he can get up to .25 cents off a gallon most times he fills up.  I was interested as to how, and he told me …. “by following them on Twitter and finding the word of the day before I go and fill up”.   All I had to do is just got to Twitter and sign up and follow them.  (He admitted he didn’t even know his username, and I informed him that he could see their Twitter account without having to follow them – they are not private)

This absolutely FLOORED me.  If there was anything I knew about marketing on Twitter, it was that my 70 year old Father would NEVER be using it.   Never.  EVER ….. How wrong I was.   I am dead serious, I didn’t even know that my Father knew what Twitter was!

We got to talking about it, and he told me how he signed up and followed this particular gas station’s account because they share “words of the day” to save gas, as well as other discounts to food items and sodas etc.  He was telling me how much he loved it, and this is where he goes for everything (gas, snacks, sodas etc.)  oh, and how he FAITHFULLY CHECKS IT EVERY DAY.  Smart.

If you are a business owner reading this, reverse engineer the point of this.  Give people a reason to sign up, and come back, no matter the age – and they will.  Now I know there are probably plenty of 70 year olds that are on Twitter, but that is not the point of this post.  The point is that Twitter can work on people you never thought it could work on, (like my Father) when you nail down the perfect reason for THEM to follow.

Here are a few screen shots of the new Google+ iPhone app. I am loving the new features and will probably end up using it more now. It’s not perfect, but it’s worlds apart from what it was.  With the latest algo update and Google putting more emphasis on social you know they are gonna be making signals from Google+ even that much more relevant.  I am already seeing huge benefits …  Get on board now!

Here is a shot of your main profile page you see when you go to navigate around the new Google+ interface.

Here is what it looks like when you click on the stream.

Here is what your profile screen looks like.

Here is what your “photos” screen looks like.

Notifications is really the only area where it has not changed a ton, but I just hope with this update it remembers when you have cleared something.  That was really annoying with the old version (at least for me).

Here is what the area to posts looks like:

Thoughts on this new update?  I am really loving it so far.  What about everybody else?  What do you like?  What do you hate?  Sound off:

If you’re a small business owner, or an internet marketer, you’re going to love and laugh at this post below. But before we get to the fun stuff, I wanted to make sure and mention the upcoming GetListed.org LocalU seminar series that is going to be taking place in Salt Lake City on June 12, 2012. SLC|SEM is hosting the event and it’s an amazing upcoming event you should be attending whether you are local in SLC, or from out of state. It’s not that often that such an event takes place here in SLC and it’s certainly worth the price of admission to hear from the likes of David Mihm (author of Local Search Ranking Factors), and Matt McGee of SearchEngineLand.com. Reps from both Google and Bing will be there as well.

As most of you know, DSM is a strong supporter of SLC|SEM and it’s events, and we really feel it’s an amazing organization to help search engine marketers in the SLC area stay in the know and connected in the state. So, we hope to see you there at the event in June and you should register now so you don’t miss the early bird special. In light of this upcoming event, I thought it would be fun to write a post about what you DON’T want to do for your Local SEO, since you’ll be able to learn all day long at the event about what you DO want to do. Now onto the fun stuff!

As a full-service online marketing firm, we’ve seen our fair share of “the good, the bad, and the ugly” when it comes to Local SEO strategies.

Since Local SEO is a no-brainer for any brick and mortar business who wants to be found online, we decided to share a “What NOT To-Do” list so you avoid utter embarrassment.

If you do the exact OPPOSITE of these “no-no’s”, you’ll be well on your way to Local SEO success.

7 Local SEO Mistakes You HAVE to Avoid

1. Wrong phone number (or no phone number)

TRUE STORY: we signed a contract with a client to help them with their local SEO. They had just had their website re-designed and were excited to be seen. However, when we tested their phone number, instead of getting their receptionist, we heard a recorded message for an “adult service” business.

Apparently one simple typo can really effect business sales.Having NO PHONE NUMBER can be just as bad. If you’re a local company that depends on people coming to your store or at least contacting you, make sure you make it as easy as possible for them to actually CONTACT you.

2. Super long domain name

If your domain name is more than 3 words long, someone is probably going to spell it wrong.

3. All links point visitors to the home page

This is a common SEO mistake overall. When you’re linking to your website, both on your own site and on other sites, don’t always link to the home page. Not only will this hurt link credibility, but it will leave out important pages in Google results that may give your business better chance of conversion.

4. Basic HTML, Florescent Colors, and FLASH

Need we say more? Flash is OUT. It’s terrible for SEO; it’s horrible for user engagement, and it’s a great sign that your business hasn’t done much online marketing research.

5. All images (that aren’t optimized), no content

Yep, that’s their HOME PAGE!

6. Cramming Content

We’ll let the image and link speak for themselves here:

Make sure to visit this site!

7. Keyword stuffed Global Title Tag

A Few Other SEO No-No’s You Should Be Aware Of

1. No blogging strategy
• One blog post last year, 5 blog posts yesterday
2. No internal linking (or linking to the wrong page or 404 error page)

When I was a junior in college I came to a crossroad that ultimately shaped my career. I had been offered an internship at Publicis, a traditional ad agency that is well known, and I accepted about 7 months before I was going to start. However, between accepting the internship and starting it I was introduced to the world of Pay-Per-Click advertising. I took a class on it, started working for free, and eventually was lucky enough to land a job doing it. The time came where I had to choose between interning with a well-known agency, or doing PPC for a small-home grown PPC agency.

I chose PPC and I made the right choice.

A friend of mine did an internship with the same company and ended up without a job at graduation, while I became a partner in my PPC Company. It’s a great time to be in Pay-Per-Click advertising. If you doubt that or feel like your PPC job is boring, here are a few reasons to reconsider:

•  Online Marketing is Growing- while traditional media spend continues to decline digital spend is increasing. According to a recent study by emarketer.com, spend on search marketing will increase from $14.38 billion in 2011 to $21.53 billion in 2015.
• Google Is On Your Side – Google wants PPC to succeed, so they do everything they can to make it work. Some of the latest changes that favor PPC are extended headlines, sitelinks, enhanced sitelinks, and more control over match types. Fortunately for Adwords users, all the data is stil “provided”. PPC makes up close to 97% of Google’s revenue. If PPC fails, Google will fail. Google is not going to fail anytime soon.
• Lots of PPC Jobs Available- According to simplyhired.com there are over 3,400+ jobs available right now for PPC! I personally knew several friends from college who were jobless at graduation, and I also personally know several friends who got jobs doing PPC. It seems that traditional marketing jobs are declining and new media jobs are increasing.
• It Works- I see lots of articles written about how other online advertising methods are better, how CPCs are too high, and even that PPC is dying. In my experience PPC works. Dream Systems Media has a thriving PPC business. Clients are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly on lead generation and ecommerce sales. Yesterday a client told us, “I’m easily seeing a 500% return on investment with PPC”. PPC works.

Ray Kroc said, “The two most important requirements for major success are: first, being in the right place at the right time, and second, doing something about it.” If you are in PPC you are in the right place, now what are you going to do about it?

photo courtesy of ppcmemes.com

We at Dream Systems Media just finished up an infographic on Pinterest Image Optimization for our friends over at Pinnable Business that was featured on Mashable today.  The graphic is a great reference for those looking for how to integrate Pinterest into their social marketing strategy. We loved being involved in this project, because we love creating infographics!  Check out the full Pinterest Image Optimization graphic by clicking the link & learn more about Pinterest for Business by checking out Pinnable Business!

Pinterest Image Optimization - Infographic done by Dream Systems Media - Click Graphic to see full version

This is the first post in a series looking at competitive research tools and their data accuracy. We’ll be looking at Spyfu.com today.

Competitive research tools are meant to serve one purpose, to get accurate data on the competition and turn that into actionable items. So how do you know ifthe data that you are getting is actually accurate or not? Perhaps you’ve plugged in one or two of your own accounts, maybe you’ve just trusted the data, or maybe you’ve not cared. Well now is the time to care! Sharing is caring, so we are going to share data on several of clients and compare that to the competitive research tools data.

As of now I have NO IDEA what we will come up with.

First, let’s get a little information about Spyfu.com and their features. If you want a full review of their tool Google “spyfu review”, however for this post we are going to focus on accuracy of data.

Spyfu.com Features:

• Classic- allows you to see competitors budget and keywords.
• Kombat- gives you the keyword overlap of up to 3 competitors.
• Keyword SmartSearch- allows you to generate keyword lists and easily filter.
• Ad History- shows a month over month history of ads.

Down and Dirty with Data

We’re going to take different accounts and test the following areas for accuracy:

• Budget
• Keywords

Budgets

Spyfu gives a range for the budget. We took the mean of the range to make the data easier to understand. Our numbers were taken from separate dates within the last two weeks.

There is obviously a significant difference in the budgets. This got me thinking that perhaps Spyfu is only tracking budgets on the search network. Here is how budgets look when only looking at numbers within search.

Average percentage difference was still 39% higher, but more accurate. Lastly, I took the average previous months budget and compared Spyfu’s previous months budget (found by hovering over the previous month in the chart).

This was the closest to being accurate. With seasonal and accounts less than 3 months old being most inaccurate.

Conclusions:

• The previous months data, found by hovering over the previous month in the graph, was more accurate than the current months data, which is prominently displayed.
• Numbers were more accurate for accounts with budgets that were consistent and unchanging for several months.
• Seasonal clients and accounts with less than 3 months data were significantly off.

Keywords

For keywords we took the entire list of active keywords in our accounts (no paused, low search volume, etc.), took out any match types (because it appears that Spyfu does not account for match types) and then compared our total number to their total number.

Conclusions:

• It appears that the larger the account the larger the discrepancy. However, in those accounts there are also more long-tail keywords, which may account for that difference. I compared keywords for one account that had received impressions to Spyfu’s keywords and found that there were few in common. One possible conclusion for this is that broad or phrase match keywords were triggering other variations of keywords, relevant of course.
• Keyword count and accuracy are more inaccurate for larger accounts.
• Keyword lists are not 100% accurate so they should be not be assumed to be winners immediately(duh?).

While Spyfu’s data is not completely accurate there are still many benefits to using the tool for competitive research. Budgets are slightly off but can still be used to get an idea of where budgets in your industry are at. By comparing several competitors you can tell who is spending the most. The keyword tool can give you keywords to expand your account or get it started. The Kombat tool seems to be the most useful tool that Spyfu has to offer.

I’m interested to hear how accurate Spyfu.com is with your own data. What do you find when you plug in your own account(s)?

-Luke

****Update – March 19 – Response From Spyfu****

Hey Luke,

Mike Roberts with SpyFu. This is cool stuff.

You’re definitely right that our budgets are search only; no content network, no partner sites.

When we publish the budget numbers we post a range. Something like $165-$330. The fewer data points we have the wider that range is; it’s an expression of uncertainty –> very much like presidential polling sampling errors (+-6%). The larger the sample size (inclusive of history), the more accurate the results.

I’m curious what you did to turn our budget into one number. Did you take the bottom number, the top number, the mean? [I took the mean -Luke]

I’d be curious how often your client’s budget falls within the actual range. [I added this to the chart]

In any case, calculating someone’s ad budget from what we see them advertise on is akin to predicting intelligent life on other planets based on the wavelength of their star. There are so many factors that determine budget (Quality score, bid strategy, position, cost per click [which we get from Google, but they don't report accurately], Shopping, Videos, Images)

Here’s the thing: When we say someone advertises on a keyword, it’s 100% true — there’s a cache page you can use as an audit trail going back to 2006. Ad budget is the biggest extrapolation we make; the farthest from the raw data. My goal when I first calculated that number was to make it so that given that I know my own Adwords budget, can I estimate how much bigger (or smaller) a player my competitors are in the market. Then, secondarily, I wanted to be able to roughly gauge the size of a client, competitor, or partner; are they spending hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions? It’s kind of hard to tell by looking at someone’s website, right? Make sense?

Anyway, I love what you’re doing. Thx.

photo courtesy of laweekly.com

*Update

View the Presentations for the event here:

Some pictures from the event:

Matt Siltala and Kevin Peck

David Mink speaking at Eastern Arizona College

Chatting with the small business owners of the Gila Valley

Matt Siltala speaking at Eastern Arizona College

Just about 24 hours from now Matt and I will once again be road-tripping across the eastern Arizona desert traveling from Phoenix down to Thatcher. 15 years ago, Matt and I were college roommates while attending Eastern Arizona College and we would often take weekend trips to Phoenix but its been a long time since we loaded up on gas and let the Alpine blast down Highway 60!

What brings us back to Thatcher you ask? We have been asked to speak at the AZSBDC event, hosted by our junior college alma mater (Eastern Arizona College), to discuss “Secrets to Converting Customers Using Social Media” and “Leveraging the Power of SEO for Your Local Business”.

You can read the full press release here — http://www.prweb.com/releases/internet-marketing-firm/dream-systems-media/prweb9270137.htm

David Mink and Matt Siltala back in EAC College Days (best pic I could find of the two of us)

Recently I was shown this chart of a client, and I couldn’t help but post about it. The chart is simple, it’s tracking 3 pretty decent keywords for the client. I think it speaks volumes, and does a much better job of showing how alive (kicking and screaming even) SEO is!

Less than 3 months.

We took on this project just before January of THIS year, (you know, the year SEO is dead … yet again) and as you can see in less than 3 months, 2 of 3 keywords have jumped to the first page. The two on the first page are in the top 3. Even better, (and more important than the rankings) sales/conversions/leads are up, and never been better (according to client). I guess SEOs and Zombies have more in common than most people realize, and answers the question to the title of this post! I have case study after case study, and chart after chart that can show this for large numbers of keywords, but I wanted a simple approach to proving my point and I think this chart does it well. I also wanted to show results for a campaign that had no social or social signals, no viral pushing, no press, no PPC … nada. SEO only…. on page & link building – simple. SEO basics & a short amount of time … SEO 101 .. ok ok you get it.

A focus on “rankings” Matt?

I usually do my best to not focus on rankings, and focus more on the conversion side (ie sales, leads etc)., but with all the talk lately about SEO, and it being declared dead yet again, I can’t resist but to post when I see stuff like this. All we did was simple SEO. We made sure the content on the page was unique, optimized and better than the competition. We used the right keywords. We made sure we had correct title tags, good meta data, used our header tags, alt tags etc. (all the normal on page SEO) and we built some links by producing good content for the site.

It’s not rocket science, its good basic SEO.

We got these results by doing what every goo0d SEO ALREADY knows they need to be doing (what they have ALWAYS been doing – head down & working) and ignore the idiots.
* hat tip to Debra Mastaler for the title of this post.

Had a blast in Hawaii during Pubcon Paradise 2012. Here is my slide deck for those that may have not found it already on SlideDeck. This presentation explored the blended world of social coming into play in the SERPs. With sites like G+, Facebook and Twitter filling up the SERPs you need to make sure your business is on it, or get left behind. Also added a pretty sweet SERP case study in which Brian LaFrance of Authority Labs helped me with. The case study shows how 1 in 3 results of the top 2560 keywords on SpyFu are actual Facebook or Twitter (or both) URLs. In other words, your business can no longer avoid these social networks (and you can no longer avoid them as an SEO). I had a blast in Hawaii and hope to do it again next year! Enjoy the slide deck!

Here are a few pictures taken during Pubcon Paradise. I will eventually upload the whole batch to Flickr and Google + but for now enjyoy these!

Andy Beal giving Aloha at Pubcon Hawaii

Thomas Ballantyne

Brett Tabke Pubcon Paradise 2012

Laura Lippay Pubcon Paradise

Arnie Kuenn Pubcon 2012

Brian McDowell Pubcon Hawaii 2012

Brent Payne Pubcon Paradise 2012

Tony Wright Pubcon Hawaii 2012

Scott Cowley at Pubcon Hawaii 2012 w/ all his ZAGG Gear

Dave Rohrer kicking back at Pubcon Hawaii

Michael Dorausch speaking at Pubcon Hawaii 2012

Kate Morris speaking at a Pubcon Hawaii Session

Pubcon Hawaii 2012

Christine Churchill Pubcon Hawaii 2012 Speaker

Michael Bonfils Pubcon

Dream Systems Media at Pubcon Hawaii 2012 Tee Shirt

Matt Siltala and Greg Lindblom at Pubcon Hawaii

Mark Barrera Pubcon

Matt Siltala moderating Pubcon session

Pubcon Hawaii 2012

Dave Zuls Pubcon Hawaii 2012

Michael Gray giving me "the mean look"

Tony Wright and Wife

Michael Dorausch looking fly at Pubcon Hawaii