Rising Media, the guys behind the SMX conferences, have launched a new event called Conversion Conference.
This is running across two days (November 1-2) at Park Plaza, Victoria and based on a great line-up of conversion optimisation speakers, it looks like it’s going to be a very interesting event!
To get a 15% discount off ticket prices, all you need to do is sign-up using the promo code: SEOPTIMISE010 – see you there!
Posted in conferences |By now I’m sure everyone’s all seen and had a play around with the new Google Instant search interface. There’s lots of early reaction to this on the web, my own included on Econsultancy yesterday.
Obviously the main goal behind this is to provide results much more quickly and look to improve a searchers overall user experience. But has anyone else noticed that the “I feel lucky”, while still listed on the homepage, is actually now redundant?
Image credit: Flickr
In my opinion, the majority of Google’s changes and updates look to achieve one of two things:
improve the relevancy of results for searchers, andmake more moneyIdeally both!
However, Google Instant is about increasing speed and reducing the user journey required for searchers. But interestingly it looks like it will make them more money too.
By providing results as soon as you start typing, the new search function now bypasses the “I feel lucky” button, which has cost Google an incredible estimated $110 million dollars in potential revenue in the past! Any good conversion optimisation specialist (or accountant) would tell you to remove that button – which is effectively what Google have done. The only way you can click the “I feel lucky” button now is for an empty query string on the Google homepage, and this just takes you to the Google logos page.
So that’s clearly a great way of generating extra revenue and that’s all before taking into account the extra paid search ads being served for each query and the potential extra interstitial clicks generated while mid-query.
Also, for Google – the main reason they are such a huge money-making machine is their huge market share? As I mentioned in my Econsultancy comments, if Instant has a negative reaction this could be a good time for users to switch (most likely to Bing). So how this affects the user has to be the main objective first and foremost. Increasing the average value per searcher is also a goal they will be keen on improving further, and rightly so, but it does little to their revenue if the market share drops as a result.
So what do you think, is a major increase in revenue a key and intentional part of Google’s thinking in the launch of Instant?
Posted in google, seo |This is a guest post from Rob Hillyard at Return on Digital.
For the full guide on how to set up Remarketing, check out this post.
Posted in google, google adwords, ppc |
July has been another busy month at SEOptimise – and seeing that we are currently writing around the web, I thought it would be a good time to share these posts with SEOptimise readers and recap on the top posts we’ve written here on the blog.
Plus I have been confirmed as a speaker at a4uexpo London in October, this is on the “20 Social Media Tools & 20 WordPress Plugins Boost Your Performance” day two session. We also sent out the latest installment of the SEOptimise newsletter yesterday – signup here if you haven’t already!
SEOptimise around the web…
For those who do not follow my writing on Econsultancy or Search Engine Watch, here are the latest posts from July – plus an interview on State of Search:
Top SEOptimise posts in July
Oh and plus the office have followed the foursquare craze this week, with the race on to become the mayor of SEOptimise!
Posted in seoptimise |One of the problems and frustrations I find with social media, is that there are now many different website’s and each of them require managing contacts in different ways.
So, for example, you’ll often end up with a completely different set of contacts on each site – when in many cases it would make far more sense if you were just connected to the same people on Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare etc.
Because each of these sites have their own friend/follow system, it’s pretty much impossible to keep track of everyone you’re connected to. This means that if you sign-up for a new social media website, like I did recently on FourSquare, you have to start all over again by adding contacts from scratch.
It is possible to import friends on many of the sites by importing your Twitter or Facebook contacts – but that doesn’t always allow for everyone you’re connected with elsewhere. Recently, I’ve tried to manage this in a more central location, using the following steps:
Go export crazy! The first step is to get an email list of contacts from Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social media sites with contact list exporting available. Sometimes you have to dig around for export options, but it’s normally available – even if they do try to insult you through not so subtle captchas!
Collect all contacts into GMail or FlowTown - This helps you to organise all of your contacts into a single location. Personally I find FlowTown to be very useful – especially for analysing demographics – but GMail does the job here too and is free (FlowTown charges per import).
Group contacts - Filter those who you’d like to connect with on all sites and if you want to be more selective over who you connect with, then it’s useful to separate professional contacts with friends and family.
Import connections – most social networking sites have the option to import contacts via CSV or GMail – so once you’ve collected and organised all of your contacts into a central location you can look to import these into each of the social media website’s you use.
I tried this out a few weeks ago on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, StumbleUpon and Foursquare – instantly finding new contacts who I’m already connected to on other sites. So from my point of view, it’s been a far more efficient way of managing and merging social contacts – has anyone found a good way of managing contacts across social media networks?
Posted in social media |
Three of the most trusted SEO and social media experts, Rhea Drysdale, Tamar Weinberg and Lee Odden. Photo by toprankonlinemarketing.
Interviews are often overlooked pieces of distilled wisdom. They aren’t very popular on social media but they definitely should be! In interviews experts often provide the most valuable nuggets of their knowledge in a very concise form. You need to study dozens of other blog posts to learn as much.
Moreover experts often tend to focus on one aspect a time when they write something themselves, even when compiling a list like this. On the other hand interviews focus on several key questions an expert wouldn’t even attempt to cover in one blog post or seminar. These facts combined result in in a very condensed piece of advice.Also it’s quite difficult to determine who’s a real expert and who is not in the SEO industry and even more in social media marketing.When someone gets interviewed s/he’s either popular or an expert or both. The difficulty in compiling this list of interviews was not finding 30 of them but sorting out the less valuable ones from the dozens there are. Also I wanted to feature not only the people everybody knows already like Rand Fishkin or Matt Cutts. There are numerous interviews with them.
Some true experts hide behind an invisible persona as an inhouse SEO and/or social media expertbut really have something to say others haven’t. So I added a few of inhouse SEO expert from big enterprises.Last but not least I couldn’t find good interview that offers deep insights with some of the brightest minds of the industry like Danny Sullivan or Barry Schwartz. There were either too short, shallow, outdated or too much focused on a specific event or topic. Add those in the comment section if you think they are must read. I repeat, I didn’t just look at the names, I solely selected those interviews that offer real insights.OK, enough of this, follow the links below to read the interviews with some of the most renowned SEO and social media experts.SEO expertsInhouse SEO expertsSocial Media expertsMatt Cutts and other Google employeesBusiness Blogging experts
Btw. how do I know who’s an expert and who is not? Difficult question. I think I’m at least expert enough by now to determine who is an expert on the subject of SEO and social media.
The interviews above have been conducted between 2008 and 2010. For hundreds of SEO & social media interviews from 2008 and earlier visit this huge list by Donna Fontenot.