DECEMBER MONTHLY SUMMARY
Globe Runner SEO Year in Review
Before we look ahead to the New Year, we felt it appropriate to spend a moment and review some of the successes of 2012. A banner year in many respects, some of the largest changes came internally, where three of our own were promoted to new positions, with the advancement of Cody Sharp to SEO Team Lead, Felipe Rocha to Lead Developer, and Damon Gochneaur to Director of Marketing. With strong leadership in place, Globe Runner added some core team members in Andy Odom, Account Strategist, Claire Parker, Communications Specialist, and Cameron Fergus, Web Developer.
While growing our team and client list, we were also proud to maintain a key position in the industry, with our CEO, Eric McGehearty, being re-elected to the DFWSEM Board of Directors as Vice President of Sponsorship. DFWSEM is the largest regional Search Engine Marketing professionals group in the country and helps to validate our role in both our local community as well as our professional circles
2013 SEO Trends
A study conducted at the end of 2012, has shown that SEO is increasing in recognition in importance as a part of an overall marketing strategy. This is illustrated by survey participants: 66% indicated that their marketing budgets were increased for 2013, 6 out of 10, reported that they were increasing their SEO budget for the following year, and 16% of organizations now have a dedicated Search department. Search as a marketing strategy continues to grow. At Globe Runner we are prepared for this and are staying ahead of the curve and continuing to develop our strategies to help our clients rank ahead of the competition.
Two trends that are predicted to take a major role in 2013 are link diversification and content marketing. At Globe Runner, we have always taken a diversified anchor text link strategy, believing that it was best to diversify back link profiles and have anchor text links to relevant content that our clients’ customers are searching. Globe Runner’s content marketing strategy has been focused on encouraging and assisting our clients in publishing and optimizing quality content often, keeping a company site fresh and useful for customers. We also stress the importance of publishing relevant, interesting company news as press releases.
Big Data is another important topic for 2013. More and more data is now available from search and social platforms. These platforms are no longer in their infancy and for the first time reliable data is available. The challenge will be to analyze and apply this data in data driven decision making. The statistics below illustrate just how much data is available and what the industry is describing as “Big Data.”
This data is really staggering when you think about its implications. New tools like Facebook Graph Search will help with the applications of this data.
Big Data Stats:
- 1 billion Facebook users
- 500 terabytes of data per day
- 2.7 billion “Like” actions per day
- 2.5 billion pieces of content per day
- 300 million photos per day
- 500 million Twitter users
- 400 million tweets per day
- 156 million Public Blogs
Social News
Facebook announced a new search tool on Tuesday: Facebook Graph Search. Graph Search will allow Facebook users to search for information about their friends within the platform. Searches can be done for information about people, photos, places, and interests. For example, within Graph Search, a user will be able to search for which of their friends like the show, How I Met Your Mother and are from Denton. The search results will display your friends. You will also be able to search friends of friends. The search tool will not violate Facebook privacy settings in anyway because the only information that will show up in search results is data that is normally viewable on Facebook based on users’ privacy settings.
The implications for social media strategy with the Graph Search tool are exciting. The tool is currently in beta mode, but once it is available, brands will be able to use the search data to highly target certain fans in a much more personal way. Watch the demo from Facebook.
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NOVEMBER MONTHLY SUMMARY
Globe Runner SEO Updates
November has been a busy month with some internal changes including the format of our monthly and weekly reports. Do not be surprised if the reports you see in January are formatted differently than what we have previously sent out.
Continuing our season of networking events, our SEO Team Lead, Cody, went to the Dallas Digital Summit. The speakers at the Summit had a central theme around the wealth of data that is provided with digital marketing and how using this data appropriately leads to better decision making and an increased ROI. Our philosophy at Globe Runner this year has been “data driven decision making” we have seen this confirmed by our peers as a winning strategy and many of our clients have benefited from these decisions.
2013 SEO Predictions
Our CEO, Eric McGehearty, recently put together some predictions for the coming year in the online marketing space. The talk was originally given for the members of TIE. In the talk, Eric discussed likely changes in the Google algorithm, possible tech mergers and acquisitions, continued growth of mobile and upsets in the social media space. The talk also focused on opportunities for entrepreneurs to leverage online marketing to their business advantages. Here is a preview of the talk.
Social News
If you are one of the millions of Twitter and Instagram users then you have probably noticed that Instagram photos no longer show up in your Twitter feed and you will now have to click on the Instagram photo link to see the photos. This is just one of the ways the social sphere is becoming more and more cutthroat as each social media platform vies for dominance. It is becoming even more important now to have a social media strategy that customizes your messaging specifically for each platform.
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HOW TO REALLY PROTECT YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT
Facebook has changed its policies and everything you post will be shared with everyone! Ok, not really. But there’s no doubt you noticed the panic that spread throughout Facebook earlier this week. Stock status updates were being shared by seemingly everyone in a desperate attempt to protect their control over their own posts. The problem was, it was all a hoax.
The Terms of Service document you approved of (but didn’t read) when you set you your account is what counts, not some viral status update.
What that panic illustrated, however, is how suspicious we remain about our privacy on the Internet and with social media networks like Facebook. We love the idea about sharing everything we want to share, but are terrified at the idea of that information getting out of our control. Luckily, these social networks offer many options to protect our content and provide multiple layers of control over sharing. Let’s take a look at some of these security options for some of the major social networks.
Twitter:
Twitter is pretty cut-and-dry: You can have a public Twitter account where everyone can see your tweets, or you can have a private Twitter account where only those you allow to follow you can see your tweets. That’s all, and it’s pretty easy to set up. Just log in to your Twitter profile, click on Settings and then check the box next to “Tweet Privacy” that says “Protect My Tweets.” Then, you’ll have to approve each person who follows you, and only those pre-approved people will be able to see your tweets.
LinkedIn:
LinkedIn has become a huge social network for professionals. In fact, it’s quickly replacing traditional resumes and becoming the first stop for recruiters. For that reason alone, it’s good to know who can see what on your account and what you choose to post there.
To review your account’s privacy settings, log in to LinkedIn and go to Settings. Then, at the bottom of your Settings page, you’ll see options that allow you to control who sees what on your profile and shared posts, when you update your profile, and even what people see when you view their profile.
It’s pretty robust, and simple to set up. However, keep in mind that the more locked down your profile is, the harder it will be for friends, colleagues, and potential employers to find you.
Facebook:
So, earlier this week, Facebook posts started popping up claiming immunity from some new Facebook policies that gives them control over who sees (or profits) from your content. The problem is it was a hoax. But, even though Facebook has a sketchy history of putting your privacy first, they’ve made great strides in giving you plenty of options to do so. Let’s take a look at 4 biggies.
1) Prevent people you don’t know by mutual connection from seeing what you like or commenting. One of the big complaints that the bogus Facebook status update was supposed to fix is that your content can be visible to people you don’t know by a mutual connection “Liking” or commenting on your post. But in reality, this is all controlled in your privacy settings.
When logged in to Facebook, look for the downward-pointing arrow in the upper right-hand corner. Click that, then click “Privacy Settings”.
From there, you can control how you connect with others, what get’s posted on your timeline from others (photo tagging, etc.), Apps connected to your profile, and even block people from your profile altogether.
2) Organize your friends into lists. Some of the previous settings are made even more powerful by creating lists and assigning friends to them. For example, if you have a list of old high school friends and a list of work friends, you might not share the same content with them. Or, maybe you want to keep your family from seeing those pictures from last weekend’s party. After sorting your contacts into lists, you can choose which lists will see a particular post when you add content to your wall.
3) How do others connect with you? How can they find you on Facebook? From the main Privacy Settings window, select “How You Connect.” There are a series of dropdowns that allow you to customize how people can find you (or not) on Facebook, who can send you friend requests, who can send you private messages, and who can post on your wall. These settings are very easy to set up, and very powerful.
4) Edit your Ads Privacy Settings. This one ties into the copyright concerns that were floating around a few days ago. If you’ve noticed that Facebook shows you what your friends have liked on other pages, then you’ve noticed Social Ads. If you want to make sure these things aren’t shared on your behalf by Facebook, go back to that little arrow, but this time click on Account Settings. Go to “Facebook Ads”, and you can change settings for “Ads Shown By Third Parties” and “Ads and Friends (Social Ads…)”.
Really, the only way to make sure that your social media accounts are private and locked down is to never “Like” anything, never share anything, or delete your profile altogether. Since that probably won’t happen, using these options provided by the different social networks under their terms and conditions will do a lot more than posting some silly viral status update.
GLOBE RUNNER CAMPING TRIP
We spend a great deal of time and effort working to create and maintain a specific culture at Globe Runner SEO. We want to foster ingenuity and creative thinking, provide an environment that nurtures yet challenges and end up with a cool, fun place to work that turns out great results.
With that in mind our intrepid C.E.O., Eric McGehearty, organized our 1st annual Father-Son Camping Trip. Several members of our staff have small children and thought this might be a great Saturday night, Sunday morning adventure. We ended up with 6 families, and even crossed the gender barrier and had two ladies join the boys club festivities.
On Saturday November 21st, our fearless group of 6 braved the treacherous roads of Dallas/Ft Worth to pitch our tents on the beautiful rocky shores of Lake Grapevine at Murrell Park.
We spent the afternoon collecting firewood, fishing with no luck, hiking and topped it off with a special racketeering presentation by one of the fathers. Despite windy conditions and water surrounding us on three sides, we successfully recovered every rocket launched!
We settled in that night to a wonderful dinner of steak, chicken and scallops on skewers cooked on an open fire under a starry sky. Add in a side of grilled vegetables and some olive oil and rosemary potatoes and we couldn’t have asked for anything more. We finished the night with some s’mores for the kiddos and then retired to our tents for the evening.
We were greeted the next morning with an absolutely brilliant morning, clear skies, cool but pleasant temps and all the colors of fall we yearn for. After collecting some more firewood and taking the kid’s on a “bear” hunt, we built a nice fire and enjoyed a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and grilled vegetables . With full belly’s and our time running out, we enjoyed some last minute fishing, football and then cleaned up our campsite, making sure to pick up and dispose of all trash and take care in dousing our fire and turning the dirt with a shovel to ensure all coals were extinguished.
As a guy with very limited camping experience, none in the last 25 years, and a self-labeled suburbanite, I was apprehensive about the entire experience. I was totally and completely wrong. We had a fabulous time as my 4 year old is still talking about the experience nearly two weeks away. From food to conversation, to ambiance to location, this was a trip we’ll seek to replicate. While I live in a digital world and work for a digital company in a digital industry, our analog night was a memory that no algorithmic update can erase or devalue.
HUNGRY TO TAKE OVER THE WEB? CITYSEARCH IS!
With the launch of its YouTube Channel Hungry, Citysearch is becoming a major player in the video content space. Recognizing that the web gets more local every day, Citysearch’s new channel celebrates local culture while expanding its local influence. My sister-in-law Tolly Moseley is the Austin, TX host for Hungry: Check out her latest episode to see how Hungry offers visitors a taste of Austin:
http://www.youtube.com/embed/aLJ2t1w_MMY?rel=0
CityGrid Media, the internet conglomerate that owns CitySearch, is far more than just a website. It’s a global-scale media company and publisher that understands the importance of local content. Unlike other ad networks, CityGrid publishes massive amounts of quality content through its various sites including Citysearch, Urbanspoon, and Insider Pages. Having proven the content marketing model, Citysearch and CityGrid Media now attract local and national advertisers alike.
What can small to midsize businesses learn from the CityGrid model?
First: Invest in Quality Content
Take the time to create stories worth reading and videos worth watching. Remember, the idea behind content marketing is to produce content that becomes your advertisement, rather than purchase advertising space alongside someone else’s content. Your content needs to be good enough that people seek it out.
Second: Go Local
We all love to hear about the places we live in and travel to. If you have a local presence, make a big deal about it. If not, you can still produce content and advertisements that are targeted to the cities you serve.
Finally: Be Authentic
Find your voice as a brand, and find voices that can help you make an impact in your target cities. Local talent can make a big difference. Hungry’s local hosts, for example, all have existing fan bases that the channel can leverage and build upon.
If you’re hungry to build your business online, follow the Citigrid recipe: use authentic, local ingredients and don’t skimp on quality.
THE KEY TO YOUR ONLINE PRESENCE
Customers are more tech-savvy than ever and the number of consumers who grew up interacting online is growing. Businesses have been flocking to the online world to spread their message and look for new buyers, but all too often the message is fake, forced, or just not relevant to modern customers.
Perhaps the most important orthodoxy underlying a brand’s online presence should be authenticity. Being online isn’t enough; you have to be real. It’s what people expect today, and they know the difference when it’s forced.
“I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my business card, so pay me maybe?”
The Internet IS the public sphere, especially in the area of social media. It’s where people gather, exchange comments and ideas, and network. But just because this is taking place online instead of face to face doesn’t mean common rules of personal etiquette don’t apply, even for a business
If you go to a dinner party or industry networking event, do you walk around introducing yourself to people, hand them your business card, and brow-beat them with information about your services and company? No. You try to have a real conversation with equal parts speaking and listening. You begin to build real relationships. And so should any authentic business looking to create a positive presence online.
Luckily, there are more tools for businesses to do this than ever. Don’t worry about being everywhere; no one belongs to every social club in town. Pick the ones that work best for your business and be real.
Authentic People Are Aware
Another key to online authenticity is awareness. Authentic people are aware of what’s going on around them. They follow up with friends and ask how their recent vacations are or how that big meeting went at work last week. Unaware people are sloppy. An unaware person forgets names. An authentic business has the same awareness about their community of online followers and the general world around them.
Unfortunately, there have been quite a few examples of brands online who haven’t made awareness, and therefore authenticity, a priority in their online presence. Take the National Rifle Association, for example. The morning after the tragic shootings in Aurora, CO, earlier this year, the NRA tweeted, “Good Morning, Happy Friday! Weekend plans?” While the NRA commented that the tweeter wasn’t aware of the shooting, the tweet stayed on their page for hours. A more aware online presence would have addressed the issue, or at least deleted the tweet, much more quickly.
Compare this with episode with Kitchen-Aid. During the first Presidential debate of 2012, the Kitchen-Aid twitter account posted: “‘Obamas gma even knew it was going 2 b bad! ‘She died 3 days b4 he became president’.” The tweet instantly went viral, and was almost immediately deleted and followed with a swift succession of tweets explaining that a staffer posted to the wrong account, apologizing for the comment, and reaching out to press outlets offering official comments. That is an aware brand.
Now, this brings up the situation of allowing others to tweet on your company’s behalf or scheduling posts ahead of time. There’s a lot of conjecture about both of these practices, but long story short, if the underlying principal of authenticity is maintained, neither are “wrong”.
Penguin And Panda Will Get You
Thanks to Google, we’ll never look at cute penguins or cuddly pandas the same way ever again. Penguin and panda are code-names for recent updates Google made to their algorithms that return search results, with Panda targeting online content and Penguin focusing on links. Google is always working to show the most relevant and legitimate search results, so it wants to weed out spam and bad content as much as possible. That means Google is looking to reward authentic content and punish bad or unauthentic content.
Websites with weak content, content that doesn’t relate to the purpose of the website, or was copy and pasted from another source, will face the wrath of penguin and panda. However, websites that have original, thoughtful, and engaging content are rewarded.
There’s more online content being generated by businesses than ever. It’s a lot to sift through. And while most businesses won’t ever have the great viral video that the whole world sees, having an authentic presence online will help ensure that when you’re brand is found online, potential customers will want to spend time with/on what you have to say.
SEPTEMBER SEO UPDATE
September Monthly Summary
Google Updates
On September 27, Google released a Panda algorithm update and an Exact Match Domain (EMD) Update. The EMD update targets domains that exactly match the search terms they hope to be found with and devalues those domains. For example, domains such a playscrabble.net and purses.com which previously ranked #3 for their respective exact match phrases (“play scrabble” and “purses”) have now been dropped out of the top 10 search results. The following graph illustrates the effect of this update.
According to a tweet from Matt Cutts, “New exact-match domain (EMD) algo affects 0.6% of English-US queries to a noticeable degree.” This update is extremely important because exact match domains used to be a very common SEO tactic and after this update it is clear that this tactic/shortcut to rankings is no longer effective. As an agency, we are following this update closely and are continuing to use proven effective strategies like great quality content and link building for our clients.
On October 4, Google announced 65 changes to their search algorithm. As usual, we have highlighted the updates we are most interested in.
- #82862. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- #84394. [project “Page Quality”] This launch helped you find more high-quality content from trusted sources.
- #84010. [project “Page Quality”] We refreshed data for the “Panda” high-quality sites algorithm.
These updates are all concerned with making sure the highest quality pages are listed first in Google’s search results.
- #83761. [project “Freshness”] This change helped you find the latest content from a given site when two or more documents from the same domain are relevant for a given search query.
- Imadex. [project “Freshness”] This change updated handling of stale content and applies a more granular function based on document age.
Fresh high quality content is continuing to be extremely important to Google search results. The more relevant and interesting the content on your site is, the higher the algorithm will rank your pages. These updates should also begin to move down those old, entrenched pdfs that sometimes rank third or fourth for a keyword, even though they were written years ago.
- #82279. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We changed to fewer results for some queries to show the most relevant results as quickly as possible.
- LTS. [project “Other Ranking Components”] We improved our web ranking to determine what pages are relevant for queries containing locations.
- #84586. [project “Other Ranking Components”] This change improved how we rank documents for queries with location terms.
- #83406. [project “Query Understanding”] We improved our ability to show relevant Universal Search results by better understanding when a search has strong image intent, local intent, video intent, etc.
Last month’s summary mentioned that Google is now sometimes only displaying only 7 results for certain search queries as opposed to the usual 10. Google’s latest updates confirm that this will continue and that we can expect to see fewer results but an increased relevancy of those results.
Just For Fun
The holidays are right around the corner and if you are going to be flying to visit family this year, you might want to check out Google Flight Search. As of Sept. 28, you can now search for flights from your tablet. What is unique about using Google to search for flights instead of Expedia, Hotwire, or Priceline is you can search all airports near a city at once. For example, a search from Dallas, TX to New York, NY shows you a comparison of flights from both DAL and DFW to JFK, LGA, and EWR.
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WHAT IS DIGITAL RETAILING? PART ONE: ORGANIZATION
Somebody who works in the E-commerce industry recently told me they have trouble explaining Digital Retailing to others. Because it’s still a fairly new concept to consumption, I, too, used to have trouble explaining Digital Retailing to others. Of course, when somebody hears the phrase Digital Retailing, they think online sales, and that’s pretty accurate. However, I’d like to speak about Digital Retailing at a higher level, as though I had to explain strategies to the Shark Tank.
I started to think about what exactly it is that I’m doing to help businesses succeed with a digital presence. I know having a proper Digital Retailing strategy is a must. And I know that my effort, skills, and knowledge provide results such as increased ROI and leads, but for a while I couldn’t explain how these elements help in an easy phrase. Then, I came up with a sentence, somewhat of an elevator pitch, that I feel clearly explains how I view Digital Retailing:
Digital Retailing involves creating a properly organized, efficient, scalable, and engaging digital presence.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to break down each element from the above phrase and explain why I feel they’re important to every company’s Digital Retailing presence. Please keep in mind that a majority of my experience and skills have been developed from Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Online Merchandising.
Organization
Working with SEM has made it clear to me that a digital presence must absolutely be well organized. Because I work at an agency, I get the incredible opportunity to work closely with a variety of departments, allowing me to get hands-on experience with how research and tasks are completed across all departments. My favorite department to hover around is development.
A partnership between search marketers and web developers works in everyone’s favor. Developers have shown me how important the organization of a project architecture must be in order for the project to function properly, ideally, and to be prepared for future updates or progressions in technology. Working with developers also introduced me to a better and more organized workflow, utilizing Version Control Systems and regular expression to make my life easier as a technical SEO (and probably so I don’t have to bother a developer for a simple change to a .htaccess or robots.txt file). In my experience, digital marketers commonly make the decision on what the hierarchical structure of categories and navigation should be, along with addressing canonical decisions and proper content organization and strategies.
Of course, having a background in search and definitely a more business oriented individual, I can’t leave out all of the organization that must go into an effective digital marketing campaign. Whether you’re working with SEO, PPC, Display, Social, or other, you’re going to accumulate A LOT of data. I’ve found the best way to handle all of that data is to develop outstanding organization skills. Once you have a solid strategy for organizing and researching, stick to it! That’s the only way you’ll keep your sanity. If you’re working with a team, make sure everybody is using the same techniques for research and data gathering. This will ensure data is kept consistent when passed around between coworkers and clients.
Another commonly overlooked aspect of Digital Retailing organization is brand consistency across channels. This includes displaying accurate content through all areas of the online landscape, including: phone numbers, website address, contact emails, promotions, descriptions, etc. As retailing moves more towards an omni-channel approach, brand consistency and organization will only become more important when delivering an optimal user experience.
AUGUST SEO UPDATE
State of the Search Industry Update
August was another month without a published Google update list so this month’s update is more of a “state of the industry” update. According to the State of Search Marketing Report 2012, search has grown 19% since 2011 and is predicted to reach an estimated $23 billion dollars by the end of the year. This growth is expected to continue at a 13% rate through 2013.
7 is the New 10
Google did make one very important algorithm change this month. Now some search queries are only pulling seven results on the first page. These first seven results may also be less diverse and much more branded. For example a search for “pc tools” returns only seven organic results. The middle of August showed this change dramatically and SEOMOZ reported that almost one-fifth of the SERPs they tracked were showing only 7 results.
Google’s 86 June-July Updates included three updates specifically mentioning site clustering. Site clustering is showing multiple links from the same domain in the search results.
- #82541. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] This is one of multiple projects that we’re working on to make our system for clustering web results better and simpler.
- NoPathsForClustering. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] We’ve made our algorithm for clustering web results from the same site or same path (same URL up until the last slash) more consistent. This is one of multiple projects that we’re working on to make our clustering system better and simpler.
- bergen. [project codename “Other Ranking Components”] This is one of multiple projects that we’re working on to make our system for clustering web results better and simpler.
Google’s response to this 7 result change was:
We’re continuing to work out the best ways to show multiple results from a single site when it’s clear users are interested in that site. Separately, we’re also experimenting with varying the number of results per page, as we do periodically. Overall our goal is to provide the most relevant results for a given query as quickly as possible, whether it’s a wide variety of sources or navigation deep into a particular source. There’s always room for improvement, so we’re going to keep working on getting the mix right.
At GlobeRunnerSEO, we are watching these changes very closely and working very hard to make sure our clients continue to rank on the first page, whether there are 7 or 10 results on that first page.
Link Building—it’s about Quality and Quantity
This week we went to DFWSEM, the largest and most important search marketing professional group in the area. We discussed links and how even with the updates to Penguin being termed “jolting” in the near future, both the quality and quantity of links will remain important to rankings.
Social Rankings Devalued?
Google has devalued social signals recently because Facebook and Twitter have blocked Google from crawling their data at different times and as Matt Cutts put it, “We can’t use what we can’t see.” This does not mean that you should give up your social campaigns. Social media is extremely important in branding, reputation, and customer service. A strong brand presence on the web drives traffic and conversions. We and several of our peers at DFWSEM predict that social media will be the fourth pillar of SEO in the very near future, joining the well-established pillars: site architecture, links, and content.
Google+ and Google Authorship of articles and blog posts have not been devalued because Google can see this data. Google Authorship (linking your Google+ profile) to a blog article you have written automatically pushes your article’s rankings higher.
Bing, on the other hand, is incorporating more social results into their search results. Bing announced in September that Quora data will now be included in their search results.
Just For Fun
We don’t typically talk much about Bing and a client’s rankings on Bing; since Bing makes up only 25.3% of all organic searches (Google processes 68.8% of all organic searches). However, Microsoft is running a blind taste test to see if users prefer Google or Bing search results. Here’s the link to the test www.bingiton.com, let us know which search engine you prefer and we will tell you which engine’s results the GlobeRunner team preferred.
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