The Reciprocal Consulting Blog

Every once in a while someone jumps up and asks the question, “Are Bing and Yahoo! still relevant?” The short answer is, yes, of course they are still relevant. The long answer is a little more involved, but it goes something like this.

Google enjoys a huge share of the search market. More than 60%. The rest is divided among Bing, Yahoo!, and the various search engines below that (Ask, Mahalo, and even YouTube). While it’s important to make sure your website meets Google’s guidelines so you can rank your website well in its index, it’s equally important to ensure that you diversify your traffic sources.

Those of you who have been around for five years or more may remember MySpace. At one time, it was the No. 1 social network. Now, hardly anyone thinks about it.

Why is MySpace important? Because it should serve as a lesson. Obscurity is just one competitor away no matter who you are – even Google.

Google may be top dog in search today, but that doesn’t mean that Web users won’t find something to replace them next year. It could be Facebook or it could be something else. If you rely entirely on Google and Google starts sending you less traffic (even if they don’t fade into obscurity), then your business is shot. Traffic diversity is one of the most important things for anyone running a business online.

For that reason, Bing and Yahoo! are still relevant. Diversify your website traffic.

If you are a local business trying to convert local traffic, the necessary first step is to attract targeted local traffic. But how do you do that?

It’s not a question of medium. Whether you are using pay per click advertising, video marketing, or a blog, the concepts are the same. SEO and social media can be used to reach an audience that is targeted for your particular services. In other words, who needs or wants what you have?

This can often be a challenge for local businesses because you think that writing content about your local area will attract people who live in your area. Maybe. Maybe not.

Let’s say that you operate a restaurant in New Orleans. Not everyone in New Orleans is interested in eating out every day. Even if your restaurant is an Italian restaurant, not everyone in New Orleans likes Italian food. But, if someone is looking for an Italian restaurant in New Orleans, you definitely want them to find yours.

So what’s the point?

If you think that targeting “New Orleans” in every blog post is more important than discussing food-related information, you might be confused. People looking for an Italian restaurant are not likely interested in the Greek festival taking place in your neighborhood. They might be interested in a kids carnival if it is going to be in your parking lot. I hope you see the difference.

The key take away here is to be judicious and thoughtful in how you approach your local content. If it’s relevant to your business, post it. If it will attract people who might be in the market for your services, post it. If not, then don’t mess with it.

In the midst of a great article on measuring ROI in search engine optimization campaigns, Michael Martinez started talking about depreciating link values. That’s an odd way to talk about link building, isn’t it? But it’s really not – not if you consider inbound links an asset.

A Website’s intrinsic value should include the intrinsic value of the links that point to it. So I feel, anyway. Hence, if you can assign a dollar value to links you can improve your asset valuation of a Website. Furthermore, if you incorporate link decay models into your depreciation methodology you can measure a type of growth in asset value that can be used to infer future conversions over virtually any period of time.

All of that’s well and good when determining the value of a website, but what about in determining the value of a link building campaign?

In order for links to depreciate, they have to appreciate. The value of a link is not necessarily what you pay for it – and I’m not talking about buying links. No matter what kind of link building you do, you have to expend some money to do it. So how do you determine link value?

4 Ways To Determine Link Value

One way to determine inbound link value is the traffic generation method. If you can assign a value to each unique visitor and to each real visitor to your website, then you can value your inbound links by the amount of traffic generation they deliver.

The downside to this method is that it doesn’t take into consideration your search engine rankings.

Another way to determine inbound link value is to measure your search engine rankings, but that doesn’t take into consider your website traffic or conversions. It’s not a very good way to judge value because there are a lot of other factors you can’t control.

You can measure link values solely on how well they convert traffic to sales, but there are weaknesses to that model as well. Not all conversions take place the first time a link is clicked, or the first time a visitor arrives at your site. A visitor could click a link and visit your website, then visit it again through a SERP, and finally convert through a PPC ad. So what is the value of that link then?

The fourth way to measure link values is by using a combination of the above methods. The downside to doing this is that you run the risk of counting certain link qualities more than once. Still, by making an honest effort, you can close the loopholes on each method and you stand a better chance of seeing a realistic picture of your link values.

A new study shows SmartPhone clicks have gone up 105% year over year since last year. Traffic from tablet users has gone up a whopping 339% year over year.

Are you astounded?

You shouldn’t be. We’ve been saying mobile marketing is growing, and now we have the proof. In fact, it’s growing by leaps and bounds.

Click traffic overall is up 21% in the U.S.

If you are engaged in online marketing or e-commerce at all, then you need to pay attention to these numbers. I don’t think this is a fluke. I fully expect these trends to continue for at least 3-5 years. More and more people are using Smartphones and using them for shopping online. People are using their Smartphones for finding local businesses and making purchases from global businesses online. Now the question to ask is, how can you tap into that money?

The first step is to make sure that your website is mobile-ready. That includes design as well as your ordering system. Can mobile users access your website?

After making sure that mobile users can access your website and use it, try marketing it. That’s right, marketing your mobile site is a tad bit different than marketing your main website. You can use PPC ads to drive traffic to your mobile site and use other acceptable online marketing methods to reach mobile customers specifically just as you do in searching for other customers.

The age of mobile has arrived. Don’t pass up this opportunity.

Should you be a guest blogger? There are a lot of people online right now telling you that guest blogging is the holy grail of Internet marketing. That’s debatable, but what’s not debatable is that guest blogging does have its benefits. What are they?

Here are 5 benefits to guest blogging that you should consider and chase. There’s nothing wrong with coveting your neighbor’s online reputation.

1. Enhanced reputation management – If you guest blog on the right industry blogs within your niche, you will build a solid reputation for yourself. Merely being associated with highly valuable and recognized blogs will enhance your online reputation.
2. Position yourself as an expert – By writing about industry topics and offering solutions to problems you can make yourself an overnight expert on your topic.
3. Expand your audience – When you write posts on other blogs within your industry you’ll reach people who otherwise might never hear of you. You have the opportunity to expand your audience and tap into someone else’s reservoir.
4. More traffic to your website – There’s hardly a benefit more important than more traffic to your website. This is an extension of your reputation, your perceived expertise, and your audience expansion efforts.
5. Search engine optimization – You might as well go for the link while you’re there. You don’t want to appear as if the link is the most important thing to guest blogging, but since you’re there, you might as well take the link.

Focus on the benefits of guest blogging and take advantage of them. It will only help your business.

Should you change your domain name or keep trucking with the domain that you have knowing that you are losing traffic, and revenue, daily?

That’s a big question. Obviously, I can’t answer this question for every online marketer without first looking at your website and your overall situation, but I hope I can at least give you some food for thought.

There are different categories of websites, and website owners. Here is the basic break down as I see them:

• Cookie-cutter websites – These websites follow the same design pattern and the webmasters who own them generally own more than one. They build a website that is successful then model all others on that one site. A lot of these websites are made-for-AdSense websites and you’ll often find them penalized after the owner has run afoul of search engine guidelines.
• Unique passive-income website – This could be a made-for-AdSense website or not, but it is clear that the revenue from the site is derived from ad clicks or affiliate links. The owner doesn’t have to continually maintain the site to earn revenue, but it does have a unique design.
• Unique online business model – Not only does this website have a unique design, but it also has its own business model that requires active maintenance on the part of the owner.
• Online extension of an off-line business – This website is the website of a previously existing off-line business and has a unique design as a result.

When Should You Change Domain Names And Move On?

When it comes to online marketing, there is one scenario where the type of your website is not an issue. If your site has been penalized for bad links, then that domain name is likely shot forever regardless of which category it falls into. Your best bet is likely to be to build another website and start over. The only exception would be if you could go back and delete all of the bad incoming links, but that is rarely possible, and even if it is, it may not help you much.

Beyond that, there are times when running afoul of search engine guidelines could be a temporary situation if you correct the deficiencies. In those cases, you can probably get by with your current domain name provided that you identify your problems and address them.

There are times when a site is penalized when the owners have done nothing wrong. If you wait it out, you’ll likely see your site regain lost traffic and revenue.

But here’s the catch: Those cookie-cutter websites probably aren’t doing you any favors. If you have several websites that look the same, even if the content is all unique, then that could be a red flag for the search engines. I’d say redesign the sites and see what happens. If your traffic and revenue don’t return after six months or so, then build yourself another site.

How To Decide If Changing Domain Names Isn’t Counterproductive?

You have to weigh the lost revenue against the time you spend trying to figure out the problem. There was a time when figuring out what has gone wrong wasn’t counterproductive, but post-Panda, that time is gone. The Panda algorithm update is such a mystery that hardly anyone knows even now what it addressed, why, or how. Sometimes, the best thing to do is count your losses and run.

Online marketing is really all about content. There’s onsite content, that content which makes up your website. Then there’s offsite content, which is content you may or may not own and does not appear on your website but benefits you in some way; it generally appears elsewhere on the Web and points back to your website.

Today we’ll focus on 4 ways to make good use of offsite content. It’s not necessarily about link building, though if you do it right you can build solid, high value inbound links to your website. Good offsite content can also drive massive traffic to your website, which is even more valuable than inbound links, particularly if it’s targeted traffic.

Here are 4 sources of offsite content, places where you can publish your content for inbound links and traffic:

1. Review websites - I’m talking about places like Yelp and Amazon. You do not necessarily own review content. If it’s written by someone else, you won’t own it. But that content can benefit you nonetheless. If people write good reviews of your products, you’ll make sales. Those sales might be on your site or might not be, but they’ll be sales.
2. Niche blogs - Go out and find niche blogs that target the same demographic you are targeting. Write a guest blog post for that blog with content that is targeted toward that audience.
3. Social media sites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest. They all have one thing in common. Your content can attract new followers and fans, people who will eventually end up on your website.
4. Directories – Directories have been dismissed by a huge portion of the SEO and Internet marketing niche, but there are still a few good directories out there. Not all of them have been banned by the search engines. Search for high value, high authority directories like DMOZ and add a listing for your business.

Offsite content is not always about search engine rankings, but if you get them it’s icing on the cake. Rather, you are trying to drive people back to your website where they will get your real high value content.

It’s pretty well established by now that long tail keyword phrases have value in and of themselves. But what constitutes the long tail?

Generally, the long tail is defined by those keywords that are less competitive than the broad search term. For instance, “website design” would be considered a broad search term. As of this writing, there are 1.79 billion results in Google for that search phrase. But we can narrow the search field by narrowing the scope of our search. Let’s try “website design for churches.” Barely more than 5 million search results.

OK, so now let’s put our keyword phrase in quotes and search. Just 11,200 results for the exact search phrase “website design for churches.” There’s your long tail.

What Long Tail Keywords Can Do For Your Business

If you were to target that keyword phrase, you wouldn’t get a lot of traffic. But if you do website design for churches, then it’s a targeted keyword phrase that would be easier to exploit for traffic purposes and you stand a much better chance at getting on page 1 for your search engine optimization efforts.

The long tail represents opportunities for you to capitalize on less often search terms that could still be profitable for your business. Think about this hypothetical-but-realistic scenario:

• The most popular search phrase in your industry delivers 10,000 unique website visitors to the website in the No. 1 position in Google. It’s not you. In fact, as a new business, you are down somewhere on page 100 of the search results. You get no traffic from that phrase.
• One long tail keyword phrase delivers 50 unique website visitors to the website in the No. 1 position in Google for that phrase. You’re No. 3 and get 10 uniques a month from that phrase.
• You target 100 long tail keyword phrases and get an average of 25 unique visitors each month from those keyword phrases – a total of 2,500 unique visitors.

Let’s stop there. With 100 long tail keyword phrases you are able to capture 2,500 very well targeted website visitors each month, and let’s say you convert 10% of them into sales. That’s 250 new customers per month. If your average sale is $30, that represents an income of $7,500 per month. Would you rather have that or 0% of 10,000?

Long tail keywords are great opportunities for new businesses online. In time, you can turn long tail keywords into broad search income. But it takes time. Be patient.

Since the Panda and Penguin updates, SEOs and Internet marketers have come out of the woodwork to tell us all how to survive the updates, how to recover from the updates, and how to ensure the next update doesn’t kill our rankings. Quite frankly, I think it’s unnecessary. If webmasters had been focused on delivering good content all along, then the discussion would be moot.

“But I followed Google’s guidelines!”

It doesn’t matter. Following the guidelines is one thing. Providing excellent content that readers want to read is another.

We’ve entered the age of content marketing, like it or not.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the process of writing content for your website and elsewhere that promotes your brand, improves your reputation, and drives traffic back to your website. You are looking at driving traffic, not improving rankings.

Don’t know the difference? Try achieving a No. 1 ranking on any search engine that doesn’t deliver traffic to your website. It happens. Believe me, it happens.

Here’s a question: Would you rather have a page 2 ranking that sends you 10 unique visitors per month or a No. 1 ranking that doesn’t send you any? Now see my point?

The purpose of content marketing is to drive traffic to your landing pages and convert that traffic into sales. It doesn’t really matter where your traffic comes from. That’s irrelevant. You want as much traffic as you can get and you want it to be targeted traffic. Pursuing search engine rankings is the old way of marketing online. Delivering fresh, original and unique content is the way it should be done now. In fact, it’s the way it should always have been done. And when you do it that way, you’ll get the traffic you want and the traffic you deserve.

Anyone who has owned a website for a couple of years or more knows that you have dips in traffic. There are highs and lows, peaks and valleys, and ups and downs. That’s really the nature of life. So did you experience a high or a low this Memorial Day weekend?

Depending on your niche you may have experienced a dip in traffic. If so, don’t sweat it. That happens. Many niches see dips over long weekends and holidays. Memorial Day is a day when a lot of people take a break from the Internet to do other things – like enjoy a barbecue cook out with their favorite neighbors and a case of beer, or to attend Memorial Day events that honor fallen veterans. Maybe both.

Traffic spikes happen and traffic dips happen. Your job as webmaster of your company’s website is to figure out a way to keep your current visitors coming back and to attract new website visitors over time. Don’t get wrapped around single events. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

So how do you do that? In a word, there are a number of ways that you can keep steady traffic flowing to your website. Here are a few ideas:

• Blog daily
• Stay active on social networks where your audience hangs out
• Do some article marketing or guest blogging
• Join a few forums
• Comment on some popular blogs within your niche

Website traffic is an up-and-down game. Always has been and always will be. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

Facebook and Bing have been partners for some time. Recently, Facebook has started to get a little bit more aggressive at promoting search to its users.

The Bing ad appears to Facebook users when they log out of their Facebook accounts. Evidently, that happens often enough that Facebook thought it might be prudent to capture those users with an ad promoting their preferred search engine – Bing. Of course, it’s still too early to tell if the promotion has resulted in Bing picking up any market share. But it could happen.

What’s even more important is, How will this affect businesses who use Facebook? Or businesses who SEO their websites for Bing?

That brings up another point. ARE you SEOing your website for Bing? Of course, you should be.

Bing has nowhere near the search market share that Google has, but it’s still a sizable enough of a market share that you shouldn’t ignore it. People do still search the Internet with Bing and it seems that more and more people are doing so. Many websites show Bing as in the top five among referrers to their website. And that’s signficant.

If Bing is listed in your referrer log as a site that sends traffic to your website, then you should do as much as you can to encourage that traffic. SEO your website for Bing search. That means new pages and old pages.

You can improve your website’s Bing SEO for old pages by checking your rankings and tweaking your pages with some type of multivariate testing. You should employ solid SEO practices for your new pages to see how you make your Bing SEO shine.

Bottom line, don’t ignore Bing – or Facebook – for traffic.

UGC stands for user generated content. If you use it, it means less work for you, more monetization opportunities, fewer time management hurdles, and possibly even better content. In most cases, it also means more website traffic.

User generated content can be solicited in any number of ways, however. And it can take on many forms. It can be straight textual content, other graphical content, photographs, videos, social networking content, or a mixture of the above. But how do you get people to send you their content to start with?

First, you should build your own content and get the pump primed. Once you’ve attracted a certain level of traffic, start building your platform. Then, put a call out on your website, in your e-mail blasts, and in forums within your niche.

You should make it easy for your website visitors to upload their content. Add a membership feature to your website and give each member the means to add content within their own community profile area. That content can be anything they desire, but you should encourage content that compliments the content you’ve already loaded to your site and that attracted people to it in the first place.

User generated content is how savvy webmasters build communities today. But you must build the platform.

If you share your links on Facebook in hopes that you’ll drive more traffic to your website or blog, you might think more about StumbleUpon for that purpose. On the other hand, maybe not.

This is a rather lame analysis on the differences between Facebook and StumbleUpon, but Cynthia Boris is right on one point, at least. Facebook was not designed to be a link sharing site – StumbleUpon was. So what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?

Look at this like this. These numbers represent an aggregate of users. StumbleUpon now drives 50% of social media traffic referral in the U.S. while Facebook dipped down below 42%. Guess what? Search engine traffic is still up around 60% of website referrals. When seen in that light, both StumbleUpon and Facebook pale in comparison.

Still, let’s get back to StumbleUpon and Facebook. SU has been a heavy driver of traffic for years. But most Internet marketers know that traffic doesn’t convert well. Facebook is better for branding. Plus, because of its social networking features, the ability to build brandable pages, and Facebook’s app development features, the largest social media website on the planet is much, much better for small business branding.

Besides that, you’ll have to do your own comparisons for your own website. Many website owners can use StumbleUpon very effectively. Others find great success with Facebook. Aggregate totals say nothing about your ability to leverage any particular social media website.

There’s nothing wrong with StumbleUpon touting its success. And there’s nothing wrong with being a little critical of it too. StumbleUpon is a good source of traffic if you keep in mind what it’s good for.

Do you understand your website’s traffic metrics? Most websites have particular days of the week, and even hours of the day, when they are at their busiest. A quick look at your website’s stats will tell you which days of the week (and which hours of the day) are most popular. The question is, can you modify your marketing to either take advantage of traffic peaks, or better yet, to drive traffic during the quieter times?

Offline businesses have been doing it for centuries. Making special offers available early in the week when customer traffic is low. Some businesses have even been accused of raising prices during peak periods – gas for our cars is a good example. What about your website – can you do the same?

Many businesses care only about right now. You need to understand your target market first. If you are selling products that are aimed at moms, then you will see a distinct peak at certain times of the day, depending of course on your product. Tweeting a super special at other times of the day may increase your traffic marginally, but if moms just aren’t available then, that special offer will be lost. More importantly, you may upset some customers since they weren’t physically able to take up your offer.

Knowing your traffic highs and lows and knowing your target market’s online habits are important metrics that you may be able to use to better target your marketing. If you use pay-per-click advertising, then you can ensure your ads are only running when your customers are online.

When it comes to blog traffic, publishing blogs shortly before your traffic peak ensures your readers are receiving the very latest. Publish after your traffic peak and regular readers are seeing your content 20-24 hours after publication – that is not ideal if you are looking to start conversations. On topical matters, you could be seen to be publishing stale news.

Understand your traffic metrics and use them to help boost your internet marketing programs.