Search Mojo

Cady:

Hello everyone and welcome to today's presentation, “Search and Social Integrated.” I'm Cady Condyles, Director of Marketing here at Search Mojo and I'll be moderating today's webinar. A few things before we get started.

Please submit your questions in the question box only, this will help us streamline the process and help us respond to them faster. We'll be sure to answer your questions during or after the webinar and if we don't get to it during the presentation, we'll follow up with an email. Some of you may be wondering, the presentation, slides, and recording will be provided to you in an email tomorrow and will also be updated to slide share.

Now to introduce today's speakers. First we have Janet Driscoll Miller. She is the President and CEO of Search Mojo. With more than 12 years of search engine optimization experience, Janet has spoken at search engine conferences including Search Engine Strategies and Pubcon. Janet also has published articles in magazines, visibility magazines, and others. She contributes to several blogs including, Search Marketing Sage, Marketing Pilgrim, and Search Engine Guru.

Katherine Watier is currently a Vice President of Social Media at Ketchum Global Public Relations Agency. Katherine offers more than 17 years of experience in communication strategy and online delivery of communication messages, including eight years of search engine optimization, social media, web analytics management, and communications training. She has extensive experience in web development and design, usability, and information architecture, and message development execution across a variety of marketing channels. She's spoken about online marketing and SEO for American Marketing Association, PRSA, D.C. Digital Capital Week, and a variety of other events and conferences.

If you'll be Tweeting the webinar, feel free to use the #mojowebinar. To give you a little background about Search Mojo, we are a search engine marketing firm that was founded in 2005 and we offer search engine optimizations, pay-for-click advertising, and social media monitoring for our clients. We're located in beautiful Charlottesville, Virginia and have been featured in the Washington Post, B2B Magazine, and Marketing Sherpa. We frequently speak at industry conferences. Janet will be speaking about Google+ and Plus 1's at the SMX Social Media Marketing conference on Monday, in Scottsdale, Arizona. If you'll be attending please sit in on Janet’s channel and say hello. All right, Janet and Katherine, take it away.

Janet:

Thank you very much. This is Janet Driscoll Miller and we're going to start off by talking about a review of what our topics are for today, what are we going to cover. First we're going to go through an overview of SEO and pay per click advertising. Cover search and social and how they're combining. They're combining in a multiple number of ways today and some ways that may surprise you. We'll talk about the Facebook like button and its importance and how the Google +1 button as well. Katherine has a great Facebook “Like” button case study to share with you, it’s just fascinating. We're also going to touch on online reputation management and how social can help you with your search, to ensure that in your search results, that you’re protecting brand.

We're going to touch on rel=author, which is an implementation on your blog to show your author's picture and some author information along with the actual listing in your web results. It gives your listing a lot more visibility.

We're going to touch on mobile search and it's importance. Katherine has lots of great information to share about where mobile is going in the next year and not just from an organic perspective, you need to think about mobile from an advertising perspective as well. How do you measure all this stuff? What are the analytics? Where can you go to get all the information you need to measure and what's the future really hold for search and social? How are they going to come together even further in the future?

Katherine and I will leave you with our key takeaways: What to do if you don't have much time, you don't have a lot of resources, what should you take away now and do today that you can clearly do to help your search along with your social?

Let's get started with the overview. I like to show this slide to demonstrate for folks who may not be familiar, which are paid listings versus organic listings. Google definitely doing their best in many ways to make this a little more difficult to tell, I think. You look at the top listings, those are sponsored results. Everything in that red box are paid listings and ads. Everything in the box we have made blue there, are organic listings or what we use SEO for.

Usually, Katherine and I, talk about a four-step program for SEO. The first thing you want to do is choose your keyword phrases that your audience is going to be using. Think about what kind of keywords your audience is going to use to search for your type of product or service or offering. It's important that you think about how they search not just what you think they great buzz words are of your industry, but also think about how users actually search for the information.

You want to label site content to match those words. You want to go back and take the keywords you decide on and you want to make sure that you edit your content on your site accordingly, so that the engines know that that's what your sites about.

The third step is you want to want to gain inbound links, they're like votes. Google's entire package is based on inbound linking technology and how links are like votes. You want to have other people link to content from your blog, social media profiles, and other websites, they are really very helpful in helping your SEO and getting inbound links. And you want each piece of online content to have its own link.

Don't just think about linking to the host page. Make sure you link to all the types of content. Different pages on your site and the different types of content you have on your site.

Lastly, this is the new one, this is what we're really going to be focusing our efforts on today is socialize. Make sure that you're using socializing tactics to gain inbound links, we talked about how important those are, and to dominate your brand in search, as well.

This is one of the things we're going to talk about more in depth today. This is the social circle, sort of an illustration of the social circle it kind of goes into what Katherine was talking about how SEO is incorporating social today. This is a snap shot of my social circle. You can see Katherine is in my social circle as well as Matt Cutts from Google. It shows what Google knows about how I know these people or how I'm connected to them and so forth.

I show this slide because I like people to kind of get an idea of how much information Google really knows about your social relationships that you may not even realize. If you want to check out your own social circle, it's fairly simple to do just make sure you're logged into your Gmail account or your Google account and you go to that link that I've got there www.google.com/f2/searchtestsocial.

You can see what Google knows about your personal social relationships as well, and how it relates you to other people. It's a little bit scary, honestly, how much people really know and I think people don't always understand how much they truly know about you and your circle that you hang out in. Well, we look to that to be a real indicator for Google in the future of personalized search results even more.

Katherine, I'm going to take the ball back from you if that's all right?

Katherine:

That's fine.

Janet:

All right. Then there are really three major things that we look at when we talk about search and social integration with SEO today. The first one is brand search results. We're going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. Universal search, today, this was implemented several years ago. As you know when you do a search on Google anymore, in the web results, you see more than just your typical web pages. You see video. You see news. You see blogs. All sorts of things in that universal search result.

You need to use that capability of all the types of content out there and in social as well to help claim your page and your brand, your first page of brand result so that you don't have to worry as much about other people writing things about your brand that you can define your brand better.

The second thing is socialized and personalized search result. Google is getting a lot more personalized in the way they serve up results. We’re going to talk about some strategies to get social links that can really help you.

A third is trending topics. How can you coordinate your outreach efforts to ride trends in Google, because Google has something we'll talk a little bit more about later called QDF or Query Deserves Freshness. Their entire algorithm is now designed to try and push recent information, recent news to the top. When you see something trending, how can you take advantage of that through social means and through other means, to make sure that you are also riding that wave?

Let's talk first about the brand search results and how you get the front page on your results. This is a sample search for our company name Search Mojo. What I want to point out here is in the top ten results, you'll notice that three things right there. This isn't even the full top ten, but for positions five, six, and seven, are social results. Notice that we have social profiles for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook appearing on search engines for our name. The benefit of that is you're really dominating, when you control those in-feeds like what's said on Twitter, what's said on LinkedIn, and what's said on your Facebook profile pages, you can then better define how your brand appears in a search.

That’s really key because for an online reputation management perspective, which is something we should all be thinking about, you never know when a crisis might happen or there is going to be something negative said about your company. This allows you to have this conduit that is already built into the top ten results where you can put in your message and your response. So that is a really important thing to think about. And you can link up a bunch of these things, which we'll talk about later, through Google+ profiles for your business or for yourself as an individual as well. So we'll talk more about that a little bit later in the presentation. And now I'm going to hand it back to Katherine who is going to talk about universal search.

Katherine:

Universal search has actually been a piece of the Google algorithm and how they've been displaying search results for a couple of years now. But I'm still sort of surprised about the number of marketers who don't leverage this to their fullest extent. The gist is that it used to be, and you folks probably remember this, that when you searched in Google you only saw web results. Over the last couple of years, Google has really wanted to show variety of stuff in search results.

As a marketer, it is really important to leverage that trend and to think, “Well, okay, I want to rank for a particular key word. How many different types of assets can I use to actually rank for that term?” Right here you can see Chef Boyardee and they're actually ranking in a bunch of places. The arrows are actually Chef Boyardee content directly from ConAgra and those are images and videos that they own and different web properties and blogs that are all sort of dominating that first page of search results.

As you're thinking about applying your SEO strategy to rank for a particular key word, keep in mind that there's a bunch of different types of content that can help you actually appear in a search. In particular we're going to talk a little about Scribd today, which is my new favorite social platform. That is a social sharing site for PDFs, we're going to talk about later, that ranks really effectively in search results, at least temporarily. It gives you a nice big bump and you quickly become part of that first page.

There is a whole bunch of stuff that you can use to rank in search. Out of this whole list, the important thing to know is that there is more click-through on certain types of things that are optimized than others. Images and video have a much higher click-through rate from search results because we like clicking on pictures, in general, when we're searching. If you have an image or a video that you can leverage, I think videos give you, is it a 50% bump to get on the first page? It's a significant chance to get on the first page results with a video in particular. You get much more click through rate. Now I'm going to hand it back over to Janet to talk about socialized and personalized search results.

Janet:

Thanks Katherine. We're going to talk a little bit about socialized/ personalized results, how social is making your personal life results much more personal these days. If I take a look at a search result, this is a search I did for a type of pie, I have a friend that likes to bake pies and she has this pie recipe called Guinness pie. I had no idea that there was so much out there about Guinness pie, but this is a search result I had when I logged in to my Google account. You'll see here at the bottom, here's my friend Mary Jean and her article on her blog about, it's called “Pie It Forward,” for Guinness pie.

Now here is the same result when I am logged out of Google. And what you'll notice is the last result there is not Mary Jean's result at all. It's a whole different website. In fact, Mary Jean's recipe ranked about 10 when I was logged into Google, but when I'm logged out of Google it doesn't appear until about position 43 or page 5.

What that tells me is that when I'm logged in Google is trying to personalize my results and actually will improve ranking for articles that are shared or are by my friends so that I can see them. Google's theory is probably, if you see your friend Mary Jean's face and you know it's from her blog and you see that she shared it, you're more likely to click on it. Google seems to think that this is something that is more value. Just know that when you're trying to include your social networks, this is one of the reasons you want to grow your social network. The more people in your social circle, the more people in your social network, the better your chance that you're going to be able to take advantage of personalized results and hopefully, move some things up the charts better, in Google.

Now Bing is a little bit different. The example on the left is Bing when I'm logged into Facebook and on the right-hand side, is Bing when I’m logged out of Facebook. You all may have heard a few weeks ago about a missing child here in Virginia and he was visiting a battle field. I did a search for that story and when I did you'll notice on the left hand side, I think you can see some small pictures and so forth of the stories I had shared and that my friends had shared. If you look here, there’s where my friend Shashi had shared on Facebook.

If you look on the right-hand side you'll notice that the same story appeared in the same spot even when I'm logged out of Facebook. What that tells me is Bing does not appear to be changing results based on social signals yet, but Google is. So because of personalized search in Google, I can see things higher in search results because of my friends and what they like, but I'm not seeing that currently in Bing, not actually changing rankings yet.

I want to talk about trending topics. I mentioned at the start of our webinar about QDF, what's called “Query Deserves Freshness,” which is really just part of the Google algorithm it is unique to Google. It's not anything new. It's been around for sometimes and you can read more about in that New York Times article there if you'd like to read more about it. It basically is determining which things are hot in search and Google is trying to define if something is hot and something is news worthy I need to index it more, index it faster, put up more results on it so that people will be able to see it very easily. If I don't, that's what people are looking for, right, a particular topic.

The interesting thing about it is it looks at things like news, blog stories, social media content, and search queries, the actual search queries that are being done on Google, and how hot those search queries are. It's an opportunity for you, if you have a blog, to really be able to make an impact very quickly if you write about the right topics.

Here's an example of QDF I did last year where I just did a search for the Home Run Derby. Basically what happened here, if you look at position five and position eight, which is we're listing from major league baseball and the New York Times talking about the home run derby what you'll notice is that a blog which was ranked at position four and it's just a San Diego Padres fan blog out ranking these two major websites on the Home Run Derby. In fact, it out ranks the people who host the home run derby in major league baseball.

I found that really compelling that in the case of this one blog, he's probably got a certain number of followers and so forth but probably not as many as major league baseball and he was able to get his particular post higher in the results, at least for a short period of time, because Home Run Derby was a trending topic around that time. Google was looking for blogs and news articles, current new content that it could rank higher and that's how that happened.

Now how do you take advantage of this QDF that's in the Google algorithm? One of the tools that I like to use is Google Insights for Search. It's fascinating stuff and you can use this particular tool to do a search. Now this particular one, I put in a search term for Cavs versus Heat. This was about a year ago when Lebron James had just gone to the Heat, oh everybody is talking about this because they want to know how everybody's going to react and what's the big buzz about it and sure enough you can see around that time frame that huge peak, that I circled there, that's a clear indicator that that's becoming a very hot topic in Google.

This is all fine and helpful if you have a popular thing. For instance, I like to use the example of Paris Hilton or whoever is the popular person at the moment, or Lindsay Lohan or whatever, if those terms are your keywords that work really great, but how do you use it in business to take advantage? Well instead of putting in all these popular terms what you want to do is use Google Insights for Search to monitor your keywords.

One of the handy tools that's available here is on this page you'll notice underneath the chart, on the left, on the bottom left-hand area of the chart, you'll see "embed this chart." You can actually put your keywords in there and get some Java script out and make your own little page that you just monitor everyday to see how your keywords in search are doing. When you see something starting to spike like this, you write a blog post about it. That's how you take advantage of it. It’s really simple to do. Now I will tell you, Insights for Search only updates once a day. So you don't have to check this every couple of hours, just check it once a day and if you start to see that surge make sure you take advantage of it. I'm going to go ahead and hand it back to Katherine now, she's got a great case study, I love this, about Facebook “Likes”.

Katherine:

Here at Ketchum we do some work with the Russian Federation and we run this website called, ModernRussia.com. The account team knew that the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin was coming up. He is one of the first Russians to go into space. They wrote a blog post, this is critical, so they wrote a blog post and they put a document up on Scribd about Yuri Gagarin about his first flight into space.

It was perfectly timed with Google switching the logo, so the logo became Yuri Gagarin on that day and as many of you probably know when you click on the logo you get a full page all about that anniversary. The Scribd document was actually a part of that highlighted page about Yuri Gagarin and we got 11,000 reads on that one document because it was indexed and searched really quickly. One of things to note, if you know the trends are coming up, Google definitely not only indexes Scribd’s but has a tendency to index social in general, when it's a trending topic more than web pages. The actual document got way more reads than the actual blog post did and everyone was very excited by how many people saw it.

Janet:

Hey Katherine, you have the ball.

Katherine:

I have the ball?

Janet:

Yes.

Katherine:

And QDF is, Janet are you going to cover this for me?

Janet:

I can do this one if you want.

Katherine:

Okay.

Janet:

So, in a fast word, QDF, what's going on now is you're seeing that Google is tweaking algorithms even more and it's designed to produce more timely result. It's great when you have a blog. I think if you leave with nothing else today, Katherine and I will probably both say, you've got to get a blog if you don't have one. They are so valuable in SEO and so valuable for Google. You're website typically doesn't always have a lot of updated information regularly.

If you're selling products, how often do you update your products? If you're Ivory soap and you're 99.9% pure, how often do you update the fact that you're Ivory soap and you're 99.9% pure? Probably not that often. You want to have some conduit, a blog is perfect for this, to always to be talking and having a conversation. That’s very helpful from this SEO and QDF standpoint. It just really, this all takes QDF to the next level and you can look a little bit more about this topic at this link here, where it talks to you about even more fresher content. Google is always trying to update the algorithm to get fresher content in there and this is just one of the ways their trying to get more and more terms affected basically by this QDF effect.

The next thing I want to talk about too associated with blogs is the rel=author tags. Rel=author is a markup you can put on your blog to add this really nifty additional information, it's like what we call a rich snippet in search, to really give your entry a lot more visibility. You can see these two search results here for two folks who use rel=author on their site and notice how it shows the picture and it adds another line it says who the author is and so forth. It helps enhance your listing. The theory is that you can get more clicks from this because you have, of course, more visibility in the top ten search results because you have a picture there, it is a little bit more visible, it catches your eye better. It’s something that all blogs can do and I'm going to tell you how you can do that now.

To implement it it's a little bit tricky in some ways I think on Google trying to make it a little bit easier, but I'm going to walk you through how you can implement it. The first thing you want to do is you want to, on your blog, you want from the author name linked to, on your blog post, link to your author page or your blog.

For instance, if you write a blog post and it says, by Janet Driscoll Miller, make sure Janet Driscoll Miller as the name is linked to the author page of your blog that talks about all the authors that you have. Not all the authors, specifically me as an author or you as an author. And then you want to add the rel=author to the link from the blog post to the author's bio page. So I have an example here of how I've done it on our blog. You can see where I've linked to my author page on our blog and then I've put rel=author there in the… Let me see if I can use this highlighter tool, this ought to be good, let's see if I can do this, right there. That's where you would add that rel=author at the end.

The next step is on your author page, your author bio page, you want to create a link to your Google+ profile. I talked a little bit earlier about how we're going to do a lot of linking together of these things with Google+, here is one of the first ways you have to that. So if you don't have a Google+ profile, go get one today. I cannot stress that enough. You need one of those for this as well, but there are other reasons you're going to need it which we'll cover a little bit later.

You want to go tag that particular link in your bio page, on your blog, with rel=me and I'll go ahead and highlight that one too. There's where it is in the link. I put it in the front of my link. That’s a link to my Google+ profile and it has rel=me. That's telling Google this person is me. On your Google profile, on your Google+ profile you want to create a link back to the author page of your blog. On Google+, I'm going to show you a highlight in a minute of how to do this.

You want to create a custom link in your about tab on your Google+ profile and tag the link with rel=me by checking, there's a check box that says, this page is specifically about me. Let me show you what that looks like. There is what it looks like on Google+ and notice how I have it highlighted down here, this page is specifically about me where I added my bio page to my blog to my bio link, my about link on Google+.

Now I'm going to hand the ball back to Katherine and she's going to talk about buttons and network.

Katherine:

I can't help but emphasize how important the rel=author is going to be. What Google is basically saying is that if they know, for instance, it used to be that if you had a small blog with very little traffic the way that you would get more traffic, one of the ways, is to get a bunch of links and then in particular look at links from other websites that have a lot of authority and wait and search like the New York Times, right? Now, what they're basically saying is, they are figuring out a way to know that it's Craig Newmark from Craig's List talking on blog. Both his own blog and then when he comes over and he blogs on your blog, if you have the rel=author tag installed on your site, Google actually knows that the weight of Craig Newmark actually moves over to your blog, him as a person. Very exciting stuff, I think and completely changing in relation to how social and search are integrating.

I'm going to talk a little bit more about the + buttons and give you some case studies of how these have actually impacted search. There are two different buttons to be aware of, one is the Google+ button, it's Google's version of Facebook's "like," it's actually impacting organic search results now. They've actually, over the last couple of weeks talked about how, in sort of big terms, it's also impacting your paid ads.

I told you that earlier today that we would be talking about paid and organic. This is one of the social things that is actually impacting the paid side. At the very least, Google will tell you, blatantly, that if you have a Google+ button on your website that will roll up into your ads. If you have + buttons on different pages, suddenly on your ad it will appear. Often times it also means a face will appear next to that and they're seeing that there is a higher click-through rate. At least from a human behavior standpoint, when we see our friends next to a search result listing whether it's organic or paid we tend to click more. It’s really important that you actually install the + button on all of your pages. It's definitely becoming a ranking factor and at the very least a click through factor.

You can measure plus one's in Google Master Tools. We've provided a link for you to actually see that. The activity is also integrated into Google Analytics, you can see it there. It's all related to Google's new Google plus network. I can't tell you enough how much of a big impact it's going to have on Google, because Google is getting very smart about who you are, who your friends are, and how powerful you might be in the online space.

Janet:

Katherine, can we go back a second too? One thing I would add there that is really super new, and I'm going to talk about some on Monday at the next social, but because I'm talking about this particular topic, the other thing that is really so new and so new that it's hard to always get all these slides, have screen shots of everything we want to have screen shots of. I can't even get a screenshot of it from Google yet that's how challenging it is right now.

There's a new add extension for your pay-per-click as well, called Social Extensions. You're going to be able to show you're +1's for your entire site. It's a cumulative effect of all your +1's and it will show up on your ads in Google AdWords. And the idea is that it's almost like reviews and so when people see that oh, this has a lot of +1's and it shows pictures of my friends who have +1’d my company or this advertisement or something with what that company is advertising.

The idea is that maybe it will tell you to click on the ad more. Social Extensions are available for everyone and I wrote an article on it in Search Insider on Tuesday. If anybody would like a copy of that article we can send that out as well on how to set that up. Again it involves that Google+ profile and linking a bunch of stuff together, but you can do it. It's all free in Google PPC. That might be another way you can get more clicks from pay-per-click, as well.

Katherine:

Everyone should also be aware that they're rolling out place pages for businesses. Right now you can only have one admin on the page, so that is somewhat limiting and there is no way for you transfer that admin to someone else. If you're a small business go, and you're the only one that would ever administer the page, I would go ahead and create one now.

The interesting thing is as you add people to your page you can put them in different circles. That actually means that you can segment your audience and then send different messaging to different people that are interested parts of what you do. For here at Ketchum for instance, we can have a circle that is all about food marketing and another circle that is all about health care marketing and send different messages to both people. Anyway if you haven't' looked into Google pages, they're free, and again, if you're the only one that would ever administer it, I would actually create a page now.

If you're in a situation where you think you might need multiple administrators, you might want to wait just a little bit until they roll that out. They did say before Christmas, but the last time they said that it was tomorrow it turned out rolling out. So soon they will have those kinds of functionality. The other neat thing about Google+ is that they have analytics actually on the back-end. They promised more analytics, in fact, that will actually show you who your major influencers are around your page, which is very sexy, exciting stuff.

Okay, so Facebook “Like” button. It’s relatively well known that Bing likes Facebook and has a stake in Facebook, and Facebook and Google don't like each other. Facebook sharing has slightly impacted Google search results, but Bing and Facebook are completely embedded. You can see here, where if I search for “All For Good,” this is me. Steve Kolberson, which is my former boss at Youth Service America, liked that post and I can see his face right next to it, that's what the integration looks like. You have to be logged into Facebook and searching in Bing, but that's what it looks like when someone likes something in your network.

Everyone who has installed these buttons, just install the Facebook “Like” button, mind you has an increase in traffic. I actually pulled this off the left, you can see ABC News and the increase in traffic they saw just by installing the “Like” button. Now when I read that I thought well that seems crazy. I can't imagine just installing a button would lead to that kind of increase in traffic. Then, I got a chance to actually try it out on one of our sites.

This is real data up there from one of our sits where for that time period we were actually not doing any other promotion, we were just doing a bunch of other things, but we installed the Facebook “Like” button. You can see there we installed the Facebook “Like” button in July, it's the only thing we did, and inbound links increased in Bing, click increased, impressions increased, overall traffic increased in Bing just by putting a button on. Totally, totally crazy. You can also track this now in Google Analytics. If you do nothing today, I would go back to your office and add a Facebook “Like” button to all your pages. I think you're going to be surprised by how much just adding that “Like” button increases, amplifies the amount of impressions and eyeballs, and traffic you get to your website.

Janet:

Katherine?

Katherine:

Yes.

Janet:

Before you move forward, I wanted to say, I like to use your slide on this one because I love, this is such a great case study, and I think this is really also a real indicator that you should probably think about adding that Google+1 button also. If you get these kinds of results in Facebook, granted Google+ is not the level of Facebook right now, but it can only help you, as Katherine has shown here, to have a “Like” button. It only is positive things. I would go ahead and add the +1 button from Google as well because as I mentioned there are other reasons like with the social extensions on ads, you would want to gather as many +1's as you can. You might as well add both. This is just a really great example of, you may not think it has a lot of impact, but you may find in the end you get a lot more likes or +1's than you would of expected.

Katherine:

You might not know, but on the paid side on Google, they have a variety of factors which they call Quality Score, which actually directly impacts the price that you pay. We won't go into all those details now, but they've sorted of hinted that the amount of popularity you might have on Google Plus would be one of those indicators in the future. If you're running online ads in Google, I think you really, really have to install the +button besides the fact that I think you're going to see a bump like this in the organic side. Sort of like magic, you just install a button and the next thing you know you've got more traffic.

We're going to switch a little bit and just talk about where we think all this is going, both search and social. If you hadn't realized already, this is becoming hyper, hyper personalized. Search results actually have been personalized for quite a few years so they know what IP you're logging in from, they know what your previous search history is, if you're in Google and you logged into Gmail they've been able to read your bookmarks, they been able to read your mail, previous search history, etc., etc. Your intent, so they can actually figure out whether you have a shopping intent or an informational intent and then they change the search results accordingly.

If you're on your mobile phone they know exactly where you are GPS wise and you will get localized search results more readily because they know exactly where you're standing. All of that, particularly, because of the mobile piece and the social integration is going to become even more personalized. Which means you need to have a social network in order to be found. It's not just enough to put up a website. Used to be you could do a website piece over here and you could do your social plans maybe over here. Well that's no longer the case. If you're going to be on the Internet and found on the Internet you really have to do both.

Increasingly, metrics and the connections are going to matter. The biggest indicator I think of this is that Google obviously provides free analytics through Google Analytics and they've been rolling out new tools to help you measure your impact to social and when they add that kind of stuff to Google Analytics it's a pretty clear indication that they want you to measure, they want you to have that data because that data is going to impact how you're found.

The other huge trend is that you really need to authentic. You have to make sure that the information that you're creating is targeted to your audience. Because you may or may not know that both engines, for the most part, are measuring when someone searches… They search for blue baby booties, and I click on a search result, a particular URL and maybe I hate it. When I land on the page, I'm like, “this is not what I want,” and I go back to search, they're measuring that. So in aggregate, if a lot of people are looking for blue baby booties, say it's your URL, they click on that URL and the design is confusing or it's not clear that's what they were looking for and everybody bails, that's going to blatantly impact how you're listing in search. That’s sort of new over the last year, year and a half, but it's really important.

Google has also rolled out this new quality mandate for content, which means they have human reviewers looking at your content and asking questions like, “Does this seem authentic? Does this seem legitimate? Is this actually answering my questions?” They literally have human beings looking at search results. The quality of the content is really important. It's where you need to start, making sure that it's actually targeting your audience’s questions and those questions are formed by keywords that they use when they're searching.

The other piece of it is mobile. Everything is going mobile and you absolutely have to be ready for it. Let me share with you a little bit of data about mobile. Right now 40% of us in the U.S. browse the web. If you go international the rates are even higher particularly in Asian countries. Japanese have like three cell phones each. Google has actually predicted by 2013, only two years away at this point, or less since we're at the end of 2011, mobile traffic is going to surpass your desktop traffic.

Now the important thing to know is that Google has also rolled out some new mandates that said, we are going to preference and show mobile landing pages over desktop landing pages in search results. That means if you don't have a mobile website depending on the search query, you might not be found with your desktop site. You need to create a mobile site because the experience is different.

Often times, you probably know, most of you probably have smart phones, the experience can be really frustrating if you're trying to navigate a desktop site on your phone. Google knows that and Google is sort of pushing us as marketers to up the game and develop mobile landing pages. The big take away is you're actually going to get more traffic from your mobile site in the next couple of years than you are from your desktop site.

I have an awesome graph, this is actually pulled from a search conference directly from Google, so that's what the growth trend looks like and has been looking like. Isn't that crazy? A huge amount of increase.

Janet:

I can tell you Katherine, from what we've done on the paid side, one of the great things about Google AdWords is that you can separate your ads campaigns on to different devices even, phones versus iPad versus desktop computers. For many years, I think you and I heard that this is the “year of mobile”. We're like, “Okay, we're waiting for it, here it comes,” and nothing seems to happen. This has been a huge mobile year and 2012 will be even bigger. From what we're seeing from ads and how many people are searching on these other devices, these mobile devices, be they phones or tablets, it has increased significantly over the past few years. I'm right there with you, you've got to get on top of the mobile very quickly.

Katherine:

In fact our next slide talks about mobile spending. Increase in mobile spending over time.

Janet:

Do you want me to talk about this one?

Katherine:

Go ahead, Janet.

Janet:

This is what we're talking about with the paid search. What we're seeing here is, look at the projection over the past few years now and the early parts of, this is just the past year or so what we're seeing, look at how that growth has been going on this year so far and we have a conservative projection and an aggressive projection. At minimum, from an aggressive projection, we're looking at almost 10% mobile ad spending.

This is where lots of folks are looking at how do I take advantage of the tablets generation? How do I take advantage of this mobile generation? And what we're also seeing is more and more people, more and more advertisers are trying to enable people to purchase online, have a mobile site where they can purchase, people want to purchase online too. It's amazing the types of things you're going to see on these devices, as an example, one reason you want to see mobile ad spending go up. If you sell products, one way people are using their mobile phones and mobile devices today, they'll walk into their local big box store, like, a Target and I can attest I did this.

I walked into Target, I scanned the Dyson vacuum cleaner and I said “where can I get it on the web cheaper?” It immediately took me to Google shopping and it gave me the same Dyson, if I scanned that with my UPC with my phone I can find all these different offers and ads around the Dyson and then I can start to make decisions. Do I really need to buy it at Target just so I can have it that day? Or can i buy it online a lot cheaper and get free shipping.

You're going to see even more growth in that department, as well. That affects both organic and paid going forward. If you have anything that you feel that you can sell online or you feel you have for instance, a store locator or something like that, you need to think about, especially, integrating mobile as much as you can into your ad spending, as well as your organic for next year because it's going to even grow further.

Katherine:

It also depends on your demographic. Actually if you are targeting a lower income demographic, particularly black or Hispanic, they're actually buying mobile phones faster than other demographics right now, smart phones. That's because they're buying a smart phone in lieu of a desktop. So if you're targeting those audiences you absolutely have to be on mobile and particularly in the Hispanic demographic, they tend to watch a lot of video on they're phone. And you can actually segment when you're running YouTube advertising to run YouTube advertising just on the phone. So there's really smart ways to sort of stay on top of this and make sure you're in front of your target demographic.

Janet:

Exactly. Next slide we'll talk about the different industries. I don't think this is really any kind of shock or surprise about which industry they're seeing the most mobile queries at this point. I mean, restaurants make a lot of sense. When you're out and you're looking for a place to eat, you're going to do that on a mobile device. Look at the incredible growth there in the restaurant industry but also automobiles.

I work with some automobile dealer manufacturers and, of course, when I'm out I might be looking for where's my dealer located or where is the closest dealer to me and because of geo-location and targeting on your phone, it makes it a lot easier for folks to find your locations. Such as a restaurant or automobile, but if you're in any of these industries going forward into 2012, you definitely need to be keeping up with your industry in the pace of the industry and make sure your in mobile now.

Even if you're not in one of those industries, start considering it. Make it a part of your plan. The good thing is I'm starting to hear from clients and prospects, they're starting to ask me about mobile, which is probably the first time I started to hear that in awhile. Even folks who maybe haven't embraced mobile yet, are asking the questions. Make sure you're thinking about this as part of your strategy.

Katherine:

We don't want this to seem highly overwhelming because there's actually a way for you to…It looks like the URL is hidden there. We'll send it out afterwards. Google is actually got a site for you to test your site on a mobile device to figure out how mobile friendly it is. They also developed all these resources to help you go mobile.

Now, from a strategic perspective depending on your audience, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to create just one page, but Google has rolled out a tool where you can actually create a landing page using a Whizzywig Editor. It's really easy to use. You can put analytics tracking on it and I would really encourage everyone if you don't have the budget right now to go and do a complete new mobile site.

Google's giving you a free chance to create a single page, which can be attached to your website and tracked where you can actually test and see do you have a mobile audience out there? How much traffic is that page going to get? So anyway there are tons of resources out there that Google is pushing to us as marketers to help us get ready for mobile, find mobile web developers, etc., etc.

I want to talk a little bit about local too, because they're very linked. If you're on your mobile device depending on your query, like, if I look for McDonald's on my mobile device, they're actually going to show me local results because they know I'm standing in a certain spot and that's really what I'm looking for the local McDonald's, not the McDonald's in general.

It’s important for you to know that the search result looks completely different when you're doing that kind of search. Not only is everything completely personalized, but then getting back to that intense thing as much as Google can figure out what you're looking for they will reorient your search result. So if they know you have a shopping query they have a tendency to show you shopping results. if they know it's local, they're going to show you local results.

What you're looking at above, to the right is actually a heat map of people looking at local results. What you're noticing is that when a local search result comes up all of us have a tendency to go to those map results. Those are from Google maps, also free for you to register and appear there. If you have a local business or local chapters, you should absolutely register them in Google maps, because clearly that's where all of eyeballs go when we actually do a local search query. Most of us are actually doing that. We have some stats here about how many searches are local in nature and how much more of that is increasing over time because of the fact that we're all on our mobile devices.

We're talking about a little bit more personalization, this is possibly going to freak you out about how much Google knows about you. If you actually logged into Google and you go to google.com/ads/preferences what it will show you is what Google knows about you in relation to orienting ads to you, which is crazy. This is actually a screenshot of mine and you can see that it knows that I'm between the ages 25 and 34, it's flattering me I'm slightly older, and that I'm female.

It knows I'm planning a wedding, you see this formal wear. It knows that I'm actually looking for locations for a reception in Seattle and then planning some stuff in Maine too. You see weddings come up. That's all from my search history. Crazy.

Now if you think about Google Sparks from Google+ and Google+ and the social network, I can say, “Hey I'm interested in organics”. That means when I search for gardening it's going to probably show me organic gardening. It can also target ads to me really effectively. I'd encourage everyone to take a quick peak on how much Google knows about you and you can also clean up and remove stuff if you want to. Of course that is why Google is showing you this stuff, to sort of align with government regulations about such things. Anyway, I just want you to know that Google knows a lot about you and from a marketing perspective we can actually use this in relation to targeting people.

Talk a little bit about measuring. So every online campaign that you launch can actually be measured. You should think about what the goals are for your campaign. How they tie back to your business fold and ROI. There's a bunch of things that people tend to measure. Maybe your overall goals for your campaign is increasing impressions overall so that is sort of a branding goal. Maybe you actually want a website to get more traffic. Maybe you want somebody to do something on your website, like sign-up for an email or download a particular PDF. Maybe you actually want to change the online discussions. Maybe you're noticing that people are really talking negatively about your brand and you want to change that perception. You can do that too and you can measure that. Or you just want to change online behavior in general.

I've actually sort of created a handy chart for you so you can figure out from the type of goal you have, where it would make sense to measure it. If you want to increase impressions across the web, you can actually take a look at how you're ranking in search for your assets. We use SEOMoz as does Janet, will actually pull a clean, non-personalized search result ranking for you and give you a sense, at least in general, of how you're ranking for the terms you want to appear for. So, how many eyeballs are you getting on the search results page.

If you want to increase impressions to a particular site or property, you can measure that in your Google analytics. Also a lot of the social media properties have the ability to measure that too. Scribd, my favorite, comes with tons of metrics one of which is how many leads your document has gotten, which is fabulous. Or in YouTube, it's how many views of your video. You can measure that kind of thing.

If you want to measure actions on your property, so did they fill out the leads form? Did they download the PDF? Did they leave a comment? You can actually use goals in Google analytics for that. Requires a little bit of thought and thinking and setup, but pretty easy. You can also use Google Analytics Campaign Tagging to measure some of that stuff too.

If you want to change the online discussion, which we do quite a bit up here at Ketchum, you can monitor the social sphere prior and benchmark and then launch your marketing campaigns and online influencer campaigns and then measure afterwards the tone or the keywords that are being used of a particular brand and note the change in conversation.

Sometimes also paid, I know, I've sat in with Google D.C. on quite a few presentations for them and they talk about how they ran a paid campaign for a drug, a national, I can't remember the acronym. It was a government program to regulate drug use. In particular, it was looking at meth users. They actually looked at how many people were looking for good and bad meth queries. Good being, I need help getting off of meth. Bad being, how do I make meth? Then, they ran online ads and they actually saw, after they ran the ads, they benched-marked the amount of search queries afterwards and noticed that they had actually switched the behavior.

They saw more people looking for meth help and less people looking for things like, how do I make meth. So paid can also impact that type of thing and you can measure it. And then the other thing is changing an online behavior and you can use Google search trends and sites for search and like I was talking about the change in keyword search to measure that kind of stuff.

The overall thing is that you can measure a lot of this. Here's a lot of metrics from some of the social pieces. So on the left there you can see Scribd. It actually shows you keywords that come in to the documents and geographies that touch the documents. How the documents have been shared. “Add this” and “Share this,” both have really great metrics in them. “Add this” has a viral lift element too, so, it will show you how you're stuff has been shared and then whether or not it's been shared again.

That’s really great to kind of see how much your message has been disseminated or your blog post has been shared across the Internet. And then in Google Analytics you can actually see a lot of social sharing now. If you adjust your analytics account you can see Facebook “Likes” and Twitter and Google+ activity and how it's impacted your traffic directly in Google analytics.

Janet:

I have some other measurements that you can do. One of the things you want to look at is, this is a screenshot from Google Webmaster Tools that shows how many +1's we have. This is a great new tool where you can take a look at how many +1's you have on each page. And for a lot of people, I'll tell you I work with a lot of clients from small brands to large brands. Most brands don't have a lot of +1's yet, honestly. It's still such a new thing that most people don't have a ton of it and there aren't enough people using Google Plus yet to make it huge. But I do believe you should start taking a look at this a monitor it. You can actually, I'm really enjoying using this highlighter tool, you can actually change the date range so you can take a look at having Plus 1's in a particular time frame. You can compare them.

I will tell you that one challenge with Webmaster Tools tends to be it doesn't keep data for very long periods of time. So I would suggest that you download this information into CSV and keep hold of it so you can report on it or look at it and compare it over time, because unfortunately, unlike Google Analytics, which you can look at for lots of historical data, Webmaster Tools does not keep data for a very long time.

This is another shot of new +1's versus all your +1's. So you can see when I got the new +1's on these pages and so forth. You can kind of tell exactly when some new story hits maybe we got a lot of +1's from that. You can correlate when you're getting +1's when you put out new data.

So Katherine and I will cover some final thoughts we have. Some key takeaways. It's a lot of, what we've talked about today, there's a lot of information, it's a lot information and you can spend probably next year doing all this stuff. So really, if you're a marketer and you have to prioritize your time and you could only do a couple of things, what are the things that we would recommend the most? I'm going to say you've got to get your social profiles. And I know Katherine loves Scribd. She loves it. She tells me that all the time. The social profiles like your Facebook, Twitter, all those things are very, very important.

Julia asked a question during our webinar and asked if you could get a Google+ business page yet? People have heard that you can't get those. Actually, they went live very recently. It's been within the last month that your business can get a Google+ Business Page. You should get one. So that's another social profile, but get all those social profiles because as we showed if you own that first page of search results on your brand it really protects you when it comes to online reputation management.

I think our second one is if you don't have a blog, you need to get one. You really need one today especially to take advantage of things like the QDF we showed and trending topics. Make sure you get one of those.

I think you need to expand your social reach and network. As we were showing, because Google will actually change your rankings and personalized results based on the social networking and what your friends like. That's important. Expand that reach and that network for those reasons because it will help you get better rankings. I think Katherine, you probably would say put a Facebook “Like” button on your page.

Katherine:

Absolutely. I mean I was just floored all we did was put the “Like” button on and look at all the traffic coming in. It was just such an easy lift with such a big return. And Google Plus, while it's small now, it is growing faster than Facebook ever did. Right now it tends to be mostly men and mostly well off men, but that doesn't mean that is where it's going to stay. Because, seriously, every time they come out with a new update about the number of people on Google+ it's pretty substantial. I would put both buttons on. They're both directly impacting how you're found in search. And if the Google Plus impact is anything like what we saw with Facebook “Like” it could be a very easy way for you to suddenly get more traffic to your website by just installing a button.

If you haven't dipped your toe into mobile yet, I would. Especially since Google is offering you a chance to try it for free basically. I promise you the Whizzywig, I looked at it and thought, I could totally do this. As a matter of fact, I can probably get my mother to do it frankly. It's a very easy Whizzywig, you should at the very least test. I'd also encourage everybody even if you don't want to test, take a look at your analytics because you can actually see mobile visitors right now.

For all the clients we look at we've been seeing mobile visitors to our websites increasing exponentially over time. So with our clients we don't even need a moment to test. We basically show them those reports and they're like okay, I guess we need to mobile, mobile landing pages. But for folks who might not have the budget, I would go ahead and tinker around with one of those free Google mobile landing pages, especially if you're a local business and see what kind of impact it has.

Janet:

This one we really didn't talk too much in the presentation, but mark-up language we did talk about, which is rel=author. Another type of mark-up language is schema.org. If you are planning a redesign to your website, just want to encourage you to check this out. It's fairly complicated so we didn't want to cover a lot today, rel=author is a type of mark-up language as well, but Schema’s is very comprehensive. I just want to put it out there, if you are planning a redesign, go to that website, checkout the mark-up language because it will be important in the future so keep that in mind. It's not something like what we covered today, but it's something that if you do a redesign you should know about. I didn't one anyone to not know about that.

Katherine also mentioned Google Maps on the phone and especially if you're a local business and getting a Google Map's listing. This goes directly into, again your social profile because protecting your online reputation management, Google Maps helps take up some of that real estate on that page as well. And especially if you are a local based business, as Katherine said, it's an essential. It helps people find you on mobile and it helps you get more maps listing and so forth when people are searching. Even generically, for generic helps you to come up in searches. So make sure you sign up for Google Maps, you get Google Places page those are really, really key.

Katherine:

You might discover that you're already there and that's because Google has been creating listing out of three major databases that have local business information. But you should at the very least if you are there, claim your listing. It will actually verify that you are the owner and that way you can manage any reviews that pop-up and the hours and all the rest of the stuff that's listed there.

Janet:

Some tools that we recommend that you check out, first of all, Google Webmaster Central. If you do not use Google Webmaster Central, you should use it now. Like I mentioned, you can get measurements for +1. There's a whole bunch of other, really, great data in there and you can hook it to your Google Analytics and qualify it that way. It's just really powerful stuff.

It can tell you things like, is your site speed to slow. Site speed is one of the ranking factors for Google algorithms. There's lots of great data in there and I highly recommend that you sign up your site for that. It's great for all these measurement tools and it helps us a lot with SEO in many different ways, social media being one of them.

Bing's Webmaster Tools, it's not quite as robust as Google's but it's still very good. One of the best things I find Bing Webmaster Tools is the linking. They can show you some inbound links that come to your site and you can see what kind of value that Bing really puts on them. Katherine and I really love Avinash, who is the Google Analytics guru. His website is fantastic if you want to look at some measurement techniques and the best ways to measure things and the best ways to measure your Google Analytics.

Katherine:

I would highly encourage you if you're trying to wrap your brain around how do I measure online campaigns in general. If you get a chance to attend any of Avinash’s webinars, he does tons of them for free online. You really should because he's really good. I actually studied under him and he's really good at explaining things in a very simple way. So not only should you buy his books and probably attend a webinar, because I think it would be really helpful. Also, if there are any nonprofits on the phone, I'd like to tell people I took advantage of the fact that “Market Motive,” where he teaches, is an online sort of university for search and online analytics and such, they actually offer scholarships to nonprofits. If you're interested in getting a scholarship in one of their certification programs that's just a little tidbit that you can probably apply for a scholarship.

Janet:

We’ll go ahead and open up to questions. If you have any questions, please feel free to put them in the Q&A box down below. We'll do our best to answer them. In the meantime we'll go ahead and put up the slide with Katherine's contact information and my contact information. Feel free please to come back and ask those questions even after the webinar because I know that we covered a lot today and it can be a lot of ground and some of it can be confusing sometimes. So if we can be of help in any way, please just reach out to us. We'd love to figure out how we can help you.

We did have a question come in from Amy who asked, "I've done blogs under the URL of a site to gain organic search engine rankings. It works well, but some would like to establish a separate blog and link it back to the main URL. I'm not convinced there is any value from that unless the second site has super page rank and what are our thoughts on that?" That's a great question Amy.

What she's basically asking is, I believe, if I have this correct, is should you basically have a blog on a separate domain, separate URL or keep it on your own domain and your own URL? I'm going to tell you to keep it on your own domain. The reason I'm going to say that is, this is how I vote, Katherine may vote differently but I don't think so. We'll ask her after I'm done.

The reason I would keep it on your same domain is because in addition to having inbound links to your site, to your own domain that count towards each page individually, there's also an authority established for your domain based on the total amount of links your domain has. If you take that blog which has the potential to have lots and lots of inbound links and you stick it on a different domain, you're really segmenting your links into two different domains. Versus if you put them on the same domain, you can use a sub-domain or a sub-holder for that blog the benefit is that all of those links go to the same domain and by doing so it helps increase your overall authority with Google instead of trying to put it on to a different site. Katherine what are your thoughts on that?

Katherine:

I always encourage clients to collapse and consolidate as much as possible. Mostly because the days of the Internet where you could just put something up on the web and it got found mysteriously on its own are completely over. You have to promote every single thing you put up on the web. What you may not know is the whole linking thing, every page needs a link.

If you put a page on your own domain, your links from your home page will actually trickle down. You have links within your site and you also have links from the outside world linking to your stuff. If you put it on your existing domain, you're probably getting links from your own website, which actually helps the search engine find the page faster. If you stick them on a completely different domain, they have to start from scratch all over again. Each and every single domain you have is sort of a separate island, and I work with many clients who created all sorts of separate islands. I always encourage them whenever possible, especially if they're in a redesign moment, to roll those back in together. You just get oomph, overall.

Janet:

I'll also add that I've had lots of clients come to me over the years with where they've already established a blog and if you're establishing a blog for the first time and let's say that you don't have the know-how to put a WordPress or some type of blogging platform on to your site, and you want to start somewhere, Wordpress.com is a good one to start with where it's hosted by Wordpress.com, if you have to go that way to start out because you just don't know how to do it any other way.

The challenge with most non self-hosted or hosted blog platforms where you don't host it yourself on your own domain, is not just an SEO issue but if you ever want to move your existing blog that you put on Typepad or Poster It's or any of those guys, and you want to move it to your site and host it maybe via WordPress or something on your own domain, most of those other hosted blog platforms, other than Wordpress.com, do not allow you to pull down all your data. Like do a CSV file and then upload.

What will happen and this happened to a couple of my clients where they had something on Typepad and lost all their legacy stuff because and their old stuff because they couldn't migrate it over to the hosted version. If you can't go self-hosted right now for whatever reason, you have challenges with that, if you go Wordpress.com would be my recommendation. Because it does allow you to download it and then eventually when you're ready to self host you can upload it much easier.

Katherine:

The same goes for YouTube. Jan and I talk about this a lot. I know a lot of folks feel that they can't host video on their own sites and so they go ahead and post it on YouTube. When people share those videos, what they're really doing is giving YouTube more oomph. It's not actually giving any oomph to your site necessarily when they share those videos directly from YouTube. I know Janet is a real big fan of Bright Cove that actually lets you, not that you shouldn't also put them on YouTube, but it actually lets you put the videos on your own domain. So when people share it, link to it, etc., it actually oomphs your own domain instead of giving more love to YouTube.

Janet:

If any of you are techies that know what CNET is or CNAME, I’m sorry, CNAME is, it allows to sign up CNAME to get like videos.search/mojo.com. They create a sub-domain directly to your site, which is really handy.

Katherine:

This question here about mobile sites, "What's the difference between getting a mobile site and getting some CSS code done to enable the site to appear optimized on different screens?” Google actually has a full SEO Guide, which I'd encourage everyone to download, that goes over a lot of the stuff we've talked about. About how you optimize your site and they also have something like four pages of instructions on how to optimize for mobile.

Some of the recommendations are things like upload a mobile-only site map to your Webmasters Tools account. A site map is basically a table of contents of the pages of your site, which is why we encourage everyone to get those free search accounts because you get a free search account with Google, a Webmaster Tools account, and then you say here's my site map, i.e., “Hey Google here are my pages”. Kind of a first step.

They're encouraging you to do that with just your mobile pages. If you also host video on your site, you need to do one for just your video stuff. The other things that Google is measuring in relation to your mobile site, which you'll see in that link that we have in the presentation, are things like, how easy is it for someone to click on something with a thumb versus your desktop, which could be hugely different. How fast does your site load? That's definitely a ranking factor in mobile search. If your site, even if it's been optimized for different screens is loading too slow, that can actually impact you in relation to being found in mobile search.

Oftentimes people are looking for different things when they are searching in mobile than they are in desktop. Now this applies more to big businesses that have local stores where you might want to go in and look for something. But oftentimes, and I know myself, when I look at a mobile or a site and I'm looking for the store locator, sometimes it does not work on a mobile phone very well.

All of those things, it's really important to know that Google is definitely taking, as is Bing, taking a look at user experience as a part of your search ranking. Again, it used to be different and totally separate and not impacting each other and that is completely not the case anymore. You might temporarily rank but if your user experience is awful, ultimately, it is going to impact how you are ranking in search both desktop and mobile.

Janet:

I will also add here, Sherrie's question about CSS versus, just using CSS to restyle things, the content itself, like Katherine said, is going to be different, but also think about which type of mobile device. It's not, if you have an iPad versus smart phone, the screens are very different. You may want to consider which types of devices you create a mobile version for.

In Sherrie's question if you have an iPad, your existing site may suffice for an iPad. But it's just not going to suffice for a mobile phone. As Katherine mentioned with the store locator as an example, you'll notice that a lot of places that do mobile well for phones what they tend to do is really reduce the number of choices and make sure you reduce the amount of typing.

There's a lot of websites where you have to do a lot of typing, I have to search for something or I have to enter this or enter that, the one thing that always seems to hold true for mobile and think about yourself as a user, people don't want to enter long, drawn out words. They want to be able to click very easily with their fingers. The more you can make things click-able and easy to choose on a, especially on a phone related site the better.

In fact, if you look at mobile queries on Google versus non-mobile queries, most of the mobile queries you'll see are like one or two words. They're not sentences like we see on the desktop searches. And that's just because people don't want to spend their time trying to type it and if you're like me, you're terrible at the thumbing on your Blackberry. I'm terrible at that kind of stuff. But some people are better at it, but it's hard to type all that stuff so keep those types of designs and things in mind when you think about the type of device you’re trying to design for a mobile versus maybe a phone versus a tablet type of device.

I think that might be all of our questions. If anyone else has any questions, please feel free to put them in now or we're going to go ahead and wrap up here in a minute. Any other final thoughts Katherine you want to share?

Cady:

No. Just I think a couple of the things that are really important to keep in mind is, obviously, it's the mobile so budget for it if nothing else and start thinking about it. The other big piece is realizing that all the things that we were able to do in silos are no longer in silos.

Usability, targeting the content to your audience, making sure your website actually works. Content that's actually engaging will encourage people to share it. Having a social media plan, that's actually baked into your website. Unfortunately all of that is part of the same mix now. It's not things you can separate at all.

As you're thinking about your own internal staffing and how you coordinate things, I know a lot of places have a tendency to put social media run by one person and maybe the website stuff run by somebody else and they don't talk. I can tell you from personal experience, when you coordinate all of those together you get better results.

In a previous life, I actually launched this report for Environmental Working Group, you might have heard about it, it was about cell phone radiations. We actually coordinated both the stuff that was written on the page, the report itself with the keyword research, with our social media planner and outreach, with the PR people, with how the website was being built and you had this perfect trifecta that unfortunately tanked our server for four days, but we got 1.2 million visitors in one month. Because you coordinate all of them.

That's actually the new world moving forward. I would encourage people to maybe do a little bit less, but be more coordinated about making sure that you have the perfect storm around everything that you promote online. Instead of just going, “Ah, I'll just put it up there and hopefully someone will see it.” That's not really how things are working anymore, unfortunately. I encourage a lot of my clients to do a lot less of producing of content and stuff and a lot more of producing stuff and forming it with a perfect promotional plan.

Janet:

That's great advice. Sherrie came in with another question, "Does embedding third-party commenting systems affect search ranking?" That’s an excellent question, I'm so glad you brought that up because there has been a development within the last two weeks.

There are a lot of people that use Facebook comments on like blog posts and pages, you can actually just have them leave the comments right there on the page. There was some concern from a lot of people that that stuff was contained in, I believe Java script, and so there was some concern because they said, “Well, Google can't index Java script.”

Well, low and behold, maybe within the last, it's been very recently, like two weeks maybe, might of been right before Thanksgiving, we found out that Google is actually indexing Facebook comments, which are contained in Java script. Which tells us that Google has the ability, truly has the ability to index Java script. The question is of course, well what are they indexing in Java script? How effective are they? Is it the same as how they index things in HTML? Still questions I think that we all have to investigate.

So is it bad to have something like a Facebook commenting system on your blog? I don't know that it's bad. I don't know that it affects your search rankings negatively per se, but it's something that you might want to try out and see how it goes for you. I do feel like the challenge with comments is always not only look at index but what's in there? I'm not sure, maybe Katherine can speak more to this, I'm not sure what controls third party systems give you over your comments, like a Facebook. Maybe you can probably delete comments if you don't like them.

In WordPress, I'm able to approve comments before they go live on the blog. I like having that because I like being able to have an eye on user-generated content to make sure nobody is spamming me. I'm not really sure what that approval situation is like in all the third party commenting systems. If somebody puts some stuff up there to try to spam your comments, that could be really negative. That could negatively impact you ranking wise, but I'm not sure how much it can help you from a positive ranking perspective using a third party system.

Katherine:

On the other hand, I think, and this makes people nervous including some of my clients, but I do think we are actually moving to a world where it's going to be tough to always control what people are going to say about you online. If you put the Facebook “Like” button on your site, they can not only like it, they can leave a comment, which you don't necessarily see because it's their Facebook page. It’s their Facebook page, I click a Facebook “Like” button on a website. It's going to pop up. I can leave a comment and it gets shared to my network on Facebook. The owner of the website, sort of sees that I shared it, but they don't necessarily see the content of the comments that I made, regardless of whether or not that gives you heartburn.

Google is also evaluating your websites and saying, “Is this spammy, is this not spammy?” that kind of thing. So again it comes back to having a good, clean online content and then recognizing that there is a lot of activity going on online and the more popular you get online, the less control you're going to have over what everybody is saying about you, unfortunately.

Janet:

At least monitor what people are saying about you so that you can respond in one way or another. I think the bigger concern for me is spammers. That's where I kind of get nervous because you hope that Google is watching for that stuff and is able to decipher some of it, but I don't… sadly, I'm more of a pessimist about that than I am an optimist. Just keep an eye on that. If you're able to control them in a sense like… I mean, I get a lot of spam on my blog and I have to delete all the time. So just keep an eye on what's there, just want to make sure people aren't' abusing the privilege of commenting and being able to share information on your site.

Okay, I think that wraps it up. That was our last question. As I mentioned, we're going to be, I think we mentioned before, we're going to archive this and we'll have a link that goes out and I will send it over to Cady to give you all the details.

Cady:

Thank you so much Janet and Katherine for all the wonderful information. Thank you for everyone for sticking around and indulging us a little bit over the time. We will be sending out emails tomorrow with a link to the presentation and to the recording so you can review this at your leisure. The contact information of our speakers is on the screen, so please feel free to reach out to them with questions. You can also submit them through SEO4YOU. If you go seo4you.search/mojo.com you can submit a question that way as well.

So thank you for attending today's webinar and we appreciate your patience.

Janet:

Thanks, everyone.

Katherine:

Thanks, guys.