Posts Tagged ‘marketers’
The Launch of Linker - SEO’s Version of Matchmaking
Ten days ago, after a long period of development followed by extensive testing during our Beta period, Linker has been launched to the public for anyone to sign up.
In the early days of the Internet, before the search engines came along, navigation was driven by links which allowed people to jump from one place (document) to another. People used hyperlinks as authors use footnotes in reference texts. The purpose of the links were to provide citations, and to advise readers of other valuable resources which they ought to consult.
When the Internet began to become popular with the masses, marketers started using links as a means of traffic acquisition. I did this type of link building as far back in the mid 1990’s “Before Google” for my own businesses. This marketing trend was actually followed by, not preceded by the search engines recognizing the value of links, and embedding a weighting value for links into their algorithms. Of course, at first the search engine did things differently, valuing any old link as a positive score. When this link recognition system was discovered as a performance score value in search results, it was unsurprising that some marketers saw the opportunity and took advantage of it. What is surprising is how far away from the fundamental reasons for link building the noise in the marketplace has taken this strategy, especially in light of how strongly the search engines have driven away from volume. Their mantra could be qualified as back to the future in regards to link values.
The reality is high value links matter. Period. A high quality link is one which readers will find of value. Generally, these links are found within the body content of a document and the link points out to content on another page or site which is relevant to your content. Your link is adding perspective for your readers, and also helping build both your sites’ authority in the search results.
Finding great resources to link to is not easy however. There’s so much content, how do you know which are the best resources, and the ones which are the most relevant to you and your readers? Just as importantly, how do you get in contact with representatives of the right sites which are the appropriate matches for yours? This was the challenge I used to face as an online marketer, and the manual process I was explaining internally when we came up with the idea behind Linker.
I’ll be starting a series of posts shortly around the philosophy behind the Linker product, and how it came to be. The reality is, no one likes to get all those spammy “link to me” emails that flood our email inboxes. They really are useless Junk. Links from, or to these low value, low relevance domains won’t add to your site’s user experience, or add any value to your business in terms of visibility in the search engines. That said, everyone with any online marketing knowledge recognizes that link building is a formidable tool in any good marketing campaign. The point everyone needs to focus on is that good quality, relevant link-building improves the user experience of your web site, and at the same time also drives traffic via search engines and direct referrals. Addressing this need is why we built Linker, a context and relevance driven introduction system which people have labeled a dating service for online marketers.
What Page in the Search Results do People Click On?
What page in the search results do people click on, and depending on that, how many pageviews should you expect, and how long will they spend on your site?
Last year, I made a post on this blog about how deep in the search results do people actually go before they clicked through on a result. At that point I found that the percentage of traffic from page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs) was increasing over time. I finally had an opportunity to revisit that data, and decided to augment the data with two additional pieces of very valuable information to web marketers:
- Do visitors from page 1 in the SERPs spend more time on websites?
- Do visitors from page 1 in the SERPs view more pages on websites?
I’m going to post that information in separate posts, hopefully over the next few days. I’ll also be posting information showing how visitors using different browsers spend differing time on site, and don’t all view the same number of web pages. Time permitting, I’ll also post how that’s true of visitors from different search engines, and dependent on the number of keywords they use in queries. For example if someone visits your site from a search engine and they used just one keyword to search, will they spend more time and view more pages than someone who used two keywords?
First off, the information about how your placement within the search results pages affects your visitor counts. The percentage of traffic from page one in the SERPs has continued to grow steadily, to the point now that if your website is not listed on page one of the search results, your business may as well be invisible. Remember, it’s not that you need to be found on page 1 for your brand name, although that’s useful, you absolutely need to be found on page 1 of the SERPs for terms which your customers are using to find your type of service / product / information.
What page in the search results do visitors visit your site from?
Please note there’s a gap in months, historical data is there to show the trend.
From this graphic, it’s obvious to anyone that if you’re not on page 1 in the search results, you won’t see much traffic. There’s still value to page 2, but it’s an ever shrinking fraction of page one referral traffic.
Of course, the data for the table is included here:
| 2007-04 | 2007-05 | 2007-06 | 2007-07 | 2007-08 | 2007-09 | |
|
Page 1
|
85.50% | 86.03% | 87.18% | 87.79% | 88.07% | 88.40% |
|
Page 2
|
7.61% | 7.52% | 6.90% | 6.52% | 6.47% | 6.44% |
|
Page 3
|
2.84% | 2.71% | 2.48% | 2.35% | 2.28% | 2.21% |
|
Page 4
|
1.30% | 1.19% | 1.09% | 1.04% | 1.00% | 0.92% |
|
Page 5
|
0.82% | 0.75% | 0.69% | 0.66% | 0.64% | 0.58% |
| 2007-10 | 2007-11 | 2007-12 | 2008-01 | 2008-02 | 2008-03 | |
|
Page 1
|
88.42% | 88.47% | 88.81% | 88.90% | 88.78% | 89.71% |
|
Page 2
|
6.47% | 6.44% | 6.23% | 6.19% | 6.39% | 5.93% |
|
Page 3
|
2.20% | 2.16% | 2.05% | 2.06% | 2.04% | 1.85% |
|
Page 4
|
0.92% | 0.91% | 0.89% | 0.88% | 0.87% | 0.78% |
|
Page 5
|
0.57% | 0.57% | 0.55% | 0.55% | 0.54% | 0.46% |
| 2009-10 | 2009-11 | |||||
|
Page 1
|
95.24% | 95.80% | ||||
|
Page 2
|
2.75% | 2.44% | ||||
|
Page 3
|
0.86% | 0.75% | ||||
|
Page 4
|
0.39% | 0.34% | ||||
|
Page 5
|
0.22% | 0.20% |
Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, and reflects click through activity data.
Mobile Browser Market Share Data
As promised to lots of people last week at Pubcon, and to Mike Grehan over at SES, I’m going to start posting even more varied data.
A frequent request from and for search marketers is insight into the mobile browser market. While still tiny in relation to general web traffic when considered from the search perspective, the growing adoption of devices built with web browsing in mind make these numbers are worth watching. I suspect that as iPhones & Android devices become even more ubiquitous, these numbers will continue to grow. Most remarkably, if Blackberry built a better web interface / UI into their devices, I suspect their share would more accurately reflect their general market share for devices in use.
I’ve prepared two charts: one which includes all the mobile browsers; and one with the iPhone removed. The reason is simple - the iPhone is so dominant that it’s impossible to see market share changes for the others without excluding it. This is very much like Google’s overwhelming marketshare dominance in search.
With the iPhone’s market share displayed, it’s hard to make out any of the competitors:
Without the iPhone’s market share displayed, it’s much easier to see the trends starting to emerge:
The obvious insights that I spied immediately were:
1) Android outperforms Blackberry even thought their install base is tiny by contrast.
2) Android’s numbers will be very interesting to watch with Verizon’s big push on their devices.
3) Windows Mobile numbers are horrible! By the time MSFT catches up on search, they’ll realize that they’ve lost their dominant position for being the interface to the web! (IE, mobile etc…)
4) Look at the Palm Pre! For a phone which T-Mobile didn’t really do a great job pushing, their lead on Microsoft is astounding. (yes, I’ve asked for those numbers to be double-checked).
5) Every one of these browsers is growing strongly and steadily. It’s a great sign for the future of mobile marketing!
What are your thoughts?
The raw data for those who prefer the numbers, not the graphics:
| iPhone | Android | Blackberry | Palm Pre | Win Mobile | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 31 | 0.448% | 0.038% | 0.026% | 0.008% | 0.005% |
| Aug 31 | 0.591% | 0.045% | 0.033% | 0.012% | 0.007% |
| Sept 30 | 0.583% | 0.043% | 0.041% | 0.012% | 0.007% |
| Oct 31 | 0.663% | 0.049% | 0.044% | 0.016% | 0.008% |
Enquisite collects data from a network of web sites distributed globally. The data used in this reports represents web sites distributed globally, accessed by browsers located in the U.S.
With mobile browsing in particular, I suspect there’s a higher level of incidence than even of browsers who look up information, but never click through to any destination web site, leaving the search engine / resource of choice being the information portal.
Yes, Google is unquestionably a portal when mobile is considered.
Observations from the Receiving End - Surprising Results in Poll Lists
August 4th, 2010 by Richard Zwicky
It’s been quite interesting watching the response to the lists about online marketers that I started published two weeks ago. . There have been over 3,000 voter submissions in the last week. That’s a lot more than I ever expected. Additionally, I’ve received many text messages, voicemails, DM’s, blog comments, and emails with suggestions of who else could be included on the lists; I appreciate all these notes.
Some people also chose to send me their own names for inclusion. One person appears to have submitted their name for inclusion ~50 times! Fortunately for you, I’m not publishing your name, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are. You’re claiming to be an Internet Marketer of some skill: Do you honestly not know that it’s easy to determine if traffic repeatedly originates from the same places or computers?
Other than the notes from a couple of manic individuals repeatedly suggesting themselves, lots of people sent me some great suggestions. I’ve been trying to follow-up on them by reading things by and about these contributors. There are some valuable resources I’m discovering, or re-discovering. Thank-you! Some of the useful suggestions are found in the blog comments of the appropriate posts.
The suggestions I’ve received go to the point of the series. It’s not been about who gets the most votes, but, that said, I will publish lists thereof. The attention seeking has been for all these valuable contributors whom I wanted to recognize via this forum. Some of the people on the lists are already well known, and justifiably so. Others are not well known yet, but they provide great information about different facets of online marketing, and should be a resource that anyone with any level of interest in the space can turn to for insights.
I do appreciate all the attention that these lists have generated, and hope that people will share the results widely – that only goes to accomplish the goal of providing these people recognition.
As for the voting; it’s been really interesting to see whose inputs are heavily valued, despite their not being common industry names. It’s also been extremely interesting to observe which channels have been driving the most traffic via social media, and other sources, as well as observing which channel’s traffic has the best user behavior once they visit the site. I’ll likely have a few posts coming out reporting on user behavior trends. Quite interesting really! For instance, as it stands right now, the day of the social media experts tweets drove the lowest RT and clickthrough activity per post or mention. Perhaps that’ll change before the lists close…
Finally, there have been two individuals who received no votes. (Bet you want to know who, eh?) I was shocked at who they were, and presume it’s because their communities did not overlap as heavily with the search or social marketplace community represented here. Hopefully they’ll learn about these lists before I close them.
In the meantime, if you haven’t checked out the lists of great contributors (or voted), please do so now at:
Search Engine Optimization Professionals
Pay-Per-Click Marketing Experts
Social Media Marketing Specialists
Link Building Masters
Amazing Cross-Channel Online Marketing Contributors
I’ll hopefully start publishing results next week.
Richard / @rzwicky
Tags: link building, linking strategies, links, marketer, marketers, Marketing, metrics, ppc, search, SEM, SEO, SEO Link Building, Social Link Building Marketplace, social marketing
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