Internet Marketing Consultant - Free eBook » Social Networking http://www.dannydemichele.com Helping you increase conversion, lower traffic costs Fri, 27 Jan 2012 19:50:50 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Google+ Negative Impact on Small Business http://www.dannydemichele.com/google-plus-small-business/ http://www.dannydemichele.com/google-plus-small-business/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:25:51 +0000 Danny DeMichele http://www.dannydemichele.com/?p=917 Continue reading →]]> Last week, I wrote a post about how Google’s algorithm and rules are increasingly geared toward hurting the small business. Essentially, big businesses, with big marketing budgets that get natural links are winning the organic ranking game because Google precludes small business from buying links.

Google recently rolled out Google+ which is the clever little +1 Button in the search results. Basically, it is a way that people can vote on a site. This, in addition to inbound links, will be theoretically the main part of the ranking algorithm in the next several updates. The evidence is in Google Webmaster tools showing “Search Impact” as outlined here:

This hurts small business because a big business, with a lot of traffic, can promote that +1 button on their site, therefore, they have a huge advantage in getting more “Likes” than a small business. Hopefully Google is able to give some type of ration credit. Just because a big business gets a lot of likes doesn’t necessarily mean that it is more relevant than the smaller guy who has simply less traffic.

]]> http://www.dannydemichele.com/google-plus-small-business/feed/ 0 Worthless Social Media Traffic May Be Exactly What You Need (With Charts) http://www.dannydemichele.com/worthless-social-media-traffic-may-be-exactly-what-you-need-with-charts/ http://www.dannydemichele.com/worthless-social-media-traffic-may-be-exactly-what-you-need-with-charts/#comments Tue, 08 Feb 2011 03:43:16 +0000 Dave Conklin http://www.dannydemichele.com/?p=899 Continue reading →]]>
I am constantly asked about social media and it’s impact on ROI. For years, because of my focus on conversions, I have answered these questions with a grunt, sour look and my thumbs pointed downward. My justification was always the high bounce rate, lack of potential customer traffic, and lack of conversions (sales, leads, etc.) the traffic would generate. In my mind, as an internet marketing consultant, if you were doing PPC (correctly with great quality score optimization) and SEO (with highly relevant, high quality link building), you were doing all that could to generate leads. My idea of “social done right” was blogger outreach (getting bloggers to talk about your stuff and linking). The social traffic that comes from Digg.com, Stumbleupon.com, Facebook, Twitter and all the others was for content sites that made money with ad revenues, not my (mostly) B2B clients who wanted leads.

An Intro To The Social Gods

About a year ago, I had dinner with Muhammad Saleem in Chicago and we had a friendly debate over social vs. SEO. At that time, there weren’t very many people talking about what I’m calling “Social SEO.” It was almost like you were one or the other. Mu was (and is) THE MAN when it comes to social networks and how to utilize them most effectively. We both enjoyed our dinner, agreed to keep in touch and went on our way.

I was intrigued after this dinner a little more, but still not enough to go full tilt. The problem was, I had an opportunity to present to a publicly traded audio/visual manufacturer in New York and they wanted a mix of SEO and Social. The only way ensure I was presenting what they really needed was to get Muhammad back on the phone and get his input. He put a lot of time into a proposal and we agreed to do the deal together should it come to fruition. The problem was… I still didn’t even “GET” social media. My SEO colored glasses were blinding me of all the social goodness. “Social Doesn’t Convert,” was all that was going through my mind.

So, I then had a large online cigar retailer who wanted to do social and I got in touch with Gerri Elder, who is a close business college of Mu’s and asked her for some help. But I asked if she would show me some examples of traffic she has generated for for other clients so I could get an understanding of this “Digg.com thing’s” impact on rankings, which would generate the “real” results for the client.

The Shocking Revelation

I use a tool called SEMRush to quickly check out a site’s organic success. By simply entering a website into this tool, you can quickly see many of the high traffic keywords the site ranks for in the top 20. So, I put the sites she was telling me about and most of them ranked for THOUSANDS of HIGH END terms. High end meaning high traffic, not necessarily high CPC (cost per click, which is the approximate cost someone would pay to “buy” that term in Google). I asked her who was handling the SEO on her stuff and she told me that digg is the only promotion used for the handful of sites that she was showing me. I was shocked… to say the least. Gerri clearly was the bomb and knew her stuff.

My Personal Tests

I decided to do a few tests of my own to get a full idea of how this stuff would impact newer sites. We have a plumbing site that we pushed a DIY Plumbing Disasters article on that hit the Digg front page. Here’s what my analytics looked like the day before we did it:

This is a normal, slow growth. We weren’t doing much link building at this point at all, which is why this makes the digg social thing a good test.

Here is the same graph, but it included the next three days:

Looks flat, right? It’s not… it’s just because of the high amount of digg traffic we received from hitting the front page. So, let’s look at the performance of this digg traffic:

If you were to look at this data and nothing else you would scream failure. 19,000 page views is wonderful… but with a 95% bounce rate? Seriously? That’s junk. 15 seconds on the site? Ridiculous.

What about the specific traffic from Digg? Was that specific traffic any better? Nope. It was even worse with more than 96% bouncing.

The Reason Your Site Needs This Crappy Traffic

So, a few weeks after this digg front page, we noticed a large increase in search related traffic for phrases we really cared about. Look at the chart below:

See the sudden increase? Yeah… that’s after the digg front page. Keep in mind this is SEARCH KEYWORD TRAFFIC. There were no other influences here other than the links that may have come about from the fact that the story was on the front page of digg.

Since then, here’s the keyword traffic that the “dugg” page has received:

It’s not a TON of traffic… BUT… This page ranks for 258 keywords now. ALL of which are phrases included in the title and htags of the page.

The Social SEO Revelation

Since experiencing this, I have been testing a lot and have found that you can have AMAZING results with rankings if you create an awesome content piece, but ensure that high traffic volume keywords are included in your title, and htags. Take a list of keywords that all have a unique head term. This can be done in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool or SEMRush and make sure that every single unique word that appears within the list is included. When you do this, make sure you don’t ruin the integrity of the article, or no one will share it socially. What you’ll end up with is a page of your site that generates traffic for MANY relevant keywords that convert well.

This concept isn’t new. People have been talking about social indicators they believed were in Google’s algorithm for months. Now I have my personal proof though. Google, without a doubt, gives an added bonus to sites that get a lot of social cred. Oh, and wink wink… especially new sites… but you didn’t hear that from me. You should test the ROI on your own.

]]> http://www.dannydemichele.com/worthless-social-media-traffic-may-be-exactly-what-you-need-with-charts/feed/ 0 A Social Media Revolution – Fun Social Media Statistics http://www.dannydemichele.com/social-media-statistics/ http://www.dannydemichele.com/social-media-statistics/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:28:27 +0000 Danny DeMichele http://www.dannydemichele.com/?p=889 Continue reading →]]> I found this really cool video online, talking about all of the growth points with Social Media over the last few years. Really Interesting. The video is at the link below, I summarized some interesting social media statistics from it below.

Video: http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/social-media/social-media-is-not-new/

Social Media Statistics extracted from this video in case you dont want to watch it (although I recommend you do!)

  1. -BY 2010 Gen Y will out number Baby Boomers.
  2. -96% of Gen Y have joined a social network.
  3. -Social  Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
  4. -1 out of 8 couples married in the U. S. last year met via social media.
  5. -Years to reach 50 million users (Radio : 38 Years, TV : 13 Years, INTERNET: 4 Years, IPOD: 3 Years)
  6. -Facebook :  Added  100 million users in less then 9 months.
  7. -Ipod application downloads hit 1 Billion in 9 months.
  8. -If Facebook were a country it would  be the world’s 4th largest (1: China. 2: India, 3: United states, 4: Facebook, 5: Indonesia, 6: Brazil, 7: Pakistan, 8: Bangladesh)
  9. -China ‘s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services.
  10. -2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students outperformed those receiving face-to-face instruction.
  11. -1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
  12. -80% of companies are using Linkedin as their primary tool to find employees.
  13. -The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females.
  14. -Ashton Kutcher and Ellen DeGeneres have more twitter followers than the entire population of Ireland, Morway and Panama.
  15. -80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices people update anywhere, anytime. (Imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?)
  16. -Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé.
  17. -In 2009 Boston College stop distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshman.
  18. -What happens in Vegas stays on  Facebook/Twitter/ Orkut/ bebo/ Flickr/ digg/ myspace/ YOU Tube.
  19. -YOU Tube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.
  20. -You Tube >1,000,000,000 videos.
  21. -WIKIPEDIA has over 13 million articles (Studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica).
  22. -If you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on WIKIPEDIA  You would earn $ 156.23 PER HOUR.
  23. -There are over 200,000,000 Blogs on the web.
  24. -54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.
  25. -25% of search results for the world’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.
  26. -34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands.
  27. -People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them. 78% of consumers trust peer. recommendations. Only 14 % trust advertisements.
  28. -Only 18% of tradditonal  TV  campaigns generate a positive ROI.
  29. -90% of people that can TiVo ads do.
  30. -Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009.
  31. -70% of 18-to-34-year-olds have watched TV on the web….only 33% have ever viewed a show on DVR/TiVo.
  32. -25% of Americans in the past month said they watched  a short video on their phone.
  33. -35% of book sales on Amazon are for the kindle.
  34. -24 of the 25 Largest Newspaper are Experiencing Record Declines in Circulation.
  35. -We no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
  36. -In the near future we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.
  37. -Social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
  38. -More than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook daily.
  39. -Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy – Listening First and Selling Second.
  40. -Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.
]]> http://www.dannydemichele.com/social-media-statistics/feed/ 0 Social Influence the leading factor of SEO? http://www.dannydemichele.com/social-influence-the-leading-factor-of-seo/ http://www.dannydemichele.com/social-influence-the-leading-factor-of-seo/#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 16:43:03 +0000 Danny DeMichele http://www.dannydemichele.com/?p=790 Continue reading →]]> A theory I have been toying with (I am sure many are toying with) is that inbound links will be seconded to the weight Google will give you from the pages of Twitter and Facebook. Lets face it, nothing is more important than a Social endorsement. It would be the same reason why DMOZ for many years was the most coveted and most powerful inbound link, because a human had to endorse it.

The social space does pose a problem for Google if they are going to try and bake it into their algorithm. People use ‘Tiny Urls’ for the most part, so they will need to start crawling these links. This issue could explode as SEO’s will manipulate this to their own benefit by spamming the social sites,  which already have a huge issue on their hands. Also, many people wont link to sites with the proper “Anchor Text”. Google would need to read the conversation and decide how to decipher relevancy from it.

Any thoughts on how they can accomplish this? Email me. Any good ones will be posted on this blog with a nice little inbound link to your site.

]]> http://www.dannydemichele.com/social-influence-the-leading-factor-of-seo/feed/ 0 Your Analytics Software does not like your Social Media Campaign. http://www.dannydemichele.com/your-analytics-software-does-not-like-your-social-media-campaign/ http://www.dannydemichele.com/your-analytics-software-does-not-like-your-social-media-campaign/#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:19:43 +0000 Danny DeMichele http://www.dannydemichele.com/?p=776 Continue reading →]]> Your analytics software does not like your social media campaign. There are certainly exceptions to this rule, but if you are going to get into the world of Twitter and Facebook, don’t expect an immediate tracked ROI from it. It is a long-term brand building solution that can take months (or years) to start showing that it is paying for itself. When we run a search and social media campaign side by side and report it as such, my social media team is constantly trying to prove themselves while the SEO team is sitting their looking like the clear winners every time.

Twitter and Facebook rarely show ROI in your analytics software, but it does not mean that it is not happening. We see the typical Social Media Campaign going down like this:

  1. Internet Users sees your ad, sponsored post or finds you in the world of social media through a friends influence for a new set of running shoes. You see the suggestion and bypass it as you were probably not in the state of mind or situation to need the product or service that you saw.
  2. Days later, you are at the gym and realize there is a hole in your shoes, and think to yourself that you need to get a new pair of shoes.
  3. That night, you log back into your Facebook account and try and find the obscure reference that your friend was speaking about. Turns out it was the new Nike WRX cross trainers that he was ranting about.
  4. You go to Google and search for Nike WRX Cross Trainer. You find several references for it.
  5. You decide which website you are going to buy from and make the purchase.
  6. Web Analytics Software shows the sale comes from Google, the SEO team jumps for joy, leaving the Social Media heroes with poor ROI and fighting to keep their job.

There are other ways that Social Media will play in a sale. In the above instance, someone may have seen a TV spot for the new Nike WRX Cross Trainer endorsed by Tiger Woods and decide to go online and look for it. 9 out of 10 times a person will start this in a Search Engine. They go to Google, type in “New Nike Cross Trainer” and results appear. They go through different User Generated review sites, Facebook conversations, Twitter, you name it, and finally they realize that this is the shoe for them. In this case, once again, the SEO department is going to take credit for this sale, which obviously should be going to the TV spot and online conversations about the product. The search engine had little to do in influencing the buyers decision and had it not been because of the TV and Social Media spots, the sale would have not happened.

In the current environment, unless you are a huge brand with huge budgets, it would be hard to narrow in on where your sale truly originates from.  You need to penetrate the social sector at some level, make sure you don’t make a knee-jerk reaction and base 100% of your decision on your Analytics Software. Social Media is a slow and steady campaign. One that is necessary for any well-rounded online marketing campaign.

]]> http://www.dannydemichele.com/your-analytics-software-does-not-like-your-social-media-campaign/feed/ 1 Real Time Search – what actually is it? http://www.dannydemichele.com/real-time-search-what-actually-is-it/ http://www.dannydemichele.com/real-time-search-what-actually-is-it/#comments Thu, 09 Jul 2009 20:43:21 +0000 Danny DeMichele http://www.dannydemichele.com/?p=573 Continue reading →]]> I ran into a very interesting article by Danny Sullivan (article referenced below) and he poses a very obvious (but so far not really talked about) question. What is Real Time Search? His argument is, and he is very right, that there is a huge difference between real time search and simply fresh results.

Real-time search means – a message, within seconds, that occurs. When someone tweets, the content of the tweet is real time, the link they submit may not be. If someone posts the following tweet:
“Wow, this new car Tesla put out is amazing! http://bit.ly/12345 ”

The Real time result portion of this article – “Wow, this new car Tesla put out is amazing”

Fresh results means – Fresh results might be news from 4 hours ago, the most recent blog post from your favorite seo consultant, a new car Tesla is launching that they talked about last week. So in the above reference, the link about Tesla may just be a fresh result, certainly not a real time one.

Real Time results are actually a little spammy. They have little value at all as it stands now except for gauging what could be important in real time. So Google or another search engine could use “the real time chatter of twitter” to gauge what is IMPORTANT in real time, not necessarily what IS real time. So, if there was chatter in twitter about Tesla, the importance of seeing the recent news about Tesla would be the real time result, not necessarily the base content of the subject matter.

Check out Danny Sulivans post, it goes really indepth Click Here

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