What impact does SEO have on your conversion issues

During the writing of my book on #FUFISM  the question of the impact of SEO on conversion and marketing funnels and how your two separate SEO teams need to collaborate and co-ordinate their efforts in a manner that best impacts on your SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)  came up in a few different areas, so needs to be addressed.

I would like to share this preliminary quote from the book with you and solicit some conversation around these issues so that I may have a deeper understanding of how technical I need to make this small section, which will be about three, perhaps four pages in the book.

FUFISM is a marketing philosophy where the social media is the primary driver of your link building campaign and plays a major role in your SEO policy and all marketing strategies, both online and off line.   to read more about FUFISM read here

Start Quote

One of the biggest issues within the SEO INDUSTRY is for the copy writer and associated visual content creators to understand which portion of the sales funnel or conversion funnel that they are working on, when they work on the content of any specific page.

Each visual content creator as well as the copy write, r and every member of your IPSEO (In Page Search Engine Optimisation) TEAM,  as well as all others who work on your In Page Search Engine Optimisation issues,  need to receive their own individual marketing brief.

You also need to ensure that these individual efforts and related issues,  are  properly documented,  showing purpose, aims and objectives, so that those who will be doing your OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation can properly understand the specific target market and primary CTA or call to action which the public relations team and associated marketing management  have laid out, and documented in their marketing action plan., which they expect the OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation), implementation team to follow through with.

If these contributors to either your IPSEO (In Page Search Engine Optimisation) or OPSEO  (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation) for your online content get things wrong you can end up in real trouble real soon as far as your SERP’s (Search Engine Results Pages) are concerned. The issue is that these have very significant impacts on your bounce rate when a page is opened from the SERP’s or Search Engine Results Page, then closed or not viewed. 

Viewers (your target audience) will quickly close the page in question or go back to the SERP’s, if what they see is not what they are looking for. This action by your intended target audience will result in the search engine giving the page in question a poor bounce rate and associated trust factor signals.  This will soon start to have an impact  on the SERP’s for this particular page, and it will slowly drop out of the SERP’s as soon as the so called QPFS or Query page freshenes score,  starts to wane with age. Remember that a fresh page always has a big boost in the SERP’s due to this QPFS which is a significant SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicator) that looses value over time on a logarithmic scale.  Many SEO practitioners do not take this into account and very few ever tell this to their client base.

This slow drop in the SERP’s is not serious at first, but as the associated trust factors start to filter through into your page’s semantic foot print over a week or so, this suddenly starts to impact on a wide variety of other issues, such as page rank, site rank as well as many different author and publisher  related SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) that are connected to trust factor issues, which makes this a very serious site wide issue.

If your web site has other such pages where the bounce rate is unduly high, these issues become ever more important to understand and fix. We will not discuss actual conversion processes or sales funnel techniques here, but this section is just to advise you that these things need to be taken into consideration, and as your specific target market for your SEO varies according the the product, service,  information, or specific online content that you want your intended target market to be exposed to, and what the primary call to action statement within that comment is, needs to be evaluated very closely when doing SEO for any specific online content..

It thus follows that knowing about specific issues associated with conversion rates and sales funnels need to be understood by your marketing team, and also documented in the over all marketing action plan.  This is essential so that one has the tools and the necessary documentation to fix any errors that may creep in and have a negative impact on your total SEO STRATEGY.

Your Social Media marketing team who are the primary OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation) drivers need to use the documentation associated with target research and associated point within your marketing / sales funnel to do their job right, as this will give them a deeper understanding of the copy and associated links that they will insert into their social media posts. Here the sequence of events leading up to that specific point in the conversion process must be clearly understood, so as to ensure the highest possible conversion rate for that page in terms of clicks on page so as to have excellent bounce rates.

It must also be noted that pages with higher conversion rates tend to climb higher in the SERP's as the trust factor signals associated with the page in question grow to a favorable bounce rate.

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Leaving your comment here or in a social media post using the hash-tag #FUFISM will be truly appreciated. I use the the mention social media marketing tool to keep track of these issues, and should respond within 24 to 48 hours

What is the value of a comment within the social media?

Comments within the social media have been  getting quite a bit of coverage during the last few weeks with many discussing the value of comments in terms of their impacts on your SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages) and your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tactics, with a focus on the semantic relationships between those who comment on a social media post or other online article and the content that elicited the comments.

+Randy Milanovic  wrote a great article where he requested input from others to discuss the issues around
determining the value of the ongoing conversation that may or may not take place within the comment stream of a post within the social media, on a blog or other online resource.  This conversation was quite interesting and had many influential people within the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) industry passing comments and discussing the implications of comments on your Search Engine Results Pages.

Randy Milanovic posed this question : 

Does Social Engagement Affect Search Results?

This question is not a new one, how ever search engines have been evolving and growing their algorithms progressively as they gather more data about us from a variety of different sources.  The many different search engines are now using this data in meaningful ways that link individuals to specific social media  profiles, which can be identified and linked to comments made across a wide spectrum of web sites, especially those web sites that use social media plug ins to register users before they add content or comment on the content already published within that specific web site.

Following His discussions with those who chose to interact with Randy's Google plus post he wrote a blog post using that discussion to elicit a much deeper  and more meaningful conversation,  covering the many sneaky and devious issues around the semantic value of comments and the impact of this potential semantic value of comments on  other related SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators)

This all came about following a comment I left using the DISCUS PLATFORM on an article that Randy Authored in the   Kayak Online Marketing Blog    

Social engagement takes on many different forms across the various social media platforms, web sites, blogs and other online resources available within CYBER SPACE, but I am only going to discuss comments further here.  Comments are a very important aspect of the social media or social aspect of any online platform and allow for ongoing conversations hopefully discussing the topic that was introduced in the original post, or  article, from a few different perspectives within the marketing industry.  This discussion will focus on the issues around search and the impact of comments on the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

On going discussions within the comments of any post or article have many impacts on a variety of marketing issues, and these are commonly called engagement issues.  Engagement issues cover a wide spectrum of issues including but not limited to 

•  network building
• link building
• content marketing
• inbound marketing
• OPSEO (Off Page Search Engine Optimisation)
• Public relations issues
• customer care issues

This article will focus exclusively on the #OPSEO or Off Page Search Engine Optimisation issues, but that does not mean that the other issues associated with the value of comments are not important or significant, because they are,  and many of these issues have sneaky and devious positive feed back loops that add some serious SEMANTIC SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) to any links that may placed within the comments, and increase the depth of the associated semantic footprints of all identified individual digital entities who comment or are mentioned in the comments associated with the post or article in question.

Search engines collect a vast quantity of data about us all the time, and use this data in VERY LARGE SCALE DATA to evaluate so many different aspects of who we are, what we do, which sites we visit, what we write about, which people we associate with online, what field of expertise interests us, and where we as individuals are deemed to be knowledgeable and so many others.

Individual people are identified, and associated with separate identifiable digital entities such as web sites, blogs, social media profiles and many others. Each digital entity has its own SEMANTIC FOOT PRINT which is much like our human fingerprints, and is unique to that specific digital entity. The more often one uses the internet the bigger the data that is collected about you, and the more accurate these calculated profiles become. For those who have concerns about online privacy these matters must be a night mare, as web sites use cookies and many other devious and dubious tracking techniques to follow our every move.  Search engines are the worst at this and they really try all tricks in the book and then a few extra to extract as much information about each online individual as they possibly can.

This information is used in many trust factor  calculations as well as in assessing your digital footprint, and the traces that one leaves where ever they visit online, are all factored into the various algorithms which pre-populate certain databases that are used in calculating the next stage algorithms which places SEOVI or Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators at the disposal of the next stage algorithms.  Google does not let us know how many stages their algorithms have, but it is at least10, though many say it is much more.  each of these preparatory stages  prepares data for the next stage, and the final stage is calculated when the end user (the searcher) presses the enter button or initiates the search by other means, such as through speech in the newest mobile devices.  The algorithms like PANDA and PENGUIN are done at the early stages just after your online content has been indexed, but are run many times over, and each iteration adjusts the SEOVI in question, and these algorithms are repeated until a limit is reached and the changes within the various SEOVI are small enough to ignore. 

Trust factor algorithms are run later, and the results of these are then fed backwards into the system and the process is repeated again until the results stabilize, then this is repeated again til these impacts of the trust factors also stabilize.  Now one must remember that every social media post is viewed as a stand alone web page within a sub web (your profile / page profile) within the specific social media platform.  This is seen very clearly seen  by the way that your profile on any social media platform is structured.  For instance my personal pinterest profile is https://www.pinterest.com/info4u2use/  where pinterest.com is the domain, and info4u2use is the sub domain, and individual pins of images  are the separate pages.  Your G+ posts are seen the same way by Google. Comments that are added to any web page are thus an addition which is deemed to be an edit by a search engine, and so the process of adjusting the associated SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicatiors) must be processed again.

Now one must realise that the search engine understands that this is an edit, and thus treats the added comment as an addition to the page, and runs through the algorithms again, but does not start at the very beginning, rather jumping into the information flow pattern at a pre-determined point and proceeding from there.   The trust factors are now an important issue, as the author attribution of the new comment is known, because only logged-in persons may place comments within the social media structures. Who is the author of this comment and what is this authors niche field of knowledge are now an important issue.  If these issues can be matched to the content of the page in question and shown to be semantically relevant to the authors niche then some extra SEOVI's (search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) are added which will have an imp[act on the position of this social media post / article within the SERP's (Search Engine Results Pages)

Each additional comment causes the same re-action from the search engine, and the trust factors as associated with each new comment are evaluated and added into the mix.  If any of the commenters have a high authority rating within the semantically linked space, then this may improve the accumulative SEOVI's associated with this particular comment and pass along many other SEOVI to other areas such as links placed with the comment in question.  The value that this has should not be underestimated, as this is part of a feed back loop which can have many unforeseen implications,  especially if the link points to a page where any one of the other commentators is referenced as an author, or directly connected to these issues through a link to a publisher, where any one of the commenters or the original poster is associated as a publisher or contributor.  When Google or other search engines re-asses the page in question these issues will then cause an improvement in some of the trust factor SEOVI and thus improve other related SEOVI that pass along value further up the chain. This added SEOVI here has a further knock on impact as this filters through the system and opperates as part of a positive feed back loop, pushing up values all along the way.

Each iteration of the algorithms causes a slight improvement until the values stabilize again at some new value.  These changes can be small, but they can also be quite substantial depending on the topic, who is commenting, what they actually type in their comments, and the links within any comment and the feed back loops that are created.  this is the reason that one should expand the conversation by placing meaningful links that expand the conversation within both the original post / article as well as within the comments.  the impacts of these links is very significant, and if done in conjunction with more than one social media platform, they can be very significant when added together.  If the original content in the web or blog has listed a publisher, through the accredited HTML 5  methods (REL = PUBLISHER)  and that publisher has created a community and then this commenting  happens within a post in that community, which is created by the author of the original article,  then the SEO impact can be very substantial.

Where the post in question that is receiving the comments resides,  is also a very big issue here, and the domain rank as well as the page rank of the original location where these comments are considered will also have an impact on the growth in value of the SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation value Indicators) associated with any individual comment.

It thus follows that the SEO value of a comment can be very significant, especially if persons who have some authority within the semantically linked niche comment and sustain an ongoing conversation with links to other resources to expand the conversation.  This once again boils down to issues of quality, and not quantity, though quantity does play a role, especially when there is plenty of good quality.

Many thanx for reading to the end...

Does paid advertising have any SEO Value?

The SEO  benefits of paid advertising are huge! 

 

Paid advertising is not usually associated with SEO, and this is a very big mistake, especially since the introduction of the Google Humming Bird Algorithm where SEMANTIC FOOTPRINTS and TRUST FACTORS now form the core of the primary SEOVI (Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators) which need to be considered when doing any form of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

To understand these issues better, we need to come to grips with what is meant by SEO and there are so many different versions of this story, so to ensure the we stay on the same page and that  YOU clearly understand my point of view I will once again quote my definition of SEO.

In my opinion SEO or Search Engine Optimisation has three distinct objectives

1) to ensure that search engines index your online content.

2) to ensure that your online content appears within the SERP's  when people are searching for your products, services and related company / organization information.

3) to ensure that your intended target market audience select the link to your  on line content, then follow through by performing at least one CTA (Call To Action)  within the page that they selected from the SERP;s

If any one of these fails your SEO has failed.   Now that we understand the purpose, aims and objectives of any good SEO strategy lets see how PAID ADVERTISING IMPACTS ON THESE ISSUES

When a spider takes its data from the page in question the information about the advert in question is also included within the page as part of the #IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation.  So you as the owner of the page need to negotiate with the advertiser and ensure that the advert is suitable and relevant to your intended target market audience.  This is basically saying that you are in control of the quality of the advert and must thus ensure that the advert meets your qualifications,  other wise do not display the advert within your page.

When you place paid advertising within your page, from display networks like Google adsense and many others you specify your target audience, and have access to many filters and tools that would ensure that your adverting is in some way related to your target audience.  If you have done your #IPSEO or In Page Search Engine Optimisation right, and documented this clearly within the target market research phase then setting these related filters within your adsense campaigns will be relatively easy. If you make it easy for the search engines to identify your desired target audience, then the ad display network will also be able to calculate and predict your intended target audience, and thus have much better quality adds.

It is our considered opinion that this improved quality of the in-page advertising filters through to the quality of your page and impacts on many other #SEOVI (Search engine Optimisation Value Indicators) from page rank and domain rank through author, publisher and many other SEOVI specifically your semantic foot print and the associated trust factors.  These Search Engine Optimisation Value Indicators (SEOVI) are the variables that Google as well as other search engines use within their very complicated multi stage algorithms that match a search query to a SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

+Rand Fishkin  of +Moz posted this  #whiteboardfriday  where he talks about the issues associated with paid advertising and explains many of the related issues.