There are so many things you need to keep track of; content, links, keywords, rankings, competitors… The list goes on.
It is an overwhelming adventure for most of us.
Not to mention the scary truth that Google could change the game whenever they want, and within a heartbeat your rankings could disappear.
It's happened before.
In 2014 Google released an update to its Panda algorithm that penalized low-quality sites or those with “thin content”.
One of the biggest brand casualties from this update was eBay, who saw an 80% decrease in organic traffic, and an estimated hit of almost $200 million in bottom line revenue.
Google's Panda slammed eBay for poor SEO practices.
What would happen if you lost 80% of your traffic? Would your business stay afloat?
For eBay, turning around this big hit to their SEO wasn't going to be a quick fix. But the even bigger challenge was making sure it didn't happen again, because search traffic was at the core of the success of their business.
How eBay stopped this from happening again and got back on track
The number one thing that made a difference for eBay was accessing actionable insights and data about their performance, and adapting their strategy accordingly.
“Search is an important driver of traffic which can translate into sales. So we need to have an accurate picture of how we are doing in search and how our natural search activity is working. How do we compare against others in our market and what are the latest developments in search? We need to be able to answer these questions.”
Maxime Rauer, Manager Natural Search at eBay.
But they faced the additional challenge of delivering a unified solution for SEO tracking and insights across global teams. This wasn't a mom and pop store looking to get a bit of extra local search traffic – this was massive.
In the past eBay's marketing team had relied on a set of separate tools across multiple regions to track this important data. They soon recognized that to avoid disasters like this in the future and improve their performance, they needed a consistent and unified view across the whole organization.
After running an in-depth product search including pilot trials and evaluations, eBay chose to go with the Searchmetrics Suite.
The Searchmetrics Suite is an enterprise level product that automates many of the time-consuming aspects of SEO analysis, monitoring and reporting.
It helps you monitor keywords, evaluate links, compare domains or identify what your competitors are doing.
“We use Searchmetrics to monitor rankings for our chosen keywords in the various regions, and to benchmark against competitors.”
Maxime Rauer, Manager Natural Search from eBay.
Searchmetrics became like a low-cost insurance policy for the huge online retailer. Organic search traffic is the lifeblood of their business, so protecting that traffic was essential.
What happened next for eBay?
Almost a year after the initial Panda 4.0 updates, eBay started to see a positive turn around in their organic traffic numbers.
Their investment into performance monitoring, competitor analysis and data-driven insights proved to be the right one. Without an all-in-one software like Searchmetrics, it could've taken eBay much longer to see a turn around in results.
This data also provides piece of mind for the future, knowing that their finger is on the pulse when it comes to good SEO practices.
So why should you care?
One of the refreshing things about the Searchmetrics platform is it eliminates the overly complex side of SEO and helps you find the information you need to improve your performance.
If you run a global enterprise that needs organic traffic to survive, and are juggling the challenges and headaches of multiple teams, domains and geographies – Searchmetrics is worth a look.
How are you managing the risk associated with an online business and the reliance on organic search traffic?
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post for Searchmetrics. As always, all thoughts and opinions are my own.
Periscope is fantastic for live broadcasts, but it will only save your streams for 24 hours (if you choose that option). A new beta feature could solve that issue, and make it easier to save your streams indefinitely. With a simple hashtag in the title of your stream, Periscope will save it in-app for as long as you choose to have it there. Previously, the only way to save a stream longer than 24 hours was to save it to your camera roll, then upload to a video hosting service like YouTube or Vimeo. Working on supporting broadcasts beyond 24h! Starting…
How is it going with getting your posts seen by your fans on Facebook these days? Let me guess. You have great stuff that think your fans are going to love. You post it and wait anxiously for all of the Reactions (used to be Likes), Comments and Shares you are bound to get (WOW! […]
(Reuters) - Facebook Inc's WhatsApp messaging service resumed in Brazil on Tuesday after an appeals court overturned a suspension and many of the application's 100 million users in the country voiced outrage.
WhatsApp was cut off in Brazil at 2 p.m. (1700 GMT) on Monday after a judge in the remote northeastern state of Sergipe ordered Brazil's five main wireless operators to block access to the app for 72 hours. The reason for the order was not made public, and it was the second such freeze in five months.
The suspension was lifted after about 24 hours when an appeals judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of an injunction by WhatsApp's lawyers, the court said in a statement.
The suspension highlighted growing international tensions between technology companies' privacy concerns and national authorities' efforts to use social media to gain information on possible criminal activities.
The same judge in Sergipe ordered the imprisonment of a Brazil-based Facebook executive in March in a dispute over demands to access the company's encrypted messaging service as part of a drug trafficking investigation.
California-based WhatsApp had said in a statement on Monday that it was “disappointed” at the judge's decision to suspend its services. It said it had done the utmost to cooperate with Brazilian tribunals, but it did not possess the information the court was requesting.
The company has said in the past that it does not store encrypted information from WhatsApp messages.
A São Paulo state judge ordered text message and Internet voice telephone service for smartphones be shut down for 48 hours on Dec. 15, after Facebook failed to comply with an order, although another court interrupted that suspension shortly afterward.
Monday's suspension angered many in Brazil, where more than 90 percent of Android devices have WhatsApp installed. Cost-conscious Brazilians are avid users of free messaging apps, and WhatsApp is by far the most popular.
The service is used by individuals, companies and federal and local governments to send messages and share pictures and videos.
Reforms proposed
As some Brazilians sought an alternative messaging system, rival Telegram said on Monday that it suffered technical problems under the weight of demand. It said it received more than a million new user requests.
Letícia Mendes, a 20-year-old shop assistant in Rio de Janeiro, said she was frustrated by the suspension because it could force people to use pay services.
“It's really bad because some people only look at WhatsApp on their phones, so now they take a long time to answer,” she told Reuters. “It's just a way of getting more money out of us, when we already have to pay for so many things.”
The suspension came as a congressional commission on cyber crime in Brazil debated changes to the 2014 legislation governing the use of the Internet.
Lower house deputy Esperidião Amin, the rapporteur of the commission, said his proposed reform would help avoid shutdowns of this kind by allowing the blocking of specific individuals or IP addresses suspected of illicit activity, rather than the access of all users.
“It's less dramatic than withdrawing the service from the whole of the Brazilian population,” he told Reuters by telephone.
(By Natalia Scalzaretto and Caio Saad, editing by Daniel Flynn and Cynthia Osterman)
More information:
More: MobileBeat 2016 is focused on the paradigm shift from apps to AI, messaging, and chatbots. Don't miss this opportunity: July 12 and 13 in San Francisco.
WhatsApp resumes in Brazil after suspension, legislators debate law
InnoSpark is unveiling Trendy Town as a new kind of take on social networking games. The real-time town simulation game combines features of massively multiplayer online games as well as chat apps such as Line or Kakao. Dozens of players can chat and socialize in each instance of a simulated town, and they can build out their identities in the social space.
If the game takes off on a global basis as InnoSpark hopes, it will be a rare success in the social networking games for casual game players. Daniel Cho, chairman of Seoul-based InnoSpark, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the company hopes to establish the genre of the “MMOSNG,” or massively multiplayer online social networking game. It's a bit hard to describe, but it looks like a cross between The Sims and FarmVille, except that all of the players are real people communicating in real-time, Cho said.
“We've been building this game for almost two years, and we want to be ready with a lot of content,” Cho said. “It's like bringing Club Penguin and its avatar chatting together with mobile social networking services such as Line or Kakao. Instead of a dialog box and words, you now have an avatar to communicate with more expression. The town brings people together. ”
In the game, players create their own avatars and chat with friends. They can trade items in the Night Bazaar and go to parties with friends and strangers. The cartoon style avatars are infinitely malleable,with endless combinations of face shapes, skin colors, hair styles, eyes, noses, lips, and fashion items. A “celebrity magazine” highlights the avatars that are considered trend setters, based on a popular vote. Players can communicate using non-verbal expressions such as facial expressions, emoji, and body gestures.
The game is aimed at people who like cute art styles, including female gamers as well as young adults. The title uses Facebook authentication as well as credit card information, which can stop children from registering on their own. The chat communication is censored so that the conversation doesn't become in appropriate, Cho said.
The game includes bots such as animals. At the outset, the game can accommodate about 30 players in a single town. Over time, that will be increased to more than 200. There's a “royal square” where everyone can hang out, and players can enjoy fireworks, social activities, and trading.
“We want the game to be stand-alone, and not tied to any one social networking platform,” Cho said.
The game is designed to keep players coming back. The game has a lot of quests and a variety of rewards for completing them. The more you know someone, the more you can communicate. If you accept someone as a friend, you can gain access to their home, which could be a French chateau, and more parts of the town.”
Above: Trendy Town
Image Credit: InnoSpark
“The game is almost more like a service, with a lots of events that stimulate people to come back,” Cho said. “If you come back, there will be more rewards and gift giving.”
The town can be viewed in either portrait mode or landscape mode on a mobile screen.
“We still want people to be able to play it with one hand,” Cho said. “And that's possible.”
If you play it on a tablet, you can see dozens of players at once. Players can talk to each other, buy items that help personalize their avatars, engage in trades, and undertake activities such as farming. The town is fully simulated, with weather, seasonal changes, and day and night cycles. Cho said it is designed to help capture emotions and emotional connections between players.
Trendy Town at night
The title is a big one for InnoSpark, which was founded in 2012 and raised a $6.5 million round of funding last fall. Investors included venture capital firm Keytone Ventures, SL Investment, and Company K Partners Limited. Innospark has developed mobile games like Hero Sky: Epic Guild Wars and Dragon Friends: Green Witch. Those games have millions of users.
The company has 80 people, with more than half of them working on Trendy Town.
“This is a game that we created from scratch,” Cho said. “There are small elements that have competitors. But we don't think there's a MMOSNG that can accommodate so many people playing at the same time in the same town.”
You've done everything you've been told to do, to increase traffic to your website and it's working.
The only problem is that nothing else seems to be happening – no conversions, no sales, no business growth.
What's going wrong?
When people come to one of your pages, you want them to do something. This could be…
Provide an email address to subscribe to a newsletter
Leave contact information for a sales person
Download a whitepaper
Make a purchase
When a visitor takes the desired action on a web page – that is called a conversion. Unfortunately, getting more traffic does not always mean getting more conversions. This is why it may be a good idea to look into conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing your landing pages to get the highest number of conversions possible. You do this by gathering as much data as you can, researching what is working for other websites, and then applying needed changes to your web pages.
If CRO is a goal for you in 2016, here are some great tips that you can put to use today.
1. Gather and analyze web traffic
Don't do anything until you know where you stand. To do this, take a very close look at the data you get from Google Analytics or another website analysis tool. This will give you the insights you need into your web traffic, so that you know where to begin.
These analytics will tell you a lot about who is visiting your web pages, when they are doing so, and what devices they are using. It also gives you insight into what they are doing once they get to your website.
Knowing this information is much more important than ever. Multiple device use is on the rise, and you will really need to pin down user behavior and activity in order to target them appropriately and know where you need to do the most work when it comes to optimization.
Once you have your data in place, you can divvy up your pages that get lots of conversions, pages that are failing to convert like they should, and pages that are somewhere in the middle.
Then subdivide each of three categories into pages that draw more mobile traffic and pages that draw more desktop traffic. Once this is done, you can begin pulling ideas from the high performance pages that have heavy mobile traffic and using those on the lower performing pages with heavy mobile traffic.
If you don't have enough landing pages to compare, knowing whether or not you have more mobile users visiting a page will give you a starting point for your conversion efforts.
You can also use analytics data to find pages where people are bouncing out. If someone visits your website, and then clicks into another page, but then quickly bounces, it is time to do some investigating. Chances are, something about that page is making people drop out.
2. Don't ignore the smaller conversions
If you are only focusing on the 'bigger conversions' in your conversion optimization strategy, you may be guilty of a bit of myopia. Yes, the big conversions, e.g. making a purchase or signing up for a subscription are important. They are after all, what impacts your bottom line. However, if you focus solely on these and ignore the smaller conversions, you may ultimately be cheating yourself out of the big conversions.
Here are a few examples of smaller conversions that you should also make the focus of your CRO strategy:
Downloading a free trial
Clicking on a link to view a detailed product description
Watching a video
Liking or sharing content
Requesting further information by email
Clicking on social media icons to check you out there
If a customer converts in one or two small ways, there is a much greater chance that they will convert in bigger ways.
It may help to think of your website as if it were a brick and mortar store selling high end chocolates. Sure, you will have customers who will simply walk in your door, look around for a few moments, grab what they want, and make a purchase.
However, you will also have many customers who take a slower approach. On their first visit, they may just take a look around. On the next, they may ask a few questions and walk out with a sales flyer. They may come back and ask for a sample. Eventually, if you treat them right, throughout all of those little actions, they will come in and make a purchase.
This is why smaller conversions should not only count, every effort should be made to make the user experience during these small conversions as great as possible.
3. Monitor user behavior on your website
There's a second type of data that you should be collecting about your customers. This is behavior analysis data, and it gives you information that is a bit different from what you get from analytics software.
Behavior analysis software uses heat maps and other tools to give you some great insights into what customers are doing each time they visit one of your pages.
For example, if you have a page where users are required to scroll through a lot of information, behavior analysis will tell you where they stop scrolling and leave. You can also use the information to determine which information on a page is being read (as indicated by the amount of time spent on that part of a page) and which is being ignored. You can even learn where users are pointing and hovering their mouse pointer. This is a good indication that they are interested in that part of your web page.
4. Give your visitors a personalized experience
Chances are, you are already tailoring your content to the various customer personas that you have developed.
The next question is, are you also customizing the user experience on your website for each of these personas? If not, why not? If one size fits all doesn't work for content, why would you think it works for web design?
For example, let's say that you sell art supplies for young children. Your website visitors might include parents, preschool and elementary school students, and children themselves. Are you serving any of them well if you give all of them an identical user experience? Probably not!
Why not ask visitors who they are, or what they want? Then, direct them towards the experience that they truly want to have.
5. Don't ignore trends
In the time it takes you to read this sentence, a website visitor forms an opinion on the look of your website. That doesn't give you much time to make a good impression.
This means that not only do you need to offer a great user experience and design that works, you have to convince visitors that they will have that great experience almost immediately.
In order to make this happen, you have to keep with the design trends that are most popular with internet users today. Because, whether or not you like a particular trend, popularity is an indication that many people do.
This doesn't mean that you have to embrace every new thing that becomes popular in web design, but your overall strategy should include the understanding that trends drive expectations. If you consistently fail to meet expectations, you will lose conversions.
Alfred is an example of a website using animation (combined with parallax scrolling) in an attempt to stand out. Click to try.
It is important to remember that many design trends aren't fads that are all flash and no substance. Many become popular because they work. They result in improved user experience, better optimization, and web pages that simply work better. These trends eventually become design standards.
To begin, simply view your website from the perspective of a visitor. Ask yourself the following questions
What information is too difficult to find?
Which functions do I most want users to perform and how easy is it for them to do so?
Do the visual elements on my page add to or detract from the user experience?
Have I seen techniques used on other websites that would work on mine?
Once you've done that, you can begin to identify changes to be made and trends to apply to your website. Then, you can A/B test those changes and implement the ones that increase conversions.
So, have you got any of your own tips to add to this post?
Guest Author: John Unger is a passionate writer and contributor from Manchester, UK. Currently, he works as an editor at AssignmentMountain. He writes about things that matter and tries to consider the issue from a different angle. His main topics of interest are self-improvement and marketing.
The 2016 United States presidential election is weird, but the Internet is doing its best to prove it can always get stranger.
Supporters of Republican presidential primary leader Donald Trump recently turned into demons and stormed the unofficial headquarters for Bernie Sanders in the online virtual world of Second Life while shouting “Trump! Trump! Trump!” This is an online world where people can take on an alternate identity and coexist with others in a 3D social space. Bixyl Shuftan, a (and this is the best thing I've ever written) “roving furry reporter,” first wrote about political griefing inside Second Life last week and revealed that the battle between Trump and Bernie supporters escalated beyond characters shouting at one another.
I wanted to see this for myself, so I decided to jump into Second Life. This took me on a journey, and I came away … different. But I also think that Second Life is helping me better understand the potential of online social games and why dark corners of the Web are so obsessed with The Donald.
Into Second Life
The first thing I did after downloading Second Life was check out Sanders' HQ. I found that Trump's crew erected a wall (surprise) that towers over the Sanders gathering place. In response, and without a hint of irony, the Sanders supporters built a wall of their own to keep Donald Trump's followers out. After exploring the monument of the reality TV star and potential presidential nominee, I clicked on the wall, and an invitation to the unofficial Trump headquarters inside Second Life popped up. I accepted, of course, and ended up meeting an interesting gang of characters - although it's hard to avoid something like that in this game.
I kinda had an idea of what to expect from a group of mostly young Trump supporters on the internet. The often-intolerant image-posting forum 4Chan, for example, has a number of users who constantly feed each other inaccurate or offensive memes about why Trump is wonderful. The denizens of these boards defend themselves by claiming they are engaging in satire that “only an idiot would take seriously.” That seems disingenuous considering 4Chan is often the source for harassment campaigns that target outspoken feminists and people they perceive as censors of Japanese video games.
J.P. Laszlo, the owner of the Trump HQ in Second Life, told GamesBeat that they definitely take inspiration from 4Chan.
But this idea that the Trump support you see on the Web is a performance is difficult to shake in Second Life because it's difficult to take a man who is ranting about Black Lives Matter seriously while he stands in the middle of a virtual orgy. That's doen't even mention the giant model train with Donald Trump's face that is smoking a joint.
Role-playing reactionaries
Something about adding animations, voices, and simulated game worlds to the way the Internet expresses its devotion to Trump makes it easier to interpret it as an act. For this collection of furries and multigenitaled dominatrixes, every slur and mean-spirited joke comes in a sneering “who's going to stop me” tone. It's like they have ended up in this room as an anthropomorphic fox with a human penis talking about hyper-conservative AM radio hosts and chemtrails only because it was the path that enabled them to offend as many people as possible.
Now, I don't think this means that any of these Trump supporters are faking their beliefs. No one here is a closet liberal. This isn't The Colbert Report, and Laszlo confirmed that.
“It's classic Internet humor,” he said. “It's memey. It's slightly trolly. We don't take ourselves too seriously. We know politics is a huge joke, but underneath all that, we know that Trump is probably the best chance we have of turning the country around. There is satire and humor on display, and it is done with a light heart. But we are real Trump supporters make no mistake on that.”
If “The Internet of Trump” is satirizing anything, it is the notion that their criticism applies to their beliefs. Everything the Second Life Trump crew does is to convey the message that their ideas are harmless, and you're absurd if you suggest that they aren't. They have go-to terms for everyone who (hypothetically) questions them. In virtual Trump HQ, every critic is a “cuck,” a “feminazi,” or a “libtard.” And those labels mean you're not worth listening to - although Laszlo claims that isn't what happens.
“Most anti-Trump people who come here are just trolls,” he said. “We tend to hear most people out and try to have a discussion with them. But if they want to troll, we'll laugh and joke back with them.”
Laszlo and his friends built the wall outside the Sanders HQ, and he says that was just another joke.
“The wall was built as banter - not as intimidation,” he said. “Sadly, the person who owns Bernie HQ didn't take it that way,” he said. “I mean we - don't hate them. Bernie is an anti-establishment outsider independent running on a party ticket. But on the other hand, if they want to act like children, so be it.”
Trump is on his way to locking up the Republican nomination for president, and many people find that concerning. But seeing his supporters in Second Life makes it much more difficult to worry about them.
They think they are so brash, and they are if you take them at face value. But mostly, they just seem lonely. You can laugh at that. I certainly did. But that wears off quickly. After an hour, I kinda just felt like I recognized their behavior and their “sense of humor” in myself.
You can tell all anyone in the Trump HQ wants is to offend people. I have that desire as well, but it's something that I've tried to outgrow. If I didn't - well, maybe I would've ended up starting a Trump HQ in an online multiplayer world.
I spent two nights in Trump HQ, and I never saw any liberal trolls visit. Laszlo and crew, in the end, are putting on their performance for no one but each other and the occasional drunk Canadian.
I thought that my journey with the Trump club ended with a banning, and it had nothing to do with Trump or politics. I let that weak part of myself take over and start trolling someone who sounded a bit drunk. I joked about us going to huff paint together. He didn't think that was very clever, and I learned the hard way that he has moderator powers for the HQ. I spent a minute trying to get back in before giving up.
So yeah, I'm kinda sad, too.
Remember the human
After getting banned, I realized I needed to give the people inside the room a chance to comment on this story. I figured I'd get some mild curiosity, and then I would be done with this whole experiment. I reached out to Laszlo and explained what I was writing. He responded, and they lifted the ban.
When I returned to the room, a different mood greeted me. Everyone mentioned they were surprised that I was a journalist because I was using a hideous avatar after fiddling with the create-a-character features. They also assumed I was working on a “hit piece” about Trump supporters. And maybe that's what I intended, but I had no idea what to expect when I downloaded the Second Life launcher. It was pure chance that I clicked on that wall and ended up teleporting to a Trump HQ where a group of his supporters were going on racist tirades.
But I could understand their skepticism, and I also remembered how I'm always begging vicious trolls who harass people on behalf of hate groups like Gamergate to remember that they are targeting a human being. And I kinda forced myself to listen to that plea even for some racist Trump supporters.
So I stuck around to give them a chance to explain themselves.
Laszlo said he would give me the benefit of the doubt, and he was the reason I was able to continue hanging out in the room. He did ask me to mention that the owner of the building (Second Life has a complex real estate market) is an Asian person and that two of the moderators are Hispanic. This was presented as evidence that the group is not some offshoot of a white-power movement.
But white power comes in a lot of flavors, and this one sure did taste like “we'll accept the good Mexicans.”
But hours later, I realized that I was enjoying hanging out with these people. As long as I didn't engage on any of the truly troublesome comments, the mood in the room remained welcoming. When we weren't talking about politics or bigotry, we were just doing what people sharing a 3D gaming world do: We made dumb jokes, we shared some links of some Disney movies that snuck in some sex stuff, and we talked about movies (turns out we all fondly remember that 1990s Jeremy Piven comedy PCU).
This is the power of social games. Earlier that night, I told everyone in the room that they probably wouldn't like what I was going to write. But because we could see our avatars sitting together, this exposure wore us down. We couldn't help treating each other with some respect.
This is a power that virtual reality could seriously amplify. Facebook likely sees Oculus VR, its subsidiary that is making the Rift headset, as a way to get an early lead in the VR social space. We've had tastes of this in games like Hover Junkers for the HTC Vive, and that feels crucial to making VR mainstream. You need the headset. You need the motion controllers. The last piece is that you need other people.
As my avatar laid in one of the Trump HQ lounger chairs while striking the Ferris Bueller pose, it occurred to me that the point of this connection is that I could potentially leave a part of me with them. So I confronted them on their racism.
Predictably, the Trump fans went with their well-worn defense mechanism: “Every example of racism is a joke or a liberal troll trying to make Trump look bad.”
I had already finished the part of this story that mentioned how 4Chan is infamous for this deflection, so I didn't even address it.
“Yeah, a part of me likes those kind of 'deal with me being offensive' jokes, too,” I said. “But if I come in here and cannot tell if you're joking or not, then what's the difference?”
I don't expect to change anyone. I also don't plan to visit the Trump HQ ever again.
