One of the first things to do when this conversation rears its head is to obviously chat through the issues with the client and get a full picture as to what’s happening and then offer your suggestions as to how your SEM efforts can best help the client through what is no doubt a difficult and stressful time. One of the great things about PPC is that budgets are flexible and can change whenever they need to and as long as you have a good structure in place you can control spend quite tightly ensuring that money is only spent in those areas that provide a return for the client.

With this in mind I thought I’d share some other tips and tricks to help get as much out of your budget as possible.

1.) Prioritise The Networks – Yes, AdWords does drive the majority of traffic but YSM & Bing traffic is often cheaper and conversion rates can be just as strong if not stronger.

2.) Analyse Your Google Search & Search Partners’ Data (If you do decide to go with AdWords) – Are the search partners spending a lot of your budget without driving any conversions? If this is the case, opt out and concentrate solely on Google Search.

3.) Investigate the Google Display (content) Network – Recent changes to this network have meant that performance is better than a few years back and the network can be used to great effect. How are your display campaigns doing? Is the network is performing well for you? Hopefully you will have followed best practice and separated your search & display campaigns in which case you should be able to quickly identify if either campaign is bringing overall performance down.

4.) Ad Scheduling – If you’ve got the data use it! Are there days of the week or hours in the day letting the side down in terms of conversion? You are spending money at midnight advertising to people who aren’t going on to convert? Are you predominantly a B2B advertiser who’s spending a lot of money at the weekends when your target audience isn’t online? Cut out this spend, it might not be vast amounts of money but as Tesco keep telling us “every little helps”.

5.) Look at Device targeting – Again, as with day parting data. Take a look in your analytics package and identify the value of mobile visitors. In an ideal world, you would obviously like to target as much of the market as possible, however, during these difficult times you really need to focus on those areas that give you a return. Are mobile/ tablet visitors converting? Is your site as mobile friendly as it could be? If the answers are no, then in the short term there really is little point targeting and spending your limited budget on these areas if they aren’t bringing the customers in through the door (metaphorically speaking).

6.) Geo-Targeting – This could be classed as one of the more basic settings, but if you are only able to fulfil orders in certain regions (e.g. mainland Britain) then you should only be targeting that area. You’d be surprised how many accounts I have taken management of and found that the campaigns were targeting areas that the business didn’t cover.

7.) Keyword Match Types & Negative keywords – Use Search Term Reports. Find those search queries that are converting for you and target them, spot those occasions that Google has matched your ad against irrelevant queries and negatively match them out. If you’re running a lot of broad match terms (heaven forbid) what variations are converting? Get them in… Whilst you’re there stop using broad match and use modified broad & phrase match more ;)

8.) Be ruthless with your keyword inventory – If it doesn’t convert and spends a lot, get rid of it. Simple as that. Also make sure you take into account your current keyword Quality Scores, if it is really low on some terms – delete them! (If you’re using Google Analytics, make use of Multi Channel funnels to ensure you’re not removing something higher up the sales funnel). If the reduced budget is likely to be temporary (which you would always hope it is) and the terms could be classed as seasonal, pause them until such a time as performance kicks in.

9.) Don’t Test Too Much – This sounds counter intuitive I know but I’m not saying don’t test at all just don’t be impatient and run loads of tests at once. Run a simple A/B test with couple of ads and then when you’ve got enough data to make a statistically valid decision (and only then) find your winner… Don’t fiddle with it until then.

10.) Optimise ad copy – We know that CTR helps improve quality score which will help reduce CPCs so go back to basics and optimise the copy as much as possible. Make sure the keywords are in the ad titles and description lines; include a strong call to action as well as any other USP that you may have (a lot to fit in 95 characters I know). This will help make your ad(s) stand out against the crowd and drive visitors to your site, which then brings me nicely onto my next point…

11.) Utilise Highly Relevant/Strong Landing Pages – I don’t usually like typing in all caps but my next point needs to be as clear as possible. DON’T SEND EVERYONE TO YOUR HOMEPAGE!! If someone is looking for Nike running shoes then send them to a Nike running shoe page, they’ll be much more likely to convert.

12.) Take Advantage of Ad Extensions – OK, like previous points this is probably more tailored to those of you running on AdWords as you’re not likely going to be offered the YSM rich ads at this level of budget but Sitelinks, Product extensions & listings, seller reviews they’ve all had great effects on CTR which is going to prove very useful in your current predicament (see point 10).

13.) Don’t Go For Position 1 – Being top is great but if it’s costing you more to appear there than the money coming in, you’re not going to be around for long. Find your optimal position and CPC and run from there. As long as your revenue or profit per click is higher than your actual cost per click you’re in a good place.

14.) Set expectations – If the cut in budget has come from an advertiser used to spending big then make sure they know that their performance may change. On a smaller budget they are unlikely to get those 1m visitors a month that they may be used to and so as long as they know this at the start there shouldn’t be any surprises later down the line when they compare data to previous timeframes.

I’m not going to pretend that this list covers off all the ways that you can get creative when working with small budgets, however, I think it covers off quite a few of the big things as well as covering a lot of the points we should be looking at when optimising any campaign regardless of budget size. If there are some things that you do that I haven’t included by all means please share them in the comments so that we can all learn from your greatness…

The last 12-months have been fantastic, both in terms of development of the SEO spider but also our growth as a search marketing agency. The tool itself feels much older to us (probably because we had it in development and used it internally before releasing it publically), but it has come a long way in a fairly short period of time. We have had 8 new versions of the SEO spider in the last 12-months, each with new updates and features as well as releasing a Mac version.

The success of the tool would not of been possible without the support of the SEO community. We have been completely overawed with how it has been received and the feedback the SEO community has provided. I have been genuinely humbled by the continued support of many of those in the industry who have helped us develop it further. You guys rock.

We have even bigger plans for the tool (as well as other projects in the pipeline) for the following 12-months, so there is a lot more to come.

Now it’s time to eat some cake.

The following new features are included in the update –

• Crawl Speed Control – The ability to control the speed of the crawl is something we have wanted to release for a long time. We have had some requests for throttle control due to the SEO spider crawling too fast for some older servers. Hence, we have introduced a ‘speed’ feature which allows you to limit the number of threads or the number of URI requests per second. This feature also allows you to significantly increase the speed of the SEO spider at the same time, which we just ask everyone uses responsibly :-).
• XML Sitemaps – We have included the ability to create XML sitemaps in the SEO spider under the top level menu ‘export’ option. Currently this feature is only for HTML pages, so it does not include images, videos etc (which we will be introducing at a later date). We conform to the standards outlined in sitemaps.org protocol. If you have over 49,999 urls the SEO spider will automatically create additional sitemap files and create a sitemap index file referencing the sitemap locations.
• Exclude Is Now Regex – Much like the ‘include’ feature, the ‘exclude’ option in the SEO spider is now regex. In previously versions it was robots.txt syntax, but regex provides more control and better balance.
• Bulk Export Missing Alt Text URI – We have included the ability to bulk export all images with missing alt text and the URI that reference them.
• List Mode Accepts XML Sitemap Files – We added the ability in ‘list’ mode to be able to upload and crawl .xml files. Hence, if you already have an XML sitemap and wish to audit it, simply switch to ‘list’ mode, change the filetype to ‘.xml’ and upload it. We will discover all the URLs automatically and crawl them.

We also fixed up a couple of bugs –

• Level – We did not always find the shortest path. Now we do.
• Https – There was a bug crawling secure pages in version 1.70. This has been fixed!

So, what are you waiting for? Go and download it now!

As always, please just let us know if anyone has any queries or feedback about the above. I will be updating the user guide this week (so please bare with me!).

Thanks again to everyone for all their support of the tool!

Now I know Halloween isn’t technically until Monday but everyone loves a distraction on a Friday and with this in mind, let me please introduce you to the newest geeky pumpkin, The Screaming Frog Jack O Lantern…

Happy Halloween!

p.s. As an extra treat (see what I did there) here’s a cool video of a Halloween light show. Enjoy…

‘You don’t know what you’re doing…You don’t….’

image - http://mcsportscheapseats.blogspot.com

What I didn’t realise at the time (probably partly due to my ignorance of the subject, partly due to the relative infancy of the industry) was that I was actually doing some of the job of an SEO. Alright, I didn’t have the foggiest what ‘page rank’ was but I was getting the content live and getting a link to the client which is the basis of link building. However, I wasn’t aware of the affect that this would have from an SEO perspective (we’ve already established that I knew little about SEO at this stage!) and how that would in turn effect SERPs. If I had known even a little about how anchor text worked and how valuable the links I was getting could be, I would have been in a great position to improve rankings for our clients.

To a PR Exec, the most important thing in any press coverage is the content – they want it to be as interesting and favourable towards their client as possible to grab as much attention, create great brand awareness and potentially leading to huge rewards for the client. To an SEO, perhaps it’s less about some of those aspects and more focused on getting the link, but the best SEOs understand it’s not just about the link, as they think more like a marketer and a PR exec.

Content is King

image - http://www.flickr.com/photos/developer71/

If you’re working in PR then you’ll be producing content every day, whether it’s a press release, an interview or research for a prospective article. Doesn’t that sound like exactly what SEOs are now doing day in day out? (And if you’re not, perhaps you should be!). We may have to consider some technical details that PR’s don’t, but then again we’re not thinking about circulation figures or publication demographics in the way in which they do.

Can PR Affect SEO?

A lot of times a good bit of press coverage will either be syndicated on the publication’s own website, or better still it may generate its own debate amongst the Twitterati, and you know what that means? Mmm yes, links, lovely juicy links. Granted, you can’t do any CTR analysis or examine the conversion rate of an actual physical newspaper article, but think about the last time you read something interesting in the paper and tell me that this isn’t a realistic thought process – ‘Hey that article on ‘XYZ’ was really interesting, maybe I’ll follow up on that, learn a bit more about that subject…right, Google that bad boy….ah right, interesting…maybe I’ll write about that on my own blog, and tweet it to my 65 followers…maybe I’ll even buy something from their online store.’ It happens.

A good friend of mine Tom Woods (@TWoods34), a senior account executive at Touchdown PR, was kind enough to give me some of his insight on the SEO/PR crossover:

“Although we don’t provide ‘online PR’ as such, a lot of what we create ends up syndicated on the web so we need to consider if the right links are included. We don’t have a formal SEO process either, but, as so many of our clients are emerging players who are focused on lead generation, we’re very aware of the value that well-optimised content can bring. The question is how to do it. I imagine there are some very easy ways to make online content more accessible and SEO friendly, and the potential for a strong mutual relationship between the two industries is vast.”

Although I’ve been told not obsess about getting links from really high authority domains, how much easier would it be if your PR team next door had a strong, working relationship with the feature editor at the Guardian?

Public Relations(hips)

The PR world is very much a ‘get on the phone, chase people down, and build relationships with journalists’ type of industry. You’re encouraged to take them out for a coffee, a bite to eat, chat about life, and do the usual ego stroking to lure them into a false sense of security, before BAM! – You demand a full feature on your client in the Sunday Times. I’ve found the online world to be much more email based and as I’m sure you know, ALL webmasters and bloggers are mysterious gargoyles that control the SEO world by operating out of their dark bedrooms, right? Not anymore. Blogging is now big business and some of the major players can make quite a tidy living off just producing content every day.

Wil Reynolds (@wilreynolds) from SEER Interactive gave a brilliant presentation on Link Building Mistakes at a recent Distilled ‘Link Love Conference’, where he emphasised the importance of interacting with (in particular) ‘mid-level bloggers’ to improve your link building. Start by following them, a couple of retweets here and there, the odd @ response to something they tweet, and before you know it they’re linking to an info graphic you’ve built and tweeting it to their 10k followers on Twitter. Not much difference to how the PR world works, right?

The Takeaways (God I HATE that phrase) In Conclusion (much better…)

SEOs: I’d encourage my colleagues who work in SEO to follow Wil’s advice and reach out to the key audiences in relation to your client. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of flattery, they’ll probably see it coming, but just be genuine and polite and try and build up those relationships. There aren’t many places left on the internet that you can go where webmasters don’t know what the value of a link from their site is (and I’m not talking about buying links, because no-one does that anymore, ahem) and they probably know what you’re after. If you can provide them with some interesting and interactive content then they won’t care where it’s come from or what your REAL motive is. Believe me, there are thousands of journalists/web editors sat on their arses, scrambling around for a story or an interesting piece of content. You are their saviour.

PRs: Get basic web-savvy. Get to know your Analytics from your Alexa Rank, your PageRank from your MozRank, because you already have the content in place, you just need to learn a bit about anchor text and backlink analysis and you’re golden. PR agencies are in a great position already to help and be part of the linking and social process. Kelvin Newman (@kelvinnewman) asks if it’s ‘too late for PRs to get in on SEO?’ in this Econsultancy article.

‘While the technical skills of SEO may be beyond the reach of most PR agencies, many of the tactics an SEO would describe as link building and development are starting to sound more and more like how PR would identify their own work.’

As an SEO, if you’re working alongside a PR team for the same client, it’s naturally important to communicate about your online content, and don’t fall into the traps that Rishi Lakhani (@rishil) cautions in his ‘9 Ways in Which PR Teams Fail SEO’ piece. My favourite of those has to be number 7 – ‘When a PR team gets a good link TAKEN OFF content. (trust me, it happens)’. Wow.

But it works both ways. If you’re a lazy SEO who is using highly dubious and clumsy link building techniques (comment spam, link farms, or worse still competitor sabotage), don’t you think that could potentially ruin your clients’ online reputation and undo all that good work that the PR team have done?

The bottom line is that the evolution of both SEO and PR is such that we’re using similar methods and creative skills to undertake our work – our ultimate intentions may be worlds apart, but when you break it down, we’re not that different.

Thanks for reading guys.

Patrick Langridge – Follow me on Twitter! @patlangridge

Well, it’s easy to use the SEO Spider to help do this. Here is a quick guide to show how this can be done:

• Step 1 – List Your URLs

Get the full list of URLs you want to check in a single txt or CSV file. Make sure you use the full URL (including http://) of the page that should contains the backlink to your site. Save this list as a .txt or .csv.

• Step 2 – Open The SEO Spider!

Go ahead and open up the SEO Spider tool!

• Step 3 – Upload The URL List

On the top toolbar, click ‘mode’ and select ‘list’. Next, click ‘select file’ and browse to where you saved your txt or csv of URLs in Step 1. Click open. The file reader will tell you how many URLs it found in the file you uploaded. If it was “0”, go back and take another look at the list of URLs and check they are all formatted OK.

Check out our user guide for more information on ‘list mode‘.

• Step 4 – Configure The Custom Source Code Filter

Back up on the navigation, click on “configuration” and then “custom”. In the custom filter configuration window you have several options available and I’m sure you’ll figure out what works best for you, however, my preference would be to select “Does Not Contain” in the filter 1 dropdown, then enter your website URL in the text input field.

Please see our user guide for more information about the custom source code search feature.

• Step 5 – Prepare & Crawl

Click the Custom Tab. Select your chosen filter from the Filter drop down on the left. Click Start.

• Step 6 – Review

In the example I set out above, hopefully the output will be blank which means that all the backlink locations do contain my site link, however, if some are listed, such as in my example below, you can can chase up why your link is no longer present.

I hope this is useful. Now it’s your turn, what different ways do you use the SEO spider?

So lets get straight to it, what new features are there in version 1.70 of the tool?

• Include (REGEX Crawling) – This new feature allows you to control URLs the spider crawls using REGEX. It narrows the default search by only crawling the URLs that match the REGEX which is particularly useful for larger sites, or sites with less intuitive URL structures.
• User Agent Switcher – The SEO spider now have a user-agent switcher with inbuilt preset user agents for Googlebot, Bingbot, Yahoo! Slurp, various browsers and more. We also have a custom user-agent feature which allows you to specify your own user agent. This feature is only available to licensed users and we ask everyone to use this responsibly.
• X-Robots-Tag & Canonical HTTP Headers – The SEO spider now offers support for both the X-robots-tag and canonical http headers.
• Re-Spider URLs – You can now re-spider urls with the right click function. This is particularly useful if you’ve had connection time outs, unexpected responses or you wish to update some URLs when editing the site itself. You can use the control and shift functions to highlight multiple URLs to re-spider. So for example, you could simply go to the ‘response codes’ tab, click the ‘No response’ filter, press ‘control a’ to highlight all the URLs, right click and re-spider to crawl them all again.

We also fixed a few bugs around around case sensitivity of content type, a meta refresh display bug, crawl control for some domain extensions (.com.au etc) and the trailing slash on the root page between host and file path.

We hope everyone enjoys the new features in the tool, as always please do just let us know if you have any feedback or encounter any bugs. To download the new version of the Screaming Frog SEO spider, simply navigate to ‘help’ and ‘check for updates’ in the interface or download it here.

Is this just a test or is the switchover complete?

Interestingly, the only time I could get the 6 sitelink format was if I was conducting a branded search.

What do people think? Is this another step closer towards the PPC & organic listings converging, as I feared previously? After all they only need to show another 2 and the sitelink format will match the organics.

Usually when you upload an ad with a display URL of over 35 characters (in Editor) you are shown a warning letting you know that you have entered a URL that is too long to be displayed and that to ensure that it meets the 35 character limit it will be truncated when shown. This is something I have been playing around with for a while and up until this week my URLs have usually been truncated (by dropping the www or the directory) to make sure they meet the 35 character limit.

After Richard’s question yesterday I revisited my ads and noticed that when they were being displayed fully which meant that the majority of my ads were showing with display URLs >35 characters. After adding a few more variations I soon found that I was able to get ads showing with URLs of up to 45 characters long, if they were any longer than this my URLs were shortened and the domain would only show. When I found that my ads were displaying normally I then decided to investigate further and find out if I was a one of (I wish) or if other people had been able to take advantage. You can see some of my findings below:

36 characters

38 characters

39 characters

41 characters

I’m not sure if this is a bug or if it is something new that Google is testing (it’s been a few days since anyone has seen a new ad test so they’re due one) but either way I think it’ll be interesting to see how a longer URL effects my CTR figures…