Is there an advantage to running paid search when you already have great SEO? Is there a halo effect? Your hard work is already paying
dividends in organic search. This is true on Google’s Adwords platform, the Bing/Yahoo Ad Network, and other search result pages. Bing/Yahoo and Google both rely on relevancy and recency to bring great organic results to their end users. Over 90 percent of searches are followed by an organic click. So why pay to play?
SEO is still king and we’re not advocating Paid over SEO, but the first rule of great SEO is not to rely completely on SEO. One king doesn’t make for a good poker hand. You need more cards to win.
What is Halo Effect?
The search results page halo effect gives higher click through rates than either paid or organic alone. It’s like a multiplier that amplifies your click through rate when both a paid result and an organic result are stacked on the same page. It occurs in both Bing and Google and occurs on average about 20% of the time on their results. Companies with great SEO increase the percent of occurrence. Companies with poor SEO don’t have an organic search result to work with.
Why does the halo effect improve results?
Because we are primarily emotional people, the way we feel overrides logical conclusions. SERPs are thought of as a place to find a solution to a problem. Showing up more than once reassures that you’re a valid solution. It provides the perception of competence and trust. You’re more attractive.
The term halo effect comes from the statistical side of marketing research. Here we discuss the idea of attractiveness equaling goodness. The link at the end of this sentence is a deep dive for non-statisticins, but if you’re interested, here’s the full definition from Lionel G. Standing with SAGE Research Methods.
Take a look at the infographic created by google that describes the correlation between ad position and click through rate. What they are describing is the percentage of ad clicks that are incremental to the organic result as the organic result moves further down the page. This is commonly referred to as Incremental Ad Click or IAC. When you’re in the organic SERPs first spot, half the time your clicks goes through the ad. In spots 2-4 82% are incremental. and 96% are incremental for spots 5 and down.
Use the Halo Effect to Incrementally Build Your Own Ad Clicks
Search providers continue to reduce the screen area shown before a user has to start scrolling down. Organic results return only one or two listings above the fold on most screens. So, naturally paid search listings are always visible first. Search providers also have reduced the distinction between paid and organic results. They’ve removed distinct labels and borders and background colors for subtle nuances.
Statistics as recent as 2012 demonstrate that those who increase their Google search ad spend from a zero basis experienced a median average increase in incremental ad click of 79%. Those who decreased an existing ad spend to zero lost 85% IAC which was not made up by organic alone. What does this mean?
Source: Google Think Insights, March 2012 – Organic Search Results and Their Impact on Paid Search Ads
If you only run ads and have no organic results, you loose out on the halo effect. If you run SEO and have no ads running you loose a 79% increase (on average) in IAC. If you stop running ads, you’ll never make up the difference with organic results and will actually loose, again on average, 85%. Running both acts as a multiplier when both organic and paid ads display on the same page.
Our research has confirmed again and again that some of the most commonly visited pages on websites are those that pertain to the people who work there. This fact often perplexes and even frustrates many web marketers because they are rarely the pages that webmasters WANT people going to. That is to say that most people don’t build a site to show off the bios of their employees but to sell products and services. Bio pages can, of course, help with this a little but as far as conversion goes, they are not the strongest.
But despite the fact that we’d often prefer that visitors spend time checking out our services and products and doing what we want them to do, many visitors will inevitably spend a lot of time pouring over our staff bios. For this reason, it behooves us to make them worthwhile.
And…what are we doing?
One thing that we have found to be very effective in engaging visitors and keeping our site’s pages looking fresh and interactive is to integrate social media. This can start with some social sharing and follow buttons as well as some feeds like the one you’ll see in the footer of our site that give visitors an opportunity to connect more with your company and gives them a sense that you are active and engaging.
But what about the staff bio pages? We established that they are some of the most commonly visited pages on the average website so what can we do to set them apart? Perhaps an integration of each staff member’s social activity could do the trick.
At least this is what we think and this is why we opted to bring in some Twitter activity for each member of our team on their bio page so visitors can see what each person is up to and talking about in a fresh, engaging way. If you want to see the end result, just visit the bio page of any team member listed on the Real Big Marketing staff page.
1. Set up your staff pages
We really wanted to make our staff pages useful to our visitors and worth checking out so we used a plugin called CustomPress to create a custom post type called “Employees”. Then we used CustomPress again to create a custom field call “Twitter Username”. This way we can write up bios for each staff member and simply insert their username into a field. Nothing fancy yet.
2. Create your custom post template
We could probably do a tutorial on this at some point in the future but for instructions on creating your own custom post template visit this how to. It’s pretty good as is this one.
Why create the custom post type and template?
There are technically a variety of ways that we could choose to accomplish our end goal of displaying the latest tweets. However, it is important to me that the process creating the bios is simple and intuitive, plus I have loads of customizations to make to the staff pages that don’t belong on any other pages. So it makes sense to have a post type for staff and an obvious field for entering a Twitter handle and it makes my job easy to have one PHP file to modify with all of my staff related tweaks.
3. Setup Latest Tweets plugin
1) We’ll start by installing the Latest Tweets plugin. For what we are about to do we will be needing version 1.1.0 of this plugin which at the time of this writing has not yet been released. So all we have to do is download the development version of the plugin under the Developers tab and we are golden.
Once downloaded we can upload, install and activate the plugin within WordPress.
2) Next we need to create a Twitter App and obtain our API keys. Once we have completed the setup for the app, we need to go to our site’s Dashboard – – > Settings – – > Twitter API and enter all four keys. Once this is done, our Twitter requests will be authenticated and will work with the Twitter API 1.1.
4. Throw in the code!
Time to really get our hands dirty. The first thing we want to do is determine where we want to display the latest tweet and then throw in the necessary script to make it show up. After that we’ll spruce it up a bit.
[toggle title_open=”Old way (no longer works)” title_closed=”Old way (no longer works)” hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”default” excerpt_length=”0″ read_more_text=”Read More” read_less_text=”Read Less” include_excerpt_html=”no”]
This method for displaying content from Twitter was stopped by Twitter in June of 2013. Now all content requests must be authenticated.
1) We’ll start by inserting the necessary scripts to get the info from Twitter (special thanks to webdesigndev):
1) We will now open up our new staff post template and start inserting our code where we want the tweets displayed. First lets grab our custom field value which will contain the username of the staff member:
Here I simply created a PHP variable called $stafftwit and set it to be the value of the custom field ‘ct_Staff_Twit_text_abd5’.
2) Put in some PHP to render the shortcode from the Latest Tweets plugin (this is why we needed version 1.1.0). I also set it to display only one tweet.
And there you have it! This is basically all I did to get the latest tweet displayed for each staff member. You may notice some interesting things here like the usage of a vector font for the Twitter icon I placed behind the tweet. That’s just making things a little more fun.
I hope you find this simple tutorial helpful. Please leave some comments if you have any questions or suggestions on how this could be improved and what other topics might be useful to cover. Thanks for stopping by!
Well here we are! Steve, Rogan and myself hopped in the car for a weekend of WordPress at the 2013 Chicago Wordcamp and are having a great time so far. So many great people and so much awesome information. Thus far we have attended 3 highly informative sessions:
So far each has been incredibly informative. We learned a lot from Brad Parbs about using SASS for compiling CSS in the first session and much more about the amazing power available within WordPress templates.
Andy Christian had a lot of great insight on typography and the best use of fonts on the web. He also had loads of great resources for fonts.
Right now about to learn more about all the cool stuff available within WP queries.
Matt Cutts with Google put out a new video regarding Penguin 2.0. Technically this is Penguin 4, but Matt and his team are going with 2.0 as this is a major upgrade to the algorithm The changes being made will mostly affect black hat SEO marketers, marketers that try to buy their way into search results, trick the system or cheat. He touched on 10 items that will be happening over the next few months and during the Summer of 2013 that these people will not like.
White Hat Marketers and small business wins with Penguin 2.0
This is a valuable update for small and medium size business owners who work hard to build a great compelling content and web sites. If that’s what you’re doing, Matt and his team are working hard to share your content with the world. While these Penguin 2.0 changes will help small – medium sized businesses, they will make it harder, or less likely, that web masters will find it difficult to rise up through the rankings when they try to buy their way into SEO, use Black Hat techniques or attempt Link Spamming. These are the main points of Penguin 2.0:
We’re going deeper that Penguin 1.0. Penguin 2.0 is according to Matt, “…a web-spam change that’s…dedicated to try to find…Black Hat webspam and to try to target and address that. This change will have more of an impact than 1.0
Advertorial that violate quality guidelines is going to have a very rough road ahead. Paid ads will no longer float pagerank Matt explains that there’s nothing wrong with Advertorials in Google’s eyes, but they should not float page ranking in the SERPS and the ad should fully disclose that the content is paid and not editorial. I suspect that we will hear a great rumbling from those who sell advertising space online from this change alone
Traditional queries will be see cleaner SERPs while traditionally spammy SERP areas will receive even tighter filtering. Matt specifically brings up pornograhpic queries and payday loan search results where Penguin 2.0 will have a much stronger impact
Denying value to link spammers by “going upstream”. This will negatively affect black hat practices like link networks even more than what has been done historically
Matt’s team is “munging” around on some ideas to enhance the sophistication of link analysis. The data they’re working with will potentially bear fruit for the team. It’s pretty early to discuss the details and we’re excited to see where this goes
Improve the ability to detect hacked sites and enhance the way site owners communicate with Google when the site is reclaimed. Potentially the best part is that there will now be a single point of contact and a single source point of information for site owners to bring their website back up the SERP results
Author Authority is going to have a huge boost this summer. The Google team is working hard to use a few new signals to better determine if an author is an authority in their sphere of influence and if so, to give them more float
The Google team has found and is adding some signals of quality to algorithm. This will positively affect the quality of results and “soften the blow” for legitimate sites who were impacted too severely by the first version of Panda
The team is reviewing a change that will limit clusters of results showing from the same domain. So as you’ve reviewed results, once you’ve seen a set from a domain, and if there’s a cluster from that domain further down in the SERPS, those additional results will be ignored to allow other results to float up. The purpose is to increase the diversity of the results page
Give more information to Webmasters. Beyond information about hacked sites as mentioned in point 6, Google is moving their resources around in order to give more concrete details and more useful URLs for diagnosing issues
My favorite line from the video is when Matt Cutts says, “If you’ve been hanging out on a lot of black hat forums and trading…different types of spamming package tips and that sort of stuff, then this may be a more eventful Summer for you!” Just goes to show that the anti-spam team is very serious about delivering quality results. Without it, Bing wouldn’t have to work as hard to gain market share.
As a team, Real Big Marketing is excited for these changes and the improvements it will provide to small and medium size businesses in Jackson, Lansing and the surrounding area. If you’re staying on top of your content, making sure it’s fresh and relevant, this shouldn’t be a problem for you and we hope that you have an “uneventful” Summer 2013.
If you’re interested in watching the video, we’ve embedded it here for you to view:
A marketing strategy is an expression of where you want to be and what you want to achieve. Some companies have it down. They’ve developed a solid, results-oriented marketing plan. Others haven’t seen the difference between success and failure. We help companies who are struggling between the two and we help people who are interested in improving their business but don’t see the results they need from their marketing spend.
We build marketing strategies for new, small- & medium-sized businesses
We help small and medium size businesses who have either grown by word of mouth or have had a little success with buying some advertising. Especially if they are in a situation where they’ve taken the advice from a bunch of different sources over time. It’s hard work to run a business. Finding the true voice of your company becomes difficult when a lot of people are pulling you in different directions. Each telling you what’s important. Situations where the agendas of others are outweighing yours. This is an ideal situation for us to help. We’ll work hard with you to figure out your voice. We’ll help you unify it across your brand and we’ll help you find the right marketing tools to promote your brand successfully, without agenda… Save yours.
We help new business owners as well. You know you have a great idea. You know people will buy it. But you’re not crazy enough to believe that, “If you build it, they will come.” That doesn’t happen. So you’re in this place where you want to step out, but don’t know how to do it safely. How can I start this business and make sure that enough people will be there to support me. Support me by buying what I sell. We help sift through what you need now and what can wait. We help figure out who’s going to help you and who’s going to steal from you. We help you figure out what to say and where to say it so that when you open your doors, people are for your success, with their money.
What is your philosophy for creating a Marketing Strategy?
We believe that people connect with brands emotionally, so we will help you connect at that level. We passionately share with our clients that one consistent message is more successful than many so we will enhance the integration and perception of your brand. Holistic strategies allow you to see a 360° view of your best customers and your best processed, so we take a comprehensive approach to solving your business challenges. We believe that goals bring accountability, so we set and act on them.
A solid, results-oriented marketing plan can be the difference between success and failure in business. Our team brings together a wide range of marketing services and tools to produce a clear marketing plan which your business can follow to success.
What type of strategic marketing services do you provide?
It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Are there enough people who know about your brand? Is your competition taking more market share than they deserve? Are you trying to bring a product or service into a new market? Whether your goals are to generate brand awareness, reach new audiences, drive leads, convert customers, increase revenue, or retain and build customer relationships, we can help. Here are some common names assigned to the consulting work we do:
[threecol_one]
Brand Strategy
Brand Positioning
Business Startups
Lead Generation
Lead Nurturing
Lead Management
[/threecol_one]
[threecol_one]
Campaign Development
Competitive Analysis
Industry Research & Insights
Market Research
Market Segmentation
Marketing Tactics
[/threecol_one]
[threecol_one_last]
Media Planning
Product Launches
Product Development
Sales Tactics
Target Marketing
[/threecol_one_last]
Big ideas and real results to transform your vision into reality.
If you’re at a decision point and concerned about making successful decisions for your brand, give us a call. We offer a no hassle, no obligation discussion about the situation. We’d love to shed some light for you and your brand. Drop us a note or call (517) 358-6794. We’d love to push you up to the next level.