Lastest Phone Leads Driving Traffic News
Nice weather leads to loud music complaints: South Euclid Police Blotter
DUS, MONTICELLO BOULEVARD: An officer spotted a man using his cell phone while stopped at a red light. As it is illegal to use a hand-held cell phone while driving in South Euclid, a traffic stop was made. While speaking with the driver, …
Read more on Plain Dealer
It's the Easter wetaway: Rain, traffic jams and airport delays hit breaks
They also warned of widespread frosts, creating tricky driving conditions for motorists. Airlines were also suggesting that staff shortages at border checks could lead to major delays at airports, with more than a million passengers flying from …
Read more on Mirror.co.uk
Suspended Registrations Lead to Yorktown Arrests
by Rick Pezzullo (email) YORKTOWN, NY — A Buchanan man and a Cold Spring woman were arrested and charged with driving with suspended registrations and uninsured vehicles during two separate traffic stops by Yorktown Police this week.
Read more on The Daily Yorktown
Part Four of ‘Is your traffic obsession sending you broke?’
Get Your Free Checklist, plus, take our “30 Minute Site Review Challenge” and win one of three website critiques by a Samurai staffer.
Today we ‘bring it home’ on this whole topic of conversion. By now, I hope you’re totally convinced that testing is the easy path to increased profit, a better lifestyle and a real competitive advantage.
In our final video, we’ll cover the logistical problems that can come up when testing and how to tackle these, and then we’ll walk through the very same conversion checklist I use.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Click here to download Ben’s personal Website Conversion Checklist.
Serious about Increasing Your Website’s Sales?
Take the Samurai “30 Minute Site Make Over Challenge”
And win one of three free website conversion critiques
OK, so you’ve got to here, you’re obviously getting serious about conversion. (Well done! This stuff is ‘live in a nicer house’ kind of powerful).
So, we have a challenge for you. I’ve thrown in a few prizes to make it interesting, but really, the benefit you want (and can expect) is a long term increase in your sales.
Early in my career I saw this process directly add over 100K to a client’s website. I’ve also watched a very ‘average’ Internet Marketing consultant consistently charge $ 500+ / hour to undertake this exact process (and you can do right now for free!).
Here’s the challenge:
“30 Minute Site Makeover Challenge”
Step 1 – Remove distractions – Shut down the software that will distract you e.g. email, Twitter, Skype, and turn off your phone … (yes, the world keeps spinning if you don’t answer your phone for half an hour). If you’re a coffee drinker, go get yourself a cup (let’s enjoy this, hey?).
Step 2 – Print off and review the checklist – Print off a copy of our conversion checklist and sit it by you for reference. Take 2 minutes to skim through it from top to bottom to refresh.
Step 3 – Pick a website you want to improve – Pick your most profitable or your highest traffic website (the one where an improvement in conversion will yield the most benefit). If you’re just learning Internet Marketing and don’t own a website yet, you can still do this exercise on a competitor’s website or for a friend just to see how powerful this exercise is.
Step 4 – Pick a “starting point” – I almost left this step out, because I don’t want you to get stuck here (so don’t!).
Do you know “off the top of your head”, the most common way new prospects find you? If you do, we’re going to use this as your starting point (if not, your starting point is your home page).
You might be getting lot of organic search engine traffic, so your starting point would be the results of a Google search for your most popular search term (often your brand name). It could be an offline advert. Whatever it is, make note of this as your starting point.
If you don’t already know how customers commonly find you, don’t get distracted and try to find out, we’ll just use your website’s home page as your starting point.
Step 5 – Print off a copy of each of the pages a prospect will visit from the starting point through to finishing the ‘goal’ you want your prospect to complete (e.g. buying from you or submitting their details as a new lead). Printing off pages might sound like a bit of a time waster, but you’ll see in a moment why it’s super important.
The series of pages a prospect follows to engage with you, or buy, will vary greatly from site to site, but a common path might include:
A search result or PPC advert (be sure to print this page off too, it’s an important part of the process).
A landing page or your home page
A product details page
A single order page or a few pages in a shopping cart checkout
A thank-you page.
Now, for those generating leads rather than sales online, the path will probably be quite short but that’s fine.
Step 6 – Think about your prospect – Take five minutes to get a mental picture of a prospective customer. Ask yourself questions like:
a) What does a normal, average prospect look like? How old are they, are they male or female, what sort of income do they have etc?
b) Now think about what is their life like, how busy are they, what are their main concerns in life? What are they worried about?
c) How familiar with technology are they?
d) What are the ultimate benefits they want from the product we sell?
e) Why might they be skeptical about buying from us?
Take a moment and note down any key points or observations you make. I even like to mentally give this prospective person a name.
Step 7 – Critique your own site – Now you’re ready to be your own ‘highly paid marketing consultant’. You’re going to slowly walk through your website with fresh eyes. On one side of your desk place the printed checklist and on the other, a pile with a printed copy of each page a prospect follows from discovering your site to buying (or completing whatever the goal of your site is).
You need to intentionally forget all the ‘history’ about your site (like how the developer was a pain to work with or that time, your sister said she didn’t like the colors etc) and pretend to be your best prospective customer discovering the site for the first time.
Beginning at your ‘starting point’ (see above), carefully follow the process of moving from ‘discovering’ your website through to purchasing. Take at least 15 minutes to do this – it can be the most profitable 15 minutes you’ll have this year.
For each step in the process, glance over the checklist. Using a pen, make big, obvious notes on the printed copy of your website whenever you see a ‘conversion’ problem.
Maybe your main call to action is buried and less prominent than the affiliate offer you’re promoting. Maybe upon reflection, your claims are all generic and lack specificity, maybe there’s little urgency when you could easily create some, maybe the site is simply difficult to actually use and you’re annoying prospects (a sure path to the poorhouse).
Remember – you’re not thinking like a website owner, you’re playing the role of the casual website visitor, just noting down issues as you go through.
Step 8 – Prioritize your list – Make a list of all the conversion improvement ideas you’ve identified. Order this list in terms of the improvements you think will be most beneficial. Remember, improving the earlier parts of your sales process will generally yield the best results as these often get the most exposure and test results will come in quickly.
Something I didn’t mention in the video is that sometimes you’ll encounter a problem that just needs to be fixed and it isn’t practical to test the ‘old’ version vs the ‘new one’. For example, it can be difficult to split test two radically different ordering procedures. So mark any such changes as “just fix” and organise to get that done.
For the rest of the conversion problems, you’ve now got a priority list of what to work on to boost your sales.
Well done! Make it a goal to systematically work through your list and watch your income rise!
Did you take the “30 Minute Site Make Over Challenge”?
Have you taken the time to do the above challenge? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Simply use the comments below to list the name of your site and the top three conversion improvements you’ve discovered.
In a week from today, we’ll post a list of the three winning contributions and in a follow-up post we’ll do a live critique video, showing what you’ve recommended and how else we think you could boost improvement.
Can’t wait to see what you folks come up with,
Ben
P.S. I’m hoping you don’t watch today’s video and think, “That was interesting”, or even worse “Yeah that’s good, I should work on my conversion some day”.
I’m hoping you’ll think “Damn it, I could have been making a stack more money!” and take the time to get to work and test your sales funnel.
Read MoreLastest Phone Leads Driving Traffic News
Tour Notebook: Tiger's driving (off the course) now under viewers' scrutiny
What an unidentified man from Australia saw on TV — and what he told the Associated Press that he reported to the Miami-Dade police department — was Woods committing two traffic violations: texting while driving and changing lanes without signaling.
Read more on Florida Times-Union
West Side Neighborhood Watch
He was the driver of a vehicle stopped for a traffic offense at Bloomfield and Noble avenues. The vehicle reportedly had marijuana and marijuana residue in it. The suspect claimed he didn't have any illegal substance on his person, but a baggie of …
Read more on Akron Leader Publications
Rapid Growth in B2B Marketing Programs Ahead as Companies Realize Benefits of …
BOSTON, Mar 15, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) — PAN Communications, a public relations and digital media leader driving communications strategy for emerging and innovative growth companies, forecasts increased interest and engagement resulting from successful …
Read more on MarketWatch (press release)
The Referral Traffic Sea Change [CHART]
![99925204 The Referral Traffic Sea Change [CHART]](http://drivingtraffic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/99925204.jpg "The Referral Traffic Sea Change [CHART]")
The vast majority of all traffic is organic, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon…
When it comes to referral traffic, however, that’s where you look for the patterns and trends that are changing the landscape. We’re seeing one right now — just look at the graphic below.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the “device-content link,” now we’re getting confirmation that this “link” is really shaking things up… and not in a way that the “Big Boys” are going to like (they pretty much don’t like any change that doesn’t help them consolidate their hold on the marketplace).
Just when they’d all got used to the world of Twitter and Facebook, everything starts changing…
Visual platforms are driving a bigger and BIGGER share of referral traffic. In February, Pinterest drove more referral traffic than Twitter for the first time. Not only that, but Facebook lost .54% of its share of referral traffic. WHY?
Part of it is the “device-content link.” Part of it is the shift to a more design-forward, visual web. Yet another part is the natural ebb and flow of business cycles (e.g. Facebook’s IPO) and human behavior.
![Shareaholic Referral Traffic Report February The Referral Traffic Sea Change [CHART]](http://drivingtraffic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Shareaholic-Referral-Traffic-Report-February.jpg "Shareaholic-Referral-Traffic-Report-February")
When it comes to marketing, cheap and easy referral traffic is GOLDEN.
The problem is that explode or disappear overnight. It’s almost like the harder you try to drive traffic, the less ROI.
That’s why I always tell my team to OPTIMIZE EVERYTHING, before driving in more paid traffic…
The other BIG concept I recommend is exploiting all existing channels. Clearly, that now includes Pinterest.
According to this chart, Pinterest is driving more traffic than Google’s entire referral network (which includes AdWords and Google+). Pretty impressive, especially when you consider that Pinterest is still invite only.
Perhaps even more surprising is who’s beating Pinterest…
Although “StumbleUpon for Marketers” isn’t a very sexy headline — but it ought to be for anyone who’s following the numbers. StumbleUpon is second only to Facebook when it comes to driving referral traffic. In other words, it’s probably worth reading StumbleUpon’s 5 Keys to Brand Discovery.
The main thing is that visual platforms like Pinterest and StumbleUpon are growing, while text-based platforms like Twitter (it doesn’t get much more text-based than Twitter, does it?) are losing eyes.
Don’t get me wrong, Twitter still has tons of active users and it’s important to marketing strategy… but driving traffic just isn’t what Twitter or Facebook are all about.
![gprofile button 16 The Referral Traffic Sea Change [CHART]](http://www.google.com/images/icons/ui/gprofile_button-16.png "The Referral Traffic Sea Change [CHART]"){kind=icon}
Hot SEO Tool Market Samurai is back!
A quick update on our progress in restoring Market Samurai functionality and some answers to common questions.
First up, a big thank you to all of you who’ve posted, emailed and tweeted various encouraging words (our users are awesome!). As mentioned in our previous post, we’re genuinely sorry for the outage.
Keyword SEO Made Easy
Hot SEO Tool Market Samurai is back!
The good news is that thanks to a big weekend and some late nights by our development team, we’re mostly up and running again. Here’s a breakdown…
What’s working?
The good news is that with the exception of large scale rank checking, Market Samurai functionality is now restored. Here’s a breakdown of the status by module.
Keyword Research – Fu lly Operational
Please note, we continue to use Google for keyword generation, traffic and CPC estimates.
We have introduced Bing for some competition estimates (see below for why Bing data works here).
SEO Competition – Fully Operational
Please note, the SEO Matrix continues to show the top 10 results from Google
Viewing (and sharing) a competition matrix has been restored and works as it previously did (including showing Google PageRank for the top 10 competing web pages).
As some users will be aware, when looking at a particular URL, the SEO Competition module allows you to explore and see the anchor text and authority of each of the top 1000 back links for that URL. This is a great way to explore competitor back links and see linking opportunities.
We’ve temporarily substituted Google’s PageRank in this detailed analysis for ACRank (an alternative and less accurate authority). We’re talking to data providers about a more robust measure of authority (e.g. PageRank, MozRank or equivalent) and will revisit this in coming months.
Rank Tracker – Operational from the local machine
Please note, we continue to track rankings from Google
As a temporary measure, we’ve modified Rank Tracker to use your local machine to check rankings in Google. Rank checks for the other engines (Bing & Yahoo!) continue to run via our servers. Checking rankings via a locally installed application works for users monitoring a small number of keywords, but for larger volumes will generally result in your service from Google being temporarily degraded.
Obviously this isn’t ideal and so we’re working on a replacement rank tracking service and we expect this will take 2-3 weeks to implement.
To date we’ve collated our usage statistics, made contact with six potential data providers and drafted an updated user interface for developers to begin working on. You can read more about this below.
Domains – Fully Operational
Monetization – Fully Operational
Find Content – Fully Operational
Publish Content – Fully Operational
Promotion – Fully Operational
Common Questions
As you’d probably guess, our support staff have received a deluge of queries, and so I thought I might help to answer a few common questions:
Will Market Samurai become a monthly subscription product?
Or as one user put it – is this all just a ploy to move to a monthly payment scheme? The answer (to both questions…) is no.
With the exception of Rank Tracker (see below), Market Samurai will continue to be a one off cost. Users who’ve been with us from the beginning (over 3 and half years ago) have received approximately 450 free updates as we’ve kept up with all the various changes in the SEO landscape – and there will be many more to come!
As many have already realised, we believe offering a high value, one-off payment product is the best way to build a loyal user base.
With the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer (previously used to power back link and Anchor text analysis) we moved to a commercial arrangement with Majestic SEO (at a 5 figure monthly cost) and have absorbed the expense without passing a cent of this substantial cost on to our customers.
Will Rank Tracker have a monthly cost and what will it be?
Google’s recent changes mean that we can no longer viably pull rank data for our user base (over 400K users in total).
As mentioned in the previous post, initial estimates put the purchase cost of our daily data requirements at $ 40,000 per day, a cost that we’re unable to absorb. So our intention is to buy ranking data from a reliable wholesale supplier and make it available on a subscription basis through the application.
We don’t yet know what the cost for Rank Tracking will be and how the offer will be structured. All we can say is that regardless of the reason, we understand that taking one of our modules that was “free to use” and making it “pay to use” isn’t great news for our customers.
We can say with confidence that we’ll be in a position to offer a highly competitive price structure on our revised ranking service. This is possible because we’ll be buying the data in bulk and we understand offering a great deal will be an important way to keep faith with you, our users.
Obviously any such package will be optional and we understand if you’ve recently purchased Market Samurai for Rank Tracking and feel you didn’t get value from your purchase you’re entitled to a refund.
We also feel this move will give us the capacity to improve the functionality in key areas also.
Can I use Rank Tracker on my local network?
As indicated above, Rank Tracker has been temporarily updated to make use of your local computer and we’ll soon be offering a revised service that again pulls data from our servers. Checking a moderate to high volume of keywords from your local computer can result in a temporarily degraded Google service for all those on the same network as you. In corporate environment this should generally be avoided.
Where does Market Samurai now use Bing data?
Important – we continue to use Google for:
- Keyword generation
- Traffic estimation
- CPC estimation
- SEO competition is still based on Google search results
- Rank Tracking continues to track rankings in Google (as well as Yahoo & Bing)
However, we have moved three data points within our Keyword Research module to Bing (via their excellent API):
SEOC – the number of competing pages containing the target keyword phrase.
SEOTC – the number of competing pages with the target keyword phrase in the title tag.
SEOUC – the number of competing pages with the target keyword phrase in the page URL.
The great news is that many users rely on SEOTC as a competition metric and due to restrictions on query volume, we previously required users to click on each keyword to trigger the data collection. With Bing integration, we’re now able to revert to automatically pulling this data for all keywords making it much quicker and easier to filter out keywords with high SEOTC / SEOUC competition.
Is Bing a valid measure of competition? Aren’t I trying to rank in Google?
Important – we continue to use Google for:
- Keyword generation
- Traffic estimation
- CPC estimation
- SEO competition is still based on Google search results
- Rank Tracking continues to track rankings in Google (as well as Yahoo & Bing).
SEOC (and the related SEOTC and SEOUC metrics) all help answer the same basic question “how many pages in the world have my keywords in them?”. Or put another way, if a keyword has a low SEOC metric, it’s ’scarce’ or ‘less used’ online than keywords with a high SEOC value.
These measures serve as high level filters to help you weed out prospective keywords that will likely have strong competition. There is a reasonable correlation with low SEOC and low competition. We should note, we have seen many cases where keywords with high SEOC values could be ranked for easily and some with low SEOC values being impenetrable.
Ultimately, in SEO, you only have 10 competitors, and they are those sites taking the top 10 rankings that you must displace in order to pull traffic. SEOC (and related measures) should be used as a basic filter, but NEVER (let me repeat that; NEVER!) as the sole basis for selecting a keyword, particularly one of the primary keywords on your site. Once you’ve filtered out the likely high competition keywords, it’s by reviewing results from the SEO Competition module (which continues to be based on the front page of Google) that you can determine with reasonable certainty your capacity to gain a ranking.
The SEO Competition module allows you to see at a glance the key SEO metrics for each of your competitors ranking in the top 10 positions.
So is Bing OK for high level competition analysis?
Given that our approach to high level competition analysis comes down to ‘how many other web pages have my keyword in them?’, then Bing is a great data source.
Bing indexes the same data (e.g. web pages) as Google and despite being somewhat of a late comer to the search game, they now boast a massive dataset (and have captured a strong market share – approximately 30% in the US including their results via Yahoo!). Remember, this has nothing to do with search algorithms.
We’re not comparing the relative merits of Bing vs Google in returning good search results (although Bing has come of age in this space too). It’s about the size of each search engine’s index – and Bing’s index is now easily large enough to give good competition metrics.
Furthermore, whilst many SEO tools include an SEOC style measure at a broad match level (e.g. your target keyword can be broken up as separate words mixed anywhere in a page), Market Samurai pulls SEOC data on a phrase match basis. This means that with Market Samurai you’re seeing how many target pages contain your keyword as a complete and intact phrase. Whilst SEOC will only ever be still a high level filter, the use of phrase match data is generally more accurate.
Why are other SEO products not affected?
Over the past three and a half years we have become very familiar with Google’s tolerances for high query volumes. Late last week and over the weekend we observed three specific and quite radical changes in this tolerance which we were unable to resolve despite the deployment of additional resources.
As one of the largest players in the market, it’s difficult to determine if Market Samurai was specifically targeted or if Google implemented new policies and we were simply active enough to trigger limits. This is quite possible as were previously one of the only tools to offer real time rank analysis on an unlimited volume of keywords. How other tools will fare, only time will tell. The good news is, we’ve been able to respond and resolve most issues.
Will Market Samurai be offline for six months?
There have been estimates from external parties in the SEO space that the issues at hand will take us six months to resolve. It’s now 5 days since we observed the change in Google’s tolerance for large volumes of queries and we again have 100% of our modules fully operational.
We anticipate a solution to large scale Rank Tracking within 2-3 weeks.
We’ve got 400,000 users, why can’t we just absorb the cost?
As you can probably understand, there are limits to what we can afford when selling a one-time payment software package which requires ongoing staff, infrastructure and data services to maintain and deliver the software.
We have a little over 50,000 paid users, with the remainder using the free edition. Whilst we are fortunate to have a profitable business and cash reserves, the cost to purchase data we previously pulled directly is beyond our means. The only silver lining is that with the user base we enjoy, we expect to be able to negotiate and in return offer ranking data on a very competitive basis.
Thank you again for your support!! (seriously!)
Finally, we would like to apologise again for the inconvenience caused by our down time. All our staff have worked some very long hours to make the required updates and I’d personally like to say a heart felt thank you for all the positive comments, emails & tweets we’ve seen come our way.
We’re as committed as ever to making Market Samurai the best Internet Marketing software, SEO Tool and investment you can make.
Eugene
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