How to Improve your Users’ Onsite Experience

What’s in the SERPS Invaders’ library? One of our old favourites is a book titled “Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works” by Janice (Ginny) Redish. This book goes into great detail about how you can best optimise your onsite features to allow your user to have the best quality experience. I wanted to share some of the key information, as although very basic, I think it is vital to remind ourselves from time to time what’s really important when it comes to website design and SEO.

So I think the best place to start is with a simple question.

Why do people use websites?

Generally people visit websites for two main purposes.

1. To find information they need. 
2. To complete a task. 

It is with this in mind that we should develop our sites, with emphasis on the following key elements.

Navigation and Accessibility

It is vital to get this right; if you don’t then your visitors are going to move on, very quickly!

• Keep your page simple and relevant, over complicating your site with flash and an over use of images will cause clutter and confusing, resulting in a loss of interest from your visitors
• Consistency is the key, by keeping the navigation bar and layout the same on each page, your users will feel comfortable and familiar with your site, resulting in a user friendly site.
• Assume your users don’t have a back button; keep each page flowing, keep them moving forward through your site.
• Use ambiguous terms to describe your links, be clear rather than clever, your site visitor simply wants to find what they need.

Content

The greatest skill one can take away from “Letting Go of the Words” is the ability to write great web content.

The way in which people read web copy is completely removed from the way they read that of a book.

Web content should be engaging and carry a conversation.

It should be quick to read/skim, relevant and easy to interpret.

You have about 2.5 seconds from the moment an average site visitor lands on your page,  for them either seeing what they need and clicking forward, or leaving your page.

Contact and Help

It is every website owner’s goal to make conversions.

So make sure this can happen at any point during a visit to your site.

Make your contact information clear and visible on every page, not just the contact page.

This ensures that when the user decides to go forward with a purchase or a sign up, they are able to quickly do so without needing to search further, which may result in the loss of a conversion.

These are just very basic fundamentals that you should implement throughout your site. In terms of SEO, I always start with the onsite factors at the start of any SEO project, as without a great site, at the end of the day all other SEO techniques will be in vain.

Online Marketing Managers? We are hiring!

Please spread the word, as we’re hiring!

SERPS Invaders are a great agency to work for if you want to move your online marketing career forward. If you already have some agency experience but feel you’re stuck in a rut and just a number, SERPS Invaders is the right place for you. Your work will not only be very varied, we also entrust our employees with their own projects and responsibilities early on.

Training is part of our weekly schedule and your personal development is important to us.

We also ensure that your have a life and get competitive holidays and bonuses for excellent performance.

If you join us now, there is still a lot of scope for you to make your mark and contribute to our marketing strategy.

Read the full job description of the Online Marketing Manager here.

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

Creating the Perfect Adwords Ad

So you’ve done your research, you have a healthy amount of keywords; you’ve broken them down into your individual Ad-groups now come the creative part, the Ad itself. There are many views and opinions on what makes the perfect Ad, but in this post I hope to sort out the strong from the weak and focus on the factors that really make a great Ad.

First thing to do is become familiar with the layout of your Ad, which is as follows:
•    Headline
•    Description 1
•    Description 2
•    Display URL
•    Destination URL (hidden)

Within these fields you have a very small amount of characters to try and sell your product to potential customers.

Let us first look at the headline, when coming up with a headline for your Ad you should be trying to create something that is both Relevant and Interesting. As an unwritten rule, use your keywords in the headline. Unless you are a huge recognisable brand such as Coke or Sony, using your company name as you headline will just be a waste of words. Be clever, and remember interesting, relevant headlines win every time.

For your main text copy you want to aim to be informative and persuasive.  When a user see’s your Ad you literally have milliseconds to capture their attention, intrigue and persuade them enough to make them click on that Ad.
Utilise as much tricks as possible such as the following:

Below are the results of a test that Mindvalley Labs carried out, notice the positive difference in CTR and CR that simply adding 3 dots had to this Ad!

Again the image below, taken from Mindvalley Labs, shows the positive effects that a simple change in pluralisation of a word can have on your Ad.

By using the word “Change” rather than “Changes” the winning Ad insinuates an amazing change in your state of mind, the losing Ad creates the impression that YOU the user must actively work to change your state of mind.

Be aware of powerful keywords such as “secret” ,“you need to” and “free” these are words that are proven to  encourage CTR. For example “Top Adwords Secrets” or  “ Download Free Advice Right Now”.

Use call to action phrases, these will pull people towards clicking on your add, “Buy Today….” “Download now….”.

Use capitalisation throughout your Ad, except for words such as “and”, “to” “in” or word with 2 letters such as “up”, doing this can boost CTR by up to 80%. Do not repeat words, this can have a negative effect on your CTR and CR.

Finally think like a Google Searcher, think what would make you click and Ad, what intrigues you. Keep trying and testing new Ad formulas to see what works best for your campaign. Search and view results, look at other Ads, look at competitor Ads see what approach they are taking and try to better them.

There are many ways to make your Ad stand out from the crowd but hopefully the tips in this article will set you on your way to becoming and Adwords wizard.

Relationship Building vs Link Building?

Link Building, the backbone of any good SEO strategy, yet still we constantly battle to succeed and win in this competitive circle. For many years the different approaches towards link building have grown and evolved, leading to many debates on which methods are more successful than others. In this article I will look at old link building strategies versus a new idea that was first brought to my attention back in May 2011 by Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz, which explores the concept of building solid online relationships in order to gain stronger more authentic links.

Firstly, let’s look at the old school method, the classical SEO approach.

• Find relevant sites from which to gain links
• Search for contact information
• Contact webmaster and attempt to gain your link through whatever means possible.

Any SEO will tell you that this approach to link building is gruelling, disheartening, awkward and a lot of the time disappointing, as satisfaction goes, a lot of the time you feel you are chasing your own tail.

What if there was a more satisfying and more humane approach to link building?

In May 2011, Rand Fishkin posted a blog titled Head Smacking Tip #20: Don’t Ask Sites for Links. Find People and Connect. As a social media fanatic I found this approach to be inspiring and have started to implement it in my client’s link building campaigns with positive results.

It is as follows:

• Find relevant people, bloggers, journalists, forum participants, members of online communities, active social networkers, people in media, PR, or simply the well-connected.
• Follow and engage in their online contributions, blog comments, Twitter, Facebook, Q+A sites and forums. ASK FOR NOTHING.
• Build and create something useful to them, an article, a blog post, advice. If you have taken the time to get to know them, you will have no problems identifying what they would appreciate and find valuable.
• Let them know about it, again through email, Twitter, Facebook, blog comment or whatever media gets your message across.

The benefits of this approach are:

• It’s a more sociable approach that may reach more people who influence, write for or control multiple properties resulting in a much higher ROI for each successful contact.
• People can trust and empathize with other people, if you sound human and genuine you are more likely to be able to build that relationship.
• This is a future proof approach. No matter how signal engines evolve or what forms of discovery become popular, your links will always carry value.
• Finally the material you produce will promote better web content and that will always be more deserving of links and better rankings.

I feel that this approach will not only ease the awkwardness of link building it will also provide link builders with job satisfaction and a sense of achievement, not to mention reinstall a sense of humanity in their life. As an unashamed social media fanatic, I for one see the strengths and positive outcomes that this method can achieve. The old school methods will always be present and, for those looking for quick links, will always be a winner, but in the long term I feel link relationships built socially on trust and authenticity will result in stronger links and longer lasting link connections.

Google, What Do You Love?

Whilst surfing around, reading blogs and keeping up with my various Social Accounts I came across this, Intriguing Link from Mashable.com. What this appears to be is a beta for a new up-and-coming Google service called “What Do You Love?”

What Do You Love? is very similar in layout to the Google search box, but what it does is return your search query in 20 different Google services, including Google Translate, Trends, YouTube, Maps and Groups to name but a few.

A beautiful feature of WDYL is the presentation of the search results. Each service, such as YouTube and Trends are displayed in boxes that can, in some cases, be easily expanded for closer inspection, by clicking on the icon in the lower right corner. Should you require even more results, you can click the button in the upper right corner of the box and go directly to the chosen service’s page.

I have been playing about with What Do You Love? and have so far been extremely impressed by this new service. I have searched for topics that interest me such as Metal Music, Gaming and Film, to topics relating to my profession such as SEO and SMM and I have to say that having all results laid out in this fashion is wonderfully accessible.

Look out or Google launching this new service very soon, I’m sure it is going to be another very important tool for both consumer and professional use.

The Impact of Social Signals on SERPs

Having just read SEOmoz’s 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors survey, I, like many, have been surprised and for some time astonished by the results and findings. However, there was one part of the survey that really stood out, and in my opinion should really be looked at more intensively, and that is the impact that social signals such as Facebook and Twitter are having on SERPs.

Seomoz recently conducted an analysis showing the correlation of social media-based factors that affect Google’s search results. What this showed was that where once the number of linking C-blocks to a page was the clear winner within ranking factors, there is now a new contender to the crown, social media signals in particular URL shares on Facebook.

Below is data taken from the SEOmoz Daily Blog “Facebook + Twitter’s Influence on Google’s Search Rankings” by Randfish.

As surprising as these findings are, the team at SEOmoz went further to investigate whether these results could have been affected in anyway by a number of search results where Facebook shares just happened to be present in the top results.

The following data was compiled:

Here we see that link data is present for nearly 99.9% of all results, which is to be expected, but more shockingly we can see large percentage of ranking results due to Facebook shares and Facebook “likes” and “comments”. It also showed that Twitter had fallen signifying that its influence on rankings may not be as strong as believed.

Whilst we cannot conclude definitely that these numbers mean Facebook directly influences Google rankings, we simply cannot ignore the fact that these sites are having an impact on rankings. To move forward we must begin to examine, analyse and test new methods and strategies on how social sites such as Facebook and Twitter can be used to the advantage of SEO.


As a big fan of Social Media, I feel we are at the crest of a wave that in the coming years will change and shape how we approach SEO. These sites have already proven their worth and are here to stay, now’s the time to adapt and learn so as not to be left behind when the wave breaks.

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We are a multilingual SEO company.

Russian SEO Techniques

When carrying out multilingual SEO techniques and in particular when optimising a Russian site, many factors have to be considered and localisation is key. Whilst approaching languages like French and German you can still apply similar methods, as Google still remains the number one search engine in those countries, however when carrying out a Russian SEO project or Chinese, your efforts require a change in direction, as Google is not the top search engine in those countries.

When optimising your site for the Russian market, your main concern will be to utilise SEO techniques that work for Yandex rather than Google.ru. Over the years Google has been experiencing issues in the Russian market, which has users driven to Yandex that now is a clear market leader with an almost 70% share of the market and continues to be on the rise in Russia.

Now why does Yandex handle the Russian language better than Google? As a fact, it’s not actually the Cyrillic characters that Google has issues dealing with. The challenge lies more within the structure of the Russian language. The critical part lies within the endings of words in Russian. Google did invest in improving in 2008, however, is still lagging behind to date.

What are our top tips for a successful Russian SEO strategy?

Yandex uses machine learning techniques, whereby human assessors judge sites and rate them according to what they think should be in the in the top results. MatrixNet, Yandex’ new method of machine learning, allows for very complex and large ranking factors.  

That is why you will have to remember the following when formulating your Russian SEO strategy:

•  Have a quality site that looks the part
  
•  Ensure your site has unique and excellent content
• Have good quality links pointing to your site
• Yandex doesn’t “like” paid links, however, realises that paid links will need to be considered at times, so there are not the same bad implications as for Google.

Best way to succeed getting your Russian site above the others, is to look at your competition, create great content, which will attract good quality links and get focus groups together assessing your site’s design and content to be ready for Yandex.