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Agency Internship Opportunity – Minneapolis

May 1st, 2012 Allison McMenimen

Hey future grads! Yeah, YOU. Nina Hale Inc is on the hunt for new talent. Check out our internship description and be sure to submit cover letters and resume by Friday, May 11.

Click here for more details.

Baby Intenr

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The Google Penguin Update – Should You Be Worried?

May 1st, 2012 Mike Grinberg

(Insert cute photo or animation of penguin here…)

Google announced its Webspam Update, almost immediately renamed Penguin Update, on April 24th. If you are reading this, you are likely already aware of this Google algorithm change, as webmasters and site owners all over the world have take to the forums and blogs to complain that their sites have been wrongly demoted in the SERPs. In this post, I don’t want to argue about whether this update has been effective in improving search results, nor do I want to argue whether Google’s overall practice of patching up its algorithm from time to time is effective. There are already plenty of good articles and blog posts about those topics out there. All I want to do is share our agencies experience with this latest update.

While the Panda update did effect some of our clients, and changed some of the SEO strategies and tactics that we were recommending, we have not seen this be the case with Penguin. We have been monitoring both rankings and organic Google traffic for our clients and haven’t seen any effect, on any of our clients, since April 24th. Again, I am not stating that Penguin didn’t negatively effect some quality sites, as there does seem to be some anecdotal evidence out there that this has happened in very isolated cases. However, as was stated in Google’s Webmaster Central Blog post about Penguin, sites implementing “white hat” SEO tactics will not be affected. We have seen this to be true with all of our clients. At a high level, we don’t do anything “black hat” – we don’t advise our clients to buy links or implement any linking schemes; we don’t advise them to hide page content or links in CSS; we don’t advise them to link to irrelevant sites, nor to participate in comment spam. We do make sure that our clients optimize their content for the most relevant search terms. We advise them to expand their content, both on-site and off, where it makes sense without being spammy. We advise them to build links from reputable and relevant sites. and we also advise them to build and use very cohesive internal linking strategies.

This isn’t to say that “black hat” SEO tactics don’t work. They do, as we exposed in one of our recent posts about buying Google +1s affecting search rankings. However, we would never recommend these types of tactics to our clients, because inevitably, at some point down the line, Google will come up with another algorithm (insert another cute furry animal name here) update that will severely penalize the sites that are using said tactic(s).

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SEO Old Hats

April 30th, 2012 Zinda Schaefer

Thirteen plus years ago my boss at the time asked if I would be interested in learning to optimize the company’s websites for the search engines. That was the start of a new career path. In thinking back to those early days when all this SEO/SEM/online marketing/PPC stuff was new to everyone, it feels like much has changed yet much has remained the same. Some of the search engines and directories are gone and been replaced by others, some of the then known players are gone, but many are still leaders in the industry. There’s not a definitive timeline that makes you an expert, but after 13 years I allow myself to say I’m an old hat in this industry. How about you?

You know you’re an “old hat” when you can remember:

  • When Yahoo!, Looksmart, and DMOZ were the dominant directories
  • AltaVista, Lycos, and Excite were the top search engines
    • Remember the buzz when Google came into the game
  • GoTo.com was the first PPC search engine and you monitored your bids manually
  • Attending the first Search Engine Strategies Conference held by Danny Sullivan in San Francisco
  • Subscribing to Search Engine Watch and reading every forum you could find to understand this new world of “search”
    • Where the likes of Ammon Johns (aka Black Knight) and Brett Tabke (and many others) answered a multitude of questions – many asked over, and over, and over….
  • The Keywords Meta tag actually contributed to rankings
  • Having to manually submit your website(s) to AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, etc.
  • Using Bruce Clay’s Search Engine Relationship Chart  (go to 11/2000)

  • Teaching company lawyers what the Title and Meta tags were and how competitors were using them to rank for the company’s branded terms (learned lots about trademarks and what could be considered trademark infringement)
  • Big debates between Black Hats and White Hats, now everyone who participated in those first debates are “old hats” too!

Well enough about the past. If you want to walk down memory lane, here’s a couple fun reads: http://www.thehistoryofseo.com/; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seo-since-1999

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Google Study: 89% of Paid Search Clicks are Incremental

April 26th, 2012 Dan Cardamone

The search engine result page has become one of the most valuable landscapes for businesses of all sizes and types because it drives more customers to their website than almost any other channel. That’s why establishing your presence on these pages is so important. One of the biggest questions that businesses ask themselves is if they need to pay for that presence and if so, how much of it do they need to pay for. The answer to that question really revolves around clicks and what mix (organic vs. paid) generates the most. Well according to Google’s recent Search Ads Pause research study, the majority of paid search clicks are actually incremental – 89% to be exact. Or in other words, 89% of the visits to the advertiser’s site from ad clicks are not replaced by organic clicks when the search ads are paused.

I’m sure that many of you are thinking the same thing that I thought after seeing this. Of course Google is going to tell us all that paid search clicks are incremental. However, after digging into their research a bit further it does give you the confidence and reassurance that you’ve been looking for all these years. One of the most interesting elements of this study was the way that Google broke out these incremental clicks by organic position. The proportion of incremental clicks varied from 50% (when the organic result was ranking #1) to 96% (when the organic result was ranked lower than 4). Even when the organic result ranked between 2 and 4, which are very productive positions, the percentage of incremental clicks from paid search was still 82%.

It is very interesting to think that even if you’re ranking #1 for a top keyword that there is still opportunity to capture 50% more clicks with the presence of an ad right above that. This research also gives you the confidence to be aggressive from a paid search perspective on keywords that you’re struggling with on the organic side. As much as we’d like to think that having a strong presence organically is enough, knowing that there are many more clicks out there for the taking makes paid search a very valuable tool for growth. So the next time you’re thinking about turning off your brand campaign in AdWords think about that 50% that you might be saying goodbye to.

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Nina Hale, Agency Recognized by Local Media

April 24th, 2012 Leslie Gibson

Nina Hale has been named an Industry Leader as part of the Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal’s 2012 Women in Business Awards. Nina and other Twin Cities Industry Leaders and Women to Watch will be recognized at the Women In Business Awards luncheon on May 23 at the Minneapolis Hilton.

The award comes on the heels of another honor for the search marketing agency, which was recently selected as one of the Best 100 Companies to Work For by Minnesota Business. The Best 100 competition is based on employee satisfaction, and “salutes Minnesota organizations that are setting the standard for leadership, benefits, best work environment, innovative training programs and employee happiness.”

The agency was also featured in a Minneapolis StarTribune business feature which detailed the ever-growing importance of search marketing to consumer and business-to-business companies.

Nina Hale Search Marketing offers direct marketing focus on eComm and Lead Generation. Our accounts are currently both B2C and B2B focused with experience managing SEO and PPC for companies including Pear Tree Greetings, Thymes, Harley-Davidson and many others. We currently manage more than $13 million in click fees per year for client pay-per-click accounts on Google, Bing, Facebook and other paid search platforms. The agency has access to expert and fast-response teams at the search engines, and regularly receives invitations to exclusive beta programs through Google AdWords and other paid search programs.

Our team approach to accounts ensures oversight and continuous improvement. 16 team members are individually certified in Google Analytics and/or in Google AdWords, the most certifications of any agency in Minnesota.

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Google Brand Impressions Tool – An Overview

April 23rd, 2012 Zac Stafford

Google just released the Brand Impressions tool – a new free way to visualize your brand presence online. Its aim is to compile what people are saying and seeing in an easily digestible and highly visual format. This seems like a step up from Google Alerts, which has some serious limitations, especially for people who totally bombarded with emails.

The new Brand impressions tool captures data from Google properties and groups the results in to four high level categories.

  • Visuals. Images and videos from Google properties. Including related videos from other YouTube users, and the brand’s official channel, should they have one. Images are described as “top results” from image search.
  • Topics.  Topics and keyword phrases. Google is pulling this from Google News RSS feed, and includes topics “related” to the brand.
  • Actions. Metrics/stats.  Seems to be a summary of the above data. Includes comments on Google+ and YouTube, number of video titles involving the brand name, total number of search results.
  • Location. Geographically speaking. Google uses location names and lat/long to plot this on a map.

You can click on the headers (Visuals, Topics, Actions) and it brings you to a page where you can click on the actual news articles but you can’t dig in deeply on the actions.

 

So while it looks great, there are some flaws. It’ll pull in odd images like the one of a man about to get a pile driver, or fairly useless information, like the number of search results for “Room&Board” (today), and there isn’t a way to modify the results with negative keywords like you can with Google Alerts.

The top locations for the brand is pretty, but not actionable, and clients always want their information to be actionable. I would love to dig in more to see why Kathmandu, Nepal is showing up higher than one of their store locations in the US, but am not able.

I was further disappointed when trying to download my results – it just wouldn’t work.

One of the more hidden features is “Compare to Another Brand”.  Clients are always asking us how they compare to their competition, and from what I can tell, Google Brand Impressions is NOT the way to find out. Half the time I couldn’t get the results to load, and when it did come up, it simply stacked the results for each brand. What would be nice is to see some new charts comparing statistics from each brand.

But hey, it’s FREE, right?! So why not spend 20 minutes playing around with it. Who knows. Maybe you’ll find a video of the Baron von Raschke giving out The Claw.

 

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Measuring Impressions: Google Announces Brand Activate Initiative

April 19th, 2012 Jenna Williamson

This is exciting news – especially for anyone trying to figure out how search can best fit into their marketing mix.

We have been recently meeting with a number of clients who are not only looking to drive leads, but also drive awareness. When we’ve discussed Search as a branding element, we talk about impressions and brand interaction.  Unfortunately, impressions kind of leave us hanging.  It gives us simply the number of people who have potentially seen your ad. Yes, the ad was triggered, but did we even get the chance to capture the attention of this audience?  Have we truly made an impression?  Will they even recall who we are?  These questions have kept some marketers from making the leap to utilizing online for branding efforts.

Online marketing continues to make up a larger part of the marketing mix, but from a branding perspective, it has been difficult for marketers to figure out how it compares with traditional media efforts.  GRP: Gross Rating Point is a term most often used by traditional media buyers to measure the size of an audience reached by a specific vehicle (frequency x % reached).  For instance a TV ad that is aired 5 times reaching 50% of the target audience has a GRP of 250.  There’s been nothing like that for online media, but Google is trying to change that.

Google is partnering and supporting the IAB’s Making Measurement Make Sense coalition to give marketers some numbers they are used to seeing = more insight to what’s really going on online.  They are calling it the Brand Activate Initiative.

The first of two Brand Activate solutions rolled out on yesterday is Active View.  Active View answers the question, “Was my ad even seen? Or even available to be seen?”   Google says advertisers will soon be able to pay only for viewed impressions: a display ad that’s at least 50% viewable on the screen for at least one second.

The second solution, Active GRP, has 2 key features.

The first is Built-In.  Active GRP is built into the ad serving tools which will (hopefully) make it easy to make real time decisions based on specific audience GRP segments  (Note: This is available initially for DoubleClick for Advertisers clients and will then be  rolled out to other products).

The second is the fact that it uses robust methodology, which Google explains as, “Active GRP is calculated by a statistical model that combines aggregated panel data and anonymous user data (either inferred or user-provided), and will work in conjunction with Active View to measure viewed impressions.”   It should be noted that Google is submitting this for methodology for MRC certification.

We like conversions and impressions, but this will give us the opportunity to determine where we are truly making an (lasting) impression for our clients!

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Social Value & Social Engagement Reporting in Google Analytics

April 18th, 2012 Peter Quale

Google Analytics made their new Social Value and Social Engagement reports generally available to users this week.  The much awaited reports do not disappoint. At first glance, they appear highly accurate and the presentation of the data is very well thought out.

google analytics social value report

Perhaps most interesting is the long list of sites Google considers “social” and moved from the relative obscurity of the Referring sites report to the forefront of social engagement.

google analytics social networks
Partner social sites like Blogger and Digg participate in the Social Data Hub which provides more detailed reports about which URLs were shared across social networks and what type of event took place– for example comparing Google+ posts and pluses.

Perhaps most interesting is the ability to add custom tracking to social widgets using a new _trackSocial JavaScript method.

This very useful for tracking interactions with known social widgets like the Pinterest “PinIt” button, but also very flexible for tracking interaction with more obscure social networks that are off the Google Radar.

Google documentation is still a little sparse, but implementation information is available here:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSocial.html

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SEO Best Practices – Don’t Over Optimize Your Site

April 17th, 2012 Nina Hale

We’re getting a lot of questions about the rolling Google “Panda” algorithm updates focused on weeding out over-optimized sites. Matt Cutts from Google announced this at SXSW and there had been general speculation about it for months.

We just need to state that this is one of the reasons why SEO is an evolving, ongoing effort, because the algorithm changes! In fact the algorithm changes about 500 times each year; this one is a big one.

What is this? Google has openly stated that they are trying to stop companies who are “gaming the system” by over-optimizing their websites to try to rise in the search rankings.

Best practices tell us to not overuse keywords in page copy, to not buy links to website. It tells us to create a good user experience based on true relevancy to the topic at hand. The problem is that Google defines relevancy by using keywords in page copy and by having people think you’re so great at something that they link to you as a source of greatness. So a thin line exists between “SEO Spam” and legitimately using descriptive content that speaks to the customer and doing good PR to disseminate your awesome content.

Some “black hat” or “grey hat” SEO companies push the edge, while other downright fly right past it. Google is trying to stamp out the people who are completely gaming the system. However, there may be instances where companies can be wrongly labeled as over-optimized.

What can you expect?

In most cases we think this will help our clients’ SEO efforts. We’ve always pushed best practices, and known that sites need to engage and convert people, not just spam keywords at them. We think that the spammy companies (that we fume about because they’ve succeeded by breaking best practices) will drop in the rankings.

However in some cases clients’ sites have been optimized heavily, and may get caught in a net that thinks they’re over-optimized. One thing that we’ve always promoted is looking for persistent footer links, and this is something that may change and no longer be a practice to follow. We’ve been talking with some of you already about changing these links, where we think it may start to hurt you. We have a persistent link on MinnPost as part of our Pro Bono work with them, and we’ve been in touch with Google via the Webmaster Tools dashboard to let them know this is a legitimate link and relationship.

Best Practices for SEO Content

  • Don’t repeat the same word too much in page content. Balance it with synonyms or long-tail variations, or break up 2-4 word combinations a bit more.
  • Stay at 7% or less. This shouldn’t be new to any of you. We’ve always said that your core keywords shouldn’t be more than 7% of total page content.
  • Rich content. Have interesting, unique content that provides helpful informative experience for people. Don’t create pages that are duplicates of each other with only slight changes in the copy.
  • Link anchor text. It’s ok to sometimes use “read more” “learn more” “click here.” While in the past we recommended changing most instances of this to become more descriptive keyword-heavy links (Read more about SEO best practices” instead of “read more“), this is something that the update will target. If you have a LOT of links that heavily use keyword rich anchor text, and especially if all the incoming links to the website use keyword heavy anchor text, you might be penalized. Use common sense. When it makes sense to use keyword text in the link, go ahead, but don’t do it on 100% of links.
  • Check your rankings and Webmaster tools. Google Webmaster tools is pretty open about telling you if they suspect issues that they think are SEO spam.
  • Be real. Remember that Google wants to reward sites with good user experience. Ones  that people engage with, convert on, and tell people about. If you provide that experience, and legitimately promote that content to the world, you’ve won a big part of the battle.

Of course for our clients who we’re actively in an SEO project or retainer, we’re always watching your site to see how the algorithm changes are impacting it, and advising on change in course.

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“How to Make an Organ Toss Game” And Other Strange & Spooky Searches

April 13th, 2012 Katie Pennell

On this Friday the 13th, we at Nina Hale, Inc. thought it was only appropriate to showcase the seedy underbelly of search. That’s right, buckle down for round four of “Weird Searches from NHI.” From hilarious searches to queries that make you question the searcher’s sanity, we see it all. So pause for a moment and follow us down the search query rabbit hole.

These are real searches that people conducted on Google from January, 2012 – March, 2012.

  1. “What is the percentage of being dead?”
  • This query only makes sense in a post-apocalyptic zombie-invested world.
  1. “Eco tech ninja”
  • Going green can be dangerous work. Best to have ninjas do the fightin’. Like this guy:

Eco Ninja

  1. “Where to get fire resistant gloves like on America’s next top model?”
  • I’m not sure if ATNM is the best place to get fire resistant glove advice …
  1. “Does Lysol cure AIDS?”
  • Aw, this one is just sad. Lysol does have many magic properties but I’m afraid curing AIDS is not one of them. After all, it’s no Windex.
  1.  “Uniform store for dogs”
  1. “Will an enlarged prostate make it harder to poop?”
  • Well, I can’t imagine it would make it easier. Also, wha?
  1. “Bladder that is leatherlike”
  • Question: how does one even know when one’s bladder is “leatherlike?” Curious and curiouser.
  1. “How do I know if I have an overactive bladder or am just drinking too much?”
  • Does your bladder wake up often in the middle of the night? Can it not sit still for more than a few minutes at a time? If you answered yes, then your bladder is overactive. (Ba-dum-bum.)
  1.  “Best online graduate ‘criminal’”
  • In my day we voted on things like “most likely to succeed.”
  1. “How to make an organ toss game”
  • This is legitimately scary. Is this some kind of serial killer game? A favorite pastime for maniac surgeons? Suffice to say I never want to meet this searcher.
  1. “Inhaling whipped cream”
  • Man, I get it. I’ve had those days too.
  1.  “Almost the most fun bunk bed ever”
  • Found next to ‘nearly the coolest night light’ and the ‘almost awesome area rug.’
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