Marketing | CategoryCode

Blogging, SEO and Website Traffic – The Domino Effect

Posted by Landon Poburan on February 26th, 2013

Most tech savvy professionals and business owners know that blogging is a great way to benefit your business online. If by chance you didn’t, it can help with search engine rankings, website traffic and social media if done correctly. I have noticed when we combine blogging and social media we have a domino effect with our SEO and Website Traffic. It compounds over time, giving you more results with the same effort.

When businesses are just starting out with SEO and Internet Marketing Strategies or just starting to use Social Media they may not have may followers, or many website visitors. But blogging and generating quality content to be hugely beneficial.

I have noticed this personally, with our CategoryCode website. I will outline our experiences with this.

Our Experiences

Each time I write a blog post, I share the article and post the article via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ and some others (When I share the article on Twitter I will typically use some hash tags so it is exposed to people following the topic). There will always be some people that see the post and visit the article. This causes a spike in Website Traffic similar to the spike we seen with our blog post last week on a WordPress Plugin called Gravity Forms. Can you see the spike?!

Now, along with this large spike in website traffic we typically also gained some Twitter followers and Likes on Facebook. Aside from the Social Media sharing, we also make sure we submit an update sitemap to the search engines so the blog post can get indexed quickly.

The Domino/Compound Effect

This is where the magic happens. Keep in mind consistency is key.

1. You write a new blog post on an interesting topic.

2. You share your awesome blog post on all your social media accounts, and gain new followers.

3. Search engines index your new page. Search engines love good, quality, fresh content. The more, the better (of quality content).

4. You see a spike in website traffic from people visiting the article.

5. Rinse, and repeat.

Each time you do this, you will gain more followers/friends on social media. This means that each time you share something more people are seeing it, compounding the amount of people that it will be exposed to, especially when they share it with their networks. Overtime you build a bigger and bigger network that your content will be exposed to.

Each time you blog you are generating new quality content. This is fantastic for search engines, this can benefit your website traffic and this can benefit various search engine ranking factors if you become a quality source of content.

Over time, your social media networks will grow, your website will perform better, and your website traffic will increase. You are putting in the same effort, but each time the results are compounding!

Tip to Maximize Your Results

Determine The Best Time To Tweet

Using a tool like SocialBro to determine the best time to Tweet can be a huge benefit. Sharing your content at optimal times means that more people will see it, creating the opportunity for more people to visit it and share it. SocialBro has a tool to see when your Twitter followers are most active – What time of the day and what days of the week.

Scheduling Your Sharing

Once you have determined the best time to share your content, you can easily schedule your content to be shared using tools such as TweetDeck or HootSuite. For example if the best time to share is Tuesdays at 9:00AM, you can still write your article on Sunday night, then schedule it to be shared on Tuesday at 9:00AM.

Doing Keyword Research

If you would like to create a bigger SEO impact with your blog post, I suggest using Google’s Keyword Tool. This will provide you some vital information on what keywords people are searching for allowing you to use them in your article title and throughout the body. We did this with an article and we ranked on page 1 for the targeted term.

Practice Makes Perfect

Many businesses don’t like blogging. I personally am not crazy about it either! But the benefits are too large to ignore.

The more you do it, the easier it gets. Ideas start to flow better, they come together faster, and it starts to take less time. Just like anything else in life, you need to get into a routine!

Wrapping Up

I truly hope that you have found some benefit to this article as we have found it beneficial for us. Hopefully you can start to see these results if your not already!

Tracking Google Analytics Goals with WordPress and Gravity Forms

Posted by Landon Poburan on February 20th, 2013

We have recently switched to using Gravity Forms for all of our WordPress websites out of necessity. We love internet marketing and conversion rate optimization but in order to do those effectively we need to properly track and record conversion data.

For every campaign, firstly, you need to effectively capture information through forms. Gravity Forms allows us to quickly build forms and I love the fact that it stores the form entries in the WordPress database for later viewing.

Along with recording entries, we need effective tracking and analytics. We had a fair bit of interested on our article on Tracking Google Website Optimizer Conversions using AJAX Forms, I figured there may be people that need to know how to track Google Analytics Goals using Gravity Forms.

Please note, this tutorial expects Google Analytics to be setup, and tracking code placed on all pages. For this we like using Google Analyticator.

Gravity Forms Confirmation Options

Gravity Forms provides 3 different confirmation options for a form submission, we’ll focus on 2. Details below from the Gravity Forms plugin.

Text

Confirmation Message Text: Enter the text you would like the user to see on the confirmation page of this form.

Page

Redirect Form to Page: Select the page you would like the user to be redirected to after they have submitted the form.

Google Analytics Tracking with ‘Page’ Confirmation

Tracking goals using Gravity Forms ‘Page’ confirmation can be done using Goal Type: URL Destination.

In Gravity Forms you can select a page on your website which you would like a user to go after submitting the form. This would typically be your thank you page.

In Google Analytics you can create a goal with the Goal Type of URL Destination (as shown above) then type in URL of your thank you page in Goal URL under Goal Details. Every time someone reaches that page you will see a goal completed.

It would be best practice to make this thank you page ‘noindex’ so that search engines cannot reach this page and possibly skew tracking.

Google Analytics Tracking with ‘Text’ Confirmation

You don’t always want to send the user to a new page when they submit a form. To do this choose ‘Text’ confirmation in Gravity Forms. This means the user will be provided a text thank you message rather then being directed to a thank you page. The user will never leave the form page.

We can still track goals with this method using Virtual Pageviews in Google Analytics. The setup for this in Google Analytics is exactly the same as the ‘Page’ confirmation (shown above) as Google Analytics is still tracking a URL Destination as the goal, however this page does not actually exist – hence virtual pageview.

In order to track a virtual pageview we need to use Google’s _gaq object and trigger the _trackPageview event so Google will track the page view.

Here is how we setup this up in Gravity Forms:

Gravity Forms Virtual Pageview

In the screenshot you can see we have chosen ‘Text’ on the Confirmation tab of our form, then we have entered our text thank you message: “Thanks for contacting us! We will get in touch with you shortly.” But the magic happens with the line below.

<script>
_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/contact-thankyou']);
</script>

You need to wrap the code in <script> tags so it fires and embeds properly into the page. Then you need to update the code with your page URL. In this example the page URL we are tracking is /contact-thankyou.

Feel free to copy and paste the code above to start tracking!

Your Next Client May Be Right Under Your Nose

Posted by Landon Poburan on November 21st, 2012

As business owners we typically always have our eyes open and ears to the ground for new opportunities such as a new or potential clients to work with. Building new relationships with clients is key for continued success in business. I started CategoryCode in 2010 and worked as a freelance web designer and web developer for approx. 6-7 years prior. The relationships and clients I gained along the way have brought me to where I am today.

In order to grow and expand we need new clients. I can assume we all agree in saying that the best form of a new lead is a referral. People have a much higher probability of buying from you or working with you when they have been referred by someone they trust. This is key, the more relationships and more clients we have, the more opportunities we have for referrals!

Creating new relationships and generating business take many forms. When you gain someone’s trust, you have a much better chance of getting a referral.

Our Experience

At CategoryCode our largest source of work comes from referrals. The largest source of our referrals is our existing and past customers. We know that the more happy customers we have, the more referrals we have the opportunity to receive. I am sure this equation can be applied to almost every industry.

But getting your next client may not be as difficult as you thought. New clients and referrals may be right under your nose. Here are two of my personal examples both within the last 2 weeks.

Example 1

Today I was shoveling the snow which is almost a daily activity in Edmonton. My neighbour was also shoveling his walks. We got to chatting and he asked me why my car is always home. I began to explain that I work from home. As most people do, he asked “What do you do”. This allowed me to explain that I run a Digital Marketing company where we build Websites and do Online Marketing.

It turns out his wife’s parents just started a limousine company and are looking to get a website built. This is fantastic, I explained I would provide him my business card and I’d be happy to sit down with them.

Example 2

I am a fitness buff and a natural bodybuilder in my spare time and I workout each day. The gym happens to be a great place to network whether you’d like to believe it or not. (Note: I don’t recommend sitting and talking at the gym. There is a time and a place for it!)

This past week I was in the change room and another gentlemen sparked a conversation asking me about my diet and what I eat. I began to explain what I eat and how it is fairly easy to maintain since I work from home. Once again, this opened up the conversation about what I do. I explain we do marketing, etc. etc. It turns out he is a real estate agent and asked if we do websites and real estate marketing. It just so happens that we have had fantastic success in this industry.

Tips and Recommendations

Your potential clients may be in front of you but you have never taken the time to notice. Here are a few tips for tapping into existing opportunities.

Tip 1 – Be Friendly

This may sound like a no-brainer but being friendly is a fantastic way to meet people. If your neighbour is outside don’t be afraid to spark a conversation Get to know them and build a connection. You never know where it may go. If you simply keep to yourself all the time you may be missing out on opportunities. Once you have engaged in a conversation take note of our next 2 tips.

Tip 2 – Actively Listen and Ask Questions

Active listening is very important when talking with people. I would urge you to ask questions and then actively listen. If you are always doing the talking, you will not get to know them and will miss key things people tell you. By asking questions you can find out what they do, who they know, etc. and by listening actively you can pickup on key things and read between the lines. For example maybe they have a website and are currently working with a company but his body language suggests he is not happy. This provides an opportunity ask questions and learn more.

Tip 3 – People Hate Being “Sold”, get them to ask you

I suggest you work on your soft marketing skills if your not proficient at networking and conversing.

I also suggest creating some key conversation points. For example I have found that when I tell people I work from home or run my own business it typically results in the other person asking and wanting to know what I do. This provides a nice way to get them to ask me a question, allowing me to answer rather there question and eliminating a need to “sell”.

When someone does engage, make sure you can with few words effectively explain what do you. You don’t want to bore them, but you want them to be able to identify what do you.

What strategies do you use to find and engage new clients?

Edmonton Real Estate Marketing Strategy

Posted by Landon Poburan on November 6th, 2012

Edmonton Real Estate Marketing

At CategoryCode we do quite a bit of real estate marketing and we have begun to build a proven process by which we’ve achieved great success. Because of this we love seeing new stats regarding this local niche.

On October 30, Top Draw Inc. posted an infographic on there blog called Alberta Searches 2012. In their infographic they display what Albertans are searching for most on Google. They did an absolute fantastic job and we were happy to see some stats on real estate. If you browse to the section “Home Sweet Home” you will see some great stats.

We always educate our real estate clients at how competitive this market is. It takes work to penetrate, but it can be done with a strategic plan in place. Finding statistics like those of Top Draw’s really help when planning your marketing strategy.

The #1 searched term for real estate is mls followed by rent. Some of the more long-tail terms are homes for sale and mls edmonton.

These are great and now let’s start to think of a marketing strategy.

Inbound Marketing

Firstly let’s look at traffic generation. You want to get your website in front of the people looking for your services. This is called Inbound Marketing. Well, these statistics show that some of the most searched terms in Alberta are “mls”, “rent”, “homes for sale” and “mls edmonton”.

Let’s set the ‘rent’ keyword aside for a second. The majority of these terms are buying-centric. This helps us take our strategy a step further. There are more people on Google looking to buy than looking to sell. This is demonstrated by none of the top 10 keywords being “selling a home” or “free home evaluations” or related to selling.

So as we setup of marketing strategy we can see some solid keywords we can target to capture some internet traffic. Now trying to optimize for “mls” alone will be difficult, so you can start to look at long tail versions of this keyword and use it as a root to build from. Taking it one step further would be “mls edmonton”. You can continue to build from there. Using a term like “mls edmonton” will still have weight for “mls” in organic seo and you can target both when using pay-per-click advertising.

The next section of the infographic is important as well. You can see that when it comes to branded terms, “Remax” is the most searched term. Followed by “comfree”, “vrbo” and “century 21″. This is also fantastic information. If you happen to be a RE/MAX REALTOR® then you definitely should do some work with that keyword as it is highly searched for. Since RE/MAX has spent that much time and effort on there brand recognition, take advantage of it!

Now if you aren’t with a RE/MAX brokerage, then we can still use this to our advantage in a different way. Another form of traffic generation we use is per-per-click advertising with Google Adwords. We classify the above mentioned keywords as competitor keywords. If people are searching for your competitors, you can still advertise to them! If your with a different organization, there is still a large amount of people searching for “Remax” so let’s put your business in front of them and see if we can’t sway them by the benefits of working with you.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Inbound Marketing is highly important. If you do not have people coming to your website then having the best website in the world will not do you much good. On the other side of the coin, if you have thousands of visitors but a poor website, that is money down the drain as well.

Conversion Rate Optimization is the other piece of the Real Estate Marketing puzzle.

Essentially CRO is building and designing a website that will turn your website visitors into leads and/or customers.

When we begin working on this part of the strategy these statistics play a very important role. To create a highly effective webpage you want the message of webpage to match what the visitors are looking for when they come to it. We call this continuity.

For example, if you follow our tips from above and are targeting “mls edmonton”. People searching for this are looking for MLS real estate listings in Edmonton. This means they are looking to buy (in most cases). But, if they click through to your website and the first thing they see your marketing is focuses on promoting Free Home Evaluations there is a very good chance they will leave.

To create the highest converting pages you need continuity to match what the visitor is looking for. If they are looking to buy then your page should be built with this in mind. You can still have information about Free Home Evaluations but it shouldn’t be the focus.

Extending and Building on the Strategy

What we have discussed is a foundation for a solid strategy. However, this can be extended and scaled to be even more effective. Here is one of many ways you can extend your strategy.

Multiple Landing Pages

Having multiple landing pages is a very effective way to increase your conversion rate. Since your in real estate, you help people with both buying and selling. So you don’t want to only focus on one. A tip however is to create multiple landing pages for different types of visitors. If you have Google Adwords running and you have some keywords targeted towards buyers and some targeted towards sellers, give them what they want!

If someone comes to your website from searching “mls edmonton” it would be best to have them land on a page about buying.

If someone comes to your website from search “free home evaluations it would be best to have them land on a page about selling and free home evaluations.

Always Track, Test and Measure

With everything you do, you need to track and measure the results. We have provided an overview of the foundation of our marketing strategy, but we track, measure and test everything.

In-depth keyword research is needed to determine the best and most useful keywords to target. Targeting “mls” may bring the most visitors, but targeting “edmonton mls listings” may bring more leads. These are things you must always test and measure.

Likewise, we are always testing the best landing page to display to our website visitors. If they are looking to buy we are always testing different elements to try and generate the most leads by identifying what they truly want and what triggers them to convert. You can only discover this through testing.

The key to constant improvement is testing new ideas and tracking the performance.

Overview

We have gone over a lot here. Here are some important take away points:

Use inbound marketing to put yourself in front of the people already looking for you
Make sure the message on your website matches what the visitor is looking for
You can always scale things up or down
Always track, test and measure performance to continually improve

As always there are many exceptions to the rule. This is an overview and a foundation of how we build our real estate marketing strategy. We have an in-depth process and extensive tool-set which allows us to bring targeted users to targeted landing pages and convert them into hot leads. However, this is only done by continuous market research and testing. Marketing is an ever-evolving and on-going process and it is never complete. You must always test new ideas, new strategies to continuously improve!

View Top Draws full Alberta Searches 2012 infographic.

Interested in Real Estate Marketing? Contact us today.

Split Testing with WordPress Themes

Posted by Landon Poburan on October 29th, 2012

As many of you know, we love conversion rate optimization and split testing at CategoryCode. We have a great set of tools that allows us to setup and track our A/B tests to constantly increase performance on our landing pages and marketing campaigns.

This past year we found a new tool, rather a WordPress plugin, that we have added to our tool set. The plugin is SES Split Testing Plugin. We found this plugin when we were required to run a split test on a WordPress website. Our client had a completely built website and we were making modifications to the design which we wanted test. We created a new template which contained a number of our changes such as revised header and navigation, and much more.

The SES Split Testing Plugin allowed us to run an A/B Split Test in combination with Google Analytics and Custom Segments!

How to Setup a Split Test with WordPress and SES

Create 2 or more WordPress themes you’d like to test
Install the Plugin
Select themes you’d like to test in plugin settings
Define custom segments in Google Analytics
Track performance in Google Analytics
Declare winner!

Note; You will need Google Analytics setup and installed on your WordPress website.

In Google Analytics you will need to setup the custom segments. Custom Segments are ways of categorizing and tracking website visitors. You will base them on a “User Defined Value”, the value will be the name of each theme folder. The SES Split Testing Plugin is very handy in that when a specific theme is being used it tags that visitor with the value of the theme name.

Once you have the segments configured in analytics it will start tracking data (may take a day to show). You can now view all of your Google Analytics data and see important stats such as Goal Completions and compare your themes.

Once your have collected ample amount of data, you can declare a winner, deactivate the plugin, then use the winning theme!

Update: Interested in more split testing tools? Look into Google Content Experiments.

» Looking to increase your ROI with Split Testing? Contact us today to find out how we can help!

2012 Search Engine Optimization Industry Survey

Posted by Landon Poburan on October 22nd, 2012

SEOmoz has released a great survey available on the SEO industry for 2012. Interested in viewing the fully survey? View the 2012 SEO Industry Survey.

This is a great little survey to read. Let’s touch on some information we’d like to highlight.

Training and Conferences

93% of respondents learned SEO from online resources and 88% learned from “hands-on experience”. This is a great little fact. I think this goes with most internet related skill sets, that they are almost always self taught. I have found that the most talented people I have ever come across are almost always self taught. This is an industry and a time where information is so readily available that we can learn as much as we want, as quick as we want and get hands-on experience from a global market.

Client Reports

49% of respondents are providing clients with monthly reports. I think reporting is extremely vital to all forms of marketing. First off, clients need to see what is being done so they can see what they are paying for. Especially in these industries where the work we do can’t always be seen and results can take time.

Also, I think it is extremely important for educating clients on what is being done. Reports really help with that. Explaining what strategies are working, what isn’t, what work was done, what work is too be done, and so on.

Lastly, reports are crucial for internal use as well. We need to track performance for historical data. We need to know if certain times of the year bring spike in performance or drops, if certain tactics or strategies benefited us or hurt us. If your not creating in-depth reports, you may be missing out on ROI for your clients.

Paid vs. Free Tools

Tools are what allow us to do our job. Using insufficient tools can seriously hurt the end product. Google dominates the Free Tool market.

93% list Google Analytics as the #1 Analytic tool
88% list Google Adwords as the #1 Keyword Research tool
73% list Google Website Optimizer (now Google Content Experiements) as the #1 CRO tool
75% list Youtube (owned by Google) as the #1 video hosting tool

Then SEOmoz seems to take the cake for top paid tool set with 55% naming them as #1.

PPC vs. SEO [infographic]

Posted by Landon Poburan on July 20th, 2012

I came across a fantastic article yesterday discussing the war between Search Engine Optimization and Pay-per-click Advertising. This is typically a great debate and each have pros and cons.

When reviewing them, SEO generates ‘free’ clicks. In essence, they are not free if your paying for SEO but your not directly paying for each click. PPC on the other hand, you pay every time someone clicks your ad and goes to your website.

Wordstream has a fantastic infographic demonstrating a plethora of statistics and comparisons. Here are some that stood out to me:

On average the top 3 spots take 41.1% of the clicks – The top 3 are paid ads.
On average the top organic listing gets just 8.9% of clicks.
PPC accounts for 64.6% of clicks for high commercial keywords.
45.5% of people couldn’t identify paid ads.
PPC is not affected by Google’s algorithm updates.

Read the full Wordstream post or view the full infographic here.

RIP Google Website Optimizer

Posted by Landon Poburan on June 27th, 2012

This month we wrote a guest post on a local Edmonton Real Estate Blog on the recent announcement of Google retiring Google Website Optimizer. This will be happening on August 1st, 2012. Since we are avid Split Testers, we wanted to review the change to move GWO into Google Analytics under the name Google Content Experiments.

You can read our full guest post to see how Google Content Experiments stacks up against the soon to be gone Google Website Optimizer.

Here is a little teaser:

Earlier this month, Google announced that it is retiring Google Website Optimizer as of August 1^st 2012. For avid split testers, this wasn’t a surprising move by Google. Google Website Optimizer hasn’t evolved quite the same way as google analytics, and was at times tricky to work with as it required a technical knowledge to run.

For myself, saying goodbye to Google Website Optimizer is like parting with an old friend. Being a graphic designer who eventually worked his way into online marketing, I got my first taste into how powerful graphic design can be with Google Website Optimizer. I tested different identity systems against each other, and the results helped me to become who I am today.

All hope isn’t lost however. Google announced that it is replacing Google Website Optimizer with the launch of Content Experiments, a split-testing feature within Google Analytics. So what does this mean for marketers? How do the tools compare?

Read our full guest post: RIP Google Website Optimizer.

Split Testing – The Perfect Solution

Posted by Landon Poburan on June 13th, 2012

Split Testing is the perfect solution to most discussions on website changes!

I had a very interesting conversation last night (June 12, 2012) with a client. This conversation falls in line with what we preach to our clients, “Only a test will show!”

Our client is looking for a simple WordPress template that can be recycled and re-purposed for a number of small projects they are working on. The template will be simple, clean, responsive and provide them the ability to modify the background color/image and banner image.

The client did have a concern:

“My existing template has rounded corners, but it uses CSS3, so they do not show up in IE8. I would like to use images so they show up in all browsers.”

I understood where he was coming from. I then explained we can definitely use images if he wished but explained our standpoint. We prefer to use CSS3 and HTML5 where we can to keep our work as current and future proof as possibly.

With this in mind, I explained we try and use these techniques for things like rounded corners, gradients, shadows, etc. These techniques degrade nicely. If their browser does not support rounded corners the website still functions (it is not broken). They just see a square corner and they don’t know any different.

We then got started to discuss if this would have an impact on lead generation. The consensus?

“Let’s test it!”

So once our template is done, we will run a split test to see if the rounded corners vs. no rounded corners have an impact on lead generation and conversions. At the end of the day, everything but data is speculation. Raw data tells the truth.

If you ever have ideas, questions, thoughts, or theories … Test them! It is the only way to truly know. Sometimes you change something from Blue to Red because Bob in Accounting thought it would Look better, therefore it should generate more clicks. There’s no need to tell Bob no or to blindly make the change not knowing the potential impact. You can simply test it! Let the data tell you what works better.

If your not testing, your not improving! Always be testing.

Optimal Time of Day to Display Your Google Ads

Posted by Landon Poburan on May 28th, 2012

We were recently asked to write a guest writer for the blog of the success Edmonton based Real Estate Firm Robert F. McLeod Realty. We were quite excited as we do lot’s of work with Real Estate Marketing and thought this would be a great opportunity to share our knowledge and success.

We decided to write our first guest post on Optimizing your Google Adword Campaigns. We recently did some work optimizing campaigns of some of our Real Estate clients where we increased their ROI without increasing their budget. Anytime you can squeeze more performance out, without spending more money, it’s a huge success.

Here is a sneak peak at our results:

Learn how we achieved this success and read the full post on Optimal Time of Day to Display Your Google Ads.

Interested in Internet Marketing? We offer free consultations and free quotes, contact us today!