This SEO tip uses intelligence coming straight from the horse’s mouth – i.e. the source of the data is coming from Google itself – specifically Google Search Console.

Google Search Console, formerly part of Google WebMasters, is a toolset that offers quite a lot of insight into the way that Google’s search engine algorithms interact with your website – specifically your website’s content and the way that organic search traffic is arriving at your website. 

The idea behind this tip is to reverse engineer the search queries which are arriving at your website – and then tailor your content to the user intent behind those queries.

(Proviso: for this trick to work, you already need to have some traffic coming from organic search)

How do you decipher user intent?

In Google Search Console under Performance > Search Results you can see what queries are sending traffic to your website. The Queries tab provides a lot of intelligence. By skimming through the queries, you should immediately see some patterns of user search intent emerging. What you see is also an accurate reflection of your best content marketing work.

Here’s an example. We worked on a content marketing piece that compares two pieces of software for one of our clients. Through Google Search Console we can see which search queries led to that particular page, as seen below. (N.B. The red & blue boxes represent the two pieces of software that we were comparing directly in our piece of content.)

It’s clear from this set of data that we’re clearly covering the intent of those searching for a direct comparison between the two. However, our digging shouldn’t stop there. We’ve satisfied the user intent of these individuals, but there may be others that arrived at our page through search queries that may provide us with hints to improve our content.

In the above screenshot, which is taken from the same search queries list as the one before it, we can make a couple of interesting observations. Several individuals have searched for the comparison of the two pieces of software, but for a different use case than the one we covered in our content. There’s also a cohort of individuals looking for a 3-way comparison with another, newer product that’s come on the market.

Using this information, there are several paths we can take to improve traffic, and fulfill user intent in a more complete way. Firstly, we can improve the content of the original piece of content to cover these queries. Or, if appropriate, we can create a companion piece that would link directly to the existing one.

Based on this lesson, here’s a list of things to keep in mind when performing this exercise with your, or your clients’’, sites.

The following are guidelines, rather than rules but they’ve worked for us

1. First and foremost, make sure your content is answering the users’ search intent exactly. If you can expand your content to hit all aspects of that intent, so much the better.

2. Use MORE of the keywords that are being searched for within that content. Whilst expanding the content on the user search intent, drop a few more keywords around the search queries.

3. Add more images and use search phrases as part of the name of the image, and in the image alt and description.

4. If possible – add a YouTube video that is also tuned towards the users’ search intent. If it doesn’t exist – create it yourself!

5. Tune your H1 title to the search query which is generating the most hits in this case.

6. Tune your meta description and meta keywords to the user’s search intent. If there are missing keywords, try to include them.

7. Be prudent – don’t overstuff your content with keywords – just make sure you have killer content for the user’s search intent.

If you do this for both the content that is generating good CTRs and especially for that content which is not generating good CTRs, you should be able to get a very good organic traffic boost.

This won’t happen overnight of course, but working in conjunction with your other SEO efforts, you should see your organic traffic climbing steadily. We’ve seen instances where the organic traffic increased by more than 30% using these techniques.

As always, also work on retaining the increased traffic. Make it easy for your new visitors to subscribe to your email newsletter or at least follow you on social media. 

Hope this helps you out!

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My year at Switch

As I celebrate my first year at Switch, I’ve decided to look back at what I’ve learnt throughout this incredible year. This may be a bit of a cheesy post, but it will help you get a clearer idea of what Switch is. Most importantly you will find out who is part of this ever-growing family.

Switch is like a family

This was a relatively new concept for me, and it might have taken me a little longer than normal to get used to the idea that at Switch, people are more than just office colleagues. My background before Switch was a very monotonous office life, where you only ever meet your colleagues at work and during the occasional Christmas office party. Very little to no socialisation took place within the office, and you were given little knowledge about who you were working with. At Switch things are different – you are more than just a number within a company. There is a strong sense of community, of helping one another. The numerous team building events, beers in the boardroom, outdoor adventures, and the long chats over lunch have created a fantastic work environment. Thanks to this, there is a strong support system – we are all here for each other, and we don’t ever allow panic to take over. If one is in need of an extra hand for a project, I can assure you that five will be presented to them, and that’s just, plain, straight awesome.

Switch is an enabler

One year into Switch, and I feel like I have learnt more here than I ever have throughout my three years as an undergraduate student at University. Switch has pushed me into researching, learning and practising what interests and passionates me. Every day I am encouraged to do something I love and to always improve in what I do. Thanks to Switch I breathe and live social media, and I am constantly learning more about it. I write interesting content in-house and for our clients. My obsessive-compulsive planning disorder is actually appreciated, as I try to always plan my work, have content ready months ahead and create colour-coded to-do lists and content calendars.

Switch thinks outside the box

Really and truly, Switch is made up of creative humans that share a place together for approximately forty hours a week. Each and every person in the company has a beautiful brain that is capable of imagining and creating breathtaking works. The best brainstorming sessions are the ones where we gather all the team in one room, and throw anything we can think of on the table, to then go through each and every idea and pick the winning one. Everyone has a say, every idea is a good idea, and we work together to think outside the box. It’s fascinating, inspiring and motivating working with such a creative bunch of people.

Switch is transparent

Switch is constantly working to become the agency of transparency – how? Check out Martina’s Office Bloggers to find out. Yes, there have been bumps along the way. Yes, there will certainly be more. After all, we are humans, we make mistakes, and nothing can ever run as smoothly as we wish. Having said this, Switch is transparent with its employees and clients. It is a very straightforward way of working, where everything is communicated. That’s right, everything. If we think your idea is terrible we won’t sweet talk you out of it, but we will plainly and simply tell you to not go ahead. We are an honest and straight-talking bunch.   

Switch builds relationships

That is certain. If you either work for or with Switch, you are bound to build a long lasting relationship with the company. Clients are treated as close friends – and let’s be honest, everyone goes an extra mile to keep their friends happy. Employees are family, which makes the job that more enjoyable.

Switch loves food

I am not much of a foodie. For this reason, I get judging looks and shocked faces when I refuse a piece of cake or a saucy burger. Here at Switch, food is pretty much a sacred thing that needs to be enjoyed to the fullest. In the past year I have learnt that food is more important than meetings. Therefore no meetings should be booked at lunch time (take note, Matt!). It’s fascinating how pastizzi can bring the whole team together. Just to put you in the picture, we celebrated Bacon Day the other day, and everyone from the office brought something homemade that included bacon. It seemed only fair, that for my year anniversary, I would bake these food lovers a cake. After all, they say the best way to a wo/man’s heart is through food. 😉

There you have it folks, this is what Switch is! If you are curious to know more about us crazy humans, check out some of the work we’ve worked on. Don’t forget to like our Facebook page to keep up to date!

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What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing focuses on making the customer engage with the brand and experience it first hand. It focuses on creating an emotional link with the customers, one that will remain with them for as long as possible – even forever!
Many big brands known worldwide have adopted this method to engage with their audience.
Let’s have a look at some of them.

Coca Cola – 007

Coca Cola used their “Coke Zero” product to promote the Skyfall movie by associating the “Zero” to 007. An interactive Coca Cola distributor was placed in a train station, where travelers were invited to ‘unlock their inner 007’ by going on a mission. The train passengers who bought a drink from the vending machine were given the opportunity to win tickets for the James Bond movie, all they had to do is get to a train platform in 70 seconds. Obviously, reaching the platform wasn’t all so easy. Check out the video:

TNT

Another very well known experiential marketing advert that went viral around three years ago is the TNT “We know drama” promotion. A red button was placed on a relatively quiet square in a Flemish town with a sign saying ‘push to add drama’, inviting people to press the button. Once pressed, the quiet square would turn into a drama scene – promoting their slogan ‘your daily dose of drama on Telenet’. Here’s a grasp of what happened:

The Simpsons

Back in 2007, Century fox and 7-Eleven partnered up to promote the new Simpsons movie. 7-Eleven turned some of their shops into the Simpson’s famous shop Kwik-E-Marts, in which products from the actual series were available for purchase, such as: KrustyO’s Cereal, Buzz Cola, and also Squishee Frozen Drinks.

Ikea Big Sleepover

In 2011, the Ikea in Essex hosted a sleepover where 100 lucky winners had the opportunity to sleep at the store. This was the result of a Facebook fan group, with over 100,000 people, called ‘I wanna have a sleepover in Ikea’. The winners could choose their beds, sheets, and were also given manicure and massages. A sleep expert was also available to provide people with advices, and help the interested ones choose a new mattress.

One of the best ways for a brand to connect with their audience is to give them an experience they won’t forget. Thinking outside the box, as the examples above showed us, is the answer as to how to get such an experience. A positive experience will result in great reviews (the digital ‘word of mouth’), which is exactly what a brand needs to become successful.

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Vine

Through Vine, people create entertaining and most of the time funny seven-second-videos. Samsung uses Vine to promote their products with simple yet entertaining clips.

Snapchat

Thanks to Snapchat people are now allowed to share experiences almost immediately, and they can choose to do so publicly or privately. For a brand, Snapchat is the perfect tool to remind the audience about a service or product. For instance, if a company is about to launch something new, using Snapchat is the perfect way to remind the people about it.
Communicating and sharing has become easier thanks to videos, as we can now share things with friends and family in real-time. Distance is no longer seen as a boundary, and people are feeling more connected than before.
Growth in video-content and social media means that brands now have a new way to approach and interact with their audience.
Through the use of videos, brands can show the ‘behind the scenes’ of the company, along as sharing some humor and also informational content.
Red Bull uses video content on all their social media platforms. The idea behind their content is to produce ‘active’ video content to represent the energy you can get with their drink. As their motto is ‘it gives you wing’, they back this up with content that makes the user want to do things, such as extreme sports. With 44 million likes on Facebook, 4 million YouTube subscribers and over 110 thousands followers on Vine, Red Bull knows the importance of using video-content to engage more with fans, reach new targets, and build a connection with the audience.

We’re operating in a world where one good video can lead to a massive social following. – Mike Henry

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I’ll be writing about Switch

I won’t be talking about what we do. You can head over to a page about it on this site. I won’t even write about how we do it. That’s easy enough: We do a bloody good job of it – just ask any of our clients.
I’ll write about why we do it, and more specifically why I do it, and why I get up in the morning with a spring in my step. About the reasons I do not dread Mondays. About why I love spending time in the place I give most of my waking hours to.
Deep down it’s really all quite simple. There was one main reason I started Switch Digital: and that’s because I really believed that there is scope for much better online marketing in Malta.
As time went on, I realised that there’s a much more important reason. A reason that transcends what we do completely. I run Switch because I want to want to go to work. And this is exactly how I run the company.
Doing this, in my opinion, is completely dependent on three things, all of which are important in equal parts. What makes it great is that they complement each other perfectly, which makes our decision making process pretty straightforward.
The hardest part of writing this post is trying to separate the three, because they’re so intricately linked, that it becomes a chicken and egg situation if you try to decide which comes first.

Produce amazing work, consistently

This might sound obvious, but so many companies around us seem to be OK with work that’s just OK. Don’t get me wrong. We know when good enough is good enough, but most of the time it is not.
If there’s an extra mile to be travelled, we’ll usually do our best to take that road if it means delivering a better result.
This, sometimes, can work against us, because we end up putting far more effort into a job than we’re being paid for – but it makes sense anyway, because we produce work that we’re proud of, and clients appreciate it.
Gauging whether we’re doing amazing work is simple, really. We ask ourselves two questions:
“Would we be happy to share this on our portfolio?” and “Would we have produced this work for ourselves?”

Choose amazing clients

Amazing work needs two ingredients. A great agency and an amazing client. We’re lucky to have quite a few of these, and we’re also pretty adamant on carefully selecting any new clients based on whether they fit us.
It’s important to understand that a great client is defined by a variety of criteria, but the basic areas we look at are:

• How willing they are to learn (about digital marketing)
• How willing they are to teach us (about their industry)
• Whether they believe in digital marketing
• Whether they understand that digital marketing is a long-term commitment
• The freedom they give us to work
• How hard they drive us to produce our best work
• Whether they will treat us as business partners, not suppliers.

A client does not need to have all of the above, but we do look for clients who can offer us a combination of quite a few of them. It is crucial that we’re seen as partners because we always see our clients as our partners, so the feeling must be reciprocal.
For us to produce amazing work, we need to feel ownership, and we will only feel a sense of ownership if the client offers us that opportunity.
And even though I mention that we’re lucky here, it also boils down to our choices. We are pretty open in our first meetings, and we make it clear that we select our clients carefully. We would decline to quote or simply tell the client that we don’t believe there’s a match.

Have an amazing team

Producing amazing work puts you in the enviable position of being able to select your clients. But the only way that can happen is if you have a team of superheroes. And here I can really say I’m lucky enough to have one.
I’m surrounded by a group of people who are energetic, intelligent, talented, hard working and really fun to work with.
They’re the ones who dig in when the going gets tough, the ones who bring my spirits up when we’re struggling with our work-load and the ones to produce the amazing work when we find fantastic clients.
And seeing that the team is so happy and relaxed, our clients love working with us, and that is why we keep receiving positive recommendations. Business owners care that we do good work, but the people we work with are humans, and we aim to be the best humans we can possibly be for them.
We make sure we are more of a help than a hinderance, we’re humble, and willing to serve, but we’re also knowledgeable and ready to impart our knowledge. We make it a point to teach our clients as much as they want to learn about our field, and this runs through the whole team.

And in the end…

Do these three points mean that we run at the optimum efficiency from a financial point of view? Hell no. I’m pretty sure that if we had to run the business in regimental style I could squeeze more minutes out of everyone’s day.
But as things stand we are all happy. We work in a business where the priority is our happiness, our level of output and who we’re outputting our work for.
And, most importantly, from a selfish point of view, I get to want to go to work in the morning. I get to work in a team that produces amazing output for amazing clients. Yeah. Life’s good.

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How does bidding work?

Well, there is no simple answer to how exactly how an ad is served up and at what price, however this example might help. We’d set a €2 per click bid for my search advert. If our competitor for that search spot has bid €1.50 per click, our ads will show up with a bid of €1.51 until our budget runs out. Theirs will then show up at €1.50 (or whatever the maximum bid is after ours).
It’s much more complicated than that in reality, because Google will look at hundreds of factors, including the quality of the ads and the relevance of the site before determining how much I’m actually going to have to bid. So the quality of the setup of search advertising is as important as how much you’re ready to spend, because it will determine how much you actually get to spend per click.

CPM

The first method quantifying the cost of advertising online is based on impressions – i.e. the number of times your advert shows up in front of a human person visiting a website. This is usually calculated on a per thousand (CPM = cost per “M”, the roman numeral for 1000).
It makes sense to determine how much you’d like to spend using CPM when your goal is to get in front of as many people as possible. In fact CPM is one of the best ways to buy display advertising.

CPC

If you’re after driving traffic to your website, then what you’re after is how much you’re going to pay every time an ad sends a click your way. This way you can control how much your traffic costs you. But you also need to know how much your traffic is worth to you.

CPC vs CPM

The really interesting stuff starts when you start comparing the two. Later on in the post we’ll be seeing what we can judge our advertising effort on, however let’s assume we’re only after traffic (clicks). I might be paying €0.50 per click and €0.20 per 1000 impressions. So if people click on my advert less than once every 2,500 times it’s served I’m better off buying clicks.
If, on the other hand, I manage to create an advert that’s good enough, and targeted enough, to generate one click per thousand impressions, for example, I’d be much better off buying ads based on impressions.

Slots

This is probably one of the hardest ways to buy online advertising for agencies like ours. It is also the easiest for clients to buy directly, but then leaves clients spending much more than they should.
When you buy a slot you’re effectively buying a banner (or sharing the views of a banner with other advertisers) on a specific site. The problem with this is that you’re committing your ad spend with a specific site at a pre-agreed rate. You usually pay over the odds both when measured on CPC and on CPM, but it could be the only way to get to a particular property, so when a site has enough clout, this is the most money they can make with online advertising.
Some sites have mastered this and earn much more revenue that they would have using traditional methods of advertising. It’s great for them, but savvy advertisers know that readers spend so much time on the internet nowadays that whether you get to them on one site or on another, you’ve still managed to serve them your ad.

How is return on investment (ROI) measured online?

Each campaign should have a goal defined. This determines the way in which we’ll judge whether the campaign we ran was a success or failure.

Reach & frequency

If all I’m after is exposure, then all I should care about is my reach and frequency. The reach of my ad is how many people (or devices) my ad was served to. How many human beings out there saw my advert.
Frequency tells me how many times each of those people saw an advert from my campaign. A successful brand exercise will aim for a pretty high frequency, even though we would try to achieve it over a protracted period if possible. In general, I’d prefer someone to see one of my ads daily for a month than 30 times in a day.
Unless I’m absolutely positive that the people I’m exposing my ad to are in the perfect audience (as we do for some clients of ours), this is a very soft measurement because I have no idea how effective my ad is (unless I use “traditional” methods, see the last point).

Traffic

When I have a site that I’m using to convert my goals, then my aim is to drive traffic to it, and the way I judge my campaign is based on traffic to my site. This is still a “softer” measurement, because if all I measure is traffic, then I can’t know whether the people coming to my site are actually interested in what I have to say or sell.
I could go into more detail based on campaigns, such as how much time people are spending on my site after they come in through an ad or whether they visit multiple pages. This would help me determine the quality of the traffic I’m generating and whether my ad is getting to the right audience.

Cost per Lead (CPL)

Cost per lead is a much better way of calculating how effective my advertising is. A lead is someone who’s interested in my product or service. With B2B advertising it is usually very hard to close sales without the intervention of a sales rep, so we’d measure how many people we’re sending to the sales force.

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

The ultimate method of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign is by calculating the cost per acquisition (and subsequently the direct Return on Investment when you have the revenue generated from a sale).

Traditional methods

Finally you have to keep in mind that online advertising can also be measured with more traditional methods – i.e. offline measures.
We recently ran a campaign for a client of ours that has no way of selling online. It was a year-long campaign which tried to take their brand of paint from being the one painters chose to also be the one home-owners chose.
There was no way to track how effective the campaign was online, but the company had a record year in terms of sales. Since it was the only thing that changed that year, it was pretty easy to attribute the success to the campaign we ran for them.
You can also use other methods such as brand recall and first of mind mentions when tracking how effective an online branding exercise has been, but it’s really hard to specifically pinpoint which medium is working more if you’re running a campaign both online and offline. Having said that, this is no harder than measuring the effectiveness of traditional media.

Shameless plug

If you’ve managed to read through this post and last week’s you’re probably pretty confused. You can probably also understand why it’s important to have an agency that really understands online marketing. There’s much more to online advertising than simply ordering a page on a magazine. The potential for reward is much greater too, but it’s also much easier to make a mess of it all.
Drop us a line if you’re confused. We’ll be happy to help you out, and as always, the coffee’s on us!

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Why is everybody moving more of their spend online?

The answer is simple, really. The value for money to be had with effective online marketing is stunning when compared to traditional media. No matter what your ultimate promotional goal is, you always get much more mileage from online marketing.

What are the ways I can advertise online?

There are loads of ways to grow your brand and sales efforts online, but in reality, when starting off you have five main ways of buying advertising online.

Banner (or Display) advertising

This is one of the very first forms of online advertising. It started off as the equivalent of print advertising, and it was therefore mainly priced that way. People used to just buy slots around the content of a site. Nowadays it is more common to buy banner advertising based on impressions though.
We usually recommend display advertising for one main goal – when you want to build brand recollection pretty far up in the sales funnel. Banner advertising is a great way of getting people to know and remember your brand.
Don’t try to use banner advertising to drive traffic to your site, though, because you’re usually going to be looking at a very costly exercise.

Video Advertising

A heck of a lot of video is consumed online on a daily basis. You can hijack some of these videos by inserting your video before whatever the audience you’re trying to target was going to watch.
It’s a more expensive medium than simple banner advertising, but gives you the opportunity to get a similar effect as TV advertising. Remember that on Youtube, for example, viewers can skip the ad after about 5 seconds, so you have to make sure that you start telling a compelling story immediately, otherwise viewers will just press “skip”.

Search Advertising

Most people’s buying journeys start with a search nowadays. If you can get your product or service in front of your potential customers at this phase in the buying cycle then you have a much better chance of converting them into customers.
Google understood this first (and best). Look where they are now. This tells you something – search advertising is effective, and companies are willing to pay a lot for spots at the top of search results.
You can’t buy your way to the top of search results organically, but you can buy your way to the top via search engine advertising. And how do you do this? By bidding the highest for the spot in particular. Google (and other search engines) have a “mini auction” every time somebody runs a search. This sees the highest bidder getting the first spot for that particular search result.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising works in pretty much the same way as display advertising does, but there’s an added dimension – the social aspect.
Even though the concept is pretty much the same – you’re placing an ad in front of an audience based on their media consumption (as opposed to a specific search), you have two main advantages.
The first advantage is that most social media advertising is native. It is presented in the same format as all other content, so a news feed advert on my news feed in Facebook will look exactly like the photo of my school-friend-I-haven’t-actually-seen-in-10-years’ new chubby baby. This means I’m primed to consume the content because I’m already in “reading mode” when the ad is served to me (unlike banner advertising, which usually lives outside the content on sites).
The second is that it is, yes, you guessed it: social. So if my best friend likes a restaurant and that restaurant runs an advertising campaign on Facebook, it can specify that the advert should only be served to friends of its customers. That way I see an ad in context – so I know that someone I trust has already vetted this restaurant, making it an implicit recommendation.

Retargeting

Retargeting is more complicated to set up and to achieve, but it is gathering quite a bit of momentum in recent years. But what is it?
Simple retargeting works by building up an audience of people who have visited your site and serving them ads that are relevant to your brand. This can be done by advertising platforms which have a large network of advertising partners.
Have you ever searched for a product on a site like Amazon or Booking.com? You are usually followed around with this (or similar ads) for a few weeks. The ads are not simply re-targeted (where I get served an ad simply because I visited a particular website), but programmed to my behaviour.
So booking.com will not just advertise its service in general to me, it will push a hotel in the city I had just searched for. This is an even more complicated system of retargeting, one that re-targets to individuals, not just generic audiences.

Direct deals

Direct deals can be far more flexible. These depend largely on the publisher and can be a combination of all the advertising methods above and more. Some sites sell packages that go beyond regular advertising – including deals for content, sponsoring newsletters, “reviews”, and leads.
Direct deals also allow for a wider take-over of sites. Some sites allow you to take over the site completely, with a re-skin of the site based on the advertiser’s needs. This is a far more immersive experience, and if done well can actually be pretty effective.
Buying directly from sites also allows you to implement advertising technology that would be harder to achieve through a network – such as ads that push a whole site’s content down and start playing a video when a visitor clicks on them.
As we’ll see next week, direct deals are usually more expensive than using a third party medium such as a banner network, however you usually have as close to a guarantee as possible of highly targeted traffic.

What’s next?

This week we’ve seen the different ways in which you can spend your money online. We haven’t really gone into how you buy advertising though. How will you know what to spend, and where to spend it? And more importantly, how will you measure the success (or failure) of your campaigns?

Shameless plug

Most companies don’t really know where to start with online advertising, which is why we’re here to help. We plan out your spending in a way that brings you much more value for money. If you feel you’re missing out on your business’ online potential but don’t really know where to start, then just drop us a line and we’ll help you get much more bang for your buck.

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