You may have noticed a lot of chatter lately about SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, and a related bill, PIPA.  The SOPA act is designed to protect the intellectual property and copyright of major media organizations from illegal piracy online.  The movie studios and record labels want to crack down on piracy, but instead of taking the fight to the website owners (who are violating their copyright), they’ve turned to Washington to legislate in the ability for them to shut down those websites and their monetization methods via government order.  More specifically, the bill would give the US government the ability to

1. order ISPs to re-route traffic going to a given website that is potentially in violation to resolve to another location
2. order search engines like Google to remove potential violating websites from the search results
3. order PayPal and other payment processors to shut down the violator’s accounts, thus cutting off their revenue stream
4. order ad services like Google AdSense to shut down advertisements for, or payments to such websites

At Ephricon, we’ll all for the protection of copyright material… however, we’re very concerned about SOPA as we feel it gives the government and major communications firms (like Comcast, for instance) too much control over the internet and the content you may or may not see.

But we’re not alone… opposition to SOPA, especially over the last few days, has been particularly strong.  High-profile websites like Wikipedia and Reddit are “going dark”, tomorrow (January 18th) and taking their sites down in protest.  The Twitter universe is also on fire with anti-SOPA sentiments, with many Twitter users adding a “STOP SOPA” icon to their avatars.

As best we can tell, there was supposed to be a congressional vote on SOPA in early January, but the recent growth of the anti-SOPA movement has caused congress to delay the vote.  President Obama has also indicated that he may veto the bill, should it pass.

So what does this mean for you?  For our clients, we don’t expect either tomorrow’s blackout or SOPA in general (should it pass) to have a major impact on SEO results and generating new business online – at least not in the short term.  Instead, we’re more concerned about SOPA from a free speech, government censorship and personal freedom standpoint.  Obviously it’s not the bad guys that SOPA might stop that we object to, but rather the free range and over-reaching power this would give to the government, and what precedents that might set on a societal level.  We’re keeping up on the latest developments and will be in touch as things progress, and should we identify any advisable action items with regard to SOPA.

Contrary to popular belief, SEO is more than adding a few words to a page and getting a couple links. There are literally 100′s of different efforts that should be included with any quality SEO effort.

One important effort that shouldn’t be left out is custom embedded video.  So, what is custom embedded video and how can it help my SEO efforts?  Let’s explain.

What is Embedded Video?

A custom embedded video is any type of flv, mpeg4 or universal video format that is embedded directly into a webpage on your website and hosted on your own server. This is different when compared to a YouTube video which has been embedded into a web page with the export feature. An actual custom embedded video has a few distinguished differences:

1. A custom embedded video is hosted on your actual website, with the path referencing the main domain. An example looks like this: http://www.mydomain.com/videos/samplevideo.swf
2. Custom embedded videos are controlled by the scripting that actually does the embedding. A true custom embedded video will have source code that looks similar to:
   
   
   
   (note, there are many different types of embed scripts and code. The key is to identify and use one that provides detailed options.)
3. Custom embedded video will not contain 3^rd party branding (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

Why Use Embedded Video in an SEO Campaign?

The use of custom embedded video within a webpage provides definite advantages when talking about SEO. When using this type of embedded video as mentioned above, Google will then provide the option to have this video displayed as a thumbnail alongside your organic search listing. This is only available when the video is directly embedded (custom embedded video), not pulled from a third-party site like YouTube. Here is an example:

This is very powerful because with a video thumbnail next to your site’s SERP listing, typically you’ll see click-through rates (CTR) increase.  When doing a search and looking at the results page, the listing with the video almost always stands out and gets a first glance or a little extra attention.

There are a few additional steps that need completed to make this effort work, which includes video sitemap creation, Google Webmaster Tools account creation, etc.  These few additional steps are worth the reward. A custom, directly embedded video is a recommended effort that works well in any SEO portfolio.

When Google first announced that they would no longer always provide keywords resulting in a natural search visit the SEO community panicked. Eventually Matt Cutts, head of Google search’s webspam efforts, said that this would only be a small amount, people started to calm down, but no one knew how much a “small amount” was.

Since then I have been closely monitoring the data for a few websites to see what Mr. Cutts meant by “small amount.” The first complete week after this was rolled out (the week starting October 23rd, 2011) seemed to confirm this claim with my clients- with the smallest percentage of “(not provided)” keywords being 0.6% of the total visits from Google natural search and the most being 3.7% of Google natural search visitors.

When it came to the second week after the roll-out (week of October 30th, 2011) it was clear that Google was gradually trickling this change throughout its users- with percentages of not provided keywords ranging from 4.0% to 21.6% of visits from Google natural search. Since the second week, these hi/lo percentages have continued to rise but have remained consistent over the last couple of weeks. This is leading me to conclude that the percentage of provided keywords from Google natural search is leveling-off, as you can see in the chart below:

Below is the largest (MAX), average (AVG) and smallest (MIN) percentages of not provided keywords from Google natural search visits over the last few weeks:

Important facts about this data:

1. The percentages mentioned above reflect a percentage of Google natural search visits- not a percentage of all natural search visits or a percentage of all visits to the website.
2. This is an average percentage of about 8 different websites, ranging in size from approximately 500 visits per week to 70,000 visits per week.
3. Most of these sites generate a majority of the visits from the United States (the first place Google is rolling-out this change) but two of these sites have a majority of visits from outside of the US). This means these percentages might grow as this change becomes more international.
4. These sites reflect a wide diversity of industries; half of these sites are business-to-business oriented and the other half are business-to-consumer oriented.
5. While the latest week of this data (the week starting December 18th, 2011) shows that on average 23% of the keywords were “not provided”, these websites ranged from 14.2% to 33.0% of the keywords that were not provided.

Are you seeing similar data in your website analytics? Do you think this is leveling-off or going to get larger?

Do you or someone you know have a passion for Internet Marketing? This position is for the Internet Marketing Assistant position on our Careers page, a great opportunity for a newbie who wants to learn more about SEO. We’re looking for someone who loves online creativity, research, blogs, and wants to get paid to learn more about organic search, Google applications, and hang out with the rest of the cool Ephricon team. We’ve posted the job on Oodle, please apply soon, we’re hoping to add to our team right after the start of 2012.

As we grow, Jon is getting swamped on the admin side of the business, so it’s time to hire on some help.  Our team is currently 10 people strong but 9 of those 10 are fully-engaged in client work.  We’re quite proud of that, but at there are some great initiatives we want to put into place to make our agency more efficient, and these initiatives don’t directly relate to any one client in particular.  It’s time to get organized and systematized!

If you know someone who would be a great fit for this position, or if you would like to learn more about the position then check out the job description on our careers page.

The Search Exchange Internet Marketing Conference is taking place this week in Charlotte, and the Ephricon team is gearing up for the event. It’s going to be three days of sharing information and learning even more about paid advertising, social media marketing and SEO.

We’re pretty pumped about having this conference in our own city, but we’re even more excited to announce that our very own Jon Payne will be one of the speakers at the event.

The third and final day of the conference will focus on SEO strategies and tactics, including Jon’s presentation on Stepping Up Your Keyword Research.

Needless to say, the boss-man is going to have a pretty good cheering section with the whole team making its way to the conference. Don’t worry though; there are also plenty of fan-boys (and gal) on our team for Rand Fishkin, Wil Reynolds and a number of the other speakers.

If you’re in the Charlotte area this week, stop by Search Exchange on Wednesday, October 5 to get some tips and insight from Jon. The conference is taking place at the Charlotte Chamber on October 3-5.

As a note to all clients – we’ll have our laptops with us and will be monitoring emails, but we may be a bit slower on the response to emails and phone calls early in the week while we’re at the conference.

Check out our latest press release for more details on the conference:
http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/President-Charlotte-SEO-Agency-Speak-Search-Exchange-Internet-Marketing-Conference-1568139.htm

Better late than never – I was on Vistaprint the other day ordering some business cards for Joe, Rob and Alan.  Their site is easy to use and the turnaround time is typically 2-3 days at most, so I find myself going back to Vistaprint even though I’ve tried more traditional options like local printers.  Anyhow, since I was already on the site I took their cross-sell offer and ordered a few new mousepads, as my old mousepad was getting a bit grungy.  Have a look at the stylish new ones:

And now a closer look:

 Very exciting, indeed.

Example #1:  Design & Messaging Makeover

At Ephricon, we spend so much time focusing on increasing traffic and conversions for our clients, that we often neglect our own website.  See the cobbler’s children adage.

The current version of our website went live in February of this year (Feb 2011).  Prior to that, the version we were using was done in July of 2006.  That’s almost 5 years in between site designs.  That’s a fairly long time for most any company, especially one that offers internet marketing services.  But alas, we’ve been pretty busy the past 5 years and just didn’t get to it!

What makes that worse, however, is that like so many other firms it wasn’t just that the visual layout component was outdated.  So was the messaging.  The services weren’t accurate.  The selling points had changed a bit.  Much had changed about our service, how we help our clients, what we offer and what makes us unique over that 5 year window.  What didn’t change was our site.  Problem.

So finally we re-did the design, and along with it we redid the messaging too.  Here’s a list of what went live in February of this year as it compares to the prior version of the site:

• New visual layout (theme)
• New messaging and selling points
• Stronger focus on “calls to action”
• Video clips interlaced throughout the site
• More focus on our people

Let me be clear first… there is A LOT that I dislike about our current site and I’m already thinking about a new approach.  I figured 5 years was such a long time I might need to do two rounds of updates close together to really get myself up to speed.  So what you see now is far from perfect or even what it should be.  Thankfully though, I didn’t let “perfection” get in the way of “progress”.  Better to act with something that was an 80% improvement than to sit on something that would be a 100% improvement but never goes live.

Okay so with that said, here’s how it impacted our conversion rate:

The red line is when we switched to the new site.  Before the switch, we were averaging about 1.3% conversion rate (visits to quote form fills… doesn’t count calls).  After the switch, we’ve been around 2.3%.  That’s a 77% increase.  That’s almost double the number of leads each week or each month.

What’s also interesting is the the conversion rate spiked the first month with the new site, and then has settled a bit since then.  I haven’t yet identified the cause for this, but I do know that there have been a few items with compatibility that we’ve identified as issues and are addressing.  Its possible those have depressed the conversion rate more recently as they were not issues immediately following the launch.

So while we’re happy with this improvement from the new site, we can still get our conversion rate a lot better.  Enter example #2…

Example #2:  Tweaks to Conversion Page

So when we put the new site live we had several points of conversion, specific to web forms:

1. A short “quote request” form in the sidebar of all “services” pages and also directly on the “contact us” page.
2. A slightly longer “quote request” form on its own dedicated page, which is linked to from the contact page, from the main navigation and from non-service interior pages.

I had guesstimated that 90% of our leads would come from #1 above, and 10% from #2.  As such, we had launched the site before making #2 nice and pretty.  The form on that page was very rough.

It turns out its not a 90/10 split, rather its more of a  65/35 split.  I should have spent 2 minutes to have dug out that number sooner!

So 35% of our leads were coming from a page where the form was not nicely formatted, the page had no explanation to introduce the form, and generally it just looked poor.  Hmmm.  I wonder how that might increase if we made the page nicer looking and more credible?

So we gave it a shot.  We just launched the tweaks.  We probably only spent 30 minutes on it (thanks Alan!) and I believe its a big improvement.  I’ll monitor this over the next month or two and see.  Intuitively, we would expect an improvement in conversion rate from that dedicated quote page as the changes made the following improvements:

1. Credibility & Professionalism: The old page was never finished and the form fields didn’t line up, it looked unfinished.  That’s okay in some industries.  For us, it was just my laziness and not getting to it.  Making the page look visually professional is important.  It helps the perception of credibility for site visitors.
2. Trust Builders: We added a little testimonial from a client.  I’m not sold that testimonials are the end-all-be-all for building trust, but I think it can certainly help.  We’ll add a few more once I can find where I’ve saved them on my computer.
3. Intro: We didn’t really say what the form was or make any case as to why a prospect should fill it out.  Now we’ve done that.

Here’s the before and after shot:

So there you have it.  With example #2 it will be interesting to monitor and quantify the impact of this change.  It was maybe 30 to 60 minutes of effort, so not much cost there.  More important was the 2 minutes spent to identify that this page was indeed getting a decent number of views and was converting even in its poor state, and thus proving to ourselves that it was very much worth spending a little time on.

Your thoughts?  Any examples you want to share?

So apparently Jim discovered a fun new source of interesting stock photos.  We’re considering blowing up the following and putting it in the conference room

We’re hiring!  Again!

This time we’re looking to add another SEO Account Manager in our Charlotte, NC office.  Check out the job description on our careers page for more info.  The job description is flexible and there is a lot that cannot be communicated in a few sentences on our website, so inquire if you are interested and/or want to know more.  Superstars only.