Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Cheers Everett.

Thanks for your response. That was my feeling on the tool (you were correct when asking which tool it was, BTW), but always good to get confirmation.

Nick.

Hi fellow Mozzers.

I'm looking for some clarification about Google's Path to Purchase tool. I'm doing some work for a small tech company that provides an online appraisal tool for all manner of industries of all shapes and sizes, based both in the UK and Europe.

I'm assuming that the details I need to input into the tool would reflect the specific customers they were going for - so if they were going to put out some custom content targeting large UK businesses in the finance sector, that would be the info I'd plug in to see how best to reach out to them.

Similarly, we're a design agency, but would we input our target audience to see which method they would be using to find us? Or do we tell it that we're in the design industry and it'll show how people from all manner of industries prefer to find out about our services.

I hope that makes sense - basically I want to know if it's the target or the source sector /size that gets input, just so I can be sure I'm interpreting it correctly.

Cheers guys!

Hi Carlos.

Thanks for the quick response. We've certainly told our clients historically that, while bounce rate is something to bear in mind, it doesn't impact rankings and on certain pages is the only real outcome (depending on what the page is aiming to achieve).

But the more I read, the more it implies it is a stat that can have an impact following the various Google quality algorithms - and I see this video is from 2010, so I'm guessing the situation may have changed by now?

As for the link to the tutorial on spamming, very useful, I'll look into where they're coming from.

Assuming there's no impact on either organic or PPC, I'll set up a filter and leave it at that - but it would still be useful to have a best practice way to send this traffic, if it's real, to the proper geographic site.

Nick.

Hi fellow Mozzers!

We're handling the digital marketing for a UK-based franchise of a Canadian SaaS company, and I've noticed that a large proportion of their traffic has been coming from the US (not the majority, but enough to skew the figures).

The Canadian arm of the business deals with the US market, but the majority, if not all, is direct traffic which seems to suggest they've seen the web address somewhere (not sure where though). Is there a search-friendly way to move this traffic back to the Canadian site? I know I can set up a filter for US traffic so it stops distorting the stats we're seeing (which I have now done), but my worry is this is causing a high bounce rate that may be impacting Google's perception of the site quality. The traffic has a 100% bounce rate (not surprisingly), so if we could find a best practice way of sending them to the Canadian site, that would be great.

My first thought was a screen that appears for US traffic prompting them to the Canadian site, but presumably this would still count as a bounce as they're only on one page?

Any help much appreciated!

Cheers guys,
Nick

Hey fellow Mozzers!

We're in the middle of working on CRO for a client of ours and we were going to try out Google Experiments for the first time.

Following the click path described on the Google help page should take me to an option that says 'Create Experiment', but this isn't coming up - do we need to create the various URLs before it will let us set up an experiment, or has the system changed now? I've found in the past Google has a habit of updating its interfaces but not the advice on using the affected tools, so wondering if I'm looking at old information?

Secondly, does the Experiment show a user the same variation of the page throughout their journey? What I mean by that is: their site currently has a real mish-mash of page styles, and I think a large part of boosting their conversions is probably down to ensuring consistency across the site as it currently seems like you're bouncing around different sites. But will this issue be made worse by running Experiments - ie, will I enter the site on Variation A, click a link and be shown the next page in Variation B and so on?

If so, are we better off running the experiment on one page at a time and using what we've learnt to impact the next page?

Thank for any help you can give!

Nick.

Hi Jane,

Yeah, a number of our clients are in the leisure and hospitality industries which means many travel bloggers naturally link to them in reviews, lists of places to stay in certain areas etc. Occasionally we need to think up clever ways of encouraging that, but it's a field where those who are pleased with the offering tend to give you, at the least, a mention.

This particular client, however, doesn't really fit that bill, but they are in an industry where there's plenty of scope for expert advice, FAQs, guides and so on, so I'm sure we can find good content-led solutions.

The content side I'm fine with, but it was more the tech aspect of harnessing cloud-based software. Thanks for your help with this - happy just knowing I'm not missing anything on that front!

Kind regards,

Nick

Hi Jane,

Thanks for responding!

Well that was my thoughts - that the 'powered by' route in and of itself is a no-go for that very reason, but I was sounding out any possible alternatives.

Reading my initial question, I'm not sure it's the clearest way I could have worded it - and in fact I'm still not sure what a clearer way would be. Basically, they have a reasonable client base using their software, but the software sits, as far I understand, external to the client's site.

So I think in hindsight I was seeing whether there was any way of harnessing the client base, but I suppose without knowing where the tool actually sits this is impossible to answer?

Hello fellow Mozzers!

We've recently rewritten the content for a cloud-based project management tool, they then asked about what they could do to rank higher.

As well as suggesting the usual content creation methods to help build links (which it looks like they'll need a LOT of - the field is either made up of terms that have no searches, or are extremely competitive), I wondered if there was any way of harnessing the fact they provide a cloud-based SaaS - a 'Powered by...' notice or somesuch? The only thing is they provide a project budget management tool, so I'm guessing the site itself wouldn't actually be coming into contact with the tool?

Does anyone have any experience / advice working on a similar scenario where you've managed to leverage the tool for links where it's cloud-based?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Nick.

Thanks guys. I thought that may be the case as all the ones I've seen have been cut. Is there even a set character count, as I could potentially write one that would at least look neat if cut early? Or does it depend from search to search?

As you say, this seems like something they maybe should look at, because while you would undoubtedly lose real estate by cutting all meta descs, you also lose a chunk by having your call to action cut, often in nonsensical or messy ways (I'm aware that this can happen anyway, but anything we can do to minimise this is always welcome!)

Thanks again!

Hey Mozzers!

Something occurred to me the other day was that, while we can write title tags and meta descriptions to be within the character count and therefore appear nice and neatly in the SERPs, when Google et al decide to pull subpages out as further site links, it seems to still pull the normal meta description but with a far lower character count. As this looks untidy and could potentially impact CTR, is there a way I can amend the preferred text for the shortened version, via Webmaster Tools, for example?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Nick.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your response. Definitely some good food for thought here - especially about ensuring the pdfs are optimised.

It may be that we can put all the content on the site as HTML, but just not have it as part of the navigation (which we are doing with certain pages, like FAQs.

Unfortunately, when they say light on content they mean just that. As we are a design agency, the designers tend to think people are only picture led and the words distract from that. I tend to think that, while people will decide if we are the agency or them based on previous work, they also like to see stats on results, client feedback and so on.

So I'll try to persuade them to go the HTML route, but at least you've pointed out some things to bear in mind if going the PDF avenue.

Thanks!

Nick

Hi fellow Mozzers,

We're just in the middle of relaunching our website (a design agency), and I had a few questions re: SEO of our service keywords.

The designers want the site to seem light on content, despite my advice that this would reduce the terms we can rank for. With that in mind, I was going to include advice pages that can be found via the site map, site search or text links but aren't promoted via the top level or second level nav. Another alternative I was going to explore was using pdfs for design case studies, so the site would feature a light case study, but with a more in-depth pdf available if wanted.

I have located numerous articles highlighting how best to optimise pdfs, but I have a few queries aside from the technical standpoint.

So:

• is this the best way to getting round the issue of keeping the site 'light' on content?

• are there stats that show CTRs on pdf pages over HTML?

• as well as optimising the pdf content and promoting them on our social media channel, is there a benefit from including them on the likes of Scribd, Edocr and so on (from either an SEO or simply from a promotional viewpoint, or both)

Hopefully that's all clear!

Nick

Hi Jason,

It's a shame that there's not really anything out there, but that's a good idea about looking at the industry specific sites - the only thing with that is that the checklist was supposed to help others if I was off on holiday or whatever, a nice, easy list of URLs that someone else in the office could send stuff to, but I have enough other sites for this not to matter too much.

Thanks for your help!

Hi Jason,

Sites that will talk about it in a news format. We're pretty well covered for the design gallery angle, but it seems these gallery sites are the only ones that come up in searches when trying to find sites with a more 'newsy' angle.

Hey Mozzers - happy 2013 to one and all, I hope everyone had a great festive season!

Now we're all back into the swing of things, we're in the process of getting our new website up and running. We're a web and graphic design agency, and I'm putting together checklists to ensure we get new projects some coverage where deserved.

There will be a different checklist for the different disciplines - brand design, packaging, web design and so on.

For many of these disciplines, there are multiple news sites that we can reach out to when we have relevant stories - Dieline for packaging, for example.

But for web design, any searches I do either show up CSS Galleries / portfolios (which I already have on the checklist under another section) or web tutorial sites. I don't seem to be able to find decent, trustworthy sites that exclusively feature web news.

I'm sure they exist and it's just a case of 'can't see for looking', but does anyone know of decent sites that carry news stories about new websites going live?

Obviously we know not every new site will be newsworthy - and indeed we wouldn't try to submit every new site we have go live for that very reason - but it would be good to have a clutch of high authority, well visited sites to turn to when we do have something of note.

Any help is much appreciated! Thanks Mozzers!

Hi fellow Mozzers!

I am just in the process of adding various reviews to our site (a design agency), but I wanted to use the ratings in different ways depending on the page.

So for the home page and the services (branding, POS, direct mail etc) I wanted to aggregate relevant reviews (giving us an average of all reviews for the home page, an average of ratings from all brand projects and so on).

Then, I wanted to put specific reviews on our portfolio pages, so the review relates specifically to that project. This is the easiest to do as the hReview generator is geared up for reviews that come from one source, but I can't find a way of aggregating the star ratings to make an average rating rich snippet.

Anyone know where I can get the coding for this?

Thanks in advance!

Nick.