An SEO Experiment

In early January 2010 HSTinCanada.com went live after some educated estimates and two weeks of design & testing with a single goal in mind – obtain visitors from search engines. After operating for two months with 50+ articles and a variety of links from other websites, the website has cracked the first page for a handful of key search phrases in Google. What is unique about HST in Canada as a topic in general is that it’s going to receive plenty of news coverage for an extended period of time. Back in the summer of 2009 I launched a quick website for a news topic that was in the news headlines for a week. With $15 dollars invested for hosting and the domain name, www.westkelownafires.com launched and recorded 7000 page views over the course of a few days, with 90% of the web traffic coming from search engines. Ever since that SEO Experiment, I’ve contemplated the potential for what might be called “opportunistic web development”. Then the next opportunity presented itself…

Starting from scratch with a brand new domain and using the wordpress platform, a website was born with the intention of being a neutral resource for a hot topic with varying opinions and feelings. The proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is coming to British Columbia and Ontario on July 1st 2010, and while it has a number of implications for businesses and citizens within these provinces, it presented a unique opportunity for a website. It was going to be on people’s minds over the next several months, and the media coverage it will receive will only intensify as groups, businesses and governments become more vocal.

For starters, any successful website must serve a valuable purpose. In the case of HSTinCanada.com there was a distinct gap in available information online. The provincial government’s in support of HST have the pros related to the HST explained on their websites. The anti-HST government websites & groups have all of the negative aspects of HST explained. There was no single source that talked about both the pros and cons of HST, so the content strategy for HST in Canada was easy to establish. Secondly, as the goal was to obtain search engine traffic, an assessment of the competing websites and an estimate of how much search volume exists was undertaken. Overtaking the competing websites isn’t insurmountable and the number of HST related search engine queries is promising.

After being live for nearly 2 months, HSTinCanada.com is on track to serve approximately 30,000 ad impressions in March 2010. With further improved search engine rankings, this topic has the legs to serve 1 million ad impressions from search engine traffic alone before July 1st, 2010.

The message here is two fold. For web publishers and businesses of all kinds, a niche website built around a current event or relevant topic optimized for search engines can gain a strong audience over the course of  a few months. Think outside the box – sometimes your current website isn’t ideal when reacting to an evolving situation. Web development is more accessible now than ever, and a ground-up website build might not cost as much as you think. Perhaps a tax advisory firm or an accounting office should have launched a website like HST in Canada – once you obtain the audience you can display whatever ads you want, even your own. Not only that, publishing web content around a certain topic solidifies your identity as an authority on the topic – trust = sales. Forgive me, but the second part of this message is blatant self-promotion – if you think there’s an angle you can use to amass an audience related to your business and want some advice on it’s potential and how to execute, please get in touch! I love doing this stuff!

Do you want to be microfamous?

There is an excellent article in Wired’s February issue addressing social media and how it can evolve into, well, something quite introverted. The article uses an example of a Ms. Evans. She started using Twitter as a grad student – with an interest in poetry her updates were topical to what she was interested in. As such, her following grew slowly with people who were interested in similar things. Interaction is frequent, people comment on posts, ask questions, Ms. Evans replies – it’s a tight little community.

Then Ms. Evans gets the idea to post a short, 140 character recipe. Next thing you know she has 13,000 followers interested in food – a slight diversion from her original use for Twitter. As the following grows, something interesting happens. When you see a person with 100 followers on Twitter they seem more approachable. You see a person with 20,000 followers, if you do in fact have a question, you tend to presume the person wouldn’t reply to your question if you did happen to ask it. So you don’t…and social media just becomes, well, media.

The concept applies to Facebook as well. Amass a group of 500 ski enthusiasts and you can talk about the best mountains, the best days, post photos, share stories, etc. Let the group grow to 15,000 and suddenly people are selling ski equipment, posting “lost and found” information, etc. Ironically enough, the Facebook group starts to take the form of a dynamic newspaper! The founder of the group questions how he or she should interact with this new organism – there’s no way to cater to everybody!

Take a good look at your social media presence and ask yourself what direction you want to go in. Is it really that valuable to reach 10,000 Twitter followers if you no longer receive feedback? Do you really want to be “microfamous”? After all, celebrities are constantly complaining about all the attention they receive. Popular Twitter users might not make the television news, but one consistency remains,  the larger audience will always be the less forgiving audience.

Social media advertising strengths

On September 1st comScore released some information stating that social media websites, like Facebook and MySpace, are responsible for over 20% of online display advertising in the USA. As an online marketing consultant living in Kelowna, which is a relatively small town in British Columbia, Canada, social media sites are an extremely valuable tool to make use of when targeting ads to a small region. Smaller cities don’t always have that go to website. The newspapers that still exist often don’t grasp the strengths of the Internet entirely, or haven’t priced their ad rates according. For radio, a website is typically there to  support the station, and in many cases, are often reiterating news based off of partnerships with newspapers.  In a general sense, neither of these mediums have really stepped up to the plate to deliver a powerful online component. TV stations are improving as video becomes more feasible online, but, at least here in BC, local television is struggling.

So if you want to drive local visitors to your website, where can you turn? Facebook has a number of ad targeting features, such as target by connections, or target by birthday, to name some of the newer options. These targeting features can often provide insight into your business. For example, tracked properly, you might find that a specific age group tends to spend more time on a specific page than another age group. To speculate, let’s say you own a flower shop. You run ads targeted at men and women separately, and I can guarantee each group would treat your website differently. The men might be more inclined to look at pre-made bouquets, or may be interested in signing up for “important day reminders” as a safety net, just to prevent forgetting that special day two years in a row. Whereas the women might want to build a custom bouquet, because they already know exactly what they want.

Or maybe, as the flower shop owner, your website only has 1 of these functions. You built a great system to promote your pre-made bouquets, and you notice men from Facebook are converting at a higher rate than women. Not only are social media sites a great way to target your ads to a specific geographic area, but it’s easy to see how targeted advertising can drive sales as well as help your website progress and evolve over time (with the right insight).

Facebook privacy for Canadians

As a follow up to my last two posts regarding targeting options available through the Facebook ads platform, Jennifer Stoddard, Canada’s privacy commissioner, recently stated that Facebook doesn’t meet Canadian privacy law standards. The complaint raised is focused on the default privacy settings of a Facebook account, the collection and use of data for advertising purposes, and the disclosure of personal information to 3rd party developers.

Personally, it’s the information available to the 3rd party developers that worries me. In most cases, we’re openly providing the data to Facebook. I don’t mind that my birthday is posted, and I don’t mind if an advertiser targets me on my birthday. If I did mind, well then I shouldn’t give Facebook my birthday details, should I? That’s a choice I made when signing up to Facebook. For the early adopters, the Facebook applications that run rampant now never existed. At the end of the day, Facebook shouldn’t ever be a burden to it’s users. If it’s too hard to delete an account, that’s a problem. If privacy settings are too complicated or buried, that’s a problem. In my opinion, a Facebook account should be locked down by default. But if that had been the case since the beginning, would Facebook be as successful as it is today?

As far as the privacy commissioner’srequest – Facebook was given 1 month to comply with recommendations. That deadline was on August 17th, and itworldcanada.com reports that discussions between Facebook and Canada are going well. Right now the Stoddard has Facebook’s reponse in hand, and has 15 days to review and reply. I’d like to get my hands on both of these documents…

Facebook ads – target by connections

Facebook is chalk full of groups and pages – you can join groups to support your love of campfires, your passion for sex on the beach or if you live in BC, your concerns about BC Harmonized Sales Tax. It’s easy to create groups, and for the right business, it can be a powerful marketing tool. One of Facebook’s three new targeting tools is “target by connections”, which allows an admin or owner of a Facebook group/event to create an ad targeting only members of a specific group, or to exclude members of a specific group.

This is an important feature for a number of reasons. Say you’re promoting an event in your town with a Facebook Ad. You set it up as a cost per click campaign, meaning you’re going to be spending 30-50 cents on every person that clicks on the ad. To get the most out of your advertising dollars, you don’t want to be spending that money on someone who has already RSVP’d to the event that clicks on the ad simply because they forgot what time the event starts. No, you want to focus on those who haven’t converted yet, and that’s exactly where this targeting feature comes into play.

Targeting by connections does present some complications by placing more power in the hands of people that are group admins or officers. For example, if I was a competitor of Nike and wanted to get an ad in front of people that had joined a particular Nike group, all you have to do is wiggle your way into an officer position of that group. Volunteer your time by removing inappropriate posts and posting pictures of your vintage Nike shoes and suddenly your trusted by the Nike group. Maybe you sell knock-off Nike products – now you have a targeted audience for your ad, and there’s over 2.5 million Facebook members that have joined a Nike group!

I’m sure it’s already going on for other reasons, but Facebook group administrators will be selling officer & admin positions within their groups simply for the sake of this ad targeting feature. Now the administrator of that silly I love campfires group with 250,000+ members can potentially generate a revenue stream for himself by selling access to his group to outdoor gear stores. The perfect ad headline would read Do You Love Campfires?…