How much do SEO agencies make?
SEOmoz isn’t afraid to tell you how they did in 2006. For those who don’t want to skim the article here are some highlights:
SEOmoz had about $600K in revenue
Rand only made $38K this year (don’t be fooled, his net worth is going through the roof)
They spent just .28% of their expenses on marketing
They made nothing on about 300 referrals to other agencies
They have 20 clients (2 of which are Fortune 500’s)
Internet retail contests
During the holidays it isn’t uncommon for us to receive some free swag from suppliers - just free samples of cool new stuff they want to show off in hopes that we will carry it. Sometimes they send it as a gift and sometimes they just do a “free giveaway” with a minimum purchase.
We actually got some cool Scosche stuff this year and were having a hard time deciding what to do with it. Of course we always could have received it into inventory and sold it, but that just didn’t seem right with a gift.
In the past we just took turns keeping the cool stuff (the only cool swag we ever got was from Google until recently), but this stuff was too cool to come to an amicable agreement. We decided to be creative and launch “The Amazing Sewell Holiday Giveaway” (hat tip to Kartch for coming up with the name and designing the page).
In our monthly email we just told everybody we had a cool bluetooth car kit and whoever could give us the best reason that they deserved the kit would win it. We had a lot more entries than I expected (click here to read a sample of the entries) and I learned that a lot of our customers are way more creative than I would have expected. I especially enjoyed Tom and Chuck’s entries. In fact they were both so good that we decided we had to give out two prizes - Chuck received a pair of bluetooth headphones from Scosche.
If you receive swag from suppliers consider trying out a contest - we saw a side of our customers that we never see, we increased the exposure of our supplier’s product and nobody got hurt deciding who got to keep the coolest stuff - Michael Scott would call that win-win-win.
Yahoo and page views
Over the past couple of weeks I have seen a ton of reports showing how much “market share” Yahoo has been losing because they have less pageviews than other competitors.
I know quite a few people who use Yahoo email and I’ve seen the new AJAX-y interface which actually looks pretty nice. The result is less pageviews (since users don’t have to refresh the page for every email message).
Yahoo had to make a tough decision before rolling out the new web client - did they want to make a better user experience or boost up their pageview statistics at their user’s expense. Fortunately Yahoo chose the former and is providing a better user experience.
Unfortunately a lot of people are capitalizing on this decision and not-so-user-friendly sites are claiming more traffic because they force their users to refresh the page in order to get anything done. Some even go as far as to auto-refresh the page every six seconds - definitely not an improvement to the user experience!
Matt Cutts, characteristically showing that he has a brain despite the fact that he is a high-profile Google engineer, comes to Yahoo’s defense on the pageview metrics. Hopefully more high profile techies will recognize that Yahoo is willing to take some heat on metrics to improve the Yahoo experience - perhaps YHOO trading near their 52-week low is a good buy afterall.
SEOmoz - get hooked
SEOmoz’s 2006 stats in review is a great example of how open SEOmoz is with all of the information they gather. Whether you’re a newbie or an old SEO pro this post should give you more than enough reasons to subscribe to their feed in 2007.
I was just converted to SEOmoz a couple of months ago by JazzCat and even as I’ve been trimming off feeds (information overload) moz has become a staple.
Google interviewing your customers
Update: My apologies to Igbor - he deserved the link on this story :)
WebProNews writes about Google interviewing their customers while using Google Analytics (with conversion tracking). Apparently this has been a known issue for some time (on selective sites) and there is no way to opt out of the program without removing the conversion tracking code.
Collecting user feedback without explicit permission from publishers? Sounds pretty evil to me…
via threadwatch
Google showing quality scores for Adwords
Search Engine Roundtable has screenshots and some information about Google showing quality scores for keywords in your adwords dashboard. This is a huge step forward - instead of guessing why your ad isn’t showing you can figure out what is causing you to have a low quality score and tweak your ad copy/landing page appropriately.
3D internet retailing
Circuit City 3D retailing? I always try to look for ways not only to compete with other internet retailers, but to compete with brick and mortars. I figured that at some point somebody would create a really good 3D shopping experience online to compete with those guys…
I never, however, thought that a major brick and mortar would lead the pack. Kudos to Circuit City for identifying and at least testing such a disruptive technology.
Testing price points
In the past I have always been slow to play with pricing too much because I don’t want to ruin the customer experience with prices fluctuating up and down. In the past I have always been reluctant to drop below certain margins in order to protect the bottom line.
I learned an important lesson this week about price points, however. It is OK in some cases to take half the margin on a product that you previously did if the volume goes up three or four times. Conceptually I always understood this and of course you have to keep in mind that fulfillment costs go up, but in the end you really can be better off and increase your purchasing power (a fringe benefit I never considered).
If you’re an internet retailer, test price points!
Duplicate content myths debunked by Adam Lasnik
I have always been annoyed with scraper sites and have spent quite a bit of time worrying about losing rankings to them. Adam Lasnik put my mind at ease to some degree with a recent post on Google’s Official Webmaster Central Blog. I highly recommend any retailer check it out.
Also, an often overlooked problem with duplicate content is having empty categories. If you’re a retailer with hundreds of blank categories (and hence hundreds of very similar pages with no unique content) you should consider either blocking said categories or not creating them until they are populated with products. I made this mistake one time and ended up with all of my pages (except my home page) in the supplemental index until I fixed it.
OS X Rules
OK, I obviously don’t really think that. But because I was too confident in a ping-pong game I am compelled to quote one of my favorite people in the world, Mr. Pernell Ringlebottom:
I was wrong all along. OS X really is vastly superior to Windows in every function, shape and form.
Pernell, nice one but I don’t agree.