Pear Analytics

The future of SEO software looks bright, but are general consumers ready for it, and can startups profit from the bigger SMB segment?

SEOmoz recently predicted that SEO software would get more prevalent in 2011 as tools and software shift from a “nice to have” to a “must have” necessity.  Part of this shift, we think, is due to more small businesses becoming aware of  the need for SEO, and Internet marketing in general.

But coupled with this promising outlook, there comes a number of challenges with SEO software:

1. The engineering challenges are a huge feat for a relatively low price-point product.  This means to build a product that is reliable, accurate and fast, the sheer number of engineering hours it takes to build this makes a sub $99 a month product with a likely high churn rate a difficult case to make.
2. The search engines are making it harder to get reliable data in the mass quantities a software needs.  With Google closing the doors on its search API (which tools use to get ranking data) in November 2010, it’s forcing users into a different API which is useful if you wanted to create your own search engine powered by Google’s algorithms.  Not to mention the increasing difficulty in getting reliable link data, which is particularly difficult for large sites.  We’re seeing more tools scrape the data they need, which is difficult to scale and high risk.
3. Expect high churn, or turnover rate, particularly with certain segments of the market that are less educated about the realistic expectations of SEO.  This results in a lower LTV (lifetime value) of the customer which limits your marketing and advertising spend and channels.
4. A good SEO tool is going to require a computationally expensive technology to filter the meaningful information to the surface for less savvy users.  This will result in higher hosting costs, and even with the cloud, could run in the 5-6 figure per month range (including backups and redundancy systems) with a considerable number of users.
5. The decision to choose an SEO provider or software is not a frictionless transaction.  That means even if the tool is under a hundred bucks a month, prospective users will still “kick the tires” and expect some sort of free trial or freemium plan.  They will also expect good customer service, and now your free users will drain your support staff with lots of “SEO help” or technical questions that they would otherwise be paying for.
6. Education in the tool is a key piece, as many users in the huge SMB segment will not completely understand the tactics behind the strategy, and will need ongoing comforts that the plan is working and producing results.  In other words, they will make you really work hard for your hundred bucks – or cancel their account.

After spending 18 months designing, building and solving these engineering challenges, the one thing we figured out was that there was a key component missing: what the user really wanted was for someone to actually fix this problem for them…to solve their pain.  And oh by the way, they don’t want to pay thousands of dollars a month to do it. That means even for a $99 a month SEO tool, someone still has to do the work; i.e. the missing component.  This resulted in a major pivot for our business.

This is precisely where we want to position Pear Analytics going into 2011.  A mix between expensive consulting and SEO software.  It’s more software AND a service, instead of just software AS a service.

For our average price of around $450 per month, you’re going to get the content creation, the link building, competitive analysis, keyword research and rankings along with a nice piece of software to manage it all and show you how you’ve progressed.  And it’s all wrapped up with some impressive support, including a consultation with an SEO expert when you get started, live chat and toll-free voice support.

It’s kind of like what Rackspace did in the hosting world 10 years ago.  You could get a cheaper server just about anywhere, but people would pay $500 a month for a server for some distinct reasons; primarily because of the support, and that they built a reputation of solving the problem in hours compared to days which was industry standard at the time.

The real question becomes can this model scale effectively more like a SaaS company, and less like a consulting company?  We think it can, but we’re not quite ready to divulge how that’s going to work just yet

1 Comment »Tags: seo software

A look at some of the major Google updates over the last 7 years, which has greatly affected search and how search engine optimizers work to find what is relevant and important.

Google is really only 12 years old, and have since made thousands of changes to their algorithm, or “secret sauce” which makes the search giant actually work. It has been said that no single person knows all of the pieces to the algorithm, but those that do know a lot about it are paid handsomely to prevent them from leaving the company.

Nonetheless, all of these changes have had some significant effect on the SEO community. Back in 2003, site owners could over-optimize their pages and “keyword stuff” the page in order to rank higher. After the “Florida” update, everything was based on relevancy, and so all of those tactics no longer applied.

You’ll also notice that the changes in 2010 are happening more frequently. Google is merging indexes in order to crawl and compute faster than ever. There is no longer a “supplemental index”, or a separate index of pages where less relevant pages were stored, and infrequently listed in the results pages. We also think they will also merge the mobile index at some point as well, so the results you see on a phone will be somewhat similar to the ones you will get on a PC (right now they are way off). Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments »Tags: google algorithm, google updates

Later this month I will be traveling to Calgary, Canada on behalf of CareerBuilder to speak to some of their potential customers about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO) in the recruitment industry, or as they refer to it: “recruitment SEO.”  Recruitment SEO is the strategy that employers use to tap into the talent pools searching online for jobs.  Companies looking to outsource their job portals, or online recruitment strategies should read this post.

Many companies use an Applicant Tracking System, or “ATS” to manage their job applications and resume data.  Data is fed to the ATS either through internal sources, such as the company’s website, or through external sources like job and resume boards such as CareerBuilder.com.  The ATS makes it much easier for employers to manage the recruitment workflow, as well as data mining, collecting and reporting.

Problems with ATS

Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) have been a little slow to the SEO game.  Some of the problems that have plagued their systems (and still do) are blocking the search engines from indexing the job content in the robots.txt file, putting searchable content behind password protected areas that a search engine cannot access, using improper URL structures that lack target keywords or that are overly dynamic, and much more.

Applicant Tracking Systems have also failed to address mobile content, and how to exactly integrate social media into the process. In essence, the ATS systems were built to manage the recruitment process, and not the online marketing process.  But this is where CareerBuilder’s Talent Network tool comes in.  They leverage your existing ATS by putting their platform on top of it, enabling you to leverage your online marketing components.  Not only that, but you also get CareerBuilder’s proprietary algorithms matching your job postings to qualified candidates instantly.

Want the top talent? They need to be able to find you.

According to ERE.net, a recruitment intelligence community, there are over 124 million job related searches through Google each month.  Below are some global search volumes for some general job descriptions, using the Google Keyword Tool:

I’m going to pick on Rackspace as an example of what enterprise companies are doing for recruitment, and then show you how it can be improved.  Rackspace is a big magnet for talent here in San Antonio, and attracts techies from all over the country (and the world) to come and work for the company with Google-style perks.

If I do a search for “jobs at racksapce”, it can easily find their job recruitment portal – www.rackertalent.com.  But what if I don’t know who Rackspace is, and I’m a java developer from New Jersey?  What if my wife and I are moving to Texas, and I need to find a job there?  If I search for “java developer jobs in texas”, not only do I not find Rackspace in the first page, but I don’t find them in the first 10 pages!  They are not listed in some of the other Job Search Engines (JSE’s) like indeed.com and others.

3 Ways Rackspace Could Improve Their Recruitment SEO

1.  Use unique URL’s with keywords. For example, on this Java Developer job listing, notice how the URL stays at www.rackertalent.com/careers/?  They would be better served with a URL such as www.rakcertalent.com/jobs-in-texas/software-development/java-developer/.  In this case, we would recommend “jobs in Texas” as the intermediary page that accumulates all of the jobs in Texas, then by category, such as “Software Development” – then onward to the job details page.

2.  Customize the Title Tags and Meta Descriptions. In this case, they are using the exact same title tag and meta description throughout the entire site.

3.  Create unique job description detail pages. This entire site is dynamically generated, which was probably a lot of fun for a developer, but does not create any SEO value.  In fact, according to Google, RackerTalent.com only has around 200 pages in their index to cover the 156 open jobs, the blog and other content on the site.  They are leaving all of the job position data out of the search engine index.

CareerBuilder’s Talent Network platform could alleviate these SEO issues, and immediately find matching candidates for their 156 openings.

7 Comments »Tags: career builder, rackspace, recruitment seo

The following post outlines a very useful hack for KISS Insights that allows you to run a “multi-variate survey mode” where you can evenly rotate surveys, which is not currently available in their software.  With Pear being a “power user” of KISS Insights, they graciously helped us build this, and so we figured we would share it with the community.  Enjoy!

KISS Insights is a powerful page level survey tool that we started to use heavily to find out what people really wanted out of our software, as well as real-time direction from users as to what features we should build next.

But we needed more. We actually wanted a way to test pricing where we could evenly rotate a pricing question on the same page within the software – kind of like multi-variate testing. We wanted to know if users would pay $10, $20, $30, $49 or $99 per month for the service. By getting an equal amount of responses for each, we can use that data to come out of the gate with the most widely accepted price plan (if you’re wondering, as it turns out, it was NOT the $10 price point).

The limitation in KISS Insights was that we could only test one question at a time per page, which meant we would have to set one survey at one price, let it run until we had 30-40 results, and then go in and deactivate that survey, and activate a new one with a different price point. Not only was this kind of cumbersome in the UI, but it was going to take weeks, or even months to get an answer.

So internally, we figured that what we would do is hack KISS by creating 5 or 6 Insights accounts, and then using tracking cookies, assign each unique visitor a different code snippet from one of the accounts, and each KISS account would have a different pricing question.  Didn’t seem that hard to do, and logically, seemed like it would work.

So I contacted Hiten and asked him if he thought this was a good idea, and he actually responded with something much better.

In a few days, KISS actually developed some custom code for us that we could attach to our existing script to enable the multi-variate survey mode we were trying to create ourselves. All we had to do was create each survey, then get the survey ID and replace it in the additional code snippet:

_kiq.push(function(){
if(KI.location.matches(‘/free-seo-analysis(/.*)?’)) {
var surveys = [XXXX, XXXX]; // Replace with ID’s
var ab = new $KI.Cookie(‘ab_test_1′, surveys[Math.floor(Math.random() * surveys.length)]);
if(ab) {
KI.show_by_id(‘survey’, ab.get());
}
}
});

So our entire code snippet looks like this:

We found that the “if(KI.location.matches(‘/free-seo-analysis(/.*)?’)) {” line to be optional, and the snippet will work without it, although it does force a URL match, allowing you to use whatever URL’s when setting up the survey.  Now, the 5 surveys are rotating evenly each time the page is viewed, and I’m testing 5 different prices at the same time, allowing us to get an answer much faster.  And as I mentioned in the beginning, the answer was not the lowest price, but rather the mid-level price.

Thanks to Hiten and the KISS team for making this so easy!

5 Comments »Tags: kiss insights

Learning how to install Google Analytics is easy for most site owners.  It will involve getting an account with Google, and then knowing how to place some code on your website or blog.  Before you install Google Analytics, you should be aware of a couple of things:

1.  Google Analytics tracks visitors on your site, what they’re clicking on, and how they are interacting with your site.  While all of the data is anonymous, you might want to include a blurb in your Privacy Policy page that you are tracking visitors, or cookie-ing them for other things. Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments »Tags: analytics, google analytics, google analytics annotation feature

The header tag, or the <h1> tag in HTML, will usually be the title of a post, or other emphasized text on the page.  It will usually be the largest text that stands out.  There are other header tags in HTML too, like an h2, h3, h4, etc.  Each can have a lesser degree of importance on the page, but it really depends on how your HTML/CSS guy did the layout.  Sometimes, they make your logo the h1 – because it’s in the “header”, but it would be best to make the h1 the title of the page or post instead.

How you write your header, or h1 tag, is going to be similar to how you wrote your title tag.  Sometimes these can be the same, and that’s OK.  Here are a few tips:

1.  Put your header tag <h1> </h1> at the top of the page, preferably after the <body> tag.

2.  Are you targeting the keywords you wish to rank higher for?  If not, go in and modify your tags slightly to include those words.  If your h1 happens to be an image, use the image alt tag to add those juicy keywords.

3. Can I have more than 1 header tag on the page?  Sure, but you want the most important one at the top.

13 Comments »Tags: header tag, On-Page Optimization

How you write your title tag is as much art as it is science.  You want to write something attractive enough for a user to click on, but also write something that contains the keywords you wish to rank for.  Notice in the image below how Google will almost always try to find an exact match to your search first, and then list results which appear to be similarly related.  This is a very common occurrence in a search results page.

So how do you start writing better title tags for SEO?  Here are a few tips:

1. Do a bit of research on the keyword, and check Google Instant. The easiest thing for you to do is go and search for what you are writing about in Google, and if you have Google Instant turned on, you will immediately see what Google is serving up for suggestions based on what you are typing in.  It might not be a bad idea to choose the words as they appear in one of the suggestions.  If you want to do more advanced research, check the Google External Keyword Tool for more suggestions with search volume.

2.  Put the keyword you wish to rank for up front, not in the end. Notice again in the search results how the first listings have the word or phrase immediately in the title tag.  If you put it in the end, like “Pear Analytics SEO Tools | How To Write A Title Tag for SEO”, you run the risk of the important phrases getting cut off.  Plus, it’s seen as more “relevant” in the front too.

3.  Keep them under 70 characters. After that, they will get truncated by the search engine.  Again, you don’t want all of the important stuff in the end of the tag.

4.  Avoid tags like these: “Home”, “Your Company Name”, “Index” or anything else that is completely irrelevant and does not indicate what the page is about.

5 Comments »Tags: On-Page Optimization, title tags

I’m going to show you how I concepted and built not one, but two recurring revenue products in one evening using Unbounce, Wufoo and Chargify – and I never wrote a single line of code.  And the results were unreal.

I am not a programmer.  I wish I was, but I took a different path after engineering school and went more into the marketing side.  My programmers are busy.  I can’t bother them, but I need revenue.  Do I get them off what they’re doing, or can I build something myself to test with some users?  There has to be a way….we get plenty of traffic, and somehow I’ve got to get the 1,500 people a week using our software, and the 10,000+ users in our mailing list to check this out.  I’ve got to do something without bothering engineering just yet….just till I can prove this works.

OK, here we go.  My first product is simply an SEO copywriting service that I just want to set up as a one-time fee for now.  $35 per article sounds good, and we’ll even write the tags you need (title, meta description, H1, etc.).  My second product is a link building service, and I want to get folks on a small, manageable plan, but one where we can keep working on month-to-month, chipping away and building good quality links the old-fashioned way – manually.  Both of these sound totally un-scalable and an absolute nightmare to execute.  But that’s OK because we’re engineers and we can figure out the process flow because that’s what we do…make things efficient.  (And I want to do a blog post later about Software AND a Service, versus Software AS a Service).  Why do I want to do this? Well, we learned from our software, and the 20,000+ websites we’ve run and the tons of customer feedback, that they need MORE than someone telling them their site sucks.  They want you to fix it.  I mean, you don’t go to a doctor and he tells you everything that’s wrong with you, and then send you on your way with a “good luck”, right?  There HAS to be something in adding a reasonable and reputable service to the software we have.  Yeah, it’s going to take some work internally, I mean this isn’t all “hands off” – but hey, it’s really no different than staffing up a bunch of support people anyway that most SaaS products are destined to have.

The first thing I did was log into my Unbounce account and set up my landing pages.  This beautiful interface lets me build landing pages in a snap without needing a single programmer.  The link building page took about 30 minutes longer because I had to spend a while playing with buttons, colors of the boxes, etc.  In the end, I thought it turned out OK.  You can see the SEO copywriting page here, and the link building page here.  Now you can see the modified page after tons of iterations, and lots of help from the guys at Unbounce

The second thing I went into my Wufoo online form builder account and created some info gathering forms in a jiffy.  Once a user clicks on the call-to-action button from the Unbounce landing page, they get dumped into the form and I ask them all of the info I need to know in order to start the job, right, so it’s like a “job request form”.  Easy.  Then I went back to the Unbounce landing pages and linked them all up to the various buttons, and I did send each unique landing page to a unique form, because depending on what they clicked on originally, I needed to send them to a specific Chargify page.

Now, enter Chargify, the leader in recurring billing for web 2.0 services.  These guys are really awesome, because they let me create all the products I want, and they only start charging me after I’ve hit 50 customers (regular charges from your merchant, like Authorize.net still apply).  So I created a product family for “SEO Copywriting” and one for “Link Building Services”, and under the link building services, I created three different products based on the three monthly plans we’re offering.  They let me easily create a Payment Page that all I have to do is link to from the Wufoo form after they hit “submit” on the form, and they’ll send them on over for payment.  Oh yeah, I also used a KISS Insight page level survey on each Unbounce landing page, so I could gauge weather I was full of shit or not.

The result? Well, after an email blast this morning and linking to these pages in our existing software (which I can also do myself), we got 600 leads in the first day, and $1,450 of recurring monthly revenue and $350 of one-time revenue since 11 am this morning.

I get a confirmation from Wufoo and Chargify when someone completes the forms, so then all we have to do is match them up afterward, and start working on the project.  Chargify takes care of the auto-billing for me, and now all I need to do is let people know we have the service now (a marketing function, not an engineering function).

As for rapid iteration, I’ve already created a new product in Chargify and a different Wufoo form for 4 SEO articles per month for $100, and for $150 we will install it on your WordPress blog for you, and already we’ve gotten some folks to sign up.  Took me 8 minutes to create the new product.

At the end of the day, I completely hacked all of this together, but I didn’t need to write code, and I didn’t need to bother a code writer.  I can test various products and pricing, and let the engineers focus on something else.  My next task is to make sure we can keep a high quality product, fast turnaround (some of the articles are already done), and scalability.  Who knows, next week we might try a few more products

Update 9/22/10 2:31p – I just set up Chargify to send a successful transaction to a “thank you” page I set up.  Turns out I got 3 chats today asking me “what should I expect”, so now they know   I also set up a B page in Unbounce for the copywriting service to sell a 4 articles for $100/mo plan.  30% better conversion rate on that one!

Update 9/23/10 4:58p – I just hacked together a very simple rating system, again, no code required.  Since we started sending articles back to folks, I wanted to see what they thought of it, so in the bottom of the email, we put “Please Rate this Article: Awesome! |  Good :/ |  Sucked ” which then takes them to a page I created on our WordPress blog which has more information about how to fix an article, have us re-write it, or even order more.  My thought was I can track unique pageviews to identify a trend or problem.  It’s probably not the most effective thing in the world, but it works for now.

Update 9/24/9:58a – Yesterday I used Unbounce to create a variant of my Link Building landing page, which was sucking wind.  For whatever reasons, people think link building is a “spammy” SEO tactic.  So I went in and created a new variant to try and address that, and BAM!  1,271% better conversion rate!!

47 Comments »Tags: chargify, kiss insights, link building, seo copywriting, unbounce, wufoo

There are two main problems being a startup: 1) we have limited capital which means we can’t waste money on poorly performing campaigns (which is a good thing, actually); and 2) as founders we have to do everything ourselves and learn all of this marketing stuff, and its usually the hard way.

So, here are 4 easy ways you can increase your AdWords conversion rates by 3 o’clock this afternoon.  This is the stuff I experimented with, and I went from a 12% conversion rate to a 56% conversion rate and it now performs better than our organic traffic most of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

10 Comments »Tags: conversion optimization, Google AdWords, increase conversions

So this really surprises and frustrates me. Surprises me because it’s Salesforce (aren’t they the world’s largest sales platform with Fortune 500 clients ?). Aren’t they supposed to strive so that all this data they capture is more insightful ? Frustrates me because it shows such a blatant lack of knowledge in showing data the right way : which should be to provide insight. Which isn’t what their charts do. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments »Tags: graphs, visualization