Audience-Development-Strategy

The Anatomy of a Floater

The case for testing website floaters to increase conversion
rates and build your email list

When website users are asked whether they like pop-ups, they say no. They'll say they
hate them. They'll tell you they're the most annoying things on the Internet. They
might even tell you they never fill them out.

Well, I'll politely call them fibbers, because every A/B test I've ever run and
researched disagrees.

But we don't like pop-ups either. They "pop up," can ruin the user experience, and
they can be blocked by pop-up blockers. What's the fun in all that?

Floaters, however, don't do any of those things. And when publishers test them,
along with OFIEs, text ads and other elements of website conversion architecture,
they see a 20-50% lift in website conversions; in some cases, even more. For many

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Mequoda System clients, we find that more than 60% of those extra website
conversions come through the floater.

Benefits of Website Floaters

• Floaters have mostly replaced pop-ups and pop-unders.
• Floaters are not affected by pop-up blockers.
• Floaters can be deployed contextually on a site-wide basis, to make different

offers in different “zones” of a website.
• Floaters can be configured to stop bothering frequent guests.
• Although a floater looks like a separate document floating on top of a website

page, it's really just a layer in the HTML code. To the user, it looks a lot like a
magazine blow-in card.

There are paid floaters, like the ones on Better Homes and Gardens' BHG.com:

But we prefer ones that promote free products (freemiums) so we can build our email
list and sell them a magazine, newsletter, event or other information product later on.

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We especially like it when they darken the background, which we refer to as the
Death Star Floater.

If you're thinking that this is a recurring usability nightmare, don't worry. The codes
for floaters are designed to recognize users who have subscribed and spare them
from having to see the floater again.

This provides all the benefits of a pop-up's high conversion rate without the negative
effects on the users' experience with your website.

Best Practices for Effective Website Floaters

• Except for the home page, floaters must promote a contextual free product.
• Floaters must not appear to existing email subscribers who are already logged

in.
• Floaters must take a hiatus from appearing after a reader has seen the floater

X number of times and has not converted (also known as not annoying your
readers).
• Floaters must be mobile-friendly so they can be easily closed on a mobile
device.

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While printing blow-in cards and inserting them into print products is cheap, floaters,
like their pop-up predecessors, are virtually cost-free. Like blow-ins and pop-ups,
floaters can irritate users if over used or used to promote offers that seem out of
context to website users.

That's why every good Mequoda System is designed to offer contextual floaters.

We use floaters primarily to build email lists by offering freemiums (like a free white
paper). So in order to make our floater contextual, that means we must have one
freemium for every blog category on our website. This way, when someone reads an
article about, say, "baking an apple pie," we can promote a freemium about "XX 30-
Minute Baking Recipes" or "XX Best Pie Recipes."

As anyone who reads their analytics knows, most users don’t enter their website via
the homepage. By design, most users enter through content pages one or more levels
down from the homepage. This makes floaters ideal for site-wide use to entice users

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to download a freemium and build your email circulation.

How Online Publishers Use Floaters

There was a very long period when the social media folks—the anarchists of the
online marketing industry—refused to use floaters. They relied on their intuition
instead of testing. They shamed companies for annoying people with marketing. “Just
talk to them,” they said. “Write good content,” they said. Then the social media folks
started actually testing.

The fact is, you can’t talk to everyone when they’re visiting your website. However, if
you can get them on your email list, you’ll have a chance to talk to them later.

Several years ago, we covered an interesting case study by Darren Rowse of
ProBlogger who added a floater to his site Digital Photography School.

He admitted that it took him so long because he was afraid his users would hate him
for it. The social media peeps would judge him!

"My fear was that they’d annoy readers, page views per visit would drop and that I’d
end up with a lot of angry emails from readers," said Rowse at the time.

But he went for it anyway. Instead of getting an inbox full of angry emails (he only
got two), he went from harvesting 41 new email subscribers per day, to 350 new
email subscribers per day -- more than 127,000 new email subscribers per year.

At the time, I had calculated that he was getting an 18% conversion rate on that
floater, circa 2008.

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Six years later and he's still using floaters, but they've gotten quite the upgrade, along
with his very successful website. Certainly this blogger has changed his mind about
them!

Speaker and savvy marketer Chris Penn is another smart marketer who tried them

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out and saw a 733% increase in email subscribers. Smart marketers test, test, test.

All of our Mequoda Systems go live with floaters right off the bat, and the floaters are
responsible for the majority of their email conversions.

People who continually close a floater and don't subscribe aren't our target customers
— if they don't require our information on a daily basis to do their jobs, then they're
also highly unlikely to buy a product or attend an event.

So, who would we rather please? Our potential customers who we can make happy
by writing useful content every day — or our non-customers? We don't worry about
the people who might not subscribe and instead spend our efforts making sure that
we're making new subscribers happy by publishing valuable freemiums that align with
the content that's being read, and by sending email newsletters packed with original,
helpful content that always gives a take-away.

If you didn't absorb the take-away yet, it’s this: Test floaters!

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The Anatomy of a Text Ad

Turning blog readers into email subscribers

For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.

This short story, allegedly written by Ernest Hemingway to settle a bet, is the soul of
brevity, yet is has the power to evoke curiosity and emotion.

It should serve to inspire every modern direct response copywriter.

Why? Because at no other time in history has the ability to write very short, succinct
copy been more valuable.

“Melts in Your Mouth…Not in Your Hand”

This headline, written more than 50 years ago by the legendary Rosser Reeves,
created so much appetite for M&M’s chocolate candy that they had to build a new
factory to meet demand.

Fast forward to today: Billions of dollars are being generated on the Internet with
small text ads — perhaps as much as $100 billion annually. The type of text ads I
refer to now are the ones paid for in Pay-Per-Click, but the ones we use on our own
websites for audience development are just as important – and the focus of this
article.

It’s true. In the new world of digital marketing, text ads have now surpassed display
ads as the most effective and widely used online advertising medium.

High-design, long-text, hard-to-produce display ads are dead. Less is more. Short-
attention-span text ads work.

Text ads are the new control.

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The result: Copywriting now reigns supreme. If you want a click, or if you want
someone to download a product in exchange for their email address, even if it’s free,
you have to work for it.

How We Use Text Ads Online

Although a text ad could refer to any ad consisting of text, we’re currently referring to
those that are part of your conversion architecture. These ads are placed in the dead
center of all your articles and invite your website visitors to download a free product
that will get them on your email list.

All Mequoda Systems incorporate inline text ads in their posts, which point readers to
a free downloadable product that is aligned with the topic of the post.

To save time in writing new text ads every day, Mequoda Systems clients have a plug-
in we developed called the Mequoda Text Include Manager, which allows operators a
one-time set up of text ads to use in multiple posts.

Since most reading this aren’t Mequoda clients, you can ask your own developers to
come up with a plug-in or workaround that builds in this same functionality.

The key is to have a free downloadable product for each category of your blog. That
way, your text ads will always promote a free download that’s on a similar topic to the
blog post they’re reading.

The Art of Writing Text Ads

If you’re selling anything online, or trying to build an email list, or just expecting
people to click on your social media links, you must become an expert at writing text
ads that attract reader attention, communicate a succinct message, and persuade the
user to take immediate action.

And you must do all that in a very limited number of words. The harsh discipline of
writing for a very constrained space forces you to produce the best work you’ve ever
created.

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Writing text ads is not particularly difficult. But it is different from what you may
think … and it is a rare skill.

If you’ve been trained in a traditional ad agency, where display advertising was the
norm … where copywriters reported to art directors … you’re in for a surprise.

If you were trained in long-form direct response copywriting, you have a new skill set
to master.

The inline ads that drive millions of dollars in product sales are text ads. They’re
generally a captivating headline, a couple of lines of benefit-laden body copy, and a
call to action — the same as Google AdWords.

The same goes for building an email list. The text ads that drive millions of email
subscribes are also text ads, in the same format.

The same skills needed to write an inline text ad in an email newsletter or blog post
are those you need to write a 95-character Google AdWords text ad, or a 140-
character Twitter message, or an effective, 55-character email subject line.

As with any online ad that you want someone to click, there are three basic rules:

1. Don’t give everything away in the ad. Is your text ad sufficiently intriguing to
prompt the recipient to click your link? Or do you “give away” the entire take-away in
the text ad, diminishing the subscriber’s incentive to download your free product?

2. Don’t trick subscribers into clicking your link. Mystery is a good thing, but
make sure not to cross the line of “tricking” your readers into clicking your ad for a
download that’s not in line with what you’re promising them. The email text ad is not
creative if it prompts the recipient to click your ad, but subsequently disappoints,
confuses, or worse, alienates the user.

3. Keep the download relevant to the category you’re publishing in. If your free
download is about kayaking, don’t publish a text ad with copy solely about fishing,
even if the download is about using the kayak to get to the fishing venue.

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Publishers Using Text Ads
Here’s an example of a text ad on Nutrition Action’s daily blog.

The target audience for a person reading this post is most likely someone who needs
to reduce their sodium intake. Therefore, Nutrition Action pairs a text ad with this
article that promotes their free Salt in Food: Replacing the Salt Shaker eBook download.

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You can see how someone reading this article would be more inclined to download
their report and sign up for their email newsletter than if they promoted a free
download about curing head lice, or reducing wrinkles naturally. Alignment is key.

As part of our basic SEO best practices, we tell publishers to create a new text
include ad for every free download they produce. The secret to writing them is that
there isn’t any one secret: test, test and test again.

Some sources for your text ad may come from copy that’s already in your landing
page. For example, when we published Subscription Website Publishing handbook, we
used the copy on the landing page come up with these five text ads:

• Claim your FREE digital copy of Subscription Website Publishing: The 9 Most
Profitable Subscription Website Business Models now.

• The only complete guide to subscription website publishing is now available.
Download now.

• Find out what’s wrong with some of the biggest subscription based websites –
and learn how you can always make more money, no matter how
successful you already are. Download Subscription Website Publishing for FREE.

• Ready for the next step? Download our complete, exhaustive guide to
starting a subscription website.

• Our clients pay handsomely to gain access to the Mequoda consulting team’s
expertise. Download Subscription Website Publishing: The 9 Most Profitable Subscription
Website Business Models, and get the complete outline of our best practices all in
one place, to read and reference any time you need it.

There are no formulas or special tricks other than playing with your copywriting
technique and seeing which one gets the most clicks and downloads. For every free
download you create, come up with five different text ads you can use in your articles
to provoke downloads. Use tracking codes on each of them and rotate through them
until you know which reigns supreme and then stick with that one.

If nothing else, the four pieces of conversion architecture we just discussed in depth,
RCLPs, OFIEs, floaters and text ads, are your first priority when developing or
redesigning a website. You’ll see them over and over again throughout the rest of this
book!

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Optimizing a Site For Search

How to turn every page of your website into a landing page
for search visitors

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Picking SEO Keyword Fights You Can Win

All SEO keywords are not created equally—volume and
competition matter!

But everything you just learned will be for nothing, if you’re not using SEO to
develop content for your site that attracts website visitors.

True or false?

The most effective SEO keyword strategy is to compete vigorously for top placement
for the most popular keyword suggestions returned by the Google Keyword
Planner (see: https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home) for a given
root keyword phrase (Primary Keyword Phrase).

If you answered “true,” you might want to reconsider.

On the surface, aiming for the most popular SEO keywords seems like a good
strategy. But in reality, it can be like trying to slay a dragon with a peashooter. The big
guys with the bazookas may have you outgunned.

The little-known fact is, if your SEO keyword strategy is targeting only highly popular
terms, your odds of SEO success are minimal. Alternatively, you might want to settle
for aiming at smaller targets… and succeeding.

Here’s how to decide on the best SEO keyword strategy for
your website

An effective SEO strategy begins with extensive research. Sure, you need to know
which keyword phrases are searched most frequently by customers in your market. However,

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that information alone is not enough to guide your SEO efforts and create the right
keyword-rich editorial content.

Beyond simply “searched most frequently,” you need to know a number: how many
searches are done each month on each individual keyword phrase in your keyword
universe.

Finally, you also need to know what the competition is for those phrases: how many
pages currently serve up those phrases.

The simple but often overlooked truth is this: There’s a popularity contest going on
within your keyword universe, and some keyword phrases are used much more often
than others. That can create an intense competition — and often your website won’t
have the gravitas to win.

Pick keyword fights you can win

If you do the math, you’ll realize that there’s a keyword risk ranking inside each
keyword cluster in your keyword universe, and this information can help prioritize
your choices. You may discover that it’s unwise to target the most popular keyword
phrases, especially if there’s a lot of competition for those phrases.

The best SEO keyword strategy is to target keyword phrases that are more modest in
popularity, and for which there is little competition.

To use an economic metaphor, you’re looking for modest demand and low supply.
The Google Keyword Planner can tell you the demand.

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Googling the keyword “in quotes” at Google.com will tell you the exact match search
results – the competition.

And the Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) reveals the relationship of demand to
competition.

The KCI is the estimated annual search impressions (global monthly searches taken
from the GKP multiplied by 12 months) divided by the number of exact match
search engine results (the competition) at a point in time. Read more about using the
Google Search Phrase Match command to find exact match search results.

Using the Keyword Competitive Index (KCI)

The “sweet spot” for your SEO efforts is often a keyword phrase with a high KCI.
At Mequoda Daily, we generally consider any keyword phrase with a KCI of .5 or
better to be a high value, low-risk target. A keyword phrase with a KCI of .1 to .49 is
a B-grade target. Anything with a lower KCI is not generally a reasonable target
for Mequoda Daily, and most of our consulting clients unless the competition is
practically non-existent, making it a shoo-in for page-one ranking.

Here’s an example from Mequoda Daily.

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One of our old primary keyword clusters was website homepage ideas. We
published a free report, Website Homepage Ideas, on a Rapid Conversion Landing
Page (RCLP).
On a simple broad match search (the type of search most users do), Google ranked
Mequoda Daily first among the 305 million matches it has indexed for the phrase
website homepage ideas.

Google ranked Mequoda Daily second among the 477 million pages indexed for the
singular phrase website homepage idea.

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Both phrases were successfully targeted at the time based on a great KCI between .5
and 1.

The subtle power of “how to”
Here’s a tip that every online editor and copywriter should know.

Many people start their search by typing the words “how to” and a verb in the query
box. Adding “how to” and verbs to your primary keyword phrases can result in
optimal rankings. Test it out with the GKP and see for yourself.

Takeaway: If you don’t consider volume and competition, your SEO success will be
random.

Mequoda supplies all its clients with something we call the Google Visibility Report, a
spreadsheet that displays competitive data for all keywords, The GVR enables them
to target, track and manage their SEO efforts and results. Over time, it will reveal
whether they’ve correctly evaluated the risk of a particular SEO keyword target.

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Perhaps most important, a GVR enables them to discover the best SEO keyword
phrases to target for attracting the most high-quality organic traffic to their websites.
We use these tools to optimize every page of our websites. You’ll learn how to build a
Google Visibility Report in a few chapters.

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Writing Content with an Optimal Keyword Density

Get more page one rankings in Google by being a better
keyword density checker for your business

In the online marketing circles you might be hearing “density is dead” but that
couldn’t be further from the truth. And any SEO guru worth their salt won’t tell you
density is dead, either. All testing confirms it’s alive and well.

As we all know, where you rank in search engine results won’t be based entirely on
keyword density—there are many other factors like site reputation, social media
signals, etc. Your goal is to not let keyword density preclude you from getting on
page one – it might not get you there, but it won’t exclude you.

Our SEO process has several layers that starts with keyword research and ends with
content marketing and an accompanying freemium. Somewhere in the middle of this
process we take what we see as a great keyword and drop it into the article or landing
page that we’re writing.

Typically when we’re writing a 500-word article, the keyword or keyword phrase is
included in the:

• Title
• Subhead
• Body of the article

We’ve always been advocates of using your keywords within body copy, but there was
a period when all it really took was a great keyword in the title and meta description

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to get ranked. This isn’t the case anymore. Google wants it in your copy, but they also
want variations.

Google has begun creating their own meta descriptions to show up in search results,
sometimes instead of using the carefully optimized ones that you write. This makes
including your targeted keyword in the body copy of your article even more
important.

The reason Google is creating its own meta descriptions (those little blurbs that show
up in the Google search page) is for user experience – to prove the article will help
serve their search. Google pulls in a sentence from the article that uses the keyword
the user was searching for.

The lesson here is that if you only use your primary keyword in the title, Google
won’t have anything to pull into that meta description when they need it, and they’ll
be less likely to show you as a top result.

Optimizing your body content

This is a lesson that we teach our clients’ magazine and blog editors when we train
them on search engine optimization.

Write a blog title that includes your keyword or keyword phrase, preferably including
it at the beginning of the title.

Write a subtitle that includes the keyword, again, as close to the beginning as you can.
Write an 800 word article (could be longer, depending on the publication) and include
the keyword several* times.

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*When we say “several times” here, it’s completely dependent on the
keyword. Keep reading.

In order to keep Google happy, but avoid any keyword-stuffing, we like to see a
keyword density of between 1 and 3.

Back in the day, we looked for a density of between 3 and 5, but we’ve recently
lowered after testing what works, and what Google appears to be happy with.
For a less manual approach to keyword density, install the SEO Tool Keyword
Density Checker for WordPress.

Or, if your page is live, try the Keyword Density Checker from SEOBook.
To do it manually, here’s the equation we use to manually determine the keyword
density of an article:

Keyword Density = # of times used divided by number of words in
article multiplied by # of words in keyword phrase.

For example, I’ve used the keyword phrase “keyword density checker” five times in
this chapter – once in the title, once in the subtitle, and three times in the article.

Let’s say the number of words in the chapter is 500, and the number of words in the
keyword phase is three: keyword-density-checker.

(5/500)*3 = .03 which is equal to 3%. – A three-word keyword phrase needs to be
inserted five times to reach 3% keyword density.

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If the keyword phrase only had one word in it, I’d have to use it a few more time to
increase the density of the article, for example:

(15/500)*1 = 3% – A one-word keyword would need to be inserted 15 times in an
article to reach 3% keyword density.
Even though this chapter is truthfully about 700 words long, the density is still steady
at 2.1 because a long keyword phrase was chosen. Not bad, right?

Want to do a little test?

Pick a phrase from your website and find out who ranks for it (that you also rank for)

Then check the keyword density of the top ten pages.

What’s the density of your page?

What’s the density of theirs?

Analyze and ponder to see if there’s any improvement opportunity.

Now, find a keyword you want to rank for. Go through the same process to see how
you might get your page five post onto page one.

It’s one solid check on the checklist of SEO.

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Proven Strategies for SEO Campaign Management

The keys to SEO campaign management can be mastered
in 35 steps

Search is the most fundamental element of content marketing. If you thought social
media was the silver bullet, you were wrong. It’s at least a bronze bullet, but social
media is just one stepping-stone towards search optimization. More likes and Tweets
equal better rank. Better rank means you’ll keep getting website traffic to articles
without even promoting them.

As I noted earlier, one major asset to any Mequoda System is a freemium, or a free
product download. These are the 34 steps for creating, recycling and promoting an
SEO campaign with a freemium.

SEO campaign management part #1:
Choose keywords
There’s no SEO without keyword optimization. If you want people to find you, you must first find
out what they’re looking for.

1. Research audience interest and keywords using the Google Keyword Planner.

2. Choose two keyword phrases from the GKP, make sure they’re the best ones you
can find. Remember, these phrases have high search and a comparably low number
of competing pages.

SEO campaign management part #2:
Decide which content will be most useful

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Google has come to appreciate quality content in order to scare spammy SEOs away. It’s more
important than ever to optimize your best pages and create the content that has already proven itself.

3. Review the most frequently asked questions posted to your online forum.

4. Determine which of your paid products are the best sellers.

5. Examine your magazine cover stories to determine which have the best sell-
through.

6. Determine which sessions at your live events are the most popular.

7. Review your direct mail results to determine which teaser lines create the most
sales.

8. Review the subject lines of your most successful email marketing campaigns to
determine which create the highest open rates.

SEO campaign management part #3:
Create your freemium
Your freemium needs not only to be written, but optimized for search too. After all, it’s the title and
subhead that will be repeated throughout the copy on your landing page. Injecting keywords in your
title makes it easy to optimize a page naturally.

9. Write a title that is eight to 12 words.

10. Use your primary keyword (the best phrase you could find) in the title.

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11. Add the secondary keyword (the second-best phrase you could find) in the
subtitle after a colon.

12. Feel free to repurpose content from your website. Some of the best freemiums
are simply mash-ups of five epic blog articles.

13. Edit and make sure you don’t make these mistakes.*

14. Include a call to action at the back of the freemium, like an up-sell to a premium
product.

15. Include a URL in the footer that links back to the site (or freemium archive).

16. Write the freemium in clear, non-technical language.

17. Design the freemium to be clean and uncluttered.

18. Lay out the freemium to be printed on 8.5 x 11 paper.

SEO campaign management part #4:
Write your RCLP
Your RCLP is what will be found in search engines, so make it count. By repeating the name of the
freemium, which has been optimized, you’ll have a search-friendly page, but try injecting them
naturally into copy, too.

19. Write around 1,500-2,500 words worth of interesting copy about the freemium so
that Google reads it as a valuable, information-packed page.

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20. Repurpose copy from the freemium into the RCLP. Use it to construct a list of
takeaways from the freemium.

21. Use your keywords several times in the copy, but don’t stuff them in there. We
usually aim for a keyword density of 1-3% (more on that next).

22. Create an order form in editorial (OFIE) for the top of the page so that a reader
can submit their email address immediately. Include the keyword-optimized title of
the freemium in every OFIE.

23. Repeat the OFIE throughout the page so that every time you scroll, there’s always
one above the fold.

24. Design the cover of the freemium so the title is large enough to be read in a small
image/thumbnail on the page. Include the cover image in all the OFIEs on your
page.

25. Allow comments on your RCLP and encourage people to use them to write
testimonials.

26. Enable social sharing buttons to boost inbound links and social cred.

SEO campaign management part #5:
Link everything to your RCLP
Search engines appreciate pages with links, and when many internal pages link to your RCLP, it
tells Google that you find this page to be very important. And what’s more important than conversion
pages?

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27. Create a press release and submit it to the best free press release sites, and paid
ones if you want.

28. Add the OFIE to the top of your category page (using an ad server like OpenX).

29. Add the OFIE to the top of every article in that category (again, something like
OpenX).

30. Add a text ad into every article in the related category. The copy promotes the
freemium and links to the RCLP.

31. Send out an email to your own list promoting the new freemium.

32. Work out an arrangement with your partners for them to promote the freemium
and RCLP to their lists.

33. Send out Tweets and post to Facebook about the new freemium.

34. Get in touch with industry bloggers and send them the PDF of your freemium.
Include a link to the RCLP and a short bulleted list of takeaways to make their job
easier.

35. Keep track of everywhere you posted your press release, and all of the sites who
wrote about your freemium. Create an ongoing press list from this so that you can
focus your efforts more effectively the next time.

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Building a Keyword Universe

Instead of researching new keywords every time you write a post or create a new
freemium for your SEO campaign, you might want to consider creating a keyword
universe. It will make steps 1, 2, 9, 10, 11 and 21 much less time consuming.

Your Keyword Universe is the total number of keyword phrases you are tracking for
your website. It’s the total number of keyword phrases your potential audience is
searching for that your content could potentially answer.

Your keyword universe consists of primary keyword phrases and secondary keyword
phrases.

Your primary keyword phrases, or clusters, will generally be your most broad
keyword phrases, usually your website topics or categories. Within your primary
keyword phrases, or clusters, you will have hundreds to thousands of related
secondary keyword phrases.

The secondary keyword phrases are usually 3-5 words long and may be very specific.
You use these phrases in articles, free report titles and anywhere else you’re looking
to build traffic. The more specific the term is, the more likely you are to be ranked.

You can build your keyword universe by using the free AdWords Keyword Planner
and exporting the list of keywords you discover into a categorized spreadsheet. From
there, you can use tools like Advanced Web Ranking to find out where you rank on
the keywords, and track your progress month to month. You can manually check the
competition on keywords also, so that when you choose a keyword, you’re picking a

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keyword fight you can win. When we produce these for our clients, it’s a 20- to 40-
hour process in total.

Picking Out Desirable Keywords

Mary Van Doren is our lead copywriter and we love her insights on SEO. She’s a
trained wordsmith, so if anyone can squash a keyword into a sentence and make it
sound like they’re not even trying, it’s Mary. Here’s what she suggests:

• Seek out keywords with other desirable traits besides their keyword
competitive index (KCI). It’s easy to nail the SEO without even trying, or at
least without writing the often dull copy you wind up with when you have to
manipulate your text awkwardly to include less targeted keywords.

• Look for nouns that score well in both singular and plural, since it’s always a
challenge to use one or the other only. We just write naturally that way using
both.

• Keep your eyes peeled for keyword phrases that consist of “how to” plus a
verb. They rank well, and imagine how easy it is to write “how to” in a variety
of sentences.

• You’re in luck if you can locate keyword phrases in which the last word of
keyword phrase 1 is the same as the first word in keyword phrase 2. If “clinical
laboratory” and “laboratory business” are both in your universe, you’ll get
double the pleasure every time you write “clinical laboratory business.”

SEO campaign management is a bit of an artform, isn’t it? And we’re not ashamed to
admit that researching keywords can be considered an actual hobby of ours. First,
you get to analyze the data in front of you, then you create a product that uses the
data, then you see if your data and product produce the results you hypothesized. If

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they don’t, try again; And if they do, try, try again! Long-time Mequoda operators
have 30 or more RCLPs and freemiums in their arsenal; how many are in yours?

Recycling Freemiums During an SEO Slump

Freemiums with RCLPs that are optimized for search and any good blockbuster
RCLP, one that ranks in the No. 1 position for a good keyword phrase, can bring in
60% or more email subscribers. And if you’re wondering why we love email
subscribers, it’s because email gives us the chance to court potential buyers and
subscribers with good content before we ask them to buy anything.

With all of this in mind, sometimes a very effective freemium can drop in search.
This means that a funnel of new email leads can suddenly come to a halt. While
there’s no magic way to know why Google would drop a first page ranking article
onto the second page or below, these are a few factors:

• Too many people found it in search and clicked the back button quickly,
signifying that the content isn’t what they were looking for. This is an
indicator that the keyword you’re targeting doesn’t match what you’re actually
offering on the page.

• You bought backlinks at one point, and Google is catching up with your black
hat practices.

• Other pages targeting the same keywords have more social media backlinks
than yours does.

• You keyword-stuffed the post with an astronomical keyword density and
Google is now punishing you.

• The page hasn’t been updated in a long time, and Google is considering it
outdated.

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Since our clients are all trained the white hat way, the most common reason for a
drop on an RCLP is that last bullet; the page has simply gotten stale. Perhaps it hasn’t
been updated in a while, or nobody is sharing it in social media anymore. In any case,
nobody has given it a good hug in a while and Google has begun to pick the cooler
pages over yours. When is life not like high school, right?

The Second Life of your Freemium Strategy

This is the point where it’s time to recycle, refresh, and re-promote. It’s time to get a
makeover! If you want to refresh one that has begun to lose rank and needs a boost,
follow the next steps:

1. Review the comments you’ve gotten on your freemium thus far in email, social
media, or on the RCLP itself if your RCLP allows comments (we suggest it does).
Use this feedback to create a better report, but also to write better bullet points (pain
points!) for the description of your freemium.

2. Once your report has been updated, update your RCLP that updates the content
and makes it more current, like an “updated for 2016″ sticker.

3. Create a new press release touting the update and submit it to the best free press
release sites, and paid ones if you want.

4. Refresh your text ads and OFIEs with new copy. The copy promotes the
freemium and links to the RCLP.

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5. Write a blog post announcing the updated freemium. Write at least three new blog
posts over the next several weeks and months that recycle content from the
freemium and promotes it at the same time.

6. Send out a circ builder email to your own list promoting the updated freemium. If
you are able to tell who downloaded the report previously, consider sending them an
email letting them know the report has been updated.

7. Work out an arrangement with your partners for them to promote the freemium
and RCLP to their lists.

8. Send out Tweets and post to Facebook about the new freemium. Schedule Tweets
out for the next few weeks and for the next 12 months so that it’s always being
refreshed.

9. Get in touch with industry bloggers and send them the PDF of your freemium.
Include a link to the RCLP and a short bulleted list of take-aways to make their job
easier.

10. Keep track of everywhere you posted your press release, and all of the sites that
wrote about your freemium. Create an ongoing press list from this so that you can
focus your efforts more effectively the next time.

Bonus: As mentioned, one of our best practices is to allow comments on RCLPs.
This is because you can use it as an area for people to say nice things about your
download. It also helps with SEO, because Google likes pages with comments on
them.

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A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Google Visibility
Report

Five steps to building a blueprint for a well-optimized website

Our clients publish in many different niches: food, investing, archaeology, martial
arts, natural health, golf among others, and that doesn’t even include any of our B2B
clients. When they first come to us, they have nothing in common with one another,
but after working with us for six months to a year, they all have one thing in
common: a Google Visibility Report (GVR).

The Google Visibility Report (GVR) enables you to target, track and manage your
SEO efforts and results. Over time, it will reveal whether you’ve correctly evaluated
the risk of a particular SEO keyword target.

Perhaps most important, the GVR will enable you and your online publishing team to
discover the best SEO keyword phrases to target for attracting the most high quality
organic traffic to your website.

Every time you write a new blog post or name a new free report, you can use the
GVR to pick a title based on a keyword that your audience has proven to be looking
for. Because why would you title it otherwise?

There’s a very important metric in every GVR we call the Keyword Competitive
Index (KCI). The KCI is a simple formula that takes the annual search volume for a
keyword phrase and divides it by the amount of exact Google listings for that
keyword: Annual Search Volume/Exact Google Listings.

The higher the KCI, the better chance you have of ranking on the term. If you can
find keyword phrases with a KCI of 1 or higher, it means there’s more search volume

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than exact Google listings. These are the type of keyword phrases worth targeting,
especially if they’re highly relevant to your audience and have high search volume.

How to Build a Google Visibility Report

To answer right up front a common question: Creating Google Visibility Report’s is
one of the services we provides to our clients, so you might be wondering why we’re
telling you how to build a GVR. The reason is that it takes between 40-80 hours to
build — if you want to build it on your own, more power to you!

In order to get the true process for the GVR, I interviewed our analytics director,
Norann Oleson who broke down the process into these steps:

Step 1: Brainstorming

The first step in the GVR process is looking at what you publish, what you sell, and
how closely the two are tied together. In a perfect Mequoda System, every free piece
of content is related to a paid product or an aligned sponsor. Therefore, for every
blog category, there should be a free download in that category that leads to a paid or
sponsored product in the same category.

To see how far along you are with this alignment, we begin with a brainstorm. Part of
this brainstorm may include re-categorizing your website with new topics that you
aren’t currently covering or eliminating ones that you are. “We often do a content
audit to help us figure out what topics to focus on,” says Oleson. “I always research
more topics than needed because we will also look at search volume to help narrow
down the topics to focus on.”

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Step 2: Search Volume Research

Where else to start but the world’s most popular search engine? As mentioned
before, we use Google’s Keyword Planner (GKP) to determine what search phrases
people are looking for. You must create and sign into a Google account to use this
tool even though it’s free. The GKP was designed specifically to run AdWords
campaigns, so it has many more functions that we don’t need for simple keyword
research. This is the process:

• Choose “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas.”

• Enter a word or phrase into the search box (ex. azaleas) 86

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Targeting: The default setting is All Languages/Google – depending on the
audience you can customize – the GKP provides a high level of geo-targeting that the
old Keyword Tool did not, which can be critically important for regional
publications.

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• Hit “Get Ideas” and select the tab that says “Keyword Ideas.”
• The GKP will suggest up to 800 proximity phrases (phrases that occur in close

physical proximity on a webpage to the original seed phrase).
• Download the results. The only data needed is Keyword and Avg. Monthly

Searches. All other columns can be deleted. Save to Excel.

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Important note: There is a column that says “Competition.” This is the bidding
competition for Adwords campaigns, not webpage competition.

Step 3: Research the Competition

At this point, we might look at the spreadsheet and see phrases that make no sense or
are misspelled and need to be removed.

Next, we Google each phrase in “quotes” – either manually or with a program.

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Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) is a program which can process large lists of phrases
but it has an important limitation – phrases with no exact match will come back with
broad match data. Be careful not to confuse the two.

Step 4: Organize the Data

Start with your GKP file. These will be your first columns, columns A and B of the
GVR that you’re now beginning to build.

Next, create columns for Annual Searches, Google Listings and Google KCI.
• Annual searches = Monthly search volume (from GKP) x 12
• Google Listings (competition) = Google the phrase in quotes to get this
number (from Step 3)

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• Google Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) = Annual search / Google
listings

Mequoda’s KCI Grading Scale

Not sure which keywords to go after? Use the KCI as your guide. The “sweet spot”
for your SEO efforts is often a keyword phrase with a high KCI. At Mequoda we
generally consider any keyword phrase with a KCI of .5 or better to be a high value,
low-risk target. A keyword phrase with a KCI of .1 to .49 is a B-grade target.

Anything with a lower KCI is not generally a good target for Mequoda and most of
our consulting clients. However, keep competition in mind, too, because there’s little
point in targeting a word with a high KCI and 50 million competing pages. On that
note, feel free to target keywords that have competition under 100,000 competing

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pages. Even though the traffic may be low, these keyword phrases are often a shoo-in
for page-one ranking and an easy win. To quote the old John Wayne line – “I’m not
looking for a fair fight, I’m looking for a fight I can win.”

Step 5: Benchmark

Create columns for Google Position, Google Visibility Index (GVI) and Annual
Impressions.

If you have multiple topics/clusters then you can add a column for a Primary
Keyword Cluster. This is usually the name of the category an article will publish into
on your blog. We can use the GVR to determine the name of the Primary Keyword
Cluster.

Google Position: This column tells us whether or not we rank on a keyword already.
We use AWR to automatically Google all phrases against any URL provided. It will
look at the first 50 positions and provide the ranking URL strings.

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Google Visibility Index (GVI): The GVI is based on Google position. This is
the percentage of search traffic that will see your post headline and description in
their search results, based on which page it shows up on. For example, if your article
shows up on page 1 in Google, we assume that 100% of searchers looking for that
term will see your article in their results. If it shows up on page two, only 5% will see
it because most people don’t visit page 2 for a search result.

• Page 1: GVI = 100%
• Page 2: GVI = 5%
• Page 3: GVI = 1%
• Pages 4 & 5: GVI = 0

Annual Impressions: This is how many annual impressions we estimate you’ll get
based on your GVI. For example, if the term gets 2000 searches per year and you’re
on page one, we expect you will get up to 2000 impressions on that Google results
page in a year. Users will then choose if they want to click it to read more. The
formula for this column is Annual Searches x GVI.

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Building Your Cluster Summary

As I mentioned previously, you can categorize your keywords into different
“clusters.”

Google places high value on publishers that they consider “authoritative” – so it’s
important not just to focus on individual phrases but also on clusters of phrases. The
ultimate goal is to have a depth of posts on the same topic. If there is one post for
each keyword, a cluster with 300-400 phrases might have several hundred posts.

To simplify the jargon, think of the clusters as your website categories and each
keyword in that cluster as a blog post. With this in mind, the GVR becomes an index
of current and potential content on your website, an SEO roadmap you can use to
plan new content and track existing content.

This content should be updated and monitored regularly.

• Annually – update search volume, Google listings, perform new keyword
research.

• Monthly – update Google position to see if you have gained or lost rank.
• Daily – editors should always double-check search volume and Google

Listings (competition) before choosing keywords.

We’ve been building GVRs at Mequoda for some time now, and it’s an ever-evolving
process as Google changes their tools, APIs and datasets. So far we’ve been able to
work with the data they provide to create extremely valuable and optimized websites
using the GVR.

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Some of the Adjustments We’ve Made Recently

Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) isn’t perfect and can serve up to 20% of inaccurate
results. One of the biggest weaknesses is revealed when you have certain phrases that
are 3, 4, 5 or more words long. They’ll often show up with unusually high Google
listings (several million).

When Norann performed the exercise manually, she discovered that many of these
phrases actually had no exact match results, so the tool was giving broad match data.

To compensate for this type of error, we’ve been scanning the results to identify
longer phrases that we would expect to have low competition and checking them
manually by going to Google.com and searching for the phrase in quotes, as
explained above.

NOTE: It’s important to be logged out of your account when you do this, otherwise
the results may be personalized to you and the numbers skewed.

We’ve also updated our own plugin to check and detect errors with AWR that we
discover. It’s not a perfect process, but we’re dedicated to working on the behalf of
our clients to always be updating and improving because the GVR is the single most
useful tool a publisher can have in their online marketing arsenal.

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Social Media Optimization

How to drive more traffic to your website and build a larger
email list through social media

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Using Social Media to Drive Email Circulation

Social media is not the enemy of email.
In fact, it can be used to build email circulation.

Most publishers we’ve talked to say social media isn’t a huge sales driver for them.
Sure, they’ve made a few bucks here, but they’re not making Dell money or anything
(Dell makes millions of dollars per year through Twitter alone).

However, social media is more often than not, a big traffic driver, and more
importantly, an SEO-supporter. And if you’ve gotten this far, then you know that
both of these components result in revenue. Every Tweet, reTweet, like and
comment is a social signal that tells Google you’re part of the cool club and that
people like you.

I read a Tweet once that said, “I like to say that Twitter is like a bar, Facebook is your
living room and LinkedIn is the local chamber of commerce.” I don’t know the
woman who wrote it, Brenda S. Stoltz from Ariad Partners, but the idea is so
relatable that I couldn’t just try to make up my own version; I decided to elaborate
instead.

Twitter is the bar. You talk to everyone and anyone. You have a few too many and
you’re telling people your life story. More importantly, other people are there, like
you, to meet people and build new relationships. Some people talk too much and
don’t listen, others listen well but might not talk as much. Either way, there’s a
revolving captive audience and there are relationships developing in the bar. As a
business, you should know that there’s a lot of chatter to keep up with, but so many
different ways to become everyone’s best friend.

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Facebook is indeed like your living room. You don’t invite everyone from the bar to
your living room, but you might have hung out with a couple of your new bar friends
at a more sobering place and have become comfortable with inviting them to your
living room. When you’re a business on Facebook, you need to remember that you’re
still kind of that bar person—the one they don’t necessarily invite into their living
room. However, if you brought some good brownies (a sale) or beer (discounts) they
might let you in to stay as long as you don’t creep out everyone else.

LinkedIn is sort of like the local chamber of commerce; however I like to think of it
more like a conference too. Everyone on LinkedIn is on it for a professional reason,
whether they’re looking for a job, trying to establish themselves as an expert in
LinkedIn Answers, or build a bigger network. As businesses, we should recognize
that the bulk of people on LinkedIn are business people and don’t go to LinkedIn to
find deals like they do Twitter and Facebook. If you’re a B2B publisher, this is great
news and makes your updates and group interactions very easy. If you’re a consumer
magazine it just means that your best efforts are likely spent elsewhere.

But there are other social networks to think about now too, like Pinterest and
YouTube. Even Google+.

Google+ is like the party you got invited to, but you’re pretty much the only one that
showed up. You’re there for the good karma (SEO) and because you can’t really leave
(Google is watching you!) It’s awkward, and nobody laughs at your
jokes. And everybody is wondering why they came and how they can figure out an
excuse to run out the front door without looking like a jerk.

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Pinterest is a like a baby shower, and that’s fairly accurate because 92% of pins on
Pinterest are created or shared by women. This is where people come together to
display their craft projects and recipes. Everybody oggles each other’s fun ideas and
relentlessly share them with one another.

YouTube is like a night out at karaoke. The person on stage is the star and you can’t
look away even if you want to. YouTube videos offer instant authority, regardless of
the quality of the video. In the same respect, you have to love a person who gets up
and sings, regardless of whether they’re a Whitney Houston or a Rebecca Black. Song
choice is what counts – everyone loves to sing along. The same goes for content – it’s
what you say that matters.

So What About Email?

Some might argue that email is more personal than social media because an email gets
delivered to your inbox, whereas you need to log into Facebook or Twitter to read a
message or post. What can’t be argued is that email still drives the highest profits and
typically “touches” the most number of people per promotion.

There was a time when publishers feared social media a little bit. And that’s not
without merit, either. Savvy folks often unsubscribe from emails and “like” a
Facebook page instead. This isn’t the worst thing in the world; it just means that a
subscriber wants to hear from you less often. And as we all know, Facebook knows
how to limit your exposure.

That’s why it’s becoming more important to build your social media “back up” list. If
you can’t keep people subscribed through email, your social media “lists” can come in
handy.

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Since all of our email subscribers become subscribed by downloading a free white
paper, we’ve added “like us” and “follow us” buttons to our “thank-you” pages. That
way, right after a user has felt comfortable enough to give us their email address, they
might also be warmed up enough to click “like” or “follow” too. By doing this, our
monthly “likes” and “follows” have skyrocketed tenfold.

Now, how can you use those social media lists to build your email list to the newbies?
Easy. Here are a few things we do at Mequoda and lessons we’ve learned from our
clients. As you might already know, a good Mequoda system relies on a robust
collection of excellent ebooks, special reports and white papers to give away. So
naturally, all of our tips include giving something away!

Twitter
Obviously there are a million ways to send out links to your landing pages, but here’s
one strategy.

Every week we have “Free Report Friday.” We’ve even done “White Paper
Wednesday” on our @Mequoda account, and we’d recommend you do the same.
You don’t want to commercialize your Twitter feed too much, but you can quickly
convert Twitter followers to email subscribers by tossing around a freemium here and
there. We’ve found that Twitter users convert 200% better than visitors from search
– likely because they’re highly qualified “leads.” After all, they were already
subscribed to your content through Twitter!

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