Simple but Useful Calculators for SEOs, Internet Marketers

It’s Wednesday calling. I need a miracle.

How often does this happen?….You’ve got 50 things that need to get done today and now you’ve got : (pick one or many)

1. a meeting with the CEO in 10 min. to discuss trimming back your traditional marketing dept.
2. a big potential SEO client that’s interested but is coming in so that you can seal the deal.
3. an existing client calling to let you know they “think” their new site design is ineffective, even though it JUST went live.
4. to show the estimated value of all your social media efforts.

What do you do?

No, no, no – even though it sounds bad, you can’t just off yourself.

If you had asked me this question 5 years back though, I would’ve suggested you simply walk out to your car to get something you forgot – and then told you to either trip in the parking lot, making sure to hit your face on the asphalt,  or throw yourself down the escalator – anywhere a good number of people can vouch for the severity of the incident, since you won’t be able to talk, or see straight- hopefully earning you a few days off. Lucky for you, it’s 5 years later, and there are some really helpful tools that can accomplish (or at least assist) many of the above tasks without eating up your entire day.

And you didn’t even have to get out of your chair – or maim yourself – to find them. Let’s get started by listing the appropriate calculator for the job:

Meeting with the CEO in 10 min. to discuss trimming back our marketing dept.

Marketsmith’s Marketing Staff Calculator will help you determine the number of staff members you need in your marketing department (excluding web-related functions & print buying).

big potential SEO client that’s interested but is coming in so that you can seal the deal

Siteposition’s Conversion Rate Calculators lead costs, figures in management and setup costs for SEO and PPC, and provides quick and dirty ROI numbers for those times when you just need some rough numbers to know whether or not going further is even worth the effort.

an existing client calling to let you know they “think” their new site design is ineffective, even though it JUST went live

Marketo’s Landing Page Testing Calculator is really handy, offering the “say what?” options as default. In less than 1 minute, it’ll return the recommended testing time and number of versions to test to ensure valid results.Resist the urge to get defensive and argue with them – just say “no problem, let’s test that theory” – and then rip out these numbers off the cuff, making sure to ask them what  confidence level % they require from you to minimize false positives and negatives.  They’ll leave the conversation reassured and smiling. hopefully.

show the estimated value of all your social media efforts.

Oh crap. If you knew the answer to this, your trouble’s would be over. After all, isn’t it “impossible” to gauge the value of social media efforts, since there are so many unknown, untrackable variables?

Probably, but fortunately for you Dragonsearch created a social networking media ROI calculator anyway. Does it work accurately? I have no idea – but something is better than nothing, which is what you’ve got right now. It does factor in social network account setup time, # of posts, hourly monitoring and activity time – but also leaves it up to you to assign values to fields such as “word of  mouth” and “story value”, so don’t expect your CFO to fall for these numbers. But hey, you’re in marketing – you should be good at making stuff up and getting people to buy in. That’s what you do.

10 Tips for Passing Google Adwords Certification

Google Adwords Professional Exam Helpful Hints

Even though it seems that the SEO/SEM industry is somewhat immune from the economic downturn that’s affecting most of the U.S.,  it’s still a very good idea to make sure that you’re doing everything you can to increase your value to your company and your clients. And because our industry is still in its toddler stage, professional qualifications and certifications are limited – making them all the more important.

Google’s Adwords professional qualification status is probably at the top of the list for most recognized – which is why you need to take it as soon as you’re able.  I recently did just that (and passed first time through, …whew!) – and I thought that I would share some helpful tips to make YOUR exam experience as smooth as possible.

Obviously you know that you can’t take the test until you’ve met all the requirements. Once you’ve completed those, it’s time to get to studying.

1. Get very, very familiar with all the topics covered in the adwords learning center. Don’t rely on only the quiz sections to get you through it. Read ALL the info. Note the differences in multimedia and text lessons -I’d advise going through both sections, even though Google says you don’t have to.
2. Understand the different billing options and how they work.
3. Understand in depth the differences in content and search targeting.
   
4. Know exactly where to find information and reports within the different tabs.
   
5. Have a solid grasp of the different bid management and ad optimization solutions.
6. Don’t think that just passing the practice exam will guarantee success. The real test is substantially tougher – at least mine was.
   
7. Download the NEW Adwords editor (if you haven’t already) – know it inside out.
8. REALLY read the adwords editorial guidelines – know what you can and can’t have on your landing page. Make notes and keep them handy.
   
9. If you have dual monitors – use them. There is no restriction on using sources while taking the exam, but you’ll quickly realize that there’s just not much time to look stuff up – roughly 100-120 questions in 1 1/2 hours. Spend too long looking it up, and you’ll find yourself scrambling at the end.
10. Sleep well the night before – eat a good breakfast – avoid all distractions while taking the test.
    
11. (super secret tip) – there’s a little check box at the top right of the exam page which allows you to mark a question for later review. Make SURE to check it, otherwise you’ll never make it back to the beginning questions before time runs out  (you have to manually click back through each question if you Don’t check it). I know this, because I forgot to do it – I left several questions unanswered early on, thinking I would just return – but alas, I ran out of time. Fortunately, I must be some kind of genius, because I still passed with a pretty decent score.

If you take my advice, I feel pretty confident that you’ll more than likely pass without too much difficulty. Either way, you won’t have to wait too long to obtain your results – and if you DO pass, you’ll get the joy of being able to place this cool little badge on your site and promotional materials, as well as some other nifty perks.

Hope this helps!

Google Squared Hates Conservatives

Does google hate conservatives?

If I had to answer that based on what I’ve seen over the last year, and especially today – I would have to say……YES.

Before I get into what I perceive as blatant bias from Google against certain political views, I want to let you know that I didn’t plan on writing a post about this topic.   I had originally thought that I would do some weird searches on google squared to see if I could get any whacked out or interesting results that I could share  - well, to that end, I guess they ARE interesting. And disturbing.

I’m just going to cut to the chase.

After running a bunch of different names and topics through squared (type in google, keep adding the recommendation squares and you get back hilltop algorithm, for example), I was actually having fun, and thinking how great this would be for doing school reports, or discovering hot topics related to my clients’ service offerings.

I wanted to see how good squared was at grabbing recent events, so I typed in Obama – which presented this (click each image to view larger):

I'm sure Google would have wrapped this square in a heart if they could.

Pretty cool. It includes members of his cabinet and campaign committee. Not bad.

Then I typed in George Bush and got this:

I'm sure they didn't MEAN to put a disrespectful picture here. yeah, right.

You’re kidding me, right? THAT’s the picture that google returns for George Bush? It doesn’t even SAY George Bush next to it, and it’s the 1st square on the page! I’m not a huge fan of George Bush, but I think he deserves a bit more respect than that. It’s got to be a fluke, so I move on – to Bill Clinton. If someone’s going to have interesting pictures associated with a president, I can’t think of a better choice….

Gotta love the unbiased description

Well hang on. It looks like an actual presidential photo. And nothing on Monica? hmph. What about his VP, Al Gore…..

they inconveniently left out his creation of the internet.

Besides the fact that I had to MANUALLY put Al Gore into a square at the bottom, since Google has a tough time when you include first and last name sometimes, this is pretty much what I think most people would expect. To see how Squared treats Bush’s VP, Dick Cheney – just look at the image at the beginning of this post.

I’m not one to just immediately jump to conclusions though, so I go for one more – this time, Ronald Reagan.

This makes me want to throw up, it's so disrespectful.

Ok, it’s pretty hard NOT to think they’re being deliberately biased when you see results like that. Still, there’s always a chance that the “secret google algorithm” is pulling the most popular results from image search, so I go ahead and check to see….

Think the image is retreived by most popular result? think again.

Guess we can mark that as a big NO.

To sum things up – I really could care less what side of the political fence you’re on, and I think Google does 80-90% of everything right. But, with each year, Google grows a bit larger and a bit more powerful – so we need to keep things in check.  I’ll let Mr. Reagan end this post with a couple of very pertinent quotes…

Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.

To sit back hoping that someday, some way, someone will make things right
is to go on feeding the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last – but eat you he will.

Think I’m way off base? Have examples that show bias towards liberals? Let me know by leaving a comment!- I’m open to discussion!

*disclaimer: the thoughts and views represented in this post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of my company or clients.