Bots are trending in the artificial intelligence industry. I don't mean the infamous Russian 'bots' which are mainly people-run, created to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. No. I mean online bots that receive, process and respond to information; they perform the mundane tasks that we'd normally complete. According to Kurt Wagner from CNBC, bots range from online chatbots that simulate conversation, to bots that schedule appointments and bots that provide customer service support (e.g. respond to inquiries). The bot industry is growing by the day and large companies such as Google (with Google Now), Microsoft, Slack, Kik and now Facebook are increasingly creating bots that perform simple tasks.
Google's Fresh Bots (which constantly return to updated sites) and Deep Crawlers (which scout sites monthly) index updates for Google, that is, perform a relatively simple task which would otherwise require an enormous undertaking for humans to complete. Just think about having to register updates as they happen, every day, hour and even minute for thousands of sites. If it were not for bots, this would be nearly impossible. What if we were to create a customizable bot service that performs one task for your regular, on a budget, entrepreneur? The bot can learn to send you reminders or schedule reminders, or to use your credit card to buy toilet paper every month. In effect, to complete one mundane task that you do often and would save so much time if it were outsourced to an online robot.
I've tried to search for a service like this, but I've come up with zero results and prototypes at best. I'd be intrigued to see where this opportunity goes and if something like this comes out in the near future.
In any case, these bots could completely change the possibilities for off-site optimization. Just think about it, a bot that messages companies requests for backlinks? Bots that check your site and make sure you're using internal links, deep links for other sites, or to make sure that "click here" doesn't appear but instead the name of the page, etc. A bot to complete the relatively easy tasks which a busy entrepreneur may not have time to complete or a novice start-up not familiar with optimization would know about. Bots that help startups to start up, by taking care of the little things that can make a big difference in the long run.
Showing posts with label search optimization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label search optimization. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Sunday, July 07, 2013
Organic Search is #1
According to a recent study, customers acquired through organic search are worth more than customers acquired through all other means, on a lifetime value basis.
The study, compared organic search to everything from CPC to Email to Facebook and Twitter. I'm a bit surprised that Twitter ended up 23% below the average CLV. Honestly, I thought most Twitter advertisements were more about brand building than about CLV, so I'm not sure how accurate the study is.
The lesson here, is that optimizing your website, which moves you up the search rankings for "free" is a better value marketing than many of the paid marketing routes.
From the article, the growth of email marketing is significant, as it has grown over 4x over the last 4 years. However, it is still dwarfed by Organic Search, which is twice as prevalent.
The study, compared organic search to everything from CPC to Email to Facebook and Twitter. I'm a bit surprised that Twitter ended up 23% below the average CLV. Honestly, I thought most Twitter advertisements were more about brand building than about CLV, so I'm not sure how accurate the study is.
The lesson here, is that optimizing your website, which moves you up the search rankings for "free" is a better value marketing than many of the paid marketing routes.
From the article, the growth of email marketing is significant, as it has grown over 4x over the last 4 years. However, it is still dwarfed by Organic Search, which is twice as prevalent.
Sunday, June 05, 2011
SEO Lessons Learned
As soon as I had a little time this weekend, I downloaded the Foxy SEO toolbar, and used it to scan the keywords of a website I recently launched for my company. It was fascinating to see that the 'title' of the site was indeed still 'home', as opposed to anything that would actually drive qualified visitors to the content. Furthermore, very few relevant keywords showed up on the page at all.
We had several web specialists on the project -- information architecture and user interface specialists, designers and producers. But none were charged with SEO specifically, and while some many have had a general sense that verbiage on the site would be important, it didn't occur to anyone to make sure that the words were integrated in the most critical places.
For me there are a few lessons learned from this experience:
1. SEO won't happen by itself; someone has to be the point person for making sure that it's a part of site design and content development. Designers know design. Content developers know content. Neither group is thinking about SEO unless someone with bigger vision is pushing search optimization as part of the agenda.
2. We thought that more conceptual and less concrete copy frameworks would be better for our audience. That may be true, but because our copy focuses on vague and general rather than concrete and specific, many of the keywords we need for search are present.
3. Meeting your audience's needs isn't possible if the audience can't find you. The best copy can't achieve it's goals if people aren't coming to the site -- and search (particularly Google) is the single greatest driver of traffic.
4. The keywords that drive traffic may not be the most obvious. We did have a few relevant search terms on our page, but they were so broad that we would not be able to compete with the many other sites in our category on the web. We need to get specific.
Looking forward to playing around with the other tools to see where else we may have gone wrong (and hopefully some places we've gone right!).
We had several web specialists on the project -- information architecture and user interface specialists, designers and producers. But none were charged with SEO specifically, and while some many have had a general sense that verbiage on the site would be important, it didn't occur to anyone to make sure that the words were integrated in the most critical places.
For me there are a few lessons learned from this experience:
1. SEO won't happen by itself; someone has to be the point person for making sure that it's a part of site design and content development. Designers know design. Content developers know content. Neither group is thinking about SEO unless someone with bigger vision is pushing search optimization as part of the agenda.
2. We thought that more conceptual and less concrete copy frameworks would be better for our audience. That may be true, but because our copy focuses on vague and general rather than concrete and specific, many of the keywords we need for search are present.
3. Meeting your audience's needs isn't possible if the audience can't find you. The best copy can't achieve it's goals if people aren't coming to the site -- and search (particularly Google) is the single greatest driver of traffic.
4. The keywords that drive traffic may not be the most obvious. We did have a few relevant search terms on our page, but they were so broad that we would not be able to compete with the many other sites in our category on the web. We need to get specific.
Looking forward to playing around with the other tools to see where else we may have gone wrong (and hopefully some places we've gone right!).
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