SEO Newsletter

Hi there folks! This newsletter is designed to keep you up-to-date regarding the world of SEO and Performics SEO offering. This month we want to give you the lowdown on what's worth reading from the SEO community, how search is changing through the development of the semantic web and what you can do to stay ahead of the curve. We also have some exciting news about the team here in London.

April 2012

Hello & Goodbye...

We have some big news regarding our team in London this month with several senior SEOs moving around the Performics network to pursue new opportunities: Ben Chesters, mainstay of the team for over 3 years has been promoted to become Head of SEO in our Singapore office. Hell be skipping the country at the end of April for his new life in SE Asia. Good luck Ben! Jonah Berger, who has been an SEO with Performics for over 5 years, is moving from our Chicago office to take Bens place as SEO Account Director in London. Jonah brings a wealth of experience with him (he wrote the piece on semantic search overleaf) and he will be in place from May 1st.

Rich Kirk

Head of SEO

Top Tips...
Heres a neat way to monitor the success of your SEO activity for target keywords on a daily basis. Using Google Analytics custom alerts you can now be emailed automatically when a keyword begins to drive a significantly increased volume of traffic. Open Analytics as normal. Click Home > Intelligence Events > Overview > Custom Alerts > Manage > New Custom Alert. Now you build the alerts. Set the period to day. Isolate organic search traffic by selecting medium matches exactly organic. Then configure the alert to let you know when you see a 15% increase or decrease (youll want separate alerts for each) vs. the same day the previous week. Once thats done Google will send you an email when the alert is triggered, allowing you to understand on a daily basis which keywords are being impacted by SEO or a seasonal spike in demand.

Lucy Scanlon also joins the team this month to head-up our relationship with Reckitt Benckiser. Lucy has been an account director within the SEO industry for several years and has a particularly strong background with regard to linkbuilding.
Fun facts about our new arrivals: Jonah is a frequent marathon runner (11 so far) and Lucy is a yoga-enthusiast. Looks like the team will be getting a whole lot fitter this summer!

Performics now boast offices in almost 30 countries, and in each one we have SEO expertise we can put at your disposal. Our offices coordinate through regular best practice councils and our hub offices (Chicago, London and Singapore) invest significant amounts of resource into ensuring that our approach and service levels are consistent across borders and languages.

Performics Rebrand You may notice a new Performics brand style over the coming weeks. This is all part of our ongoing programme to align even more closely with our colleagues in Performics and Zenith Optimedia offices around the world. More news next month.
Performics EMEA Office: 48 Charlotte St, London W1T 2NS T +44(0)20 3585 7306 www.performics.com

SEO Newsletter

April 2012

Worth Reading This Month...

http://goo.gl/8Hh92 - Googles latest research on the relationship between paid and organic visibility for the same keywords. http://goo.gl/FLBge - Bit of a rant about website usability but full of really useful tips on how to make sure your developers are paying attention to the little details that ensure a high-quality user experience. http://goo.gl/H4tlu - Nielsens latest Global Trust in Advertising report is out. Unsurprisingly, recommendations and reviews, either from someone known to the user or a stranger, are the most trusted sources of information for buying decisions. Paid ads have fallen further behind. http://goo.gl/atGgt - Shameless plug here for our own content, but this blogpost and white paper on semantic search is really useful for getting to grips with a topic that will come to dominate SEO over the coming months. Search engines want you to organise and tag your content in more detail so they can answer much more detailed queries than they currently receive, with the ultimate aim of saving users time. http://goo.gl/WUbmQ - Another interesting piece by Performics how could hipster-site-ofthe-moment Pinterest play a role in your SEO strategy? Depending on how its content is shared, Pinterest has the potential to increase search visibility for a wider variety of search terms related to your brand. http://goo.gl/6Lgzs - great write-up of the recent Webmaster Edu session at Google UK, which we were lucky enough to be at. The session was given by people who actually work on search quality & webspam at Google (theyre the guys who build & manage the algorithm). It was a really interesting session and there are all sorts of useful titbits in here to take-away.
Performics EMEA Office: 48 Charlotte St, London W1T 2NS T +44(0)20 3585 7306 www.performics.com

Best in Class...
Baking Mad are a UK-based baking community. With over 2000 recipes on their website they have a lot of great content. Their main KPI is increasing traffic from generic keywords on a monthly basis.

Thanks to a progressive linkbuilding approach and a continual effort to optimise their webpages, Baking Mad have seen some absolutely stellar results from their SEO activity. Year-on-year growth has been phenomenal:

+395% Y-o-Y change in visits to the website

from generic keywords.

+540%

Y-o-Y change in visits to the site from Valentines Day related keywords

+1263%

Y-o-Y change in visits to the site from Easter-related keywords. Baking Mad have also captured significant market-share from competitor websites through this programme. We work on a quarterly review basis with Baking Mad, allowing them the freedom to increase / decrease investment based on results.
Baking Mad: Visits from Organic Search

+461% change in total traffic from SEO over 15 months

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Total SEO Traffic Generic Keyword SEO Traffic

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