It’s been two months since increasing our investment in our blogs, and we’re already seeing big dividends! Page views and visits are up 10% each on PPC Hero and SEO Boy. Bounce rates on both have decreased 2% and average time on site is up 8% and 4%, respectively. Big, big congrats to our team at Hanapin for doing such an outstanding job, and kudos to Bethany Bey and Abby Henry who led the charge! Here’s what the team has in store for this month…
NEWS UPDATES
For both blogs, we’ll continue writing our news updates, and for PPC Hero specifically, we’re paying extra attention to breaking news that we receive from Google as one of their agency partners. They recently paid us a visit to help plan for the rest of 2011 and are giving us unprecedented access to webinars, white papers, and other materials. If there’s new information to report on AdWords, you’ll hear it from us first!
UPCOMING ARTICLES
For PPC Hero, we have several topics lined up. Among them are ‘how to create a test conversion’ that should increase your ROI since you’ll be able to verify and pinpoint tracking issues sooner and ‘the effects of broad modifiers on an account’ which will give some good tips and insights on how keyword and match type selection impact your account’s performance.
For SEO Boy, we’re writing about ‘analyzing SEO data.’ At first, I thought this topic was a bit vanilla, primarily because that’s a fundamental service that Hanapin provides to all our clients already. However, when I read a recent tweet from SMX about how the “next wave” of SEO reporting will go beyond just reporting the data and start to give the client insights from that data, I changed my mind. This should be a solid post, and I’ll lay even odds that you’ll start seeing posts from other agencies about what Hanapin has been doing for years.
We’ll also write about whether or not SEO is dead. Of course it’s not dead, but this debate has been revived again through recent news, primarily because prominent entrepreneurs like Chris Dixon have been misinterpreting startups not doing SEO well or claiming that that it’s not the foremost tactic any longer as a sign that SEO doesn’t work. Danny Sullivan, as always, has a great response to Chris and we’ll put our two cents in too.
MAY CONTEST
The past two months, we’ve introduced a new feature on the blogs – a contest for our readers. We hope it gives you a break from your daily search marketing work and we know it’s fun for us to create for you! Last month, we did SEO haikus on SEO Boy, and we were even graced with a live appearance from SEO Boy to announce the winner. Thanks to Dave Rosborough, one of our Assistant Account Executives, who was a good sport and dressed up for us! This month, we’ll have “best dressed” PPC manager on PPC Hero. The team has some interesting and fun guidelines, so keep on the lookout for the announcement.
CUSTOM ILLUSTRATIONS
We have three custom illustrations this month, and two of them are for the uber geeks out there! We’ll have illustrations for Star Wars Day (5/4), Cinco De May (5/5), and Geek Pride Day (5/25). If you have any ideas for June that you’d like to see, please post them in the comments.
TWITTER INTERVIEW
Last month featured our very first Twitter interview. Not an interview with someone from Twitter, but rather an interview with someone in the SEM industry, which was held completely over Twitter. Tom Demers of Measured SEM was kind enough to be our first guest, and I think it went great! You can find a full transcript of the interview here. There’s another one in the hopper for this month, though the team hasn’t told me who the interviewee is yet, so it must be a good one! We’ll announce it on the PPC Hero Twitter account and you can follow the interview with the hashtag #heroview.
VIDEO BLOGS
Last but not least, you’ve likely noticed the videos our team has been creating. We have several on PPC Hero and just posted our first on SEO Boy to announce the SEO haiku winner. As part of our investment in our blogs, we’ll continue making more videos, led by Hanapin’s own Creative Specialist, Jessica Rooney.
This month, Jessica will be creating weekly videos that will provide extra insight into account problems that may have viewers stumped. The series started yesterday and is called “Ticker Tuesdays” (with the clock being the “ticker”), and they are visually similar to ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption,” with no shouting, of course. 🙂 The hook of our Tuesday video shorts is that the answers will be given in a minute, with a running clock on the screen that counts down the time. The answers will be listed on the side of the screen as they come up. The first Ticker Tuesday episode, posted this morning, was about how to make good accounts great. Keep an eye out next Tuesday for the second episode about advanced bidding strategies.
That’s it for this month! Thank you for being a loyal reader, for helping our re-investment pay off so quickly for us, and for all your wonderful comments and feedback!
