Ask an SEO – Tara West on women in digital

Posted on June 12, 2013 by martin

According to the 2012 SEO Survey from Moz, just 23% of internet marketers are female.

Tara West

It’s a shocking statistic when you consider the attributes of good internet marketers – creativity, communication, organisation – are also traits that are often associated more with women than men.

I was lucky enough to interview Tara West, an internet marketing executive at Koozai and one of the organisers of the Digital Industry Females event. I asked her why there is such as male dominance in the industry and what needs to be done to redress the balance.

Q) Could you start by telling us a little bit about your background, how did you get into internet marketing?
A) I studied advertising at University, and worked as an intern in a digital creative agency, where I was first introduced to SEO and digital marketing. From that point it was always something which I had an interest in and I went on to specialise in UX at Uni, which lead me nicely to working in digital once I completed my degree. It shocked me that there was nothing in my degree about digital media buying, and I think if it wasn’t for my internship I might not have found myself working in digital.

Q) Why do you think there is such an imbalance in the male/female ratio in digital at the moment?
A) Although statistics have proven that there is an imbalance of the male/female ratio in digital at the moment, I think it is something which is definitely changing. Perhaps gender stereotypes and traditions have played a part in the past which meant that woman naturally chose to work in industries other than digital, but these stereotypes are becoming less prominent and more and more women are choosing careers in digital industries.

Q) Tell us about the Digital Industry Females event, what are you hoping to achieve?
A) The event was originally set up as after attending a lot of UK conferences it was apparent that the male/female split was very low with on average around 20% of attendees being female. This surprised us so we set about trying to uncover more females in the digital industry and Digital Females was created.

Initially, we wanted to get as many females from the industry together as possible for a glass of wine and a chat one evening. As the group was so niche, we weren’t sure how well it would take off but we are now approaching the 8th event and have got a new format with great presentations from industry experts.

One of the goals of creating the group was to get females together so they could network in a smaller group and get to know one and other before going along to one of the larger digital conferences. It has been great to see so many Digital Females attending the large events over the past year and we are hoping for that to continue.

The event has never been ‘anti-male’, and is simply a nice way to have a get together with other females in the industry and share our knowledge and network.

Q) I note that your event is female only, what’s the thinking behind this? Would inviting men along, if only to listen to the speakers, not help to promote females in the industry even more?
A) If we invited males there would not be a differentiating factor between Digital Females and other digital events. `Even though our audience would increase, and it would give the presentations and knowledge we are sharing a wider reach, it would make the point of the group redundant.

One of the reasons some women like the Digital Females events, is because they can sometimes feel intimidated at larger events when they don’t know anyone else there. If we invited men along to the events the group would grow but it would remove the benefit of having a smaller event which some of the ladies say is important to them.

The Digital Industry Females Event

Q) Your next event is focused on content marketing – do you think that as internet marketing inevitably shifts towards a more content-led approach more women will get involved?
A) Content creation is certainly one of the most creative aspects of internet marketing, and perhaps woman have been stereotyped as being the more creative of the two genders, so it may result in more women finding internet marketing as a more appealing career choice. Having said that, I know plenty of ladies in digital marketing who aren’t very creative at all (and don’t aspire to be), and some of the most renowned creative artists of our lifetime have been men, so I think it really is down to an individual’s personality rather than their gender.

Q) Do you think that perceptions of internet marketing as being a technical discipline are what is perhaps preventing some women from choosing it as a career? Or indeed preventing companies from hiring women?
A) I don’t think the technical aspects of the industry put women off. If a person’s skill sets match those required of a job role in digital then there is no reason the technical aspects of the job would put them off, regardless of their gender. There are lots of other aspects of digital which do not require an advanced technical skill set, so if the technical aspect is something which a woman is put off by, then there are lots of other areas in the industry which they can excel at. Using myself as an example; I have basic coding skills, but I have great skills for other aspects of SEO, PPC, Display Advertising etc. Having limited skills in the very technical aspects of SEO has never held me back in my career, so I don’t see how the perception of it being a technical industry would deter a woman from choosing a career in digital if it is something she wants to pursue.

Q) Many universities now offer internet marketing related degree courses, is it fair to say that more needs to be done at school and college level to engage women in digital?
A) My personal experience has led me to believe that more education about digital needs to take place in school, college and Universities in general, let alone to engage women.

Q) Some of the most pioneering people in digital – Marissa Mayer, Sheryl Sandberg, Martha Lane Fox to name a few, are female. Who are your most influential women in digital and why?
A) There are so many!

Judith Lewis from Beyond is very engaging as a speaker and her ideas are really interesting, which make her influential for me.

Irish Wonder (Julia Logan) is awesome because she is very matter-of-fact about SEO tactics, which is refreshing.

Lisa Myers is very inspirational and influential because she combines family life and running her business, Verve Search, as well as always being happy to share her ideas and expertise.

I also find our very own Samantha Noble influential as her knowledge and passion for the industry combined with always having a positive outlook means she is great to learn from.

Koozai do a great job of creating and sharing useful content

Q) A couple of more general questions now – I’ve always admired Koozai’s approach of sharing great content in the form of blogs and videos. Could you give us some insight into the planning and production process of this, and any tips you could perhaps share with us?
A) Although the whole team are involved in the creation of posts and videos, the mastermind who pulls our strategy together is Mike Essex, so I asked him for his top tips in terms of the planning and production process and he said:

“We pride ourselves on consistency so we always produce a blog post every weekday, a video every week and a whitepaper every month. This allows us to always have something lined up. We schedule content for an entire month in advance and aim to have it completed at least three days before the go live date, so we always know that we have content ready.

We also divide the work-load across every employee so pretty much everyone writes or creates something, which is great because everyone gets to put their own voice on something and we are never short on things to say!”

Q) What are your favourite internet marketing tools?
A) I’m all for tools because they save us time and make us more productive in most cases, but I do worry that as an industry we are becoming too dependent on tools for certain things and we are losing the autonomy which we need to turn the information tools give us into something valuable and actionable. Because of this I have quite a small portfolio of tools that I use very often, which are:

Screaming Frog can be used for just about anything (http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/)
Majestic SEO is the best place for raw backlink data (http://www.majesticseo.com/)
Ubersuggest keyword research tool (http://ubersuggest.org/)
Wayback Machine is awesome for seeing old versions of websites (http://archive.org/web/web.php)
Copyscape is fab for checking a site for duplicate content (http://www.copyscape.com/)

Ask an SEO – Anji Ismail, DOZ

Posted on June 2, 2013 by martin

Anji Ismail – DOZ

Lots of the components of an SEO campaign can be successfully outsourced. Link building, keyword research and of course, content. But can an SEO campaign be outsourced from end-to-end?

It’s an interesting concept and one Anji Ismail, co-founder of DOZ believes to be the future of internet marketing. DOZ is based on a new concept known as ‘prosourcing’ which enables customers to tap into a base of select freelancers from around the world who are delegated tasks in order to meet pre-agreed traffic targets.

I caught up with Anji and asked him to explain how the site works.

Q) Hi Anji, could you maybe start by giving me some insight into your background? How did you come up with the concept of DOZ?

A) DOZ is a product from Capseo – a company that I started in France in 2009 with my co-founder Faouzi El Yagoubi. From internships, we saw how unscalable digital agencies were.

From the beginning we believed that clients and freelancers couldn’t be in direct relation since they don’t speak the same “language”. A client would like to rank on keywords “X,Y,Z”, but freelancers cannot guarantee rankings. A client would like an increase of X% in traffic, but freelancers cannot guarantee it either.

DOZ is the product we launched in the US in March 2013, after prototyping in Europe for over 2 years.

Enter traffic target and timescale, et voila!

Q) Could you explain to me a little bit about the process of how DOZ works? After I have given you my URL and traffic target, what happens next?

A) This is magic…. Kidding. Well a little bit

Our system first analyses your website presence, your URL history, your environment and competition. Then you provide information about your goals, industry, targeted market etc. This information will build what we call a brief.

Based on this brief, our algorithms will filter and curate the best marketing experts that are available at that time, are natives of your target market and have the expertise in your industry to start working on your campaign.

You have to imagine a DOZ campaign as a fastidious sequence of micro-task marketing : search engines, social media and content marketing.

Q) The cynic in me would question the value of signing up for a pre-agreed amount of traffic from indeterminate sources, how do I know that I wouldn’t just get a load of traffic from click farms?

A) Good question. One of the first things our clients have to do when they connect for the first time to DOZ is to connect their Google Analytics account. Our system will cross data from our actions with Google Analytics to show where the traffic is coming from. Clients can control everything and see in real time where their traffic is coming from.

Also we have implemented a “peer review” process. Every task before being validated is reviewed by another expert, in a blind mode, which guarantees confidentiality and also neutral opinion on the work.

Q) Here in the UK, companies are pretty nervous about link building right now, how do you plan to handle people’s objections that what you are doing might not necessarily ethical and future proof?

A) Well, this is why our model is based on a community of experts. We believe that no agency can pretend to have all the knowledge about how SEO works. By asking the crowd what is good or not, we are always at the forefront of any evolution in Search Engine algorithms.

Q) The common problem with SEO is that companies sign up for it and then simply ignore the recommendations provided, how will you tackle that issue, particularly if it is going to cost you money in terms of meeting your traffic target?

A) True, we have seen that a lot. But our traffic is not only coming from Search Engines, so Social Media or Blogs can also reach traffic target, if SEO is not doing as well as it could be. We are also trying to integrate with CMS through plugins, so for clients using those, our experts will be able to push recommendations directly.

Q) Can you disclose some information about the screening process you have for your members, how do you ensure that not only do they have the right skill set, but that they are also reliable?

A) We do several background check using “social proofs”. When the experts signup they are asked to link their Linkedin account, and they can also provide links to their other social network profiles, or personal blogs. By looking at this data, we match their skills, hobbies and experience with campaign requirements.

Also, we have several “test tasks” that the system gives to experts to see if they are a reliable person.

This is our added value, to be 100% sure that the people working on our client’s campaigns are the best, and we are responsible for that.

Q) With such a global reach, how have you gone about ensuring that you have the resource in place to deal with requirements in every country?

A )With our model, you don’t need to have 1000 experts in each country to perform campaigns. What is important is that the core basis of experts stays active.
In the near future, we will be using crowdsourcing marketplace APIs to find experts in new regions.

DOZ is just the “quality layer”, selecting the best people for a given campaign.

Q) One of the biggest problems we have faced with Copify is keeping a writer base engaged whilst we scale up client recruitment and balancing demand with resource. How do you propose to tackle this?

A) It’s an issue that we have too. But we believe that the non-used resources can be useful for other purpose when there is a lack of demand. For example, we are running campaigns for Non-Profits. We call that “Webchariting”, which is basically Webmarketing for Charities.

Your writer base can be really useful to generate content (for free) for NGOs!
Also having a game mechanic using “virtual points” can be a way to keep them engaged even when they are not “working”, for example writing content for the Copify Blog and getting CopiPoints

Q) On to some more general SEO questions now, are there any particular tools that you use/recommend?

A) Nothing really original I guess, Majestic, – Semrush – Ahrefs – Scrapebox – Webceo and…Google hahaha

Laurent Bourelly

Q) Who are your favourite ‘SEO rockstars’?!

A) I’m reading more and more of Danny Sullivan’s articles. We also have some very good SEO gurus in France, such as Laurent Bourrelly.

But there are also tons of anonymous guys who I cannot remember the names of, who are amazing at testing and finding the last small changes in Google algorithms.

How to tackle the real issue with content marketing

Posted on May 30, 2013 by martin

Everyone is talking about content marketing right now, but after the strategy meetings have finished and the content calendar has been filled in until 2019, there’s a small matter to deal with – who is actually going to write the copy?!

It’s a real problem, but it doesn’t need to be. You can help to solve it by selling our copywriting services under your own branding.

If you offer a web-based marketing product or service we can help you to add real value to your proposition. Your customers will have a compelling reason to choose you over competitors, and you will also add a lucrative new revenue stream.

Think of it as a bit like drop shipping for content.

Here’s how it works

Using our REST API you can push and pull orders from the Copify site, meaning that you can offer your clients the ability to order content from us through your own site, in much the same way as they would order directly from us. The only difference will be that they will see your branding and not ours – they will have no visibility of the fact that their content has been delivered by Copify.

Here are just some of the businesses that could benefit:

Content marketing platforms – It seems as if a new content marketing platform is springing up about every 5 minutes. Hubspot, Marketo, Kapost, Ceros…the list goes on. These platforms are great at helping you to plan content marketing campaigns but none of them help their customers to actually write the content. Come on Silicon Valley – get your act together!

A white label copywriting site built using the Copify API

White label copywriting services – Creating a white label copywriting site like this one is quick and easy. All you’ll need is a front end ordering system and a payment gateway. Once orders are complete you can deliver the content either through a bespoke back end, or simply by email.

SEO tools – You show your clients their rankings and links, but what about actually helping them to get stuff done? Raven use an API from T********r but there’s still plenty of opportunity for those who believe in QUALITY content. Sites like Majestic, Linkdex and SEO Analytics could add real value to their offering by selling content.

Ecommerce platforms - We’ve helped loads of clients on Magento to order content from us and we’re in the process of building a plugin, but what are the likes of Shopify, Interspire and Bigcommerce doing to make life easy for their clients to order content?

If you run one of the above talk to me about how we can help you with an API integration today.

Interview – Callum McKeefery of Reviews.co.uk on user generated content

Posted on May 17, 2013 by martin

So-called SEO/PPC experts fail to grasp the full potential of reviews.
Brands missing out on valuable user generated content.
Don’t be scared of negative reviews.
Messages from company spokesperson outperform discounts or incentives in gathering reviews.

Callum McKeefery – Reviews.co.uk

With all of the hype that is surrounding content marketing at the moment, I can’t help but feel that many brands are missing a trick when it comes to user generated content.

I talked UGC expert Callum McKeefery of Reviews.co.uk recently. We discussed how to obtain customer reviews and how to leverage them for SEO and conversion success.

Q) Hi Callum, could you start by telling us a little bit about your company Reviews.co.uk?
A) Reviews.co.uk is a review collection service provider that helps its clients collect both merchant and product reviews.

We basically help online retailers collect and leverage merchant & product reviews as well as questions & answers from their customers. It has been proven time and time again that customer reviews increase sales and build brand loyalty.

Q) Where did the idea come from, was there a eureka moment?
A) I wouldn’t say that there was one eureka moment that comes to mind, rather years of cultivating a business model that works and that offers a unique spin on what other Review Collection Companies are already offering.

Q) In your experience, what are the best ways to encourage customers to leave a review of your product or service?
A) We have tried many methods to increase our review collection conversion, but the method that always outperforms everything else is a message from the managing director or spokesperson of the company asking for feedback. The personal message outdoes any incentive method such as discount codes or competitions.

Q) In terms of incentives to review what is most attractive to consumers?
A) If you are going to incentivise I would recommend a discount code, we actually have a new area in our client dashboard that makes it really easy to integrate discount codes into your review collection solution. I must state though that the code must be given to all consumers not just the customers who write positive reviews.

Q) Is it fair to say that certain verticals are easier to gather reviews on?
A) Travel reviews are very easy to collect, we tend not to focus on travel because that sector is awash with so many fake reviews. Our main area of focus is ecommerce reviews of both merchants and products.

Veet for Men – Use with caution

Q) Lets talk about gamification – does it work for reviews and if so, do you have any particular tips for our readers?
A) We use subtle gamification to get customers to write more in-depth useful reviews. We are really careful about how and what we ask our reviewers. Reviews.co.uk conversion rate for collection is as high as 17% thanks to all the A/B testing we have done over the past year. Funnily enough we have seen our conversion move up and down depending on the weather. Last week when it was raining non-stop we actually hit a 34% collection rate which is astounding.

Q) Would I be right in thinking that in certain cases, negative reviews can actually have a positive impact on conversion rate?
A) Negative reviews can also show a potential customer that your reviews are real. Yes, I think companies need to stop being so scared of negative reviews and embrace them. Every company at some point is going to get a negative review. What companies should be doing is replying to these reviews pointing out what actions they have taken to fix the problem. This way potential customers see that you are proactive company that will work hard to try and fix a problem if something goes wrong. Plus I think it’s a trust thing, if you have only 5 star reviews, customers will assume they are fake. Our platform encourages our clients to respond to any negative reviews, we never remove genuine negative reviews even when asked by our clients.

Q) Would you ever advocate a using fake reviews on a site?
A) Never, fake reviews only ever do you more damage. There should never be any need for a company to write fake reviews. If a company feels the need to write fake reviews, I urge them to contact us. I truly believe that Reviews.co.uk can help any company get back on track collecting honest reviews while improving brand reputation.

Q) Would you ever recommend funny reviews like Amazon’s Veet for Men as a link bait tactic? If so, any tips on how to go about this?
A) I personally wouldn’t recommend as it could backfire big time, especially for a smaller brand, but I think we will see more of these types of fake/funny reviews popping over the next few months. It’s a great way to get some viral marketing going.

On Reviews.co.uk we have had literally hundreds of weird and wonderful reviews over the past year, but unfortunately none come close to the Amazon Veet review!

Appliances Online – one of the few brands who do Facebook well

Q) Which brands do you think are doing UGC particularly well?
A) I like what Appliances Online in the UK and Nordstrom in the US have been doing. They both get it! They both put the customer at the heart of everything they do. They invite their customers to interact with them on multiple platforms and Appliances Online use Facebook better than any company I have come across.

Q) Can you name and shame any that you think have missed the boat?
A) I don’t think anybody has missed the boat yet, but its slowly drifting away. One of the strangest things I have noticed in our industry is that so called SEO/PPC experts have failed to grasp the full potential of product and merchant reviews.

Q) Who are the thought leaders in UGC that we should look out for?
A) I have a lot of respect for Brant Barton & Brett Hurt from BazaarVoice as well as Richard Anson from Reevoo. Although these guys are the competition I have the utmost respect for them.