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This Is What Losing Money Looks Like

This Is What Losing Money Looks Like

The following graph shows the daily traffic for a quality consumer information site (I was brought in to analyse the issue this week):

The pain starts in early May and then turns to heartbreak as traffic declines over the following month. From almost 20K visits to under 2K visits daily. That’s a 90% drop in traffic. And for this site – where the business model revolves around referring visitors to suppliers and taking a commission – that’s a massive drop in income.

Here’s the similar trend in terms of their rankings (ie number of terms they rank for) drop:

So, what happened in early May? Well, that’s when they went live with a brand new site. New design, […]

By Craig Bailey|September 15th, 2012|SEO|6 Comments

Google Instant Roundup

It’s been a week now since Google Instant hit the news desks of IT blogs everywhere. I’ve started getting a few questions from clients and friends about it, so I thought I’d put together a simple collection of recommended links, and finish off with some of my thoughts. There’s been tons of discussion of course, but for a good summary of the main points, the following 4 or 5 posts will serve you well: SEObook – How Google Instant Changes the SEO Landscape Aaron Wall has a good overview of the announcement and summary of the main effects (and if you are an SEObook member a very detailed analysis inside) as […]

By Craig Bailey|September 14th, 2010|Google, SEM, SEO|2 Comments

Introduction to Search Engine Marketing

Just realised I hadn’t posted this presentation I gave at the NSW.NET event last month. I was lucky enough to be presenting after Mark Vozzo who gave an excellent introduction to SEO, so my session on SEM flowed on nicely. In the SEM presentation (embedded below) I went through the following main points: How SEO and SEM work together (and covered the various definitions of SEM) Why you should use paid search to complement your SEO activities Advice on using AdWords effectively including coverage of 3 useful strategies: tight […]

By Craig Bailey|July 28th, 2010|SEM, SEO|0 Comments

Using Excel 2010 Sparklines to Analyse Google Analytics

Seriously, how would businesses survive if it weren’t for Excel? Excel is perfect for analysing analytics data in a variety of ways (eg using Pivot tables and Conditional formatting) and it keeps getting better. I’m loving Office 2010 and Excel 2010 in particular – it’s just beautiful to use. In this post I want to highlight one of the ‘tiny’ new things in Excel 2010 that I love. It’s the new Sparklines feature. In a nutshell Sparklines allow you to analyse a range of data and display tiny trend graphs. They’re very handy for spotting correlating trends. Here’s a simple (contrived) example: In this post I’ll […]

By Craig Bailey|June 20th, 2010|Featured, Microsoft, Office, SEM, SEO|22 Comments

SEO and SEM at NSW.NET

I’m excited to be presenting with Mark Vozzo (<- SEO guru) at this month’s NSW.NET meeting. It’s on this coming Thursday morning, June 24. You can register here. The event is in two parts. Mark will be covering Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for 30 minutes, and then after breakfast I’ll cover Search Engine Marketing (SEM). To give you a quick introduction to the event, consider the following screenshots* from Google and Bing. In the green you’ll see organic search engine results, in the red you’ll see the paid ads (eg via Google AdWords) Here’s how it looks in Bing: In […]

By Craig Bailey|June 18th, 2010|Featured, SEM, SEO|3 Comments

Bing Webmaster Blog

It’s good to see the Bing Webmaster Center Blog picking up. I’ve been following Rick DeJarnette’s posts more closely lately – he’s putting out some good stuff. I thought it worth highlighting a few examples: SEO for Silverlight SEO Site Review tips – Part 1 SEO Site Review tips – Part 2 Chasing the Long Tail with Keyword Research It’s not all good though – try to avoid any posts that refer to ‘discussions’ on the Bing forums – there’s so much bad advice and busy work getting pumped out there it’s not funny (example). Oh, and […]

By Craig Bailey|June 2nd, 2010|Bing, Featured, SEO|2 Comments

WordPress and SEO

How time flies I’ve been meaning to post these for months now – they’re sessions on SEO and WordPress I’ve presented at various User Group meetings this year. First off, here’s the notes from my IIS SEO toolkit presentation at SWUG back in February. The slides are pretty simple, so I recommend reading my complete review of the IIS SEO Toolkit (from my XEN SEO site). IIS SEO toolkit And for a quick overview of SEO tips, here’s a 10 Thing in 10 Minutes mini-session on SEO – with just the basics. [drain […]

By Craig Bailey|May 7th, 2010|SEO, WordPress|6 Comments

Microsoft IIS SEO Toolkit

If you are interested in knowing a little more about the IIS SEO Toolkit (I give it the big thumbs up), I’ve written a little review over on my XEN SEO blog (note I originally wrote the review based on the beta version, but it has been updated based on the release in mid Jan). Plus, as mentioned in my previous post, I also discussed the SEO Toolkit with Andrew and Michael on Frankly Speaking last week. And if you are in Sydney tomorrow (Wed 10 Feb), I’ll be presenting on it at the Sydney Windows User Group (here’s the SWUG post with details). Tomorrow will be a big night – its […]

By Craig Bailey|February 9th, 2010|Featured, Microsoft, SEO|4 Comments

Frankly Speaking on SEO

A big thank you to Andrew Coates and Michael Kordahi for having me on their Frankly Speaking podcast to chat about SEO. You can listen to it here. Frankly Speaking (for those who aren’t yet familiar with it) is an Australian Tech podcast (or perhaps even an Australian Microsoft podcast) and listening to it should be on your weekly To-Do list. SEO is a big topic of course so we only scratched the surface, but here’s a summary and links to the various items we touched on: Danny Sullivan on SEO for Bill Gates – in which Danny reviewed Bill Gates’ new site The […]

By Craig Bailey|February 7th, 2010|Microsoft, SEO|13 Comments

Search as an Experience

It’s easy to think of search (ie searching on Google or Bing) as simply a (boring) research activity. And in turn, to think that all the innovation in search is about providing a ‘better’ result. But what does ‘better’ mean when it comes to search? Joseph Pine’s TED talk on what consumers want is a good insight into how the search game is changing (and hat tip to Michael Gray for the link and thought). Joseph’s talk is from 2004, but his point is relevant now. It’s essentially this: people want an experience. And they want an experience with authenticity. Consider how the UX and designer communities have grown in […]

By Craig Bailey|February 4th, 2010|Bing, Google, SEO|2 Comments

Search market increases in 2009

It should come as no surprise that search engine usage is increasing – but perhaps the rate of increase will (come as a surprise that is). comScore figures released this month show that search usage (note: includes search engines and related properties) increased by 46% in 2009. Google sites were in the order of 58% increase. That’s significant. How many industries do you know (or work in) that have that kind of increase? Whether you take the numbers as a threat or an opportunity is up to you, but either way you should be acting on them. It’s rare to find a business these days that doesn’t have at least some exposure […]

By Craig Bailey|February 2nd, 2010|SEO|2 Comments

New Years Resolutions – Link More

Yes, it’s a little early, but I thought I’d get in with my blogging resolution for next year. I’m going to link more. I used to write a lot of shorter link posts here pointing to sites, news and blogs I thought useful. But with social networking popularity and Twitter in particular most of my linking over the last year has been via those channels. This is easier for me, more consumable by you (if you are on Twitter) but bad for the sites I link to. Why? It doesn’t help them rank. One of the main ways that sites rank is via the number of other sites linking to […]

By Craig Bailey|December 23rd, 2009|SEO|5 Comments