RankPower

31/10/2023

In 2018 I deleted my website that had ranked as NZ's number 1 in Google for SEO words for almost 5 years straight.

It ranked number 1 for "SEO services".

It ranked number 1 for "SEO agency nz".

It ranked number 1 for "best SEO agency".

It ranked number 1 for about 100 more similar keywords.

It dominated against agencies that did SEO as a service.

For a while, I thought about turning the content into a book. Because it had 200,000+ words in it, all about 'how to do SEO'.

And I deleted it. On purpose.

Because it made me feel like a fraud.

Because I knew that half of the stuff written in it was out of date a month or two after I wrote it.

And I didn't feel like updating it because Google changed their system 3 times just today, three times yesterday, and three times the day before. Or more.

Way too much for me to keep up.

So here's my advice if you want to learn SEO:

You need to be at the coal-face, now. And every day.

You need to learn to forget what you learned, and be prepared for endless evolution.

You need to challenge everything you read about it. Because it may well have been out of date.

You need to challenge everything you think you know about it. Because your theory might have been right yesterday, but wrong today.

Me and my website content couldn't keep up.

A book certainly can't.

It's hard work. But I have a tactic to cope with this sort of crazy endless change.

If you want to know what that tactic is, talk to me.

09/10/2023

How much do you invest in SEO?

We know the answers can range a lot depending on the type and size of business you have. So instead of looking at a specific number, we created this “SEO Effort v. Result” model that you can apply to your own scale and decide for yourself what the right number is.

*The “Slow But Steady, Every Month my Budget/12 and That’s All” Model 1.*

This is where you have decided that SEO is a necessary investment, and you are going to allocate a fixed monthly budget to it over a long term.

This model is very typical of a business that has hired an agency to deliver SEO work, assuming that work is also completed and is in line with what should be done, we think it might follow this sort of growth pattern.

The investment may be on the lower side of where maybe it ought to be, because too often, it’s a “reluctant” investment.

Remember: any agency doing SEO work for you should be able to demonstrate what was done, and align with a plan that you have agreed. There should be complete transparency over the tasks and a set of clear and reasonable KPIs to work towards.

*The “I know I need SEO but Don’t Have the Long Term Budget” Model 2.*

You know you need SEO and you make a really good up-front investment into several aspects of work, like technical SEO, Information Architecture planning and Content up-front for the website.

What the chart suggests is that you won’t reap the benefits until a little later. The danger about this is that you might get the idea that the SEO work wasn’t necessary after all, because you made the wins after you stopped doing SEO. You may even end up losing the positions eventually, which makes it all seem too fickle, and it could fel like the whole thing was a bad idea in the first place.

This is a common model for Startups who see value in it – perhaps even have a dream of being Number 1, but don’t continue to invest in it. A Startup might run out of cashflow if they “put all their eggs in the SEO basket” and have run out of marketing cash. This is an issue around planning and lack of capital. At RankPower, we believe you should establish cashflow first and then invest some of the net margin into SEO.

*The “Why No Results Yet? – I give Up!” Model 3.*

This is the same as Model 1, but the business gave up when results didn’t come quickly enough. This is an issue around expectations. SEO is definitely a long term plan.

By giving up on it early, the business achieves maybe a tiny base level of organic traffic, but nothing more and no further growth likely.

*The “I Can’t Afford to Invest Much in SEO” Model 4.*

In this model, the business decided that SEO wasn’t really where the investment needed to be.

Aside from some brand rank and occasional blips, there is little if any organic position won over time.

In our view, the thinking should be: “I can’t afford NOT to invest in SEO”.

This business would rely entirely on other channels like Paid Marketing and would be at great risk of the Paid Marketing channels had pricing changes, or faced heavy competitive activity.

*The “I know how to build success with SEO” Model 5.*

With a strong upfront investment into Information Architecture planning, on-page Technical SEO, and initial Content (and Keywords), this business makes a plan for success.

They also allocate as much effort as they reasonably can over the long term, and even have the odd month where they invest less (or even none), but know they need to keep it up to keep gaining.

As with other SEO results, the up-tick might take a while, but it does come, and when it comes, it’s strong.

Businesses that invest in SEO like this could survive even if at some stage they shut down their Paid Marketing < that right there is key!.

Delivery was probably collaborative, since having an in-house SEO expert can be expensive. So with agency support, a part time in-house person could execute this plan.

*So which is Your SEO Investment Model?*

Reach out if you want to discuss what the ideal balance of channel investment might be for your business.

04/10/2023

If you could double your online business, would you?
This same question applies to a website that generates leads into a sales process, not necessarily just eCommerce.

Both are a numbers game.

Here’s a realistic example for eCommerce Sales:

* Quality traffic = 10,000 in a month, cost to generate using Google Shopping Ads was $10,000.
* Total market visibility share is less than 15%.
* Sales rate is 4% from traffic (4% of 10,000 is 400 transactions)
* Average Basket Value is $200
* Total sales revenue is therefore $80,000.
* Cost of marketing is therefore 12.5% or revenue.
* Average NET margin is 45% of sale.

So WHY would you NOT scale up now?

Valid reasons not to scale could be issues around logistics – can’t land stock fast enough, can’t store stock, can’t dispatch sales fast enough. But let’s say you could solve these easily or didn’t have them at all, what then?

Why not double the traffic, double the marketing budget, double the market visibility share to 30% and DOUBLE the REVENUE?

Actually: you could easily QUADRUPLE (4X) this business with about the same rate of profitability, and probably better if you get concessions at the inventory buying end.

It’s just math. But it does depend one super important factor:

Is the market visibility share calculation valid? (We do this for our clients). This is a metric that must fit within a very specific tactical approach to advertising in Google. If the tactic isn’t quite right, then the metric becomes unreliable or blatantly wrong.

I have access to another set of data where I see the following scenario:

* Quality traffic = 1000, cost to generate using Google Search Ads was $2000.
* Total market visibility share is about 40%.
* Enquiry rate is 25% from traffic (10% of 1000 is 250)
* Sales success rate from enquiries is 4%
* Total sales are therefore 10.
* Cost per sale is therefore $2000 / 10 = $200 per sale.
* Average NET commission per sale is >$2000.

You could double this business overnight.

So WHY would you NOT scale up now?

No idea.

Call us if this is of interest, or see the link in the comments for details.

27/09/2023

What’s our Market Size, Share & Growth Oppotunity?

Your C-Suite wants you to use this digital marketing tactic, but many marketers (and even agencies) don’t know how to pull it off. Here’s what they want:

C-suiters might not express this specifically, but you can bet that they want to identify these key factors:

* What is the size of our market?
* What is the business’ current market share?
* What will it take to win more market share?
* Is our Brand presence growing?

RankPower Ltd specialises in leveraging existing (or new) digital marketing performance data to reveal answers or insights into the questions posed above. But it’s not that simple.

How do we do pull that off?

Google Search (via organic and paid channels) has a few key revealing metrics available that, if you know how to find them, can indicate what’s happening in the market and how to effectively answer those questions.

It works because a steady percentage of users turn to Google (either intentionally or coincidentally) as part of their research and buying journey. And while that exact % figure isn’t certain, the fact that it’s only growing gradually means that relative predictability can be leveraged.

But conditions need to be met to be able to reveal these insights with any accuracy:

* Campaigns need to be segmented correctly.
* You might need to ignore some advice from Google too, as they have an active campaign to get businesses to leave performance decisions up to them.
* Ad targeting and bidding tactics need to be aligned.
* Budgets need to be appropriately distributed. A simple fixed monthly figure chosen arbitrarily probably won’t do.
* Advanced reporting capabilities must be in place – they are not standard parts of the Ads or organic platforms.
* Finally: you need to have a mindset and mandate to seize opportunities as they arise.

That last point is arguably the most important.

More success, greater market share, brand growth, these are not goals won with a “marketing is a cost” mindset. Marketing is always an investment.

My questions for you are:

Has your C-suite ever communicated anything like the points at the top of this post to you? And if not, do you think it’s worth asking them if that’s what they want? (I bet it is).

If it is, we’d like to talk with you about how we can partner towards those objectives.

I challenge you to ask this question and let us know what your feedback is.

Perry Bernard

27/09/2023

What do you think about this? Could it be the beginning of the end?

"There should not be one ounce of trust left that any advertiser has in Google Ads."

06/09/2023

GA4: Do you hate it too?

You're not alone if you are finding Google Analytics GA4 too hard to use for the average marketer. We're here to help however you need it.

30/08/2023

How to Measure Brand Lift - Alternative Methodologies.

Whenever we run brand marketing activities, we are faced with the challenge of understanding how those activities affect online traffic and conversions. There may be no direct way to measure that connection.

Most agencies report their brand marketing in terms of the reach or frequency of showing the ad to the target demographic, but this tells you nothing about the results. You probably want to understand how your investment is paying off in terms of the brand becoming more well-known or desirable, known as brand lift.

In some instances, agencies may connect online activity with brand marketing, for example, through YouTube ads or similar methods, and try to express it as a cost per acquisition (CPA) of winning a conversion from the user who clicked on the ad. However, human nature means that when watching YouTube or reading the news, we tend to engage in what we are there for and not be bothered right now with an ad. We might remember the brand and try to look it up later or recall the brand name when we have an interest in what the brand was offering.

In those cases, we have to rely on existing datasets to see if any patterns emerge that might correlate with brand marketing. If patterns emerge, we could potentially credit the brand marketing with the result.

In this article, I provide 2 Alternative Methods for measuring the effect of Brand Marketing without necessarily having direct line of sight back to the campaign:

User journeys are very complex. Take advantage of the Brand Search touchpoints to undertand whether Brand Marketing is working as expected.

10/08/2023

3 Reasons Why Your Google Search Ads Aren’t Working:

We thought it might be a good idea to share some of the reasons why this type of campaign isn’t working out for you. This is by no means a full list of what could be wrong, so if your campaign setup isn’t working the way you expected, feel free to reach out to us for help.

Google Search Ads campaigns, not surprisingly, are campaigns that show ads in Google search results when a person is searching for something. They are mainly based on a text ad format where you will create a selection of Headlines and Descriptions, and the ad will link to a specific page or set of pages in your website.

If you use some of the Google enhancement capabilities for this ad type, it might also include a logo image, phone number links, pricing tiles, store location links and a few more that you can select.

Reason 1: You are using Broad Match Keywords....

https://rankpower.com/google-ads/3-reasons-why-your-google-search-ads-arent-working/

25/07/2023

https://rankpower.com/google-ads/the-google-ads-transparency-center/

This one-stop shop was designed with you in mind by ensuring you have easy access to information about the ads you see from Google.

12/07/2023

Do you need a Gmail address to have a Google Account and access all those Googly things like Docs, Calendar and Analytics?

Emphatically: NO!

Find out why setting up a Google Account with a Gmail also negatively affects business data security.

Q: So why does Google encourage you to take up a Gmail at all? A: So that they get your user data insights to figure out how and what to market to you.

25/06/2023

Since “Google Analytics D-Day” has almost come, we thought maybe it was a good time to share a few tips about GA4, especially for those people who have delayed switching over to using the new version thanks to the obvious learning curve involved. Or just because you couldn’t let go of a familiar friend.



Not sure what date we’re talking about?

On July 1, 2023, the old Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) will stop working entirely. You’ll still have access to the data, for now, but from this date no new data will be added to it, even if you keep the Google Analytics UA code installed in your website.

Google have been sending out increasingly alarming message to lots of you warning how you must switch over ASAP. They have even put in an “emergency plan” of sorts in case you still didn’t do it.

Universal Analytics has been with us many years now. Since 2012. So, over the 11 years since then perhaps you’ve come to love it, or like so many, you loath it. Whichever way you feel about the old version, it was a powerful tool capable of telling you a lot about users and their behaviour on your website and we’ve always been strong promoters of its use.

Well, since 2020, the new Google Analytics version GA4 has been edging its way into the limelight. First as a ‘beta’, but now from July 1st 2023, it will become your only choice.

Read a few of our tips:

Since “Google Analytics D-Day” has almost come, we thought maybe it was a good time to share a few tips about GA4, especially for those people who have delayed switching.

15/06/2023

How to Avoid the SEO Rug-Pull:
A Guide to Verifying and Securing your SEO work.

Before partnering with an SEO agency, it’s crucial to understand the type of SEO work they will deliver. SEO is not magic; it requires hard work. No one has a direct line to Google or possesses all the SEO knowledge and secrets. Any agency that guarantees specific rank positions in Google search results is misleading you. Such guarantees often revolve around keywords that already have a high chance of success, regardless of the agency’s efforts.

A tactical plan should be provided to you, outlining the agency’s approach to your SEO work in broad terms. It doesn’t need to be detailed, just a one-page summary would do. For instance, it should specify the number of content pieces produced per month, the platforms used for content sharing, and the focus on technical SEO and a strategy for link acquisition. During regular review meetings, ask the agency to demonstrate the produced content. If nothing tangible is presented, it suggests that the agency either focuses solely on technical SEO (which can be verified by experienced web professionals) or engages in link building through means not approved by Google. Clarity on the agency’s approach should be established from the beginning.

And don't forget: Bad SEO (or SEO that ends in the Rug-Pull) costs you in two ways: You paid for the work to be done. And you will have lost precious time where positive SEO effect should continue to pay off later. Bad SEO is often cheaper by the dollar, but far more expensive by the result and the potentially negative impact to your business.



Read our full article here (est 4 min)

To avoid falling victim to the SEO Rug-Pull, it is essential to know exactly what you are signing up for and to have tangible evidence of the work being done.