Best Traffic Tips

Archive for March 9th, 2010

How do you attract a flash mob of 150+ people to your restaurant?  Offer the possibility of a Foursquare Swarm Badge, of course!

Last week, restaurant owner Joe Sorge attracted 161 Foursquare users at the same time to his burger joint in Milwaukee, AJ Bombers (pretty impressive considering there are approximately only 300-400 total Foursquare users in the area).  Even more impressive is the fact that the restaurant more than doubled its typical Sunday sales, with an increase of 110% that day.

So how did he do it?  If you haven’t heard, Foursquare is a location-based mobile app that has been growing in popularity. Using the service, people “check in” at locations and earn badges based on a variety of factors, including frequency of check-ins, etc.  In order to attract people to his restaurant to raise money for the Milwaukee Social Media Community to host an event at popular interactive conference South by Southwest (SXSW), Joe promoted the possibility of restaurant-goers earning the coveted Swarm Badge, which is awarded to users who check in at a location where over 50 other users are checked into at the same time. As a result, the restaurant raised over $500 toward the SXSW meetup.

In an interview with Joe, he explains that he came up with the idea when he realized how much of the restaurant’s fan base was getting into Foursquare.  He promoted the event primarily using Twitter, but also took advantage of Facebook fan connections as well.  As a result, AJ Bombers attracted well over the 50 people required to award the Swarm Badge, and restaurant-goers generated a ton of buzz about the meetup via their social networks.  Joe also created a video (below) and a Flickr set showcasing photos from the event.

Why Should Businesses Care?

This case study is a great example of business owners harnessing the power of social media sites and applications to attract customers.  It’s also testament to the growing power of location-based mobile applications.  Joe paid attention to his customers to learn more about them, discovered their growing interest in Foursquare, then did his research about how he could take advantage of the new trend.  The result was a carefully and successfully implemented promotion that afforded him new customers and additional buzz (and — you guessed it — the opportunity to create more content). 

The lesson here is simple: Using social media for business works.  Stay on top of and understand the latest trends, and most importantly — be creative!  Think about innovative ways you can use these applications to generate traffic to your website and/or your physical store. 

Mobile and location-based applications continue to grow in popularity.  Are you thinking about how you can use them to your advantage?

Already a Foursquare user? Measure your Foursquare mojo with our new Foursquare Grader tool!

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Posted by RobOusbey

Search Engine Optimization covers a huge range of tactics – all of which can bring direct benefit to a website. In this post, I’ve shared examples of different tactics used at different websites, and the effects that have been seen. If you’re considering an SEO campaign for your site, or are trying to persuade someone else to invest in internet marketing, I hope this post will help demonstrate the potential of internet marketing.

The post includes real screen shots from Google Analytics (click any of them to enlarge) but the sites and data have been anonymized.

Target Your Target Terms

Remember that post about building a page with perfect keyword targeting? SEOmoz wasn’t kidding around.

A website that sells homewares had issues with site structure and on-page targeting. Their category level pages were at subdomains such as

• http://kitchenequipment.sitename.com

or

• http://livingrooms.sitename.com

whilst each sub-category was back on the main subdomain at:

• www.sitename.com/find_product2.asp?url1=living+room&url2=rugs+and+carpets

Category and sub-category pages had a distinct lack of semantic HTML or term targeting.

Getting appropriate H1 tags onto each page was a quick job, improving title tag structure took a bit longer, clean & friendly URLs and internal links with appropriate anchor text were also added.

The site saw ranking improvements across the board, which brought new traffic through head, mid and long tail terms. Can you guess when the changes were made?

Getting sorted in Google Local

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ranking factors for Local Search, dead simple tactics, etc, it’s important to get the basics right. A large chain of restaurants created a ‘bulk upload’ file with the correct data for each one of their locations. After uploading the file, they applied for it to be reviewed and ‘whitelisted’. Local data that’s been uploaded by the business owner and whitelisted is treated as authoritatively as locations that have been manually verified by postcard.

Despite various issues (Google’s best practice guidelines still aren’t quite the best solution in some cases) the traffic generated by visibility in Local Search has been significant and valuable. (The uploads were verified in late November when the traffic begins its steady rise.)

Architecture of Change

A current affairs magazine wanted to get more from their website. Because of falling advertising revenue, the publication was at risk of being closed down. They’d seen some growth from SEO already, but wanted to prove that the website had greater value.

Although the site had a good brand and some great content, it suffered from similar problems to many news-type websites, including badly archived content, duplicate issues and a CMS that hampered keyword targeting or promoting individual articles. Recommendations were made to improve the site’s architecture and migrate to the new structure.

The effect of the changes was immediate growth which took the organic traffic to 257% in three months. A month later, the magazine’s owner explained that the falling revenue from print advertising meant that they couldn’t continue to lose money publishing the mag, and closed it down.

Hook, Line, Sinker

An office cleaning company wanted to improve the profile of their site through SEO. Amongst other tactics, a member of staff spent a day writing a ‘linkbait’ post to publish on their blog. This generated huge amounts of traffic from social media sites (dwarfing their regular daily visitors) and was subsequently linked to from dozens of sites. This post, along with other content published on the site to attract links, helped the site grow in strength and authority, and it now ranks position 3 for ‘office cleaning’ in their country.

Paid In Full

This is SEOmoz, but I’d like to share a graph from a PPC colleague working on a site that sells scooters. They were initially bidding on very broad terms (scooter, scooters, buy a scooter, etc) but the campaign was adjusted to target more long tail terms, including descriptions, specifications, etc.

Over a period of around six weeks, the cost per click was reduced by 30% and the more targeted traffic converted increasingly well – this allowed the site owners to increase their ad budget and generated more sales than their paid search campaign ever had before.

If you’re new to SEOmoz and this post has inspired you to get involved in search marketing for your site, do browse the site for the PRO & free SEO guides and the SEO blog. If you’re a regular, do share any stories you’re particularly proud of in the comments.

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