Tractus Design

The US Powerball jackpot has reached $425 million after 12 consecutive rollovers and is guaranteed to be one of the Top 5 Lottery Jackpots in the World! Below you will find an SEO-Lottery analysis that is highly relevant to this enormous American lotto draw and Search Engine Journal readers can buy Powerball tickets online here.

How many times have you heard a phrase such as ‘success in the SEO world is a lottery’? Certainly more often than the idea that ‘success in the lottery world is all about SEO’!

Some would argue the former as the exasperated cry (boo hoo!) of the inexperienced SEO rookie who needs to learn to roll with the Panda and Penguin punches, rather than blame fate for their current SERP ranking. Certainly harsh if perhaps fair. With regards to the latter, I personally would argue that good SEO will absolutely win a few online lottery battles but brand and integrity will triumph to win the lotto war.

Putting these arguments to one side, what no one can deny is that as fast changing industries that revolve around omnicentric stars such as Google and the US Powerball, SEO and lotteries are both at the very least unpredictable!

A Lottery Look at Penguin 2.0

Fill an 80,000 seat football stadium with SEO managers and ask ‘how are you sleeping lately?’ and you’ll barely get a soccer XI from those who answer ‘absolutely fine’. Let’s be honest, who outside of the Mountain View Googleplex saw it coming?

As Jayson DeMers put it here:

“When Penguin 1.0 and 2.0 hit, it caused a more drastic impact upon individuals than did the financial meltdown of 2008.”

Admittedly, online lottery websites were affected like everyone else and even official lottery organisations such as the UK National Lottery have been asking ‘what just happened?’  We will know more in the upcoming months if this is a long term setback or if official sites got caught in the crossfire while Google was tweaking its algorithm.

A Particularly Green Red Card for USA Lottery

Certain industries do well in an economic downturn and purchases of Gold (low risk) and lottery tickets (high reward) see a significant increase in popularity. Despite the United States (read Wall Street’s) position as a prime cause of financial crises since the turn of the Millennium, there apparently is no shortage of people around the world desperate for their chance at the American Dream. As a result, Google has deemed it fit to raise the status of the United States’ Green Card and Diversity Visa Lotteries, overruling the objective assumption that people searching for ‘USA lottery’ would like to partake in a high jackpot American number draw game.

Sites such as online lottery tickets agent theLotter.com have internationally diverse audiences and for a significant percentage of our fan base English is not their first language. theLotter offers 12 (soon to be 14) languages on our site, yet when new players look to buy lotto tickets for the US Powerball or American Mega Millions online, many will use the search term US or USA lottery. Panda and Penguin 2.0 updates have ushered in an era where online lottery agents need to think outside the box to serve the needs of non-English speakers searching for our services.

The Point of News Return

Search for a lottery story online like ‘US Powerball record jackpot winners 2012’ and chances are you will find traditional and modern media channels such as ABC, CNN or the Huffington Post high in your search results. Generic terms such as ‘Mega Millions winning numbers’ or ‘last night’s EuroMillions results’ are more likely to take the reader to the official US lottery site for America’s Mega Millions or a reliable third party lottery site.

When the US Powerball jackpot jumped from $360 million to close to $600 million between its Wednesday and Saturday draws in May 2013, searchers might have expected to find www.powerball.com at number one for ‘US Powerball results’ or ‘estimated Powerball jackpot’. However, the massive public interest in the American lottery’s acceleration towards a new personal best caught the attention of established local and national news outlets and snippets of news reports flooded YouTube channels and news sites. Google elevated the status of these media clips due to the high Domain Authority held by such services, boosting their ranking for US Powerball and lottery-related keywords ahead of official and semi-official websites with far greater lotto passion and expertise.

Location, location, location!

Take a quick look on Wikipedia’s list of Lottery Jackpot Records and it looks like the world’s top jackpots are exclusively awarded by American lottery draws. Dig a little deeper and you will see that the gap between the US and Europe’s top lottery prizes is smaller than it first appears:

1. Euros (€) and Pounds Sterling (£) are both consistently worth more than one US Dollar ($)
2. American lotteries put a little more faith in the prudence of winners (read marketing spin on their tallies) and advertise the annuity, pre-tax value of the prize, whereas European lotteries provide a lump sum amount that will often be entirely free of taxes
3. The number of winning ticket holders needs to be taken into account

As a lump sum, the world record of $656 million set by the US Mega Millions on 30^th March 2012 was worth $474 million. It was split across three tickets bought in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland, so now we’re down to $158 million apiece. Take an approximate tax burden of 34% away from each winner and the true value of each lottery win was about $104 million.

Obviously this is not a figure to be sniffed at and I am sure that none of the three winning parties are complaining. However, the EuroMillions jackpot cap and record (fixed in January 2012 and won by Gillian and Adrian Bayford in August the same year) is worth €190 million. As UK residents, the Bayfords’ prize was not subject to any taxes and was worth £148 million, or $231 million, which is more than double the prize of US winners of the historic Mega Millions draw.

So, why is all of this important?

When you compare keyword trends from the $656 million American Mega Millions record jackpot, the $590.5 million US Powerball personal best (‘C’ in above image) and the recent €188 million EuroMillions draws (‘A’ in above image), you can see the importance of geography and all-round marketing in SEO search results. The American lotteries were more newsworthy, cooler and better advertised, whereas European lottos’ prizes and dignity are reserved, at least on Google, for a more loyal and committed fan base.

Conclusion

Between Penguins and Pandas, Green Cards and red cards, who’s talking about a topic, how something is advertised and where that thing is taking place, the mutual characteristic of SEO and lotteries is their unpredictability – although in my opinion both the online and offline worlds are better off being kept on their toes!

Yesterday I wrote a story at Search Engine Land named Google: Guest Blogging For Links? You Better Nofollow Those Links. As you can imagine, it caught people’s attention – as it should. The title is not as extreme as Marie’s Yes, high quality guest posts CAN get you penalized! but it is extreme enough.

In short, if you are intentionally guest blogging for the sole purpose of that post having a dofollow link to your site – Google would prefer that you nofollow the link. If you do not, you leave yourself open to a possible manual penalty.

That is the short of it. You can argue otherwise but if Google sees a guest blog post with a dofollow link and that person at Google feels the guest blog post is only done with the intent of a link, then they may serve your site a penalty. Or they may not – it depends on who is reviewing it.

That being said, Google is not to blame. While guest blogging and writing is and can be a great way to get exposure for your name and your company name, it has gotten to the point of being heavily abused.

A Cre8asite Forum thread has one SEO claiming that one site wanted to charge him £3,100 ($4,620 US dollars) for a guest blog post! Another site he contacted wanted £450 ($670 US dollars) for a guest post.

The number of email requests I get each day from people to pay me to post guest blog posts here is huge and the number keeps rising.

Truth is, guest blogging and writing although started for a good purpose, has been abused like many other real marketing tactics. Now, Google does have to take a closer look and also take action when they believe the intent is to manipulate their search results.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forum.

New changes to email accounts at Yahoo have the potential to frustrate marketers and cause privacy concerns across the globe.

Privacy has never been so important to all of us, and invasion of privacy has never been feared as it is today.

Countless reports over the past few years around hacking and miss-use of data has reached the top of the news headlines, which makes Yahoo!’s recent move in releasing dormant email accounts, all the more puzzling.

In the past few months, Yahoo! has become more aggressive about attempting to reactivate email accounts, and if unsuccessful, invalidating those “inactive” email addresses so that someone else can use it.

Ultimately, they are trying to get inactive users to reclaim their Yahoo! email address by sending out email messages to these users’ alternative addresses similar to the following:

Yahoo! has stated in the above example, that any account that has been inactive for at least a year that has not been accessed by July 15 will be released ‘back into the wild’, starting in August. Wow.

Cheerfully announced via the company’s Tumblr page by Jay Rossiter, Senior Vice President of Platforms at Yahoo!, yourname@yahoo.com can be yours (although likely to be at the expense of some other poor soul). Interested?

Marketers and consumers are both worried about this – you only have to look at the sentiment on the Yahoo! Tumblr page where it was announced.

One user described Yahoo! as “more dangerous to the security of the internet than any government at this point”. A little extreme maybe, but it represents how people feel about this bizzare move from the tech giant.

There is certainly some concern with this from a privacy perspective as emails could come to these re-purposed, re-assigned addresses that were intended for the previous owner, not only risking the wrath of a spam complaint (beware, marketers), but potentially sending sensitive information to an unintended recipient.

Clearly it is bad practice for marketers to send to any individual that has been unresponsive for such a long time, but we all know that it happens at times.

Surely if this is an attempt to reactivate ‘lapsed’ email account holders, it would be best for everyone if they just write-off those addresses instead of re-releasing them back into the public?

As you know, the Google Keyword Tool is being replaced by the Google Keyword Planner tool in the next month or so. Google is going to shut down the legacy Google Keyword Tool.

But what might be obvious to some but not all is that the Google Keyword Tool for external, non signed in users, is completely going away. To access any AdWords based keyword tool, you will need to sign up for an AdWords account.

Here is the warning Google is showing users:

Again, you won’t be able to use an AdWords Keyword tool without an AdWords account. This may upset some SEOs.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google has quietly dropped the support to deliver your Google Alerts via RSS.

A warning at the top of the page, for those who had RSS delivery previous set up for Alerts reads:

Google Reader is no longer available. To continue receiving Google Alerts, change to email delivery.

Here is a screen shot:

In October 2008, Google added RSS support for Google Alerts of wWeb search results. Since then it worked very well, that is until Google Alerts in general started to break earlier this year.

For me, losing RSS as an option for delivery of Google Alerts is a big problem. I use it as a method of discovering news on topics otherwise hard to find.

The only alternative is to have all these alerts, which in my case can be hundreds per day, emailed to me. For me, that is not an option. I need the alerts immediately but I also cannot have them in my inbox.

The true value of a brand identity lies in the view of the target audience. It reveals the consumer’s knowledge about the existence of the brand and its repeated exposure of the identity draws instant attention from people.

One of the images that view the identity of the brand is the website of the company. People can easily recognize how the brand operates through the functionality of the site.

Advantages of a Strong Brand Identity

• Reveals your unique value proposition and develop a competitive advantage in the market.
• Reflects the voice of the brand through social interaction and outreach.
• Improve the consumer’s experience towards your company through visual elements (logos, color scheme, typography, etc.)
• Maximizes your ability to increase awareness and brand loyalty with your customers.

I’d like to share some tips on how you can improve your brand identity to achieve your goals and become an authority in your industry. Let’s get started.

Optimize Your Content

Trust is the king in inbound marketing and is achieved only by proving great value to the customers. Comprehensive guides, actionable tips and compelling information give credibility to your brand and foster engagement with your people.

The rule of thumb in creating a high quality content is to fulfill your customers’ needs. Use Five Second Test to know if your site provides a memorable experience. NavFlow and ClickTest are good at analyzing your navigation and design engagement. Compress the sizes of your images. Keep each page under 1MB in total to keep your site’s loading speed fast.

Add social sharing buttons above and below the fold to leverage the acquisition of links and share. Don’t splatter all your share buttons on every single page of your site. Otherwise, it will only give a poor user experience and may decrease your repeating visitors.

Create an approachable identity by allowing your readers leave their comments or send personal emails to you. A simple instruction at the end of the post like “Leave a comment below” or “Share with us your experience” would encourage user feedback.

Use Visual Devices

The use of visual devices on your website helps you gain more traction and creates a remarkable identity. Incorporate your core values to the common attributes of your logo like colors and shapes. People will interact with you based on how they understand your logo. Different meanings can be made out of logo since different countries has its own cultural views and personal experiences.

Use fonts and colors that complement your brand. Your customers must be able to grasp what you want to say to them. Select a text color to improve your user’s readability. Avoid annoying ads that can distract your customers. If you run ads, keep them outside of the content area. Pay attention to what your customers want to do on your site such as subscribing to your blog, making purchase of your product or contact you to know more about your services. You have to observe your customers’ behavior using Google Analytics. Identify your top landing pages to determine the most engaged activity of your site (contact page, about us, etc.).

Develop your affinity marketing

Affinity marketing is the use of brand assets to develop lasting relationships with other brands (alliances) and to build closer relationships with the customers. This can be noticed in many authority brands that create friendly personalities to increase their overall customer base.

Be real and friendly with your customers. Use effective platforms such as social media and webinar. People want to see the person behind your company. Talk to your audience and educate them by providing free webinars and video tutorials. Tell them your stories and experiences. Case study is a good way to show transparency and expertise in the field.

Use pictures, faces or even mascots in every marketing channel. Associate them to your brand in a fun and engaging manner. The Roger mascot of Moz helped them established a recognized identity that stands out from the competition of SEOs. This mechanical and sci-fi robot is used to create a loveable hook to get customers into their company. The use of brand assets enables your brand to widen your visibility on the web and makes your users understand the mission, vision as well as the core values of your company.

In order to develop successful branding strategies, your business needs to stand out. You must emphasize what you have that your competitors don’t have. You need to tell your customers what makes your business different from other companies. You need to be consistent, proactive and informative with your brand messages. Brand awareness and purchase intent are highly correlated with repetitive viewing and consistent branding. For example, you should encourage viewers to return to your website by placing frequently updated and informative content.

Partner with other brands whose customers are same as yours. Keep your relationships with them growing since they’ll be your long lasting brand evangelists. Get them to know more about your services/products by giving them discounts or free versions of what you are to offer to them. Promote other brands as well through social media and content marketing.

How do you develop your brand identity? What do you think are the main factors you need to achieve success in branding? Comment below.