The power of popularity, leveraging auDA stupidity

I’ve been analysing data from our recent victory against auDA in the fight against shutting down stewartmedia.com.au. The spikes in traffic and rankings on relevant media coverage days enforce my teachings that Google is obligated to show the most relevant results first.

What I learned

• Our positive outcome from the Registrants Review Panel shows flaws in auDA

• Traffic spikes hit when we are in the media

• The side effects of non-branded search

• Build on efficient site basics

• Target your buyer personas

• Content marketing is marketing

Hey. Welcome back, rankers. Thought I’d try something a little bit different. I got a bit tired of just having the same photo up on my screen. So I thought I’d take you through some stuff using the Google analytics graph. There is one really big pointy one and the rest are down here. Pretty much along here. And this one’s up here, because this is last Thursday.

A personal attack or incompetence?

What happened last Thursday? Well, I published a blog post about how the auDA tried to take away our domain name. So, basically what happened back on the 20th of February is a complaint was issued against stewartmedia.com.au. You can go and read the blog post so I won’t bore you with the details. But then what proceeded was that the Australian domain name administrator said they were going to delete stewartmedia.com.au on the 14th of March. Then on the 28th, we got submitted to the Registrants Review Panel or were accepted which is basically the last right of appeal. And at that point, they said no, auDA, you are wrong and basically the CEO had said they were going to delete it and he agreed with the findings and the Registrants Review Panel said no. That’s incorrect. And, interestingly, this is the first time since they’ve had these rules for the auDA that someone has had to go and apply to the Registrants Review Panel.

So, I’ll let you be the judge if it was victimisation or stupidity. Maybe it was both. I don’t know. But, you can’t have it both ways, either you don’t know the policy or it’s a personal attack. Anyway.

Publicity driven spikes

So, I published a document or blog post about that, shared it on LinkedIn, got picked up by SmartCompany and on that day we had a four hundred percent increase in normal Thursday traffic. Then all the brand related phrases had doubled. We found that all the organic traffic had doubled. This is traffic coming from Google. So, what was happening was either people were reading the blog post or reading the story on SmartCompany and then they were going and Googling the brand or my name to find out more about it. We also started to rank for things we shouldn’t have. This has happened previously and I’ve seen a few more over the weekend since we’ve had this spike in activity. So, back on March 14 when we got the story on the ABC News, after that we had a lot of stuff that just jumped up and that, I think, was because we were having a spike in our brand search. And because we had a spike in our brand search, Google knew that people were actually looking for us and looking for our content. So that’s when we started to jump for things like marketing speaker and digital marketing speaker.

We weren’t even focused on that yet it went to number one. SEO audit’s gone right up which I think was on page 2. So, we’ve had a lot of these phrases just jump above without actually doing anything specifically on those phrases or on those pages not doing any sort of SEO. We’ve basically just been talking about it in the media. And a lot of them sort of jumped from nowhere which we didn’t expect, like ranking for things we shouldn’t, like Search Console, or for a period there we were ranking for Google Australia. That’s gone now. But, that was interesting. And, so, without doing anything except focusing on our business and getting a message out that we wanted to get out there, it’s helped us rank for other things.

So, probably can’t see that big spike. It’s probably all washed out. I’ll try to zoom in to it with the screen. But, here is the data. So, of that big spike and here’s what’s interesting, is that forty percent … this is all users we’re looking at here. So we’re looking at all users, desktop, and mobile. And what we can see here is that forty percent of those users last week were social and twenty-three percent were direct and organic search. This one is fourteen percent and this is nineteen percent. So, this is referral traffic, all right? So, this is traffic, essentially, mainly from LinkedIn. And, well, a lot of this is LinkedIn. This is a little more multiple Facebook like m-dot, l-dot, and all that sort of stuff on Facebook that you get. Then you can see here we got a little bit of paid search happening as well. But, look at the difference between mobile on … sorry, social on mobile, social on desktop. You’re talking an extra seven or eight percent of the traffic on mobile was from social. And a whole lot less referral traffic, possibly that’s just an anomaly in analytics because it’s looking at m-dot here. Right? But, then when we have a look at this graph here, this is the before, so this is the Thursday before, right? So you can see we’ve had massive jumps in the social and … but look at organic search.

Organic search was the major winner last week. And then this week you look and its dwindled significantly because … well, its increased in actual numbers but as a percentage of the overall pie it’s certainly decreased and we’ve had a lot more traffic coming from these areas. So, essentially, that’s what we’re focused on now. To get that traffic over that period of time, to get that coverage … we’re talking about the traffic doubling, organic traffic doubling on the site since we started the campaign, so back on the 14th of February. So, this is the presentation I was giving ten days ago and I said thirty news articles. It’s actually fifty news articles now. So, it’s getting hard to keep up with them and there will be more press coming out this week.

That included national TV news, 30k video views, mentioned in Federal Parliament, and of course the doubling of organic traffic. Build on the basics So, for me the message of this story apart from the auDA stuff itself from a marketing perspective and what you’re looking at is that make sure you’ve got everything working on your site properly. All the user experiences that you know you need to have and speed, all that sort of stuff. Keep publishing content that’s relevant to your bio personas. But, you have to get it out there.

You have to get that content out there.

People ask how often do you have to publish? Well, it depends on you and your audience, your bio personas, your resources, all those sorts of things. You could just do it with one good ad, like a Dollar Shave, or you might be able to do it with one good ad like a Purple mattresses or something like that. It may not need to be sustained, you know, week after week after week I got to do a blog post. I do it because I’ve got a big mouth and I want to talk about this stuff and so I’m publishing constantly. So, it’s up to you how you want to do it, but just remember this is marketing. A lot of people talk about content marketing. It’s marketing. Where are your buyers? Where are they hanging out? I did find them. Find out where they’re hanging out online.

And, you know, work out strategies to get your message in front of them and get them talking about you and get them searching about you because that’s the most important thing. And remember when it comes to voice search, Alexa, Google Home, all of these other things, you want people requesting your brand that they want to buy. Not some generic category that your brand happens to be a part of, if that makes sense. Hopefully, that’s helpful. We’ll see you next week! Thanks very much everyone for your support. You’ve been awesome!