Ottawa SEO Consultant

Speaking Gigs

Doing SEO Right with WordPress, Speaking at GAUGE Boston

September 3, 2012 – 1:34 pm

It's been almost a year since my last speaking gig and I'm hoping to finish the year off big with two more in 2012; one local meetup presentation and a conference in Boston.

"Doing SEO Right with WordPress" is the title of my gig in Ottawa. I attended the Ottawa WordPress Meetup for the first time in August. The talk was an interesting one; Multilingual WordPress. Many of Rick's points I could reflect off my experience working with International SEO clients at Cardinal Path (just not WordPress sites), and it's a facinating area of study that I'm still swimming to grasp all that there is to know multilingual websites.

In this presentation that I will be giving(and this will get uploaded to Slideshare, and shared here too), I will be offering tips on how to optimize a WordPress site to achieve better search engine optimization (SEO) results. This involves looking at WordPress configurations, recommended SEO plugins and things to avoid that may impact your SEO in a negative way. I'm exicted to give this talk because I truly believe that WordPress has given birth to an opportunity that bloggers like myself can publish our thoughts online in a simple and affordable manner. Just checking the WordPress stats… there are 55,332,180 WordPress sites in the world, with over 338 million people viewing more than 2.5 billion pages each month and about 500k new posts and 400k new comments on an average day. Holy bananas!

Come join me and lets talk about WordPress + SEO!

Doing SEO Right with WordPress from Jackson Lo

When: Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Where: Ottawa Library, Main Branch - 120 Metcalfe, Ottawa, ON

A few weeks later, I will be travelling down to the beautiful city of Boston to give two talks; Improving Search Optimization with Google Analytics and Drilling Into Social with Google Analytics. The excitement is building up, but the nervousness is also racing along as the date approaches in a months time.

GAUGE Boston will be the first conference that I'll have ever spoken at. I expect it to be a great event and look forward to meeting many at the event. For any of my friends who are reading this, ping me if you're interested in flying in and attending the event! (I may have discount passes for you

One final note: I've added a section in my About page that will list all my speaking gigs from here on out, with links to my presentation slides. Be sure to subscribe to me on Slideshare!

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Events

“Open Mic Night” Saves the Day After No-Show Speaker

August 19, 2012 – 1:19 pm

In short: What do you do when your speaker bails at the last minute? Think of something quick, but don't cancel!

Last Wednesday, I organized a meetup to bring together marketing enthusiasts in the Ottawa and invited a special guest speaker from across the borders to join us and talk about Google+ Marketing. Short story: an unexpected event happened and got word at 2PM (4 hours before the event) that he wouldn't be able to make it. I was stumped. I didn't know what to do. I thought, this is the worst thing that could happen right now.

I first thought about what people would say if I cancelled the event because our speaker won't be making an appearance. Then I thought; what if we told the people that our speaker is not coming, but change up the format and still hold the event? I thought, the worst thing I could do is to cancel the event after 64 people had confirmed their attendance. So I knew what I needed to do.

I received the message at work and got a few Pathers to help me brainstorm ideas to fix this problem, and to still deliver an exceptional show to those who've been waiting weeks for this to take place. There are two concepts that i think really worked. Most, if not all, of those who showed up, stayed from the beginning, right to till the end. I was, more than shockingly surprised and happy.

A message was sent out to the group letting them know about the cancellation of our speaker. Still, we got a decent showing of ~30 people. After the message was sent, replies were coming in and many still wanted to meet. So I was glad only a select few bailed last minute.

On to the two ideas:

"Open Mic Night" – this idea came from one of my colleagues, Mike Prouty.
Questions, Answers and Discussions – this came up on the spot at the event

As simple as it sounds, one the key objectives of our group is fostering knowledge sharing. I feel like both of these accomplished that, and it worked out well enough that the audience was engaged and participated in the discussions.

Open Mic Night – this idea is all about giving members an opportunity to get into the spotlight and share a project that they're working on. The topic had to be on something related to Internet Marketing (SEO, SEM, Web Analytics, UX, etc.). Each participant had 10 minutes to talk about their project, with a few Q&A at the end.

Questions, Answers and Discussions – to fill the gap where if nobody was brave enough to take the stage, I asked whether anyone had any questions about their website or anything related to Internet Marketing. Immediately, a few hands shot up and the questions and answers got into motion.

At The Ottawa Web Marketing group (free event), we take privilege to those who volunteer their time and assemble a presentation and share it with the group. We hope to continue down this path, and that our group continues its growth into 2013. If you're an avid or enthusiastic marketer, I invite you out to our next event to check us out! Come join the fun!

Has this situation ever happen you? What have you done to keep your event live and entertaining?

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Google Analytics

Using Month of Year Dimension in Google Analytics Custom Reports

August 2, 2012 – 5:21 am

Lately, I've been spending a bit more time inside the Google Analytics Custom Reporting section making notice of some new dimensions appearing in the drop downs (notably the month of year dimension). I'm a huge fan of simplifying and automating the reporting process and I think custom reports delivers on allowing Google Analytics to be more flexible for analysts to create their own views of how to lay out data in a table.

Justin Cutroni wrote a great column on what custom reports are and how you can construct your own to suit your needs. To illustrate how useful this (these) dimensions are, I will walk you through an example here.

Let's pretend you are an SEO today and you've been tasked by your manager to give a report and presentation on how the company's been doing in search. So you log into Google Analytics and head over to the Organic Search reports, stretch your

timeline back one year, take a screenshot and show your boss in a PowerPoint deck. Let's also say that in the past year, there were 20K+ keywords that brought new and existing readers to your site. So you export that as a CSV, so a bit of Excel magic and present that too.

What do you think your boss will say? He will probably say 'thanks' and wack you across the head and tell you to come back with something better!

So why might this not work?

It takes too much time; everytime you need a report like this you need to navigate to the organic search report, configure your dates and take screenshots that are deemed useless when it comes to reporting
Can't scale it; continuing down this path will not only be time consuming, but the process doesn't make sense if you know exactly what you want and there are other solutions to get it done quicker
Be a creative thinker ('like a boss'); your boss probably hired you to do this because he say something in you. Maybe he knew you can do something but also wanted you to go beyond a simple screenshot of a trendline

So how might you approach this differently?

Let's use Custom Reports

First, you will want to navigate to the Custom Reporting section of Google Analytics. You can find along the top orange navigation bar. Then, you will wanted click Create Custom Report. Here, you will need to give your report and the report content sections names. Here is what I have:

After you've done that, you'll need to select your Metrics and Dimensions.

The metrics we will choose here will be Visits, Revenue and Transactions because I'm interested in understanding how the volumes of visits from organic search correlate with sales.

For dimensions, we will select Month of Year.

As you can see, Google Analytics allows you to assign specific time dimensions to your custom reports. I believe this is a new feature (correct me if I'm wrong) in Google Analytics and haven't heard it being up at all in the Analytics community. This dimension is extremely powerful because it allows you to aggregate all your visits into buckets (months) and get a nice table showing you how many visits came in each month, how much money was made and how many transactions were processed.

In the past, I've had to use NextAnalytics to generate a report like this. But not anymore!

Finally, the last step is to apply a filter to your report. Because we're interested in visitors who performed a search to come our website, we will include visits where medium is organic, as shown below:

Now you're done! If this was your first custom report ever created, give yourself a pat on the back!

Here is what my report looks like in the end:

Remember, if you are exporting this data, remember to increase your row count because on default it will only export 10 rows (10 months).

I don't think custom reporting is all that difficult. Do you? If you have any thoughts or ideas about my approach above, please share your comments below, would be happy to hear from ya!

Now, get out and have fun with custom reports!

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