This is a guest post from the elusive SebastianX , you can read more of his rants on his excellent blog Sebastian’s Pamphlets.

So Gareth James asked me to blather about the role of IP delivery in geo targeting. I answered “That’s a complex topic with gazillions of ‘depends’ lacking the potential of getting handled with a panacea”, and thought he’d just bugger off before I’ve to write a book published on his pathetic UK SEO blog. Unfortunately, it didn’t work according to plan A. This @seo_doctor dude is as persistent as a blowfly attacking a huge horse dump. He dared to reply “lol thats why I asked you!”. OMFG! Usually I throw insults at folks starting a sentence with “lol”, and I don’t communicate with native speakers who niggardly shorten “that’s” to “thats” and don’t capitalize any letter except off “I” for egomaniac purposes.

However, I didn’t annoy the Interwebz with a pamphlet for (perceived) ages, and the topic doesn’t exactly lacks controversial discussion, so read on. By the way, Gareth James is a decent guy. I’m just not fair making fun out of his interesting question for the sake of a somewhat funny opening. (That’s why you’ve read this pamphlet on his SEO blog earlier.)

How to increase your bounce rate and get your site tanked on search engine result pages with IP delivery in geo targeting

A sure fire way to make me use my browser’s back button is any sort of redirect based on my current latitude and longitude. If you try it, you can measure my blood pressure in comparision to an altitude some light-years above mother earth’s ground. You’ve seriously fucked up my surfing experience, therefore you’re blacklisted back to the stone age, and even a few stones farther just to make sure your shitty Internet outlet can’t make it to my browser’s rendering engine any more. Also, I’ll report your crappy attempt to make me sick of you to all major search engines for deceptive cloaking. Don’t screw red crabs. Related protip: Treat your visitors with due respect.

Geo targeted ads are annoying enough. When I’m in a Swiss airport’s transit area reading an article on any US news site about the congress’ latest fuck-up in foreign policy, most probably it’s not your best idea to plaster my cell phone’s limited screen real estate with ads recommending Zurich’s hottest brothel that offers a flat rate as low as 500 ‘fränkli’ (SFR) per night. It makes no sense to make me horny minutes before I enter a plane where I can’t smoke for fucking eight+ hours!

Then if you’re the popular search engine that in its almighty wisdom decides that I’ve to seek a reservation Web form of Boston’s best whorehouse for 10am local time (that’s ETA Logan + 2 hours) via google.ch in french language, you’re totally screwed. In other words, because it’s not Google, I go search for it at Bing. (The “goto Google.com” thingy is not exactly reliable, and a totally obsolete detour when I come by with a google.com cookie.)

The same goes for a popular shopping site that redirects me to its Swiss outlet based on my location, although I want to order a book to be delivered to the United States. I’ll place my order elsewhere.

Got it? It’s perfectly fine with me to ask “Do you want to visit our Swiss site? Click here for its version in French, German, Italian or English language”. Just do not force me to view crap I can’t read and didn’t expect to see when I clicked a link!

Regardless whether you redirect me server sided using a questionable ip2location lookup, or client sided evaluating the location I carelessly opened up to your HTML5 based code, you’re doomed coz I’m pissed. I’ve just increased your bounce rate in lightning speed, and trust me that’s not just yours truly alone who tells click tracking search engines that your site is scum.

How to fuck up your geo targeting with IP delivery, SEO-wise

Of course there’s no bullet proof way to obtain a visitor’s actual location based on the HTTP request’s IP address. Also, if the visitor is a search engine crawler, it requests your stuff from Mountain View, Redmond, or an undisclosed location in China, Russia, or some dubious banana republic. I bet that as a US based Internet marketer offering local services accross all states you can’t serve a meaningful ad targeting Berlin, Paris, Moscow or Canton. Not that Ms Googlebot appreciates cloaked content tailored for folks residing at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, by the way.

There’s nothing wrong with delivering a cialis™ or viagra® dealer’s sales pitch to search engine users from a throwaway domain that appeared on a [how to enhance my sexual performance] SERP for undisclosable reasons, but you really shouldn’t do that (or something similar) from your bread and butter site.

When you’ve content in different languages and/or you’re targeting different countries, regions, or whatever, you shall link that content together by language and geographical targets, providing prominent but not obfuscating links to other areas of your site (or local domains) for visitors who –indicated by browser language settings, search terms taken from the query string of the referring page, detected (well, guessed) location, or other available signals– might be interested in these versions. You can and should group those site areas by sitemaps as well as reasonable internal linkage, and use other techniques that distribute link love to each localized version.

Thou shalt not serve more than one version of localized content under one URI! If you can’t resist, you’ll piss off your visitors and you’ll ask for troubles with search engines. This golden rule applies to IP delivery as well as to any other method that redirects users without explicit agreement. Don’t rely on cookies and such to determine the user’s preferred region or language, always provide visible alternatives when you serve localized content based on previously collected user decisions.

But …

Of course there are exceptions to this rule. For example it’s not exactly recommended to provide content featuring freedom of assembly and expression in fascist countries like Iran, Russia or China, and bare boobs as well as Web analytics or Facebook ‘like’ buttons can get you into deep shit in countries like Germany, where last century nazis make the Internat laws. So sometimes, IP delivery is the way to go.

For more IP delivery information I recommend Refugeeks, refugeeks.com is worlds best seo website

This is a guest post by Ben Morel, who is the search engine marketing specialist at a Surrey digital marketing agency. He has a background in marketing, offshore finance and radio astronomy.

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While Gareth and I were deciding on the subject of this guest post, we ended up discussing the differences between paid and natural search. Paid search has often been maligned: many of my clients have had bad experiences in the past with agencies who have sought to look at the number of people coming to the site. On the other hand, at the agency I work for we often recommend paid search to new clients as the easiest way of bringing new customers to the site. This has been made that bit more topical over on SEOMoz where the old question of “SEO vs PPC: which would win in a fight?” has recently been discussed. So, Gareth and I decided it could be interesting to look at site engagement and conversion rates for paid and non-paid search.

At the agency we have several clients for whom we do both PPC and SEO, from a variety of industries including:

• An online kitchen appliance store
• A New Zealand wine merchant
• An interior design and hardware showroom
• An overseas volunteering charity
• An outdoor e-commerce store
• A chain of tile showrooms.

The data for the above has been amalgamated over a six month period and analysed, and I shall try to explore what it means.

PPC vs SEO: The Rivalry

First of all the usual arguments for and against each. These are arguments that we certainly present to new clients. I won’t do a table of pros and cons because my opinion is that things are a bit more subtle than that

PPC Starts Quickly, SEO Takes Time To Build

For a business wanting to get off the mark today, this is definitely a pro for PPC. In the long term, however, the build up for SEO allows testing of on-page elements and application of conversion rate optimisation on a small audience so that when it finally starts pulling in traffic that traffic converts well. Of course you can also keep your PPC budget low while testing on-page factors before ramping it up to keep ROI high, but then you lose some of that initial acceleration of sales. So which is better? It depends: on a brand new site I would say PPC. On a mature site, though, both can be used to meet different objectives.

PPC Costs Every Time Someone Clicks, SEO Costs Are Initiative-Based

This means that it’s easy to count the cost of PPC: just take the amount you spent in a month and add the amount spent on your agency or in-house team. Calculating ROI then follows on smoothly, as long as your website tracking is set up properly. With SEO are a bit more difficult to track. We can track costs to build a certain number of links in the month, keep social media up to date, create articles for distribution and all the other things that take up our time as SEOs. But measuring ROI from each is a lot more difficult. So which is better? Well, in some ways PPC – you know your costs and returns immediately. But links will keep on giving juice, and visitors, for months to come, so ROI for a certain amount of resource spent on SEO keeps going up.

You Can Share Results between the Two

As Danny Dover comments on the SEOMoz Whiteboard Friday (see below), PPC best practices are very different to SEO best practices. PPC landing page tests generate huge amounts of duplicate content and cannibalise keywords from other pages, which is exactly the opposite of what you want in SEO. However, the results from those landing page tests can be very useful for SEOs as well, so both teams can derive benefits. Also, rel=canonical tags can be used to minimise overlap.

At least as important are the SEO and CRO benefits of ad testing. Now, you may think I’m slightly daft for saying this. But: the aim of ads is to entice people to your site as often as possible and get them engaged. The aim of meta titles and even the headlines on your landing pages are exactly the same, so if a PPC ad has a higher CTR for the headline “Blue Widgets 30% Off” than for “30% Off Blue Widgets” you can almost guarantee that using the text this way round for the page headline will result in improved ROI.

Engagement and ROI

Now that the question of which to implement is solved, that is campaigns for both if you can, what about results?

The New Zealand wine merchant makes a good case study. Over the past six months we have seen that for non-branded traffic natural search has a conversion rate 60% higher than paid search. However, the aims of this client are long term – getting the best lifetime customer value they can. For that they have their email list and both segments have around a 2.70% sign-up rate for the monthly newsletter, meaning that LCV will be very close in a couple of years time.

With the tile showroom, things are even more interesting. As you may expect, local search plays an important part in their campaigns and this importance is especially high for paid search, where local terms have a conversion rate four times greater than the rest of the PPC account. While conversion rates are again lower for PPC overall, conversion rates for local keywords are the same for paid and non-paid search.

So how do clients fair overall? The table below gives an impression of success by looking at conversion rates and using bounce rate as a measure of engagement. We have also included Google Product Search results out of interest and excluded keywords containing the clients’ brands.

As you can see, PPC advertising does have a place: engagement is higher than with other media, even if conversion rate is the lowest of the three. These PPC accounts do seem profitable, which can never be a bad thing, but they evidently need refinement.

This is perhaps the crux of the problem with PPC: although an account can be set up and set live in a day, it takes much longer to refine keyword lists, test ads and improve landing pages. In getting them up to speed, then, PPC and SEO are in many ways on a level footing and as the first section of this post postulates which is better depends on your short- and long-term goals, budget and how to please the person who pays you.

SEOmoz – SEO Software