Below are some takeaways observed when we had a chance to step into some of the great sessions at Atlanta Digital Summit:

Keynote: How to Not Suck at Marketing
Alexis Ohanian
Co-Founder, Reddit

-Your worst enemy online is the “Back” button. if you can’t entice someone they will hit the back button. There is so much competition for viewers attention.

-No one wants “your marketing”. You have to convince them they should spend their time on you.

-Make something people want.

-Marketers ruin everything. Marketers are why we cant have nice things. People are trying to hard to sell something not in creating a community.

-Monetize with communities, not against them.

-Entrepreneur means “Has Ideas, Does Them”.

Usability & Experience
Showing the ROI-Where User Testing and Conversion Testing Collide
Mike Perla
Fathom, Dir. of Conversion Optimization

-It’s about making decisions on return on investment.

User Testing
+Conversion Testing
+Accurate Goal Value
=Show the ROI

-Do whatever it takes to determine an average lead value.

-Convert the main stakeholder and the others will fall in line.

Creating Intuitive Interfaces
Erik Muendel, CEO Brightline Interactive

Right Minded Interactive
-Provide Samples or Collect Data
-Create original content that can be shared.

Usability Improvement Process
-Define your goals in numbers
-Match experience to Goals
-Solve common problems in UX, no visual hierarchy, no calls to action, interfaces don’t go through focus groups, UX and interface are created in a vacuum.

Ecommerce Conversion Optimization: New Research, Optimization Tactics Compared and the Consumer of the Future
Stefan Tomquist, VP Research at eConsultancy.

-50% of teens use smartphones as their primary access to the internet.
-78% of consumers use the internet to research products
-55% of smartphone users use them to run price comparisons.
-2010 Black Friday purchased via mobile were 6%. In 2012 this rose to 24%.
-#1 influential source for purchasers are Reviews.
-The fastest growing segment is Direct to Consumer sales by manufactures. 15% annual growth.
-In 2009, mobile commerce barely existed. Today, mobile accounts for one in three ebay purchases.
-Currently for every $92 spent acquiring visitors. $1 spent converting.
-Don’t for about site search. Those who use site search are more likely to buy.

Online Video
Facebook Engagement is Killing Your Strategy
Anna Belle Blue

-Facebook is a tactic not a strategy
-40% of time spent on Facebook are is in the News Feed.
-Don’t try to game Edgerank.

Leveraging Twitter in the B2B space
Trish Nettleship, Dir. Social Media, UCB

-Who is the Twitter audience, 100% listen and 60% tweet.
-They are everywhere, talk about everything and they are mobile.
-Listen, promote your brand, interact with your customers, create buzz around upcoming events. Provide great content.
-Optimize your profile with unique cover photo and call to action and have a featured tweet.
-Generate leads by connecting to your blog and also promoting offers.
-Promote content and integrate with your site.

Google+: The Marriage of Search and Social.
Becky Sheel
-Google+ treats G+ pages just like regular websites in search.
-Use more information based posts and less marketing…and don;t mention Facebook.
-Use large photography or video.

Make a schedule and stick to it:

This seems like a no-brainer (and should be) for many; but once you’ve made a schedule it can be easy to get distracted with pings from your co-workers or your boss asking you for some help here and there. While it’s great to be a team player, you also want to be dedicated to your clients. So the next time you get an IM or email asking for your attention,  it’s perfectly acceptable to ask how important the task is or if it can wait a few hours. As a matter of fact, it’s smart.  It’s called prioritizing and staying on task.  Stopping completely to work on something else can be really distracting, so if you must do so make sure it’s something worth your time.  Being pulled all over the place just spreads you too thin where you can’t be 100% effective in any one area.

Keep like projects together:

Once you’ve got a schedule in mind, try to keep the items that are closely related together.  That way when working on them, your mind will be focused and in the gear (thought patterns) you need it to be.  You’ll be able to stay strong, effective and creative.  For example, I try to schedule as many link building tasks as I can together so I can stay focused on link building for as long as I can.  The same goes for content writing. Even if it’s for a different client, having my mind set one topic will help the creative juices flow and I end up generating better quality work.

Staying focused:

This may seem weird to some, but I’ve grown to like background noise when I’m working. I don’t mean kids screaming upstairs or the chatter of the office but music, white noise or even rain sounds.  Lisa Barone mentions this in Copyblogger’s How Lisa Barone Writes.   I’ve found it helps keep me focused and sane. If you must have a hot cup of coffee/tea/whatever, grab a big mug and get started.

Staying on track:

I have a habit of checking the clock or a reminder every 15 minutes or so.  It’s a bad habit but I’m getting better with it.  I’ve started pushing my reminders back to 30 – 45 minutes. I’ve also started to be okay with going over 10 minutes or so on a task if I’m at the end of it. Just because I’m close to finishing out a task and time allotted for that task has expired doesn’t mean “stop, pencils down.” I have to finish what I was in the middle of.  When this happens to you, just finish it as quickly as you can and move on to the next task. If you’ve been using the allotted time wisely then going over just a bit shouldn’t matter much.

If you need some help keeping track of your time and Microsoft Outlook isn’t your cup of tea, there are a few other options out there:

Project Insight – This is a paid software, used mostly to manage projects and tasks but it comes with a nifty stopwatch for projects. Just click start when you begin a project and stop when you finish it or take a break. This will record all your time spent on it and truly let you know how much time you’ve gone over or have left.  It also lets you know what project deadlines are being missed by turning the task to red.  You can also view team members time on any shared tasks.

Klok – A software that works with Adobe AIR (there is a free version) that lets you create blocks of time for projects and timelines within the project for each task needed to be done. This doesn’t take much space and works with pretty much any OS.

ZOHO – This is an online tool (both paid and free versions), that lets you track your time and view teammates times on projects. It’s great for seeing how a project is coming along and being able to identify what areas could be slipping.

Keep it consistent:

If you’ve never kept yourself in a routine like this, it’s best to start now. It’s just like with exercising or eating right.  You have to develop a routine, stick to it and be disciplined and everything else will fall into place.

We know social media is pull marketing, soft sales and assisted conversions (not direct conversions).  But it’d be nice to know there is something a little more concrete for all the time and effort, right?  Well, there is.  We just have to know where to look and how to interpret it.

HubSpot has released their 2013 State of Inbound Marketing Annual Report which offers great stats on real results from social media marketing efforts, collected from interviews with over 3300 marketers world-wide.  This 5th annual release gives some outstanding insights into just how effective social media marketing can be.  To sum it up. the top 10 are:

1.    Social media produces almost double the marketing leads of trade shows, telemarketing, direct mail, or PPC.
2.    Social media lead conversion rates are 13% higher than the average lead conversion rate.
3.    21% of marketers say that social media has become more important to their company over the past six months.
4.    Companies that generate more than 1,000 Facebook likes also receive nearly 1,400 Website visits a day.
5.    52% of all marketers have found a customer via Facebook in 2013
6.    43% of all marketers have found a customer via LinkedIn in 2013.
7.    36% of all marketers have found a customer via Twitter in 2013.
8.    59% of Twitter users have visited B2B tech brand sites, compared to 40% for the average internet population.
9.    23% of marketers are investing in blogging and social media this year, a 9% increase from 2012.
10.    Approximately 46% of online users count on social media when making a purchase decision.

With the understanding that these stats cover a wide range of companies (some of the over 3300 marketers are CEOs and staff doing their own in-house marketing, so it’s not all professional marketing companies) with a range of target audiences and audience sizes, what is your take?  What is your experience with your social media marketing efforts?  Do these stats hit home or are they far off from your own experiences?  Let us know you thoughts and share your experiences in the comments below.

As always, if you need assistance, just tap our shoulders.  We’re here to help:  Social Media Marketing Services from Vizion Interactive.

First, remember to stick to the 80/20 rule when creating content for social media channels. This content should be 80% thought leadership, tips, industry news, resource shares, etc., while only 20% of this content should be  promotional. 

Social media is no place for push marketing, hard sales or spammy links.  However, make the 20% you get to be promotional count.  You do want assisted conversions from social media, right?

Look at your PPC data to determine what is working for your target audience at large to help determine how to reach your social community:

• What is getting clicked? 
• How is that content written? 
• What are the topics? 
• What are the keywords being used?
• Are the keywords capitalized or lower case?
• What calls-to-action are getting the action? 
• What demographic engaged the most with your ads?

Use that knowledge to create great social media content.  Then test and experiment with different post types. Implementing these PPC strategies into your social media strategies, as well as any content marketing effort, should yield more likes, comments, shares and links clicked.  Your analytics may show the increase in assisted conversions and social value you’ve been looking for.

Also utilize the strength of PPC’s ability to get the clicks on short-term campaigns and promotions. Just as PPC is a traffic driver to your website that also increases conversions and visibility, it can also do those things for your social media campaigns and channels:

Set up PPC’s to drive users to your social media promotion through a strong, appealing call-to-action that yields some sort of benefit to the searcher.  Use PPC ads to:

• Direct users to your social media promotion
• Build awareness for your social channels
• Grow your social communities with an incentive
• Direct users to a multimedia resource, such as a video on YouTube

Now turn the tables.  Use your social media analytics to strengthen paid search efforts.  With Facebook ads you can specifically target your desired audience.  Use the analytics from that to determine what audience you can now target in paid search. 

Use both social media and PPC for remarketing purposes.  Use the analytics from PPC, such as identifying the audience of users who put items in their shopping cart but never checked out and create a targeted social campaign for them.  Sometimes it’s just the extra nudge and additional exposure to your brand that converts the user into a customer.

Use some of the same strategies across both PPC and social media to remind users they have seen your brand before.  This eventually builds trust.  Use some of the same images and echo some of the same words in your ads.  Offer something similar to what they have viewed before. 

The key takeaway here is to use what you know.  Stop thinking of PPC as a whole other world from social media and vice versa. Instead, realize they are both working on the same overarching goal of reaching your target audience(s).  Use what you know from one to identify new strategies and secondary audiences for the other. Use both the remarket appropriately across the mediums.  Test and refine.  Rinse and repeat.  This should yield some very targeted and streamlined marketing efforts across the board, giving you a win in multiple areas.

Feel free to reach out to us for help with any of your PPC Marketing or Social Media Marketing needs.

Now, assuming that you have been performing a PPC initiative be very careful in how you interpret the data. Keep these points in mind when assessing paid search referrals at a keyword level. In PPC, it is not about the traffic count but the quality of traffic as a reference for organic potential.

• Don’t just look at the number of visits for a term, (you bought this traffic). What is the conversion rate of this traffic?
• Just because you bought the traffic doesn’t mean it correlated with the theme of your landing pages. What is the paid bounce rate of these terms?

Okie dokie, so you parsed through the paid search keyword data and eliminated those not applicable to the above considerations. What do you have left?  A pile of amazingly low-bouncing, highly-converting terms, right? These can all be an SEO opportunity, right? Not so fast. Just because these terms did very well there are other considerations that we must process before we bring these terms into SEO consideration.

• Was the landing page for the referring terms a devoted PPC landing page or is it a standard site page which Google will likely rank for the term?

You must consider that a specific PPC landing page vs. the organic focused landing page is going to likely feature an enticing headline, a prominent call to action and little else to distract the visitor. Additionally, this visitor landed here kudos to a compelling ad title.

• Is the term focused around selling something or of informational intent?

The PPC visitor is likely more so of buying intent, ready to take action sooner than an organic based click through.

Now that your keyword list has made it past the second round of considerations you may have gleaned some additional insight into beneficial keywords/themes for SEO campaign. The above mentioned process isn’t necessarily a one and done process either. As you move down the road you will want to continually review this process to assess additional opportunity. Also, you know what is great about this entire process? It works vice-versa. Top performing SEO terms can also have paid search potential. Keep in mind, you need to take the above considerations with an inverse approach.

Want to know more about creating an effective SEO campaign?

With cost per click consistently rising year over year, marketers must find unique ways to maximize and convert each click.  This means being in tune with your customers and their browsing and shopping habits, as well as being there when they are ready to pull the purchase trigger.  So how do you fine tune your campaigns to ensure that you are paying the least amount per click and maximizing that click to the best ROI possible?  In this guide I’ll give you a few tips to ensure you are earning a return on every dollar you spend in paid search.

Quality Score

Quality Score is Google’s estimate of how relevant your ads, keywords and landing pages are to a user seeing your ad.  Quality Scores have enormous influence over the cost and effectiveness of paid search campaigns.  Securing a high quality score garners you:

Lower Cost Per Click (CPC) – Google will lower your CPC if you have a good quality score.  This means you pay less for each click; which in turn lowers your cost per acquisition (CPA).  This provides you with a better ROI on your campaigns, and in laymen terms, makes you more money.

Extended Reach – Google will show your ads more often and in top positions without having to raise the bids.  You can get more exposure, more clicks and more conversions at a cheaper price.  Again – providing you with a better ROI.

KPIs for Mobile Campaigns

Mobile searchers, mainly those using smartphones, search differently than users on desktops and laptops.  When was the last time you searched on your iPhone?  Were you looking for a physical location, making a purchase or establishing social touch points with your friends?

A study done by Google called Global Insights on Smartphone Users & Mobile Marketers gives us insight into smartphone usage and helps uncover new opportunities for marketers in these markets.  The data shows:

• Smartphone Users Are Avid Video Watchers
• Smartphone Users Are Frequent Social Networkers
• Smartphone Users Are Local Information Seekers
• The Smartphone Is a Consumer’s Always-on Companion – Especially While Shopping
• Mobile is an Emerging Point of Purchase

With this in mind, streamline your KPI’s to align with the goals of your business and users searching for your services or products.  As a business, you should consider whether or not the same success metrics used in your main campaign apply to mobile campaigns.

Separate Mobile Campaigns – Not Anymore

There is no need to separate mobile campaigns any longer.  This year Google rolled out their new feature called enhanced campaigns.  Enhanced campaigns let you easily manage complex targeting, bidding and ads for different platforms like mobile and computers, all within the same campaign.  Account management has also been consolidated for tablets and desktops. Additionally, with enhanced campaigns you can reduce the overall number of campaigns you need to create — you no longer need to create a separate campaign for each target device type or location.

Per Google:

“Enhanced campaigns can help simplify the way you manage your campaigns for targeting across multiple devices and locations. Some of its main features include:

1. Powerful advertising tools for the multi-device world: Ability to manage your bids across devices, locations and time (e.g. bidding higher when showing your ad on mobile devices or to users who are within a half-mile of your store)

2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts: Ability to show the right creative, sitelink, app or extension based on the context of your prospective customers and the devices they’re using

3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types: Ability to track new conversion types, such as calls, digital downloads, and conversions across devices”

Determine Ad Targeting

Know when to use certain targeting.  Should you target by geographical areas, operating systems, mobile devices, etc.?  Utilizing existing data from your campaigns should give you a good idea on what, when and where to target your ads.  If a user searches for “tire shop Atlanta” what type of targeting and ad presentation should be displayed for them?  A local listing with your phone number?  A device targeted listing with a coupon?  Knowing your potential searcher/user search habits will help with these decisions. 

Ad Extensions

Utilizing the enhanced campaign function gives you more control and deeper reporting on four types of ad extensions: call extensions, app extensions, sitelink extensions and offer extensions. These are called upgraded extensions.  Some nice features of upgraded extensions are the ability to schedule start and end dates for the extension to run; or set up running for specific days of the week and times of day.  Another great feature you can use for mobile users is the mobile-preferred sitelink extensions.  You can highlight your store locator or in-store deals to mobile users to help user convert at a higher rate.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are a factor in acquiring and maintaining a high quality score.  Your landing pages should be optimized for adgroups and keywords alike.  A good landing page experience can help you gain the trust of your customers and keep them coming back to your site.

Landing pages should answer the question that the user is asking.  If a user searches for “wooden chairs,” don’t land users on the main furniture page.  Instead land them on the wooden chair furniture page.  Landing users on the exact product page they searched for will increase conversions and increase your quality scores because the landing page will be relevant to the ads as well as the keyword the users searched.

Select Keywords That Sale 

In my latest post Top Keyword Selection Formula for Organic Search I wrote about selecting top performing keywords that are at the bottom of the buying funnel.  With paid search campaigns you want to target all levels of the buying funnel.  Maybe a user is searching for “golf clubs.”  I would consider this user to be at the awareness level of the buying funnel. Landing this user on the main golf club product section would be optimal to push the user into the consideration stage.

If a user searches for “Callaway golf clubs,” I would consider this user to be at the consideration stage of the purchase funnel.  At this level the user is ripe for calls to action, sales and coupon offers. 

Try different types of calls to action, keywords and landing pages to ensure you are always providing users the most relevant information for what they searched for.  A/B testing of ads and landing pages is recommended until you get a mix that works well for your business.

Providing synergy with your keywords, ads and landing pages will give you a better return on your paid search spend and help to increase your quality score, lower  CPC and increase  conversion rates.  This leads to what all businesses want at the end of the day, increase revenue and increased profits! 

If you are struggling with managing paid search campaigns effectively, give us a call.  We are here to help!

Evaluate Landing Pages

One item that is taken into consideration managing PPC is the landing page you’re sending visitors to. It’s highly recommended you send users to a specific landing page associated with the phrases the ad is targeting. Pointing every ad at the homepage isn’t a great method, and sending every link to your homepage isn’t either. When building links you want to make sure you’re sending users to the page that is the most relevant to the anchor text being used. Don’t start users out on the homepage only to have them begin their search over again. And speaking of anchor text, vary it up!

Vary Anchor Text

Go chat with your PPC consultants.  Using the exact same content for each PPC ad is a bad idea. In addition, even if you’re targeting the same phrase you want the ads to be different. More than likely you have several areas of your site you want to promote, so target them as you see fit but keep it varied. There’s more than one way to describe your products/services and there are multiple phrases each of those could be ranking for. Take time to do some good keyword research and plan out what phrases you want to target.

Build Links Internally

It’s not enough to just rely on Google to get some visibility from PPC.  You need to work on getting your ads up on other sites as well. If you’re already building links on other sites, you want to make sure you’re building links internally. This doesn’t mean you need to make sure every page on your site is plastered with links to the pages on your site you want to rank. Just make sure you are writing about it on your blog or creating some infographics on standalone pages pointing to it.

Check Out PPC Analytics

Link building is not the best testing ground for A/B testing, but your PPCs should have plenty of data for you to look at. Go check out what has worked/hasn’t worked and focus on that for your link building. If there’s one thing that can give you feedback on what has converted quickly it’s your PPCs. This should give you some insight as to what type of content users are clicking on.  Use this information when writing the content for your site as well as for any outreach you may be doing.

Links are advertising.  No matter what type of link building you’re doing, you’re advertising your site or at least sections of your site. So with that in mind, why not make sure the links you’re building are also going to get clicked to bring potential clients to your site and hopefully bringing in conversions as well.

If you are need of some help with your PPC campaigns, give us a shout. 

While brands know and understand this, they seem to miss the mark when creating their own content marketing strategies.  Take infographics for example.  If your brand is creating and pushing out infographics that educates and earns the trust of your consumer audience, that is great.  Well done.  However, if in these infographics your brand is being positioned and pushed in the content itself, then that is a serious fail.  In essence, you are photo bombing your own content. 

Take Your Brand Out of the Picture

Remember that your brand positioning, as well as your product and service offerings, live on your website. They do not belong positioned in the middle of an infographic, article, video, or in the majority of your tweets or Facebook posts.  When that is done, it turns those content pieces into traditional sales ads.  That is not what you want. 

Content marketing, and social media  marketing, is about providing solutions to your consumers’ problems, establishing yourself as a trusted resource, providing industry information they may not get elsewhere as well as creating buzz and getting them to engage with your brand.  It’s an avenue to provide tips and ideas that may be new to your audience and a place to share transparent facts about your business.  It’s about relationship building through emotional appeal and problem solving.  There is no need to thread your brand positioning and sales pitches in the content itself.  Your brand and offerings are inferred.  So stay out of the picture and don’t photo bomb your own messaging.

Conduct a Content and Conversational Analysis

Focus on creating quality, educational content for your consumers.  Audit your own content.  Go back and see what types of content you have produced in the past that got the most social shares, comments and engagements.   What was it about the piece that earned the buzz?  What problems did you solve?  Use these ideas to create new content.  There may even be chances to create secondary, follow-up pieces that provide an opportunity to link back to the original content and create more buzz around it.

It would also be wise to conduct an audit of your competitors’ content.  This will breed topic ideas you may have never thought of.  It will also give you insights into how your audience engages with your competitors versus your brand in regard to the same services or products.  Use that knowledge to know your audience better and cater your content marketing and social media marketing efforts accordingly.

Do an analysis of the conversations in the social space around your industry’s product and services.  How is the audience engaging?  What seems to get the emotional appeal from them that makes them share, comment and engage?  What problems have they voiced that you can provide solutions to?  What hashtag conversations are on Twitter that you can join in?  Who are the major influencers that you need to be engaging with and sharing content?  Are there negative reviews on Yelp that give you an opportunity to come in and save the day, crushing your competitors in the process? 

Utilize Google Analytics for Keyword Insights

What keywords are users finding you with?  These keywords need to play an integral part in your content marketing and social media efforts.  Create content around these keywords and optimize accordingly; but don’t just use the keywords in your content.  Use the keyword to brainstorm for topics and content ideas.  Use these ideas to branch out to new audiences you may not have thought of before.

Add Structure

While you want to be a trusted resource to your audience, you also want your content to be indexed by the search engines. That means including structured content in order to communicate contextual information to the engines in a way they can understand.  The best way to do this is to use the microdata tool, schema, to tag your content.  This allows the search engines a better contextual understanding of the content itself and properly index it for search.  You can learn more about using schema here:  schema.org

The bottom line is this:  Content marketing and social media marketing are not traditional forms of advertising.  Work on becoming a trusted resource in your industry through education, transparency and useful advice.  Also keep in mind not to forget the search engines.  Cater to them as well with structured content. If you do these things, you should experience some joyful wins for your brand instead of embarrassing photo bombs.

For more information, please visit Content Marketing from Vizion Interactive

(Google Analytics is our preferred tool of choice and is used for the examples below.)

Users

While having someone with access to your analytics will not necessarily inhibit the validity of your data, it does mean that this user has the ability to make changes that could impair data quality.

Review: Admin>>Profile>>Users

Coverage

First, utilize a tool such as analyticscheckup.com before a site-wide audit of your code to ensure that all pages feature Google Analytics tracking snippets so page level data will be transferred to analytics.

Review: The fore mentioned tool above will provide an audit of site pages and email a list of all pages without tracking code.

Multi-domain Tracking

Ensure that you do not have the tracking code on other owned sites. This can be found by reviewing pageviews by page and noticing whether there are URLs that do not appear to follow the URL structure of the site you do want to track rankings for.

Review: Content>>All Pages

Filtering

Most of us performing an SEO campaign are focused on the generation of quality new visitors to the site. With this in mind, filtering internal site traffic helps you to gain a better perspective on the non-company related traffic that is entering the site. If internal traffic i.e., a call center is accessing the site often through search and completing form submissions, etc., you have just marred the perception of your Organic lead conversion success. Remove traffic from correlating supporting internal domains (as with example above) or to specific IP blocks.

Review: Admin>>Profile>>Filters

Goals

No one likes to boast about their SEO success as it relates to lead generation or goal conversions only to find out they were tracking them inaccurately in the first place. Ensure that you have a complete understanding of your goal URL structure. With this, do goal URLs remain exactly the same or does each goal URL have ID numbers appended for example. Knowing this will allow you to properly detail what match type will be needed in your goal configuration.

Review: Admin>>Profile>>Users

Paid to Organic Slippage

When it comes to screwed up analytics and an organic search campaigns the resounding culprit is often PPC visits that are accidentally not reporting in paid referrals but being lumped into organic search data. Any up-spend in PPC and you think you have miraculously hit organic pay dirt. Finding this can be tricky sometimes. If you PPC landing pages are all in a custom folder structure, i.e., /landingpages/ then you can filter organic traffic to show these and see if PPC and organic tracking are merging. You can also filter by specific PPC URL variables if your landing pages follow that specific structure. Lastly, strong keyword performance for a term you know you are not ranking well for (I know, you wish you were) can be determinate of tracking inefficiencies here.  The best course of action is to review your Adwords profile preferred settings to ensure they are linked to Google Analytics or inversely by reviewing your cost source setting in Google Analytics.

Conclusion

While there may still be an ability to have flawed analytical tracking, these are the most common. Paying heed to the above mentioned areas will help to ensure your analytical data is sound.

Give us a shout if you need help with your Web analytics.

With over 2.7 billion searches performed on Google a day, it’s imperative that companies select the right keywords for their Websites.  Keywords are not only for SEO purposes but they give businesses a look into their customers and how their customers interact with their business.  Are we inexpensive or are we good at what we do?  Do we think outside the box or are we just like our competition?

Knowing which keywords will drive the most traffic to your Website and ultimately a conversion is something you learn over time using your analytics tool.  You can also use these same tools to help you with your keyword selection process.   In this guide I will show you how to select the top performing keywords for your business and how to optimize your landing pages to convert.

Building Your Initial Keyword List (Seed List)

Most keyword research starts with a keyword seed list.  This is a list of random terms that you feel are very much relevant to your business.  I recommend using your Website to help create the seed list.  You can view your Website’s navigation structure, such as the services page.  What services do you offer?  How would you search for that particular service?  If you sale golf clubs, for example, you would think that being in position one in Google for the keyword “golf clubs” would be great.  Well it would be for traffic; but we want the searcher/user that is closer to the bottom of the buying funnel.  An example term that would yield more conversions would be “Callaway golf clubs” as the user is closer to a purchase decision.

Also look into your analytics program to see which keywords are currently driving visitors to your Website.  If you have goals or conversion analytics setup, utilize it to see which keywords are actually converting and at what percent.  If you are running PPC campaigns, ask your PPC specialist to provide you a report of converting keywords and click data.  This is all data that you will use later to build your keyword portfolio.

Building a very relevant seed list and thinking about driving visitors to conversions, helps you create a better overall portfolio of keywords.  It also helps you drive conversions/leads/sales and not just traffic.  Once you have your seed list, you are ready to move on to generating additional terms off your seed list.

Generate Additional Keywords

Now that you have your seed list we need to see what Google thinks are relevant keywords for your Website.   I like to use the Google Adwords keyword tool, Word Tracker, SEMRush and a host of other tools for the purpose of generating additional keywords, search volume and competition.  For this guide I will stick to the Google Adwords tool.  (There are a ton of tools on the market that help with keyword data collection.  Keep in mind that all tools present supplemental and aggregated data, so there are no exacts, but it’s enough to make good marketing decisions on.)

Take your seed list and paste it into the Google Adwords keywords tool.  The tool will provide you with hundreds of keyword ideas based on what users have searched for in the past and based on what’s relevant to your business.  It will also provide you with plurals and common variations of the keywords you placed in the tool.  Example:

From here you can go through and select the keywords you feel are most relevant for your business.  I recommend selecting at least 100 keywords, as we will use these keywords for our weighting exercise.  Keep in mind user intent.  If the user is at the top or bottom of the buying funnel and if the user is looking for information or services.

Building a Keyword Weighting Tool

Why go out and invest thousands of dollars into expensive software to weigh your keywords when you can build a keyword weighing tool yourself?  With Microsoft Excel and all the data we have collected throughout our research, we have all we need to weigh and score our keywords accurately.

A keyword weighting tool is what we use to assign values or weighting to each and every keyword.  When you are building a keyword list you must use as much data as you can, as there is no guessing when it comes down to generating revenue for your business.  I like to use the formula below to calculate keyword scores:

Google Search Volume Estimates (Weighting at 40%)

Google search volume shows search volume statistics for the most recent month that Google has data for.  These statistics show the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network.  If no one is searching for your keywords, that’s a pretty good sign that the keyword is not a fit for your campaign.

Search volume is weighted at 40% as it is a huge factor in determining if a keyword is a good candidate for driving quality traffic to your Website.  An example of the weighing scale would be a keyword that has 101-3000 searches.  That keyword would receive a weighted score of 2 while a keyword that has 25000+ searches would get a perfect score of 10 (for this weighting section).

Organic Search Revenue (Weighting at 20%)

If you have your goals configured or an eCommerce analytics package installed, you can keep track of revenue generated by each organic keyword that drives users to your site and ultimately converts.  For example – using Google Analytics you can assign a dollar value to each goal, whether the goal is a newsletter sign up, contact form submissions or a product purchase.  There is a dollar value assigned to provide you with an ROI on your marketing campaign.

Organic search revenue is weighted at 20% and is weighted at the dollar value.  For example:  a purchase of $1-$250 would be assigned a score of 1 while a purchase of $15,000+ would be given a perfect score of 10 (for this weighting section).

Paid Search Revenue (Weighting at 10%):

Paid search revenue utilizes the same goals or value system utilized for organic search revenue.  The only difference is that the PPC campaigns have their own assignment of value which is done at the conversion code level.   You can still find this data using Google Analytics by clicking on Traffic Sources – Sources – Search – Paid.  Here you can find how your keywords are doing and gain insight into conversions and traffic data for each keyword.

Paid search revenue is weighted at 10% and makes up the third data point to finalizing our keyword portfolio.  Weighting example would be the same as Organic search revenue.  Example:

Room for Improvement (Weighting at 10%):

The room for improvement column is used to gauge which keywords show the most room for improvement.  A keyword ranked in the 22^nd position, has a better chance of moving up in rankings compared to a keyword that is ranked 2^nd position.  Any keyword that was ranked higher than 200 should be labeled as 200 on the keyword weighting exercise.

Room for improvement is weighted at 10% and is determined based on the Google ranking for a particular keyword at that point in time.  Weighting example would be any keyword currently ranking 4-10 would receive a score of 4 while any keyword ranking past 31 would receive a score of 10.

Competition (Weighting at 20%):

Competition is determined by submitting each keyword to the search engine and documenting the number of competing web pages given in response.  When selecting keywords it is imperative that you find a balance between search frequency and competition.  The lower the competition the easier to reach the top using this keyword, but, too low says that the keyword is no good, and the search frequency will reflect this.

Google should be used for the competitive data. Terms that rank extremely high or extremely low in your competitive analysis should be weighted lower than those terms that fall in the mid-range.  For example keywords with 10million to 100 million competing webpages should be assigned a score of 2 while keywords with 400,000 to 800,000 competing web pages should be assigned a score of 10.  Competition data is weighted at 20%

Keep in mind that some of the weighting for columns may need to be tweaked for your particular industry, search volumes etc..  Maybe none of your keywords get more than 10,000 searches.  In this case you will need to adjust your ranges to accommodate your data.

Reviewing Your Scores and Selecting Your Keywords

Now that you have all this data and your columns are lined up in Excel, you must add your ranges from which your formulas will complete the calculations and assign the final score for each keyword.  Your last column in your spreadsheet is where you will place your results/total percent scores. If you have done everything correctly you should see scores ranging from 0.1 to 10.  I recommend selecting keywords that have a final score of 5.3% or better.

Based on human logic/human search behavior combined with the resulting total score from the keyword weighting exercise and paid search data, you should be able to focus your list down to terms that will successfully move the needle in terms of revenue. 

If you need help finding the right keywords for your search campaigns don’t hesitate to contact us.  We are here to help!

You know the type of emails I’m talking about…the ones that say something like “guaranteed top positions in Google,” “guaranteed results,” “guaranteed SEO rankings.” Or perhaps they go so far as to say (as this one did) “guarantee that organic traffic and pageviews from search engines will increase,” that you’ll see “an increase in new site visitors from search engines” and “improved overall rankings for targeted keywords and phrases.”

 As I replied to this client…

Seriously? 

SEOs offering guarantees is about as old as SEO itself.

Do you want me to dig into this?

No SEO can legitimately offer a guarantee. And they do this guarantee before they know whether or not the Website/owner has their own domain (perhaps it’s a Mary Kay affiliate with duplicate pages on the Mark Kay domain that they don’t even control?) or whether or not they have more than one Web page (and are able to add content?) or if they have any links at all?.

This is complete BS. Always has been…always will be.

I can honestly tell you that I walk away from a lot more SEO prospects/opportunities than I accept. By “a lot” I mean “a lot a lot.”  Like, perhaps 80% of the prospects that I speak with.

If SEO were so easy, do you think Google would be a very good search engine and deliver such good results? Absolutely not.  

Nowadays, search engine optimization – when done well – is a component of “good marketing.” To get a Website to rank in the search engines is an effort that, for some, is not something that can be ROI positive in the short term. You may need to build a ton of good/resourceful/unique content, promote your company/Website for many months via many channels (press releases, social media, guest blog posting, other PR/mentions of the company, etc.) before you gain the traction necessary to EARN your organic/natural presence in the search engines.

For some SEO simply isn’t possible because, as noted above, they don’t even control their own Website, own their own domain or have the ability to add any pages of content.

I have accepted work on brand-new Websites just getting started, but I cautioned the Website owners/my clients…this is gonna take some time and a lot of content/link building, etc. (all the stuff noted above)… in other words:  it’s gonna take work. I made sure that they were realistic as to what may be able to be achieved and “when” (truth told, no one can say with any degree of accuracy exactly “when” but we try to set expectations appropriately).

As for this company that sent out this – well, there’s no other description  for it – “SPAM solicitation!” I checked their site on SEMRush and they’re getting a whopping $65.00 per month “worth of” organic traffic to their site. In other words, they’re not doing very well in the search engines themselves. And to make matters worse, I checked out their company on LinkedIn and – as best I can tell – they don’t even have an SEO on staff (?)

Now, I can’t “guarantee” that’s the case (perhaps every single one of their SEOs either hasn’t updated their profile to include this company or they simply don’t use LinkedIn? but it sure looks suspicious…about as suspicious as their email, in my humble opinion. There’s no staff page on their Website, so take from that what you will.

Everyone wants a guarantee or warranty.  I get it.  But…

The thing is SEOs only control so much.  Google’s sudden change in algorithm is not one of them.  Competitor efforts are not on the list either.  It’s not as if you’re buying a product that could be defective (unless you’re ordering search engine optimization services from a company that, apparently, doesn’t even employ an SEO?…I’m just  sayin’).

I could certainly try and guarantee something for a large brand/retailer which already has a bazillion pages to their site and links from CNN, WSJ, and every other incredibly authoritative Website known to man. But, truth told, does the guarantee go both ways? Am I guaranteed that someone in IT over at this company isn’t gonna mess something up? Am I guaranteed that they’ll actually implement the recommendations that are made, in a timely manner? Even then, am I guaranteed that something “dramatic” might happen with Google’s algorithm that totally changes the game?

SEOs are humans with limited control. If you want a guarantee, buy some PPC ads.  That way you’re “guaranteed” to pay for the clicks that you actually get. Not trying to sound cynical, but I am – to a fault – honest and candid.  It’s that whole human thing.  I’d rather turn down 80% of prospects than “guarantee” something I clearly cannot.  I’d much rather sleep soundly at night.

Get creative and get the client involved

Don’t get me wrong, creativity is a huge part of the process. My buddy Don Rhodes dropped some creative knowledge my way on building links for lawyers, which is not only dull at times but pretty tough (one of the toughest niches according to him). The biggest thing he did that stood out to me is he got the lawyers involved in the process. But it just wasn’t about, “hey we need you to do this for links;” it was “If we can do x, we’ll get you some good publicity and some good links.”

I’ll admit he covered a few link tactics you should be doing anyway, such as alumni sites and charities. But if anything those should just be starting points to help get the creative juices flowing. And if you need answer the question “why do we need to get involved” be ready with a solid answer. In their case, they got the lawyers to offer free advice at a local church. That’s not something Don and his team could have filled in for. They planned it and got it setup. But it was the lawyers that needed to show up and share their knowledge.

Create great content and focus it

Creativity isn’t enough; the content has to be solid. Hannah Smith made mention of several niche examples using “great content.” I agree with a lot of what Hannah says in her post, but none more so than when she mentions Blend Tec. Blend Tec has a huge following on YouTube for the “Will it blend?” series. The fact of the matter is most of that audience can’t afford the $500 blenders. But still creating buzz and a cult following has to be good for business, right?

If anything goes viral links will almost always pop up from marketing publications. It’s the way of the Web. But trying to create something viral shouldn’t be the main focus of the campaign. It should be to drive traffic and increase sales. A personal favorite of mine is the one where the CEO of a TAC (Texas Armoring Corporation) stands behind a piece of the manufactured bullet proof glass:

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the Oralbrush sensation Natalie, my co-worker, wrote about:

While these videos did well and raised awareness of the companies involved, they informed the viewers of what the product did. So if you create great content, make sure the message of the company is included. Users need to know what the product is, how it should be used and if it’s right for them. Even if it’s just a sill intro video to get people to buy cheap razors, the message should be clear.

Quit thinking of it as boring and learn like a noob

Your client got into their industry for a reason, be it a passion or simply the potential to make money. No matter the reason, you need to get involved and support it yourself. Ask you client for what they use to introduce new employees to the industry or for resources they’ve pointed people to. And while this learning is taking place keep asking yourself “why isn’t my client at the top in this industry?” At this point you should be brimming with ideas. Even if a niche is “boring,” use the creativity you’ve got to take that information and make it informative. Attract outside users to come in and take a look. They might be interested in a product they had no idea they needed in the first place. At the very least get them to try it out. When it’s comes to promoting a client site, what have been some struggles you’ve had? What have been some ways you’ve used to “catch fire” and make stuff happen?

For example, with the utilization of Graph Search, a query for “single friends in Dallas who like to go see live bands” will yield some great results.  As a matter of fact, it is supposed to pull every single one of your friends who qualify for your search.  Without Graph Search, that search query would not pull anything worthy, if anything at all.

So how is this important to you as a business owner with a Facebook business page? Well, imagine you are a Dallas bar or event location that showcases live music to your patrons.  Knowing that the reason certain friends are showing up in this example query is because they’ve liked or commented on a business page in Dallas that has live music; wouldn’t you want to be one of those pages?  The person running the query will see that.  It’d be ideal to not only be one of the pages showing up as friends liking and having been there, but dominating these results.

As a Facebook business page owner, likes for your page, likes for your posts and engagement in your community have never been more important.  Graph Search opens up an immediate opportunity for your business to have a whole new way of being discovered.  Imagine someone seeking this query:  “Live music events attended by my friends in Dallas.”  This query will pull the businesses first and show which friends have liked or attended second.   Your business will not pull to these types of searches without the digital support of your community through likes and engagement and your page being accurate and up-to-date.  

So what do you need to do to be Graph Search ready? 

1. Get likes and shares up to give your business a bigger reach and more muscle on Facebook. Promoted posts and more likes to your page can be done inexpensively directly through Facebook.  Go to “Build Audience” in the Admin Panel up top, select which promotion you’d like to do and simply follow the user-friendly instructions.
2. Launch various promotions and offers to help increase likes and engagement.  These not only will work well to increase your community but also for the engagement on your page.  Varying the offers will equal a variation in content, making your page more enticing and attracting different audiences.  Upload photos and videos with each offer to make them more click-worthy.  Use clear call-to-action language.
3. Update the About Section of Your Business Page.  Go through this entire section and check for accuracy from your business name, category, sub-category, vanity URL, etc. all need to be both complete and up-to-date.  If you need to add or edit, simply go to the Admin Panel, then “Edit Page,” then Update Info, then Basic Information. 
4. Update Your Contact Information.  If your contact information or physical address is incomplete or just not accurate, you need to fix it quick.  Your business cannot show up in a geo-specific search query in Graph Search if anything in your contact information (address, Website, etc.) is not correct or just not there.
5. Encourage Check-Ins. Most of today’s consumers have smartphones.  Most like to check in where they are.  Encourage your customers to check in on Facebook when at your business to help boost your search rankings. You can always place reminder signs at your checkout counter, at the front door, etc. and you can offer incentives online for a free product or service to everyone who checks in on a certain day, or to the 50^th check in, etc.  Get creative.

Graph Search is in limited beta for the US right now and is set to be released fully later this year.  If you want to join the wait list, click here:  Join Facebook’s Wait List for Graph Search  If you need assistance getting your page Graph Search ready or for any other social media needs, we’re always here to help:  Social Media Marketing Services from Vizion Interactive

Since my last stop on this topic, there is a lot that has changed. There has also been a lot that has changed to allow you to be the “unique listing that stood out.” The advent and adoption of rich schema markup for page properties has given the search results a much different look and feel. In my personal opinion, even after a few years of its existence and support by Google, it is still not used as widely as it should be.  This is even better news for you as it is a way you can get a little more out of your SERP display.

Top three areas you can affect very quickly with structured data markup:

Author Tagging

Help your blog posts, articles, hell, any page that has been “authored” by someone to get a better presence in SERPs via an image of the author. All this requires is a synergy/linking between the author’s blog author page and his/her Google+ account as well as an author tag on the actual pages of authored content. Just make sure that the authors Google+ picture isn’t of him doing keg stands cause this is the featured issue alongside organic search listings. More Info

Rich Snippets for Reviews

What speaks better than testimonials about your company or products? Showing them off in the SERPs. Wrapping your on-page reviews in Review/Ratings Rich Snippet format can give your SERP display star ratings, reviewer name and even testimonial information. If this isn’t enticing enough then I don’t know what is. Just make sure your markup isn’t on the one review that is a one star rating! More Info

Rich Snippets for Video

While this is no substitute for instilling a Video XML Sitemap (which you should do both of these), Rich Snippets for Video allows you to provide structured data markup for on-page videos. Doing so can help these videos to show up in the description section of the ranking page’s organic listing. More info

Conclusion

These examples above are just a few of the ways you can create a standout SERP listing display. These three above are likely the most common that correlate with the content types most people feature on their sites.

Get to “marking up!”

Ensuring that your digital marketing campaigns are in tune with the season is best practice for optimal performance.  Starting that wave early is one of the most optimal strategies we recommend to all our clients.  Why wait until the last minute to start running your Valentine’s Day ads and romantically decorated landing pages?  By that time you’re too late.  Advertisers must understand that the early bird gets the worm.  Shoppers are now making seasonal and special occasion purchase decisions  much earlier than they used to.  If you are not there when the consumer is ready to buy then that’s a missed opportunity for you, but a grand score for your competitors.

How to Romance Google’s Pandas & Penguins

We talk a lot about paid search campaigns, but you organic search campaigns need love too.  I’m sure you’re tired of those pretty little pandas and penguins attempting to stifle your online success.  So show them some love too.  Dress up your keyword research for this time period and show those creatures that you are in tune with your audience’s search habits.  Do you sell bean bag chairs?  Why not give the pandas somewhere to cuddle for Valentine’s Day?  Google’s Pandas and Penguins are looking for timely information, things that are happening right now, as they are always on the move.  Updating your site frequently ensures that the spiders will come back to crawl more often.  In the world of Google the spiders are the ones who bring your information back to the penguins and pandas so keep that in mind and cater to them too by making things easy for them to index.

For the Love of SEO, Practice Safe Link Building!

Link building is similar to dating.  If you date the wrong person you get burned.  However if you find the right partner, the relationship can last a lifetime.   When looking for a link partner we advise partnering with bloggers, Web masters, vendors  and the like that are in your vertical/industry to obtain quality backlinks to your Website.  For example, if you sale flowers engage botanist or flower fanatics bloggers with a free flower delivery to their offices.  This should score you a post on their blog about your product or services. If not, you should at least get a mention on their Facebook page.  Targeting links from topical, relevant and authoritative sites and blogs where your information would be valuable to the audience is not only a link building best practice but a very safe way to practice link building.

The Heart of PPC

Just as your heart pumps blood throughout your body, your keywords and adgroups are the heart of your PPC campaigns.  Your budget is the brains.  You can have the highest budget known to man, but if your adgroups are not tightly configured around your keywords and products, it may be time to get out the defibrillator, as you will blow through your budget in a heartbeat and not have any sales or conversions to show for it.  We recommend that each adgroup is relevant to a particular product and all keywords for that adgroup are just as relevant. 

When running display ads ensure that you are finding sites that would be most relevant for your campaigns, allowing you to connect with your customers when and where it matters.  You can do this in a number of different ways.  One way of connecting with potential customers is content targeting or contextual targeting, which uses keywords to automatically match your ad to the content of a Webpage.  Another way of ensuring that you are reaching your target audience is to use placement targeting to choose ad placements, from entire Websites to ad positions on specific Webpages.  Finding niche audiences with a combination of placement and contextual targeting is showing both your customers and your stakeholders some love.

The Bare Essentials of Social Media…and We mean Bare

Seems like everyone is on “Instagram straight flexin” (Hip-Hop has made its way to social media) and willing to bare it all for the world to see.  So why not show off your products to the world?  We all know that images are the next big social media to do, so why not be there with the cool kids and do ‘em. 

Seriously, what better way to promote your brand then having a stream of images of your products and/or services to showcase to your audience?  Just be careful what type of photos you use. Your followers will not want to see generic stock photos, boring store images or text-heavy images.  So put your creative hat on and personalize your photos.  For example, if you own a bakery shop take pictures of your employees having fun during a normal shift.  Does Tammy always put more icing on the cakes than what’s needed?  Did Marcus fall asleep on break and have his face painted with icing?  Chances are, you’ll get people’s attention and they will likely share with their social networks.  Make it funny and it’s almost a guarantee.  Humorous media gets shared more than any other kind of media out there.

What type of promotions can you try? How about free stuff ?  As humans we all love to win something that’s free.  There’s nothing more enticing to a person then the possibility of scoring something for free from their favorite store. These types of promotions are fun, generate buzz, attract new customers and increases interactivity with your brand.

With all this love in the air don’t let your opportunity to convert all these love struck searchers into customers slip by.  By romancing all your marketing campaign types year ’round, you can continue to see returns on your investments no matter what season it is.

We’re here year ’round as well.  Ask about our Full Service Digital Marketing today.

Penguin & Panda

If you do a Google image search for “Google Panda” or “Google Penguin” you get a pretty clear sentiment for how our industry viewed these updates. I don’t care what the posts these images are used with say, a picture is worth a thousand words. In short, these updates made business owners (and SEOs) pay a lot more attention to on-site and off-site optimization efforts.

Panda was focused at the content level, Penguin at the link level. Both screamed “give us quality” and imo “stay away from patterns.” From then until now, some Website owners have started to recover while others are still reeling from the hit. But one this is for certain, it’s time to stop reading about the updates and start making serious changes to your SEO model (and business model in some cases).

The fact that you need inbounds links has not changed.  You just need to quit reading about it and start doing it. I used to do a lot of reading about link building, and still do when the information is right. But the most I ever learned about link building was when I actually did it; although it didn’t always seem like that’s what I was doing. Here’s some examples of links I’ve gotten for myself and others:

Turn guest post opportunities into long-term relationships

When I first got into SEO, I did a bit of writing on my own sites (which are pretty bare now) but wanted to get my name out there. When I went in for job interviews those sites would show up when potential employees would search for my name. When Ann Smarty was the editor for the Search Engine Journal (SEJ), I shot her a quick email with a brief introduction and potential idea.

Ann read and responded pretty quickly with a rejection of my original idea, but along with an idea for another post. So I ran with it, and other than a grievous grammatical error it was a big hit (to me at least because the community was very welcoming). Since then I have written a few more posts and have gotten free reign to write when I can. This also led to me getting chances to write for a few other publications since I did a nice job at SEJ. While Ann isn’t there anymore, I made it my mission to stay in the good graces with those in charge.

For client work this means not only searching for guest posting opportunities, but looking for long term columns to setup shop and create a reputation for said client in their industry. If your client is involved at any level in their realm, chances are they know of some sources or some influencers you can reach out to today. If they know of a publication, great. If they know someone at the publication and have a relationship with them, even better.

The point is to learn as much about your client’s industry as you can.  Learn where they go to get their industry specific news, if there is an industry specific niche resource.  If not, they surely have other resources they go to frequently or bloggers they follow. That’s where you need to get plugged in with while looking for ways to get your foot in the door.

Do some favors for influencers

It’s no secret influencers have, well…influence. If you know them well enough and they know you, they can either make or break you (if you really tick them off). So when I saw someone I really respect in this industry (Sebastian, that fun loving crustacean) begin a <rant> I couldn’t help but capture it all and post my first ever story on Storify. When he had finished, I published it and then tweeted it. To my amazement he wrote a quick blog post and inserted what I had created. At the very least I thought I’d get a few dozen tweets out of it once he had RT’d it. Instead I got the RT, a blog post mention AND a link to my site. Jackpot!

It took me around 10 minutes to put that Storify post together, mostly because it was new to me. So about 10 minutes worth of work turned out to be a score of a pretty decent link. A few takeaways:

• I was looking for some RT’s and to get a chuckle from Sebastian that someone had take time to put his <rant> into Storify for easy reading.I shared the same passion he showed in the rant, which meant I wasn’t thinking “Gah, I don’t want to waste my time making this.”
• I knew more than just Sebastian would get a kick out of it. We know a lot of the same people in this industry and the sheer fact I took something Sebastian ranted about and made it easier to read with a thread of his tweets meant others would share it as well.
• When he wrote the post and I DM’d him about linking to my site he knew I was just looking for some extra credit. I wasn’t sitting outside his house with a sign begging to get noticed.
• If it’s something you’re passionate about, or something your client has really got you psyched about, creating the content and putting in some good effort should come easy to you.
• I MADE A RESOURCE FOR OTHERS TO CHECK OUT

Pick up the phone and call someone!

When I worked for a non-profit in Kansas City I remember making a ton of phone calls to get our press releases syndicated and to ask churches to post our clinic hours. What resulted from all of this phone tag was a nice amount of targeted links.

This goes along with the rest of the list here, but picking up a phone and talking to someone about getting some visibility on their site takes effort. This, like the suggestion below, takes knowing what the client is going to be marketing for the rest of the year. You need to figure out who to call, when to call and what to call about. The last thing you want to do is sound like a cold calling telemarketer reading from a script. Learn as much as you can and be prepared.

Promote the business year ‘round

When with a previous employer, we focused all infographics and blog posts to revolve around the same marketing schedule as the Director of Marketing. This allowed us to benefit from any offline marketing he did such as radio and television. When users would arrive directly to the site we had a fresh infographic or blog post waiting for them to read and share.

If you’ve already got the marketing schedule for the next year from your client (or next quarter) then you’ve got enough information for blog posts, press releases, social media AND phone calls. So you then need to plan your link strategy around their marketing schedule. Why you ask? So your efforts don’t go to waste and so you can get additional help from the client by simply working in unison with them on it. I’ll admit it sounds a lot easier than it is; but the additional benefit you get from it is well worth the effort you put into it.

It’s not enough to build links, you need to build links to the links you built (linkception)

Ok, so you got links from some good sources; but don’t stop there. If you really got some good links, you still need to build links to them. If there’s anything to learn from the shady side of link building is that stopping at just one level of linking isn’t good enough. A good resource gets linked to and promoted from other sources. This isn’t to say you should do this for every single link you get.  For example, I can’t think of one single good reason to build links to a directory link, but I can think of a few reasons as to why I’d build some links to a guest post a client has gotten.

What do all these have in common you ask? (Or don’t, I asked it for you.) They all took work. I’m not going to type out that “automation doesn’t work” because there are some ways to automate some parts of it to help speed things along. But automating too much weakens quality.

So there have been some examples of link building here and there throughout this post.  It’d be great if you were able to go out and get links by using these tactics or other some other means. But the takeaway here is that no matter what route you take to get links to your own site or promote a client, you have to have some passion for the business you are building the links for in addition to be willing to putting in the effort to create the content and make sure it gets placed in the right hands or in front of the right set of eyes, at the right time.

If you need help with your link building efforts, give us a shout anytime:

Link Building Services from Vizion Interactive

Seeing these ads can entice you to click.  Seeing all of your friends likes makes you click almost every time because you want to see what all the “hub-bub” is about.  What do these people you trust know that you don’t? 

Once you click, If you get there and see the business takes ownership of the page, is active by conversing with its community, dealing with customer service issues, sharing specials, asking questions and truly engaging in its community , etc., you’ll probably look no further.  However, if you click over and the page is practically dead and there isn’t even a logo, you’ll probably go right back to your Facebook page and see what answers your post got directly.

The point is, social is just that:  social.  Social media works because it deals with everyday life and connects people through emotional ties.  Social media keeps evolving such as with Facebook’s announcement of Graph Search, the third of its three pillars, bringing the search for people, places and things closer together than ever before.  The reason it’s important is that it’s like word-of-mouth on steroids.  When you can search to find which of your connections went to Hawaii in the last year, for example, and what their experiences were, what they had to say, etc., you get first hand consumer experience right at your fingertips.  That makes Graph Search even more important for brands.  Likes and positive comments have never been more important for business pages on Facebook. Sign up for the beta wait list here:  Facebook’s Graph Search Beta Wait List

Facebook Marketing Tip for Business:  Make sure from time-to-time to post a special just for your Facebook community.  They feel special, they’ll get engaged and they’ll share.  Make sure it’s an offer of value to get the interest and spread.  

Twitter is staying affront by releasing Vine.  Vine, an iPhone mobile app, just rolled out last week and is already being used by top brands.  Vine allows you to quickly create and share short, looping videos just a few seconds long that captures just the right communication in a playful, quirky way.  It’s already exploding and many top brands such as NBC New’s Quick Tour Inside 30 Rock, Behind The Scenes with MSNBC, and Red Vines Product Snapshots  are already using it to get messages across.  Go to the Vine Blog to see an example of what you can do and grab the Vine App download for free.

Twitter Marketing Tip for Business: Take care of customer service issues timely and professionally.  Keep in mind that humans understand human error. Showing your human side gains trust.

Regardless of the social media platform(s) you are using, remember to use visual and engaging content to connect with your audience. Use your audience as an ever present focus group to improve your products and offerings.  Share industry tips and become a trusted resource and create incentive-based and rewards-based programs just for them. 

The social media landscape is continuously changing.  It evolves based on user interest, consumer needs and human intent.  Stay up with it and be prepared to adapt to whatever the social future holds.

Now I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but the same search engine that gave me all these previous offerings also turned me into a mind-racing lunatic as I try to keep up with the search marketing landscape they so heavily influence on a continual basis. I think this allows me to ask for more. 

Google, This is What I Want

The following represents the data/analysis offerings I expected from Google by now, but definitely hope to see sometime this year. 

Indexed Content by Folder/Page

You know…like Bing has. We began with the site: operator and then moved to the Google Webmaster Tools sitemap section for a number of indexed pages based on sitemap delivery. We now have Index Status which is slightly more granular; but it still is not like Bing’s Index Explorer which shows content indexed by folder or page. This would greatly help indexing issues I have had to investigate in the recent past.

Greater Sitemap Submission Detail

Please let me know what URLs I am submitting to Google Webmaster Tools that are not getting indexed. This gives me an action list of URLs to review potential content quality guideline issues. Additionally, in this same section, Google tells me I have sitemap errors but gives me no download capability, only just a few examples.

Actual Anchor Text Counts         

Natural looking link profiles are the in-thing now. Google provides a list in order of the most frequently occurring anchor text of inbound links. Having some numbers associated with this might help us to better understand how many instances of specific keyword anchor text there are between terms. I can see this in other SEO tools but would like to know what Google sees.

Greater Analytical Insight into Image/Video Referrals

Google offers video and image universal results beyond these respective vertical indices, but the analytical insight into these areas seems to be lacking from within Google Analytics. Image referrals from universal search show up in organic search referral data, yet Image search results show up in referring site referrals? Google, if you want us to optimize images and help us help you understand in greater detail which images are performing well we need to know more. I do realize that Google Webmaster Tools allows me to assess search queries through the Images or Video Filter according to landing pages and then by ranking keyword. This helps me in Google Webmaster Tools but has not been passed along in the Google Analytics tie-in with GWT. If I am in Google Analytics there is no way for me to get to this level of reporting, not even through secondary dimension review.

Google Places/Google Analytics Integration

I would like to see the same wonderful analytical insight per local listing page we were given a few years back in Google Local Business Center that was integrated as a tab in Google Analytics. Honestly, I am not trying to be lazy here but it is like the points above.  I want to do more in Google Analytics without always having to move to Google Webmaster Tools and Google Local Business Center.

Pretty Please

So there it is, my short list of demands. I don’t think it is too much to ask for.  I will also add that I am hoping that there is some functionality that I do not know about. If so, please comment and let me know how I can get this data above, the way I want it.

1. Make measurement a priority in 2013. IIf you’re not able to track the ROI of your search campaigns (or worse yet, don’t know what ROI is or what your goals are), move this initiative to the top of your to-do list. It’s critical for your search team to be optimizing your campaign around the right products, keyword targets and metrics that move the needle for your business. Make sure your analytics are set up properly and that you’re schooled in how to get the most out of them.

2. Implement SEO recommendations quickly. Committing resources to quickly implement SEO recommendations is a critical component to success in this marketing channel. Recommendations are often based on shifting algorithms and competitors’ movements. Organic search can have significant lead time. When recommendations sit for months, opportunities are lost and the game can change. Keep in mind, once your recommendations are implemented, it will still take time for them to “bake” and affect your presence in the search engines. By quickly implementing recommendations, and giving the search engines ample time to react to modifications, you’ll realize results sooner.

3. Watch competitors in multiple channels. It used to be enough to watch the competitors above and below you in the search results. However, today’s search game is going on in multiple channels and spread across a growing number of keywords. Your competitors’ activity on YouTube/video search, image search, in social media channels, shopping feeds, with their blog or PR may be landing them in areas of the search results where you are not competitive. They may be more adept at marketing to different segments of their audience which is giving them an advantage in personalized search results.

4. Develop a content plan. Algorithm updates over the past two years have made fresh, quality content an essential ingredient for success. If content is not planned, it often doesn’t happen. Work with your entire marketing team early this year to generate an editorial calendar which incorporates seasonal promotions, new products, social media and search needs. You’ll need content which can win engagement, links and social votes. Pre-planning also gives you time to line up needed internal or external resources and/or budget. Keep in mind, sometimes content isn’t only textual.  Think video, infographics, etc.

5. Plan ahead. Pre-plan your search targets, landing pages and content needs around new products and seasonal trends. Use last year’s analytics data to find your winning keywords and landing pages. Incorporate those winners in your 2013 strategy. Know your content gaps (winning content from competitors, perhaps?) and have a schedule for building against these gaps.

6. Embrace best practices. Recent algorithm shifts have made it very apparent to some companies that they need to keep best practices in mind. Moving your search campaign forward requires letting go of outdated tactics for acquiring links and building landing pages. A more competitive landscape makes it essential to put solid SEO foundational technical practices in place. Sometimes people can over-think “good SEO” and forget that building a quality Website, ripe with great, original “usable” copy and pages are the things that can lead to success in SEO that’s “algorithm proof.”

7. Know your audience. Your mobile and tablet audience is growing. Have you optimized the experience that visitors on different devices have with you? Are you discovering more about your audience’s interests through social media? A one-size fits all approach isn’t effective any longer. Now is the time to invest in mobile initiatives, responsive design and to mine social data to develop more targeted messaging and site experiences for your customers. Sometimes very good content is better represented in video rather than text (ie. “How To” information).

8. Don’t silo data. Leverage data from other channels. If you had success with particular keywords or landing pages in paid search, look to integrate these findings in your organic campaign. If an email landing page was particularly effective, look at ways to incorporate that messaging or to test design or call to action elements on your Website. There are even great call tracking services which can monitor words your prospects are using on sales calls and find those common words being used for those who become customers. Bringing all of this information together is – yes – now part of optimization.  (Whether or not we call this “search engine optimization” is another matter.)

9. Think cross channel. The search engines are adapting to social media by incorporating social signals in their algorithms, measuring the social graph, calculating social influence, understanding relationships between content and authors and reading and displaying open graph tags in search results. If you have yet to build a social presence and tie those efforts into your Website and other channels, the time is now!

10. Embrace Diversity. If the recent fallout from Google’s Penguin and Panda taught site owners anything, it was that diversity is needed. Your link building efforts should use a diverse array of tactics to acquire links of all types. Utilizing one tactic sticks out like a sore thumb as an unnatural link profile. To accomplish this, you’ll need quality content and will greatly benefit from planning how to serve up unique slices of this content for different audiences and channels. Keep in mind that cross channel content (social / press releases, etc.) are key elements here, as well. Chuck Price had an excellent post recently on the risk/reward of link building tactics.

11. Optimize everything. Diverse search results mean that you should optimize content in most channels. If you publish a press release without optimizing the headline, links and anchors, you’ve missed an opportunity to build links and make your release more visible in news search. If you fail to optimize video assets, you are limiting their reach. After all, YouTube is the second largest search engine. Twitter content is more successful with links and images. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm determines which content gets into the news feeds.

12. Don’t forget to tag links. Adding appropriate analytics tags to links you use in PR, email, social media and paid search allows you to measure the outcome of those efforts. With tagging, you’ll be able to better understand which efforts are driving success and which efforts are contributing or supporting.

13. Feed the engines. Make your data easy and quick to interpret by the engines. Use semantic markup, schema, open graph, author tags, XML sitemaps and other formats to add to the engines’ understanding of your data and assist with crawling. Leverage Webmaster tools at Google and Bing to check in on how the engines see your data. Quickly address any flagged issues.

Image Courtesy of Jungle Media.

We’ve all been pitched by someone from a marketing agency offering number 1 rankings in Google or our money back.  Sounds enticing enough, right?  But does that offer mean they know what they are doing and what do 1^st page rankings actually do for your brand and your bottom line?  For some, it’s that boost needed to bring in tons of organic traffic to their Website.  For others, it’s just nice to say there is some ranking on Google’s 1st page for a few keywords.  But keep in mind the primary goal.  All companies are looking to increase revenue, and as a byproduct, increase profits.  So how can we, as an SEO company, show clients the value of our efforts related to their business goals? SEO success can be measured in many ways, using many different tools.  Let’s go over a few key measurements:

Traffic

There are a ton of analytics packages on the market today that measure traffic that range in price from free to tens of thousands of dollars.  We recommend to our clients the easy to install and navigate, and most utilized analytics package, Google Analytics (GA).   With GA we are able to determine how much traffic is being driven to your Website and where that traffic is coming from.  This data also let’s us see opportunities to come up with ideas for competitive comparison pages, banner advertisements, keywords that searchers are using to find your site and other competitor sites and much more. 

Traffic is a good measurement of success because the more quality traffic, the more opportunities to convert those users into paying customers.

Search Engine Coverage (Total Number/Types of Keywords Driving Traffic)

Another good measurement of success is search coverage:  knowing how many keywords are driving the traffic in comparison to competitors and in comparison to prior months/years.  Casting a wider net over the Web allows for targeting more searchers seeking search terms/keywords related to your business.  This allows for more opportunities to get your Website in front of more eyeballs and should render more clicks, more traffic and more sales/conversions.

Using Google Analytics can determine what keywords are landing the searchers onto your Webpages.  We baseline how many keywords and the types of keywords and over time we should be able to see an increase in the amount of terms driving traffic.  This data is also good for finding additional keywords not previously used. 

Let’s say you sell tents and traffic starts coming in to your Website from the term “Coleman tents.” It may be a good idea to create a Coleman tents comparison page on your site to help start ranking for the term.  We could also start up a PPC campaign targeting their brand term.  Of course, we’ll be sure to follow Adwords policy for bidding on competitor’s brand.

Keyword Rankings

Search engine rankings increases should coincide with traffic increases.  If keyword rankings move higher on a search engine results page (SERP) but traffic does not improve, there could be external factors that are causing the keyword positions to not bring in results.  Or it may be the wrong keywords are being targeted. 

We always baseline our clients’ keyword rankings at the start of each campaign. When a client does not have an eCommerce Website, we sometimes need to come up with a conversion formula that ties increase in traffic, downloads of white papers and/or signups for the newsletter, etc. to an actual dollar figure within the goals section in GA.  This provides a quantitative dollar amount to associate to ROI.

Leads/Conversion Rates

Huge increases in traffic are great, but it doesn’t mean much if that traffic doesn’t convert into paying customers. However, if higher conversion rates are seen, it is a good sign the SEO campaign is doing well. Even if conversation rates do not increase or stay flat, there should still be a higher profit if traffic increases.

At the end of the day conversions, leads, revenue and profits are the main drivers for the success of any business today.  As an SEO company, our efforts are directly related to our clients’ business goals, thus making accurate measurements of SEO success so imperative.

Just tap our shoulders if you are in need of any SEO Services from Vizion Interactive