Posts Tagged ‘seo’
Walking the Talk: I Am Joining the Serengeti Communications Team
This year I re-launched my blog focusing on Integrated Marketing Communications because it’s the only thing I know as a marketer. Fortunately, I have been part of integrated departments and teams for the past 15 years. Anyone who has experience with IMC knows that the reward of a strategically executed and successful campaign is, well, marketing nirvana.
As I have said, social media isn’t drastically changing marketing, communications or PR… it is just forcing us, as practitioners, back to our roots. For me, it’s about being true to all three, while consistently challenging myself, moving forward with new best practices, continuing to perfect my skills and sticking to my passion for IMC.
While I know a lot of you will be surprised to hear that I will be leaving MarketingProfs (February 28 will be my last day) and the role of community manager; I don’t think you’ll be surprised to learn that I will be moving into a role with Serengeti Communications, that focuses on digital integrated marketing communications (search, social, web, and more) for Serengeti as well as for some of our clients.
Who is Serengeti Communications? Serengeti is a digital marketing consultancy that helps clients understand their market and customers; implement search and social strategies and tools; measure ROI; and learn the skills required to create and sustain successful digital marketing programs. Basing smart, strategic marketing and communications on data in a way that adds value to the bottom line and helps to meet corporate goals is the definition of IMC.
I have loved working with the team at MarketingProfs and our members – both are truly fantastic! The good news is I won’t really be leaving Marketing Profs, as I’ll always be a member. I’ll also be speaking at the upcoming B2B Forum (May 4-5) in Boston, so I’ll get to reunite with everyone.
I am really looking forward to this next phase of my career as I dive into a position that allows me to prove, once again, that social media is a viable part of a sound digital marketing strategy. If you don’t know Serengeti Communications, be sure to get to know us!
[Image: iStock]
The Four Faces of Social Media
I have been thinking about this for a while because I keep bumping into the same situations (well, people) over and over… This won’t be a lengthy post because I am more interested in seeing if you are having the same experiences as me. If so, I am really interested in your thoughts.
What are the four faces of social media? Well, as I have encountered them…I have settled on:
The Social Media Purist: The person who truly embraces social media as the conversation that the tools allow people to engage in from day-to-day. The tools might change, but the ultimate goal is to listen, learn, share, and converse with customers and prospects. For the purists, it’s about the conversation and the strength of the relationships that lead to strong business relationships. And the relationships affect all departments within a company because everyone employee is responsible for a great interaction.
The Marketer/PR Professionals or Ad/PR/Interactive Agencies: For the most part, a lot of these folks (for now, I hope…fingers crossed) see social media tools as just that…tools. They are tools that are used to push one-way messaging. It’s not about the conversation, it’s about the medium and more places and people to share the message when traditional marketing like advertising, PR, direct mail, events, etc. aren’t working or delivering. It’s what most are comfortable with, and I get that. While this mindset might work in the short-term…it won’t work long-term.
The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Gang: Social media is about the tools that help generate the links. It’s about getting clients on Digg or StumbleUpon. It’s about stuffing keywords into every nook and cranny. It’s rarely about the conversation. Because SEOs are typically paid on results, they aren’t paid for helping clients engage in conversation. Or, it’s because they are making money for themselves by selling off highly ranked sites or by monetizing social sites…it’s purely business, not conversation. And yes, there are some SEO’s that get the mix of social media and SEO…I’m thinking about Lee Odden or Li Evans or Wil Reynolds.
The End User (that would be the customer): In the end, they are the people who are stuck combing through all the blog posts, tweets, and Internet links to find information that’s truly relevant to them and right at their fingertips when & where they need it. They want information or feedback that can help them to make a sound purchasing decision or the information that can help them do their job quicker, easier and better. They are the ones looking for conversation, but are the influencers that are most often forgotten by the marketing/PR/agency/SEO folks.
What’s going to happen here? And by here, I mean the world of marketing. I don’t know about you…but I don’t think social media isn’t going away any time soon. You all know me, I am obviously a purist. I enjoy conversation and I think it has many indirect and direct benefits to business and revenue.
So, should we find a way to get everyone to work together? Or will the social media purists eventually be pushed out by the marketers who continue to try to control the market and the SEO folks who are just looking to fill Google full of irrelevant links? Or, does it not even matter? What do you think?
[Image: iStock]
Smart Search Engine Optimization for SMBs
A lot of small businesses are trying to improve their natural search rankings against their competition (i.e. competition has a page rank of 3 or 4, they’d like to be 1 or 2). Sometimes they are handling SEO themselves, which can take time to produce results. What can SMBs do to meet their goal, yet not spend their entire budget?
Understanding this core issue and not fooling yourself into thinking you are succeeding at SEO (if you really are not) is how to best determine if doing it yourself is worth it. There are two types of ways to get help if you are not doing it yourself
1. Get a consultant to help hourly or
2. Get a consultant to do the whole thing
SEER only works with clients in the second phase, as we want to own our successes and own our failures too. Having someone else responsible for doing things that we could be doing gives us (and any other search company) an out if things don’t work out as planned. We try to do as much of it ourselves as possible, allowing us to have more ownership over the result. And at the end of the day, results are really all that matters.
Should use always use industry keywords or is it okay to mix known industry keywords with keywords specific to your business?
I typically recommend going HARD after the industry keywords, SEO is a game where you go where the cows are grazing. If people in your industry are all calling something by one name and you want to use another term be prepared to not drive max value from your SEO efforts. This is one of the ways people get ripped off by SEOs. The SEO gets you ranked well for the terms you want to coin that no one is searching for instead of going after the more competitive terms. This usually results in great rankings, but little business. If you are tracking your SEO efforts by rankings only you wouldn’t even realize that you are getting ripped off. A good SEO company will outline what is most queried on search engines and if you choose to go for your new terms that are industry terms that is always your choice.Is it better to stick to industry keywords on main website pages and use topic or keyword specific words on landing pages (i.e. for specific products or promotions)
I believe that you should work the words in naturally, pages that are written for users before bots often get more links! Whatever you do, your pages targeted for SEO must be easily navigated to from the homepage, even if it is 2-3-4 clicks away, but putting a page up as a landing page that is not a core part of your site will not usually work for even moderately competitive terms.
When it comes to analytics most companies use Google Analytics, what other packages are available?
Omniture, WebTrends, IndexTools, Unica NetTracker are some of the majors. I tend to believe that almost every company should start with a free tool like Google Analytics or IndexTools first, as they are VERY robust—if you start running into major limitations THEN you should look into upgrading. I find that 85% of clients who have an enterprise analytics package are typically only using the features and reports that would be easily replicated in Google Analytics. Why spend the money on a big tool without first seeing if the free one gets you what you need to make good decisions. And don’t take the reasons from analytics companies why you SHOULDN’T use a free tool; many of them are full of it. I had one rep tell me that Google Analytics doesn’t track Streaming Video as a differentiator, but guess what sales guy…I don’t care about that. I need to track to sales and leads, my clients videos at this point aren’t major revenue drivers for their businesses. Google Analytics works fine.
Are there any down sides to using analytics software? What should small businesses keep in mind?
None, other than you REALLY need to know how to get the RIGHT data. Our analysts know when we are getting false positives—its in them to look at the data and say…hey this doesn’t look right, its that gut feeling that they have, its innate. Whereas the SMB that is trying to use these tools on their own are more likely to run with the data and make an incorrect judgments leading to believing that a campaign did better or worse than it really did.
What are some SEO rules that small businesses break and how can we get them on the right track?
I think the #1 mistake small businesses make is NOT OWNING THEIR DOMAIN NAME. I have seen so many small businesses have relationships go south with the original designer and that original designer keeps the domain hostage.
The next mistake is not educating themselves enough on the process and types of questions to ask any of their Internet development or marketing partners.
Another big one I see is not finding specialists and letting your web designer, also develop the site, write the content, do the SEO, and the analytics. While finding specialists will create more project management work on your end, working with specialists will help you get the maximum return—you might be able to find a web savvy project manager to contract out to work with all the specialists.
Worrying about rankings before worrying about usability and revenue. While it is fun to sit on the golf course and tell your buddies where you rank, its much better for you to be seeking out ways to get more of that traffic to convert and to be tracking to revenue. This leads me to my last mistake:
NOT tracking all Internet efforts down to some level of an accountable metric (page views, leads, sales, etc). Think of the questions a bank would ask you if you went in for a loan—they aren’t going to list rankings as an asset!!
When it comes to setting up a blog, and keeping SEO in mind, is it better to have a blog that is separate from your corporate website?
Personally (and I highlight personally), I prefer a blog on the same domain, as it helps improve your deep link ratio (links to the blog are automatically “deep”). I also think if you have two domains, you have to have two promotion efforts, thus giving people more options to link to you. Instead of having just one site to link to you are now giving me two or more, thus splitting up your link juice. Again, just my personal take.
Thanks for your time today Wil and for helping SMBs with smarter SEO!
Want to learn more about SEO? Watch some of Wil’s videos:
Tags: marketing, search engine optimization, SEER Interative, seo, SMB, Wil Reynolds | 
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