Online Marketing for Marketers

Before starting on this let me take a moment to talk about how I define Social Search Optimization (SSO…another acronym…I know). In my world SSO is the process of taking your Social Marketing programs and optimizing them so that they can rank in the Search engines.  The goal in my mind is to have as many page 1 listings as possible in which you control the experience.  The first question that I usually get when discussing this is “How does social and SEO go together?”  So let me explain… Read more

Business and professional users searching for work-related information on the Web have muddled through the thousands of irrelevant matches provided by general search engines like Google and Yahoo.  Studies by respected organizations like Outsell and Convera have highlighted this fact for years.

The fact remains that mass market-focused search engines were never designed to be used as business tools, and instead rely heavily on the popularity theory that rewards sites with authoritative inbound links. While that works well for consumer-oriented goods and services, professional organizations get a mixed bag and realize an artificially low ROI when compared to what other marketers are obtaining through traditional offline vertical marketplaces. Read more

One of the questions I often get from clients is if the Google Analytic platform is sufficient for their needs. The answer usually depends on the nature of their site and what they would like to accomplish business-wise with it. Many B2B web sites are primarily concerned with promoting their corporate brand and lead generation. Their conversion funnels tend to be relatively simple, tracking a visitor through to a lead for example. Interestingly, many organizations only use 10-20% of the overall functionality of their web analytics platform. Read more

Many online marketing campaigns do not reach their full potential because the campaign manager fails to ask a fundamental question. Consider the following example.

Imagine you called a search engine marketing agency and instead of saying “We want to improve our natural search rankings. Can you help us?” you said “We are interested in using natural SEO to generate 1000 new customers per month at an acquisition cost of 10% or less. Can you help us?”

If you asked the second, more specific question, one of the following two things would happen. Read more

Social media like Facebook, Flickr, and Delicious has been around for a couple of years now and companies are starting to dip a tentative toe into the water. While such courage should be applauded, serious missteps have occurred that embarrass the offending company.

And it is not the courageous steps that have been embarrassing, but the sheer level of assholery with which companies have partaken their social media experiments. Because social media is all about sharing, collaboration, and communication, it is little surprise that folks expressed outrage at the heavy-handed or downright immoral dealings of the companies outlined below. Read more

What is all this talk about Link Building? And what is it?

Link building is creating links to your website from other websites in order to establish and/or improve your rank with the search engines.

Link building is critical for the following reasons. 1) Direct Traffic: Links send direct traffic to your website that could convert into leads and clients. 2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Links are the key to getting your site ranked on the first page of the major search engines for your target keywords. Read more

Online reputation management for C-Suite execs and a corporate brand: it’s more important than you might think. I love this definition from Wikipedia, “Reputation is the opinion (more technically, a social evaluation) of the public toward a person, a group of people, or an organization. It is an important factor in many fields, such as business, on line communities or social status.” Your goal is to protect and shape that public opinion in favor of your clients.   Read more

With increasing regularity, clients and partners are asking how search engine marketing (SEM) and social media marketing (SMM) integrate into the overall marketing mix. That’s good news, as the previous questions related to the “what” and “why” of emarketing. Now that we’re in the “how” stage, I feel like companies are finally getting serious about true integration between search, social media and traditional marketing. This article will outline the “how” of integration of SEM & SMM into your marking mix.  Read more

You may be short-changing yourself if you underpay your SEM agency. When an agency or other service provider is paid less than the cost of providing the level of service required to excel, bad things are known to happen (even with venture capitalists temporarily footing the bill).

Of course, sometimes a service provider is willing to lose money on your account (or perhaps just the paid search portion). Alternately, it may deliver subpar service without managing expectations or may recommend you do more heavy-lifting production work in-house. Read more

With the new release of Chrome (Google’s New Browser) yesterday and Microsoft’s recent “In” Ad-blocking option for IE8, it’s reasonable to say that the two most influential companies in Online Marketing have reenforced what most of us in the industry (and our ad agencies are realizing) already know… Advertising in its traditional sense and the Internet do not work.   Read more