Online Marketing for Marketers

One of the things that I notice about a lot of Web Design firms and even creative agencies who say they bake SEO into everything they do, is that very few of them bake it into their own sites. Now I don’t want to call anyone out today but I do want to give people a quick little guide on the top five things to look for when evaluating the SEO ability of design firm that says they know SEO. I mean, if SEO is part of their overall offering, they would be silly not to SEO their own site right? And if they haven’t taken the time to do that, is that a firm that you can really feel confident in? I think you know my answer. *lol* So here are the top 5 things that I would look for in a design firms web site that will give you some idea if they know what they are doing: Read more

We all mistakes everyday but if you’re a marketer your mistake can cost a company thousands or even millions of dollars.  It’s not easy to be a marketer and that’s because managing and building relationships is not an easy thing to do, especially for a large corporation.  As a marketer (or social media consultant) it’s easy to make a lot of assumptions that inevitably lead you down the path of an unsuccessful marketing campaign.  So what are some of the most common mistakes that marketers make? Read more

If you search the Internet, you can find at least a few dozen lists that outline the common mistakes a newbie SEO might make. Just to make sure I don’t leave out the obligatory list, I’ll present it below. After that, however, I’ll detail what really happens when a beginner starts to see results from his or her first search marketing experiments.

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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

The surest way to successfully construct a building is to follow a blueprint. A blueprint contains detailed plans and designs that enables skilled personnel to build the structure just from the blueprint. In the same way, a detailed set of plans is the surest way to build a successful search marketing campaign. And just like construction blueprints, while each SEO blueprint may be unique, each will also contain similar details to ensure success. What details should a search marketing blueprint contain?

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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

It’s not unusual for prospects to be under the mistaken impression that natural search (SEO) is free. It takes ongoing investment, that investment comes at a cost, and that cost has to be budgeted for.

But while these prospects are trying to hire our firm they are also sending us a very mixed message: “We don’t have any budget for SEO”. These words make any SEO want to scream. It’s like trying to hire a construction company to build your company a new headquarters and informing them in your first meeting “Just so you know, we aren’t likely to have the money to pay you.” This tells me that my and my colleagues’ time - and expertise - are not being truly valued. Read more

Companies are beginning to embrace SEO as a legitimate means of marketing, but they often throw a paltry amount of marketing dollars towards it, or they allocate most or all of the search budget to PPC only. That is a mistake, even for companies that don’t sell products or services online. Let’s take a look at some interesting statistics that will help show how important it is for companies to concentrate significant resources towards ranking well in the search engines’ organic rankings, which are the natural listings returned on the left side of the search results page.

Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” hosted an invitation only event at Google’s Atlanta office in January, 2008. He told attendees that only 14% of Google clicks come from paid search (the sponsored listings on the right side of the search results page, also known as PPC ads) while 86% of clicks are organic. Clearly, just from this one statistic alone, we can see how important it is to allocate resources towards natural, organic ranking through search engine optimization.

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What is the Shotgun/Sniper approach to SEO?  Basically it’s a pretty easy concept: you optimize a Web site initially for all keywords that it is relevant to (Shotgun), and once you have SEO foundation in place, you hone in on the most important keywords (Sniper). This may seem like a pretty obvious methodology for a lot of people but as always with SEO, the devil is in the details.  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