Online Marketing Blog

In the search engine marketing world, effective online marketing comes down to surfacing keyword opportunities that reflect a demand for solutions (products/services). Content about those products is created and optimized to attract search traffic for popular and relevant keywords.

Niche products often suffer from a universe of keywords that have low popularity counts and that creates a challenge. Because in the world of SEO, accountability starts with driving more organic, non-branded search traffic to a company website. If there’s very little demand for the keyword phrases identified, it can be frustrating for all.

A common reaction to that frustration is to accuse the products, company or industry as being “boring”.  But here’s the thing:

Linkbuilding has to be one of my favorite aspects of SEO. All too often people use the analogy of linkbuilding being a popularity contest. As someone who views linkbuilding in a somewhat different light – and as someone who was considered by only his parents as ‘cool’ – I think it’s time to put that analogy to bed. Yes, being the sexy-fun brand will undoubtedly drive links for your site. But in my opinion, it’s the quality of the information on the page that will not only help you succeed in proactively acquiring links, but will also inspire others to link to your page. Or to return to the analogy, the cool kid might start out with the lead, but it’s the smart kid (see nerd) who ends up winning in the long run.

Have you worked yourself to the bone on a video marketing campaign only to see the results fall flat? Do you have a wealth of video content but are unsure how to leverage it effectively to serve your marketing objectives? Can your presence on YouTube be summed as ‘well, we have a channel’?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re not alone. Getting results through your video marketing efforts can be a challenge if you don’t have the right game-plan. However, you’re in luck! At day 2 of SES New York TopRank CEO Lee Odden moderated a panel discussion with leading industry video marketers.Their stellar tips and insights that can be found below.

This afternoon I attended the panel presentation titled ” Local Myth Busters – Local Optimization Facts Proven or Debunked” which featured four very knowledgable panelists who provided a great mix of instruction and high level tactics.  This session was very focused on Google Places and finding a way to stand out from your competition.

If you are responsible for local marketing or would like to begin implementing a local/mobile marketing strategy these are some tips you don’t want to miss.  Below I have included what I considered to be highlights from the presentations.

Traditional SEO & Citations: Andrew Beckman (@Andrew_Beckman)

When implementing traditional SEO you’re on the hunt for backlinks.  When deploying a local search strategy you want to populate your “place” data among different channels in a cohesive way.  Citations (or mentions of your business) are key for ranking algorithms from search engines like Google.  How can you determine the value of a particular citation?

View from our "boat" in Barcelona during Search Congress

I’m about to go on stage at the Search Congress conference in Barcelona and I thought I’d share the presentation that I’ll be giving. Don’t worry, only the title page is in Spanish but all the photos are from my last trip to Barcelona.

As a complement to the growing amount of Content and Social Media focused advice being given by traditional SEOs, this presentation is in line with our approach at TopRank to customer-centric content optimization.

Instead of focusing solely on keywords as inspiration for optimization, this presentation provides a framework and example of how a customer centric approach would segment customer data into personas and then map keywords, topics and content types according to each persona’s journey through the buying cycle.

Optimize For Customer Experience

When people learn I’ve recently written a book called Optimize they usually ask what it’s about. I say it’s about optimizing customer discovery and engagement with content. The response I usually get is something like, “Oh, cool. I thought it was about SEO.”

Well, in a way optimizing content and customer experiences is SEO. That’s because what most of the better SEOs practice today is really more about the promise of marketing: attracting, engaging and inspiring customers to buy.

Whether it’s Google, Social Networks, Online News Media, Digital Assets or any other channel/format for content – best practices optimization is in effect for smart companies that want an advantage.

At TopRank Online Marketing, we work with clients in many different industries each facing a unique set of problems.  One of the industries we provide online consulting for regularly is software.  Be it network monitoring, healthcare system and hospital software, email marketing, project management, or B2C software, promoting technology solutions has been a part of our expertise since TopRank was founded over 10 years ago.

Software development continues to become even more valuable in today’s social, mobile and overall digital world as companies begin to migrate what were once offline industries into SaaS and cloud based services.  It wasn’t too long ago that recruiting, sales, and marketing relied heavily on meeting in person or over the phone. With advancements in software and devices, organizations are now able to accomplish the same if not better results at a drastically reduced cost.

What good is great content optimization and social media promotion without meaningful measurement? This session at SES London focused on three different perspectives towards measuring performance which were as relevant to any online marketing as they were to Search Engine Optimization.

In fact, that notion of “SEO is Marketing” lends really well with the trend a lot of people are talking about in the online marketing industry. Many SEOs are building up more strategic skills and approaching optimization more holistically. Ironically, this is my topic next week at Search Congress in Barcelona so this session proved to be quite useful for a more holistic online marketing measurement perspective (with a SEO slant).

I really lucked out after moderating the morning session at SES London on Social Media Tools by joining the SEO Tools of the Trade session that followed. Both sessions had great speakers and I’ve decided to combine my notes for both into one post about social media automation tools and SEO tools.

The sources for the SEO tool recommendations include:  Richard Baxter of SEOGadget, Dave Naylor from Bronco, and Neil Walker from Just Search. The social media tool recommendations came from Andrew Girdwood from bigmouthmedia, Paul Madden from Automica and Marcus Tober from SearchMetrics.

Before I get into the list of tools, I feel compelled to share a quote that I’ve often used to give people context for tool use, since it’s so important to use them for scale, efficiency and to gain a competitive advantage:

No SEO Migration Plan is much scarier than this pic of Big Ben.

One of the classic scenarios for the intersection of web design/development and search engine optimization is when companies decide to update their website’s design and content management system. Businesses that expect new revenue and continued visibility to various audiences through search need to manage their web site assets for more than just ease of back-end maintenance and customer user experience.

Hopefully the situation doesn’t come to light like this:

A website manager sends an email on Friday saying, “We’re launching a new website on Monday, can you take a look at it to make sure our site optimization is ok?”.

What Are Social Channels Good For?

Sure you’ve setup your company profiles and pages on social media.  However, do you know what channels are best used for which type of interaction?  This infographic by Grovo shares some great insight into specific uses for many of the popular social media platforms.  Did you know?

• 40% of people like brands for discounts and promotions
• 8% of all Huffington Post traffic comes from Facebook

“Content Marketing Becoming Vital”  Kelly OCG, a workforce consulting and outsourcing organization shares that they do no B2B brand advertising.  Instead they spend about 60% of their marketing budget on creating, distributing, and promoting their own unique content.  According to the Custom Content Council approximately $41billion dollars are spent on creating custom content. Via BtoB Magazine.

How Social Media Keeps Leaders Honest

David Jones of Havas and Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore recently sat down to talk about the responsibilities of the leaders of today to respond to social media, and how it holds them accountable.

“Google Clarifies: No, Ads Shouldn’t Help Rankings & No, SEO Isn’t Bad”  Recent comments made by a new Google employee have some SEO’s up in arms.  Apparently his comments included “SEO isn’t good for users” and “It’s a bug that you could rank highly in Google without buying ads.”  Curious to know what else he has to say and what reaction this has caused within the online community?  Via Search Engine Land.