Online Marketing Blog

I’m headed to (hopefully) sunny San Diego today for the annual Online Marketing Summit conference where I’ll get to present on one of my favorite topics: Optimization. Of course, if you read Online Marketing Blog very often, you’ll know my definition of optimization is a bit different than traditional SEO.  My post last Thursday “Are You Optimized?” touched on this.

The competition for attendance during the breakout sessions at OMS is really tough during the time slot I’m scheduled for. SAP, Wider Funnel and SAP are all presenting at the same time as I’m giving the all new “Optimize THIS: Integrating Social, SEO & Content presentation”. This post is a bit of a preview on the presentation so if you’re at OMS this week, make sure you check it out.

Who’s Using Google+?

The launch of Google+ in 2011 has put Google in the social networking boxing ring.  When it comes to user statistics some of them may surprise you.  This infographic by Flowtown shares some interesting information about the increasingly popular social media site.

• 63% of users are male
• Only 17% of users are considered active
• 61% of top 100 brands have a page on Google+

Online Marketing Tips & Tricks

“10 Brand-Building Steps For Beginners” For many companies 2012 marks the year that they will begin implementing a social media strategy.  This article provides 10 easy steps for those who have not yet many the plunge into social marketing.  Via Fast Company.

Optimize Your Images for Better Digital Asset Optimization

From Marketing to PR, digital assets are an essential part of the content used to tell stories and communicate brand messages.  For publishers and public relations professionals, optimizing the images used in news stories and press releases can have an important impact on visibility in search engines.  Images not only add flavor to news content, but they are also an opportunity to extend the reach of your message through image specific search.

Images are essential for both search and social media marketing with growing popularity as a social media asset. Long time image hosting and social network Flickr hosts well over 50 billion images and social media image sharing services like Instagram and Pintrest have exploded in popularity:

Thousands if not tens of thousands of new companies are formed every month in the U.S. and one of the most common problems to be solved relates to creating awareness, interest and motivation to buy.  Is buying Google AdWords, throwing up a blog and a Facebook Fan page the answer? What about sending out Tweets, press releases and investing in SEO?  If your start-up is executing content marketing tactics without first hand insight into the market and target customers, those tactics are a crapshoot. The irony is that most start-ups don’t have a lot of money to waste on marketing and advertising. But they do, every day. And so do many of the people reading this blog post.

Never fear, that’s why Optimize is here.

When most people think of search engine optimization for a company, it’s usually as a marketing function. That makes sense since SEO is such a low-cost, high impact and measurable method of attracting new customers and revenue. However, I think looking at SEO and optimizing social media solely as a marketing function is like looking only at the eyeball of your favorite portait. Take a step back and you’ll see a bigger, more interesting picture.

Think Outside the Marketing Search Box. Companies publish a variety of content besides products and services but usually rely only on people’s familiarity with the company website to find that information.  Customers, employees, partners, job seekers, news media, industry analysts and investors need a variety of information from those companies and with over 11 billion queries handled every month by Google, search is a prime channel for discovery. So is social. Facebook has over 800 million members, Twitter has over 200 million and LinkedIn over 100 million. If content has a purpose and an intended audience, why not optimize for findability and shareability?

As SES Chicago reaches its final sessions the audience is still alert and ready to learn at TopRank CEO Lee Odden’s afternoon presentation on “Content Marketing & Optimization.”  According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of time to the year 2003.  With so much information being shared what can we do as marketers to make our content easy to spot and easy to consume?

Can Customers Find Your Content?

Content creation is so much more than marketing, it is a way of engaging and enticing potential customers to take action.  Optimized content can make sure that customers interact with your brand.  There are many types of content that companies publish and many different audiences that a company should interact with.  Content creation is one of the most effective form of online marketing, it also happens to be the most difficult.

Amazing sunset outside of the TopRank office.

The agency (TopRank Online Marketing) that I started with Susan Misukanis celebrated it’s 10th Birthday this year and in all my time as an Internet Marketer, no other combination of marketing tactics has yielded results like Search Engine Optimization and Content. Over the past 5 years Social Media has entered the mix as an even more powerful amplifier to the effect of optimized content.

But there’s a key problem with how content marketing is implemented by many SEO-focused agencies and practitioners. Creation of “content” has escalated to amazing levels but there is a lot of that content fails to achieve the desired objective. In the midst of keywords, links, rankings and search algorithms there are several important pieces missing.

The first logo for predecessor to Google (BackRub) was this photo (via a copy machine) of of Sergey Brin's hand in 1996.

Continuing our theme this week of Content Marketing, this post digs into some of the changes that have happened with search engines (but mostly Google) and how understanding both the diversity of search results and content formats can help internet marketers gain a competitive advantage with content optimization.

There’s nothing static about Internet Marketing, but the one constant we can all count on is the persistent effort by search engines to improve search quality and user experience. Such continuous improvements can affect how content is discovered, indexed and sorted in search results as well as what external signals are considered to determine authority.

The growing Global Economy has significantly increased the number of companies seeking search marketing strategies to connect with target audiences all over the world. Many clients we work with at TopRank Online Marketing are either already global organizations or aspiring to deliver products and services in different countries. As a result, we routinely field questions as clients begin their journey into International Search.

Many companies don’t know where to start with International SEO, so here are 5 basic and tactical SEO considerations for companies looking at expanding into International Search:

1. Domain Name
3 common domain setups include Country-specific, Subdomain and Subfolder.

Whenever possible, a country-specific domain name is preferred. i.e. companyname.co.uk

Pros
The country-specific domain is a strong signal to the search engine and may provide better visibility for country-specific searches.

Copywriting for the web is a true art form, whether you’re writing web pages, press releases or landing pages. Add the practice of search engine optimization and it can get even trickier.  Too much focus on SEO and that high ranking web page may confuse readers, resulting in lacking conversions. Too little focus on keywords and search traffic will suffer.  Both questions remind copywriters to consider who their target audience really is: search engines or customers?

Obviously it’s both and working with a Keyword Glossary can provide copywriters with a solid guideline for topic planning, organization and emphasis so that both engines and customers are being optimized for.

While many companies have bought in to the fact that they need to make their content more “findable” and socially interesting to reach and engage more customers, the implementation is often a bit fragmented.

What happens on the internet in 60 seconds? 1,500 Blog Posts, 60 New Blogs, 98,000 Tweets, 20,000 Posts on Tumblr, 600+ New Videos Uploaded to YouTube, 6,600 Images Uploaded to Flickr, 79,000+ Facebook Wall Posts and over 695,000 Facebook Status Updates. What does all that activity have in common? It’s content, it’s social and presents a ripe opportunity for optimization.

Content Marketing is a hot topic and deservedly so.  According to an AOL Nielsen study in May 2011, 53% of all time on the internet is content consumption. In the U.S. alone, 27 million pieces of content are shared per day.  In the Junta42 and MarketingProfs B2B Content Marketing study, it was reported that 90% of marketers use content marketing and 51% plan to budget more than the previous year.

The trend towards “brands as publishers” over the past year has an increasing number of businesses entering the world of content in ways that are creating new opportunities for online marketing. The notion of brands publishing editorial is nothing new of course and has been known as Custom Media or Custom Publishing for years.

For example, P&G‘s “invention” of the radio and TV Soap Opera or both “Food and Wine” and “Travel and Leisure” magazines published by American Express.  Interestingly, corporate editorial content publishing often overlooks the value of SEO as a way to extend reach and grow readership.

Publishers on the other hand, are becoming much better marketers. While online and offline media have always been reliant on growing distribution and readership to warrant advertising based business models, the changing nature of media, shifts in consumer behaviors and increased competition has warranted even more marketing savvy to capture, maintain and grow readership.