How Not to Do SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) concepts are pertinent to the success of businesses in today’s technology forefront. Even though technology has such a huge influence, it is important to still be recognized as a human being.  Make things personable. Here’s what you shouldn’t be doing instead:

1.     Tons of spammy backlinks.

If you are still paying for links then you are doing more harm than good. Google assesses penalties for this kind of system gaming, and they don’t take to kindly to it. Instead of asking for bogus links, following our suggestions in our last blog detailing how to get mutually beneficial links with relevant sites that will help both your audience and you!

2.     Write for Google and not for people.

Keyword stuffed content just isn’t going to cut it anymore. If you are writing for Google’s bots instead of your target audience then you are missing the mark. Write interesting and engaging content that will hook your readers. If your readers like it then Google will catch on and reward you accordingly.

3.     Shamelessly self-promote on social media.

Blasting out self-promotion on social media is a good way to alienate your audience and get flagged for spam. Social media is for connection and conversation. Do it the right way or not at all!

4.     Quit early.

Good SEO isn’t a one-stop shop. It is a continual practice that needs to be adjusted, tweaked, and continually grown. Reputation and a captive audience won’t happen over night. If you don’t dedicate the right amount of time you will waste money and see little results!

Remember, keep you subject light; relate to the topic and then expand using personal stories and relations that would intrigue the reader. If the reader isn’t interested then why would Google be?

Link Building For Small Business

Building quality links takes time, patience, and relationship building skills. You need to be able to develop content that will be interesting to those you pitch, and pitch it in an engaging way. It’s also a time saver to be able to identify which sites will be the most relevant and willing to engage you. When considering a possible site, you will want to consider the following criteria:

• Relevancy
• Your Resources
• Feasibility

Is Their Site Relevant To Your Site?

You will want to look for non-competitive domains that link to content and resources similar to yours. Not only will this allow you access to your target audience, but Google looks for relevancy as one of the prime ways to differentiate between spammy and legitimate links. Furthermore, a quality site won’t have much of an incentive to link to or publish content from your site if it won’t be interesting to their readers.

Start by sharing the content of your target site, and working to build a relationship via social media or their blog. Once a relationship has been established, offer to write a relevant piece of content for them or help develop a resource guide. Ensuring that the link will be mutually beneficial is the best way to go.

Do You Have The Resources and Prominence to Attract Quality Sites?

If you are a brand new site with just a couple of pages and only a few social media followers, you may not have the clout to attract a site like, say, CNN. As previously mentioned, quality links are built when said link is beneficial to both parties. They will need to know that you are interesting and engaging to your own audience before they will want to introduce you to theirs.

Work hard on building you own site, adding quality content, and building your social media following and engagement. When you have a lot to offer, it will be hard to turn you down.

Is This A Site That Will Feasibly Show Interest?

If you have found a site that is relevant and you have built up your own website to be interesting and engaging, you should still ask if this site is worth spending time on? Is this a site that is frequently pitched? Do you have what it takes to stand out from the crowd? Do they have already established rules about links? Are they known for being open or closed?

Your time is best spent on building relationships with sites that you have a strong chance of connecting with. Instead of shooting out a pre-packaged pitch to anyone with an inbox, be strategic and make a plan. Save time, and increase your success!

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Keeping Up With Google: The New Adword Policies

Recently Google announced that they will be updating the AdWords Policy Center for the ever-familiar motivation of enhancing user experience and ease-of-use for advertisers. The changes are set to take place around September, so now is the time to start ramping up your best practices to match the new guidelines. Here’s what you will need to know.

Many Businesses Won’t Need to Worry

According to Google, "Almost all advertisers who comply with our current policies will also comply with the new policies." The main differences will be in restrictions on certain types of products and advertisers such as alcoholic beverages, weapons, etc. Just make sure to read the new restrictions to ensure you are still in compliance.

Ramp Up Your Content Quality

We all know that Google is huge on content quality. Almost every major adjustment is aimed at weeding out spammy content. Now they are cracking down on paid content as well. For those of us who are not marketing dangerous weapons or alcohol, this is the most important update. The are adding a new “Abuse of the Ad Network Policy” section that includes the following prohibitions:

• malicious ads, sites, or apps
• ads promoting sites that offer little unique value to users and are focused primarily on traffic generation
• businesses that attempt to gain an unfair advantage in the ad auction
• businesses that attempt to bypass our review processes
• Content that is designed for the primary purpose of showing ads, i.e. Driving traffic (whether through "arbitrage" or otherwise) to destinations with more ads than original content, little or no original content, or excessive advertising.
• Content that is replicated from another source without adding value in the form of original content or additional functionality, i.e. mirroring, framing or scraping.
• Landing pages that are solely designed to send users elsewhere, i.e. doorway pages, gateways.

Familiarize yourself with the new policies, keep your ads free of user deception and spammy links and you will be fine. For assistance with your AdWords campaigns, you can always call Think Agency, Inc. and make use of our expertise.

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How Taco Bell Won Social Media

With the advent of social media as a marketing tool, there have been a lot of wins and losses from various companies. Never has a gaffe been able to become so public so quickly. Never before have companies been able to develop such clear personalities. Among those companies who are doing it right, a few stand out above the rest. One of those companies is Taco Bell. That’s right, Taco Bell!

Taco Bell’s Social Media Approach

Nick Tran, the head of social media, claims that they use a three-pronged approach.

“You can break down the type of content we share into three categories: The first is anything Taco Bell creates internally. The other type of content we share is whatever we co-create. This is when we collaborate with influencers and give them the tools to create their own content. The last is content curation, which is basically us amplifying interesting content from our social community,” Tran said.

Essentially, Taco Bell is behaving like a person and creating a personality. One of the most popular tweets of all time was a response that they sent to Old Spice via Twitter. Old spice accused them of not using fire in their fire sauce. They accused Old Spice of not using old spices in their deodorant.

Not only that, but they frequently engage their users and provide them with opportunities to promote their brand in a fun way. Their “breakfast phone” promotion had Taco Bell calling and interacting with customers and having them perform special tasks.

Don’t Take Yourself So Seriously

Even for more traditional companies, social media needs to be a fun endeavor. Using humor, even more elegant humor, is one of the best ways to grab interest and get people engaged. Humanizing your brand is the number one best way that you can improve your social media presence, no matter who you are.

Challenge yourself this week to try a new approach. Engage your user in conversation, make some jokes, and use your business page in a more personal way. You might be surprised at the results.

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Consistent Content Always Wins The Day

Content is king, blah blah blah. In the marketing world, pithy concepts and trite phrases can make their way around like wild-fire. Sure, content marketing is what everyone is doing. But what can you do to make your efforts stand out from “everyone”? As it turns out, that answer is pretty simple. Pick a niche, write some interesting, and do it again. And again. And again. Frequent, consistent content is one of the top indicators of good search rankings. 

One Case Study On Consistency

Search Engine Journal recently published a case study in which the author set out to prove that you could build a site from scratch, and get at least 100 unique views a day within just a few months. He signed up to teach a university class, and then asked the students to start a new domain and write quality, frequent, consistent content. They set up Google Analytics, and tracked the results. As you can see, they were pretty impressive. These kids did basic WordPress hosting, no keyword research, no long-form articles, and no social signals. They just picked a topic they were passionate about, and wrote articles that they would want to read. 

Just think what you could accomplish if you combined those efforts with high level web-development, SEO, PPC campaigns, social media, etc. 

Consistency Isn’t Hard To Achieve

As the case study author suggested, consistency isn’t really a lofty goal. As he said, “Go back to that website you want to beat and look back over a few months in their archives. Add up the number of posts and calculate how often their site is updated. Once a day? Twice a week? More? Less? Doesn’t matter. Once you determine how often your competitor updates his/her site, update yours more often.” And then stick with it over the long term. There are no quick fixes. Your competitor isn’t likely to let up, so neither can you. 

A little work and a little commitment can have you outpacing your competition in short order. Have you been putting consistent content to work for your brand? 

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Creating A Well-Rounded, Web-Centric Marketing Approach

The internet has changed the marketing priorities of major brands. They have backed away from broadcast advertising options like print, TV, and radio that receive no engagement as well as traditional media advertising options like e-mail blasts and banner ads. While these options still have their place, high engagement mediums of reaching potential customers is the method of choice. Blogs, communities, and social media have revolutionized the marketing field. There is a quick overview of how to develop a web-centric marketing approach. 

Creating a Brand Strategy

Creating your brand strategy is always the first order of business. Branding strategy is what allows you to target your business’ primary audience. Branding themes, logos and graphical components permeate all visual/textual components of this plan. This process is a collaborative effort between you and your agency. For more detailing information on branding strategy see our former blog post. 

Developing Your Web Presence

Your website is the central hub for all marketing efforts. The first step to optimizing your web presence is to establish, collaboratively, your key performance indicators (KPI). Once you know what you are after, you will want to bring the people in. Drive traffic to your site through internet marketing components: SEO, SEM, and Social Media.  You will need to provide audience-specific tools that help build brand awareness and customer loyalty, and, finally, track/measure all marketing/advertising efforts through site analytics.

You will also want to focus on mobile-friendly content for your audience when they are on the go. Why? Because mobile searches lead to conversions. Take these latest stats: 

• Mobile search will overtake desktop search by the middle of 2014
• Mobile searches have quadrupled in the last year according to Google
• Mobile search isn’t just limited to phones. The tablet market will soon overtake laptop sales

HOWEVER, mobile for the sake of mobile isn’t worth the effort. Target high-value site content, and make it mobile-friendly. All mobile efforts should be conversion focused!

Formulate a Search Engine Optimization Plan

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) begins with keyword analysis. Keywords are the search terms that your audience uses to find your web content. This analysis is the basis for not only content development but also branding efforts and marketing efforts. Optimal keywords permeate all content developed throughout this marketing plan. The ultimate goal is to rank on the first page for your most important keywords. Keywords ranked on pages 2-3 are the low-hanging fruit. You will also want to consolidate your web presence. Once two sites are combined, authority and therefor organic rank, will increase. Many keywords on pages 2-3 that can be further optimized to get to page 1.

Public Relations Mixed With Social Media

Public relations has moved from traditional media distribution to online distribution. Social media and blogging can help with PR efforts drastically. You need both online and offline article distribution including white papers and case study development. Additionally, cultivate mailing lists and engage in ongoing email marketing campaigns.

Traditional Advertising

Traditional advertising still has it’s place. However, with the higher prices it is important to get it right the first time. The concepts and creative must support your brand strategy. Stay on topic, and make sure the audience understand your message. Offline this can be done in trade publications and online this can be done with PPC,targeted banner, and re-targeting advertising. Consistent visual components and themes must permeate all materials for consistency of message and corporate image. 

Incentive/Loyalty Programs

Audience-specific incentives and loyalty programs create trust, generate leads, and drive action. This could be a rewards system, a member’s only program, a discount program, or a brand evangelist program. Again, stay consistent with your messaging. 

A combination of all of these components will lead to a well-rounded, successful web-marketing approach. However, this is not a one-time thing. Long term success depends on ongoing implementation, management and tracking of plan components. Continue to re-evaluate plan components, themes and market conditions as you go. And don’t be afraid to make adjustments based on the data you collect. 

Understanding and Rocking Content Marketing

98% of all materials and product research begins on the web. For anyone selling products and services, this is an extremely important statistic. Your customers are researching you and your competition before you ever know they exist. If ignored, this can be detrimental to your bottom line. If utilized, you can grow your business at exponential rates. 

Today, your audience wants to first be educated and informed—not sold! When they understand your message, they’ll trust you, rely on you, and they’ll act. Strategic communication is critical to this process. When speaking to different audiences (investors and customers), it’s important to craft different messages. This is the essence of content marketing.

What is Content Marketing?

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content Marketing is a marketing process to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating content in order to change or enhance a consumer behavior.” In fact, 95% of B2B marketers are using content marketing to their advantage. 

What Does An Optimized Content Marketing Strategy Look Like?

There are a few different types of media used in content marketing: 

An optimized content marketing strategy utilizes all of these media types in harmony with one another. This includes press releases, blogs, keyword articles, feature articles, case studies, SEO, social media, PPC, banner ads, and trade publication ads. 

What Kind Of Content Should You Use? 

This first criteria of good content is that it be fresh. Posting new, non-duplicate content regularly is key. On-site, including keyword optimized content on every page with an emphasis given to the main objective of the page will also improve the page rank. Off-site, fresh content should be posted on Facebook, Google+, and other social networks to help increase overall website authority. 

The second criteria is “quality over quantity”. While you want to have a regular source and schedule of posting content, you don’t want to just post content without a purpose. Content must be keyword enriched, have a focus, and help make you a global source for industry-related news and information. When speaking to investors and shareholders, you want to speak to the successes, community involvement, and other stories that support your corporate story.

Final Results

All of this effort will have the final result of increased website traffic, lowered bounce rate due to increased quality of on-site content, increased keyword rankings, increased high-quality leads, and increased online authority. Give your audience what they want and they will do the same for your. It’s basic reciprocity!