Search Engine Optimization Lessons In SBIM Weekly

Ready for another issue of Small Business Internet Marketing Weekly? Here's more news and helpful links for small/medium sized business owners. We scour the internet to keep you on top of what's important to you and your business.

Here's what we've spotted this week:

1. Lessons leaned by over optimising your website - real world insights
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730

2. The new SEO process - a long but good recap of solid SEO
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-new-seo-process-quit-being-kanye

3. Buying links vs. buying blogs - this sparked some healthy debate
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/buying-links-is-shallow-buying-blogs-now-thats-a-strategy

4. 4 SEO trends to watch in 2012 - I'd have to agree on the most part
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2153424/Enterprise-SEO-4-Trends-to-Watch-in-2012

5. 40 billions videos watched in the US last month - wow wow

SEO services company

Traffic And Business Development Strategies With Jeff Johnson

[caption id="attachment_6858" align="alignleft" width="243" caption="Business tips from Jeff Johnson"][/caption]

I've just uploaded an mp3 interview for you with with Jeff Johnson - the super internet marketing guru ;)

Now this guy is near impossible to lock down for an interview but I have my ways.

In this call, I extracted his best traffic and business development strategies. We also talked about a lot of other things including, apps, mobile and social.

You really need to listen to this call.

We didn't pitch anything (except right at the end when Jeff mentioned what he's working on) and like usual, it's free, no optins, no hoops to jump through.

Just visit the link below to download:
http://www.davidjenyns.com/internet-marketing/jeff-johnson-traffic/

If you like it, be sure to share it or at the very least comment on the blog

SEO services company

How To Interview Your Way To Market Leadership

[caption id="attachment_6845" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Interview leaders to gain authority."][/caption]

One of the best ways to build your way to market leadership is to surround yourself with people that add authority and voice to what you are doing.

You will have seen how we at Melbourne SEO Services have consistently tried to do this – and recently we have published a few blog posts based around interviews that we have done.

Establishing Credibility

Your online business is nothing without credibility and establishing this early on will set the foundations for all that follows.

Interviewing leading lights in your field and related fields is a great strategy for associating your business with the best there is; that provides instant credibility.

As your profile rises in your industry you can get access to more and more of the biggest and best voices, raising your level of authority, virtually guaranteeing you get noticed and get your message out

SEO services company

Online Video Marketing – Still Lowest Hanging Fruit On The Tree!

[caption id="attachment_6829" align="alignleft" width="270" caption="It's time to hit 'Play' to your own web videos."][/caption]

When you’re navigating the jungle of online business you’ll see that the juiciest and lowest hanging fruit on the forest of trees is still …web video!

We’ve been saying it for a while and the uptake in the past couple of years has rocketed but the truth still holds – if you implement a good online video marketing strategy in your business you will be way ahead of the bulk of your competitors.

Don’t Hit the PAUSE Button

Some businesses got caught out by trying video once in the past, deciding that it didn’t bring the benefits they expected and then pressing the “PAUSE” button on the whole campaign.

That may have been a couple of years ago when online video began its big surge. Perhaps you hired the wrong production company, paid out a large sum and got your fingers burnt; or maybe you tried making it yourself and

SEO services company

What's the SEO Process When Working With Melbourne SEO Services.

Click here to download an MP3 that details our process.

How frustrating would it be to pay someone for services or charges you can't verify? I'd say "very, very" frustrating.

[caption id="attachment_6774" align="alignright" width="270" caption="We're here to help."][/caption]

Thankfully, Melbourne SEO Services clients don't have to go through that irritation. Why? Because we're about total transparency with our services. Our "open book" method not only keeps our clients up-to-date, but allows them "behind the scenes" to see how we do it and why - it's our business development and SEO process.

Because we focus on working with businesses we know we can help, we always get the best results for our clients. Not just random "shots in the dark" - but highly qualified leads. What's more, we're a true online marketing company, with roots in real world media publicity. So, we know our stuff inside and out.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that our SEO and

SEO services company

How To Set Up A Clickbank Affiliate Program

[caption id="attachment_6786" align="alignleft" width="270" caption="Follow a definite action plan."][/caption]

If you are a small business with a product or service that could be sold by others to give it maximum exposure and sales potential, a Clickbank affiliate program may be the way to go.

Great SEO, pro-active content management and excellent sales pages go a long way to selling your product on your own website but having a big team of affiliates doing that will get your product out there and in front of potential buyers more effectively.

Clickbank

Clickbank is one of the best known and widely-used affiliate networks around; there are many thousands of products available for affiliates and many thousands of affiliates looking for products to represent and earn commission – of course you will be interested in the latter, if you already have a product you want to get out there; that’s where we concentrate this article.

Think of Clickbank as a massive digital

SEO services company

Our Secret Project Revealed: Video Production Service

It's no secret I'm a big fan of web video - in fact, I've been shouting it from the roof tops... "2012 will be the year of web video".

Mark my words - you need to start using more video on your website.

I've been using videos for well over 5 years now and I can tell you for a fact it's some of the smartest marketing you can do.

You record the video once and it sells your message hundreds, even thousands, of times 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

It's so powerful we've already started offering web video services to our high end Melbourne SEO Services clients and it has dominated.

It's been so successful we just had to break it out as a stand alone service. And here it is...

Introducing www.MelbourneVideoProduction.com.au (we call it MVP)

"Web video that works."

Anyway, our video production service is brand spanking new and I want to know what you think. Do you have any suggestions for the site? I'm all ears.

Also, watch some of the videos - are they slick

SEO services company

How To Focus Your Internet Marketing Strategy On Quick Wins

[caption id="attachment_6749" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Hire the best team members."][/caption]

The recent Fast Web Formula 3 workshop by James Schramko attracted many of the industry leaders in Australia; I took the opportunity to sit down with a few of them to discuss how businesses can get some quick wins with their Internet marketing strategy.

One of those was Binh An Nguyen, who is a successful business consultant based in Adelaide, and he shared some great tips.

Generating New Leads

The focus of many businesses, both small and large, is how to generate more leads; this is not surprising as more leads means more chances to convert to sales, which is the name of the game.

One way to do this is to build lead generation funnels that get “suspects” over to the website and converted into “prospects”; there needs to be some mechanism there - like an opt-in for a free report - to capture their details so that they can be added to a database and

SEO services company

Professional Video Editing Tips For Adding Text

[caption id="attachment_4793" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Adding a lower third to your video is big news!"][/caption]

Adding text to your online videos normally falls into 4 different categories. We have covered creating the Call to Action and a Watermark in other posts, so here we look at the other 2 areas where you will need to add some text to create a clear, coherent message in your videos: the Title and the Lower Third.

Creating Titles

The Title will be the first thing your viewers see. You want them to be able to read it in a short space of time, so make it clear and concise; it should usually be on a plain background – often white text on a black background or black on a white background looks best. Also, keep the font simple. There will be some preset options in the professional video editing software you use, such as iMovies.

Whatever you choose, don’t make it too elaborate - there’s no need for tartan plaid backgrounds and curlicue fonts!

SEO services company

Google vs Facebook Face-Off?

A big thing has been made in the news this week about Facebook surpassing Google as the most viewed website in the US. You can see the figures presented first hand by hitwise here. What are the implications of these findings? How might Facebook be a threat to Google? Can you compare them like for like? How does this affect the world of SEO?

whoa, that was a lot of rhetorical questions right there. Let's break this Google vs Facebook down...

The Stats

It appears that the stats don't really tell the full story. This is google.com vs facebook.com. The stats don't include the visits to all the other google suites such as gmail, Google Maps and even Youtube (the 2nd largest search engine in the world).

Google Users vs Facebook Users

One key factor which still separates Google from Facebook is the make-up of their users. Sure Facebook recently surpassed the 400m users worldwide landmark which was some feat. But we must consider the motives for users to be active on

SEO services company

The New SEO Process (Quit Being Kanye)

The New SEO Process (Quit Being Kanye)

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

Posted by iPullRank

The responsibilities of SEO practitioners have changed to include far more of the digital ecosystem, yet for so many, much of the SEO process remains the same. Currently there are several segments of SEO strategy seen as optional that are actually absolutely imperative to the success of an SEO campaign, as well as to the synergy of other initiatives within the marketing mix. In other words, SEO must adopt and adapt in order to be taken seriously and command the type of influence required to drive change. As it stands, SEO looks to disrupt the symphony (or cacophony) that is a brand’s marketing mix. Let’s discuss a new process that allows SEO to improve the effectiveness of all digital marketing channels – not just inbound.

Disclaimer: Kanye West is awesome, but you understand how he is perfect to illustrate these points.

Problems with the Old Process

I’ve heard SEO called a lot of ugly things in the past few years. My favorite one lately was delivered to me by the wonderful Brittan Bright after someone passionately declared to her that SEO is the “Calculus of Marketing.” I love it simply because it fits. Just like Calculus, if you’re not looking at the aggregate value of what you’re working on you may do a lot of work for a result that doesn’t seem big in the grand scheme. Just like Calculus, SEO is quite specific and esoteric to those that haven’t studied it. Just like Calculus, you can be completely successful without it altogether. And finally SEO and Calculus both set a barrier of entry that excludes more than it includes.

With all that said, here is the typical SEO process as it has been defined over the years.

Although we often treat it like one, SEO has never been an initiative that existed within a vacuum. It has always required changes be made across a complete digital ecosystem in which there are numerous stakeholders. However, this existing process always asked for change without justification with regard to the purpose of goals of these touchpoints. For example, if my recommendation is to change a title tag there has been no justification as to how that affects the CTR of a page shared on Facebook. Perhaps the social media team has discovered that the target audience clicks through less when a page title doesn’t feature a brand name. That’s a hypothetical situation but let’s go into a little more detail as to why SEO will not continue to work this way.

No Regard for Market Research

Just as the diagram above suggests, most SEOs jump right into keywords, analytics and competitive analysis of those keywords. Wrong move; search is about fulfilling needs. Before looking at a single keyword there needs to be a deep understanding of business objectives and the market. Standard kickoff questions often look like this:

• What analytics package do you use?
• Are there any other domains or sites that you own?
• What SEO efforts have been done in the past?
• List your top 3 competitors.
• Do you have social media accounts?
• What keywords are you looking to rank for?

The biggest problem with this is we often take these inputs at face value. That is to say, very often the brands that the client believes they are competing with offline are not the sites they are competing with for keyword coverage in the SERPs. Also the keywords a client may think they should rank for are not the keywords that are going to help them meet their actual goals.

To simplify it, many SEO teams send clients kickoff questions to get a sense of the keywords they should target and then hop right into the keyword tool. Pages are optimized. Keywords are allocated to pages. Links are built. Content is pushed into social. Performance is measured to identify subsequent opportunities. Obviously it oftentimes goes far more in-depth for many, but this is basically the widely accepted process.

One of my biggest issues as a consumer of Search that understands SEO is if the results I click appear to be overly optimized I become quite leery of the content. This is simply because in my experience many copywriters (SEO or otherwise) often don’t know what they are talking about. Recalling dusty memories of early in my own SEO career when I wrote copy, in most cases I was just a human article spinner. I definitely read a few wiki articles and the top results for a given keyword and just reworded what other people said. I shared all that to say: Becoming an expert in the niche that you are optimizing for is an extremely underrated step in the SEO process. For this reason, if I were to hire an agency, I would prefer one with extensive prior experience or specialty in my vertical.  All my in-house SEOs – make some noise!

Little Regard for the Audience

Truthfully, the real differentiation between clients happens in a latter set of questions. Unfortunately, the following doesn’t get asked enough in the standard SEO kick-off:

• What is the purpose of your site?
• What are you trying to get users to do once they arrive?
• Who is your target audience?

These are typically questions that Conversion Rate Optimization teams focus on rather than SEO teams. For shame SEOs, for shame!

We all want traffic and we all want to rank #1 for juicy head terms, but these things are not goals. By themselves these are not KPIs that make clients successful. Simply put, if you rank highly for keywords but aren’t fulfilling the needs of people searching for them, you just put a ton of effort into exactly the wrong thing. It’s not about the keywords; it’s about the people searching for them.

Consider this offline example of Target using data on customers to identify when they’ve become pregnant to learn when to ramp up efforts to turn mothers-to-be into long-term big spenders at the wholesale department store. You can do this far more effectively with Search if you’re mindful of your audience and their needs. This measurement of intent plus interests plus demographics plus network is the Holy Grail of Marketing. With that in mind it becomes quite clear what Google’s ulterior motives are with Plus and the consolidation of privacy policies.

Recently, I had a short conversation with AJ Kohn via Twitter about personas and how client research can prove useless. I agree somewhat because clients that have done audience research beforehand may have only looked at offline factors. To that point, it is important that we validate or disprove those insights with our own research rather than taking what the client says at face value. Our goal is to optimize, not paint by numbers.

SEO Disrupts Most Digital Strategies

As much as I hate to say it, the reality of SEO is that it disrupts much of digital planning even when it’s included from the onset.

Most other digital capabilities start from the target audience before they do anything. User Experience has user stories, personas and user flows. Strategy teams build personas and need states by examining demographics and psychographics in efforts to really try and understand what does and will influence and fulfill the target audience. 

Whichever of these teams develops these audience insights then feeds them to other teams so that efforts are glued together by the target consumer. Paid channels such as Facebook Ads, Display Advertising and Paid Search benefit from this significantly in their ability to target demographically. Media teams examine the available audience by vendor and allocate dollars based on where the delivery will be most effective.

Traditionally, Organic Search ignores this step entirely and declares “HEY! I’M HERE NOW WE’RE DOING THIS MY WAY!” This is partially why SEO gets shunned by brands when they are determining where to distribute their efforts within the marketing mix. SEO is certainly effective, but it has always been a maverick that didn’t want to play by the rules. There is little meritocracy because if channels were chosen only by ROI – Display Advertising would have died 10 years ago. Evidently, they are not chosen this way so for SEO to get buy-in it needs to be team player.

Many Link Building Initiatives Exist in a Vacuum

Regardless of the hundreds of strategies, tactics and tools that are being born for link building daily, every successful link building campaign boils down to making news and/or making friends. As SEOs, we try to strong arm how and where brands will do this. Making news and building relationships are functions of many different groups and initiatives within a business from top to bottom. How is it that we as SEOs believe our best initiatives can exist outside of the things the brand itself contributes to? 

Brands launch PR campaigns, social media efforts, events, so on and a variety of other social strategies to facilitate the awareness of the news they create. How is link building any different? The fact of the matter is, it isn’t. Therefore it should be attacked from, and included with, the same standpoint as the rest of a brand’s social strategies for both scale and effectiveness. Simply put, link building is better when the entire muscle of a brand is leveraged.

To do effective SEO now, at the very least, you have to be a digital strategist, social media marketer, a content strategist, conversion rate optimizer, and a PR specialist. I’m skipping anything coding related because although I believe you should be able to build a website you don’t necessarily have to. SEOs are already inherently each of these things, however in most businesses these are all different capabilities that sit in different groups, or offices or cities. Who are we to upset an entire digital ecosystem and undermine so many people?

Well I work with some awesome digital strategists, content strategists, creatives, etc. and while they tend to have impressive grasps of web trends, audiences and their specific capabilities they typically don’t know how to leverage cross-channel campaigns as specifically as SEOs or Inbound Marketers.  It is now the role of Inbound Marketers to drive strategies that looks far more like this (sorry guys, Kanye had to go – busy schedule):

 

I wish very much that I could be there for your “aha!” moment right now as no doubt you recognize many of these steps and can guess where other tasks will fall. Now let’s break it down completely – forgive me for anything that is obvious.

• Opportunity Discovery – Opportunity Discovery is a cyclical process of understanding brand opportunity with regard to business goals, target audience, industry specifications and past performance. It’s cyclical in that insights from one step often refine insights from another step in the process.
   
• Business Objectives – Everything must be done within the context of the goals of the brand. This requires a deep understanding of where the brand has been and where it’s going. In many cases businesses large and small may not understand how to translate their goals and therefore it is the job of the Inbound Marketer to do so.
   
• Market Research – The reason why SEO gets such a bad rap for polluting the web is that so many people simply do not build content that is worthwhile or has utility for the market. At this point, the entire team must take a deep dive into the industry and be able to have more than cursory conversations on the subject matter. For those that believe this to be a largely arduous task I suggest specializing in verticals of interest.
   
• Audience Research –The Facebook Ads tool is the Adwords Keyword Tool of personas. The Doubleclick Ad Planner is also good for understanding the demographics of existing sites. If available, Facebook Insights gives demographic data on the existing users visiting the site as well. The output of this is a set of user segments and stories or – personas.
   
• Analytics Mining – As always, you should mine existing analytics data to understand who is visiting. Take deep dives into keyword performance, especially in concert with any internal Search data, to identify opportunities. All in all, this is no different than normal unless the client has already been tracking their audience at which point you can see if who they are trying to attract is actually coming or not.
   
• Social Listening – Using a core set of keywords, collect data on the conversation around those keywords. Keep track of patterns and identify user segments, demographics and need states of the people partaking in that social conversation. You’ll also want to keep track of how these users are using the keywords as this will allow you to eliminate ambiguity in keyword decisions and help to create messaging that resonates with the audience during the customer decision journey.
   
• Quantitative Analysis – Services such as ComScore, Quantcast, Forrester Research, etc. track a multitude of data points on users in various verticals by demographic. Leveraging these reports gives you deeper insight into what types of users visit your competitors and exist within the market.
   
• Keyword Research – Keyword Research must be completed with regard to the audience not just a determination of whether the keyword is viable from a search volume standpoint, but whether the keyword intent matches the business goals. Keywords should then be correlated with target personas and need states to help drive the build of content that is optimized for people first and search engines second. 
   
• Site Audit – Under the New SEO Process the Site Audit becomes decidedly more comprehensive, as it covers UX issues that would normally fall into a CRO Audit. Specifically, the audit talks about things impeding the conversions due to incongruence with the target audience in addition to the standard SEO technical issues that it covers.
   
• Asset Inventory – A standard practice SEOs are already doing wherein there is an understanding of what a brand controls and is willing to leverage to the benefit of the campaign.
   
• Content Audit – What content inside our outside of the site can be leveraged?
   
• Brand Relationships – What other companies, businesses, groups and events are the brand involved with?
   
• Offline Assets – What tools, venues, prizes, etc. are at the brands disposal?
   
• Competitive Analysis – As always, competitive analysis is a collection of high-level audits of competitors across the vertical. The difference is that since site audits are completed with regard to the audience, the competitive analysis must also include a determination of how other brands are capturing that audience.
   
• Measurement Planning –A standard practice amongst analytics teams the Measurement Plan is the Statement of Intent and determination of Key Performance Indicators with regard to the business goals and audience. Avinash Kaushik covers measurement planning in his Digital Marketing and Measurement Model post. (Hat tip: @scotttdodge)
   
• Content Strategy & Development – Content Strategy and Development are big picture initiatives with a variety of stakeholders, so it often carries with it the most pushback. Creative teams just want to take big swings for big ideas and brand managers just want to advertise. To be effective we have to show how our content ideas will connect with the brand’s target audience and make sure content is designed to our specification.
   
• Content Ideation –With all this social data we have collected and correlated to keywords we can now come with ideas for content with portions of the target audience built-in. Do so.
   
• Wireframes – are an early deliverable in the design phase of a website wherein we can annotate considerations for SEO and CRO to ensure that Creative teams design with both in mind. Be very involved in this phase.
   
• Content Build – Once all your points are baked in, it’s time to let the Creatives do what they do. If they come back with creative is not congruent with what is agreed upon in an earlier phase, then you now have data to back up your position with the client.
   
• Technical Development –Technical SEO is the price of admission and cannot be ignored, so this where we make sure that the structure of the house is sound.
   
• Technical Build –At this point, we’ve done all we can do now we just wait to see what the tech teams come back with. We’ve specified everything in wireframes and hopefully have had some say in the build of the CMS, but the tech team is going to do what they know. We’re just going to have to wait to see what they come back with unless they are open to our input during the actual build. 
   
• Implementation Audit – We’ll always have to double-check the work of a technical team and this is the spreadsheet in which we do it. An implementation audit briefly recounts the issues outlined in the site audit and wireframes and says whether or not they were successfully implemented. This is the easiest way to show that the bottlenecks are not so much with the SEO team but the tech team – as they oftentimes are.
   
• Social Strategy – Typically link building is an initiative that exists by itself, in the new SEO process link building is an initiative that must be completed as part of a broader scope. While it is clear that low quality tactics like blog commenting continue to work, even those are far more effective coupled with a social push across PR and social media. Leveraged strategically, you are launching a piece of content with a cross-channel marketing push and therefore the link velocity will appear more natural to search engines and the return on the social strategy is likely to be higher. While link building has always been about casting the widest net, social strategy is about casting the rightest net the widest. I just made up a word. Kanye approves.
   
• Link Strategy – Link building for most businesses, particularly small businesses, is not an “if you build it, they will come” situation. Therefore it is not enough to just launch content and hope for the best, we must continue to supplement content launches with smaller complementary content launches, outreach and manual submission link building. This is where this strategy is defined with its own measurement plan. Yes, I’m saying we should report both our prospects and the links we close. If you’re proud of your work that shouldn’t be a problem. Link Building is just like a PR campaign in that there is no guarantee of placements and should be explained as such.
   
• PR – News is better than advertising, so a key part of social strategy is doing things that make news. Users spend a large part of their day reading, sharing and linking to news so make it a large part of the social strategy to make sure that content is newsworthy and get it to the news outlets that your audience frequents. 
   
• Contests – Contests are an excellent way to get a one-to-many return on incentives. Rather than performing outreach and directly offering them a free sample or (gasp) money request that they enter a contest wherein their entry is a blog post about the brand’s topic that contains a link. Also add a layer of gameplay to the contest by determining the winner through the number of times their post is shared in social media. Unbounce had a similar blogging contest in 2011 but link building wasn’t the goal of the campaign so they had all the posts on their own site.
   
• Events – Throwing a party, conference or trade show is another one-to-many return for link building. Simply host an event and invite influencers in the brand’s audience where the stipulation for attendance is that people must blog about it and link back to you.
   
• Social Media – is a two way street. Not only is it a place for discovery but also a place for conversation. Use that conversation to find the influencers in the space with regard to the target audience and business goals. Build social media profiles to be authoritative and engaging to easily get your content shared and also convert sharers into linkers. Regardless of where Google is headed, the social graph will never completely replace the link graph.
   
• Social Implementation – is the phase when you let it all rip for the best synergy.
   
• Measurement – is not just about whether or not we hit the goals. It’s the insights into why that makes measurement the most valuable step in Online Marketing. Measuring with regard to the audience helps with understanding the why even further than speaking in concrete abstracts such as bounce rate of a keyword. After all the ability to tangibly measure is why digital marketing is far more effective than traditional.
   
• Reporting – is tailored specifically to the goals of the client. There’s no one-size-fit-all report. For example, a client business goal may be to get user segment A to watch a video and therefore, the primary metrics reported should be the Time On Site and persona type versus traffic and keyword. Rankings are only important with regard to how they’ve affected traffic. Everything should be focused on who (persona A) and why (because the message is unclear) rather than what (“blue widgets for sale ranked #5”). 
   
• Link Reporting – Under the umbrella of social strategy there is a lot to be said about what has been done to increase visibility. Aggregate rankings should be reported with regard to link building efforts to show the direct correlation between the two. Furthermore, link prospects and closes should also be reported with close rates to show clients what is being done on their behalf. This is obviously a subject of contention within the community, but if the links you build are so suspect that you are afraid to show them to the people you’re building them for – you need a different approach.
   
• Optimization – I had an art teacher once that always used to say “No work of art is ever finished, we just give up.” The art and science of SEO is never complete and there is always an opportunity to do more.
   
• Conversion Rate Optimization – While CRO is far more baked into this strategy it still likely to take its own seat at the table. That is to say that while SEOs may also be CROs they may be too close to the project to properly optimize. This is much the same way that the mixing engineer of a song is not supposed to also be the mastering engineer. At this point, a separate CRO Team should run A/B Tests, Usability Tests and so on and report back.
   
• Continued SEO – Do it all over again!

A Better Web

Not to go all “land of milk and honey” on you guys, but the consumer is the biggest winner here. Naturally businesses benefit immensely as well, but the more we optimize with people in mind the more likely their needs will be fulfilled and consequently, the more likely we are to get those people to convert. Including people throughout the process and making the core goal to encourage them to do something ultimately makes the web a better place because everything we create will have a distinct purpose for the user and never solely for search engines. This is not to say we are circumventing the technical tenets of SEO as they are the price of admission.

Brand Buy-In

SEO has always been an industry that explains itself using empirical data. Starting from the audience, a place that businesses can understand, it is far easier to get buy-in for SEO initiatives. So when we make recommendations and explain the impact of our efforts on a target audience that has been determined as a focus of all initiatives, it’s easier to obtain brand buy-in than when we’re just talking about keywords and traffic.

Compare the following statement:

“We want to build links targeting websites with a PageRank of 3 or higher. We’ll reach out to a variety of prospects and target anchor text for keyword opportunities identified by our extensive keyword research in order to gain rankings for your brand.”

with:

“We’d like to launch a contest targeting Influential Moms with over 5000 followers on Twitter. To enter they’d write blog posts that link back to our properties in order to drive traffic for our target Listener Moms that are using Search to buy more healthy cereal.”

Both ideas would potentially accomplish the same goals however the former will require far more explanation for the client and ultimately more effort on the part of the SEO team. Whereas the latter explains a link building campaign in terms of the brand’s target audience and business goals then further lays out a campaign wherein the brand commits cross-channel resources that the SEO team can leverage. Understanding the business objectives and the audience make it easier to develop and deliver strategies that client can easily get behind.

Scalability

Getting on the same page with the other capabilities allows SEO efforts to be scaled considerably for brands large and small. This is how we regularly achieve those otherwise rare instances of synergy between capabilities when the PR team is facilitating Link Building, the Content Strategy teams and Creative teams are creating link bait and SEO is both driving and supplementing those efforts. That is the perfect storm where we spend far more time chiseling our perfect sculptures rather than polishing poop and our efforts have far more impact with less effort. 

Cross-Channel Optimization

Learnings and wins in SEO can influence other channels. Imagine we discover through social listening, keyword research and/or measurement are a large number of the client’s target audience is looking for “red kanye west t-shirts” but the client only sells every color but red. We now have a tight business case as to why that client should start manufacturing the t-shirt in red. Conversely, what if we find out that people love the shirt but bounce from the landing page because they hate the user experience of the site? There is any number of scenarios that when explained purely from the context of search brands are far less likely to make a move. However when you explain these insights through the context of personas and market research you have a tighter case that can affect change across all channels and capabilities.

[not provided]…so what?

Google has positioned itself to take away all of our organic keyword referral data and let’s be honest they ultimately will take it all. Plus, and the consolidation of privacy policies to allow cross-product data access, is Google’s way of positioning itself to attain the Holy Grail of Marketing. However, measuring through our audience essentially allows us a new way to determine the effectiveness of a campaign. We know the keywords we are targeting for a given page and we can see rankings and analytics of a given landing page by channel to determine whether or not Search is driving traffic. The true measure of success was never the rankings, nor the traffic but how well the page a given page converted for our visitors. If we track conversions based on audience that is the only metric that is truly worth optimizing against. The holistic performance of a channel is what brands are concerned with, not necessarily the performance of a given keyword.

The following are a list of posts, pages, tools and presentations to help get a deeper understanding of personas and need states and how to apply them to various Inbound Marketing efforts.

Personas

• 10 Steps to Personas [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Develop Personas
• Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites
• Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO [SLIDESHARE]
• Understanding Your Audience Using Social Media [MOZINAR]

Need States

• AIDA: Attention-Interest-Design-Action
• Landing Pages and the Decision Making Process
• McKinsey Customer Decision Journey [VIDEO]
• Customers Go On a Journey, Escaping the Funnel

Useful Social Tools

• SocialMention
• Amplicate
• Topsy
• Trendistic
• MentionMapp
• Twtrland
• FollowerWonk
• Listorious
• KnowEm.com
• Radian6 - PAID
• Lithium - PAID

Quantitative Analysis Providers (PAID)

• ComScore
• QuantCast
• Compete
• Hitwise
• Forrester Research

During the #seochat I did on the SEO Process there were some questions of whether this applies to small businesses or not, citing that small businesses only care about the #1 spot and they “just want rank.” Yes, understanding what makes an audience tick applies to all businesses. Again, the ability to quantify the interests and intent of your audience and track a brand’s ability to persuade is the advantage of digital marketing of any kind. As I said on Twitter, #1 is not a goal, but a means to an end. #1 gets users to the door; it doesn’t keep them in the house.

Finally, the new SEO process is a call for us to speak the language of other capabilities and deliver strategies that can plug and play with what brands truly understand. The new SEO process is not about chasing the algorithm; it’s about fulfilling the needs of the people the algorithm serves. It’s about creating and discovering the content that resonates with the people that a business is trying to reach and then also covering the technical bases required to get results. It’s about understanding the connections between keywords in the mind of your target audience in order to optimize for them effectively. And most importantly, it’s about having SEO become the driver of the marketing mix rather than the outcast. No doubt SEO will remain the esoteric “Calculus of Marketing” but it’s time to prove that we can actually do the math so to speak.

So fellow marketers—what’s it gonna be? Keep it classy or keep it Kanye? 

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Sent with Reeder

Sent from my iPhone

Common Video Indexing Pitfalls

Common Video Indexing Pitfalls

Uploads by GoogleWebmasterHelp

If your video isn't being indexed and served properly, most likely it's because Google doesn't have enough data about it. Find out some best practices for video indexing in this help article: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=156442

Sent with Reeder

Sent from my iPhone

3 Winning Small Business Internet Marketing Tips – With Tim Reid

[caption id="attachment_6701" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Start creating your own content."][/caption]

I sat down with Tim Reid, of “Small Business Big Marketing” podcast fame, at a recent workshop, and asked him for his three leading Internet marketing tips for a small business.

His answers were pure gold and you won’t go far wrong if you take them on board; we share them with you below.

1. Be A Publisher!

Successful small business owners nowadays are not marketers; they are publishers.

Times have changed over the past couple of years, so the focus should no longer be on the old, “push” marketing strategies that dominated for so long; now the trick is to attract customers by providing valuable content, which encourages them to trust in and become familiar with you and then, eventually, to buy from you.

This content can include many different formats such as blogs, articles, videos and podcasts – they all allow you to share quality information,

SEO services company

What should you ask an SEO company?

There's no doubt your inbox is hit daily with SEO spam promising you fast and cheap #1 rankings; but in a nameless & faceless marketplace, who can you really trust? Good question, right?

Well, we're here to help you find that answer. Why? Because we know it's frustrating to need expert help, but to not know what questions to ask.

As an SEO and Internet Marketing company with a decade of experience, we owe our success to honestly helping people grow their business, regardless of whether they work with us or someone else.

So, as a result of so many people seeking our advice, we've organized an extensive MP3 of the most Frequently Asked SEO Questions - questions you should ask any SEO company before working with them. Click here to download the MP3 to get the answers to questions like:

-What type of SEO techniques do we use?
-What kind of guarantee do we provide?
-When will notable results be seen?
-What ROI can be expected from SEO?
-How many #1 rankings do we

SEO services

Got SEO Questions? We've Got The Answers Here

Consider the following:

Around 85% of search engine visitors click on the organic search results over the paid pay-per-click results.
The first organic listing receives about 42% of that traffic while the second position only gets around 12%.

In the long run, search engine optimization (SEO) is, hands down, the best way to obtain high quality, targeted traffic to your site . . . but only if you can maneuver your site to the top.

Over the next several paragraphs, I’ll answer your biggest SEO questions, including why Google should be your #1 target, what a “natural” link building campaign looks like, and how to avoid being banned by the search engines.

Why is Google the Most Important SEO Target?

Google dominates the search engine industry. It has an overall 67% market share, but that number can be as high as 80% in some locations. So it just makes common sense to make sure the biggest player in your space indexes your content and ranks it as high as

SEO services

Google vs Yellow Pages Survey Results

In this digital age, it is all to easy to jump to the conclusion that online marketing is dominating over offline marketing methods... but is it fair? Just like "video killed the radio star" (as the song goes), can online media really kill the once all mighty print media star?

One dinosaur of print media which seems to be, all too often, in the firing line is the Yellow Pages. Sure, on an environmental level, the Yellow Pages [physical book], may be seen as a colossal waste of paper but what about its effectiveness?

It seems that those who are most aggressively against the Yellow Pages are typically the ones who have the most to gain from its demise - namely online marketers, SEO and SEM companies.

So, before condemning the Yellow Pages, we decided to hit the streets of Melbourne to hear what the everyday person thinks. I guess you could call it some old fashioned market research :)

Watch the video below to see a quick summary of what we found...


The Survey

SEO services

Big Online Marketing Tips For Small Business – With Luke Moulton

Luke Moulton runs the Small Business Big Marketing Podcast; we sat down with him at a recent Internet marketing event and picked his brains for a few online marketing tips that a small business looking to boost its sales can get some instant “wins” with.

Below we share a few quick, actionable steps that you can apply in your business immediately, without having to redesign anything.

Testing

“A-B” testing, “multi-variant” testing or split testing – whatever you call it, it’s becoming a valuable tool for website owners to help them judge exactly what’s working and what’s not with their Internet marketing strategies.

Testing and applying the formats that work best will help to increase conversion rates – and nowadays there are several testing tools that can help you. Here are 3 of them:

Visual Website Optimiser

Zen Tester

Google free testing tool

Just a 10% increase in conversion rates can mean significant extra revenue, so investing a

SEO services

This Week’s Blog Topic: Blog Topics!

This Week’s Blog Topic: Blog Topics!

#1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

This Week’s Blog Topic: Blog Topics! is a post from: #1 Melbourne SEO Services Company

Be the boss when it comes to choosing topics.

Occasionally, with slow news weeks or when we have come to the end of a series of topics I find myself having to rack my brain for blog topics to write about.

I thought I’d do a quick search on Google for some inspiration and that didn’t throw up many gems.

Then it dawned on me that other people might be having the same problem for their own blogs; and with blog writing being an integral part of any online marketing plan these days, I thought it deserved some attention of its own, so here goes…

Blog Purposes And Targets

Don’t forget that one of the main purposes of blog writing, apart from its SEO value, is to demonstrate your expertise in your area.

You will likely be sharing your posts across social media sites like Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter, so you can get great exposure for your posts. That makes it doubly important to find subjects that talk to your audience and engage them.

Of course, if you have been following our posts over the past 12 months or so, you’ll be fully aware that before you start writing your blog you should already have clearly identified who you’re marketing to; so then it’s just a case of finding interesting, compelling content and putting your slant on it.

Your blog is the place for opinion, ideas, discussion of news and developments in your industry – there is a wide scope of subjects for any online business to get their teeth into.

How To Choose Blog Topics

Taking Melbourne SEO Services as the example, we are an SEO company first and foremost so our blog touches on many of the key areas such as On page SEO, Off page SEO, Video SEO, search engine algorithms and changes, copywriting, social media, traffic conversion and so on.

As well as this we have products that focus on best practices for online marketing generally, online video, outsourcing and so on – so this opens up many other avenues for passing on tips and prompting discussions.

What are the core competencies of your business? Expand outwards from there and embrace all the topics that your audience will find useful, thought-provoking and will get them coming to you to ask questions as an authority on the subject.

It’s All In The Angle

You can write about the same subject from many different angles.

Changing the title can provide new ideas for your blog writing; they are doubly important because without the right titles your posts may not be found by people through the search engines– or they may choose not to read because the title doesn’t inspire them.

For example if we take the subject of On page SEO, we could choose a title such as:

On Page SEO For Your Website
On Page SEO For Your Online Business

The problem with these is that they don’t really have an angle to them. It’s better to provide that angle and include in the title to get people to sit up and take notice. For example:

The 5 Biggest Mistakes Website Owners Make With On Page SEO
7 Steps To On Page SEO That Gets You To Number 1 On Google

Some other great “angles” to use in your titles are:

• “Top 10 ways to ….”
•  “How to Increase/Decrease …..”
•  “7 Tips for….”
•  “The Best….”
•  “Discover the Secret Of…”

There are many more variations on these themes but you get the general picture.

There is no hard and fast formula on blog topics but, once you have developed the knack of creating great, catchy titles, you open up many doors to writing better and more varied blog posts for your business, no matter what it is.

In case you want to learn more about internet marketing and search engine optimization in particular, take a look at our DVD course by clicking here.

Other Posts You May Be Interested In:

• Go Easy On Creating Viral Content
• The Essential Facebook And Twitter Marketing Approaches
• YouTube Update – TV Type Content On The Way?
• 3 Blog Commenting Tips To Put Your Website To The Top!
• The 5 Pillars Of YouTube Video Optimization

Sent with Reeder

Sent from my iPhone

5 Video Marketing Tips For Small Business - With Gideon Shalwick

[caption id="attachment_6668" align="alignleft" width="270" caption="Find the right rhythm for your business."][/caption]

While at the Fast Web Formula 3 event in Queensland in late 2011 I sat down with a few of my Internet marketing buddies and asked them to pass on a few video marketing tips for small business from their specialist area.

If you are thinking video marketing then you should be thinking Gideon Shalwick as he’s seen tremendous success with his YouTube –based approach. Check out his website here: www.rapidvideoblogging.com

Gideon was kind enough to share with us five great tips where a small or medium business can get some quick wins with their business set up and with using video marketing strategies – we dwell mainly on his fifth point, which was about using YouTube.

Think Of Your Business As A Piece Of Music

If your business is a piece of music then the bass line is the strategy and systems that keeps the rhythm running and doesn’t change a

SEO services

Get Top Business Tips From Internet Marketing Gurus

I'm freshly back from visiting the team in the Philippines and I think that deserves a post in itself, but before that, I wanted to send through a few interviews with some of the biggest names in the marketing. I just posted them on YouTube - and I really think they'll help you.

I actually asked them for their best (quick and easy) marketing strategies you can apply to your business right now!

They're only short videos (under 10 mins each) and I got some awesome answers. Which leads me to the question, why do chicks get more clicks?

Out of all the interviews, the one with Jen Sheehan - the Facebook Queen - has already clocked the most views.

Why?



Is it because FaceBook is a really hot topic now or is it because the marketing industry seems to be male dominated so it's a welcome change to have some girl power? Or is a little from column A and a little from column B?

What do you think?

Anyway, here are the videos, check them out, and remember to

SEO services

5 Facebook Advertising Tips - With Jen Sheahan

Unless you’ve been stuck down a hole for the past couple of years you probably know that Facebook advertising has become huge. Yet many businesses are not taking advantage of it and have either tried it and given up because it didn’t work or they are scared to try it.

We took time out from a recent Internet marketing event to sit down with Jen Sheahan, who is considered one of the leading lights of Facebook marketing and runs www.fbadlabs.com.

We asked her what small businesses could be doing to get some “quick wins” by advertising on Facebook and we share her five suggestions below:

1. Provide A Reason To Click NOW

For a successful Facebook advertising campaign you must provide a reason for people to click on your ad now. That means an offer, event or conference that incentivises your audience to click now, before a certain date. Without an incentive people will generally not click through.

2. Create The Image

Make sure you choose your image carefully -

SEO services

3 Web Business Tips To Look Like A World-Beater

[caption id="attachment_6635" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Split test your website."][/caption]

While at Fast Web Formula 3 a while back, I chatted with a few Internet marketing buddies to find out their opinions on what’s currently working best for small business.

That included Ben Stickland from Market Samurai; I asked him for his three leading web business tips and he responded with three questions which he likes to ask when consulting with a small web business.

The responses are all simple and that’s the beauty of them – making small changes can make a big difference, because most website owners don’t get the simple things right.

I share his responses with you below.

1. Does The Website Make Me Wanna Throw Up?

Is the website copy convincing and does the look and feel make you want to hang around...or throw up?!

Is the site believable and would you consider entering your credit card details on it?

If not, then making some changes can set

SEO services

This Week’s Blog Topic: Blog Topics!

[caption id="attachment_6619" align="alignleft" width="271" caption="Be the boss when it comes to choosing topics."][/caption]

Occasionally, with slow news weeks or when we have come to the end of a series of topics I find myself having to rack my brain for blog topics to write about.

I thought I’d do a quick search on Google for some inspiration and that didn’t throw up many gems.

Then it dawned on me that other people might be having the same problem for their own blogs; and with blog writing being an integral part of any online marketing plan these days, I thought it deserved some attention of its own, so here goes…

Blog Purposes And Targets

Don’t forget that one of the main purposes of blog writing, apart from its SEO value, is to demonstrate your expertise in your area.

You will likely be sharing your posts across social media sites like Facebook, Google Plus and Twitter, so you can get great exposure for your posts. That makes it doubly important to

SEO services

Go Easy On Your Creating Viral Content

[caption id="attachment_6602" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Quality content can go viral."][/caption]

There is too much emphasis placed on creating viral content.

Why? Because you are not in control of that – your audience is.

Engaging, informing and/or entertaining your audience should be the focus for your content creation… if it happens to be shared and go viral then great; if not don’t worry!

Content Is King

You can help your online presence mature by creating great content. There are so many different forms of media we can use now to do this, that it is almost criminal not to be using them!

Articles, online videos, blog posts, podcasts, social media posts and info-graphics are just some of the ways we can interact with our audience.

All of the above help position ourselves and our business as an authority, adds credibility to our online presence and most of it can help us rise in rankings with the search engines.

So you really need to plough

SEO services

The Number One Secret Of Online Business Marketing

People ask me what is the one secret of online business marketing I would pass on, if I had to summarise it in one phrase for someone.

Through my own experience and the experience of interviewing some of the leaders in online marketing I can say that there is one thing that stands out for successful web businesses and we share that below.

Focus On Automating The Back End

I cannot over-stress the importance of automating your back-end systems so that they can run without your constant input; the idea is to create a website that can gather leads, process them and convert them into sales with the minimum of your time and effort, allowing you to concentrate on growing your business rather than working in it all the time.

Sounds easy? Well, you should know by now that it’s not easy – if it was, everyone would be doing it and I wouldn’t need to write this!

But it is key – and if you get it right you can really propel your business forward and ahead of the

SEO services

3-Step Guide To Writing An Internet Marketing Business Plan

[caption id="attachment_6552" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="Take the measured steps to success!"][/caption]

Writing an Internet marketing business plan should be a top priority if you are just starting out building your online “empire”; this can be the map that your business follows over the coming months and years to guide it to where you need it to be.

It can be a little daunting for some people who have never written a business plan before so we have broken it down into 3 steps that we ourselves have followed at Melbourne SEO Services.

1. The Back End Of The Business

You need to create a stable foundation for your business by automating the back end; that means creating seamless ways for the sales funnel to attract and convert leads into sales of your products and services.

At Melbourne SEO Services we set up the following:

The SEO free report – leads are sent an auto-responder sequence of emails over 3 months – pointing to different parts of the

SEO services

7 Steps To Hiring “A” Players For Your Business

[caption id="attachment_6541" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Learn how to find top team players."][/caption]

The success of your business as it grows will partly depend on you hiring “A” players in all the key positions.

Hiring staff doesn’t need to be complicated – it’s a case of knowing who you need, using your marketing skills to attract them and then a filtering process to save time and effort in selecting the right one. We take you through it below.

Know Who You Are Looking For

If you have mapped out your business and broken it down into key systems and processes you should be able to clearly identify the skills and talents you are looking for in a new team member; what will make them an “A” player?

Also, think about the type of personality that will “fit” with your business – then you are well on the way to deciding on exactly who you are looking for. This is a key stage that all the rest of the hiring process hinges on.

Write The

SEO services

How To Use Web Outsourcing To Grow Your Business

If you don’t build a business that can operate when you’re not there you don’t really have a business – and web outsourcing is a great strategy for making sure you do have one.

If you have been following our posts on the Competition Crusher workshop topics you should be clear by now on mapping out your business into a series of detailed processes; if everything goes according to plan, you will reach a stage where you cannot look after all those processes yourself and, in order to expand, you will need to hire team members.

You Can’t Do It Alone!

Don’t pretend that you can do it all yourself – if you have built a strong business you won’t have the time or skill-set to be able to manage everything without some talented help.

Remember that a business needs to be able to operate and earn you income when you are not there, so the idea is to slowly remove yourself from the day-to-day running, so you can focus on the bigger picture.

Following The

SEO services