Written on February 11, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide, seo
by Mike Moran
You probably use many sources to brainstorm your search keywords, but how do you know if your customers are starting to change the way they search for your products? Have you listened to what your customers are saying? Time was that listening to customers demanded expensive focus groups and surveys, but that time has passed. Nowadays, you can listen to social media conversations and analyze them for any number of purposes, including search keywords.
Think about how you do keyword research normally. You probably start by entering into the search engines some keywords you know are relevant. Then you look at what pages come up and start to catalog in your mind some other words that you see on those pages. Then you start entering some of those words and continue the process until you start to see that you are getting too far away from the original subject.
Then you take those words and use a keyword research tool to help you see which words are searched for frequently enough to be valuable, and then you let those tools show you other popular variations. And while all of that is very smart, you know that over time your customers start to shift what they are looking for.
The language around your product might change, due to technology changes (cell phone becomes smart phone), changes in customer needs (low cost becomes total cost of ownership), or simple shifts in the language (energy efficient becomes green). When it does, you need some way of picking up on what’s happening so you can adjust your keyword mix in response.
For large businesses, you can use social media listening services to help you find new words that your regular keyword research might not have uncovered. The listening companies will do the work for you and find those nuggets that you might have missed. [Full disclosure: I serve as Chief Strategist at Converseon, one of those companies happy to listen to your conversation and help you with search marketing also.]
But for small businesses with limited (no?) budgets, what can they do to listen to their customers’ conversations?
Google Alerts to the rescue. You probably already use Google Alerts to monitor mentions about yourself and your company, but you can also use it for keyword research. You can load up Google Alerts with a bunch of your keywords and start reading the stories that come your way for new keywords.
But, gee, that seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it?
To take the drudgery out of it, use a word cloud (as pictured above), which visualizes the words being used so that you can see which ones seem to be occurring more than others. To automatically generate a word cloud from your Google Alerts, set up an RSS feed for your Google Alerts, rather than e-mail notification. Then, enter the URL for that RSS feed into Wordle, which creates a word cloud from any RSS feed.
Just point your RSS feed at this tool every once in a while, and immediately see what you are missing. When you listen to what your customers tell you, it’s amazing how smart you can look. (Only you and I know the truth…)
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
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Listen to Your Customers to Adjust Your Keywords
Tags: conversation ,customers ,google-alert ,have-uncovered- ,into-the-search ,keywords ,language ,marketing ,mind ,search ,searchengineguide ,words
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Written on February 11, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing, searchengineguide, seo
by Stoney deGeyter
The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.
Keywords are the blue-prints from which all your marketing efforts are built upon. Keyword research tools provide valuable insight into what words people are searching on the major search engines. But research tools are just the first step in a thorough and well-planned keyword research process. Great tools like Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker or even Google’s tools don’t tell you the intent of each search, however that information can be deduced with a bit of analysis and keyword organization.
But before we get into that, let’s look at how people search so we can better understand how to segment and organize your keywords into an effective optimization campaign.
How People Search
Over the years searching trends have changed. Once upon a time the majority of searchers used one word queries. Eventually they started realizing they they get better, more accurate, results when you give the search engine a bit more information about what you are looking for.
The more accurate the search phrase you use in your search is, the more accurate the results will be that are returned. Studies have shown that four and five-word phrases often have a higher ROI than one and two word phrases because the searcher is more likely to get results that meet their needs.
The downside of longer phrases is this increases the keyword combination potentials so the number of searches for any one phrase reduces dramatically. This makes optimization more difficult. Instead of optimizing for one general phrase you have to optimize for five very specific phrases. This is the long-tail of keywords, also known as the low hanging fruit. These longer phrases have far less competition and are much easier to get ranked, but also produce lower traffic volumes.
Long-tail phrases should not constitute the primary focus of your optimization efforts. Nor should you focus primarily on short-tail phrases either. A good keyword optimization strategy goes after both simultaneously.
keyword Buying Cycle
Every user has different needs and ultimately different goals they wish to achieve when they begin a search process. Many searches are quick with a sole purpose of learning something such as “how many days does it take the Starship Enterprise to travel from Earth to Vulcan at Warp 7?” A few searches may give you a satisfactory answer and then the sci-fi geek Trekker can go back to watching her ST:TNG marathon.
Other searches have another simple goal: to buy a product that best suites your wants and needs. While that goal maybe simple the process to reach it isn’t. Most searchers–no matter what the goal–will ultimately use at least parts of the following research cycle.
Every search starts with an interest. The interest generally uses broad keywords with one or maybe two words. As the user moves through the other stages–gather, research, exclude and purchase, they make their queries more and more specific. Every change in query, brings the searcher closer and closer to their goal, each giving them more information along the way.
Most searchers go through this process unintentionally, but as they start in the lower stages they learn more about what they want and how to search more accurately. How does a searcher know they want a 1080p blu-ray player (for his Star Trek Blu-rays) until they learn that 1080i isn’t quite as good?
Most businesses want to be ranked for the interest level searches because that’s where the most traffic is. This can often be a mistake because searchers will often use those sites as a springboard to get to the other sites that meet their more specific queries. There is still valid reasons to be ranked on these broader searches as that can help brand your site and bring people back as they know more of what they want, but the conversions come from the more specific terms.
What You Learn
Once you understand how the searcher progresses through the buying cycle you can then learn something from the keywords that were used to search. The information you glean can be crucial in determining how to develop the content and direction of your website.
Target Audience: The more you know about who your target audience is the better position you will be in to meet their needs. The keywords used by business professionals will often be different from keywords used by students and hobbyists. Both will be using keywords that appear to be relevant but depending on what you offer, not all of them truly have the same intent or delivered to the same page.
Areas of Interest: Keywords can tell you what is important to your target audience. Are they looking to satisfy a quick query about warp speed travel or are they looking for the quantum mechanical details of how warp propulsion works? Both of these queries take you to Star Trek sites but the latter would certainly turn the non hard-core Trekker away muttering, “stupid sci-fi geeks” under their breath.
Needs to be met: Finally, your keywords can tell you what needs the searcher is looking to have met. Some hobbyists are looking for a strategy for tackling their next project and a business leader may be looking for a community of like-minded individual.
Unlike the chart above, keyword research isn’t always a linear process. There is a lot of overlap and much that you do in the process requires going back and repeating once you have new data on hand. Keeping your keyword research fluid helps you maintain accuracy and adapt as changes are made in visitor search patterns.
Missed a part of this series?
Part 1: Everything You Need To Know About SEO
Part 2: Everything You Need To Know About Title Tags
Part 3: Everything You Need To Know About Meta Description and Keyword Tags
Part 4: Everything You Need To Know About Heading Tags and Alt Attributes
Part 5: Everything You Need To Know About Domain Names
Part 6: Everything You Need To Know About Search Engine Friendly URLs & Broken Links
Part 7: Everything You Need To Know About Site Architecture and Internal Linking
Part 8: Everything You Need To Know About Keywords
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
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SEO 101 - Part 8: Everything You Need to Know About Keywords
Written on January 25, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, chat, marketing, seo
With the increasing emphasis on content marketing for both SEO and Social Media, I thought I’d offer some specific tips on dealing with one of the most prevalent issues companies face in this area: long term sourcing of content. While we’ve written about content sourcing for corporate blogs in the past, but this post will emphasize how to use social media darling Twitter to find a goldmine of useful resources, tips and information that your customers will love and keep coming back for more.
The irony here is that there’s been speculation as to whether the growing popularity of Twitter has reduced the effectiveness and popularity of blogging. The reality is that Twitter and blogging compliment each other exceptionally well. Here are 5 tips on how to use Twitter to do just that:
Polls – Ask And You Shall Receive
Active participants on Twitter that have developed a certain momentum of followers and conversations can offer their Twitter network the opportunity to interact and engage on topically relevant poll questions. Polls are a great opportunity to ask for help and recognize participation.
Some guidelines on Twitter polls:
- Announce that you will be asking a series of poll questions.
- Use an intuitive #hashtag after each poll question to thread them together
- Make sure you ask questions relevant to your Tweeting history
- Thank particpants and let them know what you will do with the answers
- Acknowledge participants in the blog post. If there are a nominal number of participants, cite them in the post itself. If there are many participants, you might consider creating a Twitter list just for the poll and link to the poll from the blog post.
Annotated poll results can be published alone or the answers can be incorporated as supporting points to a post on the topic being polled.
#TwitterChats – Make a Date to Tweet
The conversation aspect of Twitter is one of the most powerful. Hidden amongst what appears to be an ongoing dinner party conversation, one can find threaded discussions amongst some of the smartest people in their fields. As mentioned above, the use of a #hashtag in tweets threads conversations together. Interested parties agree upon a set time and topic then start the conversation.
A few examples relevant to Online Marketing Blog readers include: #blogchat on Sunday nights run by @MackCollier that discusses all things blogging (example archive). Another example is #journchat on Monday nights run by @prsarahevens and it provides Public Relations professionals and journalists an opportunity to discuss issues and how they can work together more effectively (archive).
To source these threaded discussions into blog content, a search on the hashtag will present discussion as search results and can be copied into a post. There are also services you can use to automatically archive these kinds of scheduled Twitter chats. 140 characters keeps interaction succinct and often very tips focused.
Crowdsource – Wisdom of the Twitter Crowd
One of the major reasons people network is to interact and be helpful. When you have a good rapport with a Twitter network, blog topics and information can be crowdsourced. Topics can be solicited as well as sources of facts, research and other information. Followers are often happy to provide suggestions or even links to facts that can be used in a blog post. These solicitations can be public but can also be sent via direct message to specific individuals.
For example, you might post a question about which of 3 topics to post on your blog next. You can ask this directly or frame it with the context of something currently being discussed in your industry. Asking provocative questions to see what the response is can provide great feedback as to what people are interested in and can develop discussions that will help inspire the writing of a blog post. It’s important with any kind of take that there is give as well. Recognition goes a long way as does being helpful back to other Tweeple.
Search.Twitter for ?’s – Seek and You Shall Find
Being helpful is a key piece of what makes the social web go round. Twitter provides a platform for easy questions and answers. As a subject matter expert, you can use Twitter search to find out what people are asking in your area of expertise.
For example: “blog host” ? Then aggregate some of the best questions into a blog post, with answers of course.
Search.Twitter for Tips – Search for Twitter Smarties
On the flip side, you can use Twitter search to find useful tips being offered by other Twitter users. The best tips on relevant topics can be aggregated summarized in a blog post. With credit/attribution of course. Also look for tweets that include links, since 140 characters is pretty limited for useful tips. For example, iPhone apps camera OR photos
Also, there’s nothing wrong with following individuals that offer useful tips and ask them if it’s ok to repost on your blog. Not only is this coureous but it develops goodwill and creates an entre to discussion with that person.
So now you have 5 ways to source content using Twitter. Most people using Twitter have seen these tactics in practice, not as many have implemented them or found a way to do so effectively. How have you used Twitter to source content? Have you used any of the tactics above? If so, how did they work for you?
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Tags: a-good-rapport ,a-platform-for ,answers ,content marketing ,conversation ,effectiveness ,exceptionally ,online ,post ,seo ,source ,twitter marketing
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Written on January 8, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
If you are easily the number 3 horse in a three horse race does it do you any good to start saying negative things about how you race? Probably not. In fact, it’s probably better for you to act a little more confident, train a little harder and do something that will move you out of the basement.
This horse I am referring to is Microsoft’s Bing. One of the ways that they have decided to move up in the race is to ingest the number 2 horse (Yahoo), which is a decent play but the final product is still very far off. In the meantime it’s best not be saying the following in a Bing forums thread as reported by Search Engine Roundtable, especially if you are Program Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, Brett Yount
It is well known in the industry that MSNbot is fairly slow.
Ok, maybe it is well known to the industry insider but the rest of the world may not have that level of understanding. When you say something like that though now they can and not much good can come from that kind of ‘exposure’.
Bing has had a pretty quiet start to the new year thus far. With all of the talk of mobile devices and mobile ad platforms and things of the future maybe that warrants Bing being left out of the conversation? Whatever the reason, maybe the better way to make the news is to be reporting on upgrades and improvements like the number one horse has been doing for the past three plus months.
Ooops, I forgot. Steve Ballmer was busy promoting Bing at CES this week with inspiring words of innovation like these which I found in Forbes
“More than ever we are delivering the experiences that people want, where they want them, wherever they are,” Ballmer said in his second-ever keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday night. “And of course we Bing we Bing we Bing we Bing Bing Bing all the time, at least in my world.”
I don’t know about you but this kind of ‘activity’ isn’t exactly inspiring me to confidence that Bing may never be more than a distant second with its Bingahoo offering to Google for a very long time.
Your thoughts?
See the rest here:
Bing Needs to Say Something Different
Tags: a-decent-play ,consumer ,conversation ,google ,marketing ,microsoft ,music ,news ,search ,search-engine ,watch-out-other ,yahoo
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Written on November 19, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Object
Have you ever tried to create an interesting blog on a topic that people rarely interact with? Can you really build a thriving readership of loyal fans interested in a dry topic like root canals or debt consolidation? Most likely not.
It is far easier to go where the conversation is than it is to create [...]
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What Are You TALKING About?
Written on November 17, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
Oh, how I wish this was a cool YouTube video that could go viral. But it’s not. Instead, it’s some pretty interesting research by PostRank on how reader engagement in blogging has evolved over the last three years.
Not so surprisingly, trackbacks as a means of joining the conversation have dropped off in favor of taking the discussion to Twitter or other social sites. Over the last there years, trackbacks have dropped from 19% of total engagement to 3%, while social networks have soared from <1% to 29%.
This is indicative of the larger trend—the move to engagement off the site itself:
On-site engagement is down 50%, but total engagement engagement is still high—the conversation has just moved onto Facebook, Twitter and other social networks because of the “Share this” phenomenon.
Finally, the study also found that posts have a longer lifespan of engagement, due largely to the fact that engagement in the first hour has decreased:
Back in 2007, we observed that over 94% of all the engagement occurred within the first day of publishing the article. Even more interestingly, the 98% of the engagement on that first day occurred within the first hour. In other words, the half-life of a story was, and still is, less than an hour!
Fast forward to 2008 and 2009, and we’re seeing a steady increase in the lifespan of a story: down to 83% of total engagement for the first hour in 2008, and 64% in 2009.
While the majority of engagement still takes place in the first hour, the engagement is also more spread out today—because more and more people are discovering the post later, thanks to the social sharing options that have become so popular.
What do you think? Have you seen this phenomenon in your blogging and sharing?
via
Read more from the original source:
The Evolution of Blogging
Tags: article ,book ,change-the-face ,conversation ,facebook ,most ,official-google ,post ,similar-images ,swirl ,the-engagement
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Written on November 17, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, marketing
According to a recent survey by email marketing company VerticalResponse, small and medium businesses are wising up to online marketing. For their 2010 plans, they’re big into SEM, social media and email marketing—but interest in banner ads is quickly waning.
54.2% of SMBs do not plan to use banner ads online next year. Of those that are currently using banner ads, less than 20% of businesses with 11-100 employees reported increasing their banner spend this year (and about 7% of businesses with <10 employees).
A few other advertising media aren’t doing so well. 23.8% of SMBs aren’t looking at paid or natural SEM. Conversely, some 96% plan to use email marketing in 2010, and more than a third of SMBs surveyed are planning to increase their email spending “by a lot” in the coming year. But the big losses come in TV and radio, which has long been a strong seller for local advertising: 79.6% are not planning to use TV, and 72.7% won’t be using radio advertising.
VerticalResponse points out that the low level of adoption is a big opportunity for vendors in the online banner ad arena (and the SEM arena, to a lesser extent). However, unless they mean display ad marketplaces, it’s tough for full-size Internet marketing companies to accommodate the budget needs of SMBs while still offering customized campaigns, advice and value for scale. (I’ve been there.)
What do you think? Should SMBs pay more attention to online banners? How can Internet marketing companies accommodate their needs?
See the rest here:
SMBs Abandoning Banners
Written on October 30, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, Object
In this column, I’ll follow up on my conversation with Dr. Jim Jansen from Penn State and his recent investigation into behavior patterns that lie within a large data set of visitor and search advertising campaign data from a high traffic ecommerce site. In part one, Jim and I explored whether a search funnel actually [...]
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Researcher Jim Jansen On The “Sex” Of Search Queries & Personalization
Tags: a-large-data ,a-search-funnel ,Advertising ,and-his ,campaign-data ,conversation ,ecommerce-site- ,jansen ,part-one ,recent ,search-funnel ,spzmu ,state ,visitor-and
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Written on October 25, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, searchengineguide
by Eric Brown
Forget all the ‘It’s About the Conversation” Social Media hype
and babble. If you are using Social Media for your Small Business, or
any business, or you are contemplating entering the Social Media space for your
business, It is About Selling More Stuff, period. There is NO other reason to do it.
The quote by Sergio Zyman sums it up nicely, just replace the word Marketing with Social Media.
“The sole purpose of marketing is to sell more to more
people, more often and at higher prices. There is no other reason to do
it.”
If you are contemplating utilizing Social Media for your business for
any other reason Than To Sell More Stuff, consider it is a Hobby, not a
viable Business Decision
It seems that many of the “purists” in the Social Media Space may well be slowly coming around to the reality that unless they are selling something, hunger sets in. We all need to buy shoes, so sooner or later a business must profit. Absent selling something there is no profit, absent profit, there is no business, only a hobby.
For us at Urbane Apartments, Social Media Marketing has worked very well. Our year over year numbers are impressive considering the economy and the fact that we operate in SE Michigan, plagued with the highest unemployment in the nation.
Year Over Year Numbers; Sept 2008 verses Sept 2009
Our Web Site Traffic to our three web sites, UrbaneApts.com, UrbaneLobby.com and UrbaneBlog.com increased 108%! Great news right, web traffic soars from the effective use of Social Media by 108%, but who really cares? Did We Rent More Apartments, because if we didn’t, the practice of Social Media Marketing is just a hobby.
Our phyisical traffic did increase, in that we did 54% more tours and showings, but the real metirc which is Renting Apartments increased by 69%!
How Did All That Happen
We are learning a lot about how to establish and maintain
Tags: a-business-must ,a-for-your ,apartments ,business ,community ,conversation ,marketing ,small ,social ,social media ,social-media-marketing ,traffic ,urbane ,urbane lab
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Written on September 17, 2009 by admin
Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo
Several weeks ago, I revisited the 16 rules for social media optimization. Switching things up, today I thought it would be useful to approach this slightly differently and look at how to optimize time spent in social media.
These tips aren’t necessarily just for brands or companies to follow, rather they may prove even more useful for digital marketing professionals themselves. In the spirit of optimizing your time reading this, I’m going to keep the tips brief and to the point.
1. Aggregate social content about your company, brand or even yourself into a real-time feed using one of the many tools available to do this. Bring the relevant mentions to you instead of always searching for them.
2. Unfollow those who don’t add value or aren’t important to your network. This tip isn’t for a brand or company seeking to make themselves accessible to the world at large, but for you as a marketer personally. How many times have you logged into Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed – even just after a few hours of being away – and felt totally lost in the conversation. Unless you’re going to devote your life to watching the stream, make sure that who you’re following is actually worth your time.
3. Unsubscribe to all RSS feeds that aren’t unmissable. RSS is the perfect, simple way to keep track of relevant feeds, but over time your reader can become bloated. We’ve all logged into reader and seen Google display the euphemistic “1,000+ unread items” before. This isn’t very fun – so be sure to keep your subscription signal-to-noise ratio positive.
4. Learn to skim. As marketers, there just isn’t time to read everything fully. Learn to skim past the noise and recognize when there are conversations and content worth your time to read carefully. On the flip side, make your own content scanable to entice readers to skim. Done properly, this should increase engagement and draw people in deeper.
5. Establish a set of trusted sites to read frequently. No matter what niche you’re interested in, you absolutely must identify the trusted, valuable sites in that area. Read their content carefully, as in many cases, those at the top are the conversation starters for those in the tail. In other words: Following the leaders can keep you at the forefront of the greater conversation.
6. Audit your time. Calculate how much time you spend daily in different areas of the social web. It adds up, and no one is immune to losing time. Carefully audit just where your time is going and realign efforts to the areas that make a different in achieving objectives.
7. Automate where it makes sense, but do so carefully. Setting up feeds to auto-tweet when you add new content to your blog or share something in Google Reader may make sense. But careful not to automate things like direct messages, something that may irk those on the receiving end.
8. Analyze how people react to the content you create or share. Look at what content archetypes your community reacts to, learn from them, adjust and sharpen as you go forward.
9. Realize there is no information overload. Learn to navigate the unstoppable river of real-time and become a chief signal officer.
10. Become a search ninja. Search really matters to be ultra-successful in social, and knowing all the specific Google operators can help you get to what you need for your marketing efforts fast (such as content creation that requires research).
11. Consolidate your network presence, AKA the Seth Godin strategy. You don’t see him on Twitter. You don’t see him on Facebook. You see him on his blog, and he’s trained us all to go there and subscribe to get content. A diversified presence is not necessarily a better play if your ideas are remarkable.
12. Learn the ebbs and flows of content in a niche and what networks, sites and users matter. Get an understanding of how your corner of the web works, and in time you’ll develop an understanding for how it functions at the macro level.
13. Develop an efficient routine for your time spent in the social web. This will allow you to know how much time each set of tasks and updates take and allow you to become more efficient each day. With that said, as marketers it is also important to understand that we all use the web differently. So if you’re going to do this for efficiency’s sake, continue to explore other tools, trends and options. You can be efficient with your core functions but still experiment.
14. Make your processes simple. No one is going to argue against copy/paste being the best social media tool. There’s a reason for that: It’s dead simple. Make your time spent on social media as a participant and contributor as simple as the idea of copy-pasting content.
15. Use only the essential tools. With a constant slew of new apps being developed, it’s easy for marketers to get shiny new object syndrome. And while you should be trying new things out, you should get to the point you’re only using the tools daily that are essential to your core purposes in the social web.
16. Don’t multitask. If you want to do things like develop killer blog content, you have to turn off Twitter, walk away from email and focus. Social media makes it all too easy to multitask, but the results of your efforts will be sub-par compared to those who focus.
17. Cross-pollinate content sharing. Do things like sharing StumbleUpon or Digg links in Twitter – encourage users from one network to share content in another. Get creative with how you do this and make it subtle or even invisible.
18. Embrace imperfection. Part of social media means, well, being social. And our social interactions are by their very nature imperfect. Some of the best blogs on the planet are hardly perfect, but that’s not what makes them compelling.
19. Eliminate busy work. Identify where the valuable, creative opportunities are that resonate with your key audiences. Now focus there – the rest may be busy work that can be trimmed.
20. Qualitity over quantity – more participation does not trump higher-quality participation. As the social web continues to grow, this will only become more important.
21. Limit distractions. No one is going to deny that social media itself can be a distraction if you aren’t careful with your time. But limiting distractions by following the other tips listed and staying focused can make all the difference at optimizing time spent in the social web.
This is certainly a shortlist, so I’ll turn it over to the readers: What’s your best tip for optimizing time spent in social media?
Tags: a-constant-slew ,conversation ,google ,marketing ,network ,seo ,social media ,social media tips ,tips ,twitter ,words
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