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The 12-Step Landing Page Rehab Program [Infographic]

Written on July 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo

Posted by Oli Gardner

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

As with that other program, the first and most critical step is admitting you actually have a problem. So go ahead. Shout it out loud so your coworkers can hear:

Social Media: The Need For Measurement

Written on October 23, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo

Following on from my our “Social Media Guruism: Mostly Harmless” yesterday, we received the following comment:

On the surface, this seems like a great article…until you realize that it’s really just like most tweets–a total waste of time. If you wanted to really provide something valuable, you’d show me how you directly measure your social marketing campaign…Oh wait, you can’t. Why? First, cause you’ve probably never run one and you’re just regurgitating what other people have told you. And second, because ROI really doesn’t translate for most Internet campaigns. There’s just no way to directly measure it because there are so many random variables. And I challenge anyone to prove that it can be

Thanks for the response, Fearless Advisor!

Really, social media marketing is no different to other forms of marketing in that it must eventually demonstrate value and be accountable.

The “Why” Question

One of the points I made in the previous article was that a lot of people seem to confuse the medium with the message. They are using a communication channel - in this case Twitter & Facebook - without first deciding why they are doing it.

Sometimes, the answer might be no more complicated than “because it’s new”, “because it sounded good” or “because everyone else is doing it”. However, if a marketing campaign is to be successful, and repeated, it must be measured. How would you know if it was a success, or be worth repeating otherwise?

The fist step should be to ask “why”? The same question applies to any marketing campaign, be it search marketing, radio, television, or anything else. Why does this website exist? Why am I doing this and what result am I trying to achieve?

Is it to boost traffic? Is it to make more money? Is it to cut costs in other marketing activities by replacing one with another? Is it to grow the RSS subscriber base? Get more links? Grow the mail list? A combination of all these things? And how do these relate back to the purpose of the site?

Without that knowledge, the exercise is one of faith.

Demonstrate Value

The top social media marketers, just like the top search marketers, can create enormous value. And they can show it.

If clients aren’t demanding it now, they soon will. Back when I was doing search marketing for clients, I was in a sales meeting with a large mobile telecommunications company. I was doing my best to sell them on the benefits of search marketing and from the nods I was getting, I thought I was doing ok. At the end of the meeting, they said I was the first search guy who had talked to them in terms they could relate to - i.e. I was talking marketing, as opposed to hype and technology.

Social media marketing is going through the same growing- up phase that search marketing did. As search marketing clients got more savvy and gained experience with the new channel, they started to demand more traditional metrics - meaningful metrics related to the underlying business objectives - that could be analysed alongside their other marketing campaigns.

Measurement Ideas

Measurement depends on the aims of the campaign.

Here are a some common measurements used in marketing campaigns, and apply equally to social media as they do other marketing channels. Not all these measurements are appropriate, or achievable, but should serve as a starting point when considering measurement.

1. Increased Revenue

This measurement is straightforward. What was the level of business the client was doing before the social media campaign, and what is the level they are doing afterwards? Has it dropped, stayed the same, or risen?

2. Competitive Advantage

Has the client gained competitive advantage?

Do a before/after comparison against competitors. Is the client doing better in Compete/Alexa/etc than their competitors after they ran the social media campaign?

Have the competitors run social media campaigns? Can you do a similar before/after comparison on their success, or lack thereof?

3. Increased Visitor Numbers

Are there more visitors now than there were before the campaign started? Break the visitors down by channel using referral data. Who are they? Where are they from? Are they the right demographic?

4. Reach/Spreading The Word

Perhaps the most difficult aspect to measure. Research companies, like Neilsen, use Buzz Metrics and Blog Pulse to measure how many people are talking about a brand or company.

Similarly, Google Trends can be used to pinpoint spikes in attention across the net. Is your message/brand mentioned more often after the campaign? Are there more mentions across blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mainstream media?

5. Search Activity

Do more people search on a clients brand after the social media campaign? Do they use queries relating to the clients message, products or services?

6. Primary Market Research

Big companies tend to do this more so than smaller companies. Run field studies, focus groups, and interviews to determine the level of brand awareness.

7. Links

Has the client received more links? This is one of the huge value propositions of social media, especially when combined with SEO. Social media can be such a powerful link building method, second to none.

Yeah, But How?

Perhaps the social media gurus can tell us?

These are the types of metrics clients will demand. If I were buying social media marketing services - and might well be in the near future - these are the metrics I’d demand. No one, except the clueless, will be impressed by follower numbers.

There is no one tool that can measure and track all this data. Hey, perhaps there is a market opportunity for someone! But while we’re waiting for such a tool to emerge, measurement is a multi-disciplinary approach, combining both tools and techniques.

Consider analytics, behavior tracking, dedicated tracking codes for links, coupon codes that can only be seen on Facebook or Twitter, unique phone numbers used to track just that one campaign, customer surveys after they have bought something.

I’m sure social media professionals have got a wealth of techniques and tools they use. It would be great if you could share your knowledge with the community in the comments

Why A Social Media Marketer Should Do This

The end result is that clients will spend more, on an ongoing basis, if they can see demonstrable value.

A company may do a one-off campaign for fun, as an experiment, or because they think it is trendy to do so, but they’ll soon move on to the “next big thing” unless social media can demonstrate how it helps them achieve their marketing goals.

Some of the above is easy, some is difficult. It depends on the client and their goals. There will always be intangible rewards when it comes to brand building and raising awareness, but you can’t know if you’re winning the game if you don’t keep score.

I know some social media marketers already do this. Like the top search marketers, they will be the only ones left standing, and prospering once the hype dies off.

And it will.

View original here:
Social Media: The Need For Measurement

Google & Bing Annouce Real Time Search Deals With Twitter

Written on October 21, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: book, seo

Marissa Mayer announces that Google has reached an agreement with Twitter to include Twitter updates in Google’s search results.

We look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information.

Hmmm…”product”? Obviously something a bit smarter that simply providing raw indexing and display.

This move follows Bing’s recent announcement - today, in fact - they would do likewise.

We’re glad you asked that. Because today at Web 2.0 we announced that working with those clever birds over at Twitter, we now have access to the entire public Twitter feed and have a beta of Bing Twitter search for you to play with (in the US, for now). Try it out. The Bing and Twitter teams want to know what you think.

Microsoft has pulled off a similar deal with Facebook, which has six times as many users as Twitter.

With two competing deep pocketed players signing up, how long can Twitter remain unsold? Will Google build a competing version of Twitter? Much easier to crunch link data and index in real time if you can backend updates with your own systems, rather than making sense of third-party date, like Twitter, which is probably a nightmare. Some cosy integration arrangement is probably part of the deal, of course.

Read-Write-Web made the valid point that Google grew when they signed a similar deal with Yahoo. Now Twitter is doing likewise, serving their stuff to Google’s massive audience. However, given Twitters notorious fail-whale flakiness, it remains to be seen if their system is ready for the roar of traffic that will soon come their way.

What Does This Mean For SEOs?

Go where the search engines do. Link to your content from Twitter. Publish excerpts and link-backs. Monitor real-time search trends, using Google’s Hot Trends and trend data tools, such as TweetStats. Supply content to match demand.

It will be interesting to see if real-time search, on a Google scale, produces new business models. The traffic bursts should ample reward for being seen first for popular real time queries.

The news business relies on immediacy, and they just got a whole new wave of unpaid competition.

Read the original here:
Google & Bing Annouce Real Time Search Deals With Twitter

SEO Copywriting On The Road: Strange Scenes Inside The Wizard Academy

Written on August 26, 2009 by admin

Filed Under: Object, book, marketing, seo

“Easy reading is damn hard writing,” opened chancellor Roy Williams at last week’s Wizard of Ads training seminar, ’12 Languages of The Mind.’

Never is this quote from Nigel Hawthorne (not Nathaniel Hawthorne, as it’s commonly credited to, per Williams) more apt than when you are a writer of any trade struggling to find that opening hook.

(To serve a personal example, the percentage of time I spent drafting this opening paragraph will exceed the percentage of time spent on any one remaining section of this entire post.)

SEO copywriting serves perhaps the greatest challenge when finding that hook as we copywriters are encouraged to begin our posts with keywords as far up and to the left as possible in our titles.  (This post may be a bad example as a blog that begins with ‘SEO Copywriting’ carry the promise of inherent fascination within.)

Williams’ seminar, as many who have attended Wizard Academy in the past can attest, proves extremely difficult to distill into a bite-sized blog post, making a starting point even more difficult to craft (…and so I chose a mildly profane quote, which seemed as a good a hatrack as any.)

This was no simply ad or copywriting seminar, as anyone who has attended training at Wizard Academy can attest.  We learned more than just how it is that we as writers write.  Rather, our discussions (sometimes linear, more frequently not) focused on how the entirety of the human race thinks, reasons, believes and dreams.  In almost no instance, will our thought process be as flat as the paper or monitor where are words are broadcast.

So how can we overcome the inherent flatness of our mediums to give our words deeper meaning?  One way is to understand how to effectively use ‘portals.’  For the philosophical thinker, dreamer or writer – think of a portal as a doorway to another world, where the deeper meaning and additional knowledge you are about to receive is only partially visible until you cross its threshold.  For the SEO copywriter, think hyperlinks.

(If you’ve just returned from the portal I’ve provided you, you return with a knowledge and insight you would have never otherwise had, including:

• Walt Disney, like Roy Williams truly understood the additional languages needed by man, as evidenced by his quote, “Of all our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.”
• Images can help you both better tell a story, and via hyperlinks, drive traffic back to your website.
• TopRank Senior Account Manager Jolina Pettice dresses up her dog each Halloween. )

Ideas that circulated through the room during those two days touched on art, music, mathematics, physics, metaphysics, thought particles, mirror neurons, Elton John, the Wizard of Oz and The Matrix – in seemingly equal parts.

As a writer whose primary objective with this post is to provide actionable tips, distilled from two days of deeply profound thought, my dual fears are providing too much and too little.

As such, below find the top three tips that will stay with me as an SEO copywriter.  To further encourage you to attend a training at Wizard Academy, I must reiterate that the three actionable tips that will help me professionally pale in comparison to the new ways of thinking that will undoubtedly help me personally (after my travel grogginess wears off, that is.)

• Know Where To Begin – Have the confidence to create a killer opening, whether it’s the headline of a website, title of a blog post or subject line to an email campaign.An exercise conducted during the session focused on ‘chaotic ad writing’ where chancellor Williams took creative opening ad lines from 5 attendees (chosen at random) and matched them to the businesses of 5 other attendees (also chosen at random.)My opening line, ‘You’ll Never Believe What The Tornado Blew Into My Bed’ (inspired no doubt by the raging tornado that was devastating my neighborhood as I sat one-thousand miles away) was synched with a business consulting firm.  Perfectly.Try this in your own writing.  Open yourself up to the promise of complete creativity and do not be afraid to insert details personal to you.  Do this right and you will open up your own doors of perception while simultaneously opening portals into the minds of your clients and prospects.  It is these same portals that have likely been closed for some time, lest they risk ingesting awful ads or web copy, that are just dying to be reopened for something compelling.

  (Specific rules for the SEO Copywriter: You will need a keyword for this exercise.  And if you are writing a website, your opening lines should not be so out there that you cannot sustain a theme.  And you should not – I repeat – should not – conclude this exercise with copy for your client that matches how you speak, versus how they speak.)

• Know What To Leave Out – Humans are a great deal smarter than they are given credit for, unless they work at the airport.  Humans are also a great deal less patient than they are given credit for, like me at the airport.What this means to an SEO copywriter, or truly any writer, is that we can leave out details – provided we offer a reason for the reader to make their own connections.  If you write compelling website copy for an ice cream manufacturer with a one of a kind turbo-powered churner, you don’t have to talk about how the churner works.  Your audience probably knows how a churner works, and if they don’t they probably don’t care.  They want to why it makes your client’s ice cream taste better than any other kind.  This is what will sell.The same rule applies to any type of creative writing.  It doesn’t matter who the lizard king is, what matters is that you are sucked into his story so you take the time to envision who he is.  ‘Ice cream’ and ‘lizard king’ are just flat words until you let the reader give them meaning by filling in the details.

• Know When To End – Tie everything back together and close the loop you’ve created in your reader or customer’s mind.Clever nerds, or readers clever enough to follow my portal, will have picked up on the loop I began in the title of this post and connected to several times throughout.Esoteric?  Maybe.  But I’m targeting those who are interested in marketing and copywriting who were, like me, nerdy in high school.If you can close the loops you create by connecting the last mental image you present to first mental image you create, you will break through and secure permanent mindshare in your reader or customer’s brain, and be a far better writer than nearly anyone who stands before you.