Written on March 10, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step.
If you’re going through hell, keep going.
It’s always the darkest before the dawn.
Whatever the cliché being thrown around in Redmond, it must be working, because Bing’s US search share continues to nudge ever upwards.
According to comScore’s data, Bing climbed from 11.3% to 11.5%, likely stealing that share from the “we’ve given up on search” Yahoo, which dropped from 17% to 16.8%.
The only kink in Microsoft’s plan to catch Google? Google’s share increased too–up from 65.4% to 65.5%.
Original post:
Bing Takes Baby Steps Towards Catching Google
Tags: before-the-dawn ,begins-with ,being-thrown ,chinese ,darkest-before ,dawn ,google ,keep-going- ,marketing ,research ,thing-unrelated ,yahoo
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Written on March 9, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
According to a new study being published this week by Unica, European marketers trail their American cousins, when it comes to the adoption of social media marketing.
While, 58% of marketers in North America are already engaged in social media marketing, only 34% of Europeans can say the same.
That’s likely to change in the next 12 months:
Some quick math suggests that this time next year, 76% of American marketers will be knee deep in social media marketing, with an impressive game of “catch-up” played by European counterparts–hitting 64% adoption.
So what’s keeping Europe from making this a photo-finish? Well, the biggest set-back is the 20% of European marketers that don’t want anything to do with social media. Not, “we’re more than 12 months out” or “we not sure yet” but flat out “we have no plans for social media marketing.”
I’d love to know what industries those marketers represent because I’d go and steal their lunch money! 
Here is the original:
Watch Out America! Here Come the European Social Media Marketers!
Tags: bank-or-payment ,being-published ,biggest ,lunch ,marketers-trail ,marketers-will ,marketing ,merchants ,msn ,research ,returns-telling ,should-already ,social
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Written on February 23, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: 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.
Research Takes Time
The process of researching your keywords isn’t something that should be rushed. Each phase of the research process needs to be performed deliberately, ensuring that you take the time to find all relevant terms and discard the irrelevant. Any attempts to rush through the keyword research process will likely lead you down the wrong paths at best and at worst cause you to have to rethink your entire keyword targeting strategy.
Unfortunately the research process isn’t always linear. You can often be working on several phases of the research process at a time depending on what your focus is on at a given moment. There is a lot of overlap and moving backward and forward through the processes but care needs to be taken that you don’t skip over or leave any of the phases out.
Brainstorming Keywords
You can start the keyword research process anywhere, but I like to start with a clean slate. What keywords do you start the research process with? Do some brainstorming.
Brainstorming allows you to get a list of keywords from an unbiased perspective. The brainstorming process doesn’t mean just sitting around and thinking up phrases, though can be a part of it. Good brainstorming starts with asking questions that can then lead to answers. More times than not, those answers will also be your keywords.
First, think of what questions are relevant for you. Don’t try to answer them, you have time for that later, but compile your list of quetions that will help you find the keywords you are looking for.
Once you have a good list of questions do whatever research is needed to find the answers. Those answers give you a base of keywords you can then take to the online research tools to look for related phrases. These related phrases produce a wide-range of variations in how your topic is searched. Some relevant, others not so much.
Find Core Terms First
Undoubtedly in the brainstorming and research process you’ll amass a list of hundreds of phrases. You want to keep the process as simplified as possible so we’ll start by eliminating everything that is not a core term.
A core term is a keyword phrase boiled down to the essentials. It’s specific enough to produce a relevant result but broad enough to cover a wide range of much more targeted phrases. Generally a good core term is two, maybe three words. On rare occasions a core term can be a single word, but only when there is no room for alternate interpretations.
Only use qualifiers on a core term when it is necessary to ensure that the searcher will be led to a relevant page. For example the word “bag” could mean anything from a garbage bag to a sleeping bag to a travel bag. This is a core term that needs a qualifier in order to be relevant to the searcher. If it’s not relevant it’s not a core term.
Each page of your website should have a single core term associated with it. You may find several pages on your site that are a good fit for a single term. That’s fine during this research process but later you’ll want to make sure you select only the most appropriate page for any single core term. The others will have to find their own core terms.
Don’t stop your core term research until you are certain there are no more possible variations that produce measurable traffic. Using the keyword suggestion tools available in most keyword research programs, find all relevant variations on each of your core terms. For example a “travel bag” can also be a “back pack”, “luggage” (a rare case of a one-word core term) and a “duffel bag.” Each of these can be searched to find even more possible core term variants.
In almost every industry I have worked with I have been able to find different ways searchers think of the same product that the site owner hadn’t. Sometimes these variations don’t get searched much while other times they are more popular than the terms that the site owner said were the most important. Knowing these options in advance can make a dramatic difference in the direction you go with your optimization campaign.
Core Term Site Mapping
After you have put together an exhaustive list of core terms and before you start performing deeper research into finding specific phrases, you want to map out where your core terms will be integrated into your site. For some industries it’s as easy as looking at the content and assigning core terms to pages. For others, where there are a lot of core term variations that mean the exact same thing, it can be more difficult.
Assigning core terms to pages must be done very carefully. You need to ensure that the content of each page is either a 100% natural fit or the content can easily be adapted to fit that core term. A good example is “cost segregation” versus “cost segmentation”. Both essentially mean the same thing but both are frequently searched (though one more than the other.) The content of a page about “cost segregation” can easily be adapted for “cost segmentation” without altering the meaning or focus of the page.
If you can’t make a keyword fit without significantly altering the message of a page, then you find another core term, or another page for the core term.
I recommend prioritizing your core terms before assigning pages to them. Figure out which terms get more search volume, are most relevant, bring in targeted audience and which produce the best sales. These are all important factors of determining which core terms are more important than others.
By prioritizing your core terms you can research and optimize those that are most important first before moving on to lower priority terms. The optimization of your high priority terms can take some time so leaving the secondary terms for later is good optimization strategy.
Before you move into the next phase of the keyword research process you have enough information to start optimizing your website. With the core terms and the map of where each core term will be implemented, you can begin to perform a very broad and quick optimization of the website. Going a page at a time, optimize title tags, meta description tags, headings and even a bit of content.
I wouldn’t spend a lot of time on each page as you can go do a more indepth optimization later, once you have more keywords to work with.
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
Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Part 10: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Qualifiers
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
View original post here:
SEO 101 - Part 9: Everything You Need To Know About Keyword Core Terms
Tags: architecture ,conductor ,effectiveness ,facebook ,keywords ,mapping ,research ,research-takes ,search-engine ,seo ,site
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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.
View original here:
SEO 101 - Part 8: Everything You Need to Know About Keywords
Written on February 10, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
I know I did an upcoming events roundup last week but the upcoming Online Marketing Summit in San Diego is certainly worth a post of it’s own. Besides, I get to announce that one of our clients from Zoomerang (MarketTools), won a free conference pass! Congratulations to Amy Lindahl!
Last year OMS came through Minneapolis and I had an opportunity to present on building a case for social media through a Social Media Roadmap. Feedback comments like “lived up to the hype”, which is a compliment not too dis-similiar from, “it didn’t suck”, renewed my appreciation for Minnesota Nice. 
But I digress. Back to the upcoming OMS in California. The annual OMS conference is, to my great pleasure and happiness, in sunny San Diego. I’ve had a chance to connect with the event organizer, Aaron Kahlow several times and appreciate the invite to present at OMS a great deal. One of my goals for 2010 is to vary the conferences that I speak at to reach different audiences.
OMS is held in conjuction with ClickZ Feb 22-24 at the Paradise Point Resort and Spa with a day of pre-conference training and a Search Engine Strategies day on Feb 25th. I will arrive in the morning on the 23rd and will unfortunately, miss the morning sessions. But I do plan on attending “Social Media Inside The Brand: DuPont Case Study” which promises to cover the legal aspects of Social Media, how to develop a proper Social Media Marketing policy, and how to sell a “word of mouth” project internally. Sage advice for client side marketers.
There are some big names in search that will be presenting at OMS such as John Battelle, Tim Ash and Marshall Simmonds as well as marketers from brands including: Planet Holloywood, IBM, REO, New York Times, Jack in the Box, Eastman Kodak and Ogilvy 360.
Later in the afternoon (3:40 pm) on the 23rd I will be on a Social Media Forum which is part of a new “Leaders” track with a total of 5 savvy social media marketers on the panel. (Chris Baggott, Lee Odden, Michael Senger, Caitlin McCabe, Ben Hanna)
Luckily, we have Jason Baer as moderator who has taken the “Twitter approach” to Q and A in light of the inevitable time constraint. Jason will be asking questions and we are to provide answers in 140 characters or less. Topics to be covered include:
- What’s the best way to integrate social media with other marketing efforts like email, direct mail, etc?
- How can you measure the effectiveness of social media efforts?
- What’s the #1 myth preventing companies from embracing social media?
- What are the main differences between B2B and B2C social media programs?
It should be a great panel!
Day two OMS includes a great mix of sessions. I’m looking forward to:
- Social Media in the Enterprise
- Wharton Dispels Myths of Social, Viral and Online Marketing through Cold Hard Research
- Social Media Measurement Best Practices
- Integrated Marketing Forum
- Lunch Keynote: “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election”
- Acquiring New Customers with Email and Social Media
- Demand Generation Secret Sauce (Jon Miller from Marketo, our client)
- Using Social Media for eCommerce
On Feb 25th, Search Engine Strategies Day, SES has programmed a series with Search Engine Strategies conference speakers covering the gamut of SEO, PPC, Local, Social, Analytics and of course, PR/Social/Search.
I will be on the “PR, Social Media and Search” panel at 3:15 to discuss the intersection and future of these complimentary channels. If you know my agency TopRank Online Marketing and the content we publish here at Online Marketing Blog, you know the subject matter of this session is a perfect fit. Panelists include: David “dk” Klein, Dana Todd, Rand Fishkin, myself and moderator duties will be handled by Sally Falkow.
I know there are a lot of people attending OMS and there might even be some tickets left if you’re not. I’m really looking forward to it (and not just because I get to escape the snow for four days at a resort in San Diego). If you’re attending OMS later this month, please say hello. I’d like to get feedback from other attendees on this conference for our blog coverage.
If you’ve been to an OMS event, what was your favorite thing about it?
Written on February 4, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo
According to a new study by Econsultancy and ExactTarget, marketers face a conundrum when it comes to increasing their online marketing budgets in 2010.
They want to do it, but 40% of those surveyed simply don’t have the budget to spend more on marketing this year.
What to do; what to do?
I know, let us reduce our spending on print ads (41%), radio (36%), and TV (31%):
And channel those funds into Facebook and Twitter (70%), blogging (64%), and SEO (64%):
Let’s hope these companies–and their agencies–can quickly figure out their ROI from social networking. Right now, only 17% of marketers say they have a good understanding of how sites such as Facebook and Twitter convert–compared to paid search ads (54%). Though those numbers stack up well against their current ROI measurement of print and radio, so maybe there’s hope.
More here:
70% of Companies Plan to Spend More on Twitter & Facebook Marketing
Tags: book ,budget ,current ,first ,google ,img-height ,last ,marketers-face ,research ,rumors ,seo ,twitter ,well-against
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Written on February 2, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing
We’ve seen the trend for a long time: social networks are sending more and more downstream traffic to retail sites. Hitwise has the numbers from December—and the downstream traffic from social networks is up 37%.
The change doesn’t look super significant, I know, but it’s the biggest percentage increase for any category. Fewer people are starting at retailers’ sites or through permission email, so search engines and social media are more important than ever.
So is it more because users are recommending deals to their friends, or is it because of retailers’ presence on social networks? Likely both. Hitwise found that many users were actively seeking info on popular retailers.
As an example, we ran a custom analysis of internal searches on Facebook to look for retail brands during the holiday season. . . . During the holidays over 2% of the traffic to Facebook (the 2nd ranked website in the US) visited a website in the Retail 500 immediately after. Retailers like Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and Bath & Body Works (and others) all appeared within the internal searches taking place on Facebook signifying that consumers were actively seeking their content and offerings.
The first week of December, that rate topped 3%. With 175M daily visitors, even 3% is nothing to sneeze at.
What do you think? Is this proof that even big brands should be on social media? Or should they focus their efforts elsewhere?
See the rest here:
Social Network Traffic to Retail Grows
Written on January 28, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
Here’s are some metrics that should concern those inside of Twitter:
- The number of new users per month is down 20% since its peak in July 2009.
- The average Twitter user has just 27 followers, down from a peak of 42
- 80% of Twitter users have tweeted fewer than 10 times
- The percent of active Twitter users is down to just 17%
The data comes from RJMetrics, which analyzed 2 million tweets from about 50,000 users. You could argue that no data is accurate, unless it comes from Twitter itself, but isn’t it interesting that we never see any of these numbers come from Twitter? You’d think that if the real numbers were more encouraging, Twitter would issue a “State of the Twittersphere”–similar to Technorati’s state of the blogosphere report.
If these numbers are accurate, it shesd some light on why Twitter has chosen to find revenue from Google and Bing, before monetizing its user base. The user base is simply not active enough to generate any significant revenue!
(via)
Read more here:
Study: Only 17% of Twitter Users Are Active; New User Accounts Down 20%
Written on January 27, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: marketing
We already know that 84% of marketers plan to shift some of their direct marketing budgets to social media. Now, a new report from the Society of Digital Agencies suggests that 50% of marketers will shift budgets from traditional to online media.
Not only that, but the highest priority for this newly allocated budget is social networks:
Now, before all of your social media experts pee your pants with excitement, consider this. While social networking is the top priority, that doesn’t mean that companies expert to spend boatloads on it. In fact, according to this chart, social networking is #4 on the pecking order:
You’ll notice that the amount to be spent on “viral campaigns” is one of the lowest numbers. I don’t think it means that companies don’t want their campaigns to “go viral,” I think it suggests a new level of maturity in thinking. As one respondent put it:
“Rather than spending another misguided year trying to “engineer” viral campaigns that will propagate themselves, regardless of consumer intentions, it’s time to refocus our marketing efforts to align with the way that people actually behave.” – Ivan Askwith, Big Spaceship
Aw look, we’re growing up! 
Here is the original post:
50% of Marketers Shifting Funds From Traditional to Online; Social “Top Priority”
Tags: a-experts-pee ,digital ,marketers-plan ,marketers-will ,misguided ,research ,shift-budgets ,social-networking ,social-networks ,think-it-means ,with-the-way
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Written on January 25, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, Object, book, marketing, seo
Recently I posted a series of informal poll questions about blog SEO on Twitter to gain insights and feedback which were leveraged to construct a more in-depth survey. I used the longer survey to collect information on how companies are using blogs for search engine optimization purposes and what kind of impact those efforts have. Essentially, I wanted to get opinions on and answers to: “Are blogs still important for SEO and why?”.
The topic of business blogging and search engine optimization as distinct and synergistic tactics have been explored here many times. A large number of companies are familiar with the process of starting a blog, but few have experienced the challenges of maintaining and growing a blog for more than a year. Understanding long term benefits are key to sustainable business blogs.
Part of the goal was to tap into a variety of experience levels with this survey and capture insight into the SEO impact of a business blog.
Here’s a simple breakdown of the 326 survey respondents:
- 28% Internal Corporate: Advertising, Marketing or PR
- 42% Agency: Advertising, PR, Search Marketing, Social Media, Marketing
- 30% Independent Consultant or Small Biz CEO
One of the biggest questions we were looking to get insight on was the degree to which marketers are using blogs as a SEO asset.
95% of survey respondents indicated that they do incorporate blogs as part of their search engine optimization efforts
While the majority of respondents indicated SEO as a benefit to blogging, several comments indicated that there are resource issues: ”We did but resources became an issue. Will be bringing it back in 2010.” And that the applicable use of blogging for SEO outcomes depends on the market: ”Sometimes… depends on client and market and product/service”.
Blogs at the most basic level are straightforward or “easy” to start. But the real question is whether they deliver on the SEO promise so many blog marketers make. Our survey results show that 87.4% of respondents “successfully increased measurable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging“. Savvy SEO practioners made comments like, “Absolutely. In fact, we make sure to create a small, quality cluster of blogs on different platforms and Class C IP’s to support their communications initiatives.”
Of the 12.6% that didn’t find measurable SEO results from blogging, comments like “starting to but since we don’t post comments from readers on our blog I think we stall any momentum that we are generating from our posts” and “Site owners are not able to follow through on keeping up with their blog.” provided insight as to possible reasons why.
How important are blogs as part of a SEO strategy? The majority of respondents (90%) cited blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic. The remaining 10% rated blogs as somewhat important or irrelevant.
Many company marketers, public relations and communications professionals are not aware of what the SEO benefits of blogging are. We asked, “What SEO functions do blog(s) serve for you?”. While the responses were fairly evenly distributed, the most popular SEO benefit was that blogs provide an easy way to create new, optimized content. Content is the cornerstone for any search engine optimization or social media marketing effort, so it makes sense that content creation was so popular.
Overall, links were the most often cited SEO benefit from blogging: Attracting inbound links from other web sites or cross-linking from blog posts to corporate site content. Community building for content/links promotion and Increase crawl rate/frequency were also indicated as important SEO benefits from blogging. Additional social and SEO benefits from blogging mentioned include:
- Social Media word of mouth
- Show a human side to a business and another side to the more “static” web site
- Communicate back with customers
- Can surprisingly create evergreen #1 search rankings for odd phrases we might not have necessarily thought about in planning.
- We’ll serve ads through a network that allows blogs to publish our ads
- Traffic from twitter and the increased exposure that goes with that
- Establish authority in the marketplace
- Promoting products, services, sales, expertise … I come at it from the UX side – credibility, authenticity
- Blog is ideal for long tail search terms
- More long tail ranking
- Blogs dovetail well with social media efforts like twitter
- Focused silos around specific markets and functions key to the client.
With any new marketing effort, setting expectations for time to see results is crucial for allocating resources and budgeting. We asked, “In what time frame do you typically start to see an increase in measurable SEO performance indicators (links, ranking, traffic) as a result of blogging?” The most common answer was somewhat shorter than expected, 0-3 months. 54% of respondents start to see SEO benefits from blogging very quickly. This short time frame should be very encouraging to those hoping to use blog published content to gain better search engine visibility.
Since many of our respondents were professional search marketers with the ability to properly optimize a blog and promote content to attract links, time frames for results would be very different than someone who does not know how to implement blog SEO tactics.
94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months
Measuring impact is important and certainly, the definitions of success from blogging will vary according to the purpose of the blog. We asked, “What are the most important measures of success when using blogs as part of a SEO effort?”. The responses to this question were fairly evenly divided with increasing company site traffic at the top closely followed by a desire to increase company leads/sales. Other important metrics included inbound links, referrals or leads directly from the blog, web site rankings and blog traffic.
Additional success measures from blogging included many benefits besides search engine optimization, which is very important in our opinion. Starting a blog purely for SEO reasons will make content sustainability difficult in the long run. A blogging strategy must meet meet other goals as well, especially those that involve engaging customers or interactions with readers. Other success measures from blogging include:
- Increase overall online exposure. They won’t know about you if you don’t say anything, participate
- Contribute to company’s bottom line goals in at least a semi-direct way
- Branding and owning SERPS
- Increase quality of site traffic
- Improve visibility and prominence in search engine results is by far the most important, it’s all about search
- Branding
- Incease visibility and demonstrate the company is “up to date”
- Increase of Peoples (incl. existing customers) awareness of things and what you (the business) does and can do for them. It is not really quantifyable, but noticable and very important. It impacts all other figures mentioned, but indirectly.
- Increase positive blog mentions
- Increase Transparency which in turn builds loyalty.
- Puts a face on company; great customer service signal; illustrates USP over competitors
- Depends totally on strategic objectives – for some it’s leads/sales, for others it’s thought leadership
- Increase overall community interaction
- All – It depends on the objectives of the campaigns – be it traffic, sales, awareness, etc.
- The only real measure of success is conversions linked to organization goals (sales or whatever)
- Increased engagement on the blog or elsewhere
- All of these are important measures, but sales has to be number one.
- I don’t believe that blogs take the place of traditional marketing/sales tactics… they just make them easier and more credible
- Increase colloquial “voice” of the CEO/CMO/CTO/Social Marketing specialist. Finding and amplifying the voice of the company/founder/visionary.
Getting a blog implemented in a company is not always an easy task. Resources can be slim as well as expertise and confidence in the ability to achieve a return on effort within a given period of time. We asked, “What have been the most common objections from internal or external clients to implement blogs (with or without SEO benefit)?” This question received the most comments of all in the survey.
67.2% cited resource issues as the most common objection to implementing a blog
Other reasons cited included issues with content sourcing (42%) or simply not seeing the benefit (35%). Regulated industry or legal issues got in the way for 19.3% and lack of measurement round up the answers with 12.9%. Many of the comments about obstacles to blogging centered around time, resources, measurement and a lack of awareness.
On the surface, implementing a blog is straightforward, once you gain approval. The trick is sustainability and reaching measurable goals. Staying on top of what strategies and tactics are successful blogging also takes time and therefore it’s important what resources marketers depend on. We asked, “How do you stay current with blog SEO best practices?”. The overwhelming most popular answer was Other SEO blogs. The good news about that answer is that we publish a list of over 500 SEO and Internet Marketing related blogs on the TopRank BIGLIST.
Other popular resources for staying current with blogging and SEO include: Social Networks & Groups, Conferences, Observations from Testing, Newsletters, Forums and books. Interestingly, Paid Subscription Communities ranked lowest which is a niche community.
92% of respondents feel blogging will continue to be an important content optimization and marketing tactic for the next 3+ years
Interestingly, 8.3% feel blogging will only be important for the rest of 2010.
What is your opinion on the longevity of blogging as an online communications and marketing tool? Do you think the death of blogs is imminent in 2010? What blogging benefits have you experienced and how have you overcome objections to implementing a blog in your company?
We hope this survey and results have been helpful to you and plan on conducting many other surveys in 2010 to provide additional insights into digital marketing and PR topics. Clearly, there is interest and a need for companies to better understand the strategic and practical applications of business blogging. Specifically, there is benefit in understanding how search and social channels can be combined with core blog content publishing to reach business goals. We hope to continue providing such insight here at Online Marketing Blog as well as the conferences and corporate training events we’re engaged to speak at.
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