SEO | Internet Marketing | Marketing Strategy

Measuring What Matters for SEO

When measuring natural search performance, use the key performance indicators that matter to the bottom line. While each piece of data has its place in managing SEO, only visits and revenue truly identify how your natural search program is performing.

There is no shortage of data in search engine optimization: rankings, keyword data, indexation, error codes, and more. However, you can’t take rankings home and put them in the bank. Your corner grocer doesn’t take error code data as a payment method.

The King of KPIs

Ultimately, natural search revenue is the most important measurement — the king of SEO KPIs.

SEO’s role in the marketing mix is to pour visitors into the top of the funnel so that the site can convert them to customers. Ideally, those shoppers are far enough along in their own purchase decision to pull out their wallets and make a purchase. Ideally, the SEO program has optimized the right pages for search queries with purchase intent, in the right way, to lure the right prospects in to purchase.

And ideally the site experience is structured so that those shoppers are willing to purchase. But the site’s business, design, and technology also play a critical role in converting those visits to sales. Everything from the color of the checkout button to how quickly the pages load to pricing decisions to whether there are three or five steps in the checkout will impact conversion rates.

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SEO | SEO Tips - Search Engine Marketing

SEO Tutorial: 12 Immutable Laws For Dominating Google's Search

What happens in an internet minute? One year ago. The answer would have been 2.4 million searches on Google performed per minute. Yes. Per minute. This year, 3.5 million per minute. Considering that there are 1,440 minutes in any given day, the sheer vastness of that number, along with the endless petabytes of data it represents, should shock and awe even the most scarcity-minded individual.

There is real abundance in the bits and bytes that are floating about in cyberspace. It's an obfuscated layer that can't been seen with the naked eye, but only conveyed by the powerful machines that are humming across the planet. However, this is only a sliver of what's to come. The internet's exponential rise and its digital tentacles have reached even the most remote destinations. 

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Influencer Marketing | B2B Marketing, Strategy

The Importance Of Influencer Marketing For B2B Marketers

Most B2B marketers would agree: Lack of a content marketing plan could be suicidal for any product or service. The surprise is that there are not that many marketers who actively cultivate a strong influencer relationship strategy to make the most of good content beyond their client’s personal channels.

A few weeks ago I wrote 5 Steps For Getting Started With Influencer Marketing. Now I want to talk about a recent marketing study which revealed among other things, possessing a good influencer relationship plan is the goal for at least 84% of all professional marketers this year.

So just what exactly is an influencer relationship strategy?

To put it simply, the influencer relationship is concerned primarily with growing and guiding the relationship with personalities who are perceived as having an impact, an influence, with a business’ purchasing client base. Such recognized influencers include members of the blogging community, industrial analysts, prominent consultants, even trade association leaders — the total list, of course, is next to endless.

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Content Marketing | Strategy, Ideas - September 2017

5 Content Marketing Ideas for September 2017

What do bacon, spaceships, naval vessels, pop culture, and Christmas all have in common? They are all topics you can use to fuel your content marketing in September 2017.

Content marketing is the act of creating, publishing, and distributing content with the specific goal of attracting, engaging, and retaining customers.

The concept is simple. Your business builds an audience and that audience is a lot more likely to buy from you. Just ask companies like Beardbrand and Glossier, which both used content marketing to make their ecommerce operations successful.

The challenge for many businesses is coming up with ideas. What follows are five topics for your company’s content marketing in September 2017.

1. International Bacon Day: September 2, 2017

International Bacon Day is an unofficial holiday celebrated three times a year, in January, February, and on the first Monday in September.

Its origins are unclear, but in the United States it may have begun at the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus.

International Bacon Day is an opportunity for content marketers to interject a popular pork product into blog articles, podcasts, and videos. Remember to stay focused on your editorial mission statement, but otherwise go hog wild.

Here are five examples of bacon-related article titles and the businesses that might write them.

• Health supplement store: “The Worst Advice You’ve Ever Heard about Bacon”
• Kitchen supply store: “The 10 Best Bacon Recipes on Earth.”
• Rare book retailer: “7 Classic Books You Didn’t Know Were About Bacon”
• Men’s business attire store: “Making Bacon: Success Lessons from Cincinnati Pork Processing Empire”
• Hardware store: “10 Reasons Hard Working Folks Eat Bacon”

If you need further inspiration — and a laugh — watch Rhett & Link’s 2012 video, “Rub Some Bacon on It.”

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Digital Marketing | Branding - Brand Experience

The Role Of Digital Marketing In Brand Experience

In the world of brand experience, the technology that helps us to advance our narratives is evolving at breakneck speed. It seems like every week we hear about a new device or application that promises to revolutionize the industry and open new doors to engagement. For marketers, it’s a pretty wonderful time to be alive.

However, there are some who see this digital revolution as a threat to the more traditional face-to-face elements of the events industry. Nothing could be further from the truth. As always, the key to keeping up with the technological revolution is to fully embrace it, understand its potential and figure out how to properly integrate it into your larger strategy.

I really like the term “brand experience” for this reason. Strictly speaking, a brand experience is about designing a sensory experience that brings a person into a lasting and meaningful relationship with a brand. What’s nice about this definition is that it doesn’t say “how” or “when” that relationship happens. It’s purposefully open-ended because the only thing that matters is that the relationship happens in the first place. How and when you get there is entirely up to you.

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Entrepreneurs - SEO | Marketing Strategy, Investment

Five Reasons Why Entrepreneurs Should Consider SEO As An Investment

Entrepreneurs who are new to online marketing strategies may have read somewhere that search engine optimization is dead. While most people may believe that the era of the SEO is long gone, Trond Lyngbo of Search Engine Land wrote a list of reasons a few years ago about why entrepreneurs should be optimistic with their investment in SEO.

Contrary to popular belief, the so-called "death" of SEO is just a rumor. According to Lyngbo, "The digital marketing strategy is not a cost but an investment." Rumors become irrelevant if entrepreneurs look at what top Google placement can do for business growth over the coming years.

With over a decade of experience and knowledge in the online marketing field, I agree with his reasoning on the importance of investing in SEO as an entrepreneur and how impactful the results can be. Therefore, I have five reasons for entrepreneurs to consider search engine optimization as a long-term investment instead of a cost:

It's cost-effective.

The No. 1 reason why I find SEO to be a smart investment for entrepreneurs is the cost effectiveness. Almost any business can hire a specialist to help grow their business by shifting around unnecessary expenses or cutting advertising mediums that aren't producing. With proper optimization, businesses can expect long-term results and benefits. Unfortunately, we should also consider how much we spend for the service. Forbes contributor Jayson DeMers recently wrote about the dangers of "cheap" SEO services. You can expect low-quality content, black hat techniques, and inexperienced optimizers usinga cheap SEO. Look for a reliable professional with a track record and a knowledge that surpasses textbook answers. Overall, your investment in a sound digital marketing strategy is crucial to your business growth and success.

It levels the competition.

I often encourage my clients to dream big because I know we can dominate their competition online. With the help of proper optimization, you can reach your target audience with efficiency. Rebecca Stickler, a content marketing specialist, wrote, "With a strong SEO strategy, your small business can compete with even the biggest business organizations.

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SEO - SEO Tips, SEO Strategy | Search Engine Optimization

5 ways to balance technical & non-technical SEO

In SEO’s earlier days, technical SEO was largely about coding. For a fun throwback, check out this 2008 SEL article on search-friendly code by Jonathan Hochman, an internet marketer and computer sciences grad from Yale. Technical SEO was all about how to optimize (and often, manipulate) code, metadata and link profiles to achieve better results.

And you know what? That basic purpose of technical SEO hasn’t changed.

As black hat tactics and manipulation became less effective and more dangerous, they fell out of favor. This gave rise to the more creative, non-technical SEO tactics designed to show search engines the value and relevance of each piece of content.

Technical and non-technical should never be pitted against one another, as both are critical to the health of your site and the success of your campaigns. Technical SEO is the framework on which truly great content is built, ensuring that each piece is structured and optimized for search engine discoverability and human consumption.

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