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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Social Media Marketing | Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus

A Marketer's Guide to Social Media Marketing 

Between Facebook, Twitter and Google+, your business can benefit from using social media to reach a wider audience of potential customers.

Your potential customers and clients are spending more time browsing the online ecosystem we know as social media. In fact, a recent study from marketing agency Mediakix estimated that the average person will spend more than five years of their life on social media. It trailed behind watching television, and totally beat out eating, grooming, socializing and laundry.

With traditional marketing mediums, such as print and broadcast in decline, businesses can no longer afford to ignore this platform. In this guide, we detail the most important aspects of social media, explain the latest terminology and help you understand the latest tools.

Social media cannot be an afterthought. It takes planning and forward thinking. It will take plenty of trial and error to discover the right way to attract an audience and then convert that audience into customers and clients with any degree of brand loyalty. The traditional rules of marketing don't always apply to social media, and different platforms require different strategies.

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Tim Ferriss | Tools of Titans | Business Strategies

Video Marketing - Tips, Strategy, Social Media

How To Build A Successful Live Video Marketing Plan

The rise of live video over the last year or so has given content marketers a powerful new weapon to add to their armory. To add to venerable email marketing, blogging, social media and static video content, marketing professionals can now add a format that brings a whole new set of benefits. Live video is urgent, interactive and exclusive. It’s also demanding. And while it's effective by itself, it achieves its best results when used as part of an integrated marketing plan.

That plan should have four elements:

1. Audience Building

Hit the "live" button on Facebook, and your audience members will receive a notification telling them that someone they know is broadcasting. That’s even more powerful of an interruption than telemarketing -- it’s a call from someone they know. But only a small share of the audience will be free to participate at that moment, and the larger the number of people who receive that notification, the bigger the actual audience will be.

The first part of a live video marketing plan then is audience building: Line up followers so that when you’re ready to broadcast, you’ll have people watching and participating. There are all sorts of techniques for rapid audience building on social media, but one of the most effective is the strategy followed by YouTube magician Julius Dein. Dein partnered with other pages to share content, forging agreements with larger pages as his own audience grew. He went from zero to 6.5 million followers within a year. Make that growth part of your live video marketing strategy.

2. Brand Definition

What you say on your live video broadcasts will be important, but how you say it will be equally as important. The live video broadcasts created by Benefit Cosmetics are informal, friendly and tongue-in-cheek. The videos produced by Sephora are still casual but they’re more controlled and polite. It's more like a gathering of women who lunch. Both broadcasts closely match their company's brands.

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SEO Tips | Data | Social Media Strategy

How to use SEO data in your social media strategy

Everyone understands that a good social media strategy is the holy grail for businesses; it molds the perception of a brand, carries the voice, creates the appeal, and as a result, increases revenue. There are a few fundamentals that can help enhance the strategy, but SEO, or search engine optimization, is hardly ever considered. Big mistake! Here’s why.

I’ll start by stating that social media and SEO are heavily tied to each other. SEO data can help improve your social efforts, and social media can help with the search rankings.

In fact, SEO data provides a bunch of information about your visibility and target audience: who they are, how they search for things, what keywords they’re using and what sites they’re surfing, not to mention the good old profiling data found in Google Analytics, SimilarWeb and SE Ranking.

Let’s dig in deeper.

Keywords

As a growing brand and business investing a lot into social media appearance, you need to know what people are saying about your company or products. To find that out, you can use different monitoring tools such as Mention or Google Alerts. However, to set the alerts correctly, you need to understand which search terms are being used.

This is where SEO gets into the game. It’s important to determine the most frequent search queries related to your niche. This data helps interpret the social community’s most urgent concerns.

Often, the best insights come from discussions about your niche overall, but not a specific product. In other words, you need to search for the keywords you want to target in organic and paid search and use them to track social media awareness.

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Social Media Marketing | Build Your Brand

How to Build a Social Media Marketing Plan for Your Brand

With billions of active users on social media, it’s still one of the best ways to reach a global audience and grow a loyal following in the process. Years ago, social media was much easier, as there were just a handful of networks to choose from — with Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn being the most popular ones. Now that mobile usage is on the rise and social networks like Snapchat, Instagram and Pinterest are gaining ground, it’s important to have a social media marketing plan in place to make sure you have all of your bases covered.

For most brands and businesses, their social media efforts start in the form of content creation. This is usually done through their website or blog, then adding social sharing buttons and making sure each new piece of content is then being shared to their social profile pages. While this is a viable solution, it’s still only scratching the surface.

To help with this process, today we are going to look at some of the most effective ways to start using social media marketing to not only send traffic back to your site but to also potentially go viral with your content. Implement these methods into your content creation and promotion efforts today, to see continue social media success tomorrow.

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