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Feb 21 2013
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SEO Consulting in 2013: What the Pros Know that You Don’t

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is Chris Warden. – Enjoy!

SEO

photo credit: SEOPlanter via photopin cc

SEO is changing, and for the most part, the life of an SEO consultant is getting better. Gone are the days of open keyword data and mass link buying, but we’ve been lucky to gain a few things too. Most notably, we’ve gained the ability to justify the cost of good SEO and shown that a good SEO consultant is worth the additional expense in easy to understand terms and ideas such as ROI and lifetime value.

As in all walks of life, it seems that the pros are always one step ahead of the amateurs and the hobbyists. What separates the pros from the amateurs in 2013 isn’t going to be a self-proclaimed “expert” title in their bio on LinkedIn. In 2013 it’s all about strong content and quantitative analysis to determine what’s effective and what isn’t.

Here’s what’s really important in 2013, and beyond.

Content is king. Really, we mean it this time.

Google has been telling us for years that content was king. Somewhere deep down inside, I think they really meant it.

SEO experts knew that content was important, but the only benefit to good content over bad content was the potential to get it shared, thus building more links in the process. Other than that, content was content. If it were indeed king, it was the king of a place we’ve never heard of.

Now, Google has shown the world that it means business. The “new” search results are going to favor brands – whether personal or corporate – to low-quality, niche-specific, here today gone tomorrow websites or those that just build massive amounts of low-quality content (I’m looking at you eHow) in order to spam the search listings with as many of their indexed pages as possible.

Maybe content was king all along, and Google just found the right algorithm change to weed out most of the bad content by sending it to the depths of the search results. Or maybe Google held on to the idea for far too long that links were absolutely the most important tool in SEO; even though what they really wanted was good and relevant content, even though they didn’t have a quantitative way to measure what good content and bad content looked like (other than human review). We’ll never know.

What we do know is that bad content is a thing of the past, at least if you plan to build a site that generates a decent amount of organic search engine traffic.

Backlinks are losing ground to stronger rankings metrics.

Backlinks are still the most important metric when it comes to ranking a site, but they’re quickly losing ground to other – more modern – metrics such as social indicators, citations, and instances of co-occurrence. In short, SEO is becoming more and more similar to PR every day.

Pro tip: If you’re a PR guy (or girl) it might be time to add a bit of SEO knowledge to your repertoire before you’re completely obsolete.

Content doesn’t mean blogging (necessarily).

Every SEO consultant or person who happens to rely on content in order to drive traffic, leads or sales dies a little inside when we talk about content with clients only to hear about how they’re “already blogging.”

Content is writing. Content is also video, podcasting, design (infographics, presentations, etc.), and social media posting. There are quite literally dozens of ways to produce content and writing it in  a blog is certainly not the only way. Depending on your business, it might not even be the most effective way.

In essence, content is a way to express thoughts or ideas to other people. Writing is but one of may forms of content, and it is certainly something you should educate your clients to understand.

Integrated strategies are the new one trick pony.

In the last few years, the Internet marketing community has grown very segmented. With the rise of segmentation within our industry, we’ve come to rely on several one trick ponies – or people who specialize in just one thing – to get the job done.

The future is made for the strong generalist within all of us. SEO in general is switching from building backlinks, analyzing keywords and optimizing pages to an all-encompassing medium focused on everything from social media strategy to content production.

SEO consultants of the future don’t necessarily have to be good at everything, but they certainly need to be aware that SEO is more than linking and optimization, which is largely what the past generation of SEO revolved around. The good SEOs of the future understand that SEO is a mix of research, optimization, link & citation building, content production, social media and data mining. SEO can’t stand on its own anymore. To succeed in the future, you have to understand the importance of integrated marketing strategies and how to implement them for your clients.

There’s no better time to be (or hire) a great writer.

Anyone who calls himself an SEO consultant – or SEO expert – knows 2013 is the year of the writer, thus making it the year of content. We’ve been building to this point for quite some time, but the time has finally arrived where the best writers – or those that know how to find and retain the best writers – are going to leap frog over the outsourced link builders and the automated software. In short, this is the year the SEO consultant that plays by the rules is really going to shine.

For the first time in the history of search engines, we’re starting to see sites with established and authoritative writers ranked better than those that aren’t as high on the food chain. For example, Rand Fishkin is always going to have better ranking content on the subject of SEO than me, no matter how good I am at SEO. The reason for this is due to the perceived authority (deservedly so) that Rand has achieved within the SEO community.

The same goes for your business, or your clients. Better writers are beginning to show greater returns on investment than the $25 articles from no-name writers we’ve been purchasing from freelancers for the last decade.

It’s time to really dive in and learn all you can about producing great content, or to find someone who can. Good content runs in the range from $75 – $350+ for a blog post, but those that are producing the best content are those that are going to be rewarded with the links, shares, and recognition within the industry.

Cheap content is dead and gone.

There is no more room for shortcuts.

Automation software and overseas employees used to rule the SEO game.

Those days are gone. SEO is now an art form that needs micro managing and near constant supervision.

When your clients ask, can you tell them with 100-percent confidence that nothing is going on that is going to get them penalized by Google? Of course you can’t. And if you can’t be sure that you are providing value to your clients, you shouldn’t be in this business in the first place.

Conclusion

Good SEO consultants are constantly on top of the changes that happen (seemingly daily) within the industry. The main thing that separates a good SEO from a bad one is education. Educate yourself, and stay on top of trends in order to provide your client with the most bang for their buck and you’ll stay relevant no matter what changes the SEO world faces in the future.

Warden_HeadShotChris Warden is a seasoned entrepreneur and CEO. Starting his entrepreneurial career at age 19, he has performed in numerous capacities owning and managing both offline and online companies. Chris now serves as CEO of Spread Effect, a leading content marketing and publishing company. He is a member of the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) and often writes on topics of content marketing, SEO, and business development. He’s passionate about building and mentoring world-class teams and loves to chat with like-minded individuals. You can connect with Chris via Linkedin, Twitter – @ChrisWarden_SE, or Google+.

Filed Under: Coaching and Consulting, Content marketing, Referral Marketing, Search Engines, SEO, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Nov 29 2012
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5 Simple Steps for Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization

Thursday is guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest is from Aaron Houghton  – Enjoy!

Image Credit: Qole Pejorian Flickr CC

Throughout my career I’ve run my own small businesses, consulted with small business owners, and built software for small business users. I’m one of the biggest small business advocates you’ll ever meet. The passionate entrepreneurs who decide to launch and run their own businesses are the force that drives this world forward.

One of my favorite things about small business owners is that they’re natural do-it-yourselfers. As a small business owner yourself, you’ve probably learned that in order to get something done right, you oftentimes have to do it yourself.

In this article I’ll show you how to take your web marketing results into your own hands.

Although it’s common to assume that web marketing should be handled by the techies, don’t make this huge mistake. Your knowledge about your business make you the person most capable of generating big web marketing results – more sales leads and new customers for your business.

Small business owners who use this process acquire new customers at drastically lower costs than buying visitors through cost-per-click ads. Our research shows that following this process over one year produces high quality free website traffic equal to that from a $100,000 paid search engine advertising campaign.

Let’s get started.

Build a Website that You Control

You probably already have a website for your business, but if you don’t, it’s critical that you set one up immediately. A business website is the digital representation of your personal expertise. It’s where you build your authority as an expert on the topics you know best.

To establish your expertise you’ll write blog posts and articles using keywords that are important to your prospective customers. In order to do this, you need to have access to quickly and easily add new blog posts and pages on your website.

Websites built on simple editing platforms like WordPress or SquareSpace allow you to edit existing pages and add new ones at any time.

If you can’t easily edit your current business website, just create a new website right now. Imagine that you’re starting a little online magazine. Register a domain name that explains your primary topics of expertise, for instance home-garden-talk.com or makeup-for-weddings.com and set up a hosting account with GoDaddy that gives you the ability to edit and add pages to the site on your own.

Choose the Right Keywords For Your Business

In web marketing, keywords are the building blocks of success. Having the right web marketing strategy really just boils down to having the right list of keywords. It’s that simple.

Your best keywords are the words that your customers are already using.

Ask a few of your customers how they describe your business when talking with friends. Pay special attention to the words they use and write them down.

Think about the problems that your prospective customers are experiencing that your business can help them with. Add descriptions of those problems to your keyword list too. For instance, if you are a locksmith, you would write locked out of my car or need to change the locks on my house.

If your business serves a local region make sure to include all of its names too. For instance Chapel Hill, North Carolina is also referred to as part of the Triangle Area of North Carolina, and Central North Carolina. Create multiple versions of each of your existing keywords by adding the region names at the end, like locked out of my car chapel hill north carolina and locked out of my car triangle area north carolina.

You should have 25-50 words or short phrases in your list now (each on its own line). Copy your list and paste it into the Google Keyword Tool to see which keywords have the highest volume of searches and lowest level of competition.

Find the ten keywords that have the highest search volume and the lowest level of competition. You now have the perfect web marketing strategy for your business. Let’s get started implementing it.

Create a Content Schedule

You need to begin writing blog posts and articles about each of your top ten keywords. Don’t expect to do this today. It’s actually best to add these new pages to your website steadily over time.

Take a look at your schedule and add a recurring weekly event to remind you to write at least one new article each week. You don’t have to do it all yourself. Ask employees, friends, business partners, or customers to contribute. Give them a topic from your keyword list and tell them to take any angle they would like.

A good blog post or article page is three to four paragraphs in length, is focused tightly on a single keyword from your list, and is written in a friendly, conversational tone.

Write your article, or edit an article submitted to you, and then add it as a blog post or new page on your website. Include links in the article, where relevant, to product or service pages on your website.

Optimize Your Pages

Give your new blog posts and articles the best chance possible to pull in new visitors by making sure they’re optimized for the search engines.

The search engines pay special attention to certain page fields so you can gain a better search engine rankings just by putting the right words in the right places. Check for basic optimization by making sure that each page’s keyword (or keyphrase) can be found in the page title and meta description and is also used several times within the article’s text.

Use free tools like BoostSuite or SEOMoz to automatically scan your website and see where changes need to be made. Most optimization fixes are just simple text changes so you can optimize each new article in only a few minutes right when you post it online.

Commit to the Process and Get Started

Our research shows that adding one new optimized article to your website every week for one year generates an amount of free search engine traffic that would have cost around $100,000 if purchased through paid search engine advertising.

Now that’s a competitive advantage! But you actually have to follow this process to generate these results.

Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Are you willing to do the work required to grow your business and have new customers knocking down your door?

Start back at the top of the article and work your way through the process. Find your best keywords, write your first article, optimize it then add it as a new page on your website now. Your website will start receiving new visitors in just a few days.

Keep it up week after week and you’ll build a powerful web marketing system that produces thousands of website visitors and a steady flow of new customers for your business throughout the year.

Aaron Houghton is a serial entrepreneur who builds web marketing products for small business owners. Aaron is currently co-founder and CEO of BoostSuite.com. BoostSuite is a product that helps small business owners get more marketing results on their own. Formerly Aaron was co-founder of email newsletter leader iContact.com that was sold to Vocus in 2012 for $180M. Aaron was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year winner in 2008, was listed to Inc Magazine’s 30 under 30 list 2010, and was named as a Top 10 Most Influential CEO in 2010 (behind Zuckerberg, Andrew Mason, and Matt Mullenweg). In his free time Aaron is an avid wakeboarder and outdoor adventurer.

 

Filed Under: Content marketing, Search Engines, Small Business Tagged With: ,
Oct 11 2012
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How to Stay Focused On Producing Your Highest Payoff Content

Today’s post is a direct answer to a question I receive frequently.

Writing optimized content

photo credit: madamepsychosis

First, the question – “I get that I need to produce lots of content but what should I write about?”

And now, the simple answer – “Write about things that your customers and prospects want to know more about.”

It really is that simple. Of course, the challenging part is understanding and staying focused on the most important, otherwise known as highest payoff, topics.

Today it’s not enough to simply write brilliant stuff. Yes, that’s certainly one aspect, but you’ve also got to write brilliant stuff that addresses what your prospects want to know in ways that search engines and searchers alike find relevant.

A little bit of research can go a long way when trying to develop a content strategy based on winning search results for phrases and topics related to what you do.

For this I’ll turn to a primary SEO routine.

Keyword research is a fundamental practice in the search engine optimization and marketing world. It’s how you determine what your pages need to say, it’s how you determine what your competition for important search terms is doing to stay at the top of the rankings and it’s how you determine what search terms and countless variations you want to bid on in your pay-per-click campaigns.

It’s also a great way to develop a body of primary topics for your editorial content calendar.

Below is a routine I’ve used over and over again to help sort out the precise body of topics that will produce the highest payoff in terms of search engine results. (If you want to read my thoughts on how I use these phrases once I discover them check out – The 7 Most Important SEO Factors for Bloggers)

List of 30 – 5 groups

The first thing I do is brainstorm a list of key search terms based on my own analytics, my sent email box and questions that clients routinely ask. I try to produce a list of suspects that reach thirty or so.

Then I try to group them into five or so major themes.

Google Keyword Tool

Next I take this list to a free tool like the Google Keyword Tool or a paid service such as WordTracker.

I run the words or phrases into these tools and quickly start working on revising my brainstorming list based on actual search volume, competition and a host of related phrases that these tools feed me.

Volume and competition prune

I revise my list, sometimes greatly, based on an initial analysis of the amount of search volume and how competitive a search term is and land on a group of phrases somewhere between perfect world and extremely long tail.

The more specific a search phrase is the more valuable it may be in terms of conversion. In other words, someone searching “small business marketing” could be looking for a lot of things, but someone searching “small business marketing growth strategy” might likely be looking for that killer course you’re selling – less volume, more relevance.

Conduct searches

Now I take my revised list that is probably no more than ten phrases, to the Google. I plug each phrase in and note the page one results. (These days it might make sense to do this logged in and out of your Google account as the results can vary greatly.)

I analyze the top results to make sure this is a place I want to land and create a list of what I now call my “competition” for these phrases. I then employ a few competitive research tools, such as the free Open Site Explorer or SEO Toolbar from SEOBook or the paid Raven Tools to learn a great deal about why these sites or pages are ranking well for these terms.

Website content feature

google keyword tools

Using the website feature you can easily learn what search terms Google thinks a page or site is optimized for.

One last step I like to use is to return to Google Keyword tool and use the website content feature that allows you to run a keyword analysis not on a search phrase but on an actual URL.

I do this with many of the competitive sites to learn why Google thinks what they do about this page and drum up more related search term candidates.

From all of this research I can generally come up with a meaty list of topics that I know I need to blog about in a very optimized way. My only task now to is find ways to say some of the same things over and over again in highly interesting ways. I also employ a tool like Scribe in my writing to help keep me laser focused on the content strategy.

This isn’t the only way to do keyword research and I’m sure many of the SEO folks have great strategies and routines for accomplishing what I’ve described here, but this is a way that works for me and helps me naturally balance the need for content with the need for optimization.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Oct 9 2012
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The 7 Most Important SEO Factors for Bloggers

Blogging software, such as WordPress, automatically gives your content an advantage when it comes to the “on page” factors that search engines consider important in determining what content to show in search results.

Ranking higher in Google

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

That’s one of the reasons I promote the use of blogging software for every small business site on the planet. Right out of the proverbial box your site stands a better chance of ranking for key terms.

Of course that assumes that are consistently feeding your blog high quality, keyword rich, educational content. (But that’s a story for another day.)

Today I want to focus on the most important SEO factors for bloggers and talk a little about how you can do a few things to modify your blog’s default settings and get even more optimization.

Title

The title is an HTML attribute that does not actually show up on your pages, but is displayed at the top of the browser window. By default, most blogging software makes the title the same as the post title or headline.

This may be one of the most important elements to consider altering. Many times your headline for a post benefits from being catchy or even intriguing to attract readers from Twitter, but that may not make the best title for people searching.

You can change default settings in the code or you can use one of the many SEO plugins designed to give you the flexibility to alter the important the elements I address in this post. I use a plugin from Yoast called WordPress SEO.

With the plugin installed you will see a screen below your post that allows you to change elements such at the title and description.

In most cases I create a much more search engine friendly title, with important search terms, no matter the headline of the post.

SEO factors in blogging

Preview of how this post, with modified settings, might show in search results.

URL

The URL or permalink for each blog post is also something you can alter. The first step is to make sure you are using search friendly URLs. By default WordPress creates database URLs with numbers and such that aren’t search friendly at all. You can create customer URLs by going to settings – permalinks and choosing a custom structure that includes the post name.

Once you do this WordPress will by default create URLs from the headline of your post. You can edit these URLs and in some cases this makes sense. Some blog posts headlines, as I’ve mentioned, don’t make the best URLs, so this is the place to shorten and edit in some keywords for more SEO impact from the blog post URLs – another very important factor.

How to edit URL of blog posts

You can edit the URL in post screen for keywords and length

H1 tag

H tags are used in HTML to show hierarchy for things like heading and subheadings. (They are often used incorrectly by designers for styling as well.) Search engines use these tags as yet another way to make a determination about what’s important on a page so wise use of H tags can help emphasize keywords in the content.

By default your blog post headline is shown in the HTML as an H1 tag. You may also want to style subheadings with H2 or H3 tags (Something that you can easily do with the Visual editor.) Careful use of keywords in these headings and subheading can give your post a boost.

Description

The description is another HTML attribute that does not show up on the page but does show up quite often when your post in featured in search results – it’s the text that describes what the post is about.

If you don’t complete this for your posts the description text will likely be the first few words in the post. This may or may not be a good way to draw someone in to reading your post.

Using the SEO plugin mentioned above I write descriptions that read more like an ad for the post so that someone reading it really wants to dive in and read the entire post.

Adding Alt image tag

You can add a title and alt image description in the Add Media screen

Images

If you use images in your posts, and I believe you should, take the time to complete the title and alternate description fields when you upload an image as search engines can’t see the image so your descriptions in these fields offer another opportunity for keywords related to the post topic.

Also, choose the featured image setting for the image that you want to show when someone retweets or shares your post to Facebook.

Sitemap

Sitemaps are files or pages that as the term suggests map out all the pages on a site. There was a time when these were popular navigation tools but for the most part site maps have become a tool to let search engines easily access content and changes on your site.

The WordPress SEO plugin comes with a sitemap function and there are many others available as well.

Make sure that you also submit your sitemap to the Google and Bing Webmaster Tool Portals.

Speed

This last item isn’t an SEO or on page factor directly, but search engines, not to mention humans, hate sites that load slowly. Google has repeatedly implied that slow loading sites are being penalized in their latest updates.

There are many factors that impact site load speed, including theme issues, caching and plugins. Using a caching plugin such a W3Total Cache has become a pretty standard recommendation.

Another factor is hosting. Larger WordPress sites have big databases and when that’s coupled with lots of traffic a host configured for WordPress is a must. Over the years my site started to drag so I switched to Synthesis hosting recently and coupled with the Genesis Theme framework my site is once again lightning fast.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights test to see where you might have issues.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing Tagged With: ,
Jun 19 2012
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How to Use Press Releases to Create a Steady Social SEO PR Downpour

There was a day when the press release did a lot of the work in generating actual media coverage for a firm announcing a new product, acquisition, award or some other newsworthy milestone.

Yan Arief via Flickr CC

Today a great deal of this kind of news is either delivered directly to audiences through social channels or carried by a PR professional as part of a broader pitch for coverage or advocacy.

The humble press release, however, is not a relic of the past. The press release still performs a very valuable function in the online world that requires the constant care, feeding and gathering of keyword rich content, social signals and links.

Publishing a consistent stream of press releases as a tool to announce and distribute news is a proven lead generation tactic right now.

Below are the five elements required to view and implement this tactic as a systematic process in your overall lead generation plan.

Publish

Commit to publishing at least once a week. You don’t need earth-shattering news to create an announcement of update. Think about things like milestones, new hires, new products, new eBooks, awards, new clients, or new certifications. Focus on things you would like your clients to know about.

Write each release on one page using standard press release format. I’ve created a free press release tool that walks you though the process of writing a press release. It does all the formatting once you fill in the blanks.

Distribute

Once you create a press release you’ll want to get it distributed to various news and media outlets. By using a distribution service you do run some chance of garnering some media coverage, but the primary purpose of this step is online distribution. If you have a local media list you may want to submit your releases to local journalists, Chambers, industry newsletters and even your alumni newsletters.

Below are a number of choices for distribution ranging from free to full service. As you might guess, you get more options when you pay, but you can still get some coverage from free and low cost options. Most small businesses can get by with a Submit Press Release 123 or PRWeb.

Curate

Once you commit to a steady stream of releases you should house them on your website as a newsroom or use a tool like Submit 123 or PRWeb’s newsroom options so you start to build a library of keyword rich news releases, media coverage and related content.

If you use a newsroom service or a content tool like WordPress you can also create an RSS feed for your news stream allowing others to subscribe or republish the content on various pages and sites you own.

Amplify

Make sure that all of your press releases contain ways for people to connect and share in the most common social networks and social bookmarking sites. Use your Twitter, Google+. Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon accounts to amplify each press release.

By posting news to these sites you’ll garner even more readership and links as people republish and share for various reasons.

Analyze

Make sure that you add your newsroom to your Google Analytics or other tracking tool routine. When you do this you can start to test and track various distribution services, produce link reports and monitor which social sites are sending you the best traffic.

This is one of those long-term, slow and steady tactics, but if you commit to it and stick to it, you’ll find the local, social, SEO and traffic benefits to be significant.

Filed Under: Marketing Strategy, Social Media Tagged With: , , , ,
May 7 2012
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One Simple Tactic That Can Give You an Unfair Advantage in Local Search

Showing up in local search results is a pretty big deal if you’re any sort of local business. When people search online locally, but plan to buy offline locally, being the organization they find first and find when mobile could mean the difference between growth and death.

While lots of people publish tips about Google Places pages, local web content, address citations and the sort, not enough people are talking about the power of local video when it comes to gaining an advantage in local search.

Many people are talking about video from a content standpoint and I agree, but what about locally optimized video for SEO. I’ve seen this intentional tactic produce some pretty incredible results in a very short time – particularly when it comes to a Google and YouTube combination.

See, here’s the deal – Google wants to give people interesting search results and as often as possible that includes a mix of local Places pages, videos, products, images and blog posts all mashed together on page one for specific search phrases.

Local businesses that get good at producing and optimizing video can find their YouTube videos zapped to page one for highly competitive search terms with very little effort.

I did a little test over the weekend to prove this theory. Granted there may be other factors at play here, but here’s what I and I believe you can do it too.

I am hosting a couple workshops in Kansas City in June. Since this is for me a rare local play I wanted to see what could do to get some local search results. So, here’s what I did.

  • I created a very brief video recorded directly to YouTube.
  • I even did a little bit of editing using the new YouTube Tools
  • I named the video Kansas City Marketing Workshop and Training
  • I added a description with this term
  • I added keywords that related to the term
  • I saved the video
  • I embedded the video on a page on my site.
  • I pointed to the video on YouTube from my Facebook page

Total time invested was about 15 minutes. About 30 minutes later this video showed up on page one for the search term – “Kansas City Marketing Workshop”

Kansas City Marketing Training and Workshop video

A day later it moved to the #2 position for the search term and #4 position for the term Kansas City Marketing Training. I conducted these searches logged out of my Google account and even received the same results using private browsing in Safari.

There’s no telling how long this video will stay at the top of the results for my search term, but it certainly reinforced the idea that this is a powerful way to gain additional local search results while creating useful content.

Below are tips to keep in mind as you explore this tactic:

Do the keyword research

Use a tool like WordTracker or Google Keyword Tool to hunt for some search phases that make the most sense. You’re not looking for hyper competitive terms like “Marketing,” you’re looking for longer, less searched phrases that you can quickly impact.

Also keep in mind those frequently asked questions. Focus on making videos that address those issues.

Create multiple videos

The idea behind this approach is to create dozens of simple videos that allow you to build a library of content that addresses many of the things your prospects are searching for.

Make the videos sell

Make sure you add URLs and annotations to your videos so you can send people to pages that give them even more information.

Optimize for specific terms

Use the search phases you uncover as your video titles, in descriptions and as keyword combination. Do a search on YouTube for the phrase you are trying to win and see what comes up. Once you find the top videos in your search term make note of the keywords and borrow liberally.

Point to the videos

Google loves it when other sites point to videos that are hosted on YouTube. You can give your videos even more juice by linking to them from your web site, Facebook and other video hosting sites.

Experiment with the intriguing little tactic and you may uncover some pretty fantastic results for frequently searched terms that might not otherwise stand a chance of competing for.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing Tagged With: , , ,
Oct 17 2011
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The Changing Face of Lead Generation

I’ve spent a great deal of time over the last few years professing the virtues of what I’ve been calling the lead generation trio made up of some combination or advertising, public relations and referrals.

GoDakshin via Flickr

The idea behind the trio concept is to acknowledge the need to spread your lead generation activities out and diversify them in a manner that allows prospects to experience your brand in different variations and from entirely different points of view.

The components of the lead generation trio are dependent upon one another to work. They support and compliment each other and the sum the effort is definitely greater than the parts.

Lead generation in general has changed dramatically over the last few years as traditional broadcast or outbound methods have grown increasingly ineffective.

This doesn’t mean, however, that marketers are left without proactive methods for generating leads.

The fundamental idea of the blended lead generation approach is still valid, but when choosing members of a lead generation trio, business owners must now take into the account the shifting online and social landscape.

While I still contend that advertising is a primary lead driver when employed correctly, I further believe that SEO, or the ability to be found, and social media, or the ability to create direct engagement, have become primary lead drivers and must be included in any discussion concerned with rounding out the new lead generation trio.

In fact, you could easily make the case that referrals have become a member of the social media family and that public relations is now a subset of SEO. I know this point of view won’t sit well with some PR practitioners, but here’s how I now see the major lead generation activities

Advertising – this includes online ads, offline ads, direct mail, pay per click and the all-important elements of ad testing, conversion and tracking.

I believe every business that focuses on promoting content using advertising tools and incorporates landing pages, including mobile landing pages, into their conversion process can still generate leads in a quasi outbound manner.

The thing that advertising has going for it that no other form of lead generation can match is control. This is the one vehicle that allows you to select who gets your message and when.

SEO – The area of SEO is really much bigger than page and search optimization. I use this term to incorporate the production and use of keyword rich content and the acquisition of links in ways that make it easy for prospects to find your business when they search globally, locally and mobily (I know that’s not a word, but perhaps it should be these days.)

Using this broader description of SEO makes it easy to incorporate a great deal of today’s public relations activity, a great deal of which is designed to create content, links and direct prospect contact under the banner of SEO.

Social media – I’ve been saying this for some time now, but social media behavior and tactics have simply become baked into marketing in general, and of late I’ve seen this behavior mature to the point where it’s become a stable aspect of the lead generation trio.

I know many people still cringe at the idea of social and sales being mentioned in the same sentence, but social platforms have now become such an integral part of content discovery and sharing that it is nearly impossible to effectively generate leads via any form of advertising without the integration of social and most forms of successful SEO now rely on social platforms as well.

In a way social media has become the ultimate referral vehicle. Throw ratings and reviews into the social mix and you’ve pretty much round out the new face of lead generation.

So, if you still view SEO as the art of search engine manipulation or social media as a tactic still struggling to produce ROI, think again. Advertising, SEO and social media are now the foundational elements of a solid lead generation program and like so many things that are meant to go together – you can’t have one without the others.

Filed Under: Duct Tape Marketing, Marketing Strategy Tagged With: , , ,
Jul 11 2011
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The SEO Cupcake

When asked to talk about marketing these days I spend increasing amounts of time explaining the notion of being found. Like it or not, generating leads by putting lots of valuable content in the places where people look for just such a thing is central to marketing success these days.

The SEO CupcakeWhen looking for a simple way to illustrate the important relationship between content, social and SEO, I decided to forgo the obvious pyramid or Venn diagram and chose instead the uber trendy cupcake.

I mean, who hasn’t stood in line these days outside an Airstream trailer in Austin or a chic little boutique in Soho, just to purchase one of these little delights? Okay, maybe you haven’t jumped on this trend just yet, but for illustration purposes the cupcake serves well.

Content – You can’t exactly have a cupcake without, well, the cup. The little wrapper is the foundation for the entire thing. Likewise, content is the underpinning of any attempt to score well in SEO – you need lots of it, in many flavors. In fact, there’s really no reason to preheat the oven without a firm commitment to the production of content.

Keywords – Now, if all you did were serve up wrappers of content you wouldn’t have a very tasty treat. We need to add the cake in your cupcake. We need to test out the flavor combinations that keep your customers coming back for more. Keywords, the actual stuff that prospects put into search engines to find a business like yours, are what give your SEO efforts tastiness and set the table for surfers and search engines alike.

Links – Of course, if you really want to attract the search engine spiders you’ve got to pile on the icing in the form of links pointing the way to your content. Creating great, keyword rich content, is the best way to attract lots of links and form a strong base for mounds of traffic fattening icing.

Social – There, you’ve got an awesome cupcake, now it’s time to add that all important finishing touch. Lots of folks get the connection between social and SEO, but they don’t fully appreciate that social without content turns a scrumptious desert into a health snack. It’s nice, but it won’t satisfy the surfer’s sweet tooth. In this case, one of the best reasons to even grow raspberries (participate in social) is to top off the cupcake and add a very attractive package to your overall content play.

Okay, so today’s lesson leans a bit to the goofy side, but I just couldn’t think of a better way to simplify the interdependent relationship and hierarchy of steps involved in winning the being found game.

 

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , , ,