At Pubcon 2016 in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to speak with Debra Jasper, CEO and Founder of Mindset Digital, about the power of visual storytelling in marketing.
A critical challenge is everyone is dealing with an overflow of information, it’s becoming more difficult getting people to tune in with what you have to say.
Telling your story more visually is a compelling way to get people’s attention in an age of dwindling attention spans. Learn more in the video below.
Here are some key takeaways from the video:
In addition to realizing how content is changing, marketers also need to take into consideration how the audience is changing. We’re becoming a visually sophisticated audience, and thus expect more from the content we consume.
Consider how visual storytelling can be used to convey anything more visually. It’s not limited to just blog articles. It can be used for social media profiles, professional presentations, internal reports, and more.
Seeing always wins. Today, 70% of information is consumer through our eyes, and audience attention spans are only 8 seconds. Human brains are wired for narrative, so unpack your content into visuals to keep your audience in tune with your content
A lot of our stories are still told in old school ways, especially when you look at PowerPoint presentations and social media profiles. Most of you reading this probably have a LinkedIn account, but is it optimized for visual storytelling? On a platform like LinkedIn you can create video bios of yourself, create highlight reels of speeches you’ve given before, and things like that.
There’s still value in text, because you can’t just present a visual and leave it at that. There has to be some narrative to tell the story, which can be achieved through text.
However, even text has to be designed for a visual audience these days. You need to break up create content in short, organized, and skimmable ways (SOS). That means short paragraphs, bulleted lists, intelligent use of headings. Text that’s formatted to be skimmed helps the reader extract the information they need quickly and conveniently.
Please visit SEJ’s YouTube page for more video interviews. For more information about visual storytelling, please see the following resources:
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: SEMPO survey, HTTPS & Halloween appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
International SEO is a hot topic in digital marketing, and an area most SEOs aren’t as familiar with. In this Pubcon interview Bill Hunt, President of Back Azimuth Consulting. sat down with Kelsey Jones, SEJ’s Executive Editor, to talk about HREFLang, what it means for international SEO, and discuss some of the pitfalls SEOs face when implementing it.
A few main points Bill made were:
HREFLang is a code developed by Google that allows you to designate the language of your website so Google delivers the appropriate site to international users. This is particularly important for international SEO.
Don’t assume /uk means it is the British version, it’s actually for the Ukranian language. Make sure you are using HREFLang correctly by using a tool to check it.
To figure out which languages your site should show up in, pay attention to who is coming to your site today, who your target market is, and if you are able to support another language site. Bill points out that if you put up a site in Spanish, you are telling the Spanish-speaking audience that you have a way to communicate with them. If you can’t offer support or content in Spanish, it might not be a good fit for your site.
A report published by Reuters states that 75% of Internet use in 2017 will be from mobile devices. That’s up slightly from mobile web usage this year, according to data from media buying agency Zenith.
Looking ahead even further to 2018, Zenith predicts 60% of all advertising dollars on the web will come from mobile ads. By that time, mobile ad expenditure is expected to ready $134 billion, which is more than will be spent on any other form of advertising altogether.
“As more ad dollars shift to the digital realm from television, brands are rushing to Facebook Inc, Snapchat and Google where they can market to viewers… This trend is driving a shift in ad dollars to mobile and stoking deals in the media, entertainment and communications businesses.”
Also according to Google’s study, a growing number of people are using only smartphones to access the internet, and those who use mobile devices use them many times longer than people who use desktop computers.
We’re living in a mobile-first world, and there’s perhaps no greater evidence of that than Google invest in a better, mobile-only set of search results, which will be rolled out over the next few months.
SEMPO, in partnership with us at Search Engine Land, is asking the search industry to participate by completing the annual State of Search Survey. The survey is available by clicking here.
Those who take the survey will be given access to a free of the in-depth report that is written up based on the survey results, a value of $400. Also, you will also be eligible to win a free pass to the 2017 SEMPO Member Forum, courtesy of SEMPO or a FREE all-access pass to SMX West on March 21st-23rd, 2017 courtesy of Third Door Media.
You do not need to be a SEMPO member to complete the survey and/or be eligible for the above.
The survey asks questions about:
Search engine optimization (SEO / organic search)
Paid search (pay-per-click advertising or paid search)
Katy Tonkin (left) and Maddie Cary of Point It accept the Landy for Best B2C Enterprise SEM Initiative.
The mission they chose to accept: To build and activate paid search campaigns to promote the surprise product launch of the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book on the US Microsoft Store web site — in less than 24 hours.
Mission accomplished. For its quick execution of tailored, target campaigns that exceeded expectations, Seattle-based Point It Digital Marketing took home the Landy award for Best B2C Enterprise SEM Initiative. This was Point It’s second consecutive Landy win.
Not only was time not on their side, once the campaigns were launched, Point It faced stiff competition from other authorized sellers and retailers carrying the new Surface products.
Point It focused their campaign structure and keyword strategy on reaching lower-funnel prospects who knew about the new products and were searching on brand keywords that signaled purchase intent. Negative keywords were added to funnel target prospects to the right products.
Ad copy was crafted with product specific description copy tailored to keywords in tightly themed ad groups. Callout extensions highlighted specific product details and sitelinks provided easy navigation to product selection in the respective campaigns.
The team also initiated RLSA campaigns using BlueKai to pass audience segments into Google for targeting that proved to be highly successful. Overall, the campaigns exceeded their targets.
“This award win is a reflection of the way our paid search team executes every day,” said Maddie Cary, Director of Paid Search at Point It. “We try to think ahead and set up account management processes that allow us to scale or move with agility and efficiency. So when our client had a surprise product launch that needed to get turned around ASAP, we didn’t panic. We brainstormed, formalized, and delivered within 24 hours on a paid search plan we were proud of that capitalized on critical window of revenue opportunity for the client.”
“This is one of the most heroic SEM stories ever told,” said Landy judge Matt Van Wagner, president and founder of Find Me Faster, “Point It was uniquely qualified to take on a new product launch, but to build, test and deploy within 24 hours is the equivalent of NASA’s first landing on the moon!”
About The Author
As Third Door Media's paid media reporter, Ginny Marvin writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She provides search marketing and demand generation advice for ecommerce companies and can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.
Let’s face it: anyone with an AdWords login, bank account and keyboard can create ads for search. It can be a Wild West out there, which means that many ads ultimately fail. They fail because they don’t capture the attention of searchers, because they don’t include the best information, and frankly, because they look like every other ad out there.
Your paid search ad strategy goes way beyond the 140 text characters allotted to you. It starts with that, sure, but the entire architecture of your ad from the text to the extensions should all support a strategic message about your brand, its products or services.
So in this post, we’ll look at some of the steps you can take before you type that first word of text, so you can construct informative, eye-catching ads that truly support a company’s goals and stand out from the crowd.
Get into the mind of the business and consumer
You can’t very well create impactful ads without first understanding the business and consumer needs inside and out. And there are several ways you can facilitate research to get a 360-degree view of the company. Let’s look at those now.
Interviews and questionnaires
Create a questionnaire you can send to employees from various departments — like customer service representatives, sales teams or product teams — or talk to them directly. These folks are on the front lines every day and should have some interesting insight.
Sample prompts and questions include things like:
Describe your target audience.
Do you have a secondary market you’re looking to tap into as well?
What’s most important to your target audience when they purchase Product or Service X?
What are your customer pain points, and how do you solve them?
How often does your target audience need or buy your product?
What are three to five key selling points for your company and product or service?
Do you experience seasonal slow or peak times?
What does the company promotional or event calendar look like currently?
Customer reviews and testimonials
What a company’s customers have to say (the good and the bad) can do a lot for the ad strategy. Read as much of these as you can to see if you can spot any trends that you can work into the ads.
You may also want to talk to key folks in the organization about any negative trends in reviews. Oftentimes, internal teams are not aware of what the customers are saying, and a conversation like that can be helpful so they can tweak their strategy.
Understand how the company is the same and different from its competitors. And watch out for the we-don’t-have-any-competitors response. If you run into that, simply search in Google using the top keywords you plan to target to get a better picture of who you’re up against.
But be aware: Sometimes the ads that show up for the keywords aren’t really your competitors. For example, if Target shows up for a specialty dance shoe, use your discernment in assessing if Target really is a competitor to a specialty dance shoe company.
In this sense, an exercise like searching for keywords can really get you up to speed on the competitive landscape.
Reviewing competitor ads can also be a good thing if you don’t let what they are saying influence too much the ads you want to create (Remember, you’re trying to get away from what every other ad is doing).
However, it can help you spot missed opportunities for your own ads — places where you can one-up the competition. And sometimes, you can learn from them, too — so go in with an open mind.
Then, having candid conversations with the company about the competition’s advertising (what they like or don’t like) is also important in the strategy phase.
Understand your other marketing efforts
It’s good to understand the full scope of the company’s marketing efforts in other channels because they often inform and influence one another. So get plugged into the strategy by talking to other teams and vendors and looking at product guides, subscribing to the company’s mailing list and so on.
You can learn a lot of about the tone and the messaging of the brand by how it communicates, and you can then incorporate that into the advertising.
Plus, when you know what the other marketing teams are doing, you’re more likely to be able to work with them on the things that impact both your channels (for example, website speed) and react quicker in any given situation (for example a PR crisis).
Like any other marketing or sales effort, you have to put in the research to understand both the business needs and the audience desires. With those two areas researched well, you can begin to create killer ads that stand out from the crowd.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
, a boutique online advertising agency specializing in the Google AdWords and Bing Ads networks. As a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Jakober and her team practice cutting edge paid search strategy and management for clients across many industries.
Migrating your site to HTTPS is all the rage these days. Google is on the record as saying that using “https” in your URLs can give a site a ranking boost.
That said, going HTTPS has its share of SEO challenges. Here are but a few of the HTTPS horror stories we have witnessed over the past year:
Sites go HTTPS and don’t redirect or canonicalize the HTTP URLs to their HTTPS versions.
Sites go HTTPS without telling the SEO team, who freak out when they check into Google Search Console and see branded traffic has started to tank (Hint: check the HTTPS profile in Google Search Console that no one set up because you forgot to tell the SEO team).
Sites go HTTPS without making the site truly secure. For example, if you are serving your CSS file from an HTTP URL, you will need to update the CSS URLs to HTTPS. If you don’t do this, your browser may start to show an insecure warning like this:
Even worse, Google may start showing insecure site warnings next to your URLs in search results — a nice way to depress CTR, if that’s what you’re into…
Sites go HTTPS, get some links to HTTPS URLs, and then revert back to HTTP for whatever reason. Now, whenever someone clicks on one of those HTTPS links, they are going to get an “insecure!” warning like this:
Things can get complicated when you’re trying to keep track of all of the technical best practices, particularly if you’re working on migrating a huge, complicated site with multiple teams and vendors, which is often the case with multi-location brands.
One of the bigger complications we often come across is how to handle your local citations — the listings for your locations on various local search services such as Google My Business, Yelp, YP.com, and the main business listing data aggregators such as Acxiom, Factual, InfoGroup and Neustar Localeze (or whichever services provide listings in your country).
Now I see you scratching your head, thinking, “I thought this HTTPS stuff was just about my website. What does it have to do with a business listing on another site?” In short: plenty.
Over the past couple of years, we have conducted several studies on the impact of cleaning up your local citations, and in our experience, one of the best things you can do is remove redirects from your citation links, particularly your Google My Business listings.
Often, we see brands go HTTPS and forget that their citations still all link to HTTP URLs. This may seem fine, as the HTTP links redirect to HTTPS — but in one fell swoop, you have redirected all of your local citations, which now may be negatively impacting your Local Pack rankings.
Let’s say you have a business with 1,000 locations. Each location likely has 150 to 300 citations. So on the low end, this is 150,000 links for this site all going through a 301 redirect (at best). According to this Moz post about an accidental redirect test Wayfair.com conducted, they saw a 15 percent reduction in traffic, on average, after doing 301 redirects. In our thousand-location situation, that means we could be losing 15 percent of the traffic to each of these location pages. That’s a lot of traffic to lose.
And if you have decided not to migrate your image URLs to HTTPS (For some reason, image URLs are often the neglected stepchildren of redesigns), now any image URL that you have added to your GMB profile is likely broken.
We just worked on a case where the brand had created a new HTTPS logo URL, so every other site that had been serving the logo from the HTTP URL was now serving a broken image, including every Google My Business page. #OOPS
So maybe when you put your “we’re going HTTPS!” plan together, make sure you have someone on hand to deal with your local citations. It might make you feel a bit more secure…
PS: Don’t get too freaked out about going HTTPS. Over the past six months or so, we have seen some sites make some truly epic HTTPS migration screw-ups with little Google downside. It may be the case that since Google has promoted HTTPS so much, they have made the algorithm a bit more forgiving to avoid too many #HTTPSUCKS tweets. Your mileage may vary.
PPS: You’re the SEO person. You have made a career out of studying how to take advantage of Google’s algorithms while asking for resources from people who often don’t understand what it is that you do all day. So don’t blow it by being the one who champions migrating to HTTPS. Let the CIO do it.
Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
About The Author
Andrew Shotland is the proprietor of Local SEO Guide, a leading local search engine optimization blog and consultancy.
I’m going to predict it: 2017 will the be the year when blogging will be more important than ever before.
But here’s the catch.
Thanks to unprecedented levels of content saturation and an influx of new material every day, it’s not enough to just publish a blog and hope for the best.
Not even close.
Instead, you need to be strategic, intentional, and highly targeted in everything you do.
Today, blogging isn’t the informal method of communication it once was, at least not if you want to be good at it. Instead, it’s a skilled type of content that can offer unparalleled success if you know how to do it well. Authority level well.
In this post, I’m going to give you a complete guide for writing blogs that win in 2016.
Blogging, By The Numbers
Today, the internet virtually runs on blogs.
By providing quality information, giving readers material to connect with, and providing a point of interest for readers in various niches and categories, blogs do several jobs at once.
According to Impact Branding & Design, websites that blog have an average of 434% more pages indexed by Google. Every blog you write gives Google one more page to index which, in turn, helps your clients find you online more quickly.
As it stands today, 45% of marketers report that blogging is the most critical piece of their entire content strategy. B2B marketers who view blogging as important produce 67% more leads than those who choose not to blog, or who blog only minimally.
Marketers who make blogging a priority are 13 times as likely as their competitors to produce a positive ROI than their competitors.
When a company blogs, it earns an average of 97% more inbound links to its website than its non-blogging competitors.
When searching the web, a whopping 70-80% of all users ignore the paid advertisements displayed in Google and opt to interact with organic content, instead.
How To Write Blogs That Win in 2016, 2017 & Beyond: 10 Steps
The statistics above make it clear that blogging is critical, but how do you create good blogs that return a genuinely positive ROI? Here are ten steps:
1. Your Focus Should Be on Solid, Long-Tail Keywords
While keywords aren’t the driving force of blog rankings that they once were, they still play a significant role in providing structure and cohesion for a blog. Before we dig into this, though, keep this in mind: keyword density doesn’t matter as much as it used to. In fact, you barely need 1% density these days, so don’t trouble yourself counting keywords.
Unlike yesteryear, when the purpose of keywords was to fill your content like an overstuffed Thanksgiving turkey, the keywords of today exist to provide the “bones” of your content in a natural and organic way, which helps support semantic search.
How do you find the best long-tail keywords, you ask? Great question.
One of the best tools you can use for modern keyword research is SEMrush. Ideal for determining the monthly search volume, cost-per-click, competition, and difficulty of a given long-tail keyword, SEMrush is the perfect tool for building a keyword strategy to inform and shape your blogs.
Check out these SEMrush results for the keyword “online marketing tips and tricks”:
Screenshot of SEMrush 10/20/16
Screenshot of SEMrush 10/20/16
In addition to gaining insight into a given keyword, SEMrush also allows you to compare the difficulty of various keywords and determine which long-tail phrases will be ideal for your blog.
As you research your keywords, keep in mind that keywords don’t matter as much as the level of engagement, research, and expertise present in your blogs and that reliable and trustworthy content is more important than keyword inclusion. This brings us to the next point.
2. Write Your Most Authoritative, Trustworthy Content
While authoritative content has always been good for the reader, it’s good for search engines, as well. This biggest piece of evidence to support this is Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. After a portion of the document was leaked last year, Google released the entire 160-page PDF to the public and shortened it to 146 pages this year.
The document, which Google designed as a training and guidance manual for its search quality evaluators, dives deep into what makes good web content and what Google doesn’t like. While most of it is pretty standard – queries with multiple meanings, etc., one of the largest and most outspoken pieces of the document is the concept of EAT and YMYL.
These two acronyms, standing for Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness, and Your Money or Your Life, respectively, both refer to the qualities of a good web page. EAT, for example, indicates that high-quality pages must possess a high level of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Check out this screenshot from the guidelines themselves:
Screenshot taken 10/20/16 of Google Search Quality Guidelines
YMYL, on the other hand, indicates a unique quality standard of web page, called a Your Money or Your Life page. These are pages that feature content that has a potential to negatively impact a reader’s health, wealth, or personal wellness if it is not expert and authoritative. Examples include pages with medical or financial information.
According to Google’s guidelines, high-quality pages must have a large amount of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and a satisfying amount of professional, high-quality content.
With that in mind, taking the extra time to write authoritative and expert-level content is essential. Pages that lack these attributes may be down-rated by Google and are at risk of providing a poor user experience for readers.
3. Craft Unique, Well-Written Meta Descriptions
While many bloggers and marketers overlook meta information altogether, it’s an essential piece of writing a quality blog.
Metas are the organic search world’s PPC, and, as such, they’re critical to ensuring a high CTR for your blogs.
Unfortunately, many people don’t understand how to write meta content. So, first things first, what is a meta description?
A meta description is a form of HTML tag that helps visitors determine what your site is about so they can choose the right result from a search page. Here’s an example of what a meta description looks like (indicated by the red arrow) in the Google SERPs for the query, “how to start running,”
Screenshot taken 10/20/16
And another for the query “Design your own Nikes.”
Screenshot taken 10/20/16
In its raw form on your website, a meta description looks like this:
While Google has said that meta descriptions don’t affect ranking, it’s still essential to write them so that they can be coherent, useful, and relevant to Google searchers. Why? When your meta descriptions are good, they improve the click-through-rate of your site. This, in turn, boosts your search ranking.
3 Easy Guidelines for Meta Descriptions
Keep them short: Meta descriptions should be roughly 155 characters or less. Don’t go over 160 or you risk getting truncated by Google.
Include relevant keyword phrases: Keyword phrases help show that your page is relevant to a searcher’s query, and, when used naturally, can help boost your CTR.
Keep them original: Duplicate meta tags can damage your ranking and cause viewers to skip over your page, viewing it as spammy. Write a new meta for every page you create.
In addition to meta descriptions, you’ll also need to learn to write good meta titles. Also known as the SEO title, the meta title is the title that a search engine like Google displays to users just above your meta description.
Here is the meta title in the same “Design your own Nikes” query:
Screenshot taken 10/20/16
While both forms of metas are critical for user experience, it’s arguable that your meta title makes a larger impact, since 80% of people read headlines, and only 20% click through to read the body copy.
3 Guidelines For Meta Titles
Keep them the correct length: According to Moz, Google typically displays full text when meta titles are between 50-60 characters, after that, they risk being truncated. For best results, keep your metas 55 characters or shorter.
Include primary keywords: As is true with meta descriptions, you’ll want to include relevant keywords in your meta title for optimal search rankings.
Make them compelling: Again, more people will read your headline than will read your body content. Be sure it’s worth their while.
While writing a good meta title may seem like an unnecessary pursuit, it can make all the difference for the click-through-rate of your blogs.
4. Flesh Out Your Blogs with Quality Images
While 90% of the battle of writing a winning blog is crafting the text, visuals are more important to an excellent blog than they’ve ever been before. In addition to illustrating key points, like the screenshots in this blog are doing, visuals help inspire audience interest, which can make your blogs more readable, and more shareable.
According to HubSpot, including colored visuals in a blog boosts a person’s willingness to read it by 80%, and content that includes relevant images earns an average of 94% more views than text-only content.
With this in mind, grab some in-depth screenshots to add to your blog, hire out a custom infographic, or include some beautiful (free) stock photos from any one of the best stock photo sites on the web.
Visuals don’t detract from your text – instead, they enhance it and make it more exciting and relatable for readers.
5. Enlist Blogging Support
Perhaps one of the best blogging tips of all time is to reach out for help. As your company and content demands grow, it’s critical not to be the sole person in charge of your blogging. While many marketers think they can do this, the fact of the matter is that shouldering the entire burden of your content leads to mistakes, and this, in turn, leads to alienated readers and a less-than–ideal content strategy.
While content is critical for your online presence, blogs take a long time to create, and it can be difficult to create good blogs while also managing all of the other aspects of your business. Because of this, every business needs a blog writer, and many find that hiring one was one of the best things they’ve ever done for their content.
If you’re considering hiring a blog writer to help you create winning content, look for the following traits:
Experience with multiple content formats: The best content strategy is a diverse content strategy, and the blogger you hire should also be well-versed in social media, web content, and the importance of visual material. By finding a professional who checks all of these boxes, you can ensure that your blogs go way beyond a surface level.
Knowledge of current SEO standards: SEO changes on a regular basis and the best blogger you can hire is one who understands what Google wants at any given moment. From optimal meta description lengths to best practices for pop-up ads, your blog writer needs to have his or her finger on the pulse of everything that is online marketing and SEO. Without this knowledge, you put yourself at risk of receiving Google penalties or just missing out on the ample SEO opportunities that exist for you and your company.
Quality references and happy customers: You don’t want to take the time to train someone to be a web blog writer. In addition to taking too long, this is an approach that is bound to lead to mistakes and disappointment down the road. Instead, look for someone that already has experience in the industry.
In addition to making your content creation process easier, hiring content help also ensures high-quality blog material your readers will love.
Winning Content Starts With You
While writing winning blog posts can seem challenging, these tips – from crafting professional meta content to finding the best long-tail keywords for your topic – can help to improve your blogging on every level. From SEO, down to the experience of every person navigating a single blog on your site as a first-time reader.
Get focused, and create a blog strategy with value that stretches from today far into the future.
Years ago, I founded a link building firm based on the simple concept of only pursuing real links on real websites with a relevant audience, using a customized approach.
Eric Ward was my mentor, and frankly, I felt there were a dearth of agencies taking low-quality approach. I noticed a need in the market, and believed I could help meet market demand.
This was pre-Penguin, so it wasn’t the popular strategy, but I strongly believed in creating value – for humans, the web, and my clients. I never wanted to waste my time chasing junk links.
This was a difficult decision and route. I often worried about the fate of my business. Spam still worked, and it worked well. But at the end of the day, building links for humans won out.
As with any successful business, I have been lucky in a few respects:
I was able to hire truly wonderful people who share my ethos.
My timing was serendipitous. Within a year, the first version of Penguin affirmed my business strategy.
I was able to find great clients who believed in creating real value.
I was able to prove the model, earning the results my clients need.
It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows. We’ve made mistakes along the way, too, and were forced to learn and grow.
As my agency continued to grow, we’ve worked with a broad spectrum of clients, incorporating ever-larger businesses into our processes, who by very nature have different needs, goals, and expectations.
Today, I want to share the lessons I’ve learned working with large, enterprise-level clients. Lessons I believe vital to our success in dealing with these enterprise companies, and demonstrative of the developing needs in the online marketing world.
Making the transition from small business to enterprise-level clientage will require changes in your agency. We made mistakes that hopefully you can learn from as you transition to larger, more professional organizations.
The Keys To Our Enterprise Approach
I approach every campaign with research, creativity, and custom strategy. But enterprise clients are on another level entirely, requiring special experience, time, and care.
Multiple factors make enterprise link projects different from link acquisition for mom n’ pop shops or small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs).
The biggest differences I’ve noticed building links for enterprise businesses is the scale, documentation, integration, and buy-in necessary.
The enterprise needs we had to meet as an agency:
Up-the-ladder education (and selling) on the value of SEO, links, and particularly search
Prioritizing quality, documentation, and a professional process
Structuring and preparing for scalability
Recognizing and projecting the long-term nature of SEO campaigns
Adopting brand assimilation and integrating with ongoing marketing
These five factors have been the most important keys to success in our work with enterprise clients.
1. Many Enterprise Companies are Behind in Search as a Marketing Channel.
When I started this business, my specific goal wasn’t necessarily to work with Fortune 500 companies.
In my former professional life, I was a small business owner myself. My ambition in starting an SEO agency was to help other SMBs grow online in a way I found I had a knack for, and enjoyed: SEO and link building.
As my agency grew and I became more successful, we naturally attracted larger clients. And the larger my clients became, the more I realized large businesses are often behind in the SEO realm.
The reasons vary:
Large clients have larger brand presence, which translates well into search presence without specific effort or intent.
Large companies tend to be more invested in traditional marketing.
Corporations move slower than smaller companies, due to their size and bureaucracy.
Enterprise sites are often much larger, making SEO inherently more difficult.
Search offered an emerging channel and platform to smaller companies, who noticed the opportunity and seized it early.
I’m often surprised by enterprise sites’ SEO–or rather their lack of SEO.
At one digital marketing conference I attended–with many well-known, respected brands–few of the attendees had staff dedicated to SEO. I was floored – these were large, well-known brand names that had zero internal resources dedicated to search as a channel.
This presents opportunity–so much opportunity in fact, that it’s a challenge to meet. My agency has to work hard to prepare for any new enterprise client, to deal with their demand. When a large company commits to a service it’s often at scale, especially once you demonstrate and establish value.
Which brings me to my next point two points:
Enterprise clients have the budget and desire to work with the best of the best. To secure such clients, you need a solid reputation, systematic processes, clear communication, and strong project management.
Once you secure an enterprise client, you need to be ready to scale to their demands.
If you don’t present quality in every facet, you’ll never earn enterprise business.
2. Quality Levels Must be High Across the Board.
Enterprise clients can afford to hire the best. If you’re not considered the best within your industry, you’ll have a hard time securing enterprise attention.
Startups are designed to work fast and efficiently. Processes and systems are constantly revised, removed, changed, adapted. With enterprise clients, I’ve found a more tempered approach is best.
We needed a more systematic experience, with long projected goals, processes, and expectations. Strong organization and structure are paramount.
This need for quality translated into three different forms:
Documentation
Customer service and consultation
And, of course, product and service
The first differentiator in working with larger clients came through improving our presentation and documentation.
Our ability to win enterprise SEO business increased when we developed strong documentation, customized KPIs, and a better-developed onboarding process–all delivered with consistent communication. Delivering a quality product will always build trust early in a project, but for enterprise clients, we needed to demonstrate quality from first contact.
With enterprise companies, you’ll need a developed and smooth process that can be presented up the line to VPs and CMOs.
A good rule of thumb is to assume any documentation sent will wind up on the desks of VPs. I’ve learned it’s important to keep reports clean, professional, and easy to scan. Having a report that speaks for itself is the difference between securing budget and being cut loose.
Customer service is another area where quality must shine.
Enterprise clients require ongoing consulting. Not only do we deal with our point of contact within the company, but we are occasionally required to give a presentation to their boss/team as well.
This ties in with the fact that enterprise companies can be lagging in SEO, if not search itself. Ongoing consultation is needed to explain link strategies and present SEO-friendly suggestions and recommendations for other aspects of the client’s overarching online marketing plan.
It’s no small matter providing SEO to enterprise companies–they have far-reaching ambitions and large websites.
And these ambitions meant we needed to be able to scale to meet enterprise demand, once we secured the account and proved value.
3. Scalability is a Major Challenge
Startups live for growth.
My own agency is no different. We’ve always prided ourselves on being agile and adaptable, but that’s not enough with enterprise businesses. Enterprise clients need scale with firm consistency.
As my agency has taken on more and more enterprise-level work, I can attest to the fact that scalability is one of the biggest challenges in link acquisition for large businesses.
Large clients operate within ultra-competitive markets and industries where it takes a tremendous amount of work to move the needle. While building a handful of worthwhile links might do wonders for a mom n’ pop site, it’s going to take more to do the same for a massive enterprise website.
In manual link building, the only way to scale is to grow teams. Teams that are designed to foster creativity, collaboration, and transparency.
Scaling real people takes time. You need to be prepared before you bring on enterprise clients–if you’re scaling to meet demand as it happens, you’re likely already too late.
That’s been a tough lesson to learn.
I’ve found the best way to scale human effort is to start with a small team of dedicated link builders to build the foundation for the campaign. This smaller team’s goal is to establish momentum, implement an effective strategy, and prove campaign success. Only then can you scale the campaign effectively, by bringing on other experienced SEOs.
By developing a solid foundation you ensure your campaign continues to operate efficiently, even as you scale up to a larger team.
It can take a village to move the SEO needle for large companies, but by slowly scaling human ingenuity and manual effort it’s possible to be both effective and successful.
And best of all? It’s sustainable.
4. Enterprise Clients Need Long-term Solutions
SEO should always use sustainable practices.
Search isn’t a short-term marketing channel. As Google closes loopholes and the web matures, sustainable strategies and tactics become the only sensible option.
Nowhere is longevity more important than in working with large businesses.
These businesses aren’t looking for cheap spikes in revenue that fade overnight. They need long-term, sustainable business practices that will grow revenue quarter over quarter.
I love working with larger clients because:
Larger clients understand SEO isn’t an overnight project. They appreciate the time, energy, and effort that goes into a campaign.
They are more strategic. They understand the nature of marketing, and have the brand name, recognition, budget, and experience to take the long view, rather than chase fads.
Large companies are more stable, planning budget quarters in advance. This necessitates a forecasting of results mixed with current results, but ensures better overall planning.
They’re actively marketing, which lends support to SEO initiatives.
This all reinforces the campaign nature of link building. It’s important to snowball link acquisition with relationships and ongoing promotion.
These clients are concerned about revenue growth plain and simple–they need links that stand the test of time and provide ongoing, long-term value.
This is the work I enjoy most–building real value for brands, sites, and humans on the web.
And that necessitates brand assimilation and marketing integration.
5. Enterprise Link Campaigns Require Brand Assimilation and Marketing Integration.
To build real links that drive growth we can only secure the links a website deserves–not manipulate links into being.
This means finding and seizing link opportunities, often created by brand reputation, online mentions, other online marketing, and audience exposure.
Links don’t just happen on the web. They represent a citation, reference, vote of confidence, or endorsement of some sort. Those have to be earned, even if you’re actively seeking to build links.
Large companies are great because they’re often already link-worthy. They’re known within their vertical and have amassed reputation and visibility. We can then use that visibility to secure meaningful links.
Better yet, they’ll often work with us and listen to our advice in improving pages and link opportunities. Link building isn’t a magic bullet–it’s intelligent promotion to site owners who have a meaningful platform relevant to our client’s industry, with an overlapping audience.
We can’t force others to link; we can only persuade. And with a brand name and large client willing to work with us, that persuasion is often easier.
But representing a large company is no small matter. Brand assimilation is key, as in any marketing. It’s our responsibility to represent the company well, build worthwhile relationships, and protect the brand above all else.
We take time to familiarize ourselves with the clients’:
Core messaging
Unique selling point (USP)
Brand voice and tone
Market positioning
Target audience
The easiest way to accomplish this brand assimilation is to work with their ongoing marketing efforts.
Integrating into our client’s ongoing marketing has a variety of benefits:
Integration allows us to better adopt their brand, as we work closely with and observe those more experienced.
Integration ensures we’re working effectively, as we’re aware of opportunities created through other marketing activities.
Integration allows us to bolster other marketing efforts, with search visibility further improving the success of other marketing campaigns.
Close communication with the client allows us to express the value of our campaigns, and build goodwill with increased collaboration.
Integration improves both the efficacy and efficiency of our link building, as well as our relationship with the client.
Some common marketing practices that work well with link acquisition:
PR
Content marketing
Email marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC)
Social media marketing
Event organization
Brand partnerships
Charitable contributions
Our goal is simple: Find what the company is doing that is worth promoting and discussing. Anything that’s worth referencing could result in a link, or a link opportunity.
Accurate brand representation is essential to the success of an enterprise linkcampaignand is best achieved through integrating with their marketing efforts.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Created by A.J. Ogden of Page One Power
Do you ever get a sinking feeling as you open your paid search account? You don’t know exactly what you’re going to see, but you have a feeling that something has gone horribly, horribly wrong?
Don’t worry, you’re not alone.
If you’ve managed a paid search account for long enough, you know that sometimes, things just inexplicably go awry. Clicks stop converting…keywords stop performing…campaigns suck your budget dry.
And you don’t know why.
Well, guess what? If you’ve ever felt like your paid search account is being attacked by forces beyond your control, you just might be right…
Is Your Paid Search Account Haunted?
Although it might seem like the monsters you see portrayed in the media are simply works of fiction, the creatures you see on TV have very real counterparts in the digital realm.
Even though you might not be able to see them, they are there in the shadows, waiting for the ideal moment to strike. So, if your paid search account feels like a horror story, you just might be facing one of the following monsters:
Vampiric Keywords
The wrong keywords can quickly suck your marketing budget dry. Unfortunately, most account managers invite vampiric keywords into their campaigns without even realizing it.
Like most vampires, these keywords often look appealing on the surface (they might seem to be a great match for the search intent of your audience), but behind the scenes they are sucking budget from your productive keywords.
The biggest problem with these keywords is the fact that they can be hard to separate from your good keywords and search terms. Although holding up a cross to your computer screen might do the trick, it would take quite a while to do that to every keyword.
Instead, the easiest way to identify your vampiric keywords is to track down your wasted ad spend. A good monster hunter might not know where a vampire is hiding, but if he knows a bunch of blood-drained bodies are showing up in a particular area, that’s a pretty good clue that a vampire is nearby.
Same goes for your paid search accounts. If you open your keywords or search terms report and create a filter for “Conversions < 1,” you can quickly see which keywords or search terms are sucking your account dry—those are your vampires.
Then, once you’ve tracked down the blood-suckers, it’s time to pull a Van Helsing and put a stake in them…
Zombified Account Management
Perhaps one of the reasons why so many paid search accounts are filled with budget-sucking keywords is because those accounts are run by zombies.
Of course, those zombies don’t look like your classic brain-hungry undead, but a zombie account manager does a lot of mindless lurching about and seems to be fixated on consuming marketing budgets.
Unfortunately, paid search management zombies seem to be very common.
You know how in the movies it always seems like the zombies outnumber the good guys by a considerable margin? Well, you see the same scenario playing out in paid search management. According to Larry Kim, 9 out of every 10 AdWords accounts does not get regular attention on a quarterly basis.
Similarly, at Disruptive, we’ve found that 72% of the accounts we audit haven’t been touched in a month. So, between these two statistics, that means anywhere from 72-90% of paid search account managers are zombies!
Scary, right?
Now, if you happen to work with (or, heaven forbid, happen to be) one of these account management zombies, you might be tempted to handle the problem in classic zombie-slayer style. Luckily, you don’t have to be quite that violent to solve your zombie problem—there is a better way!
Instead of resorting to violence, the key to eliminating zombified account management is fairly simple: regular account maintenance.
In general, if you have a paid search budget of $10,000+ a month, your campaigns need to be reviewed at least once week (although ideally you should be checking on them at least 3x/week). If you’ve just launched a new campaign, you should be checking up on it 3x/day.
For budgets smaller than $10,000/month, you don’t have to be quite as vigilant, but you’ll still want to look at your account at least once or twice a month.
Now, checking on your account on a regular basis isn’t the same thing as making big changes on a regular basis. If your account has been managed by a zombie for a while, it will probably need a lot of TLC to recover, but if it’s running fairly well, you probably only need to make minor adjustments most of the time.
However, just because your account is running smoothly, that doesn’t mean that you can slack on maintenance. That’s a slippery slope into becoming a zombie account manager.
Jekyll and Hyde Messaging
Another common monster lurking in paid search accounts is Jekyll and Hyde. Here’s what happens:
Let’s say you’re running paid search campaigns for a company that certifies pilots (amongst other certifications). You’ve created a great ad (ad #2) and when someone types in “airplane pilot certification near me” they see the following results:
So far, so good.
Your prospective customer eagerly clicks on your ad and—wait a second—ends up on this page?
Screaming in horror, they hit the back button and completely reconsider their pilot certification plans…
Okay, so their response probably isn’t quite that dramatic, but still, this landing page is hardly a good fit for your potential customer.
Even though your headline says “Learn to fly today” (dynamic keyword insertion, perhaps?), nothing about the page confirms to your visitor that they are actually in the right place. The overall messaging is all wrong.
Guess what? You’ve just pulled a Jekyll and Hyde on your audience.
This example might be a bit more extreme than what you see in your own campaigns, but if you’re sending traffic to your home page or a one-size-fits-all landing page (or even a poorly designed landing page), you’ve just created an advertising horror story for your potential customers.
To avoid this outcome, you need to create specific landing pages that match the search intent of your audience and messaging of your ads. In other words, if you don’t want to unleash Hyde on your unsuspecting potential customers, you need to take the time to create specific landing pages that match the search intent of your audience.
Ideally, you should have a landing page for each group of closely-related keywords, but if that isn’t feasible, you should at least have a landing page for every marketing campaign. Otherwise, your marketing efforts may end the same way as Jekyll and Hyde’s tragic tale…
Conclusion
So, will your paid search advertising adventure be a happy ending or a horror story? It all depends on whether or not you are willing to track down and eliminate the monsters hiding in your paid search account.
Whether physical or digital, monster hunting certainly isn’t for the faint of heart. But, now that you have the right tools, you should able to put an end to your paid search nightmare.
Have you run into these paid search monsters in your own account? How did you get rid of them? Are there other monsters you’d add to this list? Let me know in the comments!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Rangizzz/DepositPhotos.com Monster images and mock landing page by Aden Andrus of Disruptive Advertising. Used with permission.
Screen capture taken October 2016.
Google’s Halloween doodle arrived a day early this morning – giving trick-or-treaters extra time to beat Google’s Magic Cat Academy game that now resides on the homepage.
Players are instructed to draw simple shapes on the screen to scare away ghosts creeping toward Momo, the cat-magician casting spells at the center of the game.
According to the Google Doodle Blog, the development of the game involved four different teams – art, engineering, production, and an “extra help” group that produced the music. Players navigate through five different levels of Magic Cat Academy – all set in a school environment – racing against time to swipe away ghosts headed toward Momo.
Google says it started with numerous ideas of elaborate symbols to draw, but in the end, decided a “short game against the clock” was a better option.
“Plans like the ‘Eiffel Tower spell’ were abandoned, and similarly, gag spells didn’t make the cut,” says Google, “Regardless, we loved the process of dreaming up the possibilities.” The Doodle team shared the following early mock-up of the game:
So far, I’ve only made it to level three – but, I’m not much of gamer, so my results are not the best measure of the game’s difficulty. At the end of the game, players are given the option to share it via social channels or email, and the search icon leads to results for a “Halloween” query.
Google says the game was inspired by an actual cat named Momo who belongs to Doodler Juliana Chen. You can read more about early versions of the game and see a picture of the actual cat behind Magic Cat Academy at: Google’s Halloween 2016 Doodle.
About The Author
Amy Gesenhues is Third Door Media's General Assignment Reporter, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land and Marketing Land. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including
There’s always a thousand and one things to attend to. And when it comes to SEO, make that a thousand and one.
Of course, don’t forget that’s without keeping on top of the subject matter and learning all the new techniques and updates. SEO can be complex; it seems like every day there is some new SEO strategy to be learned and 100 more articles to read.
It can be overwhelming and often, force it to the back burner. I know so many business owners who have found it can be too time-consuming to get enough of the skills and knowledge to dive in and optimize for SEO on their sites.
That’s where systems come into play. And systems run better when they’re automated.
The good news?
There are plenty of tools out there that can help you dramatically improve your SEO while saving you time and energy by automating the process. The problem for many is trying to figure out which of those tools are going to let you work smarter and get great results.
Here, you’ll find a number of incredible SEO tools that we’ve used in our business and have helped us create a system to improve our rankings.
Keyword Research
SEMRush – From $69.95/mo and up
Keyword research is at the heart of any successful SEO campaign. If you don’t know which keywords are the best for you to target, then chances are, you’re going to be in trouble before you even get started.
That’s where SEMRush becomes a great tool. As a tool for keyword research, it offers a number of options that will let you find the best keywords for both paid and organic campaigns, find keyword matches as well as related keywords, and highlight those long tail keywords that can often be ignored.
SEMRush also has a “keyword difficulty” tool that is specifically designed to highlight those keywords that have less competition, and alternative options for keywords that are notoriously difficult to rank.
Alternative tool: For a free option, it never hurts to turn to Google’s Keyword Planner. While it won’t give you the in-depth reports and information that SEMRush does, if you’re looking for a quick and easy tool that can help with basic keyword research, this works.
Ranking Analysis
Authority Labs – From $99/mo and up
Rank tracking can get complicated; it’s something that you do want to pay attention to but the biggest problem is that keeping track of rankings can be incredibly time-consuming.
The good thing is there is a tool that makes it very simple: Authority Labs. With Authority Labs they offer a very easy to use and reliable tool to get the job done automatically. That means you get all of your daily tracking results in one report. This is going to allow you to be able to pivot quickly and see how your campaigns are doing.
Another big benefit of Authority Labs is it’s really developed for Local SEO as well. It also has options to track results based on zip codes and includes Google+ rankings as well.
Alternative Tool:Google Search Console has replaced what the old Google Webmasters Tools was and offers a suite of options for SEO for free. Use the Search Analytics tool to find out where your websites are ranking.
Content Intel
MozBar – Free
When it comes to search engine optimization, it’s not enough to just look at your own sites; it’s also important to pay attention to what your competitors are doing as well. This is why so many consider MozBar to be such a valuable tool.
Quick and easy to use, MozBar is a Google Chrome plugin that will give you instant and accurate information on a number of key metrics of any website you’re on. While the free version will work well enough for many, if you’re looking to upgrade your intel with the best information out there, MozBar Pro starts at $99/mo.
MozBar has a bunch of features that will help you improve your own SEO by collecting important intel. Some of the most important include social metric tracking, custom searches, data export and on page highlighting to check specific types of links.
Alternative Tool: For quite a few SEO experts, SpyFu is up there as one of the best competitor intel tools out there. Use it to track competitor’s keywords, which can help improve your own strategy. Pricing starts from $79/mo.
Content Optimization
Yoast – Free
One of the biggest ways to immediately improve your own rankings and see some small SEO wins is to optimize your content. Most people don’t realize that they are missing some opportunities on their home pages and within blog posts.
One amazing tool to help change that is Yoast. This is a free WordPress plugin that is the go-to tool for SEO on blogs and other sites. In fact, it is the #1 top ranked SEO WordPress plugin, so it’s pretty clear it works.
Once installed, Yoast is incredibly easy to use. It allows you to pick a keyword for each page, create a meta tag, and it monitors the content itself to let you know of any potential problems and opportunities to improve.
Alternative Tool: Another good tool to use to monitor content is Seobility, which bills itself as a site auditor. What’s really helpful is it digs deep into your site and can highlight links that are useful but have been buried and help you rank them better.
Link Building
BuzzStream – From $24/mo and up
One component of SEO that is very important is link building. There are a number of ways to approach link building. Unfortunately, many brands ( especially small businesses) just don’t have the time or the human resources to devote to it productively.
That’s where a tool like BuzzStream can make the process feel almost automated, saving you and your time a lot of time and effort. BuzzStream was built to let you easily find and connect with influencers to create relationships with people and brands that will get your site placed on quality sites.
Once you’ve got BuzzStream up and running, you’ll find it’s where you can do all your outreach and potential link building in one place. Use it to make lists, contact influencers, and keep track of projects all at the same time.
Alternative Tool: A lot of sites run into issues with broken links when trying to improve their SEO. LinkMiner can help solve that. This tool is a free Chrome extension that highlights broken links so they can be fixed.
Backlink Analysis
Ahrefs – From $99/mo and up
Getting high-quality backlinks is an essential building block of good search engine optimization. In fact, a number of SEO experts cite that when it comes to getting high rankings, it’s important to have at least a few high-quality backlinks pointing back to your site.
One of the best tools out on the marketing for backlink analysis is Ahrefs. It has two big benefits going for it: first, the site has an index of over 12 trillion links, and second, it is incredibly easy to use for such a powerful tool.
Their reports let you see a number of details on any backlink including the anchor terms that are being used for it, it’s ranking, referring pages, the content that it is being linked to, and how strong the backlinks are. In addition, they have an alert system that will notify you if you’ve gained or lost a backlink on your own site.
Alternative Tool:Open Site Explorer is an alternative tool that can be used as well and is part of the Moz Pro bundle of SEO tools. It helps you find backlink opportunities, discover any potentially damaging links, and researches backlinks, too.
Outreach
Ninja Outreach – From $49/mo and up
Outreach has always been an important piece of any SEO improvement strategy, but over the past few years, it’s been a much bigger part for many successful brands. Much of that has to do with influencer marketing.
Ninja Outreach is a tool that was specifically created exactly for this situation. It helps brands find the biggest influencers in their particular niche or market and then connect with them directly.
What makes Ninja Outreach special is that it provides a treasure trove of information on influencers in one place. You can find links to content they have written, social media shares, and SEO metrics. This data lets you see who can really give your brand a boost.
Alternative Tool: Are you tired of wasting hours scanning the web for link building possibilities? If so, Link Prospector is another great tool. It scours the internet for blogs, guest posts, and resources pages, for new outreach opportunities.
Conclusion
Let’s face it, when it comes to SEO there are a lot of tools out there. Fortunately, these can help really bring your SEO to the next level without having to devote much time and energy to the cause.
As you continue to build your brand, being able to effectively and efficiently improve your search engine rankings and results is going to be a key part of that strategy. That’s why having the right tools to get the job done is so important.
These are just a few of my favorite SEO tools. What about yours?
Image Credits Featured Image:DepositPhotos.com Screenshot by Tony Messer. Taken October 2016.
Social media nurturing has to be a requirement for all businesses. Businesses have turned social media automation into something that seems to resemble broadcast radio by posting large volumes of tweets and updates occurs fast with automation tools. Now imagine every business, regardless of their industry, doing the exact same thing.
Automated postings have inundated social communities to a point that no one is listening anymore.
Unfortunately, businesses have over-used social media automation tools to be the end of their marketing efforts. They are seeking efficient (not necessarily effective) ways of getting their message out as fast and as low cost as possible. Low cost to these businesses includes low to no labor. These quick tactics are not effective and do more harm than good.
The question we have to ask ourselves is how effective is broadcasting your message in bulk? How effective is it to wait for people to come to you? With every business broadcasting to the social communities, how likely is it for someone to listen on the other end? It is more likely people have become numb to the broadcasts.
4 DON’Ts of Social Media Automation
The reliance on social media automation tools can put a business at risk of ruining their social community presence. First, we must recognize social media marketing to be about relationship marketing. If the audience doesn’t recognize there is a real human being behind the business account, they are not likely to stay engaged.
Don’t make auto Direct Messages part of your social media strategy.
Don’t treat scheduled messages as a one size fits all tactic.
Don’t forget to analyze your scheduled messages for results.
Don’t forget to read the articles you’re sharing for quality.
Over-reliance on marketing automation tools will create the opposite effect over time. Consider balance between using marketing automation tools and your time.
Getting Past The Noise
Nurturing your social media activities does not mean you need to drop your social media automation. Rather, nurturing is about augmenting the automation with real relationship marketing.
“Engagement and nurturing go hand in hand. One of the most important factors in being nurturing on Twitter is how well you engage with your followers. Thank everyone who followed you, introduce yourself and let your followers know that you are interested in learning more about who they are and what they do. Respond to all of your messages that are not on auto-pilot,” says Audrey DeSisto, Founder and CEO of Digital Marketing Stream.
There are two simple points to understand when it comes to nurturing your social media marketing activities.
Pick one quality post and nurture that post for one week and only one week. This one post will be more effective than 10 broadcasts from social automation.
Nurturing is about bringing people in your conversations. Waiting for someone to maybe like or comment on your post is not going to do the trick. The difference is active social media marketing versus passive social media marketing.
The nurturing process is about spending 15 minutes or less each day. Imagine putting on a reporter hat on and interviewing those who you have selected to bring into your conversation. You are soliciting for their help, opinion, knowledge, experience, and expertise. You’ll see how much people would like to share their thoughts. This process does need you to keep asking questions to keep the conversation alive.
Your Social Nurturing Activities
“Nurturing begins when you meet socially, just as if you are meeting someone personally. When you have made a connection, and the connection has been supportive, thank them with a tweet. Check your notifications often for connections asking for a Retweet, it is very easy to miss important messages from fans.” added Audrey DeSisto for your Twitter relationship nurturing activities.
The list of activities to nurture your social media marketing is not that long and completed in 15 minutes. The activities below are best suited for LinkedIn. The concepts are similar in other social communities:
Select a post you would like to nurture on a Monday.
Add a comment to your post followed by a question and tag three people in your connected network.
Tagging means you are going to add their First and Last name to the post. In LinkedIn, as you type a name, the people in your network will appear in a pop-up menu for easy selection.
The people you have tagged will receive an email telling them to visit your post to include their comments.
Come back to your nurtured post in 24 hours.
If no one has responded, don’t give up. Add another comment and tag three different people.
If you received a response, Like that person’s response and comment about what they said to keep the conversation going.
In your next comment add three more people.
You can like your own comments and your post to give it added exposure.
The more activity on this post they more likely that others will see the post and join the conversation.
Does it help to know your network? Yes. Start with people you know will engage with you. Later start tagging people who have a high volume of connections. Each time others comment on your post, their entire network sees their activity. This means they see your post too. This is how viral marketing gets going.
Depending upon the success of a post you may decide to sponsor the post for even more exposure. Planning this up front will be helpful since you need to start this type of conversation from your company page.
In LinkedIn, you may wish to start a post and nurture the conversation in the Pulse Post section. This opens the conversation up to the entire LinkedIn network. In Pulse Posts other people can see your posts without a connection to you. Since the Pulse Posts are open to the public, Google will see your activity, too. This improves your chances of showing in search results.
Points About Twitter Nurturing
Audrey DeSisto provides some final thoughts on this subject. “The best Twitter practice is to grow your account organically. Everyone has visibility to profile follower lists, and many profiles like to copy followers who are like-minded. Growing an account organically, nurturing it, and getting to know your followers will prove to be much more rewarding. There are many Twitter accounts with a large follow with no likes, retweets or engagement. That is a sign the profile built a follow, set up an auto post schedule for a year and moved on. Set up a list called auto-pilot and add them!“
Social Relationships Take Time
Nurturing your social media activities is helpful to present your knowledge and authority on a subject to your network. I would recommend visiting the profiles of those who have commented on your posts. You can then Like their activities along with commenting on one of their posts without solicitation by them.
You are now showing respect for their efforts and your relationship marketing is well underway. This has a much better possibility to become real revenue generating business!
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: AdWords Partners bug, AMP upsets publishers & SEO power appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
