Finger on the Pulse

Blue Fountain Media has received an advanced copy of Econsultancy & SEMPO’s forthcoming State of Search Engine Marketing Report 2010. The report is based on a world-wide survey of over 1,500 advertisers (companies) and advertising agencies across a wide range of business sectors.

SEO’s Double Digit Growth

The SEO/SEM industry grew 8% to $14.6 Billion in 2009. This year things are expected to be even better as the industry will grow by 14% to $16.6 Billion. But where’s all that money coming from?

How SEO Killed the Newspaper

Companies and agencies are increasing SEO, SEM, and Social Media Marketing budgets at the expense of other advertising spending. This is particularly true of print advertising like newspapers and magazines.

Of the companies re-allocating budgets to search engine marketing, around half (49%) are moving it from print advertising. More than a third (36%) are shifting money from direct mail, and almost a quarter are moving budgets from conferences and exhibitions (24%) and web display advertising (23%).

Agencies see the print advertising sector even more heavily hit, with 69% of supply-side respondents noticing a shift of budget from newspapers and magazines into search engine marketing.

Perhaps the single biggest loser in the move away from print is the phone book industry. SEMPO’s survey found 85% of agencies see local search as a significant trend.

Why bother with newspapers or The Yellow Pages when you could just sign up for a free listing on Google Maps or do a cool Mayor offer on Foursquare?

What you might not know is that everyone in the marketing department, from analysts and copywriters to project managers and the department directory, started out as an intern. We’re actively hiring interns for 2010.

Are you ready?

We’re looking for enough skills to contribute from day one, plus the potential to join our team full-time. We have some exciting new projects coming up in 2010, and we’re getting ready to take them on.

If you’re interested, you should have all of the following skills and characteristics:

• An interest in online media and online marketing.
• A blog, Twitter, podcast, Youtube channel—something that shows that you’re active on the Internet.
• Good writing skills (you should be able to inform, convince—and effortlessly sprinkle your prose with high-value keywords).

You should also be able to do at least one of the following:

• Code in HTML.
• Code in PHP.
• Design in Photoshop.
• Create the kind of attention-grabbing content that finds its way to the homepage of Digg, Reddit, and Delicious.

The internship starts in January. Internships typically last for six months, after which they generally lead to a full-time offer. After the first few weeks, we’ll help you specialize in one of the major components of SEO: on-site analysis, link-building, social media, or copywriting. The compensation for this internship is $500 per month, with frequent raises for interns who demonstrate skills.

To apply, send a cover letter, resume, and a writing sample (e.g. a blog post, school essay—anything over 500 words) to careers@bluefountainmedia.com.

At the SMX East Ad Agencies discussion, a few of the panelists have discussed the problems they run into when they scale up SEO, particularly as part of a large company or a complex marketing plan.

Blue Fountain Media has approached the same problem—we work with large, Fortune 500 companies; we work alongside PR companies and ad agencies; and we often work with websites that use legacy software, and companies that face strict regulatory issues. Here’s what we’ve learned about integrating search engine optimization into larger campaigns.

1. Find out what the broader goals are: if the PR company is rebranding a client as a premium provider, it’s a good idea for us to avoid targeting keywords that start with “cheap”. At the same time, it’s good to find out how their marketing materials describe the company. If they describe themselves as “The only company in the X industry that offers unconditional full refunds,” you can guess that customers who don’t remember the name may remember the pitch—and target keywords accordingly.
2. Learn who to communicate with: there’s nothing worse than realizing that a week-long email thread could have been resolved with a five-minute phone call to the right person. At Blue Fountain Media, we go to the source: if we’re doing something that involves media outreach, we’ll talk to the PR people first; if we need to edit a client’s website, we’ll work with the IT team to do it as efficiently as possible.
3. Get ready to share credit—in both directions: The PR team got them into the top industry trade magazine. The SEO team made sure that mention came with a link. Obviously, the PR team scored a major hit—but the SEO team helped get even more value out of it.

   We’ve gotten the best results when we measure what actions we’ve taken, and what results those actions usually get. When a PR company, an SEO firm, and an internal IT team work together, they can compound the results—if something goes wrong, keeping close track of the actions taken lets you pinpoint what didn’t work.

4. Share insight: SEO and social media marketing simply can’t be matched when it comes to finding data. It’s impossible to get so much high-quality information—on what customers are looking for, what convinces them to buy, what prices and discounts they respond to.

   But we’re happy to share. If an SEO campaign reveals that customers love “25% off your first two purchases!” and don’t care for “half off your second purchase!” that’s information that can be used in TV ads, in-store displays, and other forms of traditional marketing.

   At the same time, PR agencies can give us good people to contact, and general advertising agencies often come up with great creative ideas that we can incorporate into search and social interaction.

At Blue Fountain Media, we don’t operate in a vacuum. And we don’t want to! We’re web design and search engine marketing experts, and we’re happy to work alongside experts in other fields. The most common result is that we all provide a better service to the client.

1. Keep your enemies closer, but keep your friends close too.

When you start an SEO campaign, the focus is usually on competitor research: what are your competitors optimizing for, where are they getting links, and how can you do a better job at it than them? But through Google Analytics you can also see what sites you are already getting traffic from. Well, a lot of the time, the users that come in through those referring sites ended up there because of a previous search query. Why is the referrer ranking, and what can you do to get your site on that SERP too?

2.  Exploring site search

A lot of websites have a search bar that allow you to search through the content of the site. This is a nice safety feature, but once a user is on your site, you have control over their experience, so they shouldn’t have to: important information should be accessible through site navigation. Luckily, you can track popular internal search terms with Google Analytics. If a lot of users are searching for the same pieces of content, it’s probably a good idea to investigate how easy it is to navigate to them.

3. Using advanced segments in Google Analytics data

There is a lot of data in Google Analytics, but the default reports are not always easy to sort through. Sometimes you want to look at a the performance of a whole group of keywords, without the distraction of extraneous data; or you want to look at the sources, conversion rates and actions of only the “highly-engaged users” who visit more than three pages. Advanced Segments allow you to view custom sets of data in a single report.

• Decide what to target: If you don’t have a big budget and an experienced search marketing team, don’t try to compete with someone who does. You should try to target the name of your business, and the names of any of your principal employees. You can also rank well for extremely local, extremely specific keywords. You probably won’t get “New York Auto Repair,” but you might get “Sunset Park Ford parts.”

• Create Useful Content: You know your business better than your customers: so show them. Write a section on your site that includes your main targeted keyword in the title, and includes related keywords in section titles. Don’t overdo it: read your page out loud and see if it sounds natural.

• Link effectively within the site: Once you have something worth reading on your site—a useful description of how your business works, a history of your company showcasing your experience, an impressive biographical page about the founder—you can start linking within the pages.

Your founder bio can link to your company page (and vice versa). Your company page can link to specific services pages in context, to give readers more information.

• Promote, but just a little bit: you don’t need to work full-time to promote your website. But you can link to your company page through your social media profiles, and you can contribute to online news sources that are relevant to your business. This gets your name in front of people who could be interested in your business—and it shows search engines that relevant sites are willing to link to you (and webmasters don’t mind the free content!)

• Get active, locally: Add your physical address to the footer of your site, and add your business to location-based sites like Yelp. You should also add yourself to local search listings on the main search engines.

• Test results—patiently: You won’t get instant results, and you shouldn’t expect to. But once you’ve created your content and gotten a few links, wait a few weeks and check your rankings. You should be ranking well for your brand name; you’ll probably be near the top for employee names, behind LinkedIn and Facebook. If you don’t rank well for local searches for your product or service, look at who outranks you, and find out what they’re doing differently: more links? More targeted content? A more popular site in general? If you can match their advantages, do it—if not, get more specific about where you are and what you do. Ranking well locally is better than ranking decently on broader queries. Who is more likely to be your next customer: the one who searches for your products in your city, or the one who searches for your product in your exact neighborhood?

The 3-day conference revolves around the latest techniques and news in search engine marketing. It is one of many world-class conferences that our team members attend to be on the cutting edge of the online marketing industry.

We will be publishing short posts from the conference with tips that can be implemented immediately for your online business.

(photo source: Jerry Luk)

Here are some of the techniques they use—the internal linking structure, the user guidelines, and the content aggregation methods they use to rank well even if they don’t know what they’ll rank for.

• Yelp.com’s SEO has quite a pedigree: they’re one of SEOMoz’s clients. There’s a detailed (but now obsolete) description of the SEO tricks Yelp used to optimize their site:

• Yelp’s SEO: Part I

• Yelp’s SEO: Part II

Essentially, what Yelp does is combine a ‘directory’-style front page (with hierarchical information easily accessible to search engines) with fresh content that entices users (and means that frequently-updated pages get indexed). At the same time, Yelp used to aggressively use the nofollow tag, a technique that is not nearly as effective as it used to be.

• LinkedIn.com’s SEO is designed to do one thing and one thing only: make sure they own your name on Google. To do this, they’ve created several alphabetical directories (which search engines can quickly rip through to gather the data they need) and a few subject-specific pages. LinkedIn also brings in links by giving people badges they can post to their sites.

• Ezinearticles’ SEO stands out from the group for a couple reasons: one, the site is not as well known as LinkedIn or Yelp—and yet, you’re almost guaranteed to have encountered it at some point in your life. If Yelp is for places, and LinkedIn is for people, Ezine is for “Misc.”

They use some standard SEO techniques—detailed category views, ‘related-articles’ links to give search engines contextual clues, and a front page full of random articles so something five clicks away from the homepage will still get noticed by search engines. But the most important thing they do is require quality: they edit articles to reject grammatical errors and tone down salesly language, and the result is that you can’t help but write something helpful if you’re using Ezine. They could operate the site as a loophole in search engines’ ranking algorithms, but instead they closed the loophole and created a source of reasonably high-quality information.

As we prepare to launch a very exciting user-generated site (with a great chance to change the industry and a decent chance to change the world), we’re doing everything we can to learn how other user-generated sites succeed.

(source: Jason Nicholls)

Many companies are at a point where their brand identity in an on-line environment is static in an era of chaos. Things that used to work now don’t. Traditional branding has always been built on out-branding the competition in an ever-increasing advertising clutter-filled environment, media fragmentation, and the seemingly limitless choices that are offered in just about every product category.

Why do some companies “get it” and some are being left behind in the dust? Why are Nike, JetBlue, and Zappos the poster-children for companies that “get it”, and how are they achieving their social media success? Why is transparency so important? Will these things have a positive ROI and how do you measure it?

We have to remember that social media is just one piece of the puzzle and a component of branding. The following are things you have to remember when trying to build a strong brand interactively:

Listen:

I’ve mentioned numerous times that as a brand you have to actively listen. Create ego-centric searches on as many social media platforms as you can—Twitter, Facebook, Google Blogsearch, Friendfeed, Technorati. Read blogs and people’s comments—understand what people are saying, and always ask yourself why. Why are people saying what they say?

Care:

Ultimately one of the core aspects as a company or brand is that you care about your customers and your own product or service. I know this sounds fundamental, but many companies’ online presence suggest that they just don’t give a damn about either—and they didn’t have to in the past. Customers were forced to rely on brands that gave them bad customer service and they had no say in it. The power of broadcasting bad customer service wasn’t transparent.

Online Real Estate & Interaction:

Wherever there is conversation you have to connect with it—connecting with people is integral, not only as a brand but as a society. Build your brand on:

• Twitter (Word of Mouth on steroids)

• Facebook and/or Myspace (soon becoming obsolete unless you’re a musician)

• Flickr (for photos)

• Youtube (for video)

• StumbleUpon/Digg (for discovering websites and voting on them)

• LinkedIn to connect with your employees and business related individuals

There are other social networks out there like Plaxo, Friendfeed, Bebo, etc., but those depend on your needs versus wants and on the audience or consumer you want to target.

Signing up for these services is just the first step, actively listening and participating is the second step. Participating on a timely manner and correcting situations is the next.

Content:

Content is key! Create new content regularly. Think about it as your interactive voice—you want to have something to say, but don’t be annoying and obnoxious (no one really likes jerks). Create content on you website or blog regularly—at least twice a week (create one if you don’t have one—it also helps your website’s SEO). Create engaging content—company and industry news—and make it personal (people like human emotions, we’re hardwired that way). And if you promise something follow through with it. Many have promised the world to their customers (*AHEM—Cuil*) and don’t follow through 100% of the time. You lose credibility as a brand and trust is hard to get back once you lose it.

Conversation & Community:

Now that you are listening to the conversation, you should participate to stay actively pertinent. Comment on blogs and converse with “Tweeters”—all in a reasonable time-frame (the sooner the better). If you discover bad news or negativity of your brand, try not to be too defensive—be honest, professional, and deal with the situation as best as you can (and always try to go above and beyond what’s expected) .

Also make sure that you are easily “accessible” by the community, since you are so connected. When a customer needs some customer service, don’t shun them! Connect with them!

Also be human—I know this sounds stupid, but people forget (intentionally or unintentionally). These social media platforms are tools to connect—Twitter is a powerful tool to connect, sometimes faster than email and phone communication. Quick response is optimal, but any response is better than no response.

Passion:

Last but not least, have some passion! Passion is one of the most important factors, if not the most important factor as a brand. I’ve briefly touched on this earlier with caring for your customer and product. Sure you have to have a quality product, conversation, avenues, listening skills, but if you’re doing all those things without passion, you may as well not do them at all. Because it will show.

Currently, RAG NY is not running any sort of digital marketing campaign except through it’s brick and mortar stores in NYC. In the month of of July (almost a year after our SEO work stopped) they broke all previous records for traffic from search engines.

We often see record-breaking results from our clients, months after our work is done–this goes to show how important SEO is for any online businesses, especially e-commerce. SEO makes the content of your site more relevant, more attractive, and more easily accessible by search engines and potential customers.

With a dedicated team of specialized individuals that will bring your extraordinary results through constant communication, we are here to help your business succeed.