Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google…Review
Posted by in Industry News, Internet Marketing Books on October 15th, 2009
Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah have teamed up to write a new book on internet marketing entitled, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Together they co-founded Hubspot, a leading internet marketing SaaS platform to help businesses manage all their marketing activities online. To me, this information isn’t entirely new - it has been well covered on the Hubspot website and blog. What is new, I believe, is the appearance of the ideas, principles and tactics that Halligan and Shah espouse in one centralized, hard cover book. Just like when David Meerman Scott penned The New Rules of PR and Marketing and changed the online PR game, this book deserves to reach a wide audience of marketers looking to stretch their budget, gain brand awareness, establish thought leadership, future proof their internet marketing activities and ultimately, create the absolute best website in their respective niches.
Halligan and Shah contend that in order to connect with customers online, customers need to be pulled in with remarkable content, decent SEO, regular and meaningful social media engagement, and clear calls to action - instead of relying on old style interruption based, big budget advertising techniques like direct mail, radio, television, trade shows and trade mags.
So far, so good, right?
Their thesis absolutely hangs on the idea that remarkable content must be created. If you can’t write great content, you can’t succeed. This content will drive brand awareness, fulfill searchers needs as they gather information about products and services and most importantly garner increasing visitors and backlinks to your website. According to Shah and Halligan, Google rewards sites with the best, highest quality links (i.e. endorsements to rank) pointing back to the site from other third party sites. This, of course, is not a revelation in the eyes of any SEO guru (nor did they intend it to be a revelation). However, what is important here. if you read between the lines, is that the authors are saying that artificial link building is a waste of time or at least an activity of secondary importance. Thus, if your site isn’t generating links on it’s own by - your site is just not remarkable enough in terms of content, value proposition and positioning to earn a backlink. This is an interesting idea for sure and one I’ve blogged about recently (Content Isn’t King, It’s the Crown Prince).
Thus, without this dedication to content creation, link growth can’t occur. Link growth is the foundational piece for most truly successful websites. This is 100% true. To attract links in 2009, 2010 and beyond - you’ll need truly great tools, features and content on your website. Without links, your site can’t possibly play in any competitive online neighborhood. Plus if you’re building crappy links (or your SEO agency is) you won’t be able to compete against an aggressive inbound marketing strategy pursued by a competitor as laid out by Halligan and Shah. Clearly, this inbound strategy is very future oriented and requires aggressive, dedicated marketers to properly implement.
The book also, I believe, will help to put to bed the ideas that internet marketing is easy and that SEO is trickery. Successful internet marketing is tough, ongoing work that requires new skills, new rules and a dedication to creating the absolute best website in your niche and working tirelessly off=site to engage customers via social media.
If you’ve the read the book, I’d love to hear what you thought, so please leave a comment below. Great comments will be given a “do follow” link.
Offshore SEO Review
Posted by in SEO Providers on August 10th, 2009
One of the most common questions I get asked in the realm of SEO/SEM and PPC is this:
“Is hiring offshore SEO worth it? It seems to much cheaper than domestic providers.”
My answer is a very qualified - yes - certainly, there must be many competent SEO shops offshore. However, I haven’t had the pleasure of working with them. (Full disclaimer: I sell offshore SEO management services and help organizations build and manage competent offshore SEO teams) Almost every offshore SEO firm or service provider I come acrosss appear to missing the mark by a long margin. Their traditional marketing expertise is minimal. Often, it is not clear who is actually doing your work. Little attention is given to actually convert the traffic into sales or leads.
I think this state of affairs is really due to the fact that traffic and rankings are not necessarily factors that will drive success for your business online. Certainly, qualified traffic that is likely to convert is more valuable than mere traffic. In the same vein, rankings for keywords that will drive qualified traffic are more valuable that ranking high for esoteric (or too broad) non-conversion prone keywords.
Herein, in my experience, lies the difference between onshore and offshore SEO. Well managed offshore resources can make a difference in your core rankings. They just need to be pursuing the right tasks and focusing on the correct, most conversion prone keywords. Typically, inferior SEO shops spend the majority of their time in activities that will never drive a business result by chasing things like never ending directory submissions, search engine submission and an obsession with social media. Instead, SEO’s should focus on building the absolute best site in the respective niche possible - or even working closely to improve conversions.
Beyond some very basic SEO strategies that repesent the foundation of search marketing there are few one sized fits all solutions. Thus, when you approach SEO providers the two biggest factors to consider are : 1) understanding where to find qualified traffic and 2) working tirelessly to obtain a piece of that traffic and 3) working tireslessly to convert those visitors when they arrive on your website. If offshore SEO providers don’t address these concers early and often - they are probably not geared towards effective, white hat on-page optimization.
One of My Favorite Google Analytics Views
Posted by in Uncategorized, Wordpress and SEO on June 23rd, 2009
It’s time for another look at the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of analytics and reporting. Today, I wanted to write about the Good - in this instance one particular report that is the product of the marriage of Google AdWords data with the functionality and reporting pizazz of Google Analytics. This great report is the AdWords Keyword Position Report.
Assuming you have correctly linked your AdWords account with your Analytics account you will be able to dive into this treasure trove of information right now.
The Adwords position report tells you what position your ad was in when it was clicked on. You then can segment out this position data by conversion, bounce rate and time on site. The reason this is good should be semi-obvious…being #1 in the paid results is a great thing for click volume but it is not a great quality filter. Discerning, deep diving browsers looking for real answers to their pain points will look for the ads beyond those in the top positions. Thus, this report will help you get some additional mileage out of your PPC campaigns as you begin to do your homework, understand the qualitative differences between clicks and plan an overall PPC strategy for max coverage (impression share) in the position (bid rate) that is most aligned with your business goals.
To get to the Keyword Position report within AdWords, click “Traffic Sources” > “AdWords” > “Keyword Positions”
Good luck!
The Future of SEO and Internet Marketing
Posted by in Search Engine Optimization on June 16th, 2009
Back in 2007, Searchengingeland.com did a great interview with Matt Cutts on the future of SEO. I find it extremely interesting just how high quality Matt’s advice really was. It really hinged on a few things:
- personalized search results
- local search results
- the need for a website that is more focused on a users need than the need of the search engine
Well, not suprising everything discussed has really come to pass. Google is serving up more local results and has rolled out ways to allow for increasing personalization - (the show options update and the old Google promote are just the latest examples).
Interestingly, even though this was a few years ago the advice does not yet seem to have been taken fully to heart.
Local search, personalized search, blended search and a high quality website are all more important than ever. Yet, these are often ignored by many businesses.
One interesting trend that I continue to see is that many small and mid-sized companies are paying thousands of dollars to “SEO” their website while spending next to nothing on new content and content development. This lack of focus on building and bettering their web assets is troubling. It means that search engine optimization services are being sold into a situation in which a long lasting, positive result is not really possible.
Companies need to focus on content creation and optimizing that content as the primary technique for marketing online. Certainly, things can be done to underlying meta data, existing content and site infrastructure that can all be tremendously important - yet, the paramount tasks for any Director of Marketing or Sales that is charged with managing and marketing their website should be pulled in any combination from this list:
- case study/white paper creation
- extensive encyclopedia-like articles on products and services
- frequent blog postings
- frequent on-page press releases and press release syndication
- creation of product videos/testimonial videos, etc.
These steps should help make your site very relevant to both visitors and search engines alike. These simple steps will help future proof your internet marketing efforts.
Some Interesting SEO Blog Posts
Posted by in Wordpress and SEO on June 14th, 2009
Here was an interesting post on the best wordpress permalink structure - interesting that Matt Cutts weighed in as well. The comments section here - where I weighed in - really disproves the central thesis of the blog post. There has been a lot of ink spilled on this topic and this should be the final word for some time to come.
If you’re wondering about SEO and wordpress then you should come around soon to realizing that Wordpress is an incredible, awesome platform for creating blogs and static sites that are quite optimized.
Matt Cutts popped into a few sessions at SMX last week and confused people. Nothing new - it seems that the idea that Google will be adding weight to dofollow links that actually have traffic flowing through them is catching on. Equally interesting is his advice to worry less about about pagerank sculpting and more about getting valuable content further up in the site hierarchy. This seems logical - but on the other hand many of the most content heavy websites (like newspapers, article directories, etc.) have the majority of their current a few clicks deep. So it seems not entirely clear how large, content sites can get pages further up the hierarchy - other than ensuring content pages aren’t too deep.
That is it for this week - we’ll see what next week holds
Content is King? More Like the Crown Prince
Posted by in Content Generation on June 12th, 2009
In the five years that I have been doing internet marketing I often heard, and continue to hear, the phrase that “content is king” when it comes to successful search engine optimization and internet marketing.
I certainly agree that good authoritative, content is vitally important when it comes to generating inbound traffic to your web assets.
However, I would contend that content isn’t truly king. It is more like the crown prince (or princess).. The real holy grail is to get your website in front of steady, natural link growth. Obviously, there are many paths to steady, natural link growth and continuous content generation is just one of these paths.
On one hand, I’ve seen sites create great, one of a kind, heavily trafficked content that generates zero back links. On the other hand, I’ve seen three year old widgets, calculators, quizzes, discussion posts etc. generate steady streams of links across huge periods of time.
I think this idea of steady, natural link growth really transcends the idea of “link bait” - to me, link bait has always seemed more temporal, and fleeting. With this philosophy, you’re creating content that is meant to generate back links. SEO gurus and webmasters spend time thinking about what might grab people’s attention and compel them to link to your site. Of course, this works well for the will it blendpeople and others but for a telecom or pharma player it might be a whole harder to create attractive link bait.
Instead, I think one practical take away here is that those SEOs and webmasters trying to create authoritative, important websites spend the time and money to generate not only great, fresh authoritative content and link bait but also spend time creating the tools, ROI calculators, quizzes, etc. that aren’t easily duplicated and/or that require serious inputs of time and money to create. The differentiator here is that this content has lasting value and is useful to your visitor and is much more likely to create that steady stream of back links needed to be competitive against major brands and major sites that often have hundreds of thousands of indexed pages and backlinks.
Yahoo Penalties: Something is Rotten in Sunnyvale
Posted by in Search Engine Penalty on June 11th, 2009
Yahoo! really manages to mess up on a regular basis. If you’ve ever experienced a Yahoo! penalty - you know something is rotten at the Yahoo! HQ.
But, let’s take a closer look at the Yahoo! penalty box first.
Let’s assume your not trying to buy your way to the top with Yahoo! paid inclusion or utterly waste money on Yahoo! basic submit.
How do you know you are being penalized by Yahoo?
1) you don’t appear on page one (or position#1) when searching for your company name or home page URL.
2) you notice a drastic drop off in Yahoo! traffic - literally on one day, off the next with an occasional steep decline instead
3) no pages from your site indexed by Yahoo! or even worse all of your pages indexed but you receive absolutely no Yahoo! traffic. I’ve seen sites with a hundred thousand pages in the Yahoo! index that receive 20K visitors per day from Google, but manage to get no visitors from Yahoo!.
Ok, lets assume you are getting penalized…
Are you violating Yahoo!’s content quality guidelines - yes, they are nebulous and meaningless but they are worth a quick scan.
If you’re sure you are not being penalized, you are probably wrong. Somehow, some way - Yahoo! is pissed at your site.
If you’re still convinced you can not possibly be violating their terms - go ahead and submit the Yahoo! Search URL Status Review Form.
Otherwise, start cleaning up the site. I’ve seen excessive links on the homepage trigger a Yahoo! penalty. I’ve seen outbound links to other banned Yahoo! sites trigger a penalty. I believe I’ve seen cloaking trigger a penalty and I believe I’ve seen excessive sitewide interlinking trigger it as well. After you have wasted a lot of time guessing and executing various clean ups your are again ready for the Yahoo! Search URL Status Review Form.
At this point, I’ve never heard of someone actually receiving feedback fromYahoo! as a result of submitting the form. (If you’ve received a response from Yahoo! on a penalty inquiry, I’d love to hear from you).
For more reading check out Rand Fishkin on Yahoo! penalties. The bottom line is that Yahoo! is a bad product and is totally unresponsive when it comes to dealing with the Webmasters that have helped build the Yahoo! index. Google is 1000% better when it comes to penalties, cleaning up your site and returning traffic.
Early signs are that Bing is easily outpacing Yahoo! - perhaps Yahoo! going dark isn’t too far in the future.
Social Media is Useless
Posted by in Social Media on June 10th, 2009
Well, maybe not quite.
Amongst the big community and communication sites, I sort of like Twitter and I definitely like Linkedin. I don’t see too much use for myself or my clients on Facebook or Myspace.
Linkedin is a very viable place to build networks, promote your yourself or your business, and stay in touch with colleagues and peers. You can also do some pretty nifty targeted advertising on Linkedin - a very useful channel for channel starved B2B’s looking to burn through some loot.
Twitter is…well, pretty silly - but I’ve still seen some companies leverage it really well like @jetblue. Either way, I’m on the bandwagon. Are you on the bandwagon? If not, why not?
If you’re a social media evangelist (or evangelista?) and believe that social media is more powerful than other internet marketing mediums, I want to hear from you!
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