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Posted on October 15, 2009
The Progression From Search to Social Media Marketing
BY PETE HALL
**This article outlines a personal experience with a client, leading them from search marketing success into social media and word of mouth marketing. To respect their privacy, I will only refer to them as 'The Client'.**
Five years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising were only beginning to take shape as legitimate lead generation and marketing strategies. At the time, SEO and PPC were cutting edge marketing strategies - many brands and companies had heard the buzz surrounding SEO and PPC, but were unable to pinpoint strategy or purpose behind it.
Today, SEO and PPC have evolved into common marketing strategies for brands to place their marketing budget. Companies understand the huge opportunities that exist within search marketing for return on investment. Social media, conversely, exists much like SEO and PPC did five years ago. Companies and brands are keen to explore the social media space, but are often unable to define social media marketing success or execute a defined strategy.
Within our niche in the industry, we execute both search marketing and social media marketing for clients. As such, there exists a unique opportunity to take learnings and success from search marketing efforts and transition into the social media space. This is what happened with an opportunistic client of ours.
We were initially hired to restructure The Client's AdWords account and increase conversion volume. They had managed their PPC efforts internally, and reached out to us to take their account to the next level. After much research and testing, we were able to determine what converted within their account - what calls to action best resonated with users, what keywords and themes were most effective, and what landing page variations were most conducive to converting. We branched out their PPC efforts into Yahoo! and Bing with continued success. Eventually, The Client began asking, "what next?" - their PPC accounts were converting in record numbers at the lowest cost per conversion yet.
Moving forward, we thoroughly researched The Client and their presence online and saw a huge opportunity for them to improve their organic search rankings. Therefore, our next step in their overall strategy was an SEO overhaul. We were able to construct an SEO blueprint based upon their PCC successes and laid out a clear strategy with actionable goals. This SEO strategy is still being executed, but we have already seen important gains in organic search results for several search terms. Recently, The Client again asked "what next?" with their sights set on entering into the space of social media.
The next phase in the overall strategy for The Client was taking the business intelligence learned from successful PPC and SEO implementation and applying it into the space of social media. Sometimes, depending on what industry you are looking to engage with, simply setting up a Facebook page or a Twitter handle is not a priority for a client. After all, you cannot fit a square peg into a round hole. With The Client being in a niche industry, there simply was not enough chatter or interest on Facebook or Twitter to warrant developing a strategy. Therefore, we researched alternative, more relevant opportunities in the social media space for The Client to engage with.
After meeting with key stakeholders and discussing goals, we were able to conclude that the next logical step was for The Client to begin a blog. A blog strategy presented the best opportunity to base conversation in the social media space around learnings from search marketing. Why? Because through search marketing, we are able to pinpoint what inspires potential customers to engage with the company. The Client will be able to create engaging conversations based around these learnings through a blog. They will be able to reach their target audience, reach industry influencers who act as information-hungry word of mouth propellers, as well as comment on other niche blogs, message boards and forums.
As it was with search marketing five years ago, social media marketing today poses a conundrum for brands - they realize that they should probably participate in the space, but are unclear how to enter in and achieve success. For a company like The Client, calculated steps and a logical progression from search engine marketing to social media marketing proved to be the best strategy. The calls to action that have worked best through SEO and PPC now act as a road map for content creation we know will be relevant to prospects, customers and influencers in the social media space.
Has anyone else had success transitioning learnings from search engine marketing into social media? Have any questions or comments? Leave them here!
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Posted on November 27, 2006
Using Sitemaps to Your Advantage
BY JASON CORMIER
As a search engine marketer, one of the most important aspects of my job is getting clients exposure on the web. There are literally hundreds of ways to accomplish this, as anyone who has done SEM research will tell you. Facing such an abundance of information can be daunting, and it can also make formulating a plan of attack much more challenging. So how exactly should one begin their SEM campaign? My research has shown me that one of the quickest, and by far the most beneficial, ways to start a campaign is by building a sitemap.
During their never-ending pursuit to index the world, Google began experimenting with sitemaps in June of 2005. For those of you that don't know, a sitemap is an XML documents that contains a list of all pages hosted on a website. In addition, the sitemap also details when pages were last updated, and how important a particular page is in relation to other pages on your site. This, if you haven't figured it out already, is huge when it comes to getting your web site indexed.
Typically search engines discover web pages by sending out spiders that follow links, this is also known as crawling the web. The spider then reports back to the search engine all the pages that it has found, which are then indexed. This method, while it works, is inefficient. Who is to say that every page on the Internet has an inbound link with which the spider can discover them by? Google understood this pitfall, and began working on a better way to index the web. Thus the sitemap was born. The thought is this, why go out and actively find pages to index when you can have those pages come to you? Although this requires a little more effort by the webmaster, it also allows the webmaster to indicate exactly what pages he or she wants indexed, and how often those pages should be re-crawled for updated content.
For a webmaster, the benefits of building a sitemap are tremendous. But how exactly does one create a sitemap? There are two ways this can be accomplished. The first, and often most complete way, is to run a script in the root of your web directory that reads every file therein. While this method allows for a complete listing of pages, providing you have a website with static content, it requires the ability to run a script on the hosting server, which isn't a possibility for everyone. The second method, which is more commonly used, is to have a third party website crawl your site and create a sitemap for you. If all the pages on your site are linked well to one another (use caution with DHTML or javascript links), then this method will work just as well. If the inter-linking of the website is not set up well, then having a third party website crawl your site will be subject to the same pitfalls that a search engine would experience, as previously discussed. Below are three resources that will help you to create your sitemap.
Script based solution: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
Website based solution: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
Other solutions: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
Alright, so now you've created a sitemap, or at least know how to. The next step is to submit your sitemap to the search engines. Up until about two weeks ago Google was the only search engine that worked with sitemaps. Fortunately both Yahoo and MSN have recently followed suit, and now you can submit that same sitemap to all the major search engines. This, again, is great news for you as a webmaster. Before the end-user is able to find your website, the search engine must know that you exist, and building/submitting your sitemap is by far the quickest way accomplish that. Once you are indexed, the next step is to get your site decently ranked in the search engines, but lets save that for another post.
For more information on building your sitemap and the various protocols you will need to follow, check out www.sitemaps.org. This site is co-run by Google, MSN, and Yahoo (I know, its mind boggling). There you can find up to date information on the sitemap protocol and the answers to many frequently asked question regarding sitemaps.
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Posted on August 8, 2006
Search Engine User Research
BY JASON CORMIER
I just came across a report released by iProspect, with Jupiter Research's help, about three months ago regarding important user behavior stats on people using search engines. The leading summary points were as follows.
Of over 2,300 people surveyed:
1. 62% of search engine users click on first page results, and a total of 90% click on results within the first three pages.
2. 82% begin a new search query using the same search engine if they don't find what they are looking for with the first search term used
3. 41% of users who continue their search after not finding what they were looking for will change their search term and/or search engine if they don't find favorable results on the first page.
4. Now here is the BIG ONE: 36% believe that company websites that are ranked in the top search results are at the top because they are leaders in that field.
Point number 4 is interesting indeed, suggesting that over a third of the population believes that search engines somehow determine who are industry leaders - and then rank them accordingly. Wow. Any companies out there willing to take advantage of this proven perception? No wonder SEO services continue to be a larger part of marketing budgets across the board.
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