This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed raise awareness on how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.

Image credit: Flickr

It’s essential that the different elements of your marketing reinforce one another if your budget is going to generate the highest possible returns.

Search marketing, traditional marketing and PR cannot happen in isolation from each other, or you will inevitably end up spending more than you need to on a less-effective campaign.
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Use Google Analytics custom segments to audit and improve search marketing

Anyone who has ever reviewed the keywords attracting visitors to a site will have seen that brand search terms usually dominate, often accounting for more than 50% of search related visits for well-known brands.

Every site has associated brands, but to paraphrase Morrisey, some brands are biggger than others. For these, isolating brand search is essential if you’re serious about using search to create incremental business i.e. create awareness and sales from new customers.

It follows that it’s futile to try to review and improve search engine marketing without taking brand phrases into account, but that’s the default for the less than savvy. For marketers, reviewing their analytics it’s easy to understand since the analytics tool doesn’t readily isolate brand and non-brand phrases.

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This list is not meant for the average small business owner. These 46 CRO/Conversion Rate Optimization resources require web design, SEO and social media experts to implement, use or even understand them.

How do you find out whether your web designer, SEO or social media consultant or company has enough expertise to deal with them?

• In case your web designer thinks web design is about fancy graphics, flashy animations and cool homepages s/he isn’t an expert.
• In case your SEO consultant speaks about meta tags, PageRank and keyword density all the time s/he isn’t an expert.
• In case your social media expert advises you to gain more Twitter followers using an autopilot tool, to submit your site to hundreds of social media sites or has no flagship blog s/he isn’t an expert either.

These people won’t be able to make proper use of these resources.

In contrast highly skilled specialists of all the three industries, web design, SEO and social media speak about conversions and ROI all the time.

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We all love case studies. Who is we? We in the SEO industry, we in social media and online marketing, we business people. Case studies show on real life examples, real websites, projects and campaigns that something works.

Good case studies are more than proof though. They also show you how to market or optimize a site. They show an example of how it actually works.

Case studies combine both, the insight of a how to articles and the business proof of a finished campaign. They shows the results from experience.

These are some of the reasons why I’ve collected a comprehensive list of 30 SEO, social media & marketing case studies that prove the ROI of it All.

Yes, the ROI in SEO, social media and other kinds of online marketing is still too often fuzzy. We want success stories, numbers and explanations so that we can reenact the steps you need to succeed. So here they are, enjoy:

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Google have announced this week at SES New York the introduction of AdWords Search Funnels. The conversion attribution problem has been heavily discussed during the last year and this led me to think of a quote which was on Twitter a while ago, (I think it was from Chris Lake – correct me if I’m wrong though): “Conversion Attribution is Like Selling Xabi Alonso & Hoping for the Same Result”.

Image credit: Flickr

Even if you don’t know anything about football, hopefully this will still make some sort of sense – but being a big Liverpool fan this quote really struck home with me as an excellent analogy. For those who don’t know, last season Xabi Alonso often provided the assist before an assist leading towards a goal. So if you’re looking at stats on goals scored and direct assists it may be difficult to understand the true value Alonso added to the team.
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Google Trends for Tumblr, Digg and StumbleUpon

Last year I made about 30 predictions on Web trends for 2009. Many of them came true, others, of course, did not. Still even in those cases the ideas from the Web trends list were useful. Even those trends that disappeared from the radar or haven’t got main stream yet should be watched closely as they might pop up again sooner or later.

Around 5 years ago I read the book Who Moved my Cheese. It’s a very simple, short story about the different methods of dealing with change. I’ve recently re-read this, (it only takes about an hour so I’d definitely recommend reading if you haven’t already) – but I realised that there’s a lot which can be applied to day-to-day life in search marketing.

Image Credit: Flickr

They say an internet year is the equalivent to 7 normal years, I’m sure a search engine marketing year may be more! So basically if you don’t like change – you’re probably in the wrong job! Continue Reading »

If you’re about to embark on an online marketing campaign, have you actually thought about what you want to achieve?

Last week, I was reading Patricio Robles’ excellent article 10 reasons people criticise SEO. Among the many comments left on the post was one suggesting that many clients don’t really know what it is they want to achieve from search engine optimisation before they start.

I think this is surprisingly true. At SEOptimise, we always encourage our clients to outline what they would consider to be success, to make sure we’re targeting our efforts. Not everyone’s goal is a straightforward commercial one.

Surprisingly often, they don’t really know and SEO is now just one more aspect of online marketing. Many organisations dutifully sign up and spend a great deal of cash of an array of web-based promotional efforts without a clear picture of what they want to achieve.

Considering how easy it is to analyse and measure online marketing success, this is an inexplicable waste of money.

More sales

This is the most obvious reason for any online marketing effort – to increase traffic to a commercial website in order to increase sales; to boost a brand’s reputation and mindshare in order to increase sales; and to encourage customers to return and make further purchases.

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To be or not to be

A recent statistic has opened my eyes. While I still somehow assumed to be an early adopter of social media in its still early days a Forrester Research study has shown that 80% of US Internet users use social media in one or more ways. While most of them are lurkers which is no surprise a large amount of the people actually contribute in an active manner. Social media in Europe is not as popular yet but the trend is clear.

While pondering the results it dawned on me that most of the businesses I encounter are far behind.
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Nowadays lowering bounce rates and increasing conversion rates are two or rather one (as both are closely tied together) of the main tasks that modern SEO is about.

Image credit: Sean Dreilinger

It’s obvious: Rankings and traffic do not mean much when the website visitors bounce off and you fail to convert them to buyers, subscribers or whatever you desire your visitors to do for you. Some industry insiders even suspect bounce rate to be a ranking factor itself already.
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