All posts in search engine marketing

When speaking to small business owners, I often find myself being told that SEO isn’t right for them. Unsurprisingly, I rarely agree. So I thought I’d write about the five most common reasons people give for not adopting an SEO strategy and outline why I think they’re wrong.

Reason one:  I’m just a small, local business

There’s a common misconception that SEO will only benefit companies that are already operating on a national or even international scale. Many small businesses only want to attract customers in their local area. Casting a wider net would be a wasted investment as the firm can’t cater for a non-local customer base.

Why you’re wrong

From an SEO perspective, it’s actually much more effective to target geo-specific keyword phrases. Geo-targeting will help attract visitors in your own local area when you optimise your website for search queries with a geographic preference, such as ‘Cheshire chimney sweep’.

 

I have been working as a full time SEO Exec for just about a year now and a few things have become apparent in that time, most notably that SEOs love tools and are always on the lookout for that elusive competitive advantage to give them a ranking edge. So it strikes me as odd that every agency already has access to a free tool that will (amongst other things) get them high quality links, improve their keyword research, increase their PPC CTRs and conversion rates and keep their clients happy and informed. But they very rarely use it to its full potential.

There are often too many people in the search marketing and social media industry who proclaim themselves ‘experts’, but can any of us really justify the title?

What is an expert?
Image credit: Flickr

Mashable noticed that there were 15,740 social media experts on Twitter and this was back in 2009.  In fact, with the prevalence of blogs and Twitter, it can be hard to distinguish between the writers with something useful to say and those simply filling space.

As we all wind down for the Christmas week, I thought I’d revisit some of the best comments left on my guest blog posts over the year…

Christmas Penguin
Image credit: Flickr

Regular readers of my Twitter feed will know that I am a regular guest blogger, often appearing on websites such as Search Engine Watch, Econsultancy and Search Engine Land, as well as writing here on the SEOptimise blog.

Some of the responses to posts I write are extremely knowledgeable and often provoke informed debate.

This is a guest post from Kelvin Newman at Site Visibility.

I’m starting to feel a bit sorry for Yahoo, not only are they seen by most people as a bit of a joke, largely the stick is unwarranted. They’ve got some great little products and services, two of which I use to this great little way of keeping tracking of easy social media interaction opportunities.

The main service is Yahoo Answers, its a hugely popular social site where users ask and answer questions. If you’ve not checked Yahoo Answers recently, go over now and have a look, there will be dozens of people asking questions related to your industry – no matter how obscure or niche it is.

The nightmare though is having to revisit the site everyday to see whether there’s anything new or relevant. Fortunately the main categories have RSS feeds so you could set up the feed in your RSS reader to keep track of the mentions in your chosen category, but your a busy digital marketer, you don’t have time to check through every question asked on the site. That’s where Yahoo Pipes comes in.

Last weekend I finally convinced myself to buy an iPad, after a few weeks of trying to figure out if I actually needed one.

I know I’m not the only one – and there’s probably a lot of people in the search industry who are currently contemplating the same decision, so I’m sure you’ll appreciate a few extra reasons you convince yourself that an iPad is essential!

1) How do you advertise on an iPad?
iPad advertising
This is a question I was asked last week. The right answer may be that they don’t need an iPad app and they don’t need to think about marketing any differently just yet. But as a search marketer you should be aware and able to respond to your client, letting them know how the iPad may potentially change the game.


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.

When it comes to travel SEO, competition is often fierce. Huge authority travel sites, luxury hotels and millions of apartments all fight for attention. Both SEOptimise in the UK and myself in Germany have been working with many SEO clients from the travel sector. Kevin Gibbons has already provided a must read resource on travel SEO back in 2008.

I’d like to list here 10 travel SEO strategies for those who have to compete in this tough niche.

Due to the high competitiveness of this market, travel SEO should be approached in manifold ways.

You can’t always compete with the big guys and age-old leaders in the good old organic results of Google. Thanks to universal search we have plenty of ways to get found. Also travel is about car rentals and flights. You have specialized “vertical” search engines for those.

SMX LondonThe full agenda for SMX London is now almost complete, this was a great conference last year and is expected to be a must-attend event again this year – especially as this is now an advanced conference.

There’s lots of great tracks, but if you’re attending make sure you come and see us on the following panels:
Day 1) Search Ad Quality, Under The Microscope – Richard Fergie
Day 2) Social Media, Search & Reputation Management – Kevin Gibbons

And if you haven’t signed up yet, make sure you use our 15% discount code: KEVING010.

To our American readers not making the journey across the pond, we are also attending SMX Advanced in Seattle this June so we should get to see you there instead! ;)

Creative Commons image by ahisgett

No matter if you like it or not when the old year fades away and the new year arrives most of us think about the past and the future.

  • Was it a successful year?
  • Where did we succeed, where did we fail?
  • Which of the mistakes do we want to overcome next year?

Most people tend to plan for the upcoming year. Plenty like to be very specific about these plans so they come up with new year’s resolutions they want to fulfill. We’re in the SEO industry are not exempt from it.

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