Every year for the past 4 years the SEOptimise blog has predicted trends within the online marketing industry. In keeping with this tradition, I’ve listed 25 trends that I think we’ll see becoming more and more mainstream in 2013. Considering the rate of change within the online marketing space, most of these listed may not even be new. So, without further ado, here’s my list of online marketing trends for 2013:
As this is my first post on the SEOptimise blog, I wanted to write on a subject that reflects a situation that I find myself in an awful lot. No doubt this is a situation that anyone reading this post will have found themselves in at one time or another.
Whenever we receive an enquiry, whether it’s a phone call or an enquiry form from our website, this person has taken the first steps in contacting us, meaning that they are interested in SEO services. Yes, I am a genius for figuring this part out! The people who enquire will tend to fit into one of two categories; people who know what they want and people who don’t.
I usually get asked this question quite a lot: “I want to advertise on Facebook, how much of a budget would you recommend?” and thought I’d share with you my methodology of how I estimate and recommend budgets to potential clients who have never advertised on Facebook before.
1. Figure out target audience volume
The best thing about Facebook is that it provides you with audience volumes. Therefore, before you calculate estimated budgets, you’ll need to obtain information on the different target audiences such as locations, age, gender, and other interests. Ideally the target audience profiles should be something like this:
Married women who live in the UK and are 40 years or older, who like, ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘Homes Under the Hammer’, ‘Location, Location, Location’, ‘Grand Designs’, ‘John Lewis’, and ‘Ocado’.
Whether you’re decking the halls, or trying to pretend it won’t happen this year, Christmas is fast approaching. For marketers of all kinds, it’s a topic that’s impossible to avoid if you want your content to appear timely and relevant to your readers.
But if you want to cash in on the Christmas rush, you can’t wait until the turkey’s in the oven to start publishing festive content on your website. Not only that, but you need to be equally ready to move quickly once it’s all over, in order to get your website ready for the new year.
A website that’s still Christmassy by January is sadder than an empty tin of Quality Street.
There are lots of articles available on blogger outreach, including our own! However, the challenge is in converting these steps into a scalable process. This is why I’d like to share with you our process and to talk you through some of its benefits and flaws.
As you might have read in a previous post by Rachel we use Buzzstream – among other tools – to perform blogger outreach. Placing content is time consuming and the process sometimes can be complex, especially when you’re tempted to use every tool you hear about or read about on blog posts. But tools alone aren’t enough; from what I have experienced, the key really is to have a well-organised process.
What you will need
Before you start you need to get the right tools. We use the following:
The SEOMoz toolbar – we use this tool to determine a webpage’s/websites’ quality based on page authority, domain authority and trust rank (post penguin, trust rank to me is a very important metric).
Good ol’ Google search – To find relevant websites manually using search operators (use SoloSEO to pull all possible operators with links to the search results. Here’s an example list for the keyword “nappies”)
Sometimes it can seem like the demands of SEO and clickability are fundamentally opposed, but this isn’t true. Your SEO team may want you to use keywords in the header and subheaders, but that doesn’t mean they have to be lengthy lists of keywords. With the right care and attention, your headlines can still be interesting, clickable, and amusing.
So, whether it’s for a blog, press release, or article, here’s what you need to consider:
First, remember that a headline should be brief – this is not the place to target that eight-word long-tail keyword phrase. Stick to the basics and pull out the most important point of your entire article, as this is most likely to engage with the reader.
There’s no reason why you shouldn’t include a short keyword phrase if appropriate, but remember the article needs to be read by people, and not just search bots – so if it looks too forced it’s going to be a huge turn-off for your audience.
Even if you have the best intentions in the world, coming up with a constant stream of new ideas for blog posts can be pretty intimidating. All too soon, the corporate blog lies empty because the company has run out of ideas. Don’t let that happen to you! From company brainstorms to new ways of planning copy, we are going to provide you with some great tips on how to generate ideas for blog content.
WARNING: This is a long post, but we think it’s worth the read (and hopefully you’ll agree). If you really don’t have time then there’s a list of our top tips at the end!
We are live from Brighton, and we’re really looking forward to hearing the insights and thoughts of all the speakers (all 19 of them!) Doors opened at 9:00am and the first speaker is scheduled to speak at 10:00 am. Stay tuned.
We don’t have fancy auto-refreshes so you’ll need to refresh your browser to see the updates :-)
10:01 am: The first speaker is on stage, Dave Trott – Executive Creative Director at CSTTG will be talking about “Predatory Thinking”. Sounds intriguing. Must be similar to “Guerilla Marketing”. Dave’s using an analogy of pure maths and applied math with pure creativity and applied creativity.
Journalists have been frantically learning SEO and social media techniques over recent years, so they can stay ahead online. But now some of them are so skilled that SEO teams could learn a few things from them too. From writing clickable headlines, to using Twitter to network, here are all the journo skills that I’ve learnt by following (no, not stalking!) some of the best in the business…
Monitoring and Targeting
Like most blogs, news sites tend to cover a number of different subjects. For the main newspapers, these tend to be major topics such as politics, finance, property, jobs and so on. However, within those ‘channels’, similar stories often come up again and again – interest rates, house prices, unemployment figures, that kind of thing.
Journalists and editors use analytics programs to check how many readers are visiting each section and which stories are grabbing their interest. That means that they can give more coverage to the stories that really interest their readers, and move other stories further down the hierarchy. This also allows them to maximise click-throughs from their front pages because they know what stories get readers excited.
SEO used to be something that happened on the sidelines of a business, usually by some tech specialist in a separate office. It often seemed like it had very little to do with the rest of the organisation.
But as the internet and what we do with it has changed, most firms have now realised that this needs to change. To make the most of their online presence, SEO has to be an integral part of their online operations in every department.
Search engine optimisation is now too important to be left lingering on the sidelines. From customer services and HR to marketing and PR, here’s how SEO matters to every single area in your business. Read on to find out why you should be optimising everything you do online.
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