Let's Get Social

You know those friends you have on Facebook that you don't ever interact with? The ones you kind of wish weren't there, but haven't gotten around to unfriending? The ones who send you annoying requests for pumpkins, goats or hugs?

Is your business one of those friends to your customers?

Social media. It's not just media, and certainly not just another venue for marketers. For an effort to be successful requires transparency, innovation and a more than a little bit of genius. That's why I truly believe that creativity has to be behind every successful social media effort.

No, not fakery - creativity. Finding ways to engage people in ways they will enjoy, and in ways that your business will enjoy increased awareness and preference. You can't just put up a Facebook page and expect that to do it for you. You have to connect people with each other and with your business. And you have to do it now.

Content, Capabilities and Conversion

There are a few things that site owners often just don't get when it comes to SEO, but they are absolutely crucial when it comes to having a site that can be found and be used.
1. Content is KING and queen and prince.... Original content will be rewarded. Interesting, thoughtful, funny, unusual, insightful, helpful content will draw Google to your site. Because it will draw traffic to your site.
2. If YOUR SITE LOADS SLOWLY, or if it has a lot of glitches, redirects, bad pages, etc. your SEO will suffer. Fix the problems.
3. If you don't know what you want your site to do, how will people know what to do with it? Make sure you have some sort of conversion goal in mind ON EVERY PAGE.

I Still Hate Twitter

I admit it. Good optimization tool or not, I can't stand Twitter. Just as I can't stand direct mail and robo-calling. Sure, they may be effective, but they're a pain in the butt.

I don't care how many times people tell me about how relevant it is, how timely it is. About the only good use I've seen of it is its use in the Middle East to mobilize ordinary citizens to actually do something. Here in the USA, it's still mainly about ego. Sure, sharing links is good. Aren't you clever? Aren't you informed? Don't you need to make sure everyone knows it?

I'm sure I'll get some haters hating this. But that's okay. I also hate haters.

Branding? Important to SEO?

While social optimization is going to continue being a huge trend in SEO in 2011, one of the more interesting things is that a traditional, tried and true way to build business is making a BIG comeback - branding. Yep, branding.
As search becomes ever more personalized, better known sites (that usually means better known names) are going to get even more traffic. That can be a problem for smaller, breakthrough marketers, but it can be an opportunity, too. If you take a structured approach to building your brand and your visibility at the same time, you can outpace your peer competitors.
Making sure that you are optimized for mobile devices is key, too, as well as making sure that you're optimized in your area (for small, local businesses). It's all kind of like a puzzle, but one where you can move the pieces around.

Are You Being Watched?

It's a good thing if you are, you know.
If your site or content is being "liked", tweeted about, followed, shared, linked to or from, or just plain found, that means you're more visible. You can get more visibility from tweeting, following, linking, blogging, listing, sharing and liking.
More visible = more business.
How's that for an ROI?

Visibility Optimization

It's not just SEO anymore - it's about visibility everywhere online - social, listing, bookmarking, blogging, advertising. It all adds up to better visibility overall, and for more than just your website. If you're a small business person and you're not taking advantage of all the ways to make yourself more visible, then you're missing out on prospective customers.

Tools, Tools, Tools

There are tons of good visibility tools out there these days, many of which can give your small business an overview of how they fare against some of their competitors. I like to use Website Grader and Alexa as a first look. Then I move on to my paid tools, like Sheer SEO, SEO PowerSuite and SERP Analytics. You can even just do searches in a whole bunch of different engines and see how you do there.

The problem is, how do you then analyze what you find out? It can take days to really delve into what makes you more or less visible online. It's all determined by a big mashup of all the things that engines take into account - links, content, images, age of domain, blog, twitter, etc. Sure, Google rewards good content and relevancy, but punishes "black hat" tactics - so what's the difference?

Visibility Optimization isn't rocket science, but it does takes some knowledge and analytical skills. You have to be up on the constantly-changing importance of different aspects. It's a lot of work, but it can be very rewarding.

SEO Matters

There are people out there now saying that SEO is dead. They think that the new Google instant search, and more recently, the preview function on Google will somehow replace thoughtful, informative, relevant content.
They are wrong.
Google Instant Search simply won't serve up your website if it doesn't think it's relevant to those search terms. No amount of previewing will get them to your site if you're not on the first page. That's why SEO still matters. Maybe even more than it did before.

Blog Based Websites

More and more companies and people are discovering how easy, fun and manageable it is to build an entire website in a blog platform, like Wordpress. If you plan to do the same, just remember one word: fresh.
Fresh content will make you more visible, no matter what format your site is built in. But if you're building a site on a blog platform, it's so easy to refresh your site, you should do it daily. Do it with a new link, a new post or a twitter feed. Change things around. Play. It will work in your favor.

Google Instant. Instantly Problematic?

The votes are coming in, and the answer is..... maybe.

For SEO, it will be problematic if your site isn't well-written, organized and optimized for keywords. It will favor the big guys. It will be a problem for those who ascribe to the "just plug 'em in" SEO strategy.

Unlike before, searchers will not have to type in long tails - Google will serve them up, and they can just choose. Google has already been doing "personalized" search for a long time - when you type in the Google space on your browser, it basically does what Instant does. Just without showing all the pages.

Now, you'll see results and ads changing in real time as you type. So it will make search more efficient, even if for many, it's more irritating. But it does NOT make SEO irrelevant. Long tails will matter less, but how well Google likes your site will matter more. Good content is king, still.

SEO Changes - Do You?

SEO is a constantly challenging challenge. It's not something that you can "do" - it's something that needs to live and breathe. Here are a few things you should be up on right now:

• Social Media SEO. Creating links and backlinks is even more important than ever. So is building good social media profiles and networks
• On-page quality. Quality of the writing, load time, ease of use all contribute to your SEO.
• Build a good local presence. The old adage of "think globally, act locally" comes to play here. It's easier to build a big local presence than a global one. The search engines will help you out by ranking you higher. 
• Make sure you optimize for mobile devices. Duh. 
• Videos. Put up videos on YouTube with your keywords and watch your optimization climb.
• Integrate your blog into your site instead of letting it live somewhere else. This is especially true for small business.  
• Keep at it. I cannot stress this enough. YOU HAVE TO KEEP WORKING AT IT. 

SEO changes all the time. So should your efforts at it.

Pay Per Click Campaigns and The Big Question

Can you do it yourself?

Maybe. If you're a small local business, then it should be fairly easy to set up and manage a PPC on Google Adwords. But - and this is a big but - you may not know how to get the most out of it.

Let's say you have a small budget of maybe $10 a day. And you're a localized service business like a plumbing company, a single franchisee or florist. You can geo-target your ads to a radius around your business, pick some keywords, write a couple of ads and poof! You've got a PPC campaign.

But to really get the most out of your dollars, you need to monitor it constantly, switch out keywords, know how to write ads that Google likes and will serve up and know what to change about ads that don't perform well. It's a time investment, and you'll have to do some reading and research to understand what things like quality scores and click through rates really mean. You'll have to check out what your competition is doing, get your optimization working in your favor, know what needs to be on your landing pages, which landing pages you should really link to and figure out why your cost per click can fluctuate wildly.

If you don't have that kind of time, then the answer to the big question is NO. You can't do it yourself. Or you'll be wasting money and whatever time you do put into it. If your budget is small, choose an independent who knows what he or she is doing. If it's large, choose a company that can handle larger PPC campaigns, web revisions and SEO. It may cost you a bit, but in the end, it will save you money.

I'm Just Sayin'

Google rewards you for relevancy. Just sayin'

The Three Big Questions Before SEO and PPC

Before you even START thinking about implementing SEO or PPC, there are three hugely important questions you must ask yourself:

1. What do you want to be found for?

2. What are people actually searching for?

3. What do you want to happen when they find you?

So, while you may want to be found for some proprietary term you have for yourself like "experiential retention" what people are really searching for are terms like "customer service experts" or "effective loyalty programs". You cannot be obtuse when it comes to SEO or choosing your keywords for PPC.

Then, if you want people to actually do something once they do find you, send them to the right page. Don't send someone who click on an ad about rare vinyl records to a home page that's about your music store - send them to the vinyl records page. Don't send a person looking for diamond stud earrings to a page with a big picture of pearls. If you want them to buy something, send them there.

I've had SEO clients who have taken top search terms out of copy because they don't like the sound of them, or think they're too mundane. Problem is, those are the terms people are searching for, and if they're not in the copy, I can't just put them in the tags, so the search engines don't find them on their site, and guess what - they don't get found.

It seems simple, but it's one of the main mistakes I've seen. Don't make it.

How Many Hats?

How many hats do you wear?

If it's only one, you're waaaayyy out of sync with the rest of the business world these days. The fast pace of change in the marketplace, the ever-expanding ways to reach an audience, the downsizing of the recent past economy and the confusion on the part of management have all coalesced to form the perfect storm of hat proliferation.

Are you the project manager and the PPC person? Are you the go-to for social media and for SEO? Can you juggle your design work with app development? Stretched? We all are.

But.....

There are times when we all need some help. When we simply don't have time to learn a new application or polish up on the latest Google insights. It's okay to ask for help, even if it's with one of your hats. Every hat you take off lightens the load, even if it's only for a little while. And gives you the much-needed time to recharge. Occasionally, you must go hatless all together and re-boot.

And when you do need help, ask.

Knowledge Isn't Just Knowing Rules

Knowledge is about actually knowing.

I read a very interesting article the other day about knowledge. Surprise, surprise. When it comes to real knowledge - and by that I mean real understanding - experts are often lacking. Take into account this story about Google offering to help a client increase his ROI on adwords, even though the guy had been running a successful campaign already. His campaign may not have followed all of Google's rules, but it did work. Once all the rules were applied, somehow it didn't. Old adage time: if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

So think about it. All the formulas and rules and ratings in the world don't mean anything if someone doesn't have real on-the-ground information, intuition and insight into your customers. Choose your partners based on that, and you'll choose the right partners.

Pay Per Click For Small Business

Used to be, you could just make a list of keywords, set up a couple of ads on Adwords and let it go - but those days are long, long gone. One of the reasons a small business owner should hire a person or company with real PPC knowledge and experience is that PPC needs to be monitored, adjusted and tweaked constantly. It's a time-consuming task, but for someone with experience it's easier to spot what needs to be done when. Ultimately, it will probably save you time and money to hire someone experienced, set your budget, give them your wish list and let them do what they know how to do. 

Of course, you can do it yourself.  But only if you're resigned to a long learning curve of mediocre results. And only if you truly have the time to spend. Think about it.

A Couple of Useful (And Free) Tools To Check Your Site

If you're a business person new to SEO, there are some quick, easy and free ways to see how your website is doing. A couple I use right off the bat are websitegrader and Alexa. They're maybe not as in-depth as something you'd get from a professional site report, but they'll give you a pretty good idea of what your main weaknesses and strengths are.
As a copywriter who's done (and doing) a lot of SEO analysis and writing, as well as PPC, I use these two all the time. They can point to some problems that are very easily fixed, and that means quickly fixed. And since SEO is something that needs to be constantly tweaked and improved, you can incorporate changes as you dive deeper. That's the beauty - and the burden - of good SEO.

It's Not Rocket Science

SEO and PPC are not rocket science. But they're not easy, either. Analysis of SEO takes a lot of time and tools that most small businesses don't have. PPC has a lot of little ins and outs that can make setting up and managing an Adwords campaign something that keeps getting pushed to the back burner. Companies that specialize in this stuff charge more than most small businesses can afford.
So....Check here occasionally to find out a few things. Learn from the posts and links. And if you find yourself with questions, ask them. I'll either answer them or find someone who can.