Chris W. Smith

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Four Ways That Search Marketing Costs May Rise In 2013

December 26, 2012 By Chris Smith 1 Comment

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

In successful SEO campaigns, long-term return on investment tends to be better than in a PPC campaign. It’s almost like renting versus buying; even though you might have spend more upfront, you’re building equity that can be “cashed in” later in the form of organic rankings, citations/backlinks, and search engine results page domination.

That being said, a well-run SEO campaign will likely become more costly in the new year; more work and time has to be devoted to keep an acceptable level of success. Let’s look at a few ways that costs might rise in 2013.

Content Generation For Link Building

With the massive amount of Panda-related algorithm changes in 2012, SEO efforts have shifted focus from primarily technical and link building to quality content generation. “Link building” activities now aren’t just about finding great directories; it’s about providing content to site owners/editors for publishing purposes to gain the all-important contextual link.

Site owners are becoming more picky as to what content they’ll accept for guest posting, editorials, and article submissions. Unless you’re an excellent author and providing your own content, you’re probably outsourcing writing tasks to a third party. If you’re having trouble getting content accepted and published, you may need to review the writer and quality of content being submitted. It’s not unusual to have to change writers after a time; at some point, you’ll outgrow your current team and need to move on to someone at the next level.

More Emphasis On Conversion Improvement

Because of blended SERPs, traffic resulting from straight organic results are declining. Google is funneling more and more traffic through avenues like AdWords, Local results, YouTube videos, and Product Listings. Therefore, the traffic that does come in through the organic keyword results becomes much more valuable. Conversion rate testing takes time and money to develop content, graphics, and code for each new iteration, and through aggressive testing, the rising cost of organic traffic will be offset by increased organic conversions.

Experienced SEO Talent Will Be Harder To Acquire

With nearly every company in the world looking towards inbound marketing, experienced SEO talent is becoming an in-demand workforce in almost every industry vertical. This creates problems on both the in-house and agency side, even at the beginner level of the game. Few colleges offer any sort of online marketing classes, and the ones that do are outdated before the syllabus is even printed. Subsequently, new graduates are not a reliable source of fresh talent.

To simply keep up with their industry competition, companies will be forced to poach experienced employees from other firms with offers of higher salaries and better benefits. Although this will raise budgets for inbound marketing in 2013, most companies will find favorable growth with a solid internet marketing plan for the new year.

Diversifying Content Generation Plans

While many agency or in-house search marketing teams might have an excellent writer on staff, with the blended search result pages, creating more than just written content should be in every SEO’s game plan in 2013. Whether it’s product videos, an industry roundtable discussion on a podcast, or snappy infographics showing the state of your business sector, it’s all an important part of a content marketing plan these days. If you’re a very small company, you might be able to bootstrap these projects and do “good enough” to get by, but for many companies, hiring outside talent to handle these type of tasks is usually preferred. If you’re in a highly competitive niche, production quality of content will be a weighty qualifier for customer. Looking second-rate to your customers will have a negative effect no matter how great of a product you have, so leaving this to the professionals is the only logical choice for most companies. Be prepared to invest significant cash, but reap bigger long-term rewards through repurposing content, organically viral campaigns, and customer engagement and loyalty.

Although costs for search engine marketing are poised to rise in 2013, this is a necessary expenditure to keep up with the constant pushback from algorithm updates, industry competitors starting new inbound campaigns, and finding/acquiring experienced talent. While no one wants to have to spend more money on marketing, the potential payoff of beating out your sleeping competitors can be huge.

Filed Under: Marketing

Yahoo Testing Cost Per Lead Search Ads

December 17, 2012 By Chris Smith Leave a Comment

Since the Bing/Yahoo merger, Yahoo’s ad system has been in a serious state of turbulance. While it’s never been on par with AdWords, there was some value to be had in certain verticals.

In what we’d call a bold move, Marissa Mayer and company have launched Cost Per Lead ads, in a bid to earn some income in advertising apart from the Microsoft deal on normal PPC ads.

Yahoo Cost Per Lead Ad screenshotThe new format won’t be sold in the auction-style pricing like you might be used to with normal pay per click ads; the pricing will be set depending on the size of the advertiser and the vertical that advertiser is in. One ad per search results page is the plan for now, and if you’re not the only competitor in the space, the higher ranking advertiser shows up (who knows how that’s determined).

The supposed upsides are higher click-through rates, verified leads, and prominent positioning on the page. You can have up to six fields in the ad itself, and customize your “thank you” text that’s displayed after the form is submitted.

Yahoo has had a disappointing time in the ad space since the Bing merger. Perhaps this is just the thing to pull them out of the slump.

Filed Under: Bing, Marketing, PPC, Yahoo

3 Ways To SEO Someone Else’s Site (And Benefit From It)

December 15, 2012 By Chris Smith Leave a Comment

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

All the time, we’re told that all of our efforts should push traffic only to our site. We should be building links to try to raise domain authority, take advantage of referral traffic, and building up rankings for our site. While we can’t abandon those ideas altogether, sometimes there are moments where stepping outside of that thought pattern can really help us in the long run.

1. Great PR, Bad SEO

If you’re doing content marketing the way you should be, chances are, you’ll have some writeups in various publications. Ideally, if you get a great review from the local newpaper calling your business the best in town, you’d want that to show up when someone searches your brand name, right? Unfortunately, most of the traditional-media-turned-online-media are still pretty bad at search optimization.

Getting a branded search to show that glowing writeup will do great things for your conversion rate, so take some time to point some branded links towards that resource. You’ll help build up the link profile (and the authority) for that page, which hopefully will flow back down to your site. But, more importantly, that site will show up for someone searching for information about you, and perhaps be a little more convinced that you have what they’re looking for.

2. Pass The Authority

Sometimes there are keywords you really want to go after, but they’re just too competitive, or you’ve got a brand new site that hasn’t quite taken off yet. That doesn’t mean that you’re left high and dry. Just because your site doesn’t have the weight to show for that keyword, there are plenty of properties you can control that do.

This is where social media properties can be a great asset. Not just your company page on Twitter and Facebook (although properly optimizing those can help out), but the “second tier” stuff like Eventbrite and Slideshare. If you do ANY sort of presentations, upload them to Slideshare. You can control nearly any aspect of the page, and optimize it pretty nicely. If you get a fair amount of action on that Slideshare presentation, you’ll show up on the front page of the site. That will get your presentation ranked for some pretty competitive keywords, and in turn, drive some educated and interested traffic back to your site.

You could do something similar for Eventbrite if you’re in a business that does events. Create your event invite, and optimize the page for the keywords you’d like to rank for. Tying the Eventbrite into your social networks will promote action on that page, and in turn, will push it up, giving it a solid chance to rank well.

Here’s where it starts getting even more meta: guest posting. If you don’t have much in the way of blogging, or an already established authority, it might be a little more difficult, but if you can swing it, it’s worth it.

Find a blogger that ranks well for your niche, particularly, a keyword or two you’d like to rank for. Offer a guest post, but don’t ask for a link back. Yes, you read that correctly. You’re much more likely to get a “yes” to a guest post if you make sure that you aren’t asking for a link. You simply want to provide an awesome post that’s associated with you and your brand name (an unstructured citation). When you’re shopping for guest-posting opportunities in the future, this will give you a leg up on the link-hungry wolves going after every blogger out there.

3. Six Two Degrees Of Seperation

This is a little bit of the first tactic, mixed in with a little bit of black-hat tactic, but cleaned up a bit to keep your site safe from harm.

Sometimes, you’ll get what should be a great link from a great, high-authority site. But, you’re just not getting the traffic you think you should from it. Maybe it just wasn’t a relevant or a popular idea yet, and kind of got buried in the noise. It might not have even been indexed. If it’s on a high-authority domain, it may be worth it to point some links at it to give it a bump. Once you help it get indexed and show the search engines a little bit of traction on it, often, it’ll start to inherit some of that high authority and begin to rank much better. It’s a great case for re-posting on your social media profiles, dropping a comment on a forum you frequent already if it’s a pertinent article, or (and here’s the little bit of black-hat for you) testing out that directory that you aren’t really quite sure about yet.

Just remember though, what goes around, comes around. Don’t get crazy and blast it with spammy links. As Wil Reynolds could tell you, that sort of thing can come back to haunt you.

Finally…

This all boils down to one idea: increasing and enhancing the rankability of other sites that can directly affect you in a positive way. The better those guys do in search, the more business that’ll be pushed your way. Search engine marketing sometimes takes some odd and unique ideas, and this is one that can work for you.

Filed Under: Backlinking, Marketing, SEO, Social Media

Why Social Media Is Important To SEO

December 14, 2012 By Chris Smith Leave a Comment

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

The lines between social media and SEO continue to blur more and more each day, and there is only one reason; social media is important to SEO! Why is social media so important to SEO? Simply put, social media is content and content is important to a well-executed SEO strategy.

So, big deal; we already knew that content was important to SEO. But, what we know and what we practice are often two very different things. Every social media post you schedule has the ability to reach your brand’s target audience, and it’s your responsibility to schedule engaging content. Engaging content could be things such as personal insights and stories, useful videos and tips; resources that help your customers solve their day-to-day problems. Just keep in mind the key is to add value. If you aren’t adding value, then why are you posting?

You can earn customers via social media without spending a ton of money.” –Jennifer Lopez, Director of Community at SEOmoz

Social Media CartoonAs you continue to add value to people’s lives, you will slowly (and sometimes, if you’re lucky, rapidly) see your social audience grow. As your social audience grows, so does your influence, and in turn your authority. There is something funny about authority, when we are young we want nothing to do with it, but once we are older it’s all we want….well that is if you are searching for Google’s authority! The amount of engaging content you produce on your social networking sites result in Google passing a certain amount of “authority” to your brand, as it views you as an authority in your specific area due to the amount of people commenting, liking, sharing, re-tweeting, etc.

The important thing to remember is that Google is looking for social validation.

The SEO industry has developed a bad reputation with people buying thousands of links and following the worst of the worst black-hat SEO practices just to get a step ahead of the curve, but remember cheaters only win for a short while. Spend the time building quality content, and you won’t have to worry when the next Google Penguin update hits.

I’m no fortuneteller, but the signs are as plain as day. Social media will continue to become more and more closely linked with SEO. Make sure to spend the time developing your content, and remember to always ask yourself if you are adding value.

Filed Under: Social Media

C2 Creative’s New Co-Working Space

November 1, 2011 By Chris Smith 1 Comment

Houston, if you don’t know, has one of the best job markets in the country right now. We’re a town rich with industries in the high-tech, medical, and petrochemical/energy fields. Something that’s a great byproduct of this is a strong and prosperous entrepreneurial community. Whether it’s a new-idea-incubation startup, or a creative/tech service like what I do, right now is simply this best possible time and climate to start a business.

Through knowing great folks at places like CulturePilot, Primer Grey, and Ecclesia Church, I’ve come to become connected to a great non-profit organization called C2 Creative. C2 is launching a new creative co-working space in the Montrose area of Houston (just west of Downtown). Ecclesia is proving a great facility for not only a top-notch co-working space, but a great performance/presentation venue, art gallery, and some of the best coffee in Houston.

Take just a moment to learn more about what C2 Creative is doing, and if you’re so inclined, donate. I know it sounds cliche, but every dollar certainly helps!

If you’re an entrepreneur and you’re looking for an environment that will help you grow (both mentally and in your business), I’d suggest you check out the memberships. They’re extremely affordable no matter what level of resources you might require.

Filed Under: Co-Working, Houston

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