Chris W. Smith

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Divide and Conquer: Why You Shouldn’t Do It All

April 14, 2014 By Chris Smith Leave a Comment

(originally posted on DesignBigger)

Liz Lemon Can't Do It All.

If you’re lazy, here’s the short answer: Because you can’t. Because you shouldn’t. Because you’ll do a pretty bad job at it.

I came from a background of having to do it all. I started my online marketing career with a company who, other than me, had a population of 1. I was responsible for pretty much anything that was related to technology. I had a pretty solid IT background, so building up the technological infrastructure for a small company wasn’t difficult. I’d done it a hundred times before. After my initial six months of cranking away and getting to the point where we could hire actual employees, I was told my focus was shifting; I would be responsible solely for the website and increasing sales through it via SEO and PPC. PPC was just starting to be worth considering at the time. We brought in a lot of traffic (mostly junk traffic), but it was outsourced to India, as was our SEO and web development.

After a couple of years of learning, experimenting, and lots of failing and some succeeding, I was becoming pretty good at SEO and PPC. We went from clearing just over $800k the first year I was there, to $14.7 million the year I left (5 years later), and it was almost entirely online sales. I was pretty confident that I was, well,…awesome.

For various reasons, I decided to see what else was out there for me employment-wise, and landed at a great local search marketing agency that focused on B2B clients. Although it was out of the norm, I was brought in to take on SEO and PPC accounts for clients. While I could easily kill it for clients from the SEO side, I just found little need for paid search marketing with these same clients. In fact, I began to HATE taking care of their AdWords accounts. I felt like it was wasting resources that could have been put to better use on SEO initiatives.

Eventually, I tried to migrate to doing nothing but SEO (with other employees taking on PPC), and it worked out better…or so I thought. I noticed during reporting time that the PPC accounts were starting to get some positive action going. The problem wasn’t the fact that we were doing PPC; the problem was that I was doing the PPC.

With this realization, it let me spend time on figuring out deeper issues on the SEO side that benefited the paid search side as a byproduct. I couldn’t do it all, but what I could do, I did better.

Figure out your strengths, but more importantly, figure out your weaknesses. Those are the areas that will make you money. We (as agencies) tend to downplay and not try to upsell our weaknesses. It’s self-preservation. While that’s fine and admirable, it doesn’t pay the bills.

What could you do for a client if you could take on that business in your weak spot? Would it make them an extra $10k a month? Maybe they could start a new campaign that would eventually incorporate what you are good at. There are tons of ways it could play out, and hopefully for you, pay out.

So what happens when you do sell a client on budget for something you’re not great at? You try it anyhow and screw it up? You hope they forget about it?

Why not try giving it to someone else?

If you aren’t out there actively trying to partner with people you compete with, you are going to get left behind. The other agencies will outgrow and overpower you because they have solutions that you don’t have. They don’t do video marketing? That’s okay, because they’ve got a partner for that. What about a designer that really gets industrial and commercial design? It’s probably not worth it to keep that person on staff, but being able to call them up for a job because you’ve got an existing relationship with them is money in the bank for you.

A lot of people I talk to refuse to consider doing business this way:

  1. It’s helping our competition! – By NOT doing it, yes, you are. Every service you can’t adequately offer puts you that much further behind the next guy. This is the biggest farce in marketing partnerships. Actively stealing work from you only will serve to hurt them in the long run.
  2. I swore I’d never outsource work! – This is simply a deflection. You outsource everything in your life. It doesn’t make it automatically worse because someone else does it. While you are responsible for what gets produced for the client, nothing says you have to tolerate poor work from a partner.
  3. We’re going to lose money by paying someone else to do it! – What are the implications of NOT doing it? Does the client get a poorer return on their marketing investment and end up canceling anyhow? Maybe they cut budget because they are seeing slow results, which end up being more work per hour for you to be able to still make enough impact to keep the account.

In the end, everyone wins. The client gets a solid service offering. The original agency gets to look like a hero, and probably increased budgets over the lifetime of the client (not to mention the dividends from referrals happy clients make). The executing agency gets to save money on having to find new work, and gets revenue from actually executing the plan.

It’s not a hard concept to be successful with when you put the effort into building the relationships. So, get out there and start building.

Filed Under: Marketing

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

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