Digital Expression

This post is a summary of how I managed to secure the #1 ranking on Google for the keyword phrase twitter marketing campaign.

Good Timing:  People were actively searching for more information about a controversial social media campaign being run by a Web CMS company in th UK.  It made headlines the world over.The volume of keyword searches was very high.   But, there was no data, case studies or analyses published that provided any sort of insight. Having a good understanding of how to measure the impact of online marketing campaigns, I penned What the Moonfruit? A Twitter Marketing Campaign Analysis.

Newsworthy: Professional and packed full of fresh content, the report proved newsworthy. A press release was aggregated by Google News and subsequently picked up by 2 major online papers. Over 30 fellow bloggers interested in social media, twitter and online marketing cited the report on their websites. The 2 key benefits were:

1. An increase in referred traffic
2. High authority link juice.

Promotional Activity:

• I bookmarked on the report on every relevant social site I could find.  Some of  these included Delicious, Stumbleupon,Linkedin,Twitter,Slideshare,Docstoc and Scribd.
• I republised extracts of the report of relevant niche authority websites: Socialmediatoday, Business Exchange and DaniwebIT.
• I commented (insightfully) on related blog posts and linked back to the full report. (Note the 'No Follow' attribute means no link juice, but I still get eyeballs.)
• Connected with authority bloggers and asked for their thoughts, which results in added credibility and possible high authority backlinks.

And that's all there was to it.  The result is that What the Moonfruit? is now established as an authority page when it comes to social media marketing with Twitter.  As a marketing tool, it enhances the credibility of any of my Adwords that prospects may see alongside my organic listing.

It's been almost a year since Moonfruit and I'd like to share what i've learned about SEO Strategy & Tactics.

You can discuss marketing on Twitter with me @kunalkripalani

A couple of days ago I wrote about 5 ways social media can enhance your SEO efforts.This is good stuff, but:

SM and SEO certainly overlap, but I still see too many people operating in silos...Neither effort will succeed unless it's part of a larger marketing and analytics strategy." @AndrewCMiller

Wise words. So, SEO is only a fragment of an overall search marketing strategy, which in itself is part of a larger stragetic drive by a business as a means of achieving their goals.  So let's take one step back and look at:

1. Why you might use search engine optimisation.
2. How you can use SEO to achieve business goals.

1. SEO should form part of a strategy to achieve business goals like,

• An increase in brand awareness
• An increase in sales / market share
• A reduction in customer acquisition costs.
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Reducing customer service queries

2. The business benefits of high organic search rankings are the result of a well formulated and sustained SEO effort.

"SEO needs to be iterative and evolutionary. It should learn from itself and its PPC sister to become more targeted and relevant to the intended audience."@RyanDeShazer

So it follows that SEO does not deliver free traffic, because it requires time to first implement your strategy and then also to sustain it. That's human resources working with an analytics package. There are ofcourse opportunities to reduce the financial investment by using automation tools like Wordstream, but let's not get sidetracked.

You want to make sure people who need what you have are able to find you more easily than they can find your competitors.

We want them to visit our website, to place orders, fill out applications and subscribe to our mailing lists.  You need to know what keywords are driving tangible results and we need to measure our progress month to month and quarter to quarter.

If you are an SEO newbie, you need to read Google's Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide.  For the rest of us i've created a 35 point Search Engine Optimisation Checklist to increase your visibility and rankings.  I also recommend reading about Conversion Optimisation to guarantee the effectiveness of your SEO efforts. The landing pages that prospects clickthrough to are critical.

Talk SEO with me @KunalKripalani

Appearing on the first page of Google for your chosen search terms is perhaps the online equivalent of an Oscar win. Pete Cashmore, Mashable.

With 95% of clicks coming from page 1 and most of those clicks going to the Top 3 spots, the research says that if you don't rank on the first page, then you may as well not be there at all. If you're unfamiliar with search engine optimisation, you might like to have a read of SEO is Relevance, Uniqueness and Freshness first.  Search Engine Optimisation is always changing and its latest evolution is inseperably connected to social media. Let's explore why and how we can integrate social media into a search marketing strategy:

Social Media is an essential component of your SEO plan because of:

1. Real Time Search: The latest press releases, blogs, tweets, YouTube videos,images and fan page updates are almost instantly indexed by the major search engines. Because it's real time search, the benefits quickly fade so it's important to do two things:

1. Quite simply, make regular updates that are relevant, unique and timely - discussing current and future events. Demonstrate thought leadership.
2. Repurpose your real time content into topic related pages on your website. This is your unique content and makes for valuable SEO mortar. It also means your content is not lost in social media archives.

2. Content Accesibility: Repurposing your content and making it accessble through Scribd,Youtube,Slideshare,Vimeo,Twitter and Facebook increases the odds that your content will be seen and spread.

3. The Google Honeymoon Period: When a new site launches, it ranks highly for the first few weeks and then SERP rankings can drop dramatically if Google thinks that it doesn't meet peoples needs for what it appears to offer. So measure your bounce rates. SM can help keep your content sticky & fresh by facilitating the crowdsourcing process.
 
4. The popularity of Social Bookmarks including Facebook "Likes" Facebook Like is similar to social bookmarks like Digg,Stumbleupon and Delicious, but offers greater viral spread through your friend network. Indications are strong that more and more websites will continue to integrate with Facebook, making its Open Graph a valid measure of content relevance on the internet. The Levi's Store is a good example.

5. Google is getting more social.  The new interace emphasises the ability to segment your search by images, videos, maps, news, books, blogs updates and discussions.  That's atleast 8 opportunities to appear on the first SERP. And let's not forget their Buzz social bookmarking tool - Is it significant to search? The simple answer is inextricably yes, because Google owns it.

Finally, Benchmark where you rank for your Top 100 keywords before you start so you can measure the results of your efforts.

Not sure where to start?  Here's a comprehensive SEO checklist.

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Critical Mass and mainstream are words you could start to associate with social media. The bottom line is:

Your customers are embracing social media, making it an opportunity to build a community around your offering.

It's an opportunity to build rapport, loyalty and warm fuzzy feelings about your brand. Because of the context of the medium, you can afford to, in fact - you have to take a less formal tone than the typically corporate one size fits all corporate approach.

What is the new approach?
It's conversational. It's an opportunity to share what's remarkable about your product with people who are genuinely interested and turn them into evangelists that include their networks in the conversation also.

Engaging in Social Media is also a way to take back some control over your online reputation. For example, if someone leaves negative feedback on Facebook or Twitter, your monitoring and engagement means you can respond to the critisicm then and there.

Key areas of benefit are:

CRM: Communicate with customers through a medium of their choice, be it Twitter, a forum or Facebook. Because it's all public, understand that this is an opportunity to show the world that you genuinely care about your customers.  In the first instance, respond to the issue quickly and in a manner that ensures it does not spiral into a long public debate. Sometimes, when sensitve personal data needs to be shared, it's best to take an issue private using Twitter DMs or even back to email.

Sales: In it's simplest form: consider how can you repackage old marketing tactics?  For example, affiliate programs for lead generation on insurance policies can be made more social & conmmunity friendly.  Instead of a $50 commission to an affiliate marketer, you give that $50 to the favourite charity of your existing customer who gives you a new lead that converts.

Brand Visibility: Your presence on social sites will positively impact your visibility in Google search results, but more importantly, it puts you in front of eyeballs, and at a fraction of the cost of banner ads.

New Product Development Research: What better way is there to get fast and cost-effective feedback on new product ideas? What's working? What needs improving? Even what geographic location you get most interest from can be identified and perhaps used as a launch market.

Ultimately, you have an opportunity to have a conversation with every one of your customers, and win new ones.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is improving your website's visibility and ranking on the first page of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs.) This is successfully achieved through:

1. Relevance: determined by contextual keywords, volume of traffic, volume & quality of backlinks from credible (authoritative) websites and internal linking
2. Uniqueness: Original content, with unique meta titles (But don't waste your time on Meta keywords.) Meta description, author, robots etc. are important for human navigation and for search engines to properly index your websites, but they are insignificant when it comes to your rankings.
3. Freshness:  Update your content frequently.

Each of these factors can be addressed with the following tactics:

1. Relevant Keyword List: Identify the top 100 words and phrases related to your offering that people are searching for.  Identify them using tools like Google Insights for Search  and the Adwords Keyword tool, which also identifies the level of competition you have to deal with and how much it will cost. The lower the competition, the higher the chances of appearing high on SERPs.
2. Building backlinks: Get links on authority websites relevant to your niche. Link deep; not just to your homepage, but to many pages on your site.
3. Building internal links - This is as much to cross-promote your content as it is for SEO.
4. Sitemap:  XML for search engines & HTML for Users:  While not impacting your rankings, sitemaps help search engines more easily discover and index the content on your website and therefore boosts your visibility. More indexed pages, means a higher chance that one of them will hit the first page. Use of human readable URLS rather than dynamic query strings and use of robots.txt files fits into this category
5. Images: Images that are tactically named (refer to your top 100 keyword list) to drive traffic. Commonly overlooked, images.google.com can prove to be a significant source of traffic.
6. Video: Submit a video sitemap to help Google with indexing. Include include new tags (content, player, thumbnail location, categories, family-friendly?). If your URL must be less than 60 characters to appear in Google Search and will only show up if it is family-friendly.
6. Local search directory listings: Google maps, Yahoo Local and Bing Local. Submit a KML file to Webmaster Central specifying latitude and longitude.
8. Using Google Webmaster Central and identify what country your website targets.  This is done automatically by IP address, but if your server happens not to be in your target country, then this is a necessary step because one part of Google's personalisation algorithm is to serve up country specific results.