A B2B Marketing Playbook
Does my business need a blog? Am I doing search engine optimization (SEO) right? How should I use Twitter and Facebook?
If thoughts like these are keeping you up at night, read on.
Over the past year, John Kim and I (@SmokeJumper) set out to answer these and related questions on behalf of small businesses.
The world is changing right before our eyes (and webcams).
From a technological perspective, 2011 was a watershed year:
- In the U.S., smart phone penetration reached 51 percent by the end of last year, according to Nielsen.
- Time spent by users on social media sites as a percentage of overall time online reached 30 percent.
- Time spent on social media as a percentage of online mobile time reached 60 percent.
Think you already feel the impact of this on-the-go, always-connected society? Hang on to your hat, because that impact is going to get even larger. We will see a steady rise of more people on more powerful devices participating in ever more social experiences to discover and share information that shapes their personal and professional decision-making. Read more
How SEO Can Drive Non-SEO Marketing
April 4, 2011 by admin · Leave a Comment
A year ago I was asked by a friend and former colleague of mine, who is now a Partner at a prominent Silicon Valley Venture Capital firm, to come be the lead speaker at a “Marketing Meetup” they were hosting. It seems that many of the companies that the firm had invested in were struggling with (or at least hesitating) to take advantage of online marketing (e.g. search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing, blogging, social media, etc.).
How Marketing Changed in the 2000’s
I was recently reflecting on that session and thought it would be interesting to go back and see what, if anything had changed in my perspective. When I gave the talk, I did my best to provide some context of how marketing had changed during the last decade (or at least back to when my former colleague was pushing product out the door for Netscape Communications).
- Access to media, thought leaders and influencers was somewhat limited and pre-defined by the traditional bounds of print (and even early online) publications and the relationships that Public Relations (PR) professionals had with the media whose coverage they sought. Read more
Journey to SEO Nirvana | Keyword Research (step 3 of 5)
February 3, 2011 by admin · 3 Comments
Now that we got quantification and some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) housekeeping out of the way, step three in our journey to SEO nirvana is one of my favorites — keyword research. Clients I work with often have strong ideas on what words they want to “own” on Google or the other leading search engines.
After years of experimenting and monitoring, I have found there are often too many words that could conceivably be SEO targets for optimizing their site. The result of keyword research should be a very clear delineation as to which select words are targeted for optimization on a page-by-page basis.
Here’s a magic keyword selection formula . . . all thing’s being equal, you should target keywords that have:
- High volumes of search traffic (in your geography)
- Low levels of competition
- High current ordinal rankings (for your website) on search engines
- High levels of your website-specific search traffic (e.g. the terms visitors to your website are searching on to find you, and the search terms visitors use on your site itself)
- High performance in Search Engine Marketing campaigns (e.g., high rates of clicks generated and/or conversions in any Google AdWords, or equivalent, campaigns)
Sounds simple, right? Let’s walk through each of the above. Read more
Journey to SEO Nirvana | Housekeeping (step 2 of 5)
January 13, 2011 by admin · 3 Comments
In my recent blog post “Journey to SEO Nirvana | Baseline (step 1 of 5),“ I aired my dirty laundry (and that of most consultants, teachers and parents – “do as I say, not as I do”) in that despite offering strategic and practical online marketing advice and services for my clients, my own website is not well optimized for search engines.
The main reason for this is that my business is driven through relationships and my professional network, as opposed to the website. But I still feel that my site should adhere to the best practices I espouse, so…
I’m going to chart a practical path towards search engine optimization (SEO) bliss! Come along; it’ll be fun — or if not fun, hopefully relatively painless. Read more
Journey to SEO Nirvana | Baseline (step 1 of 5)
December 10, 2010 by admin · 2 Comments
This high-tech cobbler is committed to making shoes for his children this holiday season. Let me explain.
The clients I help with SEO, SEM and social media strategy often tell me that they imagine my website must be “super well optimized” for search engines. As embarrassing as it is to admit, I have to tell them, “No, it is not.”
The truth is that as a busy consultant and owner of several small independent businesses, I rarely get to focus on the online marketing efforts of my own web-based consultancy, SmokeJumper Strategy.
Therefore, much like the cobbler who is so busy making shoes for paying customers that his own children run around barefoot, my website runs around the Internet without any SEO-optimized shoes on at all!
Well, hopefully that will all change soon. Read more