The 5HITS

As I work in an SEO agency we are constantly recruiting SEO staff. The challenges we have include:

• Recruiters do NOT understand our business, no matter how much they say they do
• People overstate their own capabilities

I always joke and say when I see a resume, the person looks so good I feel I should report to them. When you interview, you get about half of what the resume said, thanks to the resume writers and online resume tools. Then what you end up hiring is about half of what was represented in the interview. So 25% of the initial resume. The other side of this I accept is that with all the resumes this way, we take the best looking ones, which may be a somewhat flawed approach, but it is hard selecting from multiple applications.

Don’t get me wrong we have great staff, who are loyal and who field calls from recruiters at least once per week. Keeping up with rising salaries is also a challenge. Nobody calls me though, cannot understand why. Put it this way, we hire people with little or some experience, train them heavily, pay them increasing market related rates, and give them a performance based bonus, and all this time adding serious value to them, through skills, experience and education. Should they not be paying us for the opportunity? I ask myself everyday? Just kidding.

On average what we consider to be a senior SEO person for hiring is not what gets presented as a senior SEO person. In fact most of the so called 1-2 years experience people we hire are good as analysts and where he have hired managers this has ended in tears.

The impact on our industry is as follows:

• Agencies hiring in, to fill a competency, often do not know the ins and outs of SEO and are reliant on this person to deliver
• Companies hiring SEO’s are buying their past experience which is often small websites and expecting them to pull top rankings out of the hat for large dynamic websites
• There are few very experienced SEO people out there who have worked on and succeeded with large dynamic websites. I can probably name around 15, but hey maybe my SEO circle is small.

Read more…

Internet, Online marketing Digital Strategy, In-house SEO, Marketing, Marketing managers, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, SEO Training

Are you Committed

Some of you may have heard the saying: Are you the pig or the chicken. When it comes to eating a breakfast of egg & bacon, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. When it comes to your online search campaigns, are you the chicken or the pig? Should the type of business you are in help decide whether in fact you should be a chicken or a pig?

We all agree ROI is important. We all agree that any marketing or business activity should have some form of ROI. How do we best manage the link between SEO and ROI, especially when there are very different players, angles, business models all trying to rank for the same keywords?

Consider the graph below and how the various players might interact or see SEO in their business model.
The Large Consumer Bank would have a large dependency on their website for operations i.e. Internet banking, applications and so on, however when it comes to sales they would have multiple, multiple sales channels from account managers to television spots to in branch activities, all driving people to convert either online or offline. Operations would be driven by complex systems integrating to the front end behind the scenes. May take a couple of touch points to convert a customer. While the need for SEO might be considered small, being found online for all the campaigns, slogans is not. SEO is integral, most of them just realize how integral.

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Business online, Internet, Paid Search, Search Marketing SEO Committment

So Valentines Day is over and we move on. Some interesting stats on Valentines Day. Assuming search engines are a good indication of the peoples intention, and we know that Google has in excess of 90% market share, we can say the following:

• People only start thinking about valentines day 16 days in advance, looking for general gifts
• They start to think roses are the answer 10 days in advance and alternate gift ideas 9 days in advance
• Those who are organised get it done 7 days before and then there are those that panic all the way up to the last minute
• Most people still search on the generic terms flowers and roses rather than including valentines day in the search phrase

Interesting and remember this for next year.

Flowers v Roses Search Volume Graphs

Business online, Internet, Search Marketing valentines day

Valentines Day is the most important occasion of the year. Don’t believe me, check out the graph below:

Business online, Internet, Search Marketing valentines day

I recently got the International Kindle as a gift, even though I had been researching and waiting for the Apple Tablet, maybe to be launched on the 26th. I get asked a lot about the Kindle and why I got one prior to the launch of the tablet, aside from the fact it was a gift. From my perspective in comparing the Kindle to the tablet these are 2 very different propositions, and cannot really be compared:

For the Apple iPad tablet, I assume the following:

• Larger version of the iphone. The interface is tried and trusted and integrates with iTunes and the App store, why not?
• Great interactive screen, scrolling menus, as with the iPhone
• Average to bad battery life
• Access and use of iTunes and the App store etc.
• Main use will not be to replace your laptop but rather extend your Internet access, i.e. lap browsing while watching TV or waiting for the train, reading websites while lying in bed, ever tried to do that on a laptop? and having access to the web outside of the office
• This will no doubt drive the move further toward cloud computing. If you have a mini or a laptop and a desktop you will be familiar with the issues around managing multiple files and emails on different hard drives. Reading emails on your lap on a tablet will be easy. Urrggh more emails less spare time…
• Drive new and better Apps, which will work better on a larger screen
• Bad solution for typing long documents with the on-screen keyboard
• The tablet will find new uses of its own, no doubt with peripherals attached

Internet Apple Tablet, Compare, Kindle

Most advertising works as follows in larger organisations, right?

• Identify requirements re target market, product etc.
• Develop campaign to meet requirements
• Pitch to client
• Plan media
• Buy media
• Run campaign through proposed media
• Measure success
• Celebrate
• Ad agency wins award

Traditionally, Media = television, radio, magazines, newspapers and more recently banner advertising, paid search maybe given budgets in certain sectors SEO (Search engine optimisation) or social media such as Facebook or Youtube.

Everything is generally measurable for the campaign, everything is short term, switch on and switched off and budget driven. Run the campaign, get the exposure, drive sales. Unfortunately its not always that simple. Social media requires ongoing genuine conversations to be of value, natural search rankings require changes to the website which may need to be planned and take time, taking longer to get results than the campaign itself. So we have some ongoing or longer term solutions interacting with shorter term, campaign driven ideas.

So, why not build your own media instead of buying it? As a large organisations with advertising and marketing budgets why invest all of this into shorter term campaigns? You no doubt have a website with vast information on your products, their benefits and features? Why not extend this and build your own media, including information, tools, communities? In the past many news organisations have morphed into this area, they have a newspaper, add a baby site, dating site, car site etc etc. Guess what, more media for you to buy.

Theoretical case study in point

Theoretical case study and I labour the point, theoretical. Any relationship to actual events, individuals or organisations are purely coincidental. I promise. But consider this. I am say a CEO of a large food company with numerous brands. One of my brands makes breakfast cereals and snack bars for the health conscious professional females aged 25-35 years old, single or married with no children. I know she generally does the household shopping, goes to gym and cares how she looks, feels and takes care of herself.

My website is all about product, how great they are, low GI, good to eat after exercise, handy for snacking and so on. My site ranks well for product names and the brand which delivers some but not a lot of monthly traffic, my last campaign increased traffic to the site but with a lesser increase in sales.

My issue is that I am in a highly competitive market, competitors are doing deals with supermarkets for better shelf space. Supermarkets are 80% of my channel. When customers come in, they are often overwhelmed, time poor and will make a decision based on brand recollection and association or convenience and perception. Great!

Firstly I decide to get rid of focus groups, they are small, not representative of anything in many cases and the results are often influenced by the questions asked and the facilitator. People are naturally polite, especially when being paid and also generally relate to the what is known rather than what could be.

I get detailed keyword research done, understanding what the masses want and are looking for. I realise there are few searches in search engines for my products and some are on brand but that bounce rate is high, unles I have promotions, free give-aways or competitions. Fickle bunch…

Read more…

Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing Advertising, Digital Strategy, Marketing, Media, Online

New business models for social marketers. Managing your brand on the web just got interesting. Sidewicki, the tool in your Google Toolbar allowing you to see comments made next to websites has been upgraded to allow you to view these for an entire domain, per the Google blog. You are pretty quickly going to get a view on what a business/ restaurant/ website is about using this feature.

On the upside, to comment users need a Google profile and also need some “trust” or “authority”, lets call it PageRank for profiles before they are published. As more people comment so this bar will rise. So you spam the sidewicki, as with search you will become invisible. But comment wisely and responsibly and you build an ability to influence an extremely important part of todays marketing mix.

Granted:

• Low use and understanding of Google profiles
• Not that hard to set up a profile
• Low use or understanding of Sidewicki, let alone having the toolbar installed

But

• Gmail, Local Business Centre and so on will continually enhance our understanding
• Google social will encourage all to set up profiles, also just to claim your own space
• Online profiles will continue to grow in importance and need to be managed

So this has the opportunity to bring power to the people. You want to book a flight and have some adventure, search for “air tickets to Iraq” and find the #1 ranking site, but low and behold there are numerous sidewicki entires about how that airline runs late, loses your lugage, are rude to customers etc. You still going to book with them?

In the future of search, if there were enough of these and the quality was good, why would they not Read more…

Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing Google sidewicki, reputation management

Bye Bye those upfront buys

Great video on traditional and online advertising written to Bye Bye Miss American pie. If you are in marketing or advertising and pitch against some of the larger more traditional agencies you may relate to this.

Business online, Internet, Online marketing, Paid Search, Search Marketing Advertising

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Training Course from Bruce Clay here in Australia. We ran it in Tasmania, ratings and feedback were good, so now we are running it in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane during October 2009. Bruce Clay training is well known and our 3 day training course highly rated (4.8/5 average) for the 3 years it has been running to date. We now have added a 1 day curriculum which will run more regularly than 6 monthly as in the past. You can register here.

The course includes detailed material, live examples and

Where and when will the SEO training be held?
Brisbane – Wednesday the 14th of October, 2009
Novotel, 200 Creek St, Brisbane.

Melbourne – Tuesday the 20th of October, 2009
Stamford Plaza, 111 Little Collins St, Melbourne.

Sydney – Thursday the 29th of October, 2009
Menzies Hotel, 14 Carrington St, Sydney.

What is covered in the SEO course?
•            Achieving better rankings in search engine results
•            How to increase click-through rates
•            How to make your site more relevant
•            How to identify the best keywords for your site
•            What is PageRank and how to increase link popularity
•            How to identify and characterise your competition
•            How to analyse and edit your own content
•            How to avoid Spam
•            How to include Engagement Objects™
•            Designing and structuring your site in the right way to achieve better search engine rankings
•            Optimising the technical structure of your site to improve rankings
•            Ensuring your site is able to be spidered by the search engine robots
•            How to develop links worth having
•            Monitoring you and your competitors positions within the search engine rankings
•            Being ethical whilst optimising your site
•            How to measure your success

What is included?
Fees include the 1 day training course, meals and refreshments, a 1 year free subscription to the SEOToolSet® (valued at over $1,000) and a detailed course manual.

Bookings
Bookings can now be made at the following url: https://www.seotoolset.com/training/register_au.html

More information
More information on the 1 day SEO training course can be found at http://www.bruceclay.com.au/training/one-day-SEO-course.htm.

More information on the 3 day SEO training course can be found at http://www.bruceclay.com.au/training/index.htm.

Internet, Online marketing, Search Marketing SEO Training

Reading George F Colony’s Blogcalled the Counterintuitive CEO on how what CEOs will face next with respect to the recession and how it will act a s a gateway connecting 2 different era’s got me thinking on the top things CEOs should be considering to get them through this gateway or portal with business intact.

1. There is always opportunity. It just looks different, maybe now it is less abundant, but it is there. Opportunity + Planning = success. Testing ideas online is cheap.
2. There is no such thing as an unprofitable business. Just unprofitable business models.
3. Stay clean, squeaky clean. The digital trail never dies. Manage your life and your associated online reputation carefully.
4. Invest in your digital properties and digital footprint. Proactively managing your online customer and future customer base is key. Make sure your selection processes for vendors and software are sound.
5. Educate yourself on all things digital. Take a course. Invest some time. Understand search engine marketing (SEM) and especially search engine optimisation (SEO) and how it applies to your business. Read more…

Business online, Internet CEO