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

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

The global financial crisis means the economy will flow down. While things look bad there are opportunities out there, just not where you maybe looking. If you sell things that people really don’t need, then this may not be for you.

• While hair dressers might be doing it tough, sellers of hair treatments and dye are doing very well as more people do their hair at home to save money
• While weekend getaway hotels might be doing it tough, flower deliveries are up as people choose cheaper options to treat their loved ones
• While air travel is down, regional hotels are getting the business as people stay closer to home
• People are moving away from media advertising to search marketing due to the ROI and from paid toward more SEO based approaches. Social marketing is big, why do you think?

In every industry there is a flow down economy. Are you tapping into yours?

How is your GFC?

I meet a number of business owners, corporate managers and CEO’s and the first question usually how is business? In other words, we seem to be doing OK, are you guys doing OK? With all the bad news around, we are not sure if things are good or bad. On average I would sum up responses and the feeling toward the economy as such:

• So far we seem to be tracking OK, given the bad economic news
• We are not rushing out to hire and have not replaced certain people
• Revenues are in a range of 10%  up to 10% down on prior year

Keep in mind these companies are generally still profitable and thus engaging my services or about to. I accept sometimes people are frugal with the truth. So if you are reading this and doing it tough I accept there are real issues out there in certain industries. If you look at the Classifind job index, that also tells part of the story.

Consider your business model?

1. Marketing & sales

• Have you reconsidered who your customer is, your customer profile?
• Have you considered whether your customer needs have changed? They may still be buying but for different reasons.
• Have you considered new customer markets on a needs basis, and how to reach these people?
• Are you still paying to market to the wrong target customers?
• Where is the current spend and are you tapping into it?

2. Customer service

• Where is your customer service dollar being spent, still on the upper end? Are you servicing customers who are no longer buying? Read more…

Business online, Online marketing Economy

Bruce Clay has just launched their Australian search engine optimisation (SEO) blog. You can catch all the latest SEO related news, updates and events on the new Bruce Clay blog. The new SEO blog was launched in line with SMX Sydney and you can catch all the action from all the sessions there now. The focus of the blog will be updates, information, research, events and interviews, all from an Australian perspective. The goal as we understand it is to become the leading SEO blog in Australia within 6 months.

Coming up on the blog are interviews with some of Australia’s leading in-house SEO’s who work and manage some of Australia’s largest websites. Also watch out for 1 day training from Bruce Clay based on the recent 1 day training done for SES New York and others. The first session will be in Tasmania in May 2009. You can now get the latest and best right here in Australia.

Follow me on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jeremybolt for all the latest blog updates and news.

And yes… the 5hits will continue.

Online marketing, Search Marketing SEO Blog

So Google has just anounced, if you are logged in you can manipulate your search results, and would not rule out these manipulations being included into the algorithm in the future at some stage, bringing a human power element into the mix and potentially giving Google an edge over purely software driven search results. Google Searchwiki, you can read more at Searchengineland.

The Google folks are all very smart people, at least the ones I have met appear to be. But, I have the following question?

If search results are mainly about discovery and the answering of questions. Why would you manipulate them, so you know the answer or potential answers before you search. I can see the fun side, like me ranking this blog #1 for the term “search engine optimisation” on our office gmail login and seeing who realizes first. Also potentially very niche searches who want to see very specific results only for a group of people. But why would I edit search results when I am looking for answers.

It will also be interesting to see how the comments get handled and whether they are spammed out of existence or not. Maybe the community will rule on this one.

Anyway, watch this space, and my blog going to #1

Online marketing, Search Marketing Searchwiki

We know the number of web pages is growing exponentially, more and more content is out there.

We know that around 75% of small businesses do not even have a web presence, try searching for a butcher in your local suburb. This will grow over the next 3 years.

We know that large companies can afford good web design and search engine optimisation (SEO) firms to help them build their rankings in search engines.

We know that Google is largely dependent on search related revenue and continued growth, and it is thus critically important for them to keep users engaged with search results.

We know that human beings are creatures of habit and that most will not act more than around 30% of the accepted norm.

 Finally, we know search is a set of software based rules, search engines cannot see the patterns or form opinions, it is rule based.

So what? I hear you think?

Well, if most established sites and companies can afford large websites and the best SEO advice money can buy, the chances of a smaller company ranking for a highly searched on term does not look so good from the start, and we know search users will use similar key terms to find things. In fact Google helps with the suggest feature. So other than for obscure, long tail items, pretty much,  you are going to see the same culprits ranking for certain keywords, being branded, well known large organisations. Right? In fact search users get comfort they have used the right search terms when they see brands they recognise in the results who provide the product or service they are after.

So if 20% of all keywords provide 80% of the traffic and there is big dollars behind these search terms, how will Google keep users engaged in search results which have the potential to become increasingly similar for similar terms, other than to encourage them to click past the first page of results.

Read more…

Online marketing, Search Marketing behavioural search, local search

If you doing SEO to any reasonable level you would understand the concept of theming and siloing developed by Bruce Clay. Theming and siloing at a simplistic level relates to grouping pages of similar content and passing PageRank to those pages you want the search engines to see as important. Simple, right.

Marriage has a lot of similarities to the theming and siloing for the following reasons, just think about it.

Here are the top 10 reasons website siloing for search engine optimisation is just like marriage:

1. Linking outside your silo is not a good thing 
2. Bringing unrelated 3rd parties into your silo can result in relationship dilution and a loss of important rankings
3. You may think a rel=nofollow will hide something, but trust me, someone will find out, somewhere and it will get indexed Read more…

Online marketing, Search Marketing Marriage, Website Theming