Blog Case Studies

I remember reading a fair few months ago, according to Technorati;
100,000,000 + blogs have less than 20 in-bound links.
400,000 blogs have more than 20,000 in-bound links.
The top 2,500 bloggers have greater than 100,000 in-bound links.

Maybe I’m naive, this illustrates to me that reaching the top isn’t a monumental task.

Blogs on their own can do very well as a marketing tool. When optimised, socialised, and linked out to other blogs, they’re phenomenal. Basically, if you can optimise content that’s relevant, a good read and adds value, then you’ll get promoted.

Blog Case Study 1: Our Online Marketing Consulting

A senior citizens housing developer. Worked with the developer on a consultancy basis. Strategy was to create a communication channel to target a market that’s less formal than on the corporate website.

Tactically – upgraded the blog, optimised it according to our advice, and reach out to other bloggers in their space. Within a few months, became a top source of traffic to site: rankings went up, visitors increased. Very nominal effort with very tangible results.

Blog Case Study 2: Large SEO Investment

A book and game retailer wanted to generate sales. Many in the buying space are passionate about games and brain teasers. We wanted to create a place for people to play games.

Tactic – created an SEO’d blog, created communities on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and Stumbleupon. We mined Twitter data to find out what people are talking about and to friend people based on this research. Result – great top 3 rankings for target keywords.

Did a social promotion for an old style carnival game. Created a flash version, and promoted that via social media.

Results – Many wrote about this game and we create a big spike. There was another spike as a latent effect, people started searching for the game. Traffic and page-views quintupled! Now the blog sell ads in addition to products and generates a very good revenue stream.

Blog Case Study 3: Small Business SEO

An Online Marketing Blog. Strategy – Increase thought leadership – cover tips, thoughts, news and the SEM basics. Goal – Eventually to generate leads. Tactic – create unique content on a regular schedule via relevant SEM subjects, agency insights, etc.

What happened over time? Generated No.1 Keywords, regular readership and brand awareness.

Next Step – Make the blog into a conversion tool for consultancy and create advertising revenue.

Still a slow burner as budget and time are limited, but has great potential and a very important digital asset.

Key takeaways:

Goals drive content. Automate SEO as much as possible – Socialise – Measure – Refine – Repeat. Make sure you focus on end objectives.

Adwords Quality Score Help Part 3

The progressive conversation on relevancy:

With the onset of Quality Score, relevancy is much more scientific than most SEO packageswill let you believe… if you want to approach it properly. The conversation has been going on for quite a while. I am going to focus specifically on the landing page and the collaboration that needs to occur to get this right.

Relevancy: what it used to mean, you had this bucket of keywords that you’d created during your search engine optimization training. You had the same titles and descriptions for everything on your list. Maybe you categorised them in Excel, started to map keywords, either way it used to be extremely manual. Then, the tools started to get better, standards started to raise, and relevancy became increasingly part of the conversation when it came to do quality search marketing.

We got more aggressive on bidding strategy, handling text ad methods, titles and descriptions, keyword landing page, and getting more serious about what we wanted the consumer to do.

Landing page: we have always been delivering this to deliver on consumer demand. Where you land on the page is one thing but now there are many more things to look at. You want to look at the account history, content and layout, usability and navigation and load time.

If Quality Score is well handled, it will force the tightening of relevancy to occur earlier on. We want to deliver on relevancy.

Guidance: When it comes to content, content rich strategies in search have always been wise. Use tags when necessary and be descriptive.

Usability: It should be useful, relevant, and deliver.

Navigation: Direct connection to what is sought. Make it clear how to get there. Ease of passage.

Transparency: Make sure the nature of your business is crystal clear.

Load time: this can be smooth with the right kind of collaboration. Minimize the number of redirects and come up with creative workarounds of slow servers.

Conclusion: If you are serious about relevancy, you need to take Quality Score seriously. It does I believe represent an opportunity to hang your interests on. As you go about making site modifications and dealing with all the other factors, understand what the threshold is and what your efforts should be. Know that your efforts are going to be re-evaluated by the engines over time, and will get better and better.

Summit for all your online marketing consulting

5 Tips for Driving Qualified Traffic With Online Marketing

Online marketing consulting firms often need to be creative when it comes to solving client web site traffic and sales problems. Inspiration from friends and family, movies, or even the smooth sounds of the local radio station can be useful.

Take this longstanding frustration: The efforts of a top SEO can sometimes produce an increase in website traffic that is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in conversions. While more traffic is almost always positive, it does little good if the majority of site visitors aren’t seriously interested in the products or services being promoted.

So how does one make sure the right traffic finds the right web site content? I recommend taking the advice of 80′s pop icon Lionel Richie by asking your site visitors the classic question, “Hello, is it me you’re looking for?”

While Mr. Richie may be directing his sentiments at a visually-impaired student (see the video if you don’t know what I’m talking about), this is a question whose answer is critical to every online marketer as well. In order to get conversions, you need to make sure the business you are promoting is being found by legitimate prospects. Ensure your site provides what visitors are looking for by following these five musically-themed guidelines:

* Know your audience – Should you be targeting a product’s end-users or distributors? What stage of the buying cycle are you targeting? A good online marketing team conducts the proper background research in order to fully understand who they are trying to reach, where they are in the buying cycle and plans content creation, optimisation and promotion accordingly.

* Book your prospect’s favorite venue – Once you feel you have actionable knowledge of your target audience, you can select appropriate places for reaching them. Research communities, influencers and behaviours of the target audience to establish a useful presence and content, be it on social networks, forums, blogs or the company web site.

* Give fans what they want – Make sure the offer and conversion opportunity are a good match for what the target audience is looking for. In some cases they will be looking to buy your product, but in others they may want more information like a white paper or a case study, or the opportunity to be contacted.

* Choose the right ‚”lyrics” – When selecting keywords to optimise your site content or pay-per-click campaign, keyword popularity is only a starting point. Choosing the most appropriate keywords to describe product or service offerings considering relevancy, context and intent are important. Research, consideration, evaluation and purchasing are different phases of the buyer’s search experience. Optimising the right content with the right keywords for each of these phases will help prospects find your site in a more relevant way.

* Sing it loud – The copy, images and overall design of your website and landing pages should be obvious cues to the type of product or service offered and consistent with search query that brought them there. Structure your site design and calls to action so that prospects immediately know that they’ve found what they are looking for. For example, sending PPC traffic from a specific product keyword to the company home page will alienate and confuse the searcher. Send specific traffic queries to specific landing pages. For SEO, optimise specific content for specific phrases to help searchers pull themselves to the right content for conversion.

Implementing these tactics can increase web site traffic specifically for people who are more likely to convert. When you pose Lionel Richie’s question to your visitors, more will respond with a resounding “Yes it is you I’m looking for!” And while you may not receive thanks in the form of a clay sculpture, the increase in your conversions should more than make up for it.

Please contact SEO Liverpool for more information about our SEO packages.

Tips for finding Niche Keywords Part 3

The final part in our post from Summit online marketing looking… the top seo guide to finding niche keywords

4. Did you know that there are differences between the written word and spoken dialogue? Try exploring natural sounding “dialogue” and words based on dialogue. Your friends and customers often will say things, that give you a starting place to explore new data.

5. Open up your research and explore the world of colour. For example, what happens if you enter a single term representing a colour like “red,” or “aqua” or “green” or any other colour?

6. Explore any type of data at all in terms of a root word. Don’t forget to explore everything and anything that comes to mind. From a topic you notice on the news, to something that may not even be a word at all. What happens if you try to explore a number, or a price like £9.95 instead of a word?

7. Instead of just thinking of your research as “keywords” try thinking in terms of your audience’s “topics of interest.”

Wordtracker will give you absolutely AMAZING detail if you take time to think about it laterally, and outside of the context of just a “keyword hunt.” Don’t let the natural tendency to “guess at keywords” stop you from uncovering all the hidden evidence, that just needs a little digging to find.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, if you want more ideas you can visit Wordtracker and have a go for free!

Michael Campbell Notes: Anybody involved with online marketing consulting would think about your audience’s trade lingo, industry jargon, and words that are specific to a certain holiday, sport, hobby or service. For example, RIP, stripper, loupe, masking, pantone, dot gain and super black are all related to the printing industry. Spend some time in the industry association sites or read industry specific magazines to learn their lingo, for more potential niches.

Another tip is to use verbs and action words like “stop” or “improve” as your root word. Then let the keyword service (my favourite is NicheBot) tell you what people want “stopped” or “improved” in their lives.