Is Search Engine Optimisation becoming Search Optimisation?
This article really does contemplate a very interesting question about search. Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO); the concept that an entire industry has been build on, primarily around the awe-inspiring Google; shifting gear and morphing in to Search Optimisation?
The hypothesis is quite simple. Where are people spending their time online and more importantly what are they doing while they are online and not using a search engine?!
For my money, the answer in short is that internet users are spending their time online using their social networks – the places they spend a lot of time – to search a few things :
- the product or service that they are looking to make use of.
- references from friends who have used the product or service that they need.
In short the power of search within social networks is only really beginning to be understood. These social influences are what drive people far more than what you can say on your website or blog.
According to Alexa the following sites have the most traffic in South Africa : 
- google.co.za
- facebook.com
- google.com
- youtube.com
- yahoo.com
- wikipedia.org
- twitter.com
- blogger.com
- gumtree.co.za
- news24.com
- linkedin.com
- bidorbuy.co.za
- standardbank.co.za
- fnb.co.za
- live.com
While Google is at the top of the list – which means that they are getting a the most of the traffic – there are sites like facebook, youtube, wikipedia, twitter and linkedin that are being highly visited and searched. In other words, here are the average search statistics for a number of networks :
- Google: 88 billion per month (this is ALL Google properties (youtube, Google web search, Google image search etc)
- Twitter: 19 billion per month
- Yahoo: 9.4 billion per month
- Bing: 4.1 billion per month
With 19 billion searches on Twitter every month; can you afford not to be found if someone is looking for information on a product or service that you are able to provide?
As I said in the beginning, this is very much just a hypothesis; but ultimately you cannot afford to put all your eggs in 1 basket.
Internet users are getting more and more savvy about where they are searching for what they need. If you are not positioning your company to be found online – yes that’s right – online; not just on Google; then I am afraid that the internet using public is going to pass you by.
Search engine optimisation is not dead… It is just evolving…
Advertising; Augmented Reality and the future!
I dove into the world of augmented reality today for the first time; and to tell you the truth I basically only just scratched the surface!
First, augmented reality refers to a display in which simulated imagery, graphics, or symbology is superimposed on a view of the surrounding environment.
Augmented reality really allows you to experience a literal new dimension to the world around you. This technology simply put allows the camera, gps and a layer of software on your device to function as one. It pulls all these resources together to work out exactly :
1. Where you are.
2. what you are looking at.
3. What information has been attributed to whatever you are looking at.
In the example image above the user of the phone is looking at buying a new house. They simply look at the houses in the area that are shown to be available and the software interface does the rest by flagging the pertinent info and showing the user the detail relevant to the house they are looking at.
Advertising alert!
This opens many millions of doors to advertisers both online and offline! Magazine adverts can have augmented reality features built in so that the adverts “come alive” when you move your phone or media consumption device (trying really hard not to say iPad – D’oh!) over the advert additional info can be displayed.
Billboard advertising can really begin to flourish and the “3D” advertising we have at the moment (thank you Eno’s 3D billboard) will soon be a thing of the past and look like amateurish outdoor advertising. With augmented reality, the billboards will again be able to live and move.
As dangerous as it sounds, image having the windscreen of your car acting as the platform on which these additional bits of info were displayed. No longer will you have to squint your eyes to see the tiny GPS screen; now your entire windscreen IS the gps (I should patent that if its not already taken!).
The reality (augmented or otherwise) is that every media device being launched at the moment already houses some augmented reality software and with developers launching AR (augmented reality) apps every day; the future is here already. The device houses that don’t keep up with this digital trend are going to lose market share and are going to find themselves scrambling to keep up.
Mixed Reality.
For the moment there is still mixed reality; the tiny little stepping stone that might get completely forgotten. It’s the bridge where you can still use your hand held device to look at an image and then translate that image into a online experience.
An example of this is the 2D barcode 
(if you are using a BlackBerry, you can use BeeTag which is available in App World). When you scan this image with your phone, BeeTag then reads this info and pushes you to the website destination.
When this becomes mainstream; as many people still don’t use this either as marketers or as consumers; augmented reality will be hot on its heels and ready to blow us all away from advertising to the way we experience the world in general!
Marketing Strategy is like solving a Rubik’s Cube
This is rather a weird thing to say when you look at it at face value. But the metaphor is really actually quite beautiful when you dig a little deeper in to it.
When trying to solve a Rubik’s cube, you cannot just look at the move you are about to make in isolation, but rather you need to be living a few moves in to the future and make sure that you know how each move affects the other blocks on the cube.
The same can be said about marketing strategy. Each and every marketing decision you make has a ripple on affect that can go in a few different directions. As a marketing strategist or a marketing planner you need to keep these possibilities at the very forefront of all your decision making.
Marketing connects everything!
The ripples that your marketing can make do not only change the way in which clients can interact with you, but they also change the way in which different departments within your business behave as well.
This means that if you are running a marketing campaign on a certain widget that your business makes then in your planning you need to be sure that you looked at :
- Can you supply if the demand picks up?
- Is there enough staff to process the orders?
- Can you meet the delivery times promised?
- Is the widget actually profitable at the marketed price if the uptake is low?
These are just some of the very simple questions that marketing strategists need to ask and again this is because everything that marketing does is connected to everything else.
Planning for success.
Back to the analogy.
The business goal is to solve the Rubik’s Cube. To have every colour neatly on its own side of the cube. The marketing strategy is getting the individual squares to play with and move where you need them to.
Careful thought and planning of your marketing initiatives is critical. But more important than how cool your marketing looks; is it moving you closer to your business objective of solving the Rubik’s Cube?
Marketing and Sales : Business Strategy Channel Surfing
Effective strategies are born out of more than just an excellent idea! There needs to be action and a certain amount of follow through to ensure that your stagnant piece of paper, which has the best strategy in the world right now for you and your business, actually lives and breathes.
There are particularly 2 main areas where business strategies fall short. Those are :
- Marketing Channels
- Distribution Channels
Marketing Channels.
A lot of the content that I write about on this blog is mostly around Online Marketing. But that is just one marketing channel. There is still a place in the world for offline marketing & it is rather the mixture of each of these channels which truly makes for a winning strategy.
The key to getting this balance right is to research exactly where your exact target market are consuming their media as well as effective ways on how to reach them.
Online marketing as a channel is becoming more and more effective as it is head and shoulders the most measurable and innovative of the marketing channels out there.
Distribution Channels.
Distribution channels are from where your wares are peddled. In other words – if you have an online shop, your website is a distribution channel (it’s also a marketing channel). It is the vehicle that gets your product to market, it can either be directly, through retailers, etc.
Typically you would have a different sales strategy for each of your distribution channels as each distribution channel may have a different specific criteria or target market.
Where Business Strategy Goes Wrong.
Where a lot of businesses lose their way is when they are not effectively optimising each of these independent strategies as well as the cross over points between these strategies.
Each of these individual marketing channels needs to be looked at first in isolation and then as part of the whole. Each of these will work with different strengths and intensities and drive different qualities of visitor to your site. These need to be looked at critically to return the highest ROI.
Simply put, using the online marketing strategy as an example.You embark on a grand online marketing strategy. This strategy succeeds and sends thousands of visitors to your site. This means that your marketing strategy succeeded with which ever channels you used to drive the traffic with.
This is where your marketing strategy and sales strategy cross over. As soon as they land on your site and begin to interact and are funneled into taking action they are skipping across the line of sales and marketing.
Should your sales strategy not compliment your marketing strategy and vice versa then there will be a breakdown in your overall strategy and your sales will be negatively effected.
Make it work.
Looking at each and every part of your business strategies; from sales and marketing to distribution and everything in between cannot be done enough. Many businesses today suffer 1 of 2 fates, either they didn’t spend enough time working on their strategies, or they got consumed by them and forgot that they still actually need to conduct business.
Get the balance right and make it work!
Target market selection : ensure they are worth it
When you look at this from the outset, it sounds like one of the simplest things to do. But very often when putting together any form of marketing campaign, both online or offline, very often this point gets lost.
Where does targeting go wrong?
On a micro level there are many places where the sight does not quite line up to the target.
Sometimes the creative execution gets in the way and the idea becomes unmanageable. The marketing is stunning and the creative is eye catching and incredibly compelling but somewhere along the way it becomes too complicated. The target market may not have all the technology available to even view the creative and so all of that hard work and creative brilliance is wasted.
Very often every creatives, marketing strategists, even copywriters forget that the target market might be completely different from them. The campaign then gets planned and executed for their point of view to meet and achieve their expectations of what would make the campaign successful. This means that we’d have huge complex multi-level campaigns involving smartphones and internet marketing being pitched at low income, low LSM demographics.
On a more macro level, there are further pitfalls that can be run into when a company is looking at their marketing initiatives. Again, targeting is an area that needs to be given a lot of thought. This time though; when looking at the target market, we are less concerned about the demographical breakdown of the target market, but rather the critical mass that makes up that target market. This is especially true when looking at a business-to-business marketing model.
(Can you tell, I’m NO graphic designer?) What the graphic is basically trying to illustrate is that in the blue pyramid there are a large number of companies at the bottom of the pyramid, this then progresses to fewer companies at the top. When you look at the proportion of revenue generated (orange triangle) by each company in the blue pyramid, proportionally each company at the bottom is making FAR less revenue that those at the top.
In a short easy to understand sentence… “There are a lot of companies that make very little money, while there are very few companies who are making absolute bucket loads of cash!”
This means it vitally important that you ensure that when choosing your target market you make sure that the segment you ar going to be going after is big enough to sustain your business into the future.
Something which certainly every business owner has learnt since the recession became a buzzword is that if you do not have a sustainable target market in tough times, your business is going to be on permanently shaky ground.
Finding your target market means making sure that you have a sweet spot. You can still market to the areas slightly above and below your core group. But you need a large enough potential group to ensure further success.
Large Advertising Agencies Still Not Getting Online…
I feel that I need to start this off with a disclaimer. This is not a personal dig, jab, poke or knife in for big agencies some of whom may be featured in this blog post. This is merely looking at what I feel large agencies are failing to notice and are still in my opinion; doing wrong! I don’t intend to piss anyone off (although I am virtually guaranteed of doing that). So with that out of the way; let’s get this started.
Full Service; Full Stop.
I’m specifically picking on agencies who call themselves “full service agencies”. In days gone by, large agencies were especially guilty of saying that they were full service agencies, this included advertising, branding, communication and everything in between. Unfortunately for them, digital no longer means that you can get away with a (say in Capetonian accent) “like totally awesome design, that contemplates the meaning of life!” That was especially cool when people gave a damn! Now there is a HUGE emphasis placed on what does my digital marketing do for me?! Where is my ROI (Return On Investment)?!
Websites in particular need to be found online and once they are found, what are the visitors going to do on the site when they are there? Are they going to give you a pat on the back for your ability to bring them to orgasm by looking at their design? No! They are going to leave if you cannot offer them what they are looking for in as short an amount of time as possible.
But this is true of EVERY digital medium out there as well, not only websites, but as I said large advertising agencies just dont seem to get online.
Let’s back this up with a few examples :
(click on each image to see it full screen)
The Father of advertising’s website.
Ogilvy‘s website is quite possibly the most difficult website to get to grips with out of all the ones I looked at. And may I draw your eye to the 4th line of text on their site which says “Digital Media & Search Marketing”. Erm… Did I miss something…!? The entire site is flash – which does not index and if you happen not to have a flash player – that’s one site you are not going to see…!
I know that everyone (and I stress everyone) is or was a fan of TIM (The Incredible Machine); but when did it become a good idea to design a website in a 90′s style PC game? Ebony & Ivory have designed a beautiful site – half of which you can see at any time as they designed it to be seen of a 52inch monitor as it doesn’t scale any smaller.
It truly is beautiful and the attention to detail is superb; but it is the perfect example of large advertising creative steam rolling digital sense!
This might just be my favourite of all. Network BBDO clearly had this designed in Cape Town! (in another Cape Tonian accent) “This site is like totally groovy, becaue as you move your mouse the perspective changes and that is like a metaphor for the work that we do. WE like totally change the perspectives of how people interact with your brand!” Crap! It’s kak to navigate, it plays some awful sound when you navigate over a highlighted button and it gives you a headache! The only action I wanted to take was to click “back” not make you my agency of choice!
The reason why I love this one so much is because they are a huge advertising agency ; both in South Africa as well as globally. But the real kicker is that they are a sister company to Gloo Digital (don’t get me started). Clearly they are not sharing digital ideas that convert and if they are, they are certainly keeping it a secret.
Wrapping It Up!
The basic outtake from all of this is that when you are choosing a digital partner or even a stock standard advertising agency; be sure that their digital is not all about the creative; but that they are backing it up with hard core search engine optimisation as well as website conversion techniques – cos a pretty totally awesome design does not bring your business cash – no matter how many Loeries it wins!
Planning your online marketing campaign success
In the recent weeks and months there has been a lot of discussion and effort around companies wanting to rank for specific events that are only relevant for a very short period of time. Take the recent World Cup that was played in South Africa; so many companies have stretched their online marketing budgets to try and ensure that they can catch some of the tourist spend that has flooded in to the country.
Businesses in the travel and accommodation sectors have been particularly keen on making their online marketing budgets have a far greater bang. Unfortunately for the majority there has been one crucial flaw in all their online marketing. That flaw has been the time that they devoted to the campaign itself.
Let me explain this a little further. The campaign start date was June 23rd, the campaign end date was July 11. That’s a month worth of campaign. Now this would be great if the campaign was using online marketing such as 3rd party advertising and AdWords only; unfortunately many companies have had limited budgets and have wanted to rank organically for specific search terms over this specific period. (can you see the problem yet???)
Search engines, although they have given some assistance with real time search results, are still looking for longevity and relevance!
The keyword there is longevity. If you want to rank for a keyword or phrase that is going to be highly contested, a single page (no matter how well written for search) is not going to be seen as the most relevant to a search engine. To this end, an online marketing campaign’s start needs have traction before the event you are “piggy backing” off starts. This means that at least 6 weeks to 10 weeks before your special actually kicks in, you need to be promoting and speaking about your special and the event itself. This will make your content more relevant and more compelling to both search engines as well as the people you are trying to reach.
For events that are truly massive with a worldwide appeal such as the 2012 Olympics and the keyword “2012 Olympics accommodation”, you’d better get started within the next year. Make sure all content is relevant, from the domain name to the articles.
Ultimately backing this ‘basic’ seo up with AdWords and 3rd party advertising, not to mention social media, is what will truly culminate in a successful online marketing initiative. Online marketing is truly successful when many different layers are used together; this means taking best practice SEO as the base and then adding social media (twitter, facebook, etc); pay-per-click advertising (AdWords, Facebook ads) and 3rd party advertising to that all concentrate your efforts and make for a better return on investment.
Is website optimization really worth the trouble?
The short answer here is : yes..!
Website optimization allows you the opportunity to take a good looking website and convert into a great performing website!
Let’s face it, we all want a website that not only has a lot of traffic driven to it, but also a site that then takes that traffic and makes sure that it converts by filling in a form or actually buying something there and then! This is the point of a website; to make people convert. To make your website change from being a presence online to a money making machine!
How can this be?
Website optimization makes this possible.
Website design is an art. The designer needs to take note of many different pieces of information to design a site which answers to the websites objectives. They need to look at everything from brand to customer demographic as well as the site’s objectives. By testing the layout, colours, calls to action, copy, headlines and more you can really start to ensure that your page is converting as many people as possible.
Google’s Website Optimizer tools are excellent as they cover both a/b testing as well as multivariate testing.
a/b testing is an optimization technique where you literally change one variable at a time to gauge how it changes the conversions on a specific page. By testing one variable at a time, we get a very clear indication of exactly what works and what does not.
Multivariate testing is when different versions of the page are tested. This offers completely different versions of the page which gives great results, but the pin point accuracy of exactly which change made the difference is lost.
Elements to test
Of all the elements that make up a landing page. There are a few that are slightly more important than other in my opinion.
The first is your heading.
The heading is the link between what the user searched for, and your page. They have trusted you enough to click on your PPC ad or your organic listing, now you need to let them know they did the right thing. By reflecting what they clicked on in your heading you are earning a little more trust and will make the user a little more at ease.
Second is the call to action.
The Call To Action (CTA) is what you want the user to do on your page. Fill in a form, click a button, buy something. Don’t confuse your user by having 3 things for them to do. Make it clear to see, obvious to understand and impossible to miss. This is why your website exists, it is to get people to take this action; so why hide it?
One of the best solutions is to have the form that you want them to fill in (assuming its a form) on the page and above the fold. Don’t make them look for it and don’t make them click away to a “contact us” page. Make it easy for them to contact you.
Benefits or features?
Benefits. Benefits. Benefits. It’s as simple as that. Make sure that the benefits you are mentioning on your page are addressing something that the user typed in to find your page in the first place. This is going to build confidence with the user and take one more step in convincing them to fill in your perfectly positioned contact form. Convincing copy that is relevant to their search term and shows them value is always a win.
These are by no means all the things you need to look at when practicing website optimizastion, but I feel that they are some of the important ones that you should look at first.
Online Reputation Management, what’s it worth?
When speaking to any company today about what the online market in general thinks about their product and service; and their answer is along the lines of, “who cares?!” then you are talking to a company that has turned its back on customer service and consumer loyalty.
What is online reputation management?
A companies online worth is stored in the comments and attitudes of those who interact with the brand online. Their perceptions of the product or service are recorded in the comments that they leave in an array of places. Online Reputation Management is the monitoring of, and acting on, of these comments. This tracking is vital for companies today as they can no longer control each and every conversation about them online.
Where and why do people comment?
As the internet develops, more and more people are beginning to use it as a platform where they can research products and services that they are interested in. These same people are also looking at other comments that similar users are leaving about those self same products and services and basing their buying decisions on those comments first, sometimes even before they have gone to your company’s own website.
Users can do this in a huge array of different places. Facebook, Twitter, blogs and Hello Peter! are just some of the many places where they can post their thoughts and comments on your brand.
Why should my company care?
Your company needs to care about what people are saying about your brand. This is a simple fact with many strong reasons backing it up. Simply put :
- Simply ignoring comments online doesn’t mean that those comments don’t exist.
- Seeing what people are saying about your brand allows you insight into possible future product development.
- Contributing to comments allows you to influence the conversation and also show a positive face to the online world.
Luckily for companies there are many free tools that allow you keep tabs on what is being said about you. Some of these tools are :
Google Alerts – a simple alerts program which sends you an email whenever it finds a new mention of your specified keywords.
Yahoo! Pipes – slightly more sophisticated than Google Alerts, but its definitely for the more advanced user as it is more difficult to setup.
How Sociable? – a great tool that gives you a quick snapshot overview of how well (or badly) you are doing in the online social world.
While these are all great tools, they are all very simple in their construction and are not 100% reliable to use as a means of finding out what users online are saying about you at any given time. To clarify, these individual tools are the precursor to Online Reputation Management tools, but they do serve as a nice intriduction for anyone who is beginning to monitor their brand online.
Watch this space as the company that I work for is in the process of developing our own Online Reputation Management tool which will encompass the basics of ORM, but also push the boundaries of where, when and how information is being tracked.
What to watch for with online copy writing
Traditional copy writing and online copy writing are essentially two sides of the same coin in most peoples eyes. But to a large degree they are wrong.
The base level intent of onilne copy writing – especially for SEO – is to convince the reader to take action in as short a time as possible. This means that there are a number of things that we need to look at when we are writing for online.
Sentence Length.
Probably the most important factor of online copy writing is sentence length. Readers need to be able to understand and grasp what you are saying quickly without having to re-read sentences a number of times.
Traditionally online readers are looking for instant gratification. They want the information they are looking for as quickly as possible and the quicker you can give it to them , the more likely they are to fill in a form or buy something right there and then.
Copy structure
The copy of all online copy needs to be written in such a way that as your reader moves through the content they are picking up on the relevant info as they go along. This is typically shown by writing your copy with a pyramid in mind.
- The main point you are trying to convey at the top of the copy.
- The key facts to support your point second.
- Lastly follow this up with less important details which will not immediately affect their decision.
Calls To Action
Online copy needs to encourage the reads to take action. This is achieved by” littering” your copy with calls to action which make it as easy as possible for them to, once they have the desired info, take the next step and give you dome info about them.
Quick Fire Tips
When writing copy online, it is important to make the article to your target audience as well as search engines. This means striking a balance between stuffing the copy with the keywords you want to be found under, and making it compelling for real people to read.
Always write for people first and search engines second.
Keep the sentence length short and make sure that you are writing at the correct level for your audience.
Use readability tools to check that your article meets with these guidelines. A great one to use is www.editcentral.com
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