Posted at: 12:02 PM by Si

So you have a nice new shiny website, fresh design, some nice new images - and a nifty content management system that lets you update your content easily. Excellent - great news. The bad news is that this is really only half the challenge of a new (or rebuilt) website.

Here at Zabisco, we often get asked - how do I boost my traffic? The answer is not simple, Google is an advanced and complex beast. However there are some basic principles you can adhere to to help your search engine visibility. One of the most overlooked is updating the content on the website, not only does Google keep track of what pages get updated, it is also a good way to ensure that visitors see fresh and engaging content.

All very easy so far - where's the problem I hear you cry? Well in our experience, and through no fault of their own, new and engaging content can easily be overlooked by clients. The reason? Well everyone has a day job - you can't always be thinking about a new blog post, or how to make your homepage more key rich. Creating time to manage a website is not always easy and if lots of people are contributing then consistency of tone of voice and best practice can be lost.

At Zabisco we are always looking to add value to our clients, so recently we have been trialing our content management/generation service (suggestions for a catchier name are welcome) with a few key clients. So what does this service entail?

• we visit the client regularly or keep in touch over the phone to ensure we know what is going on in their company/industry
• we generate regular news and content items for the site and ensure they are key word rich but also maintain a consistent and engaging tone of voice
• as well as looking to promote content we also then aim to push that content out to a wider audience, so we look to post links to the content on relevant sites, and to promote it through social media channels (such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)

The service can cost as little or as much as you want, it really depends on how much you want us to do.

For more information feel free to get in touch with us

Labels: content, seo, social media

Posted at: 3:26 PM by David

About Guest Poster, Ben McKay Ben McKay, has been in marketing since 2001, in various online and offline campaign management roles. Throughout recent years he has made a more permanent move into search marketing in 2006, working in-house and on a consulting basis for clients in the UK and USA. Say hello to Ben on Twitter.

I was kindly asked to write a a post about search engine marketing for 2009, by the nice guys at Persona. I thought I would pick-up on a topic that challenges how social media marketing's ability to consider ROI via scientific means that seems so current at the moment. I wanted to discuss the topic as it follows on nicely from recent posts, including how SEO should brand the web, or how it needs to be lead by both scientific and marketing intentions, and, how more traditional marketing principles can play a role in SEO and link-building.

This topic of science and social media marketing that I'm going to cover, albeit briefly, is one that I think will be a challenge for many throughout 2009...i.e. tackling social media marketing effectively, with accountability and return on investment. There is so much in the online and offline press regarding social media sites regarding the availability and benefits of interacting online that we really should be prepared for this influx of users and the increase in demand for commercially aware and accountable SMM service providers.

Before Time and Social Media Marketing Began

Even before social media took shape, sociologists and psychologist where trying to scientifically demonstrate that humans act in scientifically and measurable behaviour. But even at this higher level of comprehension, compromises and simple inadequacies are found in both the inputs and outputs of these principles. It's no wonder why social media marketing struggles on grounds of accountability, consistent results and return on investment.

Social Media Marketing and Return on Investment

SMM is really a field I have only ever dipped my leg into, really...those best at it are the one's who totally immerse themselves in it on a daily basis...but here's what I've learnt from the time I have been involved in it anyway.

Social media has commercial value so has led to social media marketing, in the same we advertise on buses on bus tickets - it is a form of media that is visible to the consuming public. As a result, I love (and hate) the idea of social media profiles being assets, on both a personal and commercial basis, but the big challenge for 2009 is actually measuring the return on this investment.

A typical example and the problem: for SMM to be a commercially viable option for marketing client businesses and products way into the future there needs to be a measured return on investment fast. The biggest example of this is when things are going well...when things are on the up, it's obvious, no questions are asked as to exactly how the results were gained - they just happened, and everybody was happy.

The solution: a clear understanding of the measurable intentions of the marketing efforts is vital. If conversions are the primary goal of the SMM, this does not mean to say that you should just look at directly related factors to conversion rates but as much of the process as possible; essentially answering the question of what was the buyer-behaviour of the convertee?

I once put out a tweet asking for a resource of variables that I could use to carry-out some multivariate testing / split testing. I got a very helpful tweet back, along the lines of 'only test what you are going to use' (I'm unable to find the tweet, but if it's you, please credit yourself at the bottom!). I originally thought it was helpful because it told me not to clutter up my results with things that I didn't want to know, but now I think it is helpful because it prompts me to think about exactly about what you intend to learn each stage of the process.

The importance of this is that it is just as important to measure the process as it is the output.

5 Tips for Results-Driven SMM and ORM

The outputs of a social media campaign can take a huge range of forms. What you can do this is use online monitoring and buzz monitoring tools. These essentially collate instances of pre-programmed keywords and key phrases that you decide relate to your marketing efforts.

(1) Know your ideal customers inside-out This is is great advice before any sort of marketing effort. Firstly identify your typical customers, and then also identify your ideal customers - this tells you where you want to be. Look after your typical customers, but ensure that you design your marketing efforts to target your ideal customers too . There is a rule of thumb that suggests that 80% of your profits (not revenue) come from 20% of your customers...this highlights the need to 'get to know' your ideal customers far more than we typically do.

(2) Search Language The important thing here is to ensure that you understand the types of language that people might use in response to your communications. It might be that your PR efforts use certain language but your consumers respond in quite different languages. Offline / online language can differ quite differently

(3) Integrate Search Language into Social Media Marketing After getting to grips with your customers search language, ensure that this language is built into your PR efforts but if not, is also monitored. Remember that this has two purposes: it becomes semantically relevant (beyond simple keyword research) and also attracts and relates to your ideal customers. If you can find a new, personalised quirky/provocative/funny word that you can use in your title of your press releases and content titles - people will more than likely adopt this word for use within their own content as it will shock or make people smile...

(4) Offline Marketing Maybe your visitors are arriving directly onto your site in response to offline marketing efforts. How would you attribute one practice's results from the other. After all, your customers are not always online.

(5) Contingency Marketing Plan for the worst, expect the best. It's a good idea when working in an environment of such flux and evolving marketing communications and trends to hold something back. Keep some of your marketing spend in reserve - this will help you to either provide a disaster marketing budget or an opportunity to capitalise on unexpected, evolving opportunities, think: the snowball effect.

8 More items for SMM monitoring and the ORM process to consider

• Market Awareness - social media marketing is more than just links, traffic and conversions.
• Referrer Tracking - this can be quite sophisticated by dishing out unique URLs to different media channels to see which area of media is most effective for you and your site.
• Visitor Behaviour - those precious click through's make your site that much closer to converting ? is your site ready for that traffic? Specifically monitor the response of visitors from social media sources - what is their user behaviour. Consider something like ClickTale.
• Conversions - tracing that click-through right from referrer through to the conversion.
• Voters - who voted for your content on social media sites? Chat with them?
• Champions - who has gone one step-further and started championing your content off the site? I frequently do this with exceptional content about search marketing.
• Conversation - get involved in the conversation about your products out. DO NOT SPAM - add value, and you are not spamming.
• Who commented? A negative response to the post is not necessarily a bad thing either remember - a little controversy can drive a lot of traffic, trigger debate and links to the discussion...

So the SMM science...?

Well, ultimately, the science behind social media marketing, at this stage, is not very scientific at all. It's social and obviously difficult to measure and get a complete picture. As a result, attention to the campaign planning, and information that you do collect, need to be all the more carefully planned and analysed as a result.

It justifies future campaigns, it informs where areas of the campaign can be grown, and obviously highlights failures (or thinking positively: areas of improvement). If there's no science to SMM, then will it not fail as there is no demonstrable ROI?

2009 Results and the SMM Bubble

There is talk of the social media marketing bubble bursting but in reality that's not going to happen. There are too many consumers embracing these online forms of media in more ways, that naturally lend themselves to online marketers. Magazine advertising did not fail because of a lack of accountable ROI, and I expect marketing in social media circles will not either, especially as this is much more analysable. The bubble cannot burst as a result - the demand at this stage is too high.

Those companies and those clients that do not manage their social media campaigns effectively will obviously suffer a personal bubble burst as a result. Time and money can be ploughed into managing these campaigns via wishy-washy talk, so although we can't make SMM a scientific form of marketing like we can/should SEO campaigns, we should certainly push for the closest thing.

2009, a year for SMM boom or bust? What are your thoughts?

Labels: guest, marketing, seo, social media

Posted at: 2:58 PM by David

A new eye tracking study shows the importance of high rankings in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through rate.

The visual heat map (below) suggests how users scan the results on Google and which areas tend to get the maximum attention.

The "Golden Triangle" is formed.

Organic Ranking Visibility

The percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location:

Rank 1 - 100% Rank 2 - 100% Rank 3 - 100% Rank 4 - 85% Rank 5 - 60% Rank 6 - 50% Rank 7 - 50% Rank 8 - 30% Rank 9 - 30% Rank 10 - 20%

The study suggests that if your website is in the top 3 then 100% of searches will notice your listing, but it doesn't mean the same amount of people will click on positions 1,2 and 3. Far more users click the website in position 1 compared to the rest.

The amount of eye movement declined rapidly through the top 4 or 5 results, and then at the bottom of the screen, tends to become more constant through to the end of the page. There seems to be a F shaped scan pattern, where users tend to scan horizontally at the top then travel vertically along the left side of results, forming the Golden Triangle.

Notice the thick red line, which is called the fold line and is where the page needs to be scrolled. Much less attention is placed below the fold line compared to the top 4.

Conclusion: A top 3 listing could be up to five times more effective than a listing in position 10. Contact Persona, online marketing and web design agency, today to find out how we can get you there.

Labels: google, marketing, seo

Posted at: 10:35 AM by David

Hello! My name is David Coveney, welcome to my first post as Online Marketing Executive here at Persona. It's very exciting to join such a young and professional agency; I am privileged to be part of the team.

I have joined Persona after acquiring 5 years experience in web design, development and most importantly online marketing. I've had great success promoting all types of business - from small to large - and public sector organisations.

My aim is to use this knowledge to successfully promote Persona's services as well as optimise our client's sites. Along the way I shall try to help you understand the world of online marketing by regularly posting informative marketing news that aims to help your online business become a success.

Online Advertising is Soaring

Internet advertising has seen phenomenal growth over the last few years. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers an estimated £7.5billion was spent on online advertising last year. This soar in spending has helped hoist Google into the stratosphere making it the market leader in online advertising. Can your business afford to be left behind? Or, is your business paying the price for ineffective marketing?

Although paying for visitors can be an expensive exercise if done incorrectly Persona can provide strategic account management to help maximise your Return on Investment (ROI). I will post more info on pay-per-click, banner advertising, directory listings and other paid for marketing activities.

Invest in SEO so you don't have to pay for visitors

Investing in pay-per-click campaigns are not the only to get more visitors to your site. On the contrary, there are many ways to market your business and get it known to the wider audience. Search Engine Optimisation is one such activity and is the active practise of optimising a web site by improving both on-page and off-page aspects in order to increase organic traffic from the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

SEO is a broad subject and can be split into smaller sub categories such as keyword analysis, competition analysis, copywriting, link building and a few others. I intend on writing blog posts on each of these so stay tuned. To find out more about Persona's Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services get in contact with us.

Social Media and Web 2.0

Social media has turned the web upside down in the last few years and has the power to literally make or break your online marketing campaign. Done well a social media campaign can result in increased brand exposure, thousands of new website visitors and natural links to your site. In turn this will increase those all important search engine rankings for your target keywords.

Social marketing is a great way to promote your business and become part of a community. Never before have you had your customers grouped together in such an accessible fashion. I will be posting a lot more information on social media, social bookmarking and social networking sites.

Get in touch

So if you are looking to promote your website and make it work harder for your business I would love to hear from you! Send me a comment or email (david@per-so-na.com).

Labels: marketing, online advertising, ppc, seo, social media