I’m always glad to see the gleam of positive news in the reams of economic doom, gloom and despair–and especially when it’s good news about our sector. This just in from the new Technical SEO Consultants blog:

While the world is experiencing an economic financial crisis, the SEO industry is experiencing a surprising increase in demand. From intensive training and SEO consultation to actual website changes and link building, the demand for expert SEO help is growing at an astonishing rate….But currently most established SEO professionals seem to have just the opposite need, they have too much business. Many established SEO professionals are declining to take on new clients because they just cannot accept any additional work load right now.

Google is releasing SEO guides, Microsoft and Yahoo! both have in-house SEO departments and the “SEO is BSâ€Â� crowd have lost a little of their swagger and a lot of their arguments. No surprise – solid evidence trumps wishful thinking, especially when times are tough….

“Prospects are demanding more specific information related to their sites issues and detailed, actionable solutions are expected. Generic audits that look automated in any way are no longer welcome. Ex: Don’t just tell me I got a problem with my titles, but tell me exactly how are we going to fix them! That is the attitude of an average educated site owner looking for help. This will ultimately separate the amateurs from the experts.�
-Jose Nunez

We’ve seen a year-end push from new clients, and of course the normal inquiries related to setting 2009 budgets. December looks to be very busy, for which we are thankful. The good news is that clients are getting a lot smarter about both the value of SEO and how it works. In tough times, the SEO charlatans who promise a lot for a little are going to be hard-pressed to show results, and the clients who continue to improve their sites are going to gain market share. Those SEO agencies which do good work are going to ride out the storm as valuable team members of those successful companies.

Search Engine Marketing isn’t just for companies with substantial marketing budgets selling nationally and internationally.  ‘Bricks and mortar’ businesses in metropolitan areas are often shocked when they discover how much search exists for their products and services in their city. 

For example, there are approximately 3,500 (broad) Google searches per month on pet grooming services in Austin, TX (metro population approx. 1.5 million).  Strategic optimization with appropriate keywords like ‘Austin dog grooming’ and ‘mobile pet grooming Austin’ could drive a substantial amount of searches to the website over time, and a pay per click campaign starts at just a nickel per click on many of those keywords.

Even better, most businesses don’t know that the local search results�at the very top of the Google search results�are a FREE service. To sign up, click on the blue link at the top of the listings for your category, then go to the bottom of the page with listings. There’s a link for Information for Business Owners. From there, complete the forms on your business, and verify by phone or post card.

If you are a small business, more people are searching for your products in your city than you think - find out how small business SEO can work for you!

Here are some numbers from page 42 of Groundswell, by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff:

From a sample of 10,000 online US consumers, the percent who say they do the following things monthly:

Use Twitter – 5%

Write articles, stories, poems, etc, and post them online – 7%

Use RSS – 8%

Listen to podcasts – 11%

Publish / update their own Web pages – 11%

Publish / maintain / or update a blog – 11%

Post ratings / reviews of products or services – 11%

Listen to or download audio/music from other users – 14%

Contribute to online forums or discussion groups – 18%

Add comments to someone’s page on a social networking site – 18%

Update / maintain a profile on a social networking site – 20%

Read blogs – 25%

Read reviews / ratings – 25%

Visit social networking sites – 25%

Read online forums or discussion groups – 28%

Watch video from other users – 29%

Those of us in b2b marketing must keep in mind that business-to-business happens person-to-person. And more and more, folks are getting together online to swap stories in one way or another…are your prospects there?

…says the Wall Street Journal. I agree. The book is “Citizen Marketers – When People Are the Message” by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (favorite bloggers of ours at Church of the Customer).

This insightful book is a quick read and helps explain how social media has come about and how one person can truly make a difference. The book is a social media primer. It’s an historical reference more than a how-to-do-social-media guide, but some of the history happened without my noticing and it’s nice to have a short and sweet explanation of things that now “defineâ€Â� social media.

If you’re not clear what all the hype is about, it’s worth a few hours to read this book. The authors deliver their message via informative, real-life stories. You’ll read about the effect an individual can have on a brand, and how that single person can influence what LOTS of people buy. Get ideas on how companies can benefit — and profit — from engaging Citizen Marketers. Social media is a “trendâ€Â� that’s real and is becoming a new standard for good marketing and communications.

Now I *almost* understand why people spend so much time blogging, posting videos, creating podcasts and composing advertisements. It’s powerful stuff.

As part of the audit we do to kick off SEO strategy development, we ask folks to let us know who their competitors are.  Then we look at the competitors for search visibility on  the search terms we’ve been provided, and sometimes find, (through OK, way more meticulous research than might be needed, but you never want to leave any stone untermed), many times the competitors the client provides simply aren’t players.

We’ll find those URLs in the 20′s and 30′s ranks, or not present at all in the top 50. Checking out the top 20 URLs, competition that may be lurking just outside the client’s radar often emerges.  Sometimes an entirely new category of competitors emerges.  For instance, in an industry where dealers, affiliates or aggregators develop a lot of content about the industry (franchising, for example), those aggregators actually are your stiffest competition for getting your corporate URL seen in ranks 1-20.

This is a great example of why it pays to hire SEO out.  If you are coming up to speed on SEO, you might start your research by looking at which URLs are present on the terms you think are the best.  Then, if you don’t see your competitor’s URLs…you might think SEO isn’t all that important – since none of your competitors seem to be doing it.  What you don’t know by guessing is that there are probably dozens of search terms that people are using. Between not quantifying the Total Available Search Market(TM) and not understanding the competitive landscape, you may be overlooking the potential gains from SEO entirely.

The truth is, your prospects are searching.  That’s all you need to know, to know investing in SEO campaign management and analysis makes sense.  Besides, you really don’t want to look through data on who’s out there in the top 50 ranks for hundreds of terms on a zillion search engine pages, do you? And I do…

Recently, I received an invitation to join John’s network on TimeBridge, a social media site allowing groups of people to share schedules and availability. TimeBridge may be a good solution, but my relatively short experience was pretty bad.
(more…)

Marketing people are very good at communicating. That’s what we call it, and that’s how we make our money, but really, what we like to do is talk, have other people listen, and then see them take action. That’s exciting. On the web, we search marketers pay a lot of attention to what people are looking for, and try to help them find it, but I’m not sure if we marketers are really communicating with the market. That’s where social media comes in…where we get to listen.

Dave Evans pointed out the difference last Thursday at the InteractiveAustin2008 conference, and I wanted to bring it up in the panel I was on, because it needs discussion. That didn’t happen–we did have a lot to cover, between niche marketing on the web and bridging the generations–but it is something to keep in mind as you think about using social media in your marketing mix. Social media is about listening.

Where are people talking about you? What are they saying? Can you help solve their problem with your company or your product? These seem like great opportunities for marketers to get closer to your customers…and learn what they really want, not what we think they want.

We’ve talked about the algorithm change over at Google and how it demands actual high-quality content and links from sites if they want to be ranked well–that’s on top of the standard SEO practices and good site architecture. When talking about content, a lot of people want to know what we mean by that. What is good content, and where do you find it? And links?!

Well, you have to make it yourself. You have to think about it and put the work into it. No, it’s not some fifteen minute fix where you go to a site and click some buttons and voila! A really good place to start that gives you both content and links is writing and submitting articles on topics relevant to your business. You write an article and submit it to some of the article submissions sites–there’s probably a small fee–then newsletters and news outlets can pick it up and publish it. The article will link back to your site, giving you a link each time it’s used.

It’s pretty simple to do. What are the basic topics people ask about your industry or business? Can you do a short (under 10) list of things to ask or consider or know about whatever it is that you do? Can you de-mystify something briefly? Know something about the hot topics? Then write up an article and get it out there in the world. An hour or two well-spent doing this can get you a few dozen relevant links in a short period of time. If you put the article up on your site as well, you’ve added well-written, pertinent content to your site. A pretty good use of an afternoon if you ask me…

We have a couple of people coming in to interview this week, and it brings questions to mind for me. Not the obvious ones–though those are bouncing around in there–but ones about how I can shortcut the long and winding path to getting what we do. It takes a while. Once you get it, then you can start innovating. Things come zipping along nicely, and it goes from being a bunch of acronyms to being a delicious basket of possibilities. For most people, there’s a hurdle of frustration and boredom before the “aha!” moment with search marketing, made more frustrating because you understand the potential but haven’t quiiiiite clicked with it yet.

This is part of a larger block of thinking I’ve been doing for the past couple of months. It would be awfully nice to be able to have some nuggets of insight in hand this week, though. For me, it’s made more important because we’re interviewing a potential summer intern tomorrow morning. She’s smart–4.0, worked on the AdFed team whose project went to nationals, really wants to learn about web marketing and get some actual work experience. I had a couple of office jobs in college hoping to get experience and learn, only to find myself mired in the admin pool. That sucks, but it sucks more when you’re the smartest one there and get to do things like staple and take an inventory of the magazine and catalogue subscriptions. In the year 2000, I got praised by the boss two levels up from mine for the brilliant idea of using the internet to find the information nobody had been able to locate. I mean praised as in stood up in front of the office and talked about as an example.

The last thing I want to do is waste my time and the time and resources of someone who actually wants to learn and could do a great job. Yes, it’s just a summer job. I get that. But if those of us who live a level or two above the norm in the tech atmosphere could find a way to put people closer to that Matrix moment of understanding by being clear for once, we could reap some really amazing things. Maybe it’s one of those things that’s personal and you find in your own time. Social media is that way–once you figure out how to use it and connect in ways that make sense, it’s powerful and not a task. Virtual worlds are that way–once you make friends or learn to create/build, everything falls into place and you’re hooked.

What’s the magic connecting point for what we do and how quickly can we bring people to it? Is it seeing the results graphs for what happens in the months after the site you redid goes live? Is it finding the competition’s weak spot and trouncing them? Or is it simply moving into mastery of a craft that can’t be skipped ahead to?

My son has mastered the cable remote, which means he’s no longer a captive to Boomerang. Suddenly he can take himself to the rest of the kid’s channels…and be doused in their calculated and scheming heaps of commercials for a bunch of crap.

Thank goodness a friend taught us about “What’s The Lie?� About 15 seconds in to a commercial for sneakers, my son shouts “The lie is that those shoes can make you jump as tall as a building and have cartoons coming out of your feet!� The next one is easy – after a couple seconds he says “The lie is that having that will make a lot of cool-looking kids want to hang out with you.�

The third commercial is for markers made to mix a pair of colors when they write…he has some first-hand data here. “That they work after the first time – that’s the lie,� he says as wryly as a child can be wry. The next up is a public service announcement against kid’s smoking. “No lie in this one, right mom? What’s it called again, a PSA?�

What turns out to be the last commercial in this set is for a boxed set of radio hits from the 70’s. A tough one…My candidate for the lie is that the offered price is a bargain, but what comes through visually is more an assertion that dancing to this music will make you happy…and, well, that’s true.

Here at the office, we more and more frequently are in dialogue about how to assess ROI for the not-quite-so-analytics-friendly tactics - like articles and press releases and blogging, for instance - in our quiver as part of a really thorough web marketing campaign. The ROI here – it has to be about trust, right?

The return on investing the time and resources to educate, inform, inspire, and interact with your customers is that they become invested in your relationship. (Yes, there are benefits that translate into something you can show on a graph or include in a report) The point of these tactics that aren’t exactly marketing isn’t about ROI in the way that PPC advertising campaign management is. The return on that is calculable, downloadable directly from the service in a variety of file formats.

The return on actually sitting down and interacting, on giving away information that helps and enriches your customers, that’s the kind of return you can’t show a direct correlation in a quarterly report. But it is the difference between loving and loathing in a lot of cases. If you go in saying you’re interacting and real, but the whole thing is about ROI and selling, your customers will spot the lie faster than my son can tell you breakfast cereal won’t make you friends with cartoon leprechauns.