So, it was a pleasant surprise this past week to be super busy working on proposals and projects. I think some consistently positive economic news has generated a little confidence in the executive ranks, emboldening marketing folks to get going. Clients are now talking about branding and complete site redesigns, not just tweaks. That’s what we like to hear!

We always kick off the new year by looking at year-over-year stats for our clients, using Google Analytics to provide visual reinforcement for the gains of the past year. We’re really enjoying some of the bells and whistles in the new GA interface…one of the best is persistent dates and comparisons, which made these YOY comparisons a snap. (Googlers, please get busy on restoring email and PDF exports…our clients rely on getting these!)

Some of the new energy in the search marketing world is coming from Google+ and the emphasis on social search in their current direction. This should not have a significant impact on B2B marketers at present, but it’s a trend to watch. By all means, set up a Google+ page for your business, and learn about Circles, which is the clever organizational tool they’re using to help you filter your communications. Social marketing, whether it’s PR or your blog or now Google+, is creating links for your site in the biosphere of relationships and interconnectedness…your site needs to be an active part of the community
of your industry.

The continuing tweaks Google is making to the Panda release of their indexing shows more emphasis on freshness, on a positive user experience (especially page load times and engagement), and on quality. Sites with lots of ads at the top of the page are seeing their rankings go down. After all, a site visitor wants to see your content, not a bunch of AdWords ads. It’s always good when Google reinforces the message of quality…we’ve always been about quality content and thoughtful site architecture, so our clients’ rankings remain remarkably consistent, through change after change in the mighty Google algorithm.

The start of the year is a good time to revisit your web strategy. Have you opened up your site to mobile users? Are you migrating from Flash to HTML5, to the benefit of all those visitors using iPads or iPhones? How are you doing with your rankings? Are you missing opportunities because you’ve been complacent about reaching all the people searching? A fresh analysis of the Total Available Search Market™ right now can open up new possibilities for growth…and drive a brilliant 2012.

John Rasco

An article in the new Fast Company explains that there is typically little, if any, accountability demanded of social media. And it’s interesting, in terms of actual prospects coming to your site, that the top metric most marketers are using is click-throughs, which shows you the dependence of marketing pros on paid search. While we understand the utility (and handy reporting) of PPC, we’d like to see lead gen and ROI as equally important.

After all, when you’re paying for clicks, and reporting click-throughs without disclosing bounce rates and time on the site, there’s very little real accountability. Since traffic is a direct effect of site optimization, we’re very glad to see that in the #2 position…because marketing drives traffic, and search marketing does it at less expense than any other medium.

I’m in charge of coming up with B2B social media marketing strategies for our clients, then helping get the content that makes them work through the process of development and implementation. That means I do a lot of research and exploration to find out what lies in that lovely matrix of customer interest and market opportunity. What I do is all about possibility. It’s about sorting out the puzzle pieces and making something cohesive from them (which I love doing).

My research takes me outside of the things that are my immediate domain because I need to have an understanding of what the client does already and how it’s working, what they’re not doing, and where the opportunities are. There tends to be a pile of “other stuff” that isn’t what we’re contracted to do. If there’s something that really needs attention, we’ll point it out and can help you get it taken care of or refer you to someone who can.

Sometimes, I wish that it was my job to help deal with this pile of “other stuff” that could be done as part of the web marketing strategy. It can be hard to curtail scope creep when you’re really excited about finding a huge, untapped opportunity for a client. You might be wondering how people missed these big opportunities in their own business. They’re often not the most obvious or trendy ways to solve the problem. Or maybe they solve the problem in an unexpected way. What they almost always are is the second right answer.

A Facebook page or Twitter stream might not yield big results for your company. You might not have the time or strategy to market it, maintain interest, and fill it with useful content. That doesn’t mean you’re exempt from needing to have some social media in place. Would answering common troubleshooting questions regarding your product or software on tech forums make users less frustrated and inspire brand loyalty? Is checking your reviews on Google, Yahoo!, and Yelp part of your routine? What about responding to customers that had a less than ideal experience?

If you’re intimidated or unable to build and maintain some of the bigger efforts that would boost your company’s web marketing strategy, I challenge you to sit down and think of a dozen things you could do that are second right ideas. Just because they weren’t the first right idea doesn’t make them any less right!

This was all possible because last Thursday, we launched our SEO dashboard at InnoTech in Austin, in combination with more flexible, less expensive service offerings. This is a big milestone, because it’s the first fruit of our strategy to evolve into a product company. As a bridge from here to there, we’re only selling the dashboard in combination with services we provide. From the business perspective, we now have a $250/mo. entry level price point instead of a typical monthly price of $2000, so our expectation is that this will stimulate a lot more demand. Plus, now we can help a lot more people weather the recession.

As a company, our intent is to become known for personalized education about search, tools for clients to better oversee and manage SEO (either internally or for an overview of the results from their consultants or SEO agencies), and as a trusted partner for developing site optimization strategy. The SEO dashboard is the first tool we’ve created, in response to where we believe the market is headed, which is wanting to develop search marketing as an internal capability. With the right kind of help, we think clients can develop this as a truly sustainable competitive advantage.

We talk to a lot of companies who a) didn’t know they were missing 90+ percent of their potential new prospects by having an unoptimized site, b) had no idea they would need to rework their website to reach these people, and c) didn’t budget for it. Well, what other marketing investment is going to increase your leads and web sales by 50-100%? That makes the ROI on the investment easy to figure out.

If you don’t know what it’s going to cost to fix your site, talk to a good SEO agency now, discuss your options, and make sure you include enough money to do the substantial work with content that will improve your rankings. Even if you only have $1000 a month to put toward working on the site, that’s still enough to effect positive change. We have clients who spend $250 a month, and clients who spend $5-10,000 a month on SEO. What you need for a search marketing budget really depends on what needs to be done…which is why we start with an audit or, for bigger companies, an audit with a thorough competitive analysis. That gives you a strategy and road map of how to get there…well worth the effort and the limited investment ($2500-4500). Our rule of thumb for B2B sites is to plan on spending $25-30K in the first year, and adjust based on your results.

Natural search adherents learn the value of tweaks and tweets

It’s not news that marketing budgets have been cut to the bone, nor that even paid search expenditures are in a slump.

What is new, and slowly building over at least the past six months, is the realization by marketers that search engine optimization—the “free” kind of Web site tweaking based on content, metatags and link-building that helps a company get recognized in search queries—can return big, enduring benefits.

“Because of the recession, there has been an acceleration [in attempts] to figure out proper Web site optimization due to its lower cost overall and higher ROI,” said Aaron Kahlow, founder and CEO of the Online Marketing Summit conferences.

SEO GETS LEADS
“It’s forced us to ask what is the most effective way- to get traffic leads and sales,” he said. “And there’s almost no one out there who won’t say SEO is now No. 1 by far, with e-mail a close second.”

Besides attributing this burgeoning focus to the recession, Kahlow believes marketers are simply outgrowing old assumptions.

“It doesn’t take a lot of skill for the mainstream marketer to get started with paid search,” he said. “They’re used to paying for ads, and also perhaps some got burned by the SEO work done for them by snake oil salesmen. But today, there’s a gradual awakening to the virtues of natural search.”

Early bird registration for the Interactive Strategies ’09 conference ends on July 3rd.

1) research what users are entering … not what you call your product/service (“divorce lawyer” rather than “family law lawyer”)
2) use geolocation/geotargeting information to get traffic from the *right* parts of the country/area
3) review the design of your landing pages — a simple tweak could easily bring more conversions (make use of bounce rate data)

Are you using your analytics data to improve your site?  Or, like many, have you implemented, then forgotten it?

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