The economic storm is raging, and most of us have trimmed our sails and hunkered down. For seafaring men, time in port was not just spent drinking ale and carousing–the sailors needed to mend the sails, caulk the cracks in the hull, and take on provisions. In the economic downturn and the start of the holiday season, it might be easy to put off thinking about working on your website, but deferring maintenance may incur additional cost later…including the cost of missed opportunity. To be ready for driving business in the new year, now is the time to freshen your content, fix barriers to sales, and maybe overhaul your site optimization…or even the site design.

We have several design firms/developers/interactive shops we work with…there is no shortage of creative talent in Austin. Each company we work with has its particular niche and pricing structure, and each one really understands the importance of integrating a solid SEO strategy into the site architecture. If you’re thinking about putting the old site into dry dock and putting on a fresh coat of paint, give us a call and we’ll point you in the right direction.

Today we are announcing a new SEO coaching program, as well as a new, proprietary SEO management dashboard. This is a collaborative working environment for making improvements over time, as well as a way to monitor your rankings and clearly see the increase in penetrating the Total Available Search Market. If search engine optimization is one of those projects that you put off in the boom times, working with a flexible, creative, experienced SEO agency might be the most significant thing you can do in the lull to put wind in your sails when the new year dawns.

We have talked with three companies over the last few weeks who are all focused on creating or leveraging their directories. Although directories are nothing new, these companies are focused on capturing and aggressively maintaining position for the terms in the industries that they serve.

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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?

I get to talk to a lot of smart people about how to improve their site’s search marketing performance. And I read a lot of industry news and opinions on SEO, from both the SEO agency side and from the client side. Plus, there is such excellent research on trends and patterns, from MarketingSherpa, eMarketer and the like. It’s great to be in a hot industry.

One of the trends that gets contentious is one where we see traditional advertising agencies somehow acquiring search marketing “expertise” overnight. I’ve always contended that search engine MARKETING is what SEO is all about–and that PPC is just search engine ADVERTISING. Agencies should be able to do a good job at PPC, because that’s a world they understand (although writing classified ads is not the creative activity that justifies their high fees). On developing a robust strategic information architecture, writing page content that cascades into the site, drawing the search engine spiders along and establishing authority on choice keyword phrases? Not exactly the forte of a hot creative shop.

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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…

One thing I love about Twitter is getting quick links to interesting posts from people in the industry I respect. Posts by poseurs on Twitter being slow today? Not so much…hey guy, you’re not helping!

So, even though Seth Godin is in our search marketing blogroll and one of the best and brightest writing on marketing, I had not seen this post on The Secret of the Web (hint: it’s a virtue) until today. (Gosh, I was out of the loop for almost a day!) It’s a good reminder that the hard things, like refining your content to be more relevant for a golden nugget of a search term that nobody else has discovered yet, are ultimately worth doing. The cool things that keep you from doing the hard things, like SEO? He talks about that, too.

It took a couple of pining hours, but when Sara our blog guru and fashionista de officina arrived she immediately said “Oh my gosh, look at your shoes! Oh my, those are amazing.” And then graciously she endured my enthusiastic telling of the sighting and capture of these stunning pink and wedge heeled mary janes finished with white trim, a peek-a-boo toe opening and a big white flapper-dancer button clasp.

Just about now you just might be thinking “I thought this was a b2b web marketing blog,” or “Crud, I Googled s-h-o-e instead of s-e-o; I must really be tired…”

Hang in – you’re in the right place. This is a b2b internet marketing agency blog. The topic today is online social networks, and the question is how much of an individual’s personality is appropriate for their social network presence, especially in industries like ours, where we are likely to have an online presence for career that flows quickly in to our personal online profiles.

Barring the extreme, say, for instance, a case where I’d have a facebook persona called Notice My Cool Shoes, and another account with completely different credentials called Susan McElhenney Views Source…where does professional social networking stop and personal hanging out on the web begin?

A creature of detail, I’ll move us to examples. That I do Search Engine Optimization, that’s professional. That I am a working mom with 2 young children…appropriate detail for my Facebook profile? Linked In? How about my interest in transcendent bikram yoga? OK, now, how about the detail that I’m a long distance runner? What if I run with a group called Marketers Marking Miles? What if I run with a group called Moms For The Right to Nurse Our Babies While Standing In Line At the Bank? Are these affinity groups part of my work blog profile? My linked-in profile? My facebook profile? What do you think: Can I twitter my new, pink, absolutely fabulous shoes?

We’re kicking off a vlogging series called Search Camp today. There will be short videos on the topics that our clients and colleagues have a lot of interest in. You’ll even have the opportunity to earn merit badges that you can use to breed wild envy among your fellow marketers. Social media marketing is going to be the focus of the first few videos since we get a lot of questions about it. So here’s the first little video… hope you enjoy it!

Click to play

SEO’s prevalence can be maddening. Recently, a client’s design firm questioned our methods and suggested that they not implement our strategy. From the client’s point of view their concerns seemed valid, especially since the designer lists SEO as one of the services they offer. They suggested that below the fold copy with lots of keyword phrases is borderline black hat.

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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…