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.

There are a couple of search marketing luminaries I really admire. One is the seen-everywhere, cited-everywhere Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro, whose company originated the heat map research which has been so illuminating to the industry. They do a great job on research, they also specialize in B2B search marketing (we’re just thankful they’re in Canada and we’re in Texas), and I bet they do a bang-up job for their clients.

The other guy I am thinking about is Mark Jackson, who is super sharp and unfortunately right here in Texas. He’s actually the inspiration for this post, with his concise, accurate and insightful column in last week’s Search Engine Watch. He’s someone we all can learn from, and his columns are the ones I pass along to our account managers and biz dev people as excellent models for communicating about the complex world of organic SEO.

Here is a taste of his food for thought–remember, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so don’t just read it, DO IT! For more specific information on the issues found at the intersection of web design and search marketing, please see his excellent two-part series on “Don’t Hire a Butcher to do a Baker’s Job,” with 13 questions to ask the design firm.

Last weekend, we learned of the death of beloved U.S. newsman Tim Russert. Within minutes, Google’s results reflected the news in its index. Most of the Top 10 ranked URLs on a search for his name were related to the (very) recent news of his passing.

That’s the “new” reality of SEO, and goes to the heart of why every company should create fresh content.

Fresh content will help you achieve top rankings right away, and help your Web site become an “authority” site. Search engines love fresh content and deep Web sites….Keep in mind, the old tried and true SEO method still holds. You should have static pages (pages that have always been there, and will always be there) within your Web site and a regular schedule of developing links to these pages, both externally (links from other Web sites, using a varied description/anchor text) and internally (links from other pages of your Web site).

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.

One of the things we all struggle with is building relevant links to our sites. “Relevant” being a link from a page that’s actually related to the site content, and “building” as opposed to “paid,” which has become a no-no in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Assuming you are a professional marketer with search as one of your many responsibilities, we certainly understand the need to outsource. But since you can’t throw money at this problem any more, and it goes without saying that you have better things to do than spam site owners asking for reciprocal links, what now?

PR is a great way to get links. For us, links outweigh ink in terms of the benefit. A story gets interest for a day, but press releases with links to your content stay out there forever. Because we’re active in social marketing, we’ve watched very carefully as online press releases have become, for some, the preferred way of getting news. A Google Alert takes a minute to set up, and you immediately get updates on any new web content relevant to your interest. Take that and add optimized press releases, and you have a much more energized public for your public relations. (You may also may be keeping your competitors more informed than you would like.) However, public companies have fiduciary responsibilities that sometimes get in the way of aggressive marketing with PR…so PR is not a one-size-fits-all solution.

Taking the next flight into cyberspace, why not look into promoting your site, your product, your expertise with articles? The intent of the article submission sites is to provide non-copyrighted articles for use by publishers doing newsletters, blogs and periodicals, so they prefer that the article be for a general audience, and not self-promotional. But you can easily explain the benefits of using your product or write a brief educational piece (400-600 words) that gets people thinking. In the “resource block,” you can place a short bio and a link to your site. When someone picks up the article and includes this resource block, you get another link.

As an experiment, I wrote a couple of articles in November and submitted them. Within 30 days, I found that we had 42 new links to the site, picked up by Yahoo’s Site Explorer. Now, we have 51 links from those articles. Considering that investing an afternoon in writing and publishing increased our link total by about 11%, article submission is definitely my new best friend when it comes to getting links. I control the content of the page, and I control the keyword phrase used to link to the site. The only thing I don’t control is where and when the article runs, but one did get picked up by a national search marketing newsletter. I found that one by searching on my name…because they didn’t include the link. Running a Google Alert on your name is a great way to see where the article gets picked up.

As you would expect from a marketing company working on our direction for the future, we have been homing in on our differentiation. Surprisingly, there are a lot of search marketing companies which don’t have much real marketing experience. Because it’s web marketing, companies tend to skew young, to have a hip, wired, energetic company. However, a company full of marketing newbies may not be a good fit if you need a business partner entrusted with bottom line performance. It isn’t hard to do PPC, and any web person can add tags to a site, but real agency- and client-side marketing management experience is hard to come by. Since we happen to have a lot of that (and some of us have some gray hair to go along with it), it’s an important part of our identity. And, we’ve realized that a lot of our joy in doing our jobs comes from helping our clients understand how web marketing works, so we are focusing our future on education, strategy and reporting.

From this most recent study from eMarketer, it looks like marketing executives are really coming up to speed on two important issues: marketing basics (any economic downturn spurs both a drive toward “back to basics” in budgeting and an emphasis on measurement and then reporting on ROI) and, surprisingly, search engine optimization. From our viewpoint, SEO is the foundation of modern marketing, especially if you are marketing to businesses…it’s nice to see our client-side marketing peers mention it as both a trend and as an almost fundamental emphasis.

Lots of good thinking out there on how referrals are becoming the new filters that sort out the good stuff from the “90% of everything that’s crud.” (Chris Anderson, The Long Tail) It’s not so much the wisdom of crowds (remember Howard Dean?) but the “nichebusters” that break to daylight and someone casually gives you a rendezvous with greatness. That’s the power of social media, and why it is so important to the future of search marketing. Even for B2B. Thinking future perfect, we are already becoming a social media agency, courtesy of our teaming with leaders like Tom Parish, Cynthia Baker and Deltina Hay. (These would be the people you would HOPE to have in your network!)

As marketers who are in the business of helping people find what they are looking for, it’s nice to know that we are both helpful and contributors to the bottom line for our clients. It’s so much better than being in advertising and trying to figure out how to persuade someone that one brand is better than any other option, just because of the cool person who is using it in our TV ad! (for a cool $250K)

I love this quote because it can explain to your CEO why nobody ever searches on your tagline:

“Marketers now have to compete with the conversations customers are having with one another about the products they buy. None of those conversations consists of customers repeating the same three word phrases over and over. This is one of the main drivers for (the market’s) interest in “customer-generated media”: Not only are customers more credible—a 2006 study by Edelman PR showed that customers think the most trustworthy source of information about a company is “a person like me”—they’re also more interesting. Customers are now “mashing up” marketing materials—re-editing them into parodies, mixing them up with totally inappropriate soundtracks—turning commercials back against their creators and in the process making them far more interesting than they were originally. Think of it as customers’ revenge for all those years of being treated like simpletons.”

The truth is that advertising stopped being smart and tried to win by being clever, and fell away from relevance. As David Ogilvy said, the consumer isn’t stupid, she’s your wife. For this next gen of search marketers, the lesson should be clear: don’t try to use tricks to outsmart Google, because in the long term, you will never win. Talk to the people! Open up and let them in…they are smart enough to see through corporate speak, and they ARE talking about you behind your back. If you are honest, responsive and reliable, that will be your reputation. My view? You don’t really manage your reputation–you earn it every day.

Once your site is optimized, there are all these important keyword terms embedded in your content, but only the search engines know how they fit into the information architecture of your site. Unless you have unique content, they won’t begin to PREFER your site until other people link to it…preferably using the very keyword phrases you have worked so hard to integrate. Links are equally important to getting good rankings from your SEO efforts on content and architecture.

Articles disseminated across the web are a great way to plant these seeds. On a regular basis, write short articles (600-1000 words), put them on your site, and then offer them up for people to use as content on their blogs, in newsletters, etc. Sites that specialize in this include ezinearticles.com, articlesbase.com, articlesfactory.com, contentdesk.com and ideamarketers.com. When people reproduce your content, they pick up the links, and often will link to the article on your site.

The very best mentions are on pages with relevant content on authority sites, because these links are seen as most significant. We recently participated in an online survey from Business.com on B2B search marketing, and were quoted in the resulting white paper. Of course you can buy links from a big vertical search engine, but by helping them gather good data and providing a thoughtful little snippet, we have fresh new links to our site:

In this case, we didn’t get a keyword phrase as the link, which would have been more beneficial, but they also are distributing this white paper to all their advertisers, so the prominent mention at the top of the section on B2B SEO is even more valuable…prospects can click right through to the site.