Part of the work we do as a b2b internet marketing agency is helping clients choose words to describe their products and services. When we start a project, we ask for a list of the keywords they already use to talk about their goods, as well as for words they might be considering using, have heard their competitors using, or have discovered some other way.It makes for a delicate inquiry, and sometimes an awkward first dialogue. A marketing executive who has spent a great deal of time and money in the creative, analytical, and political work to get agreement on a differentiating way to describe what they sell can be at least disappointed when her SEO agency doesn’t want to work on making their site visible for their new slogan.

After many, many meetings to come up with “Lightspring Cloud Walkers,” hearing us say you’ve got to make your site visible for “diabetic foot shoes” might not be all that thrilling. Or say you’ve spent a year getting agreement on “Mini Mobile Executive Identification Device (MMEID) ” and your SEO agency suggests optimizing your site for “employee badge” and “nametag.” You need the bigger name, you say, because next year the MMEID also will have fingerprint and retina scans built in…and we give back…”security badge.”

Like we say, nobody’s searching on your tag line. At least not yet, anyway.

I get two or three new business calls a week. It’s typically a business owner who needs to improve her web marketing, but has no idea what it will cost to get to the top of the search results. Or, it’s a sales guy in a company who is looking for a quick fix, to make his numbers for the quarter. Both get a quick, free assessment, and it usually doesn’t include my recommendation that they sign up for search engine optimization.

Having a small business myself, I know how much I needed sales in the early days, and how much I have had to learn about marketing to understand where sales come from. Have you ever noticed how few advertising agencies advertise? That should tell you something about marketing professional services.

When it comes to web marketing, the small local business owner is clueless about what tools are available. One of the most powerful is absolutely free: signing up for a business listing on Google Maps. Local results are often at the very top of the search engine results, right where you want to be found.

The other recommendation I make is to try pay per click advertising. For a modest budget, maybe $300-600 a month, you can advertise on the most popular search terms for your business, and target only local prospects. Over a few months, you will gather data on what search terms are resulting in traffic, which terms actually turn into business, and how much it costs to be present when people are shopping. Since a full SEO program costs at least a couple thousand dollars a month, PPC advertising can help you test the waters and see if search marketing is profitable for your business. This is a test we recommend, before you make the financial commitment to use SEO to show up on top of the rankings, based on your site’s merits and not ad dollars. If PPC works for you, and you know that only 18% of B2B prospects click on those ads, then SEO starts to look like a better investment.

No, not by the IRS. We’re talking about having an SEO agency do an audit of your site. It’s something we believe in so strongly that it’s become a policy for us to start with a site audit. If you don’t do it, you don’t know what’s broken or why or how to fix it. Starting a web marketing expedition without the audit is just like taking your car to the mechanic and saying, “It’s making this noise sometimes, and I smelled something funny.” Then him saying, “Oh, that’ll be $3,000.” And then you pay it. If it doesn’t work, you can pay him some more or chalk it up to those cars and their confounding mechanical systems.

You don’t do that, though. No! You get it diagnosed. That’s why there’s a diagnostic fee–they really do have to do some work and look around to tell you what’s wrong. If you’re debating about whether the money spent on a site audit is worth it, the answer is yes. This great little article from Search Engine Land covers the stages of search marketing and SEO your company might find itself in, then explains how an audit would be of assistance wherever you are. Go forth and read!

Susan the Meticulous has had a relationship with social media like those little birds with twiggy legs at the beach have with the water. They run toward the incoming wave, get a little bit of a leg or beak wet, and then turn around and run away fast. While I believe in the power of telling, and believing a priori is not a strong suit of mine, I go through periods of resistance to blogging, filling out the “about me” part of the social network profile, saying any more than absolutely is necessary. I struggle between desire to share and fear of exposure. Personally, it’s the fear of saying that one very wrong thing. Professionally, well, it’s exactly the same.

What do you think - do younger people, people who have been blogging or reading blogs since their teens and are now in the workforce - have that same fear? Privateness - it just seems to be so, like, out. Controlling who one is to others by self-editing, holding back, playing cards close to the chest…who needs that layer of faking it? Hey, duh, we change, we evolve, we adopt new perspectives. Yesterday we were blue and today we’re red. If we’re smart, we are where our customers are and trying to figure out if orange is next and if so exactly what shade.

Here’s another wonder: for seo agency client companies marketing to people young enough and social-media-centric enough to assume that a transparent evolving personal or corporate identity is the norm, what are the limits of the fabled transparency?

Corporate competition always has been secretive. Will businesses seeking to prosper in a social-media public relations framework adopt a norm of carefully spawning yet another public corporate image - people creating characters whose purpose it is to be real people on social media? Perhaps a persona of a CEO telling all or an entry-level worker climbing the ladder, personas we’re drawn to… personas manufactured as distraction and to give the appearance of transparency.

Or will social media be able to do what it seems like it could do – through sheer volume of uncontrolled communication, be able to establish a fairly enforceable terrain of true and customer-mandated transparency?

Immediate engagement starts before your prospects visit your site. Maybe they’ve listened to those enlightened podcasts you’ve been cranking out for the last few months, or seen the wacky videos you’ve posted on YouTube.

The more you focus on drawing prospects from social media, the more likely they will get to know you on a personal level before they know you professionally. Once they’re engaged, don’t loose them with corporate speak.

BAD, BAD HOME PAGE
Consider the following example from the home page of the fictional Happy Baby Megacorp website.

At Happy Baby Megacorp, makers of Happy Baby Cloth Diapers, the rashless diaper solution, and H.B. Powder Ups, the only baby powder with added vitamins, our goal is to be the global leader in portable infant waste entrapment and removal solutions for working mothers, in-home infant health care workers, and government-supported and private health care facilities.

Seriously, nobody cares what your goals are. They just want their babies’ butts to be clean. Building loyalty comes from helping people meet their needs. As marketing professionals, you already know that.

The danger for us as marketers is the potential disconnect between the personal voice we use with social media and the professional voice we use on our website, particularly the home page. So how do we maintain our professional dignity without losing their interest?

First, be consistent with your message. You can’t just go off on some obscure diaper example without having an underlying message that matches the message on your site. Have fun with the social media, but stay on message.

Second, always talk to your prospects on their level. That gives a consistent feel to the conversation as they move from connecting with you “out there” in the social media universe to their interaction with your website and eventually with you.

Third, engage them at every step. Your vision statement sounds like the Happy Baby Megacorp example above. Keep it to yourself. Consider how your home page sounds to the person who only knows you from your quirky blog posts.

Finally, use excellent organic seo practices. People may be entertained by your social media content, but they will likely use search to find the right solution.

SEO’s flexibility gives you the advantage of being able to quickly change as the market changes. Suppose a competitor posts an obnoxiously cute video on YouTube for their “Super Baby rash-free diapers.” Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapers”… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.”

Incorporating new terms in a way that sounds natural is the cornerstone of ethical search engine optimization. When your message is consistent, talks to your target audience on their level, addresses their needs, and when your site uses good seo copy writing so people can find you, then you can connect with them effectively with social media and search.

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.

Dear Webmaster or Supported Personnel,

As our research suggests, you are doing the specimens e.g. Search engine Optimization, PPC, link building, Content Development & Web-Promotional activities. This really hurts us! As so many individuals have not clearly about the root to which we concern if you will outsource campaigns of any theme, we will definitely put our rhythm right giving 100% effort-making activities. How to draw the attention of the Search engines in major SERPS with targeted traffic as well as quality prospects to their sites - without paying a single penny to Google, Yahoo or MSN like search engines. I know that it’s your business and you want to achieve the key objective incorporated with the initiation of your website. But I have the solution for you to wipe out such worries that are tormenting you on your way to achieve the necessary business success. From one of my daily emails from service providers in India.

I was talking today with an agency friend about a client who always wants the cheapest solution. It’s an unsophisticated client, so it’s not likely she can educate them about how to evaluate the offer, trying to understand what QUALITY is being offered at that low price. I suggested they try the cheap solution for a few months, see what the real cost turns out to be, and then measure the cost per lead or cost per acquisition. One of the great things about web marketing is that you can measure everything…that is, everything that comes in to your site. You can’t measure the damage from people who dismiss you without visiting because your content doesn’t look professional, or if there are errors in the content on your pages. Part of your job as a marketer concerned with reputation management should be the quality of prospective SEO firms.

I don’t know how many people are using offshore SEO vendors, or how many agencies are outsourcing to them, but as a recovering English major, I don’t understand how a person can justify the risk of having their web content developed by a vendor which is not a marketing firm, does not have American writers, and who does not know the technology, the competition, the market or the customer. The sample text above is the worst written email pitching professional services I have ever received, but not ONE of these Indian companies has ever sent an email soliciting my SEO business without a syntactical or other grammatical error. That is the concern that has put my rhythm right, tormenting me on the way to achieving the necessary business success. Well, actually, it gives me some security, that there are some jobs that really can’t be outsourced. In terms of your reputation and that first impression, quality doesn’t cost, it pays.

There is a reason they call me Susan the Meticulous. I’m going with the notion it’s a compliment. I say yes, that’s me, and I have the shoes to match.

It is a safe (workplace!*) characterization. I do tend toward research and cross-checks. I perk up when I get an afternoon of View–>Source for a zillion websites to get a sense of how our client’s competitors are coding in support of their organic SEO. I jump with delight when I can get a whole year of client HitsLink data, and it if it includes conversion tracking, well, start thinking tranquilizer dart. And, yes, I always set the keyword research setting to return 1000 results.

I have, however, stumbled around the block enough times to respect some limits, one of those being we can optimize a website, at least on the first round, for a very finite set of terms. We’re talking somewhere between the legal driving age and the age you get dropped from your parent’s health insurance. Inevitably we’ve carefully pruned a list of a few thousand terms to a list of a couple hundred, and now the task is to choose which are the top 10% to optimize.

Usually there’s not a year’s worth of data (sigh) about terms that have worked for the client. OK, usually there is not a day’s worth of data about what terms have worked for the client. We’ve got data about search volumes and numbers of competing pages, but we all have to admit that data has imperfections.

So here’s my question. Other than using some variation of the ratio of search volume to competing pages, what comes to your mind reading this - how would you go about ranking a list of 200 great terms so you can take the top 20 for optimization? No matter your perspective - marketer, SEO expert, any other interested party…I am curious what first comes to your mind.

Because no one knows better than someone who adores manually comparing lists for overlap and gaps that sometimes the best choices have little to do with anything listed in columns and rows. Rather, they come from listening to what strategies seem interesting to folks like you, folks who might make it this far in to an entry in an SEO blog.

So let me know. And until then, I’ll be sorting and pivoting among columns and rows, earbuds tuned to the ambient wood flute and yoga bells channel, looking for clues.

*Please do not go looking for those shoes in my closet. My image would be so blown. I can only imagine the new nickname.

I enjoyed reading the recent post by Gord Hotchkiss, titled, “Will Agencies Get Search: Don’t Hold Your Breath.” He’s right about several things:
1) Companies (advertisers) are allocating a fraction of their small online budgets for Search…because they should be investing in Search. Everybody says so.
2) It IS better now than it was even a few years ago.
3) And – he really nailed this one – agencies don’t “get” Search because they see Search as small.

Search does not lend itself to high-falutin’ campaigns or creative graphics. It’s not sexy. And even though pay-per-click (PPC) Search is advertising (right up an agency’s alley), it is not glamorous. The creatives don’t find Search stimulating. There’s nothing there for a copywriter to sink his teeth into, and the art directors aren’t even invited.

There is money in it for an agency, though. A percentage of media spend. As more advertisers dictate that budgets (however small) be allocated to Search, the agencies will “get” Search. As long as Search means PPC.

What agencies won’t ever get is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is the killer app for advertisers – not so much for agencies.

SEO, even less glamorous than PPC, requires lots of research and patience. Not fun. You do get to do a little bit of brainstorming, but then it’s more research and patience. It’s all about implementing, waiting, measuring, and then tweaking and waiting some more. The lion’s share of SEO work for a site is done upfront, and the results take longer than PPC. Then, you follow up with more of those tweaks I mentioned. That’s not profitable for the agency.

SEO requires access to the company website. Not always an easy task. And company websites are almost never accessible to an agency. Typically, the agency’s client (probably a marketing or advertising manager) has to wait – sometimes weeks – for the “owners” of the site (probably the IT folks) to make recommended SEO changes. Then they can start the waiting and watching stage, only to wait weeks for the next set of tweaks to be put into place by the site owners. Very tedious. And, not something an agency can charge for.

But SEO is effective. And profitable…for the client. Amazingly so. Often, when SEO starts working, clients can reduce PPC budgets substantially and still increase Search traffic to the site. Incremental traffic starts coming in “for free.” So much for the agency’s percent of media spend, I’m afraid.

I understand how an agency makes its money. I’ve worked for – and with – some great agencies. But they aren’t going to get SEO because they can’t see how it improves their bottom line. It’s not fun. It’s not sexy. It’s a lot of hard work.

But SEO really is sexy. It’s a little bit technology. A little bit marketing. A little bit sales. And a whole lot CREATIVE. It’s a giant jigsaw puzzle, and when the final pieces fall in place and the metrics start their upward climb, it’s a beautiful picture. Clients see the results and, sure enough, funnel more budget to Search. Next thing you know, they’ll be allocating some of their Search budget to Advertising.