Search Engine Marketing Info and Strategies

There is one report that will work for any type of website, and it qualifies as my nominee for the best web analytics report: Outcomes by All Traffic Sources…this report represents two things you should care about more than anything else: sources of traffic and Outcomes…you can strongly infer the kinds of people coming to your site and why they may be coming…it highlights two questions to focus on first: who? and how much?…If you start with this, you’ll find that your senior executives suddenly care about your web analytics reports…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0 Click here to keep learning

Writing content for a website is easy. Writing good, search-engine-friendly content for a website is hard. Writing great search and user-friendly content for your website is, well, pretty dang difficult. There is a lot that has to be considered when trying to engage your audience because you’re not writing for an audience of one, but of many. And all of them have a personality and motivations of their very own!

When creating engaging content, there are two concepts that you must first understand: why visitors are on your site and what they want to find. These two concepts can be translated into two words: personas and personalities.

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It seems to be getting more and more difficult to define what exactly SEO is. Is it on-page optimization? Link building? Conversion optimization? Or is just about rankings, and leave the rest of that stuff to someone else?

I think it’s some of both and a little of all. SEO has to focus on more than just “getting rankings” and must use the knowledge of the search engines to bring together all the various online marketing elements into a singular web marketing campaign. People seem to be using the term “inbound marketing” more and more to describe this integrated approach.

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Company owners and other business decision makers who handle a web marketing budget are given, whether it’s their fault or not, too much website data that doesn’t directly relate to an impact on the bottom line. What’s wrong with this?  Only looking at visits and pageviews gives an incomplete story of how a site is truly performing for its customers and the company.  So, when it’s time to decide how to invest, there’s nothing concrete that gives confidence in where to put money.  To combat this problem, there needs to be a fundamental mindset shift to focusing on outcomes.

Step One: What’s the Point?

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Google
Dec 2011: 66.1%
Nov 2011: 65.7%
Change: +0.4

January 2011: 64.6%
Change: +1.5

Yahoo
Dec 2011: 16.2%
Nov 2011: 16.3%
Change: -0.1

January 2011: 17.9%
Change: -1.7

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A few weeks ago I was thinking about how companies seem to haphazardly invest in various aspects of online marketing. Some throw all their budget at SEO, leaving no room for PPC. Other businesses put so much money in PPC that they leave little room for genuine SEO growth. While Herman Cain’s bold 9-9-9 tax plan may be as dead as his presidential ambitions, there is something that that we might be able to steal borrow to help frame a successful online marketing campaign.

I’ve read that the best way to win an argument is to tell a story, so I got one for you. Well, no. I’m not a good story teller, but I can throw together a pretty decent analogy.

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Cutting through all the clutter of data, which metrics are your critical few?  You probably have at most three critical few metrics that define your existence…If you can’t take action with anything, then perhaps you are using the wrong metric for your business…the simple process of identifying a metric as your key performance indicator and creating a graph of it rarely helps you find insights…before you diagnose how to improve a metric, you have to identify all the influencing variables…analyzing the variables will help you identify where the true opportunities for improvement are…it forces you to dig in a methodical manner and let the data, not opinions, drive action…

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0

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Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing
Author: Arnie Kuenn
Paperback: 266 pages
Cost: $17.95
Published: July, 2011

My company uses the tag line “Velocitize Your Web Marketing”. So you know that when I saw the title of Arnie Kuenn’s book, Accelerate!, I had to read it. Well, that and (full disclosure) he asked me to write a chapter introduction. (He also mentions me on page 147, but that’s neither here nor there.)

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Business

• Winning, Jack Welch
• Hard Goals: The Secret to Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be, Mark Murphy
• Anointed for Business: How to Use Your Influence in the Marketplace to Change the World, Ed Silvoso
• The Truth about Leadership: The No-fads, Heart-of-the-Matter Facts You Need to Know, James Kouzes & Barry Posner
• Accelerate!: Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing, Arnie Kuenn

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…life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot…hits and pageviews don’t mean anything except that someone came to your site and consumed some content…metrics are a dime a dozen, so how do you know which ones to use?  They should have the following four attributes…

• Uncomplex – If you want action, everyone involved in the decision-making must easily comprehend performance.
• Relevant – they must be measuring the success objectives that are unique to you and your website.
• Timely – Even the greatest metric in the world is useless if it takes nine days while your world changes every three days.
• Instantly Useful – you need to be able to find insights as soon as you look at it.

-Avinash Kaushik (@avinash), Web Analytics 2.0 Click here to keep learning