In my last post I discussed using personas to create content that targets your potential customer. In that post I defined the differences between personalities and personas:
Persona = motivation (what the visitor needs, why they are on your site)
Personality = temperament (how they navigate, what they need to see or read to find what they want)
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.
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.
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.
If you’ve been to any kind of social media seminar lately, you may have heard that making videos is the next Big Thing in online marketing. Depending on your industry and your business goals, that may or may not be true for you. Of course, if you’re even the tiniest bit familiar with online marketing, you know that making videos does not guarantee that anyone will watch or share them. The competition is brutal. On YouTube alone, people upload more than 48 hours of video every minute and watch over three billion videos every day.
So, without a plan for how to create and optimize your video content, you may end up a Sisyphus. (Just saying that word makes me giggle like a junior high girl.) In Greek mythology, Sisyphus pushes a gigantic boulder up a hill every day only to watch it roll back down again. Every day. For eternity. That’s a rough gig.
SEOs don’t build websites; they build web presence.
SEOs don’t design websites; they make your website more usable.
SEOs don’t build links; they build relationships.
SEOs don’t socialize your content; they communicate your value.
SEOs don’t spam keywords in content to rank; they integrate key words into content to sell.
SEOs don’t sell your products/services; they help you attract buyers for you to sell to.
SEOs don’t drive traffic; they drive customers.
Keyword research is important to online marketing efforts. But even more important than that is the keywords you select for your SEO and PPC efforts. Of course, you cannot select what you have not researched, but finding keywords generally isn’t the problem. There are tons of keyword tools available that will help you do that.
The question is, what do you do with your keyword lists once you’ve compiled them?
Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword. A few that tend to top our keyword selections lists are:
Engaging in online marketing is all about customer acquisition, ROI and profits. If you see growth in these three areas, you can be reasonably confident that your online marketing efforts are paying off in some form or another.
But things might not always be as they appear. While it’s never a bad thing to grow in profits, ROI or a growing customer base, you may actually be paying good money to lose great customers.
Over the past 15 years starting a new business has become easier than ever before. The daily dread of horrible bosses, annoying red tape and ringing alarm clocks that force you out of bed before God gets up is forever behind you as you make that long-awaited jump to start your own online business. Your dream of financial freedom and peddling your own wares is almost as easy as point and click.
Almost. I might have left out a few details.
While the ease of starting a business online is great for life, liberty and the pursuit of sticking it to the man, it can also have its drawbacks. Just like starting a 100 mile sprint may be easy, finishing is another thing altogether. Every business must still follow basic business principles of success in order to attain a long and profitable life.
Final Lap time again! Check out some of the great stuff our team The Pit Crew read during the week of October 24.
(Don't wait for the movie!)
E-Marketing Performance: Effective Strategies for Building, Optimizing & Marketing Your Website Online
