Lately it seems that every article I read about SEO or online marketing techniques is thrusting a new programme or app at me. It’s always ‘the best new SEO tool’ or the ‘app that SEO’s cant live without’ and all I keep thinking is… I’m coping pretty well without this tool already?
In fact, I’d go as far as to say that I’m coping really well without this tool. So if like me you’ve come to that conclusion, it might be time to take a quick look at your current repertoire of go-to tools and show your appreciation for the years of service they’ve given you.
Since my entire working life pretty much revolves around Google, it’s no surprise to anyone that some of my best used SEO tools are courtesy of the Big G itself (and free, of course). So, if you’re not bothered by the latest SEO fad, here are the steadfast Google products that I think every SEO and online marketer should use:
You know how I referenced Google as the Big G? Well to me, Google Analytics is the Bible. No matter what your marketing strategy is, you will need to track it which will probably mean you’ll spend time in here on a daily basis.
Improving for presence in Google Search? Track it in Analytics. Experimenting with different AdWords campaigns? Track them in Analytics. Studying how users navigate around your site? Track them in Analytics.
Seriously, pray to it.
Webmaster Tools is like your websites doctor, except you go for a check up every day. It can tell you exactly which bits of your site arent working; links, broken pages etc. and for the bits that are working, it can give you various stats like CTRs, navigational patterns, referrers etc.
It can also show you which search queries are bringing traffic to your site, which pages they’re landing on and how many impressions those queries are receiving. Even more recently, Webmaster Tools can show your +1 statistics and which pages are receiving the most +1’s. It’s like the Bible, part 2.
If you’re a content creating online marketer then Think Insights is a haven of sharable information that Google will freely allow you to use in your blogs, articles, white papers, infographics, case studies etc.
If you’re just looking for a little educational material then you can search for journals and studies based on your industry, your media platform, your audience, or your marketing objective. The marketing objective search is really useful as you can search for objectives like ‘Drive Online Conversions’, ‘Engage your Audience’, and ‘Build Brand Awareness’; all great stuff if you need a helping hand.
You can also compare search patterns for certain terms and over certain periods of time. So if you’re really clever you could make an educated guesstimate of which search patterns are likely to emerge and tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.
Given that this is a paid tool, it’s not vital that you use it, but it’s a pretty big part of most online marketing strategies so I’d recommend that you do.
AdWords is a pretty intricate system and can take some time to get used to but once you’ve got the hang of refining campaigns and keyword targeting it’s a great tool for bringing in highly targeted traffic from an audience with the right intent.
It’s likely that you already have a list of obvious keywords you want to try to rank against/include in content/advertise against; but sometimes obvious isn’t enough to produce an effective marketing campaign.
Enter the Google Keyword Tool. Based on a phrase or website you provide, the tool will show you a load of similar terms and how high the competition for ranking is. Its not a tool you need to rely on but if you find your keywords arent putting out the results you’d like, then giving it a go is a good idea.
As you well know, everything you do when it comes to marketing (online or otherwise) needs to be tested. Testing SEO changes is relatively easy in that traffic will either increase or decrease, you’ll either rank or you wont, etc.
Where it does start getting a little tricky is testing how effective actual pages are, and that’s where Google’s Website Optimiser can help you out.
A/B split testing is a pretty common thing when you’re trialling landing pages and the website optimiser will allow you to test several different elements on the same page to see which headlines, content, images, etc. are the most effective. (You can do similar tests using AdWords and running a few different campaigns).
So there you have it, my favourite Google tools for SEO and online marketing! Let me know what your favourite tools are in the comments below. (No, SEOmoz doesn’t count, everyone loves SEOmoz).
Content might not be king any more but that doesn’t mean it’s been booted out of the kingdom altogether. Businesses shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that content marketing is a waste of time and the Venn diagram, courtesy of SEOmoz, shows that even though content marketing is now sharing the limelight with Technical SEO and Social Media, it’s still very much a part of any optimisation strategy.
To really maximise your content marketing, whether it be via blog posts, news items, press releases, or email marketing, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you get off to a good start.
1. What do you want to achieve?
Before you start a content marketing campaign it’s important to firmly establish the point of it. What are you trying to achieve? Promotion of a product? Customer interaction? Brand awareness?
Content marketing isn’t likely to be the sole form of marketing you use so think about how content can aid your current campaign. Also set yourself a deadline, by what date do you want to achieve your goals?
2. Know your audience
Blog posts, news posts or email marketing campaigns are likely to fail unless you can display a coherent theme that relates to your audience. In order to find out which themes will be effective, you first need to know your audience.
Do all the research you can to determine exactly who your audience is. If you have the resources it’s helpful to perhaps send out a survey or a poll so you can get a general idea of the age, sex, demographic, interests etc. of your audience.
There are of course, a few assumptions that can be made when determining your audience. For example, if you’re a web hosting company you can assume that your audience will display more of an interest in blog posts relating to web hosting than they would graphic design.
3. Themes & developing content
Once you’ve established what you want to achieve and the exact audience to which you want to target, you can actually start planning your content.
Start thinking about what themes you want your content to revolve around, what kind of voice (are you writing from a personal perspective?), the kind of tone you want (informative/stern or conversational), and whether you want to aim more towards guides or casual news items. Personally, I find making a list of rough titles I want to write to helps me with developing content so I have a kind of check list of posts I want to write, this also helps me with the planning of my content, which brings me on to my next point.
4. Scheduling
Think about how often to want to publish content. If you’re sending emails, how often are they going out? Perhaps you’re writing an monthly newsletter or a weekly product update. If you’re blogging are you aiming for a daily post? Do you have the time and staff to do this? Always try to be realistic with your schedule or you could become overwhelmed and start producing poor quality content, or missing deadlines altogether.
The tips from now on can be seen as a continual loop. When you first start your content marketing you’ll take an educated guess at what times and dates are best for publishing content. However, once you go through the testing, measuring results, and plan review stages below you’ll probably find that you need to come back round to the scheduling stage and re-evaluate your strategy.
This isn’t a bad thing though so don’t worry if you find yourself back here 3 or 4 times before you start seeing some positive feedback.
5. Testing
As with any kind of online marketing and advertising campaigns it’s important to test different methods of promoting your campaign in order to determine the most effective delivery method.
Testing may seem easy but there are tonnes of variable combinations that you’ll need to explore if you want to really cover all your bases. Don’t just test whether a short blog post works better than a long one, test whether a short blog post works better than a long one at 10am, whether it gets more retweets on Twitter than a long one, or whether it gets you more comments.
Testing and measuring your results (below) go hand in hand so remember that for every variable you test and change, you also need to be recording its effect.
6. Measuring your results
As a company that takes pride in our email marketing campaigns we put a great deal of effort into measuring the success of each campaign. We take into account factors like the number of people in the campaign, the title of the email, the time of day, the length of the email, interaction rates, the relevance of the email to the recipient, and much more.
We can look at all of these things to determine why certain emails failed and what proved to be effective; do 10am emails have a higher interaction rate than 5pm emails? What about Monday compared to Friday? Long emails or Short? These are all factors that can be turned into useful information; market research if you like.
The same principles can be applied to blog posts and news items too; timings, content, audience, relevancy; they’re universal variables that come into play with all kinds of content marketing, and are therefore all variables that can be harnessed and studied.
7. Don’t be afraid to change the plan
Obviously, the point of testing and measuring your results is so you can optimise your content marketing strategy. If you find that your original plan isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it.
If your content either isn’t working, or starts to drop (in visits, CTR’s, comments etc.) then loop back round to the testing stage and start again. It’s safe to assume that once your figures start dropping, you start to lose the attention of your audience and therefore you start to lose the reason for your content marketing.
See also: A Guide to Successful Email Marketing
I’ve had a Pinterest.com account for about a year now, so I was quite surprised to see that it’s becoming such a phenomenon recently. Personally, I don’t think I’m particularly utilising it to the best of its ability; while I like to think I’m somewhat creative, my internet habits tend to drift towards tech news sites and blogs, and I rarely find myself in a position where I need to ‘pin’ a remarkable image.
However, I do go on the site from time to time and on each visit my homepage is flooded with stunning images from my graphic designer, fashionista, and art-inclined friends who are clearly befitting from Pinterest’s features.
This got me wondering how this kind of ‘vision board’ site could be implemented as part of an online marketing strategy (for the right company). There are definitely a few obvious uses for Pinterest in online marketing, but there are also a handful of other techniques that are flying under the radar.
Note: I need to make it clear that Pinterest.com will not apply to all businesses. You should be able to tell just from the site the kind of businesses that will benefit from this are creative, crafty, visual, graphic, arty, etc. Your local Chinese restaurant? Probably not gonna work too well.
The Obvious – Portfolio’s
You could have guessed that when I said ‘obvious’ benefits, portfolio’s was one of them. Pinterest is a great platform for organising and presenting portfolios of images and videos.
If you’re new to Pinterest then let me explain. A ‘Board’ acts kind of like a folder you’d have on your computer. You can name a folder ‘Things I like’ (for example) and then when you add or ‘pin’ an image, you select which board you’d like to pin it too (i.e. which folder you’d like to put it in.)
Once you get this you’ll understand why Pinterest works for portfolios. Boards can have an unlimited amount of pins so if you’re working on a big project/promotion/product you could pretty much capture the entire thing in one board, and invite everyone to come and look at it.
You can also pin videos, add them to boards etc. so the same principle can apply to video projects, and of course you can have a board with both videos and images in. (The image to the right is a board, called Illustrations, which contains just images).
The eCommerce – Shopping Experience
As I mentioned above, Pinterest can be a good online marketing platform for most industries, but it can only be a great platform for some. One of those industries is online retail.
The site has a section called ‘Gifts’ which will display the price of an item (and link back to the retailer) when it is pinned from the online retail store. For retailers, this is great; people will pin the stuff they love, and followers of their boards (who will probably be like-minded people) will also see that stuff, as well as the price and where to get it from.
Because of interactions like this, Pinterest is being seen as a new type of vertical search service that is arguably more targeted and more refined than any of Google’s ad matching algorithms. Start building a following on here and people could be sharing, pinning, and even buying your products as a result of the site.
The Necessary – Meeting Influencers
Meeting influencers is where the ‘like-minded people’ point mentioned above comes into play. Pinterest makes it relatively simple to connect with the influencers of your industry and interact with the pins and boards that they have shared.
Pins will show you how many times they have been repinned, as well as the original owner of the pin. The snowman image is an example of a popular pin that shows the amount of repin’s and the original owner of the pin.
This information means you’ll be able to work out how influential a pin is (and the owner of that pin). The comments boxes can also contribute to finding members and also offer a way of interaction for businesses that may be present on the site. You’ll also be able to see a persons ‘followers’ and ‘following’ on their profile which will also point you in the direction of other influential users (very much like Twitter).
Here’s a really good example of a well utilised Pinterest.com profile for personal use: http://pinterest.com/caroljws/
And a good example of a business profile using Pinterest.com for online marketing: http://pinterest.com/edosalon/
The Social – Adding and Sharing
The only down side is that you can’t share out whole boards (yet anyway, I imagine this will come in time). Once you click into an image you can Tweet it out, Facebook Like it, etc. but the only option with boards as a whole is to Facebook Like it which doesn’t really constitute as sharing as it can’t be re-done, as such.
Adding followers and following members is really where you need to focus your efforts on Pinterest. As mentioned above, like-minded people will tend to follow each other so if you’re on someone’s following list you’re likely to be attributed with the same labels that ‘someone’ has. I.e. if someone has boards dedicated to art, and they’re following you, it’s likely that it’s because you also share art related pins.
Think of it in the same way as Facebook or LinkedIn works; with Facebook you’ll search through friends of friends (who will likely have the same interests), and with LinkedIn you can see someone’s connections (who will tend to work within the same industry).
The only way to truly engage with Pinterest.com as part of your online marketing strategy is to give it a go. Like I said, as a marketing strategy, it will only benefit certain industries but that’s not to say it can’t be used as another form of informal communication for individuals (again, much like Twitter. Not all Twitter users discuss their business).
See also: Connecting Pinterest.com to Your Website and Social Pages
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