Posts on State of Search about ‘Strategy’

Everything Starts With a Marketing Strategy

Marketing business sales

It’s time to throw scepticism overboard. Time to bite the bullet. No matter how much we want to deny it, we have to face up to the fact that content is king.

Whether your content strategy focuses on creating highly engaging pieces of quality content, or whether it’s about automated processes that churn out massive amounts of unique human-readable articles – or whatever hybrid model you adopt that sits somewhere on a spectrum between those two extremes – the fact remains that content is the pivot around which all our digital marketing activities revolve. (more…)

The Optimal Website User Experience (Part 2)

Buy-Key

Last month I wrote about my experiences on how I recently for the first time had been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. In my first post I talked about the ‘Flow’ Notion, Identifying Your Visitors Online Persona, The 4 Online Personas, Trust and a Community and Social User Experience.

This is part two of my learnings in which I will be talking about looking at your competitors, mobile and devices, perceived affordance and the differences between offline and online customer experience management. (more…)

The Optimal Website User Experience

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Recently I have for the first time been involved with website re-design and creating valuable on-site directions for site visitors to improve the user’s online experience. My professional background is not too tech-heavy therefore I started by looking at the psychology of online users to gain an understanding (in the deeper sense) why someone is visiting your website and what the motivations are for doing so.

I came across the Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi  who is best-known as the architect of the notion of ‘flow’, as well as being one of the leading researchers on ‘positive psychology’.  His theory is that people are at their happiest when they are in “flow” mode. In other words the condition where motivation, attention and the current situation meet resulting in a kind of productive harmony or feedback. The challenging part for us marketers though is to create the right conditions for individuals to achieve this state. The art though is to strike the right balance between the skill of the performer and the challenge of the task level. If one or the other is too easy/difficult ‘flow’ will not occur. So how can we transmit that to a website? To increase the likelihood for your visitor to experience the flow state try to remove unnecessarily distractions from your site. Reason being that once the visitor is in the ‘flow’ he/she has to ‘automatically’ block stimuli that are interfering with the task/purchase/sign-up engagement. Therefore we ought to help users not to get distracted. (more…)

Video Is The Winner In Branded Content Marketing

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Via Panda, Penguin and other subtler algo updates, Google are hammering home the message that content is everything when it comes to judging the worth of a site and how often they are prepared to return it in the search results for its target keywords.

Savvy marketers have been using a variety of methods for years to attract visitors, both on and off page but the latest report from ContentWise and the Custom Content Council shows that it is video content that is proving to be an invaluable addition to their branded marketing repertoire. (more…)

Ray-Ban Hoax on Facebook Shows Even Marketers Fall for Peer Pressure

Peer-Pressure

If something is popular and a lot of people go to a specific place you are certain that that place is going to be the target of those trying to do wrong. A busy shopping street will attract a lot of pick pockets. A busy website will attract hackers and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook will attract spam and hoaxes.

Usually most marketers know when something is a hoax or not and don’t respond to it. Last Friday however we witnessed a hoax attempt on Facebook go viral. The interesting part there was that most of the people who ‘fell for it’ were marketers. A funny side effect here was that they ‘fell’ for what is part of their own strategy: human psychology. (more…)

We Will Need To Work On Authority

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This article was originally written for Affiliates4U.

The last few months have been crazy if you are a ‘Google watcher’, somebody who follows what Google and the other search engines are up to. Google has been ‘under siege’ on several occasions. Most of the time they themselves were to blame.

In between a lot of little things which changed one thing was rolled out which we had seen coming ever since Google+ made its entrance, different articles we wrote at State of Search all saw Google heading this way. This change however will significantly change the way we search and the way we as website owners work: Google Search Plus Your World.

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Want To Make Money From YouTube: Be Any Good!

youtube partner

So, you are producing decent videos and they are attracting a lot of attention on YouTube – your subscriber numbers are increasing weekly and your content is generating views and likes? Excellent news. Now, if there was only a way of generating revenue in return for your efforts….

Well, dear YouTube user, you are in luck as YouTube created the Partnership programme to reward those creators who consistently produce high quality and high value videos. (more…)

SES London Keynote – Avinash Kaushik – #seslondon

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It’s almost two years to the day that State of Search was launched and I heard Avinash speak at SES. He was truly inspirational and some of the ideas he presented that day I still use on a weekly basis today. Needless to say I am a huge fan and was really looking forward to the keynote.

He started with a favourite quote from a Kenyan Farmer, “information is powerful but it is how we use it that will define us.” We spend a lot of time making love to data but very little happens as a result. The key is trying to find out how to move beyond that information to drive change in your company.

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Google’s Search Plus Your World – Getting Over The Shock

State of Search - Google+

Ok, we have had a chance to breathe and calm down since our SERPS changed. Google really “messed up” our search results, and made the SERP somewhat ugly. What do we do know? We are Search Engine Optimizers, or as I like to say – Organic Web Strategists.

We have seen change after change occur, both algorithmically and user interface, which affects what we do for clients and their respective campaigns. With this post, we are going to get through it together, both the more pressing matters (how do I get rid of it) and the long-term plan (how do I get my clients conversions from it.) (more…)

Having “Fans” Does Not Mean Engagement: Only 1% of Fans Engage

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Social Media is a weird science, if you can call it a science at all. In essence it is very close to what we as human beings have always been doing: recommending things to others and communicating about what we see happening around us. Still marketers seem to have difficulties grabbing and understanding this and making the best use of this.

This probably comes from decades of ‘old school marketing’ we have been doing. Trying to reach as many people at once, hoping that some of them will respond to it. This type of old marketing leads to a ‘wrong’ approach of Social Media. We try to reach as many people as possible hoping they will interact with us.

Recent research shows that the way marketers and users look at Social Media differs quite a bit. Where marketers still believe ‘presence’ counts and people will engage if you just share things with them, users actually don’t care that much. It turns out that only one percent of Facebook users for example tend to ‘engage’ with brands. (more…)

What Website Owners can Learn From Gordon Ramsay

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Who doesn’t know British chef Gordon Ramsay. He is well-known around the world, mostly because of his swearing in the kitchen, but also because he has set up many successful restaurants., His fame is mainly based on his television shows like “Hell’s Kitchen” and “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” and the swear words he uses in these shows.

One show in particular is now running for years with huge success: “Kitchen Nightmares”. In this show he comes into a restaurant, which is usually almost bankrupt and barely attracting any customers, and helps save it.

Watching this show can help you a lot when optimizing your website. Think whatever you want about Ramsay and his swearing, but he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to optimizing a business. And optimizing a business, or restaurant in this matter, is not that different from running a restaurant. Let’s take a look at some lessons we can learn from Gordon Ramsay. (more…)

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