Posts on State of Search about ‘Strategy’

How Sentiment Analysis via Twitter can help you Beat the Market

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How much power can be gained from 140 characters you wonder? Well in the case of the Derwent Capital Hedge Fund market an awful lot. In May this year Derwent Capital Hedge Fund started trading using algorithms and a trading model that follow comments posted on Twitter.

Paul Hawtin who is the hedge fund manager of Derwent stated that “For years investors have widely accepted that financial markets are driven by fear and greed but we’ve never before had the technology or data to be able to quantify human emotions.” Now we do. This newly developed algorithm allows is based on a research paper from the University of Manchester and Indian University which concluded that there was a strong correlation between the mood on Twitter and the rise/fall of stock and commodity prices in the FTSE 100 and the Dow Jones.  There are now 175 million users on Twitter producing around 95 million posts per day, a pot of gold for data analysts and mathematicians who have already started to find new ways to analyse rapidly growing source of real time data. (more…)

3 Key Areas Where it is Essential you Think like a Marketer

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The size of your agency or your client might dictate just how far you have to go to really help a site improve. Over the years I have worked with large clients both in terms of the size of the site, turnover and staff to clients whose marketing department consisted of 1-3 people. It is on these occasions that you really get involved in every area of a client’s marketing strategy and gain a much deeper understanding of the client. I have regularly found that larger organisations often have internal politics which affects the role you can play as certain information such as PR, social accounts and site updates is loathed to be given over.

I personally feel you should essentially be an extension of a client’s marketing arm, and have found that by immersing yourself within the business you discover aspects that the client never shared at the beginning of the campaign but can help you improve your content strategy, conversion optimisation or off page campaign. My fellow blogger Claire Carlile’s post on starting a campaign with client questions is a good start if you have recently taken on a new client. Thinking like a marketer means that you have a solid understanding on USPs, audience, marketplace, competitors and think more about the end user than a search engine. It also means that some issues which traditionally you might not have gotten involved in are exactly where you should. The price of a product is one example and the CRM systems is another. (more…)

Time Management for an SEO: The Pomodoro Technique

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“For every minute spent in organising, an hour is earned”

As an SEO, or in any industry where time is spent earning value for your clients, the ability to manage time effectively is a skill that needs to be learnt. I think this is particularly true for anyone, at any level, within search marketing and that mainly holds true because there are normally several activities that needed to be done yesterday.

A well thought out and constructed timeline can help with project management but if you are the account manager of numerous clients a certain amount of overlapping is bound to inevitable. Clients are not the only thing that requires your time and attention during a normal day at the office, reading and keeping up to date with news, strategies, studies and methods is essential. Add to this the constant stream of information pouring through Twitter and now Google + and you are faced with a persistent fight against your urges to check whether you have missed anything in the last minute. (more…)

SEO Keyword Research – Should Competition Ever be A Consideration?

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In the words of La Whitney Houston “I’m asking you ‘cos you know about these things.”

In the general course of business, I will ask clients, trainees and others how they currently approach keyword research and am told time and again that level of competition is a key consideration; and that choosing less competitive keywords means you can rank highly, easily.

I take issue with this.

I can not see why competition (and to be clear I’m talking about the level of competition not specific competitor research) should ever be a consideration in term selection. Surely competition is an environmental factor outside of our control? It is nice to have insight to the level of competition only insofar as it can inform our rate of progress against objectives; however I’m yet to come up against a keyword research project where this should inform consideration to term selection. (more…)

SEO within the SOSTAC® strategy framework

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I tend to blog about things I’m actively engaged with, and this week I’ve been digging in to a structured approach to our company’s internet marketing (IM) activities. Basically we’re developing a strategy for all our IM projects, and we’ve chosen the SOSTAC® approach as the framework, as recommended by Econsultancy .

To summarize it very briefly, SOSTAC® stands for Situation Analysis, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics, Actions, and Control. Developed by PR Smith, SOSTAC® is a powerful yet simple strategy framework that captures all aspects of creating and executing an IM strategy, yet it has enough flexibility to fit around the varying requirements of our wide range of clients. (more…)

How to Use Xenu for the basis of a SEO Campaign

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Depending on who you ask Xenu is either the dictator of the “Galactic Confederacy” who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft or a tool that finds broken links. The second option doesn’t sound as interesting but to you and me it is far more valuable.

Earlier this week I was speaking to a few SEOs I know who work in house and I was surprised to hear that neither of them had heard about Xenu. I was even more surprised since they both work for large brands whose sites have over 50k pages indexed and if anyone can benefit fromXenu it is large sites.  Xenu was originally built as a broken link checker but as I will illustrate you can use it as a basis for technical and on poge analysis but to also as a basis for client questions and discovery. A lot of our regular readers will most probably be familiar with Xenu although there are hopefully some takeaways for everybody. (more…)

SEO Forecasting: A Poor Allocation of Resource

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As I’m sure we all know, SEO forecasting is one of the most tedious and frustrating tasks that many of us have to cope with for pitches. In my short time at OMD I am quickly learning how important these forecasts are to larger clients and as a result our team have been forced to  improve the sophistication of our forecasting models.

When I first spoke to Bas about writing this post my intention was to write a bit of a rant about the cost and time consuming nature of forecasting and as many have already illustrated before “a forecast for SEO is not even worth the paper it is printed on.” However, given our involvement in an ongoing pitch and the subsequent improvements we have made to our model I think it is worth sharing my findings and suggestions and would love to hear what sort of things others in the industry have come up with to cope with the myriad of issues thrown up by this reporting.

So, if you are a technical SEO and you already know how horrible the data is, I urge you to skip to the end of the post and to weigh in on the comments below about some of the techniques and modelling you all have done to make life easier (e.g. Excel hacks, estimation tricks, number of terms use when trying to create a sample, how you deal with the long-tail, etc.). Though you may find some of the statistics and arguments useful should you find yourself needing to forecast!

However, if you are a client, if you have to deal with clients or if you have to sell to clients I strongly urge you to read the below issues with the data most SEOs use for forecasting and also read about the amount of time this sort of work can take – time that we could be spending to make your website better! (more…)

Mobile Marketing Strategies: how to drive traffic with mobile applications

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Mobile strategies are an ever increasing consideration when organisations consider marketing budgets. This session focused on mobile SEO but also touched on how to drive traffic with mobile applications.

Both presenters discussed the common mistakes that are made within the mobile environment and how you can act to resolve them and have a more effective mobile strategy

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Integrating Online and Offline Marketing Efforts

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One of the more interesting parts of moving from a small specialist search agency into a search team within a major global media agency has been the opportunity to work together with some of our other teams and focus on marketing and brand management beyond the SERPs. When I was working in a specialist agency we did a good job of integrating with internal marketing teams and external agencies alike but there is something unique about working directly with the folks who manage display, paid search, television and more for really big companies.

As part of my role we have been working really hard on better integrating these efforts and making sure that natural search has a seat at the table when broader digital meetings take place, but increasingly we are getting involved with some of the offline efforts for our clients as well. (more…)

Marketeers, Google and Bing are forgetting to make use of the snow

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It’s snowing out there. There is no denying it. Take a look at my garden and you know that a big part of Europe is having some issues when it comes to the weather. Many parts are covered in snow which leads in some cases to panic. Trains stop working, traffic is jamming and flights are being canceled. In Norway they are used to this Lisa told me and they look at us with some pity, but here we are all a bit confused. How do we handle this?

And believe it or not, the weather is even influencing the way we search. Looking at search trends in the past few weeks you can see that the weather is keeping us busy. It’s another proof of how a marketeer should always look at what is going on around him or her and act on it. The same goes for the search engines. Google and Bing for example, they must be noticing something is going on. Right? Well, it doesn’t seem to be that way. Both marketeers as the search engines are not using the snow the way they could be using it to actually grab that “user intent” they’re always talking about. (more…)

SES Berlin 2010: Integration of Search Engine Marketing in the Online Marketing Mix

This post is written by Thomas Hertkorn of Ads2people who is guest blogging for us on SES Berlin 2010. Keep an eye on his posts!

Speakers: Marcus Koch, Goldbach Interactive GmbH blue summit
moderated by Thomas Bindl Refined Labs

Here we go again after the break with Marcus Koch speach about the integration of SEM in the Online Marketing Mix. The subject sounds exciting, lets see what happens.

Again the big “last ad tacking” problem will be main subject of this session.

Marcus said it is important for people to be aware of the complete process of a conversion. Not only in the way of search funnels then more in the way of different advertising channels. Everyone should notice that there are correlations between different advertising channels. (more…)

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