Posts About ‘strategy’

How to Create a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

content-strategy

This is a guest post by Scott Mclay, who has been around the digital industry for the last 9 years and has worked for both agencies and freelance.

Content marketing has been one of the fastest rising SEO disciplines over the last year, with search interest reaching its all-time highest point in January (2013). One of the main challenges our industry faces is knowing what it takes to create a successful campaign.

A successful campaign does not have to cost you an arm and a leg, some successful campaigns revolve around a few small changes to a product description or adding an image for comedy value (everyone has seen something like this)  in such a way that it looks like a user error or a ticked off employee set out for revenge. (more…)

4 Principles to Drive SEO Success

SEO Principles to Success

I’ve been lately asked to give some tips, especially to new SEOs, to enhance their skills. Although I already presented in MozCon last year best practices and guidelines to effectively manage SEO projects, I would like to share some principles –instead of specific tips–, that when followed together I’ve found they create the foundation of a great SEO work, providing consistent, long-term value to clients that can be applicable to any SEO project and differentiate exceptional SEO specialists.

I have no doubt that most of you already know and follow them in one way or another but I have also seen how these principles are unfortunately diluted in our busy daily SEO life. Here are these 4 principles to enhance your SEO value and ultimately, achieve SEO success.

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Personas and the Facebook Graph Search

Facebook Graph Search Logo

When I was working in the TV industry between 1997 and 2003 and my job had nothing to do with Internet Marketing, one of mine biggest problems was identifying clearly what our real target of paying viewers was. Usually we were relying on market research and on audience analysis based on data collected by Nielsen and other sources.

The definition of who were our potential viewers was quite empiric, though, and gut was playing an important role.

In some cases that was enough: for instance it was relatively easy to paint a set of typical users for our Classic Movies Channel (CineClassics). And not that hard was defining the same for the Classic TV Series Channel (Canal Jimmy). But that investigation was harder in the case of our generic Movie Channel (CineCinemas).

Over the base of that studies, a person like me, in charge of planning the channel scheduling and buying the TV rights of movies, documentaries et al, I was able to create the most compelling possible programming (and win few TV awards as well). (more…)

No SEO is an Island – You Need to Integrate to Win

Future and Vision signs

There are many awesome traits of the typical SEO, from the constant inquisitiveness to the unparalleled competitiveness, but we often see ourselves as an island within the digital marketing sphere. In my opinion this is the biggest threat to SEO. In no way do I believe that SEO is, or ever will be, dead. I do however believe it is going to get far harder to do great SEO without great integration.

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After Sales Marketing Critique

After Sales Marketing

In November this year I decided to book a holiday for over Christmas, in particular a SKI Holiday. I of course looked on line initially to gauge prices and then went into Thomson & Tomas Cook branches (Off Line.)

Firstly what I realised is that these travel companies may be some of the biggest in the UK, however in their stores they general market Holidays in the Sun, when it came to ski-ing (This is based on the representatives I spoke to) they were not much use.

I decided to go back on-line  because I had specific requirements I wasn’t willing to book without talking to someone, I called a company called Crystal Ski. I realised very quickly that Crystal provide Ski & Snowboard holidays and so could give me all the advice I needed and couldn’t get in a general holiday shop or from a general Online holiday site.

I decided to make the purchase via phone and off course forgot about it.

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The Future of the Internet: Establishing the Boundaries

boundarie

And now for something completely different.

There is a war going on. A war on the internet. No. The war of the internet.

The internet is growing up. It’s now much more than just the collection of webpages it was before. It has grown more complex, more rich, over the last few years. The amount of information on the web keeps growing at an unbelievable rate and with that growth questions arise of who owns which information. Who are the rights holders of what kind of information? What data can be stored, used and sold by whom? And who is to set the boundaries of this all? It’s all about data nowadays. (more…)

How to Genuinely Have an Impact on Influencers

influence-2

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the SEO and PR industry. The reason? Google’s latest developments – mainly Authorship and its ranking signals. For a change this is not only one for SEOs, this time it also highly impacts other professions such as PRs and journalists.

Frankly put industries that have quite a few similarities as both require high visibility and exposure to increase ROI on their efforts. The foundation of PR is creating compelling content that grasps their target audiences’ attention but in order to grasp their attention any PR has to be armed with the finest relationship building skills with the hope that influential journalists will cover the topic, right?

Journalists on the other hand have to ensure that they are well respected and trusted within the industry to maximise their ROI, therefore visibility and exposure are crucial. So where am I going with this? (more…)

FAQ Pages – Are you Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?

classroom_hand_raised

Last month I spoke at the SearchLove London conference. One of the sessions I took part in was entitled ‘Let’s Get Real’ where each of the speakers were asked to share an actionable tip or tactic.

The tip I shared was around FAQ or Terms and Conditions pages, and went a little something like this:

When you get back to the office on Wednesday morning, go take a look at your FAQ and/or Terms and Conditions pages. Most are woeful. All too often the language used is unfriendly at best; or impenetrable legal jargon at worst. This is a crying shame on several counts – not only may it adversely affect a visitor’s perception of your company, but it may actually lose you business.

Why am I bothered about these pages?

Because the visitors who are reading your FAQ or Terms and Conditions pages are a hair’s breadth from converting on your site.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

No one wants to be *that* girl.

 

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Romney shows us: Not Everyone is Like Us

romney-site-screen-1

Last week I reported on how Mitt Romney’s presidential website accidentally came online and how it was indexed by Google. A classic mistake for those working with websites, I suspect there are few readers who have set websites live in the past did not run into a similar issue once in their professional lives.

In this case however it was the classic mistake made by the company in combination with the losing elections from Romney and the fact that it involved a ‘big name’ which made it interesting. The post did really well, lots of views and lots of shares, most of them with added texts like “hehe” or “Oops”.

The mistake was covered by many websites, from tech sites to political sites to newspaper websites. All over the world. Looking at these articles around the globe about this relatively small mistake gives a nice insight in how different people from different backgrounds can look at this. (more…)

Overcoming Short-term Thinking in the Digital Industry

Future and Vision signs

My single biggest gripe I have about the digital marketing industry is the pervasiveness of short-term thinking in clients.

Too many corporate leaders seem to think that digital marketing has a magic bullet, a secret button that can be pressed and voilà  tens of thousands of website visitors come rolling out eager to give their hard-earned money to the company.

Of course we know that it’s a ludicrous idea. This stuff is hard. It takes time and effort and patience. (more…)

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