Your Mission, Should You Decide to Enable It…
Have you noticed that we, at Intrapromote, LLC, write about a variety of topics on a regular basis, not limited to just the technical aspects of Search and Social? The really cool thing about our approach is being able to share our collective value and the diversity of our unique business experiences, education and our culture. We value all contributions so that we can weave a strong fabric of content and interest on a variety of topics aimed at complimenting and adding value to our core business. More importantly, the variety in our content focuses on the needs of our clients and our community—the true value we offer as a boutique search and social agency. We focus on the needs of our clients and often gain inspiration from the challenges our clients hire us to address. You can say, we are always on a mission.
Practically speaking, having a clear mission statement and even a corporate and/or organization vision statement serves many organizational purposes. In addition, a mission statement can provide much needed direction and serve as a compass for checking on whether or not your online content and outreach are directionally suitable to meet your goals. Equally importantly, a mission statement can help you determine whether or not offered content meets the needs of your stakeholders who are made up of unique clients, customers, prospects and employees. A mission statement can guide the why and how your organization behaves on behalf of all of your stakeholders when you empower them to act, especially as Search and Social activity become more and more prevalent as a marketing and communications tool.
If you don’t know where to start to create your own mission statement or if you would like to consider perspective on a few tips, here are the ones that are top of mind and easily implemented:
1. Decide what your chief purpose is and what you want (as in your goal); and decide what you are going to offer up in return.
- Here, be sure to look at the big picture. Think less in terms of internally focused needs and look externally at what benefit will be served outside of your organization, and do not forget employees as stakeholders.
- This is not new advice, but taking it to the level of knowing that your stakeholders make up your social communities is key to upholding any core values of authenticity and relevance.
- In a recent post A.J. said it best when he wrote about knowing your audience while executing SEO: “If you want to optimize your online marketing presence and search engine ranking to best of your abilities, just make sure to remember you’re still talking to people and not computers.”
- Just as important, your audience wants to know who you are and what you stand for and that your organization is made up of humans that comprise your organization’s persona.
2. Decide what your organization does that is unique from others in the marketplace.
3. If you are still looking for a that diamond in the rough piece of advice to spark the start of what can be a life-altering journey for you and your organization, I like to reference one of my favorite authors and experts, Stephen R. Covey: “…start with the end in mind…”
When ready, introduce your mission statement at all levels of the organization and weave it into your culture (here I am reminded that we have to ‘walk the talk’). You may even want to share your mission statement in the form of an elevator pitch.
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Don’t Forget the “Who” Of Search Engine Optimization
Do you consider the target market enough in your SEO plans?
In Marketing and business in general, a company must constantly work around the nucleus of the customer. This is, has been and always shall be the focus of business. Not every company or industry has the same type of customer though, so it’s important to never forget who your target market is. A company’s target audience can change, and they can adapt, so the company has to constantly monitor and adapt their strategy and approach to continue maximizing production. For a Search Engine Optimization company, it’s imperative to keep the target market in mind as well to create a different kind of impact.
Some of the key elements of a target market greatly revolve around demographics. Age, salary, gender, location, education (demographics) and many more are all ways to measure and categorize your potential customer. There’s a strong similarity to the information that Google Analytics provides company websites and there’s a reason for that. This is the important information that you have to pay attention to in order to have continued success and growth as a company no matter what industry you’re in. Target market analysis or the “who” of why you build a website needs to be continuously balanced with the “what” or structure, content, and technical aspects of a website.
When working in SEO, you might get caught up in a lot of the technical aspects of websites, Google analytics and search results, which are more of the products of the work you do as an SEO specialist. Work as an SEO specialist may include content creation, link development tactics, keyword research, on page optimization, and increasingly more social media. Ultimately all of these are tools to drive exposure, awareness and especially sales to customers. To continue to maximize your search engine impact in exposure, awareness and sales, don’t forget the traditional marketing tactic of knowing your target market.
- Are there personas; are there ages or a gender that your product, content or service lends itself to the most?
- Do you have multiple segments you are targeting?
- How organized is your content and SEO efforts to reach its targeted segment?
These are all questions you should be asking as an online marketing, or search engine optimization specialist. Sometimes with all of the technical aspects and jargon we drown ourselves in, we put the human aspect or personal touch on the back burner. If you want to optimize your online marketing presence and search engine ranking to best of your abilities, just make sure to remember you’re still talking to people and not computers.
Online Risk Management: Actions Speak Louder than Words
Mobile device and distributed workforce proliferation have created myriad ways that sensitive data can leak onto the public Internet. If you’ve read your umpteenth article about how your company should set up a corporate data security policy and are ready to take the next step towards reducing your risk of a data leak, we recommend a three prong strategy to put some teeth in your data security plan:
1) Integrate HR and IT to assign real consequences to employees who are lax with their data security compliance and those individuals who intentionally disable security features on their devices. Take the time to have employees sign a data security policy and conduct quarterly data security refresher courses. Educate and inform and show leadership on this issue; these actions can help save your company from a data security nightmare.
2) Check into Cisco’s enterprise mobility offerings especially their Secure Services Client that can keep your company’s data secure and still allow employees to use their own devices. The key point from Cisco that resonates is this: “Enforce corporate compliance across all wired and wireless endpoint devices.”
Still not convinced about the risks that unsecured devices present? Look at this quote from ITWorld’s ‘Corporates struggle to secure employee mobile devices‘ and think about how unsecure mobile devices can be posing a threat to your company’s data security right now:
“What is clear is that personal mobile devices outnumber managed ones by nearly three to one on some networks, which begs the question of how a company can secure so many devices that don’t belong to them.”
3) Determine your current online risk status with Intrapromote’s Internet Reputation Management service. First we’ll tell you where potential data security problems exist today. Next we’ll institute our proprietary methodology to proactively discover, lock down, and remove sensitive data from where it resides on third party sites. Then our continuous monitoring provides the perfect complement to your security policies and mobility security initiatives.
Take steps now to protect sensitive data. Intrapromote can provide you with a custom Internet Reputation Management proposal to assess your needs.
2 Quick Search Optimization Tips For Your Facebook Page
At a thirty thousand-foot view, we must look at a Facebook page in the way that the Google crawling robot does and stay mindful of what Google counts as valuable information for returning relevant search results.
With traditional search-optimized sites, Google is able to glean all of the necessary information from what our own HTML gives it. This means that we are very much in control of what gets indexed, what is prioritized for Google as “relevant” information, and what keywords should be associated with our site. This becomes a little more difficult when attempting to optimize “templated” HTML for the Googlebot, like Facebook.
Friendly Googlebot!
Contrary to popular belief, the Googlebot is not your Facebook page’s enemy. In fact, the Googlebot is working overtime to figure out what your Facebook page is actually about. This becomes very clear when you review the limited amount of data that the Googlebot has to work with while still managing to return relevant results to the bulk of your search queries.
1 – The Googlebot knows what it can and cannot trust on a Facebook page. It knows that it can absolutely trust a “Company Overview” section of the Info tab, so it puts a lot of weight and priority on that one subsection. Go ahead– check your info tab to make sure you filled the “Company Overview” section out…I’ll wait.
The Googlebot also knows that content updates from pages are not the most trustworthy pieces of information to base its relevancy score for your page on. This is because, as many social media marketers know, your content should be targeted toward your social audience and not the Googlebot. This is good news, because now Europe’s “The Final Countdown” YouTube video will not be associated with your pages relevancy and keyword determination. Thank Google later.
2 – So before you go stuffing the “Company Overview” section with keywords, let’s make sure it still makes sense to the users of Facebook. If your keywords just won’t fit into the context of your “Company Overview”, don’t fret! It’s far more important to have that section make sense to the potential consumer than to pander to the Googlebot’s own insufficiency on Facebook. Here’s the workaround: Proximity Linking.
Proximity linking is a very simple idea that can turn into a very powerful determining factor for the relevancy for any page, not just a Facebook page. Proximity linking is when you surround a link with specific keywords (or place it in a specific part of your content) to allow the destination URL’s search qualities to reflect upon your page. In other words, if you’d like to ensure that the Googlebot knows your Facebook page has to do with widgets, but can’t think of a decent way to include “widgets” into the context of your “Company Overview”, throw a link in there to the deep page on your site about widgets and the Googlebot will make the connection!
Remember, the Googlebot only knows as much as you let it know, and only has a limited amount of content from Facebook anyway. So make it easy on the little guy; he’s doing the best he can with what he’s given!
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Google Adwords Vs. Facebook Ads – Part Five
Part Five: The Exposure Difference
In the last installment of this Google Adwords vs Facebook Ads series we talked about turning a click into a customer. Let’s turn our attention now to some of the fundamentals within each platform. When my ad is running, how many people will see it? How many times will those people see it?
Incredible Exposure
Adwords:
Google Adwords visibility is a combination of factors, but is mostly tied to your budget. The ideal convergence is having a high quality score, that will reduce your bid price, and being willing to pay for placement “above the fold” on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
A. How many people will see my ad? How many times will people see my ad?
Google is very good at showing us how much we are missing out on by not maximizing our budget. Under the Opportunities tab in the Adwords dashboard (see image below) we are able to see how much more traffic we would get (an estimation mind you) if we upped our budget and/or made some keyword changes.
Google Adwords Back-end
Now we can increase exposure by have a quality score (7 or above generally), and paying attention to Click Thru Rates on keywords and ads (often overlooked). However the most potent way to increase exposure remains to be a higher budget.
B. When is my ad running?
The answer is a little nebulous but I’ll give it a shot. The first determinate is, surprise, budget. If you are willing to spend as much as Google estimates you should then you are going to show as much as the algorithm will allow. If you are not in this camp then you’ve probably run into the scenario where you Google your products/services and you can’t find your ad anywhere. If this is you here are few more things to look at before you contact your account manager.
- Check beyond the first page: Sometimes the ad’s get pushed back.
- Refresh your browser page (search again): If you do this you’ll changes in the ad’s that are served. This is what Google refers to as ad rotation and is how they fit in ad’s that don’t have the budget to show all of the time.
Ads can further be restricted, or targeted, your choice of vernacular, by the following:
- Geographically (Geo-targeting)
- Time of Day (Ad Scheduling)
- IP Restriction (IP Address Exclusion)
Finally, there are more methods to target your ad’s but to be honest it’s really very simple. More exposure = more budget.
Facebook Ads:
With Facebook Ads, this question is a relatively simple one. First of all, you have complete control over the targeting aspect of Facebook Ads, covered in this installment of our blog series, so you will be able to clearly see how many Facebook users will directly be targeted. Facebook refers to that number as your “targeted Reach”. When your ad goes live, you’ll see this graphically as the grey circle within the reach graph:
From Facebook Ads Manager
This number is determined by your targeting parameters. The second circle shown above, the green circle, represents the total amount of those users that have seen your ad. This number does not include multiple impressions of the Facebook Ad, this is just individual user exposure to the ad.
The yellow circle represents how your ad is capturing more impressions when using a Sponsored Story or Facebook Page Ad. These impressions occur when someone interacts with those types of ads by creating a broadcast message to their friends. These impressions cannot be estimated since they depend on user interactivity to gain exposure. Also note that these impressions will not count against your spend when utilizing a CPM model for budget.
Now let’s look at how your ad shows, and what that means.
From Facebook Ads Manager
Campaign Reach illustrates how many times your ad has shown (total impressions, including multiple impressions for individual users). Unless you are utilizing the CPM model for your ad budget, this number has little significance to your campaign.
Frequency shows how many times an individual user has seen your ad, on average. In this case, each user exposed to our Facebook Ad has seen the same ad, or variation in the same campaign, about 3 times. This is a very good number, as traditional marketing suggests that a consumer will need 3 different impressions to make a qualified decision. Most Facebook Ad campaigns will average between 3 and 5 impressions per user.
Social Reach illustrates how many additional Facebook users were exposed to the ad content or a broadcast message from their friends who interact with the Facebook Ads. This reach is not available for Ads that do not point to a Facebook Page directly or a sponsored story.
Connections illustrates how many people have “Liked” your Facebook Page as a result of your ad campaign. This metric will not be available to you if your ad does not connect to your Facebook Page directly.
Clicks are exactly what they say: how many users clicked on my ad directly? This is the all-important number when determining how your ad content is performing.
CTR (Click-Through Rate) allows Facebook to determine how valuable your ad and content are. It is the percentage of clicks over total impressions. If your click-through rate is extremely low (0.01% – 0.05%) Facebook will typically remove your ad from its rotation of impressions because Facebook will not be making much money on your campaign.
So it obviously takes some diligent monitoring in order to adjust and manage your Ad campaign in order to achieve a solid amount of impressions and increase your overall CTR.
The example shown above is from a very successful Facebook Ads campaign with 16 different variations of ad copy, images and destination pages. These variations were created upon daily monitoring and analysis, and were achieved through the tried-and-true method of A/B testing scenarios.
To test A/B CTR without having Facebook interfere with your impression count, turn on CPM (cost per impression) budget ads against each other at a smaller budget to get a good idea about which ads will produce the best CTR over time.
Have you explored all of your options within the Facebook Ads platform? Have you taken full advantage of Google Adwords’ tools to determine your most effective and visible ads? Contact Intrapromote today for more information on fully managed Ad campaigns and how they can dramatically affect your business.
Our next installment is our final installment where we discern the pros and cons of each platform, and give our readers the guidance when they are in a position to choose which platform to utilize for their online advertising dollars. Stay tuned!
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What Makes a Good Link? Part 5 (Traffic)
In the first four posts of my blog series on Foundational Link Development, I discussed the significance of the relevancy of the link, the age of a domain, the ability in acquiring the link, and pagerank.
Part 5: Traffic
There’s another factor that link builders can sometimes forget to consider during their link research efforts: traffic!
While link builders spend all their time looking for the perfect, relevant, aged, link with high PR, they can frequently dismiss links that carry quality traffic. After all, isn’t that what we’re doing all of this for at the end of the day? We’re optimizing our sites and building links to get higher rankings so that we can get all the traffic!
There have been a handful of times where I’ve come across site that wasn’t quite strong in the notable factors like domain age or decent PR (or any for that matter). Nonetheless, traffic value should never be overlooked. If a link can potentially bring traffic (especially traffic that would be interested in your site or business),then it should certainly be considered as a link building target.
To find sites within your industry or niche that can bring traffic, it’s best to start with the top bloggers in your niche (unless your business is in a very niche area, other strategies may have to be considered). If we continue with our seemingly permanent example of dog beds, we’ll start with bloggers in the “dog” niche.
Performing a “dog blogs” search in Google yields some great results. The fourth site belongs to the All Things Dog Blog.
In examining this blog, we see that it has both decent PR on the homepage (PR3) and domain age (November 1999). And it being ranked #4 for a fairly popular term “dog blogs,” would be more than enough reason to consider it a high link target. However, the real value here is both the traffic and quality of traffic. Using Compete.com, we see that over the past year, this blog has received a monthly average of a little over 1000 visitors. Furthermore, the site a premiere blog that discusses nothing but dogs! If we sold dog beds, we would absolutely love a link from this blog! A link that could bring SEO value and some free advertising is a gold nugget!
Now let’s recap on the variables that make a good link.
1.) Relevancy – Stay within the relevant realms of your site’s niche
2.) Age – The older the site, the more trust search engines place in it.
3.) Ability to Acquire the Link – CNN isn’t listening to any link requests anytime soon. Stick to sites that will actually consider responding to your link request.
4.) PageRank – It’s not as important as you think, however, high PR can certainly pass some great value to your site.
5.) Traffic – Don’t ignore traffic value. A link for the most part is a good thing (unless it’s from a porn, gambling, or spam type site). A link that brings traffic is a great thing (not to mention free advertising).
I hope you’ve enjoyed my multi-part blog series on “What Makes a Good Link.” Consider the factors above and you’ll certainly be on your way to finding some quality, powerful backlinks for your site!
