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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For Automotive SEO: Video Is A Dealer’s Best Friend
As I mentioned in my previous article (For Automotive SEO: Always Be Creating Content), the line between “Always Be Closing” and “Always Be Creating Content” is disappearing, mainly because automotive online searches are becoming a bigger and bigger part of consumers’ buying cycle. The online experience comes first, and, in many ways, is as important as the in-person experience.
And a good online customer relationship starts with good SEO, because just about all the same principles that guide SEO practices are the same principles that set up the right expectations for a car buying experience. For example: Site architecture. If it’s confusing for a customer, it’s probably confusing for Google, and vice-versa. Another example is video – what a video can tell a search engine matters as much as what it can tell a customer.
Video For All
Video is one of the best tools at a dealership’s disposal. Having consumers seeing the video on a dealer’s website is better than TV advertising for many reasons, but most of all because if they are on a dealer’s website, chances are they are interested in buying a car, and they create a much more targeted audience than TV can provide.
Numerous studies show that customers react strongly to video. It’s a fact. Video works. And with sites like YouTube, and with small, affordable video cameras everywhere, video is the best marketing content any auto dealer can create. Any dealer can shoot any kind of video they want, from the informally quirky to the supremely classy. Thanks to email and social media, sharing video has never been easier – and, as my mother taught me, sharing is caring. In fact, video just might be a dealership’s best friend today.
Shoot First and Optimize Later
Video can be optimized for search engines with simple tips like creating titles that accurately reflect the content of the video, naming the files to match the titles, adding descriptive and appropriate meta tags, and so on. These things are good for both search engines and car buyers. Search engines absolutely adore properly-optimized video.
If a dealer maintains good habits of optimizing their videos for search engines, then shooting video for the web can be more fun than work, and the reach of the videos will just extend and extend and extend.
The Bottom Line
Video is easy-to-create, highly-effective content that can not only help boost a dealer’s automotive search results, but can also boost their actual sales.
Basically, the more video a dealer shares of their dealership online, the more customers will see of the dealership. Again, it’s all about transparency and expectations. My advice is to take as much video of the sales reps as possible, since A) sales reps are interesting people with big personalities, and B) sales reps are the ones the customers will encounter from the start. Deals close faster and with less resistance when customers know what they’re getting into before they set foot on the lot.
Video is easy-to-create, highly-effective content that can not only help boost a dealer’s automotive search results, but can also boost their actual sales. So get a camera and start shooting!
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.
For Automotive SEO: Always Be Creating Content
Automotive retail is not an easy business, especially in this day and age. Retailers must not only keep pace with ever-evolving car shoppers, they must outpace their competition just to stay in business. And as shoppers perform more and more of their shopping online, search engine optimization becomes more and more important.
A dealer’s website is necessary to attract in-market car buyers – it’s nearly impossible nowadays to trust a business without a website. But a website alone is not enough. A dealer’s website must be optimized, accurate, relevant, fresh, and entertaining. Automotive online marketing doesn’t just provide visibility to an audience, it provides an online shopping experience. Online shoppers need to have a great online shopping experience before they can have a great in-person shopping experience.
It’s a good idea for dealers to partner their websites up with other, larger, third-party websites that offer advertising exposure, inventory listings, and dealer reviews, because they also offer strong SEO benefits as a result. Every single inventory listing on these sites contains a link to that dealer’s website – that’s a lot of link juice! Many of these sites also provide ratings and reviews for a dealership. These are a few of online shoppers’ favorite things, and can also help your search engine results page placement.
ABC+C = Always Be Creating Content
Content is crucial – it’s an old favorite cliché of SEO experts, but it’s true. And it matters a good deal not just for search engine robots and spiders, but for automotive shoppers, too. The transition from online shopping to actually taking that test drive is a big step, often wrought with anxiety and uncertainty. It’s highly important to set up the proper expectations of what they’ll find at a dealership, from the location of the lot to the people inside. Dealers manage this expectation whether they realize it or not, from their visibility on search results pages to the reviews people write about them to the personality that shines through on blog posts, Facebook page updates, videos, etc. The line between “Always Be Closing” and “Always Be Creating Content” is vanishing.
Car dealerships are full of big personalities. There’s no reason there shouldn’t be a fresh new video, blog post, status update, tweet, pin, Instagram or whatever as soon as a car is sold off the lot. Someone at the dealership is undoubtedly willing to do these things on behalf of the dealership, because it’s fun. Keeping up this habit is an excellent way to stay relevant to consumers as well as to search engines.
A diverse portfolio of online marketing content generation takes a search campaign from good to great.
As in almost every corner of any business, diversity is key. A diverse portfolio of online marketing content generation takes a search campaign from good to great. It will also set up the proper expectations of a dealership before the customer walks in. And that leads to better customer experiences. And that leads to more sales. And those sales, brought about by better customer experiences, are brought about by optimized, accurate, relevant, fresh, and entertaining content. And the cycle repeats.
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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SEO Benefits of Re-Marketing Content
Companies can capitalize on positive content that is generated outside of their organization and make it work to their SEO benefit. This is called re-marketing, and we are going to outline steps companies and agencies can take to leverage third-party, positive content as much as possible.
Identifying Positive Content
One way to find news (whether positive, negative, or neutral) about your company or organization is to try a manual Google News search where your query is simply your company name. While this works, it isn’t always the most efficient route. Luckily, Google has set up their intuitive Google Alerts, allowing you to add and manage alerts. This way, whenever your company or organization is mentioned, your team can receive notifications in their email alerting them to mentions around the web. Alerts can be customized for the search query or queries you want to monitor, what types of results you would like to see (news, blogs, videos, etc), and how often you’d like to receive alerts.
Potential Ways to Strengthen Content
While third-party content may offer a lot of praise for your company or organization, they may not always link back to your site. While re-marketing that content, it could also be beneficial to contact the third-party author and ask that they link back to your site if they haven’t already. You can also request they use certain anchor text when creating the hyperlink. However, don’t always expect a response or for them to follow through with your requests.
Re-Marketing Positive Content on Your Site
Once positive content has been identified, you should find the best place on your site or within other content channels to re-market it. Whether you are mentioning the third-party content on your main site, within a newsletter, email blasts, or social media assets, the fundamental strategy should not differ immensely. While you can expand upon content in greater depth on Facebook or in a newsletter compared to re-marketing content within the 140-character limitations of Twitter, you should always be incorporating targeted keywords and linking back to your main site.
While re-marketing content allows you to digitally spread positive news, it also provides the opportunity to add details that the original author may have left out and provide your own commentary or spin. Re-marketed content should always link back to relevant areas of your main site, and utilize targeted keywords within your commentary or summary and in anchor text.
At Intrapromote, we can help you identify positive content and re-market it through the appropriate channels. Contact us if you’d like to learn more about how we can help!
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