SEO for Smarter Social Media

Social media and SEO may not look like brothers in arms, but they cannot succeed without each other either. While social media stimulates off-site conversation and interaction with your customers, SEO aims to pull traffic to your website. However, these two marketing disciplines have more in common than you may think. A recent article in presented a nice summary of the intersections. Here’s a summary:

• Social media is all about generating interesting content to share with social audiences. As this content is shared, distributed, and discussed on forums, it creates linking opportunities. The quality and quantity of these links can have a big impact on your SEO
• Social media can help you draw traffic to your website for less competitive keywords.
• Social media users tend to search for terms that are lower in the sales funnel. You can use this knowledge to optimize your PPC spend.
• Social media can offer deep insights into search terms that are popular and useful to your audience right now. This kind of real-time optimization can be rich dividends on SEO.
  

At the end of the day, we have to stop thinking of search and social media as two separate marketing silos. Just as online advertising may affect the in-store customer experience, social media impacts brand awareness and SEO in online marketing. It is essential for marketers to integrate SEO and social media in the right way to leverage greater benefits.

Deals are not Enough, Social Followers want More

Primary motives of any social media campaign are buzz creation and engagement. But social followers want something beyond the regular.

A recent Marketing Sherpa survey showed that discovering a great deal (sale, special offers or discounts etc.) remains the top motivation of those who befriended or followed a brand online. Looking for savings is followed closely by learning about new products, features or services.

The survey results support the findings of another study by Razorfish, that listed searching for exclusive deals and offers as the primary motivation of US Internet users for following brands on Twitter.

The tip for marketers here is that only by sharing interesting content that users care about, along with exciting deals and discounts, they can engage and motivate customers to spread marketing messages further.

Why should you keep your current SEO going?

As SEO providers, we are constantly being asked to justify our existence. Why should we continue SEO work? We already added keywords and tags to all our pages. Although self-serving, here’s a great exposition of the value ongoing SEO services create.  Ongoing search marketing consulting is important because a large percentage of organizations fail to implement the recommendations provided to them by their SEO consultants.  Here are the five reasons why you should continue.

12 Must Know Digital Marketing Forecasts for 2010

Internet marketing continues to undergo a rapid transformation every year. Areas that will be affected in 2010 may include: future monetization models, the effect of transparency on advertising, social and search, mobile, social commerce, public relations, social advertising, Twitter, video and mom/pop internet usage. And, we are only in January! Here’s a great compilation of some of these trends from data at eMarketer. Here are some useful insights on what digital marketing may would look like in 2010. What would the future monetization models look like? What will be the effect of transparency on advertising? Read on to know this and more.

Packing the Social Punch to Search

The fine line between search and social media marketing is fading rapidly. Marketers are now toggling between Google, Facebook, and Twitter to find deals, connect with brands, and start the purchase process. Here’s how you can unite the search and social power for greater marketing results.

Email beats Internet Marketing for Highest ROI

Email marketing beats Internet marketing by delivering the highest ROI amongst online marketing channels. Here’s how much profit marketers made with email marketing. Read more

Is Your SEO Ready for the 2010 Challenge?

2010 is the year of conversion rate optimization, personalized searches, increased SEO budgets, Twitter Link Graph, and much more. Are you ready for it? Read on.

Measuring Email Marketing for Success

Memorability has been one of the greatest strengths of email marketing, especially compared with other channels such as print, broadcast and direct mail. However, metrics are useful only if they are taken of advantage of. It might be time to move beyond the basics and truly exploit the breadth and depth of available email metrics. Read More