TopRank Marketing Blog

A large number of companies are familiar with the process of starting a blog, but few have experienced the challenges of maintaining and growing a blog for more than a year. Understanding the long term benefits is key to sustainable business blogging. One of the most notable benefits of publishing blog content, especially if optimized, is the compliment to search engine optimization efforts.

TopRank Marketing’s Online Marketing Blog recently conducted a survey with 326 Corporate, Agency, Small Biz and Independent marketers to discover their current experiences with blogging and the perceived impact on search engine optimization efforts.  Key findings:

95% indicated blogs are used as part of their search engine optimization efforts
87.4% successfully increased measurable SEO objectives as a direct result of blogging
90% cited blogging as important, significantly important or a primary SEO tactic

Blogs are started for many reasons ranging from corporate communications in a newsroom format to conversational posts from executives or subject matter experts. When it came to SEO benefits from blogging, the top choices were:

• Creat new optimized content
• Linking from blog posts to optimized web site content
• Attract external links
• Increase crawl rate / frequency
• Community building for content/links promotion
• Content Syndication

The timeframe between starting a blogging effort and seeing results is a very common question for companies considering a blog as part of the marketing and communications mix. In the TopRank survey, respondents reported seeing SEO results fairly quickly:

94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months
54% of respondents start to see SEO benefits from blogging within 3 months

After timeframe to see results, the next most common question about building a case for a corporate blog are the results. Adding a SEO effort to a corporate blog allows companies to increase the outcomes and reach of the content published. The top benefits from blog SEO included:

• Increasing company site traffic
• Increase company leads/sales
• Inbound links
• Referrals from the blog
• Lead generation from the blog
• Improved web site rankings
• Increased blog traffic

Starting a blog purely for SEO reasons will make content sustainability difficult in the long run. A blogging strategy must meet meet other goals as well, especially those that involve engaging customers or interactions with readers. Other success measures from blogging include:

• Increase overall online exposure. They won’t know about you if you don’t say anything, participate
• Contribute to company’s bottom line goals in at least a semi-direct way
• Branding and owning SERPS
• Increase quality of site traffic
• Improve visibility and prominence in search engine results is by far the most important, it’s all about search
• Branding
• Incease visibility and demonstrate the company is “up to date”

Convincing management that a corporate blog or any kind of blog is not always easy. Nor is long term creation of content and promotion. Many of the comments about obstacles to blogging centered around time, resources, measurement and a lack of awareness.

• 67.2% cited resource issues as the most common objection to implementing a blog
• 42% cited content sourcing issues
• 35% didn’t see the benefit of blogging
• Regulated industry or legal issues got in the way for 19.3

Is blogging here to stay? 92% of respondents feel blogging will continue to be an important content optimization and marketing tactic for the next 3+ years.

Read the full results of the Blogging and SEO Survey here along with a large number of comments from respondents on measuring success and SEO applications of blogging. Follow @toprank on Twitter for more insights into Social SEO and Blogging.

According to eMarketer, total US search marketing spending is predicted to reach $23.4 billion within 3 years.  Follow the money and you’ll see an industry that is credible and where corporate marketers are investing.  The following search engine optimization case study illustrates how TopRank® Online Marketing helped improve revenue for the national Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Jobcenter.

Improving search visibility of job listings led to visitor referral increases exceeding 400%, dramatically increasing the value PRSA JobCenter job listings provide to companies hiring PR and Communications professionals and attracting more advertisers.

SEO Case Study Situation:

PRSA represents the world’s largest PR organization with over 31,000 professional and student members. One of the key resources the PRSA offers to its members is the Jobcenter where over 77,000 potential employees are able to connect with Communications and PR hiring managers at major corporations and agencies nationwide.

To improve the reach of job listings published on the JobCenter and improve the effectiveness of connecting candidates with open PR and communications positions, PRSA engaged Minnesota based TopRank Marketing to address JobCenter search engine optimization issues. Keyword research, code and content optimization, content organization, ongoing promotion and link building plus analytics combined to boost JobCenter search traffic via Google, Yahoo and Bing search engines.

SEO Solution:

A SEO Audit was conducted to identify target market keywords, opportunities for code level optimization, crawling and indexing issues as well as content that would meet the needs of candidates searching for specific types of PR and communications jobs.  A keyword glossary of popular and relevant terms was reconciled with the available content on the web site and recommendations were made to update pages, tags and links where necessary.

Part of those recommendations were to create job category pages that offered specific information on the top job searches on the PRSA Jobcenter.  RSS feeds for each category were created and promoted, allowing job seekers to subscribe and receive automatic updates.

A variety of link building tactics including the use of a widget to populate other web sites with PRSA powered job listings provided direct traffic and a useful signal to search engine crawlers that other topically relevant web sites considered the PRSA Jobcenter worth linking to.

The Jobcenter site optimization edits and new job category pages provided targeted content for the search engines and also created a seamless connection between the employers job listings and job seekers. Clustering popular phrases by category and subsequent content pages proved useful for search engines and for searchers.

Ongoing training of PRSA staff on keyword usage in new document creation as well as link building helped the client, “help themselves”.

Within the first six months of implementing the SEO audit and new category pages, total traffic to PRSA’s site has increased substantially, while pageviews for PRSA’s Jobcenter increased by over 40% and continues to climb.

Search engine rankings and visitor referrals from competitive keyword phrases increased substantially. For example, referrals from queries on the #1 Google ranking keyword phrase ‘public relations jobs‘ have increased by over 450%.

The goal of making Public Relations and Communications job listings posted to PRSA’s Jobcenter more easily found via search directly affected the ability to promote PRSA over competitors and attract new advertisers.

For other search engine optimization case studies, tips and how to’s connect with TopRank:

Website: Internet Marketing Consulting
Twitter: @toprank

Blog: Online Marketing Blog
Facebook: TopRank Online Marketing

As a business owner, you take pride in the quality of the goods and services you provide to your customers. Why should your marketing and advertising efforts reflect anything less? This is particularly true for pay per click (PPC) advertising campaigns, or the listings in the search engine for which you pay each time a user clicks on your ad.

Unfortunately, many PPC advertisers adopt a “set it and forget it” attitude towards paid search: selecting keywords at will, haphazardly drafting ad copy, directing those who click on their ads to a homepage, and expecting the leads to pour in. A truly effective, quality PPC campaign requires a little more effort than that.

Just as you would take the time to nurture your goods into the high quality products your customers expect, so should you take the time to nurture your PPC program into a high quality, optimally performing campaign. Follow the below five steps for PPC campaign creation and practice a little quality control in your online marketing efforts.

1. Materials: Think of keywords as the basic materials of your pay per click campaign. You ensure the materials you put into your goods and services answer a specific need to create your ideal product. Take the same approach to keyword selection. Look at the specific terms that truly describe what you are offering to searchers, and not just which terms are most popular.
2. Assembly: The way in which you organize your keywords into specific ad groups is similar to how you would structure the assembly of your product to ensure maximum efficiency. In product assembly, you group like tasks together. In ad group creation, you group like keywords together. Place your keywords into extremely granular, closely-related groups that can speak directly to your ad copy to ensure a high quality, cohesive ad group.
3. Packaging: Ad copy is the packaging of your PPC campaign. You design your packaging to attract attention and entice customers, and your PPC ad copy should function in the same way. Your first goal is to let searchers know exactly what you are offering – so draft your copy to speak directly to the keywords in its ad group. As PPC ads are very brief, don’t be cryptic. State exactly why searchers should click on your ad rather than all the other rankings, both organic and paid, for a given term.
4. Product: Your landing page is the product of your PPC campaign. It’s what you are trying to get searchers to ‘buy,’ by either filling out an inquiry form, downloading a piece of fulfillment, or even directly purchasing your goods. Your clients want a functional, appealing product that fulfills their need. Your landing page should be user-friendly, informative, and a direct response to the user’s search query.
5. Quality Assurance: You continually monitor and adjust your product for improvement. A PPC campaign is no different. Take your ‘customer feedback,’ or your click through and conversion rates, into consideration and adjust your keyword lists, ad copy and landing page continually in order to develop the optimal PPC campaign.

Creating a quality PPC program can take some time and effort; however the end result of a high-impact campaign is increased brand awareness and leads that translate into greater revenue. Approach PPC like you approach your product, and you can create a quality PPC program that generates a high ROI.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a necessary component of any successful business website. The internet has become the primary resource for information on everything, including the goods and services your company provides. Yet with all of the search engine hoops to jump through, an effective SEO campaign is surprisingly similar to a political campaign. You need to beat out your competitors and win over your public, in this case the search engines, to convince them you are most deserving of the top spot.

So how do you get the search engines’ votes? Will you need to hire a campaign staff, i.e. enlist outside assistance, to make it to the top? Take TopRank’s five SEO campaign essentials into account and ensure your website is elected to the highest search engine position.

1. Plot Your Campaign Trail: Know what you ultimately want to achieve with your SEO campaign. Are you looking to increase your site traffic? Up your brand visibility among your target audience? Generate more leads? Solidifying your goals is a necessary step in deciding which SEO campaign tactics to deploy and how to measure your results.
2. Staff Your Campaign Headquarters: Do you have the resources to implement your ideal SEO program? Or will you need the help of a seasoned campaign manager to reach your goals? Once you have established what you hope to attain with your SEO program, take a look at your capital, SEO knowledge, and bandwidth to decide what you can accomplish and what you will need help with.
3. Count Your Votes Unlike a political campaign, you don’t have “yay or nay” votes to indicate your win: and even these are not always so clear-cut. Do you determine success by your website’s rankings for key terms in the search engines? Or by a change in organic website traffic over a given period of time? Reference the objectives you established in order to solidify precise metrics that will clearly indicate the success of your SEO campaign.
4. Take Your Message to the People: Just like a candidate, you need to get your campaign message in front of an audience in order to sway those votes. Find your target audience online, rather than waiting for them to find you. Knowing where your prospective customers are interacting with one another online, and promoting your website as a resource within that space, can increase the reach of your SEO program and improve your ROI.
5. Deliver on Your Campaign Promises: You need to make good on the initial ‘promises’ you made to the search engines in terms of the quality and relevancy of you website in order to maintain the top spot. As search engines are constantly upgrading the way in which they determine website rank, a good SEO program should adapt to survive and thrive in the changing online environment. A consistent, ongoing SEO program is your best bet to ensure you win your bid for reelection and continue to rank highly in the search engines.

Campaigning for the top slot in the search engines can be difficult. Your needs are unique, and you need to keep your goals clearly in mind in order to establish a campaign that will get you the ‘votes’ you need to exceed the competition. Good SEO consultants or in-house SEO specialists should use their expertise to establish individualized campaigns for each and every project.

Digital Asset Optimization

Keyword optimizing standard text content and images found in web pages isn’t nearly enough to win in competitive categories. As a result, in-house search marketers and search engine optimization consulting companies are adopting holistic social media and digital asset content SEO. Digital Asset Optimization is a SEO Point of View that TopRank started developing in early 2007.

Managing a textbook SEO program for a complex website can be challenging. Managing a digital asset optimization program which involves a matrix of media types (text, image, audio, video and interactive applications) and formats (web pages, MS Office docs, shared media, news, blogs, etc) with promotion channels in a big company carries even more of a challenge.

With every challenge there is an opportunity to create a competitive advantage, especially when it comes to managing Digital Asset Optimization efforts.

The first step to managing a digital asset optimization program is to take inventory of the media assets and content types that are currently being created. It is important not to discount content because it is not published online. Many types of interactive, video and image assets that are used with CD, DVD, kiosks and various electronic advertising platforms can be repurposed for online optimization and promotion.

The second step for a successful DAO program is to create a matrix of inventoried digital assets and the corresponding promotional channels. This is helpful when a strategic promotion plan is put in place because it’s easier to see what parts of a program can be promoted individually.

The third step is to keyword optimize the media and content types being promoted. Ideally, a process and training is put in place with the various content creation sources to enable new content to be optimized and promoted on an ongoing basis.

The fourth step in the digital asset optimization campaign management process is to create a content promotion plan. It’s important to consider both the strategic DAO promotion opportunities as well as the promotion of individual media types.

For example, an entire viral campaign can be deployed leveraging not only the buzz building and word of mouth benefits, but also the ability for individual components of the program to drive traffic and attract links on their own.

Like all marketing efforts, campaign activity and conversion tracking and content interactions should be analyzed with analytics software. Monitor what’s working and what’s not ensuring to continuously test and refine.

Other resources on DAO:

• SEO evolved: Digital asset optimization - DMNews
• Digital Asset Optimization for News Content

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxhsBVLmqGU

Search Engine Optimization has been ranked the highest ROI and top conversion tactic for internet marketing. Add social media to the SEO mix and the impact on community building with optimized content brings an online marketing effort to the next level.

This video interview with  TopRank’s CEO, Lee Odden, shares insights into the type of SEO and Social Media training offered by TopRank Online Marketing to help companies improve their search marketing and social media results.