Performance Media Sydney

Another Story on Content Marketing

2013-04-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

How an Inbound Marketing Inquiry led to Irrationality

Like all inbound marketers Sherlock Holmes is no stranger to juggling many different talents simultaneously to get results. He’s also no stranger to navigating project management chaos to end up with strong results. However Sherlock might be more fantastic than his marketing counterparts because he can walk into anyone’s house smoking a pipe in a deerstalker hat without any repercussions.

"You know my methods, Watson”.

The Truth about Relativity

User based Segmentation can work on a broad scale however Sherlock Holmes knows what happens when he advertises his services to the masses!
Customers may potentially use search engines to find a “detective” and or “Investigator” however this completed search is ambiguous and the common customer might not be interested in a Private detective.
As a result Holmes may spend more hours than needed speaking to the wrong people. Search queries become even more ambiguous through translation overseas. Therefore Content Marketers need to organise there content universally to be accessible and useful to target customers.
Some ways which we can organise and group our online content is through the use of search, whereas groups of keywords or phrase types used are matched to "Informational, Transactional or Navigation" based keyword or phrase types.

The Social Trade off

It would be a shame to put all that effort into creating and then building content, optimising and link building to achieve a number one spot for “detective” and or “investigator” to have an 80% bounce rate because you chose to highlight a keyword with less demand per user intent. Let’s find out how we optimise for the right term....

"By heavens, Holmes, I believe that they are really after us."

1. Setting the Expectation

Until our world starts to look more like something that George Lucas and Rupert Murdock would have collaborated on, there’s no way for us to know exactly what every user is thinking when they search or come to a site.

There are a vast amount of Social tools that can be used to tap into the existing conversation and understand common phrases and keywords. You can also use mechanisms on Facebook such as Facebook insights. Additionally use page post ads to learn more on what phrase types or keywords achieve greater results .

In most cases it’s good enough to just pop your keyword into a Twitter with a # and sift through how people or personas are talking about it.

"Now Said Holmes to Watson, the fair sex is your department"

2. Knowing your Personas

Personas usually are groups of individuals who suit a particular target group for content marketing purposes. Depending on how in-depth you would like to go, it is possible to create personas based on personality identify, place, ethnicity, frequency of website visits or lack there of, in the event you’d just like to rewards users if you like.

The purpose of a persona is actually to identify a target audience and rely on them as a reference point to communicate marketing activity.

Personas are typically employed by usability tests but as you may imagine their implications are more granular when applied to Search.

There are plenty of tools that give you demographic persona data like Neilsen, ComScore, Hitwise and Google Ad Planner but in most cases social listening by itself is better because this activity provides real time insights into conversation from selected audiences.

3. Understanding the Bounce

Once you have identified keywords that fall into multiple need states you then have something worth A/B testing. In this case we have contextual elements to test which we can easily accomplish with an A/B test.

A/B testing can be used for multilingual and mobile websites, creative messaging and display. Context detection can then be configured to ensure that the appropriate content is delivered to users depending on, for example, their device and location.

4. Know your Target Personas, Know your Target Keywords

Marketers need to understand how consumers use different types of search terms as shown in the table below. The search matrix graph illustrates the repeated use of different types or phrase types used of search terms for a single customer during his or her customer journey (other digital channels such as affiliates are ignored here).

The above graph is an example of keyword or phrase type weighted allocation from the same customer using various keyword searches and key phrases across branded search and generic to find useful and accessible content.

An additional way to visualise this across a rage of keywords or phrase types is to classify them as generic, long-tail (complex 4+ keywords) or brand. This can give you a similar type graph once mapped out.

5. Optimise to Win in each Market!

The keywords and phrase type group matching selected personas in the above matrix can also be clarified in an A/B test. This type of approach can help with optimising your website with clean URLs, Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Body copy to a certain extent towards your target personas.

That is to say the landing page with the lower bounce rate, higher time on site and highest number of pageviews is the owner of that keyword or phrase type selected for your Organic Search campaign.

In Conclusion

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, it must be the truth?” - Sherlock Holmes

The Story of a Content Marketer...

Sources:

Quotes: http://sherlockholmesquotes.com

Images: www.bestofsherlock.com/sidney-paget-original-art.htm

Novel: http://www.booktopia.com.au/the-complete-sherlock-holmes-sir-arthur-conan-doyle

Extra Reading: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seogadget-guide-conversion-rate-optimization

Market Analyzer for Facebook on Obama vs Romney

2012-08-05T00:16:00.003-07:00

Obama clearly liked with data on the Facebook App Hike Market Analyser, this app will allow you to draw some top line assumptions.

Facebook Market

Responsive Media and Mobile SEO

2012-04-29T11:00:00.000-07:00

It may come as no surprise that we have officially turned the corner in the ways we look to develop mobile strategies to reach an audience in the search engine marketing sense.

Keynote speaker Ross Dawson, Futurist, Strategist and advisor at the Google Atmosphere Enterprise Sydney recently addressed the audience with some rather interesting facts. Dawson made claim that 56% of all people now store things on the cloud. Dawson also made mention of the rise of digital consumption. Overwhelming most of us we are now dealing with Zeta Bites of information that need to be better managed for a successful Enterprise. The majority of this data consumption takes place on hand held devices, Mobile phones...Australia leading growth in this area more recently.

The model of mobile marketing in 2012 and beyond is much more about the relationship with OS device carriers and the cloud in that sense.

On the 28^th of April, 2012 Google introduced Google Drive. An application where people can store, collaborate and share content from their Desk-top, Tablet or Mobile phone. This is not just another social channel by design; conversely Google Drive offers an evolutional search capability “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR) technology. This is a key stand out along with its other features. OCR recognises text within scanned documents and PDFs. It also enables image recognition, for example if I drag and drop photos from Picasa of Ayres Rock into Google Drive you will be able to search (Ayres Rock) and the exact photo should show up in a similar way to in the Google Drive picture below.

Looking at Google Drive you will find an integration of Google Play a multimedia content service which collaborates Music, Apps, Movies, Games, eBooks and more; this is a great working installation of HTML5, CCS3 and media queries. Working installations around HTML5 <a> href attributes (Links) within this environment is an area of consideration since the Google Penguin Update and Google Mobile search. Search Engine Land offers some tips on this: penguin-update-recovery-tips-advice

Mobile Blogs, RSS feeds, Images etc often don’t have an offering for Mobile and some businesses do a straight lift over copy from their PC site. This leads to page duplication and can also get caught up with online with Google. Many people often want to be led from one mobile friendly site to another. Therefore a separate link building strategy for Mobile SEO is needed while considering original content.

Drupal 7 allows for working installations built in HTML5, CCS3 and media queries that helps in the working process of responsive design through templates. This content is rendered differently via templates if set up correctly.

Content distribution like the use of apps are another good way to build up a number of relevant links pointing to a Mobile site in a similar way Mobile apps are a good offering for link building. There are plenty of other ideas available for content distribution and inbound marketing it’s just a matter of production and distribution.

In conclusion I am left wondering where this Mobile trend will take us. Following the most recent Google Penguin algorithm update paid links and thin content are in consideration.

I can’t help think that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) will make its way into the Search network and if this does what it means for Image Alt Tags and SEO as we know it today.

We need to adapt and recognise that as our interests will change so too will the algorithm. The challenge will be in the way we manage this regardless of device and how we promote it.

LinkedIn Audience Statistics Across Markets

2011-09-25T16:36:00.000-07:00

Infographic: LinkedIn Usage Across Selected Markets

Courtesy of CeBIT Writer: Neerav Bhatt - 5 Tips For Effective Linkedin Business Use & Case Study

Unique Update on Google Panda

2011-09-03T08:46:00.000-07:00

Search Engine Marketing paths a way forward for many Australian businesses today but recent algorithmic changes such as the Panda updates from Google's search engine has effected search results, challenging many online businesses and publishers.

Content farms who have adopted a content syndication strategy catered for the proliferation of content across engines are some of the worse hit sites. Some sites have taken a tremendous loss of organic search traffic, having lost as much as 40% on their total site traffic.
Search-news/google-panda-update-causes-40-traffic-loss month to date.

A funny video I watched on Google reviews can be seen in the clip below :-)

Taking a step back to 2000 I still recall how many experts were quick to write-off virtual business and claimed that the use of Internet would limit information exchange.

Thankful to many others who had the foresight in Australia to see this opportunity have brought our Australian Online businesses forward, according to new research by PwC and Frost & Sullivan, Australians will spend more than $13.6 billion online in 2011, an increase of over 13% on last year's $12 billion due to their infrastructure and resources.

Price Water House Coppers - Digital Media Research June 2011

The combination of high demand in search queries has led to an increase of paid and organic search algorithmic changes to Google’s search engine. More businesses have needed to adopted an online strategy globally, while circumventing any updates such as Google Panda updates to retain site traffic during these periods..

One of the many justifications Google has based the Panda updates on is around improving their search quality results by reducing duplicate content. I guess you could say old content copied and produced does not sit well for Google.

As more updates continue arise, businesses will continue to look at their network to recover any loses and build back up to improve on page conversions. The question is will they perform well enough to keep up to date?

Vanessa Fox a continuous writer and named one of Seattle’s 2008 top 25 innovators and entrepreneurs. Her book, Marketing in the Age of Google, provides a blueprint for incorporating search into organizations at all levels.

Please also check out my colleagues blog at Seobrain Videos for more information on link building.

Thank you