Communicating SEO’s Value To Clients And C-Level Execs

When it comes to marketing activities, SEO is often the first thing on the chopping block when budget cuts come around.

As an SEO professional, you understand the value of your work. You also understand that not all of your clients or prospects (or C-level execs if you’re working in house) fully appreciate what is required to really make SEO work.

This can be due in part to the fact that proving return on investment for dollars spent on SEO can be challenging. That does not mean, however, that it is impossible.

It is important to track ROI on SEO efforts. You need to do this to justify your worth to your clients and your clients need it to justify continued expenditures to themselves or their management.

Sadly, SEO is one of the first things that many businesses let go in favor of activities that more readily present themselves with hard ROI statistics. How do you combat this?

Let The Numbers Do The Talking

When proving the value of SEO, utilizing hard data is a must. The following steps can streamline this process:

1. Measure leads
2. Measure revenue
3. Measure revenue per leads

You can calculate revenue per leads by simply dividing the total amount of revenue by the total number of leads.

A Word (Or Two) About Leads

Perhaps the first thing that must be said here is that page visits are not necessarily leads. They can be, but they do not have to be. Tracking page visits can provide a snapshot of overall activity, but the data most important to track here when mapping it back to revenue are events or goals.

Events and goals in Google Analytics can be confusing to many companies. Turn this confusion into an opportunity for you by educating clients about them — what they are and why they are important to businesses.

Start by clearly explaining what events and goals are, as follows:

• Events: An event is a particular action that a user engages in while on a website. Examples include clicking on links or downloading information or assets. Each event indicates some form of engagement by a visitor, indicating that particular prospect is more qualified than one who simply visits a page. Hence, the importance of tracking events versus just page views.
• Goals: A goal, as the name suggests, is something that you want to happen. In terms of web visits, there are four important goals a business may want to track. The first is visits to a particular URL, such as a confirmation page. The second is the length of time that a person spends on a site. The third is the number of pages on a site viewed in a single visit. The fourth is actually an event as noted above.

Tracking events and goals gives you and your clients far more insight into their prospect and customer behavior that simply tracking the number of people who came to their sites ever could. These metrics can also tie directly into revenue stream data.

Set Yourself – And Your Clients – Up For Success

Perhaps one of the most important elements of accurately measuring the ROI of your SEO work is to set the stage from the get-go. Ensuring that you and your clients are on the same page can go a long way toward avoiding some unpleasant (and unnecessary) experiences.

Once again, you are presented with an opportunity to shine by showcasing your expertise and sharing it with your clients. The more you teach your clients, the more you empower them and the more you increase their loyalty to you.

The three most important points to establish with new clients are:

1. SEO Is A Long-Term Proposition

Instant gratification is great but that is not at all what SEO is about. This may not be what clients want to hear but it is exactly what you need to tell them. The upside to this is that SEO can return benefits for the long haul, boosting its value tremendously.

Even when search result positions improve, revenue increases may not yet be apparent for some time. It is vital that clients understand this and be willing to wait more than just a few months to get what they really want.

2. How To Measure ROI

It is not just the revenue per lead or even the number of events or goals that indicate success with an SEO program.

Because SEO can take some time to realize its full potential, there are many things along the way that should be measured to track progress such as the removal of Google penalties. Additionally, some metrics are simply not directly trackable to revenue, like a click to driving directions.

3. How To Set Up Analytics

If your clients’ analytics are not set up to track conversions properly, the analytics themselves may paint an incorrect picture. Work closely with your clients to make sure all analytics are setup to capture and show what you need to know.

Establishing these concepts when you first begin working with a client goes a long way toward a healthy — and profitable— relationship between you and that client.

SEO Is Not About Getting Leads

SEO is about getting the right leads. It is also about accurately tracking those leads so that you can make adjustments to your activities as need be but also so that you can accurately help your clients calculate their ROI for SEO.

Content Source - http://nuzzel.com/sharedstory/09012014/searchengineland/communicating_seos_value_to_clients_and_clevel_execs

10 Laws of Social Media Marketing

For business owners just getting started, a guide to build brand buzz and boost your bottom line.     

Leveraging the power of content and social media marketing can help elevate your audience and customer base in a dramatic way. But getting started without any previous experience or insight could be challenging.

It's vital that you understand social media marketing fundamentals. From maximizing quality to increasing your online entry points, abiding by these 10 laws will help build a foundation that will serve your customers, your brand and -- perhaps most importantly -- your bottom line.

1. The Law of Listening

Success with social media and content marketing requires more listening and less talking. Read your target audience’s online content and join discussions to learn what’s important to them. Only then can you create content and spark conversations that add value rather than clutter to their lives.

2. The Law of Focus

It’s better to specialize than to be a jack-of-all-trades. A highly-focused social media and content marketing strategy intended to build a strong brand has a better chance for success than a broad strategy that attempts to be all things to all people.

3. The Law of Quality

Quality trumps quantity. It’s better to have 1,000 online connections who read, share and talk about your content with their own audiences than 10,000 connections who disappear after connecting with you the first time.

4. The Law of Patience

Social media and content marketing success doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s possible to catch lightning in a bottle, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to achieve results.

5. The Law of Compounding

If you publish amazing, quality content and work to build your online audience of quality followers, they’ll share it with their own audiences on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, their own blogs and more.

This sharing and discussing of your content opens new entry points for search engines like Google to find it in keyword searches. Those entry points could grow to hundreds or thousands of more potential ways for people to find you online.

6. The Law of Influence

Spend time finding the online influencers in your market who have quality audiences and are likely to be interested in your products, services and business. Connect with those people and work to build relationships with them.

If you get on their radar as an authoritative, interesting source of useful information, they might share your content with their own followers, which could put you and your business in front of a huge new audience.

7. The Law of Value

If you spend all your time on the social Web directly promoting your products and services, people will stop listening. You must add value to the conversation. Focus less on conversions and more on creating amazing content and developing relationships with online influencers. In time, those people will become a powerful catalyst for word-of-mouth marketing for your business.

8. The Law of Acknowledgment

You wouldn’t ignore someone who reaches out to you in person so don’t ignore them online. Building relationships is one of the most important parts of social media marketing success, so always acknowledge every person who reaches out to you.

9. The Law of Accessibility

Don’t publish your content and then disappear. Be available to your audience. That means you need to consistently publish content and participate in conversations. Followers online can be fickle and they won’t hesitate to replace you if you disappear for weeks or months.

10. The Law of Reciprocity

You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, a portion of the time you spend on social media should be focused on sharing and talking about content published by others.  

Content Source - Social Media Marketing 

Content Marketing Rules: What to Ditch and What to Keep

When reaching out to your leads and the targeted audience is on the agenda, content marketing is an approach that works.

The digital landscape is rapidly changing and different ways to promote our products and services are adding new dimensions to the way marketing was done in the past. The old mainstream habits have made way for innovation. And when was the last time you referred to the number of press releases you launched for your product to evaluate the reach of your brand or measure the success of your promotional endeavors.

Content marketing is not about press releases!

But, with an increasing awareness among the brands regarding the typical and atypical content marketing ways, more and more business owners have resorted to multiple ways to use content for maximizing their reach. That could include running a blog, or boosting their social media presence, or for that matter, continuing on with their email marketing.

…and that’s how the “Rules” were born

With the frenzy over content marketing as a potent tool to maximize brand’s presence over the web, the digital marketeers of the web have curated some “unwritten content marketing rules” that are being increasingly referred  to by those who are novices.

So, what really are these rules? Do you need to follow them to their last thread? Or maybe you need to listen to your own requirements and make your own rules.

Well, it’s a bit of both.

Instead of building from the ground up, it would be easier for you to go with the tried and true ways, but at the same time, using approaches that are relevant to your brand is what will serve you in the long run.

Here are some rules to “ditch” and some to “keep”

1. A rule to ditch: The title of post *Has to be shorter*

Shorter and crisper titles not exactly a passe, but if you are under the impression that your visitors will always find the lengthy titles too unwieldy to read, you have not been keeping up with the trends. The best of websites and bloggers can be observed of making their post breaking all the rules of word limit. Their titles sometimes end up being as long as 80 characters (at times longer), and they are still doing as far as gaining traffic is concerned.

A common myth going around the web is that the Internet readers are too impatient to read a long-drawn out title and they instead pay attention to the ones that express the theme in 5-6 words. The truth however lies somewhere between “definitely” and “not quite”. If you are able to make your title interesting enough, you have got their attention.

Look at Buzzfeed for inspiration

Buzzfeed has indeed created a buzz riding on their unconventional long titles that grab a reader’s attention.

2. A rule to keep: Include search-friendly phrases or words in the title

Now, there is no dearth of words and phrases that have a dominating presence over the web. As visitors, we usually start our queries on Google with certain words that include:

• How to
• What are
• Why is
• Difference Between
• Tips to/for
• Free
• New
• Best
• Good

Now that you are already open to using long titles, injecting these keywords or phrases shouldn’t be a matter of force-fitting them.

3. Rule to ditch: Email marketing is passe, go for social media marketing

There is absolutely no doubt over the efficacy of social media as a marketing tool, but you would be widely off the mark in your analysis if you believe you don’t need email marketing.

All you need to do is to observe how many fans on your Facebook  page see your posts on their Newsfeed. I have observed it to drop as abysmally as 0.3%. on my luckiest day, it sometimes reaches in excess of 5%, but that is rare.

Twitter is now a much better alternative for organic reach.

Posts on your blog that are are directly delivered to the inbox of your readers is effective and an essential part of content marketing.

In fact why don’t you start building your email list with Facebook using a tool like Heyo’s free contest builder.

4. Rule to keep: Write longer posts

Whilst there is an anti-rule as well to the word limit which suggests that you write shorter posts to stand a better chance of capturing the attention of readers, but most experts would advise you to write longer posts. The more information your post provides (unless you are just forcing-in words), more eyeballs it manages to grab. Let’s elucidate it further by the study Moz performed a while back:

Moz ran a test on their blog to evaluate the number of backlinks they customarily get based on the length of the posts:

As far the links to those posts were concerned, here is the graph for links against number of words:

But it doesn’t end with Google and links, the social media users like to Share and Like longer posts much more than the shorter posts. Neil Patel observed that the posts written in more than 1500 words received these results:

• 68.1% more tweets
• 22.6% more Facebook likes

It has been proven that content-rich posts get more ‘Likes’ and ‘Shares’ across the social media and most importantly, Google likes them!

So, with more links and likes to the content which lasts for more than 1500 words, it can be safely deduced that you don’t have to hold back while writing a post.

5. An evergreen rule that’s beyond ditching and keeping: Make your blog conversational

Conversational writing is now an essential approach to content marketing. And what is one way to do that? By asking questions.

Refashioning that approach, you can use it for your blogs as well. Whilst you don’t have to change the approach you take while writing your blogs, you can tweak the conclusion part by adding a relevant question at the end of each post, asking readers to express their opinions in the comment box.

Increasing activity in the comment box leads to increased engagement on your website. But don’t make that question scientific or filled with jargons. Ask a question the likes of which can be answered by the general audience, and you will see a lot many hands raised.

Wrapping up

Content marketing isn’t an exercise where you need to overplot and overcook, but it sure is a practice where focusing on the relevant, and getting rid of the fluff is what matters to fuel more-than-desirable results come down the pike.

Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2014/08/11/content-marketing-rules-what-to-ditch-and-what-to-keep