Like many companies, SmartBrief utilizes search engine marketing (SEM) and social media to drive growth. On the pay-per-click (PPC) side of our marketing, we have some fairly robust equations aimed at maximizing conversions at a comfortable cost.
Once upon a time, SmartBrief’s PPC metrics existed in a vacuum. We continuously refined our bidding and selection strategies to meet our price-per-acquisition goals, and the data gathered helped us form a baseline on what we were willing to spend on a subscriber to each publication. In time, those baseline numbers became useful when negotiating partnerships, barters and affiliate deals — and have now become a target for our social efforts.
When I read “Trial and Error with AdWords and SEO” and saw the firestorm in the comments pitting SEM against social media, it struck me as irrational. Like search, social-media performs better when you employ a smart targeting strategy. If you’re using AdWords or any other PPC platform, you’ve got data at your fingertips that will make your social-media efforts smarter. (read more…)
Today’s guest post is written by Norm Elrod, a contributor to Search Engine Watch, producers of the Search Engine Strategies San Francisco Conference & Expo. Norm is also a digital media consultant who blogs about his employment experiences at Jobless and Less.
Links heavily influence your rankings for a particular search term. Anybody who practices SEO, wants to learn about SEO or has ever heard of SEO probably knows this much. A few link-related factors that contribute to a page’s search ranking include:
- Anchor text of incoming links
- Link popularity
- Diversity of links
Anchor text refers to the actual words in a link. Link popularity means the sheer number of incoming links. And link diversity represents the number of sites from which those links come.
A company’s search and social-media efforts can each improve the other. But what’s with all this SEO link talk? Funny you should ask. (read more…)
Today’s guest post was written by Norm Elrod, a contributor to Search Engine Watch, producers of the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference & Expo. Norm is also a digital media consultant who blogs about his employment experiences at Jobless and Less.
Who among us has it all figured out? The search side of your marketing is buzzing right along. Pay-per-click campaigns are bringing in qualified traffic; search-engine optimization efforts have pushed the right pages into the top three in desired search results. On the social media side, the right messages are reaching fans and followers on Facebook and Twitter, driving traffic back to your site. If this describes your company, stand up and take a bow.
But what about integration? Have you integrated search with your social media? Marketing divided into silos is inefficient and only lets you reach narrow goals. I can almost hear the reactions. (read more…)
This guest post was written by Norm Elrod, a contributor to Search Engine Watch, producers of the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference & Expo. Norm is also a digital media consultant who blogs about his employment experiences at Jobless and Less.
Search is dead. Long live social media. This seems to be the rallying cry of late. And social media does show lots of promise for marketers. But discussions like this seem to miss the point. Both search and social media are weapons in a smart marketer’s armory. And used together, they can help to better target consumers.
In Marketing Sherpa’s recent Social Media Marketing Benchmark Survey, only 32% of respondents found integrating Social Media with SEO very effective. Fifty-four percent found it somewhat effective, and 14% not effective at all. Presumably, these are people who have tried to integrate — a small fraction of those engaged in social media. (read more…)
Two weeks ago, I was all excited about Google integrating social media with e-mail. Today, Yahoo! makes a giant stride toward integrating content with social networking and I’m, at best, mildly curious.
Web portals such as Yahoo! exist to solve an information-filtering problem. In the early days of the Web, visiting a portal site such as Yahoo! saved you a lot of time, because it meant you didn’t have to visit a bunch of different sites to get all the news and other content you need. But times have changed — now we’ve got all kinds of tools to help keep us in the loop: text and e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, super-cool e-mail newsletters and a plethora of social networks. Each of these platforms does a better job of filtering information than a single, all-purpose portal, because they’re easier to tailor to the things you actually care about. Why take a step back? (read more…)
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