The evolution of organic SEO is a case study in self-regulating integrity. It has taken approximately 20 years for Google to figure out what sites are authentic and authoritative, which ones are mediocre or minimally acceptable and which are just “spam.” And believe, me, they know!

Bogus gets the boot!

Guess what Google focuses on when determining your website’s ranking? Your actual industry knowledge, the depth and veracity of your site’s content, the visitors’ user experiences, visitor interactions, shared links and referrals. Should you ever speak with someone who professes to be an “SEO expert,” and they begin confusing you with a lot of technical jargon, walk away. If instead, they discuss robust content development and ways to improve user experience, then it would be worth having a conversation with them.

In 2017, the bottom line for organic search is this: If you want good organic SEO results, you need to work hard to make sure your web content is valuable, dynamic and comprehensive for visitors. That takes creative brainpower and has nothing to do with technology.

In recent years a lot of companies wasted a lot of money on SEO services that may have shown early results but then worked against them because of “black hat” tactics such as keyword stuffing. Too much effort was expended trying to court Google (or fake them out) based on keyword and metadata veneer with little or no substance behind it. Now, you better make sure there’s valuable substance to your content and that it’s as deep as you can make it.

You know where to spend your time. Where should you spend your money?

Are you considering a search engine marketing campaign and budget? Good! Because today we have more definitive ways to drive search engine results. Any reputable web designer should build your website properly so that it’s “search engine friendly.” In 2017 this should be a given! The point is, don’t worry about the technical side of SEO or put any real money into it.

If you’re going to spend money on organic search, start with a writer who understands your industry or else pay yourself to do it (spend your own company’s manhours). The best place to put your money is exactly where Google wants you to spend it – in a Google Adwords campaign. Paid search marketing will deliver immediate results and give you extremely valuable data to keep improving the results, not only of your paid campaigns but also your organic website content, further boosting your organic SEO efforts. See the synergy?

The Old One-Two Punch

So, now you have a clear route to search engine optimization and marketing success in 2017. Spend time on content and (gulp) money on advertising! You need to be proactive on both fronts: quality web content and targeted pay-per-click advertising with a set budget that you control. You only pay for actual results – real world search clicks to your website. When those legitimate searchers land on your website, the content better darn well deliver what they want! Then you’ll be firing on all cylinders.

The post SEO 2017: Where to spend time and where to spend money appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Manifold is defined as numerous and varied; of many kinds…

Consistency in messaging across multiple media outlets is a well established best practice in marketing communications. You hear about it all the time. Simple enough, right? So if companies would just do it – website, social media, blog, content, events, outdoor, print, mobile, television, radio, collateral, etc., they’ll do just fine.

Okay, knowing this, do we drain our coffers now or borrow to finance marketing communications up to our debt limit? Neither is an acceptable option so the question becomes: How can a business choose which marketing channels to use and how many should be consistently deployed to produce growth and profitable sales results – all for an affordable and sustainable budget?

Take a look at your current growth pattern and profit margins.

Like most executives, you know you can do better!

Are you like some company leaders who know they MUST do better?

Having finite resources, how do you determine how many different channels you can afford, and which ones will give you the most profitable returns? In the digital world, you can do more, maybe much more!

When I hear about how some of my clients have, in the recent past, spent all of their marketing budgets on newspaper advertising with increasingly disappointing results, I “feel their pain.” I lost my shirt trying that not too long ago. The publication even had great circulation in the heart of my target market.

Image by Moma, Sao Paulo, Brazil

In previous decades, advertising in “mass media” like regional newspapers and local radio & TV was certainly expensive but very effective at getting the phone to ring and feet through the door. Now the ROI from using a traditional one or two-channel approach is proving to be negative for most businesses and some of the newspaper holdovers are finally realizing that highly effective and affordable digital marketing tactics are passing them by. These tactics always include multiple distribution channels by virtue of how people use the Internet, which is extremely multi-faceted.

Your website, social pages, email marketing, blog, online maps, directories, local reviews and other online content can be every bit as good or better than those of giants like Wells Fargo,  IBM, Coke, Apple, Marcum, Microsoft, La-Z-Boy, Harvard… you name your big brand! You can compete head-to-head with them in terms of design, content quality, target market distribution, and local search engine marketing/optimization.

How do you plan a Manifold Marketing Strategy to increase growth and profitability?

• Take a look at what has worked and what hasn’t in the last 12 – 18 months. Did success or failure result from your message reaching enough of your target audience or not?

• Evaluate your message content:  Do your promotional concepts align with the priorities of your target market? Are your messages clear and succinct?

• Does anyone care about your creative ideas or do they only care about what your products and services can do for them to make life and business better?

• Study your industry for successful marketing case studies. What are similar businesses doing online that’s working for them? Study their websites, blog and newsletters. Did they transition from traditional “mass media” to a more digitally-centric strategy? Did they hire new consultants or work differently with established vendors? What services did they add and what did they drop?

Once you’ve evaluated your current position and answered the questions posed, you’re ready to start leveraging your money instead of simply allocating it!

Everyone gets their business and consumer information online now. That doesn’t mean they never read print or watch TV but it does mean that you can reach them on the Web just as readily and for much less cost.

I was fortunate to build a strong brand in content marketing services with zero capital. I launched a startup business in a super-competitive market facing a legion of well-financed competitors. Struggling to scrape together about three hundred dollars in total, here’s what I accomplished in the first year: An awesome logo design, a nice website, an active blog, business cards, a highly effective email marketing program and a stellar reputation in social media. It’s fair to mention that I also had a network of professional friends that I developed through years of networking. I’m not unique in this sense. Everyone has some kind of a foundation on which they can stand and work.

If one broke man can build an established, steadily growing 5-year-old business by spending his last few dollars on marketing, think about how an already established firm like yours can do so much better! By implementing a manifold marketing strategy optimized to reach customers and resonate with their priorities, you can begin taking big bites out of your competitors’ market share and your brand can be the dominant one in your local market.

The post Manifold Marketing for Steady Growth appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Famous 20^th Century industrialist John Wanamaker made legendary his quote, “I know that at least half of my advertising dollars are wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Image by Moma, Sao Paulo, Brazil

This was true of most advertising all the way up until digital technology and the Internet started to dominate how we broadcast marketing messages. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still a relatively new way to advertise although it’s been around since Google and other search engines have commercially operated (no pun intended).

Buying space in print and time on broadcast networks is largely a “spray and pray” method whereby you can begin to narrow down channels that your target audience may be more likely to see/hear your ad. But if you’re like most businesses, only a small fraction of the audience you pay for will have any interest in your offer. Even if your message is in front of an interested prospect, you rely on his or her whims at that moment. An unknown distraction can divert the attention of someone intending to respond to your ad and, poof! The prospect forgets all about you.

Now there’s a way to assure that every dollar you spend buying advertising will be the direct result of physically engaging a person with your message online based on keywords, phrases and questions they are typing into search fields. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) has given you control over the type of online shoppers you would attract and exactly how much you will spend to reach and engage each single prospect or customer. Analytics programs such as Google Analytics will track and measure the direct results (clicks and website interaction) of your advertising campaign in real time. John Wanamaker would be impressed! He might say, “Now I know exactly what my advertising dollars are doing. I just wish online shoppers weren’t so fickle!”

Google is the dominant search marketing giant and wants its customers to get results. To that end they’ve put together a nice best practices guide which this article will encapsulate.

We’re curating the basics of SEM success directly from Google:

1. Keywords – Effective keyword management helps you reach the right customers and grow your business. Your keywords should reflect all of the different types of user queries that could help someone find you when they’re looking for something you offer. Keyword research and analysis is a fundamental step you must take initially to make sure you reach your target audience searching online for your products & services.

• Negative Keywords – Words or phrases that allow you to filter out who your ads will be served to in the search results page. Upon deciding that a term is irrelevant to your campaign, you can add that term as a negative keyword. Whenever someone searches on Google with that term included, depending on match types, Google will refrain from showing your ad and you won’t waste money paying for an irrelevant click. To help you determine negative keywords for your campaign, here’s a free negative keyword tool.

2. Your Ads – One of the most important things to get right in your search ad is “the Creative” – the key message you put into it. Creative relevance drives more qualified clicks. Make your ad relevant and resonant to pull qualified click through engagement.

3. Your Advertising Budget – Google AdWords lets you set daily budgets for your campaigns with the flexibility to change them at any time. A key benefit of developing and fine tuning an SEM campaign is your ability to measure, adjust and actually begin to control your response rates within a spending limit. This helps you manage your growth and marketing administration costs.

4. Reporting & Analytics – AdWords and Google Analytics together offer insights into the performance of your campaigns and those insights help you become a better marketer. By carefully measuring, analyzing and making adjustments to your keywords and messaging, you will continually improve the ROI performance of your SEM campaign.

There is more science to the practice of Search Engine Marketing than this overview reveals. Within each of the four major components of SEM listed above, there are entire sets of best practices with various tactical options that will help you customize your campaign to generate the best results. For more in depth education, go to PPC University.

If you would like a free evaluation and consultation regarding an SEM program for your business, feel free to contact us at 603-345-7223.

The post Who’s in command of your advertising? appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.

Seth Godin is one of the most brilliant and prolific business thinkers of our time. He understands human motivation and behavior. That’s why I go to him for ideas. You might say I’m in his “tribe.” I choose to follow him because his ideas are valuable to me. And I’m a customer, having purchased one of his books and patronized his advertisers. I’m sure that Seth would be glad to know that I’m a follower and consumer.

On the other hand, let’s take the CEO of say, Proctor & Gamble. Right now I have no idea who that is, although I can find out in a snap. He or she might care about me as a consumer though, and really want my business for multiple products. Should I be loyal to their brands, I would spend hundreds of thousands, potentially a million on P&G products throughout the course of my lifetime. Multiply me and the numbers are staggering. I know I’ve used their products but I’m indifferent to them and most of their competitors’ as well. I’m bombarded with messages from them delivered through mass media every day and it hasn’t made a bit of difference in how I feel about their brands.

Now, I’m sure Mr. Alan G. Lafley (I just went to Google because I wanted his name.) would be concerned to know that most consumers feel as I do about P&G brands – indifferent to them vs the competition (product parity and no attractive differentiation). P&G broadcasts its messages at me and Seth Godin simply gives away his specialized “product” on the Internet, and somehow I find it because I seek it. He knows what I’m looking for because he specializes in understanding my professional needs. When I need something of his that he isn’t offering free, I go to Amazon and buy his book to be edified. In essence, I’m a micro market to Mr. Godin.

Whatever approach you use to push your message (create and buy advertising) in mass media to reach a mass audience, use the opposite approach on the Internet. Seth Godin gets the fundamental difference between Internet marketing and everything else (mass media; TV, radio and print advertising). Let me sum it up succinctly:

Web = “I seek and want your offering.” All other = “What do you want out of me?”

Seth himself points out, “When someone wants to know how big you can make your audience, your market share, your volume, it might be worth pointing out that it’s better to be important, to be in sync, to be the one that’s hard to be replaced. And the only way to be important is to be relevant, focused and specific.”

Mass media relevance is fading because the messages are mostly phony and manipulative. Seth goes on, “Mass marketers don’t like this and they often don’t even see it. They’re struggling to turn Snapchat and Twitter and other sites into substitutes for TV, but it’s not working, because it’s an astonishing waste of attention [for the consumer].”

Broadcast media exists mostly to enable mass marketers to do their job. Broadcast technology (TV) was essentially invented for that purpose, but the Internet was not invented to enable big brands to reach their audiences. It was first developed for the purpose of sharing information quickly among scientists – highly specialized knowledge.

On the Internet, whether it’s your website & SEO strategy, blog or social media channels, you need to think micro. Appeal genuinely to individuals who would benefit from the use your product or service and develop relationships with each one that connects with you. Since you read this far, we probably have a relationship and I want to thank you wholeheartedly for it! <3

The post The Internet and everything else. Don’t be confused. appeared first on Chuck Sink Link.