Attention Small Business Owners: SEO Demands Your Involvement

SEO has changed dramatically in the last few years. With massive algorithmic changes from Google launching each season, it can be tough for small business owners to keep up.

Some small business owners are getting SEO fatigue, opting for marketing that is simpler to understand and less risky. Others refuse to believe the rules have really changed and use outdated SEO tactics on the cheap. This, unfortunately, can lead to catastrophic outcomes asGoogle continues to hammer link networks.

Does SEO By Itself Still Work?

While demand for SEO services remains healthy, those who integrate their marketing strategies are finding the best results. Thirty-eight percent of companies who say their SEO is "highly effective" have pulled SEO and social media together. But this isn't an easy task. And it's a far cry from the straightforward link building activities of years' past.

The integrated SEO strategy of 2014 requires a renewed emphasis on brand and audience. This does not mean that rankings are no longer important. However, it does imply that priorities need to shift to remain competitive in the current SEO landscape.

Inserting the Small Business Brand into SEO

It used to be possible to do SEO in isolation and never mention or inspect the brand. First with on-site tactics, then blog comments, and finally with widgets, infographics, and article marketing. While the purists will insist this wasn't true, many small businesses forced their way onto Page 1 of search engines with non-branded link building tactics. Most agree that this is no longer effective.

Today's top ranking sites have focused on audience optimization, the idea that the attraction of citations, social shares, and backlinks stems from an intimate understanding of what the audience is looking for. Content marketing is the activity that feeds an eager audience high-quality materials, which is why 93 percent of marketers plan to use content marketing in 2014.

A funny thing happens when small businesses produce high-quality content: They want to put their name on it. Once again, Google is ahead of the masses, understanding that branded mentions (even those that don't accompany a backlink) are a signal of legitimacy. This is perhaps why so many SEO professionals insist that press releases help rankings, despite some data to the contrary.

Be Responsive to the SEO Provider

Despite the need for greater brand and social integration, 50 percent of small business still prefer to outsource SEO. However, the nature and frequency of interactions with the vendor will be vastly different in 2014 than in previous years.

To successfully build stronger content marketing, SEO professionals will need more knowledge of the business and their audience, which requires client contact.

As the SEO firm pushes press release activities, the small business needs to provide newsworthy ideas and approve final copy in a timely fashion to maintain a consistent editorial calendar. Business owners need to accept that branded mentions without backlinks are a good thing. This may sound crazy, but some small business owners don't return phone calls from their SEO firm.

Conclusions

As much as small business owners may miss the simplistic link building days, all data indicates that SEO is now a much more complicated activity. While still strongly profitable, SEO in 2014 is integrated with social and PR in ways never before seen.

This has had a strong impact on the demands the SEO firm must place on the small business owner. And to remain successful in the rankings, small businesses must find the time to participate in the process (or at least return phone calls).

Source:http://goo.gl/eUbDN4

Optimize Your PPC With a Segmented Performance Analysis

When working in PPC accounts for months on end, it's very easy to get sucked into all the little details and get stuck in the weeds.

It feels natural to look at smaller optimizations – one ad group needing an ad test or adding a few keywords across multiple different campaigns – but you may end up putting in a lot of effort without necessarily achieving a proportionate result. In other words, you might not be getting the biggest bang for your buck, time, or effort.

It's vital to ensure you also get a high-level view of how your account is doing. Monitoring this so-called 50-foot view of your account on a regular basis can help you strategize your optimizations most effectively.

How to Create an Impactful Segmented Performance Analysis

Now just looking at the account as a whole isn't diagnostic-friendly. You'll want to drill down one level deeper and look at the high-level categories to gauge their performance.

You can review your account to identify the segments that make the most sense to you, but some great ones to get started with would be:

• Branded – Generic (e.g., Dior makeup)
• Branded – Product Specific (e.g., Dior Addict Extreme lipstick 756)
• Non-branded – Generic (e.g., party makeup ideas)
• Non-branded – Product specific (e.g., long-lasting red lipstick)
• Competitive – Generic (e.g., Clinique make-up)
• Competitive – Product specific (e.g., Clinique long-lasting lipstick)

You can further segment these categories based on network (i.e., performance on the search network vs. performance on the display network). Once you have your categories, plot them into a grid format.

Start with your descriptive columns. List the different categories and add in the names of all the campaigns from your account that fall under that category.

Next, list some sample keywords that would be typical of those campaigns (and that category), as well as an example of an ad from those campaigns that would be typical of that category. See the example below:

Now that you have this base set up, you can compare a variety of different KPIs to identify and prioritize the optimizations you can perform.

Top Analyses to Conduct

Opportunity Analysis

Which campaigns should you spend your time on? If you follow the Pareto principle, you'd want to spend your time on the top 20 percent of your account which generated 80 percent of your profits. This segmented performance analysis can help you identify your big-money categories where you should carry out your optimizations.

Add on a performance and growth potential section next to your descriptive section to track performance and opportunity size. Add in columns that reflect the average number of monthly impressions, clicks, and orders, as well as the average cost per acquisition (CPA) and profit per month. This data so far will allow you to gauge which segments are most profitable for you.

However, that's not the complete picture. You also want to see how much more universe there is to capture and which segment you could grow the most in, so you will need to assess share of voice data.

Add in the current impression share data, along with columns for impression share lost due to rank and budget. This way, you can find the profitable segments that you still have opportunity to grow within.

As in the example above, populated by dummy data of course, the most profitable category is the Branded-Product Specific one. However, we've also captured almost all the available impression share so there isn't much room to grow impression volume there.

While you could still focus your efforts on improving click-through rates (CTR) and conversion rates (CR) to boost performance, it likely won't fall into your top five opportunities for growth. Still, it's good to have identified which KPIs would be best influenced in each category.

In the above example, the campaign that has the largest room for growth is the Non-Branded – Generic one, with only 15% of impression share being captured. Additionally, CTR and CR optimizations are very much in need here. Focusing efforts within this category of campaigns will pay off the most for you.

Thus, with this analysis you can most easily prioritize your efforts in terms of biggest return on investment.

Creative Ideation and Funnel Optimization Analysis

By evaluating and understanding audience intent for each category, you can work to ensure you are conveying the right messages in your creative to help you close the sale. It's important to grab the right kind of attention at the right time in order to get the searcher to take the desired action.

Use the searcher goals data for each category to fill out the "Relevant Messaging in Ads and Landing Page" and "Key Points to Cover" columns. This data will provide a robust foundation for creating test ad copy as well as test landing pages. You'll be able to identify just how to attract attention and persuade searchers along the sales funnel once you are more familiar with their intent.

You can then look at ways to optimize your sales funnel. Upper funnel category visitors may need more information and convincing before you show them an order form, while a lower funnel category may allow you to ask for the sale right away.

Furthermore, you can use the segmented performance analysis for a variety of additional things such as keyword expansion ideas, competitor intelligence by category and a historical month-over-month or year-over-year analysis to see how performance has changed within each segment over time.

Review this report at least monthly to keep your efforts on course and ensure the strategies you are working on will yield the highest returns.

Have ideas for ways this can help you? Please do share your thoughts in the comments below.

Source:http://goo.gl/b6VcKL