Here’s the process: Setup Alerts> Fill up your Reader> Outreach

One valuable way we’ve helped clients is by setting them up with Google Alerts.

By setting up Google Alerts for your business, you will be notified at any interval (weekly, daily, multi-daily, etc…) when Google finds a mention of your brand, product, industry, or any specific search query.

In this example above, let’s say that my company sells kitchen cleaning supplies. If I spent the last week putting together a comprehensive kitchen appliance infographic, I want people to discover this interesting, sharable piece of content. In Google Alerts, I can put in possible search queries that are related to my infographic, and whenever Google discovers an article about kitchen appliances, they notify me (through email or straight into my Google Reader).

Once Google lets me know they have found my search term on a new page, I can sift through the results and see if there are any link building opportunities. These perfect linking opportunities lie in reaching out to bloggers, publications, review sites, or anyone who’s talking about kitchen appliances, and then letting them know that you have the perfect piece of content that would complement their specific blog post, article, breaking story, etc.

For example, you could say to them:

Dear Mr. Blogger,

I love the piece you did on kitchen appliances in Manhattan. I remember seeing those types of new dishwashers you mentioned on my last trip out to the big city. In the last paragraph of your post, you talked about increasing the value of your kitchen by upgrading with new appliances. I have the perfect infographic that you could use for your post that would give your readers a comprehensive look at all of the types of kitchen appliances.

If you want to add this to your post or another post, here is a link to the infographic. www.kitchencleaners.com/infographic.jpg

Thanks so much for your time!

Sincerely,

Paul            

Now you might be thinking, I don’t want to sit with a fine tooth comb and sift through all of these alerts. Well, Google has made it easy where you can have these alerts delivered right into your Google Reader.

This makes organization of these alerts a breeze. You could go in once or twice a week and see if there are any potential linking opportunities, and reach out to some of these people.

Here’s the key: Help them help you. If you have a helpful and relevant piece of content for these prospects then, you help them improve their content and help yourself build a link.

Lastly, if your content is sticky enough and your timing is perfect, you even have an opportunity for your content to go viral and gain a load of brand awareness.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or comments about link building or anything SEO: PSchmidt(at)UpWordSEM(dot)com

Then Google allowed companies to create Google Plus Brand Pages. Again we explained how this would help get people to follow them, and result in them showing up in that persons personalized results more often, providing both SEO and Social Media benefits. Most companies said they couldn’t put time and resources into managing another social profile, especially as they felt more people would continue to use Facebook anyway.

So today I saw an organic result that I think really helps solidify the need for a Google Plus Brand page. Beyond the ‘authority’ and ‘personalization’ benefits listed above a Google Plus Brand Page can basically be a Free Branded SEM Ad. Look at the placement of the Google Plus info below for the search “vmware”:

Branded Search with Google Plus Profile Info in the SERP

Now look at the SERP for “vmware” when Google Plus information does not appear (Note- Google does not always show Plus profile info- the more I searched and did not click on vmare the less I saw Plus profile info):

Branded Search with Google Plus Profile Info NOT in the SERP

Which would you rather have? Even if it doesn’t show up for every branded search the potential for it showing up makes setting up a Google Plus Brand page a no-brainer.

 What does this mean for your SEO strategy:

• If you have churned out a thousand 250 word pages over the last year or two all with the same template, same exact keywords in your Title, Description, H1 etc. Google can tell you read the How to do SEO 101 document but didn’t really think creatively about your content.
• You won’t get ‘penalized’ so much for low quality content but rather ‘not promoted’. You pretty much have to know what you are doing is wrong and still do it to get banned- but its easy to do a lot, with just enough knowledge to be dangerous, only to get passed by Google as if you put in no effort.
• This really is an extension of the Google “Panda” algorithm update of Feb. 2011 that weeded out many sites deemed “content farms” that were flooding the web with low quality content solely to target as many keywords as possible.
• Google states it wants to make sure it promotes “quality content” even if SEO tactics have not been used, rather than low or adequate content that has used SEO tactics.

What can be done:

• Evaluate the quality of your content by analyzing existing Panda elements- text beneath the fold, amount of advertising on a page, word count, user engagement (bounce rate, time on site, etc.)
• Audit your current pages for those currently receiving the most organic search entry referrals and good engagement- find similarities to work in to new pages
• Create a content expansion plan that produces “quality” content, not just pages that exist solely to target individual keywords
• Evaluate your pages as if you were a user- add images, videos, related links, tools etc. on your content pages, don’t just write paragraphs of text.
• Continue to execute long-term “ethical” SEO services as always

Google just announced that in the coming weeks they will begin to roll out SSL encryption across the globe. The security feature encrypts the search queries of users when they are logged into a Google account.

While it is intended to create more privacy for someone surfing the web, marketers have lashed out against the new feature since its introduction in the U.S. this past October. Most notably, marketers using analytics on their website are no longer able to see which keywords referred logged-in visitors to their website. Instead, they see “not provided” listed where they keyword would typically be found.

Until now, this has only affected searches coming from Google.com. But with Google implementing this feature globally, organizations that have an international presence online will begin to see an increase in “not provided” keyword visits.

Wrong.

Conducting research to find popular keywords is an important step in the process of driving more qualified traffic to your website, but it is not the ultimate consideration for search marketing. Finding the most popular keywords points to something more important–user behavior and intent.

Behind every query there is a person. A real, living, breathing human being who has thoughts, fears, hopes and dreams. Every keyword used in these queries represents a user’s intentions. Running a keyword research report can accurately measure the actions taken by users, but it can’t always identify the reasons why they chose to use those keywords.

Why It Pays To Understand Search Intent

More Relevant Visitors: You wouldn’t invite a vegetarian over your house to eat a meat lover’s pizza. But when you haphazardly choose keywords based search volume alone, you run the risk of inviting the wrong people to your website. Understanding why your customers search for certain keywords is just as important as understanding what they search for. Figure this out early in the keyword research process and you will attract the right visitors.

Better Content Creation: Understanding the intent of users makes for more robust content creation. When you understand the motivation behind a search, your blog posts are no longer written for search engines, they are written for people. You write in order to solve their problems, make them think, make them laugh, etc.

More Effective Linkbuilding: Understanding why people are searching in the first place  helps you create content that they naturally want to share with others.

Higher Conversion Rates: Writing good copy is always about selling benefits instead of features. Knowing your users’ search intent allows you to craft higher converting landing pages.

Anticipation of The Long Tail: Over 70% of the queries that will bring in traffic to your website are not going to show up with any significant search volume in a keyword research report. (See a great illustration  here at SEOMoz) This phenomenon is commonly known as the “long tail”. Webmasters and search experts will find long tail keywords in their analytics reports after people visit their site. But using social media allows you to anticipate what types of long tail combinations might be valuable for your business.

How To Uncover Search Intent with Social Media (aka Mind Reading 101)

1) Identify online communities that are relevant to your niche

Virtually every niche is represented by an online community. By a community, I’m simply referring to a network of people who are communicating online, usually around specific pieces content. Blogs, forums, and platforms like Facebook and Twitter are a few examples of places where communities interact.

It’s important for you to identify where the conversations are happening that pertain to your niche. But searching within each major social network individually would take a very long time and it’s likely that you’ll get distracted from your initial goal! Use one or more of the following tools to search across every major social network simultaneously for topics related to your niche:

Socialmention.com
Spy.appspot.com
whostalkin.com
samepoint.com

Once you have identified where the conversations are taking place, be sure to remember where they are. Take full advantage of tools like an RSS feed to stay engaged with blogs and relevant news feeds.

Think of these online communities as focus groups. You get a (free) chance to listen in on what matters most to your audience.

2) Identify the influencers within those communities

Every community has “go to” guys or gals that are upheld as an authority on certain topics. Frankly, this should be you, but we will address that in another post. Right now, you are concerned with uncovering the search intent of your potential customers. To do it effectively, you need to know who they are following online and why. We all are playing a long game of “follow the leader”. If you want to learn more about an audience, see what their leader is writing/recommending/ranting about.

Influencers will not only have large followings, they will have a lot of users engaging with their content.

Here are some of the characteristics of an influencer:

• They are quoted and linked to regularly across the blogosphere
• They are frequently re-tweeted on Twitter, or their status updates are “liked” hundreds or thousands of times on Facebook
• They command thousands of subscribers on their RSS feed
• They are found guest blogging on other major industry sites

Hootsuite.com has a helpful tool that will actually quantify a certain person’s influence across different social media platforms–they call it a Klout score. Of course, you don’t want to get too bogged down in the details. Use common sense, and don’t ignore some of the obvious signs of an influencer.

Most importantly for your efforts right now–why are these people popular in the community? What is it that draws people to their blog? Expertise is an obvious answer. But ask some of these questions to drill deeper:

• What types of problems are they solving for the community?
• What types of opinion pieces get people fired up?

3) Identify the most popular content within your community

Finding the most popular content is not just about taking a look at the first page Google rankings. Web 2.0 is a very dynamic environment where people are sharing content across different media. Google does a great job of ranking popular pages (it is there job afterall) but that doesn’t mean they will get it right everytime. It’s up to you to find popular posts, articles, videos and more.

Here are a few questions to guide your investigation:

• How much is that content shared across social networks?
• Does it inspire other blog posts/articles that offer rebuttals?
• Does it have any commercial value?

Some tools for your search:

• Google+ Popular Posts (socialstatistics.com). Find out what is most popular across Google+ using a variety of search paramenters. Also view demographic information on those sharing the content..
• Alltop.com Find the hottest topics from virtually any category
• Reddit.com, Digg.com or Stumbleupon.com. These are each “social bookmarking” sites where people share and categorize their favorite content online.
• Itstrending.com measures the amount of times a piece of content is shared across Facebook.

4) Study the conversation

Now that you have found a relevant online community, identified influencers and their most popular content, you are ready for the real heavy lifting. The absolute best way to uncover search intent is to be a student of the conversations in your niche. A conversation can be anything from a string of blog comments to an exchange on Twitter.

Some questions to ask as you study:

• What are the buzz words used by potential clients?
• Are there common abbreviations or other nuances to the language used when describing a product or service?

Flikr: "Clairity"

Take a close look at the comment strings in a blog post. What are the types of responses that trigger the most interaction? What boils people’s blood? What inspires them? What moves them to tears of joy (or frustration). Become a student of these responses and you will begin to understand what drives your audience to participate online.

One quick way to detect a hot conversation is to dig through the re-tweets of an influencer in your community. Check out retweetrank.com to quickly find the tweets that have sparked the most interest.

5) Study the users in each community

Remember, every search online has a real person behind it. So far, you have learned about tools that will help you identify where people are interacting online and what drives them to participate. All of this research will help you uncover what makes your audience tick. Once you find potential customers who are active in a niche-relevant community, track them.

• Follow a sample of users (you decide the size) for a period of 30 days.
• Identify trends about what they share, or respond to online.
• Make private Twitter lists that help you quickly read over a user’s activity.
• Group people into Google+ Circles.

Discover how your audience chooses to identify themselves. What are the words they use to describe themselves in a profile bio (e.g. “tech-geek”, “social media nerd”, “entrepreneurial mom blogger”).

Be A Mind Reader, But Use Real Data

The beauty of search marketing is that you rarely have to guess. There are plenty of ways to gather meaningful analytics. Don’t risk assuming that a high volume search term has commercial value to your business. If you do the hard work up front of learning why and how your potential customers interact online, you will be rewarded with a more focused keyword strategy.

• Open source ensures platform can be customized and is always being improved and compatible with changes in SEO best practices
• Can configure to have SEO friendly URLs
• Can be configured to allow custom and rules based tagging
• Facilitates content creation
• Facilitates blog creation and updates
• Can give different people different access levels- administrator, editor, author, etc.
• Can set rules so new content is ‘pending’ until approved by an administrator, but author can enter info right in to the cms saving a step
• Can set days/times for content to be published which is good for managing freshness
• Can easily integrate social media sharing buttons
• Can easily integrate 3rd party widgets which can help user experience among other benefits
• Tools are available to help migrate sites in and out of wordpress and other CMS systems so you don’t need to change your design/branding
• Free SEO Plugins exist to help provide additional SEO options and customizations
• Can implement Google Analytics, webmaster verifications, and other custom tracking and tags
• Provides wyswyg and html editing options
• Can save images and videos in a media library so they are one click away from adding to new content/posts
• Design can be custom designed, do not need to use free or paid themes, although they can sometimes help provide a foundation for customization
• Many designers/developers are skilled at working with wordpress

We are able to give them loads of advice to make sure their local profile page is optimized, completely filled out, AND the information is consistent with all of their other digital touchpoints (ie. Internet directories, social profiles, website contact us page, etc…)

Then comes one of the toughest parts of improving a local profile…getting reviews.

Google is continually adapting its search algorithm to make social influence a bigger factor in rankings. Google’s Search, plus Your World is another evident sign of this.

Though gaining positive reviews through sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Urbanspoon are also important for building your company’s reputation, you need to think about sending some of your positive reviewers to your Google Places Page to gain better local search rankings.

Here are 5 steps to get more reviews for your Google Places Page:

1. Shorten and track your local profile URL: Run your Google Places URL through a URL shortener like bit.ly, goo.gl, or ow.ly.

• Now you have a shortened URL that is easy to track. You can even run this same URL several times through the shortener if you want to track this URL across different outlets (twitter, facebook, blog post, press release, etc) and see which outlet is gaining the most traction.

2. Reviews through Social Media: Place your shortened Google Places URL on your company’s Facebook profile, Google+ page, Twitter Profile and blog, and encourage positive customers to review your service.
3. Reviews after Service Completion: Place your shortened Google Places URL on the invoice or Thank You letter after completion of service, and ask satisfied customers for a review.
4. Reviews from Customer History: If you have access to your previous customer’s history, contact the customers and see if they would be willing to give you a review.
5. Reviews from other review sites: Look at other review sites like Yelp. Often times if you login, you’ll be able to see information from reviewers of your business. Privately reach out to people that have already given you a positive review, and ask if they would be willing to write one up on your Google Places page.

Some industries are harder and more competitive than others to move up in rankings, however, by increasing your amount of positive reviews to your Google Places page, you will have a much higher chance of gaining a substantial amount of local search traffic.

What are some easy ways you’ve used to increase local traffic to your Google Places Profile?

So at this point you’ve got yourself set up on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, etc and you’re following the rules of trying to grow your audience and post useful, engaging content.  Now… how do you show your boss or your clients that your social media efforts are working?  Here is a list of social media KPI’s that we suggest you focus on as you begin your voyage into the social media world.  (Keep in mind there are many paid social monitoring tools that make tracking these metrics easier for you, which is a blog post for a different date… but at the very least, these are the metrics you should be concerned with).

1.       Network/Audience Size & Growth Over Time

While having the largest social profile does not necessarily have a direct impact on performance, you still need an audience to see your content and start sharing it, which does have an impact.  Focus on growing your audience with relevant followers who have an interest in the type of content you post.

2.       Engagement with Content & Growth Over Time

You’ve probably heard this term thrown around a lot.  And “engagement” on a social site will mean something different for every social platform.  At a high level, engagement should monitor the number of social interactions your content receives.  Here are some examples:

Facebook – monitor the # of Comments, Likes, Shares of a wall post
Twitter – monitor the # of Retweets, Mentions, Replies of a tweet
Google+ – monitor the # of Comments, +1’s of a wall post

3.       Traffic to Website & Growth Over Time

Now that we have wall posts that have been shared, liked, retweeted etc, how do we measure that for value to the client?  A good start is with traffic back to your website.  This is one way to show whether your time spent on social media has been valuable.  Track visits at the very least.  If you have more time try taking it one step further and take a look at page views, time on site, bounce rate and conversions from social platforms.

At a high level, here is an example of these 3 KPI’s (using Facebook as an example) in an easy to digest dashboard view that could easily be sent to a client:

So what was the result of this action?

1. The agency issued an apology and stated it conducted the practice without Google’s approval.
2. Google actually penalized itself for unethical SEO practices. Kudos to Google, they do not appear on the first page of results for “web browser”. As Matt Cutts explains:

“In response, the webspam team has taken manual action to demote www.google.com/chrome for at least 60 days. After that, someone on the Chrome side can submit a reconsideration request documenting their clean-up just like any other company would. During the 60 days, the PageRank of www.google.com/chrome will also be lowered to reflect the fact that we also won’t trust outgoing links from that page.”  http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-penalizes-chrome/38469/

It is good to see that Google has penalized itself as it would other web sites. Even if for any other reason their action helps keep SEO spam relevant and a consideration for those agencies that participate in unethical tactics, helping to hopefully level the playing field for the rest of us that abide by Google’s quality guidelines.

This also shows how important it is for SEO agencies, and marketing companies in general, to truly understand their client’s business. In this case the agency proved that:

1. they did not understand SEO, and even if they were not paying bloggers for SEO benefit, they showed their overall lack of understanding of the intertwining cause and effect relationships of all online marketing efforts
2. they did not understand their own client’s business.

Here’s hoping that larger agencies don’t harm the reputation of SEO for ethical agencies, and that all SEO spam, not just that of large companies, results in ranking penalization in 2012.

Local businesses often ask us, “What are some easy ways I can use both SEO and social media to compete with my local competition?”  One of the ways we have guided them is through creating a local content strategy that gives them a better shot at appearing within local search and social media results

One major step in any content strategy is to create a plan or calendar of content that can be released and delivered to the right channels at the right times.

4 Steps to Creating a Calendar of Local Content:

1.  Find a local calendar of events for your city.

Most of these top listings will give you a good idea of what is happening in and around your city.

2. Look through your city calendar for the next 6-12 months and pull out one or two events for each month in your city that you know people will be seeking out logistical or related event information.

You might be wondering, “How will these big events in my city help draw in traffic/leads to my business?” Try to think about your business beyond just a local craft shop, restaurant, or auto parts store. Think about yourself as a publisher and about your business as a reputable source of local information.

Customers trust local brands that appear to be more involved with their community. Even if your business is only tangentially related to what the event is about, you still have the opportunity to be a rich source of local information, which can also help improve trust and your reputation in your community.

3. Think about what types of information people will be searching before they come to some of these events. For example, in Boston, St. Paddy’s day brings in a flood of traffic from the New England region. What are some types of information people might be seeking before they come for the celebrations and parades?

Perhaps they might want to know:

• Where is the best place to park for the parade in South Boston?
• What time should I get there to make sure I don’t miss the parade?
• How long does the parade run?
• What is the best place to stand during the parade?
• What hotels are closest to the parade?
• What are some other events in the city in the afternoon or the evening?

These are just some ideas you could use, and I’m sure you could think of several more pieces of information that could be valuable to readers.

You can then take this information and create a blog post and/or guide titled:

Boston St Patrick’s Day Guide 2012 – What to do in Boston

By using a keyword rich title and content, and then filling the post with lots of useful local information like the list above, you’ll have an amazing chance to appear on page one of search for several related long-tail queries.

Here are some estimated search volumes from Google for these types of Boston St. Patrick’s Day Queries:

From here you can see there is a significant amount of people looking for information for this big day in Boston.

4. Create content for each of these events that you can regularly publish and push out through social media.

You can create all types of content for these local events including: blog posts, pdf guides, guides that are tailored for people to read on their mobile devices, top 5 lists, and many other types of content that are easy to read, digest, and share.

You can then take these content creation ideas, and develop them for the other big events in your city to become a source of local information for your community. Again, think of yourself as a helpful local publisher and you will start to receive more traffic, visibility, and leads for your company through your local content.

So to recap these 4 steps to creating your calendar of local content:

1. Find a local event calendar
2. Pull out the major local events for the next 6-12 months.
3. Brainstorm and create lists of logistical and related information that people will be interested in knowing for each event.
4. Create different types of content including: guides, blog posts, lists of tips, or other content that will be a timely, trusted, and helpful source of information for searchers. Lastly, make sure this content is easy to read, understand, and share.

What are some types of content that you’ve used to gain more local traffic?