All posts tagged Online Marketing
How Private Is Your Data? Pt. II
By now you’ve probably heard the news that, as of March 1st, Google will consolidate its 70+ privacy policies into one, marking a sea change in Google’s attitude toward privacy and tracking. Much of the buzz has been negative, and Google has been putting out fires for the past week, but the switch does not necessarily mean that the search giant is dropping the “Don’t” from their famous motto, “Don’t Be Evil”. First, the Google blog spin:
“Finally, what we’re not changing. We remain committed to data liberation, so if you want to take your information elsewhere you can. We don’t sell your personal information, nor do we share it externally without your permission except in very limited circumstances like a valid court order. We try hard to be transparent about the information we collect, and to give you meaningful choices about how it is used—for example our Ads Preferences Manager enables you to edit the interest categories we advertise against or turn off certain Google ads altogether. And we continue to design privacy controls, like Google+’s circles, into our products from the ground up.”
While this may be reassuring to some, the bolded section (our emphasis) leaves a much open to interpretation. Will they begin selling this to advertisers if they continue to be threatened by Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft? What happens when the next innovative search engine or social network gains traction and gets big? This remains to be seen.
From an advertising standpoint, though, this integration is aimed at providing users more targeted, relevant ads by combining the vast stores of user data from Gmail, search, YouTube, et al. This has obvious benefits for the user, but is also a boon to advertisers:
- Higher Quality Scores start with better relevancy, eventually leading to lower paid search costs. Google’s update could lead to hyper-targeted paid search and display ads.
- As Google learns more about each user, including demographic and behavioral data, the organic SERP could become hyper-personalized to that user. This complicates the SEO process and leads to our third point:
- Success in Google Search will be largely dependent upon the level of interaction you can generate across all Google properties. The future of SEO may become as connected to content marketing strategies as it is to current optimization best practices.
The recent IPO filing by Facebook, combined with these radical changes by Google indicate a new stage in the ongoing struggle for user data and advertising dollars between the two giants. Since the early aughts, Google has had virtually no competition in search and online advertising, but that has now changed, and they no longer have the luxury of eschewing common business practices that are seen in more competitive vertical markets. To maintain dominance, Google now has to make some tough decisions, this only being the latest.
Mobile Apps Transforming Online Interaction
Is it too soon to claim that ?The Web Is Dead?? Wired magazine trumpeted that headline a few months back, and new data published by Flurry would seem to lend some credence to that. Perhaps it is a bit sensationalistic to say that the web is dead, but for the first reported time, time spent per day on mobile apps has exceeded time spent browsing. Flurry combined their own analytics data on mobile app usage, which is – according to their report – ?…now exceeding 500 million aggregated, anonymous use sessions per day across more than 85,000 applications,? and data from comScore and Alexa on Web browsing to come up with the provocative results.
This comes on the heel of a report four months ago by Mary Meeker and Matt Murphy at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers that in 2011, smartphone and tablet shipments exceed those of desktop and notebook shipments. While this does mark a startling trend towards the increasing role of mobile devices in our respective lives, it surely does not indicate the death of anything. Other than that of phones that only do one thing – call people.
In light of these trends, effective online marketing now has taken on several dimensions, and to succeed in all areas and keep one?s audience engaged requires both skill and a clear strategy. Social media marketing and optimization is now an essential part of reaching new customers and keep them happy and coming back. Because, while people are now increasingly addicted to their smartphones and tablets, those weren?t really built for browsing anyway – they are best used through apps. And furthermore, gaming and social media applications are the driving force behind the aforementioned statistics:
Web design is catching up to being more mobile device friendly, but apps are still clearly the most efficient and user-friendly way for a consumer to shop, game, and interact on their phones and tablets. Effective online marketing must acknowledge and adapt to the more diffuse ways in which the online audience accesses the Web.
Simple SEO Tips for Bloggers
A lot of my clients know that blogging about their products and services is an important part of marketing in today’s social media crazed cyber world. Yet, they are not quite sure how it will help them with their search rankings. Regardless of what platform you use (Blogger, Drupal, WordPress, etc.) make sure you follow these best practices for blogging as they will assist with your SEO efforts.
* Identify a few targeted keywords that you want to be ranked and found by the search engines. These keywords will need to be the most common words used in your blog post and make sure they are in the title, URL, used in outbound links and are bolded.
* Change your permalink (i.e. permanent URL) structure to show the title of your blog post rather than the default URL (ex. “yourblog.com/?p=123″). This will make it easy for search engine spiders to find and crawl blog content.
* Write the title of your blog as a headline in order to grab the reader’s attention but also include targeted keywords because your blog will get archived and your titles can become searchable.
* Categorize your content so it allows the aggregation of content according to themes, thus making it easier for search engines to understand your content and giving you a better chance of ranking well on particular topics.
* Keep the content fresh in order to keep the readers and search engines coming back. From a search engine perspective, if your blog is updated frequently, it will attract the attention of spiders and causes more crawling and faster indexing, thus allowing your new content to become searchable more quickly.
* Create internal links by deep linking anchor text to product and/or information pages on interior pages of the site.
* Encourage interaction through comments. This will help create a more active community, which will translate in more content, traffic and eventually higher rankings.
SEO Should Still be at the Top of the List
Businesses seem to spend a lot of time, resources, money and effort on designing and developing a website and fail to spend as much time on their online marketing initiatives. Driving traffic to a website is challenging enough, let alone retaining and converting visitors into buyers or subscribers. That’s why deciding on a marketing channel is an important decision as any.
Deciding on where to spend the marketing dollars is not an easy choice. There’s affiliate, blogging, display, email, mobile, pay per click, social media and search engine optimization (SEO), to name a few.
The type of business, industry, business model and, of course, budget have a lot say in this decision. However, one could argue that SEO would be a good channel to start with. Let’s examine a few supporting points.
1. SEO is both art and science. Meaning, it allows us (the business owner) to examine our marketing message, keywords and competition. Other channels don’t off an in depth look at these areas.
2. Search Engines is the starting point to the worlds information. Yes, social media is picking up steam in knowledge sharing but search engines provide a comfortable user experience coupled with high quality search results. Surveys show that ~ 65-70% of searchers are more likely to favor natural search listings when seeking information or purchasing a product or service.
3. There are a bevy of tools that support SEO efforts. For example, after launching a website, Google’s Webmaster Tools is the logical next step and perfect complement to improving your site’s visibility, identifying site errors and understanding keywords. There are also a number of page ranking, keyword density and competitor related reports available at no or little cost.
4. ROI for SEO can be in the thousands of percents. No joke. SEO can help you build traffic levels in a cost-effective way versus, say, pay per click or banner advertising where keyword bids or impressions may be costly over time. Besides, very few websites are in the business of driving traffic short term so if you take the long-term approach then your return on investment will eventually start to grow.
5. There’s a lot of cross over into other channels. Working on SEO allows you to venture into the world of content writing, social bookmarking, directory submissions, article writing, blogging, press releases, forum posting and more. The end result of this overlap will drive incremental traffic and build up relevancy via external linking.
6. Numbers speak for themselves. According to IAB/PWC Internet Advertising Report, search represented 45% of the overall advertising revenue in 2008.
