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5 Digital Branding Mistakes

Posted on February 24, 2014 by seanhecking
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branding-mistakes
Maybe you heard it from a college buddy or read it somewhere online. We often take advice from friends and colleagues on products to buy, books to read, cars to drive, movies to watch and more. There is no doubt, friends can be very helpful in making purchase decisions big and small.

When it comes to growing your business, do you lean on the same advice from those same friends? If the answer is yes, take a moment to consider their background. Someone who is a great chef or successful banker is a master of their craft. They have spent many years fine tuning their talents. Those years of hard work have paid off in making them who they are today. Does their expertise in cooking or corporate finance also make them an expert in digital marketing? Most likely no.

Avoid These 5 Digital Branding Mistakes

What works for one business or industry does not work for all. There is no secret sauce that all businesses must tap into for success. Below are five common mistakes companies make when trying to market their business online.

1. Poor Domain Name Branding

Did a buddy, or worse yet a black hat SEO, tell you that “Cheapiphonecase.com” was a great domain name for your company? Domain names stuffed with keywords are more likely to be flagged for Google spam in 2014. What may have been a strength in 2008 is now a liability. Have a domain name that fits your brand. If your company name is “Pete’s Home Electronics”, stick with that name and branding for your domain name. Better yet, if you can shorten that name to something easy to remember and share, go for it. Long domain names and keyword filled domains have a very tough row to hoe.

Poor: Cheapiphonecase.com
Good: Peteselectronics.com

2. Under-Investing in a Website

How can you tell the story about your brand with a logo, text and few links to white papers? Under-investing in a website can give a poor reflection of your actual services. If you want to be viewed as “best in class”, have a “best in class” web presence. Just because your friend paid $599 for a website for his pizza shop doesn’t mean your high profile law firm should do the same. Have a website budget that matches your industry. Higher paying customers expect you to have a high quality website.

Ignore the competition and stand out! Which leads me to my next point…

3. Copying the Competition

Competitive analysis is an important part of monitoring your industry. Competitors can provide insights into strategies and tactics. Your gut instinct may be to find that top competitor and copy everything they’re doing to be successful. The problem with being a copy of your competitor is just that. You’re a copy, not original or special in any way. If you copy most or all of what your top competitor does in marketing, you will be seen as “the same” or inferior if you are trying to under-cut your competitors on price. Find something that makes you stand out.

4. Be the Cheapest (and the Best)

Pricing is an important part of branding your product or company. Do you want customers to see you as “the cheapest” or “the best”? “The cheapest” and “the best” are usually not the same company or product. Think about how you want to position your product in the minds of customers. Apple products, for example, are not the cheapest. Apple does however rate high on product satisfaction. Being the cheapest means being the cheapest always. If customers expect to you to be cheapest, they will expect you to always lower your prices even if it means cutting your margins down to nothing. Provide value and you will get valuable customers in return.

5. Under-Investing in Marketing

You are a small business or startup. To see a return on your marketing investment is going to take time. It’s not going to happen in a few weeks or even a few months. The smaller your budget, the longer it will generally take to see results from your efforts. For example, your top competitor is spending $15,000 per month in Google AdWords. How much business do you think $500 per month is going to bring? Be realistic with your marketing budget and make sure your budget matches your expectations.

Having all your digital budget in one bucket is also a bad strategy. If there is a major disruption to one channel (like Google Panda) your business is going to feel the negative impact of that change more than competitors. Have a multi-channel strategy to make sure your marketing is sustainable for years to come.
Posted in branding

Why Did My Google Rank Drop?

Posted on January 31, 2014 by seanhecking
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One of the questions I get asked most often from new and prospective clients is, “How do I get my website back to ranking well again in Google?” I tell them, “Lets do a full website audit first, then check to see what needs fixed over time. After we assess your situation, we can dig deeper into why your site is performing poorly.” Sometimes this is enough to get the conversation steered more toward potential website issues and away from rankings, sometimes not.
Does your chart look like this? I hope not.

Does your chart look like this? I hope not.

Usually if a business owner is seeking a new search marketing firm or consultant, they have already seen some of their page 1 keyword listings drop down to page 2, 3 or out of the first 100 listings. Perhaps they only rank well for brand keywords. What ever the case may be, they know there is a problem that is only getting worse with time.

“What am I Doing Wrong Here?”

As a small business owner, your first thought would be, “what am I doing or what is my SEO doing that is causing my website to fall out of favor in Google?” In many cases, websites will drift down the list of results because of a variety of factors. Here are just a few examples:

1. Old Website and/or Not Mobile Friendly

“We launched a website in 2005 that has been doing well for several years. Why is this site not ranking well anymore?”

Times change, technology changes and what worked well in 2006 doesn’t work in 2014. If search engines like Google see the same code from 2005, why would they rank your site over a site with a new/mobile friendly layout from 2012? We now live in a multi-device world with product research performed on a variety of devices*. (*Google Study)

Google-Study-11

The video below from Matt Cutts helps explain why older sites tend not to perform well in search engines:


2. Outdated SEO Practices

“We hired a link building firm to promote our website last year. We were doing great for a few months, now our website has fallen off Google completely. How do we recover from this?”

Having a link building company perform digital marketing is not a good practice. That link building company is going to build links, period. They have no other task than to build more links. They don’t care if you’re selling products or if your website disappears a few months later. They are not in the strategy business since they don’t have any insight into your advertising campaigns, products or business goals. Links are only 1 part of a larger strategy with several other factors.

us-ranking-factors-2013

Before you hire someone to just do one marketing task, consider hiring a consultant or small agency that can provide you with strategic guidance. Strategy is much more valuable to your company than a few links or pages of optimized web copy.

I would argue that the days of specialized SEO firms are gone. You can no longer perform SEO in a vacuum (only focused on keywords). The goals of a company are much larger than a group of keywords. A good digital marketing agency will be able to handle all the paid search and social channels, as well as your organic strategy.

3. Technical Problems

“We relaunched our website several weeks ago, now our site is nowhere on Google. What happened to our rankings?”

This is a very common problem. A company hires a web design shop to redesign their site with a one page scrolling layout (called Parallax, see SEO problems here) that seems to be “all the rage” with designers. When the company launches the website, almost overnight their old listings are gone. What happened here?

Many times a web design shop isn’t hired to perform search engine marketing and doesn’t bid a web project with SEO included for budget reasons (or just to win the work by outbidding competitors). This is not a good practice and the company suffers by losing organic visitors. The web shop may be great at designing websites, but lacks the in-house expertise to deliver on search engine optimization. If you are going to spend $30,000+ on a new website, make sure you have a professional SEO take a look at the web design or have a quick pre-launch audit.

Screen shot 2014-01-31 at 12.13.36 PM

Often, things like “page not found” errors and site structure issues can be prevented early if the right search marketing people are involved in your project in the beginning.

Always Hire Professionals

I hope what you read here can be helpful for a business owner considering a website redesign or looking into why their current site is performing poorly. As always, make sure the people you hire to do this type of work have experience in search marketing and can deliver on technical side as well. Technical SEO and a well built website is the foundation for online marketing performance growth.
Posted in seo

Is Guest Blogging Bad for SEO?

Posted on January 22, 2014 by seanhecking
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guest-blog

This week, Matt Cutts at Google wrote a blog post (ironically) on the pitfalls of guest blogging in future Google search engine updates. I’m asked questions this week like “Is guest blogging bad?” or “Should we avoid too many authors on our blog?” These are all good questions and made me think about what makes a good blog post. Quality, authentic, in-depth, expert posts will never go out of favor. The trouble is, there are only so many experts on any given subject. So what is a website owner to do? Many of the them simply hired or allowed someone to post on their blog who they thought was a good writer.

“The trouble is, there are only so many experts on any given subject.”

To me, what is really being discussed here are the guest blogging networks or blogger for hire schemes. For years, these same networks were in the business of buying links and link exchanges. As little as a few hundred dollars could get you 10 high quality guest posts for your website?! (yeah, right)

Short History of Guest Blogging

MyBlogGuest was a good early guest blogging forum which I used a couple years ago to connect with legitimate bloggers. As time went on, more spammers and bloggers for hire began to fill up forums like these until they were flooded with blogger for hire networks.

SEOs, small business owners and marketing companies accustom to getting 100s of emails a week from link building networks, started to see more and more spam emails. This time the emails were a mix of blogging services and guest writing for hire companies, many of them from overseas.

Some business owners used these cheap blogging networks, noticed a jump in organic search visitors, so they funneled more of their link building money into guest blogging. My assumption is the same folks that felt the pain of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates in the past two years are the same companies that will be hit by future guest blogging updates by Google. Let’s face it. These folks have a very limited budget so it’s unlikely they will go full “white hat” SEO anytime soon.

Guest Posting Tips

In my mind guest posting (and link building for that matter) lives on. What Google and other search engines want to see is authoritative, subjective and in-depth posts on any given subject matter. If someone is a subject matter expert they will likely have a blog of their own, a social media following and be published somewhere other than a handful of guest posts.

Where guest posting gets into trouble is when an author has 100s of guest posts but no real social following or published work outside of these blogger for hire networks. I expect blogging networks to feel the same Google wrath as link networks in 2014. Here are some tips you can use to avoid getting flagged as spam.

1. Find an Expert

Not everyone is an expert in any given field but whom ever you reach out to for a guest post should have a background on the subject. Check to see if they have worked or been published on the subject anywhere else. Twitter, Google+ and a social search engine like Topsy are great ways to start you expert research. Using social media as a way to background check your authors is a good practice.

2. Ask for an In-Depth Post

It’s not easy to create an in-depth blog post on a given subject, so try to provide the author with some prep questions or talking points. These can help lead to a longer post, a better reader response and social sharing. I would ask for at least 500+ words. Generally the longer the better.

3. Proof Read

After you or your author has created their post, make sure to check for spelling errors and the like. Grammarly is a great tool for double checking your work. Chrome has some nice extensions for spell checking to make it easier. A second set of eyes is always a good idea.

Blog On!

As always, if it sounds too good to be true (like 15 bucks for a quality guest post for your website) it probably is. If you are a guest blogger, keep these simple tips in mind as you’re blogging to avoid red flags on your post or SEO spam on your clients website. Happy guest posting!

photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography cc
Posted in google, seo

Linkedin Advertising Tips: Sponsored Updates

Posted on January 4, 2014 by seanhecking — No Comments ↓
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In August 2013, Linkedin announced the arrival of a new advertising option called “sponsored updates“. Many current Linkedin advertisers were aware of Linkedin Ads, those small text with image ads that appear when someone searches on linkedin, views a profile, etc. To the delight of marketers, the option to pay for sponsored updates meant the “updates” (ads) would begin to appear along with other news updates in someones home page feed in Facebook and other social media websites.

20140104-063105.jpg

Sponsored Updates vs. Normal Linkedin Ads

Three more obvious benefits from sponsored updates include;

1. Increased Exposure

Increased visibility due to ad placement in news feed vs. a designated ad spot that people can ignore. Placement is key to getting your ad clicked on. Ads can generate 1,000s of impressions with only a handful or no clicks. A Mashable social profile eye tracking study reveals some interesting insights into how people view their news feed.

social-profile-eye-tracking

2. Increased Click Through Rates

Due to the placement of the sponsored updates in the news feed, one would assume click through on the updates would be higher than those of the ads. Generally, this is true. We have seen higher click through rates overall.

3. Enhanced Media

As you can see in the example above, advertisers now have the option to include images, videos and other media as part of the ad. Embedding a video or download is a great way to help increase click through performance and generate more activity.

Tips for Improving Sponsored Updates

So you’re ready to jump into sponsored updates head first. If you just started your first Linkedin ad campaign or are looking to test out sponsored updates, here are a few tips you might find helpful.

1. Tag Your Links

Make sure you have some way of tagging your campaign links in analytics. Linkedin Ads may appear in Google Analytics as a campaign but you may need some custom tagging or the visits will appear as Linkedin referring visits.

In Google Analytics, check: Acquisition > Campaigns

It will be much more difficult to track if clicks were a result of the ads. I recommend setting up campaign tagging in Google Analytics for any non-Google ad platform just to be safe. You can do this by using Google’s URL builder tool.

2. Target

Casting too wide of a net can run up your budget fast and result in poor quality leads. If you are on a limited budget, try only a small set of demographics like one age set and a few industries. Limiting your demographics is a great way to test performance. If a campaign seems to be going well, expand your demographics by adding an industry or group. As a rule, I generally start with 500,000-1,000,000+ in each ad audience. Any smaller and you could be limiting your potential for clicks.

As your campaign grows, start testing groups and other demographic features. I recommend keeping the targeting options relatively simple until you learn more about your audience and the opportunities in each group.

linkedin-demographics

There are obviously more managers than there are CEOs so don’t limit your targeting options to just owners and directors.

3. Give it Time

You may see relatively low clicks in the first few weeks after starting your campaign. I would recommend giving the campaign some time to bake into Linkedin. Just like any other form of advertising, it can take several weeks or even months to see a good response or return on your ad spend. Since the first round of ads, targeting and bids will be mainly a test, your campaigns will need some time to optimize. A good campaign manager will make small changes to your campaign over time to maximize ad spend and increase your click through performance.

chart

Good Luck!

With Linkedin sponsored updates and other social media advertising being relatively new as a marketing channel, you should expect to see some experimentation. Make sure you have an advertising budget that allows for some experimentation and good luck!

Posted in social media marketing

7 Dead Link Building Tactics in 2014

Posted on December 23, 2013 by seanhecking — No Comments ↓
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In 2008, link building was queen (or king) when it came to ranking well in search engines. Companies dumped most of their SEO budget into link building activities designed to increase link numbers, thus ranking higher in search engines over time. Link counts were closely measured, anchor text was optimized, page 1 rankings were achieved and there was much rejoicing!

puppies

Puppies are cute but not a good content strategy. Avoid content mills as a tactic for growing visitors, links and shares.

What was once an effective SEO tactic that almost everyone was doing quickly backfired during the Google Penguin update in spring of 2012. Many marketers were left scratching their heads wondering if link building was still a worthwhile tactic. Some SEO firms simply abandoned link building in favor of other tactics. Rather than spending hours and hours on link requests, they began to focus on content marketing tactics to help build organic visitors. This was a positive strategy shift but a poor understanding of how link building can be used to generate results.

Link Building (aka Content Marketing)

Link building is still alive and well in 2014. What is now called “content marketing” is basically a best practice of traditional SEO and link building. If marketers in 2011 were using best practices for link building, they would have been using content to generate links. They would have avoided shortcuts to the top like 100s of directory link submissions and buying from link networks. They would have used content to build links naturally and ignored anchor text placement. For 80% or more of the SEO world, this just wasn’t the case. SEOs continued to spam web directories with keyword rich links and forced Google to release the Penguin update in 2012. Penguin targets what Google considers “link spam”.

Shifting from Links to Shares

Since 2012, there has been a major shift from keywords, links and anchor text to attracting organic visitors through great content. Great content also works well in social media, which is a win-win if done correctly. Search engines have started to use social signals like “shares” to help them distinguish between good links and poor links. The future of link building means getting links and shares from social media as well as traditional websites.

You may be asking yourself, “It’s 2014, should I be link building?” The answer is yes and no. Building links (and social shares) is still very effective. It’s always important to understand, what may not hurt a website today may be detrimental several months down the road. Be sure to avoid these 7 link building tactics that could backfire now and in the future.

1. Directory Links

If you are submitting your website to low quality directories, please stop! You should only be concerned with a directory if it’s one of only a few high quality sites. If your website is relatively new or you need local exposure, a select group of directories make sense. Avoid an SEO firm that is still submitting your site to 100s of worthless directories each month. Even if that firm only charges you $199 per month, it’s money you might as well burn.

2. Poorly Designed Infographics

Infographics are an effective tool to gain links but are you churning out poorly designed infographics every week? If you are going to use graphics to gain links, make them easy to understand and simple. Good graphics will always be an important part of marketing.

3. Fake Shares & Social Spam

Avoid spamming social media through fake personas and fake shares. Real people matter and search engines are smart enough to know the difference. Google is hard at work on detecting social media spam the same way they went after link networks. Spammer beware!

4. Spam Videos

You may have noticed YouTube videos ranking well in search engines for “Keyword X”. It’s clear these videos were optimized for 1 or 2 keywords. YouTube video spam is Google’s next target. If your spam video is still ranking well now, it will not be for long. Create an engaging video that helps build your brand. Avoid over optimized videos created for the sake of SEO.
Look at this garbage video Google is ranking for "Columbus SEO".

Look at this garbage video Google is ranking on page 1 for “Columbus SEO”. This can’t last.

5. Anchor Text

Avoid using anchor text to influence search results. If your link is from a relevant website and has shares from relevant industry authorities, it will perform well in organic search. Sure, it’s still important to have some basic content optimization in place but don’t go overboard when it comes to keywords.

6. Content Mills (Content Farms)

Ok, you’ve heard content is good for generating links and visitors. Heck, you’ve seen your visitors grow over time so that’s got to be a good think right?! Stop posting articles for the sake of posting. If you don’t have anything good to post, brainstorm ideas and release good content, not just “good enough”. I’ve encountered a few clients who crank out content every day to bring in visitors and wonder why their conversion rates are so low. Know your audience and build your brand.

7. Cheap Thrills

Avoid cheap and easy hooks to gain visitors. You know what I’m talking about. Pictures of bikini models, puppies and kittens just to name a few. Just because it generates shares or likes doesn’t make it relevant to your audience. Good marketing is helping your customers solve problems. While your content should be exciting, it’s shouldn’t offend grandma or embarrass your client.

We hope these tips will help you improve your link building and content marketing in 2014. Please share any additional tips or tactics you feel need added to this list. Happy link building!

photo credit: Ritmó cc. Modified with text overlay.

Posted in seo, social media marketing