For crying out loud…yes, it’s another awesome infographic. But how could I resist? It’s a mashup of SEO and SCIENCE. Now go print this and put it on your wall.
Posts Tagged ‘SEO’
July20
The Periodic Table of SEO
SEOMoz just published a must-read case study on Google News and how they discovered it can become a major traffic funnel. The catch? It has to fall within Google’s definition of “news.” Snip from Google’s help articles:
“Google News only includes sites that publish articles reporting on recent events. We currently do not include informational and how-to articles, classified ads, fictitious content, job postings, event announcements, advice columns, and various other non-news content.”
Now, how-to’s and advice columns are some of the tastiest bread & butter a B2B can serve to their stakeholders. But there’s no reason why B2Bs shouldn’t go beyond that and publish articles on recent INDUSTRY events. I had written earlier about Diversifying the Temporality of your Blog Posts, and how writing for the long-term would drawn in more long tail readers. But SEOMoz’s idea makes a strong case for writing about things happening within a news cycle.
Guess it’s the content that’s useful in the medium term that should get short shrift (Marsha! Marsha! Marsha!).
Message bibles are like deodorant. When they work you don’t know they’re there. When they don’t, you stink and everyone knows it.
Speaking of which, if your message bible was last updated before social media went mainstream, it’s probably getting ripe. Why?
1. An unscientific starting point. At best, your bible drew its word choice from focus groups, industry research, media clips and native industry knowledge. That’s really good, but it’s not scientific. With social media monitoring and SEO keyword tools (especially those that measure keyword density), you can count how many times and how often your verbiage appears. You can see with perfect clarity — in multiple languages — how people describe your company, its products and the issues that affect it. They even remove the variable found in focus groups of people subtly changing what they say when they know they’re being observed. Companies have been using these tools for industry intelligence purposes, but it’s time PR applied them to messaging.
2. It’s being used as a dead tree. Like their advertising cousins, message bibles are static devices. You throw them out there hoping something sticks; hoping even more that you’ll be able to see if it does. But it’s not meant to be changed often. Heck, it’s called a “bible” because you want employees to get that it’s really important NOT to change, to stay on message. (Note, I’m not saying that a company’s DNA or value proposition should change. Just the language that’s trying to communicate it.)
But with social media, small, but scientifically valid testing of terms can happen on the fly and on an ongoing basis. Like one of Darwin’s finches, each syllable should be run through the evolutionary wringer, with only the fittest phrases surviving.
Adopting this approach turns your message bible into a living document. That dead-end corporate speak that someone insisted be in the boilerplate? Gone. Courtesy of search results that show it’s not being repeated. The phrase everyone thought was solid, but not exciting? Turns out your customers embraced it, spread it through the meme-o-sphere and it’s now the title of your CEO’s roadshow speech.
Like songs in the music industry, you can never quite predict what’s going to happen until you test it. And people don’t have to worry about being wrong, because everyone’s right when they start off by saying “we’ll do what works” and then use the scientific method to figure it out.
So what do you get with a message bible that social media & SEO helped build?
- You and your communities speak the same language, lowering the cost of customer acquisition and extending loyalty
- Your SEO program operates on a different verbal track than that of your competitors, lowering its costs while delivering more.
- Your communications to customers (via sales and customer service), the media, investors, analysts and everyone else mutually reinforce one another.
What do you think? What tools and approaches would you use to update your message bible in 2011?
A very respectable 48% of B2B companies are using their social media programs to build inbound links and improve their search engine rankings, finds a study released this week by B2B Magazine and Business.com. About half of those, 44%, say the impact is positive. The one fly in the ointment — and it’s a small one given the progress made — is that just 26% are examining conversations about their products to discover keywords.
Of course, while that aspect of listening can help you reverse engineer your keyword list, there’s nothing like the classic PR approach of influencing the very terms that are being used. Buy those keywords and you’ll leave your competitors wondering where their traffic went. Snip:
“For example, for a client that specializes in virtualization software, GyroHSR started using the phrase “server virtualization” in conversations about database virtualization on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook. (DeShazer declined to name the client.) ‘As the conversation shifts to “server virtualization,’ people will search on Google and will use the term being spoken about in social channels. We have an opportunity to influence what queries users are searching for,’ DeShazer said.”
Via TechCrunch, an SEO expert captured video of a new feature Google is testing that updates search results in real time as you type. It has to be seen to be believed. I can just imagine being on the phone with a reporter, having a live chat on Twitter, or getting into an edit war on Wikipedia and the person on the other side of the line running searches based on each syllable I utter. Talk about the integration of conversational marketing and search! How many months (years?) do you think it will take for the PR industry to catch up?
Yahoo News is testing a new system called “infinite browse” that suggests search queries based on the news story you’ve just read. Snip via TechCrunch:
“For example, news about Al Qaida will show links to searches for “Al-Qaida Camp” or “Al-Qaida Flags.” The idea is to allow readers to access related content they would search for without having to go to a separate search portal and type in the query.”
Given that the feature “results in twice the amount of user engagement” this capability is sure to be incorporated on news sites of all types.
On the plus side for B2B PR, stories you’ve secured for a new product launch would automatically include search suggestions that lead deeper into your marketing funnel. On the other hand, what if the algorithm calculates that the reader would be interested in a recent lawsuit? Accounting scandal? An activist shareholder proxy battle?
All of which means that PR pros must not only deepen their understanding of SEO, but learn the ins and outs of algorithms like these.
Remember the old days when PR meant pitching a reporter instead of pitching a formula that’s in turn pitching your audiences?
In any case, Yahoo says it will be “rolling this out to all users as soon as it is ready.” Are you?
Here’s the piece from TechCrunch, and a blog post from Yahoo that has screen shots of the new feature.
The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” package blasted onto the scene Monday, starting a week-long, agenda-setting news cycle on the U.S.’s intelligence infrastructure.
In all the excitement about the content it’s easy to miss the brilliant marketing. But that would be a shame. Because in its components lies the answer to an important corporate communications question: how should I promote my company’s biggest thought leadership study of the year? You know the one.
But before we dive in, be sure to check out their microsite if you haven’t already.
Done? Great. Let’s go.
Don’t Write a Story, Develop a Tool
First, recognize that WaPo didn’t do a “story.” They didn’t even perform a public service. They CREATED a public service; a research tool that their readers can use on an ongoing basis. They researched and assembled data point by point, expressed it in graphical ways and made it searchable. They hired (as their press release mentions) cartography experts, database reporters and interactive graphic designers to pull it together.
WaPo goes out of its way to say this isn’t news, but “first and most comprehensive examination of the complex system.” I’m sure news will come out of it, but it doesn’t need to given the results they’ve already achieved. This is far cry from your average investigative journalism piece and it’s an inspiration for a new generation of corporate thought leadership.
Enforcing a Longer Attention Span
Having created this package, they’re using a non-traditional tempo to distribute it. Instead of dropping this huge mass of information out there in a day, they’re dripping it out slowly over time.
Why? Because WaPo and your company face the same marketing problem. Even if you unveil a great study (for WaPo, a story) there’s so much competition you simply can’t hold the public’s attention for long. How’s WaPo solving that? The same way you can!
- They’re taking a week to release portions of their research. Each day another article will come out, keeping a stream of people fixated on their topic and coming back to their properties. It also makes the effort feel big and compels the audience to reflect on the topic over a period of time.
- The video intro gives the site an imprimatur of weight and authority to the package. It communicates, “this is so special, so historic that we created a dramatic video about it.” And yet video production is now so cheap any thought leadership study can have its own flashy intro and feel weightier. Bonus points for making it entertaining.
- They’re escaping the tyranny of the traditional media news cycle by using social media. Who cares if the press jumps onto some other story next week ? The conversation with readers will continue online, especially among those most interested in the issues it raises. WaPo says their TSA-focused blog is the anchor of the microsite, “providing updates on Top Secret America coverage, original journalism and insight around related national security matters… will serve as an online destination for further reporting, discussion, analysis, and interaction. Priest and Arkin will host this continuing conversation throughout the rest of the year…”
- In several places on the site, WaPo states how much work it took to assemble. “Two years in the making…more than a dozen Washington Post journalists.” Readers know when real work goes into something. If WaPo took two years to create this, the least I can do is give it a serious look.
Other good moves to emulate:
1. Microsite: The content has its own microsite. That conveys the importance of the topic and gives WaPo the freedom to customize the layout that’s as unique as the content. It also frees them from WashingtonPost.com’s format, which resembles a print newspaper — not an interactive research tool.
2. Authors are people, not institutions: The authors of the package, Dana Priest and William Arkin, are prominently featured on the site with head shots and bios and they make appearances in the intro video. That puts a face to the topic and will help with recall when the authors appear on TV through the week. Readers will also note their bylines in subsequent pieces. Especially in professional services circles, where clients are buying people’s expertise, it’s important to show the faces behind research.
On the downside, I was hoping to see a way to connect to the authors. A twitter feed or blog I could follow, maybe a LinkedIn or Facebook account to connect with (not ones dedicated to the topic, but the experts on it). Alas, these reporters are probably too busy to run those channels, but it’s a lost opportunity. Even a box to fill in an email address to sign up for their latest articles would have added to the WaPo’s win.
3. Social media: There are the standard share/comment buttons. A prominent section of the microsite is devoted to “Conversation” with Twitter (@PostTSA) and Facebook channels. A Twitter scroll of #topsecretamerica is included to show they’re listening and to give readers a chance to see the conversation evolve over time. I couldn’t find any embed code to include their tool on my blog, but I’ve asked them via Twitter if that’s available and will let you know if they come back.
4. Who cares about the press release?: The press release is at the very bottom of the microsite — where it should be. Really, compared to these other channels, how can a release compare?
5. Helping the reader: Under the banner of usefulness, they have a helpful reference section with definitions and explanation of national security terms and services. Again, it gives the visitor a reason to come back multiple times and makes you feel indebted and thankful to the company.
6. Send us Tips: Tip section headlined with, “Talk to us. Want to contribute to this ongoing project?” Every page has one, from the front page entry point to each and every company profile entry. You’re invited to upload docs, video or audio. Wow.
7. SEO: They’ve set up multiple domains and routes into the package. There’s http://topsecretamerica.com, http://www.washingtonpost.com/TopSecretAmerica, and http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america. Multiple domains mean they’ll dominate their search results more with their own material. (Any SEO experts want to offer something specifgic on why this is a good/bad idea?)
Here’s what it looks like to completely dominate a topic on day one of release:
The first couple results are authoritative blogs (NYT, CNN and third, ironically — WaPo). Note that on the right hand side are adwords for Video: Top Secret America.” Talk about integrated marketing!
The next two results are Washingtonpost.com properties, then Slashdot (having a proud geek moment), followed by a live-tweet stream punctuated by blog posts in a scrolly. YouTube videos from the companion PBS documentary are next.
Finally, a Google trends chart that states the topic is the 16th most popular search in the past hour.
So there’s our new high bar for thought leadership dominance. What ideas do YOU get from WaPo’s delivery of this story?
Spiders can be scary, but you can’t deny how effective they are. Take the Cellar Spider, AKA Daddy Long Legs. When one of their webs gets old, they use it as scaffolding to build a new one. This happens over and over again until you get a mass of cobwebs.
Considering that there’s literally a web of information out there on a topic you’re trying to establish your leadership on, Daddy Long Legs’ approach is worth considering. Most SEO efforts are focused on getting YOUR stuff — white papers, studies or other docs — ranked high in search queries. But there’s no reason why you can’t use the other people’s already highly ranked content as scaffolding to build your own intellectual web to achieve the same ends.
Here’s how:
1. Assemble the keywords you anticipate customers (I’m going to say “customers” but I mean any targeted audience) are using to learn about a topic.
2. Run ‘em through the top search engines. Sit back and consider the terawatts of power, gigabytes of
storage and millions of people hours that went into compiling the list of results before you. They’ve worked for thousands or and potentially millions of other searchers. This is your scaffolding.
Among the results are blog posts, forums, news articles, wiki entries, YouTube videos, Slideshare decks and Flickr pics. Every one of those types of media have comment boxes underneath. Use them! Post comments, post links to your studies, use the publications and blogs that come up as a hit list for byline pieces.
Be strategic, be authentic, thoughtful and don’t be overly talkative. Recognize that if you’re articulating a complex, sophisticated and nuanced vision, the followers you want to attract are already paying very close attention to these hits. They’ll see your contributions to the conversation and then follow your links back to your own intellectual web.
These comments will not be indexed. Pretty much all comment infrastructures have a “nofollow” line of code in the HTML that tells search engines to ignore what comes next. But the end result is the same. People searching for information on your topic will find YOU.
A few tips:
When making comments, a lot of blogs allow a unified sign-in like DISQUS. It allows you to build a profile based on all your comments online. If people like one thing you’ve written under a DISQUS account, they can click on it and see everything else, further drawing them in to your point of view.
Don’t forget to use specific search engines for blogs, like Icerocket and Technorati to find prominent discussions to show up in.
When news breaks, be sure to join in the conversation. Search engines increasingly track the “real-time web” and recognizing that those results will be on top and then using ‘em is about as useful as SEO can get.
Remember, it’s a web. Customers don’t have to land in the center for you to capture them. Find a strand, yank on it and reel ‘em in.
This is the fourth of five posts marking the first ever Thought Leadership-SEO Week. Be sure to take the poll on how companies are using SEO for thought leadership, how to use SEO to promote white papers and how the psychological principle of closure affects SEO.
Look at the two shapes above. Circle and rectangle, right? Oops. They’re almost a circle and rectangle, but your mind filled in the gaps to show you the shapes you’re accustomed to.
How about a real-world example? Imagine you heard last night that it was going to rain. In the morning you look out the window and see clear skies and puddles. What images fill your mind? The air thick with rain in the dark? Thunder and lightening?
Welcome to the Gestalt “Law of Closure.“ A psychological principle that basically states people fill in gaps in information with whatever they’re predisposed to believe is there. It’s a factor that needs to be taken into consideration with your SEO-thought leadership efforts.
Do a search now on your company’s name and a topic that you’d like it to be seen as a thought leader on. What dots would stakeholders connect among the various links? As your SEO-thought leadership campaign progresses, how will those dots change? Can you adjust your projected course so that the lines are drawn more in your favor?
Keep in mind, it’s pretty much impossible to completely dominate all the results that will come up for a topic, even if it’s narrow and you occupy the space exclusively. There’s just too much out there. But you can exert some measure of control by considering how closure will affect people’s perception and then either preempting the perception or following up with counter-messaging through other channels.
Happy thought leadership-SEO week! Continuing the week-long series on the topic, I can’t help but reflect on how shocking it is that a search engine’s algorithm can mean more to a company’s success than an editor at the Wall Street Journal.
It’s sad, but there’s no reason it should discourage PR pros from embracing SEO. In fact, the more you learn about it, the more you realize how valuable traditional PR skills are in making SEO work.
Let’s say you’ve got a white paper to promote and no HTML experience. Here’s a 25-piece SEO starter kit that any PR pro can use.
Evaluate the White Paper – Does it deserve the SEO treatment?
1. How long will this paper be useful to your audiences? It can take a lot of person-hours to do SEO right, and even then it can take months for pages to get fully indexed. If the core idea has a half life of a month, you’ll want to use some of these techniques, but not most of them. (Related post on Diversifying the temporality of your blog posts.)
2. How referencable is the white paper’s information? This means more than just “interesting.” Interesting stuff happens every day (thank you, Gawker). But to inspire people to link to a white paper, the more useful it is as a reference guide, the more nitty gritty hard-to-find information it contains, the better. Tables of data can trump an interesting idea in this regard. Often we strip out data for journalist’s sake, simplifying the document to save them time and make the idea of reading the study less daunting. Ignore that instinct. Go deep. Your audiences will appreciate its value and link to it.
3. How niche? The more narrow and specific your white paper is, the less competition it will face online from other search results.
Choose the right format. PDFs, Microsites and Domains, Oh-My.
4. Microsites are best: It’s likely your white paper is in PDF form. The bad news is that for a variety of reasons PDFs don’t index as well as regular web pages. To retain the beautiful formatting of the PDF, yet achieve the search-friendliness of HTML, set up a one-page microsite on your site that contains all the text and charts in the document. Include a link to the PDF so people can download it. Use this URL in all the steps that follow. Keep in mind, the idea is to be a thought leader, not a specific document in a specific format leader.
5. Don’t mistake sites for pages: Individual web pages, not sites, are what can be optimized for search engines. If your company’s site is #1 on Google, that’s great. But it doesn’t mean that when someone is searching for keywords related to your topic that your white paper will come up. Every white paper needs its own page and optimization effort behind it.
6. Sub domains: Consider setting up a sub domain name for the white paper. If you use dashes-in-the-address with your keywords then the search engines will see it and better understand and catalog your work.
Select Your Keywords
7. Empathize: Using every empathetic bone in your body, imagine the keywords that your target audience might use to find your white paper. Include lists of terms used by people who use your jargon, don’t use your jargon, and those who are looking for your information but don’t know it yet. Are they the right keywords? Right means what people use to search, not what you think they should use to search. If someone else is using your keywords (i.e. “servers” in the restaurant field versus technology) even if they’re in another field, find another set. Remember what Sun-Tzu says about being where the enemy isn’t. There are hundreds of keyword analysis tools you can use. Which ones? Ask a search engine!
8. Spelling: Make sure the term you’re trying to own is easy to spell and doesn’t have hyphens or sound like it might require them. Slight word variations and typos can detail the most well-intentioned SEO effort.
SEO-Friendly Edits for Your White Paper
9. Page location: The higher up and further left your keywords, the better. Optimally, you’re using your keywords in your headline, subhead and beginning of the body.
10. Style: Bold, underline, italics, bullet points, bigger sized text all help search engines know which words are most important.
11. Keyword density: The number of times your keywords appear on a page matters. Over-use them and it will annoy readers search engines might smell a rat. Use them too little and you won’t get your point across to either humans or algorithms. Use too many different keywords and you’ll dilute the impact of the important ones. What’s the right balance? No one really knows. The best principal to keep in mind is “how useful is this to my audience?”
12. http:// When citing links, always use http://www. Not just www…
13. Outbound links: Embed links to reputable resources in your white paper. Search engines are trying to figure out where in the web of ideas your report fits. You can help them by showing what resources support and relate to your findings. Linking to other people’s content, even that written by competitors isn’t a failure to lead. It’s a necessary part of marketing when search engines are gauging your intellectual honesty.
14. Geography: It’s is increasingly affecting the results people get when they post. If your white paper has a geographic angle, highlight it.
Build links – Most SEO experts agree that the number and quality of inbound links is the most important determinant of rankings.
15. Anchor text: This is really, really important. “Anchor text” are the words that are linked to a site. Having those match the title of your page will make a world of difference in your rankings. For example, if your white paper was on Greek bond sales in July, it’s good for people to link the words “Greek bond sales” in their hyperlink. But it’s even better if “Greek bond sales in July” is selected. Again, provided that precisely matches the title of your page. So whenever you ask people to link to the white paper’s URL, ask them to use the precise keywords you want.
16. Bylined articles – If the white paper is good, you’re likely pitching these anyway. But to add the element of SEO, pick publications that can bring in the most link juice. Optimally these are sites that are highly ranked themselves, well trafficked, narrowly focused on your topic, and — critical — they’ll let you embed a link (with anchor text!) back to the URL.
17. Multimedia: Link building isn’t just about building up the visibility of one link, but creating several properties that can dominate a list of search results. Distributing multimedia versions of your white paper is a great way to do that. That can include a video interview of the paper’s author posted to YouTube, pictures of the document’s cover page and charts posted to Flickr, and a Slideshare deck summarizing the findings. And since there’s a lot less competition for your keywords in multimedia formats, the chances of you pushing out some irrelevant text links from the results page are high.
18. Press release: Issue a press release on the white paper with links to the white paper’s URL. Remember the anchor text lessons above. Links in press releases will help, though only so long as the releases remain online. A lot of newswires pull them after a few weeks.
19. Twitter: Tweet your report. Multiple times. Be conversational, not promotional. Hold a #conversation on the topic. That way you can tweet the report multiple times without coming off as spamming.
20. Put a face on the study: Tie an executive bio to the white paper. It gives you another page to appear in the search results. Google Profiles and LinkedIn are musts.
21. Employee blogs – These can be a great source of links. Just don’t be an ogre, pressuring employees to do a post.
22. Industry associations: often have newsletters or sections of their sites where you can contribute a piece.
23. Conferences: Try to unveil the white paper at a conference. The conference’s site will likely let you post a link, plus you’ll have people in the room tweeting, blogging and writing articles about the paper. Record the speech on YouTube and post pictures of the person making the speech to Flickr. Use your keywords in the video and photo titles and tags. Post links to the white paper in the comment boxes. Content in comment boxes are almost never indexed (see “nofollow” for why) but if the titles and tags get crawled, they’ll come up in search results and people will open those gateways and find their way to your URL.
24. Use your community: Remember how your boss was looking for a reason why it’s good to have lots of fans on Facebook? SEO is one reason why. Distribute the white paper to your fan base, encourage them to share it, post it online and link back to the URL. That’ll build inlinks.
25. The final tool for your starter kit is…Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. A great read, chock full of resources, and well worth the time and money. It also makes the HTML aspects easier to understand and deal with, even for non-techies.
Ideas? Thoughts to add? Examples you’ve seen of other ways to use SEO to promote white papers? Add ‘em in the comments below.
