Sensible Marketing for Small Business

MarketingSherpa just released its eighth annual 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition. The 202-page report, which is organized by company size, primary market, industry sector, social media use and SEO maturity, examines the SEO habits and effectiveness of some 1,530 B2B and B2C marketers.

Its findings include some nice numbers that support the value of inbound marketing:

• Using social media boosted leads 30% and revenue 114%
• Finding and testing niche content increased organic traffic 40%
• Revamped and optimized Web content doubled lead conversions

But looking beyond individual SEO tactics to the companies’ big-picture B2B marketing strategies reveals some interesting insights about how today’s businesses are – or aren’t – leveraging their SEO techniques.

Of SEO techniques used by the businesses surveyed:

• Content creation works best, but takes the most work
• Incremental SEO improvements add up to large gains
• Future investments in SEO are supported by having an SEO process in place
• Local business listing tactics are underutilized
• Developing strategy is a top challenge but a bottom objective

That last point is particularly interesting, as it reveals a disconnect between what companies want from SEO and what they’re inclined to actually do.

Many organizations are sidestepping the discipline of charting out a strategic plan, choosing instead to put their immediate focus on tactical objectives like increasing website traffic, lead generation and measurable ROI. [...] They need to be strategic with their planning and processes, and ever-savvy with the creation and optimization of all digital assets. But developing a process to plan, measure and execute their SEO programs’ performance isn’t their top objective. In fact, increasing measurable ROI ranked higher as an objective than developing an actual strategy to do so!

So despite encouraging findings about companies that strategically implement formal processes for SEO optimization – for example, that they yield 150% more lead conversion than companies with no such processes in place – only 27% of companies surveyed said they considered planning an effective SEO strategy an important objective. This is a logic gap that companies will need to repair if they want to realize the top revenue results they crave in the long term.

It’s true that SEO and other inbound marketing techniques aren’t always easy. Content creation, in particular, was cited as the most difficult process – but also the one that yielded the greatest returns. See the graphic below for how the various techniques stack up.

Where to begin planning your SEO strategy? The white paper 3 Steps to B2B Marketing Optimization by Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing, Anna Talerico of Ion Interactive, and Maria Pergolino from Marketo is a great place to start.

Note:  INC Magazine interviewed me for this article on the emergence of video in search marketing and lead gen programs

Video can raise your search engine optimization prominence and bring in new customers — if you do it right.

How can a small company build visibility for a product or service in a big marketplace?  Uploading video to websites such as YouTube can be a surprisingly powerful tool for gaining visibility in search engines. Businesses who’ve tried it report this strategy offers huge advantages over simply the hosting video within their own website.

“In our small software company, we use video to generate leads that will bring us new business,” reports Michael E. Williams, director of marketing at BillQuick Software.

BillQuick Software. It wasn’t always that way. Before Williams joined the company about a year and a half ago, instructional videos were hosted on BillQuick’s site, as part of its support content. “A lot of time and effort goes into creating those videos,” Williams says. “Keeping them behind a firewall on a support site is ridiculous.” The problem is that search engine “spider” software can’t look behind the firewall to see how many times a video’s been viewed. Since viewings lead to search engine a prominence, without this information, the spider won’t give the video a high search ranking.

So when the company launched BillQuick 2008, Williams used TubeMogul to upload video to a variety of video-sharing sites, including YouTube, Brightcove, and Metacafe. “We started seeing a tremendous amount of viewings,” he reports, more than 2,500 viewings in one day. The reason is that the video drew search engine prominence. “If you typed in ‘BillQuick 2008,’ the video would come up higher than our own site,” he notes.

Getting video SEO right

Uploading content to sites like YouTube is a start, but there are many additional methods for leveraging video’s to lift search engine rankings. Here are some of the most effective:

1 Take advantage of text. Most search engines can’t tell what content is actually contained in the video, so they use the accompanying text to determine its relevance. Most people don’t put much thought into the text that accompanies videos, so this step alone can provide competitive advantage. Carefully craft the text that accompanies the video, the title of the video (which should be relevant but short), and the video’s keyword tags.

Don’t neglect the actual video filename. “A lot of files are called things like ‘video1.wmv,’” notes Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of the video search engine Blinkx. That’s a wasted opportunity, he says, because many search engines also consider the actual name of the file when determining a video’s relevance.

To truly take advantage of the power of text to boost video’s search engine optimization (SEO), consider providing a transcript of what’s said in the video. In fact, that’s the only way to gain search engine ranking for a privately hosted video, says Aaron Wall, author of SEOBook.com, an online SEO resource. “That way, the search engines have the text to rank against,” he says.

2. Build traffic to the video. That is, to the video hosted on a service, so the search engine will be able to track those viewings. “If you have a popular blog or newsletter for customers and you can use those things to link to the video, that helps a lot,” Wall says.

One effective way to build traffic to a video hosted on YouTube or another service is to embed a link to the video on your site, rather than hosting it at all. This has the added advantage of saving you bandwidth and giving viewers a better experience at the same time. “The video sharing sites have better load balancing than you do, so the video loads really quickly,” Williams says.

Some businesses, he adds, might hesitate to embed a video with the YouTube logo on it. But Brightcove and some other services offer the option to embed a video link with no logo, and will even allow you to customize the video player appearance to match your site, he says.

3. Provide quality content. This doesn’t necessarily mean spending a ton on production. For instance Printable Promotions, which provides promotional giveaways such as reusable grocery bags, achieved significant search engine prominence with videos shot using the video feature of an inexpensive digital camera.

“I make sure to add value,” explains Stacie Long, operations manager. “I’m not talking about price, or saying ‘Buy, buy, buy!’ I’m giving you information about the product.” For instance, one popular Printable Promotions video shows how to fold the reusable bag into its own inner pouch, making it easy to carry in a pocket. “A still picture wouldn’t really explain it,” she says.

Needless to say, you should avoid the depressingly common practice of putting tags on videos that may boost SEO prominence, but have little or no relationship to the video’s actual content. “Some people use tags of popular search terms such as ‘Britney Spears’ to bring viewers to a video about their product or service,” Chandratillake says. Blinkx is fighting back, he notes, with voice-recognition software that can actually tell what’s being said in the video. “If we find a video where the tags talk about one thing, and the video is actually about something else, it will be penalized in relevance,” he says.

4. Track your results. TubeMogul provides details analysis of how many times a video is watched, and YouTube has a similar feature. Williams also recommends adding a query string the URL link from the video to your site, so that you can tell when traffic arrives from a particular video site. By using this system, Williams learned that the video hosted on  Sclipo, a video sharing site devoted to instructional videos, had a higher clickthrough rate than the other sites, though a lower number of viewings overall.

And Long found a useful new search term. “We sell reusable grocery bags that people can put their logos on,” she says. That’s how she’d always thought of them, but by reviewing YouTube data she discovered many viewers had searched “supermarket bag” instead. “I had not thought of using the word ‘supermarket,’” she says. “I now know to update our product pages so they have the keyword ‘supermarket’ in them.”

For the full article, follow this link:  http://technology.inc.com/internet/articles/200806/videoSEO.html

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