Social Media Marketing has exploded and more and more businesses, both small and large, are taking advantage of the benefits in their SEO campaign.  One of the newest social networks available is Google Plus, which has been out for quite a while; however, businesses have yet to take advantage of it’s full potential. Want to know why?

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Sticking Around

Pinterest allows users to share and catalogue new interests people discover through web browsing by using a bookmarklet to “pin” it to one of their boards. You can link a Pinterest account to either a Twitter or Facebook account, and have your pinned items automatically be sent there as well.

While you can cross promote with Twitter by signing up with your business email, there isn’t currently a way to connect to a business Facebook page, only your personal one. And of course, Google + is completely absent.  So it’s not as efficient as it could be for a limited social media budget. However, with it’s incredibly rapid growth, there’s little doubt that Pinterest is going to become an important part of your social media marketing campaign.

Marketing on Pinterest

Where your fans go, so too should you. While the site does discourage blatant self-promotion, this doesn’t mean you can’t market through it. While doing online marketing and building a community on Pinterest is a little different, it won’t take long to get your efforts to generate results. Also, every link on Pinterest is a follow link, so you can rack up some Google juice with just a few re-pins.

• While getting on Pinterest still requires an invite, you can sign up for one on the site. However, if you know someone who is already a member, they can send you an invitation and that’s certainly the quicker of the two methods.
• Add a Pinterest follow button to your sites. Encourage customers to use it to help boost your online presence.
• Pinterest is very visual based. While titles hold a lot of sway everywhere else, efficient use of Pinterest is going to rely on a great picture that visually grabs the reader or intrigues them enough to click on it.
• As for building a community, Pinterest is all about the lifestyle. Building your Pinterest presence around the lifestyle of your user base is an ideal method of building a community, and you’ll want to fill your boards with relevant content from communities similar to yours. This will let you keep users coming back for content on an even more regular basis than your own content production methods allow.
• You can also make a pinboard for users to contribute their own content. Get some of your more vocal or loyal fans and encourage them to fill a board with things that relate to your product. It’s a great way to generate fan interaction, and you could even make this opportunity a reward in a contest.
• And of course, Pinterest works both ways. You can look at your follower’s boards to see what they are interested in. It’s like a little focus group right there for you to follow. And what a better way to find content other followers will enjoy than from a fellow fan?
• Curating is the name of the game with Pinterest and if you become the lead source of curated info for a lifestyle built around your product, then that’s only going to be a bonus for you. Though you’ll have to commit some time initially in order to collect a large amount of material, it’ll pay off in the end.

Many large business and organizations have already gotten on board with Pinterest and are using it with great effect. The National Post has clearly gotten the idea of curating, and you can find many boards all dedicated to the types of posts they produce. There’s no reason you can’t have just as strong a presence.

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Have you ever noticed how you have a couple hundred friends on Facebook, but your news feed typically only shows posts from the same few dozen? There’s a reason for this, and it’s called EdgeRank. Facebook’s EdgeRank is an algorithm that decides whether your post is good enough to be put on someone’s news feed. And most people are failing to make the grade.

Knowing is Half the Battle

It’s important to figure out how this algorithm affects you. The average shelf life for a post on Facebook is about 4 hours. After that, it’s lost to the timeline. Sure, you can boost it’s shelf life with some fundamental SEO for social media strategies, but within Facebook, there’s little that SEO can do.

So if you want to make sure you post makes it to the largest number of fans, you need to maximize your EdgeRank.

EdgeRank is much like gravity. It’s invisible, incredibly important, but no one really knows exactly how it works. However, the algorithm is known, and it’s pretty easy to understand. The ranking of the status comes down to User Affinity x Edge Weight x Time Decay. Each part of the algorithm is equally important.

The Three Keys

The EdgeRank for a post isn’t constant. Every time a user opens their news feed, the status updates they see are based on the post’s EdgeRank as of right that moment. This is where time decay comes into play. Otherwise, the same posts could keep clogging up news feeds ad nauseum.

Edge weight is where the mystery really comes into play. Facebook tries to display posts that are relevant to the user’s interests. So it “weighs” your update with what the fan likes, and tries to make a match. Facebook’s ability to predict user interests was actually a little too good, and prompted the changing of the EdgeRank algorithm to include the occasional random post as well. Also included in the Edge weight is how much activity the post is generating, especially with user affinity factored in.

User affinity is how much you have in common with your friends. If you and Joe have 88 friends in common, and you frequently post on each other’s walls, chances are good you’ll see most of Joes posts. Facebook thinks you clearly share similar interests, and you interact with a similar set of people. And that’s great, until you’re trying to get your post on someone’s news feed that you don’t share a lot of posts or friends with.

How to Solve It

Since the goal is to get your posts to more people, you need to make sure your posts and updates maximize every bit of the EdgeRank algorithm. Since it’s pretty hard to beat an algorithm, the only sure way to come out on top is to make sure you have quality content on a frequent basis. Of course, you should have seen that coming.

Quality content is the best solution to every social media problem. Be mindful of that when posting constant offers on an avalanche of political commentary on Facebook – the less people interact with your post, the smaller your reach is.

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So our first obstacle was inserting ourselves into a niche community of fans and establish connections very quickly.

Twitter Prevails

Of course, before we could make the connections, we had to find them. With FollowerWonk you simply type in any keywords and it finds people that tweet about such keywords, ranked according to their influence (# of followers, etc).  So we knew right off who was important and who we needed to reach out to. Of course, that left us with a large number of lists to manage and follow.

That’s where Tweetdeck came into play. It allowed us to manage multiple twitter lists, so we could make appropriate comments, re-tweets, responses and generally interact more often in a smaller amount of time than if we hadn’t used it.

Social Interaction And Sex Appeal

The Theatre Bizarre is a movie in a very distinct sub-genre of horror. It focuses on gratuitous use of nudity and large amounts of gore. We wanted to capitalize on the disturbingly graphic content that we knew would appeal to fans. We acquired still shots that we dolled out in order to tease fans and whet their appetites for more.

We also had giveaways through Facebook and Twitter that included posters and t-shirts. The picture on the t-shirt was the same as the posters, an open mouth with an eye in it.

We used a young woman to model the t-shirt for pictures, which generated an overwhelmingly positive response. We recieved multiple  likes, comments and shares based on the picture alone. Many of the comments also referred to our model, and there’s little doubt she helped in the popularity of the pictures.

The Theater Bizzare

For a movie that’s only receiving a limited release, The Theatre Bizarre has a strong online following. Numerous horror blogs have written articles about the movie and the Facebook and Twitter campaigns  have both gotten great exposure.

Our team monitors several channels throughout the day and focuses on engaging and interacting with fans that often look for answer to ticket availability, screening times and venues, and more.

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In the last post, we talked a bit about how staff should always motivate customers to share their awesome experiences online. Reviews and fan interaction makes the Google juice flow, and you want your cup to run over. The first thing we’ll focus on is getting the online interactions you REALLY need: from the fans.

If you can’t get your customer base interacting online, your social media campaign is less effective than it could be.

Worth the Effort

Generating fan action isn’t simple. While some people live to talk about how awesome your product is or their experience was, the average person doesn’t. They walk away satisfied and if it happens to come up, they may mention it to a friend. They mean well, but life is busy and they often forget to go back online and write a review. If they’ve never used a site like Yelp! before, they may be turned off by the registration process. There are tons of reasons this happens, and no way to account for them all.

However, there is one way to overcome it. Incentive. If you offer the customer a reward for participating online, you can easily overcome any reason to not do so. The greater the reward, the more likely the customer is to respond.

• A 15% discount will generate a few reviews, but a 25% discount will probably lead to more interaction than you can handle. However, you don’t want people spamming reviews for discounts, so you need to put a limit, such as one per customer or even one per review site.
• Offering deals for checking in on Foursquare is a common tactic, and is built right into the service. Try offering a bonus for anyone who writes a review or tip as well.
• Offer contests in your store to encourage people to follow you on Twitter or Facebook. Offer a reward after a certain number of followers is achieved.
• You can also offer rewards for people who Tweet about you.

All of these techniques will generate an increase in customer interaction. And if you keep maintaining contests and incentives for people to talk about you, you’ll certainly reap the rewards.

Aside from simple word of mouth, the more people talk about you, the more other people will notice. And increased traffic leads to increased social activity (tweets, likes, +1s, etc), which in turn is noticed by search engines, boosting your SEO results and driving more people to your site.

It’s all a big cycle and all you have to do is give it a little push now and again.

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Google. They love to make our lives harder by making things easier. With the new Google Search Plus Your World (SPYW), Google+ results from your circles are popping in at the top of the search results. While Facebook and Twitter complain about anti-trust laws for not being included (Google says they didnt want to share data with them), the fact is, most people who use Google don’t care. They’re going to keep plugging in search terms and expecting results. And if someone in one of their circles happened to +1 something related, it’s going to pop up first, no matter what the content.

Search Plus Your World In Video… Google Style

So much for your social media efforts, huh? Well, maybe not.

G+ is here to stay, and if you’re ignoring it still, what’s wrong with you? G+ has become integral to national and local internet marketing campaigns. And now with SPYW, social media is equally if not more important than traditional SEO techniques.

Beyond Keywords

While proper usage of keywords and the like is still critical, content is king baby. Now it’s about getting people to +1 your posts, so when their friends see it, bam! You come up number one. It’s more important than ever to generate unique, quality content that engages users and makes them want to share it, or at least +1 it.

Because now, you could beat out national brands and social media campaigns worth millions of dollars, simply because you got someone’s friend to +1 your post. You did install that Google button on your blog, right?

Shout! Shout! Let It All Out!

Of course, we all write quality content, right? Sure.

But it’s still not going to go anywhere until someone starts spreading it around. That’s why it’s critically important to use ALL of your resources. Especially fellow employees and client employees.

Every single person even remotely connected to the campaign should be spreading the word. If you have 20 employees, and the client has 20 employees, then your goal should be to have 40 +1’s on that post within a day.

There’s no reason this shouldn’t happen, and yet it never does. It’s in your company’s best interests and the clients best interests. It takes 30 seconds to email a link to everyone involved, and 30 seconds to +1 it. Within one minute, your post could be at the top of the G+ food chain.

+1 to Infinity

With 40 +1s on a post, it’s going to get around. Their friends will find it and +1 it, and then their friend’s friends will find it, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Ok, that’s really a best case scenario, and you shouldn’t put too much expectation into one blog post. However, if you’re pumping out even a single post a week, and you get 40 +1s on each one, then at the end of the year, you’ll have 2,080 +1s to your campaign! That’s going to generate results because SPYW is making damn sure of it. It’s only polite to take advantage of it.

You did create your Google+ business page right?

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I wasn’t born on the Outer Banks. I wasnt even born in the U.S. But I’ve grown fond of the Outer Banks and I’m proud of calling myself a local. That’s why I was shocked to learn that interest for the Outer Banks has fallen 55% since July 2004!

Let me explain – while performing keyword research for an SEO client on the Outer Banks, we ran across worrisome data.

Search Demand For The Outer Banks Is Steadily Falling

The graphic below comes from Google Insights for Search, a tool that compiles Worldwide search data:

I decided to dig a bit deeper, and found out that the OBX had quite the trendy status back in 2004. Beaches were more untamed back then, apparently. It was around that time the famous OBX Real Estate industry was making millionaires left and right and construction jobs were soaring, attracting not just tourists, but investors. A couple of Real Estate crisis later, along with increased gas and rental prices, we may start to understand the scenario.

But one thing that macro economic signals fail to address is the competition exerted by other beach towns and their tourism boards. Specially due to the powerful tools available in Search Engine Marketing, towns were able to gain crucial exposure for vacation-related searches.

Ranking For Non-Branded Keywords

The Outer Banks Visitors Bureau does a lot of things right. Their positioning for branded keywords (those that contain “Outer Banks” within the query) is extremely strong, and they maintain their site well updated. But they’re completely missing the boat on non-branded keywords, which are fundamental when trying to raise awareness.

Of course, ranking for all of the keywords above is no easy feat. But even if we launch a Pay Per Click campaign aimed at those terms, with a 2% CTR, we’re looking at an additional 10,000 visits every month, based on the search volume for the term “family vacation” alone.

Similar Cities Are Pushing Harder

The graph below shows how aggressively Charleston is pushing its SEO campaign, compared to the OBX or Myrtle Beach:

Click for larger Image

I’ve recommended stronger backlinks on both SEO Blueprint for Tent Rentals and Spencer Yatchs. On this case, however, the Tourism Board needs to focus more on their anchor text.

With a more diverse backlink anchor profile, focused on non-branded terms, the OBX can begin to compete for bigger keywords and more exposure.

But The OBX Tourism Board Is Good

Their Google AdWords display campaign is fairly well-structured AND well-designed.

While performing research for this post, I noticed 2 fantastic OBX ads. They were clear, had a giant call to action, and very prominent on the pages. This means that whoever is running their campaign is doing a great job at retargeting and we have a great designer!

But they’re missing the boat by not optimizing their search campaign (the one that shows on the search results) for the keywords I showed above. Unfortunately, I’ve only seen PPC ads on search results pages that involved branded keywords for “Outer Banks”.

Final Thoughts

We’re not employed by the Tourism Board. Even though we’d love to get our hands dirty and outrank Myrtle Beach and other beaches, we have no tie whatsoever in this industry. If you’re the current SEO for the OBX Tourism Board, let us know, and we’d be happy to help.

The comments are all yours!

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However, the SEO blueprint idea got a lot of buzz from the community, and I want to continue posting them. Today, we’ll explore the party rental industry in New Jersey. This choice is completely random, just because I see ConTent Party Rentals’ trucks on my way to work all the time. Shall we dig in?

Brief On-Page Analysis

Their homepage does a good job of simplifying navigation by giving visitors big, easy-to-click buttons that link to their main services – Tent, Chairs, Stage, and Table rentals. Those landing pages are great at answering a major question – PRICE. But they miss several very important aspects necessary to great conversion rates:

• More images per product
• Product dimensions
• Product Reviews

Aside from that, the entire domain lacks a healthy amount of content. Most pages barely have 100 words of content, and most of the time, that content is repeated on every page.

Digging Into Off-Page Analysis

A brief open site explorer report tells a pretty worrisome story:

In the report you see a comparison against a site in the very same industry that we built for a client on the Outer Banks. It’s a site that we havent optimized in almost a year, and it’s not their primary website. I was surprised to see the contrast.

This report shows a great need for – of course – strong link-building. Yeah, link-building is the “magical pill” for SEO, but a deeper glance reviews absolutely no social presence, which can be an important source of domain authority.

Top Keyword Opportunities

As in all successful SEO campaigns, we begin by looking at Google Keyword Tool to determine which keywords have the most search volume. Clearly, search volume only dictates a part of the campaign. But we’ll get there – check out what the biggest keywords are for this industry:

Even though Party Rentals has, by far, the biggest search volume, that keyword is very generic. Somebody looking for party rentals could be looking for tents, tables, chair, chinaware, or even just a popcorn machine for their children’s birthday party. It’s hard to asses relevancy in these cases, and often times, when chasing generic keywords we spend a ton of time and money without a clear idea of Return On Investment. After all, ROI is the only way to keep track of your search optimization team.

So we’re going to look into the keyword Tent Rentals. Not just because it’s the 2nd highest volume keyword, but because it is targeted. And because it’s a large-ticket item with a great profit margin, one that usually triggers additional sales of smaller items, such as chairs and tables.

Taking the Campaign with Local SEO

Okay, so tent rentals is our winning keyword. That’s great, but we dont want to optimize simply for “tent rentals”, since they dont service the entire US. We’ll have much better results tapping into local keywords. Let’s dig into their local market and figure out our plan of action:

“Tent Rentals NJ” and “tent rentals NY” have a very similar search volume. Depending on where Content makes most of their business, we’d pick one or the other. Without that data, based on current rankings, I’d focus on “tent rentals NJ”. After all, it’s better to start with poor rankings than no ranking at all. See the chart below, from SEOMOZ’s rank tracker:

Bring In The Competition!

Mesmerize your eyes with some of the competition:

Lol. I cant believe this site is still ranking after so many Panda iterations. You know what’s worse? They have pretty impressive authority scores:

The Good News & The Attack Plan

Competition is certainly not the strongest. There are tons of opportunities for a well-optimized site to take over. If we were in charge of Content Party’s SEO, we’d focus on:

1. Improved Site Structure – more content, more pictures, maybe even some Youtube Slideshows
2. Relevant link-building – most of their customers are corporations, that might have blogs. If they had a post about their party, they could link back to Content.
3. Social Integration – mobilizing wedding planners, party coordinators, and even staff to Like, Tweet, and +1 their page can do wonders for their domain authority

Final Thoughts

Online, Content Party Rentals good certainly use a hand. The party rental industry is highly competitive, but focusing on niche services they have the opportunity to gain precious market share. And, with tents as their main service, generating a great return-on-investment wont be a problem.

Now, I must say – we’re not working for Content Party Rentals or any other company in their industry. I picked their company randomly, and I can do the same for yours, if you want. Just leave me a comment and we’ll get our team on it!

Finally – if you decide to use some of the ideas we shared here, at least link back to us and tell us how you did it in the comments.

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Friend of mine launched her business not too long ago, and is doing quite well during her inaugural month. Love seeing her gloat on Facebook about all the new business. We’re not close friends, but she’s worked for us in the past, so I reached out to congratulate her.

“Congratulations on the big success, Jane! Your marketing seems to be doing fantastic” I said, secretly hoping she’d thank me for teaching her one or two things about online marketing. Yeah, Mr. Honesty here. “Well, thank you Leo, but I’m not doing any marketing at all!” That was worrisome. What do you mean, no marketing? No ads, no billboards, no AdWords, no nothing? I was desperate to understand. Eventually, she told me, “Two of our local articles wrote very positive pieces about our grand opening, and my family has been telling everybody to stop by”.

Okay, that was not so bad. Press coverage, specially positive, is very healthy. Then I asked- “So, how’s traffic to your site? Are you building a client list for email marketing?” I barely lost my jaw when she replied “We never finished our site, the guy disappeared and we didnt feel like chasing him”. Ugh. And to think she had worked for me!

I was very disappointed. Before I logged out, I wanted to extend a hand – “Well Jane, dont you think you should have your site up during the opening, generating leads for you?” and then she said something that hurt just like a punch in the face – “Oh, I dont need it right now. Got more leads than I can handle”.

Ok, Bye, Jane!

Why Market When Things Are Going Well?

Because you want things to continue to be going well. I thought this was obvious, but looking back at some of our most delicate clients, I recognize a large majority of them approached us during a downturn on their businesses. They demanded results yesterday, expecting us to use the magic Google wand and send tons of business their way. Whether we can do that is besides the point – we’ve seen successful Google AdWords campaigns resuscitate businesses within a few weeks.

But having your back against the wall is bad in any situation. And that’s what marketing I call “remedy marketing” – campaigns aimed at fixing something that broke a while back (business doesnt just suddenly disappear). Remedy marketing has it’s place, after all, we get sick sometimes. But if after you finish your round of cough syrup you decide to take a walk in the snow wearing your speedos, dont expect to stay healthy for too long.

Doctor Visits Vs Vitamins

A visit to your doctor will run at least $80, if you dont need any exams. A bottle of vitamins wont cost you more than $30. The same applies for online marketing.

When you want extreme dedication to your project in order to generate results ASAP, expect to pay extra for those extra hours. It’s something we recommend clients avoid at all costs, since it doesnt always generate better results.

Sharpen Your Marketing During Good Times

If things are going well, use your marketing budget to venture into new keywords, new markets. Strengthen your SEO for eCommerce Use it to increase your social presence, by running like-fueled Facebook ads campaigns, or by allocating resources to your new Google+ Business Page.

The idea is to prevent bad times from happening. But even when they do, with a solid web presence, you’re able to quickly identify your biggest money makers using Analytics, reach your customers via email marketing, and engage your current fans/followers in a contest to drum up new business. Things become more flexible when you understand your traffic, you have a strong voice in social media, and a responsive email list.

And really – is there anything else one can do to prevent bad times? Focusing on things you can control – SEO, PPC, Social Media – you can better shield yourself from almost anything Wall Street, Washing, FBI, IMF, or the GOP throw your way. Dont you think?

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Fairy Tale Made In China

The outdated, narrow minded, holding-on-for-dear-life folks of Hollywood have lobbied their way into Congress with the Protect IP Act / Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a bill that wants to put you in jail for posting that horrible karaoke video on Youtube last night.

China runs the most complex online censorship program on the planet, and the US is now considering a law that would mirror the blood-stopping powers of the Great Firewall. Consider the implications:

- You post a video of your latest set to a large online community of DJs. A copyright holder complains about one of the songs in the hour-long set and complains to a censorship official. You can go to jail. The online community can be forcefully taken down.

- After finding a very funny LOLCat image of a feline imitating Rihanna’s dance pose, you post it to your Facebook along with a picture of Rihanna that you found on Google. That picture had a copyright and the holders see it. You can go to jail. Facebook can forcefully taken down.

That’s Stupid. Why Do Such Things?

The intent, like usual, is valid – stop “shady” sites like PirateBay that allow illegal torrents to be downloaded. The good folks at the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America have spoken in support of bill, of course. They claim illegal downloads lead to loss of jobs.

But again, as the savvy internet users that they are, Congresswomen and men went too far and did too little. They turned sites such as Youtube and Facebook liable for all users’ content. It’s not enough they’re already able to place ads on videos and even remove the videos completely.

What YOU Can Do To Help

1. Stop SOPA – sign up and send a physical letter to Congress demanding this bill never passes.
2. Call Your Representatives – let them know how silly this is and how that’d hurt not just our leisure time, but innovative startups that fuel this economy.
3. Educate your friends and those around you. Information is power.

Let us know what you’re doing to help and if you have any questions in the comments below.

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