By Marc Purtell | @MarcPurtell | Director, SEO
MediaWhiz’s SEO experts share their wisdom in a new white paper, “Leveraging SEO’s Brand-Building Powers.”
SEO is no longer just about driving traffic; it’s about building a brand.
When marketers consider branding, search engine optimization typically doesn’t come to mind. SEO has long been used as a vehicle for driving highly qualified visitors to brands’ websites. But SEO is no longer just about driving traffic; it’s about building a brand.
There is often a power struggle within organizations as to how advertising dollars should be spent on branding versus SEO. Rather than fighting that tug of war for SEO budget, marketers can position SEO as part of their overall branding effort rather than a silo marketing channel.
Marketers’ requests for investment in SEO are made easier when they make the case for SEO’s brand- and online reputation-enhancing qualities. With that in mind, MediaWhiz has written a new guide for marketers to use to tap into SEO’s inherent brand-building powers.
The guide represents a new and innovative way of thinking about how brands and marketers can best use SEO strategies and tactics to enhance their brand’s reputation, public image and search engine rankings.
Learn why brand authority trumps paid search. Explore how to use SEO tactics to improve your brand’s online and offline reputation. Round out your SEO knowledge with best practices for leveraging SEO’s brand-building powers. All that and more can be found in MediaWhiz’s new white paper, “Leveraging SEO’s Brand-Building Powers.”
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
Virtually everything in the world goes through evolution. Some are just faster and have greater impact than others.
Search engine optimization is no exception. It is a form of marketing that has evolved at light speed over the past 15 years.
Drastic changes beginning with the rise of Google in the late 1990s, and carried out through search engine algorithm updates, the growth of the World Wide Web and increasing expertise within the SEO community have become commonplace in how search engine optimization is handled.
In order to understand the future of SEO it’s important to first understand where it has been. For a visual representation of the evolution of SEO, download this presentation by Adam Riff, MediaWhiz’s SVP of digital strategy. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Pinterest Fosters Unique Shopping Behaviors | eMarketer
A new eMarketer report delves into the retail activity spurred by the latest social network to make headlines — Pinterest. The visually focused, aspirational site has grown tremendously, and it offers a lot of promise for retailers, assuming they can get users to link images with product offerings and purchases.
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By Darrell Long | SEO Innovation Lead
Google’s announcement this week of its much-anticipated Disavow Links tool marks a new era for search marketing. Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Web spam team, released a video detailing the new tool, why it was launched and its value to brands and marketers. Watch the video here.
The tool is live and can be found here.
What the Disavow Links Tool Offers Marketers
The Disavow tool allows webmasters to inform Google of links pointing to their website they believe are irrelevant to their brand or may be spam.
Google cautions webmasters to use the Disavow Links tool with restraint. Marketers should only use this tool if they have already reviewed their link profile and contacted the hosts of potentially harmful links pointing to their website, requesting removal of the links to no avail. (more…)
MediaWhiz’s leaders are continually sought after as resources for opinions, advice and expertise, based on our deep understanding of industry trends, the needs of our customers and the broader marketplace in which we operate.
For the week of Oct. 1-5, 2012, MediaWhiz experts were quoted or featured on a variety of digital media news and trends, including debunking the myth that proposed Do Not Track legislation will kill online advertising and what Bruce Springsteen can teach marketers about success brand marketing in the digital age. | Read previous MediaWhiz In the News posts.
Do Not Buy the Do Not Track Hype
Digiday | Oct. 2, 2012 | Op-Ed by Peter Klein
Reality check: The proposed Do Not Track legislation won’t kill online advertising. It may hamper innovation and cause financial hardship for businesses that thrive on online consumer-data tracking, but it won’t kill a $31 billion industry.
Not all see it this way, of course. 33Across CMO Allie Kline recently called on marketers to “fight [the] anti-tracking forces.” It’s a call to action growing with increasing alarm in the digital media and online publishing industries.
That argument, which my MediaWhiz colleagues and I respect, comes about 10 years too late. Some form of anti-tracking legislation is inevitable given the industry’s size and influence. How marketers, publishers and advertisers respond to this legislation will determine whether the industry retains its sizable influence on consumers’ purchasing habits. Read more … (more…)
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC. Read previous Friday Five posts here.
Mobile Ads: What Works and What Doesn’t | Wall Street Journal
It’s no secret that there are a lot of bad mobile ads out there. From poor creative to brands not realizing that a consumers’ tiny smartphone screen isn’t the best place to use detailed copy in an ad, the number of bad mobile ads seems outweigh the good ones. But as this Wall Street Journal article examines, those characteristics are starting to change. Marketers are learning more about how to work around the “fat finger effect” that afflicts smartphone users. And they are also tailoring their mobile ads specifically for users of different smartphones, rather than just scaling them to size.
RELATED: WSJ Article on Mobile Ads Nearly ‘Content Free’ (i2G)
Social Media Proves Value, Gets Budgets | eMarketer
Despite prognostications from naysayers suggesting otherwise, budgets for social media marketing are on the rise, with both B2B and B2C marketers proving they have generated leads and sales from their social outreach, according to eMarketer.
140 Characters of Risk: Some CEOs Fear Twitter | Wall Street Journal
“CEOs should accept that social media is part of their job description.” That’s the prognosis of this Wall Street Journal analysis of Twitter use by Fortune 500 CEOs. Despite having been around for more than five years, some CEOs still don’t see the value of Twitter or are leery of using the social network. But in an era when consumers expect transparency from brands and their executives, those fears may be misplaced and potentially damaging to a company’s bottom line, reports The Wall Street Journal. (more…)
By Adam Riff | @AdamRiff | SVP, Digital Strategy
Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt of an op-ed that was originally published in Search Engine Land.
There is little doubt that mobile search is the hot topic in the SEO world at the moment. Some brands are now finding that more than 30 percent of all searches come from mobile devices,according to Mobile Marketer. It’s fair to say that mobile search is quickly moving out of the Stone Age and into the digital age.
That’s the premise of a new insight paper, Mobile SEO Best Practices, published recently by my company, MediaWhiz (disclosure: I lead MediaWhiz’s search marketing and digital strategy divisions). In addition to a list of our top-10 tips for effective mobile SEO, the paper offers marketers a step-by-step guide to delivering effective mobile search campaigns.
The tips range from the simple (e.g., understanding the differences in how people search on mobile devices compared to their searches on desktops) to the complex, such as best practices to ensure a site’s mobile content can be properly viewed and crawled by search engines.
Below are my top-10 tips for effective mobile SEO. What are yours? Share your tips in the comments section.
1. Be A Search Psychologist
Searchers using mobile devices enter keyword queries differently than they do with desktop applications. They use shorter tail phrases.
Often, their searches are more local in nature and more prone to rely on Google’s Autocomplete feature complete a query. When optimizing meta title and descriptions, it is important to optimize for these shorter tail queries.
2. Think Social-first, Mobile-second
Mobile users tend to want to be “entertained,” and in many instances, they are connected 24/7 to their social media networks via apps. Content displayed for mobile users should be “entertaining.” When developing online content, think social-first, mobile-second.
Mobile sites should have social media links embedded on every page, as many smartphone users are connected to their social networks 24/7. Doing so will increase exposure, traffic and engagement by ensuring content is easily shared across social networks.
The examples below from Macy’s and Tiffany’s show how a social-first, mobile-second mindset with site design leads to more visually appealing mobile sites.
Read the full op-ed in Search Engine Land.
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Mobile SEO isn’t your grandfather’s SEO.
Mobile SEO is one of the fastest-growing sectors of digital marketing.
Mobile SEO is hot. It is one of the fastest-growing sectors in digital media and marketing. It is also a huge growth opportunity for brands and marketers — if they know how to properly optimize their mobile campaigns. Mobile SEO best practices are no longer a nice-to-have; they are essential to any effective digital marketing campaign.
The steep rise of consumers accessing the Web and performing searches on their mobile devices has generated a significant demand on mobile-device-friendly Web content. Search engines are indexing this mobile content and deciding when it is most appropriate to serve it to consumers, depending on the device they are using. At this time, Google and Bing have had conflicting recommendations for Web developers with respect to how their search engines index and serve up this influx of mobile-friendly content.
While the debate continues for search engines, MediaWhiz believes that best practices will evolve and, eventually, an industry-wide standard will form.
It’s with this in mind that MediaWhiz is proud to release its new insights paper, “Mobile SEO Best Practices.” This informative paper was unveiled this week in the Search Engine Land newsletter. It presents our point of view on the best practices for digital and mobile marketers, helping them ensure their mobile marketing campaigns are SEO-effective.
This insight paper will help marketers:
- Develop successful mobile-search campaigns
- Create mobile-friendly Web pages and content that attracts consumers’ attention
- Understand new technologies that help brands rank first in mobile searches
The mobile marketing space is fragmented. Cut through the clutter with insight from integrated digital media agency MediaWhiz. Let us know how we can help you solve your mobile search and SEO needs. Contact our sales team for a consultation.
Download Now >
Welcome to The Friday Five, curated reads about marketing, advertising and digital media from the team at @MediaWhizLLC.
Bing Offers Own Version of ‘Pepsi Challenge’ Against Google: ‘Bing It On’ | Search Engine Land
Bing is breaking out its own version of the infamous “soda wars” between Coca-Cola at Pepsi in the 1980s. This week, it launched an ad campaign called “Bing It On” in which it asks people on the street to compare search results between its Bing search engine and Google. According to Search Engine Land, Microsoft claim’s that “people prefer Bing by 2:1 over Google.” Unfortunately for Microsoft, the stats on consumer use of Bing don’t reflect that comparison. More than 65 percent of Americans use Google as their regular search engine, according to SmartInsights.com, while Bing comes in third, behind Yahoo! Search, at just under 14 percent.
The Social Media Hype Cycle: Can It Bring Us to Our Socially Happy Place? | MediaWhiz Blog
“Facebook has failed” screamed the headlines all summer long, as Facebook’s stock continued to tumble amid mounting analyst, investor and advertiser concerns over the efficacy of Facebook’s ad platform. For Facebook, the concern present a troubling reality: it must evolve or die. The trick to keeping Facebook relevant to users and brands, according to Ryan Partnership’s Michael Velasco, will be to not only enhance the feeling that users have of the social network being indispensable to their daily lives, to extend that feeling to new areas and features that users find appealing.
[RELATED: Join MediaWhiz on Sept. 28 for a Social Media Week Chicago panel exploring the “Social Media Hype Cycle.” Register here.] (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | @KeithTrivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Editor’s note: The following post was originally published in iMedia Connection.
Google has always been a search marketing dynamo. It has literally invented or made mainstream several well-known search functions, including autocomplete of search terms and the basic structure of search-based online advertising that is used today. So it should come as no surprise that in its seemingly never-ending race to one-up its competitors, it has recently introduced or improved two critical functions of its search business:
The latter isn’t an earth-shattering announcement. Google launched voice search for both desktop and mobile platforms in 2011 and now serves dozens of languages. This latest update, according to Direct Marketing News, adds languages from various European markets, including Swedish, European Portuguese and Finnish, along with regional tongues such as Basque, Catalan, and Galician. The company said in a blog post that the addition of those newly added languages will add nearly 100 million people to its voice search function.
It’s the integration of Gmail into search results that has generated the most intrigue. Industry reaction to the announcement varied. Some said it wasn’t that big of a deal, while others called it “interesting and creepy.” (more…)
