3 Tools To Instantly Boost Your Online Marketing
Posted on 02. Nov, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, seo tools, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, tools
[Note from Lee: This week's guest post is from someone I've known from the Search Marketing world for a long time. Bryan Eisenberg is a Wall Street Journal & New York Times Best Selling Author, popular keynote speaker and well respected guru in all things related to marketing and conversion optimization. We serve on the SES Conference Board of Advisors together and as he's elevated his status in the business world, has always been helpful and full of practical advice. You'll see that in this post about several tools for which he is an advisor.]
True or false? You never seem to have enough time in the day to get your job done.
If you answered “true”, then lets explore some tools/services that will maximize your time and effectiveness. Marshall McLuhan said “We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” If the explosion of tools to improve your website and marketing efforts over the last 3 years is any indication of how we are being shaped then there may be hope for the time and resource starved.
If you agree that content is king then we should serve a feast that uses our customers’ own words. All we have to do is leverage all the social and search data that uses our customers’ words. I offer that as a common sense recommendation. However, all too often I see people (even experienced SEMs) failing to leverage this data in their everyday workflow. Don’t you think that access to search and social intelligence while writing content that it would make you a more effective writer?
A recent study I co-authored helped prove that it provided: a significant and consistent impact on search engine results, an increase in reader engagement. and an increase in conversion. It did all that and improved content relevance across a variety of writers and online content types who used a new content coaching tool called Inbound Writer. It’s free for up to 8 documents and month and costs only $19.95 for unlimited documents.
Never write an ad your landing page can’t cash! Do you know who the most successful PPC advertiser of all time is? Amazon! That is because they built their PPC program opposite of the way most people do it. They built and continuously optimize each of their product and category pages to convert at maximum efficiency. They have loads of content to help customers make a buying decision. Only then do they focus on what ads would drive you to that page and then what keywords should trigger that ad. Most advertisers start at the keyword first. One way to avoid that mistake is using a tool like TagCrowd.
TagCrowd will make a word cloud from any text you paste in (i.e. a press release), a plain text file you can upload or a web page url. The larger that words appear on the tag cloud the more times those words appear on the page (tweak the setting for a minimum frequency of 2 or 3 to filter out some noise). One quick look at the tag cloud should give you a good clue about what your landing page is about. Use those words in your ads and as starting points for the keywords you’ll target.
Example of TopRank Newsroom Tag Cloud
What if you could get an army of writers who would compete on a regular basis to improve the effectiveness of your PPC and FaceBook ads and the only time you ever paid them was when they beat your best effort? Well thanks to crowd-sourcing company BoostCTR you can take advantage of that opportunity today. While this company is relatively new, they have been producing guaranteed lifts in click through rates (CTRs) and conversions (by around 30%) for their clients. In fact, they are so confident about their service you can get started with a free trial. You pick the ad group you want their network to optimize, then they will start a contest where their writers compete in an A/B test against your best “control” ad (you pick which of the variations you choose to be included in the contest) and you only pay when you have a winner.
I hope these tool recommendations were useful to you. As an online tool junkie I review tons of other great online marketing tools you can leverage to improve your website and marketing efforts but hopefully these 3 will give you a good head start over your competition.
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3 Tools To Instantly Boost Your Online Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com
5 Keyword Research Alternatives for Mobile, News, Social, Image & Video Optimization
Posted on 26. Sep, 2011 by Lee Odden in Blog, Keyword Research, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, tools
Keyword and topic research is a significant part of Search, Social Media and Content Marketing. An understanding of what customers care about related to a brand’s offering and how that manifests as keywords, helps drive how marketer’s approach content, optimization and promotion.
Over the past 5+ years, the search landscape has evolved significantly and optimization has extended beyond the web page to digital assets like images, PDF’s and video, news, social media and mobile. The increased diversity of content requires internet marketers become more creative in their keyword research in order to fine tune the matching of optimized content with what and where consumers are searching.
There are a mix of standard keyword research tools that most SEO practitioners will use, ranging from WordTracker to WordStream. Here are a mix of keyword tools and ways to use them in order customize keyword research for the increasing diversity of content types and methods of search.
Mobile Keyword Research:
Mobile SEO is the probably the most underrated of SEO practice areas. According to a study by Google, 77% of smartphone users visit search engine websites and 90% of smartphone searches result in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc). That’s pretty compelling data and if you have mobile-specific content, it makes sense to understand what words mobile users are searching with, relevant to your mobile website.
Recommended Mobile Keyword Research Tool: Google AdWords Keyword Research Tool offers several filtering options for mobile: All Mobile Devices, Mobile WAP Devices, Mobile Devices with Full Internet Browsers. Now you can leverage mobile-specific keyword insight when creating content that is likely to be consumed via mobile devices whether it’s a dedicated mobile site or a general website that is mobile friendly.
News Keyword Research:
News optimization can impact ranking of content within news search engines like Google News in addition to Google.com. Many marketers realize that the home page of the major search engines isn’t the only place target audiences are searching. News aggregator websites like Google News can provide an important source of relevant discovery and website traffic from end users and journalists. Internet Marketers that have access to publishing and distribution of content through a trusted Google News Source (website, mobile site or YouTube channel) may want to better optimize their content by understanding what keyword phrases are being used by News Search readers. The difference between popular searches on Google.com vs. Google News might modest, but for popular and trending topics, it could prove a worthy investment.
Recommended News Keyword Research Tool: Übersuggest provides a useful service by collecting the auto-suggested search words provided by Google News as you type. It can do this for Google.com as well. The Google Suggest feature tries to autocomplete user search keywords, suggestion words and phrases based on previous queries. By capturing an alphabetical sequence of the variations on your search phrase, you can get some good ideas about what’s popular and a whole range of variations. The temporal nature of news topics provides an opportunity to identify news topics that Internet Marketers can act on by creating news keyword optimized content. Optimizing news content means end users as well as journalists, analysts and bloggers that research stories will have an easier time of finding your content.
Video Keyword Research:
Video optimization is another hot area for Internet Marketers, especially since there are over 600 new videos published on YouTube every 60 seconds. Videos that rank well on Google have a good chance of also doing well on Google.com. If so, Google will display a thumbnail of the video, which stands out from the mostly text content that makes up most Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Recommended Video Keyword Research Tool: YouTube Promoted Video Keyword Research Tool provides insights into what users are searching for on YouTube with options to source your suggestions from keywords, another YouTube video or a diverse array of demographic information. This tool is intended to work in concert with ads on YouTube, but can provide some useful insight into words video content producers might use with titles, descriptions and even in the script.
YouTube’s Keyword Suggest feature of auto-completing your search phrase is another possible source of keyword ideas. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t make it possible to copy and past the list of phrases that are suggested as Ubgersuggest does above with Google.com and News search.
Social Media Keyword Research:
Social Media Optimization can mean a variety of content types from video to images to blogs, and that makes it a bit trickier to recommend one specific tool. Social media content can be optimized for better visibility in public search engines like Google and Bing as well as the internal search engines that power closed networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. At a minimum, understanding trending social topics can help inform social content planning so marketers can create content that’s being discussed by the social community, “right now”.
Recommended Social Media Keyword Research Tool: socialmention is a general social media search engine that provides a downloadable list of keywords that most often occur in conjunction with whatever it is that you search on. Sources range from Twitter to comments to video to forums.
There are many other tag based sources that you can use for social media optimization keyword research as well including: Delicious, Technorati, StumbleUpon, and Bing Hot Social Topics. But those are simply lists or tag clouds, not in response to a query where you get results based on popularity. Despite that, they could be worth checking for trending topics.
Image Keyword Research:
Image optimization falls in line with the intersection of digital assets and social media. Every 60 seconds, 6,600 images are uploaded to Flickr. Images are often shared through social channels from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram. Images can also appear on certain queries made on Google and Bing as well as their respective image search engines. Well optimized images can provide a very relevant source of traffic to a website.
Recommended Image Keyword Research Tool: Google Insights for Search using the Images filter, provides ”top searches” and “rising searches” relevant to your query. You are also provided with regional interest over time that is presented as an animation highlighting different areas on a map as the popularity of the search term rises there. There are a number of additional filters including geographic region, time frame and industry category. Additional top level filters include News, Web and Product search, so essentially this is another tool for news keyword research as well.
Of course there are many other creative ways and reasons to do keyword research and I’m stopping at my shortlist of 5 so that you might share a few of your own. Have you found keyword research tools specific to other types of search engines or media? Have you used the tools above to any significant effect?
Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. |
5 Keyword Research Alternatives for Mobile, News, Social, Image & Video Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com
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