Mediaboss Marketing

Slingshot SEO addressed the countrys top chief marketing officers yesterday at the Marketing 360 West Exchange conference in San Francisco.

Indianapolis, Indiana (PRWEB) March 05, 2012

Slingshot SEO addressed the gathering on how companies can identify value from SEO (search engine optimization).

We are honored to have been asked to present to this group of enterprise brand marketers, Daren Tomey, Senior VP of Corporate Development for Slingshot SEO. SEO is one of the most cost effective tactics to drive lead generation while increasing your brands online presence. In addition to being a thought-leader in SEO, Slingshot SEO helps clients achieve first page rankings on Google and Bing by planning, managing, and executing SEO campaigns for targeted keyword categories. We help our clients develop a great online presence that both users and search engines want.

The Marketing 360 Exchange West Coast is an invitation-only event that brings together senior marketing executives focused on executing leading strategies to achieve brand excellence and greater profitability.

About Slingshot SEO

Indianapolis-based Slingshot SEO was ranked #58 on the 2011 list of Incs 500 Fastest Growing Companies, and was #14 on the 2011 Tech200. Founded in 2006, Slingshot SEO provides professional SEO services to more than 150 clients across the country. The companys results are driven by a tireless passion to make deserving brands digitally relevant. For more information about Slingshot SEO and to read customer reviews, visit: http://www.slingshotseo.com

Kate Snedeker Slingshot SEO 888.603.7337 Email Information

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Slingshot SEO Addresses Top CMOs at Marketing 360 West Exchange

Personalization is here! Wait, it was kind of already here, so now is it totally here?

Its often hard to dissect how far we are into personalization already as we work past the ramblings of many who are angry that Google and Bing might actually know something about them. We also have to look back at where weve been as well, and as SEOs, formulate where we need to go in the future.

Personalization is the logical next step in the progression of the top search engines. In Google alone, we have seen the entry of local results, the birth of universal search, the Caffeine update, Google Instant, and Search Plus Your World. This shows that our content marketing efforts need to be fresh, fast, and most importantly relevant.

Googles Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt reinforced the fact that changes to search are on the horizon.

Google search will continue to become more personalized, getting away from the 10 link approach that we see in search results today," Schmidt said at the Mobile World Congress.

So, why is everyone so mad? In the previous context, Google wants to give us the most relevant results possible even if it is a little creepy. Im willing to accept the creepiness of artificial intelligence knowing everything about me in order to make my life easier via extremely relevant search results.

When GPS systems became a featured component in newer cars did we freak out that a computer knew where we were? Did we pull over and look for our horse and buggy? No, we appreciated the convenience and it probably saved a few headaches getting to our destination. This is simply the same thing that search engine personalization is evolving into.

First off, Google and Bing are becoming smarter at corralling SEOs into todays search model. The days of building out pages with content just to target a certain term, building some links, and walking away are over.

Optimized sites/content are now becoming a vehicle for forward facing web marketing. Content must have likability. It must be shared and be of the quality that will be passed among the masses socially. In the future, the algorithm won't accept that you feature some keyword terms on a page and some randomly associated links.

Gone are the days of waiting for traffic to arrive at your site. Instead of building a website, now youre building a brand. A brand that delivers content through news outlets, a brand that is engaged in social media, a brand that pushes content through email and through other avenues just to name a few.

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SEO & Personalization: An Evolving Relationship

The challenge for every website owner is to keep their websites updated with quality content catering to all search options. SEO 2012 is all about Content Creativity , Content Excellence and Content Marketing . The main focus is on creating unique content in all forms images, videos, infographics, text, audio, etc. Google has focused on quality content like never before with their series of Panda Updates in 2011.

Content marketing and social media presence are not the new SEO and are certainly not replacing search, they are supplementing SEO along with all the other on-page and off-page factors on which we have been working on till date. Panda or no Panda content has been king since the first web page was published on the web. It is Google who has become capable in picking quality content in 2012 and hence wants to reward sites with quality content with more visibility.

So, adding regular great content is the key to the right start, but just having great content is not enough, as the search engines are checking the social buzz too. So, this content (the Link) has to be shared on the social media platforms for a good outreach and a viral ripple effect. The conversations around the shared content add the valuable trust and authority factor and the contextual mentions and the replies add to the magnitude of this factor.

Every piece of content in any form and on any platform created by you or shared by you is adding on to the data on the web. This data created and shared by you gets inter-linked and becomes your online identity. The social signals add to the reputation and this online reputation is the lifeline of any online presence. In the real world, You are what your thoughts are on the web You are what You Share and where you share.

As Tim Berners-Lee (The Man Who Invented The WWW and created the HTTP protocol ) has shared in the video below all this data on the web whether it is government data, enterprise data or social data is inter-linked and has relationships and all these signals are establishing your web presence. The likes, the shares, +1s, etc. are just a medium to quantify these signals . [YouTube Video] The statement made by Avinash Kaushik at SES London this year is also stated below gives an indication about the social search impact. [Embedded Tweet]

Social media is not about facebook, twitter etcit has arch deeper impact than we appreciate right now @avinash #seslondon

SES Conference (@SESConf) February 21, 2012

The SEO just tries to help you to highlight these factors and makes it possible for the search engines to record it in their index to influence better search presence. Just like in real life you need to have an attractive sign board, a good product, a competitive price, good WOM, efficient sales people, etc. which help in improving your business .

Google also tries to find such signals via many platforms and metrics. The social media buzz and the UGC generate your digital WOM, your website content reflects the product details and company ethics, The Time On Site and the bounce rate metrics indicate the interest level of the people in the products, the online sales indicate the acceptance of the product and pricing, etc.

SEO is all about helping you establish your over all web presence in a qualitative way so that each and every foot print of yours on the web gets indexed and your best foot is put forward, for every search made on the web. Though SEO is a subset of online marketing , it is has got its own niche in the whole online marketing scenario.

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About Content, Inter-Linked Data And SEO

A well-defined brand no longer guarantees search placement. It is only through enterprise-level cultural changes, informed by a close monitoring of search evolution, that sustained SEO success can occur.

Yes, brands are still a very strong signal when it comes to ranking, however, recent advancements like authorship rank and Search Plus Your World have hyper-focused our promotion strategies.

A presumption of entitlement drives many legacy brands to complacency. Too often, we see an organization enjoy a few years of strong search results and then relax into weve got that covered mode, allowing its focus, vital resources and attention to shift to other initiatives.

But it is essential for any in-house marketer/SEO/embedded strategist to push past the corporate ego and bureaucracy to assess and identify changing technical / editorial barriers while protecting the protocol vital to traffic success.

The first sign of internal SEO procedures breaking down is often a competitor doing it better, faster and using your own assets. Nothing gets your boss attention faster than a competitor outranking you with your own ideas or contentnot necessarily via scraping or syndication, but by rewriting or covering popular stories with better optimization.

Sometimes getting beaten is a simple misstepa missed title tag on your partbut it could also be indicative of larger problems with your content creation process, from execution of best practices to keyword research to XML sitemap inclusion.

In SEO, all roads lead back to editorial. Content producers (who already have plenty to do) find and amplify the voice of a company, guarding the brands editorial integrity. But the days of search engine optimization responsibilities falling to another department are long gone.

In this age, content teams are expected to fully understand their audience. In fact, audience cultivation is their obligation. This means content producers must perform regular keyword research around their topics, identifying search and seasonal trends, monitoring news and user behavior and integrating the data back into the workflow, style guides and processes.

A lot of this information is already well known. For example, ask anyone on the editorial team and Im sure theyll know if readers use the search phrase picture over photo. But they can do more.

Thats not to say the SEO specialists shouldnt be involved as well. SEO advisers can still educate and guide the process. But if keyword research isnt decentralized, a bottleneck of tremendous proportions can effectively kill this critical step in strategy.

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Why So Many Companies Fail At Enterprise SEO

**Full disclosure, this is meant to be a humorous type post and rant for fellow SEO professional, sorry if I have offended anyone! 🙂

After 13 years in this industry, I have had my share of absolutely horrible SEO leads. I know that dealing with bad leads comes with the territory of being a business owner, regardless of industry, but sometimes I feel like SEO has to deal with more (or much worse) bad leads than other industries. Here are four of my favorite worst SEO leads Ive come across over the years. How many of these have you had to deal with?

Whenever I talk with an SEO lead that refers to themselves as a serial entrepreneur, all I can usually think is hyper client. I know there are people out there that make a fantastic living building a business from the ground up and then selling it and moving onto the next project, but Ive found that the ones who are really successful at that arent trying to juggle 10 companies at once.

I was speaking with a lead a few months ago that had 90 websites he wanted SEO services for. Almost all of them were brand new (meaning zero search engine trust factor), poorly designed and had next to no content. I dont like taking on clients that I dont think I can actually help, and I knew that my company wasnt a good fit for this site owner. I recommended that he take a few SEO training courses and learn the basics of SEO for himself and really narrow his focus on which sites he thought had the most potential and then maybe a few months down the road we could revisit an SEO partnership. His response? He didnt have the money to take any SEO classes. Then how are you going to pay for full-service SEO on 90 websites?!

In my experience, serial entrepreneurs usually turn into hyper clients. They have a hard time focusing on what needs to be done (and getting in down in a set time frame) and arent ready to settle in for the long haul. SEO requires a lot of patience and a lot of trust in your provider, and leads like this usually have neither.

I do my best to get back to every lead that comes into my company, whether it is by phone or our online lead form. I am more than happy to spend a few hours going back and forth with a potential SEO client and walking them through my companys SEO process. I do my best to address any concerns and questions, especially if they have been burned by a black hat SEO company in the past. Ill draw up a proposal, and even meet them in person if I think its a potentially great client. But then what happens sometimes? They vanish off the face of the earth. Suddenly emails stopped getting answered, phone calls dont get returned and that proposal is probably sitting in someones trash folder.

If you decide your site isnt ready for outsourcing SEO, or you found another SEO provider to work with thats fine, just let me know! Ive put a lot of my time and effort into guiding you through the process, please dont just disappear on me.

How many phone calls, proposals, face-to-face meetings and back-and-forth emails does one lead really need? I understand that choosing an SEO provider isnt like deciding where you want to go for lunch, but there comes a point where you have all the information I can give you without you becoming an actual client. I want to make the process as transparent as possible and make you feel confident about choosing my SEO company as your SEO provider but there is only so much I can do!

Also, dont expect me to outline an entire onsite and link building campaign for your website during the sales process. Im not holding out on you, but I truly cant make educated recommendations without having access to your sites analytics, an insiders look at your business and much more. Unless you are prepared to let me dig through your site dont expect a custom SEO plan upfront.

I really hate it when leads try to play me against other SEO firms. If you liked what you heard from another SEO company so much that you feel the need to bring it up in our conversation why havent you hired them already? Trust your gut and go with it! I especially feel like it comes up a lot when leads start asking about pricing and they are trying to get me to lower the cost of my monthly SEO services by saying that company X was only going to charge them so much. I understand that some leads are just trying to get a feel for the types of SEO providers out there and figure out which one is the best fit for them, but it feels like others are trying to pit us against each other just so they can get a better deal. There is no secret to SEO success, and trying to convince me that another SEO company knows one and I better divulge it if I want you as a client isnt going to work.

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My Favorite Worst SEO Leads