WTC Recap: Mitch Joel, Chris Brogan, and Julien Smith on SEO and its Future

May 17, 2010 By Scott Cowley Leave a Comment

Chris Brogan and Julien Smith at Women Tech Council

SEO is alive and flourishing, according to some best-selling authors and professional bloggers. In a Utah event sponsored by the Women Tech Council in Utah last week, Chris Brogan, Mitch Joel, and Julien Smith drove home the importance of visibility as one of the keys to building online communities and earning consumer trust today.

While they spoke about topics that extend beyond the SEO world, they made some valid points and gave stats that are worth passing on to the SEO community.

From Mitch Joel:

  • The number of clicks on banner ads has declined by 50 percent since 2007. (The overall number makes up a very small fraction of the total number of web users).
  • The average online review score (on a 1-5 scale) is 4.3. This is rather high, considering that many companies are fearful of potentially negative reviews. They shouldn’t be if they’re doing things right. In fact, negative reviews often convert better than positive ones, in instances where the complaint is because of a feature or attribute unimportant to the prospect.
  • Around 20 percent of searches each day are completely unique (never before searched). This demonstrates the importance of long-tail content creation and optimization.
  • Around 80 percent of first brand interactions occur in search results. (No better testament to SEO importance than that)
  • About social media: “Don’t write checks with social media that your website can’t cash.” (from Avinash Kaushik) Investment in driving site traffic only pays off when the site is prepared to receive the traffic.

From Julien Smith:

  • Break patterns to create emotional connections, meaning “do things differently so that people remember you.” There must be something unique about your website, your content, etc. so that an emotional connection is formed.
  • People don’t gather around the profound. They gather around the simple and silly content. Don’t overdo your site content to appeal to a “highest” common denominator, especially if you’re trying to sell. That being said, do use “insider language” and terminology to build reputation and credibility. You can form a community around yourself if your content rewards people who are “in on it.”

From Chris Brogan:

  • We buy from people we know and like, regardless of the value proposition. (You don’t have to worry about being the lowest price if you’re giving people a way to know you and buy from you, and you’re connecting with them)
  • New Media Labs (Brogan’s company) targeted their market with changes in website wording. They put, “Works with Fortune 100 and 500 companies” on the site before they had ever had a client from that group and it brought in business that qualified itself because of that statement.
  • Upcoming trends on the horizon include (1) mobile computing being an increasingly more important ground for ecommerce and interaction, (2) increasing presence of private networks/communities online, (3) development of more sophisticated “social CRMs” that shorten the gap between company and customer.

From the top-secret post-conference Q&A:

  • The future of SEO will be about the integration of content creation with the way humans think. SEO companies should focus on offering content creation as a service to more closely tie keywords to content.
  • Learning social media monitoring and listening is worth more than learning how to use social media messaging tools. Listening transforms your company’s branding and messaging to match what people are talking about rather than the “message” your marketing department made up.
  • There is no such thing as a social media expert. Brogan and Smith both reiterated that they’re both businessmen who know how to use the tools, but who will be around long after the social networks turn over, using new tools and techniques.

Image credit: Sheri Bell-Rehwoldt

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Statistically Insignificant Slice of Wisdom From Conversion Conference

May 12, 2010 By Josh Summerhays Leave a Comment

My head is still spinning from the awesomeness proffered at the inaugural Conversion Conference held last week in San Jose, Calif. Not only could I not share every bit of value (believe me, I tried – to the tune of 160+ tweets), I’m still distilling new insights from my scattered notes.

 

Tweet counts for Conversion Conference

But, since I want to show you how cool I am for being there, here are my main takeaways:

The supply (and value) of conversion optimization (CO) best practices is limited.

If you’re new to conversion optimization, there is plenty to read, learn, and apply in a general sense. However, if you’ve been scarfing down CO goodies for a few years now, there aren’t a lot of new items on the menu that you haven’t tried.

I’m not saying that the CO field is getting stale. Quite the opposite—conversion optimization is a dynamic playing field wherein the majority of opportunity lies in the ability of a marketer to

  1. Discern their customers’ needs and
  2. Test potential solutions for those needs intelligently.

There are plenty of behind-the-times companies that would benefit from a shot of tried-and-true CO best practices, but the opportunity for huge growth lies in continual, smart testing. Learn definitively what works best for your customers, not just for the majority of other businesses, and keep trying to improve their experiences with your company’s website.

The opportunity to gain a competitive advantage through CO is huge … but going fast.

The secret is out about conversion optimization. It’s a lot easier to boost profitability by significantly increasing your conversion rate rather than cramming increasingly more traffic through the same mediocre website experience.

The proliferation of cost-effective, even free, analysis and testing tools has made CO more accessible and potent than it has ever been. If you aren’t getting on board now, you may find yourself hopelessly behind your competition a few months from now.

Conversely, if you establish a ninja-style culture of testing in your organization now, you’ll spin circles around your competitors and entrench yourself as a market leader.

You think you know your customers, but you don’t. You REALLY don’t.

Michael Summers and the great Jakob Nielsen threw a one-two punch that floored me.

What assumptions have you made about your customers and how they interact with your website? You think people get it because you get it.

You’re wrong. Most consumers aren’t wired to use websites the way we’ve decided to build them. Until you see people in action with your website and understand their thoughts and reactions, you will miss opportunities to deliver a more effective, helpful website experience.

Don’t just deal in averages from your data. Take the opportunity to engage in qualitative analysis to add depth to your analytics data, as well as break down your over-educated opinions about it.

In conversion optimization, the cool kids all say “gobbley gook” instead of “clutter”.

Tim Ash, conference organizer and SiteTuners founder, and Matt Mickiewicz, creator of 99designs.com and SitePoint, dropped “gobbley gook” in their presentations.

Inconsequential? I think not!

“Gobbley gook” is a much better descriptor of the absolute mess some companies make of their website and the confusion and frustration they heap on their customers.

Clutter doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Heck, I’ve got a little clutter in just about every personal space I own or occupy and it doesn’t seem to slow me down much.

On the other hand, gobbley gook gets in my way and makes life difficult. My little girl’s tricycle in front of the garage door? Gobbley gook. I have to deal with it much more quickly because it’s agitating! Your Web visitors can’t move the tricycle to get to your garage. They just bounce from your site and write off your company.

Maybe you haven’t started optimizing your website for conversion because the clutter doesn’t really seem that painful. Well, your would-be customers see gobbley gook everywhere and it’s bugging the crap out of them.

Start cleaning up the gobbley gook today!

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SEO.com Sponsors WTC Social Media Summit with Chris Brogan, Julien Smith and Mitch Joel

May 10, 2010 By Dan Bischoff Leave a Comment

When we heard about the Women Tech Council’s event, which hosts three New York Times Bestselling authors and renowned marketers, we jumped at the chance to be part of it. Chris Brogan, Julien Smith and Mitch Joel — some of the most respected leaders in social media marketing — will focus on building trust and relationships online.

And in the end, building strong relationships is what social media is all about. It’s what effective marketing is all about. If you are in business at all, you won’t want to miss it. Plus, you’ll be able to see us there, which is always cool.

Here are the details:

What: Social Media Summit; Building Trust in a Connected World

When: Tuesday, May 11. 7:30 a.m. to Noon.

Where: Noah’s. Located at 322 West 11000 South in South Jordan, UT 84095 

Cost: $65 for members, $75 for non-members. Sponsorship opportunities and group discounts are available. Price of admission includes breakfast and 2 books: Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, and Six Pixels of Separation by Mitch Joel.

Register Now

More on the Speakers:

Chris Brogan

Julien Smith

Mitch Joel

For a sneak peak, here’s Chris Brogan and Julien Smith from “Rise of the Trust Agents”:

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PubCon South Dallas 2010 Highlights

April 16, 2010 By Andy Chesnut Leave a Comment

Yesterday was the last day of PubCon South here in Dallas. There was no shortage of chatter around the sessions, yet somehow I had a song in my head all day. It was something about, “Chinese food makes me sick,” and “Abercrombie and Fitch.” If you know what song that is, you are probably the guy who was two rows behind me humming it. Anyhow, let’s recap with a few of the best sessions of my experience here. If you saw others that I missed, grab me on twitter, @andychesnut. I’m wishing that I had cloned myself for this conference.

Scott Stratten – Keynote Speaker — ROI and Social Media

Scott split the curtains wide to open up the conference day by making every reactionary businessman on the globe feel silly for having referred to talking as “Social Media.” I wholeheartedly agreed with his expressions of frustration. Whether it is text, audio or video, you are talking. If what you are saying is worthless, that worthlessness just became magnified by the virtual channels you released it through.

His best tip of the morning – If you are asking, “what’s my ROI? You are thinking about it WRONG!” Talk with your customers. Use the virtualization “talking” platforms as a chance for publicized customer service. You can try to put a dollar sign in front of the effort required to appreciate and engage a customer, but if the dollar sign is thought about before the happiness of the customer, you’re going to flop in the social platforms.

Jessica Bowman – Inhouse SEO

This next bit applies to the Inhouse SEO, the agency that is trying desperately to understand client business strategy, and the IT department manager who is suddenly having his project scope swamped with SEO requirements. For the SEOs, Jessica was pleading that you understand the SEO-IT gap can exist between the executive vision and the action level.

While your CEO and VPs may be absolutely pumped about the SEO strategy, you may be shooting yourself in the foot if you are skipping the directors and going down to the developers. You can bet that when the development team sees how much SEO strategy is going to add to the budget, hours and scope of their next launch, they are going to take it up the line. Please, take the time to work with everyone in the chain.

To those in IT, be patient with your SEO. Search engine optimization specialists have a tendency to stick their nose in everything. So ask them SEO questions and take a little time to understand the SEO strategy. You may not be able to implement everything at first, but work with the SEO team in baby steps if you need to.

Bill Hunt – Large Scale and International Search Strategy

I got to sit in on two of Bill’s sessions, and I was sponging (is that a word?) everything he said. He talked about his experiences with helping to organize IBM’s global search program. He shared his thoughts on making global site templates a priority in any international brand. He also emphasized the impact that can be had from getting involved in the corporate policies and letting them work to the benefit of the search team. I got the chance to talk with him for a long while afterward and he was kind enough to volunteer some thoughts about managing massive keyword databases.

Rob Snell – E-Commerce

Rob talked a great deal about the story behind his family business. I could recap the whole thing here, but it’s far more entertaining from him in his Mississippi steez. The highlights I pulled from him are:

Do everything you can to interact with your customers online the way you interact with them on the phone. Steve (Rob’s brother) would spend 30 minutes on the phone with each customer letting them get to know him. Do you let your online customers know who you are?

Content happens in the 15 minutes you have while waiting for your next meeting. As a site owner, use downtime to be writing a product review, a description, or an FAQ. Generating unique quality content requires time, so find the time.

Ian Lurie – Query Deserves Freshness

Ian had some great thoughts for those of you who are starting small and feel overwhelmed with the task of beating out the behemoths in the search engine results pages (SERPs). It’s called QDF and its not anything new, but it is becoming more and more popular.

To break it down, in the event of a spike in searches for a given term, the search engine will boost new content that is relevant and reliable to the top of the SERP for that term. This means that if you are involved in the topic, or well aware of the trending topic, you as a small competitor can grab some traffic from the trend wave. Few big brands are using QDF to their advantage, so take hope, if you are agile enough to post content while the topic is trending, you can get some of that traffic.

There were other sessions about some great search tools, and some thoughts on gathering competitive intel. Michael Gray gave some insight into Google using social network data as an influence in universal search rankings – quantity of retweets, etc. Amanda Watlington was also on the Personalized and Universal Search panel. She made some bold statements about the coming death of rankings. I’ll have a blast posting about that one at a future date because I disagree on so many levels. Rankings will be a key metric for many years, even if the metric is modified. What do you think? Is rank headed for the trash? To be clear, I’m a fan of Amanda and her Ph.D in Linguistics. If ever there were a person who could teach about keyword research and search intent, it is her!

I have about twenty other pages of notes from the sessions, but I just can’t fit it all into this post. Tell me what you thought of the conference.

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Raise the Roof at the March Madness Rankings Workshop

March 9, 2010 By Dan Bischoff Leave a Comment


On March 25, some of college basketball’s best teams will compete in Salt Lake City for a chance to play in the Final Four. But before they tip off, smart marketers will assemble just up the road at the SEO.com headquarters for some March Madness of their own.

We’re hosting our third free workshop. And it’s going to be a barn burner full of SEO, PPC and social media marketing genius; networking opportunities with some of Utah’s brightest minds; and, of course, some great game-day snacks. And we’ll be evaluating two random attendees’ websites on the spot. You’ll be raising the roof, guaranteed.

Here’s the quick skinny:

What: March Madness Rankings Workshop
When: Thursday, March 25 from 2-5 p.m.
Where: 14870 Pony Express Road, # 100 in Bluffdale, Utah — just off I-15 at the point of the mountain
Topics: Pay-Per-Click Advertising, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, Website Review
Cost: It’s free, but space is limited so reserve a seat by filling out the form on http://www.seo.com/march-madness/

Companies are putting more and more $$$ toward online marketing. eMarketer.com says $23 billion will be spent online, half of that in search engine optimization. This workshop will show marketers how to maximize those marketing dollars by mixing smart SEO, PPC and Social Media strategies to gain traffic and drive sales.

As usual, we’ll have presenters for each subject followed by a Q&A session. But this time, we’ll be doing something different. Attendees will compete in a short shooting competition to have their websites reviewed on the spot by our trio of all-stars: CEO Dave Bascom, VP of Client Services Nelson James, and the Director of SEO Ash Buckles.

So, before you check out the NCAA Tournament on the 25th, make sure to stop by and get some tips to bring your website more traffic. For more information, to reserve your spot, or to see the list of presenters, go to http://www.seo.com/march-madness/ .

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