How do you measure social media?

A simple question, most people who are thinking of using social media as part of their campaign often ask.

But how do you actually know you are getting a good ROI for your social media campaign?

social media landscape

1. Traffic
Before you begin the social media campaign, make sure you record the number of visits to your site. If you have Google Analytics, you can export the traffic to your site and the key terms driving the most volume. You will see an increase in the amount of traffic during and after the social media campaign has finished.

2. Rankings
Measure your rankings weekly during the campaign. You should notice an improvement in the rankings as people are talking more about your site and your product.

3. Links
With an increase in the amount of buzz from the campaign, you should also see more links to your site. Make sure you record the number of inbound links before the campaign starts, this you can do by logging into your Google Webmaster tools.

You can easily measure the effects of social media if you are just working on that area of digital. It gets more difficult to relate the change in traffic, rankings and links when you are also running paid search, affiliates and off line advertising campaigns. However, you should consider social media as part of your integrated search and seo campaign. It is a growing area of digital and the effects it can have in terms of traffic and buzz to your site and around your brand can be phenomenal.

Working agency or client side

Working in digital, you have have two options. You can either work:

1. Agency side
or
2. Client side

But how do you know which route to follow? This post will explain some of the highlights and lowlights of working in both areas.

Agency
There are three advantages:
1. Working for an agency gives you a lot of experience across a wide range of clients. You can work on up to 10 different clients across different industries, finance, retail, telecomms and entertainment meaning you gain an extensive amount of experience without having to spend years working in each of those sectors.

2. In an agency you can have a very specific role such as seo manager, ppc manager, display executive. This means you can become specialised in a shorter time than if you were client side. It also means you can then take this experience and start working freelance. You have the experience, the clients you have worked on, the good name of the agency and hey presto you are ready to roll.

3. A lot of agencies have graduate programmes which allows you to gain experience across the different departments before choosing an area such as search to work in full time. There are a lot of young people working at agencies, it is a good transition between University and working in the real world. You work hard and play hard. You socialise often with your work colleagues who end up being very good friends.

There are of course disadvantages. Working agency side can be very stressful. You sometimes get a call asking you to start and complete a task when your whole day was full anyway of other important client work. You can therefore never really plan your day, as there will always be something that drops in on your lap last minute and that has to be attended to right away.

Client
I have worked client side for 6 years and as within an agency, there are some advantages and disadvantages:

1. Your job remit client side is much broader than agency. Marketing manager means you cover not just search, but offline work as well. You can get experience working on digital – seo, ppc, display, affiliates but also print such as advertising in newspapers and magazines and out of home advertising which is posters and billboards. You have a marketing budget and can see the ROI which is not always clear when you are working agency side on one small section of the budget.

2. One of the areas I liked most client side, was working with the different agencies. As a client you are able to send out briefs to potential agencies which they then have to respond and present back to you. This way you can see how creative the different agencies are in terms of the solutions they offer. This can be particularly interesting if there is a small budget and if your product offering is new and original with very few competitors in the market place.

3. Stress free

Working client side, means you can usually plan your day. You know what work you have to do, what is outstanding when the meeting with the marketing director is and you can therefore easily prepare for these. If you need help with running reports, you can always ask your agency to do that for you, making your day less stressful.

Working for a client can also have some drawbacks. You are just focused in one industry (such as telecoms) and cannot move easily to gain experience across another area such as finance. Therefore once you have chosen the industry that you like, you tend to stay there for a while. It is fine if you enjoy it and good at it, but if you want to try something new, this will often incur a step back in terms of pay and job title.

Before you choose which area you want to work for, think about your long term goals. Where do you see yourselves in ten years? If you want to gain a lot of experience quickly in a specific field, I recommend agency. However, the work, life balance can sometimes be easier to attain client side, but then it is up to the individual on how you handle your work load. Let me know what route you decided to explore and why.

Google – Live real time search results

I was reading the news today and found an interesting video showing live updating results when a user types a search term into Google

What will Google think of next?

Integrated search – a new buzz word

So you are looking for a new agency to help you with your digital strategy and all the people you have met are talking about delivering an “integrated search” strategy.

This is the new buzz word in search and it is here to stay. Affiliates, paid search, seo and social media working independently will not get you to the top of the search results. Paid search and seo go hand in hand. They are a match made in digital heaven and should not be treated as separately.

How do they compliment one another?
Studies have shown that if users see both a paid search ad and the natural search results, they will click on the natural search listings which is free. You are not paying for that click and if that therefore generates sales, you are lowering your cost per acquisition.

How can you integrate the two?
Communication is the key. Have regular meetings with the paid and natural search team. In this way both teams are aware of the campaigns and seo work on optimising the key landing pages the site wants to rank for making it appear higher in the search results.

Report back as one
When you are analysing the results, make sure you record how seo and ppc have complimented one another on a campaign by campaign level and then how this has led to a decrease in paid search costs overall. This way you can show to senior management and those in control of the purse strings the positive effect of integration while drilling down to the detail of the campaigns and can tweak these even further for next time.

Do you have any case studies where you have delivered an integrated search strategy that has worked well? Or perhaps you are still in the middle of working on it. Let me know, all comments welcome.

Photo is from Flickr

Ignore PR, focus on SEO – the simple easy option

Sometimes working with the client’s PR team is a nightmare, they never listen to your seo recommendations and if they do, it takes weeks to get content approved. Some, despite claiming they know about seo, still upload press releases with no optimised content or links.

If you want to take this attitude, I do not blame you, but it will be harder to get your client ranking high in the search results without them.

PR and SEO should work closely together. Having a press release ranking for a key term can help your seo efforts:
1. It will appear in the top search results, therefore pushing down the competition.
2. PR will help you to appear in the news results as well.
3. By appearing high in the web and news results, you will drive more traffic to your site, the whole objective of most website owners.

So how can you work closely with PR so that they like and respect your seo efforts?

1. Educate
Speak to them about how important seo is and by working together you are complimenting their efforts.
2. Optimise signed off press releases
You will not be able to change the copy of most press releases, that is pretty much guaranteed., but what you can do is add in links to key terms the site should be ranking for.
3. Results
You will get the PR team on board quicker if you can show them results from working with previous clients.
4. Quick turn around
Make sure when you have a press release, you optimise it and send it back to the team quickly.

PR and SEO should work closely together so they can compliment one another’s efforts. A solid partnership with bring long lasting results which will benefit the agency and the client.

Can you optimise Facebook for seo?

Yes of course you can.

To make a good facebook page, optimised for both customers and seo, you need to get your fans talking about the brand and the experience.

The page needs to be kept fresh, full of relevant content and be kept active.

Here are a few tips:

• Relevant and timely content
• Special offers/ promo codes unique to facebook fans
• Ask your fans when you have a question – feedback is important
• Multimedia: add photos, videos, events
• Use facebook ads to drive new fans to your page
• Advertise by targeting your competitor’s fans
• Make it conversational, not salesy or spammy
• Use Facebook to build relationships with current customers, not to get new customers.

Optimising for seo

1.Choose the best name for your Facebook Page and stick to it.

Don’t put too many keywords in the title as it will be seen as spammy and will stop the viral growth of your Page.
Don’t make the facebook page too generic. Facebook want all pages to authentically represent business, brands or celebrity.

Use your business’s real name as the name of the Page.

2. Select the best URL (Facebook username) for your Facebook Page

The URL is one of the most important SEO opportunities on Facebook.
When you choose a Facebook username for your Page, your Page’s URL becomes www.facebook.com/YourUsernameHere. Facebook recently launched the ability to choose the vanity URL.

Once a username and URL is selected for your page, it cannot be changed, so choose wisely, use the business name with generic keywords which represent your company.

Facebook requires that your Page have at least 100 fans before it becomes eligible to select a username.

3. Use the “About” text box to place keyword-dense prose near the top of your Page

Place keyword-dense prose as close to the top of the Page as possible. There is a limit of 250 characters.

4. Include important keywords, priority links on the “Info” tab

Complete all the fields on the Info tab with keywords and links to other parts of the site. Make sure you also include your company address, company overview as this will all help to increase the content score of your Facebook Page for many types of Google searches.

Address, City, County, Post code are important fields for local searches

Company Overview, Mission, and Products are important fields for product searches

Make sure you choose the category that best suits your business as the different fields are dependent on the category.

5. Post direct links to your website (or other relevant sites) in your Page’s stream

Status updates are a great way to place direct links at the top of your Page’s structure and it can boost your Facebook Page’s link score.

There are two ways to put post links into your Page’s stream:

- Include the raw URL in the text of the status update itself

- Use the “attach link” feature in the Facebook publisher

6. Add photos with captions, events with descriptions, and a discussion forum

Always share interesting content on your Facebook Page.
Make sure that all photos and videos have titles and captions
When you post events, include text and keywords in the event description. Add a discussion forum to your Page.

7. Get more inbound links to your Facebook Page from the web

Post links to your Facebook Page on all your websites

The more inbound links you have to your Facebook Page, the more it will boost its PageRank.. You can do this with anchor text links and the “Find Us On Facebook” badge which it encourages Page owners to use.

8. Get more intra-Facebook inbound links from your fans

Facebook places links to Facebook Pages on the default version of Facebook users’ profile pages.
These links are visibile to search engines which is great for seo. The more fans you get, the more links you will have to your Page within Facebook.

And there you have it, a few tips to make sure you are top of the facebook search results and Google.

Birthday number 5

London Girl Geek dinner celebrated their fifth birthday on Wednesday and what an event it was.

Hosted at the lovely Google UK headquarters with sponsors from Dinastia Vivanco, Green & Blacks and Juniper Networks, there were a lot of girl geeks.

It kicked off around 6:30 and then we were welcomed by Sarah Gordon from Google who gave a presentation about the growth of the smartphone market. It is amazing how much the mobile phone has changed over the past decade and sometimes I wonder what the market will be like in the next ten years.

This was one of the best networking events I have attended. Maybe because there were so many women in the same room all into “geeky things” and the fact that it was at Google and there were interesting talks about mobile and by Sue Black who discussed how social media helped her raise the profile of Bletchley Park. It was a great event and I am so pleased I got to attend, there were over 300 people that applied for a ticket, but only 80 people got to go.

Happy 5th Birthday Girl Geek Dinners

There was a raffle at the event and there were a lot of cool prizes to be won. Sadly I did not win, but all the money raised through the raffle went to charity. London Girl Geek dinners is working on getting charitable status, so if you would like to help, get in touch with them. It would be fantastic if they could get charitable status as they raise a lot of money already.

I look forward to the next Girl Geek Dinners, I was amazed at how much they have grown over the past five years, from just 33 members in 2005 to over 27,000 now. They have girl geek dinners all round the world including Europe, Canada and Australia. You will never be far from a girl geek.

Don’t optimise your website

if you want minimal traffic to your site.

But what would be the point in that? If you have a site, of course you want traffic. Surprisingly there are some clients that do not even think about seo. I am always battling to encourage those important stakeholders in a web project to use implement seo before the site has been built, ever before the wireframes are signed off.

Here are a few tips to help those fighting for seo overcome the hurdles:

1. Keyword research
You need to have evidence to back up why you want to use certain keywords for the website. If it is a new product launch and there is no search volume, use Google Insights to show how popular the term is.

2. Google Caffeine
What I like about this is that so many non seo people picked up on caffeine and the fact they thought it would affect their site dramtically. Little did they know that caffeine was working in the background and it was the press release by Google in June that announced they were happy with caffeine. In companies I have worked in, people are more responsive to seo when there are press releases from Google about algorithmns and updates.

3. Title and meta description
If there is not much you can do on the page as that would spoil the “design”, then at least optimise the page title and meta description. The page title is one of the most important elements of seo, you must make sure the keywords you want the page to rank for are the first terms in the title tag. Despite what the brand team may want, I would put the brand name at the end of the title tag.

4. Optimise their press release
If the company has press releases that they regularly post on their website, but has very little optimised copy, make sure you insert links in the body copy. Choose a couple of keyterms where you want to link from on the press release and link internally to that desired page.

5. Monitor all results
Make sure you report back on the results that you see in regards to the changes made. This will then give you more evidence to push forward for more seo changes. Once the client is amazed by the little work done so far and the amazing results, then you can suggest implementing seo as BAU on any new webproject.

Once clients have seen results, they can then begin to understand how important seo is for their website. Don’t give up if they are proving difficult and are reluctant to spend a lot of money on seo.

Include seo and social media as part of your search strategy

It is important to have an integrated search strategy to deliver to your clients. There is so much overlap between paid search, seo and social media, that implementing one without the other means that you are failing to capture all potential traffic to your website.

I work closely with social media who produce monitor the amount of online mentions or “buzz” for a particular brand. The seo guys use these buzz reports to see which bloggers and twitters are talking about the brands. The social media team contacts the bloggers but the seo team people give them the optimised content. This means that when the bloggers write about a particular product we have asked them to review they are linking back to our destinated web page on our key terms.

Facebook ties in with social media, but it also has an impact on seo. If your client wants to have a facebook page then they need to make sure it is optimised for seo. They must make sure that their key terms and links are on the facebook page and that they have an optimised URL.

Paid search and seo go hand in hand. By monitoring paid search adverts, we can see the number of impressions and click throughs for certain campaigns. If there is a high number of clicks on key terms and then we see through tracking that there is a high bounce rate, it may be that the landing page does not have enough content or that people cannot find what they are looking for. A new landing page will need to be created and the keywords that generated the highest CTR will be used in the page title, meta description and on page copy.

Another example of working together is when there is a brief for a new landing page to be built. Paid search will carry out keyword research to check the volumes around particular terms. This research can also feed into the seo recommendations.

The next time a client asks you just to do their paid search for them, look at their site and see if they have optimised it for seo. If they have not, show them the great opportunities there are with the integrated search strategy.

Integration is the key to unlocking traffic and high rankings.

Mary queen of shops comes to Kingston upon Thames

I watched Mary Queen of Shops last week where Mary came to an old vintage and furniture store called “Under the Moon” in Kingston Upon Thames. Being a local resident, I was very interested in the programme and how she was able to turn this shop around. It recently had a closing down sale as they could not afford to keep the shop open.

What Mary does is great, she uses her expertise to allow the business owners to understand their core offering which makes them unique. Mary makes it simple to see the pitfalls, where they went wrong and makes it so easy to see how they can turn their business around.

I like simplicity. I wish websites were given the same publicity as retail stores. Some web owners need to have a “Mary” assess their site and help them to increase traffic and rankings. As part of my job, I audit many websites and analyse what elements they need to change in order to make their websites more profitable.

When a website is built, seo tends to be the last thing people think of, when it should be the first. Seo should be seen as the most important element of a website as it is the first step people take when they are searching for a product or service. Seo is the route to your website. If a retail shop is not in a busy street, if it is down a side alley that is not easily visible for people to see, then they will not come in to browse and purchase. The same is true with a website. It needs to be clearly visible within the search engine results in order for people to click through.

I have raised the profile of seo with my clients through training workshops and have already seen changes. People just have to know about seo and how easy it is to incorporate it with their usual business/marketing tasks. The results will speak for themselves.