Search Marketing Sage

I’m engaged! Woot woot, (yes, I just did an “I’m engaged happy dance”) and now all I want to do is read wedding blogs and look at Facebook posts about wedding invitations. If you are in the wedding industry, this is WEDDING SEASON and you probably do not have the energy to stay up until 3AM writing a blog post to market yourself to the newly engaged. I’m here to share some suggestions about content creation that can work for you, as well as  just about anyone in a business that has a busy season that may prevent them from staying on top of social media marketing. A great way to prepare for a busy season is to get ahead by creating evergreen content (content that is non-seasonal and will be relevant no matter what time of year it is) to keep your online presence fresh and SEO-friendly. This does require planning, but will pay off in the end.

SMX Advanced took place this week in Seattle, and our own Janet Driscoll Miller and Amanda Sides were there live blogging the flurry of tips and tricks, new tactics, best practices, and announcements that search marketers have come to love and expect from the SMX conferences. We’ve put together a roundup of all of Janet’s and Amanda’s posts from SMX Advanced so you can catch up on anything you missed – whether you were able to attend, or watched from the Twitter sidelines. Plus, we’ve included a link to Janet’s own SMX Advanced presentation on Authorship. Enjoy!

What is paid social? Why is it a good option for marketers and what are the options available? This panel featured Jeffrey Jewett of Optify, Jennifer Wong of HasOffers, Marty Weintraub of Aimclear, and Adam Berke of AdRoll who answered those questions.

Last week, Michelle shared some updates with Google+’s most used feature – Hangouts. This week I wanted to share how Google+ is tying itself into search results even more as it continues to grow and develop. Both this post and Michelle’s post show how Google has continued to combine Google+ with other Google products to allow users to get more relevant information faster.

If you aren’t already familiar with the Knowledge Graph, it is how Google attempts to “answer questions you never thought to ask” after you submit a search query. The Knowledge Graph appears in the upper right hand corner of the first page of search results and doesn’t yet appear for all queries. Google has an extensive program for nonprofits, which includes the Google Grants program and YouTube for Nonprofits, so it makes sense that they would want to continue to promote nonprofits to the best of their ability in organic search. On Google+, it was recently announced that the Knowledge Graph will further support searches for nonprofit organizations:

First, as a member of the Social Team at an SEO/ online marketing agency, it would be fairly negligent of me not to champion Google’s oft-maligned social network for its genuine SEO importance—I mean, it’s owned by Google. For all of the talk surrounding the increasing value of social indicators for search, we’d be naïve to think that the search engine giant’s personal social network would be left out of the equation. At minimum, having an up-to-date, fully optimized, keyword-heavy, image-heavy, and active (posting a couple times each day) Google+ page will help your brand get a more detailed Knowledge Graph showing in search. And if you’re still not quite convinced, be sure to take a look at our Google+ Business Benefits infographic to learn about even more benefits to your business.

With the preaching out of the way, the main purpose of this post was to introduce the new Hangouts, and get you to simply try them out. Hangouts replaces Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and Google+ Hangouts’ classic video chats, providing the integrated messaging platform that Google had been missing.  There are so many features that make me think this could actually be the catalyst that changes the average individual’s perception of Google+ and leads them to start taking it seriously as a social network—we’ll just have to see if Google can push all of its Gmail/ Android users to get on board…