Search Marketing Sage

Marketers are increasingly looking to video as a major content marketing priority, making video marketing their top area for investment in 2012. It will continue to be a top priority in 2013, with video considered an effective content marketing tactic by 58% of marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s report 2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends.

With the right strategy in place, video content can be a highly effective content marketing tactic. Whether you’re already creating videos, or want to start creating them, it’s important to make sure they’re properly optimized for search. We’ve created this checklist of video SEO tactics to ensure they get the search engine exposure they deserve.

Do your customers know where you are? Your website may be ranking well in Google, but many of your prospects could be looking at a more local level to find the products and services they need.  Just take a look at your website analytics to see how much traffic your website receives from your city, or even your state. If you’re seeing very little (or not seeing any at all), then it’s time to consider employing some local SEO tactics. Local SEO will help your prospective customers find what they’re looking for in their own backyard – giving you an edge over your competitors.

How can local SEO help to drive more local traffic and leads to your business? Join Amanda Chaney, Account Director at Search Mojo, for a free 30 minute webinar on Thursday, January 10th at 2:00pm ET, Leveraging Local SEO for More Leads.  During this webinar, Amanda will show you:

• Why Google+ is a local SEO must for businesses
• What local citations are and why they’re important
• How to ensure your website is properly optimized for local search

For a preview of what you’ll learn during the webinar, check out this Mojo Minute video:

This webinar will pack a ton of useful local SEO tips and tactics into just 30 minutes, plus Amanda will be answering your local SEO questions as well.

UPDATE 1/14/2013: Did you miss the webinar? Watch Leveraging Local SEO for More Leads in ts entirety here! Check out the preview below:

It’s a new year, and time to make some new marketing resolutions for 2013. Have you included any of the following in your 2013 search and social media marketing plans?

• Creating more fresh, quality content for your website?
• Leveraging semantic search?
• Digging up more useful data from your analytics?
• Branding your business online?
• Getting on board with Google+?
• Experimenting with social advertising?
• Creating and improving your landing pages?
• Getting a little creepy with retargeting?
• Making your site more mobile-friendly?

We’ve created this checklist of search and social media marketing tactics with 30 of the most important tactics not to overlook in 2013. Any marketer can use this checklist to augment their current marketing plans for 2013 with effective tactics that are also easy to implement.

As the curtain closes on another year at Search Mojo, we like to take one last look back at what made our year interesting – and our blog posts here on Search Marketing Sage are an excellent reflection of that. We write about the new things we as search marketers are learning about each day so we can pass that knowledge on to you, our awesome readers. And because of you, 2012 was the most successful year yet for the Search Marketing Sage!

We’ve compiled a list of our top 30 blog posts on search marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and content marketing for 2012. These were the most popular posts of the year, judged by your visits and feedback. We hope you enjoy these (and even learn something you didn’t know before), and here’s to a successful 2013 for all of us!

Confession:    I’ve been writing this blog post since April, 2012.  I’ve truly hesitated to publicly say these words.  I lost my biggest client, that I had for 6 years this year.  I made this client wildly successful to the tune of many millions of dollars a year in revenues attributable from natural and paid search.  I lost that client because they got fed up with dealing with multiple agencies for Branding, Print, TV, Display, Web Design, Digital Creative, Web Development, E-mail, SEO and PPC.  I’ve also lost another client that is a major national brand to the Digital Agency of Record model in the last week.  2012 has been the year of getting our butt kicked by the Bundled Services Agency of Record model for big brand clients. In both situations the direct contacts we worked with were completely against our elimination from their accounts, but their superiors forced them to let us go. I’m not a sour-grapes kind of guy and I wanted to make sure my emotions weren’t clouding my judgement if I put this out for the world to see.  Time and sore feelings are put aside and this is how I see the situation.

One Throat To Choke

The “One Throat to Choke” philosophy seems to be born (at least from what I can see online) from debate in the IT industry.  The philosophy suggests that you get all your technology and vendor support from or through a single vendor so that you have one vendor to appeal to when you have issues.   When something goes wrong you supposedly have “one throat to choke” to resolve the problem.

With the advent of the digital age, there are apparently 3 models mostly being employed by marketers with their agencies:

The first model is one in which a client selects one lead entity — at either the holding company or agency level — and grants it the power to oversee all marketing efforts and partners. The second model is one in which the client itself assumes that leadership role. And the third model is one in which a client hires a slew of agencies and tells them to go collaborate.