Search Marketing Sage

It’s National Tell A Story Day tomorrow, April 27th – and as a marketer, I love to tell stories. Ultimately, that is what your content should be doing: telling a story your customers can understand and relate to. But the biggest mistake we as marketers can make in our content is telling a story about our companies and products, and NOT our customers. You must know what challenges they have, how what you’re selling will help them with that challenge, and then create content that shows them this while making them the hero of your story.

I recently participated in a panel of very smart marketers at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, and we talked about how Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates created a fundamental shift in how we view content creation. All of a sudden, we needed to create content that was useful and people liked to read (gasp!), rather than just content to feed the Google monster and get rankings. So, the way we approached SEO also shifted – no more over-optimization practices, just good content that was not only searchable, but shareable.

But that doesn’t mean that SEO goes completely out the window when creating content. You can still optimize, just don’t over-optimize. You want to make sure that Google is still indexing your content correctly and for the proper keywords. Here are some tips to ensure your content is telling Google the right story:

As a search engine marketer, we always automatically default to utilizing Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool to conduct our keyword research. But, what if other tools existed to help us expand our keyword research efforts? In this SMX East session, Shawn Livengood and Laura Thieme introduce new keyword research tactics in order to perform better keyword research.

As a search engine marketer, whether for PPC or SEO purposes, I always enlist the help of Google AdWords’ Keyword Tool to inspire some keyword ideas. While using the Keyword Tool the other day, I noticed that the keywords were organized into categories, thus my introduction to the “Ad group ideas” tab, which is in its beta testing phase in AdWords.

The new “Ad group ideas” tab works similarly to the “Keyword ideas” tab. When you enter in keywords into the Keyword Tool, the suggested keywords are categorized into potential ad groups. The “Ad group ideas” tab takes some of the guess work out of determining how to group together and separate keywords. In addition, these ad group recommendations can be saved and added directly to your current campaigns, further easing the process of creating ad groups and adding keywords.

Free Webinar Next Week:
Online Reputation Management – Protecting Your Brand in the Internet Age
When: Thursday, March 1^st at 2p.m. ET
Presenter: Janet Driscoll Miller, CEO & President of Search Mojo
Register here.

As the reach of the internet continues to rapidly grow, particularly with the frequency and reach of updates through social media sites, online reputation management is becoming a bigger concern for brands and individuals alike. The internet seems to never forget and only compiles more and more information about users and companies, both positive and negative. But what if there were ways to manage how negative reviews, bad press, or a scandal was perpetuated within the search results pages? Search Mojo will review the importance of proactive reputation management in our upcoming webinar, Online Reputation Management – Protecting Your Brand in the Internet Age, on March 1, 2012 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

If you read part one of this blog series, you now know all the basics for doing keyword research for SEO.  PPC keyword research is somewhat similar to SEO, but instead of focusing on monthly search traffic, your are mainly focused on getting every single keyword that someone could search for!

Step 1:  Build an Account Structure

First you need to make a skeleton of what you want your AdWords (or Bing) account to look like.  What do you want to advertise or what are your main focuses?  If you truly have no idea how to start, create a basic keyword list as in step 1 of the SEO keyword research.  Write a list of everything you can think of about what you do; it’s also helpful to go through your website to pick out key terms.  Then look through your list for patterns.  Are there obvious sections or categories?  Make each one a campaign, and there you have a skeleton account structure.