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The Blogging Gospel According to Seth

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One of the reasons we love blogs so much at Fathom is because they are such an excellent means to provide fresh content to your website on a regular (weekly? daily?) basis. That is, as long as your blog is on your domain and NOT on some massive blog-hosting platform. You want all that fresh content featuring your important keywords to be generated right where you live for search engine cumulative effect, and it does truly work over time.

Another strong point about blogs is that they can establish oneself as an expert in an area. Seth Godin, for example, is a really respected guy in the online marketing world, and his blog is rated by many to be the best in the industry. He blogs about all things marketing-related, but in a syncretistic manner using all sorts of subject matter to make his point, which makes for entertaining reading. And reading should be entertaining!

I came across this interesting article on Neil Patel’s website QUICKSPROUT, illuminating 10 things any blogger can learn about blogging from Seth, and although the whole “list” aesthetic of many online articles is getting old, some of the points mentioned are quite empowering. A few I found encouraging were: blog every day; write like you talk; avoid time-sucking meetings and television and blog instead; edit, edit, edit!

None of these points offers any new revelation, and they’re all pretty much common sense. But as C.S.Lewis once wrote, “good teachers don’t teach you anything new, they simply remind you of what you’ve forgotten.”

So bloggers, start your engines. You CAN use blogging as an effective content marketing strategy to increase your content, site rankings, and expertise quotient in your industry—no matter what business you happen to be in.  Go for it, just like Seth.

Posted in Content Creation, Content Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO | Tagged ,

 

Social Media for Education

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 In a world where technology is becoming more prevalent in classrooms and the education system, I would like to focus today on a social networking platform that I recently stumbled upon. Figment.com is an online community focused on the creation, discovery, and sharing of works of writing. It is a superb example of how the power of social media can affect change and inspiration.

In December 2010, co-founders Jacob Lewis and Dana Goodyear launched Figment expecting the site to be like a Facebook for teenagers interested in young-adult fiction. Shortly after, they observed the traditional social media mindset of ‘liking’ and gathering friends was not what the users were interested in. Instead of simply sharing or rating books and documents, users themselves wanted to be the writers, thus opening up a new way for teens to write content, explore peers’ work, and provide and receive feedback.

The company’s tagline, “Write Youself In,” challenges users to write. Yes, to simply write about anything and everything they can imagine. As long as you are over the age of 13, you can sign up for a free account and start writing and connecting. Figment also provides free publications by professional authors and has a library of more than 350,000 pieces. While this could eventually lead to authors using the popular online community for marketing advantages, publishing is not the main point of the site.

Figment.com

  One of the biggest advantages of the site is how educators can use it as a teaching tool; teachers can create a private group and include their students. This allows for collaboration and review by the teacher and other students as well as the ability to monitor students’ writing. After their assignment is complete they can make their works public where all users—as well as published authors— can comment, which can challenge the writer to expand the content or take the ideas to the next level. “Figs,” as users like to be called, are not just data-dumping on the site, but are a highly engaged audience.

While the marketing potential is certainly there, it is more important to focus on how this is transforming the idea of social media as well as providing a new way to interact with schoolwork and education. Instead of merely sharing ideas that are already out there with people you already know, this community is creating a huge collection of  original content with the entire user base. It allows students to feel empowered that their teachers are viewing and commenting on their writing, and their peers and even professionals are getting involved.  Figment gives them a safe environment to express themselves, the exhilaration of knowing their voice and ideas are not going unheard, and the motivation to keep writing themselves in.

Posted in Content Creation, Education, Social Media | Tagged , , , , ,

 

How Schools Can Use Personas to Entice Prospective Students

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Targeting your audience is never a simple task, but it can get especially tricky for colleges. For example, your audience can change drastically depending on the degree programs each prospect explores and the learning method (traditional or online) they prefer.

And don’t forget factors that are as fundamental as personality. Some prospective students are eager; others are lazy. Some choose a degree program quickly while some take forever.

So how do you account for all of these variables when trying to reach out to prospective students? Fortunately, there’s a solution—you can develop personas!

Last quarter, the writers at Fathom set out to learn all about buyer personas. If you’re not familiar with personas, check out “Your Crash Course on Buyer Personas” by Caroline Bogart.

As the writer for the education vertical, I’ve been developing personas primarily for schools, and this means figuring out what students really want when they’re considering a college. For each school, I develop four different personas, one for each of the common buying personalities: Competitive, Methodical, Humanistic, and Spontaneous.

For each persona type, I’ll use the school’s demographics to assign a name, picture, occupation, and brief bio, which help the persona come to life.  But what’s really important are the persona’s goals because they are specific to each school. These goals are based on the persona type’s typical influencers and motivations, and once the goals are developed, I brainstorm possible solutions to address them.

These solutions are essentially strategies, and I’ve listed some general strategies below to give you a quick overview of what each persona type will look for on college websites.

  • Methodical prospective students want to become experts on your school and their program of interest. These are the people who want to receive fact-based emails, read white papers, and identify ways to reach out for answers to their questions.
  • Competitive people want to know they’re choosing the best school and the best program, and they want to explore your content quickly to identify your unique selling proposition. Some solutions include short, bulleted copy and charts showing why you’re better than the competitors.
  • Spontaneous people make quick decisions, but they want to see any positive media attention your school has received to determine whether it’s a popular choice. To target spontaneous people, you can emphasize awards and publish the latest news on the school blog.
  • Humanistic people want to know all about your school’s history and learning environment because they want to become part of a supportive community. They will want to see your social media profiles, a good human-interest story on your “About Us” page, and plenty of student success stories and testimonials.

Keep in mind that these strategies will change based on your audience’s specific goals. Also, certain strategies may appeal to more than one persona type.

Have questions about using personas in the Education Vertical? Feel free to ask them below!

 

*Image provided by Agonic on Flickr

Posted in Content Creation, Education | Tagged

 

Do You Smell That? It Could Be Your Stale Content

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Once you create quality content for all the pages on your website you’re finished, right?

Wrong. Your content is not something you can just write and ignore. You may not realize how quickly your content can go stale.  Just like the brown bananas in your kitchen, if you let your content sit for too long without edits, it can go stale. Fresh content is key to keeping your site relevant.

While it may seem like a hassle to continually track all of your content, if you take the time to do it right maintenance will be much easier.

Creating a Content Inventory Spreadsheet

First, it’s important to log all of your existing content on a spreadsheet or chart. The important information you need to include:

  • URL – Add the page URL for tracking purposes
  • Page description  – Include a quick description of the page’s content
  • Page level – Note where the page occurs on the site
  • Content function – What kind of content is on the page?
  • Content owner – Who is responsible for the up-keep of the page’s content
  • Date of creation – The date the content was originally developed
  • Update frequency – How often will the page need updated to stay relevant?
  • Current status – Is the page current, or does it already require edits?
  • Notes – Add any additional information that will be necessary to know

If your website has numerous pages, it can seem overwhelming to create a spreadsheet like this. However, if you start with the primary pages and slowly work through content page by page, you will eventually have a working inventory of all your content.

A content inventory spreadsheet is meant to guide you when it comes to making site updates and creating new pages. Pages that have a high update frequency will be your major priority. These pages usually include upcoming events, press releases, employee directories and things that could quickly change within your company.  When it comes to content creation, use your inventory as a reference as to what your website is currently lacking.

While the process of a content inventory is tedious, the benefits far outweigh the boredom.

How do you currently keep track of content on your website?

Posted in Content Creation, Online Marketing, SEO

 

Fathom’s Blog Wins PPC Hero’s Search Marketing Madness Contest

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Thank you, readers! The voters have spoken, and they chose Fathom.

Yes, as the title of this post states, this very blog won a competition that encompassed several rounds of voting in a pool of 64 blogs. The contest was PPC Hero’s “Search Marketing Madness,” and Fathom outlasted uber-popular social-media blog Mashable (a great blog in its own right) in the championship match. Technically, the blog was entered in the “SEO” division, though it also covers the other divisions of PPC, blogging and social media.

Trophy acceptance speech
This contest serves as a reminder of what keeps this blog going: our great audience. On behalf of the many Fathom blog authors, I thank you again for reading our regular posts. We hope to maintain our high levels of frequency, quality and candor (not necessarily in that order!) well into the future. I’d also like to thank PPC Hero for giving the Fathom blog a great platform and give a “game ball” to our own contributor Noah Brooks for coaching Fathom through the tournament.

Posted in Content Creation, Fathom Company News | Tagged , , ,

 

Mr. Hymen Lipman, “The Father of Modern Content Editing” – This Day in SEO History: Vol. 4

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Welcome back for another educational and whacky edition of “This Day in SEO History!” Did you know that March 30th marks the 154th anniversary of the patent for a pencil featuring a built-in eraser, invented by Mr. Hymen Lipman in 1858?

I know what you’re thinking; Slymenstra Hymen was that woman (?) who used to sing and fire-dance for the heavy metal band, Gwar. Well, my friend – that is incorrect… Although she may have had a built-in-eraser attached somewhere to that costume…

Before Lipman invented the pencil-with-eraser, people were having big trouble when they created content. The SEO world owes Hymen a big shout-out because his content-editing tool was the beginning of word processing & content management systems. Today, online marketers edit website content to increase search engine rankings and to add-in strong keywords.

Check out This Day in SEO History: Vol. 4 – “The Father of Content Editing,” written and starring our own Father of Content, Daiv Whaley, and produced by the most rockin’ production intern in the world, Victoria Wilhelm.

Happy unofficial Annual Pencil Day, everybody!

Shoot us a comment below to give us your take on SEO History! And don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. Thanks for watching, and stay tuned for more educational <and historical> content from Fathom!

Posted in Content Creation, Internet Video Marketing, Online Marketing, Online Video, SEO | Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

 

Your Crash Course on Buyer Personas

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In today’s competitive buyer-driven business world, it’s more important than ever to really understand your customers at a deeper level. That’s where buyer personas come in handy. But do you know what buyer personas are or how you can use them? And do you know why they’re important to incorporate into your online marketing efforts?

What is a buyer persona?

Not to be confused with a target market, a buyer persona is a group of people within a target market who share common demographics, problems, desires, motivations, goals and needs. Personas go beyond the basic demographics and help you get personal with customers.

Why are buyer personas important?

Personas help you develop and market content to someone rather than to everyone. Why is that important? Creating a piece of content that addresses the needs of everyone is difficult, if not impossible. While it might work in some instances, in most cases you won’t truly be able to connect, build trust and influence anyone if you’re writing for everyone. You need to be able to address specific needs of specific types of people individually.

How do you develop personas?

There are many different ways to develop personas and at Fathom, we’ve been developing personas based on four buying personalities: Methodical, Competitive, Spontaneous and Humanistic. No matter how you decide go about this, you’ll need to understand what each personas goals are when they come to your website, what they’re influenced by, what motivates them, as well as basic demographic information to help you visualize this person.

What do you do with personas?

Now that you’ve developed your personas, what are you supposed to do with them? Pretty much everything! Everything about your online marketing efforts can be tied to personas. Website content, social media outreach, calls to action, pay per click campaigns, email campaigns, video marketing, and more, can all use the help of personas.  With the right buyer personas identified, you can develop the targeted messages needed to help your business succeed.

Posted in Content Creation, Online Marketing | Tagged , , , ,

 

NE Ohio Businesses Look Largely to Net for Leads

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New survey data from Fathom and Smart Business show a vast majority of Northeast Ohio businesses count the Internet as the most important source of sales leads.*  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Internet defeated traditional sources like direct mail, radio and TV by a 2:1 margin. This margin increased to more than 3:1 when the same businesses projected the most important sources of leads 3 years into the future.

If the respondents—83% of whom belong to the “C-level”—have any accurate sense of where their richest marketing opportunities are going (and recent Forrester research suggests they do), then businesses across the spectrum will be relying on the Internet for lead-gen with growing dependency in the near future. Consider your own current marketing strategy: Are you reaching and captivating your potential audience with the right mix of inbound, outbound, and automated (i.e. nurturing) marketing?

As far as your Internet presence is concerned, is your site user-friendly? Do you have readable, Web-appropriate copy? Do you offer select paths for different user personas? How well are you catering to different stages of a buying cycle, B2B or B2C? How about the utility and desirability of your content?

NE Ohio has spoken. Are you listening? If the Internet is going to be the most important source of your sales leads, make sure that your business is ready to navigate the digital world with a steady hand.

*Results compiled from an October 2011 magazine wrapper questionnaire with 400+ respondents. For full details, please download the Fathom-Smart Business survey summary (PDF).

Posted in Content Creation, Lead-gen, Online Marketing, Usability | Tagged , , ,

 

Losing Rank? Over-Optimization Might Be Your Problem

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Google recently announced they are working on a search ranking penalty for sites that are “over-optimized” or “overly SEO’ed”. Read the recap on Search Engine Land.

As a full-service digital agency, with our roots in SEO, Fathom is used to the changes and is prepared to react quickly if we see drops in organic keyword rankings. After all, one of our core values is “Make Order From Chaos“. We saw this update coming a few months ago and put measures in place with our sites before the vague Google news hit the internet.

Our efforts to understand the changes (and taking action quickly) can be beneficial to others dealing with the same updates by Google. Well-aligned optimization tactics are what it took over the years to rank for highly competitive keywords, and those tactics are still important… however we can expect Google to continue to make changes to overly optimized sites with the intention to improve their search results and drop rankings for low value content. Below are some practical tips to help you in efforts to “un-optimize” your high traffic landing pages that have dropped a few spots in the organic keyword rankings. If your site pages have low value content and have been de-indexed from Google completely, there may be bigger issues at hand that this post will not solve.

The Situation:

You have secured a top 10 competitive keyword ranking for a long while, and the ranking has dropped, and worse yet… the ranking URL has changed. You feel the intended ranking page is optimized to the best of its ability, and the inbound links support the keyword focus, yet you are scratching your head as to why your aligned efforts aren’t moving the needle.

The Reality:

Google is constantly making algorithmic changes and you are at their mercy. Ranking reports and ongoing analysis allow you to review trends as they relate to keyword rankings. Sometimes proper tweaking of content or more inbound links can move the needle in the right direction – but there is a need to dive deeper if you are at a standstill or the rankings continue to drop. With the flip of a switch Google can decide to rank a lesser desired page, but in Google’s eyes the page is more naturally optimized, and not “over-optimized”.

What to Check:

  • Determine what’s common among the top 10 ranked results? (How does your site compare?)
    • Title tag, description/snippet, on-page content, inbound links and quality, social media shares, domain authority, freshness of content, keyword density, does the homepage or interior page rank?
  • Review keyword synonyms highlighted in the SERPs
  • What are strong keyword modifiers that are still ranking? Here are some tools to help find keyword variations:
    • Google Analytics > Entrance Keywords to Landing Pages
    • Google Webmaster Tools > Your site on the web > Search queries
    • Google Suggest
    • Google Related Searches
  • Do you have top rankings for the keyword modifiers? Can these offset the drop in the strategic keyword ranking while you are revising your optimization tactics? Can these keywords reinforce the strategic keyword ranking?
  • Take a technical deep dive looking at crawling issues and internal linking structure
  • Perform an on-page ranking analysis using tools, data and experience (why did Google decide to rank a page that isn’t as good of a fit?)

Start Testing:

  • Use the data above to start revising the way you optimized your pages that have recently dropped – think about creating sustainable content!
  • Get all the SEO foundation basics and technical optimization cleaned up
  • Start lowering the keyword density and closely check the keyword ranking movement, traffic and conversions
  • Tweak the anchor text on inbound links to be more natural (remove low value links)
  • Tweak the anchor text on internal links to be more natural (do you have too many links pointing to a select few pages?)

Long Term Solution:

  • Re-evaluate your information architecture and directory structure. This could be preventing proper crawling and competitive keyword rankings
  • Remove any technical and crawling roadblocks. Review site load time. Poor usability could be a hindrance as well.

Tools for Support:

  • SEO analysis tools – BrightEdge, SEOmoz, Raven Tools, etc.
  • Google Analytics
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • SERP spot checks
  • Firefox and Chrome plugins for quick spot checks of your site and competitors (i.e. Search Status)

Are there other keyword optimization tactics or experiences you would like to share? Please leave a comment below!

Posted in Content Creation, Link-Building, Search Engines, SEO, Technical Issues | Tagged

 

My Top Five SMX West Takeaways

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After finally recovering from my trip to SMX West last week, I’ve started sifting through the many pages of notes I took during the conference. All of the sessions were extremely beneficial and I had the opportunity to learn from industry leaders such as Danny Sullivan and Susan Wojcicki. Every evening I left on total information-overload. But I mean that in the best possible way, of course!

While reviewing my seemingly endless pile of notes, I noticed some trends emerging. So, if you weren’t fortunate enough to visit the San Jose SMX conference yourself, consider my top five takeaways:

1. Become a Social Butterfly

If you’ve been resisting social media, you could be severely hindering the success of your business. I know what you’re thinking, no one is going to follow your business on Facebook. That’s where your creativity comes in. If you have a business that wouldn’t traditionally gain followers through social media, offer people a reason to follow you. For example, if you run a bank, maybe you can offer financial tips to people who check in to your business on Foursquare (after all, there are an average of 23 check-ins every second). Own a real estate business? Consider offering people who like you on Facebook insider information about local bars, restaurants and stores.

2. If you aren’t on Google+, Now is the Time to Join

If you didn’t already guess it from my first takeaway, social media was huge at SMX West this year, and Google+ was no exception. While many businesses are resisting the adoption of this social media channel, it offers a variety of important benefits for businesses. Did you know that only 57% of Fortune 100 Companies are currently using Google+ and of those 57% only 3% encourage visitors to visit their page by using badges on their homepage. Put yourself ahead of the competition by being the first in your industry to take advantage of this growing social channel. Google+ results are already showing up in Google SERPs. Make sure you are taking full advantage of this opportunity for your business to show up in the results.

3. Differentiate or Die

While it may seem dramatic, if you don’t differentiate yourself you won’t survive in the results. When searching Google for “how to make French toast,” you get almost 32,400,000 search results. How many of those do you think are really relevant to that search? Maybe four or five. That means, if you aren’t showing up in the top results for your key terms, it might be time to change your tactics. By keeping your content fresh, integrating social media, personalizing your content, and most importantly, creating content that is truly relevant to the searcher, you can start to differentiate yourself from the millions of other search results.

4. Understand Your Mobile Users

If you find that people are searching for your business on mobile phones, it is your job to create a mobile site that is as user-friendly as possible. People that are searching on their mobile device have a completely different mindset than those searching on a traditional laptop or PC. The cognitive strain is so much greater for a mobile searcher. When creating your mobile site, cut through all the distractions give your audience a simple, user-friendly platform.

5. Create Killer Content

Is content really still king? According to the speakers at SMX, yes! 92% of marketers agree that content creation is very or somewhat effective as an SEO strategy. How can you create content that is truly killer? Get in touch with your audience. Revisit your customer personas, tighten up your pages that drive the most income for your business, clean up outdated content, and focus on creating conversion-friendly content over Google-friendly content.

Now do you understand why I was on information-overload all week? While this may seem like an overwhelming to-do list when it comes to your SEO, if you just implement a few of these ideas and grow on them  over time, you can improve your conversions and rankings.

 

Posted in Conferences and Events, Content Creation, Google, SEO, Social Media | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

 

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