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There are several factors that go into search engine optimization and how your content ranks in the search engines.  If you had to break them in to two categories it would be the onsite and offsite optimization.  Social media marketing and optimization applies to both.  Here are a few simple takeaways about social media for SEO that you should know. (more…)

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be complicated stuff, but not all of it is hard to understand or even implement as a novice.  To give your website the best possible chance to be found in the search engines, you should at least cover the 9 SEO basics I’ve listed below. (more…)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may not be offered as a degree or even a class at your school, but you may have heard that it’s a growing and exciting industry. And you are right. A quick search on Monster.com shows almost 1,000 job openings for the skill “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”, which, in our current recession, is a good sign of a robust job field.

If you are a student thinking about starting a career in SEO in St. Louis or in any other city, keep reading for a list of 22 key SEO references, industry big names and tools. (more…)

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at MarketSTL, a local conference focused on helping business owners in St. Louis learn how to optimize their online presence. The conference pulled in some of the region’s top experts on topics such as search engine optimization, social media, video and website analytics. The audience included a solid mix of local business owners and professionals in online marketing and related fields.

The day kicked off with a great keynote from Jason Tinnin (@jasontinnin) of SimpleFlame (@simpleflame)that was charged with energy, humor, and some solid nuggets of advice such as the importance of finding a trusted advisor as a partner in your web strategy, and treating social media like courting – “You can’t just walk up and say ‘Hey, you wanna get married?’”

After the keynote got everyone fired up, I attended Russ Henneberry’s (@russhenneberry) “Using Content to Drive Hot Referrals” presentation. There was great content (no surprise) in this presentation, and Russ has energy. We gave him kudos for being so LOUD and even gave him an honorary Loud name of Loudenberry.

Up next was the Local Search panel, which I joined along with Will Hanke (@TechLH) and Rachel Boone (@trileafdesigns). This session was an open discussion format in which we introduced the importance of local search and encouraged the audience to ask questions relating to local search and local SEO. The audience had a LOT of questions – clearly the search engines have a long way to go in communicating with local businesses. Google has taken some steps in a positive direction lately by partnering with the US SBA on a site called “Tools for Online Success” which offers video-based tips for small businesses.

Other helpful sites mentioned in this discussion:

• Get Listed
• LocalEze
• And of course Google, Yahoo and Bing local resources

In the afternoon Lisa and I attended Jim Barnthouse’s (@jimbarnthouse) session on incorporating video into your online marketing strategy. Jim provided a lot of great tips on optimizing your video strategy for the web and shared a lesson learned from a Youtube casino incident.

Next up was Melissa Gilliam (@milligfunk) on Planning for Success in Social Media. Melissa shared many social media tips and tricks that she’s picked up along the way as a world traveler, blogger, photographer, freelance writer and Marketing Director for the YMCA.

I had the honor of closing out the day with my website analytics presentation. Be sure to check out the slides and free analytics metric dashboard.

That’s a wrap for all of the sessions that I attended at this Fall’s MarketSTL Conference. I had a great time, and enjoyed meeting many talented people and motivated business owners from the St. Louis area.

Note to speakers and attendees: If you have any slides or notes from the day that you’d like to share, let me know and I’ll add links to this post.

About the Author
Erin Steinbruegge is a Partner and Lead Marketing Strategist at The Loud Few who specializes in search engine marketing strategy. You can learn more about her here or follow her on twitter at twitter.com/steinburglar.

Competitive Analysis of Your Industry’s Social Media Use

So your business has started dabbling in social media because you have heard that there is all sorts of opportunity, and you are right.  You have a blog, a Facebook Page and  a Twitter account, which you have been updating, but will admit you don’t have a clear social media strategy to increase business or boost engagement with your audiences.  You figure competitive research will be useful and you are right again! In Part 3 of our Competitive Smackdown Series, we will show  you how to research your competitors’, industry influencers’ and indirect competitors’ social media strategies.

The first thing we need to do for basic social media competitor research is clarify what we are looking for, and then you can be the judge of what you want to include in your social media strategy.  It’s not just about the social media outlets that your direct competitors or industry influencers are using, but also the content that they use to keep people engaged and interested.  Here is a breakdown of what you should be looking for and analyzing:

• Competitors – You know your direct competitors, but we really need to identify who the indirect competitors and industry personalities are in your social media space.
• Channels – Which social media outlets are being used in your industry to communicate and engage – Blogs, YouTube, SlideShare, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Content – What type of communication or content is effective in getting people engaged?  Is it the articles, news, videos, tips, industry links, deals, promotions, contests, tools, presentations or something else?

Direct Competitors – You know who your direct competitors are in your industry.  Check their website to find where they have a presence in social media and how they are using that presence.  Also search for your competitors directly through the search function in the more commonly used social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare), since a lot of companies fail to properly promote their social media accounts on their website.

Keep a list to compare channel use and content types used in each social media channel.  Identify content trends across competitors. Keep reading for more on content later in this post.

Industry Personalities, Influencers and Indirect Social Media Competitors – You may be in an industry that does not have a lot of direct competitors participating in social media. Or, you may have a strong list of direct competitors that you just prepared. Either way, you will also want to research industry personalities, influencers and indirect competitors, since these will also play a big factor in guiding your social media strategy.

For instance, Home Depot would consider Lowe’s a direct competitor, but Bob Villa would be an industry personality or influencer. It will help Home Depot develop a full and effective social media strategy to analyze both what Lowe’s and Bob Villa are doing in social media. Industry influencers are a great guide to see what type of content your audiences are  responding to.

So how do you find your indirect competitors and industry leaders in social media? Here are a few good social media tools to help you find them and save you some time:

Twitter

• http://www.twellow.com – A yellow pages type search to find most popular profiles on Twitter.
• http://wefollow.com/ – Profiles by tags, basically your competition will be organized and labeled by your core keywords.
• http://refollow.com/ – Ability to find who follows who, a great tool for sniffing out who the lead personalities in an industry are and who they follow.
• http://search.twitter.com/advanced – much better than the typical Twitter search.

Facebook

• Facebook Search – The search functionality of Facebook is sad. So, also try finding the link from a website, a friend on Facebook, a Twitter link, or somewhere else.

Blogs

• http://technorati.com/ -  Probably the best blog search engine.
• http://blogsearch.google.com/ – Google’s own search engine for Blogs, a good tool that could be better.
• http://www.icerocket.com/ – Blog search that can also find related Facebook, Twitter and video content.

Analyzing Content

At this point, you have done your research and have found a lot of great competitors in your social arena.  Now, you really have to sit down and find out what the common and popular content trends are for your industry.

Here are a few good questions to analyze your competitors’ social media content:

• What content is needed to satisfy your audiences and keep them coming back?
• What content is being used to establish authority?
• Are your competitors using presentations, whitepapers and articles effectively?
• What is the tone your successful competitors use to speak with your audience: are they more casual or are they very professional?  It varies through the different social media channels and industries, but the tone successful businesses use in most social media channels tends to be casual.
• How are your competitors getting people to engage: are they running promotions, and if so, what type (contests, polls, social games, personal engagement, controversial topics)?
• Do your competitors use video? is it effective?
• Are they promoting events? How?
• Do they provide links Flickr or other photo galleries?
• Are they blogging? What topics do they blog about?

If you are thinking, proper competitor social media research is going to take some time, you are right again. However, if you need some assistance please don’t forget The Loud Few can help, we are a full service interactive marketing firm in St.Louis that would be excited to help with your social media marketing strategy.

Ongoing Competitive Analysis

Since the internet doesn’t sleep and social media trends are always being created, we need to keep our finger on the pulse.  Leveraging even more social media tools is a great way to do that.

RSS Readers – Subscribe to industry related RSS feeds produced by your indirect and direct competitors, and you can keep up on your competition in one place.

• www.google.com/reader
• http://bloglines.com/

Google Alerts -http://www.google.com/alerts – Setup alerts for activity on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and webpages related to certain search phrases.  Try setting up alerts for popular industry search terms, company names and personalities.  You will also notice options below the main sections of Google search for news, video and the new Google Realtime.

What other ways do you research your competitors’ and influencers’ social media usage? Let me know in the comments.

Related posts:

Competitive Smackdown Part 1: Using Google for Competitive Research

Smackdown Part 2: Your Competitors’ Link Strategy & Indexed Content

Use This Worksheet to Track Your Competitor Research
About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist at The Loud Few who specializes in search engine marketing strategy. You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.

Researching your competition is an unbelievably important step in establishing your site online.  It will help set the basic framework for your internet marketing strategy, and if done effectively will also greatly reduce the resources you invest to increase your website visibility.  Part 1 of our competitive analysis blog post is sort of a tease; sorry for you more seasoned veterans.  We will start off with basic awareness of what we can learn from Google and how to get started.  The next few posts we will cover less obvious and more complicated ways to research your competition.  You should already know a few main competitors and a few search phrases of interest that you can start our research with.

Our example, since it is interesting to me, will be research for an ecommerce startup that sells home brewing equipment online (I keep telling myself, “one of these days”).  One obvious keyword phrase to start with is “home brewing equipment”.  I also know via word of mouth that Northern Brewer, and Midwest Supplies will be the bigger competitors online.  So now we can get started.

Starting with a search for “home brewing equipment” leads us to this helpful dropdown of Google suggestions.

Pay attention to this valuable information, Google Suggest is informing us that “home brewing supplies” is possibly a better keyword, or at least more popular.  Google will push that synonymous term to searchers over the one I initially thought of, as well as “home brewing kits” and popular local phrases too. This is a good way to start compiling a list of keywords to do competitive research on for our industry.

Tool Tip: Here is a free tool that can provide Google Suggest based keyword research – http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-information/

So let’s start again with the phrase that Google is pushing on us (you should start a list of all the other keyword phrase ideas to check on later). Our new search term “home brewing supplies” provided us with the universal search results below.  Universal Search will tell us more than just the competitor’s sites; it can also highlight the various ways to compete for search traffic.

Depending on your industry, and your search phrase, you may be surprised at the amount of direct and indirect competitors included in the results; and you can learn from both types of competitors.

One search will not provide all of the minable information you can obtain from basic Google searching, but you can use this process iteratively for other keyword search terms to build a list of valuable competitive information. This list will be great to have for my next post on researching the competition you have identified.

Key takeaways from this simple competitive research process are listed below:

• Keywords that Google Suggest is providing that are relevant to your business.
• Basic list of direct competitors to further research.
• Basic list of indirect competitors to further research.
• An understanding of what type of content Google thinks is important to display in the Universal Search results – this could be images, videos, news articles, shopping feeds, local business maps, etc.  If you know what Google likes to show for your industry searches, then you can plan to include it in your content strategy.
• Price comparisons from Google shopping results.
• Knowledge of which competitors are in the paid search game for your industry

Stay tuned for the next episode in Dr. Loudweiser’s Competitive Smackdown…

Related Posts:

Smackdown Part 2: Your Competitors’ Link Strategy & Indexed Content

Smackdown Part 3: Analyze Your Competitors’ Social Media Strategy

Use This Worksheet to Track Your Competitive Research

About the Author

Aaron Stevens is an Internet Marketing Strategist at The Loud Few who specializes in search engine marketing strategy. You can learn more about him here or follow him on twitter at twitter.com/MarmadukeBrew.