Did you say SEO was dead?

By | Published Thursday 20 December 2012

“You don’t want the next Penguin update. Google engineers have been working hard on this, which will be jarring and jolting for webmasters and SEOs.” – Matt Cutts, Google's Head of Search Spam
Image credit goes to www.portent.com

 The launching of Panda (2011) and Penguin (2012) to assess websites’ ranks has scared web-developers and SEO recently. There have been continuous debates online about the death of SEO. The quote above spiced up the debates even more. Having done my own research and talked to some SEO professionals, I came up with one conclusion: SEO is not dead, it’s maturing and becoming a more fair practice. SEO has been always an evolving process in response to the ever-changing internet market. What the experts call “social content replacing SEO" is no other than what SEO is evolving to. SEO old practices do still matter.

I was really sure about this until I analysed how a leading digital agency applied SEO on their websites using 2 different tools: Power Mapper and SEO Workers.

 The results were absolutely shocking.

 Power Mapper Assessment
Power Mapper assesses websites by looking at errors, accessibility, compatibility, privacy, SEO, standards and usability. It specifically points out specific pages with issues.

AKQA: 5 out of 10 web pages with SEO issues (worse than average)









AKQA's integration of social media and the website is impressive. The site also has a lot of internal and external links. However, a lot of pages are missing meta-tag descriptions and keywords. Also, some links don't include the most relevant keywords in its descriptions.

SEO Workers Assessment
The results from SEO Workers of both websites are pretty much the same with the ones from Power Mapper. SEO Worker also noticed that AKQA is missing alt image attributes and has no single keyword on its website.

SEO results
AKQA scores the highest for its own brand name on Google and Bing. However, the site isn’t on the first page of both search engines when we type relevant keywords s.a. digital, digital agency, online agency, innovation,…. you name it.

The fact that an agency with this caliber seems to only care about social SEO and neglect old SEO practices made me questioning: Are good old SEO practices are really going to die?

What does the competitor do?
To answer my question, I assessed another digital acency's website, Koozai, which has high visibility on Google, The website is always listed on the first page of Google when we type “digital marketing agency” or “digital agency”. Apparently, Koozai implemented all Google search engine guidelines perfectly. 

I believe that the reason why AKQA doesn't fully apply old SEO practices is simply because they don't aim to achieve high search engines scores. People in the industry already know their name; online brand awareness is not their main goal.
So, good old SEO isn't dead. At least not yet.

ht.

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Do we always need to be interactive on social media?

By | Published Wednesday 12 December 2012


Image credit goes to mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl

AKQA is one of the world's leading digital agencies. Founded in 2001, the multi-award winning agency has now 11 offices in the US, Europe and Asia. AKQA caught my attention for having a lot of interactions online, without being interactive.

AKQA implements all the general beliefs of “how can you be successful online” except being interactive. Having analysed their online efforts, I could say that AKQA’s online contents are perfectly integrated to communicate a consistent message: AKQA is the thought leader in the industry. This leads to the creation of desire and interest among its target audience, which will generate sales leads, quality employees and free publicity.

Let’s take a closer look at AKQA’s brilliant online strategy and how it has been implemented.

User classification
AKQA’s target audience includes professionals who are classified as potential clients (top level management), potential employees and media. This can be seen from the content of all online activities mentioning the brand that focuses on the agency’s achievements, notable work and thoughts.

Positioning & Strategy
AKQA’s positions itself as a thought leader in digital marketing industry to strengthen its image as one of the world's leading digital marketing agencies. Thus, its online strategy focuses on informing rather than interacting. This demonstrates AKQA’s extensive knowledge about the industry.
The contents it promotes highlight the company’s USPs (innovation, quality, service and thoughts) by presenting their work, achievements and opinions. Additionally, AKQA uses professional tone-of-voice in all its online contact points to relate with its target audience.

Channels
AKQA uses a number of owned media to communicate its brand message:
  •  AKQA’s website is attractive both in visual and content appeals. It contains all the relevant information needed by potential clients.
  • Social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
    The contents show their work, awards they have won, thoughts and publications. The chosen images are always appealing and  relevant to the content.

 Goals
Having analysed AKQA’s online activities, I noticed its two interrelated goals:
  • To create a credible image as the world's leading digital agency who focuses on innovation, quality, service and thoughts
  • To increase interest and desire among its target audience
All those online activities can be seen as a pull-marketing effort.

Findability
AKQA has excellent online findability for people who already know the agency name. When you type “AKQA” on the two most used search engines (Google and Bing), the first 50 pages of both search engines are filled with AKQA's online activity and news mentioning AKQA. However, AKQA’s website is not listed on the first two pages of any of those search engines when you type “digital agency”, “digital marketing”, or “interactive agency”. This shows that increasing awareness isn’t AKQA’s objective. AKQA assumes that its target audience already know their name.

Success
AKQA has been playing its cards right. Either by performing excellent PR or executing its online strategy well, AKQA has gained a lot of earned media. Forbes, Adweek, Wall Blog, Marketing Magazine, and many more have given a bunch of favourable publicity. Along with that, a lot of the employees voluntarily (I suppose) mention AKQA in their personal blogs. Here are a few of them: James Hogwood Blog  and Tink. 

All those earned media is very powerful to boost the company’s credibility and AKQA's image. The company has met its goals.

I believe that AKQA’s approach in being informative and less interactive online is the best strategy to position the company as a thought leader in the industry. This shows that AKQA knows the industry the best and doesn't need any input from their target audience. AKQA is a great example of a company that refuses to follow the general belief “brands need to be interactive” in its strategy, and still excels.

Do you see it differently? Share your thoughts on the comment below.

ht.

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The battle of social mentions

By | Published Monday 10 December 2012


How global digital marketing agencies promote themselves online

Have you ever wondered about how global digital marketing agencies promote themselves online?

Using Social Media Check and Social Mention, I compared two competing global digital marketing agencies operating in the Netherlands: AKQA and LBi (Lost Boys International). It’s interesting how they differ in social network and keywords used.

Personally, I like using Social Mention better as it gives you an “Advance Search” option. This helps you to do a narrower (or wider) and more accurate search. Social Mention also provides more extensive information about your brand than Social Media Check. Social Media Check, on the other hand, only monitors brand mentions on Dutch domains. As AKQA is not really active on Dutch social media, using Social Media Check isn’t really the fairest way to compare both brands.

Here is what I found from 2 days monitoring both brands on Social Mention (I could give you results from 7 days monitoring but it would take you decades to read J).




LBi has more brand mentions than AKQA. LBi had 1 day average per mention whereas AKQA had 7 days. However, AKQA had higher positive : negative mention ratio than LBi. LBi had less unique visitors (lower reach) yet higher passion (the likelihood of the authors to repeatedly talking about the brand) than AKQA. On that day, most brand mentions of LBi came from Youtube, Twitter and Picasa Web. Meanwhile AKQA's mentions came from Youtube, Google_blog and Google_video.



Comparing the data from both days, you can see that the activity varies depending on the online activities of each brand. You could see the differences in key stats from the data above. LBi's mentions were mostly from Youtube and Picasa Web while AKQA's mentions came from Twitter, Youtube and Flickr.

What I found interesting from the results of 2 days is that most authors of LBi are from other LBi accounts (owned media), while authors of AKQA vary from individuals, TV and media (earned media).

So what do those stats mean? Analysing all the findings roughly, we can conclude that:
  •  LBi has more activities on owned media, while AKQA generates more mentions from earned media
  • As LBi focuses more on their owned media, the authors are considered more loyal in the sense that each author generates more content that AKQA’s author. Most likely, LBi's authors are the employees responsible their social networks.
  • Mentions of both brands come mostly from Youtube, Twitter and Picasa Web.
  • Most likely, AKQA has different social media objectives than LBi. AKWA uses more relevant keywords to attract clients (s. a. digital and agency) while LBi brought up more casual conversations on its Twitter account.

 All in all, I think Social Mention is a great tool to monitor mentions of your brand on weekly basis. Throughout the week, Social Mention provides you with useful information about your online brand exposure in comparison with your competitors. For daily monitoring, however, Social Mention gives you figures that can be misinterpreted as they highly depend on the time that you and your competitors are active on social media. Try both Social Mention and Social Media Check for yourself and see which one suits you better.

Happy monitoring!

ht.

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By | Published Saturday 8 December 2012


Do you make these social media mistakes?


Original picture source: www.jeffbullas.com

 “We don’t have a choice on whether we DO social media. The question is how well we DO it.”

I saw this quote of Erik Qualman in a video I checked out the other day. The video,Social Media Revolution 2012 brings together shocking facts about social media (f.e. some universities stop using email accounts and start using social media instead) and how it affects offline behaviour (3 out of 5 gay couple meet online!). The video shows how powerful social media is today. Surprise surprise. A lot of researches have been done and most of them support this statement. According to a research done by Social Media Today, 42% SME owners claim that 25% of new customers are acquired through social media.

 Enough said, even your mom knows how important it is to have social media presence for businesses. However, many business owners and professionals underestimate social media practices. Some of them think that using social media for personal purposes instantly makes them social media experts. And then, they start doing social media for brands with neither a deeper understanding of the subject nor any strategy.

When doing social media for businesses, make sure that you avoid these social media mistakes:
1. Treat social media as your stepchild
Some companies do social media just for the sake of being there. They are not willing to spend significant money to hire social media professionals or to spend time researching what the best practice is. We can’t expect to have an instant success on anything, can we?

2.  Too slow to respond
In corporations, we are all bombarded by emails, meetings and hierarchy. Prioritising those over social media is a common practice. We easily forget the beauty of social media: it facilitates instant interaction between our brands and consumers. Social media needs fast responses, otherwise your social relationships would suffer.

3. Have no social media voice
General belief says that corporations have no sense of humour. And this is what corporations communicate on social media. They are being too serious, trying to be inoffensive and politically correct all the time. That’s boring. You must have a clear voice. If your company’s tone of voice is sarcastic, then be it! If your employees like to joke around, then show it! Having a clear voice or personality will make some consumers love you and some hate you. But isn’t it the number one rule of branding? Never try to satisfy everyone; a strong brand is the one that is either liked or hated. Think about “possibly the greatest conversation on Twitter ever” between Douwe Egberts and The Dolphin Pub. This is a great example of having a clear voice on social media.

4. Focusing on selling rather than customer service
Wouldn’t you be hating if all the brands you follow were trying to sell you something? I would. Some corporations’ bottom line to measure social media effectiveness is the number of sales deals closed. However, this is not something we should directly focus on. Have you heard 80/20 rule? 80% of the company profit comes from 20% customers. Doesn’t it make more sense if you focus to satisfy those 20% customers to make them remain loyal? Social media is a great tool to escalate your customer service as you will react in real time and other people will see how well you handle other customers. Read how you do great customer service on Twitter street style.

5. Generalise ROI of social media
“The ROI of social media is your business will still exist in 5 years”
A pretty strong statement mentioned in Social Media Revolution 2012 [Socialnomics 3] video. I’m really curious how they did the math. Is this based on an assumption that every business does social media well?
For me, social media ROI is something that can’t be generalised. ROI is really dependent on your business objectives. Do you want to reach PR objectives in a cheaper and faster way? Do you want to increase your brand awareness, reach and engagement? Or do you want to decrease call centre cost and increase customer revenue? Your social media strategy needs to be adjusted to your business objectives. And social media ROI predicts whether you’ll reach the goal.
How about key performance indicators such as number of likes, virality, number of retweets? Those are things that can help you calculating ROI. Not the final numbers. If you are interested in knowing how to correctly calculate your social media ROI, see ROI of Social Media: Myths, Truths and How to Measure. 

Do you know any other social media mistakes? Share them in comments below.

Happy socialising!

 ht.

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6 things about Youtube all digital marketeers should know

By | Published Wednesday 14 November 2012


Youtube, the 2nd largest search engine behind Google, is often overlooked by many marketeers these days. While the frenzies about website SEO on Google, Bing and Yahoo are everywhere, only few people pay much attention to video SEO on Youtube. A big mistake for digital marketeers. If you want to be successful in digital field, you’d better know how to apply SEO on Youtube.

Not convinced yet? Here are more quick facts about Youtube.
  •  Youtube is the 2nd largest search engine, outperforming Yahoo and Bing
  • Every minute, there are 35 hours of content uploaded on Youtube
  • Brands with optimised videos are 50% more likely to be put on Google 1st page listing
Nowadays, you and your mom have videos. Without SEO, be ready to see your videos go unnoticed.

Now that you realised the importance of video SEO, let’s have a look at four pillars to get your videos the highest ranks. And nope, views and virality are not included.
  •  Content (50% of the pie)
  •  Promotion (25%)
  •  Metadata (15%)
  • Community (10%)
-     Stick to monogamy!
Create a portfolio of videos around the same content and use similar keywords.

Make videos with long shelf contents and high replay value In plain English, your videos have to be relevant and timelessly needed by people.

Optimise your keywords and playlists Optimise your playlist using the most searchable keywords relevant to your content. Choosing keywords on Youtube is a bit tricky as they are different than what searched the most by people on Google. So how do you choose? Use https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool to analyse which keywords work the best.

Leverage Youtube insights Youtube insights is a powerful tool to see which video works and which does not. In this way, you can continue using the approach that holds people’s attention the longest and avoid using approaches generating low traffic.

Again, social media Promote your videos on other social media and make sure to put a “Share” button on your post to increase traffic and link building. The more your videos are promoted in blogs and other websites, the higher your video rank is.

Youtube Promoted Videos Use this tool so browsers can find your videos on Youtube homepage when they type certain keywords.

Call to action overlays Youtube has been generous to give people a free tool to give a brief description of your video during your video play time. This will keep people who are interested in your content watching. This tool has been proven to increase 3.7% of the click-through-rate.

Cross-promotion Promote other videos in your video. Youtube has been generous to give you a clickable feature within your video. This is brilliant to get that one person to watch your other videos.

The obvious
Make sure to fill in appropriate title, description and tags.

The non-obvious
Put captions of  the videos.

Interesting and engaging thumbnails
Your thumbnails will appear on a lot of search engines' lists. Be sure to make yours interesting to encourage people to watch your video. Keep in mind that Youtube also captures a thumbnail from ¼, ½ and ¾ of your video. Putting some watermarks on your video in those periods won't hurt.


Optimise your homepage
Who wants to follow you if you have a blank homepage? No one. Spend some time on your homepage to make your Featured video and Playlist look neat and interesting.

Have a personality
Never try to be liked by all people. It’s better to be favourited by certain group and hated by other groups than having everybody feels neutral about you.

Open up a comment board
Make sure to check the comments and respond to them quickly and appropriately.

Get people to rate your videos and stay ranked organically.

 If you want to know more, click here to watch a complete tutorial how to optimise your Youtube video.

Have any useful tips of your own? Share them in the comments below.

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'The art of..' is this the trend now?

By | Published Friday 2 November 2012

Lately, I've seen these statements so many times on the internet:

Writing: the art of literature
Marketing: the art of selling
Branding: the art of story-telling
Architecture: the art of living space

Just wait until someone says Math-the art of calculation or Physics-the art of laws of nature.

I was often amused, but sometimes annoyed. Do those people using these words actually see the artsy aspect of each field or do they just use the words for the sake of following the trend?

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Trend in communication world: Simplicity

By | Published Monday 15 October 2012

It seems that in the past two years, most of the design agencies are going simple. You barely find them bragging about how great they are on their websites. Most of them show their qualities through pictures, some of them do not put any. True minimalistic.

Yet, you have a feeling after looking at their websites that they are exceptional designers.

The challenge: how to send across a message with the least words and pictures possible. It really isn't easy.

Simplicity isn't simple after all.



SOFA - unfortunately is no longer existing




Tim Bjorn

Do you like this style?



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