Category Archives: Search engine optimisation

The importance of content planning to search, sales & social media

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

For a long time, we’ve been driving home the importance of content to meeting your online objectives. In fact, Ben wrote about the relationship between content, search marketing and social media back in 2009.

Content can be used to connect with and engage your audience at each stage of their buying journey. As such, I believe that content planning should be core to your digital marketing strategy. A solid content plan gives all of your disciplines creative direction, streamlines resource, ensures messaging is consistent and works to enforce the role that each stakeholder (internal and external) plays in meeting online goals.

At the heart of content planning is a strong understanding of your target audience. By understanding the needs and motivations of your prospects and customers it will help you to create content that is in line with how your audience wants to consume it and therefore where to market that content to support search, website optimisation and social media objectives.

How customer insight and content supports these three channels is best reflected in the infographic below:

Starting with search, the information presented back to us when searching comes in a range of content types i.e. maps, images, video and shopping feeds (in Google’s case, this is called Universal Search). In turn, this means brands must create, optimise and market useful and engaging content that benefits both the target audience and supports SEO objectives.  In light of Google’s Panda update earlier this year, good quality, relevant and interesting content for the end user is more important than ever. Adopting old hat techniques such as keyword-stuffed press releases and articles, created purely for SEO purposes, might just bring you to Google’s attention…and not in a good way!

Content also has an integral role to play once visitors arrive at your website. A content driven approach to e-commerce helps create a richer and more rounded website experience, which in turn aids conversion rates and average order values. Strong imagery and video, for example, are proven to engage visitors and drive up sales. Marks and Spencer, with its pioneering ‘M&S TV’, has reportedly seen three times as many product views when supported with video and an average uplift in basket size of 23%.

Content is also vitally important in giving your brand a voice across your social media channels. Too many brands fall in to the trap of using social media to simply broadcast special offers and promotions. Content is the foundation of which a truly engaging social media experience is built and therefore how you can build a following by having your customers share your news, views and stories with their colleagues and peers.

This diagram reflects the interdependency between search, social media and content; one discipline cannot operate in isolation of the other two.

Practical steps to creating a content plan

So with content playing such a vital role in search, conversion rates and social media outreach, where should you start?

I recommend working from a central content plan as it helps to ensure consistent and clear messaging from each of your company’s communication channels and ensures any content output is aligned to your business objectives.

The first step to creating great content is to align all communication channels to work together. Holding regular content workshops involving all those responsible for creating content is a great way to achieve this. The objective of these workshops is to mine the business for all marketing plans across online and offline disciplines and brainstorm raw ideas, thoughts and materials.

You can then shape the resulting output into a comprehensive six-12 month content plan that cascades into all online communication channels, for example:

  • Content to support sales, such as buyers guides
  • Blog content
  • Emails / newsletters
  • On and offline PR
  • On and offline advertising, such as catalogues
  • In-store event ideas

This level of planning provides the necessary structure and formalising of responsibilities to maximise the value of the content created by all stakeholders.

The output is a month by month plan (it can be as simple as using an Excel spreadsheet) that details what content will be created, in what format, by whom and through which channels it will marketed and when. It sounds simple but I’m amazed at how many businesses we speak to are creating content in a totally disjointed manner meaning they fail to maximise its value to meeting digital marketing objectives.

Conclusion

Don’t fall into the trap of creating content purely for the purposes of gaming search engines. Really think about your customer and create content that is genuinely useful and engaging. Get all of your content creators in a room and plan, plan, plan. In turn, you’ll be rewarded with stronger search engine rankings, higher conversion rates and more fans and followers who feel a genuine connection to your brand.

My two pence worth on the IR Expo 2011

Posted on by Suzanne Taylor

I was fortunate enough to attend the Internet Retailing Conference 2011 last Tuesday. The overriding thought of the day was that retailers must be thinking Multi-Channel. Nearly every talk focussed on the importance of building your brand and creating a seamless user experience across all channels. This is of course sage advice however, in my view there was a notable absence in retailers talking about search as part of this experience, particularly the benefits of optimising your website and social media presence for non-brand searches.

Building your brand with targeted and engaging content across channels is great for existing customers but what about potential new customers who don’t already know your brand? Search is absolutely fundamental to increasing non-brand exposure and starting to engage with those not familiar with your brand.

Many niche brands come to us with the same problems: they are getting zero traffic for non-brand terms and their home page accounts for the vast number of entrances to the site (which is being driven by brand domain authority).

So what do you need to do to increase visibility for non-brand terms? You need to go back to basics to ensure all of the content you create on and off site is optimised in a way that search engines can understand.

Optimise your meta titles, page headers, internal links and include areas of optimised copy on every page. The search engines will then be able to effectively evaluate and rank your pages for more product-focussed, non-brand terms. Link build to those pages and other engaging site content you are creating using those non-brand terms. Natural search visibility has to be a fundamental part of any multi-channel strategy as it is the starting point of the customer user journey for so many new customers.

It is refreshing to see that retailers are taking strides towards multi-channel and talking seriously about the customer experience. Just don’t forget that search is a key part of this.

I’ll finish with some of my key take outs from the conference:

  • Embrace, invest and commit to multi-channel – You need to make sure you evolve your strategy. Customer behavior and trends and changing, driven mainly by technology so in turn search campaigns, payments methods, user-experience and so also need to evolve.
  • Demonstrate ROI across the business (rather than for each channel) – Make sure you have good multi-channel analytics tool in place to understand the journey customers take from research through to sale. In turn, this allows you to optimise marketing channels properly.
  • Be agnostic about where a sale takes place – Customers shop wherever they want, whenever they want. So you need to embrace technology and provide a cohesive user experience across all channels.
  • Understand your customer – Make them feel good.  Listen and engage with them, find out what they want, what they like, what’s important to them and find out where they spend their time (both on and offline). Use this insight to align your strategy.
  • Make your brand accessible across channels – Strive to provide a unique brand experience but ensure the brand experience is consistent across all your channels. Bring your brand to life with hot spotting videos, creative content, dynamic merchandising, contextual product imagery etc.
  • Mobile is (still) the next big thing – If you haven’t got a mobile site, get one! Use your customer insight to find out what your customers do on their mobiles and match your mobile offering to this. Mobiles add locality so don’t forget your local strategy.

Leapfrogg’s approach to social media (infographic)

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

Social media is an integral part of your audience’s digital engagement with your brand. At Leapfrogg, we take a holistic approach to social media; our approach reflects the interdependency between search, social media and content; we believe that you cannot operate a successful digital marketing campaign in silos.

We advise our clients on the best channels by which to reach their audience by conducting comprehensive research; in short, how and where their prospects and customers spend their time online. Using this information, we develop a centralised content plan, which is also aligned to the greater marketing strategy. Having all departments (agency and client side) working to an agreed plan not only gives clear direction but also ensures that messaging remains consistent through all marketing channels, regardless of the channel your consumer prefers to engage with you via. This is essential to giving a retail brand a voice across social media channels that extends beyond special offers and promotions; it’s about offering a more compelling reason to follow that brand.

A centralised content plan also helps deliver the consistent experience that customers expect as they move between channels, something which is essential for retailers to get right but much easier said than done!

This approach is illustrated below with this rather wonderful infographic:Phase one: Insight & understanding
Creating a successful, engaging and compelling space for relationship building with your target market is only possible if you know who your target audience is, what they care about and how they like to communicate; and you measure that relationship accordingly. Taking time to understand your target audience feeds directly into phase two.

Phase two: Centralised content strategy, operation structure & clear objectives
A solid content strategy gives you creative direction, streamlines resources and ensures all messaging is consistent. This also allows you to engage with your target audience in the appropriate way and set clear objectives for your activity.

Phase three: Pool of clear results
Done well, content planning and social media can deliver brand awareness, customer engagement, ownership of search results, stronger relationships with the media and drive direct sales. Only by structuring your approach, execution and measurement will you be guaranteed to add value and deliver tangible business benefits.

Gearing up for tomorrow’s SheerB2B conference

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

I’m very excited (and a bit nervous!) to be talking tomorrow at the illustrious SheerB2B conference at Fulham Town Hall.  The trade and B2B arm of SheerLuxe, the definitive guide to luxury and premium shopping,  SheerB2B is a unique online community that brings together support and advice, a directory of recommended industry agencies, suppliers & experts, case studies and interviews to help premium and independent Etailers successfully grow their businesses.

I’m presenting alongside Google, my-wardrobe.com and other premium retail experts around the day’s event focus, ‘content’:  how to create the best possible content for your website, how to use that content to support your wider SEO objectives and how content can support conversion and sales.

I’m looking specifically at why it’s vital that brands bring their PR online and how an effective online PR strategy, dovetailed to your wider SEO and social media activity, is an essential part of a holistic approach to digital marketing.

My presentation includes a look at how a central content plan can help you streamline and consolidate your content production and cascade into a structure for your blog, social media, link building and online PR plans.  I’m also going to be taking people through Leapfrogg’s view of how link building has evolved over the past few years to be a great deal more sophisticated and therefore demand a PR/editorial approach to maximise success in search and customer acquisition.

As well as being super nervous about standing up in front of a room of such experts, I’ll also be wearing utterly ridiculous shoes, so I’m also secretly hoping I don’t fall over in front of everyone!

Wish me luck everyone!

Optimising for social signals

Posted on by Ben Adam

social buttons

Although social content sharing has been around for some time now, only recently has the sharing of content had a direct impact on a pages ranking in Google or Bing. It is becoming ever more important to ensure customers are encouraged to tweet, share, like and now +1 your products or news stories.

The most popular and most significant social influencers on the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) are:

  • Tweets
  • Facebook likes and shares
  • Google’s +1

What are the benefits?

Google and Bing have both stated that social signals have a direct effect on rankings. Tweets already have been shown to aid rankings and there is an increasingly need for them to be considered as an additional form a link building. Sites should be aiming to get pages mentioned in tweets by authoritative people as you would aim to gain links from authoritative websites.

Twitter

If an article is retweeted or referenced in Twitter, Bing will add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. However, it currently carries more weight in Bing Social Search. Google also use it as a signal in both their organic and news rankings. However, only in the last couple of days there have been reports of Google placing less emphasis on Twitter and removing the ‘real time’ filter from the search options on the left hand side of the page. It remains to be seen if this is temporary or a more permanent move, perhaps to drive users towards Google+ and +1.

Facebook likes and share

For links shared within Facebook, either through personal walls or fan pages Bing has a close relationship with Facebook and currently looks at links shared that are marked as “Everyone,” and links shared from Facebook fan pages. Google treat links shared on Facebook fan pages the same as it treats tweeted links but has no personal wall data from Facebook.

Facebook “send” is more personalised recommendation and endorsement; earning Facebook shares currently will not directly boost your rankings (though it may have positive effects that indirectly promote links, tweets and other signals Google may use as suggested by Matt Peters).

Google +1

Google has been indicating right from the start that +1s are going to influence search results. Once fully rolled out in the UK, +1s, as well as being  used as a ranking factor, are also going to  impact both paid and natural CTRs from SERPs, as +1s appear alongside the search result.

Adding buttons to your site

Incorporating buttons into your site design is no simple task; there is an important balance between avoiding clutter and promoting the share buttons.

Generally the most popular method for implementing social buttons is a “Catchall service” such as “addthis”. Although the catchall can help prevent cluttering of your pages and avoid user confusion, they lack the call to action and impact of big bold buttons. They also don’t show the number of shares that may encourage greater user interaction.

What buttons should be included?

To avoid cluttering your pages and confusing customers only buttons that you see as significant use should be included, ideally limiting them to 3. Look closely at where your current traffic is coming from and consider your customer demographic before choosing the buttons to add.

What pages?

Social buttons are not relevant to all pages of the site and should not simply be replicated across every page. There are a variety of ways that the social sharing buttons should be incorporated into the site such as:

  • Product detail pages
  • Blog posts and news articles
  • Category level pages
  • Thank you pages
  • Wish lists

Where?

It is important that when placing social buttons there is a balance between content and promotion. We don’t want to the buttons to draw attention from any other goals but do want them to be simple to find. Consider containing within one widget and above the fold. Also add secondary buttons to the foot of long pages such as articles and posts.

A link builder’s guide to working with bloggers

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

As a ‘traditional’ PR professional who made the move to a purely digital role six months ago, working with bloggers had never been quite as important to me as it is now.  What I’ve learned at Leapfrogg, is that link building with blogs, especially the more influential ones, can be an extremely powerful way of gaining a stronger external link profile, as well as delivering the PR benefit from the coverage. Whilst traditional media still remains important, links from blogs can offer longer-lasting value as they tend to have a slower archive rate.

Approaching bloggers however is completely different to traditional media outlets. First of all, blogs are a labour of love; often written in spare time alongside a day job. Unless it’s a corporate blog, bloggers do not get paid for running their site and writing content, unlike professional journalists, meaning the approach must be much more personal. The most important thing is to demonstrate you have read the blog and know a bit about the writer, remember that bloggers are real people (not news sites!) and take the time to find out about the blog topics and audience.

Most recently, I’ve been working closely with mummy bloggers around a client’s nightwear launch and with travel and food blogs for a client specialising in tailor-made holidays.  This has included attending Travel Bloggers Unite, an annual travel blogger event.

So applying everything I have learnt in recent months, here are a few tips to consider when approaching bloggers. Whilst there might be guidelines specific to certain industries or sectors, I’d say the points below apply regardless of sector or blog topic:

  • The first rule of thumb is not to inundate bloggers with press releases, which they do get sent a lot of on a daily basis. They do not want to be treated as news feeds; they want their content to be unique and personal. However, a blog might be open to publishing your press release if you pay them to do so!
  • Bloggers are more often than not very open to selling their ‘retail space’ on their blogs for content that is relevant and useful for their readers. The preferred method is usually paid guest blogging, running over a number of months. This gives them a subscription based income and regular content onto their site and you get regular links from a relevant domain in return
  • Product reviews work very well for both bloggers and brands – who wouldn’t want to be sent free stuff! However, ensure the product you’re offering fits with the style and audience of the blog and make sure you’re offering bloggers products you genuinely believe in
  • For travel bloggers, press trips can still be few and far between, so if your blogger can get time away from work or their family, expect a positive response if you can offer bloggers places on one…and in return get a fair bit of coverage!  You have to bear in mind however, that your coverage will be honest and ‘as seen’ by the bloggers you send.  You can’t expect a glowing review just because they attended the press trip!
  • Competitions generally aren’t a great link building tactic as once they’ve run, the pages tend to be taken down (online magazine sites being an example). However, blog competitions stay archived and it’s a great way for bloggers to invite interaction from their readers and attract new ones
  • Honesty is key. If you’re speaking to a number of blogs about the same topic, tell them (they usually all know each other anyway!) and always follow through; if budgets are cut or the plans have changed tell the blogger – keep the relationship honest, open and nurtured

As with any media, establishing good relationships with bloggers is the basis to securing great results and being a successful editorial link builder!

Distilled & SEOmoz link building seminar overview

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

I attended the highly popular Distilled & SEOmoz link building seminar in London in mid March. Speakers were from various SEO backgrounds and topics ranged from personal link building mistakes to the future of link building – even touching on some dark hat tactics that surprisingly many agencies still adopt!

I won’t go into full detail of each talk but have compiled the top advice and insights:

Having a plan for all your link building activity might sound obvious, but it was highlighted how many times a great idea is executed without considering the wider context. Always have a solid plan and map it back to your wider strategy before embarking on any link building activity. At Leapfrogg we always create central content plans at the start of campaigns that all creative content and link building cascades from. This helps tie all activity into the wider marketing mix and enables all communication output to be unified.

An important aspect for any brand is building advocates – these can be on topic bloggers or even better, current users of your site. If you have an active community on your site already, use them! Continue to build an ‘army’ by creating blogger relationships and nurturing them well before you think you may want their input in return.

Using social media does work. It may not deliver rankings per se, but will enforce the voice of your brand amongst your target audience. You can use Twitter as a short term strategy to see temporary boosts in rankings. As social search is becoming more vital in the consumer purchase journey, it’s important to be fully aware of the power of these channels.

There have been some opinions that widgets are an old and useless tactic. However, widgets still work – any embedded content does! This is good news for me, as I’m about to embark on some widget building activity… (more on that later!).

Finally, don’t forget the importance of existing links. Link reclamation is often a quick and powerful win. If you can’t get a keyword rich link, ensure your brand or website link is correct – this will still add value to your whole domain.

The main take out was simple: always think of the end user first, search engines second – by creating diverse, compelling content…not spam! This is the same message that Leapfrogg has been advocating since 2003 when the agency started out so nothing particularly new there. But it was good to see even some of the most hardened black hatters in attendance coming round to this way of thinking.

Digital marketing benchmarking report for premium food and drink retailers

Posted on by Ben Potter

Last year, we conducted a survey of premium home and garden retailers, seeking to understand their use of, and attitudes towards digital marketing.

This year, we have looked at the food and drink sector, focusing on retailers selling premium/luxury products online. The basic premise remained the same as the previous home and garden study; to better understand the marketing tactics being employed by retailers, what they felt was working (or not, as the case may be) and plans for 2011.

This research was conducted over a series of one-to-one qualitative interviews.  Out of a target list of 80 companies, a quarter were kind enough to take part in almost 40 hours of discussions.

Top level findings

In summary, we found that a lack of understanding, lack of resource and inaccurate reporting are key factors hampering online success in the premium food and drink sector. The research revealed many companies are seemingly hamstrung by a failure to map digital marketing activity back to their overall business and financial objectives. Indeed, fewer than 20% of respondents know the return on investment (ROI) they are seeing from digital marketing and only a quarter of our interview sample is measuring the lifetime value of a customer.

However, companies are seemingly willing to continue increasing investment in certain activities without setting clear objectives and having the tools in place to measure the impact. Social media, which includes social networking, forums and communities and blogging, is shown to be an activity that many of the respondents do not fully understand and, historically, have been unable to measure results with any degree of accuracy. However, almost half of respondents plan on dedicating greater resource to this activity in 2011.

You can download for full report for free. It also includes a number of key questions (page 6) that we believe premium food and drink retailers need to be asking of themselves if they are to achieve the following:

  • Link digital marketing activity to overall commercial and financial objectives
  • Invest, what is often limited resources (time and money), in the right areas
  • Measure the impact of activity back to the bottom line
  • Keep abreast of the new developments and shifts in consumer behaviour

If you would like to discuss any aspect of the report findings, please get in touch with Ben Potter.

Brand link building vs conversion link building

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

In my last post I talked about different methods of link building. For Leapfrogg, it’s not just about being creative in our output; it’s also about being strategic in our thinking.

We design our natural search campaigns to consist of different tiers – each with a different objective. For example, the first tier could consist of brand link building to the homepage through broad search terms to drive volume of traffic, with further tiers focusing on longer tail terms to build links to deeper, more specific landing pages to aid conversion.

The two fold benefit of this approach means that the PR coverage enables us to communicate to a wide audience, with the SEO benefit of the links supporting the natural search objective.

I’ve illustrated in the diagram below how this may work in terms of a travel target audience:

The audience in the outermost circle can be captured with broad online PR, social media and brand link building activity before they are even considering a purchase. The best way to target this audience is by using creative tactics placed in general, everyday media.

Broad search terms help build a brand and capture the ‘inspiration’ searches. Furthermore, this tactic gets your brand in front of a potential customer before they’re even looking for a holiday.  For example, if I know I want to go on holiday but have not decided where to go, I will search for ‘beach holidays’ to inspire me.

By using creative tactics to acquire high quality links you get the added benefit of brand awareness. Tactics we are currently adopting include a combination of guest blogging, editorial features with bloggers / online press, case studies and blog sponsorships. Creating compelling content engages and informs your target audience to make your brand stand out.

The middle circle is the audience who have already decided on the purchase but not on the exact item. They are looking for inspiration and can also be reached by broad link building activity placed in travel specific publications.

Whilst ranking number one for a broad search term is great, it’s often the more specific, longer tail keywords that deliver conversions. Your target audience searching in more detail are influenced well before making any purchases. Now if I know I specifically want to go on holiday to Marmaris in Turkey, I will search for ‘beach holidays Marmaris’ for the best deal.  Understanding where your audience is and what they’re looking for is key and enables you to target them in the right way, at the right time with the right message. Traffic will be less so at the long tail, but conversion arguably higher and ranking an easier win.

Often the deeper landing pages are more difficult to build links to so quick wins delivered by a combination of link reclamation, directory and article sharing site submissions (not those recently damned by Google’s Panda update!)  and news wires are the best way to get them ranking. More time can then be spent around the tougher, more PR led tactics to generate higher quality links to aid the broader search.

A combination of both brand and longer tail links will help to build a varied external link profile to your site and enables you to trade clear business ROI from a marketing function previously difficult to measure.

The importance of optimising your Google Place listing; a quick case study

Posted on by Ben Adam

Since Google integrated its Place results into the standard web results, claiming your listing has been a quick win to climb the search engine results page (SERP), helping many local businesses leapfrog the competition.

However, even if you’ve claimed your Place page it might not be fulfilling its true potential. Using an example from one of our retail clients, I’ll explain how.

What we did

We took a number of local stores and added some key store information to improve and optimise the listings both content wise and visually thereby making them more enticing to users. We…

  • Added listing to relevant categories
  • Added optimised descriptions
  • Added store specific information including
  1. Parking availability
  2. Disabled access availability
  3. Ranges available
  4. Brands available
  5. Any extra store info
  • Added 10 product images that directly relate to stores range and best selling products

The results

Here are the great results we’ve seen in the last few months:

Note

Impressions = how many times users saw your business listing as a local search result
Actions = how many times users showed interest in your business listing

Store 1

Store 2

Store 3

Conclusion

A well optimised, enticing and informative Place page resulted in many more people interacting with the listings, sending increased traffic levels to the site.

Therefore be sure to optimise your Place page and add as much relevant and useful information as possible!