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1st
APR

BIGLIST Update: These SEO Blogs Are No April Fools

Posted by under Internet Marketing, Pay-Per-Click

On this fine April Fool’s day BIGLIST foregos the tricks and brings you yet another collection of better than average SEO & SEM blog reviews. Over the past 2 years we’ve reviewed over 1,000  SEO blogs and we offer you 5 more to add to your RSS reader and get search engine smart. Think Traffic – This blog by internet entreprenuer Corbett Barr  makes some serious promises: “…teach you the techniques, tools and knowledge you need to build real, sustainable web traffic without a big budget.”  Sounds pretty good to me. Corbett relates his experiences with past projects and growing an audience for Think Traffic to the benefit of readers.  This very new blog offers practical tips and is well designed enough to get our top listing for this week’s review. Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg – Best selling author of multiple books, Bryan Eisenberg begged me for months to add his new blog to the BIGLIST. I challenged Bryan to write another best selling book, start a new company, become a keynote speaker at several popular industry conferences and lose at least 30 pounds. (Hey, we set the bar high for the BIGLIST).  Of course, I’m kidding about the challenge (and the begging). Bryan has accomplished all of those things and much more while writing an excellent blog on conversion optimization and internet marketing strategy with his brother Jeffrey, who is also a best selling author, keynote speaker and online marketing strategist for major brands. Jeff Bullas’s Blog – Jeff works as a sales and marketing manager at Infinity Technologies and his self-titled blog flavors towards social media – offering examples, case studies, lists of tips posts and insights from setting aside his traditional marketing roots and current focus on building trust and relationships with customers through social media, permission and inbound marketing. CanuckSEO – Long time internet marketing veteran Jim Rudnick writes with passion and flair about “Canadian SEO for Google Success!” as well as small business, local SEM and plenty of flavorful opinion posts on a variety of search marketing industry topics. Go for the tips, stay for the story telling and enthusiasm. Honorable Mention Lip Service – Laura Lippay is an ex-circus performer, SEO pioneer, very classy woman and currently Director of Technical Marketing for Yahoo! Media. Laura teases us all by occasionally writing about life and search marketing on this blog that just isn’t active enough to be added to the full BIGLIST. But the Feb 2010 posts are certainly worth an Honorable Mention. Did your SEO or SEM blog make the cut? Share the good news with your readers using the badges page .

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3rd
MAR

Small Business Tips For Reporting Web Metrics

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

[Last week, we shared some web analytics basics for small businesses or web site owners new to tracking website visitor data. Building on that, this post explores what you should do next to report that data.] It’s an exciting time to be a small business owner or communications professional. Why? We’ve never had more data and metrics at our fingertips. Actually, we flew past merely having data to having real-time data. Surprisingly some don’t initially like web metrics. Common concerns I’ve heard over the years include: It’s too confusing Information overload What am I supposed to do with all this data? Won’t all this tracking be expensive? All understandable to someone new to digital marketing but ultimately unfounded. Web metrics are simple to interpret, can be parsed to provide just the information you need, and provide actionable insights for your products or marketing without requiring an expensive research firm. When introduced and walked through the process, most companies quickly fall in love with the accountability provided. Getting web analytics setup is step one. Once you’re tracking, the next step is reporting in a way that is meaningful to stakeholders and using the data to provide actionable recommendations at the strategy table. Beginning the reporting process: 1) Learn the basic and advanced functions of your analytics package If you’re using Google Analytics and are new, learn both the basic and deeper functionality, such as creating advanced segmentation. It’s critical to understand your tool before you get into creating reports. Inevitably after making reports questions will arise asking for specifics, so you’ll want to know how to answer them. Smashing Magazine has a fleshed out guide to Google Analytics that will give you a crash course in the app. 2) Pull key data from your analytics package and document monthly in your own dashboard While there’s little concern major web analytics services will lose data, you should (either automated or manually) pull metrics out monthly into a customized dashboard. Now here’s the critical part: just pull out the data relevant to your objectives and defined KPIs. You can always go back into your analytics package for more detailed metrics (and you should be doing that anyway). By pulling out the data relevant to your objectives, you are being your own best friend and making it simple to craft internal reports/memos, create presentations, share metrics with your team and have it in a malleable format. 3) Know the difference between KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and objectives More traffic to a blog may be nice, but if your goal is to build subscribers traffic is just a KPI. More traffic will logically build more subscribers and it’s something you want to track, but it’s not your success metric. Most web pros are extremely conscious of this difference, however I’ve seen many businesses and marketers either confusing these or not bothering to define them in the first place. 4) Draft detailed insights and an executive summary If you’re doing something like emailing a report with the monthly web analytics summary, don’t send just the data. It’s up to you to interpret what the data means to recipients. Remember, even though you’re taking the time to learn how to report on web metrics the digital divide is still very real. Many won’t even know basic web analytics definitions. If your company is still new to web reporting, it’s an opportunity for you to become the internal analytics evangelist and educate your team. The more they understand, the more valuable the web reports will become. In addition to the detailed insights behind the data, create a brief executive summary each month outlining the major trends in a quick to skim format. If the summary is compelling – you may hook team members to read the whole report. With that said, many will never get past the summary no matter how interesting it is. So it’s a critical component to influence decision makers who don’t have time to read a 1,000 word report. 5) Create goals that push you, but are realistic Great – you’re now not just tracking web analytics, you’re analyzing the data and creating insightful reports. A potential outcome is someone will say: “we want to increase X metric by Y %.” Goals are a good thing and will keep you focused, but make it a policy to keep them realistic. Growing organic web traffic is a long-term process which unless you’re a seasoned digital marketer you may not be able to project realistically (and even then there are too many variables for it to be predicted with 100% accuracy). If you’re new, stay on the conservative side so you don’t set unrealistic expectations. Now that we’ve gone through some basic tips for web analytics reporting – let’s outline a skeleton of some SEO and social media specific metrics worth reporting on. Basic KPIs to monitor relating to SEO A healthy stream of search traffic is vital to the success of any business’ visibility. You’ll want to monitor some specific KPIs to provide insight into your organic search traffic. With the rise of personalized search, it’s smart to set your objective as organic search engine traffic, not search rankings. In a world where search phrases are getting longer and we all see a different SERP for the same phrases due to personalized search, rankings should just be a KPI. Branded to non-branded keyword mix – if all you’re getting is branded search traffic, you’ll want to conduct a technical and content SEO audit of your site as something is probably not in order. A well optimized site (unless it’s a brand with strong marketing prowess or has broad terms in their name) should see a majority of traffic from non-branded terms. Total organic traffic – increases in search traffic can potentially impact your other organic referral sources as well (for example, more people find the site via search engines, share via social channels, which spawns more referral traffic). Search engine rankings – they still matter to keep an eye on. An unbiased report of rankings in search engines for priority terms is something to monitor as it relates to the SEO health of your site. Most popular phrases – keeping track of the popular phrases sending you traffic is important – this data allows you to show correlation between rankings and web traffic. Unique pages on your site – if you’re interested in more search traffic, you should be adding content to your site over time. By adding fresh content at regular intervals, you’re creating signals to the engines to crawl more often and also create more potential search phrases users can find your site for. Depth/length of visit – if you’re optimized for certain terms but traffic from those terms is bouncing or leaving the site quickly, you may want to adjust your glossary. More advanced users will want to track things like conversion rate per keyword, most popular pages, backlink volume and quantity, etc. But don’t become a victim of KPI creep – start simple and add more as you get comfortable. Basic KPIs to monitor relating to social media Along with your small business website, do you have a blog or forum where you’re nurturing a community? Below are some social-media specific metrics to monitor. Your objectives could vary quite a bit (and may even be one of the KPIs listed below) as social media application is as open as your creativity. Number of subscribers – how many people are reading your blog through RSS or email every month? You’ll want to pay attention to this, as subscribers are a vital element of an online marketing growth strategy . Branded searches/non-branded – again, it’s important to know how many people are actively seeking out a community or blog you are monitoring/marketing. This number should grow over time as a byproduct of all marketing activity, digital or otherwise. Overall unique visitors – how much traffic does your community generate? Search engine traffic – search traffic to a blog or web forum should increase month over month as more content is added, links are acquired and authority is gained. If you execute properly increased search traffic is a by product of your social destination. Visitor to subscriber conversion ratios – how many people are coming to your blog but not bothering to subscribe? Might it be worthwhile to experiment moving around the subscription CTAs or adding another below content? You can’t know unless you’re tracking this data. Just compare unique visitors monthly to new subscribers and reduce. I.E. – if your blog had 1,000 visitors last month and 10 new subscribers, you’re converting roughly 1 subscriber per 100 visitors. It’s a rough number because certain referral sources will send better traffic but over time you’ll see the trend emerge. Followers/fans in outposts – Chris Brogan talked about using outposts in his social media strategy. Darren Rowse went ahead and fleshed out a visualization behind this. Outpost is the perfect word to describe how many of us leverage social sites to feed self-hosted communities that live in the open web. Track the growth of these monthly, and remember to do things that actively bridge the connections between them to strengthen your presence. Referral traffic – is StumbleUpon your #1 referral source month over month but you’re not calling it out specifically as a sharing button on your site? Are certain types of blogs sending you highly relevant traffic you can form deeper relationships with? A social program should be extremely sensitive to referral traffic. Number and quality of conversations/posts inspired externally – as your blog starts to grow in popularity it will spawn organic conversations/posts externally. You’ll want to know both how many have been inspired and if they were high quality (score them). Knowing this data, you can line it up next to your blog posts published each month and see trends in the the kind of content that resonates. Number of shares of content across platforms – in addition to conversations/posts inspired externally, you’ll want to know how many people Dugg, Stumbled, Tweeted or otherwise shared your content. Same process – line this up with content and you’ll start to see what is resonating vs. falling flat. Wrapping up Web analytics reporting is a requirement for modern businesses.  It allows your marketing to be more accountable and enables you to support key decisions with data – a powerful selling tool.  If you’re new, don’t let perceived complexity or jargon scare you off:  start simple and get into a rhythm with reporting on the basics.  Over time as your team becomes fluent the process, then you can add additional depth. As many of you reading are extremely savvy in web analytics – what advice would you add to help those who are new?

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17th
FEB

Basic Tips on Web Analytics

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

Just about every business with a web site does something to market and promote it. When those companies are asked about web analytics, it’s surprising how many look back with a blank stare.  This isn’t the case with mature online marketers but it does happen a lot with new business web sites and blogs. For many companies that are new to web analytics the idea of digging in and finding useful information can be daunting.  It’s common marketing sense to measure what you’re marketing, but making sense of analytics data doesn’t always find time in the mix of duties a small business or new web site owner is responsible for. The amount of information that analytics packages deliver isn’t always easy to sort through and turn into business decisions. So what should those that are new to web analytics do? Keep it simple and start off with the basics. Each analytics package is different in features, price and learning curve. I’d suggest starting out with Google Analytics as it’s free, feature rich, and not too complicated to learn. Start off by looking at the items below. Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are are an important metric as it counts everyone as one for any given time period. This means that if you had 250 unique visitors, 250 different people visited your site at least once. If your unique visitor number is low, it could mean that your site is either having issues in search engines, or need more content. Traffic Sources – Are you getting traffic from Google, Yahoo, Twitter, or other sites? Referring information can help you see where your traffic is coming from which you can then use to make decisions on where and how to promote your future content. Referring Keywords – These are the phrases that someone put into a search engine and arrived at your site with. Ideally they’d be keyword phrases that related to your company. If not, then it may be an indication that you’re either not optimized, or optimized for the wrong phrases. Top Content – No matter what size your site is, knowing what pages get the most traffic can help you when building out new pages. Using the same format, or building out content on that topic, can help drive more traffic. These are also pages that call to action (CTA) buttons should be added if you want your visitors to do download a white paper or do something specific. Location – If your business wants a strong local presence, the location area in analytics can tell you country, state and city of where your visitors are coming from. Are your visitors actually local? That’d be a good thing to know. Campaign Tracking –  Track visitors from sources where you are marketing to a particular goal page or conversion. As you feel more comfortable with Google Analytics you can then start to explore other actionable data including conversions, trends and features such as the most often used search terms on your internal search engine. Features like goals, top entrance/exit pages, bounce rates, and time on site are also a good metrics to use in understanding how visitors are interacting with your content. Visit the Google Analytics Help page to find out everything you need to know to make the most out of GA. Web analytics can be overwhelming as there is a lot of information to be analyzed and then decisions that need to be made from that data. Instead of trying to jump in and consume it all, take it one step at a time.

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15th
FEB

Ten Must Read Tips to Start a Small Business Blog

Posted by under Blog Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Web Marketing

A friend of mine who is an experienced corporate marketer started a new business. The store just opened and being the good pal that I am, I was able to provide some advice regarding marketing on the web – specifically regarding blog marketing. This is a new small business, so considerations for what to do about a web site included: cost, functionality, flexibility, ease of maintenance and marketability. The web site needed to serve as both an online representation of the business, but without transactional functionality, as well as a host for landing pages used with email and PPC campaigns. My recommendation for a low cost, easy to use and search engine friendly content mangagement system? Blog software. What often happens when friends ask for advice regarding web marketing is that I’ll make some recommendations in a casual setting or email links to a few resources like this one on blog marketing tips , then a few weeks or months later, the conversation will turn to, “So, how is your blog or web site doing?”, and I find out that the site/blog was either not started at all, it was created in a way that blows away any chance of SEO or marketability outside of advertising or it was built using resources with no cost of entry but without the capabilities to scale if successful. Something along those lines happend with my friend’s blog. What was the issue? The blog was started using Blogger.com, which by itself is not a problem, but the blog address selected was: nameofstore.blogspot.com. This is understandable because it’s the default URL selection when you create a blog with Blogger.com. However, picking a third party domain for the blog address violates one of the most important rules in sustainable blogging: Always host the blog address with a domain name you control. That means yourdomainname.com/blog or blog.yourdomainname.com or yourdomainnameblog.com. Otherwise, you give up control. How so? What if the blog host goes down? Free services rarely provide support. Also, what if the service does not support the functionality you need? You can’t change their entire platform to suit your individual needs. There are other reasons for keeping the blog address as part of your own domain name including the ability to change blog software services without having to change your blog address. Of course there’s also a benefit for search engine optimization if you host the blog as a sub directory of your main company domain name such as yourdomainname.com/blog. Blogs are very linkable entities and other blogs tend to be enthusiastic about linking, so any links to your blog can be percieved as a vote of credibility to your main web site since the blog and the web site share the same domain name. Now back to our tale of the small business blog. My friend had only made one post on the blogspot.com URL so nothing would be lost by moving to a dedicated domain name. My own experience with Online Marketing Blog was different. After blogging for nearly 2 years at a blogspot.com address, I decided to move to a dedicated domain name and WordPress. It took some talented optimization and 6 months of aggressive promotion to recoup the linking footprint (100,000+ inbound links) that was lost. Of course, now our traffic is multiple times more than what it was. What my friend decided to do was register a domain name and setup a hosting account. Since there was no main company web site to attach the blog to, this makes the most sense. Essentially, the blog became the company web site. With more and more businesses, this is becoming a very practical, cost effective and functionally efficient way to manage web site content: Using blog software as a content management system. As my friend asked what to do next, writing everything down in a notebook, it became clear that there’s a litany of things you COULD do with setting up a blog. Even if we filtered it down to what one SHOULD do, the list was amazingly long. As someone new to the whole idea of blogging and this not being a formal consulting arrangement, I decided to create what I think, is a short list of what a small businesses CAN do when starting a blog. 1. Decide the purpose of the blog. Do this before going out and registering a domain name or anything else. Is the blog going to serve as a journal for starting the business? Is it a search marketing tool? Is it to be used to demonstrate thought leadership and create credibility? Will it be a communication tool for customers? Will it also serve as the main company web site? Is the purpose some or all of the above? I could elaborate on setting up each of these types of blogs if I ever decided to write that book, but for now, we’ll stick with a blog that serves as a company web site, hosts landing pages, serves as a small business resource and marketing tool. 2. Pick a URL. If the purpose of the blog is to support company brand and audience, then the URL should be part of the company web site. Ideally, the blog hosting situation allows for a sub directory such as companysite.com/blog.  Otherwise, a sub-domain such as blog.companysite.com will work and you can can host the blog elsewhere, separate from the company web servers. IT will like that. If the purpose of the blog is independent of the primary company brand, or messaging, then a dedicated domain name such as topicgoeshereblog.com might work better. It’s tempting to use a keyword only domain name, but those keywords will not be a silver bullet for search engine rankings. A catchy, meaningul brand name for the blog will go much farther as content can always be optimized for search engine rankings. 3. Pick blog software. In most cases, WordPress is the way to go. An inexpensive Linux platform hosting account that supports PHP and mySQL can be secured for $10-$20 per month. However, should the blog get really popular, expect to upgrade to support increased demand. It’s entirely worth it. The blog software will need to be installed on the server that will host it and the database will also need to be set up. This is fairly straightforward, but in all honesty, it’s best to have someone that knows what they’re doing help. As an example, I do very little of the technical work on our blog and prefer to have a specialist (Thomas McMahon) take care of maintenance, adding plugins, design and functionality updates. We have outside programmers do any heavy lifting in the application development department. WordPress software is open source, ie free, so if you are code/technically savvy and you have the time to figure it out, it’s certainly doable. There is no one “right way” to setup a blog. There are literally hundreds of shades of gray. It can cost a hundreds to thousand of dollars for a blog consultant to install, setup and customize the design of your blog. You’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for expertise that will save you MONTHS of time and allow you to get to market more quickly and efficiently. 4. Customize the blog. After installation of the core blog software, there are a number of customization tasks. First, the blog design should be modified to match your branding. If you don’t hire a consultant to do this, there are many free templates that can then be customized, but many of them require a link to the author at the bottom. Personally, I’m not a fan of those, but they are a low/no cost place to start. Design customization involves modifying the CSS, JavaScript, graphics and possibly a few database elements. The second set of customization tasks involves plug-ins to improve the adminstration, front end functionality and the SEO friendliness of the blog. Thanks to Twitter and Thomas for this recommended minimum list of plug-ins: Redirection HeadSpace2 Google XML sitemaps Gravity forms All In One SEO PostPost ACE WP Plug ComLuv Disqus Members only Cookies for comments Section widget Page order Related posts FeedSmith FeedBurner Plugin Sociable Askimet or WP-SpamFree Post Teaser 5. Create a content plan. In concert with the purpose of the blog, it’s important to generate a basic editorial guideline for creating content. The easiest way to manage this is by creating categories for the kinds of content you plan on posting. Before you create those categories, it’s a good idea to do some keyword research as the categories will become excellent repositories of related content. Why not make it even easier for search engines to understand and rank them? Common keyword research tools include: WordTracker and Google . Paid keyword tools include WordStream.com and KeywordDiscovery.com Once you identify which keyword phrases best represent the content you’ll be publishing, use them to name your content categories. Each time you make a blog post, that entry will be associated with one or more categories, creating a very search engine friendly repository of content. Create an editorial calendar or schedule of posts to keep you on topic for your audience and true to the purpose of the blog. Leverage interactions with blog readers as well as your analytics to know if your content and keyword picks are productive or not. 6. Pick your blogging team. In the case of most small businesses, the blogging team is a team of one. That’s fine, just be sure to document what’s working and what’s not so when the time comes, you can get your blogging team mate up to speed quickly. Since blogger’s block (like writer’s block) can really dampen a good thing for a small business blog, go ahead and keep a good number of posts in draft mode. Add to them as you get new ideas and inspiration. Or facts and examples. That way, you’ll have a steady stream of blog posts ready to publish in advance. In fact, you can schedule blog posts in advance using WordPress. 7. Make it easy to share. Blogging in a vaccum is inevitable blogging death. It’s essential that you solicit comments in your posts, respond to comments quickly, create and enforce a commenting policy. Being responsive is an essential part of attracting subscribers . Don’t covet the comments either. Visit other blogs in your industry and write useful comments. Those bloggers may notice you and it can become something more, like an invite for a guest post, collaboration or simply a new online friend. Make it easy for readers of your blog to save and share your content with sharing buttons or widgets. It pays to create accounts on the more popular services and develop social networks there. Your contacts on Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and similar services will watch for your next post and vote for the good stuff, which can drive your content to be exposed on more popular areas of those web sites. More exposure can mean more traffic. The social bookmarks tool is handy for adding such functionality to any web page and Thomas offered several new blog promotion tips last week. 8. Get your social on . RSS feeds come with blogs and it’s worth taking the time to make sure the RSS feed is readily available and obvious for people to subscribe. Submit your blog and RSS feed to our HUGE list of blog and RSS directories . Set up social profiles on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as appropriate and automate the sharing of links from your blog posts to those services. In other words, you could use a service like TwitterFeed to publish your latest blog post to Twitter and Facebook automatically. Be sure to publish your blog URL everywhere you publish your web site address. 9. Make static. If you’re using the blog as a CMS for a small business web site, then make your static web pages such as those for About our Company, Product/Service pages, Contact Forms, etc. The blog can be customized to have a home page like any other web site as well. That way, visitors arriving on your site can see what they expect from a company selling products/services. At the same time, blogging creates a rich and frequent source of useful content that’s syndicated via RSS, promoted automatically to relevant social channels and leaves the door open for interaction via comments. 10. Measure. Test – Test. Measure. It’s important that you set goals for the blog, a plan to execute tactics and most of all, measure progress. Most web site measurement is focused on web analytics and metrics specific to different types of marketing such as with email, SEO or PPC. Standard web analytics software such as Google Analytics will address the vast majority of your needs. I would also recommend social media monitoring and analytics. Monitoring can be as simple as the RSS feed from search.twitter.com combined with the RSS feed from the results of a search on Google’s blog search. You could also use services like socialmention.com , trackur.com or more robust social media monitoring tools such as Techrigy SM2, ScoutLabs or Radian6. Social monitoring tools will help you understand what your customers are saying about you on the social web as well as uncover new interaction opportiunities with influentials. Real time search means real time marketing and social monitoring can facilitate that. One example would be if a competitor Tweets a deal on a product. Your Twitter search on that competitor or product would create an alert. You could then decide to offer a deal at a lower price or some other counter offer. Another example is if a customer complains about your company. Before others jump on the bandwagon, your social monitoring tools would alert you and you can then qualify and address the situation quickly. As web analytics and social media monitoring tools become increasingly intertwined, you’ll be able to identify many other key metrics for the effect of your social participation on bottom line business goals. There you go. Ten tips for starting a small business blog. This was a long post and yet, it’s nowhere near a comprehensive guide to create a small business blog. Even though there is plenty of free blog software and advice available online, many companies would benefit from having professional help with a business blog. The funny thing is, my friend will look at this post and say, “This is the SHORT list?”. Blogging can be simple to start, but no one said it wasn’t hard work. If you’ve created a blog for your small business, what has your experience been? Did you do it yourself? Do you get expert help? Have you set up a small business web site using blog software? we’d love to hear about your experiences, challenges and successes.

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8th
FEB

Two Biggest Advantages of Small Businesses SEO

Posted by BlogPostman under Pay-Per-Click

With  search engine optimization , small businesses have two advantages larger competitors often can’t match: creativity and agility. By embracing these two philosophies as part of their digital marketing DNA, small businesses can carve out a search marketing strategy that runs circles around larger competitors. Today, we’ll briefly explore why creativity and agility are advantages small businesses have for search marketing, and some quick tips to activate each. Creativity as a search marketing advantage Large = more risk management – Small = creativity/individuality can shine Larger corporations are naturally risk-averse. Most won’t create blogs that take sides on issues, create controversy or linkbait, push the envelope with snarky ideas or allow shining examples of individuality. Which is why individuals and smaller companies have a continued advantage: there are far less stakeholders so it’s easier to sell creative, controversial or compelling ideas. The more creative your content is, the more editorially earned, organic links you’ll attract from the web community that content builds. Tips to activate for SEO benefit: Develop creative linkbait – small, creative groups have the perfect environment to brainstorm linkbait. Where larger companies will mostly follow proven archetypes, a small business can break the mold with clever, catchy and outside the box linkbait ideas. It’s an opportunity to create the kind of linkbait social web influencers are looking for but larger competitors do not understand. By embracing this it’s possible to outpace those who can only engage in manual/mechanical linkbuilding efforts because the content they are working with is dry. Create controversy – success in small businesses comes from dedicated team members passionate about their industry of choice. Due to this passion, they will naturally have strong feelings about the industry they are in. Why not turn that passion loose on the web to attract others who feel the same? It’s going to be more authentic, let you leverage an angle larger competitors can’t or won’t use, and more closely connect with an audience. Even those who disagree with you play into this strategy, because as they respond to you in droves, they bring an influx of links and referral traffic. Individuals in your niche are dominating the SERPs by leveraging this approach and it’s an opportunity if your small business can artfully direct controversy. Leverage a creative CMS – where large competitors are stuck using SEO-unfriendly CMS platforms, your small business can take advantage of cheap/free SEO-friendly online publishing tools like WordPress . Creative web developers can turn WordPress into an entire CMS to power your site at an extremely reasonable cost. If you need something more powerful, a CMS like Expression Engine is both affordable and natively search engine friendly. Small businesses have a choice where larger companies frequently get locked into complex systems or dated technologies. Agility as a search marketing advantage Larger = slower moving – Small = the advantage of speed and agility Agility isn’t just a factor for influencing the social web . It’s an effective way for a small businesses to create an SEO strategy disruptive to competitors. Because larger corporations naturally have complex layers of approval processes, lawyers and committees, smaller businesses have an opportunity to exploit this by being first. Many small businesses try to act like large corporations, however this is not embracing the advantage possible by being able to turn on a dime. Tips to activate for SEO benefit: Flip your mindset about web content from formal to improvisational – particularly with content published through a social channel such as a blog.  According to the recent TopRank Marketing survey on  blogging and SEO 94% of bloggers reported seeing measurable SEO benefits from blogging within 12 months. A majority see benefit, since more content  equals more hooks in the water for search engines. Data from Hitwise showing search phrases are getting longer reinforces this, showing you should feed the tail now more than ever. By having an agile content development process, smaller companies can and do outpace larger competitors who have more resources, but can’t get out of their own way. Embrace personal brands – when a company embraces their team members having personal brands, this will as a by-product provide a search marketing advantage. For example: in interviews, on their own blogs and through their own exposure, a company and the individual both benefit since both parties frequently get mentioned/linked together. It’s a win-win situation. Where larger corporations use their many partners as an advantage for links, small businesses can encourage and embrace their passionate, trusted team members to develop personal brands in their industry. Break news – as we’ve noted previously in social media marketing applications (and also discussed by Brian Clark at Copyblogger): every company is now a media company. By breaking news right along with media, you’re going to attract links and referral traffic. Instead of relying on external entities for attention, your company will start to become a trusted source as its own brand of media. To embrace this in a way that matters, agility is essential. The more small businesses take advantage of their ability to be more creative and agile than larger competitors, the more their online content marketing and SEO programs will succeed. What other advantages do you think small businesses have for search marketing?

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