I’m certain that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) was not a subject that was on the curriculum when I studied marketing.^[1]

However, in the year 2011, it’s hard to call yourself a digital marketing consultant and not understand the drivers behind new customer acquisition via search engines like Google and Bing.

SEO is not as sexy as witty, or zeitgeist catching creative. It’s not as trendy as social media or as cutting edge as location based services with augmented reality, but my informed guess is that Google and Bing send more customers to your site than any of these marketing methods.

Despite the fact that most businesses say that being on the top of Google is one of their most important customer acquisition methods, marketing people (like me) have never really been given the SEO tools to help clients take control of this essential digital marketing task. There are thousands of marketing and PR agencies that have SEO in their menu of services, but in reality, most of these companies don’t know how to do it.

So how important are search engines for driving traffic to your website? The following is a breakdown of where new visitors come from for one of my sites.^[2]

• Google – 49.9%
• Direct – 16.4%
• Facebook – 7.5%
• Bing – 4.4%
• Yahoo – 4.0%
• Twitter – 2.8%

So whose responsibility is it to look after the 50% of new business that is delivered this way? Is it Marketing, PR or IT? The answer is that all these functions have a part to play in making sure that your business has the best chance of being at the top of the search engine results.

Luckily, for marketing and PR people, we already have the basic skill-set required to do SEO. At the heart of good search engine optimisation is the creation of relevant content for an identified audience. If you know how to do targeting and messaging, then you know how to come up with keyword phrases that your customers use to search for your products and services.

If you know how to pitch an article to a newspaper or magazine,  then you know how to pitch for a link from an authoritative website. Building relationships with influencers is a key part of SEO, so all your work building a following on Twitter and acquiring Facebook fans can add-value too.

Okay – now for the disclaimer bit – for the last few months, I have been working with a company called Linkdex who have been funded by Amadaues Capital to build a set of SEO tools that help businesses take control of SEO. The online application allows marketing people to build workflows and procedures to make the most of this new business acquisition method.

Everything they never taught you at marketing school about SEO is woven into an integrated set of tools that can take you from zero-to-hero if you apply the methodology. The secret that SEO people don’t want marketing people to know, is that anyone who knows how to use WordPress or similar CMS can rank at the top of search engines.

Even if you don’t sign up to the SEO tools developed by Linkdex, you should check out the great free Learn SEO posts that reveal how to do key tasks like link-building.

1. ^[1] I first saw Mosaic running during my 2nd year at university. Alta Vista may have come shortly after that. ↩
2. ^[2] www.yachtsponsorship.com ↩

The Internet has been with us for at while now. We hear stories about how 500 million people are members of sites like Facebook and more impressively how that ‘customer’ base has been built in just a few years.

Nevertheless, there are still many businesses who don’t prioritise the internet as a source of revenue, who have been conditioned to think that a company’s web presence is a job for the guy in IT or that agency that charges more than the lawyers.

This week I have seen headlines in traditional media with headlines like ‘Why you should consider Internet marketing’ as if it was still the bleeding edge of promotional activity – as if there was some reason why you might not do internet marketing.

Functions that are fundamental to business are still being marginalised internally and that provides technology companies that can explain the business benefits of their services an opportunity.

Take search. Even a 5 year old entrepreneur with a lemonade stand knows that location is important. If nobody knows where to find you, no-one can buy from you. Nowadays, even passing trade can be hijacked by competitors making real-time offers to tempt your customers down the street using location based services, but your customer’s journey probably started much earlier – with an internet search.

Why then, do savvy business people who understand that location is important, not think about the location of their website in a page of search results?

Perhaps it’s too hard. Perhaps the mystery built up by the ‘search industry’ has convinced business owners that they are powerless to have an effect on the corporate machinery of sites like Google, bing and Yahoo!

Even if that is the case, why aren’t search experts then given the same priority as an accountant or lawyer?

In fact, it’s not the case that search is hard. While Google is not as transparent as the yellow pages, there are simple rules that have not changed for several years that almost anyone can follow to get the basics right.

Like accountancy or tax, there is a level of expertise that will meet basic requirements and then there are more complicated issues that require more expert knowledge to make the most of the system.

(It’s at this point that I feel like starting this blog again, having come up with the analogy between search and tax, but that will have to be another post!)

If you accept that location is a fundamental business requirement, then how you rank in search engines becomes a priority ahead of many other business functions. You page rank in relation to your key search terms or keywords needs to be a metric that has the same importance as your sales conversions or gross margin.

What if you could have a tool that did for search what MYOB or Sage does for accounting or what SalesForce does for CRM? What if you could do search engine optimisation (SEO) ‘the Google way’ in a step by step way that demystified the process but provided real business benefits?

What would you want from that service suite?

Those of you following my Twitter feed may have noticed that there has been an increase in references to search and search engine optimisation (SEO) recently.

I’m currently working as a marketing consultant to a company that understands search better than most – who have created a suite of tools to help companies ‘do search the Google way’ and achieve better page rankings, increase traffic and do more business.

It wasn’t until I started looking at the services offered, that I realised how little I really understood about search despite its increasing importance. Given that consumer journeys are changing rapidly thanks to almost pervasive internet connectivity, search is probably not given the priority or resource it deserves in most businesses.

One of the reasons might be that search is full of jargon and complicated ‘black box’ processes that are almost impossible to measure and change on a regular basis. (‘black box’ is different from ‘black hat’ which is an even murkier aspect of search).

One of the other reasons that search is not given it’s proper place in marketing is that many business people have a sense of  ‘learned helplessness’ when it comes to Google and other search engines. This sense that nothing can be done to affect the outcome of a website’s ranking forces many companies to hire SEO consultants or agencies, without any mechanism to measure success.

Over the next few weeks, I will be noting some of the learnings I pick up from working with one of the most switched on companies in the space. While it is trendy to talk about Social Media and influence, there are a few ‘influencers’ you might be ignoring at your own cost.

My guess is that if you look at your website analytics, the biggest driver of traffic to your website, and therefore the entity influencing your customers the most is a search engine. Of course you are all running integrated marketing campaigns, so you have all allocated resources in accordance with expected outcomes, so it is redundant to suggest that you should be spending as much time building long-term authoritative, relevant links as you do cultivating the attention of more fashionable influencers.

I’ll reveal my client in the next few weeks as the product offer comes together…

The final panel at the Sport and New Media conference in Manchester included Jeff Nathenson, Head of Partner Management for YouTube in Northern Europe and Jerry Newman, Chelsea FC Digital Media, Digital Product Manager. They  had some real takeaway advice from those doing, not just talking about it.

There is no doubt that YouTube has changed the sporting landscape. The ability to be able to broadcast high quality – or low quality video around the world is available to anyone with a £15 webcam. As Nathenson says – Youtube is a great equaliser. Chelsea Football Club and the smallest teams have access to the same tools and the same audience, but you need to put in the effort.

While some brands might be scared of putting out content that has lower production values, despite making truly awful corporate videos, Nathenson says that User Interface is not important. Think of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, not exactly the most good looking or friendly sites. Instead it is the content that is king. Some of the most successful videos on YouTube have no beginning, no middle and no end. What they do have is personality.

What YouTube knows, from millions of hours of content being uploaded and watched every minute of every day is that the old rules don’t apply.

Jeff Nathenson’s top tips for being successful.

1. Do not block comments. Turning off the ability for people to engage with your content limits the conversation. If people are writing negative comments, they are a refection on them, or YouTube rather than your brand or the content. Even if there are negative comments, there is no way for you to stop them.

2. Be flexible and be able to move quickly. YouTube is only 5 years old. Many other big tech brands have come and gone in the space of a few years. While Facebook and Twitter and Apple iPhone Apps might be the big thing now, they might all be replaced by something else just around the corner. This leads into point 3.

3. You are going to make mistakes. There are no gurus in this space. Some people have got lucky, some have applied good old fashioned marketing and business fundamentals to the new platforms and had success, but the ones who do best are those who experiment early and often and learn from mistakes.

One thing I disagree with Jeff Nathenson on is his comment that “you can throw a rock out a window, hit a teenager and get them to run this stuff for you.” I believe that if you have spent a lot of time and money in building a brand, then if you do decide to become more open and more public with your consumers via these mechanisms then it needs to be integrated with the rest of your communications.

Having one voice from corporate with one culture and another completely different voice on new media can have long term implications. You need to be true to your company culture and just as people should be themselves on social media, so too should brands not try and pretend to be something different.

Some sporting organisations make the mistake of lumping all fans together as a homogeneous mass. While there are some broad values that could be applied to the supporters of one club versus another, large global brands like Chelsea FC have a fanbase that spans nationalities, socio-economic types and different access to technology.

As Jerry Newman was speaking, Facebook was announcing that 700,000 Chelsea Fans were being reclassfied as 700,000 people who ‘liked’ Chelsea FC. The club’s Twitter stream is attracting new followers at a rate of 2000 a month. For Chelsea, new media is an unofficial channel that can be more nuanced, less corporate and careful.

Newman’s top tips are similar to those of many who spoke on the day.

1. Understand your customers. Not a new media thing. Not even a sport thing. Just a fundamental of business. New Media allows for a feedback mechanism that is honest and in real-time.

2. Always be learning and Act on what you learn. This speaks to the power of analytics and data. Who is watching what? Where are fans coming from? What languages are they speaking? Where are the conversations happening. Why are some pages never visited? YouTube, Facebook and other top channels provide powerful insights and metrics about demographics that can be used to create more value.

3. Interact. Don’t be afraid to engage. This is the thing that scares some people the most. The fear of negative feedback paralyses businesses from getting more involved, however sports fans are by definition fanatical about the athlete or team that they follow and for every negative comment there will be brand advocates – one eyed supporters who will fight the corner of the brand. Think about Apple – for every person that is sceptical about the iPad, there are hundreds who will defend it – even if they have never seen one.

See how smaller rights owners and teams are putting some of these thoughts into practise. Proof that you don’t have to be Chelsea FC to make it work.

• playing with Google talk and Lattitude. Only problem is that no-one knows my googlemail address. #
• watching @rubytv interview with Katrina Sedgewick at the Venice Film Festival. #

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