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@TerenceMace This is also dependant on usage of Safari vs Chrome on iOS.
Otherwise, great napkin-maths!
@Mallikarjunan So they've given you their email (via a whitepaper download, or otherwise) and your sales rep hasn't been able to get in touch with the business?
Is the literal assessment of my site free?
"No sales pitch, no BS."
And then you immediately launch into a sales pitch:
It's like you're calling attention to the fact that you are yet another BSing salesperson.
Any marketer savvy enough to know "inbound marketing" also likely knows about using dynamic fields to target users. They're going to be savvy enough to know that this doesn't make Hubspot "personable."
I'd re-evaluate the level of respect you're showing your (potential) customers. There might be considerable benefit from conducting user research -- I'm personally not able to identify, like Joel, what we're supposed to talk about (what does Hubspot know about my business, my marketing, my ROI, or my headaches?)
Look at Moz, for example.
Website errors, missed conversions, and SEO opportunities = my headaches
Reporting, research, and community = my marketing
&c.
Right now we're just using the Editors provided by Google/Bing. I think we could benefit from using something like Kenshoo, but the team prefers to be hands-on.
I use SEMRush pretty extensively to look at competitor habits, ad copies, &c. Our team at Google does a great job at providing quarterly opportunity analysis, so we always have new insights in terms of our performance against our peer set.
Hey @victorpan!
It really depends on your website. The first client I ever worked with was Reader's Digest, and most of the keywords we were targeting were lifestyle (diabetes, recipes, home and garden). The last client I worked with when I was at an agency was General Motors, and there were some talks about creating blogs that would target keywords like "best roadtrips" and what not. I think after the whistleblower scandal in mid-2014 came about, GM wasn't really worried about lifestyle keywords ;)
Lifestyle keywords can be difficult to rank for, because there are oodles of 5-10 year old websites that already capture the organic search traffic for keywords you might profit from. If lifestyle keywords are your primary keywords, unless you pull a Rap Genius and completely disrupt the niche, you're admittedly facing an uphill battle.
TBH I very rarely opt for SEO when it comes to B2B products.
Usually, the resources it takes to rank a website in organic are far too costly and so it makes more sense to go with paid search. I'm quite biased, however, from negative experiences working with B2B companies.
Depending on your site, and your competitors', I would review your navigation and how you're using anchor text for interlinking. For long tail keywords, especially on niche B2B keywords, you're basically stuck with blogging. The whole idea just bores me to death, and I'd rather just pay for the traffic and improve the UX so that the leads actually convert.
Oh, yes. We love gifs at SSENSE haha.
.webm is a great file format as well, if you're interested in moving image but are looking for something higher quality. These files are also quite performant vs much larger .mp4 files!
I'm blushing! Thanks for your kind words.
For analytics, I really just read Simo Ahava's blog. I'm quite lucky that my best friend is an Analytical Lead at Google here in Montreal, so I'm able to grab dinner and drinks with him and bounce ideas around.
Optimize Smart is another great resource. I try to avoid Quicksprout, ConversionXL, and all those blogs, as I find them really pushy with newsletter sign-ups.
Ca va @SammyQc!
The balance is: Spend like a mad motherf***er in PPC, maintain a >1:3 ROI, and use the profit to "finance serendipity."
In all seriousness, I work an environment where most of the management comes from engineering backgrounds. In this way, they "get" PPC. Dollars in, dollars out. Easy-peasy. For organic, I try to find projects that share objectives with other channels or departments. When page speed was an issue for us, it wasn't only affecting organic's performance. When the quality score in AdWords needs improvement, I can help make a case for changing the landing pages (which, again, help organic).
You really need to play the diplomat -- find where others are hurting, provide support, build in SEO best practices, and always broadcast the positive ripple effects that these projects have throughout the business.
Hey @KevinWaugh!
One design trend that I've completely fallen in love with is the ability to inject URLs into a seemingly infinite scroll website. Some examples of this can be found on TIME, Quartz and Bullet Magazine.
With the direction the web is going, with a heavy focus on single page apps, interaction design, and personalization, there are going to be handfuls of new challenges for proper crawlability/indexation. And, with the direction brands are going, improving the discovery and longevity of content is going to a key way SEO/inbound specialists will contribute to brand-as-publisher initiatives.
New ways of building things that both look and perform beautifully will always surprise me.
What about you?
Big brands I've worked with are rarely able to leverage data they've collected from digital, and this is precisely how start-ups are able to gain a competitive advantage and start siphoning customers who've been unhappy, but haven't come across an alternative. On the flip side, start-ups whose core competencies lie in data-driven decision making are prone to over-optimizing (yes, over-optimizing).
Because user/customer-level data is obscured/heavily sampled when using platforms most junior/intermediate marketers are familiar with, such as Google Analytics, it can be difficult to glean accurate models for customer segmentation from available datasets. For customer segmentation, we look at raw transactional data from our database. After discovering "actionable" (puke) insights/patterns from this data, you can begin creating re-marketing lists in Google and exporting these lists to their various ad platforms.
Hey @utituki! Great questions.
I'm a big fan of this Integrated Loyalty one-pager (pdf).
In terms of luxury apparel, there's actually a really intelligent affiliate called Lyst. If you sign up for an account with them, you'll see what I mean. They have a very unique user on-boarding process where you select brands and/or categories that you're into, and this will customize your "shop" as well as the newsletters you receive. I say it's "very unique" because the execution of it doesn't make you want to wretch and/or never visit the website again.
Other companies, like ASOS, are offering Amazon Prime-like subscription services for best-in-class delivery. In luxury apparel, you need to remember that loyalty programs can't be built around savings (discounts, samples) but instead offering concierge services. Free shipping and returns with no minimum spend, 24/7 customer support, personal stylist available, &c.
Hey @NikkiElizDemere!
Thanks for having me. We carry a brand called Surface 2 Air, who often do collaborations with musicians (previously Justice, Kavinsky). In 2014 they were working on a series of jackets with Chromeo, who originate from Montreal, and who actually went to high school with our CEO!
We had already been providing the fashion for several music videos last year, highlight reel here, and so to have an opportunity to work with musicians who were already collaborating with a brand we stock was a bit of a no-brainer.
Besides their music video, we also spun out an interview with the fashion designer, and a separate interview with Chromeo. This sort of snackable content is fed into our newsletter, and across our social media channels. We also ended up doing a Twitter Q&A with Dave-1 from Chromeo, after the music video's premiere.
Yo @TheLogothete!
These are my recommended reads for anyone interested in content marketing:
Subcompact Publishing
NY Times Innovation Report
Jonah Peretti Goes Long
BuzzFeed is the Apple of Media
Organizing for the Unpredictable
The Newonomics of Quartz
I also regularly read: Hacker News, Stratechery, and anything by consulting firms Undercurrent and NOBL.
(Edit: Cleaner links)
Hey @FrancisBedard! Long time no see, ami. Hope all is well at iProspect!
I think the key difference, in my experience, is that as an agency you're paid to provide insights and recommendations but not necessarily assist with the implementation of the work. This tension isn't limited to search; IDEO is notorious for providing design consulting, then blaming the client for not executing their strategy as provided. The consequence of this relationship is twofold: one, you're often paid without seeing projects through to completion; and two, this lack of accountability can lead to poor client satisfaction, ultimately shortening the length/profitability of the relationship
Working in-house, the projects you work on are tied to your personal success within the company. No longer are your recommendations taken at face value -- the work doesn't stop at the brief. Most of my days are not spent with my peers in the marketing department, but instead with designers and developers.
Say hello to the crew for me!
To answer your question, "... why the following scenario breeches Google's guidelines ..."
One response could be that parts of the methodology of your "linking strategy" require illegal tactics (at least in Canada):
You may not be doing the second part (though for hundreds of archery websites, you likely are "only with plenty more expertise and tools to make the process of doing things the right way easier now"), but sending unsolicited emails promoting a resource (for the purpose of monetizing it) is "commercial."
Other parts of your methodology are fine. But, I suspect, you're leaving aspects of it ambiguous as to make a case.
When SEOs engage in "polite outreach by email," usually they are specifying things like anchor text, dofollow or alt text. If you're not doing this, you're breeching fewer guidelines (or committing third- instead of first-degree murder). But if you're choosing not to use well-researched anchor text, links that pass PageRank and descriptive alt text for image hyperlinks, you're really under-serving your client, the archery fanatic, because these elements would bring his site to a wider audience (and accelerate the monetization of the resource). If you're selling organic traffic, that is, and not just your "linking strategy."
And the last part of your methodology that's a red/orange flag, in my opinion, is the carpet bombing approach to your "linking strategy." You know, in your heart of hearts, that # of unique linking domains is a factor in your archery buddy's domain authority. You also know that some of these archery sites are ugly, defunct, and without traffic. But you're hitting them up regardless. This lack of focus on garnering quality links (PR), vs quantity links (SEO), is likely the straw that breaks the camel's back / breeches the Google's guidelines.
Also, "Archery related organizations" makes me wretch a little, and seems like another ambiguous loophole built into your scenario to make a case. It opens up referring domains "to interpretation." If you're using 6 Degrees of Separation to get the word out about archery, it's likely you're participating in web spam.
My 0.02c. It's fine to make your living and feed your kids this way. It's how I used to feed myself, and I ate quite well. But it's another thing to pretend that this "linking strategy" doesn't infringe on Google's guidelines when it blatantly does. Yes, you could scale it further into blackhattedness, but even as-is, it's really not compliant with what Google's rulebook states.
Hm. Maybe at it's conception. In 2014 it feels more along the lines of:
"We built Google for advertisers, not users."
"huge time sink.... do spreadsheets that we update by hand"
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