How Small Businesses Can Integrate SEO Into Their Social Media Efforts

Integrating SEO with your social media strategy isn’t just something you should “think” about doing. Optimizing your social media efforts so that both search engines and social community members can find your content is essential if you’re going to have any chance at success and for your own efforts to get the “credit” rather than another company or individual.
Take for example last year’s viral video of the man with the “Golden Voice.” I wrote about this in depth, but in essence, had the newspaper who originally found this man paid attention to optimizing their content along with allowing it to be shared, they would have gotten the millions of views, plus the notoriety that came along with finding the man and becoming the authority on the subject, not MSNBC’s Today Show or YouTube.

Your company doesn’t have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars set aside to integrate search engine optimization into your social media efforts. Any small business can make sure they’re taking the essential steps that will help their content get the traction it needs. The key to making sure that your content is optimized is two-part. First, optimizing for how people search when they go to a search engine like Google or Bing, and second, optimizing for how people search when they go to a social networking community like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
Read more: ClickZ
Key Findings in Audience Efficiency
I spoke the other week at AdMonsters OPS Markets London on the subject of audience efficiency. This is a methodology both to evaluate individual segments relative to a target audience, usually client converters or visitors, and the most efficient way to describe that target. We posted a preliminary piece on this very site. I offered five key findings based on more than 200 client models in my presentation and want to share three of those findings, and their implications, here.

A Reminder on Audience Efficiency

We can visualise audience efficiency as a tradeoff between how well an audience segment fits a client’s target audience (lift) and the reach. Mathematically, there is no possible selection of audiences that provides the same lift for a given reach or vice versa.

Third-Party Audiences Aren’t Efficient on Their Own

In this luxury auto manufacturer example we see that different third parties have radically different audience efficiency characteristics. At one extreme, we see that partner 2 has very high lift but very low reach. Partner 2’s total audience reach is higher than this, of course, but these are the only segments that show up as statistically relevant to this client target. At the other extreme, we see that partner 5 has very low lift, just 1 to 2 times the network average, though with very high reach.
Read more: admonsters

Founded in 2008, Posterous, which has gone head to head with Tumblr (a more popular simple blogging site), emerged from the well-known Silicon Valley technology incubator, Y Combinator.
The company’s team will be joining Twitter’s developers, as part of the deal, the company announced in a blog post.
Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman wrote on the company blog. “This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

Read more: The Telegraph
3 Proven Ways to Convert Traffic From Search
Most marketers have discovered effective ways to drive qualified traffic to their websites by optimizing paid search campaigns. But for all of the effort that organizations put into testing and optimizing AdWords buys, many overlook ways to improve the rate at which traffic converts after a search campaign successfully brings them to their website.
Currently there is a 92:1 ratio in the amount of money spent to encourage consumers to visit a website versus the amount spent to convert them after they’ve clicked through to the brand. With an average online conversion rate of just 2.5 percent, marketers are presented with a huge opportunity for improvement by investing additional resources into making the website experience more relevant for traffic driven to their sites via paid search.

Here are three ways for brands to optimize the website experience to maximize conversions from paid search traffic.

1. Make Every Page a Landing Page An important first step toward maximizing conversions from search traffic is echoing keyword copy with website messages that reinforce the trigger that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Keyword copy can have multiple triggers up front, but the key is understanding what will resonate with visitors when they arrive at your website after clicking on an ad and carrying that messaging throughout the entire user session.

To optimize the customer experience and achieve improvements in everything from your add-to-cart rate to the total number of conversions, marketers must find the right messages that resonate with customers and be agile enough to change those messages.
Read more: ClickZ

Measurements Differ, But Online Ad Spend Up

Despite a lack of measurement standards, local online ad spending will show double-digit growth over the next few years, and will continue to increase its share of total local ad spending, according to a new report from eMarketer.

As consumers turn to local search, mobile devices, hyper-local sites and daily deals to satisfy their need for highly relevant news and information, local online ad spending will rise up to meet them, insists eMarketer analyst and report author Lauren Fisher.

“Local online ad spending is growing as fast as — if not faster than — total online ad spending,” according to Fisher. “National advertisers shifting dollars to follow the U.S. population online will largely fuel this growth.”

As of May, 90% of U.S. agencies surveyed by local forum site Topix said their clients had asked for geographically targeted ads. Although the agency sample was small, it included large firms that represent a greater number of national advertisers.

For eMarketer, any company using digital ads to reach an audience in a specific area is engaging in local online advertising. Most research firms agree on this general definition, but they largely disagree on how to apply it across advertiser type, ad format and online property. The result: conflicting local ad-spending estimates.

Read More: MediaPost

How Search Marketers Expect To Use Data In 2012

About half the search marketers participating in MediaPost’s Search Insider Summit survey during the three-day conference said they take responsibility both for search and social campaigns — making the range of topics discussed at last week’s MediaPost Search Insider Summit all the more important.

Most marketers — 72.7% — who participated in the survey said they rely on interest-based targeting in search campaigns. Targeting beyond keywords continues as a trend in search engine marketing, as well as social. Evidence of the movement can be found in a recent Twitter campaign connecting AMC TV brands to consumers.

Search marketers also clearly understand the benefits of tying social and social data into search engine marketing campaigns, as well as search engine data into social media campaigns. When asked whether their company has a Google+ account, 82.4% of respondents said yes.

It turns out that 60% of marketers said they tie search data into two or more online campaign media. Aside from social, some of the options discussed at the MediaPost Search Insider Summit include tying search data into display advertising or campaigns supported by demand-side platform providers.

Read More: MediaPost