Digital marketers all over the world have gained one more day today to implement and experiment with social media, search engine optimization, paid search, and analytics. For the past 20 years of my marketing experience, a common issue is “the lack of time” to communicate and navigate the Internet waters.

The search industry is changing overnight with new social networks to love… like Pinterest. This is a prime example of why Digital marketing directors and managers need a search team who is ready to roll to help make their strategies move faster.

Global opportunities are abound in social search and I am just jumping up and down as I see these large companies missing the “boat”. If your social networks are not being managed and strategically integrated into your marketing plans, then there are gaping holes of opportunity. These need to be filled with the digital marketing leaders’ genius for innovation, to create more leads for your company.

Whether you are in automotive, manufacturing, or biotechnology, you need to take the time to integrate the communication channels to streamline your story to get it communicated clearly. Real people in your marketing teams need to manage and measure this communication.

Large corporations are large ships that cannot move as fast as a luxury Cobalt 200 speedboat. If, however, marketing departments are given the budget and team to navigate as fast as a Cobalt 200, then marketing issues of the past (slow results and slow ROI) could be removed and more CFOs will see the results directly in their balance sheets.

So what are you doing with your extra time today?

At Pure Visibility, we’ve worked with SEO clients of all shapes and sizes over the years, but more and more of our work is done on behalf of corporate marketing teams. And even though all of the same SEO principles and best practices apply to engagements of this scale, many corporate environments present unique hurdles to successfully delivering “Enterprise SEO“.

Here’s a list of some that are, unfortunately, among the most common and most painful.  If you’re in the ranks of corporate marketing, I’m sure many of these will ring a bell.

Enterprise SEO Killer #1: Necessary Enterprise SEO Resources Are Spread Far and Wide

SEO draws upon a wide array of talent and resources to be successful. Chances are, the larger the organization, the more likely it is that these key ingredients are fragmented across various business units, divisions and departments (each with their own budgets, project calendars, etc.).  Aligning them all in support of your SEO effort is a challenge under even the best of circumstances.

Enterprise SEO Killer #2: The Corporate SEO Project Lacks the Proper “Champion”

In a way, this is really a corollary of Enterprise SEO Killer #1. Search engine optimization is only one of many marketing initiatives that a sophisticated enterprise will probably engage in.

I would argue, however, that few marketing activities draw from as many teams and budgets, when done properly, as SEO.  Consequently, an SEO project needs a champion that has enough influence to assemble the sort of cross-functional team needed to get the job done. Few in a corporate setting have the oversight and clout to coordinate the various moving parts in an efficient, timely fashion (if at all!).

Enterprise SEO Killer #3: Competing Priorities Constantly Challenge Corporate SEO Progress

Unfortunately, a corporation’s website isn’t usually owned by the SEO team (Correction: is NEVER owned by the SEO team). Stakeholders too numerous to mention across the organization have designs for every scrap of digital real estate available.

More likely than not, they probably don’t know (or even care) one bit about your SEO program. Perhaps the IT team wants to upgrade or replace the CMS; or HQ wants to broaden the countries and languages addressed by the website; or corporate marketing has new “messaging” they want to deploy… any one of these could easily unravel every shred of SEO progress made if you’re not careful.

Enterprise SEO Killer #4: Fiscal Year Budgets Aren’t Responsive to SEO Discoveries

Even if you have a fairly mature, stable SEO program going, new and emerging issues arise in this discipline at least every quarter (if not every week), but most corporate SEO budgets are fixed on an annual basis.

If you’re lucky, you might be able to swap or shuffle program funding to get what you need. Otherwise, you’re dead in your tracks unless you can make a compelling case to someone above you with deeper pockets.

In light of the “Enterprise SEO Killers” described above, here are some takeaways for the corporate marketer wanting to keep his or her SEO project alive in the coming year:

1. Make friends across departmental lines. Get to know the webmaster or IT team, the corporate communication team, product marketing teams, etc.
2. Earn the trust and support of someone who has sway over the resources necessary to get your SEO project done. This will likely involve “selling” the value of SEO from an ROI perspective.
3. Always be planning ahead, particularly from a budget perspective. Catch wind of a CMS upgrade or “marketecture” revamp in the coming year?  Defend budget (if you can) so that SEO can make a meaningful contribution.

Got a good corporate SEO horror story to share?  Please shoot me a comment below, but leave out the names to protect the innocent!

Those of us who are native Michiganders are known for holding up our hands as makeshift maps to show others where we are located within the state. For example, the Mackinac Bridge is just off the tip of your middle finger, Ann Arbor is located just below the center of your palm, and Detroit is a little closer to the base of your thumb.

Speaking of thumbs, our opposable digits also make for a handy mnemonic device for SEO keyword placement opportunities on a webpage. I often use this simple device when creating new pages of content or to review keyword distribution on live pages.

(T) Title Tags

(H) H1 (and other headings tags)

(U) URL

(M) Meta Description

(B) Body

Let’s say you have a website that sells bike supplies and one page is specifically devoted to vintage Italian bikes. You have done your keyword research and decided that the best keyword to target is “vintage Italian bicycles.”

Now is the time to get that keyword working for you! Insert that phrase as close to the beginning of the title tag as possible.  Looking at the HTML source code your title tag should look something like this:

<title>Vintage Italian Bicycles and Bike Parts | Your Bike Biz</title>

Keep in mind that the title tag is perhaps the most important place to insert your keyword. The title tag is the information displayed at the top of your browser and also appears prominently in the search engine return pages (SERPs).

It is a strong indicator to your audience, as well as the search engines, of the subject of your page. When writing your title tag it is ideal to keep it fewer than 70 characters, as anything longer than this will be truncated in the Google search displays.

Working our way down through the “SEO Rules of THUMB”, you can similarly insert the keyphrase “Vintage Italian Bicycles” in the h1 of the page. This is a page heading tag that can be used to indicate headlines or the primary topic of a page.

<h1>Vintage Italian Bicycles – Current Stock of Parts and Supplies</h1>

Although there are occasions when certain designs require multiple h1 tags, it is generally best practice to only use the h1 tag once per page.

On to the URL. This is a great opportunity to use your keywords. Whether you are creating a basic HTML page, posting blog content or generating a page using a CMS platform (WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) most systems allow you to customize your URL. Some platforms may not allow custom URLs as they are generated from database locations and session IDs, etc.; however, if you do have the ability, creating succinct, readable URLs is a great indicator of the content of the page.

Try to avoid using any unnecessary characters and make the URL as easy to read and remember as possible. For example:

www.yourbikebiz.com/vintage-italian-bicycles

The meta description should be a brief summary of the page content. Although it isn’t a significant factor of search engine rank for your keyword, it is displayed in the SERPs and therefore should contain your keyword as well as display information that would make searchers click on your site.

It is a best practice to keep your meta descriptions to 155 characters or less. Here is an example of a meta description optimized for the keyword “vintage Italian bicycles”:

<META name=”description” content=” We stock a large supply of vintage Italian bicycles and vintage bike parts by Bianchi, Cinelli, Colnago and more. Contact us for more information.”>

Lastly, it is important to use your keyword in the body of the page. This may sound obvious, but it is easy to overlook after working so hard to insert the keyword in all of the other places! While there are no rules about how many times your keyword should be used in the body, it should appear within the first 200 words and be repeated uniformly throughout the copy so that it sounds natural when read.

Although there are a number of other places that you could use your keyword (image file names, alt text, anchor text, etc.), these “Five SEO Rules of THUMB” are your roadmap to on-page optimization of your keyword target.

By now your bowls of extra Valentine’s Day candy are empty, your sugar buzz has worn off, and you’re ready to turn your attention back to what’s important. Search and social news. Here is what we’re reading, and what you should be as well.

• Facebook launching verified accounts and nicknames today – via The Verge
• Google showing fewer than 10 results for some searches? - via Search Engine Land
• Fair use or free riding? The AP’s new attack on news scraping – via padContent
• For social sharing, Apple turns to Twitter again- via GigaOM

Happy Valentines Day from Pure Visibility!

Around here, there is no better Valentine’s gift than Google Insights for Search. (Well, we like chocolates too, if you want to send us something.) Google Insights for Search is a pretty important tool for us, and fun to play with to boot. Google describes the tool as aiming to “provide insights into broad search patterns” and that is exactly what we do with it.

I want to give you a quick tour of the Insights for Search tool.  First, here is what the main page looks like.

To get started, just put a search term into the search box, choose a date range and click search. Since it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s start with that term and, just for fun, let’s look at the last three years. After we enter this, the top box looks like this.

It might be fun to also include some Valentine’s related terms, so I will also add the search terms “roses” and “hallmark” before I start the search.

When I click the Search button, Google looks at how often each of those terms was searched by month, for the time period we chose and then normalizes the data to be on a scale of 0 to 100. This is important to note, because you are not looking at actual numbers of searches, but a scaled and normalized version of those numbers.

At this point Google shows me this really pretty graph with the search data I requested.

If you look in the top right corner, you can see that for February, 2011 the term “valentines day” (blue) rated 69, “roses” (red) rated 37, and “hallmark” rated 13. From this chart, we can see that there seems to be a fairly yearly cycle for these search terms and that that cycle seems to be continuing in 2012.

This is just a simple, fun example of the information we can get from Insights for Search. At Pure Visibility, when we are trying to optimize a page, say for a fictional client that sells cell phones, we can use this tool to see whether people are searching more for “cell phone”, “cellphone” or “mobile phone” in the specified market. For example, if our client was in the United States we would want to use the term “cell phone” but if we were in the United Kingdom we would want “mobile phone”.

For more information or to try it out for yourself with your favorite search terms, visit http://www.google.com/insights/search/

In high school you may have had to choose between studying statistics over being social with friends. Some think this still applies when it comes to social media. Here are a few simple ways you can measure the effectiveness of your company’s social efforts.

1. Set Goals

To measure whether something is effective or not, you need to figure out what you’re measuring against. First, determine what a valuable action on your site would be. Making a purchase, requesting a quote, or downloading a whitepaper are common conversions (measurable desired actions).

After you figure out what you want to measure, follow the next steps to determine how social media plays a part in driving conversions for your business.

2. Social Tracking

If you’re like many companies, you use Google Analytics to track traffic coming to your site. Using Social Interaction Analytics you can measure social interaction with non-Google networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

This Analytics report will show you if someone came to your site, looked at your Facebook page to get more information, then came back to make a purchase. You may notice people with a social interaction spend more time on your site or are more likely to make a purchase.

3. Multi-channel Funnels

Your company doesn’t just advertise on one channel. You have mobile ads, email campaigns, pay-per-click ads, links on referral sites, and social media pages. The Multi-channel Funnel report in Google Analytics will let you know what are the most popular “paths” people take to convert on your site.

Maybe your email campaign is driving traffic to Facebook. People then search for your company, come to your site, and convert. This report will help you determine the return on not only social, but other online channels.

4. Link Tagging

If 500 people view this blog post and then go to our contact page I can determine that from Analytics. But if 500 people come from a single Twitter post, it can be harder to measure. Google provides a great free tool called the URL Builder. This tool allows you to “tag” your links with information that will be recognized by Analytics.

Use this URL, for example:

purevisibility.com/contact?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=SocialExplained

The bold words will send extra information to Analytics for tracking. I will easily be able to see this traffic was a “referral” from the “SocialExplained” post on our “blog.” If you tag links from Twitter mentioning your fall clearance sale you can easily see how that traffic acts once reaching your site.

5. Good Ol’ Traffic Sources

Finally, look at how social traffic interacts with your site. Segment Facebook or LinkedIn traffic and see if anything stands out. Don’t just look at how many Tweets you sent out or how many commented on your company’s Valentine’s Day greeting.

Look at how social traffic acts differently compared to PPC or organic. Does social increase your conversion rate? Do they spend more? Now you can tell your marketing director that in 2011 LinkedIn traffic downloaded 20% more whitepapers than organic traffic did!

Social? Measured. Boom.

It’s good practice to appreciate your successes and learn from mistakes. Reviewing lessons learned and acknowledging co-workers is encouraged by such process gurus as the Project Management Institute. We were taken by a recent discovery: how Umbraco CMS is creating and embracing an asynchronous non-geolocated team of open source developers through shared “high fives” over Twitter.

Our History – You Rock Awards

You Rock Awards at Pure Visibility

We are a driven bunch, much more prone to notice and stew about the 5-10% that went wrong instead of the 90-95% that went right about a project. We started a practice to give each other public compliments and called them “pineapples” (for reasons you can read about on the Pure Visibility History page). Sometimes we even presented actual tasty pineapples to each other.

Toy porcupine, shared by eperales on Flickr

Over time, we decided to expand our practice to include “porcupines”, the inverse of a pineapple, something that was a learning event. We elected to share these to prevent teammates from going down a known dead-end path.

We like nuance rather than black and white, so we elaborated the taxonomy to include “pork-apples” (half porcupine, half pineapples) and “pine-u-pines” (half pineapple, half porcupine).

Or the more complicated and multi-faceted “yay-boo-yay,” a good thing with a bad surprise inside that has an OK resolution, or “boo-yay-boo”, a bad thing that seems to resolve but then reveals another problem underneath. These silly names got us talking about these things, and sharing solutions.

We have experimented a little with Twitter-like chat and messaging systems, where we can make these kinds of announcements to include remote team members in the celebrations and the lessons, but usage of these has faded after a short while. Institutionalizing this practice (everyone had to share a pineapple and a porcupine each week…) kind of deadened it and we got out of the habit.

Umbraco’s Approach

So, we were heartened to see this practice echoed and expanded immensely to Twitter (something many of our team members already use) by Umbraco CMS, an open source Content Management System. We haven’t actually seen an Umbraco CMS deployment, so we cannot comment on their product, but their process is fun and lighthearted.

They’re using Twitter, and the hashtag #h5yr (high five, you rock) to call out colleagues for successes. They’re also using Twitter and the hashtag #h5is (high five, I suck) to share lessons learned. What’s interesting is that instead of by reciting your errors by rote and educating the team about how to avoid your misdeed, there’s something light and positive about announcing that you rock for finding your own error.

Maybe it’s snarky  and self-deprecating when used by some, but I’m taking it at face value. I believe there is a victory in finding and correcting mistakes. I’ve always been an advocate of “making mistakes faster” – sharing work early and producing work iteratively to ensure that mistakes in understanding are corrected way before the end of the production process.

Anyway, see for yourself to interpret how it is being used by the Umbraco community by reading some recent posts on these sites:

• h5yr.com
• h5is.com

What I like is that it is shared, public, using a system that exists and is already in use, and lighthearted.

Hat tip to the Chief Happiness Officer blog.

Under the radar, Google has quietly raised AdWords account limits. Accounts can now get boosted to include up to 500 campaigns and 3 million keywords. Previously accounts were limited to 100 campaigns and 1 million keywords.

If you wanted to expand beyond that, you had to open new accounts. This was a headache because you’d need to work out tracking, billing, and access requirements for the new accounts. That required putting new scripts on your website; handling credit cards or invoicing agreements; and getting together new Google users, possibly implementing a sub-MCC.

In the past it also meant that your additional accounts wouldn’t be linked to a Google Analytics account. Though, nowadays, you can also link multiple AdWords accounts to a single Analytics account.

Making Account Management Easier

While for very large marketing efforts, separation at the account level may make sense, in all likelihood, going through the effort of starting new accounts to accommodate AdWords limits is going to make maintenance, error-checking, and reporting more difficult.

If you’re implementing over 100 campaigns, some of them are probably close copies of one another with different targeting settings. For example, sites for local businesses might be targeting mobile separate from other devices. Or if your business targets multiple locations that perform differently and have different ad requirements, these would also be separated into different campaigns that are similar to each other.

Bulk changes using the AdWords Editor becomes a multi-step operation with multiple campaigns. Even with accounts consolidated under a single MCC, running reports across multiple accounts, implementing changes, or understanding how the targeting might overlap between different campaigns in different accounts becomes a more robust task.

A quick lookup or troubleshooting becomes not so quick anymore. So it’s good that AdWords is making efforts to accommodate larger accounts. (Although with so much duplication within larger accounts, it also is surprising that a better management option hasn’t surfaced that eliminates the need to increase account limits.)

Getting the Maximum Limits

To get the maximum limits for an account that has the default settings, you still have to consult with a Google AdWords Representative, requesting a boost. If you have an account that should be using limits that are this high, you most likely are already in contact Google Reps about other things.

You know that you need a boost if you get account limit errors from AdWords Editor when you try to post new additions. But what this doesn’t tell you is if you’re wasting your time filling your account with clutter or if you’re sincerely in need of more, more, more.

Which accounts should be using the new limits? Whenever you notice performance differences by network or device, it’s always a good idea to separate campaigns out to single out targeting. It’s also a good idea to keep a healthy keyword list, to be sure that all of the relevant queries trigger your ads.

In well-organized ad groups it’s fairly easy to maintain a large number of keywords. But unless you have a million products, or hundreds of business locations, you’re not going to need anywhere near the account limit of keywords and campaigns.