Next up is the SoLoMo session.

Featuring the following speakers:
Bryson Meunier, Resolution Media @brysonmeunier
Matt Siltala, Dream Systems Media, @Matt_Siltala
Jed Williams, BIA/Kelsey, @williamsjed

We’re gonna discuss a lot of the primary issues of where Social Local and Mobile are colliding right now.

First up is Jed Williams of BIA/Kelsey. The Social-Local-Mobile Collision

Solomo is one of those cliche terms that you hear 100 times a day what does that mean and how is it taking shape for you?

Some SoLoMo stats:
~100m U.S. smartphone users
350M+ mobile facebook users
Twitter: 50% mobile usage

How does this translate into actual dollars?
The bottom line: 2011 = $137.2B in Local Advertising (BIA/Kelsey)

Mobile/Social /Local

Mobile – US Smartphone penetration
Smartphone penetration and OS Share
Q3 2011 US

Some statistics of specific types of mobile devices:

Feature phones 57%
Smartphones 43%
Apple IPhone (iOS) 28%
Android 43%
RIM Blackberry 18%
Windows Mobile 7%
Other 4%

Smartphone users and local search

37% Local searchers
63% Non local searchers

General Mobile consumer

75% Local Searchers
35% Non local searches

Google
20% of overall search volume is mobile
40% of mobile searches are local (20% on desktop)

One example: Yelp

Monthly Yelp mobile stats
4.5 million unique visitors
Every 30 seconds, a photo is uploaded from a yelp app
Every other second, a consumer generated directions or called a local business from a Yelp app
Over 1/3 of all searches on Yelp.com come from mobile

Mobile Ads: Smartphone users do more than just click – they engage

Locally-targeted mobile ads average CTR of 6.5% (xAD)
Compare with average online banner CTR (.1%) and average mobile banner CTR (.64%).

What type of information do consumers access?

Calls 62%
Maps & Directions 24%
Other 3%

Reviews & share 0.13%
More details 2.69%

High secondary Action Rate (SAR)

Every other second, a consumer generated directions or called a local business from a Yelp App.

Engagement levels
Local vs. National Ad Spend in Mobile

Nearly 70% of mobile advertising will be geo targeted/locally based,

Social Media ubiquity, by the numbers

Social networks & blogs account for nearly 25% of all time Americans spend online (22.5%)
U.S. Facebook users spend an average of 7 hours, 21 minutes each month on the site.
30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each month.

Social Signals influence brand affinity & purchase intent

Facebook Social Commerce Stats: 52% say friend recommendation is the #1 influencer in trying a local business
Social sharing makes a purchase 3x more likely than e-mail
SocialCode: FB Fans are 291% more likely to engage with a brand than non-fans.

Local

Sharing location = value exchange

51% are willing to share their current location to receive more relevant advertising.
Sourced: JiWire Q3 2010

What location-based advertising most appeals to you?

Coupons for nearby stores
Closest Store location
Reviews on nearby retailers
Info on promotional deals/sales
Contact information

So I just got a whole data set we have social local mobile. Just because we have so lo mo does so+lo+mo equal something bigger than the individual data???

Check-ins 2.0 – A Means to a larger end.

Emerging Check-in themes: Automatic & implicit
Push Recommendations
Value Exchange: social + tangible rewards

Foursquare radar: The anti check-in

Not a “hindsight service”
Suggestions & tips driven by the social graph
Deeper integration of location deals (scoutmob)

Deals, offers, & loyalty – a clearer path to conversion

What locations – local or national?
How many should sell?
What days will it run?
How long will it run?
What market(s)?
What’s the deal?
Is this a franchise deal?
What are the business details?

Local response
Aggregates social activity (check-ins, photos, comments) around a local biz
Empowers business to connect, offer & reward influencers directly

Zaarly: “Collaborative Commerce”

Reverse eBay meets craig’s list for mobile
Real-time marketplace: Filtered leads, location, time, price
Coming Soon: Alerts for requests.

Next steps for SoLoMo –

Deeper mobile-social sharing “Where I am becomes what I’m doing, content I’m consuming.

Mobile deals: better personalization & targeting, performance models develop around yield management.

Emerging SoLoMo business models: monetizing merchant profiles & dashboards, services, deals management

Facebook credits enter new forms of social commerce (media first, tangible goods later)

——————————————————————
Next up is Bryson Meunier
SoLoMo Opportunties for Marketers

Solomo shouldn’t really be that intimidating it’s one of the same things that we’ve been dealing with for awhile.

What are the top mobile social networks?

1. Facebook is the top mobile social network at 350 million active users
2. Twitter – 92 million active users
3. Myspace 25 million active users
4. Moco space – 20 million active users
5. Foursquare – 10 million active users

Prioritize social network activity based on mobile interest and reach.

Mobile Volume of the following services include:

Facebook 285,000,000
Youtube 37,200,000
orkut 11,100,000
Myspace 24,900,000
Twitter 11,100,000
Mocospace – 7,480,000
linked in – 246,000
tumblr – 673,000
groupon – 165,000
digg – 90,500
foursquare – 246,000
stumbleupon – 27,100
google buzz – 33,100
[delicious] – 22,200
google latitude – 60,500
gowalla – 14,800
quora – 3,600

Nearly half of Facebook’s users are Mobile.

250% growth in mobile users in less than two years!

A good exercise for marketers to do is to figure out the digital day. IF we have someone we’re trying to market to we know where this particular person is. Understand consumer behavior on all platforms.

Data suggests 90% of journalists like Jennifer will seek blogs and social media outlets for ideation of a story.
Social media presence for Jennifer should include areas where she can digest info quickly (Twitter, social bookmark sites, etc.)
Dietitian Blogs should be employed for Dietitian POV’s to help rank in blog-search (Likely to be used to refine search for Jennifer)

Messaging to Mobile Users in Social Environments: Surveys

The company LeapFrog is a good example. They took the opportuntity to send a survey to people/mobile users on Facebook, so they can figure out the affinity between social mobile and local.

App introductions – If your audience is social, local, mobile you really want to target them with your app.

QR Codes/Coupons

QR Codes are really good for Facebook. You really want to give them coupon codes so they can go into the store and redeem the coupon code.l

Social Messaging to mobile users

Use a “Like Us” On Facebook decal
bit.ly/facebookdecal

Google Favorite Place Decals QR Codes – These have QR codes that you can scan for your local business.

Twitter and texting are twins separated at birth
Use closing follow message in text message campaigns like “Follow us on Twitter @ http://www.twitter.com/username”.

Check-ins

Edit a venue
Facebook
Foursquare
Google

Active management of these “edit-a-venue’s” increased check-ins by 302% in six months.

Foursquare specials
User discovers specials on mobile device
User spots Foursquare decal on venue door
User spots check in placard in business

The thing about SoLoMo is that it is difficult to track. Right now you have a lot of manual work you have to do and if you invest a lot of money you really want to track the ROI for this. There are now tools available for this, and one of these data tools is Kenshoo Check-ins Trend Reports.

Instant mobile deals

Are really something you should be taking advantage of if you have a local business, such as Groupon or livingsocial. These can help you with deals getting those through to consumers. You really need to create a type of urgency with mobile users and these types of services are perfect for it so you can take advantage of creating deals that expire in a day or other deals like this.

If you are going to do an instant mobile deal then let your users know immediately.

Coordinated effort in siloed marketing department.

SoLoMo is difficult – I’ve worked with large marketing companies where SoLoMo doesn’t reside in one place, they’re spread out between silos. They don’t talk with each other because each of them are separated from each other. If you want to really be successful in SoLoMo in 2012 you really have to have SoLoMo combined and use a dedicated resource to do this.

Summary

Facebook has more social local mobile impact than Foursquare.
Prioritize social network activity based on mobile interest and reach.
Understand consumer behavior on all platforms
Messaging to mobile users in Social environments, Surveys, app intros and QR Codes/coupons/deals.
Social messaging to mobile users.
Keep faceboook places and pages up to date with feed management.
Analyze check-ins to see how they correspond with branding and ad investment.
Reward brand enthusiasts with instant mobile deals.
Set aside portion of mobile, local, and social budget for SoLoMo experimentation.

———————————————————-

Matt Siltala is the next speaker, president of Dream Systems media.

We were talking about the engagement on Foursquare and being much different than Facebook. I’m not the best powerpoint presentation maker so bear with me.

So who uses the YellowPages? (very few hands raise up)

My presenation is based on TommyBoy so for those who haven’t seen it I’m sorry.

Everyone that has all those yellow pages on their doors like that you need a new map so here it is…

40% of Yelp’s traffic is from mobile devices.

This is a stat recently released. It’s huge. People are using, whether it’s Foursquare or Yelp or facebook or whatever it is people are using these devices for finding info and deals.

Danny Sullivan had tweeted something about eating lunch, checked in and saw nearby haircut special. Even in a small town it’s finally starting to come through people are using these programs people are starting to check in people are seeing this urgency. I use foursquare all the time. If you try to friend me though I won’t friend you. I don’t use it like that. You have to use foursquare differently in order to see a substantial return.

A 2011 study by the National Restaurant Association confirms that consumers who use social media, including apps, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Urbanspoon and more, not only dine out more, but are more likely to become return customers. – ReadWriteWeb.

We’ve talked about different levels different peers. If you aren’t using these and you don’t have these deals setup then you’re missing out.

Average new customers gained online (per month tracked by secretary – 15 (for dentist)
Average new customers gained online (per month) tracked by secretary – 12 (for chiropractor)

Foursquare Yelp

Dentist averaged 10 New customers per month (total of 25 new customers a month added) – This can be directly attributed to Yelp.

Chriopractor added 8 New Customers per month (total of 20 new customers a month added).

If you’re not seeing results then you’re just not using it. Yelp is free it’s out there, you’re just not setting up your specials, your deals and getting people there.

You can use Foursquare as a customer acquisition tool.

You can use it as a customer retention tool.

Example – You can get a free bear claw with a check-in at Dunkin Donuts as an example campaign they might run.

95% of Facebook Wall Posts are not answered by brands (All Facebook). the point is for you to start looking at this as a monitoring tool.

Foursquare as a monitoring tool. So if you have an employee who hates his job as a manager you can probably find out from these statuses if he hates his job.

One of the big things we worry about is if someone is saying anything negative about you on there and you have to work a bit to help control this.

Matt sent a complaint in to a business and the manager emailed him back and offered him a free 40% card. Matt says: He didn’t ask me to remove my review. I went ahead and went back because I had a bad day, I updated the review with 4 stars and added more information. The point is you have to handle the situation correctly. There was an incident with a dentist who went after her patient that added a negative review on Yelp and everyone else started slamming that review page with negative reviews because that dentist didn’t handle the situation right. It’s all about handling the situation right.

Hmmm…(showing slide)…I live in an area where nothing is trending and I wanted to put up that slide because I got a good laugh out of that.

“RADAR” – It’s interesting the direction that Foursquare is going to gain

Foursquare in the physical world.

Have a physical call out: Foursquare Checki-in Here.

Have some engagement. You can use Twitter. Say you know that there’s a customer that’s always tweeting out their check-in and you haven’t seen them in awhile. Monitor them saying “Hope you come visit us sometime anyways! =)” Hey we haven’t seen them in awhile let’s give you 10% off if you come back in.

34% of marketsers have generated leads using Twitter, and 25% have closed deals using Twitter (AllTwitter).

What makes people retweet? 92% interesting content. 84% humor. 66% personal connection 21% celeb status, 32% offered incentive (tangible or virtual). 26% “Please RT!” – WhiteFireSEO

Create monetary incentive for check-in.

Use in tandem with main offers.
“Check-in” and order off the lunch or dinner menu- chicken wings included!

Create draw for groups.
25% off T-Bone steak from “your local butcher” if you bring a friend…oh wait…

Train your staff.

How many guys – how many of you have you gone to a place and shown them a device with foursquare and twitter on them and they had no idea what they were? Well be sure to tell them what they are. If you don’t train your staff, then you have lost you have to ensure that your staff knows about these tools (Yelp, FS, Twitter) and offers in order to get them through.

“Tips” – Foursquare’s version of ‘Reviews’.
Foursquare Tips
Reviews are huge for gaining new customers
Customers post activity to other Social Networks

HUGE!!!

…hint hint.

My best advice to you is when you get here, how to I get reviews? Well you are always giving receipts or asking for reviews when you’re done, well put a decal or logo on your invoice or review paper that sends them to Yelp or Foursquare to review your business and their experience. Make it EXTREMELY easy for them.

What about Divorce Attorneys?

You can claim your places and claim all your business listings and make sure that you have that group that makes people checking in all the time. Make sure all your stuff is right, make sure your right URL or phone number is right. The thing where foursquare is going to have people using it more is Foursquare Discovery. Local Businesses can start to put this foursquare save button (just released four days ago) on their website. when you do this, and you log in it will remind you that you added this to your saved button.

——— End Session ————

Well that’s it for today’s Social Local Mobile session! Stay tuned for more coverage of SMX Social Media 2011!!!

All right here we are ready to start the SMX Social Media marathon! I’m live blogging some of the sessions this week and will help keep you updated to most of what’s going on – so let’s get hopping! The first session of today is Free Facebook Tactics to Drive Traffic and Conversions.

Here we’re ready to get an idea of the tactics and tricks that we are able to use to obtain even more traffic and higher conversions.

Free Facebook Tactics to Drive Traffic and Conversions

Speakers:
Drew Conrad, Social Media Marketing Specialist,  ZAGG.com (@drewconrad)
Arnie Kuenn, President, Vertical Measures (@ArnieK)
Kevin Scholl, Social Media Manager, Red Roof Inn

Kevin Scholl
Social Media Manager of The Red Roof Inn

Kevin Scholl is the first person to start off this presentation.

You can engage your customers by simply investing one thing: TIME.

We monitor our social tools 24/7. We strive to respond within 24 hours to negative and 48 hours to positive. We average about less than an hour to responses on Facebook.

We probably have about 60% of our conversations on our Facebook page that have been resolved via social media.

Conversations about your products or services should come naturally to you, and you should leverage your expertise to drive conversations in a social medium.

Engage your social community by showing them that you care about their feedback, opinions and what they care about. These are all things you are doing in person, now take it online.

We engage them in conversations about “Tell us about your travel experiences,” and other topics of that nature. Conversations that are tailored to the client they are working with.

#1 – Brand advocates can be one of the best members of your social team. Why, you ask?

They work for FREE!

Once you have shown the community they are involved you will have a harder time not posting items from them than posting items from them.

Next Kevin goes through a number of examples of Facebook pages that he feels exemplify best practices: Dunkin Donuts, Zappos, Skittles among others.

Once you have set up Facebook and begin engaging your community remember this simple fact: content matters.

#2 – You absolutely want to make sure that you are engaging your communities.

I would rather have 10,000 engaged members than 100,000 disinterested members. Develop content that is going to engage people rather than drive people away.  If they’re engaged they have more opportunity to help increase conversions.

#3 -Engage your community with content that shows you care.

One of the things we did was we partnered with a disabled veterans organization. We decided we were going to donate a certain dollar amount to commemorate veterans day. With this we were able to partner with an organization who had 60,000+ people on their Facebook page which helped drive traffic to our facebook page, and we got 100+ likes/comments on our page per day as a result.

They try their best to use Facebook as a guest relation tool, to go beyond the usual service and find opportunities to help potential clients.

#4 – Use Facebook as a spring board for customer comments, feedback, and input on the content you are creating for your community.

Involve your community in brainstorming so they will be engaged when you launch the content.

They constantly involved their community in terms of content that they put on Facebook. What kind of information would you like to see on our Facebook page? What questions would you like to have answered? What kind of giveaways would you like to see? What types of conversions do they want to be involved in? Contests like giveaways are great ways to help engage the community.

For example, they setup a page for Redbook pets – they talked about doing something for the community, asking the community what they would like to see, and other pertinent questions as well.

Think outside of the box when creating content. Relevance to your brand or product does not always have to be a key factor of your content.

Think engagement, think viral.

Engagement requires response.

You can only engage people when they respond to you.

Partner with causes your community cares about.

Partner with complimentary brands and communities.

Leverage your partners’ community to grow your own.

Drew Conrad

Next up is Drew Conrad. He is the social media marketing specialist for ZAGG.com.

Facebook – Facebook.com/ZAGG

Twitter.com/ZAGGdaily

Blog – ZAGG.com/blog

Tumblr – ZAGGdaily.com

Youtube – Youtube.com/ZAGGTV

The three main goals of their facebook strategy are:

Collect an email address

Convert the potential customer

Get the user to ZAGG.com

They are very ROI focused. It’s very important they get their Facebook user to ZAGG.com. It’s an important part of their strategy to show their shareholders how valuable what they do is through ROI statistics.

ZAGG Facebook Fans and Revenue

R=.95135

There is a very strong correlation between an increase in Facebook Fans and an increase in direct revenue from Facebook. They’ve seen a huge return on building their facebook page.

Ideas for increasing social media revenue

Creat urgency – Giveaways – don’t have to be big. They’ve done everything from ipads to papa john’s pizza. Once they’re on the site you want them to click and look around.

Voting contests – incentivize the share – Spam all your friends, have them all come check you out.

Upsell banners – Frequent links to pages that convert well. Build some upsell banners around that giveaway landing page. You want to be able to market your product through an effective way. Think of different ways you can get that out to your facebook friends frequently. Build your facebook post with the link to the page that convert well, and then put that link on your facebook page. You can get creative with it.

ZAGG recently performed a hugely successful Facebook campaign that featured the following giveaways:

12 Weeks of Christmas

Ipad-a-day

Ipad-an-hour

1.       Sign up to enter the giveaway

2.       Share it for 2 additional entries

3.       Tweet it for an additional entry

4.       Like ZAGG on Facebook for early winner notification

This helps incentivize people to actually share.  They use a lightbox to help get traffic. Everyone trusts lightbox. Every single day, people like to come back, give them their email address to share on Facebook.

For black Friday they did an ipad an hour giveaway. They said, “If you would like to participate, enter your email address, and share on Facebook and twitter.”

Results of 12 weeks of Christmas

Facebook Shares vs. Twitter tweets

8982 Most in 1 day

6.415 Tweets

38,704 1 week Facebook

30,324 Tweets

339,885 FB

Black Friday 2011 Ipad- an-hour – They gave away 24 ipads for 24 hours. This resulted in:

238,000 Facebook shares

3.23 New FB Fans per minute

They set a new ZAGG.com traffic record that increased by 234%.

New fans during the 12 weeks of Christmas shows that a major increase is part of the beginning of the campaign.

The majority of the big push is going to come in the beginning, and then it drops off throughout the rest of the campaign. You really need to maximize your efforts at the beginning of that campaign to get the best results, since the major traffic increase happens right there.

Facebook post success – hilarious iphone text screen shot post

640% more clicks than average Facebook post

105% more orders than average

132% more revenue than average

Three things for a successful Social media campaign model:

You need to have a reason to share

It has to be easy to share

It has to be measurable

The reason they think they did so well with their ipad giveaway is they made it extremely easy to share it.

They know what their client base likes, what they don’t like. They know how to create the content in such a way that will develop more likes.

Arnie Kuenn – President of Vertical Measures

Arnie Kuenn is up next. He is the President of Vertical Measures – offering SEO, link building social media & content marketing services. Also the author of Accelerate! Move Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social, & Content Marketing

First of all, Develop your Facebook Strategy.

Why are you creating the content you are creating?

One of the things to consider is your audience and who are you – what kind of voice do you have? Do you want to be serious most of the time or have a sense of humor?

Who is your audience and who are you?

What will you measure?

What is different a year from now?

One thing about social media is that it takes lots of effort and lots of man hours. What is an estimate of the results you can expect by putting in x amount of hours and effort?

How often should you post?

The most common complaint from FB users is newsfeed spam.

The most popular facebook pages post once a day or less.

Posting one to four times per week produces 71% higher user engagement.

It was measured by both likes and shares.

Focus on quality, not quantity on Facebook.

Only 50% of your posts should be about your content. Businesses that share other content have a higher engagement rate.

Strategies for effective posts

Post length: 80 characters or less, 27% more engagement) (as high as 65% in some verticals like retail).

URL shorteners – engagement rates are 3x higher for full length URLs

The reason is that people could be concerned about clicking a URL that they don’t recognize.

Action keywords: fans follow instructions. Ask them to like, post, comment, or tell you something.

Ask questions at the end: 2x higher engagement rate.

Fill in the blank posts: 9x more comments than other posts.

Avoid complicated wall posts.

How do you come up with content ideas?

Start with keyword research

Facebook of course has a ranking algorithm that does include keywords.

Keyword research should be the foundation

What keyword phrases do your customers use? (analytics)

Use tools like…

Soovle.com

Ubersuggest.org

This will drop down a number of search results alphabetically

Good idea generator.

Standard Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Then do online market research

Look at trending topics

Twitter, Yahoo, Google +

Question and answer sites

Yahoo, Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook

You can use these tools to search questions and answers about your keywords and see what people are talking about and build your content around that.

Check Voting Sites

StumbleUpon

Digg

Reddit

Do a search for your market keywords and see what kind of content is getting voted up on these sites.

You can see what it is that people seem to like – videos, content whatever people like in your market.

Google’s Discussions in Search

Create a content calendar

Plan for Monday to be videos, Wed featured fans, etc.

This helps you focus when writing and makes planning ahead easier.

Question and Answer Session

With FB changes how to you expect this to change how we create content?

ArnieK – I don’t think it’s going to change too much what we do as publishers. You still have to find ways to engage and produce content that they like. I don’t think it’s going to change how you approach creating engaging content.

Kevin Scholl – People are still going to be expecting content. As long as you have that engagement and as a content creator I’m not too worried about these changes in that regard.

From a brand angle how do you get buy-in from management on a social media angle?

Drew Conrad – My boss has a lot of freedom and trusts what we do and what we feel will work. If we feel something is going to get a lot of ROI then we do it. We experiment a lot and ourmanagement team allows us to do that.

Kevin Scholl – We don’t do much of traditional marketing. It’s really easy to get our leadership engaged. The easy part for us is we’re used to talking about our topics, our brands, and with our guests. Social Media provides a new means of communicating with our guests because of this the buy-in was pretty easy.

What about when clients are posting something that’s negative

Kevin – Unless it’s something that is offensive or cause some controversy we welcome any types of conversation. In addition to brand advocates we also have people who have negative experiences. We want to deal with these negative experiences and help resolve the situation through social media. They say we appreciate your experience with us. What they want to do is apologize for that experience and hopefully they can take that experience and turn it around. Hopefully we avoid doing negative things but we don’t and if they happen we are there to help resolve them. We want to make sure that our guests are taken care of and turn negatives to a positive experience.

Drew Conrad – They have a social media person and her job is to respond to complaints on the social media side. One thing they’ve noticed is that some people will post negative comments and go back and edit them and say they did something to their comments. If people see that you’re responding they like that so we try to keep doing this. They thought it was kind of cool that Justin Bieber was using their products so they added a Justin Bieber photo to their page but actually got a lot of negative comments on that so they took it down.

Kevin – When they do get negative posts they do have a lot of brand advocates that come in and help defend the brand, which can help turn around a negative into a psotive experience.

How do you identify and engage your brand advocates and how do you reward them as well?

Kevin- They look at who they’re getting mjultiple posts from and see who the brand advocates are and they do reward them. They may do it at the property level depending on where they’re staing. They have a schedule for giving away a price or contest but they also try to set aside an opportunity to try and give something else away. They try to find brand advocates who are out there and try to reward the brand advocate. But they don’t just want to reward the concept of being a brand advocate but also want to reward the concept.

Drew – They’ve had situations where there are brand advocates who are so advocative that they act like they are employees of the company.

Arnie – One technique I recommend is that you welcome your clients especially if they have a Facebook page go onto that page and welcome the client.

What are the suggestions for following newsfeeds, tickers and the newsfeed algorithms

Arnie – I don’t really know that.

Drew – They were put up a post or something or status

Why does ZAGG test ideas on Twitter before Facebook?

Drew – We treat them with different audiences On Facebook vs. Twitter it’s not always a 100% correlation, but if something has a lot of shares on Twitter,  this is not a twitter vs. Facebook. Because of the way Twitter is you can get a better feel regarding how people will react regarding a piece of content vs. Facebook.

Question for Kevin – How do you manage communication for individual hotel properties.

Kevin – For properties we highly recommend they don’t have a facebook page. At a property level they really don’t have the time to focus on creating something at the local level. Most  of our properties are really focused on trip advisory. They manage all the local things through the brand page. They will promote discounts and stuff through the local city page. They get a lot of local traffic through that. They want people to be engaged with the brand as a whole rather than an individual property.

Whew!!! That’s it for this blog post everyone. Stay tuned for more SMX Social Media coverage throughout the next couple days!

As an SEO I have worked with many clients who have the misplaced assumption that SEO is a waste of time and money.  They fall for the (wrong) assumption that leads and rankings will come immediately, that leads and rankings are some sort of a magic overnight solution to a problem that has been festering for who knows how long.  This couldn’t be further from the truth.

A Tale of Two Websites

In fact, investing in the technology of SEO can actually save you money in the long run.  Let’s consider a couple of examples and let’s determine how these examples can illustrate such a trend. 

Example 1:  A website that has never been SEO’ed.  It remains and continues to be stagnant (in fact, Google has never included the site in its SERPs).   Let’s call this site garyswidgetsforsale.com for the sake of our example.  This site specializes in selling widgets online, and primarily gets its advertising from such offline methods as magazines, newspapers, advertising signs, and the like.  They don’t do any kind of SEO due to the owner’s misplaced assumptions that SEO is way too expensive and will cost the business too much money.  The offline advertising results in 5-10 customers a month who pay $149.99 for this specific widget.

Example 2:  A website that invests heavily in SEO and the latest marketing strategies.  For the sake of our second example, let’s call this website johnssuperwidgetsforsale.com.  This site specializes in similar widgets to Gary’s, and is a long time competitor of Gary’s.  They advertise aggressively both online and offline, including SEO and SEM.  The owner has no misplaced assumptions and heavily subscribes to the technology first philosophy.  They end up gaining about double the conversion rate of the first example, and over time their continued branding and SEO efforts end up increasing results over time. 

It continues expanding its marketing campaigns to various markets, including heavily saturated and competitive keywords.   Over time, the results of this SEO campaign will end up destroying the results of example 1.  How does this happen?  Let’s take a look at some potential trends that track conversions from month to month:

Example 1 – Jan. – 5, Feb. – 7, March – 4, April – 8, May – 6, June – 5, July – 4, Aug. – 7, Sept. – 6

Example 2 – Jan. – 5, Feb. – 6, March – 5, April – 8, May – 10, June – 14, July – 15, Aug. – 18, Sept. – 22

Example 1 is typical of the average website that does no SEO.  They can get indexed, sure.  They can be supported by offline advertising, and generally don’t necessarily want more than what they’re currently handling.  Example 2, however, is the company that believes heavily in SEO and its benefits to traffic and conversions.  As a result of consistent efforts in gaining rankings in the SERPs, there is a significant contribution to the company’s overall marketplace perception and the increase in success as a result.

Compared to example 2, example 1 is actually LOSING a ton of money and traction in the marketplace due to their hesitation in investing in SEO.  If they had invested in SEO, they would be gaining clients and converted sales as a result.  Without SEO, they remain stagnant and will eventually suffer from the lack of increases to their bottom line.  Now, if they were to actually invest in SEO in August, they would need to end up investing more in order to catch up to example #2, because example #2 has already cornered the market and developed a following of clients as a result.

The Importance of SEO

SEO is so important – both from a business standpoint and a personal one.  With SEO being implemented correctly as it should be, you can gain traction in a market and develop a positive reputation online as well.  You can corner both offline and online strategies and reap the rewards as a result.  While the results with your competitors can remain similar during the first few months, the compounding efforts can help provide a steady stream of conversions that can help the business over the long haul.  SEO is a long term, disciplined activity.  It takes patience, perseverance, and an overall execution method of near perfection that will help deliver results for years to come.  Don’t be left behind – be sure to invest in the future of your website TODAY!

Well hello everyone!  As a brand-new year comes into full swing, big changes are a-happening and this includes making things even better than they EVER were previously!

I am excited to announce this brand-new web site, http://www.Artistic-SEO.com.  It is one of my largest web sites yet – a complete joining together of both the previous ProlificSEO.com and WorldOfWebDesign.info – all rolled into one.  In addition, it is going to feature all of my artwork, writing, web site and Flash projects, SEO projects, and additional advice for SEO content writing as a major sub-feature.  You will also find all of the standard SEO advice and general industry discussions in a brand-new regular posting schedule.

I hope you will continue to drop by and keep yourselves updated on the latest happenings on this blog, this web site, and the SEO industry in general.  This is sure to be a fantastic and interesting year for all of us.  :)

Warmest Regards,

~   Brian Harnish

You’re ready to tackle starting your own business. You have your idea. You have your computer. And, you even have your full home office setup complete with fax machine, computer, printer/copier, and a beanbag chair for your own comfort. So, you get to work. You work on the web site. Then, you talk to potential clients online. Then, you may even work on soliciting business from people in person. But, there’s one thing that’s missing that can make or break your business. No, it’s not the business license. No, it’s not the demographics of your target market unless you forgot to perform that research. It’s not the fact that you haven’t typed a single word on that blank screen of yours. No, it’s something different and intangible.

What are you forgetting that drove you into going into business for yourself in the first place? Did you forget to file your DBA (Doing-Business-As) announcement with the county clerk’s office? Did you setup your merchant accounts for online transactions? Did you establish a business checking account? Did you obtain your business license? Did you file all of the proper forms for the city? Did you come up with a great sounding brand name that will communicate the worthiness of your business? Good. So you’ve done all of the legal stuff and you’ve developed your idea into something tangible. What’s missing?

Well, if you haven’t guessed yet, what’s missing is entrepeneurial spirit, passion, drive, or whatever you want to call it. There should be a passion for whatever you’re going into business to sell or develop. If you have a passion for what you do, then all that’s going to matter to you is your final goal. Everything else between starting and finishing and reaching your goal is all part of the process of reaching it. Passion is the deciding factor between failure and success. However, in addition to passion, you have to be doing all the right things. If you take passion and direct it toward all of the wrong activities, then you’re almost guaranteed failure. Of course, I should note at this point that market conditions beyond your control can also be a factor. Working with a certain formula can help mitigate certain things that might happen that are beyond your control.

Therefore, there is a formula to success that help increase your odds of success tremendously, and many successful people follow it to some degree. That formula is: Entrepeneurship + Passion + Education + Correct Action = Success.