CHAPTER 2

Journey: Where Does Optimize and Socialize Fit in Your Company?

Companies large and small, in industries from retail to manufacturing, publish content online with an expectation that a certain audience of people will find, read, and act on that content. While most search engine optimization and social media marketing efforts are rightly focused on marketing goals like acquiring more customers and increasing revenue, making purchases is not the only reason consumers use search or ask for referrals through social networks.

There’s a lot of tactical advice online about search, social media, and content marketing for companies that want to better connect with customers, but that advice doesn’t always consider the differences between types of companies or even content within companies. For the best return on marketing investment, it’s important to understand that there are notable differences in tactics for effective optimization depending on the audience and how they prefer to discover, consume, and act on information. The very nature of B2C versus B2B or small company versus large company content, audience, and outcomes can be different, so the approach to optimizing content for search and social media must be tailored accordingly.

As an online marketer, you’re charged with assessing internal resources, overall business goals, customer buying cycle, and time frame in order to make the best decisions possible with your resources. As you read on, watch for some of the things that best represent your business and online marketing situation. This chapter gives you optimization examples to understand the differences between B2B, B2C, small companies, and large companies. We will also talk about several rarely explored opportunities for holistic search and social media optimization of content: internal departments such as public relations, customer service, and human resources and recruiting.

OPTIMIZED B2C SEARCH MARKETING

J&O Fabrics is a small business in New Jersey that was historically focused on selling fabric through its brick-and-mortar store as well as through online channels like eBay. Dissatisfaction with third-party marketing costs in combination with a frustration over limited website traffic led to an investment in SEO. As a result of optimizing the website with relevant keywords and a program designed to attract links, traffic to the J&O Fabrics website increased 214 percent. The company’s online marketing became more efficient and effective, allowing it to eliminate certain types of advertising and increase organic “free” search traffic significantly.

Stop there and you have a typical SEO success story. But Ryan Safady of J&O Fabrics understood from the start that content was the key to making the pages of his online store stand out for more than just search engines. With a keen understanding of customer needs as well as data from web analytics and keyword research, content creation and optimization were made part of the process of maintaining product content on the website www.jandofabrics.com. As a small business, J&O needed to use their resources efficiently, so when a blog was started, an existing customer e-mail newsletter was leveraged for content along with a free blog-hosting platform. Knowing what types of products customers were prone to buy online and in which season helped flavor content and optimization efforts on a mix of broad topics and more specific long-tail keyword phrases. The combination of making keyword optimization a process for updating and adding new content to the online store as well as offering customer-centric tips on the blog helped facilitate a website that became highly relevant for ready-to-buy customers, search engines, and other websites that link to useful resources. Increased content relevancy and usefulness inspired the kind of inbound links and social sharing that search engines like Google reward with top three positions on hundreds of important keyword phrases. Extensive top search visibility has enabled J&O’s small business to effectively compete directly with national chains, all based from a single retail store.

J&O Fabrics has continued to work on being the most relevant source of fabric online by expanding content and optimization efforts to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Social channels share unique content with the J&O Fabrics community and involve members in content creation through contests and promotions that result in even more awareness, sharing, and links. A strong search and social media presence reinforces a cycle of discovery, consumption, and sharing that involves current customer networks as well as attracting new customers actively looking to purchase specific products.

B2B CONTENT MARKETING OPTIMIZATION

Companies focused on business-to-business sales often experience a much longer sales cycle involving the creation of more content that serves to educate and nurture prospects into qualified leads and customers. In other words, there’s usually a lot more content romance involved with B2B prospects before they become customers.

The approach to optimization for J&O Fabrics as a small, B2C company was notably different than that employed by Marketo, a B2B marketing software company. Before Marketo’s initial product was officially launched, the company made the decision to invest in content and optimization, particularly through the practice of blogging. Whereas J&O Fabrics had a longstanding website and content to begin with, Marketo started its SEO efforts with a very new website and blog. B2B markets are often less competitive in search, but that was not the case with Marketo, which faced several longstanding competitors that had anywhere from 3 to 10 years’ head start with their search engine optimization programs.

Audits are a key part of search engine optimization, allowing marketers to assess the current state of the website in ways that identify any conflicts or inefficiencies for search engines as they crawl, index, and rank web pages. An audit with Marketo’s website early on helped chart a productive course toward technical optimization of the content management system as well as a content creation plan. Blogs can be highly effective players in an integrated search and social media strategy, and Marketo took full advantage of the platform by creating an intelligent and ambitious mix of keyword-rich content that was just as relevant to buyers as it was to search engines.

Keyword research into broad industry- and category-focused keyword phrases that would associate Marketo as an industry player, in combination with more specific phrases relevant to buyers as they make their way through the sales process, played well for Marketo in its SEO and content creation efforts. Beginning as a small business and a start-up, Marketo has been able to accelerate the growth of its business through the marketing efficiency and effectiveness that come from content and search engine optimization focused both on customers and search engines.

The result? Although Marketo is only a four-year-old company in the B2B marketing space, you can easily find the company on Google using phrases like “B2B Marketing” in a category where competitors have operated full-scale SEO programs for nearly 10 years. One keyword doesn’t make a business, though, and Marketo understands that an abundance of information online means prospects have pulled themselves through much of the traditional sales funnel by discovering and consuming brand content. Marketo’s dedication to creating and promoting relevant content on its array of blogs and resource center in accordance to the information needs of its prospects throughout the buying cycle facilitated a substantial online presence on hundreds of competitive topics where the company’s prospective customers were actively looking. In fact, Marketo added more than 1,100 customers1 in its first three years, and revenue increased 700 percent over a two-year period, with vice president of marketing Jon Miller citing search and blogging as being the most effective lead-generation tactics2 during an Online Marketing Summit conference in San Diego.

OPTIMIZATION AND THE ENTERPRISE

Large and complex organizations have many more considerations with coordinated optimization, social media, and content marketing efforts. Many effective SEO and social media marketing consultants have had difficulty making an impact because of their inability to win internal client support among interdepartmental teams needed for implementation. Competent SEO and social media marketing expertise is moot if a consultant doesn’t understand how to navigate large and complex organizational structures. Success is as dependent on political and organizational savvy as it is on content marketing mastery.

A very large company in the health care technology field, which generates tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue among more than 20 different companies, decided to roll all of the disparate company brands and websites under a common corporate content management system. Customers visiting the old website addresses were redirected to the new home of the company under the main company website. The new CMS allowed centralized management of website resources and a common brand identity.

The company soon realized that, although the combined website presented a unified brand and redirected requests for old pages to new destinations, the methods of redirection were not as easy for search engines to understand as they were for people. Website traffic was affected and an SEO audit was completed to identify the issues that we significantly affecting organic search engine traffic. Working with more than 20 different business and operating units as well as corporate IT, the SEO migration issues were identified and a range of SEO best practices recommendations implemented in order to provide search engines a crystal clear signal of what was old, what was new. As a result, search engines were better able to see and rank the most relevant pages without confusion while continuing to provide a good user experience for customers that clicked on old links.

Seeing an even bigger opportunity, the company decided to further leverage search engine optimization as an effective method for relevant discovery and engagement with its B2B prospects. An SEO program was rolled out among individual business units with the corporate website and public relations content. Ongoing SEO implementation, content creation, link building, and formal and informal training resulted in significant increases in search traffic and online leads across the portfolio of companies.

Because this company is one of the largest in the world, change isn’t always easy to implement, but the SEO consulting and training initiatives grew confidence in online marketing programs, and the company has been implementing more social media components into its online marketing mix along with content and optimization. Confidence in the technical and creative aspects of SEO and content combined with multi-department and business unit training on best practices helped this 150+-year-old company transition into more integrated SEO and content marketing processes before many of their competitors.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

When social media participation by brands became more popular, companies often began with marketing and sales outcomes in mind but soon discovered that people use social tools for many types of communication ranging from customer service to public relations to recruiting. The same opportunity exists with optimizing content for easy and relevant discovery through search engines.

The content that marketing departments produce is not the only type of information that can be optimized. Many other areas of an organization publish content online for specific audience and outcomes. The public relations function within a company often produces nearly as much content as marketing in the form of a corporate newsroom with media coverage, press releases, images, video, case studies, white papers, and other resources that would be useful to journalists. Each of those assets is an opportunity for journalists to discover the brand story through search engines or social referrals.

PRWeb is a press release distribution service that publishes thousands of press releases for PR practitioners and small business marketers every month. As a pioneer in the area of optimized press release distribution, PRWeb has been relied on by the SEO and PR industries to deliver outcomes such as high-ranking press releases on Google and Yahoo! News, website traffic, and links for more than 10 years. Companies that optimize and socialize their press releases give new life and extended reach to their news by making it easy for bloggers and end consumers to find and share press release content.

When it comes to integrating SEO, social media, and content with public relations, PRWeb walks the talk by producing industry reports, blogging, and managing a robust resource section on their website with numerous optimized articles that are helpful to their target audience, including journalists. Additionally, PRWeb leverages social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to connect with their community. PRWeb community manager Stacey Acevero holds Twitter chats every other week (called #PRWebchat) that brings together prospects, customers, bloggers, and the media to ask and answer questions along a theme and often including a guest subject matter expert. With an editorial plan that factors search keywords in place, web and social media content produced and promoted by PRWeb is more likely to be found in search; and with increasing numbers of journalists reporting search as a tool they use daily, it makes SEO an excellent public relations resource. Jason DeRusha, News Anchor for WCCO-TV, supports this notion of search as a PR asset, “I begin every day at search engine. It doesn’t matter what story I’m working on, it always starts with a search.”

Within the public relations department arsenal of content, there’s a mix of optimization opportunities beyond the press release, from the corporate newsroom to video and images to social media content and even contributed articles to publications and blogs. The unique opportunity for PR content optimization is that it serves the information needs of the news media as well as end consumers.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

While much of the optimization and social media efforts of companies is focused on content related to customer acquisition, there’s tremendous value in making sure content that serves existing customers is easy to find. That means optimizing frequently asked questions and other support material for easy and relevant discovery through search. From a social media perspective, it means being aware of which support-related search queries are most popular so that topical social media monitoring efforts can uncover service opportunities on platforms like Twitter, in forums, or in comments on blogs. Customer support web page optimization also affects social content creation, so answers are easily discovered and shared within social channels by social media community managers, customer service staff, and brand advocates.

Optimization of content for customer discovery can happen with public information that’s accessed via search engines like Google or Bing as well as internal repositories of information behind a login. A large health care technology company faced the need to optimize post-sale content for customers. Feedback from usability studies showed that customers were having trouble locating information, such as frequently asked questions and user information, in the customer portal.

To help provide a better customer experience, SEO best practices were applied to existing content to create better content architecture and ensure relevant results were served via the search functionality of the internal customer portal. The project began by identifying customer segments and working with client-side marketers and customer service reps to identify the information customers were most likely to search for.

Next, a separate keyword glossary was researched and created for the content found within the customer portal. Following the development of the keyword glossary, best-practice search engine optimization was applied, including editing titles of documents, headings, copy, and cross-linking within copy.

The end result was better-organized, easier-to-find content to help serve customer needs across multiple post-sale stages.

Making customer content easier to navigate and find quickly can lead to increased customer satisfaction, increased frequency of accessing customer focused resources, and, ultimately, cost savings by displacing inquiries to a call center to the web.

RECRUITING AND HR

Even with an uncertain economy, many companies have difficulty finding new employees who have the right mix of necessary skills. The recruiting industry has effectively used social media channels for promoting open positions and networking with candidates. Some companies have used Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter as part of their recruiting efforts. Ernst & Young was the first professional services firm to launch a careers page on Facebook in 2006 and now has a community of more than 50,000 fans there.3 Talented people search the web, social networks, and job sites and to find something that catches their attention. Why not your company’s job listing?

The Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), headquartered in New York, has maintained a job listing service that provides a useful source of career opportunities and advice for PR and communications professionals for several years. The PRSA jobcenter also serves as a resource for agencies and corporate PR departments that want to attract talented candidates. By reviewing website traffic trends and having keyword research performed, William Murray, president and COO of the PRSA, decided SEO was worth exploring to help the jobcenter content and job listings attract more search engine traffic, thereby creating additional value for the companies that paid to list job openings there. After SEO work was performed related to job listing keyword research, a website audit, content audit, and link-building program were implemented. Total traffic to the PRSA site increased by 20 percent, while page views for the PRSA jobcenter increased by 40 percent. Additionally, visitor referrals from competitive keyword rankings increased substantially. Referrals from a single target keyword phrase with more than 76,200,000 competing search results on Google increased by over 450 percent.

If search engines like Google and Bing are imperfect, then the search functions within company websites are far from perfect. That means optimizing content for internal use can help employees (just like customers) find answers more quickly and efficiently. I’m sure many people reading this book have used Google or Bing to search for content on their own company website. That experience shows the power of a search engine for exposing content that’s important for performing one’s job. It also reveals the importance of making any kind of content with a purpose and an expected audience to be optimized for discovery through search.

Whether your small or large business is focused on B2B or B2C markets, it is essential to take advantage of the opportunity to optimize and socialize content to aid in the connection with intended audiences. Further, being able to discern the uniqueness of different customer expectations for how brand content is discovered, consumed, and acted on will help marketers better plan their content optimization and social media efforts to the benefit of customers and brands alike.

Now that we have an understanding of where an optimized approach can fit in with content marketing across marketing, public relations, recruiting, and customer service, let’s move on to research in Chapter 3: From the search and social media landscape to the search engine–friendliness of your website.

ACTION ITEMS

Notes

1. David Kirkpatrick, “Marketing Strategy: Revenue-oriented approach leads to 700% two-year growth,” Marketing Sherpa, June 1, 2011, http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=31928.

2. Lee Odden, “OMS10 B2B Marketing Case Study: Marketo,” TopRank (blog), February 2010, http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/02/b2b-marketing-case-study-marketo/.

3. “Ernst & Young Previews New Campus Recruitment and Social Media Strategies,” PR Newswire, September 23, 2011, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ernst—young-previews-new-campus-recruitment-and-social-media-strategies-103640319.html.