Recently, our very own Marketing Director, Matt Erickson, gave his industry insights and shared some of his favorite strategies via a podcast interview for Enterprise Radio.
In this interview, Matt discusses how digital marketing effects business in brands, touching on everything from search engine optimization to search engine marketing to retargeting and beyond.
Enterprise Radio is the signature show of EPN – the Entrepreneur Podcast Network with host Eric Dye, known for his exclusive interviews with small business owners, entrepreneurs and top executives around the world.
Scroll down a little for the full, transcribed interview below.
In the mood to listen? Click the video below to listen now. Short on time? Check out the timestamps directly below the video to jump to the topic of your choice.
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QUESTION ONE: SEO is such a big subject, if a business could only focus on a few areas of SEO, what should those be?
It is a big subject. If you can only focus on a few. I’ll break these down, I would say: content development, your technical, your site speed and your mobile.
- Content Development
- SEO is still based on the content you create and how people react to that content. So, how long that content keeps people on your site, and the actions people take after consuming that content. So, content that people find valuable – like industry tips and tricks that can be used by your audience, content that’s written in a simple format that your audience can understand (limiting that jargon to a minimum) and video content that people will actually want to watch. All of these should be key areas of your SEO content.
- Technical and Site Speed
- Make sure your site is technically sound and is not damaging your site speed.
- The longer your site takes to load (and we are talking milliseconds) the higher the chance that visitors are going to be bounce out and look for another site – to find someone else who has the answers they want.
- We are in a very immediate gratification kind of world – we hate wasting any amount of time– so anything that can be done to speed up your site should be a focus as well.
- Mobile Websites
- Mobile traffic – the data is there –it’s no joke. It can’t be an afterthought when it comes to SEO. There has been a lot of talk from Google about splitting their search index between mobile-friendly, mobile-optimized sites and desktop sites. So, if you have invested a lot of time on your desktop site – but have not put the same time and care into your mobile site, this is likely going to hurt you in search and you’re not going to show up in those mobile search rankings.
- Google also just announced their “Speed Update” surrounding mobile – officially making mobile speed a ranking factor as well.
- So when locking down your mobile site’s performance – again – you want to make sure speed a priority.
- BONUS TIP: Focus on your local market in your SEO content.
- In search – especially on mobile – your results are going to default to your local market, your local geography. So, taking advantage of your local search results – with content that is contextually aimed at your local market – is something to seriously consider.
QUESTION TWO: So keeping with this subject of SEO and content how does voice technology factor into all of this?
- Voice is a crazy, growing interesting area both in terms of SEO and building your brand.
- On the SEO side, more people (including myself) are asking their phones for information more often, “Where can I buy a pair of white Nikes?” “How do I change my Facebook privacy settings?” “What the best way to market my business in 2018?” The way we speak a search is naturally different from the way we would type a search.
- So – when we create content for voice search – we really need to focus on making it contextually rich and more conversational to take advantage of people searching this way.
- Additionally, on the branding side, voice opens up a plethora of other branding and marketing opportunities like:
- Creating your own podcasts, like this one, or maybe creating an Alexa skill if that works for your brand.
- What it really comes down to is that using voice is faster – and consuming voice content – like podcasts, allows us to multitask, we don’t need to stop what we are doing and focus – like we do when watch a piece of video content.
- So overall – businesses and marketers need to realize – that the use of voice search and consuming voice-based content is just getting started – it’s not going away anytime soon. And now is the time to start experimenting with ways they can capitalize on it.
QUESTION THREE: So moving from SEO to the SEM side (search engine marketing) should brands be more focused on platforms like Google Ads or Alternatives like Facebook ads?
- Google vs. Facebook. This is a constant debate, even in our office. The honest answer is – you should use the one that works best for your business and your brand. This might sound like a cop out answer but its true. Here are some considerations for each though of these platforms
- Let’s say if you’re getting started – know what kind of budget investment you can make overall – along with who you are trying to target – and then work backwards and go from there.
- For example, (if you were are a small boutique business) – your product is prepared meal delivery – and you can afford to spend $200 (a month) on advertising I would go with Facebook ads. You can build and test a couple of ads over a couple of weeks with $50 or $100 – and then invest the remaining spend into the ad(s) that’s working the best. The targeting for this type of boutique business, in a local market, to their exact demographic specific you’re looking for – would cost $3 to $5 – per thousand people reached – and would be more cost effective for them than your standard Google Ad.
- Now… if you are an international B2B cyber security company – that can invest $50k a month – you are going to have a much wider net that you can cast and $50-$80 per click on Google (in this type of industry) may be totally worth it. So with this type of business Google Ads may be the way to test and invest.
- Overall – If you can afford to advertise and test on both – to get a real world taste of each segment – (your Google search and Facebook audiences), I would definitely do it.
QUESTION FOUR: Retargeting on Google and Facebook, when should brands or marketers be using this strategy?
- If you are advertising on either platform, remarketing should be part of your mix. It should be baked into your strategy. As everyone knows, usually we need to see a brand name, product, or service several times (7-10 times or more) – before we will take any kind of action – and go look for that product.
- So remarketing helps us do just that – show your message to the same audience – and often at a lower cost than your “first-touch” advertising. Being that you can remarket (or retarget) on both platforms – you could actually run remarketing campaigns across your platforms as well.- not a lot of people will talk about this or seem to
- So, for example you could run a Google campaign (a PPC campaign) that sends a visitor to a landing page – that has a Facebook remarketing pixel on it – which will let you show them another ad on Facebook.
- So using them together can be extremely beneficial as well.It might take a little more leg work to tease out the data and the correlations on this kind of campaign (remarketing across platforms) but if it works, it is going to be totally worth it.
QUESTION FIVE: You mentioned teasing out the data. Why is the data so important when it comes to SEO and SEM?
People get a little skittish around data sometimes. The simple answer…when you break it down – is because the data doesn’t really care about our feelings – or really about anything. It doesn’t care how creative you are, what worked in the past, or how great you think your idea is. The data tells us the – “True Hollywood story” if you will – about what your marketing is doing and it’s only there to help us improve. And if you know what you are looking for it can guide your SEO/SEM efforts
- One example would be your website – IF you have a great looking site – but analytics (the data) – says you dont have any traffic – you have an attention or search problem (or maybe both). OR You have a lot of traffic. That’s fantastic! But if the data is showing that you have a 80%-90% bounce rate (they’re coming in and then they’re leaving immediately)- you may have a content problem or maybe a slow loading issue – that’s causing people to bounce out of our site like we discussed before – A slow loading site can equal a higher bounce rate.
- On the flip side – lets say you have a lot of traffic, a low bounce rate, decent time on site – the data is looking all fantastic – but you don’t have any site conversions – now you may be needing to focus your time on your calls to actions and site forms.
- All in all – understanding the data – can help guide our improvement. This same thing applies to your content, your videos, your advertising, when it comes to the data, almost everything. If you know how things correlate – in the big picture – you can use the data to weed out the bad and pinpoint the good in your marketing strategies.
QUESTION SIX: Anything to add in conclusion?
- All in all when it comes to marketing, it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle – it can feel like you’re trying to nail Jell-O to the wall sometimes, but there are lots of tools and lots of strategies you can try and test.
- I would say, overall, Don’t try to do everything all at once – this goes for marketers and business owners – pick a few things that make the most since for your business or your brand– and go from there.
- Really put the work into those strategies- keep an eye on the data – keep testing and improving bit by bit, build a good foundation, and above all be patient and strive for steady growth – not the spikes but steady growth.