Every SEO company knows that high quality content is a staple of a good campaign. Compelling, relevant content helps a site rank (due to keyword density and by capturing long tail search traffic), greatly increases the potential for generating organic inbound links, and helps to increase conversion  thanks to increased traffic and a heightened perception of value and thought leadership in the marketplace.

However, developing content that is going to capture the attention of your target demographic is no easy task, and, to add another element of difficulty, it needs to be an ongoing process of developing and distributing compelling pieces. Even if you have a great hit with a single piece of killer content, you still need to be thinking about what’s next.

Unless you happen to have an insane genius on staff who simply can’t help but come up with killer content every time he or she touches a keyboard, you’re probably going to need a plan. I’ve spent some time outlining what I think are the core elements of an ongoing content development strategy, and I’d like to share them with you.

Building a Visual Outline

First, let’s take a look at this diagram, which I will explain below:

Let’s break down what the diagram is showing.

1. Expertise Categories

   Every piece of content generated needs to be based on the expertise of the person or organization it’s supposed to help promote. Blogs, for example, are wildly popular and useful because so many of them are written by knowledgeable, impassioned people who are providing useful, relevant information to their readers. You need to make sure that you follow the same model when crafting content. Don’t write about Paris Hilton because Google Trends is showing that she’s a hot topic today – write about what you know. Most likely, your expertise or the expertise of the organization you’re generating content for can be split into multiple topics. For example, a financial services firm might have expertise in risk management, retirement planning, and estate planning. Each of these would fit into the categories section, and would drive ideas for the types of content you should be generating

2. Buyer Personas

   After you’ve figured out what categories your content is going to live in, you need to think about the market for each of those categories. Who is your audience, and what writing style will appeal to them? In our example above, the markets for risk management and retirement planning might very well be quite different, and the types of people who will be consuming the content will be hooked in by different writing styles and topics.

3. Trends

   You need to know what’s going on in your industry right now if you have any chance of being considered an authority in your field. So, when generating content, it’s good to make note of current trends in the market that are worth commenting on. It’s always a good idea to have content in the pipeline that’s not time sensitive and can be used at any time, but late-breaking industry news is generally ideal to comment on.

4. Content

   Once you’ve figured out precisely what you need to write about, go ahead and generate the content. Make it compelling, make it personal. Afterward, you’ll need some kind of distribution mechanism. I discuss below the different distribution categories that content can fall into, but actually implementing a distribution plan is outside the scope of this post (though I will be writing about it later)

Applying it to a Real Website

Let’s take a look at what the diagram might look like in a real world example. We’ll use one of my personal favorite sites, seomoz.org. Seomoz offers a variety of SEO related services and is generally considered to be a leader in the SEO industry, especially thanks to their daily SEO blog. These guys pump out quality content on a daily basis, so I thought they’d be a good example for how toimplement a content creation plan. Note that this diagram is far from complete and probably far from accurate, but it’s meant only to serve as an example:

Expertise

I’ve taken three of the categories of expertise that SEOmoz has – SEO, tech startups, and online advertising. Additional categories can be added, but for the sake of our example, we’ll use these three.

Buyer personas

Next we have potential buyer personas for each of the areas of expertise included at the top. The colors indicate which areas of expertise are applicable to which buyer persona, with some areas being applicable to multiple or all personas.

SEOmoz provides search marketing consulting to high-end businesses, so that’s obviously a market they want to connect with. Additionally, they offer tools & services (branded as SEOmoz pro) to other SEO agencies who want to make use of their expertise, so I’ve also included a buyer persona titled “potential SEOmoz pro customers”.

A less obvious buyer persona

The other buyer persona, “colleagues and competitors”, is particularly interesting. Targeting this persona is useful not to generate sales directly, but to establish leadership in the industry. I have never hired SEOmoz, nor have I ever spoken to one of their clients, yet I have the distinct impression that these guys know exactly what they’re doing. Why is that? Because reading their content has given me that impression. This is a very important component of content development, usually dubbed “thought leadership”.

Trends

The trends indicated above were generated just from my knowledge of what’s going on in the industry right now. I was pleased to find that it was very easy to find content on the seomoz site dedicated to these trends, since it helped to reinforce my ideas on quality content development. For example, I know that a lot of large companies are dealing with budget cuts right now due to the economy, so I figured there would be a post about how SEO is the best place to spend your marketing dollars.

Content Distribution

Great content will not only get people to read it, but will generate inbound links. A full inbound link plan it outside the scope of this post, but I did want to break down the distribution categories a piece of content can fall into. Deciding on where you want to publish content can be integral to your success, and I may actually add that decision step in a next revision of the diagrams above.

Content distribution categories

• Internal / Generated
  This type of content is created by you and posted on your own site. It can include general website content, blog posts, or anything else that comes internally from you or your organization, and ultimately lives on your own site
• External / Generated
  The external/generated content type is where something like a guest blog post might live. You wrote the content yourself, but it didn’t get posted on your own site.
• External / Acquired
  The external/acquired type of content is where a newspaper article about your organization would fit. You may have had to request that the article be written (as in traditional PR), or a writer/journalist may have come to you for an interview. Either way, your involvement was an integral part of the process, which is what separates this type from the External / Organic type
• External / Organic
  The external / organic content type is covers content that was written about you or your organization, but that you had no involvement in whatsoever. For example, a blogger creating a post specifically as a reaction to a post on your blog would fall under the external / organic category

Conclusion

Engaging web content is the new way to market any business. With 113 billion searches being performed every month, you need to have a plan in place to get your expertise into the marketplace so that people looking for answers find you first. If you’ve already solved a problem for them before they’ve even gotten in touch with you, you’re way ahead of the game.

We signed up for Raven a few months ago, although I have to admit that we didn’t really start digging into its features until recently. After working with it in a bit more detail, I thought I’d give a quick run through of what we’ve found so far.

For those who don’t know what it is, Raven is a web-based application for managing Internet Marketing campaigns. It’s a hosted solution, so there’s nothing to install, and it is either $79/month or $199/month depending on the number of users you’ll need. It has a whole host of features that you can check out on their website, but the three I’ll go over here are the SERP tracker, Link Manager, and Social Media manager.

SERP Tracker

Initially, we weren’t too impressed with the SERP tracker in raven, but we found that it’s important to let it run for a few weeks before you can really see the value here. You don’t get immediate results the way you do with a local application like WebCEO, but I’ve come to really like Raven’t SERP tracker, especially since it supports graphing of SERP history (pictured left)

Link Manager

Another feature we’ve been utilizing in Raven is the Link Manager, which provides a handy way to keep track of all the inbound links you’ve acquired or requested. It also has link monitoring so that it will let you know when a requested link becomes active, or if an active link becomes inactive.

Social Media Manager

This is a feature we just started delving into, but it’s pretty cool. Raven allows you to manage “personas”, which are accounts on social media sites that you’ve created for your clients. Especially interesting is the Twitter account manager, which provides a concise report of Twitter “key performance indicators”, including ReTweets and followers (the image to the left was taken from the user manual). Raven also allows you to perform brand management by tracking mentions of your client’s name – kind of like a Google alerts for social media – but admittedly we haven’t really investigated this feature too much.

Conclusion

So far, we’re digging Raven as a campaign management tool. We’re currently using it on the $79/month plan, which is a pretty reasonable price for what you get, though I do think that they could stand to give more than two user accounts at that price. We don’t have any relationship with Raven whatsoever, so this isn’t supposed to be a promotional post, I just thought I’d post some thoughts after using the package.

Wil Reynolds from Seer tweeted this link from Michael Gray’s blog earlier today, which basically answers the question of whether hCards are actually beneficial to SEO with “probably not”. Now, I’m not in a position to really argue based on anything I’ve seen (and my official position is that I agree with Gray), but we did see something last month with one of our clients that made me wonder about whether hCards were beneficial to our local search visibility, and I’d been meaning to post about it.

The rundown is this: We’re currently ranking well for a fairly competitive term in the Philadelphia region. Our organic positioning is in the top 3, and our local business positioning is generally #1 out of about 5 “top” results. However, for the past week or so, we’ve noticed that our client has become the only local business result for the phrase, despite there being very clear competitors who are also engaged in SEO.

To illustrate, the local results used to look something like this:

And now, it triumphantly looks like this, at least from when and where I’m searching (identifying information removed):

One of our changes at the start of this month was the implementation of hCard formatting for their address, so I’m wondering if that change has given us a leg up on the local results. It’s quite possible that there are other factors at work here, but it was enough to make me wonder. Any thoughts?

Over the years, I’ve spoken to a lot of people who have been soured on search optimization due to a bad experience, and even some who don’t “believe” in SEO because it’s always been explained to them in an abstract, condescending, too-complicated-for-you-to-understand kind of way. Those of us in the industry know how effective SEO and conversion optimization can be because we see the results on our own sites and in the leads and sales we generate for our clients. However, I recently took on an SEO project that hit close to home for me, and I thought it would make for a nice little story that would highlight the impact a good SEO campaign can have.

My family owns a banquet hall in the heart of Northeast Philadelphia that my grandparents built up from scratch, starting with a small corner tavern in the Kensington section of the city and eventually growing into an event hall capable of holding 600 guests. It’s a regular reality TV show of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins trying to keep the doors open and the guests happy without strangling one another.

Although the hall had seen prosperous times in the 80s and 90s, the past few years have proven to be difficult for business. The declining economy in Northeast Philadelphia – coupled with a few antiquated business practices – was causing a drastic drop in revenue, and it was clear that something had to be done to revitalize the business.

I decided to put Context to work building a new website for the banquet hall and implementing an SEO campaign to drive targeted traffic to the site.  We paid attention to our landing pages and optimized for local search, and the results were stellar.

With their old site and no SEO, they saw maybe 1 or 2 leads per month coming over the web. However, thanks to our efforts, they now receive an average of 4 to 5 leads per day. In fact, I just checked the analytics, and 9 leads were generated in the past 24 hours. Their website is now a core component of the business, and things have started to completely turn around.  With this new source of revenue, they’ve been able to renovate the banquet rooms, which in turn is generating even more business.

I guess the moral of the story here is that SEO works. More importantly though, SEO can go as far as to revitalize a struggling business. And while some people may think to themselves, “this is probably a ‘results not typical’ kind of situation”, I’d have to respond by saying that I have yet to find a client who didn’t see direct benefits from our efforts in search optimization and site optimization.

I recently decided that our monthly SEO and conversion strategy reports were kind of weak, so Brian (one of our SEO/conversion strategists) and I set out to redevelop our report template. We came up with some fairly concise, direct principles to follow, so I thought I’d include them here in case anyone can make use of our efforts or can add to what we’ve done:

1. Lead with what’s important

   I’ve seen a lot of reports that start with very basic, dashboard-style metrics that provide an overview of site traffic, visitors, bounce rate, etc. Those metrics are useful (in the right context – more on that below), but if you’re really looking to do well by your clients, you’re looking at conversion, conversion, conversion.

   As a result, we decided to start the report with two things: goal completion metrics (as compared to the previous month), and an executive summary of the status of the campaign. The summary outlines very concisely how our efforts fared that month, our assessment of strengths and weaknesses (e.g. why some things worked and others didn’t), and plans for moving forward into the next monthly cycle.

2. Put the data in context

   Another issue I’ve seen with SEO reports is that they’ll give information such as “the site received 10,000 visits this month”. The problem is that, by itself, there’s no way of knowing if 10,000 visits is good or bad. This is true for any metric: if you don’t compare it to some kind of benchmark, it doesn’t provide any actionable information to anyone. An easy way to give the data a reason to exist is to simply compare it to the previous month’s data.

3. Don’t include useless data

   There’s probably no reason to include your top 100 keywords or top 100 content pages in a monthly report. If the data isn’t directly actionable – if it doesn’t spur you to tweak your campaign – it’s probably not really relevant enough to include in the report.

   Depending on the size of the site, we’ll take a subset of the top (or the most important) keywords and content, and make some decisions based on the metrics around that subset. For example, we recently noticed that the media page for one of our clients was their top content right beneath their home page, so we included a media player widget on the home page. Eliminating that one click actually increased the number of qualified leads generated through the site.  Instead of listing out the top x content pages, we included that decision in the report, which I think is much more compelling than a generic export of top content.

4. Don’t include graphs for the sake of having graphs

   Graphs look pretty, but I’ve seen reports where the graph serves no function other than eye candy, because they were too small or pixilated to actually read. Resist the urge to fill the report with fancy graphs instead of filling it with concise but complete textual content that outlines your findings and details how they will affect your campaign moving forward.

5. Use your own words

   The report should read like a summary of a meeting where your team outlined what was done during the previous month, analyzed the metrics, then decided what the next course of action should be. If something you previously implemented didn’t work out as well as you had hoped, include that in the report, then follow it up with what you’ll be doing to fix or replace the failed strategy. Be candid, as if the client was in front of you asking you to give them the nitty gritty of what’s happening with the campaign.

In the end, the new report format came out looking like the outline below. I’m sure we’ll continually revise it, but I’m much happier with what we have now as compared to what we were doing previously.

• Conversion & goal metrics (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Executive summary / overview of campaign status
• Visitor stats overview (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Search Engine rank
  • a list of where we’re currently ranking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for our target keywords and phrases. We’re now using Raven to track these for us.
  • Also includes a brief analysis of what we can do to improve or maintain ranking, or branch into new keywords & phrases
• Traffic sources overview (as compared to previous month)
  • direct traffic vs. referring sites vs. search engine traffic
  • Brief analysis of what we can do to bolster traffic sources we might be lacking in, or how we might generally increase referred or search traffic
• Top Keywords (as compared to previous month)
  • Brief analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly here as well – what we can do to further penetrate the keywords we’re doing well on, and where else we can look to target traffic
  • References exported list of top 10 keywords, which is included as an appendix after the main report
• Top Content (as compared to previous month)
  • Same as above, references exported list of top 10 content pages, again included as an appendix after the main report

When clients are on a budget, it can be tough to build a decent inbound link campaign. Even if you’re only looking to acquire free links, there is a lot of time and effort involved in researching & securing links, especially if you want permanent, high-PR backlinks that are going to help bolster your search ranking.

One method a lot of SEOs use to jumpstart a link campaign is to submit their clients’ press releases to websites that will allow you to do so for free, and will also allow backlinks to your website. We set out to find some of the better, more SEO-friendly free press release sites, and I’ve included our list below (in no particular order). All PageRanks come from the Google toolbar, so they’re more of an approximation of PageRank as opposed to anything official.

Free Press Release Sites

1. www.prlog.org
   PageRank: 6
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
2. www.sanepr.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: Yes
3. www.pressreleasepoint.com
   PageRank: 5
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: no
4. www.free-press-release-center.info
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
5. www.transworldnews.com
   PageRank: 4
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
6. www.theopenpress.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
7. www.information-online.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
8. www.pagerelease.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
9. www.pressexposure.com
   PageRank: 3
   Allows backlink: yes
   Custom anchor text: yes
10. www.pr-usa.net
    PageRank: 5
    Allows backlink: yes
    Custom anchor text: yes

Ok, we all know that if you’re going to move a website or even a single page, you’ll want to make sure you issue a 301 header to tell the search engines that the page has been “moved permanently”. I always equate it to moving to a new office space, but leaving a sign at the old location that says “We’ve moved!” and lists the new address. The 301 header performs exactly the same task as that sign.

However, last month marked our first experience with having to move a site we had previously optimized to a new domain altogether. The client hadn’t been sure which of their two domains was going to be the ‘official’ one, and didn’t decide until after we had already placed them on Google page 1 for their primary target phrase – on what was to become the ‘unofficial’ domain.

I had read other peoples’ stories about temporarily losing placement when doing 301 redirects, but in the back of my mind I thought, “they didn’t do it properly – they missed something or the 301 header wasn’t being issued”. I guess you can blame the ego on my programming background. In any case, I wasn’t expecting any trouble with the ranking.

Lo and behold, soon after setting up the redirects and changing the virtual hosts, the site dropped from page 1 to page 3-5 for the targeted phrases. No need to panic though – I figured things would balance back out soon enough. It took 2-4 weeks to creep back into the first page of results, but we’re pretty much back in place except for one straggler at the top of page #2 (although we’re getting the #1 local result for that phrase, so it’s not as big an issue as it might be).

So that was our experience with 301′ing a whole site. All in all not too bad, but I think the conclusion should be that unless you have direct help from Google (which they will provide for very large scale/well known sites), you can expect your positioning to get rocked a bit for a few weeks.

1. Taking credit for ranking…for their own company name
   I’ve seen SEO companies tell clients to search for their name on Google to show that they rank at #1 for their own company name. If you can’t rank for your own company name, either your company is named “blog”, or you’re just not even trying. Even if you are able to fill the entire first page with articles about your own company, there’s nothing impressive (or conversion worthy) going on there.
2. Ranking for phrases no one will ever search for
   Some SEO companies will make it a point to note how they rank at #1 for phrases like “the best greatest Internet company #1 in Philadelphia”. Maybe they do, but no one’s searching that term. In fact, you can easily find out what the actual search volume is for any given keyword on Google before you decide which phrases to target. For example, tomorrow this blog post will probably be ranked at #1 for the phrase “Jim Keller’s super wonderful informative seo blog”, but it doesn’t matter because no one’s (normally) searching for that phrase.
3. Claiming pay-per-click / sponsored ads as a #1 positioning
   I’ve also seen SEO companies tell clients “look, we got you to page 1″. When the client asks “where? I don’t see it”, the SEO company then directs them to the sponsored links on the top or sides of the search engine results. Pay-per-click, or PPC,  is a valuable tool for Internet marketing – there’s no question about it. But anyone who’s willing to spend enough money can get a #1 sponsored link position almost immediately, because positioning is based on how much you’re willing to pay, not by actual content relevance or domain authority. You don’t even need an SEO company to get a first place ranking in the sponsored ads, you just need to sign up & pay the bill.
4. Claiming to have intimate, exclusive knowledge of Google’s algorithms.
   No, they don’t. Even Google has debunked the myth of SEO companies with “special relationships” or “detailed information” about their algorithms, so this one is just a flat out lie. Maybe you can bend the truth by doing what every SEO does, which is to study empirical results and then make educated guesses about how the search algorithms work, but that’s hardly “detailed information” that’s exclusive to one company.
5. Focusing on raw traffic and “hits” rather than actual conversion rates
   Many “lesser” SEO companies don’t even breathe a word about conversion to their clients. They’re too focused on making the Google Analytics graph go up and to the right to notice how many of those visits are actually resulting in warm leads, product sales, or whatever the goal might be. All too often, clients are completely unaware that there is more than one page to Google Analytics. Their SEO company sends them a report that consists of the monthly overview (which is interesting, but probably not helping much, especially if no one points out the 87% bounce rate), never indicating what the results actually mean or how the client can measure them in dollars and cents. For any business looking to undertake an SEO campaign, I recommend educating yourself on Google analytics as much as you can so that you know what’s possible and what to expect. Google’s Conversion University is a great place to start, though it may be a bit technical for some.

There you have it – Five things that give SEO as a whole a bad name. Clients often get soured on the whole notion of SEO thanks to companies who promise the world but provide no actual results.

…at least according to our Google positioning today. I’m happy to report that, from where I’m searching, Context is the first result for “Philadelphia SEO Firm”, one of our targeted keyword phrases:

We still have work to do on phrases like Philadelphia SEO (<– notice the gratutious internal link) and Philadelphia SEO Company, and obviously the position is going to bounce around based on locality and the other normal factors that effect Google’s algorithm, but hey, it’s always nice to see #1 positioning on a target phrase. I like to think that the positioning we do have is largely based on providing relevant, useful content to visitors (basically, posts that aren’t nearly as self-serving as this one is) via the blog or other parts of our site.

Also, why do I get the feeling we’ll mysteriously bounce out of place once @wilreynolds gets wind of this?

One of the toughest questions for businesses – especially businesses who don’t sell products directly through their website – is: how can we generate return on investment after launching our new website?

If you’re asking this question, you’re on the right track. Many businesses never bother to ask about website ROI, and instead pay for flashy web design and copywriting, only to realize that none of it had any effect on their revenue.  If you fall into this category, please be sure to read on, as you may be surprised at just how much your website can do for you.

Goals and Analytics

Website ROI comes down to two things: goals and analytics. In this article, I’m going to focus on setting up website goals. A followup article will detail how to measure and report on the effectiveness of your implementation of those goals.

Too many businesses think of their website as an online business card – a place where people may go if they’re directed there by a salesperson, but nothing that is going to drive new business opportunities.  Oftentimes, we find that our clients have never viewed their website in the appropriate light, and instead subscribe to an antiquated idea of what it means to do business on the web. Regardless of your industry, your service offerings, or your target demographic, your website should be a tool for generating new business, for creating and maintaining contact with warm leads, and for decreasing their overhead costs.

Setting Goals

So, how do we shift our thinking and get started with ROI on our website? First, set a goal.
Many companies have never asked themselves: “why do we have a website?”. Other questions too rarely asked include: “Ideally, what types of visitors would we like to attract to our website” or (this one is very important) “what do we want them to do when they get there?”

For companies that sell products online, the answer to these questions is generally pretty simple – “we want our visitors to go through the buying process and purchase our products”. There is still plenty of room for creating efficiencies & identifying goals in that process, but right now I will take a moment to talk about those companies who don’t sell products online. Maybe they are service based or have a lengthy sales cycle due to custom or niche products. These are quite often the companies that overlook the value of their website, assuming that because they don’t have an online store, the web can’t be at the forefront of their business. This type of thinking is toxic to a business model in 2009, and needs to be addressed and updated.

Why do you have a website?

The answer to “why do we have a website” should be something to the effect of “to drive new business to our company through search engines and to offset our customer service costs by providing information and online support to our clients, employees, and investors”.

The first part of this answer is handled by search engine optimization, or SEO, which is the process of positioning a website high in the search results for given keywords and phrases. This process should be handled by a capable SEO firm, but be wary of SEO companies that promise big results but don’t ask many questions, or who seem to be unable to give a clear idea of what you should expect from the process.

The second part of the answer – offsetting customer service costs – is often overlooked. Consider how many man (or woman) hours your company might save if you were able to reduce the number of customer service calls by 20%? What about 40%? What if you directed your customers or investors to a web page rather than mailing out hard-copies of presentations, white papers, or financial reports? For many companies, having complete, constant control over their website content is something they think is out of their reach, because the old method of content control is to email your web design company and have them make small changes to existing text (usually at a hefty hourly rate). However, content management systems (CMS) are the standard for building websites in 2009, and if you are operating on anything else, you are at a disadvantage. A CMS makes updating your website as easy as word processing, and is a staple of a successful website.

What types of visitors would you like to attract to your website?

The answer to this question should be: “everyone in your target demographic”. Often we find companies who are convinced that their target demographic is not using the web. Actual statistics show otherwise. According to Internet World Stats, 248,241,969 people in North America have access to the Internet (consider that the entire population of North America is 337,572,949, according to the 2008 census). Additionally, a recent PEW research study concluded that “Contrary to the image of Generation Y as the ‘Net Generation,’ Internet users in their 20s do not dominate every aspect of online life.”. Make no mistake about it: your target demographic is on the web, and right now, they’re browsing your competitors’ sites.

What do you want visitors to do when they get to the site?

The simplest answer here, if you’re not selling products directly, is “contact us”. It is extremely common for companies to purchase warm leads, why not use your website to bring in your own? Browse through your website and ask yourself “how hard is it to figure out the specific services we offer, and what value we bring as compared to our competition?”. Also ask, “how easy is it for a potential customer to contact us from any page of our site?”, and “how easy is it for visitors to get to specific information about our products and services?”.

Implementation

After you’ve determined what you’d like to do with your website, you need to implement changes to help reach your goals. A competent web strategy firm will be required to help you with this process. If you have separate marketing and web development teams, you should ideally have your marketing team develop a clear plan for the web team, who should then implement the changes.

Context can help you get the most out of your website by developing and implementing your goals, then measuring and reporting on the progress and ROI. Please read more about our SEO, Website Optimization, and Content Management services.

What’s Next

Once you’ve identified your goals and updated your site to best suit those goals, you need to find out how successful you’ve been in your implementation. This is where analytics comes in, and I will be following up shortly with an article about measuring ROI.