How To Brand Your SEO Agency

November 15, 2011 by

Posted by neilpatel This post was originally in YOUmoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Last month I talked about 7 lessons I learned from running an SEO agency . One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that you can command clients to pay you 6 and even 7 figures a year if your agency has brand recognition. Brand recognition also gets you more inbound inquires from companies who need SEO, which will help your revenue become more stable. If you are ready to take your agency to the next level, here’s how you can build a big brand: Start a blog Not only can a blog help build your brand, it can also drive thousands of extra visitors to your website each month. Before you start a SEO blog, you need to know 1 important fact… it needs to be on the same domain as your agency website. Early on I made the mistake of calling my SEO blog “Pronet Advertising”, when my SEO agency was in fact called “ACS”. The blog was hosted at pronetadvertising.com while the agency site was hosted at acsseo.com. Once the blog became popular people didn’t know whether we were called ACS or Pronet Advertising… even though on the blog it clearly stated that it was owned by ACS. Once you have a blog up and running, there are a few things that you have to do if you want it to become popular. These days there are hundreds of SEO blogs and if you aren’t unique, there is no point in starting one. Write detailed blog posts – if you write how to type of posts you’ll typically gain more traction than if you just blog about SEO news. Use stats – blog posts that contain facts and percentages also tend to do better. If you look at the SEOmoz blog, you’ll notice that posts like this are popular because they contain stats. Dumb things down – SEO is a complicated topic, so if you can dumb down your blog posts you’re better off than if you only use technical jargon. At the end of the day the person who is most likely to hire and pay you won’t understand this jargon, if they did they’d just optimize their own site. By using images and even whiteboards , you’ll be able to dumb down your blog posts, yet still keep them somewhat technical. If you blog on a weekly basis and push out good content every week, you’ll start to get more traffic and see an increase in brand recognition in the SEO space. Become a guest author Blogging on your own site isn’t enough. You need to start blogging on other blogs. By becoming a guest author on popular SEO and marketing blogs you’ll brand yourself as an SEO expert, which will also help your agency. In addition to blogging on marketing blogs you also want to start blogging in places that your ideal customer may be looking. For example if your typical customer is a business owner, you could guest post on Entrepreneur.com. If they are an up and coming startup, TechCrunch would be great place for you to blog. Every week you should be guest posting on at least 2 blogs. The first should be a marketing/SEO blog and the second should be a blog that your ideal customer is reading. To achieve this goal you should email at least 10 people every Sunday night that you are interested in guest posting for. The reason you want to email 10 people is that most bloggers will say “no”. However, if you let them know the specific topic you want to blog on and you do the research to make sure these blogs accept guest posts, you should get at least 20% of them saying “yes”. When you submit your guest post make sure you include an image of yourself as well as a bio that includes a link to your company. If you forget the bio you won’t be building up your agency’s brand. Attend conferences Conferences are a great place to brand your agency and pick up new customers. When I first started out I attended all of the major SEO conferences, and boy did I make a lot of money doing so. People got to know me, I met potential customers and I even gained more knowledge. Over time SEO conferences became competitive, which caused my brand to be mixed in with hundreds of others SEOs. After a while I rarely was able to pick up new clients from them… even if I was speaking . I started to look for new conferences to brand my agency. I quickly realized that industry specific conferences and regional based events aren’t crowded with a ton of SEOs. Which makes it easier to pick up new clients. If you want pick up new clients start attending industry specific events that aren’t SEO related and also focus on attending regional based events. If you want to start building your brand through conferences you have to attend dozens of them each year as some conferences will work out while others won’t. In most cases the events that cost a lot tend to provide a better ROI because if someone can afford to pay $3000 to attend a conference, they can probably afford to hire your firm. Create white papers and beginner’s guides Everyone these days is releasing free information because it really helps with branding. Just look at SEOmoz’s guide to SEO . It’s become the default guide if you want to learn about the subject. It’s so popular that when people ask other SEOs about learning SEO, they just point them to SEOmoz’s guide. By no means is this a short-term branding strategy, but if you can produce really good white papers and beginner’s guides you should start seeing them passed around. The trick is to just make them downloadable so that people can pass them around within their organization. If you are going to create content, make sure you don’t just publish the same information that others have already released. For example it would be a waste of your time to reproduce the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Buy banner ads Banner ads? They are a waste of money, right? Well if you buy them on other SEO sites they aren’t. When I ran my agency we would spend up to $15,000 a month buying banner ads on other SEO sites…these sites weren’t just news related like Sphinn . We would actually buy ads on our competitors’ site. As weird as that may sound, other SEO bloggers, who are also service providers, sell ads. From the Wolf Howl blog to Search Engine Roundtable , you can buy ads on some of the most popular SEO sites on the web. When I bought ads I found that most of them didn’t convert when I sent them to my homepage, but when I sent them to a landing page that gave away a free white paper, it was very effective. As your sales team can take those leads and close them. Participate in the community The cool part about the SEO industry is that SEOs have a tendency to work together. They play nice with each other and they are willing to share customers. For this reason it’s important to build up your brand amongst other SEOs. Other than going to SEO networking events, you can do this through 2 simple ways: Comment on 5 different SEO blogs each day . Don’t leave generic comments; instead leave very detailed comments that are adding to the conversation. Join popular SEO forums like SEO Chat and respond to 5 different questions each day. Similar to leaving comments on blogs, make sure your responses on forums are detailed. If you do these two things for a year, you’ll end up building a large Rolodex of SEOs. Help people out for free The most effective branding strategy I used with my firm was to help out popular bloggers for free with their SEO. In exchange for helping them, they would add an image link with my company logo that stated “SEO by ACS”. When you do this for 30 of the Technorati 100 blogs like I did, you’ll quickly build up your brand as these blogs get millions of visitors each month. You don’t have to know these blogs to do their SEO, just shoot them an emailing offering free SEO services in exchange for an image link. Trust me, it works. And think of it this way, if someone has that popular of a blog, the chances are they know at least 1 company who can afford to pay you at least $10,000 a month for your consulting services. If you help these bloggers increase their traffic you should be able to get a few introductions to companies that can pay you. Help people out for free Another effective tactic that I used to build up my agency’s brand was to just help out people for free. You’ll notice that over time a lot of people and companies who can’t afford your services will hit you up. Instead of turning them down, give them some free advice every once in a while. You’ll be shocked on what that will do for your brand. My first million-dollar customer came from someone who had no money. I helped him out for free for 30 minutes at a conference and he continually told everyone at the event how I was a great SEO. Within hours I had businesses hitting me up and a few of them were interested in engaging with my firm for 1.2 million dollars a year . Out of those few that were interested 1 agreed. So the next time someone emails you asking for free advice, don’t push them away. Offer some free help, as they’ll constantly tell other people good things about you and your agency. Create case studies If you are good at what you do, you should be able to create some awesome case studies. All you have to do is breakdown what you specifically did for that company, how long it took, and the exact results they saw. When you breakdown the results be sure to include numbers such as traffic stats, revenue increases or anything else the client will let you include. And when wrapping up the case study, make sure you get a good testimonial or video interview from the client. One agency that does this very well (they aren’t an SEO agency) is Conversion Rate Experts . I found out about them through their SEOmoz case study . The video Rand did with them broke down how they made SEOmoz over a million dollars, and convinced me to hire them. Showcase these case studies all over your website as they will help get your agency out there in front of bigger companies. Without them it’s going to be tough to gain interest from Fortune 500 companies. Conclusion If you do everything I mentioned above, you’ll brand your agency as one of the best shops around. I know it’s a lot work, but in the end the revenue will make up for the hard work. Give it a shot; try out just a few of the tactics above for the next 6 months and I guarantee that you’ll see results. You have to make sure you keep at it, as you can’t expect miracles in the first few months of doing this. 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How To Brand Your SEO Agency

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Scalable Link Building Using Social Media – Whiteboard Friday

November 10, 2011 by

Posted by caseyhen This week we are thrilled to have Mike King join us again for another amazing Whiteboard Friday. As marketers and SEOs we all have asked our selves at one time or another how we can use Social Media to build links.  Mike lays out a very scalable way to build links for just about any business. Enjoy and share your thoughts below in the comments. Video Transcription Greetings and citations, SEOmoz fans. My name is Michael King, and we’re going to talk about scalable link building using social media. Follow me on Twitter, iPullRank . So the first thing you want to do is identify your audience, and you’re going to use industry demographic data from sources like comScore , QuantCast , and Compete . These are paid tools, but they do give you a lot of stuff for free. So just play around with them until you can figure out what you can get. From there, you also want to use social listening tools. There are a couple of free ones, and there are some paid ones as well. So, the free ones are Social Mention and Amplicate . Basically, what you are going to do is you put in a keyword, and it’s going to give you back all the people talking about that keyword. You can use that to figure out who your audience is because what we’re going to ultimately do is get to the personas. I’m going to get to that in a second. There are some paid tools, such as Radian6 , Scout Labs , and Alterian SM2 . They’re really extensive, but they’re also kind of expensive. So you may not be able to use those. If you can’t, you can get a lot of stuff out of Social Mention and Amplicate. With all that information, what we’re going to do is create four core groups, and these are our personas. They’re a representation of the four groups of people in your audience. So, in this case, we have Music Moms, Happy Hobbyists, Raging Rock Stars, and Involved Instructors. So what we’ve identified, we’re talking about a guitar company and these are their audience. What we have identified are these four groups of people. Music Moms are people that typically have children that are Happy Hobbyists. They’re the hip mom who wants to buy the guitar for their son. They’re trying to figure out which guitar is best. Then, you have the Happy Hobbyists. These are the people that make the most content in this space. They’ve learned all of these cool things from their Involved Instructors, and they’re at home on YouTube practicing, showing you their favorite song and they’re playing it. They’re typically, like I said, learning how to play an instrument. Raging Rock Stars are typically independent musicians or even celebrity musicians. We would reach out to these people as influencers and for guest posts, things of that nature. Involved Instructors are the people that are teaching your Happy Hobbyists how to play an instrument, and they’re also involved in the conversation, talking about which guitars are the best, which piano should I get my Happy Hobbyist student to buy. Once we have these people, we figured out what words go with these people, and we can go to Follower Wonk with these keywords and identify them. In the case of Music Moms, you can type in “music mom” and you get a whole list of moms that are into music and may have children that are Happy Hobbyists. Happy Hobbyists, you could type in “guitar student,” and you’re going to get a whole bunch of kids that are guitar students. So, what you want to do is use that in concert with the Scraper Tool for Chrome. It’s a plug-in, and you can right click one of the names, and it will give you all these people in Google Docs so then you can export them to Excel or whatever it is. From there, what you want to do is use Norm.com, and you can put in people’s user names and see where they are on the different places throughout social media, because most people use the same user name for all their different social media profiles. For example, Rand Fish, if you put it in Norm, you see that he has YouTube, SlideShare, MySpace, Squidoo, Foursquare. You can look at all of these things together and figure out what that person is into and create a mental model and use that for context when you contact them. From there, what you also want to do is create an industry specific persona for yourself. The reason you want to do that is because, let’s say you did your link building through Twitter using your SEO Twitter. Then someone came back to your profile and they’re looking at all of this stuff about link building. They’re not going to believe you. They know that you’re just trying to get a link. It’s the same thing as if you were a pickup artist and then you gave your girlfriend a copy of Neil Strauss’ book. It’s not going to work. No, don’t do that. So, create a persona for yourself with all types of information and posts and content about your industry, and that way when people see that, they’re like, “Oh, this person is an authority. They’re genuine.” Then, what you want to do is make sure that your messaging stands out. If you’re going with email, make sure your subjects are short. Make sure your subjects are natural. Don’t use link requests in your subject because nobody will ever open it. The whole point of making these messages stand out in the inbox is that they actually open the message. So, you want to send email as a person, not as a company, not as a web theme. You want to send it as an actual person. Then you also want to include a natural citation because that’s what shows up on the bar in Gmail, and they’re going to get that preview. If it’s like “Dear Sir or Madam,” they’re not going to open it. Now, Twitter is actually better for outreach link building because people are expecting to be hit up with inane conversation and unsolicited conversation. What you want to make sure you do is converse with context. If they’ve mention guitars, respond to their question if they had a question or say, “Hey, I saw something that goes with what you’re talking about.” Don’t spam them. Don’t just send them a link and be like, “Hey, here’s my link. Link to me.” No, it doesn’t work. Nobody likes spam. You don’t like spam. Escalate quickly. You want to also, as soon as you’re in that conversation say, “Hey, follow me so that I can DM you.” Then you can take that conversation offline. Then you can get the email easily, stuff like that. You just want to be able to talk to them privately. Then, you need to continually participate. That goes back to this point of create an industry specific persona because that way, if you’re participating, you’re constantly putting up content related to that thing, and people are like, “Hey, I’m going to follow this guy.” Also, write relevant hashtags. So if it’s something about music or something about guitars, post your content, your information with those hashtags, and people will find you, and then it’s easier to develop that rapport and then get a link. From there, you also want to continue to offer value. When I say offer value, I don’t mean necessarily give them an incentive. If you have something that’s entertaining, that they might be into, send them a funny YouTube video. Or if you have a resource that they may not know about, send them that. If it’s an infographic, whatever it is. It doesn’t even have to be something that’s on your site, just something that’s relevant to the topic. Send it to them so that you’re a valuable resource to them, somebody they might follow on Twitter. Then, if you do have incentives, you want to dangle the carrot. You don’t want to just be like, “Hey, we have free guitars. I can give you a guitar for a link.” No, it doesn’t work like that. What you want to do is create some sort of contest or campaign around that and invite them to join it. For example, let’s says I have 50 guitars to give away. I would just give them away to 50 people. What I do is I set up a contest where they write a blog post about guitars and link back to our site in question. Then, that way, it becomes a one-to-many thing rather than a one-to-one thing. When it’s one-to-one, you get one link per guitar. I don’t think that’s really worthwhile. But if you can get 100 links per guitar, then it’s worth a lot more. Then, once you’ve actually closed a link prospect, maintain the rapport, and the best way to do that is just follow them on Twitter with a private list or make a link building circle on Google+. Make it private and just hit them up every once in a while just to maintain that rapport and send them some new content or just keep it going so when you have something else that you want to get a link from, you can easily just contact them, or they may even naturally just link to you again because they’ve seen that you continue to make awesome content. So, with that, that’s scalable link building using social media. My name is Michael King. Thank you again. Please follow me on Twitter, iPullRank . Video transcription by Speechpad.com Do you like this post? Yes No

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An SEO Guide to Adsense, Ads and Placement

November 8, 2011 by

Posted by Cyrus Shepard The Internet is made of kittens , but it’s paid for by advertising. SEOs don’t talk about advertising much, perhaps because it’s the conceptual opposite of “great content.” The truth is, advertising is the gasoline that runs much of the web. Without ad revenue, great sites we love like Search Engine Land , Smashing Magazine , and even Wired might cease to exist. Ads are great, but as SEOs we need to present them as the commercials that they are, not the main show. Optimizing for CTR the Old Way Not long ago, it was common to see sites like this dominating the SERPs. (Thanks to Michael Gray for the lead) When Panda struck, sites like this got hit hard, time and time again. Even websites with superior content were penalized if they contained over-aggressive ads above the fold. I don’t know if the site above was penalized by Panda, but I’m guessing their traffic is not as healthy as it could be, and a simple layout change would help significantly. 1. Ads as a Ranking Factor The 2011 Ranking Factors showed a slight negative correlation between rankings and the amount of Adsense on a page. Several Panda updates have rolled out since this data was collected, and I would expect the relationship today to be even more negative. Although Adsense isn’t the only game on the market, it’s the one ad network SEOs get the most information from. Matt Cutts has said that his team sends one way messages to the Adsense team in order to help webmasters comply with Google quality guidelines. In April, after Panda hit, Adsense changed how they advocate best practices for ad placement . Gone (or at least tucked away) were the old heat maps . 2. Panda Friendly Layouts The new layouts specifically advocate for ads that do not push content below the fold . These are the types of layouts that should be safe no matter what kind of ads you run. You can see earlier versions in their one-click optimizer , but these older layouts don’t go very far in placing content first. Use at your own risk. 3. Balance Your Template Footprint Ads are a component your template footprint . A template footprint is any non-unique content that appears on every page, as opposed to content that makes the page unique. It’s best to keep your ratio of unique content to footprint as high as possible. If you can’t reduce your template footprint, at least place your content in the highest, most prominent place possible in order to stay out of the penalty zone. 4. Future Proof Your Ads The new Adsense recommendations are great for this round of Panda, but what about next year? In my opinion, they represent the minimum of what you should do to avoid a penalty. The New York Times does a good job of balancing ads against content. Their strategy neither ignores users nor puts them at risk for near-future algorithm changes. Aggressive ads tend to alienate users, which can effect your bounce rate, time on site, pageviews and other user engagement metrics . All of these can have undesirable long term consequences. For publishers dedicated to long term profits, there is a better approach. 5. Beyond CTR – Smart Ways to Increase Ad Revenue It’s true that higher click-through rates give webmasters incentive to place ads above content. But CTR isn’t the only way to increase earnings. You can optimize several other factors to your long term advantage. If you are an Adsense publisher, you are familiar with these concepts. 1. Coverage 2. Cost-Per-Click (CPC) 3. Cost Per Impression (CPI or CPM) 4. Impressions All of these can be optimized for higher earnings. Number 4, impressions, is the most actionable from an SEO point of view. If you’re producing great content and promoting it the right way, then your pageviews will soar. Here in the States, the SuperBowl will always make more in ad revenue than reruns of Murder, She Wrote . If you sell ads, be the SuperBowl of content publishers. Produce the best content you can, and you can sell your premium ad space for top dollar. Do you like this post? Yes No

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An SEO Guide to Adsense, Ads and Placement

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