Daily Magazine

Marketing & SEO
Your marketing team might think SEO doesn't apply to them especially now. With all this talk of, "The death of SEO," marketers can ignore SEO and focus on branding right? Not so much.

Search engines control traffic; traffic is money so you need to avoid these common marketing SEO mistakes.

5 Common SEO Marketing Mistakes
1. Not thinking about SEO as you create online marketing.
2. Creating your own language instead of using keywords.

3. HIPPO decisions not test or data decisions.
4. Being boring.

5. Not open, relevant or social enough.

Marketing people need to understand SEO. Does every marketing person need to spend a week in Mill Valley in class with SEO Guru Bruce Clay as I did? No, but all-marketing people need to read and understand SEO. You can't delegate understand SEO, at least at a conceptual level, to others.

Marketing people love to create stories and often develop their own way to tag, refer to and name products, services, features and benefits. Better to use adwords keyword tool to CHECK your assumptions about marketing language.

If there is greater demand for e-commerce than ecommerce then make sure and use BOTH in your copy. Don't enforce your beliefs on your copy or marketing. Check your beliefs and modify if you are creating your own language, modify to be aligned with the way customers think about and name your products and services (otherwise known as keywords).

Highest Paid Person In The Room HIPPO can do more damage to Internet marketing than the plague. Internet marketing is DATA based. There isn't a reason to guess or roll dice. Do something, look ad the data, create the test. The problem is websites are also political things.

When the CEO says they like shocking pink and company logos the size of dump trucks it takes courage to say, "Let's test that," but if anyone could be an Internet marketer then you wouldn't get paid the big bucks :).

You can be many things in your online communication boring better not be one of them. Boring is as boring does and when HIPPOs tell you to use corporate speak, talk to yourself about yourself or ignore the conversational nature of online communication you are bing boring (and in the worst way).

Finally every website needs to be open, inclusive and relevant. Think of your job as a CURATOR of your online information. Just like those helpful people at the library you want to help people looking for information and engagement find it. Best way to do that? A: LISTEN and be open to social signals and all of their implications.