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A Night with Rand: 3 Lessons to Tweak and Make Your Own

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In the search world, getting an opportunity to meet Rand Fishkin is a big deal.  His influence within the SEO community is renowned and SEMs all over the world take his advice on how to win at the search engine game.

For the Blue Global search team, this occasion meant a chance to grow and develop strategy while getting a few lingering questions answered.

Fishkin began his AZIMA session rolling out some interesting points on the biases many marketers hold, and compared these preconceived ideas with some interesting statistics on short men in the online dating world.  In the way women excluded vertically-challenged men, despite the fact that they met every other qualification, marketers tend to ignore beneficial SEO strategies and aim only for page one rankings or a single keyword.Rand Fishkin visits Arizona

While it’s hard to argue with most of Rand’s points – mainly because he’s Rand Fishkin and who would want to argue SEO with him – it’s important to know how certain tips apply on an individual level.  Lead generation within the financial market can’t do exactly what a blogger in the retail vertical would.

It’s important to scale Rand’s advice and implement the best of his ideas in a way that is complimentary to the industry at hand.

 The Importance of Ranking

Fishkin pointed out that the pursuit of page one, spot one is often a misguided goal.  Though holding a place down for a high converting term isn’t a bad thing, it’s important to know what factors influence click-through rate with your audience.

As he pointed out in the session, everything from reviews to author to media type can affect the CTR.

Entrepreneurs need to get to know what will entice a searcher to leave the SERPs and enter their site.    For businesses with a complex product, like software, a how-to video could get potential customers from point A to point B.  But that’s not to say a credit card company with a quick video on making payments will have the same effect.

A similar point can be made for authorship.  Rand Fishkin’s bearded headshot has recognition within his industry and can motivate inquiring Internet users to click, but unknowns putting their picture next to an article could fall flat.

Business owners have to always think like a consumer rather than a search engine.  Just because a page is high on page one doesn’t mean it will convert or even entice searchers to click.

Keywords are What Count

By now, most know that over-obsessing about “owning” a particular keyword is an almost futile pursuit.  It has a tendency to breed poor practices, create clumsy content and generally drive SEMs mad.  There has to be a deeper consideration when it comes to keywords.

For Fishkin, it’s all about the middle and long tail terms.  And not just because the competition is often much lower.

People are searching a lot different than they used to.  Instead of typing in “car insurance” and hoping for the best, searchers are starting to get detailed with their queries.  As Google gets smarter and people recognize they can be lengthier, terms like “car insurance after a DUI” and “cheap full coverage car insurance for used vehicles” are going to be the money terms.

Add to the fact that as specifics go up, so does the opportunity for conversion.

Fulfilling this need goes back to simply knowing what consumers are looking for from a search query.  Are customers looking for the business that ranks best for a search term or are they looking for answers?

A business can rank for the best possible terms and still not fulfill the needs of customers.

Social Media is a Must

Talking about social media’s impact is a must when it comes to SEO, traffic and link building.  It is the Da Vinci Code-sized mystery everyone is trying to crack.  For Fishkin, there are a lot of factors that contribute to improved social media engagement and gaining more eyes on a site.

From where a link is placed in a Tweet to adding a full sized picture to Facebook posts, he has a lot of good ideas for increasing the effectiveness of social shares.

But what if a business just doesn’t fit in on Facebook or has a weak impact on the Twitterverse?  Learning how to maximize the information that gets sent out is important, but business owners have to know if their audience is even reachable through all of the channels they are explore.

Social media can have an “everyone is invited and everyone is here” sort of feel, but that just isn’t the case.  Anyone looking to gain traffic through social platforms has to figure out the level of effectiveness it carries for their business before they start optimizing for the best time to tweet and the most engaging way to gain a +1.

SEO is not a one-size-fits-all experience.  The advice given by experts like Rand Fishkin should be taken seriously, but it also has to be expanded to fit different brands.  The tricks and tools that make SEOMoz so findable in Google can’t be copied exactly to produce results for a local construction company.

At the core it will always be about learning the patterns and preferences of a specific audience and building SEO around that.

 

The post A Night with Rand: 3 Lessons to Tweak and Make Your Own appeared first on Blue Global.


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