Geoffrey Radcliffe, Mission Controller and CEO of Post Launch, a web presence marketing firm specializing in SEO, on-site content creation, keyword rich content creation and social media management, joins Enterprise Radio. He answers 5 important questions about increasing online visibility.
1. Why aren’t your search rankings the end all be all of web presence marketing?
Let me answer your question at a high level, first of all. The term Web Presence Marketing is really all encompassing, everything that has to do with online visibility whether it’s your brand, your website, your service or yourself. We focus on all aspects of web presence marketing.
Search engine rankings aren’t the most important way to find people anymore. It is important to the overall mix, however, we look at search engine rankings and specifically search engine optimization, as roughly 20% of the total effort to give you maximum visibility online. Unless you’re looking for something very specific, you probably don’t actually do a google search that often. A lot of times when you are, you’re looking for a piece of research or you’re looking for something that’s already been referred to you by someone else―a new restaurant, a doctor or a dentist―something that you are really trying to find this location information.
When we are marketing a firm, a company, an organization or an individual, we’re creating dozens and dozens of touch points on the internet. This might mean we create a robust outreach social profile for them for people who are consuming on social websites like Facebook, Twitter, G+, Linkedin. We go through and we actually spend a lot of time doing video for a lot of our clients. The din of textual information on the internet is so great these days what works really well for us is to just plop someone in front of a video camera.
Think about how online users actually consume information online.
When someone sits down and tells us about their story, tells us about their product, themselves, we actually take those videos and we edit them into consumable content for sites like Youtube, Vimeo, G+ and even Facebook lets you upload videos directly these days. We’ll take single piece of video, transcribe all of the content, everything that’s spoken we write all that information on their own website, which gives their website all the information, all the content that it needs to rank well in the search engines. This also gives humans, which search engines do their best to replicate but often times falls a little bit short, it gives humans the opportunity to interact with the individuals behind a company, the individuals behind a brand or the individuals themselves.
It’s been very effective for us inasmuch that if somebody sits down and tries to come up with their own blog article, things to tweet about, their own things to talk about on the internet, it becomes incredibly difficult. One of the things that we found being the most successful and most effective from a time perspective is for someone just to simply turn on their webcam and talk about what’s interesting for them today.
Today I woke up and what was interesting to me was the fact that I got speak with you on this program. If I were to be effective and probably right after this I’ll go ahead and turn on my webcam and talk about what it was like to be on this program. I’ll then have one of my writers on our team go through and transcribe that whole video session. They’ll syndicate it through most of the normal syndication sources sites like I mentioned, but also I’ve got a nice written prose of what this whole experience is like, what I hope to gain from it and how easy it was to speak to you about these things today.
Effectively, I’ll take five minutes and I’ll create what could turn into a 1,500/2,000-word blog article which are snapped up quite well online.
- What is the point of maintaining a social media campaign?
When we look at a social media campaign, there’s one thing that we’ve found in our efforts, this goes back to what we were saying about search engine popularity overall, that search engines like to see that you have active social media profiles. There are so many companies that have built websites over the years and many of them are out of business or inactive. A lot of the time you’ll come across a site or you’ll see the site isn’t even up anymore. For search engines, if they’re delivering you a dead company, a dead product or a dead website, they haven’t done their job. The job of Google, the job of Yahoo and the job of Bing is to serve you, the customer, exactly what you’re looking for. If they’re giving you incorrect information or out-of-date information, they haven’t done their job and you as a customer become unhappy.
A lot of search engines take into account whether or not you have an active social profile just like anyone who’s done the research knows it’s important to keep content on your site fresh, through blogging, video blogging or even press releases. Social media takes it a step further.
If you’re actively posting and adhering to some best practices, one or two Facebook posts, four daily tweets and one daily Google plus post to keep yourself up to speed, showcasing to the search engines that yes, we are an active company and active site. We want people to come to our site. We do want people to do business with us because we’re here and we’re ready to interact with them.
- How can utilizing video create compelling content?
I encourage everyone to do a 10-day video challenge. As a business owner, manager or employee, sit down in front of your webcam on your laptop, take out your smartphone, and film yourself talking about something for less than two minutes that you find interesting at your workplace, at your job or in your industry. This creates a great video library. If someone can take 30 minutes a day for 10 days for 10 videos, they position themselves to be extremely respected as a video industry talent.
Take those 10 videos instead of writing 10 blogs. Upload it, transcribe it and link it back to your website or blog page. It would be impossible to sit down and write 10 blog articles over 5 hours because we know we have the research and the background, citations, backlinks, anchor text, all the things that go into a specific blog article. By taking five hours, someone could easily record 10 videos of themselves engaging their audience. It’s so much faster and so much easier than sitting and doing traditional writing. You’ll find it easier to find something interesting.
We do this for all of our clients. We’ll sit them down and prep them informally. We’ll put a camera on them and say: “Tell me something interesting that happened at your business this week.” We find if they find it interesting, other people will find it interesting.
We’ve been in a bad habit for many years of dumbing down content making sure what’s delivered to people is sort of the lowest common denominator. You’ll see a lot of that in the non-emergency medical space specifically.
We’ll talk about dental where you’ll see posts, social posts, blog posts, saying “Don’t forget to floss, don’t forget to floss.” We all know that. We’ve been told that all our lives. But grabbing a relevant piece of information like the fact that you shouldn’t brush your teeth 30 minutes after having a red glass wine because your enamel is weakened. That kind of content is much more engaging to an adult audience, as opposed to being reminded for the thousandth time to floss.
What we do is we find an interesting topic and we sit them down. Here are 5 things that are interesting. Here are 5 things that are trending. I want you to talk for 2 minutes on each one. Keep those videos to a single topic that gives us a lot of content to push out. 10 pieces of video could easily be a year’s worth of video content for your average company or individual. Videos can be recycled or reused again and again. The beauty of digital video: one keystroke and it’s gone. Video works extremely well for someone looking to gain more visibility online.
- How do I get the best reach for my online content?
The best thing to do is to consider all the options. Keep your content interesting. Make sure you’re not catering to just what’s trending. Show your excitement. At the end of the day, if a single piece of content is written and it goes onto your website also take the time to syndicate it through proper syndication channels. There’s so many out there. Just look up online “best places to syndicate content for free.” The sites we like use include Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Tumblr and Reddit. All of these are great sources to syndicate content, which then gets picked up by an audience if there’s something truly compelling about what you’re saying.
- What are some opportunities for do-it-yourself solutions in regards to online, web presence marketing?
In regard to do it yourself solutions, the great thing to do and I challenge everyone to do this, for the next 10 business days, sit down and take 5 minutes and write a list of things you find interesting right now. If you can’t come up with 10, give yourself 5 and then revisit it in a week. Go through and record 10 videos. Record from your iPhone, from your android―desktop, laptop, camera. Don’t over produce them. Find something that’s interesting to you and talk about it on camera. Don’t worry about the production value of these videos. As a do-it-yourself take away, record video, put them all on YouTube, put a paragraph description for at least each one. Link those videos back to your own website.
Whether the videos go to your main page or your about us page, that in and of itself will give people a massive leg up if they are actually doing the things they need to be doing. If you have intelligent people, quality leaders or quality people onboard, that will shine through in a lot of these videos. It shouldn’t take long. Once the process is down, it will probably take 10 minutes to get the whole process all buttoned up. We encourage everyone to get in the habit of doing their own video blogging.
Find more information about Web Presence Marketing on our website postlaunch.co. Check us out online or give us a call as well at 702-800-213. Our staff is based here in Las Vegas, Nevada, so we’re on pacific time. We have a full team here who you can talk to or reach out to me through the contact us page or follow us on Twitter. Our handle is @postlaunch.co.
For those of you who made it this far, the final word count for this transcribed podcast is 1,900 words.
