As I was reading through the LSJ the other day, I couldn’t help but think long and hard about this story on the business opportunities brought in by the recent NCAA Women’s Basketball games going on at Breslin. Obviously, this brings in a lot of visitors to town, and their money comes with them. Then, I thought about how these visitors would ultimately make their decisions on where they would spend that money. Whether they wanted to shop, find a pizza place, or just find something entertaining to do when they weren’t watching basketball, how would they make their decisions?
I know for me, and most of the people I know, the old days of relying on the concierge or the Yellow Pages are long since gone. In their place are our laptops and smartphones. Leaving the game with a car full of kids and need a place to eat? Hop on your iPhone and do a quick mobile search to find the nearest family friendly pizza joint. Your site’s not listed? Kiss that business goodbye.
Local and mobile search are incredibly important for local businesses, particularly in a college town like East Lansing where visitors often drop in for short visits and will undoubtedly need food and entertainment. Not listed? What are you waiting for? Get started with your listing at the Google Local Business Center, it’s free!
After recently weighing in on what I feel are some deceitful practices in the world of SEO, I have decided to weigh in on an increasingly marketed approach to pay per click marketing that I’ve been presented with and asked questions about quite a bit recently.
The topic? “Guaranteed top Google listings for a flat fee.” I’ve seen faxes and emails touting this service, one such example being one my brother sent along in a fax called PageRank Global. Scouring some industry boards will show various other companies offering this same service as well. Reading through those boards I haven’t found a lot of people that say they have used these services, but I have seen a lot of discussion about questions receiving less than satisfactory answers. However, apparently some of these companies check out well with the Better Business Bureau.
To lay it out for you, here’s the basis of what these companies offer:
Guaranteed top three listings each month on Google
A flat fee for that whole month
Now, this strikes me as an odd business model, but I think it would be possible to do this on the up and up given a couple of circumstances:
The company is willing to lose money, or have wildly varying margins per client month to month
The budgets are managed EXTREMELY closely so as to pinch every penny imaginable
However, one claim that runs across several of these companies is that they can offer this pricing via a “special deal through Google”. This does not happen. Ever. No exceptions.
That, to me is a huge warning flag. If your marketing pitch begins with a blatant untruth, it should be an uphill battle to win anyone’s business. Beyond that, if someone were still truly interested in going down the road of using one of these services, here’s a short list of questions to ask them:
How do they configure pricing?
What is their anticipated margin on your project?
What information is included in reporting? This should include impressions, clicks and most importantly cost per click and total cost.
Will you have access to the AdWords account (now THAT is transparency).
Will they setup or tie in your existing Google Analytics account for you to monitor the traffic from your PPC efforts (this will prevent them cooking the books in their reports)?
I could see someone saying “no” to number four, as some companies could fear tampering with the campaign. But beyond that, questions one and two should have simple straight forward answers, and two should be in a number form. If number three doesn’t include all of the requested information, request that it be included. If not, I would find another company, as you have no real idea what you’re getting charged for.
Any one else have experience with this type of thing that they’re willing to share?
While I’m certainly not a bashful person, I do tend to shy away from too much professional bravado. However, I got a kick out of some of our organic results when I took a look at them today. A while back I published an article about geo-targeting with SEO, discussing the benefits of targeting your local market first, particularly in highly competitive environments. In it I discussed our approach at Netvantage, where we made it a focus to establish ourselves in the local market before moving to broader, generalized terms.
Well, since I have been doing a lot of speaking engagements lately, and I also was introduced to an article which made it clear that you need to call out proposed “gurus”, I thought I’d throw this out on the table to prove the value in what I say. We have three primary services here at Netvantage Marketing: Search engine optimization, paid search management and web analytics consulting. So in terms of geo-targeting these terms, we want to be the prominent firm for these services in Michigan. So, according to Big Brother Google, how do we stack up? As of 1:25am today (no, I don’t sleep), here are our results for:
Admittedly, we have teetered between number one and six for “Michigan search engine optimization” recently as we have turned our focus slightly towards other terms, but we have the top two listings for “Michigan paid search management“, “Michigan web analytics consulting” and even “Michigan web analytics” pretty solidly sewn up for the time being. Granted, these are not the most competitive keywords on the market, but they are competitive and provide us a solid flow of highly targeted traffic.
We aim for transparency at Netvantage, and we laid out our strategy and just wanted to show that it’s working. Since we can’t publicize what we do for our clients, I figured this would help show that our strategies and tactics work. If you go back to the original article, you’ll also see that I pointed out that we aimed to segue this tactic into national level rankings. To show how that’s working:
Well, that puts the bullseye firmly on us for our competitors, but I think it’s important to display that our tactics work, even in the most difficult of markets. And trust me, trying to SEO against the nation’s best SEOs (and Michigan has several of the best SEO firms, including OneUpWeb and Pure Visibility) is no small task.
***CAUTION: Blatant sales pitch to follow***
SEO is the most important marketing tool we have, and we want to make it just as valuable to you. Contact us online to learn more about our services, or just give us a call at 877.204.0234.
I don’t know what everyone else’s client roster looks like, but for us it’s all over the map, both literally and figuratively. Not only have our clients allowed us to fulfill our dream of manifest destiny (almost), but they range from billion dollar corporations to one person start ups and everything in between. Obviously, the means and the goals of these types of businesses are drastically different, and from our standpoint they each require us to use different “SEO muscles”.
For our smaller clients that don’t have the budget or resources to do consistent content development, a large burden falls on building links through relationships. Now there’s nothing I hate more than people talking about “relationship building”. It makes my skin crawl. It reminds me of this financial planner I met recently who was so obviously phony, but just kept saying “building relationships” until you either got sick of him or decided to buy into his shtick. I chose the former.
But as much as I hate this cliched term, there’s definitely something to be said for it when it comes to effective link building. It can be so easy to fall into the trap of thinking about links transactionally. Do what you need to do to get the link, then on to the next target. This is a pretty limiting approach for both you and your client, however.
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of this type of work, and particularly in the world of small to mid sized business, there’s a lot of education that needs to take place as you approach link targets in adjacent markets. People want to know why you want a link and what the value is. If you’re experienced in the game, you can likely give these folks a fairly canned but convincing response get the link and move on. However, I’ve been pushing increasingly to help educate my targets as to what I’m doing, the benefit for my client, and the benefit for them. Most often, I find that they appreciate the knowledge passed along, and in some instances, it even opens the door to opportunities for gaining a new client, either the link target themselves or one of their business contacts. Even without that benefit, I’ve found some of my targets become increasingly willing to refer me to other good link targets, and having established that relationship makes gaining that next link that much easier.
This is terribly fundamental, but sometimes fundamentals are the easiest things to forget. I played a basketball game the other night and halfway through the game we were really struggling on offense and we called timeout. Everyone started throwing out ideas of what to do and someone finally said, “Why don’t we just run a pick and roll?” One of the oldest and simplest plays in basketball. We all shrugged and agreed to give it a shot. The result? The easiest two points of the night. The moral of the story? Sometimes revisiting the fundamentals can really reap some great rewards, and I think that definitely holds true for link building.
In the first edition of this series we tackled the topic of audio, so now that you have the basics of making your videos sound good, it’s about time you learn how to make your videos look more professional. When amateurs pick up a camcorder, one of the biggest sins they commit is in framing their shots. By keeping a couple simple things in mind while you shoot, you can drastically improve the professionalism of your video.
1. Head room
What is head room? It’s not this:
But come to think of it, it actually is. If you watch the video, notice how Max is framed in the video, and pay close attention to the top of the screen in relation to his head. Head room is the spacing between the top of your subject’s head and the top of the frame. If you leave too much head room (which is often the case), it looks like your on camera subject is sinking off the screen. Usually, the less head room the better.
Here’s a good example (originally produced by the good folks at San Diego State University) of too much head room (on the left) vs. appropriate head room (on the right).
Clearly, the framing on the right provides an easier to view image, and what you typically see from professional video footage.
2. The Rule of Thirds
Another thing to notice in the Max Headroom video is his horizontal positioning. While he is the only subject within the TV screen (the screen within the screen, that is), you will notice that he is never exactly in the center. Filmmakers and videographers typically abide by the rule of thirds to help place emphasis within a shot. If you think of the screen in thirds, it would basically be divided up like the tic-tac-toe board below:
Rule of thirds
Humans instinctively look to these points of intersection for emphasis (in film school we were told that these intersections mirror the human face - eyes and the corners of the mouth). Regardless, it makes for a less stagnant looking image, and provides lead room for a subject. What is lead room? If moving, or turned slightly in one direction, planting them in the middle of the screen will make it seem as if they are going to run off the screen. So if you have someone facing off screen to the right, you can use the rule of thirds to frame the key points of emphasis (usually their face) along the intersection on the top left. Notice in the Netvantage video segment below that the subjects always have “lead room”, with more empty space in front of our faces than behind our heads.
This creates a more natural feel, particularly when someone is moving, which makes it feel like the camera subject has space to keep moving. Illustrated simply in a still image:
If the subject was directly in the center of the frame, it would feel awkward. Following the rule of thirds makes it clear who the subject is, and allows easily for movement and allows the viewer to get a better feeling for the subject’s direction.
So that’s it for lesson number two. As you continue creating video, remember to remain aware of head room and think of your frame in thirds. These simple steps will help your videography look like it was done by a seasoned professional.
If you have any questions or want me to address pieces of this further, feel free to contact me.
