My Travels on the Net

I just came out of the session on SEO and Social Media Marketing. Although I wanted to slam my head against table because the chummy, clubby-ness of the panelists, I did manage to get one nagging question answered.

On the surface, social media seems like a natural fit for service professionals. If you write good content, people vote for it which gets exposure for your website. The problem with social media is that the “linksters” voting on social media sites are typically young men (and to a lesser degree women) who are highly technically savvy. My client’s target markets are usually C level executives who don’t have the time or inclination to dink around on the internet. The question become “How can my grown up clients use social media to reach their target markets?”

The answer is one of targeting content to the social media audience. If you can find something related to your business or the concerns of your clients and find something about it that appeals to the social media demographic, you can cross the divide. Linksters link to your site which improves rankings so it’s more likely to come up in the search results when your target markets are looking for your service.

It also helps if you refocus the purpose of social media from getting your target market to read your article to focusing on getting links to the site; especially links from bloggers. It’s more reasonable to expect that C level executives are reading blogs than voting on social networking sites.

Labels: emarketing, links, service businesses, social media

I’m at the Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara this week. Most of the seminars and panels are biased toward product driven companies so I will be posting short blog entries on material that with be of use to professional service companies.

This morning at a panel discuss “The Blended Search Revoultion”*, Raju Mathotra of Microsoft, discussed the three main ways people search.
Find – The searcher is looking for a specific answer to a specific question. i.e. driving directions or movie times.
Discover – The searcher has a clear need but is uncertain about next steps.
Explore – The searcher is interested in a topic and is noodling around on the internet. (I know I often do my research this way.)

In both discovery and exploration, the searcher tends to have multiple, search sessions.
What does this mean for service professionals? I think it means they need to consider all these types of searching when creating quality content on their blog and website. An FAQ page could be a way to attract the Finders. Focusing text on problems and solutions can be a way to attract the Discovers and “How To” articles can be a way to attract explorers.
But before you do any of this, you need to think about what questions do my target markets want answered, what problems do they have and what do I know that they’d be interested in? If you’re not clear on what your target markets are looking for, you wind up missing the mark and that great content turns out to be charity work. (Nothing wrong with charity work but it’s best to be clear that that’s your intention.)

* The Blended Search Revolution - The first generation of search engines ranked pages based on the content of those pages alone -- the words on the page. The second generation increased relevancy by analyzing links. The third generation, Search 3.0, is upon us now in full force. Google Universal Search, Ask.com's Morph, Microsoft Live Search Scopes and Yahoo Shortcuts are different names for the same core concept -- automatically blending in results from specialized or "vertical" search engines such as video search or local search. This session looks at the revolutionary change happening with blended search and how search marketers can ride the wave to success.

Labels: blended search, how people search, Search Marketing Expo, service professionals