Social Media Marketing takes time and patience, but when done correctly has tremendous rewards. The following are some ideas and exercises to help you get started in the right direction…

Install Web Analytics

As it has been said many times, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure.” It definitely holds true for your web site.

Google provides a perfect solution for tracking your Social Media Marketing activities: Google Analytics. One of its best selling features… it’s absolutely free.

It is important to collect 15-30 days worth of data before making any important business decisions on the results you see. The more data, the more it aggregates and averages out, thus giving you a better representation of what is actually happening.

Sign up for a free Google Analytics account at: http://analytics.google.com

Analyze Site Visitor Patterns

There are three main questions you will need to answer
when looking at your web traffic:

1. Who are your visitors?
   Through web analytics, there is important information you can discover: how often do they visit, how long do they stay, what languages and hardware are they using to browse your site, how many times do they come back, and what parts of the world do they come from.There is also a part of this answer which should be derived from the data you collect through web site registrations or other web forms. In its most basic form, you will want to separate your user-base into segments and then market specifically to those segments. However, segmentation is such an important strategy that it will be covered in its own article.
2. Where are they coming from?
   You will want to find this answer both geographically and in relation to which web sites generate the most traffic for you.If you know which web sites are the ones generating the most traffic for you, compare them. What are their commonalities? Are there other sites that you could find to draw even more qualified traffic from? Are these a new market that you haven’t yet explored?When speaking geographically, you can dive deeper. Are these markets large enough for offline marketing? Are there additional locations that you have considered advertising in, but haven’t yet? What areas of the world respond best to your content or industry? Are there current events in high-traffic geographical locations that cause the interest? How else could you expand your geographical traffic generation based on trends you can start to see forming?Finally, you will want to determine the top keywords used to find your site. Separate them by any keywords you are paying for listings on and any that you are coming up in the listings organically (free listings). Many web analytics applications will provide the functionality to show you the separate keywords in a report.
3. What are they viewing on your site?
   Find out what your top content is. Why is this your best performing content? Are there commonalities between your most popular content? Can you use this commonality to refocus your web site to perform even better?In addition to your top content, it is also imperative that you find out your: top exit pages (where people leave your site), top landing pages (where people entered your site), and bounce rates (which pages cause the visitor to jump to another page right away?).

Keyword Research - Learn How Customers will Find You!

Almost the entire Social Media Marketing philosophy revolves around knowing what keywords your visitors will be using to find your site and information.

Chief Ingredient offers the following solutions:

Build your Traffic Generating Keyword Power List

The following illustration outlines how to find your most valuable keywords.

 

 

To find your most valuable keywords, you will start with 5-10 “seed keywords”, get all possible variations of these words, trim it down based on number of search and estimated competition, and end up with your 10-20 most valuable keywords.

Seed Keywords
Start with 5-10 seed keywords. These are high-level, highly searched keywords. For example, if you sell organic cotton bedding for baby cribs… your seed keywords may consist of the following:

• Bedding
• Cribs
• Baby
• Infants
• Sheets
• Child Safety

Building the Full List of Related Keywords
Once you have your list of seed keywords, you can use online tools to find the full list of related keywords.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ offers a great related keyword tool.

Selected Keyword List
Once you have a list of all possible keywords, you will need to manually sort through the list and remove all keywords that will not generate quality traffic.

In our crib bedding example, a related keyword phrase is “king size bedding”. Since we are only selling organic crib bedding, a visitor looking for king size bedding would not be considered quality traffic.

In short, there is no real purpose in driving traffic for the sake of driving traffic.

Segmenting your Keyword List
In some situations, you may want to separate your Selected Keyword list into further segments. For example, you may provide products and services. In this case, it may be helpful to define the keywords that are best for your products and the ones best for your services.

You can use these segments as quick-reference keyword guides for writing content, blogs, and press releases.

Estimating Clicks and Competition
Google AdWords provides an invaluable tool called the Traffic Estimator. You will need a Google AdWords account to access this tool.

If you used Excel or similar application to keep track of your selected keywords, you should be able to simply copy and paste your Selected Keyword List into Google’s Traffic Estimator Tool.

Leave the Max CPC and the Daily Budget blank. This will calculate your estimates for the top positions and give you an idea of the overall competition, related costs and estimated clicks.

This tool is used for AdWords, but provides insight into how much competition each keyword has (the cost), as well as how effective the keyword may be to drive traffic (the clicks).

RELATED TIP: Read our Article on Creating a Keyword Heatmap in Excel to create an easy way to visualize and spot valuable keywords.

Putting it all Together
Using the info and tools mentioned above, you should be able to build a list of:

• Seed keywords
• Full list of related searches and estimated searches per month
• Selected keywords and estimated searches per month
• Segmented keywords and estimated searches per month
• Estimated clicks, costs, and competition

The next step is a bit of an art form in itself, but using this data, you should be able to pinpoint approximately 10-20 of the Most Valuable Keywords.

The MVK’s will have high search volumes (over 1,000 per month), low competition, and high click estimates. Each “threshold” for the selection is different for each industry and situation and with a little practice you will easily start to get the feel of how the data transforms into actual results.

View the 3-Year Trends of Your Most Valuable Keywords

Keyword trending allows you to see:

• The search volume
• The news volume
• Top countries the searches were performed in
• Top cities the searches were performed in
• Top languages the searches were performed in

 

To view these trends, visit: http://www.google.com/trends

Use these trends to:

• Find the best time for promotion
• Find additional offline markets
• Find potential keywords to use in press-releases
• And more…

Create a Backlinking Strategy
and Get Better Rankings Organically

A backlink is a link from another web site that links to your web site. When backlinking, it is important that the sites that link to yours are relevant to your web site.

Having the right backlinks will not only generate quality traffic but may increase your rankings within the search engines.

 

 

Questions on building a backlinking strategy? Contact Chief Ingredient

 

Create a Data Collection Strategy

If this list was in order of importance, this would be in the top 3.

It is imperative that data be collected from the people interested in your site. This is the online equivalent to cold-calling, you have to make a lot of calls just to find someone interested. Online, you need a lot of visitors to find the people that are interested — only now, you don’t even have a dialog started with them!

Here are some quick tips:

• Do you have your email posted on your site? Get rid of it! Instead, use a contact form. Not only are your email address from getting on spam lists, you are also collecting important information on the people who are interested in your company.
• Do you have information that would be of value to your prospects? Give them a free trial! But not without first getting their name and email address.
• Do you have a monthly newsletter? Create an email version! Not only is it much easier to track successes, but you are also able to easily increase your subscriber size by collecting emails on your site.
• Do you have a demo? Make sure you require people to sign up with their name and email before letting them in.

With a little creativity and brainstorming, you should be able to create a whole list of ways to collect data online.

Be cautious though… if you over do it, you will be scaring visitors away, not making them interested. One of the best solutions is to start small. If you don’t have any information on them, just ask for their name and email. As you build a relationship, whether it’s automated through email or via the phone, you can always collect more data as the relationship progresses.

Optimize Your Web Site for the Search Engines

Below are some basic guidelines to help get your optimization off on the right foot. When it comes down to it, the point is to provide quality relevant content and make that content easy for the search engines (and humans) to understand and read.

• When optimizing for the search engines, only use <tables> when absolutely necessary, instead use <div> tags.
• Make sure to separate your styles from your layout. In other words, make sure you use an external CSS file. Use the HTML to define how the site should be structured, and the CSS to define what that structure should look like. In addition to the Search Engine Optimization benefits, this also makes your web site more scalable and easier to make updates to.
• Use HTML text whenever possible, currently search engines cannot read the text within graphics.
• Make sure <img> tags include an alt=”" attribute and include valuable keywords within. This ensures search engine optimization, but also makes your site more accessible.
• Include keywords in hyperlinks and make sure your <a> tag has a title=”" attribute. Like the alt attribute, this helps with both search engine optimization and accessibility.
• Include keywords in your image names and folder names.
• Use URL rewriting when using query string variables. Instead of having yourpage.html?q=1&location=mpls&topic=stem-cells, you should optimize your URL to allow the search engines to understand the content of the URL. Using URL Rewriting would allow your URL to look like: yourpage/1/mpls/stem-cells.
• Make sure there are no broken links in the web site. Google provides helpful tools at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools. Included are reports on which, if any, errors occurred while Google was trying to spider or index your web site.
• Make sure there are no client-side redirections. Instead, when optimizing for search engines, use a 301 redirect in your .htaccess file.
• Make sure there are no typos.
• Make sure each page has a <title> tag and description and keyword <meta> tags. Although search engines like Google are said to no longer use the <meta> tags as they previously did. There are some search engines that do take this into account. In addition to the optimization side of it, the Description <meta> tag will allow you to specify what viewers see in the summary of your page on the search engine listings.
• Use <h1> through <h6> tags to organize the headers of content. <h1> is the most important header on the page, while <h6> is the least. Use CSS to style the tags.
  
  Each page should have a “keyword focus”, these are the 2-3 keywords that make it clear to the search engine what this page is about.

Create Optimized Profiles
for Social Media Marketing Web Sites

What Should I use in my Profile and Contributions?
Ask yourself or your employees the following questions to help you organize how and what you will initially be able to contribute to the Social Media.

Be sure to infuse the following answers and the content you drop into your profile with your most valuable keywords.

1. List 10 to 30 general words or short phrases that describe your product, service and business. These will be used as “keywords” and “tags” for your business, products and/or services within the Social Arena.
2. Describe your business in a few paragraphs.
3. Describe your target market and their demographics.
4. List your most popular products or services, and provide a brief statement on what makes them unique or different from other products or services.
5. Describe what makes your business, as a whole, unique and different from your competition.
6. List any press releases that have recently been sent.
7. List any write-ups or articles that have been published about your company.
8. List any awards that your company has received.