1. Content Strategy & SEO Process
Jake Aull, GSU Social Media Marketing Course
September 2011

2. Intro…
• http://www.salesdnaltd.com/blog/what-was-it-you-wanted-to-sell-me/
• http://prezi.com/c8ppuxcwvolu/intro-to-seo-meets-some/
• T.O.C.
– Communications & Theory
– Writing Mechanics
– Web Marketing & SEO Objectives
– SEO Strategy & Plan
– SEO Stages of Execution
– SEO Details – Breakdown of Stages
– Review

3. Communications Models & Theory

4. Content Collaboration
• Audience involvement is highest when they "Join"
communications:
http://socmedgsucourse.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/mgmtcomm-ch3audanalysis.jpg

5. Communications Models
• Broadcast (eyeballs; passive) vs two way
collaborative communication (engagement;
active)
• Talk to me vs. talk with me
• People want collaboration
• American Idol mobile voting blew away
predictions.
• Canceled TV shows brought back due to viewer
social media communications and demand

6. Communications Models
• Writing for SEO
- Writing for search engines vs. writing for
readers
- Latent Semantic Content
- Facebook recommended sources and Google
blocks
• IMC (integrated mktg)

7. Content & Communities
Here's the Zen of it - social media content progression
evolves in a circle. My recommended stages:
• Listening (starting point: social sphere research and
observation of your industry)
• Answers (your responses to industry questions across
the social media sphere)
• Discussions (often on others' communities)
• Shared Stories (with reader response)
• Whole, Themed Communities (you built it, they came)
• Customer-Driven Wikis and Communities (about your
brand)
• Monitoring and Answering (back to start: the cycle
begins again)

8. Communications Models
• Legacy business similarities vs. Web 2.0 models:
http://socmedgsucourse.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/legacy-vs-web2biz1a.png

9. Communications & Honesty
• The global village?
• I leave a community, come back; people react to
me as if I never left?
• Negativity in blogging, commenting, and how to
respond
– iPhone and AT&T
– AT&T today

10. Bad Examples

11. Bad Examples

12. Communications & Honesty
• The future of stealth marketing bloggers (does
the public just accept this as part of blogosphere?
Or keep fighting and whistleblowing? Class
thoughts?)?
• “If you heard information about a company from
each of these sources, how credible would it be?:
A person like yourself 60%; An academic 54%;
Financial or industry analyst 56%; Regular
employee of a company 43%; CEO of a company
23%; Government official or regulator 21%;
Blogger 11%.” (“The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit”.
Edelman. 2008, p. 6. http://blog.guykawasaki.com/OBAMA%20SNA%20Strategic_1.pdf )

13. Communications & Honesty
• Wikileaks;
“Apple Removes WikiLeaks App From
App Store” (TechCrunch article; source in
Recommended Sources blog page)
• Are social media channels just as susceptible to
spam?
– Twitter blocking
– Future of spam & social media;
does history repeat itself?

14. Writing Mechanics

15. Writing & Keywords
• Web page titles and relevant copy (latent semantic content)
– You can search for your blog phrase in search engine…
• Web writing with keywords
– Writing for audience or writing for search engines?
– Tone and positiveness
– Stealth marketing (reference case study)
• The traditional marketing funnel
(eyeballs>>awareness>>consideration>>preference>>action>>loyalty>>buyers;
from Groundswell)
• Clickstream and customer journey
• “Blogging” in the lost center of the funnel
(consideration>>preference>>action)
• Keyword funnels

16. Twitter/HootSuite review
• RTs/options
• List Twitter pgs for follow
– Paper.li
• Hash tags
– #FF, #MM, d, RT, etc.
– Hash tags as keywords
• Optimize keywords in Twitter profile descriptions
• URL shorteners and ht.ly

17. Web Marketing & SEO Objectives

18. SEO (& PPC) Objectivies
- Page rank
- Top/first page results goals
- PPC and first-page real estate
- PPC or SEM?
- Groundswell case for blog advertising ROI

20. SEO Strategy & Plan

22. Keyword Discovery & Content Strategy
• PROBLEMS TO SOLVE:
• BENEFITS:
– Why should customers visit our site or buy our product?
• WHAT IS THE BRAND PERSONALITY WE WANT TO PROJECT?
– Tone of copy:
• MARKETING/DIGITAL STRATEGY:
– Existing:
– Proposed:
• POSITIONING STATEMENT OR USP:

23. Customer Targeting & Journey
• TARGET AUDIENCE:
– CURRENT TARGET CUSTOMER BELIEF
– CURRENT TARGET CUSTOMER CLICKING/BUYING BEHAVIOR
– DESIRED FUTURE CUSTOMER BELIEF
– DESIRED FUTURE CUSTOMER CLICKING/BUYING BEHAVIOR
• WHY SHOULD CUSTOMER BEHAVE THIS WAY?
• TARGET CUSTOMER INSIGHT:
• KEYWORDS:
– Previous website & competitor keywords
– Client list
– Post-analysis recommendations

24. SEO Web Page Plan

25. SEO Stages of Execution

26. The Stages of SEO
• Strategy & Discovery
– Keyword Analysis & discovery
– Marketing strategic alignment
– SEO plan
– Keyword/copywriting plan
• Implementation & Programming
– Coding keywords & tags
– Robot.txt file
– Search engine integrations
– Analytics integrations & auto-reporting
– Geo-local integrations
– Google Images, video, etc.

27. The Stages of SEO
• Off-site Activities
– Local directories set-up
– Submission to social sites & social search engines
– Articles & PR publishing
– Obtaining links
• Ongoing Maintainance
– Reviewing analytics

28. SEO Details – Breakdowns of Stages

29. Keyword Discovery & Optimization
• Content/Inputs:
– Client measurement assessment
– SEO goals discovery
– Client-provided keywords assessed
– Content/keyword analysis of past client site
– Keyword research, analysis and comparison
• Tools:
– Pro SEO tools utilized: Google AdWords keyword tool, SEO Book Tools,
iSpionage, Open Site Explorer
– .xls report downloads, aggregated spreadsheets
• Reports/Outputs:
– Competitor ranking report
• Backlinks
– Keyword effectiveness index/ranking reports
– Head and long-tail keyword weighting for optimal keywords/phrases
– KPIs and measurement plan
– SEO/keyword plans

30. Website Submissions & Analytics Implementations
• Site Integrations & Submissions:
– Search engine submissions and verifications (Google,
Bing, Yahoo!)
– Additional search engine tools implementations (e.g.,
Google Webmaster tools, Google Analytics)
• Analytics:
– KPI plan integration
– Keyword monitoring set-up (e.g., Google Alerts,
SocialMention)
– Google analytics set-up
– Website auto reports set-up

31. Website Development/Programming Aspects
– Robots.txt file creation/upload
– Sitemap.xml file created for search engines
– Maps/geo-local website tools integrations
– Website SEO implementation:
• title
• meta description
• meta keywords
• H1s/H2s (headlines)
• text editing
• Anchor links
• Image alt tags

32. Off-Site Link Building & Brand-Owned
• Link Building:
– Quality and relevance over quantity
– Press release/white paper placement
– Social bookmarking (Del.icio.us)
– Submission to share sites (e.g., Digg, Technorati)
– Search engine local directories/site submissions
(e.g., Yahoo! Local, InsiderPages, Yelp, etc.)
• Brand-side SEO simplified
– Copywriters who know your industry best
– Keyword evaluation
– Monitoring
– Sharing/link building

33. Inbound & Social Links for SEO
• Inbound web links (a.k.a. backlinks and
referrals) are vital. Here's why:
– They boost search engine rankings (both for the target
website and themselves).
– They increase paths to the target - more ways and
places for visitors to find the site.
– They create alternative entry paths for crawlers to
specific web pages (even when the target site is not
optimized for search engines).

34. Inbound & Social Links for SEO
– Inbound links represent a solid, alternative (to in-site)
web metric. They gauge the content value and referral
traffic of a site in the online marketplace (especially
valuable if there are issues with existing in-site SEO or
analytics).
– They get shared among web users and multiplicity of
network effects occurs.

35. SEO Lead-Gen Funnel Analytics

36. Review

37. Review of Topics
• Why does social media change communications
models?
• How to approach writing in social media…
• Why is it important to identify and align
marketing and SEO objectives?
• How to form SEO Strategy & Plan
• What are the major stages of SEO execution?

38. Summary
The lesson of the 21st century is that people want
to be involved and contributing; they want to be
“prosumers.” We see it in communications models,
product sourcing/R&D, we see it in the success of
the social media boom.