If you are not working within these digital platforms on a daily basis, the changes can often be overwhelming. Fortunately, in addition to providing digital marketing services, the 435 Digital team strives to educate the business community about ongoing changes in digital marketing and the necessary strategies to be successful through ongoing seminars. These seminars are a mix of lively informative presentations, as well as engaging discussions with real business owners.

On April 3rd Joan Daluga and I led a two-hour Introduction to Social Media Marketing seminar with an eager group of business owners. Both Joan and I were able to interact one-on-one with each of the attendees, but Derrick Gillard of The Fashion Buddha was willing to answer a few questions after the seminar about his experience.

1. What did your business look to achieve at the Introduction to Social Media Seminar on April 3rd?

I didn’t know what to expect, really. I was open to the experience, and I was not disappointed. I was warmly met by one of the speakers and immediately made to feel at home. I was just in a space of wanting to understand, and 435 Digital delivered the whole package!

2. How did 435 Digital’s presentation resonate?

I love to communicate with all people and I feel a sense of loss when I cannot do so effectively. The tips, techniques, and social etiquette that were provided by Joan and Austin really resonated with me in helping me with what I love the most – effective and positive communication.

3. Would you recommend 435 Digital Seminars to other business owners?

Yes, I would recommend the presentations by 435 Digital to other business owners!

Developing a business can be a challenge. You are constantly wearing different hats and changing masks, depending on what you are seeking to accomplish for that day. I felt first-hand the concern and the desire to help me build my brand and I was able to sit in a one-on-one with one of the presenters to laser in on my specific needs, goals, and aspirations. You can’t find that type of commitment much anymore. Thank you, 435 Digital.

As 435 Digital moves forward with upcoming seminars, feedback like Derrick’s pushes us to continue providing the highest quality of content and value. With a deep understanding of many industries, our team can relate the value and strategies of digital marketing to your business needs.

If your business needs to polish-up or jump-start its digital marketing strategy, 435 Digital seminars are for you. Upcoming seminar topics include SEO, Website Development, and Google Analytics. Interested in one or all of those? Use the discount code “435BLOG” to receive 10% off your registration fee.

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Carolyn Shelby, Director of SEO

Paid Search

First to present was PPC Specialist, Rich Funk. Here are the four main topics he covered:

Effective Keyword Lists
Keywords are the most important to your account because that is how you choose where your ad is seen. Having the wrong keyword list is usually worse than having no keyword list; consider it a better investment to throw money down the drain.

Advanced Targeting
The people you target and where they are can be just as important as your keyword list. Efficiency is key here. Putting your ad in front of people in the wrong place or the wrong time can be wasteful. Effective geographic targeting is important to the campaign.

Proper Account Structure
Make it easy on yourself. If you have an account that is messy and disorganized, any changes you make will take longer and work less effectively. Being organized will help you make quick changes to your campaigns and give you more time to optimize.

Effective Ad Copy
Your ad copy is how you present yourself to your potential customers. If you have the wrong message you could alienate potential clients. Ad copy testing will help determine the most effective messaging. You can do this by creating A/B tests on a regular basis.

Search Engine Optimization (Organic)

Here’s what Director of SEO, Carolyn Shelby, covered:

What Search Engines Do
Search engines want to refer each user to websites most relevant to the user’s search query. This relevancy is determined by a number of factors – all designed to ensure authenticity. Search engines do not support underhanded tactics and tricks to get to the top.

Multichannel Optimization
We can’t always control what types of results appear (blended/universal, news, images, video, etc.), so we need to optimize all of our digital assets. We also need to keep our messaging (the voice and style of our brands) unified across all channels (social media channels, web, print, broadcast, etc.). Every time a consumer is exposed to our brand, we want that exposure to reinforce our message. Unified messaging builds and reinforces branding and helps train the customers to search for you by the terms YOU want to be found under.

Business Considerations
Before getting submerged in SEO, your business needs to determine its goals on the web and make sure your web development/marketing team understands your business model. The most important question (that everyone on the team should be able to answer is): How do we make money? Do we sell impressions? Do we only make money on conversions? How do we define a conversion? Who are our customers?

Build out the right type of website functionality and content to suit your business needs.

On-Page SEO Best Practices
Many factors go into SEO and their value collectively can improve your search rankings. Carolyn discussed metadata, good and bad coding, how to brainstorm for keywords, and the importance of developing quality content for your website.

Whoa, that’s a lot to cover in one session!

Yes, there was a lot of information covered in the Intro to Digital Marketing seminar. If you were unable to attend, we hope you will join us at an upcoming seminar in April. We will be covering Social Media, Advanced PPC, and Advanced SEO. So whether your business is just getting started in digital marketing or your team has successful experience, we are here to provide the most recent updates and strategies for success.

The post 435 Digital Seminars kicks off with PPC and SEO appeared first on 435 Digital.

Since this was meant to be an Introduction to Digital Marketing, Carolyn started by explaining what SEO is and what it isn’t. Many people have heard the term SEO, but get confused on what SEO really means.

• SEO IS – the process of “packaging” your message in a format that the search engines understand best.
• SEO is NOT – cheating or gaming the system, and it is not paid search (PPC). You can’t buy your way to the top.

To clarify the difference between PPC and SEO, here’s an example of how Google organizes their paid search results (ads) and their organic search results (SEO):

The red box represents organic search results and the green boxes are where you’ll commonly find ads in search results. The important thing to remember is that Google doesn’t always display ads for every search, so you’ll need to look closely before you assume something is or is not an organic search result.

The Importance of Relevancy

One big takeaway from Carolyn’s presentation is that search engines love relevancy, which can be determined by a number of factors, including:

• Content on your site – topic of the site, text on the pages, menu items, titles, and descriptions need to be aligned.
• Performance of your site – Does everything work the way it should? How fast does your site load?
• Authority of your site – Do people reference your site elsewhere or link to it?
• User experience – Is the site easy to use and do people like to stay on your site?

If you’re doing all of these things right, your site should be attracting natural inbound links and traffic, and people will spend time interacting and engaging with your website. All of these things will have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.

Personalized Results: What You See May Not Be What I See

When you’re keeping track of how well your website is doing in search, many people focus on the search engine rankings for certain terms. Unfortunately, not everyone knows that the way Google displays search results is not constant — Google personalizes the search results for *you* based on what they think your intent is, where you’re physically located, and what kind of device you’re searching from. So not only might you see something different than what I see, but you could even get different results on your own different devices.

Some of the factors that can impact the results you see are:

• Geographic location
• The device you’re using to search (phone, computer, tablet, etc.)
• Whether or not you are logged into your Google account (Gmail, etc.)

This can sometimes make looking at search results with your SEO Specialist a little confusing, but it’s Google’s way of trying to feed you the most relevant results based on your personal factors.

Why is it important to know about personalized search results?

The reason it’s important to understand how search rankings vary by person and by device is to keep you from getting too stressed out about exact rankings. For many businesses, especially those who only serve one specific geographic region, the average rankings you’ll get from rank monitoring services don’t tell you the whole story. You’ll find that monitoring your analytics to see which keyword phrases are actually driving the most and the best qualified traffic will do more for your optimization campaigns than simply relying on rankings.

Types of Search Results And How to Optimize For Them

The organic search results that we talked about earlier aren’t the only kind of results you can find on search engines. There are also news, local, video, images, and blog search results that could use your attention. One important thing to remember with this is that you can’t always control what types of results will appear, but you can optimize the content that you have for each category to make sure that the the engines understand what content you’re offering, and that you’re making it as attractive as possible to the engines.

Here are Carolyn’s tips for optimizing for these different types of results:

• Have a mobile version of your site – Mobile-friendly sites are more likely to be served in results for queries made from mobile devices.
• Optimize your non-text content – Non-text assets are things like images, PDFs, and videos. Add appropriate attributes and surrounding context so they can be properly indexed.
• Use Rich Snippets and RDFa – especially for ecommerce or data heavy sites.
• Diversify Your Assets – It’s usually easier to rank a video on the first page of the universal or blended results than create a new, standard web page and have it get to page 1 of the SERPs. If possible, try to offer more than just plain jane HTML pages — videos, images, PDFs, etc. will all help diversify your inventory.

Upcoming SEO Seminars

Keep in mind that I’ve only summarized one section of Carolyn’s presentation. There’s a lot more to learn. If you’re interested in learning more, I have some additional opportunities to hear Carolyn talk SEO that I can share with you. The first being a radio appearance on SEW Weekly on WebmasterRadio.fm this Thursday, February 7th, at 11am central.

The second chance to learn more from Carolyn is a SEO seminar with 312 Digital entitled “(Not Exactly) Intro to SEO.” This seminar takes place on March 20th, 2013 and registration is already open. Carolyn’s section of the seminar will be covering on-page optimization including:

• Domains
• Content types and styles
• On-page optimization factors
• Keyword research
• How to write optimized content

Use the promo code “435Digital” to save $100 off the registration price. Visit 312 Digital’s Eventbrite page to register today.

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