Category: Marketing

Help your audience find your stuff

Carl Setzer
man holding mug in front of laptop

A few days ago I was scrolling through Instagram, as we’re want to do these days. On a rather popular site (for some pop-star) was a post featuring some product. Whoever crafted the post wrote the standard “link in bio”. Then the top comments were asking “where’s the link”? Interest piqued, I followed the link. The landing page showed links to a blog and plenty of pages, but where to find this specific link, this product was unclear at best. This caused me to cringe. People are interested in this item and they’re having to play “hide-and-seek”. You don’t want to do this with your fans!

I am reminded of a developer maxim (I believe it was said by Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot) about minimizing the number clicks you need to access information. I can’t remember the specifics of that quote, but the basic premise is the fewer the better. Each click builds frustration, which is worsened when the process isn’t clear. Also, having to guess where to click next is a key element of bad UX. I assume they shared the information in that post hoping to engage their audience and sell some stuff. Clearly, that wasn’t successful, or at least not as successful as it could be.

There are a number of ways that this could’ve been executed better. Now, I understand that Instagram gives you one link. One! And no links in the content are allowed. Plenty of folks have developed solutions, however. The easiest (to me) is linktree. Elegant in it’s simplicity, linktree simply collects your links and serves them up in a clean, clear list. This is a highly used tool: you see it in many profiles. Here’s mine for example.

Another, perhaps slightly more complex solution, is to create a landing page on your site with all the links you reference in your posts. I would itemize them in list, with the dates and post titles and also the images of the Instagram posts to make it very clear which link goes with each post.

Put a little thought into your anticipated user flow, into how you want them to find your information. How easily do you want to make it to buy your stuff? To interact with your latest “thing”? Providing clear calls-to-action, clear directions, and clear paths to finding what they want makes your user experience good and enjoyable. That helps good ol’ conversion, which ensures your project keeps moving. Great things, right?

SEO: Link Building and Establishing Authority

Carl Setzer
SEO

Authority is a key part of evaluating the quality of a site. And inbound links, aka “backlinks” are key parts of how Search engines develop ascertain that authority.  Additionally, Google has confirmed that links are one of the three main elements for determining a site’s ranking. So, earning quality backlinks is extremely valuable in pushing your site up a search engine results page. Search engines evaluate the quality of the referring site as well. One good referral is worth far more than dozens of weak ones. With that, we want to focus on links from sites that will direct high-quality traffic to our site. I think it’s best to find sites that will send users that are highly interested in whatever your site features. If you focus on providing good and interesting content, you will naturally attract good links.

Below are some key best practices, and a few things to avoid.

Let’s start with a list of tactics to avoid:

  • Purchased links
  • Link exchanges or reciprocal linking
  • Google’s specific guidance is to avoid “excessive” link exchange.
  • Low-quality directory links

To end on a positive note, here are some recommended tactics:

  • Earn your links! Good, useful content that adds value
  • Seek to gain links from pages with high-authority
  • You want to increase your backlinks over time
  • They should come from topically relevant sources
  • Make sure you use natural anchor text
  • Publish a blog
  • Create “resource” pages

Moz Chapter 3 KEYWORD RESEARCH

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic

Another post based on this past quarter’s research on SEO via Moz

There are many key tools for determining a good keyword strategy. The first, and most important one, is the act of questioning. Starting with core questions is critical to developing the right focus on for the other research tools. Who are our customers? What are their goals? What do they want? How do they search? Once you have answers for these, you can explore several other tools like:

      • Google Keywords Planner
      • Google Trends
      • Moz Keyword Explorer
Google’s tools are perhaps the most important, as the vast majority of US based search is done via Google. Google Keywords gives you the ability to explore which keywords are relevant, which have high competition, and which have low competition. The “finding new keywords” tool looks particularly powerful. Google Trends is another tool that is worthy of adding to your toolbox. With it you can see what the world is searching for, both at the broadest levels as well as refined to the local or even hyper-local. Besides being able to search for specific keywords, you can also looking at macro trends across the internet. Moz, one of the leaders in digital marketing has their own Keyword Research tool. In many respects, it’s more powerful than Google’s. Especially for the Pro version. But even the free version has great details on their research dashboard, including keyword suggestions and SERP analysis.
With this type of work, you can determine the value of any keyword and build strategies around them.

What are the seven steps to successful SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic
  • “What are the seven steps to successful SEO?”
    • Successful SEO has seven key steps, per MOZ’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO“. These are valuable ways to help your website be discoverable by new users by ranking high in Search Engine Results Pages.
      • Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
        • Enabling search engines to find and index my site
      • Compelling content that answers the searchers query
        • The site needs to answer questions in an interesting and engaging way.
      • Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
        • Be thoughtful with the composition of the website so that relevant keywords are featured in the articles
      • Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
        • The site needs to be streamlined so that it loads quickly, yet also has an interesting and engaging design
      • Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
        • Content that engages your audience enough that they feel compelled to share it.
      • Title, URL, and description to draw high Click-Through Rates in the rankings
        • Thoughtfully considering article titles, the site’s URL, and description to make it compelling to someone, seeing it in a search, is very interested in clicking on the link and coming to the page.
      • Snippet/scheme markup to stand out in SERPs
        • Make the additional comments that show up on the Search Results Page engaging and encouraging the viewer to click over to the site.

What is SEO?

Carl Setzer
SEO Graphic

This quarter I studied SEO techniques, mainly working off of Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. Let’s take a look at some of my main takeaways. Today, let’s start with the basics: What Is SEO?

  • SEO is otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. Essentially, this is a technique to strategize your website’s content to place better in the search results of Google and Bing. This requires deeply understanding your target demographics, what they are interested in, what sorts of things they search for, how they search, and the way they structure their searches. Also, you need to understand how search engines work. They crawl the internet, creating indexes of the content they find. Ultimately, SEO is about creating better organic search results, as opposed to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns. SEO has 20 times more traffic opportunities than PPC (via both mobile and desktop). SEO also pays off over a longer time.

Edit: corrected the link to Moz’s “Beginner’s Guide To SEO”. 

A Summary Of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Carl Setzer
Google Webmaster Tools

One of my assignments this week was to read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and summarize their general recommendations.

  • Make sure your pages can get links from other pages. You will want to make sure you use crawlable links when you do that, which means using anchor tags (<a> with a href attribute).
  • Create a sitemap and ensure that it has links to all the important pages on the site. They also recommend having this as a “human-readable” list of links for those important pages.
  • Keep the number of links on a page to a “reasonable number”. They recommend “a few thousand at most”, which, to me, seems excessive.
  • Ensure that the hosting server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, which is what informs the Googlebots when content has been changed since they last visited the page. It’s important as it saves bandwidth and, thus, networking overhead costs.
  • Use the robots.txt file well. It is important to ensure that the web crawler bots are not crawling non-important pages. Besides ensuring the robots.txt file has the right information, you also want to make sure that it is kept up-to-date. Doing these things ensures that your “crawling budget” is utilized well.
  • Another thing that you can do is manually submit your site to Google’s crawlers. This triggers them to head over to your site immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be discovered crawling other sites.
  • Lastly, you should make sure that administrators of other relevant sites know about yours. Emailing an announcement, or posting such on social media is a great tool towards creating awareness of your site and garnering backlinks.

Seth Godin: I Hate This Restaurant

Carl Setzer
Photo by Burst from Pexels

I always appreciate Mr. Godin’s insights. Today’s blog post reminds me of something I’ve long thought about: understanding what you, and your business, offer the world. If you try to please all people, well, you aim for the middle and become a commodity. That only seems profitable by the large, mega-brands that can operate on huge scale. Most of us need to focus on the niche, on being unique. This requires creativity and insight. Those that master this space impress and inspire me.

Seth Godin: I Hate This Restaurant 

Featured image by Burst from Pexels

The Monday Peeve: Help Lines

Carl Setzer1 Comment
Angry on the Phone

Paula Light’s “Monday Peeve” for today resonates with me. I hate automated help systems, too. Unanswered emails, the chat messages that go nowhere, or the dreaded calls navigating multiple menus. Nothing says we aren’t valued by your business than hearing “your call is very important to us” every 10 seconds while on hold for an hour.

I hope your Monday was free of such misery.

The featured image is by Moose Photos from Pexels.

Facebook Annoyances

Carl Setzer

I’ve been managing Facebook and Instagram posts for a friend of mine for a while now (she’s a real estate agent just north of Seattle, Sarosh Altaf…check her out). And if you’ve spent any time with me, you’ll know that I’ve been doing that sort of thing for years, for a number of people and organizations.

So, this morning I post an article from a local newspaper about an art contest (Puget Sound Bird Fest poster art contest announced). Fun, great content to share and connect with the community. However, something with the way I posted the article made something with the Facebook algorithm think it was a job post. I didn’t catch that until we had a few applications come through. So, pulled down the post and sent apology messages to the applicants. A bit awkward, but nothing too horrible. What’s doubly puzzling, though, is that when I went and posted it a second time, from the publishing tools window, using the same language, hoping to see whether I missed something, or if it’s some weird “autocorrect” type of thing. But, nope, nothing. It posted the article on the way like I thought I had the first time. Weird.

Have any of you come across something like this with the spawn of Zuckerberg?

Week In Review: 3-29-2020

Carl Setzer

With covid-19 disrupting so very much of life, I thought I’d take a moment to rehash what I’m working on to keep busy. My family has been home due to school closures. I have been unemployed since the February 28th.

First, I’m signed up to study web application and cloud development at Edmonds Community College starting next quarter. There are still pieces to pull together, but I’m moving forward. Classes start on April 13, so it’s coming quickly. I also need to get my math skills back up to snuff. I struggled mightily on an assessment test and was pretty made at myself. Then it hit me: the last math class I took may have been calculus, but it’s been several decades since. One of the folks at the school connected me with a website to help that along, so I’ve been working on getting those skills back up to snuff.

Also, I’ve spent time refreshing some skills. I had purchased a CompTIA training bundle last summer that I haven’t had a chance to start with yet. And I have a Adobe Creative Suite bundle as well. I’ve been carving time for each of those as I can. I also discovered IronCAD, which apparently has a free download, so I might try and squeeze some more CAD work in as well. That’s one big thing I miss from my Eagle Country Construction days.

As for entertainment, I’ve been binging on “Traveling Robert“, a YouTuber traveling the US with his trailer. I really have enjoyed the show. There’s a genuineness that’s delightful. I discovered him via YouTube’s algorithm. It dished up his trip to Seattle this past summer, which I found nice.

 

There’s plenty of other things that I’ve been working on, too. Keeping several websites up to date, as well as a couple of email communication campaigns (about the covid-19 closures and such). And I’ve helped a few folks with their WordPress sites, and with setting up Facebook business pages and trying to pull together some kind of marketing plan in the midst of the pandemic. I mean, how do you market in such a way that you’re being, well, a decent human being.