How do you compete on a shoestring budget with all those big, well-funded companies out there who hire professional search marketers and agencies to manage their organic listings in Bing, Google, and other search services?
One answer that Randy and I share with our clients is a reflective strategy: to optimize for search outside of the search space. There is less competition in the reflective marketing spaces because most people follow the crowd.
Reflective marketing for search is easy and easily scalable for several reasons. More importantly, it doesn’t have to cost a fortune if you want to do it right. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, however. After all, if we can help small business owners dominate in reflective marketing strategies why wouldn’t the big companies go after those opportunities?
I am sure somewhere down the road someone will get the bright idea of marketing for search outside of search … again. It comes up every few years. Most people scratch their heads and move on. A few folks figured out how to make their own niches.
Let’s look at some past examples and see where we are today.
Web Directory Optimization Before today’s Internet grew up on Google you had to promote your Website through human-edited directories. There were dozens of them and Yahoo! was only the most important out of many important resources. A good directory submission required that you write a concise and interesting description of a Website in 25 words or less. Many people struggled with those 25 words. Truth be told, it didn’t come easy but rather from writing a whole lot of 25 word descriptions, over and over again, until you could boil down just about any Website to a simple elevator pitch.
When search engines began to overshadow Web directories as sources of traffic the major directories continued to feed the search engines with links and crawlable URLs. So know which directories were important for SEO crawling (and possibly also for influencing search rankings) was an important priority in the early 2000s. Although millions of people still use Web directories today they are mostly niche directories. Yahoo! maintains its directory but will not allow its users to actually SEARCH the directory. How crazy is that?
Web Forum Optimization Before “social media” was identified with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn it was dominated by hundreds of thousands of Web forums. Many of these forums were maintained by service companies that allowed users to create their own forums as subdomains. Unfortunately, search engines didn’t always know what to make of the forums so if you had any experience at helping Web forums rank in search engine results you were considered highly valuable in some industries.
Web forums come with their own terrible search tools and many people actually rely on Bing and Google to search forums for them. Of course, because of all the spam that “Internet marketers” have posted to thousands of forums across the Web the search engines don’t promote forum discussions as often as they used to. Question-and-Answer sites are more likely to be given the special consideration that search engines once reserved for Web forums.
Web forums still exist today but many forum owners are struggling to find visitors; they not only have to compete with each other but also with the major social media platforms. There will probably always be specialty Web forums but the day of the lone forum owner may soon be over. Targeting your marketing resources at Web forums probably doesn’t make as much sense now as it once did.
Blog Profiling Before everyone became a blogger and needed to compete for search engine visitors there were — in most categories — only a few very successful blogs that people followed on a regular basis. If you could get one of these power bloggers to write about your Website you would receive thousands of visitors.
We still have power bloggers today but many of their readers are smart phone and tablet users who don’t spend much time surfing the Web they way they do from desktop and laptop PCs. So the influential power blogger is in decline. Furthermore, there are more sites competing to be “power influencers” than ever before, so being profiled by a power blogger doesn’t have quite the impact that it once did. Some of today’s most successful sites were kickstarted by profiles written by power bloggers years ago, but repeating that success is not so easy.
That Was Then, and This Is Now…
So if those are the best reflective search marketing strategies of the past, what is left for today? Obviously you can still look to each of those above sources for traffic if your business lines up with the right specialty community. But since social media is all the rage most reflective marketing strategies focus on social media optimization. Let’s take a look at how these services can help your organi search referral traffic.
Pinterest and Tumblr Anyone who publishes pictures on their Website — where the pictures are intended for sharing — wants to be found for “brand” queries in organic search, not “topic queries”. In other words, you want to be “Getty Images” not “picture of mountains”. Image search indexes all sorts of images, but it tends to be dominated by a handful of Websites that have earned a lot of links. The search engines really don’t reward good images with high placements any more.
So a service like Pinterest, where you can share your favorite images and feature your own content will help you create brand value for your name and Website. By teasing Pinterest and Tumblr users with high quality content you’ll create a small, loyal audience who become your advocates in the image sharing community. Even if your business is not about images, if you publish interesting and compelling images that challenge common assumptions about what you do, you will find that people appreciate your work.
LinkedIn More marketers are turning to LinkedIn because that is where “the professionals can be found”. Unfortuntely, for professionals that means exposing yourself to random inquiries and connections from people who just want to pitch their products and services to you. Be careful whose invitation you accept. They may be someone in your industry who wants to see what you are up to or they may just be another smarmy salesperson with a bad idea.
Being helpfully visible on LinkedIn may mean you’ll attract links from people who appreciate your comments and decide to mention you on their blogs, in their own forums, or other social media platforms.
Facebook Marketers remain divided on the value of Facebook. Leaving aside the debates about Facebook’s advertising channel(s), some companies have invested all their social media resources in building Facebook “PAGES” where anyone with a Facebook account can leave comments, ask questions, read about the business, etc. Sadly, Facebook’s internal search is horribly broken. You’re not likely to find anything on Facebook through Facebook; fortunately, Facebook allows the major search engines to index these “PAGES”.
Facebook pages act as standalone Websites, we call them “satellite sites” if they are associated with a flagship domain. But some small businesses just put up a Facebook page instead of building a Website. For example, many farm/orchard owners who cater to the public (“pick your own [fruit/vegetables]“) use Facebook to connect with their loyal customers, sharing updates on harvests, how weather affects roads in their areas, and more.
It may be easier for you to build a loyal customer community on Facebook if your customers are already on Facebook than for you to persuade them to sign up with your own Web forum or mailing list.
Twitter Although Twitter boasts fewer user accounts than Facebook both services suffer from a lot of dead wood. Neither service has as many active users as it has accounts. So don’t be put off by Facebook’s larger number of accounts. What is important to know about Twitter is that it is favored by celebrities and many technical experts alike. You can use your personal Twitter account to share occasional updates about your business or you can have a dedicated business account for Twitter.
In fact, Reflective Dynamics has has an official Reflective Dynamics Twitter account but Randy Ray and I both have personal Twitter accounts where we may occasionally share information about Reflective Dynamics.
The social media industry has also invested heavily in advertising platforms, so you can consider the option of buying ads on those services. These ads may be targeted toward people who have expressed interest in topics related to your industry.
More importantly, though, is the fact that Twitter is the world’s second busiest search engine. Yes, more people use Twitter search every day than use Bing search. Okay, technically, YouTube probably gets more searches than Twitter. But whereas searching YouTube only returns YouTube content, searching Twitter returns links to millions of Websites. You cannot visit them all.
Twitter search is an important cornerstone of today’s search engine optimization world. Hence, being visible on Twitter is extremely important to any reflective strategy. Your Twitter account may appear in search results on Bing and Google, or in search results on Twitter itself. AND you can build a loyal community of followers on Twitter who read your Tweets directly.
What Else, Besides Social Media?
Fortunately for marketers interested in reaching new readers, the news industry is becoming more open to allowing third parties to use its services.
First there are the press release distribution services. Many of them offer free subscriptions to visitors who want to see the latest press releases from specific industries. So publishing your press releases through the right services means people will see your releases in their email.
Second, many press release services work with Bing, Google, and Yahoo! to become included in their news search indexes. News search can be an important source of traffic to Websites. Unfortunately the press release industry has been criticized for accepting too many poorly written releases from Internet marketers who were using their services for search-influencing links. But a couple of recent campaigns from Google may have dampened marketers enthusiasm for abusing the press release services.
As long as you think about the people who read press releases rather than search engines, press release distribution remains a worthy option for reflective marketing. People often search on the companies they read about in press releases.
In addition to press releases, many news sites are now experimenting with “Native Advertising”. This is essentially the printed Advertorial transposed onto the Web. Native Advertising consists of copy you write and pay to have published on the news sites. To comply with search engine guidelines the news sites may prevent their native ads from being indexed, but if people read your native ads and like what they find they’ll be interested in searching for you on the Internet through Bing, Google, and other search services.
Finally, there are still plenty of blogging options to consider. Although connecting with a power blogger who can incubate a huge community for you is very unlikely, there are attractive options for helping small businesses reach out to bloggers. You don’t have to have a full marketing department with a big budget.
In fact, many large companies have squandered millions of dollars on forced “blog marketing”, doing it the wrong way. The search engines have cracked down on so-called “guest posting (for links)” and a lot of big Websites have found themselves struggling with major losses of search referral traffic because they were too heavily involved in the wrong kind of blogger outreach.
Being reflective in the blogosphere calls for a different approach to blog content. You’re not looking for links that influence search engines results; you’re looking for opportunities to create visibility for yourself and promote your business to real people.
We call this Digital Audience Relations here at Reflective Dynamics. We believe that creating real content for people rather than spammy fake content for search engines takes you farther into marketing success than all the SEO fakery that has been passed around for years.
And the great news is we’re not keeping this concept to ourselves. We not only help our business clients with Digital Audience Relations, we work with other SEO agencies through our white label services.
Read More about Search Engine Optimization
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Natural Backlink Profile: Endless Ways to Build One
Website Not On Google? Why Some Internal Pages Aren't Indexed
RankBrain and Neural Matching: What Is the Difference?
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