.
Search Engine Optimization
(revisited)
Viral marketing
MBA 563
WEEK 5
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VIRAL MARKETING
Before we start….
• Why videos go viral Kevin Allocca TED 2011 (7
minutes)
• So what is going on here?
Viral marketing – what is it?
• A marketing phenomenon that encourages
people to pass along a marketing message in such
a way that it spreads like a virus or a meme
– Compulsive reading, listening or viewing
• Can be text, image, video, sound file
– So amazing that people have the urge to share with
others
• Social media is the engine for viral marketing
because of the “network effect”
• WoM is trusted
Based on: eMarketing eXcellence. 2008. Chaffey et al. BH
Engaging in the conversation –
balancing control and credibility
CONTROL
Monologue
Traditional
marketing
communications
and PR
“a person like yourself”
CREDIBILITY
Spontaneity
Conversation
Advertising
Dialogue
Community
Based on ideas from Edelman’s Trust Barometer
Viral marketing (word-of-mouth direct
marketing)
• Viral includes any strategy that encourages people to pass on your
message to others
– Word of mouth is the most trusted form of communication
(because the message is coming from “a person like yourself”
• Let the users of the Internet do your marketing for you –
traditionally by eMail, but now by using social networking sites,
blogs and video sharing sites
• Built-in mechanism to pass on to someone else
– It works (sometimes), and it’s free or low cost (sometimes)
– VERY difficult to plan for and do successfully – especially as it has
been around for more than 20 years – people become jaded
Viral marketing – having “remarkable”
products
• Seth Godin on How to Get Your Ideas to
Spread “sliced bread and other marketing
delights” - getting people to talk about you
and your products (17 minutes)
• TED conference, 2003
Using social media sites for viral
marketing – watch out!
• "While these sites may appear to be the most effective manner of
delivering a message regardless of brand appropriateness," he said, "by
failing to truly understand the audience, viral marketers stand to
alienate as many consumers as they interest."
– David Schatsky, President, JupiterResearch, on the pitfalls of social networking sites:
• Undercover or “stealth” marketing - be careful of customer perception
that they are being “used” – people are increasingly sophisticated and
cynical
– Fake bloggers etc (eg. Mazda commercials disguised as user generated videos)
• Watch out for people to highjack your campaign with parody videos, or
highjacking of your hashtag
Elements of a viral marketing
campaign
1. Creative material – the viral agent (text, image,
video)
–
Consider meme-jacking?
2. Seeding – identifying websites, blogs, or people
(influencers) to start the message moving
–
Understand and exploit existing communications
networks – go where the people are
3. Tracking – to monitor the effect, to assess the
return from the cost of developing the viral agent
and seeding
•Based on: eMarketing eXcellence. 2008. Chaffey et al. BH
Can virality be predicted or
reproduced?
• Tod Maffin’s Six Genetic Markers of Viral
Marketing
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
AAC Matching
Simple concept
Sentiment
Reward sharing
Embrace unofficials
Successive rounds
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
AAC matching
• The target Audience must match the Creative,
which must match the Call-to-Action
• No mixed messages
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Simple Concept
• Plots and developed characters do not get
traction
• Keep the campaign simple
• One idea at a time
• Stop over-thinking
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Sentiment
• Your campaign should be either
– Serious
– Silly
– Stunning
• Don’t experiment with other tones
– Definitely don’t mix them
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Reward sharing
• Incentivize people to share your content and
they will share it for you
• Don’t rely on freebies or begging (or bribing)
• Give recognition
• How about gamification?
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Embrace unofficials
• When a fan uses your brand imagery to praise
you, embrace them
• Don’t shut them down
• Enough with the cease and desist letters
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Successive Rounds
• Keep a good idea going (because then it might
become a meme?) – build on recognition
• Plan to have at least three “rounds” of content
which riffs on your first release.
Tod Maffin. Viral Marketing. The Six Genetic Markers
Then there is this….
• “DisneyCollectorBR is a faceless YouTube
channel giant that is consistently among the
site’s top most viewed per month. In April, the
channel was the third-most viewed
worldwide. During the week of July 4 [2014],
the DisneyCollectorBR channel received more
views in the United States — 55 million —
than any other channel on YouTube.” Buzzfeed
Some successful viral marketing
campaigns
• Hotmail launch – 1.5 million subscribers in the
first 18 months
– Gmail strategy?
• Dove Evolution – “Campaign for natural
beauty”
• The Old Spice Guy wins an Emmy for social
media campaign
• LOTS of examples at Viral Friday
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
(SEO) REVISITED
Search engine marketing – 2 major
methods
•
TWO MAJOR METHODS - OBJECTIVE IS TO
BE IN THE TOP FEW SEARCH RESULTS
1. Search engine optimization (SEO) - built into the
design of web pages / inbound link quality
(organic positioning) - TODAY
2. Search engine advertising: Pay-per-Click (next
class)
Trust in search engine providers relies on the fact that
organic search is not tainted by payment…
Paid listings
SEO Organic
listings
Search engine optimization (for organic
listings)
• Objective: top position in search engine results pages
(SERPS) - without paying the search engine for the
position by bidding on key words
• A way to reach those who are ALREADY interested in
your product or service – but may not even know
that your firm exists
• What we are optimizing for are RELEVANCE and
IMPORTANCE
– Optimizing the web page CONTENT (and code) for search
engine indexing
– Link strategy
Search engine optimization
• Focuses on:
1. ON-PAGE optimization
•
•
designing web pages that are friendly to search
engine spiders and are optimized for your
keywords/phrases
making sure that the elements that are indexed by
search engines are all optimal for your page goals
2. OFF-PAGE optimization
•
Having high-quality in-bound links
Chaffey, D. et al. Internet Marketing. 2007
How search engines work
• Search engine indexing
– GoogleBot and its sister spiders
– How do search engines work? (Google video 3 minutes)
– Relevancy ranking algorithms – Google PageRank and
other factors
• Google Tutorial on Ranking: relevance and importance
• Remember, they all search engines use different
ranking algorithms and methods
• Google has around 65% market share
– Target some engines and do your research
• SearchEngineWatch.com and SearchEngineLand.com
Changes in Google’s relevancy
ranking algorithm that impact SEO
• Some pundits say that “SEO is dead”
• It isn’t, but is has changed and become even
more challenging: Search metrics rank
correlation factors report
• Looser keyword matching
• Social signals becoming increasingly important
• The fundamentals don’t change much – we
will focus on those
Steps involved in SEO
1. Create a content-rich site that real people will
find valuable (but remember, each page is in
competition)
2. Use clean, simple code
3. Research competition and keywords / phrases.
Identify and select keywords and phrases for
optimization, then validate them for popularity
4. Add your keywords to the content (do not spam)
5. Get inbound links from other reputable sites
6. Submit to search engines
7. Repeat – this is NOT a one-off effort – the playingfield changes continually
1. Create a content-rich site that real
people will find valuable
• Search engines reward sites with good content
– this is the most important element of all
• Create high quality, relevant content
– create content your target audience is genuinely interested
in
– Search engines reward sites that have valuable information
– Do some test searches and note that it is not always the
best looking sites that are at the top…it is the ones with the
best CONTENT
• Eg. Digital camera review site versus digital camera eCommerce site
• Wikipedia
– Think about how this works for image and video search..
2. Use clean, simple code
• What you see…..
• What GoogleBot sees…..
• XHTML and CSS – separation of structure and
content from presentation elements helps (make
sure that your developer is following current web
standards from the W3C)
• Make sure that any firm that you hire to build a
website understands how SEO works
3. Select your Keywords/keyphrases
• This is the most important concept to grasp in
search marketing
• What are members of your target market
actually typing into search engines?
– Those are the keywords/keyphrases that you must
optimize for
Identify and select keywords and phrases
then validate them for popularity
• “Keywords” or “key phrases” are the search
terms people type into search engines
– Brainstorm and research
– Do test searches
– Try out keywords from generators
– eg. Google’s Keyword Planner (lots of data about
traffic and trends)
– or download the Bing Ads Intelligence tool
– Keyword Generator: Wordtracker (no longer free)
– Google search trends might be interesting
Long-tail keywords (based on
power law concept)
• Distinguish “long-tail” keywords from “head”
keywords
– running shoes = “head term”
– compare grip new balance and nike trail running
= “long-tail term”
• These search terms have good ROI because
they are less competitive and give higher user
satisfaction (lower bounce rates?)
• Example of a long-tail keyword generator
The impact of changes in Google’s
search interface and algorithm
• The impact of Google Instant on the SERPs and on
search behaviour?
– How Google Instant affects SEO (Bruce Clay)
• The other thing to take into account is that
Google personalizes search results according
to search / web history
– A competing search engine explains the impact
• Google changes its algorithm quite frequently
(algorithm change history) – most recently to
favour sites optimized for mobile
3. Research your competition
• Use your target search engines and perform
analysis of top results for your keywords
• Track and analyze what your competitors are
doing
– See how they rank for keywords / phrases
– Look at their code to see what keywords they use
and how they use them
4. Add your keywords to the
content (do not spam!)
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Page body text: content / page copy
Title tag
Heading tags
Graphics: alt tags
Hypertext links
Meta tags
How to Look at Your Website the Way
Google Does
Page body text: content / page copy
• Page copy - make sure your keywords are well
represented
– Higher in the page the better (definitely in the first 25
words)
– Use your customer’s language: not all marketing copy
uses the words that your customers use
• Relationship of a keyword phrase to the total
number of words on a page = keyword density
– Keyword density is a good indication of relevancy
– But remember balance: higher is not always better
(boring for users and penalized as spam!)
Title tag
• Probably the most important page element tag
• Should always contain your most important keywords
or key terms
• Each page of your site should have a different title tag
• Example of a good TITLE tag that will generate traffic
from people searching for “Leonardo da Vinci” the
renaissance artist:
– <TITLE>Leonardo da Vinci. Art of the renaissance</TITLE>
(absolute relevance)
• This example is less relevant (but contains other
useful info – remember to balance marketing needs)
– <TITLE>Artefacts: Leonardo da Vinci. High quality prints and
framing</TITLE>
• This one will put you out of business:
– <TITLE>Welcome to your Number One Online Resource for
Wall Art Solutions!!!</TITLE>
Heading tags
• <H1>, <H2>, <H3> etc
• Used to indicate importance: ie. page
heading or paragraph headings
• Should therefore be a good indicator of
content - these should indicate the theme
of the page or section
• Use your keywords in heading tags
• Use heading tags when coding - Never just
make the text bigger using font size
Graphics: alt tags
• Spiders can’t see or read graphics
• Make sure all graphics have relevant and
descriptive ALT tags (not photo34643)
• Use your keywords – especially in places like the
alt tags for your logo
• Especially important for navigation graphics (you
don’t want a spider to get stuck on a page)
• Also….think about how image search
works…
Hypertext links to other parts of your site
– use your keywords in hypertext links
– Never use “click here”! – does that look like
relevant or interesting content to a spider?
– make it easy for spiders to follow links
– Include text links for navigation in addition to
javascript jump or hierarchical menus
Meta tags (description and
keyword tags)
• No longer useful as sole tactic to influence
rankings
• keywords used in meta tags should match
those in the visible body text
• BUT search engines often use title and
description in the listings themselves
– Example of a VIU listing on Google
5. Get inbound links from other
reputable sites
• What gives your site “authority”?
• Link popularity strongly influences relevance ranking (it
signals importance)
• Number and quality of other sites that link to yours
(inbound links)
– must be content relevant (don’t spam!)
– request links from relevant high-ranking sites
– get a listing in a directory
• Google moves against “link farms, content farms, and
spam sites” – the losers and JC Penney
• Find out who links to you now
– link:www.nanaimo.ca
• Think about the “landing page”
– remember individual pages are competing - not your entire site
• Google’s new Link Disavowal tool
URL strategy and landing pages
• If we are going to drive traffic to our site one
of the most important pieces of marketing
real estate is the URL
• Not just a question of selecting the right
domain name
• URL strategy relates to placement of landing
page in folder so web address itself is
meaningful (Google now uses this explicitly)
• Campaign URLs (CURLS)
6. Submit to search engines
• If you don’t play, you can’t win
• Check which pages are already indexed –
inurl:viu.ca or Google’s Site Status Wizard
• Decide which search engines to target, and read all the
information for submission and ranking eg. Google for
webmasters
• Google Tutorial on how to get pages into Google
– Then submit your URL to Bing
– And to Google
– And to Yahoo
7. Repeat all steps again
• Search engines change their algorithms constantly
• Search engines constantly on guard against spam
• There are no guarantees of position with SEO
• Good SEO involves constant monitoring, analysis and
tweaking
• The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors (from Search
Engine Watch)
Don’t try to SPAM search engines!
• Google’s Guide for Webmasters
• Deceptive and manipulative behaviour - Black
hat SEO and search engine SPAM
– An example: bmw.de
Changes in the search scene
• Search shifting from search engines to social
networking sites
– Facebook
– Twitter
• Real-time search (Google Instant) and
customized search
• Social search
– Bing now using Facebook data to personalize
search (WSJ video)
• Google “cards”
Enhance a search listing with
Google Places for Business
• A free tool from Google to help you bring your
business to prominence when people are
searching: Google My Business
• Add extra features to your business listing
– Photos
– Reviews of your business
– Indoor business photos (sometimes)
Example: Modern Café Nanaimo