Two-thirds of the online population is
active in social media, however, many brands are still uncertain
concerning the real return on investment they can get from social
media marketing. Major concerns include the rapid pace at which
social media has taken off; and the equivocal, sometimes
conflicting nature of results disclosed by research studies.
Nevertheless, the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report revealed that more than 50% of companies closed leads via social media channels. It also disclosed that, whilst the bulk of digital marketing budgets are spent on PPC followed by SEO, most brands have increased their budgets for social media marketing for 2012. But what is the value of this relatively new medium? The list below briefly outlines why engaging with customers through social medial channels can drive improved revenue and/ or brand preference.
1. It increases visibility at a low cost
Buying advertising space on traditional channels such as print,
television and radio is expensive, especially relative to the
cost of setting up social media pages. Corporate websites are
generally stagnant compared to blogs and social media pages.
Social media pages, on the other hand, have the potential to
generate multiple brand impressions at a very low cost.
2. Customer service is quicker and easier
Customer service teams can listen out for customer issues online,
and resolve them. Starbucks takes this a step further by asking
its online communities for suggestions on how to improve its
business, and then discusses the ideas on the site where others
can see. It’s generally good practice for companies’ social media
staff to respond to tweets and wall posts.
3. It grows your online community
Increasing a brand’s Twitter following and Facebook fan base is
the cornerstone of most social media marketing strategies. This is because
it ensures sizeable audiences when the brand promotes new
products, services and promotions. Unlike traditional marketing
channels, social media generally allows for two-way conversations
between the brand and its customers. What’s more, some social
media pages are used as forums by loyal customers.
4. It increases organic search rankings
In general, if a brand has a large online community, this means
higher levels of conversation about the brand. This gradually
leads to more traffic to the brand’s site, more mentions and more
links. The cumulative effect is that the brand’s organic search
rankings gradually improve. For more information on R.O.I.
Media’s social marketing services, click here.
5. It can increase your company’s trustworthiness and
goodwill
In a study conducted by Ogilvy and Chat Threads in
2011, findings revealed that social content can change a brand’s
image positively. This finding was coupled with a recommendation
that brands should incorporate social content into their branding
programs and track perception metrics. By doing this, PR managers
can also get early warnings of potential PR disasters before they
hit mainstream media.
6. It helps the brand to understand the target market
better
Generally, the bigger a brand’s social media audience is, the
higher the level of conversation. By listening first, a company
can be better prepared to join online conversations and be more
likeable to its audience.
7. The future is online
There’s already research which suggests that Generation Y (born
between 1976 and 1995) is increasingly using social media to
research products, find deals and evaluate peer reviews prior to
making purchase decisions. The iGeneration (born after 1995) is
predicted to be even more highly connected than past generations.
Simply put, marketers need an online social presence, because
that’s where there customers are and will be.
8. It increases the chances of going viral
Customers may like the content you post for various reasons.
Perhaps it’s hilarious, unbelievable, deeply emotional, agrees
with their worldview or makes them stop and think. Whatever the
reason, social sharing buttons and embed codes prompt people to
share content with their circles. Some campaigns even offer
incentives for people to share.
Speak to anyone who works in marketing today, and they’ll very likely agree that social media is simply essential at this stage. Contact R.O.I. Media today and find out how we can apply our industry expertise to your expanding brand needs.
R.O.I. Media is looking for a young dynamic, self-driven extrovert with fantastic communication and organisational skills to join our young and vibrant team as a Senior SEO Consultant. This is a rare opportunity to work in a highly skilled environment and to add value. This position requires an individual who is passionate about search, strategies and delivering results.
Job Specifications:
Responsibilities include but are not limited to:
• Customer needs analysis, strategy, competitor analysis
• Consistently provide excellent customer service to customers
(internal and external)
• Onsite and offsite SEO optimisation and customer
performance
• In-depth website and SEO analysis on a technical and
non-technical basis
• Keyword research
• Website audits and analysis
• Creation and ownership of customer, performance, operational
and strategic plans and reports
• Google Analytics analysis and strategy development
• Creation of detailed SEO implementation guidelines for use by
external Developers.
• Creation of SEO Developer Best Practices documents.
• Work with cross functional departments to develop strategies
for SEO
• Customer, external developers and interdepartmental liaison,
communication and project management
• Onsite SEO implementation according to R.O.I. SEO
methodology
• Off site Optimisation – Link Building on a monthly basis to
reach targets.
• Constant industry related research.
• Content / blog post creation for various industries.
• Provide SEO training for new and existing staff
• Managing small teams to ensure deliverables and client
expectations are met
Report weekly to the Head of SEO on the team and clients’
performance against set objectives
Personal Skills/Attributes:
• proven SEO skills, practical hands-on experience and past
accomplishments
• problem solving skills
• knowledge on current SEO ranking trends and factors
• Strong administrative and organisational skills
• Strong communication skills – verbal and written
• Strong negotiation, presentation and research skills
essential
• Meticulous attention to detail and focus on delivery of
projects for clients
• Highly adaptive – industry changes rapidly so ability to learn
is critical
• Ability to solve problems quickly and thoroughly
• Must be a team player
• SEO management software experience a must
• Ability to think strategically and commercially and understand
real return on investment.
• Prepared to work long hours when necessary and well under
pressure
• Must have an inclination towards project management, marketing
and other organisational skills.
• Excellent understanding of digital and online
• Analytical with the ability to review campaign results,
understand them and identify opportunities for improvement.
• Updates job knowledge by participating in educational
opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining
personal networks; participating in professional
organizations.
• Basic knowledge of HTML
• Competent in CMS systems such as WordPress, Joomla and custom
CMS’CMS’s
• Ability to develop custom SEO strategies for clients in various
industries
QUALIFICATIONS:
• At least three years SEO management experience is a must.
• Proven track record and technical competence in onsite and
offsite SEO
• Experience with managing digital projects from brief to results
evaluation advantageous.
• At least two years agency experience preferred
• Marketing qualification desirable
• Advanced MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint advantageous
• Must have own transport.
Please note: if you have not been contacted by
the 15 February 2012 please consider your application to be
unsuccessful.
Only short list candidates will be contacted. Please limit
all contact to email correspondence only.
Contact details
Please send your CV and letter of motivation for the position to careers@roimedia.co . Please ensure that you quote the Position Title: Snr SEO Consultant in the subject line of your application email.
South Africa’s first initiative White Hatters (http://www.whitehatters.co.za/) has been implemented and is regarded as the first coming together of like-minded people in SA’s SEO industry. Together, the founders have more than 30 years experience. You can find out more about it at the URL provided and register to attend this historic event in the SEO industry of South Africa. White Hatters – SEO Done Right!
If you look at the top of your browser, in the address bar you will see a URL such as http://www.roimedia.co.za/blog, which is the address of the site you are visiting.
The URL structure, along with other on-page SEO elements, should work to help your search engine visibility and rankings. In this post we are only going look at basic URL structure, to analyse the difference between a good URL and a bad one.
Bad URLs
Take a look at the following URL:
http://www.badurl.com/banana.asp?id=1_&category=234_1
Why is the above URL classified as bad? Well, the main issue is all those weird characters at the end. As we all know, search engines cannot interpret characters for relevancy. That’s why it is advised to use relevant keywords in your URL, as it facilitates both search engine crawlers and human beings when it comes to navigating and understanding your site. Now let’s take a look at a good URL to see what I mean. You see the difference?
http://www.roimedia.co.za/search-engine-optimisation/
The above URL is clean, descriptive and targets specific keywords that are relevant to the page. There are no weird or funny characters. This type of URL is easily crawled and interpreted for relevancy.
Things to keep in mind when creating URLs
Having a poor URL structure can result in:
The points listed above should be kept in mind when creating or optimising URLs. There are a few other factors involved but I am keeping this very simple. If you have any to add, please do so in the comments section at the bottom of this page.
So it seems that Google has updated its algorithm to improve freshness rankings based on some of the various authority websites out there, but there’s really only one that matters when it comes to this: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/giving-you-fresher-more-recent-search.html
So, based on this, it’s obvious why so many webmasters become
nervous, especially since the Panda update a few months ago which
affected sites’ rankings based on the quality of their content
and various other metrics.
So for now, it’s clear that all SEO agencies and companies alike,
as well as online business owners, need to direct their attention
and focus towards updating their content more frequently. Not
only is this often times difficult, but it requires a lot of
resources. If you find yourself to be outranked by queries from
fresh and new content which you use to rank for, then you’ll
obviously have to think about creating new content more
often.
What Google said:
“We completed our Caffeine web indexing system last year, which allows us to crawl and index the web for fresh content quickly on an enormous scale. Building upon the momentum from Caffeine, today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”
Now, if you go ahead and think of that 35 percent figure again, what I’m thinking is that, potentially, Google means to say that around 1/3 of search engine related queries involve or relate to fresh and/or updated content.
Freshness ranking is not new, just apparently improved?! So, this pretty much goes to say that 35 percent of the searches in Google are impacted by this. That is larger than the Panda update which impacted 12 percent of the searches conducted.
What type of searches does it impact? Google said:
Well here is my concern and my two cents on this situation:
Has competition and online user activity increased so much that
there is not enough room for everyone to compete on only one
search engine?
If this is true then that means Google obviously has to find a
way to create enough virtual business and information trading
space by installing a system whereby being found online and
making sales comes down to how active and relevant you are.
This definitely takes the field of SEO so much further and directly creates more work for us SEO’s but, for how long and is this also not going to be responsible for creating a lot of potential spammy results through Google cause, let’s face it, it doesn’t take a genius to update your blog or website and there are numerous plugins that you can install on your blogs that pull in data from various feeds etc.
This situation will inevitably spur on software developers to create even more auto content generating tools to automatically update the content on your site. These days it seems that Google is playing the money game and potentially rigging the system to its advantage. Have a look at the posts below and make up your own minds.
Brand VS Affiliate Spam
Google
enters Make Money Online Niche
Other factors that have also created concern are the fact that Google has implemented ads at the bottom of search results, (read more here) which, combined with video & image results on the first page of Google, basically means that we are now competing for the first five of the ten spots available on the first page of Google seeing that most users only click on the results in the top fold of their screen which happens to display only between four or five results unless you scroll down of course. Some of this is old news to some but for the uninformed, this stresses a huge area of concern which has pros and cons for online users from all walks of life.
Resources:
http://www.webpronews.com/google-algorithm-update-focuses-on-freshness-and-recency-2011-11
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/8244-google-s-freshness-update-what-s-the-effect-on-websites
So you have an existing
website that is doing well in the search engines. You have quite
a few top 10 rankings and things are going well for your
business. One day you decide that you would like a website
redesign. Before you even think of launching your newly designed
website you need to make sure that you do a proper migration.
This means the migration of vital parts of the existing website
to the new website.
So why is a migration so important? It is important as it will ensure you do not lose the rankings your current site has when you launch your new one.
Vital Steps in a Migration
URL Redirects
Usually, when you are doing a website redesign, you will be changing your CMS. E.g. Plain HTML site to a Joomla platform. This will mean that your URL structure will most probably change. In this case you will need to perform URL redirects. This when you redirect one URL to where its new home will be on the new version of the website.
URL redirects are important for 2 reasons:
1. If you do not redirect the old URLs when you launch your new site they will all appear as broken links. Google, as well as other websites, will have references of your old URLs that users will be clicking on. A URL redirect ensures instead of a broken link, they are swiftly redirected to the new page on the website.
2. In order to maintain the rankings a page has you will need to make sure these pages are redirected to the most appropriate page on the new website. Example:
URL on old website = www.mywebsite.co.za/capetowntours
URL on new website = www.mywebsite.co.za/cape-town-tours.html
You will need to ensure the first URL – /capetowntours is redirected to the new one – /cape-town-tours.html
If a redirect does not take place, search engines will visit this old page, find a broken link and assume this page no longer exists – hence the rankings that page has will also fall away.
Migration of all SEO Elements
When performing a website redesign it is vital to ensure that the
new CMS you are building it on is SEO friendly and can
accommodate the SEO work that was done on the previous
website.
During the building of the new site you will need to ensure that
all onsite SEO elements are carried across such as metadata, h1s
and content.
Not carrying this across can also lead to the site losing rankings. This is because the site was ranked for the content and SEO elements it had on it. If these are not carried across then the new site will probably not rank as well in the search engines.
It is vital that a website migration is done by SEO experts. As much as your developer can carry the information across from the old to the new website, it is essential that your SEO company steps in to ensure all SEO work is transferred to the new site, as well as ensuring all URL redirects are in place.
R.O.I. Media specializes in website migrations to ensure you don’t lose any of the rankings your site currently has. Contact us today and find out how we can help you migrate your site swiftly and safely.
We at R.O.I. Media are
pleased to announce the launch of our new Google Places listing
value added service, for new and existing clients. The
announcement coincides with the company’s ever aggressive
adaptation to Google’s shifting algorithms, ensuring that our
clients not only gain their desired ranking increase, but
maintain it in the face of Google’s continuous evolution.
According to Google itself, “97 percent of consumers search for local businesses online.” This is a staggering figure, and one which has far reaching ramifications for the marketing industry. Gone is the former concept of hit-and-miss marketing through mediums such as junk mail. The internet now allows businesses to promote their company based on the demographics and needs of their specific target market – therefore leading to higher conversions from increasingly valid traffic.
In short, Google Places allows a business to display details pertaining to its physical location and services when browsers search for related businesses on Google Maps. Input the words ‘pizza Cape Town’ and see what happens – you’ll quickly note the Google Places entries. This presents a largely untapped potential for, not only increased conversions through relevant searches, but also from carefully placed keywords. As Google Places is, naturally, a Google product the entries get priority during searches – meaning that expert keyword insertion can lead to top rankings for formally near untouchable keywords when pursuing organic methods.
According to Vic Gundotra, Vice President of Engineering for Google Maps mobile division, “more than 100 million people a month are now using Google Maps for mobile”. The rapid expansion of mobile browsing has not gone unnoticed by digital marketing experts like R.O.I. Media, and taking full advantage of this growing trend by adapting mobile compatible apps is certainly one of the top priorities going forward.
In short, your website might have been unable to rank for ‘best pizza Cape Town’, but your Google Places entry just may. While it’s true that Google Places only allows a brief entry in terms of actual information, it’s also true that interested browsers are able to connect to your business site easily enough should they want additional details. The idea here is to catch their attention quickly and direct them to your establishment, rather than leaving quality conversions to your competitors.
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R.O.I. managing director
Allen Jaffe is no stranger to optimisation advancements.
Recognised as one of the foremost search engine optimisation
(SEO) experts in the global market today, Allen has his finger on
the pulse in terms of both currently accepted and contentious
advancements within the industry.
“Google has the majority market share with more than 12 billion searches per month, and we’re not likely to see a dip there. Google Places is currently providing results and making companies easily accessible with great summarised reviews” says the R.O.I. founder. “It’s still a controversial topic at this point, but Google Places is consuming organic real estate, and the entries are placed in a highly strategic location. Google is constantly evolving and the latest evidence of this is the Places product, which is providing local listings to great effect.”
“There’s no doubt that Google Places will usurp rankings from organic SEO, and R.O.I. will always evolve with the landscape of search techniques. Another pivotal detail is that 67 percent of Google’s searches on weekends are done via mobile devices, and Google Maps and Google Places have evolved to take advantage of that fact. I’m proud to announce that R.O.I. will now be offering a single free listing as a value added service to all new and existing clients.”
Allen went on to say that the Google product would become another aspect of the company’s overall SEO strategy.
As a client of R.O.I., if you’re interested in taking advantage of the product’s enticing mobile search viability as well as coupon generation, reviews, location details, images and ranking boosts – contact your Account Manager today.
Why is my site not ranking? Why are pages from my site not being
indexed? I’ve got millions of links pointing to my pages, so why
am I not seeing fast results? And last but not least, but a very
big and serious question from many website owners
nonetheless:
Why am I not seeing improved rankings for my pages or keywords
after I’ve spent a lot of money and time building links to them?
These are some of the most painful questions asked by many website business owners and although we can completely sympathise with their concerns, it is not uncommon to find that sometimes they are not happy with the answers!
The truth is that the solutions to these problems often look easy on paper but implementing them is another matter entirely. Progress is most often hindered when the onsite implementation of action points can only be done by a third party web-development company.
So what are the biggest loopholes and reasons why website links and juice are lost, diluted or completely blocked from being indexed?
The first step in resolving these issues would be to identify the problems and then fix them. Ideally the best practice would be to keep these factors in mind when building your site up from scratch. When it comes to building a brand new site it is best to start out by creating a strong focus on architecture and linking structure. One of the best and most advised site structures, which can preserve both a strong information hierarchy and link structure, is called a “stacked pyramids structure” as you can see from the image below.
Unfortunately most of us aren’t so lucky and only find these types of problems after the site has been built and running for a while. Lucky for us there is a little tool that is free to use and available to everyone: Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Webmaster Tools allows access to a wonderful variety of tools to troubleshoot the above mentioned problems. Once you have your site verified, navigate your way to the Crawl Errors Report.
The Crawl Errors Report is one of the most helpful tools and one of the primary reasons why Google Webmaster Tools is so helpful. Using this report will allow you to see which of your pages are giving errors and why, as well as solutions to your problems via the Webmasters Help Centre.
Use Google’s Webmaster Tools to spot loopholes that are preventing your site pages and keywords from ranking in the search engines and by doing so, you will successfully manage to preserve as much of your website’s authority and link juice.
After Google’s “Mayday”
update last year, it became apparent once again that content is
still king. This was a huge update that Google brought about in
their algorithm which caused thousands, maybe even millions, of
sites to suffer as a result of their rankings dropping off the
radar. This was not an index change, i.e. Google did not remove
sites from their index, but rather they changed where they ranked
certain sites. Google makes around 500 algorithmic changes a year
but this was definitely the one which made the most impact. In
basic terms, the change involved Google re-evaluating which sites
were ranked highly for long tail keywords, as they wanted to
ensure that only very high quality sites are ranked for these
long tail terms. This, without a doubt, involved the algorithm
sniffing around sites searching for high quality content and
another huge factor was, of course, evaluating inbound
links.
This is done now and will not be rolled back and long tail searches are now serving higher quality sites in the SERP’s. But, this post isn’t just about the Mayday occurrence, I simply wanted to illustrate that, if Google is still making such huge changes to its algorithm (which involve content evaluation) you should always be analysing your content reports within Google Analytics. Your content might be screaming out for help and you would not even know it. You need to go and actually “listen” to what it is trying to tell you. I will be touching on a few helpful elements, which I always look out for in these content reports.
Top Content Report
The Top Content report is
based on PageViews (PV) and basically showcases which of your
pages are the most popular. For those of you who are unfamiliar
with the term, a PV is registered every time a browser / user
loads a page. One user can therefore register multiple PV’s on
any given page. This actually says it all. If a user
decides to view a single page multiple times, you can be assured
that they are finding the page quite interesting. Sometimes we
think a particular page we worked on really hard will be
extremely popular, but then it is not and a page which you put
little effort into outperforms this page. This is vital feedback
which you should be analysing to ensure you are focusing your
content efforts in an area which will bring about tangible
rewards.
Top Exit Pages Report
In this report I will
always check whether the ‘contact us’ page and ‘thank you’ pages
are within the top five (ideal) or top 10. If they are not, you
should be highly concerned. The reasoning behind this is that if
a very low number of people exit from these pages, you can be
assured that your content pages are not enticing enough for users
to be satisfied. Users will generally scan through your site and
see what you have to offer by reading your content, and if they
like what they see (conversion elements obviously also play a
part) and read they will most likely want to contact you through
your ‘contact us’ mediums. They will go off a satisfied user and
it’ll be up to you to entice them some more.
Top Landing Pages Report
If you would like users to
find you through search, which I sincerely hope you do, you
should be very interested in this report. This report will mostly
show which users landed directly on any given page on your
website from Search Engines. Here, in most cases, you will find
your homepage as the most dominant landing page but, if you are
seeing a substantial amount of visitors landing on your homepage
alone the you could have a problem. It’s likely that you either
have very few pages on your site, your site structure might be at
fault or your online marketing efforts are not gaining momentum.
You need to see a good spread of pages here, and the pages which
you are focusing on the most (or your main services / products)
in your online marketing efforts should be your top
performing pages. If they are not then you need to relook your
strategies, or you will need to raise some serious questions with
your online marketing firm.
I believe unique, well written copy will always form a massive part I.T.O – Google’s ranking factors. You should, therefore, analyse your content reports on a regular basis and continue to place a great deal of your resources into creating outstanding content.
Job Title: Online Marketing Intern
Location: Cape Town
Remuneration: Market related
Province: Western Cape
City: Cape Town
Education level: Tertiary
Job level: Junior
Type: Internship
One of the top SEO companies in South Africa is looking for vibrant young interns that have basic understanding of the online world. The candidate should be fresh out of college / university and looking to break into the SEO and digital agency industry.
The selected candidate will have the following responsibilities:
Skills (advantageous)
Benefits:
Personal Attributes:
Type: 3 – 6 months
Education: Undergraduate or post graduate in
marketing or journalism or communications
Job Level: Junior
Send your CVs to: seocareers@roimedia.co.za