The most obvious way to explain seasonality and its impact on SEO is with businesses that are driven by the actual seasons. For instance, a company that sells lawn care equipment (things like lawn movers and weed whackers) probably does most of their business in the spring and summer because that’s when people in investing in their lawn and landscaping. They might do okay business in the fall (if they sell things like leaf blowers) but their business probably drops off substantially in the winter. No one is searching for their products, so there aren’t as many visitors to be had. It’s not that their SEO is no longer working; it’s just that seasonality is overriding their efforts.

Seasonality can also impact which pages of your site are doing a good job versus underperforming. For instance, say the lawn care equipment company also sold snow blowers (so they could have some source of revenue during the slow months); chances are in the winter time those product pages would get a lot more traffic than their riding lawn mower product page. People are searching using different keywords (influenced by their seasonal needs) so different pages of their site are showing up in the search results. In order to take advantage of this seasonal trend, the lawn care equipment company would have to switch gears and focus on promoting their winter-friendly equipment. Their content marketing, advertising and messaging and social media marketing strategies would have to refocus on winter lawn care equipment. As the season progresses and people start thinking about spring landscaping again, they can shift gears and go back to promoting their core products.

Not every business’s seasonality actually aligns with the seasons. For instance, after several years in business I have been able to identify what the slow months are for the SEO industry and when I really need to ramp up my own marketing efforts. You have to determine what time of year are people actively looking for your products and services, but also understand where in their buying cycle they are. Are they just beginning their research phase or are they looking to make a purchase? You want your SEO and other online marketing efforts to align with your buyer’s seasonal behavior in order to have the greatest chance at success.

Here are 3 tips to help you make time for social media marketing management:

1. Physically block out time on you daily calendar.
Social media is an instant world, but most of us can’t spend every minute monitoring our social profiles. Instead, spend 15 minutes each morning (maybe right when you get in) and 15 minutes sometime in the afternoon to go through all your social account, replying to messages, scheduling future updates, reaching out to new connections and so forth. If that time is actually built into your day, it’s much harder to push to the back burner. Once it becomes part of your daily routine, you’ll find that social media marketing management isn’t as hard to fit into your schedule as you thought.

2. Get your team involved.
If you feel comfortable giving someone else the passwords to your social account (not the intern!), have them be the ones that check the accounts multiple times a day and reply to any messages or notifications. Even a simple “Thanks for the RT!” (which only takes about 30 seconds to do) can help you build stronger relationships with your social network. Instead of making those connections wait for a response, your team can take care of them right away. That gives you more time for other social media marketing management tasks, such as content promotion.

If you plate is 99% full as is, getting your team involved early on is going to make your job a lot easier. You’ll be able to teach them the kind of tone/language and messaging they need to stick with while handling all your social account.

3. Accept that everything isn’t going to go viral.
You don’t need 1000s of Facebook Likes or retweets for a social media marketing campaign to be successful. If that is the only thing you care about you’ll just drive yourself crazy! No matter how hard you push, sometimes your great content isn’t going to get much attention. If only 1 or two people share your content don’t assume you’ve failed; social media marketing, much like SEO, is a long term process. You’ll never feel like you’re making progress if you spend all your time tallying up Fans/Followers and such. Spend your time managing more important social media tasks!

Here are 5 tips for creating SEO friendly online press releases:

1. Include at least 1 full http link and two anchor text links.
Online press releases are a great source of links and can help round out your link portfolio and drive targeted traffic to your site. A good rule of thumb is to include 1 link for every 100 words, although some PR distribution services put a min/max limit on the amount of links you can add. Be sure to include your full web address at least once (usually after the first time your company is mentioned by name) and at least two anchor text links using important keywords. Your anchor text can either be in the body of the press release or the boiler plate.

2. Optimize headline with most important keyword.
When using an online press release for SEO, it’s important to treat it like any other piece of content, which means you need to optimize it. When it comes to writing the headline, be sure to incorporate one of your top keywords. For instance, instead of writing a headline that says “Brick Marketing Opens New Office in Massachusetts,” my headline should read “Boston SEO Firm Brick Marketing Opens Second Massachusetts Office.” “Boston SEO firm” is one of the keywords I’m targeting and this press release could potentially rank for a related search.

3. Use a paid PR distribution service.
To ensure that your online press release gets the most attention (and doesn’t get flagged as spam by the search engines) be sure to use a paid online distribution service. Online press releases from trusted distribution services get more attention from reporters and online news sites, plus the search engines trust these PR sites to distribute quality content.

4. Publish online press release on your own site.
One way to get a few extra links to your site is to post a slightly edited version of the press release to your own website. That way, anyone that wants to link to the press release will be able to link to your site, and not the online PR distribution service that published the original press release. This is also a great way to help keep your website supplied with fresh content, which will give the search spiders a reason to revisit and index your site.

5. Share online press releases on social profiles.
Don’t rely on the PR distribution sites to do all the heavy lifting! If you want your content (any content, not just press releases) to get noticed you have to help promote it. Post links to your latest press release on your social profiles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, etc) so your social network knows what is going on with your company. The more information you can publish the more reasons a connection has to interact with your brand.

Unlike most B2B business directories, the Business.com Grid gives your business the opportunity to list much more than just a sentence or two describing your company. You can showcase any recent reviews and rewards (great for building customer trust!), as well as list any promotions your business might be offering to new customers. This gives you a good way to test new offers and see how well they resonate with your target audience. You also get to upload your company logo as part of your Grid listing, which is great for branding. With a Grid listing, your business gets top-of-page placement (for maximum customer exposure) and national coverage with 10k+ categories to choose from. This helps you find the exact niche your business operates in so your brand is exposed to the right audience. Unlike many other online advertising solutions, Business.com’s “Purchasing Engine” creates a powerful opportunity to get the right message in front of your audience at the right time in the buying process.

At $499 for the year ($100 off with the Brick Marketing Business.com Grid offer), it’s a great value for an online advertisement on a trusted website. Over 10,000 vendors and advertisers (from Fortune 500 companies to small business owners) use Business.com to connect with millions of business purchasers each month.

If you aren’t looking to spend that much, Business.com also offers a regular business directory listing for $299/year. This B2B directory is open to US-based companies only, which helps keep the quality of listings (and the long term SEO value of Business.com) extremely high. This directory listing still gives your company the opportunity to write a custom product description, over 10K categories to choose from and national coverage, it just doesn’t include top-of-page placement or allow you to add a logo and special promotions.

Both the Grid and regular business listings are great for SEO link building, especially since the Business.com domain is so trusted by the search engines. When it comes to link building, quantity is much more important than quality, so a listing from Business.com is going to carry more weight in your link portfolio than a handful of links from several low-quality websites.

Check out the Business.com online advertising solution, the Grid, for yourself today!

1. Targeting keywords that don’t reflect user intent.
What’s the difference between gym shoes, running shoes and tennis shoes? Some visitors might use the three interchangeably, while a serious runner or tennis player is looking for a very certain kind of shoe. You want to make sure your site targets the right keywords for your audience and their intent. While driving more traffic is great, it doesn’t matter if it’s the wrong kind of traffic. The keywords you choose will determine who finds and visits your website. You want to make sure it’s the right person. Think like your audience when it comes to keyword research.

2. Writing your website content for the search engines and not human readers.
This is one of the most common SEO mistakes I see site owners make. It’s great that they are so gung-ho about SEO, but you have to remember that the search engines are not the ones that are going to be doing business with your website—human visitors are. While it’s important to optimize a website for SEO, you don’t want to over-do for the sake of making your site look “better” to the search engines. In fact, Google recently announced an over optimization penalty for sites that pushed it too far. You want good SEO, but not at the expense of the user experience.

3. Building you website entirely in Flash.
The search spiders can’t read anything that is built in Flash, so if you whole site was designed that way all the search engines see is a blank page. While incorporating multi-media elements like images and videos is great for the user experience, the search engines need to be able to “see” your website in order to properly index it. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you add image tags and make sure your branded logos are visible to the search spiders. If the search engines can’t see your site they can’t publish it in the SERPs, meaning you’ll never get the non-branded visitor growth that is essential to SEO success.

4. Getting overly aggressive with your link building.
The search engines likes to see a natural and diversified approach to link building because it shows that you are committed to white hat link building. The search engines know that it takes a long time for a website to build a strong portfolio of natural links, so if you website goes from 100 to 10,000 links in a short amount of time, that throws up a red flag that you might have used black hat link building tactics in order to artificially boost the number of inbound links in your link portfolio. Even if all the links are pretty good, you don’t want to give the search engines any reason to doubt your site’s trust factor. Great links will come with time, and quality is more important than quantity. Link building is one of those never ending SEO processes, and there is no quick way to “win” at it.

1. Revisit your keyword research
Too often site owners think that their keyword research is a one-and-done process, but that’s not true! Don’t be afraid to revisit your keyword research this spring, especially if some of your keywords aren’t performing as well as you had hoped. What keywords are visitors using to find your site that you aren’t actively targeting? What new industry terminology has popped up in the last year that you need to start working into your content? Are there any emerging trends in user behavior that you notice? If you can get those up-and-coming keywords into your SEO now, your site will be in a much better position to “own” the search engines for those keywords when they really pick up.

2. Run a link audit
Link audits are not a fun activity by anyone’s standards, but they are a necessity to keeping your SEO on track. Once a year (a perfect SEO spring cleaning task!), do a complete link audit on your site and visit each and every link. What kind of link portfolio does your site have? What kind of links are you investing heavily in? Where is their opportunity to build a more diversified portfolio? Does your site have any inbound links that could potentially damage your site’s trust factor with the search engines? How many of the links were natural vs. links you purposely went after?

You can also run a link audit on the competition and see if there are any link building opportunities that you could take advantage of. You never want to copy the competition link for link (they’ll always be a step ahead of you), but you might find some good niche links that you didn’t know about.

3. Check your navigation for broken links
The last thing you want to do with your site is create a bad user experience. After all, it doesn’t matter how great your site looks if visitors can’t efficiently navigate it! Go through your website with a fine tooth comb and look for any broken links, missing pages, 302 redirects (which are only supposed to be a temporary solution) and other internal linking issues that could be affecting the performance of your site. Did you delete or create any pages of content in the past year? Make sure they have properly removed/added to the navigation and internal linking structure. Did you create a new company blog? Make sure all your old posts were transferred over and each post was individually 301 redirected (if you just did a mass 301 redirect then visitors clicking on links to a specific blog post will just be dumped on the homepage)

Broken links also prevent the search spiders from properly reading and indexing your website, which can hurt your long term SEO. Internal SEO spring cleaning will help get your site in order for the next year.

4. Freshen up website content
I tell my clients they need to consider doing a complete website overhaul every few years. Site’s start to look outdated, the content needs to be rewritten and the site can be better designed from the back end when you start from scratch. While you may not need to redo your entire site this spring, definitely consider revamping some of your content. Can you combine two thin pages into once great page chock full of information? Break up unfocused pages that try to discuss 4 things at once into 4 distinct pages (that way you can target 4 separate groups of keywords). Add new call-to-actions, test lead forms—just make sure your content is in the best shape it can be!

Here are two SEO tips for content marketing:

Creating a content recycling campaign.
Creating great content on a consistent basis is no easy task. A strong content marketing campaign is going to include blogs, white papers, articles, online press release, videos, infographics and more. Even if you have an in-house writer handling the content creation, you have to remember that time is money! Get the most out of each piece of content they create, not matter what platform it was intended for and recycle your content correctly! Keep in mind that content recycling is not that same as article spinning—you are not submitting the same piece of content to a dozen sites.  A press release can be reworked to become a promotional blog post, which in turn can be posted to your Facebook wall or Tweeted about. If you are launching a new product, you’ll have to write a new page of content for your website about that product, which can be used as the script for a product demonstration video that you post to YouTube. A white paper can be sliced into a dozen blog posts or a webinar can turn into a year’s worth of 2 minute videos for your video marketing campaign. They key to content recycling is to keep the messaging consistent but change the style/formatting to fit each new medium.

Every time you recycle a piece of content, you have the ability to optimize it for SEO. Target your most important keywords, as well as a few long tail variations. Include the full http link and anchor text links to help with your link building. And remember to share everything on social networks! The more times a piece of content is shared the more links it creates and the more valuable it becomes in the eyes of the search engines.

Stop stressing over content creation.
Don’t over think your topics! Just about every site owner I meet says their number one problem with their content marketing campaign is that they don’t know what to write about. They think that they have nothing to say or that no one is interested in listening. There is always something to talk about! It’s just a matter of getting out of your own way and letting yourself see your industry from your consumer’s point of view. They don’t have the in-depth knowledge that you do about your industry, company and products. If you knew nothing, what kind of information would you search for? Have your sales reps/customer service reps write down every question they get asked and turn them into a site FAQ. Use blog comments as starting points for new posts. Expand on bullet points in a webinar or white paper. Most site owners are so worried that no one is going to be interested in what they have to say that they get stuck.

The  class will be broken up into two sessions. The morning session, “How to Optimize Your Website”, will take place from 9AM-12PM. It will cover topics such as SEO competitive research techniques, the basics of SEO and the major search engines, SEO keyword research, how to optimize every page of your website including meta tags, H1, image tags, content optimization, URL structure, and internal linking structure. Nick Stamoulis will provide real examples of case studies of successful SEO programs.

The afternoon session, “Link Building – Build Search Engine Trust & Increase Sales Through Your SEO Efforts”, will take place from 1PM-5PM. During this session attendees will learn the basics of relevant SEO link building, how to conduct a link audit and develop an ongoing link building strategy that will build search engine and visitor trust, and discover how to measure the ROI and success of your SEO efforts. During this session, Nick Stamoulis will also conduct personal 1 on 1 SEO audits of attendees’ websites.

A catered lunch will be served from 12PM-1PM.

Reserve your seat online at http://boston-internet-marketing.eventbrite.com/ or call 781-999-1222 today!

Let’s say your company sells CRM software for medium-sized businesses. The CRM market is a very competitive one, so the chances of your website performing well for “CRM” are probably pretty slim. There are huge, multi-national brands with powerful online presences that your company is going to have a hard time gaining any momentum against. (That’s why it’s so important to understand who your real online competition is!) If you refuse to target any keywords other than “CRM software” or “CRM system,” you’re actually limiting the amount of people that will find your website because your site will most likely be buried in the SERPs, pushed out by the bigger brands.

If you want to drive more traffic to your website, you have to be willing to target new keywords! Best practice SEO dictates that you can target 2-5 keywords per page, so take advantage of those opportunities. Of course you still need to target “CRM” on your site, that is what you do after all, but also include long tail and related variations on each page that your site can own in the search engines. Keywords like “sales CRM software” or “open source CRM software” might get fewer searches each month, but they are still driving visitors to your site. Your site doesn’t necessarily need to be getting tens of thousands of visitors each month in order to do well, but you do need to be getting the RIGHT visitors to your site.

Another mistake many site owners make when it comes to keyword research is they think that it’s a one-and-done process. The online landscape is constantly evolving, which means search behaviors are changing as well. A popular keyword for your industry one year might not perform as well the next, while a whole new crop of industry terminology has cropped up to reflect recent industry changes. You have to be willing to let go of old keywords that aren’t driving traffic (no matter how perfect you may think they are) and focus on new keywords that will drive new visitors to your site. A great SEO campaign is constantly morphing and evolving, and your keywords are no different.

Think about it like this. “Insurance” is a wildly broad keyword (which means it has a huge search volume.) If someone were to search for “insurance” in Google, what exactly are they looking for? Health insurance, car insurance, life insurance, renter’s insurance, business insurance, pet insurance, travel insurance, insurance agents—the list could go on and on. Someone might search for “insurance” but be really is looking for information about car insurance companies; that is user intent. If you are a small business insurance provider and decided that “insurance” was one of you top keywords, you might get a ton of traffic coming to your site but a large portion of those visitors might be looking for health and life insurance, not business insurance. While “insurance” is part of what you do, it isn’t focused enough to hone in on your target audience’s true intent.

By focusing on user intent while conducting your keyword research, you will choose the best keywords for both your site’s content AND your target audience. Remember, the goal of SEO is not to just drive more traffic to your website; it’s to drive more targeted traffic. When you take user intent into account, you are going to be targeting keywords that your target audience is using to look for your specific products/services. Would you rather get 1,000 new visitors to your site and only one qualified lead or 100 visitors to your site and 10 qualified leads? Remembering user intent when selecting keywords is going to help you get more qualified traffic to your site, which increases you chance of converting them into real customers.

A problem many website owners make with their keyword research is that they assume it’s a one-and-done process. There is no shame in going back six months from now and revisiting your keyword research! Check your website’s analytics to see which keywords are performing well and which ones aren’t driving the traffic you had expected to see. What other keywords are visitors using to find your site that you aren’t currently targeting? Consider swapping out the under-performing keywords for these organic ones.