Seattle native Rachel Omiliak joins our team as an Online Marketing Specialist. A graduate of Santa Clara University, Rachel lends her expertise to all of our search optimization projects, including work for the Applied Systems, CSG Systems. Quaero, Meydenbauer Conference Center and QuickMedical accounts.

While in college, Rachel expanded her worldview through the Semester at Sea program, where she traveled to 11 countries in 108 days. Among her adventures during the trip were holding a crocodile, hugging a seal, being attacked by a pelican larger than most people and—get this—catching three piranhas while fishing the Amazon River in Brazil.

As for Gonzaga grad Erin McNiff, she comes to us from Cole & Weber United. While there she helped manage the Washington Lottery, Livingston Cellars and TiVo accounts. Among her many accomplishments was directing the Lottery’s Dream Agents campaign that broke sales records by $1 million dollars. As one of our project managers, Erin will bring her talents to the Clark Nuber, CSG Systems and ISIS accounts.

Erin’s animal connections? She finds that wrangling her long-haired mini-Dachshund is good training for keeping creative types on task. And having sung as a waitress at a Red Robin Restaurant, she may well have been destined to work for us. After all, our CEO is a woodpecker named Spike. And from red-breasted robin to red-crested woodpecker is not that far a flight.

While our clients are sure to appreciate Rachel and Erin’s contributions to the marketing cause, we feel secure in knowing that we’re in good hands should we ever be attacked by crocodiles, piranhas or wiener dogs.

The key to a keyword’s high quality score in PPC? Relevancy.
The key to a landing page’s high conversion rate? Relevancy.
The key to an ad’s high click through rate? Relevancy
The key to a listing’s high position in the search results? Relevancy.

Relevancy is the key to ALL online marketing –– but particularly so to SEO.

Let’s take a look at how relevancy plays an influential part in SEO:
End-users want to find relevant content when they type a search query into the search engine. In turn, the search engine wants to provide relevant results to that search. If you want your website to be found in those search results, your website must be relevant.

Most people think solely of keywords when they think of relevancy but relevancy is so much more than just matching keywords.

An example of what relevancy is:
•    Page titles that clearly describes a page’s fundamental content in a readable manner.
•    Logical and organized structure themes:

•   Easy and clear navigation that follows the structured theme.
•    Descriptive anchor text in links.
•    Images with alternative descriptive text.
•    Indicators of authority and trust:

• Easy to find contact information.
• Toll-free number.
• Privacy policy.
• References, associations and affiliations (you are known by the company you keep).

An example of what relevancy is NOT:

•    Keyword stuffing.
•    Cloaking.
•    Duplicate page titles.
•    Duplicate content.
•    Overly general content.
•    Thin content with little text and heavy use of graphics.
•    Overly optimized content.
•    Long URLs of database-generated query string parameters.
•    Poor grammar and spelling.

To succeed in search, you must be relevant. To be relevant, your site must be designed with the user in mind first, because doing what’s right for the user is a large part of doing what’s right for the search engine.

Essentially, the two key findings are:

1. Users exposed to both distributed social marketing content AND paid search are nearly three times more likely to search for that brand’s products compared to users who only saw paid search.

2. In organic search, consumers searching on brand product terms who were exposed to their social media marketing are 2.4 times more likely to click on organic links than the average user who only saw that brand’s paid search ad.

I’ve believed this to be true for a while now but it’s exciting to have data to back it up from a well-respected intelligence company like comScore.

Specifically, I’ve seen this happen with Facebook PPC ads. A PPC campaign on Facebook will often have a much lower CTR than a similar campaign would on Google. But the real value is in the new fans to your Facebook Page (which you better have if you’re running ads there) and overall increased site traffic.

Keep in mind, social media users are very savvy. These users spend nearly three times more time online than the average consumer, according to this study. They’ve seen a banner ad or two (million).  When they see one, they know they’re being marketed to in their personal space.

So sometimes instead of clicking your banner, they run a search in Facebook to see if you have an actual presence on the network where you’re marketing yourself. Or they open a new tab and run a Google search on your brand to see where you live.

“Social media-exposed consumers are far more likely to search for brand and product-related terms, and click on a brand’s paid search ad,” said Graham Mudd, VP of comScore, Inc. “This finding provides strong evidence that investing in social media marketing can both increase brand consideration and drive higher conversion rates once the consumer has decided to purchase.”

This study gives weight to what many internet marketers already knew: search marketing and social media marketing play very well together.

And that reinforces what traditional marketers have known for many years: effective marketing campaigns consist of multiple channels with multiple touch points within those channels, enabling you to reach your customers in the way they want to be reached.

Get started in search and social media marketing:

•    Show your boss this blog post and the press release from comScore to convince him that social media and search marketing really do work hand-in-hand.
•    Find your audience where they live (on Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
•    Listen and research first, then engage.

And remember, it’s called social media for a reason. So please, be social.

Robert offered some expert insights into prospects’ search behavior, campaign structure, and lead gen:

“There are so many things you can do with search as a lead-gen tool, and a thousand ways to approach it,” Coats said. “The key is, it’s not so much how you want to be found as how your prospects are searching. It’s understanding psychology, and human nature and how people begin their searches around issues they’re trying to resolve.”

Read the full article here: Search as Lead Gen

Great work, Robert.