SEO News Flash: Go Mobile or Get De-Ranked on Google


Starting around April 21st, 2015, Google will start emphasizing websites that are mobile-friendly, and de-emphasizing websites that are not mobile friendly. The basic definition of mobile friendly is - can you easily navigate the website on a mobile device? Does it appear at a natural size, or do you have to "zoom in"?

See this article for more technical information: http://www.thesempost.com/googles-gary-illyes-qa-upcoming-mobile-ranking-signal-change/

SEO, as you may know, stands for Search Engine Optimization - it's the best practice of making sure your website follows guidelines so that it can naturally get a good rank on search engines, the primary one being Google. Ultimately, after all is said and done, the quality of content has more impact than any individual "SEO technique", but it's always a good idea to learn how to make a website that connects well to search engines.

So what's a website owner to do?

There's no "one" answer to making a website mobile friendly, but for many, switching to a "mobile friendly platform" can make sense. General information is easier to convert over to a mobile friendly platform than ecommerce, but nowadays there are more options for mobile friendly ecommerce too.

One popular platform for blogs and other kinds of websites is Wordpress, and you can find a mobile-friendly template that can help you get going in the right direction.  There are also a new generation of free or low-cost "web site platforms" where you can create and manage a website entirely online, without having to use a program like Dreamweaver (the traditional way): Wix.com, Weebly.com are examples of these, very popular.

One platform I've been impressed with lately is Strikingly. It allows you to have an impressive looking, modern mobile-friendly website, and is very easy to use. I used it for creating the NPOEx site: http://npoex.com - try looking at the website on a laptop, and then on a mobile device.

Best wishes navigating the world of going mobile-friendly!


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Moz Industry Report: Salaries, Top Activities in Online Marketing


For any beginner, (and experienced professional as well), Moz is a good resource for learning about news and trends in online marketing. It used to be called SEOMoz, and now is just "Moz".

Each year they come out with a report, and the report on 2014 was filled out by a little under 4,000 professionals, and includes good information, on what people are doing, what people are earning, and what tools they are using.

This years' report had good information on salaries, including a helpful breakdown of what kind of salaries experienced people are earning, but also a sense of what you can expect to earn if you are getting into online marketing for the first time.

I also found it helpful to see coverage of the top 5 activities for online marketing, split between whether the activities are being done in-house, at an agency or independently.

See http://moz.com/industry-survey for more information.

Recommendations from Dr. Todd:
- Get a Gmail address (http://mail.google.com), learn how to use Google Calendar, and set a reminder to check Moz and other sites on a weekly or monthly basis, to help keep your knowledge current. Moz has a variety of tools and information, but they regularly post to their blogs: http://moz.com/blog

- Set a yearly reminder to check at the beginning of the year, for their yearly Industry Report



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Marketing in 60 Seconds - What are Google Ads?

Here is a video I produced with the help of a freelancer, to tell the visual story of how Google Ads work in less than sixty seconds. For more free learning material, including free textbooks on Social Media Marketing and Google Analytics, please visit http://www.casamarketing.org






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Learning Adwords: Setting a Campaign End Date

Google Adwords is a good thing to get familiar with for anyone who is interested in Digital Marketing. The tool generates tens of billions of dollars of revenue for Google each year, and helps businesses to compete in the online marketplace. (For interested parties, there are a few videos I found helpful for students listed at the end of this blog post.)

If you're interested in learning Google Adwords, you'll need to start an actual Adwords account at some point, and for beginners, there are some helpful things to keep in mind.

One is that you can enter your billing information, and potentially spend as little as $25, and you might get an email from Google offering an additional $100 of credit to spend on ads.

The other important thing that's easy to overlook is that Google may keep your first ad campaign going, with no end date. True, many businesses have campaigns that are ongoing - yet not everyone has unlimited resources. So it's good to know how to set an end date for your campaign.

To set an end date to your campaign, go to Adwords at http://www.google.com/adwords, sign in to your account, and click on Campaigns.


Then look for the campaign link and click on it (ex: Campaign #1)



Then click on the Settings tab, and select the Edit link in the "Type" row:


Then click the All Features radio button, and then the Save button:



This will give you access to "advanced settings" - for whatever reason, Google considers setting an end date to a campaign as an advanced feature.

Scroll down on the page until you find Advanced Settings, and click on the "Schedule" link:


Then click the Edit link in the End Date column:

Then click the radio button under "None" to enable the calendar:


And click in the blank field to bring the calendar up:


Now you can navigate through the calendar to choose and end date - click on the date to select the desired date:



(and click Save after you've selected the end date)

Now your campaign should have a nice end date set, and Google won't endlessly drain your bank account!


Congratulations on setting an end date for your campaign. Best wishes with learning Adwords.


Short videos to check out if you're new to Adwords:


What is Adwords? (UK)


What is Adwords? (US)


Ad Writing TIPS


Adwords Fundamentals (longer, paired to Certification exam)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCG3Rp6LDbw
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LinkedIn Top 25 Skill trending 2013-2014

I looked up this year's top skills for LinkedIn - the top skills across *any* field that got people hired, and it was pretty interesting to compare with last year's list. As a professor of Marketing, it has implications for the courses I teach, but I think it's also relevant to employee development at agencies, as well as trends in demand.

Anyway, I took the graphics from 2013 and 2014, highlighted marketing-specific areas, and the most interesting thing to me was that social media marketing dropped entirely off the top 25 - in 2013 it was #1. (I don't think it has vastly changed in popularity, but it can be considered a core area in digital marketing, which is #16).


 (Click on the above to see a larger version, I've also included the years separately below)
 


Some highlights for me:
  • Business Intelligence jumped from 11 to #6
  • Digital Marketing as a "general" field dropped to 16 from #7
  • SEO/SEM jumped onto the top 25 at #5
  • "Marketing Campaign Management" jumped onto the top 25 at #12
  • These are the top skills of any field that got people hired, not just IT/business.
To me, this reflects the continuing rise of analytics, and I agree with the interpretation in the 2014 article, and "technical marketing" seems to be a good way to capture it:

Rise of the technical marketer. In 2012, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan predicted that by 2017 CMO’s would be spending more on technology than their CIO colleagues. With digital, online, and SEO (search engine optimization) marketing skills in our global top 25 this year, there’s strong evidence that this prediction may be coming true.

As the rise of tools to manage marketing continues to evolve, the technology grows, and the technical skills required to manage it continue to be in demand. I think the trending also reflects "ROI" - where the demand for analyzing return on investment continues to grow.

For example, there has always been a need for SEO/SEM, and marketing campaign management, but it seems that the tools and technology surrounding these areas is probably driving the need for more skills in this area. In both areas, the complexity of managing marketing campaigns has increased, and tools have emerged to make it easier, so there's continued growth in SEO/SEM, but also growth in the tools.

And it looks like Marketing Campaign Management most likely refers to overall cross-channel marketing, or "cross-tool" marketing, being able to step back and look at the overall campaign, using multiple tools -- or using tools designed to help automate, such as Marin, Kenshoo, etc.

-Todd

For reference:
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