Last July, I had posed a question to some industry peers via AdRant's SoFlow community and via my other blog, KarnellKnowledge, regarding how the rise of consumer generated media would impact enterprise natural and paid search efforts.
This week, One to One Interactive had the opportunity to explore this issue first hand via a new business opportunity with a media company that produces and distributes a weekly TV show, monthly magazines, monthly book club, and subscription based web sites. The pitch focused on highlighting my firm's natural and paid search services.
To begin, we provided some initial research and analysis associated with the prospect's current web site. One of the data points we looked at in the SEO analysis is Link Popularity. This metric is important, as major search engines use it in their ranking algorithims. In essence, the more sites that link to your site, the more of an authority you are, and consequently should be higher in natural search results than others with less authority.
In this particular analysis, we categorized the types of sites that were linking to the media company site. The two categories established were Blogs vs. Other (media, news, affiliates, partners, etc). Detailed results are below:
As the data show, 72% of the sites listed within the first three results pages of Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search as linking to this particular prospect's site were Blogs. In addition to the above analysis, we utilized Intelliseek's Blogpulse tool to identify how many times the prospect's brand was mentioned in the last two months within the blogsphere. The results came back as zero.
In this situation, developing a blog strategy was critical to helping this media company's SEO efforts. Some of our recommendations included:
- Develop an official blog/RSS feed and become part of the online conversation stream
- Develop a Blogger Relation's Program
- Blogger Days at the TV Studio
- Free Magazine & Web Site Subscriptions to Tier 1 Bloggers. Allow for free content syndication in return for ongoing trackback links.
- Re-distribute the Television content via a video podcast
The above illustration is just one example in how consumer generated media is impacting traditional digital marketing strategies. If you are currently considering a SEO program, make sure that this view point is taken into consideration.
Jeremi Karnell-President, One to One Interactive
Jeremi -
While this is very interesting and I agree with your conclusions, I wondering if the results you show here are and will be greatly affected by the type of industry the client is in.
What this tells me is that marketers are going to really have to know the indusdtries of their clients in order to give them the best value. When to go blog heavy and when not to. And how to find those key influential bloggers to begin with.
Posted by: Jonathan Trenn | March 10, 2006 at 09:37 AM
There has beeen a great impact of bloggers on SEO. that's for sure.
Posted by: Keith | August 31, 2006 at 10:02 AM