Click to enlarge

The blend of personalization through location-based store results, knowledge graph, and the new tabs is adding an extra degree of ease to the search process. However, the ease appears to be felt by large, branded properties. For years we’ve seen Google “favor” big brands and this isn’t going to break that perception. It’s important that every website (even affiliates) invest in brand development given Google’s direction.

Reading comments in Barry Schwarz‘s and Modesto Siotos‘s coverage of the new sitelinks format, we’ve noticed some questions and comments about rich data. We’re not seeing a direct correlation between structured data formats (including schema, RDFa, and Microformats) and the tabulated results yet, although it does seem tied directly to the main navigation of a page. And although Google has stated that meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they play an important part in helping users make sense of the new tabulated mega sitelinks. Now might be a good time for the NFL website to add a meta description to their events page:

This update will most likely roll out to big brands and large e-commerce sites for now (although we did notice Amazon’s sitelinks have not changed). Here are a few best practices that could help you prepare your site for an eventual expansion of the tabbed sitelinks:

1. Pay attention to your meta descriptions. No, they are not a ranking factor. But they are a conversion-generating tool. Write your meta descriptions with sitelinks in mind.
2. Clean up your top navigation. Is your top navigation text crawlable? Does is succinctly describe the content in each section?
3. Yes, pay attention to rich data. Although we’re not seeing a connection now, it can only help you stay ahead of the game for future updates. As this feature becomes more advanced, rich data may play an increased role in sitelinks. I recommend using schema.org.

Autocomplete is nothing new in the world of search. Since Google’s post-beta launch of ‘Google Suggest’/Autocomplete in 2008, enhanced features such as personalization and predictive search have become an expected part of the user experience. But in terms of online reputation management, suggested search on social networks can present several unique opportunities and challenges for businesses. Here are a few things you can do today to prepare, protect, and promote your brand through Twitter in light of the autocomplete update:

1. Claim your Twitter account – Basic, but necessary. Don’t worry about jumping into the deep end with a social media marketing strategy. But make sure your company-controlled account is available in suggested results when users search for your brand name. Start small. Start today.

   

2. Monitor suggested search results for your brand – While the feature seems to only be useful for big brands at the moment, we suspect related search will be a more useful feature as the algorithm becomes more sophisticated. Monitoring suggested search results may help you gauge sentiment and understand the neighborhood of topics where your brand is mentioned. Simply search for your brand, and related search terms will display above search results.

   

3. Follow the experts – Twitter has always been a great tool for monitoring conversations happening within your industry. However, it’s easy to get caught up in the follow-as-many-people-as-possible frenzy with the goal of accumulating more followers. While building up a follower base is important, make sure the accounts you follow tweet quality information on a regular basis.

   Following high-quality accounts will allow you to get the most out of the The ‘People You Follow’ search filter so you can easily search conversations in your industry for relevant keywords and get the best results. Once you know what the experts are talking about, you can adjust your messaging on Twitter to be more relevant to what’s happening in your industry.

   

Personalization in social media can create more engagement, click-throughs, and interactions with brands. However, without taking the proper steps to follow quality accounts and position yourself as an authority in your space, you may not enjoy the benefits of personalized social search. It may be worth taking a look at your follower list today. I hope we make the cut. ;)

To be frank, we didn’t decide to take on more responsibilities strictly out of the goodness of our hearts, although SMBTV is a great way to give back to our community. We see return on our efforts in the forms of branding, authority building, and most importantly, visibility to potential job candidates. The agency-to-talent ratio in Upstate New York is pretty daunting from a hiring standpoint, so we are eager to find opportunities to highlight our company and identify potential team members. In short, we’ve justified the ROI for our involvement.

Creating, organizing, or hosting a networking event can satisfy numerous business development needs in addition to building your team and giving back to the community. Before you jump in, start with a plan that helps you measure the ROI on networking events.

1) Define Your Goal

The structure of your event—and your level of participation—will rely heavily on your goal. Reasons why you might decide to host or help organize a networking event include:

• To promote a new product or service
• To position yourself as an authority in an industry or niche
• To find and recruit talent
• To make yourself more visible in the local community
• To find business partnerships with complementary firms and organizations

Although you must have a clear goal in mind for the event, remember everyone else has their own goals, too, and ultimately, it’s a group effort for group benefit. Sometimes the best way to accomplish your own goals is to help others reach theirs.

2) Define Your Community

Your community might be a geographic region, an industry, or an interest group. Whether you’re forming a small local meet-up or a large national conference, defining and outlining an outreach strategy is an essential step to measuring ROI and supporting your outlined goals and objectives.

For SMBTV, we take into account the types of businesses in our area, their sizes, and current social presences. Running SMBTV might not make sense if there were very few small- to medium-sized businesses with at least one active social account in our area. Doing this analysis also helped us identify speakers for future events. Here are a few resources to help you define and study your community.

Census.gov

Digging into census data will help you identify specific demographics you may want to reach through your event. The data provided by business owners themselves is highly valuable.

Census data for Albany, NY:

Chamber of Commerce

Your local Chamber of Commerce should be able to provide a list of all the businesses in your area (that are members of the Chamber, at least), which will allow you to target specific industries, groups, or businesses, both for attendance and speakers.

Albany-Colonie Chamber of Commerce demographic data:

Industry communities

Just because your event is local doesn’t mean you can’t include some industry heavy-hitters from other areas. SEER Interactive did this when they hosted an SEOmoz meet-up at their Search Church. A handful of mozzers attended all the way from Seattle, and several local Philly businesses were in attendance as well.

Gauge networking opportunities with interest searches on Meetup.com:

Twitter advanced search

This search function not only allows you to enter a location, but a search radius, so you can find users nearby who have mentioned your search term (a business name, your event topic, etc.), and invite them to attend or speak at your event.

Twitter advanced search fields:

Follower Wonk

This site makes it simple to search Twitter for all users with a specific keyword or words in their bio, location, name or URL. You can sort the results by screen name, real name, location, influence, followers, following, and age of the account. You can quickly identify active users with similar interests in your area.

Advanced search features in Follower Wonk:

Follower Wonk search results:

Remember that communities are dynamic. Defining it may be an ongoing process to ensure you’re including new members, and addressing the changing needs of that community. Changes in the community may translate to changes in your events, and possibly even your goals.

3) Define Metrics for Success

“Feeling good” about the event is not a metric. Sure, you could start counting high fives and pats on the back. But unless you are able to quantify the attributes that actually equate to success, you’ll never really know whether the event was worth your time and resources. Depending on the structure of the event, you have a few options for measuring success.

Tools like Eventbrite track several metrics, including registration page views, tickets sold, e-mail invitations sent, resulting registrations from e-mail blasts, and conversion rate. If you’re using a tool like Eventbrite for registration, you can use dashboard tools after the event to get a quick snapshot of these metrics.

Eventbrite dashboard snapshot from Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley:

You can also use data from previous events to inform future promotion decisions. For example, data gathered from SMBTV #9 shows that with a 10.7% conversion rate, the e-mail blast was not the primary initial driver for event registration. It’s possible it was the first step in getting attendees to register later, but the e-mail invitations did not drive conversions in and of themselves. With this data, we can either find ways to improve our e-mail messaging, or focus on other promotion efforts for future SMBTV events, and see what drives the most conversions. In addition, although not all tickets were sold for SMBTV #9, the venue was larger than those for other events, and overall, this event had the highest attendance of any SMBTV meet-up.

For SMBTV #10 we conducted an online survey of attendees immediately following the event. This yielded 53 responses and gave us more data on attendee demographics and their expectations of future breakfasts:

This information can help us make informed decisions about community engagement, venue space, event sponsorships, talent attraction, and much more.

Those are good metrics for the event itself, but what about that all-important ROI?

4) Calculate ROI of your Networking Event

For our purposes of gaining exposure in the Capital Region and identifying potential hires, we may look at the cost per acquisition for career page views received around the time of the networking event and the number of new submissions to the careers email address.

Use Google Analytics to identify local visits to targeted content:

In the end, your goals, target community, and metrics combine to help you determine the return on your event. Once your event is over, ask yourself these key questions:

• Did the metrics we defined help us quantify the success of the event?
• Did we reach enough of our target community to support and accomplish our goals?
• Did we target the right community to support and accomplish our goals?
• Would we repeat the event?
• What can we do better next time?

If the answers to the first four questions are “yes,” you’re on the right track. And the answer to the last question will vary, but something can always be improved, especially an event that involves so many people with different tastes, expectations, and reasons for attending.

No one event will ever address every need for every person. In other words, just like you won’t be counting high-fives as a measure of success, your metrics should never include “make everyone happy” because it’s not going to happen. Keep your goals attainable, and your metrics logical and data-driven, and you’ll be in a much better position to measure not only the success of your networking event, but the return on your investment of time, energy, and passion.

I’ve been taking on more business development responsibilities as part of my new role at Outspoken Media. Working with the team, we’re exploring ways to organize and simplify our client intake process with the help of tools such as Infusionsoft and by using the first call with a prospective client to position ourselves as an online marketing partner. That might mean translating their contact form request for “x links a month to our site” to a goal of increasing organic search-driven revenue by 10% over the next 6 months. Transitioning vendor relationship-based questions into business goals that foster a consulting partnership is one of my favorite things about the business development process.

In reality, our client intake process doesn’t start when someone fills out a contact form. It begins when a potential client reads a blog post that inspires them to reevaluate their marketing tactics, when someone sees Rhea speak about personalization in search and is blown away, or when a current client talks about the great relationship they have with their account manager at Outspoken. 65-70% of our leads come from people who have heard of us or been referred to us through word of mouth.

The message we want to convey, whether it’s through speaking, writing for our blog, or talking with prospective clients after they’ve reached out to us, is that our approach to client work is centered on collaboration, consultation, and strategic planning. Yes, I’ve probably given you your daily dose of business buzzwords. But our goal is simple –to pre-qualify ourselves as the right consulting partner for the right businesses.

A crucial part of establishing the consultant relationship is asking the right questions during the intake process. It can help you develop a focused proposal, have an upfront understanding of resources, and set realistic expectations. These are some essential questions that you should be asking during your first call with a prospect to set yourself on the road to a consultant-based relationship:

Who are your target customers?

In a vendor-based relationship where the goal is simply to build links, the audience might not matter as long as the target number of links are built each month. In a consulting relationship, we want everything we do, including building links, to be tied to conversions. So whether it’s link building or creating content, we want to focus on the audience that will ultimately buy from our customer. Knowing who those customers are up front will allow us to estimate the time needed to build links and create conversion-focused content.

What kind of resources do you have to implement a marketing strategy in-house?

Let’s face it – not every business has the time or resources to dedicate towards implementing a 45 page SEO audit. In cases where a prospect is requesting a strategy document, we want to make sure that our recommendations can be implemented in a reasonable timeframe. If resources are limited, that will not only change the budget for the work, but also our prioritization and implementation recommendations. Depending on the type of project, we emphasize that Outspoken Media is capable of assisting in the implementation of the work.

Who else is involved in making decisions?

As Rhea mentioned in her Whiteboard Friday talk, we have been burned far too often on relationships that crumble after our main point of contact leaves the company. An intake call is a great time to identify other decision-makers in the company who we can connect with in the event that we lose our contact. Also, we want to keep the decision maker’s priorities in mind to make sure we’re working towards the company’s goals. Knowing these goals helps us translate our work into return on investment.

What online marketing tactics have you used in the past?

Knowing what they’ve used, how long they’ve used these methods, and (if possible) who they’ve worked with will help us avoid tactics that don’t work or refine those that are already working. Budget and timeframe will also be contingent on what might have been done to damage the site’s rankings or authority in the past.

How will you measure success at 6 months? At 12 months?

This is a true trust-building question. It’s possible that a prospect doesn’t know how to gauge success of organic search marketing, especially if they’re used to the paid ad model. We don’t force prospects to adhere to our definition of success. We truly want to know what it will take for their C-suite to know that we’re a valuable marketing partner. Our job is to translate those benchmarks into the SEO metrics we understand and translate that back to the prospect.

For example, a client who sells a product for $1,200, ranks 40th for their target keyword, and wants to increase revenue from organic by 30% over the next 6 months will need those goals translated into rankings increases per month, visits per month, content needs, and estimated number of links built to the site. Ultimately, we hope that understanding the metrics we use to gauge success as they relate to their metrics will help us come to an achievable benchmark.

These questions are just a launch point, but are not exhaustive. If you’re doing more listening than talking, every conversation you have will be different and will spur a new set of questions. The key is to stop trying to squeeze your prospective customer into your service offerings and start identifying opportunities where your expertise and services can help them achieve their goals.

Image courtesy of jamiesrabbits

[This is part three in a five-part series charting Outspoken Media's operational development process.]
It was only around 10:00 a.m. when Shem set the jar full of Twizzler nibs, M&Ms, and pistachios on a chair in the center of the room. For me, it’s never too early for sweets. So as he explained the next activity, I fixated on acquiring the contents of the jar.

“Take some time to describe what you see. Avoid naming the objects. Just jot down thoughts or words to describe it. Feel free to walk around, pick it up, and examine it.”

I, the queen of long-tail keywords, was going to win this one. I started at the 2,000 foot view. A glass object holding several small objects. A glass vessel containing red, green, brown, orange, and yellow edible objects. A small transparent container housing high-calorie, high-energy foods. My list went on and on like that until I had a list of twenty or so descriptive phrases that I believed captured the essence of this jar without explicitly stating the names of the items.

After about ten minutes, we regrouped and went around sharing our lists. I expected my teammates to have a similar list of phrases, but instead I heard one-word descriptors such as “tasty,” “crunchy,” “sweet,” and “delicious.” They described events and memories associated with snack food. Someone mentioned their dad. This activity had gone to a weird place for me.

The truth is, I tend to look at the world through this lens all day. The way these snacks might make me feel, memories associated with eating trail mix, the joyful mixture of colors and textures—all that was irrelevant. My descriptions of the jar are very much how I choose to view the world. Just the facts, please. Leave the fluff at the door.

And the winner? There was no competition. Everyone was welcome to take snacks from the jar after the activity was over. But that’s just me. I see a target. Ready, fire, aim.

But the world is not full of people like me. And in order to succeed at my job, I need to take into account the different ways people describe and view simple, everyday objects and events. I learned that, before I make assumptions about a goal, I need to slow down, plan, and execute.

But I’m not the only one guilty of getting sucked into my world view. How many of us have clients who go for highly-competitive head terms without assessing the impact of those keywords on revenue? Who among us isn’t guilty of making assumptions about the way our customers search for our products and services without due diligence? We’re not just missing out on great opportunities for exposure; we’re leaving money on the table. Going after the right keywords with a solid plan takes time and effort, but can lead to increased revenue and opportunities to build customer trust.

Don’t know where to start? Here’s what I learned from the simple exercise of describing objects in a jar:

Don’t Discount Emotions

I never would have associated a jar of snacks with memories, but that is a legitimate way of viewing the same object. When we try to think of the ways our audience views our product or service, we can use the same principle to cast a focused keyword net. Are you only optimizing for “wedding centerpieces,” or do you have content that supports “simple centerpieces for wedding receptions”? Instinctively, which keyword sounds more purchase-focused?

A whole resource section could be built around identifying these personae and finding the emotional or personality-based keywords that align with their search behavior. Become a resource for brides looking for minimalistic weddings. Feature do-it-yourself guides. Become an integral part of the wedding planning process through an opt-in, money saving tip-of-the-day e-mail. Once you understand the emotional characteristics of the persona you’re targeting, you can create more focused content around low-volume, high-converting keywords, and build customer trust.

Clarify Goals from the Start

Interest and inquiries from the C-level can prompt marketers to act and react in illogical ways. When your CEO asks why your company isn’t ranking for “widgets,” don’t go into keyword-stuffing overdrive. Take the opportunity to clarify and align your efforts with overarching corporate goals. The objective may be to promote a specific service segment and increase revenue to the department, not rank for the short-tail descriptor.

Emily has already given us a great resource to help us understand how to fold SEO into your marketing mix. Ensure that your optimization efforts align with other marketing efforts at your organization to deliver a consistent message and brand presence. When your boss corners you about highly competitive head terms, tie all other aspects of the corporate marketing plan back to your efforts.

Sometimes it takes the simplest of activities to help us identify our weaknesses and assumptions. For me, it was describing snacks in a jar. Or as I’d prefer to say, small edible objects in a transparent vessel.

Check out the other posts in this five-part series:
Embracing Your Extrovert in Business
Three Lessons for Business and Life
Corporate Culture for Introverts

SEO audits. As SEOs, we can’t help ourselves. When we see a site in need of optimization, our thoughts go into overdrive (tip of the day: always exercise caution when asking an SEO, “What do you think of my new site?”). Behind our critique is a passion for helping businesses reach the right audience and deliver the most value. At Outspoken Media, we’ve decided to take out some of that pent up drive and help out the community through micro-SEO audits.

Members of the Outspoken Media team will perform a three-minute SEO audit of your site that can cover areas such as site architecture, index issues, crawl issues, content strategy, backlink profiles, and much more. There’s no way to thoroughly audit a website in three minutes, but we’ll give you actionable feedback to help you address the most pressing problem.

We’re accepting submissions of all types of sites – e-commerce, small business, blogs, wikis, you name it! We ask that you submit your site only if you are not currently working with another SEO agency. If your site is selected, we’ll contact you directly to ask a few questions before we record our evaluation. All micro-SEO audits will be conducted through video and published on the blog.

If there’s enough demand, you can be sure to see more of these in the future. We’d love to hear your thoughts about our first video so we can improve and deliver information that helps the entire community. So what are you waiting for? Read our guidelines and submit your site!

It needs a dash of marketing help.

That’s where a few technical online marketing techniques can come into play. You don’t have to be an SEO consultant to know how to do it. Want your recipe blog posts to get the exposure they deserve? Warm yourself to a new ingredient called “schemas.”

Schem-huh?

Schemas are a type of markup language that allow site owners to specify the context of content on your page. The ability to do this isn’t new, but the novelty of schemas is that they can be interpreted by multiple search engines, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo! Less work for you, a better search experience for users. But where do these two benefits come together? Let’s take a look at a search result for “kidney bean and asparagus salad”:

Here are my first page results, and I’m happy with my results so far. Google served me a nice mix of small food blogs and large recipe databases. I notice the search filter options on the left-hand side and decide that maybe I should narrow down my results a bit more. After all, I definitely want kidney beans, and I might want to find something under 300 calories.

Gah! Where did all the food blogs go? I took a quick look at the first result before I filtered my results, and LolaCooks’ kidney bean salad recipe definitely fits my criteria, so what happened? By using schemas I can get in on the filtering game so that Google and other search engines offering recipe-based filtering criteria can include me as users begin to narrow down their search. Now, let’s figure out how to use them.

Match Up Your Data

Local food blogger, Jen is Green, was kind enough to allow me to use one of her recipes as an example of how to implement schemas. Despite the unseasonably warm weather in the Capital Region today, a bowl of her Mom’s Secret Vegetarian Chili appeals to me.

There are ton of fields that may apply to a recipe post, so feel free to access the full list of recipe schemas. For practical purposes, I’ll focus on the ones that are commonly applicable to the food blogs I follow, namely:

• Description (description)
• Image (image)
• Name (name)
• Prep Time (prepTime)
• Cook Time (cookTime)
• Servings (recipeYield)
• Nutrition facts (nutrition)
• Ingredients (ingredients)
• Directions (recipeInstructions)

After you’ve written your recipe post, identify the sections of your recipe that match up with these fields. Using Jen’s recipe as an example, I may add some sections. Keep in mind that the schema content does not have to be clumped together, just as long as you keep your tags straight and close them when appropriate:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Recipe">

<img itemprop="image" src="http://www.jenisgreen.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/DSC03619.jpg /">

<span itemprop="name">Mom’s Secret Vegetarian Chili</span>

<span itemprop="description">Perfect meal for a rainy day!</span>

Prep Time: <meta itemprop="prepTime" content="PT15M">15 minutes

Cook time: <meta itemprop="cookTime" content="PT1H">1 hour,  50 minutes

Ingredients:

• <span itemprop="ingredients">1 large (1lb/12oz) can of diced tomatoes</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1 can (15 oz) of Hunt’s Manwich Original sauce</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1 1/2 cups of water</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1 package of 30% less sodium chili seasoning mix</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1/2 bag of Morning Star Veggie Crumbles</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1/2 large sweet onion, chopped</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1/2 large green pepper, chopped</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1 TBSP of sugar</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">1 large can (2lbs/8oz) of dark red kidney beans</span>
• <span itemprop="ingredients">Small handful of shredded cheese</span>

Directions:

<span itemprop="recipeInstructions">

1. In a large sauce pan, add all ingredients but kidney beans and cheese
2. Bring to a boil
3. Reduce heat to medium/low
4. Cook for 1 hour and 30 minutes
5. Drain and rinse kidney beans
6. Add kidney beans to pot
7. Cook for an additional 20 minutes
8. Sprinkle your bowl of chili with cheese and enjoy!  </span>

Makes <span itemprop="recipeYield">6 hearty servings</span>

<div itemprop="nutrition"

itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/NutritionInformation">

Nutrition facts per serving:

<span itemprop="calories">180 calories</span>,

<span itemprop="fatContent">4.6 grams fat</span>

</div>

</div>

Once you publish the recipe post, use Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippets Testing Tool to verify that you implemented schemas correctly. It will show you the fields the Google bot was able to scrape from your page and how your page would display in search results.

This may all seem like gibberish to you, so feel free to plug in to these fields until you get the hang of it.

Don’t Shy Away from Nutritional Info

Keeping track of calorie information has become all the rage (especially in the Outspoken Media office), and offering this information can help you stay included in filtered search results. There are several easy methods and tools available to determine the nutritional data for your recipe:

• Add them by hand – The simplest method. Tally the total fat, carbs, protein, and calories from each ingredient based on what’s listed on the label.
• Wolgram|Alpha Nutritional Information Widget – This widget can only handle up to six ingredients, but it pulls nutrition information directly from Wolfram|Alpha’s database, ensuring data accuracy.
• SparkRecipes Nutrition Calculator – This tool can handle more ingredients, but you must create an account for access.
• Other recipe databases – Use allrecipes.com or simplyrecipes.com to search for similar recipes. Spices tend to account for very little in terms of nutritional value, so you can assume that if most ingredients line up, the nutritional value will be the same

Once you have your nutrition information, you can plug it directly into the nutrition facts schema described above.

Whatever you do, don’t be afraid of schemas. Thankfully, incorrectly using them cannot damage your rankings. However, successful implementation can only help, and will ensure your recipes stay in the running as users begin filtering their recipe results.

Not to be too cynical. After all, infographics are not dead. Just because we’re all tired of the buzzword doesn’t mean that data visualization, as a whole, is a thing of the past. Consuming information in easy to understand, visually appealing, digestible formats will never lose its popularity (if you need confirmation, just check out the Egyptian hieroglyphs). And corporations have oodles of data about their industry or products that could be interesting to a wide audience.

But not everyone has the internal resources to develop a flashy infographic to dazzle their audience.  If that’s you and you’re short on either dollars, time frame or even data — fear not.  As we’ve seen time and time again, simple visualizations with good data can be just as popular as high budget, flashy infographics.

Of course, having a solid content promotion strategy from the get-go will yield the best return on your infographic spend, but it’s not necessary to spend hundreds of dollars on a designer to create interesting data visualizations. Many of the tools you need are sitting right on your desktop waiting to be used.  After all, the best way to maximize your bottom line is to remove those unnecessary costs.

Don’t be afraid. Dig in.   Below are some tips on how to create awesome infographics while still pinching those pennies.

Finding Data Sources

Sure, your internal data might tell an interesting story, but try bringing in outside sources to add another dimension and relate it back to the user. You may find interesting correlations between product sales and overall economic activity or seasonal fluctuations (Google Correlate is a good place to find interesting correlations)! It’s important to keep in mind that correlation is not causation, so avoid bending and twisting the data until it submits to your will.

FedStats.gov
Not the sexiest site, but a great source of raw data from national, state, and county levels. Data at this level might be a good use for small businesses such as lawyers, doctors, and small retailers who want to create visualizations that appeal to their local community.

CIA World Factbook
Curious about the number of internet hosts in Bulgaria? The CIA World Factbook can probably help you out. The World Factbook contains every statistic you’d ever want to know about any country in the world, continuously updated on a weekly basis. All facts and photos are public domain.

Google Public Data
Search for data across a pool of government and international organizations such as the U.S. Census Bureau, World Economic Forum, and the OECD Factbook. You can display data in line, bar, map, or bubble chart form and embed it directly on your site.

Data Visualization Tools

Around the OSM office, I often refer to Microsoft Excel as being my second husband. I could write an epic poem (or at least a rambling blog post) about all the ways that Excel can make your dreams come true. But there’s a whole world of data visualization tools outside of Excel that can help you turn your drab spreadsheet into a valuable digital asset.

Excel
Again, I could offer a ton of advice about Excel, but I often recommend that everyone get comfortable using Pivot Tables. They offer a way to create cross tabulations of large sets of data. Best of all, after you’re done tabulating your data, you can automatically create a PivotChart and continue to slice and dice the data without compromising your chart. To transfer the chart to an image editing tool, select the drop-down arrow next to “Copy” on the home tab, then select “Copy as Picture…”

Fusion Tables
Use your own Excel or Google Spreadsheet, or pull in publicly available data to create embeddable maps, charts, and timelines. You can allow your spreadsheet to be used by others and specify the attribution of the data so that anytime someone uses your data in their visualization, the attribution will appear next to the table name. Google has also stated that public tables may be indexed, adding more visibility and credibility to your brand.

Open Source Options
Open source visualization tools such as Axiis.org, SIMILE Widgets, and Flare allow you to create interactive, Flash-based maps and graphs. Although these tools excel in terms of flexibility, they are not as straightforward and easy to use as Excel and Fusion Tables.

Design Elements

I’m a big proponent of using the skills you have and outsourcing the tasks that are not your strong suit. With so many vector graphic, mapping, and design element resources available, you don’t have to worry about spending time and money creating cute cartoon characters. Use these resources to find the design elements you need.

OpenClipArt.org
A library of clip art images with CC0 1.0 dedication (public domain). Open Clip Art Library 2.0 contains over 26,000 images, although not all are suitable for infographic design. Try to stay within the same collection for consistency.

Vector Pack
Not a free option, but AppSumo is currently featuring a deal for 162 design elements for $10. The site offers several free vectors sampled from various packs.

Vector4Free
A collection of free user submitted vector graphics. Although there are a ton of options to choose from, select only those design elements that will help highlight, support, and emphasize your data. Vector graphic overload can be distracting or make your data look less professional.

Once you’re ready to put it all together, you can use a simple image editing tool such as Gimp to combine the elements. A simple design scheme such as the one described by Jonathan Patterson can help you construct a visually appealing infographic, or consider hosting your data on a static page. Both formats present link building and customer experience enrichment opportunities.

Today, the link between online reviews and community is more evident than it was when I first joined Yelp. Building a community around your product or service can increase engagement, keep you top of mind, and create an army of super fans eager to lay eggs of positivity (reviews) that will hatch into your next wave of customers.

Time to get those geese a’ layin.

Keep in Touch

There’s no better way to sabotage your community development than by being an absentee community manager. Users can smell neglect from a mile away. While automated tools can prevent your social accounts from appearing stale, relying on them can sometimes produce undesirable consequences.

It may not be feasible for you to hire a full time community manager, but just a half hour a day of TLC can make all the difference. Step in to post to your Twitter or Facebook accounts to personally respond to tweets and give your brand a more personal touch. Active online engagement conveys a belief in your own brand, and will establish trust between you and your users. Rather than outright soliciting reviews, ask the community for their feedback (pointing them to sites such as Yelp, Yahoo Local, and your Google Places page). What fan doesn’t want to feel as though their opinion is valued?

Give Back

There’s more to giving back to your community than sending out free chotchkies. Giving back means enriching the user’s experience so they leave your site with more than just a better understanding of your product or service. Use your expertise in your field to educate others by offering guides, how-tos, or other educational resources.

Etsy does a great job of giving back by offering online labs and events that help artists improve their storefronts and develop new skills that can be applied to their crafts. The community fostered between Etsy and their vendors trickles down to the vendor-customer relationship, which leads to increased reviews for the artists and the site itself.

Bridge Online and Offline Events

Offline casual gathering or networking events can be a great opportunity to showcase your product or service and allow other fans to get to know each other in a relaxed environment. Launching a new product? Invite your super fans to an exclusive test drive. Fans love to meet the face behind the brand, so make members of your team available to mingle, answer questions, and encourage attendees to leave their feedback online. Yelp demonstrates faith in their own platform by allowing users to review Elite events.

If you don’t have the resources to plan and execute an offline event, consider empowering your fans to do some of the heavy lifting for you. Personally reach out to a customer who has been vocal about your brand and ask if they’d be willing to help host a local event. Cover costs for food and other necessities, and work with your volunteer to plan details and coordinate outreach. In some cases, users may be more responsive to an invite from a peer than from your brand.

How have you used community development as a way to foster online reviews?

Even with a background in Cultural Anthropology, I occasionally catch myself thinking about SEO from an ethnocentric point of view. For the most part, the clients I work with are focused on a domestic audience, and so I may only need to account for slight differences in accessibility and keyword phrasing. But upon taking a cross-cultural comparison of online buying behavior, you’ll find that one size does not fit all when it comes to international SEO. Differences in device usage (mobile vs. desktop/laptop devices), language differences, and cultural receptiveness to your product or service all come into play when you are marketing to a specific country or culture.

[This post is part of our 12 Days of SEO series where we'll be publishing a different nugget of knowledge related to the sounds of the season. We'll be updating the 12 Days of SEO page as new posts are published.]

So, on the third day of SEO, Outspoken Media gives to thee – three French hens, in the form of international SEO advice, of course.

Keyword Research

A wise SEO wouldn’t only optimize a site for “cell phone” without doing keyword research for the most valuable variations. Similarly, you wouldn’t only optimize the French version of your site for “téléphone cellulaire” just because it’s a textbook translation of the word. Research variations such as “téléphone portable” or “le portable,” keeping country-specific colloquialisms in mind. For example, although “téléphone portable” has a greater average monthly search volume in France (18,100), “téléphone cellulaire” is the most widely used French term for search in Canada (1,300).

If you do create multiple versions of your site in different languages, consider creating the non-English versions in subfolders of your main domain (i.e. – awesomecellz.com/fr/index.htm). This will allow all links to the non-English versions to contribute authority to the whole domain. Keep in mind that all content, including meta data, must be in the target language to avoid any duplicate content problems.

Gauge Your Mobile Presence

If you’re ignoring mobile optimization, you might be missing a large segment of your target country. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, the number of mobile-only internet users globally has more than doubled from 14 million in 2010 to 31.9 million in 2011. If your audience is in the Asian Pacific region, you can expect the number of mobile-only internet users to jump from 6.8 million to 20.5 million in 2012. This not only includes users who may abandon laptop and desktops altogether, but those adopting internet-enabled devices for the first time.

Research the most popular mobile OS and handsets in your target countries. Cindy Krum’s search and handset emulators are great tools to help you visualize your site and rankings on various handsets.

YouTube Optimization

Marketers have long known the power of YouTube videos. They can be an effective, sneaky way to “dark horse” your way into the top 10 search results. The key is effective YouTube optimization, keeping the basics in mind, but also paying special attention to your subtitles.

You don’t need to have a French video to rank for French terms. YouTube allows you to add closed captioning to videos by uploading your own transcription. Not only does this make the video more accessible to your target audience, but it allows Google’s crawlers to scrape the content of the subtitles for keywords. YouTube users can search for videos by the content of captions, so it’s especially important to enable closed captioning for keyword rich videos. For more information on how to create and upload closed captioning, see YouTube’s guide to adding and editing captions and subtitles.