Professional and Business Online Presence #OLP

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about- Oscar Wilde

Today, everyone wants to make business decision quickly without needing to have meetings or walk into your store, as meetings and traffic are time consuming. The place where the majority of people will learn about you and/or your business will be online.

This is a positive direction.

Why?
Because if someone can find everything they need about you that gives them the confidence to purchase a product or set a meeting, the faster the decision comes to actually hit the Purchase, Submit or Email button. This happens before ever stepping foot in your building or meeting space. This is why it is important to care about your online presence.

Stop reading and take a few minutes to type your name or business name in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. search box. What links show up on pages on 1- 5? Are you even a result within the first 5 pages?

Yes?
Great! Are they links that help you sell or build trust with customers to buy/do business with you.

No, or just not sure?

We are available to help you answer those questions, contact us for a free 30 minute consultation.

 CONTACT NSG TODAY

Today you can no longer just have a website. People need 5-10 trusted sources before deciding to buy or schedule a meeting. They want to see your reviews on Glassdoor, Google, Yelp, Facebook, or even BBB. They will look at your customer’s comments and reviews. They want to see that you are covered in key media outlets as a leader in the industry and much more.

So now—go back to those first 5 pages of search. Do they include links to your LinkedIn company page, an article in a trade journal, videos, trade shows, associations….? If not, you have a lot work to do.

Now many marketing firms will tell you to run ads to increase your SEO. But ask yourself before you do—when is the last time you really wanted to click on one of those paid ads? You might have clicked only because you needed information right away. But if you had other choices on page 1 to get the info, you will more than likely skip the ad.

We have nothing against running ads but you also have to do the hard stuff. Realistically to get great links on pages 1-5, you may need to hire a person or an agency to help you reach your goal of good organic results within a short time frame.

Here are 5 key items that you can do to help you improve your online presence quickly:

1- Hire someone to write content for your website, social media and trade media.

2- Hire someone to take photographs— because you are going to need a lot of them.

3- Think about topics for videos for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. Then get someone to create at least one a month for the next 6 months or so.

4- Get someone to send press release, product info, photos, videos, etc. to key media to earn high quality backlinks.

5- Make sure your website is current, looks clean and attractive, is mobile friendly, easy to use and is on the right server platform. – NSG uses AWS

There are always more things that you can do to improve your online presence. But if you do at least some basics task’s you will be much further ahead than your competition.

We know that your first meetings/engagements with potential partners/customers will be more successful when you are able to build trust from your online presence and you can show them that you are a company they want to do business with or even to buy a single product from.
To learn how NSG Consulting Inc can help: chase@nsgconsultinginc.com

Your First Marketing Hire For A Startup

Your First Marketing Hire

http://blog.drift.com/

As many have written (most recently Jason Lemkin on Quora), B2B marketing contains at least four really discrete disciplines: demand generation, product marketing, positioning/strategy, and PR/communications/branding. Increasingly, marketing technologist & operations is being broken out separately, but it otherwise falls into the demand generation role.

When it comes time to hire a company’s first marketing person, most founders think they just need a director or experienced individual contributor to start doing demand generation and bring in leads. They think, “I’ve got to make sales productive with leads.” They invest in SEO, spend thousands on SEM, turn on email marketing, and crank out webinars. That is one approach, but I’ll argue it is the wrong one.

I recommend starting with a director or senior product marketing manager who is willing and ready to roll up her sleeves for three key reasons:

1. In the early stages, all marketing is product marketing.

The most important marketing milestones are to articulate the value proposition in your customer’s’ eyes, position it relative to competition and alternatives and help the company tell its story. If you’re spending money to amplify a bad or wrong story, it’s money down a drain.

2. Making sales productive is sales enablement not lead gen.

Making the company’s new sales people productive *is* critical, but what sales most needs is sales enablement tools rather than leads. Product marketing creates company presentations, case studies, ROI calculators, the website, and materials for a webinar or conference presentation. Product marketers are domain experts who can create content for lead gen and generate thought leadership.

3. Product marketers by definition are generalists with broad skill sets.

Someone who is exclusively really great at Demand Gen is not likely to be good at articulating a great story. They look for short-term clicks vs. playing the long game, which is what positioning is. On the other hand, product marketers tend to be “athletes” who play a productive role and stand up other marketing disciplines. A product marketer can build the website, write and disseminate articles, pick and manage PR agencies, run an analyst tour, optimize website for search, initiate and manage a competent SEM campaign, and pick the first basic marketing tools.

Companies who do not do the positioning work up front do not build the necessary foundation.

The risk of NOT doing the positioning work up front is you get customers, but they’re not the best or right ones. Your single best marketing asset as an early B2B company are early customers who love you.

For example, one major online backup company did all performance-based acquisition in its early days. They took anyone whose money was green. Only when they saturated their early markets did they start working on positioning, but at that point Dropbox already dominated the conversations in their categories. Shifting awareness at that point took millions instead of the thousands it would have taken to own their position in those markets up front.

There are plenty of companies that have experience on one side of this line or the other. But even though it’s contrary to today’s conventional wisdom, at Costanoa we feel leading with product marketing is the way to go.

https://medium.com/costanoa-venture-capital/your-first-marketing-hire-6b40553e97bb?_hsenc=p2ANqtz--jx0BqeeZxM9WD_NF4FEkAO0G1_cH7L_TLNOlEImjChUdzvenQbVN9whjenjpIil3rTuQdO2EXJZ0wWe9QGuLhroJwVQ&_hsmi=36789099#.3nregz1xs

Instagram's Newest Updates Cuts Time Between Clients and Streamlines with Facebook Company Pages

Logging in and out of more than 5 accounts throughout the week on Instagram is very annoying.

But I do it because I have to.

I've been struggling with having to choose which client I need to be logged into during each day. Between a handful of social media clients, it's easy to miss comments, new interactions, and sales opportunities when you're the only one managing accounts like these that need to be very social in order to sell. Then throw in when your client is active on the company Instagram account and checks the notifications in the morning before you wake up but doesn't reply to comments of potential sales?!?!?!

I may not be logged in for a couple of days, and by the time I come back; we have just witnessed a moment in the twilight hour where business opportunities are missed and sales are down. LOL

Now with Instagram's new update, managing every account through what feels like 1 account now, I am cutting approximately 1 hr a week out of my reports that I can use to take a break, or work that extra hour and bill for it accordingly.

But for real, the hour a week that this new update physically saves me, is more than just physical time. It streamlines my work schedule to have less stress, a shorter thinking process, and a more effective use of my time.

Also with Instagram's newer updates, advertising has become streamlined with Facebook advertising. Merging your Facebook Company Page with the brands Instagram is a necessity now and you need to make sure that your Instagram in settings is linked to your other social accounts.

You are also now assured that your Facebook/Twitter/etc. share button during your Instagram post creation, there will now be the text of your other social accounts page names, which is reassuring.

Thank you #Instagram!

#marketing #marketingtips

Numbers Don't Matter, Influence Does

Gary Vaynerchuk

CEO, Entrepreneur, Investor, Best-Selling Author, Speaker, Jets Fan

The importance that people and brands place on follower counts or the impressions their content receives is grossly overvalued. I can’t say numbers don’t matter, but the value everyone places on these numbers needs to be reconsidered.There is just too much emphasis on the width of engagement—how many potential connections they make—rather than the depth of those interactions which, in my eyes, is far more important.

THE NUMBER OF IMPRESSIONS YOU HAVE DON’T ALWAYS TELL THE FULL STORY

The entire marketing world is blinded by the notion that more impressions always correlates to a successful piece of content (the sad part is, most of them don’t care about the business outcomes). For example, you might hear somebody say “500,000 people saw my YouTube pre-roll ad!” But, the truth is that they likely didn’t. What probably happened was that as soon as the ad started, the “viewer” clicked away to another tab or did something else until it was over. Or looked at their phone…. So even though they didn’t pay attention, the analytics still show that they saw it.

Not only can an impression count be misleading, but it may not even reflect a positive consumer engagement. There are companies I will never buy from again because their pop-up ads annoyed me so much—you know, the ones that havehundreds of extra “clickthroughs” because someone accidentally clicked on it 8 times because the “close window” icon was too small. While those extra clicks look like engagement, they were only expressions of frustration with the brand. That context gets lost when we are playing in a world that treats impressions as a be-all, end-all.

WHY YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA FOLLOWER COUNT IS IRRELEVANT

The same misconception can be applied to follower counts: they only matter if the audience actually cares and actively consumes your content. Followers can be absolutely everything or absolutely nothing.

Let’s say you have 20,000 followers on Instagram and 12,000 of them buy ten copies of your book because you posted about it. That type of conversion means you have an engaged audience consuming your content. That’s valuable.

On the other hand, let’s say you have 200,000 purchased fans. When you post something and it gets zero engagement, those followers have zero value because (1) they either don’t care about your content or (2) they’re not real. Either way, your follower count does not represent their real value to you.

Even the thought that a low number of followers can be considered “irrelevant” makes no sense to me. You can have 10, 10,000, or 1,000,000 followers and all it takes is for one post to be noticed by one person to cause a social media chain reaction. The absolute number does not matter. One retweet, one repost, one link in an email is enough to get the ball rolling.

WHAT MATTERS MOST IS THE ATTENTION, NOT THE NUMBERS

Instead of talking about how many people see your content, we need to be focusing on how much value that piece of content actually brings your audience. For a consumer to get excited about something, to be compelled to click an ad or watch a video, it comes down to caring about your audience’s attention. And in order for you to win, they really need to consume it. That’s the game.

In terms of organic reach, the #1 platform in the world right now is Instagram (even with the new algorithm). If you have 297 followers on Instagram, 150 of them are actually going to consume your posts. On the reverse side, someone with 3,000 followers on Twitter would not command nearly as much attention due to Twitter’s noise problem. For any platform, you need to understand the context of how your followers are consuming. Once you do that, you can reverse engineer how you can go deep to connect with that consumer and how that “impression” translates into actual interest.

For my newest book release, I sent free advance copies to over 1,000 Instagram influencers and asked them to post a substantial longform review with a photo. Not on Amazon, not on Twitter, not on their blog, but Instagram. Why? Because I day trade attention and I understood that this tactic was going to command the most amount of awareness.

Snapchat also has great organic reach right now. It’s the reason why I’ve been so excited for custom Snapchat filters and Story takeovers. When someone is using a filter or watching a Story, they have intent and you can be sure they’re paying attention. Remember, it’s about depth, not width. It’s not how many you reach, it’s how many you connect with.

Bottom line: I don’t care how many people see something, “I care about how many people see something.” Quality over quantity. Depth over width. Reach does not equal value and follower count doesn’t mean people are listening. We need to stop focusing on optimizing the number of views and instead concentrate on making each one of those viewers care about your brand. Because, at the end of the day, that’s the only way you’ll drive results to your end goal.

This article was originally published at www.garyvaynerchuk.com/blog

Lean on me The evolving world of growth and marketing

Annie Katrina LeeDec 38 min read

Lean on me

The evolving world of growth and marketing

There’s no shortage of articles about how to build a growth team, why you need a growth team, and the differences between marketing and growth teams. But, there aren’t a lot of articles about how these teams should lean on each other and ways to work towards the same vision. Why?

This was puzzling to me when I arrived in San Francisco to join my first startup — Pinterest — in 2012. “Growth” seemed to be the buzzword around the Valley, but when I boiled it down, the tactics were familiar. As a marketer, my job was to sell, position, drive results….and grow. Right?

Wrong.

Soon enough, I learned the ins and outs of the growth hacking community, and why startups gravitate towards them. What I didn’t comprehend was the friction between growth and marketing teams, and why people believed they were mutually exclusive.

I was determined to understand this dichotomy and somehow change this mindset. At Pinterest, one of our core values is “knitting” (pun intended). Knitting means taking the time to learn about other disciplines to help you make better and informed decisions. It’s not just about getting along with people or being nice, or as many big companies say “cross-group collaboration.” It’s about complementing skills and remembering that we’re all here to support the same goal.

Over the years, we’ve gone through rapid change and different ways of working with our growth team, but overall my experience has been positive. Sure, there’s tension, but it’s a healthy tension. The kind of tension that helps us build a better product for Pinners.

We’ve learned a lot. Some things worked, and some things didn’t — that’s the beauty of a startup. Our growth lead Casey Winters and I thought it would be helpful to share some of our experiences. Hopefully our story can help other companies create a productive working environment, regardless ofwhat stage of a startup you’re in.

Building the best user experience

In the early days of Pinterest, we spent a lot of time thinking about what brings people to the door (signups) and what makes them stick around long-term (preventing churn / retention). Ultimately, we identified that content is what Pinners valued. If people didn’t find content they cared about, they left. It became apparent that content was our currency — leveraging content and figuring out how we distribute was one way to think about driving growth.

We approached content as an art as well as science. Questions like “is the content good?” and “does it represent our brand” were just as important as “what topics are trending?” and “what performs better?” On top of that, we had to think about how to scale.

It was clear that both marketing and growth teams were trying to build a better experience for Pinners using content, so we focused on that.

Curated vs. personalized content

Email was the easiest channel to tackle first. It’s not the sexiest growth channel, but the scale was large enough to make an impact, and it allowed us to balance discoverable (curated things you might like) and relevant (things personalized for you based on algorithms) types of content.

After auditing the content in our emails, the gap was clear. Personalized content was well-covered, while curated content wasn’t.

We started a new email series that curated content based on seasonal topics, called editorial. The marketing team used data to identify topics that communities wanted to hear about and targeted Pinners who were active in those topics, while the growth team worked on ways to distribute content without annoying users.

One of our top-performing editorial emails

While these emails drove visits and activity on Pinterest, it arguably had a bigger impact in showing the possibilities of Pinterest, which is harder to measure. The challenge was that we didn’t have fantastic ways to control the delivery of email in general to Pinners. Some Pinners were receiving nothing, and others were receiving way more than they could anticipate. Editorial, in some cases, was piling on to a problem of engaged Pinners already receiving too much email.

Working together, we were able to standardize not only who should receive each editorial email, but prioritize it with other emails as well. Casey hacked together queries that limited email volume, and later, with a scalable system that limited emails for each Pinner based on their activity, their interests, and what they previously opened and clicked on.

Today, 20% of email engagement comes from editorial, driving an incremental volume of users who don’t churn and/or resurrect.

Boom. Knitting = winning.

Quality vs. quantity (traffic & signups)

Good growth teams care about driving acquisition. Great growth teams care about acquiring users who will stick around. To reconcile the number of signups with the right type of signups, we looked at our traffic sources and signup page to see where we could optimize.

For traffic, we began adding new landing pages that pulled together the best seasonally relevant content so users on search engines could find it. The first experiments went well, so the growth team built an internal tool to allow the marketing team to add new keywords on their own, based on our editorial calendar.

Keyword landing page for “Halloween Costumes”

For signups, Pinterest had millions of people landing on its home page without a complete understanding of what it is. Our previous home page did little to explain what Pinterest was or how you could use. The growth team built a new version of the home page focusing on visually representing popular use cases of Pinterest, which increased signup conversion by 10%. To continue optimizing, the growth team built a self-serve tool for the marketing team to swap out content based on seasonal use cases, which led to an additional 1–2% increase in conversion rate.

See, two heads are better than one.

Complementing skills

Marketing is great at identifying perception challenges and telling stories that can get others to understand the value of Pinterest. Growth is great at identifying the top opportunities in where to tell those stories. While growth can A/B test messaging until the cows come home, marketing makes sure we test the right messages that make long-term sense for Pinterest.

Conversely, marketing may be able to tell the best stories, but not succeed at driving the distribution of those stories. That is where the growth team can do the math and really understand if this will have the impact it needs to be worth the time investment.

Managing differences

I hear a lot of horror stories about growth teams hacking new ideas to achieve “hockey stick” growth, but lose brand equity in the process. At Pinterest, we value both our growth rate (how quickly we’re growing) and our brand reputation (how people perceive and feel about us). These goals tend to be at odds with each other, and over time, we’ve learned how to pick and choose our battles wisely.

Send a Pin email: Before and after

Our Send a Pin email is one example where we didn’t see eye to eye. We debated whether we should show the message in the email or make Pinners click through to see the message on Pinterest. Obviously, the latter option would lead to higher click rates, but what we didn’t consider was how much we’d annoy Pinners by adding an additional click to see content they’re interested in. So, we did some digging and looked at all the tradeoffs.

What we saw was that Pinners were only 1–2% more engaged by that one additional visit from email than Pinners who saw the message directly in their inbox. If we only looked at email clicks rates, it was an obvious choice: make people come to Pinterest and see the message. However, considering the small percentage, we decided it was not worth the tradeoff. We opted for our long-term gain (building trust with Pinners) vs. short-term gain (more clicks to Pinterest from this specific email), because we could always find ways to drive more clicks from other growth hacks, but it would be difficult to scalably build trust once it’s gone.

That’s how we manage through differences. We prioritize the Pinner experience first, instead of our own personal goals.

Practical takeaways

Teams naturally become siloed because of how people are incentivized. Organizations tend to reward people for results and impact. Results can easily be translated into things people can take credit for, versus how teams should work together to drive the impact everyone wants to achieve.

Our recommendation isn’t to drastically change the way you recruit or structure your teams. Whether you’re a CEO or a leader of growth and marketing teams, our recommendation is to create an environment where the two teams are incentivized to work as one. Here are some tactical ways to bring this to life — they’re no brainers, but they’re easier said than done.

1. Establish brutally honest role clarity: Identify strengths (ask questions! exchange your MBTI!) and build teams with domain expertise that complement each other. This will alleviate headaches down the road and avoid people fighting for the same projects.
2. Map goals together: Whether you’re creating weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals, make sure both teams are aligned on prioritieswell in advance. Goals should also reflect things that will help each other’s goals, including fluid resources if it makes sense. “Keeping headcount” is a slippery slope, but it happens way more often than it should.
3. Have frequent 1:1’s: In the beginning, frequent meetings can help keep everyone on the same page, especially in startups that are moving quickly. Get recurring syncs on the calendar, but don’t wait for meetings to connect either. Email, IM, text — whatever communication is preferred,use it and use it often.
4. Tag team meetings: This is a hard one, because it’s easy to have too many cooks in the kitchen. There’s a tradeoff, however, to not attending the same meetings. Information doesn’t flow as quickly, inaccurate assumptions are made, and you end up spending more meetings (ugh) to untangle misalignments. As the need for technical skills are increasing, the reality is that marketing is an unbundling discipline and growth is one of them. You can either make effort to collaborate early on or force yourself to clean up the mess later on.
5. Defer decision making: Assuming #1 is established, decision making should be easy, but making decisions tend to make people feel empowered and people can easily get caught in the “receiving credit” trap. Teams will build trust when they’re given opportunities to make a call about their domain expertise. Check egos at the door and know when to defer decisions to the right team.

Over the years, we’ve been working together on crafting a growth strategy that doesn’t tarnish our brand. It’s certainly not perfect, and still a work in progress, but we’ve learned a lot along the way. Whether you need to hire a marketer or a growth hacker first is a question that should be uniquely answered for each company. What’s more important, is how well they complement each other and their willingness to truly collaborate towards the same vision.

Thanks @onecaseman for contributing to this post!

StartupGrowth HackingMarketing

https://medium.com/art-marketing/lean-on-me-df6a152f649d#.c7jsrrnn1

We totally agree with Ryan Stewart -Stop selling SEO

Why I Stopped Selling SEO Services and You Should, Too

Local SEO | Advanced SEO | Basic SEO

This post was promoted from YouMoz. The author’s views are entirely his or her own (excluding an unlikely case of hypnosis) and may not reflect the views of Moz.

In my 28 years on this planet, I've come to accept two things as fact:

1. The sun rises every morning.
2. Marketers screw everything up.

Because of fact No. 2, I had to stop selling SEO.

Why? Here's an interaction I used to have five times a day.

*Phone rings*

Me: "This is Ryan Stewart with WEBRIS. How can I help you?"

Caller: "I'm looking for SEO for [domain.com]. I want to rank for [keyword terms x, y, and z]. Can you guys handle that?"

Me:

I'm over it. 

I'm tired of explaining to people SEO doesn't work that way anymore. And I need the rest of you to get on board with me, because we're driving ourselves out of business.

I mean, come on people. Look around. We need to stop trying to jam websites where they don't belong. The SERPs have changed.

Google shows search results based on what's best for the user. We can't just rank for whatever keywords we want.

Let's take a look at a few examples:

Example #1: Search "best headphones"

What do you notice?

Not a single result on the first page is a product page.

They're all articles about different headphone types, their benefits, pricing, etc.

We're all Google users. We all know these are much better results to get than getting a single brand's product page. I want to shop around, compare products, and read reviews. Don't you?

Example #2: Search "restaurants in miami"

What do you notice?

Not a single result on the first page is a restaurant's website.

As a matter of fact, the results above the fold are tied to review aggregators and Zagat ratings.

Underneath the fold, the results are filled with listicles, reviews, and articles.

I'd much rather read reviews about dozens of restaurants than be directed to a singular one.

Example #3: Search "buy a cheap tv"

What do you notice?

Ahhhh, yes, I threw this one in for the comment trolls.

The top five results are product pages. However, they're all mega-brands. With the current algorithms, we'll never outrank a brand for keywords like that (without spamming the hell out of it).

What else do you notice?

Articles, not product pages, are ranking at the bottom of the first page.

Example #4: Google "plumbers in san francisco"

What do you notice?

Not a single result on the first page is a website. There are only review aggregators: Yelp and Google+.

OK, so what's happening?

It's a combination of two things:

#1: Google's got a lot of data, and they're utilizing it

It's safe to say Google understands what users want by analyzing the massive amount of data it has. If we take off our SEO goggles, it's hard to disagree.

Personally, I love the power of choice. I'd rather pick from a list of companies with reviews and comparison data than one that only includes websites that make it to the top of organic listings.

In addition (as much as I hate to say it), I trust brands. I'd rather buy a TV from Best Buy than www.shop-cheap-tvs.com. Wouldn't you?

#2: We're moving into the "pay-to-play" era with Google

Not too long ago, Facebook moved into the "pay-to-play" era. Now Google's headed that way.

Google's main source of revenue is advertising, counting for almost 90% of Google's revenue in 2014. And one of their main earners, display, is falling fast.

Google's message is clear: If you want to sell directly through the Google platform, then you'll need to pay for it.

Let's go back to my last example, "plumbers in San Francisco." Look at what's happening above the fold with that query:

That's right, baby! Paid local listings.

If this test sticks, it's going to have massive implications on local search. If I were a betting man (and I am), I'm all in that this is the future of local search.

But is SEO dead?

SEO is absolutely not dead. As long as people use Google search, SEO will be alive.

However, let's recap. Money/buyer (i.e., purchase-intent) keywords are:

1. Dominated by huge brands that 99% of the world can't outrank (without spamming)
2. Returning less product pages and more articles and other forms of content
3. Triggering the knowledge graph, review aggregators, and more user-focused results

What this means is it's time to seriously reevaluate the landscape. The days of ranking a products or services page first for these purchase-intent keywords are limited.

If we want to capture that traffic moving forward, there are three things we can do:

#1: Pay for it

This is very straight forward. I like to use paid search as a remarketing tactic. We capture traffic from all corners of the web, and then when those people are ready to buy (using those money keywords), we use highly targeted paid ads to snag their business.

#2: Create valuable content

If we go back to my first example, best headphones, the results are dominated by content that compares ratings and pricing for various headphones.

No one shares, engages, or links to products and services pages. The fact is, no one except for us cares.

Instead of trying to jam those pages with links, create a piece of content that delivers what Google (and users) want. By creating value with your content, you open it up to earning social media shares and powerful links from relevant sites.

If you want to compete against the big dogs for organic search real estate, content is your best option.

#3: Optimize your website for the web

It's SEO (Search Engine Optimization), not GO (Google Optimization).

Yelp is a search engine. Facebook is a search engine. Twitter is a search engine. Amazon is a search engine. Quora is a search engine. Pinterest is a search engine. YouTube is a search engine. See where I'm going?

Each of these platforms offers unique benefits to the user. In a lot of cases, people looking for things on these platforms are likely to bypass Google altogether.

For example, l just moved into a loft in downtown Miami. I loathe shopping of any sort, so I allowed my girlfriend to manage the process for me. She ended up purchasing all of the furniture from Etsy (an e-commerce platform I knew very little about).

I asked her how she arrived there. This is what she told me:

• Pinterest - She used Pinterest search to find inspiration on how to decorate. Using keywords like "loft decorations," she narrowed it down to the specific pieces of furniture she liked.
• Amazon - She then went to Amazon and searched with keywords that were based on the furniture she liked on Pinterest. She was looking for rustic furniture. Amazon didn't have a great selection of that type.
• Ebay - So she moved to Ebay, knowing that she could find cheap, secondhand (i.e., rustic) furniture there. She found that most things were a little "too used," so she moved on.
• Etsy - Finally, she landed on Etsy, knowing they specialize in unique handmade items. She purchased all the furniture from there (and simultaneously broke my bank account).

Now, I realize she could've used Google to search for all these things. She chose not to, though, because she felt it was an extra step she didn't have to take. 

She chose to use those specific websites/platforms/search engines because each one was built to handle exactly what she was looking for.

Applying this to your website

The long-winded point I'm trying to make is this:

It's no longer just about optimizing your website for Google. It's about optimizing your presence across the web.

By understanding who our target audience is and where they spend their time, we can attack those platforms and build an organic presence.

• If you're an attorney, you need to be on sites like Avvo, Lawyer.com and Find Law because they dominate the SERPS
• If you're a local business, Yelp and Thumbtack are crushing it right now
• If you have an e-commerce store, get your product on as many platforms where your customers are as possible (including Pinterest)
• If you sell large-ticket B2B services, SlideShare and LinkedIn are gold mines for connecting with C-suite executives looking for information

The list goes on and on...

Bringing it all home

This is why I stopped selling SEO. I'm begging you to follow suit.

We need to educate non-marketers that times have changed. We can't just "rank and bank" for whatever we want anymore. 

We don't want to wait around until it's too late. This isn't a phase. This is the way it's going to be going forward, and we all need to get on board with it.

As Google gets more intelligent, we need to get more intelligent about how we approach marketing. That doesn't mean looking for ways to beat the search engine algorithms. Instead, we must learn to use them to our advantage.

About ryanwashere — I've been working in digital marketing for almost a decade, specializing in web analytics, SEO and inbound marketing strategy. I currently own and operate Webris, a Miami based search and web analytics agency. Connect with me on Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or Instagram.

https://moz.com/blog/why-i-stopped-selling-seo-services-and-you-should-too?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=stopselling_seo&utm_campaign=blog_post