Integrated Online Marketing

I have seen a lot of articles and reports recently talking about what Google is doing to the SEO world.  What does this mean for the future of online marketers, or marketing consulting?  It means that they need to start branching out, and fast.

SEO doesnt meant link building and on site optimization anymore.  It means that you have an intergrated and diversified online "portfolio" so to speak.  Agencies need to start moving that direction.  Instead of offering services that silo certain activites like link building, social media, pr, etc... it should move in the direction of doing it all together, at the same time.

Lets Start with Some Google Searches

I was thinknig of planning a trip to Phoenix to visit family, so I took a reasearch detour. Recently looking at some marketing companies in phoenix, I came across one specific internet marketing company Phoenix, which would obviously have a lot of competition for online marketing agencies (just like any major city would), but at least these guys have started pushing the right pieces of the puzzle.  Social media, video, seo, graphic design and some other more traditional pieces that are part of the multimedia type program.  This company is just one of the many- the issue being that they offer the full suite of services which is what a company would need.

If you google "internet marketing companies phoenix", you get the typical search results of top 3 (netwirks.com, adwebdesigns.com, digitaltraffic.com), local search pack, and more organic results. The top three all look the same to me, and dont have great websites.  Half of them offer a full multimedia search marketing suite, and half of them dont (or they might but I can really tell).  The other internet marketing companies in Phoenix have websites that all look the same and say the same thing.  I would prefer to see the messaging adjusted to a post-panda/penguin world.

I did plenty of "internet marketing in (city)" search across the US and found that most of them look the same.  Some do better than others, but I tend to get the feeling that a lot will start scambling as clients take massive hits from low quality SEO services that are put on the Google chopping block.

Utilizing A Sitemap Index

Sitemap indexes are an effective way to organize the content from your site for search engines. The most common use of the sitemap index is for different media/content indexation, such as:

  • Pages
  • Videos
  • News

Most SEM pros know the basics behind using it for different media and content types. One lesser known techniques around the sitemap index revolve around creating sections of your static content pages as part of your sitemap index. Examples of this could include:

  • product pages
  • review pages
  • category pages

Success can come from creating asitemap from even your static content in order to improve the crawl effeciency and the number of indexed pages on your site.