John Doherty's Blog

08 Jun

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 3 comments

From Quick Wins to Hard Work

SEO is not about quick wins. I get asked all the time to “give us something that we can do now that will have a noticeable effect”. People, everyone, wants to get the most bang for their buck, and this especially happens in business where there is direct pressure to produce ROI. After all, no one brings in a consultant until they are unable to solve their own problems. At this point, your problems become mine. And if you’ve been seeking quick wins and they’re not working, what the heck makes you think that me giving you quick wins is going to fix your problems? Quick wins have not been solving your issues until now, so why do you think anything is going to be different with my quick wins?

Remember, doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results isn’t smart. It’s actually a sign of madness. Read more about From Quick Wins to Hard Work …

05 Jun

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 24 comments

11 Ways to Drive Gobs of Traffic to Your Website

This is mostly a search marketing blog, but I’ve written before about how SEO is not a complete marketing strategy. In fact, it should be a piece of a larger marketing strategy that includes email, possibly paid search, social, content, and even display and print. Here’s Rand’s inbound marketing model that many of you are familiar with:

I’ll be the first to admit that search might not be the best way for your site to get traffic. Search takes a while to take effect (often you won’t see returns for 3-6 months, and it grows slowly oftentimes even then). Read more about 11 Ways to Drive Gobs of Traffic to Your Website …

01 Jun

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 17 comments

Viral Growth Pisses Me Off

Let’s talk about virality and viral growth. I live in New York City and work in online marketing, so I’m on the Internet pretty much all the time. And since I am on the Internet all the time, I notice trends. One trend that I have noticed is that a lot of tech startups are focused on viral growth. When asked how they plan to go, I get an answer along the lines of:

Oh, you know, we’ve got this rockstar developer guru who has hooked us into the OpenGraph, so we’re going to autopost everything you do on our site onto their wall. Then, their friends will see it and we’ll have millions of users in no time and we’ll get bought for 1 billion dollars just like Instagram!

Newsflash for you: this is a terrible idea if your only way to grow is through Facebook.
Read more about Viral Growth Pisses Me Off …

29 May

Chris Warren Posted in Guest Posts 10 comments

A Microsite Strategy To Create Content That Converts

The internet has revolutionized the sales cycle from destroying old revenue models and creating large communities where your customers will talk about you whether you are part of the conversation or not. In fact the research below showed 79% of respondents were doing 50% or more of their shopping research online:

Source

That means it’s more important than ever to get yourself into that conversation and create content that your users want to engage with. By marketing with content you can reach potential customers while they are forming those critical opinions early in the sales cycle. This method is a great way to start investing slowly and methodically focusing on the kind of material that will drive conversions. Read more about A Microsite Strategy To Create Content That Converts …

17 May

John Doherty Posted in Uncategorized 8 comments

Entity Search is Here. What Does It Mean?

Today Google announced that they have rolled out the “Knowledge Graph”, which Matt Cutts explains thusly:

Big search news: goo.gl/RTBCs Moving from keywords toward knowledge of real-world entities and their relationships.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 16, 2012

Google has been talking about entity search for a while, and a lot of talk has happened in the past few months, starting with this story on Mashable (of all places) and an interview with Amit Singhal of Google. In that interview, Amit said:

It’s a challenging task, but the work has already begun. Google is “building a huge, in-house understanding of what an entity is and a repository of what entities are in the world and what should you know about those entities,” said Singhal.”

16 May

John Doherty Posted in Marketing 14 comments

Why SEOs/Inbound Marketers Should Work Onsite

Because the rules of SEO have changed in the past 6-18 months, especially with the release of algorithms such as Panda and Penguin, as digital marketers we now have to think broader about how our work affects the other parts of the marketing ecosystem. Like Hugo said in his recent post:

…[W]hat I didn’t realize at the time was how this relatively small sharing gesture would result in a significant surge in collaboration, implementation, and general advocacy on the part of this particular division. In fact, the amount of effort and emphasis that this group provided extended beyond SEO and into one of the other channels that I manage.

And the result has been obvious lift in ROI for both of these channels as well as a much stronger sense of rapport between my team and this parallel business group.

Being in New York City, I’ve had the fortune to be able to go work onsite with a few of my clients. This has afforded me to the opportunity to get to know all of the employees as friends (we’ve been working together for over 6 months now), which is a greatly underestimated competitive advantage when working with a consultant. Couple people who are motivated, talented, and smart with mentors who are experts in their fields, and all of a sudden you have a very formidable company pushing flywheels that are all pushing a larger company flywheel. Read more about Why SEOs/Inbound Marketers Should Work Onsite …