Social Media Marketing

The other day, whilst doing a spot of random searching in Google for various keyword phrases related to our business (it was a light day in the office) I came across an interesting blog based web site from a fellow called Peer Lawther who markets himself under the guise of “Rubber Genius”.

What Peer seems to specialize in is “social media” or “online social media marketing and promotional services”. For the uninitiated, this basically means adopting the concepts of the various social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and My Space etc as a means of directly promoting a specific business, product or service or even raising awareness of one’s own personal brand. It’s growing area within the online digital marketing sector to be fair and there’s undoubtedly some value in it for certain types companies that have identified “social media marketing” as a promotional channel.

Anyway, that aside; what makes Peer’s article interesting is that he talks about the various digital media marketing agencies in and around Leeds and how the city is growing as a media hub in the North of England. (We’re not listed on his site yet – but give it time!)

As he continues to write, Peer sets down a challenge in which he basically invites any Leeds based digital marketing and social media marketing company (or those within a 15 mile radius of Leeds) to be listed on his site.

Now, as any search engine marketing consultant who knows his onions, will tell you ; good quality in bound links to a web site are perceived as “good votes” by the boys at Google. This in turns helps boost back-link popularity which in turn helps boost a particular site within Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Having read the pages across Peer’s site, I think we’d like to have a link from his site to ours as his site is relevant to the subject matter of ours (which is an important factor to consider).

However, he sets out some conditions. The specific digital marketing or social media marketing company based in or around Leeds, must already be listed highly in Google for the following keyword phrases

“online marketing Leeds”, “online advertising Leeds”, “Leeds ppc”, “Leeds seo” or “social media Leeds”

At this moment in time, we’re no where to be seen in Google’s SERPS for these phrases and whilst we’d agree that a few of these keyword phrases such as “online marketing Leeds” may be a phrase that some “switched on” clients may use as search phrases when trying to find a company that will help market their business online; we’d argue that the other terms are phrases that only people who are in the industry would use. As far as we’re concerned, that’s not the sort of traffic we want to attract.

Many of our clients, both big and small; consider terminology such as “SEO” or “Social Media” to be too technical and not part of their everyday speech. In other words, it’s not a term they would use when searching for a companies such as ours and our competitors, namely the ones Peer talks about in the Leeds digital and social media sector. As such, in our mind; there’s no point in attempting to get listed highly in Google’s SERPS for these phrases.

However, having said that; we’re always up for a challenge and given that we’d like a link from Peer’s page, we’ll make it our mission to get listed in the top 20 listing results of Google for at least 3 of the above phrases and others related to online social media marketing.

If nothing else it is a good test of our SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEP (Search Engine Promotion) skills.

Reserve us some space on your page Peer; chocks away; here we come!