Bill Hunt is currently the President of Back Azimuth Consulting and co-author of Search Engine Marketing Inc. His personal blog is whunt.com.
Content
Contributor Bill Hunt recaps a session from SMX East in which Joe Oliver and Cody Cahill from Page One Power explain the different strategies required for success in enterprise-level link building.
Google Algorithm Updates
I believe that once everyone starts thinking clearly again after the last round of Penguin updates — focusing on their business rather than on ways to game the system or mass produce activities that are not scalable — we can get down to action that can actually move the needle. One such action? Focus on […]
SEO
The lowly keyword phrase seems to be getting more attention these days. Last month, I spoke at SMX West about big data and co-optimization, then finished up at the International Search Summit with global keyword research and management. Based on the recently released 2013 Search Marketer Survey from BrightEdge, it appears as though global search […]
Search Penalties and Toxins
eMarketer’s recent report on Global e-commerce growth showed online sales globally exceeded $1 trillion in 2012. They further indicate that global e-commerce will grow by an additional 19% in 2013, with the Asia-Pacific region surpassing North America in online sales. This reemphasizes the importance of articles like Andy Atkins-Krüger’s recent article on international pricing strategies and […]
SEO
In my last article, Big Win & Fails For Global Search Marketing, I recapped some of the failures and successes in Global Search Marketing and identified the lack of communication and collaboration as the biggest failure. While it is the biggest challenge, it is actually the easiest to fix. When Mike Moran initially brought me […]
Amazon
Rather than one of the typical year-end/new year predictions, I am going to use this space to rant about our industry and some obvious fails that should not be happening with the level of maturity Global Search has achieved. I see far too many problems, organizational dysfunction, and hear lame excuses and failures by companies […]
Content
What if you could only spend one hour each week identifying some of your biggest opportunities and problems? What would you spend the time doing? That was a question – well, more of a “challenge” given to me by a few attendees of a recent Advanced Keyword Modeling presentation. While the many possible analysis were […]
SEO
In the last few articles, we focused on minimums of keyword research and measuring performance, and now we can extend that process to budgeting. With search budgets, especially for paid search, we have three different options for budgeting. As the fairly tale goes, Goldilocks samples each of the bowls of porridge to see which was the […]
SEO
Last time, we looked at the process of A Minimalist Approach To Global Keyword Expansion & Monitoring, which is the bare minimum a company should do in an overseas market. This essentially solves for the first phrase of the typical purchase cycle – Awareness. It is critical in a market where you don’t have a […]
SEO
There have been a number of articles lately on keyword expansion and management but most of them seemed to skip over the basics especially at the global level. It is critical to make sure you include the brand and product sets for each of the local markets. As we have been importing data into our […]
SEO
I just wrapped up a strategy session in Europe with two different companies and wanted to recap some of the issues I encountered and how we are working through them. It was interesting that in both cases, their US programs were fairly advanced and organized, yet their local market programs were under-performing and in a […]
SEO
After much confusion and frustration from multilingual site webmasters on how to properly use the hreflang element, Google announced new functionality to allow multilingual and multinational site owners to set the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” link annotation using XML sitemaps. This is a much better way of implementing it than telling webmasters to add hundreds of lines of code […]
SEO
With the change from winter to spring, we are seeing a lot of companies bringing their international sites out of hibernation and refreshing them with new looks as well as new content. I am seeing this even more new sites evolving in Asia and Latin America where companies are trying to capture significant opportunities in […]
SEO
Last time, we talked about making your Global Search Marketing Ecosystem thrive and one of the key elements for success was effective IT Integration. Adam Sherk’s recent article on Nine Common SEO Road Blocks delves into some of the IT challenges. His article identifies three of the nine barriers being directly related to IT and […]
SEO
Nearly two years ago, I wrote about creating a Global Search Center of Excellence and since have had the opportunity to keynote a number of company search summits, conference panels and then last week at the International Search Summit at SMX, I spoke for an entire session on how and why you should use your […]
SEO
A positive trend I have seen over the past few months is companies adopting a dedicated SEO diagnostics person or integrating SEO diagnostics into existing web diagnostics protocols. I have seen a huge missed opportunity, especially with global companies, that don’t take the action to monitor page inclusions, duplicate content and redirection issues. It is […]
SEO
As we kick off the new year with replenished budgets, many of you are using your pot of gold to kick off new markets. Over the past few months I have surveyed over 150 companies on how they manage their keywords. The research will be presented in a forthcoming article. In the process, I received […]
SEO
Year-end is a good time to review your programs to get them ready for the next year. Typically, this time of year things slow down due to the holidays you might have some time to focus on the recommendations below. Year-end Recap It is critical that you develop a year-end recap and send it out […]
Link Building
Nearly all search vendors have some sort of agreement, and the larger the client, the more complex the terms of service will be with procurement as well. Most of these focus on the standard stuff: how long, how much, scope and what happens if their vendor screws up and the relationship needs to be terminated. […]
SEO
I just returned from a week in the Nordic region of Northern Europe speaking at conferences in Stockholm Sweden (SMX Stockholm) and Oslo Norway (SEM Konfrensen) which became the 35th country where I have given a presentation. While I am more well known across Asia, I really like attending these events from time to time. […]