You are here

Home » Monthly archive

February 2016

4x3 Ideas

February 29, 2016

Netflix, Content Marketing, and the Power of Data

I read recently that Nexflix greenlighted "House of Cards" without first making a pilot. This constitutes a $100 million investment (what it cost to produce "House of Cards" Season 1) without any sort of test to see whether audiences actually liked the show. 

Sounds crazy, right? Well, Netflix has something TV networks traditionally do not. Data. Lots and lots of data. Nexflix analyzed the viewing habits and preferences of 33,000,000 users before investing in "House of Cards." 

The streaming video provider uses “a balance of intuition and analytics to analyze everything from promotion of its original content to which shows it picks up next,” according to LookBookHQ.

Content Marketing: putting data to work

We can’t all mine such a rich stream of customer information. But every business with a Web presence has data they can utilize to set marketing strategy. Everything from email open rates (which subject lines have the most traction?) to number of page views per session (what did we do last month that made our website more "sticky"?) can be put to use to improve your Web strategy. 

Keep at content marketing long enough and maybe some day you’ll have enough cash on hand to hire Kevin Spacey!

Tags:
Marketing, Content Marketing

4x3 Ideas

February 15, 2016

Optimizing SEO Beyond Google

In search, Google is king, but that doesn't mean you should ignore the other search engines out there. According to Search Engine Land, one in five searches now take place through Bing—not a small percentage. Other search platforms are also growing (i.e. Duck Duck Go, based right here on the Main Line), and old warhorse Yahoo holds on to a significant amount of Internet searches.

So how is SEO optimization different with some of these other search engines? The markITwrite blog offers some good advice, with a few key points expanded on here.

Bing and Yahoo: Go Meta  

While they are no longer considered by Google, meta keywords (which describe the theme of an individual Web page) still matter in Bing and Yahoo. Plus, Bing and Yahoo do more than Google to index rich media content such as Flash and Silverlight, so pay attention to directory and file names when utilizing these applications (you still want to put any text you wish to be crawled outside of such media).

Bing helps Facebook return search queries, so that’s a good reason to pay Microsoft’s search engine some attention. You might weigh keywords a bit differently to return particular Bing/Facebook results, for instance.

Duck Duck Go Loves FAQs

FAQ pages can help return results for specific search queries. This can be especially helpful with Duck Duck Go, which tries to directly answer such queries on its results page.

When you type “How can I become a member of Historic Odessa?“ into Duck Duck Go, 4x3 client Historic Odessa’s FAQ page comes up second from the top. While returning multiple pages from the Historic Odessa website, the same question in Google does not (for us) bring up the FAQ page anywhere on the first page of results.

This is a good example of why different search engine algorithms matter.

SEO Optimization

For the most part the advice for search engine optimization is similar no matter which service is used—mobile responsive sites, a link-building strategy, quality content, local keywords, alt tags. Good SEO is good SEO, after all.

Tags:
SEO, Tips for Business