The statistic or something similar to it has dominated the sales pitches and marketing materials of search engine optimization companies for a very long time. I just saw a mention of it in an article from 2005 and it’s been reiterated again and again ever since. Nearly every study seems to come to the same conclusion. Nearly every study is wrong, at least from a business perspective.

If you torture statistics long enough, you can make them say anything you want. I could go into a long-winded breakdown of why this is a completely bogus statistic, but I’m going to appeal to common sense instead. If you take a second to think about it, the reality of search engine optimization becomes very clear.

If you include all searches, the number is probably accurate. The problem is that the majority of searches should not be considered when judging the importance of the top ranking in Google. They aren’t the type of keywords that need to be optimized. For example, the top keyword for 2012 was “Facebook”. It was searched for over 3 billion times a month in 2012. People wanted to go to Facebook, so they searched for it in Google. It’s the safest way to avoid the challenges of typos that take you to the wrong place, so they search for it. Guess what the first listing is for that keyword? What percentage of those 3 billion monthly searches do you think clicked on the top listing?

The second most searched keyword was “YouTube”, followed by “Hotmail”, and then “Google” (yes, people searched for Google in Google). Again, the top listing gets the lion’s share of those searches.

From a business perspective, the top keyword for the vast majority of companies will be by name. People who do a search for Dell with find dell.com at the top and that’s exactly what they’re going to click. People who search for “Richmond Ford” were looking for Richmond Ford and will click on the top listing which is.

The other searches, the important ones that people type in when they’re looking for something other than a specific company or website, are the money terms. They’re the ones that you will want to rank for in order to drive additional traffic to you website. These are the searches that drive down the numbers from being so high (near 100% when people do a search for Hotmail, for example) all the way down to 42%. Why? Because when people do these types of searches, they’re looking for choices. They’re not looking for a single website in particular. They’re looking for the right website. They will scan the listing and pick out pages that seem to match their needs.

People who are searching for “Richmond Ford” know what they want. People searching for “Virginia Ford Dealers” want options. It’s easy for richmondford.com to rank at the top for “Richmond Ford”, but the ability to rank at the top for “Virginia Ford Dealers” is the key to moving the needle. For those searches, the top listing does not get 42% of the clicks. The top listing gets more than the second listing, which gets more than the third listing, which gets much more than the fourth and fifth listings, which get much more than the next five listings. I’m not saying that being at the top isn’t important.

I’m saying that the right search strategy for the majority of businesses that have a diverse range of keywords that can drive relevant traffic to their site is to get the top spot for as many keywords as possible, but also top 3 listings for other keywords and even top 5 listings for others. Getting more keywords is more important than getting the top listing for fewer keywords.

The same effort that it takes to get the top listing for a challenging but semi-relevant keyword can be used to get top 3 or top 5 listings for dozens of other keywords. This is where the needle is moved. This is where the traffic is increased. Once the wide strategy is in place, it’s good to go back and move them up even further, but don’t get hung up on getting the top listing for single keywords. It’s good for ego but not necessarily for traffic.

Let’s first take a moment to let the cover image of this story wear off a bit. It’s pretty freaky, I know. Once that’s done, let’s talk about how the evolution of search marketing has come to the point that we need to use freaky images to get your attention.

SEO and PPC are very different which is why for years it has been okay to have one company running one and another company running the other. They have always been complementary of each other but they didn’t necessarily have to talk to each other. The separation between paid and organic has for some time been considered a positive – trying to do both is hard because of the potential conflict in strategy and purpose.

Things have changed in 2013. The two must talk to each other. Whether it’s two different companies working each separately or through a single company that handles both with different departments, the best way to have a solid search marketing strategy is by making sure that efforts on both fronts are truly working together. When done properly, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Here’s why:

• PPC Focus on Organic Weaknesses – SEO takes time. PPC is instant. When there are important keywords that are lagging from an organic perspective, the fastest way to bridge the gap is through PPC.
• Organic Cannibalization – This is a debate that I would love to have with any search professional. If you’re ranked at the top organically for a mid-level search term, you don’t need to pay as much for it (or even buy it at all). Studies have shown that for the types of mid-level search terms that garner clicks based upon choice rather than position, PPC can take organic clicks away and yield the same basic results as not buying that keyword in the first place. In other words, the money is spent but the clicks don’t measurably increase. There is a very specific strategy behind identifying these types of keywords that would take more than this blog post to flesh out, but when the two sides are communicating, money is saved on the same number of clicks. In essence, ROI goes up as a result.
• Double Down Principle – There are certain keywords with which it makes sense to dominate from both a paid and organic perspective. This is where having a shared understanding of the analytics driving both comes into play. For example, is a page ranks at the top organically, a consolidated strategy would have the paid listing pointing to a different landing page. When people click through to one, then the other, they’re greeted with two different types of propositions.
• Rightsized Budgets – This is arguably the most important reason to have organic and paid talking to each other, even being the same entity. There are times when services should compete, but this isn’t one of those times. When the dollars are being managed separately, both sides want more of the budget to prove success. When the budgets are consolidated, the goals align to achieve the most high-value clicks for the amount of money being spent regardless of which hand is doing the spending. It’s the best path to achieve the highest ROI on search marketing spend.

Take a look at your paid and organic search companies. Are they talking to each other? Are either saying that they don’t need to talk to the other because they work independently? If so, it may be time to look at someone else because that sort of thinking is antiquated. Get the two hands talking to each other as soon as possible.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's the main point, but it's definitely one of the keys. Exposure on social media is an extremely high-potential benefit of having a strong presence on social media sites, particularly Facebook.

There has been a lot of talk lately about social signals for SEO purposes. This is another key, but it's completely separate from getting exposure. There are other key points and goals - driving foot traffic, driving website traffic, and having a proper communication and reputation management tool are just some of the others. Today, we're talking about exposure. It's the one thing that has been very commonly used in the past by many dealers but it's also something that some have fallen away from in recent months.

In many ways, social media is like television. People don't go there to hear about car dealers, to see the brand, or to hear about the big sale this weekend, but that doesn't mean that the message doesn't reach them. Unlike television, there are algorithms in place to help or hurt your exposure. This is where managing your social media for the sake of exposure comes in very handy. When done right, a dealership can get exposure and help to improve their EdgeRank at the same time. Here are some of the things that you can do to make it easier.

Post Good Content

It sounds simple, but so many dealers and businesses in general simply aren't posting good content. In the car business, it's easy to find good content. We're surrounded by it at the dealership. We're exposed to it all the time on social media itself. It makes the news, fills thousands of blogs, and is the central topic of tons of videos that are posted every day. There's no reason to not be able to find strong automotive content to post on social media.

Local content can be good as well when done right. You have things happening in your community right now. You have places that make for amazing photographs or stunning videos.

The biggest challenge that some face is repetition. Depending on who you're using as a social media partner or the tastes of the people at the dealership who are doing the posting, it's very possible that the content getting posted is good but common. We've seen some vendors that will go so far as to post the same content to multiple dealership pages. This is just lazy. It doesn't have to be absolutely unique, but it shouldn't be so common that everyone has already seen it.

Keep it Steady but Don't Overload

There was a time in the not-too-distant past when social media gurus were recommending posting every single day no matter what. Many have changed tunes do to research, experimentation, and simple trial and error. Today, it's very possible to get a good bump on Facebook exposure without posting more than 2 or 3 things a week.

That's not what I'm recommending. I just want you to know that it can be done and works just fine. Ideally, you're able to post enough on a daily basis at the right pace based upon your fan engagement to get a strong momentum boost going with EdgeRank. However, if you don't have that boost, if you're not gaining momentum, it's better to slow down than speed up. Posting too much can do more harm than not posting enough.

Play in Other Yards

This is something that nobody's really doing. Sure, there might be a few, but for the most part Facebook pages are only interacting with those who are posting to their page. An easy way to get the brand out there, build interaction, and participate in the community is to venture forth onto other pages on Facebook and interact.

Sincerity is key. You do not want to like, share, or comment on local pages without a strong and valid reason. Interacting for the sake of interacting is easy to sniff out, so make sure that if you're representing the dealership with a like or comment on someone's Facebook post, you really mean it.

This helps in that it allows your brand to spread to people other than your fans and friends of fans. It's an ultra-simple way to separate your dealership from your competitors because nobody is doing it.

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There are plenty of ways to gain exposure through social media that we haven't talked about here. Think quality over quantity. Think sincerity over automation. If you do it the right way, you'll get the same type of benefit that you get from television at pennies on the dollar.

It's very possible that I'm beating a dead horse on this one, but I'd rather beat a dead one than a live one.

If you hear me speak or read my writing, you'll know that I've been pushing this concept for a long time. This is the last plea I'll be making. It's the eleventh hour, so everything I post going forward on the subject will be tips for those who have decided to do it the right way. No more heartfelt pleas - either you get it or you don't.

Social media is embracing search as a primary missing piece to the time-domination puzzle. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest - they all realize that being integrated properly with external search while allowing for robust search features of their own is the key to taking the tremendous amounts of personal data they have on us all and turning it into something useful for both users as well as the all-important advertisers and data-collection services.

Google and Bing are acutely aware that they have all of the outside data that they need. The only part that's been missing to some degree for a decade has been true human sentiment on a personal level that is not tainted by artificial inflation techniques. Finding that balance between understanding what the people really feel versus being manipulated by blackhat techniques is the last victory they need to make their search engines nearly perfect which is why both have been trying for three years now to properly integrate social signals into their search ranking algorithms.

Content is the binding force in all of this. It's very similar to the food that a restaurant serves. From a search perspective, understanding the way that food at a restaurant makes them feel is a key to getting a true understanding of consumer sentiment surrounding that restaurant. In other words, the things that people are saying about the food helps the search engines know which restaurants to recommend. From a social perspective, they need to be able to gather all of the data about the restaurants themselves. They know individual sentiment. Now they need to combine it to form conclusions.

This is the bare essence of the merging of search and social around the hub of content. Businesses that are creating high-quality content and using the right strategies to get this content out there from a search and social perspective are the ones that will win in the long run. Before anyone starts saying that they need strategies that work today, it should be noted that marketing is often like driving a car (warning - it's another analogy so brace yourself). You don't look at the road directly in front of the bumper on your vehicle to steer the car. You look down the road. You see what's happening beside you, behind you, and in the distance in front of you. When you're barreling down the highway and you see brake lights ahead, you put your foot on your own brakes.

The same holds true for internet marketing. Knowing that search and social are hovering around content as the key to both disciplines and uniting all three around a unified strategy is what we're seeing on the highway ahead. As a result, we're able to drive the road that we're on more efficiently, at a higher rate of speed, and with the knowledge that we're going to be able to make turns or hit the brakes before getting into an accident. This is the strategy that helped us be preparing for the Google Penguin update years before it was ever introduced. It is the strategy that helped us avoid the pitfalls of artificial page like inflation on Facebook well before it became more of a detriment than a benefit.

This is what's coming. Are your eyes on the road ahead or are you peering over your bumper to look at the road conditions right now?

Here's an infographic by Marketing Adept that gives a decent breakdown of what's happening now. Knowing that can help you look to the future.

Some may try to call me out on the title of this post. “Don’t you mean ‘strategies’ plural?”

No. Search and social strategy. One thing. Different processes. Slightly different goals. Same strategy.

As we move forward through the second quarter of 2013, it’s important to understand how the dynamic between search engine marketing and social media marketing is operating. We’ve been saying for a long time that search and social were intersecting, that Google and Bing are getting more social while Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks were integrating search and becoming more popular as venues to find things, but the way that this dynamic has accelerated in the first part of 2013 is noteworthy.

For years, search and social have been separate disciplines. Most online marketing companies either focus on one or the other, or they have separate products and services. It is now clear that trying to separate the two is like trying to separate a car engine from a transmission. Both are required to work together to make the vehicle move.

If you currently have two different groups of people handling these components, rethink it. It’s not possible to have the highest level of search engine optimization without taking into account the social factor. It’s not a best practice to run social media marketing without taking search into account. They are officially hip-to-hip, hand-in-hand, and lockstep in form and function.

Don’t misread this. It’s not a call for marketing generalists. Specialists are still required. Some of the best social media marketers I know can’s spell “SEO” and some of the most talented search optimizers I know don’t have a Facebook page. The point is that they need to be communicating. They need to know what the other is doing and combine efforts when appropriate. There’s nothing more annoying than seeing a beautiful piece of content designed for search go untouched from a social perspective. Conversely, some of the activities I’ve seen from social teams could have been slightly adjusted to make them social and search optimization gold.

The goals of search and social are also starting to blend. When one talks about public relations, we often think of social media and/or reputation management. Today, search plays a tremendous role in public relations. One could even argue that true reputation management has less to do with reviews and comments that people are making and more to do with the reviews and comments that people can find online. A bad review on a website that sits on page three of Google when searching for a company by name is basically not much of a problem from a PR perspective, but I’ve seen companies spend exuberant amounts of time, effort, and even money to try to get that review removed or countered. That’s just one example.

If you have two different departments, two different vendors, or a department handling one and a vendor handling the other, make sure they’re working together. If they aren’t in constant communication, they cannot fulfill their responsibilities as well as they could. That’s a fact. In today’s world of digital marketing, there can no longer be a separation of search and social.

Is your engine connected to your transmission?

The rise of content marketing and more importantly the focus that Google and Bing have put on website content engagement have changed the way we view the types of content we put on our websites. It’s no longer sufficient to focus all of your content on the basic search engine principles of keyword targeting. You have to have content on your domain that draws in the important social signals and time spent on site.

In other words, your websites have to be interesting to a wider range of people, not just those specifically looking for your products and services.

There are several types of content that go on websites, but the two we’re going to be talking about here are the two most important content additions. There is basic content that is relatively stagnant on your website; product descriptions and inventory items rarely have to change, for example. There are other types of regular content additions that somewhat influential as well such as press releases and service announcements. Those are the content types that we won’t be covering.

What we will be covering are often called different things depending on who is describing them, but I look at them as conversion content and conversation content. These are the pages that should be getting added to your website regularly and on an ongoing basis. If you can only focus on one major discipline when it comes to enhancing your website traffic, search rankings, and social significance, creating these two types of content would be the activity that I would wholeheartedly recommend at the top of the activity list.

Conversion Content

For those marketing a website, this is arguably the easiest to understand from a needs basis. This is the type of content that should have an immediate impact. It’s usually geographically targeted and almost always product focused, so there’s a clear understanding how it can help.

For example, a Honda dealer in Irvine, CA, should be ranking well in Google for the various Irvine searches with their homepage alone, but they may need to create a content page called, “2013 Honda Accord Santa Ana” to have a landing page geared towards those in neighboring Santa Ana.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and as a general rule anything that’s too easy is probably the wrong way to do it in the eyes of Google. In other words, automatically generating dozens, hundreds, even thousands of pages to hit the multitude of targets is the wrong way to do it. The practice is relatively common, so common that it often takes Google time to catch those who are doing it, but in the end they catch everyone. This type of blackhat conversion content creation leads to destruction (i.e. de-indexing or even a penalty).

Real conversion content creation is a manual effort, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be tedious or time-consuming. The page mentioned above should only take 10-20 minutes to create depending on what content management system is being used. It’s not rocket science nor does anyone need a PhD in SEO to make it happen. They simply need to create a page with lead generating tools on it that has visuals in the form of images and/or videos of the product and content describing it. The content itself doesn’t have to be long – a paragraph or two works though a little more would be better – and it can still be conversational.

There is no need to make the content keyword rich. As long as the title tag is set up properly and the content mentions the target keywords somewhere in there, that should be enough to start targeting the keyword appropriately. When you try too hard to get the keyword, you often make it harder to get.

Conversation Content

This is the type of content that I often have the hardest time convincing people to build. It goes against the nature of old-school marketing that has been embedded in most of us. In essence, conversational content has nothing to do with converting a visitor into a lead or a sale. It’s often whimsical, only loosely relevant, and seems to bring no value other than to entertain or educate.

Today, it’s the content that can have the biggest impact on search and social marketing. With conversation content, the goal is clear as day written in its name. You want conversations. You want people talking about the content on social media. You want people saving the content in their bookmarks. You want people talking to you about the content in the form of comments.

The image above was taken from a conversational piece of content titled “7 Charming Honda Vintage Ads”. There is very little chance that a Honda dealer is going to have any of the cars being advertised on the page. The page is not designed to sell anything, in fact. It’s designed to get shared. It’s designed for people to see it on social media sites, click through, and reminisce.

Most business website pages outside of the blog are not shareable. Sure, they might have social sharing buttons on them, but nobody is going to share an inventory details page of a 2009 Honda Civic. They aren’t going to share a service appointment page, a specials page, or an about us page. People share content that they find interesting.

Just as you want to be in the conversation with pages on your website, people want to share content on social media that can spark conversations. A page like this one will encourage people to share on their social networks because it’s interesting to see things such as vintage ads.

Social signals don’t just help with social media popularity. They don’t just help with the search rankings of a particular page. Their most important influence is that they help a domain rank better. The more pages that are on a domain that are getting shared well on social sites, the better chance they have of ranking for similar keyword terms as well. This dealership might not care about whether it’s ranked for “Vintage Honda Ads” but it certainly wants to rank for “Dallas Honda Dealers”. Social signals through conversation content pages help to this end tremendously.

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As you continue to push the envelope and watch your digital marketing evolve, it’s important to keep in mind that things aren’t always obvious. They’re clear – that much is certain – but the techniques and strategies that have lower adoption rates such as creating the types of content in this article can be the differentiators between your own marketing and the marketing of your competitors. If you’re creating these types of pages and your competitors are not, you have the upper hand. It’s that simple.

The social media world and offices across America were joined in laughter last week when a video by Pepsi featuring race car driver Jeff Gordon exploded all over Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

The video showed an unsuspecting salesperson getting put through a harrowing experience during a test drive while being recorded by hidden camera. The only problem was that it was completely fake.

In reality, that wasn’t a problem at all. It’s approaching 30 million YouTube views and has been shared over 2 million times on Facebook. The ad worked even if it was completely staged, even if the car salesperson is an actor, even if a stunt driver took the Camaro up ramps, around poles, and up to speeds that are more NASCAR than test drive level. This is advertising in 2013.

In many ways, it’s not right. The video was so well produced that most disbelief in the validity of the video were suspended just long enough to get small crowds gathered around cubicles while bosses were at lunch. It started millions of conversations on social media and sparked debates. It received the level of attention that should really only be associated with reality and the fact that it was staged takes away from the wonders of the video.

In other ways, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. We are an advanced society that knows there will be real and fake mixed in all across the internet. Part of the fun is determining whether something is real or not. Part of the fun is in deciding whether or not the fake things are clever enough to still admire despite being staged. For example, the Golden Eagle Snatches Kid video that terrified parents and acted as a rallying call for eagle hunters turned out to be a school project, but that didn’t stop it from getting over 40 million YouTube views.

Today, we don’t trust that anything is real on the internet without proof. Images are accused of being Photoshopped. Videos are easier to enhance and produce today than ever before. There are companies that work solely in determining the validity of videos. Is it really that bad that this video promoting Pepsi Max was manufactured?

If one were to break down the video, they’ll see that much of it is absolute perfection if you’re going to stage something like this. From claiming that he drives a minivan to making statements such as, “well, we better buckle up,” Gordon played his role appropriately, but the “salesperson” really nailed it. He responded exactly how one would imagine  when put in that situation, all the way to the amazing look of shock and realization on his face during the reveal.

It’s the reveal, of course, that brings everything together. It anchors the video and turns it from a cruel prank to a happy story. The actor is relieved. People are clapping. He even asks a good sport question, “Want to do it again?”

The reveal makes it almost heart warming that this guy made it through the prank and has something amazing to tell his grandchildren.

Here’s the video. If there’s one complaint, it’s that it didn’t have enough Pepsi in it. In fact, there’s a very good chance that when asked about it afterwards, many people might even refer to it as the “Jeff Gordon Camaro Prank” rather than the “Jeff Gordon Pepsi Max Prank”. Chevrolet doesn’t mind at all. Neither does NASCAR.

Just in case you haven’t seen it, here’s the golden eagle video as well…

I don't believe in coincidences. Everything happens for a reason and there's a particular harmony in this world that cannot be denied if you really look into it.

Last week, I was reviewing a dealer's marketing strategy when I came across their content posting style. They had an offsite blog, an onsite blog, and they posted many of their posts on different automotive websites. All of this is good except that they were posting the same content everywhere without exception.

There are times to take content and syndicate it out and there are times when it's best to give a particular piece of content a single home. There are two factors to consider when making the decision - the content itself and the venues.

For the content, you should decide on the goal(s) of every piece of content you publish. Is it intended to be a direct communication with your customers that is newsworthy and specifically about the dealership such as sales announcements? That can be syndicated. You want as much reach as possible. Other content that is designed to bring value to your readers or that is specifically designed to help with search or social promotions should find an isolated home and become an exclusive piece of content. You don't want your content fighting with itself, particularly if you're posting it on your dealership blog, then posting it on an industry website that will likely get more love from the search engines.

The second component is the venue itself. Every venue that you own should have its own unique content. Some say half, some say more, and some say less, but having two or more blogs with the exact same content is just adding effort. Google has become exceptional at finding when blogs themselves are duplicated completely and they will make a decision about who is the source and who is the scraper. There are plenty of scrapers out there - no need to scrape your own content.

That's not to say that every venue you own should have completely different content. It's okay to syndicate, but you shouldn't syndicate every single piece of content. Every venue needs its own unique content or you risk losing one or more of them altogether in the eyes of the search engines.

I post a ton of content every day. Some I syndicate, some I leave exclusively on the appropriate venue. Finding the right mix depends on how often you post and on which sites you have access. There's no formula that works. It has to be analyzed and a strategy has to be set.

This particular article was one that I intended to write last week after doing the analysis on the dealer's marketing, but something held me back. Now I know why. This morning I logged into driving sales for the first time this week after a whirlwind round of traveling and found that they were separating exclusive content from syndicated posts. This made it a no-brainer about where this particular post would be published.

Everything happens for a reason. Welcome to life.