Long Tail Search Engine Optimization and Social Media results in Increased Traffic Over Time
As we’ve mentioned in earlier posts, we are leveraging our experience at the smbZen BizJournal to investigate the effect of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media marketing on web traffic. Two months of data derived from consistent execution of this strategy at the BizJournal indicates that Search Engine Optimization of long-tail search engine keywords coupled with Social Media marketing can produce a substantial increase in web traffic (visits and pageviews) over time. The following week-by-week snapshot of BizJournal website traffic, measured in unique visits, clearly illustrates this conclusion: 
What follows is a discussion of the strategy we employed to drive this growth and the conclusions we can draw from this two month data set.
The Future of Small Business Marketing and Operations
This past February, the Intuit Institute for the Future issued a 32 page report discussing the three trends that will affect small businesses over the next decade. Given our focus on entrepreneurship and small business here on the smbZen BizJournal, we found the report to be both interesting and incredibly insightful. The trends are:
- “The Connected World: Small Business Management On My Time, On My Terms”
- “Beyond Web 2.0: Technology Fuels Small Business Formation, Operations, and Innovation”
- “Small Business Marketing: The Mindset from Push to Pull”
In the following sections, we discuss trend two and trend three.
Using Social Media Marketing To Understand Buyer Desire
“Rivers of Revenue” is another books I highly recommend. In Chapter 3, Kristin Zhivago writes about tapping into buyer desire through customer interviews. In the current marketing environment, the growing adoption of blogs and social media tools make this easier and more effective than ever before. Through Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Google BlogSearch you can identify bloggers within your target market, and by commenting on these blogs, by truly adding to the conversation, you can overtime, obtain valuable “buyer-centric” feedback.
Let’s review a few of the reasons Zhivago outlines for conducting customer interviews and frame them in social media marketing terms.
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