Teaching SEO to College Freshman

Thu, 10/06/2011 - 14:54 — mos

Clients often come to us and want to know more about how we can help them with SEO, SEM, or Social Media. Part of this process always involves education. I am a firm believer in the more educated you are on a topic the better. At motionstrand we are 100% transparent in what we do and clients seem to appreciate this. Clients know exactly where their marketing dollars go, how many hours we spent on each tactic, what their direct spend was, what the results were, etc. 

 
Recently I was invited to speak to a College Freshman marketing class at our local community College - Palomar Community College. I decided to create a case study based loosely on one of our local clients (the data has been changed). I wanted to give students a taste of what it was like to help a business from start to finish. I came up with the following outline (the full presentation is at the end of this post if you would like to see it):
 
  • Case Study
    • The Client
    • Where to Start
    • Data Gathering
  • Strategy
    • The 3 C’s Model
    • Initial Hypothesis
    • Goals & Objectives
    • Target Audience
    • Personas
  • Tactics
    • SERPs
    • SEO Components
    • Keyword Analysis
    • Coding & Content
    • Linkbuilding
    • Local Factors
  • Metrics
    • Leading & Lagging
  • The Future
    • Trends
 
The main takeaway I wanted students to have was the importance of setting up a solid strategy. One of my favorite quotes by Kenichi Ohmae is, “Rowing harder doesn’t help if the boat is headed in the wrong direction.” It is really your responsibility to make sure the right strategy is in place for your client, whether you’re working on SEO, PPC or a new social media campaign, if you have the wrong strategy you’re not going to get very far and/or you’re going to spend a lot more money getting there.
 
The second key takeaway I wanted students to have was the importance of setting up goals and metrics for clients. There is zero excuse for not measuring campaign performance, especially given all the free tools out there. Some of our favorites tools are (not all are free): Google Analytics, AdWords or Bing conversion tracking, Marchex call tracking, EdgeRank Checker, Raven Tools and SEOmoz.  Google Analytics alone allows you to accomplish nearly everything you need to with regards to tracking when installedd correctly. Why settle for fuzzy feel good metrics when you can calculate ROI, ROAS and see your cost-per-conversion segmented by referral source or keyword. I’m not sure how well I conveyed this part but I attempted to.
 
The third thing I wanted them to take away from class was a better understanding of search engine optimization (SEO), since that was the one tactic we were covering in class. I started with an overview of SERPs and why SEO was important and then got into some of the easier components of SEO. We looked at on-page factors and off-page factors (specifically local) and then some linkbuilding best practices. 
 
Student’s seemed to be engaged, they may have glossed over a bit when I got into technical aspects of SEO but overall I think it went well. If I did it again here are the things I would do differently:
 
  • Create a more holistic case study that felt more cohesive from start to finish.
  • Employ tactics I recommended they use by asking for feedback on ways to improve the presentation at the end. 
  • Discuss social media a bit more.
  • Shorten the presentation to allow for more Q&A time.
 
Here is the presentation. I'd love your feedback.
College Lecture on Local SEO

 

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