SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

For many, a well-executed viral marketing campaign increases sales or brand perception. Viral campaigns spread very quickly and with the advent of blogs, social networking, and other web 2.0 sites, mention of a business, product/service can appear in hundreds to thousands of websites around the world overnight.

While viral marketing offers the advantages of “word-of-mouth” advertising, sophisticated marketers must realize that SEO plays a large role in converting visitors to buyers as well.

In the JupiterResearch report “Consumer-Created Content: Assessing Opportunities for Automotive Marketers”, consumers did one or more of the following after viewing an online ad:

31% searched the product or service to learn more
22% visited a site related to the ad
12% told a friend about the ad or product
8% forwarded the ad to someone
7% went to a related site to post a comment
5% went to a related site to upload photos or videos

What’s interesting to note is how little trust was placed on consumer-created content such as blogs and forums. Almost 50% more people found public forums untrustworthy. Four times more people didn’t trust ads. More than double found product information on blogs untrustworthy.

Consumers of higher-priced items are getting savvier and perform more research to check out a product before purchase. By having a more pervasive presence in the search engines in addition to a virally spread message, a business capitalizes on building a stronger brand and gives them an additional opportunity to re-introduce the message to their target audience through the corporate site by showing up in the top ten organic search results for their business name/product/service.

Via Clickz, JupiterResearch Analyst Emily Riley emphasizes:

Viral marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum, to consumers these are all just different ways of getting a message about the same product….Just taking advantage of this new tactic in social media doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to improve your brand affinity

For many SEOs, on-page text is an important first step in getting search engines to index and classify a website correctly.

Audio and video has been gaining momentum with the explosion in the use of services such as Google Video and YouTube. Audio and especially video are the hot mediums of marketing and distribution because of the proliferation of Ipods and people’s desire to actually watch a video rather than read a book or ebook about it.

How does one make use of audio and video files without comprimising on the benefits of on-page text? The answer could lie in VeoTag. This service allows you to create an equivalent of a table of contents for your audio and video files. The tags for these “chapters” give the listener/viewer the opportunity to skip to particular sections they are most interested in. This helps the listener/viewer navigate the file and see what’s ahead instead of having to listen/watch the entire file only to find out there’s nothing new they can get from it.

You can get some samples of this technology being implemented on actual files at Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Just checked my stats and found a surge in traffic from an article that was written several months ago (Secrets to Successful Blogging), got syndicated on a site picked up by Google News yesterday. The traffic surge continued till this evening when the news was refreshed again.

Article syndication has proven in this case to not only be excellent for SEO, but also for driving targeted traffic while at the same time building up online reputation.

Good articles can give your site visitors a “preview” of your company, products, and services by providing insight into your philosophy of doing business. When you syndicate well-written articles, they spread faster, wider, and tend to be picked up by large authority sites. When articles you write appear on relevant authority sites they build credibility in the reader’s mind by “transferance” from the authority site, in effect saying they like what they saw in your company.

If you still have marketed your site through articles, now is a good time to start. You can find tips to get started in my article distribution post or contact us for a custom quote.