What would you do?

[Prospector-Plastics]

We have quite a few ideas for projects to help improve our web presence on SERPs while providing value to our members. Below is a 'short' selection.

Which one strategy do you think would be highest priority, and why?

1. Dynamically-Generated Content Create additional unique content-rich pages dynamically from technical data about plastic materials stored in our database. We don't just want to puke out data, but make it meaningful and unique - educational in fact to engineers, thinking it's good for them and also might give us an opportunity to gain links from edu websites.

2. More Content Hire a company to transcribe our 60+ recorded plastics industry webinar presentations. These are really cool topics (at least that's what engineers think) presented by top industry experts - something we want to continue to do to capture knowledge for future engineers.

3. Forum / User-Generated Content & Interaction Create an online forum for people who design with plastic materials - a forum like the SEOmoz format we think, would be cool! It's good for the users to interact and provide additional user-generated content that can be useful for our members and for SEO.

4. Social Push This is a tough one for us because the plastics industry is an older audience (that continually 'grows' younger). We can see a shift towards social adoption over the past few years, and obviously its impact on search. We see growth on Twitter and LinkedIn, but Facebook and others are a mystery for us - but we've got to adopt it early so we're ready when the plastics industry matures. We're a small company, so we've got to pick and choose the best things that help improve our business while providing top notch products and services to our users, members and customers. Simply posting to a blog that auto posts to all other social outlets seems like an opportunity, but kind of cheesy. You probably have better ideas...

5. Videos We can easily generate short educational videos to post on our site through YouTube. This would be a great strategy, albeit it would take some effort, but we're thinking it would be well worth it.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Awesome feedback Keri, thank you!

We're getting serious about capturing experts' knowledge in video format for future engineers in the plastics industry, so everything we can do to make it top notch is a good thing. Investing in microphone and production software and training is inexpensive, with big returns.

Your husband gets an A+. We'll be adding a note to the top of each webinar page that allows our users to suggest topics with an open-ended text box. Earlier this week we sent an email to our users asking for topics - a screenshot of the landing page is below, so we will update our signup page to reflect. Again, A+ for Mr. Morgret!

LinkedIn is perhaps the most widely adopted social site for the plastics industry so far. There are quite a few groups and we have a group with about 1400 members that ask design and processing questions. From time to time we comb LI to answer questions, but as EGOL pointed out, having a small staff makes it difficult to do this. Perhaps having some sort of automated monitor for keywords that could notify us of certain topics would be the way to go - maybe Google Alerts, unless you have other ideas.

Thanks again!

webinars-signup.jpg

[Prospector-Plastics]

Thank you Egol,

More content - check! That one is a pretty simple project since it involves a little bit of programming to extract more content from our database. We're thinking of hiring interns to research and write original content about each type of general plastic which I think would be valuable to engineers, especially those who work with polymers infrequently.

Having enough staff for the forum is a toughie. Our thought was to pull historical support requests from our CRM system to initially populate the forum so it doesn't look like a ghost town at launch. Then do what we can to mirror the way SEOmoz does this forum with points and so forth so that it becomes user generated. Another option we discussed was to hire consultants and industry experts to moderate forums that deal with specific topics.

Videos - yes! Great to hear the confirmation and we'll only do them if they are of high value for our users. Great insight - thank you!

[Prospector-Plastics]

Hmmmm, to get you back to normal dinner life IS a tough question! If I think of something, I'll let you know...

Digikey is a great service, one we're familiar with and often refer our customers to. We work the other way around where a design engineer using our Premium paid services can search one plastic material property requirements to find the right material for their application. All of that is hidden behind a login, but it's pretty amazing search technology non-the-less.

[KeriMorgret]

I'd also invest in a better quality microphone or better production quality for your webinars. My husband is listening to the full hour of the selecting plastics webinar, and needed to shut his office door because the audio was scratchy and the microphone was either poor quality or the person narrating was too close to the mic.

Another quick thought is to make more ways for users to request certain types of webinars. He said he saw a form to submit ideas when he requested to watch one of the webinars -- but it sounded like if none of the webinars were of interest to him that there wasn't a page to submit what he was interested in.

Are there LinkedIn groups that talk about plastics where you might have someone be able to go in and answer questions and suggest resources, as an idea for your social outlets.

[EGOL]

More Content - This sounds like low-hanging fruit to me.  DO ASAP!

Forum / User-Generated Content & Interaction & Social Push  - Do you have the staff to support this today and ongoing?

Videos  - great if the are really good

My top suggestion would be articles that are "first thing that a person should read" about the most important topics in your niche.

[KeriMorgret]

Just purely personal opinion, but I like the idea of transcribing the webinars and/or videos. It gives me the user a way to skim through the content and see if I want to take the time to watch the video, and it gives the search engines a lot of great content to index.

However, I'm married to a mechanical engineer, and thus one of the people more likely to watch a video on plastics than on shoes. You know, I bet you might have some success with some funny pieces too like "top signs someone is a plastics engineer". My husband has created a few injection-molded pieces for our business, and now he can't just put ketchup on his hamburger without looking at the way the plastic bottle was created and add comments about the quality of the process. Can you tell me how to get back a normal dinner life?

Back to thinking seriously again for a minute. My husband and brother both own their own businesses and deal with a lot of different parts sourcing. They use Digikey a lot because of the great search engine that Digikey has for finding the part numbers that meet their design specifications. If Digikey has a somewhat reasonable price, they buy from Digikey since they're already there, and to help show some support for Digikey going to all the work to make such a good way to find parts. I don't know if this fits your site at all, but it would certainly be an example of providing something truly useful if people could come to your site and input specs and find a list of plastics that met those specs.

[Prospector-Plastics]

Yeah, I'm typically accused of asking loaded questions

I do think all tactics are important - just wish there were 5 (or maybe even 6 of me)!

Thanks Shane, your list of priorities is falling in line with my thoughts.

[Jinx14678]

WOW that is a SUPER loaded question...

I am not sure I would automatically pick videos, due to a video about a consumer item like shoes is a more interesting and globally accepted topic than plastics.. But i could be totally wrong, but just because something works well for one industry does not automatically translate to another so testing would need to occur (in my opinion)

I would say in order of how I would prioritize (but would still concentrate on all as an overall strat)...

#2 -  for more industry relevant context

#4 for future proofing Branding and Web Presence

#1 - for link bait

#5 for conversion assist

I know you asked for the top one, but I am not sure focusing on one single tactic is really the best answer in general, as diversity is key.

w00t!

[Prospector-Plastics]

Yeah, I read just an article by Wil Reynolds this morning that Zappos produces 60-100 videos per day!

Never Worry About an Algorithm Update Again, a History | SEOmoz

Thanks RankSurge.

Keep the comments coming folks because it's interesting to track and see what efforts you all think is most valuable!

[RankSurge]

Videos! - 50% of all online activity is watching video. Zappos makes videos everyday since they have stats that prove that conversion rates improve for products or services that have video.

Good luck!