Insights from Nebo

As I’ve said many times, agency life is amazing. Agency marketers are some of the luckiest people on the planet. We get to work with great brands, help launch new products, work with exceptionally smart people, and probably party harder and have more fun than people in any other industry.

However, if you were to take a sneak peak inside the marketing brain, you’d get a glimpse at our biggest fears. And you’d probably come away thinking we’re insecure masochists. Just under our consciousness are horrible aching fears that keep us up at night and give us cold sweats.

Recently, my Facebook newsfeed was inundated with statuses about Spring Break. And while admittedly I may be slightly jealous as I stare at rain all week, I can’t say I miss that time of my life. Because I know what comes next…

The job search.

Marketing students across the country are gearing up to graduate college, which means they’re diving head face-first into the job search. It’s stressful, messy, and requires an iron will and the ability to forgive yourself for the amount of stress eating you’ll do.

Here’s a question -- how many “must-read” blogs do you follow?

How many blogs do you visit on a regular basis, whether by manually typing in the URL, following a bookmark, or subscribing to an RSS feed?

And what percentage does that make up of the total content you consume?

If you’re like most people, the answer is probably ‘little to none’. This just isn’t how we find and consume content anymore.

Every blog owner has seen them - hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands of them. Spam comments. Those weird, mysterious comments that show up underneath nearly every post, typically mentioning topics ranging from luxury handbags to Oceanspray coupons to payday loans to cheap Viagra to total gibberish.

Search engines have acted as a catalyst to expand target markets and increase reach for businesses of all sizes. For international and global brands, optimizing for different locations and cultures is crucial in driving organic visibility and ultimately growing their business.

There is no “one-size-fits-all” SEO strategy that can be extrapolated into multiple languages, and too often disreputable SEO agencies will promise they can do international SEO when in reality they’re doing little more than leveraging Google translate for multilingual optimizations.

There are a lot of opinions and questions around what constitutes international SEO – both in the SEO community and among global companies. At its core, international SEO isn’t that different from any other digital marketing strategy. You have to start by researching and defining the strategy and goals. Then you implement campaigns and report and measure results over time.

With that said, there are a few key elements to international SEO that should be taken into consideration.

It’s not easy for recent college graduates these days.

You’re bright. You’re eager. You feel like you’ve served your time in the classroom and you’re ready to take on the working world of adulthood. As graduation approaches, 20-somethings celebrate job acceptances with friends and prepare for the next stage of life. You're thrilled to finally make it out into the workforce until you suddenly realize, “I have zero clue what I’m doing.”