Huntington Beach Brochure

Today's task was to redesign a four page brochure for advertising Huntington Beach. I have come up with two options based on different audiences and interests, but each would be successful in that they both are clean, easy to read, and incorporate a lot of images which has been found to be important in engaging an audience's attention.

Option 1: picture strips
This option is designed for a younger more hip audience that would be interested in visiting Huntington Beach to shop, surf, or play on the beach. The sand texture background serves to reflect this active attitude. The picture strips keep the images grounded and together and also establish a fun scrap booking nostalgic feel.

Option 2: sunset
This option is designed for a more mature audience but is still eye catching with complimentary colors that pop off of a dramatic a picturesque sunset background. The colors and fonts establish a high class feel that would encourage the audience to visit Huntington Beach for the upscale shopping, restaurants and night life or a relaxing vacation as opposed to the previous option that highlights beach activities. This design may be more timeless in a coffee table book fashion in that Huntington Beach may change over time but the sunset representing this location will not.

Youtube Marketing

Recently, I've been reading that Youtube is a great venue for Indirect SEM (Search Engine Marketing). When using Google, it's impossible to ignore the fact that on the first page provided for any give search, there is roughly a 90% chance that one of those top 10 results will be a relative Youtube video, and why not - Google owns Youtube.

With this in mind, I've decided to begin testing the waters with Youtube as a viable SEM tool. Now I'm not naive, I do realize that Youtube is in fact used by million for marketing purposes, but I'm specifically interested to see if and how well the Google Freshness Algorithm will rank new videos.

I Am Not Impressed

I recently saw this old school ad… I laughed, and this is why.

The site authors seek to impress us by showing how well they can get a site to appear on the first page of Google. They want you to believe that because they can show first page search results that their service is valuable. However, the terms used in the sample video were obscure and had low competition values. In some cases there was no exact phrase match for the term used. What does this mean… any living creature with fingers and able to type could get the same results. Let's look at an example.

Let's say that you live in a tiny town like Collbran Colorado with a population of 388 and decide that you want to rank #1 for a search phrase like Collbran Law Firm. A quick check on Google will show you that there is a total of only 2660 pages that contain the three terms in our phrase. An exact match search using quotes around the phrase will reveal just 1 search result. This is because just one page out of 63 billion web pages contain those three words in order. So of course you can quickly rank on the first page of google for that search term just by having that phrase on your page.

What's missing from many of these videos is the keyword research conducted before video production, KW research designed to find extremely obscure or easy terms to rank.

Competition value is important to guys like me that perform the work relating to affordable SEO, this is because some terms are extremely competitive and next to impossible to rank, we prefer terms that have fewer competitors yet still have a decent search volume in order to keep new visitors coming into the site.

Search Volume? Search volume is the number of times any given phrase is searched for on the web. Obviously competition matters little if there no one is actually searching the web using your chosen search phrase. So sure, anyone can rank for a low competition phrase that contains no search volume, but if you want to impress me, then show me ranking within a competitive market or niche, and show me some search volume to match it.

That's my 2 cents, keep the change.