The Marketing Technology Blog

Last week I had coffee with Brandon McGee, a VP with Huntington bank that specializes in Mobile Banking. Brandon’s blog has some great search engine ranking - thanks to his concentrated content as well as the tight niche he’s blogging about.

We chatted about his blog and even talked mobile for a while, he’s provided me with some cool insight as to where the industry is going and it’s quite exciting. Here’s a synopsis of our conversation - I wanted to share it with everyone.

• Niche, niche, niche… micro, micro, micro. I’m jealous of Brandon’s choice in blogging. I had always though casting a wide net would get me more fish; but the truth is quite the opposite. Because I don’t have a very tight niche, I compete with a lot of other sites. Brandon doesn’t have to compete (yet). For those of you thinking about blogging, there’s a lot of noise out here so try to find your own frequency!
• Selecting the domain name. Brandon is currently hosted with Blogger. This is where the ‘yet’ comes into consideration in my previous point. If someone decides to blog about mobile banking and they snag a great domain name, Brandon could be pushed down the Search Engine results page as other people rise up with targeted domain names.
• Hosted vs. hosting. Brandon’s choice in Blogger was a great one to get him up and running. He’s got his niche and he’s consistently blogging on great subjects. The blog is definitely a winner and is fostering him some attention. However, I don’t think it’s fostering him as much attention as it could be if he were to host it himself. Hosting on a platform like WordPress will allow him to theme his layout, do some in-depth search engine optimization, as well as ‘own’ the audience making their way to his site (instead of the distractions of Blogger).

Here’s one example that I provided Brandon, how his content is displayed in a SERP. If you look at how his posts and links are indexed and displayed in Google, there’s an important element missing:



Notice all of the post descriptions? Not very compelling, are they? With WordPress, a plugin such as the All in One SEO Pack allows you to customize the excerpts that are associated with your links in Google. This allows you to write some targeted, keyword-rich, and compelling content that will drive more clicks through to your site.

Here’s what my links look like:


I don’t proclaim to be any guru of SEO, but the ability to modify the content that is displayed within your Search Engine result is an important one - both the the search engines, and to the folks using them.

Since ecommerce and banking share some similar compliance issues and seem to be evolving to mobile, I’m looking forward to digging in to Brandon’s blog a little deeper. He’s already pointed me to some great mobile industry resources.