Jan 12
Here’s a great video that discusses “on-page SEO” …the coding factors of your site that can dramatically affect your search engine rankings. In Steamboat today, I see a wealth of website owners that don’t know or take the time to review and update their on-page SEO.
Sep 30
Pay Per Click At a Glance
If your considering whether or not to explore the realm of pay per click (PPC) advertising, let me tell you that there’s no more powerful way to achieve instant results. If you’ve got a website and need traffic, PPC is the most targeted way to capture the attention you need to market your product or services to consumers online. PPC combines targeted keywords and search phrases to serve up text ads at the very moment a prospective client is trying to have their needs served. Think of a typical online search as a conversation, question or problem your customers are trying to have solved. By properly planting your advertising at the right place with the right offer, PPC will be a winning strategy every time.
PPC- What Exactly Does It Include?
The concept of pay per click advertising is actually very simple to comprehend. There are a ton of tools online that can help you with your keyword research to find what your customers are searching for. If you’ve done your job, you’ll know exactly “where” you want your ads. The next step is of course to design your ads. Think of an Adwords ad as a one sentence summation of why a buyer should visit your site. Next you’ll need to set your bids. That’ right, gaining top search results takes spending a specific amount of money for every visitor you attract to click over to your landing page. While your first reaction might be to say that the highest bid always wins, this isn’t the case. As I addressed in a previous post, there are other factors (like Quality Score) that will affect what you have to spend.
In order to run a profitable PPC campaign, you’ll need to become master to skills like effectively writing ads, tailoring your ads to the right audience, choosing the most appropriate keywords to target and judging the competition. The next step of the process is to properly track your results so you can hone in on the gold and toss the junk. This is where many PPC marketers make their mistakes and end up pursuing more organic search engine optimization (SEO) instead. The immediate results aren’t there like with PPC, but the risks (i.e. throwing away your money on bogus ads & targets) seem to be less.
NEW Website – PPC Is The Best Initial Strategy
Once a new site is built, the litmus test becomes how it performs. The best way to quickly judge this is through immediate high traffic. There’s no better way to instantly attract visitors than with PPC. Besides, it will most likely take months of steady link building before a new website will even begin to see traffic from its SEO efforts. Simply put, PPC may often be the lifeline your business needs to drive the steady stream of traffic you need to generate immediate revenue.
As I advocated before, the reality is that using a combination of PPC and SEO tactics should be the keystone to any web marketing strategy. By initially pursuing a PPC campaign you give time to let the SEO endeavors take hold. In fact, the most savvy entrepreneurs tend to continue their successful PPC campaigns well past the time they begin to see results stemming from their SEO plan. A synergistic approach like this when approaching one’s online marketing will win the day every time! A well-rounded use of both PPC and SEO will ultimately lead to multiple streams of revenue for years to come.
Reason #1: Wasted Time Amongst Employees
Let’s face it, social media sites are becoming more mainstream and the talk around water coolers across the world. Employees are linked both professionally and socially across platforms like Facebook throughout the day, and mostly during work hours.
Whether employers block access to certain sites from the corporate servers or not, workers are using smartphones (i.e. Blackberry & Palm) to access the internet and the sites they want. Twitter “tweets” and LinkedIn updates occurring from these types of devices are happening on lunch breaks, during meetings, from the bathroom… and there’s no stopping it.
Bottom line, if an employee wants to access their social networks during the daily “9to5” there’s no way to stop it. Allowing workers access to the internet but trying to block these types of sites is simply pointless.
Reason #2: Social Comments Might Hurt the Brand
A question that pops up in executive workshops all the time is the threat of bad publicity spreading to the mainstream. This type of negative feedback about the brand is feared to ultimately hurt sales.
Well… that’s exactly true! But what CEOs don’t want to fess up to is that sometimes negative feedback is exactly what they need to hear. It’s easy for the “ivory tower” to forget that their company might have inherent problems or that consumers don’t absolutely love everything about them. As they saying goes, you can’t fix a problem if you don’t know it exists.
Besides, the upside of social media for honest and upstanding companies is that their supporters are online to support them. If there’s a negative statement about their products or service that aren’t true, the power of a client to correct the misinformation directly often holds far greater weight than a published corporate statement.
Companies need to monitor brand attacks but view them as opportunities, not threats.
Reason #3: Companies Will Lose Control of Their Brand
The fact remains that in this day and age consumers hold the power, not PR departments. Long gone are the days of “wag the dog” marketing tactics. With open access to the internet, the game has changed. If you think your customers aren’t already talking about you, you’re dead wrong.
Workers are spreading news about the company amongst friends and family through Facebook, emails and personal blogs. Clients are using Twitter and sites like Yelp (among others) to leave positive or negative feedback about your brand and there’s no stopping it.
So what do you do about it? Treat each and every employee and customer like an ambassador for your brand. Providing avenues to generate loyal and lasting customers have never been more important than in the internet age. And don’t fear the conversations, JOIN THEM!
Reason #4: Keeping Up With Social Media Is Expensive
There is a misconception that social media is absolutely free, and to some extent, this is true. The reality is that for an employer to effectively participate in social media and monitor their online presence does take at least some resources. But these don’t have to include a budget line item.
Whether it’s the time spent by staffers tracking feedback across different social media sites or hiring consultants to maintain your presence for you, there is a cost factor. But just because there are people highly trained in the art of social media science doesn’t mean that you should run right out and hire outsiders.
Many times an outsourced affiliate doesn’t know the inner workings of your operation and can post statements that aren’t all-together factual. And it is these same firms that will ultimately end up costing you the most money and risk hurting your brand. Corporations are often better served by empowering existing employees to make social posts. If they’ve done their job properly training their staff, there shouldn’t be a major concern of information leaks or negative comments. Chalk the time spent by employees on these social network sites as a necessary operating expense. Ultimately, the return on investment is well worth it.
Reason #5: With “No Control” They Risk a Lawsuit
This is the biggest fallacy I’ve ever heard. Social media was never meant, or presently considered to be, cold-hard fact. The entire basis of social media is the spread of opinion. Whether it’s stemming from a current or past customer or originating right within the corporate walls, it’s nothing that would ever give a plaintiff a leg to stand on!
Those that believe they’ll get sued for what’s posted in forums, blogs or other such sites are going to have a hard time coping in modern day since public opinion is now spread more rampantly than ever. Assuming your employees are spreading blatant lies about you (and if they are, you have much bigger problems to worry about!) then you simply don’t need to lose the sleep over it.
Reason #6: The Fear of Information Leaks From Within
The remedy to this concern is two-fold:
Sep 27
When you’re ready to make an investment of time, money and effort into SEO, it’s important that you set realistic goals about the results that you are expecting to see. Many people know that SEO can be extremely beneficial for an online business, however they don’t quite understand how the process works, or what they should expect. Therefore it’s important to get an idea of what you should be expecting both in terms of the process itself and the success you and your business will end up seeing.
The Basic Process of SEO
There are many different elements of an effective search marketing campaign. With SEO, the details definitely do make a big difference, and the most successful campaigns are the ones that combine many different strategies into one cohesive plan. The element of SEO that gets the most buzz however remains the use of keywords.
Keywords, of course, are the actual terms that people type into the search engines in order to begin looking for something. By targeting the right keywords and key phrases, you can increase your chances of being found by more individuals. Research here is of the utmost importance, because by digging down into the data you can find great long-tail key phrases, which have three or more words, which will enable you to be ranked as highly as possible.
After all, very few people these days just type for something such as “football”. They may make a search however for “buying replica football jerseys”. Not to mention that ranking for generic terms and phrases is incredibly hard. Once you know the actual keywords that people use for your niche or industry, you can then go about including them on your site as a piece of your search marketing game plan. The result is that you will end up seeing not just more traffic, but traffic that is truly targeted, which will result in more prospects and customers for your business.
So how do you go about including keywords into your website after the research has been performed? Keywords can be used in any number of different ways, starting from the beginning of the process when you may want to choose a domain name that includes some of your targeted keywords. From there, keywords can be used in individual page names, in the links that you have from one page on your site to the others and most prevalently, in the written content of the page itself.
A crucial thing to remember with SEO is that you can’t overdo your keyword usage, a practice known as “keyword stuffing”. Not only with this turn off your visitors, who have a hard time reading the content you have on your site, but it also marks you as spam in the eyes of the search engines. Your rankings will plummet, and you’ll never receive the traffic that you have been craving. Ultimately, effective search marketing when it comes to the inclusion of keywords is all about walking the fine line between too many keywords and spam, and too few keywords and a lack of connection to those search queries.
It’s also important to note that while many people feel that “content is king” when it comes to SEO, content just for the sake of content isn’t valuable at all. Adding dozens of keyword stuffed pages to your website won’t produce results. What your site actually needs is high quality, unique and valuable content that serves a purpose beyond helping your search marketing efforts.
In addition to these onsite SEO tactics, effective search marketing also includes offsite SEO, primarily in the form of link building. Once your website is established, you can go about the process of generating incoming links leading to your site. Each incoming link from another site to your own is like a vote for your site in the eyes of the search engines.
The more votes the better, as your reputation and credibility will grow. Additionally, votes from more reputable sources do count for more, and will provide a bigger boost to your rankings. There are many different ways to go about link building, including directory submissions, article marketing, blog posting and commenting and on down the line.
Search Marketing Results
After you have begun work with an SEO strategy, what kind of results should you expect to see and how soon should you expect to see them? SEO works very quickly, but it’s not instantaneous and in many cases it is a gradual process. A few more links and a few pages of optimized content won’t send you to the number 1 spot in Google overnight.
However, continuing to develop your site in the right fashion and working hard to deploy a long term SEO game plan will get you to that highly coveted first page. You have to remember, all of those websites on the first page are there for a reason, and they probably have been doing a few things right. Therefore you can’t automatically supplant them when you start your own work, nor can you bypass all of the websites also undertaking their own strategies.
The bottom line is that you have to be in it for the long haul. The right combination of smart SEO strategies, consistently applied will get you to that first page, but you can’t expect to put a few keywords on your page and show up as number 1 tomorrow morning.
Once you know some of the basic processes involved with SEO you will be able to dive in for yourself. You have to remember to have realistic expectations though about what kind of work you’ll need to do, or what you would like to have done for you. Additionally, while there is an unlimited upside with SEO, there aren’t any free lunches either. It’s a process, and it can start working very quickly, but nothing is instantaneous or guaranteed when the competition is as fierce as it currently is with search marketing.
With executives gaining more and more information on the importance of search engine marketing, budget allocations for search engine optimization (SEO) are on the rise. Simply put, the opportunity to maximize profits through online sales and lead generation has become too enticing to ignore.
A far as a long term strategy goes for customer acquisition and consumer presence, SEO is taking a larger role versus traditional marketing avenues. Reports are in that corporate spending on SEO pursuits is expected to see a dramatic increase over the coming years. With the current down economy, more serious talks are taking place in boardrooms across the country as to how these businesses will more effectively position their websites within the search engines.
Highly touted publications predict that organic search efforts (unpaid traffic generation) will rise anywhere from 17 to 20 percent while we simultaneously witness paid search (pay per click advertising) decline in the neighborhood of 11-15 percent. A fantastic outline of this is depicted in the graph below, from our friends at eMarketer:
SEO Market Growth
Surveys are also beginning to suggest that companies placed in the top 5 of organic search results hold a slightly higher value and garner more targeted click-through traffic. This doesn’t mean that paid advertising with Google, Yahoo and Bing doesn’t get its fair share of traffic, just that organic results are getting equivalent conversions as consumers become more aware of the differences between paid vs. organic rankings.
The most obvious way to positively impact search engine results is to participate in both paid and SEO endeavors. Pay per click offers immediate results while search engine optimization is a longer process that takes time and persistence. Many large and small companies are finding that a pay per click campaign becomes a needed initial expense while SEO initiatives take root. Many businesses can then realistically begin to decrease dollars spent on pay per click as they see their organic search results rise.
No matter what online activities a company decides to begin, proper reporting is the key ingredient to success. Without having the proper tracking and reporting infrastructure in place, many dollars can be wasted on poor decisions. There becomes no way of properly gauging the return on investment received from these pursuits without the statistics to back it up.
Web analytics are vital in order to gain useful knowledge and information when judging the results of a campaign. Google offers “Google Analytics” which is free and only requires a small line of code be added to your site. The type of data supplied from Google about a site’s traffic and visitors sources can be extremely helpful.
The bottom line with increased investments put toward companies’ online efforts is that anyone not exploring the options with search engine marketing is sinking further behind the curve. In addition to increased traffic to their website, businesses need to consider SEO much like their public relations arm. Getting ranked in the search engines gets customers in the door but in the end, it is the products and services offered that ultimately make the sale.
Today’s world of online interaction has become more complex, but more exciting, than ever. The ways that connections are now made with friends and clients on the web has evolved to an entirely new level. But I’m here to tell you that this “new frontier” of networking through your computer is not as scary as it might first appear. As long as you follow these simple rules.
Rule #1: You have to be good at what you do.
A mistake that people often make when entering the world of social media is to believe that simply setting up a blog, Facebook page, Twitter account or other online presence will automatically bring them customers. The reality is that your business has to already have strong fundamentals and a solid marketing plan.
Part of being a great social media player is knowing what type of communication resonates with prospective customers. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can “fake it” in your online interactions. If you’re not experienced in what you do, prospects will sniff that out quicker than sharks smell blood.
Rule #2: Social media requires staying on top of your routine.
If you’re thinking about starting a new blog or some other kind of online presence, map out your plan first! Posting information without a purpose is like skipping rocks on the water. You might create tiny ripples here and there but there’s no clear path for your customers to follow.
Take the time needed to not only write and post your own material, but to engage in other sites as well. Reading and interacting with related sites (and customers) is the nature of social media. Standing alone on the island of your blog without ever reaching out to others will leave you stranded like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Without one-on-one interactions your message won’t effectively be heard by anyone.
Keep your updates regular and make it a part of your standing routine. Consistency is a key ingredient. Though this is a big time commitment, the rewards can be tremendous.
Rule #3: You don’t have to be a “computer geek” to join the fun.
If you’re uncomfortable with using the Internet to leverage today’s business tools, information resources and networking opportunities, it’s time to step up to the plate and take a swing. If the fear of the unknown is what’s holding you back… stop being afraid right now! Don’t let slight ignorance of technology be your reason for non-participation.
Though you may find the concept of engaging people online foreign at first, just know that most of the applications you will be using are very intuitive and user-friendly. Most of the widely used web platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress (blogging) and community forums come with a load of resources you can utilize when getting started.
So what do you do to get started? Give it a try! Go ahead and join LinkedIn, set up a Facebook profile, read blogs related to your business as well as social networking, ask your peers and explore new websites. You’ll be amazed at how quickly these actions will get you where you need to be in the world of online media.
Rule #4: The Internet is constantly changing. Change with it!
Being the first to explore the early, experimental side of social media can pay off big dividends for those that have an “early-adopter” attitude. Just think about where you’d be had you started using Twitter just a couple of years ago when microblogging was a foreign concept to most. Today, Twitter sees over 55 million visits a month… who knew?
Since we can all agree that the web is here to stay and an ever-evolving creature with the possibility of taking your business to new levels, don’t be afraid to try new things. It might take some time to get started with a new platform and work through the learning curve, but if you find a progressive new avenue for networking with prospective clients, go for it!
Rule #5: No matter what, you can’t fake it.
Just because online communication doesn’t involve face-to-face interaction doesn’t mean that you can be someone you’re not. In fact, the most successful bloggers and online networkers have seen success by being genuine and representing themselves exactly as they are. Believe it or not, customers can smell the “B.S.” your slinging, so steer clear of creating a new personality just because you think you can.
This goes for your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn and all of it! Though you may feel like the worldwide web is an anonymous place to interact, it’s completely the opposite. Your social networks are your first introduction to the people you hope to do business with, your colleagues and friends. Make absolutely sure that your impressions showcase the real you. Remember, it’s better to generate a small number of leads with a higher conversion rate than a large pool of leads that simply suck your time with no real interest of doing business with you.
Rule #6: The web is more than just a prospecting tool.
Sure, the Internet has a great capacity to bring in new customers at a lower cost than traditional media. But it’s so much more than that! The real value of the web lies in the amazing opportunity to be an education tool.
This is where people come to learn about you and your business and hear the things you have to say to the world. Your ideas, expertise, attitudes and personality can be transferred across the world with the click of a button. There’s no better platform than the web to display your market intelligence and customers want that!
Also, and not surprisingly, the web is a powerful tool at your fingertips to find resources galore about successful online marketing and prospecting tools. Finding timely information about what others are doing on the web to make real money is as easy as it’s ever been. Take advantage of that and you will join the ranks of those touted as the most successful professionals in your given industry.
Here’s to your success!