Internet Marketing
6 Critical Elements to Guarantee a Successful Web Presence
A successful web presence that attracts your ideal client and makes a great first impression is now much more complex, incorporating not only your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, business directories and review sites. It’s no longer enough to just have a website. Your website is just one component of a complex network of information about your business that projects your brand and expertise to those in search of a product or solution.
Website Call-to-Action Strategy
Want to increase visitor response on your website? Then give them a reason to do something and connect with you!
If your website is simply a brochure for your company products and services, you are missing an opportunity to encourage your visitors to take some action that benefits them and you. Maybe it’s time for a website marketing makeover that includes an effective call-to-action strategy.
A “call-to-action” refers to active copy that compels a user to do something such as watch a video demo, download a useful tool or sign up for your mailing list. Visitors that find your website by searching may find what they are looking for, but don’t let that opportunity to capture their attention slip away by not providing them with an offer.
On the other hand, if you drive a visitor to your website through a marketing campaign and don’t provide a clear call-to-action, you run the risk of them getting confused, frustrated and leaving without connecting with you. Offer your visitors compelling content and something that benefits them and they will do what you want them to do.
But like other marketing activities, you need a strategy to focus you on what you are trying to accomplish. Read more on Website Call-to-Action Strategy…
Tags: call to action, small business websites, website design
5 Steps to Analyzing Your Web Presence for Better Online Marketing
Any small business that is not developing an expansive Web presence as part of your online marketing activities is missing an opportunity to gain visibility and develop an expert reputation. Think of your online presence as one entity with many customer touch points. Each of those touch points must effectively convey your brand and your message in order to help your target audience continue their effort to get to know you.
A Web presence analysis is an exercise that helps you determine how your business is perceived when someone searches for your area of expertise. Important to your online marketing strategy, this analysis answers questions such as:
- How well can your business be found when someone searches?
- Is your brand consistent across all of your online properties?
- How is your business seen with respect to your competition?
Evaluating how you are perceived online will help you pinpoint areas that need attention, enabling you to develop a better online marketing plan that focuses on these specific areas and puts activities in place that will improve the effectiveness of your online marketing. Read more on 5 Steps to Analyzing Your Web Presence for Better Online Marketing…
Tags: keyword analysis, search engine optimization, SEO, social media presence, web presence, website analysis
10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility
Here are my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses that will help you gain more visibility with your target customer.
- Create a vision and set realistic goals for your business. What’s that have to do with marketing, you ask? Knowing your vision will help you make decisions on what types of activities you will need to get where you’d like to go. Goals break the process into smaller pieces to allow you to get there one step at a time. Without a vision and a set of goals, you may make some decisions that lead you nowhere.
Read more on 10 Marketing Tips for Gaining Online Visibility…
Top Search Queries: Data to Help You Know How to Get Found
As I reviewed the information in the Google Webmaster Tools for one of my clients today, I noticed something different in the information being presented in the Top Search Queries report – it has expanded and now contains a lot of great information on how your site appears in the search results for various keywords. It just so happens that Google reported this new feature update in their blog just today: More Data & Charts in Top Search Queries. I love stumbling into something new!
Not only have they improved this report by giving you a significantly larger number of queries in the report, they have also provided detail that can help you determine how to improve your site’s ranking. And from a marketing perspective, this will help many small business owners determine how their websites are doing and what types of improvements they need to make to get better rankings.
What you get
You get the number of impressions and click-through information for each search query and each position that your site’s pages appeared at in the search results associated with that query. Plus you also get the pages that were linked to from the search results for that search query. Read more on Top Search Queries: Data to Help You Know How to Get Found…
Tags: google webmaster tools, keyword ranking, search engine optimization, SEO
“Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword – 10 On Page SEO Tips
It’s nice to be friendly and welcome your visitors to your website, but unless you are in the hospitality business, using Welcome! as your home page header and title is wasting valuable real estate when it comes to SEO (search engine optimization). You can have welcoming content for your visitors without sacrificing the best practices of SEO. Remember that a website is your primary tool for marketing your business online and you need to do what it takes to ensure your website is found.
For those business owners that are writing the content for their website, keep these following on page SEO tips handy. Rather than provide the list in order of priority from an SEO perspective, I will present them in the order the human needs to address them. Read more on “Welcome” is Not a Useful Keyword — 10 On Page SEO Tips…
Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEO, XML Sitemaps
Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product
Another week and another client calls me to ask about yet another company claiming they can optimize his website and guarantee first page placement on Google. After doing my usual research, I find a Ripoff Report by an unhappy customer who felt they were taken for a lot of money. One unhappy customer does not make the company bad. But this exercise got me wondering about why so many of these SEO and PPC companies have so many complaints posted all over the Web?
SEO and PPC are Not Commodity Products
These companies that call small business owners trying to sell them their software to manage their SEO and PPC activities are trying to treat Search Engine Marketing as a commodity – a one size fits all so to speak. This is absolutely not the case and most likely the wrong business model for success.
Each of my client’s search engine marketing strategy is unique. It takes a deep understanding of their business, their customers and what they are trying to accomplish with their online marketing. It takes creating relevant content that appeals to their prospects and attracts them to their Website. And, what works for one company may not necessarily work for another.
Are there common elements to setting up search engine optimization or a pay-per-click advertising campaign? Absolutely. But what is a common exercise is just a piece of the search engine marketing puzzle. Read more on Search Engine Marketing is not a Commodity Product…
Tags: pay-per-click advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing
I got a call from a small business owner yesterday that reminds me why I focus on helping small business owners market their businesses. It disheartens me when someone spends a substantial amount of money with a company for pay-per-click or SEO services that do not get them any results. These companies charge $500 – $3000 per month for these services of which only a percentage of it is applied to your actual campaign. The rest goes into their pockets. They also redirect your website to a copy that they maintain, replace your phone number with one of theirs (to measure phone calls from their services along with clicks) and basically eliminate any ranking you may have in the search engines. They basically hold you hostage.
In most cases, what they actually provide can be done yourself with a little knowledge or with someone who can help you get your advertising off the ground for a lot less. Here is how you get started.
Determining Your Keywords
Finding your keywords are easy to do yourself with tools such as Google AdWords External Keyword Tool or the Google Search-based Keyword Tool. Both enable you to plug in your website and they return keywords that they associate with your website. They provide search volume and competition for the keywords. The Google Search-based Keyword Tool also provides a suggested bid price if you want to set up an AdWords campaign. These keywords can be exported so you can organize them into groups for optimizing your pages of your website or to build your pay-per-click campaigns. Read more on Why You Should Control Your Online Marketing…
Tags: local business listings, pay-per-click advertising, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
Don’t Wait for Perfection
Striving for perfection is a nice goal, but sometimes waiting for perfection can hold you back.
The beauty of marketing on the Internet is that, in most cases, you can test, change, modify and update your campaigns once they go live. Having everything completely perfect prior to getting out there and being seen is no longer a necessity. It is more important to take action and become visible, even if it’s not perfect, than sit around and wait.
Recently, I’ve noticed this trend of waiting for perfection with some small business owners. The problem with this strategy is:
- The longer you wait, the more chance you give your competition to be found before you, potentially stealing the thunder from something you thought was unique;
- The Web changes too quickly to worry about finding small imperfections that can be fixed quickly once they are discovered;
- Marketing takes time to work and waiting just lengthens the time before you will see results.
Read more on Don’t Wait for Perfection…
Tags: internet presence, marketing tactics, web marketing, web presence
If I Can’t Find You Online, Do You Exist?
Eight down and one to go in the year end marketing review series to help small business owners get ready for a wonderful new year.
Before we plan our marketing activities for the new year, we have one more review – do you and your business exist online? As a small business owner, how you are perceived when people search and find your information will determine whether they contact you about your products and services. So as hard as it may be to know the truth, we must understand whether:
- We have an online presence or not;
- Our online presence consistently projects how we want to be perceived.
Do You Exist?
This may be the easier issue to deal with as you get to start with a clean slate and do it right from the beginning. Make developing your online presence and marketing your business online the major part of your marketing plan this year. If you’re not sure how to go about developing your online presence, it may just be worth it to hire someone to help you make choices. Make sure this person has strong marketing experience in both online and traditional marketing and understands the challenges of small business owners. Make sure this person will guide you through the entire process, from brand and message development through implementation. Read more on If I Can’t Find You Online, Do You Exist?…
Tags: online reputation, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SEO
