SEO: Essential for Effective Inbound Marketing
Search engine optimization plays a critical part in the success of your inbound marketing efforts by increasing the effectiveness of the other three pillars – content marketing, social media marketing and public relations – to drive targeted traffic to your website.
Inbound Marketing Plan
Now that you understand what inbound marketing is and how it can help your small business, it’s time to figure out your inbound marketing strategy. I know, you hate writing marketing plans. So do I actually, but they are necessary to keep us on track. However, once you put it in writing, you will only need to update it when you measure your results and determine what changes need to be made. And we can make it a quick and painless exercise that will get you out there doing something to start your lead generation activities.
Tags: content strategy, lead nurturing, public relations, SEO
8 Step Process for Gaining Local Search Engine Visibility
For many of my clients, being found by those searching for local businesses can make a huge difference in the number of inbound leads they receive. If you are a local business (i.e. you service clients within a specific geography or have a store front) and haven’t implemented a local search strategy, your missing a huge opportunity to grow your business.
Read more on 8 Step Process for Gaining Local Search Engine Visibility…
Tags: local online marketing, local search, SEO
10 Ways to Drive Qualified Visitors to Your Website
Just Because You’ve Built It, Doesn’t Mean They Will Come
You finally have a powerful website and blog that you are proud to show off, with messages that clearly explain how you help your clients and the value you provide. Now, how do you drive your target audience to your site and generate qualified leads? The following 10 tips create an inbound marketing plan that will drive traffic to and turn your website into a powerful hub for your web presence.
1. Optimize your site around your top keywords
Understanding how people search for your products or services enables you to develop a keyword list that you use for all of your marketing activities. Then optimize each page of your website around one keyword phrase, making sure you use it in your web page title, the meta description tag and appropriately throughout your content. Read more on 10 Ways to Drive Qualified Visitors to Your Website…
Tags: article marketing, content syndication, search engine optimization, SEO, web presence
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
Power of Three in Marketing
I was asked an interesting question during one of my coaching sessions:
As a small business owner, if you were to focus on only three marketing activities over the next six months, what would they be?
That made me stop and think for a bit. Putting the gears in motion and applying the power of threes, I realized that this question and its answer would help other small business owners focus on what is important for them to be found. My recommendation for three marketing activities include:
#1 Building a first-class Web presence to develop your expert reputation
Today’s small business needs to have a solid presence on the Internet to help build your expert reputation. Building a first-class presence includes:
- Building a website and blog on WordPress
- Creating compelling profiles on Google, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Establishing local business listings on Google, Yahoo, Bing and Best of the Web
- Launching a Facebook Business Page
- Setting up a Twitter account with a custom, branded background
- Syndicating your content out to relevant sites
In order for this to all work, all the gears need to be moving in unison in order for all the pieces to create one unified image.
Read more on Power of Three in Marketing…
Tags: keyword development, referral sources, search engine optimization, SEO, word of mouth marketing
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…
