Internet Marketing Tips, Tools and Strategies

You may have only dipped your toe in the Online Marketing water in 2011. Or, you might have just ignored most of the search/social/local online marketing talk that was floating around. Whatever the case might be, I want to encourage you to try and bring some key activities to your Online Marketing Strategy in 2012. Here are three things you should absolutely focus on in the coming months:

One, Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This should be number one on any Online Marketing plan in 2012. Afterall, what is the point of a website if no one is visiting it? Optimizing your current website, or building a website from scratch with SEO in mind should be your top priority in 2012. Start by identifying target keywords, focus on these when writing content, meta tags and meta descriptions for your website.

If you just don’t feel comfortable with handling SEO concepts, find an Internet Marketing Consult that can help.

Two, Social Media. Social media platforms aren’t just for fun these days. They are powerful tools that should be included in your Online Marketing Strategy in 2012. Social Media allows you to connect with your customers (and potential customers) on a level they are already actively using. Most consumers nowadays think a company doesn’t exist if they can’t find them on Facebook, Twitter, or Google+. Speaking of Google+, this new social platform is primed to dominate 2012.

Three, Mobile Marketing. It seems everyone is mobile these days - more users are browsing the web via smartphones and iPads (tablets). Don’t be left out, include a mobile website in your 2012 Online Marketing Strategy! Make sure your current website is optimized for mobile use, or create a “mirror” of your current website for mobile users. Also, be sure your mobile site focus on the things mobile users need.

Make 2012 the year of success, by including these three key activities in your Online Marketing Strategy for the year. Get 2012 started the right way by getting your website score with our FREE Website Scan!

 

You probably are already running a PPC or pay-per-click campaign. You probably are getting a decent amount of traffic from your advertisements as well. So, why would I suggest you consider moving away from PPC and towards building your organic search traffic?

Well, let me start by saying that I think PPC traffic has benefits and you shouldn’t stop advertising this way completely. That being said, organic traffic has a different sort of value associated with the clicks. Let’s look at three highly valuable benefits of trying to increase your organic search traffic:

Increasing Organic Traffic or building a SEO Method makes you focus on content. When you start developing your organic search strategy you really get to focus on your website and what information you are putting out to the public.

Building a SEO strategy to increase organic traffic involves competitor analysis. By analyzing your competitors you get a better idea of what separates you apart from them, meaning you know what makes you better! Knowing the difference between you and your competition allows you to approach potential customers with ALL the information they need to make a decision.

Higher Quality Leads. According to eMarketer, only 25% of people will ever click on a Pay Per Click ad. That means that if you are heavily invested in PPC vs SEO, you may be missing 75% of your market online! Most companies will try to combat this by just investing more in PPC thinking that this will help them compete more effectively, and this does work somewhat, but the minute you turn off your PPC campaign your traffic stops. You are left with nothing but your previous leads/sales.

Also, according to Dan Zarella at Hubspot and the research they compiled recently, most people do not trust PPC ads. Organic search results are more trustworthy by a large margin. So not only are less people likely to click on your PPC ads, the leads you are going to get are not necessarily going to be the most qualified.

Now these are just a few of the many benefits associated with developing an organic search strategy. To be fair any traffic increase to your website can only be a boon, right?

Why not start increasing your organic search traffic by signing up for our free website scan? The scan will let you know where your website currently stands in search engines and how it stacks up to your competition.   

 

There are two voices in the online community in regards to incorporating misspelled keywords in your SEO and PPC strategies. One school of thought says, “why not pick up traffic from these popular keywords….that as a bonus usually come cheap?”. The other says that there are several great reasons NOT to try this keyword strategy. Let’s look at the pro’s and con’s of both opinions:

The “for-it” school -

Misspelled keywords get ranked and can get you traffic. Period. Users will sometimes be in a hurry and make mistakes when searching, and this doesn’t mean they aren’t going to click on the top web site that pops-up; especially if that site gets them information on what they were searching. The argument being, if a user types insurnce (meaning insurance) and you are an insurance company, they receive the information they were looking for and you get traffic - everyone wins.

Not only do these misspelled words rank and get traffic, but they are cheaper to bid on and have lower competition. What is the ideal scenario when focusing on keywords for SEO and PPC? Low competition and a high global monthly search; misspelled words usually fall into this scenario.

The “opposed” school -

You aren’t selling insurnce, you are selling insurance. Focus on your keywords and develop useful content that supports your website in searches. Google’s main focus is to match the user and valuable content websites, based on the users search queries. They already weed out (or negatively impact) websites for various reasons: spammy, no useful content, broken links, and so forth. Who is to say that Google won’t negatively target misspelling tactics in the future, to improve user experience? Do a Google search on insurnce, see that “Showing results for insurance” under the ads section? That is Google trying to tell you “hey you spelt insurance wrong!”.

Google will also go so far as to intuit what you were searching for in the first place and give you an auto populated list of 5 topics (dropdown list) related to your initial few letters you are typing in. This relatively new feature in Google never ceases to amaze me! I swear Google can read my mind 95% of the time and rarely do I personally ever get to the point where I misspell something because of this feature.

Another reason not to subscribe to the misspelling strategy? User confidence.  Think of when you are talking to a customer and you stumble over you words, embarrassing right? Purposely misspelling keywords is a lot like that. Not only are users not looking for insurnce (insurance), but Google is already doing everything they can to give users the highest quality content, it is only a matter of time before misspellings are weeded out.

What should you do?

So, you might be asking yourself “where do you fall on this misspelling thing?”. I suggest you focus on your content and SEO strategy - develop useful and highly valuable content that includes your targeted keywords and you have already won part of the battle for website traffic. Paid Search is a much better place to test out misspellings and see what results you can generate. You may want to test out some landing pages with some misspelled words to improve your paid search quality score, but that might not be necessary as misspelled words typically already come cheap enough.

An Internet Marketing Consultant, such as WSI, can not only help you identify other high-value keywords (that you might not be already focusing on),  but can help you develop a multi-dimensional Internet Marketing campaign that gets results. Think about that option before you start purposely misspelling words.

Matt Cutts from Google answers the question we all want to know:
Does Google Consider SEO Spam? 

His answer can be found in this video...

His answer is pretty clear. No, Google does not consider SEO spam. High quality search engine optimization or organic marketing is all about improving the user experience and helping the search engines determine what your web site is all about. A well constructed web site, with good content, good keywords, and a well thought out internal and external linking strategy will get you traffic from Google. 

Sure, there are plenty of web site owners and search engine optimization companies employing "black hat" spammy techniques, but this is a sure fire way to get your site blacklisted eventually. Black hat techniques may work short term but why bother putting in all that effort into something that may get you banned from Google? Good quality search engine optimization will get you results and allow steady growth for years to come with no danger of ever being blacklisted. 

If you are going to hire an internet marketing company to take over your SEO, make sure they have references, case studies, and proof that the sites they have optimized have survived all the changes at Google (see list of Google Algorithm Changes). SEO works extremely well, you just have to make sure you are doing it right or the company you hire knows what they are doing. 

Want to find out how well your site is optimized?
Get a Free WebScan, and see how well your site is built, how fast it loads, how well optimized it is, and more. 

One of the best things about internet marketing is that it's one of the easiest forms of media to track results. The beauty is you can test and tweak your marketing methods depending on the response you see from your efforts. This type of flexibility simply is not available with more traditional methods of advertising like television, print or radio ads, or at least not as easily and not as in depth.

Google Analytics is a well known free service for tracking website performance. Anyone who has ever looked at Google Analytics will tell you that the information can be a little overwhelming. 

What exactly should you track to better understand how your website is performing? 

Here are 3 tips to help you find the answer:

1. Know How Your Keywords Rank -

Once you have narrowed down the keywords that you want to target for your business you need to see where you stand with them. For example, if your keyword is "personal injury lawyer Chicago" and you find out your Google rank is 59, that means that 58 other websites will appear on the search engine results page before yours. 

Anyone who shops or does research online will tell you that it is unlikely that they will get beyond the first few results. Definitely not off the first page. Monitoring how your keyword rank improves is a direct response to your SEO techniques. Check your analytics data and see what keyword variations you are currently getting traffic from and look to expand on those before adding any new keywords into the mix. 

2. How Many People Click Through To Your Site -

It can be very exciting to see your Google keyword rankings rise however that is only a piece of the puzzle. Ranking for random keyword terms is all well and good, but do those keywords actually drive visits? Use Google Keyword Tool and Google Analytics to determine which keywords to focus on and how much traffic comes from each keyword, and use that information to grow the effectiveness of your search engine optimization campaign.

3. Getting the Lead or Sale -

Another important piece is tracking the leads and sales (if e-commerce) on your website by setting up Goal Tracking in Analytics. Track the keyword used in the search that lead to the conversion (lead or sale). The power to be able to measure the success of a specific keywords, articles, or campaigns by watching each step in the Conversion Funnel is extremely valuable.

Your internet marketing consulting professional will tell you that tracking your results is crucial. If you don't have analytics installed on your website, or you aren't checking it on a regular basis, you are most likely wasting money, time, and losing opportunity. Make sure that you are working on tweaking your campaigns after you evaluate your SEO results. This will give you a stronger campaign going forward and it will help you grow your business. 

Search engine optimization is the first thing internet marketing consulting professionals will mention when trying to increase your website's performance within search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. SEO is the method of creating lots of high quality, keyword focused content on your website and blogs so that search engines can index and present that content within search engine results. 

What do you do when another website is proving to have content that is seen as equal to yours by the search engine? How can you stand apart if you're already doing all the "On-Site SEO" you can?

The next step to improve your search engine ranks is with "off-page" optimization. You may refer to off-page optimization as link building. It is the act of building links back to your website from other places on the web and increasing your authority or what simply equates to votes back to your site. A link or vote from another website tells the search engines that this site is interesting or worthy enough to receive a link back. 

Not all links are created equal and you want to make sure that you do not cut corners when promoting your site. Look for high quality blogs, social media sites, associations, relevant directory listings, and press release sites that you can share content with. Do NOT SPAM! Spamming link farms or other people's sites is a sure fire way to get your website into trouble with the search engines. Keep in mind that all of these link building opportunities all become components of your overall web presence, so make sure you are using sites that are worthy.  

A quick blogging example - if you read several industry blogs to stay up to date on news consider leaving a comment. Blog comments are designed so that your name (or the name of your business) links to your website. If you leave thoughtful and relevant comments they will receive approval from the moderator and link back to your website.

Another way to increase your off-page optimization is to write articles on article sites like EZine Articles, HubPages and Squidoo. These articles appear on these sites and link back to your website and can also be found organically (independent of your site) adding another channel for your marketing. 

YouTube is an opportunity to upload videos and optimize them with your keywords linking back to website. Video has become very popular and it gives you the chance to show your target audience exactly how your service or product works.

Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter offer you the opportunity to share links back to your website on your social profiles. Social media marketing is a great way to build links however it's important to remember not to over market your business through social media. Social media is about building relationships, not pushing your product, and Facebook posts are not indexed by search engines. 

Press releases are another opportunity to anchor links back to your site while sharing important information with your consumers. If you are launching a new product or service, moving locations or expanding your company and bringing on a new team member announce it to the public through a press release. You're increasing brand awareness while also building links back to your site.

Ultimately if Google sees you and another site as equals in terms of the industry information offered on your site, it's the off-page links that will set you apart and move you ahead for a better search engine rank.

Keyword rich content is a necessary element to successful search engine optimization. If you are trying to increase the amount of content that is on your website the answer may be as simple as starting a blog.

The idea of "blogging" can often be overwhelming for some business owners. Those that are less internet savvy may see it as a challenge they do not want to face. However if you're letting your concerns hold you back from blogging you're missing out on a fun and easy way to add valuable content to your website and improve your search engine optimization. There are several marketing studies available online that show a direct correlation to the amount of blog content to number of leads/sales generated. More Content = More Leads/Sales.

If you're not sure where to start with your blog here are a few helpful blogging tips to get you started.

Blog theme - Your blog needs a centralized theme. This will determine what you write about. Typically it is best to classify your genre and write within that scope. The search engines are constantly trying to figure out what your site is all about so that it can display your site pages within the search results. Writing within the niche you serve helps not only the search engines, but can position you as an expert in your field.

Don't pitch - The point of a blog is not to make a sale. Your blog is a great tool to position yourself as an industry expert and leader. Share your knowledge with the world and end it at that. At the most, at the end of your post, a small link to a Free Offer of some kind should be fine.

Good title - It sometimes takes as long to come up with a good title as it does to write an entire blog post. This is because your title is the best chance you have to catch your readers attention. Make it count! The title of your blog post is the 1st thing that the search engines will see. Incorporating some good keywords here makes a lot of sense.

Content length - Blog posts are typically brief, 300 words is good. But don't write much less because what we have found, for seo purposes, content is more effective if the content is 300 words or more.

Bring something new - Your audience has a lot of choices out there. Give them a reason to read your blog. Share new and cutting edge information. Make it really valuable and readers will come back again and again.
 
Quality - Check your spelling and grammar before posting. No one wants to read poor writing.

Frequency - When you are just starting a new blog it's very important to post on a very regular basis. Shoot for 3 posts every week but as little as a few each month can hold your readership. If you don't post enough people will lose interest.

Share you Opinion - Share your opinion with your audience in a clear and concise way but keep your outlook positive. Don't bring anger and negativity into your blog posts, it will turn away readers.

Follow these tips and you can have a bustling blog in no time.

 Search engine optimization has become a common term and business owners realize that maintaining quality SEO is the best way to ensure your website is appearing high on the results pages for searches surrounding your keywords. 

Content marketing is a great component of a successful SEO campaign, both on-page and off-page. Without content (consistent, well written, unique content) it becomes very difficult to improve your rankings and organic exposure.

It’s essential that you start by optimizing the content that will be appearing on your site. Most sites can also benefit from adding regular high quality articles to either a blog or “news” section on your site.

These tips can help you optimize an article to perform at its best on your website:

1. Write about something interesting or catchy. Quality writing can grab the attention of readers even if the content is a little bland.

2. Make a list of all the keywords based on your article as well as what your business/website has to offer and use your favorite keyword research tool to find keywords that have medium to low competition level but a good amount of traffic associated with them.

3. Plant important keywords at least twice within your article. Twice is the absolute minimum. You also need to make sure keywords aren't back to back but rather throughout the article.

4. Improve "keyword density" by placing your main keyword at least once or even twice in each paragraph. Secondary keywords should appear at least once in each paragraph.

5. Don't over use keywords. There certainly can be too much of a good thing. Don't go crazy with keywords and make the article less credible and difficult to read and comprehend. Remember, you are writing for your audience, not for the search engines. Your readers come first, search engines 2nd.
The proper use of keywords can really boost your search engine ranks. Quality content boosts your reputation as an industry expert and does some heavy lifting for your SEO efforts.

 Pay Per Click advertising is one of the strongest forms of advertising today. You pay to have your PPC ad appear when someone conducts a search using your keywords. Your ad is shown in the paid search results and you only pay if your ad is clicked on.

PPC becomes even stronger when you also optimize your website (SEO) to appear among the top results for organic searches (unpaid). But what happens after the lead clicks on your ad? Where are they delivered? Your home page or contact us page of your site?

Sometimes leads are lost after clicking through. This means that the landing page you are directing them to isn't doing its job to turn this lead into a customer. Here are 5 steps to make sure your landing page is working to turn website traffic into revenue.

1. Attention Grabbing Headline - Your headline is the first thing the visitor will see when landing on your page. This makes it the perfect place to tell them what your business has to offer them. Consider what key words they were searching and hook them.

2. Give Them A Deal - This is your bait. Give the visitor an incentive to give you a try. Free shipping, a discount on their purchase, a free consultation or any other offer is effective for capturing your customer.

3. Photos That Sell - Use valuable photos on your landing page. Ideally they should really speak to your customer and show them what it is that makes your product special. Another important fact: photo captions are read almost as much as headlines.

4. Intro Copy - Getting a visitor to your copy is a great success. Now don't bore them. Get them enticed enough to read further. Give them your best most interesting and compelling information right up front. Landing page copy should be short and to the point.

5. Present The Complete Package - The best way to lose a customer is to send them to an unprofessional, malfunctioning landing page. You need to put your page together in a way that instills confidence in the visitor. Professional logos and clean copy and layout are a must.

Follow these steps are you are on your way to PPC success. The ROI for a PPC campaign is very measurable. Watching the number of clicks you are getting combined with the number of converted customers will clearly tell you if your landing page is working.

Understanding SEO vs PPC 

Search engine optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) have become household phrases to most marketers and businesses. Many of us know they are important to the overall success of your online presence and we've heard that they often work very well together but very few people really know the difference between the two.

While both SEO and PPC affect how your website ranks on popular search engines, they both accomplish this in very different ways. This is very important because 90% of people who do an online search only use the first page of results to determine what company to use or product to buy and on average about 80% never click on a PPC ad. This does not mean PPC is not important, but you need to know the averages to understand what you are dealing with.

Search Engine Optimization:

Implementing a solid SEO strategy is going to be the foundation of your online marketing efforts. The techniques you use should have lasting benefits that will increase the success of your site in the long term. As long as you are implementing ethical “white hat” or borderline “grey hat” SEO techniques, you should be able to grow the organic exposure and drive new traffic to your site with 7-30 days. Most companies are implementing a combination of white and grey which in my book is completely acceptable.

Obviously the goal of SEO is to get free traffic. While the idea that this traffic is “free” is not usually the case because you either have to hire a marketing company to implement/execute the SEO strategy or you are doing this work yourself. And as a business owner, your time is never free. To get this traffic, you typically research some core keyword phrases that work well for your industry, and expand on those to incorporate some long tail keywords. Creating an overall keyword theme for your site will certainly help expedite the results. Integrate these into your content (Title Tag, Meta Description, H1, Content, Internal Linking). This is the basic idea, but there is a lot more to it that we cannot possibly cover in this article.

Now you need credibility, link juice, Google love, PageRank…whatever you want to call it, or all of the above. The way that you accomplish this within an SEO strategy is by increasing the number and quality of links back to your site. Google is in the business of making money and they do that by providing the best search experience to their customers (you and me). In a nutshell, their goal is to provide the most relevant web site matched to a specific search phrase and provide the user with several options to choose from.

However, for any given search, there could literally be millions of sites that mention that search phrase somewhere on the site. Google also uses a bunch of other criteria to arrive at a site they believe is the most relevant and so on down the line. Typically, a site that is well optimized for the search phrase, and has a lot of quality contextual links (link on someone else’s site + search phrase in the link pointing back to target site). The links preferably should be contextual, but this isn’t a requirement either. It really depends on how many sites are targeting the exact same keyword phrase and how aggressive they are targeting it for you to rank on page 1.

Geo-Modifiers will be used to narrow the results if someone is looking for a local business, and Google will do that by looking at the IP address where the search is being done and comparing it to the locations of the websites that match. Typically just adding a location to your search

As mentioned previously, 80% of searchers will only click on the organic results so it becomes very important for every company to have some exposure here. But just relying on SEO or Pay Per Click to get traffic is a fools game. SEO can take months to see results, while PPC you can potentially start getting traffic over night. And with SEO strategy, your PPC Quality Score (every search engine has a system for rewarding sites that are well planned out and that align with the search phrase) will most likely suffer causing you to spend more per click then is necessary. Make sure you have some SEO work done to your site even if your entire online strategy revolves around PPC.

The biggest downside to SEO is that you have no control over whether or not your site will ever show up in the search results, and for some phrases it can literally take years to get on Page 1. SEO requires a consistent time investment and has become so complex that it is difficult for most companies to implement a strategy that generates results without hiring a full time employee or two, or outsourcing to a reputable marketing firm.

Pay Per Click 

Pay Per Click is essentially a way to pay for “air time” for your site on Google, Yahoo, Bing. PPC ads are the ones displayed typically at the top and sides of a search engine result page, also known as sponsored links. A PPC campaign is composed of a group of keywords and phrases that you are trying to target along with your ad copy. Each keyword you can select a bid amount for and depending on the keyword phrase you covet to show up on Page 1 for, your bids will vary considerably. You set a daily ad budget and your ads will start appearing and you will get charged each time someone clicks on your ad.

Basically you pay to show up at the center or right hand side of the search results page with the other paid results. This is very effective because a well thought out PPC campaign can ensure that you are being seen every time a certain word is searched (depending on the budget) and allows your site to start getting traffic overnight vs monts later with SEO. Ultimately your PPC listing is a mini-advertisement even if it isn't clicked on, it gets your name and product in front of your target consumer.

The downside of PPC is that when you stop paying to be seen at the top of the paid search list then you are instantly removed. You would have to pay forever to ensure you would always be visible on the major search engines. PPC is also getting very competitive in just about every industry. This is driving up the cost per click (CPC) and the cost per acquisition obtained through these campaigns. Also, Google is getting extremely picky about what types of companies can advertise through their PPC program (AdWords) and the rules they have are several pages long. PPC also requires constant monitoring on a daily basis to optimize the campaign to ensure that you are getting the most from your advertising dollars. 

Using both SEO and PPC together typically provides the strongest method of increasing your visibility within the search engines.