Internet Marketing Tips, Tools and Strategies

During my Online Marketing Consultant career, I have often been asked what the key activities a company should be doing online to not only be visible, but also successful. Well, my first answer would be to hire an Online Marketing expert, but if your budget just doesn’t allow for it or you want to try a do-it-yourself approach there are five key areas a business should focus on when trying to have success online:

One, keywords. Any successful online business marketing strategy should begin here. You need to know what keywords are appropriate for your products or services, audience and industry. By doing your initial keyword research you will be able to –

• Write content focusing on these keywords, thus driving search traffic up.
• Understand your competition and what they are focusing on.
• Have a deeper understanding of what your customers are looking for online, and have the ability to tailor your services to them.

DO NOT skip or skimp out on your keyword research. This should be the foundation of everything else you do online.

Two, website development. You don’t have to go and spend thousands of dollars on a web design team to create your businesses website. The key to any successful website is to have:

• Clean look – no clutter!
• Simple to use navigation
• Valuable content (more on this later)
• Clear call-to-actions
• Strong branding

Three, quality content. Having quality and valuable content not only helps increase traffic to your site (Google gives big search bonuses to sites with quality content), but it also ensures users stay on your site and eventually convert into a lead. Your online business marketing strategy should contain creating keyword rich content that not only has value, but is also easily readable for users.

Also, you need to continue to create content (blog posts, news articles, etc.) as time goes on to keep your site fresh.

Four, target your local audience. Unless your business is a global online store, you should be focusing on your local city / county / state audience. This means letting the user know your products or services are for their specific location. Some simple ways of doing this are:

• Adding the areas you service at the top of your web pages – “Coffee Cabana services the Chicago, Illinois area”
• Creating listings for your company on location based websites and apps – Google Places, Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook Check-in, etc.
• Use geographical targeted keywords when writing content
• Get listed in local search directories online and offline
• If you service a larger area (usually state-wide), you might want to create geo-targeted landing pages for each major location/city around you

Five, take advantage of social media networks. You might skeptical of their value, but social media networks can be a powerful tool for anyone’s online business marketing strategy. Actually not being visible on the popular social media networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) can almost send the message to users that you don’t exist. Not only do you want to be visible, but you want to also be sure you are engaging users and addressing any potential negative brand images you may have. Some companies even use social media networks as another form of customer service!

Anyone can find success online; the key is to have a strong online business marketing strategy that creates results! If you are thinking about developing your own online marketing strategy or you want to see if your current strategy is working, start by taking our Free Website Scan.

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.

It is a common goal of anyone who conducts business through a website to want to appear at the top of the search results for their core keywords or phrases. With a solid search engine optimization strategy combined with a thoughtful pay-per-click campaign you can ensure your website will be among the top results for searches involving your keywords.

However once this goal is met where do you go? How can you build upon being the number one organic and paid search result for your keywords? Even if you are getting little traffic to your stand alone website, there are many more ways to drive quality traffic and brand awareness “off-site.”

The answer is to increase your web presence across many different online marketing channels. Being number one in organic search for some of your keywords is great, but it leaves room for your competition in the rest of the first page spots (2-10), and there is also more “space” on Page 1 in Google now with the integration of their Google Places listings. If your site appears first (or even 1-3) on the list of search results, it is very likely that the person searching will visit your site. Hopefully once they land on your site they'll find everything they need and not leave until they've made a purchase or taken action with your company. However it's more likely that they'll go back to the search results and check out a couple other websites or even mix up what they are searching for to get even more specific. This leaves room for the competition to swoop in and steal the business if you are not targeting more than one location in the search results.

Enhancing your web presence means creating a strategy to dominate organic search results using multiple websites like Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Google Places, etc. There are so many sites, its impossible to list them all in this article. You need to register your business and website with local directories, review sites, setup a blog or 2 focusing on different keywords and services you offer, a micro site, social media, and article marketing sites.

When done correctly and optimized highlighting your keywords, location, business name…the goal is that your business could potentially take up the entire first page of the search results. Dominating the page and showing the person searching that you are #1-#10 in your market creates huge brand power. Even just getting 2 or 3 listings on page 1 for a keyword related to your services or products can drive quality traffic and separate you from the pack.

Increasing the number and quality of business listings for your website can guarantee that more people come accross your business. This will ultimately drive more traffic to your site and help show you and your site as a leader in your industry.

Magazines are now offering online subscriptions, consumers are catching up on television shows they missed online, and products are searched for and purchased on the web. Building an online presence is more important than ever.

Watch this video to learn more about the importance of digital marketing and look into WSI's new platform that will revolutionize online digital marketing, WSI ReachCast.