These days website traffic can be increased through numerous methods. Whether you're initiating a PPC campaign, sending targeted emails or adding valuable content to your site you need to keep one constant in place. Your goals!
The ultimate (macro) goal may be to sell a product or gain a customer. Other macro goals may be:
• Downloading a whitepaper
• Signing up for an e-newsletter
• Requesting a quote
• Submitting information in return for something of value
• Viewing a product, service page or consuming some form of content (article, video, blog, etc.)
These macro goals can take time to achieve. Equally important to success are smaller (micro) goals that help build to your ultimate goals. Micro goals are the steps it takes to complete the macro goal. These may include:
• Opening an email
• Clicking on a PPC ad
• Browsing your website and viewing multiple pages
• Putting products into a cart and providing billing information
Initiating an analytics package can easily help you track the actions of consumers during a visit to your website. Where did they spend the most time, what actions did they take and what was the bounce rate upon the initial arrival? Understanding the steps taken prior to completing a macro goal can help you better understand your consumer and how to direct them where you want them to end up.
Upon visiting your site potential customers will either "surf" (engage with your content) or they will "turf" it (leave without participating.) You only have about 7 seconds to engage a visitor to your site and that includes the time it takes for your site to load on their computer. Ultimately you want your visitors to visit multiple pages of your site and click through when given the opportunity, or if you create a great landing page they should be able to "convert" on that page without needing to see anymore pages.
Considering how challenging it can be to get a consumer to your site you don't want to lose them by making it hard for them to find what they need via search. The key is making sure your site pages are listed in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Visibility on SERP is achieved through SEO to increase your organic search standing, through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads, and indirectly through Social Media. Ultimate success is often achieved with a combination of the two. Since it is easier to guarantee your standing in PPC it is important to create a conversion-focused PPC ad that compels a consumer to click through.
Here are 3 tips to create a successful PPC ad:
1. Include Strong Call-to-actions or Promotional Offers
- Use compelling words like "save, "order", "buy" etc. If there are no current sales "free shipping" or "compare" are also successful.
- Keep the most important information within the "Title Tag" which is the line of text underlined in blue. Pay attention to how any characters each search engine will display in the Title Tag and make sure your most important information is within that range.
2. Ensure You Write Your Keywords in the Title Tag First
- Do not begin your title tag with your brand name. It won't be as well received by the user and it hinders SEO efforts.
- Following your keywords use action words in the title such as "learn", "discover", "find" etc.
- Add secondary keywords or geographies you business services to the title tag.
- Last but not least, put the brand name of your company.
3. Go Social
- Social media is an umbrella term for medias that integrate technology, social interaction and include pictures, videos, audio and written communication.
To learn more tips to help ensure your website is "surfed" rather than "turfed" check out our recorded webinar, "Surf and Turf with Surf and Social."
If you are trying to increase your website visibility through a PPC campaign or by improving your organic search standings it's time to think about the speed behind your website. When ranking PPC standings Google has added loading time to it's ranking and organic searches will soon take page load time into account as well. There's no reason to allow messy coding to prevent you from getting the best possible search engine rankings.
The goal was once to keep a page load under 100kB per page. Today that can be more difficult but if your site falls between 300kB and 500kB then you need to reduce your page size. You can use Google's Page Speed plug-in for Firebug to get a page speed analysis.
The best place to start evaluating the loading time of your site look to these four areas:
1. (X)HTML: What is Your Code Weight
Make sure your HTML is clean and simple. Avoid unnecessary tables and inline images. HTML should not be over 30kB - 50kB on a single page.
2. CSS Sheets
Keep sheets minimal and well written. Divide the sheets so they are organized within the site structure. Remove any unused classes.
3. JavaScripting
Make sure all JavaScripting files are external and with everything else, keep them lightweight.
4. Images Optimization
Using the correct image files and reducing image size is a common cause of slower page loading. Use JPGs for photos and PNGs for line art. Avoid GIFs when possible as they do not compress as well as PNGs. Make sure image files are compressed correctly to avoid an oversized page.
This information came from today's blog post: Need For Speed: Give Your Web Pages a Nitro Boost by Kristine Schachinger. To read her tips in more detail click here: http://budurl.com/NFSBlogWSI63
In order to grow your dental business you need to market yourself. A radio or print ad can cost you $12,000 and it needs costly design and production before it can run. This day in age our lives are driven by the internet. For most of us it would be a challenge to completely avoid the internet for an entire week. 94,000,000 American adults use the internet every day and 63% of those people are using search engines everyday. Pay Per Click Marketing can give your dental office a cost effective way to easily and quickly bring in new business. Studies have shown that you can aquire a new customer through PPC for a cost of about $8.50 each. Considering a customer is likely to stay with your dental practice for the next 5, 10 or even 50 years that's an amazing return on your investment.
Research your keywords. For example, an estimated 40,500 people are searching Google every month for "Dentist Chicago". Finding additional keywords that are more unique will be inexpensive and enhance your campaign. Make sure your ad is clear and well written and stays true to your keywords. A PPC campaign can ensure that you are high on the paid search results but you also need to be sure your website is appearing under the organic search results as well. This will ensure the most clicks as some people gravitate to organic results. (Adjusting your organic ratings is a project for another day.)
Need more proof of the potential a PPC campaign can have for you. If you spend $2,000/month on PPC marketing and focus on a 10 mile radius you are likely to get 45,000-50,000 ad impressions (how many times your ad shows up in search engines) and from those impressions roughly 500 - 550 people will visit your site. These people need to land on a page of your site that entices them to call, email or fill out a form to take the next step with your business. On average 10% of these 500-550 visitors will act on the landing page. This gives you 50 new leads for your dental practice. If you want to be more conservative say that only 35 leads came from those visits and 30% of those didn't act beyond that initial communication. From those 25 prospects you may book appointments with 20% (on average.) Thus booking 5 new patients for the month. Depending on the dental procedures they book, perhaps a couple cleanings and a couple cosmetic procedures. If 4 out of 5 were happy with your services they could become customers for decades. Think of the return of 4 patients for 10 years. More than worth the small $2,000 initial investment for that month.
Budgets are tight but marketing is more valuable than ever. PPC is a way to market your business without breaking the bank.
Here are some quick Pay Per Click Marketing tips for you to consider when managing your own campaigns.
• Set Goals - Determine the goal of your campaign (sales, leads, brand awareness)
• Know your audience – allows you to narrow in on keywords, ad text, landing pages to avoid potential “roadblocks” in the conversion process.
• Less is more! – don’t try to do too much with 1 campaign. Creating multiple, highly targeted campaigns with focused ad groups and keywords that align well with ad copy and landing pages, will improve your quality score, relevancy, conversion, and squeeze more out of your PPC budgets.
• Geo Targeting – if your business is local, have your pay per click ads only display in a 10, 15, 25 mile radius of your office or primary market. If you are on a limited budget, the smaller the radius the better.
• Content Networks – avoid content networks until you have a good feel for your campaigns. Test content networks in small increments to see what works and what doesn’t.
• Keywords – find niche, long tail keywords that convert and you will get more from your budget. Spending time on keyword research is vital to your success. Review your keywords on a regular basis and search for more. What might work today, might not work tomorrow. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize!
• Landing Pages – make sure the page you are sending your traffic aligns well with the keywords and ad copy. Investing in a good landing page with a well crafted PPC campaign can produce excellent results.
• Analytics – study your analytics data and conversion goals. You need to know what is working and what is not producing results.
• #1 Position Isn’t Always Better– businesses are obsessed with obtaining the #1 paid ad position in the search engines. Why? They believe that being #1 will produce the best results, but this is not necessarily true. It depends on the keywords, bidding strategy, landing page, and conversion results from various placements. A #3-5 position can generate better results with a well thought out campaign with a good landing page vs. a #1 position with poor keyword to ad alignment and a below average landing page. And it will cost you a lot less! That doesn’t mean we don’t see the value in a #1 position, if we can get there by achieving a good Quality Score, and good results for a reasonable investment.
Obviously, there is a lot more to PPC than what I can provide in a blog post, and to do it well is going to take a lot of time. If you are going to manage your own campaigns, you need to stay educated and up to speed with the industry changes. There are lots of great resources online and Google even offers some good educational tools to help learn more about PPC and how to manage a campaign.
Over the past 2 years, online shopping alone has increased to over 875 million consumers (According to Nielsen’s Global Online Survey). That’s a 40% increase in 2 years. Not to mention all those who use the internet for research and to find local business services, which accounts for nearly 80% of all US adults.
Think of all those opportunities for your business. Pay Per Click (PPC) is an effective and powerful marketing tool that allows your business to get instant exposure online. We have found that PPC marketing returns are some of the strongest in the marketing industry, and averages about the same return as search engine optimization (only 8% of marketers experienced a poor ROI according to www.eMarketer.com), but produces almost instant results.
Pay Per Click marketing allows you more control over your marketing dollars and the ability to pin point market niches more effectively than SEO. PPC is like having an ad in your local newspaper and only paying for the prospects that actually read your ad! According to www.eMarketer.com, PPC advertising will grow to a $16.950 billion dollars a year in marketing spends.
No wonder Newspapers are going out of business, television advertising is decreasing along with radio. Internet marketing is here to stay and Pay Per Click marketing is a valuable marketing tool to consider for most businesses.
Most of our clients are familiar with pay per click marketing campaigns, and many use WSI for this very service. But it is important to understand that running a PPC campaign is really only half as effective as it could be if the ads are not directed to a customized landing page - and the best possible landing page, at that.
If you are running a PPC campaign and seeing great results, you can stop reading here. You either already have the best landing page for your business (bravo!) or are incredibly lucky and don't need one. (WSI still thinks you could do better if you had one.) But if you were expecting more from your PPC advertising, it may be time to ask yourself why you aren't converting the traffic that you're paying for. Most likely, you need to take another look at the landing page, or whatever page your potential customers hit after they click through.
To help you further understand the partnership between PPC and landing pages, we recommend that you contact WSI today or attend our upcoming webinar. Click here to sign up today!
Twitter is a social networking site that people and businesses use to stay hyper-connected to other people and businesses. By "following" a user on facebook, you receive up to the minute updates ("tweets") as often as they are posted. If you're like most of our clients, you've heard of Twitter - maybe you're even a member - but you're not 100% sure how it fits in with your overall Internet marketing plan.
Although Twitter has been around since 2006, it has only recently blown up to the 30,000,000 users it currently has. And even with those astounding numbers, according to a recent article by eMarketer, 25% of users have never "tweeted." Obviously there is a tremendous opportunity to reach businesses and consumers using this service, but industry experts have yet to pinpoint exactly how.
We're using Twitter to update our followers and drive traffic to our website, and a handful of our clients are doing the same. Twitter is a great complement to the rest of our Internet marketing solutions, but it doesn't appear that it will replace any of the tried and true methods of revenue generation like search engine optimization and pay per click.
Think you have squeezed every last dollar out of your Pay Per Click campaigns? Or think you have your Custom Landing Page down to a science? Maybe....maybe Not. As the old saying goes, "You can't improve what you can't measure." This holds true even more so during tough economic times like we are facing today. The answer is effectively managing your Analytics.
Maketing managers and business owners are looking for ways to trim marketing budgets and increase ROI (we should always be looking to do this, recession or not). If you can spend less and make more money, why wouldn't you want to do this?
Ask yourself: 1) Does my print ad in the local newspaper really work? And how well does it work?
2) What is my Yellow Page Ad costing me per lead?
3) Is my website unattractive to my visitors?
4) Is my search engine optimization (SEO) work giving us the leads we are looking for?
5) Are my email marketing campaigns even reaching my prospects INBOX or going straight to Junk Mail?
6) I am spending all this money on a radio ad, but how can I measure its effectiveness?
If you are asking yourself these questions then its pretty clear that you probably aren't up to speed with Web Analytics. You can track and measure all of these marketing campaigns effectiveness. Without proper analysis and not being able to make informed decisions, business owners and marketing managers might stop campaigns that might be working or just need some tweaking.
Check out our Analytics Webinar and Whitepaper on Web Analytics and How to Optimize Your Marketing Dollars During a Recession.
Forbes Media "Ad Effectiveness Survey" polled 112 marketers online back in February and March to learn more about their attitudes towards digital marketing. Not only were these forms of internet marketing considering most effective at increasing conversions, but also considered most effective in demand fulfillment rather then demand creation. That is the true beauty behind effective internet marketing, your message appears at the exact time the prospect wants it to appear, its not forced, the prospect has the control.
Internet marketing is not a "demand creation" marketing medium like TV or radio. TV, Radio, and even magazines can be effective in creating demand for your product, but we get bombarded everyday with thousands of marketing messages and most people are simply tuning out. A greater ROI can be derived from effective internet marketing campaigns because we are focusing only on those who want to learn more about our products and services, and not wasting our time/money on those who don't. In today's economy, a great website marketed effectively on the internet, can be the difference maker between those companies who survive and those who don't.
that entices them to call, email or fill out a form to take the next step with your business. On average 10% of these 500-550 visitors will act on the 
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