Search Engine Marketing

What a Medium Size Business Should Know aAbout Advertising Online

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Many small businesses do not have an advertising budget for what I believe to be a few reasons. It’s not that they don’t advertise, but they just don’t know how much they should spend on advertising and online marketing. The sad truth is that in order to go from a small business to a medium sized business, you’ve got to have some knowledge of these things. In order for you to be a successful medium size business that outperforms your competitors, you’ve got to know exactly how much you can spend, and how much you should spend.

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More Businesses Going Digital in 2010?

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Business Makeover

The next trend in corporate marketing is going to be relying less on traditional advertising and marketing agencies, according to the latest State of Marketing Report from the Chief Marketing Officer Council. Continuing to build online awareness and generating higher digital demand were the top initiatives reported for 2010 by the global affinity network of senior marketers.

Nearly half of the members surveyed (46%) reported that their companies are presently undergoing a “digital marketing makeover” or will be sometime in 2010. Fifty-eight percent said they were going to train and develop existing staff specifically in this area, and 36 percent expect to hire new talent with digital marketing skills. Forty percent of corporate marketers will be adding or expanding their support from agencies that specialize in digital marketing while an all-time low eight percent plan to conduct advertising agency reviews. Read more

Smart Business Owners are Marketing Online

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Online MarketingI’m currently reading a book entitled The New Rules of Marketing and PR that my friend and local business owner Brad Johnson of Lawn America loaned to me.  It’s quite good!  I came across a story about a company that we all know and can identify with, and I found it relevant to many of the business owners that I speak to every week.  So, I thought I’d share…

Century 21 Real Estate LLC is the franchisor of the world’s largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant comprising approx. 8,000 offices in 45 countries.  You’ve seen Century 21’s TV ads before, but you haven’t seen them lately.  In 2009, the company pulled its national TV advertising and invested those resources into online marketing.  That’s a huge move considering the amount of TV they were doing. Read more

The Power of the Online Review

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online reviewsHow important is someone reviewing your business or organization online?  I don’t know, because there is no way to put a number to it…but I’ll try.  I do know this:  I’ll listen to another consumer about a company rather than some form of one-directional advertising trying to get my business for the same company.  Not that I don’t pay attention to advertising, but is that just because I look at it to critique it and draw ideas from it?  Some advertising has turned into a form of entertainment, I think.

I look at it this way: the consumer was once in my shoes, performed a similar search for a local company that provided a service that they need(ed), and they made a decision.

How is their experience with that company captured?  How can we, the other consumers, learn from their decision to choose one company over another? Well, (drumroll…..), enter the online review. Read more

Your Homepage No Longer Does the Heavy Lifting

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Gone are the days of the homepage. True, every website has one, but the days when website owners expect their homepage to do all the heavy lifting are gone.

Thanks to the evolving science of search, the search engines have made our lives easier by providing the consumer with relevant search results for specific keyword queries. Visitors now stream directly into websites via side doors and back doors. They can magically teleport into a website without ever seeing the homepage; they are practically flying through the windows to land directly where they want to be.

For a consumer looking for a specific product or service, this is fantastic, but for site owners and operators, the importance of optimizing each and every individual page you would potentially want a searcher to visit is magnified considerably. When visitors can enter a site and land anywhere, there are brand implications. If it’s not immediately apparent where they are, and why, they might not stick around. The same thought and energy you put into the homepage of the site to brand the product or company must be put into each page that you intend to be searchable for the consumers that you want to be on your site. Read more

Tulsa SEO & Internet Marketing

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Search Engine Optimization is the foundation, the bedrock of online marketing. It is the foundation of all Internet marketing.

Launching a website without actively marketing it properly (and professionally) is like buying a new car, never putting gas in it, and then complaining that it doesn’t work. The potential for leads and sales certainly exists, but without some direct focus on Search Engine Optimization and Internet marketing, you’ll never see those leads.

You see, search engines have taught consumers how to search. They have redefined how people shop and find the services that you offer. And when someone types a keyword into the search box and presses that search button, there are only two possible outcomes:

  1. They will find you.
  2. They will find your competitors.

You can’t afford to allow your competitors to hog all of the search results in Google, Bing, or Yahoo while you spend advertising dollars on avenues that cannot justify a positive return on investment. Read more

Web Developers Stand Up

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While eating some chocolate donuts this morning with my son, it dawned on me that each miniature donut was identical.  All the same size, shape, taste, etc.  I thought to myself, “what if all web content developers put ample, and equal time on each web project dedicated to search engine optimization for the site?”  Well, it would definitely make the fight to get on Google’s first page much more difficult.  The content online everywhere would be so relevant and the searches would be so close together in similarity that one listing would not stand head and shoulders above the other searched results, as it does now.

Well, the truth is, most web designers do just that – they design websites.  Developing a website entails much more than just throwing some files on the server and invoicing the client.  Proper SEO practices are not followed by all.  One firm that we took over a website at the request of the client put together a really nice site, but even after it was launched for over a month, there were no title tags, no descriptions or key words; just nothing but some text and some graphics.  When I asked him why they didn’t do any of it, his reply was, “We kinda ran out of time.”  2 weeks after we optimized the site, it was all over the first page of Google and the other major indexes.  That company is no longer in business. Read more