I Do Web Marketing

As we discussed in Part One of this series, measuring the success of your online marketing strategy depends on understanding the differences between ROI in traditional marketing and ROI in the online world. When it comes to your SEO strategy, your ultimate goal is of course generating traffic that leads to conversions, but in order to truly gauge the effectiveness of your campaign, you’ll need to understand the dynamics that go into reaching that goal. Analytics programs offer a lot of data, but sometimes it can all be overwhelming. Let’s start by discussing what metrics you should be watching.

Metrics That Determine SEO Success

The most important metrics in determining SEO success revolve around rankings and customer interaction with your site. Keep an eye on the following metrics to see how well your campaign performs:

• Rankings—Keep an eye on rankings in all the major search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo) to determine whether your target audience can find you.
• Website Traffic—Monitor who is visiting your site and where they’re coming from to find out whether your SEO strategy is bringing people in.
• Bounce Rates—How many people enter and leave your site without ever clicking? Find out whether your SEO strategy is targeting the right audience by tracking bounce rate.
• Page Load Time—If your page takes too long to load, you’ll lose a significant portion of visitors before they ever see your site. Monitor your load time in order to tweak hefty site elements when needed.
• Pages Visited—Does your conversion funnel operate as you intend it too? Does your SEO strategy target the audience most interested in what you have to offer? Find out by watching which pages your visitors view.

SEO Analytics Tools

With your short list of SEO metrics in hand, the next step is to choose an analytics tool that will make it easy to monitor those metrics. Here are the best of the bunch:

Google Analytics—Probably the best free analytics tool available, Google Analytics lets you segment, customize, and track your website metrics in order to hone your online marketing strategy strategy.

Google Webmaster Tools—View reports detailing your site’s visibility on Google as well as your average search engine ranking.

Authority Labs—Follow overall rankings and keyword data with this fully automated tool.

In Part 3 of this series, we are going to look at some social media metrics you should be monitoring as well as some tools that will help with the management of your social media accounts.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Recently, I have been on a landing page generation machine. I recently launched 11 landing pages, and have another 15 in the works. I am in the process of creating content for these landing pages, while one of my teammates at SEORCHERS works on building them out. It can be a rather large and daunting task if you are doing it all, so I have become a huge fan of delegation.

As online marketing has become more integrated into company marketing strategies, many marketers have begun facing tough questions such as “How much revenue does this initiative bring in?” and “What results can you show me from the social media strategy we began implementing last month?” While these seem like straightforward questions from a big picture perspective, they can actually be tough to answer down on the ground. So often, the results we see aren’t couched in dollars and cents, at least not right away. That’s why it’s important to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and whether or not it’s producing the results you want.

Let’s Dig a Little Deeper

In this series of articles, we’ll be taking a look at how you can get answers to the above questions. More importantly, we’ll discover what ROI actually means in the online marketing realm and how you can measure it concretely. For now, you just need to know that ROI for your online marketing strategy can take many different forms including conversions, leads, contacts, and customer relationships. In order to calculate these sometimes elusive metrics, you’ll also need to know how to gather data using analytics tools, what individual elements you should be monitoring, and what tools will give you the best results.

In Part Two of this series, we’ll discuss what metrics will give you the information you need for your SEO initiative and we’ll take a look at some of the tools available to keep you on track. Part Three will tackle social media metrics and tools. And in Part Four, we’ll talk about how to put all that information together to keep your online marketing strategy performing at its best.

What You Can Expect To See

The most important thing monitoring your metrics will do for you is show you whether you’re meeting your goals. Creating a website that brings in no traffic or a Twitter account that generates no leads does nothing for your company. That’s obvious, but what may not be so obvious is whether the methods you’re currently using are doing what you think they are. Knowing what metrics to watch and what tools will be your best eyes will help you keep your finger on the pulse of your online marketing strategy, enabling you to tweak what needs tweaking and scrap what needs scrapping. And if your strategy is bringing in more customers than ever before, you’ll have something concrete to celebrate.

This is the first of a four part series. I’ll be rolling out Parts 2 (SEO Metrics and Tools) and 3 (Social Media Metrics and Tools) next week and Part 4 (Bringing it all together) over the course of the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned!

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Managing your Twitter followers can be a headache, but with Tweepi, you can perform both simple and complex management tasks with the click of a button. Tweepi’s distinguishing factor is that it allows you to view stats about your followers in spreadsheet format, enabling you to sort and search on any number of criteria: the promotional geekiness.

Basic Overview
As self-described geeks, Tweepi offers four “geeky” tools to help you keep your Twitter account up to date.

• Flush—This tool lets you find the people you follow who haven’t followed you back. Think of it as a geeky way to pay back the people who have insulted you by not reciprocating your follow. While this might be a fun tool for personal interactions, businesses may not gain much from it.
• Reciprocate—The best way to make sure you don’t get Flushed, Reciprocate enables you to find and follow the people who have followed you but who are not yet on your follow list. Again, this may not be all that useful for businesses.
• Cleanup—This is where the tools starts getting fun for businesses. Cleanup allows you to view all of your contacts in list format along with a broad range of stats for each one. Sort based on number of tweets, date of last tweet, link-to-tweet ratio, or any number of other stats and cleanup your list based on hard data.
• Follow—Finally, the Follow tool enables you to type in a user and view all of his followers along with activity stats. It’s a great way to beef up your lists, but unfortunately doesn’t allow you to flip the equation in order to see who a particular user is following.

Cool Functions

While there are a host of Twitter management tools out there, Tweepi does have a few functions that set it apart. First and most obvious is the stats feature. Tweepi allows you to organize your follower lists the geeky way, based on activity stats and hard data. Another feature we like is the Safelist button. Safelist allows you to place a lock on a particular follower so you don’t accidentally follow or unfollow (we’ve all experienced the headaches that can cause). Finally, we love the customizability of stats. Hide or reveal columns and followers at will so that only the information you’re currently evaluating appears on screen.

Versions
Get started with Tweepi using their free package. If you like what you see, you can upgrade to silver or platinum packages which offer greater options and more features for a monthly fee.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

This is a guest post from Sachin of Web Profits.

Online marketing is an art form, a science, and is closely related to the basic principles of SEO. The marketing industry has been having a hard time getting a grip on this very tricky market, and the reasons are all too obvious. The basic process of getting sales isn’t well understood. Part of the trouble is that marketing online is marketing to an entirely different buying pattern based on external information sources.

The fact is that most online marketing is still being done using Old Media techniques, trying to transfer TV advertising and marketing methods to the internet. It’s a bit like trying to sell sand to people living in the Sahara. The net is full of advertising and marketing materials which are strenuously avoided. Most people are quite happy to ditch a web page rather than put up with irritating materials.

There’s a good reason for the resistance. Wading through marketing materials can be a colossal waste of time. When people are actually trying to buy something, they don’t go running to the nearest ad. They go looking for information about the products and services they want. They can evaluate any number of choices very easily.

This is the only market in the world where the consumer is more likely to be better informed than the market itself. People learn very quickly how to find the information they need about things they really want to buy. There is such a thing as impulse buying online, but that’s equally selective, and when it’s so easy to do a bit of research while shopping, that’s what happens.

What sells, an overview

Ironically enough in the Information Age, what sells is information. People are quite happy to read through any useful information and get facts. They’re a lot more receptive to meaningful information about products and services than they are to hype of any kind.

For example:

• Tell someone you’ve got a great new app that will cure their acne, improve their love life and make them 20 years younger, and nobody will pay the slightest attention.
• Tell someone you’ve got a new app that can do their business for them, and you’ll be snowed under with orders, the minute people can check it out, see how it works, and evaluate it. That’s information. Anything else is nothing.

What marketers need to install into their craniums is that their materials are a click away from oblivion in this environment. Nobody cares what the advertiser thinks of their own product. The mere fact that someone who may or may not exist and is living in a tree in Wisconsin likes it isn’t overly persuasive, either.

The “Why” factor

Internet marketing has its own rationales. The question marketers should be asking themselves is “Why would anyone want to buy this product?”, because that’s exactly what the consumers will be asking themselves. Online marketing must relate to information values, not hype, to sell.

The “Why” factor is the real issue for marketers. If you expect people to spend money, that endangered species in anyone’s life, they must have a reason. Concentrate on that, and you’ll sell, and sell well.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

The debate continues to rage over whether SEO or PPC will benefit your online marketing strategy most effectively. While it’s true that PPC can generate quality traffic for your site, there are some good reasons most SEO professionals balk at using it extensively. Let’s take a look at the top four:

Cost Vs. Results
PPC carries a much higher cost than SEO. There’s the monthly fee to the search engine, the fee per click, and the money wasted by fraudulent clicking. And the fact is, the results achieved by PPC campaigns generally don’t justify all that money, especially when you can get similar or better results by instituting a well-designed SEO strategy. No, SEO is not strictly free, but it does offer a higher ratio of results to cost over the long-term.

Finite Effectiveness
It’s difficult to maintain a PPC campaign over the long-term. It requires constant maintenance and continuous outflow of cash. Once the well dries up, so does your traffic. On the other hand, once SEO is in place, it will continue producing results for years to come. With solid techniques and regular website maintenance, you can continue seeing high listings for your chosen keywords, even if the algorithms change.

User Psychology
Studies show that 100% of users will view the organic search listings on a given search results page, while significantly fewer will bother with the ads. Increasingly, users have become immune to obvious advertising, resulting in decreased effectiveness of PPC campaigns. This behavior can be attributed to higher levels of trust in the organic search results, natural aversion to the sales pitch, or expectations of better content on a page listed by Google as opposed to one listed by a paying advertiser. In any case, most users will be more likely to click your link if it appears on the first page of search results than they will if you pay to have it listed in the ad section.

Deceptively Easy
Anyone can throw together a few PPC ads and get them listed, right? Right, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that all those ads will be equally effective. The ease of starting a PPC campaign can deceive businesses into thinking it will require little effort to maintain. The truth, however, is that the kind of ads that receive the best ranking positions require extensive keyword research, scrupulous maintenance, and a robust budget.

Engaging in SEO takes some knowhow, but in the long-term you’ll be rewarded with better results that cost less and require less maintenance than a PPC campaign. With that said, I am a big advocate of utilizing both services as part of your marketing campaign to provide maximum exposure. So long as the ROI is there!

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

How Google Places Uses Directory Listings

Google Places has positioned itself to become the trusted resource for local business listings. Google’s decision to give more weight to the Places listings in regular organic searches has boosted the prominence of those listings, meaning that businesses need to pay a little more attention to whether they have claimed their listing and how they can optimize their page for search. Companies that formerly relied on third-party directory listings should give serious consideration to their listing strategy in order to receive the most traffic.

How Third Party Directories Play a Role in Google Places

Before the big switch that began including Google Places listings in regular organic search results, third party directories were the best way to make sure your local listing could be found quickly and easily. The listings were considered authoritative and often ranked high in the SERPs. After the switch, the rules have changed. Google has given much more weight to Google Places listings, meaning that if you claim your page with Google Places, that page will be given more authority than a third party directory listing because you’ve created it yourself. However, third party directories still feed information to Google Places for businesses that have not claimed their Places page.

What This Means for Businesses

Since third party directories carry less weight than officially claimed Google Places pages, your first priority should be to claim your page and keep it updated. That will be Google’s first source of information about your company. You’ll also need to keep your regular website updated and maintained since your search ranking could be affected by the attention you’ve given to SEO there. Keep in mind, however, that Google does scrape third party directories and that they especially look for listings with reviews. Third party references to your business or website can lend greater credibility to your Places page, increasing your chance of being ranked highly. Other factors that increase Places rankings include review quality and quantity, links, and citations.

Google’s algorithm switch is proving to be a game changer for many local businesses. In order to remain visible, you’ll now need to register for and update a Google Places page as well as keep your third-party directory listings updated. The more trusted sources you have supplying the information, the more credible you’ll be and the higher you’ll be ranked in the organic search results.

Related articles

• The Ultimate List: 50 Local Business Directories (hubspot.com)

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Google remains notoriously close-mouthed about the factors that affect their search engine results pages, and that’s not changing when it comes to Google Places. But through observation and tracking results over time, it’s possible to create educated theories about the factors most likely to increase your Google Places ranking. Because Google has begun integrating Google Places results within the regular organic search results, it’s even more important that you pay attention to your local listing in order to increase traffic for your website.  With that said, let’s take a look at five factors that will significantly influence your Google Places rankings.

1.       Address

Your address must be in the same city as the search query in order for you to be listed. For instance, if someone searches for hotels near Disney World, you must be listed in Orlando in order to show on the results page. The closer you are to the location searched, the higher your ranking.

2.       Complete Business Information

Theoretically, the more information you have on your Google Places page, the more you’ll be able to offer visitors and the more important Google will consider you to be. Beef up your page by adding a fleshed-out business description, pictures, videos, and all the relevant information you can to give your page more weight. The more consistent this information is across various websites and directories, the better off your results will be.

3.       Keyword as Part of Your Business Name

While Google has been very effective in stamping out spammy keywords, it still helps if your business name includes the keyword being searched. Avoid including a keyword if it isn’t really part of your name since Google can figure that out pretty quickly, but be aware that businesses with legitimate occurrences of searchable keywords included in their names may be given more weight.

4.       External Citations

Both links and mentions of your business by other websites will earn credibility with Google Places. Be sure that you use various business directories (I will be compiling a post of these directories in the near future).

5.       Customer Reviews

Because Google has begun relying more heavily on Google Places listings in their organic search results, it makes sense that they would want only highly valued businesses to appear among the top results. While simply having a large number of reviews on your site may be beneficial, Google does display overall rankings in the summary on the results page, so it’s important to cultivate positive reviews for greatest effect.

There are other factors that play into your Google Places results as well including domain age, business categories, and having a local phone number. Keep these and the elements listed above in mind as you improve your Google Places page in order to generate high quality traffic to your business website.

Related articles

• 4 Real Reasons to Care About Google Place Pages (businessinsider.com)

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

This is a guest blog post from Wes Towers, a loyal reader of the I Do Web Marketing blog who operates Omnific Design.

As a trained graphic designer who moved into web design in 2000, I known our clients in both fields are looking for the same result. They want a design that is not only attractive but engaging and functional especially when it comes to website design. The reason is obvious, an appealing website catches the eye, sustains attention and causes a response. I want to be extremely clear here, beauty is not the only aspect of good web design. If you want a great web design, you must consider usability, structure and accessibility.

Proper coding should be a given, in any website. Sadly, most website coding I look at is riddled with errors which would be hurting not only the way the site displays in some browsers but it would also be having a massive impact on the search engine optimisation.

Code Semantics… Huh… How can that help?

Now for a little techy stuff. If you are not a coder, stick with me on this. You should be able to pick up enough info here to ensure your website coder knows what he is doing.

Make sure you use proper code semantics within your website. One of the best things about using semantic code is it performs well when it comes to search engines. When search engine spiders crawl your web pages, they don’t look at it like humans do. They rely on the code, text and formatting to understand what is important within a web page. Give them what they want and structure you code right. These spiders do their best to learn more about your site through the tags contained in the codes. For example, you MUST use header tags <h1> and <h2> so the search engines understand these are heading and can easily identify what the page is about based on words used in headings.

Semantics are also responsible for the accessibility of your website. If you follow the basic principles of code semantics as well as accessibility, you will be able to structure your content so humans and search engines can both understand your content. You should consider people with special needs when having a website coded. For example, there are speech browsers for the blind and the Alt tags for images are incredibly important here.

In a nut-shell, code semantics allow you to have cleaner code. This means your download time will be faster because the size of your page files will be smaller. If you are a web designer who is not dependent on WYSIWYG programs for web design, then using semantics for your coding is the best recourse for you when it comes to updating and editing your website.

Graphic Design Melbourne specialist, Wes Towers invites you to learn more about marketing, branding, graphic design and web design and how they can help in your business. Check out www.omnificdesign.com.au for more resources and free ebooks.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, and now even Facebook’s check-in functionality have become all the rage these days. They represent a growing segment of the marketing industry that allows businesses to deliver advertising messages directly to their customers’ mobile phones based on their location. While check-in apps like these may be trendy, they don’t represent the whole picture when it comes to location based marketing. Whether you’re ready to dive into Foursquare or not, location based marketing can help your business in a variety of ways.

What is Location Based Marketing?

Location based marketing seeks to reach customers where they are by putting advertising messages that relate to their current location in front of them. It’s not a new concept. Phone books have been offering location specific ads for years. But with the new technological aspect, the process has become more personal, more effective, and more desirable. With the advent of mobile marketing, companies can use location information gleaned from a mobile phone to provide instantaneous marketing messages when people come within the vicinity of their stores.

What Can Location Based Marketing Do for Me?

The applications of location based marketing present new marketing vistas for the savvy company. Interactive point-of-sale texts that provide information about a product the customer is considering, location-specific coupons that entice customers into a store, incentives for checking in multiple times with an app like Foursquare, and mobile ads that appear when a customer is within a certain radius of the store can all help drive traffic and increase overall sales in your brick-and-mortar store. The key is to respect consumer privacy by using opt-in measures that allow them to choose which ads they want to see.

What is the Future of Location Based Marketing?

The future looks bright for applications like Foursquare. The company already has plans in the works for improved user experience, increased capabilities, and proactive recommendations. Spending in the location based marketing field is expected to surge to $4 billion by the year 2015 as companies like Google and Facebook jump on the band wagon with location specific features.

Location based marketing seeks to build a bridge between traditional and digital marketing. With millions of users relying on their mobile phones for internet access and product research, companies would be wise to take advantage of the opportunities available to incorporate location based marketing into their overall marketing strategy.

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

Online video popularity has mushroomed, with fifteen hours of new video being posted on YouTube every minute. As web users increasingly expect videos to walk them through the decision making process and to provide them with information, tips, and entertainment, integrating video into your website can reach a segment of your audience that may not be willing to sit down and skim through your site. The key to optimizing the effectiveness of videos on your website is understanding how those videos relate to the concept of SEO.

Video SEO cannot be separated from general site SEO if you want to achieve the best results. That means that you’ll need to incorporate SEO best practices in your video strategy in order to make them accessible to the greatest number of people. Incorporating SEO correctly with your videos can increase your search rankings by making you more visible and increasing the amount of time visitors spend on your page, so let’s take a look at some tips for maximizing your efforts.

●      Incorporate General SEO Principles

To date, search engines cannot decipher actual video content, which means you’ll have to spell out what’s in your video in order to help the search engine find you. That means optimizing your titles, tags, and headings using keywords to attract attention. Google’s universal search integrates video into the results list, but since few companies optimize their videos correctly, incorporating SEO techniques with your hosted videos can quickly boost you to the top of the rankings.

●      Encourage Interaction

One of the best ways to promote your video is to encourage sharing. When visitors can easily share your videos, your exposure increases dramatically, making you more visible to the search engine. You can also allow users to subscribe to a video feed and enable commenting to boost your visibility.

●      Post Videos to Third Party Sites

Sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, and Metacafe all increase the likelihood that your video will be seen by broad segments of your target audience. Most videos that go viral first appear on video sharing sites and not on company websites. In order to reach the top of the site search rankings, you’ll need to optimize your titles and tags, incorporate descriptive text, and include your URL in the description.

The potential impact of video SEO has yet to be realized for most companies. By leveraging your multimedia options, you can reach a broader audience using SEO as the springboard for increasing video visibility. What are some things that you are doing with video?

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.