Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of visitors that come to the website and leave without going past the landing page.

Conversion Rate: The rate at which visitors get converted to customers or are moved astep closer to customer acquisition.

Keyword: A word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it’s highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine).

Landing Page: The landing page is a web page where people go to once they click on an online advertisement or natural search listing. Landing pages are designed to be highly relevant to the advertisement or search listing and encourage users to complete a “call to action”. The landing page is also known as the “click through URL” or “destination URL”. Example uses of landing pages are newsletter sign up forms, download demonstration trial software and purchasing of a product or service.

Link Building: Requesting links from webmasters of other sites for the purpose of increasing your “link popularity” and/or “PageRank.” Considerations for link building can include directory submissions and press release syndication.

Meta Tags: Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine.

Page Title: Like a meta tag, the page title is not visible on the web page, however it does appear in the browser page and as the title in the search result.  Optimizing the page title is a vital part of SEO.

We general use Google Analytics on our websites because it is a free program and a very powerful program.  With Google Analytics I can tell clients what part of the country visitors came to their site ffrom, how long they stayed, how many pages they viewed and that is just the basics.  I can track what keyword brought a person to a website and how they reacted once they were there, did they fill out a contact form or watch a video we wanted them to watch?

If you are using Pay Per Click Marketing or do any type of E-Commerce on your site it is imperative that you have Analytics installed on your site.   The actual installation of an Analytics program is not too difficult and many websites that are built on platforms like WordPress or Drupal will have plugins that can install the code for you.  The tracking starts almost instantly and you are able to start realizing if your site is working or not.

The more serious hacks involve people taking over your profile and messaging people or chatting with friends to try and get informatuion or money.  these generally happen because of a password break, make your passwords hard and change them often.  And if you do get hacked jump on it quickly letting friends and family know to try and limit the damage.

Mashable- as always- has a good article on avoiding Facebook Spam.

Some key points:

A few things to keep in mind about these types of spam app attacks:

• Beware of short links that accompany text on your wall from people who don’t normally post links.
• Investigate or research any app that seems too good to be true before agreeing to install it.
• Pay attention to what apps you authorize to post to your wall.

So we decided to try a few new products and the one we have decided on is Advanced Web Ranking.  I had never heard of the product and got to it from a Google Search.  I expected to be disappointed with any product that we found this way, but Caphyon- the creator of Advanced Web Ranking offers a full 30 day trial- which is great because it gave us time to actually test the full product and not just a demo.  This generally means you are dealing with a quality company who is confident in their product.

One of the things we do is make the online world simple for our clients, and Advanced Web Ranking is not simple seo software.  It is very robust and feature heavy.  What the program does at its core is search the major search engines for the results of keywords that we put in and see if a site ranking is what it should be.  Why do we care about this?

Where a website ranks in Google, Bing or Yahoo can have a huge effect on traffic.  Ranking high under relevant keywords puts your website in front of a very qualified audience that is actively searching for your product.   That is called Search Engine Optimization and we do it by making your site as attractive as possible to the Search Engines, both on site and off site (which we will get into later), and Advanced Web Ranking basically lets us know if we are being successful.

As we mentioned, we like to try and keep things simple for our clients, which Advanced Web Ranking allows us to do.  It gives us a lot of information, not only about the rankings for the websites we track but also for competitive web sites and it shows us the top websites for any keyword we are searching.  This is very handy as it allows us to quickly identify our competition and see what they have done to be successful.  They also have a great keyword research tool which helps us add important keywords.   Tracking not only your web site but also your competition gives you a full view of what is happening on the site.  We can take this information and email it to our clients in a handy report feature, or more likely for us, we distill the information into our monthly top level reports.

We track results monthly and Advanced Web Ranking allows us to schedule these reports to drop on the first of every month, which is when we use them.  If we wanted to we could even set it to auto email those reports to our clients, but we actually use those reports to make a lot of decisions about what work we are going to do that month.

The Search Engine Optimization work we do involves both on site work (fixing broken websites, inserting keywords, bringing the site up to the standards set by the Search Engines, etc) we also try and get links back to the site from relevant web sites, called link building.  This can involve asking for reviews, paid advertising or just building partnerships.  Our results can be very hard for us to measure, but Caphyon had another program called Advanced Link Manager that we stumbled on when we were downloading Advanced Web Ranking.

Advanced Link Manager allows us to track who is linking to our websites, how many of these links are reciprocal and if these links are going up or down or our link popularity.  As websites get more popular and more buzz, they get more links which helps them move up in the Search Engines.  It does more as well such as letting us compare our site to other sites, see the Page Rank and other ranks of sites linking to our sites and even let us examine the text in the links that are coming back to us, which really lets us know what other people think about our sites.  Advanced Link Manager also allows automatically setting up and sending reports so that clients can keep track of their own rankings, but we generally take care of that for our clients and make it so they don’t have to deal with going through all that information.

Advanced Web Manager and Advanced Link Manager make a very potent team in helping us build our clients up and watch for problems.  Combined with other analytics tools they help give us a clear view of the web landscape for our clients.  They offer several different levels on their product and  offer special pricing if you get both products.  We love this deal because these two programs working together are a very powerful tool.

All in all we have been very pleased with Advanced Web Ranking and Advanced Link Ranking and would strongly recommend to other companies helping clients online.  The only con that we have run into is that it is not a very simple or intuitive program, mainly due to the sheer number of features.  They have an active blog and support.

These tools have replaced and upgraded several other programs we were using; they help us greatly to continue to bring large budget results down to smaller budgets.

“Online spending is still a relatively small piece of the holiday pie, between 8 and 10 percent of total holiday sales.”

I was excited for this session, mainly because doing stuff and being happy are two major challenges!  Roy Christopher gave a laid back presentation that basically went through some ideas on how to keep your focus and try and stay happy while actually getting things done.

Roy covers a lot of the information that was in his presentation on his own blog right here so we won’t go over all of that however some of the things we really took away from the session:

1. Roy was a competitive Rubik’s Cube Player (established geek cred for sure!)
2. Find people who have done what you want to do and emulate them
3. Feed and water your mentors- let people know you respect them and why
4. Save your own story
5. Keep a journal
6. Keep a promise file
7. Get organized
8. Trust your curiosity

A very timely session indeed as unemployment continues to run in the double digits, this session was intersting both for people looking for employment and for companies looking for employees.  The Panel was moderated by Hal Thomas from BFG Communications and he was joined by Katrina Kibben from Monster.com and Garrick Throckmorton from Memorial University Medical Center.

The session was presented very well, for employers there is so much information out there on the employees that they can sift through.  Employers should use this information but shouldn’t disqualify possible employees based on social networking profiles, it is important to remember that these are generally personal profiles.

The flip side of that is that prospective employees need to remember that any public information can be seen by potential employers.  However potential employees can use social networking to learn as much about prospective employers from social networks such as Twitter feeds, Facebook fan pages, and LinkedIn profiles.  Prospective employees can use this information to learn about the culture of the company and often who the decision makes are.  It is even possible to make informal introductions and start the process of builkding a relationship through Social Media Networks.

The panel also suggested that prospective employees start a blog about the industry they are interested in.  Much more than a resume, if job applicants can point to continuing education, personal research and success stories through documented posts.

The moderator Hal Thomas had an interesting story about how he got his job with the help of Social Media. Hal used a creative Twitpic to showcase himself and his sense of humor when BFG was looking for someone to do social media generation, a story that was picked up by National Media.  Hal made a point though that while the Tweet may have gotten BFG interested in him; it was 2 years of documented experience that got him the job.

The tips we took away for job searchers were:

1. Clean up your social profiles- nothing you wouldn’t want your boss to see, but don’t strip away your personality
2. Follow, friend, fan, and link with prospective companies and employers- don’t stalk, rather use this information to learn about the company and culture
3. Start a blog in your field of interest.

This was by far the most surprising of the sessions that I attended.  I didn’t end up taking notes as this was the only session where I closed the computer and just listened.  The speaker was Tom Kohler, from  Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy, a program that connects people on the fringes on society with people who are more solidly grounded and successful in Savannah.  Mr. Kohler started off by introducing his personal favorite social networking tool- his coffee mug.  His session had little to do with technology but more with telling stories of people who had fallen outside society through physical and mental limitations and how we can work to pull those people back into society’s fold by building relationships in the community.

What they do is very interesting and inspiring and rather than try and go through his speech I recommend you follow up on their own page and learn more about Chatham-Savannah Citizen Advocacy.  Read the book Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community.

A quote from the CSCA page in Tom Kohler’s biography really ties up a lot of what we learned from his session:

In the early days, Tom was taught that the question was “In what ways is this person broken and how do we fix them?” It has taken thirty years to get to a better question, “The world has a deep crack in it;, how do we try and stitch it back together?” This question follows Buckminster Fuller’s maxim, “Life is long; pick something big and interesting and work on it.”

I was very interested in this workshop as we use WordPress to build our web sites, and we always want to make sure we are doing what is best for our clients with their specific needs.   This session was hosted by Micheal Edenfield (Drupal) from the Savannah College of Art & Design, Philip Joyner from Paragon Design Group (WordPress), and Erik Reagan from Focus Lab, LLC (ExpressionEngine).

A CMS is a Content Management System , this allows us to build websites that our clients can update easily themselves.

They ran through the features of each and the benefits of each CMS.  ExpressionEngine is not open source and is much more of a blank slate to work with.  That doesn’t suit our needs at all as we like WordPress as a content management system because it is open source (free and very supported by an active community) and it starts with a structure that we build off of including themes that allow us to save clients a significant amount of money in the design phase of the site.  Drupal is open source and actually seems very similar to WordPress with an active community of developers who continually add functionality to the site. Drupal does have it’s own “language” as you build and there is a much higher learning curve to working with Drupal.

From our own personal research we have found that while Drupal is considered more powerful as a full content management system with a very powerful back end, WordPress has a more active community and is much easier to use.  For our purposes that is the most important, so we are comfortable with our decision to use WordPress for the majority of our sites, although we certainly keep our minds open depending  on the needs of the project.

In researching this post we found  a good Drupal vs WordPress article: http://www.adamestrada.com/2010/02/26/drupal-vs-wordpress-for-geo/

Mirror Mirror- The Social Media Reality Check was hosted by Margaret Francis from Lithium a Social Media Management Company. It was mainly a run through of how some brands are and are not using Social Media.

Some examples she shared of good Social Media Campaigns included Comcast with their @Comcastcares twitter campaign that changed Comcast Support. Comcast has been know for bad support in the past, but they attacked social media and responded to requests for help, got people routed and solved problems online. It changed the way many people thought about support and Comcast. This is one of the most famous and effective social media campaigns to date.

Another example of an effective social media campaign was the way that Ford launched the 2011 Ford Fiesta. Basically Ford provided 100 Free Fiesta to technologically sound consumers and arranged for them to send updates, attend events and give their own opinions of the cars. The media coverage alone was worth the cost of the promotion, plus a very large Facebook following for cars.

She also noted many other brands that are not following or engaging their customers, but that the conversation is still happening. The Comcast account worked because it surprised people by providing support where people didn’t expect it. The main point of the talk was that Social media is the biggest suggestion box in the world; people are talking honestly about your brand online you need to at least be listening, and you should be engaging.

1.                  Sales

2.                  Time on Site

3.                  Bounce Rate

4.                  Amplification (Retweets and Shares)

He also let us know that the single most effective thing they have done in Social Media was when Paula Deen was hit in the face by a ham:

His point was that if you screw up or so something embarrassing, own it. It’s out there, now you have to respond.  He also talked about monitoring your reputation in social media.  If people are speaking well of you online let them, don’t feel like you need to jump in, however if people are complaining you should do what you can to address these issues asap.

He ended talking about what Social Media is not:

1.                  It is not controlled so don’t try

2.                  It is not organized

3.                  It is not exclusive

4.                  It is not always On Message- don’t feed the trolls online.  Don’t get angry and don’t take it personally.

5.                  It is not product driven- too easy to lose you clientele.

What we took from it was that social media is a conversation and most big companies are looking at it from a marketing standpoint and not as the support tool that it could and can be.    Social is very immediate and transparent, complaints are are public and can build steam.  Brad’s best quote was the the Waffle House has his favorite business model because it is all so transparent and immediate.  You make your order, you watch your food be cooked, you eat it in front of the server, you pay and you leave.

It was a good session and had me start thinking about new uses for social media especially for small businesses.  We will look at that later in the week.

Geekend 2010 was the second annual conference about all things “Geeky”.  People there represented creative, web developers, programmers, photographers, social media marketers and Internet marketing groups.

It seems to be the baby of Sloane Kelley from BFG Communications and the Creative Coast in Savannah.  The event started on Thursday evening and had full days of classes on Friday and Saturday.  Each class (or seminar or session or whatever) ran 45 minutes and had questions at the end.  Some events had one speaker and some had panels.  Each time block had three sessions one geared towards creative people, one more towards business focused people, and some were targeted at developers.  It says a lot for the conference that nobody I know followed any path exactly.

There were three keynote speakers. Scott Stratten from Unmarketing (link this) got things started on Friday (after the obligatory pre-conference marching band that entertained us for an hour).  Scott is very funny and very passionate and knows what he is talking about.  He gave a great presentation (if you don’t believe me just search Twitter for #Geekend and go back to Thursday night). Friday’s keynote was Oscar Gerardo, the Chief Architect of NBC.com.  He was very interesting going through how NBC has been using social media to become the number one on line network.  Noah Everett the 26 year old founder of twitpic, which is located in Charleston SC.  He was very interesting in talking about building a company on the fly, taking no outside money and working a full time job.  Twitpic started as a weekend project and grew into a multi-million dollar per year business.

There were nice parties after each night and we met a lot and networked with a lot of geeks, including our favorites from the Savannah Convention and Visitors Bureau. Those ladies are just a great time.

Geekend was definitely a success for me and I assume it was for the organizers.  Hopefully it is something that will be around for a long time.

We use Google Analytics on all our sites, we also use Web Position Pro to track our position under keywords on the web and other statistical tools.  Our site was doing great in the rankings, we were owning 1, 2 or 3 in almost every one of our targeted keywords and we were getting good traffic.  However, when we looked at our Analytics we saw that 70% of that traffic was bouncing or leaving after only looking at one page, so we knew we had to look hard at exactly why we were losing traffic that was clearly searching for what we had to offer.

A redesign of the site is just our first step. We made the navigation much simpler, moved more relevant information to the home page and tried to make the site much less busy.  Now- here is the fun part, we will test this by watching the Analytics.  We will see if we are losing traffic and where we are losing it.

So yes, even a business like ours has to make adjustments- but what about your site? Do you know how many people are searching for, where they are coming from and how they are reacting to your site once they are there.  If you don’t, you should.  Especially if you are using ads or driving traffic to your site.  You could be wasting a lot of money, or you should be spending more on things that are working- but you have to know!

]]> http://www.raisesbm.com/2010/05/17/new-client-palmetto-sands-vacation-rental/feed/ 0 http://www.raisesbm.com/2010/02/08/getting-things-done-book-review/ http://www.raisesbm.com/2010/02/08/getting-things-done-book-review/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:41:31 +0000 admin http://www.raiseinteractive.com/?p=408 At Raise Small Business Marketing we are constantly studying and learning to help our clients.  We follow many message boards, blogs, web sites, articles and books to make sure that we stay on top of current and future trends and ideas.  On our blog we will offer “reviews” of these learning tools, but not in the traditional way.  Our goal is to find the three to five things that stood out the most to us in our niche and how we might be able to use these ideas.

Getting Things Done

By David Allen

Getting Things Done is a productivity book, which is not necessarily marketing related- but time consumption is a big deal for many small business owners.  Proper use of time by small business can be the difference between success and failure.  Allen also argues that our productivity is directly related to our ability to relax, which I agree with wholeheartedly.  There is nothing worse than trying to relax knowing how much is on your plate at the office.  And when your office is at home, as mine is, it can make you crazy and really not ever allow you to relax.  So I was excited to get this information from David Allen.

1. Do it, delegate it, defer or drop it.  Those four words really do sum up Allen’s system.  At it’s simplest, you take every actionable item that comes across your desk or from your inbox and handle it one of four ways.  If it is something that can be handled quickly, do it; if a subordinate can handle it,let them; if it can’t be dealt witgh right now or shouldn’t be, put it in a tickler file until it is possible or appropriate to complete; or if it is not something that can be handled, let it go or throw it away.

2. This system is designed to not only help workers be more productive, but also allow them to be productive in the heat of the day.  The system can be used on your inbox on your desk, your mail, your email inbox or any other number of places.  It is a good system, that allows you to look at your life and work from different levels, from close up (day to day tasks) to far away (5-10 year plans).

3.  My main problem with this book is that I really just summed up the entire book in two bullet points, where Allen took 250.  For a book about productivity there i an awful lot of fluff and repeated information.  I honestly feel like the book could have been broken down into a flow chart that appears in the book and maybe 10 other pages.

In my opinion, while the book is fine, it wasted a lot more of my time than it saved.  With all the information available on the web from sites like Lifehacker, there is really no need for the book.  I do utilize parts of the system but still hobble together my index cards and Outlook as well.  If you really want ideas on productivity it isn’t bad, it just certainly was not worth the price I paid for it.

In the meantime we have seen a lot of great articles and ideas out there.  One article that caught my eye recently was this one from MSNBC.com (the link could be broken in firefox).  A key paragraph that sums it up for me is:

With unemployment hovering at 10 percent and the economy still shedding jobs, many would-be employees have concluded that the best way forward is to go into business for themselves, whether they want to or not.

The number one reason I found this article interesting is because it very much applies to Raise Small Business Marketing.  We always planned to start a business, but certainly not yet.  I am only 33, the goal was to be in a better place financially with more knowledge and resources at my disposal.  However the lack of jobs in the area where my wife works forced our hand before we were ready.

It’s the best thing that could have happened.  I now see that there would have been no time when we would have considered ourselves “ready”.  Well I was and I am.  We are always learning as a company, figuring somethings out as we go, but overall we have been much more successful than I could have hoped.

The other point this brings home is how to make yourself stand out when there are so many start ups in the marketplace.  That is what we do, don’t hesitate to contact a professional to help you build an identity, set goals, make plans and work towards those goals.  Budgets, media buying, web tracking; all of that is difficult to learn and takes away from the time you could spend building your business.  Talk to us and we will help you find your way. It is our job to make your life a little easier and help you from making expensive mistakes.

Contact Us Today.

Full disclosure: The client discovered this trick, I wish I could take credit for it, but it was brought to my attention.

Coupons can be a very effective marketing tool if they are used correctly.  Many affiliate sites are deal or coupon  based  and build a following through visitors looking for deals.  However many of these coupon sites are really nothing more than vulture sites who are taking money from transactions that they did not contribute to.  Here’s how it works:

Let’s say you are at Staples.com and getting ready to checkout.  On the checkout page there is a box for a coupon redemption code.  You don’t have a coupon, but you wonder if there is one out there, so you go to Google and search staples coupon (there are over  190,000 searches for variations of that search every month) and see some sites that offer a coupon.  You go to the site and it says click here for the coupon code, you click, probably see an expired coupon or maybe just a special offer, and staples.com opens up in a new tab, or it just redirects through.  At this point a cookie has been dropped on your computer and when you go back to the site, with or without a coupon, and complete your order, a pixel fires and that coupon site gets paid a percentage of your order.  They contributed nothing to the process but get a nice percentage of the sale.

The client who discovered this did because they have not offered coupons in over six months, yet his highest grossing affiliates are all coupon sites.  This client is going to remove the coupon code from his checkout cart which should alleviate the problem.  But what if he wanted to use a special coupon for email customers?  At that point he would have to consider removing coupon affiliates from his program.

It is kind of like the wild west out there in affiliate marketing, and while I would never recommend that businesses not use it, it is very important to make sure you are managing your program actively and watching out for fraud.  It is programs like this that can keep affiliate marketing out of the mainstream and not allow many small businesses who should be affiliate marketing to take advantage of it due to the time commitment needed to run a clean mutually beneficial affiliate campaign.

Brand Warfare

By David D’Alessandro with Michele Owens copyright 2001

Brand Warfare is an interesting book written by David D’Alessandro, the CEO of John Hancock.  It is subtitled 10 Rules for Building the Killer Brand.  That is the way the book is set up is through the Ten Rules and include such chapters as, It’s the Brand Stupid and Do Not Allow Scandal to Destroy a Brand.  It is about how companies can build their brand, get employees on board, plan advertising, and protect and take care of the brand.

The Three Main Things We Took from This Book

1. The word Brand is still very hard to define.  Even though the book is completely dedicated to brands and building your brand there is no simple one sentence answer to what is a brand.  The book talks about how everyone from big business to Hollywood stars talk about their “brand”.  In the end, our working definition of the brand is what consumers think of you, what you  think of yourself, and everything that goes into creating those ideas about your business including marketing, products, and services.  Business people often have n idea of what their brand is that is completely different than what their customers think and sometimes even what their employers think.
2. If You Want Great Advertising You Have to Fight For It.  This is the name of a chapter in the book hat really made sense.  Oftentimes advertising campaigns have too many people involved.  The creative team comes up with a great concept and shows it to the client who is allowed to make changes based on intuition, advice from friends or employees, or just because they don’t like it.  Trust your creative people; you hired them for a reason.  Business owners should not allow incorrect information into their ads and should make sure that main themes are included but should trust the people they are paying to bring a clear consistent message.
3. David D’Alessandro  foresaw the demise of Circuit City all the way back in 2001.  Well maybe not exactly, but in the Chapter “Make Your Distributors Slave to Your Brand” he talks about an unnamed Superstore that could easily be Circuit City.  He talks about how the stores are messy, cashiers are hard to find, and salespeople are not knowledgeable.  That was my experience every time I walked into Circuit City.  Compare that to Best Buy, which prides itself on it’s customer service and the knowledge of the salespeople.  Best Buy is in business and Circuit City was liquidated earlier this year.  Know you niche, and market to your niche.  Some things, like high level electronics, will never just be commodities even if some consumers want them to be.  Sell on value, not on price.
4. Viral Marketing is not for small businesses.  Viral marketing is all the rage.  Some very forward thinking business owners attempt to start a viral marketing campaign using social media, YouTube and word of mouth.  But this is very hard for an unestablished brand.   D’Alessandro  uses he dot com bust to illustrate this point.  All the new tech companies had these funny ad campaigns and spent millions on SuperBowl ads that had nothing to do with their business.  Many were trying to follow Apple’s iconic “hammer throw” ad.  But Apple already had a known brand.  That commercial didn’t launch them; it propelled them to the next level.  You have to do all the hard work of brand identity before you should even think about getting cute or too subtle with your advertising.  Lay the groundwork first.

I did like this book and would recommend it to anyone with interest in the idea of brand.  Most of these strategies are for businesses much larger than the ones we normally deal with.  For instance we haven’t had any clients ask us about the pros and cons of being an Olympic Sponsor or buying the naming rights to a stadium, but the concepts remain the same.  After all what we always try and do is bring big business strategies to small businesses.

One thing we realized quickly is that many small business owners don’t always know their own brand and customers.  This is very important information to have.  Also, we found many business owners treat their marketing one of two ways:
1.    They have marketing out there in different places but really didn’t base their media buys on any kind of empirical information or demographics but rather on rates and intuition.  They might have different ads in different places and no real way to track them.
2.    The other small business owner does what is called “ostrich marketing”.  Burying your head in the sand and hoping the marketing takes care of itself will not work.

That’s when we decided to really use all of our experience including over 10 years working in print media, branding experience, understanding competing media, and demographic research.  We also know that all your advertising needs to work together to advance your brand.  It is the only way to move forward.

We decided to become full service marketing agency for our customers including demographic research and media buying.  We design brands, write copy, plan, institute and track full advertising campaigns.  We make sure that online and offline work together to increase new business and and keep customers coming back.

We know small business owners are busy!  Your number one issue is sometimes time.  Our goal is to make marketing easy.  We want to take it off your plate and really cut down the time you spend on marketing while increasing the effectiveness.

As part of our re-launch we want to offer a free analysis of your current marketing efforts.  Just a no hassle, no obligation review of your current marketing. Trust us; it will be worth your time.

1. Social Media Marketing

This is something that we have always been doing but wanted to make  official; Raise Interactive provides Social Marketing for businesses.  This includes Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other online networking venues.  Everybody is talking about Social Media marketing, but does it make sense for your business?  If so, how?  Nothing is more annoying that the person on Facebook who continually posts links about their business.  Nobody likes that and you will soon see friends start dropping.  There is a right way and a wrong way to use these powerful tools and Raise will help you develop the plan that makes the most sense for your business, implement that plan, and track results.  At that point we can either turn the plan over to you or handle the work ourselves with your input.  If you are interested in learning more contact us today.

2.  More Traditional Agency Services

The more time we spend talking to clients the more I realize that there is a real need for qualified, affordable marketing advice.  From Brand Management to Advertising Budgets, we have come to realize that most small businesses just don’t have the time or the expertise to effectively institute a “marketing plan” and follow it.  This leads to wasteful spending or missed opportunities.  We ask clients where they are currently advertising and they either don’t know, or name a bunch of different venues many of which don’t make sense for their customer.  As I said, I will get into exactly what this all entails in more detail in the future, but basically this will allow us to service all of our customers so much better, bringing online and offline together effectively.

If you would like to learn more please contact us today through our online form.

In the last newsletter we defined terms and discussed three methods for driving traffic to your website through the search engines, natural rankings, paid search marketing and local results. This article will narrow in on natural rankings, how to achieve them, and what they mean. (Read the last newsletter here)

How do Search Engines Pick Their Results?

You type a phrase or question into Google, the results come up and you pick a page to view. How do Google, Yahoo or any of the other engines figure out which sites rank highest for the search queries?

They actually have a very complex algorithm that takes many factors into account.  These algorithms are tightly guarded secrets and constantly, but we do have some ideas of things that the search engines look for.  One very important aspect that the Search Engines need to see is keywords on the site.  This makes website design and copywriting very important.  Another factor that can make a big difference is your url name.  Putting keywords into the url can be a quick way to get a new website ranked.  Inbound links from relevant authority sites are what separates big players from small players.  These links back to your site make all the difference and this is what most Search Engine Marketing Consultants provide.  The more links back to your site, generally the better the site will rank under a number of keywords.

1.       Why do Search Rankings matter?

A website’s ranking in the Search Engines can absolutely make or break a business.  Websites that rank in the top three for heavily searched keywords bring in more customers that are actively looking for their product or service.  This type of pull marketing can help businesses sell more products, gain more clients, or sell advertising on their web site.

2.       So how do you move up?

That’s where a company like Raise Interactive can help.  We help companies improve their rankings in the Search Engines but we do a lot more as well.  It is important to have a smart strategy when starting a Search Engine Optimization Campaign.  You have to pick keywords carefully, and find relevant reasons for people to link back to your site.  We monitor traffic to your site and make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is qualified and acting the way we want them to you.  It’s important that people don’t come to your site and leave instantly.  This is where a consultant like Raise Interactive can really help your site.

Please contact us today for more information:

Tourists are not leaving their computers at home anymore and when they come one vacation they use the computers to make decisions about where they are going to spend money.  The Internet allows  visitors to quickly compare charter boats, jet skis,  or restaurants online.  It is imperative that these businesses provide decent pictures,  the benefits of their service, rates and directions or they will lose business to companies that do have that on their website.

It isn’t neccassary to have the greatset site ever with super flash movies and music and video (although video used properly can be VERY effective).  We need to take brochures and marketing materials and put them online.  For example, I recently completed a site for a Hilton Head Island Mechanic, Island Motors. This site is not fancy, and doesn’t even have an email form on it.  The owner doesn’t have time for that time of thing and doesn’t want to let emails sit and get stale.  But, when a tourist is in Town and there car is overheating, when they don’t go to the yellow pages, or even if they do, his site is going to let people know what he does and where he is.  This online brochure is not expensive, as a matter of fact at raise Interactive we usually charge around $600 for a site like this, not thousands, and we keep them online for $15/month.  Its effective and it works. I have another client, a Hilton Head Island Vacation Home, who needed an attractive web prescence to drive traffic to through such sites as VRBO and Craigslist.  Again, simple and easy, it gets 100s of hits a day and its rare that a day goes by without the contact form filled out.

So we encourage people, if youb have questions, fill out our form.  We are happy to work with you to build your business online.  We don’t double talk or use crazy buzzwords, we just build effective websites.

So you have spent the time and the money to build a website, now how do you get people to your site?  There are a variety of ways to bring traffic to a website including advertising campaigns, word of mouth and search engine marketing.  Advertising campaigns can be effective, however it is very hit and miss and often goes against what you are trying to do online, be cost effective and track results.  Word of mouth is very effective however it is also the slowest form of marketing and probably won’t bring a lot of new visitors to the site.  Search Marketing is what Raise Interactive focuses on and is the most effective way to bring a qualified audience to your site.  If a visitor comes to your site from the Search Engines it means that they typed in a word or phrase that brought your site up.

To market to the Search Engines it is important to identify some key terms.  People always talk about Google and “googling things” online. It is so common because Google holds over 60% of the market share in search engines.  The other major players are Yahoo, MSN and Ask.  These make up most of the other 40% of the Search Engines traffic.  There are also many search engines that focus specifically on certain industries or verticals.  Almost all of these engines have both natural or organic rankings and paid search.  Many also feature Local Search that might be very important to your business.  In the next few newsletters we will focus on explaining how organic search results, local search and paid search results work in deep detail, but first we will focus on defining what these terms mean.

Natural Search Rankings

Natural or organic search rankings are the results that come up on the left side of the page in most Search Engines, as highlighted in the picture.  These rankings are based on complex algorithms that the Search Engines have developed based on the content of your site and inbound links to your site.  Organic rankings get more than 80% of the clicks on a page and carry the most trust from the visitor.

Organic, Local and Paid Search

Paid Search Marketing

Paid Search is generally on the right hand side and possibly the top of the page.   These results are determined by an auction style system; basically clients bid on keywords that they feel will bring qualified traffic to their site. It is more involved, but basically the more you are willing to pay for someone to come to your site the higher you will be in the results.

Local Results

There is a third area of the Search Engines becoming more and more important especially to small businesses and these are local results.   Often these are listed at the top of the Search Page.  These results show as people type in local city names combined with keywords.  It is important that your business is listed there as these are often the first results that people see.  These local results often allow you to put in your business hours and coupons.

In the next three newsletters we will examine these three types of results and how you can use them effectively in more detail.  Please don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

This is a newsletter article from Raise Interactive, if you would like to receive our newsletter please fill out our contact form.

The reasons for Cuil’s failure so far can be attributed at least partly to the space and competition.  The Search Market is established, and the current Engines do what they do well.  To get a consumer to change their current search engine you don’t have to be five percent better than Google you have to be 500 percent better and that is a high bar to cross. Consumers are now ingrained to search Google, and “Googling” has entered our lexicon.

It reminds me of when Fox decided it was going to be a “network” like ABC, CBS, and NBC.  They failed for a long time until they had to severely overpay for the NFL, which brought viewers and news, and finally respectability.  But what is the NFL out there that can pull any kind of major traffic away from Google, Yahoo, MSN or even Ask.  It seems a different business model is emerging.

This article from Electronic Retailer Magazine talks about Vertical Search Engines.  These are engines that focus on a specific industry or topic and deliver results suited to those topics. Often these engines use humans to sort the results to keep out spam and make sure results are relevant. While none will approach the traffic of Google they can each siphon off searchers who know what they are looking for and need focused results.

To demonstrate we ran a test  for search results on a subject that brings back very different results.  We ran “steroids” through Google and OmniMedicalSearch and they brought back very different results, which makes sense. Both have paid advertising, OmniMedicalSearch keeps 6 AdSense results at the top of the page and Google runs them on the top and down the side.  On Google the organic or natural results come back with a site to buy steroids, general news about steroids, pictures of bodybuilders, very general, topical results. On OmniMedicalSearch the results come from Medical sites and give the definition of steroids and list different types. Obviously these would be results that would make more sense for a medical professional.  If you wnated to reach Medical professionals with a product OmniMedicalSearch can be a great place to advertise through the Google content network. Other engines actually sell their own space on their sites. Search Engine Watch has a nice list of  vertical engines that you can check out.

The article points out that these engines are like cable television, popping up and taking specialized traffic away from the Search Engines.  The goal is not to try and change everybody, but rather to deliver more focused results to a core group of searchers.

So how can small businesses use these engines?  In actuality, these engines can be a major part of small business strategies.  They can deliver more quality results for less money in the paid search realm and getting ranked in these engines can drive qualified organic search. Ian Howells, general manager of agency services at Pepperjam, one of the nation’s fastest growing online marketing agencies was quoted in the article as saying:

General search engines are focused on returning the most relevant results for the widest variety of searches.”  A vertical search engine puts more effort–much of it human, as opposed to automated–into a much smaller index of results. Typically, the results are of a superior quality. There is far less spam. Results tend to be extremely relevant and the site quality is excellent.”

He points out that while these engines don’t drive nearly as much traffic that the large engines bring, but the traffic that comes to a site through these engines is much more affordable, focused and likely to convert.  That is kind of a mantra here at Raise, bringing qualified traffic that is likely to convert as efficiently as possible.  When we take on clients for a search marketing campaign one of the first things that we do is identify any Vertical Search Engines that will make sense for them.  Often there aren’t any, or we run tests and they aren’t as effective as we hoped but when they work they can be a true home run for a company, especially a small business with a tight budget.

If you have more questions about Vertical Search Engines please don’t hesitate to contact us for a more in depth conversation.

This seems extreme but businesses should make this consideration when naming a business or certainly when picking a domain name.  If you can get important keywords into your domain it will help you rank for those keywords.  It doesn’t guarantee rankings but it can be an important piece of the puzzle.

As an an internet marketing company based on Hilton Head Island we see this a lot.  There are a lot of very competitive terms  for Hilton Head Island and sometimes the short term vacation terms completely dominate the long term or local keyword searched.  For instance Hilton Head Rental will bring terms that relate exclusively to short term rentals as opposed to long term rentals for those of us who live here.  We are forced to type in apartments, or long term rentals.  So when picking a company name or a domain name make sure you examine the landscape and attempt to incorporate your major keyword if it makes sense.

In these cases we use the WordPress platform to build business websites.  Originally started as blogging software it allows us to not only build websites but it is a built in Content Management System, allowing clients or Raise Interactive to easily update the site.  It is a fantastic program that is also Open Source, allowing people to use the platform for free.  It encourages a number of independent developers to make plugins and tools that they distribute, often for free.

On this platform we utilize a number of WordPress Themes from iThemes.com.  We experimented with several free themes or templates and they just don’t do the job.  The iThemes themes are very flexible and customizable, they look great and they have been very stable.  They allow us to cut hours of time off a website design which significantly lowers the price for our clients.  And to give you an idea, this site was built using the Architect Theme from iThemes.

This process allows us to build customizable, great looking, fully functioning sites for our clients that don’t cost an arm and a leg.  And when we do run into a larger job we still have the resources of our network of trusted developers.

11 Sandpiper.com

Raise Interactive is pleased to announce the redesign and relaunch of 11Sandpiper.com, a Hilton Head Island Vacation Home. 11 Sandpiper is located in the North Forest Beach region of Hilton Head Island, steps from the beach and right in the middle of shopping, dining and world famous golf. Check out the private putting green.  Check their calendar for availability and book your dream vacation!

We went through some recent sites that have come to our attention and made a list of some pitfalls that small businesses should avoid when designing and building a website.

1. Make a plan: I can’t tell you how many companies, both large and small seem to have a website because they think they need one.  The website has some basic information,  and maybe some pictures, but no real information and no sense of how people should go through it.  Small businesses need to have a plan before a site ever gets launched.

The first step is deciding what the site is for.  This step is often overlooked.  Is it an information sharing portal for your business holding store hours and contact information?  That is a very basic site and the focus should be on making sure it looks its best and gives the feel of the company it represents.  If the business wants to sell online they will need to decide how much of their product they want to sell online, how the inventory will be managed, and how the orders will come in.

Business owners need to think about how they want visitors to react to their sites and plan accordingly. You might design some pages as landing pages and others as pages that are design to be the second or third page viewed.

It also helps to completely design the site architecture, write out all the content on the site,  and pick any pictures that are going to be on the site.  While it doesn’t have to be set in stone, if all the content is ready before the first piece of code is written it will make the web site go up quicker and be more effective in the long term.

2. Avoid heavy use of flash, sound effects and other unnecessary bells and whistles: We know many designers who build only in Adobe Flash, and many do great work, however they are doing a serious disservice to 90% of their clients.  To search engine spiders and bots Flash is viewed as an image, which makes an all Flash page basically invisible to the search engines.  This makes it very difficult to achieve solid organic rankings in the Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other engines.  Through a strong link building campaign it is possible but it is a major handicap and in any competitive space it will be a real hindrance.

There are other sites that don’t use flash but are completely image based. These sites have the same problem as Flash sites, they are invisible to the the engines.   A good rule of thumb is if you can’t highlight, copy and paste the text than the search engines can’t see it.

A personal pet peeve of mine is websites that talk, play music or sound when you first arrive without giving you a choice.  There is a place for video on your site and those people who walk out and talk to customers, but if you surprise people with sound many will quickly back out or close their browsers.  Also, many prospects search from work computers and don’t want loud a video letting their co-workers know what sites they are viewing.  ESPN is a major offender of this and that is one of the major reasons I get most of my sports news from CNNSi.  The proper way to use video on your site is to start the video running with the mute on and a large button or slider to turn the volume on.  The customer can make the decision then if they want to hear the sound or not.

3. Don’t be overly ambitious: We see this a lot from small businesses but I think it is often the fault of the web designers.  Your site does not have to do everything imaginable, especially if it is the first site going up for a small business.  The site needs to portray the image and brand of the business and follow the plan that was set at the beginning.  It probably does not need customer forums, the ability to upload video, web 2.0 interactivity or any other buzz word.  Every one of those bells and whistles probably won’t be used and they can also break, making your site look bad. Focus on the plan and how you want visitors to react to your site.

We have also seen more and more small businesses with advertising on their site.  This is generally a bad idea for most small businesses.  We have worked so hard to get people to your site, why do you want to lead them off of it?

4. Too little content: Many sites have far too little content for what they are trying to accomplish.  We want clean sites that are not just long paragraph after long paragraph, but if handled correctly most websites could be much more content rich.  Users can click through to a new page, read an excerpt and decide to read more, or scan bullet points and then scroll down to read the whole article.  Let the user select how in-depth they want to get with your site, it will give your site more authority, keywords and build more trust with your customers.

5. Track the results: This is absolutely essential and something that small businesses do far too little of.  For a business website it is imperative to constantly track traffic to your site and see how visitors are reacting.  If 90% of the traffic that hits your home page leaves immediately, we probably have a problem.  You can also track paths and make sure visitors are reacting in the manner that you planned.  If not, make changes.  The tools are there, they just need to be used.

So those are 5 rules of mistakes that small businesses make when building  a new website.  If you have questions or would like more information about small business web design, just drop us a line. We are happy to run a free analysis on any site.

1. Set a Cost per Conversion Maximum: This is a very important step that most small businesses skip.  A Cost per Conversion goal is the maximum amount a lead or sale can cost you and still be profitable. The first thing that you have to do is define what your “Goal” is.  For mot businesses online the goal is to make a sale at that time.  But for other businesses, more complicated sales process that involves at least one phone call or service industries, the goal might be the visitor filling out your lead form or making a phone call.  For retail businesses there is a relatively easy way to figure this out, just figure out your average profit per sale minus any shipping and handling costs; that is your Maximum Cost Per Conversion, or MCPC. It may seem like a zero sum number but if you provide a quality product and good service you should have repeat customers which won’t cost you anything next time.

For lead-based goals it is a more complicated process.  Basically businesses either figure out how many leads equal a sale or estimate how many it should take, take the average profit per sale and divide the two.  This will give you a good MCPC target that can be refined through the life of the campaign.

2. Choose Your Keywords Carefully: You know your business better than anyone so you know what the keywords in your business are.  But are these keywords actually bringing prospective clients to your business?  Many times small businesses choose keywords that are too general or that are industry words.  It is important to use tools like Google’s Keyword Tool to choose keywords that have a high search volume but are not too general or too competitive.  You are paying for every customer who walks through your virtual door, you want them to be as qualified as possible.  Narrow your keyword list down and then …

3. Refine Your Keywords by Using Phrase and Exact Match: All of the major paid search engines allow businesses to use different match types when they set up an account.  There are four different match types, broad match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.  Broad Match means that if someone puts in any of the words in your keyword string your ad will come up.   Phrase Match keywords only show up if someone types the words into the Search Engine in the exact order that you entered them, but they can be part of a much larger string of words. Exact Match keywords only appear in the Search Engines if the visitor types in your phrase or string of keywords exactly, with no other terms.  Negative match keywords are words that businesses never want their ads to appear under.

The right match choice can make all the difference in your campaign.  When we work with small businesses we start with almost every word under exact match and track the impressions and click through rates.  If the account is not getting any traffic through exact match keywords we loosen up to phrase or broad match. This is the opposite of most agencies, which generally  deal with much larger budgets, who start with broad match and make decisions based on the results. That approach brings great results over a number of months but it is for businesses who can afford to lose money in the beginning for tracking purposes. Raise Interactive works with smaller businesses and we realize how important every dollar is to our clients so we keep our accounts pretty tight and we recommend that strategy to small businesses.

4. Install an Analytics Program and Track: If a small business is considering Paid Search they have to have a way to track results.  Your Adwords Account, or other search account, will only show you what page the visitor came to.  It won’t show you how they reacted to your site and how long they stayed on your site.  An Analytics program can track all of that and more.  It allows you to test your website and make changes based on user reaction, not guesses.

5. Make Changes Based on the Results: The real beauty of Pay Per Click Marketing is the ability to refine your campaign by watching user results.  You can test different keywords, landing pages and ads and focus on the most successful campaigns.  You can ease the restrictions on your keywords or tighten them based on results.  At this point you can revise your MCPC goals through the results.  There is also the matter of Quality Score, which makes your ads more cost effective over time, which we will address in a later post.

Pay Per Click Marketing might not be an effective strategy for some small businesses, but if handled correctly it can be a very effective and trackable part of most small businesses strategies. Contact Us Today with any questions.

Neighborhood Restaurant: Restaurants rely so much on repeat business.  An email marketing campaign would be deployed to keep customers coming back and recommending the restaurant to their friends.  We would collect email addresses in store through a free giveaway; drop your business card in the bowl for a chance to win a free lunch.  The winner would be announced every week on Monday through an email newsletter to everyone who dropped their business card.  The email would also include the weekly specials, any upcoming events and coupons designed to push traffic at slow times of the day.  It could provide news and hours as well as contact information.  Who wouldn’t want an email like that from their favorite restaurant?

Lawyers Office: Lawyers could use email marketing to stay top of mind with their clients and provide relevant news.  For professionals like lawyers, accountants or doctors we recommend an informative newsletter that educates the consumers about industry news and changes.  These are used to establish the firm or practice as the ultimate authority in the field.   We would only send out about one per month with a general interest article, news about the firm and any upcoming events, like tax season, that clients need to consider.

Mechanic’s Shop: No self respecting mechanic would market through email, right?  Well we can think of several ways a mechanic or other service professional could use email to improve their business.  Any business that is seasonal at all can use email marketing to push services and remind customers of needs.  Just before it gets warm a mechanic could let all his customers know about a special on air conditioning inspection and service.  Just as it got cold he could run a special on batteries and offer free testing.  Email can also be used to drive traffic to more profitable areas of the business or to let customers know about new services.

Realtors: Many Realtors already use email marketing and the Realtors who don’t should.  It is a cost effective way to deliver market information and news to a wide range of audience.  Any business that has a long product cycle can benefit tthrough staying top of mind with customers.  If the clients thought the Realtor did a god job when she sold them a house they should be more likely to trust her when the are ready to sell.  Staying in touch with an email newsletter every couple of months that is filled with market news and information will keep her in their thoughts and position her as the expert in the field.

Vacation Homes: Many people have a second or investment home that they rent out through sites like Vacation Rental by Owner.  These homeowners would be wise to collect email addresses from everyone who stays at the house and keep in touch with a monthly email newsletter.  The newsletter can highlight specials on weeks, show vacationers pictures and remind people of the great time they had at the house.  This makes it more likely the client will come back the next time they are going on vacation.

Neighborhood Associations: Many neighborhood associations have no idea how to share important information with homeowners.  Mail is too expensive, nobody wants to print and hand deliver 200 newsletters.  Why not get everybody on board with email?  With the click of a button the association can let everybody know about neighborhood news and events at a very low cost.

These are just some examples of people that we have worked with or ideas we have pitched in the past.  The key to every successful email campaign is to deliver relevant useful information to people who want it.  You don’t want to send out emails every day or with no information.  This will antagonize your customers make them think less of your business.  Its important that the emails look good and that they are professionally written.  Make it easy for them to unsubscribe.  Watch how many people open the email and how many click through to the website to make decisions on future emails.  This is a much different idea than SPAM or direct mail marketing through email.  That has its place, but we have found email to be most effective when used to increase repeat and referral business.  We are happy to share ideas with you on email marketing for small businesses, just give us a shout.

Affiliate Marketing at its most basic is putting a independent sales force to work marketing your business who only get paid if the traffic they drive to your site actually converts. It should be a purely cost per action style of marketing, not pay per click, or pay per impression, but only paying when sale is made or a lead is generated. Wikipedia has an article on Affiliate Marketing that we think provides a good explanation and history.

So how do you do it? The easiest and most efficient way to start an Affiliate Program is to join one or more Affiliate Networks, such as Pepperjam, LinkShare, or Commission Junction. This puts your offer out to a huge number of affiliates, many more than you could find yourself. They also give you the tools to distribute approved advertising and set the terms for your campaign. All sales and traffic are tracked through a cookie and pixel system. When a prospective customer is on an affiliate site a cookie is dropped on their browser when they click through to the advertiser site. After they purchase from the advertiser a pixel fires on the confirmation page. This pixel transmits information back to the network, providing the affiliate id, the amount of the sale and other relevant information. The advertiser account is debited the predetermined percentage or amount and that amount is transferred to the affiliate.

Affiliates drive traffic to the advertiser sites through many means, including coupon sites, pay per click campaigns, review sites, email marketing and banner advertising. The best affiliates or Super Affiliates actually run businesses that focus solely on driving traffic to advertiser sites. They are professional and very good at what they do, and they are the people you want marketing your site.

This all sounds good right, so what are the downsides? Well there can be several reasons a small business might avoid affiliate marketing. The first is price. Advertisers need margins high enough to make money while still paying a competitive amount to the affiliates. There are also start up costs to any affiliate program: building the ads, network fees, monthly minimum fees, and the advertiser website might need upgraded. There are also fraud issues, and an affiliate program can take a lot of time to run properly, especially in the beginning.

There are firms, including Raise, that manage programs for advertisers. Would this make sense for your business? Check back as we will go over the what affiliate program managers do and their responsibilities.

Tom Cavanagh and Erick McCormack from the TNT show "Trust Me"

The storyline revolved around a tagline and whether it was stolen and how it tested in focus groups.  It just made me think how old and inefficient  the advertising process of large companies is.  Focus groups? Taglines?  These are not the most important things to bringing new customers to your business and actually improving your bottom line.  It used to be the only way but with the tools to track everything.  The punchline of the show was that two people were able to torpedo a good tagline in a focus group. That is not efficient!  Why use a focus group when the entire world can be your focus group, or at least the world that we are able to drive to your website.  You can see, almost in real time how visitors are reacting to offers on your site, the layout and the structure and if they are buying or filling out your contact form.  And the best part is that online we can change on a dime.

That is where I feel small businesses have a major advantage over larger competition.  Speed and flexibility.  If a strategy isn’t working, change it.  Now.  Small business don’t need to run ideas through commitees, deal with internal politics or focus groups.  If we are smart, we can use the tools available to make decisions based on what our customers want, not what we think they might want six months from now.  So use those advantages, be flexible and quick.  It is how David beat Goliath…

1. Decide what you want the site to do:

Too many websites decide they need a site before they decide why.  One of the first things we do when we talk to a prospective client is ask them what they want the site to do.  Is it an online brochure?  Are you trying to sell things online? Are you trying to generate leads?  These are three completely different sites.

2. Do you need a custom site or does a platform make sense:

There are many good reasons for businesses to build a website completely from scratch, however this can be cost prohibitive for many small businesses.  Depending on your needs it may make more sense to build on a platform, such as WordPress, that allows you to build and edit the site in a very easy, inexpensive way.  And with all the widgets and plugins out there these sites can be pretty powerful. Our company site is built on the WordPress platform and it works for us.

3. Don’t overuse Flash or other image based platforms:

Flash is a great program, however text in images is basically invisible to Search Engines,which will hamper any type of an optimization campaign.  Get text out of images on your page.  A good rule of thumb is that if you can copy and paste the the text on your screen the Search Engines can crawl and index the information.

4. Decide all pages and write the content before you start:

Before you start building a site write the full site design including all the pages and sub pages.  Think about how you want the consumer to interact with your page and how you want visitors to travel through your site. Is a blog appropriate?  They are great for Search Engine Campaigns, but if you don’t update them they make your business look lazy or closed.  Write all the content for the pages before you start, it makes the process  easier and quicker.  You can always change it later.

5. Once you build test everything and test often:

Once your site is online test everything.  Test all the links, your contact form, and reproof the pages.  Things can break.  Sometimes a “small” change you think made can have cascading effects over the page.  Keep an eye on everything on the site, because a broken site can reflect poorly on your business.

Once your site is up and working, consider different marketing techniques.  Consider a Pay Per Click Campaign or a link building strategy.  Start a campaign to collect email addresses.  Keep your blog up to date, and talk to your customers.  Ask them what they think, how the site works for them, and watch your results.  Install an Analytics program like Google Analytics to keep track of how visitors interact with the site and check them often.  Make changes based on the results.  While you don’t want to make wholesale changes often, make small fixes and tweaks.  Remember, your website is often the first look visitors get at your business, and you don’t often get a second chance at a first impression.

1. Target Geographically: Paid Search can be laser focused on certain areas, allowing you to purchase very desirable terms only in the areas you do business in. Organic search can be geo-targeted but it involves the searcher entering in geo-targeted keywords. With pay per click, you can pick the areas you want your ad to show up in increase the effectiveness of your budget. Geo-targeting is also useful if you plan to target new areas or expand locations, giving you a quick foothold in new areas.
2. Jump start a new business or site: If you have a new business or have just launched a website, its going to take time to drive traffic to your site even with the best search engine optimization firm in the business. So run a small targeted PPC campaign to drive traffic, start spreading the word and collecting new leads.
3. Fill in the gaps in an ongoing Search Engine Optimization: This goes right with number two. Let’s say you have been aggressive with your search techniques, building back links and gaining rankings in the engines. There are still words that you will want to target that you aren’t ranking for. The most lucrative keywords in your industry are going to be the most competitive and paid search can you give you a presence at the top of these search pages.
4. Seasonal Specials: If your business is seasonal at all, you can use paid search to increase your traffic at key points of the year. If you know the next three months are going to be slow, start a paid campaign for your most relevant keywords to make sure you still have traffic and leads coming in. On the flip side if you are a purely seasonal business you can use PPC to really drive traffic during the hot times.
5. Test keywords, conversions and your page: Because PPC marketing is so flexible and the reporting is so good, you can use it in combination with Google Analytics to test your page and your search strategy. Run some paid search on the keywords you are trying to rank for. See if that traffic converts to customers, and if it does, that’s great. If it doesn’t, you might need to think about the effectiveness of your keywords, your site and possibly your business model. Because you can test these words instantly it could save you six months of time and money trying to rank for keywords that might bring traffic to your site but not customers.

There are other great reasons as well but they generally apply to larger businesses with larger budgets. For instance there is research that shows that companies that own both the top ranking, organically and paid, get better name recognition and reputation with searchers. But small businesses need to be smart and reasonable. In a dream world with unlimited budgets maybe we could do that, but our goal is to your grow your business not bankrupt it. Would we ever recommend that a company focus its budget on Ad Words instead of a Search Optimization Campaign? Probably not, but it could be a very effective additional strategy for gaining new customers. So how do you do it with a small budget and limited knowledge of the space? We will address that in a future post. You can also just contact us and I would be happy to go over strategies with you.

1.  You won’t get good results. As much as these companies promise, their strategy is generally to pick and choose the least competitive keywords that you are training to attain and focus on those.  The problem is that these keywords are not competitive for a reason – they aren’t receiving good search volume or they aren’t relevant to your site.  You don’t want to focus all your time on a keyword that won’t generate traffic or conversions. Also, focusing on any very small specific keyword list is a bad idea. You want to grow your site and audience in a broad manner. Just trying to rank for one or two keywords is not a successful long term strategy.

2. This model encourages black hat behavior. A company that only gets paid for results has much greater reason to try “black hat” or shady methods of getting your site ranked quickly.  These tricks may get your site ranked for some keywords pretty quickly, but the search engines are smart. They are constantly watching tactics and changing their algorithms to jump in front of it.  And if Google sees your site breaking their webmaster guidelines you will be penalized and lose rank or be removed from the search engines altogether.  It doesn’t matter that somebody else was responsible, it is your site and you will be penalized. Only work with companies that use strictly white hat, transparent SEO techniques.

3.  Its bad strategy that will not help your business in the long run: We would never guarantee results at Raise because of the hundreds of factors that go into ranking a page – for instance, it matters what your competition is doing, how long your domain has been active and what the search engines do.  Also, just getting ranked for a keyword is great but that is only half of a successful search engine campaign.  You must watch how that traffic reacts with your site and make adjustments based on the results using such programs as Google Analytics.

We understand why these companies would build a model like that, and we understand why businesses, especially small businesses would, jump at the offer.  Pay-per-performance has its place on the internet and is the future of sales, I don’t doubt that. But I cannot see when SEO will join those ranks. It is a service that takes time and expertise. Our focus is building for the long haul, not a short bang. In the end the mantra is true that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Maybe.  It looks like this is going to be a very tough year, however the businesses that come through in the end are going to come out leaner, stronger and smarter.  There are ways to protect yourself.  One of the first is to look at your marketing.  Cut everything that you cannot track.  There is an old advertising saying – “I know 50% of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which 50%”.  Online we track everything, down to what word brought a person to your site and what they did on your site.  If you haven’t yet, it is time to reassess your newspaper ads, your TV and radio and especially your yellow page  advertising.  I don’t have a phone book in my house and I have not for 5 years.  Everything I need I find online or through my phone or from a friend.

Make sure you are featured in Google Local and other similar services.  Make sure your website works, and that it is attractive and informative.  If it is not look for a respected small business web design company.  It doesn’t have to blow fire out computer speakers or have people walking across the screen.  The most important goal of website is to deliver the information that the client is looking for and give them a reason to become your customer.

Focus on email marketing. Ask your current customers if it is okay if you send them information and then set up a system to stay in touch with them in a responsible way.  Use a program like Constant Contact so you can track open rates and bounce rates. If people are unsubscribing it means you are emailing too much or not sending good information.  Take some marketing money and put it into pay-per-click marketing.  It will drive people to your site instantly and you can experiment with different keywords to see what converts.  We don’t have to guess.  I came up in newspapers, I understand how they work, but there is a reason that they are dying.

So now we have a reasonable and completely trackable plan for marketing. Our costs are cut and, for everything we do, we know how it worked.  Maybe we just hold our own, maybe we lose some business, but as things start to come around, and they will, we are ready.  We are lean.  And we push, we don’t have to make adjustments to changing media, we have already done it.  Obviously this is one facet of how a small business can make it through the tough times, but let me tell you something from experience.  Businesses that cut their marketing completely when times get tough never recover.  It makes more sense to focus your resources on areas that you can track completely.

Raise Interactive will design sites and strategies to improve your business and your customer satisfaction at a fraction of big budget agencies costs. We are excited to be open for business and we look forward to hearing from you!