Posts Tagged ‘SEM’

Choose SEO First When Starting Your Online Lead Strategy

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Develop an online marketing plan with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as your starting point, comparatively to other lead generation channels, such as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), affiliate marketing, email marketing or media buys.

SEO, for all the newbies out there, is the organic listings that appear on the left-side of Google’s search results. It is free to appear in Google’s organic listings, which is how 75% of online users will find content. Also, 85% of Google Search users tend to click on organic listings compared to paid advertising links that appear at either the top or right-side of Google’s results. Although free to appear, it is not easy to get your website listed on the first page of the organic search, which is primarily where you want to appear, since most people tend not to go past the 1st page of the listings. So, how do you begin to make your site SEO-friendly?

Start with the title of the web pages. Name the title tags with 3-4 keywords that are relevant to the information on the page.  Next, make sure that your information on the web pages are specific to the keywords.  Lastly, get as many external links that go to your website.  The more links you have, the more it will help in the popularity of your site, which will drive your site up in the rankings of the organic search.

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Posted in online marketing, Search, SEO | 3 Comments »

Know Your Marketing Metrics!

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

I can’t stress enough that, if you are running online marketing campaigns, you have to track them for measuring success.  There is no excuse for any online marketer to not track their campaigns through either paid or free analytic software.  Google Analytics (/www.google.com/analytics)  is a free software that enables any marketer to see how well their Search campaign is going, as well as, other online campaigns.  What’s great about this software is that you can place a simple tracking code, provided by Google Analytics, on your website to see how specific campaigns are converting at your site, how users are interacting with the site, and if you have an e-commerce site, how well sales are converting.  Without knowing how new users and repeat users are interacting with your site, you won’t be able to know how to improve the user experience to increase registrant or sales conversions.

There is a down-side to Google Analytics, it has problems aggregating all of the traffic accurately for unique visitors and visits.  For example, if you are running a Facebook advertising campaign, Google statistically will show less traffic to your site, than what Facebook reports, but hey, what do you expect from a free software.

For a more robust analytic software, try WebTrends.  WebTrends can be customized to your needs and is very granular about its tracking. Keeping in mind, it is a paid software, but if you can afford it, I would highly recommend it. If you are running a Search campaign, you’ll be able to see, down to the keyword, if new registrants or sales can be accounted to those specific keywords.

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Posted in internet marketing, online marketing, Search | 1 Comment »

Is there a difference between B2B and B2C Online Marketing?

Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

Is there a difference between Business-to-Business (B2B) and Business-to-Consumer (B2C) online marketing?  Absolutely.  Don’t let an inexperienced marketer tell you otherwise.  B2B marketing tends to focus on providing targeted content, such as white papers, case studies and webinars to their target market, in exchange for the target markets’ contact information.  Also, B2B marketers tend to focus more on customer acquisition, rather than customer retention, since attrition is much lower in the business market than in the consumer market. Online marketing channels tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO and related business information websites.

B2C marketing tends to focus equally on customer acquisition and retention marketing programs.  Consumers are more price & service sensitive than businesses. Consumers visit more alternative online services, if they believe there is a better value for them testing out varied sites.  Many good B2C online marketers will focus on creating customer retention programs that keep consumers coming back to their sites to extend their Life Time Value (LTV) of their online members…i.e. if the average of an online user is 2 months at a casual gaming site, then the marketer seeks to extend the LTV to 3-4 months.  By extending the LTV of an online member, potentially increases online usage at the site and will increase overall ROI for revenues.

Online marketing channels for B2C online services tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO, direct marketing, email campaigns, blogs, viral and affiliate marketing.

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Posted in internet marketing, Media Buying, online marketing, Search, SEO | 1 Comment »

SEO and How to Get Higher Traffic Rankings

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the top buzz word on every online marketer’s mind right now, but what does it mean for your website and driving traffic to it?  SEO in short, is how you optimize your site to have higher rankings in Google’s Organic Search results, which appear to the left of the screen.  There are many techniques that you will have to consider to optimize your site, but if you don’t have a lot of money to hire an agency to help you with this process, one simple way that you can help your rankings, is to have as many links as possible from other sites pointed to your site; this is a guaranteed way to help boost your rankings. But how do you get your url placed on other sites? Try going to the top ComScore sites that accept urls from other websites, such as YouTube.

For example,  if you are trying to market a product to a consumer audience, consider creating a short video about how to use the product and place that video on MySpace, YouTube, and Veoh.   Make sure the video you create is fun and exciting to watch, otherwise, you won’t have anyone watching.  Don’t make the mistake that many others do, that assume just because you built it, people will watch it. Make sure to include your url in the video as a tagline at the bottom of the screen, so viewers can go to your site, once they are done watching the video.

By doing simple guerrilla marketing techniques as the video example, will help increase your traffic and boost your rankings in Google’s Search.

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Posted in Ashley Hart, guerrilla marketing, internet marketing, online marketing, Search, SEO | No Comments »