Internet Marketing Newsletter

Want to Reach More Local Customers - Try Local Search Engine Optimization (Local SEO)

2011-03-30T21:11:00.000-07:00

Local SEO including Google places offer a lot of opportunities for your business to reach your local customers. Google Places is a fairly new program. Google introduced it in October 2010. It is more budget oriented compared with a full search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. In most cases it is less expensive than a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign and it presents great opportunities for potential customers to find and connect to your business.

It is very interesting to know that it DOES FIT well a start up business and yes, you can STILL USE it if your website is in flash, JavaScript or any other not so friendly search engine technologies. Local SEO is a perfect program for any business to use and start his internet marketing journey.

Your local SEO may start with your Google Places listing. Google Places is the digital “yellow pages” directory for the 21st Century.

See example:

In order to get your business listed your Places page has to be claimed or created. Then your local Google listing has to be enhanced and optimized with pictures, videos, client reviews and more.

Google Places builds a dynamic page, presenting your business, with combined information from what you have submitted and what Google crawler finds around the web about your business. The listing includes business contact details such as your business name, location, phone number, fax, email, website address, if you have one. Additional details include: pictures, videos, clients’ reviews, etc.

Years ago, when the Internet started, it was much more difficult to get local results. Now, new technologies allow the search engines to determine the location of the users. In many cases the users have become more educated and they enter a geo-specific descriptor in the search terms. Examples are: “dentist Chicago”, “carpet cleaning Orange County”, etc. Nowadays consumers prefer to use and search for local business and support their communities. With these trends Local Internet Marketing, Local SEO and Google Places will gain additional popularity.

Local SEO and Google Places offer opportunities for businesses to get higher website ROI and expand their local market share.

“GOOGLE PLACES” provides an opportunity for businesses to implement and take advantage of Local Search Engine Optimization (Local SEO)

2011-01-12T16:09:00.000-08:00

In October 2010 Google introduced a new type of natural search results (local SEO results) - “Google Places” - a new and a more effective way for every business to reach more local customers.

Before “Google Places”, a local-oriented query in Google like “Chicago business attorney” might have returned a “7-pack” of Maps results followed by normal organic web page results. Now, queries like this will return a page of hybrid web results with Google Maps listing information below each qualified result. The map that is part of the local results is now moved to the top right of the page above the paid search listings.

As a result of this change now 'Google Places' data is more prominent. Google Place pages’ content is more important, as users are now exposed to more of the local results on the standard web search results page (SERP).

Proceed Innovative will be hosting a FREE SEMINAR "Get Noticed on Google!"
Join us and learn about the newest programs such as Google Places, our Local SEO , Mobile SEO programs and how to apply them to your business.

Google Buzz Gmail Integration

2010-02-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

Google makes it easy for Gmail users to get social and start conversations using Google Buzz. The users' reactions to the new social networking service are controversial. Google Buzz will reflect on SEO as well.
Let us know what you think about Google Buzz - post a comment or answer the poll question. Thank you!

Holiday Marketing Promotion

2009-11-24T11:57:00.000-08:00

The holidays are here and we will welcome the new year soon. It is time to look at what we have achieved so far, but also to find new opportunities for better ROI.

With the boom in Internet technologies and social media websites, online marketing is becoming a-must-have strategy for every business.

To get results, you need more than a pre-defined suite of marketing tactics. Proceed Innovative will consult with you on your Internet marketing objectives, analyze your website design and search engine optimization goals, help define successful web metrics and analytics, and provide a complete set of integrated marketing tactics to accomplish your business objectives.

Holiday Marketing Promotion: Contact us for customized FREE analysis of your Internet marketing opportunities or register for our FREE Internet Marketing Seminar - "Get Noticed on Google!".

What do we do with all this traffic from Google?

2009-10-29T12:19:00.001-07:00

We recently optimized a website for a new client. After the high rankings and website traffic kicked in, they sent us this question:

“How do we take all this traffic and start converting them to clients?”

Here are a few ways to improve web usability and accomplish this:

Go through every page and make sure it has a well-written call to action. Something on the page ought to urge visitors to click. Putting the call to action at the top of each page helps people understand where to click next. Move the traffic where you want it to go.

Create a blog, e-zine, and/or free white papers. Analyze which perform best at persuading visitors to convert to clients.

See how long it takes your main pages to load. Nobody wants to wait around for a page to load when they can just hit the back button.

Add a live chat representative. “She” can help visitors throughout their visit to your website, offer customer service and improve conversions.

These are only a few suggestions…please let us know what you’ve tried.

Video Marketing

2009-10-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

With the boom in Internet technologies and social media websites, video marketing is becoming more and more popular. However, simply shooting a video and posting it online will not guarantee results. The key to a successful video campaign is compelling content and optimization.

The first and most important step is to produce a high quality original. Then the goal is to load the video as quickly as possible, grab the viewers' attention, and leave them wanting more. Publish the video content on your website and on popular video sharing websites.

The next very important step is the VIDEO SEM (Search Engine Marketing)!
Read our 8 Web Video Marketing Tips.

Approaches to Your Online SEM Budget

2009-10-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

1) Fixed budget – a simple approach when an organization will set up a budget for a fixed amount for a certain period of time.

2) Modified fixed budget – a fixed budget for a certain period of time and adjusted periodically based on ROI or other factors.

3) Many e-commerce advertisers adjust their budget based on sales to revenue percentage. For example on each $1000 in sales they will reinvest 10-15% back in SEM (search engine marketing).

4) Seasonality plays a big role especially in the paid campaigns (like PPC). Companies will set up different budgets to meet the number of searches and get exposure during different time periods.

5) Lastly many large organizations use a percentage of their marketing budgets for SEM.

For more informatibon contact Proceed Innovative. We will provide you with customized online marketing data based on your industry and competitors analysis.

If my competitors are using many of the same keywords, how does one website get ranked in Google over the others?

2009-08-11T10:22:00.000-07:00

In our search term/keyword research period we find fresh search terms for SEO. The best way to find them is with research tools that let us put in words, and collect many combinations and extra usages of those words. We also learn general information concerning how frequently each search term is used.

When choosing which of these search terms to use, we bear in mind that the more common it is, the harder it will be in obtaining top placement in Google. However if we choose terms with minimal searches we won’t acquire much traffic, so we choose terms in the middle.

There are so many different combinations of search terms, so usually our clients don't have just one website they're competing with. Don’t believe it? Look at your last ranking report and see how many different websites rank number one for each of your search terms. We recently did this for a potential client and found that for 25 search terms there are 20 websites that ranked number one. So websites aren't all going after the same keywords.

PageRank

2009-07-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

PageRank is an algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine to assign a numerical weighting to each web page. It is a trademark of Google. PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. PageRank is a number between 0 and 10. The most popular web pages have a PageRank of 10. The higher the PageRank the better chances this page has for appearing on the first SERP. Google has not disclosed the exact method for determining the PageRank value but it is based on links to the webpage. A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. The Google Toolbar displays the current page's PageRank. See the example:

Interesting fact is that PageRank has been named after one of the two Google founders, Larry Page.

PageRank and SERP are related but different terms. SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page and consists of a list of links to web pages displayed as a result of search query. The order of the listed links is determined by their SERP rank. The SERP rank of a web page depends on a relatively large and continuously adjusted set of factors including PageRank.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is aimed at achieving high SERP ranks for a website.

Google Closing In

2009-07-14T11:09:00.000-07:00

What Percent of Your Traffic is From Google?

Last month, Hitwise reported that Google comprised 72.4 percent of all U.S. searches carried out in the four weeks concluding April 25, 2009. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com picked up 16.3 percent, 5.78 percent and 4.0 percent, respectively. For Google that represents a 7% year over year change.
The other 49 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for only 1.4 percent of U.S. searches.

In April 2008, 14% of the traffic to our website - ProceedInnovative.com - was from Google organic searches.
In April 2009 it was 34%! In that same month only 4% was from Yahoo.

What else did Hitwise say about April ’09 compared to April ‘08?
- Lengthier search terms, averaging five to more than eight words long, have risen 7 percent.
- Business and Finance, Sports and Online Video categories displayed double-digit escalations in their share of traffic arriving directly from search engines.

What does this mean for my website marketing?
Three things:
- It’s all about Google.
- Go for the long tail.
- If you can get your site to come up in Google for long tail search terms, it could become a goldmine.

How about you? What percent of your traffic is from Google?

Do you optimize for the short tail or the long tail? Send us your comments.

What is SERP?

2009-06-10T08:44:00.000-07:00

SERP is the search engine results page that displays the listings of web pages returned by a search engine in response to a keyword search. The results normally include listings of web pages with titles, descriptions and a link to each page. It is important to provide compelling titles and descriptions in order to have the visitors click on the displayed links. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is aimed at achieving high SERP ranks for a website.

What is a search engine spider?

2009-06-10T08:37:00.000-07:00

The search engine spider is also known as a bot or crawler. It is a program that follows web links and crawls web pages on behalf of search engines. Spiders process and index the content of a web page based on the search engine algorithm and store the pages in the search engine's database. Googlebot is the name of Google’s spider program.

Having many crawlable (or available for the spider) web pages is the first step to a successful search engine marketing program.

How creating a blog can help my business?

2009-06-04T12:28:00.000-07:00

Yes, a blog can help your business in many ways. Blogs are big part of social media marketing these days. For example you can create and use a corporate blog to "talk" to your customers. Encourage them to write questions or comments on your products and services, and the product features they like or wish to have. A blog is easy to create and maintain. If well optimized it can help your main web site get better rankings on the search engines.

Online Competitive Intelligence

2009-05-19T12:25:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about search engine optimization is the intelligence you can obtain from it on your competitors.

For websites, the battle for clicks from Googlers is brutal.
Rankings go up and down throughout the week. Every day more and more web pages appear. Google changes its algorithms all the time.

If you can't keep track of your competitors, how do you expect to out-rank them in Google’s search results? Explore who your competitors are in the online world and what they're doing to promote themselves.

"Competitive Intelligence is defined as the process of obtaining and analyzing competitive information from publicly available sources to help achieve the objectives of the organization." Source: Wikipedia

Your online competitors may or may not be the same as your offline competitors. First you need to find out who your competition is. Do a search in Google for a term or terms that you want to rank for – the top spots (disregard sponsored links) are your competitors.

How you can gather online competitive intelligence

Read their websites thoroughly
See who is linking to them
Find out how much traffic they are getting
Identify their key phrases
Find out their Google PageRank

Apply what you discover from your competitive intelligence. Use this new knowledge to increase your online marketing success and your profits.

How Competitive Is Your Brand

2009-05-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

Search trends can be interesting for all sorts of reasons. Use Google Trends to check the popularity of your or your competitor's products and brands, or to predict the outcome of your promotions.
Here is an example of how popular some abbreviations for our search marketing services are:

Google and Yahoo Local Listings

2009-04-15T12:02:00.000-07:00

Get listed at Google and Yahoo! Local to see some extra, qualified traffic. You'll need location information for your offices, a phone number to list, a description of what you do or sell, an email address and website. For Google, you'll have to verify your location by phone or mail. Basic Local Yahoo listings are free of charge just like Google Local.
Local search is becoming more important to any business and having optimized local listings is essential part of your online presence. Contact us for more information regarding local search engine submissions.

301 Redirect

2009-03-09T10:43:00.000-07:00

When to use a 301 redirect?
When you are launching a new website and the actual URL structure of your site changes. For example: current page is www.mywebsite.com/about.html and the new page is www.mywebsite.com/about.php. If the current page has prominent position in search engine results and/or back links - you'll want to pass on this credit to the new page. 301 redirect is the way to go!

301 redirects are search engine friendly and the ultimate way to pass on credit from an old page to a new one. Even if you are deleting a page - first use a 301 redirect to forward it to your home page or your site map page.

301 redirects are implemented differently based on the type of your web host. Contact Proceed Innovative if you need more information.

Social Media is Part of Your Search Engine Marketing Plan

2009-02-04T06:33:00.000-08:00

As the social media becomes an important part of any company's marketing plan many marketers are not sure where to start from. There are so many tools and platforms, what is the best start someone would ask. Social Media as part of Search Engine Optimization has three main parts or phases: monitor, participate, measure the results.
Monitor is the first step. Your start could be a very simple step: Get subscribed for "Google Alerts" and monitor the information Google has indexed for your business name and perhaps your competitors’ names. It is easy, flexible and free. Get subscribed for "Google Alerts".
This is the start. There are lot more tools to help you. Check this blog often or contact Proceed Innovative for more information. Our Office is in Schaumburg. Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing are our primary services. Call 800-933-2402 or register for a free seminar at www.proceedinnovative.com/google

Search Engine Spider Simulator

2009-02-03T12:01:00.000-08:00

It is very important to create user-friendly web pages. But it is also important to check how the SE spiders see your content.

This tool Simulates a Search Engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a Search Engine would see it. It also displays the hyperlinks that will be followed (crawled) by a Search Engine when it visits the specified webpage.

2008-10-28T10:58:00.000-07:00

What’s new at Google?

You can access this tool by going into an ad group and clicking the Ad Variations tab.
Then Google will walk you through the do-it-yourself Display Ad Builder. They make it pretty easy.
These ads run on Google partner sites as part of the content network.
Check out some of their display ads that you can personalize:

According to Google, the ads are optimized for direct user response and use a clear call to action you define.
Display Ad Builder is a form of online marketing that should be tried and tested if you are already in a PPC ad campaign. It may help your products or services stand out from the rest.

If you need help setting up your Adwords campaign, please consider our professional PPC services.

Use Google Analytics to get the most from your Google AdWords budget

2008-10-10T12:09:00.000-07:00

There’s a report in Google Analytics that can be very useful in optimizing your pay per click campaign.

In order to get to the keyword report, in the left navigation select “Traffic Sources” and then “Keywords”.
Once the report loads, towards the bottom of your screen you will see something like this:

Search sent 2,218 paid visits via 288 keywords

Directly below it you will see Show: total | paid | non-paid. Click on “paid” (see red box below):

The top search terms/ keywords that people have used to arrive at your website from your pay per click campaign will be listed. The third and fourth columns are named “Pages/Visit” and “Avg. Time on Site”.

In our example we have highlighted the term that had the highest and lowest numbers in these columns. Not surprisingly – the search term (overseas adventure travel) with the lowest number in column three also has the lowest in column four and the highest bounce rate (column six). In other words of the 159 visitors who came to the site by typing that search term into Google, and then clicking on our client’s ad, most did not click through to any other pages. The average time spent on the website was seven seconds.

On the other hand, the search term “all inclusive honeymoons” had the highest number in columns three and four, and the lowest bounce rate. So of the 58 visitors who clicked on our client’s ad, only 15.5% did not click through to other pages. The average time spent on the website was about 2 ½ minutes, and the average pages viewed was about 5.

It’s clear which search term is more valuable. Although many more people arrived at the site searching for “overseas adventure travel” than for “all inclusive honeymoons”, we don’t want to pay for clicks if people are going to be quickly exiting.

As a result of this data, we paused the first search term and plan to create and test a new landing page for it. We also increased the bid on the second search term in order to try and increase our position in Google. In addition, we will optimize the landing page for “all inclusive honeymoons” so that we may benefit from free Google traffic as well.

Please, contact us for more information regarding our Google Analytics Consulting services.

Why Hire an SEO Consultant or SEO Company?

2008-08-11T13:39:00.000-07:00

The Internet is the biggest market place today and is growing bigger every day.
If you have already spent money to build a website and declare your presence on this huge market, you will probably want to better promote your business online and to better target your potential clients.
How do those potential clients shop the huge Internet market? They use search engines to find the product or service they are looking for.
And where your website is listed in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for the products and services you offer is very important for your successful online presence.

SEO (search engine optimization) is the process of optimizing your website to perform better on the search results of the top search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.)
If you've got plenty of time on your hands you can try to do your own SEO. If you'd prefer to concentrate your efforts on running your business, then hiring an SEO Consultant or SEO Company is the perfect solution and our SEO services are highly recommended.
SEO isn't rocket science, but it is hard work. If you are busy running your business you can hire us to take care of your search engine optimisation.

A full-service Chicago internet marketing agency, Proceed Innovative LLC helps companies extend brand awareness and drive sales through interactive marketing strategies, search engine optimization, ppc management, creative web design, website promotion and web analytics consulting.

How to choose an SEO Consultant or SEO Company - Q and A

Is SEO better than PPC?

2008-08-06T15:33:00.000-07:00

Google's Pay-Per-Click (PPC) program is called Google AdWords. PPC is an easy way to get some search engine visibility. This however may not be the most effective Internet marketing option. Naturally (SEO) ranked websites are preferred option by the searchers.

In most cases the best solution is a well-designed mix of PPC and SEO. This search engine marketing approach allows businesses to get free traffic on the most expensive and popular terms as well as to stay in front of their prospects for less popular and seasonal search terms. Keep in mind that PPC works great for promotional and seasonal items.

Visit www.proceedinnovative.com for more information, register for our free Internet marketing seminar or contact us. We will gladly assist you.

Sign Up for Our Next Search Marketing Seminar

2008-07-22T09:31:00.000-07:00

Get Noticed on Google!

Search Engine Marketing is the fastest growing direct marketing channel. Advertisers spent $9.4 Billion on Internet Marketing in 2006. Spending is projected to grow to $18.6 Billion by 2011 in North America.

SEMPO - State of Search Engine Marketing 2006 Report

Hello,

Search Engine Marketing is moving forward at the speed of light.

Learn how you can grow your business online:
Sign up for our next Search Marketing Seminar.

With so much so happening in your day-to-day business, it's tough to stay ahead of the competition and understand the full potential of the Internet. Proceed Innovative can help you get noticed.
Our team of professionals is experienced in every component of online marketing and can help you understand the options available to your organization, including key concepts to consider when making important advertising decisions.

Google has become an internet icon and in everyday conversations you will often hear people say "just Google it". This shows the massive impact of this search engine on people's lives. Google is an advertising media that, if used properly, can provide an abundance of highly converting traffic.

Please join us for a free seminar that will cover the basics of Online Marketing and how to Get Noticed on Google, including a Q/A session that will address areas such as:

How to stay ahead of the competition through smart, well-balanced marketing strategies including organic search optimization (SEO) and PPC management.

How and where to allocate your advertising dollars in the online ad space.

How to measure and refine your online marketing campaigns to increase effectiveness and improve your return on investment (ROI).

Learn how you can compete online - sign up for our free seminars.