Internet Marketing Clinic

I just reviewed a one hour video featuring Matt Cutts (of Google) that gives a really good short course in search engine optimization. It is posted on Matt Cutts blog. Matt and his team go over all the basics of optimization in this session. It is a great overview, and points out a few tools that can be of great value to webmasters.  Most everything he mentions in this session has been covered in our clinic, but I was not aware until he pointed it out, that Webmaster Tools will check your site for the existence of malware! Something like that can be really important to know if you think you are having a problem. This is a video that is worth an hour of your time if you want to make your web site perform better in the search engines!

This information was brought to my attention by Don Parsons, who has been associated with our clinic for many years and has taught several sessions for us. Thanks, Don!

I have often commented in our clinic that big brands on big sites that have big budgets don’t really rank well in search engines. I just came across a long post that takes apart several sites to illustrate the point in considerable detail.

This post analyzes several big corporate sites and demonstrates pretty clearly that they just don’t do SEO very well! From my point of view, this is great news! What this means is that people who understand how to do their SEO properly, and who are willing to put the effort into doing it, can achieve great performance on search engines without having to spend a lot of money.

Since my clinic is oriented toward small businesses, and small businesses typically don’t have a lot of money (otherwise, they would be “big businesses”, yes?), this is really good news!

As I said, the article is a little long, and may seem, to some readers, technical, but it is worth reading to get a better understanding of what you are up against when working on your web site.

We talk a lot in our clinic about the importance of linking your site properly in order to improve your search engine rankings. When you set up your links, there are some details that can be important.

For example, create your links as “absolute” links, not relative links. What that means is that your link in your code should contain the complete address to the linked page, like “http://www.your-domain-name.com/page-name.html”, not something like “…/page-name.html”.

This makes your reference clear, and will get you link credit if someone “scrapes” your page. Little things like this do make a difference if you apply the rules persistently. You get a cumulative effect from doing things the right way that can really make a difference in how your site performs!

Also, always refer to pages on your site in the same way, that is, if you use “www” as part of your domain name, always use it. Don’t refer to your site sometimes with it and sometimes without. Those would count as different links and will not give you the same benefit.

I received a newsletter from Hubspot with a short list of reasons to use social media in your business. The list was very concise and to the point, so I found it hard to summarize. Here it is in its entirety:

“Why Social Media and Blogs Can Help Your Business

1. Start Fast. You could launch a page on Facebook today and get a blog going in a couple days.

2. Low Cost. You can get started in social media and blogging for very little or no money.  They are among the most cost-effective methods of reaching your audience.

3. Instant Interactivity. Both blogs and social media can give you nearly instant market feedback – good or bad.  We get all kinds of feedback through the comments on our blog, and people also leave reviews and other comments for us on Facebook and other social media venues.

4. It’s the Search Engines, Silly. Surveys indicate that 90% or more of people begin their purchasing process in search engines.  Blogs and social media make it more likely that your prospects will find you online when they search.

5. Inbound Marketing. If you read our blog, you know that we’re all big fans of inbound marketing at HubSpot.  Outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail, email blasts (not lovely nurturing emails like this one to you), TV and print ads – all the things that buyers tend to block out more and more.  Social media and blogs are essential inbound marketing tools.

6. First Mover Advantage. For blogs and social media, there is an advantage to moving first.  If you don’t jump into the conversation, your competitors, competitor’s customers or your customers will (if they have not already) and then you’re fighting an uphill battle to become influential in these online conversations.  Start now, and claim the virtual conversation-ground to your advantage.”

Hubspot is the same group that published the Facebook Guide that I referred to in a prior blog. They seem to have some good information and might be a good place to check in from time to time.

Facebook can be a powerful tool for marketing your business, but, like anything else, you have to understand how to use it and you have to put some effort into it. Many small business owners are just taking the first step in getting acquainted with Facebook as a tool.

I have just come across an eBook on the web that provides a great introduction to setting up Facebook. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a short course to get them started with this powerful tool.

The book is a free download and it contains links to other materials provided by the people who offer this guide.

Google just called me to sign me up for a new feature of their local advertising. I talked to the rep for a while to see what the features are to see whether they might be of interest to businesses that I work with, particularly those with a local connection.

Google’s Local Business Center is a free service that Google provides that will place a marker on a map when a keyword search returns your site and other businesses in the results. I recommend signing up and creating a listing for every one of my business clients, since it is all free, and provides more opportunity to be seen and found. Creating your listing requires a Google account, which is also free, and you should be able to create your account at their local business center. From there, you can enter lots of information about your business, including a description where you can feature keyword phrases that you should be found with.

This listing will also give you statistical reports on how often your listing is presented in searches, and how often it is clicked on. This reporting is similar to their AdWords reporting, but doesn’t cost anything.

Their new feature, for which they charge $25/month, is the ability to create “tags” that will show up with your listing to make it stand out from other businesses that you are competing directly against. If you search in Google for “houston auto glass“, you should see several examples of how this can work. In this example (and, as of this date!), there are 3 listings with tags, and, each listing reflects a different option on the tag. You can see from the tags, and from the listings that accompany the tags, that one business linked its tag to it’s web site, one to a coupon offer, and one to a video. There are other options available as well. The New York Times has an article describing how one business in Houston used this tool to its advantage.

I always say that paying for any advertising on the web is strictly a judgment call and must be tested against what it produces for you in your business, but this little feature sounded interesting to me as an option to consider.

In a new blog posting, Google has just announced that they are now using site speed in their ranking algorithm.

In our clinic, we have always taught that the speed with which your page loads is an important factor in achieving a high performing web site. This announcement from Google makes it official!

In their article, they also provide links to tools to evaluate the speed of your web site. These certainly belong in your “webmaster toolkit”.

One tool, in particular, I found very interesting. The webpagetest gave me a detailed readout of the time it takes to load various components on my main clinic page.  It not only breaks down the file size, but reports the time for the initial connection to the component, the time to first result, and the time to complete the download. As a result of this one examination of a single page on my site, I will institute new practices for building my pages, and will make several modifications to the page I tested.

In this specific case, I will remove the map providing directions to the classes, and will make that into a link to another page where the map and the link to Google Maps will appear. I can easily foresee how important this kind of testing can be to showing my clients how important it can be to revise how they build some of their more complicated pages on their sites!

Google also emphasizes another of the points that we harp on in the clinic, which is that the most important factor in high ranking is good, relevant content! Join us in our free Internet Marketing class to stay up to date with the latest developments in effective marketing over the web.

“According to Forrester Research, 25% of US online retailers are planning at least some mobile features for 2010, compared with just 4% in 2009.”

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Mobile applications have not achieved much penetration in the marketing area yet, but there are signs that this may be changing. An article from eMarketer provides some of the reasons why businesses have not yet turned to mobile applications.

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In our Internet Marketing Clinic, we plan to have a presentation from a local developer of mobile applications in the near future. This will be a good opportunity to learn something about the mobile application environment and a chance to identify ways that mobile applications might offer some benefit to your web site and business.

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Watch our schedule to see when our guest will be presenting!

A new study reported in eMarketer indicates that 90% of local shoppers go online first to find what they are looking for! I find this an astonishing figure. It really says that no matter what kind of business you are in, you better have an Internet presence if you want to be effective  in meeting your competition.

Local shoppers shop online first!

This chart, coming from BIA/Kelsey, makes the point clearly. Ignore this at your peril! If you are in business and not utilizing the web to inform your prospects about your products and services, your competitors are going to have an advantage over you. Someone competing with you will be using the web, and they are who shoppers will encounter when they go online.

I have often noted in our clinic that small businesses can compete very effectively against larger businesses with large marketing budgets by learning how to market their businesses over the web. A study by Conductor, Inc. documents the failure by Fortune 500 companies to make effective use of search engine optimization to promote their businesses. The study is available from their website by signing in to download.

The study opens with a list of what they consider to ge its “key takeaways”:

• The Fortune 500 as a group spent approximately $3.4 million per day on 97,559 keywords – yet only 25% of these keywords rank in the top 50 natural search results.
• Only 2% of the domains (not companies) surveyed showed a significant number of their terms in the top results. All of these positive domain scores were offset by other owned domains with significant visibility issues.
• 15% of Fortune 500 companies studied showed mid to strong presence for their most advertised keywords.
• 32% of Fortune 500 companies have low to mid presence.
• 53% of Fortune 500 companies have no natural search visibility for their most advertised keywords.
• Fortune 500 natural search visibility decreased with longer search queries.
• 68% of keywords were found on a landing page (e.g. www.amazon.com/cellphone) versus a top level domain page (e.g. www.amazon.com).

I have not yet absorbed the full report, but will be posting more interesting observations from there as I go through the report.

The key message here is quite clear, and that is that small businesses can compete against bigger marketing budgets by learning what works on the web and applying what they learn to their own websites!