Internet Marketing Clinic

Google’s latest algorithm update is anticipated to have an impact on web sites that might not have performed well under the prior algorithm. Comments on the Google Webmaster blog recently indicate that sites with lower traffic should perform better in searches typically described as “long tail” because they use keyword phrases that are not the high volume phrases that much SEO effort focuses its attention on.

What this means (we think?) is that the technique that we espouse in our clinic discussions of making sure that your site pays attention to all the phrases  that might be relevant to your content instead of focusing all your effort on just the top ranking phrases could experience a great boost in results. To put it another way, if you have worked on phrases when developing your content that are further down the list of ranking phrases, this might mean a big payoff for your approach!

This is the kind of thing we think is a great reward for “doing things the right way” from the beginning! As always, we try to provide you with the techniques that have staying power with search engines, not the “tricks” that fool the engines for a short time, but the practices that are consistent with improved quality of content and improved performance results for the search engines. We encourage a “win-win”approach to marketing, something that works for you and for the search engines at the same time.

This is the beginning step in a new marketing campaign using the new features and capabilities of Facebook.

Internet Marketing | Promote Your Page Too

The initial operation is to create a page in Facebook for the campaign and get a badge, as seen above, to use in promoting the page across different platforms. This blog post is sort of a “stream of consciousness” trail of what I am doing. There will be more entries to follow as I progress.

The newsletter I get from eMarketer is one of my favorite sources of information about what is going on with businesses and marketing on the Internet. Today, they provide information about how businesses are using social media to improve their marketing efforts to other businesses.

We have talked in other postings about how social media can drive traffic directly to a web site, and how it can be used to improve brand awareness. These are fairly obvious applications of the medium, and are entirely consistent with the efforts we make at marketing through our web sites themselves.

Less obvious, perhaps, is the benefit that social media offers in doing research into customer attitudes and preferences. If your company has established a presence on social media, you have an opportunity to listen to what your audience is saying about your business. That kind of information can head off some serious customer relationship issues, on occasion, but can also contribute to strengthening y0ur marketing of your site in more traditional ways.

We are always on the lookout for keyword phrases that can be important to our audience, and, in particular, phrases that might be overlooked by our competition! Those phrases are of special interest because of the impact they can have on the specific audience we are trying to reach, and because they can be much easier to achieve very high rankings on!

Keep on top of this important medium by following our comments on social media marketing.

Two recent articles present some interesting information about how the Internet is changing. One is in a eMarketer and the other in an article in Wired magazine.

The first talks about demographics on social media and points out how it is changing to an older crowd. In the group between 50-64, 47% use social media. This is a substantial representation. In the prime age group of 30-49, over 60% use social media. Facebook logged its 5oo millionth user in June of this year. That is a huge audience. And this is a worldwide group. Remember that this is more people than live in the United States.

These age groups tend to use the media in different ways from the younger group, an important consideration for marketers. Older users are involved in Facebook and Linked In, and have other differences in their pattern of use.

Ad spending for social media is also changing. This indicates that bigger companies recognize the appeal of this size audience and are working heard to find a position in it where they can capitalize on the attention that people pay to this medium. If you are in a retail business, you have to take this market seriously.

In the other article, the emphasis is on how traffic on the internet is changing. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between the web and the Internet. In broad terms, the Internet is the highway, and the web is destinations. That is an oversimplification, but useful and easy to remember.

This article points out that the volume of traffic on the Internet that is devoted to the web is now only 23% of the total volume of traffic! Keep in mind, this point is about traffic, not visitors. As marketers, we are interested in visitors. Traffic that comes from watching videos or listening to music consumes more bandwidth than traffic going to and from web sites, and that accounts for some of the huge change in where the volume of traffic comes from, but it still points to big changes in how the Internet is used.

What do these changes mean to your business, both in terms of threats and in terms of opportunities? It will certainly depend upon what segment of business you are in and what the demographics of your audience are, but no one will be unaffected by these changes. Pay attention so you will be on the bus instead of under it!

A new report from eMarketer shows the growth and potential of social media to businesses.

A couple of the interesting statistics cited in the piece include the percentage of ad spending that is going to social media, and the popularity of social media sites as compared to search sites.

This chart shows the growth in spending and is an indication of how seriously businesses are taking the media. This is a new factor in marketing and is still being explored to determine where and how it works best, but, whatever the findings, it is a factor that businesses must take into account when developing their strategy for the Internet.

This next graph shows the popularity of sites on the Internet in New Zealand. New Zealand may not be the biggest target in your marketing strategy, but the graph is still interesting because it reflects a trend that is much broader than NZ, which is that different applications are occupying more and more time of people on the Internet.

A recent magazine article in Wired announced that “The Web is Dead”. This may be an overstatement (not uncommon in selling magazines), but the point they are making is an important one to keep in mind, which is that the pattern of usage on the web is changing quickly and dramatically.

The question, as always, is, “What does this mean to me and to my marketing strategy?”

We will continue to explore that issue, and I plan to post some comments about the Wired article later after I have had more time to review it. Watch this space!

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!