Internet Marketing Clinic

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!

What a surprise! I picked up the phone (actually, I listened to my voice mail) and a perky voice says to me, “Hi, this is Sharon from Google!” I never heard of Google calling people before. I am just not on that kind of list.

What the call was about, as it turned out, is they are promoting their local business center. This is the place where you can enter information about your business so it will come up on Google Maps when people search for your products or services. I have had a listing for years and recommend it to anyone with a web site and any kind of local business. It is a free service from Google.

I guess the reason for the call is that they are offering enhancements to the listing that you can pay for and they are actually informing people of that by phone (seems a little retrograde to me, but, hey, whatever works!)

I went to the site (click here for Local Business Center information) and found some new features that I had not seen before. Most interesting to me was the statistics that they provide on your listing, so you can see how many impressions you have gotten and how many clicks from those impressions. This is all available on a dashboard where you see other sites that you may have entered, say, if you have multiple businesses, or have entered site information for companies you are supporting.

Anyway, this is good information and worth your time to review just to update yourself on how the whole thing works. If you don’t have a listing for your business yet, this is a great time to set one up. Remember your keywords when you set up your business description, because that is what it is all about. This is one more way to give your business an edge that others (like your competitors) are not so astute about.

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