Internet Marketing Clinic

Marketing on the Internet is constantly changing, and it pays to stay in touch with what the changes are as they happen. eMarketer featured an interview about changes in retailing marketing that will be of interest to businesses in this market segment.

One interesting comment in this interview is, “I’m seeing retailers spend less in paid search and invest more in search engine optimization.” That indicates that ranking on organic results may get more difficult as more attention is paid to this method of getting attention on the Internet. That emphasized the importance of staying in  touch with the latest techniques for promoting your business on the web, and of continually working on your site to maintain the competitive position that you have achieved. As the saying goes, “Never look back, someone might be gaining on you!” Even if you are doing a great job and out-performing all your competition, you cannot afford to let up in your efforts.

Another comment that jumped out at me is, “It’s still a bit of a mystery as to how to monetize Facebook.” This is a medium that business has not mastered yet. That says two things to me. One is that if you don’t quite understand how to make use of this tool, you are not alone. The second is that if you can figure out how to make it work for you, you will be ahead of the pack!

Now this is not going to work for everyone, or for all kinds of businesses, but if you are in a position to benefit from the audience that you can reach through this tool (Note: I am specifically thinking of Facebook as I write this.), it can prove to be a powerful tool for you.

The way I am seeing this used to some good effect is for a business to create a Facebook Page for their business. It could be useful to create multiple pages for different product lines(?) Creating a page is not a big job and does not require a huge investment of your time or energy.

The next step is to get the page in front of an audience. You must have people who are willing to become  a fan of the page. When you have created this audience, what you do is post something of interest periodically to keep yourself and your business in front of your audience. The people who have signed up to get your information will see that while they are browsing their pages for information about their friends.

What kind of business might this be a good vehicle for? An easy answer might be restaurants. Restaurants are social businesses, and people are always interested in learning about new and interesting restaurants, and would be happy to learn about specials that a restaurant might be running or a new menu item they are introducing. And people are always interested in getting referrals to restaurants from their friends who like a place. If your business fits this kind of pattern, this could be a great tool for you to utilize. If your business is oilfield equipment, it could be a completely different situation!It all depends on you and how you can make this work for you!

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!

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!

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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