Posted on December 10th, 2009 by Dave Davis
Improving your CTR is now the single biggest thing you as an advertiser can do to improve your AdWords quality score and reduce your CPC. When it comes to CTR, every little helps. Today, I’m going to show you two very simply things you can do to increase your CTR and as a result, your quality score. The following can be implemented easily and immediately but as with all changes to your PPC account, make sure you test the results. If it doesn’t work for you, revert.
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Posted on December 3rd, 2009 by Stoney deGeyter
Whenever a new medium emerges and becomes the “it” thing. Everyone flocks to it until the next shiny thing comes around and then that becomes the new “it.” Inevitably, those on the cutting edge of “it” always decry the downfall of the previous “it” which then becomes “that”. “That” is obsolete. “That” doesn’t have long-term value. You need to give “that” up and put your money in “it.”
But “that” doesn’t always go away no matter how much “it” gains in popularity.
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Posted on November 19th, 2009 by Jordan McCollum
Oh, how I wish this was a cool YouTube video that could go viral. But it’s not. Instead, it’s some pretty interesting research by PostRank on how reader engagement in blogging has evolved over the last three years.
Not so surprisingly, trackbacks as a means of joining the conversation have dropped off in favor of taking the discussion to Twitter or other social sites. Over the last there years, trackbacks have dropped from 19% of total engagement to 3%, while social networks have soared from <1% to 29%.
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Posted on November 12th, 2009 by Stacy Karacostas
A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a terrific conference in San Diego put on by Lisa Sasevich of The Invisible Close. While she shared a lot of powerful information specific to building my type of business, and to making sales without being salesy, the tips that really hit home were a bit more general. However they still packed a powerful punch.
All of these I already knew to some extent, but something Lisa said, or a part of my own experiences in the last few weeks, has really crystallized these ideas for me.
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Posted on October 29th, 2009 by Stoney deGeyter
Branding is a tricky subject for most small businesses. Historically brand building has been a costly effort that only big businesses could afford. But online marketing has changed that allowing even small business to build a recognizable brand. In fact, when it comes to SEO and website marketing, I see the necessity of helping our client’s brand themselves in the search sphere.
In the past, we often felt that some clients just didn’t need to be branded in the search results. Maybe because they were smaller clients or didn’t have a nationally recognized name. But then how do companies become nationally recognized names? You got it. Branding.
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Posted on October 22nd, 2009 by Mike Moran
I’m often asked by small business owners (and folks in larger businesses, too) how they can keep up with all the new things going on in social media, search, and everything else on the Internet. It’s hard for them to hear sometimes, but I keep trying to tell them that is the wrong question. What they need to do instead is to simply decide what to ignore.
That’s scary for many of us, because none of us wants to miss the next big thing. Or even the next fairly sizable thing that will boost revenue a little bit because this has been a really bad month.
That’s understandable. It’s human nature. But it’s dumb.
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Posted on October 15th, 2009 by Stoney deGeyter
There are clients SEOs love to have… and then there are those other kind. Every SEO has them and very few SEOs can be so selective as to weed out every client that isn’t the “perfect client” (and those that do generally work only for themselves.)
Being the perfect client may not be attainable, but you can certainly avoid being the bad client nobody wants. Here are seven things bad SEO clients do:
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Posted on October 8th, 2009 by Thomas McMahon
With more and more marketers jumping onto the social media bandwagon, a lot of questions come up. Is it possible to track metrics and ROI? What are other companies doing? Why isn’t it working? Being prepared to answer questions like these can make a difference in how a company interacts with social media and if they can succeed.
How can we track social media?
Unfortunately, there is no one “most effective” social media tracking system. Marketers across the web are still working to figure out how to measure social media, how to attach ROI, and how to sell the benefits of participation on the social web to those that don’t “get it”.
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Posted on October 1st, 2009 by Stoney deGeyter
In the world of marketing and campaign measurement, the web has been a goldmine. Almost every conceivable metric can be measured online. But of all the things you can track, measure, weigh and analyze, the only metric that truly matters is conversions. Click through rates, page views, time spent on site, number of pages read, entrance and exit points, abandonment; all of these metrics are fantastic, but if you’re not using them to improve your conversion rates, then why bother?
Most people look at their website as a whole but in reality it is a collection of many parts. These parts (web pages) are essentially individual steps on a path that should lead your visitors to a specific goal: the conversion. If your site as a whole, and web pages individually, are working properly, you should see an increase in conversion rates and sales. If anything is broken along the way your visitors are led the wrong way at the wrong time and you open the door to having them leave before they’ve reached the conversion goal.
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Posted on September 24th, 2009 by Patrick Hare
Special Note: Buying the wrong kinds of sponsored links can have serious SEO consequences. In some cases, the links will have no value whatsoever and are a waste of money, but in other situations you could damage or eliminate your search engine rankings if you engage in obvious link buying tactics. Even if you’re just buying links for traffic, you could be hurting yourself in the search engines. When in doubt, consult with an SEO professional.
Aside from the content and composition of your website, the number and type of inbound links to your website plays a huge role in search engine rankings. Google even patented its PageRank algorithm, which clearly indicates the importance on links to your website from other sites on the internet. Originally, the quantity of inbound links had a greater impact on rankings, but now the trustworthiness of every website that links to you plays a greater role in your search engine rankings. Almost all of the top sites on search engine rankings got there by way of good inbound links and good content, in that order. Read more…
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