Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Archive for September, 2010

SEO Tool Alert: What (else) Can Google Analytics Do for Your SEM

Friday, September 17th, 2010

Recently, Google Analytics upgraded its services to include another handy tool for search engine optimizers: Weighted Sort.

What does Weighted Sort mean for the optimizers and search engine marketers? Seasoned SEO expert Avinash Kaushik posted a blog explaining how this new GA feature works.

To keep it simple, Weighted Sort is a new filter that shows you the data that impacts your business the most. Before this, when you plugged keywords in to the web analytics tool you would get a large quantity of data without a clue. There was no sorting tool to show you which keywords were increasing web traffic and which ones were wastes of your optimizing bandwidth. Additionally, we should note Google also has a keyword suggestion option, based on what keywording you and your competitors have.

Back to Weighted Sort, though. For search engine marketers this gives you a significant advantage in tweaking your optimization, website content and monitoring your website performance based on more clear variables. To make it even more simple—having Weighted Sort is like an “Easy” button; it cuts down the amount of time your web solutions expert spends hunting and pecking for useful key word phrases, and increases the time they can positively impact your web marketing results!

SEM Online Advertising Strategy: Training Your SEO to SEM

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

We’ve discussed the merits of an in-house search engine optimization expert vs. a web solutions agency, and this post brings the issue up again. If you have in-house SEO experts, but no search engine marketing on your team, then your optimization crew will have to learn web marketing strategy immediately. Tailoring your content optimization to achieve positive website marketing results involves things like optimizing as-needed, and learning excellent online advertising strategies.

Even if you are a small business, you need the boost online marketing provides. Simple social media promotion isn’t enough. Having an SEO blog is great for organic search traffic, but it cannot bring in the big bucks alone. Search engine marketing takes traditional marketing and advertising strategies and implements them online. An example is one aspect of affiliate marketing. Just like the Sunday newspaper has coupons and sale notices, affiliate marketing sends out Internet coupons to the various major marketing networks. Those networks target audiences looking for your product and show them the promo code.

Online marketing uses things like pay-per-click (PPC) and paid search to bring in the dollars to your website. If you sell products online, this is incredibly necessary to growing your audience. If you sell physical services, it still increases your local brand in the community and incentivizes your target audience to come to your website and storefront.

If you have the means to hire a web solutions company with expertise in branding, advertising and website content promotion, then you should definitely go that route. Otherwise, a search engine optimization expert should be able to pick up at least the basic aspects of website marketing, since it is the natural next step after optimizing and promoting.

SEM Strategy: Marketing Internationally

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

If your company is in a position to provide services internationally, then your website content must be tailored to target a much larger organic search base. An experienced web marketer understands your business needs to adapt to a global search market and should be prepared to seek out global opportunities for growth.

Before you get to the fun stuff like setting up international shipping, prices and delivery options, your inventory has to match your audiences taste. Certain things like key words and key phrase searches can drastically affect your web performance. An example is “football cleats.” In the U.K. this term would do excellently but in the U.S. you wouldn’t get many results unless you keworded for “soccer cleats.”

Then there’s the issue of sizes and measurements. Most of the world uses the metric system, so, unless your product descriptions include numbers that make sense to your global audience, you won’t get much click through traffic and your web analytics will be full of disappointing results.

Another sticky situation to avoid in web marketing is the online content. Sure, it may sound great in English, but how does it sound in Chinese, or Spanish? If you’re targeting primarily non-English speaking countries with your product, your copy needs to be flawless in multiple languages or your potential customers will not be impressed, and you will miss out on building good organic search results.

Finally, although Google is king in America, in different countries, search engines like Yahoo, Yandix and other engines dominate. The easiest way to resolve this issue is to use the search engine in your home country to build local search results, and make an effort to understand the algorithms of the other search engines and start optimizing for those markets bit by bit.

With the Internet providing access to your website from people all over the world, your online business has the potential to become an international success with the right optimization and web marketing people in place to make it happen.

SEO Marketing Strategy: When to Ignore Your A/B Testing

Saturday, September 11th, 2010

Most search engine marketers and web optimizers know the ultimate power of good A/B testing to prove or improve click-through rates, conversions and sign-ups. But where do you draw the line between using your research wisely and over-analyzing it?

In order to avoid getting lost in the minutia of A/B Testing, here’s a shortlist from the PDF guide of experienced conversion rate optimizer, Stephen Pavlovich, (with a few snarky footnotes from yours truly):

1.      Become the customer- Channel that inner consumer. Think about how you shop for products similar to yours and understand your target audience base. If you don’t know who you’re marketing to, you need more than optimization.

2.      Set Up Funnels in Google Analytics- In fact, set up EVERYTHING in Google Analytics. They’ve got nifty new features to help create new key phrases and key words, and get a decent idea of your competition through web analytics. USE THEM.

3.      Use Other Analytics Packages- Unless you’re broke, spring for another web analytics package. There are enough out there to where they are competitively priced, and each web marketer has their own favorite brand they can wax philosophic about.

4.      Do 5 Usability Tests- One is not enough to determine any value, two doesn’t determine a trend. Five is enough to create enough variables to determine functionality, usability and what impact it will have on your conversion rates and web marketing strategy.

5.      Survey Your Customers- They will give you the brutally honest truth! If they don’t like it, then it needs to go. Search engine marketing made EASY.

6.      Talk to Sales Staff- Your customer service representatives deal with your target audience on a daily basis. Logically, the CRs should have excellent natural instincts and opinions about the specific behaviors of your target audience, and how to bring in more people like them.

SEO Strategy: Mastering the SEM Master Service Agreement

Thursday, September 9th, 2010

For a larger business hiring web marketing experts is easy in that you will most likely have a lawyer or two hanging about on retainer to make sure the Master Service Agreement has all of the correct legal information. For most small businesses it can be a bit of a challenge, even if you hire a lawyer to handle your contracts.

In most standard contracts with search engine marketing agencies or freelancers, there is an overview of the contract, delivery of services (the terms and fees), payment terms, intellectual property ownership, limited warranties, customer (you) responsibilities and a whole assortment of incredibly dense legalese best left to the professionals to explain.

Delivery of services, intellectual property ownership, limited warranties and customer responsibilities are the key phrases to clue into. This is where the meat of the Master Service Agreement exists; where you’re telling the search engine marketer or search optimizer what you expect, how it should be delivered and who is responsible for what. A sloppy SEM contract might leave out some important details like who will run the web analytics, and what happens if the paid search campaign flops.

Intellectual property is a big one, too. It ensures your information wont be available to other clients a search engine marketing agency could possibly take on. If you’re going in-house with your search engine optimization efforts, then it ensures your SEO won’t use company information for their benefit or for any other clients they take on.

At the end of the day, you want your content optimized, key phrases ranking high, and your organic search yielding increasing web traffic and profits. So does the company you’re hiring. Trust them to do the work well, but make sure your Master Service Agreement is airtight, so the SEM is accountable in that legally binding way.

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