Ideate Media SEO Web Marketing Blog (2)

Posts Tagged ‘seo strategy’

SEM Strategy: Beating your competition (Part 1-How’re you doing?)

Monday, March 21st, 2011

Whether your website is an online business in competition with others of its ilk, or you are one among a flotilla of online information websites, you are always competing with some other website for a bigger slice of the Internet pie in your target demographic of users. Most importantly your online business is competing for the higher SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).

You probably know your immediate competition just by happenstance, but it’s not enough just knowing about them as a search engine marketing strategist. You should know them intimately, to the point where you can list their homepage’s keywords and have a general idea of how their organic search results are, when compared to yours. The thing about competitive research, though, is you can’t gauge someone else’s success without knowing how your online business marketing strategy is working out. This first blog is dedicated to figuring out your website’s metrics.

You should also get some numbers for your current website metrics so you can come close in your projections of future web traffic. What numbers do you need? The easy answer for a search engine optimizer is “whatever ones you want to track,” but for someone new to the SEM and SEO analytics game, the answer is a little more involved. Tomorrow’s blog goes into the metrics you need to gather, how to gather them, when you can comfortably make predictions of future traffic and what kind of a formula you can use for that. Stay tuned!

SEM Strategy: Addressing negative feedback (Part 1)

Tuesday, March 8th, 2011

If you are a small-to-mid-size online business owner, you might go check for your Internet rankings one day only to find you’ve been listed in RipOffReport, or criticized on Yelp, Scam.com, Pissed Consumer or Complaints Board. While these opinion/reporting tools were meant to be used as a way for people to anonymously report real issues with a company, they can be used by irate customers who wanted to vent their frustration; making your website the SEO and SEM victim. The damage to your web marketing lasts much longer than the poster’s wrath, and you need to address the issue before your organic search and SEM results are affected.

Unfortunately for your website business, the organic ranking of these types of websites is extraordinarily high, and if you have been dedicated to keeping your customers satisfied and your search engine marketing strategy ethical, then these kinds of reports can be rather crushing, not just to your morale, but to your brand reputation.

Instead of letting those negative comments sit there like a festering wound, you, or your search engine marketing specialist, should take the steps to fix or address negative feedback that could harm your online business’ reputation. In order to take the steps to fix the problem, you need to be able to identify it in the first place. Our first recommendation is to look for groups where you can create and manage your own pages (like Yelp and Google, where you can claim the business page). Then, identify the other pages where your company could be listed and discussed, so you can monitor them. Stay tuned for part 2, where we’ll discuss what to do when you find a negative report.

SEM Strategy: Avoiding a bad reputation

Monday, March 7th, 2011

One of the things you want to make sure of, as you build your online business, is to avoid acquiring a bad reputation through poor search engine marketing strategy.

We’ve discussed avoiding a bad reputation before, but apart from the vague threat of possibly being flagged by the search engines as a spambot, we’d like to go into better detail about the long-term implications of how a bad reputation harms your search engine optimization and online business marketing strategy.

If your website business mishandles its customers by producing bad products or services, messing up online purchases, or generally making your clients unhappy, they will not hold back on the criticisms. The more you neglect the business aspect of your online business marketing, the sooner you can expect to see negative reviews on Yelp, RipOffReports, Facebook and other social media pages with higher Internet rankings than your website business.

What that means is the first impression a potential new customer will get of your company is negative reviews. Even if you are ranking in the top tier for a keyword or keyphrases, those bad reviews will strongly influence customers, possibly making them choose your competitor online.

Another way a bad reputation hurts your online business SEO strategy and search engine marketing is with linkbuilding. It’s not impossible, mind you, but while your search engine optimization or SEM specialist can create good-quality links for you, they might not convert into good organic search results or web traffic because of your rep.

SEM Strategy: Are you reporting your discoveries? (Part 2)

Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

Once you’ve created that skeleton report of your online business and its general health, you should flesh it out with a secondary report outlining your goals, what metrics you will be tracking for success and how you intend to achieve these goals. We recommend creating these types of SEO analytics reports twice a year, so that if some goals aren’t achieved, you can explain how, and take enough time with your final report to reflect the actual findings and what they mean for the online business.

For your personal information, you should keep an Excel document outlining how your online business is doing on a weekly, or monthly, basis. Regardless of whether you share these results or not, it will give you a realistic picture of your Internet business marketing strategy. If it’s going right, you will have a clear track to success, and it will make your final report a lot easier to put together. If it is not heading in the right direction, you know to change tracks, update your final report to reflect this decision, and produce winning results.

It also allows you to have the necessary information about your website business in “real time,” if the online business’ owner asks for an update at any given moment. Don’t go overboard with this, though, or the numbers will drive you crazy; once a week is plenty.

SEM Strategy: How healthy is your website?

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Once in a while, when you’re figuring out SEO analytics and search engine marketing strategy, you should take a step back from the technical mumbo jumbo of search engine optimizing to just LOOK at your website.

Of course, if you can’t take that step back to judge your website as an unbiased viewer, find a teenager, (preferably one unrelated to you) give them a few dollars and ask them to look around your website and find 10 things they like and 10 things they don’t like. Chances are, you’ll learn more about your website business in that 10 to 15 minutes than anything your online business marketing tools can tell you easily. In a physical business setting, this sort of thing is called market research, and it’s a great way for companies to learn about what the public thinks of their product or service.

One you have an unbiased opinion, from a user’s standpoint, about how your website looks or acts, you have the opportunity to fix its flaws and improve the website design and strength overall. The more usable your website, the better your target audience will respond to it. While doing the web health checkup, we recommend analyzing whether it’s worth making small changes, implementing any new changes slowly and testing their success over time (45 days, minimum).

No matter what, do not roll out any huge web design changes during times when your website is set to get a lot of traffic, because it will confuse and put off your niche audience. Make subtle changes during those peak online business times, and save the big stuff for the off-season, and your website’s health report will always be glowing!

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