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SEM Strategy: Are your employees happy? (Part 1.)

Friday, March 4th, 2011

On frequent occasions we fall back on our earlier training in retail customer service to explain the world of search engine marketing and how it relates to online business marketing strategy. One of the cardinal rules of customer service is the customer is always right. Right? Wrong. While customers are very important, the people who work for you and interact with the customers should be your first concern.

The big red flag your Internet business should look for is whether the people behind the scenes are happily doing it. They are the “face” of your company, working to make your search engine marketing, content optimizing and product/service promoting flawless. If your employees aren’t happy, then you’re in a heap of trouble, and so is your online marketing.

Generally speaking, a happy employee is more productive at work and more willing to take on the tasks necessary to push your business from good to great. A “9 to 5″ employee will be there long enough to get the hours, but a dedicated employee will stay long enough to get the job done. While your search engine marketing or online business team might not be perfect, it has to work, so you need to make sure to provide a good work environment.

So, your first order of business as an Internet marketing strategist is to take a look at your people and ask these questions:

  • Are they overworked?
  • Are they under-worked?
  • Do your employees know they can count on you to back them up in any (non-illegal) situation?
  • Do your employees keep things about business processes from you?
  • Are they qualified for the task they are performing?

    • If you can answer these with a simple “yes” or “no,” you can figure out the general atmosphere of your Internat marketing work environment. Next, you can assess and address the issues!

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    SEM Strategy: What are you analyzing?

    Thursday, February 24th, 2011

    Whether you’re tracking your online business marketing strategy through good ol’ Google Analytics, or you’re paying for one of those slick and pretty SEO analytics software companies to track everything for you, it’s important to know where that line in the sand is for your website business. In other words, what are the metrics you actually want to track, and how do you want to analyze them?

    As far as Internet businesses go, each one is going to have a different standard for online success. Some people feel that the number of “fans” they have on their social media outlets is a fair indicator of their target audience. What it boils down to, especially if you’re an online business and trying to sell a service or product, is the money. If there isn’t a substantial profit coming from investing in your online presence, then it might not be worth sinking a ton of money into the web effort.

    Luckily, if you have the patience (and legal clearance) to put tracking pixels on your website, you can see the behavior of visitors to your homepage, and see if their clicking patterns yields to a sale. If your company doesn’t sell anything, then you can analyze their click through patterns to see if they were finally directed to the area they needed to be (this is valuable for websites of nonprofit agencies, who don’t sell a product, but are competing to be a high-traffic site for information seekers).

    When you sit down to figure out what are the analytics that matter to you, then you should figure out the best way to find those numbers and translate them into a profit or loss. After that, the biggest, but most-important, nuisance of search engine marketing strategy is gone.

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    SEM Strategy: Are you covered?

    Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

    Although we aren’t terribly keen on creating search engine marketing doomsday scenarios, if you’ve got a website business then there are a few mishaps you need to make sure are always thought about and accounted for before your online business is put in jeopardy because of human error or technical difficulties.

    The first thing you should account for is your system records and information. These vital records, the lifeblood of your Internet marketing business’ success, should be continuously backed up on encrypted external servers. Whether it’s literally external hard drives connected to your computers, or a company that you outsource this task to, back up your records and you won’t have any problems with server crashes or computer failure.

    Second, despite this being the Internet age, you should account for the possibility of losing Internet service during a business day. While this might not impact customers shopping through your online business for whatever product or service you have, it could delay your company’s ability to update your SEO or follow your search engine marketing editorial calendar properly. If you can afford it, we recommend having, or acquiring a backup Internet service provider, or putting some kind of a plan in place for your employees to work remotely to ensure the work is accomplished on time.

    Finally, you should account for major disasters (the Catch-22s) when building a campaign or editorial calendar for you SEM or SEO, and build in a few hours of wiggle room to assess the situation and figure out the best way to resolve it. It’s easy to hate the doomsday scenario, but if you don’t have some plan for how to deal with the worst-case scenario on your busiest online business day, you’re asking for it.

    Oh, and before we forget the golden rule of working on a computer; save early and often.

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    SEM Strategy: Where is your traffic hiding? Part 2-What’re you looking at? No really, what?

    Friday, February 11th, 2011

    Another fantastic way to draw viewers into your website, (apart from our favorite—slick, keyword-rich and optimized content) is by showing them, instead of telling them about your online business. Internet marketing is a tough sell, especially if you’ve got a niche market where your competitors have figured out how to use social media and SEO analytics to make their pages shine.

    Images, then, are a way to stand out against your website business competition in the land of search engine marketing and SEO strategy. There are a few good ways images can help bolster your Internet business and help gain ranking online. First—it’s a great place to put some keyword-rich alt text that your visually-impaired customers can see, and the search engines can index. Second, it helps break up long batches of web content.

    Even though we love to read, it’s hard staring at a screen of text. No matter what your website business is about, you need to either keep your text brief, or break up the long paragraphs with something relevant and pretty to look at. A third point in favor of using images as part of your search engine optimizing and website marketing strategy is that your images can also be ranked by search engine crawlers. This adds to your website business’ net Internet rankings with relatively little work.

    The number one tip for using images as part of your SEM or SEO strategy—USE GOOD QUALITY IMAGES! Choose high-quality, glossy images that have been taken under appropriate lighting, Make sure to use an SEO naming convention, tag the picture correctly and use keyword-rich alt text to describe the image and you’ll be set!

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    SEM Strategy: T is for Title—The First Impression

    Friday, January 28th, 2011

    On a website, just like a news article or any written document, the title describes what is in the document. One of the easiest things you can do with search engine optimizing your online business is to have unique titles for each of your pages. If necessary, you should also create keyword optimized titles throughout the website content, to help break up the ideas.

    Ideal titles are 8-10 words at most, descriptive of the content on the website without being too long. Generally speaking, if you want the titles to help improve website performance, they should be unique, describe the important things on the website and in the best situation, be something used as the link anchor text. Descriptive anchor text increases the chance your link will be clicked on.

    In order to write SEO friendly titles, either choose from your bank of researched keywords strongly associated with your Internet marketing business, or select the key phrases, issues and familiar buzzwords surrounding your niche website business that your target audience can strongly associate with. The bonus of using popular buzzwords is you will engage your target audience and compel them to select your link, but your web content should relate to your title, or it will affect your bounce rates negatively.

    Like any first impression, a title tag gives strangers an impression of what your online business looks like; be sure to put your best foot forward.

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