As we’ve mentioned in an earlier post, keyword selection is one of the most important factors in creating a successful PPC campaign. In the world of pay-per-click advertising where you simply have to get the most of your advertising dollars, it pays to be choosy – and to be smart and savvy, instead of reckless, in making decisions about keywords. Of course, this doesn’t mean choosing the most popular – and therefore most expensive – keywords. You have to take the time to research which ones are fit for your needs and budget, and which, when taken as a group, will still bring you high-volume traffic. Keyword research will require a set of tools that you can use to bring in the data, which can make you spend even more than you ought to. That’s why we’ve come up with this list of free keyword research tools that can potentially help you drive more traffic to your site and increase – Read the full article
Internet marketing is generally broken into three areas- Research, Implementation and Tracking. Research includes using tools such as wordtracker, SEO Book or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. There are dozens of keyword tools to choose from but we like these because they are very easy to use and they supply the information that help us make good keyword decisions. These tools help you analyze what you believe the keyword list to be and modify it to maximize the potential website traffic. Simple things like making keywords plural has have significant increases in traffic or variations in phrases such as “online marketing” vs “Internet marketing.” While you may think that both phrases sound the same, you may think that maybe one or the other has a higher search volume- but you may be surprised to learn that “Internet marketing” has about 2.5 times the search volume of “online marketing.” Based on your objectives you would target the word that converts better for – Read the full article
It’s great to drive traffic – online and offline – from all corners of the world. But if you’re a smart marketer, you’ll realize you don’t have to be so international – at least not when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Thanks to local search, businesses don’t have to squander resources on attracting customers and visitors that are beyond their geographic reach anyway. One can instead focus on catering to the heart of the locals. Want to find out how? Here’s a list of 17 great local SEO and local search tips, tricks, and tools to help you get started. Claim. Claim your local listing on Google Places. While you’re at it, go to Bing Local and Yahoo Local and claim your listings there, too. Apply best practices. Read our guide on Google Places to put yourself closer to the center of the map. Submit your info to the online yellow pages. Sign up in online directories and – Read the full article
About a year back we compiled a list of competitive intelligence tools and it turned out to be one of our most popular posts. Well its a new year now and we thought you deserved an updated list. We went through the old list and threw out a few services that are no longer useful and added a whole bunch of new ones for you to check out. Some of the sites are more convenient than others depending on your needs. Some are free and some our expensive. Some of them directly monitor competitors’ advertising efforts while others track social media channels. Some of them offer several services and others only one or two. Heck, some of them aren’t even meant to be competitive intelligence tools, but we think each has something beneficial to offer. It was by pure coincidence that it came out to be an even 40 tools so let us know if there’s more we need to – Read the full article
Small business owners will have heard all the rave and buzz about Twitter, and how this microblogging site can help enhance their respective brands. But if you’re not particularly adept at social media, you might be hesitant to dedicate your time and spend all your efforts on something you’re unsure of. Don’t worry; it’s perfectly natural. It is indeed difficult to cut through all the noise and find out what exactly you’re getting from Twitter. How does it help your brand? What are people saying about it? In what ways can you manage the so-called “Twitter sentiment” when you don’t even know what that sentiment is? Below you’ll find a list of Twitter tools to help bring you closer to the answers you’re looking for. These are tools for tracking Twitter sentiment – or how people perceive your brand – in the popular social media site. Twitter Search: It goes without saying that the volume of Tweets that the world – Read the full article
Marketing research isn’t what it used to be. It has expanded to include the world of websites, blogs, social media, online advertising, and other web-based media. The great thing about this all is that there are lots of tools you can use conduct market research and gather competitive intelligence. Our top posts on Lakeshore Branding have been about social media monitoring and competitive intelligence. So I thought we would share some our favorite tools and this list turned into a description of 29 tools for competitive intelligence. So check out the list and please let us know if we are missing any. 1. SpyFu: Spyfu is a tool that lets you find out what keywords your competitors are targeting in the search engines. Not just keywords, mind you, but AdWords, too. All you have to do is type your competitor’s site in SpyFu’s search bar, and voila! Immediate results that show you the keyword and AdWords landscape for that domain. – Read the full article
Marketing any product or service online can be a daunting task for a marketer, especially when the competition is cutthroat and the attention span of audiences has been reduced to just a click. So being at the right place at the right moment is as good as going on the right kind of diet regime – one that would bring in results! One strategy to building a business online – specifically, link building – is considered one of the best ways to connect to the audience. Businesses around the world today rely on the Internet to expand and optimize their visibility for their potential clients and more. It’s a given that Google has set nearly an unbeatable standard for linking only those sites that are trustworthy and pass their acid test. The Web is truly a place where marketers can lose track as linking to sites that basically have no status or ranking by the search engines usually results into – Read the full article
SEO copywriters can be placed into three broad categories: Those who write for users. Those who write for search engines. Those who try to blend the two. Copywriters who actually succeed in the third category are like blue diamonds: rare and extremely valuable. Search engines don’t care about grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. They don’t care for eloquence. Instead, they care about keywords. Search engines are crows and keywords are bright, shiny objects that gleam amid reams of text. Search engines zero in on the keywords and proudly display them in search results. That’s why keyword research and matching keywords to specific website pages is so important. It’s why some copywriters are reluctant to stray too far away from keywords; some will even use the weird combinations that keyword tools provide – e.g. “recipe lasagnarome” – instead of boldly splitting them up into a coherent sentence. Unfortunately for these writers, people don’t care about keywords, but they do care – Read the full article
