Establishing – or enhancing – the presence of your business online will require a lot of text. Let’s see: website copy (with multiple pages), product and service descriptions, blog entries, tweets, Facebook wall posts, E-mail newsletters, pay-per-click ads, etc. So who’s going to do all that writing? Hire a web content writer. That’s the simplest solution, right? It’s also one of the most efficient. You hire the writer for a specific content creation project, maybe even an outsourced writer from offshore. It’s cost-effective, and you’re also able to free up a lot of time for yourself – time that you can spend focusing on running and growing your business, as opposed to playing the role of a copywriter or communication agency. Before you handpick a writer, though, you have to make sure that he or she is your best candidate. An interview may even be necessary. The most important thing, of course, is that the writer has what it takes – Read the full article
When researching or choosing a product or service, visitors typically follow a keyword path. This keyword path can be used to help inform your SEO campaigns. For example, let’s imagine we have an imaginary visitor who is trying to choose a digital camera. Our visitor might start off by researching digital cameras. In Google, they will search upon the keywords “digital cameras”. They might complete some research, read some reviews, and decide upon a make of camera – let’s say they have decided upon a Nikon. Let’s now imagine that our visitor will now carry out a search for “Nikon digital cameras” and following further research, eventually decides upon a Nikon P100. Finally, at this stage, the visitor will carry out searches for “Nikon P100 prices”, which now indicates they are ready to buy and are carrying out price checks online. This keyword path will typically apply in most sectors, and your job as a website owner is to figure – Read the full article
Earlier today, Google officially announced Google Instant- a real-time search experience that predicts search results as you type. As with most announcements, the long-term impacts are not yet known, but let’s look into the important parts.
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
A PPC – pay-per-click – campaign is not for everyone, but when it works for you, then you’ll find out how it can stretch your advertising dollars and realize your sales potential. We wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s hugely underrated, but PPC can work in a way that helps your local business – hugely. In achieving local SEO and PPC success, however, you do have to keep some of these things in mind. Go for balance. Getting the right keyword or set of keywords is important. Choose too popular a keyword, and you may take years or never before you can reach the first page of the search engines results page. Choose keywords that are too uncompetitive, and you risk generating no traffic and lower conversion to ROI. Do all the necessary research. There are four main factors that come into why prospects will buy from you – or why they will not buy from you. These – 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
Looking to stretch your advertising dollars? Try implementing a PPC (pay per click) campaign. It’s cheap. It’s ideal for small businesses. It’s not as costly as producing a full-blown advertising or Internet marketing campaign. It’s also can be very effective if executed correctly. Getting your money’s worth on PPC advertising means coming up first with a good strategy. A lot of people think that a PPC campaign can be hastily thrown together – “okay, I’ve chosen my keywords – I’m done!” – and they are the ones who are most prone to making costly mistakes. So, before you go about launching your own PPC campaign, take a look first at these helpful tips. They won’t just help you save money; it will also maximize your money and, subsequently, your sales potential. Keyword Selection Choose keywords wisely, and cast your net broadly. Of course you want a high PPC ranking. But that doesn’t mean you have to get the most popular – Read the full article
The keywords people search for the most on search engines in your niche or industry are not always the most profitable keywords to focus on for your business. This is at the heart of Chris Anderson’s concept of ”the Long Tail” from his groundbreaking 2004 Wired article and his book of the same title released in 2006. The Long Tail was originally meant to discuss an emerging trend where online retailers like Amazon, Netflix & Rhapsody found success increasing the depth of their inventory and selling less of more in an internet driven environment but it has had implications far beyond its initial insight. Nowhere was this more apparent than with Search Engine Marketing. Understanding “the long tail” and applying strategies to leverage it for SEO has proven time and again over the last few years to be one of the highest value activities in search marketing. To many this is not something new, but it is surely worth revisiting. – Read the full article
